Marcel Proust 4

Sous la direction de Bernard Brunet Juliette Hassine. Paris, Minard. 292 pp. Pb €21.00. This volume indiscriminately mixes articles illustrating recent developments in Proust studies with papers given at the conference whose title is used as the title for the volume. ‘Proust au tournant des siècles’ thus refers both to the time when Proust was writing as well as to contemporary research on his work. The conference organized by Juliette Hassine and Judith Kauffmann, which was held in November 2001 at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, inevitably raised the question of Proust's portrayal of Judaism, to which Brun responds by concentrating on the anti-semitic jokes in the working versions of A la recherche du temps perdu. The conference was also an appropriate forum for Helit Yeshurun to discuss the Hebrew translation of Proust's novel, in an article arguing that Hebrew is the language of memory. The strength of this volume lies in the essays which revisit canonical aspects of Proust criticism, illuminating them in excitingly new ways. The first two articles are based on genetic criticism: in the first, Nathalie Mauriac Dyer makes the hitherto overlooked point that Proust's portrayal of male homosexuality predates his 1908 essay on pederasty, as the Baron de Charlus is clearly the literary heir to the figure of M. de Lomperolles in Jean Santeuil. Mireille Naturel uses the rough drafts of Proust's novel to highlight the importance of the episode relating how the narrator discovers and reads his own article in Le Figaro newspaper. Her minute investigation of Proust's manuscripts reveals that he had intended to position the episode in the opening scene of the novel, which she takes as proof that Proust conceived the episode as a mise-en-abyme of the various stages of literary creation: writing, publishing and reading. Jo Yoshida's article on Proust's reference to Le Martyre de saint Sébastien makes a significant contribution to the well-worked field of Proustian intertextuality. Yoshida establishes Proust's knowledge of the artistic representations of the early Christian martyr, from Mantegna's painting in the Louvre to the five-hour Gesamtkunstwerk performed in Paris in 1911, based on d'Annunzio's play, Debussy's music, Bakst's set design and Fokine's choreography for the Ballets russes. By casting the androgynous Ida Rubinstein in the role of the saint, d'Annunzio adds homoerotic resonance to Le Martyre de saint Sébastien which, as Yoshida argues, explains why Proust cites Sebastian's name in a covert reference to the homosexuality of his character, Legrandin. The articles in this volume reflect current preoccupations of Proust criticism, but Jean Delacour's scientific study of Proustian memory goes even further by relocating research on Proust in the medical sphere. The volume's lack of a ‘Notes on the Contributors’ section leaves doubt about whether Delacour's writings on neuroscience are based on experiments or medical practice, just as it prompts the question whether Helit Yeshurun's article about a Hebrew translation of A la recherche du temps perdu is theoretical or empirical. As an ensemble, these essays confirm that the Parisian publishing house Minard was right to launch a new series of studies on Proust: there are still questions to debate and areas to explore

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