Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time #1) by Marcel Proust (translated by C.K. Scott Moncrief and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright)
Don’t you remember?
Finished: 12 January 2022
Rating: ★★★★☆
There was a time when I thought I would dedicate an entire year to making my way through all seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, given that so many people have hailed it as life-changing. (Except these people, some of whom have a point.) That idea died pretty quickly but, in pursuit of that vanished era, I finally finished the first volume and it only took quite a long time.
Books about memory and conscious, or subconscious, experience bear the burden of having to render into prose what is often felt wordlessly and in an instant, not articulated in any logical sense. Proust’s best passages are when something — a madeleine, a musical phrase — brings to characters’ minds a whole host of associations, transporting them somewhere else entirely, forgetting instantly the room in which they are standing. The accuracy of Proust’s descriptions of the sensation is dazzling, and these passages find brilliant insight. It prompted me to think back on my own past and pick up objects of my childhood, which in turn unlocked things I forgot lived in my memory. I loved Swann’s musings on music when a particular phrase brought to his mind a whole host of associations and revelations — the music not only revived memories but was able to teach him something new about his situation.
However, most of this was buried by overwrought description. I understand that the thrill of Proust is for some to gain a richer way of looking at the world, but so many other writers and poets, especially, do this far more succinctly. Writing for The Atlantic, Oliver Munday reflects on how Proust’s processes of perception began to seep into his own experience of the world: “this novel made clear all that the familiar still had to disclose, if I was willing to look”. The wonder of art is how it lets us perceive the world differently, in a way that takes us closer to some heart as yet unknown, some truth. While I felt this strongly in the first half with the narrator’s recollections of Combray, I found it more exhausting to work through the characters’ experiences given the similarity of the love storylines in the second part. Munday had to make his way through a few volumes to find a fuller appreciation, so perhaps I’m premature, but such voluminous memory is a double-edged sword — the second edge being that no one can process that much detail all the time in real life.
In fact, memory is famously lacking. Proust doesn’t really explore the fragmentary nature of the mind and the fallibility of memory. Other than aforementioned objects triggering intense memories that lurk in one’s subconscious, the flow of his writing is linear. There is not the chaos of thoughts leaping back, forth, and all over that one finds in William Faulkner and James Joyce, both a few years after Proust. The recurring theme in Swann’s Way seems to be that memory can be intensely faithful — so faithful that we’re drowning in every bit of it. For a novel that is meant to recall the past, it wants to show us how to experience and absorb the present. There isn’t the same murkiness and anxiety of the unknown that lurks in the work of W.G. Sebald, who wrote in The Rings of Saturn: “Whenever a shift in our spiritual life occurs and fragments such as these surface, we believe we can remember. But in reality, of course, memory fails us. Too many buildings have fallen down, too much rubble has been heaped up, the moraines and deposits are insuperable.” So even though Swann’s Way is narrated as memory, Proust’s concern feels more centred on how we can move through and perceive the world, on the flow of consciousness — not on how we might recall or fail to recall our lives.
To this end, Proust is wonderful at illuminating areas of our lives in which we sail willingly into the arms of torturous scrutiny. The two main characters, from whose perspectives the book is told, are both racked with lovesickness, though at different stages in life. The to-and-fro of does she love me? will she be at this corner on the street that I know she visits at noon every third Wednesday? when will she confess her love so we can live together in the exact bliss I have imagined, and why is nothing going exactly as I want it? was infuriating because it was so long-winded and yet also gut-wrenchingly real. How many hours has one ever spent wondering if one’s crush feels the same, daydreaming about the future, and then being crushed in turn when it looks like it might not work out? Taylor Swift has spent an entire career. (And, to be honest, All Too Well (10 Minute Version) was playing in my mind the entire time.) I say this not to trivialise Proust but rather to emphasise his timelessness in this respect. I thought Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments a singular work for his unique expression of the figures of the lover and beloved, but found the seeds of these figures and their mentalities already in Proust.
In sum, the highs were high and the lows weren’t great. Proust is at once both dull and thrilling, fun and tedious. Although my enjoyment of this novel was less than I’d hoped it would be, the brilliance of certain passages along with the cultural influence I can feel in many later books I have loved is undeniable. Either that, or I’m remembering incorrectly. I guess that somehow adds up to 4 stars in this ridiculous scoring system, but the truer mark of a text is the amount of time I spend thinking about it afterwards. I think I’ll be chewing on this one a while.