Proust, and the Importance of In Search of Lost Time

[Anonymous No.18078454]

This is a subject that seems to come up in /lit/'s occasional Proust threads.

>"In Search of Lost Time is this revolutionary novel? Why? What did Proust change?"

And no decent explanations are given in the threads I have seen, either through ignorance or a preference (perhaps unsurprising, given the English-language nature of this board) for the innovations of the contemporaneous Joyce.

As a result, I've cribbed from a number of essays some explanations for why Proust was a radical writer. This isn't exhaustive (I don't have anything to hand too detailed on the innovations of psychoanalysis in Search, for instance) but I hope the subsequent posts will add some context to the publication of this novel and illuminate certain points for anons.

[1/? No.18078463]

The publication of In Search of Lost Time between 1913 and 1927 constitutes both a summa of and a new departure for Western literature.

With its guiding theme of an artistic vocation, its sensitive portrayal of a sentimental education from childhood to maturity and its quest for deeper metaphysical truths beyond the confines of the material world, the novel aligns itself with a tradition of foundational texts that have shaped European literature for almost 1,000 years. Dante’s Divine Comedy with its allegory of a spiritual peregrination; the analytical novel in the tradition of Madame de Lafayette; the Bildungsroman in the style of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship – not to forget the great Russian novel with its complex narrative construction and epic portraits of society – are but some of the models that resonate in Proust’s novel.

The author’s use of a first-person narrative, sharp characterization and satirical descriptions of upper-class society recall the Mémoires of Saint-Simon – a major influence on the Search – while his probing analysis of human nature and relationships evokes the 19th-century French personal novel of authors such as Benjamin Constant, Nerval and Chateaubriand.

The novel’s doubling up as a philosophical treatise and an aesthetic manifesto, finally, puts it in the lineage of essayistic works such as Montaigne’s Essays and Pascal’s Pensées while heralding the heightened self-reflexivity that characterizes modernist and postmodern fiction.

[2/? No.18078474]

Just how indebted the Recherche is to its literary predecessors and how readily its author engages in intertextual games and pastiches can be gleaned from the extensive literary references in the text, ranging from Homer, Saint-Simon and Racine to George Eliot, Balzac and Dostoyevsky. Proust’s quasi-encyclopedic knowledge of Western literature across the ages and his subtlety and flair as a literary critic have enriched and nourished his novel, endowing it with an intertextual and generic complexity matched perhaps only by his fellow modernist James Joyce.

In the eyes of early criticism and of many of Proust’s contemporaries, the world of the Search appeared distant from modernity and resolutely steeped in the salons of the Belle Époque. Indeed, In Search of Lost Time draws its cultural, scientific and literary references from the end of the 19th century, and re-stages them anachronistically in a 20th-century novel.

The immediate response to Swann’s Way in 1913 was mixed. The book had its supporters but some of the most scathing criticisms came from Paul Souday at Le Temps. Souday mentioned Proust’s talent, but attacked the style and grammar of his French, and furthermore noted that the book was “chaotic” with too much attention devoted to detail, that nothing extraordinary happened in these autobiographical “memories of childhood”, and that what did happen was “rather banal”.

[3/? No.18078489]

Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night revolutionized the French literary landscape when it was published in 1932 and its caricature of Proust and the Parisian idle rich of the rear during the war years was in keeping with Céline’s denunciation of the Great War and with a certain image of Proust as a “ghost” belonging to a world both past and feminine.

For the critic Philippe Dufour, Proust, unlike Céline to whom he was compared, had missed the boat: the Great War, he wrote, “knocked against the Recherche” but did not affect its Belle Époque world.

Later, Proust would come to occupy the position of an interstitial, “entre-deux” writer poised between the literary experiments of the second half of the nineteenth century (spearheaded by, amongst others, Flaubert, Baudelaire and Mallarmé) and the high modernism that was to challenge traditional genre conventions in the period between World War I and II.

