Affleurements de l’intrigue policièredans À la recherche du temps perdu

Strangely enough, In Search of Lost Time could be considered as a protacted detective novel; the story in itself does not make Proust’s novel a whudunnit or a thriller; but the epistemology which underlines Proust’s fiction is close to what Carlo Ginzburg labelled the ‘evidential paradigm’. This study tries to understand why the hero of In Search of Lost Time is at the same time a sagacious semiologist, remarkably able to decipher signs and search clues, and a disastrous detective, whenever he undertakes to discover a truth related to his own complicated love affairs. This intriguing paradox could be overcome if we remember the legal status of homosexuality at the turn of the xixth and xxth centuries. Detectives and inspectors appear in Proust’s fiction in close relation to the repression of homosexuality; the hero, who is not supposed to be gay, is nonetheless submitted to a permeating feeling of guilt which makes him very much akin to the most infamous homosexual characters of the novel. That’s why the hero of In Search of Lost Time so badly lacks the will or the pugnacity of a good detective though he has all the intellectual resources that would qualify him to become a sleuth. If we are to understand the logic of his semiological success and failures, we ought to consider Proust’s hero not as a determined detective, but rather as a selfless scientist