The Musical Innertube - Volume 2, Number 144 - Michael Wood on Proust

JOHN

Our guest today again is Michael Wood, Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His wide-ranging curiosity has led him to teach and write all over the world and in many languages about many literatures. This is our second straight episode starring Michael because he's been writing such interesting books, and today we discuss yet another one, his 2023 book Marcel Proust. But before we get to that: Don, go ahead.

DON

I feel like we should put a little subtitle on this: “Last week on the Musical Innertube.” “Previously on the Musical Innertube.” We talked about Hitchcock, and at the end of last week's talk, Michael, I kind of dismissed Frenzy, and I went back and rewatched it this week. And, although I do still think it's Hitchcock desperately trying to be Hitchcock again, maybe over the top trying to be Hitchcock again, because it's very violent and it's very fast moving, but one thing that occurred to me, especially after our talk about Shadow of a Doubt, the guy in Frenzy almost gets away with it again. Even to the point of putting him in danger to get his pin back - there's a pin on one of his victims, that she has in her hand, and he dumps her body, and then realizes he doesn't have the pin, and goes back to her body to get that pin. And he's in peril, and we actually kind of feel for him, because he's in the back of a truck desperately trying to get this pin. He finally gets it. He gets out. He's relieved, he walks away, and he's not actually caught until the final frame of the film. So, this is part of that suspense that we were talking about last week that just kind of glared at me when I rewatched Frenzy.

MICHAEL

Don, I think that's a really great thought, I think it is. You’re right about the movie, he is trying a little bit too hard to be Alfred Hitchcock, I think, that he feels that he's not been Alfred Hitchcock for a while, and it’s time to do it. But that moment is very, is, I think, a real attempt to do in detail the thing he's often doing at other times. That is, to make us feel almost in our nerves that the way what could happen, and what could not happen, are almost identical. It's just another pin, or a moment, that that happiness and unhappiness, there's no boundary, really, between these two things. Except there is. There's what actually happens. He's inviting us to live in a kind of world where the theory of what might happen is actually far too close to the practice of what does happen. It's very scary, I think.

DON

I know, the whole movie’s scary. It's at a breakneck pace. One of the other things that I wanted to say before we got into this, John, is that I have, in my entire career, not been exposed to Proust. My entire exposure to Proust has been in the last week, when John has force fed me several Prousts, and your book, which I thumbed through. And the only thing I want to say is, to kick it off, is, I'm one of those unwashed Proust people that you're talking to. So, convince me. Number two, I remember one of my literature teachers in college, and one of the people raised their hands about halfway through and says, “How come you haven't assigned any Proust?” And she said, “I haven't assigned any Proust for the same reason I haven't assigned James Joyce. And that is, you have to be in a certain frame of mind to read those things, and to figure out what's going on, and I don't want you going there unless you voluntarily want to go.” So, I said OK, fine, Proust is unreachable, I'm not going there, and I continued my life until this very moment Proust-less. So, gentlemen,  convince me that Proust is something that I have been derelict in, and needed desperately in my life.

MICHAEL

1. John, you want to take it from there?

JOHN

Sure. Yeah. Well, let's talk about that, because poor Marcel Proust has suffered the double curse of being universally famous - often called the greatest of all 20th century novelists -  yet almost unknown. And one thing involved, maybe the sheer length of his life work, titled In Search of Lost Time, which weighs in between six and seven volumes, depending on which edition you're reading. So, to rescue him from being only a funny name in Monty Python's very funny “Summarized Proust Competition,” let me give you a quick potted introduction to Marcel Proust. He was born in 1871 and died in 1922. He was a very accomplished essayist and occasional writer, in turn of the century Paris. Moved among many of the best literary salons, did a long time social column, and had literary acquaintances such as Anatole France and André Gide. He was also a very sick man, suffering from a vascular disease that would lead to his early death. Because of this illness, Proust was all but a recluse for much of his adulthood, writing in bed in a famous cork-lined bedroom. In the first decade of the 20th century, he was trying to write a novel, as well as a long philosophical treatise, as Michael documents in his new book, titled Proust, when, in 1908 or 1909, something happened, as we hope Michael will talk about. Whatever did happen by 1909, Proust was at work on his great masterwork, In Search of Lost Time. By the way, it's amazing to me that, sick as he was - because this is no joke, what he had, this vascular disease - sick as he was, he writes a huge seven-volume novel like this, just to keep that in mind. On one hand, it's a huge tapestry about French social life. On the other, it's a penetrating investigation of intensely private individual lives. And above all, it concerns memory, with its power to bring together long-distant experiences and allow us, in effect, to stand outside the movement of time and understand the arc of things. Proust self-published the first volume, Swann's Way, ‘cause he couldn't get anybody to publish it in 1913, and he saw three other volumes published before he died at age 51. His brother, Robert, published the last three volumes in 1919. The second volume, In the Shadow of Young Girls and Flower, won the prestigious Goncourt Prize, which I think Michael will agree with me, is sort of the Pulitzer Prize and The National Book Award all in one, and that was the thing that made Proust widely famous. Michael, would you want to add anything to that? I feel terrible about writing, you know, such a sort of aerial view of a life like this.

