Proust dans la décadence (review)

This lucid book convincingly traces the influence of the Decadent movement on Marcel Proust, building a sustained and persuasive argument around the complexity of certain aspects of that movement, from its links with classical decadence to its obsession with decline, decomposition, sex, and death. Acknowledging at the outset the fluidity of the term ‘Decadence’, Schmid clearly articulates the framework of her analysis along the two lines of interpretation just mentioned, and the book takes a chronological and thematic approach to Proust’s work. The first chapter places Proust neatly in the context of fin de siècle literary endeavour, making a nuanced distinction between Decadent and Symbolist literature, and drawing on a wide range of material, including Proust’s own juvenilia, to show the importance of such figures as Baudelaire and Montesquiou in the development of Proust’s aesthetics. The second chapter is an impressive in-depth examination of Les Plaisirs et les jours (1896) and points up the internal logic of the ordering of the pieces included in that volume. As well as its debt to Decadence on a formal level, Schmid shows how in Les Plaisirs et les jours Proust consistently pastiches tropes of Decadent writing, using it as material for an exercise in stylistic refinement. His ironical appropriation of such tropes can thus be seen as less a criticism of them than an experiment in different voices and styles. Chapter 3, ‘Esthétisme et idolâtrie’, underlines the importance of nineteenth-century English aestheticism for Proust, especially the notion of ‘art for art’s sake’ and the work of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and John Ruskin, which, as Schmid shows, helped Proust to refine and articulate his own precise idea of what idolatry of art meant; astute analyses of the aesthetes and poseurs in À la recherche du temps perdu underline how they function as counter-models for the narrator. In ‘Sexe et vice’ (Chapter 4) Schmid’s claims regarding the significance of the Decadent movement’s fascination with transgressive sexualities and evil for Proust’s work convince: once again a dialectic of assimilation and rejection in Proust’s ambiguous relation to Decadent forms and figures is compellingly traced, in Les Plaisirs et les jours and in early drafts of À la recherche du temps perdu as well as the final text. Chapter 5 explores the imagery of catastrophe, apocalypse, and neurosis in Proust’s work, drawing out the links between the Decadent preoccupation with pathological degeneration and Proust’s representation of the ‘triade de la folie’ (p. 174) that is Charlus, Morel, and Albertine, before the final chapter clarifies how integral Decadent style was as a precursor to twentieth-century literary modernism. Schmid shows how Proust’s Goncourt pastiches enable the development of his ‘écriture polyphonique’ (p. 221) and are the means by which he assimilates and moves beyond the style of his predecessors, while his consistent emphasis on the unity of his novel underlines his rejection of a Decadence-style explosion of form. Clear and meticulously documented, this is a valuable addition to the field of Proust studies.