The Great Silence in Combray
The Great Silence in Combray
Proust and Patois
This chapter shows how the disappearing dialects of the countryside of the French countryside shaped the modernist vision of Marcel Proust. In À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), patois in the Recherche seems to the narrator to be one of the miraculous gateways to a reality immune to the ravages of time. In symbolic opposition to the modish and changeful speech of the bourgeoisie, the “feudal” dialect and accents of the peasantry and the aristocracy come to offer a challenge to the ideals of middle-class progress: development, cultivation, Bildung. In this way, patois represents a lyric alternative to the novel—a middle-class literary genre of narrative and change. In the end, however, patois proves to be subject to time and change too, and the symbolic alternative that dialect appears to offer is an imaginary, utopian longing.
Keywords: Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu / In Search of Lost Time, Patois, French dialects, Aristocracy, Peasantry, Middle-class, Bourgeoisie, Bildung, The novel
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