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the Narrator’s earliest attempt at writing, first discussed in Swann’s Way. His piece, a sort of prose poem, is an account of his experience of seeing the bell towers of the Martinville and Vieuxvicq churches apparently – impossibly – shifting position, disappearing and reappearing in different configurations as he travels along a winding road sitting next to Dr Percepied’s coachman. When we read this passage primed with a knowledge of trends in visual art of the period, it seems that Proust’s prose is seeking similar ends to those of Cézanne in his later work and of the Cubist painters that came after him. Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) inaugurated a move away from conventional perspective in painting in the 1880s and 1890s (‘he broke up consistent linear perspective with multiple perspectives, he violated aerial perspective in landscapes by painting objects in the distance as bright or brighter than those in the foreground’14), and this experimentation opened the way for later artists – such as Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso – radically to explore how our perception of physical objects could be depicted on the flat plane of a canvas. Multiple aspects of a single object were represented at once, as if fractured and multiplied by the perceiving conscience, and different objects on the same plane were depicted with different intensities, their boundaries fluid and indeterminate.

At the same time, the passage can be taken to illustrate the philosophical notion of perspectivism – the contention that there is no single truth but a multiplicity of truths, as many as there are ways of seeing – that has its roots in Nietzsche’s writings. Proust and his ex-classmates from Condorcet showed a great deal of interest in Nietzsche’s work in their short-lived journal Le Banquet. In successive numbers they published translated extracts from his writings and discussions of criticism of these works. The prefatory remarks to the journal’s first number, signed collectively ‘La redaction’ [the editors], make intriguing reading. Proust, Gregh et al. are driven, they say, not just by a desire to see their own writings published, but also ‘by the desire to make known in France, in a somewhat coherent manner, the most interesting and most recent productions of foreign art’.15 Beyond the Martinville episode we find numerous instances in the Search of an individual or a state of affairs being described by the Narrator and then subsequently being recalled by other characters who display quite different conceptions of the reality or truth of what they recall. The questions raised in such moments about the relative value of truth and the nature (and fallibility) of perception are important for the novel’s exploration of the key themes of time, memory and the status of the subject in relation to the material world.

A thinker whose writing also finds echoes in the Martinville episode is Henri Bergson (1859–1941), philosopher, public intellectual, cousin of Proust by marriage in 1891 and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. Bergson’s conception of ‘durée’ (time as subjectively experienced duration, rather than as measured by science), his interest in the nature of memory, its role in perception, and in the relation between mind and body, have led critics to speak of his influence on Proust’s novel. In his metaphors for the interconnections between sensations, brain and body, Bergson often seems Proustian: the brain is ‘a sort of central telephone exchange’ and the sense organs are ‘an immense keyboard, on which the material object executes all of a sudden its chord of a thousand notes’.16 Doubtless the intersections, as well as the divergences, of many of Proust’s key notions with Bergson’s philosophy can be instructive, but it is important not to overplay the notion of influence or borrowing. Proust grants memory recall its pivotal position in his aesthetics in his notes for Jean Santeuil in 1895, and the Carnet de 1908 indicates that he did not read Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1896) until 1909.

Another figure pondering similar problems in