In Search of Lost Time, Vol. VII: Finding Time Again

"Yes. So, we already encountered involuntary memory in the first volume, with the madeleine episode—in which a character eats a madeleine dipped into a cup of tea, which he used to have pretty much every Sunday in the summer with his aunt Léonie. But he hasn’t had it in years, maybe decades, and because he hasn’t had it in so long it acts as a powerful trigger for memories. It’s as though he becomes again the child that he was at that time, and remembers all kinds of things he had forgotten, and he says the experience made him feel immortal, but that he wasn’t to know for many years why. Now, in the final volume, some 3000 or so pages later, we learn why. So you have to be very patient, and you have to have a good memory. That’s one of the things the novel does—it encourages us to flex our memory muscles. So it’s not just a novel about memory, but a novel that cultivates memory. Time Regained starts out by continuing in the bleakness of the sixth volume; the main character even spends time in a sanatorium. He’s really not doing well. Then comes World War One, and we see Paris in wartime. About halfway through, we get a series of epiphanies, a series of involuntary memories in which the character understands finally why that experience made him feel immortal. This turns out to be the answer to all the questions that he had, all at once. That’s a great question. So, he was writing about involuntary memories before this. There’s an abandoned manuscript that people refer to as Jean Santeuil , named after the main character of that manuscript. Some people think it was going to be its own novel. Others think we should think of those pages as drafts for what ended up being In Search of Lost Time. Either way, he’s writing about involuntary memories, but they don’t play the same role that they do in In Search of Lost Time . So a lot of people think that even though Proust did very likely experience involuntary memories—and, hey, many of us do—what happened to his character is not what happened to him. It’s not that he had an epiphany one day while eating a madeleine, but rather it was something he was interested in, and he realised it could form the structure of a novel. By 1911 he had a draft of the whole beginning and the whole end, so the first 100-ish pages and the last 100-ish pages. Then he wrote the middle. That’s actually fairly emblematic of the way he worked. He would drive his typesetters mad, because he would send handwritten pages in, and they would type them and send them back to him for corrections. Very standard process. But instead of correcting the typos, he added more stuff. You can find his manuscript pages online. They are almost inadvertent artworks; he adds so much that the writing starts spiralling out into the margins, beautifully. But, yes, this drove the typesetters mad. He was constantly adding stuff in the middle. And so the thing grew enormously over the course of the 13-or-so years he was writing. But he had a sense, right from the beginning, of what the overall architecture was going to look like, including that promise: it made him feel immortal, but he didn’t yet know why. Then, at the other end of the book, this series of epiphanies and the understanding of why involuntary memory is so important, what it shows us about who we are, how it solves these problems—or at least some of these problems—to do with identity. There’s even, in the manuscript, a sort of second scene, in which there is an objection to the serene confidence that this character has achieved during these epiphanies while he is sitting in the library of an aristocratic house waiting to be admitted. When he does get admitted to this social event, he sees a lot of people he hasn’t seen in a very long time. This is the Bal des Têtes, something like a masked ball. Essentially these people are almost unrecognisable, so this scene functions as a kind of objection to his sense that the most important part of us is atemporal, exists outside of time. Time turns people into these almost unrecognisable versions of themselves. What do we do with that? He had this structure very, very early on. He had the opening of the novel—the episode about forgetting the madeleines, the promise that this is really important—and the explanation of why it is important, this beautiful and moving meditation on the atemporal aspect of who we are, and then the objection, and ultimately a solution to the objection. That was all in place by 1911, then a bunch of stuff was added, the war happened, and because the war happened and you couldn’t print things, Proust had a whole bunch of time on his hands. That’s when the novel just grew and grew in his own mind. So the novel changed, but it also stayed the same. Something I’ve thought a lot about is why this thing had to be a novel. When Proust was starting to think about it in 1908, he wrote to a couple of people saying, I’m working on something, but I don’t know if it’s going to be an essay or a story. He himself was trying to figure out what it was he was writing. He was obviously very interested in philosophical questions: What is love? Is it good for us or bad for us? Why do we fall in love with the people we fall in love with? Who am I really? Is there a connection between the social self and the self of the writer? Can the world be re-enchanted? All of these are great questions, and you could write it as a philosophy book, but he didn’t. Instead, he wrote a 3000-page novel. We don’t have strong indications from his letters as to all the reasons he was doing that, but I think we get a lot of hints in the way in which he talks about art, and in how his character talks about art. In some of his essays, he seems to suggest that art can do things that other forms of communication cannot. One thing that art can do is serve as a kind of Rorschach test, or mirror. It can allow the reader to see themselves in a way you won’t if you are reading a textbook, say, about biology. A novel can raise difficult questions, and also tempt you to make certain interpretive mistakes. Proust said in a letter to a critic that he makes his character say something at the end of the first volume that he completely disagreed with, was the opposite of what he believed: “too bad for me if the reader believes that I take them for truth.” So he’s pulling all these tricks in the novel, which is the opposite of what you do in a philosophy book, but which allows the reader to find themselves and to ask themselves questions. You may disagree with the character about whether love is a disease. I hope you do! But that’s part of the operation of the novel, to get you thinking about this. It’s also, I think a training ground for some of our capacities. As I was saying earlier, it really gives a workout to our memory muscles. And I think the unreliability gives a workout to our caution muscles—our probabilistic thinking muscles—which I think is very helpful to us in 2025, so we don’t always immediately give full credence to something that we hear. So that’s a lot of things that this novel is doing, right? Acting as a formal model, acting as a training ground, acting as a Rorschach test. I’ll say one more quick thing. There’s a lovely essay by Hervé G. Picherit, a former student of mine: ‘ The Impossibly Many Loves of Charles Swann .’ It talks about that section of the first volume, ‘Swann in Love,’ where Swann falls for Odette. And what Hervé notices is that Swann falls in love with Odette ‘for the first time’ nine times. Now, depending on how you count, maybe you can get that down to five times, but you definitely cannot get it down to one first time. Weirdly, Swann keeps falling in love for the first time with the same person, and for different reasons. Sometimes it’s because there’s a piece of music that opens up a space in his heart, or because she reminds him of a painting, or because she makes a nice cup of tea—which, as a Brit, I can understand. But most crucially, some of these reasons conflict with each other. He falls in love with her on one occasion because he’s confident she will fall in love with him. Then, on another occasion, because he’s worried that she doesn’t really like him. What Hervé concludes from this, very nicely, is that it is making space for the reader: you’re being offered five, six, seven, eight, nine different accounts of why someone falls in love with someone else. I often do this survey with my students: Why did Swann fall in love? And it’s very rare that people notice there were multiple and conflicting reasons given; people gravitate towards one or other of them. And that will show you something about yourself, either something you believe or something you are worried about or thinking about, something like that. These are some of the reasons, I think, why Proust ultimately decided he wasn’t going to write a philosophy book like the philosophers he admired. He was going to write a novel like the artists he admired, like the composers he admired, like the painters he admired. He then produces an object that works on us in multiple ways at once. It asks these really interesting philosophical questions. It gets us thinking about things, but also it gives us better mental habits. Because you’re going to be spending—well, I spent seven years reading this. Maybe ten pages a day? The fastest I’ve heard of someone reading the whole book was three months. That’s still a chunk of time. But more likely it will be one or two years, or in my case, seven. Exactly. It’s like spending time with a friend, and that friendship changes your life."