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Beyond the Recherche
337 Plays3 months ago
Join your hosts Emma Claussen and Hannah Weaver for a bonus episode discussing the lasting influence of Proust on today’s literary culture. We discuss memoirs, translations, and the transformative power of Proust, particularly two books that profoundly influenced our reading: Laure Murat’s Proust, roman familial (forthcoming in English as Proust, A Family Romance) and Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory. Plus, we reveal what we appreciate in friends in our final round of the Proust Questionnaire.
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Transcript
Introduction to Proust Curious Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Proust Curious, a podcast in partnership with Public Books. I'm Hannah Weaver, an assistant professor of medieval literature at Columbia University and formerly a fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination. And I'm Anna Clausen, an early modernist at Trinity College, Cambridge. Proust Curious is, or has been, a podcast about the experience of reading hellolo shahi tampadu All Seven Volumes. But we've now done that.
00:00:30
Speaker
so So today we're offering a final bonus episode and something a little different. So join us as we search for lost time and remember things Proust related.
Proust's Influence on Writers
00:01:02
Speaker
So, Alach HaSheh's Yutom Perju has its place in literary culture partly because it has influenced generations of writers. If you've not read Proust, you might have read about him. So today we're thinking about some of those works just in time to inspire holiday gifts for the Proust lovers in your life.
00:01:21
Speaker
ah That's only somewhat is somewhat tongue in cheek. It could be useful for that. But let let me just mention to Emma before we get started that we're still not dealing with the raft of academic work on Proust, which is intimidatingly varied and deep. And we're still not talking about it.
00:01:42
Speaker
No, nor are we talking about that many books about Proust, because there are a lot. We're just talking about a few, including the one that inspired our entire podcast project, which is called Proust Romain Familiel by Lor Murat.
Origin of the Podcast and Friendship
00:01:56
Speaker
Hannah had just read this. We just read this when we met in Paris a year ago, and that got us talking about Proust and launched the reading project. It launched our whole friendship, really. Yeah, yeah. Thanks, L'Oreal, for your wonderful book, and also for saying that after all, the Recherche is just seven paperbacks and not that difficult to read. we felt We felt so humiliated by that contention that we had to do this.
00:02:20
Speaker
Yeah, so that inspired us to leap into reading and spend what has turned out to be a fun but also quite exhausting year of Proust and Proust adjacent activity. Indeed. So put more simply, Proust wrote a lot and then others wrote even more.
Friendship Reflections from the Proust Questionnaire
00:02:37
Speaker
But before we dive into this final episode of Proust Curious, it's time to answer one last question from the famous Proust questionnaire, answered by Proust twice at ages 13 and 20, and used as an interview device by Vanity Fair. We'll put a link to the questionnaire in the show notes. Today, it's also a kind of prompt more than a question, and it is sukeja pre a plus shimme aisa what I most appreciate about my friends.
00:03:02
Speaker
And Proust answered, I'm roughly translating, I appreciate if they're tender for me. If, their being is ex exquisite enough to make their tenderness extremely valuable. I mean, wow.
00:03:20
Speaker
Wow, I've never ranked my friends in terms of their exquisite-ness. As a repressed British person, the word tenderness is difficult for me, full stop. Tenderness is hard. Yeah, yeah that's hard for Americans too. Okay. Yeah. But I think what he's saying is, you know, when you really like someone, if they like you as well, that's awesome.
00:03:40
Speaker
Yeah, that's true. That's true. If you have kind of a friend crush on someone and it seems reciprocated, that can be very exciting. Indeed. So what's what's your answer to this one, Hannah? What do you appreciate the most in your friends? I appreciate in my friends when they also know what is funny about something without me needing to explain it.
00:04:03
Speaker
when I can send a screencap of something and they know exactly why I sent it without any further commentary. That is a real joy to feel that level of connection with someone. What about you, Emma? What do you appreciate the most in your friends? Yeah, that's very true about ah shared humor.
00:04:22
Speaker
I think a lot of my answers to the Proust questionnaire in this whole series have really been about what I appreciate about my friends. Oh, that's true. Like about what my favorite virtues are and my idea of misery, right? So I guess what I appreciate in my friends is like showing up for me or for themselves as well and you being courageous.
