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In Search of Lost Time (fr. À la recherche du temps perdu) is a novel by Marcel Proust in seven volumes written in the form of an autobiography. This, his most prominent work, is popularly known for its length and the author's notion of involuntary memory, the most famous example being the "episode of the madeleine." Its title was rendered in English as Remembrance of Things Past until the early 1990s. 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). At the risk of over-simplification, In Search of Lost Time can be viewed as a bildungsroman in which the neurasthenic narrator discovers that he is a writer after a life spent distracted by society and love.
Initial publication Although different editions divide the work into a varying number of tomes, À la recherche du temps perdu or In Search of Lost Time is a novel consisting of seven volumes. Volume 1: Du côté de chez Swann (1913) was rejected by a number of prospective publishers, including Fasquelle, Ollendorf, and the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF). Proust eventually arranged with the publisher Grasset to pay for the costs of publication himself. When published it was advertised as the first of a three-volume novel (Bouillaguet and Rogers, 316-7). Du côté de chez Swann is divided into 4 parts: "Combray I" (sometimes referred to in English as the "Overture"), "Combray II," "Un Amour de Swann," and "Noms de pays: le nom." A third-person novella within Du côté de chez Swann, "Un Amour de Swann" is sometimes published as a volume by itself. As it forms the self-contained story of Charles Swann's love affair with Odette de Crécy and is relatively short, it is generally considered a good introduction to the work and is often a set text in French schools. "Combray I" is also similarly excerpted. In early 1914 André Gide, who had been involved in NRF's rejection of the book, wrote Proust to apologize and to offer congratulations on the novel. "For several days I have been unable to put your book down.... The rejection of this book will remain the most serious mistake ever made by the NRF and, since I bear the shame of being very much responsible for it, one of the most stinging and remorseful regrets of my life" (Tadié, 611). Gallimard (the publishing arm of NRF) offered to publish the remaining volumes, but Proust chose to stay with Grasset. Volume 2: À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (1919), scheduled to be published in 1914, was delayed by the onset of World War I. At the same time, Grasset's firm was closed down when the publisher went into military service. This freed Proust to move to Gallimard, where all the subsequent volumes were published. Meanwhile, the novel kept growing in length and in conception. À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs was awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1919. Volume 3: Le Côté de Guermantes originally appeared as Le Côté de Guermantes I (1920) and Le Côté de Guermantes II (1921). Volume 4: The first forty pages of Sodome et Gomorrhe initially appeared at the end of Le Côté de Guermantes II (Bouillaguet and Rogers, 942), the remainder appearing as Sodome et Gomorrhe I (1921) and Sodome et Gomorrhe II (1922). It was the last volume over which Proust supervised publication before his death in November 1922. The publication of the remaining volumes was carried out by his brother, Robert Proust, and Jacques Rivière. Volume 5: La Prisonnière (1923), first volume of the section of the novel known as "le roman d'Albertine" ("the Albertine novel"). The name "Albertine" first appears in Proust's notebooks in 1913. The material in these volumes was developed during the hiatus between the publication of Volumes 1 and 2, and they are a departure from the three-volume series announced by Proust in Du côté de chez Swann. Volume 6: La Fugitive or Albertine disparue (1925) is the most editorially vexed volume. As noted, the final three volumes of the novel were published posthumously and without Proust's final corrections and revisions. The first edition, based on Proust's manuscript, was published as Albertine disparue to prevent it from being confused with Rabindranath Tagore's La Fugitive (1921).The Way by Swann's |- style="vertical-align: middle;" | style="white-space: nowrap;" |2 | style="white-space: nowrap;" |À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs | style="white-space: nowrap;" |1919 | style="white-space: nowrap;" |Within a Budding Grove In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower |- style="vertical-align: middle;" | style="white-space: nowrap;" |3 | style="white-space: nowrap;" |Le Côté de Guermantes (published in two volumes) | style="white-space: nowrap;" |1920/21 | style="white-space: nowrap;" |The Guermantes Way |- style="vertical-align: middle;" | style="white-space: nowrap;" |4 | style="white-space: nowrap;" |Sodome et Gomorrhe (published in two volumes) | style="white-space: nowrap;" |1921/22 | style="white-space: nowrap;" |Cities of the Plain Sodom and Gomorrah |- style="vertical-align: middle;" | style="white-space: nowrap;" |5 | style="white-space: nowrap;" |La Prisonnière | style="white-space: nowrap;" |1923 | style="white-space: nowrap;" |The Captive The Prisoner |- style="vertical-align: middle;" | style="white-space: nowrap;" |6 | style="white-space: nowrap;" |La Fugitive Albertine disparue | style="white-space: nowrap;" |1925 | style="white-space: nowrap;" |The Fugitive The Sweet Cheat Gone Albertine Gone |- style="vertical-align: middle;" | style="white-space: nowrap;" |7 | style="white-space: nowrap;" |Le Temps retrouvé | style="white-space: nowrap;" |1927 | style="white-space: nowrap;" |The Past RecapturedTime Regained Finding Time Again |} Publication in English The first six volumes were first translated into English by the Scotsman C. K. Scott-Moncrieff between 1922 and his death in 1930 under the overall title Remembrance of Things Past, a phrase taken from Shakespeare's Sonnet 30. The final volume, Le Temps retrouvé, was initially published in English in the UK as Time Regained (1931), translated by Stephen Hudson (a pseudonym of Sydney Schiff), and in the US as The Past Recaptured (1932) in a translation by Frederick Blossom. Although cordial with Scott Moncrieff, Proust grudgingly remarked in a letter that Remembrance eliminated the correspondence between Temps perdu and Temps retrouvé (Painter, 352). Terence Kilmartin revised the Scott Moncrieff translation in 1981. An additional revision by D.J. Enright published by the Modern Library in 1992, based on the latest and most authoritative French text (1987–89), rendered