This article is taken from the
Figaro Hors-série “Marcel Proust, the mirror of our days”.
On the occasion of the centenary of his death, discover in this sumptuously illustrated tribute issue the life of the famous author of In
Search of Lost Time
, his sharp gaze on the great world, the deciphering of his works, the psychological portrait of his characters…
Le Figaro Special Edition
“Marcel Proust, the mirror of our days”.
Le Figaro
The
"real in literature is the result of an entirely spiritual work, however material the occasion may be (a walk, a night of love, social dramas), a kind of discovery in the spiritual or sentimental order that the mind makes, so that the value of literature is not in the material unfolded before the writer, but in the nature of the work that his mind operates on it”.
Reading these lines taken from
Jean Santeuil,
we understand that the interest shown by the novelist Marcel Proust in the events does not depend on their specific content, their objective reality, their moral value or their historical consequences, but rather on the experience they make possible.
Read alsoThree reasons to read or re-read In the Shadow of Young Girls in Bloom, by Marcel Proust
If, for the author of the
Research
, the content of this experience is not determined a priori, it nevertheless has a form.
It must be singular, subjective, concrete, intimate, authentic and fully lived.
Only then can his material be qualified as fictional material allowing the exploration of the intimate consciousness of time, in order to find the latter, to stop it, to abolish it.
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