In Search of Lost Time: The Complete Masterpiece in The Year of Reading Proust

Dec 09, 2012 Ben rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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Why did Proust have to write a 4000 page novel, especially when there is not any discernable, coherent plot? Was it really necessary to have those extended society scenes, some of which lasted for 150 pages or so? Couldn’t the whole thing have been tightened up a little and cut down to 1000 pages or so?

I asked myself these questions at various points over the nine months it took me to journey through Proust’s masterpiece. It was not until the final two volumes (and particularly the latter half Why did Proust have to write a 4000 page novel, especially when there is not any discernable, coherent plot? Was it really necessary to have those extended society scenes, some of which lasted for 150 pages or so? Couldn’t the whole thing have been tightened up a little and cut down to 1000 pages or so?

I asked myself these questions at various points over the nine months it took me to journey through Proust’s masterpiece. It was not until the final two volumes (and particularly the latter half of Time Regained) that it all started to make sense. The point Proust is trying to make can only be experienced (as opposed to realized intellectually) if you have plodded through the seemingly endless series of anecdotes, asides and philosophical musings.

Proust is trying to tell us how the experiences of our past slip away from our memory and, as such, no longer have any obvious impact on us. In some cases, (i.e. sexual jealousy and grief), this is a good thing, lest the pain of these losses would forever burden us. But it also isolates us from those moments of pleasure, of experiencing pure beauty. We can try, through the vehicle of voluntary memory to retrieve “the good old days” but we will get nothing more than a snapshot, and will not feel the experience of what it was really like in those moments. The only way to recapture lost time, Proust tells us, is through the involuntary memories that spontaneously arise from random sensory input (the taste of a madeleine soaked in tea, the experience of standing on uneven paving stones, the clang of a spoon against a dish) as it triggers the memories of the last time we experienced the same sensations along with the other physical and emotional sensations with which the catalytic sensation is associated. The experience of these sensations is actually of a purer form than we experienced when they happened to us the first time, because they are not impeded by all the other competing stimuli that were impinging on us at the time. At the time, for example, we may have been disappointed that this resort was not exactly what we had in mind, we may have been worried about the health of a loved one, we might be distracted by concerns of our professional careers. In this moment of recapturing the past, all that comes to us is the unadulterated form of the experience of pleasure.

Of course, this is a pretty unreliable mechanism to tap into our past and, as Proust shows, it is fleeting as well. The only way to recapture the past in a lasting way is through the creation of a work of art: which is where the book comes in. How does a writer depict an experience which is eventually forgotten, and is then perfectly recaptured years later? Well, you have to help the reader have the experience of long stretches of time, of the entirety of a long life lived, complete with all the hundreds of people and experiences and moments of inspiration and self-doubt that come with it. When, in the last pages of Time Regained, Proust describes the incident of the “good night kiss” (one of the earliest episodes of the book), I felt like this did occur 40 years ago, given how long ago I read it. And, as Proust, through his magnificent prose lovingly reconstructed the scene, it came back to me with the full force of his original description. He had succeeded in helping me recapture this literary event, and how beautiful the experience of it was!

I certainly don’t want to try to compete with the length of In Search of Lost Time itself with this review, so let me conclude quickly. Please, if you have any interest at all in serious literature, do not be thrown off by the length of this book. It is an unparalleled work of genius for which, as I hope I have argued successfully above, the length is an essential element. If you make the commitment, you will be rewarded.
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