A Narrator Who Wins Us
By Adam Gopnik
Marcel Proust
To celebrate the 100th
anniversary of the publication of “Swann’s Way,” The Times asked writers and
critics to share their experience of reading the book and the other volumes of
“In Search of Lost Time.”
I suppose that by now
to announce that I first read Proust with the woman now my wife — or the man
now my husband, or the woman now my partner, or however it might work out — is
to participate in a cliché, touched by a not-entirely-appealing local color.
Only in America has the experience of Proust become a ritual of courtship. But, as it happened, I did.
The girl I was in love
with in college and I went out and, in a second-hand bookstore in Montreal,
bought the old Random House two-volume version of the Moncrieff translation.
What surprised me in that first reading, up on Mount Royal, was not how
impressed I was by Proust’s command, the beauty of his sentences and the
confidence of his psychological generalizations. It was, rather, that,
expecting a profound but slightly forbidding, even “estranging,” literary tour
de force, on the order of “Ulysses” or “Paradise Lost” — a text like a mountain
to be scaled, with the reader arriving at last wearily at the top, panting for
oxygen with a Sherpa-like companion; glad to have made the ascent and yet
haunted by the frozen bodies seen fallen short of the summit, those who never
made it past “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” — given that expectation,
I was shocked by how much I liked Marcel, to give the narrator the name
he only once gives himself.
We are taught sternly
to announce, and tumidly to lecture our creative writing students, that our
favorite characters need not be our favorite people. Good characters, from
Becky Sharp to Satan in Milton, can be rotten to the core and still delicious
to the bite. But, at the risk of letting the waistband of my bourgeois boxers
show too largely above my borrowed modernist pants, I do think that narrators
need to win us if they are to hold us. Nick Carraway, Huck Finn, and even poor
Charles Ryder — the truth is that just as heroes are better when they are
heroic, narrators in long tales are best when we are charmed by their company
and are given reasons to trust their sensations. Narrators need not be
likeable, in the sense of touched by moral rectitude, but it does seem
necessary in any successful full-length tale for the narrator to be lovable—
exactly as, say, Humbert Humbert in “Lolita” is lovable, in his own horrible
way.
Well, the narrator in
Proust — let us defy academic fastidiousness and call him Marcel — struck me
then, and strikes me still, as the most high-hearted, self-deprecating,
joyously observant, tender, frequently funny, always attentive voice I had
encountered in literature. (Far more, doubtless, than Proust would have been
himself.) Frankly neurotic in his anxieties, the narrator’s neurosis on the
page registers above all as sensitivity, mindfulness. His wide-eyed appreciations
illuminate those first volumes with affection: appreciations of his aunt
Léonie, of Françoise, the cook, of his Madame Sévigné-loving grandmother, above
all of his well-meaning father and loving mother. Even the secondary
characters, satiric targets, are on the whole treated with a malice rendered
affectionate by understanding: Madame Verdurin is chiefly silly, not wicked; in
over her social head.
And are there, in the
old-fashioned sense, more admirable characters in literature than
Saint-Loup, the aristocrat trying to struggle out of the limitations of his
inherited world view without sacrificing its elegance — or, above all, than
Swann, whose tragedy in love does not diminish our admiration for his tact, his
delicacy, his essential kindness, and his readiness to make himself look
shallow in order to avoid betraying a friend? The book is, among other things,
a manifesto against malicious speech, and Swann moves us because he understands
that true aristocracy lies in a readiness to refrain from malice, even at the
price of having others think him simple.
And then there is,
well, so much pure Charlie Brown in the narrator’s voice: his worrying
desperately in front of the pillar with the poster of Berma’s next appearance
about how he will feel when he actually sees her act; his anxieties about
Gilberte — the original Little Red-Haired Girl — and her possible presence in
the playground on the Champs-Élysées. That he buys his cravat intending to
impress her at Charvet rather than at Sears does not diminish the universality
of his unrequited ardor.
My first sense,
confirmed by two subsequent readings (one, in French, that did indeed have some
of the exhausting aspects of an Everest expedition) is that the philosophical
and psychological theories registered in the book are the least interesting
thing about it, and the charm and humor and social observation evident on every
page, the most. Yes, indeed, Proust’s conclusions about human love are sadly
persuasive: We invent the people we love as much as we experience them; our
infatuations, even those that shape our lives, are our own inventions. And he’s
right to advance nostalgia as an organizing principle: we agree with him that
time is the
first principle of life, devouring our experience, in all its intensity and
heartbreak, and leaving us wondering, aghast, not just where life has passed
but where the world has gone.
But it’s not the
profundity of these ideas that matters. It’s the joy of their enactment, which
cuts the edge of Proust’s official pessimism on every page. Joyce, in
“Finnegan’s Wake,” another expedition That Woman and I attempted, ends by
asserting simply that there is a mountainous male principle in life, and a
fluid female one, and life is best when one flows nimbly round the other, as
rivers round cities — and one need not endorse this rather old-fashioned,
patriarchal Irish view to appreciate the passion, the infinite resourcefulness,
of its expression. Great writing, like first love, works best as an obvious
idea freshly enacted — an old book, newly bought.
Mr. Gopnik is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His books include “The
Steps Across the Water” and, most recently, “The Table Comes First.”
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