Proust and literary geography. From icongraphy to manuscript

Abstract

Though André Ferré is known, with Pierre Clarac, as the editor of the first publication of À la recherche du temps perdu in the «Pléiade collection», he nevertheless was the author of a thesis then of a book about Marcel Proust’s Geography (Le Sagittaire, 1939) too. The editorial revival of a wandering process commented by Roland Barthes - also the topic of a series of a radio programme in 1978 - leading us from Paris to Combray transports us back to proustian mythical places. The latest publication, by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, of The Seventy-five folios and other manuscripts, extracted from Bernard de Fallois’s archives, confirms Marcel Proust’s «obsessive desire» for a place. But what interest us more here is the emergence of proustian places mythologies for Proust’s first generations of readers. In the paradoxical fascination it engenders between reality and fiction, the place is photographed, drawn, reproduced. Illiers village, that will become Illiers-Combray in 1971 will serve as a reference for us.