In Time Regained, the concluding volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, an older version of the narrator gloomily decides to attend a gathering at the Guermantes' mansion. He’s thinking, as Joshua Landy paraphrases here, "I might as well go and waste my time with these high-society snobs." But then he experiences a jolt of involuntary memory, prompted by a step onto uneven paving stones. His memory casts him across time, and he begins to think that he could commit himself to writing that might also access something true and enduring, beyond conventional time.

"With Proust,” Hannah Freed-Thall tells us, “chance and contingency are so at the center of his aesthetic and epistemological world." Involuntary memory, by which the narrator senses a connection to a kind of being apart from the usual passage of time, has to happen by surprise, or it won’t be involuntary. Chance, therefore, leads to a feeling for something kind of magical. "Precisely because nothing is ordering this," Freed-Thall says, "enchantment is possible."

When Proust’s narrator joins the party, however, he encounters aging characters, and the unavoidable force of mundane time is made vivid. He and the reader are left with a sense of something enduring along with recognition of the passage of time. Neither time nor timelessness seems to win here. “We can make of music what we will,” Alex Ross said earlier this season, and similarly, readers are free to make of this conclusion—and all of In Search of Lost Time—what they will.

Guests this season include: The New Yorker’s Alex Ross—see especially "Imaginary Concerts"; Christine Smallwood, author of La Captive; Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm; Hannah Freed-Thall, author of Modernism at the Beach; and Joshua Landy, author of The World According to Proust.

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The Prisoner—the fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time—spirals through the vortex of the narrator’s jealousy concerning Albertine. Something of that vortex churns on into The Fugitive—the sixth volume—and then the focus moves toward grief. But across the entire novel, there are intimations of other ways to be, of other possibilities for the narrator. Hannah Freed-Thall describes, for example, a beach scene in the second volume, where the narrator is “in love with the whole landscape, and the sea, and the beach, and the air.”

Intense experiences of art also jolt the narrator into other kinds of thinking. Joshua Landy says, “Art ends up being the answer to a lot of questions. In this context, one of the questions that it’s answering is: how can I make genuine contact with another mind?” Alex Ross explains how music in Proust’s novel offers “a deeper and more complex experience of life, time, memory, everything.” Hannah Freed-Thall sees potential for that richer experience beyond the narrator’s engagement with art, too. “In Proust,” she says, “it’s like everything is an aesthetic experience.”

Guests this season include: The New Yorker’s Alex Ross—see especially "Imaginary Concerts"; Christine Smallwood, author of La Captive; Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm; Hannah Freed-Thall, author of Modernism at the Beach; and Joshua Landy, author of The World According to Proust.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The “lost time” of In Search of Lost Time can connote “wasted time,” and Marcel Proust’s narrator does confront wastes of time, through pretentious conversations and moments when habit takes control. But the novel makes much of this waste, and we glimpse something beyond wasted time when involuntary memory prompts the narrator to consider existence beyond a drably habitual scheme.

Christine Smallwood reads here from her book La Captive, where, reflecting on concepts of art and wasted time that the narrator considers, she writes, “Art is a record of the waste. It holds the waste, and changes it. Its material is time, and it makes time material.” In this episode, you'll hear how wasted time, the time of dull habits, gets remixed and reworked by Proust. And you’ll hear readings from the third and fourth volumes of the novel: The Guermantes Way and Sodom et Gomorrah.

Guests this season include: The New Yorker’s Alex Ross—see especially "Imaginary Concerts"; Christine Smallwood, author of La Captive; Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm; Hannah Freed-Thall, author of Modernism at the Beach; and Joshua Landy, author of The World According to Proust.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.