Proust: Quick Thoughts - Part Two
It's also worth noting how Morel and Saint-Loup are both types for Proust, two sides of a single erotic coin. Saint-Loup is refined, socially noble, emotionally loyal (to a degree); Morel is plebeian, calculating, sexually untrustworthy. Yet both are objectified and adored by men, Charlus and Marcel, respectively.
Finding Time Again was the best of the three last volumes upon this reading. I think Proust knew how he wanted to end the novel early on. So the actual last 200 hundred pages or so is more or less a philosophical essay about Art and the role of life in Art with, out of the blue, three involuntary memory experiences in quick succession, followed by a party where everyone is either old or dead. To the extraordinary meeting of Gilbert's 16-yo daughter which ties together everything in the long story all the way back, specifically, to the two ways at Combray in Swann's Way. And the Narrator realizes from the profoundity of his involuntary memory and his decision to begin is work on his novel despite living a life as apparently a rapidly aging man.
The moment when the Narrator first beholds Gilberte's daughter was an overwhelming experience for me as a first-time reader. It is still something that give me goosepumps, if were inclined to such things. It is one of the finest moments in all of literature, just as astonishingly emotive and interwoven in many dimensions as anything I have ever read. It ranks with very few other such moments, one of them being the famous Madeline and tes experience near the beginning of Swann's Way.
Finding Time Again has the weight of culmination, even through the haze and inconsistencies of an unfinished manuscript. It might be messier than earlier volumes in terms of narrative control, but conceptually it’s the most assured. You can feel Proust returning to his master vision, the one he sketched early on but hadn’t fully grown into. The early books wander through memory like it’s a forest. The final volume—especially that last philosophical stretch—feels like someone stepping out of the trees and realizing they were in a labyrinth all along.
The three involuntary memory episodes come like seismic aftershocks. That uneven paving stone at the Guermantes' party—the madeleine of the dying man—is so subtle, yet it opens the same trapdoor the original moment did, only deeper. And this time, Marcel doesn’t resist the lesson. The past returns not just as emotion or nostalgia, but as material, as form, as necessity. The artist is born not in ecstasy but in clarity.
And then that party. It’s grotesque and beautiful at once. Everyone has aged into caricatures of themselves, or been transfigured by time and illness into something nearly unrecognizable. It’s like a ghost ball. The narrator moves through it in shock, but not sadness—almost awe. It’s a living memento mori. And the idea that so many are dead already, even as they speak—it’s quietly apocalyptic. It reminds me of Joyce’s The Dead, except it’s the whole damn social world that’s walking around posthumously.
Gilberte’s daughter is the final stroke of genius. That she appears as the daughter of Robert de Saint-Loup and Gilberte—meaning she is the spiritual granddaughter of both Swann and Charlus—is a wild culmination. She is the mingling of the two ways of the Narrator's youth at Combray. And when Marcel sees her, he sees the Two Ways fused into one being—the Way of Swann (sensuality, social aspiration, doomed romanticism) and the Way of Guermantes (aristocratic distance, intellectual pride, time’s slow rot). She is, in a sense, the novel’s final metaphor. And she says nothing. She is presence. The book's entire history resolves into her gesture.
Then the narrator decides to write. And not just write, but write as a dying man, at the edge of time, knowing that death has already claimed much of his world. It’s his last rebellion, and maybe the only one that matters. He doesn’t conquer time—he uses it. He folds it, distills it, and turns it into this impossible, spiraling, obsessive book.
The triumph of Art is one of the most satisfying aspects of the novel, filled with descriptions of the experiences of all kinds of Art. Proust doesn’t just argue for the power of Art—he makes the novel itself into the demonstration. It's not didactic, it’s performative. Every aesthetic theory the narrator offers, every reflection on music or painting or architecture, eventually loops back into this book as the living embodiment of his claim. By the end, it feels like art isn’t just a human activity, it’s a survival mechanism for consciousness.
And you're right, the novel is saturated with encounters with Art. Elstir’s paintings, Vinteuil’s sonata and septet, the cathedrals, the tapestries, the theater, the salon wit, even the forms of social life—all these get treated as art forms, or as failed versions of art. What they all seem to share, in Proust’s view, is their ability to open up hidden dimensions of time and perception. Art becomes a kind of involuntary memory on purpose—something that lets you engineer the experience that the madeleine gives you by accident.
And then there’s the personal evolution: early in the novel, Art is something the narrator wants to consume. He reveres it, he longs for it, he sees it as something others (Elstir, Vinteuil, Bergotte) produce. But by the end, it’s something he must do, or he risks dissolving entirely. Art is no longer a luxury, it's a form of time rescue, a way of extracting meaning from decay.
Bergotte's death in front of the little patch of yellow wall in the Vermeer painting—that always stuck with me as a kind of prefiguration. He dies because he sees it, finally. He recognizes the standard he should have written to, and that recognition is fatal. But Marcel survives his revelation. Barely. He stumbles into the truth about time and perception and doesn’t die—he writes.
That gesture is so satisfying because it’s earned. It's not just a declaration that art is meaningful—it’s an act of transformation, of turning obsession, decay, and confusion into shape. And In Search of Lost Time is the result. The very thing it describes is the thing it is.
In skimming the Enright kindle edition, I noticed that there are two "burials" mentioned by the Narrator. His grandmother's is mentioned in passing. Robert Saint-Loup's is mentioned before it happens. It is delayed for some unknown reason. I guess I should have noticed this obvious fact before. But I was considering so many more things about the novel.