00:04:43
Speaker
helping me be courageous. But, you know, by now I'm one for a sentimental answer. So I'd also say that what I really appreciate in my friends is when they really understand me, but also leave me alone about it, you know?
00:04:59
Speaker
It's a real Goldilocks situation here. Yeah. Yeah. Because, you know, it's great to be seen, but it's also great to be seen tactfully. That's what I'd say.
00:05:12
Speaker
That's a very British answer, if I can be honest. Yeah, send help. Being seen tactically. Well, that's something to for me to aspire to, um hitting that balance.
Exploration of Proust Literature
00:05:30
Speaker
There are so many sort of para-proust books, even excluding the academic ones, that you can't help but start to see categories. So there are some that have to do with Proust's biography, written by people that knew him, like most famously Celeste Abaré, who was his long-time servant and companion. and and help meet in terms of actually getting the Recherche written down. She wrote a memoir called Monsieur Proust about her experience living with him and but helping him, etc. And there are also then scholars and researchers who
00:06:06
Speaker
Excavate aspects of his biography that might have inspired what's in the novel so i've been reading this really great example of this genre by caroline weber which is called proust duchess and it takes up the biography of the three women who were sort of amalgamated into the duchess to gamble.
00:06:25
Speaker
in the novel it is a wonderful book i would highly recommend it it is also yeah i've not ready it's an absolute home it is deeply long but deeply engaging so i regret that i haven't finished it enough to.
00:06:38
Speaker
tell everyone all about it. But I i would I would recommend it. I think it was a finalist for the Pulitzer. It's hardly obscure. But okay, so there are these sort of like biographical Proustiana. And then what are some other categories Emma? Well, I'd say that translations of Proust are a whole other category of Proust writing. I mean, it's not really books about Proust, but they do get a lot of critical attention. I'd say yeah yeah yeah perhaps more than other translations, even of classics. Oh, I agree. So in English, you've got the writer Lydia Davis, for instance. She just translated Swan's Way.
00:07:17
Speaker
Yeah, but this has been going since since the first or kind of the early years of publication of Proust. So Walter Benjamin translated some of the early volumes into German, which is very interesting. I didn't know that until recently. Or in or in Italian, Natalia Ginsberg translated Proust.
00:07:33
Speaker
who was herself a great novelist. ah Yeah, so she wrote a book that I've just read called Family Lexicon, Lecico Familiare. So this book references Proust a few times and also treats quite a few themes that Proust has dealt with about an earlier period in a different city, so the nature of family and idiolects and Jewish history as well. So there's an overlap then between translations of Proust and creative writing by all kinds of really well-known writers like Davis, Benjamin, and Kinsberg. Then there are books that either are themselves
00:08:11
Speaker
fetish objects around Proust or that recount stories of people having a fetish for Proust. So there are things that are that are very important for scholars, but like the entirety of Proust's correspondence has been published. Or you can now see facsimiles, I think you can buy facsimiles of all the manuscripts of the Recherche, like that, this sort of like intense attention to everything that ever had anything to do with Proust. This is not a book, but you can also go to the Musée Canavalier and visit Proust's bedroom basically in Paris. That's the Museum of the History of Paris, and his bedroom has pride of place in the history of Paris, um which is sort of a wild premise all by itself. I read um
00:08:54
Speaker
It's the opposite of the web or book in a way because it's a very slender volume that talks about one such obsessive collector a man called the jacket who is a perfume maker and very wealthy from that and also obsessively collected.
Jacques Guerin's Proust Collection
00:09:12
Speaker
everything he could acquire from Proust's brother's estate after he passed and sort of the the thing he wanted the most was the fur overcoat that Proust had famously basically lived in once he retreated into his cork lined room.
00:09:29
Speaker
And he finally was able to get his hands on it. And now it's on display at the Musée Carnavalet. So if you want to see Proust's overcoat, you can. And all the a lot of those items in that bedroom were donated by this man Jacques Guerin and Lorenzo Foscini in this very stylish short book recounts the story of his obsession, basically.
00:09:51
Speaker
Yeah, I've not read this book, but I think I did read that it's thanks to Gerand that we have a lot of Proust's archive, because his family wanted to get rid of it. Yes, a lot of it was going to the trash heaper, like the junk seller, and he sort of single-handedly rescued much of it from disappearance. Yeah, there's something of the relic to all this, a kind of veneration of the saintly objects.
