The fact that we might be surprised to recognize someone we know in a portrait painted four centuries ago suggests how hard it is to hold on to anything more than a theoretical belief in a universal human nature. As Proust saw the problem:
People of bygone ages seem infinitely remote from us. We do not feel justified in ascribing to them any underlying
intentions beyond those they formally express; we are amazed when we come across an emotion more or less like what we feel today in a Homeric hero.… [I]t is as though we imagined the epic poet … to be as remote from ourselves as an animal seen in a zoo
.
It is perhaps only normal if our initial impulse on being introduced to the characters of The Odyssey is to stare at them as though they were a family of duck-billed platypuses circling their enclosure in the municipal zoo. Bewilderment might be no less intense at the thought of listening to a louche character with a thick mustache, standing in the midst of antiquated-looking figures:
But an advantage of more prolonged encounters with Proust or Homer is that worlds that had seemed threateningly alien reveal themselves to be essentially much like our own, expanding the range of places in which we feel at home. It means we can open the zoo gates and release a set of trapped creatures from the Trojan War or the Faubourg Saint-Germain, whom we had previously considered with unwarranted provincial suspicion because they had names like Eurycleia and Telemachus or had never sent a fax.
(II) A CURE FOR LONELINESS
We might also let ourselves out of the zoo. What is considered normal for a person to feel in any place at any point is liable to be an abbreviated version of what is in fact normal, so that the experiences of fictional characters afford us a hugely expanded picture of human behavior, and thereby a confirmation of the essential normality of thoughts or feelings unmentioned in our immediate environment. After we have childishly picked a fight with a lover who had looked distracted throughout dinner, there is relief in hearing Proust’s narrator admit to us that “as soon as I found Albertine not being nice to me, instead of telling her I was sad, I became nasty,” and revealing that “I never expressed a desire to break up with her except when I was unable to do without her,” after which our own romantic antics might seem less like those of a perverse platypus.
Similarly, MLPs can make us feel less lonely. After we have been abandoned by a lover who has expressed in the kindest way imaginable a need to spend a little more time on her own, how consoling to lie in bed and witness Proust’s narrator crystallizing the following thought:
When two people part it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches
.
How comforting to witness a fictional person (who is also, miraculously, ourselves as we read) suffering the same agonies of a saccharine dismissal and, importantly, surviving.
(III) THE FINGER-PLACING ABILITY
The value of a novel is not limited to its depiction of emotions and people akin to those in our own life; it stretches to an ability to describe these far better than we would have been able, to put a finger on perceptions that we recognize as our own, but could not have formulated on our own.
We might have known someone like the fictional Duchesse de Guermantes and felt there was something superior and insolent in her manner, without knowing quite what, until Proust discreetly pointed out in parentheses how the Duchesse reacted when, during a smart dinner, a Madame de Gallardon made the error of being a little overfamiliar with the Duchesse, known also as Oriane des Laumes, and addressed her by her first name:
“Oriane” (at once Mme des Laumes looked with amused astonishment towards an invisible third person, whom she seemed to call to witness that she had never authorised Mme de Gallardon to use her Christian name) …
An effect of reading a book which has devoted attention to noticing such faint yet vital tremors is that once we’ve put the volume down and resumed our own life, we may attend to precisely the things the author would have responded to had he or she been in our company. Our mind will be like a radar newly attuned to pick up certain objects floating through consciousness; the effect will be like bringing a radio into a room that we had thought silent, and realizing that the silence only existed at a particular frequency and that all along we in fact shared the room with waves of sound coming in from a Ukrainian station or the nighttime chatter of a minicab firm. Our attention will be drawn to the shades of the sky, to the changeability of a face, to the hypocrisy of a friend, or to a submerged sadness about a situation which we had previously not even known we could feel sad about. The book will have sensitized us, stimulated our dormant antennae by evidence of its own developed sensitivity.
Which is why Proust proposed, in words he would modestly never have applied to his own noveclass="underline"
If we read the new masterpiece of a man of genius, we are delighted to find in it those reflections of ours that we despised, joys and sorrows which we had repressed, a whole world of feeling we had scorned, and whose value the book in which we discover them suddenly teaches us
.
Whatever the merits of Proust’s work, even a fervent admirer would be hard pressed to deny one of its awkward features: length. As Proust’s brother, Robert, put it, “The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have broken a leg in order to have the opportunity to read In Search of Lost Time.” And as they lie in bed with their limb newly encased in plaster or a tubercle bacillus diagnosed in their lungs, they face another challenge in the length of individual Proustian sentences, snakelike constructions, the very longest of which, located in the fifth volume, would, if arranged along a single line in standard-sized text, run on for a little short of four meters and stretch around the base of a bottle of wine seventeen times:
Alfred Humblot had never seen anything like it. As head of the esteemed publishing house Ollendorf, he had, early in 1913, been asked to consider Proust’s manuscript for publication by one of his authors, Louis de Robert, who had undertaken to help Proust get into print. “My dear friend, I may be dense,” replied Humblot after taking a brief and clearly bewildering glance at the opening of the novel, “but I fail to see why a chap needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep.”
He wasn’t alone. Jacques Madeleine, a reader for the publishing house Fasquelle, had been asked to look at the same bundle of papers a few months earlier. “At the end of seven hundred and twelve pages of this manuscript,” he had reported, “after innumerable griefs at being drowned in unfathomable developments and irritating impatience at never being able to rise to the surface—one doesn’t have a single, but not a single clue of what this is about. What is the point of all this? What does it all mean? Where is it all leading? Impossible to know anything about it! Impossible to say anything about it!”
Madeleine nevertheless had a go at summarizing the events of the first seventeen pages: “A man has insomnia. He turns over in bed, he recaptures his impressions and hallucinations of half-sleep, some of which have to do with the difficulty of getting to sleep when he was a boy in his room in the country house of his parents in Combray Seventeen pages! Where one sentence (at the end of page 4 and page 5) goes on for forty-four lines.”