The Miracle of an Analogy

Myopia, Memory, and Art in In Search of Lost Time

I rather pitied all the diners because I felt that for them the round tables were not planets and that they had
not cut through the scheme of things in such a way as to be delivered from the bondage of habitual
appearances and enabled to perceive analogies. (Within a Budding Grove 533)

There is something silly about writing analytically on time and memory in Proust. This is
partially due to the vast amount of scholarly work that has already been done. But far more
importantly, it is because Proust himself leaves hardly any aspect of his own novel untheorized: the
Search is a highly transparent work, and analysis seems to risk only diffusing the lucidity it already
possesses. On the other hand, if Proust clearly traces some paths through his own rich web of ideas,
there are infinite other paths that might be taken; surely, every individual reader walks a unique path.
Here I will sketch one of the paths I found myself following as I read In Search of Lost Time, one
small strand of ideas, impressions and repeated words, a simple harmonic progression that fructifies
out into some of the greatest themes of Prousts symphony: the transcendence of myopia through
the power of analogy.

Myopia.
Proust quietly plants the seed of this grand theme in the first paragraph of his overture. The
narrator recalls that sometimes, as he woke at midnight, the residue of a dream would persist for a
few moments, would lay like scales upon my eyes (I.1). But soon it would begin to seem
unintelligible, as the thoughts of a previous existence must be after reincarnation, and the dream
would separate itself from meand at the same time my sight would return and I would be
astonished to find myself in a state of darkness. The mental world of the dream, inhabited so fully
just a moment ago, is rendered suddenly incomprehensible, irretrievable, a murky previous
existence cast into oblivion as the narrator is reincarnated into a new world: into his waking self.

A similar moment of transition occurs at the end of the walks along the Guermantes way.
These walks fill him with great happiness: I asked nothing more from life in such moments than
that it should consist always of a series of joyous afternoons (I.257). But when he sees a certain
farm that signifies the impending return to Combray, Marcel, like a dreamer suddenly possessed of a
momentary glimmer of consciousness (2), realizes that in half an hour we should be at home
and thatI should be sent to bed as soon as I had swallowed my soup (257). A change sweeps
over the world. The zone of melancholy which I then entered was as distinct from the zone in
which I had been bounding with joy a moment before as, in certain skies, a band of pink is
separated, as though by a line invisibly drawn, from a band of green or black. Marcel is like a bird
flying across the pink: it draws near the border-line, touches it, enters and is lost upon the
black (257-8). The joys and desires that have just consumed him become unintelligible: I was now
so remote from the longings by which I had just been absorbed that their fulfillment would have
afforded me no pleasure. How readily would I have sacrificed them all, just to be able to cry all night
long in Mammas arms! (258; though, we might recall, even in the case of his jealous desire for his
mother, as soon as my anguish was assuaged, I could no longer understand it (58).) The ecstasy of
the walk is a dream that has slipped into oblivionyet he knows that, the very next morning, his
present state of dejection will in turn become the forgotten dream and he will run down at once
into the garden, with no thought of the fact that evening must return. Thus, the narrator learns to
distinguish between these states which reign alternately within me so foreign to one another, so
devoid of means of communication, that I can no longer under-stand, or even picture to myself, in
one state what I have desired or dreaded or accomplished in the other. And if these zones within a
single day are so compartmentalized, so too are the separate days: the walks on the Guermantes way
and those on Swanns way are far apart from one another and unaware of each others existence, in
the airtight compartments of separate afternoons (190).

Another set of such hermetically sealed states or zones is love and indifference. Swann,
while still in love, having often thought with terror that a day must come when he would cease to
be in love with Odette had determined to keep a sharp look-out, and as soon as he felt that love
was beginning to leave him, to cling to it and hold it back (like someone receiving an intimation of
dawn yet longing to stay wrapped in a dream). But in spite of himself, Swann begins to change, and
a man cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to obey the dictates
of the self which he has ceased to be. Swann, as he falls out of love, ceases to understand the
desire he had, while in love, to stay in love. He catches glimpses of the jealousy he is leaving behind,
and they offer him an agreeable thrill, as, to the sad Parisian who is leaving Venice behind him to
return to France, a last mosquito proves that Italy and summer are still not too remote. But his
ability to experience jealousy slips gradually away:
As a rule, with this particular period of his life from which he was emerging, when he made an
effort, if not to remain in it, at least to obtain a clear view of it while he could, he discovered that
already it was too late; he would have liked to glimpse, as though it were a landscape that was about
to disappear, that love from which he had departed; but it is so difficult to enter into a state of
duality and to present to oneself the lifelike spectacle of a feeling one has ceased to possess, that very
soon, the clouds gathering in his brain, he could see nothing at all, abandoned the attempt. (537)

Swann wants to remember his love after having awoken from it, to still be in love when he is not.
But, as if by fate, this state of duality eludes him:
He told himself that he would do better to rest for a little, that there would be time enough later on,
and settled back into his corner with the incuriosity, the torpor of the drowsy traveler who pulls his
hat down over his eyes to get some sleep in the railway-carriage that is drawing him, he feels, faster
and faster out of the country in which he has lived for so long and which he had vowed not to allow
to slip away from him without looking out to bid it a last farewell. Indeed, like the same traveler if he
does not awake until he has crossed the frontier and is back in France, when Swann chanced to
alight, close at hand, on proof that Forcheville had been Odettes lover, he realized that it caused him
no pain, that love was now far behind, and he regretted that he had had no warning of the moment
when he had emerged from it for ever. (537-8)

The transition is imperceptible, in spite of all his attempts to observe it; and once past a certain
critical boundary, he can no longer conceive of the lifelike spectacle of the state of jealousy which
is now lost to him. Having left this zone of life, this self, he cannot achieve the state of duality that

would allow him to comprehend the person he was then, the way he felt, the specific qualities of all
those moments in which he was once so thoroughly entwined.
In connection with jealous love, we can see how the motif of compartmentalized zones
blossoms out into one of the central pillars of the novels philosophical structure: Habit and the
death of the self. Habit traps us on the surface of time, in the attachments of the present moment,
and makes us incapable of seeing beyond it. There is a great and desperate resistance put up by the
things that constitute the better part of our present life against our mentally acknowledging the
possibility of a future in which they are to have no part (II.341). For Marcel, Habit renders
unintelligible such things as ceasing to love Gilberte, or dying. The intellectual knowledge that we
will eventually become indifferent to what we are now so afraid of losing is in fact the greatest pain
of all, for that indifference would indicate that our old self would have changedso that it would
be in a real sense the death of the self, a death followed, it is true, by a resurrection, but in a
different self, to the love of which the elements of the old self that are condemned to die cannot
bring themselves to aspire. All of our affections will be erased and replaced when death, and then
another life, had, in the guise of Habit, performed their double task. Of course, after all the
resistances of Habit, we do forget, we do die, and when we do, these resistances become just as
inconceivable as our indifference (which is now our reality) once seemed. If Swann is incapable of
fathoming his past jealousy once he has passed into indifference, it is because the self that was
jealous no longer exists: like the dreamer of I.1, he has left an entire existence, undergone
resurrection. Similarly, as Marcel detaches himself from Albertine in The Fugitive, he must renounce
the entire universe (V.653) in a painful process of exfoliation1 (720), eventually replacing it with a
new set of attachments, an entire universe of new impressions and associations, to the point at
which he can barely even recall that Albertine existed, and trying to conceive of his jealousy
becomes akin to trying to remember a blurry dream: It may well be that likewise our nightmares are
horrifying. But on waking we are another person, who cares little that the person whose place he

takes has had to flee from a gang of cut-throats during the night (805). We have awoken to a new
reality; we are, like the bird, lost upon the black of a new existence; the beloved and the self that
loved her are filed away in the vast library of our memory (735), buried in the mountain of the
past, another layer disappearing beneath the stratifications of time and Habit.2
Common to all these passages is the impossibility of a state of duality. We are trapped in a
myopic existence, drifting through isolated webs of impressions and associations, jealousies, loves,
fields of intelligibility from within which all others appear unintelligible. Between these zones of
existence are lacunae, vast stretches of oblivion, as it were the gulf of a difference in altitude or the
incompatibility of two divergent qualities of breathed atmosphere and surrounding coloration
much more than a distance in timethe distance that there would be between two separate
universes whose substance was not the same (III.545). We are entrenched in time and in Habit,
consumed by a procession of discrete immediate appearances with nothing seeming to connect
them. We can feebly imagine the past or the future, but these are only shallow intellectual facsimiles,
while in reality what we feel is the only thing that exists for uswe possess only what is really
present to us (V.658, 712-3).
The miracle of an analogy.
One cure for our myopia is, of course, involuntary memory. If, while falling out of love,
Swann wishes for a state of duality but cannot achieve it, earlier in his love affair such a state is
thrust upon him against his wishes, and brings with it tremendous suffering. Odette, once so
devoted, has become only a source of torment, and Swann has hidden his past happiness from
himself so as not to feel as acutely its diminishment. But when he hears Vinteuils sonata played at a
dinner party, a torrent of impressions rushes back to him and he is suddenly, for a moment, happy
again. In place of the abstract expressions the time when I was happy, the time when I was loved,
which he had often used before then without suffering too much since his intelligence had not
embodied in them anything of the past save fictitious extracts which preserved none of the reality,

he now recovered everything that had fixed unalterably the specific volatile essence of that lost
happiness (I.491). Through the medium of the sonata in which it was stored, that lost time explodes back into the present, and, even as he stands in Mme de Saint-Euvertes drawing room, he
could see it allall the network of mental habits, of seasonal impressions, of sensory reactions,
which had extended over a series of weeks its uniform meshes in which his body found itself inextricably caught. Swann knew that this happiness had once existed, but until he was made to feel it again
with all its specific volatile essence, until the past leapt up and violently thrust itself onto the present, it
was not real to him. It belonged to a mysterious world to which one never may return again once
its doors are closed (493; like the doors of sleep). But in this moment, the doors have been flung
open to reveal all of the visceral specificity that was buried.3
Again, during the involuntary memory of his grandmother, the narrator emphasizes that it is
a state of duality that makes the memory so intense, and so painful: for I had only just, on feeling
her for the first time alive, real on finding her at last, learned that I had lost her for ever (IV.213).
He struggles to understand a profound contradiction: on the one hand existence, a tenderness,
surviving in me as I had known thenand on the other hand, as soon as I had relived that bliss as
though it were present, feeling it shot through by the certainty, throbbing like a recurrent pain, of an
annihilation that had effaced my image of that tenderness, had destroyed that existence. In a
painful synthesis of survival and annihilation (216), she is both alive and dead at the same time, he
simultaneously feels her specific volatile essence and feels its absence, and only by this state of duality
is Marcel able to realize what it is that he has lost. This experience of temporal duality even manages
to briefly uproot his habitual conception of time, allowing him to form an image of a multidimensional Time: As though Time were to consist of a series of parallel lines (212).
Though in both of these examples it is linked to pain, the state of duality created by involuntary memory often brings great rapture. At the Champs-Elysees with Francoise, the walls of the
lavatory entrance emit a cool, fusty smell and Marcel, suddenly filled with a mysterious joy, seeks

to explore this antiquated emanation which invited me not only to enjoy the pleasure which it was
offering me as a bonus, but to descend into the underlying reality which it had not yet disclosed to
me (II.88) Later he realizes that the smell was that of Adolphes sitting-room at Combray, but fails
to understand why the recollection of so trivial an impression had filled me with such
happiness (91). Similarly, upon seeing three trees arranged in a pattern which I was not seeing for
the first time, the narrators mind wavered between some distant year and the present moment (a
fragile state of duality), but the source of the impression is like an object placed out of reach, so
that our fingers, stretched out at arms-length, can only touch for a moment its outer surface (405).
The cause of his rapture (and sometimes pain), as finally revealed in Time Regained, is that in
such moments the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present (VI.261-2). An
analogy is, of course, a state of duality. Just as a literary analogy superimposes two ideas or images,
involuntary memory allows Marcel to experience a set of sensations at the present moment and at
the same time in the context of a distant moment, so that the past was made to encroach upon the
present (262). It is not just an echo, a duplicate of a past sensationit was that past sensation
itself, and when these resurrections took place, the distant scene engendered around the common
sensation had for a moment grappled, like a wrestler with the present scene, causing him to waver
doubtfully in a dazed uncertainty such as we feel sometimes when an indescribably beautiful
vision presents itself to us at the moment of our falling asleep (267-8). And just as a literary
analogy works to accentuate the common features of the two things juxtaposed, the analogy of the
two moments in timethe friction of the two wrestlersworks to distill what is common to those
two moments, something that unifies and transcends them. Because the impressions in involuntary
memory are common to two moments in time, this means in some way they were extratemporal (262). The analogy reveals the essence of thingsoutside time, a fragment of time in
the pure state (264, 3). But involuntary memory doesnt only liberate those impressions: A minute
freed from the order of time has re-created in us, to feel it, the man freed from the order of time, a

being nourished only by the essences of things (264-5)a being that has transcended his myopia
and exists in a sublime state of extra-temporal joy (272), suspended between two moments,
reveling in their essence and in his own newly-discovered true life (277). This leads the narrator to
conclude that truthand life toocan be attained by us only when, by comparing a quality
common to two sensations, we succeed in extracting their common essence and in reuniting them,
liberated from the contingencies of time, within a metaphor (290). We can become aware of the
beauty of one thing only in another thing (290). The grand analogies between moments in time
reveal a beauty that extends through transcendent Time, and a human self that, itself an element of
this Time, transcends its compartmentalized myopia to rest in eternity.
But involuntary memory is only one facet of the miracle of analogy in the Search. The
crafting of analogies is also seen as the primary function of art. First of all, it is worth remarking
that analogy is the centerpiece of Prousts prose style. The Search is built out of an enormous net of
finely crafted analogies and metaphors. Proust is constantly working to carve deeper and deeper into
a state of limpid perceptual clarity by comparing the things he describes to other things. Any page
of Swanns Way will provide a bounty of examples.
It is not surprising then that analogy, which makes a thing visible in another thing, is also
central to the theories of art that the narrator develops throughout the novel. This is especially clear
in the passages describing the work of Elstir. Just as involuntary memory metamorphosed the
staleness of one-dimensional reality by crafting comparisons between moments, the charm of
Elstirs paint-ings lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the objects represented, analogous to what in
poetry we call metaphor (566). The quotidian mind separates things, classifies them,
compartmentalizes them; but the rare moments in which we see nature as she is, poetically, were
those from which Elstirs work was created. One of the metaphors that occurred most frequently in
the seascapes which surrounded him here was precisely that which, comparing land with sea,
suppressed all demarcation between them. It was this comparison, tacitly and untiringly repeated on

a single canvas, which gave it that multiform and powerful unity. Elstirs painting is powerful
precisely because of its ability to draw analogies, to show how a thing is not just itself, but also other
thingsjust as involuntary memory tears down the demarcations between moments in time.
If there are metaphors within Elstirs paintings, his different paintings also serve as analogies
for each other: when juxtaposed, it becomes clear that, regardless of the object he paints, he is, in a
sense, always painting the same thing4: when Marcel sees a collection of Elstirs arrayed at the Guermantes house, he realizes, I had before me fragments of that world of new and strange colours
which was no more than the projection of that great painters peculiar visionthe parts of the walls
that were covered by paintings of his, all homogeneous with one another, were like the luminous
images of a magic lantern which in this instance was the brain of the artist (III.574) When juxtaposed like this, one sees the homogeneous essence that unifies them despite their different
subjects: one is able to perceive the inner garden (IV.465) in which Elstir does all his paintings.5
This same theme of different works of art serving as analogies for each other and distilling a
single artistic subjectivity is elaborated more fully in The Captive. Discussing literature with Albertine,
Marcel argues that the novel beauty of Dostoievskys work derives from the fact that, throughout
all his works, just as, in Vermeer, theres the creation of a certain soul, of a certain colour of fabrics
and places, so in Dostoievsky theres the creation not only of people but of their homes, of the
house of Murder which recurs in several of his novels, of all those buffoons who keep on
reappearing, as well as the Dostoievsky womanisnt she always the same? (V.511). These juxtapositions of common elements in different works reveal the world of profound and unique truths,
which belong only to Dostoievsky (511).
This theme reaches its climax when Marcel hears Vinteuils septet for the first time. No
doubt the glowing septet differed singularly form the lily-white sonataand yet these very different
phrases were composed of the same elements: for, just as there was a certain world, perceptible to
us in those fragments scattered here and there, in private houses, in public galleries, which was

Elstirs world, the world he saw, the world in which he lived, so too the music of Vinteuil extended,
note by note, stroke by stroke the unknown, incalculable colourings of an unsuspected
world (339-40). In spite of all their differences, the two works, when compared with each other, are
revealed to be nevertheless the same prayer, bursting forth like different inner sunrises, and merely
refracted through the different mediums of other thoughtsA prayer, a hope which was at heart
the same, distinguishable beneath these disguises in the various works of Vinteuil (340). When he
tries to create something different, this work of analogy is accentuated more strongly: one
recognized, beneath all the apparent differences, the profound similarities that existed in the body of
the work there is an abundance of disguised, involuntary resemblances, which broke out in
different colours, between the two separate masterpieces. Just as Elstir painted the same thing over
and over again, whatever the question asked, it is in the same accent that [Vinteuil]
replies (340-341).
And if the temporal analogies of involuntary memory take us out of time and reveal a true
life of extra-temporal essences, then the analogies between different works of art reveal another
transcendent reality: they serve as a proof of the irreducibly individual existence of the soul and
indicate that each artist seems to be the native of an unknown country, which he himself has
forgotten, and which is different from that whence another great artist, setting sail for the earth, will
eventually emerge. (342). Indeed, the artist seems to be engaged in a kind of involuntary memory:
as his work develops, his vision of the universe is modified, purified, becomes more adapted to his
memory of his inner homeland, a homeland to which he is unconsciously attuned and which he
expresses in spite of himself (342, 341) And just as involuntary memory allows us to be transported away from the compartmentalized, superficial zones in which we are normally stuck by
Habit, the great work of art offers true experiences of other worlds, other states of being: The
only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to
possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the

hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir,
with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star (343)

When analogies are drawn not between works of art but between moments in ones life, one
realizes the way Time itself works as an artist, diffracting a single essence onto all these different
planes within which Time seemed to dispose the different elements of my life (VI.505-6), just as
Elstirs paintings, arrayed side by side, are all seen as the projections of a single magic lantern. Thus,
we can see the temporal analogies of involuntary memory as only a subset of the larger artistic
process of crafting analogies, states of wrestling duality out of which essences are distilled, true
reality is revealed, and through which the trap of superficial myopia is transcended. Swann longed
for a state of duality, but the analogies of art and Time offer us the potential for even greater
multiplicities: art takes us to as many worlds as there are artists, and after all the revelations of Time
Regained, the narrator begins to see his acquaintances, and himself, as each perched on the summit of
a lifetime of moments, moments that have accrued in Time and exist all at once in the body of a
four-dimensional giant plunged into the years (532). These transcendent essences, so invisible to
those stuck in the myopia of habitual time, are extracted through those privilegedeven divine
moments in which the miracle of analogy suddenly enables us to see and exist multiply.

