Driving the Plot Through Colour

Reading passages from Proust (in my view, the most visual of literary writers), I analyze a passage where the color yellow acts like a character. This relationship between color and character ends up constituting a plot element of major importance for Proust’s novel, In Search of Lost Time. I begin by presenting Proust as a discussant on the distinctions between the media of literature and visual art. Artists and literary authors do not “use” aesthetics; they “do” aesthetics, performatively. They put their hooks into the flesh of their predecessors, examine all corners and holes in older texts. Corners: what seems marginal, but has not been sufficiently explored. Holes: what was omitted, contradictory, untenable. That is where innovation, creation, happens: critique and experiment. In spite of Proust’s modernist sides, the passages examined here are strikingly postmodern. The novel does not emerge from inner needs but from outer coincidence.