SOURCE: Rosengarten, Frank. “Problems of Structure, Unity and Aesthetic Philosophy.” In The Writings of the Young Marcel Proust (1885-1900): An Ideological Critique, pp. 101-17. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2001.

In the following essay, Rosengarten examines narrative structure in Proust's Les Plaisirs et les jours.

Much of the critical debate about PJ [Les Plaisirs et les jours] has centered around the question of whether it can be considered a structured, unified whole rather than a mere patchwork of miscellaneous pieces. This is an important question inasmuch as the way a writer organizes and arranges the material of a fictional work often reflects the point of view from which s/he has embarked on the task of writing

Proust always paid careful attention to how the parts of his writings related to the whole and the whole to the parts. Bernard Gicquel picks up on precisely this aspect of Proust's...