"Albertine's Futuristic Gastronomy"
Swann at 100 / Swann à 100 ans, Vol. 12, Pages 184-196, Brill, 2015.
To eat or not to eat the world is a question that opposes on the one hand, what Leo Bersani calls the masochism of art, a selfless, disinterested attitude which he sees embodied by the narrator's restraint of his desire to devour the world, and on the other, Albertine's sadistic creation/destruction of an imaginary foodscape, the famous sculpted ice landscape, offering astonishing resemblances with the imagined gastronomic creations of the Futurist movement. This article suggests that this movement, whose Manifest in 1909 coincided with the year the writing of the Recherche suddenly takes off, can be construed as an accelerator of what is there from the outset in the first published volume : the novel's pendulum movement, its intermittences du cceur.