Marcel Proust Research Articles

Marcel Proust by Michael Wood (review)

Marcel Proust by Michael Wood (review)

From Folklore to Proust: A Quest across Symbolic Universes

This study explores the intersection of folklore and literature, specifically examining how a methodology developed for interpreting wondertales can be applied to a complex literary corpus, such as Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). The discussion proposes a case study for the use of allomotifs, or interchangeable motifs, to understand symbolic patterns in Proust’s literary work. The paper lays bare a widespread metaphorical field in wondertales, then follows its complications in the Proustian corpus. It suggests that Proust’s œuvre, much like folklore, operates within a symbolic universe where binary oppositions, such as good and evil or male and female, are fluid and dynamic. The discussion shows that Proust’s literary imagination aligns surprisingly well with the workings of folklore. This hybrid space of the imagination challenges conventional distinctions between folklore and literature, and brings to mind Lévi-Strauss’ erstwhile ruminations on the pensée sauvage.

Mere light

ABSTRACT The special issue Mere Light examines hidden paradoxes of light, perhaps the most conventional imagistic figure known to literature and philosophy alike. In this introduction, the editors lay out the stakes of the special issue, while offering brief readings of passages from Roland Barthes, Marcel Proust, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, and Arthur Schopenhauer that disrupt some of light’s conventional associations – as an unproblematic emblem of meaning, mimesis, truth, or the aesthetic itself – to reveal a deeper obscurity.

Inquisitive racialization or race after secularization: a critical phenomenological approach

ABSTRACT In this article, we develop the notion of ‘inquisitive racialization’, to elaborate a critical phenomenological perspective on how the expectation that religion should be privatized and/or made invisible under secularization can enable, and even stimulate, a specific form of racialization. We show that this is specifically relevant for understanding antisemitism and Islamophobia, discussing two literary and theatrical works: a fragment from the novel In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (written between 1909–1922) and Rachida Lamrabet’s five-minute play Projet deburkanisation. We try to make plausible that a critical phenomenological approach enables us to bring into focus structural and everyday interpersonal, social, bodily, and affective dimensions of religion-related securitization and racialization. We discuss the influential notion of the ‘lived experience’ (l’expérience vécue), introduced by Frantz Fanon, trying to adapt it to contexts in which the racialization has an important religious component, discussing notions of proteophobia (Zygmunt Bauman) and opacity (Édouard Glissant) in connection to phenomenological works by, among others Alia Al-Saji, Gail Weiss and Sara Ahmed.

WFH at the Maison de Molière: the Comédie-Française’s use of rehearsal to respond to Covid-19

ABSTRACT France’s policy of confinement in response to Covid-19 posed an existential threat to theatres. The Comédie-Française responded with a range of digital and cinematic programming. This article examines Christophe Honoré’s film Guermantes (2021), created following the cancellation of his stage adaptation of Marcel Proust’s Le Côté de Guermantes, and Théâtre à la table, a series of staged readings posted to YouTube between November 2020 and June 2021. These projects are notable for how they centred rehearsal. The article shows how the Comédie-Française mobilised the intimacy of the rehearsal room to compensate for the loss of corporeal presence, and then interrogates Guermantes’s argument for the aesthetic value of rehearsal as an end in itself. However, while these works claim to show the process rather than the product, they in fact show little of the repetitive work of the répétition. Both were also preceded by rehearsals to which audiences were not given access. Noting the proliferation in recent years of rehearsal diaries and documentaries in France, the article concludes by arguing that the Comédie-Française’s response to the pandemic reflects a broader interrogation in contemporary French theatre of the aesthetic value of the rehearsal.

