In Search of Lost Time: A novel (novels) about evocation, not representation

Following up on yesterday's post about Marcel Proust's commentary on the art of fiction through the device of the famous writer Bergotte whom his narrator M. meets at a dinner party in "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower," Bergotte a strange conversationalist who's talk is a porridge of catty gossip, scathing critiques, and nearly opaque observations - and how is it then that he can be one of the great writers of his time? In M.'s terminology, he has reduced his personality to a mirror, to paraphrase, and is therefore a negative personality but retains the capacity to reflect all that is around him, even if what's around him is trivial, coarse, or mundane - that transformative power itself is the art of fiction - Proust probably the only great writer in history to set this as his objective and to achieve it. This pure reflective quality, the capturing of a moment, place, mood, is in most minds much more akin to poetry, especially lyric poetry, which captures and preserves a mood or an insight - a la the Grecian urn - and rarely, till Proust, associated with long fiction, which one would think would need a narrative arc, a plot, characters who grow and change, and though Proust gives all that in his In Search of Lost Time (aka Remembrance of Things Past) - his narrator does grow and learn and mature and become old, and the world around him changes as war encroaches - the essential mood of the set of novels is much like that of a poem - the famous madeleine, and also in this 2nd volume the smell from a public lavatory reminding Proust of another childhood memory - a novel entirely about evocation rather than representation.