Discovering Proust with André Aciman

Photo: Don Pollard

"Most of us remember who we were, where we were, and what we were doing when we came face to face with Proust for the first time," writes Andre Aciman in his preface to The Proust Project (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), opening a window onto his own encounters with French author Marcel Proust (1871-1922) and leaving it open for the many insightful reflections in this unique volume. Aciman is a professor in the Ph.D. Program in Comparative Literature whose wide-ranging areas of expertise also include 17th-century French literature, Madame de LaFayette, the psychological novel and the roman d'analyse; and memoirs and memory in the 20th century. He is the author of Out of Egypt: A Memoir (1995); Letters of Transit: Reflections of Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss (1999); and False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory (2000); among other books. He also writes articles for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times. Folio spoke with Aciman about the new book, his awe of Proust, and the importance of writing for a mainstream audience.

Can you tell us about The Proust Project?

I was asked to edit a book on Proust, for which I would do the preface and invite fifteen or so writers to participate. We ended up with twenty-eight, all of whom selected individual segments by Proust that they considered meaningful. And they wrote about that particular segment in a style that is recognizably theirs, so that everybody's personality comes out in their individual essays. [Contributors include Richard Howard, Alain de Botton, Susan Minot, and Edmund White--as well as Graduate Center faculty members Mary Ann Caws and Wayne Koestenbaum, and doctoral students Laura Vapnyar and Noam Scheindlin.] It's a beautiful book; it has some wonderful pieces, and all reflect the simple fact that Proust is, basically, a fantastic writer with a fantastic sensibility that speaks to everyone.

What makes Proust so fantastic?

Proust is one of the two most significant writers of the twentieth century. For many readers and especially aspiring writers it's extremely intimidating to even open his novel, because you realize, as soon as you read the first paragraph, how easy it is to be thoroughly mediocre by comparison. Proust is a towering figure for two reasons: technically, it is impossible to think of anyone who has written better prose; but he is a greater writer yet because, with the exception of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Joyce, few writers have been more personal, more human, more profound, and more directly bound to life on earth. The good thing about Proust is that he's also the best teacher of them all.

Why do you say he's the best teacher?

Because very few writers have thought about writing as much as he has. Moreover, very few writers are as lucid, and as unremittingly intelligent as Proust. His mind seems to be working on overdrive, constantly--and so must ours when we read him. As a result, we may find ourselves formulating ideas and entertaining ways of seeing things that would never have crossed our minds without him. He doesn't necessarily teach us new things; instead he teaches us how to re-examine what we had dimly perceived or never really thought through. And that, in a nutshell, is what good teaching is all about: not necessarily bringing new information, but new ways of examining information that has always been around us for a long time.

In addition to your scholarly work, you write a lot for publications like The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times. Why is that important?

One of the things that I try to do for my students is to introduce them to another aspect of scholarship that I consider very important. On the one hand, a scholar has to know his or her field and contribute to that field. This, however, feeds the academy only. Scholars also have an obligation to reach a very broad and by no means uneducated public. There are highly educated professionals out there who've been to great schools, who've read and keep reading everything worth reading, and who are thirsty for new ways of putting together what goes on in the arts. They don't want to sit in a classroom; but they want the very best that happens in a classroom to come to them. And that's one of the purposes of such magazines as The New York Review or The New Yorker: they are the natural extensions of lifelong learning. Once a semester, I hold an informal seminar to teach students how to write for mainstream publications. Graduate students need to be able to write in a way that is clear and that highly educated non-academics can understand.

How do you adjust your writing style for a mainstream audience?

The temptation for a scholar is to swerve on the side of "academese." Scholars are meticulous readers. They nitpick. That's our job. Give us a fourteen-line poem, and we'll nitpick until we're convinced that every syllable and every shade of meaning is accounted for. This is exactly what we mean by literary analysis--and I love to do it. But we also have to be able to understand that an intelligent reader needs one, well-formulated idea, and perhaps one or two examples to get the point--but he does not need a battery of examples or a list of footnotes. Above all, mainstream readers like someone to put ideas together for them; they like the broader, sometimes more abstract picture.

What are you working on now?

One of my projects is another book on Proust. It will be totally devoted to Proust's style [entitled, "Proust's Sentence"]. This is really what interests me about Proust. When I teach my seminar on Proust, I almost never deal with any of the themes that most readers associate with Proust. I just focus on style. It's amazing what Proust did. Proust's novel is about many, many things, but mostly about one thing: the difficulty (impossibility, maybe) of finding happiness. But let me give you a stylistic example. Proust was very often in the habit of using a pronoun before giving you its antecedent. He would say "I looked at it..." and maybe even mention it several times in the sentence, without telling the reader what that it stands for. And then he'll say, "I suddenly realized that it was...my beloved's letter I'd been staring at all this time ." By the time the word "letter" appears at the very end of a long Proustian sentence, you've been fascinated, puzzled, charmed, lost, teased, infuriated, because you've had to put everything on hold in order to get through to the very end of that sentence without knowing what that sentence was really about. When you find out what the it is, the word "letter" comes as a reward, as a revelation, and Proust wants you to experience revelation in every sentence--not just because revelation is magical wherever it occurs, but because it's his gift. It will make you happy. And you know it's made him happy as well.