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

Before Proust scholars discovered photography as a worthwhile motif for academic investigation, theorists of the medium had long begun to use some of Proust’s observations on photography as a source of inspiration. Siegfried Kracauer and Susan Sontag, for example, famously read À la recherche du temps perdu as illustration of an anti-photographic aesthetic where the involuntary, unmediated memory image wins over the photographic picture as metaphor for voluntary, mediated memory. More recent critics such as Malcolm Bowie, Rainer Warning, and Irene Albers have reconsidered the significance of involuntary memory in Proust’s poetics. The interpretation of photography in his writing, therefore, has changed. Mieke Bal, with her idea that Proust’s visual poetics is driven by a conflict between the fascination with the ‘flatness of photography’ on the one hand and the staging of depth on the other, has been particularly influential. Most recently, Patrick Mathieu has taken the debate to a higher level when seeking to reinterpret Proust’s literary theory through an analysis of his ‘écriture photographique’. Áine Larkin shies away from positioning her study precisely within this impressive field of research when she sets out to explore ‘the assimilation of photography’ into modern French literature by analysing Proust’s formal and stylistic use of photographic motifs in relation to perception, memory, lineage, and love. Consequently, the main merit of her study lies not in a media-theoretical or media-historical reinterpretation of the theme, but in her captivating and comprehensive literary analysis, which gains its strength from in-depth readings of selected scenes, often bringing previously little-studied passages to new prominence. Larkin opens with a discussion of the functional appropriations of photography in relation to the realization of the narrator Marcel’s creative literary vocation. The second chapter concentrates on figurative uses of the medium and explores the relation of photographic practice and images to perception, memory, and the lexicon of photography. The third chapter, on narrative focalization and image juxtaposition, considers the dual narratological structure of À la recherche du temps perdu and the way it is used to undermine any potential certainty of the narrator’s experience. Drawing on Georges Poulet, Frank Wegner, and Gérard Genette (Larkin’s principal sources of reference throughout the book), the fourth chapter aims to explore the extent to which photography serves to represent a paradox on which Proust’s autobiographical novel rests — in Poulet’s words, ‘the presence in the present of an other present: the past’ (cited on p. 135) — through analysing the evocation of composite photographs and radiographic images. The last and strongest chapter disentangles the links between clandestine sexualities and photography when tracing the circulation of photographs in relation to characters’ movements between social worlds initially believed to be mutually exclusive. Throughout the volume, Larkin’s close readings often provide fresh insights by situating themselves at a tangent to existing interpretations. In this way they form an individual trajectory, turning the study into a valuable source of orientation and stimulation for experts and newcomers to the field alike.