{"id":73406,"date":"2014-07-01T14:45:40","date_gmt":"2014-07-01T18:45:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=73406"},"modified":"2014-07-01T16:10:46","modified_gmt":"2014-07-01T20:10:46","slug":"the-discovery-of-oneself-an-interview-with-daniel-mendelsohn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/01\/the-discovery-of-oneself-an-interview-with-daniel-mendelsohn\/","title":{"rendered":"The Discovery of Oneself: An Interview with Daniel Mendelsohn"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Mendelsohn-matt<\/a>

Photographed by Matt Mendelsohn.<\/p><\/div>\n

Last year<\/em>, the French magazine <\/em>La Revue des Deux Mondes<\/a> published an interview with Daniel Mendelsohn about his experiences reading Proust as part of a special issue on \u201cProust vu d\u2019Am\u00e9rique<\/em>.\u201d We\u2019re pleased to present an English version of the interview here,<\/em> translated from the French by Anna Heyward<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In <\/strong>Time Regained<\/em>, Proust writes, \u201cIn reality every reader is, when he reads, the reader of his own self. The work of the writer is just a kind of optical instrument that is offered to the reader to permit him to discern that which, without the book in question, he could not have seen within himself.\u201d You read Proust for the first time when you were a Classics student at the University of Virginia. What did you feel then?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Discovering Proust was a real shock\u2014the shock of recognition. I was twenty, and my encounter with this novel gave me a shock that, I believe, is felt by every gay person reading Proust for the first time. It was remarkable to understand that the unsatisfied desires and the erotic frustrations I harbored had not only been felt by someone else\u2014much bigger news in 1980 than today, it\u2019s worth remembering\u2014but, even more extraordinarily, had been made the subject of a great book. And yet, interestingly, when I read Swann\u2019s Way<\/em>, it wasn\u2019t any specific description of homosexual desire that touched me\u2014that theme is treated much more fully in a later volume, as we know\u2014but something much more general, the novel\u2019s description of unreciprocated desire and, above all, the astounding revelation, or perhaps confirmation, for me, that desire can\u2019t endure its own satisfaction. We see that exemplified in Swann in Love.<\/em> When Swann succeeds in physically possessing Odette, when she ceases to escape him, his desire for her vanishes. For me, yes, that was a revelation as well as a recognition of something I was feeling in my own early erotic encounters.<\/p>\n

And then I had another kind of shock. Thanks to Proust, I found a certain consolation in thinking that all artistic creation is a substitute for erotic frustration and disappointment. That art feeds on our failures. Back then, I remember thinking to myself, I can\u2019t get what I want anyway\u2014by which, at the time, I meant that it didn\u2019t seem possible to have a fulfilled \u201cromantic\u201d life\u2014so I may as well become a writer.<\/p>\n

Some readers feel the need to dive straight back into In Search of Lost Time<\/em> as soon as they\u2019ve finished reading the seven volumes of the book. Was that the case for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No. On the contrary, when I read it that first time, and in fact every time I\u2019ve read it since, I need time to absorb it, to let it resonate, or perhaps percolate. After a sentence, a moment, as magnificent as the ones that end \u00a0Time Regained\u00b9<\/em>, I find it difficult to return to any reading at all. You feel everything has been said. On the other hand, I\u2019ve reread In Search of Lost Time<\/em> about every ten years since I was twenty. I\u2019m a little over fifty now, and so I suppose it\u2019s high time I start my fourth reading. <\/p>\n

Have these successive readings brought you closer to Proust\u2019s work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a question of proximity to the text. Rather, I think that something different can be found in the text each time. To use the Proustian metaphor that you evoked, each reading of Proust is a bit like a visit to the optician\u2014depending on which pair of lenses you\u2019re given to try, you\u2019re either capable or incapable of distinguishing a pattern or a letter projected onto a screen in the dark. Successive readings of Proust are like those different sets of lenses\u2014with each one, you see something different. For instance, when I was twenty, so much of French culture escaped me. I was inexperienced, I had never left the U.S. The whole Proustian world of Faubourg Saint-Germain and of Combray went straight over my head. I was incapable, for example, of understanding the type of person that Fran\u00e7oise represented in French heritage\u2014the earthy peasant type that comes with the social territory, so to speak. Today, I\u2019m not the same person I was when I was twenty. I have all the experience of a life. I\u2019m also well traveled and I know France well, I have many friends living there, and so I understand French culture much better than I did thirty years ago and can appreciate aspects of Proust\u2019s novel I couldn\u2019t before. On the other hand, it must be said that I will never again feel the amazement I felt on my first reading of In Search of Lost Time<\/em>. It\u2019s an aesthetic experience that you only have once in your life. <\/p>\n

