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Marcel Proust
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Marcel Proust
born July 10, 1871, Auteuil, near Paris, France
died Nov. 18, 1922, Paris
French novelist, author of À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; In
Search of Lost Time), a seven-volume novel based on Proust’s life told
psychologically and allegorically.
Life and works
Marcel was the son of Adrien Proust, an eminent physician of
provincial French Catholic descent, and his wife, Jeanne, née Weil, of a
wealthy Jewish family. After a first attack in 1880, he suffered from
asthma throughout his life. His childhood holidays were spent at Illiers
and Auteuil (which together became the Combray of his novel) or at
seaside resorts in Normandy with his maternal grandmother. At the Lycée
Condorcet (1882–89) he wrote for class magazines, fell in love with a
little girl named Marie de Benardaky in the Champs-Élysées, made friends
whose mothers were society hostesses, and was influenced by his
philosophy master Alphonse Darlu. He enjoyed the discipline and
comradeship of military service at Orléans (1889–90) and studied at the
School of Political Sciences, taking licences in law (1893) and in
literature (1895). During these student days his thought was influenced
by the philosophers Henri Bergson (his cousin by marriage) and Paul
Desjardins and by the historian Albert Sorel. Meanwhile, via the
bourgeois salons of Madames Straus, Arman de Caillavet, Aubernon, and
Madeleine Lemaire, he became an observant habitué of the most exclusive
drawing rooms of the nobility. In 1896 he published Les Plaisirs et les
jours (Pleasures and Days), a collection of short stories at once
precious and profound, most of which had appeared during 1892–93 in the
magazines Le Banquet and La Revue Blanche. From 1895 to 1899 he wrote
Jean Santeuil, an autobiographical novel that, though unfinished and
ill-constructed, showed awakening genius and foreshadowed À la
recherche. A gradual disengagement from social life coincided with
growing ill health and with his active involvement in the Dreyfus affair
of 1897–99, when French politics and society were split by the movement
to liberate the Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus, unjustly imprisoned
on Devil’s Island as a spy. Proust helped to organize petitions and
assisted Dreyfus’s lawyer Labori, courageously defying the risk of
social ostracism. (Although Proust was not, in fact, ostracized, the
experience helped to crystallize his disillusionment with aristocratic
society, which became visible in his novel.) Proust’s discovery of John
Ruskin’s art criticism in 1899 caused him to abandon Jean Santeuil and
to seek a new revelation in the beauty of nature and in Gothic
architecture, considered as symbols of man confronted with eternity:
“Suddenly,” he wrote, “the universe regained in my eyes an immeasurable
value.” On this quest he visited Venice (with his mother in May 1900)
and the churches of France and translated Ruskin’s Bible of Amiens and
Sesame and Lilies, with prefaces in which the note of his mature prose
is first heard.
The death of Proust’s father in 1903 and of his mother in 1905 left
him grief stricken and alone but financially independent and free to
attempt his great novel. At least one early version was written in
1905–06. Another, begun in 1907, was laid aside in October 1908. This
had itself been interrupted by a series of brilliant parodies—of Balzac,
Flaubert, Renan, Saint-Simon, and others of Proust’s favourite French
authors—called “L’Affaire Lemoine” (published in Le Figaro), through
which he endeavoured to purge his style of extraneous influences. Then,
realizing the need to establish the philosophical basis that his novel
had hitherto lacked, he wrote the essay “Contre Sainte-Beuve” (published
1954), attacking the French critic’s view of literature as a pastime of
the cultivated intelligence and putting forward his own, in which the
artist’s task is to release from the buried world of unconscious memory
the ever-living reality to which habit makes us blind. In January 1909
occurred the real-life incident of an involuntary revival of a childhood
memory through the taste of tea and a rusk biscuit (which in his novel
became madeleine cake); in May the characters of his novel invaded his
essay; and, in July of this crucial year, he began À la recherche du
temps perdu. He thought of marrying “a very young and delightful girl”
whom he met at Cabourg, a seaside resort in Normandy that became the
Balbec of his novel, where he spent summer holidays from 1907 to 1914;
but, instead, he retired from the world to write his novel, finishing
the first draft in September 1912. The first volume, Du côté de chez
Swann (Swann’s Way), was refused by the best-selling publishers
Fasquelle and Ollendorff and even by the intellectual La Nouvelle Revue
Française, under the direction of the novelist André Gide, but was
finally issued at the author’s expense in November 1913 by the
progressive young publisher Bernard Grasset and met with some success.
Proust then planned only two further volumes, the premature appearance
of which was fortunately thwarted by his anguish at the flight and death
of his secretary Alfred Agostinelli and by the outbreak of World War I.
