How Proust Can Change Your Life

In speaking, Albertine kept her head motionless and her nostrils pinched, and scarcely moved her lips. The result of this was a drawling, nasal sound, into the composition of which there entered perhaps a provincial heredity, a juvenile affectation of British phlegm, the teaching of a foreign governess and a congestive hypertrophy of the mucus of the nose. This enunciation which, as it happened, soon disappeared when she knew people better, giving place to a girlish tone, might have been thought unpleasant. But to me it was peculiarly delightful. Whenever I had gone for several days without seeing her, I would refresh my spirit by repeating to myself: “We don’t ever see you playing golf,” with the nasal intonation in which she had uttered the words, point blank, without moving a muscle of her face. And I thought then that there was no one in the world so desirable

.

It is difficult when reading the description of a fictional character not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintance whom he or she most closely, if often unexpectedly, resembles. It has, for example, proved impossible for me to separate Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes from the image of the fifty-five-year-old stepmother of an ex-girlfriend, even though this unsuspecting lady speaks no French, has no title, and lives in Devon. What is more, when Proust’s hesitant, shy character Saniette asks if he can visit the narrator in his hotel in Balbec, the proud defensive tone with which he masks his friendly intentions seems exactly that of an old college acquaintance of mine who had a manic habit of never putting himself in a situation where he might encounter rejection.

“You don’t happen to know what you’ll be doing in the next few days, because I will probably be somewhere in the neighborhood of Balbec? Not that it makes the slightest difference, I just thought I’d ask,” says Saniette to the narrator, though it could equally well have been Philip proposing plans for an evening.

How helpful of Proust to remark that “one cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love.” It lends respectability to a habit of imagining that Albertine, last seen walking in Balbec with her brilliant laughing eyes and black polo cap, bears a striking resemblance to my girlfriend Kate, who has never read Proust and prefers George Eliot, or Marie-Claire after a difficult day.

Kate/Albertine

Such intimate communion between our own life and the novels we read may be why Proust argued:

In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have

experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity

.

But why would readers seek to be the readers of their own selves? Why does Proust privilege the connection between ourselves and works of art, as much in his novel as in his museum habits?

One answer is because it is the only way in which art can properly affect rather than simply distract us from life, and that there are a stream of extraordinary benefits attached to what might be termed the Marquis de Lau phenomenon (MLP), attached to the possibility of recognizing Kate in a portrait of Albertine, Philip in a description of Saniette, and, more generally, ourselves in badly printed volumes purchased in train stations.

THE BENEFITS OF THE MLP

(I) TO FEEL AT HOME EVERYWHERE