Imaginaire et écriture de la mort dans l'oeuvre de Marcel Proust (review)

This excellent study of death in Proust begins with a paradox: in speaking about death we acknowledge death's absolute inaccessibility. As Bataille puts it in an epigraph to Le Roux-Kieken's book: "C'est bien entendu la fumisterie la plus profonde que de parler de mort" (9, original emphasis). Despite Bataille's provocative assertion, Le Roux-Kieken nonetheless takes up the challenge to speak of that which cannot be accessed through speech. Indeed, if "l'aporie de tout discours et de toute reflexion sur la mort" (9) suggests that nothing real can be said about death, Le Roux-Kieken's solution is not only practical but methodologically sound: to create a discursive proxy by speaking "'autour' de la mort" (10) through metaphor and indirection.

This insistence on the necessity of metaphor explains Le Roux-Kieken's explicitly thematic approach, characterized, she claims, by the use of analogy, proximity, and displacement. Heavily influenced by Jean-Pierre Richard and Gaston Bachelard in particular, she seeks out coherence in Proust – "à la recherche d'une cohérence" (14) – through an organicist process of classification. Replacing Bachelard's four essential elements with the three reigns of vegetal, animal, and mineral phenomena, Le Roux-Kieken attempts to create "'une vue totale' de la peinture proustienne de la mort" (14).

Given the massive corpus of scholarly works on Proust that explore the ubiquitous theme of death in his oeuvre, the challenge to say something original on the topic is not a minor one. Le Roux-Kieken readily acknowledges the numerous Proust studies that have covered death from a variety of angles, including biographical, medical, genetic, stylistic, narratological, psychoanalytic, comparatist, and philosophical approaches (15). In the face of this work, Le Roux-Kieken stakes her claims to originality precisely in her synthetic, comprehensive approach and in her singular attention to the play of images of death throughout the Recherche. And although the stated aim of comprehensive classification leads one to expect a dry typology of images, the resulting analysis in fact achieves an impressive level of sensitivity and philosophical depth.

In addition to the brief introduction and conclusion, this 496-page study is divided into five major sections: the topoi of death, the definition of death, and one section each on the vegetal, animal, and mineral worlds. Of particular interest is the second major chapter on the definition of death, which philosophically grounds the more detailed analysis of images to follow. Here Le Roux-Kieken presents the book's unifying thesis: "la mort est d'une part 'terriblement positive' et est d'autre part 'fragmentaire'" (109). In emphasizing death as "terriblement positive," Le Roux-Kieken highlights Proust's reversal of idealist conceptions of death and his insistence on death as a concrete, palpable, tangible presence that literally fills the body. This insistence on death's corporeality is linked to its fragmentary nature, the "mort fragmentaire" that constitutes subjectivity in Proust. As the essence of Time, death becomes the force of interruption that separates past and present selves, constructing a self ultimately marked by multiple, successive deaths.

These reflections form the foundation for a detailed analysis of images of death through the grid provided by the vegetal, animal, and mineral partition of the physical world. From her readings of the imagery of seeds nourished by the putrefaction of death to the animal imagery of Albertine's fatal accident on horseback to the mineral hardening of the human body as sculpture, Le Roux-Kieken's analyses are thorough, sophisticated, and subtle. In her reinterpretations of many of the most commented passages of Proust's œuvre – the drame du coucher, the death of the grandmother, Albertine's death – Le Roux-Kieken manages both to acknowledge prior critical commentary and to develop surprisingly original insights into this familiar material. Admirable as well for its erudition, the study draws on a vast array of intertextual and intratextual sources, from the world of Greek myth...