Marcel's Manifesto

“I must admit this much: the passages that I like least in Proust…. Are precisely these resurrection which emerge for his “second memory”… those disillusioned discoveries of familiar places which have shrunk and become unrecognizable when one returns to them after a long absence; those amalgams of a name and an image, of a feeling and a circumstance, of the sound of a heating installation and a period of one’s life, of a smell and the memory of a great love…. Yes, all that is true; it all happens to us, but we have to admit that it does not possess much interest except for ourselves.”

Jean-Francois Revel, On Proust

I wonder about the distinction between “ourselves” and others in Proust’s masterwork. Isn’t the whole of the Search Marcel’s? As we read into Time Regained, doesn’t the blurring of boundaries between Marcel and others become more evident as he meets old acquaintances? Don’t Marcel and readers of the Search meld, becoming “ourselves?” M. Revel argues that Proust is best when describing social events, the numerous descriptions of soirees, dinners, tea parties. Instances of involuntary memory? M. Revel would like to run away each time he encounters one.

M. Revel, whose thoughts on Proust are penetrating, must have sprinted from his reading when he reached the first transition in Time Regained. The transition moves us from wartime Paris to the city in 1926. Marcel has returned after a long stay at a sanatorium. We find him in the anteroom of the Princesse de Guermantes where he has arrived late and must wait until the music in the inner chamber has finished before joining the soiree. As he waits he experiences three involuntary memories in succession. First, tripping on the stones in front of the Princesses’ home evokes the vision standing on uneven stones in Venice’s St. Mark’s. This involuntary memory is soon followed by the clinking of a spoon, which brings up the memory of dispassionately seeing trees from a railway car during his return to Paris. Lastly, wiping his mouth with a napkin brings up an azure vision of his first day in Balbec. Reading of these involuntary memories, I sympathized briefly with M. Revel in his dislike of these private, inward moments. Three seemed a bit much. But, the accumulation of three involuntary memories propels Marcel, as presumably one or two might not, into the realization that he can become a writer. And, of more interest to me, the three memories show Marcel what is a worthwhile subject for the writer.

There follows a prolonged exploration of art and its value. One of our Proust group declared this Marcel’s manifesto, reduced each exploratory foray to a sentence, and read the sentences one after another to great comic effect. The joke hinges on presenting Marcel’s assertions linearly. Proust, we know long before coming to Time Regained, is hardly a linear writer. He presents an idea, circles around it, leaves it and returns to circle again. Nor is Proust reducible (despite Monty Python). Put him in a box, wrapped and ready to be presented, and you’ll find that he’s squeezed out while you were proudly finishing tying the bow.

The three memories yield Marcel’s breakthrough insight: description is worthless without involuntary associations between disparate things. Description without association is “a mere vain and tedious duplication of what our eyes see and our intellect records.” This puts to rest the anxiety Marcel experienced when reading the Goncourt journal; no matter how brilliant it seems, and how lacking Marcel feels to achieve that descriptive power, the result is not worth the effort because it lacks involuntary association. For it is association that reveals the essence of things, which are “immanent in all men no less than the artist.” But it is the artist who translates these truths, becoming “a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceive in himself.” The metaphor of the optical instrument recurs throughout the Search and once again leads one to ask: Does the artist see Truth or a truth that resonates with the reader?