The Figural Exile in Proust A “whisper of crossed distances”

The images are places. Thus, something (a color, for example) can be kept away from its origin or from the one who perceives it, in and by an image conceived as a exile’s place. In À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust explores the dialectic of the image’s birth in the distance: figural exile increases the imaginative potentialities, at the heart of the apprehension of reality and of sensations or individual impressions, in the light of the distorting perspective of Time.