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Time of Death: Alterity

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Mourning and Creativity in Proust

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism ((PSATLC))

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Abstract

This chapter concentrates on how a process of mourning changes the experience of time for the bereft. It presents the Recherche’s portrayal of this transformed perception of time as mediated by the depiction of the body. After a theoretical opening section on the belatedness and anticipation of mourning in Freud and Nancy, this part focuses on three instances when Proust’s narrative lends particular prominence to the body during a process of mourning, namely the narrator’s touching of Albertine in the partie de furet game in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs and subsequently after her death in Albertine disparue, the representation of the grandmother’s sick body during her agony and death, and finally, the divulging of the narrator’s own body throughout the novel.

O mon ombre en deuil de moi-même1Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Voie lactée ô sœur lumineuse’, in Œuvres poétiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), p. 54.

Guillaume Apollinaire

Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego2Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, p. 249.

Sigmund Freud

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Le Grand Robert de la langue française, ed. by Alain Rey, 2nd edn, 6 vols (Paris: Le Robert, 2001), II, 1425. See also entry for ‘deuil’ in TLF, http://atilf.atilf.fr/ [accessed 5 June 2009].

  2. 2.

    The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. by C.T. Onions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 593. The asterisk qualifies the word as a hypothetical spoken form.

  3. 3.

    Bowie, Proust Among the Stars, p. 289. Bowie gives a variety of textual examples where ‘survivance’ is opposed to ‘néant’ in the Recherche.

  4. 4.

    Barthes, Journal de deuil, p. 168.

  5. 5.

    Antoine Compagnon discusses this feature of mourning in ‘Ecrire la vie: Montaigne, Stendhal, Proust’, Cours au Collège de France, 2009, http://www.college-de-france.fr/site/antoine-compagnon/course-2008-2009.htm [accessed 10 April 2016]. As far as the etymology of ‘chagrin’ is concerned, its origins remain unclear in the Grand Robert. The TLF defines it as a derivative of ‘se chagriner’: ‘Composé de grigner* au sens de “grincer des dents, faire la grimace, être maussade”’ and ‘la syllabe initiale est d’orig. obsc.: elle représente peut-être le fr. chat* pour exprimer l’idée de “se lamenter comme les chats” […], cf. all. katzenjammer “malaise, état de détresse”’, ‘chagriner’, in TLF, http://atilf.atilf.fr/ [accessed 10 November 2015].

  6. 6.

    Barthes, Journal de deuil, p. 149, p. 160.

  7. 7.

    Wassenaar, p. 207.

  8. 8.

    Nicola Luckhurst, Science and Structure in Proust’s ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 216 (Particularly the chapter ‘Theory-laden souffrance’, pp. 200–225, where Luckhurst juxtaposes ‘Les intermittences’ with Albertine disparue, is relevant to the discussion of mourning).

  9. 9.

    Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis give an overview of Freud’s use of Nachträglichkeit in Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris: PUF, 1997), pp. 33–36. As Laplanche and Pontalis remind us, the credit for drawing attention to this Freudian concept goes to Jacques Lacan and his work on the après-coup. Moreover, it should be pointed out that the most frequent English translation as ‘deferred action’ is misleading, as there is no precise time-lapse that characterizes Nachträglichkeit nor is any particular ‘action’ associated with it.

  10. 10.

    See Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995). Fuss devotes an article to the development of the Freudian concept of identification, part of which deals with ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (particularly pp. 37–39). Unfortunately, however, the section on ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ does not adequately distinguish between identification, incorporation and introjection, which leads Fuss to state that ‘the melancholic spectacularly fails, unable or unwilling to incorporate the once beloved object’ (p. 37); this is in fact the opposite of Freud’s definition of melancholia in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’.

  11. 11.

    See Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Identification’, pp. 187–190.

  12. 12.

    See for example Abraham and Torok’s essay ‘Deuil ou Mélancolie, Introjecter-Incorporer’, in L’Ecorce et le noyau (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), pp. 229–252.

  13. 13.

    Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 172. Chapters 5 and 6 are particularly relevant for questions concerning identification, mourning and melancholia. Chapter 5, ‘Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification’, takes up issues concerning identification and gender already raised in Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 2006), and while the Recherche certainly lends itself to a reading of mourning with regard to gender theory, this lies outside of the scope of this book.