During the war he revised the remainder of his novel, enriching and
deepening its feeling, texture, and construction, increasing the
realistic and satirical elements, and tripling its length. In this
majestic process he transformed a work that in its earlier state was
still below the level of his highest powers into one of the greatest
achievements of the modern novel. In March 1914, instigated by the
repentant Gide, La Nouvelle Revue Française offered to take over his
novel, but Proust now rejected them. Further negotiations in
May–September 1916 were successful, and in June 1919 À l’ombre des
jeunes filles en fleurs (Within a Budding Grove) was published
simultaneously with a reprint of Swann and with Pastiches et mélanges, a
miscellaneous volume containing “L’Affaire Lemoine” and the Ruskin
prefaces. In December 1919, through Léon Daudet’s recommendation, À
l’ombre received the Prix Goncourt, and Proust suddenly became world
famous. Three more installments appeared in his lifetime, with the
benefit of his final revision, comprising Le Côté de Guermantes
(1920–21; The Guermantes Way) and Sodome et Gomorrhe (1921–22; Sodom and
Gomorrah). He died in Paris of pneumonia, succumbing to a weakness of
the lungs that many had mistaken for a form of hypochondria and
struggling to the last with the revision of La Prisonnière (The
Captive). The last three parts of À la recherche were published
posthumously, in an advanced but not final stage of revision: La
Prisonnière (1923), Albertine disparue (1925; The Fugitive), and Le
Temps retrouvé (1927; Time Regained).
Proust’s enormous correspondence (although thousands of letters have
appeared in print, many await publication), remarkable for its
communication of his living presence, as well as for its elegance and
nobility of style and thought, is also highly significant as the raw
material from which a great artist built his fictional world. For À la
recherche du temps perdu is the story of Proust’s own life, told as an
allegorical search for truth.
At first, the only childhood memory available to the middle-aged
narrator is the evening of a visit from the family friend, Swann, when
the child forced his mother to give him the goodnight kiss that she had
refused. But, through the accidental tasting of tea and a madeleine
cake, the narrator retrieves from his unconscious memory the landscape
and people of his boyhood holidays in the village of Combray. In an
ominous digression on love and jealousy, the reader learns of the
unhappy passion of Swann (a Jewish dilettante received in high society)
for the courtesan Odette, whom he had met in the bourgeois salon of the
Verdurins during the years before the narrator’s birth. As an adolescent
the narrator falls in love with Gilberte (the daughter of Swann and
Odette) in the Champs-Élysées. During a seaside holiday at Balbec, he
meets the handsome young nobleman Saint-Loup, Saint-Loup’s strange uncle
the Baron de Charlus, and a band of young girls led by Albertine. He
falls in love with the Duchesse de Guermantes but, after an autumnal
visit to Saint-Loup’s garrison-town Doncières, is cured when he meets
her in society. As he travels through the Guermantes’s world, its
apparent poetry and intelligence is dispersed and its real vanity and
sterility revealed. Charlus is discovered to be homosexual, pursuing the
elderly tailor Jupien and the young violinist Morel, and the vices of
Sodom and Gomorrah henceforth proliferate through the novel. On a second
visit to Balbec the narrator suspects Albertine of loving women, carries
her back to Paris, and keeps her captive. He witnesses the tragic
betrayal of Charlus by the Verdurins and Morel; his own jealous passion
is only intensified by the flight and death of Albertine. When he
attains oblivion of his love, time is lost; beauty and meaning have
faded from all he ever pursued and won; and he renounces the book he has
always hoped to write. A long absence in a sanatorium is interrupted by
a wartime visit to Paris, bombarded like Pompeii or Sodom from the
skies. Charlus, disintegrated by his vice, is seen in Jupien’s infernal
brothel, and Saint-Loup, married to Gilberte and turned homosexual, dies
heroically in battle. After the war, at the Princesse de Guermantes’s
afternoon reception, the narrator becomes aware, through a series of
incidents of unconscious memory, that all the beauty he has experienced
in the past is eternally alive. Time is regained, and he sets to work,
racing against death, to write the very novel the reader has just
experienced.
Proust’s novel has a circular construction and must be considered in
the light of the revelation with which it ends. The author reinstates
the extratemporal values of time regained, his subject being salvation.
Other patterns of redemption are shown in counterpoint to the main
theme: the narrator’s parents are saved by their natural goodness, great
artists (the novelist Bergotte, the painter Elstir, the composer
Vinteuil) through the vision of their art, Swann through suffering in
love, and even Charlus through the Lear-like grandeur of his fall.
Proust’s novel is, ultimately, both optimistic and set in the context of
human religious experience. “I realized that the materials of my work
consisted of my own past,” says the narrator at the moment of time
regained. An important quality in the understanding of À la recherche
lies in its meaning for Proust himself as the allegorical story of his
own life, from which its events, places, and characters are taken. In
his quest for time lost, he invented nothing but altered everything,
selecting, fusing, and transmuting the facts so that their underlying
unity and universal significance should be revealed, working inward to
himself and outward to every aspect of the human condition. À la
recherche is comparable in this respect not only with other major novels
but also with such creative and symbolic autobiographies as Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit and the Viscount de
Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outretombe, both of which influenced Proust.
Assessment
Proust projected his own homosexuality upon his characters, treating
this, as well as snobbism, vanity, and cruelty, as a major symbol of
original sin. His insight into women and the love of men for women
(which he himself experienced for the many female originals of his
heroines) remained unimpaired, and he is among the greatest novelists in
the fields of both heterosexual and homosexual love.
