I. The Death and Rebirth of Marcel Proust

When Marcel Proust died in 1922, only the first four installments of A la recher­che du temps perdu had been published. Sometime between his death in 1922 and the completion of publication of the seven-volume cycle in 1927 the myth of Marcel Proust began to take shape. He had, it is true, known some celebrity during his lifetime, especially in 1919, when he was awarded the Prix Goncourt for A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. But in an important sense the story of Proust’s reception is the history of his afterlife. Not until the posthumous publication of the last three volumes could the greater design of the novel emerge: the Albertine cycle of volumes five and six threw into relief all the stories of erotic obsession and jealousy that preceded it, while the circularity of the final pages revealed at last the edifice of time that had structured the fiction from the start. And of course the years following his death would also codify and popularize the mythic narrative of Proust’s neurotic achievement. The now-iconic image of the invalid genius barricaded in his cork-lined room, racing to complete his masterwork before pneumonia could kill him, became in certain circles inseparable from the vast work he had written. Yet, in 1927, with Proust barely buried, Wyndham Lewis refused to eulogize with any deference a man who had struggled to complete his monumental novel while trying to ward off death:

Proust embalmed himself alive . . . when those complicated and peculiar needs of admiration extracted by his slight, ailing, feminine body, with deep expansions of bottomless vanity, were in the nature of things no longer forthcoming . . . he bleakly awoke; in his wakeful industrious nights he began stealth­ily revisiting the glimpses of the sun of the past time-scene. that was his way of making himself into an historical personage, by embalming himself in a mechanical medium of “time.” 

The passage is from Time and Western Man, that thick collection of polemical essays in which Lewis railed against the “time-books” and “time-cult” of Joyce and Proust, the modernist epics of excessive psychologizing, where a fanaticism of chronology had reached excruciating proportions. According to his calculus, the antidote to their “exasperated time-sense”—the necessary retort to Marcel’s time-looping consciousness or Leopold Bloom’s day of compressed and archetypal thinking—could only be the mode of writing that Lewis himself was now practicing: satire.

In fact, the decade and a half before the Second World War did mark a certain renaissance of European and American satirical fiction. In 1928 Evelyn Waugh published Decline and Fall, thereby inaugurating a ten-year cycle of sharp English satires. In 1932 an extraordinary novel with little in common with Lewis’s work other than the sustained energy of its vituperation, Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of Night), appeared in France. The following year saw the American publication of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, a satire without real precedent in modern American fiction. Then, in the years just before the war, Céline wrote Mort à crédit (Death on the Installment Plan), West completed The Day of the Locust, and Lewis consolidated his theories of satire in a series of essays.

Lewis seems to have had little if any interest in Céline or Waugh or West; he mentions them nowhere in his writings of the 1930s. Yet their common impulse to forge a kind of prose entirely different from the psychological “time-books” of Proust and his contemporaries seems to confirm Lewis’s suspicion that he was standing at the threshold of a new age of satire. My interest lies in exploring this peculiar terrain, particularly during the years between Proust’s death and the outbreak of World War II. The fiction of this period was defined by a reliance on imprecation and ridicule mostly absent from the novels of the previous generation of modernists. Likewise, visions of imbecility, folly, delirium, and paranoia suddenly came to the forefront. Although we can look to the ravages of the financial crisis and the arrival of Fascism to try to account for this shift, we can also look within literature: to the expiration of certain paradigms and to the lampooning tendencies that sought to fill the void those paradigms had left. My focus here falls on two of these writers, Lewis and Céline, and the common object of their scorn, Marcel Proust. During the 1930s the work of both writers is perennially vexed by the specter of Proust: sometimes they offer grudging admiration, but far more often they threaten to demolish the vast edifice he had erected.