It is thus Bakhtin's conception of the novel as a carnivalesque, parodic meeting-place of all genres which seems to elucidate best the Proustian project. Perhaps because dialogism is essentially an oral concept, it applies particularly well to Proust's written discourse, itself so connected to orality. Dialogues of structure and genre exist alongside the dialogues of words. Meaning is located in the dialogic process of interaction between various types of texts, voices and languages. As David Lodge and Lennard Davis have each suggested in a slightly different context, as soon as a variety of literary forms or genres is allowed into a textual space – highly reader-conscious discourses like journalism or letters, expressly ironic forms like parodies or pastiches, third-person narration alongside first-person – a resistance is established to the domination of any single form.

Does the advent of this newly purposeful author at the end of A la recherche mean that peace has been made with the question of the nerves and their anxieties? In his discussions of artistic individuality, Proust connects the idea of intermittence and recurrence to the individual's nervous makeup. But what thematic recurrence lays bare is a purified version of the composer's or the painter's nervous physiognomy, the essence of their individuality which, in the case of normal human exchange, remains incommunicable: