I'm writing a guide to In Search of Lost Time. Here's my first entry, for the first 6 or so pages (depending on edition). Think of it as something between summary and analysis.
I’ve read In Search of Lost Time on three separate occasions. I’ve read Swann’s Way 5 times. Now I’m reading the whole thing again and writing something between a response and summary on a weekly basis, covering maybe 12 pages at a time. My challenge is to make a guide and summary of the text but in a way that also includes my own feelings and thoughts. I believe a well-written summary can communicate some of the novel’s power and bring some underlying pieces to the surface as I begin some authentic analysis of its genius. Mostly, I hope it’s fun to write and read!
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Appropriately, Swann’s Way starts with the narrator out of place and time. It tells us not about a specific event in time but about a series of events merged as one (“For a long time…”). The narrator falls asleep accidentally and unwittingly. He believes he’s awake, experiencing reality, but he’s in his dreams, and his dreams are infected with the book he was reading when he fell asleep. This all occurs in the past, when he was a child (*edit, possibly not a child, as a reader pointed out, it's unclear, and probably unlikely that he's reading what he reads in the opening as a kid). He’s telling us this in retrospect. Fiction, dreams, and memory displace the present and the real. We’re in his mind, where we’ll be for the remaining million or so words.
For these opening pages, we stay in a diffuse moment. Nothing happens. He describes a habit. The phrase “I would” appears again and again, letting us know this happened frequently, that this is close to a nightly routine.
The narrator takes leaps of imagination. Distant sounds bring to mind far-away travelers. A light beneath the door is first the sun (“Oh, joy of joys it is morning.”), and then it’s extinguished. It was a gas lantern, put out by a servant going to bed. Rather than ending, the night is beginning. Like so much of the novel, the narrator’s confusion produces fears, hopes, and drama out of thin air.
He sleeps again and has anxious dreams. The narrator feels his uncle pull at curls the narrator cut off long ago. He finds a woman who, “just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam,” has been created in his dreams from some “strain in the position of my limbs.” Sometimes this dream woman resembles a real one, and, with his satisfaction incomplete, he decides to seek her out, “like people out on a journey to see with their own eyes some city that they have always longed to visit, and imagine that they can taste in reality what was charmed their fancy.” But the memory of this woman “would dissolve and vanish, until I had forgotten the maiden of my dreams.”
Unsatisfied desire. Unattainable love. A reality that can’t hold a candle to the dreams. It’s all here already.
In his dreams, the narrator goes on far away adventures, and when he wakes in different rooms, he has to “put together by degrees the component parts of my ego.” Even his own identity can shift beneath him. Even that must be composed. He must wonder: “perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.” In his analysis of objects, we can see the future anxieties he’ll have about people.
In the dark room where he’s woken, he remembers rooms from the past. Maybe he’s recomposed himself. But when is this? Is he in his bedroom at his great-aunt’s house? Has Mamma only recently gone to bed? No, he is in Madame de Saint-Loup’s country home. Or is he? He’s not sure. For a few seconds, he is lost amidst the “shifting and confused gusts of memory.”
When he finally wakes fully, he reflects and thinks on the various places he’s known—Combray, Balbec, Paris, Doncieres, Venice, and more—and the many people he met.
The narrator remembers Combray and his room there and a gift he received, a magic lantern, which projects onto the walls an “impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window.” The walls become a land of tales, but this only adds to his sorrows (his mind is fertile soil for sorrows, which sprout like crabgrass in spring). The room has been bearable only because it was stable, and though he loves stories and legends and fictions and fantasy, these projections have disturbed the room’s stability and the narrator already has enough instability to contend with: he has to recompose his own self when he wakes, after all, he loses tracks of dreams and reality, and time is easily placed out of joint.
In the span of a handful of dense, perambulating pages, the novel has established some primary concerns amidst confusion, dread, and dreams. Similes, metaphors, and metonyms abound. At certain times, they’re frightful and unwanted, and at other times they seem to be life’s animating source. Why must a distant train whistle be like “the note of a bird in a forest” and why must that bring to mind a traveler? Because to do otherwise would be to prune the world of the true reality, of the many layers and possibilities present in a dream woman, who can be Eve or a real woman or a city, or of those present in a streak of light, which can be the sun or a lamp. The “immobility” of these objects, their oneness and wholeness, is “forced upon them.” The novel’s figurative language and comparisons aren’t the work of an overly imaginative mind but rather the result of someone truly seeing the objects as their truly incomprehensible, uncircumscribable, fragmented selves.
It’s a perfect declaration for one of the great of imagination that mankind has ever produced. We’re in a world of abundance and pluripotentiality, where two things can be the same thing and neither can be only one thing. Appropriately, it is as if we, the readers, are emerging from a dream of our own.
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A note on translation:
I first read In Search of Lost time through the Modern Library editions, the Moncrieff translation revised by Kilmartin and Enright. I then reread the same translation. I then read the new Penguin editions. For this project, I’m reading the unrevised Moncrieff translations while simultaneously listening to the audiobook of that version (a practice known as Immersive Reading, which I enjoy and recommend). I have a sentimental attachment to the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright, but I think that regardless of individual flaws, you can read any translation and love the books. I would recommend you pick one set, and when it’s time to reread (if you love these books, you’ll want to reread), you pick a different set.