Proust et la guerre by Brigitte Mahuzier (review)

Exempt from military service during the First World War, Proust figures among the ‘écrivains de l’arrière’, those who lacked first-hand experience of the horrors of the trenches. Even if this war fundamentally shaped the internal growth of À la recherche du temps perdu, only approximately 130 pages are directly concerned with it, which has created the deceptive image of a Proust largely unperturbed by the conflict. In her timely study Mahuzier proposes to look behind this ‘Proust fantasmé’ (p. 24) by reading À la recherche ‘de l’arrière’ (p. 15), thereby uncovering its ‘structure de l’après-coup’ (p. 55), which reveals that the brief war episode represents only ‘le sommet visible et reconnaissable d’un iceberg’ that in fact permeates the entire novel (p. 92). She does so in scintillating prose, opening with an engaging analysis of the famous photograph depicting the young Proust during his voluntary military service in 1889; on the basis of this image, Mahuzier develops two ostensibly conflicting discourses of patriotism and military ideology in the novel. This intertwining of ‘vie’ and ‘œuvre’ also structures the second chapter, in which the differing versions of Albertine disparue are read in the light of Proust’s mourning over Alfred Agostinelli’s death, which in May 1914 anticipated the future disappearance of many of Proust’s friends at the front. Even if Mahuzier brushes somewhat too swiftly over the differences between mourning and melancholia, she convincingly links the number of missing bodies during the war to Albertine’s geographical localization in ‘le voisinage de Montjouvain’ (À la recherche, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–89), IV, 1062) in the shorter typescript discovered in 1986, and argues that this localization allows for the process of mourning to take place. By connecting Albertine and her family to the great financial crisis of 1914, she also sheds light on material concerns, a topic traditionally confined to Proust’s biography. This masterful study brings together critical theory, genetic criticism, Proust’s correspondence, and military history (with one disconcerting and persistent misspelling: ‘Schließen’ instead of ‘Schlieffen’ Plan), but it is on the textual level that Mahuzier is at her most engaging, a particularly fascinating example being her reading of the closing image of À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (p. 90). By awarding the 1919 Prix Goncourt to Proust’s novel rather than to Roland Dorgelès’s Les Croix de bois, the jury opted for the seemingly antiideological, pre-war choice. But turning to the war episode in Le Temps retrouvé, Mahuzier presents Proust as a brilliant chronicler of this ‘monde à l’arrière’ that is wartime Paris, and into which Saint-Loup appears from the front to make a moving ‘plaidoyer pour un retour à la rhétorique des émotions’ (p. 108), albeit loosing his ‘croix de guerre’ in Jupien’s brothel and thereby crowning the novel with an image of non-redemption. Mahuzier’s important book, which closes with a reading of the similarities between military and literary strategy, sets an example for what excellent Proust criticism can still achieve, by making a strong case that À la recherche can, and in fact should, also be read as ‘un long voyage au bout de la nuit’ (p. 20).