Proust ou le bonheur du petit personnage qui compare (review)

Standing in the shadows of the familiar 'petit personnage barométrique', who represents just one of the narrator's coexisting 'moi', is the philosopher who delights in the analogies discernible between 'deux oeuvres' or 'deux sensations' (III, 522). This figure becomes the guiding emblem for Philippe Chardin's subtle analysis of the aesthetic, affective and conceptual affinities that ally Proust more closely to European currents in novelistic innovation than to a French neo-classical tradition. Underpinning the study is the suggestive image of an 'entre deux' Proust, whose own experimentation owes more to his pioneering reflections on nineteenth-century predecessors than to the creative strategies of his contemporaries. This 'entre deux siècles' writer becomes a figure of 'entre deux' aesthetics, oscillating between classifications and reinventing novelistic conventions. The first part of the study establishes Proust's distance from classicism by foregrounding such features as Bergotte's aesthetics or the Recherche's baroque elements. Yet Chardin resists overly schematic categorization by recognizing ambiguity, affinity and hybridity. Proust shares, for instance, neo-classicism's quest for generalized 'truths' and accompanying rejection of the journalistic focus on particularities characteristic of Realism and Naturalism. Proust's redefined classicism likewise transcends rigid aesthetic categories: his 'classiques' are simply 'les grands novateurs' (CS-B, p. 617). A final section engages fruitfully with criticisms of the epiphanic dénouement of the Recherche, tracing its tones and tempos back to such European 'novateurs' as Dickens, Eliot, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Goethe. The second part confirms Proust's status as stylistic iconoclast and comparatist avant la lettre in chapters devoted to Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Ruskin. Proust's avant-garde readings of Dostoevsky – including his links to the visual arts and carnivalesque accents – are posited as key stimuli to Proust's innovations in the domains of style, psychology and morality. Tolstoy's often under-rated role in Proust's formation is also granted the prominence it merits, as Chardin uncovers the ongoing, critical dialogue between the two writers on such questions as 'la vraie vie', art and morality, perspectivism and the architecture of the novel. Proust's 'affinités ignorées' (p. 119) with Svevo, Joyce and Musil are explored in Part 3. Joyce's Portrait of the Artist offers an alternative lens to view Proust's displacement of Christian terms onto art in the Recherche, while a dual focus on Musil and the auto-fictional foundations of Proust's novel enables a flexible, generic definition of the latter in relation to the philosophical treatise. The representation of jealousy in Un amour de Swann is woven into a web of association with Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata and Svevo's Senilità in the final part of Chardin's study. A broad spectrum of correspondences emerges: jealousy as Freudian catharsis or pleasure; subversions of gender stereotypes and power dynamics; jealousy as self-destruction, abjection, possession and/or vengeance. Here, too, Chardin exposes the fluidity of generic classifications: the 'rude épreuve' (p. 187) to which love is submitted by Proust approximates a 'roman à these', despite his rejection of the genre. Chardin's study returns to some familiar faces in Proustian criticism, yet it offers new and intriguing insights into the intertextual and generic layers of his palimpsestic novel.