The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [75]
Although he wrote no book-length study of the author, one of Proust’s most gifted and sensitive readers in the 1960s and 1970s was Roland Barthes, whose strategies of reading and attitudes to textuality have left a profound mark on Proust criticism and on literary studies more generally.8 In his essays Barthes returns repeatedly to Proust, writing, for example, in 1974:
Proust is a complete system for reading the world … There is not, in our daily lives, an incident, an encounter, a trait, a situation, without its reference in Proust: Proust can be my memory, my culture, my language … The pleasure of reading Proust – or rather re-reading him – resembles, albeit without holiness and respect, a biblical consultation.9
This statement is characteristic of the structuralist investment in the authority of the text (‘Proust’ in the sentences quoted surely stands for the novel to which he put his name). It is not all reverence and the Proustian sin of idolatry, however: ‘the joy of Proust’, writes Barthes elsewhere, ‘from one reading to another one never skips the same passages.’10
Jean-Pierre Richard’s Proust et le monde sensible [Proust and the World of the Senses] (1974) represents a major trend in French literary criticism of the period. It is an example of ‘critique thématique’ or thematic criticism, which minutely examines literary texts in order to map the workings of the writer’s imagination. Richard draws on semiology (the science of signs) and psychoanalysis to build up a picture of how sense experience contributes to the construction of the imaginary world of the novel, gathering his explorations under the headings ‘Matière’ [matter], ‘Sens’ [meaning] and ‘Forme’ [form]. This seemingly simplistic approach reveals the complexities which the Narrator’s own attention to simple things often unveils: ‘When one reads Proust,’ Richard comments, ‘one is immediately struck by the extraordinary multiplication, variation, lability of both personal and sensory identities and by the importance of the hiatuses, the gaps separating each of their situations.’11 When we look at the novel through Richard’s optic our act of reading it is no dry academic pursuit, but a sensory encounter that leaves us longing to taste, to smell, to engage with the world around us. For Richard, the closer our attention to the text, the more we will learn about the inter-relation of the Narrator’s sensations, intellect and imagination, all crucial for the production of the work of art. The revelations may not be neat, handle-able unities of sense but they tend to point towards something greater: as Richard memorably puts it, ‘chez Proust, le décousu est toujours aussi l’en-train-de-se-coudre’ [with Proust, what is disjointed is always also what is in the process of being joined up].12
Serge Doubrovsky’s La Place de la Madeleine: écriture et fantasme chez Proust [Writing and Fantasy in Proust: la place de la madeleine], also published in 1974, is a bold study which reads the madeleine scene, its echoes and aftershocks, through the lens of Freudian psychoanalysis. Doubrovsky builds on the insights of Philippe Lejeune’s important 1971 article ‘Écriture et sexualité’ [Writing and Sexuality]; the book offers a sustained example of the degree to which Freud’s thinking about desire and sexuality can shed valuable light on the possible motivations of the complex narrative unfolding of Proust’s novel. Malcolm Bowie’s complementary Freud, Proust, Lacan: Theory as Fiction (1987) is a beautifully nuanced and subtle account of the overlap and interplay discernible between the kinds of thinking we find in Proust, Freud and his best-known French interpreter.
An extremely perceptive work that tackles many issues raised by Deleuze, Richard and Doubrovsky is Julia Kristeva’s 1994 study, Le Temps sensible: Proust et l’expérience littéraire [Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature]. Kristeva’s approach draws on genetic