00:10:13
Speaker
Do you have any of this? Are you someone that wishes you had, I don't know, an autograph by your favorite author or something? No. No, me neither. I'm not at all. I don't I don't get this impulse at all. I do. I am thankful to this this obsessive because truly we would have lost a lot of historical information if it weren't for him. But at the same time, I don't have that impulse at all. So it was it was interesting to sort of visit that psychic place that is not my place.
00:10:39
Speaker
I do like going to writer's houses. Ah yes, that I do like. And seeing what they saw, seeing their views from their windows, that kind of thing. Yeah. Like I really want to go to the model for Balbec at some point in Normandy. Yes, I mean, it's on girlfriend.
00:10:56
Speaker
So we've talked about collection, archive, biography, translation.
Creative Works Inspired by Proust
00:11:03
Speaker
But when I mentioned Ginsberg, for example, I was also touching on another category of Proust book. That's not too inemagant to call it that, which is ah writing that engages in similar themes in conversation with Proust. And we're about to talk about one of those, but also a major category.
00:11:22
Speaker
is Proust as a kind of life guide, Proust as a writer who has really understood what it is to exist and who can help us, whoever we are, with our feelings about existing. So there is quite a frequent trope in writing about Proust which is that you find yourself in this book. You recognise the suffering heart of humanity, etc, etc.
00:11:50
Speaker
And I have always found that a little bit off-putting, if I'm completely honest. I think something we've not really talked about that much in this podcast, but there's a lot of reasons not to read Proust.
00:12:04
Speaker
ah so surprisingly and um What I mean is all this talk about how he has truly expressed the human condition, how he is the best writer ever. It's all a bit pressurising and also I feel a little inherently repulsed by all claims of universality, because it's really easy to read anything and not see yourself in it. However, I would say that the book that we're going to talk about first, Lord Murat's book about Proust, is absolutely the best and most moving account of understanding life through Proust that I've come across.
00:12:43
Speaker
Yes, I agree. So what is this book, you might be asking yourself? Laura Murat is currently a professor at UCLA. But in terms of her book, it's more important that she is descended on both sides from French aristocracy, her father's side, Napoleonic aristocracy, the other side, pre-revolution and pre-empire. She counts as an ancestor, Louis the 13th.
00:13:11
Speaker
Her birth certificate names her as a princess, which I think is like, as an American, I'm like, what? But that being said, although that's the milieu she was born into, as a gay woman, she had long been estranged from her family, although it seems like to varying degrees before her parents died. But an understanding of the rarefied but hollow class in which she grew up proved elusive until she found it refracted through p Proust's novel and indeed his own life. I couldn't believe her story when I read it. I also couldn't believe that her name effectively is Princess.
00:13:52
Speaker
Even though I'm English and the British aristocracy is a storied thing itself, believe that they're real, which comes up in interesting ways in her book where she describes the aristocracy as this kind of world of fantasy in pure forms. and But we should say before we really dive in that this book is currently only available in French. It should appear with Penguin in the next year or so as a Proust, a family romance. um So hopefully if you aren't going to read it in French, you can read it then. And we'll put a link to all the other British and American publishers of the books we're discussing in the show notes.
00:14:29
Speaker
but we really can't recommend
Murat's Insight on Aristocracy
00:14:30
Speaker
it highly enough. So if you don't read French, do do keep an eye out for the Penguin publication in English. So since this is the kind of origin of of our whole podcast project, why Did we love this book so much and find it so inspiring? What what got you about it, Hannah? Well, I mean, in part it was just that Mira is a beautiful writer and so I just don't want to pass unnoticed that part of it is the way she constructs her memoir and moving between the personal
00:15:00
Speaker
the novel and then the archive really because she herself is unlike us an expert on Proust and has done her own original archival research which she brings to bear on the novel. But in terms of our conversation today, I think that one thing that Miura really broke open for me was the relationship between Proust's novel and indeed Proust's life and class. And I actually think that we didn't talk about that all that much during our series. And I personally feel that I didn't want to talk about it because I felt like I would just end up parroting Miura because she's so compelling on the topic. So maybe we can just share a few of her insights rather than try you know trying to fold them into our larger conversations.
