In literature, Marcel Proust is shorthand for a hard nut. Either you read Proust, or you do something else. It helps to give the author what his readers say he deserves: respect. He demands all of your attention, and in return he gives you a world you will not forget for the rest of your life. Reading him well requires a taste for contemplation, so much so that his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, is often called the longest novel ever written: it comprises seven volumes and 1,250,000 words.
What keeps this epic largely unread, though, is not its length, but its lengthy descriptions. Some sentences end pages later. You find yourself short of breath, waiting for the full stop that will finally close the sentence. The author embroidered every page stitch by stitch, like needlework, and the reader must cling to its interweaving threads.
Few writers close one era and open another; before In Search of Lost Time, a novel had never treated memory and time on this scale. Pushing the plot into the background, building a single life out of contradictory impressions, making the narrator both hero and commentator: these three things count today as ordinary tools of the modern novel, and in 1913 they were almost unheard of. Proust’s design of memory and time, inspired by philosopher Henri Bergson, became legendary. In the same book, however, a society was written from the inside for the first time, and only the memory was remembered; the salon and high society stayed in the background.
A reading prescription has passed from hand to hand since its publication. To understand it fully, knowledge of semiotics is not enough; one must also know the work of the field’s specialists: Ferdinand de Saussure, Algirdas Greimas, Roland Barthes, and Umberto Eco. Before opening Volume I, Swann’s Way (Du côté de chez Swann, 1913), it helps to have a strong understanding of mythology, musicology, art and painting, and even botany. A novel about the upper bourgeoisie demands the same store of knowledge from its readers.
Its characters seem to confirm this reputation. Over the course of the epic, more than 2,000 people, fictional and real, enter circulation; some appear in a sentence and vanish, others change from one person to another from volume to volume. In the middle of this crowd, the narrator’s own name appears only twice, and only in the fifth volume, The Prisoner (La Prisonnière, 1923; The Captive in Scott Moncrieff’s translation), and only indirectly. The first time, the author steps in to say that the narrator, “if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book,” would be called Marcel; the second time, the name appears at the end of a short note left by his lover: “What a Marcel! What a Marcel!” A narrator who stays nameless for four volumes and is half-mentioned twice in the fifth is quietly telling us something: what matters is not himself but what he tells, his circle and its settings.
Two layers run through In Search of Lost Time, meaning it speaks to two different readers. The upper layer is one of allusions: the names of flowers, the real composer who inspired the sonata of Vinteuil, and the imaginary composer; that layer asks for intertextual reading and knowledge of music history. In the lower layer a cauldron of gossip boils; that part tells, with satire and black humor, the comic situations people fall into for the sake of nobility, and it is open to every reader. The stage is the Faubourg Saint-Germain: the Guermantes mansion, the privilege and ego that come with membership in the Jockey Club, a name that comes by birth and cannot be bought. Here Proust carries Honoré de Balzac‘s Human Comedy one generation forward; he takes a map that began in the street and in money, brings it into the salon, and draws the reader a socio-cultural sketch of a society.
Readers who boast of having read Proust cite one scene above all: the madeleine. They describe at length the little cake dipped in lime-flower tea, its taste dissolving on the tongue and bringing back childhood. That scene, however, is only in the first volume. In the next five volumes the cake is brushed aside in two half-sentences; only in the seventh, Time Regained (Le Temps retrouvé, 1927) does it return as a detail among other memories. In Search of Lost Time, the most famous scene is, in fact, the one it returns to least; those who take it for the lead never finished this work.
Another scene stays with the patient reader. A woman who, for 40 years, drove the “bores” out of her salon enters the novel’s final party as its hostess; her rise is like the French version of the American Dream, achieved not by work alone but by a lineage acquired through marriage. Her name is now one of the oldest in France: two marriages later, Madame Verdurin has become the Princesse de Guermantes.