Nowadays, Proust has become so well known that it may be difficult for modern readers to imagine just how revolutionary his prose style appeared. The Search sinned against the accepted order of magnitude for works of art: the sentences were too long, the thoughts too convoluted, the general thematic aims not apparent enough in their wide extension.

Walter Benjamin would write, two years after the publication of Time Regained: “From its structure, which is at once fiction, autobiography, and commentary, to the syntax of boundless sentences (a Nile of language, which overflows and fructifies the plains of truth), everything transcends the norm.”

Put succinctly, what Proust was proposing as a novel in 1913 was unusual, strange and disquieting. Even the most intelligent of readers found the work hard to classify, impossible to discuss within the given parameters of early-20th-century fiction.

[4/? No.18078504]

What characterizes the Modernist text is an exceptional degree of self-consciousness, a strong emphasis on the individual over against society, and the capacity to create an imagined world which does not refer directly or mimetically to exterior reality, but calls attention to itself.

Proust has often been (mis)construed as an anti-modernist and compared with Baudelaire, whose ambiguous stance towards modernity and opposition to progress was a mainstay of romanticism and symbolism. This misunderstanding was compounded since Proust never missed an occasion to assert his predilection for classicism, albeit that he defined it as what is “out of step with its own times” and not simply as classical.

Like other early modernists – Joyce, Mann and Gide – Proust found in the cultural and literary imaginary of the fin de siècle a vast repertoire of themes and motifs which he appropriated for his own writing in a complex process of absorption, distancing and, ultimately, overcoming.

The result, In Search of Lost Time, is a novel that is both a reflection and a catalyst of the influences that have shaped it.

One influence in particular was Decadence, a movement that fed on fin-de-siècle fears and preoccupations: the primacy of art over nature; the subversion of normative gender and sexual roles; a penchant for the morbid, the perverse and the grotesque; the quest to escape banal, everyday life through the cultivation of heightened sensations and immersion into artificial paradises and exotic fantasies.

When Proust wrote the first drafts for what was to become the Recherche, Decadence as an artistic and literary fashion was already passé.

Nonetheless, Proust continued to draw on a fin-de-siècle imaginary in his writing. Many of the novel’s great themes – the struggles for social hegemony and the end of an era; the critique of aestheticism and idolatry; the subversion of gender and sexual roles; hereditary degeneracy and the collapse of the old social order – are indebted to Decadence.

[5/? No.18078514]

As both influence and counter-model, overcoming Decadence would be a vital step in Proust’s modernist journey.

Fitting for the belatedness of Proust’s own writing with regard to the literary models he pastiches and for the growing critical distance that separates him from the universe of Decadence, favourite tropes of the period – the black mass, blasphemy and debauchery, profanation and defilement – are conjugated with irony. Even Proust’s sadomasochistic rites do not lack humour.

Proust increasingly parodies and pastiches the forms and figures of Decadence, particularly in his critical engagement with aestheticism and the Decadent aesthetic.

Crucially, Proust rejected the primacy of art over life (the Verdurin clan) and the “banal aestheticism” promoted by contemporaries like Oscar Wilde. In the Recherche the dangers of an aestheticism lacking in philosophical meaning and the pitfalls of artistic idolatry are dramatized through a host of aesthetes and dilettantes who forsake creation for artistic contemplation or content themselves with amateurish artistic practice.

[6/? No.18078518]

In the character of the aesthete Swann, who seeks to elevate banal life by assimilating it into the artistic sphere – as reflected in the accrued prestige bestowed upon Odette thanks to her resemblance with Botticelli’s Zephora – Proust stigmatizes the attitude of the idolater who confuses art and reality.

For Proust, true art must penetrate beneath the world of appearances to extract some general essence. The overcoming of Decadence is part of a wider liberation from Decadent sensibilities in the last volume.

