Marcel Proust is not an easy writer to approach. First, one must grow accustomed to his extended syntactic constructions, those famous sentences that stretch across several pages, dense with compound and subordinate clauses. Then, one must allow oneself to be carried along by the branching and interlacing of his ideas, surrendering to getting lost and then finding one’s way back again and again. And finally, one must accept that truly appreciating the seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time requires two things that seem to have evaporated from modern life: time and concentration. Only then does the epiphany occur, the veils lift, and we begin to see, amid the many commonplaces of the landscape, the unmistakable signs of Proust’s worlds.
If, for Stendhal, as for most nineteenth-century writers, the novel was a mirror held up to the road, Proust did not hesitate to step off that road and hold the mirror before himself. Thus, although his work contains nothing supernatural, it far exceeds the traditional realism of his predecessors by adopting a perspective that rejects any supposed universality of the “objective.” In Search of Lost Time portrays life as experienced from each individual’s singular body and interiority. It unfolds, therefore, in the realm of emotion, subjectivity, and the irrational.
Moreover, because two of the great taboos of his time, Judaism and homosexuality, inhabit the novel’s fabric, its plots are masterfully woven around social worlds whose existence is acknowledged yet unaccepted, worlds spoken of only through allusion, and always obliquely, whether out of fear or prejudice.
One of the most striking achievements of this work is the author’s ability to use language to construct what almost always escapes expression. That is what makes In Search of Lost Time an incomparable experience, marked by the intensity and force of the sensations it provokes; sensations capable of unsettling both reason and the unconscious. As one progresses, what was barely suspected at first becomes undeniable: Stendhal’s mirror shifts once again; it is no longer the writer who stands before it, but oneself. To read Proust is, ultimately, to read oneself—an exercise as painful as it is pleasurable, a pure act of passion.
Proust is not an easy writer. But wasn’t José Lezama Lima right, after all, when he said that “only what is difficult is stimulating”?
