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Proust's Way: A Field Guide to in Search of Lost Time

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It's like an addiction. First I order William Carter's great biography of Marcel Proust. It's brand new and at 800 pgs hardly an outline, but still quite a romp. After 300 pages I'm hooked. So I go order part I of the "The Search for Lost Time". Ever since high school I've been telling myself: someday, someday...Well I just turned 60 and it's now someday. One hundred pages into "Swann's Way" and I am in a swelter. Whoa... I knew Proust was not something one dips only their little toe into. Luckily along comes my life raft!

I've been a fan of Roger Shattuck ever since I read his The Banquet Years and he now, just in time, he has this guide to Proust. Now I am juggling three books at once and one of them 3000 pages in length. I think I should have started at age 50.

The guide has been a godsend! Shattuck can balance the academic with the popular. Right off the bat you get hit with words like hypotaxis and parataxis, but not to fret, he nicely explains in simple terms what they mean. And he understands that not all of us stayed awake in French class and kindly provides translations of the French quotes. Even better, he does not sneer at those of use who will read the Search in English saying that the newest translation is more than adequate.

Shattuck debunks the common idea that Proust's Search is a prissy and doting exposition of the ways and byways of the fin de siecle French upper class. Far from it. Proust was a wicked observer with a keen sense of humor. Shattuck tells us that: "Reading Proust bears many resemblances to visiting a zoo. The specimens he collected from the remotest corners of society amaze and amuse us in their variety." In fact there is a whole chapter in the Guide on the comic vision in the Search.

The most important chapter in the book for me at my entry point to reading the Search is "How to Read a Roman-Fleuve." Here is a multitude of tips on how to deal with many of the complexities in the Search. He also points out that we must pay attention and what seems to be going nowhere eventually comes together. And he has lots more to aid the reader He has some nice charts for keeping track of "places", "characters", "couples", and "scenes." There are other chapters on Proust's sources, the length issue, etc. which I have skimmed through but I am sure they will become more valuable as I penetrate further into the Search.

This is not a book to read in place of reading Proust. It is clearly intended as a guide to a first time reader or one re-reading the Search. If you do buy it, you will be sorely tempted to read Proust's "The Search for Lost Time, which by the way is the newest translation of what was once called "Remembrance of Things Past." If you intend to read the Search, this book is a must.

Now if I only new what a Roman-Fleuve was.

Roger Shattuck has provided a book that truly lives up to its subtitle: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time. The highly credentialed and astutely discerning author gives both the first-time reader of Proust and the Proustian scholar useful information that will help them read, enjoy, and plumb the depths of Proust's massive oeuvre. I count myself among the former group, having made a number of attempts at reading In Search of Lost Time, but always managing to stall out somewhere in the middle of Swann's Way and then jumping around the other volumes looking for amusing sections.

Although certain chapters have been previously published, Shattuck has taken care to fully integrate them into this Field Guide, and readers will probably be best served by reading the book from cover to cover. Some chapters, I suspect, will be more meaningful to me after I've read more of the novel, but the ones I found most useful as a novice Proustian were "Proust's Complaint" (the "clouding of the mind at the moment of achieving what it most desires") and "How to Read a Roman-Fleuve" (Check out the footnote on p. 25: it gives an abbreviated reading plan for those who aren't ready to read the entire 3,000 page novel from beginning to end). I also found the discussions about the English translations in the chapter on "Continuing Disputes" especially fascinating.

Owners of the Random House/Vintage 3-volume Rembrance of Things Past should be warned that all citations are keyed to the 6-volume Modern Library edition of In Search of Lost Time. This is frustrating if you want to read a passage in context, but, on the whole, is not especially problematic since Shattuck quotes the passages that are most germane to his arguments. The Selected Bibliography is extremely short, but I suspect every work that made it to the list has earned Shattuck's high regard and is worth looking into.

Proust's Way is a thoughtful work that any serious reader of Proust will want to keep at his or her elbow when reading In Search of Lost Time.

