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This chapter considers Julia Kristeva's reading of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time in connection to the themes of melancholia and sublimation. Kristeva argues against the claim that in Proust's texts “recall without remainder is presumed,” saying that the modernity of Proust's temporality is that of “irreconcilable fragments of time that are pulling us in all directions more fervently and dramatically than before.” However, she credits Proust with the inauguration of a new, melancholic sense of modernity—the same impulse that gave rise to abstract expressionism in visual art. It is in this sense that the work of art is a sublimation; like the theory of the sublime in eighteenth and nineteenth century aesthetic theory, sublimation makes present what in principle is unpresentable.

This chapter talks about the culmination of Marcel Proust's long quest both in love and in the writing of In Search of Lost Time. At the beginning of his transposing of his love affairs and infatuations into the novel, he looked to the letters of Alfred de Musset—his favorite poet in his adolescence—for inspiration. Proust's Narrator became a representative of the utopian figure of the artist, of successful men and women, who saves himself from aimlessness and also gifts his readers with the insight of his experience of his loves. This chapter thus takes a conclusive look at Proust's novel and how the events and relationships in his life have revealed truths to its readers. All this resulted in the literary success of the novel, that Edmund Wilson praised it for being the literary equivalent of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

This chapter addresses the idea of reading a novel as an experience of veering, as well as looking at some of the ways in which novels themselves invite the readers to think about veering. It starts with a perhaps deceptively ‘easy read’: Alan Bennett's charming novel, The Uncommon Reader. The appeal of veering, as a way of talking about digression, deviation or divagation in novels, has to do with its sense of ongoing movement, an uncertainty in and of the present. ‘Wavering’ is not the same as ‘veering’, but they are close. James Joyce's Ulysses might lead us to think about veering as a key to what makes a literary classic or masterpiece. Veering is a figure for thinking about desire — at once reassuring and unsettling. Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time are both marked by an extraordinary sense of ‘veering about’.

This chapter narrates the many relationships and acquaintances of Marcel Proust that would help in the building and formulation of his novel. It begins with the young men he befriended during his 1908–1909 summer vacations, where he met two engineers, Pierre Parent and Max Daireaux, and his most interesting new acquaintance Albert Nahmias fils. These attractive young men would find their way into Within a Budding Grove as a little band of girls in bloom that the Narrator encounters at the beach at Balbec. The chapter also narrates the apocryphal account of the meeting between Proust and Oscar Wilde, whose case and trial would make its way into Proust's work Sodom and Gamorrah. The chapter thus relates other similar encounters and acquaintances that would greatly influence Proust's writing of In Search of Lost Time.

Chapter four examines Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927) in the context of the modernist novel’s preoccupation with representing consciousness. Proust’s aesthetic philosophy explores both the capacities and the limits of any person’s affective and sensory receptivity and expressiveness. Contrasting Proust’s representations of his narrator against Elaine Scarry’s notion of literature as a means of creating and sharing experiences of beauty, the chapter shows that Proust seeks not simply to validate his narrator’s sensitivity, but to stress the temporariness of the moments when this sensitivity becomes meaningful and important to others. Proust’s narrator must ultimately come to terms with how much less others care about his thoughts and feelings than he does. The difficulty of this task is represented both in comic terms and as a serious challenge to an understanding of the novel as a genre that claims to validate an individual’s experience of her world.

This chapter takes as its point of departure a curious scene in Sodom and Gomorrah in which a fountain maliciously drenches a society lady, almost raping her in the sight of a bluff, guffawing Grand Duke. Critics have long pondered the significance of the incident. So far, no one has suggested as a possible influence the title of Machaut’s La Fonteinne Amoureuse, an edition of which appeared in Paris in 1908 just as Marcel Proust was beginning work on the texts that developed into In Search of Lost Time. While this hypothesis cannot be proved beyond all doubt, one cannot fail to be struck by a number of similarities between the Proust and Machaut texts: both feature insomniac first-person narrators who produce self-fertilizing narratives displaying a high degree of reflexivity. Both narrators must overcome modest backgrounds as they seek to rise in society. The chapter suggests that Proust, intrigued by the idea of an “amorous” fountain, half-remembered and literalized it—but then occluded the fascinating source, inhibited by a complicated nexus of feelings involving his gay, half-Jewish identity, his addiction to onanism, Machaut’s occasionally anti-semitic diatribes and the rampant anti-semitism of Paris society in the Dreyfus era.

In ‘Proustian Peristalsis: Parties Before, During and After’, David Ellison offers a reading of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913-27) in which the movement of characters through the social hierarchy and their expulsion from it, as evidenced by their inclusion or exclusion from parties, illuminate narratological method. Proustian narrative ‘flow’, Ellison argues, can aptly be characterised by the pressure exerted by a frame on the party scene it encloses. Demonstrating the phenomenon with reference to the dinner hosted by the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes in The Guermantes Way, the soirée hosted by the Princesse de Guermantes in Sodom and Gomorrah and the matinée hosted by the Princesse in Finding Time Again, Ellison provides a model of reading that links parties to ideas of excess and waste, a model which recognises the peristaltic tension and ease evoked in the reader consuming Proust’s narrative.

