Time
Very early on, in the Overture section of Swann’s Way, Proust engages metaphor to…well, actually to delineate the entire structure and purpose of the massive collection of volumes that make up the whole of In Search of Lost Time.
“When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth’s surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks.”
Proust spent most of his adult life trying to capture the essence of this concept of time as being subject to confusion distill it into his masterpiece.
Dr. Cottard
Dr. Cottard is one of many fascinating characters constructed of paradox, idiosyncrasy and contradiction. Fortunately, Proust sums him up almost completely in one twist metaphorical description shortly after the physician successfully prescribes a detox cleansing of the narrator.
“And we realised that this imbecile was a clinical genius.”
Say Their Name
The effect of meeting a young lesbian woman named Albertine has the narrator’s head spinning with love and attraction and obsession and he moves straight to simile to put this feeling one gets upon first falling under the spell of someone new entirely within a context everyone can understand who has ever been there:
“We say the name to ourselves, and as we remain silent it seems as though we inscribed it on ourselves, as though it left its trace on our brain which must end by being, like a wall upon which somebody has amused himself by scribbling, entirely covered with the name, written a thousand times over, of her whom we love. We repeat it all the time in our mind, even when we are happy, all the more when we are unhappy.”
This distillation of the universal into the personal through figurative language relying upon comparison is a recurring pattern throughout the entire collected volume.
Moving from Metaphor to the Literal
Another common occurring literary device is for the narrator to begin musing upon a metaphorical figure of speech or symbolic construct and then make the movement from the abstract to the concrete by situation the symbolic within the literal. A good example occurs in the section volume titled The Guermantes Way when the narrator is pondering the idea of death; a subject which holds great fascination for him:
“We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say so we represent that hour to ourselves as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time, it never occurs to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned, or may signify that death — or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again — may occur this very afternoon”
Men and Monsters in Time and Space
After several thousand pages, the narrator brings his long story to a close using—what else—a vivid metaphor describing how man’s place in time in different from that of his place in space:
“I would therein describe men, if need be, as monsters occupying a place in Time infinitely more important than the restricted one reserved for them in space, a place, on the contrary, prolonged immeasurably since, simultaneously touching widely separated years and the distant periods they have lived through — between which so many days have ranged themselves — they stand like giants immersed in Time.”
