In Search of Lost Time
In Search of Lost Time (a translation of the original À la recherche du temps perdu) is a French novel, or sequence of novels by Marcel Proust. It is considered to be one of the major works of literature from any period. Previous English translations used the Shakespearean phrase Remembrance of Things Past as a title, despite Proust's exhortations to the contrary.
The original work was published in several volumes between 1913 and 1927, the last few posthumously and without the final corrections and revisions that Proust left unfinished at the time of his death. Rather than recount a clear sequence of events, Proust focuses on the narrator's memories (which are semi-autobiographical) and the connections between them.
Early in the first volume, the narrator's memories of childhood are triggered by his tasting a petite madeleine (a type of small sponge cake) dipped in tea. This is probably the novel's best-known scene, explored at great length by critics, and petite madeleine or madeleine has since taken on a metaphorical usage in daily language.
À la recherche du temps perdu consists of 7 volumes, although different editions split the work in different ways:
- Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way) (1913)
- À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (Within a Budding Grove) (1919, awarded the 1919 Prix Goncourt).
- Le côté de Guermantes (The Guermantes Way) (1922)
- Sodome et Gomorrhe (Sodom and Gomorrah) (1922)
- La prisonnière (The Prisoner) (1923)
- La fugitive (The Fugitive) (1925, published as Albertine disparue because another book with a similar title was published around the same time)
- Le temps retrouvé (Time Regained) (1927)
Un Amour de Swann, part two of Du côté de chez Swann, is often published as a volume by itself. Because 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.
The story is about how the story came to be written. That is to say, young Marcel dreams of being a writer - he is so sickly that he is not pushed to seek any kind of career, let alone strenuous work - but finds himself wallowing in distractions, such as social life, pursuing women, etc. His process of maturation takes him through highs and lows as he tries with various degrees of effort to complete something publishable, yearning of following in the footsteps of his idol, the novelist Bergotte.
Themes
Regarding writing style, Proust loved the works of John Ruskin, and translated them into French. He claimed, also, that Á la recherche du temps perdu was his attempt at writing a French incarnation of The Thousand and One Nights.
The novel shows how we alienate ourselves from ourselves through distractions, and also, in memorable passages involving a telephone or an airplane, reflects on the changes wrought by the advent of new technology.
Proust, who wrote contemporaneously with the early works of Sigmund Freud, propounds a theory of personality and psychology which privileges memory, and the formative experiences of childhood. Dr. Howard Hertz of Pasadena City College has compared this with the Freudian theorist Melanie Klein. The role of memory is central, hence the famous episode with the madeleines in the first book. 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 novel (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 or sounds, which transports the narrator back to an earlier time in his life.
A large amount of the novel has to do with the nature of art. The greatest moment of the novel is the death of the author Bergotte, who collapses after visiting a museum exhibition of Vermeer. In the museum, the writer takes up a whole page describing a tiny patch of yellow in the middle of the painting, which is a daub of paint that represents a stone wall, a tiny detail in the middle of the beautiful painting View of Delft. Proust sets forth a democratic theory of art, where we all are capable of producing art: the key is to take the experiences of life and perform work upon them, to transform 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 debated.
From The Guermantes Way and on, homosexuality is a major theme in the book. There are several homosexual characters, and Proust uses this to examine the issues of deviance within society and the exhaustive pursuit of sex as a distracting influence in life.
Main Characters
