In Search of Lost Time

by Marcel Proust

  So I had already come to the conclusion that we have no freedom at all in the face of the work of art, that we cannot shape it according to our wishes, but that as it pre-exists us, and both because it is necessary and hidden, and because it is, as it were, a law of nature, we have to discover it. But is not this discovery, which art can cause us to make, the discovery, fundamentally, of the thing that ought to be most precious to us, and of which we normally remain unaware for ever, our true life, our reality as we have experienced it, which is often so different from what we believe it to be that we are filled with happiness when some chance event brings the real memory back to us? I found further support for this view in the falsity of so-called realist art, which would not be so untruthful if life had not given us the habit of expressing our experience in ways that do not reflect it, but which we none the less take in a very short space of time to be reality. I felt that I would not have to worry about the various literary theories which had troubled me now and then – notably those which critics had developed at the time of the Dreyfus Affair and which they had taken up again during the war, with the intention of ‘bringing the artist down from his ivory tower’ and encouraging the abandonment of frivolous or sentimental subjects in favour of the great workers’ movements or, if crowds were not possible, at least of noble intellectuals or heroes rather than insignificant members of the idle rich (‘I must admit that the depiction of these useless people leaves me rather cold,’ Bloch would say).

  But anyway, quite apart from their intellectual content, these theories seemed to me to indicate the inferiority of their supporters, in the same way that a really well brought-up child who hears the people with whom he has been taken to lunch saying: ‘We don’t hide anything here, we say whatever we think,’ senses that this indicates a moral quality inferior to that inherent in good deeds, pure and simple, which do not need words. Real art has nothing to do with proclamations of this sort, and carries out its work in silence. Also, the people who indulged in this kind of theorizing used ready-made expressions which had a curious similarity to those of the idiots they were attacking. Indeed it may well be that quality of language is a better gauge of the level of moral or intellectual endeavour than aesthetic approach. Conversely, though, this quality of language (and the laws of character can be equally well studied in a frivolous subject and in a serious one, just as an anatomist can as easily study the laws of anatomy on the body of an imbecile as on that of a man of talent, the great moral laws, as much as those of the circulation of the blood or renal filtration, differing very little with the intellectual level of the individual), which the theoreticians think they can do without, those who admire the theoreticians believe simplistically that it shows no great intellectual worth, worth which they need, if they are to discern it, to see expressed directly and which they cannot infer from the beauty of an image. Whence the vulgar temptation for the writer to write intellectual works. Gross unscrupulousness. A work in which there are theories is like an object with its price-tag still attached. Even this latter only gives something a value, which, on the contrary, logical reasoning in literature diminishes. One reasons, that is one wanders off the track, each time that one does not have the strength of mind to force oneself to make an impression pass through all the successive states which will lead to its stabilization and its expression.

  The reality to be expressed resided, I now realized, not in the subject’s appearance but at a depth where appearance hardly matters, as in the case of its symbolization by the sound of the spoon on a plate, or the starched stiffness of the napkin, which had been more valuable for my spiritual renewal than any number of humanitarian, patriotic, internationalist or metaphysical conversations. ‘No more style, was what I had heard people say in those days, no more literature, what we want is life.’ It is easy to see how even M. de Norpois’s simple theories in opposition to ‘flute-players’ had taken on a new lease of life since the war. For all those who do not have an artistic sense, by which I mean the submission to an interior reality, may still be endowed with the capacity to argue about art till the cows come home. And to the extent that they are also diplomats or financiers, deeply involved in the ‘realities’ of the present time, they are all the more willing to believe that literature is just a form of intellectual amusement destined to be gradually eliminated. Some even wanted the novel to be a sort of cinematographic stream of things. This was an absurd idea. Nothing sets us further apart from what we have really perceived than that sort of cinematographic approach.

