In my retirement letter from Minot State, I had tried to hit a light note by saying that I had wanted all my life to read Remembrance of Things past and had finally realized I was going to have to retire to do that. So I got the three-volume Scott Moncrief translation and went at it. It runs to nearly 3500 pages; it took me two years. As I look back over it, the whole monumental experience comes flooding over me, and I can hardly wait to begin reading it again. I can (fleetingly) imagine myself learning French in order to read it in the original. I can (fleetingly) imagine myself memorizing whole passages—me, whose memory is so porous it can take a week to memorize a stanza of a Dylan lyric that I have been listening to for 20 years.
Proust rivals Dickens in the variety and richness of his characters; Montaigne in his wise generalizations; Wilde in his poignant treatment of homosexuality; Hammnet in the intricacy of the detective stories that unfold as Swan tries to find out if his wife is promiscuous and Marcel tries to find out if Albertine is a lesbian; James in his intricate rendering of scenes.
On page 715 of volume I, Marcel rides up on an elevator at Balbec, a seaside resort. The ride takes a page. During it, the elevator operator is described as a “domestic, industrious, captive squirrel” who, Marcel says, “bore me aloft in his wake towards the dome of this temple of Mammon.” A sentence given almost in passing encapsulates everything important about adolescent sexuality: “along one of the galleries . . . came a chambermaid carrying a bolster. I applied to her face, which was blurred in twilight, the mask of my most impassioned dreams, but read in her eyes as they turned towards me the horror my own nonentity.”
Marcel tries to converse with the elevator operator, who continues to “maniplate the registers of his instrument and to finger the stops.” Every moment chosen for description is caressed twice—once by Marcel’s observation and again by Proust’s prose. No doubt some readers would find this pace excruciating and would rather read “I went up in the elevator.” But eventually one comes to see that Proust is writing “realistically”—life really IS this rich and nuanced, though most of the time we cannot take time to see it and don’t know how. Proust reveals the complexities of the reality we live in and reminds us that these worlds—and all worlds–are connected in ways we can only be grateful for. Incredibly, the elevator operator shows up 2285 pages later as he is about the join the French air force and fight in WWI: “No doubt the young man was tired of going up on the captive cage of the lift, and the heights of the staircase of the Grand Hotel no longer sufficed him.”
But all this is, in a sense, gilding on the lily of Proust’s theory of memory. He may have gotten the idea from Bergson, but he has transformed it into something rich and strange enough to form the heart of the book’s title, À la recherche du temps perdu. As everyone (who sees to) knows, that title, properly translated, is not Remembrance of Things Past (a line lifted from a Shakespeare sonnet) but Recovery of Past Time. Thus the book begins with a long description of eating a madeleine (a complicated kind of cookie) dipped in tea. The sensation triggers a memory of similar taste years before, thus collapsing decades of time into one moment and redeeming the original moment which had passed uncelebrated. Periodically the narrator, Marcel, has similar experiences, with the clink of teaspoon, the feel of uneven paving stones beneath his feet, the stiffness of a napkin on his lips.
Incredibly, this theory of memory also forms the plot of the book, because Marcel, who for 2500 pages has presented himself as a charming, sickly, intelligent fop who drifts from one highbrow watering hole to another, sustained by vague but endless postponed plans to “write.” This unlikely hero discovers at the end of the book that his wasted life can be redeemed by connecting remembered moments with present ones and writing the book, which–as Marcel the narrator does not know but which Proust the author DOES know– is the very book we have reading, called Remembrance of Things Past.
In theological terms, we would say that redemption is one of the two great themes of the of the book. The other is grace, because the narrator Marcel and the author Proust both insist that such moments are not to be summoned by any act of will or discipline. Marcel says that “their essential character was that I was not free to choose them, that “such as they were they were given to me.” So, without any forcing—so it seems to me—I found that two of the great themes of this book were themes of scripture. That happens a lot, even when those works are written by authors who profess to be indifferent or hostile to Christian scripture. That does not mean, of course, that literature should be read from a Christian point of view, whatever that might be. I still think what I was taught by new criticism to think: that literature must be read on its own terms, that we cannot use literature as an “example” of any external system, even the system I have found truest of all. But I cannot not help noticing how often great stories (lived or told) resonate with great scriptural themes: creation, incarnation, grace, redemption, atonement.
georgeslanger 