PROUSTIAN UNCERTAINTIES

A book-length essay on Proust’s masterpiece.

Early on, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Friedländer writes that he believes In Search of Lost Time is not only the greatest novel of French literature, but one of the most important novels ever written.” In this brief, thought-provoking examination that is likely to appeal most to literary scholars he focuses on the “Narrator’s strange, contradictory statements” and how the Narrator functions as Proust’s “alter ego.” The Narrator is a “disembodied presence unlike that in any novel before,” and Friedländer engages in a close reading of the book to “decipher the author’s strategy.” His extensive quoting from the novel and his many debates with other Proust scholars create something of a running dialogue among many voices. After assessing the Narrator’s love-hate relationship with his mother and Proust’s own deep love for his, Friedländer takes on the book’s puzzling treatment of Jews. Proust was Jewish; his Narrator is not. The Narrator’s attitudes toward Jews are “often negative,” and the novel is “replete with anti-Semitic remarks adopted by the Narrator without any comment.” Friedländer notes the importance of understanding the Narrator’s “obsession with the Jewish question in general and his own identity in particular,” and even though the Narrator never “admits to even a whiff of homosexuality,” it, too, plays a key role in the novel. Most of all, In Search is a “social satire on the grandest scale and an incomparable analysis of complex emotional constructs, but it mostly lacks a sense of tragedy.” A “paean to memory,” it’s very much a “novel about time, but with a twist: it is directed toward the future…in order to recapture the past.” It’s “not Proust’s story that we follow,” Friedländer writes, “but that of his Narrator.” The author is a wise, enthusiastic guide to Proust, but this one is mostly for the academic audience.

An intimate literary investigation; those seeking a broader assessment will need to look elsewhere.