Читать книгу Proust Among the Stars: How To Read Him; Why Read Him? - Malcolm Bowie - Страница 10
ОглавлениеWolą falszywą nutę od muzyki sfer.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA
Out of tune suits them better than the music of the spheres.
From first word to last, Proust’s novel is about time. Everyone says so, including Proust himself. Within the dense texture of the narrator’s soliloquy, the theme rings out clamorously. Inside his accustomed voice, there is a time voice – urgent, serious, elevated, expansive, and given to sudden bursts of semi-philosophical speculation – whose sound is fashioned, as telephone voices are, by a sense of occasion and a need to impress. The passage of human time is a deadly business, the narrator often reminds his reader, and if the tide of meaning is ever to turn again from ebb to flow the individual must hold himself in readiness to seize time’s wonders. Time is no laughing matter. It is the fundamental enigma of living substance, and the artist who solves it has indeed found the philosopher’s stone.
The empirical evidence for this view of the novel is irresistible. Where do its principal landmarks come from if not from its temporal obsession? Le Temps retrouvé culminates in long passages of impassioned reverie that are doubly devoted to the time dimension: they are essays on time, almost free-standing disquisitions on its alternative registers and intensities, but they are also episodes in the long history of a fictional character’s consciousness and closely woven into its characteristic rhythms. What is more, Proust’s plot, while having many strands and many denouements, turns upon a central temporal conundrum to which, in the end, after countless diversions and delays, a convincing answer is found. On the first page of the novel, Proust takes aim at a very remote target, and with devastating accuracy he eventually strikes it. In due course, time will be redeemed. A lost past will be recovered, and the dying creature’s messianic hopes will be fulfilled.
Time, being highlighted in such ways both by Proust the would-be essayist and by Proust the consummate plotter, has seemed to many admirers of the book to be so clearly its main concern that other candidates for this office have scarcely been worth considering. Time matters to the book precisely because it is a ‘big’ controlling theme, calls forth an impressive philosophical diction and offers a satisfying overview of Proust’s narrative architecture. His last word (‘Temps’) distils an immutable quintessence from the imperfect world of temporal process to which his first word (‘Longtemps’) had referred.
Yet there is something not quite right about this view. It answers too many questions, and levitates too obligingly above the restless detail of Proust’s writing. A la recherche du temps perdu is one of those literary works that spell out at length the terms in which they are to be interpreted and understood. It can be intimidating and coercive when it does this: its author seems to have such clear-cut ideas about his own motives and long-range goals that only a fool or a wilful eccentric would seek other paths to understanding. The problem, however, is that time as presented by the narrator in his abstractly philosophising vein is too big for the ordinary time-bound business of reading Proust. The more instructive time becomes as an overall structuring idea, the more likely it is to disappear from the fabric of individual sentences and paragraphs. Yet it is here, down among Proust’s intricate propositional structures with their outrageous embeddings, suspensions and redundancies, that his boldest pieces of temporal architecture are to be found. Already in the second sentence of the book, his grammatical building materials are beginning to acquire a promising elasticity: ‘Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n’avais pas le temps de me dire: «Je m’endors.»’ (I, 3; ‘Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself: “I’m falling asleep’” (I, 1)). Two time-scales are in force at once here, and these set ‘real’ against ‘virtual’ time, things that happened against things that might have happened but did not. A proposition belonging to one time-world nests inside a proposition belonging to another, and between them a galvanic spasm passes.
Theodor Adorno, in his ‘Short Commentaries on Proust’ (1958), wrote with great force about the relationship between the big-time temporality of Proust’s novel and spasmodic local time-events such as these. Surely, he began his essay by suggesting, a reader of any work as ‘rich and intricate’ as Proust’s novel must needs retreat from its detail at times and seek to gain an overview. And should not criticism help him in this endeavour? For Adorno, however, this view of criticism was based on a misperception of Proust’s work:
In Proust, however, the relationship of the whole to the detail is not that of an overall architectonic plan to the specifics that fill it in: it is against precisely that, against the brutal untruth of a subsuming form forced on from above, that Proust revolted. Just as the temperament of his work challenges customary notions about the general and the particular and gives aesthetic force to the dictum from Hegel’s Logic that the particular is the general and vice versa, with each mediated through the other, so the whole, resistant to abstract outlines, crystallizes out of intertwined individual presentations. Each of them conceals within itself constellations of what ultimately emerges as the idea of the novel. Great musicians of Proust’s era, like Alban Berg, knew that living totality is achieved only through rank vegetal proliferation. The productive force that aims at unity is identical to the passive capacity to lose oneself in details without restraint or reservation. In the inner formal composition of Proust’s work, however – and it was not only on account of its long, obscure sentences that Proust’s work struck the Frenchmen of his time as so German – there dwells, Proust’s primarily optical gifts notwithstanding and with no cheap analogy to composition intended, a musical impulse. It is evidenced most emphatically in the paradox that Proust’s great theme, the rescue of the transient, is fulfilled through its own transience, time.
