One of the qualities of Proust’s novel that people did notice immediately was that its writing is expansive; its sentences are complex; its thoughts and images are rich and detailed; its pace is leisurely; its structural features emerge only slowly. (“Proust tries our patience so long as we expect his story to move forward,” Clive Bell would write in 1928, “that not being the direction in which it is intended to move.”) The readers at Ollendorff and Charpentier obviously found the novel’s pace and density to be an overwhelming obstacle to comprehension. Gide points to a similar experience when, having finally sat down to read the book attentively, he finds himself “supersaturating [him]self in it, rapturously, wallowing in it.” With Proust, a little goes a long way, it seems, and opening the novel with the expectation of making quick progress turns out to be an unwise idea.
As early readers of Proust began to assimilate the novel’s opening volumes (the first volume appeared in 1913, the second in 1919, the final one in 1927, five years after Proust’s death in 1922), they quickly found ways to relate Proust’s project to other familiar reference points. Some immediately linked it to other contemporary modernist literary projects. J. Middleton Murry, writing in 1922, would note “three significant books, calling themselves novels” that appeared in 1913–14, Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs. They were all “attempts to record immediately the growth of a consciousness … without any effort at mediation by means of an interposed plot or story.” What was different about Proust, for Murry, was that “he established as the starting point of his book the level of consciousness from which the exploration actually began.” That is, Proust’s narrative method involved “perpetual reference to the present adult consciousness of the author.” What Murry calls the author here, others will call Proust’s narrator, but the feature Murry identifies has become one that people take to be a hallmark of Proust’s writing: the subtle play of perspectives that can be found within the bounds of any one sentence from Proust’s novel, where the consciousness that seems to be responsible for the sentence in question shifts rapidly through time, locating itself temporarily at any one of many different points on the time line making up the narrator’s life.
When Murry reaches for a figure to whom Proust could be compared or contrasted, he chooses the Rousseau of the Confessions. Others in the early years of Proust’s reception would choose Montaigne or Saint-Simon. If Montaigne and Rousseau came to mind as part of an effort to understand the focus in Proust’s novel on the workings of consciousness and memory in the elaboration of a self, Saint-Simon (whose celebrated Memoires chronicle the court of Louis XIV and the subsequent period of the Regency) came to mind not only because he is mentioned several dozen times throughout the novel, but because the novel also involves a great deal of sociologically acute observations of high-society people interacting within complex and carefully delineated social environments. Writing in 1923, in a special issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française honoring Proust after his death, the French critic Albert Thibaudet wrote: “In Saint-Simon we have a tide of history on the move, people in the mass, the whole of France and the living vehement soul of Saint-Simon ever-present and manifest everywhere. In Proust we have a psychological tide, as vast as the former but, so as to yield its full power and make headway, in need only of a soul, either the author’s or the soul of a character whom it has failed to exhaust, inexhaustible as all creatures are.” Thibaudet moves Proust away from the sociological to the psychological impulse in novel writing. Proust’s sociological ambitions for his novel (honed through his reading of other novelists he deeply admired, such as Balzac, Flaubert, and George Eliot) were perhaps not so easily appreciated in the early years of his reception.
“The beauties one discovers soonest are also those which pall soonest,” Proust’s narrator had observed. In the case of A la recherche du temps perdu, for certain novelists of the next generation it would be Proust’s intense focus on the interior life of his characters that had palled. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir would turn to American novelists of the 1930s (people like John Dos Passos) in an attempt to craft a different narrative style, a different way of representing human beings acting in the world. Instead of focusing on interior life, their intent, Sartre would write in 1939, was to arrive at an understanding of the world in which “finally, everything is outside, everything, even ourselves: outside, in the world, among all the others.” Sartre would even go so far as to say in that same essay (written while he was planning his novel L’âge de raison [The Age of Reason] and Beauvoir was working on L’invitée [She Came to Stay]) that “we have put Proust behind us.”
The project of writing novels with no interest in interior life would be taken a step further by someone like Alain Robbe-Grillet, a standard-bearer for the New Novel, exemplified by works such as his 1957 La jalousie (Jealousy). In an essay from 1961, Robbe-Grillet would state that the New Novelists were interested in pursuing the evolution of the form of the novel that could be traced through a line of precursors including “Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Beckett.” In the course of its evolution, Robbe-Grillet affirmed, the novel was gradually shedding a concern with worn-out notions such as “character, chronology, sociological study, and so on.” It now seems clear that the extent of Proust’s impact on literature (both in France and around the world), and the nature of what Proust had achieved, was only starting to be felt and understood as Sartre or Robbe-Grillet wrote; it might also be noted that the clear forward-moving path of the novel’s formal evolution that Robbe-Grillet thought he could point to looks decidedly less convincing from today’s point of view. Proust was not part of an evolution in which the novel was shedding such categories as character, chronology, or sociological study. He was reinventing those categories; he was turning them to new ends.
