The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [1]
Where the abbreviated form is the same for both English and French texts, it only figures once, the English page number preceding the French. I have at times modified the Vintage translation (indicated by ‘trans. mod.’ in the text). References to Proust’s essays and shorter writings are taken from Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, translated by John Sturrock (Penguin, 1988) and Contre Sainte Beuve précédé de Pastiches et mélanges et suivi de Essais et articles, ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Gallimard, 1971) and are incorporated in the text in the form ASB or CSB, each followed by page numbers.
All references to Proust’s correspondence (abbreviated to ‘Corr.’, followed by a volume number and page reference) are to the Correspondance de Marcel Proust, ed. Philip Kolb, 21 vols. (Plon, 1970–93); translations from the correspondence, and from all other works in French, unless otherwise stated, are my own.
Introduction
By anyone’s standards, Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27) is a very long book: seven novels combine into a single overarching narrative, whose multiple strands keep even the most committed readers occupied for months, even years. Time, therefore, is an integral part of the enterprise. The story is relatively simple: an individual narrates his life in the first person, seeking to determine what it amounts to and whether he has it in him to become a writer. To read the novel, however, involves relearning our experience of time, not only in the novel’s radically unconventional structuring but in its themes and the ways in which it takes over our empty minutes, fills our cramped commuter journeys and our soaks in the bathtub with expansiveness and capaciousness previously unknown in literature. A single evening party stretches out to fill scores of pages; and the fleeting real-time duration of sensations – a smell, a sound – are drawn out and intensified by the onward rush of prose that seeks tirelessly to capture every conceivable contour of human experience. This is not time wasted. It is time revitalized or, rather, it is the novel sensitizing us to literary time and, through this, to a store of experiential riches in the real world that might otherwise pass us by.
The novel’s original translator, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, rendered Proust’s title as Remembrance of Things Past, a phrase borrowed from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, which begins ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past’. Moncrieff’s title is often still heard, but the voluntary, willed nature of ‘summoning’ runs counter to the importance granted by Proust to involuntary memory; ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ also loses the original balance between the ‘temps perdu’ (lost time) of the overall title and the ‘temps retrouvé’ (time regained) of the final volume. In Search of Lost Time was adopted as the novel’s English title in 1992 when D. J. Enright revised Terence Kilmartin’s 1981 revision of Moncrieff’s translation. The Search, however, was not Proust’s only work. Interested readers can dip their toes, even immerse themselves, in his early writings if they are so minded: the results are mixed, but the overall impression we come away with is that of a writer gradually honing a voice, refining his material and seeking a form that will let one express the other. Proust’s generic experimentation was vitally instructive and the hybridity of his efforts in the determining year between 1908 and 1909 – pastiches, essay, dialogue, novelistic fragments, theoretical reflections on art – was never wholly eradicated from the magnum opus, whose corrections were still unfinished when its author wheezed his