/lit/ - Literature

What characterizes the Modernist text is an exceptional degree of self-consciousness, a strong emphasis on the individual over against society, and the capacity to create an imagined world which does not refer directly or mimetically to exterior reality, but calls attention to itself.

Proust has often been (mis)construed as an anti-modernist and compared with Baudelaire, whose ambiguous stance towards modernity and opposition to progress was a mainstay of romanticism and symbolism. This misunderstanding was compounded since Proust never missed an occasion to assert his predilection for classicism, albeit that he defined it as what is “out of step with its own times” and not simply as classical.

Like other early modernists – Joyce, Mann and Gide – Proust found in the cultural and literary imaginary of the fin de siècle a vast repertoire of themes and motifs which he appropriated for his own writing in a complex process of absorption, distancing and, ultimately, overcoming.

The result, In Search of Lost Time, is a novel that is both a reflection and a catalyst of the influences that have shaped it.

One influence in particular was Decadence, a movement that fed on fin-de-siècle fears and preoccupations: the primacy of art over nature; the subversion of normative gender and sexual roles; a penchant for the morbid, the perverse and the grotesque; the quest to escape banal, everyday life through the cultivation of heightened sensations and immersion into artificial paradises and exotic fantasies.

When Proust wrote the first drafts for what was to become the Recherche, Decadence as an artistic and literary fashion was already passé.

Nonetheless, Proust continued to draw on a fin-de-siècle imaginary in his writing. Many of the novel’s great themes – the struggles for social hegemony and the end of an era; the critique of aestheticism and idolatry; the subversion of gender and sexual roles; hereditary degeneracy and the collapse of the old social order – are indebted to Decadence.