Waterstones In Search of Lost Time: Volume 6

Author: Peter Jordan

Rating: 5

Review: But for the Great War, 'Time Regained' ('Finding Time Again') would have been preceded by only two parts, 'Swann’s Way' and 'The Guermantes Way'. In this last part, owing to changes in society, the two ways—in their metaphorical sense—have met. But then they had never been irreconcilable, as the narrator learns from his old friend Gilberte de Saint-Loup on revisiting them with her. They had even been united, in the person of the Guermantes’s friend Charles Swann. When the three-part novel was superseded, the balanced design was lost, but much was gained—notably, in the intervening parts, the story of the narrator’s mistress, Albertine, and the development of the character of the Baron de Charlus. And in 'Time Regained' as we have it now, not only is Charlus’s portrait completed, the War becomes at once the background and the subject. The long war chapter, too—what distinguishes this last volume from its predecessors, mostly meditative or reflective—, was written as it was lived. And on the other hand, in both the outer chapters the reflective quality is enhanced by their having mostly retrospects for subject-matter. Already on his return to Tansonville to see Gilberte, his first love, the narrator has found his heart changed even more than her face. Though staying on now at her husband’s insistence, he is struck by the change in Robert and in their friendship. And though he has Gilberte recall Albertine for him, he does so with indifference. In the third and final chapter it’s to Paris that he has returned, after the War, and, as in the second chapter, after long years in a sanatorium. Proust did spend six weeks in a sanatorium after his mother died, and if Thomas Mann could set a whole novel in one so could he have done. Yet although Marcel has related his life exhaustively until now, he says nothing about all his sanatorium years except that the treatment consisted in isolation. Evidently this is some such device as that which introduced ‘Swann in Love’. Of course, there is a clue in that word ‘isolation’, and another in the author’s remark that it was ‘a long time since [he had] seen any of the personages mentioned in this work’. So far as Proust had, himself, withdrawn from the world, it was less for the sake of his health than for that of his novel, but this was the story of a writer’s formation, not of his working life. As he expanded and developed that great set piece which is the final Guermantes party, Proust must have thought how striking it would be for the characters he was now bringing back together for the last time, following a tradition with novelists, to reappear changed almost out of recognition. But this could only be contrived by a not very artistic stretching of time’s thread. On his way to the party, through the streets along which his old nurse Françoise used to take him to the Champs Élysées, Marcel had felt he was gliding through the past. In the courtyard of the Guermantes mansion he had gloomily reminded himself that the joys of the mind weren’t for him, incapable as he was (or felt he was) of any serious literary work. But it was just when he had resigned himself to the frivolous pleasure of the party that he had stumbled against an uneven flagstone and been overwhelmed by a mysterious happiness. And upstairs in the Prince’s library, before joining the party, he has finally solved the riddle of that happiness, with the revelation of Time Regained. A vast set of variations on the theme of time past is offered by the party itself. Having failed to recognize, at first, one after another of his old acquaintances, he realizes that time here is visible—and so fails at first to recognize the former Mme Swann, because she has not changed, though for the same reason she seems hardly alive. As for the stout lady who declared “You took me for Mama”, she did indeed look more like Mme Swann than like the Gilberte of their ‘colloques sentimentales’ at Tansonville. But there are also guests he doesn’t recognize because he doesn’t know them, guests who have penetrated into this fashionable gathering because time has been at work on society too. Its action is measurable not only by people’s physical transformations but by their movements up or down the social scale. Even the Duchess de Guermantes’s stock has gone down, because she has taken to frequenting actresses and to reading! And in his scandalous old age her brother-in-law, M. de Charlus, is quite isolated. Does Proust’s account, in ‘Paris during the War’, of ‘the pleasures of M. de Charlus’ throw light on an element in his own psychology? If you accept the biographical hints of sadistic desires on his part, and wish to think that the goings-on in Jupien’s male brothel were experiences of his own, you will need to believe that as well as wanting his character to represent him, he wanted his readers to be misled, and this is why he made the Baron a masochist. Anyhow, the narrator can now contemplate, in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, radical change exactly where it had seemed impossible. More than one guest whom he and we used to know and have lost sight of is actually glad to greet him here for old times’ sake, and although this is fiction indeed, we want to believe in such people. They are like real people in this, that the memories he and they are exchanging interest them only as relating to themselves. And if Marcel is bored with them, whereas they—these speaking portraits—are the proof of the interest Proust took in their originals, Marcel is like Proust, and unlike them, in not egotizing. In fact the narrator who now finds the minutes he has to spend in Madame de Forcheville’s company interminable, who has no intention of talking literature with Gilberte or with the Duchesse de Guermantes, and who means to resume a solitary life the very next day,—this narrator is indistinguishable from the author. ‘Wasn’t it in order to concern myself with them that I was going to live apart from them?’ Actually, he is only pleased when Gilberte presents her daughter to him, and his pleasure then is poignant. The two great ‘ways’, connecting so many people and places in his life, have both led to her, Swann’s granddaughter, in whom he sees her father—who had been his closest friend—, and time materialized. ‘Smiling, full of hope still, formed from the very years I had lost, she was like my own youth.’ After he has observed the Duc de Guermantes, at the end, tottering on the stilts of his eighty-three years, it is as ‘occupying a place in the dimension of time’ that Marcel means to describe people in the book he is at last resolved to write. Before his meditating was done and he joined his fellow guests, he had realized that he had all the materials for a work of literature in his past life. And these materials are already changed almost out of recognition. So it’s in the full consciousness of time’s power that he feels the joy of his new-found assurance: the work time threatens is the means of conquering it. To accept Proust’s theory of Time Regained, it isn’t enough to believe there is a transcendent reality, you must believe there is a transcendent reality other than that of the mystics. But you may think it enough to recognize here a full and final statement, not of a philosophy of time, but of the unifying theme, now orchestrated more sumptuously than ever, of the whole novel. And if you have discovered no ‘grand general plan’, still from here you can see the whole in its true perspective, that is, from the same point as the author—the only point from which, every part throwing light on another, you can at length make sense of it all. ‘Is art more real than life?’ the narrator had asked himself earlier, and now (adapting what Baudelaire said about poetry) he answers definitively: ‘Art is what is most real’. No doubt Proust ascribed a superior reality to Art by way of affirming Art’s supreme value for him. On finishing his novel, his readers today may feel they value his art as being, not indeed more real than life, but—by its way of ‘reconstituting’ life as only great art can do—life-enhancing, and as showing, if not that life has a meaning in itself, at least that it can be given one. (Full review on reviewer’s website. And seeIn Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7 ].)

Author: Amazon Customer

Rating: 1

Review: I have just finished the final volume. One of the themes in this one is Proust's concern that he would not live long enough to finish it. I know just how he felt. It is interminable tripe. The vanity and snobbery are distasteful and the extreme misogyny and homophobia are disgraceful. The fact that we cannot possibly believe in any of the people depicted and the improbability of most of the action (if that is the right term) and relationships rather undermines the idea that this is a novel at all. I simply do not understand where Proust's reputation comes from. I suspect in many cases from people who could not face finishing it.