Proust and the Joy of Suffering
In Elisa Gabbert’s column Mess with a Classic, she revisits canonical works of literature and addresses the anxiety of confronting the art of the past (and the past in general).
Marcel Proust. Hulton Archive/Stringer.
One recent Monday evening, I scanned through our bookshelves for an unread classic—I had one last piece to write in this series on revisiting the canon. I considered writing about Moby-Dick, but did not seriously consider reading Moby-Dick. I want to, very much in fact, but I rarely read long books, and moreover feel that I’m saving Moby-Dick for an unclear future experience, some contained and isolating context it deserves—a long sea voyage, my deathbed. Perhaps I could write about not reading Moby-Dick. Then I thought about In Search of Lost Time, another novel people, especially writers, almost brag about not having read, as though admitting you haven’t read Proust suggests you’ve read everything else. I pulled Swann’s Way 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—it 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.
Over the next couple of nights I read the “Overture” chapter. I had the sense, while I was reading Proust, that I was “reading Proust,” having a packaged experience like a tour of the Louvre. When friends asked what I was reading, I said, “I’m reading Proust, actually,” acknowledging the improbability. “Wow,” said my friend Kathleen, who knows me well. “Do you think you’ll finish it?” to have paragraphs at all. He wanted it to appear as one volume, with no sections, chapters, or even margins. It’s as though he wanted it to be unreadable, more a gesture than a text.
