8.4 /10 1 Votes
Language French Originally published 1964 Translator Richard Howard Country France | 4.2/5 Goodreads ISBN 978-0816632589 Subject Marcel Proust | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Original title Marcel Proust et les signes Media type Print (hardcover and paperback) Pages 188 (University of Minnesota Press edition, 2000) Page count 188 (University of Minnesota Press edition, 2000) Similar Gilles Deleuze books, Other books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Proust and Signs (French: Marcel Proust et les signes) is a 1964 book by Gilles Deleuze, in which Deleuze explores the system of signs within the work of the celebrated French novelist Marcel Proust. It was translated into English by Richard Howard.
Deleuze looks at signs left by persons and events in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, illustrating how memory interprets the signs creatively but inaccurately. The jealous lover, for example, cannot accurately decipher the deceptions of his beloved. Deleuze demonstrates how Proust's book, because of the multiplication of signs, becomes a literary machine, or rather three literary machines: of partial objects or impulses, of resources, and of forced moments. Deleuze understands Proust (or the narrator) as the "universal schizophrenic" whose signs weave a spider web by sending out threads to the paranoiac Charlus and the erotomaniac Albertine, all "marionettes of his own delirium" or "profiles of his own madness."