In Search of Lost Time

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Template:Cleanup-date Template:French literature (small) In Search of Lost Time (fr. À la recherche du temps perdu) is a semiautobiographical novel in seven volumes written by Marcel Proust. This, his most prominent work, is popularly known for its length and the author's notion of involuntary memory, the most famous example being the "episode of the madeleine."

Published in France between 1913 and 1927, many of the novel's ideas, motifs, and scenes appear in adumbrated form in Proust's unfinished novel, Jean Santeuil (1896-99), and in his unfinished hybrid of philosophical essay and story, Contre Sainte-Beuve (1908-09).

At the risk of over-simplification, In Search of Lost Time can be viewed as a bildungsroman in which the neurasthenic narrator discovers that he is a writer after a life spent distracted by society and love.

Contents

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Reception

In Search of Lost Time is considered the definitive Modern novel by many scholars, and it had a profound impact on subsequent writers such as the Bloomsbury Group. (Bragg) "Oh if I could write like that!" marveled Virginia Woolf in 1922 (2:525). More recently, literary critic Harold Bloom, wrote that In Search of Lost Time is now "widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century." [1]

Since the publication in 1992 of a revised English translation by The Modern Library, based on a new definitive French edition (1987-89), interest in Proust's novel in the English-speaking world has notably increased. Two substantial new biographies have appeared in English, by Edmund White and William C. Carter, and at least two books about the experience of reading Proust have appeared, by Alain de Botton and Phyllis Rose.

Founded in 1997, at the present time there are three chapters of the Proust Society of America: at The Mercantile Library in New York City, the Mechanic's Institute Library in San Francisco, and the Atheneum Library in Boston. Template:Sect-stub

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Initial Publication

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Although different editions divide the work into a varying number of tomes, À la recherche du temps perdu or In Search of Lost Time is a novel consisting of seven volumes.

Volume 1: Du côté de chez Swann (1913) was rejected by a number of prospective publishers, including Fasquelle, Ollendorf, and the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF). Proust eventually arranged with the publisher Grasset to pay for the costs of publication himself. When published it was advertised as the first of a three-volume novel (Bouillaguet and Rogers, 316-7).

Du côté de chez Swann is divided into 4 parts: "Combray I" (sometimes referred to in English as the "Overture"), "Combray II," "Un Amour de Swann," (in English, "Swann in Love"), and "Noms de pays: le nom." A third-person novella within Du côté de chez Swann, "Un Amour de Swann" is sometimes published as a volume by itself. As it forms the self-contained story of Charles Swann's love affair with Odette de Crécy and is relatively short, it is generally considered a good introduction to the work and is often a set text in French schools. "Combray I" is also similarly excerpted.

In early 1914 André Gide, who had been involved in NRF's rejection of the book, wrote Proust to apologize and to offer congratulations on the novel. "For several days I have been unable to put your book down.... The rejection of this book will remain the most serious mistake ever made by the NRF and, since I bear the shame of being very much responsible for it, one of the most stinging and remorseful regrets of my life" (Tadié, 611). Gallimard (the publishing arm of NRF) offered to publish the remaining volumes, but Proust chose to stay with Grasset.

Volume 2: À l'ombre de jeunes filles en fleurs (1919), scheduled to be published in 1914, was delayed by the onset of World War I. At the same time, Grasset's firm was closed down when the publisher went into military service. This freed Proust to move to Gallimard, where all the subsequent volumes were published. Meanwhile, the novel kept growing in length and in conception.

À l'ombre de jeunes filles en fleurs was awarded prestigious Goncourt Prize in 1919.

Volume 3: Le Côté de Guermantes originally appeared as Le Côté de Guermantes I (1920) and Le Côté de Guermantes II (1921).

Volume 4: The first forty pages of Sodome et Gomorrhe initially appeared at the end of Le Côté de Guermantes II (Bouillaguet and Rogers, 942), the remainder appearing as Sodome et Gomorrhe I (1921) and Sodome et Gomorrhe II (1922). It was the last volume over which Proust supervised publication before his death in November 1922. The publication of the remaining volumes was carried out by his brother, Robert Proust, and Jacques Rivière.

Volume 5: La Prisonnière (1923), first volume of the section of the novel known as "le roman d'Albertine" ("the Albertine novel"). The name "Albertine" first appears in Proust's notebooks in 1913. The material in these volumes was developed during the hiatus between the publication of Volumes 1 and 2, and they are a departure from the three-volume series announced by Proust in Du côté de chez Swann.

Volume 6: La Fugitive or Albertine disparue (1925) is the most editorially vexed volume. As noted, the final three volumes of the novel were published posthumously and without Proust's final corrections and revisions. The first edition, based on Proust's manuscript, was published as Albertine disparue to prevent it from being confused with Rabindranath Tagore's La Fugitive (1921). [2] The first definitive edition of the novel in French (1954), also based on Proust's manuscript, used the title La Fugitive. The second, even-more-definitive French edition (1987-89) uses the title Albertine disparue and is based on an unmarked typescript acquired in 1962 by the Bibliothèque Nationale. To complicate matters, after the death in 1986 of Proust's niece, Suzy Mante-Proust, her son-in-law discovered among her papers a typescript that had been corrected and annotated by Proust. The late changes Proust made include a small crucial detail and the deletion of approximately 150 pages. This version was published as Albertine disparue in France in 1987.

Volume 7: Much of Le Temps retrouvé (1927) was written at the same time as Du côté de chez Swann, but was revised and expanded during the course of the novel's publication to account for, to a greater or lesser success, the then unforeseen material now contained in the middle volumes (Terdiman, 153n3). This volume includes a noteworthy episode describing Paris during the First World War.

No. French titles Published English titles
1 Du côté de chez Swann 1913 Swann's Way
The Way by Swann's
2 À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs 1919 Within a Budding Grove
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
3 Le Côté de Guermantes
(published in two volumes) 		1920/21 The Guermantes Way
4 Sodome et Gomorrhe
(published in two volumes) 		1921/22 Cities of the Plain
Sodom and Gomorrah
5 La Prisonnière 1923 The Captive
The Prisoner
6 La Fugitive
Albertine disparue 		1925 The Fugitive
The Sweet Cheat Gone
Albertine Gone
7 Le Temps retrouvé 1927 The Past Recaptured</br>Time Regained
Finding Time Again

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Publication in English

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The first six volumes were first translated into English by the Scotsman C.K. Scott Moncrieff between 1922 and his death in 1930 under the overall title Remembrance of Things Past, a phrase taken from Shakespeare's Sonnet 30. The final volume, Le Temps retrouvé, was initially published in English in the UK as Time Regained (1931), translated by Stephen Hudson (a pseudonym of Sydney Schiff), and in the US as The Past Recaptured (1932) in a translation by Frederick Blossom. Although cordial with Scott Moncrieff, Proust grudgingly remarked in a letter that Remembrance eliminated the correspondence between Temps perdu and Temps retrouvé, but he was relieved when British reviews tended to declare the translation superior to the original (Painter, 352). In his "Note on the Translation" prefacing his 1981 revision of Scott Moncrieff's translation, Terence Kilmartin states that Remembrance of Things Past, during its 50-year reign as the only translation available in English, "earned a reputation as one of the great English translations, almost a masterpiece in its own right" (ix). Kilmartin's revision retained the same general title, but a second revision in 1992 by D.J. Enright rendered it more accurately as In Search of Lost Time.

In 1995, Penguin undertook a fresh translation of In Search of Lost Time by editor Christopher Prendergast and seven translators in three countries, also based on the latest and most authoritative French text. Its six volumes were published in Britain under the Allen Lane imprint in 2002. The first four (those which under American copyright law are in the public domain) have since been published in the U.S. under the Viking imprint and in paperback under the Penguin Classics imprint. Of this translation, the Observer of London noted that "the figure who emerges in these pages is indeed more plain-speaking, even blokeish, than many readers might expect, with an edgy wit, no longer blunted by Scott Moncrieff's purplish prose. In many respects, this is a Proust for our time." Similarly, Malcolm Bowie in the Telegraph noted: "The latest Penguin Proust is a triumph, and will bring this inexhaustible artwork to new audiences throughout the English-speaking world," though conceding, "Devotees will also need their Enright." [3]

The revised Scott Moncrieff and new Penguin translations both provide a detailed plot synopsis at the end of each volume. In addition, the last volume of the Modern Library edition, Time Regained, also includes Kilmartin's "A Guide to Proust," an index of the novel's characters, persons, places, and themes. For their part, the Penguin volumes each provide a welcome set of brief footnotes that identify cultural references perhaps unfamiliar to contemporary English readers.