What I shall be proposing is that the ‘rank vegetal proliferation’ of Proust’s text is the most puzzling and rewarding site for his experiments with time, and that the transient materials which Proust accumulates and adroitly manipulates sentence by sentence as his long tale unfolds are pregnant with meaning of a particularly uncomfortable sort. Such details not only make the overview difficult to achieve but tell a story about time that is alarmingly at odds with the official story told by Proust’s narrator in his didactic moods.
We must be thankful that it is not necessary to possess time concepts of particular subtlety in order to have time experiences that are complex and moving. Miracles of temporal construction-work can occur in a bar or a bus queue; and one does not need to activate the notions of retrospection and anticipation, and still less their rhetorical counterparts analepsis and prolepsis, to become aware that the living present of an individual’s experience is put together, concocted, from residues of the past and conjectural glimpses of the future. But even ‘past’ and ‘future’ sound too conceptual, too thought-about, for the rough-and-tumble of lived time, which can be made from whatever materials are to hand. This is a case in which the sensuous immediacy of art can remind us of something even more immediate-seeming that takes place in ordinary experience. Three brief examples will provide a route back to this feature of daily life, and to Proust as one of its unacclaimed guardians.
In the first movement of the Eroica symphony, Beethoven has one of the horns begin the recapitulation prematurely. Some unfathomable eagerness in the ranks of the orchestra, or so it sounds, has produced a solecism, and the listener is obliged to hesitate for a moment between two temporalities, one of them correct, proper and opportune and the other hasty and disjointed. In the closing sequence of The Spider’s Stratagem (1970), Bertolucci’s film adaptation of the Borges story ‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’, a man waits at a deserted railway station: a voice repeatedly announces over the loudspeaker that his train will be delayed, and grass sprouts between the tracks. In Washington, DC, on 13 February 1962, at the height of the North American craze for Brazilian music, Stan Getz plays ‘Desafinado’: towards the end of his solo he delays the return of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s out-of-tune tune by producing ghostly, near-miss alternatives to it. He flirts with his hearers: you can have your tune, but not yet.
What all three cases have in common is that time-effects of considerable complexity are made palpable in the expressive medium of the art form involved. There will be stories in the background, of course, and cunning calculations, and appropriate technical concepts, but the artistry of the artist in each instance lies in his ability to stand clear of all this and treat time as directly manipulable stuff: in the shocking proximity of grass and metal, in the sound of the horn arriving early or of the tenor saxophone arriving late, we rediscover the time of our desires and fears. Artists may choose at moments to confer special privileges on belated or precocious intensities of feeling, but the flexed, syncopated temporal medium that they thereby reveal belongs not to art in particular but to time-dwelling human creatures at large: we live like this, now too early and now too late.
If I insist upon the ordinariness that underlies these exquisite artistic contrivances, it is because I am conscious of an unusual burden that Proust places upon his reader. He expects his reader to proceed slowly, patiently, and with wide-ranging attention. In his characteristic long sentence, with its welter of subordinate material, he obliges us to pursue a number of associative chains at once and expects us all uncomplainingly to accumulate, and then at intervals deploy, large quantities of information. Self-contained propositional events take place against a relatively undifferentiated semantic mass. These qualities of the Proust text seem so clearly to side with contrivance, and against simplicity, that readers may feel themselves summoned to worship in a temple of high art, and somehow required to leave their awkward everyday selves at the door. The presence in the book of a psychology and a metaphysics of time may enhance this impression and suggest that time is an issue in Proust only when his text announces it as such. But ‘time-effects’, as I have been calling them, are present when the key theoretical ideas are veiled, or absent altogether. And such effects, which belong to the individual sentences of the work long before they are incorporated into any larger narrative scheme, are worth itemising. By doing so, we can begin to see how the ‘bottom-up’ approach recommended by Adorno might pay special dividends: from the temporality of the individual sentence, through that of the paragraph sequence or the self-contained narrative episode, we may ascend gradually to the temporality of the whole novel as prescribed in its doctrinal passages or enacted in its time-intoxicated plot, and yet not imagine as we rise that this arrangement of levels is a simple hierarchical one. Proust is too venturesome and too perverse to allow us merely to read upwards towards a promised apex.
The following is a sentence from Du côté de chez Swann in which the grand temporal design of the book’s plot is kept at a safe distance, and in which explicit time-theoretical references are of the thinnest. The narrator describes the Vivonne at the moment when its stream begins to accelerate on emerging from the grounds of a local property:
Que de fois j’ai vu, j’ai désiré imiter quand je serais libre de vivre à ma guise, un rameur, qui, ayant lâché l’aviron, s’était couché à plat sur le dos, la tête en bas, au fond de sa barque, et la laissant flotter à la dérive, ne pouvant voir que le ciel qui filait lentement au-dessus de lui, portait sur son visage l’avant-goût du bonheur et de la paix.
(I, 168)
How often have I watched, and longed to imitate when I should be free to live as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lay flat on his back in the bottom of his boat, letting it drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky gliding slowly by above him, his face aglow with a foretaste of happiness and peace!
