Proust’s debility and self-exile limited the effects on his personal life of the guns of August. What Proust was writing during these World War years was an autobiographical chronicle of French high society in the whole half century before. It is the story of an author’s growth in consciousness until at the end of it all the author is ready “to begin work.” The final work, one third of which was published only posthumously, came to about three thousand pages. But Proust’s original versions were at least ten thousand pages, and thirty thousand draft pages were destroyed at his orders. He was a prolific correspondent. Some three thousand of his letters have already appeared in print. He died in Paris in November 1922 of pneumonia while revising his book.
Of all novels, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is least suited to summary. For it is the story of itself, of how the author came to write the book. In place of a plot there is the flow of unconscious memory, purposely undirected by the intellect. Nor is it well suited for anthologies. Many a sentence becomes a long paragraph, and every memory flows with a stream.
And so it was that, for a long time afterwards, when I lay awake at night and revived old memories of Combray, I saw no more of it than this sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background, like the panels which a Bengal fire or some electric sign will illuminate and dissect from the front of a building the other parts of which remain plunged in darkness: broad enough at its base, the little parlour, the dining-room, the alluring shadows of the path along which could come M. Swann, the unconscious author of my sufferings, the hall through which I would journey to the first step of that staircase, so hard to climb, which constituted all by itself, the tapering “elevation” of an irregular pyramid; and, at the summit, my bedroom, with the little passage through whose glazed door Mamma would enter.…
(Translated by C.K.M. Scott-Moncrieff)
The book is divided into seven sections, on different themes. The narrator, Marcel, relives his own growth and the trivial travails of French aristocratic society. Proust had given up the idea of a linear narrative around the single character Swann. Instead he clustered the parts around themes, which he thought could be as inspiring and intelligible as a cathedral—infinite detail surrounding the grand direction of a nave. Never forgetting Ruskin, Proust described writing as his “architectural” labor, and often wrote of the architectural structure of his book. He had made a cathedral of his memories, as he confessed to a friend in 1919:
When you speak to me of cathedrals, I cannot but feel touched at the evidence of an intuition which has led you to guess what I have never mentioned to anybody, and here set down in writing for the first time—that I once planned to give to each part of my book a succession of titles, such as Porch, Windows in the Apse, etc., so as to defend myself in advance against the sort of stupid criticism which has been made to the effect that my books lack construction, whereas I hope to prove to you that their sole merit lies in the solidity of their tiniest parts. I gave up the idea of using these architectural titles because I found them too pretentious, but I am touched at finding that you have dug them up by a sort of intelligent divination.…
(Translated by Gerhard Hopkins)
His seven themes were childhood (Swann’s Way); awakening loves for people and the arts (Within a Budding Grove); high society (The Guermantes Way); heterosexual and homosexual love (Cities of the Plain); ways of being possessed (The Captive); deprivation (The Sweet Cheat Gone); and the cycle of recapturing life through memory (The Past Recaptured).
The whole book is a story of what Proust described as his “favorite occupation,” loving. And it tells of the narrator and others falling in and out of love: Swann’s passion for the courtesan Odette; the narrator’s own love affair with Gilberte, the daughter of Swann and Odette; his meeting with the attractive nobleman Saint-Loup, and Saint-Loup’s uncle Baron de Charlus, Albertine, and others; a passing love affair with the duchesse de Guermantes, and Charlus’s homosexual pursuits. Then the narrator’s suspicions of Albertine’s lesbian love affairs and his keeping her captive until she flees and dies. Then other love affairs punctuated by scenes of Paris in wartime, with the possible disintegration of several of the characters by assorted passions and the passage of time, and how Saint-Loup, become homosexual, marries Gilberte, and later dies in battle. Finally, after the war, the narrator at a reception of the princesse de Guermantes in another madeleine-like epiphany discovers how the past has been made eternal. In The Past Recaptured, his final volume, he recalls how slow he was to recognize the effects of passing time:
The first instant I did not understand why I could not immediately recognize the master of the house and the guests, who seemed to have “made themselves up,” usually with powdered hair, in a way that completely changed their appearance. The Prince, as he received his guests, still retained the genial manner of a fairyland king which had struck me in him the first time, but this day, having apparently submitted to the same etiquette as he had established for his guests, he had rigged himself up with a white beard and what looked like leaden soles which made his feet drag heavily. He seemed to have taken it upon himself to represent one of the Seven Ages of Man. His mustachios were also white, as though a hoar-frost from the forest of Hop-o’-my-thumb. They made his mouth stiff and awkward and he should have removed them, once they had produced their effect.
