Similarly, Proust’s use of the iter

Similarly, Proust’s use of the iterative mode of frequency enables him to create a global pattern for the past from the various local events that occur, a global pattern that is not fixed but evolving. Thereby does the past remain alive. What is at issue here is not whether Proust himself captured his own lost time. As we know, there was no Combray: Proust merged his memories of childhood days spent in Illiers and Auteuil in order to create this fictional city.23 The madeleine itself—the most famous cookie in literature—was initially just a dry biscuit.24 When we examine the evolution of the text itself (its inception in Jean Santeuil and the Contre Saint-Beuve essay, its various permutations in the notebooks), we can see that Proust was concerned not with evoking his own past (although certainly that past resonates in the text), but with demonstrating, through a careful crafting of episodes and a deliberate attention to style, the mapping and modeling process whereby a past might be recaptured. Thus the plot of Search recounts the narrator’s efforts to achieve the structure and style that would enable him to recapture the past, presumably successful efforts if we take “his” book as evidence