Thesis Proposal (submitted)

In À La recherche du temps perdu, Proust establishes a world where things rarely exist separately. Instead, people and objects are created by their placement, both in time and in space. In a different time, or a different place, both person and object are different. There seems to be no underlying exteriority—no outside reality—to the world envisioned by Proust. Perception is usually figured through metonymic associations, both in the world described and in the text on the page, and it is always the product of the subjectivity of the perceiver. The experiences of each character become the reality they each inhabit. Thus, the characters in the Recerche exist in different spheres. These spheres are dynamic, changing with both time and place. The only means of connection between spheres that is offered is art, “par l'art seulement nous pouvons sortir de nous, savoir ce que voit un autre de cet univers qui n'est pas le même que le nôtre et dont les paysages nous seraient restés aussi inconnus que ceux qu'il peut y avoir dans la lune.” Somehow, art allows us to see through the contraints of our own subjectivity. The essential quality of art is the particular faculty of vision it bestows. To experience art is to acquire vision and to be able to both see the world as it is, and also to recognize the plurality of worlds that are seen by others.
The central question of my thesis is this: How does art manage to escape the metonymic contingencies of time and space and instead exist as a metaphoric unity? The idea of a “metaphoric unity” requires further explanation. In À L’ombre des jeune filles en fleurs, the charm of the marine paintings in Mme de Guermantes’ atelier are due to “a sort of metamorphosis of the things represented, analogous to what in poetry is called metaphor”. In particular, the marine painting by Elstir has a “multiform and powerful unity”, despite being built on a metonymic connection between the land and the sea (though Marcel refers to this as a metaphor). The paintings of Elstir give access to a certain quality of vision through which one sees “nature such as it is, poetically”.
In answering this question I also want to explore the place of vision in the Recherche and its relation to subjectivity. From the beginning of the Recherce, vision occupies a perculiar and important spot. 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 regains 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”. Already, this signals the beginning of Marcel’s processes of metonymic (and metaphoric) description as a method of bringing the world into being. In looking at vision’s place in the Recherche, I would also like to answer the following question: How do we square the metaphoric sense of vision leading to unity with the fact that upon waking, and having only the faculty of sight, Marcel has no sense of self?
What Marcel undergoes as he wakes up is a process of expansion and differentiation. Description is constitutive of subjectivity in the Recherche. It is the process by which subjects become aware of their surroundings and of their relationship to them. The ambiguity of “their” and “them” in the last sentence is indicative of this process. There is a reciprocal determination of both subject (person) and object; both change with each other, and neither one can be seen as outside of the relationship, acting as the cause of the changes undergone by the other.
It is through description that the different spheres of the Recherche come into being. In Proust and Signs, Deleuze views the Recherche as the exploration of different worlds (spheres) of signs. Though the Recherche is certainly “the exploration of different worlds of signs”, it is 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 a voyage through 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 (both syntagmatically and paradigmatically.)

As the analysis of description will be central to my thesis, I am concluding my proposal with some thoughts on description: To describe is to attribute qualities to something, it is to make it (that something) an object of thought and a subject of discourse, and in doing so, to diffenrentiate it from other things—to make it no longer some thing, but a particular thing, distinguished as an individual entity, or, as part of a larger group that is different from other groups . Above all, description is expansive in nature. It enlarges the footprint that a particular entity occupies in our imagination. However, at its basis description is the creation of difference, without which a particular thing could not be perceived to exist. We have then the two fundamental qualities of description, expansion and differentiation .