The Global Novel: a literature podcast
The Global Novel is a podcast that surveys the narratology of world literature and history of translation from antiquity to modernity with a critical lens and aims to make academic education in literature accessible to the world.
The Global Novel: a literature podcast
In Search of Lost Time (1913)
In Search of Lost Time (1913) by Marcel Proust remains one of the most profound and monumental novels of the 20th century, presenting us an intricate labyrinth of memory, time, and desire. With us are Professor Darci Gardner from Appalachian State University, whose expertise is in 19th and 20th-century French literature and she will shed light on the enigmatic Proustian syntax as a vehicle for story-telling and more. We also have Professor François Proulx from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and his expertise in French literature will enlighten us on aspects of desire and sexuality in this novel.
Suggested Readings:
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (vol.1 of In Search of Lost Time)
Proust and the Arts (2018) ed.Christie McDonald & François Proulx
D. Gardner, "Rereading as a Mechanism of Defamiliarization in Proust," Poetics Today (2016) 37 (1): 55–105.https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-3452619
F. Proulx, “Beyond the Epistemology of the Closet.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 48:3-4 (2020), 185-192.https://muse.jhu.edu/article/754608
F. Proulx, “Proust’s Drawings and the Secret of the ‘Solitary House.’” Modern Language Notes 133:4 (2018), 865-890.https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/707619
F. Proulx and H. Freed-Thall, eds. “Proust to Other Ends,” special issue of L’Esprit Créateur, 62:3 (Fall 2022), 164 pages.https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/48666
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In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust remains one of the most profound and monumental novels of the 20th century, presenting us an intricate labyrinth of memory, time and desire. Welcome to the Global Novel Podcast. I'm your host, Claire Hennessey. Today, we're very excited to have two distinguished scholars on the show who will help us better understand and appreciate the aestheticism of Proust's works. We have Professor Darcy Gardner from Appalachian State University, whose expertise is in 19th and 20th century French literature, and she will shed light on the enigmatic Proustian syntax as a vehicle for storytelling and more. We also have Professor François Proulx from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and his expertise in French literature will enlighten us on aspects of desire and sexuality in the novel.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show, Darcy and François. Thank you for having us. Welcome to the show, Darcy and Francois. Thank you for having us. Well, Proust's novelistic universe famously examines themes of memory, identity and the passage of time that resonate as philosophically today as they did over a century ago. Let's begin with your own experiences with this novel. What initially draws you into this elegantly written and yet at times perplexing novel, right, and what inspires you to research deeper into it?
Speaker 2:Well, I really enjoy the long range of facts. I think it was Diane Leonard who wrote a chapter about how Proust built his novel like a cathedral, in that interesting patterns connect distant volumes and new information is constantly transforming our understanding of earlier moments in the narrative. I also really appreciate how the novel rewards rereading. Adam Watt says we never quite finish reading Proust, and it's true because the text includes passages that can only be fully understood retrospectively. For example, elizabeth Ladenson talks about readers shifting interpretations of characters as we learn more about them, and Kalaneski says we get different things from the novel when we read it at different points in our lives. So all of this makes Proust really enjoyable for me to read and to study.
Speaker 3:I agree. For me it's also about how endless it is, how we keep, even as a researcher, even as a specialist, we keep finding new things, and so it's really kind of a portal or a compendium, an entryway into lots of different things, into art, history, into music, into the history of fashion, into french history. Um, it just leads down an endless number of pathways and students and readers can kind of pick what they want to know more about. For me personally, also, going back to what Darcy was saying about rereading, I love that aspect of the text that, um, all the little sort of easter eggs you could, you could say in right, in more modern parlance All the hidden secrets, all the what some critics, like Francine Grugon, have called the doublure of the text, which is a French word that means sort of the doubling or the lining.
Speaker 3:So if we think of the novel as a cathedral but Proust described it as a cathedral in some letters, but he also describes it as a dress in some moments of the novel itself so it's both kind of monumental but also something very intimate, something that's close to the body, something that can be kind of tailored to you in your own reading. It can sort of match your own experiences and like the dresses that he describes on certain characters Madame Swan's dresses, for example. They're full of intricate details. There's wonderful descriptions where the protagonist notices that the inside of the sleeve of Madame Swan has all this delicate embroidery that's not even really meant to be visible because it's inside right. So the novel is built a little bit like that. It has all of these details that are not immediately visible or noticeable to a casual reader or a first-time reader, but that can become accessible the more you delve into it, and it's kind of infinitely rewarding that way right.
Speaker 1:Well, what part of the author's life do you consider as providing important context for us to understand the novel better, and which aspects of Proust's life might have provided some inspiration for his stories?
Speaker 2:It's very helpful to think about the author's sexuality because it can be tempting for some readers to conflate the author and the narrator tempting for some readers to conflate the author and the narrator. Josh Landy wrote an article about this. You know the importance of distinction and our protagonist is heterosexual, and so thinking about Proust's life even just that way gives us a cue or can help us. You know, notice not to read too much into heterosexuality. The occasional reference to his protagonist as Marcel.
