7.32 Proust — Du côté de chez Swann — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read about 2,000 words of Marcel Proust's Du côté de chez Swann : the famous opening, Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure , and the scene of the madeleine dipped in tea. Follow Proust's long sentences by finding their main clause and letting the rest unfold around it. Understand involuntary memory: a taste that brings back a whole lost world without being asked. Notice how the tenses move, in a single page, from the narrator's present to his past and to a past more distant still. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English d’ouvrir les yeux pour fixer le kaléidoscope de l’obscurité to open my eyes and stare at the kaleidoscope of the darkness La vue de la petite madeleine ne m’avait rien rappelé avant que je n’y eusse goûté The sight of the little madeleine had reminded me of nothing before I had tasted it Elle envoya chercher un de ces gâteaux courts et dodus appelés Petites Madeleines qui semblaient avoir été moulés dans la valve rainurée d’une coquille de Saint-Jacques. She sent for one of those short, plump cakes called Petites Madeleines, which looked as though they had been moulded in the grooved valve of a scallop shell. Je rétrograde par la pensée au moment où je pris la première cuillerée de thé. In thought I go back to the moment when I took the first spoonful of tea. Je pose la tasse et me tourne vers mon esprit. I put down the cup and turn towards my mind. Cette croyance survivait pendant quelques secondes à mon réveil This belief lived on for a few seconds after I woke Prerequisites : 7.31 — this is the last reading of the phase, after 7.31 Reading . You need the vocabulary of the mind ( l'esprit , la conscience ) from 5.20 Vocabulary , and the patience the long readings of this phase have built. About this text Marcel Proust (1871–1922) spent the last fourteen years of his life writing a single novel in seven volumes, À la recherche du temps perdu , In Search of Lost Time . The first volume, Du côté de chez Swann , appeared in 1913 after several publishers had refused it; the second won the Prix Goncourt in 1919. The narrator, an unnamed man who will become a writer, tries to recover his whole life, from his childhood in the small town of Combray to the society of Paris. The novel opens with a man who lies awake at night and remembers the rooms where he has slept. For years, he says, the only part of Combray he could remember was the drama of going to bed. Then, one winter day, his mother gives him tea and a small cake called a madeleine. He dips a piece of it in the tea, tastes it, and feels an extraordinary joy he cannot explain. He tries again and again to find its cause, and at last the memory comes back: the taste of the madeleine that his aunt Léonie gave him, dipped in her lime-blossom tea, on Sunday mornings in Combray. And with it, the whole of Combray rises from his cup. The text here gives the first three paragraphs of the novel, about 650 words, and, after an omission marked […], the madeleine scene, about 1,300 words, from the edition published in Paris by Gallimard in 1946, as transcribed in French Wikisource. Reading Proust The long sentence. Proust's sentences can run for half a page. Look first for the subject and the main verb, then read the rest as additions: parentheses, comparisons, second thoughts. The last sentence of the excerpt is built on a single comparison, Et comme dans ce jeu où les Japonais s'amusent , followed by de même maintenant , and ends, after many clauses, with est sorti, ville et jardins, de ma tasse de thé . Three times. The narrator writes from a present: Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure , where the passé composé ties the past to the time of writing, and je ne sais pourquoi . He tells a past moment, the winter day of the madeleine, in the literary past: je tressaillis . And he recovers a more distant past, his childhood in Combray, in the imperfect. In the middle of the scene, the narration even slips into the present to make the search immediate: Je bois une seconde gorgée , Je pose la tasse et me tourne vers mon esprit . Involuntary memory. Proust distinguishes the memory we call up deliberately, which gives only dead images, from the memory that rises by chance from a sensation, a taste or a smell, and brings the past back alive. The madeleine is its most famous example, and une madeleine de Proust has become an ordinary French expression for any small thing that brings back the past. The subjunctive of the past. Proust uses the imperfect and pluperfect subjunctive of formal writing: avant que je n'y eusse goûté (pluperfect), quoique je ne susse pas encore (imperfect). Recognise them as subjunctives; you will not need to write them. Reading it a second time, part by part Going to sleep. For a long time the narrator went to bed early. He fell asleep reading and woke believing he was part of his book; he struck a match to see the time; he woke in the dark not knowing where he was. Combray reduced to a bedtime. Many years later, all that remained of Combray for him was the stage of his evening drama, the anguish of going up to bed. The cake. One winter day, cold and low, he accepts his mother's tea and a madeleine, and a joy invades him at the first spoonful. The search. He drinks again, and the joy weakens; he turns to his own mind, clears it, tries again and again to bring up the image that is bound to the taste. The memory. Suddenly it appears: aunt Léonie 's madeleine on Sunday mornings. Then the old grey house, the garden, the town, the streets and the church rise one after another, like Japanese paper flowers opening in water. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. Combray For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, my candle barely out, my eyes w