Proust in the dark room: portraits and photographs of the author

Abstract

This article proposes to tease out the complexities in the relationship between photographs of Proust and the author’s metaphor of literary creation as a photographic process. To do so, the article begins by studying how the publishers blurred the boundaries between fiction and autobiography by illustrating the covers of Proust’s works with a photograph of the author. The article then examines how Proust himself transgressed that boundary by including a reference to a real photograph of himself in his narrative. The last section of the article analyses the portraits of Proust on his death bed done by artists and photographers who penetrated into his dark room in order to immortalize him in a last image. These images mark the turning point between the author’s final word and the reader’s first step into the text.