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The Imagination of Marcel Proust 2/24/2015 8:27:21 PM
Some years ago, when I worked in Sudbury, Ontario, a nickel mining city, I had the time to read a translation of the seven volumes of Marcel Proust's great autobiographical novel "Remembrance of Things Past." I came away from it thinking that it was a substantial work that I didn't understand very well and that was needlessly wordy. I set it aside.
Not too long ago, I bought an audiotape of the first volume, "Swann's Way", and have been listening to it in small doses. What a revelation!
Neville Jason, the reader, brings the text to life in a way I hadn't been able to do myself in private reading. Other volumes in the series are available on audible.com now. If he can read the next six volumes for audible at the same level, he will have created a remarkable statement of support for the author. It's already a noteworthy achievement. Jason has become a partner with Proust as he brings the great work to life in the listener's ear.
First, his reading is measured, clear, and easy to follow. He has proved to me that Proust's text is not so hard to understand as I'd thought. He brings me an insight I'd missed completely while reading -- how much Proust enjoyed life -- at least in the first third of "Swann's Way": his family and the people who worked for them, the town the Proust's visited on holiday, nature, neighbors he meets, and the church. Along with spells of melancholy, he was happy in the world that surrounded him.
Another feature that surprises me is the extent to which Proust aligned himself with the centuries old life-ways of the western world: family, church, social life, morality.
A third aspect that stands out for me is Proust's gift for concentrating on what he was doing and his capacity for absorption and apt response. Such things as the church and hawthorn trees at Combray held his attention. He was a keen observer of the people he met and got to know. His comments on character must be as penetrating as any in our literature.
Here's part of a long passage chosen almost at random in which the narrator describes his first sight, at a wedding in the Combray church, of the Duchesse de Guermantes: "But this Mme. de Guermantes of whom I had so often dreamed, now that I could see that she had a real existence independent of myself, acquired a fresh increase of power over my imagination, which, paralysed for a moment by contact with a reality so different from anything that it had expected, began to react and to say within me: "Great and glorious before the days of Charlemagne, the Guermantes had the right of life and death over their vassals; the Duchesse de Guermantes descends from Genevieve de Brabant. She does not know, nor would she consent to know, any of the people who are here today." (from the Scott-Moncrieff translation)
Proust must have been a difficult person to get acquainted with. As a young man, despite a spirit of vanity and what some call snobbbery, he was enormously talented with numerous advantages and an abundance of promise. His later life was filled with complications, disappointments, and severe illness, despite which he kept on going.
The outline of Proust's life is well known. To dig deeper, along with listening to "Swann's Way", I've been reading the first volume of George D. Painter's, biography of Proust, which.a critic called one of the great biographies in English. While riding in a Toronto subway car the other day, I came upon a few sentences that prompted me to write this blog-post:
"...Proust's belief in the imagination was still misplaced; for in "A la Recherche" and perhaps in all great works of art, the true function of the imagination is, paradoxically, not to imagine -- in the sense of inventing or transforming -- but to see: to see the reality which is concealed by habit and the phenomenal world.....'the artist is only a scribe'. (p. 255)
