Reading, ignorance

The papacy, people say, counts in centuries, and perhaps never even thinks of counting, because its goal is eternity.¹

 
It has been a pleasure every few months to buy the latest volume in the new translation of À la recherche du temps perdu. I've now read the third, by Peter Bush. The Oxford World's Classics paperbacks are affordable, easy to hold open and, while the typeface is small, it's not too small. Overall, this is the ideal edition for those planning to read Proust in English for the first time and for those wanting to read a translation more faithful to the original than Scott-Moncrieff's, bountiful as it is.

The contents for each volume suggests another reason to recommend, coming as it does with extensive background information. Excluding Proust's titles, the table of contents looks like this:

• General Editors' Preface
• Translator's Note
• Introduction
• Note on the Text 
• Select Bibliography
• A Chronology of Marcel Proust
• Explanatory Notes 

Compare this to the Penguin Classics paperback from the 1980s in which I first read Proust: while The Guermantes Way is 100 pages longer because of the larger typeface, it also includes Cities of the Plain, making it a bulky 1,100 pages.² Also, the table of contents lists (again, in addition to Proust's) only Notes, Addenda and Synopsis, with the notes filling three pages. The new edition has sixty-seven. The reader is directed to each note by an asterisk placed after a word. In a flurry of black snowflakes, there are often several to a page. If some provide detail of Proust's life to align the fiction to his biography, most explain the narrator's allusions, cultural references and the contemporary and historical events mentioned. This includes a veritable Who's Who of the fin de siècle French aristocracy, which is of course almost entirely unfamiliar to modern English readers. 

In two previous posts on the first volumes new translation, I express dismay at the unfamiliarity of the details, which I assumed exposed the shallowness of my first reading.³ In the new translation, Marcel's visit to the barracks at Doncières, his grandmother's decline and death, Albertine's brief visit to his home, his attendance at the salons of Mme de Villeparisis and the Duchesse de Guermantes, and the surprising turn taken in his call on the Baron de Charlus at the very end, are each very clear and memorable, yet almost entirely new to me. And then there is the seismic presence of the Dreyfus Affair splitting high society into two camps, which I do remember. But what did I know of it back then? Perhaps only visions of Steve McQueen in Papillon.

Nearly forty years later then, it was a different experience, a kind of disappointment, in that it was mostly intellectual, if not lacking the usual pleasures of reading, including laughs. In discussing de Charlus' excessive grieving over his late wife, the Princesse de Parme notes that "we sometimes do for the dead what wouldn't have done for the living", with which Mme de Guermantes concurs: "For one thing...we go to their funerals, which we never do for the living!" 

What this meant was that the breadth of space opened in my mind by Proust's long, luscious sentences as rendered, perhaps misleadingly, by Scott-Moncrieff, with, as Julia Kristeva puts it, their "odors, sounds, colors, shapes, tasty delicacies, and tactile pleasures", as well as arcane references proliferating across clause and sub-clause, in which one's thinking turns from a slog into a waltz, was not repeated.⁴ Had my young self been seduced then by the mere flourishes of an arch stylist? If I am appalled at myself for not being more attentive, for seeing the novel not only as a transcendent presence but as a guide to a life to come and the value of art, it is a recognition reflected in Marcel's own journey. I see that now. From a distance, he falls in love with the Duchesse de Guermantes solely on account of her family name only to be disillusioned upon getting to know her and the world she inhabits. We become enchanted with a certain work like In Search of Lost Time and wish to pursue it beyond the covers, perhaps by reading biographies and literary studies, by reading philosophers who influenced its ideas and the novelists inspired by its example or, if that isn't enough, by visiting the writer's house if they're dead or going to hear them talk at a literary festival if they're the living dead. 

What The Guermantes Way makes plain is that much of this research is unsatisfying, a dissatisfaction blurred like the sun seen through oceanic depths of information, and is also why many common readers will struggle with this part of the novel: there are hundreds of pages full of the twitterings of dinner parties, part of what Gilles Deleuze called the narrator's "apprenticeship to signs".⁵ According to him, there are four signs: worldly signs, the signs of love, sensuous signs, and the signs of art. The Guermantes Way offers a prolonged exposure to the first. Worldly signs constitute the language of an in-crowd. Maintaining one's place within it depends on making the right signs.

Nothing funny is said at the Verdurins', and Mme Verdurin does not laugh; but Cottard makes a sign that he is saying something funny, Mme Verdurin makes a sign that she is laughing, and her sign is so perfectly emitted that M. Verdurin, not to be outdone, seeks in his turn for an appropriate mimicry.

Deleuze is referring to another salon here but the signs apply across high society. While these signs are empty, their emptiness nevertheless "confers upon them a ritual perfection" in which everything is clear and known.  The signs of love, by contrast, confer a ritual of anxiety. The loved one "expresses a possible world unknown to us", one that we wish to enter and study with the intensity of a codebreaker. Nothing about the loved one is clear and knowledge is sought with trepidation. We seek facts as a painkiller only for it to turn into a knife under the ribcage, as we remain excluded, even, and especially, when the loved one gives us signs of preference. Thus, "the means we count on to preserve us from jealousy are the very means that develop that jealousy". We see this in serial form across the novel, from Swann's love for Odette, St Loup's for Rachel, and Marcel's for Gilberte and Albertine. The sensuous signs are those that have made In Search of Lost Time famous: the petite madeleine, the loose paving stone, etc. presenting an ecstatic truth without intellectual agency. Beckett guesses there are 12 or 13.

Involuntary memory is explosive, 'an immediate, total and delicious deflagration.' It restores, not mere the past object, but the Lazarus that it charmed or tortured, not merely Lazarus and the object, but more because less, more because it abstracts the useful, the opportune, the accidental, because in its flame it has consumed Habit and all its works, and in its brightness revealed what mock reality of experience never can and never will reveal–the real.⁶

As with the signs of love, they demand interpretation and the signs of art constitute the 'Search' of Proust's title. The goal is to recover time wasted at dinner parties and time lost in love (the 'perdu' of the title can mean lost and wasted). Deleuze notes that the first three types of signs depend on material conditions while art is immaterial. In this way it is not subordinated to the experience of an individual and as such enables us to recognise its place in the plurality of experience. 

If Deleuze's analysis helps us to understand why it is especially challenging to maintain attention throughout The Guermantes Way, it may also help us to appreciate the difference between novels in general and the essential novel. That is, by applying Deleuze's signs to the culture of reading and writing about novels. We can see the critical apparatus given in the Oxford World's Classics edition as the worldly signs of reading novels. They enable us to place the reading experience in the context of literary history, the macro history of the author's time and the micro history of the author's life. They offer knowledge we can use to accommodate our response to the work and express it in public. We can see the overall series as a worldly sign: the edition presents world's classics and everything that phrase implies, acting like the bright pastel colours of supermarket fiction or the gothic filigree of YA Fantasy. Genre fiction makes a sign of pleasure and the reader makes a sign of enjoyment. Both are empty. This is why booklovers claim with an addict's panicked fervour that they devour books. We can also see the worldly signs in the framing of novels in The Guardian newspaper's book coverage.

What then are the signs of love? The stack above of Proust studies and Proust's writings in addition to the novel itself indicate my attempts to interpret the signs given by a reading of Albertine Asleep I heard in 1978 and the beloved beaten-up secondhand copy of volume one of Remembrance of Things Past bought in 1987 for £3:10 (the minutiae of infatuation). The means we seek to get closer to the work may be the very means of increasing distance. A magnificent distance nonetheless. The books to be valued must be those we least understand, and as critics we must seek to undo our understanding.

The sensuous signs of reading are the most difficult to describe. It should consitute the focus of critical response. Gabriel Josipovici spoke of what Proust's novel does that other forms cannot.

I have never wanted to write poetry. So there must be things fiction can do that poetry can't.....This has something to do with time, with how human beings respond to time, with what time does to us, the losses it brings, and the sense of possibilities unrealized, but also the Proustian sense of sudden loops in time and the way our lives are sealed off to us but suddenly, in time, open up momentarily. 

