The Truth of the Novel  -Part 1

Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu

by Charles Embry

 

 

The Approach to Proust

 

I approach the great novel, as I approach all great novels, simply as a lover of literature and a philosopher, that is, as a lover of wisdom. I lay great stress upon the word "lover," and I pretend neither to finality nor comprehensiveness in what I have to say about any novel, but especially about À la recherche du temps perdu, (In Search of Lost Time).¹

 

I assume this stance intentionally from the conviction that all great literature can be read, understood, and enjoyed by ordinary human beings who love stories because the stories that have been vouchsafed us by the great writers arise from that "place" and timelessly dwell in that "place" where we all live: the embodied consciousness of a human being.

 

 

In a letter to Robert B. Heilman, Eric Voegelin, identify­ing the reason why we read and study great works of literature as well as the basis for historical interpretation, said:

The occupation with works of art, poetry, philosophy, mythical imagination, and so forth, makes sense only if it is conducted as an inquiry into the nature of man. That sentence, while it excludes historicism, does not exclude history, for it is peculiar to the nature of man that it unfolds its potentialities historically.

Not that historically anything 'new' comes up–human nature is always wholly present–but there are modes of clarity and degrees of comprehensive­ness in man's understanding of his self and his position in the world . . . .

History [then] is the unfolding of the human Psyche; historiography is the reconstruction of the unfolding through the psyche of the historian. The basis of historical interpretation is the identity of substance (the psyche) in the object and the subject of interpretation; and its purpose is partici­pation in the great dialogue that goes through the centuries among men about their nature and destiny.²

 

If we reread that passage and substitute "Literature" for "History," "literary criticism" for "historiography," and "reader" for "historian," we will begin to understand an approach to literature from within a Voegelinian philosophical framework.

In Search of Lost Time: An Overview

 

Writing about À la recherche du temps perdu, one is obliged to acknowl­edge those things that one commonly reads about in the vast Proust criti­cism, as well as in the Internet sites devoted to Proust and his novel, sites that have been mounted by an enormous number of Proustophiles.³

 

These discussions include topics such as length (of course), breadth of time, the famous petite madeleine incident, the cast of characters, Proust's work habits (his cork-lined bedroom, reclusiveness, and revisions and extensive rewritings of page proofs) during the last years of his life, his illnesses and sickliness, the shortness of his originally planned three volumes of approximately 500,000 words and the length of the final version of seven volumes and approximately 1.25 million words, and finally the fact that Proust died before the last three volumes–published posthumously–could benefit from his inveterate habit of revising his text.

 

Commenting on the length of the novel, as well as the length of indi­vidual sentences, Alain de Botton writes,

Whatever the merits of Proust's work, even a fervent admirer would be hard pressed to deny one of its awkward features: length. As Proust's brother, Robert, put it, "The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have broken a leg in order to have the opportunity to read In Search of Lost Time."

And as they lie in bed with their limb newly en­cased in plaster or a tubercle bacillus diagnosed in their lungs, they face another challenge in the length of individual Proustian sentences, snakelike construction, the very longest of which, located in the fifth volume, would, if arranged along a single line in standard-sized text, run on for a little short of four meters and stretch around the around the base of a bottle of wine seventeen times.⁴

 

Lydia Davis, the translator of Swann's Way in the Penguin Proust, also writes about the length of Proust's sentences:

Proust felt, however, that a long sentence contained a whole, com­plex thought, a thought that should not be fragmented or broken. The shape of the sentence was the shape of the thought, and every word was necessary to the thought: "I really have to weave these long silks as I spin them," he said. "If I shortened my sentences, it would make little pieces of sentences, not sentences." He wished to "encircle the truth with a single–even if long and sinuous–stroke. "⁵

 

By summarizing "A Guide to Proust" by Terence Kilmartin (revised by Joanna Kilmartin) that is appended to the Modern Library edition, I hope to supply a sense of the enormity of the novel as well as its complexity. The Kilmartins, who acknowledge their debt to P. A. Spalding's Reader's Handbook to Proust and to the detailed index to the 1954 Pleiade edition of À la recherche du temps perdu, write in their foreword that it is

intended as a guide through the 4,300-page labyrinth of In Search of Lost Time not only for readers who are embarking on Proust's mas­terpiece for the first time but for those too who, already under way, find themselves daunted or bewildered by the profusion of charac­ters, themes and allusions.

