How to Begin a Novel: Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu and the Author–Reader Relation

This article offers a reconsideration, from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, of the opening to Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. The discussion reopens the debate on the founding status of the madeleine scene for the novel as a whole with reference to the narrator’s own promotion thereof and critical accounts offered by Beckett, Genette, Landy and Doubrovsky. While these critics have tended to identify a single founding cause to the narrative that is discovered in this scene, this article finds in Proust’s circuitous path to the start of his Recherche an inscription of the Lacanian account of subject-formation given in the eleventh seminar via the twin processes of alienation and separation. This account of the coming to desire, furthermore, is identified as consonant with Roland Barthes’s presentation of the author–reader relation in Le Plaisir du texte as a ‘dialectique du désir’. What Proust thus discovers in the madeleine scene, it is argued here, is desiring subjectivity itself as condition of possibility of narrative, furnishing simultaneously a narrating subject of the unconscious susceptible to involuntary memory, the economic means for that narration to proceed (metonymy) and, at the metatextual level, the mode of appeal identified by Barthes as proper to the author–reader relation itself.