  On the subject of books, I had remembered as I came into the library what the Goncourts say about the fine editions it contains, and had promised myself that I would look at them while I was closeted here. So all the time I had been following my line of thought, I had been taking down the precious volumes at random until, absent-mindedly opening one of them, François le Champi by George Sand,81 I felt unpleasantly struck by some impression which seemed to have too little in common with my current thoughts, until I realized a moment later, with an emotion which brought tears to my eyes, how much in accord with them this impression actually was. In a room where somebody has died, the undertaker’s men are getting ready to bring down the coffin, while the son of a man who has done his country some service shakes hands with the last friends as they file out; if a fanfare suddenly sounds beneath the windows, he is horrified and thinks that some mockery is being made of his grief. At this, although he has until then remained in control of himself, he can suddenly no longer restrain his tears; because he has just realized that what he is hearing is the band of a regiment that is sharing his mourning and paying its last respects to his father’s mortal remains. In the same way, I had just recognized how well suited my current feelings were to the painful impression I had experienced when I read the title of a book in the Prince de Guermantes’s library; a title which had given me the idea that literature really did give us that world of mystery which I no longer found in it. And yet it was not a particularly outstanding book, it was only François le Champi. But that name, like the Guermantes’ name, was not like all the other names I have come across since: the memory of what had seemed inexplicable to me in the subject of François le Champi when Mama was reading me George Sand’s book was re-awoken by the title (just as the Guermantes’ name, when I had not seen them for such a long time, contained the essence of the feudal system for me – so François le Champi contained the essence of the novel), and for a moment took the place of the generally accepted idea of what George Sand’s rural Berry novels are about. At a dinner-party, where thought always remains close to the surface of things, I would probably have been able to talk about François le Champi and the Guermantes without either of them meaning what they had meant in Combray. But when I was alone, as at this moment, I was plunged down to a much greater depth. In those moments, the idea that some woman I had met in society was a cousin of Mme de Guermantes, that is, the cousin of a magic-lantern character, seemed incomprehensible, and it seemed equally incomprehensible that the finest books that I had read might be – I do not say better than, which of course they were – but even equal to the extraordinary François le Champi. This was an impression from long ago, in which my memories of childhood and family were affectionately mingled and which I had not immediately recognized. For a moment I had angrily wondered who the stranger was who had just upset me. But the stranger was myself, it was the child I was then, whom the book had just brought back to life within me because, knowing nothing of me except this child, it was this child that the book had immediately summoned, wanting to be looked at only by his eyes, loved only by his heart, and wanting to speak only to him. So this book which my mother had read aloud to me in Combray until it was almost morning had retained for me all the wonder of that night. It is true that the ‘pen’ of George Sand, to use an expression of Brichot’s, who was so fond of saying that a book had been written ‘with a nimble pen’, did not at all seem to me, as it had seemed so long ago to my mother before she slowly began
to model her literary tastes on mine, a magical pen. But it was a pen which, without meaning to, I had charged with electricity, as schoolboys often do for fun, and now a thousand insignificant details from Combray, unglimpsed for a very long time, came tumbling helter-skelter of their own accord to hang from the magnetized nib in an endless, flickering line of memories.

  Some mystery-loving minds maintain that objects retain something of the eyes that have looked at them, that we can see monuments and pictures only through an almost tangible veil woven over them through the centuries by the love and contemplation of so many admirers. This fantasy would become truth if they transposed it into the realm of the only reality each person knows, into the domain of their own sensitivity. Yes, in that sense and that sense only (but it is much the more important one), a thing which we have looked at long ago, if we see it again, brings back to us, along with our original gaze, all the images which that gaze contained. This is because things – a book in its red binding, like the rest – at the moment we notice them, turn within us into something immaterial, akin to all the preoccupations or sensations we have at that particular time, and mingle indissolubly with them. Some name, read long ago in a book, contains among its syllables the strong wind and bright sunlight of the day when we were reading it. Thus the sort of literature which is content to ‘describe things’, to provide nothing more of them than a miserable list of lines and surfaces, despite calling itself realist, is the furthest away from reality, the most impoverishing and depressing, because it unceremoniously cuts all communication between our present self and the past, the essence of which is retained in things, and the future, where things prompt us to enjoy it afresh. It is this that any art worthy of the name must express, and, if it fails in this, we can still draw a lesson from its incapacity (whereas there is none to be drawn even from the successes of realism), namely that this essence is, in part, subjective and impossible to communicate.

  More than that, a thing which we saw at a certain time in our lives, a book which we read, does not remain for ever a part solely of what there was around us; it remains just as faithfully part of what we then were, and can be re-experienced, rethought, only by the sensibility, the thought processes, the person that we then were; if in the library I take down François le Champi, a child immediately rises up within me and takes my place, the only one who has the right to read the title François le Champi and who reads it as he read it then, with the same impression of the weather outside in the garden, the same dreams as he formed then about other countries and about life, the same anxiety about the future. Or again, if I see a thing from another time, it will be a young man who rises up. So that my character today is nothing but an abandoned quarry, thinking everything it contains to be monotonous and identical, but out of which each memory, like a sculptor of genius, makes countless statues. I say each thing that we see again, because books in this respect behave as things; the way a book opened along the spine, the texture of the paper, may have retained within it as vivid a memory of the way I imagined Venice then, and of my wish to go there, as the book’s actual sentences. More vivid even, for words sometimes get in the way, like those photographs of a person, looking at which one remembers him less well than if one had been content just to think about him. Certainly with many of the books of my childhood, even, sadly, some by Bergotte himself, if I happen to pick them up some evening when I am feeling tired, I do so only as I might take a train, in the hope of finding some repose by looking at different things and breathing the atmosphere of times past. But it sometimes happens that this sought-for evocation is hindered by prolonged reading of the book. There is, for instance, one of Bergotte’s books (the copy of which in the Prince’s library bore a dedication that was fawning and platitudinous in the extreme), which I read one winter day when I was unable to see Gilberte, in which I can never manage to find the phrases I used to love so much. Certain words almost make me believe that I’ve found them again, but it’s impossible. Where could the beauty be that I used to find in them? Yet from the volume itself, the snow that covered the Champs-Élysées on the day I read it has not been removed: I can see it still.

