Combray – A Childhood Proust’s Stream of Consciousness

The first thing that struck me when reading Proust’s Combray was how smooth, continuous, and flowing the prose was. While many books are cut up quite finely by short sentences, paragraph breaks, and general changes in topic, Combray reads like one smooth flow. It features very long sentences and paragraphs, and it moves through description and imagery that evoke all five of the senses. Like some of James Joyce’s work, it reads like a stream of consciousness. I think that this helps the book capture some of the feeling of childhood, when consciousness is not so demarcated.

I hadn’t read any of Proust’s work before reading Combray, nor did I know anything about the man except that he was prolific, so I went into the book without many expectations. I was surprised by how dreamlike it felt. My reading experience was like the state of reverie you sometimes find yourself in when you’re teetering on the edge of sleep and wakefulness. The extend of the young Proust’s obsession with his mother’s kissing him goodnight, and the degree to which his nights become hellish if she doesn’t kiss him, make sense to me within the book’s tone and atmosphere. In the harsh, cold light of adult consciousness this preoccupation may seem silly, but from the child’s perspective we can understand what the young Proust is feeling. His plot to send a letter downstairs to his mother feels very much like a fever dream, but then again doesn’t nearly all of childhood? 

While I wasn’t as enthralled by Combray’s plot as I am with most novels, I still enjoyed reading it because of the prose and the way it captures the feeling of childhood. Many adults write about children as though they were adults, only short and dumb. I feel that Proust has a deeper understanding of the child’s world, and of the everyday experiences children have which are forgotten in adulthood. I will admit that I found it difficult to finish Combray, because of its lack of the explicit story structure that most stories have, featuring a character with a want, a need, and adventures that help them navigate between the two. You could argue that Proust’s novel contains this structure implicitly, and you may well be right, but if so it was too implicit to grip me the way plots normally do. 

My question for discussion is: In writing Combray, has Proust ultimately “found” the “lost time” referenced in the book’s title (In Search of Lost Time)?