Proust and the Visual ed. by Nathalie Aubert (review)

This collective volume promises a coherent set of new approaches to the much-studied area of the role of images, vision, and visual culture in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Nathalie Aubert’s short Introduction, however, loaded with phenomenological terms that are not developed, risks leaving the reader confused about what she suggests is the common theoretical framework behind the essays. Georges Didi-Huberman’s notion of the visual is set as a point of reference, for instance, but for those unfamiliar with his work it would have been helpful to have a little more about this concept than the rather hermetic remark that the visual ‘manifest[s] transcendental temporality’ (p. 1). In Devant l’image (1990), Didi-Huberman distinguishes between the ‘visible’ and the ‘visual’: the former refers to the legibility of the image based on the knowledge of relevant conventions, while the latter is present to the gaze in its upsetting obscurity and escapes the grasp of the intelligence. Certainly, this concept of the visual holds unexploited potential for the reading of Proust, yet only a few of the essays here relate to it, and Vincent Ferré’s analysis of film adaptations has an entirely non-visual focus. Aubert’s opening chapter nevertheless helps the reader to understand the phenomenological approach signalled in the Introduction, arguing that expression and style are rooted in the relations between perception, the lived body, subjectivity, and time, and that vision enjoys primacy among the senses. Adam Watt’s article, strikingly, goes against this, by highlighting among other things the irrelevance and impotence of vision for involuntary memory and for the search for lost time in general. To mention some of the most compelling of the arguments that follow: Patrick ffrench examines gesture, a generally overlooked aspect of bodily existence, taking us from Saint-Loup’s elegant movement to its ethical implications; Hugues Azérad offers an enlightening comparison between Pierre Reverdy’s modernist aesthetic and Proust’s theory of the metaphor; and Sarah Tribout-Joseph shows that it is the lesser valued works in art history, rather than the works of the great masters, that have a higher potential to generate great literature. Further studies include a semiotic approach to handwriting (Akane Kawakami), analyses of Proust’s practice of seeing and writing in and through paintings (Karen Haddad, Thomas Baldwin), the implicit links of his style with photographic imaging (Áine Larkin), an introduction to the Proust-inspired paintings of Luis Marsans and Enrico Baj (Florence Godeau), and a discussion of theatre adaptations of the Recherche (Marion Schmid). Overall, while the theoretical framing of the book remains largely notional, and the visual is understood and approached in very different ways, the variety of insights these eminent Proust scholars provide into the multiple manifestations and functions of the visual in and around the Recherche make this an appealing study. The quotations translated into English in the main text make the volume accessible to a non-French speaking audience interested in visual studies and literature, but, while the book itself is visually beautiful, with a Turner on the cover, it contains a regrettable number of typographical errors and inconsistent spellings.