Speaker 3:It's an interesting question, given that Proust in some of his early drafts around 1908, in what he then was calling the Contre Sainte-Beuve project against Sainte-Beuve Sainte-Beuve being a 19th century biographer of Chateaubriand and literary critic who developed a method for literary analysis that was based in biography Proust really went against that in that project for an essay and basically arguing that biography is the wrong approach with which to try to really have a deep understanding of a literary text. It can only provide a kind of surface understanding of the person behind the work and the essence of the work. The deeper meaning of the work is something that is in the text itself. And those drafts were published in the early 1950s and had a huge influence on what became French New Criticism, which then led to some of the things that we still teach about or know of in the US Academy structuralism, post-structuralism. So you know you're not supposed to talk about the author's life when you do a close reading of this and that, when you do a close reading of this and that. But even though he's the person who really set that up, or he was really influential in setting that up, of course his life is mirrored in all kinds of ways in his novel. It's always sort of diffracted and so it's never a one-to-one perfect image. It's always like a hall of mirrors, it's deformed, it's only elements that you can find, some correspondences and so on. I think.
Speaker 3:To get back to your question, if we had to pick, I would go with his parents. I mean, it's such a basic thing. But his mother, of course, is an important character in the novel. But in real life she was Jeanne Proust, learned woman who really instilled in him a love of of classical french letters, uh proper epistolary practices. She was very well read, uh very eloquent, and brought with her um, a lot of um, jewish culture.
Speaker 3:Or, as she's from her side of the family, it's that 19th century Jewish assimilation into French high bourgeoisie with all of the aspirations that came with that. So it's no accident in some way that she was so well-versed in the classical French 17th century was a way for her family to display Frenchness at a time when that was still being contested. And his father was a famous doctor, a professor of medicine, who lectured at the University of Paris Medical Faculty and wrote a number of treatises, including about things like neurasthenia and diseases of the will and so on. And there are many ways in which Proust engages with and kind of writes against some of his father's propositions, responds to his father's medical work in Marcel Proust's own literary work. So the parents are both key formative elements, not just biographically but in terms of the kinds of literature that they each practiced.
Speaker 1:Proust can be a very difficult read, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Proust's novel is obviously very difficult to read. I didn't even try until my first year of graduate school. You know it's tough because of the length of his sentences, the syntax and also the lack of a clean or compact sequence of plot events to latch onto. But it's also interesting because, you know, in this youthful essay against obscurity he denounced this tendency of symbolist poets at that time to write hermetic ideas in complex language because he felt that their difficulty was forced and snobbish. By contrast, when his work is difficult, I think it's often necessary in the sense that he can't get his point across as well another way. For example, I'm thinking of this passage that I've written about, where the narrator describes memory as a worker that reconstructs facsimiles of what we hear. But the syntax of the sentence is such that we forget parts of it before we get through it. So it ironizes the narrator by undermining what he says. As he says it, the difficulty of that sentence is indispensable to its literary effect, and I think that's often the case with Proust. His difficulty can sometimes be productive.
Speaker 3:The first 40 or 50 pages are difficult and that's what rebuts a lot of readers and that's what infamously made it difficult for Proust to find a publisher before 1913. You know there are these sort of legends about editors' reports saying well, this is just about a man tossing and turning in bed and I don't really see why this needs to be hundreds of pages long. But so that opening sequence Combré I, as it's known, or the first translator, called it an overture. It is a little more challenging because the reader doesn't have any bearings, just like the protagonist. The protagonist is describing being in a state between sleep and wakefulness, remembering sleeping in different bedrooms throughout his life and some names and places associated with those bedrooms. But it's all a bit of a jumble, or a kaleidoscope is one of the words that he uses. So it's a beautiful passage.
Speaker 3:It is a little bit challenging. It's a little bit close to a kind of stream of consciousness like you might find in other modernist authors. But once you get past that it's basically a straightforward narrative line. It's long, so that's what makes it challenging is the length. The duration and the length of the sentences can take some time to get used to, I think if you read an English translation. A lot of translations will chop up the sentences a little bit or sort of traffic them a little bit. You can't quite do as many things in an English sentence as you can do in a French sentence.
Speaker 2:And yet he knows that he might sometimes be misinterpreted right? So there's that difficulty as well. There's the difficulty of holding the parts of the sentences in your mind as you process it, and there's also this difficulty of he knows occasionally people are going to misread things that he says and the novel also forces interpretive errors at certain junctures precisely for the effects that they generate. So I agree with Francois that he's certainly not difficult in the same way that you know, madame Reyes, for example, or many of his contemporaries, but he does, I think, present some challenges for readers.
Speaker 1:In Search of Lost Time is also renowned for its exploration of involuntary memory right Epitomized by this famous sensual trigger of the famous Madeline cookie. How do you think this involuntary memory shapes the narrative structure and the themes of the novel, and what insights does it offer about the relationship between memory, art and the passage of time?
