'Unreal enchantment': poetic vocatio(n) and the spoken word in Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.

This article argues that the quasi-magical powers of the spoken word in Marcel Proust's novel bring the work's aesthetics closer to the traditions of lyric poetry than of prose. It explores the connection between the narrator's vocation as a 'calling' (with poetic moments in the text 'speaking' to the narrator) and the resurrective potential of the voice to conjure or 'call forth'. Emphasizing the association of spoken language with life and written language with death, it shows how Proust's understanding of the printed text is indebted to Mallarmé's conception of the interplay between textual sound and blank space on the page. In this way, it outlines how the notion of the printed voice might come to compete with what critics have seen as the primacy of the written word in Proust. This perspective offers alternative ways to conceive of both the work we are reading and the work the narrator will one day produce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]