August 15, 2024 • 20 mins
In Search of Lost Time (1913) by Marcel Proust remains one of the most profound and monumental novels of the 20th century, presenting us an intricate labyrinth of memory, time, and desire. With us are Professor Darci Gardner from Appalachian State University, whose expertise is in 19th and 20th-century French literature and she will shed light on the enigmatic Proustian syntax as a vehicle for story-telling and more. We also have Professor François Proulx from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and his expertise in French literature will enlighten us on aspects of desire and sexuality in this novel.
Suggested Readings:
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (vol.1 of In Search of Lost Time)
Proust and the Arts (2018) ed.Christie McDonald & François Proulx
D. Gardner, "Rereading as a Mechanism of Defamiliarization in Proust," Poetics Today (2016) 37 (1): 55–105.https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-3452619
F. Proulx, “Beyond the Epistemology of the Closet.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 48:3-4 (2020), 185-192.https://muse.jhu.edu/article/754608
F. Proulx, “Proust’s Drawings and the Secret of the ‘Solitary House.’” Modern Language Notes 133:4 (2018), 865-890.https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/707619
F. Proulx and H. Freed-Thall, eds. “Proust to Other Ends,” special issue of L’Esprit Créateur, 62:3 (Fall 2022), 164 pages.https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/48666
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust remains
one of the most profound andmonumental novels of the 20th
century, presenting us anintricate labyrinth of memory,
time and desire.
Welcome to the Global NovelPodcast.
I'm your host, Claire Hennessey.
Today, we're very excited tohave two distinguished scholars
on the show who will help usbetter understand and appreciate
(00:25):
the aestheticism of Proust'sworks.
We have Professor Darcy Gardnerfrom Appalachian State
University, whose expertise isin 19th and 20th century French
literature, and she will shedlight on the enigmatic Proustian
syntax as a vehicle forstorytelling and more.
We also have Professor FrançoisProulx from the University of
(00:46):
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, andhis expertise in French
literature will enlighten us onaspects of desire and sexuality
in the novel.
Welcome to the show, Darcy andFrançois.
Thank you for having us.
Welcome to the show, Darcy andFrancois.
Thank you for having us.
(01:06):
Well, Proust's novelisticuniverse famously examines
themes of memory, identity andthe passage of time that
resonate as philosophicallytoday as they did over a century
ago.
Let's begin with your ownexperiences with this novel.
What initially draws you intothis elegantly written and yet
at times perplexing novel, right, and what inspires you to
(01:29):
research deeper into it?
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Well, I really enjoy the long range of facts.
I think it was Diane Leonardwho wrote a chapter about how
Proust built his novel like acathedral, in that interesting
patterns connect distant volumesand new information is
constantly transforming ourunderstanding of earlier moments
in the narrative.
I also really appreciate howthe novel rewards rereading.
(01:53):
Adam Watt says we never quitefinish reading Proust, and it's
true because the text includespassages that can only be fully
understood retrospectively.
For example, elizabeth Ladensontalks about readers shifting
interpretations of characters aswe learn more about them, and
Kalaneski says we get differentthings from the novel when we
(02:13):
read it at different points inour lives.
So all of this makes Proustreally enjoyable for me to read
and to study.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
I agree.
For me it's also about howendless it is, how we keep, even
as a researcher, even as aspecialist, we keep finding new
things, and so it's really kindof a portal or a compendium, an
(02:49):
entryway into lots of differentthings, into art, history, into
music, into the history offashion, into french history.
Um, it just leads down anendless number of pathways and
students and readers can kind ofpick what they want to know
more about.
For me personally, also, goingback to what Darcy was saying
(03:13):
about rereading, I love thataspect of the text that, um, all
the little sort of easter eggsyou could, you could say in
right, in more modern parlanceAll the hidden secrets, all the
what some critics, like FrancineGrugon, have called the
doublure of the text, which is aFrench word that means sort of
(03:38):
the doubling or the lining.
So if we think of the novel as acathedral but Proust described
it as a cathedral in someletters, but he also describes
it as a dress in some moments ofthe novel itself so it's both
kind of monumental but alsosomething very intimate,
something that's close to thebody, something that can be kind
of tailored to you in your ownreading.
