Marcel

In my earlier pieces on Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (SF nos. 56 and 57) I looked at different aspects of the novel as embodied, first, in the character of Charles Swann and then in the family of the Guermantes, the crème de la crème of the French aristocracy. It is now time to turn to the central figure in the novel, the narrator himself, the author of this fictional autobiography.

Stretching over seven books and amounting to more than 3,000 pages, Proust’s novel opens with the narrator remembering times when, as a boy, he stayed with his parents, his grandmother and their housekeeper, Françoise, in his great-aunt’s house in the village of Combray. We are not told at any stage what age this boy is, nor what he is called. We are plunged only into the boy’s mind and feelings – when he is told a story by his aunt illustrated by magic-lantern slides projected on to his bedroom curtains, or when he sits in the garden of the house reading the novels of his favourite author, Bergotte, or when he lies awake in a state of panic on the evenings when the presence of a guest at the family supper table might mean that his mother will not come up to give him his goodnight kiss, and he will be unable to sleep. We gather quite quickly, from what the narrator tells us both about himself and about the attitudes taken to him by his family, that he is a sickly child, probably a chronic asthmatic, certainly prone to breathlessness and panic attacks, tearful, clinging, a mummy’s boy, cossetted, perhaps, and overprotected. His grandmother, while anxious to encourage his precocious intellectual and artistic interests with gifts of classic novels and postcards of famous paintings, constantly recommends more fresh air and exercise for the boy, while his mother tries to wean him off his dependence on her goodnight kiss, in an attempt to strengthen his will and encourage more independence. The narrator then describes one night in particular, a night when his parents’ friend M. Swann comes to supper, and his father, who is impatient with these childish rituals, at first refuses to permit the boy’s mother to go upstairs to deliver the goodnight kiss but then unexpectedly changes his mind, agreeing to her not only giving him his kiss but even spending the night with the boy. This dramatic night of his boyhood is recalled on repeated occasions during the novel, as if it were a key both to his suffering in later years at the hands of the girls and women he falls in love with, and to his failures of willpower in regard to the work he must finally settle down to. In many other ways, too, the opening book, The Way by Swann’s, is the seed, or bulb, from which the remaining six books and hundreds of pages grow, and within which their entire structure, colour and texture are adumbrated. Like the overture of a great opera, The Way by Swann’s contains all the themes that will be developed at much greater length, and with greater variety, and subtlety, in the remainder of the work, as well as introducing us to very many of the characters whose lives we will follow. And just as it is possible to listen to an overture – to The Marriage of Figaro or Die Meistersinger – as a separate piece of music, so The Way by Swann’s can be read on its own, since it has its own sense of completeness. So, in one way, it is little wonder that some readers get to the end of The Way by Swann’s and then stop. Others who persevere beyond the first book break off at some later stage, meaning to return but never finding the time. There are reasons for this, too. The novel is not an easy read. Proust’s sentences can be long, very long; his paragraphs can cover pages. (It has been difficult to find suitable quotations for this very reason.) The narrator is much given to reflection, and takes advantage of his captive audience, his readers, to reflect at length. The book demands patience; it has to be taken slowly. It is also, as an acquaintance recently said of a different novel, ‘very French’. Not only are the names of the characters, the streets, the villages and towns French, the historical and literary references are mostly French, and the quotations are from French poems and plays. Racine’s tragedy of jealous obsession, Phèdre, is one running motif of the novel, as are his later religious plays Esther and Athalie, but while we have heard of and possibly seen the first, the second and third are barely known even to the most cultivated English readers. There are other things about the novel that can seem off-putting. The narrator himself is in many respects not particularly admirable and can come across as arrogant and with an intellectual superiority complex. But those who do set the novel aside early are missing out on one of the greatest experiences literature has to offer. Doing so is comparable to visiting one of the great cathedrals and seeing only the façade, without going inside to appreciate the soaring columns, the tracery of the roof and the brilliant stained glass. However trying the narrator may be from time to time, whatever the longueurs of certain sections, the novel is as great a work as a cathedral and the narrator is the guide making sense of it all. For, as well as being a social history of France in the period 1870–1920, Proust’s novel is the history of a single life of that period (or two lives, if we include Swann) and it is through the narrator’s eyes and mind that we experience the times. Through the narrator Proust introduces the element of subjective experience into the story, so that reading the novel through the medium of the narrator’s thoughts echoes our own experience