Proust: Quick Thoughts on Finishing the Novel Again

Proof of purchase.  The newest English translations of Proust's great novel. 

 

I just finished Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time for the fourth time. Naturally, I have a lot of things floating around in my mind. It's so vast! One thing struck me like a ton of bricks this time around. There is no burial or funeral for Albertine!

It’s startling when you notice it, like stumbling across a missing chapter that no one seems to talk about. Albertine disappears from the narrative in terms of ritual or closure. She dies offstage, and then... nothing. No funeral. No burial. No mention of it. No real communal moment of grief. Just Marcel’s introspection, spiraling, rationalizing, eroticizing, analyzing. Her death becomes yet another hall of mirrors for his self-obsession, jealousy, projection.

The absence of a burial feels symbolic. It’s like Proust is doubling down on the internal landscape—reality filtered completely through Marcel’s consciousness, where even death is subsumed by memory and desire. Albertine becomes vaporous after her death, even more so than she was in life (where she was already elusive, mutable, constantly reinterpreted). Her physicality, her actual personhood, gets wiped out. No ritual, no shared mourning. She's just folded back into the endless churn of Marcel’s thoughts.

There’s also something eerie and telling about that lack of external social response to her death. No one else seems to mark it with ceremony. It’s as if she never existed beyond his obsession, as if she were only ever a projection, a kind of character he cast in his drama of longing and control.

It makes me wonder if Proust deliberately sidestepped the funeral to underscore just how solipsistic the narrator’s world is. Or maybe to deny her the dignity of an ending. After all, closure belongs to the living, not the dead, and Marcel doesn’t really allow Albertine to die—he keeps her alive in speculation and fantasy and doubt, even in absence.

A novel obsessed with time, memory, decay, and the passage of life, and yet it conspicuously avoids the most formal, communal ritual for marking death. There are no funerals in the novel. Not one. Even characters we know intimately,, like Marcel’s grandmother, who gets one of the most devastating deathbed scenes in literature, dissolve from the world without ceremony. It’s almost ghostly, like the entire social fabric of mourning has been stripped away.

And considering how saturated the novel is with ceremony—salons, social games, dinners, greetings, the exhausting rituals of aristocratic and bourgeois society—it’s a deliberate absence. Proust gives us pages on the exact way someone enters a room or pronounces a name, but death? No collective pause, no final act. It makes death feel more internalized, more like a private shift than a public event.

There’s also something metaphysical lurking here. In In Search of Lost Time, people die, but they don’t “go away” in a conventional sense. They linger as impressions, distortions, refractions through memory. Or, many times, they are forgotten and only recalled in passing, so to speak. It's like Proust is saying the social formality of death—the funeral—is irrelevant compared to the real event, which is how memory handles the departed. Funerals provide structure, maybe even relief, but memory keeps the dead alive in a more stubborn, sometimes perverse way. It refuses closure.

I read the most recent English translations this time, the Penguin editions. The ones edited by Christopher Prendergast with each volume translated by a different hand: Lydia Davis, James Grieve, Mark Treharne, etc. They are remarkable for how they sound more like contemporary English while still keeping Proust’s labyrinthine structure and delicate register. They're less baroque than the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright lineage, more restrained, a little more crystalline in places though still unmistakably Proustian.

Lydia Davis's Swann's Way in particular stirred up a lot of conversation when it came out in 2003. Her sensitivity to the sentence, her almost obsessive fidelity to syntax, gave the text a sort of taut clarity. Some purists think the older translations captured more of the “music,” while others argue Davis and company get you closer to the psychological texture of the original French. It’s a matter of whether you want your Proust shimmering or scalpel-precise.

Honestly, I prefer Enright most of the time. There are some instances where the new translations shined but, generally, they are not as poetic and the word choices flatten the power of the prose. Supposedly, they are truer to Proust's French in some ways but I prefer Enright. One area where the new translations seemed to shine, however, was showing me the large amount of humor in the novel. Or perhaps I noticed it more this being my fourth reading.

The Enright revision of Moncrieff has that rich, lyrical texture that, while maybe not always literal, catches the spirit of Proust in a way that's more emotionally immersive. There’s a kind of rolling grandeur and poetic magnetism in Moncrieff’s English that makes the novel feel like it’s happening on some suspended plane of consciousness. Even when he takes liberties, it’s often with taste and a kind of intuitive feel for what the prose is doing.

The newer translations sometimes land with a thud in comparison. I supposed they are more accurate. But they are also more clipped, less hypnotic, and occasionally too plainspoken for a work that’s as much about sensation as it is about thought. Flattened is exactly the word. You lose some of the magic in the name of fidelity, kind of like trying to color-correct a dream.

That said, one of the real gifts of the Penguin series is how much it clarifies the absurdity in Proust—the wit, the social satire, the weird deadpan comedy of how people behave. In the Moncrieff version, that stuff can get buried in the fog of elegance. But in the newer translations, the ridiculousness of the Guermantes’ salon, the posturing of Bloch, the ridiculous names and status anxiety, the Narrator's deadpan sarcasm, they pop more sharply. The tone’s a little closer to modern comedy of manners at times.

Overall, I found the last three volumes to be more obviously weak to me this time, than in previous readings. I guess the fact they are unfinished hurts them. Leading to errors like Berma dying in The Fugitive only to be giving a party in Finding Time Again. And the astonishing lack of burial for Albertine...or the grandmother or anyone else. No gravesides in the novel.

On a first or even second read, the vastness and intensity of In Search of Lost Time can make the unevenness of the last three volumes, a little more than one-third of the whole novel, feel like part of the tidal rhythm. But on a fourth reading? The cracks in the later volumes start glowing under the light. The posthumous quality of these passages, especially The Prisoner and The Fugitive, does show. They’re looser, more rushed in places, sometimes even repetitive in ways that feel uncharacteristic. Characters pop in and out without the precision of the earlier books. It's not sloppy so much as draft of the final version that never came.

One of the last things Proust did was actually strike out much about Albertine contained in The Prisoner and The Fugitive. This very late decision on Proust's part (he died before he could explain himself to anyone) seems to have been intended to shorten the piece, excising the novel of about 250 pages, basically eliminating the need for one of seven volumes.

But that's all speculative really. In that spirit, I will suggest that Proust truly felt he was going to die and, realizing he could not flesh out this portion of the novel to the extent he desired, wanted to eliminate it entirely even though it was perfectly readable in terms of the plot and characters and so on. These three are unfinished but, happily, complete enough to read and enjoy with the rest of the novel. Which, when you consider how poor Proust's health was by this point, is a rather remarkable achievement.

That Berma slip is especially jarring. It almost feels dreamlike, like the book has entered its own disordered afterlife. And yet that might accidentally reinforce something haunting about the whole structure: the way time folds in on itself, the way the past can suddenly reassert itself with no regard for continuity or logic. Still, you know it wasn’t intentional. It’s an artifact of death creeping into the writing process itself.

And that absence of graves, it's almost uncanny. Not only are there no funerals, there are no places for the dead. No resting sites. No tombs. It’s like the whole novel takes place in a fluid, ungrounded memory-space where people disappear and are reconstituted endlessly in the narrator’s mind. The only real “burial” is in recollection, obsession, and the ever-mutable texture of remembrance. There's no physical anchor. Proust’s world is made of impressions, not gravestones.

In a way, it’s beautiful and terrifying. These people live on, but only in Marcel’s looping consciousness. Once he forgets, or lets go, they’re vapor. That’s the great cost of that solipsistic architecture: the dead can’t even rest in peace. They have to perform, over and over, for the mind of the rememberer.