It can sort of match your ownexperiences and like the dresses
(04:01):
that he describes on certaincharacters Madame Swan's dresses
, for example.
They're full of intricatedetails.
There's wonderful descriptionswhere the protagonist notices
that the inside of the sleeve ofMadame Swan has all this
delicate embroidery that's noteven really meant to be visible
because it's inside right.
(04:26):
So the novel is built a littlebit like that.
It has all of these detailsthat are not immediately visible
or noticeable to a casualreader or a first-time reader,
but that can become accessiblethe more you delve into it, and
it's kind of infinitelyrewarding that way right.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Well, what part of the author's life do you
consider as providing importantcontext for us to understand the
novel better, and which aspectsof Proust's life might have
provided some inspiration forhis stories?
Speaker 2 (04:55):
It's very helpful to think about the author's
sexuality because it can betempting for some readers to
conflate the author and thenarrator tempting for some
readers to conflate the authorand the narrator.
Josh Landy wrote an articleabout this.
You know the importance ofdistinction and our protagonist
is heterosexual, and so thinkingabout Proust's life even just
(05:19):
that way gives us a cue or canhelp us.
You know, notice not to readtoo much into heterosexuality.
The occasional reference to hisprotagonist as Marcel.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
It's an interesting question, given that Proust in
some of his early drafts around1908, in what he then was
calling the Contre Sainte-Beuveproject against Sainte-Beuve
Sainte-Beuve being a 19thcentury biographer of
Chateaubriand and literarycritic who developed a method
(05:48):
for literary analysis that wasbased in biography Proust really
went against that in thatproject for an essay and
basically arguing that biographyis the wrong approach with
which to try to really have adeep understanding of a literary
text.
It can only provide a kind ofsurface understanding of the
(06:11):
person behind the work and theessence of the work.
The deeper meaning of the workis something that is in the text
itself.
And those drafts were publishedin the early 1950s and had a
huge influence on what becameFrench New Criticism, which then
led to some of the things thatwe still teach about or know of
(06:34):
in the US Academy structuralism,post-structuralism.
So you know you're not supposedto talk about the author's life
when you do a close reading ofthis and that, when you do a
close reading of this and that.
But even though he's the personwho really set that up, or he
was really influential insetting that up, of course his
(06:56):
life is mirrored in all kinds ofways in his novel.
It's always sort of diffractedand so it's never a one-to-one
perfect image.
It's always like a hall ofmirrors, it's deformed, it's
only elements that you can find,some correspondences and so on.
(07:21):
I think.
To get back to your question, ifwe had to pick, I would go with
his parents.
I mean, it's such a basic thing.
But his mother, of course, isan important character in the
novel.
But in real life she was JeanneProust, learned woman who
(07:51):
really instilled in him a loveof of classical french letters,
uh proper epistolary practices.
She was very well read, uh veryeloquent, and brought with her
um, a lot of um, jewish culture.
Or, as she's from her side ofthe family, it's that 19th
(08:12):
century Jewish assimilation intoFrench high bourgeoisie with
all of the aspirations that camewith that.
So it's no accident in some waythat she was so well-versed in
the classical French 17thcentury was a way for her family
to display Frenchness at a timewhen that was still being
(08:32):
contested.
And his father was a famousdoctor, a professor of medicine,
who lectured at the Universityof Paris Medical Faculty and
wrote a number of treatises,including about things like
(08:52):
neurasthenia and diseases of thewill and so on.
And there are many ways inwhich Proust engages with and
kind of writes against some ofhis father's propositions,
responds to his father's medicalwork in Marcel Proust's own
literary work.
So the parents are both keyformative elements, not just
(09:17):
biographically but in terms ofthe kinds of literature that
they each practiced.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Proust can be a very difficult read, isn't it?
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Proust's novel is obviously very difficult to read
.
I didn't even try until myfirst year of graduate school.
You know it's tough because ofthe length of his sentences, the
syntax and also the lack of aclean or compact sequence of
plot events to latch onto.
But it's also interestingbecause, you know, in this
youthful essay against obscurityhe denounced this tendency of
(09:49):
symbolist poets at that time towrite hermetic ideas in complex
language because he felt thattheir difficulty was forced and
snobbish.
By contrast, when his work isdifficult, I think it's often
necessary in the sense that hecan't get his point across as
well another way.
For example, I'm thinking ofthis passage that I've written
(10:14):
about, where the narratordescribes memory as a worker
that reconstructs facsimiles ofwhat we hear.
But the syntax of the sentenceis such that we forget parts of
it before we get through it.
So it ironizes the narrator byundermining what he says.
As he says it, the difficultyof that sentence is
(10:37):
indispensable to its literaryeffect, and I think that's often
the case with Proust.
His difficulty can sometimes beproductive.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
The first 40 or 50 pages are difficult and that's
what rebuts a lot of readers andthat's what infamously made it
difficult for Proust to find apublisher before 1913.
You know there are these sortof legends about editors'
reports saying well, this isjust about a man tossing and
(11:05):
turning in bed and I don'treally see why this needs to be
hundreds of pages long.
But so that opening sequenceCombré I, as it's known, or the
first translator, called it anoverture.
It is a little more challengingbecause the reader doesn't have
any bearings, just like theprotagonist.
(11:27):
The protagonist is describingbeing in a state between sleep
and wakefulness, rememberingsleeping in different bedrooms
throughout his life and somenames and places associated with
those bedrooms.
But it's all a bit of a jumble,or a kaleidoscope is one of the
(11:49):
words that he uses.
So it's a beautiful passage.
It is a little bit challenging.
It's a little bit close to akind of stream of consciousness
like you might find in othermodernist authors.
But once you get past that it'sbasically a straightforward
narrative line.
It's long, so that's what makesit challenging is the length.
(12:12):
The duration and the length ofthe sentences can take some time
to get used to, I think if youread an English translation.
A lot of translations will chopup the sentences a little bit
or sort of traffic them a littlebit.
You can't quite do as manythings in an English sentence as
you can do in a French sentence.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
And yet he knows that he might sometimes be
misinterpreted right?
So there's that difficulty aswell.
There's the difficulty ofholding the parts of the
sentences in your mind as youprocess it, and there's also
this difficulty of he knowsoccasionally people are going to
misread things that he says andthe novel also forces
interpretive errors at certainjunctures precisely for the
(12:55):
effects that they generate.
So I agree with Francois thathe's certainly not difficult in
the same way that you know,madame Reyes, for example, or
many of his contemporaries, buthe does, I think, present some
challenges for readers.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
In Search of Lost Time is also renowned for its
exploration of involuntarymemory right Epitomized by this
famous sensual trigger of thefamous Madeline cookie.
How do you think thisinvoluntary memory shapes the
narrative structure and thethemes of the novel, and what
insights does it offer about therelationship between memory,
(13:32):
art and the passage of time?
Speaker 2 (13:34):
I love how memory is not just a theme in the novel,
it's truly experiential, right.
I think you know Roland Barthessaid it best when he noted that
Proust demands circular memory,meaning that readers
continually recall earlierpassages as they encounter new
ones.
And I think Josh Landy has alsoargued that the novel
(13:55):
encourages us to stretch ourmemory capacity.
So in other words, readersfigure out early on that it's
useful to store as muchinformation as possible, because
you never know when what'scoming next might radically
change the meaning of previouslynarrated events.
So I guess in this sense thefocus, the thematic focus on the
relationship between memory,art and the passage of time, is
(14:17):
kind of accompanied by thesesimulations in which the reader
experiences the effects ofmemory.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
I think involuntary memory and the Madeleine are
somehow the most famous.
But it's a device.
It's a storytelling device.
It's a great way of opening thenovel, of sort of jumping into
a reminiscence of the past andsort of setting the narrative in
motion.
(14:44):
But the novel is not aboutinvoluntary memory.
Involuntary memory shows upthroughout the novel as um, as a
trigger or as a kind ofreminder of something like the
possibility of melding the pastand the present together.
