Interview with the winners of the 2019 pastiche competition

Several winners of the 2019 Proustian pastiche competition agreed to answer a few questions about the experience. As a reminder, the 2020 edition is open until 31 March. And the texts of all the finalists are available here or there.

1. Why did you take part in the 2019 pastiche competition?

Jean-Jacques Salomon (1st "professional" prize): The chance course of my professional life – though perhaps I should rather speak of necessity, as a psychoanalyst once suggested to me – this chance or necessity, then, having led me at the time to write a short book on the daily life of secretaries under François Mitterrand, I found myself, to avoid the trap of the blank page, recounting the everyday life of these women (for the profession then counted very few men) in the manner of Proust, Balzac and Stendhal, with a pleasure whose memory, returning as soon as I learned of the launch of the 2019 competition, seemed to say to me, like a challenge: "You can still walk ten hours at a stretch, you can still fit into your uniform, but are you still capable of pasticheing La Recherche?".

Nicolas Fréry (1st "amateur" prize): As a lover of pastiche, I learned with delight of the existence of this competition, which offered a fine opportunity to pastiche one of the greatest writers – and one of the greatest pasticheurs – there is. Too rarely given its due, pastiche is nonetheless an incomparable exercise in literary criticism: is one ever so attentive as when pasticheing (then amending one's pastiche and debating it with other readers) to identifying what constitutes a writer's own signature, down to the finest details and beyond the received image one may have of them? At the end of this task, both daunting (for literary criticism here brushes more closely than elsewhere against personal writing) and particularly rewarding, an author's voice resonates within us more truly, more familiarly and more strongly.

Maya Barreau (2nd "professional" prize): I learned of this competition through "a chain of circumstances", as Proust would say: one wants to spend a weekend in Chartres and Illiers-Combray and, while organising it, one comes across the website of the Société des Amis de Marcel Proust, where the competition is announced. As I had read La Recherche extensively in the past, something of its music, its motifs, had stayed with me. The moment I began writing my pastiche, all of that resurfaced… with the taste of a madeleine.

Philippe Morel (2nd "amateur" prize): I have always loved pastiches, reading them but also writing them: somewhere between homage and irony, they allow one to grasp and render the essence of an author. Almost a pedagogical function, beyond the amusement they provide. So I threw myself into it when I heard of the competition organised by the SAMP. For me it was just a schoolboy's joke (particularly the pun in the title, closer to the Canard enchaîné than to À la recherche du temps perdu! [Mr Morel's pastiche is entitled: À l'ombre, les jeunes flics en pleurs]) and I did not take myself very seriously (me, imitating Proust, really?); I was happy and surprised to receive a prize.

Gilles Lucas (3rd "amateur" prize): I took part because I love writing very much and have practised pastiche for a long time. Thanks in particular to Marcel Proust, whose Pastiches et Mélanges filled me with enthusiasm and encouraged me to write pastiches. For me it is a particularly creative and engrossing literary game. And so I have found myself "imitating" (or attempting to "imitate") many authors I admire, such as Flaubert, Stendhal, Zola, Céline… Boileau, Molière… When I learned that the Société des Amis de Marcel Proust was organising a pastiche competition, I did not hesitate.

2. What advice would you give to someone hesitating to enter the 2020 edition of this same competition?

Jean-Jacques Salomon: For me, there is not one, but several Proustian styles. On the other hand, there is truly only one man, with a recursive mind and a mischievous social judgement. To anyone who hesitates, I would say they should ask themselves not whether they will manage to write in the manner of Proust, but whether they feel able to think as he did. If so, and if they find charm in it, they should go for it. The words to say it will come easily.

Maya Barreau: Confronting a literary genius is daunting, but a little humour and humility will lift that barrier. In Proust, society, love, landscapes, art… are all sources of inspiration. If, on one of these subjects, one manages to make lovers of this great writer smile, feel moved, or grow enthusiastic, the wager is won – at least with the readers!

Philippe Morel: First, find the idea, the angle of attack, that will remain close to the Proustian universe. One may search for a long time, following fruitless leads before finding one's own paving-stone of Guermantes. ​Write the first draft and rework it, of course, as Boileau put it: "Vingt fois sur le métier remettez votre ouvrage, ​Polissez-le sans cesse et le repolissez." Then there is style, obviously. One may draw inspiration from a remark by Jean-Yves Tadié, for whom the Proustian sentence must be "structured, contain poetic images, comic elements and elements of knowledge. Achieving this is not easy."

Gilles Lucas: No hesitation! If you love Proust and enjoy imitation, go for it! What a pleasure it is to slip into the style of so renowned a writer!

3. What did you find the most difficult in this exercise of Proustian pastiche?

Jean-Jacques Salomon: When one embarks on a Proustian pastiche, one runs the risk of giving too much rein to the inflation of words. How does one preserve the back-and-forth of thought that underlies the Proustian genre without falling into caricature? The greatest difficulty for me was to avoid that risk while still submitting to the obligatory exercises of the long sentence, an abundance of metaphor and freedom of punctuation. A question of measure, in short!

Nicolas Fréry: I believe a major difficulty facing the pasticheur is to write a text that brings together a number of devices emblematic of a writer's style without being excessively saturated with them. Firstly because pastiche, so long as it does not aspire to be parody, must guard against lapsing into caricature (it can at most be a magnifying mirror); secondly because it is not a matter of mechanically compiling a repertoire of stylistic peculiarities, but of attempting to mould oneself to a writer's universe. It follows that pastiche, although resting above all on imitation of rhythm, turns of phrase and lexical choices, is not a purely formal exercise: one must also – and this is a thorny matter – have the intuition of a subject the author might have treated, one in harmony with the stylistic resources deployed. In this respect, it is no simple matter to develop that subject in a text that, for all its brevity, possesses an internal coherence (whereas the author being pastiched does not necessarily build his work from short textual units). Pastiche, in short, rests on a principle of condensation: condensation of stylistic traits – avoiding saturation – and, very often, condensation of the anecdote, so as to compose a brief text that stands as a representative sample while also having an interest of its own (for if it had none, could it give the illusion of being from the pen of a great author?).

Maya Barreau: I would speak more of a challenge than a real difficulty. On the subject of pastiche, Marcel Proust – himself a pasticheur – speaks of "criticism in action". The challenge is to find a balance between empathy and criticism. To let Proust resonate within oneself, while at the same time understanding certain mechanisms of his thought and style. From there, one can write a small, original story that will ring true. Without forgetting a note of humour.

Philippe Morel: Finding a theme, an idea. I ended up, almost by chance, making the connection with a political event of 2018; from then on the title flowed almost naturally and dictated what followed. I am not entirely sure how this mayonnaise took, the inspiration could have come from anywhere! Then came the writing: staying close to the author, to his universe (events, characters…), to his style, while avoiding too flat a copy and remaining original. A sort of squaring of the circle.

Gilles Lucas: Finding an interesting subject with an original angle. In my case, I chose a mise en abyme. Not merely offering a simple tracing of the most famous episodes of the Recherche. As for the tone adopted, I wanted it to be resolutely humorous. I also wondered whether to set the story in Proust's time or in the present day. I chose our own era. In the writing itself, composing long sentences, for example, was no easy exercise. Grammatically speaking, it had to be correct.