Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [48]
But the victory was not yet secure. His critics dismissed his book as disorganized childhood and adolescent memories—formless, plotless, endless. Since Proust himself knew how the whole epic turned out, he was impatient for Gallimard to rush the later volumes into print. He was convinced that once critics had the entire seven volumes in hand they would see the overall design. The apparently meandering prologue to the whole epic, “Combray,” for instance, is actually something like a strict overture to an opera, in the sense that it announces and compresses all the successive themes. Thus the two paths, or “ways,” the Méséglise way (also known as Swann’s way) and the Guermantes way, which seem to the Narrator as a child to be two entirely different itineraries leading in opposite directions, are revealed in the very last volume, Time Regained, to be joined—in fact, to be the same path. The adult narrator learns about this surprising unity from Swann’s daughter Gilberte, who herself has married a Guermantes relative, Robert de Saint-Loup. The heraldic weight of the Guermantes name is first touched on in “Combray,” as is the theme of illness (real and imaginary), snobbism, the difference between family love and romantic passion, the power of reading to bewitch, and so on. Developing themes and recurring characters spanning the whole long arc of the seven books give it an architectural solidity which casual readers of the first two volumes could not have suspected.
Similarly, the theme of involuntary memory, announced in “Combray” by the madeleine and the realization that taste and smell alone bear “the vast structure of recollection,” is not fully worked out until Time Regained, when three successive sensations awaken three involuntary memories—and the past is brilliantly, eternally recaptured and made available as material for literature. Two uneven paving stones in the Guermantes’ courtyard bring back a flood of memories about two similar stones in St. Mark’s church in Venice. Later, the sound of a spoon chiming on a plate reminds the Narrator of the noise of a hammer on the metal wheel of a train, heard years earlier when his train had stopped in the woods. Finally, a stiff napkin makes the Narrator recall the starchy towel he’d dried off with when he was a boy, during his first visit to Balbec.
In analyzing the joy that these memories bring him, Proust realizes that at the time they occurred he was unable to bring his imagination to bear on the experiences, the imagination “which was the only organ that I possessed for the enjoyment of beauty. . . .” Now, however, involuntary memory allowed the recollected experiences “to be mirrored at one and the same time in the past, so that my imagination was permitted to savor it, and in the present, where the actual shock to my senses of the noise, the touch of the linen napkin, or whatever it might be, had added to the dreams of the imagination the concept of ‘existence’ which they usually lack, and through this subterfuge had made it possible for my being to secure, to isolate, to immobilize—for a moment brief as a flash of lightning—what normally it never apprehends: a fragment of time in the pure state.”
Proust always claimed that he had a bad memory and that, besides, a carefully reconstructed recollection, prompted by photos or shared reminiscences, was invariably colorless. Only an involuntary memory, triggered by a taste or smell or other sensation, could erase the passage of time and restore a past experience in its first, full effulgence. Proust was anti-intellectual and convinced that the domain of art, which is recollected experience, can never be tapped through reasoning or method alone; it must be delivered to us, fresh and vivid, through a process beyond