This is close to my own experience of the essential novel. On a summer's day browsing bookshelves, anxious and passing time before a meeting, I picked up Peter Handke's Across and, reading the first line, I felt the dense air evaporate. Time disappeared, replaced in miraculous moment by immaterial time. It's happened since in different ways and in different novels by different authors. One cannot seek them. They cannot be guaranteed. We forget them by losing ourselves in worldly signs. What Proust's example shows us is that we must create our own work, equivalent to In Search of Lost Time however feeble our resources in comparison to his. Weakness in this case should be considered the greatest strength. 

 

Notes

1: from The Guermantes Way. 

2. The title is Scott-Moncrieff's bowdlerised version of Sodom and Gomorrah. Proust's original title is restored in the Oxford World's Classics edition translated by Helen Constantine, published in June 2026.

3.  The Swann Way and In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom respectively.  

4. In Time & Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, translated by Ross Guberman. 

5. In Proust & Signs, translated by Richard Howard. 

6. In Proust by Samuel Beckett.

 

Reading, forgetting

When John Updike read À la recherche du temps perdu after having read Scott-Moncrieff's translation, he was surprised to find Proust less Proustian, the epithet we associate with flowery prose blossoming over prodigious sentences proliferating clause within clause. While I cannot read French, this was also my experience of reading the new translations, first The Swann Way by Brian Nelson and now In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom by Charlotte Mandell. In the glow of remembering the experience of reading Within a Budding Grove, the prose of the new translation is noticebly less ornate, one might say more colloquial, at least at arm's length from the decadence of fin de siècle France, an impression created perhaps by Scott-Moncrieff's grandiloquence. This worried me, as I've often described Proust to those who haven't read the novel as mind-expanding; one begins to follow thoughts into their depths of variation and reversal, suggesting that the recognition and interpretation of the signs of the world offers more to life than a novel's notable events, and I wondered if the overripe vocabulary and unusually generous size of the original typeface had something to do with this. With the new translations, one is sobered up enough from Scott-Moncrieff-intoxication to draw alongside Marcel the man himself, realising only too painfully one has failed to heed the lessons in love he presents with such eloquence and precision. With some shame, the reader comes to identify with Swann and Marcel.

In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom is a novel written in shade and sunlight. In the first part, Marcel's frustrated love for Swann's daughter Gilberte is given a long post-mortem, much as The Swann Way is a post-mortem for Swann's jealous love for Gilberte's mother Odette, while in the second Marcel has moved on from Gilberte and is spending Summer in a high-end hotel in Balbec on the Normandy coast. There he becomes infatuated with a "little band" of teenage girls he sees cycling around the resort, getting up to minor mischief. He describes their clothes and features lit by sunlight brightened by the sea, trying to discern their secrets, longing to get closer. Each day is charged by the thrill of catching a glimpse. The evocation of teenage kicks is hard to beat, provoking memories and melancholy shared by the reader.

It comes so quickly, the time when you have nothing left to look forward to, when your body is fixed in a state of immobility that promises no more surprises, when you lose all hope at the sight of faces that are still young framed by hair that's falling out or growing grey, like a tree in full summer with leaves that are already dead; it is so short, this radiant morning, that one comes to love only very young girls, the ones in whom the flesh, like a precious dough, is still rising. They are nothing but a pliable flow of matter, constantly moulded by whatever passing impression dominates them at the time. 

Back at the hotel, the family becomes acquainted with the painter Elstir who, impressed by Marcel, invites him to his studio, but Marcel keeps putting it off because he cannot bear to miss an opportunity to spot the little band. This proves to be an error.

It is decades since my reading of Terence Kilmartin's revision of Scott-Moncrieff's Remembrance of Things Past and then Penguin's retitled re-translation, and I was alarmed by how much detail was unfamiliar; I had forgotten entirely Madame Swann's little salon, and images of train journeys, visits to Elstir's studio and sightings of the little band were only vague. What I do remember very clearly is fresh air and brilliant light, as if the novel itself is a holiday in the sun. While this exposes dilettantish tendencies, it may be fairer to compare the condition to the narrator's experience of enchantment with the group of girls. Likewise, we are enchanted by certain books and, like Marcel, we can be "profoundly surprised" each time we are in their presence, which in his case he puts down to "the multiplicity of each individual" compared to when "we are left alone with the arbitrary simplicity of our memory". Our relationship to a book can also follow the via dolorosa of disenchantment and Marcel's post-mortem commentary bulks out that path, accessorising what is otherwise an unremarkable story, so perhaps I had become jaded over the decades. Except, commentary does not constitute forgotten detail, as the winding sentences unconsciously nourish the growth of the reader's quality of perception, acting at a crude level like a prose exposition of a poem or to the summary of a dream minus the purity of its experience. Purity shines like the Balbec sun. 

Seeking to recover the dream, to give the purity of the experience a presence we might hold and share, we turn to plot summaries, biographies, scholarly monographs, documentaries, film adaptations, even blog posts, leaving us in a state of literary insomnia comparable to a night in the hotel in which an exhausted Marcel tosses and turns in bed, kept awake by the dread of sleeplessness.

All of a sudden I did fall asleep; I fell into that deep sleep that opens up for us a return to childhood, the rediscovery of years past and emotions once felt, disincarnation, the transmigration of souls, the recollection of the dead, the illusions of madness, regression to the most primitive forms of nature (for it's said we often see animals in our dreams, but we forget that, almost always when we dream, we ourselves are animals deprived of the rationality that projects the light of certainty onto things; on the contrary, all we can direct at the spectacle of life is an uncertain gaze constantly being obliterated by forgetfulness, each reality vanishing before the next takes its place like the ever-shifting projection of a magic lantern as the slides are changed) all these mysteries we think we don't know but into which we are actually initiated almost every night, just as we're introduced to the other great mystery of annihilation and resurrection. 

The places to which we are taken in this passage and the music in Charlotte Mandell's beautifully invisible translation is reminiscent of the unrelenting procession of the dreams of which it speaks, and in this we might recognise that literature is, like dream, in excess of the world. We cannot access its mysteries by day.  

Blanchot notes that modern literature has "a preoccupation with a profoundly continuous speech" giving rise "with Lautréamont, with Proust, then with surrealism, then with Joyce...to works that were manifestly scandalous". Scandalous not because of the content but because an "excess of continuity unsettles the reader, and unsettles the reader's habits of regular comprehension". Again, like dreaming. The excess of continuity draws us close to what is discontinuous of habitual life, to what remains stubbornly unfamiliar and yet into which we are initiated in certain books, the axe-books Kafka said we needed. This may in turn explain why novelists like Beckett and Bernhard, as different from Proust as one can imagine, are nevertheless closer companions than those who write regular novels of time and memory. If we compare this to Heidegger's claim that the measure of a great poet is to the extent they are able to commit to "one single poetic statement", a statement that is not explicit, we can appreciate that such continuousness is the outpouring of what cannot be stated and that our attachment to a particular book is not something we can properly articulate without becoming novelists ourselves. Marcel recognises this once he is initiated into friendship with the little band:

It was on them that my thoughts contentedly dwelled when I thought I was thinking of something else, or of nothing. But when, even without realizing it, I thought of them, at an even deeper level of unconsciousness they were the hilly blue undulations of the sea, a procession silhouetted against the sea. It was the sea I was hoping to find again, if I went to some town where they might be. The most exclusive love for a person is always love for something else.  

To discover something else, we might ask: how can we sleep? This may be the question for the literature of our time.

Note

In Proust Regained, I wrote about Brian Nelson's translation The Swann Way and included links to other posts of mine on Proust and In Search of Lost Time.

On the Calculation of Volume 1 by Solvej Balle

The premise of this multi-volume novel is simple: a modern-day French woman called Tara finds herself stuck inside the eighteenth day of a November. The nineteenth never appears. On the 121st iteration of the same day she begins to write by describing the sounds made by her husband Thomas as he moves around upstairs. The same moves, the same noises every day. A simple premise and very promising, but very difficult to turn into a compelling narrative. If everything she sees and hears is going to be the same from one day to the next, variation or resolution can only undermine the conceit, making the novel the diary of an anecdote, essentially a ghost story,¹ but if there is no variation or resolution, boredom and impatience are inevitable. And the novel is indeed fascinating and frustrating in equal measure, as the premise gives the reader an existential thrill imagining what such a condition might entail while also wondering how the constraint on the story will develop, and perhaps even resolve, but frustrating because there are only so many meditations on a regular day one can read.

