Proust's optics: Photographic vision as luxury

Abstract

The article examines references to photography in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. In contrast to a well-established view of this medium's role in the writer's universe as secondary and purely negative, this article proceeds from the assumption that the invention and proliferation of photography in the 19th century was a major infuence on Proust's artistic vision. Photographs are present in Proust's novel both as physical objects and as metaphors. As the former they appear mainly in social contexts, where they embody and visualize emotional exchanges, degrees of intimacy, connection and division of various milieus. Proust shows society, especially its elite strata, as operating in a quasimechanical way, and the photograph as an automatically produced image echoes this aspect of human relationships. On the other hand, metaphorical references to photography tend to emphasize the “internal” quality of the changes which flm undergoes, as well as their temporal dimension: a pause that lies at the very heart of the ever-increasing pace of modernity. Paradoxically combining the meanings of the serial and the unique, the photograph becomes a site where massifed technical reproducibility becomes ‘dislocated', creating a quintessentially modern experience of luxury.