Proust told his housekeeper that the narrator of his seven-volume novel was not him—but his own notebooks and letters suggest otherwise. This project travels to the Harry Ransom Center in Texas to examine Proust’s personal archives, including notes to his housekeeper Céleste Albaret, to settle a long-standing literary puzzle: whether the character called Marcel in *In Search of Lost Time* is actually Proust himself. The problem matters because Proust publicly rejected biographical readings of fiction, yet drew heavily on his own life in the novel. The rise of autofiction—works by writers like Annie Ernaux and Karl Ove Knausgård that blur life and fiction—has made this question urgent again. By comparing Proust’s literary criticism with his private writings, the researcher will clarify how authors can both identify with and distance themselves from their narrators. A reading group will test whether seeing archival materials changes how readers interpret the novel. This is fundamental humanities research: it will not fix a pipe or speed up a computer, but it may reshape how scholars and readers understand the relationship between a writer’s life and their work—a question that autofiction has pushed to the centre of contemporary literature.
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Literary critics have speculated about whether, Marcel, the narrator in A la recherche du temps perdu, is in fact Proust. This project will use the Proust collection at the Harry Ransom Center to investigate how the writer positions himself in his fiction in relation to narrative voice. In his book of essays, Contre Sainte-Beuve, Proust rejects the idea that an author’s biography provides insights into authorial intention – that he is Marcel. Barthes strengthened this stance against biographical criticism in his essay, ‘La mort de l'auteur’ (1967) – a mainstay of post-structuralist criticism. This century, the flourishing autofiction movement – as varied as Lauren Oyler, Ernaux and Karl Knausgård – has refocused scholarly inquiry into the relationship between life and fiction. Consulting notes to his housekeeper, Céleste Albaret, I will examine the dynamics of how Proust identifies with and distances himself from his work, within and beyond the text. Proust draws heavily on his own experience in Temps perdu, but dismisses the significance of this in his literary criticism. I will bring new perspectives to this problem of narrator identity, informed by close reading and biographical sources. I will also draw on my own research into the tradition and theory of autofiction. Additionally, I will establish a Proust reading group to reflect on how engagement with archival sources alters our interpretation of the novel. The group will inform my own research on readerships in relation to autobiographical traditions, whilst also facilitating historically-grounded textual encounters with Proust’s work and the collections.
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