Chapter 2

Beckett’s Proust, Schopenhauer, and the Musical Art of Pastiche

Céline Surprenant

In 1931 Samuel Beckett published a study of Marcel Proust’s partly posthumous seven-part novel À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27), simply entitled Proust. Du côté de chez Swann – the first volume of the novel – had appeared in November 1913. Having written what he thought would form the first and the last volumes in 1913, Proust continued to expand and revise sections of the existing manuscript until his death in 1922. He did so especially during the First World War, working during this period on Sodome et Gomorrhe and the ‘Albertine’ sections. Interrupted during the conflict, the publication of the novel resumed in 1919 with À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, and ended in 1927 with the posthumous publication of Le Temps retrouvé.¹ Proust (and editors after him) modified the outline of the novel and the number of volumes in which it was published throughout its editorial history. During the summer of 1930, Beckett read it twice in the 16-volume Gallimard edition published between 1927 and 1930.²

Beckett, who had been a lecteur d’anglais at the École normale supérieure in Paris between 1928 and 1930 before writing Proust, did not at that time have today’s critical editions documenting the genesis of the novel at his disposal. Even though he was commissioned to write a literary study of the writer, he adopted an irreverent attitude towards literary academic conventions and the psycho-biographical bias of the rare existing studies of Proust that had been published since Proust’s death.³ Throughout the seven sections of the book that deal with the themes of time, habit, memory, the ‘Albertine tragedy’⁴ and time regained in Proust’s novel, and with the narrator’s reflections on aesthetics and death, Beckett anticipated later critics. Among other points, he signalled the incessant ‘mobility’ of the characters and was one of the first reader–critics to be interested in the architecture of the novel, emphasizing the symmetrical structure whereby episodes come in pairs.⁵ Beckett saw, for example, how listening to the sonata by the fictive composer Vinteuil in Du côté de chez Swann was mirrored by listening to Vinteuil’s septuor described in the penultimate volume of the novel, denoting transformations in musical aesthetics from romantic to dissonant. Moreover, Beckett was one of the first critics to compare Proust to a number of philosophers, such as Descartes, Leibniz, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, whom he happened to be reading in 1930.⁶

It is not only through his choice of themes and foci that Beckett anticipated later readers and critics of Proust. He also made a distinctive contribution through the style in which he chose to present À la recherche du temps perdu. Among other tactics, Beckett, the ‘lecteur perspicace [perspicacious reader]’, exaggerated apparently secondary aspects of the novel, such as the idea of the mathematical ‘equation’, with which Proust begins. The idea of the equation is found in La Prisonnière, which Beckett discussed in his section on the Albertine tragedy.⁷ Beckett detached this term from its context and thus blurred its meaning, applying what Luc Fraisse has described as ‘une technique de collage en mosaïque [a collage technique resembling mosaic]’.⁸ The ‘equation’ however, like other mathematical metaphors that Beckett extracted and distributed throughout his study, is also a means of highlighting the tension between sensible experience and analytical reasoning upon which the narrator’s aesthetic reflections on writing, visual art and music bear.⁹

Beckett ‘took a deep and abiding interest’ in music and mathematics for, as Mary Bryden suggests, ‘they share a grounding in mensuration, and adherence to an abstract domain, a preoccupation with patterning and interconnection’.¹⁰ As though he were anticipating the importance that ‘counting … rhythms, repetitions and variations’ were to take in his later plays, the young writer seized on the musical theme of À la recherche du temps perdu and carefully annotated the pages of Du côté de chez Swann devoted to Swann’s repeated listening to a phrase of the Vinteuil sonata, as I will discuss further below.¹¹ He concluded the book with an excursus on music in which music is described as ‘the catalyctic element’ of the novel. Beckett took this view from Jacques Benoist-Méchin, who in 1926 had underlined how music predominates in the novel because, among all other arts, it is the one that makes us most ‘sensible à l’écoulement du temps [aware of the passing of time]’.¹² The ‘Proustian demonstration’ concerning music, Beckett claimed, thus echoing the ‘Proustian equation’ with which the book began, derived from Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music.¹³ How does Beckett treat that philosophical source in which Proust was interested from his first writings onwards?¹⁴

Critics have both praised and dismissed Beckett’s idiosyncratic reading of À la recherche du temps perdu, some seeing it as a feat of ‘déformations créatrices [creative distortion]’¹⁵ while others consider it a work which is ‘obscurely worded and seriously under-argued’.¹⁶ John Pilling has described the concluding passage on music in Proust as ‘Beckett’s only extended assessment of what music might mean’, a somewhat striking affirmation given how the concluding lines are, indeed, under-argued and therefore hardly make for an extended assessment.¹⁷ Nevertheless, if Beckett’s reading of and commentary upon À la recherche du temps perdu was formative for the writer’s subsequent work, this might have to do with his treatment of music in it, however abstract and suggestive that remained. The theme of music provided him with an opportunity not only to apply the ‘Schopenhauer filter’ to the novel, which other themes such as habit, love and death also allowed him to do, but also to emphasize and, so to speak, to turn into parody the conflicting alliance of intellect and sensation that music performs in the novel, as I aim to show in the rest of this chapter. It is thus worth re-examining Proust by focusing on Beckett’s discussion of music, for it indexes his reading of the novel’s other earliest critics and testifies to the popularity of Schopenhauer’s views on music at the end of the nineteenth-century, views to which Proust’s novel sends us back through its representation of the hearing of a fictive composer’s music.

However, it is not only À la recherche du temps perdu that has been subjected to Beckett’s ‘creative distortions’. Schopenhauer, whose pronouncements on music Beckett cited only sparsely but from which he nevertheless drew substantially, is also the object of a transformative re-description. Schopenhauer’s ideas on music, more particularly, allowed Beckett to highlight the opposition between the intellect and sensation, the importance of which in Proust’s novel, he acutely perceived.¹⁸ Beckett may have carried out a ‘very original endeavour’¹⁹ in Proust, yet, through the theme of music, we discover that his study of À la recherche du temps perdu owes a great deal to the early reception of Proust and that Beckett had been a perspicacious reader, too, of Proust’s early critics.

Music in Proust

In Proustian studies, the theme of music has recurred ‘avec la régularité du pendule [with the regularity of a pendulum]’.²⁰ When Beckett stated in Proust that ‘one could write an entire book on music in Proust, in particular of the music of Vinteuil: the Sonata and the Septuor’, he was in fact referring to existing critical works written during the 1920s.²¹ Since the earliest criticism, it had been deemed that music plays a revelatory role in À la recherche du temps perdu. Benoist-Méchin believed that ‘de tous les arts, c’est peut-être la musique que Proust a traité le plus magistralement [music is, of all the arts, the one that Proust has most consummately represented]’ and that music occupies ‘la place plus élevée [the highest place]’ in the novel.²² Charles du Bos stated that ‘toutes les fois où dans son œuvre [la musique] intervient, Proust est par elle aussitôt porté au sommet de sa puissance [every time that music plays a part in his work, Proust is, through it, immediately brought to the height of his power]’.²³ Arnaud Dandieu judged that, together with Ruskin’s influence, music had been for Proust, ‘l’initiatrice indispensable [the essential initiator]’,²⁴ while a later critic, Georges Piroué, presented À la recherche du temps perdu ‘comme l’équivalent d’une composition musicale [as being the equivalent of a musical composition]’, a description that no doubt comes from the importance of Wagner and the leitmotiv in the novel.²⁵

Benoist-Méchin argued that it is difficult to say ‘où la musique commence et où elle cesse [where music begins and where it stops]’ in the novel because ‘elle déborde de beaucoup sur les passages qui lui sont plus particulièrement assignés [it extends beyond passages that are specifically devoted to it]’.²⁶ Music, together with painting and writing, is an element of the ‘story of a vocation’ that the novel tells, through the scenes of listening to fictive compositions by Vinteuil, the character whom Proust described as ‘une des clés de voûte de sa construction Romanesque [one of the cornerstones of his novelistic composition]’.²⁷ Passages devoted to the hearing of Vinteuil’s music condense many of the narrator’s concerns, notably on aesthetics, posterity and the role of the intellect in the enjoyment of art and music. The recitals of Vinteuil’s music that are described more than once take place at different stages of the narrator’s life, and constitute steps in his aesthetic education and thinking. It is possible to relate the fictional musical pieces in the novel to precise musical compositions and ideas from the fin-de-siècle French school of music (most notably those of Camille Saint-Saëns, César Franck and Gabriel Fauré) of which the narrator was fond during his adolescence, and to Wagner and Beethoven, who replaced his early preferences during his years of maturity.²⁸ There is an emphasis on change both in musical compositions themselves and in musical taste.

It thus matters that the experience of listening to Vinteuil’s music is repeated, because it is not only that we see the composer’s œuvre evolve with the passing of time, but listening more than once to a piece of music modifies it in the ears of the listener. It is these modifications, within a single hearing of a piece and from one hearing to the next, that we follow through Swann’s repeated hearings of Vinteuil’s music as relayed by the narrator, for whom the sonata at first remained ‘invisible’, until, much later in life, Vinteuil’s septuor serves as the support for the narrator’s understanding of what art and music should be.²⁹

Vinteuil’s Music

Although Vinteuil’s music pervades the entire work, only a small number of the pages devoted to it include technical terms of musical analysis. Instead, they consist of the narrator’s describing, qualifying and comparing the movement of the sound of the notes of Vinteuil’s ‘petite phrase’ in terms other than musical.³⁰ Vinteuil’s music allows the reader to witness the attempted conversion of sensory perception into intellectual equivalents. However, the conversion is never quite realized. The narrator insists on the negative role that the ‘formes du raisonnements [rational discourse]’³¹ play in this matter, because they make the musical object disappear. The rational approach to music thus never completely holds. Hearing music is represented in terms of an alternation between the exercise of reason and sensory experience.

The first time Swann hears a particular phrase of the sonata that detaches itself from the rest, he perceives the ‘qualité matérielle des sons sécrétés par les instruments [the material quality of the sounds which those instruments secreted]’.³² In the midst of his listening, however, something detaches itself from the line of the violin, in a ‘clapotement liquid [sort of liquid rippling of sound]’,³³ which creates an ‘impression … confuse’, that is, ‘une de ces impressions qui sont peut-être pourtant les seules purement musicales, inétendues, entièrement originales, irréductibles à tout autre ordre d’impressions. Une impression de ce genre, pendant un instant, est pour ainsi dire sine materia [so confused an impression, one of those that are, notwithstanding, our only purely musical impressions, limited in their extent, entirely original, and irreducible to any other kind. An impression of this order, vanishing in an instant, is, so to speak, an impression sine materia]’.³⁴ From the description of that first perception follows another related to the way in which memory transcribes it, ‘comme un ouvrier qui travaille à établir des fondations durables au milieu des flots [like a labourer who toils at the laying down of firm foundations beneath the tumult of the waves]’.³⁵ Memory makes the line no longer ‘insaisissable [ineffable]’,³⁶ for Swann now ‘s’en représentait l’étendue, les groupements symétriques, la graphie, la valeur expressive; il avait devant lui cette chose qui n’est plus de la musique pure, qui est du dessin, de l’architecture, de la pensée, et qui permet de se rappeler la musique [was able to picture to himself its extent, its symmetrical arrangement, its notations, the strength of its expression; he had before him that definite object which was no longer pure music but rather design, architecture, thought, and which allowed the actual music to be recalled]’.³⁷ Music expands the soul, but soon ‘les notes que nous entendons alors, tendent déjà, selon leur hauteur et leur quantité, à couvrir devant nos yeux des surfaces de dimensions variées … à nous donner des sensations de largeur, de ténuité, de stabilité, de caprice [the notes which we hear at such moments tend to spread out before our eyes, over surfaces greater or smaller according to their pitch and volume … to give us the sensation of breath or tenuity, stability or caprice]’.³⁸

The ‘petite phrase’, which for Swann condenses Vinteuil’s music, is tied to the progress of Swann and Odette’s love. Changes in the perception of it are subjective changes that mark the changes in Swann’s relation to his love object. When he later hears the sonata again, notes can then be grasped through analytical categories, for once Odette had ceased to love him, the motif that he had perceived as a ‘mystérieuse entité [mysterious entity]’³⁹ and which gave a confused impression could become again the object of a reasoned apprehension. The subjective experience of love had until then subtracted it from an analytical grasp, from rational discourse. The narrator underlines the two ways in which to account for the aesthetic effect of the romantic sonata. It can be described in terms of the ‘faible écart entre les cinq notes qui la composaient et au rappel constant de deux d’entre elles [the closeness of the intervals between the five notes of which it is composed and the constant repetition of two of these]’.⁴⁰ Yet, this explanation is invalid because, in creating its effect, the pianist did not dispose of a ‘clavier mesquin de sept notes [a miserable stave of seven notes]’, but rather, ‘un clavier incommensurable [an immeasurable keyboard]’,⁴¹ composed of ‘un millions de touches de tendresse, de passion, de courage, de sérénité [millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity]’⁴² to be discovered by composers. That first listening – which is relayed through the memory of the narrator’s hearing of the dissonant Vinteuil septuor – demonstrates that music can trigger a reasoned, intellectual listening as well as a poetical, sensible one.⁴³

Just as water would appear to be consubstantial with music in the passages describing the recitals, the enjoyment of a musical object goes together with the rejection of reasoning. The musicologists’ methods that are based on reasoning are the negative side of the ‘direct impression’ of music, even though something in music, as in other subjective experiences, invites precisely such reasoning. Within À la recherche du temps perdu, listening to music is thus not only the experience of sensible and qualitative essences. It also provides a concrete form to tensions within and beyond the apprehension of music itself.

