À La Recherche and Proust’s Unstable Metaphors of Divinity

Abstract

In his expansive novel A la recherche du temps perdu,1 Marcel Proust employs the ancient metaphor of God as artist that was resurrected in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nietzsche and the late nineteenth century had raised epistemological questions about the nature of God and art that needed to be grappled with, and authors such as Proust began to struggle with these issues through their use of metaphors of artistic creation and perception. That God functions as a metaphor in literature is accepted across disciplines and centuries. What God is a metaphor for is an unanswerable but necessary interpretive question at the heart of modern theology, philosophy, and literary critical theory. In this work, God has been a metaphor for totality, completeness, mystery, the inexpressible, and nothing, none of which are mutually exclusive. For Nietzsche, the creative artist “merges with the primal architect of the cosmos” (Birth of Tragedy 9); for Wallace Stevens, “God and the imagination are one” (Opus Posthumous 178). Each author, as Mark C. Taylor puts it, “displaces divine creativity onto human creativity,” (About Religion 208), and this move is also central in the work of Proust. Just as it takes the novel’s narrator a full year to come to a true recognition of the death of his grandmother, the narrator, Proust, and perhaps the whole twentieth century never fully realized Nietzsche’s death of God. The narrator only feels the absence of his grandmother in a moment of involuntary memory as he bends over to unbutton his boots—a type of the atheological absence of God embedded in the difficult web of Proust’s text.