RESEARCH General Arts

PROUST
Essays examine enduring fascination with French novelist

Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@uiuc.edu

11/1/02

Photo by Bill Wiegand Armine Kotin Mortimer, one of the editors of "Proust in Perspective" and a UI professor of French, attributes Proust's longstanding fascination is that he is "one of the greatest writers of all time," his prose "finely honed," his sentences "captivating."

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Although notoriously impenetrable to the common reader, the French novelist Marcel Proust has somehow managed to infiltrate many popular cultures over the decades since his death in 1922. He even got into a recent episode of the hit TV drama "The Sopranos."

What is it about the memory- and guilt-obsessed Proust that makes him and his work so ubiquitous, so often quoted? What is it about the brilliant, mother-attached asthmatic who devoted most of his life to writing and rewriting one huge novel, "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu" ("In Search of Time Lost"), that draws so many people into his wordy web and world?

"Proust in Perspective" (University of Illinois Press), a new book of 19 essays written by some of the best-known Proustians in the world, tries to answer such questions, and along the way, guide readers through "the dense weave" of Proust’s fiction.

One explanation, according to Armine Kotin Mortimer, one of the book’s editors and a UI professor of French, is that Proust is "one of the greatest writers of all time," his prose "finely honed," his sentences "captivating." To the other editor, Katherine Kolb, a professor of French at Southeastern Louisiana University, Proust also is "one of the great comic writers of all times," a brilliant
"social satirist." The two agree that today, Proust "is nothing less than a cultural phenomenon."

"Like Shakespeare, he is named, his words quoted, his picture recognized by thousands who have never read a line of his work. Proust’s popularity as a topic for teaching and research mirrors his presence in film, theater, television, mystery novels, comic strips, advertisements and magazines."

The new edited volume is itself "Proustian," the editors claim, "in bringing together scholars of very different stripes" who offer "a wide variety of scholarly approaches." In the book:

Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, Proust’s great-grandniece and a specialist on his manuscripts, reconstructs Proust’s "Venice episode" to reveal insights into how the author built his novel.

Geneviève Henrot redefines Proust’s episodes of involuntary memory – including the famous madeleine cookie epiphany, which surfaced in Tony Soprano’s session with his psychiatrist.

Lawrence R. Schehr, a professor of French at Illinois, focuses on one key scene to reveal Proust’s use of "gaydar," the radar-like ability to "see the reality of a person’s homosexuality."

As the editors wrote, "we quickly realize that the mechanisms of seeing or not seeing in this instance serve as allegories of knowledge across all domains."

Alberto Beretta Anguissola shows "just how strongly Proust can speak to us today," Kolb said, "about questions of immediate political and social import: Society’s tendency to scapegoat, which he dramatized in reference to the Dreyfus affair, was applicable to the Hitler period and is still all too relevant today. It shows how Proust, far from being the recluse and dreamer of legend, was vitally concerned with the issues of his time – and ours."