Right, it's that superimpression or super imposition
of two layers of time that theMadeleine scene represents.
(15:10):
It's the first occurrence of itin the novel, but it's fleeting
, right, it doesn't that.
That's what you?
You get immediately in themeddling scene.
But he says well, if I takeanother sip, another bite, it
doesn't work as well.
And eventually I realize thatit's not in the cookie, it's in
myself that I have to look.
So involuntary memory is a, isa platform or a sort of an
(15:35):
entryway into a process.
But it's not the end point,it's just the beginning.
The quest, the search is whatreally is called Rocher.
The search is what the novel isabout.
Involuntary memory is just sortof the first door that you walk
through if you choose to go onthe quest with the protagonist.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Well, I don't know if this happens with anyone who
reads Proust, but I couldn'tavoid the compulsion to buy
myself some Madeleine cookiesand eat them with tea every time
I reread this novel.
So, putting aside the power ofsuggestion, I do agree with one
of Proust's translators, lydiaDavis, who highlighted that we
(16:17):
need to settle down in order tofollow Proust's unique
storytelling right, andespecially, we need to be
patient with his long sentencesand let them guide us and form
new reading habits.
I know, darcy, you are theexpert in this aspect.
Could you share with us orsummarize the characteristics
that typify Proust's syntax andwhat is the purpose of such
(16:40):
textual manipulation?
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Sure, I think, as anyone who's even begun to read
the novel has noticed, and asFrancois mentioned, it's perhaps
more conspicuous at thebeginning, before you get used
to it.
Proust's syntax isexceptionally hypotactic.
It's full of subordinateclauses and it can also
sometimes be recursive,digressive, and this is to say
nothing about how protractedsome of the sentences are, you
(17:04):
know, spanning more than a page,and I think that syntax causes
us to reread recent paragraphsand even individual sentences.
Sometimes we refer back to anearlier passage because the text
seems to contradict it and wewant to check our recollection
of the narrative.
Other times we reach a point inan exceptionally long or
(17:27):
complex sentence where we haveto start over just to get the
gist of it.
So in this piece that appearedin Poetics Today a few years
back, I argued that the purposeof the rereading that Bruce's
novel demands is both toconfound interpretive practices
that he considered problematicand to facilitate instead a
(17:50):
primary aesthetic effect of hiswork, which I think is
defamiliarization.
To facilitate instead a primaryaesthetic effect of his work,
which I think isdefamiliarization.
In the 19th century English artcritic, john Ruskin, whose work
Proust translated, promoted thisbelief that reading a literary
work offers the same benefits asa conversation with its author,
(18:12):
who presumably has some wisdomto share.
But Proust adamantly rejectedthis view.
Ruskin's approach gets thereader to see everything the way
that the narrator does, andit's a problem because it leads
us to conflate the narrator'sbeliefs and the author's, which
are often very different.
It can get us to trust anunreliable narrator, often very
(18:36):
different.
It can get us to trust anunreliable narrator.
It can get us to overlookauthorial irony of the narrator
and when we read it, as Ruskintells us too, we're really just
being spoon-fed ideas ratherthan actively generating them
for ourselves.
I think Proust does want thereader to adopt the narrator's
perspective, but, unlike Ruskin,he wants us to do this only
temporarily.
(18:56):
He seems to have consideredpart of literature's appeal to
be its potential to help usmomentarily escape our habitual
way of seeing.
He wrote that habit takes holdof reality and covers it in a
film of indifference that sortof prevents us from seeing
things, but literature immersesus in someone else's perspective
(19:21):
so that when we return to ourown, we see the world with fresh
eyes.
I think this aestheticphilosophy is essentially a
variant of what Russianformalist Viktor Shklovsky, at
the start of the 20th centurydescribed as defamiliarization.
He wrote that as perceptionbecomes habitual, it becomes
(19:43):
automatic, and instead of seeingobjects in their entirety we
recognize them by their maincharacteristics we see them as
though they're enveloped in asack.
So this idea that habit dullsour experience of the world.
And in Shklovsky's view, artexists to recover the sensation
of life.
It makes one feel things, andthe way that it accomplishes
(20:05):
this is by making objectsunfamiliar.
So it increases the difficultyand the length of perception.
This is, I think, essentiallywhat rereading Proust does at
the length of perception.
This is, I think, essentiallywhat rereading Proust does at
the level of sentences.
It makes forms difficult.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
In the second part of this episode, professors
Gardner and Proust will shedlight on the cognitive aspect of
why do we identify withfictional characters in Proust's
novel and how time isrepresented in the novel, as
well as desire and homosexuality.
We encourage you to subscribeat theglobalnovelcom slash
subscribe if you want a completelistening to the entire episode
(20:44):
.
Thank you so much for listening.
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust remains
one of the most profound andmonumental novels of the 20th
century, presenting us anintricate labyrinth of memory,
time and desire.
Welcome to the Global NovelPodcast.
I'm your host, Claire Hennessey.
Today, we're very excited tohave two distinguished scholars
on the show who will help usbetter understand and appreciate
(00:25):
the aestheticism of Proust'sworks.
We have Professor Darcy Gardnerfrom Appalachian State
University, whose expertise isin 19th and 20th century French
literature, and she will shedlight on the enigmatic Proustian
syntax as a vehicle forstorytelling and more.
We also have Professor FrançoisProulx from the University of
(00:46):
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, andhis expertise in French
literature will enlighten us onaspects of desire and sexuality
in the novel.
Welcome to the show, Darcy andFrançois.
Thank you for having us.
Welcome to the show, Darcy andFrancois.
Thank you for having us.
(01:06):
Well, Proust's novelisticuniverse famously examines
themes of memory, identity andthe passage of time that
resonate as philosophicallytoday as they did over a century
ago.
Let's begin with your ownexperiences with this novel.
What initially draws you intothis elegantly written and yet
at times perplexing novel, right, and what inspires you to
(01:29):
research deeper into it?
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Well, I really enjoy the long range of facts.
I think it was Diane Leonardwho wrote a chapter about how
Proust built his novel like acathedral, in that interesting
patterns connect distant volumesand new information is
constantly transforming ourunderstanding of earlier moments
in the narrative.
I also really appreciate howthe novel rewards rereading.
(01:53):
Adam Watt says we never quitefinish reading Proust, and it's
true because the text includespassages that can only be fully
understood retrospectively.
For example, elizabeth Ladensontalks about readers shifting
interpretations of characters aswe learn more about them, and
Kalaneski says we get differentthings from the novel when we
(02:13):
read it at different points inour lives.
So all of this makes Proustreally enjoyable for me to read
and to study.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
I agree.
For me it's also about howendless it is, how we keep, even
as a researcher, even as aspecialist, we keep finding new
things, and so it's really kindof a portal or a compendium, an
(02:49):
entryway into lots of differentthings, into art, history, into
music, into the history offashion, into french history.
Um, it just leads down anendless number of pathways and
students and readers can kind ofpick what they want to know
more about.
For me personally, also, goingback to what Darcy was saying
(03:13):
about rereading, I love thataspect of the text that, um, all
the little sort of easter eggsyou could, you could say in
right, in more modern parlanceAll the hidden secrets, all the
what some critics, like FrancineGrugon, have called the
doublure of the text, which is aFrench word that means sort of
(03:38):
the doubling or the lining.
So if we think of the novel as acathedral but Proust described
it as a cathedral in someletters, but he also describes
it as a dress in some moments ofthe novel itself so it's both
kind of monumental but alsosomething very intimate,
something that's close to thebody, something that can be kind
of tailored to you in your ownreading.
It can sort of match your ownexperiences and like the dresses
(04:01):
that he describes on certaincharacters Madame Swan's dresses
, for example.
They're full of intricatedetails.
There's wonderful descriptionswhere the protagonist notices
that the inside of the sleeve ofMadame Swan has all this
delicate embroidery that's noteven really meant to be visible
because it's inside right.
(04:26):
So the novel is built a littlebit like that.
