Marcel Proust

“Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument
that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book,
he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”
Marcel Proust

Like Joyce’s Ulysses, Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time is a mountain of Modernism that many people aspire to read and then fail. The full Salon Study of this massive book – broken down into manageable sections – involves two-and-a-half years of reading together. Most participants stay the course and find the work immensely satisfying.

Having led a number of such journeys, Literary Salon Director Toby Brothers says simply “My own time in Proust has changed the way I understand my relationship to the world of art and experience.”

Here is how one Salonista describes the pleasure and work of reading Proust: “This is a velvet jewel of a book that demands the attention of a lover full of enchantment and obsession, we need not get impatient as all good lovers perfect their art in taking their time.”

Reading Proust teaches the reader to observe how the world is experienced, to be aware that although humans are tempted to give greater weight to the perceptual universe, it is the entwining of memory, idealized experience (dreams) and relationships with what our senses perceive that moulds our consciousness.

Proust also uses his curious and attentive narrator to uncover the ombre – the part of the self that hides in the shade or shadow. As we come to know the characters in the narrator’s world, each turns out to have aspects that reveal a savagery or laziness or discrepancy that was not what appeared on the surface. Of course, as soon as Proust reflects this to the reader, we recognize this truth of human nature: all carry a shadow, an untoward or simply unmanageable part of the self that we struggle to contain. In Proust’s world, these aspects are equally a part of the coherent self. This has me thinking a great deal about how carefully we construct the social self – and how we temper what simmers beneath the surface.