From the Bookshelf of 2017: Our Year of Reading Proust…

He put us inside somebody’s mind in a way, and with a kind of determination, and an elasticity, a capacity to move inside that mind in a way that nobody had ever done before [or ever can do] . . . he has this ability to conjure up a social world and then plunge you into the mind recording it, and the mind beyond just the recording of that world . . . and he makes the mind tactile; it is a very sensuous novel, so it’s not just the interiority of thought, it’s also the physical sensation of being

He put us inside somebody’s mind in a way, and with a kind of determination, and an elasticity, a capacity to move inside that mind in a way that nobody had ever done before [or ever can do] . . . he has this ability to conjure up a social world and then plunge you into the mind recording it, and the mind beyond just the recording of that world . . . and he makes the mind tactile; it is a very sensuous novel, so it’s not just the interiority of thought, it’s also the physical sensation of being inside that mind; it’s a kind of, Erotics of Thought, and nobody had done that before . . .

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One of my favourite moments in Proust is when he says “Our lives are full of memories, but we do not have the ability to recall them . . . Given that that’s the case, why do we think those memories we can’t recall just go back to the last thirty years of our lives; maybe they go back to another planet, and lives we lived in the bodies of other men . . ." That’s to say this is really infinity we are talking about here. Now I think what happens is the concern about memory and what we can and we can’t know about our own minds, then fixes on the body and the mind and the existence of these women, and it becomes as it were an allegory for a chase after something, which in his wisest moments, Proust knows, one can never control or know, because you never know what the people you love are doing when they’re not with you . . . you can never know and control another person . . .

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But he’s saying something so strange about desire, that you don’t desire directly, you desire though association; somebody reminds you of somebody else, somebody makes you think of somebody else, or even to refer back to the discussion of Ruskin, you only desire something if it’s already been aesthetically framed for you . . .

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He’s a snob who provides the most brilliant critique of snobbery we’ve ever had, and there's a real ambiguity at the heart of his belonging in that world, he comes from an upper-middle class professional medical family, and all he wanted to do was hang out with aristocrats and royalty . . . and he allowed them to indict themselves in the most chilling and devastating way; they just tear themselves to shreds under his acute eye . . . —Jacqueline Rose, In Our Time - Proust