The Irish Proust is doubtless one of the most original events being held to mark the November 22nd centenary of the death of the great French writer Marcel Proust.
Organised by Michael Cronin of Trinity College Dublin and Max McGuinness of University College Dublin, the gathering will bring academics and Proustians from the French and English-speaking worlds to the Museum of Literature Ireland on October 28th and 29th for 23 thematically-organised lectures. Attendees can register at https://moli.ie/irish-proust/
The conference will focus mainly on the impact of Proust’s 3,000-page masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, on Irish writers. “Throughout 20th century Irish literature, writers have been inspired by Proust,” McGuinness explains. “The aim of the conference is to explore the full indebtedness of Irish writers to Proust.”
In addition to lectures on Proust and Beckett and Proust and Joyce, the conference will consider Proust’s influence on Elizabeth Bowen – who began her novel about the decline of Anglo-Irish aristocracy, The Last September, with an epigram from Proust – as well as Brendan Behan, John McGahern, Mary Devenport O’Neill and Seamus Heaney.
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Proust is not known to have visited Ireland, or to have had a special interest in the country. Yet McGuinness found repeated references to the French president Patrice de MacMahon, whose family emigrated from Ireland to France with the Wild Geese in the 18th century. MacMahon claimed descent from Brian Boru.
The narrator of In Search of Lost Time is obsessed with the fictional Duke and Duchess of Guermantes and their aristocratic milieu. The real-life MacMahon “was at once descended from Gaelic and French nobility, and married a French aristocrat”, McGuinness says. “Proust used MacMahon’s name to signify absolute social distinction.”
The word metempsychosis, meaning the transmigration of souls or reincarnation, appears on the first page of In Search of Lost Time, when the narrator compares his thoughts on awakening from a brief sleep to memories of a previous life.
A little later in the book, McGuinness notes, Proust links what he says is a Celtic belief in metempsychosis to his concept of involuntary memory, induced in the first instance by the taste of a small, hump-backed cake known as a madeleine soaked in tea.
In the volume entitled Sodom and Gomorrah, a pompous academic called Brichot alludes to a fictitious place in Normandy connected with Saint Lawrence O’Toole. “Proust used the Irish name for the saint, who is known in France as Laurence d’Eu,” McGuinness notes. He sees a perhaps inadvertent parallel between Irish history and Brichot’s discourse on the Celtic, Norse, Norman, pagan and Christian influences that collided in Normandy.
As an avid reader of newspapers, Proust was aware of events in Ireland. “When he was in failing health and eating very little, Proust several times compared himself to Terence MacSwiney, the lord mayor of Cork who went on hunger strike and became a republican martyr,” McGuinness says. “He knew about the War of Independence.”
Samuel Beckett is one of the earliest, most tangible links between Proust and Irish writers. In his foreword to the small volume entitled Proust which he wrote for Chatto & Windus in 1931, the young Beckett cheekily denounced “the abominable edition of the Nouvelle Revue Française” for its sloppy editing of Proust’s novel. It was Beckett’s first book and the first book about Proust in English.
Nathalie Mauriac Dyer of the French national research centre CNRS will focus in her keynote address, the first of the two-day conference, on Beckett’s reading of Proust. “I wanted to see how a great writer in the making reads an already established great writer,” she explains. Beckett’s small book is far more than an essay commissioned to introduce Proust to British readers, Mauriac Dyer says. “Beckett understood Proust perfectly, from the inside. It was an exceptional, piercing understanding, at times very critical, particularly of autobiographical aspects.”
McGuinness notes Beckett’s fascination with the theory of involuntary memory, which may have shaped the monologue in Krapp’s Last Tape, where Krapp recalls the realisation of his literary vocation in a storm at the end of a pier.
As the great grandniece of Proust and the granddaughter of François Mauriac, the Nobel laureate who was a friend of Proust, Mauriac Dyer is tantamount to French literary nobility. Her lineage “is a great honour and at times a little heavy to bear”, Mauriac Dyer sighs. “It is not always easy to live up to.”
Mauriac Dyer’s grandmother, Suzy Mante Proust, the daughter of Proust’s brother Robert, inherited Proust’s manuscripts, which she sold to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) in 1964. To commemorate the centenary of Proust’s death, Mauriac Dyer co-curated an exhibition based largely on those manuscripts, entitled Marcel Proust, the Making of the Oeuvre, which continues at the BnF until January 22nd, 2023.
