Chapter 23 - The First World War

Summary

À la recherche du temps perdu as we know it is a product of the war. When the First World War broke out, in August 1914, Proust, who was forty-three, asthmatic, and in poor health (he would live only another eight years), had just published the first volume, Du côté de chez Swann (1913). At this point, the Recherche was in its author's mind only a trilogy, a Hegelian structure with a redemptive Aufhebung. To the notion of ‘lost time’ (in the first volume) would correspond that of ‘time regained’ (in the third volume). In between, Le Côté de Guermantes would be a sort of ‘crossing of the desert,’ time wasted rather than lost (‘perdu’ has both meanings), which in the end would be redeemed through Art, an episode called ‘Adoration perpétuelle’.

The overall structure, time lost/time regained, of the cathedral-like novel endured. But the volume in between, Le Côté de Guermantes, which was ready for the press, did not. A moratorium on publication prevented Grasset, then Gallimard from publishing it, and as the surprisingly long war extended the moratorium, it gave Proust time to dismantle this first Guermantes and reconstruct, expand and modify the middle section in ways he had not anticipated.