The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Marcel Proust · a novel in seven volumes · published 1913–27, the last three after the author’s death · scored on Proust’s French, with C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of the first volume (1922), the only text in hand, for sense and for every English quotation
Mode
Novel of memory and vocation; social comedy, love story and treatise on art held in one first-person life
Mythos
Souls held captive in things and freed by recognition; the lost paradise; the cities of the plain; a name descended from legend and emptied on contact
Phase
A life from a childhood bedtime at Combray to an afternoon party in Paris after the war, told from after its end
Presentation
Fiction; seven volumes, the last three published after the author’s death and unrevised; one narrator, with a love affair told in the third person set inside the first volume
Register
From Françoise’s country speech, Cottard’s puns and Bloch’s mock-Homeric to the salons’ wit and a long analytic sentence that can hold a church and its centuries
Scale
One consciousness, one life; a society from the Faubourg Saint-Germain to the kitchen
Governing Proposition
A boy who cannot sleep without his mother’s kiss grows up to lose his childhood, his loves and his world to time and habit, and finds them again whole in a taste, a phrase of music, an uneven paving stone. The wager of the novel is that the past survives not in what we remember but in what we feel, and that only a work of art can give a life back to the one who lived it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.”
“For a long time I used to go to bed early.” The first sentence is told from a time after all the times it tells. A man wakes in the dark and does not know which room he is in. The rooms he has slept in pass over him in one sentence that runs, even in Moncrieff’s English, to nearly six hundred words, until “the good angel of certainty” sets the furniture back in its places. Before there is a story there is a self putting itself together out of the places it has been. The book will take seven volumes to finish what that first page begins.
Around that waking stands an architecture larger than its first plan. In 1913 the work was announced in three volumes. The first appeared that November, at the author’s expense, after several publishers had refused it. The war stopped publication for five years, and the book grew in the interval: the middle swelled with a second great love, a study of Sodom and the war itself. Proust revised in proof and in pasted extensions, so that each volume grew as it went to press, and that process stopped at his death in November 1922, with four volumes published and three still to come. The last appeared in 1927. Its ending had been written early. Proust said that the last chapter of the last volume was written straight after the first chapter of the first, and it stood.
The first volume sets the laws the six after it will test. It has four parts. The two halves of Combray tell a childhood, much of it as what used to happen rather than what happened once. Un amour de Swann, nearly half the volume, all but leaves the first person and tells in the third a love affair from about the time of the narrator’s birth. A short last part returns to the boy, to a girl on the lawn of the Champs-Élysées and to the Bois years afterwards. Some of his memories are, he admits, “actually the memories of another, from whom I had acquired them at second hand”, and Swann’s story is kept as a template: what the boy will learn about love, Swann has already learned at his own cost.
Movement II
The drama the whole work turns on is a child’s bedtime. When Swann comes to dinner the mother does not come up to kiss the boy goodnight. He waits up for her, and the father, “devoid of principles (in my grandmother’s sense)”, unaccountably sends her to him: “Go along with him, then”. Huge in his nightshirt, the father stands “like Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli which M. Swann had given me”. Then the narrator steps out of the scene: “Many years have passed since that night.” The staircase wall is demolished, the father can give no such orders now, and yet the sobs the boy held back in his presence are heard again: “Actually, their echo has never ceased”. That night, and the book his mother read aloud to him through it, will return in the last volume.
For years nothing else of Combray exists for him. The pictures the will recalls “preserve nothing of the past itself”, and he asks whether it is dead: “Permanently dead? Very possibly.” Against that he sets “the Celtic belief” that the souls of those we have lost are held captive in some object until we pass it and recognise their voice, when “they have overcome death and return to share our life.” Then the tea, and the cake, “one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’”. At the taste “a shudder ran through my whole body”, and “I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.” He drinks again and finds less each time; the truth “lies not in the cup but in myself.” What the mind must do is more than look: “Seek? More than that: create.”
“Et tout d’un coup le souvenir m’est apparu.”
