Hinterland

Do you have to be mad to read Proust’s stream-ofconsciousness epic? Au contraire, it’d be crazy not to

Anyone who recalls the Monty Python sketch about “The All-England Summarize Proust Competition” knows the absurdity of trying to capture the essence of the Frenchman or his achievement in a newspaper column. Some of us never learn; wish me luck.

Having by the age of 38 earned a reputation as one of Paris’s leading literary critics, Marcel Proust embarked, in 1909, on the work with which his name is now synonymous: the seven-volume novel À la recherche du temps perdu. Now usually translated as

In Search of Lost Time, Proust’s first English translator, Charles Scott Moncrieff, rendered the title with a phrase taken from Shakespeare: Remembrance of Things Past.

While this was not exactly what Proust had intended, it does capture one element of what he was trying to do: to record as much experience as possible in his seven volumes, and in recording that experience to demonstrate how people’s thoughts affect their actions, how individuals evolve, and how time and chance take their toll on us all. Yet, as the end of the work suggests, much of it is about regaining, or exerting a mastery over, time.

Proust died on 18 November 1922, in the same modernist annus mirabilis that gave us Ulysses and The Waste Land. A few months earlier, at the Hôtel Majestic in Paris, Joyce met Proust, but both claimed not to have read each other’s books. Proust’s first volume appeared in 1913 (the last came in 1927, five years after the author’s death) and the use of memory as a main theme is close to what Joyce, over a far shorter time frame, did in Ulysses, begun in 1914. Both works reject the traditional idea of a plot-based novel and instead explore character – and pursue the truth about humanity – by describing experience.

Proust intimidates many English readers for three reasons: the sheer size of the novel-sequence is the first. The seven volumes run to over 3,200 pages and include a cast of more than 2,000 characters. The world the author describes stretches over several decades and embraces the brittle, closed but vast-feeling sphere of Parisian high society. The second hurdle is the radical nature of the form – what later came to be called “stream of consciousness”.

Proust was a complex and conflicted man and, as I have written here before, if you want to get the measure of him, you must read George Painter’s peerless 1965 account, one of the greatest literary biographies in the English language.

But Proust’s complications, especially those concerning his homosexuality in an ostensibly very orthodox society, are already laid out on every page of his semi-autobiographical fiction. A translator of Ruskin, he also carried his precious and sensitive view of art into his novels. Wallowing in Proust’s life, vicariously, is a splendid form of escape; and he writes about a world changed – or, in the last part of the sequence, being changed – forever by a war that presented an existentialist threat.

The third barrier for many readers will be that Proust wrote, of course, in French. However, huge lengths have been gone to to ensure that nothing is lost in translation. Moncrieff died before his own version was completed, so Sydney Schiff finished the job. Terence Kilmartin revised Moncrieff in the 1980s, and an international committee of translators used a new, revised and corrected French text that Penguin published in 2002. That considerable obstacle out of the way, the question for the reader then becomes whether one has the time and intellectual stamina to embark on such a vast work. For any civilised and rational person, the answer to that must be “yes”. All human life is there: and there is a world of such beauty, nuance and depth that one is drawn in almost immediately, as the narrator – our constant companion throughout all seven volumes – recalls lying in bed at his childhood home, having been made to go to bed early. It is an enviable world to visit; thanks to Proust’s own efforts, our stay becomes a long one.

If you speak French, do read the original. Proust wrote the most perfect French, so much so that if yours is rusty, a stroll through his pages will sharpen it up perfectly. And there could be no better reason to do so.

In Search of Lost Time runs to over 3,200 pages and has more than 2,000 characters