The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [81]
Another important group, this time with a uniquely scholarly focus, whose work pushes Proust ever further into the new century, is the Équipe Proust [Proust Team] at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits modernes (ITEM), a major research centre which works in association with the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.4 These scholars work on Proust’s manuscripts, proofs and other primary documents and publish the annual Bulletin d’informations proustiennes, which reflects the reassessments of Proust’s novel and the explorations of his writing process afforded by genetic criticism; the latter part of the journal keeps readers abreast of Proust-related events and provides reviews of recent publications.5
A group of scholars, many of them from the Équipe Proust, is currently at work under the direction of Nathalie Mauriac Dyer on perhaps the biggest Proust project to date: a full facsimile edition of seventy-five of Proust’s Cahiers, the notebooks from which the Search emerged: about 8,000 handwritten pages in all. Each cahier (two have appeared to date) is presented in two volumes: the first a stunning, digitally produced colour facsimile, in its original format, faced by diagrams of the ‘unités textuelles’ [textual units] that make up each folio; the second is an exhaustive diplomatic transcription (that is, recording all annotations and deletions, every detail of Proust’s palimpsestic pages as well as offering critical notes and remarks on chronology and interpretation). Together these volumes allow readers to explore the many-layered, multiform structures of Proust’s writing, the likely order of composition of any given section, the movements of blocks of text and the addition of stuck-on strips and streamers of verbal matter in the age before word processing made such things possible at a keystroke. They remind us of the vast complexity of the tasks facing any editor seeking to produce a ‘definitive’ edition of the novel. These volumes are expensive, but when the project is completed (and it will likely take a generation or more), research libraries around the world will be able to offer readers an experience very close to that of consulting the original manuscripts themselves; at the same time this project will electronically preserve from further irreparable deterioration what are already fragile artefacts.6
Beyond the walls of the academy, artists of many stripes have drawn on Proust and his work for inspiration or creative stimulus. Film-makers have been attracted by the opportunities and challenges offered by the Search yet most have concentrated their efforts predominantly on a single volume of the novel. Volker Schlöndorff’s Un amour de Swann, starring Jeremy Irons as Swann, Ornella Muti as Odette and Alain Delon as Charlus was released in 1984; Raoul Ruiz’s Le Temps retrouvé (1999) features a galaxy of long-established stars, including Emmanuelle Béart, Catherine Deneuve and John Malkovitch (as Charlus); and Chantal Akerman’s inventive drama La Captive appeared in 2000. Harold Pinter’s 1972 The Proust Screenplay (first published in 1978) is the nearest anyone has come to a comprehensive filmic interpretation of the Search. The screenplay has never been made into a film but it was successfully adapted by Pinter and Di Trevis for the stage at the Royal National Theatre in London in 2000.7 For an excellent overview of