Proust et le fait litteraire: reception et creation

Abstract

Mireille Naturel sets out to capture the capaciousness of the literary process (its genesis, production, and dissemination) and reflects on the various channels through which a complex cultural construction such as À la recherche du temps perdu passes en route to acquiring the status of ‘lieu de mémoire’. In Proust's case, the levers of ‘le fait littéraire’, to use Naturel's metaphor, are multiple. The early journalism, making a start on the novel, finding a publisher, securing prepublications (notably in Le Figaro), proofreading and negotiations with printers, relations with the press: these are all considered by Naturel, as is the complex posthumous configuration of a literary reputation, within which corrected galleys and deluxe first editions become prized commodities, while Proust's novel continues to be consumed in an array of forms, traditional and contemporary. Media attention, for example, has spawned ‘la médiacritique littéraire’, Jean Peytard's term including television programmes which focus on literary figures and their works and which explore visually such practices as ‘la critique génétique’. Poring over the myriad stages of production and consumption, Naturel's work offers memorable images of the materiality involved. We have the portait of Proust, unhappy with the Mercure de France's record in sending out copies of his translation La Bible d'Amiens, personally dispatching complimentary copies of his translation of Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies in 1906: ‘un travail d’épicier', he remarks, ‘avec des pelotes de ficelle de papier d'emballage et des Tout Paris’ (p. 259); or again, in 1919 Proust lubricates the system, writing two pages on the subject ‘M. Marcel Proust, Prix de l'Académie Goncourt’, which become journalist's copy for L'Éclair. Naturel's work is marked by its attention to telling detail as she records the triggers and vicissitudes of literary production. She highlights Paul Bourget's homage to the Belgian critic Charles de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul (Le Figaro, 7 July 1907), which contains Bourget's endorsement of Sainte-Beuve (‘le grand Lundiste’ in Bourget's formulation) and helps spark Proust's decision to write an article ‘contre Sainte-Beuve’; and she points to the irony whereby Proust struggled, famously as we now see it, to find a publisher for Du côté de chez Swann, whereas his friend and correspondent Georges de Lauris straightforwardly secured publication for the novel Ginette (Grasset, 1910), of which literally no copy now exists in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Among the many angles covered in Proust et le fait littéraire are Proust's reception by later canonical authors such as Duras and Le Clézio, the place of his works within French national heritage, and the relevance of the orientalism of his day, with the influence of Pierre Loti and Claude Farrère emerging strongly. Using the conduit of the literary prize (another channel for ‘le fait littéraire’), Naturel shows how Farrère's Les Civilisés (Prix Goncourt, 1905) generates an erotic colonial atmosphere (‘Saïgon, que les initiés nomment parfois Sodome et Gomorrhe’ (p. 114), writes Farrère), which Naturel sees as anticipating images of the sexualized modern metropolis to be found in À la recherche du temps perdu.