The entire climate of the 20th-century novel was affected by À la
recherche du temps perdu, which is one of the supreme achievements of
modern fiction. Taking as raw material the author’s past life, À la
recherche is ostensibly about the irrecoverability of time lost, about
the forfeiture of innocence through experience, the emptiness of love
and friendship, the vanity of human endeavour, and the triumph of sin
and despair; but Proust’s conclusion is that the life of every day is
supremely important, full of moral joy and beauty, which, though they
may be lost through faults inherent in human nature, are indestructible
and recoverable. Proust’s style is one of the most original in all
literature and is unique in its union of speed and protraction,
precision and iridescence, force and enchantment, classicism and
symbolism.
George Duncan Painter
Ed.
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PROUST
Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was physically frail, an asthmatic, who as a young
man moved freely m Parisian high society. There he acquired the material for
his single great masterpiece, A la recherche dii temps perdu (published in
seven sections between 1913 and 1927), translated as Remembrance of Things
Past. The work became practically his only interest during his latter years
when he lived as a recluse, seldom venturing outside in daytime, an
existence only partly prescribed by deteriorating health. The subject of
this seminal novel, which ran to about 3,000 pages, is Time and Memory. The
authentic past can only be recaptured through involuntary memory, triggered
by an apparently insignificant incident or object. Through such 'privileged
moments', the past is recaptured. All traditional ideas of narrative are
abandoned, and events and feelings are fed through a narrator figure, Marcel
(not, in spite of similarities, an alter ego). Proust's precision in
describing human consciousness echoes Henry James and Joyce; his idea of
insignificant past incidents assuming later importance is found in Virginia
Woolf, and his notion of human relationships forming a pattern like a piece
of music was adopted by Anthony Powell in A Dance to the Music of Time
(1951-75).
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Marcel Proust
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (10 July 1871 –
18 November 1922) was a French novelist, essayist and critic, best known as
the author of À la recherche du temps perdu (in English, In Search of Lost
Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past), a monumental work
of twentieth-century fiction published in seven parts from 1913 to 1927.
Proust was born in Auteuil (the southern sector of Paris's then-rustic 16th
arrondissement) at the home of his great-uncle, two months after the Treaty
of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian War. His birth took place
during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune,
and his childhood corresponds with the consolidation of the French Third
Republic. Much of In Search of Lost Time concerns the vast changes, most
particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle
classes, that occurred in France during the Third Republic and the fin de
siècle. Proust's father, Achille Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist
and epidemiologist, responsible for studying and attempting to remedy the
causes and movements of cholera through Europe and Asia; he was the author
of many articles and books on medicine and hygiene. Proust's mother, Jeanne
Clémence Weil, was the daughter of a well-off and cultured Jewish family.
She was a literate and well-read woman. Her letters demonstrate a
well-developed sense of humour, and her command of English was sufficient
for her to provide the necessary impetus to her son's later attempts to
translate John Ruskin.By the age of nine, Proust had had his first serious
asthma attack, and thereafter he was considered by himself, his family and
his friends as a sickly child. Proust spent long holidays in the village of
Illiers. This village, combined with aspects of the time he spent at his
great-uncle's house in Auteuil became the model for the fictional town of
Combray, where some of the most important scenes of In Search of Lost Time
take place. (Illiers was renamed Illiers-Combray on the occasion of the
Proust centenary celebrations). Despite his poor health, Proust served a
year (1889–90) as an enlisted man in the French army, stationed at Coligny
Caserne in Orléans, an experience that provided a lengthy episode in The
Guermantes' Way, part three of his novel. As a young man, Proust was a
dilettante and a social climber, whose aspirations as a writer were hampered
by his lack of application. His reputation from this period, as a snob and
an amateur, contributed to his later troubles with getting Swann's Way, the
first part of his large-scale novel, published in 1913. Proust had a close
relationship with his mother. In order to appease his father, who insisted
that he pursue a career, Proust obtained a volunteer position at the
Bibliothèque Mazarine in the summer of 1896. After exerting considerable
effort, he obtained a sick leave which was to extend for several years until
he was considered to have resigned. He never worked at his job, and he did
not move from his parents' apartment until after both were dead (Tadié).
Proust, who was homosexual, was one of the first European novelists to treat
homosexuality openly and at length. His life and family circle changed
considerably between 1900 and 1905. In February 1903, Proust's brother
Robert married and left the family home. His father died in September of the
same year. Finally, and most crushingly, Proust's beloved mother died in
September 1905, leaving him a considerable inheritance. (In today's terms, a
principal of about $6 million, with a monthly income of about $15,000.) His
health throughout this period continued to deteriorate. Proust spent the
last three years of his life largely confined to his cork-lined bedroom,
sleeping during the day and working at night to complete his novel. He died
in 1922 and is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
Proust was involved in writing and publishing from an early age. In addition
to the literary magazines with which he was associated, and in which he
published, while at school, La Revue verte and La Revue lilas, from 1890–91
Proust published a regular society column in the journal Le Mensuel (Tadie).
