Thesis Proposal: A first attempt

In some sense, eveything in Proust seems to work in similar ways. From the simple metonymies of words to the complex allegories of time, memory, place and identity. In Proust’s world, things rarely, if ever, exist separately. Things and people are not simply understood, but are in fact created by their placement—both in time and space. In a different time, or a different place, both person and thing are different. There seems to be no underlying exteriority—no outside reality—to the world envisioned by Proust. Perception is figured linguistically and everything is understood in figures—metonymy and metaphor.
My first question then is: are there any subjects (people, places, things) that exist outside of these relationships, or in other words, do any of the elements of the Recherche exist in their realized forms prior to its undertaking. If such things do exist, it must mean (to some extent) that they are not subject to the contigencies of time and space. This would certainly bestow upon them a special significance, but it is also possible that the conclusion be negative, and this is what is suggested by the first scenes of Du côté de chez Swann. Against this idea, Deleuze, in Proust et les signes argues that “the material sens is nothing without an ideal sense that it incarnates. Using Deleuze’s terminology, my question could be reformulated as, “do any such ideal senses exist actually exist?”
In the first scenes of Du côté de chez Swann, Marcel undergoes a progressive awakening that begins with sight. At first, he has not yet developed a sense of self as subject, and though he can now see—having seperated himself from the subjects of his books—the objects of his perception are incomprehensible to him, they appear to his esprit as “a thing without cause”. The sound of the whistling trains, “like the song of a bird in the forest”, signals the return of his ability to hear. Though there now seems to be a distinction between inside and outside, it is not yet definite. The sounds of the trains are “more or less far away”, and do not establish definite points of reference. Instead, they elicit dream like images of a voyager, and the relationship between the unfamiliar experiences of the voyager’s explorations and the indelible imprints they will leave on his memory. The bounds of Marcel’s physical sense of self are more firmly established as he (re)gains the faculty of touch with the feeling of “his cheeks against the beautiful cheeks of the pillow that, full and fresh, are like the cheeks of our childhood”. And yet, this already signals the beginning of Marcel’s processes of metonymic (and metaphoric) description as his method of bringing the world into being. The pillow has beautiful cheeks because of its contigent, metonymic connection with Marcel’s own cheeks, which are then in turn understood metaphorically in relation to the pillow’s cheeks. Marcel does not (re)gain taste and smell for some time, but already the processes of metonymy and metaphor, by which the worlds of the Recherche come into being, have been unleashed. These processes are often realized as experiences of synesthesia that blur the boundaries between metonymy and metaphor (Ullmann). Metaphoric connections often culminate a process of metonymic connection, and yet they usually refer back, establishing a circularity that appears to coincide with the bounds of particular worlds, which we might also characterize as perpsectives of experience.
In this way, the different worlds into which Deleuze divides the Recherche make sense. However Deleuze uses signs as the basic unit, saying that “the Recherche presents itself as the exploration of different worlds of signs…the signs are specific et constitute the material of this or that world.” Though the Recherche is certainly “the exploration of the different worlds of signs”, it is perhaps more accurately the exploration of the way those different worlds are created by the relationships between the signs of which they are constituted. It is not simply about the exploration of different worlds of signs, but about the exploration of how worlds come into being, and in the Recherche, worlds come into being through the association of signs. “Association” is perhaps a bad word, as it recalls Saussure’s term for the paradigmatic axis (associative). By the “association” of signs in Proust, I mean both syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships, metonymic and metaphoric (Jakobson), and perhaps more importantly, the intertwinning of the two. There is no world in the Recherche without these relationships, and thus to call signs the material of the worlds in Proust places the focus in the wrong place. Though it certainly takes at least two signs to make a metaphoric or metonymic connection, and thus signs are certainly the buidling blocks of the worlds in Proust, it is not the signs which make the worlds different. In fact, I don’t think one could even say that the worlds in Proust share the same underlying signs. Though they certainly share signifiers, their signs are not the same because referents do not exist separately in the Recherche. They are always only understood in linguistic (metonymic and metaphoric) connection to each other. In doing away with the notion of an underlying, pre-existing reality, Proust has also jettisoned the independence of signs.