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13 See ASB, pp. 286–309 (302). ‘A propos de Baudelaire’, CSB, pp. 618–39.

14 Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, p. 141.

15 See Le Banquet (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971), p. 5.

16 Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire: essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968 [1896]), pp. 26, 144.

17 William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1890), I, p. 239, cited by Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, p. 24.

18 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Image of Proust’, in Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999 [1970]), p. 197.

3. Early works and late essays

1 See Marcel Proust, Pleasures and Days, trans. by Andrew Brown (London: Hesperus, 2004), hereafter PD. In French, see Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre, eds, Jean Santeuil précédé de Les Plaisirs et les jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), hereafter PJ.

2 Letter to Mme Proust, 17 September 1896, Corr., II, 125.

3 Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil, trans. by Gerard Hopkins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 [London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955]), ‘Introduction’, p. 1. This edition is based on Fallois’s French text. My French references are to the Pléiade edition: Clarac and Sandre, Jean Santeuil précédé de Les Plaisirs et les jours, here p. 181. Hereafter references will be abbreviated to JS followed by the English then the French page numbers.

4 This essay and ‘John Ruskin’, the preface to Proust’s translation of The Bible of Amiens, have recently been republished in the Penguin ‘Great Ideas’ series: see Days of Reading, trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 2008); see also ASB, 161–94 and 195–226.

5 Letter to Ramon Fernandez, August 1919, Corr., XVIII, 380.

6 Letter to Robert Dreyfus, 18 March 1908, Corr., VIII, 61.

7 Letter to Louis d’Albufera, 5 or 6 May 1908, Corr., VIII, 112–13.

8 Letters to George de Lauris and to Mme de Noailles, mid December 1908, Corr., VIII, 320–1.

9 Letter to Alfred Vallette, mid August 1909, Corr., IX, 155.

4. In Search of Lost Time

1 Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: John Calder, 1987 [1931]), p. 34.

2 The argument of these pages has much in common with the one Proust advances in his essay ‘Contre l’obscurité’ [Against Obscurity], in which he suggests that contriving to make art complex or obscure is pointless, since the words of everyday language already have an evocative power ‘at least as great as [their] power of strict signification’: see ASB, 137, trans. mod.; CSB, 392–3.

3 This is Scott Moncrieff’s title; the more recent Penguin translation is much more literal: see In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. by James Grieve (London: Penguin, 2003).

4 Book-jacket blurb to The Guermantes Way, trans. by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (London: Vintage, 1996).

5 See Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image, Music, Text, selected essays trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977); ‘La Mort de l’auteur’, in Le bruissement de la langue: Essais critiques IV (Paris: Seuil, 1984). See Chapter Five for more on Roland Barthes’ place in Proust criticism.

6 The divisions in the text between the close of The Fugitive and the opening of Time Regained differ between the French and English editions. What is printed as the first eight pages of TR in English features in the French edition as the closing pages of AD. Accordingly, readers of the English text will find the revelations relative to Combray discussed above in TR, rather than F.

5. Proust criticism

1 See Leighton Hodson, ed., Marcel Proust: The Critical Heritage (1989), p. 75. Full bibliographical details for texts referred to in this chapter are found in ‘Further reading’.

2 The Critical Heritage, p. 81.

3 See ‘La Recherche du temps perdu de Marcel Proust’, in Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de mémoire (1984–92), ‘Quarto’ edition, 3 vols., III ‘Les Frances’ (1997), pp. 3835–69; Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer, vol. 2 (1997), pp. 211