Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Straightening out literary criticism: T. S. Eliot and error
- 2 The end of poetry for ladies: T. S. Eliot's early poetry
- 3 Text of error, text in error: James Joyce's Ulysses
- 4 Sexual/textual inversion: Marcel Proust
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
4 - Sexual/textual inversion: Marcel Proust
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Straightening out literary criticism: T. S. Eliot and error
- 2 The end of poetry for ladies: T. S. Eliot's early poetry
- 3 Text of error, text in error: James Joyce's Ulysses
- 4 Sexual/textual inversion: Marcel Proust
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
Summary
We would like to have [the author] give us answers, when all he can do is give us desires.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things PastRemembrance of Things Past is usually read as the record of its hero's journey from misperceptions to intuitive insight, from the forgetfulness of voluntary memory to the indubitability of involuntary memory, from error to epiphanic truth. The novel's “long path of error,” according to Roger Shattuck, leads finally, like a detective story, to “the solution,” thus giving hope to its readers who must persevere in “the sucession of errors which is our lot.” Perhaps every reader of the Remembrance has wondered why the trip takes so long, though, and has found herself rather dispirited by the many blind alleys encountered along the way. Responding to early complaints regarding the vagrant, piecemeal construction of Swann's Way (before the addition of the Albertine volumes), Proust justified his style because he had chosen to “recreate” the “evolution of a mind,” and “so I am forced to depict errors, but without feeling bound to say that I hold them to be errors. So much the worse … if the reader believes I hold them to be the truth.” The “last volume will clear” up this “misunderstanding,” Proust explained.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Deviant ModernismSexual and Textual Errancy in T.S Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust, pp. 170 - 216Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998