(I, 204)
The overall design of the plot may be absent from this sentence, but the underlying emotional teleology of the book is not. The narrator describes his earlier childhood self as driven by an imagined future beatitude. Once the shackles of parental supervision have been untied, he will enjoy the free exercise of his desires and bask negligently in each new-found bliss. Literary ambition already has a part to play in this quest. Just as Dante hastened to rejoin Virgil when he strode on ahead of him in the Inferno (XXIII, 145–8), so I, the narrator has just announced, would run to catch up with my parents on the towpath. And Virgil’s destiny later in the Commedia, we may remember, was to be left behind … Such references are common in these early stages of the novel, and one happy vision of the future certainly involves a free and self-replenishing literary creativity, to be exercised perhaps on a Dantesque scale. But what is striking about this sentence is not so much its pre-echo of a later outcome as its choice in the here-and-now of a hard path towards ‘happiness and peace’.
At least three time-scales are present. The oarsman sinks back languorously after hard work with arms and legs; the narrator enjoys himself when he is finally able to break free from a constraining family; and Proust’s sentence arrives at its final visionary affirmation after much syntactic travail. No problem arises from the fact that two futures – ‘his’ and ‘mine’ – are being narrated simultaneously, nor from their being consigned to an epoch that is already long past at the moment of narration: we regularly consult other people’s hopes in order to understand our own, and will readily own that our past was as future-driven as our present now is. The problem – and the pleasurableness – of sentences on this model lies in their insistent intermixing of past, present and future. Their syntax and tense-pattern deal in prematurity and belatedness to the near-exclusion of linear succession. ‘Que de fois j’ai vu … un rameur, qui … portait sur son visage l’avant-gout du bonheur et de la paix’: such is the straightforward subject-predicate chronology of the sentence if one extracts it from the text, but, left inside the text, this chronology is subject to turbulence and fracture. The narrator blurts out the general import of his fantasy (‘quand je serais libre de vivre a ma guise’) before the object of his fantasy has been named, and then, having pre-empted his lolling oarsman, holds him back from his moment of abandonment and repose with a series of short staccato phrases.
The temporality of Proust’s sentence is insistently heterogeneous: moment by moment, the flow of time is stalled, and unpacked into its backward- and forward-looking ingredients. The reader who does not hesitate is lost: ‘j’ai vu’, ‘j’ai désiré’ look as if they are co-ordinated and indeed are; ‘filait’ and ‘portait’ look as if they are co-ordinated and are not. Reading forwards involves backtracking, and checking, and measuring one possible syntactic pathway against others; the mutual attraction of ‘filait’ and ‘portait’ has first to be felt and then repudiated. The past of such sentences is constantly being revisited and remade. This is an extremely simple case of Proustian time in one of its typical textual incarnations: the reader reaches an anticipated goal, but only after a series of delays and only by an unexpected route. What is happening is that flux and dérive are threatening, but not in the end seriously damaging, propositional structure. Indeed, such structure, eventually repossessed and reproclaimed, emerges not just as well-made and obedient to grammatical rule but as the bearer of sensuous satisfaction: completing the syntactic pattern is strictly synchronised with the achievement of ecstasy. Diversion, detour, drift and discontinuity, all the untidy syncopations of lived time, are to be resolved into a sublime timeliness. The force of such writing is not at all in a theory of time, clearly not, but in its power of performance, and its readiness to pass the raw materials of fantasy through a strenuous process of syntactic dismantling and reassembly. By way of such artifice, the narrative rejoins the ordinary panic and disarray that are proper to desire-time.
Musicalised sentences of this kind, in which internal relations multiply, are in some ways especially suited to the rapt, supercharged nature description at which Proust was so adept. The mobile surfaces of the natural world, and the play of light upon them, and the slow, ineluctable processes of organic growth or decay, are themselves a stylistic lesson and may call forth from the writer an imitative tribute. What could be more natural than a prose which teemed with inner voices and fluent transformations? Yet Proust is a caustic social observer as well as a devoted dweller among fields and streams, and his syntax does not desert him when his attention turns to the human bestiary of the salon or the seaside hotel.
In this sentence from Sodome et Gomorrhe, the narrator begins to explain why he had felt obliged to refuse a tempting invitation from Mme de Cambremer. The invitation had arrived at a time when grief at his grandmother’s death had suddenly been revived:
Et certes il y a seulement deux jours, si fatigué de vie mondaine que je fusse, c’eût été un vrai plaisir pour moi que de la goûter transplantée dans ces jardins où poussaient en pleine terre, grâce à l’exposition de Féterne, les figuiers, les palmiers, les plants de rosiers, jusque dans la mer souvent d’un calme et d’un bleu méditerranéens et sur laquelle le petit yacht des propriétaires allait, avant le commencement de la fête, chercher dans les plages de l’autre côté de la baie, les invités les plus importants, servait, avec ses vélums tendus contre le soleil, quand tout le monde était arrivé, de salle à manger pour goûter, et repartait le soir reconduire ceux qu’il avait amenés.
