Drawing ‘the apprenticeship of a man of letters’: Adapting Remembrance of Things Past for bande dessinée

The most famous image in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu) is that of the madeleine cake whose crumbs, in a spoonful of warm tea, provoke in the narrator an involuntary memory of his childhood holidays spent in the fictional town of Combray. Yet although involuntary memory represents an important theme in the novel it is not, Gilles Deleuze has suggested, ‘[w]hat constitutes the unity of [Remembrance of Things Past]’ (1). Rather, the novel is ‘the narrative of an apprenticeship: more precisely, the apprenticeship of a man of letters’ (2). Remembrance of Things Past, then, is fundamentally bound up with the act of writing, what it means to write, and the process by which one becomes a writer. Similarly, the novel concerns itself with the nature and expression of ideas in written language or text. Walter Benjamin described the book as ‘the Nile of language’, while Mary Zimmerman, writing on her process in adapting Proust’s work for the theatre, asserted: ‘I cannot think of another text that is so textual, so bound to its print form’ (3).

Yet Zimmerman did adapt sections of the text for the stage, and the book has also been the subject of numerous film and television adaptations. In 1998, Delcourt published the first part of Stéphane Heuet’s thirteen volume adaptation of Remembrance of Things Past in the bande dessinée format. Producing this most textual and “writerly” of works in a form that, even in its very name, emphasises the act of drawing (bande dessinée translates as “drawn strip”), presents some significant challenges for the adaptation of Proust’s work specifically, and for the adaptation of literature into comics more generally. In this paper I will consider these challenges, and look at the ways in which the adaptation of Remembrance of Things Past deals with the expression of information and the communication of ideas in the original novel. I will pay particular attention to the representations of processes such as remembering and recognition across the two versions of the work. I will also speak more broadly about the questions posed by the adaptation of literature into what has been described, not unproblematically, as ‘graphic literature’ (4).

(1) Deleuze, Gilles. 2008 (1964). Proust and Signs, London & New York: Continuum. 3. Although the title of Proust’s novel is now more commonly translated as In Search of Lost Time, I will be referring to the English language translation of the text by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, and the English translation of the bande dessinée published by NBM, both of which use Remembrance of Things Past, so I have employed that version consistently here.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Benjamin, Walter. 2005 (1929). ‘On the Image of Proust’. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol. 2, Part 1, 1927–1930, by Walter Benjamin, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, translated by Rodney Livingstone, 237-247. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 236. Zimmerman, Mary. 2009. ‘Adapting Proust: A Moment in the Red Room’. In TriQuarterly 134, 57-65. 58.

(4) See: Stein, Daniel and Jan-Noël Thon. 2013. From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter. 7.