Marcel Proust

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Marcel Proust (French, 1871)

"A La Recherche du Temps Perdu/ In Search of Lost Time" (1922) ++ was composed between 1909 and 1922. The first volume was published in 1913 after being rejected by several publishers. It was in fact self-published because Proust paid all the costs. The second was ready to be published in 1914 but the publisher paused the project when World War I broke out. Proust continued writing and expanding the novel until his death in 1922. The text is marked by numerous inconsistencies, redundancies and even incomplete sentences.
The story takes place in the Belle Epoque of France (1871–1914), a period of peace, economic prosperity and scientific progress. At the turn of the century (the "Fin de Siecle") the intellectual mood mixed enthusiasm and anxiety.
The novel functions as a literary symphony, with an overture (the first volume, which establishes the central themes of memory and nostalgia), a development (the intricate and verbose middle volumes), and a finale (the "old people’s ball," where the characters perform a metaphorical final dance as they confront the passage of time).
Proust’s prose is at time reminiscent of Impressionism, and at times of Cubism. Proust indulges in nested and sprawling sentences.
Proust creates a social and often satirical fresco (a "swan song" for the Belle Epoque), criticizing both the decaying aristocracy and the rising bourgeoisie, but also an inner fresco of "stream of consciousness". Memory is triggered by random events and it is always imperfect, almost an inner dialogue rather than a movie of what truly happened. The memory of a person splinters into infinite and often contradictory fragments. His social analysis also centers on homosexuality and Jewishness, both sharing the curse of being discriminated in French society of the era. At the same time, the novel is a mythological autobiography in disguise: characters such as Charlus, Bloch, and Swann represent aspects of his own life and persona.
He wrote most of the book during the carnage of World War I, which ended an era and opened a much more turbulent era. While he couldn't know what would happen next (Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler), he could sense the instability represented and amplified by that senseless war.
At the end of the novel, time is not lost after all: Marcel's time has not been wasted, but was the necessary test to be able to write the very book that we are reading. Marcel’s journey from childhood to adulthood is the journey of a writer searching for his subject.

The first volume is titled "Du Cote' de Chez Swann/ Swann's Way" (1913) and is divided into four parts: "Combray I" (which ends with the "Madeleine Cake" episode, where the theme of involuntary memory is introduced), "Combray II", "Un Amour de Swann/ Swann in Love" (a third-person novella that tells the story of Charles Swann's love affair with Odette de Crecy), and "Noms de pays: le Nom/ Names of Places: the Name". Upon tasting a madeleine cake dipped in tea, memories of his childhood in Combray's country villa begin to flow. One summer he fell in love with Gilberte Swann. The novel then shifts to the love story of Gilberte’s parents in Paris: the erudite Charles falls in love with the ignorant actress Odette whose love affairs (with both men and women) causes him to go mad. But eventually Charles marries Odette.

"À l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs/ In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower" (1918) tells the story of Marcel's love for Gilberte. Charles doesn't like Marcel, and Marcel feels rejected by the family. When finally the family accepts him, he discovers a side of Gilberte that he doesn't like and he prefers to leave her. Two years later, at a beach resort, Marcel befriends two aristocrats, the young army officer Robert and the Baron de Charlus, both descendants of the Guermantes. Marcel is attracted to a group of young girls in sports attire, who are the daughters of wealthy businessmen, and eventually he falls in love with Albertine. However, she rejects him.

"Le Cote' de Guermantes/ The Guermantes Way" (1921), set a few years later, tells the story of how Marcel fell in love with a duchess, married to the duke de Guermantes. Desperate, Marcel visited her nephew Saint-Loup, a military officer. Marcel frequents a salon where Bloch, a Jew, discusses the Dreyfus Affair with a group of aristocrats who are clearly anti-Semitic. Marcel’s grandmother dies, a major tragedy for Marcel, and Albertine is now interested in Marcel, but Marcel is no longer attracted to her. Finally granted entry into the more important salon of the duchess, Marcel is disappointed by the aristocrats, who are neither intelligent nor generous.

"Sodome et Gomorrhe/ Sodom and Gomorrah" (1922), the last volume published before Proust's death in November 1922, continues the adventures of Marcel within the aristocracy. Marcel secretly watches Baron de Charlus flirt with the tailor Jupien and realizes they are homosexual, which explains Charlus’s alternating warmth and hostility towards him. Marcel compares the hidden lives of homosexuals to the social suffering of Jews. Marcel returns to the beach town where his grandmother died and falls in love again with Albertine. Marcel becomes jealous when he sees her dance intimately with Andree and hears gossip that she could be a lesbian. Marcel decides to save her from that sin by taking her back with him to Paris.

"La Prisonniere/ The Prisoner" (1923), the first part of "le Roman d'Albertine" (the "Albertine novel"), tells the story of how Marcel moves Albertine into his family’s apartment to keep her under constant surveillance, allowing her out only with Andree. Albertine becomes increasingly evasive, contradicting herself about her relationships with other women, causing Marcel to be consumed by obsessive jealousy. When she wants to attend a party, Marcel forbids her and attends in her place. There he hears talk of the host's lesbian daughter and of her companion, which fuels his suspicions that Albertine could be the companion. Their relationship deteriorates into accusations, denials, and reconciliations. Just as Marcel decides to separate amicably and travel alone to Venice, Albertine abruptly leaves at dawn.

"Albertine Disparue/ The Fugitive" (1925), the second and last part of the "Albertine novel", was re-published with corrections in 1954 and then again in 1987–89 (after the discoveries of some lost Proust notes). Marcel is devastated by the departure of Albertine. He tries to convince her to return. He finally sends a desperate telegram begging her to return, but Albertine has died in a horse-riding accident. He is initially grief-stricken, but then he hears gossip that her affairs with women, and plunges again into mad jealousy. Eventually, Andree confesses that she herself was Albertine's lover. Marcel travels to Venice with his mother and falls in love with the city and finally forgets Albertine. Back in Paris, he finds out that Saint-Loup married Gilberte for money and is revealed to be a homosexual. Gilberte confesses that she had loved Marcel from their first meeting, even if she behaved as she hated him.

"Le Temps Retrouve'/ Finding Time Again" (1927) is set in 1916, when Marcel returns to Paris after several years spent in a sanatorium. The city has been transformed by the war. Social hierarchies have been turned upside down. Saint-Loup is fighting at the front. Gilberte mourns the destruction of Combray’s cherished landscapes. One night during a blackout, Marcel stumbles upon a male brothel run by Jupien and witnesses the Baron de Charlus being sadomasochistically abused. Soon after surviving an air raid, he learns that Saint-Loup has been killed in combat. Following more years in a sanatorium, Marcel attends a reception at the Prince de Guermantes’s house. Stepping on an uneven paving stone, he experiences a rush of involuntary memory like the madeleine moment that started the novel: past and present fuse, revealing a timeless truth. He understands that his vocation is to transform such revelations into literature, uncovering hidden connections and giving them form through style. Resolving at last to write the book that he has always postponed, he attends a party only to find his acquaintances grotesquely aged and unrecognizable, their social roles reversed and illusions shattered. Now anxious about his own mortality, Marcel commits himself to one final task: to capture these people in writing and restore them to their place in time.