“Swann's Way” ~ Marcel Proust

“Swann's Way” ~ Marcel Proust

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“In Search of Lost Time” or “Remembrance of Things Past” is a semi-autobiographical novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust. His most prominent work, it is popularly known for its extended length and the notion of involuntary memory, the most famous example being the “episode of the Madeleine”. The novel is still widely referred to in English as “Remembrance of Things Past”, but the title “In Search of Lost Time”, a more accurate rendering of the French, has gained in usage since D.J. Enright’s 1992 revision of the earlier translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. Begun in 1909, finished just before his death in 1922, and published in France between 1913 and 1927, many of the novel’s ideas, motifs, and scenes appear in adumbrated form in Proust’s unfinished novel, “Jean Santeuil” (1896–99), and in his unfinished hybrid of philosophical essay and story, “Contre Sainte-Beuve” (1908–09). The novel has had a pervasive influence on twentieth-century literature, whether because writers have sought to emulate it, or attempted to parody and discredit some of its traits. In it, Proust explores the themes of time, space, and memory, but the novel is above all a condensation of innumerable literary, structural, stylistic, and thematic possibilities. Proust died before completing his revisions of the drafts and proofs of the final volumes. His brother Robert had the final three volumes edited, and they were published posthumously.

The role of memory is central to the novel, introduced with the famous “madeleine episode” in the first section of the novel, and in the last volume, “Time Regained”, a flashback similar to that caused by the madeleine, is the beginning of the resolution of the story. Throughout the work many similar instances of involuntary memory, triggered by sensory experiences such as sights, sounds, smells and so on, conjure important memories for the narrator, and sometimes return attention to an earlier episode of the novel. Although Proust wrote contemporaneously with Sigmund Freud, with there being many points of similarity between their thought on the structures and mechanisms of the human mind, neither author read a word of the other’s work (Bragg). Gilles Deleuze, by contrast, believed that the main focus of Proust was not memory and the past but the narrator’s learning the use of “signs” to understand — and communicate — ultimate reality, and thereby becoming an artist.

The nature of art is another recurring topic in the novel, and is often explored at great length. Proust sets forth a theory of art in which we are all capable of producing art, if by this we mean taking the experiences of life and transforming them in a way that shows understanding and maturity. Writing, painting and music are also discussed at great length. Morel the violinist, for example, is examined to give an example of a certain type of “artistic” character, along with other fictional artists, namely the novelist Bergotte and painter Elstir.