Proust's Work Research Articles

Marcel Proust: portrait d'un jeune écrivain en philosophe by Claudio Rozzoni

Reviewed by: Marcel Proust: portrait d'un jeune écrivain en philosophe by Claudio Rozzoni Jennifer Rushworth Marcel Proust: portrait d'un jeune écrivain en philosophe. By Claudio Rozzoni. Paris: Classiques Garnier. 2016. 251 pp. €31. ISBN 978–2–8124–4720–4. This book is an interesting account of the early philosophical formation of Marcel Proust. Claudio Rozzoni's study is organized chronologically, from Proust's childhood up until early adulthood. It deliberately stops short of Proust's work on John Ruskin, but makes frequent reference to A la recherche du temps perdu since its interest lies in the development and prefiguration of Proust's philosophical ideas. The first part consists of a short section on Proust's parents and a much longer section on his school education. Rozzoni comments especially on Proust's father's career as having inspired Proust's use of medical metaphors and terminology and on his mother as having provided exposure to literature and languages as well as to habits of humour and letter-writing. Rozzoni emphasizes the importance for Proust of his philosophy teacher Alphonse Darlu, unearthing new materials while also drawing explicitly on the earlier studies of André Ferré, Les Années de collège de Marcel Proust (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), and Henri Bonnet, Alphonse Darlu (1894–1921): le maître de philosophie de Marcel Proust (Paris: Nizet, 1961). Rozzoni's analysis dwells especially on Darlu's contribution to journals such as the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale founded in 1893 by lycée friends of Proust, while acknowledging both the paucity of written evidence of Darlu's thinking and Proust's eventual 'renversement' (a term that recurs, but see e.g. p. 205) of Darlu's views on truth and morality. The second part takes us into Proust's post-school years, initially with a focus on his 'année sabbatique' (p. 148) in military training, his entry into society and first writings about society, and his interactions with his cousin by marriage Henri Bergson. Continuing with the focus on Proust's education, Rozzoni also considers his university studies, first in law and then in literature and philosophy, the latter including formative lessons in aesthetics from Gabriel Séailles. It is a shame that we do not have access to material from Proust's university years comparable to his school essays and notes, on which Rozzoni earlier draws so fruitfully. Proust's obtaining of the 'licence en lettres et philosophie' on 27 March 1895 is the book's purported endpoint. That said, as noted, Rozzoni makes frequent connections with Proust's eventual novel, especially with an eye to aspects which can be said (in a typical phrase) to 'anticipe[r] le chef-d'œuvre proustien à venir' (p. 59). The book and its reading of Proust are thus strongly teleological, and the 'jeune écrivain' of the title can at times feel overshadowed by discussion of the later novel. Nonetheless, contemporary theories of memory and of the self, or multiple selves, are interestingly reviewed in this light, especially in the middle section of the second part, on 'Le milieu psychologique' (pp. 163–203). Rozzoni concurs with Luc Fraisse about the eclecticism of Proust's philosophical sources (see especially Fraisse, L'Éclectisme philosophique de Marcel Proust (Paris: PUPS, 2013)), while emphasizing what is idiosyncratic about Proust's theory of memory in particular. Alongside its historical, biographical approach, the book is also characterized by a sustained dialogue with Gilles Deleuze, and while fascinating and meticulously explored, this dialogue can likewise at times feel like a distraction from the book's [End Page 246] avowed focus. At the end of the Prologue Rozzoni explains that 'Une première version de ce texte a paru en italien'—that is, I segni del giovane Proust: per un ritratto filosofico del futuro autore della 'Recherche' (Milan: AlboVersorio, 2009)—and he thanks 'Adeline Thulard et Pietro Allia pour leur traduction du texte en français' (p. 20). It seems important to acknowledge the work of Rozzoni's translators here, too, in bringing this useful and wide-ranging work to new readers. Jennifer Rushworth University College London Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

