프루스트의 예술가론: 『잃어버린 시간을 찾아서』의 화가 엘스티르의 세 점의 그림을 중심으로

Abstract

In Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, about 300 characters appear, among them various artists such as writers, musicians, theater actors and painters. This study aims to understand Marcel Proust's image of a great artist through the fictitious painter Elstir. For this purpose, this study describes the scene in which the hero, Marcel, first meets Elstir as setting the scope for the analysis. Marcel visits the painter's atelier, located in a seaside village in Normandy, where he sees three of the painter's paintings. Symbolically, these show the novelist's esthetics. Elstir is presented as a painter of the metaphor who discovers an invisible correspondence existing between two distant objects and connects them; a painter who breaks away from the trap of intelligence and faithfully reproduces what he perceives, relying purely on instinct; and a painter who symbolizes the logic that the social 'I' and the artist 'I' should be distinctly separated, and that the value of an artist should be evaluated only through his or her work of art. In this way, Elstir becomes a teacher who introduces Marcel to the world of genuine art, and in this way he is distinguished from the other artists in the novel.