Christopher Prendergast on Living and Dying with Marcel Proust

A conversation between Christopher Prendergast and Alice McCrum at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 15/11/2022 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
Marcel Proust expert Christopher Prendergast discusses the enduring presence of In Search of Lost Time and the meaning of treating literature as life.
From recent features at the Musée Carnavalet and the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme to uncountable commentaries and historical studies, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time remains an object of public fascination and adoration one hundred years after its publication. No one is more qualified to speak on the depths of Proustianism than Christopher Prendergast, general editor of Penguin’s English reissues of Proust’s magnum opus. In new work Living and Dying with Marcel Proust, Prendergast maps out the life, mind, and Recherche of Proust, revealing the genius of the author and the enduring importance of the text. At the American Library, he celebrates life, literature, love, time, memory, and Marcel Proust.
About the speaker:
Christopher Prendergast is a fellow of Cambridge University and the British Academy. A writer for the London Review of Books and New Left Review, he is an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Officier dans l‘Ordre des Palmes académiques. Living and Dying with Marcel Proust was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Publishers’ Weekly Most Anticipated Work of 2022.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.

[@ronaldw.jastal16]

Oh, dear! Thank you infinitely for this encounter with people who give one an excuse to live on❤! Alice and Christopher. Thank you.

[@haydenwalton2766]

wonderful discussion and analysis. it has added, for me, ever more layers to this precious masterpiece

[@sattarabus]

Chris Pendergast's commentary on Proust is masterly but for the poor audio due to the wobbly mike in his unduly expressive hand. " Alain de Botton's book on Proust is what Oprah Winfrey's programme on Schopenhauer would be "--- was a harsh comment on a seemingly self-help book intended to entice a common reader to the demanding diet of Proust. Living and Dying with Proust by Pendergast is an illuminating book on a forbidding writer like Proust.

[@JohnBorstlap]

As for the question: if there had not been a madeleine, would that mean that there would not have been Proust's long novel? In other words: it was pure chance that the madeleine invoked the chain of memories and their implications. But what is 'chance'? The creative process of great artists, a writer in this case, happens - to a great extent - in the subconscious. Works of art often gradually take form as faint visions under the level of awareness. It seems more likely that Proust's subconsciousness MADE him get the involuntary experience as provoked by the madeleine. It could as well have been another experience, but his subconsciousness directed him towards the 'click' between experience in the present, and the invocation of experiences from the past. There is also a whole territory of life experience where 'chance' plays a crucial role as something quite different: often the most influential experiences in life are due to 'chance' and later appear to have been related to constitutions of the inner life. On this connection between the inner life and seemingly random occurances, the ancient Chinese oracle book I Tjing is based, one of the subjects studied and explained by C.G. Jung. 'Chance' can be considered the moment when the objective (out there) and the subjectiuve (in here) meet in a meanigful way. This is saying something about the nature of the world and of the human psyche, as related to each other. Proust's novel is one of the results of that constitution.

[@anodyne57]

Not sure from this evidence that Prendergast has actually read de Botton's book. Granted, it's pretty clear he's looked at the chapter headings...enough ammunition for him to billow a fairly ready disdain. I'm not arguing that de Botton's work is anything like what Prendergast has written; I just think he protests...a mite much.

[@JohnBorstlap]

I read De Botton's book. It is indeed a terrible self-help book, diminishing the novel in an awful and trivial way. De Botton is a flimsy type of 'thinker', superficial, fashionable.

[@nicolasfl1864]

On the contrary, DeBotton pays homage to proust and makes some of his ideas accessible to many who would otherwise dismiss them.

[@douglasdarracott1563]

just too hard to hear

[@stokescroftmuseum]

What a dull little man. Proust would have recoiled at his arrogance and rude refusal to look at the interviewer, among other things. I'd much rather hear the interviewer read a shopping list.

[@lindamiller2648]

How presumptuous to assert Proust's reaction to Prendergast! Of hundreds of writers on La Recherche, Prendergast is a great favorite of mine.

[@tommurray6407]

Marcel proust is dead. He is not dead.

[@jillfryer6699]

I thought the Cure for Insomnia would be copy MP and sleep by day and work and the rest by night. It worked well for him. However as a life long asthma sufferer I can say Proust does nothing to help. And psychosomatic is a quack diagnosis or an unsympathetic relation. I better exit and check out the Not the Andrew Marr Show.

[@homayounshirazi9550]

Did PROUST consider Freud's references to sexuality?