The Chris Hedges Report: Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time with Justin E.H. Smith

now you talk about Terror [Music] what about for me [Music] I've been terrorized all my days [Music] a century ago on November 18 1922 Marcel Bruce died he worked feverishly in his final hours on his Masterpiece Allah Perdue In Search of Lost Time his four thousand page novel is one of the most remarkable works of literature of the 20th century during the war in Bosnia I plowed my way through its seven volumes populated with 400 characters not as an escape from the war for the Specter of death and the Twilight of an expiring Society haunts proof's work but as a way to reflect on the disintegration around me proust like all great writers gave me the words to describe aspects of a human condition I knew instinctively but had trouble articulating proust understood the conflicting ways we perceive reality and come to our own peculiar self-serving truths he illuminated human Folly with its Illusions ambiguities and contradictions he reminded his readers that empathy is the most important virtue in life especially for the vulnerable he explored the fragility of human goodness the seduction and hollowness of power and social status the inconsistency of the human heart racism especially anti-Semitism and our looming mortality which hovers over every page as it did for the sickly proust as he struggled to finish his Masterpiece dictating changes on the last night he was alive in his hermetically sealed cork-lined bedroom in Paris those who see in his work a retreat from the world are poor readers approved for his power is his Freudian understanding of the unconscious and Subterranean forces that Define and shape human existence there are very few writers who are his equal joining me to discuss Marcel proofs In Search of Lost time is Justin E H Smith a professor of history and the philosophy of science at the University of Paris the main belt asteroid 13585 Justin Smith is named after him you can find him on substack at Justin e h Smith's internet so just in the the passage of time uh haunts the novel especially at the end it exposes as we age as the characters age the vanity of our youthful pretensions I think this is true for most of the characters including Burma as a thinly disguised Sarah Bernhard abandoned by her admirers in her old age or the main courtesan or debt The Passion of Swan and the compta forcefil who was once a beauty and a seductress who Enchanted certainly male Paris is in the end relegated to the corner of her daughter's Salon where she's ignored even ridiculed and Bruce writes about Odette and this woman adulated and worshiped her whole life now a human wreck in formal dress and Grand toilette looks out alarmed and bewildered at the Ferocious social world and seems to me for the first time likable so I wonder if you could address time the passage of time and its effects which is certainly one of the themes that is Central to proof's novel absolutely thanks Chris I know you want to talk about proust and philosophy later but I think it's hard at least for me to talk about time without engaging at least a bit with the question of proust's relationship to philosophy in particular to the reflections on the nature of time as something experienced that are unfolding in the early 20th century of which proust is I would say vaguely aware interested I wouldn't call him a dabbler I would call him a thorough reader who is also intelligent enough to see seep or no to to absorb Reflections from phenomenology from figures like who sorrow from Angry Bird songs philosophy of time and to translate this into something that on the face of it is a sort of Auto Fiction it's an auto fiction but it's also a philosophy of time for me that really only becomes clear or the payoff really only uh emerges in the seventh and final volume the the time regained as we usually translate it uh and this is it's funny that you mentioned your coverage of the War uh in Bosnia in the 1990s and your encounter with proust in the context of War because for me it's the ravages of world war one that are recounted in the seventh volume that really make us understand what it means for uh the things we value to slip into the past and for our world to collapse so obviously throughout the previous six volumes there are the let's say gentler ravages of time with um laberma uh getting old and wrinkly and of course also the uh several uh little deaths of falling out of love with um the people he has at least thought he was in love with that's debatable and we can get back to that uh and also of course the more kind of signature moments of the the madlan and the T and the UN on uh unsolicited memories that come come back to us that make us realize what's been lost but nothing makes this clearer than his kind of ghost like stalking throughout Paris when there are uh uh uh curfews uh because of the Air Raids um and uh his sense that everything is really in the past and of course the real proof not the the narrator but the real proofs um during World War One already surely has a sharp sense of his own declining health and his own uh let's say near ghost status already um so that's where it really comes through to my mind and that's where we start getting uh capitalized