The richness of the book is such that it seems impossible to be aware, in just a single reading, of the layers of meaning, the themes that unfold\u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a parallel with The Odyssey<\/em>, about which I\u2019m writing a book at the moment. Like The Odyssey<\/em>, In Search of Lost Time<\/em> is a complete work, a text that doesn\u2019t reveal its full meaning in a single reading. To my mind, that is the definition of a true work of art. If you manage to get everything out of a book in a single go, the author can\u2019t have said that much. But Homer, like Proust, is an author who can accompany us through the entire length of a life. Everything is in Homer. Everything is in Proust.<\/p>\n

Is there a particular character that stands out for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0Odette de Cr\u00e9cy, without question. Not because she would be my \u201cfavorite,\u201d and certainly not because she\u2019s the most interesting or admirable or complex, but because she represents, to me, a completely realized character. It\u2019s as though Odette emerges from the text in a three-dimensional form. I can imagine her existence beyond the context of In Search of Lost Time<\/em>. She is a whole entity, she functions so remarkably, which is something that can\u2019t be said for all Proustian characters. Take Oriane de Guermantes, for example\u2014I can\u2019t imagine her outside the book. In my opinion, she doesn\u2019t represent much more than an assemblage of traits that characterize the aristocracy. I feel the same about Albertine, whose relationship to the Narrator, with its obsessisive possessiveness and deep frustrations, is clearly meant to reflect the relationship between Swann and Odette. To me, Albertine is an abstraction, a \u201cnotion,\u201d her sole purpose is to crystallize the obsessive thoughts of the narrator. She is a coat hook on which Proust has hung his ideas, next to the young lady\u2019s Fortuny tea gowns. Even much earlier than The Prisoner<\/em>, for instance in the second volume when Albertine appears in the midst of the little gang of girls at Balbec, I don\u2019t find her credible. (But then, very little of the Narrator\u2019s alleged passion for girls is persuasive.) By contrast, Odette feels real<\/em> to me. I understand Swann\u2019s feelings for Odette, I feel his desire and his frustration. You know, it\u2019s so difficult for a writer to create a \u201cliving\u201d character. And with the \u201clady in pink,\u201d who appears in the first novel and has such immense consequences for the whole work, although she herself is \u201cminor\u201d in a way, Proust has created a complete character, a truly marvelous creation.<\/p>\n

Your book The Lost<\/em> seems to be directly descended from Proust. You quote directly from Proust\u2019s work\u00b2,<\/strong> but the connection is also implicit\u2014The Lost<\/em>, like In Search of Lost Time<\/em>, is the story of a quest for memory. Proust writes in <\/strong>Time <\/em><\/strong>Regained<\/em><\/strong>, \u201c<\/strong>A book is a great cemetery in which, for the most part, the names upon the tombs are effaced<\/strong>.\u201d Would<\/strong> you say that Proust played a role in your decision to write about your family history?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, Proust had an enormous influence on the project of The Lost<\/em>, and I was very conscious of it. It was as though Proust was haunting the project, step by step. Actually, I was rereading In Search of Lost Time<\/em> just before I started the actual writing of my book. So yes, absolutely, The Lost<\/em> bears the imprint of Proust. In many ways.<\/p>\n

First, I wanted to pay homage to Proust in the title of my book. The full title\u2014The Lost<\/em>: <\/em>A Search for Six of Six Million<\/em>\u2014deliberately echoes In Search of Lost Time<\/em>. This Proustian reference was obscured in the French version, when the title became les Disparus<\/em>, or \u201c<\/em>The Vanished.\u201d My book has a similar preoccupation to In Search of Lost Time<\/em>\u2014how does one resuscitate the past, bring it to life in the present? What can be preserved from the past, and in which form? The Proustian metaphor that you mentioned, of the book as a cemetery, is perfect. Because in a way, The Lost<\/em> is a project marked by failure. For every detail that I managed to exhume, how many others have been lost?<\/p>\n

And then, stylistically, there were elements in Proust I set out deliberately to recreate, to some extent. For instance I\u2019ve always admired the way in which Proust manages to embrace a multitude of elements in the same sentence, whether it\u2019s an analysis, a series of hypotheses, or a paradox. That\u2019s an incredible literary achievement. In certain passages of The Lost<\/em>, I tried to reproduce that complexity, by testing the limits of a single long sentence. For example, at one point, I made a conscious \u201cProustian\u201d effort to comprehend two apparently unrelated realities in the same sentence. I\u2019m writing about a single day in 1942 on which, in Poland, certain members of my family were exterminated in a Be\u0142\u017cec gas chamber, while in in the United States, on that same day, my mother, an eleven-year old schoolgirl in the Bronx, took the same route to school that she took every other day. By threading both of these events into the same long sentence, I tried to achieve a kind of pointed juxtaposition which spoke to a large them of my book, which is what I think of as the ironies of \u201cunknowability.\u201d How much of what is transpiring in the world, of what has happened in history, we simply can never know. So that \u201cProustian\u201d technique was one I occasionally, and quite self-consciously, employed now and then to achieve a sort of heightened effect.<\/p>\n

Finally, there is another Proustian method that I have always admired. Quite often Proust \u201cplants\u201d a piece of apparently anodyne information\u2014something minor, something en passant<\/em>\u2014somewhere, a fact or name or bit of history so seemingly insignificant that you\u2019re almost invited to ignore it. And then all of a sudden, 654 pages later, the information germinates, and takes on all of its rich and unexpected and often ironic meaning. Those moments of surprise, of revelation, are absolutely incredible for me. And that is really what makes In Search of Lost Time<\/em> the stuff of life. Because that is what happens in real life\u2014you can lose touch with a person for years until, one fine day, you cross paths with them again, and they have been completely transformed. I find it miraculous that Proust succeeds in giving characters the density that is the result only of the passage of time\u2014in reproducing on the page, or rather over the course of hundreds of pages, the different masks that time makes us wear, exactly as time changes us and changes those we know, to the point of that we and they often become unrecognizable over long stretches of time, which is of course one of Proust\u2019s major themes., This is the case at the afternoon party at the Princess de Guermantes, the closing scene of the novel, when the narrator encounters so many characters known to him, and to us, from earlier on but time has ravaged them.<\/p>\n

In terms of literary technique, that\u2019s a delicate thing to do\u2014among other things, it\u2019s a technique that can\u2019t succeed unless the narrative itself is quite long\u2014and something that I attempted in The Lost<\/em>. I wanted to create something of that effect, for instance, in a particular scene\u2014an unexpected and very emotional reunion with a family friend from my childhood, a woman whom I hadn\u2019t seen literally in decades when, out of the blue, in Israel, in 2003, I ran into her at a particularly fraught moment in my search for information about what happened to my relatives during the Holocaust. In order to recreate some of the emotional intensity of that experience in my writing\u2014in other words, to make it emotional for the reader<\/em>\u2014I had to introduce this family friend early on in the story so that she\u2019d register in the the reader\u2019s consciousness in some small way at the outset\u2014precisely so that the reader would be able to \u201crecognize\u201d her when she popped up again, would be able to share in my shock when I ran into her later. It\u2019s difficult to achieve. With this method, it\u2019s a question of careful, controlled measurement. The information needs to be given early enough, but not so<\/em> early that it can have been forgotten by the time it comes into play.<\/p>\n

