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is an enduring one. Proust may live on in contemporary culture because his work, as Margaret Gray has argued, stands gallingly for all that resists the very essence of that culture: ‘In an age that values speed, brevity, efficacy, performance, and appearance,’ writes Gray, ‘Proust “signifies” slowness, length, labour, contemplation, resistance, transcendence.’27 The preceding pages have shown many of the ways in which Proust’s novel stands for these qualities, but they have equally shown how it has pace, brevity, flightiness and humour. Proust’s conception of the primary concerns of his work – love, passion, identity, truth, happiness, mortality – may have taken shape in what is now a far distant, almost unrecognizable past. But the novel lives on for us today, providing shivers, laughs, tears and tired eyes because its concerns are enduring human preoccupations relevant to every and any epoch. As long as we continue to seek satisfaction, to love and deceive each other, to ponder questions of art, to search for happiness and an understanding of ourselves and the beauties of the world in which we live, Proust’s novel, this singular, subjective rhapsody on experience, will continue to find an audience.

Notes

1. Life

1 The first questionnaire and responses are reproduced in William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 52–3; Carter also discusses the second questionnaire (pp. 140–1).

2 For a full account of the (possible) meeting, see Carter, Marcel Proust, pp. 124–6 and, in French, J.-Y. Tadié, Marcel Proust: Biographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), pp. 158–9.

3 Letter to Mme de Noailles, 27 September 1905, Corr., V, 345.

4 Letter to Emile Straus, 3 June 1914, Corr., XIII, 228.

5 Letter to ‘un jeune homme’, end of June or start of July 1911, Corr., X, 307–8.

6 Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1973), p. 404.

2. Contexts

1 For an excellent, concise overview of the interplay of ‘real’ socio-historical context and the people and places of Proust’s fiction, see Cynthia Gamble, ‘From Belle Époque to First World War: The Social Panorama’, in Richard Bales, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Proust (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 7–24.

2 Much of my historical account here draws on Robert Gildea’s excellent Children of the Revolution: The French 1799–1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2008). See also Charles Sowerwine, France since 1870: Culture, Politics, Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), Parts I and II.

3 Malcolm Bowie, Proust among the Stars (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 126.

4 Edmund White, Proust (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), p. 83.

5 See CSB, pp. 63–9 (66). This article is not included in the English translation.

6 An exploration of the contemporaneous development of the thinking of Proust and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) is beyond the scope of this chapter. Proust did not read Freud nor Freud Proust but there is, undoubtedly, a good deal of shared ground in their respective conceptions of human behaviour and mental functioning. Interested readers should consult Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust, Lacan: Theory as Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 1987).

7 Stephen Kern provides a brief, accessible account of these theories in his superb study The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2003 [1983]). See pp. 18–19, 135–6.

8 Letter to the Duc de Guiche, 9 or 10 December 1921; Corr., XX, 578.

9 William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000), note to p. 69.

10 At the brothel, in his anxiety Proust broke a chamber pot and, as Carter puts it, ‘lost his erection and his money’; Carter, Marcel Proust, p. 70.

11 Bowie, Proust among the Stars, p. 230.

12 He does so in some revealing notes made on Halévy’s draft poems; see Anne Borrel, ed., Marcel Proust: Écrits de jeunesse, 1887–1895 (Paris: Institut Marcel Proust International: Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de Combray, 1991),