ABSTRACT
One of the troubling elements of the Marcel Proustian work resides in what Mario Lavagetto has called the almost absent name of the hero–narrator of La Recherche. The attribution of the first name Marcel to the hero does not invalidate the critical readings which consider the quasi-constant anonymity of the narrator and the first person narrative as fundamental choices in the writing of La Recherche. In a process similar to the Freudian 'return of the repressed', Marcel Proust's initials can be read in the 'Petite Madeleine'. Strangeness is indeed a trait of La Recherche's singular hero, jealous man who does not seem to perceive at all the mixture of awe and tenderness involved in Albertine's exclamation: 'Quel Marcel!' The erasure of the hero's name is indeed inscribed within an ensemble of 'oddities' that translate the liberties taken by Proust vis-a-vis the form of the novel, and the way in which he made La Recherche a text impossible to imitate.
