The Art of Jealousy

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.

The Prisoner—the fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time—spirals through the vortex of the narrator’s jealousy concerning Albertine. Something of that vortex churns on into The Fugitive—the sixth volume—and then the focus moves toward grief. But across the entire novel, there are intimations of other ways to be, of other possibilities for the narrator. Hannah Freed-Thall describes, for example, a beach scene in the second volume, where the narrator is “in love with the whole landscape, and the sea, and the beach, and the air.”

Intense experiences of art also jolt the narrator into other kinds of thinking. Joshua Landy says, “Art ends up being the answer to a lot of questions. In this context, one of the questions that it’s answering is: how can I make genuine contact with another mind?” Alex Ross explains how music in Proust’s novel offers “a deeper and more complex experience of life, time, memory, everything.” Hannah Freed-Thall sees potential for that richer experience beyond the narrator’s engagement with art, too. “In Proust,” she says, “it’s like everything is an aesthetic experience.”

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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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