LIBRARY NOTES
John W. Kneller
Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time
Wednesday, October 30, 1996 at 5:30 PM
Members' Room; $60 per person
In our daily lives, Marcel Proust tells us, we need to find a continuity with the past. The past resides within us as impressions that we can resurrect through our faculty of memory. Our memory is often our defense against time. Time changes human beings, as we are all painfully aware, but does not alter the image we may have preserved of us.
The real nature of the world may be out there, but it also resides within us. In the external world, time is linear and chronological; illusion and change govern us. The world within - the world of reminiscence - promises stability, beauty, and peace.
In Search of Lost Time tells the narrator's "struggle to discern beneath matter, beneath experience, beneath words, something that is different from them." This struggle to find "the true paradises... that we have lost" reverses what we do in our everyday lives, where we look away from ourselves, "where vanity, passion and habit smother our true impressions."
Unlike Balzac's
La Comedie humaine and Zola's
Les Rougon-Macquart,
In Search of Lost Time is a single, long novel in which all the seven parts, or shorter novels, are serially connected. In our "Conversations", we will concentrate on the first novel,
Swann's Way, and the last,
Time Regained. These two novels contain most of the major themes of In Search of Lost Time and will, I hope, inspire you to read or reread the other five. We will use the three-volume Random/Vintage edition, which, though it bears the old Scott Moncrieff title, Remembrance of Things Past, contains essentially the same text as the more recent six-volume Random House/ Modern Library edition.
Now professor emeritus of CUNY's Graduate Center and president emeritus of Brooklyn College, John W. Kneller has had a long and distinguished career as professor of French literature, first at Oberlin College and then at Hunter College and the Graduate Center. He has served as associate editor of Yale French Studies and editor-in-chief of The French Review.
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