Marcel Proust never admitted the influence of Freud or Darwin or Einstein on his work. But as the American critic Edmund Wilson has pointed out, Einstein, Freud and Proust, the first two Jewish, the latter half-Jewish, ‘drew their strength from their marginality which heightened their powers of observance.’ In November 1913 Proust published the first volume of his multivolume work A la recherche du temps perdu, normally translated as Remembrance of Things Past, though many critics/scholars now prefer In Search of Lost Time, arguing that it better conveys Proust’s idea that the novel has some of the qualities of science – the research element – and Proust’s great emphasis on time, time being lost and recovered rather than just gone.
Proust was born in 1871 into a well-off family and never had to work. A brilliant child, he was educated at the Lycée Condorcet and at home, an arrangement that encouraged a close relationship with his mother, a neurotic woman. After she died in 1905, aged fifty seven, two years after her husband, her son withdrew from the world into a cork-lined room where he began to correspond with hundreds of friends and convert his meticulously detailed diaries into his masterpiece. A la recherche du temps perdu has been described as the literary equivalent of Einstein or Freud, though as the Proust scholar Harold March has pointed out, such comparisons are generally made by people unfamiliar with either Freud or Einstein. Proust once described his multivolume work in an interview as ‘a series of novels of the unconscious’. But not in a Freudian sense (there is no evidence that Proust ever read Freud, whose works were not translated into French until the novelist was near the end of his life). Proust ‘realised’ one idea to wonderful heights. This was the notion of involuntary memory, the idea that the sudden taste of a pastry, say, or the smell of some old back stairs, brings back not just events in the past but a whole constellation of experiences, vivid feelings and thoughts about that past. For many people, Proust’s insight is transcendentally powerful, for others it is overstated (Proust has always divided the critics).
His real achievement is what he makes of this. He is able to evoke the intense emotions of childhood – for example, near the beginning of the book when he describes the narrator’s desperate desire to be kissed by his mother before he goes to sleep. This shifting back and forth in time is what has led many people to argue that Proust was giving a response to Einstein’s theories about time and relativity though there is no real evidence to link the novelist and the physicist any more than there is to link him with Freud. Again, as Harold March has said, we should really consider Proust on his own terms. Looked at in this way, In Search of Lost Time is a rich, gossipy picture of French aristocratic/upper class life, a class that, as in Chekhov and Mann, was disappearing and vanished completely with World War I. Proust was used to this world – his letters constantly refer to Princess This, the Count of That, the Marquis of the Other.54 His characters are beautifully drawn; Proust was gifted not only with wonderful powers of observation but with a mellifluous prose, writing in long, languid sentences interlaced with subordinate clauses, a dense foliage of words whose direction and meaning nonetheless always remains vivid and clear.
The first volume, published in 1913, Du côté de chez Swann, ‘Swann’s Way’ (in the sense of Swann’s area of town), comprised what would turn out to be about a third of the whole book. We slip in and out of the past, in and around Combray, learning the architecture, the layout of the streets, the view from this or that window, the flower borders and the walkways as much as we know the people. Among the characters are Swann himself, Odette, his lover and a prostitute, the Duchesse de Guermantes. Proust’s characters are in some instances modelled on real people.55 In sheer writing power, he is able to convey the joy of eating a madeleine, the erotic jealousy of a lover, the exquisite humiliation heaped on a victim of snobbery or anti-Semitism. Whether or not one feels the need to relate him to Bergson, Baudelaire or Zola, as others have done, his descriptions work as writing. It is enough.
Proust did not find it easy to publish his book. It was turned down by a number of publishers, including the writer André Gide at Nouvelle Revue Française, who thought Proust a snob and a literary amateur. For a while the forty-two-year-old would-be author panicked and considered publishing privately. But then Grasset accepted his book, and he now shamelessly lobbied to get it noticed. Proust did not win the Prix Goncourt as he had hoped, but a number of influential admirers wrote to offer their support, and even Gide had the grace to admit he had been wrong in rejecting the book and offered to publish future volumes. At that stage, in fact, only one other volume had been planned, but war broke out and publication was abandoned. For the time being, Proust had to content himself with his voluminous letters.
Since 1900 Freud had expended a great deal of time and energy extending the reach of the discipline he had founded; psychoanalytic societies now existed in six countries, and an International Association of Psychoanalysis had been formed in 1908. At the same time, the ‘movement,’ as Freud thought of it, had suffered its first defectors. Alfred Adler, along with Wilhelm Stekel, left in 1911, Adler because his own experiences gave him a very different view of the psychological forces that shape personality. Crippled by rickets as a child and suffering from pneumonia, he had been involved in a number of street accidents that made his injuries worse. Trained as an ophthalmologist, he became aware of patients who, suffering from some deficiency in their body, compensated by strengthening other faculties. Blind people, for example, as is well known, develop very acute hearing. A social Democrat and a Jew who had converted to Christianity, Adler tried hard to reconcile the Marxist doctrine of class struggle with his own ideas about psychic struggle. He formed the view that the libido is not a predominantly sexual force but inherently aggressive, the search for power becoming for him the mainspring of life and the ‘inferiority complex’ the directing force that gives lives their shape.56 He resigned as spokesman of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Association because its rules stipulated that its aim was the propagation of Freud’s views. Adler’s brand of ‘individual psychology’ remained very popular for a number of years.
Freud’s break with Carl Jung, which took place between the end of 1912 and the early part of 1914, was much more acrimonious than any of the other schisms because Freud, who was fifty-seven in 1913, saw Jung as his successor, the new leader of ‘the movement.’ The break came because although Jung had been devoted to Freud at first, he revised his views on two seminal Freudian concepts. Jung thought that the libido was not, as Freud insisted, solely a sexual instinct but more a matter of ‘psychic energy’ as a whole, a reconceptualisation that, among other things, vitiated the entire idea of childhood sexuality, not to mention the Oedipal relationship.57 Second, and perhaps even more important, Jung argued that he had discovered the existence of the unconscious for himself, entirely independently of Freud. It had come about, he said, when he had been working at Burghölzli mental hospital in Zurich, where he had seen a ‘regression’ of the libido in schizophrenia and where he was treating a woman who had killed her favourite child.58 Earlier in life the woman had fallen in love with a young man who, so she believed, was too rich and too socially superior ever to want to marry her, so she had turned to someone else. A few years later, however, a friend of the rich man had told the woman that he had in fact been inconsolable when she had spurned him. Not long after, she had been bathing her two young children and had allowed her daughter to suck the bath sponge even though she knew the water being used was infected. Worse, she gave her son a glass of infected water. Jung claimed that he had grasped for himself, without Freud’s help, the central fact of the case – that the woman was acting from an unconscious desire to obliterate all traces of her present marriage to free herself for the man she really loved. The woman’s daughter caught typhoid fever and died from the infected sponge. The mother’s symptoms of depression, which appeared when she was told the truth about the wealthy man she had loved, turned worse after her daughter’s death, to the point where she had to be sent to Burghölzli.