From aesthetic idolatry to the plot of bourgeois life. Charles Swann and the novel of the jealous

Abstract

The figure of the jealous is fundamental in Proust's work, and its first manifestation is the character of Charles Swann. This article examines the characteristics of the jealous novel, proposing as a central premise that there is a dislocation of narrative structure due to the intensification of the plot, and that this sets the character of the aesthete at odds because he is confronted with the vicissitudes of bourgeois life. The proliferation of actions - material as well as speculative - that introduces jealousy undermines the problem of the autonomy of art, the central axis of bourgeois aesthetics and the guiding principle of an exponent of aestheticism like Swann. But jealousy can also imply, by the opposite route, a restitution of the autonomy of art, based on the uselessness of the lover's research and his total immersion in the fabric of practical life.