2013 Diversité des sens, unité sensible

The hero of the Recherche seems to despair of ever being able to master a life in which everything is nothing but fragment and loss. Friendship, love, travel, art itself are dispersed and crumble in the luring diversity of our senses. Indeed, unity only lies within writing, in the fusion of sensorial rhetoric (TR, IV, 470), that 'small furrow' where life's meaning hides away. A dense network of synesthetic figures runs though Proust's text, wrapping the diversity of human perceptions in a delicate yet perfect casing. Our aim is to identify and analyse selected passages from the Recherche, in which this stylistic trend seems symptomatic of the unity of the writing, whose foundation rests on existential diversity. We will attempt to show that this sensorial rhetoric lies at the very heart of Proustian 'truth': secular though spiritual, carnal though eternal