I Am So Gay for Proust

I have been reading Remembrance of Things Past for seven years now. I have made great progress in that time, having finished five of the seven novels comprising this 3,000-page behemoth. (The sixth novel - The Captive - I plan to take up once I finish Boccaccio's Decameron, which is itself very lengthy and may take some time.) My usual pattern has been to take up one of the novels, stick with it, and then leave my mind fallow for a short while before taking up the next one (while reading other types of books in the interim). This keeps my interest fresh from one book to the next, but it also explains why it has taken me seven years to get where I am.

Anyway, the point of this post is to give some explanation as to why I'm so damn sweet on the guy. I remember watching a movie made in 2000 and based on Alain de Botton's 1997 book, How Proust Can Change Your Life (a book I have not in fact read). The movie starred - kind of out of nowhere - Ralph Fiennes as Proust, was narrated by Felicity Kendal, and featured commentary by Botton himself. As presented in that movie, Proust's argument is basically this: people can be happy if they develop an ability to take satisfaction in the details of life that crowd around them. Proust took an inordinate interest in detail (that's how you get to 3,000 pages), and could describe at great length such apparently mundane happenings as eating a madeleine or visiting a church in Normandy.

But these disquisitions are never boring - they are, in fact, revelatory. In Proust, the most mundane happenings can prompt deep and incisive inquiry. Take, for instance, the madeleine scene, which appears at the very beginning of the book. In this scene, the narrator takes a bite of a madeleine in a spoonful of tea and is suddenly reminded by that sensation (through "involuntary memory") of an event from his childhood. Proust uses this scene to launch the notion - a theme, in fact, of the entire work - that we can find happiness and insight by connecting the experiences of our lives with the memory of other experiences.

Take another example, from Within a Budding Grove, the second novel. It deals with the awakening of the narrator's awareness of women, love, and desire. It is, perhaps, my favorite so far, and in fact it won the Prix Goncourt (France's Pulitzer) when it was first published in 1919. Toward the end of that novel, the narrator visits a church in the fictitious Norman town of Balbec, near where he had been passing the summer with his aged grandmother. He had long wanted to visit this church to see a certain statue of the Virgin Mary that stood in the church's porch. Here is how Proust - in the exquisite translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff - describes the sensations that attended this visit:

I said to myself: "Here I am: this is the Church of Balbec. This square, which looks as though it were conscious of its glory, is the only place in the world that possesses Balbec Church. All that I have seen so far have been photographs of this church—and of these famous Apostles, this Virgin of the Porch, mere casts only. Now it is the church itself, the statue itself; these are they; they, the unique things--this is something far greater."

It was something less, perhaps, also. As a young man on the day of an examination or of a duel feels the question that he has been asked, the shot that he has fired, to be a very little thing when he thinks of the reserves of knowledge and of valour that he possesses and would like to have displayed, so my mind, which had exalted the Virgin of the Porch far above the reproductions that I had had before my eyes, inaccessible by the vicissitudes which had power to threaten them, intact although they were destroyed, ideal, endowed with universal value, was astonished to see the statue which it had carved a thousand times, reduced now to its own apparent form in stone, occupying, on the radius of my outstretched arm, a place in which it had for rivals an election placard and the point of my stick, fettered to the Square, inseparable from the head of the main street, powerless to hide from the gaze of the Café and of the omnibus office, receiving on its face half of that ray of the setting sun (half, presently, in a few hours' time, of the light of the street lamp) of which the Bank building received the other half, tainted simultaneously with that branch office of a money-lending establishment by the smells from the pastry-cook's oven, subjected to the tyranny of the Individual to such a point that, if I had chosen to scribble my name upon that stone, it was she, the illustrious Virgin whom until then I had endowed with a general existence and an intangible beauty, the Virgin of Balbec, the unique (which meant, alas, the only one) who, on her body coated with the same soot as defiled the neighbouring houses, would have displayed--powerless to rid herself of them--to all the admiring strangers come there to gaze upon her, the marks of my piece of chalk and the letters of my name; it was she, indeed, the immortal work of art, so long desired, whom I found, transformed, as was the church itself, into a little old woman in stone whose height I could measure and count her wrinkles.

Now, aside from being wonderful prose to read, this passage illustrates how Proust takes a very simple and ordinary scene - visiting a church to see a statue - and turns it into an occasion for remarkable introspection. In my case, for instance, I realized that my attitude toward a visitation was completely the opposite: that what I especially enjoyed about visiting, say, Notre Dame is that it can be seen in a different perspective from a riverboat, that cars and mopeds zoom by it, that political posters go up on walls and buildings nearby, and that it is a real and actual place in a real and actual context - not an abstraction. I suppose I had always had this view, unconsciously; the above passage, however, made me aware of it in myself for the first time. Proust's rambling discourse on visiting a statue caused me to ask myself a question to which, unbeknownst to me, I had already formed an answer.

And Proust gives us 3,000 pages of this stuff. I can't wait to dive back in.

Fun Fact!: Ralph Fiennes, who plays Proust in the movie mentioned above, lived for a short spell in Kilkenny, my home town in Ireland, and went to St. Kieran's College, the same high school as my dad. Strange but true!

Fun Clip!: And then, of course, there's always this: