Jacke Wilson: Yeah, the sociology is a basis for his psychology. He talks about the various footmen and lift boys and butlers and chambermaids and cooks, and it’s just this incredible kind of realization of the way you view servants and the way you think you’re above them or you try to relate to them, and how loaded these kind of social interactions are. But the way he unfolds it in this novel is incredible. The struggle to be happy, what makes you unhappy, your class issues. In life, you don’t encounter it-you know it. The world that he introduces you to is so familiar, but you don’t encounter it that often in literature. Mike Palindrome: Alain de Botton has some good details and quotes from Proust, and he says that “our social personality is the creation of the minds of others.” And I think that encapsulates the insecurity that Proust captures when you’re in love, and when you’re trying to become an expert in painting or fiction writing or art, and trying to master your own self and find out what makes you happy and makes you unhappy. In this episode, Jacke and Mike discuss Swann’s Way (1913) to see whether this opening volume serves as a good introduction to the entire work. Published in seven volumes over a fourteen-year period, the enormous novel has generally been recognized as both the highest form of artistic achievement and one of the most difficult reading experiences imaginable. Since its first appearance, Marcel Proust’s magnum opus In Search of Lost Time has delighted and confounded editors, readers, and critics. How did literature develop? What forms has it taken? And what can we learn from engaging with these works today? Hosted by Jacke Wilson, an amateur scholar with a lifelong passion for literature, The History of Literature takes a fresh look at some of the most compelling examples of creative genius the world has ever known. We know it today as literature, a term broad enough to encompass everything from ancient epic poetry to contemporary novels. Four thousand years ago they began writing down these stories, and a great flourishing of human achievement began. For tens of thousands of years, human beings have been using fictional devices to shape their worlds and communicate with one another.
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