Table Of Content

The Strange M. Proust legenda egena, founded in 1995 by the european Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research association and Routledge. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, including works on arabic, Catalan, english, French, german, greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. an editorial Board of distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly bodies such as the Society for French Studies and the British Comparative literature association. MHRa The Modern Humanities Research association (hra) encourages and promotes advanced study and research in the field of the modern humanities, especially modern european languages and literature, including english, and also cinema. It also aims to break down the barriers between scholars working in different disciplines and to maintain the unity of humanistic scholarship in the face of increasing specialization. The association fulfils this purpose primarily through the publication of journals, bibliographies, monographs and other aids to research. Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences. Founded in 1836, it has published many of the greatest thinkers and scholars of the last hundred years, including adorno, einstein, Russell, Popper, Wittgenstein, Jung, Bohm, Hayek, Mcluhan, Marcuse and Sartre. Today Routledge is one of the world’s leading academic publishers in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It publishes thousands of books and journals each year, serving scholars, instructors, and professional communities worldwide. www.routledge.com edITORIal BOaRd Chairman Professor Martin Mclaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford Professor John Batchelor, University of newcastle (english) Professor Malcolm Cook, University of exeter (French) Professor Colin davis, Royal Holloway University of london (Modern literature, Film and Theory) Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish) Professor Paul garner, University of leeds (Spanish) Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret, Queen Mary University of london (French) Professor Catriona Kelly, new College, Oxford (Russian) Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (linguistics) Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (linguistics) dr Stephen Parkinson, linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese) Professor Ritchie Robertson, St John’s College, Oxford (german) Professor lesley Sharpe, University of exeter (german) Professor david Shepherd, University of Sheffield (Russian) Professor alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish) Professor david Treece, King’s College london (Portuguese) Professor diego Zancani, Balliol College, Oxford (Italian) Managing Editor dr graham nelson 41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK [email protected] www.legenda.mhra.org.uk Marcel à Paris (2001), by Ann Baldwin The Strange M. Proust ❖ eite by anré Benhaï Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2009 First published 2009 Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA LEGENDA is an imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2009, except: Chapter 7 first appeared in Proust in Perspective (University of Illinois Press, 2002) and is © Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 2002: reproduced here by kind permission Chapter 10 is © the Estate of Malcolm Bowie 2009 ISBN 978-1-905981-9-77(hbk) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recordings, fax or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Contents ❖ Preamble 1 anré benhaï (princeton university) 1 The disquieting Strangeness of Marcel Proust 12 avi eison (university of iai) 2 The Formalist, the Spider, and the Phenomenologist: Proust in the Magic Mirror of the Twentieth Century 23 anne sion (cnrs/université paris–3) 3 ‘Quel Marcel!’ (and Other Oddities of the narrator’s designations in A la recherche du temps perdu) 36 eugène nicoe (new york university) 4 Strange Jewishness: essay on the Treatment of Jewish Identity in Proust 45 joseph brai (university of aryan) 5 Proust’s Singhalese Song (a Strange little Story) 57 anré benhaï (princeton university) 6 a Proustian ‘Metterza’ 71 rayone couert (université paris–7) 7 Da capo: accumulations and explosions 86 christie cona (harvar university) 8 Other eyes: Proust and the Myths of Photography 101 ichae woo (princeton university) 9 ‘Truth and Justice’ 112 antoine copagnon (coège e france/coubia university) 10 Reading Proust Between the lines 125 aco bowie (cabrige university) Works Cited 135 Index 140 this book is eicate to the eory of aco bowie 1943–2007 PREAMBLE ❖ The present volume stems from an international symposium convened at Princeton University on 22 and 23 April 2006.1 This event was aimed at questioning Proust’s work, as well as its reception. Although A la recherche du temps perdu has become a canonical work, and its author is often considered the first and the greatest of the twentieth century, the monument of Proust remains, in many regards, ‘strange’. Often ‘obvious’ to its first readers, this strangeness has been forgotten or occulted by public and institutional recognition. Odd indeed is the subject of this ‘semi- autobiographical’ novel, with a narrator whose anonymity and omnipresent but fragmented subjectivity have disoriented many readers. Odd too is the very form of this book, made of autonomous yet intricately related books; and yet, over the course of more than three thousand pages, it tells in the end one thing really: how the man who wrote it became a writer. But La Recherche is a tale where many extraordinary and often incredible things happen, where the author never ceases to challenge (often with seemingly playful intent) the reason, attention, and the trust of his public. Strange tale whose generating principle and perpetual motion seem to be constantly questioning the ‘truth’ and the ‘general laws’ that its author/hero says he is seeking: questioning time (through an a-chronological History), space (in an often unrecognizable France), and even language itself (with a French that is hardly ‘classical’). Exploring the diverse aspects of the strangeness fundamental to Proust means not simply rekindling the interest in a work that now enjoys the fascination of an amazingly broad public, from the Académie Française to Hollywood, but reassessing how this in many ways imperfect masterpiece was canonized, and what may have incited such a universal enthusiasm, in France and especially (another paradox) abroad, where Proust was recognized earlier than in his homeland. It thus seemed fitting that scholars should have gathered ‘overseas’ to discuss Proust’s strangeness. To discuss, or rather, to muse. Indeed, this collective reflection was principally intended to enable us to grapple with this classic work in a new way, reactivating the sense of peculiarity inherent in its newness when it first appeared. In this context, Proust scholars shared personal interpretations of what they considered surprising aspects of Proust’s work in a free exercise of criticism, akin to the original form of the essay. The following readings therefore present a broad range of interpretations pertaining to very diverse aspects of the work and stemming from a number of fields of interpretations, from philosophy to psychology, from anthropology to musicology, from art history to the judiciary, from onomastics to politics. This ball of rejuvenating readings, hopefully as revelatory as the eerie ‘Bal de têtes’ closing La Recherche, is opened by David Ellison who offers an insightful