Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 3, December 2004
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Wimmers, Inge Crosman, Proust and Emotion, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2003. 278, 0-8020-8727-2, $US 55
Reviewed by
Louisiana State University, USA
In this hermeneutic reading of Proust, Ms. Wimmers offers two major analytical themes. The first is the role of re-appearing characters seen as an affective variation of Balzac’s original technique, and the second is a problem of what she calls Proustian metaphor. As for the literary character, Ms. Wimmers is willing to look outside the hermeneutic boundaries at Barthes but does not discuss his view that the literary character is not continuous, is not even an entity. She prefers to speak only of Barthes’s second more seasoned reading of Proust. But Barthes’s reasoning persists, and Ms. Wimmers should have engaged his work in order to develop her theory of characters which evolve toward totality. Barthes believed that the character is simply the words that make him/her up, not an organic totality. “Ce qui est caduc aujourd’hui dans le roman, ce n’est pas le romanesque, c’est le personnage; ce qui ne peut plus être écrit, c’est le nom propre. » S/Z, 1970, II, 618. Indeed this is Barthes˙s most consistent position ever since the influence of Greimas and the concept of characters as “actants” (“Introduction à l’Analyse Structurale des Récits” , 1966). Morover, at the recent colloquium: “Proust : Surprises de la Recherche” à l’Université de Paris VII May, 2004, Bernard Brun, obviously influenced by Barthes, remarked in his paper that Proustian characters «do nothing but represent the different stages of aesthetic initiation.” (May 28, 10:00am). Now, when Ms Wimmers opens her book with the following quote from Martha Nussbaum: “the understanding of any single emotion is incomplete unless its narrative history is grasped and studied for the light it sheds on the present response”, we can see that she is going against not only the work on characters by Barthes and those who have followed his lead, but also against characterological work from the Russian Formalists’ “functions” to Greimas’s “actants”. Furthermore, just how one gets to the actual historical composite of a characterological emotion is not clear.
After her discussion of “affect” as a characterological center, Ms, Wimmers develops the second problem, that of metaphor: “[at first] the narrator introduces his view of metaphor in Le Temps retrouvé, into the midst of a discussion where he criticizes the cinematographic vision of realist art. In presenting his own aesthetics, which is diametrically opposed to the surface notation of realist art, he begins by giving two examples based on experience –the evocative cover of a book once read and a certain mode of being associated with the morning cup of coffee – both of which are able to make contact with the past …”(p.135).
Readers of Proust will of course recognize these moments as “mémoire affective” as examples of texts concerning what Proust once referred to as “l’édifice immense du souvenir”. And while the reader finds here one of the better theoretical moments of the book, Ricoeur’s work on metaphorical thinking as not being normal objective language but rather a non-disjunctive poetic language suspended between presence and absence (p.177), even so, the palimpsest text that Ms Wimmers likes to read (p.143) risks being a different palimpsest for the narrator, all the more so since only that part of the palimpsest created for Marcel can be said to exist even in fiction. We come back to Barthes and the nature of a literary character… That said, the pleasure of the book, for this reader, is in the hermeneutic discussions. The pages on Iser and Ricoeur are particularly helpful. I admit to reading against the theoretical grain of this book, but I can recommend it nonetheless. It is always helpful to take our own biases through someone else’s thought.