‘Ma vision harmonieuse et transparente’: The Sound of Words in Proust’s Argument against Obscurity

This article explores Marcel Proust’s treatment of sound in À la recherche du temps perdu , considering whether the commonplace symbolist idea of music as a model for poetry is applicable to his aesthetics. Exploring the notion of obscurity proposed in his 1896 article ‘Contre l’obscurité’, it demonstrates Proust’s subtle rejection of the ideal of a pure, which is to say non-referential, musicality. Instead, the article shows how Proust’s poetics expounds the virtue of what he calls ‘la transparence’, a quality which applies only when the sound of words combines with semantic intelligibility and clarity of thought. By rejecting the notion of music as a model for literature, and even as the paradigm for the exploration of sound and listening in Proust’s novel, poetic, not musical, sound emerges as central to his theory of art. Tracing where Proust follows and departs from fin-de-siècle thought in describing poetry in musical terms and music in terms of language, this article suggests a more nuanced understanding of the role of the intelligence in apprehending the work of art, in which the referential force of language can coexist with the ‘musique latente’ of its poetry to produce a work of art ideal in its transparency. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .