Proust and Marcel, Chicken and Egg

In Swann’s Way, Marcel’s childhood foretells Proust’s artistic achievement. Marcel, the protagonist of In Search of Lost Time, explains how he spends afternoons reading while the family is summering at Combray. And the impact of these afternoons on the young narrator is striking: “[T]hose afternoons contained more dramatic events than does, often, an entire lifetime.” For Marcel, the characters in his books are more real, and their emotions more moving, than anyone or anything he encounters in daily life. Not long thereafter, he becomes enchanted with the writer, Bergotte, a friend of Swann’s, whose perceptions are more real, and whose metaphors are more accurate, than anything poor Marcel can experience in the real world.

If one accepts Lost Time as a chronological narrative, the child Marcel finds his everyday experience overwhelmed, surpassed, and transcended, by what he finds in his books, just as the adult Proust will recognize the power of his artistic achievement. But in fact, Lost Time is not at all chronological, but proceeds backwards, from the starting point in The Past Recaptured when Marcel finds himself overcome by waves of involuntary memory, when his childhood comes rushing back to him, and when he himself is changed into Proust, the novelist, who will return to his room and write Lost Time.

So when Proust does that, when he puts pen to paper, which has really come first? Did young Marcel truly see the world this way, as Proust describes it in Swann’s Way? And if so, were his memories simply buried within himself, only to be released years later when Proust began to write? Or did the epiphanies that Proust experienced as a young man somehow recreate or redefine his childhood, changing forever what had occurred previously. Marcel may have spent summer afternoons lost in his childhood reading, but was it Proust, who later realized art’s transcendence, who then elevated those lost afternoons into something more meaningful and real than the everyday world of Combray? From our perspective, it’s not possible to know which came first, for whatever happened to Marcel has been changed irrevocably by Proust, when he created the world in which young Marcel now eternally resides.