Hermit and brilliant neurotic – on the 100th anniversary of Marcel Proust’s death | free press

by time news

He was considered sensitive, strange, avid writers and wrote the most monumental novel of the 20th century.

Serious illness dictated Marcel Proust’s rhythm of existence from his youth. He had his first asthma attack when he was nine. Time and time again, the condition forced him to withdraw to a hermetically sealed room for weeks, even months, the windows of which had to remain closed at all times. He himself reported on these phases of total isolation: “I lead a fantastic existence. I don’t go out at all anymore, I get out of bed around eleven o’clock in the evening, if I get up at all.” The French writer Marcel Proust never got old: 100 years ago, on November 18, 1922, he died at the age of 51. His main work “In Search of Lost Time” consists of seven volumes and over 4500 pages, it has made him world famous and is considered the most monumental novel of the 20th century.

Despite his elegant clothes and noble demeanor, Proust seemed to his friend Leon-Paul Fargue “like a hermit who hasn’t left his hollow oak tree for a long time”. Proust tried by all means to protect his sensitive and badly damaged body, but his tendency to isolate was not only due to poor health. From childhood he felt a strong urge to isolate himself. This form of claustrophilia thrived in strange ways: he had the walls of his hermitage lined with cork boards, designed to absorb even the slightest sound from the outside. In the silence of the soundproof cell, the brilliant neurotic worked on his manuscripts, which he combined from a tangled bundle of slips of paper. He wrote thousands of pages in this voluntary imprisonment. Much remained fragmentary, such as the novel “Jean Santeuil”, which only came to light from the legacy 30 years after his death.
Intellectuals like to adorn themselves with quotations from Proust’s oeuvre, but apart from experts hardly anyone deals with him today. His monumental project “In Search of Lost Time” is reminiscent of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” in its impenetrability. The gigantic prose cycle draws on an expansive, impressionistic style. Proust emphasized that he wrote this work “as one builds a cathedral”.

The early stories are better suited as an introduction to the cosmos of his poetry. These texts have an almost organic connection to the painting style of Claude Monet or Camille Pissarro. Blurry and at the same time clear, these novellas deliver impressions of the immensely complicated psychological situation of a writer who was troubled by boundless hypersensitivity, an Oedipus complex and unacknowledged homosexuality.

Proust is one of the masters of self-observation, for whom the dissection of one’s own psyche blossomed into an exciting artistic event. His writings thus always embody a piece of self-observation. At the same time, however, they form a sensual panorama of the nervous and over-refined culture on the threshold of the 19th and 20th centuries.

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