Poetry as Creative Critique

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

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