In 1892 he was involved in founding a literary review called Le Banquet
(also the French title of Plato's Symposium), and throughout the next
several years Proust published small pieces regularly in this journal and in
the prestigious La Revue Blanche. In 1896 Les Plaisirs et les Jours, a
compendium of many of these early pieces, was published. The book included a
foreword by Anatole France, drawings by Mme. Lemaire, and was so sumptuously
produced that it cost twice the normal price of a book its size. That year
Proust also began working on a novel which was eventually published in 1954
and titled Jean Santeuil by his posthumous editors. Many of the themes later
developed in In Search of Lost Time find their first articulation in this
unfinished work, including the enigma of memory and the necessity of
reflection; several sections of In Search of Lost Time can be read in first
draft in Jean Santeuil. The portrait of the parents in Jean Santeuil is
quite harsh, in marked contrast to the adoration with which the parents are
painted in Proust's masterpiece. Following the poor reception of Les
Plaisirs et les Jours, and internal troubles with resolving the plot, Proust
gradually abandoned Jean Santeuil in 1897 and stopped work on it entirely by
1899.
Beginning in 1895 Proust spent several years reading Carlyle, Emerson and
John Ruskin. Through this reading Proust began to refine his own theories of
art and the role of the artist in society. Also, in Time Regained Proust's
universal protagonist recalls having translated Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies.
The artist's responsibility is to confront the appearance of nature, deduce
its essence and retell or explain that essence in the work of art. Ruskin's
view of artistic production was central to this conception, and Ruskin's
work was so important to Proust that he claimed to know "by heart" several
of Ruskin's books, including The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Bible of
Amiens, and Praeterita (Tadié 350). Proust set out to translate two of
Ruskin's works into French, but was hampered by an imperfect command of
English. In order to compensate for this he made his translations a group
affair: sketched out by his mother, the drafts were first revised by Proust,
then by Marie Nordlinger, the English cousin of his friend and sometime
lover Reynaldo Hahn, then by Proust again finally polished. Confronted about
his method by an editor, Proust responded, "I don't claim to know English; I
claim to know Ruskin" (Tadié). The Bible of Amiens, with Proust's extended
introduction, was published in French in 1904. Both the translation and the
introduction were very well reviewed; Henri Bergson called Proust's
introduction "an important contribution to the psychology of Ruskin" and had
similar praise for the translation (Tadié 433). At the time of this
publication, Proust was already at work on translating Ruskin's Sesame and
Lilies, which he completed in June 1905, just prior to his mother's death,
and published in 1906. Literary historians and critics have ascertained
that, apart from Ruskin, Proust's chief literary influences included Saint
Simon, Montaigne, Stendhal, Flaubert, George Eliot, Fyodor Dostoevsky and
Leo Tolstoy. 1908 was an important year for Proust's development as a
writer. During the first part of the year he published in various journals
pastiches of other writers. These exercises in imitation may have allowed
Proust to solidify his own style. In addition, in the spring and summer of
the year Proust began work on several different fragments of writing that
would later coalesce under the working title of Contre Saint-Beuve. Proust
described what he was working on in a letter to a friend: "I have in
progress: a study on the nobility, a Parisian novel, an essay on
Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert, an essay on women, an essay on pederasty (not
easy to publish), a study on stained-glass windows, a study on tombstones, a
study on the novel" (Tadié 513). From these disparate fragments Proust began
to shape a novel on which he worked continually during this period. The
rough outline of the work centered on a first-person narrator, unable to
sleep, who during the night remembers waiting as a child for his mother to
come to him in the morning. The novel was to have ended with a critical
examination of Sainte-Beuve and a refutation of his theory that biography
was the most important tool for understanding an artist's work. Present in
the unfinished manuscript notebooks are many elements that correspond to
parts of the Recherche, in particular, to the "Combray" and "Swann in Love"
sections of Volume 1, and to the final section of Volume 7. Trouble with
finding a publisher, as well as a gradually changing conception of his
novel, led Proust to shift work to a substantially different project that
still contained many of the same themes and elements. By 1910 he was at work
on À la recherche du temps perdu.
Begun in 1909, À la recherche du temps perdu consists of seven volumes
spanning some 3,200 pages and teeming with more than 2,000 literary
characters. Graham Greene called Proust the "greatest novelist of the 20th
century", and W. Somerset Maugham called the novel the "greatest fiction to
date." Proust died before he was able to complete his revision of the drafts
and proofs of the final volumes, the last three of which were published
posthumously and edited by his brother, Robert. The book was translated into
English by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, appearing as Remembrance of Things Past
between 1922 and 1931. In 1995, Penguin undertook a fresh translation of the
book by editor Christopher Prendergast and seven translators in three
countries, based on the latest and most authoritative French text.
Subsequently, the title of the novel was more accurately translated as In
Search of Lost Time and is now often referred to as such. Its six volumes
were published in Britain under the Allen Lane imprint in 2002. The first
four (those which under American copyright law are in the public domain)
have since been published in the U.S. under the Viking imprint and in
paperback under the Penguin Classics imprint.