00:15:50
Speaker
Yeah, I do agree on all counts. I think she makes Proust really accessible in this book and enables the kind of overcoming of all kinds of mental blocks. And one of the mental blocks I did have about Proust was this idea that she totally debunks, which is that it's just a love affair with the aristocracy. It totally valorises that class above all others, that it's a book that is very ultimately snobby.
00:16:18
Speaker
And that made me not want to read it, you know but she she makes it clear that that's not the case. She actually says that it's a full takedown of the aristocratic class and a real kind of an anatomy or autopsy of yeah a very corrupt and dysfunctional class structure.
00:16:38
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that a lot of the reason that that impression sort of floats around is that if you only read the first volume, you would have every reason to think that. It's really in later volumes that the hollowness at the center of the aristocracy comes to light.
00:16:53
Speaker
And basically, Murat ends up reading aristocracy as a form that is perceptible through the lens of Proust. She writes, and this is my translation, she writes, the text filled in the emptiness. The novel took on the nothingness and futility of a world that thought it had the keys to the kingdom.
00:17:13
Speaker
Literature brought firmness, density, and thickness to the place where an inconsequential pantomime and a sequence of chic scenes with no meat or interest used to rule. Proust's development gave me back a view over the entire landscape. His steps back and his putting things in perspective gave me the impression of being an orbiting astronaut who sees autonomous Earth detach itself in inter-cosmic space and who will be changed by the site forever.
00:17:43
Speaker
So good. That's what we were saying, which is that he bruust takes this critical approach to the aristocracy as well as showing them as an aesthetic object.
00:17:56
Speaker
I think what she's partially saying here is that ah she had noticed that it felt like the people around her were in some way acting something out, but she didn't really understand what that something was until she saw it thickly represented in Proust's novel.
00:18:14
Speaker
and that she was able then to to take this like huge step back and almost be like an astronaut looking back at earth and seeing like the whole globe as opposed to being distracted by the particularities of the exact people around her.
00:18:30
Speaker
And Proust really was describing her world. He had connections with various people who knew or were members of her family. There's this amazing passage where she explains why the Duchess of Guermont must in fact be her aunt.
Proust's Impact on Murat's Life
00:18:47
Speaker
ah Can you imagine being in that position and and reading the novel and feeling like it really is a family story for her? Yeah.
00:18:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's amazing and I love that chapter as well. where she describes what it was like being in her family's chateau when her grandfather died there. The chateau de l'une? How do you pronounce that? I guess, l'une? Yeah, and the sort of like ugly furniture and thick walls and just sort of- In a storm. In a storm while the ceiling is sort of collapsing because it's impossible to take care of a chateau unless you have all the rents that are needed to keep it up and the sort of semi enslaved people to keep it up.
00:19:29
Speaker
A bit like some of Proust, there's a fairy tale aspect to that chapter. And what she says is that Proust's book replaces the chateau as a place where she can live, but where she can live as a full person, unlike under the aristocratic bell jar that she had to grow up in. Yeah, I think it enables her to reorient and really find her own orientation.
00:19:56
Speaker
Yeah, socially and sexually. right She gives us a really compelling and accessible, as I've said already, understanding of Proust in this book. But she's also very clear then about what Proust gives her. So Proust has given her a way to rethink sexuality. Proust has given her a way to escape and process at the same time her aristocratic upbringing.
00:20:23
Speaker
There's this chapter that I can't get into now that I found it really interesting, so I highly, highly recommend, once again, this book about how Proust gave her a way of understanding reality because she'd kind of grown up in a way where she felt like the material and the spiritual were totally at odds with one another, and Proust's sensory but still spiritual account of existence enabled her to see their integration. I think you know that relates to some of the stuff that we talked about in earlier episodes. I think that's really interesting.
00:20:51
Speaker
And then she has this really moving final chapter about Proust and consolation that I'm not sure I fully appreciated until I reread it after we'd finished the whole project because throughout I was thinking about Proust as both sad and reassuring, life affirming and upsetting. yeah And she talks about how Proust offered her consolation, although he seems to refuse the whole concept of it. And that is through
00:21:24
Speaker
rather than trying to mend or somehow obfuscate pain or grief, he turns it into a project. Yeah. Which for me brought the word recherche in the title into relief for almost the first time. I've been so fixated on lost time right that I wasn't really thinking about the searching. But actually she concludes with this account of what it is to want to know something and how that seeking, that searching and the action of it can be its own consolation, a form of libido that she calls libido ciendi. And she says that's how Proust saved her. And I read that and I was like, oh. It's not just searching, right? It's also like researching. Yeah. That the desire for knowledge can be its own consolation.