Writing the mire – ‘for we are loom’

ABSTRACT In this essay, I am in-conversation with Proust was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer [2008, Proust was a Neuroscientist. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company]. I engage with Lehrer’s chapters focusing Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and Paul Cézanne. This essay is a contribution to an ongoing conversation with Professors Kate Coles and Jen Webb regarding the distinctions, or lack thereof, between narrative and the lyric, within the context of broader discussions about genre classifications (Great Writing 2023, 2024). In this essay, I respond to Coles and Webb’s provocative question: What is it you mean, they ask, when you use the term realism? I consider this question from a practice-led perspective, as a writer who loves to read, and a writer-researcher who is drawn to neuro-psychoanalytic approaches to writing and creativity. I’m drawn to the quagmire of memory, as a primary source of stimulus for creative practice. My understanding of what I have come to call narrative lyricism is that it is a form of writing in which narrative may exist in ghost. Its incompleteness (if evaluated within traditional expectations of complication and dénouement) reflects the complicated (which is to say entangled) nature of the operations of memory.

Son et lumière in Proust

ABSTRACT Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is underpinned by an enduring tension between sight and the other senses. Conventional scholarship on Proust claims that the visual pole of this tension is linked to the intellect, as opposed to the association of the remaining senses with intuition and the unfathomable. This reading, however, presents an oversimplification of the complex economy of the senses explored by Proust insofar as it falls prey to visualism, a theoretical predisposition characterised by a double reduction of the perceptual experience. Challenging this tendency, this article draws on sensorial cross-modality and multisensory processes in order to interrogate the connection between sunlight and song in Proust’s novel. In particular, we focus on the ‘little barometer man’ at the start of La Prisonnière, whom the narrator anticipates singing on his death bed ‘if there is a blink of sun’. We also consider this Proustian connection between song and sunlight in light of a longer tradition, including St Francis of Assisi’s ‘Canticle of Brother Sun’ and the statue of Memnon’s dawn song. Proust’s consequent demythologising of light and his materialist approach to song support an attempt to consider light shorn of its usual metaphorical connotations.

Cognitive-epistemological, pragmatic, and psycholinguistic aspects of French interjections

Interjections as a lexical and grammatical category still belong to the interdisciplinary lacunae, as they require the concretization of interpretations in various aspects: terminological definitions, pragmatic functions, cognitive reception by a speaker, and an adequate reproduction by an addressee. Their functional capabilities to reflect and combine emotional and rational, verbal and non-verbal information in communication are significant. Interjections are closely related to a speech act, the mental characteristics of its participants, verbal and non-verbal means of communication, context, and objective reality. The current study aims to analyze the determinative interpretations and lexical and grammatical structures of interjections as a universal category used for determining communicative and pragmatic functions. A part of the psychological epic In Search of Lost Time/“A la recherche du temps perdu” – “Albertine Disappears” (“Albertine Disparue”) by Marcel Proust (1925) serves as a research material. Interjections, as a universal category, hold a prominent place in the lexical and grammatical system of languages. As a result of conducted quantitative analysis of interjections, the most common interjections discovered in the studied literary French-language text were one-word interjections, ‘oh!’ ‘ah!’, and ‘hélas!’, which, depending on the author’s illocutionary intention, their pragmatic function, as well as their position in the remark - at the beginning, in the middle or at the end - can create a range of meanings according to their emotional effect, such as hope, disappointment, doubt, embarrassment, confirmation, denial, request or call to action. Conversely, the texts frequently comprise interjection phrases that convey the processes of reflection on the inner experiences of a particular character and their psychological state. This, in turn, reveals the process of their personality development. Disclosure Statement The authors reported no potential conflicts of interest. * Corresponding author: Oksana Rohach, 0000-0002-5304-0837oksanarog@vnu.edu.ua

The Work of Art as a Fictionalized Duplicate of Life: Boris Lehman's Babel film project in the Light of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time

Belgian filmmaker Boris Lehman has created what is surely the most ambitious film diary in the history of cinema, Babel, a twenty-four-hour film divided into nine parts and several appendices, which traces a sort of sublimated filmic duplicate of the author's life between 1983 and 2020. In Babel, Lehman painstakingly records the daily activities of his life: eating breakfast, walking, talking with friends, traveling, playing the piano, being evicted, looking for a job or paying his taxes. Despite the appearance of a realistic duplicate, the filmmaker claims for his film the denomination of "autobiographical fiction". How can we understand this mismatch between the everyday reality suggested by the film and the fictional will that the author proposes as a key to reading it? This article proposes to consider this fictional quality of Lehman's autobiographical project in the light of the aesthetic proposal crystallized in Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, which Gérard Genette proposed to call "autofiction".