(III, 164)
And indeed only two days earlier, tired as I was of social life, it would have been a real pleasure to me to taste it, transplanted amid those gardens in which, thanks to the exposure of Féterne, fig trees, palms, rose bushes grew out in the open and stretched down to a sea often as blue and calm as the Mediterranean, upon which the hosts’ little yacht would sail across, before the party began, to fetch the most important guests from the places on the other side of the bay, would serve, with its awnings spread to shut out the sun, as an open-air refreshment room after the party had assembled, and would set sail again in the evening to take back those whom it had brought.
(IV, 193)
Again, certain of the time-relations here are straightforward: this is the future I would have enjoyed, in prospect and in actuality, if I had received the invitation earlier and if the pain of my bereavement had not returned. Futures, even unrealised ones, have their history. But the copious elaborations of the sentence sketch a much more impulsive and diversified passage of time too. Time is measured by criss-crossing spatial journeys, held together in a single propositional structure. Two kinds of transplantation occur at Féterne, the Cambremers’ château: exotic plants have been taken there and flourish thanks to its favourable position, and exotic social creatures, seasonally removed from the capital to this seaside neighbourhood, are gathered up into a shimmering matinée. Transport is provided for guests of appropriate rank or status, and the morning and evening journeys of the Cambremer yacht trace a thoroughly socialised map of local space and time. This is the double portrait of a society and one of its members, and the syntax of the sentence fuses into a single drama the advance and recoil of the narrator’s sympathy for his would-be hosts. A single proposition scans, enumerates, explores lateral relationships, arranges improbable encounters, allows fantasy to take wing, yet reaches finally a point of narrative and syntactic closure: the party is over, the yacht bears the privileged guests away, and a grand amplificatory linguistic mechanism is brought to rest.
In so far as Proust reconstructs the temporality of daily living, then, we may already safely say that syntax has a main role in providing his account with a sense of phenomenological fullness. The particular ingenuity of his syntax in this respect is that it brings together into one complex pattern a continuous forward-flung intention and a simultaneous host of retrospective or sideways vistas. It seeks stability and finality, celebrates these qualities with its emphatic final cadences, yet leaves the door open too: riddles remain to be solved, curiosity to be satisfied, and a larger narrative syntax to be pursued. A balance must be kept between completion and a necessary provisionality. The reader must be fed, yet kept hungry.
Even during the narrator’s lengthy philosophical or psychological discussions of time, even as he deploys his rich vocabulary of chronological terms, his syntax is often quietly performing a quite different and seemingly unauthorised set of tasks. The last of my three single-sentence examples is thoroughly ‘time-theoretical’ in that it discusses a curious human present largely washed clean of its own past. It is taken from Le Côté de Guermantes and concerns Mme de Guermantes’s slightly improbable incapacity to bear grudges and nurse grievances:
Non seulement elle ne s’attardait pas à des explications rétrospectives, à des demi-mots, à des sourires ambigus, à des sous-entendus, non seulement elle avait dans son affabilité actuelle, sans retours en arrière, sans réticences, quelque chose d’aussi fièrement rectiligne que sa majestueuse stature, mais les griefs qu’elle avait pu ressentir contre quelqu’un dans le passé étaient si entièrement réduits en cendres, ces cendres étaient elles-mêmes rejetées si loin de sa mémoire ou tout au moins de sa manière d’être, qu’à regarder son visage chaque fois qu’elle avait à traiter par la plus belle des simplifications ce qui chez tant d’autres eût été prétexte à des restes de froideur, à des récriminations, on avait l’impression d’une sorte de purification.
(II, 676)
Not only did she waste no time in retrospective inquiries, in hints, allusions or ambiguous smiles, not only was there in her present affability, without any harking back to the past, without the slightest reticence, something as proudly rectilinear as her majestic stature, but any resentment which she might have felt against someone in the past was so entirely reduced to ashes, and those ashes were themselves cast so utterly from her memory, or at least from her manner, that on studying her face whenever she had occasion to treat with the most exquisite simplicity what in so many other people would have been a pretext for reviving stale antipathies and recriminations, one had the impression of a sort of purification.
(III, 440)
The comedy of this sentence, and the subcutaneous malice which permeates its apparent act of homage, stem from the disproportion between the supposed candour of the duchesse and the hard labour that her virtue seems to entail. Far from being a natural grace of personality, or a fortunate psychological tic, her freedom from grudges is achieved by a triple process of incineration, grinding and scattering, and may even then be an effect of social self-presentation rather than an emotional reality. The narrator puts his syntax to work in the same showily laborious vein: here are all the afterthoughts and retrospective mental retouchings that the duchesse knows nothing of, all deliciously listed at the beginning of the sentence, and wrapped up in an incriminating double negative; and at the end of the sentence, with full cadential force, here is the strange moment of catharsis by which all gritty residues are removed from the scene. It should not be necessary for this region of her soul to be purified over time, for purity is its native condition, but some demon in Proust’s writing wants all states, moral or physical, to become transformational processes.
