In Our Time - Proust

Episode Date: April 10, 2003

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work Marcel Proust whose novel À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, or In Search of Lost Time, has been called the definitive modern novel. His stylistic innovation, sensory exploration and fascination with memory were to influence a whole body of thinkers, from the German intellectuals of the 1930s to the Bloomsbury set, chief among them Virginia Woolf, and innumerable critics and novelists since. But how did he succeed in creating a 3000 page novel with such an artistic coherence? To what extent did John Ruskin influence Proust? Is his fascination with memory and recall simply a nostalgia for the past? And what impact did he have on the 20th century novel? With Jacqueline Rose, Professor of English Literature at Queen Mary, University of London and author of Albertine; Malcolm Bowie, Master of Christ’s College, Cambridge and author of Proust among the Stars; Dr Robert Fraser, Senior Research Fellow in the Literature Department at the Open University and author of Proust and the Victorians.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, Marcel Proust's novel, Alireches Dut-Tompadieu, or In Search of Lost Time, has been called The Definitive Modern Novel. His stylistic innovation, sensory exploration and fascination with memory

were to influence a whole body of thinkers from the German intellectuals of the 1930s to the Blount Reset, chief among them of Ginny Wolff, and innumerable critics and novelists since. But how did he succeed in creating a 3,000-page novel with such an artistic coherence? To what extent did John Ruskin influence Proust?

Is his fascination with memory and recall simply a nostalgia for the past, and what impact did he have on the 20th century novel? With me to discuss Proust at Jacqueline Rose, Professor of English Literature at Queen Mary University London, an author of Albertine, a novel based on a rewriting of Proust's central female character. Mark and Bowie, Master of Christ College, Cambridge,

an author of Proust Among the Stars, and Dr. Robert Fraser, senior research fellow in the Literature Department at the Open University and author of Proust and the Victorians. Jacqueline Rose, why can in search of lost time be seen as the definitive modern novel? Well, I think it's because Proust did something quite extraordinary, which is that he put us inside somebody's mind in a way and with a kind of determination and an elasticity,

a capacity to move inside that mind in a way that nobody had ever done before. I mean, he has been described as a cross between Dickens and James because he has this ability to conjure up a social world and then plunge you into the mind recording it and the mind beyond just the recording of that world, which is quite unique. And he makes the mind tact.

It is a very centrist novel. So it's not just the interiority of thought. It's also a physical sensation of being inside that mind. It's a kind of erotics of thought, and nobody had done that before. Well, there are three things, though. Why, to be more specific, do you think it could be called definitive? Why do you think it could be called modern? And how is he actually describing the process of thinking?

Well, I'll take modern first, because, I mean, it is rather remarkable that Freud and Proust never. read a single word of each other. But in fact, the analogies between them are incredibly powerful. We're talking about the beginning of the 20th century, a novel written between 1912 and 1922. So Freud and Proust are writing at the same time. And for some reason,

which is difficult to give a simple answer to, both Freud and Proust thought that the best way to get inside the mind was to go behind what the mind thinks it knows of itself. That is to say, to allow for the fact that there are pockets of thought and areas of feeling which are conscious controlling minds do not have access to

and that the mind is the friend to all kinds of things which if we stop in the tracks of our normal identities we wouldn't be comfortable with. And the reason why I think Proust is the definitive modern novel is because he gives flesh to that in a way that Freud can't. I mean Freud is trying to be scientific, is trying to control it, whereas Proust, although he has a... a very strong understand this agenda plunges you inside the processes,

and you have to lose yourself there. You cannot read Proust unless you're willing to really let go and go inside there with him. What about this business of describing thinking, writing, everybody will know about the long sentences, the extremely long sentences is sometimes used, and you've said somewhere that this actually you think describes the way in which we do think, or reflects the way in which we do. Well, it has a kind of similarity to the method that Freud devised for the psychonetic session, which is a kind of free association, which is the mind is allowed to wander inside its own processes, although it's much more controlled in Proust, there's absolutely no doubt about it.