Critical analyses of music in Proust from the early 1920s relate this tension within the experience of music to Schopenhauer’s ideas about music, which, according to Fraisse, allows us to represent the uncapturable, because it gives us access to the will yet without any of its objectification in words or images.⁴⁴ In an oft-quoted interview published in Le Temps (12 November 1913), following the publication of Du côté de chez Swann, Proust stated:

S[‘il se] permet de raisonner sur [son] livre, c’est qu’il n’est à aucun degré une œuvre de raisonnement; c’est que ses moindres éléments [lui ont été] fournis par [sa] sensibilité, qu [il les a] d’abord aperçus au fond de [lui]-même, sans les comprendre, ayant autant de peine à les convertir en quelque chose d’intelligible que s’ils avaient été aussi étrangers au monde de l’intelligence que, comment dire? un motif musical.



[If he allows himself to reason about his book, it is because the latter is in no way borne out of reasoning; it is because it is his sensibility that had provided it with its slightest elements, which he had first perceived in himself, without understanding them, having as much trouble converting them into something intelligible as if they had been as foreign to the work of the intellect as, how should I say, a musical motif?]⁴⁵

Proust was defending himself against the charge that he was presenting mere intricacies. What was at stake, he objected, were realities that required a particular clarification and that were distinct from logical ideas. The interview presented one of the underlying dualities of the novel in a chiasmus that recurs in Proust’s writing whenever matters are concerned with the relationship between the intellect and sensibility. In order to emphasize the role of the senses in his work, Proust reminds us of the part reason plays.

The analogy between a direct apprehension of the book and that of a musical motif calls for a rapprochement with Schopenhauer, who affirms how the unmediated experience of art (with music as the singular case within the arts), excludes abstract understanding, even if this leaves us in obscurity. The case of music is complex, because given that music ‘cannot free itself [from arithmetic] without entirely ceasing to be music’, it would seem precisely to invite an abstract understanding.

Treating music as something that is foreign to the domain of the intellect, then, simplifies the problem of establishing the relation between music and the intellect, which Schopenhauer discussed in The World as Will and Representation when underlining the fact that music has a stronger effect on us than the other arts:

[Music’s] representative relation to the world must be very deep, absolutely true, and strikingly accurate, because it is instantly understood by every one, and has the appearance of a certain infallibility, because its form may be reduced to perfectly definite rules expressed in numbers, from which it cannot free itself without entirely ceasing to be music. Yet the point of comparison between music and the world, the respect in which it stands to the world in the relation of a copy or repetition, is very obscure. Men have practised music in all ages without being able to account for this; content to understand it directly, they renounce all claims to an abstract conception of this direct understanding itself.⁴⁶

Compared with the other arts, which are the objectification of will through the representation of particular things that ‘excite … the knowledge’ of the Platonic Ideas, music is not ‘the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the will itself, whose objectivity the Ideas are’. It does not speak of shadows, but of ‘the thing itself’.⁴⁷ In a book published the same year as Du côté de chez Swann, André Fauconnet situates music with respect to the duality between arithmetic and music, a duality that Beckett’s take on music in Proust presupposes:

Tandis que la première [arithmetic] fait appel à l’entremise des concepts abstraits et met en jeu notre entendement discursif, la seconde [music] agit sur nos sens, émeut notre coeur et stimule immédiatement nos facultés d’intuition. Toutes deux s’accordent dans la mesure où elles représentent deux copies d’un même texte. Le texte, c’est le vouloir vivre universel avec ses degrés d’objectivation et sa progression rythmée de la satisfaction au désir, du désir à la satisfaction. La copie directe, immediate, fidèle, au point de rester obscure à l’intelligence, comme son modèle même, c’est la musique. La traduction pensée commentée du texte nous la devons à l’arithmétique.



[While the first one appeals to abstract concepts and calls into play our discursive understanding, the second one acts on our senses, moves our Heart and stimulates our intuitive faculty. They are in harmony with each other in so far as they represent two copies of the same text. The text is the universal will to live, with its degrees of objectification and its rhythmic progression from satisfaction to desire, and from desire to satisfaction. The direct, immediate, faithful copy, as faithful as to remain obscure to the intellect, as its very model, is music. Arithmetic takes care of the thoughtfully annotated translation of the text.]⁴⁸

Beckett does not enquire into Schopenhauer’s theory of the gradation of the will in music, as reconstituted by Fauconnet. However, he emphasizes the way in which the affirmation of the uselessness of abstract reasoning and understanding can itself become a source of aesthetic creation, an idea upon which he drew throughout Proust. He does so in particular when discussing the reversals that occur around what he called Proust’s romantic and anti-intellectual stance, which Beckett associates with his ‘substitutions of affectivity for intelligence … his rejection of Concept in favour of the Idea, his scepticism before causality’.⁴⁹ In emphasizing the logico-mathematical register, Beckett reversed Proust’s ‘substitution of affectivity for intelligence’ in order to re-affirm or to re-experience that substitution through his own writing.⁵⁰ The substitution that he praises in Proust inspires Beckett to re-describe the novel through an accumulation of reversals. In this way, involuntary memory restores ‘more because less’; time is ‘a condition of resurrection because an instrument of death’, among other formulations.⁵¹

