Marcel Proust Term Paper
Born in
1871, Marcel Proust grew up at the time of relatively peaceful period of French
history: the belle époque. Asthma and recluse gravely stalled Proust after his
mother's death in 1905. After that he spent the remainder of his life to writing
of his novel Á La Recherche du temps perdu, which was published in seven
sections between 1913 and 1927. The philosophy of Henri Bergson, and the
theories of Sigmund Freud moved Proust.
His writings over the years indicated the themes of culpability and memory: the
eight-volume Remembrance of Things Past. Proust started to work in ardent in the
implacable years leading up to World War I, and Swann's Way was published in
1913. As the war prolonged, so did his publishing, and he in1922, having
finished writing, but not revising, the last three volumes of his eight-volume
novel.
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During Proust time, one of the renowned philosophers was Henri Bergson, who
believed in a more "natural" form of time called "duration," which "flowed" like
music. Different from the "homogenous" time measured by a clock, Bergson's
duration had no pauses, but was an interconnected "interpenetration" of moments
that were much alike. Proust, in his writings, opted this idea to elucidate his
theories about time and memory. He wrote that "we labor in vain" to try to
retrieve the past by means of the intelligence, as he recollects that only the
workings of chance can pull a person back in time to the moment he pursue.
Proust collates his own theories about time and memory to the Celtic doctrine
that the souls of departed beloved are held captive in objects. These beloved
are reincarnated only when a person experiences a brief encounter or passes by
these objects and identifies the voices of these loved ones.
Proust also found motivation for his work in the contemporaneous aesthetic
philosophies of the visual arts. Notwithstanding the extensive prevalence of
photography in his day, Proust weighed painting a more "natural" expression of
emotions. In addition to praise in Swann's Way the distinguished works by such
Renaissance artists as Botticelli and Caravaggio, he endeavored to capture the
classy influences of one of the most radical aesthetic accomplishments of the
belle époque: Impressionism.
"Overture," sets the thematic and classy tone not just for the remainder of
Swann's Way, but also for the other novels in Proust's series, translated from
French as Remembrance of Things Past.
The relationship between time and memory, which served, perhaps, as Proust's
primary motivation for writing Remembrance of Things Past, sets one of the major
themes. Proust held that time was not indispensably a lineal, clock-like,
dimension of fixed and immutable moments. But, he theorized that time, or
duration, embroiled a "flowing together" of changed moments and experiences so
that one individual point in time was much alike. An explanation of this
hypothesis is the famed Madeleine scene, in which an older Marcel is suddenly
drawn in time to Combray from the natural association of the taste of cake
dipped in tea. At the outset, Marcel attempted to coerce his memory to travel
back in time to the moment when he last had a Madeleine and succeeded.
Nonetheless, in eliciting the memory of Combray only when he allows his guard
down and thinks of the taste of the cake itself. This unintentional and
apparently aimless power of the memory to carry a person back in time directs
the classy and thematic groundwork of Swann's Way.
Marcel's mother occupies an important place in his work. Marcel seeks guidance,
sympathy, and love, from her, but when he gets these comforts, he feels
blameworthy about not being more self-reliant. Marcel experiences this blame by
anticipating the effects that his need for his mother has on her. He thinks that
begging his mother to spend the night with him "traced a first wrinkle upon her
soul and brought out a first white hair on her head." Consequently, their
relationship is tarnished by Marcel's notion that he is always causing her some
kind of anguish. The Oedipal triangle between Marcel, his mother, and his father
follow as an archetype for different relationships all over Swann's Way.
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The interaction between habit or routine and memory, the "magic lantern" and the
images it projects on young Marcel's bedroom walls at Combray make him unable to
recognize his room; as a consequence, he feels lost in time, and must fight to
remember where and when he is. In this case, severing with habit causes Marcel
distress. It is significant to bear in mind that an important amount of the plot
matter in Swann's Way is autobiographical. Proust’s memories, and his hopes and
fears, are frequently what Proust himself desired to recollect from his own
youth. However, Proust firmly held that the life of an author had all but
nothing to do with his written work.
Proust belonged to a tradition of memory writing that emphasizes the inner
workings of the faculty instead of its externalizing cognitive function that had
rapt writers on eloquence from antiquity to the Renaissance. Proust refers to
the ‘sensation bizarre’ leading to the ascent of memory in Nerval’s Sylvie, and
to the sound that reminds Chateaubriand of his childhood in the Mémoires
d’outre-tombe, which takes the writer back to his adolescent years of the ‘ranz
des vaches’. This all depicts how an aimless sensory perception that sparks off
memory gives the subject an augmented feeling of personal identity by connecting
his past to his present.
Proust assigns absolute value to remembrance as the groundwork of selfhood and
ranks the lived process of restoring the past above the simple identification of
material stored in the brain, he appears to be echoing Montaigne. While he
blends the processes of recollection and literary transformation into a poetics
of fiction, he follows the eighteenth-century reminiscence novelists who
distinguished implicitly between narrating the past stable imaginative. He may
appear modern in making cognizance his subject.
To Proust the scientific and imaginative investigation had to acknowledge that
when people speak of ‘memory’ they are often only imply to the way some past
experience was involved in the initiation of a current thought. Just as any idea
we have of the past can help us to comprehend it without matching it, our past
may reflect only indirectly, the ‘objective’ nature of the events that took
place then. Because the past is not real, memory lacks substance. Therefore, it
can be challenged, as it is an operation, not an object. Therefore, there is not
a memory; rather, people have varied memories. Proust asserts that memory
requires adaptive construction if it is to do more than simply supply the dead.
Fresh memory gives nobility to creative arts like that of fiction because it
stands for meaningful gist rather than genital exactitude. Though, truth and
memory are linked the aesthetic importance of memory lies in its citation to
what is believed in rather than what is identifiably the case. It is unsaid in
our routine of talking about memory in terms of space as well as time.
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