MICHAEL

I think that's great, John, and I think it actually catches a great deal of what's sort of the mystery and what is really going on there. So, I think the two things I would add is that he published the first, there were six or seven volumes, as you say, depending on which edition you used, he published the first one in 1913. He published nothing at all between 1913 and 1919, when he published the second volume. So that the war, the whole World War, and a whole change of French society, intervened between the publication of Volume one and Volume two. Initially, there were only supposed to be two volumes. And so, he'd written the first and the last. So, the novel itself is a kind of an immense insertion into the middle of an already written book.

JOHN

Wow.

MICHAEL

So he got the beginning, and he got the ending, and he had the middle, and he kept extending the middle.

JOHN

And the world that he was writing about, at one point, was no longer there, toward the end of it.

MICHAEL

Yeah, it wasn't there anymore.  I think of this sort of, this is very similar, in this thing, to Henry James, for example, and to Virginia Woolf, and to Faulkner, where part of the art is to put more clauses into the sentence. We know where the main verb is, we know what the subject is, we know what happens in the end, but that doesn’t stop you from filling out the sentences with subordinate clauses. That's what he does endlessly, but in a way that mirrors the structure of his time, and his writing life. If you like these sort of things, you can look at a photocopy of the last page of his manuscript. I wanted the Oxford to do that in the book, but they wouldn't do it. It was just too fancy. But the last page of the manuscript shows the last sentence of the book, right? And this is something like, if I have time, I'll make sure I write a book about people who are situated in time. That's the main sentence.  And so, the word time appears, the very last word of the book, time. It's about this very simple clause. He just fills it out again and again, "We stand on it like monsters on stilts,” “time is this and this,” so by the time you got to the edge, half of it's crossed out, half is written in between the lines. Bottom of the page, it says, “end.” “Fin.” F-I-N. Except that the writing goes on over the top of the word “fin.” I've always loved that. Because to me, it's not just about process, it’s about, a lot of great writers are essentially writing unfinishable books. You can end them, but you can't finish them.

JOHN

I think his brother Robert probably was grumbling the whole time, going, “That guy! Oh my God!” ‘Cause Robert had to see the last three volumes through the press. And controversially.  I might add some people wonder how much is him. But I don’t know

MICHAEL

Yeah, they do. Since people have had access to all the papers, there’ve been some very good editions of this book, but nobody finally knows what he would have done. But the more recent the edition, the more thorough. Also, a lot of people complain about the currently standard editions, four volumes on very thin paper and very tiny press. And the huge amount of what’s the matter with this is actually what might have been there that wasn't. So if you've got the four volumes, there actually were going to be 3 volumes, if you didn't have all the notes, the manuscripts, drafts and stuff. I think it's valuable, but a lot of people complain this is not the way to publish a great book, because it turns it into another scholarly enterprise.

JOHN

Such an object is illegible by most definitions of legibility.

MICHAEL

You can't really read it, and you'll want it. Yeah. So, many people complain. I think it's useful, it's up to date, and some great scholars have worked on it. But again, it's very off-putting if what you want is a closeness to the book, I think.

JOHN

What do you think happened to him? Because he was a pretty good writer in 1907. He was  laboring over a novel that he sort of knew didn't have the guts to get over the finish line. I think, I mean, I've read that one too, and obviously it's got its brilliant moments, which do get imported to In Search of Lost Time. He knew how to use old stuff. And then he was writing this philosophical argument against Sainte-Beuve, which also doesn't really get there either. And, so, he's like a lot of writers, they're very good, but they don't have their vehicle. But then something happens, and suddenly he does. Do you have any idea what the turning point was for this guy?

