Abstract
The dissertation "On the Function and Formation of the imaginaire social in Marcel Proust's Work" investigates the social imaginary in Proust's oeuvre and its transformation from first a novel-essay, the posthumously appearing fragment Contre Sainte-Beuve to the novel A la recherche du temps perdu. Before the background of the signs of breaking up, as they exemplarily pulled through the French society in the cases of the Dreyfus-Affaire and the First World war, the dissertation analyses the paradoxical function of the traditional identity forming concepts as famille, race, and sexe in Proust's narrative strategies.
The heavily emphasised poetological figure of the moi profond is hermetically sealed from the public sphere. In the face of nationalism and anti-Semitism, as they also penetrated literary criticism after the Dreyfus Affaire, the moi profond is readable as a counter-figure against the restrictive societal and aesthetical discourse of the race, and connected to that, gender. The anti-social poetics of the moi profond are also destabilised in the many semantically-hybrid points of fracture of the Contre Sainte-Beuve. The occurrences of polyphony, mediality, and dialogism are pulled through the text fragments, thereby working against the monologic hermetic of the moi profond. The poetological fragility of the confrontation of the moi profond and the moi social points to the complex narrator in À la recherche du temps perdu.
The investigation of the multi-sided narrator in Proust's novel is at the centre of the second and longest part of the dissertation. Departing on the one hand from questioning influenced by discursive and psychoanalytic theory, and on the other, from linkage of the narrative phenomenon of the novel in media- and psychiatric-historical aspects, the dissertation undertakes a highly detailed textual interpretation. Equipped with hypersensitive receivers of snob, a homosexual, and a Jew, the narrator enters into an intensely close relationship with the characters corresponding to him, and thereby simultaneously steps out of the distance and security of the moi profond.
In these close encounters, the microscopic level of the society comes into being. It is here that the imaginaire social of the narrator tilts into the hallucinatory. The central thesis is that only in the close encounters of the narrator with privileged aktanten of the conceptualisation of the imagined society can be more clearly read. The narrator, or in psychoanalytical terms, his unconscious desire, follows a peculiar obsession: the traditional identity-forming concepts of famille, race, sexe, are always set in new relation to the categories of the snob, the invert, and the Jew. In front of the background of the nationalistic-anti-Semitic climate of Proust?s contemporary society, the above mentioned unifying concepts are thereby deconstructed. The confrontation of traditional societal categories through its counter force, as will be shown by the dissertation, leads to increasing destabilisations without, at the same time, establishing new intrinsic attributes. Where the imaginaire social in the novel becomes phantasmagorical, thus the concluding thesis of the dissertation, experience as in integrations model, as claimed by the path breaking societially-diagnostic Proust interpretations of Adornos and Arendt, can therefore only partially function. |
