The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [77]
Other important works in this sub-field include Victor Graham’s The Imagery of Proust (1966), a comprehensive survey of the nature and function of Proust’s figural language;16 Jean Milly’s Proust et le style (1970) and La Phrase de Proust (1975; reprinted 1983); and Leo Spitzer’s brilliantly perceptive essay ‘Le style de Marcel Proust’ in his Études de style (first published in German in 1961). This last piece covers material germane to Malcolm Bowie’s superb essay ‘Reading Proust between the Lines’ (printed in Benhaïm’s The Strange M. Proust), itself a pendant to his earlier ‘Proust and the Art of Brevity’ in the Cambridge Companion to Proust. Bowie’s essays encourage us to pay heed to what he calls the ‘micro-movements’ of the Proustian phrase and sentence, to the rhythms, echoes and cross-currents that often get lost in interpretations that favour grand schemes over fine details. Layering or ‘superimposition’ is Bowie’s intriguing subject in Benhaïm’s book. Both essays should be read by anyone about to undertake a critical commentary or write an essay on a given Proustian theme: they charge us with receptivity, encourage us to look, to listen, to read with the care Proust bestowed on his work; the rewards are many.
Proust and the arts
A major area of Proust studies is that concerned with the role of music, visual art, theatre and literature in his work. J. M. Cocking’s essays ‘Proust and Music’ and ‘Proust and Painting’ are a good place to start,17 as is Bowie’s extremely rich chapter ‘Art’ in Proust among the Stars. Bales’ essay ‘Proust and the Fine Arts’ in the Cambridge Companion gives a valuable overview. In a crowded field Antoine Compagnon’s masterly 1989 study Proust entre deux siècles [Proust between Two Centuries] stands out. It is a valuable resource for readers interested in two voices that resound with some insistence through the Search: those of Baudelaire and Racine; it also draws music, painting and the works of other writers of the period into its purview. Compagnon’s thesis is that what characterizes the Search and Sodom and Gomorrah, its pivotal central volume in particular, is its in-between-ness, temporally and aesthetically between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Persuasive comparative essays on Proust and Manet, Fauré and Huysmans, among others, demonstrate how the text’s recurrent undecidability is characteristic of its status as classic. Such works of art, Compagnon argues, do not lend themselves to straightforward, unproblematic interpretations: they are disconcerting in any present moment.
On Proust’s views on music and the role of music in his novel, J.-J. Nattiez’s Proust musicien [Proust as Musician], published in 1984, is the key study. Readers should also consult Edward Saïd’s Musical Elaborations (1991), which discusses Proust’s theorization of music with great sensitivity. Emile Bedriomo’s Proust, Wagner et la coïncidence des arts (1984) offers a comparative account of these two ‘totalizing’ creators of imaginary worlds. More recently, Alex Ross has written engagingly about the role of Vinteuil’s music in the novel, in the broader context of imaginary music in fiction: interested readers will be well rewarded by his New Yorker essay ‘Imaginary Concerts’ (24 August 2009).
The scholarship on Proust and the visual arts is vast. A recent, valuable and extremely handsome contribution to the field is Eric Karpeles’ Painting