  14. 14.

    Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, p. 243. Freud’s claim that melancholia might be caused by the loss of an abstract idea, has been taken up by postmodernist philosophy, for example in Jacques Derrida’s Les Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 2006), where Derrida discusses the fate of Marx in post-communist Europe. In her book Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Gillian Rose attacks postmodernist appropriations of Freud’s division of mourning and melancholia, particularly those proclaiming the loss of abstract concepts such as International Marxism or reason. While I agree with Rose that such an appropriation of melancholia is problematic, I believe that Freud’s later work does not allow for such a division and instead proclaims that melancholia partakes in a variety of mental processes.

  15. 15.

    Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, p. 28.

  16. 16.

    Ibid., p. 29.

  17. 17.

    Clewell, p. 61.

  18. 18.

    Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, p. 134.

  19. 19.

    Bowie, Proust Among the Stars, p. 290.

  20. 20.

    The relationship between the self and the other in the Recherche has been abundantly discussed, though not in the context of mourning. Apart from Bowie’s excellent Freud, Proust and Lacan and Baudry’s Proust, Freud et l’autre, Hans Robert Jauss’s succinct chapter on alterity in Zeit und Erinnerung in Marcel Prousts ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie des Romans (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), pp. 198–214, also proves useful. Jacques Chabot, L’Autre et le moi chez Proust (Paris: Champion, 1999) provides a detailed reading of the self-other relationship in Proust, but the Levinasian framework seems at times uncritically accepted by the author.

  21. 21.

    This idea that for the narrator’s mother, life has been a constant preparation for her own mother’s death, is one that Proust also explores in his correspondance concerning his own mother’s death. Thanking Maurice Barrès for a letter of condolence following his mother’s death, he writes in January 1906: ‘Toute notre vie n’avait été qu’un entraînement, elle à m’apprendre à me passer d’elle pour le jour où elle me quitterait, et cela depuis mon enfance, quand elle refusait de venir dix fois me dire bonsoir avant d’aller en soirée, quand je voyais le train l’emporter quand elle me laissait à la campagne, quand plus tard à Fontainebleau et cette été même où elle était allée à Saint-Cloud sous tous les prétextes je lui téléphonais à toute heure.’ (Corr., VI, pp. 27–28) Proust’s own mourning seemingly informed the mother’s mourning in the Recherche, and in Chapter 2, we return to this idea that the mother’s mourning for her own mother becomes a metaphor for the narrator’s anticipated mourning.

  22. 22.

    Paul-Laurent Assoun, ‘Le Deuil et sa complaisance somatique; Le deuil et le corps selon Freud’, Revue Française de Psychosomatique, ‘Deuil et somatisations’, 30 (2006), 121–131 (p. 122).

  23. 23.

    Ibid., p. 125.

  24. 24.

    A number of studies partly examine the body in the Recherche, but Liza Gabaston’s book on body language is one of the few exceptions that solely focuses on the body; see Liza Gabaston, Le Langage du corps dans ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011). Richard W. Saunders’s Metamorphoses of the Proustian Body: A Study of Bodily Signs in ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ (New York: Peter Lang, 1994) gives an account of bodies in the Recherche, yet pays almost no attention to the body of the narrator himself. Michel R. Finn’s study Proust, The Body and Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) investigates the connections between Proust’s fin-de-siècle ‘nervousness’ and his apprehensions regarding literary form, but Finn is more interested in establishing links between Proust’s life and his work than in focusing entirely on the Recherche. See also André Benhaïm, Panim: Visages de Proust (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2006), which examines the Proustian depiction of the face within a predominantly Levinasian framework.

  25. 25.

    Ian James discusses the body in Nancy’s work in The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), particularly pp. 114–152. The work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty constitutes another theoretical voice that emphasizes the importance of the body in philosophical discourse, and Merleau-Ponty has been a major influence on Nancy. Yet it is Nancy’s continuous oscillation between a theoretical and a personal discourse on the body which I believe makes him a more interesting interlocutor for Proust. On Proust and Merleau-Ponty, see Catherine Hansen, ‘The Anonymous Flesh of Time: Merleau-Ponty and Blanchot on Proust’, L’Esprit Créateur, 46 (2006), 33–43.

  26. 26.

    Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité (Paris: Kluwer Academic, 1971), p. 176.

  27. 27.

    James, p. 131.

  28. 28.

    Jean-Luc Nancy, L’Intrus (Paris: Galilée, 2000).

  29. 29.

    Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. by Richard A. Rand (bilingual edition) (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 30.

  30. 30.

    Nancy, Corpus, p. 32.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., p. 14.

  32. 32.

    Levinas, Totalité et infini, p. 177.

  33. 33.

    Berthold Brecht, Geschichten vom Herrn Keuner (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1958), p. 35. ‘What do you do,’ Mr. K. was asked, ‘if you love someone?’ ‘I make a sketch of the person,’ said Mr. K., ‘and make sure that one comes to resemble the other.’ ‘Which? The sketch?’ ‘No,’ said Mr K., ‘the person’ (Stories of Mr. Keuner, trans. by Martin Chalmers (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2001), p. 27).

  34. 34.

    There is a large amount of genetic criticism on Albertine disparue; for a book-length study about the genesis of the ‘roman d’Albertine’, see Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, Proust inachevé: le dossier ‘Albertine Disparue’ (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005).

  35. 35.

    Richard Terdiman, The Dialectics of Isolation: Self and Society in the French Novel from the Realists to Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 201.

  36. 36.

    ‘Albertine’ appears 2362 times in the 1987–89 Pléiade edition; Frantext, http://www.frantext.fr/ [accessed 10 April 2010].

  37. 37.

    See Jacques Dubois, Pour Albertine: Proust et le sens du social (Paris: Seuil, 1997), Raymonde Coudert, Proust au féminin (Paris: Grasset, 1998), Elizabeth Ladenson, Proust’s Lesbianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999) and most recently Judith Oriol, Les Femmes proustiennes (Paris: EST, 2010). While not concerned with mourning, Emma Wilson’s Sexuality and the Reading Encounter: Identity and Desire in Proust, Duras, Tournier, and Cixous (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) questions how the narrator’s fantasies surrounding Albertine ‘constitute the narrator’s own identity’ (p. 61), which is the underlying question of this chapter. An exception in the critical literature on Albertine in so far as questions apart from her sexuality are discussed are the online dossier ‘A la Recherche d’Albertine Disparue’, Acta Fabula, published 13–15 February 2007: http://www.fabula.org/colloques/sommaire446.php [accessed 10 April 2010] and Terdiman’s analysis of narrative strategies, pp. 199–225.

  38. 38.

    Bowie, Proust Among the Stars, p. 295.

  39. 39.

    Schulte Nordholt, p. 141.

  40. 40.

    Edward J. Hughes, Marcel Proust: A Study in the Quality of Awareness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 158–160.

  41. 41.

    Another sense that constitutes difference is vision, and the examination of the ‘visage’ in a Levinasian framework allows for another way to establish mourning as impossible. See Benhaïm, pp. 93–115. See also Coudert, pp. 252–258.

  42. 42.

    The term stems from Derrida’s remarks at the Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine, 5 April 1995, quoted in Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, p. 195. Derrida develops the concept of ‘affirmative incorporation’ in his obituary for Louis Marin, even if he does not use the exact term; see Chaque fois unique, pp. 175–204. First published in English as ‘By Force of Mourning’, Critical Inquiry, 22 (1996), 171–192.

  43. 43.

    Gilles Deleuze, Proust et les signes (Paris: PUF, 1986), p. 14.

  44. 44.

    Adam Watt has shown that the first allusion to Albertine’s death occurs when the narrator reacts to a letter from Gilberte: ‘Je voyais tout vaciller comme quelqu’un qui tombe de cheval’ (I, 491), Reading in Proust’s ‘A la recherche’: ‘le délire de la lecture’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 106. A further allusion to her death occurs here: ‘Je vous en prie, ma petite chérie, pas de haute voltige comme vous avez fait l’autre jour. Pensez, Albertine, s’il vous arrivait un accident!’ (III, 627).

  45. 45.

    Jacques Derrida, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 1998).

  46. 46.

    Levinas, ‘L’Autre dans Proust’, in Noms propres (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1976), pp. 149–156 (p. 152).

  47. 47.

    Ibid., p. 153.

  48. 48.

    Wassenaar, p. 180.

  49. 49.

