ELWYN'S PROUST PAGE
INTRODUCTION
This is very much a personal journey with Proust. I first read the full 12 volumes of the Scott Moncrieff translation over 20 years ago after I retired[1]. At the time, I made copious notes, not only concerning Proust’s principal theme of unconscious or involuntary memory, but also his reflections on a variety of other subject matters which appealed to me. In this regard, Proust may be said to have covered the field of human subjective experience. The nature of these disparate themes appears in the text, with more particularity in the Index. Had I not resorted to copious note-taking in this fashion, I would have retained very little, if any, of what I had read.
In those days, technology was not what it is today, and my notes were all typed out in hard copy directly from the text beside me. I then printed them out and placed them in a folder. Some years later, I scanned them all into my computer, and over a period of time, largely forgot about them, but the fact of their existence no doubt remained in my conscious memory. Only now has it dawned on me that they may be suitable for reproduction as a website. It also only recently dawned upon me that I had compiled an Index, and, as I look at it now, I am surprised by its amount of detail.
At the time my interest was initially aroused in Proust, I was already well versed in the history of the Third Republic before the Great War, having studied that period as necessary background for my Ph D thesis. However, I was little acquainted with the literature of the period. In the years ahead, I became better acquainted with the literature and the artistic endeavour generally of La Belle Époque, as it is colloquially known, and this webpage is the result.
No doubt, reading the text in English, one does not get the full flavour of the French original. Nevertheless, the translators, and in particular Scott-Moncrieff, have done a sterling job. One aspect which has been the subject of some comment from time to time is the title: Remembrance of Things Past, a purported translation of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. The reason, I would imagine, is that that translation was already sitting there from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets[2]: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thoughts/ I summon up remembrance of things past/.”
But summoning up conscious memories of things gone by is not what Proust is all about. Proust is concerned more with the involuntary surfacing of past experiences thanks to some purely chance event occurring in the present. Our conscious memory is selective and fragile. It grows fainter with the passage of time. Our unconscious memory houses a multitude of experiences congealed as in a liquid fluid and secreted away beneath the surface until an aspect of it is disturbed, not by an earthquake of cataclysmic proportions, but more often than not by some event of apparently minuscule proportions in the present.
For this reason, Proust did not care particularly much for the English translation with its emphasis on “remembering” things. The subject of his preoccupation was the involuntary resurfacing of a past experiences as the result of some purely chance event taking place in the present, thereby affording a link between the two - the until now forgotten memory and the present experience. In other words, the process involves not a conscious dredging up of long forgotten memories and experiences buried in the past, in the sense of a deliberate looking for something, but the involuntary resurfacing of past experiences, in the process giving meaning to both the present as well as the past.
The text is replete with such experiences. There is the primary instance of the madeleine dunked in tea (I, 57-8), a purely accidental happening which immediately released a flood of entirely pleasurable sensations. Where did they come from? What was their origin? And then after a gigantic effort at recall, he found their origin in his happy boyhood years at Combray and suddenly a whole host of associated memories flooded in, all in living colour and very real just as if they were happening right at this moment - and in the meantime, throughout the intervening years, he had barely given Combray a thought.
In Book IX, 25-6, Françoise has come in to light the fire, and to make it draw, she throws upon it a handful of twigs, the scent of which, forgotten for a year past, “traced round the fireplace a magic circle” which again was the host of a whole series of pleasant memories of yesteryear in Combray and Doncières, with the Narrator remaining all the while in his bedroom in Paris.
And then, in the final volume, the Narrator arrives at the Prince de Guermantes’ mansion for a party, having spent the last several years in a sanatorium. He steps on an uneven paving stone, and is immediately filled with a sense of coolness and dazzling light. He searches for the origin of these feelings, and realises that they have transported him back to Venice, where he had encountered a similar uneven paving stone in the Baptistry of St. Mark’s.
And right at the close, the sudden surfacing of the distant far away sound of the bell on the garden gate at Combray as Swann departed for the evening summons up all the events of the intervening years, prompting the recognition that its peal had always been there inside him, and not this sound only but also, between that distant moment and the present one, the whole of that past unrolled in all its vast length which he was not aware that he carried about within him. (XII, 472).
These experiences (of which the above are but representative examples) occurring on a periodic basis throughout the twelve volumes of text, serve to endow Proust’s masterpiece with a dominant theme and an overall unity throughout.
