9. Is the ISOLT an autobiography? 

9- Proustaverses 

The ISOLT is an autobiography and a roman à clef, as evidenced by the large amount of secondary literature in which people try to piece together details from Marcel Proust’s real life onto what happens in the ISOLT, with some authors acting as detectives to find out who each character is based on. 

9- Proustophiles 

If the ISOLT is detached from its biographical contextualization, in other words, if it is detached from the false idea that it is a roman à clef that is secretly an autobiography, then a much more interesting reading opens. The reading of the ISOLT must be “de-Sainte-Beuvinized”. Proust has repeatedly explained with tooth and nail that the ISOLT is neither an autobiography nor a roman à clef, that the characters are always an assemblage of different figures, assemblages that are then also “literarized”. 

“There are no keys to the characters in this book; or else there are eight or ten for one. … I repeat to you, the characters are entirely invented and there is no key. … I see because decidedly reality reproduces itself by division like infusoria, as well as by amalgamation.” 

Letter to Jacques de Lacretelle of April 20, 1918  

Correspondence, Ed. Philippe Kolb, XVIII, p.193 

It is also beside the point to confuse the Narrator in the ISOLT with the man and writer Marcel Proust. The storyline that the Narrator goes through from childhood to old age runs synchronously with the social portrait of the changing world of the aristocracy during the Belle Epoque. The developments through the unspecified time that the Narrator goes through together with the many characters in the ISOLT focus the attention of the Reader, who is regularly rewarded for his perseverance with pages of sheer beauty. 

The ISOLT is a work of art created by the artist Marcel Proust and therefore inevitably shows traces of the man Marcel Proust.