Abstract
With Marcel Proust, a theory and experience of reading become a theory and motor of writing. Such would be the fundamental intuition of his literary system, to use the words of Henri Bergson, according to whom all philosophy is the paraphrase of an unspeakable image.
However, Bergson's proposition would have to be reversed: if at the source of a system of ideas lies a fundamental image, why conversely, at the source of a system of images and words, i.e. a literary work, would we not find an idea or concept ? At the root of Romanticism, then, would be a theory of lyrical expression ; at the root of Symbolism, a theory of world language. While Valéry's theory of creation is primary, Proust's is the experience of disappointing reading.
This disappointing reading reveals itself to Proust as an adult, as Ruskin's reader and translator : he translates a book he thinks he likes, and in the end, the book disappoints him, just as Swann realizes that Odette " was not [his] kind ". This disappointment in reading Ruskin is itself no more than the reminiscence of an earlier disappointment : that of reading as a child, where the hopeless finitude of the book is revealed.
In response, Proust devised the solution of a work, La Recherche, which integrates its end into an organic achievement, as an initiatory journey completed both by the narrator and the reader. In short, the disappointment of reading opens the door to transcending : it's a negative illumination that takes us to another level. It's about going behind words and things, towards the vision that gives shape to the work.
