[In February, I reached out to friends and colleagues about contributing to this durational project on La Recherche. Partly this was self-interested: I felt it would be useful to have regimented opportunities to step back from my own writing inside of it—the indelible relief of handing over the keys to the castle—and partly it was about calcifying my sense of regards, marcel as a community effort. Two years of Proust is a significant journey to embark on: we need all hands on deck. Last month, we were offered a dispatch on the evocative history of madeleines from food writer and critic Alicia Kennedy. Today, I’m delighted to share a conversation on Proust, the pleasures and frustrations of the Search, translation, and fugu between my former Bookforum editor, David O’Neill, and Rebecca Ariel Porte, a writer and core faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. I hope you luxuriate in it as much as I have. — Jamie Hood]
This past December, Bookforum, the twenty-eight-year-old magazine where I had worked since 2008, folded. It was a big loss for a small community and felt to me like the end of an epoch. We all gathered one winter day in our old offices and took a picture. A Proustian moment, to be sure, except no one looked very much older. I went home, stayed in bed with COVID, and luxuriated in involuntary memories: The squeak of an A/V cart rolled into the office for Obama’s inauguration; the pastel bloom of flowers sent by a writer who loved to push deadlines; the feel of a dull red fact-checking pencil scratching out a last-minute question; the red face of a person who got us to shut up by yelling, “We are having A CONVERSATION!”
This overwhelming sense of time lost and found was not lost on me; I had just read Time Regained in Rebecca Ariel Porte’s Brooklyn Institute for Social Research online seminar. Porte is a brilliant writer and scholar who balances delicate insights into Proustian subtleties with a masterful command of the unwieldy Proustian scholarly apparatus. I recently caught up with Porte to discuss the Recherche, Proust in translation, the ways in which MP frustrates us (a lot), and the many yields of the 1.2-million-word masterpiece. —David O’Neill
David O’Neill: You’ve been teaching La Recherche for years now. I wondered if you’ve seen common obstacles for students starting Swann’s Way. What advice would you give to those reading Proust for the first time?
Rebecca Ariel Porte: It’s some kind of milestone when you’ve been teaching Proust for nearly the same length of time it took him to write the novel! That said, Proust can be daunting for beginners who are thinking in terms of length: not merely the length of the Recherche but the length of Proust’s sentences and the length of the critical tradition that has grown up around his writing. Many first-time readers I’ve taught have talked about Proust as a massive task they’ve always wanted to accomplish but had trouble beginning or weren’t quite sure they were undertaking correctly. To these readers, I say (and want to say) that one of the best things you can do for yourself is to forget the desired end and to experience Proust with as little in the way of hardened expectation as you can.
Given its canonical nimbus, it’s tempting to think of Proust as a complicated lock with only one key, but nothing could be further from the truth. He meant the novel as a kind of mirror of human psychology, and if one takes that seriously, nothing is off the table for the reader: pleasure, affection, excitement, boredom, suspicion, irritation, anger. All these feelings—the positive as well as the negative—are likely to be part of the experience of reading the Recherche. And the frustrations of the book (sometimes Proust frustrates me quite a lot) are no less legitimate than its delights are—they are, in fact, part of what makes it such a rich object of critique. There’s a learning curve with Proust, and many students have described to me how, once immersed, they catch his rhythms and the resistance of the text seems to lessen. Swann’s Way is both more and less inviting than it has a reputation for being. Perhaps the novel’s most polished installment, it features some of the book’s most iconic, propulsive sequences (the madeleine and the lime blossom tisane, Gilberte among the hawthorns, Swann and Odette’s courtship) and some of its most baroque sentences and metaphors. But the first sentence is seductive and deceptively simple. And if you can read that sentence, then you can read the next. And if you can read that sentence, then you can read the next, and, sentence by sentence, you wade in.
David O’Neill: I think “wading” is right. And we should also say it’s also OK to drown in it. Should we warn our innocent Swann’s Way readers about the interminable sections to come in La Prisonnière and Albertine disparue? I’m wary of Proust as a path to self-improvement. He’s exasperating, but I feel closest to him when he’s most unhinged. The reader might become a worse person after their exposure to Proust.
English-speaking readers might also struggle with the question of translation. It’s easy to get hung up on which version to read. What are your thoughts?
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