In a narrative strongly indebted to fin-de-siècle topoi of decadence and renewal (the last chapters are replete with metaphors of apocalyptic destruction and messianic rebirth, especially in the great spectacle of war), the Narrator’s symbolic death and resurrection through art in the last volume allegorize the overcoming of sterile Decadence and the advent of a new form of writing.

Proust eventually assimilates and renegotiates, parodies and pastiches, emulates and eventually overcomes Decadence, on a thematic as well as a stylistic level.

[Anonymous No.18078534]

>>18078454
>The way by Swann's
Stopped right there.

[7/? No.18078535]

Beyond Decadence, by the time of Proust’s artistic maturity Paris was once again at the pinnacle of artistic experimentation, shaken by the advent of a new avant-garde, notably Cubism and Futurism.

Jacques Rivière, a contemporary critic, perceived Proust’s forays into such avant-garde techniques. In a letter of July 1922, Rivière addressed Proust’s cubism, writing to the author:

>A thing that’s struck me for the first time is your relationship to the Cubist movement – and more profoundly, your profound immersion in contemporary aesthetic reality . . . never have the same statements been presented from so many different angles; to the point, no doubt, that they seem to lose all meaning, and would lose all meaning, if the movement and ceaseless continuation of your narration didn’t ensure their restoration.

Rivière pinpointed the rich ambivalence of Proust’s aesthetic: its anti-symbolist and anti-realist stance within a profoundly understood classicism, its radical psychology and its “pure experience” based on “no preconceived ideas”.

[Anonymous No.18078545]

>>18078534
Yes, sorry, anon, there is a mix in here. I hope the rest may be of interest, though.

[8/? No.18078554]

Throughout the Search, the Narrator strives to define objects, reality and individuals as he “sees” them and not as he “knows” them.

This attempt at reaching for the lived experience, the pure sensation of the object, past the a priori nets of mimetic representation, is a mainstay of Proustian, Cubist and Futurist aesthetics, however different each is in practice.

Proust was not only geographically close to the most radical of twentieth-century avant-gardes but aesthetically, too. He developed both the narrative and the theoretical parts of his Search simultaneously, in his habitual manner of composing textual units to be assembled at a later stage – anticipating the montage technique of modern cinema popularized by Sergei Eisenstein and fellow Soviet filmmakers some 20 years later.

Even at a time when the new aesthetics of collage was changing traditional forms of composition, Proust remained preoccupied by the conflict between romantic (open) and classical (closed) form – or, in fin-de-siècle terms, between Decadence (fragmentation) and vitalism (organicity) – that had informed nineteenth-century aesthetic discourses.

The truly innovative work, then, casts a look backwards at a tradition it not only inflects but “corrects”.

[9/? No.18078564]

The dead end in which the French novel found itself around 1910 goaded Proust into outlining the aesthetic principles that would liberate his forthcoming novel from the positivist edicts that reigned in the narrow, mostly Parisian literary circles of the early 20th century.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that the aesthetic “manifesto” of the Search was written in draft form as early as 1911, and one wonders whether Proust was not bent on sketching out ideas which he knew were revolutionary in scope and content, with a view to undergirding the theoretical foundations of a work still pregnant with its futurity.

The non-synchronous synchronicity between the author, the Narrator and the protagonist, is one of Proust’s most daring innovations; a technique of double internal focalization – that is, the splitting-up of the first person into a narrated and a narrating self.

Through this ironic mise en abyme of the Narrator as a “new writer” to come, and of the author of the Search as a “new writer” in actuality, Proust raises the spectre of the ephemerality and contingency of artistic innovation, however genuine, for it not only has to contend with public reception (and attendant misinterpretation), but with inevitable supersession.

Proust knows that this spectre may well turn into an “artistic law” and that he, also, will be swept aside by new artists. At the same time, he hopes that in writing the Search, he is hatching a more fundamental innovation which will endure not only the test of public reception, but also that of time.