Mauriac Dyer and her co-commissioners have re-established the numbering of volumes as Proust intended. When Proust died at the age of 51, his brother Robert, a physician, tried to present the novel as a finished work. “Because it was unfinished they fussed over it and made confusing something which Proust intended to be clear,” Mauriac Dyer says. For the first time, the novel is now presented at the BnF in its authentic, unfinished state.
The exhibition also follows the evolution of key episodes in In Search of Lost Time.
The incipit of the novel, “Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure” (For a long time I went to bed early) is one of the most famous sentences in the French language. Examination of successive manuscripts and corrected proofs established that Proust wrote 16 versions of that sentence before it was published, then changed it twice again at the printers. In earlier versions the madeleine dipped in tea was stale bread, toast or a rusk.
In his biography of Oscar Wilde, Richard Ellmann recounted a perhaps apocryphal story that Proust invited Wilde to dinner in 1891. Wilde allegedly locked himself in the toilet, then fled saying that he had expected to dine alone with Proust, not with the writer and his parents in their ugly apartment.
Elisabeth Ladenson of Columbia University will deliver the second keynote address, about Proust and Wilde. She doubts the veracity of the anecdote, because Proust was only 20 in 1891, and because he never spoke or wrote about an aborted dinner with Wilde. He did, however, allude to Wilde in his writings, never by name but as “the unfortunate poet”.
Wilde’s trial for “gross indecency” made front-page headlines in French newspapers. “It must have been extremely traumatic for Proust to see this man, whom he may or may not have met, dragged into court and sentenced to two years hard labour for ‘posing as a sodomite’,” Ladenson says. “Proust was trying to figure out how to live his own homosexuality at this point.”
Proust, whose mother was Jewish, drew a parallel between Jews and homosexuals as outcasts. Ladenson traces the comparison to the chronological coincidence between the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish army captain was falsely accused of betraying French military secrets, and Wilde’s trial. He must have been profoundly marked by both events, she says.
James Joyce met Proust only once, at a dinner given by British patrons of the arts at the Majestic Hotel in Paris on May 18th, 1922. Joyce had published Ulysses three months earlier, and Proust would die six months later. Ladenson published an exhaustive account of their apparently fruitless meeting in a study entitled A Talk Consisting Solely of the Word “No”: Joyce Meets Proust.
“Joyce clearly saw Proust as a competitor, a rival, no doubt, for the title of single greatest literary figure of their time,” Ladenson writes. Both authors claimed not to have read the other’s work. But after Proust said that he had not read Ulysses, Joyce might have lost face if he admitted to having read Proust. There are indications that Joyce read In Search of Lost Time after all. In a later interview with Arthur Power of The Irish Times, Joyce referred to Proust as “the most important French author of our day”.
In the third and closing keynote address of the conference, Prof Barry McCrea of Notre Dame University will compare French and Irish traditions of the 20th century novel, as established by Proust and Joyce.
The Proustian tradition “is a kind of bourgeois novel written in very high, elevated language, that is very interested in its own work,” McCrea says. “Proust’s novel tells you what hard work the writer is doing, whereas Joyce is all about sprezzatura.”
In Ireland, McCrea continues, “we have been trained to value anything that seems to be spontaneous or intuitive or flashes of brilliance. We get that from the Gaelic revival, the idea that the folk vernacular culture that Britain left us had been suppressed and needed to be given value again. You see that in Ulysses. It happens in one day; one flash of life.”
Proust, McCrea says, was analytical and essayistic in a way that was alien to Irish writers. Modern French writers continued the Proustian tradition, while modern Irish writers followed Joyce.
“Irish readers love linguistic fireworks, vernacular especially, spontaneous expressions,” McCrea says. “French writers develop a style within the standard language, whereas Irish writers tend to deconstruct standard language and do something tricksy with it.”
The academics interviewed for this article consider themselves to be more Proustian than Joycean. “When you read Proust, you feel you are reading a book about yourself,” McCrea says. “There is some sort of ingredient which I cannot identify. It’s as if the way he uses prose enters your DNA. Once it’s inside you, you cannot really leave it. It is part of you forever.”
