Proust, the readers’ way. On Véronique Aubouy and Mathieu Riboulet’s À la lecture

Abstract

Focusing on Veronique Aubouy and Mathieu Riboulet’s book À la lecture (2014), this article proposes a reflection on the role that reading À la recherche du temps perdu plays in the lives of ordinary readers. Literary scholarship, in the name of the modernist paradigm of literature, contributed to the sacralization of Proust’s novel and its disconnection from social reality. However, contemporary amateur readers (“liseurs”), who treat the Recherche as a book of life touching their daily existence, restore to the novel its “reparative” or anthropological dimension. By telling the stories of people who agreed to read a fragment of the novel in front of the artist’s camera, Aubouy and Riboulet draw attention to the ideological entanglements of academic criticism. What is more, following in the footsteps of Michel de Certeau, Roland Barthes, or Georges Perec, they show how the “uses” of the novel in individual acts of reading dismantle the hermeneutical models of reception of Proust’s work promoted by this criticism.