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Marcel Proust As Rising Star Essay, Research Paper

There are developments, trends — I don’t know quite what to call them — that pique the interest because they don’t quite make sense; they are culturally paradoxical. We could all see Survivor coming — it’s the perfect marriage of technological scopophilia and our growing appetite for real-life spectacle. But I would not have guessed, ever, that we should in the millennium year find ourselves in the middle of what looks like a Proust boomlet. That’s Marcel Proust, author of In Search of Lost Time (still widely known as Remembrance of Things Past) — the longest, and in many ways the most taxing, novel in the whole literary canon.

I can think of any number of good reasons why not Proust, beginning with our incredible shrinking attention spans and our post-Hemingway distaste for most species of ornate prose (Proust favors the sentence-as-steeplechase approach), and moving on to our great democratic repudiation of social snobbism (the man was legendary, even in his own time, for his obsession with class and caste distinctions) and the general postmodern sense of bemused detachment from the steadily growing midden of history, the nightmare from which Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus was famously trying to rouse himself.

But the evidence is not to be ignored. The stock of M. Proust is trading actively on the literary Bourse. I can cite the appearance this year of two mammoth biographies: William Carter’s Marcel Proust and a translation of Jean-Yves Tadie’s Marcel Proust: A Life (which most scholars agree utterly supplants George Painter’s two-volume biography, the standard for some decades now). There is also Edmund White’s mini-biography — sketchy but readable — in the new Penguin Lives series. Moreover, apart from the expected steady flow of scholarly studies and dissertations, we find recent books like Phyllis Rose’s The Year of Reading Proust (1997), Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), Malcolm Bowie’s Proust Among the Stars (1999), and Roger Shattuck’s crisply intelligent and accessible Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time (2000), not to mention the film Time Regained (1999), by the Chilean director Raoul Ruiz. These latter make the best case for the belated arrival of Proust into our midst, for they are all, books and movie, pitched not to the academic but to the educated, interested lay audience. A spot check of the Amazon.com sales rankings shows the de Botton and Shattuck selling very well, along with the now-standard three-volume Random House paperback boxed set, in the revised C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin translation, which costs as much as a night at the opera and weighs as much as a magnum of champagne.

Of course, I don’t mean to convey the impression that Americans everywhere are suddenly converting to Proustianism — God knows we’re not about to replace televised wrestling with literary talking heads — but within one little segment of our cultural Balkans the magus of the cork-lined room is making his presence felt. What strange counterintuitive flowerings of sensibility the times encourage — that the master of reverie should be finding new readers in this era of hurtling signals. In a way, the perfect emblem for this paradox is Edmund White’s mini-biography. The whole Penguin series is, after all, pitched to be digestible gist for the reader on the move, while Proust, obviously, stands for the opposite: his ideal map would unroll point for point over the territory to be traversed.

Late-modern accelerations notwithstanding, there are a number of reasons why Proust’s hour has come around again. For one thing, the passing of time has — as is almost always the case with innovative works of art — made his monolith less forbidding. Think of it as the Everest syndrome. First one intrepid explorer makes it up, then several; eventually everyone old enough to strap on a pair of climbing boots has planted a flag. I exaggerate, yes, but the point stands. Since his death in 1922, Proust’s work has been taken up, evaluated, fought over, and generally carried into the stream of our collective awareness. Most educated readers at least know the grandly circular conception of the novel, that it documents the romantic, social, and artistic coming of age of the narrator, Marcel, bringing him to the point where he reconciles the two symbolic “ways,” or paths, of childhood memory — Swann’s Way (the way of love) and the Guermantes Way (the way of society) — and is at last ready to write the book we are reading. Although few readers ever make it through to the end of the Search, there is yet a sense of do-ability about it; it is there to be gotten.

Linked with the novel’s receding from us in time has been the rising tide of nostalgia — not just for Proust’s period, but for the whole unrecoverable then. In our era of hyper-progress, every passing year exponentially increases the gulf between us and what went before. At mid-century Proust’s novel was still part of a world remembered; now it is a chronicle of Atlantis, and the author’s portrayals of the society of his day seem locked away in amber. As Edmund White puts it, “He is read more as a fabulist than a chronicler, as a maker of myths.”

Then, too, we must note the enormous changes wrought by the gay-rights revolution of recent decades. Although Proust’s narrator, Marcel, wears hetero garb in the novel, his world, as White’s short biography makes very clear, is complexly coded to the author’s passions for various young men, the most noted example being the partial modeling of Marcel’s great love, Albertine, on the figure of Alfred Agostinelli, Proust’s lover and chauffeur.

If the gay sensibility has gained influence in recent years, so has the culture-wide disposition toward the

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