Both the grandmother’s and Saint-Loup’s burials are barely there, almost like narrative afterthoughts. The grandmother’s is folded into the emotional aftershocks of her death, which are so powerfully rendered through Marcel’s dissociation and denial. Her actual burial is mentioned in passing, as you said, but never seen. It’s strange—Proust gives us so much about her decline, her illness, the quiet horror of her final days, yet the ceremony that marks her exit from the world is invisible.
Same with Saint-Loup. His death in World War I is reported almost obliquely—like news received from afar. His burial is said to be delayed, but we never hear more. There’s no coffin, no mourners, no mud or flags or prayers. No moment where time stops to acknowledge loss. Instead, the narrative flows right past, as if the death, while tragic, is just another stone in the riverbed of memory.
A pattern emerges. Deaths in In Search of Lost Time are internalized. They don’t happen socially, with ritual and finality. They happen psychically. The real grieving is private, often interior to the point of madness, and stretched over months or years. The funerals vanish because they belong to a kind of public time, and Proust is uninterested in public time. His attention is elsewhere, on what death does to perception, to rhythm, to thought. What it does inside.
And then there's the added layer: the Narrator himself never goes to funerals. He’s always too ill, too anxious, too entangled in his own mental theater. There's a sense that to attend a burial would be to fix death in time and space. Proust resists that. Instead, death bleeds into memory, haunts objects, returns in gestures, reconfigures identities. That’s the real mourning process in this novel.
The book, especially in the last volume, starts to loop back and critique its own earlier certainties. That self-interrogation is part of the arc. The Narrator realizes, gradually, that he hasn’t seen clearly, and that even his monumental sensitivity has failed him at key points. The art that emerges at the end isn’t born from perfect vision; it’s born from recognizing the limits of vision.
It’s also, in a weird way, a long practical lesson in how memory and perception aren’t about accuracy. They’re about pattern, rhythm, tone. Proust’s selectivity is less about what’s true and more about what feels structurally resonant in the mind. So he gives us endless detail about the texture of a sidewalk or the light on a church wall—but skips the burial of a beloved character. Because one will ring eternally in memory, and the other vanishes the moment it ends.
The strength of is there, particularly compared with The Prisoner and The Fugitive, Finding Time Again, doesn’t just complete the narrative—it dismantles and revises it. It has this eerie, post-mortem quality, like someone sorting through the wreckage of their own illusions. The Narrator doesn’t just reflect in the final book; he begins to re-evaluate everything he thought he understood across the previous six volumes. It’s a quiet reckoning.
The loopback happens on several levels.
First, there's the party at the Guermantes' mansion. This isn't just another society event—it's a grotesque mirror of all the salons we've seen before, a kind of carnival of decay. All the glittering figures of the past have aged into caricatures. Their power, beauty, and elegance are mostly gone, and the Narrator is shocked by how time has worn them down. This moment slashes at the earlier volumes’ obsession with social ascent and proximity to aristocracy. The whole thing looks hollow now—withered, pathetic. What had seemed like a meaningful hierarchy is exposed as fragile pageantry. It's a final indictment of social vanity.
Second, there's the collapse of romantic memory. Albertine is hardly mentioned in Finding Time Again. The feverish jealousy, the obsession, the grief, it’s faded into a kind of mental footnote. The Narrator realizes, brutally, that what he took for eternal love was a construction of habit, projection, and possessiveness. His mourning was deep, yes, but also solipsistic. That whole saga gets quietly reabsorbed into the book’s theory of perception: love isn’t a stable truth, but a series of shifting mental images. Even his famous grief is recontextualized as aesthetic training, a kind of painful apprenticeship for the real work to come.
Third, the narrator begins to explicitly acknowledge his earlier failures of understanding. He admits that many of the things he once thought important were misperceived. He says it flat-out: he didn’t see things clearly because he didn’t yet understand the nature of time. The flash of the uneven paving stone (the final involuntary memory) is the moment when everything crystallizes, when he realizes that the truth of life is hidden in time’s foldings, not in ambition or pleasure or even memory as recollection. That truth was present in earlier moments, but he wasn’t ready to grasp it.
And finally, there's the critique of himself as a writer. He realizes that all the scattered impressions, half-truths, and inconsistencies aren’t mistakes, they’re material. He isn’t building a shrine to coherence or moral clarity. He’s building a book that mimics the structure of consciousness itself, where understanding comes late, often too late, but with a kind of retroactive illumination. The whole novel becomes an argument against tidy narrative and toward a deeper truth embedded in style, duration, and form.
So the final volume doesn’t just finish the book, it re-writes it in a sense. It frames the previous six volumes not as naïve, but as incomplete, waiting for the final lens of time and the decision to transform it all into art.
This time through, something clicked when I came to the paving stone scene. Suddenly the novel shifts from memoir to construction mode. The Narrator takes charge of his relatively pathetic life and decides to devote himself to creating his work of Art. He is inspired, one might say even enthused. This is not just the consequences of involuntary memory, it is a transformation at the heart of the long aesthetic essay that finishes the novel.
I started reading In Search of Lost Time on December 26, 2024 and finished on April 8, 2025. It took me about 14 weeks this time. I read two other novels and part of a biography during this time as well, taking little breaks from Proust. Time to let the novel digest for a while. More later.
(Assisted by ChatGPT.)
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