Most of the young guests holding teacups do not know who she used to be; they think they are in a princess’s house, and they are right. She is a princess now; she has erased her past identity, built a new one in its place, and receives people behind a new mask. The narrator reminds us that the same woman, 40 years earlier, patronized a young pianist in a bourgeois salon and gave herself the airs of a protector of the arts. That protective posture is in this room too, only hidden this time under more elite clothes. They are both in the same room. She has forgotten where she came from. He does not forget, and cannot. This scene is the heart of the real matter, and nobody quotes it. This story begins a hundred pages before the madeleine and ends a thousand pages after it.
The Status of Snobbery
Snobbery is the spine of In Search of Lost Time. The novel tells everything through the scramble to be a snob, or not to be one, and the comedy of high society grows out of that scramble. The English invented the word in its modern sense: William M. Thackeray published The Book of Snobs in 1848, 23 years before Proust was born, and turned the word into a fault. Thackeray described snobbery from the outside, with a grin; in his day it was always somebody else’s obsession, never the author’s.
In the world of In Search of Lost Time, the thing itself is different. Snobbery is not a fault but a rank, and people dig each other’s graves to reach it. Nobody is exempt, not even the narrator: for seven volumes he swings between being one and not being one, looks down on people exactly like himself, and waits for years at a duchess’s door. Proust may not have been the first to describe the condition. He was, however, the first to describe it as the working principle of an entire society.
To grasp this scramble for rank, and to make sense of it inside the novel’s universe, the simplest method is to map the books by how often they name each person. The most named of all is the beloved, Albertine. After her come not the loved but the doors one wants to enter: the Guermantes and the Verdurins, the aristocratic salon and the bourgeois one; Swann, the one man who was admitted among the nobles without being noble; and the Baron de Charlus, an aristocrat by birth who sits at the Verdurin table out of habit. These people are, in a sense, the poles of snobbery, and the whole story shuttles between them.
Their story, and that of the hundreds of minor figures around them, stretches over 40 years, and in that time the narrator’s view of himself and his surroundings changes many times. What never changes is the social layer each character belongs to. The novel says so in its first volume, in words that read almost like a manifesto for what follows: “middle-class people in those days took what was almost a Hindu view of society, which they held to consist of sharply defined castes,” so that a man born the son of a stockbroker found himself “immured for life in a caste” (all quotations are from C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation). Aristocracy on one side, bourgeoisie on the other, and a third class that serves both and knows them more closely than anyone.
None of this is drawn as a pitiable crowd; it is a world with its own hierarchy. Even the kitchen has a caste order, and the family cook, Françoise, knows the rules of polite society better than her mistress; in truth, she keeps that order standing. Snobbery is not only the language of those who look downward. Those who watch from below speak it as well, and more fluently, because they know that world better.
Nowhere is this language spoken better than in a scene from the first volume. In Combray, an engineer named Legrandin talks of art, the countryside, and simplicity, and breathes fire at the aristocracy and anyone who fawns on it. One Sunday morning, coming out of church in the company of a lady who owns a château, he pretends not to know the narrator’s father. No greeting, only something said with the eyes; then, when alone again, he embraces the same family.
The man angriest at such snobbery is the story’s first snob, and his anger is snobbery itself. He does not know that he belongs to that world, and he does not even know that he does not know. This is precisely why the semiotician Mehmet Rifat titled his book on the novel’s characters Authentic Snobs (Otantik Snoplar, Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2014). In Rifat’s reading, the novel’s snob imitates the ever-changing ways of living, speaking, and judging art of those deemed distinguished. He does so without any deep need and to ridiculous effect, all the while trying not to betray that he wants to. The last part of the definition is the engineer of Combray to the letter: the one who imitates and hides the imitation. These people are not acting; they believe in what they perceive themselves to be, because it is the only way of life they know.
The Cost of Attaining a “Name”
Wanting to climb never lifts anyone to another level on its own. Social climbing needs an instrument, and in the novel’s world, that instrument is money. Legrandin knows only how to want with his eyes; Madame Verdurin’s fortune buys the thing wanted. George Eliot wrote about how the economy helps in this business half a century earlier, in a provincial town where fortune decides marriage, debt decides morals, and inheritance decides fate. Middlemarch is set in the three years around the Reform Act of 1832, when the vote passed from a handful of landed families to householders occupying property worth ten pounds a year, some 200,000 new voters overnight, and the industrialists began to take political power from the landowners.
