Stephanie Zavas

In Search of Lost Time

13 May 2015

Proust on Music (pages 334-37; 339-340)

Throughout this part of the book the narrator focuses immensely on Art– it’s form, function, and the skilled people who create it. In these passages Marcel is at the Verdurins’, having lied to Albertine so he could go alone. He discusses love and explains his theory on how jealousy begets lying to a lover, and how subsequently that wounds the strength of union between two hearts because the notion of consenting to lie or mislead one’s partner tarnishes the purity of the relationship (295). The primary instigator of these thoughts of mistrust and these desires to be untruthful are feelings of jealousy. Jealousy, however, merely sets the stage for the actual catalyst of division; it’s the lying afterward that ruins the bond between two hearts.

While the narrator is listening to the deceased composer Vinteuil’s music being played, he is finding out that art can be more than something beautiful; it can be transcendental (340). This quality, which he is experiences through Vinteuil’s compositions, can allow people to experience hundreds of lifetimes, of feelings, across the stars (343). He finds in the music his phrase for his feelings about Albertine, the love, the pain, the contradiction of his feelings is expressed in the variations of rhythm and tone in a song, an expression of emotion that doesn’t use words or colours but can convey them through an entirely different form—sound (336-7).

This made me think back on the importance of Swann and Odette’s phrase, and how art in general is portrayed as influencing so many aspects of life; social standing, emotions, physical and mental well-being (Mme. Verdurin is a good example I think of a person who is affected physically by music), and can serve as a way to immortalize one’s individuality, like Proust said about Vinteuil and Elstir’s work on page 339. He expounds on the idea of art being a means to prevent oneself from vanishing into the past, and he says that because life encompasses experiences artists are only able to keep fragments alive, intimations of their individuality because experiences are separated by their own starts and stops, we can’t remember the entire summation of our experiences in a fluid way because memories are something like immersed in an ocean of existence, of time, so when we hear or see some masterpiece, we can get carried on a wave of what the artist is in that sand-dollar memory we find in opening up to experience great art (339-40). The, “…proof of the irreducibly individual existence of the soul.“ (341) lay in the artist’s “habitual speculation” and their own ability to express with an exactitude that is similar to a totally individual accent, the voice of their soul and existence through creating a piece of art which moves people into feeling who they were at the moment of composition.

Linking this notion of preserving oneself in fragments, as memories which other people can maybe access on their own person level to the theme of time and it’s anachronistic, choppy, nature is interesting to me. Proust compares sounds to colours, images to songs and this aids in effectively translating an observation on why creating is important, how it takes us back and into another time, place, world, and can influence future perceptions of experiences by the memory of what that art imparted—they are memories which aren’t our own but which we internalize and interpret within ourselves, which makes it ours. We are not lost at sea, we are droplets of the same ocean, no matter which wave we comprise.