Recently published by Bernard Grasset, 61, rue des Saints-Pères,
Paris.
A la recherche du temps perdu : Du côté de chez Swann
by M. Marcel Proust, 1 vol. in-18 ... 3.50.
Under this mysterious title M. Marcel Proust has just published the
first installment of a novel which will be of no less interest to the
philosopher than to the artist. The work is the most moving literary
illustration of the famous theories of M. Bergson and the new philosophy.
Balzac wrote La Recherche de l'Absolu; M. Marcel Proust,
desperate to attain a different object than the impressions left by things
on our soul, has turned to the past, this "time lost" out of which the
present is created and which is pregnant with the future. With a curiosity
for life, not simply as an observer who approaches it from the outside, it
is through imagery that reality lays its evidence in the depths of the
unconscious and the emotional memories through which he perceives the
variety of human life. M. Marcel Proust is the realist of the soul.
His intuitive analysis goes further than any other into the sensibility of
human existence and his style is possessed of a marvellous subtlety in
order to translate everything that is fugitive, fleeting, in the
underlying impressions that make up the fabric of our life.
It seemed to us that up until now music alone was suitable to suggest
in such subtle fashion the emotions in their natural flow. Equally well
does the affair of Swann, who is in love with Odette de Crécy and for whom
love is transformed into an anxious, dark and unhealthy passion,
accompanied by all the agitations of the most cruel jealousy, move us like
a song of anguish that betrays the soul's interior to the full. A whole
life unfolds in innumerable and precise detail which holds us, disorders
us and overwhelms us.
This highly original novel is the work of an authentic artist who has
been able to make use of the rarest discoveries of the new psychology.
Single page "press kit", included with the first printings of Du
còté de chez Swann, intended for the use of journalists to
publicize the book. It is unclear whether Proust had a hand in writing
this or not. Librairie Jean-Claude Vrain, Catalogue Marcel Proust
première partie: "There is little doubt that this Prière
d'inserer was written by the book's author, as is generally the
rule in the world of publishing." But in a letter to Henri Gheon, 6 Jan
1914, Proust wrote: "Whereas the eulogies and the reproaches that I
receive for having 'declared that I wanted to convey in a novel the
philosophy of M. Bergson' leave me as stupefied as someone who has had
delivered to his house, as a result of a prank, twenty parcels that he
has never ordered. I have never had any such idea! And as I see an
announcement for the book (probably sent and written by my publisher)
where this same noble intention is attributed to me, I ask you to
believe, if you have read it too, that I never had any such preposterous
intention. I have enough to do with what I have felt, and to try and
convert it - in so far as I have been given the days and the strength to
do so - into clear ideas, without trying to put M. Bergson's philosophy
into a novel!"
Created 21.12.22