In Search of Lost Time Read Online Free

effect that seems worth preserving. Proust is a
     wonderful mimic of different speech styles but philosophically he consistently
     devalues dialogue, the social arts of conversational exchange (what he calls
     ‘
causerie
’), as worthless alongside the abundance
     of the interior life. In any case, whatever itspractical or
     literary motivations, we have reproduced Proust’s varying use of the
     ventilated and the embedded. We have also retained his practice of punctuating
     embedded dialogue, normally with quotation marks opening and closing a given
     sequence, the transition from one speaker to another within the sequence effected by
     the use of the dash (or ‘
tiret
’). This too can make for
     a degree of confusion as to the identities of speakers, but, since – at
     least in its embedded form – it is hardly less alien to a French reader
     than it is to an English one, we have resisted Kilmartin’s importation of
     quotation marks for each instance of separate speech within a sequence. There seems
     to be no good reason for making English Proust more
     ‘reader-friendly’ than French Proust.
    If these are some of the issues on which, in the interests of
     consistency, editorial intervention has been necessary to cut the Gordian knot of
     passionately held differences of philosophical outlook, there are other areas in
     which the intrinsically heterogeneous nature of a team-translation has been allowed
     to express itself more freely. While it makes sense to speak of a distinctively
     Proustian ‘tone’, it is a mistake to think of
A la
     recherche
as governed by a single homogeneous style. The intellectual
     bedrock of
A la recherche
is a commitment to the mobile and the multiple,
     starting with the ‘I’ which articulates this commitment over and
     over again. The self and the world in Proust are not self-identical either through
     time or at any one moment in time; they are systematically disaggregated into a
     plurality of selves and worlds. And this grand Proustian theme is mirrored in and
     enacted by Proust’s language, both at the macro-level of the novel as a
     whole and at the micro-level of the individual sentence. It is also reflected in the
     shifting array of modes and registers across the individual volumes, from, say,
     Proust’s version of the bucolic (in
A l’ombre des jeunes
     filles en fleurs
) to his version of the apocalyptic (in
Sodome et
     Gomorrhe
). One of the benefits of the division of labour entailed by a
     collective translation is that it arguably heightens the chances of bringing into
     focus the stylistic variety we encounter as we move from one volume to the next. A
     single translator, however flexible, is more likely to be constrained by the
     conscious or unconscious operation of a particular
parti pris
.
    Multiple selves, multiple worlds, multiple styles:
     this, paradoxically, is the quintessence of Proust. His narrator-hero has been aptly
     described (in witty counter-allusion to the title of Musil’s novel
A
     Man Without Qualities
) as ‘a man with too many
     qualities’. Inquisitive, naive, kind, lazy, anxious, cruel, irresolute,
     self-deceiving, jealous, indifferent, he comes to us, along with Joyce’s
     Bloom, Eliot’s Prufrock, Pound’s Mauberly and Kafka’s
     Joseph K, as a modern everyman, but with one unusual quality: his possession of a
     scintillatingly restless intelligence. This is not to be confused with the Proust of
     the maxim, which has led some to think of
A la recherche
as a source-book
     for the good and wise life. The form of the intelligence that matters here is
     speculative rather than apodictic, geared to the energies of hypothetical inquiry.
     No sentence-type is more typically Proustian than the spiralling structure which
     contains half a dozen possible answers to a simple question. This is why the
     intelligence is peculiarly suited to fiction. The novel