Don't try to read Proust for the style

Read it for the content, and appreciation of the style will come in time

About twelve years ago I was browsing the shelves in a library near my house, and I came across the first volume of Proust's novel.¹ I was about three years into my Great Books enterprise at that point, and I was like hmm I've heard of this, so I took it down and took it home and read it.

I was frequently bored while reading Swann's Way. The first third in particular is pretty slow-going. Marcel describes his youth in Combray--how he used to wait up anxiously for his mother to come and comfort him after her dinner parties were over--he discusses at length his grandmother, his Aunt Leonie, her servant Francois. He talks about Monsieur Swann, the fashionable gentleman who lives nearby. A number of characters are introduced. Then comes the most famous chapter in the whole work, Swann in Love, where we leap backwards to Swann's life as a young man in the city, and his affair with Odette de Crecy, who'll torment and bedevil him for the rest of his life (as well as recur ceaselessly through the novel).

Here's the thing: whenever someone writes about Proust, they always talk about his style--his very, very, very long sentences, which spin around ceaselessly on themselves. And his style is certainly impressive.

The problem is that if you sell Proust this way, people are almost certainly not going to read past the first volume.² His style is, at its core, pretty simple: you get the flavor of it within a few hundred pages. It's beautiful, and it's engaging, and, once you learn to read it, there's even a certain pleasure to it, but in my humble opinion you do not read Proust primarily for the style.

But, to me, Proust's novel is first and foremost a novel of manners. It's about a set of extremely complex social relationships, and the ways that these relationships change over time. Take for instance the characters we've already mentioned. There's Aunt Leonie and Francoise. From what we can tell, Francois hates Leonie, is always complaining about her, scolding her, saying she's too demanding. Leonie is a hypochondriac who is, essentially, preparing for her own death--she has long ago ceased to leave her upper-floor apartment. And yet when Leonie finally dies, Francois is utterly disconsolate--utterly extravagant in her grief--and we realize, wait a second, these two people were bound together by ties stronger than can be conceptualized by the words 'love' or 'hate'.

During the long fortnight of my aunt’s last illness Françoise never left her for an instant, never undressed, allowed no one else to do anything for her, and did not leave her body until it was actually in its grave. Then at last we understood that the sort of terror in which Françoise had lived of my aunt’s harsh words, her suspicions and her anger, had developed in her a feeling which we had mistaken for hatred and which was really veneration and love. Her true mistress, whose decisions had been impossible to foresee, whose ruses had been so difficult to foil, of whose good nature it had been so easy to take advantage, her sovereign, her mysterious and omnipotent monarch was no more. Compared with such a mistress we were of very little account.

This paragraph is the reason you read the book. Because this paragraph, as impressive as it is on a sentence-level, took dozens of pages to set up. Proust very carefully allowed us to get first one and then another impression of their relationship, and then allowed these impressions to merge and go to war against each other.

Francoise will go on to big things in the book. She goes to work for Marcel's family, and she becomes a constant companion to him, but one day (a thousand pages later!) an acquaintance tries to tell him that when he's not around, Francois talks trash on him!

These words of Jupien’s set up at once before my eyes, in new and strange colours, a print of my relations with Françoise so different from the one which I often took pleasure in contemplating and in which, without the least shadow of doubt, Françoise adored me and lost no opportunity of singing my praises, that I realised that it is not only the physical world that differs from the aspect in which we see it; that all reality is perhaps equally dissimilar from what we believe ourselves to be directly perceiving and which we compose with the aid of ideas that do not reveal themselves but are none the less efficacious, just as the trees, the sun and the sky would not be the same as what we see if they were apprehended by creatures having eyes differently constituted from ours, or else endowed for that purpose with organs other than eyes which would furnish equivalents of trees and sky and sun, though not visual ones. However that might be, this sudden glimpse that Jupien afforded me of the real world appalled me. And yet it concerned only Françoise, about whom I cared little. Was it the same with all one’s social relations?

This is why you read Proust! To get this kind of stuff--which is multiplied across every character, every relationship, every interaction. You're gonna learn about Mme Verdurin, who goes from trivial, silly wannabe--the wife of a provincial doctor--to the most fashionable hostess in town. You're gonna learn about Bergotte, the writer Proust idolizes, who turns out to have silly, trivial conversation and be rather vain and insecure. You're gonna learn about Villeparisis and her paramour the diplomat Norpois, who seem to be simultaneously at the apex of worldly power and also constantly under a cloud of disgrace. You're gonna learn about the Dreyfus affair, about airplanes, bombs, telephones, cars, and war. You're gonna learn about the Jews, the gays, the lesbians, the actors and actresses, the soldiers, and everyone else. Oh and don't even get me started on the Prince and Princess de Guermantes and their cousin/rivals the Duc and Duchess de Guermantes, and that wily motherfucker Baron de Charlus.

That's the real draw of Proust--it's not the style, it's the content--it's the beauty and joy of going page by page through this extravagantly detailed, extravagantly alive world, and the way that this world changes, blossoms, and evaporates through time.

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Now even from the passages you've seen here, you're probably aware that Proust is slow going and frequently boring and confusing. But so what? I always thought that when I read Proust I was just faking it--pretending to like it because you needed to like Proust to be literate.

But about three or four years later I got very depressed and decided to reread Proust (which I did in the much superior Enright revision of the Scott-Moncrieff translation)³, and I found myself breezing through it and really loving it. Apparently, in the process of reading Proust I had taught myself how to read Proust.

Which is to say, I think it sets up very high expectations if you're supposed to read Proust for the style--it means that if you're not enjoying the style as you read, then you're doing a bad job of reading him. But if you're reading him for the content, then that's a totally different matter, because you can get the content even if you're not enjoying the style.

This goes for all the Great Books by the way. The whole point of them is that the style is inimitable and inextricably linked to the content. You can't just sit around reading couplets from, say, Milton and going golly shucks how beautiful--that doesn't work. You can certainly pretend to do it, pretend to enjoy it that way, but that's just not how the book is best-enjoyed. You read Paradise Lost as a story. That's all it is, it's a story.

The only exception is lyric poetry--with lyric poetry you really do get thrown into the deep end, and you need to experience it as pure verbal texture right away--but that's not necessary with any form of narrative art or any work with a strong purpose. Obviously for the latter you do want to enjoy the style eventually, but that's something you learn to do by reading the work--it's absurd to expect that from the moment you open the work you're going to have instantly assimilated the style, such that it sends you into paroxysms of delight. Just read the novel like it's a novel, and you'll be a lot happier.

1. I always call it Proust’s novel because it just takes a long time to type In Search of Long Time or Remembrance of Things Past or A recherche du temps perdu.

2. One of the many pieces of advice I give that nobody ever takes is to read all six volumes in a relatively short period of time (let’s say in under a year), because they are full of callbacks to each other, and you’ll forget who is who if you’re not reading quickly. Also, it really does build to a truly sublime ending: Finding Time Again really sticks the landing in an almost-unimaginable way. It pays off both narratively and thematically in a way that scarcely seems possible. The fifth volume (The Fugitive and The Prisoner) is a huge slog though unfortunately and is the worst in the series, because it merely repeats many of the themes and tropes we’ve already seen play out several times.

3. I love Lydia Davis as much as the next gal, and maybe if she’d done all six volumes of the new Penguin translations, they would be able to compare to the other ones, but as it is, you really don’t want to be switching translators with each volume. Scott-Moncrieff was a great translator of Proust who unfortunately bowdlerized some of the more sexual passages, but Enright went back and carefully restored the stuff that Moncrieff took out, creating a wonderful whole that’s available at a very reasonable price from The Modern Library.