[10/10 No.18078570]

As a final aside, one should remember that as publication of its volumes continued, the topic of homosexuality became an ever more central aspect of the Search’s early reception, and ought to be considered one of its revolutionary features.

For not only does the story accord a central role to homosexuality – no mean feat given the repressive social climate of the time – it probes the lesser charted waters of polyvalent sexual identities and practices. Albertine’s sodomist fantasies and Morel’s intermittent lesbian – which perturbs Charlus’s more traditional sexual taxonomy of being, or not being, “one of them” – destabilize any binary classifications into hetero-, homo- or bisexuality.

[Anonymous No.18078953]

>>18078454
>essays some explanations for why Proust was a radical writer
Who cares? Does this make his work any better/worse?

[Anonymous No.18078983]

based and proustpilled
appreciate it

[Anonymous No.18079000]

>>18078454
what's the merit of making random changes to the normal structure of the fiction? everybody can distort the most common structure of the current fiction, it's the same as with avant-garde in plastic arts, it's a race to nowhere or to extinction of the art

[Anonymous No.18079015]

Thanks for the effort posting. One of the few valuable /lit/ threads of recent time.

[Anonymous No.18079040]

>let's make it weird and new groundbreaking
>why? because I feel like it inside
Total subjectivism is absurd

[Anonymous No.18079192]

>>18078564
I like the books, but I always think of this whole approach to praising them as tenuous, and reliant on this Whig idea of literature, whereby virtue consists of being in the vanguard.

Yeah, Proust is reflexive, but reflexivity is about as old as the novel - fake memoir, self conscious (mis)naming of the character (or author) was not new. The merging of genres, particularly memoir and philosophy was not remotely new. The exact combination of features is unique to Proust but "the capacity to create an imagined world which does not refer directly or mimetically to exterior reality, but calls attention to itself." is academic blather obscuring the high degree of continuity.

That he discusses fin de siecle decadence and has more freedom to discuss homosexuality (though less than the writers who followed him) is not an argument for his technical innovation but rather a reflection of his times.

Proust does not need to be a revolution, it suffices to be excellent.

[Anonymous No.18079530]

>>18079000
I think to call them "random" is unfair. Proust spent years, arguably decades, refining this work and would have continued to do so had he not died when he did.

And you seem to imply it's easy to think of changes to the traditional ways of art, and easy to make them coherent and appealing. That raises a host of questions that I'm sure you can guess.

>>18079192
>I always think of this whole approach to praising them as tenuous, and reliant on this Whig idea of literature, whereby virtue consists of being in the vanguard.
I agree, and I think even Proust would agree. Much as he valued art, he was never "art for art's sake" and that is part of the message of the Search. As demonstrated above, that novel does not set out to be revolutionary for the sake of it. And I would entirely agree that one does not need to perceive ISoLT as "revolutionary" to appreciate it.

>That he discusses fin de siecle decadence and has more freedom to discuss homosexuality (though less than the writers who followed him) is not an argument for his technical innovation but rather a reflection of his times.
I would agree here, too. But if these topics have not been seen in literature before in this way, that is still innovative, no? And as some of the other posts mention, I do think Proust utilised some daring technical innovations such as the first person divided into a narrated and a narrating self.

[Anonymous No.18079539]

bump
thas was a nice read. thanks anon

[Anonymous No.18079577]

>>18078454
I MUST.... I MUSTTTTT..... I MUST INNOOOOOOOOVATE

[Anonymous No.18079983]

Don't read Proust if you want to have literally every other book seem mediocre and amateur in comparison. It's so depressing.
I should be happy that somebody like Proust even existed, and be thankful it happened once. But the greediness in me wants like 2 or 3 other writers like him. I just want to know that Proust wasn't a fluke and we humans have the capability of writing like this if we want to.

[Anonymous No.18080023]

>>18079983
Is reading him in translation worth it?

[Anonymous No.18080038]

>>18080023
Yeah of course. Reading the original language only matters with poetry, not prose.