(Translated by Frederick A. Blossom)
Time finally is recaptured and the narrator is now ready to write this novel. All these episodes are overcast with ambiguities, which even open doubts about the sex of the heroine Albertine, who becomes a kind of embodied (or disembodied?) symbol of generalized love. At the same time the whole narrative is replete with rich detail of Paris’s disintegrating high society, its family connections and disconnections, its nuances of climbings, of greetings and snubbings on the street and in the salon.
Like the first creators of the arts, Proust saw man in a battle against time, and his art as a weapon and a monument of man’s victory in the battle. This was his religion of art—immortality achieved not in an unworldly otherworld but in the worldly otherworld of the arts. The Vanguard Word, the literary art, had a strange power of giving immortality not just to a single “soul,” some one unique transtemporal distilled self in each individual, but to the whole succession of “selves” in whom Proust’s memories flowed and through whom they came to the present.
And I saw myself, as though in the first truthful mirror I had found, through the eyes of old folk who thought they had remained young (just as I believed I had myself) and who, when I pointed to myself as an example of an old man, hoping they would contradict me, shewed no look of protest in their eyes, which saw me as they did not see themselves but as I saw them.… And now I understood what old age was—old age which, of all the realities, is perhaps the one concerning which we retain for the longest time a purely abstract conception, looking at the calendars, dating our letters, watching our friends get married and our friends’ children, without understanding, whether through fear or indolence, what it all means, until the day we catch sight of a strange silhouette, such as M. d’Argencourt’s, which opens our eyes to the fact that we are now living in a different world.…
(Translated by Frederick A. Blossom)
Although “the disintegration of the self is a continuous death” in time, the artist can capture and make these many selves immortal. Proust has made explicit the battle all artists had been fighting, and he has won the battle in the act of chronicling it, for he has enlisted Time as his ally, the principal character and force in his novel. He has brought Time inward, where it is one with his life, creating in the unconscious. “It is plain that the object of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself.… Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.”
Back in his Bible of Amiens (1904) he saw this uncanny power
“that Claude Monet has fixed in his sublime canvases, where he has displayed the life of that thing which men have created but which Nature has resumed and made part of herself—a cathedral whose existence, like that of the earth in her double revolution, has unwound through the long tale of the centuries, yet every day is renewed and achieved afresh.” As he explained of Renoir and Manet, this was what every great artist accomplished.
If they are to succeed, they have—the original painter and the original writer—to proceed much in the manner of oculists. The treatment administered through their paintings or their literature, is not always pleasant. When it is finished, they say to us “Now look!”—and suddenly the world, which, far from having been created once and for all, is created afresh each time that a new artist comes on the scene, is shown to us in perfect clarity—but looking very different from the one we knew before.… Such is the new and perishable universe freshly created. It will remain convincing until the next geological catastrophe precipitated by a new painter or a new writer of originality.…
(Translated by Gerhard Hopkins)
Proust’s originality was his way of conquering Time, not in Rouen stone nor on Manet canvas but in the word. His way was also a kind of surrender to Time, re-creation not by a bold stroke of the conscious intellect, but by allowing experience to flow again in unconscious memory. Thus, while Proust sees how in the outer world everything and everybody is disintegrated by Time, his narrator finally discovers that “they can all remain alive, young, and beautiful in the artist’s recapturing memory, drawing from his inner consciousness those forms which he finds in a supernatural world which is his own exclusive experience.” Over the narrator finally came “a feeling of profound fatigue at the realization that all this long stretch of time not only had been uninterruptedly lived, thought, secreted by me, that it was my life, my very self, but also that I must, every minute of my life, keep it closely by me, that it upheld me, that I was perched on its dizzying summit, that I could not move without carrying it about with me.” The author would finally conquer time in autobiography by exploring the self—but in his own special way, for, as his biographer George Painter observes, he “invented nothing but altered everything.”
Proust reveals how he has encompassed the enemy in the last sentence of the last volume of his novel. “If, at least, there were granted me time enough to complete my work, I would not fail to stamp it with the seal of that Time the understanding of which was this day so forcibly impressing itself upon me, and I would therein describe men—even should that give them the semblance of monstrous creatures—as occupying in Time a place far more considerable than the so restricted one allotted them in space, on the contrary, extending boundlessly since, giant-like, reaching far back into the years, they touch simultaneously epochs of their lives—with countless intervening days between—so widely separated from one another in Time.” He finally conquers Time, then, by writing the novel we have just read.
Just as the Japanese in their buildings conquered Time by acquiescing in it with their structures of wood, so Proust was playing his version of literary judo, “the gentle way.” He conquered Time by deferring to it, making it the raw material of his novel, making it his art to re-create life in time rather than in space. But somehow critics were bound, with Bergson, to see Time in the metaphors of space, and they said that Proust had seen experience distorted through a microscope. “My instrument,” Proust retorted, “is not a microscope but a telescope directed upon Time.”
