Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922) was a French novelist, essayist and critic whose seven-volume novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) is regarded as one of the central works of twentieth-century literature. [1] Written over more than a decade and published between 1913 and 1927, it examines memory, desire, social ambition and the passage of time through the recollections of a single narrator. [2] The second volume won the Prix Goncourt in 1919.
Early life and education
Proust was born on 10 July 1871 in the Auteuil district of Paris, shortly after the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. His father, Adrien Proust, was a distinguished physician and epidemiologist; his mother, Jeanne Weil, came from a prosperous Jewish family and remained the most important figure in his life. From the age of nine he suffered severe asthma, which shaped his habits and eventually confined him. [1]
He was educated at the Lycée Condorcet, performed a year of military service, and then studied at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques and took degrees in law and literature at the University of Paris. He moved in fashionable literary and aristocratic salons, which gave him the close observation of social manoeuvre that fills his fiction. [2]
Early writing
Proust's first book, Les Plaisirs et les Jours (1896), collected stories, poems and sketches and attracted little attention. He worked for years on an unfinished novel published posthumously as Jean Santeuil, and translated and annotated the art criticism of John Ruskin, whose ideas about perception and memory influenced his own. [1]
He also published Contre Sainte-Beuve, an essay arguing against the biographical criticism of the day and asserting that the self that writes is distinct from the self known to society. The argument became the foundation of his mature method. During the Dreyfus affair he supported Alfred Dreyfus and helped gather signatures for petitions on his behalf. [3]
In Search of Lost Time
After the deaths of his father in 1903 and his mother in 1905, Proust withdrew from society and began the novel that occupied the rest of his life. He worked mainly at night in a cork-lined bedroom, revising continuously and expanding the manuscript through successive drafts. [2]
The first volume, Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way), was rejected by several publishers, including the Nouvelle Revue Française, and appeared at Proust's own expense in 1913. It contains the episode of the madeleine dipped in tea, in which an involuntary memory restores the narrator's childhood at Combray — the passage that came to stand for the whole work. [1]
À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs won the Prix Goncourt in 1919, bringing him wide recognition. Three further volumes appeared in his lifetime, and the final three were edited and published posthumously by his brother Robert, concluding with Le Temps retrouvé in 1927. [2]
Death and legacy
Proust's health declined sharply as he raced to complete the manuscript. He died of pneumonia in Paris on 18 November 1922 at the age of fifty-one and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery. He had been made a Knight of the Legion of Honour. [1]
His novel has influenced generations of writers, philosophers and critics, from Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf to Gilles Deleuze and Roland Barthes, and its treatment of time, memory and homosexuality has been the subject of extensive scholarship. [3] It has been translated repeatedly into English, most famously by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, and is frequently cited as the longest novel in the Western canon.
