The Man With the X-Ray Eyes

There are perhaps still those who think of literature as rescuing the concrete and the sensuous and dwelling with what is irreducible to concepts and laws. Proust, for one, turns this around, and reveals the real abstraction behind the unreal 'concrete' exchanges. What he says here about dinner parties is indicative:

I was like a surgeon who beneath the smooth surface of a woman's belly sees the internal disease which is devouring it. If I went to a dinner party I did not see the guests: when I thought I was looking at them I was in fact examining them with x-rays.. the patterns of lines I had traced took the form of a collection of psychological laws in which the actual purport of the remarks of each guest occupied but a very small space.

I know the feeling. But yes, the ostensible (propositional) content counts much less than the nature of the rhetorical act, the strategies of distinction, the ways people have of postioning themselves and others. However, these 'psychological laws' are invariably also markers of class and not just psychology. (Which is why Proust is such a touchstone for Bourdieu).

Through Proust’s ‘x-ray vision’ and faculty of abstraction, the empty chatter of the dinner party is suddenly reperceived as so many signs and signals, so many fascinating markers of an otherwise hidden social structure.

Who are the great X-ray writers of the present??