In Search of Lost Time<\/em><\/strong> shows us the restorative power of writing. In collecting fragments of memory, it is possible to get to the truth of things and people that existed and are now gone. With Proust, this resurrection is accompanied by a kind of aesthetic and moral redemption. Does this apply to your experience as well? <\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that In Search of Lost Time<\/em> finishes \u201cwell.\u201d There is a sort of optimism in thinking that a work of art can allow us to recreate and to preserve the past. It\u2019s different for me, though. I never claimed that my writing would be able to do anything at all for my family, long gone. The past is the past, the dead are the dead, that is an unchangeable reality. If literature is able to bring something to life, it\u2019s the writer\u2014and the writer alone\u2014who reaps the benefits, not those he writes about. This is true in the case of Proust\u2019s narrator. All the characters he mixes with have the same fate\u2014transformation into literary fodder, to allow his own reinvention, as a writer.<\/p>\n

In the preface to your translations of the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy\u2019s Complete Poems<\/em>, you write that Cavafy thought of himself as a sort of \u201cpoet-historian,\u201d because much of his writing was about antiquity. You also write that his artistic career is similar to Proust\u2019s\u2014Cavafy had a radical literary metamorphosis, in changing from \u201cdilettante\u201d to major writer. Do you see any other resemblances between the two?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s funny that you mention Cavafy. He is, along with Proust, the writer who accompanied me along the way working on The Lost<\/em>. There\u2019s one fundamental similarity between Proust and Cavafy\u2014they are both writers of memory. Both believe in the power of writing as a defense against the passage of time. With Cavafy, too often we make the distinction between his historical poems and his love poems, the so-called erotic poems. But for me this distinction is meaningless. There\u2019s only really one theme in Cavafy\u2019s work, and it\u2019s time\u2014the causes, nature, and effects of the passage of time.<\/p>\n

There is, with both those writers, a constant agony. Regardless of status, our existence will be annihilated by time, by history. Proust is equally preoccupied by the great, important people of the world, like the Baron de Charlus, and by the little people, like the tailor Jupien. Cavafy demonstrates it by emphasizing a fundamental irony of history, the fact that emperors and kings are buried in oblivion along with obscure functionaries from far away provinces. With Proust, as with Cavafy, that which survives the past is most often the result of chance\u2014there\u2019s a sort of irony in that observation. It\u2019s precisely reflected in the poem \u201cThe Year 31 B.C. in Alexandria.\u201d In ten lines, Cavafy describes a day in the life of a perfume vendor who goes to the Alexandria marketplace to sell his wares and finds the city in a state of advanced agitation. Everyone is bustling and crowding the marketplace, no one pays him any attention. On approaching the palace, he hears that Marc Antony has won the battle of Actium against Octavian, which explains the bustle and excitement in the marketplace of the Egyptian capital. So there is this contrast between the individual anecdote and the march of history, which is typical of Cavafy. The acute, further irony here\u2014also typical\u2014is, of course, is the merchant has been misinformed. In fact, Antony and Cleopatra were defeated at Actium, the news of their victory is just a lie that the palace is spinning.<\/p>\n

As for Cavafy\u2019s erotic poems, to my mind they\u2019re only a pretext for speaking about the passage of time, for exploring the traces that an outburst of desire leaves in the memory. When Cavafy speaks of the memory of a beautiful young boy on the beach of Alexandria, thirty years earlier, it\u2019s a question for him of preserving that beauty, of capturing the fugitive moment with poetry.<\/p>\n

But even if their predilections are similar, are their styles not radically different?<\/strong><\/p>\n

They both address the same problems with different instruments. Proust\u2019s style is as rich as Cavafy\u2019s is laconic and stripped. Cavafy seems to me to have a quasi-archaeological approach to writing\u2014for him, the more concise things are, the greater chance they have of surviving. The opposite is true of Proust, who attempts to be as exhaustive as possible, to recover traces of the past by means of fantastically detailed descriptions. Should we perceive, thereby, a distinction between Greek and French sensibilities? That\u2019s uncertain. Cavafy seems very French to me in certain ways. He\u2019s a master of the epigram, for instance, a particularly French art.<\/p>\n

