Proust on the move: essence and mobility in À la recherche du temps perdu

Thesis

Does Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) have an essence? Or is it a series of mobile fragments, with no underlying purpose, order, or meaning? Over the last sixty years, Proustian criticism has moved steadily towards the second hypothesis. This study argues against that trend. Rather than examining one particular theme or idea, it takes the Recherche as a whole, and goes in search of its essence. The justification for this bold new approach is given in an introduction, entitled ‘For a Hermeneutics of Naïvety’. This argues that influential ‘fragmentary’ readings, like those of Georges Poulet (1963) or Gilles Deleuze (1971), limit our experience of the text as much as earlier readings that theorised its essence. A ‘naïve’ reader, on the other hand, tries to understand what the novel is ‘about’ — its underlying message or vision or form — but without a fixed theorisation of its essence. The ensuing four chapters elaborate a unified, ‘naïve’ reading of the Recherche from beginning to end. We see how a ‘naïve’ interpretative desire is solicited from the very first pages, and how the novel then builds on this interest in its opening volumes by articulating two contradictory theorisations of the literary text: text as fluid mobility; text as atemporal essence. The thesis then makes a wholly new case for the importance of boredom for hero and reader of the Recherche. It argues that, in the closing volumes, the experience of boredom may solve the hero’s problem with theorisation. A close reading of the final pages leads to the argument that it is the very indeterminacy, or ‘mobility’, of textual essence that underwrites poetic experience in Proust. This fresh approach challenges long-held critical assumptions about the Recherche. It proposes not only a new ‘naïve’ way of reading Proust, but literature more broadly.

Authors: Husain, A

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-ae6xnzoqy
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Martin Heidegger; Georges Poulet; boredom; Venice; Brichot; Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve; Marcel Proust; poeisis; Gilles Deleuze
• Subjects: Comparative Literature; Philosophy of Literature; French Literature