Proust, Marcel(1871–1922)
The French author Marcel Proust was born and educated in Paris. He lived there all his life, leaving only for short holidays or artistic pilgrimages, most of which were to the great cathedral cities of France. His father, a professor of medicine, was Catholic; his mother, whom he adored, was Jewish. Both traditions, as well as his consuming interest in French history and culture, played important roles in his life and art, although he was neither religiously orthodox nor politically chauvinistic. He undertook a considerable and seemingly futile search for a vocation and did some writing, most of which was discarded drafts of his future novel. Suffering terribly from asthma and from certain guilts about his homosexuality, but with economic as well as spiritual means sufficient to indulge and transmute these ills, Proust ensconced himself in his famous cork-lined room to write his masterpiece, A la recherche du temps perdu.
Philosophical Themes
Although Proust compared a work of art in which there are theories to an object on which the price is marked, A la recherche is, nonetheless, a philosophical novel. There are two major philosophical themes woven into the novel: that reality is composed of artistic essences and that the search for essences ends in their dissolution. Proust stated only the first theme; the second, however, is implied by much of the action of the novel.
In the last volume of the novel, Le temps retrouvé, Proust, as narrator and participant, stated his theory of artistic essences as reality; this theory, because of its role in the context of the whole novel, must be understood as an integral part of it, along with the characterization, dialogue, and plot. According to Proust's theory, we live in a world of people, places, and things, all of which are organized spatially or temporally, in the ordinary sense of space and time, and which impinge on us. Most of us merely react to these phenomena. The true artist, however, like the scientists, attempts to find the laws that govern these phenomena. Whereas the scientist proceeds by his intellect, the artist cannot, for his laws are to be discovered only by intuition. The artist's intellect supplements, but it cannot supplant, intuition. Intuition is that state of mind in which the artist—rooted in past experiences, nourished by suffering, and graced by an involuntary memory of a past sensation joined with a similar present one—extracts the qualitative similarity or essence from these sensations in order to embody that essence in a metaphor which, like the essence, is not subject to the ravages of time. Thus, these essences are the only true reality, and their artistic expression the only true judgment on reality.
Proust, it is important to realize, did not deny the existence of temporal or spatial relations, but he rejected them as unreal. Hence, he must understand by reality something quite distinct from existence: reality for him functioned as an honorific term denoting that which is salvageable from the past and which transcends the present—that, therefore, which is ultimate in the precise sense of being out of time. Reality, in effect, denotes the essences extracted by intuition from what exists in relation to what existed.
It has been claimed that Proust's conceptions of time and intuition are Bergsonian. It seems, however, that there are important differences. According to Henri Bergson, time is essentially duration (durée). The concepts of the past, present, and future cannot apply to time because they spatialize it. Duration can only be experienced, not thought of or talked about; it is the indivisible, ultimate fact of process in the world, and intuition is the experience of duration, a direct acquaintance with it. For Proust, however, time is not duration; it consists of chronological relations among events. Nor is time ultimate; only the timeless essences are that. Finally, intuition for Proust is an extraction from, not an immersion in, time.
Nor is Proust's theory Platonic, as has sometimes been suggested. Plato's timeless essences are perfect and have their being absolutely independently of the spatial and temporal particulars of this world; the Proustian essences are at most more or less imperfect copies of the truly real forms.
Besides this aesthetic-ontological theme, which Proust integrated magnificently in the novel, there is the nether theme of the dissolution of essences in the very search for them. Although he never stated this theme, much of the novel embodies it. The treatment of love is probably the best single example. Through the narration of many different love relationships, commonly regarded as a major achievement of the novel, Proust dramatized that love has no essence, only an inexhaustible set of properties, none of which is necessary or sufficient. Here intellect supplants rather than supplements intuition. Proust's observations, analyses, and generalizations harvest a vast multiplicity of criteria that govern our understanding and concept of love. In effect, Proust showed through his characterization, monologue and dialogue, as well as through the plot, that the range of the experience of love renders impossible any traditional essentialist definition of it. To have discovered, explored, and artistically wrought this important truth about our conceptual life and to have shown it a full generation before philosophers stated it is not the least of Proust's accomplishments in his great novel.
Appearance and Reality; Bergson, Henri; Intuition; Plato; Platonism and the Platonic Tradition.
Bibliography
Works by Proust
Portraits de peintres. Paris: Heugel, 1896.
Les plaisirs et les jours. Paris, 1896. Translated by Louise Varese and others as Pleasures and Days, with an introduction by F. W. Dupee. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957.
La bible d'Amiens. Paris, 1904. A translation, with preface and notes, of John Ruskin's Bible of Amiens.
Sésame et lys. Paris, 1906. A translation, with preface ("Journées de lecture") and notes, of Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies.
A la recherche du temps perdu (published by the Nouvelle Revue Française). 7 parts, 13 vols. Paris, 1919–1927. One volume had been published in 1913, at Proust's expense. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff (the first 6 parts) and Stephen Hudson (last part only) as Remembrance of Things Past. New York: Random House, 1922–1931. Uniform edition, 12 vols. London and New York, 1941. Pléiade edition, 3 vols., Paris, 1954.
Chroniques. Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle revue francaise, 1927.
Jean Santeuil. With introduction by André Maurois. Paris, 1954. Translated by Gerard Hopkins. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.
Contre Sainte-Beuve. Paris: Gallimard, 1954. Translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner as By Way of Sainte-Beuve. London: Chatto and Windus, 1958.
Works on Proust
Brée, Germaine. Marcel Proust and Deliverance from Time. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955.
Cocking, J. M. Proust. London: Bowes and Bowes, 1956.
Delattre, Floris. Bergson et Proust. Paris, 1948. Vol. I of Les études Bergsoniennes.
Green, F. C. The Mind of Proust. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1949.
Maurois, André. The Quest for Proust. London, 1950.
Weitz, Morris. Philosophy in Literature: Shakespeare, Voltaire, Tolstoy and Proust. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963.
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