00:22:16
Speaker
and Perhaps we particularly appreciate that as academic research. perhaps but regardless i think There is sort of a an idea out there that people do research cuz they're avoiding their emotions are avoiding their You know, it's easier to look at facts and excavate historical realities than it is to really go through grief or something like that. But actually she's showing that in Proust, those two are not incompatible and that therefore for her, they're also not incompatible. So it's not just academics after all, or in the formal sense, who seek knowledge. And in a second, we're going to turn to another writer who's
00:23:02
Speaker
searching in her own way for for last time, partly as a response to huge devastation.
Stepanova's Memoir and Memory
00:23:12
Speaker
First Curious is brought to you in partnership with Public Books, an online magazine of ideas, arts, and scholarship. You can find us at publicbooks dot.org. That's publicbooks dot.org. To donate to Public Books, visit publicbooks dot.org slash donate.
00:23:29
Speaker
So this next book that you just mentioned, Emma, is an essayistic memoir by the tremendous Russian poet Maria Stepanova called In Memory of Memory. It has been translated by the glorious poet in her own right, Sasha Dugdale, into English. And Maria Stepanova is also fluent in English and and had collaborated with Dugdale on this translation.
00:23:56
Speaker
So, what is it? Basically, in this book, Stepanova goes in search of her family history, or maybe lost time, through aquasis of ephemera from her ordinary bourgeois Jewish family, intensive study of painting and photography, transcription of century-old letters, and visits to far-flung towns of the former Soviet Union and current European cities.
00:24:20
Speaker
Unlike Proust, Stepanova concludes that lost time can never be meaningfully recovered, and in fact, might best be left to its own devices. Emma, how is this book for you? I mean, I want to thank you for telling me to read it, just like with the Miura. It is an incredible read, very intense, very evocative.
00:24:42
Speaker
It took me quite a long time to read it and I read it in quite a staccato way because I kept stopping to be like, oh my God. Well, I think some of that is that Maria Stepanova is like, she's mostly a poet, right? And so I do think that her prose is like densely poetic and rewards the sort of close attention that you might normally give to a poem. Yeah.
00:25:04
Speaker
it's really moving. I read it in a state of heightened emotion and very beautiful. It's an account of Jewish, Russian and Ukrainian history in the 20th century, so history that is both of annihilation and survival. It's also a history of being a person with a family, yeah recovering the ordinary of the past, thinking so deeply about who we remember, how we remember, why we remember them.
00:25:36
Speaker
I'd like to read a brief quotation that's from her own reading of Seebelt because she does engage with many, many, like Proust, many, many different writers throughout this book. She writes, there is no miracle. Everything we see before us, including ourselves, will disappear and it won't take long. So there is no choice. Any object or fate or person deserves to be remembered, to flicker once again in the light before all is finally dark. So she's thinking so carefully about the act of memory, remembering who gets memorialised. I mean, it's also quite funny it's as well as being really poetic and moving, like when she goes to the Holocaust Museum in Washington.
00:26:16
Speaker
And the person that she speaks to in the archive is like, oh, loads of people are doing little trips to figure out their family history and writing books about it these days. And she just she just says, yeah, and there's going to be one more. Yes, I think that this is some another thing she shares with Proust, really, is that she's addressing these very serious topics and thinking really carefully and also leaving room for humor like we talked about way back in episode one how funny proust is and i i think that's something that's upon about shares but in the quote you just read we see too that there's this idea of.
00:26:53
Speaker
disappearance, that that there is a sort of irrecoverability of memory that is certainly at odds with the memory that Proust presents to us, particularly in the seventh volume, which we discussed in our episode from yesterday. So maybe we should talk more about her different view of memory and and why she might have such a different view from Proust.
00:27:18
Speaker
Yeah, because she's writing in dialogue with Proust, absolutely. Explicitly so. She refers to him often and even in places where she doesn't say his name. Those of us who have just read the Recherche will recognize Proustian references peppering her pages.
