Sound is sufficiently prominent in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, the text ringing with church bells, doorbells and footsteps, that early readers such as Jean Cocteau wrote of hearing the work rather than reading it. Listening has often been a way for literature to discuss limits. As Angela Leighton notes, ‘Both the ear's limitation, and the unnerving reach and ubiquity of sound, are facts explored by literature's own awareness of the written word's mixed silence and audibility’. Where, as often in Proust, the physical body is immobile or contained, the ‘reach’ of sound comes to hold a special ability both to define a space and to traverse its visual boundaries.

As Margaret Topping notes, Proust's narrator ‘undertakes journeys of proximity […] disentangling the notion of travel from that of physical mobility’, exemplifying Jean-Didier Urbain's ‘endotic’, or vertical, travel. Ideas of vertical travel have often exhibited, as Charles Forsdick has shown, a desire ‘to disrupt the connection between horizontalism and ocularcentrism, and to suggest that the microspection it entails is a multisensory practice’. Among the many twentieth-century writers calling for an end to tired notions of the exotic informed by the primacy of horizontal exploration of new geographies, Victor Segalen, writing contemporaneously to Proust in his ‘Essay on Exoticism’, speaks of the need to ‘[s]trip Exoticism of its “geographic” component’, focusing instead on ‘[t]he love of other worlds, the world of sound, for example’. Sound plays a crucial role in Proust's geography of space and time, as horizontal travel is overtaken by the role of memory, offering journeys through past time. As conventional journeying across physical space is interrupted by the imposition of limits on the travelling body, new opportu-nities arise for the travelling mind. In this chapter, I would like to focus on how Proust simultaneously exploits three alternatives to conventional travel, with the audible rivalling the visual, the vertical taking precedence over the horizontal, and time conquering space.