Proust sous le regard de Jacques Rivière

Jacques Rivière is undoubtedly one of the most intelligent and admiring readers of the Recherche. However, his correspondence with Proust shows how - while sensing the extraordinary novelty of his work - he sees it as the most successful and advanced outcome of the French tradition of the analytical novel. The publication of extracts from the Recherche in the “Nouvelle Revue Française” proved to be a real battleground between Rivière and Proust. While the first would like to make, of these extracts, miniature novels, coherent and perfectly concluded, so as to reveal to the public their author’s extraordinary capacity for psychological introspection, the second aims to give readers of the magazine an insight into the complexity of his work, which develops on several planes simultaneously, incorporating dissonant motifs and different registers.