A Unity of Disunity: Ambivalence toward Modernity in Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way

Abstract

This article explores the contradictions and complexities intrinsic to modernity manifest in Proust’s Swann’s Way as a way of understanding not only how modernity is depicted, but also how this text engages in the notion of modernity by embracing it, critiquing it, and responding to it. The first part examines Proust’s description of the changing mode of consciousness and the complex nature of reality in the modern_x000D_ society. The second part explores Proust’s deep ambivalence toward modernity which forms a tension underlying his narrative. The third part discusses how Proust, rendering the momentary and the fleeting by means of memory and writing, extracts poetry from within modernity. Grappling with, and seeking not to subdue, the dissonance introduced by such ambivalence, Proust draws upon art to counter the contingence of time and history.