Swann's Way
Place on List:
II. Literary Genre: The
Novel
2.
How does a novel represent the individual's internal struggle?
Marcel
Proust. *Swann's
Way.
(1913, France)
Supporting References:
- The Modernism Lab at Yale
- Birch, Dinah. "À la recherche du temps perdu." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 27 Aug. 2013
“À la recherche
du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). A novel by Marcel
*Proust, published in seven volumes between
1913 and 1927: Du côté de chez Swann (1913: Swann's
Way), À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (1919:
Within a Budding Grove), Le Côté de Guermantes
(1920–1: The Guermantes Way), Sodome et Gomorrhe
(1921–2: Cities of the Plain), La Prisonnière
(1923: The Captive), Albertine disparue (1925: The
Sweet Cheat Gone), and Le Temps retrouvé (1927: Time
Regained). The novel's plot is circular: the narrator Marcel
tells the story of his own life, which culminates in his discovering
his artistic vocation, which leads him to write about his life in the
very book the reader has just been reading. The dominant tone of the
work is one of despair at the apparent irrecoverability of past
experience and regret at the vanity of all human endeavour seen in
the perspective of the destructive power of time. The search
proclaimed in the novel's title is, however, vindicated by the
narrator's discovery that the past is, in fact, eternally alive in
the unconscious, and that it may be rescued from oblivion, either
through the chance operation of sensory perception (the power of
‘involuntary’ memory) or through the agency of the work of art.
But if the novel is fundamentally an account of an artistic vocation,
it also offers a sustained analysis of a wide range of other
subjects: the psychology of family relationships and of sexual
relations, both homosexual and heterosexual; the fluidity that
characterizes contemporary French society; and the aesthetics of the
novel, music, and painting (Virigina
*Woolf famously observed that if major
Impressionist paintings were destroyed, they could be reconstructed
from the descriptions in À la recherche). A definitive
scholarly edition of the French text was published in the Pléiade
series in 1987–9, ed. Jean‐Yves Tadié. Remembrance of Things
Past (1922–30), C. K. Scott Moncrieff's English translation of
the first six volumes of Proust's novel was supplemented in 1970 by
Andreas Mayor's translation of the final volume (Time Regained),
and has since been revised by Terence Kilmartin (1981) and D.
J. *Enright (1992). A new translation was
published in 2003, edited by Christopher Prendergast.”
- "Proust, Marcel." The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Eds. Drabble, Margaret, Jenny Stringer, and Daniel Hahn. : Oxford University Press, 2007. Oxford Reference. 2007. Date Accessed 16 Aug. 2013
The article offers
an overview of Proust and less a discussion on the above-cited
text.
“(1871–1922) French novelist,
essayist, and critic, author of À la recherche du temps perdu
(1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past, 1922–31). In the
1890s Proust moved in the most fashionable Parisian circles, but
later became a virtual recluse, dedicating himself to the completion
of À la recherche. Published in sections, À la
recherche is of circular construction: it ends with the narrator
Marcel's discovery of his artistic vocation, a discovery which will
lead him to the writing of the book the reader has just experienced.
The narrator's progress is characterized by a sustained analysis of a
wide range of subjects: the psychology of family relationships and of
sexual relations, both homosexual and heterosexual, the aesthetics of
the novel, of music, and of painting, and the fluidity of
contemporary French society. His other works include Les Plaisirs
et les jours (1896; Pleasures and Regrets, 1948;
essays, poems, and stories); an early version of À la recherche
published posthumously as Jean Santeuil (1952; English
trans., 1955); and Pastiches et mélanges (1919), a
collection of literary parodies. Around 1899 he discovered Ruskin's
art criticism, and subsequently translated Ruskin's The Bible of
Amiens and Sesame and Lilies into French. Proust
explored his own literary aesthetic in Contre Sainte‐Beuve
(1954; By Way of Sainte‐Beuve, 1958), where he defines the
artist's task as the releasing of the creative energies of past
experience from the hidden store of the unconscious, an aesthetic
which found its most developed literary expression in À la
recherche.”
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