On Garréta on Proust

This article explores Anne F. Garréta’s engagements with Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu in La Décomposition (1999). I argue that Garréta’s various ‘rewritings’ of Proust’s novel supply a new image of the productive tensions between literary works and critical or novelistic approaches to them and simultaneously resist a tendency to reproduce and consume Proust’s work as a cultural fetish. In examining Garréta’s creation of a series of interfaces with passages in À la recherche, I suggest that some readers of La Décomposition encounter a ‘virtual’ text that shares some of the features of both authors’ novels but is identical to neither. I also consider the ways in which Roland Barthes’s understanding of Proust and of Proust criticism more generally can help us to appreciate the significance of what Garréta has done.