    This oscillation between the self and the other and absence and presence already characterizes the narrator’s relationship with Albertine prior to her death; see Proust’s description of the narrator’s feelings for Albertine as ‘amour amphibie’ (III, 679).

  50. 50.

    Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, De quoi demain…Dialogue (Paris: Fayard, 2001), pp. 257–8.

  51. 51.

    Ibid.

  52. 52.

    Laurent Jenny, ‘L’Effet Albertine’, Poétique, 142 (2005), 205–219 (p. 206).

  53. 53.

    Antoine Compagnon refers to the Baudelaire passage (Charles Baudelaire, Correspondance, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), II, 25) in his book Baudelaire devant l’innombrable (Paris: Presses universitaires Paris Sorbonne, 2003), p. 70, yet he only links this to Proust in his Cours at the Collège de France, 10 March 2009.

  54. 54.

    Jenny describes Albertine not as a character of the Recherche, but ‘un principe d’indétermination des essences et multiplication des identités’ (p. 213). In fact, a similar experience of ‘émiettement’ is reported when kissing Albertine, but Proust describes it as ‘dédoublement’ rather than ‘multiplication’.

  55. 55.

    See Jean-Luc Nancy, Être singulier pluriel (Paris: Galilée, 1996). Nancy’s understanding of the singular plurality of being suggests that not only thought, but as James points out, equally art, community and the body are ‘irreducibly fragmentary in nature’ (James, p. 113). In the example evoked, the narrator’s corporeal experience becomes an instrument that triggers such a fragmentation, an oscillation between the self and the other, identity and the dissolution thereof.

  56. 56.

    Bowie writes about the diversity of meanings the notion of ‘superposition’ and ‘superposer’ take in Proust in his posthumously published article ‘Reading Proust between the Lines’, in The Strange M. Proust, ed. by André Benhaïm (Oxford: Legenda, 2009), pp. 125–135. See equally Georges Poulet’s discussion of juxta- and superposition in Proust, L’Espace proustien (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), pp. 112–136.

  57. 57.

    The self and the discontinuity of its identity over time is amply discussed in Proust; see for example Leo Bersani, Marcel Proust: Fictions of Life and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 46–55, or Joshua Landy, Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 105–109. In mourning, however, the experience of the death of former selves is intensified through the actual death of Albertine.

  58. 58.

    Dubois, p. 180.

  59. 59.

    Julia Kristeva, Le Temps sensible: Proust et l’expérience littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), p. 107.

  60. 60.

    Jean Milly, ‘L’Article dans Le Figaro’, Acta Fabula, ‘A la Recherche d’Albertine Disparue’, published 13 February 2007, http://www.fabula.org/colloques/document476.php [accessed 20 April 2015] and Nicole Deschamps, ‘L’Auteur en lecteur de soi-même’, Tangence, 76 (2004), 9–24.

  61. 61.

    It can only be inferred that the article is the one the narrator composed on the steeples of Martinville and to which he refers in various volumes of the Recherche; see Landy, p. 54.

  62. 62.

    Derrida, Chaque fois unique, p. 199.

  63. 63.

    Ricciardi, p. 77. For a study of the importance of forgetting in European literature, see Harald Weinrich, Lethe: Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1997). Weinrich devotes a chapter to Proust (pp. 187–194), but does not emphasize the importance of forgetting within the process of mourning. Evelyn Ender discusses the interplay between memory and forgetting in Proust and how it relates to new methods of Alzheimer treatment in her chapter ‘Proustian Memory Gardens’, see Architexts of Memory: Literature, Science and Autobiography (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), pp. 111–138. Haruhiko Tokuda has extensively written on the importance of forgetting in Proust, though none of his articles relates specifically to discourses of mourning. See Haruhiko Tokuda, ‘L’oubli chez Proust: faudrait-il l’oublier?’, Études proustiennes, Proust sans frontières 2, 7 (2009), ed. by Bernard Brun, Masafumi Oguro et Kazuyoshi Yoshikawa, 125–143. For a study of forgetting as a topos of modernity, see also Marc Augé, Les Formes de l’oubli (Paris: Rivages, 2001) and Paul Connerton, How Modernity Forgets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

  64. 64.

    Ricciardi, p. 98.

  65. 65.

    See IV, 476, 615–616.

