ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the time-bound signifying process of Marcel Proust's novel, its murmurings and echoings, its long-range insect life. Proust has inserted a non-linear refrain, a palimpsest, into his Venetian tale of loss and mourning; instances of layering are themselves stratified in the passage; the aftermath of a love affair is arrested upon a cat's cradle of erotic associations and verbal echoes stretching back in time. Reflecting on the strangeness of Proust's style, the chapter explains whether Walter Benjamin's beautiful remark might contain a useful general principle for readers of A la recherche du temps perdu, a guideline on how to read the novel. La Berma, like Proust's narrator, consumes and transmutes the art of others, and in her stacking of system upon system provides the novel with an allegory of its own process. The triumphal moment in Proust's scientific quest, for Albertine — stratified, intermittent, has become an immensely powerful algorithm.
