Marcel Proust
(1871-1922)
Remembrance of Things Past
Marcel-Valentin-Louis-EugèneGeorges Proust
• French intellectual, novelist,
essayist and critic.
• Author of huge novel, La
Recherche du Temps Perdu,
or In Search of Lost Time
(also translated as
Remembrance of Things Past
– "a seven-volume novel
based on Proust's life told
psychologically and
allegorically."
La belle époque. or “The
beautiful era"
• A period in France's history that began during the
late 19th century and lasted until World War I.
• After a humiliating defeat to Prussia in 1871,
France attempted to reassert its national pride and
honor during the next thirty years.
• It quickly repaid its debt to Prussia (which had
been incorporated into the German Empire) and
sought to reestablish the reputation of its army
– (Proust refers to the common practice of dueling as
a national movement to assert French masculinity).
• The stabilization of the political situation, in addition to
Baron Haussman's modernization of Paris in the 1850s,
helped usher in the culture-rich era of the belle époque.
• The new, French-dominated artistic school of
Impressionism rose to international prominence, and
masters such as Van Gogh and Monet left an indelible
mark on the world of art;
• the Eiffel Tower, erected in 1889, dominated the
Parisian skyline as a triumph of architectural
engineering;
• The Lumière Brothers revolutionized entertainment by
inventing modern day cinema.
• It was also a time of great scientific achievement, as
Louis Pasteur and Pierre and Marie Curie helped
France lead the world in the study of disease and
radiology.
A Remembrance of Times Past
• A semi-autobiographical novel in seven volumes
(the last three volumes published posthumously).
• Published in France between 1913 and 1927,
many of the novel's ideas, motifs, and scenes
appear in adumbrated form in Proust's unfinished
novel, Jean Santeuil (1896-99), and in his
unfinished hybrid of philosophical essay and
story, Contre Sainte-Beuve (1908-09).
Important Concepts
• Involuntary memory When compared with
voluntary memory this concept designates
memories retrieved by "intelligence," that is,
memories produced when we put conscious effort
into remembering events, people, and places.
• Proust's narrator laments that such memories are
inevitably partial, and do not bear the "essence" of
the past.
• Involuntary memories, on the other hand, function
similarly to the phenomenon known as déjà-vu:
they possess a vivid and plenary sensory
immediacy that seems to obliterate the passage of
time between the original event and its reexperience in involuntary memory.
• A Neurasthenia Narrator (Marcel)
• Dr. George Miller Beard in 1869 identified the
condition of "neurasthenia" described a condition
with symptoms of
–fatigue, anxiety, headache,
–impotence, neuralgia and depression.
• This state was especially explained as being a
result of exhaustion of the central nervous system's
energy reserves, which Beard attributed to
civilisation.
• Physicians of the Beard way of thinking associated
neurasthenia with the stresses of urbanization and
the pressures placed on the intellectual class by the
increasingly competitive business environment.
Typically, it was associated with upper class
individuals in sedentary employment.
Major Ideas
• The novel shows how we alienate ourselves from
ourselves through distractions, and also, in
memorable passages involving the telephone,
automobile, and airplane, reflects on the changes
wrought by the advent of new technology.
• Similarly, the author wove World War I into his
story, including an aerial bombardment of Paris;
the narrator's boyhood haunts have become a
battlefield, with 600,000 Germans lost in the
struggle for Méséglise, and Combray itself divided
between the opposing armies.
• Proust had trouble deciding whether Swann's Way
should be a fictional account or an explicit
discussion about his philosophical interests. He
settled the question by making the novel both.
• The nature of time and the power of memory,
have both fictional and philosophical implications
in the novel.
– Marcel's favorite writer, Bergotte, is a reference to
Henri Bergson and his theories of time and space.
– Bergson believed that time was not necessarily a
linear, clock-like, measure of fixed and
unchangeable moments.
– Instead, he believed that time, or duration as he
liked to call it, involved a "flowing together" of
different moments and experiences so that one
individual point in time was indistinguishable from
any other.
Bergson convinced many
young people through his
writing that immediate
experience and intuition
were as important as
rational and scientific
thinking for understanding
reality.
In 1927 Bergson was
awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature
• Another theme that Proust emphasizes is the link
between reading and self-knowledge.
• He believed that with each reading of a book, a
different meaning emerged, since readers tend to
shape the characters they read about.
• Consequently, re-reading books enjoyed in
childhood allows readers to perceive how they
have changed.
– Marcel is an avid reader and books soon become
more of a reality to him than the outside world. His
interest in Oedipus Rex and François le Champi,
which both involve a quasi-sexual relationship
between a mother and son, is a manifestation of his
anxiety about his own relationship with his mother.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
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10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.
Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXX [30]
Major Ideas in Swan’s Way: “Overture”
• The relationship between time and memory,
which served, perhaps, as Proust's primary
motivation for writing Remembrance of
Things Past.
– Proust believed that time was not necessarily a
linear, clock-like, measure of fixed and
unchangeable moments.
– Instead, he believed that time, or duration, as he
liked to call it, involved a "flowing together" of
different moments and experiences so that one
individual point in time was indistinguishable
from any other.
• Marcel's complex emotional attitude toward
his mother. Marcel's mother occupies an
important place in the novel;
– Marcel looks to her for guidance, sympathy, and
love, but when he receives these comforts, he feels
guilty about not being more independent. Marcel
experiences this guilt by envisioning the effects
that his need for his mother has on her. He
imagines, for example, that begging his mother to
spend the night with him "traced a first wrinkle
upon her soul and brought out a first white hair on
her head." As a result, their relationship is tainted
by Marcel's belief that he is always causing her
some sort of grief.
– The Oedipal triangle between Marcel, his mother,
and his father serves as a model for various
relationships throughout “Swann's Way.”
The interaction between habit or routine and
memory.
• The "magic lantern" and the images it projects
on young Marcel's bedroom walls at Combray
make him unable to recognize his room; as a
result, he feels lost in time, and must struggle
to remember where and when he is.
• In this instance, breaking with habit
(changing the habitual appearance of his
room) causes Marcel anguish, but in the
episode of the madeleine, breaking with his
usual routine by having tea causes his
pleasurable reminiscences of Combray to
resurface.
Sites Cited
• Maxwell, Daniel. SparkNote on Swann's
Way. 12 Apr. 2007
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/swannsway/
• “In Search of Lost Time” Wikipedia the
Free Encyclopedia. 12 Apr. 2007
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_
Lost_Time