Atmospheric Texturability as Proustian Onto-Phenomenology in In Search of Lost Time

This article proposes texture as the medium for worlding in Proust's In Search of Lost Time by developing Husserl's theory of aesthetic consciousness and Merleau-Ponty's onto-phenomenology of flesh. Proust's narrator constantly interposes unusual surfaces between perception and sensorial experiences, for instance on faces and landscapes, I contend, not simply as metaphors or metonymies to enhance the understanding of ideas, but rather as textural overlays — means of contact with a new reality. Following Mauro Carbone's ‘sensible idea’ in An Unprecedented Deformation (2011) and Anne Simon's explication of a rediscovered real in Proust ou un reél retrouvé (2018), I argue that a sensible, material, textural unfolding and furrowing is the Proustian ontological structure through which the narrator accesses an otherwise virtual, non-actual world. Hence texture is the medium both in the sense of that which is in the middle, and that which is a means to a way out to a wholly other reality. I will analyse the Opéra theatre box passage in The Guermantes Way with Husserl's theory of the image and Merleau-Ponty's flesh as a mottled, texturing mediacy to arrive at a Proustian onto-phenomenology.