In Search of Lost Time Read Online

In Search of Lost Time, Volume I

PRAISE FOR THE Mod LIBRARY

EDITION OF IN SEARCH OF LOST Time

"Twice amended to bring it to documentary decorum and the kind of textual completion Proust himself could never attain, the C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation of the Search, buffed, rebuffed, lightened, tightened, and in the abstergent sense, brightened, constitutes a monument which is also a medium—THE medium by which to gain access to the book, the books, even the apocrypha of mod scripture. A triumph of tone, of a single (and singular) vision, this ultimate revision of the primary version affords the surest sled over the ice fields as well equally the near sinuous surfboard over the breakers of Proustian prose, an invaluable and inescapable text."

—RICHARD HOWARD

2003 Modernistic Library Paperback Edition

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the The states by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Ballantine Publishing Group, a sectionalization of Random Business firm, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random Business firm of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Modernistic LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This edition was originally published in hardcover in Great Britain past Chatto & Windus and in the Usa by Modern Library in 1992.

This translation is a revised edition of the 1981 translation of Swann'due south Fashion by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, published in the United States by Random House, Inc., and in Nifty Uk by Chatto & Windus. Revisions past D. J. Enright.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION Information

Proust, Marcel, 1871–1922.

[Du côte de chez Swann. English]

Swann's way/Marcel Proust; translated by C. K. Scott

Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin; revised by D. J. Enright.

p. cm. — (In search of lost time; 5. i)

Translation of: Du côte de chez Swann.

eISBN: 978-0-679-64178-0

I. Championship. II. Series.

PQ2631.R63D83 1992

843′ .912—dc20 92-25657

Mod Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

v3.1_r1

MARCEL PROUST

Marcel Proust was born in the Parisian suburb of Auteuil on July ten, 1871. His father, Adrien Proust, was a physician celebrated for his work in epidemiology; his mother, Jeanne Weil, was a stockbroker's daughter of Jewish descent. He lived as a child in the family home on Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris, only spent vacations with his aunt and uncle in the town of Illiers nearly Chartres, where the Prousts had lived for generations and which became the model for the Combray of his great novel. (In recent years it was officially renamed Illiers-Combray.) Sickly from nascency, Marcel was subject from the age of nine to trigger-happy attacks of asthma, and although he did a year of armed services service as a boyfriend and studied law and political science, his invalidism butterfingers him from an active professional life.

During the 1890s Proust contributed sketches to Le Figaro and to a brusque-lived mag, Le Banquet, founded by some of his schoolhouse friends in 1892. Pleasures and Days, a collection of his stories, essays, and poems, was published in 1896. In his youth Proust led an active social life, penetrating the highest circles of wealth and aristocracy. Artistically and intellectually, his influences included the aesthetic criticism of John Ruskin, the philosophy of Henri Bergson, the music of Wagner, and the fiction of Anatole France (on whom he modeled his character Bergotte). An affair begun in 1894 with the composer and pianist Reynaldo Hahn marked the beginning of Proust's often anguished acknowledgment of his homosexuality. Post-obit the publication of Emile Zola's letter in defense of Colonel Dreyfus in 1898, Proust became "the get-go Dreyfusard," as he later phrased information technology. By the time Dreyfus was finally vindicated of charges of treason, Proust's social circles had been torn apart by the anti-Semitism and political hatreds stirred up by the affair.

