La tour d’ivoire d’un mondain dans sa chambre. Proust était-il un écrivain isolé ?

Proust only twice uses the expression, revealed by Sainte-Beuve, “the writer in his ivory tower”. These two occurrences come at the beginning and the end of his literary life, and provide an insight into the evolution of the writer’s relationship to writing, and the place he must occupy in the world and society. From the early 1890s, Proust mocked the image of the ivory tower as a decadent myth, and the status of the artist that derived from it. At the end of his life, in a passage intended for Le Temps retrouvé, Proust stresses the need for writers to deal with the times, and not to give up on confronting history, whether it be the Dreyfus affair or the Great War.