{"id":136670,"date":"2019-05-28T09:00:23","date_gmt":"2019-05-28T13:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=136670"},"modified":"2019-05-28T10:50:26","modified_gmt":"2019-05-28T14:50:26","slug":"proust-and-the-joy-of-suffering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/05\/28\/proust-and-the-joy-of-suffering\/","title":{"rendered":"Proust and the Joy of Suffering"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Elisa Gabbert\u2019s column\u00a0Mess with a Classic<\/a>, she revisits canonical works of literature and addresses the anxiety of confronting the art of the past (and the past in general).<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Marcel Proust. Hulton Archive\/Stringer.<\/p><\/div>\n

One recent Monday evening, I scanned through our bookshelves for an unread classic\u2014I had one last piece to write in this series on revisiting the canon. I considered writing about Moby-Dick<\/em>, but did not seriously consider reading Moby-Dick<\/em>. I want to, very much in fact, but I rarely read long books, and moreover feel that I\u2019m saving Moby-Dick<\/em> for an unclear future experience, some contained and isolating context it deserves\u2014a long sea voyage, my deathbed. Perhaps I could write about not reading Moby-Dick<\/em>. Then I thought about In Search of Lost Time<\/em>, another novel people, especially writers, almost brag about not having read, as though admitting you haven\u2019t read Proust suggests you\u2019ve read everything else. I pulled Swann\u2019s Way<\/em> off the shelf, read the first paragraph, and was astonished. Its obsessive attention to memory, time, and the minutiae of experience as it occurs through thinking\u2014it was not just good. It was, as they say, extremely my shit. Everyone says you should read Proust, but no one had ever told me that I, specifically, should read Proust.<\/p>\n

Over the next couple of nights I read the \u201cOverture\u201d chapter. I had the sense, while I was reading Proust, that I was \u201creading Proust,\u201d having a packaged experience like a tour of the Louvre. When friends asked what I was reading, I said, \u201cI\u2019m reading Proust, actually,\u201d acknowledging the improbability. \u201cWow,\u201d said my friend Kathleen, who knows me well. \u201cDo you think you\u2019ll finish it?\u201d \u201cI highly doubt it,\u201d I said. It was more readable than I\u2019d expected, but it wasn\u2019t exactly light reading. That first paragraph was deceptive, in part by virtue of being a paragraph. Later I read that Proust hadn\u2019t wanted In Search of Lost Time<\/em> to have paragraphs at all. He wanted it to appear as one volume, with no sections, chapters, or even margins. It\u2019s as though he wanted it to be unreadable, more a gesture than a text. <\/p>\n

That Friday night, my husband and I stayed in to read, but I was tired and didn\u2019t feel up for Proust. Instead I read My Name Is Lucy Barton<\/em>, by Elizabeth Strout, which is the kind of book you can tear through in a couple of hours, and I did, only afterward realizing that thematically, it is not unlike Swann\u2019s Way<\/em>. Lucy Barton recalls a time when she was very sick and had to stay in the hospital for over two months. Her mother, who she hasn\u2019t seen in years, comes to visit and stays in her room, sitting at the foot of Lucy\u2019s bed and rarely sleeping, only dozing in her chair. Their conversations are often disturbing\u2014Lucy grew up in poverty, with an abusive father, and she is not sure how much her mother knows, remembers, or has willfully forgotten. Their talks stir up the sediment of their grim past, but they are also often joyful: \u201cI was so happy. Oh, I was happy speaking with my mother this way!\u201d<\/p>\n

The overture to Swann\u2019s Way<\/em> revolves around a memory or series of memories\u2014the narrator\u2019s difficulty with going to sleep without the benediction of a kiss from his mother\u2014so overwhelming they seem to encompass the whole of his childhood. These memories, amalgamated in a single scene, come back to him each time he falls asleep:<\/p>\n

For a long time afterwards, when I lay awake at night and revived old memories of Combray, I saw no more of it than this sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background \u2026 the hall through which I would journey to the first step of that staircase, so painful to climb, which constituted, all by itself, the slender cone of this irregular pyramid; and, at the summit, my bedroom, with the little passage through whose glazed door Mamma would enter; in a word, seen always at the same evening hour, isolated from all its possible surroundings, detached and solitary against the dark background, the bare minimum of scenery necessary (like the d\u00e9cor one sees prescribed on the title-page of an old play, for its performance in the provinces) to the drama of my undressing; as though all Combray had consisted of but two floors joined by a slender staircase, and as though there had been no time there but seven o\u2019clock at night.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One night, when the family has been entertaining M. Swann\u2014on such occasions our narrator was routinely sent to bed without his kiss\u2014the boy decides he simply cannot go without it, and contrives to summon his mother by a ruse. He sends a note via Fran\u00e7oise, the cook. The ruse fails. He knows he has already angered his parents\u2014they consider the ritual a silly indulgence and do not wish to coddle his delicate nerves\u2014but having gone this far, he is committed to self-destruction: \u201cI had formed a resolution to abandon all attempts to go to sleep without seeing Mamma, had made up my mind to kiss her at all costs \u2026 the calm which succeeded my anguish filled me with an extraordinary exhilaration, no less than my sense of expectation, my thirst for and my fear of danger.\u201d<\/p>\n

He waits in the hall for his mother to come up to bed, his heart throbbing \u201cwith terror and joy.\u201d She is shocked and tries to send him back to bed before his father sees him, but in an unexpected turn of events, an amoral whim, his father rules in the boy\u2019s favor, sending her in to stay with the child all night: \u201cGo along with him then \u2026 you can see quite well that the child is unhappy. After all, we aren\u2019t gaolers.\u201d Alone at last with her he dissolves into sobs. The cook asks, \u201cBut, Madame, what is young master crying for?\u201d \u201cWhy, Fran\u00e7oise, he doesn\u2019t know himself: it\u2019s his nerves.\u201d His mother cries a little, too, and it seems to be a mutual admission, a giving up: they cannot scare the child out of his fear; he will be delicate forever. He knows this event is \u201ca rare and artificial exception,\u201d it can never happen again: \u201cTo-morrow night my anguish would return and Mamma would not stay by my side.\u201d So the night, and its memory, which cannot be separated, are impossibly precious. In retrospect, \u201cthe present\u201d is just a memory in real time.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe aren\u2019t gaolers,\u201d Proust\u2019s father (if we take the narrator to be a stand-in for Proust) had said, but the child did feel like his bedroom was a cell, a place for time to be borne. In the winter of 1940, the Polish artist and writer J\u00f3zef Czapski was in a Soviet prison camp, and he was thinking about Proust. He was among a small group of officers and soldiers who survived the war; thousands of others were executed. In Czapski\u2019s words\u2014he writes it twice\u2014those others \u201cdisappeared without a trace.\u201d To occupy themselves, to keep their intellects sharp, to give \u201cproof that we were still capable of thinking and reacting to matters of the mind,\u201d Czapski and his comrades in the camp delivered a series of lectures to one another. \u201cEach of us spoke about what we remembered best,\u201d be it architectural history or mountain climbing. For Czapski, who had studied painting in France and been friendly with some of Proust\u2019s old friends, that subject was In Search of Lost Time<\/em>. As the painter and translator Eric Karpeles writes in his introduction to Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp<\/em>, \u201cA prisoner\u2019s constant state of vigilance was surprisingly conducive to the reclamation of memories.\u201d It came back to Czapski there, in the freezing ruins of a bombed convent, the way Combray came back to \u201cProust\u201d when he was dozing off or when he tasted the madeleine dipped in linden tea. He delivered the talks in French because he\u2019d read the novel in French\u2014they say you should study for a test at the same time of day you\u2019ll be taking the test, should suck a peppermint during both, so the taste brings the knowledge back. \u201cWhat Czapski remembered best was the quintessential book of remembering,\u201d Karpeles writes.<\/p>\n

