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to be purer and more precious as a junction, a phenomenon of memory’ (ASB, 273; CSB, 599). He goes on to trace the lineage of this structural use of involuntary recollection to Chateaubriand and to Nerval. In ‘Concerning Baudelaire’ he does something similar in exploring Baudelaire’s unfulfilled desire to entitle the collection that became Les Fleurs du Mal ‘Les Lesbiennes’, who are ‘as Baudelaire’s aesthetic and moral conceptions would have it, “Flowers of Evil”’ (ASB, 301; CSB, 632), this connection offering a link, which Proust expands upon, to their shared fascination with lesbianism. The essays that begin, then, as a defence of Flaubert and a celebration of Baudelaire undoubtedly achieve their goals with great elegance and critical acuity; but they function on a number of planes at once, proving, in fact, also to be the veiled attempts of a dying author, the publication of his life’s work not yet complete, to align himself with major, controversial figures of the century into which he was born, before he is consigned to oblivion.

Chapter 4 In Search of Lost Time

Swann’s Way

Within a Budding Grove

The Guermantes Way

Sodom and Gomorrah

The Captive

The Fugitive

Time Regained

Swann’s Way

‘Combray I’ plunges us into the Narrator’s reflections, looking back at his life, on sleep and consciousness, time, memory and identity. Then the focus shifts to the narrow segment of his childhood he can voluntarily recall, the period when his only consolation during the trauma of going to bed was his mother’s kiss, often denied him when his parents had guests. Many years later, tasting a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea, the memory of the rest of his childhood in provincial Combray is suddenly restored to him. ‘Combray II’ tells of this life: we learn about the Narrator’s family, their servant Françoise, their friend Charles Swann; we also glimpse the aristocratic Guermantes family and the Narrator’s first indications of wanting to become an artist. ‘Swann in Love’, an interpolated tale told in the third person, moves back beyond the Narrator’s childhood to recount Swann’s troubled love affair with Odette de Crécy, one of the little clan of ‘faithfuls’ at the home of the Verdurins, a socially ambitious bourgeois couple. Swann also moves in the highest circles of society and we encounter some of the prominent figures at a soirée he attends, held by the Marquise de Sainte-Euverte. The final section, ‘Place-names: The Name’, begins with a discussion of the evocative power of place-names, before turning back to the time when the Narrator would play in the ‘Champs-Élysées’ with Swann’s daughter Gilberte (first met in Combray). The Narrator loves Gilberte but soon she disappears, leaving him bereft. The volume closes with a passage, narrated from a much later point in time, reflecting on the irrevocable changes that have occurred in the Bois de Boulogne since that distant period of the Narrator’s childhood. He sombrely acknowledges the unrelenting advance of time and the impossibility of holding on to, or voluntarily recreating, the past.

‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure’ [For a long time I would go to bed early] (SW, 1; 13): thus with a phrase both awkward and banal we are drawn into Proust’s novel. ‘Longtemps’, the adverb of duration that opens the French text does so with a backward glance towards a distant past. The verb that follows it, however, in the perfect tense, suggests a short-lived or one-off completed action with a closer relation to the present than ‘longtemps’ would normally suppose. No sooner do we start to wonder from where in time this voice speaks to us than it begins to ask similar questions about who, what and where it is. And from the seemingly childish admission of regular early nights we shift swiftly to the reflections of a reader of works on churches, chamber music and sixteenth-century history, unsure of his own position yet adept at drawing analogies to illustrate his uncertainty.

As this reading of the novel’s opening paragraph shows at a micro-textual level and the summary