Hearing Swann from out of the Recherche

In this essay, we explore an approach to aesthetic experience within, or emerging from, some related scenes in Marcel Proust’s novels. What we want to highlight in this account is not a formalized philosophical or theoretical system. Instead, we want to highlight the force of an incomplete sensation that is implied, but not fully present in these scenes as they are written. In this respect, these scenes resist formal capture and even explanation. We want to suggest that Proust’s writing works to evoke this as (an) experience itself. Cinematically, sonically, imaginatively, transmedially, this mode of experience is an aesthetic kernel that exceeds formal stratification into discrete figures, and therefore bleeds through signifying orders. In so doing, we want to draw attention to—without necessarily capturing “in” the presentation of text, argument, or form—how Proust’s work suggests shortcomings in explaining thought using self-enclosed, defined, and bordered “concepts” of sign or aesthetic category, particularly through several moments that pertain to music, sound, and listening.