Summary of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

Description

“Life is too short, and Proust is too long,” wrote Anatole France in 1913 after the publication of In Search of Lost Time’s first volume – at a time when the remaining six volumes weren’t even on the horizon. Nobody, not even the author himself, had the slightest idea what the agonizing, drawn-out search for the meaning and essence of art would spawn: a literary universe that tackled or anticipated nearly all the philosophical and psychological questions of his time. The novel deals with the subjective nature of experiencing reality; with the power of the unconscious; and with love, jealousy, sickness, war, homosexuality, pederasty, the transience of life, and death – or merely the creative potency of a childhood memory. Proust remains unmatched in the obsession and attention to detail with which he illuminated every single aspect of human existence. This makes for a lengthy voyage, and you are likely to run out of steam at times. But to dive deeply into Proust’s universe is well worth your effort – and certainly not time lost.

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Sujets

• Classics
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: GetAbstract AG
• Date de parution: 18 novembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798887270340
• Langue: English

Extrait

In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust•First edition: Paris 1913-1927

Novel
Modernism

Take-Aways In Search of Lost Time is a modern narrative experiment in seven volumes and one of the most influential novels of the 20th century. Marcel Proust suffers from writer’s block and fritters away his life as a snob. He experiences anti-Semitism, homosexuality and pathological jealousy, getting tangled up in tragic love affairs. Only when unexpected sensory cues provoke distant memories does he start to write his life’s oeuvre. In the novel, love and friendship are illusions. People remain strangers to one another and fail to make meaningful connections. Everyone is trapped in their own world; objective thought is impossible. Homosexuality is a central theme. In his novel, Proust processed his own painful existence as a closeted homosexual. Fiction and autobiography merge together. The author modeled many characters after his real-life contemporaries. Proust began by writing the opening and closing scenes of the cycle. The broad middle is the result of a manic creative process that went on until his death. Published between 1913 and 1927, the work provoked outrage, incomprehension and admiration.  The magnum opus makes up Proust’s life’s work: Otherwise, he published just a few essays and stories. “An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates, and what we call reality is a certain connection between these immediate sensations and the memories which envelop us simultaneously with them.”

What It’s About
“Life is too short, and Proust is too long,” wrote Anatole France in 1913 after the publication of In Search of Lost Time ’s first volume – at a time when the remaining six volumes weren’t even on the horizon. Nobody, not even the author himself, had the slightest idea what the agonizing, drawn-out search for the meaning and essence of art would spawn: a literary universe that tackled or anticipated nearly all the philosophical and psychological questions of his time. The novel deals with the subjective nature of experiencing reality; with the power of the unconscious; and with love, jealousy, sickness, war, homosexuality, pederasty, the transience of life, and death – or merely the creative potency of a childhood memory. Proust remains unmatched in the obsession and attention to detail with which he illuminated every single aspect of human existence. This makes for a lengthy voyage, and you are likely to run out of steam at times. But to dive deeply into Proust’s universe is well worth your effort – and certainly not time lost.

Summary
Volume 1: Swann’s Way
Marcel   Proust remembers his childhood in the family’s country home in Combray: the drama of bedtime when his mother failed to give him the habitual goodnight kiss, the colorful garden flowers, the water lilies on the rivulet Vivonne and the scent of the hawthorn hedges on his summer strolls. These impressions rise from his subconscious upon tasting a madeleine cake dipped in tea, filling him with a divine kind of bliss. The experience reminds him of childhood Sundays when, before High Mass, his aunt Léonie in Combray would offer him cake dipped in lime blossom tea.
“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.”