Proust and the agony of experience
In an age of intense neuroticism, the narrator of The Way by Swann's makes us all seem quite chilled out.
I finally finished The Way By Swann’s today, the Lydia Davis translation of the first volume of In Search of Lost Time. Sitting in Flat White, the nutty aroma of the dark-roast coffee beans commingling with the auditory impressions surrounding me of blonde students, fresh from the Regatta, I found it difficult to concentrate on those final melancholy pages — the words receded back into the page, reconfiguring themselves as abstract squiggles, willing no longer to communicate their Delphic secrets to me, as though the prose and I were passengers on a lengthy coach ride, where genial conversation had been made for the first six hours, but as we reached the final half-hour we allowed ourselves to express our mutual irritation and fatigue.
That was my attempt at writing in Proust’s style, did you like it? I won’t pursue it, don’t worry. The Way by Swann’s has been the only book I’ve read for the past four or five months. I’ve chipped away at it twenty pages at a time, which is an approach I really don’t recommend, and isn’t really necessary. Davis’s translation is, on the English prose level (I can’t assess its merit as a translation), quite welcoming and flowing for the contemporary reader. I think the phenomenological nature of the book made it hard for me to dive in and commit for hours at a time. Reading Proust is like sharing a skull with someone even more neurotic and anxious than you are. The way the young narrator agonises over whether or not he’ll receive a goodnight kiss from his mother, filling pages cycling through cunning plans and superstitious rituals, makes the little vivid details of childhood feel crushing and overwhelming. I was familiar with the general idea of ‘Proustian’ sensory impressions in their non-fungible uniqueness, but I didn’t expect the tyrannical, oppressive character which Proust gives many of these centrepiece recollections.
The book is definitely worth reading. His prose is often dazzlingly beautiful, with a descriptive capacity I haven’t encountered anywhere else (although I’m not very widely read). Walks in the countryside, dinner parties, the spatial layouts of humdrum French villages, all lit up in golden splendour. Every detail of Combray feels wrapped up in adoration, with no question of boredom or mundanity or inadequacy. Proust makes sensory experience feel so much thicker than it really is. The beguiling smell of hawthorns isn’t just something you notice and remark upon to your friend; it fills you up, overwhelming you with reality and goodness. The Combray part of the novel makes real present experience feel deeply grey and unexceptional. So should the reader be actively sceptical? Should we ask “what are Proust’s motives in presenting childhood sensory experience as the outside of Plato’s cave?” Maybe we should. But although when I was a child I don’t recall experiencing smells and sights with the level of intensity Proust gives them, I do think that like Proust’s narrator I was a neurotic and oversensitive child, and that mundane experiences often felt sharp or heavy in a way that things don’t anymore. It’s difficult to explain what I mean by sharp or heavy in this context, which is why The Way by Swann’s is a great novel. It captures the saturated quality of childhood experience, and through its richness and splendour hints at the troublingly hollow quality of modern adult life.
I never knew that a third of the novel is taken up by a novel within a novel, A Love of Swann’s. This follows a younger Monsieur Swann, and traces the complete arc of his relationship with a beautiful, urbane younger woman. Proust portrays the infallible beginnings of a relationship in stunning accuracy: the way you find ways to see each other every night, the metaphysical elevation certain songs (or phrases of songs) acquire as the love develops, the new private language of little code words and metaphors. I think the warmth of this narrative, the palpable and recognisable sense of romance which many of us will be lucky to recognise from our own lives, makes the next hundred pages incredibly painful, because they detail the steady decline and decay of the relationship: an inexplicable one-sided cooling of interest, a previously chilled-out man beset by sexual paranoia and jealousy, the abrogation of all of Swann’s passions and friendships in the long pursual of a perfect union which is already broken and gone. I think the good part of the relationship lasts for a few months, and Swann pursues it for about three years. It feels extra sad because of the phenomenological character of the prose — since you’re sharing a skull with Monsieur Swann, you have to witness him hysterically investigate every pang of sexual jealousy (this feels deeply familiar in the age of instagram), witness him acknowledge and analyse his own desperation, endlessly and exhaustingly pulling apart and recycling his sorry situation.
Thinking about it, maybe the Love of Swann’s story disproves my thoughts on the Combray section. The adult Swann’s experience in his doomed love affair is also heavy, saturated, the details grandiosely significant. But we should bear in mind that this story is still the work of Proust’s narrator. We follow Swann for pages and pages at a time, then a rogue “I” appears, musing on a detail or connecting it to Combray, and we are reminded that we have no access into Swann’s mind. We are still trapped in Proust’s narrator’s skull, and maybe this whole story within a story is an extension of the narrator’s intense neuroticism — this must be how it feels to be the eminent Monsieur Swann, and this must be how soul-destroying it was for his great love to lose her interest in him.
But in reality, even I’m not as neurotic as Proust’s narrator, and even the most neurotic of my friends, most of whom are very neurotic, aren’t as neurotic as Proust’s narrator. And so it’s in this story within a story that the apparent universality of the novel — “Wow, all this modernist vivid detail captures so vividly what it’s like for us all to experience childhood / remembrance / romance!” — falls away somewhat; just because Proust’s narrator thinks it’s the natural way of the heart for Swann to pursue a disdainful Odette for three years, it doesn’t actually mean that romance really is so sadistic and cruel. I suppose it’s troubling because I do absolutely recognise and admire the tracing of the relationship’s beautiful beginning. Just remember that authors are merchants of subterfuge and trickery.