In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Marcel Proust constructiviste
  • Margaret Topping
Marcel Proust constructiviste. By Sjef Houppermans. (Faux Titre, 300). Amsterdam– New York, Rodopi, 2007. 244 pp. Pb €40.00.

Sjef Houppermans’ study centres on a constructivist epistemology which places the composition of the Recherche in the service of desire. Its construction is, for Houppermans, based on metamorphosis. Echoing the work of critics including Nathalie Mauriac-Dyer, the novel’s undeniable constructedness is also an ongoing ‘constructibility’: it is mobile, ‘inachevé’ (or, rather, ‘inachevable’), reconstructed by each individual reader. Openness, polyphony, undecidability and fragmentation are thus central to Houppermans’ analysis, as is reflected in the rather idiosyncratic — at times, disorienting — structure of his study. The book progresses in an eclectic series of chapters illustrating different aspects of Proust’s constructivism. An initial chapter dramatizes the narrator’s search for diversions from pain and anxiety about death, diversions which lead, paradoxically, to a painful awareness of figures such as Albertine’s own elusiveness, indeed, her own diversionary strategies. This idea is extended in the following, innovative discussion of the ‘jeu de furet’ the narrator plays with the ‘jeunes filles’. The game becomes a metaphor for desire and for the ‘caractère fondamentalement insaisissable de l’autre’ (p. 53) as well as for the shifting meanings at the heart of this constructivist epistemology. From here, Houppermans’ focus shifts to the transversal lines linking Proust’s and Beckett’s presentation of grief, specifically the paradox of presence in absence represented by the phantasmal. An analysis of Beckett’s monograph on Proust leads to an examination of the Proustian echoes in Beckett’s later work. Subsequent chapters explore the essentially subjective nature of both colour perception and the desires manifested in dreams. Here, Houppermans offers some important additions to existing critical work such as Jean-Pierre Richard’s Proust et le monde sensible. A diverse pairing of closely focused chapters on machines and on ‘la mèche’ offers fine analyses of the craftedness of these thematics in the Recherche, as well as their status as nomadic figures of the movements that propel the text onwards. The discussion of the ‘mèche’ as a recurrent mechanism for the ‘théâtralisation’ (p. 140) of desire is unusual and persuasive. The following three chapters are linked by their focus on questions of intertextuality, understood in terms of both Proust’s intertexts and Proust as an intertext for future writers and filmmakers. Deleuze’s rhizome guides Houppermans’ fluid account of the presence of Saint-Simon, Mme de Sévigné, Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, Baudelaire and others in Proust’s novel, while Beckett and Claude Simon provide the focus for the discussion of writers in whose work Proust’s presence may be detected as an intertextual echo. A final, concluding chapter returns to the quintessentially Proustian themes of time and memory, identifying Proustian time as ‘sensible, variable, mouvant, erratique, diasporique et rhizomateux’ (p. 224) in a vision of the novel which fittingly recognizes ‘la réussite que constitue la Recherche mais implique également ses ambiguités, son caractère provisoire et son inachèvement définitif ’ (ibid.). Despite some reservations about the structural coherence of the [End Page 355] study, this is a valuable and provocative exploration of the tantalizing oscillation in Proust’s work between unity and diversity, closure and openness, a teleological progression and concentric circles of experience and meaning.

Margaret Topping
Cardiff University
...

pdf

Share