  66. 66.

    Bayard, pp. 21–31.

  67. 67.

    Derrida, Chaque foi unique, p. 179.

  68. 68.

    Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. by Mary M. Innes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), VI 146–312, p. 142.

  69. 69.

    For a study of the cultural significance of pain in literature, art and medicine, see David B. Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) and more recently, Joanna Bourke, The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkiller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). A book that should be mentioned here, even if the subject of other people’s pain is dealt with from the perspective of photography, is Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2004). The question of how the pain of another affects and is responded to is also at the heart of the various doctor patient encounters in the Recherche, see Anna Magdalena Elsner, ‘À la recherche du médecin philosophe: Der Proustsche Arzt zwischen Beruf und Berufung’, Marcel Proust und die Medizin, ed. by Marc Föcking (Berlin: Insel Verlag, 2014), pp. 109–127.

  70. 70.

    Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 3.

  71. 71.

    Goodkin, p. 135.

  72. 72.

    For an exploration of the human-animal distinction, illness and mourning, see my article Anna Magdalena Elsner, ‘“Penser Commence Peut-être Là”: Proust and Derrida on Animals, Ethics, and Mortality’, The Modern Language Review, 111.2 (2016), 373–389.

  73. 73.

    Hiroya Sakamoto, ‘Du théâtrophone au téléphone: repenser la mise en scène du dialogue dans A la recherche du temps perdu’, Marcel Proust Aujourd’hui, 4 (2006), 251–271 (p. 262).

  74. 74.

    Ibid., p. 261.

  75. 75.

    Nancy, Corpus, p. 32.

  76. 76.

    In the article ‘Involuntary Narration, Narrating Involition: Proust on Death, Repetition and Self-Becoming’, Modern Languages Notes (hereafter MLN), 117 (2002), 943–970 (p. 960), Bo Earle discusses the telephone conversation between grandmother and grandson as part of Proust’s ‘mortuary aesthetics’. Less interested in the self/other dynamics of the passage, Earle reads it as a step towards the narrator’s self-becoming, and eventual creativity.

  77. 77.

    For a discussion of the passage’s mythological imagery, see Jo Yoshida, ‘Sur quelques images de l’agonie chez Marcel Proust’, Equinox, 15 (1998), 54–65.

  78. 78.

    Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor for Modernity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), p. 7 and p. 8.

  79. 79.

    Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Weather in Proust, ed. by Jonathan Goldberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 28.

  80. 80.

    Le Roux-Kieken, pp. 339–415.

  81. 81.

    Katja Haustein, ‘Proust’s Emotional Cavities: Vision and Affect in A la recherche du temps perdu’, French Studies, 113 (2009), 161–173 (p. 162).

  82. 82.

    Davide Vago’s article ‘Proust, impossible Persée? Le regard antique dans l’épisode de la mort de la grand-mère’, Bulletin Marcel Proust (hereafter BMP), 57 (2007), 63–80, analyses the significance of Medusa with regard to the grandmother’s illness and death. For a reading of Ovid’s metamorphoses in Proust and how the mythical figure of Medusa is interwoven with other Ovidian myths and the theme of petrification in the scene of the grandmother’s death, see Marie Miguet-Ollagnier, La Mythologie de Marcel Proust (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, Annales Littéraires de l’Université de Besançon, 1982), pp. 165–175.

  83. 83.

    Hughes, Quality of Awareness, pp. 156–157.

  84. 84.

    In the Grasset edition of 1913, Proust still placed ‘Les intermittences du cœur’ immediately after the death of the grandmother, which illustrates that his later editing was meant to highlight the importance of the Nachträglichkeit of grief. For an overview of the development of the scene of the grandmother’s death in Proust’s Cahiers see Jo Yoshida, ‘Sur les trois jeux de dactylographies de la “mort de la grand-mère”: un aspect du processus de la correction et du montage chez Marcel Proust’, Equinoxe, 9 (1992), 63–73.

  85. 85.

    Haustein also proposes that the sleeping Albertine shares some motifs with the scene of the grandmother’s death, but she focuses on the description of Albertine as a plant or landscape, ‘Proust’s Emotional Cavities’, p. 167. Hughes furthermore points out that the statuesque quality of Albertine is not only explored when she sleeps, but also when she visits the narrator’s house after the death of his grandmother (Quality of Awareness, p. 157).

