Adam Watt - The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)

The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust

Prousts A la recherche du temps perdu ( In Search of Lost Time , 191327) changed the course of modern narrative fiction. This Introduction provides an account of Prousts life, the socio-historical and cultural contexts of his work and an assessment of his early works. At its core is a volume-by-volume study of A la recherche , which attends to its remarkable superstructure as well as to individual images and the intricacies of Prousts finely stitched prose. The book reaches beyond stale commonplaces of madeleines and memory, alerting readers to Prousts verbal virtuosity, his preoccupations with the fleeting and the unforeseeable, with desire, jealousy and the nature of reality. Lively, informative chapters on Proust criticism and the works afterlives in contemporary culture provide a multitude of paths to follow; the book charges readers with the energy and confidence to move beyond anecdote and hearsay and to read Prousts novel for themselves.

Adam Watt is Senior Lecturer in French at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Reading in Prousts A la recherche : le dlire de la lecture (2009), and editor of Le Temps retrouv Eighty Years After/80 ans aprs: Critical Essays/Essais critiques (2009).

The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust

Adam Watt

Royal Holloway, University of London

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Adam Watt 2011

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2011

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Watt, Adam A. (Adam Andrew), 1979

The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust / Adam Watt.

p. cm

ISBN 978-0-521-51643-3 ISBN 978-0-521-73432-5 (pbk.)

1. Proust, Marcel, 18711922Criticism and interpretation. 2. Proust, Marcel

18711922. la recherche du temps perdu. I. Title.

PQ2631.R63Z9817 2011

843.912dc22

2010052338

ISBN 978-0-521-51643-3 Hardback

ISBN 978-0-521-73432-5 Paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Stace

Mon amour, ma chrie

Contents

Texts and abbreviations

All quotations are taken from the Vintage Classics edition of In Search of Lost Time in six volumes, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff (except for Time Regained , translated by Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin), revised by Terence Kilmartin and D. J. Enright (Vintage, 20002). Page references are also provided to the single-volume Quarto Gallimard edition of A la recherche du temps perdu which, although it does not have the admirable critical apparatus of Jean-Yves Tadis four authoritative Pliade volumes (Gallimard, 19879), reproduces the same text in handle-able and considerably more affordable format. The following abbreviated forms are incorporated in the text (the roman numerals refer to the Vintage volume numbers):

Where the abbreviated form is the same for both English and French texts, it only figures once, the English page number preceding the French. I have at times modified the Vintage translation (indicated by trans. mod. in the text). References to Prousts essays and shorter writings are taken from Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays , translated by John Sturrock (Penguin, 1988) and Contre Sainte Beuve prcd de Pastiches et mlanges et suivi de Essais et articles , ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Gallimard, 1971) and are incorporated in the text in the form ASB or CSB , each followed by page numbers.

All references to Prousts correspondence (abbreviated to Corr ., followed by a volume number and page reference) are to the Correspondance de Marcel Proust , ed. Philip Kolb, 21 vols. (Plon, 197093); translations from the correspondence, and from all other works in French, unless otherwise stated, are my own.

Introduction

By anyones standards, Prousts A la recherche du temps perdu ( In Search of Lost Time , 191327) is a very long book: seven novels combine into a single overarching narrative, whose multiple strands keep even the most committed readers occupied for months, even years. Time , therefore, is an integral part of the enterprise. The story is relatively simple: an individual narrates his life in the first person, seeking to determine what it amounts to and whether he has it in him to become a writer. To read the novel, however, involves relearning our experience of time, not only in the novels radically unconventional structuring but in its themes and the ways in which it takes over our empty minutes, fills our cramped commuter journeys and our soaks in the bathtub with expansiveness and capaciousness previously unknown in literature. A single evening party stretches out to fill scores of pages; and the fleeting real-time duration of sensations a smell, a sound are drawn out and intensified by the onward rush of prose that seeks tirelessly to capture every conceivable contour of human experience. This is not time wasted. It is time revitalized or, rather, it is the novel sensitizing us to literary time and, through this, to a store of experiential riches in the real world that might otherwise pass us by.

The novels original translator, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, rendered Prousts title as Remembrance of Things Past , a phrase borrowed from Shakespeares Sonnet 30, which begins When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past. Moncrieffs title is often still heard, but the voluntary, willed nature of summoning runs counter to the importance granted by Proust to involuntary memory; Remembrance of Things Past also loses the original balance between the temps perdu (lost time) of the overall title and the temps retrouv (time regained) of the final volume. In Search of Lost Time was adopted as the novels English title in 1992 when D. J. Enright revised Terence Kilmartins 1981 revision of Moncrieffs translation. The Search , however, was not Prousts only work. Interested readers can dip their toes, even immerse themselves, in his early writings if they are so minded: the results are mixed, but the overall impression we come away with is that of a writer gradually honing a voice, refining his material and seeking a form that will let one express the other. Prousts generic experimentation was vitally instructive and the hybridity of his efforts in the determining year between 1908 and 1909 pastiches, essay, dialogue, novelistic fragments, theoretical reflections on art was never wholly eradicated from the magnum opus , whose corrections were still unfinished when its author wheezed his last shallow breath in 1922.

The Search is perhaps the greatest achievement of twentieth-century literary modernity, an improbable feat of individual creativity. It incorporates numerous traits of style and technique of nineteenth-century literature: romantic reflection and self-absorption; realistic accounts of people, places and events; naturalistic studies of genealogy and vice. It also takes in a vast sweep of history and culture, from cave paintings to Carpaccio, Mozart to music hall, Napoleon to Nietzsche and Nijinski, Leonardo to Lloyd George, Socrates to Svign. Prousts penchant for Russian doll-like clausal constructions, sentences that sprawl unhurriedly over several pages, sets him apart from his immediate forebears, yet his equally frequent habit of formulating laws and maxims puts one in mind of the seventeenth-century moralistes La Bruyre and La Rochefoucauld.