In preparation for his lecture, Czapski made a series of elaborate diagrams, like crib notes in tiny, neat print, drawn over with lines and circles in different shades of ink. Several are reproduced in Lost Time<\/em>, and these too are translated, meticulously re-created in color by Karpeles. On one spread of the insert, we see Czapski\u2019s notes on the right, partially in Polish, partially in French. In the middle of the page is a yellow oval with lines around it, a crude sun. Inside, in all caps, underlined in red: \u201cA MORT INDIFFERENTE.\u201d In Karpeles\u2019s version on the left, the same yellow sun, the same thick red line: \u201cINDIFFERENT DEATH.\u201d Some pale script to the lower right of Czapski\u2019s sun circle is almost unintelligible to me; in the translation, it looks like this:<\/p>\n

x PRECIOUS WOUND<\/p>\n

x A BIT MIRED IN<\/p>\n

THE FLESH<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These strange visual poems, \u201ca hybrid of writing and drawing\u201d as Karpeles describes them, were meant to serve as an aide-m\u00e9moire. The cheat sheets were all Czapski had because, of course, he could not check his quotes, could not fact-check any of his notes. This makes the errors more touching. Karpeles notes a couple: Czapski replaces the word madeleine<\/em>, the most iconic detail of the novel and one of the most iconic in all of modern literature, with the word brioche<\/em>. He calls an unnamed character Jeanne. \u201cHe has not misremembered her name,\u201d Karpeles writes, \u201che has simply provided her with one, which Proust had failed to do.\u201d I found a mistake, too. Czapski speaks of finding Proust to be \u201calmost Pascalian,\u201d then refers to a night in Blaise Pascal\u2019s life \u201cthat will always remain known as Pascal\u2019s mystery,\u201d<\/p>\n

a night yielding an intense vision of a super-terrestrial world which caused him forever after, until his death, to wear around his neck a small scrap of paper on which was inscribed these few words: \u201cTears, tears of joy.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was reminded of Percy Shelley\u2019s corpse washing ashore with a volume of Keats in his breast pocket. Wanting to know more about this story, I googled the phrase \u201cPascal\u2019s mystery\u201d and found nothing. Had Czapski confused Pascal\u2019s experience with the paschal mystery, or le myst\u00e8re pascal<\/em>\u2014no relation? (It\u2019s from the Greek pascha<\/em>, as in Easter, meaning \u201cpassing over.\u201d) It seems likely; he\u2019d also gotten the inscription wrong. It was not just a few words but a longer prayer or poem, a transcription of his vision, that Pascal wrote out on a piece of parchment and sewed into the lining of his coat. Here\u2019s the passage in question:<\/p>\n

FIRE.<\/p>\n

GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob
\nnot of the philosophers and of the learned.
\nCertitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
\nGOD of Jesus Christ.
\nMy God and your God.
\nYour GOD will be my God.
\nForgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD.
\nHe is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel.
\nGrandeur of the human soul.
\nRighteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.
\nJoy, joy, joy, tears of joy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019ve seen it rendered differently; sometimes \u201cFire\u201d is underlined, sometimes it\u2019s \u201cFire!\u201d But always, the \u201ctears\u201d line is \u201cJoy, joy, joy, tears of joy\u201d\u2014the word joy<\/em> is repeated, not tears<\/em>. Earlier, in his own footnote to the lecture, Czapski notes that he is quoting Goethe from memory, \u201cperhaps distorting his text.\u201d He then quotes (or misquotes?) the Russian writer Vasily Rozanov: \u201cThere\u2019s nothing easier than to quote a text precisely, you just have to check the books. It\u2019s far more difficult to assimilate a quotation to the point where it becomes yours and becomes part of you.\u201d \u201cPascal\u2019s mystery,\u201d those \u201ctears, tears of joy\u201d around his neck, were not Pascal\u2019s but Czapski\u2019s, a semi-invention, a collaborative memory.<\/p>\n

In a brief introduction to the lecture, written in 1944, Czapski speaks of \u201cthe joy\u201d of that time in the prison camp, the \u201crose-colored light\u201d of those hours spent giving and listening to lectures, \u201cwhere a world we had feared lost to us forever was revived.\u201d Others in the camps were having similar, peculiarly happy experiences, somehow between or inside their sufferings. The Polish writer Aleksander Wat, while in Lubyanka, lucked into a Russian translation of Swann\u2019s Way<\/em> with a Marxist critical introduction. Reading Proust in Lubyanka, Wat writes in his memoir My Century<\/em>, was \u201cone of the greatest experiences of my life \u2026 from then on I had a completely new understanding, not only of literature, but of everything.\u201d Czapski had only dabbled in Proust until bedridden with illness: \u201cI only have typhoid fever to thank for rendering me so helpless over a whole summer that I was able to read his work in its entirety.\u201d I feel a small, perverse twinge of envy\u2014not for the fever or torture or persecution, obviously, but for the life-altering encounter with a book that can happen in a season of despair.<\/p>\n

