Proustian Echoes
This year marks the hundredth anniversary of Marcel Proust’s winning of the Prix Goncourt, France’s prestigious equivalent of the Booker Prize. He won the award for A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur ( In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower), the second part of his seven-volume, three-thousand-page novel sequence, A la recherche du temps perdu ( In Remembrance of Things Past). The jury’s choice was unexpected: the First World War had just ended and laureates in previous years had all sourced their material from the Great War. Winners prior to the war, writers such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, Léon Hennique and Léon Daudet had tended to write in a rather classical style about the provinces, far from the lives of the Parisian aristocracy. In 1919, Proust’s main contender for the prize was Roland Dorgelès’s Les Croix de bois, one of the best war novels to have come out of the conflict. Despite the fact that Proust lavishly wined and dined all the members of the Académie Goncourt well in advance, he was nevertheless surprised when they decided to nominate him.
A storm of protest arose when the winner was announced. To many it felt like a betrayal of all those who had fought in the war. Others decried Proust’s aristocratic origins, vastly exaggerating his wealth. At the age of forty-eight, Proust was also deemed too old for the prize. The Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, both high-ranking novelists in their day, had set up the prize in their wills to perpetuate their name but also to allow an unsupported young writer to live on an annual stipend of 5000 francs. Their third aim was to foster the art of the novel which the more traditional and backward-looking Académie Française had sidelined completely in favour of poetry and drama. The jury’s maverick choice that year proved providential: the novel went on to become the first world-renowned work to be crowned by the Goncourt.
To celebrate Proust’s award and the whole of his work, the Printemps
Proustien committee, in conjunction with the Académie Goncourt, organized a whole series of events this spring around Proust and the places of his novels. The city of Illiers (recently renamed Illiers-Combray to highlight its Proustian heritage) held a Belle Époque party to celebrate the place in which Proust’s narrator spent his holidays as a child in Tante Léonie’s house (based on Proust’s aunt Elisabeth Proust). The whole city was decked out in late nineteenth-century fashions with old-style vintage vehicles, horse-drawn carriages and Proustian food. A series of concerts and readings by French writers and actors were given at IlliersCambray, Chartres and Châteaudun. The Maison de Tante Léonie museum in Illiers housed a series of exciting exhibits such as the contract Proust signed with Gallimard, his publisher (who took him on after André Gide refused to accept his manuscript for Grasset because there were ‘too many countesses’ – Gide later regretted this decision rather bitterly). The proofs and the manuscript of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur were on show as well as Jacques-Emile Blanche’s famous portrait of Proust, on loan from the Musée d’Orsay.
To honour the celebrations, I decided to do my own bit of literary sleuthing by contacting a number of French novelists and critics for the occasion. Over half of them answered my call, which is a good deal more than I expected, knowing how busy and over-solicited writers tend to be. Among those who didn’t answer were Michel Houellebecq (number one on my list of expected dead letters), Patrick Grainville and Richard Millet. Those who answered tend to have a reputation for kindness. I got several letters and emails back from high-profile novelists such as Pierre Assouline, Philippe Labro, Amélie Nothomb, Anne Terral, Bruno Gibert and Philippe Lançon. I also got answers from Jean-Yves Tadié, an eminent Proust scholar from the Sorbonne as well as one from a prominent member of the Collège de France, the culture critic Antoine Compagnon. Before I disclose what these living writers had to say, I’ll outline first the reaction of novelists no longer with us.
Let me indulge in at least one attempt at a Proustian paragraph-sentence to introduce this legacy (noting in passing that critic Jean-Yves Tadié has
pointed out that a Proustian sentence has less to do with length than with its inclusion of Latinate clausal structuring, poetic imagery, comedy and knowledgeable observations): after his death in 1922 from the respiratory disease which was no doubt made worse by the fact that he cloistered himself into his home (going as far as keeping his shutters closed day and night, insulating the walls of his apartment, forcing the maid to wear feltpadded shoes and paying off noisy workers in other apartments to leave their work unfinished), Proust remained popular throughout the Roaring Twenties (Jean Cocteau often reminisced about his friend and rival calling him ‘a magnificent Easter egg’); he left the limelight during the 1930s when those writers in favour of a littérature engagée (politically-committed, leftwing literature) deemed him too apolitical and lacking in moral fibre.
Proust’s fortunes began to rise again under the Vichy regime in the 1940s when his work featured in school anthologies for the first time. A new generation of writers (collectively known under the novelistic label of the nouveau roman) had read Proust in the mid-to-late 1920s and began to champion him in their novels. Of these nouveaux romanciers, the most obvious formal Proustian is Claude Simon who won the Nobel Prize in 1985 (the first Frenchman to win the award after the Swedish Academy allegedly punished French writers for Sartre’s refusal to accept it in 1964 – despite this moratorium, France is still the country that totalizes the greatest number of Nobel Prizes for literature).
