PROUST ENCORE

A Past Self Meets Other Past Selves

For the first time in a long time, as part of a larger essay I hope to someday write, I turned back to Proust. "Turning back" is a bit misleading because all I have with me here in Lisbon is the first volume of the old Vintage edition of C.K. Scott Moncrieff's translation—the one with the runic art nouveau motifs— and which I here confess to never having read. In college and graduate school, I'd swotted through the original French, sometimes resorting to the more literal D.J. Enright revised translation as occasional crib; then I'd read parts of Lydia Davis's retranslation alongside the French with a small salon of Proustians back in my Philadelphia days. So, in a way, I was coming to it fresh, and in another way I was returning via a different path to some familiar haunts.

In French, I find Proust's language, even the famous long and breathless sentences, to be a remarkable synthesis of economy and expansion. Nothing feels unnecessary, even—especially— as he does go on and on. The monumental undertaking of reading Proust inheres in the book being both very long and a slow read. Sometimes unraveling a paragraph makes for a good day's reading. His translators mostly end up choosing one aspect or the other of the duality. Davis emphasizes the economy—no surprise—so that her The Way By Swann's can feel almost rushed. Moncrieff's older, "original" translation achieves expansiveness by means of what now feels like mannered, lofty diction. People in the UK who like to say they prefer Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time to Remembrances of Things Past aren’t just being contrarian or jingoistic: they’re either comparing an original work of English prose with a translated one or comparing the experience of reading in a native language with an acquired one.

The filter however is important for what follows: What I want to describe most likely only could have happened to me now because I was reading "through" translation—I'd like to insist on this more accurate prepositional phrase. I was reading the opening of the second act of "Within a Budding Grove," in which Marcel, in recovery from the disappointment of his adolescent love for Gilberte Swann, arrives for the first time at the seaside resort of Balbec, in the company of his grandmother. There's an essayistic overture that I'll return to in a bit, but we are soon off on the journey to Normandy by train. A thicket of descriptions and perceptions of the train ride make Marcel seem at once much older and very much younger than the character's age at this point in the novel—about 15 or 16—and I was making my way through them when I stopped on this rather innocuous, sentimental passage:

“An old ticket collector came to ask for our tickets, I was charmed by the silvery gleam that shone from the metal buttons of his tunic. I wanted to ask him to sit down beside us. But he passed on to the next carriage and I thought with longing of the life led by railwaymen for whom, since they spent all their time on the line, hardly a day could pass without their seeing this old collector.”

Here my own memory stirred: I was a child of about six or seven years old traveling to the mainline suburbs of Philadelphia with my mother to visit my grandmother. The railway conductors, as my mother called them then—no mere "ticket collectors"—were just these kind of charmed and charming beings—I don't recall silvery metal buttons but the flash of the metal hole puncher they used when they took our tickets, the clicking sound it made up and down the car in counter-rhythm with the chukka-chukka of the train wheels. They also had a swagger or gravitas. They'd chat familiarly with certain regular passengers, almost sitting down with them, and one of them used to intone each passenger's stop to the whole car as he returned the ticket, "Trenton, Philadelphia 30th Street, Bryn Mawr, St. David's, Ardmore, Paoli."

Like many boys, I was also a sucker for uniforms of various kinds. I even liked sanitation worker overalls. There was something exciting about these train conductor clothes—the dark suit, the shiny-brimmed forage-style cap with the flashy Amtrak red, white, and blue insignia, the vest with useful slashed pockets, also occasionally adorned with pins or buttons—I think on one of the trips I was given one, perhaps belonging to the railway workers union. Exciting is probably the wrong word—reassuring is more like it: I could be an anxious traveler, as I could also be an anxious child. The conductor was a living reassurance that we were on the right track, a confirmation of our eventual arrival at what seemed an impossibly far off destination. Even the name that they shared with baton-wielding orchestra leaders—figures much venerated by my parents—promised authority, safety, trust...

I hadn't thought about my earliest impressions of Amtrak train conductors in years. Really, I hadn't thought about them at all. They weren't even thoughts. They had been locked away somewhere. Now courtesy of this little passage of Proust I was having a full-on re-experience of what it felt like to be that child again. A Proustian experience, one might say.

Except, crucially, at least on first appearance, this is not how Proust says involuntary memory works and not how his own involuntary recalls proceed. We experience involuntary memory through sensual cues that are irretrievable by ordinary means, not in the intellect, not by reading books written by other people.

In the little essay that precedes the train journey, Proust offers a restatement of his work's major memory dynamics. The narrator begins by acknowledging he has almost entirely overcome his heartbreak over Gilberte but that in doing so he lost a self. The self that loved Gilberte is not the self that he is now. New habits have been laid down. And the self is nothing but a habit, or set of habits, i.e. clothes, like the ticket collector's uniforms. The transformation, however, is not complete and is indeed never quite completed. We retain a way of remaining in touch with these former selves, never quite wholly dead, but not the same as us, but only thanks to our capacity for forgetting physical or sensual memories of the past:

"The better part of our memories exists outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever in short we happen upon what our mind, having no use for, had rejected...Outside us? Within us, rather, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the person that we were, place ourselves in relation to things as he was placed, suffer anew because we are no longer ourselves but he, and because he loved what now leaves us indifferent."

If we ever want to remember something truly, we must risk it all by truly forgetting. There are no half-measures. Then Proust gives a summation but by way of a real mind-bending simile: "In the broad daylight of our habitual memory, the images of the past turn gradually pale and fade out of sight, nothing remains of them, we shall never recapture them...Or rather we should never recapture them had not a few words been carefully locked away in oblivion, just as an author deposits in the National Library a copy of a book which might otherwise become unobtainable."

The author who puts the book in the Bibliothèque Nationale is not doing so because they fear they will not remember having written it or what the book contains but for the sake of posterity, future generations, which is to say other readers, other minds, wholly separate beings. Proust's ideas of memory here (and maybe this is Bergson's too, I don't know, to be honest) imply that we consist of a multiplicity of selves that are only irregularly in relation to each other. The self who loved Gilberte is not the self traveling to Balbec, but there exist channels of secret sympathies between them, and uniquely only them. The image he settles on to explain this relationship is that of a book that is both hidden and stored in a national library that anyone can read, a book not unlike the one called À la Recherche Du Temps Perdu" or Remembrances of Things Past.

So, in this non-obvious way, Proust anticipates the possibility that a person could have an involuntary memory experience by reading Proust, even if the trigger is somehow related only to an encounter with someone else's words on the page. The simile then does more than an ordinary simile: Not only are our richest memories like a book written by some other person that has been put into an archive with the hope that it might be one day retrievable, but the reverse also holds: a book written by some wholly other person that has been put into an archive might some day serve to awaken what lies forgotten in us.¹

All the same, it's not enough for me to think that I'd been restored to my feelings about Amtrak train conductors around 1981 only because I read a similar passage in a novel that takes the recovery of lost sensations as its major theme. Some kind of suggestion was at play: I had been quite literally hypnotized by the intentionally hypnotic description that immediately precedes the arrival of the ticket collector. Marcel is staring at the train car’s blue window-shade until no other color exists and the window shade prefigures the view of the ocean to come. Also it was lulling me to sleep as I read. But I think too there was some kind of sensory or sensual trigger on my end; I wasn’t only receiving. I shouldn't neglect the ways my experience very much arose from dynamics of involuntary memory Proust describes in his own case.

My childhood memories of riding the now discontinued "Paoli Local" line had indeed been obliviated. It wasn't just by the ordinary passage of time, but exactly by a new set of habits. For years of my adult life I lived in Philadelphia and commuted to New York City on various versions of the same regional train that had once brought me to the sleepy suburban station where my grandmother would be waiting for us. Whatever excitement, whatever adventure, whatever anxiety I felt as a child on those trips with my mother was effaced by a new routine, by the technology that replaced the glittering hole punchers with electronic scanners with red eyes, the warm yellow light of the train cars with bright white LEDS, the danger and adventure of travel by the discourse of "commuting," replete with maturer, boring reflections on the decline of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor service alongside steep price increases.

There was also the whole stultified and arrested landscape of post-industral American life that I witnessed along the route itself. The same ruined factories, chop shops, abandoned hulks of cars that frightened and awed me as a child remained in place, decades later. I defended myself against this vision of life at a standstill by making sure I was reading or grading or texting, both looking and not looking, because I feared that these now immemorial ruins had contaminated my own life with their stasis and stagnation, had settled over my ambitions like a pall or a curse.

Maybe it was by changing scene completely that I was able to recover what I'd lost; and then again only in this multi-translated form: Not the Northeast Corridor, not even Paris, but Lisbon, where I would never in a million years have expected myself to end up; not myself, not Proust, but a self shared with Proust and Moncrieff, plus all the Proustians I'd known and studied with. If I'd been reading in French, chances are my mind would have been too focused on untangling the syntax and the meaning to let itself subside into impressions and associations.

Nevertheless the French was there, in ghost form. In the original, the section I was reading is called "Nom de Pays: Le Pays," which Moncrieff gives as "Place Names: The Place." The French meaning contains country, lands, territory, region, or one could even say "zone." I prefer the French, since it connects us to land and landscape and also that process through which we, alongside young Marcel, find ourselves by losing ourselves—a dépaysement that is more complete than a simple Freudian or English "displacement." To be depaysé is to suffer a transformational loss of "the home-like" and habitual. It could be exile or expatriation or just knocked off one’s bearings, adrift. I wouldn't say I was consciously homesick or heartsick while reading this longtime companion of my literary life for the first time in this other country. I only remember now, in writing this sentence, a recent ex-girlfriend's proposal that we jointly read In Search of Lost Time at a point when it seemed we might get back together. None of that. I was just letting myself go.

1. We could really expand Proust’s theory of multiple selves and identities and suggest that by reading the book our various selves merge with Proust’s selves and all the selves who read that book into a common body—a genderless fraternity, as it were—of reader/writer selves: And this is in fact a good definition of what reading is…We gain a self that is both not ourself and ourself NOW. This is a separate essay.