Understanding Backwards
(The full review referred to in the Amazon abridgement)
But for the Great War, Time Regained would have been preceded by only two parts, Swann’s Way and The Guermantes Way. In this last part, owing to changes in society, the two ways—in their metaphorical sense—have met, and not only through the former Mme Swann’s liaison with the Duc de Guermantes: her daughter Gilberte is now married now to another Guermantes, Robert de Saint-Loup, the narrator’s closest friend. But then the two ways had never been irreconcilable, as the narrator learns from Gilberte on revisiting them with her (at the beginning of this part in the later Pléiade edition, at the end of the previous part in this English edition). They had even been united, in the person of her father, the Guermantes’s friend Charles Swann.
When the three-part novel was superseded, the balanced design was lost, but much was gained—notably, in the intervening parts, the story of the narrator’s mistress, Albertine, and the development of the character of the Baron de Charlus. And in Time Regained as we have it now, not only is Charlus’s portrait completed, the War becomes at once the background and the subject. The long war chapter, too—what distinguishes this last volume from its predecessors, mostly meditative or reflective—, was written as it was lived. And on the other hand, in both the outer chapters the reflective quality is enhanced by their having mostly retrospects for subject-matter.
A review of Marcel Proust's Time Regained
Already on his return to Tansonville to see Gilberte, his first love, the narrator has found his heart changed even more than her face. Though staying on now at her husband’s insistence, he is struck by the change in Robert too and in their friendship. The two ways themselves have given him no pleasure, his imagination and sensibility seemed to him enfeebled when he thought of the child he had been, and just as he was hardly interested in Gilberte’s revelations about the sort of child she had been, so now he asks her with indifference about his dead mistress, Albertine.
In the third and final chapter it’s to Paris that he has returned, after the War, and, as in the second chapter, after long years in a sanatorium. Proust did spend six weeks in a sanatorium after his mother died, and if Thomas Mann could set a whole novel in one so could he have done. Yet although Marcel has related his life exhaustively until now, he says nothing about all his sanatorium years except that the treatment consisted in isolation. Evidently this is some such device as that which introduced 'Swann in Love' [1]. Of course, there is a clue in that word ‘isolation’, and another in the author’s remark that it was ‘a long time since [he had] seen any of the personages mentioned in this work’. So far as Proust had, himself, withdrawn from the world, it was less for the sake of his health than for that of his novel, but this was the story of a writer’s formation, not of his working life. As he expanded and developed that great set piece which is the final Guermantes party, Proust must have thought how striking it would be for the characters he was now bringing back together for the last time, following a tradition with novelists, to reappear changed almost out of recognition. But this could only be contrived by a not very artistic stretching of time’s thread.
On his way to the party (given by the Princesse de Guermantes, whom Swann had known as plain Mme Verdurin), through the streets along which his old nurse Françoise used to take him to the Champs Élysées, Marcel had felt he was gliding through the past. And leaving his cab, he had met for the last time Charlus, who had dragged up ancient recollections of meeting him for the first time, at Balbec. In the courtyard of the Guermantes mansion he had gloomily reminded himself that the joys of the mind weren’t for him, incapable as he was (or felt he was) of any serious literary work. But it was just when he had resigned himself to the frivolous pleasure of the party that he had stumbled against an uneven flagstone and been overwhelmed by a mysterious happiness. At the beginning of the novel the taste of a crumb dipped in tea had brought back to him the Combray of his childhood, now another sensation has brought back the reality of Venice (in Proust’s real life the goal and scene of a Ruskinian pilgrimage with his mother). Upstairs in the Prince’s library, he experiences two more sensations with a like effect. And there, considering past experiences of the same kind as well as these new ones, before joining the party, he finally solves the riddle of that happiness, with the revelation of Time Regained.
A vast set of variations on the theme of time past is offered by the party itself. Having failed to recognize, at first, one after another of his old acquaintances, he realizes that time here is visible—and so fails at first to recognize the former Mme Swann, Odette de Forcheville, because she has not changed, though for the same reason she seems hardly alive. As for the stout lady who declared “You took me for Mama”, she did indeed look more like Mme Swann than like the Gilberte of their ‘colloques sentimentales’ at Tansonville, and he could attach the image of a little girl behind a pink hawthorn hedge to neither.
But there are also guests he doesn’t recognize because he doesn’t know them, guests who have penetrated into this fashionable gathering because time has been at work on society too. Its action is measurable not only by people’s physical transformations but by their movements up or down the social scale, including the movements of dead people about whom the new generation is ill-informed. Readers to whom the author has communicated his special fondness for Swann may be saddened to learn that Swann since his death has sunk socially as far as Mme Verdurin has risen—unless they consider that if the social world is indeed the realm of nullity, as Proust has assured us it is (though still writing about it obsessively), it would have been better for Swann to have lost his position in it while he was alive.
From the Duchess de Guermantes the narrator learns that the Duke’s stock has gone down because of his liaison with Odette. We learn from the narrator that the Duchess’s salon has almost ceased to function because she has taken to frequenting actresses and to reading! And it seems her brother-in-law, M. de Charlus, whose old age is even more scandalous than her husband’s, is now socially quite isolated. Does Proust’s account, in ‘Paris during the War’, of ‘the pleasures of M. de Charlus’ throw light on an element in his own psychology? If you accept the biographical hints of sadistic desires on his part, and wish to think that the goings-on in Jupien’s male brothel were experiences of his own, you will need to believe that as well as wanting his character to represent him, he wanted his readers to be misled, and this is why he made the Baron a masochist. Anyhow, the narrator can now contemplate, in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, radical change exactly where it had seemed impossible.
More than one guest whom he and we used to know and have lost sight of is actually glad to greet him here for old times’ sake, and although this is fiction indeed, we want to believe in such people. They are like real people in this, that the memories he and they are exchanging interest them only as relating to themselves. And if Marcel is bored with them, whereas they—these speaking portraits—are the proof of the interest Proust took in their originals, Marcel is like Proust, and unlike them, in not egotizing. In fact the narrator who now finds the minutes he has to spend in Odette’s company interminable, who has no intention of talking literature with Gilberte or with the Duchesse de Guermantes, and who means to resume a solitary life the very next day,—this narrator is indistinguishable from the author. ‘Wasn’t it in order to concern myself with them that I was going to live apart from them?’
(Susequently, nevertheless, he will see Odette again, and the Duc’s latest and last mistress will tell him anecdotes of her dubious past and remember Swann with him—yet another retrospect.)
Actually, he is only pleased when Gilberte presents her daughter to him, and his pleasure then is poignant. The two great ‘ways’, connecting so many people and places in his life, have both led to her, Swann’s granddaughter, in whom he sees her father—Robert de Saint-Loup, killed in action—, and time materialized. ‘Smiling, full of hope still, formed from the very years I had lost, she was like my own youth.’
After he has observed the Duc de Guermantes, at the end, tottering on the stilts of his eighty-three years, it is as ‘occupying a place in the dimension of time’ that Marcel means to describe people in the book he is at last resolved to write. Before his meditating was done and he joined his fellow guests, he had realized that he had all the materials for a work of literature in his past life. And these materials are already changed almost out of recognition. So it’s in the full consciousness of time’s power that he feels the joy of his new-found confidence in ‘The Art that baffles Time’s tyrannic claim/To quench it’.
To accept Proust’s theory of Time Regained, it isn’t enough to believe there is a transcendent reality, you must believe there is a transcendent reality one other than that of the mystics. (See also my piece ‘Eternity’s own hostage’.) But you may think it enough to recognize here a full and final statement, not of a philosophy of time, but of the unifying theme, now orchestrated more sumptuously than ever, of the whole novel. And if you have discovered no ‘grand general plan’, still from here you can see the whole in its true perspective, that is, from the same point as the author—the only point from which, every part throwing light on another, you can at length make sense of it all. The would-be writer’s repeated professions of self-doubt were never to be taken quite seriously if he was supposed to be the writer of this very book, but of course they were calculated to make the chance happenings which finally dispel that doubt all the more dramatic. And as the narrator contemplates the task before him, which had seemed to him impossible, the author’s message to his readers is wholly positive: ‘for neither our greatest fears nor our greatest hopes are beyond the limits of our strength—we are able in the end both to dominate the first and to achieve the second.’
Recalling what his achievement cost him, his readers may reflect that the doom of man was yet not reversed for him, and considering how the lot of so many is failure and oblivion, that even if his message would have been true as a personal statement, in this generalized form it needs qualifying. Proust complained that just because he had 'had the misfortune' to begin a book with the word ‘I’, he was at once believed to be engaged, not in trying to discover general laws, but in self-analysis [2]. (He may have wanted to consecrate his art to a supernatural reality which the world-view of men like his father excluded, Proust also wanted his findings to carry as much weight as theirs, and so claimed for ‘the artist’ their kind of methodology—conceiving him to be, in his own sphere, ‘studying laws, conducting experiments, making discoveries as delicate as those of science’). But many of his readers since—especially when young, and disposed as he himself had been to take a favourite author for an oracle—have believed they were receiving truths about human nature just because he had the habit of beginning personal observations with the word ‘We’.
