Marcel Proust Analysis

In addition to his magnum opus, Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust (prewst) wrote a number of less well-known works. His first book, Les Plaisirs et les jours (1896; Pleasures and Regrets, 1948), a collection of stories and some verse, was published in 1896. Its primary value lies in its preliminary statement of themes that are developed more fully in Remembrance of Things Past, as Edmund Wilson has pointed out.

Proust’s fascination with John Ruskin led to prefaces for and translations of Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens (1880-1885) in 1904 and of his Sesame and Lilies (1865) in 1906. Before turning his full attention to the novel, Proust also wrote a series of parodies of his favorite French writers, which were published in Le Figaro. Of considerable interest to Proust scholars is Contre Sainte-Beuve (By Way of Sainte-Beuve, 1958), written in 1908 but not published until 1954. In it, Proust uses a variety of essays, autobiographical pieces, and fiction to attack criticism that claims to be scientific and objective. Proust argues instead that only memory and the unconscious can break through the barriers of habit that impede art. Of somewhat less interest is Pastiches et mélanges, a volume of miscellaneous pieces published in 1919. Proust’s brother, Robert, collected magazine and newspaper articles written by Proust as late as 1921 and published them in Chroniques (1927).

Marcel Proust’s monumental achievement in writing Remembrance of Things Past consists not simply in the work’s multivolume length or the complexity of the extended and intermingled lives of its characters, although these elements alone are impressive. It is above all the intense psychological realism with which the novel’s characters—particularly the author’s alter ego, Marcel—are rendered that has influenced other writers and has drawn critical acclaim. That “realism” is internal: Proust was fascinated by the interplay between external events and the mind, especially by the way human perception synthesizes and interprets events in time—by “the symbolic omnitemporality of an event fixed in a remembering consciousness,” as Erich Auerbach put it. These concerns are reflected in much of twentieth century literature—notably in the works of James Joyce, Thomas Mann, and Virginia Woolf—and Proust may be said to have introduced their fullexposition in his magnum opus.

Although, at the beginning of his writing career, Proust received little recognition outside his literary milieu, he was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1919 for Within a Budding Grove. This recognition helped establish him as a serious and significant author, and since his death, his reputation and influence have continued to grow.

Was Marcel Proust a snob? How is snobbery treated in Remembrance of Things Past?

It has been suggested that the title Remembrance of Things Past, alluding to a phrase in the thirtieth of William Shakespeare’s sonnets, is not as accurate a translation of Proust’s title as In Search of Lost Time. Do you agree?

What changes does Swann undergo during the course of the novel?

What aspects of Marcel’s character does his grandmother bring forth?

What portrait of pre-World War I Paris society does Proust give?

How did the war change Proust’s world?

What can a reader learn about reading from Remembrance of Things Past?

Proust wrote thousands of letters. What do they reveal about his habits of literary composition?