Quote of the Day (Marcel Proust, on How Art is Discovered Rather Than Made)

“I had arrived then at the conclusion that in fashioning a work of art we are by no means free, that we do not choose how we shall make it but that it pre-exists us and therefore we are obliged, since it is both necessary and hidden, to do what we should have to do if it were a law of nature—to discover it.” —French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Time Regained, Vol. VI of In Search of Lost Time, translated by Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright (1992)

Quote of the Day (Marcel Proust, on How the Days in Our Lives Are Not Equal)

“[I]n our life the days are not all equal. To reach the end of a day, natures that are slightly nervous, as mine was, make use, like motor-cars, of different ‘speeds.’ There are mountainous, uncomfortable days, up which one takes an infinite time to pass, and days downward sloping, through which one can go at full tilt, singing as one goes.”—French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Swann’s Way, Vol. 1 of In Search of Lost Time, translated from the French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1913-1927)

This past weekend marked the 150^th birthday of Marcel Proust, and before the time passed by irrevocably, I really had to take note of it here.

I would not change my basic opinion of the French novelist expressed in this blog post from eight years ago. But the age of COVID-19 has certainly deepened my appreciation for the achievement on which his reputation rests: the seven-volume In Search of Lost Time, the result of his massive outburst of “involuntary memory.”

What other major novelist could have not merely survived our pandemic, but thrived? At the height of his powers, Hemingway would have gone crazy without the chance to fish, hunt big game, ski, watch bullfights, or simply drink at cafes. Dickens, unable to tramp the streets of London, would have felt cooped up inside with his wife and kids. Balzac would have bemoaned all those hours not spent in Parisian salons, soaking up social manners. Even Henry James would have withered if he couldn’t have taken afternoon teas with friends.

But Proust? He would have been made for this situation. Asthmatic, he would have been even more determined to shut out the world than he had been when he got down to work in his cork-lined apartment. Though it’s almost impossible to imagine, he might conceivably have produced even more than the 4,000-plus pages and nearly 1.3 million words of his magnum opus. There would have been nothing to distract him from his geyser of memory.

If there is any limit to the devotion of Proust fans, I have yet to discover it. Consider these examples: 

*The presence of multiple blogs paying tribute to him: “182 Days of Marcel Proust,” a journal about reading In Search of Lost Time at the rate of at least ten pages a day; “Proust for All,” with French and English posts; and “Reading Proust for Fun.”

*A book-length analysis of his life and art that functions as a kind of literary self-help manual: Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life; and,

*In a fictional example of this last title, the decision by the title character in Larry McMurtry’s Duane's Depressed (the concluding volume of his “Last Picture Show” Trilogy) to follow his lesbian psychologist’s prescription for his late middle-age melancholy: read Proust. (A remarkable plot development, considering that Duane’s reading to this point in his life has been limited.)

What also fascinates me about Proust is how he represents not just a kind of Mount Everest for readers, but also for filmmakers. For a medium that consists fundamentally of moving pictures, In Search of Lost Time can be a stark challenge: long on leisurely description and rumination, short on dialogue and plot.

But that hasn’t stopped screenwriters and directors from dreaming about bringing the novelist to screens big and small. In 1984, Volker Schlöndorff directed Swann in Love, with Peter Brook, Jean-Claude Carrière, Marie-Hélène Estienne, and the director himself taking a crack at Swann’s Way. Raúl Ruiz adapted Time Regained (1999), based on the last novel in the series; and Chantal Akerman's The Captive (2000) focused on the fifth volume, The Prisoner.

Both Luchino Visconsi and Joseph Losey were forced to abandon their plans to adapt In Search of Lost Time when they could not secure enough financing. But in Losey’s case, all was not lost.

In 1978, his collaborator, Harold Pinter, published the unproduced screenplay. Had it been filmed, it would have clocked in at about four hours—pushing the boundaries of visual narrative, just as Proust had stretched what future writers could do with the novel.

(See Peter Bradshaw’s 2013 essay in the British newspaper The Guardian on “the troubled history of Proust on film.”)

Quote of the Day (Marcel Proust, on ‘The Only True Paradise’)

“The only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost.”— French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922), In Search of Lost Time: Vol. VI: Finding Time Again, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by Ian Patterson

Quote of the Day (Marcel Proust, on ‘People of Bygone Ages’)

“The people of bygone ages seem infinitely remote from us. We do not feel justified in ascribing to them any underlying intentions beyond those they formally express; we are amazed when we come upon a sentiment more or less akin to what we feel today in a Homeric hero, or a skillful tactical feint by Hannibal during the battle of Cannae, where he let his flank be driven back in order to take the enemy by surprise and encircle him; it is as though we imagined the epic poet and the Carthaginian general to be as remote from ourselves as an animal seen in a zoo.”—French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922), The Guermantes Way (1913), Vol. III of In Search of Lost Time, translated by Mark Treharne

Quote of the Day (Marcel Proust, on a ‘Woman Whom We Need’)

“A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us.” — French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Time Regained, Vol. VI of In Search of Lost Time

This would deeply disappoint Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory, for it means that his best friend, Leonard, experiences far more in the presence of Penny than himself. Not that the “man of genius” didn’t surmise this already…

TV Quote of the Day (‘Monty Python,’ With the ‘All-England Summarise Proust Competition’)

Host Arthur Mee (played by Terry Jones): “Good evening and welcome, whereas Proust would say, 'la malade imaginaire de recondition et de toute surveillance est bientôt la même chose'. (roars of applause; quick shot of grinning faces of the jury) Remember each contestant this evening has a maximum of fifteen seconds to sum up 'A La Recherche du Temps Perdu' and on the Proustometer over here...” (curtain pulls back at back of stage to reveal a true, enormous, but cheap, audience appreciation gauge; it lists the seven books of Proust's masterwork in the firm of a thermometer) “you can see exactly how far he gets. So let's crack straight on with our first contestant tonight. He's last year's semi-finalist from Luton – Mr. Harry Baggot.” (Baggot, in evening dress, comes forward from back of stage, with a number three on his back.) “Hello, Harry. Now there's the summarizing spot—you're on the summarizing spot, fifteen seconds from now.”

(Music starts, continuity-type music. The needle of the Proustometer creeps up almost inperceptibly to a tiny level.)

Harry (played by Graham Chapman): “Proust's novel ostensibly tells of the irrevocability of time lost, the forfeiture of innocence through experience, the reinstallment of extra-temporal values of time regained. Ultimately the novel is both optimistic and set within the context of a humane religious experience, re-stating as it does the concept of intemporality. In the first volume, Swann, the family friend visits...”

(Gong goes, chord of music, applause. The meter has hardly risen at all.)

Mee: “Well tried, Harry.”

Voice Over  (provided by John Cleese): “A good attempt there but unfortunately he chose a general appraisal of the work, before getting on to the story and as you can see” (close up of Proustometer) “he only got as far as page one of 'Swann's Way', the first of the seven volumes. A good try, though, and very nice posture.”— Monty Python's Flying Circus, Season 3, Episode 5, “The All-England Summarise Proust Competition,” air date November 16, 1972, teleplay by Chapman, Cleese, Eric Idle, Jones, Michael Palin, and Terry Gilliam, directed by Ian MacNaughton

Quote of the Day (Marcel Proust, on Recovering ‘The Souls of Those Whom We Have Lost’)

“I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.”—Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913), Vol. I of Remembrance of Things Past (also known as In Search of Lost Time), translated by from the French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff

This month marks the centennial of the publication of Swann's Way, the opening volume in Marcel Proust’s exhaustive mining of his life for fictional purposes. I thought of using for today’s Quote of the Day the novel’s famous opening sentence (“For a long time, I used to go to bed early”), and perhaps the even more famous passage on tea and madeleines. But the above sentences struck me with unexpected force because, as someone of Irish descent who, like so many readers, has lost a loved one, I have longed to bring back to life the spirit of that person.

In an irony of literary history, someone contrived to bring together the two 20^th-century figures who helped transform the modern novel, Proust and James Joyce. The latter didn’t think much of the Frenchman’s work, lamenting to a friend that it “didn’t surprise me.”

As it happened, there was plenty about the Irishman to surprise Proust. The night of their meeting, at a (very) late-night dinner, the two shared a Parisian cab home with some others. The drunken Joyce lit up a cigarette, then opened a window—terrifying the asthmatic Proust, who hated fresh air and, consequently, addressed none of his remaining many remarks of the evening to him. 

Oddly enough, for all his frequent obscurity, I found it easier to make my way through Joyce's Ulysses than Swann’s Way when I tried it some years ago. With his long, languid sentences, the dandyish, snobbish Proust made the work of Henry James, in his late, Baroque-era phase (e.g., The Wings of the Dove) read like the screenplay for Die Hard by comparison.

Yet I vow to return to it someday and, in this age of distraction, bear down and finish it. It’s not just passages such as the one above that convince me I have been missing something. It’s also what I read about the work and the novelist himself in the delightful How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain De Botton. (For instance, this piece of advice: “When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.”) Proust was an extraordinary figure: hypochondriacal, mother-fixated, secluded in a soundproof, cork-lined bedroom, and obsessed with his work to the point where he would write all through the night.

I also want to understand why several novelists I admire were influenced so much by him. I’m thinking, in particular, of Graham Greene, who labeled him “the greatest novelist of the 20th century,” and Anthony Powell, whose 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time, in its chronicling of Britain’s upper class through the consciousness of a narrator not unlike himself, bears more than a few resemblances to Proust. The critic Clive James, in his Cultural Amnesia, writes that it is a book that "leads everywhere: a building made of corridors, and the walls of the corridors are made of doors."

Lastly, I want to experience how "involuntary memory" informed his work. The madeleine passage is only the most famous example in his work, I gather. (I witnessed an incident like this some years ago, in a Starbucks a few miles from my home. Bent down, deep in a book, I was startled by the noise of shoes on the floor. The sound transported me 30 years before to something I'd forgotten entirely: the entrance of my elementary school principal, a nun, into our classroom. Sure enough, when I looked up, it was to find another elderly nun walking slowly in similar footwear in the coffee shop!)

One hundred years after publication and 90 after its author’s death, In Search of Lost Time shows all signs that it has “overcome death.”