Narratively, we get a few days of the Narrator-Albertine living together routine in The Prisoner, then we are off to an eternal party. Eventually, the Narrator and Albertine party as a couple. This is perhaps the highlight of there mutual captivity (to each other). They take motor-car trips together. The Charlus disaster with Morel is shocking but it is merely the set-up for the sudden escape of Albertine from the Narrator (and the novel, sort of).

That stretch in The Prisoner is so strange and claustrophobic, particularly with regimented life in Proust's apartment with Albertine. This goes on and on more jealousy enters into it and it is really a rather difficult part of the novel to make it through. The Narrator is a neurotic mess. My god, there's nothing beautiful about him. It’s almost like the narrator and Albertine slip into a theatrical performance of domesticity. There’s this airless quality to it, with all the windows shut, both literally and figuratively. Marcel obsessively monitors her, confines her, tries to trap her love, her sexuality, her freedom—but under the guise of refinement, aesthetics, conversation, little rituals.

And yet within that suffocation, there are these flashes of bizarre grandeur—those motor-car trips you mention, for instance. They feel like excursions into a stage-set version of intimacy. The world opens just a little, but it’s still just the two of them locked into this ambiguous play of possession and denial. They are, as you said, both captors and Prisoners. The illusion of romance masks the machinery of fear, jealousy, and control.

The detonation of Charlus and Morel, like most of the novel, is no longer a surprise but it is sudden and out of nowhere. That whole subplot serves as both a grotesque mirror of the Narrator’s own entanglement with Albertine and a prelude to its collapse. Charlus tries to dominate Morel just as Marcel tries to dominate Albertine. In both cases, the beloved slips the net, leaves the dominator hollowed out and exposed. Morel turns cruel and calculating; Albertine simply dissolves. But it’s the same result: the illusion that love can be possessed disintegrates.

Albertine’s escape is one of the most ghostly moments in the novel. She’s suddenly gone, and it happens offstage, like a character exiting through a trapdoor. And after that, what’s left? Marcel doesn’t seek her out in the real world. He seeks her out in memory, in obsessive reconstruction, in interrogations of people who knew her. She becomes more “real” to him in absence than she ever was in presence. That’s the ultimate perversion of love in the book: the beloved becomes more compelling, more alive, once they’re ungraspable.

And yet, this is all done without overt tragedy. No final confrontation, no catharsis. It just happens. One moment she’s there, the next she’s history, and history is all we get. As we all experience many deaths of others during out lives.

The Fugitive has the Narrator in the depths of self-pity which are the most annoying aspect of the novel for me. It's like I have to survive this great desert of self-pity. You're pathetic you neurotic, privileged pervert. Your jealousy makes it all the more miserable for me to have to put up with. Definitely one of my least favorite aspects of the novel though, or course, it is the way Proust actually was in real life. I shouldn't fault him for being honest. This section of the novel offers some splendid passages of prose. There is also an interesting process of becoming indifferent toward Albertine despite the fact she has no burial and all his grieving is privately in his apartment.

The narrator’s descent into self-pity in The Fugitive can be wearying, especially when you’ve already been through the neurotic cycles of jealousy in The Prisoner. By this point in the novel, it feels less like deep exploration and more like being trapped in a loop. The emotional terrain is familiar: the possessiveness, the endless parsing of motives, the fantasies of betrayal. But now it’s unmoored, because Albertine is gone and there’s nothing to push against, no living presence to react to—just a void he fills with obsessive reconstruction.

It’s true to Proust’s character—his real-life relationships were famously fraught with suspicion, control, emotional hostage-taking—but in literary form, it becomes almost grotesque. There's a sense that the narrator is indulging in his own suffering, using it to inflate the importance of his loss, which only ever existed in this warped, half-imagined form to begin with.

And yet, The Fugitive also has some incredible writing. Maybe precisely because there’s no dramatic event, no funeral, no confrontation, just this quiet, slowly shifting internal process, the prose has to do all the heavy lifting. The mourning becomes less about Albertine and more about the narrator’s changing relationship to his own memory, his own emotional landscape. That long, strange fade from heartbreak to indifference is, in a way, the real subject of the volume. And Proust captures it with this unsettling honesty, how forgetting creeps in, how one realizes that even the grandest love or sorrow eventually loses its force.