Приключения кекса ″Мадлен″ в России: заметки о переводах романа М. Пруста В поисках утраченного времени

″The powerful joy″ (une puissante joie), ″the delicious pleasure″ (un plaisir délicieux) is a very important motive of Marcel Proust’s novel A la Recherche du temps perdu. It is represented in the famous episode of the novel, that is the narrator’s remembrances initiated by the Petite Madeleine. The narrator analyses this ecstatic gastronomic experience and creates a new form of retrospective reflection which is considered as one of the aesthetic inventions by M. Proust and as one of the foundations of the novel’s project. The article describes how this retrospective gastronomic reflection is represented in Russian translations. There are at least three unfinished Russian versions of the novel but nevertheless the completely correct translation of the Petite Madeleine episode doesn’t exist. As a starting point and as a model of the M. Proust’s novel this episode seems to be an important material for analyzing peculiarities of a reception of the French writer’s work in Russia and for developing an interpretation of A la Recherche du temps perdu.

Legal Vocabulary as a Means of Conceptualization of Cultural Communicative Situations by Aristocrats in Marcel Proust’s Novel

The author of the article argues that during the Third Republic French aristocrats used legal terms figuratively in their communication as is evidenced in Marcel Proust’s novel. The paper presents legal terms which, used metaphorically and in similes, create a certain cultural code for the personages’ private communication. Communicative situations (secular and political) employing figurative legal terms whose meaning can be perceived only by French aristocrats and their closest social circle, creating a special code for message exchange, served as material for our study. In order to describe these situations, Marcel Proust resorts to general legal vocabulary, the terms of Constitutional Law, Civil Law, International Public Law, as well as some concepts of the history of the French Law. The main methods of our study are semantic, linguistic, stylistic and contextual types of analysis. The relevance of our article could be justified by the fact that, to our knowledge, there are no scientific papers on stylistic devices, based on specialist terminology, in a literary text, or in communication. Linguists are interested in the functioning of specialist terminology as well as in the issues of classification and analysis of different stylistic devices. With regard to the stylistic analysis, we may say that the Guermants, the personages of the novel, are capable of impacting the opinion of their interlocutors in many subtle ways, just like journalists impact the viewpoints of their readers while covering political events in the news. For this purpose, they also resort to different delicate and ingenious techniques, such as play on words, aiming at belittling someone in the eyes of others. The inability of the readers to understand the meaning of some of their statements featuring legal terms to refer to some larger cultural and communicative situations, is one way for the Guermants to underline their own uniqueness, treating the people around them in terms of in-(out-)group members. Numerous communicative situations related to the figurative use of legal vocabulary allow the writer to represent Marcel’s disappointment by the aristocrats’ world he is now familiar with, as well as his misunderstanding of Baron de Charlus’ sensual hints, and total incomprehension of the new modern art by the Duke of Guermants.

A Minor Subject: Habit and Subjectivity in Modernist Literature and Philosophy


 
 
