Proust's Prescription: Sickness as the Pre-condition for Writing

Abstract

Proust's narrative moves from illness as a motivator of plot and character to illness as a vehicle for simile, then as the very means of exploring a world of memory. From characters seen acting under the aegis of threatened health Proust advances to a vast network of health-informed homologies, where the amplitude of simile, its thematic consistency and interrelations, create a compelling metaphorical truth. The imagery of illness, like the X-ray effect and the "second opinion" of simile, becomes a heuristic medium, an instrument with which to explore the social body and reveal hidden pathologies. In artistic creation, illness is not simply parasitical on health or a handicap; the relationship is rather one of symbiosis. In the sickroom of the author, the world and the self collapse and coalesce, the former now knowable only through the latter, and the latter known only through its essential somatic being and its archive of memory that accident alone can open.

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