Classics should not be taken so seriously sometimes. I know I am contradicting myself because the previous one had me in some spiral. This time, I am talking about Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. I went from reading something from the Penguin Little Black Classics collection to picking up a 1,054-page book. And this is only volume one. I am about a hundred fifty pages in, and I seem to have some thoughts.
I initially picked this book up for two reasons. One, it had been sitting on my shelf for a long time, collecting dust. Two, blame Gérard Genette, who decided it was wise to use Proust’s work as a reference point for demonstrating that a good story does not necessarily depend upon conventional structure or chronological order. Proust’s novel completely defies simple chronological storytelling through its constant movement between past and present, its sweeping shifts in duration, and its recurring memories. It is almost a laboratory for thinking about narrative time: order, speed, and frequency.
Genette himself is careful about this. He writes that “the specificity of Proustian narrative taken as a whole is irreducible,” while also arguing that its individual features can be analysed, compared, and placed into perspective. That tension is probably what brought me here in the first place. I could, of course, spend the next several hundred pages trying to decode every word Proust has put on paper and extract some grand literary or symbolic meaning from it. Too mainstream. Instead, I want to pay attention to what the novel actually feels like to read.
What’s the point of reading a classic if I don’t crash out afterwards and lose my damn mind? I mean, how do you expect me to remain sane after reading: “Sometimes, too, just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some strain in the position of my limbs.” Brother. You just woke up.
And yet that passage is a surprisingly good introduction to what Proust is doing. The novel opens in that strange space between sleep and consciousness, where the narrator wakes without immediately knowing where he is. He moves through different rooms, different places, almost different versions of himself, while his body seems to recognise things before his conscious mind can. A physical sensation can suddenly suggest the presence of another person; that sensation becomes desire, which becomes mythology, which becomes an entire meditation on identity.
A tiny bodily experience expands into something enormous. That seems fundamental to Proust. The ordinary is never quite ordinary because consciousness keeps attaching layers of memory, association, desire, and imagination to it. A sensation does not simply happen. It opens.
And this is probably why, even this early into the book, Proust feels strangely familiar to me. He is not difficult to understand in the way I expected him to be. What he does is magnify experiences that are usually too small to notice. A room, a smell, the feeling of waking up, a particular taste, the passing of time, things that can seem insignificant suddenly acquire an almost absurd emotional magnitude. That attention to little things, and the surreal quality they can acquire when you actually stop and look at them, is something I recognise. Proust seems to understand that consciousness does not experience life in neat proportions. Sometimes something tiny can feel enormous.
The most famous example of this, of course, is the madeleine. I knew about the madeleine before I read the book, so the scene itself was hardly a surprise. What interested me more was the idea surrounding it: Proust’s treatment of the past as something that is not necessarily gone, but dormant.
He describes memories almost as though they were trapped inside material things, waiting for the right encounter to release them. A taste, smell, sound, or place can suddenly unlock something that conscious effort could not retrieve. The past is not simply something the narrator remembers by deciding to remember it. It returns to him.
And the object that releases it is absurdly ordinary. Tea and a biscuit. That is the entire trigger. Proust looks at this completely unremarkable little thing and discovers an entire lost world inside it. Sir. Please relax. But that is precisely what makes the scene work. Memory, in Proust, does not seem to obey the hierarchy we usually give experience. The supposedly insignificant can contain the significant. The object itself is not extraordinary; what is extraordinary is the world that consciousness has preserved within it.
That same transformation of the ordinary continues when we enter Combray. Proust takes a childhood town and describes it with such attention that the place gradually becomes more than a setting. Its architecture, weather, church windows, smells, family relationships, routines, gossip, food, and seasonal changes accumulate until Combray feels less like a location than an entire psychological environment.
This becomes particularly striking in his descriptions of scent. Proust could have simply said that the rooms smelled of the countryside and food. Instead, he launches into an extraordinary comparison involving invisible protozoa floating through the air, turning smell into an entire microscopic ecosystem. From there, he moves through fruit, bread, frost, linen, morning, village clocks, and finally arrives at what he calls “pious smells.”
I asked what the room smelled like. Why have we reached the metaphysics of domestic fragrance?
But the excess is the point. These smells are not merely sensory details decorating the scene. They are part of the identity of the household itself. The house becomes an enclosed world in which nature has been brought indoors, domesticated, transformed, and made inseparable from memory. Proust’s descriptions therefore do something more than establish setting. They show how a place becomes meaningful through accumulation. We do not remember a childhood home as a floor plan. We remember its smells, sounds, temperatures, objects, routines, and the people attached to them. Proust turns those apparently insignificant details into the substance of memory itself.
There is also something strangely appealing about the way Proust allows the narration to move according to the logic of consciousness rather than the logic of chronology. One thought does not have to lead neatly to the next; a sensation can interrupt a memory, a memory can produce an image, an image can become an observation about desire, and suddenly the narrator is somewhere entirely different from where he began. It resembles the way thought actually works. We rarely experience our own minds as a clean sequence of beginning, middle, and end. We remember something because of a smell, think of a person because of a room, associate that person with something that happened years ago, and then find ourselves thinking about something completely unrelated. Proust gives that associative movement narrative form. The apparent digressions therefore do not feel like interruptions to the story so much as the story itself.
