The Eternal Moment: Marcel Proust And The Architecture of Memory (Ink & Identity)
Description
The Eternal Moment: Marcel Proust and the Architecture of Memory
By Hamon de Quillan
Non-fiction / Literary Criticism / Biography / European Studies
Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is often described as a cathedral of prose: immense, intricate, awe-inspiring?and, for many readers, forbidding. The Eternal Moment offers a guided tour of that cathedral, tracing how Proust designed its architecture from the materials of his own life and the upheavals of his age.
Hamon de Quillan situates Proust at the crossroads of biography and history: the sickly son of a distinguished bourgeois family; the salon habitué and outsider; the reclusive writer in a cork-lined room; the witness to a world shimmering on the brink of war and collapse. Against this backdrop, he explores the key elements of Proust's project:
- the transformation of sensory impressions (taste, smell, sound) into vast structures of memory
- the representation of time not as a straight line, but as overlapping durations, returns, and revelations
- the study of love, jealousy, and social performance in a rigid yet fragile class system
- the impact of philosophy, psychology, and the visual arts on Proust's conception of narrative
- the modernist legacy of In Search of Lost Time for later writers and thinkers
Drawing on archival letters, photographs, and major strands of contemporary Proust scholarship, The Eternal Moment is designed for clarity. Each chapter focuses on a major theme (social tapestries, the madeleine, solitude, war's shadow, critics and controversies, etc.), making the book suitable for course adoption, reading groups, and individual study alike.
For booksellers and librarians, The Eternal Moment will appeal to readers of:
- literary biography and criticism
- classic European literature
- intellectual and cultural history
- works on memory, perception, and consciousness
De Quillan does not merely explain Proust; he invites readers to experience why Proust still matters. In following Proust's own "eternal moments," we are led back to our own: the fleeting instants in which a life, suddenly, becomes legible.
