Le Temps de Proust:
About reading In Search of Lost Time, associated Proust criticism, and other secondary literature.

I often forget how good a writer Samuel Beckett was. Like many iconic writers the idea of his prose seems to exceed and overshadow his actual writing. But when we have occasion to reread something that he wrote, we’re rewarded with surprising sentences and vivid prose. His writing captures his ideas, frames them, and makes them both understandable and beautiful. Especially at the level of the sentence, much like Walter Benjamin, Beckett’s writing is both lush and incisive, a rare combination that sometimes almost unravels his paragraphs and chapters.

Beckett’s book on Proust is a wonder. Written long before the books that would later make him famous, the study is one of very few extended excursions into non-fiction. (The other, notable, example is Beckett’s earlier contribution to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, a collection of essays about Finnegans Wake.) Beckett wrote Proust in 1931, when he was just 25 years old, teaching English in Paris. He had yet to undergo his analysis with Wilfred Bion, or his flight (back) to France on the eve of World War II. Still, his book on Proust seems very polished, and he manages to both examine the structure and content of In Search of Lost Time and to introduce the themes that would recur in his own future writing.

Beckett writes about the three intertwined themes that he identifies in Proust: Time, Habit & Memory.For Proust, Beckett argues, time means death, its very passing makes death not only inevitable, but makes the thought of it intolerable. Habit stands in for a kind of comfort, the comfort of the ordinary and boring, the chain of day to day events that make it seem as if death can be forestalled. Memory, which understandably gets the most attention, is the moment of surprise that undoes both time and habit and reasserts the life of the individual.

What’s most striking about Beckett’s reading of Proust is Beckett’s understanding of memory’s role. Beckett dismisses voluntary memory, calling it worse than useless as an indicator of the self. Beckett calls voluntary memory, “the memory that is not memory but the application of a concordance to the Old Testament of the individual.”(19) In the eschatology that Beckett ascribes to Proust, but which he also clearly favors himself, this Old Testament of the individual not only lacks in revelation, it risks setting itself up as a false idol. Real memory, the residue of “inattention,”(18) is involuntary. It steals upon a person when least expected, and with it brings the past to mingle with the present. Time is therefore undone, because the real secret of involuntary memory is the strength that makes us actually relive the past again.

Swann’s Way is such a deceptive part of In Search of Lost Time because so much of it concerns Swann. On a first reading the Swann in Love section is charming, or frustrating, or even annoying, but it can never be wholly understood as the model for the narrator’s life that it ultimately becomes. It’s hard, then, without having read the rest of the novel, to appreciate the correspondences between Swann and the narrator, between habit for one and habit for the other. Beckett’s writing about habit in the first part of his study jumps ahead to the narrator’s trip to Balbec to make several of its points, but here Beckett fails to offer the strongest support for his argument, the role of habit in the making of the love between Swann and Odette. Beckett does call Swann “the cornerstone of the entire structure, and the central figure of the narrator’s childhood,”(21) but he doesn’t develop this thought. As for habit, Beckett is quite right to call it “the generic term for the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects,”(8) and to go on to describe the loss of habit as “a moment when the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being,”(8) but he should consider that Swann’s love is only possible because of such a habit. We see Swann, in that “characteristic gesture,” passing his hand across his forehead again and again because he chooses not to think through a thought that would disrupt the boredom of living. Proust, in the way that he has of protecting the narrator while dealing too harshly with those around him, calls these moments of Swann’s moments of laziness, where his natural indolence of mind replaces his desire to know, to explore, some new sensation. Somehow Swann, perhaps because it is not his book, is never granted the honor of rising above this indolence to truly consider the thing that has brought him up short. Instead: the characteristic gesture, the delay in thought, the natural laziness.

Ultimately, although Beckett identifies involuntary memory as the crucial revelation that powers Proust’s novel, and the narrator’s, I’m disappointed that he doesn’t expand on the differences between Swann and the narrator. For as much as Swann occupies the first part of the larger novel as an ideal and a stand in for the narrator, taking part in society at a time when the narrator is not yet born, he also serves as a cautionary figure (just as Charlus does later in the book), and as such, says as much about the narrator’s concerns as he does when painted as the ideal. There is not only the matter of Swann’s jewishness (about which I’ll write more when I write about Henri Raczymow’s excellent book on Swann and Charles Haas) but also precisely the relief that Swann finds in not thinking, in subsiding into habit. As we know by the time we finish Time Regained, the narrator has already been to his final party when we start the book, he has already started the process of creation, what Beckett calls “the Penelope work of recollection.” And we see him, at various places in Swann’s Way engaged in this work, this weaving. Beckett identifies several of them in Swann’s Way alone: standing before the hawthorns on the path by Swann’s, seeing the steeples of Martinville, and of course, the most famous, the bit of tea-soaked madeleine. But in each of these three instances, Beckett leaves us with the impression that the important moment, almost exterior to the narrator, is the overwhelmingly strong impression. But Swann is there in the same book to show us that this is not so. For Swann, such moments come and go unexamined, unmined, unwoven. The narrator is different precisely because he pauses, he insists to himself that he begin the work of recollection. This is quite explicit in the scene in Dr. Percepied’s trap, where the narrator toys with leaving the impression of the steeples for another hour, but argues himself into considering them immediately. It isn’t the impression, the involuntary memory, that counts, it’s the work of weaving it into understanding.