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1 results

  • Chapter 2 - A Personal Style of Face

  • Anca Parvulescu, Washington University, St Louis
  • Book:
    Face and Form
    Published online:
    21 August 2025
    Print publication:
    04 September 2025, pp 43-64
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  • Summary

    This chapter traces the development of the character of Odette in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. If in “Swann in Love” Odette functions as an ekphrastic projection of Swann’s desire (a Botticelli fresco), in “At Mme Swann’s” she reclaims her face, creating a “new, personal style of face.” The text describes a process of facialization as a mode of self-invention, with the help of photography. Thus reinvented, Odette is the only character in the novel who does not age, providing a narrative continuity for the arc of the novel. A reading of the concluding scene in which a gallery of aged characters appear as masks of their younger selves foregrounds Proust’s preoccupation with time and memory. The conclusion: the paradigmatic object of memory retrieval for Proust is the face.