[In the following review, Brooks offers a positive assessment of Kristeva's Time & Sense.]

Proust continues to be the Mount Everest that French critics want to conquer. He is there—more than ever. This sometime esthete and dandy, whose work was originally rejected by avant-garde publishers because it appeared to be a monument to a dead social order, has in the three-quarters of a century since his death become the very definition of the modern in art. We're never satisfied that we have understood Proust fully; his work is troubling, open to new interpretation, subject to change with new generations of readers. So it is significant, and welcome, that Julia Kristeva—the French semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, theoretician of desire and of language, with a large body of important critical work in her portfolio—has now written a major study of Proust.

Time & Sense stands at the intersection of Ms. Kristeva's psychoanalytic concerns and the recent boom industry in Proust editing. French academic critics have been much occupied of late with “genetic criticism”: the study of manuscripts and earlier versions of texts, tracing the evolution of a writer's definitive version through corrections, hesitations, erasures. If the enterprise in general blurs the clear outlines of the finished product—questioning the notion of the text as art object prized by generations of American New Critics—in the case of Proust it has reached the point where one almost has to question whether there is any such thing as a definitive version of In Search of Lost Time （the more accurate rendition of Proust's title, used by Ms. Kristeva's translator, Ross Guberman, rather than the old Remembrance of Things Past）.

A novel that appeared to be finished in 1913, when Swann's Way was published （at Proust's own expense）, grew during World War I （when Proust's first publisher closed shop） to the immense proportions we now know. The character Albertine began to take shape only in 1913 and went on to develop, in the later volumes, into the key figure of impossible love, demonstrating the vanity of thinking that one can possess another being. Albertine, who seems to prefer the love of women to the protagonist's possessive and jealous passion, exemplifies Proust's dark and profound understanding of sexuality. At the same time, she demonstrates how jealousy can be the very principle of a self-torturing yet creative fiction making that takes the protagonist to the threshold of his vocation as a writer, the writer alone can redeem the loss and pain of existence, through the art of narrative.

But the novel was always unfinished business: revision for Proust meant marginal additions—sometimes pages upon pages of additions, entire new developments, alternative drafts. Since death arrived before he had finished correcting the final volumes, it's never been entirely certain what material was to be considered definitive. Any edition of Proust is to some extent a reconstruction by editors, who have a plethora of manuscripts, typescripts and notebooks to work with.

This fluidity of the text, and the vast amount of available “genetic” material, create something of a playground for the psychoanalytic critic. Ms. Kristeva can dig through layers of development of a character, uncover the stylistic pentimenti of key episodes and of Proust's extraordinary sentences, which twist, turn, juxtapose apparently unrelated sensations, reach out to encompass different strata of time, working to subvert normal temporality in order to set art both within time and in opposition to it. Her display of erudition in the Proustian pre-texts at times gives an old-fashioned pedantry to her work, as when she insists on taking us back to the real-life models of some of the novel's characters; her first chapter is garnished with some 599 footnotes. The genetic research doesn't seem wholly necessary to her valid insights into the instability of character in Proust: what she aptly calls “the crumbling of the statue.”

What makes Time & Sense an important and enlivening book, despite the difficult reading it often provides, is that Ms. Kristeva is a critic of great psychoanalytic insight who is also finely sensitive to the complex rhetorical and syntactical elaboration of Proust's world. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her long meditations on the crucial Proustian figures of the homosexual and the Jew—two social outsiders who are disguised doubles for the artist. Her pages on the Baron de Charlus—the most important representative of Sodom in the novel—are both complex and luminous. If “sexual identity guarantees our psychic unity,” she writes, this unity is always threatened from within. Homosexuality, in Proust's rendering of it, reveals the latent psychosis of all identity, only tenuously held in check. “And since homosexuality transverses Proust's entire work,” she continues, “the baron depicts the potential for madness inherent in all forms of sexuality.” It is precisely this “madness” that transforms love and sexuality in the novel—Swann in love with Odette, the protagonist in love with Albertine—into a search for knowledge, for identity, for the understanding that finally can come only through art.

Ms. Kristeva brilliantly illuminates Proust's compulsive concern with Jewish identity, which reaches its political and moral crisis when the Dreyfus affair irrupts into the novel. Her complex argument works toward the conclusion that Proust eventually subverts the pretensions of exclusive ethnic and class-bound identities—and this surely is one of Proust's principal claims to our ethical attention. Finally, Ms. Kristeva as textual analyst provides striking and rewarding readings of the Proustian sentence—especially the last sentence, much revised but never given final form, of “Time Regained,” where in the additions and through the crossings-out one can trace “the architecture … of a sort of timelessness.”