Discovering Marcel Proust

“Proust was a butterfly, before being a chrysalis. Then he slowly wrapped himself in his cocoon and disappeared, leaving behind the long strands of his writing. Those who knew him were deceived by his worldly completeness. For his part, in order to write about it, he had to slowly unlearn what he had learned so perfectly, moving away from it and curling up on himself, until it disappeared… ”. In these few lines from the book “Marcel Proust” (Bompiani, 2022, pp. 272, also e-book) Giuseppe Scaraffia helps us to glimpse the essence of one of the literary geniuses of the early twentieth century. A complex essence, elusive, large and fragile at the same time and that Scaraffia investigates with the passion and wisdom of those who have dedicated most of their studies to the Proustian work par excellence, the Recherche. The result is an essay that draws a portrait of the French author capable of breaking many categories of genre. Not simply a biography, nor a text of pure literary invention, but a book that goes beyond all boundaries, becoming itself a research.

We ask Giuseppe Scaraffia, professor of French literature at Sapienza in Rome, to explain what he means when he says that “Proust was a butterfly, before being a chrysalis”?

“For a long time Proust deluded himself or tried to delude himself that he could live like the others. Just think of the episode in which, in adolescence, Marcel, to make himself beautiful in front of a friend, did not hesitate to ask a beautiful flower girl to go to bed with him. Obviously with no result. Then he tried to join the group of aristocrats, of those who, by birth, felt superior to others like him for his genius, confusedly felt as a presence yet to be demonstrated. It was the disease that snatched him from this disappointing effort, locking him in his room and delivering him to the work he was waiting impatiently ".

Once you abandoned the guise of a butterfly, who became Marcel Proust?

“Proust closed in on himself to open himself to the world of memory. He worked at night and rested during the day. He loaded Noah's Ark of the Search for Lost Time to the brim. That operation, a mixture of shocks and patience, of will and abandonment, slowly isolated him from worldly life. He began to go out more and more rarely and his outputs, we could define them militarily 'sorties', became more and more rapid raids in which he snatched keys from the present to understand the past, the lost time. He was no longer trying to fit into the present. When he went out he wore, under his overcoat or coat lined in mink with a black otter collar, evening dresses cut according to the fashion of his youth, also keeping the high starched collars. Slender and agile, despite his long hospital stay, he walked erect, with his head slightly tilted to one side ”.

Why was the relationship with his mother so important to Proust?

“The mother was the first and for a long time the only one to sense the genius hidden under the tangle of neurosis that made her son's life so difficult. It was so important that on his death Proust, overwhelmed by the pain of mourning, had to shut himself up in a clinic to overcome that predicament. But at the same time his death gave Proust the strength to start writing without fear of hurting his susceptibility ”.

What role did illness play in Proust's life?

“Like an invisible but attentive guardian, illness led him back to writing every time he was tempted to escape, to get lost in the outer life. Asthma was also a perennial ambassador of death, it reminded him that he didn't have to waste time if he wanted to save 'lost time'. In fact, he wrote: 'Nature in case of need invents protective neuroses and tutelary injuries so that the necessary gift of the artist does not have to remain inactive' ”.

Why was he so anxious to make his correspondence disappear?

“The immense Proustian correspondence, now accessible in twenty-one volumes edited by Plon, edited by the patient Philip Kolb, is extraordinarily varied. It is striking the rain of messages with which Proust tries to follow the life of his friends from his voluntary prison while engaged in the merry-go-round of worldliness. The praises he filled with a series of non-existent writers. But there were also, widely visible, the stigmata of what was then considered an unconfessable vice, his homosexuality, readable transparently in his letters to lovers and friends. For the same reason Proust was hostile to biographies, fearing that the inevitable scandal raised by his homosexuality would distract the reader or distance him from his work ”.

In what sense was Proust a snob?

“Disgusted and betrayed by his classmates, Proust had adopted, as far as he could, the lifestyle and playfully childish language of a group of young aristocrats. Isolated from his own inevitable superiority, Proust had thought that perhaps the nobility, that social group that thought itself naturally superior to others, could accept his inner eminence. But this was not the case and it was often the most intelligent members of that frivolous elite who were irritated by his undeniable stature. Whenever their friendship was tested, as at the time of their marriages, Marcel was ruthlessly excluded ”.

In what is Proust still very relevant?

“The keys of Proust, snobbery and jealousy, are always current. Snobism is not reserved for the elites but extends to all social classes; we must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the myth of the aristocracy being tarnished. The incessant metamorphosis of snobbery pushes him into the most unexpected environments, from rappers to influencers. Jealousy always remains an extraordinary instrument of knowledge, like a microscope, the jealous's gaze lingers on every gesture, analyzes every slightest clue in search of a hoped or feared revelation ".