‘Is art more real than life?’ the narrator had asked himself earlier, and now, adapting what Baudelaire said about poetry (in 'Puisque réalisme il y a'), he answers definitively: ‘Art is what is most real’. How so? To produce a work of art is to discover ‘our true life’, or ‘reality as we have felt it to be’—as he had felt it in those ‘spots of time’ in which he had found the meaning of life. Evidently this reality is not that of the physicists. The ‘inner book’ he wants to write may be ‘the only one of which the “impression” has been printed in us by reality itself’, and the impression may be for the writer ‘what experiment is for the scientist’, still the scientific analogy is quite fanciful. We already know that the truths he is after are those life communicates to us ‘in an impression which is material because it enters us through the senses but yet has a spiritual meaning’. Again, the hidden reality has to be ‘discovered like a law of nature’, but it is discovered by ‘fashioning a work of art’.
And only artists can do that, but then why does he say, of this reality, that ‘we’ have to discover it (or rather, rediscover it)—to make ‘ourselves’ fully aware of it? Is this another unwarranted generalization? Or, since ‘the essential, the only true book exists already in each one of us’, does he mean his readers too will be able to discover reality, by reading the book he will write? Let’s see.
Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated—the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived—is literature, and life thus defined is in a sense all the time immanent in ordinary men no less than in the artist. But most men do not see it because they do not seek to shed light upon it. But art, if it means awareness of our own life, means also awareness of the lives of other people. Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own. […] Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, … we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists…
No, this is not about the physicists’ reality; it is art that lays this ‘real life’ bare (‘Art’ as comprehending literature, of course). But by the time we hear what art means—awareness of our own life and of others’ lives—, this is no longer about a spiritual reality either, the ‘true’ or ‘real’ life which is in all of us; to become aware of that in others, once art had made you aware of it in yourself, would be to become aware of the same thing. What this is about we shall hear directly, but we mustn’t think that ‘to emerge from ourselves’ means ‘to enter into another’s thoughts and feelings’.—‘Through art alone’? There is such a thing as sympathy. And indeed we learn now what Proust does mean, though since much the same—it enables us to get outside ourselves and see the world as others see it—is said by anthropologists of anthropology, even this would need qualifying if he hadn’t at last decided, and let us know, that now he is talking about the varieties of aesthetic experience.
And that is all. Art enables the rest of us, not to discover reality, not to feel with other people, but to see with the eyes of different artists. We had never doubted it. Still, if Proust actually had made out not only that he had discovered reality by writing a book, but also that others could discover it merely by reading the book, he would have claimed for literature even more than his master in aesthetics, Ruskin, with his derided belief that art has a moral character, had claimed for art—perhaps even more than Wordsworth, with his belief that his readers could find a moral teacher in Nature just as he had done, had claimed for Nature.
As it is, Proust seems closer to us than to Ruskin. But not very much closer. No doubt he ascribed a superior reality to Art by way of affirming Art’s supreme value for him. On finishing his novel, his readers today may feel they value his art as being, not indeed more real than life, but—by its way of ‘reconstituting’ life as only great art can do—life-enhancing, and as showing, if not that life has a meaning in itself, at least that it can be given one.
Remembrance of Things Past, vols I to XI trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, vol. XII trans. Andreas Mayor, Chatto & Windus, 1922-70
Correspondance de Marcel Proust, 21 vols, ed. Ph. Kolb, Plon, 1970-93
[1] … A story which… had been told me of a love affair in which Swann had been involved before I was born; with that accuracy of detail which it is easier, often, to obtain when we are studying the lives of people who have been dead for centuries than when we are trying to chronicle those of our own most intimate friends, an accuracy which it seems as impossible to attain as it seemed impossible to speak from one town to another, before we learned of the contrivance by which that impossibility has been overcome (Swann’s Way, 256).
[2] 'Mais j'ai eu le malheur de commencer un livre par le mot «je» et aussitôt on a cru qu'au lieu de chercher à découvrir des lois générales, je «m'analysais» au sens individuel et détestable du mot' (to André Lang, second fortnight of October 1921, Corr. XX, 496). Also, to Jacques Boulenger, 29 Nov. 1921: ‘… il [a critic] s’imagine que j’écris sans plan, va-comme-je-te-pousse, alors que je n’ai qu’un souci qui est la composition. Mais comme j’ai eu le malheur de commencer mon livre par «Je» et que je ne pouvais plus changer, je suis «subjectif» in aeternum' (ib., 542). And to Henri Ghéon, 2 Jan. 1914: ‘Parce que je dis «je» on croit que je suis subjectif' (XIII, 25).