"Floated invincibly": Animating Character in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time

Abstract:This essay uses early twentieth-century animation to understand Marcel Proust's surprisingly minimalist approach to detail, and how In Search of Lost Time reworks the connection between the limits of description and autonomous character. Proust's Search and films by Georges Méliès and Émile Cohl share a guiding concern with how to bring characters "to life" out of relatively simple elements. In his attempts to understand others, Proust's Narrator returns to a few typifying details, and layers them against changing backgrounds, so that his characters remain identifiable even as they undergo continuous social and aesthetic transformations, beyond the purview of his gaze. As well as informing an approach to Proustian character, this essay illuminates the films' staging of elaborate ethical encounters between animator and character. In this way, the techniques of animation provide a set of cross-medial tools for understanding aesthetic vision and character at the start of the twentieth century.