A Reader's Guide to Proust's In Search of Lost Time (review)

David Ellison's newest book will most likely draw comparisons to two other "guides" to Proust's magnum opus, Patrick Alexander's Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time: A Reader's Guide to The Remembrance of Things Past and Roger Shattuck's Proust's Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time. Ellison, however, quickly distinguishes himself, focusing "on the immediate experience of reading Proust, word by word, line by line" (ix). One expects to open Alexander's book at particular points of the Recherche: the introduction of a curious new character or, for summary, at the end of a particularly intense episode or chapter. In many ways, this makes Alexander's book more a useful reference than a reader's guide. Likewise, many readers would open Shattuck's book when they have finally closed the Recherche, looking for over-arching themes throughout the novel. Ellison's, in contrast, is to be opened simultaneously with Pléiade's 1987-89 edition of the Recherche (or Penguin's new collection of translations by Lydia Davis, et al. which Ellison quotes in tandem with the French, the only of the three "guides" to use the newer translations, rather than the Kilmartin-Montcrieff-Enright translations). Rather than offering a plot summary, like Alexander's introductory "What Happens in Proust," Ellison's book attempts to "emulate Virgil to [the] reader's Dante, and disappear once he has pointed out salient areas of the landscape, leaving the more arduous, but also more rewarding stages of the peregrination to the literary pilgrim" (x).

As a guide, it therefore accompanies the reader in the chronology of her reading. For a novel beginning in a type of in medias res, regularly prefiguring important episodes with often overlooked, passing glances, and where continuous time is of questionable import, this presents many points of difficulty. Ellison deals with these much as Proust had, mentioning such prefigurations and temporal twists and turns "sometimes only in passing, sometimes in more detail" (30). In other words, spoilers ahead! Of course, the in media res structure of the novel itself, its multiple prefigurations and recalls, reduces the likelihood that Proust's Recherche is, if ever, read from beginning to end in order to gain the usual compositional "closure" of a realist novel, or to determine the ultimate fate of all the characters. Ellison's successes with accompanying the reader, continuously from front cover to back (so to speak), should not imply that the numerous themes, unattached to specific episodes, that present themselves in the course of the Recherche are glossed over. Rather, and this is one of the many strengths of the book, these wide-ranging themes are given immediate context in the story itself, through a deeper investigation of some object, place, character, interaction, citation, etc. Indeed, Ellison switches at times between the distinct episodes and the themes in themselves that are spread over conversations or characters throughout the same book. The choices made in determining which episodes and themes to highlight represent, once again, Ellison's devotion as guide. While running through many of the most obvious episodes and themes (e.g. mother's kiss, the madeleine, the perpetual adoration, Dreyfus, memory, homosexuality, etc.), Ellison gives particular attention to those episodes and themes that drive the novel, if not exactly the plot, forward and will therefore likely come into question in the reader's later Proustian "peregrinations." Once the placement of the spotlight on the particular episodes and themes that will aid the reader through the novel has been determined, a second, and perhaps more important, balance is carefully struck.

Ellison is able to find this balance by simultaneously avoiding both the temptation to delve too deeply into a convoluted analysis and the tendency to simply summarize or retell the plot points. For a novel that sacrificed narrative and temporal continuity so easily, avoiding a simple retelling of the plot may seem particularly easy, making...