The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [72]
At the matinée he is confronted with what he terms ‘the sensation of Time’ (TR, 317; 2321), which reveals a disadvantage in the way our memories store up images and impressions: ‘nothing is more painful’, he summarizes, ‘than [the] contrast between the mutability of people and the fixity of memory’ (TR, 372; 2355). We may be able fleetingly to experience moments outside time but we can do nothing to halt its progress: bodies grow weak, memories grow feeble, details and dates are forgotten, the past becomes ‘temps perdu’. Time, however, is not only destructive:
Life is perpetually weaving fresh threads which link one individual and one event to another, … these threads are crossed and recrossed, doubled and redoubled to thicken the web, so that between any slightest point of our past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us an almost infinite variety of communicating paths to choose from. (TR, 428; 2388)
If we try diagrammatically to link up even a handful of episodes or characters in the Search, the tangle of criss-crossing lines that result – ‘transversals’, Proust calls them (TR, 427; 2387) – vouch for the cogency of these remarks. An art that can incorporate this dense interweave and keep us alert to its nuances has a chance of counteracting the drain of forgetfulness from which everyone comes to suffer, the destructive force of time.
In the closing pages the tempo increases, the focus shifting away from the Narrator’s acquaintances on to the business he feels will occupy him until he breathes his last. We are never told that the work we have been reading is that which the Narrator is about to begin writing. Proust’s novel is not a closed circle (unlike Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) in which the protagonist reveals herself in the novel’s final section as the author of what has come before) and this open-endedness contributes to the urge to start over again that surprises many readers at the end of the book.
Appropriately enough for a work of its scope, the Search ends on an image of giants: our store of experience mounts up beneath us as we age, elevating us until in later life we totter as if on stilts, ‘like giants plunged into the years’ (TR, 451; 2401). Characteristically this image does not aggrandize its author: Proust’s focus is on the wonder of the individual, the untold depths each of us has concealed within the meagre confines of our bodies. Our task now, aided immeasurably by Proust’s book, is to sound those depths while we still have time
Chapter 5 Proust criticism
Getting started
Early studies
Philosophy and fiction
Style and narrative technique
Proust and the arts
Self, sex and society
Essay collections
Genetic criticism
‘Impossible to make head or tale of it!’ commented Jacques Normand (Madeleine was a fortuitous pseudonym), one of Proust’s first critics, in the reader’s report that led to the rejection of an early version of Swann’s Way by the publishing house Fasquelle in 1912.1 Despite serious misgivings, Normand concluded his report remarking that ‘it is impossible not to see here an extraordinary intellectual phenomenon’.2 And this phenomenon has attracted a staggering volume of critical responses (many more positive than Normand’s) ever since. In 1992, Antoine Compagnon, in his informative overview of Proust’s work and its fate through the years in France and abroad, published in Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire [Realms of Memory], estimated there to be ‘certainly more than two thousand’ books on Proust and his work.3 Recent bibliographical data show that over 1,200 further books, articles and essays on Proust and his work were published between 2004 and 2008. The ever-growing secondary literature on Proust dwarfs the works on Montaigne, Balzac or Sartre.4 So where does a beginner begin?
Getting started
There are several useful reference works we can lean on while reading Proust’s novel. Terence Kilmartin’s A Guide to Proust