" Taine's Essay a thousand times worse "

Abstract

Much has been said about Proust as a novelist, thanks in particular to the seminal works of Maurice Bardèche, Jean-Yves Tadié and Michel Raimond. This year's lecture will offer a kind of counterpart to these critical studies, as it aims to tackle the non-fiction aspect of Proust's work, which weaves elective affinities with the essay. It does not aim to define this genre - the question has already been the subject of numerous recent works - nor to consider À la recherche du temps perdu as an essayistic novel. Rather, it is to ask why the writer should not only be considered as a novelist, but also as a philosopher, an art historian, a sociologist, a linguist, a geographer, a literary critic and so on. This means, first of all, looking at the texts written before or after La Recherche : the Contre Sainte-Beuve, of course, but also the Pastiches and mélanges, the essays and articles. In addition, the novel itself is punctuated by theoretical pieces, such as " L'adoration perpétuelle ", maxims, sentences, apophtegms, which dissertate at greater or lesser length on a moral, psychological or aesthetic issue, etc., and which, as such, can be considered " essays in the novel ". The final question that arises is that of the transition from essay to novel : La Recherche was born of the Contre Sainte-Beuve project, and this original case of metamorphosis opens up many avenues for reflection.

The generic uncertainty of La Recherche has often been cited as a characteristic of the modern novel. " The decomposition of narrative form parallel to the loss of identity of the character crosses the boundaries of narrative and draws the literary work into the neighborhood of the essay ", writes Paul Ricœur of Musil : these analyses can be applied to Proust's novel. This is what Gérard Genette suggests. In Discours du récit, Genette draws attention to " the invasion of the story by the commentary, of the novel by the essay, of the narrative by its own discourse " in Proust's work. It was surely Barthes who gave the greatest success to this thesis of the attraction of the novel by the essay. In his eyes, La Recherche, which he sees as " the work of reference, the general mathesis, the mandala of the whole literary cosmogony ", is torn between two sides : that of the essay and that of the novel. According to Proust, he invented a "third form " : " novel, essay, neither or both ".

Proust himself was reluctant to see himself as a novelist. In his Carnet 1, which contains the first snippets of his work, he confesses his " uncertainty about the art form ". " Should it be a novel, a philosophical study, am I a novelist ? ", he asks himself. After considering various projects, including " un roman parisien ", " un essai sur Sainte-Beuve et Flaubert ", " une étude sur le roman ", in November 1908, he began making extensive notes for a critical essay on Sainte-Beuve. Attacks on Sainte-Beuve are nothing new : as early as 1905, Proust was lamenting the fact that the author of Les Lundis had " misunderstood all the writers of his time ". From the outset, the writer wondered what form his text should take. While immersed in reading Sainte-Beuve, he shared his doubts with his friend Georges de Lauris and Anna de Noailles. There are two possibilities : to write " an article in classical form ", or to write " the account of a morning " in which the narrator tells his mother about the study he wants to do on Sainte-Beuve. The fluctuating terms used to designate the forthcoming text, alternately described as " essai ", " étude ", " article ", bear witness to his procrastination.