Citario. Derived from the Latin “citāre” (to quote) plus the suffix “-ārium” (repository), similar to “bestiary.” A 21st-century neologism, it emerged among Spanish-speaking scholars at Bookish & Co., with roots in ancient anthologies and florilegia. “Citario” is related to medieval books of commonplaces (such as those by Erasmus) and proto-examples from the 19th century, such as “Familiar Quotations.” This “Citario Proust” celebrates the 154th birthday of that cartographer of lost things and surveyor of happy salons.
When a writer invents a proper name, he is subject to the same rules of motivation as the Platonic legislator when he wants to create a common name; in some way he must copy the thing, but since this task is impossible, he must at least copy the way in which the language has created some of its names. The equality of proper names and common names in relation to creation is well illustrated by an extreme case: when the writer pretends to use common words that are entirely invented: this is the case with Joyce and Michaux; in Voyage en Grande Garabagne, a word such as “arpette” has no meaning but is nonetheless full of a diffuse significance due not only to its context but also to its adherence to a common phonetic model in French. The same is true of Proustian names. Whether Laumes Argencourt, Villeparisis, Combray, or Doncières exist or not, they nonetheless present (and this is what matters) what might be called a “Francophone plausibility”: their true meaning is France, or better still, “Frenchness”; their phonetics, and on an equal footing, its spelling are constructed in accordance with sounds and groups of letters specifically linked to French toponymy (and more precisely “Proustian” toponymy): it is culture (that of French) that imposes a natural motivation on the Name: what is imitated is certainly not found in nature but in history, a history so ancient, however, that it constitutes the language that produced it as a true source of models and evidence. Proper names, particularly Proustian names, therefore have a common meaning: at the very least, they signify nationality and all the images that can be associated with it.
Roland Barthes, “Proust and Names” (New Critical Essays)
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In the second volume of his Autobiography, H. G. Wells declares that Marcel Proust has less documentary value and is less entertaining than an old diary, which has the advantage of being more reliable and does not impose its interpretation.
Jorge Luis Borges, “On Literary Life: 1938” (Captive Texts, Miscellany)
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It is well known that, like the narrator dazzled by the famous Duchess of Guermantes, Proust would stand every morning in front of the house of the Countess Adhéaume de Chevigné, one of the two models for the Duchess, and admire her in silence. What attracted him to this woman with no lips and powerful jaws who, judging by her dance cards, was ignorant of syntax and spelling? At least the Countess Greffulhe, the Duchess’s other muse, appears in Laszlo’s paintings as a very beautiful woman, but Proust’s letters tell us that what he adored most about her were her manners, her tastes, and her elegance. A curious elegance: it consisted of adorning her hair with tropical plants, wearing mauve orchid dresses, and hiding her face under a paste made from half a dozen ingredients, each imported from a different country. In one photograph, the haughty countess has written her acknowledgment to the photographer in shaky handwriting: “Only the sun and you understand me.”
Mario Vargas Llosa, “Proust en fotos” (El fuego de la imaginación, Obra periodística I)
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The Boeuf on Rue Boissy-d’Anglas consisted of two premises: a restaurant and a dance hall, a kind of communicating vessels between which, through the dark courtyard, people came and went, kissing or hitting each other, in the most financial sense of the word. The restless, jaded elite of Paris, who would change bars ten times in a single night to escape something they could never escape, regularly descended on the Bœuf to stay put. There you would find the socialites, the sportsmen, the artists’ directory, the bankers, the blackmailers, all smiling amiably at each other. It was a beautiful rehearsal room every time. Marcel Proust often dropped in, amused and gracious. One evening, as I was chatting with Raymonde Linossier, the lawyer, I saw that Proust was in excellent form. I no longer remember if my intention was to strike up a conversation or simply approach him, but at that moment my companion was rudely attacked by a surly gigolo from the bar named Delgado, who called her a governess and accused her without reason of wearing elasticated ankle boots. I rushed at the cocky fellow, whom Proust, ever the gentleman, immediately challenged to a duel. But Delgado chickened out, hung his head, and disappeared. The next day we learned that he had kicked the bucket that same night, victim of a stomach ulcer!
