Collection of the Winning Pastiches from the 2021 Competition

In 2021, the year of the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Marcel Proust's birth, the Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de Combray held the third edition of its Proustian pastiche competition. Fifty-five texts were received, testifying to a growing enthusiasm for this demanding exercise that the writer himself was fond of, and seventeen pastiches — the winners of each category or texts that received at least two votes during the jury's deliberations — are gathered here.

The volume forms part of a collection that perpetuates, at annual intervals, the tradition of stylistic imitation so dear to Proust: the very one he practised notably in 1908–1909 on the occasion of the Lemoine Affair, the fruits of which were gathered in 1919 in Pastiches et Mélanges. This third-edition collection welcomes new voices which, in their turn, try their hand at the prodigious mechanics of the Proustian sentence.

Overview

Organised by the Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de Combray, the Proustian pastiche competition reached, in 2021, its third edition. The initiative seeks to recall and celebrate the taste Marcel Proust had for the exercise of literary pastiche: the writer applied himself to it with great success, producing notably a series of articles about a single news item, the Lemoine Affair, in which he imitated in turn the styles of Saint-Simon, Balzac, Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers. Time Regained, the final volume of In Search of Lost Time, also contains a celebrated pastiche of the Journal des frères Goncourt.

For this third edition, the competition was open in two length categories — pastiches of fewer than 5,000 characters and pastiches of more than 5,000 characters — as well as a category reserved for competitors under 19 years of age. The thematic constraint imposed on all participants, in tribute to the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the writer's birth, was the compulsory inclusion of the word "naissance" (birth) in the text. The "under 19" category gave rise to no distinctions: although the two texts received were judged honourable, the jury found them too far removed from Proust's style to be recognised. The two main categories together bring together seventeen pastiches: the three winners of each category, as well as the texts that received at least two votes during the deliberations.

Authors and Contributors

In the category of pastiches of fewer than 5,000 characters, the first prize goes to Willem Hardouin for Le Messenger de Proust, the second prize to François Lemaire for Comme d'habitude, and the third prize to Guillaume Morault for La ville, le nom.

Also recognised in this category, for having received at least two votes from the jury: Christophe Crocombette (Lettre apocryphe au docteur Doyen), Sandrine Durieu (Lettre de l'au-delà), Marie Marcon (Portrait du jeune homme en tempête) and Sébastien Michalski (Un ascétisme mondain).

In the category of pastiches of more than 5,000 characters, the first prize goes to Arthur Morisseau for Du côté de la Raspelière, the second prize to Florian-Pierre Zanardi for Le salon Verdurin en distanciel, and the third prize to Frédérique Bertrand for Fin de saison à Balbec.

Also recognised in this category: Yannick Boulay (Les travaux d'Hercule), Patricia Brochier (Le bal de débutants), Emanuel Dupont (La période bleue de Marcel P.), Maryan Guisy (Un dîner au Touquet), Thierry Joffredo (Un jour d'automne à Versailles), Catherine Le Gallen (L'affaire de l'écriture inclusive) and Joëlle Mercier (Comment ! Les Verdurin font chambre commune !).

The jury, in alphabetical order, was composed of Jérôme Bastianelli, Élyane Dezon-Jones, Emily Eells, Luc Fraisse, Jean Milly and Éric Unger.

Contents

• Introduction
• Category: Pastiches of Fewer Than 5,000 Characters
• Category: Pastiches of More Than 5,000 Characters
• Jury Members
• Competition Rules

Bibliographic Information

• Format: paperback
• ISBN: 978-2-492318-08-5
• Price: 6.50 €
• Publisher: Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de Combray
• Printer: Messages SAS, Toulouse
• Legal deposit: June 2021