What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk by Michael Lucey (review)

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Reviewed by:

• What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk by Michael Lucey
• Maury Bruhn

LUCEY, MICHAEL. What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 346 pp. $35.00 paperback; $105.00 cloth; $34.99 e-book.

In 1979's Shikasta, Doris Lessing has a parenthetical aside about "Marcel Proust, sociologist and anthropologist," implying that from the perspective of the far-distant future when her novel takes place these will be the epithets chosen to describe Proust's work. Michael Lucey's What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk suggests a similar reframing for the author of In Search of Lost Time. Against early critics like Jacques Rivière who proposed Proust as the psychological novelist par excellence, and against the received idea of Proust as champion of the solitary artist, the Proust that emerges in What Proust Heard is exquisitely attentive to talk: what is said, how it is said, and what that indicates about social structures. Lucey deftly weaves close readings from In Search of Lost Time with insights drawn from linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, among many others, to convincingly demonstrate that the linguistic anthropological and sociological aspects of Proust are essential to understanding his novel's structure. [End Page 329]

What Proust Heard is divided into three chapters and three interludes (dedicated to Balzac and George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Nathalie Sarraute and Rachel Cusk). Lucey's first chapter, "Proust the Linguistic Anthropologist," outlines the "linguistic anthropological disposition of Search" (23), exploring Proust's descriptions of three levels of speech: general qualities such as accent and intonation; use of specific words; and the ways speech provides social scientific information for analysis. This chapter also introduces two of the central propositions running through What Proust Heard. The first is Lucey's insistence that, when we attend to the narrator's analysis of speech (how he enjoys the sound of Albertine and her friends talking, how he dislikes the talk of Mme. de Cambremer, how he highlights in both cases the conscious and unconscious class markers in their speech), we must also attend to the ways in which "the narrator's own language is part of the aesthetic and analytical arrangement of utterances that the novel offers for our consideration" (82). Lucey rightly maintains that the narrator is not a neutral observer and reporter, instead showing in his close readings how the narrator's own talk and reactions to the talk of others are also material offered by Proust for analysis. The second proposition is the way attention to these social dimensions of speech makes visible larger structural features of the novel. As Lucey analyzes the social dynamics at play during the first dinner the aristocratic Charlus has with the bourgeois Verdurins, he signals how "its status in the novel as one in a series of such gatherings extending across many years… involves it in several competing extensive social projects. Indeed, it seems ultimately to be these more extensive projects, and their relations to larger social processes, that Proust's novel…is interested in laying bare" (99). For readers who are not familiar with the novel as a whole, What Proust Heard helps to bring its larger structure into focus; for readers who are, we are given a compelling demonstration of the possibility that talk is not just an interesting detail of the novel but one of the keys to its structural coherence.

Chapter Two, "Idiotic Speech (Acts?) and the Form of In Search of Lost Time," is in part an intervention into a debate within linguistics around speech-act theory as popularized by J. L. Austin's 1962 How to Do Things with Words. Lucey helpfully outlines the stakes of this debate in his introduction with the example of a fight between Charles Swann and Odette. Swann tries to get Odette to perform a speech-act by swearing she has never been with another woman, which fails. Chapter Two continues the argument Lucey makes from this example, which is that in linguistic anthropological critiques of speech-act theory, and in Proust's novel, "a certain project of understanding language via the reconstruction...