A BEAUTIFUL ILLUSION: Proust and the Surrealists Explore Time

In 1931, Jesuit and theoretical physicist Father Georges Lemaître (1894-1966) proposed his “hypothesis of the primeval atom.” The French scientist was the first to conceive of the Big Bang, the theory that the entire universe rapidly inflated from a singularity, a point smaller than a subatomic particle.

Several decades before Lemaître’s hypothesis, another Frenchman, Marcel Proust (1871-1922), had created a universe of his own with his epic three-volume novel, À la recherche du temps perdu. It’s best known to English speakers as Remembrance of Things Past, but the literal translation is In Search of Lost Time. 

A Tea-Dipped Madeleine

Proust’s novel has a Big Bang of its own, when the narrator tastes a madeleine dipped in tea. From that one gustatory sensation, Proust’s myriad characters, emotions and tableaux burst forth like the universe of nebulae, stars and galaxies that would later emanate from Lemaître’s “primeval atom.” 

Besides the material universe, many scientists think something else was born at the Big Bang: time. Before that cosmic event, the scientists believe, there was no space or time, making the very idea of time meaningless.

In the 19th century, with timekeeping making great advances, scientists and philosophers started to give much more attention to time, especially in France. Proust and many of his contemporary writers, artists and composers also expressed their thoughts about time through their art. 

This interest in time would continue after Proust’s death. Some of the greatest surrealists of the early 20th century grappled with time in their art. And in 1905, the shocking reality of time was revealed in Albert Einstein’s paper On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, which proposed the relativity of time, that its passage would be dependent on the observer’s frame of reference. 

A Philosophy of Time

The French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was a Proust contemporary who was obsessed with time. Proust and Bergson were, in fact, good friends, and  Proust was the best man at Bergson’s wedding to the novelist’s cousin, Louise Neuberger. 

For a philosopher, Bergson was quite the celebrity. His fourth book, Creative Evolution, published in 1907, was an international bestseller. People would pack his lectures at the Collège de France in Paris, his talks were a sellout in London, and when he visited New York, crowds eager to see him caused a traffic jam on Broadway. His lectures were especially popular with perfumed, fashionable and fainting women, making Bergson’s “groupies” a ripe target for the satirists of the day.

For Bergson, there was a difference between “clock-time” and the time of our lived experience. He called this his theory of duration. Bergson’s theory permeates À la recherche du temps perdu. For Bergson and Proust, time was subjective and could merge past, present and future.

A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion

Einstein disagreed with Bergson, and the two debated about time. Einstein asserted that time is not subjective, but an objective and  measurable quantity. But even Einstein conceded, “People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

We may not be able to visit the future, but according to Proust, we can recapture lost time through sensations, through the persistence of memory. For each of Proust’s characters, time expands and contracts based on the emotions and experience of the moment:

Bergson couldn’t have said it any better.

The composer Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924), Proust’s friend and mutual admirer, was also immersed in Bergson’s philosophy. Music is always linked to time, and Fauré uses hemiola, rhythmic augmentation, and disorienting harmonies to bend the listener’s sense of time. 

Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbolist drama Pelléas et Mélisande, has an airy, timeless quality with an emphasis on intuition that is Bergsonian. Fauré captures this perfectly in the incidental music he wrote for the play. Fauré’s Requiem also has this quality, as does his song Après un rêve (After a dream):

Alas, alas, sad awakening from dreams!
I summon you, O night, give me back your delusions;
Return, return in radiance,
Return, O mysterious night!

Hello, Dalí

Visual artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were also drawn to the mystery of time.

The Symbolist movement sowed the seeds for what would later become surrealism. Artists like Odilon Redon (1840-1916) and Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) eschewed naturalism and instead created mysterious images and symbols to convey their artistic truths. 

Proust socialized with surrealist pioneers Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) and Salvador Dalí (1904-1989). Like Proust, these artists often addressed the topic of time, as in Dalí’s 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory.

With its melting, dripping watches, the painting seems to be referencing Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity. But when asked about it, Dalí said the painting was inspired by a Camembert cheese melting in the sun.

Dalí rarely gave a straight answer. The fact is the painter was intrigued and influenced by, not only Einstein, but also Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), who had his own ideas about time.

For Freud, the unconscious mind is not bound by time. Past, present and future mingle In dreams, just as in À la recherche du temps perdu, often without any linear order. One can see how Freud’s ideas influenced the surrealists.

Artist Max Ernst (1891-1976) was steeped in Freudian thought. Through his collages and paintings, like Time and Duration, he wanted to express Freud’s theories, including how the unconscious jumbles time. Like Einstein, Ernst and other surrealists believed that time is an illusion.

The Belgian artist René Magritte (1898-1967) was another surrealist who was steeped in Freud. His 1938 painting La Durée poignardée (Time Transfixed), which can be seen at the Art Institute of Chicago, juxtaposes everyday objects, including, notably, a clock on the mantel, in an incongruous manner to blur our idea of now and then.

Life in a Cork-Lined Bedroom

Proust spent the last three years of his life in a cork-lined bedroom, which he himself designed to keep out the pollen and dust that aggravated his allergies and asthma. His isolation allowed him to delve deeply into thought and imagination. Never leaving his room, Proust was able to probe the human heart and other mysteries of the universe. In the second volume of Remembrance of Things Past, Proust even expressed an awareness of the relativity of time that Einstein would fully explore and explain. 

Time may be an illusion, as Einstein said, but what a sublime, disquieting and profound illusion it is, especially when expressed through great art and music.