Thus Richard Bales hails Proust as champion of the arts. Yet it is no doubt for this very reason that the scientific bent of the author has tended to be overlooked. Nevertheless in recent years there has been a reassessment of the ‘supposed Proustian preference [for] art to science’. Contemporary writers were indeed aware of Proust's ‘double vision’ as this assessment by Virginia Woolf makes clear:

Science and the arts belong to different paradigms. Is there both a scientific and a poetic Proust as Woolf suggests? What evidence of crossover emerges between the arts and the sciences in Proust? The modernist period in which Proust was writing is characterized by rapid technological advance, including notably the introduction of electricity, telephony, radiography, photography and the motor car. ‘To be sure’, remarks Sara Danius, ‘most scholars and critics agree that avant-garde movements such as cubism, futurism, surrealism, and vorticism must be understood in relation to technology.’ Nevertheless she sees that traditional accounts of modernism have been marked ‘by an antitechnological bias’.