Marcel Proust: Breaking the Bonds of Time

The Prisoner by Marcel Proust. Translated by Carol Clark. 384 pp. Penguin Classics

The Fugitive by Marcel Proust. Translated by Peter Collier. 271 pp. Penguin Classics

Finding Time Again by Marcel Proust. Translated by Ian Patterson. 374 pp. Penguin Classics.

(Note: The Prisoner and The Fugitive are combined in one volume. The two books shown are British imports, not yet available from Penguin Classics in the U.S. Prices may vary.)

“The Prisoner” and “The Captive,” the fifth and sixth volumes of “In Search of Lost Time” by Marcel Proust, are also collectively known as the Albertine novel. Both share the unhappy theme of the first book, “Swann’s Way”: the role of jealousy as the prime motivator of love. In “Swann In Love,” the dilettante Charles Swann is obsessed with Odette de Crecy, known for her loose morals. The more she stays aloof from Swann, the more he pursues her. In “The Prisoner” and “The Fugitive,” Marcel, the narrator, is living with Albertine, a woman he met in volume three, “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower,” while vacationing during the summer with his grandmother at a seaside hotel in Balbec.

Marcel is consumed with hints and allegations that Albertine is a lesbian. He interrogates others regarding her past, restricts where she goes and whom she sees, and basically keeps her as a captive in his apartment in Paris. Though he is the captor, he becomes a captive himself in the same setting. Once she is his captive, his jealousy abates somewhat and he resolves to leave her–only to find that she has left first. While Albertine’s death through a horse-riding accident ends their tortured affair, Marcel continues with his posthumous investigation of her lesbian afffairs.

In the final volume, “Finding Time Again,” Marcel has gotten over Albertine and is living in Paris, suffering from bombardment during WWI. In addition to the war, the theme of mortality is starkly rendered at a ball he attends, populated by figures he has not seen for many years. At first, he believes that he must be at a costume ball, since he cannot recognize anyone. Soon, though, he realizes how everyone has deteriorated due to the ravages of time.  

What, then, rescues the narrator from the cycle of time and enables him to find it again? He has a number of experiences toward the end that resemble the famous opening episode of “In Search of Lost Time,” when he has tea and madeleine and, by a process of association, sees the entire town of Combray spring up before him. The past is connected with the present and experienced again, proving that it has never left him. Further, through deciding to write the book that we have just finished, he will also recover his entire past. Proust’s narrative, then, comes full circle and is self-contained.

Written in memory of my mother, Dorothy Tone (1923-2006), who introduced me to the writings of Proust and an entire world of art and literature.

"The Village": An Elegy for America's Artistic Center

The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues by John Strausbaugh. Illustrated. 624 pp. Ecco. $17.99 (paperback)

Sitting on a bench at Washington Square Park, having an espresso at Caffe Reggio, listening to music at the Bitter End, and wandering Cornelia, Jones, Barrow, and other winding streets that don’t follow Manhattan’s grid, one can almost imagine that Greenwich Village remains a center of bohemia and artistic experimentation. Armed with a good walking guide, one can visit the spots associated with famous artists and movements. That Village no longer exists, a reality that John Strausbaugh ruefully acknowledges in his outstanding history.

Strausbaugh’s narrative is encyclopedic in scope and teeming with Village characters, major and minor. Starting his narrative at a time four centuries ago as Manhattan gradually developed from its southernmost reaches, he quickly moves into the bohemian movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Marxism, Freudianism, free love, women’s emancipation and avant-garde art held sway. Every cultural and political movement is accounted for, as the Village gained a reputation as a countercultural haven: the New York School of abstract expressionists, the Bebop jazz musicians, the Beat writers, the folk-music scene, the ‘60s radicals, and the gay liberation movement. Along the way, we meet legendary figures: Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, John Reed, W.H. Auden, Jackson Pollock, Dizzy Gillespie, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs. We also stop in at legendary writers’ bars such as the Lion’s Inn and the Whitehorse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. And, of course, there are storied music venues, whether the Village Gate for jazz or Gerde’s Folk City for folk.

This captivating history reaches a melancholy climax, one recognized by anyone who has witnessed the Village’s contemporary evolution. The author recaptures the long history when the Village was a magnet for young artists and writers. Now, it’s affordable only to investment bankers and corporate lawyers, as “…skyrocketing prices drove resident bohemians and artists out of the Village…” This “shiny and new” gentrified area of upscale shops and restaurants is a far cry from a Village once known for its artistic and cultural experimentation and political dissent. Strausbaugh’s powerful history reminds us of those traditions and celebrates them, in an outstanding narrative that is ultimately elegiac.