I'm not an avid reader of Proust but I do dip into the odd paragraph of
the latest english translation from which one may emerge some five pages
later. However, some may offer some comments on what I am reading.
I am slowly reading, Proust and signs: the complete text, by Gilles
Deleuze and this is an easy and worthwhile little read for those who
write or are otherwise interested in novels.
Chapter four I find of particular interest, so far, where a spiritual
essence is emitted from the novel as a unified lyric voice. Using
spiritual in the non-religious sense, here. Novels emit signs as do
objects but lyric emits non-material signs which do not, even in part,
cloak objects in their signifying function. This is perhaps yet to
encounter Bakhtin's heteroglot theory but despite this the theory of
lyric provided as a unifying voice in novels holds up since we have yet
to encounter divergent synthesis. (I could perhaps tease out a longer
reading, here? It is a complex formation.)
Reading this alongside Genette's Narrative Discourse, a classic reading
of narrative in Proust, I get a very different reading to the
US-American reading I inherited from Seymour Chatman. Following this a
little further I begin to suspect Language Poetry poetics may be founded
on what is (essentially) a misreading of lyric and narrative which
confuses voice and writing. (This is very curious... but little else to
say. And not that this is a bad thing.)
However, I suspect I find here, a way to argue how and why novels need
more lyric, need an excess presence which is lyric and which cannot be
subsumed under the separate and separating category of novel narrative
as an impure mixture. Anyways, others may be interested? Chris Jones.
(Getting a bit fumbled trying to make it short. But it is a very nice
theory being offered for the taking.)
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