Proust's Deadline (review)

Cano's project—laid out in a pithy and engaging introduction that immediately snares the reader's interest—is to read the Recherche's explicit and celebrated claims for aesthetic totality against its own countervailing "paratexte": not only the doubts, fears and uncertainties Proust expressed elsewhere, but the turbulent history of the work's emergence and publication. Framing her inquiry in terms of the metaphor/metonymy polarity that has long structured one arena of debate about the Proustian text, Cano sets the work's officious claims for unity (and metaphor) against the metonymic, fragmented history of its production: a history inflected by Proust's own efforts as impresario to stage-manage the appearance of his great work.

In her first chapter, "Forthcoming: Announcing the Recherche," Cano studies Proust's unflagging effort to defend the integral unity of his work, even as contingencies of time and history, illness, publishing practice and writerly whim wrought havoc with his original publication plans. We learn that Proust's obsessive masterminding of pre-publication strategies to prepare the future reader of his work—from published excerpts, to the "écho" (now known as the blurb), to inviting recalcitrant critics over for an evening of reading aloud—was, searingly, riddled with fears that such fragments might eclipse the whole, in the reader's mind.

Such fear of being misread became an intense psychodrama for Proust as he pursued his persistent yet impossible ideal, that of the single, indivisible whole. We discover that what first prompted him to seek publication with the NRF was resistance to the idea of cutting up his work into several volumes—as though, in Proust's own image, he were being forced to chop a tapestry into the dimensions of a modern apartment. Cano draws here on Séailles's French variant of German Romantic philosophy, his conception of the temporality of process as deceptive; rather, argued Séailles, the work itself is simultaneous, all of its successively composed parts infused with the same "internal logic" of the artist. Séailles's work, which Proust knew, brings further nuance to Proust's wrestling with "the impossibility of saying everything at once" (38), the necessary deferral of comprehension to the end of the last volume—and thus to Proust's agony over the increasingly inevitability of serial publication.

The obsession with simultaneity, however, carried dangers of its own as Proust strained to keep his work intact—spawning, in particular, claims of monstrosity of various sorts: from Paul Souday's infamous review of Du côté de chez Swann to Grasset's equally infamous "c'est illisible." To this chorus of claims for monstrosity and excess, for lack of discipline, control, and selection, Cano opposes critic André Beaunier—who refused to review the novel until it had appeared in its entirety, rather than risk a misreading—and who died too soon, providing an eloquent if tragic "paradigm of the paradox of deferred meaning: a forced alternative between misreading of the part and a complete reading that may never take place" (59). The "monstrosity" tropes culminate with the posthumous appearance of the Albertine volumes (La Prisonnière and Albertine disparue), provoking new comparisons to organic process "gone awry" (Cano). Studying these claims—from Feuillerat's "excroissances" to Vigneron's "tumeurs monstrueuses" to Maurois's "monstrous product of a pregnancy having overrun its term"—Cano insightfully invokes the analogy of Frankenstein's monster: the creative project become independent of its creator. Yet, a rival critical tradition maintains that Proust was in thorough control of his text throughout, and, as Cano argues, draws on metaphors of genealogy to justify Albertine's emergence from within the depths themselves of the Recherche. As representative of this tradition, Compagnon's effort to "integrate" Albertine is seen by Cano as a "crystallization" in which Albertine materializes Proust's intention to "inflect the narrative toward Gomorrah" from the outset. In the context of this tradition, Cano compares Albertine's shadowy, potential presence to a "textual unconscious . . . the vague material waiting for a spark...