In Search of Lost Time Read Online Free Page B

Proust’s book lives to the
     full and in doing so it becomes more than just a thought. It also implicates a
     practice of writing, in so far as it defines a position ofincurable exile not only for the hero of the narrative but also for the artist
     (both the artist that the hero will become and the artist Marcel Proust):
     ‘the artist’, remarks the narrator, ‘is a native of an
     unknown country.’ Proust also once claimed, in
Contre
     Sainte-Beuve
, that the writer inhabits his native tongue as if it too were
     a foreign country. Since there is an important paradox in Proust making this claim
     about the mother-tongue in the mother-tongue, the remark needs to be quoted in the
     original French: ‘
Les beaux livres sont écrits dans une sorte
     de langue étrangère
’ (‘Beautiful
     books are written in a kind of foreign language’). In respect of Proust,
     this might seem an odd notion, given that his language is inseparable from what
     Walter Benjamin called his ‘intransigent French spirit’. It is a
     language drenched in reminiscence of the history of French prose from the
     seventeenth-century
moralistes
through the Romantics to the late
     nineteenth-century Symbolists, disclosing a form of linguistic and cultural
     at-homeness that can also be felt in Proust’s unrivalled genius for
     literary pastiche.
    What, then, could it have meant for Proust to represent writing in
     French as writing in a foreign language, and what in turn might this mean for a
     reader encountering Proust
in
a foreign language, in translation (bearing
     in mind also the narrator’s observation in
Le Temps
     retrouvé
that ‘the function and task of a writer are
     those of a translator’)? One of the things this might mean or entail is
     attending to the sheer strangeness of
A la recherche
, the sense of a text
     coming to us from a great distance. While emphatically this-worldly in its
     insatiable curiosity about the desires, appetites and motives of mankind, it is also
     powerfully other-worldly. This is to be understood not so much in terms of the
     received image of Proust’s world as offering us a pseudo-metaphysics of
     redemption, but rather as the embodiment of a twentieth-century secular
misericordia
mixing the grief-laden over things irretrievably lost and
     the stoically detached before what is doomed to decay and death. Of the many voices
     that compose the Proustian fugue, one is distinctly sepulchral, generating the
     impression of
A la recherche
as a kind of latter-day
Mémoires
     d’outre-tombe
, written from somewhere beyond the grave.
     Proust’s way of making-it-strange derives in large measure from looking at
     the ghostly dance and listening to the spectral concert of the human world as if
     from a very long wayoff. This perhaps is the privileged place
     where, in the strangeness of translation, in the no-man’s land between
     host and guest languages, we might most productively meet and negotiate his
     extraordinary novel.
    Christopher Prendergast
    Translator’s Introduction
    Many moments in Marcel Proust’s
Du
     côté de chez Swann
are by now so well known that they
     occupy a permanent place in our literary culture. Scenes and episodes are familiar
     even if one has not actually read the book: say ‘Proust’ and one
     will think ‘madeleine’ and ‘tea’ as often as
     ‘cork-lined room’. Yet we find, when at last we confront it, not
     only that its fame is justly deserved, but that our experience of it is entirely
     individual. We will have our own way of visualizing the narrator’s bedtime
     scene with his mother; his visits to his hypochondriac aunt; his teasing of the old
     servant Françoise; his embrace of the hawthorns; his vision of the three
     steeples and his first piece of serious writing. We will have our own associations
     with Swann’s agonizing love affair with