Catherine Colomb’s Vision of Time: In Dialogue with Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf

Acknowledgements

My heartfelt thanks to Professor Gilles Philippe for his invaluable and unparalleled supervision; he has kindly agreed to follow the development of my doctoral thesis in its middle phase. His exceptional guidance and encouragement were precious for seeing this project through to the end. I am grateful to Professor Peter Schnyder, who first introduced me to the work of Catherine Colomb during my master’s years at the Université de Haute-Alsace. I would also like to thank Professor Valérie Cossy for her supervision and helpful comments on the manuscript at an early stage of my doctoral studies. I have been writing this thesis in the memory of my grandmother, the poet Tamar Makhatadze and my teachers Maro Dzneladze, Lamara Amirgulova and Prof. Ramaz Tchilaia who have inspired my passion for art and literature since my early years as a student.

I am deeply grateful to the Jury members: Dr. Sara Sullam, Professor Jérôme David, and Dr. Ilaria Vidotto, for reading my manuscript in its final stage; their valuable expertise and suggestions stimulated me to better my research work.

My thanks to Professor Ekaterina Velmezova for dealing with the range of issues that arose throughout my thesis work and for acting as the chairperson of the public thesis defense. I am equally grateful to Professor Christine Le Quellec and Dr. Cyrille François for generously accepting to act as the Faculty experts.

I gratefully acknowledge the Federal Commission for Scholarships, Erna Hamburger Foundation, and the Société Académique Vaudoise, which offered research funding for this project. My thanks to the Centre for Research in French-Swiss Literature for authorizing me to read the unpublished work on and by Catherine Colomb.

Finally, my thanks to Aline Pedrazzini, Camille Schaer, and Sämi Ludwig for their helpful comments on the manuscript and Suzanne Jakimovski, Armel Kemajou, Teona Kurtsikashvili, Natela Avtandilova, Jana Konstantinova, Bobana Zuvic, Steffen Frank, and Younès Mouhib for advice and encouragement throughout. My special thanks to my mother Dali, my father Otari, and my brother Beka for their support and childcare, and my son Sergio for not minding the many days spent without him to work on this thesis.

Abbreviations

Introduction

In her 1962 radio interview for the ‘Sémaine littéraire’, the Swiss-French writer Catherine Colomb (1892–1965) highlighted her fascination with the question of time which influenced her thought and aesthetic choices throughout her writing career: ‘It’s very important to me, time, the problem of time, which I have never been able to solve, of course, but it haunts me, it’s kind of a mystery to me’.¹ [‘C’est très important chez moi, le temps, le problème du temps, sans que je n’arrive jamais à le résoudre, bien entendu, mais il me hante, c’est pour moi une sorte de mystère’.] (I.) She believed that space was the ‘abode of the living’ and ‘time—the kingdom of the dead’.² [‘L’espace, séjour des vivants, le temps, empire des morts’.] (Colomb (2019 (1962): 1380)) The concern with the cosmic issue is explicit in her œuvre. Time is one of the dominant themes of her novels, at its best mirrored as an obstacle to understanding life and the world as well as non-linear and fugitive that no order can approximate. Only by diving into the rich world of memory may the problem of time be addressed. This ontological vertigo coinciding with the renewed perception of time by science and philosophy at the turn of the 20^th century commands Colomb’s aesthetics. Her novels of memory take us to the heights and depths of what the human mind can conceive and represent time as a deep and complex reality. With their fragmented narratives unfolding on a vertical axis as in a poem, they open in the vertical world of imagination and metaphor and encourage self-reflection.

Colomb is best known for three novels, namely Châteaux en Enfance [Eng. Castles in Childhood] (1945), Les Esprits de la Terre [Eng. The Spirits of the Earth] (1953), and Le Temps des Anges [Eng. The Time of Angels] (1962). The manuscript of CE was submitted to a writing competition of Guilde du Livre. Colomb was awarded the ‘Prix du livre vaudois’ for her 1953 novel in 1956, and the ‘Prix Rambert’ for her 1962 novel which was originally published by ←13 | 14→Gallimard. She also wrote Des Noix sur un bâton in the 1930s (first published in TCC in 2019). Her first published novel Pile ou Face [Eng. Heads or Tails], originally entitled Trop de Mémoire [Eng. Too much Memory], appeared under the pen name Catherine Tissot at the Editions Victor Attinger in 1934. (TCC: 15) Her most recent novels Les Royaumes Combattants [Eng. The Fighting Realms] (entitled Les Malfilâtre in TCC) and La Valise [Eng. The Suitcase] were not quite finished when Colomb died in 1965.

Colomb has never been a widely reviewed and studied author; however, there has been a growing interest in her life and work recently. Many have read her as ‘avant-gardist’ in the collection ‘Catherine Colomb: une avant-garde inaperçue’ (2017) or located her œuvre in the ‘real world’ by relating Colomb’s three major novels to the pre-war, the war, and the post-war experiences. (Geinoz 2019) Contemporary criticism has further focused on the elements of the ‘English novel’ in the novelistic prose of Colomb and few other Swiss Francophone female writers. (Schläpfer 2019) But none of these works compare Colomb’s vision of time to other authors’. Nor do they study her representations of memory—what early critics (such as Gustave Roud (1945, 1953, 1956), Philippe Jaccottet (1953), Georges Anex (1962), André Corboz (1962), Jean-Luc Seylaz (1972, 1973), and Pierre-André Rieben (1973)) tended to emphasize in Colomb’s writing. A more recent substantial study of Colomb’s 1945 novel CE by Lise Favre (1993) focuses on the mechanisms of memory. Yet, Favre pays little attention to the question of time and does not compare Colomb to other authors. How then might we grasp the significance of Colomb’s thought and style otherwise than by placing them in the literary context? Does not Colomb’s representation of time gain more meaning when discovered along with other novelists’ conception of time? The recent edition of her Complete Works (TCC) suggests that it does. This volume includes many of Colomb’s unpublished texts which hold the evidence of her literary engagement with the culture of her time.³

←14 | 15→A few critics point out affinities between the works of Colomb and Proust, Colomb and Woolf. Gustave Roud makes an interesting observation about the differences between Proust’s and Colomb’s views of time, suggesting that time is ‘the only winner’ in La Recherche and ‘entirely contained’ in ET. (1997 (1956): 59) Thereby, he holds that ‘a victory over time’ is achieved in Colomb. In their recent articles, Beryl Schlossman (2002) and Christophe Pradeau (2020) also relate Colomb’s and Proust’s uses of the lamp (or lantern) to the novelist’s art and the recollection of reading, respectively. Colomb and Woolf are brought close in the frameworks of gender (Cossy 2008) and formal innovations. (Tappy 1979; Kuratli 2007) José-Flore Tappy thinks the absence of a ‘linear and properly temporal perspective’ is the common point of Colomb’s and Woolf’s fiction, whereas the main difference lies in the representation of the characters’ thoughts. (1979: 66) Theres Kuratli suggests that the readers can tell who speaks or thinks in Woolf’s novels, but they cannot in Colomb’s. (2007: 39) These comparisons have been made only in passing. Yet, they are useful for this study and lead us to suggest that Colomb dialogues with both Proust and Woolf by her vision of time.

Cette semaine, enfin, j’ai pu lire les deux premiers Proust que jusqu’ici je n’avais eu que fugitivement entre les mains. Je savais que je l’aimerais tant que je ne voulais le lire que lorsqu’il serait à moi. Il est encore plus admirable que mon rêve ! Quelle profondeur, et surtout quelle précision dans les termes pour décrire les choses les plus obscures ! Quelles images, non pas lyriques ou colorées seulement, mais exactement adaptées à l’objet qu’il leur compare ! Tous les autres écrivains, —par exemple et surtout Anatole France— sont superficiels à côté de lui, de pauvres mares à moitié desséchées à côté de l’océan.⁴ (L., 12 December 1925)

←15 | 16→Colomb’s letters mention Proust again two years later. She seems to have been deeply touched by the way Proust described the Narrator’s reaction to his grandmother’s death and pays tribute to his analysis of the nature of love and jealousy. But she shows less interest towards ‘these unnatural loves’: