Swann Explained by Proust [Published November 1913]
‘I am publishing only one volume, Du côté de chez Swann, of a novel whose general title will be A la recherche du temps perdu. I would like to have brought the whole of it out at once; but works in several volumes are no longer being published. I am like someone who has a tapestry too large for present-day apartments, and who has been obliged to cut it up.
‘Young writers, with whom I am otherwise in sympathy, advocate on the contrary a succinct plot with few characters. That is not my conception of the novel. How to put it to you? You know that there is plane geometry and solid geometry.
Well, for me, the novel is not only plane psychology, but psychology in time. I have attempted to isolate the invisible substance of time, but to do that the experiment had to be able to be long-lasting. I hope that at the end of my book, some minor social event of no importance, some marriage between two persons who in the first volume belong to very different worlds, will indicate that time has passed and will take on the beauty of certain patinated leadwork at Versailles, which time has encased in an emerald sheath.
‘Then, like a town which, as the train follows a curve in the track, appears now on our right hand and now on our left, the various aspects that a single character has taken on in someone else’s eyes, to the extent of being like different and successive characters, will convey – but only by this – the sensation of time having elapsed. Particular characters will later reveal themselves as different from what they are in the present volume, and different from what they will be believed to be, as very often happens in life for that matter.
‘It is not only the same characters who will reappear in the course of the work under different aspects, as in certain cycles by Balzac, but,’ M. Proust tells us, ‘certain profound, almost unconscious impressions within a single character.
‘From this point of view,’ M. Proust goes on, ‘my book would perhaps be like an attempt at a sequence of “Novels of the Unconscious”; I would not be at all ashamed to say “Bergsonian novels” if I believed that, for it happens in every age that literature attempts to attach itself – post hoc, of course – to the prevailing philosophy. But that would not be accurate, for my work is dominated by the distinction between involuntary and voluntary memory, a distinction which not only does not appear in M. Bergson’s philosophy but is even contradicted by it.’
‘How do you substantiate this distinction?’
‘For me, voluntary memory, which is above all a memory of the intellect and of the eyes, gives us only facets of the past that have no truth; but should a smell or a taste, met with again in quite different circumstances, reawaken the past in us, in spite of ourselves, we sense how different that past was from what we thought we had remembered, our voluntary memory having painted it, like a bad painter, in false colours.
Already, in this first volume, you will find the character who tells the story and who says “I” (who is not me) suddenly recovering years, gardens, people he has forgotten, in the taste of a mouthful of tea in which he has soaked a bit of madeleine; he could have remembered them no doubt, but without their colour or their charm; I have been able to make him say that, as in that little Japanese game where you soak flimsy bits of paper which, the moment you immerse them in the bowl, spread out and writhe and turn into flowers and characters, all the flowers in his garden, and the water-lilies of the Vivonne, and the good people of the village and their little houses and the church, and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, whatever can take on shape and solidity, has emerged, town and gardens, out of his cup of tea.
‘You see, I believe that it is really only to involuntary memories that the artist should go for the raw material of his work. First, precisely because they are involuntary and take shape of their own accord, drawn by the resemblance of some identical moment, they alone bear the hallmark of authenticity.
Then, they bring things back to us in exact proportions of memory and oblivion. And finally, since they give us to enjoy the same sensation in quite other circumstances, they release it from all contingency, they give us its extratemporal essence, which is the very content of good style, that general and necessary truth that the beauty of a style alone can reveal.
‘If I permit myself to rationalize about my book like this,’ M. Proust continues, ‘that is because it is not in any degree a product of the reason, for its least elements were supplied to me by my sensibility, I perceived them first deep inside myself, without understanding them and had as much difficulty converting them into something intelligible as if they had been as alien to the world of the intellect – as what shall I say – a musical motif. You are thinking I imagine that this is over-subtle. But I assure you, on the contrary, that it is a reality.
What we have not had to elucidate for ourselves, what was clear already (the ideas of logic for example), is not truly ours, we do not even know whether it is the real. It is a part of the “possible” that we select arbitrarily. Besides, you can tell that right away, you know, by the style.
‘Style is not at all an embellishment as certain people think, it is not even a matter of technique, it is – like colour with painters – a quality of vision, the revelation of the private universe that each one of us can see and which others cannot see. The pleasure an artist affords us is to introduce us to one universe the more.’
The end
