Catherine Le Gouis, Mount Holyoke College – The Humor of Marcel Proust

Apparently, Marcel Proust was funny.

Catherine Le Gouis, French professor at Mount Holyoke College, helps us appreciate the famed writer’s comedy.

Catherine Le Gouis is Professor of French at Mount Holyoke College, where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. Her area of research is French and Russian comparative literature; her current project is a biography of Nina Petrovskaya, a writer of Silver Age (early twentieth-century) Russia. Among her recent publications is “The Woman on the Cross: Ritual and Self-Sacrifice in the Decadent Search for Meaning” (The Russian Review).

The Humor of Marcel Proust

It is a running joke that Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is a bucket-list item; we intend to read it but don’t. It is a daunting tome and a formidable read, but people often overlook a prominent aspect: Proust’s humor – something that runs through every paragraph of the 4000+ pages of this immortal work.

The series of seven novels describes the French upper classes before, during, and after World War I, as seen from the perspective of a highly intelligent and sensitive narrator. Proust began work on his masterpiece after being devastated by the death of his parents. His goal was to resurrect not only them, but also their world, which was passing away as France became a middle-class society and the aristocracy no longer mattered. Proust brings that earlier age back to vivid life.

A key element is the omnipresent humor. Proust makes fun of everyone, including himself. The servant Françoise and Doctor Cottard can always be counted on for verbal infelicities; the hypochondriac Aunt Léonie’s days are regulated by the schedule of the masses and of her digestion; the grotesque Madame Verdurin only pretends to laugh for fear of unhinging her jaw.

When his beloved Maman reads a romantic novel to the young hero she leaves out the love scenes so that the story makes no sense; the lifeguards at fancy resorts rarely know how to swim; through strange circumstances, after her death, Aunt Léonie’s furniture ends up in a brothel.

These characters are universal in their strengths and weaknesses; in them we can see ourselves. Exposing their foibles by means of humor, Proust evokes our empathy. We should all delve into this work, which offers a catalog of our own human emotions and eccentricities as it draws us into a lost world.