Proust and Existentialism

The twentieth century asked new questions of the novel. What is memory? What is a self? What does a person owe to others in a world without certainties, in the shadow of two world wars and an occupation? French writers answered with some of the most ambitious and most discussed books of the century, and in the 1940s and 1950s the cafés of Paris became the stage of a philosophical movement that gave the world a new word, existentialism. This chapter follows that story from Proust to the Nouveau Roman. Names, dates and attributions are given from general knowledge and flagged where they should be checked. The political disagreements among these writers are reported without taking sides.

Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust (1871 to 1922) spent the last years of his life in a cork-lined bedroom in Paris, writing À la recherche du temps perdu, usually translated as In Search of Lost Time (check the details of the room, which is partly legend). The work runs to seven volumes, published between 1913 and 1927, the last ones after his death (check the dates). Its narrator recalls his childhood and his adult life in Paris high society, and the book is a study of memory, desire, jealousy, art and time. The most famous scene is that in which the taste of a small cake dipped in tea, a madeleine, brings back a whole forgotten childhood (check the details). Proust paid to publish the first volume himself after it was refused by publishers, including a firm whose reader was André Gide, who later admitted his mistake (check the story).

André Gide

André Gide (1869 to 1951) was a writer, critic and founder of a major literary review, the Nouvelle Revue Française, which shaped French taste for decades (check). His novels and journals explore moral freedom and the courage to be honest with oneself, including about his own sexuality. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947 (check). He is a bridge between the generation of Proust and the generation of the existentialists, several of whom he influenced.

Existentialism

After the Second World War, existentialism became fashionable in Paris, associated with the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the writers Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus (check). The term covers varied views, but a common theme is that there is no fixed human nature or pre-given meaning: individuals are free, and are responsible for what they make of themselves.

Camus was born in French Algeria, and the Algerian War of the 1950s and 1960s bore heavily on his later life and reputation (check the details). In 1952 he and Sartre quarrelled publicly over political violence and the Soviet Union, and the friendship ended (check). The quarrel is still argued over, with admirers on both sides. Camus died in a car accident in 1960 (check).

The Nouveau Roman and the Absurd Stage

In the 1950s a group of novelists, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon, rejected the traditional novel with its plot, character and moral (check the names). The group was called the Nouveau Roman, the "new novel", though its members did not form a school and disagreed among themselves. Robbe-Grillet argued for descriptions of objects without human meaning, and Sarraute for the tiny movements of feeling beneath conversation (check). Claude Simon received the Nobel Prize in 1985 (check). In the theatre, writers such as Eugène Ionesco and the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, who wrote in French, created plays in which language breaks down and nothing much happens, a style called the theatre of the absurd (check the label and the dates).

Exercises

Next chapter: Capstone: The Writer as Public Conscience, which follows one thread from Voltaire to the present day.