Proust List ImpulseSam Dolbear

Lists proliferate in Marcel Proust’s work but also his wake.11This year I have been reading one volume of À la recherche du temps perdu every month, as they were cut into twelve in a particular 1943 publication. At the start of the year I wrapped up the volumes in brown paper, and, at the start of each month, I unwrap a volume to start reading it. I am in a Proust support group with two friends, Lizzie Homersham and Aurelia Guo, who are doing something similar. We send each other voice notes, thoughts, images, and quotes. I have kept a document of notes as I go. Anne Carson lists 59 instances of Albertine’s appearances in À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), including the number of pages on which she is mentioned (807) and the percentage of time in which she’s asleep (19%).22Anne Carson, ‘The Albertine Workout’, London Review of Books, 5 June 2014. Rebecca Comay lists the remarks made by those who visited Proust on his deathbed, including François Mauriac’s comment on the youthfulness of his corpse and Paul Helleu’s note that he remained handsome, strange given his diet had consisted of little but café au lait for five months.33Rebecca Comay, ‘Proust’s Remains’, October, 144 (2013), pp. 3–24 <https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_a_00138>. Samuel Beckett lists a number of fetishes in the novel:

Beckett ends this list with the comment: ‘The list is not complete.’55Ibid., p. 37.

Anne Borrell collects together the recipes mentioned in the volumes.66Anne Borrell, Dining with Proust (London: Ebury Press, 1992). Eric Karpeles compiles the paintings.77Eric Karpeles, Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to ‘In Search of Lost Time’ (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008). Julia Kristeva, in her third lecture on Proust, lists the many stages of the experience of the consumption of the madeleine.88These are listed in eight stages: ‘Stage 1: just a “luminous patch”’; ‘Stage 2: the metamorphosis of the dead’; ‘Stage 3: I have the luck to taste a madeleine’; ‘Stage 4: incest and silence — the disappearance of two women’s names’; ‘Stage 5: an exquisite pleasure without origin’; ‘Stage 6: desire and the visible’; ‘Stage 7: a substitution quietens the effervescence — Aunt Leonie in place of Mamma’; ‘Stage 8: memory is a cascade of spatial metaphors’. See Julia Kristeva, Proust and the Sense of Time, trans. by Stephen Bann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 30–49. Edward Said lists the social institutions that Proust moved through: families, intellectual associations, musical and concert events, philosophical traditions, and academic institutions.99Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 14. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick lists the various ways in which weather signifies the transmigration of the narrator, when he becomes an ‘animated barometer’ or is born again after waking up to changed weather. Sedgwick then collates the instances of alchemical changes of state, when air and light are described as:

‘melted’ (5:100), ‘glazed’ (5:553), ‘unctuous’ (5:553), ‘elastic’ (5:555), ‘fermenting’ (5:555), ‘contracted’ (5:803), ‘distended’ (5:803), ‘solidified’ (6:19), ‘distilled’ (2:387), ‘scattered’ (2:387), ‘liquid’ (2:565), ‘woven’ (3:474), ‘brittle’ (3:474), ‘powdery’ (2:567), ‘crumbling’ (2:567), ‘embalmed’ (2:730), ‘congealed’ (4:721), ‘gummy’ (1:88), ‘flaked’ (1:88), ‘squeezed’ (1:120), ‘frayed’ (1:214), ‘pressed’ (1:235), ‘percolated’ (1:387), ‘volatilised’ (2:656), or even ‘burning’ (4:534).1010Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Weather in Proust (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 9.

The technique of listing finds its origin in syntax as much as form. Jacqueline Rose remarked in a radio interview that the experience of reading one of Proust’s sentences is equivalent to diving into a pool and holding one’s breath. You plunge into someone’s mind, you have to let yourself go, else you drown.1111‘Proust’, In Our Time, BBC Radio 4, first transmitted 17 April 2003 <https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00548wx> [accessed 6 July 2022]. With each comma comes an additional element, an accumulation, ripples that turn into waves. It could go on but it stops. Walter Benjamin also mobilized watery analogues vis-à-vis the ‘endless sentences’. He says they are like a river, specifically the Nile — a metaphor of Orientalist fancy (of which many lists could be made) — of a language that ‘overflows and fructifies the regions of truth’.1212Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Image of Proust’ [1929], trans. by Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. by Michael Jennings and others, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2004–06), ii.1 (2005), pp. 237–47 (p. 237). At another point in his essay on Proust, the sentences are weighted like fisher’s catch: ‘his sentences are the entire muscular activity of the intelligible body; they contain the whole enormous effort to raise this catch’.1313Ibid., p. 247. For Benjamin, Proust’s asthma (part of a list of other illnesses) becomes part of the sentences — or, he says, maybe his asthma is produced by the sentences, as they ‘rhythmically and step by step reproduc[e] his fear of suffocating’, as if drowning in air.1414Ibid., p. 246.

The above list of lists is incomplete. As each page turns, new ones fall out and in. Other people have no doubt compiled other lists, and other ones have yet to be collated. Each list might also end with an et cetera, to mark an inability to reach a final entry. How else to take account of experience if not by piling object on subject on object, social interaction on sensation on memory on habit? How else to make sense of the pages, to remember their contents, against excess and forgetting, when all we have been offered is durée rélle (real duration), a pool in which to swim, to come out the other side.