/lit/ - Literature

Just how indebted the Recherche is to its literary predecessors and how readily its author engages in intertextual games and pastiches can be gleaned from the extensive literary references in the text, ranging from Homer, Saint-Simon and Racine to George Eliot, Balzac and Dostoyevsky. Proust’s quasi-encyclopedic knowledge of Western literature across the ages and his subtlety and flair as a literary critic have enriched and nourished his novel, endowing it with an intertextual and generic complexity matched perhaps only by his fellow modernist James Joyce.

In the eyes of early criticism and of many of Proust’s contemporaries, the world of the Search appeared distant from modernity and resolutely steeped in the salons of the Belle Époque. Indeed, In Search of Lost Time draws its cultural, scientific and literary references from the end of the 19th century, and re-stages them anachronistically in a 20th-century novel.

The immediate response to Swann’s Way in 1913 was mixed. The book had its supporters but some of the most scathing criticisms came from Paul Souday at Le Temps. Souday mentioned Proust’s talent, but attacked the style and grammar of his French, and furthermore noted that the book was “chaotic” with too much attention devoted to detail, that nothing extraordinary happened in these autobiographical “memories of childhood”, and that what did happen was “rather banal”.