English-language translations in print
  • In Search of Lost Time, General Editor: Christopher Prendergast. Translated by Lydia Davis, Mark Treharne, James Grieve, John Sturrock, Carol Clark, Peter Collier, & Ian Patterson. London: Allen Lane, 2002 (6 vols). Based on the most recent definitive French edition (1987-89), except The Fugitive, which is based on the 1954 definitive French edition. The first four volumes have been published in New York by Viking, 2003-2004, but the Copyright Term Extension Act will delay the rest of the project until 2018.
    • (Volume titles: The Way by Swann's (in the U.S., Swann's Way) — In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower — The Guermantes Way — Sodom and Gomorrah — The Prisoner and The Fugitive — Finding Time Again.)
  • In Search of Lost Time, Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin and Andreas Mayor (Vol. 7). Revised by D.J. Enright. London: Chatto and Windus, New York: The Modern Library, 1992. Based on the most recent definitive French edition (1987-89).
    • (Volume titles: Swann's Way — Within a Budding Grove — The Guermantes Way — Sodom and Gomorrah — The Captive — The Fugitive — Time Regained.)
  • Remembrance of Things Past, Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (Vol. 7). New York: Random House, 1981 (3 vols).
    • (Vol. 1: Swann's Way — Within a Budding Grove; Vol. 2: The Guermantes Way — Cities of the Plain; Vol. 3: The Captive — The Fugitive — Time Regained.)
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Themes

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The novel shows how we alienate ourselves from ourselves through distractions, and also, in memorable passages involving the telephone, automobile, and airplane, reflects on the changes wrought by the advent of new technology. Similarly, the author wove World War I into his story, including an aerial bombardment of Paris; the narrator's boyhood haunts have become a battlefield, with 600,000 Germans lost in the struggle for Méséglise, and Combray itself divided between the opposing armies.

Proust propounds an implicit theory of psychology which privileges memory, the subconscious mind, and the formative experiences of childhood. Although he wrote contemporaneously with Sigmund Freud, neither author read a word of the other's work (Bragg). Dr. Howard Hertz of Pasadena City College has compared Proust with the work of the Freudian theorist Melanie Klein. A contemporary influence may have been the French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose early work Proust had certainly read, and who in Matter and Memory (1906) made a distinction between two types of memory, the habit of memory as in learning a poem by heart, and spontaneous memory that stores up perceptions and impressions and reveals them in sudden flashes.

The role of memory is central to the novel, hence the famous episode with the madeleines in the first volume. Proust seems to say that what we are is our memories. Part of the process of distracting ourselves is distancing ourselves from our memories, as a defence mechanism to evade pain and unhappiness. When the narrator's grandmother dies, her death agony is depicted as her seeming to fall apart, and particularly, her memories seem to flow out of her, she loses contact with her memory. In the last volume, Time Regained, a flashback similar to the madeleines episode is the beginning of the resolution of the story — Proust's trademark, a profound sensory experience of memory, triggered especially by smells, but also by sights, sounds, or touch, which transports the narrator back to an earlier time in his life.

A large part of the novel has to do with the nature of art. Proust sets forth a theory of art, democratic in appearance, in which we all are capable of producing art, if by art we mean taking the experiences of life and performing work upon them, transforming them artistically, in a way that shows understanding and maturity. Compare with Freud's theory of dreams, and "dream-work" — that some trauma in life is transformed by the mechanism of dream-work into the fantastical imagery which we see in sleep. Music is also discussed at great length. Morel, the violinist, is examined to give one example of a certain type of "artistic" character. The artistic value of Wagner's music is also debated.

Homosexuality is a major theme in the novel, especially in Sodom and Gomorrah and subsequent volumes. Though the narrator himself is ostensibly heterosexual, he invariably suspects his lovers of liaisons with other women. Similarly, Charles Swann, the central figure in much of the first volume, believes his sweetheart (later wife) to have such encounters. Several lesser characters are forthrightly lovers of their own sex, like the Baron de Charlus; while others, like the narrator's good friend Robert de Saint-Loup, are only later revealed to be secret homosexuals. In 1949 the critic Justin O'Brien published an article in the PMLA called "Albertine the Ambiguous: Notes on Proust's Transposition of Sexes" which proposed that some female characters are best understood as actually referring to young men. Strip off the feminine ending of the names of the Narrator's loves--Albertine, Gilberte, Andrée--and one has their masculine counterpart. This theory has become known as the "transposition of sexes theory" in Proust criticism, which in turn has been challenged in Epistemology of the Closet (1992) by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

Other important themes in the novel are invalidism and cruelty.

