Marcel Proust and Music as a Literary Model

Abstract

The paper aims to point out to an unbreakable bond between reading, writing and listening to music in Proust’s oeuvre. In his essay On reading, Proust gives us, while discussing the purpose and significance of reading, a hint of the narrative technique which utilizes some of the specific features of musical language. It is exactly the technique that the writer’s subsequent writing titled The quest for the time lost will be founded upon. Thus music becomes the literary model in Proust’s oeuvre and binds itself to the workings of random memory, simultaneously binding the principle capable of selecting and organizing the elements necessary to expand the possibilities of a literary word.