Marcel Proust

Abstract This short book explores the work of Marcel Proust as an event in the world, something that happened to literature and culture and our understanding of history. The subject is not so much how Proust changed our lives, biographically or individually, as how his writing affected, directly or indirectly, life in general in the twentieth century and after; how it altered, or could alter, the perceived order of the world, the horizons of thought and feeling available to us. We know science and philosophy seek to do this and quite often succeed; I hope to show that a novel can do it too, in its own way and because it is a novel and not something else. The Proust event has more aspects than we can count, but I have tried to offer detailed critical snapshots of seven of them: the birth of Proust as a novelist; Proust’s demonstration that we need to mythologize our lives in order to understand them; his curious, continuing belief that reality reaches us only as a sort of musical variation, the second time around; his patient display of love not as romance but as irresistible nightmare; his sense of the Dreyfus Affair as a garish proof that one can almost get away with almost anything; his persuasive but paranoid belief that we shall find justice in the end but only for the wrong crime; and his brilliant enactment of an endless ending.