Proust, Marcel (1871–1922)

The French novelist and essayist Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust wrote essays and reviews as well as two novels before he became famous for his novel á la recherche du temps perdu (translated variously as Remembrance of Things Fast or In Search of Lost Time; in this entry, Recherche)

Proust was the son of Adrien Proust, a prominent physician of that time, and his wife Jeanne née Weil, daughter of a wealthy Jewish family. In 1881 Marcel suffered his first attack of asthma, a disease that was to accompany him from that time onward and that finally led to his death at the age of 51. After baccalauréat and military service, he began to study law and political sciences in Paris. He finished these studies in 1892 and 1893, respectively, but against his father's will decided not to start a career in the foreign ministry and instead to begin a new study of “lettres,” which could be described as a general study of humanities. Proust chose philosophy as his main subject and received his licentiate in 1895. In 1896 Les plaisirs et les jours, a collection of prose writings, was published but not widely recognized. In the same year, he began to write his first novel, Jean Santeuil. He stopped working on it in 1904; the fragments were not published until 1952. Many themes of the Recherche can already be found in these fragments.

Between 1896 and 1908 Proust published some translations of the British art historian John Ruskin. In 1907 he began the essay “Contre Sainte Beuve” (published posthumously in 1954), which today is considered to be his preliminary stage of the Recherche. “Contre Sainte Beuve” gradually changed its nature to finally become á la recherche du temps perdu from 1909 onward. The novel consists of 15 volumes, which are divided into 7 parts. The first, Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way) was published 1913, to be followed by A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower) in 1918, Le côté de Guermantes (The Guermantes' Way) in 1920, and Sodome et Gomorrhe (Sodom and Gomorrah) in May 1922. Proust died in November 1922, leaving enough material behind to publish three more novels posthumously. The fifth part of the novel, La[Page 1057]prisonnière (The Prisoner) was published in 1923; the sixth, Albertine disparue (The Fugitive) in 1925, and the last, Le temps retrouvé (Finding Time Again) in 1927.

The main subject of the Recherche is time. The novel describes the life of the protagonist Marcel from his own perspective. The protagonist is not identical with Proust, but there are many similarities to Proust's own life.

The novel wants to give an answer to the question, “What happened to the time lost?” Proust is influenced by the model of time described by the French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson (1859–1941). Bergson divides memory into two parts, which are named mémoire (memory) and souvenir. Mémoire is the cold intellectual side of the memory, while souvenir is an involuntary evolving memory. This mémoire involontaire (involuntary memory) is often caused by sensations such as a smell or a stone touched by the foot. The perhaps most famous example for souvenir in the Recherche is the moment in which Marcel eats a madeleine (small French cake) dipped into tea. This trivial experience triggers a revival of the protagonist's whole life in Combray. Time therefore is not simply a linear experience; it is possible that “lost time” may be brought back to life again by an involuntary remembrance. The lost time comes back as it really was for the one who experienced it.

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