A la recherche du temps perdu en France et en Allemagne (1913–1958) by Pascale Fravalo-Tane (review)

passage might suggest unreadability if we seek, with de Man, to interpret the text in a strict and rigidly logical fashion. But the narrator is not interested in making logical claims here and if we are really interested in reading we should not feel bounded by a need to support them” (30). Yet whatever Watt’s reader feels or judges concerning the making of logical claims in a literary text, certainly one of the virtues of Watt’s elucidating readings is their convergent demonstration of what he calls, in this same section, the instability and “plurality” of the reading experience. In chapters 2 (“Learning to Read”) and 3 (“Lessons in Reading”) Watt examines the important mediating roles of figures such as Bergotte and Elstir as the narrator, through them, learns how to read texts. In this section of his study Watt emphasizes one of the central themes of his analysis, namely the “entanglements” of literature and life: “If reading and writing are complementary processes that form a continuum, reading and living, or reading and life show themselves [. . .] to be equally entangled: both are empirical, both are instructive and imperfect” (96). Chapters 4 (“Reading between the Lines or “le délire de la lecture”) and 5 (“Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading”) are perhaps the strongest of the study. In chapter 4, Watt takes on what is certainly the most difficult section of the novel, Albertine disparue, along with the truncated Venice episode inserted therein. Watt shows that the act of reading in this section is connected to “delirium”—to a loss of subjective control, during certain highly theatrical moments in which the narrator finds himself at the threshold of madness. Here, and in the detailed textual analyses of chapter 5, Watt engages the rhetorical and narrative complexity that characterizes the Recherche. Especially interesting is the development accorded to translation in chapter 5. When Watt asserts: “Writing a literary work of art involves translating the inner signs to make them comprehensible. [. . .] Reading, then, is interpretation is translation is creation” (142), he is making Proustian sense, but cryptically. Translation in Proust deserves ample development, and could be the topic of a subsequent book. University of Miami (FL) David R. Ellison FRAVALO-TANE, PASCALE. A la recherche du temps perdu en France et en Allemagne (1913–1958). Paris: Champion, 2008. ISBN 978-2-7453-1726-1. Pp. 461. 81 a. Pascale Fravalo-Tane provides an informative, provocative history of the reception of Proust’s novel in France and Germany from the publication of the first volume, Du côté de chez Swann (in 1913) until 1958, when the first complete German translation of A la recherche du temps perdu was published by Eva RechelMertens . Proust’s novel presented critics and readers in both countries with unprecedented obstacles: its long publication history in France; doubts about its genre; its length and complexity; and, in Germany, the lack of a complete translation , which forced critics in the early years to depend on the often flawed commentaries by French critics. Fravalo-Tane sees the German critics, Ernst Robert Curtius, Walter Benjamin, and Leo Spitzer, as being among the first to appreciate certain aspects of La Recherche. Proust lived to read Curtius’s articles, which led to a brief but important correspondence between them. Their lack of jingoistic feelings allowed them to admire the literature and music of the other’s country. Indeed, Curtius saw such Reviews 819 cultural exchanges as agents of peace leading to European unity. Unlike the early French critics, Curtius understood and appreciated Proust’s style, calling it a “un musée de l’histoire de la langue française” (152). Walter Benjamin, critic, writer, and translator of several volumes of La Recherche is best remembered for his essay “Zum Bilde Prousts” (1929) that mingles Proust’s imagery with his own to describe the novelist’s unique style. In a famous example, Benjamin analogizes Proust’s “syntaxe avec ses phrases sans rivages” as “ce Nil du langage qui déborde ici, pour les fertiliser, sur les plaines de la vérité” (307). His essay opened la voie à un nouveau type de lecture en Allemagne: Adorno, en particulier, s’inscrira dans cette perspective. [...] Si...