Sharif Gemie
[This essay was first published by Bookblast in October 2023: https://bookblast.com/blog/sharif-gemie-six-months-reading-marcel-proust/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=sharif-gemie-six-months-reading-marcel-proust]
In May 2023, I had a problem which is probably familiar to many people: there was nothing I wanted to read. Having rejected everything on the Guardian’s book review pages, I decided there was only one possible solution. I’d work through the entirety of the three volumes of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu.
A bit of context here: I used to be a lecturer. I taught myself to read French literature in the 1980s, and classic works by Balzac, Stendhal and Flaubert remain at the centre of my literary horizons. In the 1990s and 2000s I was reading more French-language books than works written in English. In the 2010s, I reverted to mostly reading English and I barely read a word of French in the lockdown years.
So I rejected the option of reading Proust in English. I wanted to revive my French and I knew from experience that reading a work in translation often feels like watching a black-and-white version of a colour film. One technical innovation helped me. My e-reader has a handy feature where you can tap on any mysterious foreign word and get an instant translation.
At first, A la recherche was very slow going. Proust’s vocabulary isn’t so difficult—but his syntax and sentence structure cause problems. Sentences will frequently stretch over half a page, paragraphs can last three pages. (One lesson gained from Proust: it’s amazing how comforting a paragraph break can be.) Sentences are also difficult to read because Proust often places qualifications in brackets in the middle of the sentence, so when you reach the end you can easily forget what was the beginning.
The pace of many chapters is not so much slow as glacier-speed. In most novels, action is speeded up, with only a few episodes unfolding in real time. In Proust, many episodes are actually slower than real time: not only does Proust describe people and their interactions in detail, he includes extensive reflections on them.
However, as Proust’s one-and-a-half million words trickled by, patterns began to emerge. There are three main topics in A la recherche. Men with unsuitable girlfriends; salons—which were exclusive social events, something like literary parties; and semi-philosophical reflections on the nature of time, self and perception. All these topics coalesce into a wider quest to portray and analyse upper-class life in early twentieth-century France. My hunch is that Proust was partly inspired by the Mémoires of the duc de Saint-Simon, who left such detailed records of the court of Louis XIV that the prominent sociologist Nobert Elias used them as the basis for his sociological enquiry into the nature of eighteenth-century society. Proust is never just describing, he is always concerned to identify the rules and codes governing behaviour.
While much of the work is written in the first person, the narrator is left vague and unnamed. On many occasions, Proust’s hero is an outsider trying to gain access to the privileged circles, always a useful literary device, for it justifies explanations of customs and practices. We learn that the narrator is frequently ill, open-minded, leisured, unmarried, childless and fascinated by literary projects and cultural innovations—all points which make him sound like Proust himself, with the notable exception of his sexuality. Proust’s hero is heterosexual, Proust himself was gay.
Gay people and gay sexuality feature frequently in the second and third volume, but much of this treatment is uneven. There is an interesting twenty-page introduction to the idea of a minority sexuality—but it’s then rather spoilt by the reductive understanding of a homosexual as being a man who’s like a woman. Certainly, the main gay character—Baron de Charlus—is erratic, dishonest, manipulative and unhappy with his sexual identity. There’s also a persistent sub-theme of male characters worried by their female partners growing entangled in lesbian flirtations. On the one hand, Proust suggests that gay sexualities are an integral part of sexual life, on the other, he tends to portray gay sexualities as confused and deviant.
One pleasant surprise was another sub-theme: humour. Many of the observations are tongue in cheek. One character is introduced as depressed, Proust then comments that he was depressed in his own way, indeed, we all get depressed in our own way, just as we all have colds in our own way. In the descriptive details, there’s often a little barb or jibe which makes the passage come alive.
I found the first volume difficult and slow. But I was happy to find that I picked up speed with the second volume, and for the third and last volume I put down my e-reader and enjoyed reading a printed, paper version. There is ultimately a surprise at the third volume where, if you stay the course, you realise that there was a sort of masterplan to the entire work. No spoilers but, yes, this is a novel about novel-writing.
The philosophical musings did not work well for me. There’s the (now) obvious point that memory isn’t like data collected on a stick: remembering is an active, creative process. Following Proust, it’s also been established that physical sensations—like the famous madeleine dunked in tea—are better triggers to memory than words. But beyond that…
The descriptive passages work well. For example, the description of Paris during the Zeppelin raids of World War One is a wonderful evocation of a time and a place. Anyone doing any form of creative writing knows how difficult it is to give a sense of ‘being there’. Proust does this well, he has the knack of making characters come alive, with swift, deft references to their clothes, their mannerisms and the way they carry themselves. The viewpoint is unusual: a chronically ill individual with limited but—possibly—deep or vivid insights into his limited world. A la recherche is an extremely distinctive work, demanding and slow going in places, but also compelling. There are some obviously dramatic moments—not car-chases or shout-outs, but twists and turns in relationships. These are actually rather clumsy.
The central drive to the work is our absorption in the mental world of the narrator and this is gently compelling. Or, at least, compelling enough to sustain my reading up to October 2023.
