Ekphrasis, Memory and Narrative After Proust : Prose Pictures and Fictional Recollection

## Illustrations Ignatius Zaaijman and Warrick Zipp. Over the years, you have all been patient enough to listen to my (often unasked for) perorations about the subjects and ideas that have now found their way onto this book's pages. I owe an inexpressible debt of gratitude to my ever supportive parents, Tatiana and Clive Jandrell, and my big-hearted grandparents, Roza and Valentin Arinine. If not for their unfailing support this book could not have been written, and I dedicate it to them. Finally, I am daily grateful to Diana Davidian. Thank you, Diana, for helping me to live outside the book. In his essay on Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Marcel Proust presents us with the following tableau: Now come into the kitchen, where the entrance is strictly guarded by a feudality of crocks of all sizes, faithful, hardworking servants, a handsome industrious race. Knives, brisk plain-dealers, lie on the table in a menacing idleness that intends no harm. But a strange monster hangs above your head, a skate, still fresh as the sea it rippled in; and the sight of it mixes the foreign charm of the sea, the calms, the tempests it matched and outrode, with the cravings of gluttony, as though a recollection of the Museum of Natural History traversed the delicious smell of food in a restaurant. It has been gutted, and you can admire the beauty of its delicate immense structural design, painted with red blood, azure nerves, and white sinews like the nave of a polychrome cathedral. ... Then there are oysters again, and a cat, counterpointing this fishy creation with the covert vitality of its subtler contours and with its glittering eyes fixed on the skate, picks its velvet-footed way in unhurried haste among the opened shells. over the oyster shells -and here we start to discern the very form of Proustian narration. Proust continues: An eye practiced in trafficking with the other senses, and in reconstituting by means of a few strokes of colour not merely a whole past, but a whole future, can already feel the freshness of the oysters that will dabble the cat's paws, and hear ... the thunder of their fall, as the precarious heap of frail splintered shells gives way under the cat's weight. (328) Reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time, we are likewise left suspended between Marcel's past, as he ekphrastically resurrects the scenes of forgotten memory retrieved by chance recall, while we also anticipate, through the narrator's proleptic remarks, the future that will shortly unfold before the 'I' that he once was. This book traces the form of Proust's novel as a modulation between descriptive delay and narrational progress, as Marcel's ekphrastic evocations of his memories overflow into the story about his life. Erich Auerbach has observed Figure 1 The Skate, 1727, by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), oil on canvas, 114.5 × 146 cm. Courtesy DeAgostini Getty Images. 'Is there anything more to say about Proust and the image?' (Haddad 115). Considering the mass of scholarship on the subject, the anxiety behind this question is certainly understandable; however, as said essay's original reading 1 See Felski, The Limits of Critique 162-185. Felski draws on Bruno Latour's actor-network theory to move away from a hermeneutics of suspicion towards a more open approach to a literary text, one that sees it as a kind of non-human 'actor' that can generate interpretation inasmuch as soliciting it (168). 2 For an overview of recent scholarship on Proust and the visual arts, see Adam Watt, Cambridge Introduction to Proust 110-112, and Watt, 'Late-Twentieth-and Twenty-First-Century Responses' 211-213. Mieke Bal's The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually remains an important contribution in this area; Bal thinks about the ways in which Proust's text foregrounds semantic exchange, examining how painting, photography and various optical instruments act as 'figurations' of writing in the novel -a way of representing the external world with their mediation (3). While her book goes a long way in unpacking visual media-and-text relations in Proust's writing, Bal does not explicitly address memory's own reliance upon (even its calling out for) intermedial ekphrasis. See also Richard Bales 183-199, where Bales discusses not only the significance of painting (Elstir) and literature (Bergotte) for Proust's aesthetic but also music (Vinteuil). 4 Edward J. Hughes's book Marcel Proust: A Study in the Quality of Awareness provides a painstaking analysis of how many of Proust's descriptive scenes were revised during the composition of the Search and what these revisions tell us about changes in the novel's conception. Hughes argues that description in Proust allows readers to vicariously experience the maturation of Marcel's artistic consciousness; see 98-132. See also Genette's reading of Proustian description in Narrative Discourse 99-106. Her good humour, her gentleness, her agreeable features, all these have so imprinted themselves on my memory, that I can still see in my mind's eye her manner, her glance, her whole air; I could describe how she was dressed, how she wore her hair, even to the two black curls which, after the fashion of the day, framed her temples. (my emphasis 10) It is striking that Rousseau here uses a modal verb, 'could' , so that he is, in effect, not describing his aunt at all well. All that we see of her through our ears, so In moving along with the new phases of the work which are revealing themselves to us, we 'see' the previous parts of the work under constantly new phenomena of temporal perspective, usually in a selection which is at least partly determined by the content of the part of the work we are just reading. These changes in our way of 'seeing' what we have read reveal not only the dynamics of the work itself ... but also the type of its unified structure, which is based in the peculiarities of its composition. We perceive ... these features of composition during the course of the reading. (142) "This book explores the relationship between ekphrasis and memory in the novel after Marcel Proust. Drawing on À la recherche du temps perdu as a model, Leonid Bilmes considers how Vladimir Nabokov, W.G. Sebald, Lydia Davis, Ali Smith and Ben Lerner have employed and reshaped Proust's way of depicting the recollected past. In each of these writers' works, memory images are variously transformed into alluring intermedial objects that inform the narrator's story, just as they shape the reader's own memory of the text. Ekphrasis in the novel after Proust, Bilmes argues, is more than mere descriptive ornament or plot device: it is a pivotal textual site where image and text, past and present, memory and forgetting, self and other continuously contest one another. Ekphrasis, Memory and Narrative after Proust surveys a wide field of critical inquiry, encompassing classic accounts of ekphrasis and memory in Horace, Henri Bergson and Paul Ricoeur, as well as more recent interventions by theorists including W.J.T. Mitchell, Jean-Luc Nancy and Liliane Louvel. The book's open dialogue between literature and theory presents a cogent argument in favour of the bond between ekphrasis and memory in the novel, one as yet underexplored"-- Provided by publisher This book explores the relationship between ekphrasis and memory in the novel. Drawing on À la recherche du temps perdu , Leonid Bilmes considers how Vladimir Nabokov, W. G. Sebald, Ben Lerner, Ali Smith and Lydia Davis have employed and reshaped Proust's way of depicting the recollected past. In Ada , Austerlitz , 10:04 , How to Be Both and The End of the Story , memory images are variously transposed into intermedial descriptions that inform the narrator's story, just as they serve to shape the reader's own remembrance of each of these narratives. Ekphrasis in the novel after Proust, Bilmes argues, acts as a distinct site within the text where past and present, self and other, image and text, seeing and hearing, are ever on the brink of reconciliation. The book surveys a wide field of critical inquiry, encompassing classical theorizations of ekphrasis, philosophical explorations of memory and visuality, as well as seminal studies of image-text relations by, among others, W. J. T. Mitchell, Jean-Luc Nancy and Liliane Louvel. Bilmes's compelling dialogue with theory and literature evinces the underexplored bond between ekphrasis and memory in the contemporary novel. Exploring the relationship between ekphrasis, memory and narrative in modern and contemporary fiction after Proust, this book considers how Vladimir Nabokov, W.G. Sebald, Lydia Davis, Ali Smith and Ben Lerner have all variously employed and reshaped Proust’s way of depicting memory in their fiction. There is critical consensus that the novel is undergoing a ‘visual turn’, but most discussions of the image-in-text focus either on the image as plot device or on the meaning surplus made possible by the citation of other media within a literary text. This book adds to scholarship in the area, arguing that ekphrasis performs another, underexplored function, serving the needs of recollection and acting as the site where memory and forgetting, absence and presence, self and other, image and text ceaselessly contest each other.