“And suddenly the memory returns.” Moncrieff puts in the present what Proust tells as finished. The taste is the crumb of madeleine aunt Léonie gave him on Sunday mornings, dipped in her lime-flower tea. When the people are dead and the things scattered, taste and smell remain “like souls, ready to remind us”, and bear “l’édifice immense du souvenir”
“the vast structure of recollection.” The old grey house rises “like the scenery of a theatre”, and with it the town, the roads, the river and the church, until the whole of Combray “sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.” Why it made him so happy is left unexplained; he “must long postpone the discovery”, and the book is that postponement.
Movement III
Combray is a church, an aunt, a servant and two walks. The church is the first model of the book: a building that occupies “four dimensions of space”, “the name of the fourth being Time”, whose nave seems to conquer not only ground but each epoch it has come through. In one of its windows is Gilbert the Bad, a lord of Guermantes, and the magic lantern of the first pages has already sent Golo riding over the bedroom curtains toward Geneviève de Brabant, “ancestress of the Guermantes family”. A name gathers legend before it gathers a person. When the boy at last sees the Duchesse de Guermantes, at a wedding in that church, she has a large nose, a red face and “a little spot at the corner of her nose”, and the name must be fitted to her.
The two walks are the book’s ground plan. One passes Swann’s park, the other follows the river toward Guermantes, and they are “so diametrically opposed that we would actually leave the house by a different door”. Never taken on the same day, they stay shut up in “the sealed vessels” of separate afternoons. Swann’s way gives the boy the pink hawthorn, “a Catholic bush indeed”, and Gilberte seen through a hedge. The Guermantes way gives him the water-lilies of the Vivonne and the steeples. In the last volume the two ways are found to meet, and Gilberte’s daughter joins them in one person.
Two scenes on these walks plant what the book will harvest. At Montjouvain, hidden in the bushes outside a lighted window and unable to leave without being heard, the boy watches Vinteuil’s daughter and her friend with the dead musician’s photograph: “Not dare to spit on it? On that?” The narrator draws from it the plainest moral law in the volume: indifference to the sufferings one causes “is the one true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty.” And on a drive at sunset the steeples of Martinville stand “like three birds perched upon the plain”, until the boy borrows pencil and paper and writes his first page. So relieved is he that, “as though I myself were a hen and had just laid an egg”, he sings at the top of his voice. The vocation the whole book narrates begins in a joke at its own expense.
Movement IV
In Un amour de Swann a man of taste falls in love, by stages, with a woman he does not find beautiful. The Verdurins’ little clan, where he meets Odette, has a pianist who plays the sonata of Vinteuil. Swann has heard a phrase of it once before and lost it; now it returns, “no longer pure music, but rather design, architecture, thought”, and becomes “the national anthem of their love.” Odette refuses to hear the rest: “Our little bit; that’s all we need.” The flowers she wears on the night he first possesses her give the lovers a word for it, and the narrator gives the law beneath the word: in physical possession “the possessor possesses nothing”.
Jealousy is the form his love takes once it is sure of itself. One night he knocks at the only lighted window in her street, sure that another man is with her: “Two old gentlemen stood facing him, in the window”. It was the house next door. Her past opens under his memories a sentence at a time. Early on she had told him how she would put off Mme Verdurin: “I need only say that my dress wasn’t ready, or that my cab came late. There is always some excuse.” Years later he imagines the same words with his own name in them: “I need only tell Swann that my dress wasn’t ready, or that my cab came late. There is always some excuse.” The refrain proves nothing, and nothing she ever said can now be heard without it.
At the Marquise de Saint-Euverte’s, among a satire of monocles, the little phrase is played again. Swann sees in it the happiness he has lost, and before that happiness a wretched figure who fills him with pity because he does not at first know him: “It was himself.” Of the music he concludes what the madeleine concluded of memory: “We shall perish, but we have for our hostages these divine captives who shall follow and share our fate.” Then he ceases to suffer, and the section ends on his verdict: years of his life, a wish to die and his greatest love, all spent “pour une femme qui ne me plaisait pas, qui n’était pas mon genre !”
“for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!” The boy lives the same law with Gilberte, and the man with Albertine, more slowly and at greater cost.
Movement V
The first volume ends years later in the Bois de Boulogne, where the narrator looks for the women he admired there as a boy, Mme Swann above all, and finds motor-cars and new hats. A belief has gone, and what survives it is “an idolatrous attachment to the old things which our belief in them did once animate”, as if the divine spark had been in them: “the death of the gods.” The places we have known were each “a thin slice” of a life, and “remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.” The volume that raised a whole town from a cup of tea ends on an avenue that will not come back.
The six volumes after it take the boy into the world his names promised and empty each name on contact: the church at Balbec, the actress, the duchess, the salon. Then they turn to death. The grandmother dies, without consolation, and the narrator feels her loss only on his second stay at Balbec, bending to unbutton his boots. Swann tells the Duchesse de Guermantes he is dying, and the Duke hurries her off to change her shoes. The novelist Bergotte dies before Vermeer’s View of Delft and its “petit pan de mur jaune”, its little patch of yellow wall. Vinteuil’s septet is pieced together from his drafts by the friend who once offered to spit on his photograph. Albertine is lost twice: she leaves, “Mademoiselle Albertine est partie !”, and then she dies, thrown from a horse.
The last volume brings the book round to its beginning. At an afternoon party given by the Princesse de Guermantes, who is the former Mme Verdurin, the narrator stumbles on uneven paving stones and Venice returns whole; a spoon against a plate, a starched napkin and a copy of François le Champi, the book of the night of the kiss, do the same. The doctrine of the first volume is stated at last: “les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus”, the true paradises are the paradises we have lost. In the drawing-room the guests seem masked by age, and Gilberte’s daughter, Mlle de Saint-Loup, joins the two ways in one person. The narrator resolves to write the book we have read, and the book ends on human beings “comme des géants plongés dans les années”, like giants plunged into the years, and on its last words, “dans le Temps.”
Act III · The Twelve
Length is not a cost; the question is whether the parts are required. The scale is compelled: time is regained only after it has been spent, and the faces aged in the last volume work only because they have been carried through every volume before it. Un amour de Swann is the template for every later love, and the boy’s love for Gilberte rehearses its law: “it was I alone who loved.” (Noms de pays : le nom). What holds the axis at 8.6 is the Albertine cycle, which restates Swann’s law of jealousy round after round in the fifth and sixth volumes. In his last typescript of the sixth Proust cut it heavily. His own cut is the evidence: perhaps a tenth of the whole could go.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosures can be stated, and they hold. The past survives in sensation, not in the will: “The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect” (Combray I). A person is partly made by others: “our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.” (Combray I). Desire makes its object, and possession empties it: “the possessor possesses nothing” (Un amour de Swann). Indifference to the suffering we cause “is the one true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty.” (Combray II). The later volumes add homosexuality seen from inside, in 1921, and the Dreyfus Affair reordering the salons. Held from the top because the laws of love are stated as universal and drawn from one temperament, and the theory of inversion that opens Sodome et Gomorrhe is contested now.
Score: 9.6 / 10
The heights reach the ceiling, and they come often. In the first volume: the father on the stair “like Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli”, and the sobs whose “echo has never ceased” (Combray I); the madeleine; the pink hawthorn; the steeples of Martinville “like three birds perched upon the plain” (Combray II); the little phrase at Saint-Euverte, where Swann pities a figure he does not know: “It was himself.” (Un amour de Swann). Later: the grandmother’s death and its return, Bergotte’s, the septet, the last party. Held below the top because long stretches are built as social comedy, not elevation, and because the method deflates its own heights: after the steeples the boy sings “as though I myself were a hen and had just laid an egg” (Combray II).
