In Search of Lost Time (3 page)

Holding this expansive and unpredictable structure in one's
head is
a taxing business. Proust is an acquired taste, acquired,
that is, in the long-haul process of reading him page by page. Many is the reader
who falls by the wayside, exhausted or exasperated after fifty pages or so of
‘Combray', or who, like the narrator in the opening pages, falls
asleep but, unlike him, never to wake up. This, for example, was more or less the
experience of one of Proust's first professional readers, Humblot, who
read (and rejected) the manuscript of
Du côté de chez
Swann
for the publishing house Ollendorff. In a letter to
Proust's brother Robert, he recorded his first impressions as follows:
‘My dear friend, perhaps I am dense but I just don't understand
why a man should take thirty pages to describe how he turns over in his bed before
he goes to sleep. It made my head swim.' It is easy to laugh at what, with
the benefit of hindsight, we can see as Humblot's colossal lack of
judgement (no less a figure than André Gide also blundered, rejecting it
for the
Nouvelle Revue Française
). We can all too easily forget
what it must have been like to read Proust through the prism of expectations
transmitted from the culture of the nineteenth-century novel. In the priority
granted by these opening pages to the night-life of the mind, we find one of
Proust's many reversals of the hierarchies of traditional narrative.
Proust takes us where hitherto the novel did not typically go, insisting that what
is deemed insignificant by the latter may hold the key to the meaning of a life.

Those who remain alert and persevere tend to end up addicted, hooked
by the unimaginable gains of their perseverance, as, enthralled, they follow the
rhythms of the mobile Proustian intelligence. It is an intelligence that corrodes
the force of that seductive yet mortal enemy, Habit, jolting us out of comfortable
sedentarities and taking us on a journey to strange places and points of no return.
Thematically, this is enacted as the expulsion of the boy-hero from the paradise of
childhood into the perplexing and often perverse world of adult social and sexual
relations. In the most famous aphorism of
A la recherche
Proust issues his
tonic warning against false nostalgias: ‘all paradises are lost
paradises', that is, they are definitively lost, with no way back, no
possible homecoming. This is a thought which Proust's book lives to the
full and in doing so it becomes more than just a thought. It also implicates a
practice of writing, in so far as it defines a position of
incurable exile not only for the hero of the narrative but also for the artist
(both the artist that the hero will become and the artist Marcel Proust):
‘the artist', remarks the narrator, ‘is a native of an
unknown country.' Proust also once claimed, in
Contre
Sainte-Beuve
, that the writer inhabits his native tongue as if it too were
a foreign country. Since there is an important paradox in Proust making this claim
about the mother-tongue in the mother-tongue, the remark needs to be quoted in the
original French: ‘
Les beaux livres sont écrits dans une sorte
de langue étrangère
' (‘Beautiful
books are written in a kind of foreign language'). In respect of Proust,
this might seem an odd notion, given that his language is inseparable from what
Walter Benjamin called his ‘intransigent French spirit'. It is a
language drenched in reminiscence of the history of French prose from the
seventeenth-century
moralistes
through the Romantics to the late
nineteenth-century Symbolists, disclosing a form of linguistic and cultural
at-homeness that can also be felt in Proust's unrivalled genius for
literary pastiche.

What, then, could it have meant for Proust to represent writing in
French as writing in a foreign language, and what in turn might this mean for a
reader encountering Proust
in
a foreign language, in translation (bearing
in mind also the narrator's observation in
Le Temps
retrouvé
that ‘the function and task of a writer are
those of a translator')? One of the things this might mean or entail is
attending to the sheer strangeness of
A la recherche
, the sense of a text
coming to us from a great distance. While emphatically this-worldly in its
insatiable curiosity about the desires, appetites and motives of mankind, it is also
powerfully other-worldly. This is to be understood not so much in terms of the
received image of Proust's world as offering us a pseudo-metaphysics of
redemption, but rather as the embodiment of a twentieth-century secular
misericordia
mixing the grief-laden over things irretrievably lost and
the stoically detached before what is doomed to decay and death. Of the many voices
that compose the Proustian fugue, one is distinctly sepulchral, generating the
impression of
A la recherche
as a kind of latter-day
Mémoires
d'outre-tombe
, written from somewhere beyond the grave.
Proust's way of making-it-strange derives in large measure from looking at
the ghostly dance and listening to the spectral concert of the human world as if
from a very long way
off. This perhaps is the privileged place
where, in the strangeness of translation, in the no-man's land between
host and guest languages, we might most productively meet and negotiate his
extraordinary novel.

Christopher Prendergast

Many moments in Marcel Proust's
Du
côté de chez Swann
are by now so well known that they
occupy a permanent place in our literary culture. Scenes and episodes are familiar
even if one has not actually read the book: say ‘Proust' and one
will think ‘madeleine' and ‘tea' as often as
‘cork-lined room'. Yet we find, when at last we confront it, not
only that its fame is justly deserved, but that our experience of it is entirely
individual. We will have our own way of visualizing the narrator's bedtime
scene with his mother; his visits to his hypochondriac aunt; his teasing of the old
servant Françoise; his embrace of the hawthorns; his vision of the three
steeples and his first piece of serious writing. We will have our own associations
with Swann's agonizing love affair with Odette and the
narrator's youthful infatuation with Swann's daughter Gilberte.
And we will have our own unexpected memories that enable us to identify with the
narrator in the most famous scene of all, in which the taste of a tea-soaked
madeleine suddenly triggers his full recollection of his childhood in the village of
Combray and, from this, leads to the unfolding of all the subsequent action in the
3,000-page novel.

We will find, too, that the better acquainted we become with this book
the more it yields. Given its richness and resilience, Proust's work may
be enjoyed on every level and in every form – as quotation, as excerpt, as
compendium, even as movie and comic book – but in the end it is best
appreciated in the way it was meant to be experienced, in the full, slow reading and
rereading of every word, in utter submission to Proust's subtle
psychological analyses, his precise portraits, his compassionate humour, his richly
coloured and lyrical landscapes,
his extended digressions, his
architectonic sentences, his symphonic structures, his perfect formal designs.

The Way by Swann's
opens with the early bedtime
of the narrator as a grown man: he describes how he used to spend the sleepless
portions of his nights remembering events from his early life and finally evokes the
episode of the madeleine. A much longer section follows, containing the memories of
his childhood at Combray that were summoned by the taste of the madeleine and that
came flooding back to him in unprecedentedly minute and sensuous detail. This first
part of the book, ‘Combray', having opened at bedtime, closes
– itself like a long sleepless night – at dawn.

The second part of the book, ‘A Love of
Swann's', which jumps back many years, consists of the
self-contained story of Swann's miserable, jealousy-racked love for the
shallow and fickle Odette who will one day be his wife; the narrator with whom we
began the book scarcely appears at all. The third and last part,
‘Place-names: the Name', much shorter than the rest of the
volume, includes the story of the narrator's infatuation, as a boy, with
Swann's daughter Gilberte over weeks of playing together on the chilly
lawns of the Champs Elysées and ends with a sort of coda: on a late
November day in the Bois de Boulogne, the narrator muses on the contrast between the
beauties of the days of his childhood and the banality of his present, and on the
nature of time.

The story is told in the first person. Proust scholars have identified
a handful of slightly different Is in
In Search of Lost Time
, but the two
main Is are those of the narrator as he tells the story and the narrator as a child
and young man. The first person, though, is freely abandoned from time to time in
favour of what seems to be an omniscient narrator, as when, in
‘Combray', we witness conversations between his Aunt
Léonie and the servant Françoise which the boy could not have
heard; and most remarkably during nearly the whole of ‘A Love of
Swann's'.

The story is told in the first person, the protagonist is referred to
as ‘Marcel', and the book is filled with events and characters
closely
resembling those of Proust's own life, yet this
novel is not autobiography wearing a thin disguise of fiction but, rather, the
opposite – fiction in the guise of autobiography. For although
Proust's own life experience is the material out of which he forms his
novel, as is the case for any writer of fiction, it has been altered, recombined,
shaped to create a coherent and meaningful fictional artefact, and this very crucial
alchemy – art's transformation of life – is itself one
of Proust's preoccupations and a principal subject and theme of the book.
The episode of the madeleine, for instance, is apparently based on an experience of
Proust's own, but what Proust actually dipped in his tea was a rusk of dry
toast, and what he remembered was his morning visits to his grandfather. The scene
of the goodnight kiss, for instance, is set, not in a single actual home of
Proust's childhood, but in a melding of two – one in Auteuil,
the suburb of Paris where he was born, and the other in Illiers, a town outside
Paris where he spent many summers. Similarly, the characters in the novel are
composites, more perfectly realized ideals or extremes, of characters in his own
life.

What is introduced in this inaugural volume of
In Search of Lost
Time
? As Samuel Beckett remarks in his slim study
Proust
,

The whole of Proust's world comes out of a teacup, and
not merely Combray and his childhood. For Combray brings us to the two
‘ways' and to Swann, and to Swann may be related every element
of the Proustian experience and consequently its climax in revelation…
Swann is the corner-stone of the entire structure, and the central figure of the
narrator's childhood, a childhood that involuntary memory, stimulated or
charmed by the long-forgotten taste of a madeleine steeped in an infusion of tea,
conjures in all the relief and colour of its essential significance from the shallow
well of a cup's inscrutable banality.

Through Charles Swann, the faithful friend and constant dinner-guest
of the narrator's family, we are led, either directly or indirectly, to
all the most important characters of
In Search of Lost Time
. Nearly all, in
fact, are introduced in
The Way by Swann's
: the young
protagonist, his parents and his grandmother; Swann, his daughter Gilberte,
and Odette, the mysterious ‘lady in pink';
Françoise, the family servant; the narrator's boyhood friend the
bookish Bloch; and the aristocrat Mme de Villeparisis. Stories are told about them
that will be echoed later by parallel stories, just as the story of the young
protagonist's longing for his mother is echoed within this volume by the
story of Swann's longing for Odette and the narrator's, when he
was a boy, for Gilberte. Stories are begun that will be continued, hints are dropped
that will be picked up, and questions are asked that will be answered in later
volumes. Places are described that will reappear in greater detail, just as each of
the major themes in the book – love, betrayal, homosexuality, manners,
taste, snobbery, etc. – is introduced in
The Way by
Swann's
and elaborated more completely in subsequent volumes.

In the narrator's recovery of his early memories through the
tasting of the tea-soaked madeleine, for instance, we learn of the power of
involuntary memory, and the madeleine is only the first of a series of inanimate
objects that appear in the course of
In Search of Lost Time
, each providing
a sensuous experience which will in turn provoke an involuntary memory (the uneven
cobblestones in a courtyard, for instance, or the touch of a stiffly starched napkin
on the lips). The incident of the madeleine will itself be taken up again and
revealed in a new light in the final volume.

In the narrator's early passion for his mother and
Swann's for Odette we are introduced to the power of love for an elusive
object, the perversity with which one's passion is intensified by the
danger of losing one's beloved. The narrator's infatuation with
Gilberte in the present volume will be echoed by his more fully developed passion,
as an adult, for Albertine in a subsequent volume. In the very first pages of
The Way By Swann's
, the notion of escape from time is alluded
to, and the description of the magic lantern which follows soon after hints at how
time will be transcended through art. The closing coda in the Bois de Boulogne,
contrasting the beauties of the remembered past with the banality of the present,
introduces the theme of the receding, in time, and the disappearance, of beloved
places and people, and their resurrection in our imagination, our memory and finally
our art.

And that, above all, is the notion introduced in
the present volume: that only in recollection does an experience become fully
significant, as we arrange it in a meaningful pattern. Thus the crucial role of our
intellect, our imagination, in our perception of the world and our recreation of it
to suit our desires, and the importance of the role of the artist in transforming
reality according to a particular inner vision: the artist escapes the tyranny of
time through art.

In one early scene, for example, the young protagonist sees the object
of his devotion, the Duchesse de Guermantes, in the village church. He has never
seen her before; what he has loved has been his own image of her, which he has
created from her name and family history, her country estate, her position and
reputation. In the flesh, she is disappointing. But immediately his imagination goes
to work again, and soon he has managed to change what he sees before him into an
object once again worthy of his love. Similarly, later in the novel Swann finds that
his love of Odette is wonderfully strengthened, even transformed, the moment he
realizes how closely she resembles a favourite painting of his: he now sees the
painting, as well, when he looks at her. The power of the intellect, and the
imagination, have come to transform the inadequacy or tediousness of the real.

Proust began writing
Du côté de chez
Swann
when he was in his late thirties, sometime between the summer of 1908
and the summer of 1909, as nearly as we can make out from references in his letters
and conversations. His mother had died several years before, and following a stay of
some months in a sanatorium he had gone to live in an apartment at Versailles while
friends searched for a suitable place for him to settle. When at last he moved, it
was to an apartment at 102, boulevard Haussmann which was already familiar to him:
his uncle had died there and his mother had often visited it. The building is now
owned by a bank, but one can still view the high-ceilinged room in which Proust
spent most of his life from then on – slept, rested, ate, received
visitors, read and wrote. It was here that he wrote most of
A la recherche du
temps perdu
.

In a sense, the book had already been in preparation for several years
before it began to take the form of a novel. It was never destined
to be composed in a neatly chronological manner in any case,
and elements of it had been emerging piecemeal in various guises: paragraphs,
passages, scenes were written and even published in earlier versions, then later
reworked and incorporated into the novel. The famous description of the steeples of
Martinville, for example, had an earlier incarnation as an article on road travel;
and versions of many scenes had appeared in Proust's first, unfinished and
unpublished novel,
Jean Santeuil
, which juxtaposed the two childhood homes
that Proust would later combine to form the setting of the drama of the goodnight
kiss.

Proust had been projecting a number of shorter works, most of them
essays. At a certain point he realized they could all be brought together in a
single form, a novel. What became its start had, immediately before, begun as an
essay contesting the ideas of the literary critic Sainte-Beuve, a work which he
conceived as having a fictional opening: the mother of the main character would come
to his bedside in the morning and the two of them would begin a conversation about
Sainte-Beuve. The first drafts of this essay evolved into the novel, and at last, by
mid-summer of 1909, Proust was actually referring to his work-in-progress as a
novel. Thereafter the work continued to develop somewhat chaotically, as Proust
wrote many different parts of the book at the same time, cutting, expanding, and
revising endlessly. Even as he wrote the opening, however, he foresaw the
conclusion, and in fact the end of the book was completed before the middle began to
grow.

A version of the present first volume,
Du côté
de chez Swann
, was in existence by January 1912, and extracts including
‘A ray of sun on the balcony' and ‘Village
Church' were published that year in the
Figaro
.

Although the publisher Fasquelle had announced that in his opinion
‘nothing must interfere with the
action
', Proust
nevertheless submitted to him a manuscript of the book in October 1912. At this
point, Proust, who admitted that his novel was very long but felt it was
‘very concise', proposed a book in two volumes, one called
Le Temps perdu
(‘Time Lost') and the other
Le
Temps retrouvé
(‘Finding Time Again'), under
the general title
Les Intermittences du coeur
(‘The
Intermittences of the Heart'). (He had not yet found the title
Du
côté de chez Swann
.)

He received no answer from Fasquelle and, in
November 1912, wrote to another publisher, Gaston Gallimard. Now he was considering
three volumes. He also sent an extract of forty-eight pages to
La Nouvelle Revue
Française
.

In December 1912, Gallimard and Fasquelle both returned their copies
of the manuscript. Fasquelle did not want to risk publishing something ‘so
different from what the public is used to reading'. The
Nouvelle Revue
Française
also rejected the extract. André Gide later
admitted to Proust: ‘The rejection of this book will remain the most
serious mistake ever made by the N.R.F. – and (since to my shame I was
largely responsible for it) one of the sorrows, one of the most bitter regrets of my
life.'