 In this essay, I intend to investigate some of the aspects of the resurgence of habit at the dawn of the twentieth century by touching upon a series of paradigmatic texts of the modernist canon and by investigating their debts to and consonances with the contemporary philosophies of habit. My thesis is that during those decades – seen as a mere chapter in the longer history of modernity – the philosophical and literary theme of habit served not only as a way to understand and represent the ordinary dimension of life, but also as a means to develop an idea of human subjectivity that could mediate between the centrifugal and the centripetal tendencies that permeated the competing ideologies of the time. The crisis of subjectivity that characterized modernism and which has often been simplistically represented as a disintegration of the subject into irredeemably broken fragments, should rather be seen as the development of a dialectical idea of a “minor subject”, that is, an open, dynamic, multilayered subjectivity still endowed by a certain malleable consistency. Both modernist literature and its philosophical counterparts found in the “minor subject” (here in the sense of “subject matter”) of habit, the opportunity to investigate and represent the porosity between activity and passivity, volition and determinism, individual identity and social structures, that characterize this idea of subjectivity.
 I focus on three different representative – though not exhaustive – facets of the issue. In the first section, relying on Virginia Woolf's work, I highlight how some of the narrative techniques developed by Modernist writers can be seen as an attempt to give a plastic representation to the blurred boundaries of subjectivity as captured in the everyday existence of their characters. I then connect these innovations to the theory of habit of Samuel Butler, whom Woolf identified as one of the harbingers of modernity. In the second section I focus on Marcel Proust to discuss how modernist writers proved to be able to combine two opposed views of habit: on the one hand, the view of habit as purely mechanical and leading to inauthentic life; on the other, the idea of habit as essential to the human being's potential for self-perfecting and creativity. The third section is dedicated to addiction, seen as a form of habit in which the subject is radically torn between opposite forces. Following insights from Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I interpret Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience as a meditation on how such a torn subjectivity manifests the essential incompleteness of the human subject and life's insuppressible nostalgia for the inorganic.
 Virginia Woolf’s blurred boundaries, Marcel Proust’s ambiguous authenticity, and Italo Svevo’s split selfhood are three interconnected facets of the modernists’ interest in the “minor subject” of habit. Investigating the interaction between the philosophical and the literary discourses on habit at the dawn of the twentieth century can contribute to a more nuanced reconstruction of a pivotal moment in the history of thought but also to the contemporary philosophical debate. Almost exactly one century later, the renewed interest in the theme of habit mirrors a situation in part similar to what characterized the ideological landscape of the time, as now too it is concerned with the attempt to reimagine a “minor subject” that mediates between the postmodern pulverization of identity and the temptation of reaffirming anachronistic forms of strong subjectivities.
 
 

Réveiller la mémoire de l’espèce. La récapitulation haeckelienne et la race de Lahor à Proust

ABSTRACT This article revisits the foundation of Haeckel’s theory of recapitulation, that is to say, the bodily reincarnation of a species within an individual, which takes place within the broader context of interspecies competition. All individuals carry within them their race, and this is what differentiates them from others and places them in opposition with others. This image is ideally suited to poetry and to fiction, where the individual becomes loaded with multiple voices, which transcend him or her. These voices are not immemorial, but on the contrary, loaded with memory. We will be exploring these whispers of an incarnated memory as a vehicle for racial theories in the poems of Jean Lahor and in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.

On Listening and Failure: Roger Laporte with Marcel Proust

Abstract: This essay reads Roger Laporte’s Une voix de fin silence (A voice of fine silence), the second volume of his idiosyncratic work Une vie (A life), in dialogue with the early volumes of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu ( In Search of Lost Time ). A constellation emerges from the analysis that allows us to consider the interrelations and interdependence of Laporte’s text, his work as a critic on Proust, and the Recherche itself. The essay argues that Laporte’s textual engagement with Proust allows us to re-evaluate notions of literary failure so as to redefine what counts as the success of a literary project conceived as a writing about writing and becoming a writer. Both Proust and Laporte practice a literary writing that evokes mental experience while never being synonymous with it because, as their texts demonstrate, mental and literary experience can never coincide perfectly. Laporte labels the writer’s search a “listening,” a precarious activity which, like failure, is impossible to summon on command and which can only be recognized as such in retrospect as a motor of literary creation.

'Nous aimons les spectacles exotiques': Queerness, Jewishness, and the Performance of Normality in Proust's Recherche

ABSTRACT: The nexus between Jewishness, queerness, and performativity runs throughout Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27). I argue that by foregrounding the theatricality of Jewishness and queerness, Proust reveals their social construction. In doing so, he destabilizes the concept of normality, exposing its factitiousness in a seemingly reformed society still dominated by exclusionary dictates. Examining instances of spectacle and unmasking, I demonstrate how the failure of the performance of normality challenges its myth of naturality. Proust's use of a dramatic lexicon to deconstruct identity offers a powerful response to the budding discourse of French fascism.

