Proust écrivain de la Première Guerre mondiale ed. by Philippe Chardin et Nathalie Mauriac Dyer (review)

This volume is an unannounced tribute anticipating the centenary of the end of the First World War. The editorial material is rather slight—a three-page Avant-propos by Philippe Chardin and Nathalie Mauriac Dyer outlining contributions, and no Conclusion — but the selection of material, including a useful bibliography by Pyra Wise, provides excellent coverage and speaks for itself. The book, which seeks to contextualize Proust’s work in relation to major testimonies of the war, is divided into three sections (‘Contextes’, ‘Discours’, ‘Mythifications’), a division that seems forced at times. However the first chapter, by Pierre-Edmond Robert, makes for an excellent introduction to the volume. Robert argues that in the context of the war Le Temps retrouvé becomes a ‘témoignage romanesque’ (p. 14), representative of ‘cette catégorie littéraire fort composite, en mal de classements efficaces’ (p. 14). While writers such as Henri Barbusse, Maurice Genevoix, and Roland Dorgelès served at the Front themselves, both Robert and Carine Trevisan make the case for Proust’s importance as a writer of the ‘arrière pays’. Meanwhile Anna Magdalena Elsner shows how frivolous questions of mourning attire can prevail. Trevisan explores the writing of the unspeakable: ‘il y a chez Proust comme une sidération ou un refus de la pensée face à l’ampleur de la catastrophe inaugurale du siècle’ (p. 27). Far from being an ‘embusqué’, exempt as Proust was from service because of his health, his assiduous reading of newspapers, his interest in military strategy, and his frequenting of officers’ circles all enter into the text via Brichot, Cottard, Norpois, Morel, and Legrandin who write in the papers: as such, Robert notes, the war is an ‘événement imprimé’ (p. 18) and Chardin goes on to show how such patriotism is satirized by the Narrator and Charlus in his Germanophile tirades. The war interrupts the writing of the Recherche, and, while many of the contributors adopt a genetic approach to Proust’s inclusion of the unfolding narrative of the war, all converge on the idea that ‘Proust ne privilégie aucun des discours de la guerre’ (p. 24), the focus of Elisheva Rosen’s contribution. Wise examines Proust’s use of language to represent both sides, and Chardin extends this to an exploration of received ideas with an apt conclusion to the volume, arguing that Proust denounces the war not ‘en tant qu’horreur inouïe’ as it is in the mimesis of realist eyewitness literature but ‘en tant qu’erreur, en tant qu’illusion parmi d’autres’ (p. 129). Edward Hughes, Brigitte Mahuzier, and Yuji Murakami read Proust through Julien Benda, Romain Rolland, and the Dreyfus Affair respectively. In the Part Three, Hiroya Sakamoto, Adam Watt, and Nathalie Mauriac Dyer look at the city, the body, and a final apocalyptic vision out of which Dyer resurrects a memorial that salvages the memory of the little things in life in the face of mass destruction.