Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Volume 39
Issue 2 Testimonies of Environmental Injustice in the Article 12
Global South

1-1-2015

Rubn Gallo. Prousts Latin Americans. Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins UP, 2014. 280 pp.
Eric Touya de Marenne
Clemson University, etouya@clemson.edu

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Recommended Citation
Touya de Marenne, Eric (2015) "Rubn Gallo. Prousts Latin Americans. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014. 280 pp.," Studies in 20th
& 21st Century Literature: Vol. 39: Iss. 2, Article 12. http://dx.doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1826

This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in 20th & 21st Century
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Rubn Gallo. Prousts Latin Americans. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
2014. 280 pp.
Abstract
Review of Rubn Gallo. Prousts Latin Americans. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014. 280 pp.

Keywords
Marcel Proust, Latin Americans

This book review is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol39/iss2/12
 Touya de Marenne: Rubn Gallo. Prousts Latin Americans

Rubn Gallo. Prousts Latin Americans. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014. 280
pp.

Rubn Gallos book explores the importance of Latin America in the life
and work of Marcel Proust. The novelists Latin Americans included the
composer Reynaldo Hahn, Prousts Venezuelan lover; Gabriel de Yturri, an
Argentinean dandy; Jos-Maria de Heredia, a Cuban poet who rose to fame in the
Parnassian movement; and Ramon Fernandez, a brilliant Mexican critic who
became one of the most influential intellectuals in Paris in the 1920s-1930s. Each
chapter is punctuated by a paperolle, a meditation on minor characters or events
that illuminate further Prousts interactions with Latin America.
The aim of the four chapters is to provide a brief biographical sketch in
which Gallo examines how each of the Latin Americans negotiated the
vicissitudes of cultural alterity while asserting a cosmopolitan identity (21).
Gallo explores their correspondence with Proust in the larger context of a
transatlantic cultural history, and their place in the aesthetic and political debates
in Europe and Latin America. The author of In Search of Lost Time lived in an era
that saw a rapid colonial expansion of his country to different continents including
the Americas, specifically Mexico, and later Panama.
Gallos focus is biographical, cultural, and historical. The book also
presents insightful readings of Proust by positing Latin America as the novelists
political unconscious. Gallo seeks to show how Prousts speculation with
Mexican stocks informed the various fictional passages of In Search of Lost Time
devoted to financial transactions, and how the Panama Affair shaped his
understanding of the conquest of America. The author discusses in the
introduction the influence of foreigners on Prousts work from Bibesco to Ruskin;
the Latin Americans in French literature in Balzac and Valery Larbaud; and Latin
Americans in la recherche du temps perdu who appear as rastaquoures among
Madame Verdurins guests and in the Guermantes soires.
The presence of foreign and borderline individuals in Proust is explained
by the fact that as a neurotic, homosexual, hypochondriac, Jewish bourgeois,
[] Proust was the ultimate stranger to himself (tranger soi-mme, to
quote Kristeva) (5). Contrary to postcolonial studies as well as theories of
displacement and exile that emphasize the traumatic experience of the foreign,
Gallo underscores the cosmopolitan nature of the Latin American authors, artists,
and poets portrayed in the book: Hahn, Yturri, and Heredia were not exiles,
refuges, outcasts, victims [] or traumatized by their experience (17).
Cosmopolitans driven by love across countries and languages, Prousts Latin
Americans embraced their adopted culture.
As the author points out, one might object to the books theoretical
contention that the Parisian Latin-Americans cosmopolitan experience of love

Published by New Prairie Press 1

 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 39, Iss. 2 [2015], Art. 12

requires much more than money [] a special psychic disposition, an openness to

others, and a willingness to reshape ones experience (19). This interpretation is
in sharp contrast with the postcolonial approaches that associate exile and
displacement with traumatic experiences. Crossing boundaries and traveling
across cultures, Rubn Gallo conceives of a theory of cosmopolitanism that
focuses on individual experience. By doing so, he makes a significant
contribution to the knowledge of French cultural history beyond the margins of
European and North American boundaries.

Eric Touya de Marenne

Clemson University

http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol39/iss2/12 2
DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1826