Proust's butterfly James McNeill Whistler and painterly writing in In Search of Lost Time

Abstract

This article examines the influence of Whistler's art on Proust and the role it plays in Proust's analysis of involuntary memory in In Search of Lost Time. Whistler (a near anagram of Proust's 'Elstir'), alongside Monet and Paul César Helleu, is generally credited with making up the composite figure of Elstir, the painter who takes his place as one of the central characters in Proust's novel and plays a pivotal role in linking the experiences of Proust's youthful narrator, Marcel, with those of the older Swann, and of reconciling the cultural shift in emphasis from portraits painted in studios to the en plein air style of the Impressionists. Whistler's, though, is an influence that runs deeper than historical or biographical contingency. Whistler, too, saw memory rather than direct observation as central to the creative act; and in the way in which his increasingly strictly pictorial art dramatizes the act of looking, he provides a parallel to Proust's concern with how memory, through the rhetoric of metaphor, is transformed into art.