[Anonymous No.18080064]

>>18079983
This. Proust is an absolute genius and everything seems tasteless compared to his book.

[Anonymous No.18080086]

>>18080038
Fucking wrong. Jesus christ, you're a fucking retard. Why would you type something so assbleedingly dumb, you shitbreathed cunt?

[Anonymous No.18080088]

>>18080064
I mean, the length of his work is impressive in its own right, but the true impressiveness is the consistency and quality. Like, you can literally turn to a random page and it will be the most brilliant heart-tugging prose you ever read. The man was an alien.

[Anonymous No.18080093]

>>18080086
I know you got memed into learning 6 languages and you want to feel justified you didn't waste your time, but I'm right. Sorry.

[Anonymous No.18080346]

>>18078554
What do you think of with "thw conflict between romanticism and classicalism"?

[Anonymous No.18080435]

>>18078570
Thank you for writing this out. Never thought of the connection to cubism, despite the multitude of perspectives being one of my favourite aspects of the work. It always fascinated me how for example Odette seem to change completely as the narrator grows older, while characters like Swann inhabits more characters at the same time. The bulk of characters however fill a single role, a cliche, to a seemingly exaggerated degree (Verdurin). You never know whether our understanding of a character is a reflection of a real person, the narrators obsession over them, or a moments' prejudice.

[Anonymous No.18080783]

>>18078454
>As a result, I've cribbed from a number of essays some explanations for why Proust was a radical writer.


Proust wrote elegant prose.

He was also a weak faggot who spends a 10 percent of his first volume whining about his mother giving him a good night kiss.

I find nothing revolutionary about him as a writer.

Balzac is superior in output and scope.

de Sade was more incisive in depecting the inner workings of gay men.

Proust just bloviates on subjects that should have made cute, succinct poems.

[Anonymous No.18080830]

>>18080783
>was also a weak faggot who spends a 10 percent of his first volume whining about his mother giving him a good night kiss.

It was more like 6/7 pages out of hundreds

[Anonymous No.18081016]

>>18079983
I loved ISoLT and still love other novels as well. It didn’t ruin anything for me

[Anonymous No.18081325]

>>18080783
Balzac is like paint drying. He is the French Dickens.

[Anonymous No.18081405]

>>18081325

Interesting criticism ITT since Comédie Humaine served to inspire the work discussed, but the Dickens point is well taken.

[Anonymous No.18081555]

>>18081325
and what does it mean to be a French Dickens?

[Anonymous No.18081573]

>>18081555
It means Tolstoy admires Proust too I guess

[Anonymous No.18082845]

>>18080435
Agreed. It wasn't something I had considered until reading this particular essay. I think it's a fascinating insight, and am happy this resonates for you.

>>18080346
I'll try and write something on this later, anon, when I have more time.

>>18080783
Come back in 10 years. Honestly. I tried to read Proust twice before and the first two times I could barely make it to page 50 of Swann's Way. I swore off him for years after that before coming back to him during lockdown last year. Suddenly things clicked and I became engrossed. Now I can see that the "excessive" writing, as well as being beautiful, is also an end unto itself.

>>18081325
Hey now. Some of Balzac's descriptions are great. Those descriptions in the first 15 or 20 pages of Père Goriot are wonderfully evocative.

[Anonymous No.18083147]

high quality thread

[Anonymous No.18083174]

What about the huge amount of faggotry in the later books? It seems like half the characters were gay

[Anonymous No.18083190]

What's the best translation of In search of Lost Time?

[Anonymous No.18083198]

>>18078454
Read Beckett’s book, or literally anything Bloom ever said. Deleuze if you’re feeling cerebral.

[Anonymous No.18083200]

>>18083174
I don't know, maybe he thought it made for interesting characters, or maybe he had a lto of sodomite friends.

Regardless, t really pisses me off that wikipedia has Proust as a "closeted homosexual". Talk about a leap of faith. If I write a book with some faggots as characters, will people forever speculate about my sexual preference?

