Foreword by Jonathan Cutler Translator's Preface PrefaceIntroduction 1. Order 2. Duration 3. Frequency 4. Mood 5. VoiceAfterword Bibliography Index

Proust's narrative techniques

Narrative discourse : an essay in method

IN A LETTER ADDRESSED IN 1922 to his friend Roman Jakobson, the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky cheerfully wrote: "We know how life is made and how Don Quixote and the car are made too."' Literary criticism as a scientific enterprise, art as a technological artifact: this is the early Formalist program in a nutshell. The names of both correspondents, then in their twenties, would come to be definitively associated with this movement.2 At the time, Shklovsky was working on his book Theory of Prose, published in 1925, which included the chapters "How Don Quixote Is Made" and "Art as Device." The latter, first published in 1917, opened with some remarks on human psychology:

Making Things Strange: The Prehistory of a Literary Device

The famous ‘madeleine episode’ of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is investigated with reference to cognitive realism in the evocation of memory, by asking how this literary memory experience compa...

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Cognitive realism and memory in Proust’s madeleine episode

Although it is, in principle, almost universally accepted today that authors and narrators must be rigorously demarcated, somehow scholars of Marcel Proust seem—whether wittingly or unwittingly—to make an exception for In Search of Lost Time. Because it is written in the first person and because it incorporates scenes borrowed from Proust's own life, the fictional narrative is routinely read as his thinly veiled autobiography, if not as evidence for any number of psychiatric disorders. At the very least, critics tend to have no hesitation in taking theses put forward by the narrator as Proust's own vision of the world and the narrator's future masterpiece as the Search itself. Now these are not only mistakes, as evidence both internal and external clearly shows, but also consequential mistakes: they prevent us, that is, from understanding how the novel functions and from taking advantage of all it has to offer. For above and beyond the dry, theoretical insights it presents for our consideration, it grants us the opportunity to train ourselves, both in the complicated art of self-fashioning and in the related art of self-deception. And it is only because the narrator's insights do not entirely add up—a weakness, so long as one treats the Search as a treatise—that the implied author can produce the training effect, one which gives his novel its ultimate strength.

Proust, His Narrator, and the Importance of the Distinction

Abstract:Scholars continue to debate the relationship between the author and the narrator of A la recherche du temps perdu, but very few would argue against the temptation to conflate the two. This article examines the nature and implications of this enticement. As I argue here, the tendency to mistake the narrator for Proust, especially regarding his sexuality, can be attributed to the intersection of narrative, sexual, and readerly transgressions throughout la Recherche. I posit that Proust draws attention to his narrator's anonymous identity in passages that breach narrative and sexual conventions thereby tempting readers to participate in a transgressive reading of the text.

Proust's narrative techniques

Citations

Narrative discourse : an essay in method

Making Things Strange: The Prehistory of a Literary Device

Cognitive realism and memory in Proust’s madeleine episode

Proust, His Narrator, and the Importance of the Distinction

Proustian Temptation: Narrative, Sexual, and Readerly Transgressions in la Recherche

Related Papers (5)

Proust's Way; Proust and Literature

Proust's Way

Proust and Language-in-Use

A Reading of Proust

The reading of Proust