The novel is filled out with Tara's precise observations of her surroundings and descriptions of the events leading up to the "rift in time", a level-headed attention suggested by the title, all of which may be interesting in context, but not otherwise. However, any longueurs are mitigated when, longing for a world in which time passes, she tries to reach the nineteenth. She interrupts Thomas' routine and explains the situation in the hope that he will be able to lead her into the next day, but by morning he has to be told all over again. However, this does have its unique joys:

We woke in the morning, we went for walks, we sat down and had coffee somewhere on the eighteenth of November. For most of the day as intimately aware of one another as couples in the first flush of love or nearsighted creatures. We made the horizon vanish. We sought this giddy feeling. The distance between us was dispelled in the fog. We made the giddiness a part of our day. Created a bright space out of dazed, gray confusion.

The reader nevertheless is impatient for a resolution and spins the hands of the clock forward enabled by the smooth translation of Balle's uncluttered prose, only to discover on closing the book that there is a serenity in the stability of Tara's infinite crisis, and now that serenity is gone. This may be why there are several more volumes ahead, just as there is always another day ahead.

Translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland

Part one of On the Calculation of Volume has been reviewed widely and made the International Booker Prize shortlist and came top of the Shadow Panel's vote.² While many of the reviews place the novel within a generic tradition and cite one of the most famous novels about time as a literary predecessor, not one review that I've found recognises the significance of the apparently random date chosen for Tara to explore. Had they wondered why a Danish author chose to write a multi-volume novel about time from the perspective of a French woman, they may have discovered that the eighteenth of November is the day in 1922 on which the author of À la recherche du temps perdu died.³ There are other parallels, albeit travelling in the opposite direction: Tara's experience at the beginning of the rift is a neat inversion of Proust's narrator at the beginning of that novel: each morning he wakes in uncertainty to reconstruct reality from forgetful sleep, while she wakes to a sense of peace as the normality of another morning appears, only for its normality to dissolve. And when she tells Thomas everything and they stay awake all night hoping the nineteenth will appear in an entirely new dawn, a sudden imperceptible loss of concentration leads to him losing the memory of the day, a moment that reverses Proust's famous instants.

Perhaps then this is a novel written from the end of time, from the blank space of death or, less morbidly, from eternity. For Nietzsche, eternity is precisely the revelation of time. This is Tara's revelation. In the face of relentless change, the serene stability of the novel is the ideal form to enable an experience of time in relation to the horizon of eternity. This may explain why the rise of the novel coincided with the decline of faith and the disenchantment of the world. If poetry is the gift of eternity and the novel the gift of time, the novels of Proust and Solvej Balle seek to merge both in the flow of imagination and reality.⁴

 

^Notes 

1. David Lowery's movie A Ghost Story springs to mind here. A dead husband haunts the house he shared with his wife and watches from afar.↩

2. See the Booker Prize website and the Shadow Panel's Substack report. The latter tends to more reliable in purely literary terms as it's not driven by corporate demands.↩

3. A letter to the TLS mentions it in response to a review, but most is behind the paywall so I can't credit the correspondent for also being a clever clogs.↩

4. There is another connection, not film or book related. In the thinking of the experience of the same day and the fog obscuring the movement from one day to the next, I remembered seeing J Mascis and the Fog perform the song Sameday live in Brighton many years ago. The Fog that night featured Mike Watt of Minutemen (and later the underrated fIREHOSE) and Ron Asheton of The Stooges.

   ↩

Proust regained

I recommend very highly for anyone who has read or not read In Search of Lost Time Brian Nelson's The Swann Way, the first volume in a new translation of the entire novel by diverse hands, in this fine and very affordable paperback from Oxford World's Classics. His translation of the chapter Swann in Love, a novel in itself more or less, was published separately in 2017, so this edition includes Combray and Place Names: The Name. 

This is the fourth translation of Du côté de chez Swann following Scott Moncrieff/Kilmartin, James Grieve's, and Lydia Davis', and the third version of the title. It's a pity (no doubt for publishing reasons) they can't all be Swann's Way, as the flow of the two esses and double double-u into the final wye has the mellifluous quality of Proust's prose.

I don't have any French (not since the ransom was paid anyway), so I can't judge it as a translation, but reading this version was like rediscovering Proust, puffing away the dust of Great Literature. I found the narrative clearer, the scenes funnier, the characters more distinctive – Aunt Léonie, Dr Cottard, Swann and Odette in particular – and the existential pressure of perception closer to the surface. And Proust's study of Swann's jealousy – "the shadow of his love" for Odette – is simply breathtaking.

Over the years I've written about Proust, most of it (like this) bookchat ephemera, but here, bar the final one, is a short list of longer, more in-depth posts:

Extratemporal meditations, on Miguel de Beistegui's Proust as Philosopher.

Encountering the fabulous point, indirectly on Józef Czapski's Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp.

When now? on Gerard Genette's Narrative Discourse. 

Can there be a pure narrative? is also the question opening Blanchot's essay The Experience of Proust, not included in selected bibliography for The Swann Way despite it being undoubtedly the best essay on Proust's novel and especially surprising given Brian Nelson edited Leslie Hill's After Blanchot.

Perhaps most enjoyably, Albertine Asleep, my recording of a reading of a passage from The Captive broadcast in the early hours of the morning on the BBC World Service in 1978 that marks my discovery of Proust. It also includes the word mellifluous. 

And talking of my discovery of Proust: a few years after the radio broadcast, I watched the Channel 4 series The Modern World: Ten Great Writers, which also had a huge impact on me, if only then of atmosphere. In the episode below Terence Kilmartin says that Proust is the most intelligent man who ever wrote a novel (obviously, this was long before Tony Parsons). The episode also features Michel Butor.

Finally, if we needed a guarantee of equal quality for the second volume, Charlotte Mandell's name would be enough, and the good news is that I understand her translation is due in 2024 [update: March 2025. I have now written about volume two].

“Can there be a pure narrative?”

The question opening Maurice Blanchot’s essay The Experience of Proust* has always drawn me back, not to secure a yes or a no, but to keep the question of pure narrative open in its initial uncertainty, perhaps, rather, in its impossibility, as it appears to make reading and writing more vital, more promising, to me at least, than the forms and issues that keep book reviewers and literary critics spinning like whirling Dervishes before a God long since disappeared. This is an attempt to understand why.

First of all, what could pure mean this context? In the very next sentence, Blanchot writes "Every narrative seeks to hide itself in novelistic density, even if only out of discretion", which implies that pure narrative is narrative in itself – perhaps its Platonic form – but that would mean every narrative is pure until the writer begins to write; a form without content, which doesn't make much sense. Gérard Genette's study quoted at length in my previous post, itself seeking answers via Proust, may help here, as it begins by offering three definitions of narrative: 

• A statement telling of an event or series of events 
• The totality of actions and situations subject to such a statement 
• The act of narrating taken in itself
  

Two are familiar in regular novel reviews (We are taken from Europe to Persia during the political upheavals of the interwar years) while the third prompts the image of an orator reciting the Iliad before an audience, which is why Genette notes that this is the oldest definition and, we might assume, the purest. But there can be no degrees of purity here, and 'act' is a verb rather than an adjective, so the question remains open.

Blanchot essays seeks to understand why the possibility of a pure narrative led Proust, otherwise “so desirous of making books and of being thought of as a writer”, to put a 750-page novel in the drawer and yet hurry to publish Les plaisirs et les jours, a comparatively insubstantial volume of short pieces not likely to make much of an impression – an apparent perversity similar to Kafka publishing Betrachtung that alone would never have led to the word Kafkaesque; a decision all the more curious because Jean Santeuil has so much in common with the novel that gave us the word Proustian: a long and detailed account of the life of a fin-de-siècle upper-class Frenchman that not only begins with the seven-year-old Jean anxiously seeking his mother's goodnight kiss but also descriptions of the famous instants and what they suggest:

Could it be that beauty and joy for the poet resides in an invisible substance which may perhaps be called imagination, which cannot work direct on immediate reality, nor yet on past reality deliberately remembered, but hovers only over past reality caught up and enshrined in the reality now present? It is as though before the eye which sees it now and saw it long ago, there floats divine imagination, which is perhaps the source of all our joy, something that we find in books, but only with the utmost difficulty in things around us. [...]

And is it not more beautiful we wonder, that the imagination, which neither the present nor the past could put into communication with life and so save from oblivion and the misinterpretation of thought and unhappy memories, the varied, individual essences of life—trains and hotel rooms, the fragrance of roses, the taste of stewed fruit, washrooms and roads from which we can look at the sea while, as it were, travelling elegantly in a carriage—is it not more beautiful that in the sudden leap which follows on the impact between an identical past and present, the imagination should thus be freed from time? For the pleasure of that experience is a sure sign of its superiority, and in it I have always put such trust that I write nothing of what I see, nothing at which I arrive by a process of reasoning, or of what I have remembered in the ordinary sense of remembering, but only of what the past brings suddenly to life in a smell, in a sight, in what has, as it were, exploded within me and set the imagination quivering, so that the accompanying joy stirs me to inspiration.
                                                                                               [Translated by Gerard Hopkins]

Pure narrative then would be the divine imagination. But, as these passages show, the problem for Proust is that these transports are presented as moments of reflection and speculation alongside the narrative rather than its divinely guided principle. The instants are neutralised, set beyond the linear progress of Jean Santeuil's life, betraying its inspiration. This is one side of the "experience" referred to in Blanchot's title: the disappointment in writing by a process of reasoning outside of divine imagination – the other side, I presume, being the experience of the instants. If published, he says, "Proust would have been lost". A disconcerting thought given how easy it would have been for Proust to have settled on what he had produced. Jean Santeuil would have become only another grain of sand in the desert of regular novels, with the events of Jean's life comprising "ordinary novelistic material" with the occasional philosophical interlude we have just read; events that are certainly beautifully written and moving to read but soon indistinguishable from other novels with yet more beautiful writing, more interludes, and more moving events borne on the desert winds. A desert may have its own majesty, but it relies on death for its power, which in terms of biographies and regular novels is its submission to a conclusion towards which as readers we hurry, invariably construing the compulsion as pure pleasure rather than as despair.

Instead, Proust needed to write a novel in which death is suspended and neutralised. As Jean Santeuil suggests above, this demanded a novel "without any other matter than the essential"; a novel, in Blanchot's desert-contrasting simile, "made only of those points from which it is formed, like the sky where apart from the stars there is only emptiness". What form might such a novel take?

Blanchot notes that Impressionism, a movement Proust admired in the visual arts, gave him a model. If had he followed the example, however, he would likely have produced a short novel we might now call poetic; appealing for its potential for cystalline beauty and the shining of something intangible absent in more garrulous novels, but one that soon palls as one stalls over yet another fussily worded sentence (see much-lauded "very experimental" writers). Instead, of course, he produced one the longest novels ever published. Pure narrative as Proust conceived it had to be abandoned. But he found a way to justify the abandonment:

He discovered something about the space of the work that had to carry all the powers of duration at once, that had also to be nothing but the movement of the work toward itself and the authentic search for its origin, that had, finally, to be the place of the imagination.

Pure narrative would then be the origin of narrative – the experience of pure time in Proust's case, accessible in the space of the imagination. Blanchot says that Proust came to think of this space as having the essence of a sphere engorged with the impurities of "novelistic density", with the instants passing from buried centre to the bright surface, revealing the origin in "joyful flashes of lightning". By filling the emptiness of the sphere with the material we're familiar with from this and other novels, Proust created a turning world in which what on the surface appears settled only for the instants to disrupt and rewrite memory. We can see this from the very beginning as Marcel emerges from sleep and struggles to recall where he is. Everything around him that was immobile in wakeful hours revolves around him in the darkness – "things, places, years" – so that he has to form and re-evaluate his reality each morning, creating "a song of possibilities" suppressed by habit. It differs from "the unreality of a scintillating space" of purely imagined novels because it is a world very close to Proust's own life, except this is not a roman à clef requiring a biographer to tease out the connections to give us the truth behind the novel but one in which the narrative "happens as if it were fortunately superimposed onto the journey of his actual life". This is the best way to appreciate In Search of Lost Time as a novel: a form in which every apparent truth and every event is subject to re-evaluation as the sphere revolves. By superimposing its revolutions onto the movement of an actual life, it implicates the reader's own life and the potential for uncovering possibilities otherwise buried in their life.

In the one life there are many lives. Alternative lives. Some are lived and others imagined. That is the absurdity of biographies, he would say, of novels. They never take account of the alternative lives casting their shadows over us as we move slowly, as though in a dream, from birth to maturity to death. 

This passage from Gabriel Josipovici's 120-page novel The Cemetery in Barnes is, despite its length, very much in the Proustian tradition of countering the habits into which novels can fall. Our "actual life" can often become a worn-out genre.

Blanchot ends his essay on what Proust produced to erase the memory of Jean Santeuil with another passage that also draws me back to ponder its implications:

There is...something indescribably wonderful in this piece of writing, which has been brought back to daylight and which shows us how the greatest writers are threatened and how much energy, inertia, inactivity, attention, and distraction are needed to go to the end of what proposes itself to them.

Does Proust count as one of Blanchot's "greatest writers" not because (or not only because) of his uniquely beautiful style – "this style of slow curves, of fluid heaviness, of transparent density, always in movement, wonderfully made to express the infinitely varied rhythm of voluminous gyration" – but because he was able to resist generic form despite being a master of it and, instead, in a combination of contradictions, follow the truth and logic of his inspiration – that which interrupts regular narrative and appears, bizarrely, to redeem a life otherwise wasted or lost – in contrast to those who build a foundation on habit and expectation, thereby finding an all-purpose literary alibi?

This is why I am drawn back. The essay on Proust confirms Timothy Clark's statement that Blanchot "offers what is surely the fullest, least idealizing and most detailed theory of inspiration in Western literature" in which the "Romantic tradition of attempting to appropriate inspiration as form of human power may be said to come to an end", as "inspiration finds its provenance outside or beyond the consciousness of the writer"; the outside or beyond coming from "both the emerging work itself and, literally, nowhere".

"Nowhere" may be pure narrative, the centre of the sphere; a less joyful version Proust's experience of pure time; "the giant murmuring upon which language opens" as Blanchot characterises it in The Space of Literature, "and thus becomes image, becomes imaginary, becomes a speaking depth, an indistinct plenitude which is empty". This alternative rendering of pure narrative helps me to understand my ambivalent relationship with narrative content, or at least with the sphere of contemporary literature as it bloats into an ever-expanding universe of love and loss so large no privileged instant can penetrate its happy and virtuous surface, and yearn instead for an acultural, ahistorical writing that puts everything into question, including itself. Except Blanchot's Proust confirms my undue haste, as this may require a paradoxical indulgence in both culture and history (which may also justify my advocacy for Knausgaard's struggle). Clark again:

The demand made by the work on the writer is...less to instrumentalize language in a certain way, than, suppressing the urge to personal expression, to impose a certain silence, form or limit upon that 'giant murmuring'.

If I have written my own Jean Santeuil, I have at least the ability to abandon it, although I did hurry to publish my own Les plaisirs et les jour. Yes, it has its moments, I think, and then realise that of course Proust’s novel has its moments too, and look what he made of them. 

 

*The Experience of Proust can be found in The Book to Come translated by Charlotte Mandell

"When now?"

Out of curiosity, I read a few novels that over the last year have received the highest praise on social media and literary podcasts, and have appeared multiple times in newspaper Books of the Year choices and on prize shortlists, and one that even won a prize. I wanted to see what industry and independent opinion considers the very best of contemporary literature written in English, and was surprised to discover there was nothing special or distinct about them; nothing at all. What, I wondered, had thrilled others while, after thirty or so pages of patient reading, my eyes began to drift over words, sentences, and then whole pages? Once again, eleven years on, I asked myself: do you really have an interest in novels?