00:27:37
Speaker
So she sees, I mean, at one point she explains how different writers and artists and and just people in the 20th century might attempt a sort of Proustian project of involuntary memory where the past comes surging back, but she sees this as sort of doomed to failure. So I quote,
00:27:59
Speaker
What began as an attempt to resurrect the old world with the power of words, to make a glass of Tilyaichi and use it as an e elixir of life, hit against a living wall of the drowned and the lost, against the simple impossibility of remembering and calling the dead by their names.
00:28:20
Speaker
yeah This is part of a chapter of this text which has a very interesting and varied structure, but this is a chapter that feels a bit like a historical essay about how memory arts and memory technologies have changed from the between the 19th and 21st centuries. What she's really pointing up is that that sort of involuntary memory that Proust describes really only works for your own memories of things that you yourself have experienced, and that's a massive constraint, particularly when you're dealing with the catastrophes that are the 20th century. In some ways, Stepanova's book is a sequel.
00:29:04
Speaker
if you can call it that, to Proust. Yeah, I love that idea. I was thinking the whole time we were reading the Rosh Hash about everything that was coming next. it felt like a dark horizon, especially when we were reading about the Dreyfus affair, reading about the war, reading the references to colonized peoples in Paris during the war. And in hindsight, you think about everything that's coming next, all the thing but ah the all the structures and memories and archives about to be lost and made. And Stepanova somehow
00:29:39
Speaker
manages to think about all of that while simultaneously having a deeply ethical approach to the question of how to even begin to confront an irrecoverable past. Yeah, she has a sort of um worry that the dead cannot consent.
00:30:01
Speaker
They can't consent to being investigated, that to exhume them and their lives may be something they never would have wished. And she compares actually the past to a colonized territory, or a potential colonized territory. I'll quote again if that's okay. The past lies before us, like a huge planet waiting to be colonized. First, the raiding parties, and then the slow modification process.
00:30:30
Speaker
The present is so certain that it owns the past, just as both Vindias were owned. The present knows as much about the past as done did Vindia, and barely notices the ghosts that float back and forth, ignoring state boundaries. So what I love about this passage is that it implies that the past is not only like unwillingly subjugated to the whims of the present, but moreover that it might change that the past might be sort of terraformed by the interests of the present. And we see here some of Stepanova's humor, the idea that John Dunn, the early modern English poet, talks about India as ah as a colony, right, that can be owned by Britain, and that the present is just as settler in its impulse as
00:31:25
Speaker
Britain was vis-a It's funny to use Dunn's contraction, Vindhya, in this way. It's funny to cite John Dunn in this passage. i just I find her very, very clever and clever in a deeply erudite and intellectual ah Way that makes me want to keep up and laugh with her if i just can manage it even as we're discussing something really ethically serious like whether we have the right. To study the past in the way that a lot of writers have attempted to both memorize and scholars.
00:32:01
Speaker
So she's looking back after a century of past recovery, memory, industry, and thinking about how that it might actually in some ways be unfair on the dead. oh That whole passage is incredible when she says, culture treats the past as a state, treats its mineral wealth, mining it for all it's worth.
00:32:22
Speaker
this parasitical relationship with the dead is a profitable industry. It's exactly what you're talking about. It's so acerbic and on point about so many problems with culture and exploitation and indeed colonisation. So a lot of the things that are unacknowledged or in progress in Proust, including a kind of manipulative relationship to the dead that is explicit and perhaps ironised in the Volume 6 on Albertine. A lot of that is being scrutinised by Stepanova.
00:32:58
Speaker
Also, I think that she pulls it off, right? Like she she manages a book that is about the dead and is about the past while doing so in a way that's ethically harmonious with her doubts about it. So I really do, again, not to just be exhorting you all this whole this whole episode, but I really do once more highly recommend this book. It would make a great gift for any any smart person in your life. Any serious melancholic that you happen to know. Or anyone who appreciates the integration of ethical considerations and wit. Absolutely.
00:33:44
Speaker
Let's end on a bit of a lighter note. We've we've just talked about two books that we both read and really really deeply admired for their intellectual projects and for what they revealed, not only about Proust and his project, but also about ah the writers. I mean, we talked about two memoirs, so we really were engaging with Miura and Stepanova in their representation and their memoirs as much as we were engaging with Proust. But there's all of this whole category that we we already mentioned that you at least are skeptical of, and I share your skepticism of seeing f seeing Proust as sort of like a self-help book, maybe?
