Memory, Design, & the Search of Lost Time
Redesigning the Cover of "Swann's Way" by Marcel Proust
As its title suggests, In Search of Lost Time it is a novel concerned with the workings of time: the way it stretches, shrinks, and collates within our minds. The sentences within, long and complex, force us to read them at a steadily fast pace so that by their conclusion we have not forgotten their beginnings. In this way the writing inspires us, in its very syntax, to experience the frailty of memory as we read.
Marcel Proust, its author, is also a master at describing those short moments — brought about by the smells, tastes, and colors of the world — in which memory discloses itself completely. In his most studied scene, the narrator dips a madeleine into his cup of tea only to find himself immersed in childhood memories. But the search for lost time is not only the desire to revoke this kind of involuntary memory, buried under layers of associations, but also a search for a time which is lost completely to memory: the essence of the everyday moments which make up the majority of our lives.
What follows is a collection of some of these moments and thoughts — those which I came across as I designed a book cover for a reissue of Swann's Way, the first volume of Proust's great novel, for Recovering the Classics.
Before commencing my design, I wanted to envision what the world recalled in the novel would have looked like. Swann's Way takes place primarily in two separate places: the town of Combray, where the narrator’s recollection of his early childhood takes place, and Paris, where he recalls the life of Charles Swann, a family friend who falls desperately in love with a young courtesan, Odette de Crecy.
In order to envision these spaces, it's possible to consult the collective memory of history to see the images which have most strongly survived from this time, the French belle-époque. Traces of Proust's world can be felt in French impressionist artworks, which seem to recall similar scenes and people as those within the novel. In Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party (pictured above) art-critic and collector Charles Ephrussi, the supposed inspiration for Charles Swann's character, stands in the background wearing a black suit and top hat. The painting conveys a joie de vivire: the colors and brushstrokes are unbound, loosened in order to convey (more than form) the motion and energy of the time.
In another interpretation of the setting, Ornella Mutti and Jeremy Irons can be seen playing the leading roles of the 1984 film adaptation of the romance. Here, the colors are just as rich as in a painting, and iconic Parisian settings are cleverly sewn together by director Volker Schlöndorff. The darkness of the alleyways which Swann roams at night, the parlor where he fawns over Odette, the social spaces they inhabit, are all richly detailed and separate from one another in tone — providing many ideas for a possible interpretation of a cover.
For envisioning the more rural settings of the book, I found Nicolas Drogoul's photo essay Photographing Literary Landscapes: Marcel Proust’s France, which contains vivid photographs of the town which inspired the fictitious Combray, as well as other settings which influenced the book.
Despite the beauty of the world surrounding Proust, it is also possible to draw images as rich as any painting entirely through his writing. When it came to finding a color palette for my design, I found an abundance of descriptions and meanings for inspiration within the written work.
Pink was the color which first stood out to me in the book : a color of life and vitality, of roses, silk dresses, seashells and the blossoms of the hawthorne tree. Then there was gray: the hair of old women, the shades of photographs, pebbles, Parisian streets, of chimney smoke and the houses at Combray, built from "the blackened stone of the country."
Interestingly, these colors appear together when the narrator describes the petals of the tisane which he prepares for his aunt, Léonie, to drink along with madeleines, in the same timeless scene I mentioned above:
The leaves, having lost or altered their original appearance, resembled the most disparate things, the transparent wing of a fly, the blank side of a label, the petal of a rose, which had all been piled together, pounded or interwoven like the materials for a nest. A thousand trifling little details… altered indeed, precisely because they were not imitations but themselves, and because they had aged. And as each new character is merely a metamorphosis from something earlier, in these little grey balls I recognised green buds plucked before their time; but beyond all else the rosy, lunar, tender gleam that lit up the blossoms among the frail forest of stems from which they hung like little golden roses — marking, as the glow upon an old wall still marks the place of a vanished fresco, the difference between those parts of the tree which had and those which had not been “in colour” — showed me that these were indeed petals which, before filling the chemist’s bag with their spring fragrance, had perfumed the evening…
This passage, for me, would prove to be the most influential for the design. The writing of color and form make for a beautiful illustration, while also doubling as a commentary about time. The pinks and grays happen simultaneously in the dry leaves of the tisane, all highlighting the coexistence of pasts and futures in the unfolding moment, an ongoing metamorphosis of things that came before into things that will follow. Even more, color is able to recall memories which are not the narrator's own: the memory of the lives of the flowers and herbs which make the tea. The combination of these grays and pinks invoke, as Proust writes, the look of peeling frescoes — reminders of the youth that remains in old age. They will also work well as the opposing colors of remembrance and forgetfulness, while recalling the soft pastel hues of impressionism.
