All over Europe, the turn of the millennium has brought a fresh interest in Things Past. Across Paris from the Pompidou’s funky vigil, the Bibliotheque Nationale has a 2 million-franc exhibit on the author, featuring portraits of Proust, paintings by his contemporary Whistler and the 95 notebooks. In Britain, the release of Raoul Ruiz’s movie “Time Regained,” starring Catherine Deneuve and John Malkovich, has spurred a run on Proust. Since the beginning of December, the book jumped nearly 3,800 places on Whitaker BookTrack, a British best-seller list. On the Web, debates about Proust minutiae rage in e-zines with titles like “Proust Said That!” The posthumous paraphernalia industry is alive and well, complete with a Proust CD-ROM, a comic book and a wine label.
Dropping out and tuning in to a 4,300-page novel is the ultimate luxury in an era when corporate lawyers charge in 7.5-minute increments and scientists can measure the millionth of a nanosecond. Proust’s obsession with time may have been different from our own, but his sense of scope isn’t. In an era when we like our media to be multi, what better to dip into than a megamerger of musings on everything from gay love to Giotto to pearl-gray frock coats to Jewishness to whether Napoleon chewed tobacco or not? Marcel Proust was a one-man World Wide Web, and, like cyberspace, his book is big and brilliant enough to embrace most people’s obsessions. Clever publishers have capitalized on this, churning out coffee-table books like “Proust: La Cuisine Retrouvee,” “The Walks of Marcel Proust” and “Marcel Proust’s Herborium.” “People get interested more in the time he represented than in his actual work,” says Miraille Naturel, a Proust scholar at the Sorbonne. “His work is a reference book. It’s like the Bible.” This spring, the faithful should get their reward with the English-language publication of “Marcel Proust” by noted French scholar Jean-Yves Tadie. And in May, a group of Proust pilgrims plan to trace the author’s footsteps at Illiers-Combray, the town that inspired the work.
Outside France, perhaps the city with the most fervent Proust community is San Francisco. There the Marcel Proust Support Group holds the annual Proust Wake, where tuxedoed devotees listen to chamber music and sip champagne. Proust probably wouldn’t have approved of having his book filmed. He would have doubtless laughed at the snobbery of the Marcel Proust pen. But one suspects that the man who got his inspiration for his masterpiece by dunking a madeleine into tea would have been amused by the most recent Wake. It featured a life-size sculpture of the author–made from cake and marzipan.
