Names and Places in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time

This post is a continuation of a series where I use natural language processing (NLP) to analyze the text of Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time (ISLT). Here is the Python code for this series.

In my previous post I examined which words most frequently occur in ISLT. You may have noticed that both “faire” and “faisait” – variations of the verb “to do” – appear in the list. If we group variations of the same root word together (for example in English, “am”, “are”, and “was” all group with “be”), then we end up with a better characterization of word frequency. This process is called lemmatization. Lemmatizing reduces the number of unique words in ISLT from 38,662 to 20,948.

The table below summarizes word frequencies for this reduced set. Verbs are dominant: “to do” and “to have” on top, closely followed by “to see”, “to be”, “to know”, “to come”, “to take”, “to say”, “to go”, and “to want”.

faire	5669
avoir	4790
y	3759
voir	3506
être	3307
savoir	2661
venir	2605
dire	2406
aller	2398
vouloir	2378
Albertine	2339
croire	2162
jour	2124
femme	2028
chose	2022
grand	2012
pouvoir	1988
connaître	1934
donner	1856
petit	1827

Twenty most frequently occurring lemmatized words in ISLT

But we should pivot from verbs, shouldn’t we? After all, names and places are of deeper interest to the Narrator of ISLT; in fact the third part of Swann’s Way is called “Place Names: The Name”.

Which names and places are most referenced in ISLT? Using spaCy, I was able to determine the answer. Here are the top 30 names:

Albertine	2338
Swann	1338
Charlus	1303
Saint-Loup	1091
Odette	971
Mme de Guermantes	897
Françoise	787
Gilberte	715
Mme Verdurin	660
Morel	558
Bloch	474
Andrée	383
Mme de Villeparisis	375
duc de Guermantes	328
Brichot	309
Bergotte	300
Norpois	293
Cottard	282
Monsieur	223
Jupien	221
Verdurin	202
Mme de Cambremer	182
Elstir	179
Rachel	168
Vinteuil	167
M. Verdurin	158
Legrandin	154
les Verdurin	137
Mlle Vinteuil	136
Forcheville	118

The 30 most frequently referenced names in ISLT

There are certain to be some errors in these counts, but I gave it a shot. I tried to combine references to different names for the same individual, for example “Robert” and “Saint-Loup” for Saint-Loup, “Mme Swann” and “Odette” for Odette, “Basin” for duc de Guermantes, and so on. Perhaps in the future I will revise this table slightly as I add to my list of aliases.

I will leave deeper analysis to others, but there are two obvious points worth making. The first is that characters are not always referenced by their proper names. Often definite pronouns such as “you”, “him”, “her”, etc are often used in the text. This analysis fails to account for that fact. To do so, I’d need to trace the reference of each definite pronoun back to its source, which I don’t know how to easily do. (I do know that if I did, the most referenced character in ISLT would be, of course, the narrator Marcel – who is mentioned by name only five times, twice in the second paragraph of chapter 345 and three times in the second paragraph of chapter 356, but as “je” countless times.)

Secondly, in my view, the list itself does reflect the true importance of each character within ISLT. For example, Gilberte is quite a critical figure in ISLT, linking the first volume to the last, and symbolizing the theme of regaining time…however she barely makes the top 10 in terms of frequency. Are there better ways of trying to capture the “deeper significance” of characters within a story? Perhaps a future post will revisit this topic.

Moving on, here are the ten most mentioned places:

Balbec	737
Guermantes	657
Paris	521
Combray	426
France	154
Venise	128
Élysées	111
Champs	97
Méséglise	75
Doncières	66

The ten most frequently mentioned places in ISLT

(It seems weird that Champs and Élysées are not recognized by spaCy as belonging to a single compound token; I need to look into the details on that.)

In my next post, I will further examine the use of names and places in ISLT.