Nonetheless, as rich as Proust's descriptions of color are, they would have meant nothing to me without my own take on these colors. The distance between myself and this source was great: I had never been to Paris or the French countryside. The colors in my mind had come from elsewhere, and I couldn't be dishonest to my own imagination. To gain a better understanding of the colors I wanted to use, I had to seek them out in my world.
A s I was walking down the stairs of my house, a few days after starting compiling my notes for the project, I noticed something that made me stop in my tracks. A jet of red light was pushing through the curtains, skipping over the couches of the living room and falling on the carpet like the trail of a firework. It's not often that I notice a sunset, so I hurried outside to take a better look.
The sun was too bright to look at directly, but by looking back at the windows of the house, I was able to tell that it was almost as red as the sunsets that pass through the clouds of wildfires. After spending a while looking at the windows, I took a walk around the neighborhood — people were soon noticing the sky as well and coming out from their own houses to see it.
As time passed, the colors began to dull, settling onto various shades of pink, gray, and blue. Each westernmost layer of the Rocky Mountains caught the falling sun more and more, so that Longs Peak and Mount Meeker were shrouded in lavender and the nearer hills under darker shades of blue.
Though it seemed to be the last sort of moment where I could be surprised by any kind of technology, that is exactly what happened next. While thinking about a way to remember the colors of the sunset, I had the idea of using a color picking app on my phone to catch the hues. With my right arm outstretched against the mountains and my left eye closed, my thumb waved around the controls on my phone as I matched the colors of the world with discrete shades on my phone.
It was difficult to catch the continuity between hues, and impossible to catch some neon colors. Nonetheless, a picture could have never caught the original colors so well, and mixing paint in that short moment would have taken too long. I was satisfied to keep a small representation of what I saw, at that moment. As Cézanne once wrote, speaking, I assume, to this feeling: “I wanted to copy nature; I wasn’t able to. I was pleased by myself when I discovered that sunlight, for example, could not be reproduced but that I had to represent it by something else…by color.”
Having found a great matching of pink and grey in the color palette I created that evening (spanish pink and lavender gray) I woke up early next morning to work on creating the book cover. I was tired of thinking and wanted to begin making something, so I brought out some oils and began mixing colors.
With red, white, and vermillion, I was able to achieve a soft "Spanish" pink. Using oranges and yellows, I passed a brush over the first layer of color after it was dry in order to achieve a little inconsistent, impressionistic look. Meanwhile — with white, grey, and blue — the smoky lavender gray began to take shape on the other half of the canvas.
So far, I had achieved the textures which I was looking for in my book cover. My purpose for using oils was exactly this: to avoid using digital shapes and colors and instead to bring out the nuances of variations in hues and material. However, I felt that something was missing yet.
While looking at the gray shades of the canvas, I remembered the first description of Combray which Proust writes in the book:
Combray at a distance… was no more than a church epitomizing the town, representing it, speaking of it and for it to the horizon, and as one drew near, gathering close about its long, dark cloak, sheltering from the wind, on the open plain, as a shepherdess gathers her sheep, the woolly-grey backs of its huddled houses, which the remains of its mediaeval ramparts enclosed, here and there, in an outline as scrupulously circular as that of a little town in a primitive painting.
I turned the canvas on its side and drew a thin, dark line between the colors, and painted the town of Combray standing between them, rising towards the gray, with faint reflections on the other half of the canvas.
People don’t want to read books without covers as much as they don't want to read books with covers which give too much away. I like to create covers through a process full of meaning, but which don’t impose any on the reader.
I believe that this cover, the result of all this thinking, was able to accomplish that. The pinks and grays are truthful to the colors of Swann's Way, while at the same time representing the discoloration and re-coloration that seems to happen between our recollections and the present moment. Here, Combray, an object on the darker, grayer side of the past, casts the shadow of memory towards the living colors of today.
