Few people read Marcel Proust. When one of the most popular current means of communication limits utterances to 140 characters it is little wonder that a work containing a 30 page description of the author trying to get to sleep appears unattractive to modern tastes. There is another problem, however. There is a general misconception of the aim of his series of novels. This is due to the unhelpful mistranslation of the title of his work – in French, “À la recherche du temps perdu”. The weakest translation was the first one – “Remembrance of things past”, later updated to the generally accepted, but little better, “In search of lost time”. The problem is that these titles encourage the popular belief that Proust’s work is nostalgic, that it is primarily about the world of memory. This is confirmed in people’s minds by the importance placed by critics on the “Madeleine” scene, in which the taste of a Madeleine cake awakens in the author’s mind a vivid, involuntary childhood memory. In my experience people see this as the point of the book and their response is “So what?” This idea – that we recall the past through the senses of taste and smell – is commonplace. Is Proust famous because he wrote several volumes to show what we all know – that when we get into a new car the smell of the interior reminds us of our first car?
The problem has arisen partly because of the misleading translation of the word “perdu” in the title. The word can indeed be translated as “lost”, but it has the alternative meaning of “wasted”, which is closer to Proust’s intention. He is not simply showing us ways of recovering experiences which have been “lost” to our memory. He is showing us that we experience reality twice, once in life and then again in memory – and here’s the important bit – experience recovered by memory is more vivid and powerful. Why? – and this gets to the point of the importance of translating “perdu” as “wasted” – it is because we do not appreciate our lives fully the first time round. Memory doesn’t just revisit our lives, it salvages wasted experience. Alain de Botton, in his excellent book “How Proust can change your life”, sums up Proust’s intention as “How to love life today”.
In 1922 Proust wrote to a newspaper which had asked its readers what they would do if it was announced that the world was about to end. Proust asked why wait? We should always live our lives as if the world was about to end. He wrote ” I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say.” Memory, particularly when prompted by the approach of old age, provides the same service. As Botton writes, Proust’s work ” far from a memoir tracing the passage of a more lyrical age, …. was a practical, universally applicable story about how to stop wasting, and begin appreciating one’s life”.