The French novelist Marcel Proust is widely considered one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. His most famous literary work, In Search of Lost Time, is an allegorical exploration of time and memory across seven volumes.
Of Lost Time, Future Science Group’s literary unit, which publishes historical letters of note, has shown much interest in Proust, particularly in an early draft of his novel, In Search of Lost Time. This draft, The Source of the Loir in Illier, offers a preparatory sketch of Proust’s narrator’s walks along the Vivonne River. In the later novel, Proust has shaped this narrative, and the narrator reflects on the route he took along this river on Easter Sundays as a child, delving into an exploration of memory and meaning.
Memory, Meaning, and the Proust Phenomenon
The passage in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time where the narrator recounts his childhood experiences of walking along the banks of the Vivonne River takes place halfway through the first of the seven volumes, Swann’s Way, soon after the scene of the “madeleine incident”. This scene is the impetus for the sparked memories of Combray, the narrator’s childhood town.
The “madeleine” section’s description of how the taste of a madeleine softened in tea evokes long-hidden memories of the people and places of the narrator’s past. The scene became so famous that the term “Proust phenomenon” has been widely adopted to refer to the experience of an involuntary memory.
In Guermantes Way, another volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator describes the route along the river, noting the picturesque view of water lilies and irises, the ripples of light and shadow, and a window of blue sky passing over a boat. Having never reached the river’s source as a child, the narrator describes the idealised beauty of his walk along the riverbanks.
It is only when the narrator becomes an adult that he can access the source of the river, which is described in volume six, The Fugitive. Proust is significantly disappointed upon observing the river’s source: “One of my other surprises was to see the ‘source of the Vivonne’, which I imagined as something as extraterrestrial as the entrance to the Underworld, and which was only a sort of square wash-house where bubbles rose.” (IV, p. 268)
The Illiers Manuscript Offers Insight Into Proust’s Literary Progression
The Source of the Loir in Illiers is an avant-texte for Proust’s riverside promenade. The manuscript was previously estimated to have been written between 1895 and 1903, but a 2018 Sotheby’s catalogue entry suggested the date was more likely between 1907 and 1908. This timeline covered the time when Proust was developing his “autobiographical, introspective tone”, thus offering a window into his experimentation and progression as a writer and the evolution of his novel.
The Illiers manuscript begins similarly to Swann’s Way, during Easter Week with long sentences that capture the beauty of the scene and personify nature to reflect the narrator’s feelings of joy. Aside from the descriptive language, Illiers contains the beginnings of Proust’s childhood that he would go on to explore in the novel.
Despite the similarities between the Illiers manuscript and Proust’s eventual novel, there are several differences between the two. While Proust continued to explore the sensations of childhood, his writing developed from autobiographical to fictional. In Proust’s Illiers, the town of his summer holidays became Combray, and the real Loir River became the fictional Vivonne. This evolution from autobiography to fiction was recognised in 1971 when the town was renamed Illiers-Combray on the centenary of Proust’s birth.
The key difference between the early manuscript and the novel is the fact that in Illiers, the narrator reaches the source of the Loir River when he is a child, unlike in the novel. In contrast to the adult narrator’s surprise at the disappointing realisation of the river source in The Fugitive, the description in the Illiersmanuscript of the washhouse retains an air of mystery. The small, washhouse becomes “as abstract and almost as holy as a certain figure of the River could have been for the Romans.”
Of Lost Time Aligns with Proust’s Exploration of Memory and Time
Following Proust’s manuscript to the source of his most iconic scenes allows for further insight into his creative process and the images that would eventually become his fictional autobiography, In Search of Lost Time. Widely recognised as “the most respected novel of the twentieth century”, it could not have progressed without the early workings recounted in manuscripts such as The Source of the Loir in Illiers.
Of Lost Time sees an alignment between itself and the Illiers manuscript. Letters and manuscripts are a written trail of an individual’s life, portraying their world view and relationships. Similarly to Proust’s efforts throughout In Search of Lost Time, Of Lost Time seeks letters of note to fully evoke “the imprint of the heart and the traces of a life.”
Of Lost Time helps modern readers understand our global history by publishing letters of note that illuminate key moments from the past few centuries. Of Lost Time’s letter collections include Enrico Caruso: By Himself, Christmas Cards for the Ages, Letters From the Holocaust, The Selected Letters of Winston Churchill, Letters for the Ages: Sport, and Writing to the Future: Letters to Save the Earth.