It has all of these detailsthat are not immediately visible
or noticeable to a casualreader or a first-time reader,
but that can become accessiblethe more you delve into it, and
it's kind of infinitelyrewarding that way right.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Well, what part of the author's life do you
consider as providing importantcontext for us to understand the
novel better, and which aspectsof Proust's life might have
provided some inspiration forhis stories?
Speaker 2 (04:55):
It's very helpful to think about the author's
sexuality because it can betempting for some readers to
conflate the author and thenarrator tempting for some
readers to conflate the authorand the narrator.
Josh Landy wrote an articleabout this.
You know the importance ofdistinction and our protagonist
is heterosexual, and so thinkingabout Proust's life even just
(05:19):
that way gives us a cue or canhelp us.
You know, notice not to readtoo much into heterosexuality.
The occasional reference to hisprotagonist as Marcel.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
It's an interesting question, given that Proust in
some of his early drafts around1908, in what he then was
calling the Contre Sainte-Beuveproject against Sainte-Beuve
Sainte-Beuve being a 19thcentury biographer of
Chateaubriand and literarycritic who developed a method
(05:48):
for literary analysis that wasbased in biography Proust really
went against that in thatproject for an essay and
basically arguing that biographyis the wrong approach with
which to try to really have adeep understanding of a literary
text.
It can only provide a kind ofsurface understanding of the
(06:11):
person behind the work and theessence of the work.
The deeper meaning of the workis something that is in the text
itself.
And those drafts were publishedin the early 1950s and had a
huge influence on what becameFrench New Criticism, which then
led to some of the things thatwe still teach about or know of
(06:34):
in the US Academy structuralism,post-structuralism.
So you know you're not supposedto talk about the author's life
when you do a close reading ofthis and that, when you do a
close reading of this and that.
But even though he's the personwho really set that up, or he
was really influential insetting that up, of course his
(06:56):
life is mirrored in all kinds ofways in his novel.
It's always sort of diffractedand so it's never a one-to-one
perfect image.
It's always like a hall ofmirrors, it's deformed, it's
only elements that you can find,some correspondences and so on.
(07:21):
I think.
To get back to your question, ifwe had to pick, I would go with
his parents.
I mean, it's such a basic thing.
But his mother, of course, isan important character in the
novel.
But in real life she was JeanneProust, learned woman who
(07:51):
really instilled in him a loveof of classical french letters,
uh proper epistolary practices.
She was very well read, uh veryeloquent, and brought with her
um, a lot of um, jewish culture.
Or, as she's from her side ofthe family, it's that 19th
(08:12):
century Jewish assimilation intoFrench high bourgeoisie with
all of the aspirations that camewith that.
So it's no accident in some waythat she was so well-versed in
the classical French 17thcentury was a way for her family
to display Frenchness at a timewhen that was still being
(08:32):
contested.
And his father was a famousdoctor, a professor of medicine,
who lectured at the Universityof Paris Medical Faculty and
wrote a number of treatises,including about things like
(08:52):
neurasthenia and diseases of thewill and so on.
And there are many ways inwhich Proust engages with and
kind of writes against some ofhis father's propositions,
responds to his father's medicalwork in Marcel Proust's own
literary work.
So the parents are both keyformative elements, not just
(09:17):
biographically but in terms ofthe kinds of literature that
they each practiced.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Proust can be a very difficult read, isn't it?
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Proust's novel is obviously very difficult to read
.
I didn't even try until myfirst year of graduate school.
You know it's tough because ofthe length of his sentences, the
syntax and also the lack of aclean or compact sequence of
plot events to latch onto.
But it's also interestingbecause, you know, in this
youthful essay against obscurityhe denounced this tendency of
(09:49):
symbolist poets at that time towrite hermetic ideas in complex
language because he felt thattheir difficulty was forced and
snobbish.
By contrast, when his work isdifficult, I think it's often
necessary in the sense that hecan't get his point across as
well another way.
For example, I'm thinking ofthis passage that I've written
(10:14):
about, where the narratordescribes memory as a worker
that reconstructs facsimiles ofwhat we hear.
But the syntax of the sentenceis such that we forget parts of
it before we get through it.
So it ironizes the narrator byundermining what he says.
