In Search of Lost Time
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"I have always said and have proved by experiment that the most powerful soporific is sleep itself. After having slept profoundly for two hours, having fought against so many giants, and formed so many life-long friendships, it is far more difficult to awake than after taking several grammes of veronal. And so, reasoning from one thing to the other, I was surprised to hear from the Norwegian philosopher, who had it from M. Boutroux, "my eminent colleague pardon me, my brother," what M. Bergson thought of the peculiar effects upon the memory of soporific drugs. Naturally," M. Bergson had said to M. Boutroux, if one was to believe the Norwegian philosopher, "soporifics, taken from time to time in moderate doses, have no effect upon that solid memory of our everyday life which is so firmly established within us. But there are other forms of memory, loftier, but also more unstable. One of my colleagues lectures upon ancient history. He tells me that if, overnight, he has taken a tablet to make him sleep, he has great difficulty, during his lecture, in recalling the Greek quotations that he requires. The doctor who recommended these tablets assured him that they had no effect upon the memory. 'That is perhaps because you do not have to quote Greek,' the historian answered, not without a note of derisive pride." [1] tr. Scott-Moncrieff |
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In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past (fr. À la recherche du temps perdu) is a semi-autobiographical novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust. His most prominent work, it is popularly known for its extended length and the notion of involuntary memory, the most famous example being the "episode of the madeleine". The title In Search of Lost Time has gained in popularity since the publication of a new translation by that name in the 1990s, but it is also widely referred to by its original English title Remembrance of Things Past.
Published in France between 1913 and 1927, many of the novel's ideas, motifs, and scenes appear in adumbrated form in Proust's unfinished novel, Jean Santeuil (1896–99), and in his unfinished hybrid of philosophical essay and story, Contre Sainte-Beuve (1908–09).
At the risk of over-simplification, In Search of Lost Time can be viewed as a vast bildungsroman in which the neurasthenic narrator discovers that he is a writer after a lifetime spent distracted by society and love. It is also a meditation on time, memory and the superiority of art in recapturing past experiences.