Again, two presentations of time are in play at once in sentences of this kind, and one of them, on the face of it, has a superior claim to generality. Certain mental types enjoy an almost magical ability to forget, just as others are haunted by memories or given to fantastical anticipations of the future, and for a moment Mme de Guermantes has become the emblem of the first group, and a caractère almost in the manner of La Bruyère. The narrator’s proposition, if we distil it in this way, is simple, self-limiting and cogent. But the second presentation, which belongs to the long, undistilled scansional sentence we in fact possess, has its own general force. It has of course the roughness and waywardness of temps vécu. It is assembled from a procession of discrete Janus-faced moments, and the recrudescence inside it of past into present cannot be legislated for or predicted. Yet this presentation has as much of a logic to it as the first: the interplay that it creates between the backwards and forwards glances of the time-bound individual, between his slowness and his precipitation, between spinning a yarn and calling a halt – and especially this interplay as controlled by a single dilated propositional structure – begins indeed to resemble a universal key to the understanding of human time, applicable on terms of strict equality to oarsmen, yachtsmen, noblewomen and novelists.
Proust’s novel contains innumerable complex sentences that are built in this way, and many that call for more intensive scanning activity on the reader’s part than does any one of these three specimens. His time-drama is in his individual sentences and in the underlying structures they reiterate. But these models of timeliness and epistemic success achieved in the teeth of distraction and anxiety do not simply sit as outliers on the margins of Proust’s narrative. They are the carriers of that narrative, and the internal echoes that give certain isolated sentences their combined quality of cohesion and dispersal are to be heard passing between the larger units of the work too. The temporality of propositions is constantly being caught up into larger narrative segments, and retemporalised in the process. Once the reader has penetrated some distance into the book, it begins to acquire its own internal dynamic of past, present and future relationships. The book allows its reader to relive, in the present moment of reading, pasts that it alone has created for him, and to breathe an air of multiple potentiality that is native to this slowly unfolding textual fabric. It is to this larger pattern of recurrences and expectations that I shall now turn, attending principally to a single highly charged nexus of motifs.
Among secrets and enigmas in the Proust world, those that involve sexuality have a special prestige. They are more resistant to the narrator’s powers of decipherment than other mysteries of social life, and solutions to them, once discovered, are more likely to falter and decay. Such questions as ‘which were his real preference, men or women?’ or ‘what did she really do in her younger years?’ have a lingering atmosphere of infantile curiosity about them in this novel, yet prompt the narrator to a series of ingenious experimental studies in cognition: Proust echoes Freud’s account of the child’s wish to know about sex as the prototypical form of all later intellectual endeavour. What is surprising, however, about Proust’s handling of sexual secrets is not simply that so much of his plot turns on their solution but that the panic they inspire should be entertained on such a lavish scale. The uncertainties which surround Uncle Toby’s wound in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) or the hero’s parentage in Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) are positively short-winded in comparison with those surrounding the sexuality and sexual prehistory of Odette, Albertine and Saint-Loup. In simple time-and-motion terms, the quantities of intelligent attention that these investigations require of the narrator are calamitous – when they are not merely farcical. A crucial temporal framework in this book is the one in which sexually driven individuals strive to find things out about each other. And in this pursuit, their expenditure of time is reckless.
I have chosen from among the numerous scenes of sexual enquiry that are to be found in the early volumes of the novel an elaborate intellectual comedy which prefigures much that is to be fully explored later. This is the episode in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs where the narrator discovers a watercolour portrait of ‘Miss Sacripant’ in Elstir’s studio and is thwarted in his desire to be introduced to the ‘little band’ of young girls (II, 203–20; II, 493–514). At least four currents of feeling are running in parallel here; the narrator wants: to meet the girls, and expects Elstir to help him do so; to find out more about Elstir’s art, and about the subject of the portrait; to respect the rhythm of Elstir’s working day rather than press his own claims upon the painter’s time; and, above all, to seem casual and disengaged in the eyes of the girls themselves. The attempt to achieve some sort of equilibrium between these incompatible wishes involves him in a distended cost-benefit analysis, and a delirium of excuses and explanations. Four stories are being told simultaneously in this episode, which is a tour de force of polyphonic invention, and any one of them may suddenly gather bulk at the expense of the others. Slowness in one narrative may permit a new access of speed in another; opening up a gap in one causal sequence may permit a gap in another to be closed. For example, between the last rekindling of the narrator’s hope that an introduction can be arranged and the definitive extinction of that hope, for today at least, Elstir proceeds with tiresome deliberation to complete his own work: he alone has the power to usher the narrator into the force-field of the eternal feminine, but devotes himself instead to the lesser magic that is his painting. The narrator not only describes this delay, but performs a complementary delaying manoeuvre of his own: a long excursus on self-love and altruism, and on the little heroisms of ordinary life, intervenes between Elstir’s last brush-stroke and the beginning of their walk together (II, 208–9; II, 499–501). Material that is in itself dignified and serious-minded intrudes hilariously upon the narrator’s sentimental adventure; within the unfolding drama, an elaborate moral discussion has the status of a simple accidental misfortune.
