Elyane Dezon-Jones and Inge Crosman Wimmers, eds.
Proust's Fiction and Criticism
New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003. Pp. xvii+184. $37.50 $19.75

Reviewed by Roy Arthur Swanson

Like Constance Garnett's now superseded translations of Russian novelists, C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu has been displaced from utility by the revisions of Terence Kilmartin and D. J. Enright, which, in turn, have been superseded by the new translations of the Penguin Group's Lydia Davis, James Grieve, and others under the general editorship of Christopher Prendergast, based on the 1987 Bibliothèque de la Pléiade re-edition under the general direction of Proust biographer Jean-Yves Tadié. Translations will always be secondary documents, even if, in the manner of Edward Fitzgerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, they tend to supplant the originals. Effective criticism, however, enables both translators and readers of translations to approach more closely the fullness of the primary documents. This kind of criticism is available in Proust's Fiction and Criticism, particularly in the prefatory, introductory, and bibliographic sections by its editors and in essays by William C. Carter, Mireille Naturel, and Roger Shattuck. Many of the other essays are uniformly enlightening, and only a few exhibit lapses from thoroughness.

Dezon-Jones insists, and the essays in the book validate her insistence, that in French literature there is a "before and an after" Proust's novel (xi). Carter places within Proust's lifetime (1871-1922) the advent of "electricity, central heating, the telephone, the automobile, and the airplane" (26), in company with cubism and the theory of relativity with its conflation of time and space; all of these phenomena inform the content of Proust's masterwork, which therewith gives major direction to twentieth-century Western literature. Somewhat questionably perhaps, Carter says, "Like the cubists, Proust depicts various aspects of an object seen in rapid succession … but unlike the cubists he presents such perspectives as a spontaneous and successive vision rather than as an intellectualized and recomposed vision" (29). One should not deny that cubists present perspectives as spontaneous and successive visions. Such also is Proust's vision, seen in both prospect and retrospect and re-composed as a continuum. Proust experiences memory as the transformation of a mere happening of the past into the reality of what Martin Heidegger calls an Ereignis. Nonetheless, Carter's relation of Proust to cubism, modern technology, and scientific relativity is rewardingly apt and concise.

Naturel's article, "Intertextual Pedagogy: Proust and Flaubert," shows the linkage of pastiche and literary criticism in Proust's work and outlines a means of studying Proust's imitations and allusions to specific works by Gustave Flaubert, including Proust's "series of pastiches known as 'L'Affaire Lemoine,'" the first alluding to Flaubert's "Un Coeur simple" and the second "devoted to Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve's criticism of Flaubert." This mode of intertextuality is analogous to cubist art, if only in the relation of pastiche (a pasting) to the cubist collage (a gluing). Naturel is not concerned to make this connection; her pedagogy is directed to the interests of readers and speakers of French who are not natives of France. The value of the article, however, is its proof of the efficacy of intertextual study in the case of Proust and Flaubert. A veritable companion piece to Naturel's article is Louis Pautrot's "Proust in an Interdisciplinary Context: Literature and Music." He observes Proust's expanding on the technique of Edouard Dujardin's monologue intérieure, "conceived as a literary transposition of the Wagnerian leitmotiv" (151). (It is to be hoped that Pautrot's translation of the title Les Lauriers sont coupés as "The Boys are Sere" is a mere typographical vagary.)

Intertextual and interdisciplinary criticism, along with comparativism, as represented by Diane R. Leonard's "Teaching Proust Comparatively: Proust, Ruskin, and the Visual Arts," constitute the core of an intelligent reading of Proust's fiction and criticism. To these must be added close reading, which Roger Shattuck illustrates with commanding precision in "Teaching the Recherche through Explication de Texte: Proust's Time-Outs."

Essays of this kind warrant the welcome accorded the MLA's "Approaches to Teaching World Literature." In this volume the materials with which one is concerned are the complex history of the composition and publications of the Recherche and Proust's shorter works; and the varieties of effective approaches to these materials are subsumed under "Contexts," "Interpretive Perspectives," and "Specific Teaching Contexts," the last of which includes Shattuck's essay and others from which the tediousness of methods-suggestions are pleasantly minimal.

Postmodernist pretension is also minimal. Margaret E. Gray, in "'Maintenant, Regardez': Proust in a Postmodern Context," calls the "multiple perspectives" that Carter expropriates from cubism "an aspect of the postmodern." She elaborates upon Proust's "occasionally fantastic use of figuration" (69) and his "weight of figuration" (65) only in the context of metaphor, a true figure, and image, not specifically a figure, except when contrived as hypotyposis or diatyposis, neither of which is mentioned, although both might well be. Her notion of "a perpetual present schizophrenically divided from past and future" (64), a "present" borrowed, as she indicates, from Fredric Jameson, challenges clarity in that schizo- denotes a splitting of an integer into two or more segments, not the separation of one integer from two or more others. Rebecca Graves, in "Proust and the Cinema," is more insistently postmodern than Gray.

There are twenty-six essays following the introductory sections; and all, including the postmodernist divagations, will provocatively engage students and teachers of Proust's works. All are on the crest of a valuable criticism that is inducing or recognizing more appropriate translations of Proust, like the first sentence of the Recherche, now for the first time correctly translated (by Lydia Davis): "For a long time I went to bed early," the exquisitely accurate preterite superseding Moncrieff's "used to go" and Kilmartin-Enright's "would go," unfortunately retained by Julie Solomon (127) in "Introducing Proust: The Segmentation of 'Combray.'" The preference is for Proustian titles now translated from the French literally instead if fancifully with lines from English poetry or euphemistically. Coutance's "diphtongue," however, is not elucidated in Eugène Nicole's otherwise enlightening "Coding and Decoding: Names in the Recherche." Nicole retains the translation by Moncrieff, itself retained by Kilmartin-Enright, of "Coutances, cathédral normande, que sa diphtongue finale, grasse et jaunissante, couronne par une tour de beurre" as "Coutances, a Norman cathedral which its final consonants, rich and yellowing, crowned with a tower of butter" (67). Davis's superior translation, "Coutances, a Norman cathedral, which its final, fat, yellowing diphthong crowns with a tower of butter," maintains the proper present tense and relieves the English reader of taking consonants for a diphthong and of limiting diphtongue to the word Coutances, by excluding the structure of the cathedral. The "final, fat, yellowing diphthong" is the heavy quadrilateral mass of the turristructural finale, the west tower catching the setting sun behind the initial of the east tower's slender conical spire. Nicole's mention of tour de beurre as an allusion to "the right tower of Rouen's cathedral" (67) should be secondary, not exclusive. The metaphor of the double-sized tower as a blended vocalism is primary, like the metaphor of a jelly of odors in a passage selected by Françoise Leriche, in "Proust Art Nouveau?," to illustrate the three rhetorical devices that mainly inform the "dynamic tension of Proustian syntax" (48), namely, parenthesis, hyperbaton, and anaphora. Nicole neglects the metaphor of structure as sound; Leriche neglects the metaphor of fluid stability, the Greek ideal of the dynamic mean. Both, however, are in concert with this volume's provision of manifold points of departure toward appreciating the possibly inexhaustible complexity of the Western world's greatest novel.