Score: 9.3 / 10
Some of the myth is built. The first section gives “the Celtic belief” that the souls of the dead are held captive in some object until we recognise them, and then “they have overcome death and return to share our life.” (Combray I). That is the machinery of the whole book: the madeleine in the first volume, the paving stones in the last. The magic lantern’s Golo and Geneviève de Brabant prove to be forebears of the Guermantes, and the name dissolves on sight into a red face with “a little spot at the corner of her nose” (Combray II). Sodom and Gomorrah title and order the middle of the work. Held at 9.2 because no single frame bears the whole, and much is evoked: Eurydice, Botticelli, Giotto’s Virtues, Racine.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The inheritance is plain, and acknowledged inside the work: Balzac’s recurring characters, Saint-Simon’s Versailles, Ruskin, whom Proust translated, and the precursors the last volume names, Chateaubriand, Nerval and Baudelaire. The turn is in what a novel attends to: a plot dissolved into habit, told as what used to happen; a sentence that runs, even in English, to nearly six hundred words; a love affair told in the third person inside a first-person book; more than a million words closed in a circle; homosexuality in the open in 1921–22. The stake was paid: several publishers, the NRF among them, refused the first volume. Held below the top because the syntax is classical and the novel of society is Balzac’s.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. In the first volume’s longest sentence the rooms of a lifetime whirl round the waking sleeper until “the good angel of certainty” makes them stand still (Combray I). Combray ends where it began, with the waker in the dark. The two ways are kept apart in “the sealed vessels” of separate afternoons (Combray II) and joined in the last volume, which ends on a vow to write the book just read. The child does not know what the man knows, so the reader lives the lost time before the doctrine that regains it. Held from the top because its maker never finally shaped the last third, and because the narrator tells what he could not know.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: a century of re-examination, from Curtius (1925), Spitzer on the style (1928), Benjamin’s essay on the image of Proust (1929) and Beckett’s Proust (1931), through Poulet, Deleuze’s Proust et les signes (1964) and Genette’s “Discours du récit” (1972), on which modern narratology was built, to Sedgwick, the genetic criticism of the notebooks, the quarrel over the sixth volume and the publication in 2021 of Les Soixante-quinze feuillets. The text plants questions it does not close: Gilberte’s gesture by the hedge, read by the boy as insult and explained by her decades later; Mlle Vinteuil, who profanes her father and, through her friend, restores his work; what the narrator ever knew of Albertine; whether the doctrine of the last volume is the book’s or only the narrator’s.
Score: 9.8 / 10
The work reorganised what a novel could attend to: memory, habit, the time of a life. It made the first-person narrator both the subject and the instrument of an inquiry, and with Ulysses it is one of the two founding turns of the modernist novel. Intrinsic force alone stands a tenth above the figure, reach a tenth below. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Prix Goncourt of 1919; Woolf, Benjamin and Beckett among its early readers; the long novel of memory after it, from Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time to Claude Simon, Sebald and Knausgaard; and in criticism, Genette’s narratology, Deleuze and queer theory. “La madeleine de Proust” is common French speech.
Score: 9.7 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over 113 years: in print throughout, edited twice for the Pléiade, in 1954 and 1987–89, and in English from 1922. The surface is heavily fixed: the genealogies of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the actors of the narrator’s schooldays (“our greatest actor was undoubtedly Got, our second Delaunay”, Combray II), the Dreyfus Affair, the fashions of the Bois. But the work narrates the death of that surface, and the first volume already mourns it as “the death of the gods.” (Noms de pays : le nom). The surface has become the work’s own world. Two costs remain: the annotation it asks for, and a text of the last volumes that is not fixed, with two versions of the sixth.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged on Proust’s French, which is not in hand; its sound is neither credited nor charged. What survives translation is load-bearing. Every register is placed: Françoise’s, Cottard’s hunger for figures of speech, Legrandin’s prose-poems, Bloch’s mock-Homeric, Odette’s “Our little bit; that’s all we need.” (Un amour de Swann). So is every scene: the profanation seen through a window by a boy who cannot leave, and the lighted window that is not Odette’s, “Two old gentlemen stood facing him, in the window” (Un amour de Swann). Refrains return with the names changed. The long period holds across 350 sentences of a hundred words or more in the English of one volume. Charged for restatement and editorial seams in the last three volumes, and for maxims sometimes laid on rather than earned.
