Cambridge Studies in FrenchSeries Number 59 Proust, the Body and Literary Form

Michael Finn examines the vogue for nervous afflictions in late nineteenth-century France, and relates Proust's anxieties about hysteria to his concern about literary form. This 1999 study examines the connections between Proust's fin-de-siècle 'nervousness' and his apprehensions regarding literary form. Michael Finn shows that Proust's anxieties both about bodily weakness and about novel-writing were fed by a set of intriguing psychological and medical texts, and were mirrored in the nerve-based afflictions of earlier writers including Flaubert, Baudelaire, Nerval and the Goncourt brothers. Finn argues that once Proust cast off his concerns about being a nervous weakling he was freed to poke fun both at the supposed purity of the novel form. Hysteria - as a figure and as a theme - becomes a key to the Proustian narrative, and a certain kind of wordless, bodily copying of gesture and event is revealed to be at the heart of a writing technique which undermines many of the conventions of fiction.