Notes
1 There seems to be a certain state of duality achieved in the process of exfoliation, on p. 718. I
felt myself still reliving a past which was now no more than the story of another person; my
personality was now somehow split in two, and while the upper part was already hard and chilled, it
still burned at its base whenever a spark made the old current pass through it, even after my mind
had long ceased to conceive of Albertine. And on the next page: Since I was a man, one of those
amphibious creatures who are plunged simultaneously in the past and in the reality of the present,
there still existed in me a contradiction between the living memory of Albertine and my
consciousness of her death. Thus it seems that the sudden loss of a profound attachment can lead
to a dual consciousness similar to that of involuntary memory though its not clear to me why it
took involuntary memory for M to realize this in the case of his grandmother.

There is a difference between the case of love and the earlier cases I mentioned, but only a
superficial one: The lover always knows that his present state is momentary and contingent, and can
imagine a time when he will no longer be in love; he may even hate his love and long for it to be
over (Swann knows Odette is not his type and hopes she will die, M hopes that Albertine will be
taken from him, will move away); M knows it and sees it at moments, like when Robert de Saint-Loup
meets Albertine and is extremely unimpressed, causing Marcel to remember when he saw Roberts
mistress was equally unimpressedand thus realizes how love is an irrational creative act that will
some day come to an end. Yet the difference is only superficial: the lovers thoughts mask a deep
inability to conceive of a future in which he will be indifferent (Not unlike how we can recall vague
ossified snapshots of the past, but not its dynamic reality.)
3

Cf. thousands of pages later, as Marcel falls out of love with Albertine, the fresh and piercing
novelty of the memories that lift a corner of the heavy curtain of habit and forgetfulness (733).
There is a passage that expresses this very clearly (something like: no matter what Elstir painted,
he really only painted the same thing over and over) but I have been unable to locate it.
4

This also seems to be why he loves the little band: they are amorphous, indistinct, like the sea and
the land in Elstirs paintings, spilling into each other. And thus Marcel is able to see that they all
partook of the same special essence (562), and so his love can shift freely between them until Habit
solidifies his jealousy around Albertine.

Epilogue
If we turn Prousts own theories of analogy onto his own book, what do we find? What is
the recurring situation that we find over and over again, like the one woman that seems to appear
over and over in Dostoievskys novels? What is the nature of the lost homeland that Proust is
seeking to remember by juxtaposing all these common situations in analogy with each other? If
what Ive said is correct, one of the recurring elements we see Proust incessantly creatingis
analogy itself. Of course, Ive mentioned Prousts extensive work of local analogies that inundate his
style and form the fundamental tissue of the text. A level above this, we have the temporal analogies,
the involuntary memories that link together disparate moments of the narrative. Then, we have
Prousts two theories of analogy in art and in involuntary memory. And above that, we find that
those two theories are in analogy with each other, pointing to some even higher level of unity. Its as
if there is a vast pyramidal structure in Proust, all built out of analogies: a vast shrine to the miracle
of analogy. So the essence that emerges out of his churning many-tiered mechanism seems to be a
kind of vital, aesthetic Platonism, working its way up a ladder of comparisons towards an ever more
rarified state of essential Beauty. The Recherche is a sort of modernist Symposium seeking to clear
away all the illusions of eikasia, carving away at the world of appearances to find a truer reality
beyond it, of which all phenomenality is a mere reflection. Indeed, it seems that all human existence
is a series of images refracting a single set of Ideal shapes: throughout the whole duration of time
great cataclysmic waves lift up from the depths of the ages the same rages, the same sadnesses, the
same heroisms, the same obsessions, through one superimposed generation after another, and that
each geological section cut through several individuals of the same series offers the repetition, as of
shadows thrown upon a succession of screens, of a picture as unchangedthough often not so
insignificantas that of Bloch exchanging angry words with his father-in-law, M. Bloch the elder
doing the same in the same fashion with M. Nissim Bernard, and many other pairs of disputants
whom I had myself never known (VI.354).