The Cultural Memory and the Cganging Moralities in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time

The Cultural Memory and the Cganging Moralities in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time

«Умная дикция» Адриана Антоновича Франковского в переводе Марселя Пруста

The article discusses Adrian Frankovsky’s method in his Marcel Proust translations in the 1920s–1930s. We analyse translations, their drafts, and Frankovsky’s forewords which were never republished and translation synopses preserved in his archive. The traditional rebuke of Frankovsky for literal rendering of Proust’s syntax is counterposed with a view on the task of translation as hermeneutical, as a “critical mime” of the original (Friedrich Schlegel) that precisely for this reason requires “literal rendering of syntax” (Walter Benjamin) and “supra-philological exactitude” (Gustav Shpet). Frankovsky’s philosophical education and translating experience preceding Proust project (modern German philosophy, Descartes, Oswald Spengler, Heinrich Wölfflin, Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, contemporary French prose, primarily Henri de Régnier) made him the adequate and essentially modern Russian translator for Proust. His paratexts to translations reveal his specific approach to fiction: Frankovsky was interested in the lucid, analytic manner of thought, intellectual humour, and irony, i. e., features primarily represented in syntax and historically underdeveloped in the Russian language. His other reference point was the idea of “noble clarity” coined by Mikhail Kuzmin, who appealed to Russian prose writers to learn “the laws of lucid harmony and ordonnance” in the “construction of periods and phrases” from European literature. Underlining in Proust’s prose similar qualities of “amazing, incredible precision,” “extraordinary precision,” “unprecedented precision,” and “the desire to achieve the most possible precision,” Frankovsky parted with the mainstream Proust criticism of his time that focused on the French writer’s minute analysis of involuntary psychological movements and sided with (or, rather, followed) Ernst Curtius and Vladimir Vejdle’s approach focused on intellectual lucidity of Proust’s style. The article presents Frankovsky’s translation method through the analysis of his synopses for four books of À la recherche du temps perdu, which are condensed and purified semantic skeletons of the original and a stylistic prototype of the translation.

Benjamin's Mimetic Re-Turn: Language, Body, Memory

Abstract: Walter Benjamin is a crucial figure in modernist mimesis. He was highly receptive to mimetic influences and at the same time a prolific and sensitive theoretician of those experiences. He moved far beyond the traditional aesthetics of a realistic and representational mimesis and must be located within the post-Nietzschean, modernist 'mimetic turn or re-turn.' Even if occluded by modern rationality, the mimetic faculty still takes effect for Benjamin in 'non-sensuous similarities,' in poetic language, in drifting expression, the unconscious, the body and its memory. To place Benjamin within mimetic modernism I will first adumbrate what I call linguistic magic in the context of modernist literature, ethnological and linguistic theory. Secondly, I will describe the modernist fascination with the body in and through which mimesis takes place. The third and main part centers on Benjamin's theological (and magical) interest in language. It focusses on his own occupation with (linguistic) magic and his conception or 'patho-logy' of mimesis. This he locates in the body, the pre-reflexive and unconscious, in the play of children, in early experience, and memory or mémoire involontaire (Marcel Proust).

»Romancier von so epochaler Bedeutung«. Hermann Grab über Marcel Proust im Prag des Jahres 1933

Abstract This article deals with a manuscript of a lecture on Marcel Proust given by the author and musician Hermann Grab (1903–1949) in the year 1933 in Prague. In a biographical and interpretative study of Marcel Proust’s life and work, Grab’s lecture tried to offer orientation in a time of growing anti-Semitism. Focusing on Proust’s Jewish family, his illness and isolation, but especially on his main Jewish characters Charles Swann and Albert Bloch, Grab explains two ways of reacting to anti-Semitic threats. But moreover, and towards the end, a third option is revealed through this biographical-interpretive work. According to this, literary narrative seemed to be the key for Grab’s approach, thus the lecture simultaneously reveals Grab’s self-image as author.

Narratives of Resistance and Remembering in Marcel Proust's Railway Station

Narratives of Resistance and Remembering in Marcel Proust's Railway Station