Proust and Emotion: The Importance of Affect in 'A la recherche du temps perdu' by Inge Crosman Wimmers (review)

MLR, 100.3, 2005 827 faith. By exploiting his religious duty, the assurance which religion should provide is destabilized and an instructive light is thrown on two characters at once: 'Jamais le pretre proustien ne se dissocie de cette institution quasi-policiere incarnee par le "confessional": I'Eglise a pour vocationdeprendrel'individuendefaut' (p. 236). Less convincing is the parallel with snobbish society situations where a religious connec? tion is being overstretched. Similarly with the idolatry and self-deception themes. More often the contrast here is between the ideal and the real, more a philosophical than a religious connection. Reference to La Berma and what the narrator is hoping to experience as transcending banality exemplifies this stretching of religious terms of reference. What the narrator has been led to believe from Bergotte's essay on Phedre and La Berma's incarnation shows his idol with feet of clay: 'L'idole exemplaire qu'est La Berma revele le lien entre idolatrie et langage. Ainsi s'explique la fragilite de l'idole: construite par un imaginaire informe par le langage, elle resiste mal a l'epreuve de la realite' (p. 285). This is less a religious fall from grace and more the shock of the real against a too hoped-for ideal. A similar slippage occurs in the sec? tions relating religious imagery to sexuality, such as Adam, Eve, Sodome, Gomorrhe. Sometimes these references seem more passing than profound. Religious connections to the mother and to Mlle Vinteuil also seem tenuous. Ambiguous feelings towards the mother, forexample, inJean Santeuil turn simply on the profanation of the notion of the divine that she represents: 'elle est la premiere et la seule durable incarnation du divin qui comble l'enfant en detresse' (p. 350). This generalized link is further stretched in the Mlle Vinteuil/father scene at Montjouvain, and again with giving Aunt Leonie's furniture to the brothel. Sometimes the analogy switches away from the religious connection to something frankly Freudian. The analogy of Albertine's kiss and the mother's goodnight kiss is an example of such a parallel. The exploit? ing of Gomorrhe likewise as a metaphor for the unknowability of the other, where the narrator feels an outsider to Albertine's pleasure like a child abandoned by his mother, is decidedly removed to a Freudian context. In the conflating of the mother and Albertine (p. 368) the religious link, if it exists, has become exceedingly slight. This tendency to spread the 'langage religieux' too thinly also marks the finalsections on the 'poetique du divin'. University of Glasgow W. L. Hodson Proust and Emotion: The Importance of Affectin 'A la recherchedu tempsperdu'. By Inge Crosman Wimmers. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: Toronto University Press. 2003. xii + 278pp. $55; ?35. ISBN 0-8020-8727-2. Unconvinced by the 1960s mantra of theorists such as Genette and Barthes that char? acters in a novel are mere functions of language, Inge Crosman Wimmers unapologetically calls fora rehabilitation ofthe character and of affectin her probing analysis of A la recherchedu tempsperdu. Wimmers prefers the Barthes ofthe late 1970s, who enthuses about his rereading of Proust in Le Bruissementde la langue: 'Tout d'un coup la litterature [. . .] co'incide absolument avec un arrachement emotif, un "cri"' (p. 16). The fusion between literature and affectis central to Wimmers's thesis, which draws on the twin optics of psychology and philosophy. Thus Christopher Bollas's theory ofthe 'unthought known' (The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987)), for example, is tellingly ap? plied to an exploration of Marcel's emotional apprenticeship, as is the argument in Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) whereby emotions are deemed to be intelligent responses with the capacity to deliver potently cognitive messages. Wimmers maps these approaches onto 828 Reviews the emotional paradigms?or, to use Proust's narrator's terminology, the 'modeles de sentiments' (A la recherchedu tempsperdu, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1987-89), iv (1989), 661)?lying at the heart ofthe Recherche. She probes especially Marcel's separation anxiety,embedded in the drame du coucher and forming the template for heightened moments of self-awareness later...

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