MICHAEL

Well, I think, a lot of people talk about this moment, and I think none of us are really gonna know what actually happened. But my take on this is sort of literary rather than psychological, let's say, and it would go with an idea. A broad idea would be this – that, okay, point number one, the only openly, aggressively modernist writers write in English. James Joyce, Virginia Wolfe; well, other writers like Proust and Thomas Mann don't know they're modernists, and don't look like modernists. So, the first thing (is) that they are deeply into the same story. There's a wonderful story about Thomas Mann reading a little book by Harry Levin about Joyce and realizing that he was a modernist. He didn't think he was, he thought James Joyce was the real Modernist and he was the old fashioned bourgeois guy who wrote in the old 19th century way, then he realized that actually, if you're retelling stories like the story of Doctor Faustus, and Joseph and his brothers from the Bible, and you're doing it with endless irony, you’re as modern as it as it gets.

JOHN

So interesting.

MICHAEL

And so that it's in that context that I think Proust, working with the very traditional idea that criticism and fiction are very different things, and you have to do one and not the other, and kept getting into a mess because one would invade the other. His book about Sainte-Beuve, he's got fictional stuff already, talking to his mother and other kinds of stuff, and these kind of things. His literary stuff has often got a lot of critical material about things, I think there are two things: the broad thing is that he understood he didn't have to do one or the other. He could do both, as he could write a novel that would fail every creative writing program instruction to show and not tell, right? And, I have elsewhere written, and I think about the. essay novel because I think there are ways of arguing that a lot of writers do that. Like Ishiguro, Julian Barnes, a lot of people, Angela Carter, that actually do write novels that are in fact a form of essay. What I take to be the more intimate thing in Proust, which I found very moving, is that he's writing this book about, he's trying to write this novel, and he keeps going, he's written a few chunks of it. They're not really very good, this is the important thing, they’re not all good and he knows they're not all that good. So, he says to himself, literally says to himself, I'm quitting here. I'm gonna write a book of criticism because I cannot write a novel. I'm not up to it, I can't do it. But I can probably write a decent book of criticism, and that's better than doing nothing. So, I'll do this. As he starts writing the book of criticism, I don't think he consciously thinks of conflating criticism and fiction, but I think something more intimate happens. In the work of criticism, he writes a lot about how he's failed to write a novel, and what it means to fail to write a novel. He writes so beautifully about failure that actually is better than anything he's done. And at some point, I think he understands that you can go where it takes you, if the writing is good. So, he starts saying things like, in the work of criticism, he says things like, “A great book is like a song you can't remember. And then you try to remember the song and then you can't remember it.” And then, he says, “But this song you can't remember will pursue you all your life.”

DON

The ultimate earworm!

MICHAEL

That's some good writing! If you could do that, you could do anything.

JOHN

We should say that there are people in this book, and that it is a largely autobiographical book, the last book takes us to Venice, where he went with his mother, one of the very few times Proust was ever away from France, and all the names have been changed. Everybody thinks they know who the people really were. All these things are interesting because it's all been traced so that we know who the big society figures are. There is a party that takes 360 pages in my book.

MICHAEL

Yes. Yeah.

JOHN

And you love the party. You don't want it to go away. And you keep reading it and keep reading it, and at a certain point you realize, “Wow, I have read a book length party!”

MICHAEL

Yes, right, right.

JOHN

And that's like the 52-page sentence by Faulkner. You wonder whether either writer realized what they were doing, you know, whether it's just, that's what happened in the midst of it. But there are people who do real things. You could say that the main protagonist is not the narrator, Marcel, but perhaps Mr. Swann, who has a love affair with Odette, or at least some kind of passionate affair for a woman named Odette. I don't want to give everything away, but it's fairly intense, and I think that Marcel, in telling us about them, falls in love with both of them. If he wasn't in love before, the act of telling the story makes him attached to them. World War One is in there. I was telling Don about a bombing raid made by zeppelins in World War One in Paris, which is part of it. There's a stay at a sanatorium, which does prefigure Magic Mountain a little bit. There's a wonderful, in the second volume, Young Girls in Flower, the whole family, he's still young man at this point, and the whole family takes a holiday out to a place called Balbec, but I think we know that this is the Normandy area. And they've gone out to a beach town and this is where he kind of becomes attached to a young woman named Albertine, whom he later will imprison in his house, but that's years later. So, I don't want people to think that this is just philosophy, but what I want to say is what you've just said, Michael, is that the book is amazing. in that the persons that are in the book and what they do are fascinating, but so is what's by the by, so are the things that he says by the way. He has fascinating things to say about newspapers, for example, which he dearly loved. It was his only lifeline to the outside world. He loved his newspaper with his cup of milk in the morning, he says. One that sticks in my mind is, he says, “No human being we've ever met is a straight line.”  And I hope that's well translated. You know this better than I do. So I think it's a book that's amazing not only in what it's about and what it contains in terms of story and character, but also in what it says in the meantime.

