Abstract
A novel is like an unknown city in which I wander. We become acquainted with literature, with a particular novel, as we walk along, as if we had arrived in a city by night. A good reader is one with a nose, like a hunting dog sniffing out clues and tracking down its prey. This comparison leads us to clarify, on the one hand, Proust's perception of space, and, on the other, the role he attributes to memory in the experience of reading, or in the phenomenology of reception, as we say today.
In Sodom and Gomorrah, the automobile excursions with Albertine around Balbec provide the opportunity for a contrasting analysis of the apprehension of space - countryside and city - by train and by car, and the comparison with a novel intervenes as if fatally: "[...] I recognized Beaumont [..like an officer in my regiment who would have seemed to me a special being, too benevolent and simple to be from a large family, too distant and mysterious already to be simply from any family, and whom I would have learned was a brother-in-law, a cousin of such and such people with whom I dined in town, so Beaumont, connected all of a sudden to places I had thought so distinct, lost its mystery and took its place in the region, making me think with terror that Mme Bovary and the Sanseverina might have seemed to me like other beings if I had met them elsewhere than in the closed atmosphere of a novel" (III, 393-394).
This is a magnificent page on taking possession of a country or city, by train, from the station as a palace superbly displaying the city's name, or by car, through the capillary network of roads and streets. The theme of reconnaissance - in the military sense, that of the compass on the map - is omnipresent, as is that of amorous acquaintance, as the automobile, still in the masculine, dances an amorous ballet with the landscape: " [... these ever-closer circles that the automobile describes around a fascinated city that was fleeing in all directions to escape, and on which it finally hurtles straight down, sheer as a rock, to the bottom of the valley where it remains lying on the ground ; so that this location, this single point, which the automobile seems to have stripped of the mystery of express trains, instead gives the impression of discovering it, of determining it for ourselves as with a compass, of helping us to feel with a more lovingly exploratory hand, with finer precision, the true geometry, the beautiful 'measure of the earth'" (III, 394).
