Sartre loved reading Proust: did you really doubt it?!

Sartre loved reading Proust: did you really doubt it?! 🤓📚

In “La Cérémonie des adieux”, published in 1981, Sartre recalls reciting passages from “In Search of Lost Time” @normalesup, together with his friend Paul Nizan. 🏫🗣

Merleau-Ponty had only recently met Simone de Beauvoir when, one day, he caught her in the library devouring Proust and told her off for reading a novel instead of philosophy. 🧠🫀

It is often said that Sartre sought to settle scores with literature in the editorial of the first issue of “Les Temps modernes”, published on 1 October 1945. Yet, when writing “Les Mots” a few years later, he naturally alluded to Proust. In this passage, he admits to himself that he had probably devoted himself to literature since childhood in order to please his grandfather. 👴🏻📖👦🏻

📌 “Truth be told, I’m like Swann, now recovered from his love, sighing: ‘To think I’ve wasted my life on a woman who wasn’t my type!’ Sometimes I’m a boor in secret: it’s a basic form of self-care. Now, the boor is always right, but only up to a point. It is true that I am not gifted at writing; people have let me know this, they have called me a ‘strong writer’: I am one; my books reek of sweat and pain (…) one speaks in one’s own language, one writes in a foreign language. (…) my grandfather’s voice, that recorded voice that startles me awake and sends me rushing to my desk – I wouldn’t listen to it if it weren’t my own.” 📌

Jean-Paul Sartre, “Les Mots”, 1964,
@editionsfolio pp. 134–135

#marcelproust #jeanpaulsartre #centenairemarcelproust #proustailleurs #proustagram @editions_gallimard