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The Filigreed Self
PROUST went far to make the remembered self a resource for re-creating the world. The refluent self became his “inner book of unknown symbols.” But the self had other outreaching possibilities, which James Joyce (1882–1941) explored with surprising consequences. For Joyce, encompassed time was no mere private garden of involuntary memory but a microcosm of all human history. This he chronicled in no heroic figure on a grand stage but in “the dailiest day possible,” not in a history-making capital but in a provincial metropolis on the periphery. He folded time in by making his work, like Proust’s, the story of its own making and of the making of himself. But he would also prove that Homer had never died.
Joyce and Proust, to be coupled forever as pioneer explorers of the self, were near-contemporaries. Proust was only ten years older than Joyce, and they appealed to the same select audience. They did meet once, at a Paris supper party for Stravinsky and Diaghilev in May 1921. Proust, on a rare excursion from 102 Boulevard Haussmann, arrived late in a fur coat and was seated beside Joyce. The best account of this legendary meeting came from the American poet William Carlos Williams, who was there. “I’ve headaches every day,” complained Joyce. “My eyes are terrible.” To which Proust replied, “My poor stomach. What am I going to do? It’s killing me. In fact, I must leave at once.” As they left each expressed regret at not having read the work of the other. But Proust tried to enliven the conversation by asking Joyce if he liked truffles. To which Joyce replied, “Yes, I do.”
Joyce’s failing eyesight and the twenty-five eye operations that left him blind for periods had a self-confining effect like Proust’s asthma. Proust’s divided Franco-Jewish self had its counterpart in the self-exile of Joyce, whose life was a web of paradox. Never living in Ireland after his twenty-second year, Joyce remained passionately Irish. He explained to his publisher that his purpose in The Dubliners was “to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.” The city became his Mediterranean. From his birth he was entangled with the issue of Irish independence. His father, John, a passionate follower of the firebrand Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891), had made a living as one of Parnell’s election agents, then enjoyed his reward as a well-paid collector of taxes for Dublin, where Joyce was born in 1882.
Joyce’s first known writing was a poem at the age of nine attacking Parnell’s opponents. And his family’s fortunes fell with those of Parnell, in melodramatic decline when he was accused of terrorist murders in Phoenix Park (which Parnell’s men had not committed) and when Parnell was named corespondent in the divorce suit of a fellow Home Rule politician. John Joyce’s heavy drinking, neglect of his office, and habit of dipping into money from the taxpayers’ till were enough reason for his dismissal from his remunerative post. The family naturally charged up their misfortunes to the enemies of Irish Home Rule. In 1891 John Joyce’s family of ten children who survived infancy tumbled from prosperity to poverty. “For the second half of his long life,” James’s brother Stanislaus observed, “my father belonged to the class of the deserving poor, that is to say, to the class of people who richly deserve to be poor.” The insecurity of the rest of James’s young life left unforgettable memories of household furniture in and out of pawn, and moving about to stay one jump ahead of the bill collector.
Somehow James Joyce still had the benefit of the best Irish schools. At six he briefly attended an elite Jesuit boarding school until his family could no longer pay the fees. For two years after 1891 he stayed home under his mother’s tutelage, then in 1893 both brothers were admitted tuition-free to a Jesuit grammar school in Dublin. Then on to another Jesuit institution, University College, Dublin, where Joyce pursued languages and made his first literary sallies. Admiring the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), at the age of eighteen he published (1900) a review of When We Dead Awaken (1899), where he contrasted “literature” that dealt with the temporary and the unique with “drama” that posed the laws of human nature. “The great human comedy in which each has share, gives limitless scope to the true artist, today as yesterday and as in years gone.” Lohengrin “is not an Antwerp legend but a world drama. Ghosts, the action of which passes in a common parlour, is of universal import.” To read Ibsen in the original, he studied Dano-Norwegian.
A message from Ibsen himself thanking him for his “benevolent” review made him ecstatic. In a letter congratulating
Ibsen on his seventy-third birthday in 1901, Joyce confessed:
But we always keep the dearest things to ourselves. I did not tell them what bound me closest to you. I did not say how what I could discern dimly of your life was my pride to see, how your battles inspired me—not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead—how your wilful resolution to wrest the secret from life gave me heart, and how in your absolute indifference to public canons of art, friends and shibboleths you walked in the light of your inward heroism.
The catalytic role that Ruskin, fixing the universal past in stone, played for Proust, Ibsen played for Joyce, helping him find the universal in the everyday. University College mates were more impressed by the twelve guineas that the Fortnightly Review (April 1, 1900) paid Joyce for his piece.
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 98