French novelist, best known for Á LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU (Remembrance of Things Past), his autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style. The work collected pieces from his childhood, details and fetishes of high class life-style, gossips, memories, recollections of the world he never quite managed to join. The leading motif in the book is that the past has true reality for man. The key scene is when a madeleine cake enables the writer to experience the past completely as a simultaneous part of his present existence. "It seems that the taste for books grows with intelligence, a little below it but on the same stem, as every passion is accomplished by a predilection for that which surrounds its object, which has an affinity for it, which in its absence still speaks of it. So, the great writers, during those hours when they are not in direct communication with their thought, delight in the society of books. Besides, is it not chiefly for them that they have been written; do they not disclose to them a thousand beauties, which remain hidden to the masses?" (Proust in Reading in Bed, selected and edited by Steven Gilbar, 1995) Marcel Proust was born in Auteuil, near Paris, as the son of an eminent doctor, Adrien Proust, and his wife, Jeanne Weil who was from a well-to-do Alsation Jewish family. He attended the Lycée Condorcet (1882-1889) and in spite of his severe asthma did his one year military service at Orléans. Proust studied law at the famous Sorbonne at the École des Sciences Politiques. In 1896 appeared his first books, PORTRAITS DE PEINTRES and LES PLAISIRS ET LES JOURS. Proust's unpublished texts from this period, JEAN SANTEUIL and CONTRE-SAINTE BEUVE, an attack of the biographical criticism of Sainte-Beuve, were discovered in the 1950s.
From 1895 to 1899 Proust worked on an autobiographical novel that remained unfinished. His earliest love affairs, which had been heterosexual, changed later into homosexual affairs. Among them was Alfred Agostelli, who was married and was killed in an air accident. To the age of 35 Proust lived the life of a snob and social climber in the salons, although he worked for a short time as a lawyer and was active in the Dreyfuss affair, like Émile Zola and other artists and intellectuals.
"A great part - perhaps the greatest - of Proust's writing is intended to show the havoc wrought in and round us by Time; and he succeeded amazingly not only in suggesting to the reader, but in making him actually feel, the universal decay invincibly creeping over everything and everybody with a kind of epic and horrible power." (Georges Lemaitre in Four French Novelists, 1938) Proust suffered from asthma throughout his life and was looked after by his Jewish mother, to whom the writer was - neurotically - attached. When his father did in 1903 and his mother in 1905, Proust withdrew gradually from his high-society social life. Becoming a virtual recluse, Proust lived in a sound-proof flat, on the Boulevard Haussmann, and devoted himself to writing and introspection. He was financially independent and was free to start his on his great novel, Remembrance of Things Past, which was influenced by the autobiographies of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and François Chateaubriand. From 1910 he spent much time in his bedroom, often sleeping in the day and working in the night. "For a long time I used to go to bed early."
In 1912 Proust produced the first volume of his sevenpart major work, Remembrance of Things Past. The second book, which was delayed by the WW I, appeared in 1919, and the next parts made him finally internationally famous. The massive story of 3 000 pages occupied the last decade of his life. Proust managed to complete the novel before his death on November 18, 1922.
The narrator in Remembrance of Things Past is Marcel. He is not Proust but resembles him in many ways. Marcel is initially ignorant - only slowly does he begin to grasp the essence of the hidden reality. At the end he is preparing to write a novel which is like the one presented just to the reader. Marcel's childhood memories starts to flow when he tastes a madeleine cake dipped in linden tea such as he was given as a child. "Once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime flowers which my aunt used to give me.. immediately the old gray house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater." Memory takes the central role in novel. The narration follows the lives of three families, Marcel's own, the aristocratic de Guermantes and the family of the Jewish bohemian dilettante Swann. Among the central characters are the faithless cocotte Odette, whom Swann marries, homosexual Baron de Charlus, Dutchess, Mme de Villeparisis, Robert Saint-Loup and Marcel's great love Albertine, who is perhaps lesbian and who dies in a riding accident. In the climax of the novel the narrator fails to recognize many of his friends because they have changed so much physically during the years. In the novel Proust attempted to answer the question, What is it to be? And being was for him the complete past, "that past which already extended so far down and which I was bearing so painfully within me." In the narration past and present merge, reality appears in half-forgotten experiences, and parts of the past are felt differently at different time. A prolific writer, Proust also was an avid letter writer. Multiple volumes of his correspondence reveal his interest in various subjects. Proust believed the proper role of the novelist is one of discovery. He is generally considered pioneer of the modern novel. Proust's work influenced widely authors in different countries, among them Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. His style, long sentences, some of which extend to several pages in length, paved way to Claude Simon's narrative inventions.
Proust's literary criticism did not attract wide attention until 1954, when CONTRE SAINTE-BEUVE appeared. He admired Vigny, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle, but Baudelaire was for him the greatest poet of the nineteenth century. Proust denied Henri Bergson's influence on his work, although they both were much occupied with time and memory. Proust made a clear distinction between man and work. The writer is a man of intuition and "A book is the product of a different self we manifest in our habits." There is no progress in literature - all writers stand alone. The most famous of Proust's essays is that on Flaubert's style, in which he compares Flaubert's grammatical use of tenses to Kant's revolution in philosophy.
