When memory and desire mix

Empire of the Mind: Proust was seeking that inscrutable space where time stops. Constrained by asthma and confined to his bedroom, memory becomes his balm 'for if life is vagabond, our memory is sedentary'.

Critics and writers consider Marcel Proust to be one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century. Proust is never easy to read and there are two views on his writing. One, that his writing is luminescent and profound; and the second, that he is pretentious and boring. What is fascinating is that he draws you into his book and allows you to choose what you think of what he ponders. In Swann’s Way, the first of seven volumes of his magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time, published in 1913, Proust mixes memory and desire to explore the two-headed beast — of damnation and salvation — Time.

Proust was seeking that inscrutable space where time stops. Constrained by asthma and confined to his bedroom, memory becomes his balm “for if life is vagabond, our memory is sedentary.”

Time devours the universe -- the hours, the days, and the years -- and there is no escape from either tomorrow or from yesterday. One is not merely older because of yesterday; one is somebody else; no longer who one was. Proust’s protagonist goes by the name Marcel, and is a creature of this predominating condition and circumstance. The aspirations of yesterday were meaningful for yesterday’s Marcel, not for who he is today; and he is disappointed with the nullity of his attainment -- the identification of the subject with the attainment of his object of desire.

Proust has a distinct style of long, intricate sentences (one sentence is 356 words long), and intensely introspective prose emphasising the subjective nature of the human experience.

That true understanding comes not from the passage of time itself but from the manner in which one perceives and remembers it. For Proust, memory and habit are attributes of time. Memory is subject to habit. Breathing is a habit, life is a habit, and the individual in one’s lifetime, a succession of individuals.

Proust advances the basic argument that the mortal microcosm cannot forgive the relative immortality of the macrocosm -- the wine bears a grudge against the decanter. “If habit”, writes Proust, “is a second nature, it keeps us in ignorance of the first and is free of its cruelties and its enchantments.”

Reading Proust fully is difficult, if not impossible. But even if one were to read just Swann’s Way, the first volume, the reader gets a glimpse of the genius. There is a poignant recollection of the narrator, anticipating his mother’s bedtime kiss, an event that Marcel, the fictional protagonist who has much in common with the author, obsessed about as a child. It transports you down your own memory lane, triggering tender memories of your own.

Swann’s Way also contains the famous Madeleine scene in which Marcel dunks his cookie in a cup of tea and has memories of his childhood flood back to him. Let me sum up the central theme of his work in his own words: “We are disillusioned [by things] when we find that they are in reality devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas.” This could be reduced to Oscar Wilde’s pithier version: “There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”

Proust presents a simple argument: While art and science both deal in facts -- “the impression is for the writer what experimentation is for the scientist” – only the artist can describe life’s reality as it is actually experienced. His reader would, he wrote, “recognise in his own self what the book says…this will be proof of its veracity.”

As you read and reflect on Proust, the realisation grows that reality is spiritual and not physical, best understood subjectively, and truth accessed intuitively. You may never read Proust but here is a glimpse of his writing from the opening lines of Swann’s Way: “For a long time, I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say, “I’m going to sleep.” And half an hour later, the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me…Instinctively, when he awakes…in an instant reads off his own position on the earth’s surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers.”

Among the handful of literary geniuses of the twentieth century, Marcel Proust is in the same league as Joyce and Kafka, Faulkner, and Camus. There is time, and there is memory, Proust’s Swann’s Way, non-fiction really, dwells on how time mutates memory. Read Swann’s Way, it is rich and complex and demands an attentive reader. Read it with your favourite beverage. It just might trigger your own epiphany to see the world as it really is.