The discovery of what could be the only footage of Marcel Proust offers a tantalising glimpse of the “rechercheur” as a young, haut bourgeois socialite far from the cork-lined room of his literary reputation. He – if indeed it is he – is glimpsed in a well-tailored grey suit and modish day hat, descending a staircase as part of a rather stuffy-looking wedding party, nine years before the publication of the first volume of his masterpiece, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, which investigated the life and loves of an haut bourgeois socialite.
The pleasure of the few flickery seconds of this stately cortege is not simply the possibility of spotting Proust himself, but of seeing him in the ambiance that would become his fiction. It sends us irresistibly back to Swann’s first, barbed, encounter with his beloved Odette. Though she was one of the best-dressed women in Paris, he observes, she was encumbered by a corset designed to evoke “an imaginary stomach” in a dress style which “gave a woman, that year, the appearance of being composed of different sections badly fitted together”.
Our reality today is so shaped by images, our culture so dominated by the biographical impulse – the urge to map all art onto the life of its creator – that the film might seem to offer new insight. Proust’s own fiction is full of caveats against such a facile reading.
Swann and Odette’s first encounter is fastidiously placed in “that year” of fashion; the consensus is that they meet in the late 1880s, long before the wedding at which Proust is captured. So Odette would be one of the older generation we see, quite possibly still clinging to the fashions of their youth. Moreover, the whole gist of the fictional scene is that Swann couldn’t see the “real” woman within the “balloon of double skirts”.
This might seem to be nit-picking, but it touches on deeper issues concerning the mechanical record of what has passed. Even if that slight figure is Proust, the film offers no hint of the battles he must already have been having with the evocation of times past. Proust himself was deeply ambivalent about photography and its interference with the emotional “truth” of memory-infused observation, writing that “a photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist”.
A sound-recording can have an even more complicated relationship to that which has vanished, as anyone who has heard Yeats’s wavering incantation of The Lake Isle of Innisfree or TS Eliot’s frigid reading of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock will tell you. Whereas the footage of Proust at the wedding might free one’s imagination to fly off in the wrong direction, a period reading, tethered to the idiosyncrasies of time and personality, can prevent the imagination from taking flight at all. Eliot is no more Prufrock than Proust is Swann. They are biographical footnotes to the literature that they have left for us to reframe according to our own truths.
It is intriguing to see or hear these creators in their moment, but a mistake to think it significantly enriches our understanding. As Samuel Beckett observed, in an essay on Proust which doubled as an early manifesto of his own project: “We cannot know and we cannot be known.” It is in his writing – rather than in any incidental footage – that the truth of this most elusive writer lives on.