Proust Among the Stars: How To Read Him; Why Read Him?

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Malcolm Bowie. Proust Among the Stars: How To Read Him; Why Read Him?

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The narrator’s wish to see clearly and to draw reliable inferences from what he sees is often outpaced by other emotional demands. His science fails even as he protests its strong-mindedness and rigour. Some obscure yet powerful drive requires the newly achieved explanation or paradigm to fall apart, to return to the ‘several pieces’ from which it had been made. Science must be present in the book, but without becoming cumulative or developing any significant power of prediction. He wants coherence, and does not want it.

Such indecision can be intensely disruptive. During his reverie on the cries of Paris in La Prisonnière, for example, the narrator remarks that the local fruit-and-vegetable seller probably knew nothing of the plainsong that her melodious cries resembled. Although Leo Spitzer, in a celebrated essay, has pointed out that her medieval predecessors are indeed likely to have known certain Gregorian cadences well, it is unreasonable to expect a modern street-trader to have any detailed knowledge of medieval musical theory. Yet this is what the narrator seems for a moment to wish when he speaks of her being ignorant of ‘l’antiphonaire et [les] sept tons qui symbolisent, quatre les sciences du quadrivium et trois celles du trivium’ (III, 625; ‘the antiphonary, or of the seven notes that symbolise, four the arts of the quadrivium and three those of the trivium’ (V, 127)). Beneath the seeming condescension of this, an urgent Proustian impulse towards exact measurement is finding expression. The cry itself:

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