‘La recherche que l’on peut dire formelle’

Abstract

This chapter makes the case that Proust's Recherche offers a way of perceiving how our pleasure in aesthetic objects (novels, septets) can, when viewed from the appropriate angle, reveal the topography of the social world through which we must all necessarily find our way. How might the experience of a particularly social level of reality be communicated in a novel?  The social world can be understood in Bourdieusian terms as a space of immanent tendencies, one in which some people are more likely to follow one kind of social trajectory than another. Proust’s novel shares with Bourdieu’s sociology an interest in how a work of art, being the product of a social world, can on occasion serve as an instrument that reveals something of the immanent structures that contribute to the shape of the social topography around it.  It does so by producing differential effects on its public. The Vinteuil Septet is presented in the Recherche as a work that has this kind of differential social effect:  by producing different effects on different listeners it becomes a diagnostic instrument revealing the social topography around it.