Abstract
There are several things besides the pleasure of experiencing a masterpiece that should be noted on reading Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Most obviously, there is the asyndeton or absence of connectives, which is so pronounced that it takes considerable good will to believe that the work actually tells a story, despite the reappearance of the first-person pronoun “I.” On an initial reading, À la recherche seems rather like a skeleton that lacks many of its ligaments, however hidden by an entrancing style. Indeed, the novel overall has such an obvious lack of articulation, rather like a cursorily organized box of bones, that it has brought caustic remarks from numerous critics, among which is Melvin Maddocks’s already quoted pronouncement that Proust could not finish things and that his vaunted “unity” was nothing but dissimilar fragments.1
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Notes
Melvin Maddocks, “Marcel Proust: Witness to a Dissolving Dream,” The Christian Science Monitor, July 10, 1971, 9. More recent approaches consider this fragmentation in a more positive vein, while insisting nonetheless on the novel’s lack of coherence. Richard Terdiman mentions, for example, “the extraordinarily low degree of contingence between events and existences”— The Dialectics of Isolation: Self and Society in the French Novel from the Realists to Proust (New Haven: Yale UP, 1976) 106.
See, also, Margaret E. Gray, Postmodern Proust (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992).
For Antoine Compagnon, it is “the novel of the in-between”—Proust entre deux siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1989) 9.
Christie McDonald suggests that Proust was to an unfinished novel—The Proustian Fabric: Associations of Memory (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1992) 82–83 and chapter 6.
Although she perhaps attaches more importance than one should to the deletions in the “short version” of Albertine disparue in: A la recherche du temps perdu. Albertine disparue/Marcel Proust; Edition originale de la dernière version revue par l’auteur (Paris: Grasset, 1987), ed. Nathalie Mauriac and Etienne Wolff (Paris: Grasset, 1987), the heavily edited edition does not affect my argument. Proust’s “fragmentation” and “digressions” were designed to highlight images that are then available for readers to form a radically new structure of associative or analogical chains keyed by their own involuntary memory. See, Anne Chevalier’s discussion of the Mauriac ms. in Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–89) 4.1028–43. References to this edition will be cited parenthetically with volume and page, while other editions will be preceded by the primary editor’s name, whether Milly, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean Milly, 10 vols. (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1984–87), or Clarac, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Pierre Clarac and André Ferré, 3 vols., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1954).
Howard Moss, The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust (New York: Macmillan, 1962) 2.
Jean Rousset, Forme et signification: Essais sur les structures littéraires de Corneille à Claudel (Paris: Corti, 1962) 166.
Gaëtan Picon, Lecture de Proust (Paris: Mercure de France, 1963) 9–10.
Vincent Descombes, Proust: Philosophie du roman (Paris: Minuit, 1987), offers a particularly insightful consideration of À la recherche as a traditional, though sophisticated, novel that “projects” the protagonist’s subjective reality into an objective work of art.
Bersani, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (New York: Oxford UP, 1965) 212.
Fisher, Le symbole littéraire: Essai sur la signification du symbole chez Wagner, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Bergson et Marcel Proust (Paris: Corti, 1941) 169.
Revel, Sur Proust: Remarques sur A la recherche du temps perdu, Bibliothèque Médiations (Paris: Denoël-Gonthier, 1970) 33.
Believing that the novel as published included large quantities of extraneous material, Albert Feuillerat attempted to reconstruct what he considered an “original” version, lacking the apparent irrelevanties—Comment Marcel Proust a composé son roman (New Haven: Yale UP, 1934), an attempt that Jean-Yves Tadié has discussed in his Lectures de Proust (Paris: Armand Colin, 1971) 211–15. Robert Vigneron likewise writes of the “compromised” order of the published text—“Structure de Swann: Combray ou le cercle parfait,” Modem Philology 45 (1948): 190—and Henri Peyre claims that the À la recherche we know is “liberally encumbered with digressions and extraneous accretions”—French Novelists of Today (New York: Oxford UP, 1967) 76. For Richard Goodkin, “it became a novel of endless digression, when it lost its way and started to indulge in lengthy developments”—Around Proust (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991) 6.
Revel, Sur Proust 34. J. Vendryes took a similar position some time ago: “Marcel Proust et les noms propres” (1940), Choix d’études linguistiques et celtiques (Paris: Klincksieck, 1952) 85.
See, J. Wayne Conner, “On Balzac’s Goriot,” Symposium 8 (1954): 70.
Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Proust as Musicien, trans. Derrick Puffett, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) 36.
See, e.g, Michel Raimond, “Note sur la structure du Côté de Guermantes” Revue d’histoire littéraire 71 (1971): 854–74
Gérard Genette, Mimologiques 315–28; Jean-Yves Tadié, Proust et le roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1971)
Roger Shattuck, Proust’s Binoculars: A Study of Memory, Time and Recognition in À la recherche du temps perdu (New York: Random House, 1963); and his Marcel Proust (New York: Viking, 1974) 25–55.
Roland Barthes, “Proust et les noms,” To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday: 11 October 1966, Janua Linguarum 31.1 (1967): 152–56.
See, also, Lelong, and Nicole 464–65. It is nonetheless true that Proust’s onomastic interests began early. See, Thanh-Van Ton-That, “Problèmes d’onomastique proustienne: rêverie et poésie autour du nom dans Jean Santeuil,” Cahiers de lexicologie 67.2 (1995): 193–205. Compagnon is probably correct to claim that in the creation of the name Brichot, the phonic pairing of br and cr are more important than the possible model, Victor Brochard (132–34). Certainly, as Plottel says, his etymologies indicate that Proust “selected the names of his book very carefully” (65). I would not go so far as Quémar, who suggests that Barthes and Genette were caught in the “piège” (trap) of accepting a textual device for unconscious associations (80–81). Nor would I join with Alain Roger who advances one of the more extreme interpretations when he not only associates certain phonemes with meanings (generally sexual) but goes on to conclude that “Proust’s onomastics never gets beyond the puerile, if not pathological, level of simple psittacism or echolalia”—Proust: Les plaisirs et les noms (Paris: Denoël, 1985) 118.
Doubrovsky, Place de la madeleine 56–58; Philippe Lejeune, Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1979) 29; and Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982) 293; Seuils (1987; Paris: Seuil, 2002) 209–10—though Genette later changes his mind in Fiction et diction (Paris: Seuil, 1991) 36–37—not to mention the Feuillerats and the Vignerons of day, all insist that À la recherche is, or almost is, an autobiography. Dorrit Cohn disagrees, indicating that though Proust brushed up against autobiography, À la recherche is not autobiography—The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998) 58–78. She expands: “Granting that Proust enters into no binding pact concerning the generic status of the Recherche, that contractually his work remains ambiguous; granting as well that other criteria (of content and narrative mode) incontestably signal its nov-elistic status—how can we explain the inhibition on the part of critics to read Proust’s masterwork ‘simply’ as a novel?” (77). I might add that with the exception of discredited biographies like that of George D. Painter, who took large handfuls of “biographical” material from À la recherche, and critics like Paul de Man, Roland Barthes, and a few others, who have been limited by their post-structuralist optic, the vast majority of critics from Martin-Chauffier on have had no trouble reading the novel as a fiction, however much the author may have exploited his own, personal experiences.
Spitzer, Études de style (Paris: Gallimard, 1970) 443
Milly, La phrase de Proust (Paris: Champion, 1983) 92n44.
Deleuze, Proust et les signes (Paris: P.U.E, 1970) 131.
Victor E. Graham, “Proust’s Etymologies,” French Studies 29 (1975): 307–12; “Water Imagery and Symbolism in Proust,” Romanic Review 50 (1959): 126–27.
Dorothy Kelly, “Seeing Albertine Seeing: Barbey and Proust through Balzac,” Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature 14.2 (1990): 139–57
Brian G. Rogers, Proust et Barbey d’Aurevilly: Le dessous des cartes (Paris: H. Champion, 2000).
Jean-Jacques Nattiez points to the similarity of Guermantes and Gurnemanz— “Le septuor de Wagner,” Magazine littéraire 210 (September 1984): 48. Proust chose the name Guermantes “around the month of May 1909,” according to Philip Kolb—Carnet de 1908, Cahiers Marcel Proust, Nouv. sér. 8 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) 141n61; 185n. 392. Anthony R. Pugh believed, however, that the leaf of this notebook where the Guermantes name first appears in the manuscripts (N.A.F. 16637, fol. 35) was written in April of 1909—The Birth of À la recherche du temps perdu (Lexington: French Forum, 1987) 64. On May 23, 1909, Proust asked Georges de Lauris, whether the Guermantes name was free for artistic use—Correspondance 9.102. More than a decade later, in a 1922 letter to Martin-Chauffier, he asked about its etymology—see, Kolb, Review of The Imagery of Proust, by Victor E. Graham, Modern Language Quarterly 29 (1968): 119. Of course, Proust was perfectly capable of sketching out these etymologies, which may have influenced his choice of imagery around the name, as Graham suggests, and moreover his choice of the name itself. We cannot be certain, though it seems very likely.
Florence Hier, La musique dans l’œuvre de Marcel Proust (New York: Columbia UP, 1933) 45
Georges Piroué, Proust et la musique du devenir (Paris: Denouël, 1960) 107–08. Nattiez argues convincingly that “[l]ike Parsifal, À la recherche is a work whose hero is on a quest for redemption” (“Septuor” 32). Daniele Gasiglia-Laster goes into some detail in respect to the parallels between Wagner’s “filles-fleurs” (flowering girls) and those of Proust (in the Milly edition—2.40–41). Margaret Mein argues that Proust thought at one point of insisting on the parallels between the redemption of Amfortas, the
Fisher King, and Swann in Le temps retrouvé—“Proust and Wagner,” Journal of European Studies 19 (1989): 205–22.
Rina Viers says twice, “The Narrator is identified with Parsifal”—“La signification des fleurs dans L’œuvre de Marcel Proust,” Bulletin de la société des amis de Marcel Proust et des amis de Combray 25 (1975): 158–59. Jean-Marc Rodrigues shows conclusively that Proust’s love of Wagner must be distinguished from the shallow fin-de-siècle Wagnerism—“Genèse du wagnerisme proustien,” Romantisme 17.57 (1987): 75–88. Of Proust’s many epistolary references to Wagner, the following seems particularly telling: “The more Wagner is legendary, the more I find him human. His most splendid artifices of the imagination seem to me nothing but the symbolic and gripping language of human truths”—Letter 239 to Reynaldo Hahn, May? 1895, Correspondance, ed. Philip Kolb, 21 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1970–93) 1.383.
Anna Louise Frey, The Swan-Knight Legend (Nashville: George Peabody College, 1931) 5–6. Proust explicitly mentions Gurnemantz, Parsifal, and Wagner in his letter of 6 February 1914 to Jacques Rivière, and elsewhere. He unquestionably knew the legend well.
Will L. McLendon, “Lettre de Marcel Proust à Léon Bailby,” Bulletin de la société des amis de Marcel Proust 21 (1971): 1124n5.
E.g., Rousset, Forme et signification 135–70; Louis Bolle, Marcel Proust ou le complexe d’Argus (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1967) 216–42; Raimond, “Note sur la structure du Côté de Guermantes” 854–74; Tadié, Roman, esp. 236–92; Gérard Genette, “Métonymie chez Proust, ou la naissance du récit,” Poétique 2 (1970): 156–73; Jean Ricardou, “‘Miracles’ de L’analogie.”
See the excellent development on an author’s necessary creation of his or her reader: Warren Motte, Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century (Champaign: Dalkey Archive, 2008) 17–37. While it is to some degree always true, it is especially important in some novels, when the reader must become the artist in order to create the work.
Godenne, “La bibliothèque de L’homme de L’an 2440 selon L.S. Mercier,” French Review 45 (1972): 579.
Ricardou, Problèmes du nouveau roman (Paris: Seuil, 1967) 178. Pascal Ifri, who focuses specifically on À la recherche and, in particular, on the nar-rataire or narratee (the textual character or consciousness whom a narrator addresses), says, “The narratee gives the narrator’s enterprise the entirety of its meaning”—Proust et son narrataire dans À la recherche du temps perdu (Geneva: Droz, 1983) 200. Gerda Blumenthal has perceptively considered the Proustian permutations of reading: Thresholds: A Study of Proust (Birmingham: Summa, 1984).
Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (London: J.C. Hotten, 1872), p. 662.
Cocteau, Journal d’un inconnu (Paris: Grasset, 1953) 153.
Louis Martin-Chauffier, “Proust et le double ‘je’ de quatre personnes,” Problèmes du roman, ed. Jean Prévost (rpt. Lyon: Confluences, 1943) 60.
Suzuki, Bulletin de la société des amis de Marcel Proust et des amis de Combray 9 (1959): esp. 80–82.
Mukarovsky, Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts, trans. Mark Suino, Michigan Slavic Contributions, no. 3 (Ann Arbor: Department of Slavic Languages, University of Michigan, 1970) 91–92.
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© 2010 Allan H. Pasco
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Pasco, A.H. (2010). Proust’s Reader. In: Inner Workings of the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117433_5
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