It happens all too frequently that even when they’re worth the trouble—and God knows there are plenty of different kinds of trouble—too many books appear on the shelves to announce themselves with the fanfare of their packaging, a fine illustration, or the sheer volume and heft of their multitudinous pages, often with some kind of pretentious adornment like deckled edges. It wants to scream to the potential reader: I am important and goddamn it I’m the worth price, or however long I’ll be gathering dust in your library. And I’d be willing to bet that we’re all convinced the price tag reflects this kind of pompous importance. So when it comes to the source material of this essay, it’s worth mentioning that In Search of Lost Time falls under a species of the latter category while still living up to its accolades and providing one hell of a reading experience. But don’t expect the price to be any lower when it comes in a package of six volumes—in this case, perhaps the public library is a good idea.
The notion is a simple one, but it governs the whole of a complex and startling universe: more than in any other facet of his sprawling masterwork, In Search of Lost Time, the brilliance of Marcel Proust lies in the supernal meeting of form and content, bringing to its fullest expression a principle of artistic harmony exemplified by some of the world’s greatest artists. But his staggering achievement is not merely that his novel finds this ideal unity, as though forever resting on its laurels as a literary artifact to be hallowed from afar. The most impressive thing is the way that Proust discovers this unity, alluring the onlooker like a desert sheikh sifting in his fingers the sands of time.
It is a peculiar one, this Proustian way: the sinuous and seductive writing leads the reader on what can become a months-long, arduous journey to the depths of its contemplations, mimicking in its style the nature of its investigation of the cold, hard, and factual data of immediate experience—the stuff of life and human consciousness. Proust labels as a crucial mechanism underlying all this experience what he comes to call involuntary memory: this is the fortuitous concurrence of a sense percept—a trigger in the form of something perceivable to the mind like an object, a smell, or a sight—and a related sense percept in the past, lurking in the depths of the memory. It is an act of fortuitous remembering, triggering a moment that connects to the present and reveals to us an entire array of moments, experiences, and memories that till that moment we didn’t realize existed within us, waiting to be discovered.
Proust goes to great lengths and is often at pains to contrast the two distinct faculties of the memory, pointing up the limitations of the voluntary and the greater but more obscure value of the involuntary. When we actively try to remember something, when we tap into the voluntary memory, we take advantage of our cognitive faculties and the context of a given moment to pry from the dungeons of the mind a few lowly prisoners reluctant to give up their secrets; but with the involuntary memory, we can begin to dig up the countless nuggets of this flickering, underground grotto splattered with the cold glint of buried treasure. The problem, of course, is that it’s involuntary, and our discovery of the hidden treasure, left up to chance.
It was in the context of this phenomenon that Proust came to emphasize, as he well understood owing to the endless cruelty and hardship of his own experience, that the potential value of our lives is concealed from us, forever dependent on the chance concurrence of sense percepts that could at once reveal the vastness and richness of our experience of life, but that would only arise in the kind of moment emphasized in the novel, which abounds in them like small lily pads getting us from one experience to the next. Our lives, otherwise, remain duller and more two-dimensional by comparison, as though a stretch between these lightning flashes of insight that reveal to us some of the substance of being alive.
But it bears mentioning on this point that dullness is not the greatest danger besetting our lives if we fail to appreciate—or encounter often enough to appreciate—these moments of insight: the greater one is that we start to imagine falsely that we’ve arrived at the conclusion that life is a certain way and not another, and that we can somehow determine the value of our lives on the basis of a limited and more temporally bounded experience of life, one without the involuntary memory, or without the richness and substance that it has to offer. This would be a life without an understanding of its potential—like that of a bird whose blindness prevents it from realizing its ability to take flight, let alone to soar.