[Anonymous No.18083220]

>>18079000
>it's the same as with avant-garde in plastic arts, it's a race to nowhere or to extinction of the art
New expressions sometimes require new forms. That’s it. Read Sarraute’s essay Age of Suspicion. I sympathize with the desire to escalate and even put these things in political terms but the expressive possibilities introduced by, say, Ulysses is worth more to me than all the Uncle Tom’s or War and Peace’s combined.

[Anonymous No.18083225]

>>18083190
Modern Library’s set of course (revised Moncrieff)

[Anonymous No.18083694]

Nice thread OP. I've been thinking about making some similar ones focused on individual essays, posting the highlight excerpts and an outline of arguments.

Unfortunately I don't have much to contribute. I almost picked up SW at the library but it was in very poor condition. I got Knausgaard's vol 2 and 3 instead which I've now finished. I can definitely see the parallels people draw between him and Proust especially in the posts you made. vol 3 was a bit tedious with so much focus on childhood but I've heard the rest are solid. Looking forward to Knausgaards angsty antipathy in his teenage years in vol 4 especially if it involves more dramatic conflicts with his father which is the strongest recurring theme to me.

[Anonymous No.18083708]

>>18083190
I'd recommend the Moncrieff translation edited by Carter. Updates the text and provides very helpful annotations along the side.

The only catch is, this version is only up to Sodom and Gomorrah, so it'll be a couple more years before it's finished.

[Anonymous No.18083718]

>>18083200
One or two is fine, but in the last few books it became ridiculous and soured it for me a bit. Don’t get me wrong I still loved it and have nothing against gays but it became comical and went from 0-100 real quick

[Anonymous No.18083940]

>>18080346
This doesn't exactly answer your question, anon, but I thought the following a somewhat related, and interesting take:

-

After Zola, Naturalism remained a dominant influence on fiction, in France and throughout the Western world, for decades… But even as Zola was writing, Modernist forms of fiction began to appear, often created in an attempt to get around what seemed to be Naturalism’s submission to science.

Literary history often presents the development of Modernism as an overcoming of Naturalism. In its rejection of naturalism, Modernism promoted fictional works that, using myth and symbol, attempted to find realms of essential revelation that somehow transcend the historical world… Modernism often sought to lay bare another realm in which literature could claim to have priority in its search for truth and knowledge.

The development of Modernism in France is undoubtedly best illustrated by Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time. Proust’s novel is, on the one hand, a key work of the early 20th century for understanding the Modernist reaction to the imperial claims of science, and, on the other hand, the key work for understanding how this rivalry came to an end.

Proust’s novel offers an extraordinary counterpoint of literary realism and Modernist transcendence. Reconciling realism and the modernist thirst for transcendence, it relocates literature’s epistemic quest so as to dispense with literature’s rivalry with science and grant literature its own object of knowledge.

The Search is an attempt to reconcile the scientific worldview with the artistic possibility of vouchsafing poetic value to the individual life. In his novel, Proust wants to find a space in which poetic salvation can be achieved in spite of the relentless reduction of the world, by science and by naturalism, to a world that can be described, if not explained, by deterministic laws.

Proust drew upon developments in modern poetry as a springboard for the creation of his novel. And his accomplishment can be best grasped if we understand that his work is, in many respects, the culmination of the search for a unique form of experience that characterized the quest undertaken by symbolist poetry— a quest for experience conceived as a unique form of knowledge. In Proust’s novel we can find reflections of both the antagonistic rivalry with science that symbolist poets felt and their attempt to render this rivalry nugatory by achieving transcendence through poetry.

Modernism inherited from symbolist poetry, in France and elsewhere, the forms designed to get around science’s imperial claims to regiment knowledge. One response to these claims was that poetry proclaimed itself to be an autonomous realm in which the individual could find transcendental revelation through poetic form. Thus understood, poetry can be seen as making a counter-claim in that it proposed to offer access to superior epistemic spaces not accessible to science.

