You’ll notice, dear 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’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 be called 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 self who votes and pays rent and has bad (or good) sex 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 society, 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 after the book was published, and even before; the Narrator is simply another Proust, one quite frequently 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’s intention to write …).
For the Proust I want to introduce is a new, an odd, a modern kind of Narrator (I’ll try to explain what I mean by modern in a little 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 course of time, from year to year until the moment he decides to write “the story” down.
What is narrated is not 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 merely successive is surely lost: only the circle can be retrouvé, a word that means not only regained but rediscovered, recognized, repossessed)—and how many challenges, discouragements, and rivalries must be endured before the desire to write achieves an ultimate triumph (this is the best reason to read straight 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 (time regained) and thereby realizes, indeed reassures himself, that he will be able to write, though as we all like to discover when we close the last 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 biographers (by now there have been so many) calls it, “a symbolic story of Proust’s life.” In one of his prophetic letters Keats wrote: “A man’s life of any worth is a continual Allegory,” and Keats seemed quite certain, actually quite sanguine, about the legibility of the allegory—it was plain and pleasing to such a poet. But Proust’s favorite poet, Charles Baudelaire, had been more doubtful, more pessimistic, in fact more tragic about reading the sense of the allegory out of the given life-experience:
as if in a shroud,
my heart lay buried in this allegory:
On Aphrodite’s island all I found
was a token gallows where my image hung …
Lord give me strength and courage to behold
my body and my heart without disgust!
Of course Proust had the courage to behold anything in his or anyone else’s body and its behaviors, but he was not so sure about what strength would be given him, or what strength remained of what had been given, and indeed in terms of his health it was a narrow squeak: Proust’s textual revisions recovered in the last twenty-five years have shown us how much was left to do, how much could not quite be done.
There is a whole other poetic drama (maker’s drama) in the recently published notebooks, the variant readings, the canceled (but plausible) versions: Marcel Proust’s wavering agon about where to place this humiliation, that death, the other sudden revelation (for instance the discovery that the two “ways” are the same). Indeed whole sections were wrested from what in linear terms would be their “right place” in order to serve the design, to fulfill the allegory; and Proust scholarship for the next twenty-five 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 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)….
This recognition brings us to the figure of Proust as a modern writer, which any introduction to the twentieth century’s greatest novelist must engage. Must, because Proust was twenty-nine when he entered that century in which he lived only twenty-two years; indeed he was thirty-five and had already written several unsuccessful versions of the Search before 1907. (Tolstoy was thirty when he completed his great autobiographical allegory Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth and began his career as a novelist.) We call Tolstoy the great(est?) novelist of the nineteenth century, though he lived a decade into the twentieth, and though the “essays” that finish off War and Peace (written the year Proust was born) seem obstructively “modern” on our first reading of that novel. Still, we do not regard Tolstoy as a “modern” novelist.
Yet Proust, who is as insistent about the “realism” of the world of the Search as anything in Anna Karenina, as inclusive about its “naturalism” as everything in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, is inveterately coupled or tripled—by Nabokov, for example—with Joyce and Biely and Kafka as indefectibly modern. I believe this is precisely because of the nature of that Narrator and his strangely absent presence, if I may put it that way. Proust’s every gigantic effort is to subtract his “empty” Narrator’s discovery (and possession) of time regained from what Gaston Bachelard calls the “false permanence” of biography. That is what pushes this enormous novel over the edge (the edge of encyclopedic allusion, of social chronicle, of literary emulation, of symbolist dithering, and of speculations concerning love, art, death, and time) into that enormous structure (abyss?) of repudiations which is our modernity.
This matter of locating Proust in such modernity is the most vexed question with which you must contend. For Proust is a writer between two centuries, between two aesthetic postulations (the “realism” of Balzac, Flaubert, Goncourt, etc., and the “symbolism” of Baudelaire, Huysmans, Mallarmé, etc., or, as Antoine Compagnon, the best critic of Proust-between-centuries, puts it, between etymology and allegory. Proust can be perceived as epitomizing the past achievements, but he can also be characterized as inaugurating new ones. His suspension between the fictional obligations of nineteenth-century masterpieces and those of twentieth-century “experiments” makes it difficult for his new readers to be comfortably aware of what he is doing; he seems on the one hand to be violating the laws (or at least the conventions) of an achieved program, and on the other hand to be regressing from explorations and discoveries into the tried-and-true (or at least the old reliable) methods of a familiar agenda.
I believe my introducing you to each other will be more convincing if I offer this notion of repudiations, of negativities, as the essential modernism of this great writer, for in the making of his gospel-novel, his fiction-as-evangel, Proust rejects, one after the other, precisely those realms of experience that have heretofore always constituted the claims of human success: the triumphs of worldliness, of friendship, and of love (all of which Proust declares to be failures, in fact disasters). It is only art, or rather the mediations to be found in art, that Proust urges as the means of regaining time, of recovering what is otherwise and always lost.
