In Search of Lost Time: Time Regained v. 6 (Modern Library) - Hardcover

Proust, Marcel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679424768 ISBN 13: 9780679424765

Publisher: Random House Inc, 1997

Synopsis

1. Time is a central concern for Proust, appearing first in the title and last as the final word of the novel. What is his vision of the past? Does he have a vision of the present? The future? Can the Narrator be said to be living in the past? Is he like the White Queen in Through the Looking-Glass , with 'jam tomorrow and jam yesterday - but never jam today'? 2. The renowned translator of Proust, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, originally grouped the opening section of In Search of Lost Time under the title 'The Overture,' which includes two famous passages, the good night kiss and the evocative taste of the madeleine. Does this seem apt? If so, how might this fifty-odd page beginning prefigure what will transpire later? What would you expect to follow, given that an overture usually introduces the main themes of a musical work? What does it suggest about Proust's conception of literature and music? 3. The episode of the good night kiss strikes some readers as odd or contradictory: the Narrator's need for a kiss seems almost infantile, while his power of observation seems extraordinarily precocious. Considering that he is sent to bed at eight o'clock, how old do you think the Narrator is? Is it significant that his father suggests the Narrator be given the kiss he craves, whereas his mother is reluctant, saying 'We mustn't let the child get into the habit . . .'? Is the fact that the Narrator succeeds in getting the kiss he wants a good thing or a bad thing? Why? 4. 'The whole of Proust's world comes out of a teacup,' observed Samuel Beckett. Indeed the episode of the madeleine dipped in tea is the first (and most famous) of numerous instances of 'involuntary memory' in the novel. A recognized psychological phenomenon triggered by smells, tastes, or sounds, involuntary memory vividly reproduces emotions, sensations, or images from the past. Why do you think readers and critics universally consider this scene to be pivotal? What does the Narrator think about the experience of involuntary memory? What might its function be in the scheme of In Search of Lost Time ? 5. Another emblematic theme involves the recurring 'little phrase' of music by Vinteuil that catches the ear of Swann at the Verdurin's salon and steals into his life. How do Vinteuil's compositions stir both Swann and the Narrator? In Proust's scheme of things, is music a higher art than painting or writing because it can produce involuntary memories? How does involuntary memory affect writing and painting? Is it unrelated to art except as a necessary catalyst? 6. In 'Combray' we are introduced to the Narrator's family, their household, and their country home. Since Paris is the true heart of upper-class France, why do you think Proust chose to begin In Search of Lost Time elsewhere? What do we learn from the Narrator's description of his family's life and habits? Is the household dominated by men or by women? Does the Narrator's account seem accurate, or is it colored by his own ideas and preoccupations? 7. A madeleine dipped into a cup of tea first impelled Proust into the 'remembrance of things past.' Though Proust was a gourmet in his youth, in the final years of his life he subsisted mainly on fillets of sole, chicken, fried potatoes, ice cream, cakes, fruit, and iced beer. Consider how food and culinary happenings - from meals at the restaurant in the Grand Hotel in Balbec to dinners at La Raspelière and the Guermantes's in Paris - form an integral part of the work. 8. Swann's Way and the Guermantes Way are presented as mutually exclusive choices for promenades, with Swann's Way given primacy of place at the novel's outset. Where, metaphorically speaking, does Swann's Way seem to lead? What are the aesthetic signposts and milestones the Narrator points out? What does the landscape around Combray represent? 9. 'I want my work to be a sort of cathedral in literature,' Proust once said. In his description of the area around Combray - and in many other places in the novel - the Narrator describes churches, and particularly steeples. Indeed, Howard Moss cites the steeple as one of Proust's most important symbols. In religious architecture, the steeple represents man's aspiration toward God, and by inference toward Art, the Proustian religion. What else might it suggest? Does it have a counterpart in nature? 10. Proust and the Narrator share an appreciation of gardens and flowers - Proust himself was eager to visit Monet's celebrated garden - and in a sense, all Combray can be seen as a garden. What associations does this evoke? How does the Narrator respond to natural beauty? What do flowers mean to him? How do we know? 11. Proust's work is filled with 'doubling' - the most obvious being the identification of the author with a fictional self of the same name but with somewhat different characteristics. Is Swann a double of the Narrator? What qualities do they share? In what ways do they seem different? What is the importance of the fact that Swann is a Jew? 12. Louis Auchincloss questions the use of a fictional first person named 'Marcel,' who is but isn't Proust. Marcel claims that he is neither a snob nor a homosexual, yet he is obsessed with both. Would Proust have strengthened Marcel's viewpoint by making it that of the young social climber that he himself so clearly was? Did he enhance or detract from Marcel's credibility by casting him as one of the few heterosexuals in the book? Does it matter that Marcel regards 'inversion' as a dangerous vice? Did Proust? 13. 'Swann in Love' might be thought of as a dress rehearsal for the Narrator's own performance, and Swann's passion for Odette establishes a model for various other love relationships that appear later in the book. Proust believed that all emotions and behavior obey certain psychological laws. E. M. Forster maintained that 'Proust's general theory of human intercourse is that the fonder we are of people the less we understand them - the theory of the complete pessimist.' Do you agree? How does Swann's love affair reflect this? What conclusions does the Narrator draw from his perception of Swann's experience? In what way does this differ from Swann's own view? 14. The Balbec sequence of Within a Budding Grove gathers a group of the novel's principal characters, many for the first time: Robert de Saint-Loup, the Baron de Charlus, and Albertine, to name three of the most important. Others begin to emerge in their true significance, like Elstir the painter. Why do you think Proust chose to bring them together in Balbec? In what ways does Balbec echo or amplify Combray? Is the little 'society' of Balbec a preview in microcosm of Paris? 15. While writing In Search of Lost Time Proust often rummaged through his vast photographic collection of Belle Époque luminaries as a means of stimulating his memory. 'You could see that his thoughts were following a kind of underground track, as if he were organizing everything into images before putting them into words,' recalled his maid Céleste Albaret. Indeed, the Baron de Charlus, in Within a Budding Grove , speaks of the special importance of photographs in preserving an unsullied moment of time past, before it has been altered by the present. Discuss how Proust used photographs in the story - just as he exploited the technology of trains, cars, and airplanes - as symbols of passing time. 16. In his landmark essay on Proust, Edmund Wilson praises the broad Dickensian humor and extravagant satire that animate vast sections of In Search of Lost Time , yet he goes on to call it 'one of the gloomiest books ever written.' Can you reconcile Wilson's remarks? 17. Critic Barbara Bucknall maintains that 'no Proustian lover really cares at all for his beloved's feelings.' Is this true? Would the Narrator agree? Would the

About this title

Review:

Reissued as a tie-in to the film by Raoul Ruiz, this final volume of Proust's masterpiece In Search of Lost Time presents obvious problems for those coming to it without the benefit of having read the previous sections: even with the extensive character guides and synopses which make up the last third of the book (230 pages!) the task is a daunting one, with Proust's notoriously labyrinthine sentences equally likely to impede the unwary reader. However, for those who do not wish to start at the beginning, with Swann's Way, this is paradoxically the one volume with which it might be conceivable to start a non-chronological attempt, for it is here that the narrator, identified as "Marcel" (but not to be confused with Proust himself, or not entirely), encounters characters from earlier books, grown older and bearing the traces of the passage of time, and decides to turn the experiences of his life into fiction, into the book we are holding. Throughout, it is Proust's boundless sensitivity to the variety of human experience and motivation, his delicate understanding of the precarious balance between memory and the present, that captivates and entrances.

Time Regained opens with Marcel visiting Gilberte, for whom he had entertained an adolescent passion. Realising that the places he loved as a child have lost their charm for him, he also reaffirms that he has a "lack of talent for literature"--the possibility of becoming a writer seems to him to be impossible. The remainder of the first half of the volume details the devastations of the First World War, which transforms Paris and the social world Marcel had known, destroying the distinctions, hierarchies and certainties that had previously existed. Many years later, he returns to Paris, and his speculations on memory--that "the true paradises are the paradises we have lost"--begin to awaken in him a sense of how he might at last answer the calling of being a writer that had first impressed itself upon him as a child. But when he revisits the social circles which had once so entranced him, he is appalled at the changes wrought by the passing of years:

I had made the discovery of this destructive action of Time at the very moment when I had conceived the ambition to make visible, to intellectualise in a work of art, realities that were outside Time.

It is the moving resolution of this problem that closes the book, and closes one of the supreme acts of literary creation of the 20th century: in its ending we are taken back to the beginning, to experience the variety and complexities of human life again, transmuted into art. --Burhan Tufail

Review:

"As close to being a definitive version of the great novel as we are likely to get" (Scotsman)

"Sublime... In Proust's interweaving of romantic delusions, the glory of the descriptions, as the narrator strives to recapture the past, redeems everyone" (John Updike)

"The way he replicates the workings of the mind changed the art of novel-writing forever...his style is extraordinary, enveloping, captivating" (Guardian)

"Proust isn't just the most profound of novelists, but the most entertaining, too. No reader ever forgets his most killingly funny scenes... Proust sinks deepest in readers because the book is so exhaustively analytical, so ceaselessly truthful. Not the least of it is the book's heavenly length, so that it inevitably takes over your life for a long stretch... the experience of reading it becomes, in itself, an unforgettable thing" (Independent)

"Surely the greatest novelist of the 20th century" (Sunday Telegraph)

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0679424768
• ISBN 13: 9780679424765
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 749