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Preface

Le seul véritable voyage, le seul bain de Jouvence, ce ne serait pas d’aller vers de nouveaux paysages, mais d’avoir d’autres yeux, de voir l’univers avec les yeux d’un autre, de cent autres, de voir les cent univers que chacun d’eux voit, que chacun d’eux est; et cela nous le pouvons avec un Elstir, avec un Vinteuil, avec leurs pareils, nous volons vraiment d’étoiles en étoiles.

MARCEL PROUST, A la recherche du temps perdu

The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.

In Search of Lost Time

When it comes to the lives and the living quarters of great writers, I have done my share of snooping. Prague beckoned me because it was Kafka’s city, and Dublin because it was Joyce’s. To Monterey I went, my nostrils ready flared for the fish-stink of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, and to Key West to booze in Hemingway’s favourite bars, and to Chawton in Hampshire to run a surreptitious hand across the table at which Emma and Persuasion were written. I have climbed Skiddaw in the footsteps of Keats, Helvellyn in those of Coleridge, and been driven by bus to the summit of Mont Ventoux, apologising self-importantly to the shade of Petrarch for not repeating the poet’s pedestrian ascent of 1336. In Ravenna I have paused before Dante’s tomb, and in Stinsford churchyard before the last resting place of Thomas Hardy’s heart. Lisbon was Pessoa, Mexico City was Octavio Paz, and Athens became Thucydides for a moment when a taxi-driver spoke of him as if he were a still-living family friend.

I report all this scurrying about of mine without feelings of pride or shame, for tourism has always struck me as a harmless passion, and the literary pilgrimage in particular as the very model of a wholesome leisure pursuit. Besides, my journeys seemed always to enhance rather than damage the pleasures of reading: standing there in yuppified, odourless, modern Monterey, I began to thirst again for the exuberant low life that Steinbeck’s writing conjures into being; the very smoothness of Jane Austen’s table reminded me of all that was edgy and abrasive in her prose.

Those were my excuses anyway. And they left me ill-prepared for my most recent visit to Cabourg on the Normandy coast. I had known this unremarkable town long ago, and had grown accustomed to the huge hump of its Grand Hotel looming up through the autumn mists. Then as now the hotel was the only peculiarity of the place, but it was of a type that numberless small resorts to the east and west also boasted. I would have shrugged in lofty indifference if I had been told that Cabourg was the main model for Proust’s enchanted Balbec, and would have refused to make any practical connection at all between the seaside temple to Eros that appears in his novel and the large commercial establishment perched greyly upon the promenade.

The first mistake I made, coming back to Cabourg after many years, was to order breakfast on the hotel terrace, alongside what was by then already known as the ‘promenade Marcel Proust’, and the second was to persuade myself almost successfully that I could see the celebrated ‘little band’ of young girls flitting back and forth on the otherwise deserted beach. Here was perdition indeed for any serious admirer of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27). Here was a world of would-be Proustian experience that seemed not to require that the novel be read, a universe parallel to that of Proust’s text and maintained in being by the combined forces of gossip, travelogue and voyeuristic biographical speculation. Just as no one need see King Lear performed to find out roughly what goes on in the play, no one need embark on Proust’s long sentences and involved semantic textures to be charmed by Albertine and her friends, or by the petite madeleine, or by Mme Verdurin’s long climb from the bourgeoisie to the aristocracy. Knowledge of these things is amply available from commentaries on the novel; and Proust’s life, including his summer holidays, has been turned into such convincing and accessible near-novels by biographers like André Maurois and George Painter that the alchemical transformation he himself performed on that life can easily seem slack and shapeless in comparison.

I began to know in Cabourg a fear that I had not known at any other of my literary destinations. This was the fear that I might lose a supreme work of literature and never get it back; that I would resign myself to a non-reading knowledge of the novel, a Proust of tea-parties and table-talk, of selected short quotations and haunting images that had long ago drifted free of their original textual moorings. Obvious truths suddenly needed restating: if Proust’s life had been in some respects mad, his novel was madder; if Proust the man had been both a snob and an egalitarian, his novel pressed this contradiction to a point of sublime extremity; if homosexuality had brought everyday excitement and anxiety to Proust as a biographical subject, it had become exorbitantly fascinating to the novel’s narrator – a spur to scientific curiosity, an endless adventure of the imagination, an Eleusinian mystery cult. Why settle for an ordinary ‘writer’s life’ when this flagrant fiction was at hand? The little band were not Cabourg summer residents. The only place where Albertine and the others could live their Protean or Mephistophelian lives was on the farther shore of literary invention.

What follows, then, is an introduction to Proust’s bulky book, and a tribute to the imaginative energy that propels it page after page. While I have no wish to deprive Cabourg, Illiers-Combray, the boulevard Haussmann or the Père Lachaise cemetery of their status as places of pilgrimage, or as stations on Proust’s own journey towards artistic triumph, I shall argue here for the superior magnetism of his writing. My book offers a series of return routes to the dazzling procession of Proust’s paragraphs, and a series of modest shrines to plurality, paradox and contradiction. Those paragraphs, to be sure, send the reader outwards to the real world, but to a wide and various world, rather than to the thin thread of Proust’s biography.

A majestic respiratory rhythm is at work in A la recherche du temps perdu. On the one hand, the narrator of the novel has a mania for multiplicity, wants the world to contain more things rather than fewer, and stands guard over an unstoppable transformational machine. He speaks of the hundreds, thousands and millions of opportunities for new perception that the world affords, and of the novelist as an insatiable traveller in outer and inner space, always on the move and always driven by the demon of imagination to actualise the potential forms of things. How wrong I was, and how dishonest, this narrator cries in La Prisonnière, to begin the present volume so schematically and with such a thinned-down sense of what the world has in it: ‘ce n’est pas un univers, c’est des millions, presque autant qu’il existe de prunelles et d’intelligences humaines, qui s’éveillent tous les matins’ (III, 696; ‘it is not one universe, but millions, almost as many as the number of human eyes and brains in existence, that awake every morning’ (V, 212)).

On the other hand, everything is connected to everything else in the remembering or fantasising mind, and the oceanic swell which seems to bear the voyager onwards to ever-new destinations can easily bring him home to his habitual tastes and his over-familiar emotional landmarks. Structure, limitation and fewness have a way of reasserting themselves even as the narrator seeks to be convinced that an indefinite plurality of worlds lies at his feet. In Le Temps retrouvé a new parsimony is discovered on the other side of plenitude. The association of ideas, having taken the narrator on a long excursion, in due course brings him back:

le poète a eu raison de parler des «fils mystérieux» que la vie brise. Mais il est encore plus vrai qu’elle en tisse sans cesse entre les êtres, entre les événements, qu’elle entrecroise ces fils, qu’elle les redouble pour épaissir la trame, si bien qu’entre le moindre point de notre passé et tous les autres un riche réseau de souvenirs ne laisse que le choix des communications.

(IV, 607)

the poet was right when he spoke of the ‘mysterious threads’ which are broken by life. But the truth, even more, is that life is perpetually weaving fresh threads which link one individual and one event to another, and that these threads are crossed and recrossed, doubled and redoubled to thicken the web, so that between any slightest point of our past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us an almost infinite variety of communicating paths to choose from.

(VI, 428)

After the ecstasy of difference without end comes the quiet satisfaction of a connecting and unifying web.

The narrative breathes out, and the world is many. It breathes in again, and the world is one. Look at the book from one angle, and it is overflowing with characters and incidents. Look at it from another angle, and the characters begin to merge, while the incidents in which they figure begin to resemble the after-shocks caused by a very small group of primal events. The narrator of the novel, far from being an impersonal manipulator of this rhythm, is himself caught inside it. At one moment, he is a loose compendium of characteristics. His voice contains many voices. He is a magpie and a mimic. He veers this way and that, and takes the colouring of the company he keeps. At the next moment, he seems to stand above the social flux, to be an individual, a singularity, a legislator, the helmsman of an artistic project that is going somewhere and must be kept on course. Proust’s narrator is both chorus and soloist, a confusion of appetites and a single long-breathed desire.

Yet the sound of breathing that is to be heard in Proust’s book comes not simply from the larger rhythms of its plot or from the periodic concentration and dispersal of the narrator’s sense of selfhood, but from a language that is unique within the French literary tradition for its alternating copiousness and restraint. Proust’s language now takes risks and now plays safe. It is full of lexical curiosities and of residual deposits left by earlier literary works, but also does many ordinary things in plain words. It cultivates elegance, ornament, obliqueness and bel canto and then switches to linguistic rough trade. It speaks of exquisite intimations that can occur only in a half-light and only on the margins of consciousness and then babbles of chamber-pots, leg-irons, aeroplane factories and policemen.

A diction of this kind, especially when it is combined with a literary syntax that seems to offer a working model of speculative thought, has an optimistic underlying message for the reader. Proust’s writing – the fantastication of it, the fine-spun texture of it, the power, pace and percipience of it – is a song of intellectual gladness and an unwearying tribute to the muse of comedy. If there were no stubborn philosophical problems in the world, and no war, famine, disease or torture in it either, all thinking might resemble a gracious and disinterested Proustian paragraph. In the present sorry state of the world we may find ourselves returning to Proust for a new sense of mental largeness and potentiality. From within our dull, platitudinous everyday language, we may go back to Proust, as if to a great poet, to be reminded of the wonders that such language, under pressure, can still perform. Proust’s novel is a three-thousand-page incantation, an insolently protracted exercise in word-magic, a tonic, a restorative for any reader who has gone tired and listless under a late twentieth-century tide of verbal waste-matter. Perhaps Proust really is Europe’s last great writer, as some of his slogan-prone enthusiasts have claimed.

Yet Proust’s novel has another, less encouraging, story in it. Seeking to localise this, we might be tempted to say, in the words of Shakespeare’s Troilus, that the narrator’s ‘desire is boundless but his act a slave to limit’, and there would be evidence for this view. Proust’s protagonist, for all his wishfulness, seems to have limited energy and willpower, and an ailing sense of purpose. In the course of a very long tale told about himself, he does not do much. In society, he is immobilised by the spectacle of other people’s busy posturings. In the inner realm, he sees bright futures ahead of him, but often sinks back into an anxious torpor at the very moment when decisive action is required to actualise any one of those possible worlds. He havers. He maunders. He drugs himself with retrospection. Surely the narrator’s vision of a boundless, millionfold, endlessly self-transforming landscape of personal experience is a compensatory fantasy of precisely the kind that one would expect from someone who spent too long lazing indoors, refusing to pull himself together, venture forth and seize the day.

Well, yes. This is partly right. Proust’s narrator is a comic creation, and he belongs, with Goncharov’s Oblomov (1859), a variety of Chekhovian males, the hero of Svevo’s As a Man Grows Older (1898) and Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), to the company of those who, while seeming merely indolent and indecisive to the impatient observer, are withheld from action by what the connoisseur will recognise as an admirable reticence and pudeur. A la recherche du temps perdu is a comedy of hypertrophied appetites and shrunken deeds. But Proust is a tragedian, too, and the tragic vision that his novel sets forth is one in which desire itself is a slave to limit. Desire in Proust teases us with the promise of an unceasing plasticity, but underneath the changing array of its objects it is all the while subject to fixation. Early configurations of sexual feeling continue to haunt adult experience. Phobias, obsessions and fetishes keep turning the narrator’s prospective, forward-flung imaginings back towards the needs, the injuries and the blighted pleasures of infancy. Desire keeps on repeating itself. It nags and needles, and will not let the past go. And Proust’s lengthy book, even while it glitters with fantasy and invention, insists upon this bounded and fixated quality: a desolate pattern of recurrence, a sense of pre-ordained pain and dissatisfaction, governs the procession of its narrative episodes. All love affairs fail, and fail in the same way. All journeys end in disappointment. All satisfactions are too little and too late. Death picks off the narrator’s admired mentors one by one, rekindling and reinforcing his childhood feelings of abandonment.

In what follows, then, my travels will take me back and forth inside Proust’s novel rather than see me shuttling between my home and Cabourg, or between Cabourg and Balbec. As I travel I shall seek to recreate, in schematic and accessible form, the characteristic rhythms of the novel’s unfolding. Proust’s great work has ‘big’ themes, and its path-breaking author has one very old-fashioned way of handling these: his characters will announce a topic, warm to it, and hold forth upon it recklessly. I have chosen a cluster of these topics as my chapter-titles, not so much because Proust’s characters have wise things to say about time, sex or death, although they often have, as because the ebb and flow of Proust’s attention can be clearly observed against these featureless horizons. Such matters, singled out, have the further advantage of allowing us to look beneath the large tidal movements of the book and to rediscover the cross-currents and counter-rhythms that mark the individual Proust paragraph, and are the hallmark indeed of a speculative style that remains sui generis.

Let me not, however, sound too high-minded about the reflections gathered here. I do still long to feel the sand and shingle of the Cabourg shore between my toes, and I have not entirely given up hope of seeing the little band materialised before me as I wander there in the cold, Northern spray. But in the meantime Proust’s gritty, breezy and salty book has many wonders, and to these I now turn.