La culture littéraire dans À la recherche du temps perdu

In this thesis, we discuss the aspect of “critique-novel” of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927). Proust originally undertook this novel as a series of fragments of critique that are titled le Contre Sainte-Beuve, but in the process of writing, the uncompleted fragments slid to a novel. This origin partly accounts for the plenty of references to literary works in this roman. Then, what is the point of the transformation from a critique to a novel? Our hypothesis is that this transformation occurs due to the transition of Proust’s main interest—from the monological narration of the critique towards the dialogical and descriptive discourse of the novel of manners, in which characters are concerned with literature in their own way. In order to demonstrate the hypothesis, we examine various aspects of characters who talk of literature in the novel, analyzing their opinion for four most frequently referred authors, Madame de Sevigne, duke de Saint-Simon, Hugo and Balzac. This approach has enabled us to find that the characters’ opinions represent the reception of the authors in question, and that the opinions have a role of typifying and situating the characters in the plot. Therefore we can conclude that Proust chose to draw the behavior of people around literature with the form of novel instead of simply stating his own idea.