uh with a big capital T and his kind of so to speak discovery of time as something approaching uh Transcendent or Divine worshipable and awesome and terrible entity right um that's uh that's that's that's the culmination of the previous six uh volumes one that's one thing that's so striking about is the way that um that that the the there's often for the most important themes of very slow build up and that where you you only realize the the full depth or the full awesomeness of the theme he's exploring little by little and and that is above all the case with time but we can talk more about this when we get back to philosophy well so let's just stay on that because there's two when I read the last volume they were like depth charges and you really needed everything that came before to get there he talks a lot about masks I think death pervades the entire novel uh but can you just address that issue of masks which which he suddenly becomes cognizant of at the end yeah well especially I mean it's especially haunting when we think of uh man Ray's famous photograph of proust on his deathbed uh when he's grown a long beard um and you know he's very close to death and he has the the a face that looks um very much as Bruce himself puts it like Marcel post the Assyrian right kind of very dark a very um Stark nose that looks like something sculpted in deep antiquity and um I don't know if Man Ray is trying to um show in a visual form um uh this notion of mask that had become so important to proust uh but it's uh certainly uh an important uh uh datum in our reflection on priest and masks but also of course the example that you bring up of La barma the um the the the the the famous actress uh modeled um broadly on uh Sarah Bernhardt um who is such a focus of priests or of the narrators Fascination and adoration in his Youth and of course he already loses the fascination long before she has been relegated to a corner of her daughter's Salon um but uh you know he loses it when he goes and this is one of my favorite scenes in the whole novel when he watches her perfect gestures on stage and he contemplates the fact that there are parts of the actress's body like for example between the wrist and the elbow over which the actress has no control so this part of my arm cannot be transfigured by Art no matter how great a genius artist I am and Bruce sees this on the stage and uh loses it right basically he thinks why was I so impressed by La Verma she's got a forearm just like I do and it's such a weird thing to discover or at least to articulate but uh Bruce does it and of course this has something to do with this the whole novels long reflection on let's say the relationship between art and life ordinarily you couldn't put a mask on a forearm that's not the sort of thing that is masked but it is still the sort of thing that shows the limits of transfiguration by Art and then when she is elderly and relegated to a corner of her daughter's salon and evidently overly made up as um some old women who are not going gently into the good night often are um this is literally a Cosmetics or mascara that are kind of uh uh showing the futility of the fight against uh Against Time and ultimately I suppose showing the futility of uh trying struggling to live in a world that is perpetually uh uh Transfiguration in the name of art against death right something like that well he's constantly uncovering masks I mean he holds up from the beginning the garmon he idolizes the elite in these turn out to be very uh banal uh disappointing figures I think there's a undercurrent of uh disillusionment uh that runs constantly uh throughout the book um we are going to have to talk about the Patia Madeleine I I love mentioning it but I mean this kind of unconscious voluntary memory and it's not just with Magdalene the T but there are many examples of this uh that uh evoke the past uh and um I I wondered if you could uh you know these kind of these uh dim fragments these uh brief uh flashes of recognition and in an unexamined life which keeps that life fragment or fragment fragment yeah known devoid of context uh and I just wondered if how for proust uh do we locate the past how do we give a context uh and then if you can talk about the importance of involuntary memory and Illuminating the reality of experience I'm just going to read a little quote from proust uh quote I find the Celtic belief very reasonable that The Souls of those we have lost are held captive in some inferior creature and an animal and a plant and some inanimate thing effectively lost to us until the day which for many never comes when we happen to pass close to the tree come into possession of the object that is their prison then they quiver they call out to us and as soon as we have recognized them the spell is broken delivered by us they have overcome death and they return to live with us so that's a lot but maybe you can address those issues oh yeah they can can I say something first about unmasking the the last one the last thing we were talking about yeah I mean one of the most striking parts of the whole novel for me is uh the scene when we know Swan is dying and he uh comes to the home of the digamonte and the Duke and his wife or bazan and orianna uh are leaving for some social engagement