THE TENSE OF PROUST’S FIRST SENTENCE.

THE TENSE OF PROUST’S FIRST SENTENCE. Roger Shattuck devotes an appendix to his book to the tense of Proust’s first sentence. The first sentence is, as Shattuck says, “almost engraved in English” in the form of the words used by Scott Moncrieff, the first translator of Proust: “For a long time I used to go to bed early.” The translation uses one of the ways of expressing the imperfect tense in English (“used to…”). Yet Proust did not use the imperfect in that first sentence, nor did he use the tenses that appear most frequently in the novel. In French, the sentence is: “Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.” The tense is passe compose, which appears rarely in Proust’s novel. (An English equivalent of the tense might be “I have slept.”) Shattuck says “…this unusual tense is one of the great enigmas in Proust. Just how does one explain the syntax of the opening sentences?” Shattuck devotes four pages of the appendix to possible implications of the tenses in the opening sentences and to their implications for the entire book. The simplest of the suggestions is this: “May we conclude that Proust wanted to keep this opening sentence free of any exact location in time and to begin in a temporal free zone?” I am convinced that Proust’s choice of tense is important, and I find it satisfying that this first memorable sentence has an indeterminate and mysterious quality.