There is another passage, however, that caught my attention even more than the famous tea scene. Proust writes about what he calls the “idle, painstaking women” who devote their generosity, money, and “transferable dreams of sentimental beauty” to creating “a fine and precious setting for the rubbed and scratched and ill-polished lives of men.”
This is one of those sentences where you have to stop reading for a second and ask: what exactly did you just call us, Marcel?
“Rubbed and scratched and ill-polished lives of men.”
It is such an unexpectedly physical description of ordinary human existence. He does not call these lives evil or even necessarily unhappy. He calls them worn. Scratched. Ill-polished. Human beings, in other words, are weathered by living.
And then there are the women who decorate that wear.
The image of the “setting” is what makes the passage so interesting. Proust treats care almost like jewellery around a stone. The stone itself may be rough, damaged, or imperfect, but a beautiful setting can give it dignity and splendour. The women he describes spend their money, imagination, generosity, taste, and emotional energy creating that setting around other people’s lives. They make the house beautiful. They give thoughtful gifts. They create occasions. They arrange rooms, prepare meals, remember birthdays, and surround ordinary existence with small ceremonies. None of this necessarily looks heroic. Yet Proust recognises it as a form of aesthetic labour. Someone else’s ugly little existence gets a beautiful frame.
And then he calls these women artists.
That is perhaps the most interesting part of the passage. Their “transferable dreams of sentimental beauty” suggest that they possess an imaginative vision of what life could be. But rather than expressing that vision through painting, literature, sculpture, or some other conventionally recognised artistic form, they apply it to life itself. Their medium is domestic existence. They aestheticise other people’s lives.
And Proust cannot resist giving them the tiniest roast while he is at it. He says that, “like all artists,” they never seek to realise the value of those dreams or enclose them within the “four-square frame” of everyday life.
Excuse me?
It is almost as though he is saying: you have all these grand artistic impulses, but instead of making a painting, you have made Uncle Whatever’s life slightly more aesthetically pleasing.
There is something admiring in the observation, but it is also slightly condescending. Proust sees the artistic intelligence involved in this kind of care while simultaneously treating it as an art that remains embedded in domestic life rather than becoming a formally recognised work. That tension makes the passage more interesting than a simple celebration of women and domestic affection.
And then Proust shifts from the atmosphere of the household to the people inhabiting it, where the same attention to small details becomes a way of constructing character.
Albert Bloch is one of the young intellectual figures who enters the narrator’s world carrying an entirely different kind of social and literary energy. He is theatrical, argumentative, intellectually pretentious, and deeply interested in literature. He also possesses the extraordinary ability to turn an ordinary social inconvenience into an elaborate philosophical declaration. He arrives an hour late to luncheon and, instead of behaving like a normal person who might say, “Sorry I’m late,” he announces: “I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time.”
I love this.
Someone is late to lunch and suddenly we discover his entire philosophy of existence. Bloch isn’t simply late. Bloch rejects Time. Sir. The food is getting cold.
But the joke is also revealing something important about Proust’s method. Character is not necessarily introduced to us through a neat explanation of who someone is. It emerges through behaviour. A person arrives late, makes an absurd statement, performs his intelligence, and suddenly we understand something about him. Social situations become miniature character studies. The same is true of the great-aunt’s relationship with her niece. They have apparently spent years refusing to speak to one another, carrying some longstanding resentment between them. And yet when the great-aunt dies, she leaves her fortune to the niece anyway.
This is where Proust’s social world becomes particularly interesting, because private feeling and social obligation do not necessarily correspond.
You haven’t spoken to this woman in years. You don’t like her. You’re angry with her. And you’re still leaving her your money? Meanwhile, the great-aunt is apparently operating under: “I may hate you personally, but I have standards.” And honestly, I would be petty as fuck. If I’ve spent twenty years refusing to speak to you, my will is absolutely not going to be a surprise inheritance.
The people in this world are constantly carrying around complicated private emotions while simultaneously participating in rituals that govern respectable social life. Affection, resentment, obligation, vanity, generosity, pretension, and memory all exist at once. Nobody is simply one thing.
And perhaps that is what has surprised me most about Proust so far. Beneath all the enormous sentences and apparently impossible detours, he is paying extraordinary attention to the ways people become themselves through tiny things. The novel’s scale is enormous, but its materials are strangely small. Proust keeps taking these little things and asking how much of a life can be contained inside them. And maybe that is why the book does not feel as intimidating as I expected it to. He is not necessarily asking me to understand everything. He is asking me to notice.
So, a hundred and fifty pages in, I have entered Combray, encountered several people who desperately need to calm down, been attacked by domestic fragrance metaphysics, watched a biscuit resurrect an entire childhood, and discovered that Proust apparently considers decorating other people’s damaged lives a legitimate artistic practice.
And honestly?
I am beginning to see the appeal.