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5 5 R P R O U S T I N T H E D R E A M T I M E M A T T H E W S P E L L B E R G With Proust, the beginning of the beginning contains it all in all its infinite strangeness. ‘‘Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure,’’ reads the modest first line of In Search of Lost Time: ‘‘For a long time I went to bed early.’’ French critics have long been fascinated with this sentence, and especially with its tense, for the adverb longtemps and the perfective ‘‘je me suis couché’’ are somewhat mismatched (one would expect, under normal circumstances , the imperfect, ‘‘je me couchais’’). But the subtleties of grammar have tended to obscure a much stranger and grander fact, a fact that is key to all that follows: that this three-thousandpage novel begins with its narrator and protagonist falling asleep. Even though many novels contain scenes of dreaming and sleep, this is an unprecedented move. In the end the novel is an emphatically waking art form, mostly because it is an emphatically social art form, and people must usually be awake in order to be in communication with one another. Beginnings of novels are usually crowded and alert. In Madame Bovary, for example, Flaubert lifts the curtain on a schoolroom where the young Charles Bovary is about to endure the first, though not the worst, of his many humiliations. In Ulysses, Joyce makes the very classi- 5 6 S P E L L B E R G Y cal decision to begin at daybreak, with Buck Mulligan waving his bowl of shaving lather at Stephen Dedalus and pretending to be a Catholic priest (in chapter 4 there is a second beginning, again at daybreak, with Bloom fixing breakfast for his indolent and unfaithful wife). On the first page of Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann gives us little Toni stumbling over her catechism with three generations of the family surrounding her, no one yet knowing that she will be the only one of them still alive on the last page. Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, meanwhile, begins by somewhat presumptuously eavesdropping on a conversation already in progress, so that we overhear Mrs Ramsey make her promise to James that he can go, on the following day, to the lighthouse. And while it’s true that on the first page of Anna Karenina someone is asleep, it’s already morning, and he’s asleep only so that he can wake up and thus make explicit his entry (or rather reentry) into the circumstances of the novel: Stiva, dwelling on a pleasant dream, suddenly remembers that he’s been sleeping in the study because his household is in shambles over his a√air with the governess, and he feels quite miserable. Stiva’s awakening on the first page of Anna Karenina is emblematic of the experience of reading a nineteenth-century novel. On the first page we open our eyes as if out of a long sleep and find everyone else has been up and about for many hours. We are suddenly and completely engulfed in plans for marriage or divorce , the uproar of servants and masters, ambitions for social advancement and financial gain, furnishings and journeys and debts. How strange, then, for Proust’s novel to start in the bedroom – and not as the sunlight filters through the windows or as a lover is just leaving, but rather in the very moment when consciousness is about to be obliterated, and, even more important, when the narrator is about to be cut o√ by his closing eyelids from all companionship , to enter that state of being when the obligations of family and friends and society ladies in their salons are all temporarily suspended. (The editor Marc Humblot rejected the manuscript saying, ‘‘I cannot understand how monsieur could spend thirty pages describing how he tosses and turns in his bed before falling asleep.’’) If such a move has antecedents, they come not from the novel but from the medieval dream-vision. Books that begin with P R O U S T I N T H E D...

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