By now Proust’s narrative architecture has become dangerously elastic. Time may be measured as a connected series of physical events, sense-perceptions, and mental promptings – ‘Le soir tombait; il fallut revenir; je ramenais Elstir vers sa villa …’ (II, 210; ‘Dusk was falling; it was time to be turning homewards. I was accompanying Elstir back to his villa’ (II, 502)) – or by the key ideas which fuel speculation, rumination or reasoning, or by the inflections of prose discourse itself. In a passage of this kind, Proust moves with gaiety and assured improvisatory skill from one system of measurement to another. Thinking, sensing, acting, writing are given a common pulse, and made into the co-equal modes of a single, encompassing transformational experiment. A sentence which begins with the words ‘Le soir tombait’ can end well, and with no note of impropriety, upon a supposition enclosed in a hypothesis: ‘[les jeunes filles qui] avaient l’air de ne pas me voir, mais sans aucun doute n’en étaient pas moins en train de porter sur moi un jugement ironique’ (II, 210; ‘[the girls] who looked as though they had not seen me but were unquestionably engaged in passing a sarcastic judgement on me’ (II, 502)). The discrepancy between public time, measurable by events, and mental time, measurable by the development of an individual’s ideas or by his changing intensities of feeling, is laid bare by Proust. Dramatic opportunities abound in the disputed territory between outside and inside, and Proust’s fluid transpositions between outer and inner time-scales are thoroughly ironic in character. These are the events, the narrator says; this, he adds, is how they look if you change your viewpoint on the scene; and this again is how they look if you remove yourself from the scene altogether and concentrate on the larger tendency of my tale. Yet despite all the attention paid by the narrator to those local repositionings of himself and his addressee, Proust’s reader is still encouraged to read ‘for the plot’, to find things out, and still invited to be seduced by secrets in the footsteps of the hero. And the scale on which this kind of reading occurs is, as I have said, very large indeed. Elstir’s painting travels back and forth both in event-time and in mind-time; it is a tight cluster of time-effects, and a time-measuring device for use in the book as a whole.
The image of ‘Miss Sacripant’ – who, it emerges after a long delay, is the youthful Odette dressed as a boy – is subjected to a barrage of reinterpretations, and gradually becomes a hypnotic sexual icon. The initial description of the portrait already hints at the uncontainable fecundity of the image:
La blancheur du plastron, d’une finesse de grésil et dont le frivole plissage avait des clochettes comme celles du muguet, s’étoilait des clairs reflets de la chambre, aigus eux-mêmes et finement nuancés comme des bouquets de fleurs qui auraient broché le linge. Et le velours du veston, brillant et nacré, avait çà et là quelque chose de hérissé, de déchiqueté et de velu qui faisait penser à l’ebouriffage des œillets dans le vase. Mais surtout on sentait qu’Elstir, insoucieux de ce que pouvait présenter d’immoral ce travesti d’une jeune actrice pour qui le talent avec lequel elle jouerait son rôle avait sans doute moins d’importance que l’attrait irritant qu’elle allait offrir aux sens blasés ou dépravés de certains spectateurs, s’était au contraire attaché à ces traits d’ambiguïté comme à un élément esthétique qui valait d’être mis en relief et qu’il avait tout fait pour souligner.
(II, 204–5)
The whiteness of the shirt-front, as fine as soft hail, with its gay pleats gathered into little bells like lilies of the valley, was spangled with bright gleams of light from the room, themselves sharply etched and subtly shaded as if they were flowers stitched into the linen. And the velvet of the jacket, with its brilliant sheen, had something rough, frayed and shaggy about it here and there that recalled the crumpled brightness of the carnations in the vase. But above all one felt that Elstir, heedless of any impression of immorality that might be given by this transvestite costume worn by a young actress for whom the talent she would bring to the role was doubtless of less importance than the titillation she would offer to the jaded or depraved senses of some of her audience, had on the contrary fastened upon this equivocal aspect as on an aesthetic element which deserved to be brought into prominence, and which he had done everything in his power to emphasise.
(II, 495)
Elstir was particularly attracted, the narrator suggests, by the undecidability of this girl-boy, but he has prepared the way for the exquisite indecision that his figure provokes in the spectator by sexualising the entire space of his picture. Light itself has two separate pictorial roles. On the one hand it is a uniform radiance emanating from objects, or an elucidating flow of energy passing across their surface and removing disparities as it goes. On the other hand, here and on numerous occasions elsewhere in the novel, light plays upon surfaces and inscribes them with its momentary messages: the outside world survives into the domestic interior as a series of ghostly reflections; a wide roomful of light is concentrated into a pattern of dancing flecks upon a bodice. Then again, Elstir’s brush has located tangles and raggedness where other artists, less daring and less ingenious in their sexual explorations, would have settled for a simple sheen: inside the close-cropped fabric of a jacket, or between smoothly enfolded carnation-petals, secret places with an unkempt covering of hair have been found. The figure of ‘Miss Sacripant’, so exhaustively boyish and girlish at the same time, and by way of the same sequence of brushstrokes, reclaims for the human body and for the arts of couture, an eroticism that is everywhere anyway, as readily available as light and air in the natural world.
