Proust being Proust

Bloom maintains that the central theme of Proust is sexual jealousy – Swann for Odette, and Marcel for Albertine, among others. Jealousy becomes a “mask for the fear of mortality.” But isn’t Proust’s jealousy simply one manifestation of his obsessions? The novel of four thousand pages begins with a night from Marcel’s childhood. The family is at Combray; the aunts are always around; Swann comes for dinner; and Marcel is denied his mama’s goodnight kiss. We have page after page explaining how the bedside kiss is so much more desirable that a kiss downstairs, which requires a solo journey up the stairs, into the bedroom, and then off to sleep. This night, Marcel schemes to send a note to his mama, thorough the maid Francoise, asking for his kiss. It all goes awry; but in a surprise twist, Marcel’s father, who ordinarily has no patience for any of this nonsense, not only refrains from punishing Marcel, but seeing how distraught he has become, rewards him by having his mother spend the night with Marcel, in the room’s other bed.

Keep in mind, for this singular work of thousands of pages, Proust’s only novel, by which he will be remembered through all eternity, he has selected this most peculiar story as his introduction to all his readers. In fact, historically, this is all most of Proust’s readers ever know of him, for there are dozens of students, maybe hundreds, who have read about the Madeleine, and then no more. So to all of them In Search of Lost Time is a story about a boy who can’t fall asleep, for want of his mama’s bedtime kiss. Now, if we want to take Bloom to the extreme, this too is a tale of sexual jealousy. But I don’t think so. I think Proust is an obsessive, really an obsessive’s obsessive. And the jealousy is only a symptom, albeit the predominant symptom, of his obsessions. I guess I’m just splitting hairs here: Bloom acknowledges Proust’s compulsiveness, but centers the book on sexual jealousy. I find Proust obsessive about everything, perhaps most prominently about the objects of his desire.

For me the bigger story is the gradual recognition, foreshadowed by the incident with the Madeleine, that Proust’s art will not only survive him, but will become his key to immortality. Bloom speaks of how, at the book’s end, the “Narrator almost imperceptibly fuses into the novelist Proust.” And how the last volume, previously called The Past Recaptured, rescues the work from “the literary romance of jealousy.” I hate to keep taking issue with the master, but isn’t it more accurate to say that this novel was created backwards. The epiphanies from the last book, the flood of involuntary memories that wash over Marcel, bring the rest of the story to life. Perhaps in original real time, the story proceeded from childhood to conclusion, but in the mind of the author, it went the other way. The epiphanies came first; then the past came back. And after all that, Marcel went back to his room, in which he secreted himself for the rest of his life, so that he could write this enormous book, the book that rescued him from all his obsessions, and most of all from his fear of death. Because the book gave Proust his immortality. Art transcends life. That’s the story of Remembrance of Things Past, or In Search of Lost Time, or A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.

Bloom says that Proust’s art provides him with the only escape from his jealousy. I think it’s more accurate to say that his art provides him with escape from life. Not just the daily troubles of life, about which Marcel obsessed, and which so rarely gave him any happiness. But also from the fundamental condition of life – namely, that it doesn’t go on forever. Marcel’s life might have been brief, as was Proust’s, but here it is a century later, and we’re still reading and writing about all of it.