While The Great War was a nearly universal experience of upheaval in society and in art, the multiplicity of identity and perception of the world was clearly realized by so many of the artists and thinkers of the fifty years before the outbreak of hostilities. The perspectives of Darwin, Ibsen, Freud, Marx and others offered new and disturbing theories of the natural and human worlds. Over against a simplified view of Enlightenment unity, late 19th Century life and thought became ever more varied and extensive through personal experience and the communication of new media such as photography, early film and recorded sound. Freud, while controversial and never completely accepted, portrayed both individual and social manifestations of the psyche as multi-leveled and even self-divided.
Marcel Proust (1871-1922) stands with James Joyce, Thomas Mann and Virginia Wolff as one of the very greatest of Modernist writers. Proust was a charmingly eccentric individual, delicate of health, pampered by his mother, a figure of aesthetic excess, an admirer of aristocracy, a homosexual and an ever-promising writer. His curious life is the stuff of myth. In his later years, he kept largely to his cork-lined room in semi-darkness, with mountains of journals, drafts, revisions, additions and extensions of his imaginative world. After writing essays, short articles and translations of the English art critic, Ruskin, Proust began around 1908 on a semi-autobiographical novel about the growth of a hyper-sensitive child into a writer of note. This novel, originally meant to be one longish volume, evolved over fourteen years and beyond into a seven volume sequence called In Search of Lost Time.

Proust’s novel was very largely imagined, and the first part published before the beginning of The Great War. The opening volume, called Swann’s Way, was published in late 1913 with Proust’s hope to complete the work with another volume the following year. The eruption of the war and the ever-broadening interior horizon of Proust’s mind and heart, led to an immense expansion of the single work. However, from the very beginning of the first volume, Proust establishes his aesthetic, psychological and philosophical world through an almost infinitely varied process of memory, reflection and the evaluation of perception.

Swann’s Way begins with the narrator’s extended experience of insomnia. The invalid narrator, who sleeps a great deal during the day, faces the vastness and the mystery of the world through nights of sleeplessness. In his intoxicating insomnia, the narrator drifts from awake-consciousness into periods of dream and association that touch on his life, heart and the troubling lack of completion or unity to his life. Proust the writer evolves a theory of the difference between conscious memory and involuntary memory. For Proust, the operations of conscious control over thought, memory and perception, while not without value, is cut off from deeper, richer and more real levels of existence. The narrator is frustrated in his attempt to remember the life of his childhood, but in one of the most famous passages in Modern literature, he reports, drinking a cup of lemon tea accompanied by a small conch shell-shaped cake, called a Madeline, the narrator is illuminated by a sense of immediacy in the taste of the Madeline dipped in the lemon tea and his is stirred with mysterious awareness and apprehension. At first, he tries the tea-moistened Madeline again, and yet a third time, but with each repetition, the intensity and wonder of the first taste begins to evaporate. So he stops, meditates and opens himself to the first impulse of awareness. Then, in a revelatory moment of understanding, he recaptures the memory of eating the Madeline with lemon tea and his ailing Aunt Leonie’s bedside. With this capturing of his involuntary memory he teases out the almost imperceptible, but oh-so-essential thread of his lived and remembered life, for a smell and taste of the Madeline, “Bare, unfalteringly in the tiny and impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”

Proust then becomes the Philosopher King of Modern writers, examining the many selves that dwell within him with all their excitement, contradiction and endless evaluation of significance, as well as the world beyond that he encounters, misjudges, foolishly pursues and with an almost unending fervor of hope offers the oh-so-elusive promise of hope. Proust’s world is rich in artistic enticements and promises. The narrator is a would-be writer and his artistic anticipation echoes through the careers of writers, musicians and artists. As with many of the energies of modernism, the meaning, pursuit and attainment of art becomes central to human life and fulfillment.

Swann’s Way offers a triple-stranded fabric of the creation of an artistic world. The opening section, devoted to the narrator’s memories and recreation of his childhood, is essential for laying the foundation of the work and the seed bed of experience. The middle section of the book is called Swann in Love and explores the fitful and intoxicating story of Charles Swann’s pursuit of the alluring but quixotic young woman, Odette de Crecy. Swann’s love affair precedes the life of the narrator, but establishes both the imaginative and erotic complexity of human relationships that will haunt his world. Swann’s romantic expectations are converted into a marriage of convenience that could never satisfy his unfulfillable yearnings. The final section of Swann’s Way then moves forward to the narrator’s boyhood when Odette, now Madam Swann, is the mother of his boyhood girlfriend, Gilberte.

The volume of Swann’s Way is only an introduction to the expansive world of Proust’s, In Search of Lost Time. While Proust’s work will continue to respond to the crises of history and self, The Great War and his own growing invalid life, his first volume establishes a world and a way of experiencing that world that stands as one of the most important artistic and conceptual achievements of Modernism and of the Modern world.