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Time and Memory in Pinter’s Proust Screenplay

1979; Western Michigan University; Volume: 13; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cdr.1979.0012

1936-1637

Enoch Brater,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Time and Memory in Pinter’s Proust Screenplay Enoch Brater Those of us who have watched Pinter develop a personal style dramatizing the effects Time works on the shape of Mem­ ory are not at all surprised by his attraction to Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu as raw material for cinematic adaptation. What is surprising, however, is his admission that he had read only Du Côté de Chez Swann, the first volume of the work, before he embarked on this project.1 For Pinter’s theater has long been engaged in what we might be tempted to call a Proustian fascination with recapturing the past. On stage Pinter’s characters habitually struggle to recreate a past which they say they can remember—a past which exists on stage in that hazy realm somewhere between imagination and reality. “That imagining,” the playwright has said with particular reference to Old Times, “is as true as real.”2 How Pinter came to write the Proust screenplay and how he reworked Proust’s grand design into a bold cinematic reduction offer us a new study in literary relationship, for the adaptation through condensation has im­ portant implications as it bears on Pinter’s work as a whole. Let us for a moment situate the Proust screenplay in its proper place in the Pinter canon. Early in 1972 Nicole Stéphane, who owned the film rights to À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, asked Joseph Losey if he would like to work on a film version of the book. Losey then asked Pinter if he was interested.3 They had already worked together on three films: The Servant, The Accident, and The Go-Between. The planning stage, however, actually began some months before that. Late in 1971 Pinter told Mel Gussow of the New York Times that he was thinking in terms of this project, though at the time he was still reluctant to discuss the venture in the public forum of an interview. He admitted only that the new adaptation would be “a film which 121 122 Comparative Drama is going to be the most difficult task I’ve ever had in my life— and one which is almost impossible. I’m pretty frightened, but I’m also excited.”4 Pinter spent three months in 1972 reading Proust and taking hundreds of notes. That summer he made several trips to Illiers, Cabourg, and Paris, steeping himself “in the Proustian locations.” He finished a draft of the screenplay in November and a complete final revision in early 1973. “Working on A la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” says Pinter, “was the best working year of my life.”5 What we should be careful to notice about this chronology is that Pinter worked on the Proust screenplay after Old Times and before No Man’s Land, the two plays which deal most definitively with the changes Time works on Memory. In adapting Proust to the screen Pinter makes us see an A la Recherche du Temps Perdu which bears his own personal stamp. Quickly dismissing the notion of producing a film cen­ tered around only one or two novels of Proust’s seven-volume network, Pinter was determined “to distill the whole work, to incorporate the major themes of the book into an integrated whole.”6 Joseph Losey and Barbara Bray, an authority on Proust who was for many years script editor for B.B.C. Radio, supported Pinter’s decision, agreeing that this would make a far more comprehensive cinematic statement. The choice was a crucial one, for what results from it is the experience of seeing Proust through Pinter’s eyes. Unlike the architecture of the novel where the narrator builds sustained, stable constructs of memory in generous selections of prose, the screenplay evokes sharp, momentary images encapsulating Proustian duration. We move quickly from scene to scene as the past, dissected and fractured, suddenly moves before us in a vast panorama of concise visual segments. Broken up as it is into short pieces, the past is not so much recaptured as it is recycled in a style more Pinteresque than Proustian. In place of long sections of verbal rotundity, the result of the...