Finishing In Search of Lost Time - Proust and the Library of Babel (or, Proust and the Blog Post of Babble)

A week or so ago I finished Marcel Proust’s Time Regained (1927), which means I have read through the seven In Search of Lost Time novels twice.  This time it took me twelve years, just about the pace of the  original publication.  Twenty-five years ago, I read it all in about three weeks.  I doubt that was wise, but I had read Proust.  Even at this distance, Time Regained was recognizably a book I had read before.

I think the first volume of the series, Swann’s Way (1913), or really, to be honest, the first two hundred pages of it, the “Combray” section describing the narrator’s childhood, is one of the greatest masterpieces of fiction.  Many of the thousands of pages that follow are dull, ridiculous, and aggravating.  Much of the narrator’s aphoristic wisdom is nonsense, so bizarre that I could only laugh.  A lot of Proust is bizarre.  Six years ago languagehat read through Proust, and in his outstanding summary post he emphasizes how odd these books are.  The narrator is odd, the story is odd, the wild gaps in the story are odd.

All kinds of great stuff – characters, insights, metaphors, jokes – are mixed in with this.  What can you do; this is the price I pay: a hundred pages of obscure comments about society people; four pages of phony French etymologies; fifteen pages in which the Baron de Charlus, one of the great characters in fiction, “in the shrill little voice with which he sometimes spoke” (807) makes incomprehensible private jokes about the difference between the French and the Germans.  “I confessed to M. de Charlus that I did not quite understand what he meant” (808) – yes, exactly!

I said the first 200 pages are the best part of Search.  The second best part – setting aside some of the great recurring characters – is the last 200 pages.  Motivation for all flagging Proust reader stuck halfway through The Guermantes Way!

The narrator, Marcel, is in a heightened state of sensitivity.  At a party – everything happens at parties in Proust – he becomes receptive to a series of sensory impressions each of which triggers a memory of something from earlier in his life.  The famous madeleine scene from Swann’s Way, three thousand pages earlier, did the same thing, but the narrator did not understand the phenomenon at that point.  This time, he gets it, and realizes that he must write a novel about memory and time, a novel much like, but clearly different than, Proust’s novel, the one I just read.

Marcel’s novel will be a fictional refraction of his own life, just like Proust’s novel, the “real” one, scrambles Proust’s own life.  Thus the new novel, the fictional one, will end with that narrator, M.P., realizing that he must write his own semi-autobiographical novel about a doppelganger who writes his own etc. etc. about etc. etc. and onward forever.

Or else Marcel’s novel perfectly reverses all of Proust’s fictionalizing, so that his novel would be, in our world, the real Proust’s non-fiction autobiography.  The two books are distorted mirror images, fiction in their own “real” world, non-fiction in their fictional world, one of which is my “real” world.

Yep, this is what In Search of Lost Time is about in the end, the creation of a novel that is not the one I have been reading.  Kind of a twist ending.

I read the Andreas Mayor translation, the old grey paperback brick.  I barely quoted a word of it.  Tomorrow.