The Timelessness of Proust

Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu—In Search of Lost Time—is one of the most important and influential novels of the modern era. In recent decades, Proust has enjoyed a new surge of critical attention, as well as a sustained growth in readership—well beyond that of other prose masters of twentieth century modernism such as Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, and Beckett. The MLA Bibliography presently lists over 3,000 citations to scholarly works devoted to Proust’s novel, and if one Googles “Proust,” the number of hits exceeds 2,000,000.

 The temporal nature of human existence and consciousness is one of the many themes explored in In Search of Lost Time, and it is this dimension of Proust’s work that unifies this collection of essays that grew from a roundtable discussion entitled “The Timelessness of Proust” conducted at the 31st annual meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society. The collection includes the following essays:

 “In Search of Lost Time: Biographies of Consciousness,” Charles R.  Embry

    “Proust, Transcendence, and Metaxic Existence,” Glenn Hughes

“The Normative Flow of Consciousness and the Self: A Philosophical Meditation on      

     Proust’s In Search of Lost Time,” Thomas J. McPartland;

“Imprisonment and Freedom: Resisting and Embracing the Tension of Existence in

     Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time,” Paulette Kidder;

“Proust’s Luminous Memory and L’Homme Éternel: The Quest for Limitless Meaning,”

     Michael Henry

“Unsought Revelations of Eternal Reality in Eliot’s Four Quartets and Proust’s In Search

     of Lost Time,” Glenn Hughes

Persons who are interested not only in the philosophical importance of literary masterworks and in how the philosophical thought of Eric Voegelin may illuminate them, but also in letting Proust serve as a guide in the exploration and understanding of their own lives, will find these essays to be of lasting interest and value.