The Two Worlds of Marcel Proust

by Harold March

. no dustjacket, 1948 Uni Pennsylvania Press, clean copy

Genres: Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published June 1, 1968

Reviews

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is primarily an analysis of Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. The author provides a dispassionate, discerning study of Proust, the man, and his work. This does not differ from orthodox opinion (save in its greater stress on his homosexuality), and once again we see the man, paralytically indecisive, minutely analytical, responsive to people and yet a solitary, from the coddled childhood to his retirement from the world in the legendary cork-lined room, confronted by the constant image of death. March interprets in the man and his writing, the duality between the intellectual and the intuitional; describes the evolution of his masterwork, its structure, its obstructive techniques; its characters, with their keys and sources; the society it reflected; its individuality as throughout the overtones of experience-rather than experience itself- are suggested.
In a final evaluation, he considers the construction, content and meaning of the work with an emphasis on the "two worlds" of "time" and "eternity", the first where ""necessity, illusion, suffering, change, decay and death are the law"" -- the second which emerged as a world of ""freedom, beauty and peace"". Written in 1948 and subsequently reprinted this is a very good secondary source supplementing such critics as Hindus, Painter, Shattuck and others.