In Search of Enchanted Images

September 24, 2026

I have never attempted to write academically about Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. This is because I believe that it is, quite possibly, the most beautiful thing that exists in the world. And while literary criticism is fun and all, there is a sense in which it kills books. By this I mean that engaging too much in criticism can lead one to believe that the only way to express one’s experience with a book is by transforming that experience into another medium — the review — so as to look at the work as an object, analyze it, dissect it, until one has found a way to “make sense” of the whole thing. There’s a lot to be gained by such an endeavour, intellectually, but after writing a literary essay I am always left feeling that I completely missed something essential: the work itself. And the work itself is a particular form, a particular beautiful expression, that can not be expressed in any other way than the work itself, and can not be experienced in any other way than by reading it.

In Search of Lost Time is a series of observations about a man’s life and the society he finds himself in. It’s hardly much of a story, and more often reads like an essay than a narrative. There are stories within it, but these are told with less care for the events themselves than for the emotions revealed by them. The work is structured not around a plot but around a set of motifs: it is a series of realized and unrealized dreams, describing the strange relationship between imagination, sentiment, and reality.

The novel is haphazardly split into six (or seven) volumes, with these divisions often occurring mid-chapter or even mid-scene. The first volume, as an example, begins with a 250-page chapter about the town where the narrator would visit his grandmother as a child; then abruptly spends 200 pages describing a jealous love affair involving a friend of the narrator’s grandfather, M. Swann; before ending with a short 50-page interlude entitled “Place-Names: The Name” (whose sequel “Place-Names: The Place” makes up the second half of Volume II.) The chapter about Swann seems like something of a non-sequitur until he becomes a significant character in Volume II, after the narrator falls in love with his daughter — and then when we reach Volumes IV and V we start to understand his tale’s resonance with the narrator’s own later love affair.

In the final count, the novel is over 3000 pages long. To say that it is “full of digressions” would imply that there is anything to digress from: the digressions are the entire content of the novel. So any attempt to categorize events feels fruitless; that’s just not how you’re going to get to the essence of this book. The essence is in the atmosphere. Not in the atmosphere of the world being described, but the atmosphere of the mind it is being described by: the book is not about Paris or the early 20th century, but about Marcel Proust. Many works derive their significance or interest to a modern reader through their belonging to a certain era, but In Search of Lost Time works differently: in this novel, the era derives its significance from Proust.

In the novel, a character is often initially described as imaginary and distant, before suddenly becoming real. M. Swann is the initial example. At first, he is a casual acquaintance of the narrator’s grandfather; then, we understand him as the hero of the love story described in the chapter “Swann in Love;” and then finally we meet him as Gilberte’s father. Gilberte herself first appears as a young girl somehow acquainted with Bergotte, the narrator’s favourite author; then she is a phantom glimpsed in her garden during a walk; finally, the narrator starts to regularly play with her, and develops a terrible crush. He yearns to know about her private life outside of the few hours a day she is with him at the park, and spends pages and pages dreaming of it — before, all of a sudden, he is invited into this life. He begins to spend his days immersed in the world of Gilberte and her father Swann, and everything that was once a dream is now transformed into the mundanity of everyday life.

This type of transformation is the fundamental motif of In Search of Lost Time. It is an aspect of life that we have all experienced: I remember in ninth grade seeing pictures on Facebook of a certain group of friends of which a few girls I knew from elementary school were part. I was not friends with any of these girls, and had no idea who anyone else in the group was, but for some reason, the photos they posted made their antics seem appealing to me. I was lonely and I dreamed occasionally of being a part of something like that. Two years later, I began dating one of the girls, and suddenly that group of friends was my group of friends; I met them all and they turned from pictures on a screen to real people. And every once in a while I would look back on the time when I didn’t know them and think about how fundamentally weird it is that it all turned out the way it did.

It is this interplay between imagination and reality that gives much of life its significance. Many people dream of their wedding day, and it is these dreams that finally give their real wedding day its magical character. At one point in Volume I of Proust the narrator finds himself somewhere dull, and says:

If only Bergotte had described the place in one of his books, I should no doubt have longed to get to know it, like so many things else of which a simulacrum had first found its way into my imagination. This breathed life into them, gave them a personality, and I sought then to rediscover them in reality; but in this public garden there was nothing that attached itself to my dreams.

The garden may have its own charms, but without a preceding simulacrum, these charms prove invisible to the narrator. When I visited Paris, my enchantment was derived from all the novels (including Proust) that I had read which took place there. I was stepping into the past, into a fantastical world populated by unreal people. It didn’t matter that Paris, as it existed in the year 2018, had little or nothing to do with anything that I had read. It was enough that the buildings were still there, that everything was in French, that the place was called Paris. Conversely, when I visited Berlin, a location without a simulacrum in my mind — in Proust’s parlance, a place without a name — I was confronted only with buildings and roads. The Brandenburg Gate and statues of Bismarck reminded me of old histories, but the city itself did not mean much to me.

These simulacra can be created in various ways, but most often they are derived from art. I often long to experience the final scene in Kon Ichikawa’s adaptation of The Makioka Sisters, as Teinosuke sits alone in a private room drinking sake and staring forlornly out at the falling snow. I want to do so even as I understand that the real experience of heartbreak, seen from the first-person and not through the lens of a camera, is not poignant at all but mundane and numbing. I can attempt to make my heartbreak poignant when I write about it, but in reality my most keen memory of heartbreak involves a long night spent playing Virtua Tennis 4 on the Xbox 360 and listening to several episodes of a video game podcast. Maybe that experience, looking back, is poignant in its own way — perhaps someone reading this might one day think to themselves, “I wish I could sit in heartbreak playing Virtua Tennis 4 on the Xbox 360 late into the night,” knowing full well that their own experiences of heartbreak were equally dull and poignant in their own right. Perhaps if The Makioka Sisters had ended with Tennosuke playing Virtua Tennis 4, I would have enjoyed that night more — or at least, it would be more satisfying now to look back on.

Conversely, there are other nights of heartbreak that I look back on more fondly, not only because of their inherent resemblance to literature, but because I myself later transformed them into literature: such as the night I walked home to my capsule hotel in Osaka after watching my girlfriend ride away on a bus on her way to Thailand. To be honest, I don’t remember the actual experience of that night as well as I remember playing Virtua Tennis 4; when I remember it, I remember it as a chapter in a novel or a scene in a movie.

When I was younger, I read a blog by a man who lived in Japan. He described listening to Japanese bands and going to locations in Tokyo. He also talked about a lot of things not particularly relevant to Japan, such as video games he liked or disliked. In my head, all these various aspects of his life cohered into a simulacra of Japan, and when I finally went to Japan, these simulacra overpowered my own experiences. I felt that the contents of that blog were the Real Japan, and My Japan was some second-rate facsimile.

Thus, we see that these simulacra can elevate some experiences, and deteriorate others. The latter is the more common. In most of the cases Proust describes, a simulacra becoming reality is a disenchantment — what made the simulacra appear special is diminished by its introduction to mundane, waking reality. Gilberte is just a girl, Swann is just a man, and La Berma, an actress the narrator longs to see, turns out to be just a woman on a stage.

Life is full of such disenchantments. For a long time, I wondered absent-mindedly about what it was like to work at a construction site. I imagined it might be satisfying to work with one’s hands as part of a team carrying out a productive task. I later learned that, to a certain extent, such satisfaction does exist, but it is easily lost within 40-plus-hour work-weeks that also includes a lot of tedious, annoying labour; boredom; compounding logistical missteps; and the occasional sense that the thing you are building is not, in fact, useful for anyone, or being constructed with any particular care.

For much of my life, I yearned for the life of a novelist. I never particularly cared whether I became a “successful” novelist or not, but just wanted to have written a novel and be working on further novels. In fact, it was almost part of the dream for my novels to be unappreciated and ignored, as had been the case for many of my idols. Such a life takes on much glory and honour in retrospect, when it becomes heroic, but actually living it is quite discouraging and frustrating; but more often than it is either of those things, it is nothing at all. As in, there is no feeling of being a novelist. I’ve written a novel and I’m working on more, but I never transformed into a novelist in the way I supposed I would. I still struggle with motivation and feelings of inadequacy. I still get distracted by other aspects of my life and occasionally forget for weeks or months that I am a novelist at all.

To me, Proust represents a simulacra of the true novelist. And thus, in all the ways that I am not Proust, I am not a novelist. Even as Proust describes feeling the exact same way about other artists, I think, “Well that’s different, because you turned out to be Marcel Proust.” But whenever Proust describes writing literature in a way that lines up with my experiences, I get the feeling that perhaps I am doing something after all. If I were to replicate the later stages of Proust’s life exactly — since emulating the early stages is already impossible — composing my masterwork while propped up on one elbow in bed, drinking two cups of coffee and eating two croissants a day, rarely seeing anyone at all and susceptible to even the slightest hint of a draft coming from any room of my house, would I gain any satisfaction from that experience? Would becoming Proust, in reality, fulfill any of my actual desires?

Would I enjoy sitting alone in a private room drinking sake and staring forlornly out at the falling snow? I mean, obviously, I wouldn’t, because part of being forlorn is not enjoying what you’re doing. My enjoyment of the scene in the film is an aesthetic joy, and it is impossible to derive aesthetic joy from the moments of one’s own life — that’s exactly what art is for. I’ve spent a large chunk of my life in love with the True Love of My Life, and yet the feeling bears almost no resemblance to the pleasure I derive from reading love stories. In fact, my earlier loves have a far greater aesthetic value, as they tell a compelling and complete story, inevitably ending (and occasionally beginning) with heartbreak. This is why I’ve spent a great deal more of my life writing about those than writing about the True Love of My Life.

Heartbreak is more aesthetically appealing than a happy marriage. Which says about as much as needs to be said about whether aesthetic appeal is reconcilable with anything resembling the Good Life. Almost none of the events that make up a great story are pleasant to live through. This means that much of our yearning for simulacra is fundamentally absurd, in that it involves yearning for things that we don’t actually want. And yet, it might be untrue to say that we don’t want unpleasant things to happen to us — at the very least, it can be argued that we want unpleasant things to have happened to us: without that heartbroken night-walk through Osaka, my life would be missing something. I love that I have that memory; it makes my past feel real and invigorating. I love that I transformed that memory, several times, into literature, because transforming things into literature is my favourite pastime and perhaps my only True Calling.

And so we have, alongside the simulacra we receive, simulacra we create. When we describe our trip to Italy to our coworkers, and they think, ‘Gee, I’d like to go to Italy,’ we have planted a simulacra in their mind. That simulacra will grow or shrink outside of our knowledge, affecting their life in ways we will likely never know about. That guy who blogged about Japan has no idea I exist, but his writings caused me to go live in a foreign country and create the foundation upon which my early 20s was built. Proust, despite my repeated attempts at seance magic, has not once acknowledged my existence, and is not actually my friend.

So here we have reached some foundational aspect of art: the creation and reception of simulacra, which bind to elements of the real world, enchanting them, and redirecting our lives along some alternative path. We may chase the object of the simulacra, or we may come across it almost by accident; in either case, it takes on a different sense than the rest of the world, it pops out of the background and captures our attention. We wish to recreate scenes we’ve read about or seen in movies, or the lifestyles of people we know or hear about, and if we can’t do it, the next best thing is to go to where these scenes or lifestyles take place, as if we are actually getting any closer to the thing, as if we aren’t trapped in our own mind and body for all time, experiencing everything as ourselves and as part of our breathing, eating, sleeping, everyday existence.

In the final reckoning, perhaps all we truly wish to do is experience the lives of others: experience them as if they are our own and watch them from afar, all at the same time. And this proves to be just as impossible as our other wish, which is to view our own life as if it were happening to someone else.