  86. 86.

    Le Roux-Kieken effectively argues that the link between death and sleep in Proust goes back to the Middle Ages, pp. 53–67.

  87. 87.

    Alison Winton [Finch], Proust’s Additions, II, 163.

  88. 88.

    Gérard Cogez, ‘Perte, perdition et réparation: l’expérience de Proust’, in Expériences de la perte, Colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, ed. by Michel Juffé (Paris: PUF, 2005), pp. 294–319 (particularly, pp. 302–310, where Cogez claims that ‘Albertine doit diparaître’ and her death is ‘la mort “qui arrange tout”’).

  89. 89.

    Maurice Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), pp. 227–235.

  90. 90.

    Ibid., p. 228.

  91. 91.

    For an exploration of the medieval imaginary, see Richard Bales, Proust and the Middle Ages (Geneva: Droz, 1975), p. 107. While Bales mentions that references to medieval sculpture seem ‘incidental’, he equally refers to the ‘medieval habit of portraying the deceased as young people’ with regard to the grandmother. He does not however include the portrayal of Albertine as a sculpture in this discussion.

  92. 92.

    Le Roux-Kieken, p. 433.

  93. 93.

    Hughes, p. 157.

  94. 94.

    Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 2012), p. 4.

  95. 95.

    Levinas, La Mort et le temps, p. 12.

  96. 96.

    Literary criticism developed an interest in this genre of life-writing in the late 1980s and early 1990s – arguably in the light of the AIDS epidemic; see Thomas Couser, Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability and Life Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), Julia Epstein, Altered Conditions: Disease, Medicine, and Storytelling (New York: Routledge, 1995), Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: The Body, Illness and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), Sander Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathographies (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1993). A relatively recent development of this rapprochement of literature and medicine is the program in ‘Narrative Medicine’ at Columbia University; see http://www.narrativemedicine.com [accessed 12 June 2014].

  97. 97.

    The term is borrowed from Robert Jay Lifton’s book The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), in which Lifton examines historical, philosophical and psychoanalytical attitudes towards death.

  98. 98.

    See Edmund Husserl, ‘The Constitution of Psychic Reality Through the Body’, in The Body, ed. by Donn Welton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 23–37. Husserl writes that the body is ‘a thing “inserted” between the rest of the material world and the “subjective” sphere’ (p. 36). For a discussion of the body in Husserl, see Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 98–108.

  99. 99.

    Anne Henry, ‘Corps’, in Dictionnaire Marcel Proust, pp. 241–243 (p. 241).

  100. 100.

    Anne Simon, ‘Phénoménologie’, in Dictionnaire Marcel Proust, pp. 762–764 (p. 763).

  101. 101.

    Bowie, Proust Among the Stars, p. 268.

  102. 102.

    Evelyne Ender, ‘“Speculating Carnally” or, Some Reflections on the Modernist Body’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 12 (1999), 113–130 (pp. 114–118).

  103. 103.

    Edward Bizub, Proust et le moi divisé: ‘La Recherche’ creuset de la psychologie experimentale (1874–1914) (Geneva: Droz, 2006).

  104. 104.

    Illness is amply analysed in Proust criticism; see Serge Béhar, L’Univers médical de Proust (Paris: Gallimard, Cahiers Marcel Proust, 1970), or, for a more recent discussion, Donald Wright, Du discours médical dans ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’: science et souffrance (Paris: Champion, 2007). Wright provides scientific and medical intertexts, which illustrate how medical knowledge is an omnipresent theme in Proust’s prose, but he does not read illness as an important step towards creativity. Recently Brian Dillon has written on the relation between Proust’s hypochondria and creativity in Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (London: Penguin, 2010), particularly pp. 183–209. A general problem in Proust criticism on illness is that Proust’s own illness is taken as evidence for the narrator’s illness, and to my knowledge no critical study exists which traces how Proust develops and edits the illness of his narrator in the genesis of the Recherche. In this context see my article on neurasthenia as connecting Proust’s father’s research interests to the development of the disease in the novel, Anna M. Elsner, ‘Un état nerveux dont je n’étais pas responsable’: Medical and Moral Language in the drame du coucher, 12 (2015), Marcel Proust Aujourd’hui, 76–90.

