Proust and Joyce in Dialogue (review)

Sarah Tribout-Joseph’s study of Proust and Joyce in Dialogue begins—rather predictably—by rehearsing the tale of the two authors’ meeting at the Hôtel Majestic in Paris in 1922 at a grand soirée also attended by Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, and Sergei Diaghilev, among other luminaries. The encounter, one of the modernist period’s most often reported incidents,¹ has, as Tribout-Joseph correctly observes, been “mythologized for the very banality of its dimensions” (1), with posterity ever agog to know more as to what passed between the two cult figures of the day. (They are said to have discussed truffles, bemoaned their respective medical problems, and professed a lack of knowledge of each other’s works: not a literary nugget in sight.) But having rightly emphasized the myth-making to which the anticlimactic meeting of the greats has given rise since its occurrence, Tribout-Joseph perplexingly goes on to indulge in not a little mythologizing herself. In a swift turnabout, the encounter is referred to as “the missed moment of literary history” and the silence at its heart described as “difficult to accept, intolerable even” (1). Within a page, Proust’s and Joyce’s casual party chitchat is fantasized into an imaginary conversation: “the silenced literary exchange they might have had and which resonates in the minds of readers and critics” (2). The delineation of this “imaginary space” leads to a strange comparison, in which critics are cast as “absent eavesdroppers” to the fetishized exchange, a position that is tenuously said to “reproduce . . . the position of the reader in relation to the scripted conversations found in books” (1). This, as adumbrated by the title, is the readerly position in which Tribout-Joseph’s main interest lies—for dialogue, in this study, is considered as “an interpretive key” to the works of both authors (18).

This introductory sally, which thus recapitulates how Proust and Joyce once failed to engage “in dialogue,” goes on to state clearly that the book in hand (self-evidently) cannot be “a record of conversations from a literary friendship” nor will it be “an account of influence” (1). The rapprochement Tribout-Joseph aspires to make between the two authors is of a more general and tangential kind: they are brought together here as representatives of the modernist movement—specifically, as exemplars of its “reconciliation of high literature with popular voices,” of its “piecing together of fragmentary discourses,” and its “desire to include everything within [itself]” (18). Aside from the brief delineation of this overarching program, the book’s unifying thread remains conspicuous by its absence. The topics falling within its scope are dizzyingly wide-ranging, and the emphases of Tribout-Joseph’s inquiries do not occur where they might have been expected. Although one of the study’s declared aims is to consider the use of dialogue in the modern novel, only short sections are devoted to dialogue per se. The investigative focus shifts from “Internalized Dialogue” in part 1 (which considers the representation of listening processes, the use of interior monologue, and the Proustian narrator’s struggle to prevent his own voice from being drowned out by those of others) to “Social Discourse” in part 2 (which looks at intertextuality, advertising language, and high-society talk). Such disparate concerns make for a puzzling reading experience, which constantly has one wondering when, and indeed whether, the “dialogue” so prominently featured in the title will take center-stage. The book’s highly fragmented structure accentuates the elusiveness of the principal argument.

In general, the study deals with its two subjects separately, veering from one author to the other as it proceeds from one section to the next. This renders any sustained exploration of the parallels between the two authors almost impossible. Nonetheless, connections do emerge. Joyce and Proust are hailed for their paradigm-shifting “use of dialogue to focus on internal debate, on the exploration of interior dramas” (8). The two are also recognized for their collapsing of the boundaries...