MICHAEL

Yeah, I think that's great, John. I think the other thing that's interesting is, and it goes both ways in this story, is that the whole thing is in a way historical, but also a certain moment in time. It's intense with French history, a certain period of French history, particularly in the run up to World War One, and during and all the way through World War One. But the interesting thing, it’s also more -  a lot of people take it to be a direct transcription, so they, “This one would be X,” some real guy. This is partly true. There is a real guy there, Except that there's a real guy, and then there are four more real guys. So, the actual composition, there's a very good book by a local boy called Proust Among the Stars, where he talks about, we have to pay attention to the labor that went into this. He didn't just say, for example, Balbec, that place in Normandy, it's not in Normandy, it's in Brittany.

JOHN

I'm sorry, right.

MICHAEL

In the book it's in Brittany, but it's a place in in Normandy that he's moved it to Brittany for the purpose having more sea and better storms and stuff.  So, he's actually shifted. It is a place, you know, it's all copied from the hotel. You can go and visit the hotel, it’s a few, it's a it's 100 miles or so to the east, or to the west, in in the novel. And all of it’s like that. And my favorite bit of this, the you know, the village where he, where the boy spends his childhood and has his first troubles with his mother not coming to kiss him goodnight, and then the whole family does all this stuff - this a place called Combray in the novel, and it's somewhere near Chartres, southwest of Paris. In the last novel, he needs the place to be occupied by the Germans, so he moves it. So, it's not southwest of Paris, it’s on the way to Belgium. I always think of that as a wonderful, wonderful contrast with Joyce, for example – in Ulysses, all the historical details have to be correct. You know, we need to know you got the right day for a horse race, you can know that the right horse won. That's its authenticity method. And the street! You can go down Eccles Street, and you can find #7 Eccles Street, where an imaginary person lived. That that's a very brilliant, very brilliant sort of factual. But Proust is the opposite. The world itself is historical but you can do what you like with it.

JOHN

It's so it's so nice.

MICHAEL

So, it’s a very interesting move, cause Joyce's work wouldn't work if he got things like that wrong. Whereas Proust’s place, I think Proust - and also, the arguments differ. Joyce is saying, the world is real, and so are novels. But Proust is saying the world's imaginary, and so are novels. It’s a little crude, but it's something like that. There's a kind of active imagination.

JOHN

We’ll return to our podcast in just a moment, but first, here’s a soothing musical interlude.

DON

Michael Wood is professor emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University.

JOHN

Born in the city of Lincoln, England, Michael received his bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD in Modern and Medieval Languages from Cambridge University.

 DON

He has written widely and in many languages about everyone from Franz Kafka to William Butler Yeats and Vladimir Nabokov to, well, Alfred Hitchcock.

JOHN

Michael has long had an interest in film, reflected in his 1975 book America in the Movies, a survey of American films of the 1940s and 1950s, and also in Film: A Very Short Introduction of 2012.

DON

Among his many honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the British Academy.

 JOHN

For more about Michael Wood, check out his Princeton University webpage at English.princeton.edu/people/Michael-wood

DON

And now we return you to The Musical Innertube, already in progress!

JOHN

So, I don't mean to put Don on the spot here, but Don, I gave you the first 50 pages and said, look this over. What were your impressions of Marcel's relationship with his mom, and that whole scene where she doesn't kiss him goodnight and suddenly there's this big rift in the fabric of existence. What did you make of that?

