Marcel Proust Beyond Decadence

This article aims to examine the transformation of the idea of decadence in Marcel Proust’s creative consciousness through the methods of conceptual history, literary history, social history, and translation studies. These transformations manifested both in the writer’s literary criticism and took artistic forms in specific characters, scenes, and episodes of the novel cycle In Search of Lost Time. The latter is analyzed as a total work of art where the author, life, and literature form a unified whole. The author argues that decadence initially served as an effective model of literary apprenticeship for Proust, which he absorbed epigonically, catching on the fly a cascade of fashionable literary themes tinged with a decadent aura. However, the paper demonstrates that as the conception of the novel evolved, Proust found both inner strength and corresponding external support to ultimately transcend and overcome decadence (both as a literary movement and as a defeatist mindset) in a kind of relevant sublation (Aufhebung). He proposes to do this through parody, satire, or even theater of cruelty in this sum of anti-decadentism, which can be considered the novel Sodom and Gomorrah (1922).