By Sam Leith
guardian

It’s wonderful stuff, swearing. It stiffens the sinews and summons up the blood, and not just metaphorically. Obscenities actually do act on us physiologically. Swearing increases electrical conductance across the skin, pushes the heart rate higher and measurably increases resistance to pain.

Obscenities are also linguistically interesting in themselves: the more currency they have, the more their emotional colouring and the associations they trigger overwhelms what they actually mean. “Fucking”, these days, only rarely means “having sex”. And they become marvellously plastic, grammatically.

Swearing doesn’t just mean what we now understand by “dirty words”. It is entwined, in social and linguistic history, with the other sort of swearing: vows and oaths. Consider for a moment the origins of almost any word we have for bad language – “profanity”, “curses”, “oaths” and “swearing” itself .

Melissa Mohr’s title, then, is more than just an attention-grabber: the history of swearing is one of a movement back and forth between the holy and the shit. At different times in the history of the west, the primary taboo has been to do either with God, or with the functions of the human body. (The latter, though, does subdivide in a meaningful way between the sexual and the excremental. Really, this book should have been called “Holy Fucking Shit”.)

Though Mohr is mainly interested in English, she is generous in roping in examples from outside it. A helpful and interesting chapter on ancient Roman filth does much to sketch the background, too. How do we know what was obscene in a dead language? By literary genre, essentially: if it was written on the toilet wall but didn’t appear in satire, it was likely to be properly rude. English has a “Big Six”: “cunt”, “fuck”, “cock”, “arse”, “shit” and “piss” (though Mohr plausibly suggests that “nigger” should now be in there). The Romans had a “Big 10”: cunnus (cunt), futuo (fuck), mentula (cock), verpa (erect or circumcised cock), landica (clitoris), culus (arse), pedico (bugger), caco (shit), fello (fellate) and irrumo (er, mouth-rape).

So the Romans, like us, had a primary relationship between the body and the idea of obscenity – though their sexual schema was a little different, with shame attaching, above all, to sexual passivity. Sexual obscenity also, to complicate things, had a sacramental function – as witness the fruity ways of the god Priapus. Some of that shit was holy.

In medieval times, though, the emphasis was all on the holy. Common words for places and things contained vulgarities regarded as quite innocuous. London and Oxford both boasted a “Gropecuntelane”, which is where the prostitutes hung out, and if you visited a country pond “there would’ve been a shiterow in there fishing, a windfucker flying above, arse-smart and cuntehoare hugging the edges of the pond, and pissabed amongst the grass”. At the same time it’s hard to recapture quite how shocking medieval people would find a vain oath.

Christianity was founded on oaths and covenants – as was the whole dispensation of feudal society. To swear an oath was to compel God to pay attention to your promise – and to do so in vain was to dishonour God and risk eternal damnation. Indeed, it was believed that if you swore on God’s body – “‘sblood!”; “God’s bones!”; “by Christ’s nails!” – you physically spilled his blood, broke his bones and tore out his nails in heaven.

Mohr credits the decline in the importance of oath-swearing to the rise of the merchant classes. Feudal society’s scheme of estates was bound by chains of oaths between lords and vassals, right up to the king. Capitalism moved us from oaths to contracts: the oath before God became less important than keeping your word to business partners – and you didn’t need eschatological terror to enforce that. Plus, there’s the dry, old complaint that swearing constantly “devalues the currency”. Between 1640 and 1660, around the civil war, men might have to swear as many as 10 conflicting oaths of loyalty if they wanted to keep their heads attached to their necks.

At the same time, something else was going on: the idea of privacy. In an age when everybody pissed and shat in public, and sex would as like as not take place in a room or even a bed shared with others, taboos around bodily functions weren’t all that strong. Chaucer‘s “swiving“, “toords“, “queyntes” and “erses” were vulgar and direct, but they weren’t obscene. One word was regarded in the late-18th and 19th centuries as so shocking that it was variously rendered “inexpressibles“, “indescribables“, “etceteras“, “unmentionables“, “ineffables“, “indispensables“, “innominables” “inexplicables” and “continuations“. That word? “Trousers.”

How things change. By the first world war, soldiers swore so much that the word “fucking” came to function as no more than “a warning that a noun is coming”. Now even the extremest obscenities have lost their power to shock. In Irvine Welsh‘s novels, for instance, “cunt” is more or less a synonym for “bloke”. It is telling that, where for the Romans the genitals were veretrum or verecundum (“parts of awe” or “parts of shame”), “in today’s American slang, the genitalia are devalued as ‘junk'”.

The only actually taboo language is that of racial insult. Words like “wop”, “kike” and “yid” (though not, interestingly, “nigger”) were intended to give offence from the off – but only to those on the receiving end. As Mohr writes, the idea that everybody should find them offensive is a relative innovation. Not, it should be said, a bad one.

Mohr’s scholarship seems to be sound and her approach positively twinkles with pleasure and amusement. She gives her chapters headings such as “Shit, That Bloody Bugger Turned Out To Be A Fucking Nackle-Ass Cocksucker!”, and she’s not above finding it funny that a paper on urinary incontinence was co-authored by Splatt and Weedon.

I’d like Mohr’s account to have tipped a wink to Viz comic’s monumental and still-growing Profanisaurus. Her argument might have been strengthened, too, by reminding us that Eric Cartman, in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, saves the world from Satan and Saddam Hussein with the words: “Fuck, shit, cock, ass, titties, boner, bitch, muff, pussy, cunt, butthole, Barbra Streisand!”

But here I pick nits. This is a cracking fucking book, and innominables to anyone who says otherwise.

By Caroline Weber
nytimes
May 8, 2013

To resume my discussion [which Sineokov didn’t post] of the French literary references upon which so much of the humor in the Recherche depends, I wanted to provide an example from “The Guermantes Way” (1920), the volume in which the upper-middle-class narrator makes his first foray into Parisian high society. As Anka Muhlstein pointed out in her splendid post yesterday, the members of the aristocratic Guermantes clan “are convinced that they are still at the apex of [that] society,” and Proust has great fun showcasing their petty vanities and elitist pretensions.

In one such instance, he describes the long-standing antipathy between the family’s two branches — the Guermantes proper, for the most part based in Paris, and their largely provincial Courvoisier cousins — and again uses a well-known (to French readers) literary allusion for laughs. The Courvoisiers, he observes, are at once appalled and intimidated by their Guermantes relations’ self-proclaimed intellectualism and unrivaled chic; they cannot forgive their cousins for preferring to hobnob with members of Paris’s flashy, socially questionable “smart” (in both senses of the term) set, whereas the stodgy Courvoisiers feel infinitely more at home socializing with fellow countrified nobles whose background (“who their ‘father and mother’ were”) is no mystery, even if their company is no fun. And so, while the Courvoisiers can’t resist attending their glamorous kinsmen’s social gatherings, in so doing they manifest a mixture of righteous indignation and poorly disguised envy that the narrator, spotting the charmless Courvoisier matron Mme de Villebon in the drawing-room of the supremely (and, to said matron, infuriatingly) elegant Duchesse de Guermantes, clinches by way of an unexpected Victor Hugo quotation:

To encounter in their cousin’s drawing-room, between five and six o’clock, people with whose relatives their own relatives did not like to associate back home in the Perche became for [the Courvoisiers] a source of mounting rage and inexhaustible denunciations. For example, the moment that the charming Comtesse G*** entered the salon, Mme de Villebon’s face assumed exactly the expression it ought to have had if she had been called upon to recite the line

And if only one of us remains, that one will be I [Et s’il n’en reste qu’un, je serai celui-là],

a line that happened to be unknown to her, anyway.

For my money, this is one of the funniest passages in the Recherche, but in translation it falls flat for a few reasons, all related to the line of poetry at the end. First, because non-French readers are almost sure not to know that line themselves — from Hugo’s “Les Châtiments” [“Castigations”] (1853), an extended indictment in verse of Emperor Napoleon III’s overthrow of the French republican government in 1851 — they are unlikely to snicker at Mme de Villebon for sharing in their ignorance. They are also unlikely to grasp the sheer over-the-top weirdness of the parallel the narrator draws (a) between a supercilious killjoy from the Perche (a tiny agricultural region best known for its purebred draft-horses) and the man revered in Proust’s day as France’s greatest poet; not to mention (b) between Mme de Villebon’s petty social hostility toward “the charming Comtesse G***” and Hugo’s lofty, principled outrage at Napoleon III’s coup d’état. (In the poem Proust cites, Hugo is directly addressing the emperor, whose coup sent the staunchly republican poet into exile, and declaring that he will defy Bonapartist authority to the end, even if he proves “the last man standing.”)

Finally, no English translation can capture the intensely stylized, emphatically sonorous grandeur of Hugo’s alexandrine: the twelve-syllable metric form that is to French classical poetry and drama what iambic pentameter is to English verse. To the French ear, nothing says “hero” quite like an alexandrine, and the line Proust quotes here, comprised of four perfect anapests (poetic “feet” in which two unstressed syllables are followed by a stressed one, as in Lord Byron’s similarly rousing “Destruction of Sennacherib” [1815]: “and the sheen of theirspears was like stars on the sea”), is a particularly resonant case in point. And yet there is obviously nothing in the least bit heroic about Mme de Villebon’s prickly pique when confronted with a “charming” Parisian socialite, nor about her self-important resolve to remain “the last man standing” in her fashionable cousin’s salon. By pairing her with Hugo, Proust thus achieves much the same effect he creates with the Françoise/Saint-Simon juxtaposition I discussed yesterday. He gives us a complex, superbly comical portrait of an individual whose all-too-human quirks are best sought and found [recherché and retrouvé] where all Proustian treasures ultimately turn out to reside: in literature.

Ms. Weber is currently at work on a book titled “Proust’s Duchess: In Search of the Exquisite in Belle Époque Paris,” to be published by Knopf in 2014.

By Adam Gopnik
nytimes
May 8, 2013

I suppose that by now to announce that I first read Proust with the woman now my wife — or the man now my husband, or the woman now my partner, or however it might work out — is to participate in a cliché, touched by a not-entirely-appealing local color. Only in America has the experience of Proust become a ritual of courtship. But, as it happened, I did.

The girl I was in love with in college and I went out and, in a second-hand bookstore in Montreal, bought the old Random House two-volume version of the Moncrieff translation. What surprised me in that first reading, up on Mount Royal, was not how impressed I was by Proust’s command, the beauty of his sentences and the confidence of his psychological generalizations. It was, rather, that, expecting a profound but slightly forbidding, even “estranging,” literary tour de force, on the order of “Ulysses” or “Paradise Lost” — a text like a mountain to be scaled, with the reader arriving at last wearily at the top, panting for oxygen with a Sherpa-like companion; glad to have made the ascent and yet haunted by the frozen bodies seen fallen short of the summit, those who never made it past “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” — given that expectation, I was shocked by how much I liked Marcel, to give the narrator the name he only once gives himself.

We are taught sternly to announce, and tumidly to lecture our creative writing students, that our favorite characters need not be our favorite people. Good characters, from Becky Sharp to Satan in Milton, can be rotten to the core and still delicious to the bite. But, at the risk of letting the waistband of my bourgeois boxers show too largely above my borrowed modernist pants, I do think that narrators need to win us if they are to hold us. Nick Carraway, Huck Finn, and even poor Charles Ryder — the truth is that just as heroes are better when they are heroic, narrators in long tales are best when we are charmed by their company and are given reasons to trust their sensations. Narrators need not be likeable, in the sense of touched by moral rectitude, but it does seem necessary in any successful full-length tale for the narrator to be lovable — exactly as, say, Humbert Humbert in “Lolita” is lovable, in his own horrible way.

Well, the narrator in Proust — let us defy academic fastidiousness and call him Marcel — struck me then, and strikes me still, as the most high-hearted, self-deprecating, joyously observant, tender, frequently funny, always attentive voice I had encountered in literature. (Far more, doubtless, than Proust would have been himself.) Frankly neurotic in his anxieties, the narrator’s neurosis on the page registers above all as sensitivity, mindfulness. His wide-eyed appreciations illuminate those first volumes with affection: appreciations of his aunt Léonie, of Françoise, the cook, of his Madame Sévigné-loving grandmother, above all of his well-meaning father and loving mother. Even the secondary characters, satiric targets, are on the whole treated with a malice rendered affectionate by understanding: Madame Verdurin is chiefly silly, not wicked; in over her social head.

And are there, in the old-fashioned sense, more admirable characters in literature than Saint-Loup, the aristocrat trying to struggle out of the limitations of his inherited world view without sacrificing its elegance — or, above all, than Swann, whose tragedy in love does not diminish our admiration for his tact, his delicacy, his essential kindness, and his readiness to make himself look shallow in order to avoid betraying a friend? The book is, among other things, a manifesto against malicious speech, and Swann moves us because he understands that true aristocracy lies in a readiness to refrain from malice, even at the price of having others think him simple.

And then there is, well, so much pure Charlie Brown in the narrator’s voice: his worrying desperately in front of the pillar with the poster of Berma’s next appearance about how he will feel when he actually sees her act; his anxieties about Gilberte — the original Little Red-Haired Girl — and her possible presence in the playground on the Champs-Élysées. That he buys his cravat intending to impress her at Charvet rather than at Sears does not diminish the universality of his unrequited ardor.

My first sense, confirmed by two subsequent readings (one, in French, that did indeed have some of the exhausting aspects of an Everest expedition) is that the philosophical and psychological theories registered in the book are the least interesting thing about it, and the charm and humor and social observation evident on every page, the most. Yes, indeed, Proust’s conclusions about human love are sadly persuasive: We invent the people we love as much as we experience them; our infatuations, even those that shape our lives, are our own inventions. And he’s right to advance nostalgia as an organizing principle: we agree with him that time is the first principle of life, devouring our experience, in all its intensity and heartbreak, and leaving us wondering, aghast, not just where life has passed but where the world has gone.

But it’s not the profundity of these ideas that matters. It’s the joy of their enactment, which cuts the edge of Proust’s official pessimism on every page. Joyce, in “Finnegan’s Wake,” another expedition That Woman and I attempted, ends by asserting simply that there is a mountainous male principle in life, and a fluid female one, and life is best when one flows nimbly round the other, as rivers round cities — and one need not endorse this rather old-fashioned, patriarchal Irish view to appreciate the passion, the infinite resourcefulness, of its expression. Great writing, like first love, works best as an obvious idea freshly enacted — an old book, newly bought.

By Anka Muhlstein
nytimes
May 7, 2013

Anka Muhlstein is the author of many books, most recently “Monsieur Proust’s Library.” Here she writes about the books that influenced Proust.

Proust’s friends claimed that he had read everything and forgotten nothing. As though to prove them right, he never created a character without putting a book in his hands, and he quotes abundantly from and alludes often to his favorite writers. It would help the reader of Proust to know the Balzac novels that pop up throughout “In Search of Lost Time”: “Father Goriot,” “Lost Illusions,” “The Girl With the Golden Eyes.” These are the novels that deal with the “uncommon passions” so important to the understanding of Proust’s homosexual characters.

Saint-Simon’s 40 volumes of memoirs of the court of Louis XIV are not required reading, but it is useful to read a few excerpts to get a taste of what the irritable French duke considered his due, and of how desperate he was to conserve his privileges. The Guermantes in “In Search of Lost Time,” who resent any ignoring of their illustrious past and are convinced that they are still at the apex of French society despite the changes brought about by the Revolution, owe a lot to Proust’s knowledge of Saint-Simon.

To seize the full flavor of the comical way Proust uses the playwright Jean Racine’s tragedies in his conflation of Jews and homosexuals, one might also read Racine’s biblical plays “Esther” and “Athalie.”

Proust’s use of French writers is straightforward and easy to detect. This is not true of his use of foreign writers: their significance is hidden, almost subterranean, and often overlooked. Yet their presence is the clearest sign of Proust’s amazing erudition. No writers had as firm a hold on Proust as English or American essayists and novelists, but he could not use them as directly or freely as French authors; he knew his French readers were most likely not as familiar with works of English literature, and perhaps not familiar with them at all.

One of Proust’s favorite novelists, one whose books reduced him to tears, was George Eliot. He read “Middlemarch” very carefully and absorbed the drama of Mr. Casaubon, the unhappy clergyman who dedicates his whole life — sacrificing on the way his young wife — to labors that produced absurd and trivial results. Proust’s narrator is anxiously searching for his true vocation, and is very much aware of the danger of losing his way in a desert of sterile and doomed tasks.

One may not think of Robert Louis Stevenson in connection with Proust, but Proust loved his work, especially “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The curious transformation of a kind and intelligent physician who turns into a psychopathic monster after imbibing a drug intended to separate the good from the evil in a person is an extreme example of personality change, a theme that runs through Proust’s novel. His characters never reveal their true personalities at the outset, and as the novel progresses they do the contrary of what one expects.

A careful reader, however, may avoid being taken by surprise. As a young man, Proust loved detective stories. Although he never wrote thrillers, he knew how to prepare his reader for a revelation by seeding a clue beforehand. Alas the reader may lose track in the thousands of pages separating the hint from the dénouement. The only remedy is to keep reading and rereading Proust!

By John Williams
nytimes
May 6, 2013

Sam and Caroline, it was my brilliant idea to tackle “Swann’s Way” for the first time as part of this enterprise. After reading your opening posts, you’ll understand if I feel like I decided to take up basketball by playing a full-court pickup game with LeBron James and Kevin Durant. My original goal was to complement your expertise with a set of fresh, eager eyes. Now I’m just afraid of getting dunked on.

I’m about 200 pages in, and hooked in a way I hadn’t expected. I thought gaining a foothold would take some doing. And it did. But as with any great work, it doesn’t take very long to acclimate to Proust’s rhythms and idiosyncrasies. This is not to say the reading experiencepicks up steam. A nearly extinct brand of patience is required. The pages don’t start turning any faster; I’m just more and more content to be immersed in them.

Like many who haven’t read the book, I had pictured the madeleine moment as a moment, but it’s not; it’s an extended scene that reads like a psychology textbook in miniature. It begins in a way that recalls the “oceanic feeling” described by the French writer Romain Rolland and discussed at length by Freud in “Civilization and Its Discontents.” Freud criticized the sensation as a vague helplessness that serves as a shaky foundation for religious belief, but in Proust the helplessness, stayed with, resolves into clarity. First there is the sense of being overwhelmed. (“An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.” “I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal.”) Then the narrator attempts, in vain, to recreate the moment through his senses. (“I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic.”) What follows is an inner concentration that borders on meditation. (“I ask my mind to make one further effort, to bring back once more the fleeting sensation. And so that nothing may interrupt it in its course I shut out every obstacle, every extraneous idea, I stop my ears and inhibit all attention against the sounds from the next room.”) After several attempts at this deep diving, the narrator gives up, and it’s only then that the memories so faintly summoned by the madeleine and tea fully return.

Having known the madeleine scene as shorthand for Proustian experience, I was surprised by the specificity of the ensuing recollection of his youth. There’s a lot of oceanic feeling in the book, but there’s a lot of inspecting individual grains of sand on the beach as well.

I’m hesitant to address Beckett’s remarks without reading the whole of his slim book (and with, oh, 3,200 pages to go in Proust), but “complete indifference to moral values and human justices” seems an odd judgment. If he means Proust ignored taboos — well, based on your descriptions of the later volumes, he clearly did. But I have the sense that some amount of moral discernment is at work in the book, even if it’s not of the hectoring variety, and even if the characters aren’t the most empathetic lot. I think here of the great description of the servant Françoise: “I came to recognize that, apart from her own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity inspired in her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance separating the sufferers from herself. The tears that flowed from her in torrents when she read in a newspaper of the misfortunes of persons unknown to her were quickly stemmed once she had been able to form a more precise mental picture of the victims.” In this scene, Françoise is impatient with a kitchen-maid suffering great pain right in front of her, but is found a short time later “violently sobbing” while reading about the similar symptoms of a faceless “prototype patient” in a medical dictionary.

And it’s true that the narrator writes: “I imagined, like everyone else, that the brains of other people were lifeless and submissive receptacles with no power of specific reaction to anything that might be introduced into them…” (That “like everyone else” is quite a clause.) This is not a statement of great moral attunement. But I’m not sure a conscious effort at the “moral education of the reader” is always the top priority — or effect — of fiction. If close observation is its own moral instruction, then Proust (as far as I’ve gotten with him) is as conscientious an instructor as any.

I’m reading the Moncrieff-Kilmartin translation. Caroline, how close do any of the translations come to capturing the feeling of the original? Are English readers doomed to have an inferior encounter with Proust? And to both of you: Where do you see Proust’s influence now? It may be impossible to measure up, but is anyone even trying? Of the modernists, is Proust the least mimicked today? I have been sometimes reminded while reading of certain David Foster Wallace sentences, which are less lapidary but equally serpentine, and that also land on punch lines that are subtly hilarious, if there is such a category. Like this, from “Infinite Jest”:

He’d kept noticing mice scurrying around his room, mice as in rodents, vermin, and when he lodged a complaint and demanded the room be fumigated at once and then began running around hunched and pounding with the heel of a hand-held Florsheim at the mice as they continued to ooze through the room’s electrical outlets and scurry repulsively about, eventually a gentle-faced nurse flanked by large men in custodial whites negotiated a trade of shoes for Librium, predicting that the mild sedative would fumigate what really needed to be fumigated.

Who, if anyone, do you see as Proust’s progeny?

By Caroline Weber
nytimes
May 3, 2013

Beckett is absolutely right to stress the “shamelessness” of the Recherche (1913-1927), though it was by no means the first French novel to evince this quality. Already in “Dangerous Liaisons” (1782), Pierre Choderlos de Laclos had subverted the genre’s morally edifying function by prefacing his cool-as-a-cucumber tale of unabashed libertine depravity with a mock-conciliatory note: “At very least, it seems to me a service to public morality to unmask the means by which the wicked corrupt the good.” This proviso did not deter the vice squad from forbidding Parisians to read Laclos’s novel in public places. Similarly, Gustave Flaubert stood trial for “offending public morality” with “Madame Bovary” (1857), a meticulously observed portrait of a vacuous, petite-bourgeoise adulteress.

Like these antecedents, the Recherche offers an unvarnished, markedly non-judgmental portrayal of sexual activities traditionally deplored as vices or even — in the context of French Catholicism — as sins. As the title of his novel’s fourth volume, “Sodom and Gommorah” (1921-1922), makes clear, male and female homosexuality are essential to Proust’s worldview, generally surfacing alongside other so-called perversions. While seducing her girlfriend, Mlle Vinteuil desecrates her late father’s portrait; the Prince de Guermantes and the Marquis de Saint-Loup both cheat on their wives with the gigolo-cum-violinist Morel; another Morel paramour, the Baron de Charlus, also indulges in whips-and-chains sex play at a tawdry gay brothel.

Yet no matter how shocking the content of these vignettes (André Gide, Proust’s contemporary and fellow “invert,” feared they would “set back the issue [of homosexuality] by 20 years”), their real import relates less to sex as such, as to the much farther-reaching moral subversion that Proust effects by rigorously investigating humanity’s most essential but elusive “enigmatic truths” — erotic and otherwise. (In the Proustian cosmos, these truths provide the “scattered lightning-flashes” to which Sam so eloquently alludes in his post.) As outlined in “Time Regained” (1927), the seventh and final volume of the Recherche, the novelist’s foremost task lies in “teasing out and illuminating our feelings, our passions; which is to say, the passions and feelings of humanity as a whole.” According to Proust, those passions and feelings operate according to “general laws” that remain constant even when surface particularities are different; for instance, even the seemingly unconscionable penchants of a Charlus illustrate a truth with which we all, sooner or later, are forced to reckon: that love can come to us in the most extravagantly improbable, inexplicable and inconvenient forms. (Witness the eponymous hero of “Swann’s Way,” declaring at what he mistakenly believes to be the end of his disastrous affair with the faithless Odette: “To think that I wasted years of my life,…[and] felt the greatest love I’ve ever known, for a woman whom I didn’t even find attractive, who wasn’t my type!”)

In this light, the writer’s work is important because it alone enables us to penetrate the thick fog of perceptual laziness and distraction and delusion that otherwise blinds us to the truth about ourselves and those around us. And it can only perform that function if its vision is undistorted by the author’s own moral judgments, whether favorable or condemnatory; what Beckett calls a “complete indifference to moral values and human justices” is thus a, even the, necessary precondition of the Proustian enterprise. In fact, Beckett’s observation echoes that of one of Proust’s earliest German translators, Walter Benjamin, who notes in a 1929 essay that

[t]here is no individual suffering, however revolting, and no social injustice, however glaring, against which Proust would have protested with a candid “No” or an intrepid “But wait!” Quite the opposite: we find in him a profound acceptance of the world just as it is, even in its saddest and most bestial manifestations.

More often than not, the world of the Recherche proves sad and bestial indeed. And yet the writer himself cannot be faulted if its hard-won insights make it appear — to borrow Proust’s own ironic epithet for Laclos’s “Dangerous Liaisons” — “the most frighteningly perverse of books.” That perversity is simply the chaff from which the novelist endeavors, fearlessly and tirelessly, to separate the wheat of elemental human nature. Put another way, Proust explains:

It was not the goodness of his virtuous heart, which happened to be considerable, that made Choderlos de Laclos write “Les Liaisons dangereuses,” nor his fondness for the bourgeoisie, petite or grande, that prompted Flaubert to choose Mme Bovary as his subject…

These authors selected their material not because they were immoral, but because they sought the truth; and so it is with Proust as well. For this reason, he concludes:

The vulgar reader is wrong to think the author wicked, for in any given, ridiculous aspect [of human behavior], the artist sees a beautiful generality; and he no more faults his subject for being ridiculous than a surgeon looks down on a patient for being afflicted with persistent circulation problems.

