Marcel Proust may have died over a century ago, but his legacy endures. Readers are still captivated by the way À la recherche du Temps Perdu redefined modern literature; by how Proust shows the drama of a life unfolding inside the mind; by his evocation of the gap between how we see ourselves and how others see us; and by so much more besides.
When it comes to quirky books about all things Proust, my favourite remains Proust’s Overcoat by Lorenza Foschini, based on the decades long quest of obsessive collector Jacques Guérin to acquire Proust’s personal effects.
“I see Proust as a great observer, capable of recording with astonishing acuity the external and the internal, the visible and invisible links between humans, the multiplicity of states of consciousness,” from Nicolas Ragonneau’s interview with Jérôme Prieur for proustonomics.com 14 april 2021
Jérôme Prieur first discovered Proust in his late teens. Although he did not initially grasp all the nuances or the world being depicted, for him, “there is a before and after, just as there are those who have read it, and those who have not . . . Reading Proust and reading ‘all’ of Proust are not the same thing at all.” But what remains of a great writer after his death, other than his work and the memories of his friends and acquaintances?
“What the writer’s eyes saw, what his senses perceived, it is these that mesmerize and lure us in pursuit of him,” Jérôme Prieur
Zombie Proust is a quest written in a series of snapshots like a literary mosaic resurrecting a figure who is endlessly revived, quoted, merchandised, dissected and embalmed by academia and cultural institutions. It is the opposite of a conventional biography or hagiography. The English title Zombie Proust referring to an animate corpse is sensationalist and modernist, while the French title Proust fantôme (ghost) is traditional and ethereal. Each carry cultural weight and resonance.
The fragmentary, associative, essayistic, restless form mirrors how memory actually works and distorts the past, which never entirely disappears. The present is refracted through remembering. As Prieur follows in Proust’s footsteps, piecing together fragments of the writer’s life, he creates an impressionistic canvas of the Parisian world of the period. He explores the Proustian themes of memory, time and absence, and blends literary history with cultural speculation.
Mind Mapping
Prieur begins by visiting the bank at 102 Boulevard Haussmann, the building in which Proust lived and wrote much of his (unfinished) magnum opus. Apart from the main entrance and the general interior, access to the private upper floors, and to Proust’s bedroom, is not easily achieved. (It is preferable to visit the Musée Carnavalet where the furniture, personal effects and the famous cork-lined walls were transferred after the bank bought the building.) Prieur also visits the apartment in rue Hamelin where Proust died; his childhood home; and haunts Père Lachaise Cemetery.
He examines physical relics, notably photographs, including one of the writer’s father and brother on a balcony taken in the 1880s. As he goes in search of lost traces in time, Prieur asks, “What if he had outlived himself?” Would he have visited the Cote d’Azur and New York? Or would he have become a total recluse? Would he have been filmed?
He interrogates the dead: friends, close acquaintances, great artists and figures of the time . . . visualises Proust the dandy “gliding like an ice skater” as he frequented high-falutin’ salons, or the Ritz . . . conjures the famous dark-eyed gaze, ripostes and humour of the elegant hypochondriac, (an invisible man who disliked the limelight). Ultimately, he evokes the presence of the loyal and indispensable housekeeper, secretary and nurse, Céleste Albaret, who cared for and fussed over Proust at the end of his life as he retreated from the outside world.
It is not necessary to be a student of French literature, or a scholar of any kind, to get value from reading Zombie Proust, skillfully translated by Nancy Kline. A shrewd critique of how modern culture handles greatness, turning exceptional artists into symbols rather than engaging with their work, this is a clever, thought-provoking essay about how culture preserves the Greats of Literature.
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