Proust Writing Photography: Fixing the Fugitive in A la recherche du temps perdu (review)

This is a fascinating subject, and also an extremely challenging one. It is hard enough to master a vast scholarship on Proust and determine one's own reading of this complex literary work, but when one also confronts a burgeoning literature on photography the task of examining "Proust writing Photography" is daunting. What is more, as this well researched volume indicates, a critical literature on the subject of Proust and photography is fast emerging.

In a well-written introduction, Larkin situates her study of Proust and photography in relation to the broader field of relations between visual technologies and literature in 19th c France. She addresses both thematic and formal elements in the Recherche. An opening chapter, "thematic appropriations of photography," treats Swann as purveyor of photographs of work of art and Saint-Loup as photographer, both of his girl friend Rachel and of Marcel's grandmother. Subsequent chapters consider figures of photographic processes (specifically as these inform Proust's treatment of memory and perception) and methods of superimposition, as these inform Proust's treatment of identity in the novel. A final chapter addresses issues of sexuality, suggesting an interesting link between the notion of sexual inversion and image inversion in photographic processes.

Approaching Proust from the perspective of photography is productive when it opens up new interpretations of the novel. Larkin's study is productive in this sense up to a point. For example, the author suggests that photography blurs the opposition between voluntary and involuntary memory. Most critics take this opposition at face value, and if the impact of photography on Proust's writing has been little studied until recently, this is probably because of explicit statements Proust makes in the Recherche that link a banality of photography to the sterility of voluntary memory. As Larkin rightly suggests, such statements should not be taken as the last word on either photography or memory.

This important insight, however, is vitiated by the author's stubborn adherence to that other pillar of conventional Proust scholarship that cries out for reconsideration: the vocation story. (Roger Shattuck is the Proust critic most often cited in this study.) In the end, Larkin does not so much blur the opposition between the two modalities of memory as recuperate voluntary memory, placing it resolutely in the service of the project of esthetic creation she attributes now to Proust, now to Marcel. Similarly, Larkin quite rightly suggests that photographic tropes link the two principal first person voices of the novel, the prospective one and the retrospective one. But the force of this insight is also weakened when it is absorbed into the vocation story. Larkin seems to adhere to the modernist view that the book Marcel sets out to write at the end of the novel is the book we will have read (even though Joshua Landy challenged this idea convincingly in Philosophy as Fiction). A certain amount of confusion arises, at times, concerning the positions of narrator, character and author, even though, at other moments, Larkin appears to have these distinctions well in hand.

I found Larkin's study uneven. Moments of real insight and critical sophistication coexist with overly enthusiastic interpretive moves that struck me as seriously imbalanced, if not downright odd. (Larkin suggests, for example, that Swann's love affair with Odette is due to his over investment in photography and that Saint Loup's engagement with photography has "an important influence on the development of [Marcel's] determination to become a writer" (57). This goes a bit too far.)

On the other hand, the author makes a number of very insightful points in this book, such as that photographic tropes in Proust help us see all the ways in which "memory is . . . not wholly distinguishable from perception in the Proustian narrative" (135). This perspective informs her discussion of "the juxtaposition of visually perceived reality in the present and memory images of the same object" (115) and her...