7.1 In Search of Lost Time: Imaginary Music

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time lifts off on page after page, but it always returns to earth, back to the narrator’s memories and thoughts and experiences. Somehow, this seven-volume French novel from the early twentieth century covers a vast range of possibility and surprise while still concerned completely with the thoughts and feelings of a single person—the narrator, whom we might or might not call Marcel, and who famously lights up when the taste of a madeleine reveals a world of memory.

In this season of The Cosmic Library, we talk about how À la recherche du temps perdu soars beyond—and stays within—its limits. Artistic discovery pulses through this novel, even though it’s full of encounters with society’s cliches, with bad habits, with jealous obsession, and with wasted time, all of which are experienced by the narrator as he grows up.

In this miniseries, we’ll hear passages from each volume of In Search of Lost Time, so you can consider these five episodes to be an unusual adaptation of Proust’s novel. Along the way, we’ll talk about the novel's notions of music, of self-discovery, of bad habits, and more. In this introduction, we hear from the first volume, Swann’s Way, and especially get into the subject of music, which activates the narrator’s thinking and that of the narrator’s family friend Charles Swann. Alex Ross, music critic at The New Yorker, explains here that the novel is "very observant about how music comes into our life and how it can obsess us.” Prompted by Proust’s musical sensibility, this season will also continually rework The Cosmic Library’s own theme song, turning to music in a way that might—the hope is—advance the show to new intensities.

Intense experiences of art can, in Proust’s novel, make things happen. The Proust scholar Joshua Landy says that the novel's music “provides us a formal model for thinking about the shape of our own life.” And a novel where lives take musical shape can take some surprising turns. Hannah Freed-Thall, Proust scholar at NYU, says that “it feels like a text that is wild and not 100% in control of itself, and that’s appealing to me.” In Search of Lost Time can explore selfhood, then, and find that the self is a sprawling, mutable thing. As the novelist Rick Moody tells us, “Especially as you get towards volume seven, there’s not a stable Marcel.”

Guests this season include: The New Yorker’s Alex Ross—see especially "Imaginary Concerts"; Christine Smallwood, author of La Captive; Hannah Freed-Thall, author of Modernism at the Beach; Joshua Landy, author of The World According to Proust; and Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm.

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