Proust du côté juif par Antoine Compagnon

Reviewed by: Proust du côté juif par Antoine Compagnon James P. Gilroy Compagnon, Antoine. Proust du côté juif. Gallimard, 2022. ISBN 978-2-07-295907-3. Pp. 424. Compagnon studies the analyses of Jewish themes in Proust's novels made in the 1920s and 30s by mostly Jewish literary critics. Compagnon also provides a large amount of documentary information about the lives and careers of these critics, as well as of Proust's Jewish classmates, friends, and correspondents. He also provides facts and dates about Proust's Jewish forebears and relatives, including his great uncle Godchaux Weil, who was a prominent author in the nineteenth century. The reader also learns much about Jewish journalistic publications in France between the two World Wars. In his explorations of the articles and books written about Proust in the period following the publication of his novel, Compagnon shows how opinions as to the influence of the novelist's maternal Judaic background fell into two groups. Some critics found in Proust's work a glorification of his Jewish heritage, especially in his characterization of Swann. They pointed out the latter's courage and perseverance during the Dreyfus Affair and his final illness as outstandingly Jewish traits lauded by his creator. Several critics discerned a parallel in the thought and writing styles of Proust and Montaigne, both of whom had Jewish mothers. The run-on prose of both, with their long, complex sentence structures, parentheses, digressions, and qualifications were thought to reveal the influence of the Talmudic commentaries on Scripture. Some critics likened Proust and Montaigne to Bergson for their mobility of spirit. Yet others thought that the Kabbalistic tradition recorded in the Book of Zohar, with its doctrine of the transmigration of souls from male to female bodies and back, influenced Proust's concept of homosexuality. Such interpretations were found in journals that were organs of the Zionist movement. The more official publications of the French Jewish Consistory played down the Jewish influence on Proust and tended to dismiss him as an example of the assimilated Jews in France who had forgotten their ancestral heritage. Although Compagnon does not include more recent studies of Jewish themes in Proust within the purview of his book, he refers intermittently to Proustian scholars who consider his work anti-Semitic. These critics find Proust's portrayal of Bloch, Rachel, and Gilberte Swann to be critical and condemnatory. They are also offended by Proust's comparison of Jews and homosexuals as outcasts who are forced by society to disguise their true selves. Much discussion is devoted by Compagnon to a statement made by Proust in a letter of condolence to a Jewish friend. In it, Proust reminisces about accompanying his maternal grandfather to the cemetery of Père-Lachaise where the family tomb of the Weil's was located. The grandfather would make an annual pilgrimage to place a stone on the monument to his ancestors, but Proust suggests that his grandfather had long since forgotten the significance of this gesture. Compagnon did extensive literary detective work to trace the actual source of this much quoted passage, and he analyzes all the possible pro- or anti-Jewish implications of Proust's remark. [End Page 271] James P. Gilroy University of Denver (CO) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Marcel Proust: In Search of Chemistry in His Work. The Author and His Great Chemical Novel

The article analyzes the use of chemistry as a means of communication and imagination in the writings of the famous French writer Marcel Proust (1871−1922). The oldest work in which Proust uses chemistry is the unfinished novel Jean Santeuil from 1895−1900. The author demonstrated a remarkable knowledge of the possibilities of analytical chemistry, including spectral analysis, and drew attention to the risk of morphine addiction. In a collection of texts Pastiches et mélanges from 1919, Proust describes the period Lemoine's affair with the alleged production of artificial diamonds (unrealizable at that time), in which the name of the French chemist and Nobelist Henri Moissan (1852−1907) also appeared. However, we find the greatest representation of chemistry in his life's work, the novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Proust – walking in the footsteps of Johann von Goethe – literally created a great chemical novel. First, we analyze the chemical nature of the so-called Proust phenomenon based on the sensory effect of substances on memory. We identify the volatile organic compounds that are responsible for the effect in the novel. Next, we note all references to chemistry and chemists as such, including alchemy. Third, we observe how the writer masterfully used chemical phenomena and concepts as a metaphorical means to express the feelings and motives of the actions of the novel's characters. Fourth, we provide an annotated overview of chemicals that are introduced in the novel as drugs: acetylsalicylic acid, aminophenazone, atropine, barbital, caffeine, quinine, cocaine, ethanol, morphine, opium, pepsin, phenol, trional, veronal. Proust's personal experience with them is demonstrated by the remarkable details about their effects mentioned in the novel. Finally, we mention the reception of Proust's work by chemists. In addition to reading for pleasure, Proust's work can also play an important communication and inspirational role in chemistry teaching in schools, as well as in the education of the public, and thus help to manage chemophobia. At the same time, it can further strengthen the identity of chemists as an essential part of human culture.

Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

Why must Marcel write? Time as a Justification for Literature in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu

Abstract Throughout the seven volumes of À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, Proust's narrator, Marcel, postpones the moment of writing. It is only at the very end of the last volume, with the discovery of Time (capital T), that the narrator finds himself ready to begin. What is “Time” and how is it a justification for literature in the Recherche? This question, which seems to be at the core of Proust's masterpiece, has been consistently neglected by theorists. To address it, I will propose that, in the context of Proust's novel, Time can be identified with a higher reality, which exceeds perception and can be captured through literature. It is because objects perceived only in the present have a temporal dimension that exceeds the present, that literature becomes a necessity for Marcel. Such an idea of Time can be associated with the pre-Einsteinian notion of a fourth dimension that became popular in Europe during the end of the nineteenth century. It also points to a broader connection between temporality and literature that extends beyond Proust's work and deserves further investigation.

“The Fury and the Mire of Human Veins”: On Bloom's “Endlessly Elaborating Poem”

"The Fury and the Mire of Human Veins":On Bloom's "Endlessly Elaborating Poem" Chris Winkler (bio) In the closing pages of his latest, and surely most personal, work, Harold Bloom poses a question that may serve as the book's theme. He asks: Is there a relation between a writer's immortality and a reader's search for consolation in regard to the death of friends or family and intimations of the reader's own impending mortality? (2019, 505) This question comes at the end of a prolonged discussion of Proust, whose very appearance as the subject of the book's coda is hardly this work's least curious aspect. Bloom takes up the novelist's famous epiphanies, a corollary of the romantic sublime. For Bloom, these Wordsworthian "spots of time" are, however brief, intimations of immortality, and, as such, death-defying; they also contain "Proust's truth," which is "compounded of perception, involuntary memory, impressionism, a search for spiritual meaning, and a kind of atheistic mysticism" (497). These are more than just aspects of Proust's work; the near five hundred pages that precede this observation portray a critic who, too, is in search of lost time and achieves a similar effect. But Bloom's reverie on Proust finally gives way to the explicit statement of the book's theme cited above—which, in its remaining few pages, solely becomes, with reference to Samuel Johnson, "intimations of the reader's [Bloom's] own impending mortality." In his use of poetry as consolation in the face of death, late Bloom is all too human. This preoccupation, though, has simultaneously and strikingly led the criticism to literalize the poetic imagination. Bloom's critical memoir, perhaps inevitably, literalizes tropes such as time and death, which are so central to the earlier work. Whereas Bloom's well-known theory of poetic relations emerges from his consideration of a poet's sense of "lateness" and the necessity of "lying against time," Possessed by Memory is haunted by the physical actuality of these concepts. If the exigencies of a critic's life can so easily transform the function of his central tropes, such a phenomenon [End Page 345] raises the question: how do these tropes understood in the context of Bloom's theory of poetry formulate a theory of life?1 This question has alternate origins in the ending to Wallace Stevens' 1950 poem "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven": This endlessly elaborating poemDisplays the theory of poetry,As the life of poetry. A more severe, More harassing master would extemporizeSubtler, more urgent proof that the theoryOf poetry is the theory of life, As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness,The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands. (2015, xx) Stevens' romantic understanding of a poem as ars poetica and as "the life of poetry" is no longer especially romantic, for we as readers and writers have unconsciously internalized such assumptions, owing in no small part to Bloom's work over the last half century. Our poems are both statements about, and demonstrations of, our conceptions of poetry. "A more severe, more harassing master," Stevens goes further, allying the theory of poetry with the theory of life. The poem's final tercet ends with rich ambiguity: is poetry or lived experience the referent? Put differently, are the poem's final figurations tropes of writing or of living? Are "the intricate evasions of as" metaphor itself or artful human action? I find it nearly impossible to read Stevens' magnificent ending without thinking of the theory of creative misprision Bloom develops over the course of two decades, beginning in 1970 with his book on Yeats. For instance, what are intricate evasions if not a poet's swerves, his defense mechanism vis a vis the past? And what are such worlds (importantly, encompassing both heavens and hells) that a poet creates if not demiurgic? Recall Bloom's exchanges with de Man in the late seventies, which more than anything forces him to clarify his theory of poetic influence against those of his fellow intertextualists.2 The telling difference between Bloom's work...

