7.5 In Search of Lost Time: Surprise Ending

About this episode

The episode explores the themes of time and memory in Marcel Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time', particularly focusing on the concluding volume 'Time Regained'.

In  Time Regained ,   the concluding volume of Marcel Proust’s  In Search of Lost Time , an older version of the narrator gloomily decides to attend a gathering at the Guermantes' mansion. He’s thinking, as Joshua Landy paraphrases here, "I might as well go and waste my time with these high-society snobs." But then he experiences a jolt of involuntary memory, prompted by a step onto uneven paving stones. His memory casts him across time, and he begins to think that he could commit himself to writing that might also access something true and enduring, beyond conventional time.  "With Proust,” Hannah Freed-Thall tells us, “chance and contingency are so at the center of his aesthetic and epistemological world." Involuntary memory, by which the narrator senses a connection to a kind of being apart from the usual passage of time, has to happen by surprise, or it won’t be involuntary. Chance, therefore, leads to a feeling for something kind of magical. "Precisely because nothing is ordering this," Freed-Thall says, "enchantment is possible."  When Proust’s narrator joins the party, however, he encounters aging characters, and the unavoidable force of…

People in this episode

Host: Adam Colman

Topics covered

• involuntary memory
• time
• Proust
• literature
• high society
• aesthetics

Keywords

• Proust
• involuntary memory
• time
• literature
• high society
• aesthetics
• chance
• enchantment

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Guermantes' mansion

Books & works: In Search of Lost Time, Time Regained