Speaker 2:I love how memory is not just a theme in the novel, it's truly experiential, right. I think you know Roland Barthes said it best when he noted that Proust demands circular memory, meaning that readers continually recall earlier passages as they encounter new ones. And I think Josh Landy has also argued that the novel encourages us to stretch our memory capacity. So in other words, readers figure out early on that it's useful to store as much information as possible, because you never know when what's coming next might radically change the meaning of previously narrated events. So I guess in this sense the focus, the thematic focus on the relationship between memory, art and the passage of time, is kind of accompanied by these simulations in which the reader experiences the effects of memory.
Speaker 3:I think involuntary memory and the Madeleine are somehow the most famous. But it's a device. It's a storytelling device. It's a great way of opening the novel, of sort of jumping into a reminiscence of the past and sort of setting the narrative in motion.
Speaker 3:But the novel is not about involuntary memory. Involuntary memory shows up throughout the novel as um, as a trigger or as a kind of reminder of something like the possibility of melding the past and the present together. Right, it's that super impression or super imposition of two layers of time that the Madeleine scene represents. It's the first occurrence of it in the novel, but it's fleeting, right, it doesn't that. That's what you? You get immediately in the meddling scene. But he says well, if I take another sip, another bite, it doesn't work as well. And eventually I realize that it's not in the cookie, it's in myself that I have to look. So involuntary memory is a, is a platform or a sort of an entryway into a process. But it's not the end point, it's just the beginning. The quest, the search is what really is called Rocher. The search is what the novel is about. Involuntary memory is just sort of the first door that you walk through if you choose to go on the quest with the protagonist.
Speaker 1:Well, I don't know if this happens with anyone who reads Proust, but I couldn't avoid the compulsion to buy myself some Madeleine cookies and eat them with tea every time I reread this novel. So, putting aside the power of suggestion, I do agree with one of Proust's translators, lydia Davis, who highlighted that we need to settle down in order to follow Proust's unique storytelling right, and especially, we need to be patient with his long sentences and let them guide us and form new reading habits. I know, darcy, you are the expert in this aspect. Could you share with us or summarize the characteristics that typify Proust's syntax and what is the purpose of such textual manipulation?
Speaker 2:Sure, I think, as anyone who's even begun to read the novel has noticed, and as Francois mentioned, it's perhaps more conspicuous at the beginning, before you get used to it. Proust's syntax is exceptionally hypotactic. It's full of subordinate clauses and it can also sometimes be recursive, digressive, and this is to say nothing about how protracted some of the sentences are, you know, spanning more than a page, and I think that syntax causes us to reread recent paragraphs and even individual sentences. Sometimes we refer back to an earlier passage because the text seems to contradict it and we want to check our recollection of the narrative. Other times we reach a point in an exceptionally long or complex sentence where we have to start over just to get the gist of it. So in this piece that appeared in Poetics Today a few years back, I argued that the purpose of the rereading that Bruce's novel demands is both to confound interpretive practices that he considered problematic and to facilitate instead a primary aesthetic effect of his work, which I think is defamiliarization. To facilitate instead a primary aesthetic effect of his work, which I think is defamiliarization.
Speaker 2:In the 19th century English art critic, john Ruskin, whose work Proust translated, promoted this belief that reading a literary work offers the same benefits as a conversation with its author, who presumably has some wisdom to share. But Proust adamantly rejected this view. Ruskin's approach gets the reader to see everything the way that the narrator does, and it's a problem because it leads us to conflate the narrator's beliefs and the author's, which are often very different. It can get us to trust an unreliable narrator, often very different. It can get us to trust an unreliable narrator. It can get us to overlook authorial irony of the narrator and when we read it, as Ruskin tells us too, we're really just being spoon-fed ideas rather than actively generating them for ourselves. I think Proust does want the reader to adopt the narrator's perspective, but, unlike Ruskin, he wants us to do this only temporarily. He seems to have considered part of literature's appeal to be its potential to help us momentarily escape our habitual way of seeing. He wrote that habit takes hold of reality and covers it in a film of indifference that sort of prevents us from seeing things, but literature immerses us in someone else's perspective so that when we return to our own, we see the world with fresh eyes.
Speaker 2:I think this aesthetic philosophy is essentially a variant of what Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky, at the start of the 20th century described as defamiliarization. He wrote that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic, and instead of seeing objects in their entirety we recognize them by their main characteristics we see them as though they're enveloped in a sack. So this idea that habit dulls our experience of the world. And in Shklovsky's view, art exists to recover the sensation of life. It makes one feel things, and the way that it accomplishes this is by making objects unfamiliar. So it increases the difficulty and the length of perception. This is, I think, essentially what rereading Proust does at the length of perception. This is, I think, essentially what rereading Proust does at the level of sentences. It makes forms difficult.
Speaker 1:In the second part of this episode, professors Gardner and Proust will shed light on the cognitive aspect of why do we identify with fictional characters in Proust's novel and how time is represented in the novel, as well as desire and homosexuality. We encourage you to subscribe at theglobalnovelcom slash subscribe if you want a complete listening to the entire episode. Thank you so much for listening.