The son and the brother of noted surgeons, Marcel Proust knew whereof he spoke: in literature, as in medicine, there is no place for shame. Or as Flaubert — who was also a doctor’s son, and whose exacting prose style, likened by at least one critic to a scalpel, Proust brilliantly parodied in his 1919 volume of literary pastiches — remarked just before his obscenity trial: “Writing well is its own kind of immorality.”

By Brian Morton
nytimes
May 3, 2013

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of “Swann’s Way,” The Times asked writers and critics to share their experience of reading the book and the other volumes of “In Search of Lost Time.”

When “Remembrance of Things Past” first reached American and English readers, everybody was blown away. Edith Wharton said it deserved to be ranked alongside the work of Tolstoy and Shakespeare. E.M. Forster called it “our second greatest novel,” after “War and Peace.” Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary: “I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes.” She continued: “One has to put the book down and gasp.”

About 50 years later, when Proust reached Teaneck High School, we were blown away, too. After a friend who’d spent his junior year in France came back with news about a novel that was different from anything we’d read before, I embarked on “Swann’s Way.” I loved everything about it: the patience with which the narrator, Marcel, investigates his perceptions; the evocation of the sorrow to which a child can be reduced by disturbances so apparently slight that the adults around him don’t even notice them; and, of course, the passage my friend had been especially excited about, in which a pastry dipped in tea opens up Marcel’s entire past (a passage that never gets old, no matter how many times you read it, and that proves for all time that a novel can bring worlds to life in a way that makes movies look lumbering and confined).

And I loved the humor, which is far from the delicate indirectness that comes to mind when many people think of Proust: the socialite so fond of showing off her big loud laugh that she dislocates her jaw; the aunts who’ve received a gift from Swann, and whose fear of vulgarity leads them to thank him in such a subtle way that he doesn’t realize he’s being thanked; Swann himself, who, after spending years in a state of such obsession for a woman that he neglected everything else in his life, comes to the conclusion that she “wasn’t even my type.”

But finally I got bogged down. It might have been in the second volume, during the analysis of Marcel’s love of Gilberte, which recapitulates many of the features of Swann’s love of Odette, but at a lower level of dramatic and intellectual intensity. Or maybe it was in the third, during the account of a Guermantes dinner party, which, now that I check, is only about a hundred pages long, but which seems to go on forever . . . would it be philistine to suggest that it would be a service to literature if someone were to put together an Abridged Proust?

I’ve gone back to Proust many times since then, and never reached the end. I blame this on a tic that has led me, every time, to start over from the beginning. I read a thousand pages, two thousand, and then, yet again, I stop. I feel like a suburban Sisyphus, pushing the seven volumes of “Remembrance of Things Past” up the hill.

Not quite Proust-worthy though I may be, I like to teach the first volume to writing students. I begin in a spirit of full disclosure, telling my class that I haven’t finished the damned thing. (As a teacher you’re often tempted to pretend to be more literate than you are, but everything goes better if you don’t.) One of the pleasures of reading Proust with writing students is that he breaks every one of the silly “rules” that have come to be enshrined in many writing programs. Conventional wisdom holds that we should “show, not tell,” but Proust tells and tells and tells. Conventional wisdom holds that point of view in fiction should always be consistent and logical, but Proust (like Melville, like Dickens) does what he pleases with point of view. Very early in “Swann’s Way,” Marcel tells us that he often used to lie awake remembering “all the places and people I had known, what I had actually seen of them, and what others had told me,” and with that slim phrase he gives himself license to tell us exactly what other people were thinking in their most intimate moments, during episodes that took place before he was born.

Many of my students have gone on to read the whole thing, disproving the idea that today’s young people are too distracted to read anything but tweets. One old student likes to e-mail me snippets from the last two volumes, magnificent passages about art and time and memory that I haven’t gotten to yet. I’m not sure if this is meant to inspire me or tease me. It doesn’t matter. I know I’ll get to the end someday. I will. I will. I will.