One of the most compelling and influential accounts of the importance of Proust’s distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory comes from a 1939 essay by Walter Benjamin called “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Among the overarching themes of Benjamin’s essay is the idea that the modern world (the world of standardization, of mass culture, of information) has become increasingly inhospitable to a richly reflective kind of experience capable of tying a given individual to a given place and time, to a given culture and community. Many different thinkers and artists have dealt with this problem in a variety of ways, Benjamin tells us, discussing Proust alongside the poets Charles Baudelaire and Paul Valéry, alongside Sigmund Freud and the French philosopher Henri Bergson. In modernity, our senses are continually being shocked by stimuli from the world around us, keeping our sense of ourselves and our world in a fragmentary and unintegrated state. For Benjamin, Proust’s interest in moments of involuntary memory is an interest in moments when the “atrophy of experience” so typical of modernity can, almost accidentally, be overcome, when individuals can hold meaningful images of their lives in their minds for a moment. In another essay, “The Image of Proust,” Benjamin writes, “A la Recherche du temps perdu is the constant attempt to charge an entire lifetime with the utmost awareness.”
If Benjamin’s comments help us focus on that aspect of the novel that relates to coherence and an overarching unifying formal structure (sometimes difficult to perceive because of the work’s enormous length), there is also the open form aspect of the book to consider, the sense that even after Proust had fixed in his mind how it was to begin and end, even after he had written the beginning and the end, the novel kept growing in the middle. Time kept passing around Proust as well. Notably, World War I intervened between the 1913 publication of Du côté de chez Swann and the 1919 publication of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur. The later parts of the novel were reimagined to include the occurrence of the war and its effect on the characters. Moreover, at some point during the war, something crucial shifted in Proust’s sense of the novel. A new character emerged, Albertine, whose role seemed then only to grow and grow. She became the narrator’s major love interest, his obsession, his project, his prisoner. Her presence in the novel energized its treatment of certain topics, including obsessive jealousy and “indecent” forms of sexuality. She also introduced a different social class into the work (the narrator calls it “une petite bourgeoisie fort riche, du monde de l’industrie et des affaires” (a quite wealthy part of the middle class whose money came from the worlds of industry or commerce), altering its sociological ambitions as well.
Albertine first appears in the novel as one of a small group of girls whose social provenance mystifies the narrator. As he learns more about her, he finds himself falling in love not with some well-placed aristocrat (a possibility he has often dreamed of) or with someone from a cultivated and wealthy family of long-standing reputation (as was the case with Gilberte Swann, his first crush), but with a bicycle-riding, golf-playing girl whose sociological profile seems utterly alien to him: she comes from new money, she is culturally right-wing (Catholic and opposed to the secular tendencies of the Third French Republic), and, when it comes to literary, musical, or artistic taste, decidedly middle-brow. The result is that he does not, he says, even know how to talk to her: “While talking to her, I had been as unaware of my words and where they went as though I had been throwing pebbles into a bottomless well. That in general the people to whom we speak draw from within themselves the meaning they give to our words, and that this meaning is very different from the one we put into them, is a truth constantly revealed to us by everyday life. But if in addition the person to whom we are speaking is, as Albertine was for me, someone whose upbringing is inconceivable, whose inclinations and principles, even the books she reads, are a mystery to us, then we cannot tell whether our words have any more semblance of meaning for her than they would if we tried to explain ourselves to an animal. Trying to strike up a relationship with Albertine felt like relating to the unknown, or even the impossible, an exercise as difficult as training a horse, as restful as keeping bees or growing roses.” We could notice any number of things about this passage: that it shows what an unpleasant fellow the narrator often reveals himself to be; that it illustrates the novel’s ongoing preoccupation with mishaps in attempts at verbal communication (and with discrepancies between different varieties of French); that it indicates that the narrator’s own psychosocial makeup, the structure of his own forms of taste and his own kinds of ambition, are part of the puzzle the novel presents us with.
The Albertine story, a central part of all the volumes of the Recherche except the first and the last, allows the novel to expand on its fascination with language as the main medium in which social identities are produced and experienced. It allows the novel more space to consider a wide range of sexualities outside the mainstream. (If the indecency Proust spoke of when referring to his novel before the war had for the most part to do with the sexual inclinations of men like Charlus, with the introduction of Albertine into the novel, someone whose sexuality will apparently remain as mysterious to the narrator as her upbringing was inconceivable, suddenly a whole range of non-mainstream sexualities between women, as well as between men who are attracted to men and women who are attracted to women, enters into the novel’s purview.) It provides a new slant on the large sociological movements the novel traces (the seemingly endless process through which the aristocracy goes on renewing its prestige even as it heads toward inevitable obsolescence; the ascending sociocultural prominence of new segments of the middle classes). The introduction of Albertine into the novel shifts its balance, we might say, gives it freedom to pursue in new ways certain topics it already had on its agenda, to take them in new directions.
