Marcel Proust: écriture, réécritures. Dynamiques de l’échange esthétique/Marcel Proust: escritura, reescrituras. Dinámicas del intercambio estético (review)

This book buzzes with the voices and languages of European culture. Ten of its twenty-four essays are in French, fourteen in Spanish. Along the way we also encounter quotations in German and Italian as we are invited to listen in to the dialogues between Proust and such figures as Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Patrick Modiano, Juan Benet, Walter Benjamin, W. G. Sebald, and Cesare Pavese. Quotations from languages other than French and Spanish are translated, but, to put it simply, those who do not read Spanish will be able to access less than half of this book. Each of its six parts approaches aspects of Proust’s work ‘in dialogue’: ‘La Recherche en dialogue avec soi-même’, ‘. . . avec le passé’, ‘. . . avec son temps’, ‘. . . avec la posterité’, ‘. . . avec la musique’; and the remaining section treats what the editors term the novel’s ‘dialogues atemporels’ — its reception, translation and adaptation. This is an omnium gatherum, then, and a decidedly uneven one: the book’s parts and the essays themselves vary considerably in length; at least four different French editions of Proust’s novel are referred to; no established abbreviations are used; and the quality of copy-editing is highly variable. That said, there is some very good material in this throng. In Spanish, Francisco González Fernández’s essay on the relations between Proust’s writing and Henri Poincaré’s working methods is rich and suggestive; Arno Gimber’s sensitive essay on the presence of Proust in Sebald’s writing, particularly in Austerlitz, enhances our understanding of the intriguing dialogue between these writers; and, in Torben Lohmüller’s contribution, Walter Benjamin’s views on translation in his published writings and his correspondence are brought productively into contact with Proust’s own practical and figural use of translation. In French, Mireille Naturel’s essay on the Flaubertian inheritance of ‘blancs narratifs’ in Proust’s work and Philippe Chardin’s parallel reading of Les Plaisirs et les jours and Joyce’s Dubliners are highlights in the sections dealing with Proust ‘in dialogue’ with his past and with his contemporaries. Michel Bertrand’s stimulating take on two fascinating Proustian texts — Serge Doubrovsky’s novel Un amour de soi (1982) and Henri Raczymow’s biographical account of Charles Haas’s shadowy presence behind Proust’s Swann, Le Cygne de Proust (1989) — like all the other contributions uses author–date referencing, but the essay’s impact is greatly undermined by the absence, in its bibliography, of over half the sources to which it refers (including, crucially, those by Proust and Raczymow). In an elegant and highly insightful essay entitled ‘Après Proust: stratégies de la mémoire aujourd’hui’, Dominique Rabaté writes of his sense that ‘pour tout écrivain important, il est impératif de se dégager de l’emprise proustienne, d’en défaire l’un ou l’autre nœud pour creuser son proper sillon’ (p. 286). Many of the pieces in this collection consider thematic or narrative traits shared by Proust and later writers, but frustratingly few of them meet the vital challenge, to which Rabaté rises, of going beyond description to identify how and why such writers unravel these knots.