Proust et Barbey d'Aurevilly: Le dessous des cartes (review)

Towards the end of La Prisonnière, Proust's narrator is giving Albertine a lesson in aesthetics. The lesson includes the observation that great literary figures, like great musicians, are only ever writing one work, offering one new form of vision, creating one particular new kind of beauty. He provides Albertine with a few key examples of the unity of vision that is to be found throughout all the work of a great artist. The first writer he mentions is Barbey d'Aurevilly. The unity of vision in question is to be found in what the narrator calls the phrase type: "Ces phrases types. . . ce serait par exemple, si vous voulez, chez Barbey d'Aurevilly une réalité cachée révélée par une trace matérielle, la rougeur physiologique de l'Ensorcelée, d'Aimée de Spens, de la Clotte, la main du Rideau cramoisi, les vieux usages, les vielles coutumes, les vieux mots, les métiers anciens et singuliers derrière lesquels il y a le Passé. . ." (3:877). After dwelling at a bit more on Barbey, the narrator turns to other important examples of great writers who exhibit the same characteristic: Hardy and Dostoevsky. Now if the novels of Hardy and Dostoevsky still stand for many readers as great achievements in the form, those of Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly (including L'Ensorcelée of 1854 and Le Chevalier des Touches of 1864) are today rarely read, and can hardly lay claim to the same stature. Barbey d'Aurevilly's stories, collected in Les Diaboliques (1874) are still somewhat widely read, but perhaps as much or more as examples of a particular cultural moment than as great works of literature. How is one to understand the glorified place granted to Barbey d'Aurevilly by Proust's narrator? Readers of Brian G. Rogers will find that interesting question answered in full detail.

Rogers is in the end perhaps too strong and uncritical a partisan of Barbey d'Aurevilly. Across the pages of Rogers's study Barbey comes to assume an exemplary status so elevated and exclusive that he almost ceases to be part of a larger cultural context: in Rogers's hands he sometimes seems to be the sole vector through which a variety of cultural forces came to act on Proust as he composed his novel. The result is perhaps a slightly distorted view of Proust's own achievement as a novelist. Nonetheless Rogers's study holds a great deal of information for which readers will be grateful. His erudition in matters Proustian and Aurevillian is, as one would have expected, intimidating, and his book will be a great resource.

We learn in Rogers's study, among many other things, at what point Proust read different works by Barbey, the kinds of echos of Barbey (both thematic and formal) that mark Les Plaisirs et les jours and Jean Santeuil, the way Proust juxtaposed Barbey and Balzac and what he emphasized regarding his interest in Barbey in his notebooks from 1908, the notebooks in which he began conceptualizing La Recherche. We learn the ways Barbey, who had his share of quarrels with Sainte-Beuve, might have been in Proust's mind during the Contre Sainte-Beuve period. We learn how Proust's way of using the word and the concept of race owes something to Barbey, as does Proust's notions of the emblematic relations between certain people, certain places, certain manners, certain words.

Rogers helpfully makes clear how, in part through his relation with Robert de Montesquiou, Proust found in the dandy Barbey an important link to various alternative sexual subcultures of the latter half of the French nineteenth century. (The ever inquisitive Paul Bourget is said to have asked Barbey if he were a pederast, to which Barbey is said...