Proust as a Self-Help Guide
00:34:23
Speaker
Yeah, the most famous of those is by the writer Alain de Botton who wrote the best-selling How Proust Can Change Your Life, which includes such chapters as How to Love Life Today.
00:34:39
Speaker
Okay, how to love life today, yes continue, sorry. How to suffer successfully, how to express your emotions, how to open your eyes, how to be happy in love, et cetera. Yikes. I just want to say that this book was really big when I was in college, so quite some time ago, but I do think that it was such, such, such a bestseller and it was very aimed at actually people who are prused curious, but may have never read Proust.
00:35:08
Speaker
I think the target audience much exceeded those who have actually sat down and read the Chachach. So I mention this just because I think that this is a book that a lot of people who are curious about Proust but have never read, Proust will have nevertheless read this book. Or come across in some way. Or come across it. And so I think that his self-help-ish interpretations of Proust have in some ways, I think, distorted what Proust is actually like. I mean, the idea that you might be able to find out anything about being happy and love from Proust is quite silly, if we can be honest. Yeah, I wish I could remember it more clearly. I have listened to this whole book on audiobook, and I enjoyed parts of it, and it does take a kind of tongue-in-cheek approach. As it must. To the self-help question. As it must.
00:35:55
Speaker
yeah but the idea that Proust could tell you what to do and really you read the rush to know not what what not to do. I think especially especially in love, like don't kidnap your girlfriend. But I also think it's just an interesting premise that, and I think he, again, I think he takes this premise with his tongue and his cheek. So like, I'm not trying to malign de Botton's project.
00:36:18
Speaker
But there is something to it as well, isn't there? Yeah, well, it is. As we saw, I think Proust did change Laure Murat's life, but not in the sort of self-help categories that we're used to. And Debaton is trying to draw those those sort of genres of self-help book and make them map onto Proust's sprawling novel.
00:36:39
Speaker
The idea of Proust as life-changing has also been treated in a recent novel in French, but which has been translated into English with Gaelic books.
Life-Altering Experiences with Proust
00:36:49
Speaker
So it's called Clara l'iproust, or Clara reads Proust. And we've both read this this year, haven't we? Yeah, it's by Stéphane Carlier, C-A-R-L-I-E-R.
00:37:01
Speaker
Yeah so we both we both read this and yes this also takes as a premise that an encounter with a research could change the outcome of your entire life. Yeah so the eponymous clara is a hairdresser in her early twenties living.
00:37:16
Speaker
in some kind of provincial French town, I think. yeah And she's OK, but she's a bit bored in life. She's a bit detached from from everything. She has a really handsome boyfriend, but that's all we find out about him is he's handsome. She doesn't really like him very much. She is pretty much at a loose end. And then one day,
00:37:39
Speaker
an unknown, handsome stranger comes into her hair salon Obviously, by the way, the salon is meant to be a kind of pastiche of the salons that we see in Proust. So this hot guy comes in, gets his haircut, and leaves on her countertop a copy, I think, of the first volume so of Ducati de Chez-Suin. And she takes the book home because the guy is hot. She's like, I wonder what, such an attractive man. I think he even says something to her like, I think you're not like the other girls, Clara.
00:38:14
Speaker
She takes this book home and forgets about it until she watches some movie or TV show with Jacob Elordi in it. And she's like, Jacob Elordi is hot. Remember that hot guy in the salon who read that book? I wonder what that book was actually about. So then she starts reading and It changes her life. She reads the whole thing. She makes new friends. She gets a whole new career out of reading Proust. Reading it out loud, we should say. Yeah, yeah. So she starts to of perform it ah in public readings and becomes an artist or like an actor or something. It's a little bit unclear.
00:38:57
Speaker
Some would say that it's a bit like starting a podcast. No, no, no, no, no. At any rate, um so it's it's a transformative experience. And in a way, it's kind of actually a protreptic experience. Protrepsis is the sort of bodying forth of a transformation that the text presents to you. But anyway, the book, obviously, as we know, the Chachach is in part about a writer figuring out how to write.
00:39:24
Speaker
And she figures out how to do art by reading the book. So like her journey echoes that of the narrator in the Recherche. And she breaks up with her boring boyfriend. She breaks up with her boying boyfriend. She meets like a hot musician guy. It's a very lighthearted, as our report has probably led you to believe. But I think that just the basic premise that Proust could lead you to change your life is ah is a funny one. and and And here's where I'm going to be embarrassing and say, I think Proust changed my life. Even though I'm like, I'm kind of dunking on these ideas of Proust as a self-help guide. I do think that there's something about the reading experience that's so overwhelming because it's just so there's so much. I mean, Emma, this has dominated our year, let's be honest. I mean, there's other stuff in our lives, but this has been a major
00:40:16
Speaker
factor in our, it just has been in terms of sheer number of hours and and amount of thought we've put into it. And actually it was, I and will tell ah an embarrassing story that Emma has heard before, but I first read Proust in translation as an undergraduate and reading it in translation made me feel acutely that I wish I could be reading it in French. And that is the whole reason that I ever started studying French.
00:40:43
Speaker
And I now have a PhD in French. It's my whole career. So I guess there is something about this sort of deluge-like reading experience that after The Flood, things have changed. Yeah. Do you think this reading process changed our life, Emma? I think it changed our friendship. I mean, what an intense and beautiful way to get to know someone.
00:41:11
Speaker
Let's do a really intense, yeah almost year-long collaborative project, my yeah new acquaintance.
Podcast's Impact on Friendship and Future Plans
00:41:22
Speaker
Look, okay, for our listeners, Hannah and I didn't know each other.
00:41:27
Speaker
We hung out a few times when I was in New York for a couple of months. And then we met again in Paris about a year ago. I actually had a migraine, so my memory of it is a little bit sparkly.
00:41:41
Speaker
Perfect. And then we decided to do this. And we have, first across the channel and then across the Atlantic, spent a ton of time together. And so it has been life-changing for me, at least at least in that respect.
00:41:56
Speaker
at least on the scale of our friendship. It has been it has been transformative. And I'm so glad. It sounds insincere. I find it really hard to be emotionally sincere. I feel that you're glad, because I'm glad. So i'm just I'm just assuming that my tenderness is reflected in you, as Proust would have it. Oh, you said tenderness. I said tenderness. You're welcome.
00:42:30
Speaker
All right, Emma, I think to wrap up, we used to do our winners and losers, but that's not really applicable this time. So I think a nice way to end might be to tell our listeners what we're going to read next now that we finally stop searching for lost time and remembering things not only Proust, but Proust related. Now that we're escaping, but now after the flood, what do we read?
00:42:55
Speaker
What are you going to be reading now, Hannah? i The next thing on my list is the Deborah Levy book, August Blue, which is, I will confess, a sort of random choice among her books. I just have been meaning to read any of her books and I heard good things about this one and so I think that's next.
00:43:15
Speaker
I also do want to finish the Caroline Webber book on Proust's Duchess, which is not a really good answer to this question because it's not really what's next. But it's just to say that that book is like actually really fun to read and I plan to finish it. I do want to read that too. In fact, you reminded me that I was given a For My Birthday Debra Levy book called Things I Don't Want to Know. So in fact, that is also what I hopefully will have time to read now. ah But my other answer, aside from all the books that my students are reading and that therefore I am also reading, rereading I should say, in case any of my students are listening. yeah The other thing that I have and am excited to read is, and this is a very basic but perhaps predictable answer, is the new Sally Rooney novel, which is called Intermezzo, which at the time of recording has recently been released. Yes, I haven't read it yet either. It's about men this time.
00:44:07
Speaker
is is the headline. you And now for some men.
00:44:16
Speaker
I really am genuinely looking forward to that. I am a Sally Rooney fan. As are we all. All right, well, I think that's it for this episode. And in fact, for the entire mini series that has been Proust Curious, we hope we've piqued your curiosity. If you liked the podcast, please tell a friend about it and leave us a rating and review so that others can find us more easily. Proust Curious has been hosted by Emma Glossen and Hannah Weaver and produced by Michael Goldsmith.
00:44:46
Speaker
you can reach us at priestcurious at gmail dot.com. We'd also like to thank our partner Public Books, an online magazine of ideas, arts, and scholarship. Check it out at publicbooks.org. And thank you so much for listening. It's really been a pleasure to spend this time with you. Thank you. Au revoir. Au revoir.