Hyperbole in Proust

C’est pourquoi la meilleure part de notremémoire est hors de nous, dans un soufflepluvieux, dans l’odeur de renfermé d’unechambre ou dans l’odeur d’une premièreflambée …

—A la recherche du temps perdu, 511

Il ne faut pas avoir peur d’aller trop loin, carla vérité est au-delà.

—Proust, letter to E. R. Curtius

Hyperbole abounds in A la recherche du temps perdu, to the extent that it seems to be the rule of linguistic production rather than the exception. Whether Proust’s narrator is comparing an episode from his childhood to a world-historical event, or is transported by emotions that seem to exceed their provocations, and led to employ a superabundant number of images or quantity of discourse, the generative principle of the narrative seems to be one of excess in one form or another. From the cup of tea that opens onto the whole of Combray, to the uneven paving stones that provoke in the narrator an indifference to death, even involuntary memory takes the form of a projection and a traversal of boundaries; perhaps it even takes the form of an exaggerated claim.

Hyperbole, from hyper, “over” and bollein, “to throw,” is defined by the Rhetorica ad Herennium as “a manner of speech exaggerating the truth, whether for the sake of magnifying or minifying something” (341).¹ The Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus gives prominent place to this figure in his manual Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style (1512), which instructed students in a variety of means of amplifying their writing, and which suggests to us that there might be a connection between figures of exaggeration and verbal abundance in general.² If we were to investigate the meaning and purpose of hyperbole in Proust’s work, we would have to confront the difficult task of selecting a few exemplary passages from an ocean of narrative—from a novel that, as Malcom Bowie puts it, is “famous for being long” (216)—and, moreover, of generalizing on the basis of these passages. No doubt this gesture would itself be hyperbolic, as claims made on behalf of examples frequently are.³ Nevertheless, if reading Proust is the best instruction in reading Proust, I propose we examine two key passages from the earlier volumes of the Recherche for the way that exaggerated claims are produced and developed in them, in the hope that they will elucidate other patterns of meaning in the novel. In the end, I shall consider hyperbole as a figure of differentiation, one that bears a certain relation to figures of contradiction as well as to figures of identity, yet without being reducible to either of these. In particular, in articulating and organizing differences, hyperbole helps capture the nature of the organization of the Proustian self with respect to its sense impressions, as well as the conversion of the self into an intelligible work of art.

I. An Allegory of Hyperbole

The young narrator’s description of the steeples of Martinville is not the first act of writing represented in the novel—this would be his note to his mother, begging her to come upstairs to his bedroom in Combray⁴—but it is the first and only representation of the narrator’s attempt at literary writing. I turn to this passage in part because of the exemplary status the narrative grants it, both as a pivotal moment in the narrator’s discovery of his vocation to write, and as a key stage in the reader’s own instruction in the Proustian aesthetic, as it presents a fragment of writing for what seems, at least at first, to be its literary merits. Yet as Joshua Landy aptly puts it, in this passage “the ratio between notoriety and justification reaches its zenith; which is to say, almost all readers of Proust know that they are supposed to take it seriously, yet very few are quite sure why” (Landy 52). Thus, I turn to this passage wondering whether its exemplary status might be overstated, and if so, to what end. At the very least, the...