La Peinture ou les leçons esthétiques chez Marcel Proust = Painting or the Aesthetic Lessons in Works of Marcel Proust

Abstract

This study focuses on the intricate connection between painting and writing in A la recherche du temps perdu, the one and only novel completed by Marcel Proust. Painting and writing, although different in their methods of expression, with the former consisting of visual images and the latter consisting of words, have a fundamental objective in common which is creating images in order to reveal the real essence of life. Proust develops correspondences between paintings (that he describes verbally) and writings not only to portray his novelistic characters, but also to reinforce his aesthetics of writing. This study stresses that correspondence to which Proust gives the name of metaphor. By choosing metaphor as the most important criterion in writing the novel which the Narrator decides to undertake at the very end of la Recherche, he speaks for Proust who elevates metaphor as the central rhetorical figure of his writing. Metaphor gives to the Proustian world a sense of continuity and homogeneity despite its innate fragmentary and dispersed impressions. In the Proustian novel, memories are incomplete, and loves are sporadic. Time and space are never continuous. Yet a homogenous ensemble is brought forth from this universe in fragments. It is metaphor that gives unity to those diverse elements by abolishing the borders that separate them. The principle of metaphor brings distant elements closer. Swann’s way unites with the Guermantes’, past transposes over present. By comparing painting and writing in the Proustian novel, I am able to emphasize the author’s aesthetics, at the foundation of which lies metaphor.