The Early Treatment by the Slovenian Philosopher of the Ontological Motifs Pertaining to the Literary Work of Art in Proust’s Opus. On the 80th Anniversary of the death of Marcel Proust (1871–1922)

Abstract

Franjo Čibej, who completed his PhD studies with a thesis entitled Subject-psychological Analysis of Social Forms (Predmetno-psihološka analiza socialnih form) under the supervision of France Veber at the Department of Philosophy at Ljubljana University in 1925, and later followed the philosophical anthropology of Max Scheler, a student of Husserl, in a study entitled “The Functions of Poetry” draws from subject theory correlated to transcendental-phenomenological philosophy. Čibej also wrote his essay under the influence of a book by E. R. Curtius, Französischer Geist im neuen Europa (with an extensive introductory discussion entitled “Marcel Proust”) and numerous literary-ontological motifs on the essence and existence of literature in Proust’s Romanesque writing, À la recherche du temps perdu. In Proust’s work, Čibej analyses some adequate descriptions of a narrator’s primary literary experience in the stream of recording the first literary work of Proust’s narrator, a short story about three belfries, and then secondary literary experience, when Proust’s narrator, the author of the story, years after writing his first work, re-experiences it so strongly while reading it that he places it completely unchanged in his new, extensive Romanesque narrative. – This understanding of Proust’s themes and motifs relating to literary art by Čibej proves that Slovene phenomenological thought in the 20s of the previous century was also fully aware of its competence in researching literary works of art and has therefore also made them prominent.