The Material Object in the Work of Marcel Proust (review)

This book delivers a probing study of the evolving status of the material object in Proust's work. Beginning with Les Plaisirs et les jours and working sequentially through Jean Santeuil and A la recherche du temps perdu, Thomas Baldwin extrapolates from the shifting responses to objects in Proust's fiction a broader move from nineteenth-century Romanticism to a twentieth-century 'philosophical drama' (p. 78) strikingly consonant with phenomenology. Thus Baldwin pinpoints the prevalence in Les Plaisirs et les jours of objects drawn from nature, signalling in the process not just the hand of Ruskin but also, Baldwin argues, the more influential figure of Emerson, who, in 'The Poet', urges us to heed 'the sufficing objects of nature, the sun and the moon, the animals, the water and the stones' (p. 29). In Jean Santeuil and a fortiori the Recherche, by contrast, Emerson's objects of nature, far from 'sufficing', come not only to be associated with reflexivity and inwardness but also to be supplemented and supplanted by man-made objects. In this context, Baldwin posits a phenomenological turn in Jean Santeuil, where the newly discovered world of Beg-Meil — 'ce monde compact, dur et glacé' (JS, 356-7) — disarms Proust's protagonist and triggers ontological enquiry. This, Baldwin argues very suggestively, anticipates the alienating unfamiliarity with the material object which Heidegger was to label 'Vorhandensein' ('present-at-handness'). Returning on a number of occasions to one of the founding images of consciousness in the Recherche, that of the 'mince liséré spirituel qui m'empêchait de jamais toucher [la] matière [d'un objet extérieur]' (RTP, I, 83), Baldwin succeeds in drawing out and connecting with an ambitious range of philosophical angles on Proust's texts. He unearths and cogently analyzes the increasingly pronounced presence in the Recherche of ekphrasis, the process whereby Proust opts for verbal representation of visual, pictorial objects; he engages at a deep level with Georges Poulet's thesis of fragmentation in L'Espace proustien and with Deleuze, for whom the individual parts of the Recherche function monadically, unable to deliver, in Baldwin's formulation, 'a continuous analogical system' (p. 150); and Baldwin concludes that the technique in Proust of representing the world as flat pictorial idiom might well form a defence for a narrator fearful of engulfment. In this respect, the pictorial plane conveyed in ekphrasis, like the 'mince liséré spirituel', distances the world and confirms the social, psychological and phenomenological liminality of Proust's narrator. Baldwin's approach to the Proustian corpus is both methodical and original. His cross-reading of extracts from the Recherche and their prototypes to be found in the earlier texts is not only painstaking but also revelatory. For it allows him to chart the emerging ontological status of the object and the place of phenomenology for an understanding of Proustian consciousness. Seen from this angle, the Recherche itself acquires a materiality and opaqueness that render our own readings insecure, unstable and, in Baldwin's phrase, 'radically incomplete' (p. 143).