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Separate but Equal: Complementary Influences of the Mother and Father on the Narrator's Development in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu

This article aims to show how, notwithstanding the tendency in Proustian criticism to focus on maternal influence, in A la recherche du temps perdu both parents contribute to the narrator's artistic development. In a sort of reversed Aristotelian paradigm, the mother is associated with culture, igniting the narrator's passion for art and reading, whilst the father is associated with nature and sensual experiences that stimulate the imagination. The 'maternal' Venice the narrator visits with his mother in Albertine disparue, the Venice of perennial monuments to which he relates as receptor, is contrasted with the 'paternal' Venice of Combray to which he relates as creator and which is a pure product of his imagination, composed of floral imagery that grows out of the father's announcement of vacation plans. The father's Venice connects the present to an as-yet unrealized future, emphasizing the diachronic passage of time in a process similar to that of creating a narrative that links him to writing. It is the ostensible counterpart to the mother's Venice, which, in Le Temps retrouvé, connects past and present in the resuscitated image of a bygone synchronous moment captured by involuntary memory. Liminal figures illustrate that Proust does not simply reverse the mother-nature/father-culture paradigm. Paternal aunt Léonie, integrating the maternal and the paternal, is a caricatural portrait of the artist underscoring their complementary influence on artistic creation.