Proust and the Squiggle Game

This article examines a recently discovered free-hand drawing from Marcel Proust to his former lover and lifelong friend, the composer Reynaldo Hahn. After unfurling the drawing’s concatenation of intimate and cultural references, including to works by La Fontaine and Massenet, I highlight shared themes of suffering and comfort in two better-known ‘medieval’ traced drawings from Proust to Hahn. Using Marion Milner’s and D. W. Winnicott’s theorisation of the ‘free drawing method’ and the ‘squiggle game’, I argue that Proust’s drawings to Hahn can be read as a pictorial trace of, and tribute to, the creative valence of the two men’s unique relationship during a crucial period: 1904–1906, immediately preceding the first known drafts of À la recherche du temps perdu. Finally, I suggest that these drawings have significant echoes in the widely commented madeleine scene at the onset of Du côté de chez Swann, where the narrator first unlocks his own repository of subjective images and his potential to plunge inward.