The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle Read Free Page B

characterized as inaugurating new ones. His suspension between the fictional obligations of nineteenth-century masterpieces and those of twentieth-century “experiments” makes it difficult for his new readers to be comfortably aware of what he is doing; he seems on the one hand to be violating the laws (or at least the conventions) of an achieved program, and on the other hand to be regressing from explorations and discoveries into the tried-and-true (or at least the old reliable) methods of a familiar agenda.
    I believe my introducing you to each other will be more convincing if I offer this notion of repudiations, of negativities, as the essential modernism of this great writer, for in the making of his gospel-novel, his fiction-as-evangel, Proust rejects, one after the other, precisely those realms of experience that have heretofore always constituted the claims of human success: the triumphs of worldliness, of friendship, and of love (all of which Proust declares to be failures, in fact disasters). It is only art, or rather the mediations to be found in art, that Proust urges as the means of regaining time, of recovering what is otherwise and always
lost
.
    That is why he elevates to a special eminence in the
Search
four characters—Elstir, Vinteuil, Bergotte, and Berma: painter, composer, writer, and actress—artists whose creations point the way to redemption for the empty fifth character, the Narrator, who in several thousand pages reveals so few hints about his physical appearance that it is impossible to imagine what sort of man he is. He is frail and suffers from asthma and insomnia, we know that much, but all his other energies and perceptions are directed, under the pressure of the most exhaustive observation, to the acknowledgment that the human enterprise—in society, in friendship, and in love—is a failure, the source of exhaustion, ruin, and despair.
    The other thirty-five? forty? fifty? characters who accompany us through the
Search
like so many grand and grotesque catastrophes—even Charlus, even the Duchess of Guermantes, even the Narrator’s grandmother whose name we never learn—are relegated to tragedy or to farce with the same dismissive gesture by which Wotan repudiates Hunding in
Die Walküre
after he has killed Siegmund: with a wave of his hand, the god casts out the mortal who has served his pathetic turn:
Geh’!. Geh’!
    Only the artist, or rather only what the artist creates, is triumphant, is exemplary, is enduring, is
successful
. And only such makings can persuade the Narrator to undertake one of his own, a persuasion in which—for three thousand pages or so—we must collude. His language (Proust’s language, of course) surrounds us, penetrates us, so that these makings are not only the Narrator’s redemptive moments but our own.
    —
    It is my fervent hope that by introducing, with some charity, you new readers to Proust, and by introducing, with an equivalent charity, Proust to his new readers, the parties may proceed some way together. To the emblematic fulfillment of this hope I am somewhat encouraged by the new street signs of Paris boulevards, which, as if they sought to celebrate the Proustian
sagesse
that asserts “we are like giants plunged in time,” flash a message picked out in little red lights (for danger? for delectation?) to those seeking safe passage to the median strip between opposing directions of traffic, a haven that must be attained before reaching the seemingly inaccessible other side:
traversez en deux temps
, the red lights direct us,
cross over time and time again
.
    —
    R ICHARD H OWARD is a poet and translator. He teaches literature in the Writing Division of Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

A N OTE ON THE T RANSLATION
 (1981)

Terence Kilmartin
    C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s version of
À la recherche du temps perdu
has in the past fifty years earned a reputation as one of the great English translations, almost as a masterpiece in its