Music and Posterity

One function of music in À la recherche du temps perdu is to trigger a reflection on the progress and the obsolescence of aesthetic judgements, and that theme, to which Beckett does not directly refer, could be inspired by Schopenhauer, who also believed that works of art precede the public that appreciates them.⁵² Proust concretized that idea through Vinteuil’s music. Indeed not only does the narrator reflect on formal developments within Vinteuil’s œuvre itself, but music also activates a reflection on how works of art create the public that will be able to appreciate them. These reflections on music and posterity occur in À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, when the narrator remembers hearing Odette play Vinteuil’s sonata, a memory that coincides with one of the stages in the narrator’s aesthetic education. The complexity of certain works and our deficient faculty of memory mean that we are permanently listening to them for the first time. Time is needed ‘pour pénétrer une œuvre un peu profonde [to penetrate a work of any depth]’,⁵³ but the time needed for that to happen ‘n’est que le raccourci et comme le symbole des années, des siècles parfois, qui s’écoulent avant que le public puisse aimer un chef-d’œuvre vraiment nouveau [is but the shortening and as if the symbol of years, sometimes of centuries, which pass by before the public should be able to appreciate a truly new work of art]’.⁵⁴ It takes time for an individual to appreciate a work, however; the work itself must create its posterity, which is both peculiar to and an extension of itself. The narrator stages that process in relation to the stages in his appreciation of Vinteuil’s music, from incomprehension to understanding. When he did not understand it, he could at least enjoy hearing Mme Swann play it. As for Swann, he had rapidly overcome its novelty, by assimilating its memory with memories of his courtship with Odette, and with the human and geographical décor in which it took place, that is, images of the Verdurin salon and its actors, and the many places where Odette and he had dined together. The narrator reports Swann thus contradicting Schopenhauer’s idea that music ‘shows’ ‘la Volonté en soi [the will-in-itself]’ or ‘la Synthèse de l’infini’ [the synthesis of the infinite]’.⁵⁵ Just as Swann had, so to speak, ‘domesticated’ the novelty of the sonata, future generations end up by assimilating even the most incomprehensible works of music or art. Thus it is for Beethoven, Impressionism, the search for dissonance, and the exclusive use of the Chinese scale, Cubism and Futurism: steps in the narrator’s aesthetic education in which music figures prominently.

Beckett’s Proust as Pastiche

Schopenhauer provided some of the themes of Beckett’s study – notably those that related to Proust’s so-called pessimism – even though Beckett did not seek to explicate Schopenhauer’s philosophy any more than he wanted to explicate Proust.⁵⁶ Among the expressions of this pessimism, Beckett spoke of the way in which the ‘observer infects the observed with its own mobility’, of human intercourse in terms of ‘two separate and immanent dynamisms related to no system of synchronization’, and stated that ‘all that is realized in Time (all Time produces), whether in Art or in Life’, can never be possessed ‘integrally at once’, but only by ‘a series of partial annexation’.⁵⁷ Other construals of Proust’s pessimism relate to time – ‘Memory and Habit are attributes of the Time cancer’⁵⁸ – to the law of memory or to habit. Granted Beckett might have drawn themes from many sources other than Schopenhauer, the philosopher appears as only one of the possible languages with which to render the novel’s great themes. This is apparent in Beckett’s presentation of habit, for example, in a procession of idioms. How to describe the ‘general laws of habit’ to which the laws of memory are subjected? There is more than one way in which to state this. We move from anthropomorphic metaphors – habit is represented as an ‘agent of security’, a ‘minister of dullness’ – to the language of moral discipline, the metaphor of a contract with renewable clauses, to habit described as the organizer of a ‘team of syntheses’ on ‘labour-saving principles’.⁵⁹ Among these metaphors, the Proustian definition of habit is ‘translated’ in Schopenhauer’s idiom, in brackets:

Life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals; the world being a projection of the individual’s consciousness (an objectivation of the individual’s will, Schopenhauer would say), the pact must be continually renewed, the letter of safe-conduct brought up to date.⁶⁰

Habit also ‘hid[es] the essence – the Idea – of the object in the haze of conception – preconception’, and towards habit we are in the position of the tourist who wishes to find his experience in the Baedeker and not the reverse.⁶¹ Schopenhauer’s ideas underlie the commentary and can be retrieved when necessary, as here concerning habit or in the conclusion of the book concerning music.

In ‘An Occult Arithmetic: The “Proustian Equation” according to Beckett’s Proust’, I suggested that Beckett made a pastiche of Proust, as though he had been guided by Proust’s description of the idea of the voluntary pastiche. ‘Pastiche’ here refers specifically to Proust’s idiosyncratic definition of the word, which is worth recalling.⁶² The coincidence between the writing and structure of Beckett’s Proust and Proust’s conception of pastiche is all the more striking in that Proust defined pastiche in musical terms. He formulated the conception in his article on Flaubert’s style ‘À propos du “style” de Flaubert’, which he wrote in response to the French critic, Albert Thibaudet, after having himself written pastiches of Balzac, Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, Henri de Régnier, the Goncourt brothers, Michelet, Émile Faguet, Ernest Renan and Saint-Simon.⁶³ For Proust, a writer is prompted to write a voluntary pastiche after having unconsciously recorded recurrent patterns, sounds, rhythms, words, turns of phrase and syntactical tics of a beloved author, then imitating and indeed reproducing them. In his article on Flaubert, he analysed what is original about Flaubert’s writing with respect to conventional grammar against those critics who had deemed that Flaubert ‘couldn’t write’.⁶⁴ However, creating a pastiche is not an analytical activity; it is a means of consciously liberating oneself from the ‘music’ of particular writers by imitating them: the more successful the imitation of another writer’s language, the more it will be possible to invent a new language.⁶⁵ Concerning Flaubert, Proust underlined the writer’s incongruous use of the conjunction ‘and’, which ‘does not have at all the aim assigned to it by grammar … it marks a pause in a rhythmical measure and divides up a description’.⁶⁶ Proust emphasized that style could be analysed with reference to music, even though in À la recherche du temps perdu music itself is not the object of musical analysis per se.

