As a follow-up to my previous post (in French — sorry, I was too tired for anything else), I just wanted to make a few more notes on Chantal Robin’s little book about the structure and themes of Time Regained.

I already wrote about the first two structuring elements she notes: initiation (a long journey through darkness culminating in a near-death experience and a rebirth/ illumination as the way to acquire intimate understanding of the world, of one’s place in it and of one’s purpose in life); and cycles, both of the natural and the human world. These account for much of the obscurity and the length of In Search of Lost Time: because Proust wanted his reader to experience the initiation (rather than the state of being initiated), he used every device he could to recreate the feelings of disorientation and duration associated with a quest. While, until the final revelation, his purpose remains hidden, he leaves “clues” in his text, many of them mythological (a way to consider In Search of… is a an apprenticeship of the signs through which the world talks to us). These clues, which one can only understand retrospectively, are the “useless”, asphyxiating details first-time readers often complain about.

The third element Chantal Robin identifies is synthesis as the intellectual mode of comprehension favored by the narrator. She shows how (to Proust’s narrator) ”good” and “evil”, “beautiful” and “ugly”, “moral” and “immoral” are facets to the same truths, and are equally indispensable to comprehension. In her view, Proust relies on an aesthetics of the link, on an encapsulation of worlds into every little detail (for instance, a book that has been associated with a family scene, bourgeois life and the countryside should evoke to the reader everything that Proust has said about any of these subjects, any time the book is mentioned).

This final third of the book did not bring much that was new to me, and I thought that some of the arguments were a little far-fetched, but overall I reiterate my recommendation. I don’t know if the booklet is translated in English, but for anyone who can read French and whose imagination is susceptible to get taken by the mythological, this is an excellent book to make you want to read Proust!