/lit/ - Literature

The dead end in which the French novel found itself around 1910 goaded Proust into outlining the aesthetic principles that would liberate his forthcoming novel from the positivist edicts that reigned in the narrow, mostly Parisian literary circles of the early 20th century.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that the aesthetic “manifesto” of the Search was written in draft form as early as 1911, and one wonders whether Proust was not bent on sketching out ideas which he knew were revolutionary in scope and content, with a view to undergirding the theoretical foundations of a work still pregnant with its futurity.

The non-synchronous synchronicity between the author, the Narrator and the protagonist, is one of Proust’s most daring innovations; a technique of double internal focalization – that is, the splitting-up of the first person into a narrated and a narrating self.

Through this ironic mise en abyme of the Narrator as a “new writer” to come, and of the author of the Search as a “new writer” in actuality, Proust raises the spectre of the ephemerality and contingency of artistic innovation, however genuine, for it not only has to contend with public reception (and attendant misinterpretation), but with inevitable supersession.

Proust knows that this spectre may well turn into an “artistic law” and that he, also, will be swept aside by new artists. At the same time, he hopes that in writing the Search, he is hatching a more fundamental innovation which will endure not only the test of public reception, but also that of time.