Proust Factory: The Writer, the Grandmother and Aphasia

The son of a doctor, Marcel Proust was very familiar with medicine from childhood, especially when he suffered his first asthma attack in the Bois de Bologne at the age of ten and became a patient himself. As a writer, on the other hand, one of his biggest fears was suffering from a brain disease – which also concerns the narrator of the “research”.

He believes that a brain disease is to blame for the fact that writing doesn’t work out, that he keeps putting off becoming a writer. In the case of Proust himself, this went so far that in 1918 he asked the famous neurologist Joseph Babinski to operate on his brain because he thought he had difficulty speaking and was paralyzed by his face. Which Babinski refused. Also with the question, because he didn’t know Proust: “Do you work? Which?”

Aphasia, the loss of speech, about which Proust’s father Adrien wrote a treatise in 1872, is one of the numerous basic medical motives of the “research”. Right at the beginning, the young Marcel talks about the difficulties he has with the name of Charles Swann, despite all the magic that this exerts on him, with all the misfortune that he brings about because of the motherly kiss goodnight: ‘That name Swann, by the way, which I had known for so long, was now, as happens with the most common expressions in certain cases of aphasia, a new name to me. He was always present in my thoughts, and yet my thoughts could not get used to him.”

At the end of the “research” it is Baron Charlus who, upon meeting the narrator, complains “that he is approaching complete aphasia and incessantly uses one word, one letter instead of another” – in order to nevertheless repeatedly demonstrate how clear he is in his head.

Although the technical term for this neurological disorder is only used twice, Proust’s powerfully eloquent novel is permeated by aphasia: specifically with the death of his grandmother and that of Bergotte, both of whom suffer from, among other things, confusion of speech (like Proust’s mother shortly before her death).

Even more, however, Proust creates poetic sparks out of aphasia by characterizing numerous characters using speech errors of all kinds. Think of Francoise. Or the director of the Grand Hotel in Balbec, who thinks he’s expressing himself in a sophisticated way, but keeps using wrong expressions. Or the valet who always says “pistoir” instead of “pissoir”.

Gerrit Bartels is a literary editor and has read In Search of Lost Time in many places, but never in the clinic.

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