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Remembrance of Things Past
Marcel Proust
1871-1922
It has often been said that the importance of Marcel Proust's
monumental novel lies in its pervasive influence on
twentieth-century literature, whether because writers have
sought to emulate it, or attempted to parody and discredit some
of its traits. However, it is equally important that readers
have enjoyed the extent to which the novel itself unfolds as a
dialogue with its literary predecessors.
Remembrance of Things Past, for In Search of Lost Time) is the
daunting and fashionable three-thousand-page "story of a
literary vocation," on which Proust worked for fourteen years.
In it, he explores the themes of time, space, and memory, but
the novel is above all a condensation of innumerable literary,
structural, stylistic, and thematic possibilities. The most
striking one is the structural device whereby the fluctuating
fortunes of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy from the
mid-1870s to the mid-1920s are narrated through the failing
memories of an aspiring writer, Marcel, who succumbs to many
distractions. This defect of memory entails misperceptions of
all sorts, partly corrected, bringing rare moments of joy by the
faculty of "involuntary" memory. These moments of connection
with the past are brought about by contingent encounters in the
present, which re-awaken long-lost sensations, perceptions, and
recollections. It is these moments that give the novel its
unique structure, which, no doubt more than any other novel,
calls for careful reading. Appropriately, the publication of
this epic novel in French is still evolving, as scholars
continue to work on notes and sketches. The novel has also
recently attracted new translators into English, long after the
first translation into English between 1922 and 1930. Proust's
"mass of writing," as it has sometimes been described,continues
to expand.
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REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST
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Type of work: Novel
Author: Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
Type of plot: Psychological realism
Time of plot: Late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Locale: France
First published: A la recherche du temps perdu, 1913-1927
(English translation, 1922-1931, 1981): Du cote de chez Swann, 1913
{Swarm's Way, 1922); A Vombre des jeunes filles enfleurs, 1919 (Within a
Budding Grove, 1924); Le Cote de Guermantes, 1920-1921 (The Guermantes
Way, 1925); Sodome et Gomorrhe, 1922 (Cities of the Plain, 1927); La
Prisonniere, 1925 (The Captive, 1929); Albertine disparue, 1925 (The
Sweet Cheat Gone, 1930); Le Temps retrouve, 1927 (Time Regained, 1931).
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The title of this seven-novel work reveals Proust's twofold
concern of time lost and time recalled. The writing is distilled from
memory, the structure determined entirely by moods and sensations evoked
by time passing or seeming to pass, recurring or seeming to recur. For
Proust the true realities of human experience are not contained in a
reconstruction of remembered scenes and events, but in the capture of
physical sensations and moods re-created in memory. Symphonic in design,
the work unfolds without plot or crisis as the writer reveals the motifs
of his experience from childhood to middle age, holds them for thematic
effect, and drops them, only to return to them once more in the
processes of recurrence and change.
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Principal Characters
Marcel (mar-seT), the narrator who tells the story of his life from
unsettled childhood to disillusioned middle age. Dealing with time lost
and time recalled, Marcel says, as he looks back to a crucial childhood
experience when his mother spent the night in his room instead of
scolding him for his insomnia, that memory eliminates precisely that
great dimension of Time which governs the fullest realization of our
lives. Through the years, from his memory of that childhood experience
to his formulation of this concept of time, Marcel sees the principals
of two social sets spurn each other, then intermingle with the change of
fortunes. He experiences love in various forms: an innocent affair with
a friend's daughter, an adolescent passion for the friend's coquettish
wife, an intermittent love affair with a lesbian. He develops
friendships and animosities among individuals in the different social
levels on which he moves. Reminded, by seeing the daughter of his
childhood sweetheart, that he is old, he realizes the futility of his
life and senses the ravages of time on everyone he has known.
Monsieur Swann (swan'), a wealthy broker and aesthete, and a friend of
Marcel's parents. Swann, having known the Comte de Paris and the Prince
of Wales, moves from level to level in the social milieu. Having married
beneath his station, he knows that wealth sustains his social position
and keeps his fickle wife dependent on him. Jealous and unhappy in
courtship and marriage, he manipulates social situations by cultivating
officers and politicians who will receive his wife. He dies, his life
having been an meaningless as Marcel sees his own to be; in fact, Marcel
sees in his own life a close parallel to that of his sensitive friend.
Madame Swann, formerly Odette de Crecy, a courtesan. A woman whose
beauty is suggestive of Botticelli's paintings, she is attractive to
both men and women. Stupid and uncomprehending, Odette continues affairs
with other men after her comfortable marriage. She introduces Swann to
the social set below his own. Despite her beginnings, she moves to
higher levels and becomes a celebrated, fashionable hostess when she
remarries after Swann's death.
Gilberte Swann (zheTbert swan'), the Swann's daughter and Marcel's
playmate in Paris. Their relationship develops into an innocent love
affair, and they remain constant good friends after Gilberte's marriage
to Marcel's close friend, Robert de Saint-Loup. The sight of Gilberte's
daughter, grown up, reminds Marcel that he himself is aging.
Madame de Villeparisis (da ve-уэ-ратё-гё'), a society matron and the
friend of Marcel's grandmother. It is said that her father ruined
himself for her, a renowned beauty when she was young. She has become a
dreadful, blowsy, hunched-up old woman; her physical deterioration is
comparable to the decline of her friends' spiritual selves.
Robert de Saint-Loup (гб-ЬёУ йэ san'-loo'), her nephew, whom she
introduces to Marcel. Their meeting is the beginning of a friendship
that lasts until Robert's death in World War I. In his courtship and
marriage, Robert suffers from the same insecurity, resulting in
jealousy, that plagues Swann and Marcel in their relations with women.
He marries Gilberte Swann.
Monsieur de Charlus (тэ-syoe' da sharliis'), another of Mme. de
Villeparisis' nephews, a baron. The baron, as he is usually referred to,
is a sexual invert who has affairs with men of many different stations
in life. In his aberration the baron is both fascinating and repulsive
to Marcel, who makes homosexuality a chief discussion in the volume
titled Cities of the Plain. The baron's depravity leads to senile old
age.
Madame Verdurin (ver-dti-rah'), a vulgar person of the bourgeoisie who,
with her husband, pretends to despise the society to which they have no
entree. Odette introduces Swann to the Verdurins. Mme. Verdurin crosses
social lines as she comes into money and marries into the old
aristocracy after her first husband dies. The middle-class Verdurins
seem to surround themselves with talented individuals, and many of their
guests become outstanding in their professions and arts.
The Prince and Princess de Guermantes (dg ger-maftt'), members of the
old aristocracy and the family used by Proust in the volume titled The
Guermantes Way, to delineate the social classes, the Guermantes
representing aristocratic group as opposed to the moneyed society
described in Swann s Way. After the princess dies, the prince, ruined by
the war, marries widowed Mme. Verdurin. Their union is further evidence
of social mobility.
The Duke and Duchess de Guermantes, members of the same family. After
Odette's rise on the social scale, the duchess is received in Odette's
salon. In earlier years the duchess left parties to avoid meeting the
vulgar social climber.
Albertine (al-ber-ten'), a lesbian attracted by and to Marcel. Over an
extended period of time their affair takes many turns. Marcel seeks
comfort from her when his grandmother dies; he is unhappy with her and
wretched without her; his immaturity drives her from him and back to her
home in Balbec. A posthumous letter to Marcel, after Albertine is killed
in a fall from a horse, tells of her intention to return to him.
Marcel's Grandmother, a woman known and revered in both the aristocratic
and the merely fashionable social sets. Marcel loves and respects her,
and her death brings into focus for him the emptiness in the lives of
his smart, wealthy friends.
Monsieur Vinteuil (van-te-уйГ), an old composer in Combray. He dies in
shame because of his daughter's association with a woman of questionable
character. Unhappy in his own life, Vinteuil's music brings pleasure to
many. Among those affected is Swann, moved to marry Odette, his
mistress, because he associates the charm of Vinteuil's exquisite
sonatas with the beauty of the cocotte. Marcel, also captured by the
spirit of Vinteuil's music, senses its effect on various listeners.
Rachel (ra-sheT), a young Jewish actress who becomes famous. Although
she is Robert de Saint-Loup's mistress, she despises him because of his
simplicity, breeding, and good taste. Rachel likes the aesthetic
charlatans she considers superior to her devoted lover.
Dr. Cottard (kot-tar'), a social boor because of his tiresome punning
and other ineptitudes, a guest at the Verdurins' parties. He becomes a
noted surgeon, professionally admired.
Elstir (el-ster'), a young man Marcel meets at Verdurins'. He becomes a
painter whose genius is admired.
Madame de Saint-Euverte (э santcevert'), a hostess whose parties attract
both the old and new friends of Swann, to his displeasure at times.
The Princess des launes (da Ion'), a long-time friend of Swann and guest
in Mme. de Saint-Euverte's salon. She is distressed at her friend's
unhappiness, caused by lowering himself to Odette's level.
Morel (тбтёГ), the musician who, at the Verdurins' party, plays
Vinteiul's compositions. Morel is a protege of the perverted Baron de
Charlus.
Jupien (zhu-pyaft'), a tailor. After becoming the object of de Charlus'
affection he establishes a house for affairs among men.
Monsieur de Norpoie (dg nor-pwa'), an ambassador who, as Marcel finally
realizes, has been Mme. de Villeparisis' lover for many years.
Aunt Leonie (la-6-пё'К Marcel's aunt. At the end he likens himself to
her as he recalls her from his childhood, when she had become an old
hypochondriac.
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The Story
All of his life Marcel found it difficult to go to sleep at night. After
he had blown out the light, he would lie quietly in the darkness and
think of the book he had been reading, of an event in history, of some
memory from the past. Sometimes he would think of all the places in
which he had slept—as a child in his great-aunt's house in the
provincial town of Combray, in Balbec on a holiday with his grandmother,
in the military town where his friend, Robert de Saint-Loup, had been
stationed, in Paris, in Venice during a visit there with his mother.
