In Search of Lost Time Read Online Free PDF

for instance, is apparently based on an experience of
     Proust’s own, but what Proust actually dipped in his tea was a rusk of dry
     toast, and what he remembered was his morning visits to his grandfather. The scene
     of the goodnight kiss, for instance, is set, not in a single actual home of
     Proust’s childhood, but in a melding of two – one in Auteuil,
     the suburb of Paris where he was born, and the other in Illiers, a town outside
     Paris where he spent many summers. Similarly, the characters in the novel are
     composites, more perfectly realized ideals or extremes, of characters in his own
     life.
    What is introduced in this inaugural volume of
In Search of Lost
     Time
? As Samuel Beckett remarks in his slim study
Proust
,
    The whole of Proust’s world comes out of a teacup, and
     not merely Combray and his childhood. For Combray brings us to the two
     ‘ways’ and to Swann, and to Swann may be related every element
     of the Proustian experience and consequently its climax in revelation…
     Swann is the corner-stone of the entire structure, and the central figure of the
     narrator’s childhood, a childhood that involuntary memory, stimulated or
     charmed by the long-forgotten taste of a madeleine steeped in an infusion of tea,
     conjures in all the relief and colour of its essential significance from the shallow
     well of a cup’s inscrutable banality.
    Through Charles Swann, the faithful friend and constant dinner-guest
     of the narrator’s family, we are led, either directly or indirectly, to
     all the most important characters of
In Search of Lost Time
. Nearly all, in
     fact, are introduced in
The Way by Swann’s
: the young
     protagonist, his parents and his grandmother; Swann, his daughter Gilberte,and Odette, the mysterious ‘lady in pink’;
     Françoise, the family servant; the narrator’s boyhood friend the
     bookish Bloch; and the aristocrat Mme de Villeparisis. Stories are told about them
     that will be echoed later by parallel stories, just as the story of the young
     protagonist’s longing for his mother is echoed within this volume by the
     story of Swann’s longing for Odette and the narrator’s, when he
     was a boy, for Gilberte. Stories are begun that will be continued, hints are dropped
     that will be picked up, and questions are asked that will be answered in later
     volumes. Places are described that will reappear in greater detail, just as each of
     the major themes in the book – love, betrayal, homosexuality, manners,
     taste, snobbery, etc. – is introduced in
The Way by
     Swann’s
and elaborated more completely in subsequent volumes.
    In the narrator’s recovery of his early memories through the
     tasting of the tea-soaked madeleine, for instance, we learn of the power of
     involuntary memory, and the madeleine is only the first of a series of inanimate
     objects that appear in the course of
In Search of Lost Time
, each providing
     a sensuous experience which will in turn provoke an involuntary memory (the uneven
     cobblestones in a courtyard, for instance, or the touch of a stiffly starched napkin
     on the lips). The incident of the madeleine will itself be taken up again and
     revealed in a new light in the final volume.
    In the narrator’s early passion for his mother and
     Swann’s for Odette we are introduced to the power of love for an elusive
     object, the perversity with which one’s passion is intensified by the
     danger of losing one’s beloved. The narrator’s infatuation with
     Gilberte in the present volume will be echoed by his more fully developed passion,
     as an adult, for Albertine in a subsequent volume. In the very first pages of
The Way By Swann’s
, the notion of escape from time is alluded
     to, and the description of the magic lantern which follows soon after hints at how
     time will be transcended through art. The closing coda in the Bois de Boulogne,