Reading in Proust’s A la recherche: ‘le délire de la lecture’ by Adam Watt

Abstract

Reid makes clear that her methodology for studying all three kinds of curiosity in question is firmly grounded in the psychoanalytical writings of Melanie Klein, particularly in Klein’s work with the notion of epistemophelia, i.e. the desire to know and the pleasure of knowing, which Reid equates with curiosity itself. Of course, this is not the first time that Gide’s work has been read through the perspective of psychoanalytical theory, but through the Kleinian lens, Reid’s approach focuses specifically on curiosity understood in light of such notions as fetishism, the mother imago, and the dynamics of the unresolved depressive position. Within this framework, Reid underscores the real-life impact of Gide’s complicated relationship to his own homosexuality (as a kind of auto-curiosity), as well as what she describes as his incuriosity toward women. She argues that it is in Gide’s passage from anxieties about the feminine in his life and in his psyche to the discovery of authentic self-assertion as a writer in the space identified as a masculine realm—his father’s library—that he reconciles these antimonies and emerges as a highly productive creative writer. Of the three sections Reid proposes, perhaps the most engaging is that on writerly curiosity, in which she explores not only the author’s own curiosity toward the world and toward the interpretation of the world in literary language, but also the curiosity Gide aimed to provoke in his readership by creating a “curious” text, not unlike Barthes’s idea of a texte lisible. In an examination of two core elements in Gide’s authorial process, observer and manifester, Reid argues that it is ultimately in the vital, defiant image of the energy of Prometheus that we can discover the true nature of curiosity for Gide, the writer ever fearful of opening Pandora’s box. University of Oklahoma Pamela A. Genova WATT, ADAM. Reading in Proust’s A la recherche: ‘le délire de la lecture’. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. ISBN 978-0-19-956617-4. Pp. 193. $120.00. Adam Watt’s study of the importance of reading in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu has many qualities, not the least of which is completeness. Although many critics have grasped the importance of reading as one of the large themes of the novel, few have followed the development of the topic from the beginning of the narrative until its conclusion. Watt takes us through the Recherche and shows us the extent to which the act of reading pervades the text, and the ways in which the narrator’s spiritual development, his interiorized Bildung, depends upon a gradual learning-to-read. Watt’s study is divided into five chapters, followed by a concise epilogue. In chapter 1 (“Primal Scenes of Reading”), he attends to the two crucial scenes in the novel’s first volume which stage the act of reading: the mother’s reading of George Sand’s François le Champi to the narrator at the close of the scène du baiser, and the episode (made famous or infamous by Paul de Man’s interpretation of it in Allegories of Reading) in which the narrator reads for himself, first in the “obscure fraîcheur” of his room, then in the garden, away from his family. For the scene of the good-night kiss, Watt judiciously uses Freud’s notion of the “primal scene.” For the episode of the narrator’s solitary reading, Watt comes to a conclusion that is central to his thesis, but that may not convince all readers of Proust. In speaking of de Man’s conclusions, he states: “the imagery found in this 818 FRENCH REVIEW 84.4 passage might suggest unreadability if we seek, with de Man, to interpret the text in a strict and rigidly logical fashion. But the narrator is not interested in making logical claims here and if we are really interested in reading we should not feel bounded by a need to support them” (30). Yet whatever Watt’s reader feels or judges concerning the making of logical claims in a literary text, certainly one of the virtues of Watt’s elucidating readings...