As he says it, the difficultyof that sentence is
(10:37):
indispensable to its literaryeffect, and I think that's often
the case with Proust.
His difficulty can sometimes beproductive.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
The first 40 or 50 pages are difficult and that's
what rebuts a lot of readers andthat's what infamously made it
difficult for Proust to find apublisher before 1913.
You know there are these sortof legends about editors'
reports saying well, this isjust about a man tossing and
(11:05):
turning in bed and I don'treally see why this needs to be
hundreds of pages long.
But so that opening sequenceCombré I, as it's known, or the
first translator, called it anoverture.
It is a little more challengingbecause the reader doesn't have
any bearings, just like theprotagonist.
(11:27):
The protagonist is describingbeing in a state between sleep
and wakefulness, rememberingsleeping in different bedrooms
throughout his life and somenames and places associated with
those bedrooms.
But it's all a bit of a jumble,or a kaleidoscope is one of the
(11:49):
words that he uses.
So it's a beautiful passage.
It is a little bit challenging.
It's a little bit close to akind of stream of consciousness
like you might find in othermodernist authors.
But once you get past that it'sbasically a straightforward
narrative line.
It's long, so that's what makesit challenging is the length.
(12:12):
The duration and the length ofthe sentences can take some time
to get used to, I think if youread an English translation.
A lot of translations will chopup the sentences a little bit
or sort of traffic them a littlebit.
You can't quite do as manythings in an English sentence as
you can do in a French sentence.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
And yet he knows that he might sometimes be
misinterpreted right?
So there's that difficulty aswell.
There's the difficulty ofholding the parts of the
sentences in your mind as youprocess it, and there's also
this difficulty of he knowsoccasionally people are going to
misread things that he says andthe novel also forces
interpretive errors at certainjunctures precisely for the
(12:55):
effects that they generate.
So I agree with Francois thathe's certainly not difficult in
the same way that you know,madame Reyes, for example, or
many of his contemporaries, buthe does, I think, present some
challenges for readers.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
In Search of Lost Time is also renowned for its
exploration of involuntarymemory right Epitomized by this
famous sensual trigger of thefamous Madeline cookie.
How do you think thisinvoluntary memory shapes the
narrative structure and thethemes of the novel, and what
insights does it offer about therelationship between memory,
(13:32):
art and the passage of time?
Speaker 2 (13:34):
I love how memory is not just a theme in the novel,
it's truly experiential, right.
I think you know Roland Barthessaid it best when he noted that
Proust demands circular memory,meaning that readers
continually recall earlierpassages as they encounter new
ones.
And I think Josh Landy has alsoargued that the novel
(13:55):
encourages us to stretch ourmemory capacity.
So in other words, readersfigure out early on that it's
useful to store as muchinformation as possible, because
you never know when what'scoming next might radically
change the meaning of previouslynarrated events.
So I guess in this sense thefocus, the thematic focus on the
relationship between memory,art and the passage of time, is
(14:17):
kind of accompanied by thesesimulations in which the reader
experiences the effects ofmemory.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
I think involuntary memory and the Madeleine are
somehow the most famous.
But it's a device.
It's a storytelling device.
It's a great way of opening thenovel, of sort of jumping into
a reminiscence of the past andsort of setting the narrative in
motion.
(14:44):
But the novel is not aboutinvoluntary memory.
Involuntary memory shows upthroughout the novel as um, as a
trigger or as a kind ofreminder of something like the
possibility of melding the pastand the present together.
Right, it's that superimpression or super imposition
of two layers of time that theMadeleine scene represents.
(15:10):
It's the first occurrence of itin the novel, but it's fleeting
, right, it doesn't that.
That's what you?
You get immediately in themeddling scene.
But he says well, if I takeanother sip, another bite, it
doesn't work as well.
And eventually I realize thatit's not in the cookie, it's in
myself that I have to look.
So involuntary memory is a, isa platform or a sort of an
(15:35):
entryway into a process.
But it's not the end point,it's just the beginning.
The quest, the search is whatreally is called Rocher.
The search is what the novel isabout.
