Understanding Marcel Proust

Allen Thiher

Description

Understanding Marcel Proust includes an overview of Marcel Proust's development as a writer, addressing both works published and unpublished in his lifetime, and then offers an in-depth interpretation of Proust's major novel, In Search of Lost Time, relating it to the Western literary tradition while also demonstrating its radical newness as a narrative.

In his introduction Allen Thiher outlines Proust's development in the context of the political and artistic life of the Third Republic, arguing that everything Proust wrote before In Search of Lost Time was an experiment in sorting out whether he wanted to be a writer of critical theory or of fiction. Ultimately, Thiher observes, all these experiments had a role in the elaboration of the novel. Proust became both theorist and fiction writer by creating a bildungsroman narrating a writer's education.

What is perhaps most original about Thiher's interpretation, however, is his demonstration that Proust removed his aged narrator from the novel's temporal flow to achieve a kind of fictional transcendence. Proust never situates his narrator in historical time, which allows him to demonstrate concretely what he sees as the function of art: the truth of the absolute particular removed from time's determinations. The artist that the narrator hopes to become at the end of the novel must pursue his own individual truths—those in fact that the novel has narrated, for him and the reader, up to the novel's conclusion.

Written in a language accessible to upper-level undergraduates as well as literate general readers, Understanding Marcel Proust simultaneously addresses a scholarly public aware of the critical arguments that Proust's work has generated. Thiher's study should make Proust's In Search of Lost Time more widely accessible by explicating its structure and themes.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Literary Figures
• The Philosopher
• The Realist
• Dictionary of Received Ideas
• Maurice Ravel
• Libertine
• Jean Genet
• Marcel Proust
• Jacques Lacan
• European
• French
• Adrien Proust
• Lucien Daudet
• Jouissance
• Faust
• Georges Bizet
• Henri Bergson
• Arthur Rimbaud
• Alfred Dreyfus
• Politique
• Jacques Derrida
• Charles Baudelaire
• Aldous Huxley

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 15 août 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 5
• EAN13: 9781611172560
• Langue: English

Extrait

Understanding Marcel Proust
Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature
James Hardin, Series Editor
volumes on
Ingeborg Bachmann
Samuel Beckett
Juan Benet
Thomas Bernhard
Johannes Bobrowski
Heinrich B ll
Italo Calvino
Albert Camus
Elias Canetti
Camilo Jos Cela
C line
Julio Cort zar
Isak Dinesen
Jos Donoso
Friedrich D rrenmatt
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Max Frisch
Federico Garc a Lorca
Gabriel Garc a M rquez
Juan Goytisolo
G nter Grass
Gerhart Hauptmann
Christoph Hein
Hermann Hesse
Eug ne Ionesco
Uwe Johnson
Milan Kundera
Primo Levi
John McGahern
Robert Musil
Boris Pasternak
Octavio Paz
Luigi Pirandello
Marcel Proust
Graciliano Ramos
Erich Maria Remarque
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Joseph Roth
Jean-Paul Sartre
W. G. Sebald
Claude Simon
Mario Vargas Llosa
Peter Weiss
Franz Werfel
Christa Wolf
UNDERSTANDING
Marcel Proust
Allen Thiher
2013 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thiher, Allen, 1941-
Understanding Marcel Proust / Allen Thiher.
pages cm. - (Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61117-255-3 (hardbound : alk. paper) -
ISBN 978-1-61117-256-0 (epub) 1. Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922-Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
PQ2631.R63Z934 2013
843 .912-dc23
2013005008
To Irma
Contents
Series Editor s Preface
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Abbreviations and Editions

