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Visual dust. On Time, Memory, and Photography in Proust

In a remarkably coherent fashion, Combray and Le Temps Retrouvé frame the novel that became the answer to Proust’s question—am I a novelist? an essayist? a philosopher? The frame that engenders the narrative voice and the narrative hero offers such a compelling discourse about life and art that reading the novel itself becomes almost secondary. The lesson of the frame provides a way to link Proust’s philosophical or esthetic reflections concerning the vocation of art to the narrative form, and to this extent it provides a convenient first approach to the novel. Indeed, some never seem to venture very far beyond it. And so, some critics will find in Proust a Platonist, where art conveys the truth of essences unavailable in life. Others will find the core of the novel’s meaning in the philosophy of Schopenhauer (Anne Henry, for example, maintains that Proust simply wrote the ideas he found in this German philosopher into novelistic scenes) (see Théories pour une esthétique and La tentation de Marcel Proust). Some prefer to read Proust through Nietzsche and, more recently (for Anne Simon and Julia Kristeva) it is Merleau-Ponty that gives the key to what Proust might have meant by essences. For some, Proust’s frame generates a modernist, selfreflexive novel, one that tells the story of the writing of the novel that the reader, at this point, has just read. This reading usually implies an idealist esthetics, leading to the conclusion of the superiority of art (which traffics in essences) to life, a disappointing muddle. In Le Temps Retrouvé, Proust’s narrator appears to vindicate this sort of reading when he explicitly proposes photography as a figure for the workings of voluntary memory and the dead images it produces. When nothing comes of his attempt to willfully recall his days in Venice in order to write about them, Marcel compares