VOLUME I : Facsimile

The complete reproduction of each cahier will be made from an exclusive Bibliothèque nationale de France digitalisation. The famous 'paperoles', the strips of paper that Proust added to his manuscripts, will be presented folded firstly, as you see them when opening the cahiers, then unfolded in a reduced size and then, finally, in their original size, spread over several pages when necessary.

The sheets or fragments of sheets that Proust tore or cut out then glued into other manuscripts to avoid copying or which have fallen from the manuscripts for other reasons, will be published in their original place as a black and white reproduction, when they have been identified. This reconstruction will provide readers with a text that is as complete as possible and illustrate an important aspect of Proust's composition method.

Roland Barthes highlighted the 'plastic beauty' of Marcel Proust's texts in the seventies and made their 'graphic explosion' one of writing's 'emblems' which, according to him, is 'a proliferation, a dissemination throughout the page'. In fact, Proust used his cahiers with a great liberty. He firstly wrote on the facing pages using margins, the page backs and then 'paperoles' and paper glued in for his additions and complementary editing, but he also sometimes used the same cahier in a  tumbled fashion, sometimes one way up, sometimes the other; or even started writing then was interrupted in the middle by pages already used to continue a dozen pages further on, or even in another cahier.

A diagram of the text units is included in the most complicated books as a guide to the labyrinthine layout that this has created. The diagram consists of showing thumbnails of the reproduction, sheet by sheet, the different graphic zones that constitute the text units of the cahier and then number them in the order of they are currently read. For greater clarity, the units that are developed mainly on the page faces and those that are developed mainly on the page backs are shown separately for the very overloaded cahiers. The contents are analysed in detail in volume II.

• Publisher's note

• Material description (Cover, Paper, Pages, Pagination, Binding books, Use, Sheets and fragments of sheets cut out, torn out, fallen out, Paperoles, Glued paper, Hand-written annotations in coloured crayon, Allographic annotations, Restoration, Comments on the microfilm, Digitalisation)

• Reproduction

• Diagram of text units

 

Brepols Publishers