Proustian Uncertainties - On Reading and Rereading In Search of Lost Time

Informationen zum Autor Saul Friedländer Klappentext Named a Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year  A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian revisits Marcel Proust’s masterpiece in this essay on literature and memory, exploring the question of identity—that of the novel’s narrator and Proust’s own.   This engaging reexamination of In Search of Lost Time considers how the narrator defines himself, how this compares to what we know of Proust himself, and what the significance is of these various points of commonality and divergence. We know, for example, that the author did not hide his homosexuality, but the narrator did. Why the difference? We know that the narrator tried to marginalize his part-Jewish background. Does this reflect the author’s position, and how does the narrator handle what he tries, but does not manage, to dismiss? These are major questions raised by the text and reflected in the text, to which the author’s life doesn’t give obvious answers. The narrator’s reflections on time, on death, on memory, and on love are as many paths leading to the image of self that he projects.   In Proustian Uncertainties , Saul Friedländer draws on his personal experience from a life spent investigating the ties between history and memory to offer a fresh perspective on the seminal work. Leseprobe INTRODUCTION   “Proust?” a French acquaintance asked me when told about my endeavor. “Why Proust?” My answer had been vague, and the question was to the point: why Proust? The vagueness of the answer was also to the point: I couldn’t tell clearly why I had decided to work on Proust, or maybe I didn’t want to tell. One thing was sure: I had not the competence and certainly not the intention of becoming one more “specialist” of Proust. And yet my desire to write specifically on À la recherche was not haphazard; I was certain about that. Was it due to the beauty of In Search ? Its complexity? Without any doubt those aspects played a role, mainly in my rereading In Search time and time again. But wasn’t there more? Wasn’t I rereading it because it responded to some need, to something in my personal life that called for delving into that book, something that was intimately attuned to it? Some themes in the novel were close to my own ruminations over the decades, mainly about identity. Whatever the motivation may have been, I started rereading In Search with particular attention. Soon I noticed aspects that I had failed to see before, and as I soon realized after some inquiry, seemed to have generally escaped attention. Of course, I felt once more the extraordinary pull of a text that, as for so many other readers, was not only the greatest novel of French literature but one of the most important novels ever written. Given that there is hardly any plot, In Search is easily summed up: it is the life story of a Narrator whose main desire since childhood has been to become a writer. As he doubts his literary talent, he spends decades of his adulthood in idleness, devoting himself to social climbing from his middle-class background into the highest reaches of the French aristocracy. It is only in late adulthood that he discovers, by pure chance, through a kind of epiphany triggered by a surge of involuntary memory, that he has the creative literary gift that will allow him to fulfill his ambition. He then starts writing the story of his life that will, in great part, tell what he remembers from his years of idleness, years that, unknown to him, have been in fact years of preparation. From then on, his writing will indeed be a search for lost time, which in the original French is both “time forgotten that has to be discovered again” and “time squandered that has to be retrieved or regained.” While the Narrator tells us that as far as writing went, he remained inactive until late in adult l...

Product details

• Authors: Saul Friedlander, Saul Friedländer
• Publisher: Other press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.01.2023
• EAN: 9781635423143
• ISBN: 978-1-63542-314-3
• No. of pages: 176
• Dimensions: 128 mm x 190 mm x 13 mm
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies