Study day - a « mysterious chemistry »: Proust and allusion

A study day is being organised by Sophie Duval and Francine Goujon on Thursday 12 March at the École normale supérieure, 29 rue d'Ulm, salle Jean Jaurès, from 9.30am to 6pm, on the theme:

A « MYSTERIOUS CHEMISTRY »: PROUST AND ALLUSION

Enfin, chaque fois que Ruskin, par voie de citation mais bien plus souvent d'allusion, fait entrer dans la construction de ses phrases quelque souvenir de la Bible, comme les Vénitiens
intercalaient dans leurs monuments les sculptures sacrées et les pierres précieuses qu'ils rapportaient d'Orient, j'ai cherché toujours la référence exacte, pour que le lecteur, en voyant
quelles transformations Ruskin faisait subir au verset avant de se l'assimiler, se rendît mieux compte de la chimie mystérieuse et toujours identique, de l'activité originale et spécifique de son esprit.
Marcel Proust, « Préface » à La Bible d'Amiens, Paris, Société du Mercure de France, 1904, p. 12.

In 1982 Gérard Genette defined allusion by situating it within the field of intertextuality, conceiving it as the least explicit and least literal form of intertextual relation (Palimpsestes, p. 8). In doing so he retained the traditional meaning of the notion of allusion (that of "implicit reference") while limiting its referential scope to intertextuality. Later, as Antoine Compagnon pointed out, the word "allusion" came to take on the "more modern sense of explicit, direct and open reference, which […] has become that of allusion today, as a synonym for intertextuality in general" ("L'allusion et le fait littéraire", 2000, p. 238). Such a definition is quite far removed from the
original meaning of the term in French.
Indeed, borrowed in the 16th century from the Late Latin allusio (derived from adludere), the noun "allusion" first appears in the field of rhetoric to designate a play on words (which could
take the form of various figures, notably paronomasia, antanaclasis and annomination, or wordplay on a proper name). It was also used at the time to designate a
veiled reference to "fable", that is, to mythology. It is from this second meaning that the word "allusion" takes on its modern sense in the 17th century: allusion "
obliquely designates something one does not wish to say openly" (Dictionnaire de l'Académie, 1694), without thereby ceasing to also constitute a verbal game. Treatises of
rhetoric would retain this double definition: from Dumarsais and Fontanier down to Morier, allusion is both wordplay and implicit reference. Allusion-as-wordplay extends its
range of action to a vast variety of figures (syllepsis, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, reticence, etc.), which it may combine and may also dispense with by resorting to
freer forms. In parallel, the referential domain of allusion likewise widens: allusion to fable, to history, to customs, to persons, to current events, to literary works, and so on, eventually covering every possible field. Allusion-as-wordplay and allusion-as-implicit-reference are indeed sometimes blurred, a verbal play being capable of conveying an implication.
It is in the sense derived from the rhetorical tradition that we would like to consider allusion here, as an implicit reference to any referential domain whatsoever, intertextuality included, and
potentially involving wordplay.

The very abundance and diversity of allusions in Proust's work, together with the near-certainty that a good many of them have not yet been deciphered, for reasons
we shall attempt to clarify, raise a number of specific problems.
The richness and complexity of the networks of allusion deployed indeed raise the question of the addressee. The dimension of literary game and riddle on offer is sometimes
obvious. To which readers is the decoding, or at times the decryption, of these allusions addressed? Are they all intended to be read, or were some of them meant to remain unnoticed? In that case they would belong rather to a specific work of the text peculiar to Proust, a formal rule which, by adding to the demands of novelistic writing, would result in the production of a text particularly rich in figures, in metaphors especially.
To shed light on these questions, we propose to open the discussion to every kind of allusion, and to focus on the system of textual clues, notably the markers
of intertextuality set up by the writer, but also the wordplay and the coded autobiographical or autofictional references.
The second aspect of this reflection will consist in considering the practice of allusion as a method and a driving force of writing, certainly comparable to others, the practice
of allusion being a trait of literary writing and perhaps of other forms of writing too. We shall of course attempt to approach Proust's originality in this respect.
A third line of enquiry, linked to the preceding ones, would be the playful character of allusions and the sometimes iconoclastic treatment of the works and events to which the text
refers, leading us to examine the critical functions of allusion and the modes of intertextual exchange it establishes.
A fourth line might concern the reception of Proustian allusions, in the author's own time and over the decades that followed.