Seeing Impossible Things: Proust at the Limits of the Reader’s Imagination

What do we see in our mind’s eye when we read Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu? The Recherche is full of objects behaving strangely, visual perspectives shifting unexpectedly, new dimensions opening within the familiar, and the lines between imagination, memory and perception blurring and collapsing. The present study argues that to see Proust’s universe, the reader must work to visualise the hitherto impossible, testing their cognitive prowess against dense descriptive challenges. Its chapters analyse how Proust’s descriptions of material, space, energy and time guide reader visualisation, demonstrating how clusters of these descriptions have the aggregate effect of expanding the reader’s imagination beyond its habitual conceptual constraints. Seeing Impossible Things ultimately proposes that the unity of the Recherche lies not in an accumulation of meaning in the form of an overarching theory of aesthetics, but in an accumulation of imaginative practice culminating in the novel’s final image.