But the Proustian sentence is a phenomenon which one approaches with trepidation and comes out feeling ones just had an amazing sort of massage or swim or something. I mean, many readers of Proust, I always say to my students, the first time you read a Proust sentence, if you hold on too tight, you'll lose it. You will not be able to get to the end of the sentence. It's like jumping into the pool. You have to go in there and let it carry you. And if you don't, you will drown.

And I think this is an amazing sort of rendition of the way we both control our own minds and have to let ourselves go inside them. How radical was it perceived at the time of its publication? Well, it depends on who you're talking to or who you're referring to. I mean, some people thought it was just outrageous. There's the famous publisher who, when he received the first section, said, you don't really expect me to publish something, which is a man tossing and turning and trying to go to sleep for 30 pages.

I mean, this is just ridiculous. And I think it was Anatole France who famously said, you know, Proust is too long, life is too short. I mean, a lot of people didn't like it and didn't get it. James Joyce didn't get it. He said, I don't see a special talent. But then I'm not very famously, I'm no. good as a literary critic. So a lot of people didn't get it. And then people were outraged by it,

not just because of what it forced you to do as a reader, but because of some of the very specific areas of sexuality that it touches on. And what could be described, I think, fairly as the perversity of it. And it enraged some people. Can you mean more specific about that? Well, the treatment of homosexuality was seen as scandalous in some ways, although we have to remember that, in fact, sodomy had been decriminalized in France. from 1790 onwards. And then that was ratified in 1810. But nonetheless, people did find that very shocking.

It is shocking to read now. It's shocking to read now. Malganbaugh, in the early 20th century, Paris was a major centre of European modernism. How far was Bruce part of that? On the surface, he was a real part of it, a very energetic attender at art shows and theatrical events, musical events, even sometimes.

There's a wonderful moment in 1920, six months before Proust's death, when he comes out into society and specifically to a party hosted by Diagellef, of all people. And at the party, Stravinsky, Picasso, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and they're all talking to each other. We have Joyce's impressions of this occasion. We have Stravinsky's impressions of this occasion. So if you look at the story simply in terms of the social highlights of the Proust career, he was very well connected indeed.

Which of us could put a guest list like that together now. On the other hand, if you look at what's actually going on in the novel, it seems to me that those cultural reference points, fellow European modernists, are very much less important than, shall we say, Ruskin we'll be talking about in a little while. And the preponderant influences that are there visibly rippling through the texture of Proust writing are from the French tradition. Racine and Balzac and Hugo are,

more or less ubiquitous in the elusive fabric of this work. So he thinks of himself as a great writer and his experiments are largely on native-born French literary materials rather than strange things brought in the way that South Sea Island tribal masks were brought to Parisian exhibitions to have a huge influence on Picasso and so forth. There's none of that sense of modernism being to do with incongruity and exoticism. modernism in Proustand is very much a home-grown product, but that product being reprocessed in such a way as to turn it towards its own critical mass

or its own explosive power. You've described by your allusion as the Frenchness of Proust and by implication the society man that Proust was, but there was an outsider element in Proust. Was that to a certain extent driven by his Jewishness, to a certain extent driven by his homosexual, although, as Jacqueline was pointed out, that was not a crime in France after the 1790s.

What's strange about the Jewishness of Proust and the homosexuality of Proust is that they are both disguised in Auerrecherche itself. Certainly the Jewishness was not disguised in his earlier writings. So the narrator figure turns out not to be Jewish, although to have many Jewish friends. And he turns out spectacularly, as Tom Gunn in a rather angry little squib noted,

The narrator turns out not to be homosexual at all. Everyone else is in danger of being brought out of the closet, except the narrator. Now, why is he doing this? The narrator far from simply keeping Jewishness and homosexuality at arm's length and removing all trace of those things from himself. In fact, opens up this inner world that we were talking about a moment ago in such a way that there's a tremendous play of fantasy and identification with homosexual and Jewish characters,

as the thing goes on. So the subjectivity of the narrator is an arena in which a whole range of different forms of engagement, insiderness and outsiderness, can be rehearsed and manipulate and transformed. It gathered for a while, Robert Fraser, it gathered the reputation of being a passport to high culture. If you read in New York, Cruz, you were a highly cultured person. Would you say that's a fair comment? Well, I think certainly now that would be its reputation, and I think that probably would be its reputation

immediately after the first couple of volumes came out. But if you go right back to the beginning of Bruce's career, there wasn't much sense that this man would produce the great book. In fact, up until about 1913, his social reputation was very much as a kind of gadfly, so much so that in 1913 he attempted to publish the first volume to go to DHS-1. Swan's way and submitted it to La Nouvelle Rebus

Frenches, Andrejide, who was the reader on the Reader's Committee, turned it down on the basis, I think, that nobody, with the kind of reputation that Proust had in 1913 could possibly produce a serious work of literature. But what had been going on, I think, is the long process of gestation, a long process of preparation, going right the way back to about 1895. when Proust first photo writing a novel.

He produced an autobiographical novel in the third person called John Sontourier, which covers a lot of the same ground as Aller Research to Tont-Perdoux, but in a very different way, in a very less imaginative, a very much less challenging way. And then in 1899, something very strange happened,

he fell in love with the work of John Ruski. almost overnight. After to reading an extract from one of Ruskin's works in a Belgian magazine, he then devoted the next six years to a systematic study of Ruskin. Although his English was rather poor, he always said that he learned English by reading Ruskin. So as you can imagine, his English was slight quaint. I mean, I'm sure it'll interest as many people as it interests me,

that a novelist so, as it seems, French, and so, as Malcolm has said, steeped in Frenchness, and as Jackalids implied, so, as he were, over there, should fasten batten onto Ruskin, about whom I suspect people have a rather hazy view nowadays, although he was massively important as an art critic in 19th century, in the 19th century in this country, and a friend and ultimately a destroyer of Turner in certain ways, but that's another programme. and he wrote in this very high-minded, rigorously moralistic way about art. It would not seem on the surface that someone from Proust's background,

which you've sketched in very wealthy, he was a snob, in like society, he seemed to be playing around with literature and got that reputation, as you said, as sort of playing a tennis racket as a banjo, a bit of a gadfly, that he would go for Ruskin. So can you just give us more details to what really attracted him, about the work of John Ruskin? I think that you found a number of things in Ruskin. The first one was a highly intelligent aesthetic,

a way of interpreting the world, aesthetically, sensuously, but also intellectually. And a long historical dimension, Ruskin enabled him, as it were, to historically situate his artistic, his aesthetic intuitions. And these interesting, Intuitions fastened upon certain artworks, certain buildings that Ruskin extolled.

There are certain artists which Ruskin introduced Proustou, Carpaccio, Joueto, which became very, very important in the structure eventually of Alarches de Tont-Pedou, certain buildings as well, the great cathedrals of France, that Ruskin wrote about in his books, and which, Proust used to conduct pilgrimages too. So in many ways, I think that Ruskin radically altered Proust's view of history and gave him a much longer view of history, enabling to situate his, as it were, his sensuous intimations of the everyday

in this long historical dimension. Alcabai, when it was finished, this was a not, the search of last time was a novel of, 3,000 pages. How would you suggest, how would you explain how that held together? I would say simply that it has one of the world's great plots. You remember Coleridge at a certain moment, asked or asked himself to reel off the greatest plots known to him at the time in the early 19th century, and he came up with Oedipus Rex and Tom Jones and the Alchemist and one or two others.

Now, if he'd had the good fortune to read Al-Ochoft-Tut-Tampel-Rue, I think he would have included that plot among them. It's a most extraordinary thing, and I don't know whether on air one should be giving away the ending of the thing. There is an element of well-madeness in purely whodunit terms. The novel has a denouma that has been set up from thousands of pages earlier with hints and glimpses of possible outcomes, multiple plot strands, and the whole thing comes round to a really extraordinary conclusion in the end, with hugely many, not all, but hugely many of the loose ends tied up. Now, that plottedness over 3,000 pages is one of the miracles of the book,

and unfortunately it's one of the miracles that's only accessible to people who have plunged on beyond the first volume, which is the point at which many Bruce readers unfortunately at the moment seem to give up, and taking themselves through the central volumes towards that extraordinary final tableau in Le T'Enretruve. Well, I'm rather surprised at that, because I would have thought that the first answer to what holds it together would not have been plot, but it's very refreshing in a way to say it's plot. It's the plot that does it.

EM Forster's, what is it, two cheers for the plot or whatever. Two cheers. What do you think, Jackie, do you think it's the plot that drives these three thousand perches through? Well, only retrospectively, which means it can't be what makes you read it. So I think what drives you through it is the hints that there will have been one. That's to say there is a, I absolutely agree with Malcolm. No, it's two cheers for democracy. Unless a novel has to have a plot.

We're going to bother me if I didn't get it out. Well, it's sort of, it tantalises you. It gives you the feeling, as Malcolm says, that something is going to be resolved. And that, you know, lures you on and makes you, means you somehow can't put it down. But the other thing I think that makes it hold together is the fact that it forces you to live what it's about,

which is about memory. So insofar as the novel is about how far we can retrieve our past selves and how far those are determinant in precipitating us towards and deciding us towards and deciding what our future is going to be like. It issues a challenge to the reader to see how much of it you can retain in your mind as you go. And that applies to the sentence, because they're so long.

It applies to the paragraph. I have a friend who says he calls out to his partner. I'll come and do the dishes when I finish this proof sentence. Little does you know that means half an hour later, right? So it works at every level. And as you're going through it, you are retaining certain things and you're losing them. And then you will be reminded again.

So you're constantly having this kind of aha experience, which is, of course, I've forgotten that. There it is again. And there's something incredibly satisfying about those moments of loss and then regaining something, which is, of course, what the book is about. So I think that's what makes you go through and carry on.

Robert Fraser, the book talks about memory, talks about regaining time. And what everybody, most people will know about Proust, is what happens after the Madeline is dipped in the concoction of lime that he used to have, it used to drink as a boy. Can you discuss memory in terms of the construction of the book? Yes, well, right from the beginning in his criticism, Proust drew a distinction between what he called voluntary memory

and what he called involuntary memory. Voluntary memory, we exercise all the time, every time we remember to go to the shops, every time we remember our next door neighbor's name or failed to. Involuntary memory is something that steals up upon us. it's much more like a deja vu. It's drinking a certain drink, the sensation of the drink on our tongue

reminds us of a previous occasion when we might have had that particular cluster of sensations. Proust's view actually was that the involuntary memory, which you might call the unconscious memory, though it's not a term that I like very much, is in some way much more patent, much more orderly, much more coherent, than the conscious memory is, than the deliberate memory is.

Now, this is the opposite of what most people think. Most people don't trust their own conscious minds. They trust their conscious minds because they need their conscious mind to get them through the day. But Proust, I think, had an immense faith in the involuntary memory and what it conjured forth. Just before he published Swan's Way, the first volume of his great sequence,

he published in a magazine called Le Tons in Paris an interesting article which actually is an interview with himself. The interviewer is not named, but the interviewer is quite clearly Proust, and the interviewee is Proust as well. And they talk about the memory. And the interviewer says, now what is this about the involuntary memory? What's so important about it?

And the interviewee, who is also Proust, Proust, the novelist says, Well, when you remember something in this involuntary way, becomes clothed in association. The word is vetu in association. It brings an entire world with it. And therefore, in a way, the unconscious memory, random as it may seem, accidental as it may seem,

is far more coherent and artistically wholesome than the conscious memory. Do you agree with that and you think more importantly that Proust worked on that principle? Look, I'm going to be heretical for a moment, if I may. I don't think this book is as much about memory as we've been suggesting and as criticism of the novel and publicity blurbs about the novel suggests. Memory is there, sure enough. It's got a couple of spotlights within the plot that I was mentioning a moment ago

trained upon it. In the middle of the first volume of the novel, there's the experience that Melvin was talking about with the Madeline cake dipped in tea and a whole seemingly lost past becoming available again, and I'm not giving very much away about the end of the novel if I tell you that a larger, more sumptuously orchestrated version of that same incident is there towards the end of the book.

But memory of that kind, let's to say, involuntarily having access to past materials that one thought had disappeared forever, does not propel the central volumes of the novel. It seems to me there one has to think in terms of the narrator's curiosity. about the behavior of Albertine, the female co-protagonist of the book. Now, his curiosity about her, which sustains the narrative and the sentences that we've been talking about

for dozens of pages, hundreds of pages on end, that's a curiosity about the here and now. What's she doing? What's she doing at the moment? What was she doing yesterday? Where is she going to go tomorrow? Is she going where she tells me she's going to go or is she going to do something completely different?

Now, that is a portrait of desire-driven, future-driven speculative thought brought to bear on, in this case, other people's sexual conduct and sexual preferences. Now, if you come at those central volumes of the novel, and we must include the central volumes which are full of social observation of the here and now of the narrator's Parisian experience, armed simply with a battery of memory concepts, you don't get very far in understanding what's going on. Can we actually transfer this to, which I think is a terrific start. We're transferring this to sworn in love, where he falls, swan is seduced by and then falls in love with someone variously described in blurbs as a courtesan, a cockat, and a prostitute. Odette, you can tell me which she is, you think, Jacqueline.

All three. That becomes an obsessive, humiliating, an extraordinarily involved-driven, driven passion. swan for this unlikely as it starts a person. I don't... Malcolm's made us all not give anything away, so okay, why she's unlikely, and so how she becomes likely. But she possesses him away, which is quite almost pathological at a certain stage. And I agree that. You could go along with Malcolm. That's got everything to do with the present of Swan's immediate life, hasn't it?

Yes and no, you see. I mean, I agree and disagree with what Malcolm said. I mean, I think the two things are intimately and passionately related. because the desire to know the other and the recognition on the part of the male narrator that he cannot know and control the woman seems to me another version of not being able to know and control one's memories.

I say the central issue here is how far one can take possession of something and indeed of oneself. And one of my favorite moments in Proust is when he says our lives are full of memories but we do not have the ability to recall them. Given that that's the case, why do we think those memories we can't recall just go back to the last 30 years of our lives?

maybe they go back to another planet and lives we lived in the bodies of other men. They say this is really infinity we're talking about here. Now I think what happens is the concern about memory and what we can and we can't know about our own minds then fixes on the body and the mind and the existence of these women

variously throughout the novel. And it becomes as it were an allegory for a chase after something which in his wisest moments, Proust knows one can never control or know because you never know what the people you love are doing when they're not with you. I mean, that's the basic problem here.

So you can never know and control another person. With Audet de Cresi, it becomes eroticised as what was she up to yesterday and how far can I have actually been there where she was if I read the letter that I think possibly her lover sent her, only to find out that in fact it wasn't her lover, but by reading it, where am I putting myself? So there's a kind of box within box, within box structure of the perversity of the diversity of the day.

desire to control her. And she has given this wondrous, sensuous presence and this incredible, well, slightly cruel casualness about the whole thing, which is how she brings him in and how she sustains him and sustains his passion for her. And of course, as you said, and we can give this away because it's the end of the first volume, he says, how could I have spent so long, completely preoccupied by a woman who wasn't even to my taste? Wasn't my type? Wasn't my type, yes. You feel absolutely nothing he's left a chance in these 3,000 pages at all. and it does begin, as Jacqueline was reminded us, with pages of someone not being able to get to sleep,

if you want to put it that way, then a man and then a boy not being able to get to sleep. And the idea of the piece, the whole piece existing in that twilight zone, let's leave it to the twilight, even though it's the right time of day come to think, if it doesn't it, in that twilight zone between consciousness and unconsciousness,

that seems to me to be what he's saying, look, this is where I'm placing the novel. And that seems to me, perhaps for me anyway, one of the most striking differences of all about it is that I'm going from there to there. I'm moving around in this strange area that we all know about when we can't sleep, when we're half awake, we don't quite know