This chapter focuses on À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), a novel distinct from the others previously discussed in this book in its focus on literal homosexuality and the explicit link it makes between queer narrative strategies and the lives of actual gay characters. Proust's novel is partly composed as a search for laws—a search for its own form—with a clear arc of evolution from family life and childhood, from a failed but cherished system of genealogical laws, to homosexuality, adulthood, and an alternative set of laws to organize experience and articulate a vision of the world.

This chapter shows how the disappearing dialects of the countryside of the French countryside shaped the modernist vision of Marcel Proust. In À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), patois in the Recherche seems to the narrator to be one of the miraculous gateways to a reality immune to the ravages of time. In symbolic opposition to the modish and changeful speech of the bourgeoisie, the “feudal” dialect and accents of the peasantry and the aristocracy come to offer a challenge to the ideals of middle-class progress: development, cultivation, Bildung. In this way, patois represents a lyric alternative to the novel—a middle-class literary genre of narrative and change. In the end, however, patois proves to be subject to time and change too, and the symbolic alternative that dialect appears to offer is an imaginary, utopian longing.

This chapter narrates the earlier years of Marcel Proust. During Proust's attendance in high school, for example, he was often snubbed by his “intimate circle” of classmates whenever he desired their undivided attention. He was jealous for attention, and demanded it in his interactions with his future writer classmates—Robert Dreyfus and Fernand Gregh being among them. The chapter narrates and notes the talent that Proust displayed even in his young age, as well as his romantic pursuits, first with Jacques Bizet, son of the distinguished composer Georges Bizet. The rest of the chapter moves on to relate several other romantic interests that Proust pursued, linking them with the characters and events in his novel In Search of Lost Time.

This chapter explores the notions of androgyny that Marcel Proust underwent as a youth. It notes how Proust often looked for the feminine traits among his male friends, and for masculine traits among his female friends—all in search of the types that were to become the characters of his novel. It narrates and examines his interests in all aspects of sexuality, an interest seen in his many writings on the topic. It also notes of his father's interest in sexual behavior. Dr. Adrien Proust would treat and deal with sexual anomalies in the manner a psychiatrist would, treating both mind and body. Thus, the chapter devotes its pages to the examination of Proust's interest in the sexuality of the figures and individuals of those around him as he formulated the men-women or women-men or his novel In Search of Lost Time.

Beginning with the famous theme of “involuntary memory,” the project of Proust’s novel is organized along several axes by the themes of forms of value (metaphysical, epistemic, and erotic or interpersonal) which depend on the surpassing or the evading of the voluntary, or conscious, exercises of the will. This paper attempts to display some of this organization and in so doing seeks to show the connection between the themes of solipsism and its overcoming, jealousy, skepticism and the interpretation of the inadvertent signs given off by others, and some of the paradoxes in the desire for the desire of another.

The afterword evaluates the potential ranges of the methodology for reading comparative modernism proposed in The Evolutions of Modernist Epic. Many more epic works than those discussed in detail could be analyzed in relation to the eclipse of Darwinism in the early twentieth century. These include, for instance, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In addition, there are a number of benefits promised by a thorough understanding of biocentric modernism. Hitherto, however, little attention has been paid to the eclipse and its impact on modernism. One reason for this is that for many years the eclipse was regarded as a scientific mistake. The afterword describes how scholars of evolution, including Lynn Margulis, Elizabeth Grosz, and others, have come to reconsider its place in relation to Neo-Darwinism. It is within this larger reconsideration that it is worthwile returning to modernist epic as a source for radical thinking about human and literary evolution.

This chapter tells of two young chauffeurs in Marcel Proust's excursions to Monaco that would play critical roles in his life and would ultimately change the course of his novel In Search of Lost Time. The first chauffeurs he hired from Jacques Bizet's car-rental agency was Alfred Agostinelli, who in his new red taxi would drive Proust to Caen—a location famous for its medieval churches. It would be Proust's stay in Cabourg that would bring about a dramatic change in his life that he would return every summer until 1914. The second chauffeur to influence his life would be Odilon Albaret, however this chapter focuses mainly upon Proust's relationship to Agostinelli, and his later infatuation and love for the Italian.

In quite different ways Kant and Proust argue that beauty is no mere source of pleasure, and that to account for what is distinctive about its concept we must make sense of an idea of necessity or requirement that does not apply to ordinary pleasures. But they differ radically in how the normative aspect of the judgment of beauty is to be understood. Kant argues that judgment of beauty is expressed in what he calls a “universal voice” which demands the agreement of everyone. Proust’s view is hard to summarize but is exemplified in scenes where the beautiful object is experienced as making a kind of claim on the beholder, and where, unlike the case of the “agreeable” pleasure of food and drink, the issue is not whether the object satisfies some antecedent appetite for pleasure but rather whether one’s own responsiveness is adequate to the beauty of the object.