Proustian Developments: The World and Object of Photography

[...]it is unable to help the subject reconnect with the lost time and regain the unity of experience. According to Barthes, a photograph demonstrates that what was placed in front of the lens is a “necessarily real thing” (76), although the choice of the thing is completely arbitrary: there is no sufficient reason for a photographer to point the camera at one object rather than another (6). According to Comay, the photograph “exemplifies this paradoxical pressure of a proximity so excessive as to signify precisely the absolute irreparability of loss” (“Impressions” 103). The narrator defines love as “the insistence upon a whole,” which “survives only if some part remains for it to conquer.” Since Albertine can never be a whole object, captured in the protagonist’s world, his love for her persists in the form of jealousy: “We imagine that love has as its object a person whom we can see lying down before our eyes, enclosed in a human body.