Abstract

The present text explores Proustian aesthetics of music from a rather unusual point of view. After having briefly sketched the general outlines of Proust’s view of music (demonstrated by the famous passages on the “little phrase” from Vinteuil’s sonata), the author goes on to confront Proust with a more contemporary musical current – spectral music. As a starting point, we propose a close reading of several texts by Michaël Levinas – one of the founders of spectral music – stressing in particular what we consider to be a very important literary inspiration for one of Levinas’s compositions: the passage on the death agony of the narrator’s grand-mother from the third volume of In Search of Lost Time. This confrontation enables us, in turn, to read the Proustian text itself from a new perspective.