Wandering Among Models: Stendhal, Proust, Sebald

This paper draws on twofold fictional landscapes; the imaginary landscapes emerging in the writings of Stendhal, Marcel Proust and W.G. Sebald as well as the invented landscapes evoked by the architectural model. Stendhal’s extensive travels are reflected in his novels, several memoirs, art criticism and guidebooks. Similarly, the topic of travelling saturates Sebald’s fiction and essays: the restless flight and the contemplative promenade in various ways frame his outstanding and existential configurations of architecture. Despite the fact that the protagonist of A la recherche is a reluctant and anxious traveler, the longing for experiencing new places are of profound importance in Proust’s oeuvre. One after another, the architectural models in Stendhal’s Mémoires d’un touriste (1838), Proust’s A l’Ombre des jeunes Filles en fleurs (1918) and Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995) destabilize the rapports between descriptions and geographies, fantasies and landscapes. In Stendhal, Proust and Sebald (almost) real places and real models are inscribed in imaginary journeys, presenting landscapes in which we, the readers, can wander among models, guided by the protagonist-narrator. The collection of cork models of Roman monuments Stendhal encounter at Nîmes, the plaster cast of the doorway of the ‘Persian’ Balbec Church ad the Trocadéro Museum in Paris, and the hyper-detailed model of the temple of Jerusalem that ‘Sebald’ comes across walking through East Anglia on foot, in complex ways unfolds the powerful autonomy of the architectural model.