The Growth of 'A la recherche du temps perdu': A Chronological Examination of Proust's Manuscripts from 1909 to 1914 by Anthony R. Pugh

MLR, IOI.4, 2oo6 II35 tomusic and language and ismasterfully exploited by both artists. He refers in this chapter to Etienne Souriau's La Correspondance des arts (Paris: Flammarion, 1947), which notes that 'ce sont les demarches de la pensee instaurative qui sont semblables entre deux arts, et non le resultat qu'engendrent ces demarches' (Milovanovic, p. I67). One might expect a fuller acknowledgement of this book, evidently germane toMilo vanovic's project, yet its details are neither footnoted nor listed in the bibliography. Chapter 5 analyses the role of 'L'esthetique gothique', arguing suggestively, after Luc Fraisse, that Proust's abandonment of the bitty, relatively unstructuredjean Santeuil comes about with his discovery of the rigorous symmetries of Gothic architecture which would underpin the Recherche. Architecture, like the other 'figures', is deemed to provide 'unmetalangage qui permet a la litterature de se definir elle-meme' (p. I84). Churches and cathedrals are models of the successful unification of different styles and modes of construction, and also embody that central tenet of Proust's aesthetic: Time. Milovanovic's conclusions repeat much of his earlier material and feature a footnote much longer than it is convincing regarding possible alchemical symbols in the Recherche (pp. 24 I-42). This book has some frustrating faults: quotations from Proust are at times in accurate; bibliographic details and page references for secondary material are given only sporadically; the thematic and name indexes are full, but only a fraction of the works referred to in the text feature in the bibliography. Details of La CathUdrale, for instance, the Huysmans novel frequently referred to and quoted from, are included neither in any note nor in the bibliography; a number of German authors are quoted in the original without accompanying translation, while others are quoted in French. These inconsistencies detract from an otherwise engaging survey. TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN ADAM WATT The Growth of A la recherche du tempsperdu': A ChronologicalExamination of Proust's Manuscriptsfrom I909 to I9I4, vol. I: I909-I9II; vol. II: I91I-I9I4. By AN THONYR. PUGH. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2004. Vol. I:xxxiv+376 pp.; vol. II:xx+447 pp. ?96. ISBN o-8020-88I8-x (set). This work provides a form of double testimony. Not only does it capture Proust's tireless compositional drive as A la recherche du temps perdu came falteringly into focus and assumed concrete, material form between i909 and the outbreak of the First World War, but additionally, in tracking someticulously the genesis of Proust's magnum opus, the work represents amonumental achievement for its own author and for genetic criticism more generally. The lateAnthony Pugh devoted two decades of his research career to the book's elaboration. The enormity of his achievement comes, ironically, at a time when academic timescales for research 'output', certainly in the UK, make projects of this scale problematic. The ambition of Pugh's undertaking is captured in his conclusion, where he cites as his goal the reconstruction of the week-to-week history of the writing of Proust's Recherche in the pre-war period. Such an endeavour requires an ability towork with myriad compositional acts, but Pugh pursues this material analysis with tenacious single-mindedness and boundless energy. The result is a copious, dense, immensely painstaking, and, occasionally, necessarily conjectural account of how the novel crys tallized. Pugh generously acknowledges existing contributions to the field while at the same time correcting earlier wrong turns taken, all too understandably, by genetic critics faced with the Byzantine difficulties of the Proust manuscripts. Pugh endorses the distinction between programmatic and immanent modes of writing made by Marion Schmid in her Processes of Literary Creation: Flaubert and I136 Reviews Proust (Oxford: Legenda, I998), and sees Proust as adopting each of them at different stages. At times, Proust pursues individual strands of narrative (situations, characters, incidents); at others, the technique of proliferation gives way to an emerging archi tectonic sense of novelistic structure. Initially, the pattern for the Proustian project was one of immanent textual accumulation, and the long, slow route to establishing a definitive text ismeticulously reconstructed by Pugh. As Proust himself conceded, the cumulative model was never easy to curb: hence, typically, his...

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