The mottled screen

by Mieke Bal

The Mottled Screen studies a great literary work that cannot be confined to language alone, even though it consists exclusively of words: Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. The author offers a sustained "visual" reading of Proust's masterpiece, pointing out its visual strategies of representation, fantasy, and poetic thought. Beginning with the attempts to emulate painting, the book develops a Proust a la Chardin, working around Chardin's painting The Skate, but only after first reading Chardin through Proust. The second part of the book is devoted to Proust's use of optical instruments - such as the magnifying glass, the eyeglass, the telescope - to produce or enhance the visions that constitute the raw material of his poetic imagination. The final part reads the specifically "photographic" writing that permeates Remembrance as a highly original and astonishingly contemporary, almost postmodern, poetics.