ABSTRACT
In 1931 Samuel Beckett published a study of Marcel Proust’s partly posthumous seven-part novel À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27), simply entitled Proust. Du côté de chez Swann – the first volume of the novel – had appeared in November 1913. Having written what he thought would form the first and the last volumes in 1913, Proust continued to expand and revise sections of the existing manuscript until his death in 1922. He did so especially during the First World War, working during this period on Sodome et Gomorrhe and the ‘Albertine’ sections. Interrupted during the conflict, the publication of the novel resumed in 1919 with À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, and ended in 1927 with the posthumous publication of Le Temps retrouvé.1 Proust (and editors after him) modified the outline of the novel and the number of volumes in which it was published throughout its editorial history. During the summer of 1930, Beckett read it twice in the 16-volume Gallimard edition published between 1927 and 1930.2
1 For a concise history of the genesis of the novel between 1908 and 1922, see Marion Schmid, ‘The Birth and Development of À la recherche du temps perdu’, in Richard Bales (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Proust (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 58-73. In its final form the novel comprises the following parts that were published in varying numbers of volumes: Du côté de chez Swann, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, Le Côté de Guermantes, Sodome et Gomorrhe, La Prisonnière, Albertine disparue (La Fugitive), and Le Temps retrouvé. References to the novel in this chapter are to the Pléiade edition in four volumes: Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris, 1987-9). References to the English translation of the novel are from the six-volume translation by Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by Dennis Joseph Enright, In Search of Lost Time (New York, 2003). All translations of quotations (other than those from À la recherche du temps perdu) are by the author. The author is very grateful to Nick Till and Sara Jane Bailes for their helpful suggestions when revising the chapter.
