| Summary: | This study investigates the role of the imagination in Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. The narrator is struck with wonder at all that he imagines, but can never find in reality that which his imagination had led him to expect. Because one can imagine only that which is absent, all presence destroys that which was expected. The narrator is left with two depressing possibilities: either he marvels at that which he cannot see, or he cannot see anything without being disappointed. By the end of the work, however, another alternative has been proposed by the narrator's experience of involuntary memory. He experiences something real, but in order to be rediscovered, this reality must be reconstructed and transmuted by the imagination. The whole Proustian enterprise consists of this reversal. Although it is first conceived of as the experience of separation and the evocation of absence, the imagination is ultimately revealed to be a mimetic faculty that makes reality present for us by recreating it within the mind.
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