He remembered always a night at Combray when he was a child. Monsieur
Swann, a family friend, had come to dinner. Marcel had been sent to bed
early, where he lay for hours nervous and unhappy until at last he heard
Monsieur Swann leave. Then his mother had come upstairs to comfort him.
For a long time, the memory of that night was his chief recollection of
Combray, where his family took him to spend a part of every summer with
his grandparents and aunts. Years later, while drinking tea with his
mother, the taste of a small sweet cake suddenly brought back all the
impressions of his old days at Combray.
He remembered the two roads. One was Swann's way, a path that ran beside
Monsieur Swann's park where the lilacs and hawthorns bloomed. The other
was the Guer-mantes way, along the river and past the chateau of the
Duke and Duchess de Guermantes, the great family of Combray. He
remembered the people he saw on his walks. There were familiar figures
like the doctor and the priest. There was Monsieur Vinteuil, an old
composer who died brokenhearted and shamed because of his daughter's
friendship with a woman of bad reputation. There were the neighbors and
friends of his grandparents. Best of all, he remembered Monsieur Swann,
whose story he pieced together slowly from family conversations and
village gossip.
Monsieur Swann was a wealthy Jew accepted in rich and fashionable
society. His wife, Odette de Crecy, was not received, however, for she
was his former mistress and a prostitute with the fair, haunting beauty
of a Botticelli painting. It was Odette who had first introduced Swann
to the Verdurins, a vulgar family that pretended to despise the polite
world of the Guermantes. At an evening party given by Madame Verdurin,
Swann heard played a movement of Vinteuil's sonata and identified his
hopeless passion for Odette with that lovely music. Swann's love was an
unhappy affair. Tortured by jealousy, aware of the vulgarity and
pettiness of the Verdurins, determined to forget his unfaithful
mistress, he went to Madame de Saint-Euverte's reception. There he heard
Vinteuil's music again. Under its influence he decided, at whatever
price, to marry Odette.
After their marriage Swann drifted more and more into the bourgeois
circle of the Verdurins. When he went to see his old friends in Combray
and in the fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain, he went alone. Many
people thought him both ridiculous and tragic.
On his walks Marcel sometimes saw Madame Swann and her daughter,
Gilberte, in the park at Combray. Later, in Paris, he met the little
girl and became her playmate. That friendship, as they grew older,
became an innocent love affair. Filled also with a schoolboyish passion
for Madame Swann, Marcel went to Swann's house as much to be in her
company as in Gilberte's, but after a time, his pampered habits and
brooding, neurasthenic nature began to bore Gilberte. His pride hurt, he
refused to see her for many years.
Marcel's family began to treat him as an invalid. With his grandmother,
he went to Balbec, a seaside resort. There he met Albertine, a girl to
whom he was immediately attracted. He also met Madame de Villeparisis,
an old friend of his grandmother's and a connection of the Guermantes
family. Madame de Villeparisis introduced him to her two nephews, Robert
de Saint-Loup and Baron de Charlus. Saint-Loup and Marcel became close
friends. While visiting Saint-Loup in a nearby garrison town, Marcel met
his friend's mistress, a young Jewish actress named Rachel. Marcel was
both fascinated and repelled by Baron de Charlus; he was not to
understand until later the baron's corrupt and depraved nature.
Through his friendship with Madame de Villeparisis and Saint-Loup,
Marcel was introduced into the smart world of the Guermantes when he
returned to Paris.
One day, while he was walking with his grandmother, she suffered a
stroke. The illness and death of that good and unselfish old woman made
him realize for the first time the empty worldliness of his smart and
wealthy friends. For comfort he turned to Albertine, who came to stay
with him in Paris while his family was away. Nevertheless, his desire to
be humored and indulged in all of his whims, his suspicions of Albertine,
and his petty jealousy finally forced her to leave him and go back to
Balbec. With her, he had been unhappy; without her, he was wretched.
Then he learned that she had been accidentally killed in a fall from her
horse. Later he received a letter, written before her death, in which
she promised to return to him.
More miserable than ever, Marcel tried to find diversion among his old
friends. They were changing with the times. Swann was ill and soon to
die. Gilberte had married Robert de Saint-Loup. Madame Verdurin, who had
inherited a fortune, now entertained the old nobility. At one of her
parties Marcel heard a Vinteuil composition played by a musician named
Morel, the nephew of a former servant and now a protege of the notorious
Baron de Charlus.
His health breaking down at last, Marcel spent the war years in a
sanatorium. When he returned to Paris, he found still greater changes.
Robert de Saint-Loup had been killed in the war. Rachel, Saint-Loup's
mistress, had become a famous actress. Swann was also dead, and his
widow had remarried and was now a fashionable hostess who received the
Duchess de Guermantes. Prince de Guermantes, his fortune lost and his
first wife dead, had married Madame Verdurin for her money. Baron de
Charlus had grown senile.
Marcel went to one last reception at the Princess de Guermantes' lavish
house. There he met the daughter of Gilberte de Saint-Loup; he realized
how time had passed, how old he had grown. In the Guermantes' library,
he happened to take down the novel by George Sand which his mother had
read to him that remembered night in Combray, years before. Suddenly, in
memory, he heard again the ringing of the bell that announced Monsieur
Swann's departure and knew that it would echo in his mind forever. He
saw then that everything in his own futile, wasted life dated from that
far night in his childhood, and in that moment of self-revelation he saw
also the ravages of time among all the people he had ever known.
