With the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses and the death of Marcel Proust, it would be no exaggeration to call 1922 the year of the novel’s apotheosis. The genre had reached the forked peak of its perfection, strained to the limits of its possibilities. No novel composed since that year has been able to escape the shadow of these twin monoliths. It’s possible that no novel ever can. And though the reputations of both Ulysses and Proust’s seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time are entirely justified, so much praise from the critics has tended to surround these books with an intimidating atmosphere. The average reader feels like they would need to set aside a few weeks in a cabin and a large bottle of brown liquor to tackle books like these. But with the hindsight that a full century affords us, it might be time to shake some of academia’s dust off of these novels and return them to their rightful place: the bedside tables, suitcases, and pockets of normal people. Both the authors, of course, wanted to write significant novels. But neither wanted their audiences to be confined to graduate school classrooms or the offices of language theorists. Instead, both authors wanted to offer a rewarding challenge to the everyday readers who they loved so much.
To convince more reader to take up that challenge, what’s needed is a better public understanding of each author’s appeal. No one, really, wants to read a book because it’s important. You have to anticipate some fresh and particular kind of pleasure. And with novels as demanding as these, the return on your investment needs to be high. Luckily, both authors reward their readers in excess. Joyce, you could say, is the Schubert of the modern novel: he renovates the genre with every line, while Proust is its Wagner, bringing each hulking stage of his masterpiece to its climax with a brilliant leitmotif. To put things more simply, Joyce experimented with the possibilities of language, while Proust renovated the possibilities of narrative. The only real way to get a sense for what I’m talking about is to grab a copy of Ulysses or Swann’s Way, the first volume in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and tuck in. Your efforts will not be wasted.
Anyone who wants to read Proust in English can take advantage of the superb C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation. Ulysses is, of course, written in a version of English that is all Joyce’s own. Among other things, Ulysses is a novel about the mind at work, its inherent inventiveness that layers the world around it with the shades of our own thought and thus infuses it with meaning:
It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don’t spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness…
What strikes us first about this passage is that it doesn’t make strict sense according to the rules of English. What strikes us second is that it still makes sense: the speaker is watching a bird in flight and, gradually, equating it with his own inner sense of freedom That clarity comes from Joyce’s ability, hard-won and long studied, to give his writing a kind of fidelity to the way language generates and moves inside the mind. If we knit our brows and “close read” a sentence like this, it will take us quite a while to suss out all the nuances of the thing. But if we relax and take each word as it comes—the intellectual equivalent of slackening your vision to see the hidden image in a Magic Eye—we find that the sentence progresses intuitively and naturally. It comes to us as our own thoughts come, piecemeal but sensible all the same.
Proust’s contribution to the novel was different. While Joyce shattered then reconstructed language at the sentence level to align it more closely with human thought, Proust was more faithful to language’s traditional structures. His innovation was to knock the bottom out of the way that plot is typically understood in literature. One could almost argue that nothing really happens in a book like Swann’s Way but that it happens dazzlingly. In Proust, hundreds of pages can be dedicated to the passage of just a few hours, whole chapters lavished on the way a particular woman wears her clothes. But the purpose of Proust’s style isn’t unnecessary extension. Rather, his obsession is with memory, and the way that recollection can suddenly unite two moments across huge gaps of time. The payoff in a Proust novel, often hundreds of pages in the making, is a sudden epiphany where a moment from the past comes rushing in and snaps the present into focus. When that happens, it’s the sort of thing that will make you lean back in your chair like you’ve been hit in the jaw.
The most famous instance of this Proustian epiphany is the oft-quoted moment with the madeleine cookie in Swann’s Way:
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. … Whence did it come? … And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it.”
The association of smell with memory, and the peculiar thrill of smelling something that recalls a long-forgotten moment, is of course very familiar to us. But Proust was the first novelist to codify thrills like these in literature. What can’t be captured with a simple excerpt is the impact that this passage has after almost a hundred pages of extended recollection. Along the way, we wonder what all this writing is for. Then, with these few phrases, he snaps the whole first part of his novel into focus. For him, such sudden and thrilling recollections became symbols for the way past versions of ourselves can get lost in time, only to be brought back in a flash by something as apparently mundane as dipping a cookie in a cup of tea. There is a poignancy to meeting those past selves. Doing so reminds us how, as Proust put it, our own desires, loves, and even personalities can seem “as fugitive as the years.” His books give us a chance to catch up with them, albeit briefly.
From this vantage, exactly one hundred years distant from the last breath of Proust and the first publication of Ulysses, it would be easy to think of each work merely as a helpful landmark, something that brought the modern novel to its present place but which need not be consulted except as a point of orientation. But if we do that, we will be missing out on the supreme enjoyment each novelist offers us. Climbing to the heights of each author’s prose can leave us winded but, despite the demands they make on us, the air at the top is unexpectedly calm and sweet. If Ulysses or Swann’s Way has been collecting dust on some shelf in your house, this could be the year you pick it up and realize why it got famous in the first place: great writing can be complicated, but pleasure never is.