How Proust Can Change Your Life

And a personal imprint is not only more beautiful, it is also a good deal more authentic. Trying to sound like Chateaubriand or Victor Hugo when you are in fact the literary editor of La Revue de Paris implies a singular lack of concern with capturing what is distinctive about being Louis Ganderax, much as attempting to sound like the archetypal bourgeois Parisian young woman (“I don’t have money to burn”; “You really are the limit!”), when you are in fact a particular young woman called Albertine, involves flattening your identity to fit a constrained social envelope. If, as Proust suggests, we are obliged to create our own language, it is because there are dimensions to ourselves absent from clichés, which require us to flout etiquette in order to convey with greater accuracy the distinctive timbre of our thought.

The need to leave a personal imprint on language is rarely more evident than in the personal sphere. The better we know someone, the more the standard name they bear comes to seem inadequate, and the greater the desire to twist theirs into a new one, so as to reflect our awareness of their particularities. Proust’s name on his birth certificate was Valentin Louis Georges Eugene Marcel Proust, but because this was a dry mouthful, it was appropriate that those closest to him molded it into something more suited to who Marcel was for them. For his beloved mother, he was “mon petit jaunet” (my little yellow one), or “mon petit serin” (my little canary), or “mon petit benêt” (my little clod), or “mon petit nigaud” (my little oaf). He was also known as “mon pauvre loup” (my poor wolf), “petit pauvre loup” (poor little wolf), and “le petit loup” (the little wolf—Madame Proust called Marcel’s brother, Robert, “mon autre loup,” which gives us a sense of family priorities). To his friend Reynaldo Hahn, Proust was “Buncht” (and Reynaldo “Bunibuls”); to his friend Antoine Bibesco, Proust was “Lecram” and, when he got too friendly, “le Flagorneur” (the toady) or, when not straight enough, “le Saturnien.” At home, he wanted his maid to refer to him as “Missou” and he would call her “Plouplou.”

If Missou, Buncht, and the petit jaunet are endearing symbols of the way new words and phrases can be constructed to capture new dimensions of a relationship, then confusing Proust’s name with someone else’s looks like a sadder symbol of a reluctance to expand a vocabulary to account for the variety of the human species. To people who didn’t know Proust very well, rather than making his name more personal, they had a depressing tendency to give him another name altogether, that of a far more famous contemporary writer, Marcel Prévost. “I am totally unknown,” specified Proust in 1912. “When readers write to me at Le Figaro after an article, which happens rarely, the letters are forwarded to Marcel Prévost, for whom my name seems to be no more than a misprint.”

Using a single word to describe two different things (the author of In Search of Lost Time and the author of The Strong Virgins) suggests a disregard for the world’s real diversity which bears comparison with that shown by the cliché user. A person who invariably describes heavy rain with the phrase “Il pleut des cordes” can be accused of neglecting the real diversity of rain showers, much as the person who calls every writer whose name begins with P and ends in t Monsieur Prévost can be accused of neglecting the real diversity of literature.

So if speaking in clichés is problematic, it is because the world itself contains a far broader range of rainfalls, moons, sunshines, and emotions than stock expressions either capture or teach us to expect.

Proust’s novel is filled with people who behave in un-stock ways. It is, for example, a conventional belief about family life that old aunts who love their family will entertain benevolent daydreams about them. But Proust’s aunt Léonie loves her family greatly, and it doesn’t stop her from deriving pleasure in involving them in the most macabre scenarios. Confined to her bed on account of a host of imaginary ailments, she is so bored with life that she longs for something exciting to happen to her, even if it should be something terrible. The most exciting thing she can imagine is a fire that would leave no stone of her house standing and would kill her entire family, but from which she herself would have plenty of time to escape. She would then be able to mourn her family affectionately for many years, and cause universal stupefaction in her village by getting out of bed to conduct the obsequies, crushed but courageous, moribund but erect.