Legacy of Marcel Proust

Proust projected his own homosexuality upon his characters, treating this, as well as snobbism, vanity, and cruelty, as a major symbol of original sin. His insight into women and the love of men for women (which he himself experienced for the many female originals of his heroines) remained unimpaired, and he is among the greatest novelists in the fields of both heterosexual and homosexual love.

The entire climate of the 20th-century novel was affected by À la recherche du temps perdu, which is one of the supreme achievements of modern fiction. Taking as raw material the author’s past life, À la recherche is ostensibly about the irrecoverability of time lost, about the forfeiture of innocence through experience, the emptiness of love and friendship, the vanity of human endeavour, and the triumph of sin and despair; but Proust’s conclusion is that the life of every day is supremely important, full of moral joy and beauty, which, though they may be lost through faults inherent in human nature, are indestructible and recoverable. Proust’s style is one of the most original in all literature and is unique in its union of speed and protraction, precision and iridescence, force and enchantment, classicism and symbolism.