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Critical Evaluation
Remembrance of Things Past is not a novel of traditional form. Symphonic
in design, it unfolds without plot or crisis as the writer reveals in
retrospect the motifs of his experience, holds them for thematic effect,
and drops them, only to return to them once more in the processes of
recurrence and change. This varied pattern of experience brings together
a series of involved relationships through the imagination and
observation of a narrator engaged in tracing with painstaking detail his
perceptions of people and places as he himself grows from childhood to
disillusioned middle age. From the waking reverie in which he recalls
the themes and characters of his novel to that closing paragraph with
its slow, repeated echoes of the word time, Marcel Proust's novel is
great art distilled from memory itself, the structure determined
entirely by moods and sensations evoked by the illusion of time passing,
or seeming to pass, recurring, or seeming to recur.
In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust, together with Leo Tolstoy (War
and Peace, 1865-1869), Fyodor Dostoevski (The Brothers Karamazov, 1879
-1880), Thomas ЪАаяп (Joseph and His Brothers, 1933-1943), andJames
Joyce (Ulysses, 1922), transformed the novel from a linear account of
events into a multidimensional art. The breakthrough was not into
Freudian psychology, or existentialism, or scientific determinism but
into a realization that all things are, or may be, interwoven, bound by
time, yet freed from time, open to every associational context.
What is reality? Certainly there is the reality of the sensory
experience; yet any moment of sensory experience may have numerous
successive or even simultaneous realities as it is relived in memory in
different contexts, and perhaps the most significant reality—or
realities—of a given act or moment may come long after the moment when
the event first took place in time. Percy Shelley, in A Defence of
Poetry (1840), said, "All things exist as they are perceived: at least
in relation to the percipient." And things which may have seemed
inconsequential at the moment of their occurrence may take on richly
multifaceted meanings in relation to other events, other memories, other
moments. The initial act is not as significant, not as real, as the
perceptions of it which may come in new contexts. Reality is a context,
made up of moods, of recollections joined by chance or design, sets of
associations that have grown over the years. This concept of the notion
of reality, one that had been taking shape with increased momentum since
the Romantic movement, opened the way to "those mysteries . . . the
presentiment of which is the quality in life and art which moves us most
deeply."
The elusive yet pervasively important nature of reality applies not only
to events, such as the taste of the made-leine (or small cake), but also
to the absence of events, for the failure of Marcel's mother to give him
his accustomed good-night kiss proved to be an occasion which memory
would recall again and again in a variety of relationships. Thus reality
can and inevitably for all people does sometimes include, if not indeed
center on, the nonbeing of an event. That nonexistence can be placed in
time and in successive times as surely as events that did happen;
moreover "it"—that nothing where something might or should have been—may
become a significant part of the contexts which, both in time and freed
from time, constitute reality.
Such thematic variations and turns of thought have led some to identify
Proust as a "dilettante." Perhaps, in its literal sense, the term is
justified, for his mind might have delighted in what, to the reader, may
be unexpected turns of thought. In this he is most closely to be
associated with Thomas Mann, whose consideration of time in the first
volume of Joseph and His Brothers leads the reader into labyrinthine but
essential paths; or whose speculations about the God-man relationship in
volume 2, in the section headed "Abraham Discovers God," lead the reader
down a dizzying path of whimsical yet serious thought. The fact remains,
however, that Mann and Proust have opened doors of contemplation that
modern man cannot afford to ignore if he would increase his
understanding of himself, the world in which he lives, and the tenuous
nature of reality and of time.
What Proust does with time and reality he also does with character.
Although he was a contemporary of Freud, and although Freudian
interpretation could be applied to some of his characters in part, his
concept of character is much too complex for reduction to ego. id, and
the subconscious. Character, like reality, is a changing total context,
not static and not a thing in itself to be held off and examined at
arm's length. Baron de Charlus is at once a study of character in
disintegration and a caricature, reduced in the end to a pitiable
specimen, scarcely human. It is Marcel, however, who is seen most fully.
His character is seen in direct statements, in his comments about others
and about situations, in what others say to him or the way they say it,
even in descriptive passages which would at first glance not seem to
relate to character at all. "Only the exhaustive can be truly
interesting," Mann said in the preface to The Magic Mountain (1924).
Proust surely agreed. His detail is not of the catalogue variety,
however; it works cumulatively, developmentally, with the thematic
progression of symphonic music.
Finally the totality of the work is "the past recaptured." To understand
this masterpiece in its full richness, one must become and remain
conscious of the author, isolated in his study, drawing upon his
recollections, associating and reassociating moments, events,
personalities (his own always central), both to recapture the past as it
happened and to discover in it the transcendent reality which supersedes
the time-bound moment of the initial occurrence. The total work is a
story, a succession of stories, and a study of the life process, which,
as one comes to understand it, must greatly enrich one's own sense of
self and of the life one lives.
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