The "Hearing I": Sounding the "Conditio Humana" in Ingeborg Bachmann's Ein Geschäft mit Träumen

This essay examines the production of Ingeborg Bachmann's first literary radio drama, Ein Geschäft mit Träumen (1952), in light of the author's reflections on Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time (1922) by drawing on her analysis of Proust's work in her lecture "Das schreibende Ich" (1959). It proposes that the rich tapestry of perceptions, memory, and experience in her script for Ein Geschäft mit Träumen creates a "hearing I," that, like Proust's "writing I," engages the audience's sense perceptions and encourages their critical reflection. This intertextual and inter-medial reading of Bachmann's play sheds light on her unique understanding of the narrative capabilities of the radio. For Bachmann, the isolation of the acoustic sense in the radio drama offered new possibilities to reveal to the audience their existential blindness and to guide them toward truth or Erkenntnis, her vision for the work of art.

Eastern influences of the figure of Marcel Proust and precedents to a comparison between À la recherche du temps perdu and Buddhism

The present study looks for influences from the East in the figure of Marcel Proust. Specifically, from the philosophy that is born from the sermons of Siddhartha Gotama known worldwide as buddhism. After the publication of several articles by some commentators of À la recherche du temps perdu in which it is said that Proust and Buddha have common features, we wanted to focus on the life and work of Proust and to confirm whether the French writer was indeed influenced by these exotic truths and to culminate his work, like Buddha, in an Enlightenment. We will also bring together here the work of these Proustian commentators, since they have not previously been grouped together in a single investigation, just as their proposals on this subject have never been evaluated.

Proust's Latin Americans

Proust's Latin Americans

The Binder’s Blunder; or, Where Is Narrative?

I would like to thank Brian Richardson and John V. Knapp for inviting me to respond to Richardson's essay. I am sympathetic with unnatural narratology's ambition to rethink the foundations of narrative theory, and I find its engagement with a wide range of noncanonical texts highly stimulating. Richardson's essay is a lucid and perceptive survey of a movement that has become, over the last years, a force to be reckoned with in narrative theory (and literary studies more generally). However, I think a mind-oriented perspective--the approach I adopt in my own work--can challenge some of the assumptions that lie at the core of unnatural narratology. The title of this response is lifted from the anecdote appearing at the end of Richardson's Target Essay. I want to use this felicitous phrase--the binder's blunder--to raise a few questions about unnatural narrative and the theory that Richardson and his colleagues have been building around it. Richardson's anecdote is about an experimental text, Partie by Helene Cixous, a section of which is printed upside down, so that readers have to physically turn around the book in order to read it. Richardson realized that his library copy of the book had been taken apart and rebound in the conventional manner, probably because a scrupulous librarian had thought the layout to be a mistake--hence the blunder. I find this anecdote intriguing because it can be read as an allegory of another kind of blindness: namely, a blindness to how narrative is in itself a binding principle that can be foregrounded to varying degrees by different texts. When that principle is particularly salient, it makes sense to assimilate and narrative, calling the physical object we are engaging with a narrative. But when that principle is weak (as is the case of many unnatural texts), the object-based view of narrative breaks down. My worry, to anticipate my argument in what follows, is that unnatural narratology is--paradoxically--stuck in an object-based paradigm even as it focuses on texts that challenge that paradigm at a very fundamental level. Let me stress, in passing, that not all unnatural narratologists are equally committed to this view of narrative: there are exceptions, most notably Jan Alber's focus on readerly strategies for making sense of unnatural texts. But, by and large, I believe the ideas articulated in this response do find purchase in work by scholars affiliated with unnatural narratology. In the Target Essay, Richardson posits that unnatural narratology extends and complements traditional theories of narrative, which--he claims--are skewed toward mimetic texts. It is well known that the account of narrative temporality proposed by Gerard Genette in his seminal Narrative Discourse rests on the analysis of Marcel Proust's Recherche. Richardson implies that Proust's work is an example of a mimetic novel, or perhaps that Genette's reading of it is mimetically biased. I'm not entirely convinced of that reading of Proust (or Genette), depending on how understands the word mimetic. However, I think this move is not the most controversial aspect of Richardson's argument. He continues: one need only imagine how different narratology would have been had Genette used Beckett's trilogy rather than Proust's Recherche as his tutor text (388). I don't think it's an accident that Genette chose Proust and not Beckett as his tutor text. I also don't think it reflects Genette's allegiance to a mimetic paradigm. The reason for this choice is simple: a narratology built on Beckett's trilogy would be too idiosyncratic and unsystematic to be generalizable to other texts; it would also, to a large extent, presuppose the kind of narratology that Genette ended up offering by focusing on Proust. To fully understand this asymmetry, needs to ask what sort of thing narrative is, or perhaps--to phrase the question otherwise--where narrative is located. Unnatural narratologists don't seem to have any doubts about this: they talk about unnatural narratives, in the plural, as if they were a specific category of texts. …