DON

Well, rather than being literal about it, I'm gonna step back for a while. Because in listening to you guys talk, and in also sort of reading around the edges - I read some things online about Proust, and about his effect on literature, and his effect on the people that lived with him, his brothers and so on. And I got the idea, the big thing - and John, you pointed this out when you gave me the thing - the big thing in the in the first book, besides Swann coming in, and not getting kissed goodnight by his mother, which is right up front in the book, is also that madeleine piece. And that's a point where he takes a cookie and dips it into his tea and eats it, and the thing of eating it brings back his memory of when he did that as a child. And that I think maybe is why it's looked upon as a psychological novel. Because, it may be a sweeping autobiography of every place he's been, and every person he's met, but it's also him reflecting on what that did to him, and what he thinks that did to the world. And Mike, in the end of your book, you talked about the last part of the novel where he is sitting in a lobby, I guess, or in a study, waiting for chamber music to end in the next room. When it ends, he goes in, thinks he's in a costume party because everybody looks different, but in reality they've just aged. And he hasn't, and he can't recognize these people, and then he does recognize them as older. And he thinks he's younger. So again, I can see where people would get all mixed up with Proust as not being a novelist, but being somebody who talks about psychology. I also don't know why anybody hasn't made a time travel movie out of this, yet. You know, some good science fiction time travel movie out of this.

MICHAEL

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a very good point, Don. And I think the interesting thing about the madeleine experience he has, and that experience he has in that waiting, waiting for the, for the music to end, he has three more experiences. And this is the sort of, this is also rather like Joyce. He says at one point, you know, the whole book is based on these experiences; the philosophical, psychological bit behind the experience is that conscious intention and will will get you nowhere. The only thing will save your life is accident. And that accident has to be a matter of senses. You have to smell it or feel it or taste it, and that will bring back everything you ever lost. But you can't make it happen.  And if you trying to make it happen, you fake it. But if you just hang on, and you're lucky, it will happen. It's kind of fairy tale. It’s the question of whether - Proust scholars argue as to about whether Proust himself believed in this fairy tale and thought it was a true story of his own life, or whether he just liked it and wanted - a bit more like Hitchcock - wanted to say, this is what might happen to you if one feels lucky. This is what's going to happen to you. But it is a very sitting point about the rush of sensation there coming in. And the other thing that I think we need to add to this is, he's often very funny, I think, in a kind of knockabout way. So, if on the one hand, you put it in the “yes, it feels more like a work by someone who’s a psychologist than a proper novelist.” On the other hand, if at the same time, it feels like a Chaplin or Buster Keaton movie, people always falling over things and stumbling over bits of pavement and sort of crashing into things and doing psychological things of that kind, then you do begin to get a sense of how weird this would be and how actually it depends on your mood. This could be very boring. I could imagine this is a book that many people couldn't, you know, read too many (pages). But the first readers, the people like André Gide, who turned down the volume of Swann before it was published, said who the hell cares about a guy not being not being able to sleep?

JOHN

Yes, that's really what the first chapter is.

MICHAEL

This guy spent 30 pages about saying you can't go to sleep. Who cares? Yeah. And that is sort of interesting.  You have to take it less seriously, rather than more seriously, to get into it.

JOHN

I think if you try to take the Albertine novel seriously, you have to take it as a picture of something else, I think. Because, first of all, I think it's funny in its absurdity. And so, I personally, still don't know how to take it, which will knock on to my next question in a minute. Because what we have is a grown woman who without that much complaint, puts up with being imprisoned by a guy. And so, that already is puzzling, but their relationship is puzzling too. So, this does knock on to my next question, which is: so, when I finish these books, I felt some relief, yes, but mostly what I felt was gratitude. There's very few books that have made me feel grateful that I have them with me now. And I felt that way for this book. But I will say this one thing, that there is almost nothing in it that I would recognize personally as love.

MICHAEL

No, no.

JOHN

I think what takes love's place is an anguished attempt to conserve the sexual resource, to guard it. Basically, jealousy. A very anxious and angst-ridden jealousy, first with Swann and later with the narrator and Albertine.

MICHAEL

Albertine, yeah.

JOHN

I'd love you to talk more about that, because we don't really, even though I think he feels he's got crushes on all the society women, Madame de Guermantes, and, you know, when he goes to these parties, he can get a crush up pretty well, you know.

MICHAEL

Yeah, sure, sure.

