Les Mailles du filet, ou, ‘Le Temps immobile’ de Claude Mauriac by Évelyne Thoizet (review)

The ten volumes of Claude Mauriac’s Le Temps immobile (1974–88) have for long attracted the attention of those interested in the cultural and literary history of twentieth-century France. This is because they incorporate a mass of historical, biographical, and documentary information but also, more interestingly, because they illustrate most forcefully the problematics of the journal intime. Inevitably, for such critics, the question of time features prominently, but never before has Mauriac’s constant obsession with it been addressed so thoroughly as in the present study. Évelyne Thoizet’s detailed and systematic analysis is based on different concepts of time, which have preoccupied philosophers since Augustine of Hippo and Plato and continue to do so. She examines it as a subjective (phenomenological) experience and explores the complexities introduced by repetition or simultaneity, for example, or by eternity and even faith, an issue over which, as a non-believer, Claude Mauriac was permanently at odds with his father. In each case Thoizet turns, often at length, to philosophers whose work she finds especially appropriate (notably Henri Bergson and Paul Ricoeur). We also find comparisons with the practices of other diarists (Chateaubriand, Julien Green, and André Gide) and novelists (Marcel Proust, Nathalie Sarraute, and Michel Butor) whose interest in and treatment of time is often strikingly similar to Mauriac’s. While time remains the overriding and permanent, if abstract and theoretical, concern of Thoizet’s essay, she is also attentive to the ways in which the ten volumes, for which there is no single method of composition, have been consciously — and at times unconsciously — put together. Places (the family property at Malagar or Venice or Le Pont Neuf in Paris), people (de Gaulle, Michel Foucault, his father, or his cousin Bertrand Gay-Lussac), or significant personal experiences, for example, prompt reflection and comparisons, as do certain coincidences — his reading of his grandfather’s diary exactly a century after Jean-Louis Mauriac had begun it, or his marriage to Marie-Claude Mante, a distant relative of Proust. These and other devices, such as Mauriac’s cross-referencing or the use of blank spaces, the search for appropriate metaphors, or his deliberate reading of scientific, philosophical, and psychological texts, are all examined but shown to be ultimately inadequate. If Thoizet’s essay reads at times like a quasi-philosophical study in which Mauriac becomes almost secondary, she draws her material together in an excellent conclusion. What becomes abundantly clear is that, while infinitely rich, Le Temps immobile is a work that remained not only unfinished but unfinishable, that no single perception of — or attempt to — define time is possible, and that the search for what Mauriac defines variously as ‘le temps pur’, ‘le temps cosmique’, or ‘le temps profond’ is doomed to fail.