Volume 36, Number 21 · January 18, 1990
A La Recherche…de Proust
By John Weightman
Marcel Proust: Selected Letters Volume Two, 1904–1909
edited by Philip Kolb, translated and with an introduction by Terence Kilmartin
Oxford University Press, 482 pp., $29.95
Marcel Proust: A Biography
by George D. Painter
Random House, 446 pp., $39.95
In his brilliant, fragmentary pamphlet known as Contre Sainte-Beuve, Proust gives forceful expression to the view that the biographical approach to writers is misconceived, because the literary work is produced not by the artist's everyday personality but by what he calls le moi profond, which operates according to its own independent, mysterious rules. He maintains that this inner, creative self stands in a very uncertain relationship to the observable, documentable human individual in which it occurs, and that to argue from the latter to the former is a debatable procedure. Proust was writing, of course, before the popularization of psychoanalytic theory in the mid-twentieth century, and he could not foresee that, for better or for worse, biography of all kinds was to become one of the most flourishing literary, or para-literary, genres.
Review, 4256 words
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