Abstract

In the first pages of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu one can see the loss of the fundamental realities of time, space and self. The resulting search for a new foundation for certainty is the underlying theme of this dissertation. The influences of various scientific disciplines on this search are evident on every level of the novel. A study of both the shared and the distinguishing qualities inherent to the scientific and to the creative activities provides a historical and a philosophical perspective from which to view Proust's novel. ;Chapter one gives an overview of the various scientific influences critics have observed in Proust's novel. While the critics mentioned here have each chosen to study essentially one aspect of science, my purpose is to produce a synthesis of these different scientific perspectives in order to provide a comprehensive cosmogony of the world Proust has created in his novel. ;Chapter two concerns the study of the relation of subject and object as it is reflected by developments in ocular science. A basic fallacy of the positivistic world view is seen in the simple act of perception. ;In chapter three, the search turns outward to the physical world. At each stage in this voyage the narrator encounters the limits in both the Cartesian conception of man and the Newtonian notion of nature. With the experience of the "special pleasure" and its companion, involuntary memory, the essence of the sensory experience is found to lie in the subject, not the object. ;In chapter four the search turns inward, toward the observing subject, man. The methodological problem Proust encountered reflects that of the psychologist: how can one arrive at man's essence, his psyche, his unconscious? Involuntary memory provides Proust with an acausal, atemporal principle which allows the essence of both man and world to be distilled into a metaphor. What causal law is to science, the metaphor is to art. As the final pages show, and the appendix illustrates, this unified world view is based on the metaphoricity of the archetypes discussed