Proust and Signs

Blurb

Proust and Signs is a 1964 book by Gilles Deleuze in which he explores the system of signs within the work of the celebrated French novelist Marcel Proust. It was translated into English by Richard Howard.
The book is divided into two parts. In the first part Deleuze looks at signs left by persons and events in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. In the chapter, "The Secondary Role of Memory," Deleuze illustrates how memory interprets the signs creatively but inaccurately. The jealous lover, for example, cannot accurately decipher the deceptions of his beloved. In the second part of the book Deleuze demonstrates how Proust's book, because of the multiplication of signs, becomes a literary machine, or rather three literary machines: of partial objects or impulses, of resources, and of forced moments.
Deleuze understands Proust as the "universal schizophrenic" whose signs weave a spider web by sending out threads to the paranoiac Charlus and the erotomaniac Albertine, all "marionettes of his own delirium" or "profiles of his own madness."