Roger Shattuck's book is a helpful guide to the most complex of novels. He provides some insight into Proust's thought and writing without being overly technical. He doesn't treat the text as sacred scripture and suggests various ways of encountering the novel without reading it from cover to cover. Also, he examines some of the peripheral concerns of Proustiana from the perspective of an English-speaker such as the value of the Scott-Moncrief translation and the various attempts to improve it. He reviews the few attempts at a film of the novel and points out where they succeed and where they fail. (This is the first I've heard of a film of "Time Regained". I hope it comes to the US soon.) His diatribe against the new Pleiade critical edition is excessively vehement, but I'm glad that someone shares my opinion that reading an author's early drafts and notes distracts one from understanding the finished work and is not a task for the general reader. This book is not an introduction, but an aid for the person who has already read the novel at least partially.

This seems an excellent introduction to Proust, but as I began reading it I had an odd sense of deja vu. That's because it's more or less a reprint of a book Shattuck wrote in the early 70s. It's still a great book, but the earlier one (simply titled Marcel Proust) was a very affordable paperback and this is an expensive hardback. The fact that the book is largely a reprint is mentioned in passing on the last pages of the volume, but isn't at all obvious from the jacket or promotional material or the front matter. Funny the way that works...

Although there are several superb biographies to Proust in print, there are comparably few good introductory works. This book by Shattuck is likely the one that most sophisticated readers will profit by the most.

The book is rather loosely structured. It is arranged thematically, but there is not a lot of logic to the arrangement of the themes. For instance, there is no obvious reason for why the chapter on "Continuing Disputes" is placed where it is, or placed in the volume at all. It is one of the more interesting chapters in the book, but it is more a chapter in which a lot of rabbits are chased than any real issues introduced. In the end, the book is a somewhat rambling affair. The upshot in the end, however, is that Shattuck discusses virtually every theme in Proust.

There are two aspects of Shattuck's approach to Proust that I thoroughly applaud and that anyone coming to Proust for the first time should heartily embrace. First, he adamantly refuses to take the approach developed by Proust's great English-language biographer George Painter, and imitated by a host of his weaker readers, and treating IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME as material for finding all the real life models for Proust's characters. As one of his French readers has pointed out, one can read much of Proust's life into the SEARCH, but one cannot read much of life out of it. In the end, focusing on what character inspired who tends to take one away from the novel and back to a gossipy preoccupation with Proust's life. Shattuck simply refuses to do this. Secondly, Shattuck, although himself an academic, refuses to acknowledge that Proust is primarily the property of the academics. He eschews editions of Proust's text weighted down by largely unusable critical apparatuses. Likewise, while he writes in a highly literate fashion, he refuses to get bogged down in any of the more arcane literary debates concerning Proust.

Speaking of not focusing on Proust's biography in reading Proust, I would like to take issue with the reviewer who found fault with Shattuck's tacit acceptance of the Narrator's affair with Albertine being a heterosexual one, and for three reasons. First, the reviewer assumes in making that statement that a reading that takes as primary the real-life sources of Proust's characters. The problem with this approach is that it overlooks the fact that it is a work of literature, and Proust did not leave his real life sources alone, but remolded them into fiction. Proust composed Albertine as a female, and a quite convincing one at that. Unless one happens to know that Albertine is modeled on several homosexual relationships, one isn't likely to think of the Albertine affair as a homosexual one. Second, "Albertine" is not based on any single, or on just a couple, of primary characters. For instance, Proust wrote many of the Albertine sections before meeting Alfred Agostinelli (commonly regarded as the most significant model for "Albertine"), who caused him to expand the character and the plot. Third, many present day readers don't seem to realize that Proust completely feminized homosexual relationships. At no place does he conceive homosexual affairs in current terms, as two males engaged in an affectionate relationship. In all Proust's affairs, one of the two involved took the "female" role. Likewise, throughout his work, he views male-female love as basic, with one or other of the male participants in an "inverted" relationship (his term) substituting for a female.

Shattuck's guide is at times brilliant, at others, pedantic. The opening chapters about Proust's life and ways to approach the novel are surprisingly the best-an excellent resource for beginning Proust readers. I highly recommended them. The middle chapters outlining Proust's "vision" and aesthetics make some intelligent and convincing points, but are over-general and are curiously earnest in their tone. I think he's very articulate about the "double I" (Marcel vs. Narrator), but neologisms like "soul error" to explain Marcel's dissipation are confusing, and the diagrams seem to function to convince rather than to elucidate. Chapter VIII, "Continuing Disputes," contains some useful information for scholars about the current state of Proust studies, but borders on self-indulgence. And while I appreciate his shattering criticism of the "critique génétique" behind the new Pléiade edition of the novel, at other times Shattuck just sounds like the curmudgeon of Proust criticism. The book ends with several appendices, which make the book conclude in a stutter. In conclusion: I would recommend the first chapters to beginning Proust readers, but beyond that it did not add much to my understanding of Proust's novel.

The book by Roger Shattuck is a good introduction to Proust. It's a shame however that it's not obvious from the jacket that the book has some 100 pages in common with Shattuck's book on Proust in the Fontana Modern Masters series (1974). Fortunately the rest (200 pp.) has some interesting new insights and makes the book still worth buying.

Roger Shattuck has written on Marcel Proust and his "In Search of Lost Time" for over forty years, and in PROUST'S WAY: A Field Guide he describes the book for the current generation of readers, who now have many choices for how to approach the work. The book contains portions both for those who haven't made their way through even the first volume yet, as well as chapters for those champion readers who want to look back and reflect on the whole seven-volume work.

Material for those who haven't--or have barely--begun includes a biography of Proust, some discussion of his general aesthetics, and "How to Read a Roman-Fleuve". This last part is useful as it gives several charts to understand how characters relate to each other. There are some "spoilers" here, although it's hardly more than you'd learn from the dust covers of the Modern Library editions, and Proust isn't just about plot anyway. There's also a very helpful graph here of how in the course of the novel the protagonist ends up a failure, while at the same time the narrator becomes a success.

For the reader who has made it through the entire Recherche, there are several chapters providing a critical view of Proust's literary technique and themes. Shattuck identifies four scenes at the heart of the Recherche as encapsulating a distincting comic vision, which many readers miss because of its very obviousness. Shattuck writes on Proust's notions of memory and recognition, as well as art and idolatry. Very fascinating is Shattuck's venture on what the structure of the Recherche is, what holds it together during seven volumes and four thousand pages, as well as what it might have become had its author only lived long enough to tie up loose ends.

For me the most interesting chapter was "Continuing Disputes", suitable for all readers, even those who don't know if they want to embark on the Recherche. The author writes a passionate, though not entirely convincing, polemic against the 1987 Gallimard "Pleiade" text, where there's almost as much cut text and critical material present as there is the final novel. He also talks about English translations, explaining exactly how Kilmartin and then Enright revised the old Moncrieff version. It is a pity that this was written a bit too early to cover the new Penguin version, with each book done by a different translator. Film adaptations are also mentioned. Shattuck admires the Pinter screenplay, and I agree that Proust fans should check it out. The last two portions of this chapter are on philosophical notions in Proust, which I found overly academic for a book marketed to the layman.

You don't *have* to read this or any other guide before starting on the Recherche (as Proust's masterwork is often called, from the abbreviation of its French title). Proust's work is massive in its proportions, but fairly easy to follow; you just have to stick with it. Still, for those interested in the general subject of his novel, guides like this provide something entertaining to read.

It's interesting if you're already interested in Proust but it's not an introduction. It's more of a book for someone who has already read at least half way through A la Recherche. As a cost-effective introduction and a sort of Cliff's Notes (maybe there are real Cliff's Notes on Proust) I would recommend Time Regained (the Enright translation) with A Guide to Proust both in one volume published by Random House in the Modern Library series. One problem is that Shattuck's style can be difficult e.g. "We live by synecdoche, by cycles of being" and "this iridescence never resolves itself completely into an unitive point of view." By the time you've read 250 pages of this you could have read a lot of Proust.
He is very kind to the Moncrieff translation, which I find too full of archaic English. He accepts without comment that Albertine is female. To me the Albertine episodes make more sense as a homosexual love affair and one Proustian I asked about this said that this was a common theory.

No book as good as In Search of Lost Time needs a reading plan. Books like Shattuck's, while not without interest, create a silly mystique about texts which are quite approachable on their own.

Bottom line: if you're looking up this book and reading this review, you can read and enjoy Proust without help. If you find that In Search of Lost Time is too confusing or boring (rather than the invigorating, funny, moving spectacle it struck me as being) then stop and read something else. It's OK if it's not your sort of book. How to's and guides are for people who would rather talk about a book or be seen holding a copy in public than actually settle down and read it.