Claude Simon’s sentences are generally as long and articulated as Proust’s. He also possesses Proust’s fascination for minutiae and the foregrounding of the narrator’s gaze. Detractors would say that Claude Simon took Proust’s repetitive pondering a step closer to boredom. A slightly more positive detractor might argue that reading Simon and Proust one after the other would be like watching a slow-moving luminous jellyfish undulate through the ocean. In the course of his Nobel Prize speech, Simon returned to Proust on several occasions, first citing Proust’s attention to inconspicuous things: ‘I attempted, wrote Marcel Proust, to find beauty where I never thought it would be: in the most mundane objects, in the innermost being of still lifes’. Simon went on to point out that the sudden death of Albertine (in La
Fugitive, the penultimate volume of A la recherche) constituted a turning point in French literature as no moral could be drawn from her undeserved, banal, untimely, unexpectedly gruesome end when she is dashed to death by a horse against a tree. Simon also praised Proust, alongside Joyce and Faulkner, for evoking the working of involuntary memory.
The nouveaux romanciers as a whole found Proust’s meditative, slowmoving mellifluous mulling a model to imitate and rework. Marguerite Duras’s melancholic reminiscences of the amorous past owe much to Proust’s narrator and his obsession with the ill-fated Albertine. In a radio programme broadcast in 1963, Duras cited Proust as an example for all writers, saying that he taught her not to lie about the past and to avoid clichés. Like most writers of her generation, she admired Proust for his absolute dedication to the craft. Nathalie Sarraute was similarly full of praise, celebrating Proust for changing the direction of French literature. She argued that it wasn’t so much his social satire or his descriptive talent that made him stand out but rather his ‘revolutionary discovery of psychology’.
While it took Michel Butor one thousand pages of Proust to find him interesting and two thousand to find him fascinating, he lauded Proust’s architectural design, arguing that it was this gradual emergence of structure (‘like a cathedral emerging from the fog’) that made A la recherche such an astonishingly monumental work. Even the surrealist writer Francis Ponge was inspired by Proust’s multiplicity: Ponge claimed to have been energized when reading him by the realization that a writer ‘could enter the forest and explore every path’.
Among the living writers I contacted who were born before or after the Second World War, Pierre Assouline was the most outspoken and commemorative. A member of the prestigious Académie Goncourt, Assouline is a novelist who is also a profoundly well-read Proust specialist, having recently published Proust par lui-même, an encyclopaedic reference dictionary of Proust’s entire oeuvre. Assouline had this to say about the impact of Proust on his novels:
having taught me to read, Proust also taught me to write, by which I mean he allowed me to avoid the pitfall of not writing the way he did. Above all, I have retained from him that the gravitation of the spirit occurs around a single axis which is the author’s consciousness. Everything depends on this ability to connect with the innermost self which allows the author to set the world into motion. As Marguerite Duras pointed out, Proust’s great cautionary lesson is that if a writer juxtaposes a false received consciousness with his own, not only will his literary project lack harmony, he will also fail to express anything worthwhile. This being said, my debt to Proust is so immense that I am unable to acknowledge it in a few lines, or even a single book on the subject.
In his first email to me, Philippe Labro claimed that:
no writer or reader can get by without Proust. His notion of time, of love, his aphorisms and his audacity, the monumentality of his work are all inscribed in us. His characters, his passions, his mores, his plunge into the human soul, the gift of his style – everything unites to make Proust the centre, the pivot, the turning point, the reference point of French literature. He is the major reference for me and for thousands of others.
When I asked Labro to tell me which of his novels he found the most Proustian, he answered that he couldn’t claim to be Proustian:
his genius surpasses all my writing. This being said, my first novel Des feux mal éteints and one of my most recent ones, Les gens, contain elements that might interest you. There is also the Proustian figure of the mother in Ma mère, cette inconnue.
The high-profile literary critic Antoine Compagnon wrote back to offer his more pessimistic view of the future of Proust’s presence, presenting the pitfalls of Proust appreciation in the age of the short informal French novel and the tweet:
Proust is ranked first in the literary surveys of French writers. But that doesn’t mean that he is read more. His writing is long and difficult; people have more and more things to do. And writers don’t read more than other people, not much more in any case. A recent phenomenon is writers who haven’t read much at all. So neither Proust’s language nor his ideas are present in any significant way in contemporary literature. He’s a big name, a monument, a brand, exploited on the cultural marketplace. I’ve personally read him on a regular basis over the last fifty years. I teach him. I’m sometimes told my sentences are too long. What would people say if I took Proust as a model?
The younger generation of writers I contacted tend to bear out Compagnon’s pessimistic view. Although he was born in 1949, Philippe Djian first epitomized the view that Proust is too disconnected from contemporary reality to be a good guide. For the magazine L’Express in 2010, he famously confessed that ‘although Proust gives me aesthetic pleasure, he doesn’t help me cross the road, he doesn’t help me to talk to my wife or my kids’.
This view tends to prevail among the X generation writers that I contacted. Although a number of her novels evoke childhood and the past, Anne Terral had this to say:
To tell you the truth, I am not the right person to contact about Proust. I read him and studied a few of his tomes as a student but I have no discourse to offer you about him. I haven’t read enough of him and have no idea what to say about him. It would just be banal. I prefer to decline the offer in all frankness.
