Written still life: For an aesthethics of the object in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu

Abstract

This article intends to study the articulations between the work of Proust, In Search of Lost Time, and the pictorial genre of still life. To do so, questions such as the complex relationship between mimesis and ekphrasis; the aesthetics of the object in artistic representation, whether visual or literary; the encyclopedic aesthetics of “accumulation”, as a consequence of object representation; the boundaries between subject-observer and object-observed; the discourse of memory, linked to the poetic work of the accumulation of objects, seen as, mainly, memento mori, will be retaken and problematized. The hypothesis of these pages is the idea that the Proustian Recherche is an immense “literary still life” where objects and their representation, even in the logic of accumulation, can be considered as fictional characters, not as mere accessories, offering, thus, an aesthetic of the object, very peculiar in the history of textual culture.