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rewards to readers today. Among these are Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Image of Proust’ (1929), Samuel Beckett’s short monograph Proust (1931), and Edmund Wilson’s chapter on Proust in his book Axel’s Castle (1931). Benjamin’s essay is remarkable for the ground it covers in less than fifteen pages and its capacity to move, like Proust, from the macro to the micro and vice versa. Just two years after the publication of Time Regained Benjamin already perceives that ‘the eternity which Proust opens to view is convoluted time, not boundless time’, whilst also remarking that ‘Proust’s pointing finger is unequalled’.5 Beckett’s book is erudite, cryptically allusive at times, but rewarding in its treatment of time, habit, memory and death – themes that later would become Beckett’s own. He comments on Proust’s ‘perspectivism’,6 the multiplicities at work in the narrative. The study has a candour and a proximity to its subject that still makes for rewarding reading as much for what it reveals of the young Beckett as it does of Proust. Wilson’s book considers Proust as part of a constellation of twentieth-century writers, alongside Yeats, Valéry, Eliot, Joyce and Gertrude Stein, who represent for him a culminating moment in the symbolist movement. The essay on Proust insightfully addresses structural issues in the narrative as well as Proust’s presentation of love and sexuality (‘[the Search] is one of the gloomiest books ever written’).7 Where Beckett refers to Proust’s perspectivism, Wilson draws on the sciences and describes his achievements of incorporating relativity into the novel as being on a par with contemporary discoveries of modern physics.

Rewarding general approaches

Further, later studies complement the insights of these early luminaries with a longer view of Proust’s practice as a novelist. Leo Bersani’s Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (1965) still has abundant insights to offer readers, remaining particularly sharp on Proust’s presentation of love, desire and pleasure and the psychological tensions explored therein. William Carter’s The Proustian Quest (1992) is an engagingly written study of the goal-driven nature of Proust’s novel, its argument illuminated by rich reference to the scientific and technological advancements of the belle époque as well as to a wealth of biographical information. Amongst general or introductory studies that take in the novel’s full span, the best is Malcolm Bowie’s prize-winning Proust among the Stars (1998). In thematically arranged chapters (‘Self’, ‘Time’, ‘Art’, etc.), Bowie reads the fine details and rhythms of Proust’s text, just as he tracks long-distance plotting and echoes, with great subtlety and panache. Bowie sets Proust the multifaceted thinker resonating with figures as diverse as Ovid, Shakespeare, Luis Buñuel and Wallace Stevens. He is attuned to dissonance and fragmentation in a text often treated as a closed system and provides a powerful reminder that the novel’s closing movement is as much concerned with the threat of death as it is with the idea of redemption through art.

Landmarks

As readers become more familiar with Proust criticism they will begin to note a number of names and titles that repeatedly crop up. In the space I have here I will outline a few of these enduring, strong readings of the Search, which provide a great deal of stimulating analysis to nuance and perhaps challenge readers’ interpretations of Proust’s novel. Chronologically first and highly influential is Gilles Deleuze’s Proust et les signes [Proust and Signs], published in 1964. Deleuze subsequently appended additional sections to the work, the ‘complete’ edition appearing in 1970. For Deleuze the Search is about the Narrator’s apprenticeship in reading the signs of intersecting domains: the empty signs of worldly interaction; the deceptive signs of love; material, sensory signs; and the essential signs of art which are capable of transforming all others. Deleuze’s vision of the Search is of an assemblage of multiple parts, a heterogeneous weave of forward-reaching