Search Results

Mad Belief

Christopher Prendergast

in Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic

This book offers a reading of Marcel Proust's novel À la recherche du temps perdu through the lens of skepticism. It examines the spectacle of Proust arguing with himself, and more specifically his ... More

This book offers a reading of Marcel Proust's novel À la recherche du temps perdu through the lens of skepticism. It examines the spectacle of Proust arguing with himself, and more specifically his attempt to apply his rule to his own creation, as an argument with and against himself, in particular, his lucid refusal to take on “faith” and hence protect from “enquiry” what in other moods and enthusiasms he most cherished, namely, his own mad belief in the resurrecting, transfiguring, and redeeming powers of art. The book also considers Proust's two voices for the invocations of madness in connection with the certifiable condition of sexual jealousy. Finally, it explores the question of “truth” in the context of philosophical “skepticism” as well as the relation between sexuality and the pursuit of knowledge in the Recherche.Less

Food Nostalgia

in Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine

À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927), Marcel Proust's novel of artistic redemption, is one of the greatest works of the twentieth century. The novel is also an emblematic text of French culture, ... More

À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927), Marcel Proust's novel of artistic redemption, is one of the greatest works of the twentieth century. The novel is also an emblematic text of French culture, one that resurrects a bygone France—a France accessible through gustatory communion. It produces a national culinary landscape in which the French recognize an idea of country. This chapter examines some of the texts that marked French cuisine as a dominant trope of French national identity, along with some of the consequences of that dominance. It shows how Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu illuminates wonderfully well the dynamics of a nationalizing culinary culture. It considers French “gastro-literature” and the salient connection between matters literary and culinary as a distinctive feature of French culture in general.Less

Proustian Jokes

Christopher Prendergast

in Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic

This chapter examines “Proustian jokes” of the kind that gives pause for thought rather than to inflict a wound. Most of the mad beliefs in À la recherche du temps perdu are droll as well as crazy, ... More

This chapter examines “Proustian jokes” of the kind that gives pause for thought rather than to inflict a wound. Most of the mad beliefs in À la recherche du temps perdu are droll as well as crazy, and have their place in what is often and rightly said of the novel, that, among so many other things, it is also a great comic novel. The chapter considers examples of Proustian jokes that it suggests also reveal some of the key sources and terms of Marcel Proust's own aesthetic: the idioms of philosophical Idealism, the practice of naming one thing as another, the transposition of one order of sensation to another, and the drama of the unfinished or unfinishable sentence. It argues that the target of self-directed humor in the Recherche is not just an empirical self but the category of Self and the risk-laden practices of self-talk.Less

Magic

Christopher Prendergast

in Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic

This chapter examines the idea of literature as magic-making by focusing on Marcel Proust's use of the term “magic,” along with its cognates “enchantment” and “charm.” Proustian magic comes in all ... More

This chapter examines the idea of literature as magic-making by focusing on Marcel Proust's use of the term “magic,” along with its cognates “enchantment” and “charm.” Proustian magic comes in all shapes and sizes, but the preferred locales for conjuring the enchanted realm are dark or semidark, the domain of nightworld and shadowland. There are many such locales in the À la recherche du temps perdu, but the alchemist's place of darkness and silence par excellence is the “restful obscurity” of the bedroom, the world of sleep and dream, especially the liminal or threshold states of falling asleep and waking up, the midzone of the waking dream. The chapter also considers the ideological tenor of Proust's aesthetic, especially the posited relation in Le Temps retrouvé between art, truth, and epiphany.Less

Bodies and Ghosts

Christopher Prendergast

in Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic

This chapter examines Marcel Proust's views on the subject of the body and the prevalence of metaphorical ghosts in À la recherche du temps perdu. It suggests that the Proustian body may turn out to ... More

This chapter examines Marcel Proust's views on the subject of the body and the prevalence of metaphorical ghosts in À la recherche du temps perdu. It suggests that the Proustian body may turn out to be something of a dead end, at least relative to Proust's restlessly curious interest in the vicissitudes of mental life. It emphasizes a primary opposition in the Recherche—between the body desired (the imago-body) and the body revealed (frail, infirm, wasted, grotesque)—and argues that the opposition is banal, a variation on Proust's way with the theme of vanitas vanitatum. Viewed in a larger historical perspective, Proust on bodies and ghosts involves his complex relation to an ideal of “embodiment” inherited from nineteenth-century aesthetics.Less

The Citizen of the Unknown Homeland

Christopher Prendergast

in Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic

This chapter examines questions about bodies and origins, homelands and fatherlands in À la recherche du temps perdu. In Marcel Proust's novel, the important parental body is the maternal body—at ... More

This chapter examines questions about bodies and origins, homelands and fatherlands in À la recherche du temps perdu. In Marcel Proust's novel, the important parental body is the maternal body—at once sacred and profane, place of both sanctuary and exile. We are also taken back periodically to the Recherche's original religious home, by, for example, the views of Charlus in pious mood on the subject of the Christian Church and the sacrament of the Word made flesh. Charlus spews out a set of stock themes from the history of anti-Semitism in Christian Europe. The chapter also considers the presence of churches and cathedrals in the Recherche; the cathedrals are an expression of nation and ancestry, and as national patrimony they belong to “the body-France.” The chapter concludes by suggesting that in Proust the body is where we live but not where we are at home.Less

What’s in a Comma?

