Proustian Uncertainties: On Reading and Rereading In Search of Lost Time

by Saul Friedländer

Named a Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian revisits Marcel Proust’s masterpiece in this essay on literature and memory, exploring the question of identity—that of the novel’s narrator and Proust’s own.   This engaging reexamination of In Search of Lost Time considers how the narrator defines himself, how this compares to what we know of Proust himself, and what the significance is of these various points of commonality and divergence. We know, for example, that the author did not hide his homosexuality, but the narrator did. Why the difference? We know that the narrator tried to marginalize his part-Jewish background. Does this reflect the author’s position, and how does the narrator handle what he tries, but does not manage, to dismiss? These are major questions raised by the text and reflected in the text, to which the author’s life doesn’t give obvious answers. The narrator’s reflections on time, on death, on memory, and on love are as many paths leading to the image of self that he projects.   In Proustian Uncertainties, Saul Friedländer draws on his personal experience from a life spent investigating the ties between history and memory to offer a fresh perspective on the seminal work.

Genres: Criticism, Literature, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction

176 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 1, 2020

About the author

Saul Friedländer (Hebrew: שאול פרידלנדר) is an Israeli/French historian and a professor emeritus of history at UCLA.

Reviews

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 3 out of 5]

Caveat lector. This is a book for Proustians, by which I mean people who have read In Search of Lost Time from end to end plus a biography or two, some commentary, etc. If you aren’t that obsessive, I suspect much of what is specific in Friedländer’s book will lack resonance. He seems to presume that his readers have read Proust as attentively as he has, even if his focus is different.

Two central uncertainties trouble him throughout. Marcel Proust was Jewish and homosexual. His Narrator throughout the long novel is neither. (As readers recognized immediately, his passages of heterosexual passion ring false. We never even learn what his lover Albertine looks like.) Friedländer’s uncertainty is focused on Proust’s conflicted perspectives on antisemitism and homophobia. These issues have been examined in depth for decades. In my view Friedländer’s writings on the fate of Jews in Europe illuminate what he writes here; less so on the issue of Proust’s homosexuality. (On that topic I’d recommend Proust in Love.)

More interesting is his uncertainty about the celebrated role of involuntary memory in the novel — the famous Moment of the Madeleine. Indeed this event plus a few others provide a dramatic turn, but Friedländer points out that most of the novel depends on the more usual type of memory, deployed in the hands of a genius. “The two faces of memory, the illumination and the generalization, cannot and need not be linked.”

The deepest uncertainty, at least for him, is what drove Proust to write the book he did. His answer is surprising, and moving.

[Kendra]

Interesting but full of spoilers -- wait till after you read ISOLT if you care!

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Friedlander has lots of interesting things to say about Proust, particularly on his characters’ perspectives on Jews. Also interesting is that Friedlander doesn’t think Proust is a true modernist author or that he has a good sense of how memory actually works.

[Ptjerónimo]

O A. é indubitavelmente um homem inteligente e culto. Parece-me que deverá ser igualmente um homem peremptório, com ideias muito firmes sobre muitas questões. Como historiador do holocausto é natural que atribua grande importância à questão judaica em geral e à identidade judia em particular. Assim não é de estranhar que essa questão, a par da relativa à homosexualidade, assuma uma relevância, no meu entender desproporcionada, na análise que faz do "Em Busca do Tempo Perdido". Na sua curta biografia de Kafka, Friedlander atribui àquela mesma questão uma grande importância mas fá-lo com mais pertinência pois para Kafka a questão de pertença ao judaísmo era efectivamente muito importante. O mesmo não acontecia com Proust para quem tal questão não sendo propriamente marginal não constituia uma das suas preocupações preponderantes. Embora todo o lado familiar da parte da sua mãe fosse judeu , Proust nunca se reconheceu como tal, nem étnica nem religiosamente e sempre se considerou acima de tudo um francês. A sua posição intransigente no caso Dreyfus não foi ditada minimamente por considerações rácicas mas sim e unicamente por um imperativo de justiça. A insistência de Friedlander nesse tónica torna-se assim por vezes irritante e as "provas" que apresenta para fundamentar as suas opiniões na matéria são rebuscadas e pouco convincentes. Aliás a análise do "Em Busca" a que procede é frequentemente artificiosa e pedante. Mas tem alguns apontamentos de indiscutível interesse.

