Reading in Proust's 'À la recherche': 'le délire de la lecture' (review)

This excellent book, which traces the significance of scenes in Proust's novel in which texts are read, offers a nuanced and wholly convincing study of the cumulative effects of this acquired, and yet in many ways ungovernable, skill for the Proustian narrator in particular, but also, ultimately, for all readers. In so doing, it successfully draws together many strands of Proust research, providing a wide-ranging and discriminating picture of current activity in Proust studies in the UK, the US, and France. The central idea of the importance of the act of reading is interrogated with care and assurance, and a compelling case is made for the uncertainty and instability of the reading encounter. The book follows the structure of À la recherche du temps perdu, moving from Du côté de che' Swann in the first chapter to Le Temps retrouvé in the last. Each of the five chapters is coherently built around close, insightful analysis of particular, occasionally overlooked, episodes from the novel, and, where often explored scenes are discussed, they are handled with inspiring freshness. Having identified what he defines in Freudian terms as the 'primal scenes' of reading in the Proustian narrative, scenes where books emerge both as concrete material objects and conduits for the highly unstable, multi-sensory activity that is reading, Watt proceeds to trace how the narrator develops his ability to read by engaging (with varying degrees of success) with a range of texts, such as Bergotte's novels, a letter inviting him to a dinner party, his own article in Le Figaro. The narrator's models of good and bad reading practice — Swann, Elstir, Norpois, Mile Vinteuil's lover, the Goncourt pastiche — are explored in the third chapter, which points up the heady instability of reading and its catalytic quality on one's powers of observation in social life and in relation to the self. The treatment of 'délire' in the fourth chapter is masterly. Based on a sensitive, perceptive engagement with the idea of (mis)reading as an act that has the potential to 'stray into the text' (p. 103) and so produce temporary interpretative delirium in the reader, this perspective on Proust's work proves richly rewarding in Watt's hands. Addressing the connection between reading and creative writing for Proust, acts both bound up with translation, the final chapter underlines the fundamental roles of vision and time in and for all such interpretative and creative processes. This lucid, elegantly written book is an important contribution to Proust studies. A considered, keen meditation on the complexities of the act of reading written texts, it is in itself a pleasure to peruse.