Proust and Signs

The Complete Text

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by Gilles Deleuze,

Translated by Richard Howard

University of Minnesota Press

Due/Published April 2000, 160 pages, cloth

ISBN 081663257X

I remember an older edition of this, but this is the first complete edition of Deleuze's book on Proust.

Here, Deleuze reads Proust's work as a narrative of an apprenticeship--more precisely, the apprenticeship of a man of letters. Considering the search (the recherche) as one directed by an experience of signs, in which the protagonist learns to interpret and decode the kinds and types of symbols that surround him, Deleuze conducts a corollary search--one that leads to a different and deeper understanding of the signs that constitute A la recherche du temps perdu. Deleuze traces the network of signs laid by Proust (those of love, art, or worldliness) and moves toward an aesthetics that culminates in a meditation on the literary work as a sign-producing "machine"--an operation that reveals the superiority of "signs of art" in a world of signs.

In Howard's translation, augmented with an essay that Deleuze added to a later French edition, Proust and Signs appears here for the first time in its entirety in English. This is one of Deleuze's most sustained attempts to understand and explain the work of art.

Review

The eagerly-awaited translation of Deleuze’s take on Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is now finally available. Though written in 1972, Deleuze’s work of literary criticism is a healthy and original addition to the flood of Proustiana that has been written of late. Deleuze maintains that In Search of Lost Time “is not an exposition of memory, but the narrative of an apprenticeship: more precisely, the apprenticeship of a man of letters.” The protagonist of In Search of Lost Time, Deleuze suggests, learns how to interpret signs as they operate in three different worlds and once he learns their meanings, and limitations, he is able to synthesize them into art. There is the world of worldliness where signs are a kind of formality of engagement but mean very little. There are also the contradictory signs of love, suggesting intimacy but also concealing. Deleuze writes, “...addressed to us, applied to us, they [signs of love] nonetheless express a world that exclude us and that the beloved will not and cannot make us know.” The final world of signs is that of sensuous qualities or impressions that spring from experience. The interpretation of these signs is only complete in In Search of Lost Time when the ideal essence of an object is grasped, a process that is made clear through art, “[H]enceforth, the world revealed by art reacts on all the others and notably on the sensuous signs; it integrates them, colors them with an aesthetic meaning, and imbues what was still opaque about them.” Deleuze’s vantage point on Proust and his focus on the novel as one concerned with the future development of its protagonist is an intriguing and ultimately groundbreaking way to read In Search of Lost Time.