In Search of Lost Time Read Online Free Page A

is pre-eminently the
     literary mode of hypothesis, adventure and quest (the search of
     ‘
recherche
’). At one level, Proust’s
     novel recapitulates the shape of the classic European
Bildungsroman
, as the
     story of a questing hero making his way in the world. In these terms, it is a
     straight-line narrative describing a trajectory from childhood in Combray to middle
     age, culminating in that spectacle of observed decay and mortality in the
     ‘
bal des têtes
’ section of
Le temps
     retrouvé
. As such, it conforms to the traditional type as a story
     of discovery and initiation. But, along with its linear forwards movement,
A la
     recherche
is also a vast exercise in imaginative retrospection, on a scale
     not seen in European literature since Wordsworth’s
Prelude
and
     Goethe’s
Dichtung und Wahrheit
. The past constantly enters the
     present, in an interaction whereby each is made subject to a process of
     theoretically infinite revision. Moreover, not only does the novel look back as it
     thrusts forwards, it also moves sideways, in a complex set of lateral shifts and
     swerves, deploying a technique of digression so systematic as to empty the notion of
     ‘digression’ of its normal meanings. Much of Proust’s
     originality lies in these local disruptions to the linear form of narrative and is
     closely related to his text’s ability to deliver surprise and
     disturbance.
    Holding this expansive and unpredictable structure in one’s
     head isa taxing business. Proust is an acquired taste, acquired,
     that is, in the long-haul process of reading him page by page. Many is the reader
     who falls by the wayside, exhausted or exasperated after fifty pages or so of
     ‘Combray’, or who, like the narrator in the opening pages, falls
     asleep but, unlike him, never to wake up. This, for example, was more or less the
     experience of one of Proust’s first professional readers, Humblot, who
     read (and rejected) the manuscript of
Du côté de chez
     Swann
for the publishing house Ollendorff. In a letter to
     Proust’s brother Robert, he recorded his first impressions as follows:
     ‘My dear friend, perhaps I am dense but I just don’t understand
     why a man should take thirty pages to describe how he turns over in his bed before
     he goes to sleep. It made my head swim.’ It is easy to laugh at what, with
     the benefit of hindsight, we can see as Humblot’s colossal lack of
     judgement (no less a figure than André Gide also blundered, rejecting it
     for the
Nouvelle Revue Française
). We can all too easily forget
     what it must have been like to read Proust through the prism of expectations
     transmitted from the culture of the nineteenth-century novel. In the priority
     granted by these opening pages to the night-life of the mind, we find one of
     Proust’s many reversals of the hierarchies of traditional narrative.
     Proust takes us where hitherto the novel did not typically go, insisting that what
     is deemed insignificant by the latter may hold the key to the meaning of a life.
    Those who remain alert and persevere tend to end up addicted, hooked
     by the unimaginable gains of their perseverance, as, enthralled, they follow the
     rhythms of the mobile Proustian intelligence. It is an intelligence that corrodes
     the force of that seductive yet mortal enemy, Habit, jolting us out of comfortable
     sedentarities and taking us on a journey to strange places and points of no return.
     Thematically, this is enacted as the expulsion of the boy-hero from the paradise of
     childhood into the perplexing and often perverse world of adult social and sexual
     relations. In the most famous aphorism of
A la recherche
Proust issues his
     tonic warning against false nostalgias: ‘all paradises are lost
     paradises’, that is, they are definitively lost, with no way back, no
     possible homecoming. This is a thought which