Proust et la guerre by Brigitte Mahuzier (review)

Reviews 225 contemporary theatre (Barbara Métais-Chastanier); and a wide-ranging survey of the potential roles of music in radiophonic documentaries (David Christoffel). Among the offerings likely to be of more direct interest to readers is Alison James’s interview of the contemporary writer, François Bon, whose animated responses make for lively reading. Parrying her repeated invitations to categorize his own work in a definitive manner—literature? non-fiction? document?—Bon finally asserts, with a note of apparent exasperation:“Il faut surtout ne pas donner trop de sérieux à ce que les gens comme moi bricolent” (55). Marie-Jeanne Zenetti proposes the term “factographies” for undertakings such as Georges Perec’s Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien, which seem to transgress conventional narrative boundaries,whileAngelos Triantafyllou explores in free-wheeling fashion the“poésie documentaire”of Blaise Cendrars. In an interesting presentation, Laurent Véray looks at how Nicole Vedrès retraces, in Paris 1900, the early development of cinema and simultaneously calls into question “les frontières entre le documentaire et la fiction, le réel et l’imaginaire, l’histoire intime et l’aventure collective” (157). One of the more entertaining contributions is Myriam Boucharenc’s account, at once scholarly and playful, of the birth and enduring popularity of the idiosyncratic advertising icon, Bébé Cadum. The editors include in mid-volume a sequence of photographs,illustrations,and film stills.Their bibliography of existing critical work on documentary arts and nonfiction brings this collection to a satisfying close. University of Kansas John T. Booker Mahuzier, Brigitte. Proust et la guerre. Paris: Champion, 2014. ISBN 978-2-74532642 -3. Pp. 192. 38 a. Readers will be familiar with the premise that the advent of World War I prolonged the writing of Le côté de Guermantes, leading to a seven, rather than three, volume work. Mahuzier invites us to read Proust’s wartime writing literally“de l’arrière”(15), pointing out that Proust used the war as a“diversion”to deviate from his original plan, allowing him to develop“ses théories de la perversion”(21), namely“l’homoérotisme sadomasochiste,” that are on display in Jupien’s male brothel (16). Mahuzier cannot resist giving“tout son sens (guerrier et homoérotique à la fois) au mot‘arrière’”(15). While her attempt at word play distracts from her point, she does make a serious one. It is the apparently most perverse patron of Jupien’s bordello, Charlus, who condemns “non seulement les excès mais l’excédante bêtise” of wartime patriotic literature (41– 42).Writing against the perception that la Recherche has little to say on the Great War, Mahuzier situates the novel in the materiality of “le contexte militaire” (19). Her first chapter recounts Proust’s military service before meandering through a series of disparate references on war, ranging from “Gavroche sur les barricades” (38), to Thucydides (39),to Derrida’s Donner la mort (40),and Georges Brassens’s song“Mourir pour des idées” (40). Such rapid shifts in tone undercut her efforts to highlight the novel’s “discours extrêmement critique de toute l’idéologie militariste” (43). Her second chapter traces the impact of beloved chauffeur Alfred Agostinelli’s death on Proust, who transposes his loss into the novel in the person of the enigmatic Albertine. Mahuzier ends this chapter with a discussion of the theme of “les intermittences du cœur” (77), describing the Narrator/Marcel’s ambivalence about finally discovering Albertine’s true sexual orientation as Proust’s“traumatophilie”(81). In a strong third chapter exploring the “poétique et morale de l’arrière” expressed by Saint-Loup and his uncle Charlus, Mahuzier returns to the wartime dynamic of the“front”and“rear” to conclude that “[l]’arrière en temps de guerre est donc le lieu privilégié pour voir le monde proustien par le petit bout de la lorgnette, dans son fourmillement d’actes minuscules et dans ses gesticulations grotesques” (99). Her final chapter begins by belaboring a banality:“[L]a stratégie militaire est à la guerre ce que la stratégie littéraire est à la littérature” (136). Analyzing closely Saint-Loup’s...