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Chapter 4 - Finding a voice: from Ruskin to the pastiches

from Part I - Life and works

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2013

By
Cynthia Gamble
Edited by
Adam Watt
Cynthia Gamble
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
Adam Watt
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Summary

His voice contains many voices. He is a magpie and a mimic. He veers this way and that, and takes the colouring of the company he keeps. Proust's narrator is both chorus and soloist.

As well as searching for a form and structure for his writing, Proust was also seeking a voice. Or, rather, he sought affirmation of his own originality, a confidence to experiment found through his engagement with the works of the polymath John Ruskin (1819–1900).

Marcel Proust possessed a keen ear and the gift of detecting inner rhythms, together with a highly developed visual, musical memory. He was acutely aware of this and jotted down in one of his exercise books:

As soon as I was reading an author, I could very soon make out the melody of the song underneath the words, different in one author from what it is in every other, and as I read, without realizing it, I would be humming it, hurrying the words, slowing them down or breaking off altogether, as one does when singing, when, depending on the tempo of the melody, one often waits a long time before saying the end of a word.

(ASB, 92; CSB, 303)
Type
Chapter
Information
Marcel Proust in Context , pp. 27 - 33
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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References

Bowie, Malcolm, Proust among the Stars (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p. xvi
Nordlinger-Riefstahl, Marie, ed., Marcel Proust: lettres à une amie (Manchester: Éditions du Calame, 1942), p. vii
Carter, William C., Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 275
Gamble, Cynthia, Proust as Interpreter of Ruskin: The Seven Lamps of Translation (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 2002), pp. 43–4.
Eagles, Stuart, After Ruskin: The Social and Political Legacies of a Victorian Prophet, 1870–1920 (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 148–96
Nordlinger-Riefstahl, Marie, ‘Proust and Ruskin’, exhibition catalogue Marcel Proust 1871–1922 (Manchester: Whitworth Art Gallery, 1956), p. 7
Ruskin, John, La Bible d'Amiens, preface, translation and notes by Marcel Proust, ed. Ergal, Y.-M. (Paris: Bartillat, 2007), p. 12
Borrel, Anne, ed., Marcel Proust: Écrits de jeunesse 1887–1895 (Illiers-Combray: Institut Marcel Proust international, 1991), p. 159
Bouillaguet, Annick, Proust lecteur de Balzac et de Flaubert: l'imitation cryptée (Paris: Champion, 2000)

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