A comprehensive introduction on how to conceptualize Proust’s Recherche.

What do we see in our mind’s eye when we read Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu? The Recherche is full of objects behaving strangely, visual perspectives shifting unexpectedly, new dimensions opening within the familiar, and the lines between imagination, memory, and perception blurring and collapsing. Seeing Impossible Things argues that to see Proust’s universe, the reader must work to visualize the hitherto impossible, testing their cognitive prowess against dense descriptive challenges. Its chapters analyze how Proust’s descriptions of material, space, energy, and time guide reader visualization, demonstrating how clusters of these descriptions have the aggregate effect of expanding the reader’s imagination beyond its habitual conceptual constraints. Seeing Impossible Things ultimately proposes that the unity of the Recherche lies not in an accumulation of meaning in the form of an overarching theory of aesthetics but in an accumulation of imaginative practice culminating in the novel’s final image.