Hauteur et profondeur dans l’écriture de Proust : une proposition de lecture

Abstract

The following excerpt is drawn from a larger study on Marcel Proust, where I frame the topic of space within the totality of his writings, and I advance a comprehensive reading of À la recherche du temps perdu in the light of the spatial terminology that accompanies the aesthetic and existential revelations of Le Temps retrouvé. More specifically, I reconstruct the reasons behind Proust’s stylistic choices, and I highlight the correspondence between the protagonist’s experience of places and the elaboration of an adequate language aimed at expressing the spiritual content of the book. In this particular passage, I rely on close reading in order to show the assimilation of the truth of experience with the truth of art in Sodome et Gomorrhe, as it is expressed in the famous account of the sea landscape seen from La Raspelière, and in the last volume.

Keywords:

• Proust
• modernism
• space
• landscape
• style
• metaphor

Notes

1 Jean-Yves Tadié, Proust et le roman, essai sur les formes et techniques du roman dans À la recherche du temps perdu, Paris, Gallimard, 1971, p. 408.

2 Dans cette scène, le sifflement des trains permet au héros de mesurer « l’étendue de la campagne déserte où le voyageur se hâte vers la station prochaine » (I, 3–4).

3 Franco Farinelli, Geografia. Un’introduzione ai modelli del mondo, Turin, Einaudi, 2003, p. 16.

4 Place qu’elle arrive à occuper par son inaction totale. Comme le souligne Anne Carson, « Albertine’s name occurs 2,363 times in Proust’s novel, more than any other character » et « Albertine herself is present or mentioned on 807 pages of Proust’s novel » : elle est omniprésente, son prénom ponctue le texte avec une fréquence obsédante. Cependant, elle n’agit pas, sinon par son refus de se faire posséder : « There are four ways Albertine is able to avoid becoming entirely possessable in volume 5 : by sleeping, by lying, by being a lesbian or by being dead » (Carson 5, 19). Ce refus passif, s’exprimant même par la mort, donne au personnage d’Albertine à la fois toute sa puissance et tout son pouvoir, résistance silencieuse au comportement harcelant du protagoniste.

5 Peter Collier, Proust and Venice, Oxford UP, 1989, p. 119.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chiara Nifosi

Chiara Nifosi is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. She is currently working on her first book project, entitled Expérience de l’espace et pensée de la métaphore chez Marcel Proust. This work explores the philosophical potential of Proust’s rhetorical strategies for describing space in his literary output through an interdisciplinary approach involving also contemporary theories on landscape in art history and geography. Her interests range from comparative European modernisms to nineteenth-century French poetry to the intersection between philosophy, social sciences and literature.

Alison James

Alison James is Professor of French at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include the Oulipo group, the contemporary French novel, theories and representations of everyday life, and questions of fact and fiction. She is the author of Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo (Northwestern UP, 2009) and The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature: Writing with Facts (Oxford UP, 2020). She has also edited volumes and journal issues on literary formalism, fieldwork literatures, and nonfiction across media.