Reading Proust: in search of the wolf-fish

Abstract

Reading Proust. In Search of the Wolf-fish. Maria Paganini. Translated by Caren Litherland with Kathryn Milun. Foreword by Christie McDonald. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 84, 1994. 265 pp. Upon opening Maria Paganini's book, her will immediately feel that they are confronted with a powerful critical personality attuned the intricacies of Marcel Proust's thinking and capable of expounding her views in excellent prose, originally written in French, but here elegantly translated by Caren Litherland and Kathryn Milun. Her will accompany her as she navigates intuitively (to use her own phrase: 22) through the novel and discover or rediscover that they are readers of themselves and gripped by the impossibility of knowing if they are analyzing the text or being analyzed by (ibid.) The author's position will be best defined if the names of Doubrovsky, Serge Gaubert and Lejeune are pronounced, but her analysis also intersects with that of a number of other commentators, one being Jeanne Bem in unjustly forgotten article of Litterature in 1980. We are further invited by Paganini's own statements situate her in relationship the cleavage between critics privilege a reading of A la recherche as organic whole on one hand and those reject the Narrator's statements as a cover-up. She seems vacillate between the two positions. While taking issue with criticism [which] jumps hasty conclusions about the text's supposed discontinuity, remaining blind the more ample systems punctuating (24) she seems (unless I misunderstand her) be in sympathy with Georges Poulet for having anticipated Deleuze and Guattari who are exceptionally sensitive the 'schizophrenia' of texts (5). The references Doubrovsky and Lejeune indicate that we have here a form of psychocritical reading of Proust's work, the exegesis being more exactly Lacanian than Freudian. To be sure, the name of the French theoretician of psychoanalysis never appears, whereas Freud is even quoted in the original German. But the use of the word jouissance (retained in French, and italicized) as well as the great attention paid signifiers are eloquent witnesses of the critic's allegiance. The signifiers are said be opaque, a qualifier that appears no fewer than thirteen times in the first four pages of the book. They are so for the Proustian subject: one of the most original insights of the author is that there is in Proust's novel an explicit recognition of others' homosexuality coupled with the surfacing of the hero's own, which exposes itself through the idiosyncrasies of Proust's writing. For the hero, it is not so much a question of shifting from ignorance a knowledge (connaissance), rashly revealed by involuntary memory. It is more a question of showing the simultaneous development of two worlds: a growing awareness of facts and thoughts and, at the same time, the opacity of these very facts and thoughts, which no elucidation will ever succeed in reducing (3). But the signifiers are also opaque for a number of critics of different persuasions, whom Paganini takes task for refusing to push the play of signifiers far enough for fear of running into a textual opacity linked unacknowledged sexuality (2). The signifiers are shown as operating in two main chains, one centering on loup, the other on rat. The former noun will immediately be recognized as the nickname used by Mme Proust (although not in the novel by the hero's mother) address her son, and it is of course one element of the name of the protagonist's closest friend. As for rat, it is only casually that the author confirms our hunch that its importance in her eyes owes something the anecdote concerning the alleged sadistic practices of the novelist.(1) An essential part of the interpretation offered is that the second chain of signifiers informs (or is informed by) a succession of stages (a point on which Paganini parts company with Jeanne Bem, had also paid attention the syllable ra), each of these being related a scenario: Tache, Consommation, Blocage and Voyeurisrne. …