415.画家：休伯特·罗伯特（Hubert Robert）Proust, a Fountain

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The meaning of EKPHRASIS is a literary description of or commentary on a visual work of art.

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Proust, a Fountain and some Pink Marble

Abstract
This article is in two parts. The first concerns a description of the ‘Hubert Robert fountain’ that occurs towards the beginning of Sodome et Gomorrhe. The second concerns the narrator's description in Le Temps retrouvé of the ‘matière’ of his work as ‘distincte, nouvelle, d'une transparence, d'une sonorité spéciales, compacte, fraîchissante et rose’.1 The two parts are connected by a transformatory effect. In the first, an object that enters the world of the text as a ‘real’ fountain, mimetically described, is transformed into a fountain depicted in a painting that the text describes ekphrastically. This painting then changes from a naturalistic depiction into a Cubist-type composition (a painting that stresses the literalness of its surface), only to turn back into an actual fountain. Proust's internal description of the novel undergoes a similar transformation. Having filled the novel with descriptions of depicted and actual things, he menaces the reader with the possibility that the virtual world is about to vanish, that the novel is a piece of marble or flesh, pink, compact and transparent — a real and tangible object.

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9 Proust and the Amorous Fountain: Secret Architecture or Suppressed Source?

Abstract
This chapter takes as its point of departure a curious scene in Sodom and Gomorrahin which a fountain maliciously drenches a society lady, almost raping her in the sight of a bluff, guffawing Grand Duke. Critics have long pondered the significance of the incident. So far, no one has suggested as a possible influence the title of Machaut’s La Fonteinne Amoureuse, an edition of which appeared in Paris in 1908 just as Marcel Proust was beginning work on the texts that developed into In Search of Lost Time. While this hypothesis cannot be proved beyond all doubt, one cannot fail to be struck by a number of similarities between the Proust and Machaut texts: both feature insomniac first-person narrators who produce self-fertilizing narratives displaying a high degree of reflexivity. Both narrators must overcome modest backgrounds as they seek to rise in society. The chapter suggests that Proust, intrigued by the idea of an “amorous” fountain, half-remembered and literalized it—but then occluded the fascinating source, inhibited by a complicated nexus of feelings involving his gay, half-Jewish identity, his addiction to onanism, Machaut’s occasionally anti-semitic diatribes and the rampant anti-semitism of Paris society in the Dreyfus era.