I soon recognised it had nothing to do with the stories or the humour, passion, skill and intelligence with which they were told, each of which appears to be what draws the high praise, and no doubt deserved for these reasons, but instead the relentless temporal stability in the clear, taken-as-axiomatic delineation between the narration and what is narrated. It helped me to recognise that the foregrounding of the relation between the two is a key factor in what stirs me when reading novels: Dante in the Vita Nuova, for example, if we can overlook the generic uncertainty for a moment, moving between the time of writing and the lost time of a living Beatrice "so mercury jumps like a spark" (as Charles Singleton describes it), or simply the clause in "A quarter of a century, or a day, has passed since I arrived in Jesenice on the trail of my missing brother", the opening line of Peter Handke's Repetition. While this may appear to be a small point, a matter of taste like a demand for realistic dialogue or "relatable" characters, I think it has implications for what fiction can offer and why so many contemporary novels written in English, whether the content relates to current affairs and thereby becomes "as real-time as novels get" (a line used in a recent review), suggesting urgency and the potential for real-world awareness, or is deemed experimental and worthy of our attention and admiration because of the unfortunate cultural prestige this term has developed, nevertheless remain, to me, inert.

To explain why, it may to help to look at an excessive example from Narrative Discourse, Gérard Genette's analysis of the temporal structure of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past which, in Scott Moncrieff’s translation of the title, has become an alibi for wistful nostalgia in the simple delineation of event and its confident narration. Instead, in a single passage, labelled alphabetically in this passage from Sodom and Gomorrah, he finds fifteen narrative sections:

(A) Swann now found equally intelligent anybody who was of his opinion, his old friend the Prince de Guermantes and my schoolfellow Bloch, (B) whom previously he had avoided (C) and whom he now invited to luncheon. (D) Swann interested Bloch greatly by telling him that the Prince de Guermantes was a Dreyfusard. "We must ask him to sign our appeal for Picquart; a name like his would have a tremendous effect." But Swann, blending with his ardent conviction as an Israelite the diplomatic moderation of a man of the world, (E) whose habits he had too thoroughly acquired (F) to be able to shed them at this late hour, refused to allow Bloch to send the Prince a circular to sign, even on his own initiative. "He cannot do such a thing, we must not expect the impossible," Swann repeated. "There you have a charming man who has travelled thousands of miles to come over to our side. He can be very useful to us. If he were to sign your list, he would simply be compromising himself with his own people, would be made to suffer on our account, might even repent of his confidences and not confide in us again." Nor was this all, Swann refused his own signature. He felt that his name was too Hebraic not to create a bad effect. Besides, even if he approved of all the attempts to secure a fresh trial, he did not wish to be mixed up in any way in the antimilitarist campaign. He wore, (G) a thing he had never done previously, the decoration (H) he had won as a young militiaman, in '70, (I) and added a codicil to his will asking that, (J) contrary to his previous dispositions, (K) he might be buried with the military honours due to his rank as Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. A request which assembled round the church of Combray a whole squadron of (L) those troopers over whose fate Françoise used to weep in days gone by, when she envisaged (M) the prospect of a war. (N) In short, Swann refused to sign Bloch's circular, with the result that, if he passed in the eyes of many people as a fanatical Dreyfusard, my friend found him lukewarm, infected with Nationalism, and a militarist. (O) Swann left me without shaking hands so as not to be forced into a general leave-taking.

Which he then aligns with nine temporal positions labelled this time with numbers:

(1) the war of 1870; (2) Marcel's childhood in Combray; (3) a time before the Guermantes soirée; (4) the Guermantes soirée, which we can place in 1898; (5) the invitation to Bloch (necessarily later than this soirée, from which Bloch is absent); (6) the Swann-Bloch luncheon; (7) the addition of the codicil; (8) Swann's funeral; (9) the war whose prospect Françoise envisaged and which, strictly speaking, occupies no definite position, since it is purely hypothetical, but which—in order to place it in time and simplify things—we may identify with the war of 1914-18. The formula of positions is then the following: 

A4-B3-C5-D6-E3-F6-G3-H1-I7-J3-K8-L2-M9-N6-O4

While this provides riches for those wishing to analyse the technical features of narration, such as the separation between an event and its narration, it obscures what presents itself in the separation, whose presence intrigues and stirs me especially when it is becomes a factor in narration, as it does across the expanse of In Search of Lost Time. The presence of the first is very familiar to readers and is indeed what we long for when opening a novel and reading the first line, yet is invariably camouflaged by all kinds of alibis, excuses and mitigations of which Proust's is an ideal example, as it contains the density of detail in its storytelling we expect from any great novel of society, enabling the reader seeking to instrumentalise the purely superfluous pleasure of reading for technical, cultural and sociological advantage. And yet it is also the poorest example, as we can also find in Proust that which Walter Benjamin recognised as "the rudiments of an enduring idealism". The reason why it is more than any great novel of society is its revelation of time, the famous instants in which time is erased, or, rather, in which time is transfigured in its erasure. 

What presents itself then is the question of the time in which the narration of the novel takes place, and which the example above begs an answer. It's a deceptively simple question with an equally deceptive answer: the time the writer is writing on the page. But in taking this answer for granted, we reveal to ourselves that what we demand of a book is an effacement of this time, which also means an effacement of the author. The regular fussing we see in reviews and social media over genre designations and features is a classic example of how narration is not in possession of the author but partakes of something shared; something outside of the jurisdiction of any single reader or writer no matter how much we try to anchor this outside by celebrating a particular author for their "genius". This is why writers prefer to dislodge such praise because they recognise more than anyone that the work is not their own. 

So if in repeating the first two questions opening The Unnamable, Maurice Blanchot asks of the narrator of Samuel Beckett's books "Where now? Who now?", we can ask the third of the narrator of In Search of Lost Time: "When now?". And if Blanchot answers the second question with the neutral, we can answer the third with eternity, if we understand the eternal not as the absence of time but time in its pure state, which is how Nietzsche's eternal recurrence has also been interpreted, a conception which itself presents an intriguing parallel to what is most familiar to us in the effacement of the separation of event and its narration. Indeed, it is what we long for when opening a novel: the unchanging, consoling content, stories recurring each time they are read, perhaps even without being read but recognised as recurring inside the covers lined up before us on a shelf, the awareness of which excites and inspires us with the promise of an escape from the ravages of real time while, at the same time, threatening a profound melancholy in the awareness of the remove of pure time, hence throwing anchors into the deep.

The ability to arouse excitement and alleviate despair forgives the recent novels, their writers and those who believe they are very best of our time and following a great tradition, as they maintain trust in the dissimulation necessary for novels to keep writers writing and for publishers to keep publishing. Despite this, I think of Erich Heller's description of Kafka's The Castle as "a terminus of soul and mind, a non plus ultra of existence" and compare it with Jean Cocteau's recognition that Proust, writing at the same time as Kafka, was on a "blind, senseless, obsessive quest for happiness", and wonder if there are novels being written and published now subject to what presents itself in the time of narrative, whether understood as a terminus or as the possibility of happiness. Is such literature still possible?

Albertine Asleep

For a short time, I stayed up most of the night. In the long summer months between years at school, there was no all-night radio let alone all-night television. Instead I would listen to the BBC World Service on unreliable Medium Wave reception. One night around two in the morning, an actor with a mellifluous voice read an extract from what I now know as Swann's Way. This was before Terence Kilmartin had updated Scott Moncrieff's original translation.

Next day, as I played football in the local park, I told my friends of this book that spent half an hour to describe someone (Swann) ringing a doorbell. Inside, however, my amused tone was tempered. Secretly, I was impressed. The following week there was an extract from another part of the novel, of which I have no memory, and in the third and final week, he read the section known as Albertine Asleep (which Anne Carson has had some fun with recently). And I taped it. The tape still exists.

