Tempo, storia

«Tutto quello che avreste voluto sapere sul Tempo ma non avete mai osato chiedere» di Christian Centamore

volume aux éditeurs qui le refusent. Il décide alors de publier à compte d’auteur. C’est

ainsi que parait en 1913 Du coté de chez Swann. Proust écrit toujours ; la maladie, qui

l’oblige du reste à se retrancher du monde, devient en quelque sorte sa «collaboratrice

inspirée ». En 1919, c’est enfin la reconnaissance: A l’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs obtient

le Prix Goncourt. Proust redouble ses efforts. Au printemps 1922, il termine le seizième

volume et appose le mot fin. Son projet est accompli et il meurt en octobre 1922.

A la recherche du temps perdu

Proust est l’auteur d’une seule grande oeuvre, A la recherche du temps perdu, dont les

différentes volumes sont comme les pièces d’un puzzle qui assemblées révèlent le sens de

l’œuvre tout entière.

1. Du Coté de chez Swann qui comprend Combray, Un Amour de Swann, Nom de pays

2. A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleures

3. Le Coté de Guermantes I et II

4. Sodome et Gomorrhe

5. La Prisonnière

6. Albertine disparue

7. Le Temps retrouvé Histoire d’un milieu

Marcel Proust ne cherche pas à donner une image exhaustive de la société de son temps,

comme Balzac ou Zola ont tenté de le faire ; il décrit le monde qu’il connaît bien, celui de

la bourgeoisie et de l’aristocratie (seuls les domestiques représentent les classes

populaires). Mais ce petit monde clos, Proust sait l’observer d’un regard aigu. Il a ainsi pu

créer des personnages dotés d’une extraordinaire présence, relevant jusqu’à leurs tics de

langage qui les rendent typiques. On cite Françoise, la cuisinière hors pair des parents de

Marcel, la duchesse de Guermantes, femme d’une grande distinction, le couple des

Verdurin, bourgeois qui singent les aristocrates, le peintre Bergotte, Charlus le dandy

homosexuel, Odette la demi-mondaine. Plus qu’une analyse matérielle de la société,

Proust propose une analyse psychologique et montre comment les rapports sociaux,

comme les rapports amoureux, fonctionnent sur le désir de ce que l’on n’a pas (par

exemple, Marcel rêvera d’entrer dans le monde de l’aristocratie que les Verdurin se

contentent d’imiter grossièrement).

Histoire d’une conscience

A la recherche du temps perdu retrace l’itinéraire d’une conscience en quête de son identité.

C’est à la fin de l’œuvre, dans le Temps retrouvé , que le narrateur découvre enfin la vérité.

Cette vérité, c’est que la vie trouve sa signification grâce à l’Art, et à l’écriture qui fixe le

passé sinon voué à la destruction. C’est pourquoi, le narrateur Marcel décide d’écrire ce

que Marcel l’écrivain a déjà écrit depuis le premier volume. La Recherche qui commence

dans un lieu clos, la chambre, et se termine dans un lieu clos, la bibliothèque, dessine une

boucle parfaite. C’est l’ouvre achevée par excellence. 5

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«Tutto quello che avreste voluto sapere sul Tempo ma non avete mai osato chiedere» di Christian Centamore

Temps et mémoire

La quête de l’identité exige que l’on se tourne vers le passé pour essayer de comprendre ce

qu’il a été. Or le Temps abolit tout et change tout, en particulier le « moi » qui évolue sans

cesse. Les plus grandes douleurs comme les plus grands bonheurs qui semblent

inoubliables au moment où on les vit se diluent dès que la cause qui les a provoqués

disparaît. C’est ce que Proust appelle les « intermittences du cœur ». Pour retrouver dans

leur vérité les émotions d’autrefois, il faut le secours de la mémoire involontaire. Une

sensation actuelle (une vision, une odeur, un goût, etc.) peut faire remonter à la surface de

la conscience les émotions d’autrefois. C’est cette théorie du souvenir, de la mémoire

affective, que Proust explique dans le célèbre passage de la petite madeleine.

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Stephen, which is her unmarried name, was born in 1882 in London, of a well-to-

do family. Virginia was the third of four children; they all received their elementary

education mostly at home. She lived her childhood in Cornwall, where she met Henry

James. Virginia adored the ocean, the sound of the waves, the ebb and flow of the tides.

All this provided a treasure-house of reminiscence, which she drew on for such works as

To the Lighthouse, Jacob’s room or The waves. Virginia was thirteen, but she was deeply

affected by her mother’s death, and for a long period she suffered from depression,

becoming shy and moody; It was the first sign of how frail her nerves were. In these years

she used to read, for long hours, in her fathers library, and began writing articles and

essays. In that period she lost also her father, and in the 1913 she attempted suicide by

taking drugs. Then, her family and she moved to Bloomsbury, where Virginia was writing

for literary reviews, and for a short time she gave lectures in English history to young

students at Morley College. In this house in Bloomsbury born the Bloomsbury Group, a

circle of intellectuals, where she met the who became his husband, Leonard Woolf, a

publisher, they got married in 1912. The group was an expression of the new tendencies of

the first half of twentieth century, but all that was the education of Virginia Woolf, was

been replaced by a new vision of the world: the “Bloomsbury apostles”, as they called

themselves, were anti-monarchist, religiously skeptical, intellectually free and open-

minded, and refined in art and literature.

In this period Virginia also worked as a volunteer in the movement for women’s suffrage,

and she always felt the subordinate position of women in society to be an injustice.

In 1917, the Woolfs founded the “Hogarth Press”, which was to publish most of Virginia’s

works as well as the works of talented young writer, such as Katherine Mansfield an T.S.

Elliot.

Beyond her work at the “press” she continued to have her mental problems because when

she was alone, she was overcome by anxiety and insecurity, by terror at the brevity of life.

During the Second World War, aware of her mental fragility, and obsessed by the fear of

madness, she decided to put an end to her life. She drowned herself in the river Ouse on

March 28th, 1941. 6

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«Tutto quello che avreste voluto sapere sul Tempo ma non avete mai osato chiedere» di Christian Centamore

Moments of being

The “moment of being”, that is to say the moment of utmost intensity, of perception, of

vision in the “incessant shower of innumerable atom” that strike our minds every day, as

she wrote in her much quoted statement:

“Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day the mind receive a myriad

impression […] life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous

halo, a semi-transparent envelop surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to

the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and

uncircumcised spirit, whatever aberration and complexity it may display, with as little

mixture of the alien and external as possible?”.

The mind has processes of its own, which obviously need different methods of narration.

Aware of this fact in compliance with Bergson’s theory of “la durée”, Woolf tried to

compress these mental processes into minimum time units, using a variety of techniques.

These techniques, which earned her novels the definition of “experimental”.

The plots of her novels unroll themselves within one ordinary day (Mrs. Dalloway), or two

different days, years apart (To the lighthouse), or only a few hours (Between the acts). In

Orlando, on the other hand, she expanded time to about three centuries.

Moreover, in her need to shift back and forth in time and intermingle past, present and

future, she followed Joyce in using two methods which are analogues to film montage:

• The subject can remain fixed in space and its consciousness can move in time (time-

montage);

• Time remain fixed, and it is the spatial element that changes (space-montage)

Un soggetto oggettivo:

Thomas Stearns Eliot

Cenni biografici (vita, morte e miracoli)

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888, into a family of English

descent and was educated at Harvard.

Though an American by birth, his cultural background was at first English and then

European. In fact he discovered John Donne and the English Metaphysical poets ; he

learned Italian by studying Dante, to whom he devoted one of his most celebrated essays

in 1929. Here Eliot stated Dante was the poet who best expressed a universal situation

and praised him for his “clear visual images ”, “the lucidity” of his style and “his

extraordinary force of compression”, to come to the conclusion that “more can be learned

about how to write poetry from Dante than from any English poet”.

In 1910 he first went to Europe and studied in Paris at the Sorbonne where he attended

Henri Bergson’s lectures, and where he started to read the works of the French Symbolists.

Later he came back to Harvard and he took a degree in philosophy.

At the outbreak of the First World War he settled in London, where he publishied essays

in philosophy, taught for a while and started to work as clerk in Lloyd’s Bank. In 1915 he

7

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«Tutto quello che avreste voluto sapere sul Tempo ma non avete mai osato chiedere» di Christian Centamore

married the British ballet dancer Vivien Haigh-Wood, despite his parents’ worries about

her mental stability.

After a collection of poems Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), which he made him an

important avant-garde poet, he edited “The Criterion” (1922), an innovative intellectual

magazine of European literature, and, in 1925, he became a director for the publishers

Faber and Faber, publishing all his writings through them and encouraging the

production of young poets such as Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and

Stephen Spender. Throughout this time Vivien was in poor health and Eliot was under

consideble emotional strain. He spent some time in a Swiss sanatorium, in Lausanne,

undergoing psychological treatment and here finished The Waste Land ; poetry was, in fact,

his only refuge where he expressed all his horror at his unhappy home life, and some lines

of The Waste Land, reflect a deep repulsion at his marriage. This long poem was published

in 1922 after Ezra Pound had helped to reduce it to its final form, and Eliot later dedicated

it to Pound Himself, “il miglior fabbro - the better craftsman -”, a quotation from Dante’s

Purgatory.

In 1927 he became a British citizen and defined himself as “classicist in literature,

monarchist in politics, Anglo-Catholic in religion. His religious poetry bloomed in Ash-

Wednesday (1930), a purgatorial poem, and then in the Four Quartets (1935-42).

Eliot finally decided to separate from his wife, who was committed to a mental asylum,

where she died nine years later in 1947. Her death, however, created a terrible sense of

guilt within the soul of the poet and unhappiness led him to write in a letter of his: “I have

always known hell – it is in my bones”.

In the Thirties and Forties, Eliot’s essays became more concerned with the ethical and

philosophical problems of modern society. His growing social concerns led him towards

theatre and he became one of the chief exponents of poetic drama. In 1948 he received the

Nobel Prize for Literature.

T. S. E. expressed his views on modern civilisation using a variety of literary forms, since

he was a poet, an essayist and a playwright.

Eliot’s features

His innovations owed a lot to his intensive study of ancient and modern writers and

literary currents, so that we can paradoxically say that Elliot was at the same time “The

most modern and the most traditional , the most influential and the most influenced of the

poets”. The development of his poetic conception can be roughly summed up as follows:

• Maintaining the poetry is to be used as an instrument to express not the poet’s own