[Leonard Singer · Rating 3 out of 5]

The thesis is that In Search of Lost Time is a record of Proust’s struggle to find or accept an identity. In the process, Proust sees the myriads of causes for the myriads of identities of his characters and recognizes the complexities and inconsistencies in those identities. Memories can be an important factor to identity. Meaningful memories are of sensations and impressions rather than of photographic images. The author’s living memory is “an immense pain that as a memory never left me: the memory of my last meeting with my mother and father, at the age of 10, in the hospital room in Montlucon where they were hiding in September 1942. [It]…never occurred to me as a reason for writing about Proust’s [book], but maybe this was it. This is it.” Readers of Proust’s book will recognize the connection to Proust’s enduring memory of his mother’s good night kiss.

[Cynthia · Rating 2 out of 5]

An extended essay that boils ISOLT down to Proust's contradictory and ambivalent attitudes towards Judaism and homosexuality. That's certainly part of the story, but it seems reductionist and often Friedländer sounds like he's putting the text and Marcel's poor mother through a pseudo-Freudian lens.

Also there are spoilers, lotsa spoilers.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed it, in particular, the conversation about the use of Arabian Nights. I just wanted a little more, in particular in how Proust saw Jews, not only his mother. It just felt very general in some ways. What does come across quite well is how much Friedlander loves Proust's work.

[Duncan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A curious book, not entirely sure what to make of it. I did enjoy it I think and 3/5 may be a bit harsh. But all felt a bit left field. Very much a personal view of Proust

[Wally Wood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, I admit it. I never finished all seven books of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. I read the first two because a graduate writing program required me to do so mand sometime after graduation I read "In a Budding Grove" a second time to build up momentum to continue on to Book 3, "The Guermantes Way." Sadly, I ran out of momentum by page 105. I know because that's where my bookmark remains.

In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past) (or A la recherche du temps perdu) is one of those literary peaks like Joyce's Ulysses, Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Lady Murasaki's The Tale of Genji, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow that anyone with literary pretensions ought to have climbed. I claim literary pretensions, but I'm afraid I've read only one of the six.

Because Proust has been waiting patiently on my bookshelf since the early 1980s, and because I believe it would be nice to have read his masterwork, I requested a review copy of Proustian Uncertanties: On Reading and Rereading In Search of Lost Time by Saul Friedländer.

Friedländer is an award-winning Israeli-American historian and currently a professor of history (emeritus) at UCLA. He was born in Prague to a family of German-speaking Jews, grew up in France, and lived in hiding during the German occupation of 1940–1944. He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945.

He has truly and thoroughly read and reread In Search and recently "I noticed aspects that I had failed to see before, and as I soon realized after some inquiry, seemed to have generally escaped attention." It is these aspects to which he directs our attention in this short essay—156 pages.

In Search reads like a memoir, but the Narrator is not Proust, so Friedländer asks, "How does the Narrator define himself? We know, for example, that the author did not hide his homosexuality, but the Narrator did. Why the difference? We know that the Narrator tried to marginalize his part-Jewish background. Does it reflect the author's position [Proust's mother was Jewish], and how does the Narrator handle what he tries but does not manage to dismiss?"

Although the Narrator "recaptures the intense relation between mother and child," Proust never gives his parents names nor does he describe them. Proust had a brother; the Narrator has no siblings. Proust was half Jewish; the Narrator and his parents appear to be pious Catholics. Moreover, "the Narrator's attitude towards Jews is contradictory throughout the Search."

Proust was 25 when the Dreyfus Affair began to make the news, 35 when Dreyfus was exonerated and reinstated as a major in the French Army. The Affair exposed a deep vein of anti-semitism in French society. The Narrator, like Proust, was pro-Dreyfus but apparently not because of Dreyfus's Jewishness, but "because of the injustice done to the officer, because of his suffering" on Devil's Island.

Proust's position toward homosexuality was clear in his life: "He told quite a few people about his unrequited and tragic love for Alfred Agostinelli" who died in a plane crash. The Narrator, however, has a rant against the homosexuality of Baron Charlus. Why? "Proust may have surmised that an openly homosexual novel," says Friedländer, "without any disclaimer, would have repelled many readers. Is that the answer? I do not know." Another Proustian uncertainty.

Finally, Friedländer's asks if there is a comprehensive moral accounting in the novel. He writes, "there is no love in the Search without betrayal and jealousy; there is no friendship that lasts over time, no loyalty except that imposed by social imperatives. But isn't that mostly the case within any society? It wouldn't be worth dwelling on if the novel didn't insist on a somewhat unusual category of betrayals: that of parents by their children and particularly of doting fathers by their daughters. . . ."
For anyone who has wondered what the damned thing is about or whether to try it once again with an informed and insightful guide, Proustian Uncertainties is a good place to start.