Extratemporal meditations: Proust as Philosopher: the art of metaphor by Miguel de Beistegui

We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns
That fall upon it out of the wind. *

Since its publication three years ago, David Shields' manifesto Reality Hunger has helped focus my thoughts on writing: why it still matters, why anyone should still read or write beyond daily utility. That is, the premise of the title and the author's brief commentary has helped rather than the pinched miscellany of the book's content. In fact, to renew that help I need go no further than the very first line, written by the compiler before he expresses his celebrated disillusionment with the routine gestures of contemporary fiction:  

Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art.

Let us pause before prose so rich in cliché and poor in soul.

At first I questioned the assumptions embedded in this line and then presented miscellaneous examples indicating that the hunger is not for reality as such and that Shields' disillusion is the dismal light shining through the twin cataracts of modernity – journalism and scientific positivism – both impermeable to deep history, philosophy, theology and art. Reality Hunger is thereby the literary correlate of New Atheism, a displacement of monotheism mitigated only by its failure to attract the heresiographers infecting the latter phenomenon (though this might be coming to an end).

It has to be said my efforts to resist outweigh anything a refutation might bring forth, no matter how fine the examples. They are untimely. Despite Reality Hunger comprising quotations and brief reflections that might have easily fallen into a Tumblr void, it commands influence precisely because it is a book. The form of a book, any book, transcends the sum of its contents by appealing to a coherent unity and the promised land of truth. The title is that unity. Corporate journalists found the premise congenial of course and the common reader was thereby tuned in to the buzz. A student correspondent of mine reported "energised" discussions on the library steps as his fellows passed the book around; after all, the food metaphor of writing's relation to the world is a tasty, bite-sized morsel.

This power to influence so many with what is effectively a literary gesture is intriguing because Reality Hunger relies on an apparent contradiction more or less identical to that of New Atheism. Implicit in both is a suppressed relation to its zone and manner of expression. In both, radical materialism is demanded from the immaterial space of mind and word, with expression demanding an a priori sufferance of the contradiction. For example, Shields pursues without irony the non-book in the one form that provides an aura of weight and promise to the demand (i.e. the Book). You may say this is a mere point of order perhaps, one casually set aside as one reads and thinks in pursuit of worldly answers to worldly concerns, and easily dismissed as a product of art-for-art's sake aestheticism or ignorant of recent theories of consciousness. Except the point remains because of how these responses are expressed; the light of consciousness does not illuminate itself.

What all this reveals is that the ancient objection to writing remains embedded in western literary culture. In the Phaedrus, Plato reports how Socrates compared written language to figurative painting, impersonal and with no guarantee of a living speaker.

The productions of painting look like living beings, but if you ask them a question they maintain a solemn silence. The same holds true of written words; you might suppose that they understand what they are saying, but if you ask them what they mean by anything they simply return the same answer over and over again.

Writing is thereby aligned to the uncanny authority of sacred places and objects. Both refer to an existence more original than themselves yet all the while pronouncing on the most pressing issues of everyday life, thereby posing problems for those promoting faith in reason and realism. The original has no presence. The premise of Reality Hunger merely echoes Socrates' anxiety about the silence of writing and, moreover, what provides Shields' solution is the same too – a physical guarantee. The cultural phenomenon we are witnessing is the laboured repetition of an attempt to reconcile our expectations with profound uncertainty.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves. **

This is why I keep returning to Reality Hunger. Like any obsessive oppositional stance, it is too close for comfort. I share Shields' disillusionment with contemporary literary fiction, especially its ossification into a Booker-winning genre. The difference is that while Shields recommends that novels seek "deliberate unartiness" and include "raw material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered", I believe the only way to go is through literature, by becoming apparently more literary, to provoke perhaps even more anxiety, which is why the books I've written about in the last few years confront the remove of writing within the work itself, a risk invariably condemned by conservative critics as self-indulgent theorising.

So what we appear to have is competition between demands differing on mere matters of taste. However, I know my shudder over for the first line of Reality Hunger quoted above is more than a connoisseur's disdain for commonplace phrases and metaphors; sentences affect my experience of the world. Beginning of time, figure out, what the artist thinks – these are cold, shallow words evoking a cold, shallow world. And while this may seem unduly subjective and impressionistic, Socrates' objection to writing suggests a deeper reason, something fundamental to the impulse to read and write and the paradoxical gifts of the novel. What recommends itself then is an alternative model for the relation of writing to the world.

Miguel de Beistegui's book Proust as Philosopher offers just that. Set aside the dry title for now. It is an unfortunate consequence of the title of the French original, Jouissance de Proust. A literal translation – The Joy of Proust – conjures an image of a bearded man grappling sweatily with a curvaceous fountain pen, and those involved were right to reconsider the title. However, jouissance is key because for Proust's narrator the proper search is for a relation to reality that might enable essential knowledge and genuine happiness, even.

The book begins by outlining the fundamental problem of Marcel's life, which may seem familiar: a present of disappointment, frustration and suffering with a future of profundity and joy promised in the form of romantic love, great art and the natural world. When fulfilment appears imminent, disappointment, frustration and suffering remain, only in different forms: the object of his love provokes intense jealousy, what he understood as great art fails to lead him into the world of truth he had awaited so keenly, and the beautiful, fragrant hawthorn bushes he adores give him asthma attacks. Worse, when he wants to requite this condition by producing a work of "infinite philosophical meaning", everything he writes, whether richly imaginative or solidly realistic, dies on the page.

In Search of Lost Time takes its form in the revelation that a key reason for such a condition is that Marcel neglected to include the failure of infinite philosophical meaning as part of infinite philosophical meaning. Fantastic and realistic modes of creativity are both provisional, merely epiphenomenal, and always trumped by solitude and the external world. Once Marcel begins to explore and animate the space opened by experience and the expectations it refuses to fulfil then a different world begins to unfurl and, what's more, enables him to write something of infinite philosophical meaning. The exploration is embodied in the opening scene of the novel as Marcel wakes up and negotiates the boundary between dream and reality, much like Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis. Waking to change then becomes a constant.

De Beistegui presents Marcel's discovery in philosophical terms: there is a lack at the heart of being – "an ontological deficiency" – that is original and fundamental to the structure of experience. The actual world escapes us because such distance is constitutive of human experience, with the real being "its very own self-absence". What Marcel experiences as hunger are the signals of what lies beyond this condition. The epiphanic moments we all know from the petite madeleine episode enable Marcel to realise his unhappiness is a form of inattention to these signals and impatience to grasp what they indicate. The signals correspond to a unity much like rhymes in a poem and the deficiency can be redeemed only by attention to rhymes across time and space. What made Marcel unhappy were the attempts to fill the lack by "a strategy of compensation"  – physical possession, genre craft or Dionysian indulgence – or by "recapturing or reproducing the 'thing' that's lacking" – reality, realism. Joy is possible only in searching for the enchanted experience of time's absence, as presented in the book we are reading, which takes time.

De Beistegui follows Maurice Blanchot in the uncontroversial claim that the main subject of In Search of Lost Time is the possibility of writing, but offers a less hazardous reason. While for Blanchot writing is situated in the lack and the novel's content is a translucent density penetrated very occasionally by rapturous singularities that make such density possible, for de Beistegui writing is a means of seeing reality differently. It "transfigures life, reversing it, not into its opposite but into its other or flip side":

Literature is the flip side of the side that coincides with reality, the wrong side or the inside of the real and the sign of another meaning of experience. Far from fleeing the real ... literature actually tracks it and weaves it, spinning and following its thread. The threads that make up its text or its fabric ... are the threads of the real itself, and its mission is to trace and disentangle them. In the process, literature lets itself be carried off to where the real flees its own self-presence. (Translated by Dorothée Katz and Simon Sparks)

From this we can see that to respond to the signals of the real requires a certain kind of writing, not one of lyric reverie or bureaucratic notation but precarious combinations of both. If the real is its own self-absence, it is not self-sufficient and thereby reliant on the literary project. This is why de Beistegui highlights the art of metaphor in Proust, with a wonderfully provocative rider: "Metaphor is not fancy or mistress of error and falsehood but the figure of the real in its self-transposition or transfiguration. The conversion of matter into spirit but only as an implicit dimension of matter itself".

It is a paradoxical situation, one that worries at habitual commonsense: life is elsewhere, or, in Marcel's terms: the only true paradise is a paradise lost. Marcel's life is pierced by signals that, enabled by metaphor, set off a chain of correspondences opening to a unified experience. However, if metaphor is "rooted in the very structure of experience and not simply a rhetorical trope" then the quality of that life resides in the quality of those metaphors, the quality of attention and the quality of writing. It makes literature all the more demanding. In Search of Lost Time is a kind of bildungsroman leading to the challenge of this discovery. Marcel shows that the true paradise relies less on formal memory than on chance recognition, those rapturous singularities. It is not a direct product of masterful agency and is therefore always on the brink of falling back into petrifying genres. It's why the novel does not follow the overt facts of Proust's life, and explains why he did not publish the 800-page Jean Santeuil and why one reader quoted in Reality Hunger insists Proust is "at base an essayist" and In Search of Lost Time is "not fiction". She is in the hotel but blocks her ears to the hymns.

If we recognise metaphor as the key to unlocking the temporal prison cell, we can then also appreciate why the central stories of In Search of Lost Time concern romantic love: Swann's pathetic obsession with Odette, Saint-Loup's for Rachel, and Marcel's own for Gilberte and Albertine. "The real significance of love" de Beistegui writes "is epistemological: it drives us to imagine what we're unable to know". But, as a character in John McGahern's Amongst Women says: "Nothing is so bad as having to imagine". Marcel first meets Albertine as part of a "little gang" of young women he watches from afar in the seaside town Balbec. In fact, it is the gang that attracts him; he wants to be amongst young women in flower. They exist for him like the summer landscape of beach, sea and sky: a larger existence he cannot attain. Eventually Albertine becomes his lover but her other life – "the vague and non-existent universe" of her excursions with Andrée, another member of the little gang – provokes jealousy so much that she becomes the title of the fifth volume: The Captive. 

Some of the most rhapsodic passages in In Search of Lost Time are dedicated to Marcel's fascination with the distance at which Albertine holds herself, even when he has her within his four walls. It is here that Proust's unique blend of lyricism and intellectual reflection is especially powerful. They are also problematic for contemporary readers. De Beistegui highlights one in particular in which Marcel watches Albertine asleep:

Stretched out at full length upon my bed, in an attitude so natural that no art could have devised it, she reminded me of a long blossoming stem that had been laid there, and so in a sense she was: the faculty of dreaming, which I possessed only in her absence, I recovered at such moments in her presence, as though by falling asleep she had become a plant. In this way her sleep realised to a certain extent the possibility of love. Alone, I could think of her, but I missed her; I did not possess her. When she was present, I spoke to her, but I was too far absent from myself to be able to think. When she was asleep, I no longer needed to talk. I knew that I was no longer observed by her. I no longer needed to live on the surface of myself. 

By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped off, one after another, the different personalities with which she had deceived me ever since the day when I had first made her acquaintance. She had called back into herself everything that lay outside, had withdrawn, enclosed, reabsorbed herself into her body. In keeping it in front of my eyes, in my hands, I had an impression of possessing her entirely, which I never had when she was awake. Her life was subjected to me, exhaled towards me its gentle breath. I listened to this murmuring, mysterious emanation, soft as a sea breeze, magical as a gleam of moonlight. ... What I felt then was a love as pure, as immaterial, as mysterious as if I had been in the presence of those inanimate creatures that are the beauties of nature. And indeed, as soon as her sleep became at all deep, she ceased to be merely the plant that she had been. Her sleep ... was to me a whole landscape. [Trans. Scott Moncrieff]

Recently Anne Carson had fun at Marcel's expense, with the audience appreciative of the comedy of Marcel's apparently sexist solipsism, treating Albertine as an object of play in his fantasy. But we can see in this passage how Albertine changes from plant to breeze, from moonlight to landscape, and how then she is like everyone, separate, herself, and yet part of a larger universe. Encountering her escape is as important for Marcel as anything else. For him, the possibility of love appears in the revelation of the correspondences her deep self exhibits:

Albertine's complete throughout all her metamorphoses; she's a bird, a plant, a landscape, she's Odette, Andrée, Marcel, all of them at once and even simultaneously, while we can never say what she truly is, essentially. Like the world in general she's always in a state of becoming, a composition of matter that connects with others and, doing so, becomes something else entirely.

This is what de Beistegui means by "the conversion of matter into spirit but only as an implicit dimension of matter itself". The real is always revealed in something else with no need to privilege one over the other and no need to rage for one order or the other. In this sense, the transcendent is immanent to our own lives, so much as we can write, and write well.

I'm aware that De Beistegui's ontology and theory of metaphor have their own genealogy in European thought, for example Gilles Deleuze – another philosopher who wrote on Proust – and Hans Blumenberg. But this is a review not a patent office and I shall leave tracking those threads to others. Reading Proust as Philosopher reminded me of the personal value of critical analysis of single works, how it can crack open the carapace of a classic work of art without bleeding it dry: adding rather than cancelling. It stands alongside last year's translation of Quentin Meillassoux's The Number and the Siren as a work that corresponds to what is apparently most untimely.


* Wallace Stevens, from part IX of An Ordinary Evening in New Haven
** from part IV of Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

Proust and the entire secret of art

Sometimes I feel like those old men Gulliver encounters in the Voyage to Laputa, who have renounced language and who try to converse by means of objects themselves.

Most days I'm with Stravinsky. An impulse to say something disappears into the steady progression of sentences. In the end, something is smothered by the necessary requirements of writing. Words are written, rhetoric deployed, but the impulse remains. There is no end. There's always a dual sense of writing being both a release and a dissipation. How can one remain true to that impulse, the inspiration, within the inevitable wandering?

This was a problem also faced by Proust. "My volume is a picture" he wrote. "It's true that a picture is necessarily seen however large it is, whereas a book isn't read in the same way." His solution was one of the two usual ones: to write a great deal. Except that Proust made the dispersal work to make present the miraculous transports in which that long time is erased, the transcendence of time in which the dispersal becomes possible. It returns the novel and its readers to the inspirational origin.

Actually, this might serve as the distinction between the exemplary literary status of In Search of Lost Time and the innumerable, interminable genre cycles some wish also to call "Proustian". For one the dissipation is the goal, for others, like Proust, its negation is a joyous, immanent inspiration. Yet as Christine Cano reveals in her new book, Proust's ambition caused problems not only with his early readers but his publishers before the work even got to the printers.

Proust's Deadline takes us back to the time when Proust was writing against time to complete the novel. One gets a strong sense of the urgency and confusion of his negotiations with publishers. They would announce volumes in accordance with the author's advice, only for Proust to change tack as the writing proceeded. And although Proust wanted the novel to be judged as a whole, the first book was not well received precisely because it wasn't a whole. To contemporary reviewers it was a self-indulgent meander without a clear development and satisfying conclusion. They complained that a few moments in the life of the narrator could take 80 pages to describe. Of course this is still a complaint from those who wish the writer to suppress any instinct to tell the truth as the book sees it and instead do a professional job for the indignant reader. But Swann's Way would have appeared less abnormal had the later volumes been there to put it in context.

Cano also reveals a potential influence on Proust which I can't find any mention of in Jean-Yves Tadie's apparently definitive biography. A young Proust attended the lectures of Gabriel Séailles, an academic influenced in turn by German Romanticism, in which he expressed the ideas contained in Essai sur le genie en l’art, published in 1897. Cano provides a tantalising quotation:

The work of art should spring forth in a single jet; it is the impossibility of saying everything at once, or the difficulty of expression, that force the artist to work successively. To disguise this, this succession of efforts, to reproduce in each detail the work as a whole, this is the entire secret of art.

The disguise is not the secret in terms of the sleight of hand but the paradoxical key to simultaneity. "The execution of the work of art makes itself simultaneous; it compensates for the impossibility of springing forth all at once by growing out in every direction." Cano provides the gloss:

Simultaneity is thus redefined as growth of the parts in relationship to one another, that is, as the internal logic behind the artist's necessarily successive efforts. It is successivity, then, not simulaneity, that is only as an appearance.