Involuntary memory is just sortof the first door that you walk
through if you choose to go onthe quest with the protagonist.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Well, I don't know if this happens with anyone who
reads Proust, but I couldn'tavoid the compulsion to buy
myself some Madeleine cookiesand eat them with tea every time
I reread this novel.
So, putting aside the power ofsuggestion, I do agree with one
of Proust's translators, lydiaDavis, who highlighted that we
(16:17):
need to settle down in order tofollow Proust's unique
storytelling right, andespecially, we need to be
patient with his long sentencesand let them guide us and form
new reading habits.
I know, darcy, you are theexpert in this aspect.
Could you share with us orsummarize the characteristics
that typify Proust's syntax andwhat is the purpose of such
(16:40):
textual manipulation?
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Sure, I think, as anyone who's even begun to read
the novel has noticed, and asFrancois mentioned, it's perhaps
more conspicuous at thebeginning, before you get used
to it.
Proust's syntax isexceptionally hypotactic.
It's full of subordinateclauses and it can also
sometimes be recursive,digressive, and this is to say
nothing about how protractedsome of the sentences are, you
(17:04):
know, spanning more than a page,and I think that syntax causes
us to reread recent paragraphsand even individual sentences.
Sometimes we refer back to anearlier passage because the text
seems to contradict it and wewant to check our recollection
of the narrative.
Other times we reach a point inan exceptionally long or
(17:27):
complex sentence where we haveto start over just to get the
gist of it.
So in this piece that appearedin Poetics Today a few years
back, I argued that the purposeof the rereading that Bruce's
novel demands is both toconfound interpretive practices
that he considered problematicand to facilitate instead a
(17:50):
primary aesthetic effect of hiswork, which I think is
defamiliarization.
To facilitate instead a primaryaesthetic effect of his work,
which I think isdefamiliarization.
In the 19th century English artcritic, john Ruskin, whose work
Proust translated, promoted thisbelief that reading a literary
work offers the same benefits asa conversation with its author,
(18:12):
who presumably has some wisdomto share.
But Proust adamantly rejectedthis view.
Ruskin's approach gets thereader to see everything the way
that the narrator does, andit's a problem because it leads
us to conflate the narrator'sbeliefs and the author's, which
are often very different.
It can get us to trust anunreliable narrator, often very
(18:36):
different.
It can get us to trust anunreliable narrator.
It can get us to overlookauthorial irony of the narrator
and when we read it, as Ruskintells us too, we're really just
being spoon-fed ideas ratherthan actively generating them
for ourselves.
I think Proust does want thereader to adopt the narrator's
perspective, but, unlike Ruskin,he wants us to do this only
temporarily.
(18:56):
He seems to have consideredpart of literature's appeal to
be its potential to help usmomentarily escape our habitual
way of seeing.
He wrote that habit takes holdof reality and covers it in a
film of indifference that sortof prevents us from seeing
things, but literature immersesus in someone else's perspective
(19:21):
so that when we return to ourown, we see the world with fresh
eyes.
I think this aestheticphilosophy is essentially a
variant of what Russianformalist Viktor Shklovsky, at
the start of the 20th centurydescribed as defamiliarization.
He wrote that as perceptionbecomes habitual, it becomes
(19:43):
automatic, and instead of seeingobjects in their entirety we
recognize them by their maincharacteristics we see them as
though they're enveloped in asack.
So this idea that habit dullsour experience of the world.
And in Shklovsky's view, artexists to recover the sensation
of life.
It makes one feel things, andthe way that it accomplishes
(20:05):
this is by making objectsunfamiliar.
So it increases the difficultyand the length of perception.
This is, I think, essentiallywhat rereading Proust does at
the length of perception.
This is, I think, essentiallywhat rereading Proust does at
the level of sentences.
It makes forms difficult.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
In the second part of this episode, professors
Gardner and Proust will shedlight on the cognitive aspect of
why do we identify withfictional characters in Proust's
novel and how time isrepresented in the novel, as
well as desire and homosexuality.
We encourage you to subscribeat theglobalnovelcom slash
subscribe if you want a completelistening to the entire episode
(20:44):
.
Thank you so much for listening.
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