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

In Search of Lost Time presents a problem to the reader who is also a writer. It’s difficult to know where or how to start writing about Proust’s novel. Partly this is due to the sheer size of the book, partly to the layering and repeating of themes which are almost impossible to discuss in isolation. In Search of Lost Time is so evocative, though, that the temptation to write about it is almost overwhelming, and it seems to call out for books which are about reading Proust rather than about Proust. Perhaps the worst book I’ve read in this vein is My Year of Reading Proust, which attempted the combination of memoir, reading response paper and exegesis that can be so deadly. My Year of Reading Proust wasn’t poorly written, but Phyllis Rose’s concerns about her own life come to seem so banal and unformed when put into comparison with Proust’s careful construction of a fiction from a life.

On the other hand, the best book about Proust that I’ve read recently is certainly Swan’s Way [Le cygne de Proust] by Henri Raczymow, and it shares many of the same devices with Rose’s memoir. Raczymow’s book is essentially an exploration of Swann and the models for the Swann character, most specifically, Charles Haas. Haas was a French Jew, the first Jewish member of the Jockey Club, and a man whose reputation as a wit and a socialite was exceeded only by his pride in his own idleness and connections. There’s no doubt that Haas was the model for Swann. The memoirs of the day confirm it; Proust wrote as much in letters. From this fact, Raczymow constructs a brief biography of Haas, a dissection of Swann, and an extended meditation on some of what it meant to be a Jew in the Belle Époque.

Raczymow’s book is best when he’s writing from the close intersections between Proust’s biography, Haas’ biography, Swann’s character, and the confusion all three exert on each other. The short sections in which he talks about Proust’s obvious failure to remember who (Swann or Haas) is fictional are brilliant and provide more than a little insight into Proust’s attitude as he wrote. The kind of confusion engendered by the shifting differences between real life and his novel clearly became overwhelming at times, and Proust would write letters in which he used Swann’s name when he should have been talking about Haas. But these moments then lead to the set of questions that are obscured at the start of Raczymow’s book, questions about immortality and time, and ultimately, in a strange way, the place of Jews in French society.

It’s impossible to read In Search of Lost Time without wondering about the hatred Proust shows to Jews and homosexuals. It’s unavoidable, and although sometimes the sentiments are offered in the mouths of his characters, at other times it seems clear that the narrator (and then Proust) is offering his own opinions. Even if we resist, as we must, the urge to reduce the novel to autobiography, these sentiments are ones with which we have to come to terms with as we read. Swann is not only tremendously socially successful, he’s a Jew, as was Proust. Swann’s Jewishness is emphasized at crucial points in the novel, as he gets sick, as he loses power (in the social sphere), as Gilberte grows up after he has died. Raczymow catalogs these moments and never fails to delicately relate them to the biography of Haas, and indeed, of Proust. What becomes most clear over the course of his short book is that Raczymow’s conception of Haas and of Swann is one radical contingency, and we’re left wondering why Proust made such a contingent figure, someone whose position and glamor rested very much on a kind of sufferance, the hero to the narrator as he’s growing up.

Raczymow’s book is also about what immortality, literary or otherwise, means. It’s clear from almost the start of this book that Haas is a person whose brilliance in life produced nothing, aside from one daughter, and who consequently is not remembered for any reason aside from (sometimes) his friends. Proust was aware of saving Haas from oblivion, of writing a character who would keep his model alive. Proust was also obviously writing a novel that would keep his own name alive. But the effect of Raczymow’s meditation on Haas, his unearthing of obscure Haas relatives, his pursuit of his hare, is to highlight how ephemeral an individual life is, even one partially preserved in a masterpiece. Haas becomes a vehicle for Raczymow to consider his own mortality, a project any decent reading of Proust engenders.

This kind of book threatens to be the worst that Proust criticism has to offer. In Search of Lost Time is many things, least of which is a catalog of correspondence between actual people and their fictional equivalents. Part of what makes Proust’s novel so difficult to write about is precisely the artistry that Proust used to distort ‘reality.’ Certainly it’s worth exploring the ways in which Proust’s life and experience informed his writing, but the temptation of reducing his novel to its constituent parts not only makes of it less than it is, it obviates Proust’s initial impetus to write contra Sainte-Beuve. But Raczymow manages to easily walk the line that separates the banal from the useful.