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The topic of this paper, which is entitled ”Textural concealments – An
investigation of transtextual topoi in Proust, Pamuk and Murakami”, is the
relationship between Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu (1913-
1927), Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book (1990) and Haruki Murakami’s The
Wind-Up Bird Cronicle (1997). My analysis will focus on identifying and
characterizing the intertextual and hypertextual topoi related to existence and
perception, which constitutes the novels’ protagonists’ identities. Hence, my
reading will pursue a strategy, which does not emphasize nationality, genre
and/or stilistic similarities, but rather the palimpsestic relationship between
the novels, which will reveal itself through a series of detail readings of scenes
involving certain topoi, which will then be put into the perspective of the
relation between the subject and the object and the general intersubjective
relations of modernity.
The first chapter, which is entitled ”The beloved”, has three
subdivisions. The first of these subdivisions, ”Imago”, is primarily concerned
with the visual representation of the beloved other, that is the perception and
recognition of the human body and the understanding of the subject as an
interrelational, non-individualized agent. Above all the analysis will focus on
the discrepancy between the actual physical being there of the other and the
perceived distance between the subject and the object, the combination of a
spatial here and a temporal then. In the second of the subdivisions, ”The
voice”, the analysis will focus on the auditive representation of the other as it
manifests itself in the telephonic contact, which place the presence of the other
in a spatial there and a temporal now. The third of the subdivisions, ”The
writing”, deals with the complex scriptural relation between the protagonist
and the disappeared woman, hence the occultation of the presence of the
other resulting in the combination of a spatial there and a temporal then.
The second chapter, which is entitled ”The other and (the being of) the
world”, has two theoretical foci: the phenomenological investigations by
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which is based on a general conception of the body
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