Malcolm Bowie - Proust Among the Stars - How To Read Him; Why Read Him?

In what follows, then, my travels will take me back and forth inside Proust’s novel rather than see me shuttling between my home and Cabourg, or between Cabourg and Balbec. As I travel I shall seek to recreate, in schematic and accessible form, the characteristic rhythms of the novel’s unfolding. Proust’s great work has ‘big’ themes, and its path-breaking author has one very old-fashioned way of handling these: his characters will announce a topic, warm to it, and hold forth upon it recklessly. I have chosen a cluster of these topics as my chapter-titles, not so much because Proust’s characters have wise things to say about time, sex or death, although they often have, as because the ebb and flow of Proust’s attention can be clearly observed against these featureless horizons. Such matters, singled out, have the further advantage of allowing us to look beneath the large tidal movements of the book and to rediscover the cross-currents and counter-rhythms that mark the individual Proust paragraph, and are the hallmark indeed of a speculative style that remains sui generis.

Let me not, however, sound too high-minded about the reflections gathered here. I do still long to feel the sand and shingle of the Cabourg shore between my toes, and I have not entirely given up hope of seeing the little band materialised before me as I wander there in the cold, Northern spray. But in the meantime Proust’s gritty, breezy and salty book has many wonders, and to these I now turn.

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