Saul Friedländer - Proustian Uncertainties: On Reading and Rereading In Search of Lost Time

Proust? a French acquaintance asked me when told about my endeavor. Why Proust? My answer had been vague, and the question was to the point: why Proust? The vagueness of the answer was also to the point: I couldnt tell clearly why I had decided to work on Proust, or maybe I didnt want to tell. One thing was sure: I had not the competence and certainly not the intention of becoming one more specialist of Proust. And yet my desire to write specifically on la recherche was not haphazard; I was certain about that. Was it due to the beauty of In Search? Its complexity? Without any doubt those aspects played a role, mainly in my rereading In Search time and time again. But wasnt there more? Wasnt I rereading it because it responded to some need, to something in my personal life that called for delving into that book, something that was intimately attuned to it? Some themes in the novel were close to my own ruminations over the decades, mainly about identity.

Whatever the motivation may have been, I started rereading In Search with particular attention. Soon I noticed aspects that I had failed to see before, and as I soon realized after some inquiry, seemed to have generally escaped attention. Of course, I felt once more the extraordinary pull of a text that, as for so many other readers, was not only the greatest novel of French literature but one of the most important novels ever written.

Given that there is hardly any plot, In Search is easily summed up: it is the life story of a Narrator whose main desire since childhood has been to become a writer. As he doubts his literary talent, he spends decades of his adulthood in idleness, devoting himself to social climbing from his middle-class background into the highest reaches of the French aristocracy. It is only in late adulthood that he discovers, by pure chance, through a kind of epiphany triggered by a surge of involuntary memory, that he has the creative literary gift that will allow him to fulfill his ambition. He then starts writing the story of his life that will, in great part, tell what he remembers from his years of idleness, years that, unknown to him, have been in fact years of preparation. From then on, his writing will indeed be a search for lost time, which in the original French is both time forgotten that has to be discovered again and time squandered that has to be retrieved or regained.

While the Narrator tells us that as far as writing went, he remained inactive until late in adult life, possibly to add importance to the quasi-magic impact of involuntary memory, Proust himself, although fixated on social climbing and plagued by sporadic illness, wrote assiduously during all these years: short stories, published when he was twenty-five, in 1896, under the title Les plaisirs et les jours (Pleasures and Days); a novel some eight hundred pages long (Jean Santeuil), unpublished during his lifetime; another book of literary criticism that also contained fragments of a novel (Contre Sainte-Beuve), also published only posthumously; and various lighter articles for newspapers and journals, mainly pastiches of well-known authors. Remarkably, all these early writings, the published and the unpublished, include an ever-growing number of themes that will reappear in the great novel, which he started sometime in 1909 (the last two volumes were only published after the authors death in 1922, at age fifty-one).

The time squandered by the Narrator gave us, the readers, the extraordinary descriptions of French society during the Belle Epoque, particularly of the high bourgeoisie (the Verdurins and their salon) and the aristocracy at its highest reaches, the Faubourg Saint-Germain (represented by several salons, but mainly by that of the Duc and the Duchesse de Guermantes). The Narrator doesnt subject us to social analysis but in a constant flow of observations, moving from the magnificent homes and material surroundings of the quasi-mythic aristocratic families to their personalities, presents their taste, their silliness, and their nastiness, particularly as expressed by their conversations.