Another means of fabricating a pastiche is by merging many sentences together, so as to reveal the similarities between them in the manner of a composite photograph and create the typical sentence of an author. The process that Proust described appeals to memory. That creation occurs automatically, as it were, when our memory retains only certain features of a writer’s sentences. Proust demonstrated that procedure with Théophile Gautier’s writing in his preface to Ruskin – ‘Journées de lecture I’ – where he supposedly quoted one of Gautier’s sentences only to reveal that he had in fact invented it by combining different parts of the writer’s sentences: ‘En réalité, cette phrase ne se trouve pas, au moins sous cette forme, dans Le Capitaine Fracasse [In point of fact, this sentence is not to be found in Le Capitaine Fracasse, at least in this form]’.⁶⁷ We encounter that procedure with Vinteuil’s fictional musical ‘phrase’: it is a composite of many pieces of music by Saint-Saens, Schubert, Wagner, Franck and Fauré.⁶⁸

In the section on the Albertine tragedy in Proust, Beckett discusses what is needed for deciphering Albertine’s lies. He speaks of her lies as ‘anagrams’ that require ‘translation’, so ‘I may go and see the Verdurins tomorrow’, for example, means ‘it is absolutely certain that I will go and see the Verdurins tomorrow’.⁶⁹ It is in this context that Beckett quotes more or less accurately the narrator’s description of his mistrust of Albertine: ‘My imagination provided equations for the unknown in this algebra of desires’, which provides one of the plausible sources of the ‘Proustian equation’ of the first sentence of the book.⁷⁰ More generally, that ‘the subject’s permanent reality’ should ‘only be apprehended as a retrospective hypothesis’, is another way of stating that the subject is constantly providing ‘equations for the unknown in this algebra of desires’.⁷¹ Albertine’s lies are not the only utterances that require translation, at least for Beckett, as he submits the narrator’s very utterances to similar kinds of translation, retaining certain terms of the original text while replacing others, creating resonances between the original and his re-description. Thus the ‘quoted’ sentence that presents the narrator as speaking of his ‘imagination providing equations’ is in fact the ‘translation’ of ‘l’équation approximative à cette inconnue qu’était pour moi la pensée d’Albertine [the approximate equation of that unknown quantity which Albertine’s thoughts were to me]’.⁷² Beckett would seem to have adopted, in writing Proust, the process of translating lies into truth that the narrator ascribes to Albertine.

John Pilling’s study of Beckett’s annotations of certain words in the margins of À la recherche du temps perdu would seem to confirm the coincidence between pastiche and Beckett’s creation and helps us read not only Beckett’s later work but also Proust as a whole. It is the rapprochement between Proust’s voluntary pastiche and Beckett’s mode of composition that incites Fraisse to view Beckett’s art of transformation as ‘creative distortions’.⁷³ To view the book as a pastiche reinforces Pilling’s idea that it is ‘in no sense a limitation of Beckett’s originality, that we find so many individual elements in Beckett that are derived, in one way or another from Proust’, because, ‘so much of the essay is “lifted” from Proust, and yet … it is nonetheless an utterly original essay’.⁷⁴ In Beckett’s paraphrasing of the novel, single words flag the provenance of particular passages, as Proust advocates the words in a pastiche should do. For example, although Beckett does not reference the passages he quotes from the novel, words such as ‘copiable’ in the ‘copiable he does not see’ are traceable to particular passages in the novel.⁷⁵ Pilling extends his remark beyond Proust and gives the example of the word ‘cloison’ that Beckett underlined in his copy of Proust’s novel and that he finds in Beckett’s later work.⁷⁶

For Proust, not only is every pastiche concerned with the music of an author, but among the pastiches of Flaubert that he wrote, one consisted in adding a musical chapter entitled ‘Mondanité et mélomanie’ to Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, the posthumously published story of two enthusiastic companions who embark unsuccessfully upon acquiring an encyclopaedic knowledge of late nineteenth-century arts and sciences. Proust made the pastiche in echo of the efforts of the disciples of César Franck to introduce Wagner into the French musical scene.⁷⁷ In his discussion of pastiche as a means of understanding the style of a writer, music is not merely an analogy, especially with regard to Flaubert, since Proust discussed Flaubert’s style not only in terms of the sound and music it creates, but also in terms of what he called the ‘blanks’, which refer to Flaubert’s particular use of ellipses to portray the passage of time and to suggest successions of events. Without having established whether or not Beckett read Proust’s article on Flaubert, we could relate Proust’s interest in ellipses to Beckett’s later cultivation of reduction and silences. Instead of saying that Beckett took ‘the colour of the author about whom he is writing’, it might be more precise to say that he developed Proust’s ‘music’ (some of his metaphors, his imagery, his intellectual operations and anti-intellectual themes), but also his enrolment of music, into an art of commentary. To consider Proust as a pastiche draws our attention to the patterns, sounds and rhythms that Beckett imitated and made resound, notably through its comic tonality.⁷⁸

In the vein of Pierre-Quint’s study Marcel Proust, sa vie, son œuvre (1925), Beckett highlighted the comical aspects of the novel, and found music to be one the sources of the comic in it. Humour is not only Beckett’s ‘justified instrument of the critical surgery that lays bare a wound’, as Pilling argues, it is also Proust’s. Humour blurs the distinction between what belongs to one and to the other. Listening to music is a propitious ground for derision. The degree of a character’s appreciation of music is proportional to the expressions that music makes him or her adopt, especially since the enjoyment is merely simulated. Hence, the habit of simulating a profound love of Wagner has forced Mme de Verdurin’s forehead to take on ‘enormous proportions’.⁷⁹

A Pastiche of Schopenhauer on Music

Schopenhauer’s ideas dominated the philosophical climate in which Proust began to write prose fiction and contribute to literary journals during the 1890s to the extent that À la recherche du temps perdu has been described as one of the most faithful, albeit fictional, transcriptions or translations of The World as Will and Representation.⁸⁰ Whether or not we agree with this idea, Beckett reproduces how Proust himself involved the philosopher’s ideas in his fictional texts, at least when they are filtered through his characters. In Proust, the characters do not directly discuss philosophical ideas. For the most part, they are said to master such and such a philosopher’s thinking, such as Mme de Cambremer with Schopenhauer’s philosophy.⁸¹ Granted that Beckett (knowingly or unknowingly) followed Proust’s conception of pastiche, a question arises as to what exactly Beckett retained from Schopenhauer. In view of the sparseness of what he imports from the philosopher, is there in Proust any evidence of a philosophical engagement with music according to Schopenhauer? Or rather did Beckett simply select extracts on music from The World as Will and Representation, as he did with words and themes from Proust’s novel and from its early critical reception?

Beckett does indeed identify certain words and ideas from the philosopher, but transforms, condenses, even distorts them, situating ideas alongside one another that Schopenhauer kept separate. For example, Beckett distorts Schopenhauer’s treatment of opera – Schopenhauer is not as negative about opera as Beckett makes him out to be – and he links Schopenhauer’s discussion of vaudeville to what the philosopher says of repetition in music, that is, to the ‘da capo’, which is entirely permissible in music, according to Schopenhauer, but which would be disagreeable in the arts of language. It is Beckett, rather than Schopenhauer, who links vaudeville and the da capo, by a comparison of vaudeville and opera. In view of the way in which ‘opera is a hideous corruption of this most immaterial of all the arts: the words of a libretto are to the musical phrase that they particularize what the Vendôme column is to the ideal perpendicular’, Beckett writes. Vaudeville ‘at least inaugurates the comedy of an exhaustive enumeration’. Beckett then praises the convention of the da capo, as though it comes close to ‘the comedy of exhaustive enumeration’.⁸² According to Pilling, Beckett ‘redistributed the elements he had retained from his reading of Schopenhauer’, which could be an exact description of how he dealt with À la recherche du temps perdu.⁸³ Through the discussion of music, we discover the creative selectiveness that presides over Beckett’s commentary more than we are able to spell out an extensive Beckettian, or even Proustian, metaphysics of music that could be demonstrated as inspired by Schopenhauer.

Given this selective treatment, it is significant that Beckett exaggerates Schopenhauer’s rejection of Leibniz’s view of music as ‘an unconscious exercise in which the mind doesn’t know it is counting’.⁸⁴ In view of the book’s play with the mathematico-scientific register, why should Beckett insist on Schopenhauer’s rejection of the Leibnizian view of music as ‘occult arithmetic’?⁸⁵ Schopenhauer engaged in a discussion of the physics of harmonics and of the problem as to whether or not arithmetic was part of the pleasure one takes in music.⁸⁶ The passages on listening to Vinteuil’s sonata in À la recherche du temps perdu echo that debate, albeit not in the philosophical idiom, when Swann passes from the appreciation of the fluid, yet un-extended entity of which music consists, to reasoning about its mathematical intervals. Beckett did not intervene or reconstitute Leibniz’s or Schopenhauer’s arguments, but rather isolated this as one of the motifs of his comic re-description of À la recherche du temps perdu.

For the young Beckett, music was one of the means through which Proust articulated what is ‘entirely intelligible but nevertheless inexplicable’, a paradox of which Beckett was fond, according to Pilling.⁸⁷ Beckett says of Proust’s demonstrations that he ‘explains them in order that they may appear as they are – inexplicable’.⁸⁸ Pilling describes as a ‘paradox’ what was described above as the chiasmus in which Proust formulated the relation between sensation and the intellect and which comes close to the way Schopenhauer qualified music in terms of a ‘clarification obscure’ or as that which is ‘capable de représenter l’irreprésentable [able to represent the unrepresentable]’.⁸⁹ That duality was a point of critical interest in the early reception of Proust’s writing, from which Beckett drew, without always acknowledging his sources. Jacques Rivière, one of Proust’s early critics and director of the Nouvelle revue française, asked whether the author of À la recherche du temps perdu did not in fact renew the tradition of the French analytical novel (in spite of what many readers perceived to be a disorderly accumulation of memories and sensations).⁹⁰ After the publication of Du côté de chez Swann, Proust had praised Rivière for perceiving that the novel was rigorously constructed.⁹¹ The problem as to whether a literature of sensations could be analytical had spurred Proust’s early critical interventions, notably concerning symbolist literature and its cultivation of obscurity. Proust contributed to these literary debates prior to writing, around 1908, the pages posthumously published and entitled Contre Sainte-Beuve, where he presented the formula of the contradiction between sensation and the intellect.⁹²

In his discussion of music in Proust, Benoist-Méchin believed that, for the Proustian narrator, music is an ‘instrument of knowledge’.⁹³ This would seem to apply to the role of music in Beckett’s Proust, except that the latter is linked with the yearning for a contradictory state of affairs, for the experience of reasoned sensations. Beckett, then, did not only anticipate philosophical discussions of the novel and understand its structure. Well before the publication of Contre Sainte-Beuve in 1954, thanks to which readers could discover that À la recherche du temps perdu originated in a conversation between a narrator and his mother on the nineteenth-century literary French critic Sainte-Beuve’s method, Beckett acutely pinpointed the opposition of intellect and sensation that Proust discussed in this ‘conversation piece’ that was expanded into the novel. He did so by paying attention to the fictional hearing of music in Proust as a ‘situation’ in which the tension between sensation and the intellect is played out. Beckett’s Proust thus brings us back to the inception of À la recherche du temps perdu, to the time when Proust was wondering whether he should write a novel or an essay.⁹⁴ According to Beckett’s perspective, then, music distinguishes itself from the other arts not so much for the reasons that Schopenhauer adduced, but because it stands and makes one hover between both kinds of writing, as he was able to demonstrate in his novel of sorts on Proust.

¹ For a concise history of the genesis of the novel between 1908 and 1922, see Marion Schmid, ‘The Birth and Development of À la recherche du temps perdu’, in Richard Bales (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Proust (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 58–73. In its final form the novel comprises the following parts that were published in varying numbers of volumes: Du côté de chez Swann, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, Le Côté de Guermantes, Sodome et Gomorrhe, La Prisonnière, Albertine disparue (La Fugitive), and Le Temps retrouvé. References to the novel in this chapter are to the Pléiade edition in four volumes: Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris, 1987–9). References to the English translation of the novel are from the six-volume translation by Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by Dennis Joseph Enright, In Search of Lost Time (New York, 2003). All translations of quotations (other than those from À la recherche du temps perdu) are by the author. The author is very grateful to Nick Till and Sara Jane Bailes for their helpful suggestions when revising the chapter.

² See John Pilling, ‘Proust and Schopenhauer: Music and Shadows’, in Mary Bryden (ed.), Samuel Beckett and Music (Oxford, 1998), pp. 173–8 (p. 176). In the Foreword to Proust, Beckett notoriously qualified the edition as ‘abominable’, referring to the typographical errors in it. For a description of Beckett’s annotations on his copy of the novel, kept at the Beckett Archive in Reading, see John Pilling, ‘Beckett’s Proust’, in Stanley E. Gontarski (ed.), The Beckett Studies Reader (Gainesville, FL, 1993), p. 26 n. 2.

³ Chatto & Windus commissioned the book in 1930, as a contribution to the Dolphin Series of Popular Literary Studies (see Luc Fraisse, ‘Le “Proust” de Beckett: Fidélité médiatrice et infidélité créatrice’, in Marius Buning, Matthijs Engelberts and Sjef Houppermans (eds), Samuel Beckett: Crossroads and Borderlines, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 6 (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, 1997), pp. 365–86 (p. 369)).

⁴ The ‘Albertine tragedy’ refers to La Prisonnière and Albertine disparue (Fraisse, ‘Le “Proust” de Beckett’, p. 377).

⁵ Ibid., p. 374. See, for example, the passage on ‘the perpetuum mobile of our disillusions’ because ‘the aspirations of yesterday were valid for yesterday’s ego, not for today’s’. The cause of the incessant mobility is the ‘poisonous ingenuity of Time in the science of affliction’ which results in the ‘unceasing modification’ of the subject’s ‘personality’ (Samuel Beckett, Proust, in Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London, 1999), pp. 14–15).

⁶ Ibid., p. 370. Beckett’s philosophical approach to the novel was fed by his reading of Descartes, Kant and, according to Fraisse, Bergson’s L’Évolution créatrice (see Fraisse, L’Éclectisme philosophique de Marcel Proust (Paris, 2013), p. 23). This does not mean that we can extract from either Proust or Beckett a coherent philosophical doctrine.

⁷ Beckett, Proust, pp. 45–67.

⁸ Fraisse, ‘Le “Proust” de Beckett’, p. 378. For the passage where the narrator describes Albertine’s lies in mathematical terms, see Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 3, p. 850; Eng. trans., vol. 5, p. 397.

⁹ For an analysis of the logico-mathematical metaphors in the book, see Céline Surprenant, ‘“An Occult Arithmetic”: The “Proustian Equation” according to Beckett’s Proust’, Journal of Romance Studies 7/3 (1997): 47–58. This chapter takes up and develops further the analyses carried out in that article.

¹⁰ Mary Bryden, ‘Beckett and the Sound of Silence’, in (ed.), Samuel Beckett and Music, pp. 21–46 (p. 40). The ‘very process of counting, in its rhythms, repetitions and variations, becomes a defining feature in some of Beckett’s later short plays … and intersects significantly with his interest in music, and the musical structure of many of his plays’ (Gerald Macklin, ‘Writing by Numbers: The Music of Mind in Samuel Beckett’s Pas’, French Studies Bulletin, 76 (2000): 10–13; see also Pascale Casanova’s commentary on Cap au pire (Worstward Ho (1983)) as ‘a developed (and resolved) equation’ in Beckett l’abstracteur: Anatomie d’une révolution littéraire (Paris, 1997), pp. 31–2).

¹¹ Bryden, ‘Beckett and the Sound of Silence’, pp. 31–2.

¹² Léon Pierre-Quint quoted in Jacques Benoist-Méchin, La Musique et l’immortalité dans l’œuvre de Marcel Proust (Paris, 1926), p. 34 n. 1, quoted in Beckett, Proust, p. 92.

¹³ Fraisse, ‘Le “Proust” de Beckett’, p. 370; Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London, 1909), vol. 1, pp. 330–47.

¹⁴ See Anne Henry, ‘Proust du Côté de Schopenhauer’, in (ed.), Schopenhauer et la création littéraire en Europe (Paris, 1989), pp. 149–64 (p. 151). According to Henry, Proust became interested in Schopenhauer’s philosophy through music, thanks to his friendship with the composer Reynaldo Hahn. Henry was the first critic to systematically argue, that Proust had transposed into a novel nineteenth-century philosophy, most particularly that of Schelling and Schopenhauer that had been assimilated by French philosophers who were taught to the young Proust at the lycée and during his philosophy studies at the Sorbonne between 1889 and 1895 (Marcel Proust: Théories pour une esthétique (Paris, 1981); see Fraisse, L’Éclectisme, p. 307). Proust also took an interest in Schopenhauer via Maupassant and Wagner, the latter being a constant reference in Proust’s correspondence and novel. On Wagner and Proust, see Françoise Leriche, ‘Wagner’, in Annick Bouillaguet and Brian G. Rogers (eds), Dictionnaire Marcel Proust (Paris, 2004), pp. 1073–4.

¹⁵ Fraisse, ‘Le Proust de Beckett’, p. 378.

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 378; James Acheson, ‘Beckett, Proust, and Schopenhauer’, Contemporary Literature, 19/2 (1978): 165–79 (p. 165).

¹⁷ Pilling, ‘Proust and Schopenhauer’, p. 173.

¹⁸ That opposition in Proust sends us back to nineteenth-century sources, such as Hippolyte Taine’s De l’intelligence (Paris, 1870) and, more generally, late nineteenth-century works in psychological sciences, from which Proust also drew and which can be explored, among others, through Donald Wright’s study, Du discours médical dans À la recherche du temps perdu: Science et souffrance (Paris, 2007). Henry believes that Proust’s recourse to human sciences, such as psychological ones, had mitigated his importation into the novel of Schopenhauer’s pessimism. See Henry, ‘Proust du côté de Schopenhauer’, p. 158. The editor of Du côté de chez Swann underlined the opposition between the metaphors of liquid substance associated with sensation, as opposed to that of architecture with the intellect (Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 1, p. 1239).

¹⁹ Fraisse, L’Éclectisme, p. 23.

²⁰ Jean Nattiez, Proust musicien (Paris, 1984), p. 13.

²¹ Beckett, Proust, p. 91.

²² Benoist-Méchin, La Musique, pp. 31–2.

²³ Charles du Bos, Approximations (Paris, 1922), p. 94.

²⁴ Arnaud Dandieu, Marcel Proust: Sa révélation psychologique (Paris, 1930), p. 112.

²⁵ Georges Piroué, Proust et la musique du devenir (Paris, 1960), p. 170.

²⁶ Benoist-Méchin, La Musique, p. 35. For a compilation of all the guises of music in the novel, see Leriche, ‘Wagner’.

²⁷ Quoted in Proust, ‘Notice’, in À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 3, p. 1685.

²⁸ Antoine Compagnon, La Troisième République des lettres (Paris, 1989); Cécile Leblanc, ‘Proust et la “bande à Franck”: Présence et influence de la musique française de la fin du dix-neuvième siècle’, in Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, Kazuyoshi Yoshikawa and Pierre-Edmond Robert (eds), Proust face à l’héritage du XIX^e siècle: Tradition et métamorphose (Paris, 2012), pp. 203–17.

²⁹ Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 3, pp. 753–68; Eng. trans., vol. 5, pp. 283–95.

³⁰ Nattiez, Proust musicien, p. 25.

³¹ Proust, À la recherché du temps perdu, vol. 1, p. 343; Eng. trans., vol. 1, p. 420.

³² Ibid., vol. 1, p. 205; Eng. trans., vol. 1, p. 250.

³³ Ibid.

