Two weeks ago, I wrote about how I was preparing to begin reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Writing from the other side of volume one, The Way by Swann's, I'm experiencing that odd feeling you get when a piece of art so culturally enshrined as to become meaningless turns out to be - stop the presses - really rather good.
When I say meaningless, I mean it in a practical sense. I thought I knew a bit about the novel, but trivia and surrounding theory are no substitute for direct engagement. In fact, reading The Way by Swann's reminded me of visiting New York for the first time: I'd seen the city so often in films that I experienced a sense of absolute familiarity repeatedly pricked by the reality of my not knowing where the hell I was. Upon sitting down with Proust I soon found that the cliches about his writing (a man who detested cliches so much he claimed they made his teeth ache), while basically accurate only describe the surface without ever - those sensitive of tooth should look away now - getting to the heart of the matter.
So, here are a neophyte's brief impressions of where the truth might lie between what I knew already and what I know now.
I'd heard that the opening 30 pages are about the narrator, Marcel, trying to get to sleep. In fact it's closer to 50, but in any case this tidbit is so reductive as to be nonsensical. It's like saying The Odyssey is about Greek island-hopping. The novel's core mechanism of the interplay of past and present, and in particular the way the latter is so constantly penetrated by the former as to make the two essentially indivisible, is presented in miniature here.
I'd heard that things really kick off when Marcel dips a cake in his tea. Spot on. I'd also heard, often in almost horrified tones, that Proust writes extremely long sentences. That was bang on the money too, but less clear to me was the artistic reasoning behind their length. Proust's prose seems the best literary approximation of the way thoughts unfurl - one triggering another, triggering another and so on, in necessarily contiguous fashion - that I've ever encountered (and if you think anything tops it then please, let me know). It's true to say I sometimes, owing to an attention span more ephemeral than a soap bubble, found myself lost in the middle of a vast sentence with no idea how it started or when it might finish, surrounded by inscrutable dependent clauses. However, such problems were easily remedied, and while Proust is undeniably wordy he's rarely prolix.
Leaving preconceptions aside, here's something I was totally unaware of and that newcomers should know: Proust is funny. Modernism isn't an artistic tendency particularly known for its rib-tickling qualities, Joyce and early Eliot aside. Proust, however, can crack wise, as shown by Marcel's boyhood friend Albert Bloch's excuses for arriving at dinner over an hour late and covered in mud:
"I never allow myself to be influenced either by atmospheric perturbations or by the conventional divisions of time. I would happily instate the use of the opium pipe and the Malay kris, but I know nothing about the use of these infinitely more pernicious and also insipidly bourgeois implements, the watch and the umbrella."
It could be Withnail speaking.
To return, finally, to more traditionally Proustian ground, he shows himself to be a masterful observer of relationships, particularly when they're going pear-shaped. His analysis of obsessive jealousy alone would be enough to mark this volume out as something special, but combine it with pages that leap from the reasons why crown princes needn't be lookers and women love firemen, to rhapsodic nature writing and the profligate seeding of themes and events that will (I presume) be developed in later volumes, and it's fair to say that, thus far, this seems a read well worth the rather extreme demands it makes on one's time. Still, Marcel remains in short trousers and there's a long way to go yet.
