To read Proust is to feel the fluctuations of a consciousness in all its mingled modes—sensory, cognitive, emotional. But for me the enchantment of his immense novel lies in the fact that the narrator is agonizingly aware of the chasm between experience and language.
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I confess: For more than forty years, I’ve had this Everest of literature on my shelves, but all previous attempts to conquer its summit had defeated me.
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Recently, I’ve come back to Proust. I did not resolve once again, once and for all, to finish reading his masterwork (like a surprising number of my literary friends, I’d been swearing to do this for years); instead, I simply began reading him again, every morning on my way to the office on the No. 7 train, and every evening on my way home.
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I read Du côté de chez Swann for the first time as a sophomore and was fortunate in having a charismatic instructor introduce me to the then strange and wonderful world of Marcel Proust. Without the help of a tisane and with no madeleine, the theatrical Professor Floyd Zulli opened up a remarkable universe which beckoned me to enter.
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My own introduction to Proust came first via my bookish mother, whose enthusiastic recommendation was enough to put me off for some years (such are the unfortunate vagaries of adolescence). When I finally started reading Swann’s Way it was in French, in France, when I was meant to be working on something else entirely.
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Admirers of Proust have to overcome an anxiety before embarking on any study of his life; an awareness that Proust himself wouldn't have been very happy to hear that we are focusing on it.
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I find it extraordinary that whenever the national media in the U. S. wants to typify the writer par excellence it is usually Proust who is cited. His name crops up all the time in The New Yorker (as do new cartoons to add to the already impressive list; more cartoons devoted to Proust than to any other writer, I'm sure), The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, etc.
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Reading the Recherche is still a rite of initiation for khâgneux. My philosophy professor said – to make fun of us, and of himself too I think – that Proust was a “super-khâgneux”, like a superhero… It seems pretty true to me. Proust, like those of us in khâgne, was that strange kid who spent the most lively days of his childhood precisely not living, “spent with a favorite book”, his adolescence deliciously tortured between Baudelaire and Rimbaud.
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At the whim of each sound, of each color, of each feeling and each emotion, Proust makes me think that maybe, in the end, literature only interests me when it sheds light on those who surround me and watch me. It becomes something more than decoration when it tells me about the way I look at others and at myself.
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Fidelity to the Proustian aesthetic calls for analogy, one’s relationship to their work calls for a mirror. Like Marcel Proust, who drew freely from musical works in order to cross-breed and transcribe them into novels, we traverse the early 20th century of French music at our discretion. It is a “sound reading” of the Recherche, subjective and rightfully so.
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Proust is so rich that it is difficult to approach him through absences, or what is missing. For example, Franz Kafka writes a brilliant text in 1909, the first time he goes to the movies, and sees a Chaplin film, and is quite willing to run off to Italy to see airplanes for real (The Aeroplanes at Brescia).
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Marcel Proust was a particularly strong presence at what felt (and still feels) like a pivotal moment in my life. I was introduced to the Recherche eight years ago, in a French class at Bard College, taught by the charming and brilliant Eric Trudel. This was only the second French literature course I had ever taken, and the first one where I felt that my imperfect understanding of the language did not distract from my enjoyment of the narrative.
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One of the great pleasures of reading Proust for the first time is going from surprise to surprise. You never know what is coming next. Characters change all the time.
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The first time I heard of Proust, I didn't even know we were talking about him. I was about 11 years old and my mathematics teacher told us the story of this guy who stumbled over a paving stone. It reminded him of a moment, years before in Venice, when he had faltered the same way on unequal slabs of stone. I understood the that unexpected memory got him out of an unbearable melancholy.
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Swann’s Way was published on November 14, 1913. Just two days before, the newspaper Le Temps printed an “interview” with Proust. This interview was a fake. It was entirely written by Proust himself. Its heading read: “In the rooms whose shades are almost always shut, Mr. Marcel Proust is lying down. The electric light accentuates his matte complexion, but two admirable eyes full of life and fervor exude light under a forehead buried beneath his hair.
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My step-dad is a philosophy professor and when I was a kid he became interested in memory. First his focus was how people remember the Holocaust, and later he came to Proust. Bear in mind, he's from Australia and was taught French by a WWII vet who'd learnt it during the war, and was hardly a Francophile. All of a sudden, he bought three different complete English translations of À la recherche du temps perdu.
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Now when I look back on Proust’s immense achievement in this year of the centennial of Swann’s Way (whose publication he had to subsidize), I realize that in the last twenty years his book has edged out Ulysses out as the canonical work of the 20th century. Although Proust predicted that he himself would be forgotten in ten years after his death, and his book in a hundred years, the renown of his great work only grows. As Proust observed, a revolutionary work of art must go out into the work and great its own posterity.
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"Proust and Me": this is the first title Roland Barthes considered for the lecture he gave on Proust in the fall of 1978 at the Collège de France, and then at NYU. Not, he said, because "I compare myself to this great writer,” but because “I identify myself with him,” for In Search of Lost Time is “the narrative of a desire to write.” Eventually, to illustrate this identification process, he chose to borrow his title from Proust’s voice itself, from the famous first (and unusually short!) sentence of the Recherche’s first volume: “For a long time, I went to bed early.”
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