This has obvious resonances with In Search of Lost Time. Except it doesn't explain why Proust was so dissatisfied with Jean Santeuil, his first attempt at writing a novel, so similar in many ways to the later work, that he abandoned it even after writing several hundred pages. To explain that, I can only point to Blanchot's essay The Experience of Proust. It is there literary criticism and great art also become simultaneous.

Rewriting literary history

This morning's headline in Guardian Books: Unlikely bestseller heralds the return of lightness and humour to German literature. Are they provoking me? "For decades German fiction has enjoyed the reputation of being serious, worthy and a bit dull." Of course, that would have nothing to do with English journalists' stereotyping and publishers' reluctance to print anything contradicting a "reputation". Gert Hofmann's wonderful, final novel for example. It's an oversight that's even more ironic considering the subject matter of Daniel Kehlmann's book. Hofmann's was also about a 19th Century Göttingen scientist who gets involved with a teenage girl. 

"Already, [Kehlmann] is being compared to Nabokov and Proust". Yeah, right. As I said the other day, these comparisons are meaningless; merely hyperbolic. Do they know what it means to be compared to these writers? No doubt other author features about Kehlmann will say he been compared to Nabokov and Proust with the only reference being to this article. Hofmann, on the other hand, is incomparable. But that might be the problem. 

Kehlmann says: "I've written a Latin American novel about Germans and German classicism." Yes, what most literary journalists really want is not German fiction but sunny South American magical realism; the sentimental confections of Márquez. What's more Kehlmann "likes British writers including Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan. 'Atonement is one of the best novels of the past 30 years. An incredible masterpiece,' he says." Oh dear. 

There's more. "A lot of interesting epic art now comes from US TV", Kehlmann continues. "You have The Sopranos. It's a modern realist novel that isn't expressed as a novel. It's like modern Balzac." What did Robbe-Grillet say yesterday? 

The big story for the Guardian, however, is that Kehlmann's novel "has proved nothing less than a literary sensation. Since it was published last September, the novel has sold more than 600,000 copies in Germany, knocking JK Rowling and Dan Brown off the top of the best-seller list." Isn't that a sales sensation rather than literary sensation? I suspect the journalist is unaware of the difference. 

By the way, Kehlmann lives in Austria, so his status as a "German" author is problematic. Austria's most famous author's work is, of course, humour and lightness itself. While it isn't magical realist or Balzacian, it is an incontrovertible literary sensation and a permanent herald.

The real thing: Ian Rankin and Proust

Ian Rankin's appearance on Desert Island Discs (as discussed at the weekend) reminded me of a long-standing fascination of mine. What makes a novel more than a rhetorical exercise?

Up to the time when his second son Kit was born, Rankin had written seven novels. He wrote the eighth (Black and Blue) as Kit was being diagnosed with the rare neurological disorder Angelman Syndrome. As he explains in this interview:

"I was writing Black and Blue, and I think that made it a big, angry, questioning book, because I was going through this process of asking, why me? I would beat Rebus up regularly on paper.” He pauses for a moment, his usual animation stilled at the memory. “By the time you get to the next book Hanging Garden, his daughter is in a wheelchair. That was just me being petty and spiteful and thinking if my son is not going to walk, your daughter is not going to walk."

The eighth novel just happened to be his breakthrough book. It sold big numbers. Sue Lawley wondered how much the anger seeping through the novel had contributed to the book's success. The author reckoned it was probably very important.

If Rankin happened to be the reincarnation of Proust, those first seven novels might not have been published. It's well-known that Proust didn't publish the 770-page novel Jean Santeuil even though, as Blanchot points out, he so badly wanted to make a book and be considered a writer. What's more, the discarded work has many of the features and events of In Search of Lost Time: the phenomenon of reminiscence, the metamorphosis it presages (transmutation of the past into the present), the feeling that there is here a door open onto the domain unique to the imagination, and finally the resolution to write in light of such moments and to bring them back to light.
So why didn't he publish?

Blanchot argues that it is because he needed the novel to include the inspiration to which Jean Santeuil merely responds. The latter novel is perhaps closer to the actual Proust ... than the narrator of Le Temps Perdu is, but this proximity is only the sign that he remains on the surface of the sphere and that he has not truly engaged himself in the new time, which causes him to glimpse the shimmering of a changing sensation. And it is to transmit the joy of this new time for which Proust writes:

yet [in Jean Santeuil] it is really Saint-Simon, La Bruyère, Flaubert who write in his place, or at least Proust the man of culture, the one who relies, as is necessary, on the art of previous writers, instead of entrusting himself, with all its risks and dangers, to that transformation that the imagination demands and that must first reach his language.

Blanchot ends his essay by making the disturbing observation that it was only through "energy, inertia, inactivity, attention, and distraction" that enabled Proust to write the other novel which made him famous; fame which Jean Santeuil would never have matched. Hard work and craft, it seems, are not guarantees of artistic success.

This is why I am so wary of books that tend to rely on the art of previous writers, that do not make the language subject to the unique inspiration and ambition of the book it forms. They are too rhetorical and crime (and other genre) novels are, by definition, mainly rhetorical works. While Rankin's eighth novel cannot be on a par with Proust's (if only because the anger is added colour rather than intrinsic to its creation), it perhaps suggests in both cases a desire among readers for something more than routine entertainment, for more than the author to do "a good professional job for the reader". They want the real thing.

More perplexity: responses to Javier Marías

As others have reported and commented, Wendy Lesser of The ThreePenny Review has begun a blog. Her latest entry is about Javier Marías' trilogy Your Face Tomorrow. On publication of volume two, she says it is "shaping up to be one of the great fictional achievements of the century".

Having just reviewed the novel for the TLS (not online), I have to express bewilderment at this statement. While the novel is objectively impressive and full of fine ruminations, it is also rather tedious and indulgent. I wonder if I'd have finished both volumes had I not been obliged to for the review. This should be a surprise considering the literary allusions peppered throughout his work and the writer to whom this project in particular has been compared.

Lesser mentions the almost-universal name-checking of Proust in connection with Your Face Tomorrow. But what do these comparisons look like? Well, at the beginning of an interview, Sarah Emily Miano says the novel is "already being compared with Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu". Yet rather than explain the implications she merely repeats the statement in the final line. This technique reminds me of those news reports in which the newscaster says "fears are growing for the Middle East peace process ..." while not actually showing or quoting anyone expressing such fear. It's just a device that assumes the peace process and/or being compared to Proust is necessarily a good thing.

Perhaps the trilogy's unusual length is the connection. But that would mean the Left Behind series can also be compared. The Review of Contemporary Fiction refers to the novel's "meditative lyricism", which is a plausible similarity. But many authors share that and they're not routinely compared to Proust.

However, the comparison is legitimate. In another review for The Times' Andrew Staffell says

Marías’s narratives are not dramatic or action-packed: they are slow-breathing, measured ruminations, introspective and philosophical. The few events that occur in the narrative “present” are broken up by long, Proustian passages of recollection and speculation.

It's good that somebody has made the effort! And also like Proust, Marías' narrator Jacques Deza is concerned with time. In his case though, it's our potential knowledge of the future with which he's concerned. I wrote that this is a promising inversion of Proust's project of recovering of the past and that

in Deza's night-time anxiety about his children, one can't miss the echo of Marcel in Combray tracing the ghostly sequences of his own mind as it moves in and out of dreams. But where Proust's novel revolved around redemptive epiphanies, here such moments are darker, more obscure, often indistinguishable from neurosis.

While all this is certainly intriguing and far more worthwhile than most novels so far published this century, the reading experience is not on a par with the Parisian neurasthenic.

If Proust also sent us on long journeys without too many fullstops, his sentences at least clarify and enrich the context of a specific observation. In Your Face Tomorrow, they tend only to accumulate superfluous qualifications and synonyms. Indeed, the series itself seems to be one of accumulation rather than development.

Sometimes it's better to constrain the work. In preparing for the review, I also read All Souls and was moved by its modesty and humour. It has the beguiling melancholy of Sebald's novels and is only 220 pages long. Unfortunately, unique novels like this tend to be overshadowed by their bloated, more ambitious companions.