Imaginaire et écriture de la mort dans l'oeuvre de Marcel Proust (review)

In Proust's Sodome et Gomorrhe, the duchesse de Guermantes speculates playfully that in the after-life, a society lady, no longer needing to concern herself with her low neckline, might rather 'exhib[er] peut-ê tre ses os et ses vers pour les grandes fêtes' (p. 38). In one sense, the duchesse's fantasy might be read counter-culturally, as replacing social glitz with bodily decomposition; yet in another way, her alternative scenario restores the conditions and situations of society living itself. The anecdote forms part of Aude Le Roux-Kieken's painstaking and detailed reflection, worked across the full spectrum of Proust's writing, on just how feasible the articulation of the otherness that is death might be. Drawing on Bataille's observation in his 'L'Enseignement de la mort' that 'c'est bien entendu la fumisterie la plus profonde que de parler de mort', Le Roux-Kieken extrapolates from the Proustian corpus evidence of a sustained circumlocution, a talking about and around death that manifests itself in an elaborate thematic weave whose strands are drawn from a great range of sources. She sees Proust attempting, most notably in the Albertine cycle and in Le Temps retrouvé, what Bachelard in his La Terre et les rêveries du repos terms 'une thanatologie littéraire et imaginaire' (p. 12). After an extensive consideration of the ways in which Proust recycles the topoi of death as generated by popular wisdom, etymology, mythology and religion, Le Roux-Kieken revisits, and then works beyond, the conventional pairing of 'l'amour' and 'la mort' to deliver a very persuasive reading in tandem of the processes of mourning and artistic creation.

The animal, vegetal and mineral worlds provide Le Roux-Kieken with a ready-made taxonomic structure for the second half of her study. Her analysis of vegetal images in Proust, whose Narrator casts himself as an 'herborisateur humain' or 'botaniste moral' in Sodome et Gomorrhe (p. 195), yields three principal thematic categories: the process of human ageing, the workings of heredity and the metaphorical links to creativity (the biblical metaphor, dear to Gide, of the seed dying as a prelude to creation and growth is no less favoured in Le Temps retrouvé). Le Roux-Kieken's exploration of the mineral world in Proust unearths what the critic identifies as 'une sémiotique du durcissement' (Chapter 6), the motif of hardening acquiring increasing salience in the Proustian representation of ageing and death. However, the search for analogies gleaned beyond the human world in the drive to articulate death is shown to be at its most inventive in Proust's forays into entomology. Le Roux-Kieken draws powerfully not just on Proust's acknowledged sources such as Fabre's Souvenirs entomologiques andMetchnikoff's Études sur la nature humaine: essai de philosophie optimiste, but also on Michelet's L'Insecte. The historian's tribute to the wasp's self-sacrifice in mute obedience to a procreative drive chimes, as Le Roux-Kieken skilfully demonstrates, with the all-too-mortal Narrator's obdurate urge to create artistically in Le Temps retrouvé. The copiousness and sustained pertinence of Le Roux-Kieken analyses will further strengthen the emerging reputation of Champion's 'Recherches proustiennes' series.