Operation Ariel
The Search for the Source of Proust’s Mystery and Beauty
by Charles Mudede

The Proust Project
Edited by André Aciman
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux) $25

The Proust Project is a book with mixed results. But it is hard to imagine how a book of this kind could have anything but mixed results. The editor of the Project, AndrĂ© Aciman, a New York intellectual, basically asked other New York and East Coast intellectuals (the most prominent of which are Richard Howard, Edmund White, Alain de Botton, and Lydia Davis), to select and comment on a beloved passage from Proust’s unnaturally long novel, Remembrance of Things Past (or In Search of Lost Time). All together, the passages—each between an opening synopsis and a closing comment—form a rough path through the novel’s plot. Because some of the writers are brilliant and some are average (none are really bad), some of the results of Aciman’s project are impressive and others are certainly not.

For the most part, the average writers are the ones who get personal, who connect the passage they picked with a moment in their life that they believe is in every way Proustain (a gloomy morning when they had to deal with the death of a loved one; a recent evening when they were reminded of their own mortality; an uneventful dusky day in late Autumn that should have been forgotten but has somehow survived the passage of time). These comments, some of which take the form of a short story, such as Colm Toiban’s “The New Year’s Day of Old Men,” are inefficacious because they don’t confront the text or extract from it anything that might fuel its mysterious and continuous beauty.

What real readers of Proust’s novel want are answers. They want to know why this particular passage is more enchanting than that enchanting passage. They want a critic who can accurately determine where Proust gets his special form of juju from. And if the critic can do that, then they want him or her to expose the means by which this special juju mesmerizes the reader so easily and so effectively. An account of a childhood or college experience will not resolve these pressing matters directly but indirectly—which is why the best that the best of the personal accounts in The Proust Project can do is contribute to the mystery of their selected passages. But what you and I want is less sorcery and more answers; we need treatments that will help neutralize the powerful spell Proust has cast on us.

The contribution by the famous translator Richard Horward, “Intermittences of the Heart,” is such a treatment. It offers an analysis of a sentence that shows Proust once again “flexing his rhetorical muscles (the reader can feel the discourse tighten and release) in preparation for the binding effort
” The only problem with Howard’s analysis is that it’s too brief; a much heavier dose of his stuff is needed to convincingly detoxicate the reader and clear the Marcelian mists from the reader’s mind. Other writers, like the music critic Renaud Machart, offer diachronic (rather than Howard’s synchronic) analyses of the text, explaining their historical sources and real-life meanings with cold precision. If the book had more of these types of studies (synchronic and diachronic), and doubled or quadrupled their length, then it would have been an invaluable resource to readers who have been to Remembrance of Things Past and back, and to readers who are about to make what will undoubtedly become the most important trip of their literary lives. (A journey through the novel’s 3,000 pages usually takes a summer.)

To begin Proust’s novel (“For a long time I used to go to bed early”) is to arrive at Prospero’s island, with its music-filled air, its strange perfumes and rich foods. As Shakespeare writes, Prospero’s industrious slave-fairy, Ariel, is the one who does the “spiriting” on this vaporous island, the one who, at his master’s command, makes “the
 noises, sounds, and sweet airs that give delight.” If a reader of Remembrance of Things Past wants to become a magician instead of the subject of a magician’s unearthly powers, then he must do his best to get a hold of Proust’s Ariel, pull him out of the air, strap his delicate body to an operating table, open him up (rib cage apart, gooey heart squeezed to a stop), and examine the grape- and olive-colored organs of the creature who charmed his ears with Debussian music, his eyes with Whistlerian colors, and his mind with Bergsonian philosophies.

AndrĂ© Aciman reads from and talks about The Proust Project at Benaroya Hall (Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall, Third Ave and University St, 888-621-2230) on Wed Jan 26 at 7:30 pm. It’s free.