Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Time Regained / Le temps retrouvé
231 Plays3 months ago
Hosts Emma Claussen and Hannah Weaver join the narrator for one last search for lost time, rejoicing with him as he finds it by stumbling on a paving stone in the courtyard of the Princesse de Guermantes’s house, and dreams about the book he finally knows he can write – if he can only live long enough. The shadow of mortality is cast not only by the Great War, which ends some time before this ‘regaining’ of lost time, but in the iconic ‘bal des têtes’ scene in which the narrator suddenly notices that he and everyone else he knows has gotten older as time has passed. We giddily discuss Proust’s vision of art and his theory of time, and how he brings his ‘unfinished’ novel to a virtuosic conclusion. Plus, we answer the question, “who is your favorite heroine?”. Join us as we search for lost time and remember things Proust.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Proust Curious'
00:00:02
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 fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
00:00:14
Speaker
and I'm Emma Clausen, an early modernist at Trinity College, Cambridge. Proust Curious is a podcast about the experience of reading ara rache du tompperie All Seven Volumes. Written between 1906 and 1922, published between 1913 and 1927, Marcel Proust's cultural touchstone is an object of enduring fascination and, let's face it, intimidation.
00:00:37
Speaker
We're not Proust experts, but we do study literature for a living, so we feel both under and over-qualified to tackle
Discussion of 'Time Regained' and WWI
00:00:44
Speaker
this. Join us as we search for lost time. And remember things, Proust.
00:01:06
Speaker
Today we're discussing the seventh and final volume, final volume, of à la recherche du temps peugeux, le temps retrouvé, or time regained. This volume starts with the narrator visiting his friend Gilbert de Saint-Luc at her country home near Cambrai, and reflecting on his long friendship with her and her husband Robert, who is off chasing men. Then the First World War breaks out, and Robert de Saint-Luc is among the millions who go off to fight.
00:01:35
Speaker
The narrator, on the other hand, remains sickly, and spends much of the war in a convalescent home of some kind, returning to Paris only a few times to observe the city in the shadow of war, and to stumble upon a brothel run by the former tailor, Jupien. As Jupien's hotel, he once again spies on Monsieur Charles, who is paying to be whipped, and reflects further on desire and habit before the shock of Saint-Luc's death in battle makes him take to his bed again.
Revelation about Time and Art
00:02:03
Speaker
We then move forward a few years to a moment after the war when the narrator returns to Paris and attends a gathering at the Prançaise de Guermont, who, by the way, is now Madame Vergiron that That's a surprise that Hannah signalled in, I think, in one of our first episodes.
00:02:18
Speaker
like you just you Her social climbing has really peaked, so he goes to this gathering. He's feeling bleak and uninspired, but then as he arrives, he trips on uneven paving stones in the courtyard, triggering a sequence of remembered impressions that enable him to finally understand how time can be regained, and therefore both the purpose of art and what his writing project is going to be.
00:02:44
Speaker
i.e. it's the one we've been reading. But before he can go ahead and write it, a servant tells him he can enter the party. He goes in, he is stunned to find that everyone he knows has aged several decades over the several decades that he's known. For ultimately, this shock is converted into further crystallisation of his sense of the relationship between art and time.
00:03:08
Speaker
Or put more simply, he figures out whom, what, where, when, and why to write. At last. At last.
Favorite Literary Heroines
00:03:18
Speaker
But before we get into it, Emma, it's time for our question from the Proust questionnaire, which Proust answered twice at ages 13 and 20. We always link to the questionnaire in our show notes. Emma, this week our question is, who is your favorite heroine?
00:03:34
Speaker
And I did assume literary heroine, right? Yes, me too. Well, you assumed literary heroine because Proust answered Berenice. Who is Berenice, Emma?
00:03:46
Speaker
Berenice is... ah queen of the classical canon, but I presume, although he didn't say, that Proust meant Racine's Berenice. She's the heroine of one of Racine's best-known plays. We know that Proust loved Racine, and he mentions Fedres several times. So it's interesting that his favourite heroine was Berenice, who is probably best summarised as somebody who takes a break-up extremely well.
00:04:15
Speaker
which is maybe the opposite of, at least the narrator. I'm not going to speak. And the opposite of fait, right? Yes, that's right. him The thing about Berenice is that it's very famous in the canon of tragedies because nobody dies, right? Racine set himself the challenge of writing a tragedy that provokes what he called priestess magestiours, so really like profound sadness without blood and violence. Essentially, that sadness is simply the fact that Bérenice and Titus, her lover, or you know maybe Bérenice and this other guy who's the third wheel in the play, can't be together. So it's about the thwarted love and the kind of the dignity that Bérenice displays in the base of this. So really a figure of dignity is his favourite heroine. Yeah, I guess you could say that. Who's your favourite heroine?
00:05:10
Speaker
You tell me yours. Who's your favorite heroine, Hannah? Okay. Well, I answered this question by looking at my shelves and having a think about who was in the books. And first of all, I was sort of appalled to realize that most of them have heroes and not heroines. and But I decided to play to type. And my favorite heroine is Enid from Chrétien de Trois' Eric et Enid, a andid ah medieval romance.
00:05:35
Speaker
And I like her because she defies every stereotype that people have about medieval women, and therefore she is just delightful because she's spunky in her own person, but also a very useful tool for teaching. So rude. What a rude reason to like someone anyway. Who is yours, Emma?
00:05:58
Speaker
Well, I think in all honesty, my favorite heroine is probably Anne Elliot from Jane Austen's Persuasion. Oh my gosh, I almost said Eleanor Dashwood. But I was like, I can't just choose a Jane Austen character. But I'm really happy you did because I feel like she has all the best heroines, no?
00:06:17
Speaker
Yeah, I think I love Anne Elliot the most, probably because I just love that book so much. And also I think that her mode of being kind of silly, but also like really struggling is very affecting. And I love the ending. So i'm a figure of dignity.
