In the literary machine that Proust’s In Search of Lost Time constitutes, we are struck by the fact that all the parts are produced as asymmetrical sections, paths that suddenly come to an end, hermetically sealed boxes, noncommunicating vessels, watertight compartments, in which there are gaps even between things that are contiguous, gaps that are affirmations, pieces of a puzzle belonging not to any one puzzle but to many, pieces assembled by forcing them into a certain place where they may or may not belong, their unmatched edges violently bent out of shape, forcibly made to fit together, to interlock, with a number of pieces always left over. It is a schizoid work par excellence: it is almost as though the author’s guilt, his confessions of guilt are merely a sort of joke. (In Kleinian terms, it might be said that the depressive position is only a cover-up for a more deeply rooted schizoid attitude.) For the rigors of the law are only an apparent expression of the protest of the One, whereas their real object is the absolution of fragmented universes, in which the law never unites anything in a single Whole, but on the contrary measures and maps out the divergences, the dispersions, the exploding into fragments of something that is innocent precisely because its source is madness.

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For what does in fact take place in In Search of Lost Time, one and the same story with infinite variations? It is clear that the narrator sees nothing, hears nothing, and that he is a body without organs, or like a spider poised in its web, observing nothing, but responding to the slightest sign, to the slightest vibration by springing on its prey. Everything begins with nebulae, statistical wholes whose outlines are blurred, molar or collective formations comprising singularities distributed haphazardly (a living room, a group of girls, a landscape). Then, within these nebulae or these collectives, “sides” take shape, series are arranged, persons figure in these series, under strange laws of lack, absence, asymmetry, exclusion, noncommunication, vice, and guilt. Next, everything becomes blurred again, everything comes apart, but this time in a molecular and pure multiplicity, where the partial objects, the “boxes,” the “vessels” all have their positive determinations, and enter into aberrant communication following a transversal that runs through the whole work; an immense flow that each partial object produces and cuts again, reproduces and cuts at the same time. More than vice, says Proust, it is madness and its innocence that disturb us. If schizophrenia is the universal, the great artist is indeed the one who scales the schizophrenic wall and reaches the land of the unknown, where he no longer belongs to any time, any milieu, any school.

Such is the case in an illustrative passage, the first kiss given Albertine. Albertine’s face is at first a nebula, barely extracted from the collective of girls. Then her person disengages itself, through a series of views that are like distinct personalities, with Albertine’s face jumping from one plane to another as the narrator’s lips draw nearer her cheek. At last, within the magnified proximity, everything falls apart like a face drawn in sand, Albertine’s face shatters into molecular partial objects, while those on the narrator’s face rejoin the body without organs, eyes closed, nostrils pinched shut, mouth filled.