{"id":6298,"date":"2014-04-24T10:01:31","date_gmt":"2014-04-24T10:01:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.geraldgarcia.com\/wordpress\/?p=6298"},"modified":"2014-04-24T10:01:31","modified_gmt":"2014-04-24T10:01:31","slug":"marcel-proust-playing-air-guitar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/geraldgarcia.com\/?p=6298","title":{"rendered":"Marcel Proust playing air guitar"},"content":{"rendered":"

c.1892: Marcel Proust playing air guitar on a tennis racket<\/h1>\n

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Thanks to Retronaut<\/a><\/p>\n

There is no record that Proust ever played the guitar, but the literary savant probably played tennis.<\/p>\n

Actually\u00a0Marcel Proust drew freely from musical works in order to cross-breed and transcribe them into novels – he uses music to transport the reader into various access points of memory, and writes in a very musical manner, cross-referencing themes, moving back and forth through time.<\/p>\n

Vinteuil is the fictitious composer to whom Proust refers throughout\u00a0\u00c0 la recherche du temps perdu<\/em>. But we know that it was in fact the amalgam of several composers who deeply influenced and affected the writer.<\/p>\n

Composer Jorge Arriagad attempted to realise Vinteuil’s violin sonata for this scene in Raoul Ruiz’s 1999 film\u00a0Le Temps retrouv\u00e9 (Time Regained)<\/em>, which takes its title from the final book of\u00a0\u00c0 la recherche du temps perdu<\/em>, but dips liberally into the entire novel. This scene replicates the kind of private salon gathering at which Vinteuil’s music would have been performed in the world of Proust’s novel.<\/p>\n