Another theme binding the novel together is that of the “Two Ways” along which the Narrator used to go for walks during his childhood: the Méséglise Way, also known as Swann’s Way, because it passed by the Swann estate, and the Guermantes Way, so named because that was the ultimate destination along that route. The “Two Ways” are in fact a literary allegory depicting the self we are born with and the self we acquire along life’s way.
And yet a third major theme emerges in the Dreyfus affair, involving a young Jewish army officer falsely accused of treason. The Affair polarised French society involving as it did the nation's pillars, the Church and the Army, and even different members of the same families, many still being convinced of Dreyfus’ guilt even after he was acquitted. The extent to which it did so is evidenced in the constantly recurring exchanges at the various social gatherings at which the Narrator was present.
Meanwhile, while the Narrator has been away, the old social order has changed. Gilberte, Swann’s daughter and the narrator’s old childhood friend in which he once had a romantic interest, has married Robert de Saint-Loup, thus becoming a member of the Guermantes family. She now has a daughter of her own, whom Time had fashioned into a masterpiece, “while on me too parallelly, it had done its work, but without, alas! A master's touch” (XII, 450). During his boyhood years, Marcel was never able to see the physical correlation between the two ways, but after the war, he finds that they were linked all along, and now they are also linked metaphorically through intermarriage.
The analogy tells its own tale: the Two Ways of the Narrator’s childhood walks in Combray have come together: the Méséglise (or Swann’s Way), representing the bourgeois society into which Marcel was born, and the Guermantes Way, the aristocratic circle of the Guermantes' family into which he has been admitted, are now united, and members of both worlds are to be found mingling in Paris society[3].
In the words of the late Neville Jason: “Remembrance of Things Past is the story of a man who is unable to bring himself to write. Finally, he discovers his theme and decides it is time to begin. And as we finish reading the novel, we realize that it is the book on which he is about to start. Here we have the perfectly formed circle of ‘Time Lost’ and ‘Time Regained’, which was Proust’s original plan”[4]. Let’s leave the rest to Proust to tell the tale from here.
Elwyn Elms
May 2019
[1] Actually, the last was translated by Philippe Julian (1960) and Andreas Mayor (paperback, 1970) after Scott Moncrieff’s untimely death.
[2] Sonnet XXX.
[3] Neville Jason, Naxos Audiobooks: “Time Regained”:
http://www.naxos.com/mainsite/blurbs_reviews.asp?item_code=NA322012&catNum=NA322012&filetype=About%20this%20Recording&language=English
[4] Ibid.
Navigation hint: Every page on this website has content. In those few instances where there is a drop down or drop out menu, the preceding page in the margin also has content which should be viewed beforehand. A reminder will be appropriately inserted.
In those days, technology was not what it is today, and my notes were all typed out in hard copy directly from the text beside me. I then printed them out and placed them in a folder. Some years later, I scanned them all into my computer, and over a period of time, largely forgot about them, but the fact of their existence no doubt remained in my conscious memory. Only now has it dawned on me that they may be suitable for reproduction as a website. It also only recently dawned upon me that I had compiled an Index, and, as I look at it now, I am surprised by its amount of detail.
At the time my interest was initially aroused in Proust, I was already well versed in the history of the Third Republic before the Great War, having studied that period as necessary background for my Ph D thesis. However, I was little acquainted with the literature of the period. In the years ahead, I became better acquainted with the literature and the artistic endeavour generally of La Belle Époque, as it is colloquially known, and this webpage is the result.
No doubt, reading the text in English, one does not get the full flavour of the French original. Nevertheless, the translators, and in particular Scott-Moncrieff, have done a sterling job. One aspect which has been the subject of some comment from time to time is the title: Remembrance of Things Past, a purported translation of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. The reason, I would imagine, is that that translation was already sitting there from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets[2]: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thoughts/ I summon up remembrance of things past/.”
But summoning up conscious memories of things gone by is not what Proust is all about. Proust is concerned more with the involuntary surfacing of past experiences thanks to some purely chance event occurring in the present. Our conscious memory is selective and fragile. It grows fainter with the passage of time. Our unconscious memory houses a multitude of experiences congealed as in a liquid fluid and secreted away beneath the surface until an aspect of it is disturbed, not by an earthquake of cataclysmic proportions, but more often than not by some event of apparently minuscule proportions in the present.
For this reason, Proust did not care particularly much for the English translation with its emphasis on “remembering” things. The subject of his preoccupation was the involuntary resurfacing of a past experiences as the result of some purely chance event taking place in the present, thereby affording a link between the two - the until now forgotten memory and the present experience. In other words, the process involves not a conscious dredging up of long forgotten memories and experiences buried in the past, in the sense of a deliberate looking for something, but the involuntary resurfacing of past experiences, in the process giving meaning to both the present as well as the past.
The text is replete with such experiences. There is the primary instance of the madeleine dunked in tea (I, 57-8), a purely accidental happening which immediately released a flood of entirely pleasurable sensations. Where did they come from? What was their origin? And then after a gigantic effort at recall, he found their origin in his happy boyhood years at Combray and suddenly a whole host of associated memories flooded in, all in living colour and very real just as if they were happening right at this moment - and in the meantime, throughout the intervening years, he had barely given Combray a thought.
In Book IX, 25-6, Françoise has come in to light the fire, and to make it draw, she throws upon it a handful of twigs, the scent of which, forgotten for a year past, “traced round the fireplace a magic circle” which again was the host of a whole series of pleasant memories of yesteryear in Combray and Doncières, with the Narrator remaining all the while in his bedroom in Paris.
And then, in the final volume, the Narrator arrives at the Prince de Guermantes’ mansion for a party, having spent the last several years in a sanatorium. He steps on an uneven paving stone, and is immediately filled with a sense of coolness and dazzling light. He searches for the origin of these feelings, and realises that they have transported him back to Venice, where he had encountered a similar uneven paving stone in the Baptistry of St. Mark’s.
And right at the close, the sudden surfacing of the distant far away sound of the bell on the garden gate at Combray as Swann departed for the evening summons up all the events of the intervening years, prompting the recognition that its peal had always been there inside him, and not this sound only but also, between that distant moment and the present one, the whole of that past unrolled in all its vast length which he was not aware that he carried about within him. (XII, 472).
These experiences (of which the above are but representative examples) occurring on a periodic basis throughout the twelve volumes of text, serve to endow Proust’s masterpiece with a dominant theme and an overall unity throughout.
Another theme binding the novel together is that of the “Two Ways” along which the Narrator used to go for walks during his childhood: the Méséglise Way, also known as Swann’s Way, because it passed by the Swann estate, and the Guermantes Way, so named because that was the ultimate destination along that route. The “Two Ways” are in fact a literary allegory depicting the self we are born with and the self we acquire along life’s way.
And yet a third major theme emerges in the Dreyfus affair, involving a young Jewish army officer falsely accused of treason. The Affair polarised French society involving as it did the nation's pillars, the Church and the Army, and even different members of the same families, many still being convinced of Dreyfus’ guilt even after he was acquitted. The extent to which it did so is evidenced in the constantly recurring exchanges at the various social gatherings at which the Narrator was present.
Meanwhile, while the Narrator has been away, the old social order has changed. Gilberte, Swann’s daughter and the narrator’s old childhood friend in which he once had a romantic interest, has married Robert de Saint-Loup, thus becoming a member of the Guermantes family. She now has a daughter of her own, whom Time had fashioned into a masterpiece, “while on me too parallelly, it had done its work, but without, alas! A master's touch” (XII, 450). During his boyhood years, Marcel was never able to see the physical correlation between the two ways, but after the war, he finds that they were linked all along, and now they are also linked metaphorically through intermarriage.
The analogy tells its own tale: the Two Ways of the Narrator’s childhood walks in Combray have come together: the Méséglise (or Swann’s Way), representing the bourgeois society into which Marcel was born, and the Guermantes Way, the aristocratic circle of the Guermantes' family into which he has been admitted, are now united, and members of both worlds are to be found mingling in Paris society[3].
In the words of the late Neville Jason: “Remembrance of Things Past is the story of a man who is unable to bring himself to write. Finally, he discovers his theme and decides it is time to begin. And as we finish reading the novel, we realize that it is the book on which he is about to start. Here we have the perfectly formed circle of ‘Time Lost’ and ‘Time Regained’, which was Proust’s original plan”[4]. Let’s leave the rest to Proust to tell the tale from here.
Elwyn Elms
May 2019
[1] Actually, the last was translated by Philippe Julian (1960) and Andreas Mayor (paperback, 1970) after Scott Moncrieff’s untimely death.
[2] Sonnet XXX.
[3] Neville Jason, Naxos Audiobooks: “Time Regained”:
http://www.naxos.com/mainsite/blurbs_reviews.asp?item_code=NA322012&catNum=NA322012&filetype=About%20this%20Recording&language=English
[4] Ibid.
Navigation hint: Every page on this website has content. In those few instances where there is a drop down or drop out menu, the preceding page in the margin also has content which should be viewed beforehand. A reminder will be appropriately inserted.