Postlude

Summary

The editor of the present volume reminded us in his Introduction of the anxieties that are associated with the sheer length and bulk of A la recherche du temps perdu, and a number of contributors have returned to this theme, sometimes anxiously, but more often in a mood of celebration. Proust's novel has always been famous for being long, and it is currently getting longer as more and more sketches, drafts and cancelled passages become available to the international community of his readers. Yet brevity too is a Proustian watchword, and it is to this aspect of his literary art that I should like to devote these concluding pages. Proust's writing can often be brisk, pithy, pointed, laconic, concise, poetically compacted, and it would be unfortunate if these qualities came to be obscured by his long-range plotting, his wideangle view of French society or the headlong inventiveness of his 'grand style'.

However, rather than immerse myself at once in the detail of Proust’s text and in the Venetian episode that I shall shortly be quarrying for one of my main examples, I shall take a preliminary glance at a pictorial detail from the brush of a great Venetian painter who does not figure in Proust’s pantheon. The painter is Canaletto (1697–1768), and the work in question a view of the Grand Canal from the Campo S. Vio. This scene was painted before 1723, and is now in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection in Madrid.