It was around 1908, when Proust was in his mid- to late thirties, that plans for his novel began to solidify in his mind. As a younger man, Proust had published various literary essays and one collection, Les plaisirs et les jours (Pleasures and Days, 1896), which comprised a miscellany of short stories, essays, a pastiche of Flaubert, poetic portraits of painters and musicians, and poems in verse and prose. Around this time he also became fascinated with the writings of the English art critic John Ruskin, who had died in 1900. The English poet Richard Aldington wrote that the source of Proust’s fascination with Ruskin lay in “Ruskin’s essential appreciativeness, his capacity for the assimilation and understanding of beauty, his reverence for the arts as symbols and expressions of civilization.” With the help of his mother, whose English was better than his, and a friend, Marie Nordlinger, Proust translated Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens (the translation was published in 1904) and also Sesame and Lilies (1906).
It is often in the lengthy preface that Proust wrote for Sesame and Lilies, called “Sur la lecture” (“On Reading”), that critics find the first premonitions of the major work that was to come. Proust’s preface seems to be pursuing multiple agendas simultaneously, and it is perhaps in this multitasking quality it evinces that it most looks forward to his great novel. On the one hand, Proust offers a lusciously detailed description of what it feels like to read (or what it felt like for him to read as a child on a summer’s day in his grandparent’s home); how the feeling of the experience of reading was woven into the experience of interruptions to eat lunch or to go for a walk; and how the experience of reading evolved across the day, taking place in a chair near the fire in the morning, and later in bed just before falling asleep. He addresses the difference between productive and unproductive kinds of reading experiences; he discusses what it means for a mind reading to be encountering the traces of the mind that wrote the words on the page; he develops his ideas regarding what it means to think of reading as an encounter with the past. The experience of Racine’s syntax, for instance, is compared to the experience of ancient architectural structures—to the walls of old
cities or the baptisteries of old churches.
Roughly two years after the publication of his translation of Sesame and Lilies, in May 1908, Proust wrote a letter to his friend Louis d’Albufera that has become famous because of the list of projects he tells Albufera he had under way:
I have in hand
a study on the nobility
a Parisian novel
an essay on Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert
an essay on women
an essay on pederasty (not easy to publish)
a study on stained-glass windows
a study on tombstones
a study on the novel.
The novel is, of course, a capacious genre, capable of incorporating many other kinds of discourse—poetry, essays, theoretical discourses of various kinds. Could a single novel be capacious enough to contain all the items on Proust’s list? During 1908 and 1909, it seems Proust decided that yes, in fact, what he was working on was a single novel. By August 1909, Proust wrote to Alfred Vallette, husband of the novelist Rachilde and editor of the Mercure de France (a major publishing house that had, for example, published works by both Gide and Colette): “I am finishing a book which in spite of its provisional title: Contre Sainte-Beuve, souvenir d’une matinée, is a genuine novel, and an extremely indecent one in places. One of the principal characters is a homosexual. … I fancy it contains some new things. … The book does indeed end with a long conversation about Sainte-Beuve and about aesthetics … and once people have finished the book they will see (I hope) that the whole novel is simply an implementation of the artistic principles expressed in this final part, a sort of preface if you like placed at the end.”
Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve was an imposing nineteenth-century literary critic, and Proust decided that it was against Sainte-Beuve’s approach to authors and their works that he would build his own aesthetic position. The novel Proust was envisioning would thus contain a metafictional aspect—it would be a novel about writing novels and about reading them, a novel calling attention to its own aesthetic beliefs and its own formal procedures through a discussion of what the right method for studying literature should be. (Gide’s 1925 Les faux-monnayeurs [The Counterfeiters] is another classic example of metafictional writing from these same years, containing a character who is a novelist, and including pages from that fictional novelist’s journal in which he writes about his attempts to write a novel called Les faux-monnayeurs. Gide would then publish his own Journal des Faux-monnayeurs in 1926.)
Would it be fair in 1909 to call the novel Proust was writing “extremely indecent” because of the homosexual characters and behaviors it described? Perhaps for some readers, but not for others. Rachilde, to whose husband Proust was writing, had published her scandalous Monsieur Vénus in 1884 (a novel about a cross-dressing female aristocrat and the tortuous relationship she constructs with an effete working-class man), and other authors who dealt with nonnormative forms of sexuality were not hard to find at the time Proust was writing. Gide, for instance, had published L’immoraliste (The Immoralist) in 1902. In his Journal, Gide recounts a conversation from 1915 with an older novelist, Paul Bourget, in which Bourget makes a point of inquiring as to whether the protagonist of L’immoraliste was a “practicing pederast.” People in these years were becoming familiar with the idea that literature was a place in which non-mainstream forms of sexuality could be represented, discussed, and analyzed. Between 1914 and 1922, Gide and Proust would exchange letters and have several late-night conversations regarding the representation of male homosexuality in the books they were working on (including Gide’s Les caves du Vatican, Corydon, Les faux-monnayeurs, and Si le grain ne meurt …). Clearly for them (and for numerous other authors around them, including, of course, Colette) this topic and the kind of literary treatment it would be given could serve as key elements for cutting-edge literary writing.
The drafts Proust was working on around this time would be published after his death under the title Contre Sainte-Beuve. While one can recognize in them the lineaments of the novel to come, Proust’s project had a good deal of evolving left to do. Not much of the writing dealing with his specific disagreements with Sainte-Beuve (regarding how to understand the relations between the works an author writes and the social life an author leads) makes its way into the published novel. But one key element of his 1909 letter to Vallette—the architectural idea of a preface that comes at the end to lay out the principle on which the whole work has been constructed—is worthy of notice. At about the same time that Du côté de chez Swann was published, in November 1913, Proust penned some observations about his novel that were published in the newspaper Le Temps. In his remarks, he insists that although only one volume of the novel was appearing at that time, it constitutes a whole—one whose effects will only be apparent at the end. “I hope that at the end of my book, some minor social event of no importance, some marriage between two persons who in the first volume belong to very different worlds, will indicate that time has passed and will take on the beauty of certain patinaed leadwork at Versailles, which time has encased in an emerald sheath.” Perhaps there is a clue here to something that interests Proust that he does not fully articulate: will that minor marriage do no more than merely give us the sense that time has passed? It seems rather that Proust is gesturing at a relationship between the passage of time and certain kinds of social processes for which he has something like an aesthetic appreciation, ongoing processes that can be perceived only in the effects they produce over time, visible only in the effects they produce on the persons and the object they shape or sculpt. Different processes, Proust’s novel will show us, become perceptible over different spans of time. Time holds certain things and also sculpts certain things, Proust seems to be suggesting, and part of his novelistic vision involved finding ways to show us time in its passage in order to make it possible for us to see what time holds and what it sculpts.
Along with insisting that his novelistic vision was meant, in a certain way, to make the passage of time visible, Proust emphasizes in his remarks for Le Temps the importance of a particular scene that occurs about fifty pages into the novel, the famous scene of the madeleine: “Already, in this first volume, you will find the character who tells the story and who says ‘I’ (who is not me) suddenly recovering years, gardens, people he has forgotten, in the taste of a mouthful of tea in which he has soaked a bit of madeleine.” This is the scene in which Proust (or his narrator) draws a distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory. In the article in Le Temps, Proust writes: “For me, voluntary memory, which is above all a memory of the intellect and of the eyes, gives us only facets of the past that have no truth; but should a smell or a taste, met with again in quite different circumstances, reawaken the past in us, in spite of ourselves, we sense how different that past was from what we thought we had remembered, our voluntary memory having painted it, like a bad painter, in false colors. … I believe that it is really only to involuntary memories that the artist should go for the raw material of his work.”
Now it turns out that the scene of the madeleine early in the novel, and the experience of involuntary memory provided in that moment, is only the first in a series of such scenes that occur periodically over the course of the novel. About halfway through the novel’s final volume, a flurry of such moments occurs, provoked successively by the narrator’s experience of stumbling over a paving stone, of hearing the sound of a spoon tapped against the side of a plate, of the feel of a starched napkin brushing across his face, and then, in a more complicated fashion, of the discovery on a bookshelf of a book (George Sand’s novel François le champi) that had played a key role in an important childhood moment. The first three instances provoke a profound sense of happiness and a renewed sense of commitment to a writerly vocation. In these moments, “the past was made to encroach upon the present and make me uncertain about which of the two I was in; the truth was that the being within me who was enjoying this impression was enjoying it because of
something shared between a day in the past and the present moment, something extra-temporal, and this being appeared only when, through one of these moments of identity between the present and the past, it was able to find itself in the only milieu in which it could live and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say outside of time.” The long passage in which the narrator thinks over the nature of this experience of involuntary memory seems to be the kind of moment Proust described to Vallette in his 1909 letter, a preface that comes at the end, describing how intellectual apprehension (voluntary memory) will always provide an inadequate account of our passage through the world. “For the truths that the intellect grasps directly as giving access to the world of full enlightenment have something less profound, less necessary about them than those that life has, despite ourselves, communicated in an impression, a material impression because it enters us through our senses, but one from which it is also possible to extract something spiritual.”
A History of Modern French Literature Page 63