Readers can read, and stop, and then, another time, resume. There are other books like that; we call them “wisdom literature,” and their matter is casually crystallized quite as often as it is likely to be exhaustively secreted. Of course I think there’s a real advantage in building up sufficient momentum to read straight through from “For a long time I would go to bed early …” to (six volumes on) “… between which so many days have come to range themselves—in Time.” But say you had provided (or permitted) a way of reading your book which took our new readers’ impatience into consideration, which summed up as they went along—even that kind of epitomizing might well strike your new readers as a sort of jungle, a sort of maze—you remember all those comparisons critics have made of the Search to a Gothic cathedral, or a Wagner opera, or even a flying carpet. You’re not generally considered pithy.

Yet all through the tangled volumes of your work, you do crystallize the world into aphorisms and epigrams—I think you’re as succinct as any of those classic French moralists politely murmuring somewhere behind you. Why sometimes you’re faster than La Rochefoucauld himself (as when you say, “It’s from adolescents who last long enough that life makes its old men”). If I could admonish your new readers to watch out for those “moments of speed,” as it were, among the prolonged dimensions and the plethoric details, I think they would find the going a lot easier than they’d expected.

But all I want to do, for now, is to make sure that in meeting your new readers you know what to expect of them, what you have to come to terms with—as I hope to tell them what to expect of you and what they have to come to terms with when they start reading the Search.

Oh, there is one more thing you ought to be aware of if you’re going to confront these new readers of yours with a modicum of good will. Even though you managed to include, with a really Tolstoyan appetite, such “modern” manifestations as the Great War, and airplanes, and telephones (wonderful what you did with them), for new American readers in the twenty-first century, the time you keep referring to as lost—in French lost means “wasted” as well—is over and done with, of no account. And a search for the past, even one recent enough to include automobiles and airplanes, is an unlikely, even an unlikeable enterprise. You see, we have a kind of allergy to the past; it’s our national disease, and the very assurance with which you insist that the past is within the present is likely to seem quite repellent, even offensive, to these new readers. I know you intend to be gentle with them—your ferocity is elsewhere—but I feel I must warn you about the reception you’re likely to meet when you release one of your zingers on the subject. I think it will take the American readers of the twenty-first century a long frequentation of themselves as well as of you to believe it when you say:

It’s no use trying to evoke our past, all the efforts of our intelligence are futile. The past lies hidden beyond the mind’s realm and reach, in some material object (in the sensation that material object gives us). And it depends entirely on chance whether or not we encounter that object before we die.

Finally, what your new readers will want to know is Who’s saying such a thing? Who tells it like it is? Who is the discoursing person? And these questions bring me to the other part of my project: introducing your new readers to you, Proust.

You’ll notice, dear new readers, that I haven’t said, “introducing … Marcel Proust …,” for I don’t believe that (biographical) person speaks in the Search at all. You’ll find that the discoursing person who is in fact the Narrator of the Search is hardly ever named, and if indeed he seems to be called Marcel once or twice, it’s extremely difficult to assign him the attributes of autobiography; he is the self who writes, and his relations with the self who votes and pays rent and has bad (or good) sex are uncertain and in some sense displaced. Proust himself has explained this neatly when he insists that Sainte-Beuve, for example, “fails to realize that a book is the product of a different ‘self’ from the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices.” In other words, it is futile to wonder if the Narrator of the Search is the Marcel Proust so many people remembered knowing after the book was published, and even before; the Narrator is simply another Proust, one quite frequently unrecognized by the author (in fact Marcel Proust couldn’t recognize the Narrator, since this other Proust is created by what is written, not by the author’s intention to write …).

For the Proust I want to introduce is a new, an odd, a modern kind of Narrator (I’ll try to explain what I mean by modern in a little while), for if he does really narrate (rather than philosophize or write what are now called “personal essays”), the narrative he writes will not apprehend a life perceived in a linear course of time, from year to year until the moment he decides to write “the story” down.

What is narrated is not the Narrator’s life, but his desire to write. Time thwarts this desire, tends it toward a conventional chronology (which must be continually subverted, for what is merely successive is surely lost: only the circle can be retrouvé, a word that means not only regained but rediscovered, recognized, repossessed)—and how many challenges, discouragements, and rivalries must be endured before the desire to write achieves an ultimate triumph (this is the best reason to read straight through to the end of Le Temps retrouvé, where the Narrator arrives at the Guermantes’s party and discovers what it is that he has to write (time regained) and thereby realizes, indeed reassures himself, that he will be able to write, though as we all like to discover when we close the last volume, it is already written.

So the reader learns that what the Search contains is indeed the Narrator’s life, but a life displaced, as I said. We’ve read a symbolic biography, or as one of Marcel Proust’s early biographers (by now there have been so many) calls it, “a symbolic story of Proust’s life.” In one of his prophetic letters Keats wrote: “A man’s life of any worth is a continual Allegory,” and Keats seemed quite certain, actually quite sanguine, about the legibility of the allegory—it was plain and pleasing to such a poet. But Proust’s favorite poet, Charles Baudelaire, had been more doubtful, more pessimistic, in fact more tragic about reading the sense of the allegory out of the given life-experience:

                         … as if in a shroud,
my heart lay buried in this allegory:

On Aphrodite’s island all I found
was a token gallows where my image hung …
Lord give me strength and courage to behold
my body and my heart without disgust!

Of course Proust had the courage to behold anything in his or anyone else’s body and its behaviors, but he was not so sure about what strength would be given him, or what strength remained of what had been given, and indeed in terms of his health it was a narrow squeak: Proust’s textual revisions recovered in the last twenty-five years have shown us how much was left to do, how much could not quite be done.

There is a whole other poetic drama (maker’s drama) in the recently published notebooks, the variant readings, the canceled (but plausible) versions: Marcel Proust’s wavering agon about where to place this humiliation, that death, the other sudden revelation (for instance the discovery that the two “ways” are the same). Indeed whole sections were wrested from what in linear terms would be their “right place” in order to serve the design, to fulfill the allegory; and Proust scholarship for the next twenty-five years will be instructing our inner graduate student as to what some of the decisions (and the indecisions) had been and what they became, more or less, finally. Certainly the requirements—the logic—of the allegory allowed, actually compelled, Proust to erase the differences, the contradictions between the novel and the discourse (as Descartes would have it), the treatise (as Spinoza), the essay (as Montaigne)….

This recognition brings us to the figure of Proust as a modern writer, which any introduction to the twentieth century’s greatest novelist must engage. Must, because Proust was twenty-nine when he entered that century in which he lived only twenty-two years; indeed he was thirty-five and had already written several unsuccessful versions of the Search before 1907. (Tolstoy was thirty when he completed his great autobiographical allegory Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth and began his career as a novelist.) We call Tolstoy the great(est?) novelist of the nineteenth century, though he lived a decade into the twentieth, and though the “essays” that finish off War and Peace (written the year Proust was born) seem obstructively “modern” on our first reading of that novel. Still, we do not regard Tolstoy as a “modern” novelist.

Yet Proust, who is as insistent about the “realism” of the world of the Search as anything in Anna Karenina, as inclusive about its “naturalism” as everything in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, is inveterately coupled or tripled—by Nabokov, for example—with Joyce and Biely and Kafka as indefectibly modern. I believe this is precisely because of the nature of that Narrator and his strangely absent presence, if I may put it that way. Proust’s every gigantic effort is to subtract his “empty” Narrator’s discovery (and possession) of time regained from what Gaston Bachelard calls the “false permanence” of biography. That is what pushes this enormous novel over the edge (the edge of encyclopedic allusion, of social chronicle, of literary emulation, of symbolist dithering, and of speculations concerning love, art, death, and time) into that enormous structure (abyss?) of repudiations which is our modernity.

This matter of locating Proust in such modernity is the most vexed question with which you must contend. For Proust is a writer between two centuries, between two aesthetic postulations (the “realism” of Balzac, Flaubert, Goncourt, etc., and the “symbolism” of Baudelaire, Huysmans, Mallarmé, etc., or, as Antoine Compagnon, the best critic of Proust-between-centuries, puts it, between etymology and allegory. Proust can be perceived as epitomizing the past achievements, but he can also be characterized as inaugurating new ones. His suspension between the fictional obligations of nineteenth-century masterpieces and those of twentieth-century “experiments” makes it difficult for his new readers to be comfortably aware of what he is doing; he seems on the one hand to be violating the laws (or at least the conventions) of an achieved program, and on the other hand to be regressing from explorations and discoveries into the tried-and-true (or at least the old reliable) methods of a familiar agenda.

I believe my introducing you to each other will be more convincing if I offer this notion of repudiations, of negativities, as the essential modernism of this great writer, for in the making of his gospel-novel, his fiction-as-evangel, Proust rejects, one after the other, precisely those realms of experience that have heretofore always constituted the claims of human success: the triumphs of worldliness, of friendship, and of love (all of which Proust declares to be failures, in fact disasters). It is only art, or rather the mediations to be found in art, that Proust urges as the means of regaining time, of recovering what is otherwise and always lost.

That is why he elevates to a special eminence in the Search four characters—Elstir, Vinteuil, Bergotte, and Berma: painter, composer, writer, and actress—artists whose creations point the way to redemption for the empty fifth character, the Narrator, who in several thousand pages reveals so few hints about his physical appearance that it is impossible to imagine what sort of man he is.