Mourning and Creativity in Proust by Anna Magdalena Elsner (review)

This is a beautiful book that demonstrates the importance and complexity of mourning in Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (the titular 'in Proust' is deceptively broad). Its theoretical framework is nuanced and carefully considered, and is predominantly built around the writings of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida. Freud is crucially shown to evolve from the quite dogmatic and binary essay 'Mourning and Melancholia' towards a position of greater openness and scepticism as regards the end(s) of grief. It is, Anna Magdalena Elsner convincingly claims, this 'multifaceted quality of Freudian mourning that turns Freud into such a fertile interlocutor for Proust' (p. 11). Likewise, Derrida — in texts that are often very personal, responding to the deaths of particular friends — offers a very rich approach to the theme of mourning, complicating binaries between memory and oubli as between fidelity and infidelity, and ultimately valorizing mourning as an impossible but necessary and inevitable ethical position. Additional reference points are Emmanuel Levinas on relationality and responsibility, Jean-Luc Nancy on embodiment, and Melanie Klein on childhood. Elsner explores Proust's novel through persuasive close readings in dialogue with theory, but also situates the novel in relation to its socio-historical context, namely what is claimed — following the work of Philippe Ariès (for example, in L'Homme devant la mort (Paris: Seuil, 1977)) — as a 'crisis of mourning' (p. xi) resulting from allied factors such as the increasingly private nature of modern grief and the staggering death toll of the First World War. There are some fascinating pages here about changing fashions of mourning dress during this period, as well as thoughtful comparison with earlier traditions regarding how long mourning should last. In Elsner's reading, mourning calls for and nourishes certain forms of creativity (a term quite broadly understood), yet creativity, vitally, is not the end of mourning but rather 'a way of extending the process of mourning' (p. 214), of rendering it 'temporarily manageable' (p. 2). Mourning is a process, but one that is neither linear nor finite. Of the many deaths mourned in Proust's novel, Elsner focuses on the two most significant, the grandmother and Albertine, and demonstrates especially mourning's strange relationship to time and space. Mourning is either anticipated or belated, and renders spaces uncanny, whether Balbec where the grandmother is mourned, Venice where Albertine is revived and where the mother mourns her mother but is also herself grieved over proleptically, or the more general and collective mourning of wartime Paris. These spaces also uncannily recall the first home, Combray, and it is to Combray that the final chapter returns, with its reconsideration of the famous drame du coucher as 'the origin of mourning in the Recherche' (p. 168), in dialogue with Klein, Jacques Lacan, and the fort/da game from Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle'. Philosophical tenets from Le Temps retrouvé are also drawn out to challenge redemptive readings of mourning in general and the novel's close in particular. This book is destined to become a staple of Proust criticism, but it is to be hoped that it will attract broader attention for its sensitive yet provocative claims about the very nature and experience of mourning.