Proust on Authors, Writing, and Reading
In Proust's In Search of Lost Time, the young narrator suggests that his first experience of writing is like a hen laying an egg, that writing is birth. But what exactly are writers giving birth to? In three different moments, we see writing and reading as ways to illuminate our daily lives.
In the narrator's recollection of his page of writing on the steeples of Combray, the narrator reveals:
[I] never thought again of this page, but at the moment when... I had
finished writing it, I found such a sense of happiness, felt that it had so
entirely relieved my mind of the obsession of the steeples, and of the
mystery which they concealed, that, as though I myself were a hen and had
just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top of my voice.
(Swann's Way)
This reflection on the euphoria of creation, coupled with the fact that the narrator never thought again of the writing, sets up an interesting dichotomy of writing that is both a device to record and to forget. This passage also gives an insight into the overall quotidian nature of much of Proust’s writing. To him, the subject is less important than being liberated from the fixation of memory and perception. By writing on a subject, the narrator is able to free himself of the subject and continue.
– Hugh Ferguson
In another scene, the narrator’s interactions with M. de Norpois are equally illuminating. While talking to the narrator, M. de Norpois rudely criticizes the narrator's love of Bergotte while deftly undermining the narrator's shared bit of writing as well: "Now that I'm aware of your quite excessive admiration for Bergotte, I can appreciate better that little thing you showed me before dinner, about which, by the way, the less said the better" (Grieve 46). Norpois then weaves this criticism in with a broader argument against writers in general. He denigrates Bergotte's writing by calling it mundane and insubstantial:
the idea of that clever fellow who once said that the only acquaintance
one should have with writers is through their books. I defy you to find an
individual who is more unlike his books than Bergotte – he's so
pretentious, so solemn, so uncongenial!
(Grieve 47)
And yet, Norpois seems to be a poor reader of character, especially of himself. While Norpois classifies a well-read man as being "pretentious" and "pompous,” he fails to note that these adjectives most readily apply to himself.
– Catherine Ashley Fairchild Perloff
Proust speaks directly about the function of reading as a method for parsing out human experience through simplification and dramatization:
A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him . . . he remains
opaque . . . If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small
section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of
feeling any emotion . . . The novelist's happy discovery was to think of
substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit,
their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can
assimilate to itself.
(Swann's Way)
Fiction and artifice give human beings the opportunity to trim the fat off of their daily lives down to what is essential and significant. The narrator posits that we are incapable of bearing the weight of daily life and must experience a lighter, selected version of our lives in order to get at the truth of our own experience. There are many points in “Combray” in which a character experiences the “lie” of an artifice more deeply and empathetically than the reality which it depicts. This is made evident with Francoise, the maid of the narrator’s aunt, who is deeply moved by news of distant misfortune but steely when she comes closer to the reality: “the tears which flowed from her in torrents when she read of the misfortunes of persons unknown to her, in a newspaper, were quickly stemmed once she had been able to form a more accurate mental picture of the victims.”
– Dante Kanter