La Création romanesque de Proust: la genèse de 'Combray' by Akio Wada (review)

The rich holdings of Proust manuscripts (cahiers de brouillon, cahiers de montage, and dactylogrammes) in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the fact that practically all such material is kept in a single place, have ensured that À la recherche du temps perdu has been a prime candidate for 'genetic' investigations. The bibliography of Akio Wada's new volume (he is already the author of an Index général des cahiers de brouillon de Marcel Proust (Osaka: Osaka University Press, 2009)) lists sixty-five such studies (books and articles), by thirty different authors, bearing chiefly on the early part of Proust's novel. Wada examines material composed, reworked, copied, or typed between the end of 1908 and the summer of 1911, and attempts to use it to trace the emergence of the 'Combray' we now know from Proust's original project of an essay on Sainte-Beuve, to be framed in an account of a morning spent with his mother. He also discusses elements of Un amour de Swann, and returns to the vexed question of how much of Le Temps retrouvé (the last volume of the finished work) was actually composed at this very early stage. These are questions of abiding interest to Proustians, but this book will be of value chiefly to specialists already deeply versed in the study of his manuscripts. The opening of Wada's Chapter 3 gives a good impression of the level of detail at which he works: 'Il faut pénétrer dans le labyrinthe des ajouts autographes qui parsèment les feuillets de la dactylographie [de 'Combray']. Les différences de couleur de l'encre suggèrent qu'ils ne datent pas de la même époque' (p. 43). He is soon able to establish (pace an earlier scholar) that certain red-ink numbers appearing in Carnet 1 of the manuscript relate to red-ink additions to the typescript. This allows him to adjust some dating by a matter of months. Most of the book is taken up with highly technical arguments of this kind with other Proust 'geneticists'. His sixth chapter (in Part II), 'Du Contre Sainte-Beuve au Temps retrouvé', will be of most interest to the non-specialist reader of Proust, and in his Conclusion (pp. 168-69) a helpful chart gives Wada's own account of the order of writing and typing of the various components of what would eventually become the first and last volumes of Proust's novel. Well-funded specialist libraries wishing to complete the 'Recherches proustiennes' series will be the most likely buyers.