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By Root 620 0

the Narrator has a succession of further experiences of involuntary memory. A spoon knocking against a plate recalls the sound of a railwayman’s hammer on the wheels of the train in which he sat and observed, unmoved, the row of sunlit trees on his return to Paris; wiping his mouth with a starched napkin brings back the seascape at Balbec that he looked upon, drying his face with a similarly textured towel, on his first morning there; the shrill sound of water in a pipe recalls the pleasure-steamers at Balbec; and discovering a copy of François le Champi in the library reincarnates in him the young boy who first read the book with his mother in Combray. The pages dedicated to working through the many lessons of these experiences are some of the richest and most densely packed in the novel; they repay close attention and re-reading.

When experiencing the past and the present at once, that moment, strictly speaking, is neither: it is situated outside Time. For their fleeting duration these moments offer a sense of eternity – time in its purest, immeasurable state. Impressions are stored up within us, often ‘lost’ in the depths of our memories without our being aware of it. If we happen to encounter the right trigger we can relive the original experience in a very pure form, unadulterated by the deformations our mind can introduce when we seek consciously to store an impression. The Narrator states that ‘the impression is for the writer what experiment is for the scientist, with the difference that in the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes the experiment and in the writer it comes after the impression’ (TR, 234; 2273). The writer’s inner store of impressions is a book that he or she alone must learn to decipher before finding a way to transform impressions into expressions – a written form that communicates to the reader.

Merely describing things as the Goncourt journal does cannot perform this task, for ‘it is only beneath the surface of [what] such a literature describes that reality has its hidden existence’ (TR, 253; 2284; my emphasis). Metaphor is key to accessing this ‘hidden existence’: to interpret a metaphor we must identify an underlying commonality or essence in two things. Through metaphor we get away from mere description and into relationality and interconnection, the pluralities of the world which have fascinated the Narrator throughout the novel.

His experiences can be used to create a work of art which thereby redeems or makes good on the life previously thought worthless. The work in turn offers its readers the opportunity better to recognize life’s riches; it is likened to an optical instrument with which we might ‘read ourselves’ (TR, 273–4; 2296–7) and avoid the superficiality that otherwise renders so much of our lives ‘temps perdu’. These ideas, and many more that there is not space to consider here, swarm forth from the Narrator’s mind, finally channelled into creative matters beyond jealousy, mourning and illness. If Proust’s theory of literature emerges from these pages in a rather ragged manner, it has every reason to: the suddenness of the Narrator’s epiphanies has provoked a fervent hyperactivity of mind; a neater, more regimented statement from our author-to-be would be out of keeping with the spontaneous rush of the whole episode. We should also note that the editing of Time Regained was not finished before Proust’s death, which may account for some of the repetition and inconsistency found in the text.

As he moves into the salons, the tone and focus shift. The guests seem to be masked or disfigured travesties of the old and ageing. But there is no illusion: these are the effects of time on the human body. Time has stooped and silvered individuals who in the Narrator’s mind were still in their prime. He is by no means immune but it takes some time for the realization of his own ageing to sink in. These pages offer counterbalance to the euphoria of the triumph over time by which the Narrator was gripped in the library: now frailty and the ultimate threat of death are everywhere