Book Review: Saul Friedländer: Proustian Uncertainties: On Reading and Rereading In Search of Lost Time

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museum official in what would in due course become the present-day Louvre, left no overt trace on his work is further evidence of a kind of creative exile co-existing with lip-service to the Republic. An earlier residual identification with the stability of the ancien régime, on the other hand, is undercut by intimations of transience which are rehearsed in the book’s three substantial chapters. The first, headed ‘Secrets’, opens up those not divulged by the painter himself before exploring his picturing of Enlightenment society’s ‘pantomime of withheld communication’ (p. 71), a world of masks and masquerades under threat, but one also exemplified by Fragonard’s own art of concealment. The second chapter, entitled ‘Surprise’, is devoted to his preoccupation with narrative rupture, captured in the bodily and psychic experience of time, and most ambivalently in the pictorially privileged moment of the kiss as either prelude or epilogue, anticipatory move or post-coital envoi which precludes the certainty of an au revoir. Accidental reversals or the advent of the unexpected are, indeed, the thematic matrix of Fragonard’s time. But Padiyar always goes beyond generalities. His extended analysis of The Swing, to cite only a single example, displays both his own interpretative brilliance and Fragonard’s subversion of convention, not least in the painting’s oblique allusions to Christian iconography overlaid by a ‘quickened state of pleasurable surprise’ which takes the divine power of arousal in ‘a self-consciously pagan and obscene direction’ (p. 101). A final chapter takes us to ‘Dreams’: daydreams; fantasies; a mental rearranging of everyday realities. Their depiction, largely in the ‘aqueous and exuberant’ (p. 178) handling of wash, represents for Padiyar both a contamination and a transformation of Fragonard’s previous quixotic styles and subject-matter. Above all, however, such de-materialized drawings became ‘an imaginative refuge from the accelerating historical change around him’ (p. 191). This is a book which is intellectually stimulating and as beautifully written as it is produced.