It also aims to provide those who have completed the journey with the means of refreshing their memories, tracking down a character or an incident, tracing a recurrent theme or favourite passage, or identifying a literary or historical reference. Perhaps, too, the book may serve as a sort of Proustian anthology or bedside companion.⁶

 

The "Guide" is presented in four indexes to include characters, persons (historical), places, and themes; each entry is keyed to the Modern Library volume and page number. In order to provide a quick overview of the almost overwhelming length and complexity of the novel, I reduced the guide to the following quantitative summary.

 

The guide itself covers 205 pages appended to the 4,363 pages of text and includes 360 characters, 682 persons, 152 places, and 73 themes. Of the 360 characters, I have ad­judged 22 as principal.⁷ Other readers designate many more characters as principal.⁸ In general, persons included may be generally categorized as artists, hereditary aristocrats, military persons, musicians, philosophers, politicians, and writers.

 

Representative samples of these include: Vermeer, Rembrandt, Botticelli, and Whistler among the artists;⁹ Louis XIV, as well as Louis VI, XI, XIII, XV, XVI, XVII, and XVIII, among hereditary aristo­crats; Dreyfuss and Foch among the military men; Wagner, Debussy, Bach, and Beethoven among the musicians; Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Bergson, and Pascal among the philosophers; Napoleon Bonaparte, Bismarck, and William II (Kaiser) among the politician-statesmen; and Homer, Shake­speare, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, and Hugo among the writers.

 

Places include both fictional (Combray) and geographical (Paris and Venice) locations. Themes are as diverse as Aeroplanes and Railways, Flowers and Food, In­version (homosexuality) and Marriage, Memory and Time, Literature and Music, and Habit and Belief.

A Short Summary of the Novel?

 

I had thought when I began writing this short piece that I would have to supply a summary of the novel for those who have not read it in its en­tirety. But as the Monty Python spoof "The All-England Summarise Proust Competition" demonstrates, such a short summary of Proust's master­piece is impossible. Many attempts at this have been made, but ultimately, it seems to me, they fail.¹⁰ The following will have to serve as that short, if insufficient, summary.

 

À la recherche du temps perdu tells the story of Marcel's life–not Marcel Proust, but the central character, whose name happens to be the same as the author's.¹¹ The story is told in retrospect–remembered with the aid of involuntary memory, but told with the help of voluntary memory and the intellect.

 

It begins in Marcel's childhood bedroom in Combray, where his family often visits, and ends with Marcel's epiphany–many years later–and recovery of his "belief in the world and in people" while attending an afternoon reception. This epiphany enables him to accept his vocation as a writer and to begin writing the novel that the reader has almost–by that point–finished reading.

 

In order to experience the full impact of the novel, one must read the whole work. Without this whole reading one will not experience the exis­tential impact that the novel can exercise on its readers.

 

The entire reading initiates an imaginative-participatory reenactment in one's self to embrace Marcel's life of suffering, divertissement, and guilt from his early experi­ences in Combray; his misguided, pathological, and failed attempts at love (first with Gilberte, Swann's daughter, and then with Albertine); his love for the Duchesse de Guermantes, Oriane, a member of the hereditary aristocracy and his successful attempts to be invited to parties given by the Duc de Guermantes, Basin, and the Duchesse and thus be included in high society; the pathos of his acquaintance the Baron de Charlus and his cruel treatment at the hands of his lover, Morel, and the Verdurins, who have established themselves in society with the salon of their "little clan"; his friendship with the Marquis de Saint-Loup-en-Bray, Robert, and later the husband of Gilberte; his love for his grandmother and later his suffer­ing and guilt over his treatment of her; and, in the final volume, his joyful recognition and acceptance of his vocation as a writer.