[Anonymous No.18084133]

>>18081325
You are insulting and praising him at the same time. Very confused.

[Anonymous No.18084757]

>>18083708
>The only catch is, this version is only up to Sodom and Gomorrah, so it'll be a couple more years before it's finished.
I've run into a similar problem with the fullest and most annotated Russian translation, which is still being done with only first 3 parts being available.
The worst thing is that all other editions are discontinued in my third-world shithole, and I'll have to scour for used books with older translations (or switch to English, but the problem being that older translations are not as updated still remains).

[Anonymous No.18084764]

>>18080783
>reddit spacing
>has no soul
like clockwork

[Anonymous No.18085129]

>>18084757
Seriously, Russia has only a single in print version of Proust, one which isn't even complete? I feel for you, anon.

[Anonymous No.18085184]

>>18081325
Proust fags have to shit on Dickens because he was just as good without being obscure

[Anonymous No.18085239]

>>18083708
Is it an edit of the original Moncrieff or also based on the Enwright/Kilmartin updates?

[Anonymous No.18085509]

>>18085239
It is Carter's own revising of Moncrieff.

From his original intro:

In many instances revising is a question not so much of modernising the text as of restoring Proust's sentences and phrases to their original simplicity. For example, where Proust writes, "mon semmeil fut profond et detendit entierement mon espirit", Scott Moncrieff translates "my sleep was so heavy as to completely relax my consciousness," which is certainly accurate, but could have been rendered as simply as Proust's original: "my sleep was deep and completely relaxed my mind."

A common practice of Scott Moncrieff's, and one that is perfectly legitimate and often the best solution, when two or more adjectives occur in French, is to make one of them a noun. For example, Proust describes a young man hired to be a footman's assistant as "nouveau et timide," which Scott Moncrieff renders as "a timid novice." Again, this is certainly accurate, but in such cases, it is easy to restore the original simplicity: "one of his aides, new and timid."

Scott Moncrieff is at times more explicit than Proust and adds words to help the non-French reader understand French culture and society as described by Proust. For example, when describing Swann's position in Parisian society, Proust mentions all Swann's "friends in the official world of the Third Republic." The "Third Republic" is an addition by Scott Moncrieff, who no doubt believed that while the era in question was immediately clear to the French reader, others might appreciate more specificity. I have used my own discretion to eliminate or keeping these signposts. In some cases, where I have found the information helpful but inessential, I have moved such an addition to a note.

Here are some examples of corrections that I have made in this volume. In one passage, he mistranslated the sentence "Je craignais qu'elle eut encore mal au coeur," as "I was afraid that her heart might be troubling her again." The passage in question is the one where the grandmother becomes ill: "mal au coeur" means to feel sick or nauseated and, despite the presence of the world "coeur" does not indicate heart trouble. Scott Moncrieff also translated literally Proust's "aigle", used to describe the Duchesse de Guermantes, as "eagle", whereas colloquially, and in the context in which it is used, it means "genius". In one passage, Proust uses a colourful idiom, "les alouettes me tombent toutes roties", which Scott Moncrieff translated nearly literally: "larks drop into my mouth already roasted." I have chosen a less literal but more accurate meaning: "things will just fall into my lap."

[Anonymous No.18085607]

>>18078454
Great thread, although obviously things can be criticized it's not often we see discussion of this quality. Do you have any literary academic formation? or are you just a passionate reader?

[Anonymous No.18085632]

>>18083198
Or Dandieu's

[Anonymous No.18086541]

>>18085607
Just an interested reader (and someone who gets paid to write hack stuff IRL).

Funnily enough, I did a lot of this research because of my previous failures to get into the Search. I felt it would help to do some background reading and that's where I came across a lot of this material. It helped my understanding and appreciation a lot, and I hope this has helped other anons too.