FLIGHTS OF ANGELS
GNOSI, DOLORE E SALVEZZA NELLA RECHERCHE DI MARCEL PROUST

Enrico Palma

The essay attempts to identify some Gnostic traces in the Proustian Recherche, analyzing essential parts of the text, such as the episode of the missed kiss by the mother and the final revelation at Guermantes’s Palace, on the last and decisive matinée. What we intend to ascertain is the applicability of some categories of historical and ontological Gnosticism to the Proustian Book, in an interpretative proposal of which rejection of the world, asceticism, transfiguration of pain, illumination, ecstasy and nostalgia for an original light will be the strong concepts. We have therefore tried to show at the end that the transformation of pain and evil that permeate the world and life into art constitutes the primary ontological figure of Proustian writing and of the Recherche, as the creation of a literary work that lay in our self and that it could only reveal itself under certain conditions. Literature, as well as the whole Proustian itinerary, is therefore articulated as the abode and privileged human activity with which to redeem and save existence.