Chapter 1 Life and Career
Chapter 2 What Proust Published before In Search of Lost Time
Chapter 3 What Proust Did Not Publish
Chapter 4 Swann s Way: Intimations of Paradise and Paradise Lost
Chapter 5 Within a Budding Grove and The Guermantes Way: Intimations of the Fall
Chapter 6 Sodom and Gomorrah, The Captive, and The Fugitive: Intimations of Hell
Chapter 7 Time Regained: Intimations of the Resurrection
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Series Editor s Preface
Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature has been planned as a series of guides for undergraduate and graduate students and nonacademic readers. Like the volumes in its companion series, Understanding Contemporary American Literature, these books provide introductions to the lives and writings of prominent modern authors and explicate their most important works.
Modern literature makes special demands, and this is particularly true of foreign literature, in which the reader must contend not only with unfamiliar, often arcane artistic conventions and philosophical concepts, but also with the handicap of reading the literature in translation. It is a truism that the nuances of one language can be rendered in another only imperfectly (and this problem is especially acute in fiction), but the fact that the works of European and Latin American writers are situated in a historical and cultural setting quite different from our own can be as great a hindrance to the understanding of these works as the linguistic barrier. For this reason the UMELL series emphasizes the sociological and historical background of the writers treated. The philosophical and cultural traditions peculiar to a given culture may be particularly important for an understanding of certain authors, and these are taken up in the introductory chapter and also in the discussion of those works to which this information is relevant. Beyond this the books treat the specifically literary aspects of the author under discussion and attempt to explain the complexities of contemporary literature lucidly. The books are conceived as introductions to the authors covered, not as comprehensive analyses. They do not provide detailed summaries of plot because they are meant to be used in conjunction with the books they treat, not as a substitute for study of the original works. The purpose of the books is to provide information and judicious literary assessment of the major works in the most compact, readable form. It is our hope that the UMELL series will help increase knowledge and understanding of European and Latin American cultures and will serve to make the literature of those cultures more accessible.
J.H.
Acknowledgments
I want first to thank the series editor, James Hardin, for his encouragement and for the work he has done for modern literature in general with this series, which he has edited through the years. That is the most recent help I have received. My thanks for the earliest help would go to Proust scholars who, as teachers, introduced me to Proust many years ago: first the late Roger Shattuck, with whom I read Proust as an undergraduate at the University of Texas, and then the late Germaine Br e, who allowed me to take her strictly limited Proust seminar for graduate students at the University of Wisconsin. Thanks also go to the indefatigable Proust scholar J. Theodore Johnson, with whom I had discussions of Proust many years ago at Madison and again more recently via e-mail as I have worked on this book. I can also give thanks to the many students and colleagues who through the years have interacted with me in reading Proust, especially at Middlebury College and at the University of Missouri.
I thank again the University of Missouri Research Council for financing a stay at Cambridge University and Clare Hall, where some years ago I began to work toward publishing my views on Proust. Cambridge s library facilities-with their unparalleled resources in French literature-and conversations with fellows at Clare Hall played their role in the genesis of this book. For a more recent stay at Cambridge, I also give thanks to the University of Missouri Research Board and the University of Missouri s Arts and Humanities Center.
Finally many thanks to Irma for help and patience.
Chronology
1871
Marcel Proust born July 10 to Jeanne Proust, n e Weil, and the doctor Adrien Proust, in the house of maternal uncle Louis Weil, in the Parisian suburb of Auteil.
Baptized in August at the Paris church Saint-Louis d Antin.
1873
Birth of Proust s only sibling, the future doctor Robert Proust.
1880
Proust s first attack of asthma, which plagues him, at times severely, all his life.
1882
After home schooling, enrolls at the Lyc e Condorcet in cinqui me, or approximately the seventh grade.
1888-89
Initiated into philosophy at Condorcet by the neo-Kantian professor Alphonse Darlu. In 1889 Proust receives his baccalaureate and the honor prize in philosophy.
1889
Begins one year of military service in an infantry regiment. Friends in service with Robert de Billy and Gaston de Caillavet.
1890
Enrolls at the cole libre des sciences politiques. Publishes texts in a journal, Le Mensuel, of which he appears to be an editor. Has an active social life.
1891
Spends the first of many summers on the Normandy coast, at Cabourg or at Trouville.
Matriculates in law school in November.
1892
Publishes texts in Le Banquet, of which he is a member of the editorial committee. Passes his exams for a diploma in political science.
1893
Publishes in La Revue blanche . Vacations in Saint Moritz, where he works on texts for his first book, Les plaisirs et les jours ( Pleasures and Days ).
Passes his law exams in fall and receives a law diploma dated October 10, 1893. Confronting a father who wants him to embrace a career, Proust keeps him at bay by matriculating for a degree in philosophy. Meets the Baron Robert de Montesquiou.
1894
Studies philosophy and becomes engaged in social life in high society, cultivating contacts with many artists and aristocrats. Involved romantically with musician Reynaldo Hahn.
1895
Gets a diploma in philosophy. Accepted for a nonremunerative position, never occupied, at the Biblioth que Mazarine. Reads Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, Honor de Balzac, and Gustave Flaubert.
1896
Begins writing a novel, published posthumously under the editor s title Jean Santeuil .
Publishes an essay, Contre l obscurit ( Against Obscurity ), in La Revue blanche .
In December publishes Pleasures and Days, with a preface by Anatole France. Proust becomes friends with Lucien Daudet.
1897
Proust duels with the critic Jean Lorrain because of an insult to him and Daudet in a review of Pleasures and Days .
1898
Is an active Dreyfusard at the moment of Zola s trial for pro-Dreyfus activity. Travels to Holland in October.
1899
Takes a fourth and final leave of absence from the Biblioth que Mazarine. Abandons his project to write Jean Santeuil . Reads mile M le on Gothic architecture and begins to translate the English art historian John Ruskin.
1900
Publication in Le Figaro of P lerinage ruskiniens en France ( Ruskinian Pilgrimages in France ) and, in Le Mercure de France , Ruskin Notre-Dame d Amiens ( Ruskin at Notre-Dame d Amiens ). Two trips to Venice, the first with his mother. Family moves from boulevard Maleherbes to rue de Courcelles, near the elegant parc Monceau.
1902
Proust in Belgium and Holland, accompanied part of the time by Bertrand de F nelon. Pastiche of Saint-Simon published in Le Figaro .
1903
Begins publishing a series of salons in Le Figaro . Death of his father.
1904
Publishes in Le Figaro a call for the preservation of medieval churches, La mort des cath drales: Une cons quence du projet Briand sur la s paration ( The Death of the Cathedrals: A Consequence of Briand s Law on the Separation of Church and State ). Publication of his translation of Ruskin s The Bible of Amiens .
1905
Publishes Sur la lecture ( On Reading ), preface to his forthcoming translation of Ruskin s Sesame and Lilies . Death of Proust s mother, beginning months of mourning. Proust is now financially independent. At end of the year, he enters a sanatorium for a cure of his asthma.
1906
Publishes his translation of Sesame and Lilies . Moves into 102