Around Proust

by Richard E. Goodkin

A study in obsession, Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is seemingly a self-sufficient universe of remarkable internal consistency and yet is full of complex, gargantuan digressions. Richard Goodkin follows the dual spirit of the novel through highly suggestive readings of the work in its interactions with music, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and cinema, and such literary genres as epic, lyric poetry, and tragedy. In exploring this fascinating intertextual network, Goodkin reveals some of Proust's less obvious creative sources and considers his influence on later art forms. The artistic and intellectual entities examined in relation to Proust's novel are extremely diverse, coming from periods ranging from antiquity (Homer, Zeno of Elea) to the 1950s (Hitchcock) and belonging to the cultures of the Greek, French, German, and English-speaking worlds. In spite of this variety of form and perspective, all of these analyses share a common methodology, that of "digressive" reading. They explore Proust's novel not only in light of such famous passages as those of the madeleine and the good-night kiss, but also on the basis of seemingly small details that ultimately take us, like the novel itself, in unexpected directions.

192 pages, Paperback

First published June 5, 1991

About the author

Richard E. Goodkin is Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a specialist of seventeenth-century French literature, but has also worked on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and on ancient Greek tragedy.

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Richard Goodkin's Around Proust is a work of great erudition that takes an intertextual approach to further understanding Marcel Proust's masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu. In the introduction to his work, Goodkin (an associate professor of French at the University of Wisconsin) defines the term "'around' Proust" (the title of this collection of essays) as "speaking about Proust by seeming to speak about other things." These other things involve, but aren't limited to: the role of avuncularity in The Odyssey; Hitchcock's Vertigo (this was perhaps my favorite essay in this collection); music, with emphasis on Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (and also Mozart); the philosophies of Zeno and Henri Bergson; Freud's work on mourning, melancholy and the ego (another favorite); and the works of Mallarmé and Racine (namely Phèdre).

I found my interest in some of these pieces greater than others, which were more tedious reads (the one on Mallarmé and Racine for instance). And while I found some of Goodkin's arguments compelling, at other times they were a bit of a stretch (which he acknowledged in asking for readers to indulge him at times), focusing often on small details within the work and sometimes (I felt) exaggerating their importance to the complete work (my critique here is the same as it is with works on mysticism, giving more meaning and significance to certain things than is perhaps due). I also thought of the number of fan theories that have emerged in response to various TV shows, books, songs and films, with the artists often finding certain theories amusing and creative but dismissing them as incompatible with the author's intended message. But, of course, any sort of work of this nature is always going to be (like reading itself) a highly subjective enterprise, something well-documented in studies of media (and I'm thinking primarily of Stuart Hall's work on encoding/decoding of media messages).

My other complaint is that I found Goodkin's style of writing a bit dry, making it necessary to read the work slowly and in small doses. A more interesting analysis of Proust, I think, is Gilles Deleuze's Proust and Signs. Though I've yet to read that whole work, I've read some excerpts from it and (from what I've read) I find Deleuze's style much more engaging. There is no doubt that Goodkin has given much thought to analyzing this great work of literature, reading between the lines and "around" the work in ways that other writers have not, but as informative as the work was overall, the delivery was comparatively flat and I couldn't ignore the fact that Goodkin often tried to attribute too much meaning to certain seemingly trivial details.