In Search of Lost Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

contrasting the beauties of the remembered past with the banality of the present,
     introduces the theme of the receding, in time, and the disappearance, of beloved
     places and people, and their resurrection in our imagination, our memory and finally
     our art.
    And that, above all, is the notion introduced in
     the present volume: that only in recollection does an experience become fully
     significant, as we arrange it in a meaningful pattern. Thus the crucial role of our
     intellect, our imagination, in our perception of the world and our recreation of it
     to suit our desires, and the importance of the role of the artist in transforming
     reality according to a particular inner vision: the artist escapes the tyranny of
     time through art.
    In one early scene, for example, the young protagonist sees the object
     of his devotion, the Duchesse de Guermantes, in the village church. He has never
     seen her before; what he has loved has been his own image of her, which he has
     created from her name and family history, her country estate, her position and
     reputation. In the flesh, she is disappointing. But immediately his imagination goes
     to work again, and soon he has managed to change what he sees before him into an
     object once again worthy of his love. Similarly, later in the novel Swann finds that
     his love of Odette is wonderfully strengthened, even transformed, the moment he
     realizes how closely she resembles a favourite painting of his: he now sees the
     painting, as well, when he looks at her. The power of the intellect, and the
     imagination, have come to transform the inadequacy or tediousness of the real.
    Proust began writing
Du côté de chez
     Swann
when he was in his late thirties, sometime between the summer of 1908
     and the summer of 1909, as nearly as we can make out from references in his letters
     and conversations. His mother had died several years before, and following a stay of
     some months in a sanatorium he had gone to live in an apartment at Versailles while
     friends searched for a suitable place for him to settle. When at last he moved, it
     was to an apartment at 102, boulevard Haussmann which was already familiar to him:
     his uncle had died there and his mother had often visited it. The building is now
     owned by a bank, but one can still view the high-ceilinged room in which Proust
     spent most of his life from then on – slept, rested, ate, received
     visitors, read and wrote. It was here that he wrote most of
A la recherche du
     temps perdu
.
    In a sense, the book had already been in preparation for several years
     before it began to take the form of a novel. It was never destinedto be composed in a neatly chronological manner in any case,
     and elements of it had been emerging piecemeal in various guises: paragraphs,
     passages, scenes were written and even published in earlier versions, then later
     reworked and incorporated into the novel. The famous description of the steeples of
     Martinville, for example, had an earlier incarnation as an article on road travel;
     and versions of many scenes had appeared in Proust’s first, unfinished and
     unpublished novel,
Jean Santeuil
, which juxtaposed the two childhood homes
     that Proust would later combine to form the setting of the drama of the goodnight
     kiss.
    Proust had been projecting a number of shorter works, most of them
     essays. At a certain point he realized they could all be brought together in a
     single form, a novel. What became its start had, immediately before, begun as an
     essay contesting the ideas of the literary critic Sainte-Beuve, a work which he
     conceived as having a fictional opening: the mother of the main character would come
     to his bedside in the morning and the two of them would begin a conversation about
     Sainte-Beuve. The first drafts of this essay evolved into the novel, and at last, by
     mid-summer of 1909, Proust was actually referring to his work-in-progress as a
     novel. Thereafter