Proust and Joyce in Dialogue (review)

This is principally a short study of two long books and it is in the relation between brevitas and overarching structure that its primary attributes, and faults, are to be discerned. Tribout-Joseph is a first-rate close reader and some of her analyses are extremely perceptive, above all when drawing out effects of phonic echo and interplay in the close weave of her chosen texts. The book's overall impact, however, is less strong. It is not always clear how its various points of focus are meant to combine. It begins with a short account of the famed fleeting encounter between Proust and Joyce in Paris in 1922. As the author acknowledges, there was no dialogue between the two writers; so why Proust and Joyce 'in dialogue'? Tribout-Joseph spends a good deal of her introduction explaining what her study will not be and offering statements about 'the modern novel' whose self-evidentness is quite out of keeping with the subtleties of her analysis elsewhere. We are offered a brief qu'est-ce que le dialogue and a rather cursory run through of the critics who have attended to its place in the novel and elsewhere. The author seeks to examine 'the integration of voices and dialogues in the literary text' (p. 2), with emphasis on listening, silences, and the unsaid, building critically on the insights of Bakhtin and Sarraute. Of the latter one would have liked to have seen more in the body of the work, suggestively illuminating as the notion of 'sous-conversation' is to the subjects in hand. The book divides into two parts, dealing respectively with 'Internalized Dialogue' and 'Social Discourses'. The sections on Norpois's writing and Aimé's letters in Albertine disparue are insightful and instructive and the 'Cyclops' section of Ulysses is interestingly read in the light of Lévi-Strauss's notion of the bricoleur. Tribout-Joseph writes well about sociolects, eavesdropping, lying and the social panoramas of Proust's novel, but so have many before her and the referencing and bibliography are surprisingly light for subjects and authors so weighty. Some of the chapters deal singly with Proust or Joyce, others deal with each in turn. Comparisons and intertextual relations are profitably used to shed light on both authors (Rabelais' listing entertainingly anticipates that of Joyce; Rimbaud and Flaubert are read between the lines of Proust's prose) but directly comparative analyses, or assessments of how considering voice and dialogue in Proust and Joyce together might be valuable or illuminating, are scarce in the body of the book. In sum the chapters do not combine persuasively into a coherent whole (there is a methodological question about comparative criticism here that stretches wider than this particular book and the scope of this review). It might be naïve to wish for a study that scrutinizes and celebrates the many-layered and fragmentary nature of the writing of High Modernism to have a more cohesive narrative structure, but the impression this book leaves is one of flashes of critical brilliance against an undoubtedly rich but somewhat tangled backcloth.