Emily Eells

Cet article s' engage dans l' étude des rapports complexes entre les pho-tographies de Proust et sa métaphore de la création littéraire comme processus pho-tographique. Pour ce faire, l'article s'arrête dans un premier temps sur le seuil du texte de Proust afin d' examiner le choix éditorial d'intégrer un portrait photographique de l'auteur sur les couvertures de ses livres. Cette étude s' efforce de montrer ensuite comment Proust brouille la distinction entre fiction et autobiographie lorsqu'il insère une référence à une photographie réelle dans sa narration. L'article se termine en analysant les portraits de Proust sur son lit de mort, exécutés par des artistes et photographes qui ont pénétré dans sa chambre noire afin d'immortaliser une dernière image de lui. Ces images marquent le basculement entre le dernier mot de l'auteur et le premier pas du lecteur dans le texte. Mots-clés. Proust, chambre noire, photographie, illustration, mort. Proust in the dark room: portraits and photographs of the author Abstract. This article proposes to tease out the complexities in the relationship between photographs of Proust and the author's metaphor of literary creation as a photographic process. To do so, the article begins by studying how the publishers blurred the boundaries between fiction and autobiography by illustrating the covers of Proust's works with a photograph of the author. The article then examines how Proust himself transgressed that boundary by including a reference to a real photograph of himself in his narrative. The last section of the article analyses the portraits of Proust on his death bed done by artists and photographers who penetrated into his dark room in order to immortalize him in a last image. These images mark the turning point between the author's final word and the reader's first step into the text.

This article focuses on Proust’s response to the visual component of Ruskin’s works, highlighting how the Ruskinian dialectic of word and image gave impetus to Proust’s Recherche du temps perdu. It borrows terms from Ruskin’s works to define their aesthetic relationship: that of ‘incrustation’, meaning both the way Venetian architects covered brick walls with marble and the way they decorated walls with precious stones, is applied here to define Ruskinian intertextuality in Proust’s text, as it involves both textual layering and the use of quotation as ornamentation. Ruskin’s concept of ‘reciprocal interference’ is adopted to designate intermediality and to suggest that Proust not only borrowed from Ruskin’s text but enriched it through his translation and annotation of it. Although his translations did not reproduce the original illustrations, his two-part article on Ruskin in the Gazette des Beaux Arts (April and August 1900) included reproductions of Giotto’s ‘Charity’ and Ruskin’s drawing of the sculpted figure from the façade of Rouen cathedral. These two figures are likened to ‘noble grotesques’ here, as they correspond to Ruskin’s definition of an allegorical figure conveying an inexpressible truth through symbolism. My argument here is that Proust appropriated those two illustrations and transformed them into illuminations, in the sense that Ruskin gave to that term in Modern Painters.

Cultural exchange necessarily involves translation and prompts the question posed by George Steiner in the concluding chapter of After Babel: ‘[to] what extent is culture the translation and rewording of previous meaning?’ (Steiner, 1975, p. 415). Wilde’s Salomé provides some elements of response and has a double claim to prominence in a volume on cross-Channel cultural relations as a play by an Irishman written directly in French and as a text which owes its critical fortune to what Steiner would call its metamorphic translation into an opera in German (Steiner, 1975, p. 415). Wilde’s original French version was first published in Paris in 1893, followed a year later by the publication of the English translation in London, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley. Three years later — and after an injunction against its performance in London — Salomé premiered at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre in Paris, on 11 February 1896, where it played for only one evening. Since that first performance, a mere dozen subsequent productions of the play have been staged in Paris, compared to 26 productions of Richard Strauss’s opera in Paris alone, and countless others worldwide.