Many literary detectives have pored over a great puzzle concerning the writer Marcel Proust: what happened in 1909? How did Cont

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问题     Many literary detectives have pored over a great puzzle concerning the writer Marcel Proust: what happened in 1909? How did Contre Saint-Beuve, an essay attacking the methods of the critic Saint Beuve, turn into the start of the novel Remembrance of Things Pasty A recently published letter from Proust to the editor Vallette confirms that Fallois, the editor of the 1954 edition of Contre Saint-Beuve, made an essentially correct guess about the relationship of the essay to the novel. Fallois proposed that Proust had tried to begin a novel in 1908, abandoned it for what was to be a long demonstration of Saint-Beuve’s blindness to the real nature of great writing, found the essay giving rise to personal memories and fictional developments, and allowed these to take over in a steadily developing novel.
    Draft passages in Proust’s 1909 notebooks indicate that the transition from essay to novel began in Contre Saint-Beuve, when Proust introduced several examples to show the powerful influence that involuntary memory exerts over the creative imagination. In effect, in trying to demonstrate that the imagination is more profound and less submissive to the intellect than Saint-Beuve assumed, Proust elicited vital memories of his own and, finding subtle connections between them, began to amass the material for Remembrance. By August, Proust was writing to Vallette, informing him of his intention to develop the material as a novel. Maurice Bardeche, in Marcel Proust, romancier, has shown the importance in the drafts of Remembrance of spontaneous and apparently random associations of Proust’s subconscious. As incidents and reflections occurred to Proust, he continually inserted new passages altering and expanding his narrative. But he found it difficult to control the drift of his inspiration. The very richness and complexity of the meaningful relationships that kept presenting and rearranging themselves on all levels, from abstract intelligence to profound dreamy feelings, made it difficult for Proust to set them out coherently. The beginning of control came when he saw how to connect the beginning and the end of his novel.
    Intrigued by Proust’s claim that he had "begun and finished" Remembrance at the same time, Henri Bonnet discovered that parts of Remembrance’s last book were actually started in 1909. Already in that year, Proust had drafted descriptions of his novel’s characters in their old age that would appear in the final book of Remembrance, where the permanence of art is set against the ravages of time. The letter to Vallette, drafts of the essay and novel, and Bonnet’s researches establish in broad outline the process by which Proust generated his novel out of the ruins of his essay. But those of us who hoped, with Kolb, that Kolb’s newly published complete edition of Proust’s correspondence for 1909 would document the process in greater detail are disappointed. For until Proust was confident that he was at last in sight of a viable structure for Remembrance, he told few correspondents that he was producing anything more ambitious than Contre Saint-Beuve.
Which of the following best describes the relationship between Contre Saint-Beuve and Remembrance of Things Past as it is explained in the passage?

选项 A、Immediately after abandoning Contre Saint-Beuve, at Vallette’s suggestion, Proust started Remembrance as a fictional demonstration that Saint-Beuve was wrong about the imagination.
B、Immediately after abandoning Contre Saint-Beuve, at Vallette’s suggestion, Proust turned his attention to Remembrance, starting with incidents that had occurred to him while planning the essay.
C、Despondent that he could not find a coherent structure for Contre Saint-Beuve, an essay about the role of memory in fiction, Proust began instead to write Remembrance, a novel devoted to important early memories.
D、While developing his argument about the imagination in Contre Saint-Beuve, Proust described and began to link together personal memories that became a foundation for Remembrance.

答案D

解析 A、B两项,文中都并未说是在放弃Contre Saint—Beuve之后立即开始创作Remembrance的,因此,这两项错误;从文章第一段最后一句“Fallois proposed that Proust had tried to begin a novel in 1909…in a steadily developing novel. ”可知C项错误,D项正确。
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