A few non-original thoughts:
Proust's masterwork, utterly remarkable, requires a certain amount of looking, wading through that which cannot be directly apprehended or remembered. Indeed, the title itself points to this; Searching for Lost Time is the book's task, not only that of Marcel the narrator. The challenge and tension of the novel, however, is that one looks but one does not, indeed, one should not, entirely find. As if it were a counter-proposition to Pound's famous "go in fear of abstraction," the philosophical given for Proust is to "go in fear of totalization." As his narrator delves deeper and deeper into his own mysterious interiority ("Why did that make me feel the way it did? What was I remembering just there that made me so melancholic?"), he realizes, as do the readers, that the interiority of other people is equally complicated and even more inacessible. Thus, totalizing others, as does the character Mme. Verdurin, is inevitably an act of violence. Proust is a good Hegelian: above anything else, the subject desires the other's desire. All of the dialectics of mastery and slavery are just beneath the surface of Parisian hierarchies. If there is any escape, it must come from not finding what one is looking for, not possessing what gives one pleasure.
The aesthetic is caught up in this potential violence, and in similar terms. Mme. Verdurin, a fan of Wagner, claims that hearing certain pieces produces in her physical pain, to the point that she claims that she will have "to stay in bed for a week": "I don't want to be made to cry until I get a cold in the head, and neuralgia all down my face" (157). In a perfect dialectical moment, her followers interpret this as a sign of her musical taste, the depth of her emotional response, in other words, her aesthetic "mastery" comes about from being made a "slave" of the work of art, an emotional reversal which is itself embedded in a social economy of imitative exchange (anyone who wants to be Mme. Verdurin's friend must admit that a young pianist she knows is the best performer of Wagner). Art is conceived of in total, and totalizing, effects. In cotnrast to this, Swann is enamoured with a single phrase, a tiny undertone that occurs in a larger piece. For a long time he doesn't even know what the piece is called, and, trying to describe it to Verdurin, she replies "I'm not in the habit" of "peering at things through a microscope, and pricking myself on pin-points of difference" (163). She is only interested in the orchestra, while Swann is looking for the phrase, to which he attaches a memory, which then evokes a subtle, and individual, pleasure. There is no mastery here, by either the work of art or the listener, simply a glancing, passing, free exchange.
Of course, the trap of mere interiority is a major problem here, if there is any effort to cross the boundary between persons. The most surefire way to escape the dialectics of violence is to remain utterly and completely alone. Which we simply cannot do, and which is why so much of Proust's narrative, slowly and gradually accumulating over 2000 pages, is dedicated to the matter of love. If we cannot directly access the other, then we fall back on the resource of language, which mediates our desire, at times as fantasy, at other times as a site of mutual communication. Language becomes a shared space, a third, which enables the other two elements to come together. For this reason, language does not merely "refer" or "perform"--instead, it becomes an object of exchange, which, in that move to objectivity, strikes me as remarkably "modernist." One example of this: after a long series of winding and charged exchanges between Swann and Odette, who has become, gradually, the object of his affection, he finally makes the move using possibly one of the oldest seduction lines in the book: "Excuse me, but the flowers on your bosom are misaligned. If I may, allow me to fix them for you." You know what happens next. What's even more interesting than schmaltzy pick-up lines, however, is the fact that the name of the flower she was wearing becomes the third in the structure of their relationship, the linguistic mediation upon which their desires meet and what, therefore, allows them to communicate it. After that evening "'Do a cattleya,' transmuted into a simple verb which they would employ without a thought of its original meaning when they wished to refer to the act of physical possession (in which, paradoxically, the possessor possesses nothing)" (179). More than simply a lover's code, "Cattleya" becomes itself an "objectless object"--precisely because, in Proustian non-totalizing love, the lover posesses nothing, words can become a substitute possession, something both can hold and exchange which keeps them from slipping into the dialectics of violence. Language is an exterior object that opens up mutual interiority, on the sly, as if by accident, an "objective subjectivity."