D’innombrables sourires dans tous les sens : évènement kinésique et implication du lecteur dans la Recherche di Proust

Starting from the Recherche’s incipit, we investigate how the involvement of the reader's bodily and kinesics knowledge are central to Proust’s conception of literature as a cognitive tool. Indeed, the epistemological scope which the writing aspires to is translated into a series of metaphors linking knowledge and reading through the reader’s simulation of posture and gestures that are original and unprecedented. Smiling is an example of the reader’s kinaesthetic involvement as a form of both communication and access to otherness. The goal is defining how expressiveness triggers interaction with the reader and how these nombreux sourires outline the overall bodily atmosphere of the novel while relating to its central issues. Through the analysis of complex metaphors concerning the face expressiveness, Proust’s use of kinesics data is shown as a vehicle for an unusual perspective or posture that the reader is called to share by untie the metaphorical knot.
The chosen examples point out the cognitive adventure underlying the Recherche and provide for different levels of interaction with the reader. In the first one, smiling unprecedently recalls the Guermantes’ social parable and the metaphor decoding is linked to a mnemonic operation by the reader; in the second one, smiling is no more a gesture but it becomes a rhetorical figure embodying the Narrator’s lost youth, which is communicated to the reader through a complex perceptive movement combining vitalism and melancholy. In the last example we focus on the dense metaphor of Françoise's smile, which – in order to be decoding - requires sensorimotor, perceptive and mnemonic knowledge. And it is precisely this relationship of mutual acknowledge, which is express in gestures, that Proust asks of his audience: a bodily and mental effort towards new knowledge, allowed by expressive and gestural communication in reading.