Is the ISOLT an incoherent, unreadable word jumble? 

10- Proustaverses 

The ISOLT is an impenetrable fog with no plot or storyline, it comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. The whole work is a word jumble of a bedridden sick dandy who pours out page after page more or less at random from his pen in an ode to snobbery, while impressionistically dissecting the idle (‘oisif’) but declining aristocracy in exaggerated detail. 

The book is a bulimic accumulation of hundreds of characters, many of whom are barely or not at all or sketched in cardboard and who are presented in an incoherent number of pages without beginning, middle or end. 

The ISOLT is a gigantic book that makes it impossible for the reader to remember everything that happens and who does what. This book is also written in endless long sentences where the end is so far on the page that you have already forgotten the beginning. The Reader needs a map and compass to – with a lot of puzzle work and patience – try to make sense of it, if at all possible. 

10- Proustophiles 

The ISOLT is a tightly directed construction of which the first and last parts are written at the same time. The opening and closing sentences were the first to be finished. The rest has been added and the whole has then been ‘fabricated’ like a Cubist collage7

Large parts of the ISOLT run synchronously with the Belle Epoque and Impressionism. Many famous impressionists appear with their canvases in the art encyclopedia that the ISOLT is, and they are ‘assembled’ in the character of the painter Elstir. The impressionistic work with undefined color patches that presents reality as an impression is in no way comparable to the precise word palette that Proust wields. 

In the meticulous construction, different storylines run through and alongside each other. Overarching is a circular structure, which, as we will discuss in detail later8, de facto forms an Infinity Loop, a Möbius strip: the Narrator wants to become a writer, becomes so frustrated by it as a young man that he gives up the pen and throws himself into the mondaine life to later lose himself in the relationship with Albertine. The Narrator realizes that he has lost a lot of time with this and withdraws into an institution for years. When he comes out of it, he has an epiphany and realizes that only Art can bring back the lost time. He decides to finally become a Writer and write the book that the Reader has just finished reading. From the famous opening sentence ‘Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure’ the Reader is drawn into the maelstrom of developments until he knows the book is finished 3200 pages later with the words ‘-dans le Temps’. What began between 1909 and 1913 with two volumes ends in 1922 in seven interwoven books that together form the Proustian multiverse. 

Why seven volumes? Seven days in a week? Seven notes on a staff? The Pleiades, the seven nymph daughters of Atlas and Pleione from Greek mythology, already mentioned by Homer? The star cluster ‘The Seven Sisters’? The holy number 7 from the Bible that denotes perfection? Seven letters in MProust? … 

Through the grandeur of the seven ISOLT cantatas, Proust does not want to provide impressions but rather to make an impression. 

Characters with varying degrees of importance populate the galaxy that the ISOLT evokes. Suns such as the Narrator, Swann, Charlus, Albertine are surrounded by moons such as Odette de Crecy, Mme ‘La Patronne’ Verdurin, La Duchesse de Guermantes, Françoise. Around them orbit satellites such as la Grandmère, Tante Léonie, Jupien, de Norpois, Legrandin, Andrée, Forcheville and other lesser gods. Around them orbit dozens of passers-by, minor characters who create the context in which Time – as the engine of the Möbius strip – plays the leading role. 

And yet the most central figure, the black hole around which the galaxy of the ISOLT dances a slow waltz through Time, is the Reader. 

En réalité, chaque lecteur est, quand il lit, le propre lecteur de soi-même. 

Marcel Proust, Le Temps Retrouvé  

Pleiade, Ed. Clarac p. 911 

The variety of themes, the layering of recurring and ever-changing characters, the rhythmic alternation of long musical sentences with short, powerful interjections, induce a hypnotic trance that concentrates the Reader’s attention. Surprising and sudden turns create a ‘pulling-in effect’ so that the Reader remains captivated to discover the developments of scenes and characters.  

It also seems as if the Writer Proust has even incorporated obstacles into the ISOLT to distinguish His True Reader from the dilettante who gives up after a too long sentence, a too foggy reflection, an intertextual mysteriousness, a filigree description of an evening, etc. 

However, the reward is great for the persevering Reader who, once accustomed to Proust’s musical style, lets himself drift on and into the ocean of beauty. It is a consolation that not every sentence, every twist and turn, every insightful essayistic paragraph, every intertextual link in and outside the actual text must be fully understood in order to enjoy it. 

The fact that this masterpiece exceeds human memory capacity is a gift. On a first reading, the Reader discovers step by step a coherence and layering that deepens as the reading progresses. With each subsequent reading, more and more secrets and cross-connections are revealed, offered as gifts and encouragement to keep reading. 

  • Who perseveres knows he is rewarded.   
  • Who keeps persevering gradually discovers the Proustian universe.   
  • Who reads and continues to (re)read becomes a Proustophile.   

Conclusion 

For they (i.e., the Readers) would not be, according to me, my readers, but their own readers, my book being only a kind of magnifying glasses like those that the Combray optician held out to a buyer; my book, thanks to which I would provide them with the means to read in themselves. 

Marcel Proust, Le Temps Retrouvé  

Pleiade, Ed. Clarac p. 1033 

Just as Life has become a novel, so his Novel has become his whole life. Marcel Proust has mixed all possible aspects of his life, his relationships, events, the work of Time on all that in an oceanic cocktail, seasoned it and then elevated it to a timeless masterpiece.