Proust takes the flag one generation later. In his Paris, wealth no longer buys votes because everyone can vote; only one thing remains to be bought: a name. In the 50 years between, the symbols changed, and the mechanism did not. Eliot wrote how money turns into marriage; her successor writes how marriage turns into a title and a noble name.
At the start of the first volume, the author invites the reader into his world and carves the scene most deeply into memory with empathy and emotional mastery. A child waits every evening for his mother to come upstairs and kiss him. She comes, it lasts a moment, and then she goes down. Some evenings she does not come because there is a guest at dinner. That guest is always the same man: a stockbroker’s son, someone who in Combray’s eyes could never step beyond his father’s circle; in Paris, meanwhile, he is a member of the Jockey Club and sits at the table of the Prince of Wales.
His family does not know this and would not believe it; in Combray, everyone stays where he was born. Even the most emotional scene is governed by a class rule: a man who has long since crossed his caste leaves a child without a kiss, orphaned in a sense, because of the caste’s rule. Everyone who reads this scene, which reaches down to the roots of empathy, hears the footsteps of their own mother; on a first reading nobody notices that what silences those footsteps is a guest, because the reader at that moment is on the staircase with the child, and being, as it were, the child’s age, pays it no attention.
In 1918 Proust wrote to the novelist Jacques de Lacretelle that his characters have no counterparts in real life, or rather that each has eight or ten. For that reason, the woman who becomes a princess is not a woman, if you will, but a representation of a class: the bourgeois salons of Paris shaped into a single body. In short, the story focuses not on the rise of one person but on the displacement of a class, and makes one woman carry it out.
Her stepping stones are clear. Odette is a cocotte and, like Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, climbs through liaisons: first she becomes Swann’s wife; when Swann dies she marries a count; when her daughter marries a Guermantes, the cocotte has given the Faubourg a son-in-law. Bloch, in a France split by the Dreyfus affair, changes his name, becomes Jacques du Rozier, then makes everyone forget that the name was ever changed. The bourgeois hostess who drove out the “bores” gives her last party, two marriages and one war later, as a princess bearing one of the oldest names in France.
As the story advances, we find that the Guermantes nobility no longer buys votes or office, and even brings in no income; their material power shrinks, and their titles mean less with every passing year. The title’s price does not fall for all that; on the contrary, its value rises, because luxury means scarcity. Money can multiply; an old name cannot. Industry produces new rich men every year, and nobody can produce a new Guermantes; so the title becomes a currency everyone still accepts, even though no power remains behind it.
Like the guinea in Eliot’s England: the coin was withdrawn in 1816, and for a century and a half people went on reckoning fees and prices in guineas, a currency that survived on nothing but agreement. The aristocracy is not a class but a waiting room. Those who get in shut the door behind them so that others cannot; they forget their own wait, call the newcomers “bores”, and so secure themselves, since the value of the door is measured by the number waiting outside.
Psychologists would give this behavior a name 50 years later, the “hedonic treadmill” (Brickman and Campbell, 1971): every arrival becomes a new starting line. In this society, everything runs flawlessly. The salon was built not to let anyone in but to measure the price of entry and pick those who can pay; it is no longer a salon but the reception room of the rich and the privileged. If entry has been made, the class line has been crossed, and the account is closed. You may have your share of the princess’s tea.
Proust Makes Clocks of Faces
One reason In Search of Lost Time marks a turning point in literature is that its author was the first to turn involuntary memory into the entire architecture of a novel. A taste, a sound, a touch brings back a moment the mind never summoned, and what it brings back, unlike what will recall, is alive as it was. Proust’s signature is also the narrative form that carries this technique: retrospective first-person narration, an aged narrator working out years later what he did not understand while living it. This method is often confused with the stream of consciousness of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, though the structure is entirely different; in Joyce, thought flows as it occurs; here, it is analyzed years later.
