The Lamp of Geometry: Thomas Hardy

Abstract

In that crucial process of deliberation, that sifting of critical priorities which led, in the years 1908–10, to the inception of the work we know as A la recherche du temps perdu, a vital part was played by a series of cogitations contained in the document known as the Carnet de 1908. The original is in the Bibliothèque Nationale: a tiny notebook with spider’s web patterns writhing over its covers like microbes run mad. It was one of five such books that Madame Straus gave him as a New Year’s gift that January.¹ Among Proust’s manuscripts it is, in several ways, unique — in content and in style. Here the sliver-like narrowness of the pages, for instance, has imposed a sort of stylistic cramp, thinning the writer’s habitually sprawling sentences into short, sharp bursts. The result is a verbal breathiness highly favourable to instantaneous jotting, and evocative too, in the reader’s mind, of galvanic thought, a revolution in personal taste, a total rethinking of preconceptions.