The sumplokē of the narrating voice in A la recherche du temps perdu. Issue 6 (2nd June 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Dutton, James
• Is Part Of: Textual practice. Volume 34:Issue 6(2020)
• Page Start: 861
• Page End: 880
• Publication Date: 2020-06-02
• Subjects: Marcel Proust -- Jacques Derrida -- voice -- presence -- iteration -- restance; Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism, Textual -- Periodicals; Semiotics -- Periodicals; 801.95
• DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2018.1520287
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0950-236X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article contends with a primary, yet unresolved, problem in Proust criticism: just who is the narrator of A la recherche du temps perdu ? Rather than answering, I seek to de-legitimise the 'who is' of this contention. Applying Derrida's famous critique of ontological presence ( parousia ) and incorporating his notion of iterability offers a reading by which the narrating 'voice' of Proust's fiction disperses across different characters even in the work of a sentence – a possibility invited by Proust's elusive style of narration. Proust's novel in turn foregrounds the instability of subjectivity which is typified by the iterability of language. As language organises to form a text, deconstruction privileges the interstices that work between words and engender context, or restance, and these become the moments of departure and appropriation for any Proustian narrator. In that regard, I argue that Derrida's adoption of the sumplokē (the weaving, or conjunction of being and not-being that renders discourse) aptly describes the fluctuation in and out of appropriated 'self' of the narrat ing Proustian sentence that never fixes a static present, or presence.