³⁴ Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 205–6; Eng. trans., vol. 1, p. 250.

³⁵ Ibid., vol. 1, p. 206; Eng. trans., vol. 1, p. 251.

³⁶ Ibid.

³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ Ibid., vol. 1, p. 206; Eng. trans., vol. 1, p. 250.

³⁹ Ibid., vol. 1, p. 343; Eng. trans., vol. 1, p. 420.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

⁴¹ Ibid.

⁴² Ibid., vol. 1, p. 344; Eng. trans., vol. 1, p. 421.

⁴³ To illustrate the rational side of Vinteuil’s art, the narrator compares it to the naturalist Lavoisier’s work (ibid., vol. 1, pp. 343–5; Eng. trans., vol. 1, p. 423).

⁴⁴ Fraisse, L’Éclectisme, p. 821.

⁴⁵ Proust, ‘Swann expliqué par Proust’, interview with Élie-Joseph Bois, in Contre Sainte-Beuve, ed. Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris, 1971), p. 559.

⁴⁶ Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, pp. 334–5.

⁴⁷ Ibid., p. 336.

⁴⁸ André Fauconnet, L’Esthétique de Schopenhauer (Paris, 1913), p. 351.

⁴⁹ Beckett, Proust, p. 81.

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹ Ibid., pp. 33, 35.

⁵² Fraisse, L’Éclectisme, pp. 841–2.

⁵³ Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 1, p. 520; Eng. trans., vol. 2, p. 120.

⁵⁴ Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 521–2; Eng. trans., vol. 2, pp. 120–21.

⁵⁵ Ibid., vol. 1, p. 524; Eng. trans., vol. 2, p. 124.

⁵⁶ For Rupert Wood, the Schopenhauer filter is a ‘well-structured combination of pessimism and a tragic view of existence’ (‘An Endgame of Aesthetics: Beckett as Essayist’, in John Pilling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Beckett (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 1–16 (p. 4)).

⁵⁷ Beckett, Proust, pp. 18–19 (my emphasis).

⁵⁸ Ibid., p. 19.

⁵⁹ Ibid., pp. 21–3.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 19.

⁶¹ Ibid., p. 23.

⁶² For a classic work on Proust’s pastiche, see Jean Milly, Les Pastiches de Proust (Paris, 1970).

⁶³ The pastiches were published in Le Figaro between 1900 and 1908 and then collected in a volume entitled Pastiches et mélanges in 1919, together with texts on Ruskin. ‘À propos du “style” de Flaubert’ was published in the Nouvelle revue française (1 Jan. 1920), in Contre Sainte-Beuve, pp. 586–600 and translated into English by John Sturrock as ‘On Flaubert’s “Style”’ (in Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays (London, 1994), pp. 261–74).

⁶⁴ Proust, ‘On Flaubert’s “Style”’, p. 265. For the other texts of the dispute about correctness in grammar, see Flaubert savait-il écrire: Une querelle grammaticale (1919–1921), ed. Gilles Philippe (Grenoble, 2004), and my review of it (Céline Surprenant, ‘Couldn’t Write’, Times Literary Supplement (6 May 2005): 22).

⁶⁵ Proust, ‘À propos du “style” de Flaubert’, pp. 594–5.

⁶⁶ For a close study of Proust’s assimilation of Flaubert’s writing into the novel, see Mireille Naturel, Proust et Flaubert: Un secret d’écriture, 2nd edn (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, 2007).

⁶⁷ Marcel Proust, ‘Journées de lecture’, in Contre Sainte-Beuve, pp. 175; ‘Days of Reading I’, in Against Sainte-Beuve, p. 209.

⁶⁸ See Proust, ‘Notice’, in À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 1, pp. 1237–40.

⁶⁹ Beckett, Proust, p. 55.

⁷⁰ Ibid.

⁷¹ Ibid., p. 15.

⁷² Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 3, p. 850; Eng. trans., vol. 5, p. 397.

⁷³ Fraisse, ‘Le “Proust” de Beckett’, p. 378.

⁷⁴ Pilling, ‘Beckett’s Proust’, pp. 23, 15.

⁷⁵ Beckett, Proust, p. 83.

⁷⁶ Pilling, ‘Beckett’s Proust’, p. 23.

⁷⁷ See Leblanc, ‘Proust et la “bande à Franck”’, p. 207.

⁷⁸ Pilling, ‘Beckett’s Proust’, pp. 12, 14; see Bryden, ‘Beckett and the Sound of Silence’, p. 51.

⁷⁹ Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 3, pp. 298, 755; Eng. trans., vol. 4, pp. 351–2, vol. 5, p. 283.

⁸⁰ See Henry, ‘Proust du Côté de Schopenhauer’, p. 149.

⁸¹ Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 4, pp. 318, 569; Eng. trans., vol. 6, pp. 60, 378 (on Schopenhauer and music).

⁸² Beckett, Proust, p. 92.

⁸³ Pilling, ‘Proust and Schopenhauer’, p. 177.

⁸⁴ Leibniz, quoted in Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, p. 257.

⁸⁵ Beckett, Proust, p. 91.

⁸⁶ Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, p. 257.

⁸⁷ Pilling, ‘Proust and Schopenhauer’, p. 177.

⁸⁸ Beckett, Proust, p. 87.

⁸⁹ Fraisse, L’Éclectisme, pp. 820–21.

⁹⁰ Jacques Rivière, Études (1909–1924): L’Œuvre critique de Jacques Rivière à la Nouvelle revue française, ed. Alain Rivière (Paris, 1999), pp. 586–92.

⁹¹ ’Enfin je trouve un lecteur qui devine que mon livre est un ouvrage dogmatique et une construction! [Finally I find a reader that has understood that my book is a dogmatic work and is a construction!]’ (Marcel Proust to Jacques Rivière, 6 Feb. 1914, in Marcel Proust: Lettres, ed. Françoise Leriche et al. (Paris, 2004), pp. 667–8.

⁹² See ‘Projets de préface’, in Contre Sainte-Beuve, pp. 211–16.

⁹³ Benoist-Méchin, La Musique, p. 89.

⁹⁴ Between 1908 and 1911, Proust wrote notes and sketches in Carnets 1, including the following oft-quoted statement concerning the uncertainty as to the art form that his project should take: ‘Faut-il en faire un roman, une étude philosophique, suis-je romancier? [Should I make of it a novel, a philosophical study, am I a novelist?]’ (Marcel Proust, Carnets, ed. Florence Callu and Antoine Compagnon (Paris, 2002), pp. 50–51).