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In Search of Lost Time: An Overview
Writing about À la recherche du temps perdu, one is obliged to acknowledge those things that one commonly reads about in the vast Proust criticism, as well as in the Internet sites devoted to Proust and his novel, sites that have been mounted by an enormous number of Proustophiles.3
These discussions include topics such as length (of course), breadth of time, the famous petite madeleine incident, the cast of characters, Proust's work habits (his cork-lined bedroom, reclusiveness, and revisions and extensive rewritings of page proofs) during the last years of his life, his illnesses and sickliness, the shortness of his originally planned three volumes of approximately 500,000 words and the length of the final version of seven volumes and approximately 1.25 million words, and finally the fact that Proust died before the last three volumes–published posthumously–could benefit from his inveterate habit of revising his text.
Commenting on the length of the novel, as well as the length of individual sentences, Alain de Botton writes,
Whatever the merits of Proust's work, even a fervent admirer would be hard pressed to deny one of its awkward features: length. As Proust's brother, Robert, put it, "The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have broken a leg in order to have the opportunity to read In Search of Lost Time."
And as they lie in bed with their limb newly encased in plaster or a tubercle bacillus diagnosed in their lungs, they face another challenge in the length of individual Proustian sentences, snakelike construction, the very longest of which, located in the fifth volume, would, if arranged along a single line in standard-sized text, run on for a little short of four meters and stretch around the around the base of a bottle of wine seventeen times.4
Lydia Davis, the translator of Swann's Way in the Penguin Proust, also writes about the length of Proust's sentences:
Proust felt, however, that a long sentence contained a whole, complex thought, a thought that should not be fragmented or broken. The shape of the sentence was the shape of the thought, and every word was necessary to the thought: "I really have to weave these long silks as I spin them," he said. "If I shortened my sentences, it would make little pieces of sentences, not sentences." He wished to "encircle the truth with a single–even if long and sinuous–stroke. "5
By summarizing "A Guide to Proust" by Terence Kilmartin (revised by Joanna Kilmartin) that is appended to the Modern Library edition, I hope to supply a sense of the enormity of the novel as well as its complexity. The Kilmartins, who acknowledge their debt to P. A. Spalding's Reader's Handbook to Proust and to the detailed index to the 1954 Pleiade edition of À la recherche du temps perdu, write in their foreword that it is
intended as a guide through the 4,300-page labyrinth of In Search of Lost Time not only for readers who are embarking on Proust's masterpiece for the first time but for those too who, already under way, find themselves daunted or bewildered by the profusion of characters, themes and allusions.
It also aims to provide those who have completed the journey with the means of refreshing their memories, tracking down a character or an incident, tracing a recurrent theme or favourite passage, or identifying a literary or historical reference. Perhaps, too, the book may serve as a sort of Proustian anthology or bedside companion.6
The "Guide" is presented in four indexes to include characters, persons (historical), places, and themes; each entry is keyed to the Modern Library volume and page number. In order to provide a quick overview of the almost overwhelming length and complexity of the novel, I reduced the guide to the following quantitative summary.
The guide itself covers 205 pages appended to the 4,363 pages of text and includes 360 characters, 682 persons, 152 places, and 73 themes. Of the 360 characters, I have adjudged 22 as principal.7 Other readers designate many more characters as principal.8 In general, persons included may be generally categorized as artists, hereditary aristocrats, military persons, musicians, philosophers, politicians, and writers.
Representative samples of these include: Vermeer, Rembrandt, Botticelli, and Whistler among the artists;9 Louis XIV, as well as Louis VI, XI, XIII, XV, XVI, XVII, and XVIII, among hereditary aristocrats; Dreyfuss and Foch among the military men; Wagner, Debussy, Bach, and Beethoven among the musicians; Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Bergson, and Pascal among the philosophers; Napoleon Bonaparte, Bismarck, and William II (Kaiser) among the politician-statesmen; and Homer, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, and Hugo among the writers.
Places include both fictional (Combray) and geographical (Paris and Venice) locations. Themes are as diverse as Aeroplanes and Railways, Flowers and Food, Inversion (homosexuality) and Marriage, Memory and Time, Literature and Music, and Habit and Belief.
