"The narrator in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time refers quite often to the text we are reading, naming 'the invisible vocation which is the subject of this book' and 'the rest of my story.' ... But who is talking to whom when we read these allusions to a novel in progress? As actual readers of Proust’s book, we have seen or read precisely these words and many others. But then is the fictional narrator speaking to us or to his fictional audience? Do we get a little dizzy thinking about his imagining as part of the past a beginning he hasn’t arrived at yet, or do we think Proust could just be making casual use of an old convention: the writer pretends she is telling a tale and readers pretend they are listening? The material acts of writing and reading are bracketed or forgotten. ..."
Office Board, by John F. Peto, 1885. The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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