 

What Exactly is Lost?

 

As the title indicates, Marcel's story is the search for lost Time. The primary question that the reader must ask upon approaching the novel is, What exactly is lost?

 

Yes, we know that Time is lost, but we want a better answer. Crucial to understanding Marcel's search–what he experienced in childhood, who he was as a child, what he lost as he grew into young adulthood, and the various activities, "love affairs" and "socializing," in which he engaged as divertissements–are what he calls, in Le temps retrouve, diverses impressions bienheureuses (various happy or blessed impressions).¹²

 

The most famous of these "happy impressions"–also referred to as resur­rections of the past, remembrances, reminiscences, and moments–is, of course, the resurrection of the "whole of Combray" from the petite madeleine dipped in a cup of tea. Eleven to thirteen of these resurrections, depending on how one reckons the avalanche of impressions that come to Marcel before he enters the Princesse de Guermantes's afternoon re­ception, reappear to him.

 

It is through the reappearances of those blessed (or happy) impressions that he comes to understand his life and to recog­nize his vocation as a novelist. This understanding comes to Marcel after he has spent a long time in a sanitarium–following years of socializing–and after his decision to reenter society by attending the party where all of his friends of the past will be present. He has not seen these social acquaintances in a long time, and he fails to recognize them because age has so changed them.

 

Thus, we conclude that Marcel himself is at least middle-aged and probably late middle-aged when he recovers his "time­less" self and accepts his vocation. The key to understanding both what Marcel lost and what he recovered is to be found in the diverses impressions bienheureuses, and his meditations on these chance occurrences.

 

This concludes my summary-sketch of the novel, but before I proceed to my reflections on Time lost and regained, I will briefly survey several philosophical symbols apropos the reading of literature that are central to Voegelin's work.

Voegelinian Symbols, Principles, and Insights

 

Voegelin's late philosophical work with its meditative-anamnetic style and focus provides an excellent backdrop against which to read À la re­cherche du temps perdu.¹³ Even though it will be apparent to readers of both Voegelin and Proust that the meditative-anamnetic style of Voegelin's late philosophy supplies an excellent philosophical complement to Proust's novelistic-artistic style, it will be helpful for the reader if I briefly discuss several of Voegelin's more important symbol-insights.

 

Voegelin's philoso­phy centers around his historical discovery, or rather recovery, of the truth that reality–explored by man in search of the truth of his existence–has a quaternarian structure constituted of God, man, world, and society.

 

This discovery resulted from his researches into the history of humankind, first reported in Israel and Revelation, the first volume of his Order and History. The introduction to this volume, entitled "The Symbolization of Order," opens with the following paragraph:

God, man, world and society form a primordial community of be­ing. The community with its quaternarian structure is, and is not, a datum of human experience. It is a datum of experience insofar as it is known to man by virtue of his participation in the mystery of its being. It is not a datum of experience insofar as it is not given in the manner of an object of the external world but is knowable only from the perspective of participation in it.¹⁴

 

These historical findings were reinforced through the exploration of his own historical biography in a series of anamnetic experiments first conducted in 1943 during the time he was working on the first volumes of Order and His­tory. The exploration of the historical-biographical dimensions of his own consciousness operationalized and deepened the insights of earlier phi­losophers like Heraclitus ("I searched into myself") and Socrates ("Know thyself").

 

It is not surprising then that anamnesis became one of the central principles of his philosophy. In his book Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics, he writes that "A philosophy of order is the process through which we find the order of our existence as human beings in the order of consciousness. Plato has let this philosophy be dominated by the symbol of 'Anamnesis,' remembrance."

