The figure of the jealous individual is fundamental in Proust's work, and its first manifestation is the character of Charles Swann. This article examines the characteristics of the jealousy novel, proposing as its central premise that there is a dislocation of narrative structure due to the intensification of the plot, and that this sets the character of the aesthete at odds the vicissitudes of bourgeois life. The proliferation of actions - material as well as speculative - that introduces jealousy undermines the problem of the autonomy of art, the central axis of bourgeois aesthetics and the guiding principle of an exponent of aestheticism like Swann. But jealousy can also imply, on the contrary, a restitution of the autonomy of art, based on the uselessness of the lover's inquiries and his total immersion in the practicalities of everyday life.
