Le fugitif. Fuir la vérité dans la Recherche du temps perdu

Abstract

Everyone knows that Proust’s Recherche is the history of an artistic vocation, the history of a quest of truth. Truth, however, is not easily found and hides itself away. The novel’s hero hides himself, he flees during three thousand pages to avoid facing his artistic mission. This article aims to analyse this flight and it is structured in three parts: the flight of friendship, the flight of love and the flight from literature, Marcel’s final attempt to indulge in divertissement, wasting the true time of beauty for urbane life. Only when sorrow and mourning lead him to the obscurity of the self, can the novel’s hero take upon himself his artistic duty. In effect, if Albertine is the Fugitive, if it is she who physically disappears, it is Marcel who keeps on fleeing in his uninterrupted ‘fugue’, in the double meaning of ‘flight’ and of “a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts”. This last meaning is only possible in the night of sorrow and in the desert of absence.