A survey of the themes which preoccupied writers and philosophers in parallel between 1914 and 1945, some perennial, some of more recent urgency, would doubtless include the following: relativism; the subjectivity of perception; the paradoxes of temporality; the instability of the self; vitalism and the limits of reason; the validity of intuition as a basis for knowledge; the mind–body relationship; the inadequacy, in expression or representation, of conceptual language; the problem of meaning; the relation between art and life. In the rich creativity of the period three paradigm texts stand out in that they do not simply mirror but actively renew reflection on these issues: Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) (1913–27), Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) (1924), and Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée (Nausea) (1938). Proust’s emphasis on discontinuity and contingency complicates his supposed affinity with Bergson; Mann’s dialogue with the ongoing legacy of Nietzsche evolves throughout his career; Sartre’s pre-war novel is a phenomenological and heuristic fiction which clears the ground for his future theory.

PROUST: A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU

Proust’s ‘search for lost time’ was also a search for truth – a search which would entail a portrayal of our errors. And, indeed, in the experience of his hero, Marcel, and in the often disabused voice of his narrator (Marcel’s older self), errors proliferate, whether they be perceptual errors, errors of self-knowledge, errors of recollection, or errors in Marcel'ment of others. Perception yields no sense of a stable world; vivid flights of imagination or expectation find no correspondence or fulfilment in an elusive reality.