Regrettably, I must begin with the quantitative — the least Proustian of all categories. The six-volume Modern Library Edition of D.J. Enright’s revision of Terrance Kilmartin’s reworking of Andreas Mayor’s and C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is 4,347 pages long. At an average speed of two hundred and fifty words, or one page, per minute, it takes approximately seventy-two hours, or three days, to read it. But seventy-two hours represents a theoretical minimum and an unattainable ideal. Thanks to a few features of Proust’s distinctive style, reading In Search of Lost Time inevitably takes at least twice or even three times as long as this. There is, first of all, the famous Proustian sentence, whose syntactic cascades of independent and subordinate clauses were compared by Walter Benjamin, one of his first translators, to the flowing of the Nile. The longest of those riverine sentences, at nine-hundred and fifty-eight words in the original French, could, if printed out on a single strip of paper, be wrapped around the base of a wine bottle seventeen times. No one, except perhaps the most gifted mnemonist, can retain so much information in their short-term memory. By the time anyone else comes to the end of a sentence of this length, having meanwhile pulled into the port of more than one semicolon for a pause, its subject has been long forgotten. To understand what has been written, the reader is sent back to the point of departure and this, in turn, causes the pages not to move, or to move in the wrong direction. Then there is the attention that Proust lavishes on seemingly insignificant details and physical spaces, such as the lengthy description of the steeple of Saint-Hilaire in Swann’s Way; his stubborn willingness to stay in a scene, such as the interminable dinner party in Guermantes Way or the scene where the narrator watches Albertine sleeping in The Captive, long after another author would have cut away; and his penchant for discursive digression throughout, in which he inflates each Rochefoucauldian aperçu to the length of an essay by Montaigne. As with the multiclausal sentences, these traits of style have the effect of slowing down the pace. Articulating the frustrations of innumerable future readers, an editor at one of the many publishing houses that turned down Swann’s Way is said to have remarked of the opening scene, “I fail to understand why a man needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep.” Most importantly, there is Proust’s mania for comparisons: for metaphors, analogies, complex conceits, and extended similes, the signature sentences that begin “just as” or “as when.” In a passage in Time Regained — we will return to it — Proust likens his book to a sort of “optical instrument” that enables the reader to read herself. The instrument works by stimulating a reader’s tendency to draw analogies between the events in the book and the events of their lives, such that, for example, one recognizes in the mediocre Bloch or the vicious Madame Verdurin the features of social climbers one has known; or in Swann’s unhappy affair with Odette, the time when one fell in love with a person not of one’s type; or in the contrarianism which topples the Baron de Charlus from the pinnacle of Parisian society, the dialectic of cant and reaction that characterize our own. Owing to this, a frequent experience while reading In Search of Lost Time is to look up half-way through a sentence and stare into the middle distance in a kind of mnemonic reverie or “epiphanic swoon” (as the scholar and translator Christopher Prendergast puts it in his recent study Living and Dying with Marcel Proust), only to find, catching sight of a clock out of the corner of one’s eye, that whole hours have passed. Quantitative analysis may be regrettable; unfortunately, it is necessary. For it is the sheer length of In Search of Lost Time, compared to which War and Peace is but a diplomatic incident and The Magic Mountain is little more than a hillock, that turns the phrase “reading Proust” from the designation of an ordinary activity into a cultural superlative, the literary equivalent of climbing Everest, walking the Camino de Santiago, riding the Trans-Siberian Express, or even sailing the Nile. (On behalf of our eyes, we may all be grateful to the editor at Gallimard who talked Proust out of printing the novel in a single volume, with two columns per page and no paragraph breaks.) One may note the delicious irony of treating a book which contains an utterly unsparing critique of snobbery as a “badge of bourgeois soul-distinction,” in Prendergast’s words, and at the same time sympathize with the “mid-cult pride,” in the words of Fredric Jameson, felt by those who finish it, as well as the genuine or downplayed regret expressed by those who do not. (A further irony: Proust is not infrequently cited as the classic author whom contemporary novelists have not read in modified versions of the magazine questionnaire that bears his name.) It is because of its length, which Proust hoped would rival the numerical-temporal One Thousand and One Nights, that In Search of Lost Time has acquired a reputation as a difficult book. Yet Proustian difficulty is not Joycean, Steinean, or Beckettian difficulty. Unlike Finnegans Wake, The Making of Americans, or The Unnameable, In Search of Lost Time is not a book that challenges our sense of what a novel is, only our sense of what a novel can do. Although it makes not inconsiderable demands on the concentration, memory, patience, and perseverance of its readers, it is roughly continuous with the form that the novel has taken since the days of Austen and Balzac. Its ultra-complicated sentences still follow grammatical rules; and while a certain degree of prior familiarity with French literature and history is helpful, understanding them at least does not require the reader to
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