A la recherche du temps perdu is never about one thing at a time. It has an amazing ability always to be about a number of things simultaneously. Everyone will have his or her own list of what seem to be its central topics (and of course, our collective sense of what the novel is about will change as we and it continue to move through time), but here are six promising candidates: (1) The novel is interested in what aesthetic experience is, how it works, and what it is used for; it is interested in how the human sensory apparatus can be captivated by beautiful things in nature or by beautiful works of art; but then it is interested in how this aesthetic capacity is used or managed by people as they move through the world and time, how people’s taste evolves and why, how it might be possible (or impossible) to predict or manipulate one’s own taste, or the taste of others. (2) The novel is interested in the faculty (or faculties) of memory, how it or they work, how they enable us to be and to become who we are, to function as the kind of people we imagine ourselves to be—or how sometimes different kinds of memory come into conflict at key moments of our lives, and leave us in a state of disorientated non-identity. (3) The novel is interested in how the social world is organized into groups (families, classes, nations, clans, religions, sexualities, professions, age cohorts), how those groups determine who we are, how they compete, replicate themselves through us, or are transformed, perhaps even disappear; the novel is persistently asking what the relationship is between the groups we belong to and the identities we imagine to be ours. (4) The novel is interested in sexuality, love, and jealousy as elements in the construction of both individual identity and social identity, as forms of energy that propel us through life, and as features of human existence that link human beings to other forms of life (animal and vegetal) and to the ecosystem around them. (5) The novel is interested in the large-scale transformations that characterize its own historic moment, in, for instance, how momentous historico-political crises (World War I being the main example) affect both the large sociopolitical institutions that organize our lives and the small structures of daily life through which we all move. Finally, (6) the novel is interested in novels, how they work, and what we use them for.
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assage of time and the instability of the experience of human subjectivity are a shared feature of all of these topics. Take just one example of this, related to the matter of how novels work—the interesting question of the way the novel deals with the narrator’s name. Often critics refer to the narrator as Marcel. The narrator is given this name nowhere in the first four volumes of the novel. Other characters apparently speak his name from time to time, but the novel makes a point of never recording it. One ostentatious example (among many others) is the scene in which the narrator is announced by the doorman upon his arrival at a party thrown by the Princesse de Guermantes: “The doorman asked my name, and I gave it to him as mechanically as a condemned man allowing himself to be attached to the block. He at once raised his head majestically and, before I had been able to beg him to keep his voice down … he shouted out the disquieting syllables with a force capable of causing the roof of the house to vibrate.” As for what those disquieting syllables were, we are given no clue.
There are only two places in the whole novel, both found in the fifth volume, La prisonnière (The Captive or The Prisoner), in which it could be argued that the narrator is named Marcel. The second of the two is a letter from Albertine to the narrator that begins “Dear darling Marcel,” and ends “Oh Marcel, Marcel! Your very own Albertine.” That might seem to be good evidence that, despite having avoided mentioning the fact for several thousand pages, the narrator is indeed named Marcel. However, earlier in the same volume the reader will have encountered a startling sentence that might make anyone wary of the truth-value of any attempt to specify the narrator’s name. At the moment in question, the narrator is admiring a sleeping Albertine and watching her slowly wake up. (Note again that the confused state between sleeping and waking with which the novel began remains at the heart of its preoccupations.) “Now she began to speak; her first words were ‘darling’ or ‘my darling,’ followed by my Christian name, which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would produce ‘darling Marcel’ or ‘my darling Marcel.’ ” What is disconcerting about this sentence is the difficulty in imagining who is speaking it, who is responsible for the words that make up its second half. Can a narrator mention the existence of his author? Is the author somehow intervening here, breaking the novel’s frame? Are we suddenly encountering words proffered by someone who is neither the author or the narrator, and if so—who could that be? The sentence seems intended to cause us to lose our bearings, almost as if we ourselves were being woken up, shaken out of a dream state by an occurrence that seems situated neither fully within the dream nor fully outside it.
Stop for a moment to consider this: When, in 1928, Colette’s novel La naissance du jour [Break of Day] was published in La Revue de Paris, it had an epigraph she claimed was from Proust, but which appears to be her modification of something Proust had said in his 1913 article for Le Temps about his relation to his narrator. Colette’s epigraph, ascribed to Proust, read “this ‘I’ which is me and which is perhaps not me.” Colette changed the epigraph when the novel appeared in book form, replacing the passage she claimed was from Proust with one cribbed from later in her own novel: “Is anyone imagining in reading me that I am portraying myself? Have patience: This is merely my model.” In reviewing La naissance du jour, the critic André Billy would write that this novel “offers something extremely new and daring, without precedent, I think, in literature … it’s that the heroine of the novel is none other than the author.” Billy was, of course, exaggerating: Colette always played with the discrepancy between novelistic representations of self and public ones. Yet we could certainly say that Proust’s and Colette’s way of creating disturbances between real and fictional persons or personas, and disturbances in our everyday understanding of the patterns of coherence that usually govern the use of the first-person pronoun proved extremely influential within French literature of the twentieth century. One might, for instance, think of Marguerite Duras in this light.
