Reading Proust - A Running Commentary

 I view the middle section of Time Regained as being the real conclusion of the novel and the the last section covering Marcel's attendance at the Prince and Princesse de Guermantes' as being a swansong as he departs Parisian society before entering the private world of the writer who will pen the book we have just read. The middle section draws together the recurring themes of the novel, such as Marcel's wavering hopes of becoming a writer and the epiphanies, and by this synthesis shows how time lost to the past can be retrieved. But before he can achieve this breakthrough, he must undergo more disillusionment. The volume opens with Marcel as a guest of Gilberte at Tansonville. On the final evening of his stay, she lends him a newly published part of the Goncourts' Journal. The journal has a mixed effect on Marcel: it makes him think he lacks any aptitude for literature because, unlike its author, he does not know how to look or listen and so cannot write like that...

 And so we come to the one part of the novel that everyone who has heard of Proust, non-readers included, knows: the episode of the madeleine. Proust prepares by introducing the idea of voluntary memory. He describes this as the memory of the intellect and does not prize it very highly because "the pictures which that kind of memory shows us preserve nothing of the past itself" ( p.57 Scott Moncrieff, p.47 Terence Kilmartin ). Of our own past, he says: "It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm and reach of the intellect in some material object ... which we do not suspect", or to be more precise "in the sensation which that material object will give us". Rather, we can only recapture the past by way of an involuntary memory (a term which Proust coined) and we will discover in the final part of the novel, after a series of similar but lesser known ...