00:06:39
Speaker
Yeah, I was thinking that she does have something in common with the Hanis. But also what i love about what I love about her is that, I mean, honestly, I read this book basically every time I get ill, so because I find it so enjoyable. And every time she's a bit different. So I think that's also something that makes me appreciate Anne Elliot. Wonderful.
Proust's Depiction of Time
00:07:07
Speaker
So Hannah, what did you notice about the final volume? of ala sha I really feel like this whole episode is going to be just a parade of what did just what did we notice, but I've picked out something in particular. But I also just want to say before I say those things that I truly feel like I marked every other page in this volume. like ah I basically it did the thing that students do where they highlight the entire text, making it sort of meaning the highlight is meaningless. That's how I felt about this volume. But for my what did I notice?
00:07:40
Speaker
I just want to mention some of the ways he talks about the past and time, some of the adjectives he gives to the past. At one point, he calls it slippery, sad, and sweet. He calls it innumerable, far away, unfurled. And all of these adjectives I find just so evocative for modifying the the word, the past.
00:08:05
Speaker
And I thought this is not so much a of just a simple adjectival modifier, but at the very end of the book he also speaks of time as a burden that people are carrying around with them. So he writes, at all events, I should not fail in his book.
00:08:23
Speaker
to depict therein man as having the extension not of his body but of his years, as being forced to the cumulatively heavy task which finally crushes him, of dragging them with him wherever he goes.
00:08:37
Speaker
This is such an amazing way of talking about really dying of old age. That old age is a is a burden that you're bearing upon yourself as you move around and you're eventually crushed by it. i found I found that really remarkable. So that's really an image of someone being under time. But he just pages later turns around and says,
00:08:59
Speaker
I had a feeling of intense fatigue when I realized that all this span of time had not only been lived, thought, secreted by me, uninterruptedly insane to think of time coming out of a person, right? Yeah. Secreted by me uninterruptedly, that it was my life, that it was myself, but more still because I had it every moment to keep it attached to myself.
00:09:22
Speaker
that it bore me up so wait he's having to like hold it to him and it is carrying him which seemed contradictory then continuing that i was poised on its dizzy summit that i could not move without taking it with me e It's just this ah massive paradoxes that that deal with time as always something huge, but whether it is external to the person, internal to the person, carrying the person, being dragged by the person, a peak that you're upon, a burden that you're beneath, and so it's sort of like that it's ineffable.
War-torn Paris and Themes of Light and Shadow
00:09:56
Speaker
And it's ineffability, I think, Proust is approaching through this sequence of paradoxes.
00:10:03
Speaker
He's making it this incredibly material, almost physical object at the same time. Yeah, right, right, right. But a physical object that has all kinds of contradictory qualities that no physical object could ever have. Yeah, so it's almost impossible to imagine. Right, right. But yet tangible. But yet tangible. Emma, what did you notice this time?
00:10:25
Speaker
I was really struck by the contrast between the long section that's about Paris at war and you know what happens to society, the diversity the of the city, of all the soldiers and there. And then the, I guess, second half or so of of the the book, which is more about you know time and art. And I think we're going to be bending spending more time on that half.
00:10:53
Speaker
almost that we might just forget that this mini war novel that's almost extractable in it zones in itself like happens as well. But there are these scenes in the Paris at War section. I think some of the descriptions of Paris during the war are really interesting and sometimes lyrical, sometimes quite odd. And those things combine in the description of the blackout, for example, that happens when Paris is under bombardment and the narrator just happens.
00:11:31
Speaker
just innocently happens to be there but to notice all kinds of like sexual creeping but that happens under the cover of darkness like down in the catacombs. So there's all this evocation of like the shadow life of society and humanity and what is possible in the dark in that part of the text interspersed with the kind of the light from the planes. And then that I feel is in interesting contrast to the really striking luminosity of the second half, which is very present in the vocabulary where he talks about like recognizing things about art and life as bolts of lightning, or a new light that has illuminated his life and given it value. He says this quite explicitly.
00:12:16
Speaker
He says, the idea of time was of value to me for yet another reason. It told me that it was time to begin if I wished to attain to what I had sometimes perceived in the course of my life, in brief lightning flashes, on the germont way and in my drives in the carriage of Madame de Ville Parisi, at those moments of perception which have made me think that life was worth living.
00:12:34
Speaker
How much more worth living did it appear to me now, now that I seem to see that this life that we live in half darkness can be illumined? And I think that the French is much more poetic actually, because instead of lightning flashes and illumined, we get églères and écarcy, so kind of... Lightening, as it were. yeah yeah Yeah, we get these echoes. So in sum, I suppose I noticed the light and the shade.
00:12:59
Speaker
How wonderful, poetic. No, but I'm really glad that you brought up the sort of symbiosis of the first and second halves because I don't think it's immediately apparent. And I think that's a really insightful reading that you've offered of how they tie together. It's almost like he's coming through the valley of the shadow of death and into the light.
00:13:20
Speaker
I've been really interested in war throughout this reading, which I think we don't have time to go into too much. But there's lots of interesting contrasts between love and war, and that those things also echo through through the second half. h but But really, really we mustn't continue.
00:13:42
Speaker
But really, what this volume is best known for isn't the war. It's the way
Artistic Insight through Past Experiences
00:13:50
Speaker
that he finally grasps what he has been reaching for. Yeah, and glimpsing, right? like yeah had He's had moments of flashes as or lightning flashes yeah of of insight, but he hasn't been able to analyze them profoundly until this time.
00:14:10
Speaker
And therefore he hasn't been able to write. So he's, you know, just after the war, he's all sad because he's like, Oh, I still have no literary talent. I don't even care about it anymore. I don't even enjoy my life. What am I even doing? And then he trips on a paving's phone.
00:14:26
Speaker
And that paving stone recalls to him a paving stone in Venice, and all of a sudden this Venice vacation, which he felt like he had nearly forgotten, comes back intact in the same way that his childhood encombre had come back intact when he had dipped the Madeline into tea at the beginning of the book.
00:14:45
Speaker
So he calls this moment, at one point, he calls it une sensation transposé, a transposed sensation, where something physical, a bodily experience, echoes so strongly a past bodily experience that past and present come together and sort of collapse, and you have ah access to things that seemed gone forever.
00:15:10
Speaker
Right. So we start to see how time might be regained. Right. So he goes through this process and and leads us through his analysis of those moments. And the first thing he does is he sort of makes a resolution, right? He's like, these things keep happening. And this time, I'm i'm quoting now,
00:15:31
Speaker
I vowed that I should not resign myself to ignoring why, without any fresh reasoning, without any definite hypothesis. The insoluble difficulties of the previous instant had lost all importance, as was the case when I tasted the Madeline.
00:15:45
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Because it is it is this involuntary thing. Like he was really sad and totally uninspired. And then suddenly he's full of joy and clarity of vision. right And he didn't try. It just happened kind of physically, but also mentally. And the result is that he becomes what he calls extra temporal. So he suddenly is able to perceive outside of time. So he's very clear that Although you might read the Madeleine scene and think, okay, this is just about the past coming back, it's just about seeing it as from a distance, it's not just the past returning. It may be something that is common to both the past and to the present again, I'm quoting now, and is much more essential than either of them.
00:16:27
Speaker
h And what's so interesting about this is that it is like a sensory experience for him. It's not just an intellectual experience. it's It's distinctly embodied. It's really a conjunction of intellect and body that make all of this possible. And he talks even about events as themselves being physical spaces, which again, it's that paradoxical thing where events are occurrences in time, right? But he talks about them as vessels and images in this very physical way. Yeah, as you read this, you can really feel Proust interlinking all the different senses as well, like sound and touch and smell. It is it is really synesthetic.
00:17:09
Speaker
Yeah. So he writes, The slightest word we have spoken at a particular period of our life, the most insignificant gesture to which we have given vent, were surrounded, bore upon them the reflection of things which logically were unconnected with them, were indeed isolated from them by the intelligence which did not need them for reasoning purposes, but in the midst of which Here, the pink evening glow upon the floral wall decoration of a rustic restaurant, a feeling of hunger, sexual desire, enjoyment of luxury. There,
Role of Sensory Experiences in Unlocking the Past
00:17:39
Speaker
curling waves beneath the blue of a morning sky enveloping musical phrases which partly emerge like mermaid's shoulders. The most simple act or gesture remains enclosed as though in a thousand jars of which each would be filled with things of different colours, odours and temperature. Not to mention that those vases placed at intervals during the growing years throughout which we see
00:17:59
Speaker
if only in dream or in thought, are situated at completely different levels and produce the impression of strangely varying climates. I love this idea of sort of a collection of vials of sensory information that themselves are, as he says, insignificant and slight, that when you access them, again, it's like the it's like the teacup and the madeline. It's like the the uneven paving zone. It's like also the sound of a spoon against a saucer that these little
00:18:30
Speaker
vials get opened and I guess not to make another weird simile but it's like Pandora's box and then after after the box is opened, everything is rushed out of them. Yeah, it doesn't matter what the thing is, it doesn't matter that you've forgotten it. Right, and it doesn't matter that the the thing itself might not be worth remembering because what it does is it allows you access to everything. It's a container.
00:18:54
Speaker
for your perceptions that you can feel play find pleasure in. Right. It's kind of a defense of the insignificant, really. It's it's saying that the the small things are the big things. It's just extraordinary. I'm sorry. I'm just like I'm almost like tortling because I find this so remarkable. So these transpose sensations.
00:19:14
Speaker
are really the key to how to find lost time. right The whole thing has been in search of lost time. And finally, we learn how to find it. Yeah, and i I told you this before, but like I was extremely thrilled.
00:19:31
Speaker
But it's findable. Whether it's true or not, but I love the theory that it's findable. When you're reading it, you can it's he's so he is so convinced of what he's writing that it is it's convincing. It's like listening to someone who it first of all, is so smart, has really thought it through, and is just like, this is it. And you can't help but be born along on that wave of feeling like, of course this is how time can be recovered. Of course time is recoverable. And here we go.
00:20:03
Speaker
just as a little teaser tomorrow, we'll be back with a bonus episode about some reactions that will include analysis and reactions to this theory. So just to say that it's not actually as open and shut as he makes it feel when you're reading it. Yeah, absolutely. But he he writes that you so what you're supposed to do is you look inside yourself for these transpose sensations, your own Madeline moments, and then Try, quote, to interpret them as symbols of so many laws and ideas by trying to think, that is, by trying to induce my sensation from its obscurity and convert it into an intellectual equivalent. And what other means were open to me than the creation of a work of art? Tell me about it, Marcel. Having your memory jogged, remembering something from the past might be the key to understanding the foundational laws of the universe.
00:20:59
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's like pretty intense. But he's completely convinced that this is true. Yeah. To go back to our first episode, this is also a little bit like psychedelic, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Suddenly he's on this trip and he's like, oh, I've understood.
00:21:23
Speaker
the meaning of the universe. He actually trips.
00:21:30
Speaker
You're right, you're right, you're right. He is tripping. So even though this is a lot like the Madeline scene, there are important differences. Yeah, and that also kind of answers the question that you may have, dear listener, as to why read all the way to this point. When there was already the Madeline scene like 30 pages in, why didn't we just stop there? Yeah, and I think what's really... compelling about this scene is that he refers back to the Madeleine scene has having become memory itself and a kind of anxious memory because it's already happened. He's had that moment where Comrade emerges out of the teacup and then he's not really understood it. He's not metabolised it. He's not been able to return to it. he is It has just become one more of those moments of inspiration that he's not been able to do anything with.
00:22:19
Speaker
and is just in contrast with the banal flow of the rest of life. Whereas now he's like, oh, I get it. I understand what caused that. I understand how to interpret this. I'm converting this into ideas or something intellectual. And therefore, I can write. I can finally do the thing that I always wanted to, but for various reasons, never could. So he can create art now. That's the difference, I think. What do you think? Yeah, no, I think that's right. I think that before it was almost like a premonition. Yeah. Or for me to go back to the first episode, it it was the type and now we're at the fulfillment.
00:22:58
Speaker
Beautiful. But the thing about his conception of art that I think is really fascinating is that for him it's not really creativity, like inventing whole cloth things, but it's rather a process of discovery or inventio in the Latin sense, right? Inventio used to just mean finding something or discovering something.
00:23:23
Speaker
And it is through art that he finds lost
Art as a Discovery of Reality
00:23:28
Speaker
time. So art is sort of a ah mechanism of discovery, but also a mechanism of transcription of that discovery. Yeah, like registering the lightning bolt that right otherwise only lasts a second. Right, he writes, thus I had already reached the conclusion that we are in no wise free in the presence of a work of art, that we do not create it as we please, but that it pre-exists in us, and we are compelled as though it were a law of nature to discover it, because it is at once hidden from us and necessary.
00:24:02
Speaker
but is not that discovery which art may enable us to make most precious to us, a discovery of that which for most of us remains forever unknown, our true life, reality as we have ourselves felt it, and which differs so much from that which we had believed, that we are filled with delight when chance brings us an authentic revelation of it.
00:24:23
Speaker
Yeah, and that delight is what we've been talking about, isn't it? That joy that this part of the work is suffused with. I think what's so fascinating here is that he really does suggest that there are two realities, right? There's the reality as we ourselves have felt it.
00:24:39
Speaker
And the reality that we had believed, I'm paraphrasing from what I just read, the reality which we had believed is the one that should be discarded in favor of the inner reality, which is art. So art is reality, and a properly lived life is literature, and vice versa, right? Like, literature is life. Reality is art. It's just this amazing manifesto. Yeah, and it's what makes life worth living.
00:25:08
Speaker
And there's a real danger, right? There's a danger that ah convention and habit might erase life itself because you stop perceiving these critical moments as critical because they're smoothed over by habit. So habit is actually the big villain in the book. Yeah, and it's the disruption to the routine of the trip that enables all of this to unfurl.
00:25:33
Speaker
Right, if he hadn't stumbled in the courtyard, if he had just walked smoothly across the courtyard, this may have never happened. Yeah, and he reflects on how this has happened on his way to a party when actually what he then decides to do in order to write his major work that he now knows how to write, what he needs to do is withdraw from society and not be in these kind of frivolous, meaningless spaces with other people engaging in friendships that are pointless.
00:26:06
Speaker
So I find that quite striking that the humdrum of other people is both necessary and deuterious to art. This whole thing is really a theory that's founded on paradox after paradox after paradox. Yeah, yeah, because it's so lonely, this perspective, it's all very inward and yet he writes as well that he's writing for others, he's trying to give this gift to the world that he sincerely believes in and that lots of people think He succeeded in giving. Right, and that he he thinks that the book the point of the book will be for the reader to find themselves in the book, to find their own true experience in it, that it's not just his true experience, that it's supposed to be some sort of universal universal true experience, that it's for many, not for ah just one. Yeah, yeah, so it's so antisocial and yet profoundly social.
00:27:00
Speaker
And so this experience and these reflections lead him to commit himself to the production of this work of art. And he's absolutely ready. He's going to do it. he Borderline wants to leave the party, but he ends up not working out. He ends up going to the party.
00:27:18
Speaker
And he thinks he thinks that someone is trolling him. This is one of the funniest and most horrifying passages in the whole seven volumes, I'm just gonna say. And we should say too, this is this is what's known as the Bal-de-Tet. It's one of the passages, it's very famous, it has its own name, so it's like the ball of faces, I guess.
00:27:42
Speaker
And I think what a balladette is, is a costume party, but where you only put a costume on your face.
00:27:52
Speaker
And so he's entered the costume party of faces, but actually what has happened is just that he's been away for a few decades and during that time, time passed for everyone, so people have aged by several decades.
00:28:06
Speaker
And he realizes that he's aged two and you get pages and pages and pages. So he's like, and this person, they got old too. This person got old. I hardly recognize this person. This other person had forgotten their grudge against me. This person went gray and then white and the gray was better. It's relentless. I can't say more than that. It's horrifying and funny. I laughed. I cringed.
00:28:32
Speaker
He says at one point that the people in the party were puppets bathed in the immaterial colors of the years, puppets which exteriorized time.
Aged Faces and Mortality at the Party
00:28:46
Speaker
so Amazing. A time but which by habit is made invisible and to become visible seeks bodies where which where it finds them, it seizes upon, to display its magic lantern upon them. So again, like harking back to to volume one. So it's another way that time is kind of materialized. But, apart from being a gallery of grotesque,
00:29:07
Speaker
a very unfair way of describing the aged body. But this ultimately feeds, and you see it in what we just quoted, this understanding of how time works and how time works in relation to art, and he reflects on the balance between the body that is art and the human body. And he evokes this cruel law of art, which is that art is vital and keeps growing and has this kind of other temporal dimension in contrast to the life of an individual, whether moral or physical, and certainly in contrast to individual bodies.
00:29:50
Speaker
So he cites this line from Victor Hugo that's something like, children die and grass keeps growing. And right and like people are the children. he He interprets this in this way and art is the grass that just won't stop. And then he projects forward to future generations who just delightfully enjoy the grass that they don't realise has like grown through the efforts of people who died long ago. and thinking about you know future appreciators of art and literature who are just enjoying their Dégeny sur l'Herbe lunch on the grass. And that is a very famous painting by Edouard Manet that you can see in Paris if you ever go. And I was just absolutely stunned by this reference to that painting, which I'd never thought of in those ways. I mean, it's a weird painting because it's like these people having a picnic and it's like naked women and men fully clothed just looking at the painter or the viewer.
00:30:48
Speaker
Which I say, not unlike Bruce's book, to be honest. yeah yeah and that's But that's why it's so so apt. I was like, oh, that's a picture of readers. There we are, having our lunch on the grass, you know? Yeah, with the the of the 20th century. Yeah, the grass of the 20th century, almost 100 years after Bruce died, just around the final drafting of this book.
00:31:16
Speaker
So, yeah, this is our podcast. your yeah We should have called it that. Prus 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. OK, Hannah, so we have elaborated so far how he gets to you figure out why writing is so meaningful, what he's going to write and how he's going to write it. And Interwoven also in this volume are more meta reflections of the kind that we've discussed before about his writing project.
00:32:08
Speaker
Right, and how how exactly his art will relate to himself as the writer and also to life as it is lived by his audience. So one of the astonishing things that he does here is he brings back this obsession with optics, which we've discussed in in past episodes. He thinks about books as optic instruments through which readers read themselves, and that if a reader isn't understanding a book, perhaps that just means that it's the wrong lens for them. He thinks of the party ah with all his aged friends as a panopticon of years, as though time is being viewed from a sort of
00:32:52
Speaker
central viewing point through these these people's aging process. I do think that's a very real observation, by the way. Like, just occasionally, you know, I have some friends I've had since I was like 11 years old.
00:33:07
Speaker
ah Yes, we're only in our 30s now, but just occasionally I look around the group and I do see a kind of panopticon of youth. Yeah, I hear i i hear that. i hear that yeah But I think maybe the most astonishing of his optical metaphors, shall we say, for his writing process is about the difference between microscopes and telescopes.
00:33:33
Speaker
So he writes, even those who sympathized with my perception of the truth I meant later to engrave upon my temple, aka who thought that his theory of art was correct and that he would he was right to sort of enshrine it as it were,
00:33:48
Speaker
So even those who are sympathetic to that project congratulated me on having discovered it with a microscope when, to the contrary, I had used a telescope to perceive things which were indeed very small because they were far away, but every one of them a world.
00:34:07
Speaker
I love this. I think I'm guilty of having considered Proust to be microscopic. I think we've talked about minutia, haven't we? Yeah. Yeah. Can we try to understand this? Yeah. Yeah. Is that okay? Can we be like very literal minded for a second? We and many others apparently thought that he had taken something minute and put it under a magnifying device.
00:34:34
Speaker
And what he's saying is that he took something really quite large but distant. and looked at it through a magnifying device. Yeah, like the way that you look at a planet. Right. And every one of them a world. But what makes these distant? Is it that they are just that other people are always fundamentally distant? Is it that they're distant in time? Yeah, I think it's both. And every one of them is a world because every one of them is a life. Right. And every life is its own universe.
Reality, Art, and Mortality
00:35:12
Speaker
Yeah, that has the capacity for all these things that I guess we shouldn't, based on this injunction, call these kind of small or micro, but it's made up of all of these different potential things that we've been talking about like sunsets and desires and hunger and bizarre images passing through the mind. That's the universe that every person, I guess, contains. Do you think? Does that too to end up being too sentimental as a reading of this?
00:35:46
Speaker
i think I think the thing is is i think this theory is sort of sentimental. It's just not expressed in a sentimental way. In a way, this this novel is profoundly unsentimental, right? Like it's scornful. It has a laugh at the expense of others. It's clear-eyed about people's shortcomings and failures. But there's something about life and death and about life and death, but there's something about this last sort of swell of excitement and theory, really, that is somehow quite a bit more sentimental. it all the All along we thought he's sneering at the people he's encountering on many occasions and feeling sort of superior. And it turns out that those people were in some fundamental way art. Yeah. I suppose we should also say it's not just people because we hark back to plants
00:36:43
Speaker
for example. Don't forget the plans. If there's one thing you take from this talk. I've been obsessed with throughout. I mean, you're just lucky that I haven't like read out my list of places where he's a plant or somebody else is a plant. I'll look forward to your think piece on the topic. um Yeah, open for commissions.
00:37:08
Speaker
So people and plants and pathways and restaurants and seasides, they're all worlds. They're all scenes. They're all the things that Proust has his telescope trained upon. And in some ways, you know, we talked about distance. We've talked a lot about disconnection, failure to connect. We've talked a lot about, or I've certainly thought a lot about isolation and the ways in which people don't manage to be together in in these texts. But in fact, all these worlds do.
00:37:45
Speaker
collide and intersect. And that's also what we've been reading, isn't it? Proust is a very careful architect, right? and And more than once in this book he refers to his work as a cathedral. And that's that's been taken as the title of various ah collections about Proust. He's very explicit about thinking of it as a great work of art that takes so long that it may never be finished.
Life as a Tapestry of Memories
00:38:11
Speaker
But I thought that the passage that was maybe most revealing about the structure of the book was not one of these evocations of a cathedral, but rather the sort of cartographical conception of the characters in the book. He is in the party, and he is going to be introduced to Gilbert's daughter, Mademoiselle de Saint-Luc. Gilbert goes to fetch her. And he writes, the surprise and pleasure caused me by Gilbert's words were quickly replaced while Madame de Saint-Luc disappeared into another room and by the idea of pastime, which Mademoiselle de Saint-Luc had brought back to me in her particular way.
00:38:50
Speaker
without my even having seen her. In common with most human beings, was she not like the center of crossroads in a forest, the point where roads converge from many directions?
00:39:02
Speaker
Those which ended in Malmaza de Saint-Luc were many, and branched out from every side of her. I just love thinking of her as the obelisk in the center of Étoile in Paris. He goes on to enumerate all the way, like, you know, her father is Robert de Saint-Luc. Gilbert is her mother. Those are the two côtes outside of Cambrai that he used to walk on, right? The côtes de mézégviz and the côtes de chais soin.
00:39:24
Speaker
are are represented by those two figures. It was because of those connections that he ended up ever being at Balbec, and then at Balbec he met Robert, and then he ends up getting somehow to Morel and Vante and Albertin. ah It's almost like a character web but that he maps out. It's a cartography of the structure of the novel. And then at the end of this incredible development, which is very spatial, he switches metaphors.
00:39:52
Speaker
Certainly, if only our hearts were in question, the poet was right when he spoke of the mysterious threads which life breaks. But it is still truer that life is ceaselessly weaving them between beings, between events, that it crosses those threads, that it doubles them to thicken the woof with such industry, that between the smallest point in our past and all the rest, the store of memories is so rich that only the choice of communications remains.
00:40:19
Speaker
I just love this so much that I'm not sure I can even say anything that sensible about it. I find this really affecting and I know that he goes towards saying that the threads are ultimately between, like I guess, yourself and your past self. But life is ceaselessly weaving threads between beings and between events and those threads are crossed and doubled and thickened with such industry. That's very beautiful.
00:40:49
Speaker
It's beautiful, and it's also, it's true of our lives, and it's true of the book, and it's also getting back to the root of textuality, right? The Latin root is that of weaving. So he's really taking the text literally as as a piece of weaving, and it brings to mind the fates spinning. It brings to mind our actual experience. It illuminates how carefully constructed this sprawling novel was.
00:41:18
Speaker
Oh, yeah, it's incredible. I end in ah being tongue tied because it's just so remarkable. It's also really given me what I wanted the whole time, which was juxtaposing that question of heartbreak, right? If only our hearts are in question, the poet was right when he spoke of the mysterious threads which life breaks. But it is truer still that life is ceaselessly weaving. And that and is so so clever again, because that's also what he's juxtaposing in this swell, as you called it at the end of the text. The pain of life and
00:41:55
Speaker
the struggles that he's experienced in love against the really tangible joy that he experiences in art, which is also a way of loving, I think. oh yeah yeah It's really, I have to say, i mean we know that he died before doing the final revisions on this book.
00:42:17
Speaker
And even so, this has got to be one of the best conclusions in literature. She says boldly, but it is remarkable how he takes so many dispersed threads and brings them back into a tapestry.
00:42:34
Speaker
He remembers everything, and there are so many minute callbacks and so many big developments and resolutions, and it really is it's the end of the story of him becoming an artist, right? Like there's one story that is told here, and then a million other stories, and they're all here too. It is just amazing.
00:42:55
Speaker
It's amazing. It's a true crescendo. Even the last couple of pages, it's just like, bang. Yes, it ends with a bang. Yes, it doesn't sort of fade out at the end. It's just the last word of the entire book is time. You find time at the end. Time is the last word. You find it. I just like, bam, I'm just saying.
00:43:17
Speaker
ends of the bang. Hannah is banging her desk. But speaking of ending, we promised that we would come back to that, again, really beautiful ending of the first volume and see how it has developed in this final volume. Should we turn to that now? Yeah. So the last sentence of the first volume, or the last couple of sentences. Which we discussed in episode one. Yeah, I'll reread it.
00:43:44
Speaker
The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time. The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment, and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
00:44:04
Speaker
And Proust said about this sentence that it would be totally misunderstanding his project to take it as representative thereof. And at the time when we were doing episode one, I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally not representative. I really didn't understand.
00:44:19
Speaker
Well, I mean, we kind of had to take him at his word because we hadn't had the whole experience of reading the whole book. It was it was sort of, but it was a lingering curiosity, right? Like in in what way is this not representative? And now I think we're maybe prepared to to answer that question. Yeah. Would we say that They are fugitive, but also that we've had all these images in this volume of the years stacking up on top of each other, all happening kind of at the same time. There is chronology and anachronism, that there is this extra temporal possibility that means that, yes, as you live, everything is fugitive, but you can have these moments where things are once again perceivable and therefore findable.
00:45:04
Speaker
Right, you can recapture a fugitive. Sorry. So he's saying that, you know, time changes things. I mean, that much, I think, the ba de tat gets back to that theme. right He's saying now in this volume that even the things that have changed are recoverable. In fact, there's this really famous citation from this book, one that's often excerpted, that I think if if we accept it a little bit more at length than it usually is,
00:45:33
Speaker
is maybe illustrative of of what we're talking about, about re-finding things. So there's this famous citation that the true paradises are paradises we have lost, right?
Memories as True Paradises
00:45:44
Speaker
like I feel like ah we've maybe read that before, heard it before, maybe not realizing that it's Proust. It's quite a lot. Emma, do you want to read the whole citation to put it into context for our listeners?
00:45:57
Speaker
Go on then. He writes, a memory thanks to forgetfulness has been unable to contract at any tie to forge any link between itself and the present if it has remained in its own place of its own date if it has kept its distance its isolation in the hollow of a valley or on the peak of a mountain It makes us suddenly breathe in air new to us, just because it is an air we have formerly breathed, an air purer than that that the poets have vainly called paradisiacal,
00:46:27
Speaker
which sorry i did a for pronounce that word para echo i think he did beautifully which offers that deep sense of renewal only because it has been breathed before, in so much as the true paradises are paradises we have lost.
00:46:42
Speaker
So he's saying that these memories that are hidden in pockets that we think are are unvisitable can in fact be visited and recovered and we can breathe their air again. And then that breathing of the past is an experience akin to visiting paradise. Right. So You could gloss this very inelegantly as the true paradises are the paradises we have lost and then found again. yeah Right. Or the paradises in the regaining, I guess, also. Yeah, yeah that the breath the breathing again, right? the yeah Again, that's so physical, right? That you breathe that you breathe it in again. Yeah, this aeration.
00:47:24
Speaker
Yeah, so something being fugitive and difficult to find is not a cause for lamentation, I think. I think that's maybe another way in which that was a false conclusion of the first volume. Because it says, houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive elas as the years, right? And that elas is so moving, which we talked about in episode one. But actually, this is not a situation for elas. This is a situation where stumbling back upon them is productive of art, can can reveal the makings of reality.
Winners and Losers in Proust's Narrative
00:48:00
Speaker
We shouldn't be lamenting, we should be excited. Yeah, it can breathe new life into us, and he really is it this kind of the sense of his lungs inflating. um Poor Bruce, the asthmatic, he really knew what it was like to not be able to breathe. and You know, he's ganfle de joie, he's like full. Inflated isn't a really good translation of that. He's kind of
00:48:20
Speaker
aerated um yeah with with joy by this. I suppose that you can keep the Elas because not everything can come back. Yes, but I think that the first volume ends on what I would consider to be an elegiac tone. Yeah. And the book itself ends on a real vindication of the power and purpose of art, even though there's an undertone of of worry about impending death, about um mortality. but It's a really joyous celebratory feeling in comparison to the elegiac ending of the first. So I almost wonder if it's just tonally the opposite yeah of of where he was going. And it's quite grandiose as well. It's a bit like the microscope versus the telescope again, when he says, you know, we'll make of all these small individuals, giants who touch each other in time. o Amazing. I mean, ah yeah, it's incredible.
00:49:23
Speaker
So now it's time, I think, for winners and losers, the last time we're going to do this. And I think let's start with the winners and losers of this volume. And then we may share the winners and losers of the book as a whole. Emma, who was your loser of this volume? Okay. With regret, I'm awarding loser of this volume to the very aged actress, Emma.
00:49:53
Speaker
er right I think I screamed so loud that you our listeners couldn't even hear who she is. Anyway, okay, who is the loser? Sorry, Emma, I won't scream again.
00:50:06
Speaker
and Okay, so La Berme is formerly the most celebrated actress of the Parisian theatre scene. The narrator was absolutely desperate to see her act in Fèdre earlier on in his life. ah She also died in Volume 6.
00:50:24
Speaker
And now has been resurrected. She's resurrected for an absolutely torturous second death in in Volume 7. I mean, the scene sequence with her death is just it's just absolutely horrifying. She is very unwell. She has this absolutely appalling daughter who the narrator basically says she deserves because she's so egocentric.
00:50:46
Speaker
hu no And she hosts for this spoiled awful daughter a recital that nobody comes to because everyone's watching or listening to her great rival perform a different piece at the Princess de Guermont's house. who And so she just sits there miserably and then her daughter just sneaks off when she gets the chance to the other party leaving her all alone.
00:51:13
Speaker
Which thing, the rival actress Rachel, formerly Sandu's mistress, we don't need to get into that, happens to mention at the theatre when she next sees La Berma and this is thought to have killed her. This final humiliation of her horrible daughter abandoning her. It's so humiliating. So we talked a lot about all these ecstatic moments and we're just totally admiring Proust's writing. But as always,
00:51:38
Speaker
Listeners, there is a lot of horrible stuff here too. And this is that. Yeah, which we didn't quite dwell on. So it's good to mention it at the end. That was also my loser and you did a better job explaining it than I did. So that's fine. Who was your winner? Okay. So my winner, I went slightly left field and I decided that my winner is the loser that I picked last time, which is Swan. Oh, okay. I like that. Tell me more.
00:52:04
Speaker
Just because at one point the narrator says, you know, it could all have happened differently, but essentially everything that's happened in my whole life is all down to Swan's prompts initially. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true. Swan ends up taking this really critical role in his ability to become an artist.
00:52:25
Speaker
Yeah, so it's almost like, you know, there's lots of different artist figures that feature time as an artist. There's painters, there's, I guess, I think actors are definitely artists. Anyway, but Swan kind of appears here as this master artist of the entire thing that is also a way of illustrating the power of contingency. And it's only a page or so, but I thought, yeah, actually, he wins the book in that page. Or perhaps a muse? Yeah, yeah, he's like a trigger.
00:52:56
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I like Trigger. Who was your winner? I mean, my I chose the most obvious winner, yeah which is the narrator. Because obviously like he's finally triumphing over the thing that he had struggled with the whole, like his vocation, which he had struggled with the whole time. it's still Nevertheless, it's not just a pure win because he feels himself growing unwell.
00:53:19
Speaker
we see that by the end he's sort of sequestered and feels very unable really to both maintain communication with anyone and do his art. So it's not an unadulterated win, but still he he was working towards a goal and he has achieved the goal. So that makes him a winner.
00:53:40
Speaker
Yeah, and life has a purpose for him. Life has a purpose for him. At last. Which is art, and art is life. So it's all the same. Who is your loser of the book as a whole? I struggled with this, honestly. I think all the people I could think of were both winners and losers at the same time. So my candidates for winning the whole thing are quite differently freighted as well. So I thought that the narrator could be the winner of the whole thing.
00:54:09
Speaker
we see him have his his struggle, his odyssey, his quest, whatever you want to call it, his kind of survival every day of his thousand and one nights of storytelling and understand his own project at the end of it. But he also ends up extremely isolated and unwell and not believing in love or friendship, which I think is also a huge loss and it's not how I feel about life. So he could be the winner and the loser. That's one candidate. I also had Odette totally differently. dad She was a candidate for winner of book for me too. Sorry, this is horrible. She's almost like a cockroach. She's unkillable and she's just always climbing the walls.
00:54:53
Speaker
Although, it's again, you could read her as a loser because she mentions towards the end, she's like, yes, I spent most of my life sort of cloistered because I'm always with these jealous men who won't let me do anything. So that's kind of dire also, um and actually an echo of the narrator being cloistered and away from society.
00:55:11
Speaker
Yeah. And she's never understood the resources that she's had at her disposal, he says. So she's just kind of there. And well, I thought she could be the winner ah in a way because she's totally unaffected by time. Like she looks the same.
00:55:25
Speaker
I think it's one point, very implausibly. that like She's 85 and she looks exactly as she did when she was 25. But being unaffected by time also seems like losing in the end. Yeah, because it does seem like the point is to know what time is and and be able to understand it.
00:55:43
Speaker
Yeah, and to see it happen to you, yeah even if it looked horrible. but but Yeah, I see what you mean. You have these bivalent yeah characters. Okay, but tell me, who did you think about as winners and losers of the whole project? Well, i I cheated. I cheated like hugely because I didn't actually choose characters. Oh, I love this. Tell me. So the winner of the book is art and the lose the loser of the book is death.
00:56:12
Speaker
Wow. Do I need to explain or should I? I don't think you need to explain why the winner is art. If you can briefly summarize why Death is the Loser, that would be very handy. Death is the Loser for two reasons. One reason is that when people die in this book, they tend to just sort of wink out, and death is not given the sort of respect that it is often given. And even in the case of the grandmother and abbot,
00:56:48
Speaker
it is emphasized over and over again that grief leads to oblivion and that being forgotten is the inevitable end for any dead person so that death in other words is just like a mechanism of forgetfulness which means that it has very little impact because when something is forgotten it is no longer affecting things. But I also think that death is the loser for a different and i almost sort of opposite reason which is that no one dies because we're still making a podcast about this, that Proust's death or even Scott Moncrief, his translator's death, had no real effect on our ability to to learn from and relish and frolic in and sneer at the people and the project of of this book. He says at one point, you know, in a hundred years, people probably won't be reading my book anymore. how wrong you were, my man, and your death had no death has power over art.
00:57:53
Speaker
We are sitting on your grass. We're sitting on your grass. Yes. So loser for two reasons. Okay. Wow. I love this. I also love it because I was thinking in completely opposite terms. So I was finishing this and I was like, death wins in a way that is okay in a way. Yeah. Yeah. Because you have to really recognize and think through mortality.
00:58:21
Speaker
in order to take the time to create and realize that it has to happen today and not tomorrow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. Death is a pressure that leads to art. So that does kind of make it a winner, no? If art is the winner, then death is its co-winner, I guess.
00:58:36
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. I just want to make every winner a loser and every loser a winner. But I do think that's true, though. That's maybe what our winners and losers segment has revealed. It's revealed that like that is no easy question with this book and that the ways in which it's not easy are actually profoundly interesting. I agree. OK. As our very final note for today, Emma, where are we with the project?
Reflections on Reading Proust
00:59:02
Speaker
Oh.
00:59:03
Speaker
It's over.
00:59:07
Speaker
It is over. We have read. We read it. We did it. We read all of Alaréchès du tempejour. We read it in French. We have recorded all of our episodes. We have seen the journey from elegiac to joyful and every other journey. But what what can we tell our listeners about being at this phase of the project?
00:59:33
Speaker
I mean, it feels like a huge achievement.
00:59:38
Speaker
would would you have ourselves on back what would you Would you recommend it to others? Definitely. And I would also say that it has been in the interstices of my life for months and months.
00:59:53
Speaker
yeah And that it has also been something that made life great in lots of different ways, maybe during some quite difficult times. So definitely I would recommend this. And would you, Hannah, think that we can conclude now that we've read the whole thing, that reading the whole thing, one through seven,
01:00:14
Speaker
is worth doing? Oh, strongly. Yes. I mean, I have I've had people asking me actually, they're like, oh, like, should I do this? And the thing is, is it is a huge commitment of time. i We're not we're not trying to hide that. But I think to really feel the feeling that you could tell we were almost in an ecstatic state recording this episode because of how satisfying the end was. And I feel like that kind of satisfaction has to do with the whole road to get there. I think if you just read the first volume and then the last volume, you'd be like, ah, cool theory of art, bro. But you almost feel like you've seen it be enacted almost over the course of the the book. Yeah. Also reading the ending would be pretty difficult if you haven't read two to six because there's so many references to previous plot points. Yes. And all the characters, you just be like, who are these? I don't care about these.
01:01:10
Speaker
Yeah, you'd be skipping over the detail and just getting the theory, but actually the theory is enacted in the detail. Yeah, right, with this with his telescope, everything in the world. But I also would just say that when I think about it, it's like, okay, I hope I do reread the whole thing eventually in my life. I hope I do. But if there's not time for that, the volumes that I think I would be quickest to reread are some of the internal volumes.
01:01:36
Speaker
I think I would really love to reread Le Côté des Germont, Volume 3. And I thought Alberts-Hindi-Spareau, Volume 6 was just astonishing. Those are ones that I think are frequently skipped, right? So I would say that how would I know that if I hadn't read them all?
01:01:54
Speaker
Yeah, I pretty much agree with you about rereading those. I also can see myself rereading sections. I don't know if that's not licit, but it's what I think I would do. I think anything is licit. This is our life. We can experience art how we want to experience it. OK, cool. I think I'd like to reread the Balbec sections together. Oh, that would be interesting, yeah. Just to see how that works from a kind of literary point of view.
01:02:22
Speaker
who And also, listeners, we just want to let you know that you should come back tomorrow, because we do have a bonus episode for you about contemporary writers responding to Proust in the different ways that Proust has often responded to. Yeah, so finally allowing other voices to say what they thought about Proust.
01:02:45
Speaker
and You've heard our opinions. Now let's talk about the broader landscape. Well, Emma, I think that's it. For this episode of Proust Curious, we hope we pique your curiosity and your desire to give the whole thing a shot. If you liked the podcast, please tell a friend about it. Proust Curious is hosted by Emma Clausen and Hannah Weaver and produced by Michael Goldsmith. You can reach us at proustcurious at gmail dot.com.
01:03:15
Speaker
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 join us tomorrow for a special bonus episode about further Prustian reading. Au revoir! Au revoir!