ABSTRACT
For Schelling, Nietzsche, and Proust alike, the affirmation of the present life entails the affirmation of the past through a creative act, which is also the condition of possibility of the future. Proust's narrator fully appreciates the challenge of facing the past and re-creating it as the foundation and possibility of the future, as shows his description of the task of writing as a mission whose success depends on the power of his will. The other great difficulty is to create the actual passage from the lived moment to the written word, to generate the language that can convey the experiences. According to the narrator's explicit theory, the substance of literature, which has to fill the gap between reality and language, is style, which is based on the use of metaphors. The Recherche may well lend itself to both approaches to the metaphor; examples that suggest the validity of either one or the other abound in the text.
