Proust, impossible Persée ? Le regard antique dans l’épisode de la mort de la grand-mère

In this essay I analyse a well-known passage from Proust’s Le Côté de Guermantes: the long description of the agony and death of the hero’s grandmother. I base my investigation on the recognizable “architecture of sight” towards Death: this architecture is based on the classic myth of Medusa and it has all the features of the Greek optics. From this perspective we understand the prevailing lexical fields of the passages (the incapability of looking at what has no face, like Death) but also the metaphoric structures founded on comparisons and the mythological references that are often camouflaged (Medusa, Perseus). The impossibility of describing this vision of Death is finally connected with Proust’s aesthetic theory, as is said in the aforementioned passage: the action of the creative artist is like the work of an oculist.