Chapter 28 - Modernism

Summary

To read Proust today, some ninety years after his death, is to encounter him enveloped in celebrity, weighed down by reams of critical commentary, domesticated by the wealth of facts and hermeneutical grids with which we can now arm ourselves as we interpret the complexities of his imagined world. Proust has become so well known that it may be difficult for us modern-day readers to imagine just how revolutionary his prose style appeared to the majority of the European reading public during the period ranging from 1913 (when Du côté de chez Swann was first published) to 1927 (when Le Temps retrouvé finally appeared, five years after the author's death). Proust had difficulty getting published, in part because, like Wagner's tetralogy, À la recherche du temps perdu sinned against the accepted order of magnitude for works of art: the sentences were too long, the thoughts too convoluted, the general thematic aims not apparent enough in their wide extension. Put succinctly, what Proust was proposing as a novel was unusual, strange, disquieting. Even the most intelligent of readers found the work hard to classify, impossible to discuss within the given parameters of early-twentieth-century fiction. One such reader, particularly adept at recognizing Proust's genius, was Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and essayist. His description of the Recherche is worth quoting, both for its lapidary incisiveness and for the brilliance of its metaphorical formulation. Here are the first sentences of his essay ‘The Image of Proust’, initially published in 1929:

The thirteen volumes of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu are the result of an unconstruable synthesis in which the absorption of a mystic, the art of a prose writer, the verve of a satirist, the erudition of a scholar, and the self-consciousness of a monomaniac have combined in an autobiographical work. It has rightly been said that all great works of literature establish a genre or dissolve one – that they are, in other words, special cases. Among these cases, this is one of the most unfathomable. From its structure, which is at once fiction, autobiography, and commentary, to the syntax of boundless sentences (the Nile of language, which here overflows and fructifies the plains of truth), everything transcends the norm.