Voegelinian Readings of Modern Literature

The Truth of the Novel: Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu

The Truth of the Novel Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu R Charles R. Embry Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as in the artist. —Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again I am not, nor do I pretend to be, a Proust scholar. I approach the great novel, as I approach all great novels, simply as a lover of literature and a philosopher, that is, as a lover of wisdom. I lay great stress upon the word “lover,” and I pretend neither to finality nor comprehensiveness in what I have to say about any novel, but especially about À la recherche du temps perdu, In Search of Lost Time.1 I assume this stance intentionally from the conviction that all great literature can be read, understood, and enjoyed by ordinary human beings who love stories because the stories that have been vouchsafed us by the great writers arise from that “place” and timelessly dwell in that “place” where we all live: the embodied consciousness of a human being. In a letter to Robert B. Heilman, Eric Voegelin, identifying the reason why we read and study great works of literature as well as the basis for historical interpretation, said: “The occupation with works of art, poetry, philosophy, mythical imagination, and so forth, makes sense only if it is conducted as an inquiry into the nature of man. That sentence, while it excludes historicism, does not exclude history, for it is peculiar to the nature of man that it unfolds its potentialities historically. Not that historically anything ‘new’ comes up—human nature is always wholly 209 210 Charles R. Embry present—but there are modes of clarity and degrees of comprehensiveness in man’s understanding of his self and his position in the world. . . . History [then] is the unfolding of the human Psyche; historiography is the reconstruction of the unfolding through the psyche of the historian. The basis of historical interpretation is the identity of substance (the psyche) in the object and the subject of interpretation; and its purpose is participation in the great dialogue that goes through the centuries among men about their nature and destiny.”2 If we reread that passage and substitute “Literature” for “History,” “literary criticism” for “historiography,” and “reader” for “historian,” we will begin to understand an approach to literature from within a Voegelinian philosophical framework. Overview of In Search of Lost Time Writing about À la recherche du temps perdu, one is obliged to acknowledge those things that one commonly reads about in the vast Proust criticism , as well as in the Internet sites devoted to Proust and his novel, sites that have been mounted by an enormous number of Proustophiles.3 These discussions include topics such as length (of course), breadth of time, the famous petite madeleine incident, the cast of characters, Proust’s work habits (his cork-lined bedroom, reclusiveness, and revisions and extensive rewritings of page proofs) during the last years of his life, his illnesses and sickliness, the shortness of his originally planned three volumes of approximately 500,000 words and the length of the final version of seven volumes and approximately 1.25 million words, and finally the fact that Proust died before the last three volumes—published posthumously— could benefit from his inveterate habit of revising his text. Commenting on the length of the novel, as well as the length of individual sentences, Alain de Botton writes, Whatever the merits of Proust’s work, even a fervent admirer would be hard pressed to deny one of its awkward features: length. As Proust’s brother, Robert, put it, “The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have broken a leg in order to have the opportunity to read In Search of Lost Time.” And as they lie in bed with their limb newly encased in plaster or a tubercle bacillus diagnosed in their lungs, they face another challenge in the length of individual Proustian sentences, snakelike construction, the very longest of which, located in the fifth volume, would, if arranged along a single line in standard-sized text, run on for a little short of four meters and stretch around the around the base of a bottle of wine seventeen times.4 211 Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu Lydia Davis...