I am always struck by depictions of happiness in wartime, in the darkest conditions\u2014in Chernobyl, in concentration camps. In Family Lexicon<\/em>, a memoir of life under fascism in Mussolini\u2019s Italy, Natalia Ginzburg writes: \u201cLola used to remember with great longing the time she spent in prison. \u2018When I was in jail,\u2019 she\u2019d often say. She would recount how in jail she finally felt tremendously at ease, finally at home and at peace with herself.\u201d She considered it the \u201cnoblest time of her life.\u201d Ginzburg\u2019s father, during bombings, \u201cwouldn\u2019t go down into the shelters \u2026 Under the roar and whistle of planes, he ran hugging the walls with his head down, happy to be in danger because danger was something he loved.\u201d When his father returns from a stint in prison, he seems \u201chappy\u201d to have been there. The people in her life treasure their worst experiences; the worst is the best. It\u2019s a form of resistance, to refuse to have pleasure taken away from you. But I think, too, there\u2019s something fundamentally life-affirming about proximity to death. We grow nostalgic for our pain, once it\u2019s safely in the past, because pain\u2019s intensity makes regular life look banal.<\/p>\n

Part of Czapski\u2019s lecture concerns Proust\u2019s self-actualization as a writer. In this section he intentionally conflates Proust and the \u201chero\u201d of the novel, which is probably what we\u2019d now call autofiction, a novelization of the author\u2019s real life. On his way to a reception at the Hotel de Guermantes, Proust has \u201cthe sudden conviction of a book existing within him, with all its details, only waiting to be realized.\u201d He enters \u201ca state of feverish clarity.\u201d As Czapski recounts it,<\/p>\n

He observes the assembled group of friends from his earlier life, already deformed by age, growing older, bloated or withering away, and then sees young people there emerging among them, a new generation who seem to harbor so poignantly the same hopes his old or dear friends once held. All this he sees with new eyes, lucidly, detached, and from a distance; finally, he knows what he is meant to do with his life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The force of the realization is such that \u201cdeath has become a matter of indifference to him.\u201d Czapski uses the phrase once more, at the end of the lecture, this time clearly in reference to Proust, the author, the living (or dying) man. He spent his last years mostly in bed, finishing and revising the novel of his life. Czapski writes: \u201cIt\u2019s not possible that he did not understand, given the state of his health, that the enormous and feverish effort required to keep on with his work would precipitate his end. But he had made up his mind, he would not take care of himself; death had become truly a matter of indifference to him.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cINDIFFERENT DEATH,\u201d as the diagram said. Around that yellow sun, there are echoing paradoxical phrases: \u201cGRANDEUR + MISERY.\u201d \u201cPRECIOUS WOUND.\u201d \u201cDECADENCE OF FORMS OF JOY.\u201d \u201cBLESSED SUFFERING.\u201d \u201cHIS TRIUMPH\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 HIS DEATH.\u201d A question, encircled: \u201cDEAD FOR GOOD?\u201d And under \u201cHIS TRIUMPH\u201d: \u201cTHEY WILL LIVE.\u201d Along with his comrades, Czapski found meaning and beauty in the prison camp (\u201cthe hours spent with memories of Proust, Delacroix, Degas seemed to me the happiest of hours\u201d), and they survived. Czapski lived to the age of ninety-six. But he had assimilated Proust\u2019s indifference to death, which is not the same as an indifference to living. It is, rather, an apprehension of existence so luminous that the threat of death recedes into dim corners.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Elisa Gabbert, a poet and essayist, is the author, most recently, of\u00a0<\/span><\/em>The Word Pretty<\/span><\/a>\u00a0(Black Ocean).<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had the sense, while I was reading Proust, that I was \u201creading Proust.\u201d I was having a packaged experience like a tour of the Louvre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1241,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46550],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mess-with-a-classic"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nProust and the Joy of Suffering by Elisa Gabbert<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"May 28, 2019 \u2013 I had the sense, while I was reading Proust, that I was \u201creading Proust.\u201d I was having a packaged experience like a tour of the Louvre.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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