ABSTRACT
Yet if Valery retraces this Proustian figure of sense, he also develops it. He indeed unveils the sexual basis of Eros and minutely deconstructs its mind-spun idolatries; but he also comes to discern, as Proust barely does, its human potential; and, discerning it, he enters a proposal for the re-working of the inherited construct. This leads him, as we shall see, to re-invest existentially in the poem of amorous relationality that intuition of inner time redeemed which Proust refers solely to art.