  And that is why, if I had ever been tempted to be a bibliophile, like

  the Prince de Guermantes, I should only have been a rather odd one, except that the beauty which accrues to a book for collectors, independently of its inherent value, when they know the libraries through which it has passed, or know that it was given by a particular sovereign on the occasion of some significant event to some famous man, when they have been able to trace its movements, from sale to sale, throughout its life, all the, so to speak, historic beauty of a book, would not be lost on me. But I would prefer to derive its value from my own life, rather than mere curiosity; and it would often not be the physical copy itself that I would associate with it, but the work itself, as in the case of François le Champi, revealed to me for the first time in my little room at Combray, during perhaps the loveliest and saddest night of my life, when I had, alas! (at a time when the mysterious Guermantes appeared completely inaccessible to me) obtained from my parents their first surrendering of authority, from which I would later come to date the decline of my health and my will, and my withdrawal, each day more complete, from a difficult task – and rediscovered today, appropriately, in the Guermantes’ library, on this most glorious day, by which were illuminated suddenly not only the old fumblings of my thought, but even the purpose of my life and perhaps of art. As for individual copies of books, I could have been interested in them too, in a living sense. The first edition of a work would have been more precious to me than the others, but by that I would have meant the edition in which I had read it for the first time. I would look for the original editions, by which I mean those from which I had received an original impression of the book. Because subsequent impressions are not original. In the case of novels, I would collect old-fashioned bindings, the ones from the period when I read my first novels and which so often would have heard Papa telling me to ‘Sit up straight!’ Like the dress a woman was wearing when we saw her for the first time, they would help me to rediscover the love I had then, the beauty over which I have superimposed too many decreasingly loved images in my attempt to rediscover the first one, I who am not the I who saw it and who must give way to the I that I was then, if it calls up the thing it knew and that my I of today does not recognize at all. But even in this sense, which is the only one I could ever understand, I would not be tempted to be a bibliophile. I am too aware of how porous things are to the mind, and how they become saturated with it, for that.

  The library which I would put together for myself in this way would be of an even greater value still; because the books I read long ago at Combray, in Venice, enriched now by my memory with vast illuminations representing the church of Saint-Hilaire, the gondola moored at the foot of San Giorgio Maggiore on the Grand Canal encrusted with glittering sapphires, would have become worthy of those ‘illustrated books’, illuminated bibles or Books of Hours, which the collector never opens to read but only to be enchanted once again by the colours which were added to it by some rival of Foucquet,82 and which make these works as priceless as they are. And yet even to open these books read long ago just to look at the pictures which did not adorn them then would still seem so dangerous that, even in this sense, the only one I could understand, I would not be tempted to be a bibliophile. I know all too well how easily these images left by the mind are effaced by the mind. For the old ones they substitute new ones which do not have the same power of resurrection. And if I still had the François le Champi which Mama took one evening out of the parcel of books my grandmother must have given me for my birthday, I would never look at it: I would be too frightened of gradually inserting into it my current impressions until they had completely covered up the old ones, I would be too frightened of seeing it become at this point a thing of the present which, when I asked it to raise up once again the child who spelled out its title in the little bedroom at Comb
ray, the child, not recognizing its accent, would no longer respond to its call, and would remain for ever buried in oblivion.

  The idea of a popular art, like that of a patriotic art, seemed to me, if indeed not dangerous, certainly laughable. If it was a question of making it accessible to the people, by sacrificing the refinements of form, ‘only good for the idle rich’, I had spent enough time among society people to know that they are the real illiterates, not the electrical workers. Seen from this perspective, an art which was popular in form might have been destined for the members of the Jockey Club rather than for those of the Confédération Générale de Travail;83 as for subject matter, popular novels are as boring to working people as books written specially for them are to children. When we read, we are seeking to be taken out of our surroundings, and workers are as curious about princes as princes are about workers. At the beginning of the war M. Barrès said that the artist (in that instance, Titian) had a duty above all else to serve the glory of his country. But he can serve it only by being an artist, that is, on condition, while he is studying these laws, instituting his experiences and making his discoveries, which are as delicate as those of science, that he does not think about anything else – even his country – except the truth which is before his eyes. Let us not be like the revolutionaries who despised the works of Watteau and de La Tour out of ‘good citizenship’, painters who do more honour to France than all those of the Revolution. Anatomy is perhaps not what the tender-hearted would choose, if they had a choice. It was not his good-hearted benevolence (which was great) that made Choderlos de Laclos write Les Liaisons dangereuses, nor his fondness for the middle class, lower or upper, that made Flaubert choose as his subjects those of Madame Bovary and L’Éducation sentimentale. Some used to say that art in a period of speed and haste would be brief, like the people before the war who predicted that it would be over quickly. The railway was thus supposed to have killed contemplative thought, and it was vain to long for the days of the stage-coach, but now the automobile fulfils their function and once again sets the tourists down in front of abandoned churches.