and she's worried about which shoes to wear and basically he's trying to tell them he's dying and they're not going to see him anymore and they are just chattering back and forth about whether the shoes match the robe somehow I always picture that couple this is my kind of dumb American pop culture orientation as um uh uh the Thurston Howell uh and his wife on on Gilligan's Island um and um it's fascinating indeed the way they are unmasked taken down uh so many notches from their early kind of exalted status and this is why I really hate uh the commentary by people like Maxine Gorky on proust who say that he is um a slavish uh uh adoring uh uh uh kind of um uh Lackey of the aristocrats obviously that's not all that's going on this is more like an expose of how how bass and Petty these people are just like all of us right it's definitely not any sort of class Consciousness if the sword Gorky would like to see but it's also not um uh uh sycophancy towards towards the nobility all right so that's just one thing let me just stop you there on that scene because first of all Gorky ends up becoming a kind of tool of Stalin so um uh but he eviscerates the the ruling I don't know how you can read the truth and not see that I mean I don't know but just that scene that you pointed out because they dismiss him and the way they dismissed Swan is by saying oh you're not really that sick you'll be fine yeah and then they're saying well we have to go we're in a hurry yeah and then she the the the the Duke sees that his wife's shoes don't match her outfit and so sends them back inside sends her back inside for a half hour to get another pair of shoes so they're in the face of death I mean I think it kind of uh says it all I like you I found that scene haunting but uh let's address the other issues yeah sure sure uh so I I have to say I mean uh it's not like I my interest in the novel trailed but I think there's no more powerful part than the opening maybe third of the first volume of the whole people when he is a child and when he is very much a sort of animist um describing the natural milieu of kombre uh and the flowers and the grass and the weather and he is very very good at evoking natural landscapes um and it's in this connection rather early on that the uh the the illusion to the Celts and their beliefs I think this comes from uh Julius Caesar's Gaelic Wars where there's some reflection on druidic religion and then it becomes a kind of commonplace in um uh French uh history of ancient peoples of France that The Druids in did indeed did indeed believe that we're um reincarnated in trees I see this a lot in 17th century texts um but it's a way for proust to um kind of indulge this uh this uh proximity to Nature and also to pursue the themes of memory right and I love the scenes in the early parts of the novel particularly surrounding asparagus and the idea the idea that uh that a stalk of asparagus is some kind of uh nature Sprite or fairy uh that um that is presumably rooted in Northern French folk beliefs um and that it's this uh this Supernatural entity in turn that causes the peculiar bouquet as he would put it in your urine some hours after you eat asparagus um and it's such a such an intense engagement with the smells and colors and and sensations of nature that he practically uh goes met him psychotic himself and you know inhabits a tree for a while I just love all that stuff um and I think it's at its strongest in uh the first volume where he is of course a boy and you're supposed to um you're supposed to get over that when you get older and enter Society so he Retreats from the intense engagement with nature as he becomes an adult and leaves behind childish things um but in the particular uh uh uh sequence of images associated with uh with the Celtic or druidic beliefs I think indeed um you know uh uh the the the the idea seems to be that uh in this reduced State you have a dimmer sense of who you are and it has to be coaxed back out um in order for the ancestor to rejoin us and that in a sense uh to evoke this image of the Soul uh lodged in a tree is to uh give an account of the condition we are all actually in where we uh you know where we can scarcely hold on to our pasts and they only come back to us in dim fragments I mean what's interesting is that they do come back to everyone in these uh a smell a sound or something uh but proust uh I mean you know here maybe we can talk about art that those are while they can evoke the past they are largely meaningless unless we are able to interpret them through artistic expression I don't know if you would agree yeah yeah yeah that's absolutely right and of course he covers uh really all of the let's say the the great Arts um not just literature but also certainly music and painting these are light motifs of the whole novel and indeed they do seem to be uh the uh the kind of answer to the question what are these dim fragments of memory for anyway um well that can be catalyzed or sublimated into a great musical idea like for example the the phrase in Vantage Sonata uh that um that seems to uh hold the secret to our existence so indeed uh and we really get this towards the the very end of the novel The Seventh volume again functioning as the payoff for so much of the long-windedness of