Concept

Marcel Proust

Overview

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust ( PROOST; French: [maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist best known for his novel À la recherche du temps perdu (translated into English as In Search of Lost Time, earlier Remembrance of Things Past), which was published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century.

Proust was born in the Auteuil quarter of Paris, to a wealthy bourgeois family. His father, Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist and epidemiologist who studied cholera. His mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was from a prosperous Jewish family. Proust was raised in his father's Catholic faith. From a young age, he struggled with severe asthma attacks which caused him to have a disrupted education. As a young man, Proust cultivated interests in literature and writing while moving in elite Parisian high society salons frequented by aristocrats and the upper bourgeoisie. These social connections provided inspiration and material for his later novel. His first works, including the collection of stories Les plaisirs et les jours, were published in the 1890s to little public success.

In 1908, Proust began work on À la recherche du temps perdu. The novel consists of seven volumes totaling around 1.25 million words. It explores themes of memory, art, love, High Society and the human experience through the narrator's recollections. Begun when Proust was 38, the novel was partially published in his lifetime, with the initial sections appearing in 1913. The remaining volumes were revised and published posthumously by his brother Robert based on drafts and proofs. La Recherche helped pioneer the stream of consciousness literary technique. The novel's length, complexity and meditation on themes like desire, artistic creativity, sexuality and class rendered it a significant work in the development of literary modernism, historically, and as a peak achievement or limit-case in the development of prose more generally.

Though he died before completing the last volume, La Recherche is translated as a whole by C. K. Scott Moncrieff; in part, by Walter Benjamin, Franz Hessel, Lydia Davis and many others.

Early monographs and studies of the work were written by Samuel Beckett (1930), Walter Benjamin (1929) and by Ernst Curtius (better known as the archaeologist who excavated Olympus). Benjamin's essay discusses the way that Proust's accomplishments overlap with those of Freud and Jung in their discovery of the underlying mechanisms of desire, their revelations about the dynamics of memory, and their unfolding of the hidden, ghostly structures and psychic forces that govern perception and experience.

Despite spending the last three years of his life confined by illness, Proust was able to complete advanced drafts of the final parts of La Recherche before his death. He died of pneumonia and pulmonary problems in 1922, aged 51, and was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Proust's sexuality and relationships with men were an open secret among his social circles, though the author himself never publicly acknowledged being homosexual.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.

Then it is that the word classic takes its true meaning, and is defined for every man of taste by an irresistible choice. Then taste is formed, it is shaped and definite; then good sense, if we are to possess it at all, is perfected in us. We have neither more time for experiments, nor a desire to go forth in search of pastures newf We cling to our friends, to those proved by long intercourse. Old wine, old books…
Michel de Montaigne, Literary and Philosophical Essays
States what Marcel Proust is.
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It would be interesting to analyse this tendency in comedy. Maybe dramatists have caught a glimpse of a fact recently brought forward by mental pathology, viz. that cranks of the same kind are drawn, by a secret attraction, to seek each other's company. Without precisely coming within the province of medicine, the comic individual, as we have shown, is in some way absentminded, and the transition from…
Henri Bergson, Laughter
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In 1804, having been at Berlin witnessing the exhibition of his _Wilhelm Tell_, he was seized, while returning, with a paroxysm of that malady which for many years had never wholly left him. The attack was fierce and violent; it brought him to the verge of the grave; but he escaped once more; was considered out of danger, and again resumed his poetical employments. Besides various translations from the French and…
Thomas Carlyle, The Life of Friedrich Schiller Comprehending an Examination of His Works
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Philosophers who discussed Marcel Proust

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Creative Evolution (book)

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Part of French philosophy.

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