This technique peaks in the seventh volume, Time Regained. Absent from society for years, the narrator goes to a reception at the mansion of the former Madame Verdurin; in the courtyard he stumbles on a paving stone, inside he hears the clink of a spoon, he touches a starched napkin, and involuntary memory fires three times in a row. The real blow comes after that. There, the author begins to read memory not from a taste but from a face, and only in those pages is the book’s title explained. What is being sought is not lost time; it is what time does to people.
French critics call this scene the “ball of heads”. When the narrator enters the salon, he recognizes no one, because the faces are blurred, as if everyone were wearing a mask. Then he realizes: there are no masks; every face has aged. Time has spared no one. The women he chased in his youth have grown heavy, the duke he admired has begun to tremble, and the witty, cutting duchess has become an imitation of herself.
This bewilderment, which passes to the reader too, fits the tale’s method: no portrait is drawn once; every face is rebuilt according to the narrator’s impression of the moment, and for 40 years the same people pass through the pages with changing faces. At the last party, all those faces appear at once, and the narrator sees for the first time that faces are clocks. Every line a year, every sag a season. Bodies carry inside them every hour they have lived, and that is why people do so much harm to those who love them.
To understand this scene and what lies beneath it, one should consult a founder of European semiotics and a master of thought and prose: Barthes. In the winter of 1980, a few weeks before his death, he was preparing a seminar for the Collège de France. Its title was “Proust and Photography”, though in his own words it would be neither about Photography nor about Proust, but about “Marcel”: its focus would be not the author of the novel but the man who wrote it, his circle, his friends, his odd habits (The Preparation of the Novel, Columbia University Press, 2011).
For this, he chose faces photographed by Paul Nadar, the son who took over the famous photographer Nadar’s studio: countesses, dukes, cocottes, the real models of the people in the novel. Next to every name on the list stood a birth date and a death date: the Comtesse Greffulhe, the duchess of the novel, 1860–1952; Charles Haas, the Swann of the novel, 1832–1902. What is depicted is not the characters’ faces, but the clocks of those faces.
In his notes, he explained why he chose these photographs: for the piling up of these faces, gazes, and clothes; for the affection some of them would stir in us; and for longing, because “they too lived once, and now they are all dead.” In his view, every person in the novel is a condensation, several real people fused into one figure; hunting for who was the model of whom is a delusion, and also the source of the pleasure of reading. The Proust myth, moreover, had long since slipped from the work into life: what seduces the reader is no longer the novel but the density of the biography, the albums, and the photographs. The narrator looking at aged faces and Barthes looking at century-old photographs were doing the same work: reading the bill that time leaves on the body.
A hundred years after the last volume, we still look at Proust and at In Search of Lost Time, but no longer to see the madeleine; we look to see the salon, the title and the faces. For a century this novel has given something different to every discipline: neuroscience took memory from it, philosophy took time, psychology took desire. What fell to sociology was the epic itself, the finest map of how high society is built and of its doors. Proust did not lose time; he rebuilt it; and inside that construction lie the century-old traces not of a memory but of an entire society and an era, and of where high society carried it from and to.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France (1978–1979 and 1979–1980). Translated by Kate Briggs. Columbia University Press. 2011.
Brickman, Philip, and Donald T. Campbell. “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society”. Adaptation-Level Theory. Ed. M. H. Appley. Academic Press. 1971.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1871–72. Project Gutenberg.
Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way and The Captive. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. 1922 and 1929. Project Gutenberg Australia.
Proust, Marcel. Sodom and Gomorrah. Translated by Helen Constantine. ed. Adam Watt. Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford University Press. 2026.
Proust, Marcel. Letter to Jacques de Lacretelle. 20 April 1918.
Rifat, Mehmet. Otantik Snoplar: Marcel Proust’un Roman Karakterleri. Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2014.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. The Book of Snobs. 1848. Project Gutenberg.