The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [83]
Alain de Botton’s Proust-as-self-help guide, How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997) was a huge hit in the United Kingdom and the United States and has been translated into several languages, including French.15 The burgeoning field of Proustiana saw two other notable contributions in 1997: Phyllis Rose’s ‘memoir in real time’ entitled The Year of Reading Proust and Kristjana Gunnars’ The Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust, a curious sort of ‘autofiction’ that reflects on the peculiarities of absorbing oneself in Proust’s novel. More recently we have seen that even in the booming market of popular science writing, Proust’s name helps sell more books. Proust was a Neuroscientist is the rather cynically catchy title of Jonah Lehrer’s 2007 collection of fascinating essays on creative artists’ anticipations of modern neuroscience.16 Compellingly drawing on, amongst others, George Eliot, Proust, Stravinsky and Cézanne, Lehrer suggests that these great creative spirits of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries might have facilitated more rapid developments in the sciences had their complementarity been recognized. Lehrer’s insights are many and his book is a fine example of engaging, accessible, truly interdisciplinary research that successfully straddles and illuminates disparate fields. The fact that the book’s title and the super-size madeleine that emblazons the cover wholly occlude the other excellent essays in the book shows how the Proust ‘brand’ sells like no other.17
A far less successful example (at least from a Proustian perspective) of attempted disciplinary border-crossing being sold under the sign of Proust is Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2007), which takes its cue from a brief paragraph in Proust’s essay ‘Days of Reading’: enough, apparently to merit using Proust’s name in the arresting title, despite there being no reference to him or his work in the 200 pages and more between the first chapter and the final paragraph of the conclusions. Wolf’s discussion of the neuroscience of reading disorders and related matters is informative but Proust, who returns uneventfully in the book’s penultimate sentence, is no more than a hook, a lure for potential readers who would not otherwise buy a book of science writing (squidophiles are only slightly better rewarded).18 The glaring contrast with Lehrer’s perceptive synthesis and analysis, his genuine interdisciplinarity (a trait we recognize everywhere in Proust’s novel) is unforgiving. Germane to these examples of cross-fertilization in the humanities and sciences, readers curious about Proust’s biography and the various ailments and pathologies that defined his adult life (and arguably shaped his world-view and hence his novel), should consult Brian Dillon’s chapter on Proust in his Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (2009).19Dillon’s study places Proust in a diverse pantheon of sufferers including Florence Nightingale, Charles Darwin and Andy Warhol: the constellations of creative minds in which Proust features (and often as the ne plus ultra) seem inexhaustible.
In the creative literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries readers will find many echoes and borrowings from Proust’s novel. Critics have noted Proustian parallels in Sartre’s Nausea (1938), for example, and throughout Beckett’s writings.20 Certain novelists are reminiscent of Proust in their use of