of life as we live it. As the narrator keeps stressing, other people are a mystery, we know them only from the outside, we have to piece their thoughts and characters together from their words and actions. So other people can defy expectations, do surprising things, fall in love with the last people we thought they would, including members of their own sex, and be capable of producing great work – paintings or music that may survive for centuries, for instance – despite the nullity of their conversation and the obscurity of their lives. People also change, their characters are not static: a chance meeting or event can awaken unsuspected sides to them, and unearth motives completely hidden up to that point. These changes take place within the framework of biology, however. The narrator is a student of botany and zoology, he studies his fellow human beings – and himself – like a scientist, his ambition is to discover the laws, or some of them, which underlie human behaviour. The laws of some aspects of psychology, he tells us, are as ‘precise as those of hydrostatics’. As he grows older, he observes how more elements of his parents’ characters emerge in his own actions. This fascination with heredity is one of the major reasons he patronizes the salons and spends so much time with the old aristocracy. In the Guermantes and their class he sees both the preservation of characteristics over large spans of time – remarking for example that the Baron de Charlus has attitudes and uses expressions which would not have been out of place at the court of Louis XIV – and the living embodiment of French history. The continuance of the Guermantes family over centuries he sees as a triumph of human survival over the great destroyer, Time. He sees the same triumph of continuity in the family’s housekeeper, Françoise, who not only preserves patterns of speech and behaviour present in the French peasantry since time immemorial but whose features echo those portrayed in the sculptures which decorate ancient French churches. The bourgeois narrator, or Marcel as he is referred to on a couple of occasions, has the pedigree of neither of these classes; he has his intelligence and, he hopes, literary talent. He employs his intelligence without rest in the attempt to understand what other people, and most painfully the objects of his desire, are about and to understand himself. How could he have missed or ignored the signs that his beloved grandmother was so ill? Why is it that he only grieves properly for her some time after her death, when the memory of her is suddenly triggered ‘in a complete and involuntary recollection’ when, back in the same bedroom of the seaside hotel in Normandy where she had stayed with him years before, he bends down to untie his boots? What is going on in this mind which, as he says at one point, is the only reality? The understanding of the intelligence can only go so far: the most significant moments in a person’s life, the only truly real moments, occur spontaneously, triggered in the memory by an accidental, unforeseen act or gesture through which what had seemed a lost moment of past life is restored. Tasting the famous madeleine crumb-led in a spoonful of tea is one such trigger; stepping on an uneven paving stone is another; a spoon striking a plate with exactly the same note as the little bell which sounded when M. Swann came through the garden gate at the house of the narrator’s great-aunt in Combray is yet another. Time as we experience it – personal time, not chronological time – is a continuous flow and we are unable to grasp the significance of any of its fleeting moments as they pass. Only occasionally, when on the receiving end of vivid impressions, like those transmitted by the foaming pink and white blossom of a line of apple trees, or the haunting, fugitive melody of a piece of music, may we be close to grasping the meaning that appears to lie hidden behind them. It is these impressions that the (‘Impressionist’) painter Elstir perfects his technique to capture, stripping himself, the narrator tells us, of every intellectual notion in order to register the visual impressions more truthfully. The intellect has no direct access to reality: that privilege is reserved for other human powers. Foremost among these is memory, triggered accidentally but overwhelming in its reality, when moments, places and people of the past who appeared to be lost forever return in the rememberer’s mind or soul. Having tried as much as possible not to give away anything of the plot, I will avoid quoting here any of the superb passages in which Proust uses all his wonderful stylistic and literary skill to convey our sense of the fleetingness of time, our regret at its passing, our fear that everything will be lost to oblivion, that nothing, neither we, nor our loved ones, nor our works will survive. A few sentences will have to suffice. The narrator is walking in the Bois de Boulogne in November, thinking back to the time when he used to walk there with Mme Swann.

The reality I had known no longer existed. That Mme Swann did not arrive exactly the same at the same moment was enough to make the avenue different. The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions that formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is only regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.

These words are from the final paragraph of The Way by Swann’s, the first book of the novel. It would be such a mistake to make them the last words you ever read of Remembrance of Things Past.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 58 © Anthony Wells 2018