A Teia de Penélope e o Anel da Tradição

It will never be too much to remember that experience is one of the most important concepts on Benjamin’s thought. It underlies his analysis of the history and also supports his critical theory of literature and has many branches, above all in his texts after 1930. His text “The Image of Proust” (Literarische Welt, 1929) develops the concept of involuntary memory, which explains the question of auratic image in the work of Proust, obtained by the process of rememoration and also explained by the contribution of Freud’s studies about the traumatic shock and its consequences on the perception’s conditions of the contemporary man. These conceptions led Benjamin to a deep thought about the way how shock and rememoration can be articulated in order to create a new historical vision, individual and collective. We examine here, in the fields of the arts, literature and history, how this articulation can defines a new conception of experience and the possibility, or not, of the transmission of the culture, in a world where, as Kafka said, “the tradition became sick”. The question is: will rememoration, this Penelope’s web, be able to operate the rescue of the historical tradition? And which tradition are we speaking here about? What does rememoration mean?

Beckett Émondeur de Proust

In his study of the work of Proust, Beckett accentuates the importance of botanic images, but he gives them a very severe treatment and his evaluation of these images of fertility in is full of negativity. In this way the images constitute a thematic and stylistic motive that reveals all the complexity of the relation between Beckett and the profuse work of Proust (in this early essay as well as in later texts). The vegetal metaphor is considered here as far as it shows the irresolvable dialectics that link fecundity and sterility, loss and remainder, literature and the world, in the work of these two authors.

Proust dans la decadence

This lucid book convincingly traces the influence of the Decadent movement on Marcel Proust, building a sustained and persuasive argument around the complexity of certain aspects of that movement, from its links with classical decadence to its obsession with decline, decomposition, sex, and death. Acknowledging at the outset the fluidity of the term ‘Decadence’, Schmid clearly articulates the framework of her analysis along the two lines of interpretation just mentioned, and the book takes a chronological and thematic approach to Proust's work. The first chapter places Proust neatly in the context of fin de siècle literary endeavour, making a nuanced distinction between Decadent and Symbolist literature, and drawing on a wide range of material, including Proust's own juvenilia, to show the importance of such figures as Baudelaire and Montesquiou in the development of Proust's aesthetics. The second chapter is an impressive in-depth examination of Les Plaisirs et les jours (1896) and points up the internal logic of the ordering of the pieces included in that volume. As well as its debt to Decadence on a formal level, Schmid shows how in Les Plaisirs et les jours Proust consistently pastiches tropes of Decadent writing, using it as material for an exercise in stylistic refinement. His ironical appropriation of such tropes can thus be seen as less a criticism of them than an experiment in different voices and styles. Chapter 3, ‘Esthétisme et idolâtrie’, underlines the importance of nineteenth-century English aestheticism for Proust, especially the notion of ‘art for art's sake’ and the work of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and John Ruskin, which, as Schmid shows, helped Proust to refine and articulate his own precise idea of what idolatry of art meant; astute analyses of the aesthetes and poseurs in À la recherche du temps perdu underline how they function as counter-models for the narrator. In ‘Sexe et vice’ (Chapter 4) Schmid's claims regarding the significance of the Decadent movement's fascination with transgressive sexualities and evil for Proust's work convince: once again a dialectic of assimilation and rejection in Proust's ambiguous relation to Decadent forms and figures is compellingly traced, in Les Plaisirs et les jours and in early drafts of À la recherche du temps perdu as well as the final text. Chapter 5 explores the imagery of catastrophe, apocalypse, and neurosis in Proust's work, drawing out the links between the Decadent preoccupation with pathological degeneration and Proust's representation of the ‘triade de la folie’ (p. 174) that is Charlus, Morel, and Albertine, before the final chapter clarifies how integral Decadent style was as a precursor to twentieth-century literary modernism. Schmid shows how Proust's Goncourt pastiches enable the development of his ‘écriture polyphonique’ (p. 221) and are the means by which he assimilates and moves beyond the style of his predecessors, while his consistent emphasis on the unity of his novel underlines his rejection of a Decadence-style explosion of form. Clear and meticulously documented, this is a valuable addition to the field of Proust studies.

