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from Part I - Life and works
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2013
His voice contains many voices. He is a magpie and a mimic. He veers this way and that, and takes the colouring of the company he keeps. Proust's narrator is both chorus and soloist.
As well as searching for a form and structure for his writing, Proust was also seeking a voice. Or, rather, he sought affirmation of his own originality, a confidence to experiment found through his engagement with the works of the polymath John Ruskin (1819–1900).
Marcel Proust possessed a keen ear and the gift of detecting inner rhythms, together with a highly developed visual, musical memory. He was acutely aware of this and jotted down in one of his exercise books:
As soon as I was reading an author, I could very soon make out the melody of the song underneath the words, different in one author from what it is in every other, and as I read, without realizing it, I would be humming it, hurrying the words, slowing them down or breaking off altogether, as one does when singing, when, depending on the tempo of the melody, one often waits a long time before saying the end of a word.
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