The Strange M. Proust (review)

Proust's name and the title of his novel are well known: they are a 'lieu de mémoire', an 'immutable image' (p. 4). Such points are commonplace, but what this excellent book seeks to do—and achieves in large measure—is to explore the qualities of shock and surprise, the bewildering oddities of Proust's peculiar novel, precisely the aspects of it that are occluded by standard readings. Here we find Malcolm Bowie's last, brilliant, posthumous essay whose characteristic subtlety and measured elegance crown the ten chapters whose origins were a symposium at Princeton in 2006. The sustained acuity of the analysis and insight in the volume is remarkable; welcome and fruitful too are the cross-currents between the pieces which focus in complementary ways on different aspects of Proustian strangeness. David Ellison considers Proust in relation to Freud's Unheimlichkeit and Heidegger's 'Letter on Humanism'. Anne Simon demonstrates the strange plasticity of Proustian subjectivity by tracking its fate in the hands of Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur, Barthes, Sartre and Deleuze (and in only ten or so pages—some feat). Joseph Brami traces the 'étrangeté' of Jewish identity from Jean Santeuil to A la recherche. André Benhaïm's sparkling chapter offers lucid analysis of the interplay of estrangement and exoticism in Mme Blatin's encounter with a Singhalese man in the 'jardin d'acclimation'. Raymonde Coudert's essay draws suggestive and convincingly argued lines of association between the metterza figure of grandmother, mother and son found in Leonardo's 'The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne' and triadic figurings in Proust's novel. Michael Wood ponders the inherent strangeness of photography and Proust's equivocal relation to it. The chapters by Antoine Compagnon and Christie McDonald stand apart for they do not explicitly or self-avowedly engage with Proustian strangeness. McDonald's essay, oddly, is reprinted from Proust in Perspective, an edited volume published in 2002 (reviewed in FS, LVIII (2004), 134 – 5). Compagnon offers a rich examination of Proust's troubling relation to concepts of truth and justice (in this the essay anticipates his 2008 Collège de France lectures, 'Morales de Proust'). The last chapter is Bowie's and it will feature hereafter alongside Spitzer and Jean Milly as essential reading on Proust's style. His guiding question is whether we can read the Recherche in such a way that its strange 'micro-movements […] are preserved rather than overridden' (p. 125). The central focus is on Proust's use of the verb 'superposer' and its cognates; his novel is one of layers and imbrications, argues Bowie (anticipated by Coudert's consideration of sfumato in Leonardo's work earlier in the volume), and artistic achievement, as writer or reader, will come from a sensitivity to the endlessly overlaid anticipations, misconstruals and revisions that make up existence, as much in the real world as in the pages of Proust's book. This essay, a pendant to Bowie's 'Postlude' to the Cambridge Companion to Proust, reminds us that in this very long novel often the smallest part can bring unexpected—and strange—revelations. Benhaïm is to be applauded for drawing together specialists working in the US, France and the UK, and for bringing to fruition a project that, whilst marking the end of an era also points ahead to an exciting new phase in the study of Proust's novel.