| This dissertation entails a critical investigation of paternal influence on the writer-narrator's process of artistic development in Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. It examines how father figures (both biological and surrogate) hold central places in the novel's formal structure, linking core thematic and theoretical networks of association through which the narrator articulates his social and aesthetic theories. It also examines the socio-historical implications of the various roles this archetypal authority figure plays. The narrator's father and grandfather are associated with sensuality and nature, often flowers, a vital symbol of the passage of time and of timeless renewal. They are present in the scene initiating the theme of romantic love when the narrator first encounters Gilberte, and the scene when the narrator's grandfather walks in Swann's garden with Swann's father immediately following his wife's passing initiates the theme of coping with death and loss. The moment when the narrator's father is compared, in an extraordinary multifaceted image, to the quintessential patriarch, Abraham, serves as a big bang from which many of the most central themes---like the Oedipus complex, homosexuality, Judeity, sadism and Time's destructive capacity---emerge.;Notwithstanding the tendency in Proustian psychoanalytic criticism to focus on maternal influence, both parents are inextricably complementary contributors to their son's literary vocation in a sort of reversed Aristotelian paradigm linking the mother to art and culture and the father to visceral, subjective experiences of nature. In planning a trip to Venice and Florence the father connects the present to an as-yet unrealized future, creating a mirror image of involuntary memory, effectuating a temporal manipulation similar to what occurs in narrative. Liminal figures illustrate that Proust does not simply reverse the mother-nature/father-culture paradigm. Paternal Aunt Leonie, integrating the maternal and the paternal, is a caricatural portrait of the artist underscoring their complementary influence.;By insisting the mother stay with the narrator in the bedtime scene, the father creates the conditions necessary for a transfer of desire from the mother to the world of literature through their nocturnal reading, in contrast to the popularly-held view that he fails to assert his authority to resolve the narrator's Oedipus complex. The metaphorically dense father/Abraham image inaugurates an era of literary, polysemious word-play, suggesting a Lacanian interpretation of the Oedipal scene better reflects what is at stake---the narrator's entry into the symbolic order of language.;Swann and Charlus, typically regarded as surrogate fathers, in fact perform maternally-associated functions. Swann not only commands dubious paternal authority in his own household but provides reproductions (maternal function par excellence) of artworks for the narrator's cultural education while sharing the grandmother's misconceptions about art. When the narrator sees the homosexual encounter of Jupien and Charlus, another highly-cultured art admirer, he does not conclude that Charlus resembles a woman but that he is one, based on his homosexual behavior, anticipating the idea that gender is not essential but performative long before the heyday of structuralism and "gender studies." Charlus, who represents the Sodom side of the Sodome et Gomorrhe paradigm finds his structural counterpart in Vinteuil, the artist role model who is also a father and whose lesbian daughter links him to Gomorrah. |
