Shortly afterward, World War I broke out and publication was put on hold. After the war, the second part of the novel, Beside the Flowering Maidens, was published in 1919, winning the Prix Goncourt, and making Proust's reputation. After that, the 3rd part of the novel, "The House of Guilmant", and the 4th part, "Sodom and Gomur", were published in 1921 and 1922, and the last 3 parts, "The Female Prisoner", "The Fugitive", and "A Recurrence of Yesteryear", were published only after Proust's death, in 1923, 1925, and 1927.
Remembrance of Days Gone by is a long novel that differs from the traditional novel. With the narrator "I" as the main body, the book combines what he sees, hears, thinks and feels into one, which is not only a true portrayal of social life and human conditions, but also a record of the author's inner experience of self-seeking and self-knowledge. In addition to the narrative, it also contains a large number of thoughts and comments. The whole work has no central character, no complete story, and no plot line with ups and downs throughout. It is largely based on the narrator's life experience and inner activities as the axis, interspersed with a large number of characters and events, like a tree with intertwined branches, can be said to be a major novel derived from a number of other independent novels, can also be said to be a huge symphony intertwined with a number of thematic songs.
The narrator of the novel, "I", is a wealthy but frail young man who grew up with a special love of books and paintings, and who once tried unsuccessfully to create a literary work. He frequented Parisian high society, frequenting teas, balls, receptions, and other fashionable social occasions, and fell in love with Gilbert, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish merchant, but soon fell out of love. In addition, he traveled to his hometown of Gomberley, where he stayed for a short time, and to the seaside resort of Barbecue, where he convalesced. He befriended another young girl, Alberti, and, realizing that Alberti suffered from homosexuality, resolved to marry her in order to correct her perversion. He confined Alberty to his home, but Alberty managed to escape, so he inquired about her and searched for her. Later, it is learned that Alberti fell to her death on a horse. In his grief he realized that his endowment was writing, and that the sorrows and joys and bitterness he had experienced were the very material for literary creation, and that only literary creation could bring back what had been lost in the past.
In the novel, the life experience of the narrator "I" does not occupy a major part of the book. The author depicts numerous characters and events through the technique of story after story, story after story, showing a picture of the life of the French high society at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. There is Madame Guilmant, who is charming, elegant but boringly vulgar, Baron Charius, a transsexual who is morally corrupt and ugly, Swann, a prodigal son who indulges in sex, and Odette, a woman who is openly supported, etc. The novel is a fascinating account of a noble family. The novel's depiction of the social activities and personnel changes of the aristocratic house of Guilmant and the house of Swann, a rich Jewish merchant, truly reflects the decadent lifestyle and spirituality of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, and reflects the decline and disintegration of the aristocracy and the growing economic power of the big bourgeoisie, with distinctive colors of the times.
In addition, the novel also depicts a group of writers and artists associated with the upper class, most of whom were disillusioned during their lifetime, while their works have survived forever; this reflects the condition of the intellectual class at that time and the author's artistic point of view. The other part of the people that the novel focuses on is the lower class laborers, who are the hearers, servants, and handymen of the aristocrats and bourgeois families, and are often more cultivated than their masters, though they come from a poor background.
This long masterpiece, Remembrance of Departed Years, calmly, truthfully and meticulously reproduces the living customs and human conditions of the French upper class through the activities of thousands of characters. Therefore, some Western critics compared it with Balzac's "The Human Comedy" and called it "the comedy of manners".
Remembrance of Lost Years is a long novel with a unique style, which not only reproduces the objective world, but also shows the subjective world of the narrator and records the narrator's inner feelings about the objective world. The author is interested not in recounting the story, explaining the plot and portraying the characters, but in expressing his feelings and analyzing a certain issue. For example, the narrator attends a dinner party at the house of the Duke of Guilmant, which shatters all his long-held illusions about the aristocracy, and he realizes that it was only the name, not the real world, that used to charm him. In the course of the narrator's interactions with Alberti, he is prompted to ponder and analyze a series of issues such as love, husband and wife, and family, which makes him experience that "man is such a creature that he cannot get out of himself, and can only understand others through himself, and that all other claims are deceptions." After recounting the changes in the personnel of the Gelmans' and Swann's houses, the narrator concludes from these changes that everything in the world moves like a puppet, and that the puller of the strings that directs their activities is time.
The novel also expresses the author's views on literature, music, and the fine arts by describing an encounter with a certain writer, a sonata, or a painting that evokes an association. In short, the description of the external world and the narrator's feeling, thinking and analyzing of it are integrated into one, and they trigger and enrich each other, thus forming the artistic realm in which things come out of me, there is me in things, there are things in me, and there is the unity of things and me.
