Marcel Proust’s View from the Persecutor’s Side

For the first-time reader of In Search of Lost Time, Proust’s sinuous sentences can feel convoluted and even taxing, demanding—without due cause—such a sustained attention that editions of Proust’s masterpiece released “for the modern reader” should be equipped with a medicinal preface that contains a filled prescription for Ritalin. This is greatness? 3,400 snobbish pages of authentique Belle Époque aestheticism? Ribbon after satin ribbon of pretentious, purple prose, twisted sadistically into knots of solipsistic self-reference?

In his Introduction to Brian Nelson’s new translation of Du Côte de Chez Swann, the first of the seven-volume À la recherche du temps perdu (Oxford University Press is slowly releasing fresh renderings of each novel, with Charlotte Mandell’s In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom due out in 2025), series editor Adam Watt alerts us to the Search’s challenge by way of identifying its genius: although The Swann Way is an account of the protagonist’s childhood, “we find ourselves plunged into the recollections and reminiscences of the adult narrator,” who, reflecting on the past “from positions of varying distance,” shifts his perspective repeatedly so that, “at times the voice that speaks is noticeably mature and worldly wise, at others it has the naïve and unworldly qualities of the youthful protagonist at the time of events portrayed,” negotiating how such a separable self can claim the same name: I.[1]

What if the sinuous subordinate clauses, separated, here and there, by merciful commas, are not random ruminations fished from “stream of consciousness,” but, rather, a carefully curated cathedral of prose that builds—brick by arch by stained glass window, an ascent from the nave to the vaulted ceiling before scaling, slowly, back to the marble floor—a giant cathedral of time? Proust, says the novelist Muriel Spark, advanced “a method of apprehending eternity through our senses, analogous to [the] sacramental understanding of eternity by faith,” and in so doing he restores the near-extinct “conception of matter which is hierarchical (all material forms possessing an ultimate eternal light.)”[2] In “The Religion of an Agnostic,” she suggests that “only a materialistic conception of Time—a strictly chronological one—could have obliterated that understanding of matter” which acknowledges outward and changing forms to be invisibly and peculiarly ‘possessed,’ each after its own kind a spiritual embodiment.”[3] And only a rare talent like Proust’s can rebuild it.

In his recent little book The Time Has Grown Short: René Girard, or the Last Law, Benoît Chantre contends that though Proust’s protagonist only transcends time with full profundity in the very last of the seven volumes, all the while the child we have been following, “is ageless; he is already adult and potentially in thrall to the illusions of desire.”[4] As Watt would have it, he alternates between both—the perspective of enthrallment and of purged detachment. The connection between suffering and sacramental time is evident in the nature of the protagonist’s creative agony.[5] “He who recaptures his childhood,” says Chantre, “manages this only after having wasted a great deal of time, at the end of a long and painful initiation.” When sickness, said Proust, “like a harsh spiritual director, caused me to die to the social world, it did me a good service for if the seed does not die after it is sown it will remain alone and will not bear much fruit.”[6] As he remembers his life after the seed’s death, he finds a “state of beatitude and communion” scattered throughout even the pains of the past, and this linkage of blessedness and prior agonies gives form to Proust’s sinuous sentences “in the flash of memory, in a ‘fragment of time in the pure state’ produced by the artwork’s temporal synthesis.”[7]

For Chantre, Proust’s synthesis of time is similar to that of the Church Fathers who read the Hebrew Bible searching for types of Christ, linking the Old Testament to the New in a mode of “figural anticipation (or expectation). The manna given to the Hebrews in the desert prefigures the Eucharist, the ‘suffering servant’ in Isaiah announces Christ, etc.”[8] This manner of seeing history uncovers a “temporal synthesis between a moment of the biblical past and a moment of the messianic present,” tearing “the one who operates this synthesis from the slavery of time: this synthesis is the prelude to the eruption of kairos—the critical or appointed moment—as an instant of eternity.”

Memory, says St. Bonaventure, is an image of eternity, because in recalling several time signatures at once it anticipates the instantaneous and indivisible eternal. Further, remembrances of things past possess a kind of permanence. Think of how hellish it can be to have a horrific happening seared into your memory apparently perennially. So harsh is the staying power of our bad recollections that we strive to rewrite our relationship to the past, editing out guilt as far as we are able. Think of how, on the contrary, just one solitary blessed reminiscence can counter a litany of current sufferings. Proust, who read Dostoevsky carefully, would have remembered Alyosha’s speech at the end of Brothers Karamazov: “You must know that there is nothing higher, or stronger, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory, especially a memory from childhood, from the parental home.”[9] Alyosha wagers everything on commemoration: were someone to “store up many such memories to take into life, then he is saved for his whole life.” A holy memory, preserved with reverence, may “serve some day for our salvation.”[10] According to a strictly psychological or merely materialistic account of memory, these pinpoints of our previous selves would lack sufficient substance, power, persistence: they would be dead matter passing like atoms over the abysmal void of time past.

Whereas Spark finds in Proust all the marks of a “deeply religious” writer sans “a moral sense and a faith,” the great novelist’s sacramental portrayal of time can also facilitate a profound examination of conscience by inviting us to explore the strange and sometimes humiliating relations of our present to our past selves. More than a temporal figuration of the eternal, Proust’s Search is profoundly moral. In Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, René Girard teases out the connection between chronology and morality: “in the quarrel which puts him in opposition to his rival, the subject reverses the logical and chronological order of desires in order to hide his imitation.”[11] Often we place ourselves in a position of reflective distance in order to pretend that we have moved past our prior, more pathetic ways of being. I used to be so cruel and haughty, but now I am a statue of humility. I used to be obsessed with honor and recognition, but now I have moved on—fully—to the point that the person who I used to be seems preposterous. It is a source of pleasure, this comparison of our present, superior (and perhaps even permanent) condition to our prior, more pathetic selves. Proust, on the contrary, has an uncanny capacity to put himself, his narrator, and the reader on the “persecutor’s side.” By tracing the arc from childhood inaction to the “mature” rationalization of the same injustice, Proust invites us to assume the side of the persecutor, to pass through the pleasant pain by which we can really reckon with our disordered desires.

The moral dimension of Proust’s magnum opus gains magnificence thanks to the 2018 discovery of the novel’s early drafts; hidden among private papers for generations, The Seventy-Five Folios were translated into English for the first time in 2023.[12] In the Folios the narrator is filled with paranoid delusions—“I felt persecuted by her and by my father who was preventing me from going with her.”[13] By the time Proust refines his childhood torments into the final novel, this feeling of victimhood is treated with ironic distance rather than indulgence. Marcel is not the victim of his parents’ various acts of forbiddance. Except when used satirically, the sense of “persecution,” repeated by both Marcel and his brother in the Folio—and always in relation to themselves—is scrubbed from the final novel’s just sentences and reserved for the grandmother who, as we will see, is a kind of figura of Christ.

It is impossible to render the total effect, the marriage of form and meaning, chronology and morality, without submitting to the passage in full:

My poor grandmother would come in and implore her husband not to drink the cognac; he would get angry and gulp it down despite her, and she would go out again saddened and discouraged but smiling, for she was so humble of spirit and so sweet that her love for others and her lack of concern for herself and her own torments came together in a smile which, unlike those seen on the faces of so many people, was ironic only towards herself, while for the rest of us kisses seemed to issue from her eyes, for she could never look upon those who were dear to her without wanting to caress them with her gaze. The torment my great-aunt inflicted on her, the sight of my grandmother’s vain entreaties, and of her feeble attempts, doomed in advance, to take the glass away from my grandfather—these were the sorts of things you get so used to in later life that you laugh at them, and take the persecutor’s side unhesitatingly and cheerfully enough to persuade yourself that no persecution is involved at all; at the time, however, they filled me with such horror that I felt like hitting my great-aunt. But as soon as I heard: “’Bathilde! Come and stop your husband from drinking cognac!’, showing myself to be already a man by my cowardice, I did what we all do when we’re grown up and witness suffering and injustice; I chose not to see them; I’d go upstairs to the very top floor next to the schoolroom, right under the roof, and sob by myself in a little room that smelled of orris root and was filled also by the fragrance of a wild blackcurrant bush that had climbed up between the stones of the outside wall and thrust a flowering branch through the half-open window. This room, from which, in the daytime, you could see as far as Roussainville-le-Pin, was intended for more specialized and vulgar use, and for a long time serves as a place of refuge for me, no doubt because it was the only room I was allowed to lock, whenever I engaged in any of the four occupations for which I required absolute privacy: reading, daydreaming, tears, and sensual pleasure. Alas, I didn’t know that, far more than her husband’s little deviation from his regimen, it was my weak will, my delicate health, and the uncertainty they cast on my future, that preyed on my grandmother’s mind in the course of her incessant perambulations, afternoon and evening, when we’d see her lovely face passing hither and thither, tilted towards the sky, showing her brown furrowed cheeks that advancing age had turned almost mauve, like ploughed fields in autumn, and which were concealed, if she was going out, by a half-raised veil, while upon them either the cold or some sad thought invariably left traces of an involuntary tear.[14]

I fear, in the wake of such sublimity, that any attempt to parse out the insights will fall guilty of what Cleanth Brooks called “the heresy of paraphrase,” for the full meaning of Proust cannot be divorced from the form: the style, which circumambulates from one time signature to another, comingling across the years and the several connotations of the same place, all the while showing the subtle ways in which “moral maturation” can mask outright cowardice. The playful reversal reveals our sophisticated capacity to mask our misdemeanors (and maybe even our murderousness) behind self-serving self-portraits. Like a man, at the first sign of grandmother’s victimization the child retreats into his room, but through the ironic justice of remembrance—under the aspect of the image of eternity—a hole in his hideout’s wall opens upon a recurring memory of his pacing grandmother and her suffering face: “unlike those seen on the faces of so many people,” her sanctified smile “was ironic only towards herself.”

As the persecutors age, they redeem their past crimes by the surrogate grace of comic reparation, but the retrospective Marcel puts the question to this suspect solution:

C’était de ces choses à la vue desquelles on s’habitue plus tard jusqu’à les considérer en riant et à prendre le parti du persécuteur assez résolument et gaiement pour se persuader à soi-même qu’il ne s’agit pas de persécution; elles me causaient alors une telle horreur, que j’aurais aimé battre ma grand’tante.[15]

In the gold standard that is C.K. Moncrieff’s translation,

All these were things of the sort to which, in later years, one can grow so accustomed as to smile at them and take the persecutor’s side resolutely and cheerfully enough to persuade oneself that it is not really persecution; but in those days they filled me with such horror that I longed to strike my great-aunt.[16]

Brian Nelson’s new rendering substitutes the second person “you” for “one”: “these were the sorts of things you get so used to in later life that you laugh at them, and take the persecutor’s side unhesitatingly and cheerfully enough to persuade yourself that no persecution is involved at all.” While Moncrieff’s is literally closer to the original French, Nelson’s has the virtue of capturing the total effect of the novel: that the abstract and even academic formality of “one” masks your proclivity to participate in the persecutions of holy innocents.

We need not search far for the centrality of figural Christs in Proust’s magnum opus, as the sacrificial offering begins on the very first page of the Folios. In the earliest extant draft of the persecution scene, like Peter who cut off the guard’s ear in the Agony in the Garden (Matt 26:36-46), Marcel, sensing that “they were going to call out to her, to say unpleasant things that broke my heart,” finds that “in those moments I wanted to kill everyone to avenge her.”[17] Still wearing the smile that “seemed to join in with the other’s taunting of her because she was never angry with anyone,” still indignant not over insults aimed at her but rather over others’ persecutions, “it was as if, coming into the world, she had sacrificed her person and her life.”[18] Marcel’s response when he witnessed her sufferings? The manuscript is bereft of the extraordinary moral insight that we tend to laugh off our talent for “taking the persecutor’s side.” Sometimes Marcel would “run off to the bathroom, my sole refuge at that time, and sob my heart out” without the saving circumambulation across time. But before he retreated into a coward’s restroom, at the very moment he was tempted to vengeance, he would do unto grandma what he desired his mother do for him every evening before bedtime: “rush over and frantically cover her with kisses to console her and to prove that at least someone understood her.”[19]

In The Swann Way, Marcel confesses that the goodnight kiss is a pinnacle of communion with his mother. In a pivotal episode early on in the novel, because Swann is joining the family for dinner, Marcel fears he will be sent away “without my viaticum,” comparing the ritual goodnight kiss to Holy Communion, though in this case—as if to accentuate his desperate straits—he employs the term reserved for the Eucharist as given to a person near or in danger of death (viaticum).[20]

Thanks to The Seventy-Five Folios, we can confirm the preeminence of the goodnight kiss for the genesis of In Search of Lost Time, and there the connection with Holy Communion is even more pronounced:[21]

I would be able to open the memory intact and kept within reach by my intelligence like a Host in which I would find her flesh and her blood, or rather it was one of those modern scientific Hosts that the memory of her cheek resembled, because I broke it and raised it to my lips so that they could rediscover the softness of her cheek, and as in a narcotic pill I found sleep.[22]

The protagonist’s elevation of the kiss to communion makes his kisses for persecuted grandma especially beautiful, but Proust’s removal of this flurry of heroic consolations from the final draft suggests that the Folio version is too self-aggrandizing. Such artful truth-telling is typical of À la recherche du temps. Lecturing from a Soviet Prison camp, Józef Czapski gets at this self-transcendence when he notes in Lost Time that “the cold precision with which, in imperceptible little ways, [Proust] exposed the cruelty of his early years, his own cruelty, well after his mother’s death, is another proof of the extent to which the writer, as his own analyst, was free of all human amour-propre, of all desire to embellish himself or retouch his portrait slightly.”[23] As René Girard has demonstrated in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, it is precisely the “victory over self-centeredness” that is the “crowning moment of novelistic creation.”

As Proust indirectly indicates throughout the whole of In Search of Lost Time, “self-centeredness is a barrier to novelistic creation.”[24] The greatest barrier to artistic creation is also the greatest obstacle to moral and spiritual conversion. But Proust’s protagonist “is none other than Marcel cured of all his errors, who has overcome his desires and is rich with novelistic grace.”[25] In an ironic reversal, this grace gives him the humility to portray his own sins in a purgative manner that invites catharsis. Simultaneously, grandmother’s eternal memory provokes self-recognition in the reader, too, quickening our conversions in the time that remains.

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