Sense: The Hollow of Experience, the Mark[ ] of Aiôn

Abstract

This chapter examines the picture of temporal experience provided by the novel considered in light of its rejection of presentational logic. It examines the novel’s opening scene to form an understanding of Deleuze’s theories of the virtual and dividual, and suggests that the setting-less, transversal beginning of the Recherche institutes the novel’s peculiarly multi-temporal quality. By incorporating Henri Bergson’s thoughts on nonnumerical multiplicity, as well as the theories of temporality and perception of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Mauro Carbone, this chapter situates its reading across a phenomenological tradition of transcendental sense, but claims that the immanent-real category of literary “remains” anchors this sense in living becoming. In doing so, it offers a reading that, while steeped in and engaging with a specific and critically recognized philosophical tradition, suggests a more “literary” understanding of its possibilities. By observing phenomenally attuned portrayals of experience like dreams and lying, Proust’s fiction directs us towards the depth and imperviousness of imaginative becoming, asking us how much of experience it is possible to forget—or if it is possible to forget at all.