Poetry as Creative Critique: Notes from the Desert of After-Proust (on Anne Carson's The Albertine Workout)

ABSTRACT

During Proust's lifetime his character and his work prompted emulation and pastiche and inspired writing both serious and playful. His way with words led his school-friends to coin the verb proustifier, communicating the verbosity and garrulous flattery that characterized even the teenage Proust. He fell out with his friend the diplomat and writer Paul Morand when the latter published his “Ode à Marcel Proust” in October 1919, which poked fun at Proust's idiosyncrasies, his nocturnal behavior, and his penchant for exaggerating the poor state of his health. In this article I focus on a recent, contemporary poetic response to Proust and his novel, creative and critical just as Morand's ode was, but coming from a markedly different perspective. Where Morand's poem was a knowing work full of nods and winks for a quite specific “in-group,” Anne Carson's The Albertine Workout is a text that is distant in time and place from the salons and rarefied enclosed spaces of Proust's world; it responds to Proust and his writing resolutely from the outside, coming at him from a position alert to issues of agency, gender, sexuality, memory, and the body, as these shape our reading experience of Proust's novel and as they are woven into it.

KEYWORDS:

• Proust
• Anne Carson
• The Albertine Workout
• creative criticism

Notes

1. A limited edition (a run of only forty copies) of an illustrated version of the poem (without the appendices, but interspersed with photogravures by artist Kim Anno) was published in August 2014.

2. See, for instance, Ladenson 1999; Dubois 2011; Carter 2006.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adam Watt

Adam Watt is Associate Professor in French at the University of Exeter. His books include Reading in Proust's À la recherche: “le délire de la lecture” (Oxford, 2009); The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust (Cambridge, 2011); Marcel Proust (Reaktion Books “Critical Lives,” 2013; Chinese edition, Lijiang Publishing, 2014); and, as editor, Marcel Proust in Context (Cambridge, 2013) and “Swann at 100/Swann à 100 ans” = Marcel Proust Aujourd'hui 12 (Brill, 2015). He is a member of the Équipe Proust (ITEM/ENS Paris), the editorial board of the “Pôle Proust” (CNRS/EHESS Paris), the “comité de lecture international” of Acta Fabula, and the AHRC's Peer Review College.