Proust's Deadline (review)

In this excellent book, Christine M. Cano explores Proust's own understanding of his literary work and his efforts to control its critical reception. Successfully and engagingly pointing up the difficulties inherent in the writing and publication of a multi-volume work such as À la recherche du temps perdu, Cano utilises historical, thematic, textual and theoretical means to study the links between temporality and figurality in Proust's writing of his novel. The lived temporality of both the writing and the reading processes is underlined in Cano's judicious exposition of Proust's correspondence with his publishers, potential readers and critics, which details his preoccupation with the timing of the publication of each volume of the novel. Cano contends that Proust's assertion of the unity and coherence of his work must be understood within the context of his anxiety regarding the threats to it of fragmentation and discontinuity – an anxiety which increased as he neared the end of his life. In opposition to metaphor – which enjoys such privileged status in À la recherche du temps perdu and in critical discourse thereupon – metonymy is taken by Cano to constitute the dominant mode of Proust's conception and representations of his writing experience. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on Proust's correspondence in order firstly to trace the representations and symbolic constructs which emerge as Proust attempts to explain the structural cohesion of his work; secondly, to underline Proust's adherence to the concept of organic form in his formulation of his novel as an indivisible whole governed by an immanent logic. The challenge posed by this latter, key element of organic theory, within the context of the extended period during which Proust wrote À la recherche du temps perdu, is made clear in Cano's analysis of Proust's instructions to publishers, and of the reception of his work after his death in 1922. Chapter 3 examines the effect on the novel of suspended publication during WW I, tracing the critical thread which, since the 1930s, contends that Proust's wartime revisions dramatically, even grossly, inflated an allegedly intact prewar text. The figure of Albertine, whose genesis from 1913 onwards has been interpreted in different ways by critics, is central to Cano's consideration of interruption and accident in the writing process. Chapter 4 details the critical reaction to Grasset's 1987 publication of a previously unpublished version of Albertine disparue, which was extensively revised by Proust just before his death and which threatens profoundly the coherence of the novel's end. The ambiguity generated by the diversity of Albertine episodes now available in different editions of À la recherche du temps perdu points up the disruption, by death, of any finished meaning in Proust's experiment with time, in his efforts 'to compress the time of writing into the closed form of the book' (p. 117). Proust's Deadline is a valuable addition to Proustian scholarship and a pleasure to read.