Au seuil de la modernité: Proust, Literature and the Arts. Essays in Memory of Richard Bales ed. by Nigel Harkness and Marion Schmid (review)

This is an excellent collection of seventeen essays, written in honour of the late Richard Bales and reflecting the great breadth and depth of his research interests, as well as his longstanding preoccupation with interactions between different art forms. Proust is the central focus of the work, and most of the essays are concerned with articulating Proust’s pivotal position on the threshold of modernity, whether in relation to aspects of its nineteenth-century beginnings, or to symbolism and surrealism in the twentieth century. The contributors include distinguished scholars from France, the UK, Ireland, and the USA, and the book is divided into four usefully chronological sections, within each of which the essays have been grouped with care so that their echoes and differences emerge clearly. In the first section, entitled ‘Meditations’, Catherine O’Beirne, Annick Bouillaguet, Timothy Unwin, and Marion Schmid each discuss intertextual links between Proust and, respectively, Dante, Balzac, Flaubert, and the Decadent poet Robert de Montesquiou. I found Catherine O’Beirne’s nuanced argument that Thomas Carlyle may have served as Proust’s source in relation to Dante’s Purgatorio particularly compelling. The second section, ‘Cultures of Modernity’, brings together essays by Alison Finch, Adam Watt, Cynthia Gamble on art nouveau, and Edward J. Hughes on nationalism. Alison Finch interrogates Proust’s status as cultural historian by incisively examining his treatment of technology and ‘lowly objects’ such as the umbrella, and of the complex concept of ‘influence’ in his work. Adam Watt’s witty discussion of the very ordinary nature of much of the matter of the Proustian universe focuses on the use of the banal object in À la recherche du temps perdu not as a starting point for metaphor and metonym creation, or for gaining access to long-sought truths about the self or the world, but as something to be resisted in order to maintain a cherished self-delusion. ‘Ontologies of the Modern’, the third section, contains essays by Jack Jordan, Diane R. Leonard, Patrick O’Donovan, and Jean Milly, each of whom explores aspects of Proust’s representation in his novel of the ontological experience of the twentieth-century subject, such as the altered conception of time and space, the subject as a fragmented, multilayered entity, affect, and the experience of love with all its ambiguities regarding the concealment and revelation of homosexuality. The essays in section IV, ‘Artistic Correspondences’, look beyond Proust to consider connections between diverse systems of representation. Thus Nigel Harkness reflects on the significance of sculpture and its deletion from the opening page of Proust’s novel within the context of nineteenth-century literature, especially Balzac, while Claire Moran looks at the influence of theatre on Belgian symbolists Fernand Khnopff and James Ensor. Patrick McGuinness explores the relationship between poetry and politics, and Peter Broome that between poetry and the visual arts, before Bernard Brun’s insightful homage to Richard Bales and his groundbreaking work brings the volume to a close. Broad in scope and meticulous in detail, this beautifully presented volume is a valuable contribution to the field of Proust studies.