Proust was very attached to his mother, and after her death in 1905 he spent some fourth dimension in a sanatorium. His health worsened progressively, and he withdrew almost completely from gild and devoted himself to writing. Proust's early on piece of work had done nothing to institute his reputation as a major author. In an unfinished novel, Jean Santeuil (non published until 1952), he laid some of the groundwork for In Search of Lost Time, and in Against Sainte-Beuve, written in 1908–ix, he stated equally his aesthetic credo: "A book is the production of a different self from the one nosotros manifest in our habits, in social club, in our vices. If nosotros mean to try to sympathize this self information technology is but in our inmost depths, by endeavoring to reconstruct it there, that the quest tin can exist achieved." He appears to have begun piece of work on his long masterpiece sometime around 1908, and the get-go volume, Swann'south Mode, was published in 1913. In 1919 the second book, Within a Budding Grove, won the Goncourt Prize, bringing Proust great and instantaneous fame. Ii subsequent sections—The Guermantes Way (1920–21) and Sodom and Gomorrah (1921)—appeared in his lifetime. (Of the depiction of homosexuality in the latter, his friend André Gide complained: "Will y'all never portray this course of Eros for u.s.a. in the aspect of youth and beauty?") The remaining volumes were published following Proust's expiry on November xviii, 1922: The Captive in 1923, The Fugitive in 1925, and Time Regained in 1927.

CONTENTS

Encompass

Title Folio

BIOGRAPHICAL Notation

AN INTRODUCTION by Richard Howard

A Notation ON THE TRANSLATION (1981)

by Terence Kilmartin

A Note ON THE REVISED TRANSLATION (1992)

by D. J. Enright

SWANN'South WAY

Office 1

COMBRAY

PART Ii

SWANN IN Beloved

Function Iii

Identify-NAMES • THE Proper noun

NOTES

SYNOPSIS

Numerals in the text refer the reader to explanatory notes, which follow the text.

AN INTRODUCTION

Richard Howard

In old days books were written

by men of letters and read by the

public. Present books are written

by the public and read by nobody.

OSCAR WILDE

Beloved Proust, I'd like you to meet your new readers. Nearly of them have heard about you for some fourth dimension (there have been at to the lowest degree four films made of In Search of Lost Time; there has fifty-fifty been a picture show about you, and your housekeeper, and your asthma, and your cork-lined room—a motion picture of course about the inaccessible last years of your life), and certainly they have had many opportunities to get acquainted with your great work—everyone has been told it is great—but for one reason or some other they haven't washed and so.

Why not? you'd similar to know. Well, to begin with, your reputation as a difficult author is widespread, and many readers are daunted. For example, you're said to have written the longest sentence in the history of literature; there'southward even a parlor game that challenges people—bright people!—to diagram it. And of course the Search itself is one of the longest novels in modernistic literature—long and intricate and allusive; why, there are even some critics (you know how we're all intimidated by critics) who say information technology isn't a novel at all.

What practise they say it is? Oh, a cultural cosmogony, a Menippean satire, and most overwhelming of all, a sort of evangel. For yous offer u.s. the postulation that we tin, in the shadow, or rather the radiance, of your own enchiridion, go and practice also. Each reader, ins

tructed and inspired past your own salvationist exercises, has a capacity to redeem his own by, to regain the time. I myself have … or have had … ii friends, Jean Stafford and Roland Barthes, they're both dead at present, who felt your book was more like a gospel than a novel. Jean used to say she had to outset your book over every v years because each time she read you she had already become a unlike person. And Roland, near the stop of his ain life in 1978, wrote that he

like Proust ill, threatened by expiry (or believing himself so) came dorsum to the phrase of Saint John which Proust quotes in Contre Sainte-Beuve: "Work, while y'all still have the calorie-free.…" Does this hateful that I am going to write a novel? How should I know? I don't know if information technology volition be possible still to telephone call a "novel" the piece of work which I desire to write and which I await to break with the nature of my previous writings. It is important for me to human action as if I were to write this utopian novel, to put myself in the position of the subject who makes something, and no longer of the subject who speaks about something.

It is of more than incidental interest, with regard to the Search as this sort of gospel and prototype, that Roland Barthes found himself qualified to make certain reservations, certain criticisms, which practise not alter his soterial purpose. He readily best-selling that he preferred certain parts of the Search to others, but that each time he read the book once again, the parts he so preferred were dissimilar ones, and that was why Proust was a great writer.

But the existent trouble new readers take with your book is reading it for the first fourth dimension. And nigh of that problem, frankly, is the length—what yous phone call longueurs. Now, if you get to know each other a little, there are means of solving this problem. For instance, one could moderate the "academic" insistence that a reading of Proust has to be conducted direct through, from beginning to terminate, no dipping here and there, no looking ahead, or dorsum.… There'due south no need to stipulate such draconian conditions for achieving some sort of intimacy with you. That's why I'yard and so eager to innovate yous to your new readers. Just for now, allow me say that in introducing them to yous, I desire you to understand that in that location might exist some problems—what appear to be contemporary problems.

Such as? Well, American readers are probable to be in a hurry—they oasis't fourth dimension, they oftentimes say. It's an expression you might appreciate. And you'll take to admit you're a very deliberate author. You need to be patient with your American readers—actually, I think you are: y'all've already devised a technique for patience, at to the lowest degree for their patience. I've noticed that oft on any one page or in any one passage—somewhere between a dirge and a chapter—you manage to cast your spell, to sound your note, to tell your truth, for goodness sake! and so that readers don't have to read all the way to the end of the whole book to go what Proust is about.

You've seen to it that the message is sent on every page. Readers can read, and end, and then, another time, resume. There are other books like that; we call them "wisdom literature," and their thing is casually crystallized quite as often equally it is likely to be exhaustively secreted. Of course I think there's a existent advantage in building up sufficient momentum to read straight through from "For a long fourth dimension I would go to bed early on …" to (vi volumes on) "… between which so many days have come to range themselves—in Time." But say you had provided (or permitted) a way of reading your volume which took our new readers' impatience into consideration, which summed up equally they went along—even that kind of epitomizing might well strike your new readers as a sort of jungle, a sort of maze—you remember all those comparisons critics take made of the Search to a Gothic cathedral, or a Wagner opera, or even a flying carpet. You're not generally considered pithy.

Yet all through the tangled volumes of your piece of work, you do crystallize the earth into aphorisms and epigrams—I recollect you're as succinct as any of those classic French moralists politely murmuring somewhere behind y'all. Why sometimes you lot're faster than La Rochefoucauld himself (equally when you say, "It's from adolescents who concluding long enough that life makes its old men"). If I could admonish your new readers to watch out for those "moments of speed," equally it were, among the prolonged dimensions and the plethoric details, I think they would find the going a lot easier than they'd expected.

Only all I want to practise, for at present, is to make sure that in coming together your new readers you know what to wait of them, what you have to come to terms with—as I hope to tell them what to expect of you and what they have to come to terms with when they offset reading the Search.

Oh, there is one more thing yous ought to be aware of if you're going to face these new readers of yours with a modicum of good will. Even though you managed to include, with a really Tolstoyan ambition, such "modern" manifestations as the Nifty State of war, and airplanes, and telephones (wonderful what you did with them), for new American readers in the xx-kickoff century, the time y'all go along referring to as lost—in French lost ways "wasted" as well—is over and washed with, of no business relationship. And a search for the past, even one recent plenty to include automobiles and airplanes, is an unlikely, fifty-fifty an unlikeable enterprise. You lot see, we have a kind of allergy to the past; information technology's our national affliction, and the very assurance with which you insist that the by is within the present is likely to seem quite repellent, even offensive, to these new readers. I know you intend to be gentle with them—your ferocity is elsewhere—merely I feel I must warn you almost the reception you lot're likely to see when you release i of your zingers on the subject. I remember it will take the American readers of the xx-outset century a long frequentation of themselves also as of you to believe it when you say:

It's no employ trying to evoke our past, all the efforts of our intelligence are futile. The past lies hidden beyond the heed's realm and reach, in some material object (in the awareness that cloth object gives u.s.). And it depends entirely on adventure whether or non we encounter that object before we dice.

Finally, what your new readers will desire to know is Who'due south saying such a matter? Who tells it like it is? Who is the discoursing person? And these questions bring me to the other part of my project: introducing your new readers to you, Proust.

You'll notice, beloved new readers, that I haven't said, "introducing … Marcel Proust …," for I don't believe that (biographical) person speaks in the Search at all. You lot'll find that the discoursing person who is in fact the Narrator of the Search is hardly ever named, and if indeed he seems to exist chosen Marcel once or twice, it's extremely difficult to assign him the attributes of autobiography; he is the self who writes, and his relations with the cocky who votes and pays hire and has bad (or proficient) sexual practice are uncertain and in some sense displaced. Proust himself has explained this neatly when he insists that Sainte-Beuve, for example, "fails to realize that a book is the product of a different 'self' from the one we manifest in our habits, in gild, in our vices." In other words, it is futile to wonder if the Narrator of the Search is the Marcel Proust so many people remembered knowing afterwards the book was published, and even before; the Narrator is simply some other Proust, i quite ofttimes unrecognized by the author (in fact Marcel Proust couldn't recognize the Narrator, since this other Proust is created by what is written, not by the author'due south intention to write …).

For the Proust I desire to innovate is a new, an odd, a modern kind of Narrator (I'll endeavour to explain what I mean by modern in a piffling while), for if he does really narrate (rather than philosophize or write what are now called "personal essays"), the narrative he writes will not apprehend a life perceived in a linear grade of time, from year to year until the moment he decides to write "the story" down.

What is narrated is non the Narrator's life, but his desire to write. Time thwarts this desire, tends it toward a conventional chronology (which must be continually subverted, for what is only successive is surely lost: simply the circle can be retrouvé, a discussion that means non only regained but rediscovered, recognized, repossessed)—and how many challenges, discouragements, and rivalries must exist endured before the desire to write achieves an ultimate triumph (

this is the all-time reason to read directly through to the end of Le Temps retrouvé, where the Narrator arrives at the Guermantes's party and discovers what it is that he has to write (fourth dimension regained) and thereby realizes, indeed reassures himself, that he will be able to write, though as nosotros all similar to discover when we close the final volume, it is already written.

So the reader learns that what the Search contains is indeed the Narrator's life, but a life displaced, as I said. We've read a symbolic biography, or as one of Marcel Proust's early on biographers (by now there have been so many) calls it, "a symbolic story of Proust's life." In 1 of his prophetic letters Keats wrote: "A man's life of whatever worth is a continual Allegory," and Keats seemed quite certain, actually quite sanguine, nearly the legibility of the allegory—it was plain and pleasing to such a poet. Just Proust's favorite poet, Charles Baudelaire, had been more than hundred-to-one, more pessimistic, in fact more tragic about reading the sense of the apologue out of the given life-feel:

… as if in a shroud,

my centre lay buried in this allegory:

On Aphrodite's island all I found

was a token gallows where my prototype hung …

Lord give me strength and courage to behold

my body and my heart without disgust!

Of course Proust had the backbone to behold anything in his or anyone else'south body and its behaviors, merely he was not and so sure near what forcefulness would be given him, or what strength remained of what had been given, and indeed in terms of his wellness information technology was a narrow squeak: Proust's textual revisions recovered in the last twenty-v years take shown us how much was left to do, how much could not quite be washed.

There is a whole other poetic drama (maker'southward drama) in the recently published notebooks, the variant readings, the canceled (but plausible) versions: Marcel Proust's wavering agon most where to identify this humiliation, that death, the other sudden revelation (for instance the discovery that the ii "ways" are the same). Indeed whole sections were wrested from what in linear terms would be their "right place" in social club to serve the design, to fulfill the allegory; and Proust scholarship for the next twenty-5 years will be instructing our inner graduate student as to what some of the decisions (and the indecisions) had been and what they became, more than or less, finally. Certainly the requirements—the logic—of the allegory allowed, actually compelled, Proust to erase the differences, the contradictions between the novel and the discourse (as Descartes would have it), the treatise (as Spinoza), the essay (as Montaigne)….

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