whether a wake or awake or sleep is it a dream or am I the dream, I'm the dream, and so, and so everybody knows about that. And it seems to me that that is the centre of it from my reading. What do you think, John Brown? Well, I think you're, I agree with you. I mean, it's a borderline novel. I mean, there's a term in psychoanalysis now, which is borderline,

which means neither neurotic or psychotic, because the psychotic really remodels the world in their own phantasmatic images, whereas neurotic just represses everything and gets very unhappy. And Proust really is operating on that borderline because there is just the immersion in the misery of the soul, and then there are these dramatic attempts to control and transform the world and his own phantasmagoria.

And I think where I would say, sort of agree and disagree with Malcolm is that I know the moments he's talking about of the magical transformation of the world. And I think in some sense they are the redemptive moments of the book. But I have to call them up when I'm faced with a skeptical student who says they cannot stand this novel because this guy is so self-obsessed. And nobody else exists for him except as a projection of his own imagination. You really have to have tough it out with students over this and say, well, doesn't the fact that he's thinking about it and is willing exactly as you say or Melvin, to lose the mind in its least certain places,

doesn't that allow a kind of ethical questioning of that form of self-obsession, but it's a difficult argument you have to have. Isn't an aspect of this going to, please come in a second, isn't an aspect of this wanting to control everything, that even the person that say Swant, to stick to Svon, because it's easy for we're able to hold on to it, he's completely obsessed with, Odette, and he's...

The only way he can really control her is by imagining her, putting her into a painting and saying, oh, she reminds me of that figure in that painting by Botticelli, although he dismisses the Bodicelli is the second great name of the referendum. Anyway, is in that painting by Botticelli?

Now I've got a fix on her. Now I know who she is and what she is. Is that part of that? Oh, absolutely, but he's saying something so strange about desire that you don't desire directly. You desire through association. Somebody reminds you of somebody or somebody makes you think of somebody else,

or even to refer back to the discussion of Ruskin, you only desire something if it's already been aesthetically framed for you. And that comes very close to moment to saying there are no people in the world. And certainly at moments, there are no women in the world. They're simply these people rendered to you by their aesthetic transformation through culture. There are no people in the world. But good heavens, he's a comic novelist. He's out there in society.

He has a wonderful parade of buffoons and charlatans and mountebanks who are introduced in the first volume, remain in the texture of the plot for 3,000 pages, become ever more absurdly themselves, ever more over the top in their self-presentation in society, and the relish and the detail and the ingenuity and the malice with which those comic characters are represented, and the insistence and the coming back to them endlessly,

is a feature of the, imagination at work. So when we talk about twilight worlds and desire worlds, we've got to remember that this is a book that is hugely funny, hugely well observed, and contains a whole litter of human foible and moral comment

on human foible, page after page. Now that is not a portrait of the mind in action or paranoid fantasy structures in action, although it may abut upon those things. It's essentially a portrait of social man and woman doing absurd things in

Salon society. Robert Ferry. I would like to say issue really with the adverb only in Jacqueline's answer. I think we might say that Proust circumscribes desire by saying that

people only entertain desire when it's aesthetically framed. But the aesthetic frame is terribly important for Proust. He was very interested in desire, very interested in structure. Of course, we're post-structural ists. We like to dismantle all these things. But the historical, the

cultural frame. He's desperately important in Bruce, which is why Ruskin was so important to him. There's one moment I would like to just describe for a moment when the narrator who's fallen out of love with Gilbert transfers his

affections temporarily to Gibette's mother, who's Odette de Creasy, who's now Madam Swan. And it's Maytime in the Bois de Beloit and they go through this long walk along the Avenue de Bois. and Odette is there and she's acknowledging all the gentlemen who are doffing their caps to her. And at one moment it's a balmy spring day.

