Dictionnaire Marcel Proust (review)

This handsome volume created by an international team of well-known Proust scholars is the single most comprehensive reference book to date on the life and work of the man who wrote A la recherche du temps perdu, generally regarded as the greatest novel of the twentieth century if not of all time. The book has many predecessors that are useful as well but whose scope was either limited or whose contents are now outdated given the many documents and editions of Proust's works published over the last several decades. For example, Jacques Nathan's Citations, références et allusions de Marcel Proust dans A la recherche du temps perdu (1969) provides, as its titles indicates, only references to quotes, proper names, and allusions in the 1954 Gallimard edition of La Recherche. Maxine Arnold Vogely's A Proust Dictionary has a similar limitation, but does provide references for both the original French and the English translation of La Recherche. Pauline Newman-Gordon's Dictionnaire des idées dans l'œuvre de Marcel Proust (1968) provides quotes arranged thematically from all of Proust's works in French, but not of course to the juvenilia and early stories published in Les Écrits de jeunesse and other recent editions of Proust's works.

The new Dictionnnaire Marcel Proust provides all of this and more. It contains entries on all of Proust's writings, including his voluminous correspondence, the main events in his life, as well as the people he knew and the characters he created, the real places he lived in and visited as well as the fictional locales that he invented for his writings. The main articles are often divided according to subject matter or genre. For instance, the section on critical studies ranges from Critique biographique to Critique thématique and includes the following: Critique filmique, Critique génétique, Critique intertextuelle, Critique narratologique, Critique philosophique et esthétique, Critique psychanalytique, Critique sociologique, and Critique stylistique. If you look under "narrateur," you will find an entry not only for the voice that narrates A la recherche du temps perdu, but entries for the narrators of Contre Sainte-Beuve and Jean Santeuil as well.

Since the title of Proust's vast novel begins with the word "A," A la recherche du temps perdu is appropriately enough the first entry in this dictionary that runs to 1098 pages. Jean Milly's excellent article on La Recherche is followed by additional useful entries on the novel: "Histoire des éditions" and "Prépublications." Each principal section of the novel (Du côté de chez Swann, A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, etc.,) is given a separate article with extensive bibliographical references for further reading plus a list of cross-references for characters, themes, and biographical items. The comprehensive list of biographical information provided through the dictionary includes many references to Philip Kolb's superb twenty-one-volume edition of Proust's nearly 4,000 known letters. These bits of detail and interpretation are of great interest since La Recherche, while a true novel, is one whose contents are at times highly autobiographical.

The quality of the bibliographical references for further reading varies with the knowledge, and perhaps the bias, of the contributor. Not surprisingly, the contributors are more familiar with francophone Proust studies than with those in other languages. Yet even here there are a number of important articles on various Proustian topics that have appeared in the Proust journal in France, Le Bulletin Marcel Proust, and that are not referenced here. I suggest that the beginning scholar also consult the index of Le Bulletin Marcel Proust that has been appearing regularly since 1950. Regarding works not in French, here is an example of an omission that surprised me. Looking at the entry for Henri Rochat, we learn that he was Proust's last live-in secretary, that he may have contributed certain traits to the character Morel, and that Henri was a waiter of Swiss origin working at the Ritz Hotel...