Proust's Glow of Sound

Abstract

Marcel Proust traces a distinct profile in literature’s well-known pantheon of hyper-sensitive individuals. Céleste Albaret, Proust’s housekeeper at 102 Boulevard Haussmann in 1913, described noise as one of Proust’s chief irritants. In an excellent essay on noise and its technological mediation in Proust, John Attridge remarks how such exquisite phonosensitivity became a prominent part of Proust’s public persona. For both Maurice Blanchot and Julia Kristeva, the silencing of noise is a prerequisite for Proust’s rhetorical transformation of time into the space of the timeless image. Blanchot writes that, “Le temps retrouvé is the story of a calling that owes everything to time experienced, but owes it everything only so that it could escape it suddenly, by an unforeseeable leap, and find the point where the pure inwardness of time, having become imaginary space, offers all things that ‘transparent unity’ in which, […]  they can come to line up next to each other in a kind of order, penetrated by the same light”. But what actually happens in this mysterious interval when sensation undergoes its “transmigration” into the written word? In this talk, I examine three instances when sound floods and distorts the operation of time’s transubstantiation into image by involuntary memory. In Proust, the image becomes enlisted as the courier of some strange kind of sonic substance. This aural entity can only be ‘heard’ in and through its transposition into the written word, which it haunts as an impossible ‘memory’ of what must precede all experience.

Bio

Sigi Jöttkandt is an Associate Professor in English at UNSW. She is author of The Nabokov Effect: Reading in the Endgame (2024), First Love: A Phenomenology of the One (2010) and Acting Beautifully: Henry James and the Ethical Aesthetic (2005). She is also Director of Open Humanities Press.