Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2009
Summary
It is thus Bakhtin's conception of the novel as a carnivalesque, parodic meeting-place of all genres which seems to elucidate best the Proustian project. Perhaps because dialogism is essentially an oral concept, it applies particularly well to Proust's written discourse, itself so connected to orality. Dialogues of structure and genre exist alongside the dialogues of words. Meaning is located in the dialogic process of interaction between various types of texts, voices and languages. As David Lodge and Lennard Davis have each suggested in a slightly different context, as soon as a variety of literary forms or genres is allowed into a textual space – highly reader-conscious discourses like journalism or letters, expressly ironic forms like parodies or pastiches, third-person narration alongside first-person – a resistance is established to the domination of any single form.
Does the advent of this newly purposeful author at the end of A la recherche mean that peace has been made with the question of the nerves and their anxieties? In his discussions of artistic individuality, Proust connects the idea of intermittence and recurrence to the individual's nervous makeup. But what thematic recurrence lays bare is a purified version of the composer's or the painter's nervous physiognomy, the essence of their individuality which, in the case of normal human exchange, remains incommunicable:
I sensed that … whatever gave me the sort of joy which I had found from time to time and at certain moments in my life, I could no more express it than the peculiar nervous quality of intoxication. Now this inexpressible quality is precisely what we experience and is, as it were, the generalization of what is none the less most distinctive in the nerves and in the soul, as if it were that inexpressible quality exteriorized that one senses in Elstir's colours, in Vinteuil's harmonies, as the colours of the spectrum make external and visible the intimate composition of stars that we will never see. [je sentais que … ce qui me donnait cette sorte de joie que je retrouvais de temps en temps à certains moments de ma vie, je ne pouvais pas plus l'exprimer que la qualiteé particulière, nerveuse, d'une ivresse. Or ce genre d'inexprimable c'est justement cela que nous retrouvons, et comme la généralisation de ce qu'il y a pourtant de plus particulier dans les nerfs et dans l'âme, comme si cela projetait au-dehors celui qu'ils ressentirent, dans les couleurs d'un Elstir, dans les harmonies d'un Vinteuil, comme les couleurs du spectre extériorisent la composition intime des astres que nous ne verrons jamais.] (III, 1169; the emphasis is mine.)
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- Proust, the Body and Literary Form , pp. 178 - 180Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999