III
cinquième trancheMarcel
Proust was the first of two sons born to a well-to-do Parisian family in
1871. His father was a prominent doctor and professor of medicine from a Catholic
family, and his mother was a highly educated, sensitive woman whose family
was Jewish.
Proust developed asthma as a child and spent
holidays at the seaside for his health. He became a great student. After graduating
with honors from high school, he attended the Ecole des Science Politiques.
Despite his asthma, he was able to perform his required year of military service
in Orleans.
Back in Paris, Proust associated with many young
writers and artists, and his social connections landed him invitations to most
of Paris' most exclusive literary and artistic salons. He published a collection
of stories called Les Plaisirs et les jours in 1898. He became an active
supporter of unjustly imprisoned Jewish soldier Alfred Dreyfus during the Dreyfus
Affair (1897-1899).
Proust's asthma became more severe in the early
1900s, about the same time that both his parents died. He moved into a pollen-proof,
cork-lined room at 102 Boulevard de Haussman in Paris, where he lived for the
next 13 years, rarely emerging except for late-night dinner parties with friends.
There, he began writing his masterpiece, À La Recherche du Temps
Perdu, in 1909. The first volume, Du Côté de Chez Swann,
was finished in 1912, but was rejected not only by magazines for excerpt, but
also by publishers. Proust published it at his own expense in 1913. The book
was a success, but World War I postponed the publication of the novel's further
volumes. In 1919, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs was published,
followed by Le Côté de Guermantes in 1921 and Sodome et Gomorrhe
in 1922. The remaining three volumes, La Prisonnière (1923), Albertine
disparue (1925), and Le Temps retrouvé (1927), were published after
Proust's death in Paris in 1922. Together, the books present an elaborate psychological
study of time and identity, and deeply influenced the works of later European
novelists. 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 du Temps Perdu 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.
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.
Taking as raw material the author's past life, À
la recherche du temps perdu 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 man may lose them 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.