Marcel Proust as Physician: The Parisian Neurological Intelligentsia (2011)
Undergraduate: Jonathan Slaughter
Faculty Advisor: Diane Leonard
Department: Romance Languages
I will present a portion of my research devoted to the treatment of the body by Marcel Proust (especially in the Recherche). I will explore both bodily metaphors in the text as well as narrative structures, etc. as representative of somatic problems. Central to this argument is Proust's own struggle with asthma and a variety of other physical and mental health complaints, for which he consulted a series of neurologists (his father had been a famous neurologist) in order to seek treatment for his "hysterical" and "neurasthenic" symptoms. This search for convalescence is central to the Recherche, which may be seen as a kind of registration or scriptural working-out of the process. One particularly influential doctor, Paul Sollier, attempted to trigger ‘emotional revivals’ (reviviscences), ‘reproducing the entire state of the personality of the subject at the time of the initial experience,' a practice remarkably similar to Proust's concept of involuntary memory. Proust's interest in these questions certainly has a closeted element to it (there are hardly any references anywhere to his extensive experience with Sollier) and is intimately linked to questions about his sexuality. I would like to explore these problems in order to integrate Proust into a larger interpretive framework, which seeks to understand Walter Benjamin's engagement with both Proust and surrealism as an attempt to uncover and develop the true desires of artistic modernism, in its manifold historical forms. JB