Dictionnaire Marcel Proust (review)

'Neither index nor guide', this work is designed to fill the gaps left by the current array of Proust reference works. But this dictionary is more than scholarly Polyfilla — it brings together and develops the content of those past works within a single handy tome, albeit rather hefty. Some entries comprise 'notes' and articles concerning both fictional and 'real' characters that figure in Proust's œuvre (including Les Plaisirs et les jours and Jean Santeuil, as well as the commentaries and prefaces to La Bible d'Amiens and Sésame et les lys). Others are more developed essays focusing on the artists and works that are mentioned in Proust's texts, on each of Proust's individual works, or on a great range of subjects grouped within the following categories: 'the man and the writer'; 'predecessors and contemporaries'; 'Proust's thought'; 'the œuvre, themes and notions — feeling, memory, idolatry etc.'; 'Proust criticism'. Each entry is complimented by an extensive bibliography, and one can happily hop between entries within what the editors call a system of correlates. The volume also contains a comprehensive list of secondary characters cited in A la recherche du temps perdu and a detailed history of the different editions. The list of contributors is impressive, including Anne Henry, Edward Hughes, Julia Kristeva, Jean Milly, Pierre-Louis Rey, Kazuyoshi Yoshikawa and Jo Yoshida (to name only a few of the better-known). For the most part, their entries combine theoretical rigour and exactness of empirical detail. Textual references to the most recent editions of Proust's works (Pléiade or otherwise) are accompanied by lucid and up-to-date discussions of an extensive selection of topics and themes. One particularly absorbing and entertaining series of entries treats of Proust's reception not only in Europe and in the United States, but also in Japan, where Proust's name was employed by a journalist for the first time in as early as 1921 and where translation work on the Recherche began in 1930. Much of this dictionary will be of great interest and use to researchers and undergraduates alike. However, a handful of entries will be off-putting (and possibly misleading) for some. Contributors occasionally fail to exercise due care or to provide sufficient detail in their treatment of other critics' analyses. For example, in a discussion of 'essence' in the Recherche, one contributor dismisses Deleuze's position in Proust et les signes in the space of one sentence. It is said simply to be 'untenable' insofar as it serves to 'separate the artistic process from the realm of the lived, which is consigned to nothingness'. Even if this is the case (Deleuze is, arguably, talking about a lived experience of the work of art as a sign of essences, notwithstanding the possibility that that work is from 'another world'), it is not obviously so. In spite of this minor criticism, this work sets a benchmark for literary dictionaries to come.