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Eleanor Lischka, Marcel Proust. By Michael Wood, French Studies, Volume 78, Issue 4, October 2024, Pages 724–725, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knae153
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Extract
Appearing as part of a critical series offering ‘personal models of what it is like to care about particular authors’ (p. vi), under the title ‘My Reading’, Michael Wood’s book enjoys a certain freedom, offering a light-footed canter through a diverse range of subjects that interest Proustian scholars. The seven chapters range in focus from questioning whether the drame du coucher really constitutes a turning point in the narrator’s life to a discussion of how Proust’s legal training informs the novel’s depiction of crime and punishment. That said, emerging from the question of what the world would be like without Proust’s novel, the book’s chapters loosely centre around the notion of Proust’s work as an ‘event’. Wood takes as his starting point what he calls the ‘sudden change of 1908’ (p. viii), when Proust turned away from the embryonic novel he had begun towards a critical work on Sainte-Beuve that would eventually lead to À la recherche du temps perdu. There is an underlying tension here, between Wood’s focus on the circumstances that gave rise to À la recherche and Proust’s own insistence, against Sainte-Beuve, that such questions should not be the focus of criticism. While not explicitly acknowledged, this tension finds an outlet in later chapters’ focus on reality and fiction in the novel, as Wood paints a picture of cause and effect, truth and deceit, dancing a strange waltz with each other across Proust’s work. Wood’s reading of an 1896 short story, ‘La Confession d’une jeune fille’, published in Les Plaisirs et les jours, exposes how the imagination of a crime can lead to its enactment and thus introduces one of his most intriguing arguments: that we might see the novel as an ‘intense, speculative exploration of certain kinds of crime and punishment’ (p. 88). The narrator’s scepticism about justice is, Wood argues, equalled only by his superstition about human guilt: there is hardly any such thing as a just verdict, but we all are guilty of some crime whether it is the one we were convicted of or not. This paradoxical atmosphere of guilt and injustice is, he suggests, informed by one of the novel’s most prominent historical events, the ‘fairytale of Alfred Dreyfus’ (p. 104). Here, Wood draws a parallel between how the novel’s pivotal moments steer the course of the narrator’s development and how real-world events can take hold of the imagination of an age. Wood’s book is one of two critical works on the Proustian event (alongside Patrick Bray’s Retours proustiens: qu’est-ce qu’un événement littéraire? (Paris: Kimé, 2022; reviewed in FS, 77 (2023), 665)) to be written during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the question of how a historical moment can inform the general atmosphere in which ideas are formed was, for obvious reasons, front of mind. His contribution to the answer is as well researched as it is readable, offering a refreshing take on how to read Proust today. It will be of interest to anyone wishing to explore why the author’s work continues to hold our attention.
