L'Ironie proustienne: la vision stéréoscopique The Gardens of Desire: Marcel Proust and the Fugitive Sublime

Abstract

By Sophie Duval. (Recherches proustiennes, 3). Paris, Champion. 2004. 516 pp. Hb £73.95; €85.00. By Stephen Gilbert Brown. Albany, State University of New York Press, 2004. x + 243 pp. Hb $50.00. After an initial Introduction offering a summary of recent studies of irony, Sophie Duval's study is in four parts, each, disconcertingly, with its own introduction and conclusion, and separately numbered chapters. Each part is devoted to one aspect of irony in A la recherche du temps perdu. Part One outlines ‘ironie explicite’ as practised by the characters and identified as such by the narrator. In Sophie Duval's terminology, the ‘je’ involved in the adventures of the text is ‘le héros’; the ‘je’ who comments, ‘le narrateur’; ‘héros’ and ‘narrateur’ combine in ‘le protagoniste’, and the author/creator/Proust is ‘le démiurge’. Duval argues that the ironic, detached stance of fashionable society fosters the dilettantism that makes Swann and Charlus ‘célibataires de l'art’, but the sterile irony of the characters nourishes the global irony of the narrator, who out-ironizes their ironies. The naïve ‘héros’ moves from illusion to experience and understanding, becoming ‘sage’, and thus absorbed into the ‘protagoniste’. In Part Two, on the satiric mode, Duval concludes that Proust's novel is not a ‘satire romanesque’ but a ‘roman satirique’, in which ‘le héros’ explores Hell, but escapes the infernal circles of satire by devoting himself to truth and creation. Part Three deals with ‘L'Ironie romanesque’, irony in the Socratic manner (‘maïeutique’), educative for both narrator and reader, while Part Four, ‘L'Ironie démiurgique’, treats the novel in its totality, stressing its overall reflexivity. Duval analyses various verbal exchanges and social encounters as transactions occurring at different (named and numbered) levels of irony, regarding almost all as indicating the presence of the demiurge in the text. References to external realities in the text are also seen as indicating the extra-textual reality of the demiurge. Proustian irony ultimately becomes the ‘ironie autophagique d'un auteur comme atteint de dépersonnalisation’ (p. 460), ‘un moi qui n'est pas “je”’(p. 461). The conclusion of Part Four suggests that as the ‘hero’ discovers himself in the mirror of others, so the demiurge finds the truth of his existence in the mirror of his creation. The book's Conclusion presents Proust's novel as ‘une œuvre de fuite’, in which the ‘ironie démiurgique’ reveals how the creator creates and organizes the novel-material. This weighty book has the thoroughness of a doctoral thesis, but does little to evoke the actual experience and delight of reading Proust. Subtle analyses cast light on some contentious issues for serious Proustians and irony specialists, but exhaustive definitions and over-meticulous classifications often swamp valid points, while Duval's use of Greek forms (l'eiron, les éthè, l'alazon, l'anagnorisis) and fondness for terms like ‘analepse’, ‘tmèse’, ‘axiologique’, ‘anamorphose’, ‘hypostases’ do not make for easy reading. The book has a useful index for names and themes, and an extensive but oddly arranged bibliography. English-language works are (predictably) absent.