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Main characters

The Narrator's household
  • The narrator (Marcel): A sensitive young man who wishes to become a writer. In volume 5, The Prisoner, he addresses the reader thus: "Now she began to speak; her first words were 'darling' or 'my darling,' followed by my Christian name, which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would produce 'darling Marcel' or 'my darling Marcel.'" (Proust, 64)
  • Bathilde Amédée: The narrator's grandmother. Her life and death greatly influence her daughter and grandson.
  • Françoise: The narrator's faithful and rather stubborn maid.
The Guermantes
  • Palamède de Guermantes (Baron de Charlus): An aristocratic and decadent aesthete with many antisocial habits.
  • Oriane de Guermantes (Duchesse de Guermantes): The toast of Paris' high society. She lives in the fashionable Faubourg St. Germain.
  • Robert de Saint-Loup: An army officer and the narrator's best friend. Despite his patrician birth (he is a relation to the Guermantes) and affluent lifestyle, Saint-Loup has no great fortune of his own.
The Swanns
  • Charles Swann: A friend of the narrator's family. His political views on the Dreyfus Affair and marriage to Odette ostracize him from much of high society.
  • Odette de Crécy: A Parisian courtesan of superior beauty. Odette is also referred to as Mme Swann or the woman in pink/white.
  • Gilberte Swann: The daughter of Swann and Odette. Her marriage to Saint-Loup joins "Swann's way" and "the Guermantes way."
Artists
  • Elstir: A famous painter whose renditions of sea and sky echo the novel's theme of the mutability of human life. His name may be an approximated anagram of "Whistler".
  • Bergotte: A well-known writer whose works the narrator has admired since childhood.
  • Vinteuil: An obscure musician who gains posthumous recognition for composing a beautiful, evocative Sonata.
Others
  • Charles Morel: The son of a servant and a gifted violinist. He profits greatly from the patronage of the Baron de Charlus.
  • Albertine Simonet: A privileged orphan of average beauty and intelligence. The narrator's romance with her is the subject of much of the novel.
  • Madame Verdurin: A poseur who rises to the top of society through inheritance, marriage, and sheer single-mindedness.
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Adaptations

  • The novel was famously sent up in a 1972 Monty Python sketch called "The All-England Summarize Proust Competition" (competitors having to summarize the book inside fifteen seconds). [4]
  • The Proust Screenplay, a film adaptation by Harold Pinter published in 1977 (never filmed).
  • Swann in Love (Un Amour de Swann), a 1984 film by Volker Schlöndorff starring Jeremy Irons and Ornella Muti.
  • Time Regained (Le Temps retrouvé), a 1999 film by Raoul Ruiz starring Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Béart, and John Malkovich.
  • La Captive, a 2000 film by Chantal Akerman.
  • Remembrance of Things Past, Part One: Combray; Part Two: Within a Budding Grove, vol.1; Part Three: Within a Budding Grove, vol.2, are graphic novel adaptations by Stéphane Heuet. Part Four: Un amour de Swann, vol.1 was recently published in France on March 15, 2006.
  • Albertine, a novel based on a rewriting of Albertine by Jacqueline Rose. Vintage UK, 2002.
  • My Life with Albertine, a 2003 Off-Broadway musical written and directed by Richard Nelson, scored by Ricky Ian Gordon.
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References

  • Bouillaguet, Annick and Rogers, Brian G. Dictionnaire Marcel Proust. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004. ISBN 2745309560
  • Bragg, Melvyn. In Our Time: Proust BBC Radio 4, 17 April 2003.
  • Douglas-Fairbank, Robert. "In search of Marcel Proust" in the Guardian, 17 November 2002.
  • Kilmartin, Terence. "Note on the Translation." Remembrance of Things Past. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage, 1981: ix-xii. ISBN 0394711823
  • Painter, George. Marcel Proust: A Biography. Vol. 2. New York: Random House, 1959. ISBN 0394500415
  • Proust, Marcel. (Carol Clark, Peter Collier, trans.) The Prisoner and The Fugitive. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2003. ISBN 0141180358
  • Shattuck, Roger. Proust's Way: A Field Guide To In Search of Lost Time. New York: W W Norton, 2000. ISBN 0393321800
  • Tadié, J-Y. (Euan Cameron, trans.) Marcel Proust: A Life. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2000. ISBN 0141002034
  • Terdiman, Richard. Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. ISBN 0801481325
  • Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 7 vols. New York: Harcourt, 1976,1977.
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Further reading

  • Carter, William C. Marcel Proust: A Life. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. ISBN 0300081456
  • de Botton, Alain. How Proust Can Change Your Life. New York: Pantheon 1997. ISBN 0679442758
  • O'Brien, Justin. "Albertine the Ambiguous: Notes on Proust's Transposition of Sexes" PMLA 64: 933-52, 1949.
  • Proust, Marcel. Albertine disparue. Paris: Grasset, 1987. ISBN 2246397316
  • Rose, Phyllis. The Year of Reading Proust. New York: Scribner, 1997. ISBN 0684839849
  • Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. ISBN 0520078748
  • White, Edmund. Marcel Proust. New York: Penguin USA, 1999. ISBN 0670880574
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External links

In Search of Lost Time internet discussion groups:

es:En busca del tiempo perdido fr:À la recherche du temps perdu ja:失われた時を求めて pl:W poszukiwaniu straconego czasu fi:Kadonnutta aikaa etsimässä sv:På spaning efter den tid som flytt

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