That is why he elevates to a special eminence in the Search four characters—Elstir, Vinteuil, Bergotte, and Berma: painter, composer, writer, and actress—artists whose creations point the way to redemption for the empty fifth character, the Narrator, who in several thousand pages reveals so few hints about his physical appearance that it is impossible to imagine what sort of man he is. He is frail and suffers from asthma and insomnia, we know th
at much, but all his other energies and perceptions are directed, under the pressure of the most exhaustive observation, to the acknowledgment that the human enterprise—in society, in friendship, and in love—is a failure, the source of exhaustion, ruin, and despair.
The other thirty-five? forty? fifty? characters who accompany us through the Search like so many grand and grotesque catastrophes—even Charlus, even the Duchess of Guermantes, even the Narrator’s grandmother whose name we never learn—are relegated to tragedy or to farce with the same dismissive gesture by which Wotan repudiates Hunding in Die Walküre after he has killed Siegmund: with a wave of his hand, the god casts out the mortal who has served his pathetic turn: Geh’!. Geh’!
Only the artist, or rather only what the artist creates, is triumphant, is exemplary, is enduring, is successful. And only such makings can persuade the Narrator to undertake one of his own, a persuasion in which—for three thousand pages or so—we must collude. His language (Proust’s language, of course) surrounds us, penetrates us, so that these makings are not only the Narrator’s redemptive moments but our own.
—
It is my fervent hope that by introducing, with some charity, you new readers to Proust, and by introducing, with an equivalent charity, Proust to his new readers, the parties may proceed some way together. To the emblematic fulfillment of this hope I am somewhat encouraged by the new street signs of Paris boulevards, which, as if they sought to celebrate the Proustian sagesse that asserts “we are like giants plunged in time,” flash a message picked out in little red lights (for danger? for delectation?) to those seeking safe passage to the median strip between opposing directions of traffic, a haven that must be attained before reaching the seemingly inaccessible other side: traversez en deux temps, the red lights direct us, cross over time and time again.
—
RICHARD HOWARD is a poet and translator. He teaches literature in the Writing Division of Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION
(1981)
Terence Kilmartin
C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s version of À la recherche du temps perdu has in the past fifty years earned a reputation as one of the great English translations, almost as a masterpiece in its own right. Why then should it need revision? Why tamper with a work that has been enjoyed and admired, not to say revered, by several generations of readers throughout the English-speaking world?
The answer is that the original French edition from which Scott Moncrieff worked (the “abominable” edition of the Nouvelle Revue Française, as Samuel Beckett described it in a marvellous short study of Proust which he published in 1931) was notoriously imperfect. This was not so much the fault of the publishers and printers as of Proust’s methods of composition. Only the first volume (Du côté de chez Swann) of the novel as originally conceived—and indeed written—was published before the 1914–1918 war. The second volume was set up in type, but publication was delayed, and moreover by that time Proust had already begun to reconsider the scale of the novel; the remaining eight years of his life (1914–1922) were spent in expanding it from its original 500,000 words to more than a million and a quarter. The margins of proofs and typescripts were covered with scribbled corrections and insertions, often overflowing on to additional sheets which were glued to the galleys or to one another to form interminable strips—what Françoise in the novel calls the narrator’s “paperoles.” The unravelling and deciphering of these copious additions cannot have been an enviable task for editors and printers.
Furthermore, the last three sections of the novel (La prisonnière, La fugitive—originally called Albertine disparue—and Le temps retrouvé) had not yet been published at the time of Proust’s death in November 1922 (he was still correcting a typed copy of La prisonnière on his deathbed). Here the original editors had to take it upon themselves to prepare a coherent text from a manuscript littered with sometimes hasty corrections, revisions and afterthoughts and leaving a number of unresolved contradictions, obscurities and chronological inconsistencies. As a result of all this the original editions—even of the volumes published in Proust’s lifetime—pullulate with errors, misreadings and omissions.
In 1954 a revised three-volume edition of À la recherche was published in Gallimard’s Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. The editors, M. Pierre Clarac and M. André Ferré, had been charged by Proust’s heirs with the task of “establishing a text of his novel as faithful as possible to his intentions.” With infinite care and patience they examined all the relevant material—manuscripts, notebooks, typescripts, proofs, as well as the original edition—and produced what is generally agreed to be a virtually impeccable transcription of Proust’s text. They scrupulously avoided the arbitrary emendations, the touchings-up, the wholesale reshufflings of paragraphs in which the original editors indulged, confining themselves to clarifying the text wherever necessary, correcting errors due to haste or inadvertence, eliminating careless repetitions and rationalising the punctuation (an area where Proust was notoriously casual). They justify and explain their editorial decisions in detailed critical notes, occupying some 200 pages over the three volumes, and print all the significant variants as well as a number of passages that Proust did not have time to work into his book.
The Pléiade text differs from that of the original edition, mostly in minor though none the less significant ways, throughout the novel. In the last three sections (the third Pléiade volume) the differences are sometimes considerable. In particular, MM. Clarac and Ferré have included a number of passages, sometimes of a paragraph or two, sometimes of several pages, which the original editors omitted for no good reason.
The present translation is a reworking, on the basis of the Pléiade edition, of Scott Moncrieff’s version of the first six sections of À la recherche—or the first eleven volumes of the twelve-volume English edition. A post-Pléiade version of the final volume, Le temps retrouvé (originally translated by Stephen Hudson after Scott Moncrieff’s death in 1930), was produced by the late Andreas Mayor and published in 1970; with some minor emendations, it is incorporated in this edition. There being no indication in Proust’s manuscript as to where La fugitive should end and Le temps retrouvé begin, I have followed the Pléiade editors in introducing the break some pages earlier than in the previous editions, both French and English—at the beginning of the account of the Tansonville episode.
The need to revise the existing translation in the light of the Pléiade edition has also provided an opportunity of correcting mistakes and misinterpretations in Scott Moncrieff’s version. Translation, almost by definition, is imperfect; there is always “room for improvement,” and it is only too easy for the latecomer to assume the beau rôle. I have refrained from officious tinkering for its own sake, but a translator’s loyalty is to the original author, and in trying to be faithful to Proust’s meaning and tone of voice I have been obliged, here and there, to make extensive alterations.
A general criticism that might be levelled against Scott Moncrieff is that his prose tends to the purple and the precious—or that this is how he interpreted the tone of the original: whereas the truth is that, complicated, dense, overloaded though it often is, Proust’s style is essentially natural and unaffected, quite free of preciosity, archaism or self-conscious elegance. Another pervasive weakness of Scott Moncrieff’s is perhaps the defect of a virtue. Contrary to a widely held view, he stuck very closely to the original (he is seldom guilty of short-cuts, omissions or loose paraphrases), and in his efforts to reproduce the structure of those elaborate sentences with their spiralling subordinate clauses, not only does he sometimes lose the thread but he wrenches his syntax into oddly unEnglish shapes: a whiff of Gallicism clings to some of the longer periods, obscuring the sense and falsifying the tone. A corollary to this is a tendency to translate French idioms and turns of phrase literally, thus making them sound weirder, more outlandish, than they would to a French reader. In endeavouring to rectify these weaknesses, I ho
pe I have preserved the undoubted felicity of much of Scott Moncrieff while doing the fullest possible justice to Proust.
I should like to thank Professor J. G. Weightman for his generous help and advice and Mr D. J. Enright for his patient and percipient editing.
A NOTE ON THE REVISED
TRANSLATION (1992)
D. J. Enright
Terence Kilmartin intended to make further changes to the translation as published in 1981 under the title Remembrance of Things Past. But, as Proust’s narrator observed while reflecting on the work he had yet to do, when the fortress of the body is besieged on all sides the mind must at length succumb. “It was precisely when the thought of death had become a matter of indifference to me that I was beginning once more to fear death … as a threat not to myself but to my book.”
C. K. Scott Moncrieff excelled in description, notably of landscape and architecture, but he was less adroit in translating dialogue of an informal, idiomatic nature. At ease with intellectual and artistic discourse and the finer feelings, and alert to sallies of humorous fantasy, he was not always comfortable with workaday matters and the less elevated aspects of human behaviour. It was left to Kilmartin to elucidate the significance of Albertine’s incomplete but alarming outburst—“… me faire casser …”—in The Captive, a passage Scott Moncrieff rendered totally incomprehensible, perhaps through squeamishness, perhaps through ignorance of low slang. Other misunderstandings of colloquialisms and failures to spot secondary meanings remained to be rectified. And some further intervention was prompted by Scott Moncrieff’s tendency to spell out things for the benefit of the English reader: an admirable intention (shared by Arthur Waley in his Tale of Genji), though the effect could be to clog Proust’s flow and make his drift harder to follow.
The present revision or re-revision has taken into account the second Pléiade edition of À la recherche du temps perdu, published in four volumes between 1987 and 1989 under the direction of Jean-Yves Tadié. This both adds, chiefly in the form of drafts and variants, and relocates material: not always helpfully from the viewpoint of the common (as distinct from specialist) reader, who may be surprised to encounter virtually the same passage in two different locations when there was doubt as to where Proust would finally have placed it. But the new edition clears up some long-standing misreadings: for example, in correcting Cambremer’s admiring “niece” in Time Regained to his “mother,” an identification which accords with a mention some thousand pages earlier in the novel.
The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle Page 2