Score: 9.6 / 10
One law: desire makes its object, contact empties it, habit numbs both, and only involuntary memory and art give back what was lived. Love obeys it: Swann gives years to a woman “who was not in my style!” (Un amour de Swann). So do snobbery, which Legrandin cannot see in himself; names, as the duchess shrinks in the church to a red face; places, as Balbec waits behind its name; and groups, as the Verdurins’ life, once “genuine”, becomes “the nethermost circle of Dante” when they shut Swann out (Un amour de Swann). The most distant elements obey it: Vinteuil’s sonata, and the friend who offers to spit on his photograph and later restores his septet. Held below the top by the narrator’s breaches of his own point of view and by the continuity lapses of the unrevised volumes.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Many orders are held in one consciousness and integrated by one law: consciousness, at its most exactly rendered; the family, in mother, grandmother, aunt and father; love and sexuality in every form the work can name; class, from the Faubourg to Françoise’s kitchen; the state and history, from Swann’s lunch at the Élysée to the Dreyfus Affair and the war; medicine; art, in four imagined masters, Bergotte, Vinteuil, Elstir and Berma; nature, in hawthorn, sea and weather; the church whose fourth dimension is “Time” (Combray II). Labour is held thinly: the kitchen-maid appears chiefly as Françoise’s victim, made to prepare the asparagus that gives her asthma. The sacred is held as aesthetic residue, not as an order the work inhabits.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Bottomless Well at 9.8 and Pressure on Tradition at 9.7, with The Unconcealment, The Living Form, The Made and The Encompassed at 9.6. A century of re-examination that has not exhausted the questions the book leaves open; a reorganisation of what a novel can attend to, felt in fiction and in criticism alike; laws of memory, desire and the social self that hold; a form that enacts the losing and regaining of time; and a society held in one consciousness.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.6, held by the Albertine cycle, which restates Swann’s law of jealousy through the fifth and sixth volumes, and by matter in the unrevised volumes that the author would probably have removed and, in his last typescript of the sixth, did. Perhaps a tenth of the whole. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep and The Imperishable at 9.2: a myth of resurrection built into the plot but no single frame bearing the whole; a surface fixed to its society, and a text of the last volumes that is not fixed.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.6, The Made at 9.6, The Inner Law at 9.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.7, The Unconcealment at 9.6, The Swerve at 9.5, The Archetypal Deep at 9.2 and The Imperishable at 9.2 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by seven tenths. The Universal Minimum is met — no axis falls below 8.6, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.6. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, scored as one novel in seven volumes on the French: Du côté de chez Swann (Grasset, 1913, at the author’s expense), À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (NRF, 1919; Prix Goncourt), Le Côté de Guermantes (1920–21), Sodome et Gomorrhe (1921–22) and, after Proust’s death on 18 November 1922, La Prisonnière (1923), Albertine disparue (1925) and Le Temps retrouvé (1927), none of the three revised by him for the press. The sixth exists in two texts: a typescript Proust corrected in his last months, found in 1986 and published in 1987, cuts it heavily and moves Albertine’s death; the Pléiade of 1987–89 prints the long text and gives the short one as a variant. The work is scored as the standard editions present it, and on the French, which is not in hand. Translation · C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s Swann’s Way (1922), Project Gutenberg e-text #7178, for sense in the first volume and for every English quotation on this page, chosen because it is the only version in hand and keeps every section of the volume. Its English is not charged to the novel: its series title, Remembrance of Things Past, is Shakespeare’s and loses temps perdu; it is more ornate than the French in places; and at the madeleine it puts a past tense into the present. Its “Overture” is Combray I, its “Combray” Combray II, “Swann in Love” Un amour de Swann and “Place-Names: The Name” Noms de pays : le nom; citations are by the French section. The revisions of Moncrieff by Terence Kilmartin (1981) and D. J. Enright (1992), and the Penguin translation under Christopher Prendergast (2002–03), are not in hand, and none is quoted. The six later volumes are paraphrased, and quoted only in a few French lines, each followed by a plain gloss. The first volume’s sentence lengths are measured in Moncrieff’s English, as a proxy for the shape of the French period. The sound of Proust’s French and its idiolects as French are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged.