MARCEL PROUST
INTRODUCTION
GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE GROWTH OF PROUSTâS REPUTATION
The fact that more has been written about Marcel Proustâs Ă la Recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) than about any other twentieth-century work attests to the present reputation of its author. However, before he gained recognition for Ă lâOmbre des jeunes filles en fleurs (Within a Budding Grove) by winning the Goncourt Prize in 1918, at which time his earlier Du CĂŽtĂ© de chez Swann (Swannâs Way) likewise gained renown, Proust was regarded by many in literary circles as a mere dilettante. After Ă lâOmbre des jeunes filles en fleurs, Proustâs reputation began to fluctuate. Even though his popularity and acclaim grew through Le CĂŽtĂ© de Guermantes (The Guermantes Way), it suffered with Sodome et Gomorrhe (Cities of the Plain) because this work was considered regressive by many. Even though La PrisonniĂšre (The Captive) and Albertine Disparue (The Sweet Cheat Gone) were somewhat less depressing, they were still the work of a dying man and suffered from similar weaknesses. Sections from these works, however, do show Proust at his best. The response to Le Temps retrouvĂ© (The Past Recaptured) was highly favorable. Even though this work also contains some of Proustâs best writing, much of the content is from the pre-World War I vintage which brought Du CĂŽtĂ© de chez Swann.
The spread of Proustâs reputation to the Anglo-Saxon world was launched by the London publisher Chatto and Windus, which published Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieffâs superlative translation of the work, Remembrance of Things Past, up through the sixth novel, The Sweet Cheat Gone. The Past Recaptured was promptly set forth after the Sterlingshire Scotsmanâs death. The Scott-Moncrieff masterpiece was brought to the United States through the sense of preservation and literary vision of the late Bennett Cerf, president of Random House, who secured the rights not only to Proustâs Remembrance of Things Past but to the masterpieces of other great Proust-influenced European authors, including James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
PROUSTâS CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
Many of the biographical events of Marcel Proustâs life pale as merely incidental when viewed in the light of the phenomenal Remembrance of Things Past. Nevertheless, there are certain landmark events in Proustâs life which cannot be overlooked, not the least of which was his doctor-fatherâs decision to make allowances for his frail sonâs self-indulgent dependence upon his mother. Before Proust reached the age of ten, it became evident that allergic reactions to common airborne substances posed a serious medical problem. The allergy became so severe that even daylight and fresh air became as toxins to his increasingly asthmatic condition. He was, in fact, to die prematurely at the age of fifty-one of asthma-related complications aggravated by exhaustion, medication, and pneumonia.
It was his physical delicacy, his not working at a regular job as a youth, and his hypochrondriacal ways (aggravated by his parentsâ deaths in his early manhood) that helped to give him the reputation of dilettantishness. He was also the cultural product of the female-dominated salons and felt like a weakling elder of his fatherâs two sons - thus being regarded by many as effeminate. Proust kept strange hours due to his allergies, frequently going out only in the evening; he was financially secure, having come from a solid bourgeois family; and was given to writing material which many of his acquaintences considered wearisome reading. It was his writing of Remembrance of Things Past which allowed him to break away from the stereotype mold of the salon worldling.
PROUSTâS MIXED JEWISH-CHRISTIAN HERITAGE
The fact that Marcel Proust was of mixed Jewish and Catholic heritage was monumentally significant to his life and work. There is a nearly perfect blend of the Hebraic and the Roman which gave his work appeal to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant world, and it seems that Proust was likewise attracted to the literature of that worldâs preeminent country, England. There is, however, another phenomenon in Proustâs work which seems inextricably tied to his mixed heritage: the phenomenon in Remembrance of Things Past known as âinvoluntary memoryâ which involves numerous highly significant and penetrating passages. A sensory experience of the present will be involved in an interplay with a past experience and will suddenly draw us into timeless eternity. It is something we could almost call a symbolic counterpart to transubstantiation - for one series of objects will create a sensation, giving the subject or partaker an almost mystical union with a presence which is the past itself bound into the present. This vision of the seeming past as an actual presence and as eternal reality might have been heightened by his mixed parentage, for it is frequently the case for people of mixed religious background to scrutinize spiritual phenomena with hypersensitive vision rather than to passively accept doctrine. It has been remarked that Proust was not a practicing Catholic as an adult, but he was taken to Mass regularly as a boy and held a life-long fascination for Catholic churches, their altars, flowers, and stained-glass windows. Much of Proustâs most beautiful prose is suffused in a religious consciousness, and bears the marks of a keen inner consciousness of transubstantiation in the âprecious momentâ sequences which include those vastly important ones involving âinvoluntary memory.â
Proust was constantly amid Catholics in Illiers and Paris, and seemed to form a consciousness of certain substances being consecrated and undergoing mystical transformation to bring a sacred presence to the partaker - as is the case with the tea and madeleine which brings a nearly sacred childhood back intact to the narrator of Remembrance of Things Past. Proust, the half-Jew living in predominantly Catholic Paris and who was in his own inner exile, reminds us of another 20th-century author of Jewish heritage who lived in another predominantly Christian city. We are reminded of Franz Kafka of Prague who had his own fascination for the Christian doctrine of salvation, but who seemed never to succeed in his desperate exiled attempts to grasp its firsthand experience.
PROUST AND DEITY
The great early biographer of Marcel Proust, LĂ©on Pierre-Quint, suggested that, despite Proustâs contact with formal Christianity, God was not present in Proustâs life. Deity, however, may manifest itself in a manâs life as an aesthetic life force as well as a purely religious phenomenon in the traditional theological sense. The two may, in fact, mingle and need not be considered as mutually exclusive entities. Proustâs evident withdrawal from formal religion in adulthood may well be rooted back to the fact that his beloved mother retained her Jewish faith and the two parents avoided religious discussions. Not only was there an absence of parental spiritual confrontations, but there was a heavy predilection for the scientific in Proustâs family as well. Both Proustâs father and his younger brother were highly prominent physicians who could very well have been guilty of scientific arrogance, for this seems to be Proustâs overriding attitude toward physicians in Remembrance of Things Past. Proustâs awareness of not just the divine but the celestial in art is surely a contact with God, for it is an ecstasy born out of transcending time and touching eternity. It also resembles nirvana, the most exalted and penetrating of religious experiences of the Eastern mystics. This is the kind of experience that is transposed into an artistic context in Le Temps retrouvĂ© (The Past Recaptured) (note the capitalization of âTempsâ) when the Proustian narrator comes around to his resolve to write his novel while attending the last matinee at the HĂŽtel de Guermantes. It is this communion with the Absolute which, in fact, becomes the main theme of Remembrance of Things Past - the nirvana of art - the firsthand intuitive experience of Being - of suspension from time and its ravages, which seems only to come after that conditioning which comes through ordeals of suffering (another main theme of the work, embodied in Vinteuil and his music). Proustâs art is the isolation and preservation of his ultimate moments of joy on the written page, and then examining and analyzing them as the gem expert would scrutinize the facets, reflections, and colorations of precious stones.
CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS IN THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MARCEL PROUST
1870 Prussians took Alsace.
1871 First year of the Third Republic. The greatness of France threatened with decline.
1871 July 10: Marcel Proust was born in suburban Auteuil of Paris, immediately after the upheaval of the Commune and the German Occupation. His father was Dr. Adrien Proust, a renowned physician and native of Illiers (fictional Combray) in Beauce. His mother was Jeanne Weil (Proust), a Jewess from Alsace-Lorraine. They lived at 9 Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris and were well-to-do financially. Marcel leaned more toward his mother in affection than toward his aloof, business-like father.
1873 Birth of Robert Proust, Marcelâs younger brother, who was of a much stronger physical constitution than Marcel and who followed in his fatherâs footsteps to become a prestigious doctor.
1880 Marcelâs first recorded attack of asthma. His contact with illness, confinement, and doctors was very influential in the formation of his attitudes and creations. Profuse clinical imagery and dislike for physicians is rampantly prevalent in his work. Proustâs progressive asthma was incurable, possibly psychosomatic and neurological in origin.
1882-1889 The school years at the LycĂ©e Concdorcet were fulfilling for Proust despite his allergies, for the clerical discipline had moderated with secularization and Proust met many men who were to profoundly influence his life. Among them was Darlu, the master in philosophy. Acquaintences among his precocious school friends included Daniel HalĂ©vy and Jacques Bizet (the son of the composer and wife who was to become the influential Mme. Straus whose salon Proust frequented). Proustâs studies of the natural sciences at the urging of his father influenced his writing in its profusion of botanical, chemical, and zoological imagery.
1889 Proust received his baccalaureate and spent, oddly enough, a rather fulfilling year in the 76th Infantry Regiment in Orleans, during which time he met Anatole France, who at times harshly criticized Proust and who seems to be the model for Bergotte.
1889 September 25: Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff was born in Sterlingshire, Scotland. Henri Bergsonâs thesis, âEssai sur les donnĂ©es immĂ©diates de la conscience,â appeared.
1890-1896 Period of great social activity and literary beginnings.
1891-1893 Studies at the Ăcole des Sciences Politique, at the Law School, and at the Sorbonne where he attended Bergsonâs lectures and absorbed his ideas on psychological time as distinguished from chronological time. Bergson was in 1891 to marry Mlle. Neuberger, a relative of Proustâs mother. Proustâs father had hoped that Marcel might become a diplomat or a lawyer, areas in which Proust had little faith. Proust caricatures the hollowness of diplomats in the composite M. de Norpois. Also, during this time, Proust began to frequent the salons of the aristocratic quarter of Paris, the Faubourg Saint-Germain, penetrating it despite his Jewish heritage. He met the composer Reynaldo Hahn whose i...