Albertine and the Inverted Mirrors: Reflections of Geographic and Ethnic Otherness

Albertine and the Inverted Mirrors:Reflections of Geographic and Ethnic Otherness Lowry Martin Since Justin O'Brien's 1949 article "Albertine the Ambiguous," which examined the importance of sexuality in Proust's corpus, most scholarly investigation has discussed male homosexuality in À la recherche du temps perdu.1 Proust's more robust development of Charlus and other male homosexual characters stands in contrast to the seemingly superfluous references to undeveloped lesbian characters, some of whom are either invisible or anonymous (e.g., Léa, the famous actress who is never seen or Bloch's sister and Mlle Vinteuil's lover who are never named). For many years, critics and contemporaries of Proust, such as André Gide or Jean Cocteau, claimed that these female characters, originally debuting in À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, were merely men in textual drag.2 In light of this "transposition" theory, it is understandable that for many years critics had largely passed over the racial and political nuances that filigree Proust's lesbian imaginings, and in particular, the way he imagined his character, Albertine.3 Her sexual ambiguity preoccupies Marcel, the narrator, as it fuels his imagination. The specter of lesbianism is woven throughout his work, and Proust's semiotics of this sexual other merits closer attention. My proposed reading of Albertine illustrates that representations of same-sex desire among women were more than literary afterthoughts. To the contrary, a careful reading of his treatment of Albertine and the Bloch cousins allows for a more nuanced and complicated understanding not only of Albertine but also of the rhetoric of Gomorrha (lesbianism) within Proust's imaginary. While Charlus serves as a Rosetta stone to unlocking and understanding the sign system of French underground gay culture, the portrayal of Albertine is also infused with an array [End Page 97] of contemporary discourses that highlight the political tensions and social anxieties of the period. This article focuses primarily on Proust's language of the nation and the other—national or ethnic stereotypes of the German, Austrian and Jew—which underscores the importance of contemporary cultural debates in the theorization of same-sex attraction between women. While Proust's reliance on cultural stereotypes may not have been a conscious political statement, they do illustrate just how deeply ingrained they were in the cultural thought of the period. Proust's various depictions of lesbianism echo and incorporate racial discourses of his time and reflect some of the political and social tensions of the French Third Republic. The fact that Proust's lesbians are descendants of the "race maudite" proves important to this kind of analysis.4 Like their male counterparts, these women are the strangers at the gate—women who, in a broader cultural context, can easily be represented as threatening the security of the nation. Through a juxtaposition of excerpts from Proust's work with materials from pivotal cultural moments of the fin-de-siècle, such as the Dreyfus Affair, I underscore how medical and political currents influenced Proust's conceptions of lesbianism and were anfractuous means of referencing contemporary social concerns. Before turning to the texts, a discussion of some of the formative ideological currents of the French Third Republic will anchor my readings. I. The Enemy Within: Creating the Threat of the Racial Other Issues of race and ethnicity inspired and structured the organization of many of the bourgeois political, legal, and medical discourses from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century.5 The legacy of French theorists such as Buffon, Cuvier, and Gobineau continued to shape French ideologies of cultural and racial superiority for decades. Bertillon's anthropometrics and Gobineau and Laponge's exaltation of the Aryan races were the cornerstones of racial claims of French supremacy. The same rhetoric provided the ideological underpinnings of France's colonial intentions. The impulse to order and to "normalize" the nation stemmed from representations of cultural dissonance that contravened accepted ideas of racial purity and sexual virtue—infrangible elements of the Third Republic's [End Page 98] ideological bedrock. The interchange between sexuality and French ideas regarding the health of the State is clearer when one considers the longstanding debates regarding the falling birthrates in France...

Snapshots in Sound: Mystère de l'instant and the Legacy of Moment Form

Dutilleux's Mystère de l'instant for cimbalom, strings and percussion (1985–1989) stands out within his output for its unusual approach to large-scale form. Eschewing processes of ‘progressive growth’ and the emphasis upon organic, symphonic continuity which had characterised the composer's mature language, this work presents a succession of self-contained ‘instants’ in which little attempt is made to establish longer-term connections of material. His approach shows some striking parallels with the aesthetic of ‘moment form’ adopted by Stockhausen and his Darmstadt colleagues during the 1960s and set out systematically by Jonathan Kramer in 1978, even though the respective musical languages employed are very different. A more detailed exploration of these parallels highlights new connections between Mystère de l'instant and the work of Proust, who has long represented an important source of inspiration for Dutilleux, and allows the work to be ‘rehabilitated’ within the main thread of the composer's stylistic development.