JOHN

What we call love, I don't find it. And I say it gets replaced by this kind of jealousy. Now it may be related to the fact that this is a novel that's sort of a beard for a homosexual tragedy, which is happening. The idea that you can't have what you want, and that is definitely there and definitely vibrant, but I wonder if there's other knock-ons that you see, you know, that this is a novel really without love as we understand it.

MICHAEL

I think maybe the mother loves her child. There might be parental love. I think she probably comes clean in this thing. She really does love her child. But even she has the full set of a sort of certain, kind of middle-class European family, which is they don't think the kid should be who he wants to be. They think the kid should be who they want him to be.  So even she, who was sort of the loving mother, she's still a sort of tyrant, you know, and he's trying to break out of that.

JOHN

Yeah, right. And before he writes this novel, he writes something in which she's not so nice in those early writings.

MICHAEL

Also, it is literally the truth that he could not write the novel until she was dead. She had to die so he could write it. I mean, the the talk about the literal Marcel Proust now, he wouldn't have written it if she was alive. you know?  A lot of things she wouldn't have approved of, and all that stuff. There is a theory that she didn't know he was gay. I don't believe that myself. She was a smart person. I think she could have figured it out. I think he may, at times, believed she didn't know. That's the real Marcel Proust, now, not the guy in the novel.. He may have thought he kept his homosexuality secret from his mother because he would upset her so much. He doesn't understand how intelligent she is. And she's also not gonna let on she knows. Because she doesn’t wanna talk about it. But I think the comedy and the kind of bleakness, if you like, of the of the human situation, do go together because, some things, nothing you can do with them except laugh at them, except find their comic version, because there is no good sentimental version. A lot of people don't feel this about Proust, they feel that this sort of exact thing you're saying, John, is really important. I think it's absolutely right. There is no such thing as love between the sexes or across the sexes or anything.  Proust the writer is quite explicit about this. He uses the word anguish - he uses the French angoisse, which can mean anguish, it can mean anxiety, it can just mean fear. But he uses it all the time, and anxiety, or anguish, or whatever it is, it is exactly what you say, John, that is, it's a form of selfishness. It's not to do with anybody else other than yourself, and it's a form of desire for possession that which you cannot possess.

JOHN

You can't make them stay. You can't make them not change. You can't....

MICHAEL

Proust’s idea, and I think he's kind of, just a kind of - I don't know how he really felt about it.  I think he was both, it was true about himself for this kind of thing. I think he's probably telling the truth here, but he was kind of expert in a kind of pathology where everything I think is really to do with myself whether I'm in control or not. And then I think, to a certain point, you just pause for a second, and you think, wait a minute, this is so kind of weird psychologically, but what if the whole society was like that? Well, if French society was largely like that, that's why they lost the war. Why? They didn't understand a whole lot of things. Here's a historical riddle you can think about: why would perhaps a majority of French people rather be defeated by the Germans than supported by the British? Is that possible within a country?

DON

Well, you know, could explain why nobody likes the French!

JOHN

And, you know, they've had a lot of practice. They lost the Franco Prussian war. Then they lost the First World War. And it's, I mean it's, you know, it's they're making, they’re trying “practice makes perfect,” you know, the more perfect defeat.

DON

They're lovers, not fighters, right? Yeah, I think any Frenchman would tell you that.

MICHAEL

And firstly, he was born in 1871, was born during the calm just after they lost a war, you know. And he was born into that world.

JOHN

It seems too that we've talked about Swann and Odette, it’s still very moving. And everyone should - sometimes the Swann story is published by itself and you can find that.

MICHAEL

It's a great story.

JOHN

It really is! And I don’t know that a tragic affair like that has ever been - and what I mean by tragic is, it can't be what the angsty one wants it to be and that's what's tragic about Charlus is, he never gets what he wants to get, and he goes to great lengths. He grooms the narrator for a while and excoriates him when he feels that the narrator has not been nice enough to him lately.

MICHAEL

Yeah, exactly.

JOHN

And then the worst of all possible things happens to him, and he runs afoul of someone who basically tells everybody what he is, which is the - it's the terrible horror behind a lot of the discussion here, I suppose. But no one can - he keeps saying, you know, our – and this goes right to your point, Michael - that our judgments about people seem to us to be fixed. And always consistent, when, if you laid them out in a row, nothing could be more like water, you know.

