Son et lumière in Proust

Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is underpinned by an enduring tension between sight and the other senses. Conventional scholarship on Proust claims that the visual pole of this tension is linked to the intellect, as opposed to the association of the remaining senses with intuition and the unfathomable. This reading, however, presents an oversimplification of the complex economy of the senses explored by Proust insofar as it falls prey to visualism, a theoretical predisposition characterised by a double reduction of the perceptual experience. Challenging this tendency, this article draws on sensorial cross-modality and multisensory processes in order to interrogate the connection between sunlight and song in Proust’s novel. In particular, we focus on the ‘little barometer man’ at the start of La Prisonnière, whom the narrator anticipates singing on his death bed ‘if there is a blink of sun’. We also consider this Proustian connection between song and sunlight in light of a longer tradition, including St Francis of Assisi’s ‘Canticle of Brother Sun’ and the statue of Memnon’s dawn song. Proust’s consequent demythologising of light and his materialist approach to song support an attempt to consider light shorn of its usual metaphorical connotations.