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

I was surprised this weekend to find an essay about Proust by Emmanuel Levinas. I pulled Proper Names off the shelf to glance through it, I’m not sure why, and saw that one of the last essays in the book was about Proust. I must have read it when I first read the book in 1998, but I had completely forgotten about it.

Levinas’s essay is short, only 5 pages, but by no means slight. It’s not at all surprising that in it Levinas recapitulates many of the themes so central to his philosophy, particularly the notions of alterity and the Other around which his phenomenology has been built, but there is also an interesting moment when he mentions the “moral rules [which] banished enchantments from the world more harshly than did the laws of nature. (101)” This reads like a section from one of his Talmudic readings.

At the start of his essay Levinas confronts the problem of Proust’s reception, particularly with regard to the generation which came of age between the Wars. Levinas makes the point that Proust’s reputation went into decline during this period in France: that his subject matter was not appreciated as it should have been (Levinas calls him “the new Saint-Simon of a nobility sans Versailles” (99)), that his novels were not stirringly heroic, and, most damningly, that his analyses were eventually seen to be without merit, in other words, that his psychology was flawed. Levinas responds to this final criticism by taking it further and scolding those for whom truth is the subject of art. “The theory of the scientist or philosopher” may be judged on its relation to the object it seeks to describe, but, according to Levinas, that of the artist cannot be, for the object described is in fact the object created. The reasoning of the artist, like anything else in their work, “like images or symbols, is meant to produce a certain rhythm in which the reality sought after will magically appear” (100). He clearly reads Proust’s novel as the exemplary reminder that the self and reality are separate from each other, that the pain and joy of living are always also reflected upon and refracted through other experience. Being human means being reflective and that each human is unique and mysterious because of differences in their reflections. “The power of being to be incomparably more than it is does not derive from I know not what symbolic function it would take on, nor from a dynamism that would unfold it into a becoming, but from its infinite sparkle under the reflective gaze. (101)”

But the bulk of “The Other in Proust” is spent making the argument that Proust manages to capture two essential aspects of the human condition, for out of the lack of correspondence between the object and the artist’s description of it which Levinas describes come conclusions about the impossiblity of the kind of fusion in connection that Proust also excludes from his universe. It’s easy to see, and criticize, in Proust’s novel the notion that love is reduced to jealousy, and jealousy of the most abject kind. Levinas sees something else, though. He sees a real love, and a recognition in Proust, that what keeps us alive for each other is our alterity, our mysterious difference. It is the Other we love, and Levinas argues that Proust captures the ways in which love is kept alive not by an impossible fusion, but by the reminder that fusion is impossible. “That is Eros in all its ontological purity,…direct relationship with what gives itself in withholding itself, with the other qua other, with mystery. (103)”

But of course the role of love in In Search of Lost Time is ultimately only to remind us of our relation to ourselves; our reflections upon our own thoughts and feelings are as jealously shepherded and questioned as are our lovers. Being alone with ourselves is like being alone with another (yet another reason why the structure of Proust’s novel, between autobiography and invention, is so brilliant). Here is the last paragraph from Levinas’s essay:

Thus the theme of solitude in Proust takes on a new meaning. Its event is in its conversion into communication. Its despair is an inexhaustible source of hope. A paradoxical conception, in a civilization that, despite the progress made since the Eleatics, sees in unity the very apotheosis of being. But Proust’s most profound teaching–if indeed poetry teaches–consists in situating the real in relation with what for ever remains other–with the other as absence and mystery. It consists in rediscovering this relation also within the very intimacy of the I and in inaugurating a dialectic that breaks definitively with Parmenides.

Proust’s two translations of Ruskin are virtually non-existent for English readers because, of course, the originals are in English. I think this leaves a curious blind spot when thinking about Proust as a writer. As I’ve been researching Proust’s translations today it’s become clear how central they were to his development. I think even a cursory introduction to Ruskin makes it clear how influential his theories were to Proust, but what’s less evident is how hard Proust worked on understanding and thinking about Ruskin.

Proust started reading Ruskin in 1895, took several trips to visit places described in his books, and started work on translating him at the very end of the 1890s. He didn’t finish working on Sesame and Lilies until 1905, which means that he spent a decade immersed in Ruskin. Some of the essays he wrote during the period, several of which were condensced into the introduction to La Bible d’Amiens, were very influential for the reception of Ruskin in France. Of course, it is strange to translate work from a language that you do not know well; Tadie, however, suggests that Proust knew written English reasonably well, but could not speak it since he learned the language during one of the worst periods of his asthma. Still, he used his mother and Marie Nordlinger to produce the first drafts which he then polished.

Proust said this about his English: “I don’t claim to know English; I claim to know Ruskin.” But what I really like is this quote about our reponsiblity to authors we love: “You know what admiration I have for Ruskin. And since I believe that each of us is responsible for those souls that he particularly loves, a responsiblity for making them known and appreciated…you know with what a scrupulous hand-but a pious one too and as gentle as I was able-I approached it.” From a letter to Georges Goyau.

1) While Robert Bononno’s translation of the book seems quite smooth and good, the title is execrable. What in French was Le cygne de Proust becomes Swan’s Way in English. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)