The Recherche performs a similar disruptive gesture in a remarkable passage from the final volume that deals with the selfless behavior of certain people during the hardest days of World War I. The narrator (or is that really who is speaking?) suddenly informs us that “in this book, in which there is not one fact that is not fictitious, not one real character concealed under a false name, in which everything has been made up by me in accordance with the needs of my exposition, I have to say, to the honour of my country, that Françoise’s millionaire relatives alone, who came out of retirement to help their niece when she was left without support, that they and they alone are real, living people.” How is it that the narrator, himself supposedly a fiction, suddenly knows who is “real” and who isn’t?
It is as if for the novel certain questions—what is the difference between being asleep and being awake? what is the difference between the narrator and the author? what is the difference between being real and being fictitious?—are all in some way versions of the same question. It is as if in all of the different topics it treats, the novel in fact encourages us to wonder if we are awake, if we are fictions. When we are caught up in aesthetic experience, who are we? When we decide we like something, what has been decided and by whom? Who do we become thanks to the aesthetic choices we imagine ourselves to make freely? When we are lost in memory, who, where, when, and what are we? When we pursue sex or love, do we know why we do what we do? Do we know the meaning of what we do? Are our actions automatic or conscious? Do we know who or what we are as we perform them? When we use language, are we in full control of what we say and do? Are we aware of, awake to, the full significance of the way group identities transmit themselves through us? Is it possible to know the full extent of what and who we have been, what we are, what we will become, to cite the novel’s closing words, “in Time”? Somehow the Recherche not only studies, it also offers us and is itself subject to, this complex experience of becoming. Even Proust, we could say, is still in the process of becoming who he is, as his novel goes on moving forward through time.
WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING
Benjamin, Walter. “The Image of Proust” and “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969.
Colette. Break of Day. Translated by Enid McLeod. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961.
———. Oeuvres, tome III. Edited by Claude Pichois et al. Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, 1991.
Gide, André. The Journals of André Gide, volume 2:1914–1927. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Knopf, 1948.
Hodson, Leighton, ed. Marcel Proust: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1989. (The observations by Richard Aldington, Clive Bell, J. Middleton Murry, Albert Thibaudet, and the reader’s report for Fasquelle can all be found in this volume.)
Proust, Marcel. Finding Time Again. Translated by Ian Patterson. London: Penguin, 2003.
———. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. Translated by James Grieve. New York: Penguin, 2005.
———. Lettres à André Gide. Neuchâtel: Ides et Calendes, 1949.
———. The Prisoner and The Fugitive. Translated by Carol Clark and Peter Collier. London: Penguin, 2003.
———. Selected Letters, 1904–1909, vol. 2. Edited by Philip Kolb. Translated by Terence Kilmartin. London: Collins, 1989.
———. Selected Letters, 1910–1917, vol. 3. Edited by Philip Kolb. Translated by Terence Kilmartin. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.
———. Sodom and Gomorrah. Translated by John Sturrock. New York: Penguin, 2005.
———. “Swann Explained by Proust” (from Le Temps in November 1913). In Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, translated by John Sturrock. London: Penguin Books, 1988.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. Translated by Richard Howard. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoméno
logie de Husserl: L’intentionnalité.” In Critiques littéraires (Situations, I). Paris: Gallimard-Folio, 2005.
The first English language translator of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu was Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff. His translation of the first volume of Proust’s novel, as Swann’s Way, was published in 1922; Scott Moncrieff also translated the five following volumes but died in 1930 before translating the end of the novel. A translation of the final volume, Time Regained, was completed by Stephen Hudson, a pseudonym of Sydney Schiff. The translation of this volume was updated by Andreas Mayor in 1970. Scott Moncrieff gave the entire novel the title Remembrance of Things Past (a phrase he borrowed from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30), while also taking liberties with the titles of a number of the individual volumes. A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur was called Within a Budding Grove. Sodome et Gomorrhe was called Cities of the Plain. The sixth volume, which has been published in French both as Albertine disparue and as La fugitive, was called The Sweet Cheat Gone.
The Scott Moncrieff and Mayor translations were updated by Terence Kilmartin in 1981. Kilmartin abandoned the title The Sweet Cheat Gone, replacing it with The Fugitive. The same translations were further revised by D. J. Enright in 1992 after the publication of a new scholarly edition of the novel in France between 1987 and 1989. Here the English title of the whole novel became In Search of Lost Time, and Cities of the Plain became Sodom and Gomorrah. Yale University Press is currently in the process of publishing yet a further revision of this translation by William C. Carter.
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