On Reading Proust

ON READING PROUST L. A. MACKAY T HE tenth anniversary of Marcel Proust's death, in November, 1922, suggests a more detached reconsideration of the lasting significance of his work. Earlier and more closely contemporary critICS frequently suffered from the disadvantage of having only a portion of that work before them, and being un able to judge it as a whole. Proust did not indeed live to complete the working out of all the later voluines, but enough has been done to make clear the general trend and intention . The whole of the Recherche du temps perdu is now available " in English; but if one has even a siight competence in French, it is infiIJitely mbre valuable to read the original. After the first feeling of strangeness has passed, the difficulties are not excessive. Fifty pages "usually suffice to give not onl}:' a grasp, but an enjoyment of the style. It is an open secret that Proust's style is periodic;" but it is rather surprising that English readers should object to this. To those whose conception of French prose is bounded on the south by Voltaire, on the north by Anatole France, and on the east and west by tlie solid phalanx of the Academy, he is naturally a disconcerting and disagreeable phenomenon. The mental effort of holding in suspension until the final phrase sets the keystone , the whole complicated structure of a long sentence in which all the parts are so necessarily and .organically interrelated that each has its full significance only in relation to all the rest, is an irritating and it may seem a superfluous labour to one accustomed to the neat and limpid flow of the A!~" .lp~!U.~. The essence of the 21 7 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY periodic style is inclusion; o( the old French style, exclusion. To gain an adequate breadth of expression for what he wanted to say, Proust was compelled 'to go back to a current abandoned in French prose since its lirst tentative springs in the seventeenth century, and to enrich it further with the more ample developmerit of English through Addison, Gibbon, Macaulay, and Ruskin, revealing in the result an entirely new richness, luxury, and flexibility in his native language. It is in away an architectural style; not only a study of memory but an exercise in memory. We see the sentence or passage not like a ribbony landscape seen out of . a train window, in which one part has disappeared as. another comes in to sight, but like a delini te single landscape , interlocking indeed with others on all sides, butin which we stand and turn our glance about from one point to another in various directions; all the components are always there and always affecting each other and, the whole picture, though changing among themselves in perspective as we move .among them. To develop the earlier metaphor, such a style is not like a ribbon but like a web of cloth spread out, which we cannot pick tIP at any point without drawing all the rest after 'it. Consequently no such style, except to persons of very exception al capacity, can give its full effect on the first reading; but, on the other hand, it gives the assurance that there will be something worth going back for on the su bsequen t readings. Nothing shows more clearly the startling novelty of Proust's style than the frequent comparisons with SaintSimon . The likeness is about the same as that between Plato and Herodotus, or Ruskin and Sterne. That·is to say, they both wrote long sentences, and both in the same language. But it is exactly the important point that is 218 - ON READING PROUST omitted : the organisation of the sentence. There is in Proust's style something reminiscent of the painters of that Venice towards which his imagination so eagerly strained ; his sentence may be as huge and as colourful as a wall-painting of Tintoretto or.Veronese, but it has the same rigorous organisation as a framework. .T he purpose'and intent Of the book has been variously and often erroneously stated, as an analysis of the passion of love, Or as the picture...