ABSTRACT
The reader of Marcel Proust will have recognized the very foundation of the Venice episode—a much-differed, fragmented narrative block which is constructed on a number of avant-textes, not only from Contre Sainte-Beuve, but also from Jean Santeuil. To pronounce the word Unheimlichkeit, is to refer to Sigmund Freud and to his 1919 essay entitled 'Das Unheimliche'. Implicit in the formulation, as Martin Heidegger reads it, are two fundamental ideas: that the word 'humanism' has a meaning and a conceptual value worthy of preservation; and that the word, or concept, through a certain evolution in the history of ideas, has lost its original meaning. The Venice of Proust is not to be confused with the city imagined by so many writers, artists, and musicians, for whom the Queen of the Adriatic represents the exotic other.
