Title: Remembrance of Things PastGenre: Novel
Sub-genre: - Psychological Novel
Nationality: - French
Time Period: -20th Century
First read by Dr. Rearick -2006 / 2007
Rated: I'm still thinking but a lot of people I respect give this book an A
Location: - Dr. Rearick's Home and Office Portions
in Norton Anthology of World Literature Vol. F
public domain e-text
Links
Comments: Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past) subjects existence to a remorseless analysis that seems to be in the best tradition of the French psychological novel. In the best known episode, that of Swann's love affair with Odette, Proust shows how the object of love is an illusion created and defined by the lover. But if reason dissects, unconscious memory may create the totality of experience. In the last volumes of this work its structure, which is based on recurring motifs perceived by intuition, is laid bare.
"French literature." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2005. Encyclopædia Britannica Online
6 Apr. 2005 <http://search.eb.com/eb/article?tocId=22576>.
Swann's Way
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.