Marcel Proust: Selected Letters Volume IV 1918-1922
Edited by Philip Kolb, translated by Joanna Kilmartin
HarperCollins £40, pp518
Buy it at BOL
In The run-up to the new millennium much was written about new dawns and striding confidently towards a pan-European future. Yet even before we had seen out January, the literary world was renewing its homage to Marcel Proust, a novelist celebrated for directing his attention towards the past.
January 2000 saw the publication of the final volume of Proust's selected letters in English, coinciding with the release of Chilean director Raoul Ruiz's film Time Regained (based on the closing volume of Proust's monumental novel, In Search of Lost Time), and a major exhibition of Proust manuscripts and memorabilia at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Later this year, there will be an English edition of Jean-Yves Tadié's new biography.
Why the clamour now? In September 1922, two months before his death, Proust wrote to the critic René Gillouin reproaching him for asserting in his review of the most recently published volume of In Search of Lost Time that Proust was suffering from a 'severely neuro-pathological condition'. Alas, responded Proust, his illness was all-too real: 'Unfortunately for me, your diagnosis of my condition in your splendid article is incorrect.'
Still, Proust, an assiduous carper at reviewers who misrepresented him, was by and large complimentary, congratulating Gillouin on 'the exceptional beauties, the profound insights' of his review. 'We never cease to be surprised,' Gillouin had written, 'at what M. Proust reveals to us about ourselves simply through talking aloud in our presence. On the other hand, his illness introduces a strongly morbid element, tackling certain aspects of reality which, till now, have been the subject of treatises by doctors and psychiatrists, or else obscene books carried under a raincoat. M. Proust's writing is the literary equivalent of Freud's psychoanalysis.'
It is, I suggest, just these qualities detected by Gillouin which account for today's resurgence of interest in In Search of Lost Time and for the curious place it occupies in the vanguard of work which commands twenty-first-century critical attention.
Proust's long, meandering masterpiece is absorbed with the way we hold in our minds memories of a lifetime of experiences, some trivial, some conventionally memorable. The past is the residual trace of events in the mind - we are each the accumulation of our past, nothing is lost or forgotten, everything that lies behind us in time goes towards the construction of our present self. The responsibility for all lasting memory resides within us.
History is past events refracted through our mental lens - Proust likened it to looking backwards through a telescope. The frivolous figures on the same scale as the fundamental. At the same time, In Search of Lost Time is a kind of Freudian 'talking cure' in which the richness of the narrator's stream of consciousness justifies his present state of lassitude. And the story-telling is a project in its own right - it literally keeps him alive.
At the end of the final volume, Marcel compares himself to the narrator in the Thousand and One Nights - as long as he keeps telling his stories, he stands a chance of living to see the next day dawn. For the reader, entering wholeheartedly into the remembered life of Marcel means coming to terms with the dashed hopes and emotional disappointments of an entire generation.
Faced with the inevitability of death, Proust's narrator dedicates himself to leaving posterity a record of the memorial history his mind has assembled with a kind of brittle brilliance. Even so, as Proust observes in a footnote to the final segment of Time Regained: 'No doubt my books too, like my flesh and blood, will eventually die. But one must resign oneself to death. One accepts the thought that in 100 years even one's books will not survive.'
In Search of Lost Time resonates compellingly for an age which has seen the emergence of a whole new genre of plangently self-scrutinising writing in the form of the testimonies of a generation living in the shadow of HIV - culturally telling writing which includes Edmund White's The Farewell Symphony and Derek Jarman's Modern Nature.
Like these, Proust's tale of a man in a fragile state of health for whom Parisian high life and its erotic and intellectual attractions prove fatally irresistible, retrospectively romanticises recklessness. It addresses a prevailing tendency in fiction and non-fiction to rank the historically insignificant, passive onlooker's personalised view above more conventionally grand narratives.
These are themes whose general celebration surely sends out profoundly pessimistic messages about ourselves, entirely at odds with the triumphalism of the Millennium Dome. We might link them with the decision of the Whitbread judges and the South Bank Show to award their annual prizes to Seamus Heaney's version of Beowulf, an Anglo-Saxon poem from the first millennium, and obsolete cornerstone of old-fashioned university courses in English literature.
Beowulf is a saga of a warrior's struggle against evil. Yet the poem's dominant tone is one of loss and regret. And indeed, since Tolkien's influential essay on the poem in 1936 it has been consistently read as a lament for Beowulf's society and its values, a poetic evocation of a lost world, rather than an emotional rallying point for our future. Heaney has explained that, for him, 'poetry helps us to live our lives in the face of destruction'.
But when did we decide, as a critical community, to abandon the optimism and hope with which we greeted 2000? I, for one, continue to hold those cultural and political high hopes, and for all my long-standing attachment to In Search of Lost Time, would prefer to leave it to gather dust on my bookshelves than celebrate it in terms such as these. For the Proust revival belongs to the post-millennial backlash, a fundamental failure of nerve at the beginning of a new era.
