Article

Name: Timing of Loss: Reflection of the Novelistic Time in the Comic Book Adaptation of Proust

Authors: N. O. Laskina

“Otkrytaya kafedra” education centre (Novosibirsk, Russian Federation)

Abstract: The article examines the comic book adaptation of the first two volumes of “In Search of Lost Time” by Stéphane Heuet as an example of intermedial translational that reflects perfectly the conflict between “timing” and “chronotope” problematized in Yu. V. Shatin’s works. The comic book narrative, subjugated to the rules of graphic layout, when entering a dialogue with a modernist novel’s nonlinear structure finds ways to overcome its own teleology. Heuet in his comics uses a number of effects imitating the novel’s poetics: inserting the narrator’s image into the visual narrative; representing on one panel distant plot events connected only by associations; destroying unity of characters; visualising leitmotivs. Some of the artist’s solutions are more original and involve creative use of the visual art’s specific nature: literal visualisations of metaphors, complexity of the metapoetic level enhanced by including drawing of texts (from notes and posters to the narrator’s first literary attempt). These effects allow the comic book to deconstruct naïveté of the traditional “ligne claire” style of the franco-belgian “bandes dessinée”, deemed inadequate by the first critics of the adaptation, and to venture outside of limits of a simple illustration.

Keywords: Marcel Proust, French literature, comics, intermediality, modernist novel

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