/lit/ - Literature

Throughout the Search, the Narrator strives to define objects, reality and individuals as he “sees” them and not as he “knows” them.

This attempt at reaching for the lived experience, the pure sensation of the object, past the a priori nets of mimetic representation, is a mainstay of Proustian, Cubist and Futurist aesthetics, however different each is in practice.

Proust was not only geographically close to the most radical of twentieth-century avant-gardes but aesthetically, too. He developed both the narrative and the theoretical parts of his Search simultaneously, in his habitual manner of composing textual units to be assembled at a later stage – anticipating the montage technique of modern cinema popularized by Sergei Eisenstein and fellow Soviet filmmakers some 20 years later.

Even at a time when the new aesthetics of collage was changing traditional forms of composition, Proust remained preoccupied by the conflict between romantic (open) and classical (closed) form – or, in fin-de-siècle terms, between Decadence (fragmentation) and vitalism (organicity) – that had informed nineteenth-century aesthetic discourses.

The truly innovative work, then, casts a look backwards at a tradition it not only inflects but “corrects”.