Marcel Proust’s poetry is marked by profound themes and an unmistakable narrative style. Below, we will explore the main themes of his work “In Search of Lost Time” and the characteristics of his style.
Marcel Proust was born in 1871 to a family of the French upper middle class. From the first years of his life, he showed poor and fragile health, with frequent asthma attacks that would mark his entire existence. He died in Paris, the same city of his birth, in 1922.
Proust’s poetics can be found in his monumental novel In Search of Lost Time , a narrative work that occupied him for many years and which outlines a picture of the vices and virtues of his time, analyzing the depth of human feelings. This novel is composed of seven volumes published while Proust was still alive, and three other volumes published posthumously, between 1923 and 1927.
Let us now analyse the specific characteristics of his poetics.
The decadent influences
Proust lived his adolescence during the period of Decadentism , a literary movement that exalted short and fragmentary forms, mystery and the interiority of the human condition. In these years, he published The Pleasures and Days , inspired by decadent theses: a collection of short stories, set in the salons of the French aristocracy . This book contains some themes dear to the writer, such as jealousy , homosexuality and memory . The narrative style is inspired by the classical authors of the seventeenth century , with short sentences and a still immature language.
Emotional Intermittencies
To understand Proustian thought and philosophy, the analysis of his only novel is the key to intimately knowing the psychology of a fragile man , who fights daily with guilt and sadness .
In Search of Lost Time begins with a memory of a holiday spent in the countryside of Combray, a painful and suffering memory of a mother who goes to her son for a goodnight kiss, because it marks the end of an era and the passage to adulthood. It is from this involuntary and nostalgic memory that his analysis of “ emotional intermittences ” springs: a single moment of childhood manages to revive forgotten moments in a “rediscovered” key.
The memory
One of the most important themes of the work is memory, which is described as voluntary memory and spontaneous memory . The first type of memory triggers logical and realistic memories, while the second makes us relive the sensations associated with that memory, creating a reality that allows us to get in touch with our Self.
Proustian research aims to rediscover happiness, lost time, in an extratemporal context that escapes the logical laws of the past and the present.The autobiographical story narrates the events of French society at the time, painting a cynical portrait that analyses the psychology of the characters through their dramas.Proust uses complex and refined language, with long and articulated phrases, which can be difficult to analyze and understand.
The sleep
Proust often refers to the theme of sleep in In Search of Lost Time . For him, sleep has a positive connotation, since it represents that lost past that must be recovered . Furthermore, sleep marks the moment in which one loses consciousness of the external world and the passage of time. Sleep therefore becomes the place where one can take refuge within oneself.
The time
Always linked to these themes, time plays a fundamental role in Proust’s poetics. He frequently cites the term “long” ( longtemps , in French), not only to indicate something habitual, but as a real connection between past and present .
Another recurring expression in the work is “early” ( bonne heure , in French), which refers to going to sleep early, a behavior that reflects a healthy and regular way of alternating wakefulness with sleep.
