Le Plaisir chez Proust par Aude Briot (review)

This elegantly written monograph approaches an interesting aspect of Proust’s Recherche, but sadly remains more descriptive than analytical. The book begins by demonstrating that all characters in Proust’s novel experience pleasure and that pleasure plays a role in their characterization. The third chapter, entitled ‘Les Effets du plaisir sur le récit’, tells us that pleasure acts as a source of information for characters’ motivations, that it is the object of ‘prolepses, analepses, de scènes et de sommaires’ (pp. 141–42), and that it is the subject of some of the narrator’s axiomatic statements. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 concern the ‘difficulty’ of pleasure, namely the obstacles to expressing it through language, its temporally elusive nature (pleasure is most often anticipated or remembered, and rarely lived), and its morally reprehensible connotations. The final three chapters offer the most teleological sequence, taking us from the limitations of human perception, which bar access to pleasure, to the dissatisfactory means used by characters to quell this shortcoming of the senses, to the ultimate solution: art. Only through the contemplation of art and the creation of art can one find a form of pleasure that is ‘pure’. The book thus concludes by agreeing with the account of ‘Plaisir’ given in the Dictionnaire Marcel Proust (ed. by Annick Bouillaguet and Brian G. Rogers (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004)), namely that it is aesthetic (p. 386). The monograph’s main weakness lies not in the predictability of its conclusions, but in the manner in which these are reached. Throughout the work, Aude Briot forms her argument by stringing together thematically related short quotations in which the word ‘plaisir’ or its cognates appear, without devoting much attention to these quotations’ context. To give one randomly chosen but illustrative example, on page 274 she cites Le Temps retrouvé, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur ii, La Prisonnière, Le Côté de Guermantes, and Sodome et Gomorrhe, as well as Proust’s juvenilia, without any consideration being given to how pleasure may have different connotations at different points in Proust’s œuvre. It may have proven more productive for the author to include fewer examples and devote more time to analysing these, for instance by undertaking close readings of complete paragraphs. Secondary sources are dealt with in a similarly superficial manner, with pertinent works of criticism being referenced, but not engaged with in depth. For example, the author cites Alain Roger’s thesis that the narrator of the Recherche is sexually impotent (pp. 205–06), but does not say whether she agrees or not with this thesis, nor does she expand on what implications such a thesis would hold for the narrator’s experience of pleasure. It would also have been interesting to see the author engage more meaningfully with Roland Barthes, Miguel de Beistegui, and Herbert James Campbell, who are all cited. Finally, the book could have benefited from engaging with English-language Proust scholarship, of which there is not a single title in its bibliography.