Under a veil, it's hidden a secret

the women, the art and the life according to Proust and Joyce

Abstract

This text proposes a reading of some excerpts from À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913-1927), by Marcel Proust, and Ulysses (1922), by James Joyce, in which there are comparisons among female characters from the novels and representations of women in the works of art mentioned in the novels. The objective is analyzing the conflict between art-life in the formation process of the artists in Joyce’s and Proust’s novels. The problems that were the starting point of this text were: Franco Moretti’s defense that James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a Künstleroman that ends when the protagonist decides for the art; and Aleida Assmann’s defense that, in Joyce and Proust, the women as a work of art are always in advantage when compared to the real women. The hypothesis is that, in contrast to what Moretti and Assmann affirm, the novel of formation of the artist from the beginning of the twentieth century is not characterized by the decision for the art; actually, it is characterized by sustained tensions between art and life. The relations with the feminine are, in Joyce and Proust’s novels, as metonymies of the esthetic tensions in the formation process of the artists in the 1920s, when begins the crisis of the idea of writers as divinities, capable of describing life while keeping an esthetic distance. This explains why there are, in Joyce and Proust, characters-authors who prefer to remember when they were artists to be, and, at the same time, characters in problematic relationships who prefer to remember when the relation with the beloved was only a desire to be realized.