Proust's Influences
By Anka Muhlstein
Anka
Muhlstein is the author of many books, most recently “Monsieur Proust’s
Library.” Here she writes about the books that influenced Proust.
Proust’s
friends claimed that he had read everything and forgotten nothing. As though to
prove them right, he never created a character without putting a book in his
hands, and he quotes abundantly from and alludes often to his favorite writers.
It would help the reader of Proust to know the Balzac novels that pop up
throughout “In Search of Lost Time”: “Father Goriot,” “Lost Illusions,” “The
Girl With the Golden Eyes.” These are the novels that deal with the “uncommon
passions” so important to the understanding of Proust’s homosexual characters.
Saint-Simon’s
40 volumes of memoirs of the court of Louis XIV are not required reading, but
it is useful to read a few excerpts to get a taste of what the irritable French
duke considered his due, and of how desperate he was to conserve his
privileges. The Guermantes in “In Search of Lost Time,” who resent any ignoring
of their illustrious past and are convinced that they are still at the apex of
French society despite the changes brought about by the Revolution, owe a lot
to Proust’s knowledge of Saint-Simon.
To
seize the full flavor of the comical way Proust uses the playwright Jean
Racine’s tragedies in his conflation of Jews and homosexuals, one might also
read Racine’s biblical plays “Esther” and “Athalie.”
Proust’s
use of French writers is straightforward and easy to detect. This is not true
of his use of foreign writers: their significance is hidden, almost
subterranean, and often overlooked. Yet their presence is the clearest sign of
Proust’s amazing erudition. No writers had as firm a hold on Proust as English
or American essayists and novelists, but he could not use them as directly or
freely as French authors; he knew his French readers were most likely not as
familiar with works of English literature, and perhaps not familiar with them
at all.
One
of Proust’s favorite novelists, one whose books reduced him to tears, was
George Eliot. He read “Middlemarch” very carefully and absorbed the drama of
Mr. Casaubon, the unhappy clergyman who dedicates his whole life — sacrificing
on the way his young wife — to labors that produced absurd and trivial results.
Proust’s narrator is anxiously searching for his true vocation, and is very
much aware of the danger of losing his way in a desert of sterile and doomed
tasks.
One
may not think of Robert Louis Stevenson in connection with Proust, but Proust
loved his work, especially “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The
curious transformation of a kind and intelligent physician who turns into a
psychopathic monster after imbibing a drug intended to separate the good from
the evil in a person is an extreme example of personality change, a theme that
runs through Proust’s novel. His characters never reveal their true
personalities at the outset, and as the novel progresses they do the contrary
of what one expects.
A careful reader, however, may avoid being taken by
surprise. As a young man, Proust loved detective stories. Although he never
wrote thrillers, he knew how to prepare his reader for a revelation by seeding
a clue beforehand. Alas the reader may lose track in the thousands of pages
separating the hint from the dénouement. The only remedy is to keep reading and
rereading Proust!
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