The big question that Proust’s work raises, but that extends to all 20th century literature, is why its authors were so obsessed with time. Probably the answer is that in that century there were more changes in our way of life than those that had occurred throughout all of history. Never has the ‘tempus fugit’ been staged with such virulence. In less than four decades, the diligence was passed to the airplane and dizzying advances in industry, commerce, technology, warfare, medicine and all other sciences. Proust was born in 1871 and died in that 1922 that we remember today, but he gave him time to prove that vertigo: the world that he portrays of aristocratic classes and rentiers is the one that would disappear with the new century. From that vertigo, and from the pain that this loss causes him, his work is born.
In the celebrations that have taken place in recent years around the figure and the legacy of Proust throughout the planet, there is a striking effort to recreate the era in which the characters of his novels move, as if it were shared by that world the same nostalgia that the writer felt. Those who today commemorate the centenary of his death also commemorate his time, thanks to his pages. In them he managed not only to be venerated today, but also to venerate the world he evoked. He managed to convey the emotion that his pleasures and his days inspired in him. And there is another change that occurred parallel to that, and that Proust also knew how to pick up: the transience in love relationships that the strong change and liberal relaxation of customs would bring with it.
In ‘The Prisoner’ (1923) possessive passion, jealousy, arguments, boredom and the possibility of breaking up explode
The phenomenology of pain
Proust’s literature is not only a tribute to time gone by, but also, and above all, to the expiration of love. Ana Karenina paid dearly for her extramarital affair with Count Alekséi Kiríllovich Vronsky, but a few decades after the last third of the 19th century, in which she is set, European society would have welcomed her in a much more benign way. The very complicated, free and heterodox relationship that the protagonist of ‘In Search of Lost Time’ maintains with Albertine Simonet attests to this great social change. From the decadent world in which he meets her, which still seems to remain faithful to the old order -the one he describes in ‘In the Shadow of the Girls in Bloom’ (1918)-, to the world of ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ (1922) in which That same character and narrator becomes obsessed with the open sexuality that he suspects in her, there is already a long stretch that gets even bigger in ‘The Prisoner’ (1923) where possessive passion, jealousy, arguments, boredom with coexistence and the possibility of rupture.
At that time of the turn of the century, love has become rare and stops drawing a romantic, faithful and monolithic relationship to dynamit itself and lose itself in the maze of mirrors that desire draws. Until then, impossible love was impossible due to social conventions that prohibited and penalized adultery. The impossibility was given because one of the lovers or both were married. In Proust we are already in something else. We are before the alter ego of a homosexual who has fallen in love with a lesbian, as we were before something else in the case of Flaubert, who a few decades earlier captured in his novels a strange modality of love based on distance, containment and desire towards the lover, paradoxically encouraged by the mediation of a third party who could be her own husband.
There are a few words at the beginning of ‘The Fugitive’, the novel that is the continuation of ‘The Prisoner’ and which was published in 1925, three years after Proust’s death, which describe with meticulous drama a pain for the loss of person who is loved, who is absolutely sincere and torn, but at the same time is loaded with insurmountable contradictions. The same protagonist who had come to think that he no longer loved Albertine, and that he wanted to lose sight of her because he had compared “the mediocre pleasures that she offered him” with “the splendid desires that he prevented him from realizing”, suddenly plunges into misery. when he knows that she has left, and he says in a few words in which one of Proust’s great clues resides: «I was wrong believing I could see clearly in my heart. But this knowledge, which the finest perceptions of intelligence had not been able to give me, had just been brought to me, hard, dazzling, strange, like crystallized salt, by the sudden reaction of pain.
If there was an ‘involuntary memory’, which manifested itself in the taste of the famous Proustian madeleine, there is also an ‘involuntary love’ and an ‘involuntary pain’. If Proust can be defined as a ‘phenomenologist of memory’, and even of the mechanisms that make up a snob sensibility, in those initial paragraphs of ‘La fugitive’ a whole phenomenology of loving suffering is exposed, a very detailed description of the layers of ignorance about himself that the human heart can harbor, his inability to accept the reality of a loss for which he is responsible and to continue contradicting himself by calling the habit of his life as a couple ‘insignificant’, while acknowledging in its cessation an insufferable wound and “as cruel as death.” We will not have to wait, however, for the next volume of the cycle to see how our man happily embarks on a trip to Venice where he will rediscover his love illusion in Baroness Putbus. An encounter with Gilberte Swam, her first love, makes him think that in the same way that he forgot her, he will be able to forget Albertine.
Often, when talking about Proust, the theme of time and memory is insisted on, but that of love is equally or more important. He is so to the point that he crosses paths with them in such a way that time lost is also time for love or time loved, as memory is loved, which is often also memory of love. And it is that, of the seven installments that make up ‘In search of lost time’, four specifically deal with the subject of sentimental relationships and in the other three these do not stop peeking and filtering at the times when other issues are addressed. As with the last volume, ‘Time Regained’. His encounter with Gilberte constitutes a confirmation of the destructive work that the years carry out, not only in physical beauty but in one’s own inner reality. This fact is expressed by the narrator in a somewhat cruel way, when he affirms that his heart had changed even more than the face of his former lover. In this work, time becomes a kind of ally, acting as a revenge on the Parisian society that he frequented in another time and as an anesthesia for old lovesickness: «In this world where everything is wasted, where everything perishes , there is one thing that falls into ruins, that is destroyed even more completely, leaving even less vestiges than beauty: it is pain.
Portrait of Marcel Proust.
Made-up cupcake?
The fact that Proust was capable of describing with extraordinary literary precision the inner storm that a sentimental break or fraud produces does not imply that he was not a writer elaborated with the wide intellectual and creative chamber that successful narrative artifice requires. Rather, reading his work indicates that he had a contrived mind to the point of twisting, and that in him nothing is improvised or spontaneous. In this way, when he wishes to display on paper the evocative and suggestive power that the syllables of an elegant surname can harbor, he chooses one, Guermantes, which does not respond to a real memory from his childhood but rather that he searched for and chose in a certain way. deliberate, making sure before that no one alive carried it. In this absolutely imaginary creation he puts all the verisimilitude that his talent allows him, establishing metaphorical and synesthetic relationships of those syllables with his own sensory perceptions (sounds, smells, colors…) or with remembrances of his bedroom as a child in Combray, the imaginary environment , half real small town of his grandparents.
Guermantes is a literary artifact like the Balbec spa, where the narrator met Albertine, and which is inspired by that of the French town of Cabourg. Proust retouches, makes up, disguises, invents surnames and place names to erase clues, or for the sheer pleasure of recreating real place names and surnames. His gift for creating credible fictions leads him to invent a piece of music that has generated rivers of ink, such as the celebrated ‘Sonata de Vinteuil’, a fictional composer who appears in the novel and who has a lesbian daughter. In ‘By Swann’s Way’, the novel with which the ‘In Search of Lost Time’ cycle opens, the character Charles Swann associates the piece with his love for Odette de Crécy in a way that is not too distant from sensations inspired by the taste of the famous madeleine. The ‘Vinteuil Sonata’, despite being a fictitious reference, thus stars in an experience as fundamental and substantial, as intimate and convincing as that of involuntary memory, which occupies a central place in Proust’s novelistic approach and in his philosophical thought.
The ‘Vinteuil Sonata’ will also appear in the episode ‘The Prisoner’ in which Albertine intends to attend a party at the Verdurin home that worries her lover, and in which the Baron de Charlus plans to interpret the happy piece. This playful aspect that Proust manifests when plotting the novelistic stagings of his most serious theses invites us to doubt that the taste experience of the madeleine itself was true and biographical. The question is obvious: could not the same theory have suggested to Proust the tasting of a food that perhaps seemed somewhat vulgar, prosaic or plebeian? In other words, what if the cupcake was invented? What if it wasn’t even something like this, like a cookie or a biscuit? What if what really suggested the involuntary memory theory to him was a piece of bacon?