Proust Writing Photography: Fixing the Fugitive in À la recherche du temps perdu by Áine Larkin (review)

Reviews 233 nouveau schéma, une “désespérance performative” (277) caractéristique de la pensée des années 1580–1600. La dernière partie de l’ouvrage aborde le renouvellement de la représentation de soi dans les années 1600–1620, discernable à la fois chez les catholiques, qui mettent en exergue une conception mécaniste du corps et de l’âme, et les réformés, qui valorisent l’entendement, la conscience et l’intériorité, tout en esquissant une“poétisation de la persona”(511). Lagrée ne s’est pas limitée aux grandes figures de la Renaissance,et c’est là l’un des grands mérites de son livre,qui nous permet aussi de redécouvrir des textes comme l’anonyme roman La Mariane du Filomène ou le Thrésor d’histoires admirables de Simon Goulart. Comme l’explique l’auteur dans les dernières pages du texte, on pourrait lui reprocher de s’être limitée à des œuvres françaises; nous voyons quant à nous dans cet ouvrage substantiel et bien conduit l’ouverture d’un champ d’investigation à l’échelle de l’Europe entière. University of Maryland, College Park Hervé-Thomas Campangne Larkin, Áine. Proust Writing Photography: Fixing the Fugitive in À la recherche du temps perdu. London: Legenda, 2011. ISBN 978-1-907747-95-3. Pp. 222. $90. Larkin’s book sets out to examine the “assimilation of photography into late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century French literary culture”by exploring Proust’s use of photographic motifs in his “monumental investigation of perception and memory, and landmark in literature for the mobility of notions of self”(1). One might think that another book on Proust and photography would not have much to offer that is new, but Larkin’s contribution is to demonstrate how the actual physical work in fixing and developing a photographic negative is reflected in Proust’s labors to create his book as well as in the narrator’s discovery of his vocation as a writer. She shows the “sensitivity with which Marcel Proust read not only photographs but also the processes and practices concomitant with these images”(195). At times she challenges readings by respected critics such as Roger Shattuck, Gilles Deleuze, Georges Poulet, and Gérard Genette: “While Genette concludes that optical illusion is the unintended result of Proustian writing, I argue that the appropriation of photography in metaphor functions as an attempt to pin down an otherwise vertiginous, utterly elusive reality”(160). A small selection of photographs by Arthur Batut illustrates Larkin’s thesis, in the chapter“Striving for Synthesis: Superimposed Images,”that Proust makes metaphorical use of this technique to “create an effect of spatial and temporal depth and thereby points to the inexorable passage of time and its effects on people” (133), as best seen in the famous bal de têtes passage in Le temps retrouvé. Certain comments may be overstated . Swann does not consistently reject introspection but suffers from a congenital disorder that prevents him from concentrating for long on any challenging problem. Too much credit may be given to Saint-Loup’s role: his“engagement with photography will profoundly inform [the Narrator’s] ultimate decision to write a work devoted to the search for lost time” (46). There are a few missed opportunities. In discussing the Marquis de Saint-Loup’s possession of one of the first handheld Kodak cameras that he uses to take snapshots,Larkin fails to note that this is one of the most evident signs of his socialist leanings and class betrayal.A closer reading of the vital but subordinate role that Proust assigns to intelligence and its relation to voluntary memory might at times have given sharper focus to her arguments, but the reader familiar with la Recherche will have no difficulty in following the development of her thesis to its sound conclusion. Larkin’s study is well researched and she is generous in acknowledging her sources and inspirations . Chief among these are Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, and Frank Wegner, whose unpublished doctoral thesis, Photography in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, is often cited. Anyone interested in Proust and photography, and the...