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Art is what gives life meaning.
In one of the most powerful passages in In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust reflects on the nature of art and the unique capacity of artists to convey their inner worlds. The narrator realizes that artists, like the fictional provincial musician Vinteuil and painter Elstir, are connected to a metaphorical “unknown country.” This country represents the deepest, most personal part of their soul—something forgotten yet embedded within them. Art becomes the medium through which they express this hidden, personal essence.
Proust suggests that while artists might not consciously remember this “native land,” they are instinctively attuned to it. They may betray it in their pursuit of fame, but paradoxically, in moments of self-abnegation or disregard for recognition, they tap into their true artistic voice. This “peculiar strain” in their work is a persistent, recognizable signature, reflective of the artist’s inner world and the “permanence” of their soul.
The passage continues with a profound meditation on the purpose and power of art. Proust posits that the “only true voyage of discovery” is not physical travel to distant places, but rather the ability to “possess other eyes” and see the world through the perspectives of others. Art, then, allows us to do this: It reveals the inner worlds of others in ways that everyday communication cannot. It is through art that the unique, ineffable experiences of others—their “individual persons”—become accessible, giving us the opportunity to truly “travel from star to star.”
The essence of the passage lies in the idea that art offers a more profound form of discovery than literal travel. It opens a window into the artist’s soul, allowing us to perceive the world through their eyes, to experience the hundred different universes that each artist inhabits and expresses.
In Search of Lost Time is not only a literary masterpiece but also a deeply philosophical work, intertwining themes from philosophy, psychology and sociology. The novel speaks to concerns central to 20th-century intellectual thought, including the nature of time, memory and identity.
Proust devotes a great deal of attention to the contrast between conscious recollection and involuntary memory, which can be triggered by a sensory experience and allows the narrator to access deep, buried layers of the past. Like the psychologist Henri Bergson, Proust is interested in the subjective, lived experience of time, as opposed to mechanical or chronological time. Proust’s portrayal of time as fluid and deeply tied to perception aligns closely with modern psychological understanding of how humans experience reality.
Proust places the subject, or individual consciousness, at the center of his narrative. The novel’s focus on the narrator’s internal reflections, desires and perceptions reflects existential and phenomenological concerns, similar to those explored by philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. These thinkers were preoccupied with the nature of subjective experience and how it shapes reality. Proust’s introspective style echoes their focus on how the self constructs meaning from experience.
Proust believed that only art could transcend time and mortality. He suggests that art, in its ability to capture the essence of life, has the power to redeem the passage of time. His notion that artists like Vinteuil or Elstir possess the ability to reveal new worlds through their work resembles Friedrich Nietzsche’s view that art is the highest expression of human will and creativity.
Like many modernist writers, Proust grapples with the instability of meaning in a world where traditional religious and moral structures are breaking down. His narrator searches for meaning in life through relationships, social status and, ultimately, art. Thinkers such as Sartre and Albert Camus, who explored the absurdity of existence and the necessity of creating meaning in a meaningless universe, would have recognized similar themes in Proust’s work.
Proust’s exploration of memory, dreams and unconscious desires echoes Sigmund Freud’s pioneering work in psychoanalysis. Freud’s theories about repression, childhood trauma and the unconscious mind find a literary parallel in Proust’s deep, introspective exploration of the narrator’s past and emotional life. The complex relationships between memory and identity in the novel resemble Freud’s ideas about how repressed memories shape individuals’ behavior and self-understanding.
Proust’s detailed description of perception and sensory experiences, especially how these trigger memories, mirrors the concerns of phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. The novel explores how the narrator experiences reality through his senses, how subjective these experiences are and how they differ from external reality. This reverberates with phenomenology’s interest in how individuals experience phenomena and construct reality based on those perceptions.
Proust’s work, particularly its focus on the narrator’s inner life and his alienation from society, speaks to the existentialist concern with authenticity. Existentialists like Sartre argued that individuals must confront the absurdity of life and create their own meaning, often through acts of personal authenticity. The narrator of In Search of Lost Time undergoes a similar journey, questioning societal conventions and finding ultimate meaning not in social status but in personal introspection and artistic expression.
The novel’s rich portrayal of French society, including its emphasis on snobbery, social climbing and hypocrisy, offers both a highly perceptive sociological analysis of status hierarchies and the everyday presentation of the self and a philosophical critique of bourgeois values. Proust dissects the absurdities and pretensions of the aristocratic and middle classes, paralleling sociological concerns about the impact of status anxieties and societal norms on individual lives. This reflects broader social and philosophical critiques of modernity, capitalism and industrialization, themes that thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Max Weber would explore.
In Search of Lost Time transcends the boundaries of literature and anticipates key 20th-century concerns, making it not just a novel of personal exploration but a philosophical meditation on the human condition. Through its rich thematic content, it speaks to and expands upon the intellectual currents of the time, resonating with philosophical, psychological and psychological discourses that shaped the 20th century.
Contemporary fiction lacks the expansiveness of the late 19th and early 20th century novel.
For those of us who love the great 19th-century novels of George Eliot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy, no work since Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time comes close. Yes, there are still novelists of great ambitions, like J. M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro or Zadie Smith, who engage deeply with philosophical, psychological and sociological issues. But even their great works lack the expansive scope, the philosophical depth, the sociological detail or the psychological insights into the inner life found in those earlier works.
Fiction once contained the world. Today’s fiction, in contrast, has turned inward.
Why is that?
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, literature did not exist apart from other intellectual pursuits. Authors like Eliot, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Proust were not only novelists but also intellectual figures whose work engaged with the most pressing philosophical and social questions of their time. These writers were not confined to “literature” as a separate realm but saw fiction as a way to explore the entire spectrum of human experience and knowledge.
By contrast, the 20th century saw the professionalization and specialization of the humanities and the social science disciplines. Philosophy became more academic and abstract, psychology became increasingly dominated by empirical science, and sociology focused more on data-driven analysis. Fiction, as a result, was left more purely in the realm of literature, often detached from broader intellectual inquiry.
Modernist authors like Proust and Joyce were deeply concerned with how human consciousness functions. In Search of Lost Time offers extended meditations on memory, time and self-awareness, blending philosophical reflections into the narrative. However, later literary movements—feminist, minimalist, existential, Afrofuturism or beat or magical realism or postmodern—shifted the focus more toward the fragmentation of narrative, playfulness with form and metafiction. These later movements were less interested in large-scale philosophical and psychological inquiry and more focused on deconstructing the very nature of storytelling.
Writers like Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace, while profound in their own ways, often engaged in ironic or fragmented explorations of culture, history and self, rather than offering the same kind of unified, large-scale moral or psychological investigations seen in In Search of Lost Time or War and Peace.
A host of changes altered both the scope and style of fiction. Writers are now working within a world that is saturated with information and competing narratives, leading to a more fragmented literary style that mirrors the disorientation of the modern world. In addition, while the range of perspectives in fiction widened, reflecting a growing diversity of voices, this also steered attention away from the grand, unified philosophical and social themes that dominated the works of 19th-century European novelists.
Then, too, a shortening of attention spans transformed the literary world, with shorter novels, more fragmented narratives and a focus on plot-driven fiction often taking precedence over lengthy, introspective works. Few readers have the patience for the kind of deep, philosophical engagement found in In Search of Lost Time. Fewer authors engage in long, detailed explorations of philosophy or psychology.
Contemporary literature tends to favor more minimalist, realistic and emotionally restrained prose, which is evident in the works of authors like Raymond Carver, Jhumpa Lahiri and Sally Rooney. While these writers certainly examine the complexities of everyday life, relationships and individual psychology, they often do so on a smaller, more intimate scale, eschewing the grand philosophical meditations that characterize Proust’s writing.
This trend toward minimalism and a slice-of-life style has moved fiction toward more personal, character-driven stories that focus on social realities rather than larger metaphysical questions. While this shift has resulted in important explorations of identity, class and culture, it has come at the expense of the sweeping intellectual ambition found in Tolstoy or Proust’s work.
Nineteenth-century fiction often engaged with a sense of historical and philosophical purpose, with writers like Eliot, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy considering themselves as chroniclers of their society’s moral and spiritual evolution. The rise of postmodernism in the late 20th century, with its skepticism of metanarratives and objective truth, has made it more difficult for contemporary authors to adopt this kind of grand, authoritative stance.
Proust’s world, in which personal memory and time offer deep revelations about the human condition, seems increasingly distant in an era that has become suspicious of large philosophical or spiritual claims. Contemporary writers are more likely to interrogate the instability of identity and meaning than assert a coherent philosophical or psychological vision.
Certainly, there are notable exceptions. Toni Morrison. Chinua Achebe. Gabriel García Márquez. And I’m sure you might add others. These are extraordinary writers who do grapple with very big issues. To my mind, they are the exceptions to my crude generalization.
While the great novelists of the 19th and early 20th centuries created works that wrestled with the most fundamental questions of existence, modern fiction has, by and large, moved away from this expansive scope, sacrificing philosophical inquiry, psychological depth and sociological observation for more insular, character-driven stories.
The novels of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from George Eliot’s moral realism to Dostoyevsky’s exploration of free will, Tolstoy’s sweeping social critique and Proust’s probing reflections on memory, time and the inner life, operated at the intersection of philosophy, sociology and psychology. Today, contemporary fiction, while often technically innovative, no longer attempts to grapple with the same depth or scope of these masters, revealing a broader cultural retreat from intellectual ambition in literature.
The expansive nature of 19th-century fiction, which used its narrative form to deeply interrogate human psychology, morality, the sociopolitical structure of society and the very nature of history, contrasts sharply with the more narrowly focused fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries. Where Eliot, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Proust viewed the novel as a vehicle for philosophical discourse and social commentary, contemporary fiction often eschews these larger themes in favor of exploring individual experience and personal identity.
In Search of Lost Time marks the final, monumental achievement of an era when fiction sought to uncover the hidden depths of human psychology, philosophical inquiry and societal roles, norms and dynamics. In contrast, many contemporary novels have abandoned this grand scope, shifting instead toward fragmented narratives and a narrower focus on individual experience, leaving behind the ambition of their literary ancestors. For the most part, today’s fiction lacks the same ambition to tackle complex, interconnected questions about human existence.
The works of Eliot, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Proust remain timeless because they offer not just character studies, but deep, multifaceted examinations of morality, society and the human psyche—qualities that many modern novels have relinquished.
I often wonder how today’s novelists would respond to the claim that their works lack the moral seriousness and the philosophical, psychological and sociological depth of writers like George Eliot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy and Marcel Proust.
I speculate that they might respond with several arguments.
- That their works are more reflective of the fragmentation and complexity of modern life.
While 19th-century novelists wrote in an era when literature was expected to grapple with grand societal and philosophical questions, today’s world is more fragmented, pluralistic and individualized. Novelists might well argue that their works explore the diverse experiences of contemporary life rather than presenting sweeping moral or philosophical statements. For example, Rachel Cusk or Zadie Smith might emphasize the fragmented nature of identity, relationships and modern life, which reflects the complexity of contemporary society.
- That their works engage deeply with the philosophical questions of today, such as globalization, postcolonialism, identity politics, climate change and technological transformation, not those of the 19th century.
While these themes may not map onto traditional existential or moral concerns in the same way, they reflect contemporary anxieties. For example, Don DeLillo in works like White Noise and Underworld explores how media, technology and consumer culture shape human consciousness, which can be seen as a kind of philosophical engagement.
- That the rise of postmodernism, metafiction and minimalism in the 20th century led many novelists to experiment with the form and structure of the novel, challenging the conventions of realism.
Writers like Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace have questioned the role of the narrator, the reliability of truth and the function of the novel itself, arguably engaging in deep philosophical inquiry but in ways that differ from 19th-century realist traditions. These authors might argue that their works challenge the reader to think critically about the nature of knowledge, reality and narrative, rather than presenting traditional moral or psychological insights.
- That their works are psychologically complex, but that their analysis takes a very different form than those of a century ago and more.
For example, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels examine the inner lives of women, the complexity of female friendships and the interplay between personal and social identity in ways that reflect deep psychological and sociological insights, even if they don’t align with the psychological concerns of Dostoyevsky or Proust.
- That the “grand narratives” that dominated the 19th and early 20th centuries no longer make sense.
Contemporary writers like Julian Barnes or Ali Smith might argue that their works reflect the skepticism and ambiguity of the modern world, which resists the kind of moral and philosophical certainty found in the works of Tolstoy or Eliot. Instead of offering sweeping statements on human nature or society, modern novels might embrace uncertainty, complexity and open-endedness.
- That while earlier novelists may have engaged more directly with philosophy or sociology, contemporary fiction is influenced by other disciplines such as neuroscience, trauma studies, gender theory and postcolonial thought.
For example, Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Enduring Love incorporate medical science and psychology into their narratives, reflecting contemporary concerns about consciousness, trauma and the ethics of intervention, but in a way that blends modern disciplines rather than adhering to traditional modes of philosophical reflection.
While contemporary fiction continues to be a rich and diverse landscape, it has moved away from the grand intellectual ambitions of its 19th- and early 20th-century predecessors. Where novelists like Eliot, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Proust embraced the novel as a medium for exploring existential questions, societal structures and the deepest recesses of human psychology, modern writers often pursue narrower, more individualistic narratives. This shift reflects broader cultural trends, including a move away from the overarching philosophical and social critiques that defined earlier literary masterpieces toward a more fragmented, personal form of storytelling.
The novels of the past century, while more experimental in form, have largely forfeited the ambition to engage deeply with the sprawling, interconnected questions of morality, society and the human condition. As a result, contemporary fiction often lacks the weight and scope that gave the works of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Proust and Eliot their enduring power and relevance. In focusing primarily on the self, identity and the subjective experience, today’s fiction may resonate with readers on a personal level, but it often does so at the expense of the broader intellectual engagement that once made literature a formidable force for grappling with life’s most profound mysteries.
In the end, the timelessness of works like Middlemarch, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov and In Search of Lost Time lies in their intellectual boldness and scope—qualities that set them apart not only as great novels but as enduring studies of human life in all its complexity. Contemporary fiction, while often remarkable for its craft, would do well to remember the rich legacy of its ancestors and the unique ability of literature to illuminate not just the individual, but the collective human experience.
