Proust and the Journey of Self-Discovery

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Past seasons have focused on Finnegans Wake, 1,001 Nights, the Hebrew Bible, Journey to the West, the American short story, and The Brothers Karamazov. This season: Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time follows the development of a self. The narrator grows up in Combray, in the seaside town of Balbec, in Paris, and resolves to become a writer. But that narrative also encompasses so much else, from historical crises to philosophical riffs to self-doubts.

Proust scholar Joshua Landy points out that Proust is “absolutely laying traps for the reader. He’s tempting the reader into thinking it’s a memoir at times. And he’s tempting the reader to think that it’s a treatise, that all the things that this narrator says can be taken at face value—you can take them to the bank, it’s the gospel truth, this is what Proust believes. In fact, that’s not the case.”

As Hannah Freed-Thall, a scholar of Proust at NYU, says: “I try to approach this text with a certain humility . . . I will never make an argument that is true for the entirety of this novel. It’s just too self-contradictory.” In this episode, we talk about how multitudinous richness buzzes throughout the novel’s story of self-discovery. Along the way, you’ll hear a reading from Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of In Search of Lost Time.

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Guests for this season of The Cosmic Library:

Hannah Freed-Thall, author of Modernism at the Beach

Joshua Landy, author of The World According to Proust

Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm

Alex Ross, writer at The New Yorker—see especially “Imaginary Concerts”

Christine Smallwood, author of La Captive

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