In your translation, you sought to remain as faithful as possible to \u201cthe diction, the structure, and the meter\u201d of Cavafy\u2019s verse, so the contemporary anglophone reader can have a visual, sonorous, and aesthetic experience as close as possible to the Greek. In Search of Lost Time<\/em> has been translated several times into English. How would you describe the difficulty of translating Proust\u2019s body of work, and how would you define its stylistic specificity?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Proust is complex, but never confused or confusing\u2014the Proustian grammar and syntax are crystalline. Yet, the fact that he often makes use of interpolated clauses, and therefore relative clauses, makes him difficult to translate into English. In an English phrase, a relative clause sounds so intrusive. It\u2019s much less common than in French. For an anglophone translator, the simple solution would be to split the Proustian phrase into several sequences, but this would be a terrible mistake, to my mind. Because the rhythms, the style, is of course as important as \u201cthe content\u201d of what Proust says. If the Proustian phrase is long and serpentine, it\u2019s because Proust wanted it thus. It was his stylistic objective. I imagine that if there is a language into which it is truly difficult to translate Proust, it\u2019s Hebrew, which doesn\u2019t love relative clauses the way French\u2014and, for that matter, Greek\u2014do.<\/p>\n

As for Proust in English, I think that the best translation of In Search of Lost Time<\/em> is the one by the Briton C.K. Scott Moncrieff, which came out in the twenties and has been successively revised by two scholars, Terrence Kilmartin in the early eighties and then D.J. Enright in the nineties. Scott Moncrieff did incredible work on Proust\u2019s text. It truly is one of the most beautiful translations in literary history, of any language or any author. It flirts with perfection because it rises to the challenge of giving the reader the same experience of reading Proust in the original.<\/p>\n

As a classicist, you often contextualize contemporary literature by going back to antiquity. In your opinion, what sort of new territory did Proust chart in literature?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think Proust, along with Joyce, represents the limits of the novel. Those two authors signed off on the end of the novel in its existing form. With them, we see the completion of a genre born at the end of the seventeenth century, which, during its development, established itself very deeply in the inner conscience of the individual. After them, there was nothing left to explore.<\/p>\n

But if I adopt the view of a professor rather than a critic, I think that Proust also marks a beginning. He opened the door to our interior world. Proust must be read, Proust must be taught, because Proust is good for the soul. He teaches us to read life as though it were a novel. It\u2019s exactly that quote you mentioned\u2014\u201cEvery reader is \u2026 a reader of himself.\u201d In this sense, Proust, like Freud, has shaped our way of thinking. Thanks to him, we have become the critics of our own psyche.<\/p>\n

After having read In Search of Lost Time<\/em>, we realize that our existence has a common thread, recurrent themes, recurring characters\u2014things that can be analyzed precisely the way they are analyzed in a text, by applying aesthetic and literary criteria to our every day lives. \u201cWhat is the lesson you draw from your own existence?\u201d This is the philosophy that Proust teaches us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2014
[1] \u201cSo, if I were given long enough to accomplish my work, I should not fail, even if the effect were to make them resemble monsters, to describe men as occupying so considerable a place, compared with the restricted place which is reserved to them in space, a place on the contrary prolonged past measure, for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch the distant epochs through which they have lived, between which so many days have come to range themselves\u2014in Time.\u201d<\/small><\/p>\n

[2] \u201cWhen we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child we were and the souls of the dead from whom we have sprung come to lavish on us their riches and their spells.\u201d \u2014The Captive<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last year, the French magazine La Revue des Deux Mondes published an interview with Daniel Mendelsohn about his experiences reading Proust as part of a special issue on \u201cProust vu d\u2019Am\u00e9rique.\u201d We\u2019re pleased to present an English version of the interview here, translated from the French by Anna Heyward. In Time Regained, Proust writes, \u201cIn […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":717,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[14475,14473,14476,9988,578,1132,14474,4524,905,14456,725,530],"class_list":["post-73406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-anna-heyward","tag-cavafy","tag-classicism","tag-daniel-mendelsohn","tag-in-search-of-lost-time","tag-interviews","tag-la-revue-des-deux-mondes","tag-modernism","tag-proust","tag-rereading","tag-swanns-way","tag-translation"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Discovery of Oneself: An Interview with Daniel Mendelsohn by Ioanna Kohler<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"July 1, 2014 \u2013 Last year, the French magazine La Revue des Deux Mondes published an interview with Daniel Mendelsohn about his experiences reading Proust as part of a\" 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