Riku Sayuj's Reviews > Du côté de chez Swann

“As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image.”

~ James Joyce, Ulysses


“The Universe is the externalization of the soul.”

~ Emerson

To attempt to review this now would be like trying to review a book after finishing the first couple of chapters. There is no way to do justice to it, or to even be sure of what one is prattling on about. So seasoned readers, please do excuse any over-eager generalizations or over-enthusiastic missteps.

Poetry in Proust

There is an atmosphere of grandness that is felt as one reads this initial book, everything is charged with a sense of premonition, as if these are all musical notes that are being played for us now in a subdued key, and exquisite as they are, they are all going to reappear in grander forms later.

There is a sense throughout of stage being set, themes being set forth and of being invited to an extremely long composition that could last a lifetime if the reader is engaged enough.

On the other hand, every paragraph I read seemed to me self-contained, like understated poetry; like a leaf so brilliantly illuminated that it outshines the whole tree, until you move your gaze to the next, when the same magic is repeated again.

Proust as Teacher

There is greatness in this work and it is beyond the obvious literary value or aesthetic pleasure that it provides. Proust also liberates literature in a way, in being so unapologetically, irrepressibly romantic about everything in life!

Thus the narrative runs on with undisguised romanticism and wide eyed enthusiasm for every detail of life. There is no attempt to tone anything down. There is none of that tendency for manly acceptance of the drollness life or of a skeptical indifference to its inevitable ugliness.

Everything is lived to its fullest and described as it should be lived. It almost feels like a fairyland, so fully heightened are the colors and emotions of Marcel’s life. Until we realize that that is exactly how rich inner lives always are, if we only surrender to the sense of wonder that drives our lives. If only we could recapture the color and the poetry.

Proust teaches us how to live.



Reading Notes:

Some of the notes (as in musical notes) that struck (a chord with) me the most, and which I know will leave a lasting impact no matter how they are modified or reinforced in the later chapters (books) are:

Proust As Madeleine

The Proust experience opens a portal to one’s own childhood — to a re-creation of one’s entire life, in fact.

This re-creation enables one to embark on the path of one’s own memories as well - to resurrect one’s childhood paths and travel them, think of fears and of flames.



Like remembering the pond one used to walk by, rediscovering the beauty and the colors that surrounded our lives…

Memories come thick and fast as we savor the Madeleine that is Proust.


The Intimate Acts of Creation

“Our social personality is a creation of the minds of others”

Thus we no longer need to hunt for the memory-objects wherein our pasts are locked away. The reading itself serves that function. And as we recreate thus our internal world, Proust also teaches us how we created the external world around us:

Just as the world is constructed after dreaming, the whole structure of society is created anew from birth for each child. We all reinvent it and then propagate it. Unless we choose the other ‘way.’

Discovering slowly class and social barriers. Understanding now how we might have been indoctrinated unconsciously…

We come with freedom and then the ties slowly bind us — constraining us, showing us already defined paths. This crystallization of our future path is what we later call our life, the path we travelled. By which we define ourselves.

How we created and defined and imbibed social relations, including superiors and equals, in an intensely solipsistic fashion. Just as when Marcel meets an aristocrat, first sees her as an ordinary person, had expected to be more, is seen to be not, and is then recreated based on the expectations — invented in short.

One example by Proust is enough to call up a hundred more of our own.

Aesthetic Oneness with Proust

Thus, you find yourself drawn into the world Proust is sketching. The involvement deepens to an immersion where the ordinary, everyday world dims and fades from the center of attention, you begin to understand and even share the feelings of the characters on the page — under ideal conditions you might reach a stage where you begin to participate in some strange way in the love being evoked.

Now, if at that moment you were to ask yourself: “Whose love is this?” a paradox arises.

It cannot be Marcel’s love for Gilberte, nor Gilberte’s love for Marcel, for they are fictional characters. It cannot be your own love, for you cannot love a fictional character. Could it be memories evoked?

Could it be that both Marcel and Gilberte exist no longer in what you feel as love as you read about them? Could it be that the emotion exists at another plane of existence now?

In any case, it is a peculiar, almost abstract love without immediate referent or context — left to you, the reader, to actualize and bring to life.



A Sanskrit aesthete would ease your anxiety by explaining to you, probably with examples from Kathakali, that you are at that moment of paradox “relishing” (asvadana) your own “fundamental emotional state” (sthayi-bhava) called “passion” (rati) which has been “decontextualised” (sadharanikaran) by the operation of “sympathetic resonance” (hrdaya-samvada) and heightened to become transformed into an “aesthetic sentiment” (rasa) called the “erotic sentiment” (srngara).

This “aesthetic sentiment” that is so subtly wrought in us is a paradoxical and ephemeral thing that can be evoked by the novel but is not exactly caused by it, for many readers may feel nothing at all during the same instance in the book. You yourself, reading it again next month, under the same circumstances, might experience nothing.

It is, moreover, something that cannot be adequately explained on analytic terms, the only proof for its existence is its direct, personal experience.

The evocation of this intense personal experience is the highest function of art.

But there is one more aim that art can have — to not only evoke it but also make you aware of how it is done. This rarified level of achievement is what Proust reaches. Proust makes you one with his world but also makes your personal experience with a piece of art concrete, through his own narrator’s experiences coming alive in what he is to eventually create out of everything he (and now you) passes through in these pages.

Proust allows us to not only experience sublime art but also its very creation.

Proust as Meditation

There is a breathlessness for the reader in everything in Proust, as we try to squeeze out meaning from every word and expression, every chance direct address by the narrator. These meanings and themes we might squeeze out are charged with special gravity in Proust — since we know that we have to remember them, we have to take them along with us in the long journey that awaits us. We cannot afford to be careless in this first sojourn. If we miss any key now, we might encounter a beautiful door that will refuse to yield later.

This effect does not depend on truth, it does not matter whether what we get out of this early reading will be valuable in reality later or not. The possibility is enough to invest a special sort of magic into the reading. A stillness of expectation, of anticipation is created. That atmosphere can be stifling or it can be as expansive as a zen garden.



One might feel lost in it or one might feel oneself in the presence of a literary holy grail. For me, I could not even tolerate the disturbance rendered by my own breathing when I read. I wanted total stillness.

It was meditation.