long Proustian shelf, The

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2001 by Bawer, Bruce

Both Shattuck (a professor at Boston University) and Bowie (Oxford) have their merits. Yet each appears determined to make A la recherche out to be challenging in ways that render his own services indispensable to readers. The hyperbole put at the service of this effort can be absurd: the dust jacket of Proust among the Stars even ventures to claim that it "sends Proust into orbit and sends back truly startling pictures of our world." What, in earth or in heaven, can this possibly mean? Naturally one hesitates to pay too much attention to jacket copy, but then again Bowie's text is itself not entirely free of such overheated and borderline perplexing rhetoric. ("Proust's political imagination plunges with abandon toward the abyss.") Nor does he refrain from tedious professorial posturing. ("There seems to me something unsatisfactory about any reading of the book that does not resist as well as endorse Le temps retrouve in the performance of this harmonizing and integrating role.") Divided into seven chapters, each devoted to a major Proustian theme-self, time, art, politics, morality, sex, death-Bowie's study (whose precise, unhurried prose moves at a pace rather reminiscent of Proust's own) intermingles long quotations, plot paraphrases, commonsensical explications, the occasional genuine insight about syntax or perspective, and loads of hyberbolic huffing and puffing about paradox, ambiguity, "the `self"' as "mobile force-field," and suchlike.

Shattuck, too, serves up his share of irksome, bemusing prose. "Mere awareness," he writes, "volatilizes what it seeks and hampers its own functioning. The most reflective of us are endowed with this antithesis of the Midas touch." And: "The mystery of Proust's world arises not from gratuitousness or from the absence of motivation but from the conflictingly overdetermined quality of most actions, and from the adaptability of most actions to a greater number of attributions." Nor is one's admiration for Shattuck enhanced by the discovery that Proust's Way, while representing itself as a new work, consists mostly of very lightly revised material from previous volumes, including most of his 1974 paperback Proust. One footnote, apparently preserved intact from his even older book Proust's Binoculars (1963), suggests that "Proust scholars will be fascinated by Dr. Wilder Penfield's report" on brain research-from 1958!

It's no surprise, accordingly, that Shattuck's "field guide" feels like something of a grab bag, its contents ranging from a synopsis of the novel (complete with structural diagrams) to a critical survey of academic Proust studies to a rant about Tadie's indiscriminate shoveling of discarded drafts into his Pleiade edition. Portentous analyses alternate with chummy, rather condescending expert tips: in one chapter, lifted right out of his 1974 book, Shattuck poses, and answers at length, such questions as "In what language should one read Proust?" (Urdu?) and "How many of the three thousand pages should one read?" My favorite line in the book follows a long quotation from Proust: "What can I say about such a passage? There's nothing to add." Alas, Shattuck isn't silenced for long.