Terral’s sometime partner the novelist Bruno Gibert who also acquired some fame composing novels about his personal past wrote back to say that he was delighted I was writing an article on Proust but that he was not the right person to contact on the subject: ‘I admire Proust, but he bores me. He’s obviously a giant statue but I prefer Flaubert. In any case, I never think about Marcel when I’m writing (it would be insane to do so!)’
Although Amélie Nothomb was eulogistic, she offered none of the details that suggest profound engagement with Proust within her own work: ‘Proust is the absolute god of literature. His work is such an act of faith that it elevates literature to the level of religion. Reading A la recherche is an engagement more profound even than reading the Bible.’ She did write another letter to let me know that La nostalgie heureuse was her most ‘Proustian’ novel. The inverted commas point to the fact that the novel ultimately owes more to the way the Japanese view the past, with an unadulterated, bliss-filled nostalgia that also happens to be Proustian.
One French Gen X writer who offers a counterblast to the Djian perception of Proust is Philippe Lançon, the author of Le lambeau, by all accounts the most outstanding novel published in 2018. Le lambeau recounts Lançon’s hospitalized ordeal after he survived the attack on the Charlie Hebdo headquarters in January 2015. Lançon’s account of Proust suggests that he can do more than help you cross the road; he can attenuate the traumatic horrors of terrorism. In his e-mail, Lançon remarked that re-reading Proust in his hospital bed offered him strong spiritual sustenance as well as all the entertainment he needed: ‘I used to tell myself that as long as Proust existed, I was alive and I knew I had lived’. Proust and his characters ‘became a second family to me’. He added, paradoxically, that it was also his irritation at the sensation that in Proust’s world ‘everything is solitude, mask and misunderstanding’ which energized him in opposition.
Proust’s suspension of time offered Lançon a supporting analogy for his own state of mind as he slowly recovered from his devastating injuries. Proust’s own first-hand knowledge of illness also provided a strong measure of comfort. His famed account of the narrator’s grandmother dying, with its Molière-inspired humorous descriptions of the medical world, afforded Lançon a stay against having to go down to the operating theatre over and over endlessly for months. He used to read the description of the dying grandmother like a ritual before every operation. Lançon also acknowledged that the reminiscences of his own grandmothers in Le lambeau were probably due to his extensive reading of A la recherche.
As a Generation X reader, I personally didn’t read much Proust outside of my literary studies. Like Philippe Djian, I found Nabokov a more exciting super-stylist than Proust. Like Bruno Gibert, I tend to find Proust’s prose bejewelled but often long-winded and a little tedious. When reading him now in my late forties, I still feel he could have done with more editing (he died before he could finish reworking the whole oeuvre of course, which makes the accusation partly unfair).
As a Franco-Irish writer, my novels tend to bear the marks of authors as diverse as Jean Cocteau, Boris Vian, Michel Tournier, James Joyce, Flann O’Brien – not to mention a host of novelists from other countries. In some ways, my writing even seems anti-Proustian to me when I think about it. My novels tend to be fast-paced and my sentences are generally tailored to a reasonable modern length. And yet, my writing contains something that I take for granted without realizing I owe it to Proust.
Corresponding the other day with an editor in a major French publishing house (I’ll keep both the editor and the company unnamed), I suddenly came to terms with my Proustian inheritance. Having sent this editor my first novel The Pleasures of Queueing to request a translation into French, the editor wrote back to say that while he had found the novel both funny and stylish, he had been frustrated by the minimalistic plot-line and had to decline the offer.
I wrote back to say that I was very surprised by the reason for his refusal, saying that I thought Marcel Proust had done away with the necessity of elaborate plotting. None of my other readers have objected to my minimal plotting because they found the setup titillating enough (the novel recounts the comic trials and tribulations of an overlarge Franco-Irish family of twenty plus children and two over-burdened parents from the 1970s to the early 1990s.) Virginia Woolf praised Proust for this legacy: since the modernist movement, literature aficionados have generally accepted that the pleasure afforded by creatively tweaked language subsumes the necessity for plotting. Geoff Dyer put it succinctly a few years ago: ‘the more style you have, the less plot you need’.
My fascination with capturing the quintessence of the past and its emotional echoes is a Proustian principle present in my second, recently-published novel, Ne soyez pas timide. The novel is based on a letter written by Jean Cocteau that was found in my grandfather’s house: the unpublished, unknown letter acted as a kind of Proustian madeleine generating a whole novel around it. Like Proust in most of A la recherche, I also decided to eschew historical events, preferring to focus on the emotional resonance triggered by the mysterious epistolary artefact I had in my hands (found by chance, like the scarlet letter). So for instance, although part of Ne soyez pas timide is set in the spring of 1932, my protagonist is so obsessed with his Albertine-like muse Jean Cocteau that he doesn’t even register a nationwide event, the assassination of the French President Paul Doumer.