This long work, "Remembering the Dead Years", is narrated in the first person, except for the third-person description of Swann's love story in the first part, and the recollection of the narrator, "I", is an important mode of artistic expression throughout the book. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator "I" wakes up from the bed, and in the dreamy state, a thousand thoughts are gathered in his mind. At this time, a cup of tea and a piece of snack triggered him to recall the small town of Gomberley, where he lived in his childhood, and how he lived in his aunt Leonie's house when he was a child. This not only leads to the narrator's family life and personal experience, but also leads to the two big families of Guilmant and Swann, and leads to all kinds of characters and events. The content of the whole novel is explored through the narrator's recollection, and gradually advanced, and finally presented in a complete way. In other words, through the narrator's memories, a forgotten world of the past is reproduced:
"I brought a spoonful of tea to my mouth, in which a small piece of dessert had been soaked, and the liquid mixed with the dessert had just touched my palate, and immediately there was a vibration across the whole body, and I paid attention to the extraordinary changes that had taken place in me, and a wonderful pleasure assailed me, unique and transcendent, unwilling to show itself, but not to be seen. It was unique and transcendent, unwilling to reveal its roots. In a moment, the blight of life I no longer valued, its calamities could no longer harm me, and its transience became something ethereal. The new sensation filled me, like love, with a precious essence, or so to speak, an essence that was not in me; it was myself. I no longer felt mediocre, insignificant, or that I was bound to die.
What is this all-powerful joy coming from? I sense it is tied to the flavor of tea and confections. Yet it is infinitely beyond such flavors, which are indeed different in nature. Where does it come from? What does it mean? How can I catch it?" "...... Suddenly, the memory returned. The flavor was that of the Madeleine treats my Aunt Leonie used to give me. On Sunday mornings in Gomberai, when I went to her chambers to greet her, she gave me this treat, first dipping it in her own cup of tea or linden tea.
I have come to recognize that smell as that of the madrasa treats which my aunt used to dip in her linden tea before bringing them to me. The old gray dwelling on the street where her bedroom stood then immediately rose like a theater set ...... and with the house came the town, as it looked at various moments from morning to night. The square, where I was always sent to find myself before luncheon; the streets, in which I ran and shopped, the country roads, where we walked when the weather was good ...... the flowers in the gardens of my house and Mr. Swann's, the water lilies of Vivona, the good townspeople of the village, their narrow tenements, the parish church, the whole of the Gomberley and all around it, showed their peculiar shapes and became tangible, and the town and the gardens alike leaped out of my teacup."
Proust argues that as time passes, years pass, society dwindles, people are going to age and die, and all material things are going to be eroded by time, lose their luster, and finally go up in smoke. Only felt, experienced things is the real existence, the world "real paradise is lost paradise". The kind of things that are felt by the human mind, they are either temporarily forgotten by the consciousness of feeling awake, precipitated in the bottom of the human consciousness; or covered by other feelings now, a moment without the opportunity to reveal. But they will not disappear in the long river of history; one day under the stimulation of some external feeling, they will awaken, will emerge from the depths of consciousness, from the junction of the conscious and the unconscious, and will rise to the surface of the waking consciousness. At this moment, the external world, which has been felt, is revived. And artistic creation is the re-creation of what the human mind feels as raw material, "the true life, the life that is finally discovered and understood, and therefore the only life that is truly experienced, which is literature." "Even something insignificant and meaningless, once it is felt and recreated, is no longer insignificant. It becomes a whole life, it becomes art."
Therefore, literature is immune to the erosion of time and has an eternal vitality. At the same time it is only in the creation of art that the empty, painful hours spent in the past take on a new meaning and emit a new luster. This is the thematic idea of In Memory of Lost Years, which is consistent with Bergson's philosophy of life and intuitionism. In this sense, Proust's In Memoriam is based on Bergson's philosophical ideas.
In Proust's view, only through reminiscence, through the recreation of past sensual experience, life has real meaning, and human beings have the value of existence. This reflects the general psychological state of modern bourgeois intellectuals in the West. In the face of the sharp contradiction between ideals, beliefs and social reality, they are not only dissatisfied with the ugliness of reality, but also can't find the right way to reform the reality, so they avoid the real world, headlong to hide inside the subjective world, replacing the reality in front of them with memories of the past, replacing the actual action with inner feelings, which is of course not a positive attitude to intervene in the life, and their worldview is also materialistic. Proust is a typical representative of modern bourgeois intellectuals in the West.
However, he changed the traditional conception of the novel with his work Remembering the Days of Passing Water, revolutionized the subject matter and writing techniques of the novel, and opened up a new chapter in the creation of contemporary novels in Europe and America. In particular, he emphasized the psychological analysis of human beings and was good at expressing the subconscious activities of the human inner world, which had a great influence on the later Western literature.
Proust's new art of fiction did not attract much attention during his lifetime, and it was only about 40 years after his death, that is, in the 1960s, that he became more and more valued by the Western world, and was honored as a master of the modern novel, which is inseparable from the wide application of stream-of-consciousness techniques in the literary world of the 1960s and the high degree of importance attached to them.
While Proust's work has not been evaluated by the name of stream of consciousness in the history of French literature, his novels have been hailed as the forerunner of the stream of consciousness novels, which has become the definitive conclusion of the Western literary and academic circles.