The Proustian Fabric

The association of ideas became the foundation of Freudian psychoanalysis, informed the nascent semiology of Saussure, and characterized the literary works of Sterne, Joyce, Woolf, and especially Marcel Proust. The author of Remembrance of Things Past, acutely aware of how philosophical, historical, and narrative writing intersected, gave years of thinking and planning to his multivolume masterpiece. Its shape was protean. Each successive volume reconfigured the previous ones and in 1987 Proust readers welcomed the publication of several new editions, among them the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, which presented as many pages of variants as of text.

The Proustian Fabric engages the complex layers of association to be found in Proust's work. According to Christie McDonald, "Remembrance of Things Past straddles the dominant thinking patterns of two centuries: the nineteenth, in which the association of fragmentary thought was to be subsumed into the notion of a totality, and the twentieth, in which the notion of associative thinking was to move toward an infinite process of referral and interpretation." Imbued with McDonald's discerning knowledge of Proust's intellectual and historical milieu, his compendious writing and his critics, The Proustian Fabric is one of the first books to take into account the rich variations of the new editions and to reexamine certain suppositions about Proust's methods, as well as his concern with philosophy, literature, art, and politics.