In Search Of Lost Time (À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu #1-7) (2003) - Plot & Excerpts
“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory.” Proust is a great teacher. This may sound embarrassingly platitudinous, and yet I find that it is a fact altogether too easily overlooked in our incessant praise (or bemoaning) of his technical achievements as a stylistic innovator. Setting aside for a while the whole issue of innovative narrative technique (which is nonetheless essential to the realization of his thought through literary art), we can appreciate that he has something important to teach us about what it means to be wise, or, in short, a more fully realized human being. He does so by bodying forth through narrative a model (I'd even say, a paradigm) of the process of self-knowledge. In so doing, he becomes an indispensable companion to our own most personal and intimate developmental struggle to compass the manifold, disjointed flux of experience into a coherent, meaningful whole that we can point to as “our self.” As psychologists now recognize, a series of narrative acts (or “acts of meaning,” as Jerome Bruner put it) weave together, one by one, the fabric of our identity. What we are fundamentally is a narrative identity, a carefully demarcated world of meaning to which we cling in the face of the flux (notice Proust's recurring focus of description: thresholds and borders, doorways and windows, walls and fences). The slow construction of this most fundamental narrative unity that constitutes the real ground of our most mundane awareness is Proust's chosen theme. This fundamental understanding of the self-making self is, paradoxically, the culmination of the pursuit of self-knowledge. And in this, Proust puts his finger on the very pulse of what identity means and can mean in our historical epoch. As Charles Taylor points out in Sources of the Self, the fundamental understanding of an ineradicable and refractory (to the theoretical understanding and its search for pure transparency) poietic element that lies at the heart of all our acts of knowing is foundational for modern thought in general. In short, we make the self we strive to know, necessarily. Deliberations about meanings to entertain and construct form the very ground we stand on in our attempts to reflect and to know Self. In this, Proust's narrative art implicitly critiques the foundational move of Western philosophy and intellectual history alike: namely, Plato's separation between narrative and knowledge, theoria and poiesis, art and philosophy. Proust seems to say that theoria is poietic, and poiesis is theoretical, and reminds us the more primal etymological sense of narrative (gno – to know). In this, he elevates the modern novel to the status of a privileged epistemic instrument and redefines the aim of wisdom. The artist stakes out for himself his own wisdom path distinct from that of the philosopher. The knowing to be sought is the kind of knowing we live by. His narrative re-enacts those acts of knowing by which we structure a life-story and come to affirm a self, and then later, transcend it.The mainstream of modern thought has, of course, led in the opposite direction. Reductionist mechanism aspires to corner the mind into some ultimate system, a self-made cage of thought - a Theory of “Everything” - from which it may never again emerge to see the light of day. Any access to immediate experience must be mediated by said totalizing System; any experience that does not fit therein is to be explained away. While we managed to keep at bay political totalitarianism as a civilization, intellectual totalitarianism still rules the day as an ever-appetizing lodestar. If we could but persuade ourselves to stay in the box we made, we might buy ourselves some semblance of certainty, provided we forget we ourselves have fabricated it. William Barrett, in “The Illusion of Technique,” outlines this totalizing aspect of modern thought well when he shows how time and again, the great thinkers of modernity are subject to the irresistible temptation to “reify the objects of their symbolism,” thereby becoming “victims of their own language.”Proust's approach to the whole question of how we may become wise differs from this mainstream in two ways: first, he avoids becoming a “victim of (his) symbolism” by adopting a “meta” stance vis-a-vis his own cognitive framings, and second, he validates the adequacy to experience of his methodology by continually touching base with where we actually stand in our most intimate dealings with the world through a close description of detail. I already touched on the first, but essentially, the critical decision here lies in his not assuming transparency and instead foregrounding and scrutinizing the constructive process of knowing a life as it unfolds. There is wisdom in this, for by pretending that our mental filters are transparent to reality, we risk mistaking the specks of dirt on our windowpane for features in the landscape. The fundamental working metaphor Proust operates with here is the magic lantern of the mind. This is introduced early on in the context of one of those childhood revelations that seems to suddenly make clear for us the sense of this strange, shadowy life. The young narrator lying in his bed awaiting sleep while struggling with separation anxiety from his mother, watched the projected fairytale images of the magic lantern gliding across his walls, furniture, doorknob. The reference to Plato's Cave is unmistakable, and yet the wisdom to be found here lies not in "peering through" to the substantial origin of these shadowy fairytale forms that float over the surface of our awareness. The umbilical chord to such cosmic orders is severed, for Proust as for so many moderns. We are left floating in a sea of images, that strange, in-between realm where mind approaches nature but never quite rests in a secure grasp of it. The best lucidity we can hope for comes from an acceptance of the free-floating quality of the magic lantern of our minds: it touches reality only when, as the projected fairytale images, the form is distorted as it glides over an obtruding object, such as the doorknob. The entire rest of the narrative is like a grand cartography of the magic lantern of the mind, and of the unshakable, unsettling, yet poignant sense of irreality that it brings to the heart of even our most lucid daylight experience. In this, Proust has a lot in common with the stripping down of layer upon layer of formal illusion that characterizes Zen meditation. The work is indeed much like a guided meditation manual. The hard-earned lucidity to be found at the culmination of the gathering back together act at the end of the narrative, in Time Regained, is one not of “seeing through” to some architectonic world-structure (which must always in the end be a cognitive artifact endlessly referencing us even as we struggle to wipe ourselves out of our picture); it is instead a lucidity that comes from a comprehensive grasp of the ineradicable stain our filtration systems leave on even the most intimate, seemingly immediate moments. We never stand in the light of day. It is a scary realization, but an unshakable one, and one that peers at the very heart of the human condition. We always stand in the shadow of our own form, and of our limited capacity for realization. Our relation to reality must be understood (and more fully realized) by incrementally beating against our walls, at last coming to make peace with them, and in so doing, finding our only possible transcendence. And second, we come to the crucial revelation detailed description allows and that theoretical systems by their nature must overlook. Detailed description, while making lazy readers cringe, is the writer's best friend, as well as his/her greatest advantage over the philosophical systematizer. It is how the modern novel becomes a philosophically significant epistemic instrument. In my review of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, I noted that Kant and Proust can be understood as complementary opposites of the phenomenological spectrum, and that a fully realized self-understanding must encompass both the stances that they represent. Kant offers the phenomenology of logical principles, Proust the sketch of phenomenological form by which we gain a hold of lived experience. I'd add here that there's simply no philosophical substitute for Proust and for the kind of world-disclosure his narrative technique enables: he is a better cartographer of Heidegger's Clearing and Husserl's Lifeworld than they ever could be (although I deeply admire both). And this is because his (literary) methodology allows him to scrutinize and lay bare the workings of that fundamental act of reflective thought: description. It goes right to the heart of our moment-to-moment encounter with reality in re-enacting the constructive framing we impose through our descriptions. One has to admire the lucidity and tenacity with which Proust takes up his analytical scalpel to the most indefinite, amorphous phenomena. He is, in my estimation, a cartographer of indefinite who charts the limits of representation, and thus, of our capacity for lucidity and meaning. To define and articulate the undefinable details of lived experience – while foregrounding the constructive nature of all such articulation, definition, and cognitive framing - is both his (insane) narrative task and greatest epistemic achievement. Relish a densely descriptive paragraph of his, say, of a summer field, or of the subtly shifting feel of the atmosphere and mood change of a room as different personages enter and exit. Countless pages meticulously render articulate what we usually allow to fester untapped in the margins of liminal awareness, through synaesthetic descriptions that try to recapture the comprehensive feel of the mingling of shades at twilight, of the shifting of air currents, of the interpenetration of music and scent, and then of the pain of lack running through it all, of never attaining some culminating state of sufficiency. For my own part, far from having to strain to appreciate the descriptive passages, I find they provide meditative exercise that gives me the tools to better bring my day-to-day experiences to articulate clarity, instead of lazily allowing them to glide past. In so doing, they intensify my capacity for awareness and presence in the world. Both cognitive form and narrative technique here are opened up to their widest capaciousness and plasticity in order to incorporate not only dramatic action, but its peripheral reverberation, not only central figure but its background of embeddedness, not only words but their echoes, too. I feel more alive after reading Proust, more present to my experiences, and more ashamed at how much of my life I let slip by me each and every day. The perspective the narrator achieves over his life here makes our usual biographical sense seem botched and anemic. In comparison, it seems like we have scarcely deigned to show up for our life story much at all. Instead of integrating and transcending in a moment of lucidity that surpasses our highest attained perspectival unity, as the narrator does at the culmination of the narrative when the various strands somehow coalesce, we just let it all slip by, rush on to the next thing, and through this habit enacted out of laziness, skim through our lives without delving deeper into the mystery they disclose. Experience washes over us and past us, leaving us untransformed and not building up to a unity, which is indeed wholly ours. His analysis of the pervasiveness of Habit as our substitute for awareness here is sobering. “Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.” He shows how through it, we fall back on prematurely fossilized interpretive structures - “our personality” - and fail to rise up to the task of continuing to develop resources for gathering meanings as they continue to unfold and emerge. The entire work seems to urge us to recall that psychological maturation, unlike physical, doesn't occur automatically or is finished once and for all at a specific moment in time after puberty. It ends with death, or with its psychological correlative – the death we experience when we opt out of the necessarily ongoing struggle to continue articulating an increasingly integrative perspective on our lives. Premature unity is psychological death; through it, our lives become a foreclosed matter. As Beckett notes in his study of Proust, “The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day.” The same goes for our own little life-world. There is no resting in the process of endless formal development until death because experience never ceases to unfold new capacities for revelation. Our understanding can never rest content with yesterday's story when facing today's experiences. Proust shows us what the stakes for self-knowledge are, and this is as inspiring for us ordinary (barely aware) mortals as it is supremely humbling. And it is enabling, as any creative work should be. It shows the way to greater realization.
11/2/2010 Oggi ho terminato di leggere "Dalla parte di Swann"."Ma quando di un antico passato non sussiste niente, dopo la morte degli esseri, dopo la distruzione delle cose, soli, più fragili ma più intensi, più immateriali, più persistenti, più fedeli, l'odore e il sapore restano ancora a lungo, come anime, a ricordare, ad attendere, a sperare, sulla rovina di tutto il resto, a reggere, senza piegarsi, sulla loro gocciolina quasi impalpabile, l'immenso edificio del ricordo".Il ricordo rimane vivo e sconfigge anche la morte.9/7/2010 Oggi ho terminato la lettura di “all’ombra delle fanciulle in fiore”.“E il timore di un avvenire in cui saremo privati della vista e della compagnia di coloro che amiamo e dai quali ci viene oggi la gioia più cara, si accresce se pensiamo che al dolore di una simile privazione si aggiungerà non sentirla come dolore, restarvi indifferente..; sarebbe dunque una vera morte di noi stessi, morte seguita da resurrezione, ma di un io diverso, all’amore del quale non possono giungere le parti dell’antico io condannato a morire. Sono queste che provano sgomento e oppongono un rifiuto, con ribellioni in cui si deve vedere un modo segreto, parziale, tangibile, reale della resistenza alla morte, della lunga, disperata e quotidiana resistenza alla morte frammentaria e continua che si insedia in noi per tutta la durata della nostra vita…”li 11/10/2010 ho terminato di leggere "i Guermantes"."Un uomo, che sia diventato sordo del tutto, non può nemmeno far scaldare accanto a sè un bollitore pieno di latte senza dover spiare con gli occhi nel recipiente scoperchiato il riflesso bianco, iperboreo, simile a quello di una tempesta di neve, che è il segno premonitore al quale sarà bene ubbidire togliendo, come il Signore arresta le onde, la spina elettrica, infatti quella specie di uovo ascendente e convulso del latte che bolle sta salendo, sollevandosi irregolarmente, gonfia, arrotonda qualche vela semicapovolta che la panna aveva increspato e ne lancia nella tempesta una di madreperla che l'interruzione di corrente, se l'uragano elettrico è scongiurato in tempo, farà girare su se stessa e getterà alla deriva mutata in petali di magnolia."Anche l'attività quotidiana più semplice come il bollire il latte è poesia nella penna di Proust.13/1/2011: ho terminato la lettura di Sodoma e Gomorra." In qualsiasi momento la consideriamo, la nostra anima nella sua totalità ha un valore quasi soltanto fittizio, nonstante il cospicuo bilancio delle sue ricchezze, poichè ora le une ora le altre sono indisponibili, sia che si tratti di ricchezze effettive o immaginarie, e nel mio caso, per esempio, quella dell'antico nome di Guermantes o quelle, tanto più gravi, del vero ricordo della nonna. Perchè ai turbamenti della memoria sono legate le intermittenze del cuore. E' probabile sia l'esistenza del nostro corpo, simile per noi a un vaso in cui sarebbe rinchiusa la nostra spiritualità, a farci supporre che tutti i nostri beni interiori, le nostre gioie passate, tutti i nostri dolori siano perennemente in nostro possesso. Forse è altrettanto inesatto credere che essi svaniscano o ritornino. In tutti i casi, se restano in noi, la maggior parte del tempo risiedono in una zona sconosciuta dove non ci sono di alcuna utilità, e dove anche i più usuali sono soffocati dai ricordi di altro ordine e che escludono ogni simultaneità con essi nella nostra coscienza. Ma se riusciamo a riafferrare l'insieme di sensazioni in cui sono custoditi, essi hanno, a loro volta, il medesimo potere di espellere tutto ciò che è incompatibile con essi, di installare in noi soltanto l'io che li ha vissuti".19/3/2011: ho terminato la lettura de "la prigioniera". Per me credo sia il volume della Recherche che più mi ha affascinato."Ciò che ci lega alle persone sono le mille radici, quei fili innumerevoli che sono i ricordi della serata di ieri, le speranze del mattino di domani, quella trama continua di abitudini da cui non riusciamo a liberarci. Così come esistono avari che accumulano per generosità, noi siamo dei prodighi che scialano per avarizia, e sacrifichiamo la nostra vita non tanto a un essere quanto a tutto ciò che egli ha saputo legare a sè delle nostre ore, dei nostri giorni, delle cose al cui confronto la vita ancora da vivere, la vita relativamente futura, ci sembra più remota, più distaccata, meno intima, meno nostra."17/5/2011: ho terminato di leggere "la fuggitiva"."Ogni donna sente che, più il suo potere su un uomo è grande, il solo modo di andarsene è fuggire.Fuggitiva perchè regina.E' così.Certo, esiste una distanza immensa tra la noia che solo un istante prima essa ci ispirava e quel furioso bisogno di averla presso di sè per il fatto che se ne è andata.""La vera vita, la vita finalmente scoperta e messa in luce, di conseguenza la sola vita realmente vissuta, è la letteratura, vita che, in un certo senso, dimora in ogni momento in tutti gli uomini così come nell'artista. Ma essi non la vedono perchè non cercano di portarla alla luce".Il mio viaggio con Proust è terminato. Cinque stelle non rappresentano il valore di quest'opera monumentale, le ho messe simbolicamente: le mie stelle sono dieci, cento, mille...
What do You think about In Search Of Lost Time (À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu #1-7) (2003)?
In my 20's I attempted Proust Swanns Way, I recall actually throwing the book across my room in frustration. I did not understand how it could be possible to read scentences that never end on themes that seemed so trivial. I came back to Proust in my 40's and ended up spending the best three months of my life consuming his Masterpiece. Maybe I had to grow up and live more before sitting with the monumental task of entering a world so carefully and wisely crafted. I don't believe just anyone at any age could appreciatte what Proust accomplished here but I wish the whole world could, we may be better people for having gone along on the ride that is only Proust. I can now just sit and explore something as common as a flower for hours on end and walk away with a new understanding of life itself thanks to Proust. The mundane and our routines and inner chatter is all there is and it is life and it is beautiful, and I thank Proust (and Woolf) for making me aware and ,I hope, a little bit wiser.
—Bert
“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922) is probably the greatest and most influential novelist of last 100 years in any language. Proust spent the last 14 years of his life, lying on a narrow bed, writing an unusually long novel titled 'À la recherché du temps perdu' or 'In search of lost time'. Since the publication of the first of the 7 volumes in 1913, 'In search of lost time' has been hailed as a masterpiece, and is consistently chosen by the critics and the public as the greatest novel of the twentieth century.'In search of lost time' (also known by the previous title 'Remembrance of things past') contains over three thousand pages, a million and a half words, and more than four hundred individual characters. It is the longest novel in world literature and undoubtedly a daunting task to begin. However, as the reader gets drawn into it, the daunting bit finally comes to an end. One needs to be aware that, in order to enjoy Proust’s work in full, the more one knows about his life is the better. This is the case with all writers to some extent, but with Proust it is so to an unparalleled degree. In search of lost time is all about the narrator’s past, the experience he has had, often in the minutest detail; the many people he has known, their characters, appearance and habits. In an almost autobiographical way, the life of the narrator of the novel almost mirrors that of Marcel Proust.Proust’s biographers have a great time identifying the models for his characters amongst the people who knew him. Despite this autobiographical overtone, none of the characters are modelled on any one person. For example, the beautiful Albertine, whom the narrator loves, grew out of the many girls Proust knew and loved in his early years in Paris. They are an amalgam of several people, several physical traits, personal characteristics and situations, and it is this reworking of memory that is the subject of the novel 'In Search of lost time'. To some extent, all writers recaptured memory before Proust, and all writers have certainly done it since, however, no one has done it with such charm, wit, intelligence and perception, and no writer has produced work which had such profound effect upon his readers.In writing 'In search of lost time', what interested Proust was the human relationships in real life situations. His privileged birth and his connections led him into the society of the rich and idle, what was considered by some to be the top of french society. The imaginary world Proust created from this unique experience is the centrepiece of 'In Search of lost time'. In addition, Proust effortlessly incorporated many radical and world-shattering ideas into his novel. There are many distinct philosophical themes throughout 'In Search of lost time', however, two of the major recurring themes are time and involuntary memory. The taste of a madeleine dipped in tea makes the narrator to recall his childhood visit to Combray, a fictional country town. In this novel, Proust shows us that although time conquers everything, time also can be defeated through art and thus past can be recaptured and relived.In this monumental novel Proust also points out the causes behind the loss of time and encourages his readers to stop wasting time and begin appreciating their lives. In Proust’s view, human beings, most of the time, walk past fascinating kinds of experiences without really looking at them, studying them - and that’s what Proust wants his readers to do. He wants his readers to take their time to appreciate how rich and interesting the world is. The advantage of taking Proust’s suggestion of not going too fast is that the world suddenly becomes more interesting in the process.Proust’s last years were so plagued by bouts of asthma and his determination to finish what he has began, that it would seem to most people, that this hermit, who slept by day and worked at night, led a dismal existence. His walls were lined with cork to keep out the noise of the day time world. He could hardly go out without getting attacks of breathlessness. His friends could only see him if they met on unsociable midnight hours. He never found anyone to love or be loved by on a stable basis.However, his work was his life, through it Proust lived, and that the world is a richer and more humane place because of his remarkable work 'In search of lost time', is without doubt. Anyone who reads this towering work of literature will never be quite the same again. A peculiar warmth and humour pervades this vast novel. Proust asks so many philosophical questions, examines so many corners of human lives and mercilessly uncovers hypocrisy and evil, as well as charm and intelligence, but he does so with wit and sensitivity, and above all generosity of spirit. After putting down 'In search of lost time', readers would know that Marcel Proust’s life was as rich and full as any life can be and the world literature is the better for it.Proust, Marcel. In search of lost time, New York : Everyman's Library, 2001.
—Hossain Salahuddin
When you read Proust, and learn to appreciate his extraordinary, dreamy, hypnotic, truly inimitable style (this review is a mere shadow on the wall of a Platonic cave), which succeeds in making the syntax of language, usually as invisible as air, into a tangible element, so that, like literary yogis, we may feel, for the first time, how enjoyable the simple activity of reading, like breathing, can be; and discover the delights of sentences which took the author days to construct and us an hour to read, unpacking layers of subordinate clauses to discover, nestling inside their crisp folds, a simile as unexpected and delicious as a Swiss chocolate rabbit, wearing a yellow marzipan waistcoat and carrying an edible rake, found in its cocoon of tissue paper under a lilac bush during a childhood Easter egg hunt; or, steaming across the calm waters of a limpid grammatical lake in the capable hands of Captain Marcel and his crew, confident that they know the route from generations of experience, and will in due time, exactly on schedule, arrive at the main verb, pointing us tourists to it with justifiable, understated pride; then you will gradually come to identify with the alchemical author, spending twenty years sitting, propped up by pillows, in his velvet dressing-gown, transmuting the lead of his accumulated experience into gold, surrounded by galley proofs which he constantly rereads and revises, pasting in a parenthesis in the middle of this sentence, an apposition in that, so that the papers are gradually festooned, like bizarre Christmas decorations, with loops and curlicues of afterthoughts; and waiting for life, his unfaithful mistress, to leave him, simultaneously knowing that it is inevitable, and also that she will never do so, at least as long as this, the greatest and strangest of all novels, is still not quite finished...
—Manny
