universal proustmania

“Not a day goes by without one or more Proustian manifestations; Journalist Nicolas Ragonneau, director of the digital magazine Proustonomics and author of The Proustographer, notes that praise in the form of adaptations, radio broadcasts, concerts, public readings and performances is proliferating everywhere. This year, four museums in Paris mobilized to evoke the figure of Marcel Proust in a round commemoration: the centennial death of the author, which took place precisely on November 18, 1922. unstable health – due to pneumonia, which he caught one night, and even in the summer he always went in a thick fur coat. However, Marcel Proust managed to die peacefully as he wrote the word “Last” in the forest of papers, the basis of the labyrinthine manuscripts of his seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time, published between 1913 and 1927.

At the beginning of the year, the Musée Carnavalet, which preserves a number of objects evoking the author’s room and his sick and closed universe, dedicated itself to an exhibition that immersed itself in the connections between Marcel Proust and Paris. The author was born on July 10, 1871, in the midst of the Paris Commune revolution, in the then-surrounding town of Auteuil – now in another quarter of the French capital – in the house of his maternal great-uncle. A complete success exhibition received one hundred thousand visits. Currently, there are two important cultural institutions that conjure up the figure of the author that made cupcakes famous forever, a fireproof symbol of involuntary memory, evoked memories. On the one hand, the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Marais examines the Semitic origin of Proust’s mother, Jeanne Weil, in its Du côté de la mère exhibition (until 28 August) and Le Petit Palais on the other. , presents a show entitled Le plaisirs et le jours (until 24 July) – as the title of the first book published by Proust – which, through Boldini’s gaze, enlivens the spirit of the Belle Époque, right near the Proust Champs Élysées (1842-1931) . The Italian painter, like Proust’s friend Count Robert de Montesquiou, painted the cream of the Fin-de-siècle aristocracy and intelligentsia, and life on the streets of Paris with vivid characters such as the newspaper salesman or the French salesman. laundresses.

The most outstanding exhibit, however, is the one presented by Marcel Proust of the National Library of France (BNF). La fabrique de l’oeuvre, which can be seen from October 11, 2022 to January 22, 2023. All these exhibitions are accompanied by an invasion of books on Proust and his works, estimated at more than seventy. The last unpublished recently published, Les soixante-quinze feuillets: Et autres manuscrits inédits (Gallimard, 2021). But Nicolas Ragonneau warns not to confuse the sale of books on Proust with the reading of his work. “My conviction, without being able to verify it scientifically, is that the past four years of commemoration – the Goncourt prize in 2019, the 150th anniversary of his birth in 2021, and the centennial in 2022 – will have positive results in increasing the base of readers”.

Heritage

Regarding his legacy, the journalist recalls that Proust did not create a literary school, although he had established himself in universal literature as an indispensable link with Dante, Shakespeare or Cervantes. “Proust’s great lesson lies in the perseverance and relentless work required to create a masterpiece. Literature, like many other human activities, is then perhaps more a matter of will than of talent». Revisiting classic American black cinema through the prism of what is also called the Recherche; Examining the traces of Proust in the work of the Greek Nobel laureate Georges Séféris; Follow the adventures of Pedro Salinas’ first translation into Spanish, the first worldwide translation of Proust’s book, or explore the French author’s influence on Romanian, Italian, and Dutch literature: Illiers’ first International Encounters -Combray, Proust’s reception abroad. focused on analysis through the article.

On the whole, it is clear that Proust’s work, in both England and Germany, Turkey or Brazil, caused a certain amount of confusion and misunderstanding at the time because of its stylistic and structural innovation. When the fourth volume, Sodom and Gomorrah, was published in 1922, rejection was quite common because of the way it dealt with homosexuality directly.

One of the most surprising presentations of the colloquium was given by Chinese doctoral student Yangje Zhao. Yes, in China Marcel Proust became posthumously recognized and his name appeared in the press in 1923 in a newspaper review where he was mistaken for another Marcel writer, Marcel Prévost. Zhao follows how Proust was soon “crowned as a master of masturbation,” an example of the worst decadent bourgeois literature. “They criticize the Duchess de Guermantes for spending six pages describing her smile,” says the young expert. In the first collective biography of French writers by Zeng Juezhi in 1933, the homosexuality of certain characters in the novel is openly addressed and indicates, in Zhao’s words, “a moral approach to the Recherche”.

However, Proust’s always cautious strategy in this regard will have an effect, because the author’s homosexuality is never questioned. After three decades of “absolute silence” brought on by the puritanical Cultural Revolution in China, a new anthology in the 1980s reinvents Proust as a literary innovative writer, a supposed precursor to the stream of consciousness. This time, however, he is “pathologized”, seen as a sick and childish writer. Today, in an environment of uncertainty regarding homosexuality, interest in Proust’s work is still very lively in China, and two translations of the entire cycle have appeared in the 21st century.

The author of À la recherche du texte pedu and the conceptual artist who presented the Proust article submitted to translation programs is Roberto Bloch, who knows translations even just to try them out. Bloch took Recherche’s first sentences to translate them into twenty languages ​​with Google Translator and then translated them back into French. The result is surprising: “Something new emerges in the text that has the value of collage and where luck plays an important role as a motor”, comments Bloch, “the result is a truly concrete poem”.

To influence

On the other hand, the persistence of Proust’s work in contemporary writers is evidenced by the presentation of Canadian Professor Gilles Dupuis, who traces the French writer’s influence on the Quebec-Chinese Ying Chen. the work repeats the structure of lost time in miniature”) or Sjef Houppermanns from the Netherlands examines the work of author Marcel Möring, who updated his theory of involuntary memory and addressed the issue of Proust’s desire in titles such as Le grand desire (Flammarion, 1998).

Professor Cynthia Gamble, representing England, recalled the words of Proust’s contemporary, North American writer Henry James, to summarize the British sentiment of criticism at the turn of the century: “Proust both bores me and fascinates me.” Although initially well-received for its originality, as the details of Proust’s private life became known—working at night and sleeping during the day, dressing even in the summer, often dining at the Ritz—the vision became a reality. Reading Proust was “proof of snobbery,” but the advent of the last volume, Sodom and Gomorrah, published during the author’s lifetime, changed the discourse: “The most influential critic of the day, AB Walkley, warned the reader to watch this book carefully. “The inverted character of Charlus, the most disgusting man the author has ever created.”

A hundred years after its author’s death, readings, revisions, and new and creative perspectives are opened up around a meaning-filled novel that produces interpretations that foster a fruitful universal Proustmania.