León-Paul Fargue, El peatón de París
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Look, there are two ways of writing: sometimes you write a book as it comes to you; other times, you write knowing what you want to say… I don’t think one method is better than the other, as both have been used with excellent results. Proust, for example, wrote as things came to him, linking ideas with ideas and memories with memories. Ulysses, on the other hand, is constructed with the precision of a symphony: there is not a single word out of place.
Alejo Carpentier, “A cuatro tiempos”
(interviewed by Ciro Bianchi Ross, 1974, collected in the volume Entrevistas)
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We can imagine that Proust inherited his sense of humor from his mother and grandparents, rather than from his father, whose stories of his time as a medical student Proust knew very well and mocked through the character of Dr. Cottard. Until the end of his life, one of his greatest pleasures was reading to his friends, among whom was Jean Cocteau, who in Opium superbly evokes Proust’s laughter as he read comic pages from his work and smeared his face with his hands.
Both authors [Freud and Proust] created a comic culture (which dies if not nourished) by collecting funny stories, often Jewish, or jokes that were circulating in the salons and theaters of late 19th-century Paris, in the vein of Meilhac and Halévy. Proust recaptures this spirit with a Halévy, Mrs. Strauss, from whom he borrows some “words” for the Duchess of Guermantes, and with the works of his friends Robert de Flers and Gaston de Cavaillet (“I’d rather find her between the sheets than the devil,” this “old joke,” or set phrase, quoted by Cottard at the Verdurins’ house, can be found in his work Miquette et sa mère).
Jean-Yves Tadié, El lago desconocido entre Proust y Freud
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At the Verdurins’ house, Marcel hears a piece of music by Vinteuil when he realizes the tragic limitation of human beings: we are trapped in our perceptions, and the most valuable of these is incommunicable. Art, he says, the music of a Vinteuil or the painting of an Elstir, is the only thing capable of revealing to us “the intimate composition of those worlds we call individuals.” Without art, we would never be able to know them. It would be useless to have wings and another respiratory system, and thus be able to cross the immensity, if we did so with the same senses. Yes, we could travel to Mars or Venus, but we would still see the same things we see on Earth. “The only true journey,” says Marcel, “would not be to go to new landscapes, but to have other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another person, of a hundred people, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and we can do that with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil.” I would add: with a Proust, with a Woolf. “With our fellow human beings,” says Marcel, and I say, “we truly fly from one star to another.”
Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La traducción del mundo. Las conferencias Weidenfeld 2022
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Reading, when it is not the utilitarian reading of information or learning, the reading of novels, is an ambiguous temporal operation. We don’t know if we are wasting time or gaining time, and we never reach a definitive conclusion on the matter. Proust raised the issue in an essay, “Journées de lecture,” and answered it, in his own way, with this intriguing proposition: “The days we have believed we have lost to life, because we spent them reading, are those we have lived most intensely.” He develops this idea with the story of a summer day in his childhood, from morning to night, entirely devoted to reading a swashbuckling novel, and yet, forty years later, he remembers every sound, every smell, every nuance of the sky, every conversation between his grandfather and his aunts… I don’t know if it can be explained by some psychological mechanism, but all readers have felt the duplication, or rather the intensification, of life that occurs when we enter that narrative suspension dominated by the adverb “momentarily.”
César Aira, Actos de presencia: Disertaciones (1989-2021)
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Ivan Blatny (long since deceased) is the poet from the generation ten years older than me whom I have admired most since I was fourteen. In one of his works, a verse with a woman’s name always came back to me: “Albertinko, ty,” which means “Albertine, you.” Naturally, it alluded to Proust’s Albertine. In my adolescence, this name became the most enchanting of all female names.
At the time, all I knew of Proust was the spine of the nearly twenty volumes of In Search of Lost Time, in Czech translation, lined up in a friend’s library. Thanks to Blatny, thanks to his “Albertinko, ty,” one day I immersed myself in that work. When I got to The Girls in Bloom, Proust’s Albertine became imperceptibly confused with my poet’s Albertina.