the title of the novel more accurately as In Search of Lost Time. In 1995, Penguin undertook a fresh translation of In Search of Lost Time by editor Christopher Prendergast and seven translators in three countries, also based on the authoritative French text. Its six volumes were published in Britain under the Allen Lane imprint in 2002. The first four (those which under American copyright law are in the public domain) have since been published in the U.S. under the Viking imprint and in paperback under the Penguin Classics imprint. Both the Modern Library and Penguin translations provide a detailed plot synopsis at the end of each volume. The last volume of the Modern Library edition, Time Regained, also includes Kilmartin's "A Guide to Proust," an index of the novel's characters, persons, places, and themes. The Modern Library volumes include a scant handful of endnotes, and alternative versions of some of the novel's famous episodes. The Penguin volumes each provide an extensive set of brief, non-scholarly endnotes that help identify cultural references perhaps unfamiliar to contemporary English readers. Reviews which discuss the merits of both translations can be found online at the ''Observer'', the ''Telegraph'', ''The New York Review of Books'', the ''Australian Financial Review'', ''The New York Times'', and ''TempsPerdu.com'' English-language translations in print Themes The novel shows how we alienate ourselves from ourselves through distractions, and also, in memorable passages involving the telephone, automobile, and airplane, reflects on the changes wrought by the advent of new technology. Similarly, the author wove World War I into his story, including an aerial bombardment of Paris; the narrator's boyhood haunts have become a battlefield, with 600,000 Germans lost in the struggle for Méséglise, and Combray itself divided between the opposing armies. Proust propounds an implicit theory of psychology which privileges memory, the subconscious mind, and the formative experiences of childhood. Although he wrote contemporaneously with Sigmund Freud, neither author read a word of the other's work (Bragg). Dr. Howard Hertz of Pasadena City College has compared Proust with the work of the Freudian theorist Melanie Klein. A contemporary influence may have been the French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose early work Proust had certainly read, and who in Matter and Memory (1906) made a distinction between two types of memory, the habit of memory as in learning a poem by heart, and spontaneous memory that stores up perceptions and impressions and reveals them in sudden flashes. The role of memory is central to the novel, hence the famous episode with the madeleine in the first volume. Proust seems to say that what we are is our memories. Part of the process of distracting ourselves is distancing ourselves from our memories, as a defence mechanism to evade pain and unhappiness. When the narrator's grandmother dies, her death agony is depicted as her seeming to fall apart, and particularly, her memories seem to flow out of her, she loses contact with her memory. In the last volume, Time Regained, a flashback similar to the madeleines episode is the beginning of the resolution of the story — Proust's trademark, a profound sensory experience of memory, triggered especially by smells, but also by sights, sounds, or touch, which transports the narrator back to an earlier time in his life. A large part of the novel has to do with the nature of art. Proust sets forth a theory of art, democratic in appearance, in which we all are capable of producing art, if by art we mean taking the experiences of life and performing work upon them, transforming them artistically, in a way that shows understanding and maturity. Compare with Freud's theory of dreams, and "dream-work" — that some trauma in life is transformed by the mechanism of dream-work into the fantastical imagery which we see in sleep. Music is also discussed at great length. Morel, the violinist, is examined to give one example of a certain type of "artistic" character. The artistic value of Wagner's music is also discussed. Homosexuality is a major theme in the novel, especially in Sodom and Gomorrah and subsequent volumes. Though the narrator himself is heterosexual, he invariably suspects his lovers of liaisons with other women. Similarly, Charles Swann, the central figure in much of the first volume, suspects his mistress Odette (whom he later marries) of having had such encounters. Several lesser characters are forthrightly lovers of their own sex, like the Baron de Charlus; while others, like the narrator's good friend Robert de Saint-Loup, are only later revealed to be secret homosexuals. In 1949 the critic Justin O'Brien published an article in the PMLA called "Albertine the Ambiguous: Notes on Proust's Transposition of Sexes" which proposed that some female characters are best understood as actually referring to young men. Strip off the feminine ending of the names of the Narrator's loves--Albertine, Gilberte, Andrée--and one has their masculine counterpart. This theory has become known as the "transposition of sexes theory" in Proust criticism, which in turn has been challenged in Epistemology of the Closet (1992) by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Other important themes in the novel are invalidism and cruelty. Main characters The Narrator's household The Guermantes The Swanns Artists: Others Legacy In Search of Lost Time is considered the definitive Modern novel by many scholars, and it had a profound impact on subsequent writers such as the Bloomsbury Group. "Oh if I could write like that!" marveled Virginia Woolf in 1922 (2:525). More recently, literary critic Harold Bloom wrote that In Search of Lost Time is now "widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century." Since the publication in 1992 of a revised English translation by The Modern Library, based on a new definitive French edition (1987–89), interest in Proust's novel in the English-speaking world has notably increased. Two substantial new biographies have appeared in English, by Edmund White and William C. Carter, and at least two books about the experience of reading Proust have appeared, by Alain de Botton and Phyllis Rose. Founded in 1997, there are now three chapters of the Proust Society of America: at The Mercantile Library in New York City, the Mechanic's Institute Library in San Francisco, and the Athenæum Library in Boston. Adaptations Screen Stage In popular culture Further reading | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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