Proust turns an imaginary painting into a tableau vivant; the central image and its accompanying furniture are motionless yet constantly reanimated by the narrator’s observing eye. He tells stories as he looks. He free-associates and, from a purely iconographical viewpoint, behaves badly: the art object is casually folded back into the ‘ordinary life’ of the narrator’s nascent sexual desires, and then abandoned with equal nonchalance for a semi-theoretical reverie on questions of artistic method. Yet what is remarkable in all this seeming flouting of the rules – whether of story-telling, or art history, or inferential argument – is that something strict and rule-governed is still going on sentence by sentence. Distinctions have to be clear if a coherent play of ambiguity, as distinct from mere semantic havering or fuss, is to be sustained. The machinery for making such distinctions is to be found in the bifurcating syntax of the long Proustian sentence, and it is the peculiar property of these sentences, placed end to end and seemingly so autonomous, to organise long stretches of text around relatively few underlying structural schemes. The sentences do many unruly things, of course: their syntax ramifies and proliferates; their meanings are sometimes amplified and embellished to the point of distraction. Yet they studiously repeat, almost in the manner of intellectual home truths, certain characteristic patterns of thought. Antithetical qualities are held against each other in equipoise. The alternative potentialities of a single situation are expounded. Surprising details yield large insights, and large insights, once they have been naturalised, seize upon the further surprising details they require to remain credible. Expectations are now confounded and now confirmed. Attention is dispersed and reconcentrated; increasing speed of perception leads to a plateau of immobilised absorption. And so forth.
The typical thought-shapes that Proust’s long sentences endlessly mobilise provide secure bridges between the markedly different kinds of writing that his novel yokes together. By the time we reach the following passage, for example, the secret of Miss Sacripant’s identity and of her former relations with Elstir have been revealed, and reflections on the perceptual rather than the sexual dealings between artist and model are apparently in order:
Mais d’ailleurs le portrait eût-il été, non pas antérieur, comme la photographie préférée de Swann, à la systématisation des traits d’Odette en un type nouveau, majestueux et charmant, mais postérieur, qu’il eût suffi de la vision d’Elstir pour désorganiser ce type. Le génie artistique agit à la façon de ces températures extrêmement élevées qui ont le pouvoir de dissocier les combinaisons d’atomes et de grouper ceux-ci suivant un ordre absolument contraire, répondant à un autre type. Toute cette harmonie factice que la femme a imposée à ses traits et dont chaque jour avant de sortir elle surveille la persistance dans sa glace, chargeant l’inclinaison du chapeau, le lissage des cheveux, l’enjouement du regard, d’en assurer la continuité, cette harmonie, le coup d’œil du grand peintre la détruit en une seconde, et à sa place il fait un regroupement des traits de la femme, de manière à donner satisfaction à un certain idéal féminin et pictural qu’il porte en lui.
(II, 216)
But in any case, even if the portrait had been, not anterior, like Swann’s favourite photograph, to the systematisation of Odette’s features into a new type, majestic and charming, but subsequent to it, Elstir’s vision would have sufficed to discompose that type. Artistic genius acts in a similar way to those extremely high temperatures which have the power to split up combinations of atoms which they proceed to combine afresh in a diametrically opposite order, corresponding to another type. All that artificial harmony which a woman has succeeded in imposing upon her features, the maintenance of which she oversees in her mirror every day before going out, relying on the angle of her hat, the smoothness of her hair, the vivacity of her expression, to ensure its continuity, that harmony the keen eye of the great painter instantly destroys, substituting for it a rearrangement of the woman’s features such as will satisfy a certain pictorial ideal of femininity which he carries in his head.
(II, 509)
Artist and model are both masters of artifice, but where the model’s first move is to quell the disorder of her past conduct and present appearance by constructing a smooth social persona, the artist’s is to introduce disorder into the unreally tranquillised scene offered by the model’s face, hair and clothes. His aggression, however, comes not from a simple preference for the wild over the tame, or for energy over repose, but from a wish to install on the canvas a smooth construction of his own. One fabrication must be dismantled and cleared away to make room for another, and the newcomer is still more obsessionally preserved from ruin than the original: where the woman simply checks herself in the mirror to make sure that each effect of art is in place, the artist, we are soon to be told, pursues his ‘pictorial ideal of femininity’ with crazed consistency from one model to the next.