Czech poets loved Proust’s work, but they didn’t know his biography. Ivan Blatný didn’t know it either. And it was only quite late that I myself lost the privilege of this beautiful ignorance when I heard that Proust had been inspired, for Albertine, by a man, one of Proust’s loves. But what does it matter to me? Inspired by him or her or not, Albertine is Albertine, and that’s enough! A novel is the product of an alchemy that transforms a woman into a man, a man into a woman, mud into gold, an anecdote into drama! This divine alchemy is what constitutes the strength of the novelist, the secret, the splendor of his art.
Milan Kundera, The Curtain: Seven Plays
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The difference between Baudelaire and Proust lies in their composition. Proust himself observed that Baudelaire proceeds “with certainty in the execution of details and uncertainty in the overall plan.” Apart from a few notable exceptions (“Le Cygne,” “Le Voyage,” etc.), there is no poem by Baudelaire that holds together from beginning to end through the success of its composition. There is often a dull rumbling that spreads from one verse to another or within a cluster of memorable verses and then recedes, or falls back on weaker formulas, assimilable to the poetic jargon of his time. But there is no overall design, or it is irrelevant. That is not what Baudelaire is looking for. In Proust, on the other hand, there is a demonic sense of great composition, full of calls, echoes, and reverberations. The lustful density of detail is cultivated almost coquettishly, because the narrator knows that behind this jungle, the powerful ribs of the construction can be glimpsed regularly. Everything is predisposed to be observed under a microscope, or else from a great distance. Both visions provoke a sense of vertigo that paralyzes. But the mercurial course of the narrative is quickly resumed, undulating and sinuous, like a prolonged nocturnal confidence.
Roberto Calasso, La Folie Baudelaire
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For Proust, as for the painter, style is more a question of vision than of technique. Proust does not share the superstition that form is nothing and content is everything, nor that the ideal masterpiece of literature can only be communicated in a series of absolute, monosyllabic propositions. For Proust, the attributes of language are more important than any ethical or aesthetic system. In fact, he does not attempt to dissociate form from content. The former is a concretization of the latter, the revelation of a universe. The Proustian universe is expressed metaphorically by the craftsman because it is apprehended metaphorically by the artist: the indirect and comparative expression of indirect and comparative perception. The rhetorical equivalent of the Proustian real is the chain figure of the metaphor. It is an exhausting style, but it does not exhaust the mind. The clarity of the sentence is cumulative and explosive. The fatigue one experiences is a fatigue of the heart, a fatigue of the blood. After an hour, one is exhausted and in a bad mood, submerged, dominated by the crest and the breaking of one metaphor after another, but at no time dazed. The criticism that it is a convoluted style, full of circumlocutions, obscure and impossible to follow, is completely unfounded.
Samuel Beckett, Proust
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Every time I return to Proust, at first I get irritated, I find him outdated, and I want only one thing: to throw the book away. But after a certain number of pages (and skipping some scenes), the charm works again, if only because of some verbal discovery or psychological observation. (Proust is very much in line with the French moralists. He is full of aphorisms: they are found on every page, even in every sentence; but they are maxims swept away by a whirlwind. For the reader to discover them, they have to stop and not get too carried away by the sentence.)
[…]
I visited the exhibition on Marcel Proust at the National Library. All those puppets that Proust turned into giants, monsters; all those conventional women promoted to the rank of goddesses (or, because of the importance they acquire and do not deserve, caricatures); all those stately homes, those bell towers, those spas, those miserable beaches, invested with magical power and transfigured… Art consists in the ability to magnify. It is quite right to talk about Proust’s world; he did indeed create a world. (He created it rather than described it.)
Emil Cioran, Cuadernos 1957-1972
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The soul can do nothing unless it creates and devours its creatures incessantly. It sketches out other lives at every moment, engenders its heroes and monsters, tests theories, begins poems… Everything that is lost, or what we believe to be lost, but everything that can be expected of oneself, that treasure of absolute value and zero value, from which each of us draws what we are—this is undoubtedly what Marcel Proust called Lost Time. No one, or almost no one, had deliberately used these resources before him. This meant using his entire being, and in doing so, he consumed himself. Proust knew how to adapt the powers of a singularly rich and elaborate inner life to the expression of a small society that pretends to be, and must be, superficial. Because of his achievement, the image of a superficial society is a profound work.
Paul Valéry, “Homage to Marcel Proust”
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Yesterday afternoon, while reading the tribute issue of the N. R. F., the excerpt from La Prisonnière, I felt the impossibility of illusion of a Proust insinuating himself into me in an increasingly penetrating way, and at the same time I was completely absorbed by the strange poetry that emanates from him. The poetry of disillusionment, yes; there is truly a form of poetry here that is entirely Proust’s own, and to which we will have to return. The self appears as a fragile boat that has ventured into a star system crossed by irresistible and insane rays that, as they pass through it, connect the stars. (This is a simple and rough sketch of an idea that must be pursued and explored further). Perhaps this poetry arises from a secondary state of the feeling of loneliness. So far, human loneliness has been conceived as gigantic hostile forces that strike uselessly at a curved being, but which—I don’t know why—we visualize as relatively fixed and immobile under the blow (Pascal), or rising in a beautiful human gesture that before Proust seemed sheltered by the comic, and then… the gesture of Vigny in Mort du Loup and Mont des Oliviers. In Proust, man’s loneliness always seems to be that of a being in motion: he is always sailing. One after another, cosmic arrows strike him, pierce him: he can bleed no more; each of his wounds brings him closer to death, and yet he retains something “uncannily” impervious: he resembles his own medium. And he continues sailing, no one knows why, as if caught in a kind of perpetual motion, and he can always foresee the weather tomorrow, in a year, in ten years… His suffering gives off whiffs of chloroform or ether… (But, once again, let us pause: this may be rich in future possibilities, but it is not yet ripe).
How wrong I was not to fully understand, that same evening, the penetrating observation made by Vernon Lee at Mrs. Duclaux’s house at the end of last May, when she told me that she had never found in literature a more cold-blooded animal than Proust. “The slowness of his circulation and, at the same time, the insistent presence of I don’t know what element in his skin make Proust, at times, intolerable to me,” she said. These are, in fact, two points that I consider particularly important, and each of which, moreover, finds confirmation in the issue of Homenaje: the first, in Ortega y Gasset’s remarkable article: “as if the author’s rhythm were less light than ours and were perpetually slowing down our haste”; the second in Boylesve’s masterful observation: “a warm, unique atmosphere, as if imbued with the scent of skin.”
Charles du Bos, Extracts from a Diary 1908-1928
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Is it possible to read Proust with any innocence? I randomly chose one of the seven volumes, The World of the Guermantes, the third part of the cycle, where the narrator laboriously enters the enchanted castle—with its strict laws and enigmatic pleasures—of the implausible and decadent aristocracy of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. More than anecdotes or gossip, Proust offers images and sensations that create the highest novel of romantic sensibility. Every reader can identify with Marcel spying on the comings and goings of Madame de Guermantes. But no reader—and consequently no writer—could have narrated them as Proust did, who turned the lovers’ journey into a speleological descent into hell.
Christopher Domínguez Michael, “Proust and Beckett”
(La sabiduría sin promesa, Vidas y letras del siglo xx)
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For an astute reader who transcends the limits of their own reading, books join the submerged parades of memories. The first Don Quixote, a gift from someone very close and dear to me. The collections in which Proust demonstrates that time can be recaptured, read in a feverish rush, with rain, slow and cottony mornings. Books that, abandoned to the flow of reminiscence, return to us like flying swords, like leaves that spread out and retreat over the waters of the senses. (Tratados en La Habana, 1958)
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In Charmides I would find the seduction of the relationship between wisdom and memory. “We only know what we remember” was the Delphic conclusion of that culture, which over the centuries would find in Proust the sadness of the innumerable beings and things that die in us when our memories are extinguished. (Paradiso, 1966)
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I am struck by the following sentence by Proust: “the long, desperate, daily resistance to fragmentary and successive death.” For a time, I believed that successive death was one of the creations of Rilke’s poetics. That, of course, reveals nothing new to us; we know how influential Valéry and Proust were for Rilke. But that should come as no surprise. What does surprise me is that Proust speaks of fragmentary and successive death. I believe that there is a long resistance when the enemy presents itself to us in the form of fragmentary death, but that resistance is nullified, giving way to the profound Pascalian theme of reconciliation when it comes to successive death. That is to say, a death that has already been death in each of its stages, since it abandons itself to its tragic homogeneity, to its terrible identity. Successive death in Rilke seems to be linked in a saving way to what is another manifestation of his poetics: the invisible poem, that is, the space incorporated into breathing. While the indistinctness of Proust’s successive death seems one of the most terrible forms of the prenatal, the uniformity of angelic processes is perhaps the only graphic part visible to mortals of the angelic absolute, of absolute intelligence. The regressive indistinctness of memory in Proust has many points of contact with the terrible ambition of Descartes, for example. But while in man the appetite for knowledge is a furious desire or painful penetration into matter, the angel bathes tranquilly in light and does not have to waste time smoothing his wings. (“Successive Death,” 1941)
José Lezama Lima
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Proust introduces the chronicle of an unfortunate time, the time of “greater, even greater still, but how much? I don’t know…” And there is no doubt that his poem would not be what it is without this lament for lost wonder. (A lament that a true master of misfortune, such as Tasso, for example, would never have been able to understand—he who, in the asylum, would listen over and over to the innocent, the marvelous concert of the Dialogo della famiglia). How can a masterpiece take root and branch out from such an illusory measure of the universe, from this preliminary and blind mourning of the heart?