  105. 105.

    Gene M. Moore, ‘The Absent Narrator of Proust’s Recherche’, The French Review, 57 (1984), 607–616.

  106. 106.

    Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 2 vols (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1978), I: Thinking, 183.

  107. 107.

    Levinas, ‘L’Autre dans Proust’, p. 153.

  108. 108.

    Nancy, L’Intrus, p. 31.

  109. 109.

    Paul Connerton has explored how mourning is inscribed within human bodies (Paul Connerton, The Spirit of Mourning: History, Memory and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)) – while his sociological focus considers the memory of genocide and torture, his essential premise—namely that ‘memory takes place on the body’s surface and in its tissues, and in accordance with levels of meaning that reflect human sensory capacity more than cognitive categories’ (Connerton, The Spirit of Mourning, p. ix (emphasis in the original)) – is close to Proust’s understanding of how memory is inscribed in the body.

  110. 110.

    Nancy, L’Intrus, p. 16.

  111. 111.

    Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), §244, pp. 32–32e.

  112. 112.

    Jean Milly, ‘Style de la maladie chez Proust’, BMP, 43 (1993), 58–71 (p. 62).

  113. 113.

    Brian Rogers, ‘Proust’s Narrator’, in The Cambridge Companion to Proust, pp. 85–99 (p. 85).

  114. 114.

    For the classical work of criticism that assesses the central place of the madeleine in the Recherche, see Serge Doubrovsky, La Place de la madeleine: écriture et fantasme chez Proust (Paris: Mercure de France, 1974). For a more recent discussion of the genesis of the madeleine episode, see Luzius Keller, Marcel Proust: la Fabrique de Combray (Geneva: Editions Zoé, 2003), particularly, ‘La biscotte salvatrice’ (pp. 11–19) and ‘L’invention des petites madeleines’ (pp. 97–139).

  115. 115.

    Mieke Bal discusses this sudden closeness, which in this scene comes to recall a photographic ‘zoom effect’ in Images littéraires ou comment lire visuellement Proust (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 1997), particularly pp. 177–187.

  116. 116.

    Deleuze, p. 217.

  117. 117.

    Gérard Bayle, ‘Métapsychologie et devenir des deuils pathologiques’, in Monographies de psychanalyse: Le deuil, ed. by Nadine Amar, Catherine Couvreur, Michel Hanus (Paris: PUF, 2004), pp. 109–125 (p. 109).

  118. 118.

    See Chap. 4, note 40.

  119. 119.

    See Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Penguin, 2000). Proust might also be imitating Flaubert here, of whom he writes in ‘À propos du “style” de Flaubert’: ‘A mon avis la chose la plus belle de L’Éducation sentimentale, ce n’est pas une phrase, mais un blanc’ (CSB, 595).

  120. 120.

    For a succinct commentary on this passage, and in particular on how allusions to fin-de-siècle motifs such as solitude, illness, death and the punishment of moral corruption in Les Plaisirs et les jours anticipate similar topics in the Recherche, see Schmid, Proust dans la décadence, pp. 63–67. For the connection between ill health and creativity, see Jo Yoshida, ‘Proust et la maladie nerveuse’, in Marcel Proust 1:‘A la recherche du temps perdu’, du personnages aux structures, ed. by Pierre-Edmond Robert (Paris: Minard, 1992), pp. 101–119; Lois Bragg and William Sayers, ‘Proust’s Prescription: Sickness as a Pre-condition for Writing’, Literature and Medicine, 19 (2000), 165–181. For a more general discussion of the fin-de-siècle opinion that ill heath might function as a condition for creativity, see Ursula Link-Heer, ‘Malgré ce formidable obstacle de santé contraire: Schreiben und Krankheit bei Proust’, in Aspekte der Literatur des Fin-de-Siècle in der Romania, ed. by Angelika Corbineau-Hoffmann and Albert Gier (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1983), pp. 179–200.

  121. 121.

    Ender, ‘Speculating Carnally’, p. 113.

  122. 122.

    Woolf, On Being Ill, p. 6.

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  1. Department of French / Centre for the Humanities and Health, King’s College London, London, UK

    Anna Magdalena Elsner

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Elsner, A.M. (2017). Time of Death: Alterity. In: Mourning and Creativity in Proust. Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60073-8_2

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