The Growth of 'A la recherche du temps perdu': A Chronological Examination of Proust's Manuscripts from 1909 to 1914 (review)

Sadly, Anthony Pugh died before he could see this, perhaps his most significant contribution to scholarship, appear in print. Yet there is no feeling of a work left ragged or incomplete: it is a thoroughly crafted and impeccably researched magnum opus, and it will take many years of study to assess the implications of the analyses which it contains. Pugh takes up from where he had left off in The Birth of 'A la recherche du temps perdu': the subtitle of the present volumes provides an exact summary of the new enterprise. This is the most complex, fascinating and frustrating period in the genesis of Proust's novel, amazingly fertile in invention, yet chaotic in execution. What Pugh essentially aims to do is work through the totality of the Cahiers and other manuscripts, typescripts and proofs which were produced at this time, weighing up their place in the emergence and elaboration of the novel, their chronological position with respect to one another and within individual notebooks, difficulties related to dating and to thematic changes in the actual material, and generally speaking to the way in which scholars have engaged with this vast corpus. And he is not kind to them! Everyone (the present reviewer included) is the recipient of more or less sharp criticism for errors of transcription, interpretation or annotation; yet it is necessary for him to do this, in order to put forward as accurate an account as possible of Proust's novel as it unfolds.

The book is constructed with unremitting logic and rigour, the first volume dealing with the accumulation of manuscript material and leading up to the 1909 typescript of 'Combray' and then, further on, to that of the sequel as it existed in 1911. Included in this survey are those passages which look forward to later on in the novel, notably episodes connected with the Guermantes, with Venice, and with what was to become Le Temps retrouvé. The second volume gradually moves away from the Cahiers (except where new material is produced in them for inclusion in the typescript), and up to the Grasset proofs of 1913 and 1914. Basically, it is the story of how Proust went about giving coherent book-like shape to what had been material notable for its fragmentary constitution. Reading Pugh's painstaking re-assemblage of the various texts, placing them in what seems the most credible chronological order, one is aware more than before of the sheer struggle Proust had with his recalcitrant material. What we witness is a writer who is often unsure of his direction, hesitant yet at the same time obsessive; for example, in Cahier 27, which Pugh sees as an exercise book used for experiments (II, 797), we see all these things, as well as indecision over whether to attribute material to Swann or to the Narrator emerging as a character in his own right. Yet, in parallel to this seeming chaos, one senses ongoing purpose and constructional potential which was, of course, to be fully realized in the shape of a 'profound coherence' (II, 804). It may well turn out that, over the years, certain adjustments need to be made to the odd detail of Pugh's account. But taken as a whole, the study is truly magisterial in scope and execution, breathtaking in its erudition. Yet this is erudition lightly worn and with an eye to clarity: for example, in a deft typographical stroke Pugh employs bold print each time the number of a Cahier is mentioned, thus rendering crossreferencing all the easier for the reader. Finally, not the least of this book's many merits lies in its vindication of the genetic approach: all potential critics of this method, at least in the case of Proust, are now comprehensively silenced.