Marcel Proust et l'imaginaire gothique

By associating the imagination of progress with its corollary, permanent innovation, one has the feeling that modernity proceeds from a break with the past, as reflected by avant-garde artists. Nevertheless, as Malraux said, Literature dwells on past works rather than on reality, and this leads us to reflect on our legacies. It is this question that this article proposes to raise in Proust's work, through a dual approach: 1) a superficial reading suggests that inRemembrance of Things Past, the novelist admires the aristocracy whose slow disappearance he would bemoan; yet nothing is more wrong, since he is very ironic about its court mentality and its callous heart. On the other hand, Proust takes aristocracy into consideration as a group belonging to a particular territory and gives it a place in the social imaginary. Consequently, the question of identity does not arise from oneself but refers to the place where one comes from; 2) it is undeniable thatRTPbrings back to life something of the French identity: the village of Combray represents the provincial and traditional France, its churches are places of memory more so than places of worship-and the writer maintains a lively relationship with all of this.