Somehow the phrase ‘how Proust can change your life’ was in my head.Turns out it’s the title of an Alain de Botton book. My Alain de Botton phase was short lived and a long time ago and the French author he introduced to me was Michel de Montaigne. I’ve now read all of In Search of Lost Time (though it was the Scott Moncrieff translation, In Remembrance of Things Past) and I have to admit myself unchanged.
Towards the end of the last volume, Proust says that he “should not ask them (the reader) to praise or to censure me, but simply tell me whether it is really like that.” He then says that his book is a tool, a lens for the reader to look inwards and if it doesn’t work it’s because “the reader has eyes for which my book is not a suitable instrument.” I guess mine are the wrong eyes because ‘it’ whether that be external or internal life doesn’t seem the same to Proust as it does to me.
That’s not to say we never converged. The immediate opening of Swann’s Way has Proust describing a sensation I have often felt but never properly shaped, that feeling of a room becoming all the rooms you have slept in as you wake up. Proust is great, in general, at describing all the woozy feelings; sleepiness, being half-asleep, falling asleep, being drunk. A great deal of the book is about the vividness of internal experience with the mediated flatness of communal and he’s really good at these moments when one slips into another.
Yet I was never as needy as the narrator. If my parents were laughing with friends downstairs when I was supposed to be falling asleep, my emotional response wasn’t a crippling panic attack at my mum not kissing me goodnight, but outrage that my parents could have fun when I wasn’t around. The narrator’s peculiar clinginess stretches into his young adult life, where going to sleep in a hotel room is some huge ordeal that can only be healed by his grandmother’s knocking on the wall to remind him that she’s there. Then it goes into his romantic life, an area where Proust certainly didn’t describe ‘it’, and I felt like I was reading something strange, alien and psychotic.
He makes the astute observation that we fall more in love with our own imagined picture of a person than the reality of them. He describes wonderfully that time as a young man when you fall in love with every woman you pass on the street, something I remember (though he calls them ‘young girls’ and gives hints that they really are young girls, not women). However the stalkerish elements of his love are not anything I’ve ever experienced. His love is one that feels nothing about following someone, breaking into their things and using people to arrange meetings.
What’s more, once he does obtain one of the objects of his affection, Albertine, he goes off her and feels that she’s little more than a pet cat. Then the only thing that incenses his ‘love’ is the jealousy that she might be sleeping with other women. This belief in the importance of jealousy must be an important one for Proust, because it was the key for Swann’s love of Odette. What is even more strange, sickening and peculiar is the way the narrator envisions Albertine as the great love of his life, it’s the core of the story and a subject repeatedly pawed over and regurgitated. At the end, when he meets Gilbertine’s daughter, who merges the Swann and Guermantes ways, it’s supposed to be an apotheosis to the story - but my only reaction was to beg him not to lock this one up.
A lot of the book deals with the narrator’s social climbing and (I suppose) acerbic takes on high society. He’s shocked that the rarefied world of the Guermantes is not the magic lantern he imagined as a child, but some pretty stupid people wasting time in pretty stupid ways. Maybe it’s because I’ve grown up in an era where the doings of the rich and powerful is splashed everywhere, but it seems pretty obvious that’s what high society is - and I question why someone who is so dismissive of that world remains so attached to it. Presumably because he’s even more dismissive of the middle-class culture vultures like the Verdurins, and completely disdains the inner lives of working people like Francoise. I also wonder why high society bothers with him, he doesn’t seem to be offering anything.
Yes, the narrator has a great openness to beauty, especially architectural and natural beauty. The description of the trees and cliffs around Balbec, or the steeple at Combray are spot on depictions of those ordinary things that catch the breath sometimes. Proust is also great at writing how the writing, painting and music we hear then shape our experience of the world. It feels very real that a church in Balbec that was talked up by Swann, proved a disappointment until rephrased by Elstir.
There are many moments and locations in the book that shine off the page. Whether that’s the village of Combray, the shining underwater hotel at Balbec, the slow-motion of the ‘little gang’ walking along the beach - and there are many more. There are also some very engaging characters. I loved his grandmother in her contrariness and love, the way her death was dealt with and the way his mother slowly became her. I like Francoise, even through his condescension. I liked Aunt Leonie, she made me laugh. I also didn’t mind St Loup, as far as posh boys go. I thought the narrator treated him terribly - does the narrator even have any actual friends? He shits on St Loup, Bloch, the little gang, the Guermantes, the Verdurins… does he actually have any affection, warmth or kindness? He’s a conceited, insufferable little shit - and he’s the author’s proxy.
Towards the end of the last volume, Proust has a 70 page explanation of what the book was trying to do, prefaced by a comment that only bad books have mission statements. In light of that, I would have to say that Proust very admirably succeeded in the things he set out to achieve, that he took on a huge project and did it well. I also have to say that I disagree with a number of those fundamentals.
That a book should focus on the physical tangible details, I agree with. I also agree that these moments can be universal and beyond time and it’s a great thing to have a book celebrating them and encouraging its readers to find them. His definition of the artistic sense as a faculty of submitting to the reality within themselves is also both interesting and important. Every painting, novel, work of art is an expression of the internal reality of it’s creator and, hopefully, universal enough to catch a reader. (I would argue that a novel is as much a craft as it is an art and that it needs to stand on it’s own legs as a chair does.. but that’s a different discussion).
I enjoyed his note that, “the working class are as bored by novels of popular life as children are by the books that are written specially for them.” It’s very much like Johnson’s comments about children’s fiction. However, I do think Proust mainly uses this as an excuse to have been writing about all the useless posh people he has. Especially because he then says that the engine that drives all self knowledge and artistic discovery is suffering. What suffering has the narrator really had? The play wasn’t as good as he hoped, the dinner party was boring and the woman he arbitrarily chose didn’t like being a prisoner. If suffering gives birth to art, then surely the working classes, who suffer far more, are the best subjects of it.
What’s more this notion that suffering is the key and that “the happy years are the lost, the wasted years” seems puerile tosh. Many great artists have suffered, it’s a precarious life. Viewed in the right way, most lives could be painted as lives as suffering, art and genius don’t really come into it. I’m not convinced that it was Van Gogh’s suffering that made him a great painter and the notion of tortured genius feels like a fallacy.
While I wouldn’t go as far to say that I’d like to recapture the lost time I spent reading Proust’s masterwork, there were many moments, characters and descriptions I very much enjoyed, I wouldn’t say I’d rush to repeat the experience. I certainly wouldn’t say it changed my life.
No comments:
Post a Comment