Collection of the Winning Pastiches from the 2020 Competition

In May 2020, the Société des Amis de Marcel Proust held the second edition of its Proustian pastiche competition, under circumstances that would prove singularly conducive to the exercise: as the whole of France was living through its first weeks of lockdown, fifty-four participants took up the challenge of feigning Proust's pen, lending the period an unexpected literary resonance. From this competition, fifteen texts were selected — the winners of each category and pastiches that received at least two votes out of four during the jury's deliberations — to form this collection, a testimony both to remarkable creative vitality and to a community of readers deeply attached to the author's work.

This volume, the second title in a now well-established collection, perpetuates the spirit of Proust himself: he who published his own pastiches in the press before gathering them in 1919 into Pastiches et Mélanges, and who slipped into Time Regained a celebrated pastiche of the Journal des frères Goncourt, saw in this exercise a "purgative, exorcising virtue," necessary for any writer wishing to free himself from the great voices that inhabit him in order to become himself again. The pastiches gathered here honour this lesson with talent and invention.

Overview

To celebrate Marcel Proust's taste for literary pastiche, the Société des Amis de Marcel Proust had organised the first edition of this competition as early as 2019. The second edition, whose texts are gathered here, was placed under a double sign: that of the centenary of the publication of The Guermantes Way I, the third volume of In Search of Lost Time, published in 1920, and that, unforeseen, of the lockdown linked to the Covid-19 pandemic that marked the spring of 2020. Each pastiche was therefore required to include the word "Guermantes" — whose meaning could freely differ from the one Proust gave it in his work — while remaining faithful in style to Proustian prose, without the subject treated necessarily having to be contemporary with the world of the Recherche.

The concurrence between the literary exercise and current events gave rise to texts of singular vivacity: the pandemic, society quarrels recast in the light of the contemporary world, involuntary memory resurfacing over a La Vache qui rit cheese madeleine in Greece, or the torments of desire in the age of dating applications, peopled Mme Verdurin's salons and the narrator's bedrooms in a manner that Proust himself — who did not hesitate to slip a few anachronisms into his own pastiches — might perhaps not have disavowed. Of the fifty-four participants, fifteen texts — divided into three categories, amateur, professional and school — were selected to form this collection, published in May 2020 by the Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de Combray.

Authors and Contributors

Michael Scrive wins the first prize in the amateur category with La Grippe de Shangaï, a pastiche centred on an influenza epidemic that paralyses Paris and brings the little clan together one last time at Mme Verdurin's before a hasty exile to la Raspelière — a text whose resonance with the events of 2020 is striking.

Nicolas Frery receives the second amateur prize for Au fond d'un tiroir, a memoir narrative in which the narrator discovers in an attic some pages from his youth of which he struggles to recognise himself as the author — a meditation on self-dispossession and the strangeness of the past self.

Garance Mazelier receives the third amateur prize with En confinement, which transposes the amorous confinement of the narrator and Albertine into the setting of the 2020 lockdown, where forced seclusion redoubles jealousy and multiplies the desire for the impossible.

Among the amateur-category pastiches to receive at least two votes from the jury: Frédérique Bertrand (Un architecte aventuré chez les Verdurin), Nicolas Bouchu (Les déplaisirs de nos jours), Lætitia Conti (En confinement), Hortense Delair (Le pays de la Cronce), Willem Hardouin (Ernestine de Guermantes), Luc Lecerf (Guère Mante, éternellement Proust), Philippe Morel (Pays de vaches : les vaches), Véronique Multon (Mademoiselle) and Florian-Pierre Zanardi (L'affaire Lemoine vue par Proust).

Laurence Grenier wins the first prize in the professional category with Un mercredi artistique, in which the little clan gathers at the Jeu de Paume to unravel the meaning of Bergotte's "little patch of yellow wall" — a collective scene of great comic charm.

Thierry Maugenest is recognised in the professional category with L'air de la calomnie, a story in which a nephew of the Cambremers, an aeroplane pilot convinced of the flatness of the Earth, sets off a society controversy that Mme Verdurin turns to her own advantage.

The 4e D class of the Collège Léopold Dussaigne in Jonzac (Charente-Maritime) wins the first prize in the school category with Échappée musicale.

The jury, in alphabetical order, was composed of Jérôme Bastianelli, Élyane Dezon-Jones, Jean Milly and Éric Unger. The competition benefited from the generosity of Bruno Roger.

Contents

• Introduction
• Amateur Category — Winners
• Amateur Category — Distinguished Pastiches
• Professional Category
• School Category
• Competition Rules
• Jury Members

Bibliographic Information

• Format: paperback
• ISBN: 978-2-9568373-3-6
• Price: 6.50 €
• Publisher: Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de Combray
• Legal deposit: May 2020