The “Debris of Experience”: The Cinema of Marcel Proust and Raoul Ruiz

As the last and most theoretical volume of Marcel Proust's novel A la recherche du temps perdu, Le Temps retrouve would appear to be a very unlikely source of inspiration for a major motion picture. In almost every possible way it resists an adaptation into another artistic medium, particularly since it narrates the discovery of a literary vocation. Le Temps retrouve, more than any other volume, presupposes a familiarity with the plots and characters of all six preceding volumes of Proust's novel and so a cinematic adaption either must trust that the film spectator already knows Proust's work or must incorporate elements from the whole novel into its portrayal of the last volume. Le Temps retrouve contains practically no plot on which to base a dramatic representation, unlike other sections of the novel, such as Un Amour de Swann and La Prisonniere, that have both been more or less successfully adapted into film.(1) Most importantly however, it is in this volume where Proust, or his narrator, aggressively denounces cinema as incapable of portraying the true nature of time. Raoul Ruiz's film adaptation of Le Temps retrouve, in grappling with perhaps the least adaptable of texts, pushes the boundaries of the cinematic form in order to conceive new ways of creating images of time that would rival those of Proust's literary inventions. (2) Proust and Cinema Proust's Le Temps retrouve follows the narrator's discovery that his reliance on a spatial foundation of identity, manifested in his obsession with various places (Balbec, Venice, and Combray), has led him astray from his vocation as a writer of a book about time. Only through an experience and exploration of time can be understand the essence of the world and realize the full potential of literature. Naturally, cinema's reliance on spatial imagery as its primary mode of expression along with its dependence on a succession of still images to create the illusion of movement pose an apparent threat to Marcel's newfound cult of time. For the narrator, cinema fails because it relies on what can be captured on film, the simple common denominator of reality that presents itself in the same manner to everyone: cette espece de dechet de l'experience, A peu pres identique pour chacun. (3) Literature, for Proust's narrator, works through metaphor to mediate perception and memory, bridging time through mental images, as opposed to cinema's visual images. Proust's critique of cinema as a debris of experience, an illusion of reality produced by a seemingly objective machine, echoes debates that emerged at the beginning of cinema and continue today as film theory grapples with the nature of cinema itself in the wake of new technologies for capturing moving images. In his classic work on cinematic adaptation, Novels into Film, George Bluestone shares a similar line of reasoning with Proust's narrator when he proposes that the difference between the two media, cinema and literature, lies in the nature of their images: the film is composed of visual, and therefore spatial, images; the novel of mental images. (4) More fundamentally for Bluestone, film and novel place their emphasis on opposing elements of human experience: Both novel and film are time arts, but whereas the formative principle in the novel is time, the formative principle of the film is Where the novel takes its space for granted and forms its narrative in a complex of rime values, the film takes its time for granted and forms its narrative in arrangements of space. (5) Only the novel, from this perspective, can successfully capture lost time because its narrative modulates the experience of rime whereas cinema is, or appears to be, limited to the mechanized rime of (greater than sixteen) frames per second. (6) As Mary Ann Doane, among others, has shown, the shock of modernity, of a mechanized and monetized temporal experience, is both embodied and thwarted by cinema, since the movie camera produces a mechanical abstraction of lived experience in the service of archiving the image of the present, of time. …

Proust e a questão do "je"

A partir da leitura dos cadernos 53 e 55, ambos dedicados à composição do romance A prisioneira, elencamos um conjunto de notas que ressuscitam uma antiga discussão da crítica com relação ao “je” proustiano, muitas vezes confundido como portador de traços autobiográficos. O objetivo deste artigo é percorrer a elaboração dessa primeira pessoa na carreira literária do escritor para demonstrar que o uso do “je” não se operou de forma espontânea na obra proustiana.

Proust's Emotional Cavities: Vision and Affect in A la recherche du temps perdu

Against the background of the 'waning of affect' in modern times 1 and the (post-) Freudian consignment of feelings to theories of drives, the ineluctable question emerges of where we can satisfactorily place emotionality at all nowadays. What role do feelings play in works of art? This article reflects on these questions by examining the relationship between vision (both bodily and photographic) and affect in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. Reading Proust's work as part of a growing tendency to hollow out the Romantic idea of emotion, the article explores the advancing displacement of 'holistic emotionality' by the rapid increase in 'emotional cavities'. These are zones devoid of any emotional contact or correspondence between the narrator and the world he perceives. In close readings of the scenes connected with the death of the grandmother and of Albertine sleeping, this article argues that Proust introduces a new understanding of affect that neither theorizes it as essential and all-pervading nor simply disqualifies it in a modernist gesture of denial. Instead, Proust's work proposes a conception of affect that eventually appears as privatized, contingent and in peril.

Les sources janétiennes de l’œuvre de Proust

It has been acknowledged for some time now that Marcel Proust's work had been influenced by the medicine of his time. But the scientific sources concerning two major themes from In Search of Past Time were discovered only recently. Hervey de Saint-Denys’ Les Rêves influenced Proust's interest in sleep and dream functions. In turn, experimental psychology works from the late xix century influenced the key concept of the “other self”, considered by Proust to be the real author of the books. In his work, Edward Bizub (Bull Marcel Proust 56 (2006) 41–51) has highlighted the novelist's in-depth readings about experiences in dual personality conducted by a myriad of Charcot's alumni, including Pierre Janet and… Adrien Proust. Knowledge about the division of consciousness and preFreudian laws of the unconscious allowed the hidden self of the hero of In Search of Past Time to emerge.

The Material Object in the Work of Marcel Proust

This book delivers a probing study of the evolving status of the material object in Proust's work. Beginning with Les Plaisirs et les jours and working sequentially through Jean Santeuil and A la recherche du temps perdu, Thomas Baldwin extrapolates from the shifting responses to objects in Proust's fiction a broader move from nineteenth-century Romanticism to a twentieth-century ‘philosophical drama’ (p. 78) strikingly consonant with phenomenology. Thus Baldwin pinpoints the prevalence in Les Plaisirs et les jours of objects drawn from nature, signalling in the process not just the hand of Ruskin but also, Baldwin argues, the more influential figure of Emerson, who, in ‘The Poet’, urges us to heed ‘the sufficing objects of nature, the sun and the moon, the animals, the water and the stones’ (p. 29). In Jean Santeuil and a fortiori the Recherche, by contrast, Emerson's objects of nature, far from ‘sufficing’, come not only to be associated with reflexivity and inwardness but also to be supplemented and supplanted by man-made objects. In this context, Baldwin posits a phenomenological turn in Jean Santeuil, where the newly discovered world of Beg-Meil — ‘ce monde compact, dur et glacé’ (JS, 356–7) — disarms Proust's protagonist and triggers ontological enquiry. This, Baldwin argues very suggestively, anticipates the alienating unfamiliarity with the material object which Heidegger was to label ‘Vorhandensein’ (‘present-at-handness’). Returning on a number of occasions to one of the founding images of consciousness in the Recherche, that of the ‘mince liséré spirituel qui m'empêchait de jamais toucher [la] matière [d'un objet extérieur]’ (RTP, I, 83), Baldwin succeeds in drawing out and connecting with an ambitious range of philosophical angles on Proust's texts. He unearths and cogently analyzes the increasingly pronounced presence in the Recherche of ekphrasis, the process whereby Proust opts for verbal representation of visual, pictorial objects; he engages at a deep level with Georges Poulet's thesis of fragmentation in L'Espace proustien and with Deleuze, for whom the individual parts of the Recherche function monadically, unable to deliver, in Baldwin's formulation, ‘a continuous analogical system’ (p. 150); and Baldwin concludes that the technique in Proust of representing the world as flat pictorial idiom might well form a defence for a narrator fearful of engulfment. In this respect, the pictorial plane conveyed in ekphrasis, like the ‘mince liséré spirituel’, distances the world and confirms the social, psychological and phenomenological liminality of Proust's narrator. Baldwin's approach to the Proustian corpus is both methodical and original. His cross-reading of extracts from the Recherche and their prototypes to be found in the earlier texts is not only painstaking but also revelatory. For it allows him to chart the emerging ontological status of the object and the place of phenomenology for an understanding of Proustian consciousness. Seen from this angle, the Recherche itself acquires a materiality and opaqueness that render our own readings insecure, unstable and, in Baldwin's phrase, ‘radically incomplete’ (p. 143).