Mourning and Creativity in Proust by Anna Magdalena Elsner

Abstract

 Reviews of the visual and the aural in the new field of reportage. e final two chapters are organized not around individual authors but around emergent archetypes in the period, namely the journalist detective (specifically Gaston Leroux’s Rouletabille and Jérôme Fandor from the Fantômas series) and the woman journalist (as depicted in Marcelle Tinayre’s La Rebelle (), Camille Pert’s Leur égale (), the Margueritte brothers’ Femmes nouvelles (), and Eugène Brieux’s play La Femme seule ()). Rees produces rich and detailed readings of all the texts she considers, unfolding their complexities with great subtlety while drawing in ideas from fields as diverse as phenomenology and remediation theory. A substantial and significant research content has been orchestrated with a sure touch, resulting in a monograph which will be of interest not only to dix-neuviémistes but to anyone concerned with the relationship between literature and journalism, and the latter’s role in shaping modern culture. K’ C L E B Mourning and Creativity in Proust. By A M E. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. . xx+ pp. £.. ISBN ––––. Anna Magdalena Elsner’s book provides a rich and fascinating account of the multifaceted quality of mourning in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. It describes mourning as a never-ending process through which the complex dynamics of the relationship between the self and the other come to the fore, and considers Proust’s depiction of this process with regard to its aesthetic, social, and ethical dimensions. In Elsner’s view, Proust’s discourse of mourning evokes the ancient connection between melancholia and creativity while at the same time urging us to reconsider this ancient topos by exposing the ethical implications of the creative responses triggered by loss (Elsner engages a quite broad definition of creativity, encompassing ‘all forms of activity, movement and expression that occur aer a period of emotional standstill’ (p. )). e ethical significance of Proust’s association of mourning and creativity is carefully teased out in the book through perceptive close readings of scenes of mourning from the novel; these are set in dialogue with philosophical voices such as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Emmanuel Levinas. Derrida in particular becomes a fertile interlocutor for Elsner, not least because, as she convincingly claims, Proustian mourning ‘confirms and simultaneously adds to’ (p. ) the Derridean idea of deuil impossible—mourning as a necessarily impossible act intrinsically linked to our ethical responsibility for those we mourn. e cornerstone in the book’s theoretical framework is Sigmund Freud’s work on mourning, and while his foundational essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ () is given ample attention, the book profits greatly from the author’s willingness to engage with the entire range of Freud’s thoughts on mourning. roughout the book, a variety of texts are discussed that allow Elsner to identify a significant shi in Freud’s perspectives on mourning, according to which, crucially, his later work ‘no longer distinguishes between mourning and melancholia, and proposes MLR, .,   that mourning, like melancholia, might be an interminable process’ (p. ). is shi contributes to making Freud so central to the book’s reading of Proust, since Proustian mourning too, Elsner argues, is characterized by interminability. is is illustrated by the two main examples of the study (the narrator’s mourning over his grandmother and Albertine), both of which depict mourning as ‘an interminable process forever trapped between anticipation and belatedness’ (p. ). While the ‘distorted time-structure of mourning’ (p. ) is the subject of Chapter , Chapter  excavates the novel’s ‘topography of mourning’ (p. ). Drawing on Freud’s de- finition of the uncanny as ‘deriving from a shiing and thereby fluid distinction between imagination and reality’ (p. ), Elsner persuasively argues that when the seemingly familiar spaces of Balbec, Venice, and Paris are re-experienced in the wake of loss, they turn into uncanny ‘spaces of mourning as the narrator’s inner grief slowly invades the exterior reality in which [mourning] is experienced’ (p. ). e section on Paris centres on the wartime passage of Le Temps retrouvé, in which Proust explores mourning as a public and collective experience. In Elsner’s shrewd analysis of this passage...