The Strange M. Proust ed. by André Benhaïm (review)

tante Léonie” où l’on pourrait voir avec Nathalie Mauriac-Dyer “un pastiche de Barbey ou une parodie de la théorie pseudo-scientifique des vertèbres craniennes” (38), le destin du Picciola de Saintine, lecture de jeunesse louée dans Jean Santeuil et décriée dans la Recherche (Dezon-Jones 231), l’erreur sur la formule chimique de l’eau (Pléiade, III, 351) qui, sans remettre en cause la “culture scientifique de Proust” passée au crible par François Vannucci (93–100), pourrait provenir, selon Mireille Naturel, d’un souvenir involontaire de Flaubert (103), le rapprochement avec Descartes que propose Bernard Brun, soulignant que l’entière structuration du livre procède du doute initial auquel est confronté le dormeur éveillé (69). A ces incursions s’ajoutent un dossier sur Proust et ses professeurs de Droit, un autre sur ses goûts en matière d’ameublement. Les savoirs de Proust furent encyclopédiques (on pourrait ajouter au présent dossier les étymologies, la stratégie militaire), ils contribuent à l’originalité formelle et thématique de son roman même si, comme l’affirme Mireille Naturel, “la recherche de la vérité refuse de se laisser approfondir et enfermer dans les rets du savoir” (109). New York University Eugène Nicole BENHAÏM, ANDRÉ, ed. The Strange M. Proust. London: Legenda, 2009. ISBN 978-1905981 -97-7. Pp. 142. $89.50. The ten essays of this volume are taken from a conference of the same name held at Princeton University in 2006, the aim of which was to explore the strangeness of Marcel Proust’s work. According to the editor of the book and organizer of the conference, André Benhaïm, “this strangeness has been forgotten or occulted by public and institutional recognition” (1). Proust has become such a sacred cow, for high and low culture alike, that the newness of In Search of Lost Time, its ability to provoke thought as well as unease in its readers, has been almost completely effaced. The eminent Proust scholars contributing to this volume all propose readings of the Search that tease out paradoxes, the uncanny, and the subversive hidden in Proust’s text through a variety of critical perspectives. Although the theme of “strangeness” is broad, the chapters cohere remarkably well and are of a uniformly high caliber. The first chapter, by David Ellison, defines a Proustian uncanny, in its similarities and differences with Freud’s notion of Unheimlichkeit. For Ellison, finding the strange in Proust means moving backwards in time to a point before the Search was familiar territory, a move he likens to the reversing of the “anaesthetizing force of Habit” (15) described by Proust’s narrator. Yet the “disquieting strangeness ” found in Proust is not simply an effect of time or narrative, but, as Ellison suggests, the strange inhabits the familiar: narrative does not overcome the uncanny but seeks to forget or displace the experience. Christie McDonald’s essay, “Da Capo: Accumulations and Explosions,” approaches the Proustian subject’s recognition of the familiar from a different perspective, that of repetition, linearity, and temporal breaks. Analyzing two key events, the narrator’s inability to recognize his own article in Le Figaro and the sudden recognition of Vinteuil’s “petite phrase” in his sonata, McDonald shows how memory accumulates slowly, in fits and starts, and “explodes into meaning” (86), for a narrative subject whose models of creative destruction are music and art. 168 FRENCH REVIEW 84.1 Michael Wood argues that, like Barthes, Proust claims to prefer photography to cinema, but that the use of the two media in the Search makes it impossible to separate them. Ultimately, what Proust prefers in photography, the freezing of the moment, and what he deplores in cinema, the unstoppable movement of time, are two sides of the same coin: “the ongoing life of the dead, and the oncoming death of the living” (110). The concluding chapter by the late Malcolm Bowie, “Reading Proust between the Lines,” is the finest piece in the book and is Bowie’s final published essay. He argues for a reading of Proust that is attentive to “the ordinary strangeness of Proust at the textual...