The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [2]
The Search is perhaps the greatest achievement of twentieth-century literary modernity, an improbable feat of individual creativity. It incorporates numerous traits of style and technique of nineteenth-century literature: romantic reflection and self-absorption; realistic accounts of people, places and events; naturalistic studies of genealogy and vice. It also takes in a vast sweep of history and culture, from cave paintings to Carpaccio, Mozart to music hall, Napoleon to Nietzsche and Nijinski, Leonardo to Lloyd George, Socrates to Sévigné. Proust’s penchant for Russian doll-like clausal constructions, sentences that sprawl unhurriedly over several pages, sets him apart from his immediate forebears, yet his equally frequent habit of formulating laws and maxims puts one in mind of the seventeenth-century moralistes La Bruyère and La Rochefoucauld.
This remarkable stylistic palate and expansive range come to us from a narrator who turns his gaze outwards to the proliferating multiplicities of the material world but just as often looks inwards, at times with increased intensity, at the tensions and traumas, real and imagined, of his own subjectivity. A large measure of Proust’s radical modernity stems from the non-linear unfolding of the novel. Prolepsis (anticipation) and analepsis (flashback) are narrative devices familiar to us in film and fiction nowadays but Proust was among the first to use them systematically in structuring a literary work. Using them, as well as subtle, sometimes unmarked shifts in perspective (movements between the Narrator’s older and younger selves) in a novel as expansive as the Search tests readers to their limits and foregrounds the importance – and the fallibility – of memory, the mental faculty Proust prizes above all else. The result is a reading experience unlike any other in the Western tradition.
Most famously, near the start of the novel the Narrator’s childhood, long thought to be a forgotten, and therefore inaccessible, chapter of his past, is recaptured for him as an adult when he tastes a madeleine, a small, sweet cake, dipped in lime-blossom tea. This sense experience, far more powerful than any willed act of the mind, revitalizes involuntarily the experience of tasting the same concoction as a child; this memory opens the floodgates and a crucial period of his existence is vividly restored to him.
Also key in the Proustian world are the complex workings of habit. Habit can dampen our senses to the stimuli of the outside world, cocoon us in an environment that is anodyne, inhabitable. For Proust’s Narrator, an absence of habit brings with it anxiety, uncertainty and fear. Coming to terms with a new environment (such as an unfamiliar room in which he must sleep) requires the Narrator to re-establish from first principles his identity and his relation to the world at large. While with time habit anaesthetizes the hyper-sensitive Narrator to the fears by which he is assailed, a routine existence shaped solely by habit (like that of Aunt Léonie in Combray) is one which threatens to limit his experience of the world and the things in it to a purely superficial level, dictating patterns of behaviour that curtail spontaneity and opportunities for real discovery. As a result the Narrator treads a treacherous path between his fear of being damaged by a complex, threatening world and his unparalleled thirst for knowledge. Whether we seek knowledge of a sonata or a salon, of how our lover finds his or her pleasure or, harder still, of his or her intimate thoughts and desires, we run the risk of ridicule by revealing our ignorance, our vice or our obsession. Worse, we might discover truths we are not equipped to handle, knowledge that with enlightenment brings suffering.
The conception of love and relationships that emerges from the Search is a pessimistic one. The Other is unknowable; what we call ‘love’ is a projection that comes from the self and whose reflection we mistake for reciprocal affection. Desire is all-powerful until the object of desire is possessed;