The Long Way Back

Marcel Proust had an epic quarrel in 1895 France with the literary critic Charles Sainte-Beuve on what the reader should know about any author and also wrote that every detail of the author’s life had to be kept in mind because his characters were simply an elaborated extension of the self, not natural creations.The most celebrated French author of the past century strongly disagreed. Consequently, he wrote an essay about that issue, Contre Sainte-Beuve. Readers who tried to make associations with people the author could or may well have known were always lost in the fog of writing, as it should be.Consider Jean Santeuil. The unfinished manuscript in which Proust tried to portray himself as the ultimate snob, a character sharp like a tack, attending long soirees in the selected Parisian society at the end of the century, revered as the brightest guy in the room, even though he is surrounded by aristocrats of ancient lineage, eminent doctors, and ministers of the French Government.Proust needed a decades-long effort to go back to that manuscript. A lazybones, a daydreamer, a reclusive homebody, he had busy nights in the cork-lined bedroom because of his condition; high like a kite with the amyl nitrate he sniffed nightly to soothe his asthma, half-destroyed his memory by incessant medications of barbiturates and opiate extracts.Already a middle-aged man, a hopeless bachelor without any occupation apart from spending the inherited fortune, Marcel Proust had a stroke of genius and found the long way back, writing his well-known masterwork like a magnificent quest by both the time lost and the time regained. With the same adventurous spirit that John Ruskin traveled to France and wrote about the cathedrals, but without leaving the desk he had on his lap, assisted fully and on time by the loyal Céleste.First and foremost, that presumptuous guy disappears completely. Go, and you try to find the narrator's name on À la recherche du temps perdu. You will not.Second, he invented a style that broke any grammatical standard—long and multi-faceted phrasing, which is his literary vengeance for the shortness of breath due to his asthma. And third, if you want to retrace all those characters he invented in his life, you will end your days like Bob Dylan’s hardcore fans. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe