Davis’ relationship to Proust's In Search of Lost Time is the most complex of her relationships with texts she has translated. Davis's move towards a more literal, source-oriented form of translation, which began with Blanchot and was developed in her translation of Leiris, continues with her translation of Proust. She has stated how her ‘aim in [this] translation was to stay as close as possible to Proust's original in every way, even to match his style as nearly as [she] could’ (Davis 2002a: xxxi). This approach allowed Davis to focus on Proust's word choice and syntax, which is mirrored by her own careful selection of words in her translation as well as in her own stories.

Davis has discussed Proust's influence on her writing of The End of the Story (Knight 1999: 529). Given that her translation of The Way by Swann's was published later in her career, the process of translating Proust is not a determining feature of that influence. On the other hand, Davis’ reading of Proust was influenced by C. K. Scott Moncrieff's earlier translation (Proust 1960). She describes Proust as ‘going deeply into the impression that a thing made on him as a child or as an adult, exploring the nuances of the effect of an experience on the narrator’ (Knight 1999: 529). This is a process that can also be seen in Davis’ The End of the Story, which explores the narrator's relationship with an unnamed man and its aftermath. The End of the Story contains several intertextual references to In Search of Lost Time which position it as a Proustian novel. As this chapter shows, similarities of form and technique also make Proust a precursor for Davis: The End of the Story begs to be read within a tradition that stems from Proust. But, I will argue, Davis subverts the teleological goal of Proust's novel in her own, writing a narrative that has no goal to reach other than its own telling.

The End of the Story could be considered to rewrite elements of Proust's novel. This is not the only rewriting of Proust that takes place in Davis’ work, however, as her translation of The Way by Swann's can also be considered a form of rewriting.

Chapter 2 looks at Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu in the context of the Belle Époque as an age characterised by the disintegration of existing hierarchies, norms, and conventions. I start out by considering the novel’s long-lost earliest drafts, Les Soixante-quinze feuillets, to then focus on close readings of a series of encounters between Marcel, Charlus, Albertine, and Andrée. Tact, Proust’s novel suggests, can be interpreted as an egalitarian force, indicating an equilibrium between the people involved. At the same time, it can also be seen as a creator of power imbalance, and a marker of social distinction. This conflict gives rise to a number of questions: Is tact a moral or an amoral category? Where do we draw the line between tact, hypocrisy, and lying? How do we deal with the uncertainty of interpretation as it begins to turn into one of the narrator’s most tantalizing concerns? Drawing on a variety of different theorists of tact (incl. Kant, Schopenhauer, Simmel, Sartre, Gadamer, Hall, Bourdieu, Goffman, Luhmann), I describe Proust’s tact as a paradoxical category that oscillates between autonomy and control, classification and declassification.

PROUST, BERNARD LAZARE, AND THE POLITICS OF PARIAHDOM

At the close of Proust’s A La recherche, Marcel reflects on his late discovery that there is within him a ‘vast dimension’ of lost time, composed of moments that ‘still adhered to me and that I could still find again, merely by descending to a greater depth within myself’. The vehicle through which he is to achieve that descent, he thinks to himself, is the novel itself, the novel he is now to write.

A la recherche is, for this reason, a novel which demands to be reread, a novel which reveals the structural necessity of rereading that inhabits all acts of being in time. This essay responds to this demand, and this necessity, by reading Proust’s novel as an exercise in rereading. The epiphanic close to the novel rests on the conviction that there will come a form of writing, and a form of reading, that might absorb lost time into itself, and in so doing stage a recovery of a spent past, and of a spent life. But in calling in this way for its own repetition, the novel can only live, again, through the loss that it seeks to overcome. This inescapable play between recovery and loss, though, does not constitute a failure of the hope that the novel seems, on each reading, to rediscover. Rather, in inserting a logic of rereading into its own expressive mechanism, the novel becomes a scale for weighing those elements of time that are recoverable against those that are not. It allows us to see the novel as a differential machine, that can find the junction, in the contemporary moment of reading, between that which can be saved and that which cannot – the junction that is the horizon, in our own time, of literary, political and personal possibility.

As we turn the page from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, the literary reputation of Marcel Proust is clearly on the rise. Not only does he continue to be considered a primary figure in European Modernism occupying the same rarefied aesthetic atmosphere as James Joyce, Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann, but increasingly, within the field of French Studies, he is being singled out as the twentieth-century writer, or even, the French writer of all time. Thus Jean-Yves Tadié, the author of the most comprehensive biographical study on Proust to date and also the general editor of the 1987–9 Pléiade edition of A la recherche du temps perdu, does not hesitate to assert:

‘Impossible to make head or tale of it!’ commented Jacques Normand (Madeleine was a fortuitous pseudonym), one of Proust's first critics, in the reader's report that led to the rejection of an early version of Swann's Way by the publishing house Fasquelle in 1912. Despite serious misgivings, Normand concluded his report remarking that ‘it is impossible not to see here an extraordinary intellectual phenomenon’. And this phenomenon has attracted a staggering volume of critical responses (many more positive than Normand's) ever since. In 1992, Antoine Compagnon, in his informative overview of Proust's work and its fate through the years in France and abroad, published in Pierre Nora's Les Lieux de mémoire [Realms of Memory], estimated there to be ‘certainly more than two thousand’ books on Proust and his work. Recent bibliographical data show that over 1,200 further books, articles and essays on Proust and his work were published between 2004 and 2008. The ever-growing secondary literature on Proust dwarfs the works on Montaigne, Balzac or Sartre. So where does a beginner begin?

Getting started

There are several useful reference works we can lean on while reading Proust's novel. Terence Kilmartin's A Guide to Proust (1983), now published together with Time Regained in the Vintage edition of the novel, offers indexes of fictional characters; historical persons; places; and, usefully, themes, all with brief descriptions and fully cross-referenced. This makes tracking down particular passages easier and reminds flagging memories of relations and connections that may have grown fuzzy over time.

Woolf’s work took a new direction after 1922, the year in which she began to read À la recherche du temps perdu. Proust helped to shape the emphasis on feeling that is so problematic in her early work into a prose whose aim was to transform feeling into the language of spiritual apprehension. Her reading notes, “The Hours” manuscript, and her diaries reveal that several of the questions that she put to herself as she worked were in fact loose translations of particular passages in the Recherche where Proust engaged questions of memory and language. She responded, for instance, to Proust’s idea that the adjacent world of sleep focuses attention on the moment of awakening, when the sleeper leaves the place of dreams for the language of the waking world. Woolf read Proust largely in the translation of C. K. Scott Moncrieff, who simplified Proust’s extensive vocabulary of words for mental functions, by reducing it to conscious and unconscious. Although his translation conveniently brought the novel into territory familiar to English readers of Freud, his mistranslations resulted in Woolf’s preference for the Proustian image of the unconscious as the source, not of error and struggle as in Freud’s work, but of the artist’s unique access to the underwater world of the mind.

Although Woolf’s notes on the Recherche cover only the first two books, Swann’s Way and Guermantes, she and Vita Sackville-West read Sodome et Gomorrhe together. At the point where Woolf’s response to particular passages is less demonstrable at the level of language, the presence of Proust in her theory of writing may better be understood in terms of translation as interpretation. Woolf shared with Proust a sense of the unseen world that lies behind the seen, which is sometimes the world of the dead, and sometimes the hidden world of sexual preferences and behaviors that the narrator is forbidden to avow. The sign that represents a world so divided creates a text designed to accommodate historical controversies and contradictions, and is necessarily contingent. Scenes of translation in Orlando seize the occasion when a term that is undergoing redefinition becomes untranslatable, as a means to undermine the sign. As in the Recherche the naked female body prompts a scene of awakening that questions the language of sexual identity, while the text relegates gender to the arcane vocabularies of law and grammar. The final pages of Woolf’s novel rewrite the relationship of the translator to a dual readership in order to mediate the contradictions created by the untranslatable word.

There is what might be called a Proustian moment in Chapter 7 of Jacob's Room (1922), but it is not really a Proustian moment, more a travesty of one. An image on which the famous madeleine episode depends is dismissed as a faddish distraction for dinner parties. Here is Proust:

In describing how the whole of the Combray of the narrator's childhood emerges from a cup of tea, Proust deploys a conceit whose success depends on a flirtation with the bathetic and grotesque. Disproportion and the possibility of comic deflation are never far away when Proust is in this mood, especially in metaphors of transformation and creation. After writing his first prose poem about the steeples of Martinville the young Marcel clucks like a hen who has laid an egg, the work as a whole is compared to a “boeufen daube” and to a dress as well as to a cathedral, and time, in the final sentence of Le Temps Retrouvé, has us teetering on the stilts of the years. Stiltedness is courted frequently, deliberately, in both the overarticulated syntax and overelaborated imagery of Proust's metaphorical flights.

Woolf's invocation of the paper flowers is sardonic, even a little condescending, the elaborated lyricism of Proust undone by briskness:

Few authors foreground the arts quite so comprehensively as Proust; certainly, none made them so central to their own literary production. Proust's whole life was saturated with love of the arts, and so too was to be his great novel: probably no other work of literature celebrates the arts as totally as his, or is so convincing in this pursuit. If one could point to, say, Joyce or Thomas Mann as examples of writers who display a keen awareness of the literary possibilities of incorporating the arts into the fabric of their own work, even their efforts seem small when compared to Proust's.

We are fortunate in possessing a clear picture of Proust’s artistic tastes in his youth, and as he grew up. Two general questionnaires which he filled in have survived (CSB, pp.335–7), and the entries for the arts make fascinating reading: if, at the age of about fourteen, there is a predictable juvenility about some of his choices (George Sand, the historian Augustin Thierry, Musset, Meissonnier, Mozart, Gounod), there are already signs of the maturity which was to be expressed, fully-fledged, in the questionnaire completed at the age of 21. Here, the list acquires more substance: Anatole France, Pierre Loti, Baudelaire, Vigny, Beethoven, Wagner, Schumann, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt. And, as if to underscore the import of his choices, at the top of the questionnaire Proust has written ‘Marcel Proust par lui-même’ [‘Marcel Proust on himself’].

The promotion in Proust's novel of inner psychological states is regularly reinforced by the Narrator's pronouncements on their importance. Thus our social life stands ostensibly as inferior to the intricate workings of private memory; time spent in society is deemed wasted, whereas according time to introspective contemplation is commended. The aesthetic solutions proposed in Le Temps retrouvé confirm this assumption. The fact that the Narrator, through involuntary memory, rediscovers his private past that is now to be immortalised in the work of art reinforces the view that the internal psychological ruminations of the Narrator should override the social. Reflecting on friendship, which signals the social, the Narrator protests that the self loses its true orientation, becoming 'hospitalisé dans une individualité étrangère' (ii, 689) ['hospitalised in an extraneous individuality' (iii, 456/541)].