The 3 great artistic heroes of the Search for Lost Time, and what they signify

Three artistic heroes in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (aka Remembrance of Things Past): the novelist Bergotte, the painter Elstir, and the composer Vinteuil. Bergotte and Elstir play fairly significant roles in volume 2, "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower," and Vinteuil doesn't emerge until later in the series, though perhaps he (or his work) is the most significant of all. One striking thing about all three of these artists is that each is fictional - though the narrator, M., has many references through the Search to real artists, writers, and composers of the past and contemporary with the setting of the novel (ca 1897-98) - in a weird Proustian twist, the decision to make the three artist heroes (heroes to M., who worships the work of each of them, and then goes through the sometimes bewildering experience of getting to know the artist), the fictional artists become by far the most real. It would have been foolish and disastrous had Proust chosen real contemporary artists to be characters in this novel - we would then have judged the novel based on its veracity, rather than on its truth. With both Bergotte and Elstir, part of M.s experience in knowing them is learning that they may be great artists but not necessarily great personalities, thinkers, conversationalists, or friends. Both share a philosophy - though somewhat different between writing (Bergotte) and painting (Elstir) of the elimination of the personality of the artist: Bergotte talks about the artist reducing himself to a mirror and Elstir about forgetting everything he knew (i.e., giving up all preconceptions about how things ought to look) in order to paint: both of these are descriptions of Proust's art, as well, a negative capability that removes his personality, even though the novel is the story of his interior (and public) life and simply looks as the world as it is, not as a writer might preconceive it to be.