The mystery of Proust and me

For all of Marcel Proust’s verbosity it is in what he doesn’t show that can be the most intriguing part of his work and one that touches me as a reader the most.

It’s at the beginning of Swann’s Way we’re introduced to the curious Young Proust — the centre of all conflicts, its causes unbeknownst to him.

His constant demands for a kiss from his mother, that when he goes without torture the young boy, causes a schism between the mother and the father. The visit to Uncle Adolphe and his lady friend exiles the old man from the family. In such incidences, and many others, the young man doesn’t know what is the source of the falling out.

Forbidden to go to the theatre, his celebration of the form is pure imagination. Explicit scenes are omitted from the books read to him. The joys of life and art are beyond his own reality, large gaps are left for him to fill. He wants to know.

Mysteries abound for the curious narrator. And his epistemological quest to know reaches an apotheosis in his consumption of the madeleine.

An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin … this new sensation having the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not in me, it was me.

Memory has the power to assault our senses. Moments of our childhood can hit us in an intense way. But to achieve this cannot be consciously done. For once the memory strikes, we go in search of its purpose and it is there it disappears.

I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth. But how?

A second and third madeleine prove to be an inevitable failure to find this truth. But it fails because it is into a void he looks for an answer, a reality constructed by an unreliable memory.

A post-modern critic (the name escapes me) wrote that every epistemological question inevitably tips into an ontological one. As the first quote shows, the madeleine and tea concoction turn into question of the essence of being — from the sensation being alongside him to actually defining him.

And throughout we get selective moments from the young man’s life that come to define his reality.

The writer friend Legrandin approaches the young man and declares ex nihilo that he has the soul of an artist.

‘Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life, little boy,’ he added turning to me. ‘You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist’s nature; never let it starve for what it needs.’

However, what may inhibit his striving to be an artist is that the Combray skyline is dominated by the Church steeple. It is a structure that arouses a joy in the grandmother akin to an artistic work.

Yet she is only able to translate her fascination into the words of another art form — it is music without the “tinny” sound. It is celebrated through its via negative quality.

But it is not just the grandmother that art proves to be beyond adequate description. Swann, after being asked what he likes about the paintings he’s acquired, is unable to say why it moves him. Instead it is the galleries that housed and sold them that is where his interest lies.

Adolphe’s painting of the chariot driving “pink and fleshy goddess” harkens back to the once unfashionable, but now fashionable Second Empire style. The narration is limited to the fashionable context. And that is all we have by way of meaningful analysis of paintings — the trends in art, not the beauty.

It is this failure of language of art that demonstrates that we as humans have a disconnection from the reality of our past selves, to the objects and events that move and define us. Young Proust is playing in the abyss. And the memory is the unreliable narrator that is the conclusion of this detachment.

But our memories sting, perhaps because of their very randomness, and that to many of us is the essence of life. The memories that we compile and reach our conscious state make us human. Near the beginning Proust is explicit about this.

When a man is asleep, he has in a circle around him the chain of the hours, the sequence of years, the order of the heavenly body. Instinctively he consults them when he awakes, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth’s surface and the time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks.

To be human is to be a construct of episodes our memory selects for us from our subconscious. It is a sequence from childhood to adulthood that forever challenges us to ask who we really are. And it is a question that proves to be impossible to master. There is so much we don’t know about ourselves.