The Year of Reading Proust discussion

This Thread is for the discussion of Marcel Proust

Harold Bloom, writer, literary critic and professor at Yale University, considers Marcel Proust the twentieth century's master in creating vivid personalities. Bloom has written extensively on Proust's writing, including the 2004 volume Marcel Proust (ISBN: 0791076598), and he is regarded as a major Proust scholar.

The only book of Bloom's I've read is The Western Canon which has a full chapter on Proust and the penultimate chapter examines Beckett as the literary descendant of Joyce, Proust and Shakespeare. This book is a survey of Western literature from the perspective of analysing what makes great literature great; and why, in an age where creative literature no longer has the cultural force it once did, such works of genius need to continue to be read and studied because of their importance as a vehicile for carrying forward our culture.

This is a personal view of Bloom's book as it is one of the principal works in developing my thoughts about writing and understanding the cultural meaning of my reading. As The Western Canon limits its scope to Western literature it does not include Islamic, South Asian or Far Eastern literature and the analysis ends with Beckett. The book is eminently readable, however I took more than two years to read it so as to read dozens of the books he discusses along with other books by the same authors, which apart from filling substantial gaps in my literature reading, enabled me to more fully appreciate Bloom's view on literature and its role in our historic cultural process.

As I understood him, Bloom believes that the three indispensible qualifications of great literature are the creative power of metaphor, the ability of an author to depict a world that is strange, that serves to immerse the reader in unfamiliarity and, thirdly, creates characters who become alive and persist in the reader's mind. Bloom is very focussed on character. As a part of the the evolution of a culture he sees language defining people's social behavior through the relation of the behavior of and between individuals in terms of the set of characters in the canon. For example, Scrooge-like behavior is understood in a culture imbued with Dickens, and similarly Quixotic deeds, etc etc.

The canon, is essence, is the body of works that hold the central commonly referred to characters in a culture. Bloom regards Shakespeare as the greatest scribe of all as he created the greatest number of characters that retained their cultural significance for so long, but fears that the replacement of reading literature as a passtime by other social activites over recent decades is leading to an erosion and perhaps ultimate loss of the canon.

On Proust, he states torture by factfinding is Proust's comic formula, since this is self torment, and the facts are essentially imaginative surmises describing how the mechanism by which we find the narrator's long suffering funny is because the reader can see that its source is entirely suppositious. He regards ISOLT alongside The Winter's Tale as the canon's greatest literary works of comic jealousy.

other links to Bloom on Proust (from the forum lounge)
Harold Bloom interview HAROLD BLOOM: You can pick up Proust the way you can pick up Dickens or the way you can pick up Cervantes or Shakespeare. You can count upon the passion and storytelling skill of the narrator. You can count upon the extraordinarily intense depth of characterization on Proust's part to carry you so deep into the interior of the crucial figures in the book that you will be concerned about their lives and deaths as human beings, not about the time in which they live or the political causes through which they're struggling. Indeed, even their particular sexual orientation in some sense becomes secondary because there's no essential difference between the sorrows and vicissitudes - you know -- that attend all human erotic relationships, whether they are heterosexual or homosexual. (thanks, ReemK10)


Harold Bloom From the forum of dedicated Proustian, Jim Everett (from where I found a link to this GR group) a section quoted from How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom which contrasts Proust with Shakespeare on jealousy. (thanks, Marcelita)

Unregistered* wrote: " Harold Bloom, writer, literary critic and professor at Yale University, considers Marcel Proust the twentieth century's master in creating vivid personalities. Bloom has written extensively on Pro..."

Thank you Unregistered*.. I shall come back to your post at the end of the read.

Harold Bloom wrote that “Proust’s greatest strength, amid so many others, is his characterization: no twentieth-century novelist can match his roster of vivid personalities.” I think however it is not his depiction of characters that is so memorable as much as it is HIS interaction with them.

Glad to hear that your reading was enhanced by "The Western Canon". I only attempted "The Anatomy of Influence" but didn't get very far.