The grief being contained entirely within the apartment adds to that sense of interiority turned pathological. The apartment becomes a kind of mausoleum, a stage for memory’s performance. No funeral, no social grief, just a man wandering around in slippers, reliving every conversation, clinging to letters, imagining what she might have done with other women. It’s absurd, a little tragic, and at times unintentionally funny.

The indifference that finally sets in doesn’t feel like healing, it feels like erosion. The loss hasn’t been resolved; it’s just been weathered into something paler. That feels brutally real, and maybe more honest than the usual narrative of closure or transcendence. But it’s also a hard mood to sit with, especially after thousands of pages.

Nevertheless, The Fugitive really hits its stride after Albertine’s ghost starts loosening its grip and Marcel re-enters the world. The Venice trip is a perfect encapsulation of the Proustian condition: endless anticipation, aesthetic idealization, and then—reality. Damp, disappointing, ordinary reality. He finally gets to this legendary city, a place shimmering with art-historical weight and romantic projection, and he’s let down almost immediately. The gondolas, the pigeons, the stones, it’s all too Venice, too literal, too overdetermined to offer any surprise. And yet his mother is enchanted. That contrast between their reactions is quietly hilarious, he, the aesthete, withered by disillusionment; she, the normie, full of wonder.

It’s one of those great inversions in the novel. Marcel’s entire project is grounded in the worship of aesthetic experiences, the sacredness of people and places and times and yet when he actually gets them, he’s deflated. It’s not just ironic; it’s also deeply revealing. His imagination outpaces the world. The real world can’t keep up with the fantasy engine of his mind. And the funniest part is: he knows it. He knows he’s ridiculous. That self-awareness adds a tinge of comedy to the whole Venetian interlude. The writing sparkles with frustrated grandeur.

And then bam!—Saint-Loup, the sexual thunderclap. That brief revelation is like a lightning strike through the text. All of Marcel’s erotic and social assumptions are suddenly scrambled. The man he admired, maybe idealized, who was once the model of masculinity, who seemed safely heterosexual... turns out to be sleeping with men. It's like Proust takes all the coded queerness simmering in the undercurrent of the novel and finally sets off the bomb.

It’s a quietly devastating moment, but also weirdly liberating. Suddenly all the hidden currents running under the narrative surface—Charlus’s perversions, Albertine’s rumored lesbianism, Marcel’s own alleged side liaisons—become part of a broader, uncontainable sexual world. One in which roles dissolve and nothing is as fixed as the narrator once believed. It also retrospectively reshapes his jealousy: Albertine’s bisexuality, if real, is no longer an exception, but part of the broader secret life everyone seems to be leading.

Proust doesn’t linger on it, which makes it hit even harder. It’s just dropped into the text like a suppressed memory. You get this jolt of recognition, then everything moves on. Here we get a great example of the literally hundreds of wonderfully worded “fortune-cookie” tid-bits of Proustian prose that fills the entire novel: “Everything that seems to us imperishable tends towards decay; a position in society, like anything else, is not created once and for all, but, just as much as the power of an empire, is continually rebuilding itself by a sort of perpetual process of creation, which explains the apparent anomalies in social or political history in the course of half a century. The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.” (page 2271, Enright, 1992, Bundled Kindle Edition).

For comparison purposes here is the newest translation of that passage: “Everything we believe imperishable tends toward destruction; a social position, like everything else, is not given once and for all but, just like the power of an empire, is reconstituted from moment to moment through a sort of endless renewed process of creation, which explains the apparent anomalies of social or political history over half a century. The creation of the world did not happen 'in the beginning,' it happens from day to day.” (page 275, Peter Collier, 2021)

Both say basically the same thing, of course. But I prefer Enright's rendering.

(to be continued)