Proust's market, war, and meterology, or how to negotiate the unpredictable

Abstract

There is no science of economics, no science of military strategy, no science of meteorology that will allow anyone to predict the crash of the stock market, the tragic unfolding of wars or the occuring of a natural disaster. For Proust, who in August 1909 had claimed to have both started and finished a long novel, with its neat Time Lost–Time Regained structure, the intervention of the war five years later, which exacerbated the volatility of the stock market, and acted with the raw unpredictability of natural disasters, called into question his earlier literary strategy, forcing him to compose and deviate from his original plan and welcome the “saving inexhaustibility of surprise” (Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Weather in Proust. Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 2011).

Keywords:

• War
• Economics
• Meteorology
• Strategy
• Science
• Predictability

Notes

1. First published in Stone, an online philosophy series, and later in the Sunday issue (24 Aug. 2013) of the New York Times.

2. For a fuller appreciation of the impact of the Great War on Proust's writing and rewriting of the Recherche, see my study in Proust et la guerre, Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014.

3. All quotations from A la Recherche du temps perdu are from the 1989 Gallimard edition.

4. The Random House (Moncrieff/Kilmartin) 1982 edition still contains that added title, whereas it disappeared from the newer (revised by Enright) 2003 Modern Library edition.

5. According to Giberte's letter, all military specifics about the battle of Méséglise correspond to the battle of Verdun.

6. It is as if all of Combray (“tout Combray”), anticipating Hiroshima's bomb, was systematically destroyed after it charmingly appeared like Japanese origami in the famous teacup.

7. Proust's theory of diversion can be applied to diversion itself as perversion: his avuncular theory (on “tantes”) as a form of transversal transmission diverting from straight family lineage.

8. Mme Aubain's barometer (in Flaubert's “Un cœur simple”), which inspired Barthes's theory of “effet de réel,” brought this (not so) innocuous banal object to fame.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brigitte Mahuzier

Brigitte Mahuzier is Professor of French at Bryn Mawr College. She specializes in the “long nineteenth century,” has edited special issues on Proust (Littérature) and queer French theory (Yale French Studies), and published a number of articles on Proust, Rodin, Mirbeau, Colette, Romain Rolland, and a book, Proust et la guerre, with Honoré Champion editions (2014).