Thomas Mann, characteristically self-absorbed, believed The Magic Mountain should “be read not once but twice,” like a symphony, which first reveals its “thematic material” and then its “symbolic and allusive formulas.” The comparison to a symphony is exaggerated but Mann had a point. A second reading reveals details a first reading may well have missed and can help one understand his complex novel better.
Proust, of course, never said so, but In Search of Lost Time, too, must be read twice—but with a difference. Though nothing compels you to read Mann again, Proust gives you no choice. Read prospectively, the novel describes the narrator’s meanderings through “frivolous pleasures, in indolence, in tenderness, in unhappiness,” in quest of his writerly vocation, which he only discovers as the book ends. Once he does, he realizes that “all [the] materials for a work of literature were simply my past life.” His past life? But that’s exactly what we have been reading all along! Read retrospectively, the very same pages that describe his failure now embody his success. Mann wrote a single work that may deserve to be read twice; Proust, two-works-in-one that compel a Janus-like reading.
“Marcel” recounts his social life, his love affairs, his sicknesses, his travels, everything that stands between him and writing—all these are parts of time lost or wasted. But so, as importantly, are the times he fails to realize that the substance of his book is already at hand and misses its significance.
One of these times occurs during a childhood walk in the country on a rainy day. When the sun comes out, the beauty of the landscape dazzles him: “I cried out to myself in my enthusiasm, brandishing my furled umbrella, ‘Zut, zut, zut, zut.’ But at the same time I felt I was in duty bound not to stop at these opaque words, but to try to see more clearly into my rapture.” And yet he doesn’t.
Like the hawthorns along Swann’s way and the trees near Balbec, the landscape fills the boy with a joy whose source seems to lie beyond his grasp, a mysterious feeling that leaves him, as his exclamation shows, frustrated and dissatisfied. But the confusion is not only his own. We are as much in the dark, and equally frustrated: What produces his “rapture” at the landscape? Why can’t he fathom the hawthorns’ “inexhaustible charm”? Why does his “happiness” at seeing the trees remain “incomplete”? As long as these questions haunt Marcel, they haunt us as well; we also miss what he misses—and when eventually he discovers it, we do too. Although it is unlikely to spark our own work of art, it may help us understand better how our own life passes by unnoticed, how much of our experience is overlooked and our own time, sadly, lost.
The confusion begins to lift when, much later, an older Marcel realizes “that it is only a clumsy and erroneous form of perception which places everything in the object, when really everything is in the mind.” The boy had failed to see that his happiness wasn’t due to “the object,” the landscape itself, but to “the mind”—his experience as described in his own clear, articulate, and beautiful terms. It is a brilliant trick: Proust writes as if the landscape’s features are independently there, passively observed by the boy, the object of his experience rather than its content, his seeing it (and, eventually, his ability to write about it) in such beautiful terms. His experience slips by unnoticed, both by him and by us. Only in retrospect is the landscape’s account seen as a record of the boy’s experience, the source of his rapture, recaptured in the book he has not yet begun but which he has already finished.
This becomes clear when the steeples of Martinville and Vieuxvicq, which seem to dance around one another in the distance, suffuse the boy with both a “special pleasure” and an uneasy sense of something “which they seemed at once to contain and to conceal.” Here, though, something follows that makes his pleasure overwhelming: “What they had concealed…became apparent; a thought came into my mind…framing itself in words in my head…I could no longer think of anything else.”
Strangely, although he doesn’t admit to himself that his revelation was verbal—which is why he fails to find it in his other experiences and why he repeatedly says that he forgot it—he feels compelled to write those words down then and there. The “little fragment” he reproduces is in fact the earliest written piece of his novel (also the earliest published, later, in Le Figaro) and it constitutes exactly what the steeples “concealed”: the articulated ex-pression of his experience. His pleasure is caused by his inchoate sense of the “invisible vocation of which this book is the history.” Not seeing his creation for what it is or (same thing) what it will become—part of his book—the boy keeps looking beyond it. No more than a fleeting impression, his experience slips by, the time it happened lost, forgotten, and wasted.
Lost? Forgotten? Wasted? Not really. Fleeting impressions, “shapes for whose meaning I searched in my brain…church steeples or wild grass growing on a wall” remain “stored…up without divining the purpose for which they were destined.” They, and the time lost with them, can be reclaimed—but only through art and the stirrings of involuntary memory: “This life that we live in half-darkness can be illumined…restored to its true pristine shape…a life, in short, can be realized within the confines of a book.” His meanderings are no longer idle: Marcel is himself the matter of his book.
Time lost and time regained are one; what was a narrative of failure turns out to have been the record of success; the book he is about to write is the novel we have already read. How can that which has not yet become be what it has always been? I am tempted to say that In Search of Lost Time is an exquisitely detailed expansion of Nietzsche’s paradoxical injunction, “Become who you are.”
Alexander Nehamas is Carpenter Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at Princeton and author, most recently, of On Friendship. He holds the Chair of the History of Philosophy at the Academy of Athens.