Settling Scores with Vinteuil: Musical Textures in Proust and Echenoz

Abstract

This paper explores two notable moments in the history of musically inspired fiction: Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and Jean Echenoz’s Cherokee. Focusing on the understudied question of music considered as a textural model for literary representation, I ask what the depictions of musical performances in these two novels reveal about their authors’ larger representational projects, and suggest that they provide revealing insights into their respective views on the relationship between foreground and background, character and place, consciousness and world. In this sense, it is possible to read the musical passages in Cherokee as a kind of ironic rejoinder to Proust’s depictions of Vinteuil’s music, elucidating Echenoz’s decision to set aside almost all consideration of his characters’ interiority in favour of an externalist poetics of surfaces and contingent encounters.