• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 614 0

criticism (see below), psychoanalysis and a wide range of literary and philosophical sources. Like Doubrovsky her study begins with the madeleine but then gradually spreads outwards, taking in matters of character and characterization; sexuality and identity; speech, perception and metaphor; sensation and phenomenology; syntax and the experience of time. Kristeva’s book expands and extends insights found in Richard and sets itself up explicitly in a position counter to that of Deleuze: ‘il faut bien se résoudre à penser’ she argues, ‘que l’élément minimal de l’écriture proustienne n’est pas le mot-signe, mais un doublet: sensation et idée; perception représentée ou image incarnée’ [we must resolve to think that the minimal element of Proustian writing is not the word-sign, but a pairing: sensation and idea; represented perception or incarnated image].13

Philosophy and fiction

Readers seeking further philosophical sustenance should consult Vincent Descombes’ Proust: philosophie du roman [Proust: Philosophy of the Novel], published in 1987. Descombes observes that the Narrator’s philosophical pronouncements, made when he is in theoretical or speculative mode, are less bold than those performed by the novel in which he appears. What Descombes explores, then, is whether we might uncover the ‘philosophy of the novel’ in narrative or descriptive passages, rather than those we might term explicitly philosophical; he sees the novel as a search not for lost time but for truth (here the philosopher and novelist share common ground). The book is an important exploration of the relation of philosophy to literature and the blurring of the boundary between them that we encounter in texts like Proust’s.14 A recent addition to this sub-field is Joshua Landy’s Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception and Knowledge in Proust (2004) which, like Descombes and Beckett before him, focuses on Proust’s perspectivism (Landy’s reading of the Martinville bell towers scene is exemplary in this regard) as well as paying heed to the productive tensions at work between the philosophical and the literary within the novel. Landy’s writing is accessible and his analyses sound, but Bowie’s Freud, Proust, Lacan covers similar ground with greater finesse.

The relation between Nietzsche and Proust, which features in Landy’s book, receives more detailed treatment in Duncan Large’s Nietzsche and Proust: A Comparative Study (2001). Large focuses above all on issues of epistemology (questions relating to knowledge) and ontology (those relating to being and existence). He attends to the writers’ respective attitudes to conversation, friendship and morality, and traces parallels between Nietzsche’s notion of eternal return and Proust’s use of metaphor and the functioning of involuntary memory. Mauro Carbone and Eleonora Sparvoli’s Proust et la philosophie aujourd’hui (2008) is the most recent, important addition to the field, a rich collection including essays by Tadié, Compagnon and others on a wide range of philosophical and philosophically inflected topics. For a flavour of the field, readers should consult Anne Simon’s essay ‘The Formalist, The Spider, and the Phenomenologist: Proust in the Magic Mirror of the Twentieth Century’, which offers a brief synthesis of the philosophical reception of Proust in France and appears in the volume edited by André Benhaïm, The Strange M. Proust (2009).

Style and narrative technique

The Search is a work of many voices, tones and rhythms. Proust’s narrative techniques are many and varied. His is the work of an ironist, a pasticheur, a social observer and a humorist.15 Brian Rogers’ Proust’s Narrative Techniques (1965), a revised, augmented edition of which appeared in 2004, traces developments in Proust’s approach to narrative in his early writings before tracking the forms of perspective and focalization we find in the novel and how these determine its unfolding. Tadié’s Proust et le roman (1971) covers similar ground; he focuses on the Narrator and Time, brilliantly scrutinizing their manifold, interconnected