MICHAEL

And I think the other thing is quite interesting, where the novel and the philosophical thing go together very nicely - and this would also be a bit like Hitchcock - is that if you live in a society which, not only (are) the French great lovers, and they have a great culture, and this sort of stuff, you live in a world that  probably rates logic and reason higher than any other culture, and certainly higher than they should do. And you yourself are trained in this language is the language you speak, it's the assumptions you have, it's a mythology you grew up with, you're a member of that nation. But you keep feeling it's wrong. Yeah. And that’s where the jokes often come in, where you make jokes to show that it’s wrong. But then sometimes you have to argue with it, or you have long demonstrations of how – then, this is why I think he's so hostile to what he calls the intelligence. It's gotta be, he believes in the unconscious. He believes in accident.

JOHN

Yes.

MICHAEL

And he believes in being grateful for accidents. And you can have lucky accidents. And so it's not a doom. It's all not fatalistic. They're not doomed. They're not bound to be unhappy. But you cannot make yourself happy. You can only be happy if you, if you're lucky and you recognize you're luck, that's it.

DON

Let me ask one other question and it's about the title of the book. The book, when it was first introduced to me, was called Remembrance of Things Past, and that has been the title for years. But, now, the title has been changed to In Search of Lost Time.  And I think,, roughly, they're the same translation of the French title that that Proust put on it. But it seems like a different interpretation. Like, Rememberance of Things Past is, oh, I'm looking back on my life. But In Search of Lost Time kind of tells me that there's something else going on there. What do you guys think about that?

MICHAEL

That's a really good point. I think the Remembrance of Lost Time actually was the earlier one, which is a quotation from Shakespeare, it’s not even Proust, it comes from a Shakespeare sonnet.  And that's actually, if we were being, you know, pedantic, about it, it’s actually wrong. The book is about you cannot remember, you could only have these mental invasions of memory. Memory can talk to you, but you can't remember.

JOHN

It can return if it wants to, but not when it's called.

MICHAEL

The idea of recalling is not there, so that when he talks about involuntary memory, not only just talking about, there is a thing going on, but he's saying that's the only kind of memory that counts. It's a very polemical claim that real remembering is a waste of time, because you only remember what your conscious mind will tell you. Unconscious remembering will bring you back. This experience, the madeline experience, I think it's quite common in ordinary life, and many people have something like this. I spent a lot of World War Two with an aunt and uncle in a town called Newark, and there was a time when somebody, or if I turned on the faucet in the bathroom and the water ran, I would be in that, in their house. I could smell the place. And then, after a while, I wouldn't have any - like, I would turn the faucet and it wouldn’t work. But it was it was exactly like when Proust talks about the madeline, and tripping on the paving stone, and having this sort of memory, it's not an exotic or strange event, I think. He's appealing to something that many people who have had this, but they wouldn't have built a whole theory of time and memory on it.  But I think it's a very interesting idea the notion, that is, that these intuitive unintended moments, they're the real thing. And that whole structure that in France you've got reason and logic - in Anglo-American it would be common sense, you say. So, there's a kind of interesting picture. The common sense is sort of, common sense lies to you a lot. And crazy unintentional events, like dreams and things, tell you stuff.

JOHN

Yes, I like the second title, for all these reasons, Michael, I like the second title more. I think it gets closer, that it's about a search. For a time that went before and the search is almost, he says at one point that that memory does not in itself have a philosophical significance.

MICHAEL

Yeah. Yes, it doesn't.

JOHN

It attaches to things and people and places and circumstance. And when it comes back, it often brings all those back with it, and it's up to us to feel the connection. I think we've all had, it's like, well, it's like what people talk about with Joyce, the moment that enlightens, even with Araby, it could be an enlightenment in the short story Araby when a person realizes, oh, actually I'm a vain person! I'm wasting my time! But there are other, you know, there are other illuminations of that sort, and he thinks that those, Proust certainly, thinks that those can change things for us or illuminate things for us.

MICHAEL

They're exactly what Joyce calls an epiphany, that the other sort of “Yeah!” moment. But it's non-intellectual discovery, it's not logical, it's not rational. And I think, even, I mean the "In Search of” is literally correct, but when you've read a bit, you realize, actually, it's not entirely clear from the title that that search is vain. You can't look for it. You can find it, but you can't look for it. So there was a kind of irony about the whole project. We’re all...

JOHN

It will find you if you're lucky.

MICHAEL

It will find you if you're lucky. But they were all in search of lost time. But, actually, the reason we're not finding it is because you can't find it. It can find you. It's also the fact that  there's a kind of pun in the French, with the French word perdu means “lost” and “wasted.” So, you see, it could mean, you could translate it as, “in search of the time I lost,” or “in search of the time I blew.”  So yeah, so normally they if somebody said, say, “perdre son temps,” is to waste time.  It's not to just spend it, or lose it, but perdre son temps only means to waste it. “Temps perdu” could mean time that's gone, but it's more likely to be wasted.

JOHN

Let me ask, to round out this just wonderful discussion we're having - and Don's question certainly made me think of this - what is it like to read Proust in French? Because the debate goes on about translations versus translations, and you write so beautifully about how, as a translator, you're always in a fix because you're doomed not to get it right. In fact, that's what translation is. Is meaning things never to get it right. But seriously, you've had the experience of reading Proust in volume in French. What is that experience like?

MICHAEL

It's smoother to read in French, and there's a social difference in about the kind of historical fact that most people speak correct French, including – John, as you and I were talking about – in modern translations, all the working class people drop their H's and drop their G's, you know... 

JOHN

‘ello, ‘ow are ya?

MICHAEL

“Breaks your bleeding 'eart, don’t it?” That sort of stuff, you know? And then, there's nothing like that in French. So you don't get that those kind of - but I think actually, I think the translations do - I would rate Proust as among the relatively translatable writers. Because I think, say, more than Thomas Mann, for example. Thomas Mann, I think is very hard to translate because everything is ironic, and you can't tell. Imagine an English person who never says, and we all know people like that, they never say what they mean, and they always say something snarky. You don't know what they think. Thomas Mann is like that all the time. You can translate literally what it says, but you can't get that effect. But Proust is very open, and he used a lot of metaphors. And metaphors are easy to translate, also, generally. So, logical propositions and metaphors are relatively easy to translate, sometimes they're hard, but as writings go, he's easier to translate than a lot of people, I think. For that reason. And, really, I mean, just if I may, just reminiscence - this goes to Don’s question, too – my first, I had a double first exposure to Proust, that is, I was studying French at university, and I was supposed to read, I knew I had to read the book for the exam. But I was looking forward to it in a way, except I thought, it has all these pages. But it's a great book and it's posh and it's gonna be difficult. So I'll put it off until next week.  Maybe later I'll get ‘round to this stuff. And so, then I went to stay with my roommate in London, and his dad was reading books. His dad was an insurance man, and he was getting the translation, the old translation, out of the public (library). You know those days, you didn't buy books, you got them from the public library, you kept them for two weeks, then you took them back.  And he was he was taking out one volume at a time of Proust, and then coming back and reading them. And he was ecstatic about this book. And I thought, here's a guy, he's not literary at all, he just likes to read books. He thinks his book is really great. And I'm thinking is it's probably gonna be unbearable, but I’ll get on this.  When I did read it, because I was prepared for it to be boring, and all highbrow, and serious, and I would be respectful of all this stuff. But I kept laughing, I kept stopping, too, I kept pausing, too - like the one, the one time I’ll just mention, there’s a wonderful moment when Madame de Guermantes, the Great Society Hostess, when we first meet her, she can't laugh when her guests make jokes, so she has to look as if she's falling about with laughter, but without actually laughing. So, she covered up her mouth, and she does various things. And then we learned a bit later, this because at one time she overdid laughing at one of her guest’s jokes and broke her jaw. It had that effect. And the Narrator says, “This is because she was so much in the habit of taking figurative things literally.” And I just thought, if a writer could do that, I'm with him. It’s a terrible joke. It's like Groucho Marx. And I thought that was in the same class, yeah.

JOHN

So, I just want to say it, this has been the best 50 minutes on Proust I've ever had, and we are so glad that you have spent a couple of episodes with us, Michael.

MICHAEL

It’s been great fun!

JOHN

I promise you, I'll wait for a little while before I ask you back, because you've got a book on Du Fu, the Chinese poet, the Tang poet, which we would love to talk about, and but we learned so much about France and about writing and about just thinking about what we read today. So, thank you and thanks to Don for putting up with me.

MICHAEL

Well, thank you both and it was, this is wonderful conversation. You don't have good conversation if you don't have a good, good partner.

DON

Oh, well thank you very much!

MICHAEL

Thank you. Appreciate it!