The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 7 August 2010
by Marcel Proust
Depending on the version you read, after almost four thousand pages, the reader can be forgiven for feeling exhausted before embarking upon the seventh volume of Proust's massive masterpiece A la recherche du temps perdu. The work is an epic journey, but the sweeping first volume (Swann's Way, and doesn't that seem so long ago now?) has an equally powerful mirror in the last volume. Time Regained takes Proust's overarching theme of Time and wraps us up in his reflection upon the journey we have just taken with him. All of the major characters of the book make an appearance in this volume, all of them aged almost beyond recognition, and it is that fact that brings our faithless narrator to the startling realization that finally allows him to sit down and write this damned book in the first place, the very book we are now reading. Years have passed since The Fugitive, and in the midst of World War One, Marcel returns to a beseiged Paris for a brief visit down from the mountain in Switzerland where he has been interred in a sanitorium for the treatment of his debilitating and often hysterical asthma attacks. Once in Paris, he visits with his beloved Robert de Saint-Loup, who is serving as an officer on the front lines. They have one last chance on the darkened streets of the city to meditate on the life of a soldier, and Marcel realizes Robert's bisexuality, his love for the violinist Charlie Morel, furthering his observation of just how many men and women of "society" exhibit alternative lifestyles. Proust was himself, of course, gay, and his sexuality was played out in often bizarre but ultimately repressed ways. He is working out those issues in his book, too, and it is an exercise for the reader to divine the real-life experiences he twists into his story with a heterosexual narrator.
He meets, too, with an aged Baron de Charlus, who has been a major figure in the narrator's life, and who acts as a sort of one-man chorus for the whole vast story. Charlus is greatly aged and acting out his own sexual peculiarities in a male brothel in which Marcel takes refuge during a Parisian blackout. In the interim, Charlus has been more or less exorcised from the high society in which he has been accustomed to move.
The last half of this book, and its entire concluding passage takes place in a massive party thrown by the Duchesse de Guermantes, who is now none other than the former Madame Verdurin. There are hundreds of guests, and they form a parade for Marcel's reflections. At first, trapped in a small library, he peruses the books and has an almost spiritual experience recalling the days of his youth, the moment of the madeleine, and all the years that have intervened. One after another, the characters move forward, each drastically altered by Time. Marcel has difficulty realizing that this same Time has altered him as well, and that he is now a middle-aged man. But the realization does come, and Marcel's meditations on man's passage through time, the evolution of identity, but also its essential continuity, all of this is brilliantly realized. It is a psychological and temporal tour-de-force, a magnificent, disturbing and hypnotic coda to Proust's overwhelming novel.
And it is also the beginning, for we witness what was also Proust's own promise to himself. To realize the great work within him, he must sequester himself from the society he had strived so hard to join, but ultimately comes to treat with cynicism as well as love. He retreats to the famous cork-lined bedroom, the ministrations of his long suffering maid Francoise (Celeste Albaret), and the occasional attentions of young girls from whom he can gain the energy to continue his work. (Marcel goes so far as to ask Gilberte, the girl with whom he had played early games of arousal many years before, if she might help him procure these girls, and she obliges with her own daughter, furthering Marcel's meditations on time and aging.) Marcel knows, as Proust certainly knew, that the work may be too vast for the years he has left, that the work itself may kill him. There are glitches throughout the seven volumes that indicate Proust had not finished editing the work, but the world can be grateful for the epic he left behind.
For the reader, it may be time to consider turning back to Swann's Way, to begin again.
Also by Proust: [Swann's Way] [Within a Budding Grove] [The Guermantes Way] [Sodom and Gomorrah] [The Captive] [The Fugitive]