Christopher Prendergast

in Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic

This chapter examines a question, the most important of the skeptic's questions, not only in but for Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu: is poetic seeing also true seeing, and how can it ... More

This chapter examines a question, the most important of the skeptic's questions, not only in but for Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu: is poetic seeing also true seeing, and how can it be if poetic seeing is the seeing of a mirage? It analyzes Proust's use of comma in the sentence “those infrequent moments when we perceive nature as it is, poetically, were what Elstir's work was made of.” It also considers Proust's identification of Elstir's way of seeing as based on an “optical illusion” or a “mirage” and looks at signs of a mercurial and probing intelligence that are to be found almost everywhere at work in the Recherche. Finally, the chapter describes the sparring contest of intellect and impression that it argues runs deeper into a question of “truth.”Less

Éblouissement

Christopher Prendergast

in Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic

This chapter examines éblouissement in Marcel Proust's Venice in À la recherche du temps perdu. It suggests that Proust's sensibility and imagination were “religious” insofar as they were animated by ... More

This chapter examines éblouissement in Marcel Proust's Venice in À la recherche du temps perdu. It suggests that Proust's sensibility and imagination were “religious” insofar as they were animated by the wish to intuit from a “feeling.” From the perspective of more rigorously conceived religious belief and doctrine, however, the chapter argues that such wish was pure folly, in many ways the blind alley of a writer for whom religious faith was not a plausible option, but who was also indifferent to what had come to replace religion—the secular narratives of “progress” underpinning the enlightenment project of “modernity.” That Proust suspected it was folly is clear from his indictment of John Ruskin with the charge of idolatry.Less

Walking on Stilts

Christopher Prendergast

in Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic

This chapter examines Marcel Proust's use of the term “metaphor” in À la recherche du temps perdu, focusing in particular on a paragraph in which the image of heights is transferred to the aged Duc ... More

This chapter examines Marcel Proust's use of the term “metaphor” in À la recherche du temps perdu, focusing in particular on a paragraph in which the image of heights is transferred to the aged Duc de Guermantes, figured as walking on living stilts from which one must inevitably fall. The metaphor of stilts is a clownish transformation of the metaphor of altitude, but the comedy has perhaps more than just thematic value, in the implied contrast between youth and age. The chapter also considers Proust's explicit comparison of Elstir's painting to poetic metaphor that is suggestive of an unstated similarity to—or tacit mise en abyme of—his own writing. The analogical track, the chapter asserts, is a self-confirming circle in which poetic metaphor furnishes an analogue for Elstir's painterly art, while the latter in turn stands as an analogue of Proust's literary art.Less

The Great Silence in Combray: Proust and Patois

Barry McCrea

in Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe

This chapter shows how the disappearing dialects of the countryside of the French countryside shaped the modernist vision of Marcel Proust. In À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), ... More

This chapter shows how the disappearing dialects of the countryside of the French countryside shaped the modernist vision of Marcel Proust. In À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), patois in the Recherche seems to the narrator to be one of the miraculous gateways to a reality immune to the ravages of time. In symbolic opposition to the modish and changeful speech of the bourgeoisie, the “feudal” dialect and accents of the peasantry and the aristocracy come to offer a challenge to the ideals of middle-class progress: development, cultivation, Bildung. In this way, patois represents a lyric alternative to the novel—a middle-class literary genre of narrative and change. In the end, however, patois proves to be subject to time and change too, and the symbolic alternative that dialect appears to offer is an imaginary, utopian longing.Less

Voulez ouyr les cris de Paris?

Daniel Karlin

in Street Songs: Writers and urban songs and cries, 1800-1925

In an episode of La Prisonnière, the sixth volume of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the narrator listens from his bedroom to the cris de Paris, which like the ‘Cries of London’ had ... More

In an episode of La Prisonnière, the sixth volume of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the narrator listens from his bedroom to the cris de Paris, which like the ‘Cries of London’ had long been enshrined in music and visual art. The pleasure the narrator takes in associating the cries he hears with Gregorian plainchant, or the music of Debussy and Mussorgsky, suggests his interest is purely aesthetic. But this aesthetic surface is a mask; in the street-vendors’ cries he hears a different song, the song of the Sirens, tempting his lover Albertine into the streets, ‘translating’ foodstuffs and trades into offers of sexual pleasure, and in particular promising to satisfy her desire for other women. Albertine’s lesbianism is the secret each withholds from the other—she refusing to admit what he refuses to tell her he already knows—and this secret is cried in the street.Less

The Trauma of Form: Death Drive as Affect in À la recherche du temps perdu

Robbie McLaughlan

in Modernism and Affect

This chapter brings contemporary Deleuzian understandings of affect into dialogue with those found in Freud. Arguing that Freud’s theorising of affect in many ways underpins the psychoanalytic ... More

This chapter brings contemporary Deleuzian understandings of affect into dialogue with those found in Freud. Arguing that Freud’s theorising of affect in many ways underpins the psychoanalytic project, the chapter suggests that, when seen through a Freudian lens, the sensory “planes of immanence” or perpetual becomings celebrated in contemporary affect theory resemble the repetition compulsion of trauma. The death drive is made explicit when we are confronted with the molecular, atomised or becoming and is manifested in the act of artistic creation. Following Derrida’s reading of Freud in The Postcard, the chapter formulates a psychoanalytic theory of the uncanny and traumatic affects of writing in relation to Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, a text that makes manifest thanatos as a source of affect.Less