Adapting the Unadaptable: Beckett’s Proust and Pinter’s Unfilmed Screenplay of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu

Abstract

This paper examines Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu through the interpretive lenses of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, focusing on themes of memory, time, and artistic adaptation. Proust’s novel, explores involuntary memory, the subjective experience of time, and the fluidity of self. An essay from 1930 by Beckett engages Proust philosophically, filtered through Schopenhauer’s pessimism and Bergson’s theories of time and consciousness, highlighting the significance of involuntary memory and suffering in artistic experience. Decades later, Pinter, collaborating with Joseph Losey and Barbara Bray, adapted the sprawling narrative into a screenplay that translates Proust’s memory-driven prose into cinematic language, using visual motifs, sound, silence, and non-linear structures to evoke the same temporal flow. While Beckett intellectualises Proust’s experience, Pinter makes it tangible, creating a sensory embodiment of memory. Unfortunately, the film was never produced. This paper situates both works as complementary approaches to Proust, showing how his novel continues to inspire diverse media and interpretive strategies.

Although never definitively concluded, it is highly likely that Pinter read Beckett’s essay and placed Beckett’s lexicon and critical framing of Proust directly within the conception of the screenplay, particularly Beckett’s emphasis on memory as a violent interruption of chronological time. Pinter’s dialogue with Proust-through-Beckett shaped the screenplay’s structure, privileging involuntary memory triggers as cinematic events. This challenges the common accounts of Pinter’s screenplay which describe the adaptation’s strategy rather than placing it explicitly as a philosophical dialogue with a Beckettian reading of Proust. There is no major study which maps how Beckett’s abstract compression of Proust’s images into philosophical concepts compares to Pinter’s concrete cinematic embodiment of those images. By placing Beckett’s critical text and Pinter’s cinematic strategies in direct counterpoint, this paper identifies a previously unarticulated, triangulated axis of Proust-Beckett-Pinter, showing complementary treatments of the temporal and psychological structures of Proust’s novel, a perspective rarely explored in previous scholarship.