She hands her coat to the narrator who puts it over his arm. As he does so, he notices the stitching inside the coat that he hadn't seen before. Whereupon Proust goes into a long epic simile, he says, as a man who reaches a cathedral town, finds a great cathedral in front of them, this is obviously Amiens Cathedral, he climbs up to the Bally Estrade on the west front, and he looks at the back of the Bally Estrade,

and she notices a detail that she never saw before. And suddenly, this fashion note about Odette DeCrasi is given this huge cultural resonance by means of a reference, not a reference to a reference to, to Ruskin's work and to medieval art and cathedrals. That kind of aesthetic framing, I think, is very, very, and historical framing is very important for Proust. We've hinted out, and Malcolm has rather fiercely brought us back to

certain social realities of Proust which are undeniable and to be celebrated. What sort of society do you think, Jacqueline is? What sort of society can you discuss that he moved in and described? What was the Paris society? The book comes out as a book full of snobbish persons. Very funny, very witty, very savage and many occasions, as Malcolm has said. But we're talking about levels of society, people who pose like a verdurras, a bit like the veneering, and Dickens aren't they?

And I dismissed and their high society, the princesses and all these people who... Well, I agree with Malcolm that there's that whole strand of the novel, and I certainly agree with what was just said about the way you can go from the personal obsession into a larger aesthetic and historical preoccupation. I think that's crucial. The problem with the social world that he describes is that, I mean, he's a snob who provides the most brilliant critique of snobbery we've ever had, and there's a real ambiguity at the heart of his belonging in that world. I mean, he came from an upper middle class professional medical family, and all he wanted to do was hang out with aristocrats and royalty. And, you know, fine,

you know, he gave, he allowed them to indict themselves in the most chilling and devastating way. I mean, they just tear themselves to shreds under his acute eye. But you can't help thinking, why are you here? What the hell are you doing here? And I know, he can't stop telling us how superior it is. Well, his... People slightly low down the social scan.

They don't realize what one hell of a chap he just come from this really big party in the book, exactly. And actually, you've got to laugh at him, even though he's, you know, 40 times. He's more clever than you at laughing at everything. Well, I'm sure I'm not the only person who's got stuck in the odd dinner party thinking, you know, it's 200 more pages to go in this dinner party.

If he doesn't leave now, I'm leaving. I mean, you have to say, what is he doing there? But if we could just go back a second to the discussion about the part of him that is not just self-obsessed, I think it's important that even if you're talking about desire, to recognize the moments in the novel where something takes flight, which goes beyond this obsessive psychological, desiring intelligence. and they are very often the relationships between the women, like between the mother and the grandmother,

and the forms of considerateness and sensitivity to somebody being someone else in the world, which he never captures through his own desire, and he interestingly never captures through a male subjectivity. It's nearly always the women who do that, so much so that a recent critic Elizabeth Ladinson has written a book called Proust Lesbianism, in which she argues that the only really,

clearly genuine erotics of connection to another come through the relationships with women, as if he's laying down his arms there and saying, I don't know, I don't understand, but they're getting up to something very different from what I've just spent 500 pages describing. Also, the grandmother you mentioned, at a certain moment in the course of the novel during the seaside holidays in Balbeck that the family take every year, moves the narrator and moves him even more in retrospect, to tears simply by tapping on the wall of her hotel room and making contact non-verbally, not even pre-verbally, just by knocking with a needy and rather bereft young person. So there's a tremendous respect and craving in the novel for non-verbal forms of communication

is built into, embroidered into this huge verbal fresco and this emphatic, over-the-top, showy, ostentatious verbal performance has got its own otherness, its own alternative dimension, caught up in it very beautifully. Can we just talk for a few minutes now about the legacy of Proust? People will know that the Bloomsbury group, first of all, they printed him, and as it were, they translated him first in this country, and Virginia Woolf was very influenced by him

and didn't want to be too influenced by him because she didn't want to be bowled over by him. but let's take that, as it were, said, and move on from there the rest of the century and into this century. What sort of general influence do you think Proust has had? That's confined to this country, on criticism, on writing, on thought about fiction in this country. Malcolm, to start with.

Proust, it seems to me, provides an extension of that extraordinary D.H. Lawrence, I say, why the novel matters. The novel matters, Lawrence says, because it's the bright book of life. It's real man and real woman, man alive, and so forth. That's right. And everything that can happen at any level, in any dimension at all, that's human, can go into the novel.

It seems to me that Proust extends that vastly by saying in a way that Lawrence never would. Let's imagine that the person whose hand goes sensuously out towards his pen and begins to write is also a thinking being, a theorist, somebody who cogitates and expatiates inwardly on his own experience. And what Proust has done is expand the novel in ways that we've been talking about to include inwardness as well as moral and social behavior and a parade of characters vitally interreacting within the plot. So this is the novel in an extraordinary form of ambition and aspiration towards a new inclusiveness. I think it's that element that has given other novelists in Britain and elsewhere. an extraordinary sense of the novel still being that which preeminently matters among the literary genre. Jacqueline.

Well, I would agree with that. I mean, you know, the death of the novel is called, you know, every other year, as you know, and it goes on being written. And I think what Proust does is give the combination of the social reality and the inward thought, but also a kind of pushing both of those to an extreme, which actually I think the legacy is ambiguous because I don't think many people have done it since, quite honestly. I think the perversity, which we haven't touched on that much, and I mean perversity in an open-minded sense,

but the kind of complications of sexuality, which make contemporary queer theory look positively innocent by comparison, and the hallucinogenic quality of the sensuous imagination, I think you'd be hard pushed to find writers today who've managed to do that in that particular combination. On the other hand, he has had the most extraordinary influence and you're right to keep alluding to the Bloomsbury group, but that was a specific moment where really it felt as if it was acceptable

for somebody like Wolf and Joyce and Dorothy Richardson to really internalize thought to the point where language almost couldn't sustain it. And I think that level of experimentation has not become the predominant form in the novel since then. Robert Mervis. As well as having a huge effect on the novel, both in France and England, he's also had a huge effect on the language of criticism. In the 1960s, the structuralist critics such as Gerard Jeanette took Proust as the template. of writing about narrative.

So much so that since the 1960s, you almost can't discuss narrative of any shape or form without implicitly discussing Proust whether you think you are or not. I've written books about the fiction 2,000 miles away from Proust that I always have Proust at the back of my mind.

You just can't get away from him. He's always there. Do you find three of you finally that obviously you're very knowledgeable and do you think that he is a novelist who, whose readership is increasing, he would seem on the surface to be the anti-noble of our times,

on the surface. Nowadays, with, you know, the usual litany people say, television, radio, film, so and so forth, who can sit down, who has the time, who has the silence, who has the privacy, who has the temperament to face 3,000 pages of a novel? Surely that time, that mind has passed. Would you deny that, Malcolm?

I think he's become a commodity, the length is something to do with that in order to demonstrate one's civilization and one's exquisiteness of taste and so forth. One needs to be seen around with at least some of those volumes under one's arm or on one's coffee table, the rest of it. But there are, and of course there are numerous adaptations and extensions, of course, that give him a sort of second order currency within the culture. But there are, I find, increasingly many people who really do read him all the way through, many times over and have serious. various things to say about him. I think he's become ever more intimately ingrained into the consciousness of the Western reading public, if I can put it in those terms. And I think he's having a rebirth at the moment, not just the new translation, but also Raoul

Reese's extraordinary film of Time Regained, Chantelle Ackerman's film of The Captive. And I think there's a real question about why on the turn of the new millennium he's become a new cult object. And I think it's because the century has beginning to think how are we going to remember ourselves? And I think that's given him a very new person. as we leave one millennium into the next. The question is how are we constituting our own historical and personal memories, and it's brought him back, and I think that will continue. Robert Friene?

I also think that Prousty is full of things that we can rediscover. We can rediscover, for example, the music of the long sentence. People tend to write in short sentences now, but I think the tide will turn. The music of the long sentence, the music of the long paragraph, the music of the long volume, the Roman fleur, all of these things are things with dementia potential, which we can learn from and continue learning from.

Well, thank you all very much indeed, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.com.