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The Way Less Traveled: Proust's Künstlerroman

A Künstlerroman, meaning “artist’s novel” in German, is a less common variation of the personal development story – such as the Künstlerroman's more common (though radically different) cousin, the Bildungsroman. A Bildungsroman is a novel of societal development, perhaps what one in the West would consider to be a coming-of-age story. It centers around a nonconforming, typically young, individual who slowly begins to conform with the developmental norms of the society in which they reside. Rather than being a novel of conformity, a Künstlerroman is a novel of development whose plot slowly forces the protagonist to have an awakening and separate from societal norms; the protagonist chooses, in a moment of epiphany, to go their own way and embrace a life of artistic and intellectual individualism.

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is one of the most analyzed works of literature. There are many incredibly complex and nuanced analytical takes on how one is supposed to read this gargantuan work of modernist fiction. Mine is relatively simple by comparison and is structured around my central idea: that the novel is a Künstlerroman with the narrator as its subject.

The unnamed narrator spends the majority of his time as a passive protagonist, observing the world around him and, perhaps most importantly, avoiding doing what he feels compelled to do: write. At the same time, the narrator spends much of the novel navigating the complex and occasionally ridiculous social circles of the French intelligentsia. Because of this, the narrator spends a vast majority of the novel in a desperate search for conformity – not just to the social circles of the time, but also to his artistic and intellectual forefathers, often lamenting that his particular artistic temperament is not identical to that of the writers he so admires: “[If I] really had the soul of an artist, what pleasure should [I] not be now experiencing at the sight of that curtain of trees lighted by the setting sun” (Time Regained).

Because the narrator doesn't feel the connection to nature that the Romantics of the previous century did, he feels he cannot possibly become an artist. His need to conform to the societal expectations of an artist, expectations based upon previous artists' particular ideas on art, is a recurring motif throughout the work. However, within the same volume, the narrator, in a series of moments of clarity, begins to see that his artistic significance lies not in the artistic temperaments and subjects of the past but in his own, modern form of artistic expression.

Individualism, not societal conformity, becomes the conclusion of the novel. Eventually, the narrator states out loud, in the midst of artistic contemplation:

[If] ever I believed myself a poet I now know that I am not one.

Perhaps in this new and barren stage of my life, men may

inspire me as Nature no longer can and the years when I

might perhaps have been able to sing her beauty will never

return.

(Time Regained)

Here, the narrator has a demonstrated artistic epiphany that later leads him to write as an original rather than emulating the writers of the past. The novel ends with the narrator finally starting the process of writing, despite now being on his death bed, and the cycle of the Künstlerroman is completed. The narrator has chosen a life of artistic individualism instead of societal conformity.

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