Excerpt from programme notes written for Love's Delusion by Emma Eager
“Loving is an unhappy ending … and there is nothing one can do about it until the enchantment is over.” (Proust, Time Regained)
In 1912, Marcel Proust sent a manuscript to André Gide, who was working on behalf of the publisher Gallimard. It was never read. For Gide, the forty-one year old Proust was “a snob, a society amateur … a faded social butterfly”, incapable of writing anything of substance.
This manuscript consisted of the first two volumes of Proust’s masterpiece, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (‘In Search of Lost Time’), eventually published as Swann’s Way in 1913 and Within a Budding Grove in 1919. Aptly enough, the novel is a profound meditation on a substanceless society, the Parisian haut monde. But it is much more than this. It is the history of a vocation, the narrator’s journey from cosseted childhood to “society amateur” to writer, a vocation realised through the redemptive power of involuntary memory. The narrator dips a madeleine into his tea and his Combray childhood surges up before him. This episode constitutes the start of the narrator’s journey, and such flashes from the past rekindle the narrator’s vocation.
In Time Regained, the last volume of Lost Time (published after Proust’s death), the narrator finally realises the importance of these involuntary memories. By writing them down he can recapture time, he can make up for his dilettante years by immortalising the past, and by extension, himself:
“The novel the reader has in his hands is therefore the book the hero is going to write. Thus the end of the book, which is the result of his reflections and leads to his decision to write, in fact predates the beginning of the story, which is the history of his vocation.” (Philippe Michel-Thiriet, The Book of Proust.)
Ironically, if Proust had not been tormented by his enduring reputation as a “social butterfly”, perhaps Lost Time would never have been written in the first place. In the novel, the character of Swann is also plagued by his frivolous existence but, unlike Proust (and the narrator), he is not able to lift himself out of the societal abyss through artistic endeavour. He never finishes his Vermeer essay – collecting art is his abiding passion – and by giving up on his creativity he also gives up on himself.