My mother’s objections to my reading have changed form as I’ve grown up. When I first became a voracious reader, decimating Harry Potter and half the young adult section in the time it took most of my classmates to choose a novel, she complained about the simplicity of the texts. I received a copy of Anna Karenina when I was eight years old, which I ignored in favour of the latest Rick Riordan release. Time passed, I continued my diet of young adult romances, and there was many a bookstore argument about how I was not applying myself. Last year, however, I chose to start reading the classics, and I loved them. I presume this development would inspire horror and scorn in my younger self, but my pride was no longer a thing I cared about. I started to love reading the kind of book that made me work to get through it for the greater rewards it offered. In a twist of fate, I even finished Anna Karenina eight years after it was gifted to me. This did not prevent my parents from continuing their snark (my father maintains the incorrect stance that I ‘skip read’; picking up every third word if that) but this new reading regimen distracted me from what might have bruised my ego.
Last winter my parents asked me what I wanted for New Year’s (Serbian Orthodox immigrant tradition is to drink on December 25th, then exchange presents on January 1st) and I responded with a list of books. My mother disqualified a few of my choices—Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense because she deemed it too depressing, Joyce’s Ulysses because she termed it a nightmare to read, and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time because it was boring. I thanked her for the books she did purchase, then used my holiday money to order a copy of Swann’s Way. If nothing else, I’m quite talented at being contrary. While I worked through other texts I wanted to read, the novel rested on my shelf, and I opened it about a week ago to delight and awe.
The narrator in Swann’s Way traverses the paths of memory with a light step, landing where he sees fit to take us and allowing his emotions to form the backbone of his travels. Thirty pages at the very beginning of the novel are devoted to his experience waking up. It reminds me of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, another misunderstood work that allows the emotions which colour and change our memory to act as a conduit for storytelling. If you want clear, cohesive plots, concise, sturdy prose, grand action, and a simple moral at the end, you are not going to enjoy Swann’s Way. If you are willing to give Proust a chance to impress you, you just might love it.
One famous episode contained in this novel is a scene of the narrator craving a good night’s kiss from his mother. Pages upon pages are devoted to the evening where he fears he will be without the comfort of her presence, his emotions detailed with the same fastidiousness one might ascribe to the specifications of a computer. This is one of the most important moments of the narrator’s childhood, determined not by the significance of his life but by what he felt then. It wasn’t a war, or some accomplishment of objective normality, but rather the intensity of a formative night. He remembers his life by his own value system, by the involuntary waves of remembrance that crest up and down as the story proceeds, by love. Life is remembered by the love contained within it, as messy and complex as Swann’s Way proves it to be.
Our entire lives are predicated on the changing nature of our memories. When we are children, we may see the denial of a dessert or a strict bedtime as proof that our parents are cruel people; then we grow up to realize that the decisions made were in our best interest. Whose interpretation of reality is correct? The child who experiences anguish at an unsatisfied desire, or the adult who knows discipline was the best route? Perhaps the answer is inconclusive, perhaps it will continue to transform as our perspective does. What we remember defines our reality, and to some degree creates it.
Proust also makes the case for the constructed existence of other people. We only know others as far as the construction we create of them, perhaps updating our perceptions in terms of minute details but remaining true to our outlook on who they are. This is why the relatives and friends of an unassuming criminal react with denial and horror when they learn of what he has done. “Not my son,” his mother will perhaps insist, “Alexei isn’t the type.” The type his mother has created of him does not gel with the type of person he has become, and she cannot move past her memory of his innocence to accept the present—which deviates from her understanding of him.
I do not suggest that there is no objectivity, only that there is a lapse in our ability to understand A hundred people can stroll through the same green field during a summer’s day and come away with entirely different impressions. The sun’s shine was dimmer for the one who learned their beloved sibling had passed away; the light was more radiant for the one who was kissed for the first time. When we search for lost time we are looking for the spaces between our recollections, the seam between reality and our remembrance of it. There is the possibility, of course, that we are looking for something that cannot be found.