And yet, Proust, already a mutilated man, remained relentlessly a poet. He understood, as all poets before him have understood (as did Leopardi, a man mutilated in a different way), that the path of poetry is one and irreversible. That it has never been anything other than reverence for the theological meaning of the limit: the precept to act as God does—from Sinai to the burning bush, from Tabor to a piece of bread.
Cristina Campo, Los imperdonables
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Proust’s desires are also collective, universal. He desires all women, tall, proud blond ladies, brunettes from the petty bourgeoisie, fruit sellers, milkmaids, or seamstresses. Restless, he is attracted to all forms of entertainment: seeing a painting by Elstir or a Gothic tapestry in a castle, leaving for Venice or Balbec, going to hear La Berma… […] Like water, these souls receive all things with a loving totalitarianism. Whitman is an ocean, his rhythm is that of the sea, the rhythm of powerful, shapeless, enormous, and elastic waves: long, flexible sentences, often without even a verb to sustain them, held together in a compact legion by a remote impetus like that which pushes the waves to the shore. Proust is still water, the water that ruins bridges, seeps through any crack, licks any inlet, reaches the most secret meanders, flows and infiltrates like leaks and damp patches, gurgles in the underground and in the sewers. When one thinks of Whitman’s songs, one thinks of the ocean; In Search of Lost Time, even in its common definition, is a river-novel.
Mario Praz, “Whitman y Proust” (El pacto con la serpiente)
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Reading in the preface to La Bible d’Amiens a forewarning of In Search of Lost Time is inevitable today. As always in Proust, practice and theoretical reflection alternate and intertwine—both in writings of various kinds and in In Search of Lost Time itself (a similar kind of intertwining in European literature can be found in Dante). Through his novel—which is also, evidently, a metanovel—Proust has provided his interpreters with the very tools to interpret him. This is not a matter of pre-established harmony, but of a constraint exerted by the author on his own readers. The critics of In Search of Lost Time have been unable to escape the interpretive instruments that Proust laid out in advance. The definition Pietro Citati gave of Proust in the mid-20th century—that he was “the greatest stylistic critic of our century”—must be taken literally and, if possible, further deepened. Stylistic criticism has ancient roots, dating back at least to the sixteenth century. But if Proust had not existed, stylistic criticism as we understand it today would never have come into being.
Carlo Ginzburg, L’étranger qui n’est pas de la maison (Collège de France, 2013, shared online)
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Which twentieth-century artists are beyond criticism – i.e. accepted by everyone as masters to question whose status would be blasphemous? Not Joyce (it’s OK to dislike Finnegan); not Stravinsky (OK to find the latter works arid); not Picasso (John Berger’s book); not Eisenstein (OK to hold his work distorted by Stalinism); not Chaplin (OK to prefer Keaton); not Brecht (OK to hold his work corrupted by dogmatic Marxism); not Shaw (OK to find him shallow); not Hemingway (infantile aggressions); etc. etc. The only exceptions I can think of are: Chekhov and Proust – and it’s stretching a point to call Chekhov a twentieth-century figure.
The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan, 1971-1980 (Bloomsbury Books, NY, 2001)
