The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [3]
The Narrator’s compulsive knowledge-seeking together with his fear of the unknown combine to produce one of literature’s most engaging and at times infuriating monologists. His urge to understand states of mind, impressions and sensations makes the Search a remarkable roman d’analyse or psychological novel, a sustained, rhapsodic study in interiority. Yet the Narrator’s quest is not only for his own identity and vocation. He seeks an understanding of art, sexuality and worldly and political affairs: he is a snoop and a voyeur; he comments and classifies; his taxonomic impulse makes the novel appear to be a vast compendium, replete with burrowing wasps and bedsteads, military strategies, stereoscopes, asparagus and aeroplanes. The metaphors and analogies the Narrator persistently uses act as conduits between the realms of mind and matter and remind us of the fluidity of their boundaries for the creative artist.
Proust’s Narrator is at times an incisive thinker, a virtuoso splitter of intellectual hairs and an accomplished cartographer of the human heart and mind. Frequently, however, his greatest insights come from fumblings in the dark, wrong turns and contingent revelations. He swings between confidence and neurosis, is a dupe and an ignorer of good advice, often because of the blinding force of jealousy. He is a sensitive aesthete seeking affection and happiness who sequesters his beloved and slowly suffocates her with a brutal regime of surveillance and interrogation.
With the caveat that an Introduction can never be a substitute for the labour of reading and rereading Proust’s work itself, what follows offers a crutch for the weary and a set of access routes for those setting out on the journey for the first time. In Search of Lost Time is a unique achievement and reading it is a life-changing process. The novel explores the ragged, shifting nature of subjectivity; it abounds in beauty, intelligence, cruelty and suffering. It is hoped that this volume will stimulate the readerly appetite of those jaded or misled by the much-peddled ‘madeleine-induced bliss’, ‘cork-lined room’ conceptions of Proust and his work. This Introduction reminds readers that Proust’s novel offers sustenance far longer-lasting, richer and more nourishing than cork or crumbs.
Chapter 1 Life
Proust led an almost irresistibly intriguing life. It was one of wretched ill health combined with seemingly endless creative stamina; desire in surfeit but scant satisfaction; wealth and privilege coupled with perennial yearnings for the company and favours of those of a lower social station. These aspects of the life make for fascinating reading and can feed profitably into our understanding and appreciation of Proust’s novel, but if we tarry too long over them we risk becoming bewitched by the man and his manias, losing sight of the art to which he dedicated his life.
As biographers and critics have profitably shown for decades, Proust drew on practically every aspect of his personal experience when creating his novel. His life and the rapidly changing world in which he lived provided inspiration, ideas and scenarios, which fed into the construction of his literary project. But this, crucially, does not mean that Proust and his Narrator are one and the same. Proust had a brother, a Jewish mother, a sinecure position for a time at the Bibliothèque mazarine; the Narrator of the Search has none of these. Proust was homosexual; for his heterosexual Narrator, lesbianism is a threatening, unknowable otherness that