Before this ideal of a life realized in the fleeting moments that have no warning and no reliable trigger, and an edifice of art and illusion so passionate and extensive that it often seems to be whispering into the ears and coaxing us along—a long, long way of some 3,000-4,000 pages depending on the edition—anyone daring to take on the challenge of adapting Proust for the screen was already going to have his work cut out for him, and mountains of it. And it was either in spite of or because of the challenge of this immense monument that the Chilean intellectual and Francophile expatriate of the twentieth century Raúl Ruiz took on the book and adapted it for the cinema, releasing in 1999 a nearly three-hour movie that really amounts to no more than a glimpse of Proust’s fantastical world. And even at that, it is an impressive creation.
Time Regained does some things very well within its limitations—and these can’t be helped—even as it fails valiantly to match the literary acrobatics of its source material. It serves above all as an excellent introduction to the world of Proust for the uninitiated as well as a suggestive sounding board for the readers exposed in this new format to the comings and goings of all the familiar characters, incarnated by a sterling cast with French stars such as Catherine Deneuve and Emmanuelle Béart. And as the wily and perverse Charlus, we have John Malkovich—the interesting outlier as an American whiling away his time in this francophone haven.
The problem in hands less capable than those of Ruiz would be that the cinematic limitations for a book as long as Proust’s make the director into a species of surgeon, excising parts here and there and suturing others to give his movie the semblance of coherence. But Ruiz’s achievement with Time Regained is that he manages to play the surgeon without doing an injustice to the source material, so that instead of being Proust, the final product is the director’s take on something like the abbreviated sensation of reading In Search of Lost Time if that sensation could be visualized. So while the plot points and the characters to the uninitiated would seem like a jumble of people, places, and things—like a half-remembered bar crawl through early-twentieth-century Paris—the achievement of the movie is that you can still follow its sinuosity, getting from the madness an idea of things to come in the novel and using it as a springboard for a dive into a Proustian universe.
Without a doubt the most memorable parts of Time Regained have to do with the characters, just as the novel itself has its characters constantly to the fore. But I have to admit: the endless roster of characters in the novel gives an immense amount of nuance to work with, to put it mildly, and for any actor taking on this daring adaptation it would have been a challenge. And yet all the principal actors carry off their roles with substance and style, even if they couldn’t have expected to live up to the impossible feat of incarnating the visions of a genius. Playing the quickly aging Odette de Crecy, former prostitute and widow of Swann, Catherine Deneuve brings out old-world charm and captures the world-weary languor of her character; her also-aging daughter with her own daughter to boot, Gilberte, is played with those coquetting and seductive glances by Emmanuelle Béart, whose talent lies in maximizing her ability to use every ounce of her fading beauty; and playing Le Baron de Charlus—a real wildcard character of In Search of Lost Time, and one of the greatest creations of twentieth-century literature—John Malkovich has his own engaging style of eccentric behavior, shifting between giggles and the withering and worldly intellect that can be pretty amusing, even as he fails to live up to a complex and subtle character developed over the course of so many pages.
Unwilling to let the challenge get out of hand while taking aim at the Proustian edifice, Ruiz includes plenty of visual tricks to get us into the supple shifting of the prose style: the opening scene occurs in the cork-lined bedroom in which an aging Proust lies on his sickbed, his maid taking dictation as we watch the furniture around him shifting into place as though alive. Another more peculiar instance of this shifting occurs at a party during a musical performance, when the members of the audience seem to be shifting in concentric circles. Ruiz includes this and other elements of the movie as a way of visualizing the ins and outs of consciousness—both that of the reader and of the author pouring it into his style—and he succeeds in giving it a playful magical-realist and even at times surrealist touch that seems less Proustian than cinematic. But that itself is part of the pleasure of this ticklish tear through the pages of a novel that is not—and could never be—suitable for the cinema. The fact that it was adapted at all is impressive, and it reveals a lot about the ambitions of its director.
And maybe about his frivolity as well. Ruiz was a man often interested in challenge for the sake of a challenge (he’s said to have boasted of having made more than 100 films, which would seem unimportant to anyone that isn’t quite as obsessed with numbers), and Time Regained is really no exception. But why not profit from the effort? At the very least, the thing serves as a Proustian titillation while getting at the notion that two masterpieces might be asking for too much. So let’s admit it: probably in this case more than in any other, one is more than enough.
