• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Literature, philosophy and the arts

To seek to survey the artistic and intellectual contexts of Proust’s life and work in any more than a summary form is a task well beyond the scope of this book. Proust’s Search is a remarkable repository of reference and allusion not just to the works produced or popular in its own time but also to several centuries of philosophy, literature, visual art and music. Swann, for example, procrastinates over an unfinished study of Vermeer (1632–75); Charlus instructs Morel on his interpretation of Beethoven’s (1770–1827) late quartets; and the Narrator gives Albertine an impromptu tutorial on novelistic technique in Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), Dostoevsky (1821–81) and Stendhal (1783–1842).

To think, then, of the intellectual and artistic contexts of Proust’s life and work we need to do so on ‘several planes at once’: we need to look back towards the nineteenth century and well beyond (Proust is frequently close in style to the seventeenth-century moralistes La Bruyère and La Rochefoucauld and shares traits with the memoirist Saint-Simon). We should also look to the belle époque, the war and post-war periods in order to gauge how Proust can be understood in the context of contemporary trends, including the shifting literary currents of Symbolism, Decadence and Naturalism, evolutions in visual art from Impressionism through Pointillism, Fauvism and Cubism, as well as wider intellectual movements such as Futurism and Dada. It is also possible to consider Proust as a central figure of European Modernism: his work can be profitably understood in the context of a canon of early-twentieth-century writers, including Mann, Kafka, Woolf and Joyce, all of whom contributed to shifting radically the scope and potential of literary creativity.

The products of the creative imagination and the intellect were Proust’s oxygen from very early in his life: in practically every letter he wrote he relates details of his reading, reflects on recent theatrical performances or seeks details of exhibitions or recitals. Some 8,000 publications and works of art are mentioned in his correspondence; the index of literary and artistic works mentioned in the Pléiade edition of the Search runs to sixteen pages of close-packed, tiny print. But what is the function of this proliferation of references? A reader new to Proust and/or unfamiliar with the expansive and varied terrain of art, literature and thought from which he picks his points of reference can quickly become overwhelmed or dispirited. In what follows I attempt to offer a selective survey of parts of this terrain and offer some paths through it.

Growing up in the early years of the French Third Republic, Proust’s education and his voluminous reading provided him with a wide-ranging knowledge of classical authors (such as Homer, Plato and Virgil) as well as French writers from the sixteenth century to his contemporaries, from Rabelais and Montaigne to Mallarmé and Henri de Régnier. In 1888, encouraging his classmate Daniel Halévy to free himself of Naturalist and Decadent tendencies in his writing, Proust suggested that he should immerse himself in a daunting diet of heavyweights, including Shakespeare, Shelley, Emerson, Goethe, Descartes, Racine and Flaubert.12 From the two keepsake questionnaires Proust completed we gain a sense of the development of his artistic tastes during his formative years. In the second questionnaire we learn that Musset, the romantic dramatist and poet of the ‘mal du siècle’ [malady of the century] has been displaced as Proust’s favourite poet by Alfred de Vigny and by Baudelaire, whose collection Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] caused scandal and was tried for offences against public morality in 1857. Vigny was a romantic, author of ‘La Maison du Berger’ [The Shepherd’s House] (1840–4), a long love poem Proust admired enormously and which the Narrator quotes to Albertine. The poem contains the lines:

La distance et le temps sont vaincus. La science

Trace autour de