A la recherche du temps perdu

Novel by Proust in seven volumes, published 1913-27 (the last three posthumously). It is the most important 20th-c. French novel, and is generally considered one of the masterpieces of European literature. Its plot is an odyssey of kinds: the narrator tells the story of his own life, recounting his errors and successes, and ends by explaining why he decided to write about this life (in, presumably, the novel we have just been reading).

A la recherche had an interesting publishing history. At first it was rejected by all the publishers Proust approached, and he had to pay to have the first volume published. Even after it was taken on by Gallimard, there were further difficulties. Some arose simply from Proust's own ceaseless reworking of his proofs, and his casual attitude to compositors' errors. But there were other complicating factors: he did not have time to revise the last three volumes properly before he died; and he was apparently making hasty decisions about the structure of the novel even while dying. The first Gallimard edition was thus full of errors and arbitrary editorial decisions.

In 1954 a new scholarly edition (the Pléiade) resolved most of these problems by sifting through the successive stages of Proust's proofs, as well as his typescripts and many of the notebooks in which he had drafted the novel (his famous ‘Cahiers’). This edition became the standard one for the next 35 years. However, from the early 1970s on, scholars were exploring these ‘Cahiers’, typescripts and proofs, and studying new documents to which the Pléiade editors had not had access. It became clear that another edition was needed—one which would respect the last state of the text as overseen by Proust, but which could, in extensive notes, describe fully both Proust's reworkings and the problems posed by the posthumous volumes. (The sixth volume, Albertine disparue, has been a particular subject of debate). A new Pléiade edition was therefore brought out in 1987-9. Since A la recherche came out of copyright in 1987 many competing editions have appeared; some over-dramatize their ‘discoveries’, and none is as satisfactory as the new Pléiade.

The first volume of the novel, Du côté de chez Swann (1913), describes a childhood in which the narrator grows up longing to be a writer, and filled with attractive but illusory images of travel, the aristocracy, and love. It opens with a painful scene which, says the narrator, is all he could remember as an adult, until one day, for the first time since childhood, he tastes some madeleine cake soaked in tea. This taste brings feelings of ecstasy and unexpectedly revives all the associated sensations—especially the pleasures—of significant periods of his childhood. The narrator now describes newly remembered landscapes, and early episodes concerning a number of characters who are to play a part in his adult life: for example, the family servant Françoise, the local snob Legrandin, the prestigious duchesse de Guermantes, his own friend Bloch, and particularly the family friend Swann. Swann shares many traits with the narrator, so much so that most of the second half of this volume is devoted to Un amour de Swann, the tale of Swann's most important love affair (which had taken place before the narrator's birth): that with Odette, the woman he is eventually to marry. This affair is first helped, then hindered, by the Verdurins, an aspiring bourgeois couple who are to achieve startling social prominence in the course of the novel. After this, the volume returns to the narrator; he plays with Gilberte, the daughter of Swann and Odette, and begins with her what is to be his first unhappy relationship.

In the second part, A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (1919), the narrator, now an adolescent, frequents Odette's salon, where he meets the writer Bergotte. He visits the seaside town Balbec, and there goes to the studio of the painter Elstir; this painter, and the composer Vinteuil, influence his view of art. In Balbec he also makes friends with the nephew of the duchesse de Guermantes, Saint-Loup; he has curious encounters with the brother of the duc de Guermantes, the baron de Charlus; and he meets Albertine, who is to be the main object of his love. In the third part, Le Côté de Guermantes (1920-1), the narrator makes his way in society, and is eventually invited to dinner by the Guermantes. Meanwhile time is passing: the narrator's grandmother dies; Swann himself is dying; and the narrator is still not working at his writing. The fourth part, Sodome et Gomorrhe (1921-2), opens with the narrator's discovery of Charlus's (and others') homosexuality: Charlus's earlier inexplicable behaviour now becomes clear. Later in this volume Charlus falls in love with Morel, a young violinist; their relationship is to echo that of the narrator and Albertine. The narrator attends another important social occasion, a soirée given by the princesse de Guermantes. During a second stay in Balbec he visits the Verdurins, who are making their way in society, and renews intimacies with Albertine. He starts to suspect Albertine of lesbianism, suspicions apparently confirmed when she claims a close relationship with a couple known to be lesbian. Devastated, he brings her back to his flat in Paris, determined to marry her.

The fifth and sixth parts, La Prisonnière (1923) and Albertine disparue (1925), describe further social encounters with the Guermantes and the Verdurins, but focus mainly on the narrator's quasi-imprisonment of Albertine; the ebb and flow of his suspicions; her eventual flight and accidental death; his mourning; and the gradual waning of a jealousy that is at first unassuaged. At the end of Albertine disparue the narrator at last goes to Venice (a long-held desire). This visit in various ways helps him realize he no longer loves Albertine. On the way back he learns that Saint-Loup is to marry Gilberte, thus uniting the Guermantes and Swann sides of his life.

The last part, Le Temps retrouvé (1927), describes Paris during World War I; the war comes as a climax to a number of earlier scenes of callousness, cruelty, lying, rumour-mongering, and dissolution. The narrator has by now reached a nadir of discouragement. He has fulfilled his worldly ambitions, going to places he had wanted to visit (Balbec and Venice); achieving social successes with the aristocracy; and forming relationships with three of the women he has desired (Gilberte, Madame de Guermantes, Albertine). But he has found that none of these experiences has brought him the hoped-for excitements, and that love can be agonizing. Furthermore, though his appreciation of art has matured and has brought him a certain wisdom, he cannot himself create. Nature no longer moves him; he cannot even believe in art as something unique. He retreats to a sanatorium, emerging eventually to go to a matinée given by the princesse de Guermantes (formerly Madame Verdurin). On his arrival a succession of physical sensations brings back to him a flood of involuntary memories. Previous involuntary memories (notably those brought by the madeleine) have seemed intensely pleasurable and significant. But, almost miraculously, it is these final ones which make him recognize the richness of his own life. They also confirm to him the continuity of his personality, which he has hitherto mainly experienced as disparate and contradictory. From these insights he gains the confidence to create at last his work of art: a book about his life. The knowledge that he and those around him are approaching death makes him all the more determined to write; he retreats from the world with a new sense of truth and a better understanding of both joy and mortality.

Within this relatively simple framework, Proust plays dazzling variations on certain conceptions of time, character, perception, and art—some his own; some clearly in a 19th-c. lineage; some coinciding startlingly with the ideas of other major contemporary thinkers whom he could not have read, like Freud. The best-known tenet of A la recherche is that promoting the power of involuntary memory, which Proust depicts as able to break down habit (the great blunter of perception) and as able to restore sensory and emotional impressions of years ago. He also illustrates over hundreds of pages his own assertion that we do not fall in love with the beauty, kindness, or intelligence of the beloved. Rather, we fall in love because we attribute to this beloved qualities and faults which issue merely from our own imaginations; or, more urgently, because we believe that she or he represents a world into which we wish to penetrate but from which we feel excluded. Proust uses bisexuality and homosexuality to stress both this subjectivity of love and its potential to exclude. His commentary on love also reinforces and informs his more general discussion of aesthetic ambiguity and of the subjectivity of perception.

A la recherche is remarkable not only for its powerful plot and its courageous ideas, but also for the beauty of its style. Proust usually writes long sentences which seem to recreate the multilayered quality of bodily sensations and inner associations. He achieves this illusion partly through his control of the most complex syntax to be found in French prose; partly through his play with phonetic patterns, metre, and other devices more often seen in verse than in prose; and partly through an extensive use of similes and metaphors that are paradoxically both apt and extraordinary. (Even Proust's generalizations tend at some point to move into a boldly physical vocabulary which integrates them into the wider network of sensory imagery.) These similes and metaphors are often marked by a quiet irony which allows one to enjoy their richness while reminding one that they are structures created by the mind.

A la recherche is not only tragic and ironic; it is also very funny, again in a way which both celebrates and deflates the objects of humour. Characters' pretences are stripped away to show pride, greed, tyranny, obstinacy, and prejudice for what they are, yet often the sheer preposterousness of these characters gives them a comic sublimity (for example, Madame Verdurin or the diplomat Norpois). In fact, all Proust's characters are amusing either occasionally or frequently: in particular, the gay baron de Charlus, by turns pathetic, outrageous, and perceptive, is one of the great comic creations of 20th-c. European literature. But Proust's humour lies perhaps chiefly in the particular linguistic talents he brings to the absurd. Among his favourite forms of wit are deliberately bathetic combinations of phrases; complex embroidery on an already-established joke after an interval of pages or even chapters; and comic metaphors which draw on comparisons taken from botany, mythology, painting, and many other spheres.

A la recherche is, finally, a political novel: it suggests that upper and lower classes view each other through rigid and mutually fascinating stereotypes; it makes detailed and penetrating analyses of social mobility; and it treats racism, poverty, homophobia, and war not just as symbols in an artistic structure, but also as historical realities.

The influence of A la recherche has been considerable. The development of the novel both inside and outside France has been deeply marked by its unprecedentedly bold use of a subjective first-person narrator; its stress on the relativism of perception; its manipulation of narrative chronology; and its ostentatious patterning by image, association, and coincidence. Thus, Gide's Les Faux-monnayeurs probably derives most of its innovations from Proust. Even those rather later writers who can seem distinct from Proust—in, say, their more urgent exploration of political or social decisions— still often echo his psychological insights or adopt his methods of creating fluid or abruptly changeable character (for example, Malraux, Sartre, and Camus). And, from the 1950s on, the Nouveau Roman and similar works take up the aesthetic lessons of A la recherche to weave them into entertaining and complicated games. No subsequent French novel has, however, achieved so successful a blend of social and psychological insight, intellectual and stylistic sophistication, tragedy and comedy. The range and moral dignity of A la recherche mark it off from those successors which, like it, relate or reflect the story of their own writing. Indeed, Proust—and his contemporary Valéry—were already, in the early part of the century, offering the most mature and aesthetically finest expression of central modern preoccupations (preoccupations with, for example, the interpretation of chaotic material or with the structuring power of language).

[Alison Finch]

Bibliography

• S. Beckett, Proust (1931)
• L. Bersani, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (1965)
• J.-Y. Tadié, Proust et le roman (1971)
• J. Cocking, Proust (1982)