the whole thing um uh the the realization that that the narrator has of himself that he needs to conjure out of himself something as um as as valuable as redeeming as ventoy's Sonata um in order to make these this this whole lifetime of dim fragmentary memories uh uh do anything for him at all I want to talk about the mutation of the self uh especially around grief uh albertine who he has a relationship with modeled after Han uh uh who was his driver who was killed uh but but there's that lamentation and of course the death of his grandmother um uh which is probably modeled on the death of his mother who was very he had a pretty much of a nervous breakdown after his mother died um but he he doesn't fear grieving I thought this was brilliant he fears the day he no longer Grieves because the stealth that was once in love with those we lost no longer exists I wonder if you could talk about that sure well I mean that's that's one of the um we already alluded to the the several small deaths not the sense of orgasms but in the sense of falling out of love uh with jit bout in particular that uh so much surprise him uh that that make him really I think question the nature of Love uh that you can fall out of love with someone and sit in a room with them and be like oh yeah I used to be in love with this person um makes it seem very um uh um uh uh fragile um and far from transcendental um and that seems to worry him a great deal at the same time it seems like uh the love that he has for his grandmother is in some respects uh of a different character than uh these uh these these various romantic loves that he has that the narrator has um and I don't you know I I should I should say incidentally that I'm not a proust scholar um I'm a scholar of other things um I and weirdly since I started writing about proust on sub stack um I've had uh journals send me requests to referee scholarship and I have to I have to say sorry I'm not your guy uh that's not my field and in fact for that reason this helps to explain why I do not read secondary literature on proust I don't want to read it I think it would I think it would make me fall out of love so to speak it would um it would take away the magic if I if I learned um much more than I know about Bruce's life um I know uh at least uh that the uh uh female love objects that are uh that the narrator has are transformed versions of his own same-sex love love objects that much I know um but I don't know exactly how the transformation is affected what I can say is that marce uh whatever his sexual orientation is remarkably good at describing heterosexual desires and Obsession of he does he's he's certainly capable of imagining his way into other people's desires um so that's just a little parenthesis um now uh so this falling out of love uh is something that again seems to be uh what um you know what I I just read Mary Shelley a lovely line it's kind of a weaning from the things of this Earth and in that sense a kind of uh rehearsal for death and I think the narrator sees it this way um the question of whether the narrator ever experiences true love uh or whether it's just um Obsession and I you know certainly I I find the narrator rather morally abhorrent someone who really never figures some basic things out um about how to be good to other people I think the whole uh fifth volume the The Prisoner is just is just shocking oh it's just in her check there which is essentially albertine becomes this is who's his lover becomes his prisoner yeah yeah yeah and he's he's extreme extremely sadistic for no good reason and doesn't seem to have any compunction about this he doesn't seem to have any interest in his own moral growth um and you know you might say that his uh his attachment to his grandmother and you know having to knock on the wall as an example you mentioned earlier uh having to knock on the wall of the hotel so that she'll hear him in his room and feeling reassured when he hears her knock back um that's already a bit like the the relationship to Aberdeen right um and yet uh the um the his love for his grandmother is in many respects uh the the the best thing he's got going um and it is indeed very sad when she dies let me also add that there's another person towards whom the narrator is morally abhorrent who I think is a really key figure for understanding the the whole novel she's kind of the backbone of the novel and that's Francoise the the the May the nanny um who is uh uh of course uh uh uh alive until the very end Witnesses it all has a sort of wisdom that um that that Aristocrats can never have and he can never have and really really holds things together he's nasty to her too but I you know I think it's pretty clear he loves her [Music] great that was just an E.H Smith professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris I want to thank the real news network and its production team Cameron granadino Adam Coley and Kayla Rivera you can find me at chrisedges.substack.com [Music]

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Keywords: Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Chris Hedges Report, The Real News Network, TRNN

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Length: 30min 26sec (1826 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 18 2022