 The narrator explicitly criticises such realist figures as Balzac and Jane Austen, for their rigid characters and spurious novelistic coherence; but also challenges Proust’s exploitation of involuntary memory, and his metaphoric method of approach.At the same time, the work is concerned with a sense of the body as a machine that is broken; and with male sexuality as oscillating between Apollo and Narcissus.“We give you one term of Apollo