 

"Remembering," he writes, "is the activity of consciousness by which the forgotten, i.e., the latent knowledge in con­sciousness, is raised from unconsciousness into the presence of conscious­ness."¹⁵ In the process, then, of searching for the truth of our existence and the order of our souls, we must remember what has been forgotten–both horizontally, back into the history of mankind, and vertically, down into the depths of our own souls.

 

This is an arduous task; Voegelin, as we have seen above, even thought that Proust's monumental novel was an expression of the penalty that must be paid for forgetting what should not be forgotten (and indeed never really was).

 

In 1970, Voegelin published an essay entitled "Equivalences of Experi­ence and Symbolization in History," in which he clarified his earlier and continuing work on his search of order with special reference to the con­stants in the historical experiences of human beings who search for the truth of their existence, the experiences that they undergo in this search, and the symbols that these experiences engender. He writes that

the flux of existence does not have the structure of order or, for that matter, of disorder, but the structure of a tension between truth and deformation of reality. Not the possession of his humanity but the concern about its full realization is the lot of man. Existence has the structure of the In-Between, of the Platonic metaxy, and if anything is constant in the history of mankind it is the language of tension be­tween life and death, immortality and mortality, perfection and im­perfection, time and timelessness.¹⁶

 

In the same essay, Voegelin asserts

To gain the understanding of his own humanity, and to order his life in the light of the insight gained, has been the written concern of man in history as far back as the written records go . . . . This field of experiences and symbols is neither an object to be observed from the outside, nor does it present the same appearance to everybody. It rather is the time dimension of existence, accessible only through participation in its reality.¹⁷

 

Following and amplifying Plato's work, Voegelin "locates" human con­sciousness in the metaxy; consciousness, paradoxically, is neither here (in the body) nor there (in physical reality outside the body), but instead is both here and there by virtue of its participation in both the inner spiri­tual world and the outer world of physical reality. It is in the metaxy that consciousness becomes conscious of itself as it experiences and thus par­ticipates in the spiritual dimension of reality, which he sometimes calls nonexistent or nonobjective reality, the invisible order that suffuses the visible-physical reality.

Knowledge in the Mode of Oblivion

 

The human, who lives in the metaxy, participates–methexis (in Plato) and metalepsis (in Aristotle)–in all the dimensions of reality with his body, soul, intellect, spirit, and imagination. In The New Science of Politics, we read that "Science [the philosophical science of order] starts from the pre­scientific existence of man, from his participation in the world with his body, soul, intellect, and spirit, from his primary grip on all the realms of being that is assured to him because his own nature is their epitome."¹⁸

 

It is through his consciousness that man experiences himself as a mem­ber of and a participant in the community of being: God, man, world, and society. As a partner in the community of being, man participates in reality through his consciousness. This consciousness is cognitive-meditative (reflective) as well as imaginative, and the presupposition for this participation is the Consubstantiality of all being and the interrelatedness of all levels of reality.

 

Ellis Sandoz, in a clarification that furthers our understanding of the experience of participation, writes that "The participatory (metaleptic) experiences of human beings in the In-Between (metaxy), which are the constitutive core of human reality, are transac­tions conducted within consciousness itself and not externally in time and space; hence Voegelin sometimes calls the realm in which they occur non­existent reality . . . , or the realm of spirit."¹⁹

 

When the symbols of the tensions of existence in the metaxy are not rec­ognized as articulations of experience, the symbols lose their meanings and, as Voegelin says, become opaque to the experiences that engendered them. It is at this point that the difficult process of remembrance, anamne­sis, must be initiated in order to recover that which has been forgotten– historically and individually–but which is not entirely beyond reach. In the foreword to Anamnesis, Voegelin writes:

The culpably forgotten will be brought to the presence of knowledge through remembrance, and in the tension to knowledge oblivion re­veals itself as the state of non-knowledge, of the agnoia of the soul in the Platonic sense. Knowledge and non-knowledge are states of exis­tential order and disorder.

What has been forgotten, however, can be remembered only because it is a knowledge in the mode of oblivion that through its presence in oblivion arouses the existential unrest that will urge toward its raising into the mode of knowledge.²⁰

 

In his later work–volume 4 (The Ecumenic Age) and the posthumously published volume 5 (In Search of Order) of Order and History–Voegelin rec­ognized, like Aristotle late in his life,²¹ the importance of myth and the foundational experience symbolized by myth and designated by Voege­lin as "the primary experience of the cosmos."²²

 

The primary experience of the cosmos manifests itself immediately in the experiences of wonder and awe found in Aristotle's Metaphysics and in Kant's Critique of Practi­cal Reason.²³ Early on, Voegelin was guided in his anamnetic experiments to "recall those experiences that . . . opened sources of excitation," those "experiences that impel toward reflection and do so because they have excited consciousness to the 'awe' of existence."²⁴

 

In his late work Voege­lin argued that both philosophy and revelation as symbolic complexes are dependent upon the primary experience of the cosmos, and that instead of supplanting myth, philosophy and revelation must subsume myth into their own symbolic linguistic structures.

 

In the essay "Eternal Being in Time," Voegelin classifies Plato's Timaeus as "a myth," and later he writes that "Plato [in the Timaeus] is struggling for a language that will optimally express the analytical movements of existential consciousness within the limits of a fides of the Cosmos."²⁵ The "fides of the Cosmos," is a linguistic equivalent to the term "primary experience of the cosmos. "²⁶

 

In a late essay, "The Beginning and the Beyond," Voegelin comments that the "adequacy of the symbolism to the experi­ence points to the miracle of a mythical imagination that can produce the adequate Tale."²⁷ While this remark was focused on the analogical symbol of "the creational Beginning" and "the cosmogonic myth," it nevertheless points us to the problem of the symbolization of the timeless, that is of a Time out of time, that may be symbolized in what Voegelin called "the Time of the Tale."

 

In a passage from the same essay, a passage that could easily function as a description of In Search of Lost Time, he writes:

I shall begin . . . from the cosmos as it impresses itself on man by the splendor of its existence, by the movements of the starry heavens, by the intelligibility of its order, and by its lasting as the habitat of man. The man who receives the impression, in his turn, is endowed with an intellect both questioning and imaginative. . . .

In this experience of the cosmos, neither the impression nor the reception of reality is dully factual. It rather is alive with the meaning of a spiritual event, for the impres­sion is revelatory of the divine mystery, while the reception responds to the revelatory component by cognition of faith.²⁸

 

The impact of the diverses impressions bienheureuses left upon Marcel's/Proust's consciousness by the primary experience of cosmos (and its forget­ting) lead to a Search for Lost Time in which Time has become (in Voegelin's lexicon) Proust's symbol for the experiences of meaning that happened to Marcel and that are resurrected with the impressions evoked by objects-fetishes.

 

Time is capitalized in order to distinguish it from the time that passes and leaves its residue of age; it is Time in its true nature that is last­ing, for it is timeless. This Time of Proust appears analogous to Plato's time as the eikon of eternity.²⁹

 

In addition to the symbols–metalepsis (participation), metaxy (the In-between), anamnesis (remembrance), and the primary experience of the cosmos–and the experiences that they articulate, two assertions by Voege­lin have also guided my reading not only of Proust's novels, but of great novels in general.

 

These two assertions are: "All art, if it is any good, is some sort of myth in the sense that it becomes what I call a cosmion, a reflection of the unity of the cosmos as a whole"; and "The truth of the symbols is not informative; it is evocative."³⁰      

  [This is part 1 of 3 parts.  Part 2 may be read HERE.]

Charles Embry is also editor of Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin: A Friendship in Letters, 1944-1984 and The Philosopher and The Storyteller: Eric Voegelin and Twentieth-Century Literature. 

 

 

NOTES