On the face of it, this passage simply moves discussion of the artist’s passions from the sensuous to the conceptual plane and begins to speak of new things. We now read of systematisation, dissociation, harmony and continuity where before we were offered velvet, mother-of-pearl, brisdes and tousled heads. But the relation between the two paragraphs is in fact much closer than their divergences of diction would suggest. The second remembers and reinflects exactly the interplay between orderliness and an exciting, irruptive disorder that had given the first its clarity and strength. There is a rhythm here, or a thought-shape, or a paradigmatic tension, that is preserved from one occasion to the next. The special virtuosity that Proust ascribes to his narrator allows him to begin his own thinking with hair and prickles, to pursue it with cognitive concepts and to give both dimensions the same underlying structure of articulate hesitation. Inside the sentence we are currently reading earlier sentences continue to sound. Present reading time is haunted by reading times past.
Two new features of Proust’s temporality begin to emerge, then, when we look beyond the retrospective and prospective dispositions of the individual complex sentence. First, within paragraphs, the propulsive energy of the writing, the living sense of futurity that drives the narration on, comes from an astonishing power of recapitulation. An ambiguity in sexual identity refashions earlier ambiguous relations – between, say, light that shines and light that dances, or between smooth and rough in the painterly representation of fabrics. The way forward into a clear new future always involves revisiting the past. Secondly, within extended episodes, continuities of this sort are at work even when the narration insists upon irreversible change. Uncovering Elstir’s secret, or meeting the little band face to face for the first time, changes for ever the way the world looks. The whole map has to be redrawn. But the text carries along, from the before of unknowing into the afterwards of knowledge, not just a lively memory of key events and their affective colouring but the imprint of mental structures that have already proved themselves and can be expected to see active service again. The appetite to know survives the moment of its own satiation, and the instruments by which the world is made intelligible, far from being thrown away after use, remain importunately in place and demand further exercise. Whatever the ‘open’ future holds, its broad contours have already been foretold.
Yet when the large-scale temporal patterning of Proust’s text is described solely in these terms an important quality is still missing from the overall picture. For although recapitulation and recurrence give the narrative a range of captivating refrains – here in La Prisonnière are the tribulations of jealousy, as acute now, in the narrator’s manhood, as they were before his birth, and here in Albertine disparue is Legrandin being Legrandin, unchanged after all these years and pages – the past is not always treated as kindly as this, and simply revisited or revived at the narrator’s leisure. Retroaction rather than simple retrospection sometimes occurs. The past is not just subjected to an indefinite process of reinterpretation, but can be materially altered by the desiring intelligence of the narrator: armed with new information and switching the direction of his gaze, he can give the past new contents. That Miss Sacripant should be Odette rather than an anonymous actress for ever lost behind the name of a stage character, that she should be Odette rather than a fantasy figure in one of Elstir’s youthful caprices, changes the way the light had fallen, moments ago, in Elstir’s studio. In the wake of the narrator’s discovery, new sexual predilections spring into being for Elstir, Swann, and Odette herself, and a new element is added to the already troubled prehistory of the Swann-Odette marriage. A catalytic reaction spreads backwards from the very recent past of the narrator himself into the barely recoverable recesses of other people’s lives. All is altered.
We rewrite the history of our lives from moment to moment, of course, even those of us who cling steadfastly to an ‘official’ autobiography, and our retroactive inventions are for the most part tiny and unremarkable. They are certainly not the stuff of which great literary plots are made. Proust turns a banal psychological mechanism into a major source of dramatic interest and energy, however, by concentrating the attention of his narrator on only a limited number of cases and by giving large-scale structural importance only to those cases involving the sexuality of his characters. The most celebrated of these is perhaps the episode of the ‘lady in pink’, seen briefly by the narrator in the home of his great-uncle Adolphe in the early pages of the novel (I, 75; I, 89) and still continuing to fascinate him at the very end (IV, 607; VI, 427). The ‘lady in pink’, like Miss Sacripant, is Odette during the heyday of her career as a courtesan, but the unveiling of her identity takes an inordinately long time, during which the narrator reveals to the reader what his earlier, narrated self still does not know. A respectable woman has had an enticingly disreputable past, and knowing this, when he eventually does know it, changes the adult narrator’s childhood, especially as Odette’s sexual magnetism had played upon a member of his otherwise harmonious and upright family circle.
Much more remarkable, however, is the case of Saint-Loup’s homosexuality, which is first intimated in gossip, and then firmly attested as fact, at the end of Albertine disparue (IV, 241; V, 762). As we saw in the preceding chapter, this discovery prompts in the narrator an elegy to lost friendship – built on the bizarre assumption that friends who come out or are ‘outed’ are automatically lost – and a protracted examination, cog by cog, of the machinery of retroactive remembering. So many aspects of Saint-Loup’s past behaviour that had previously seemed obscure now make a familiar and dispiriting kind of sense. His relationship with Rachel in particular is summoned up as a procession of episodes all demanding to be reconstrued. The evidence was all there long ago, but the narrator had no eyes with which to see it. Once the knowledge is out that Saint-Loup is ‘comme ça’, he, Rachel, and the narrator himself take up their positions in a new narrative sequence, and the switching of the narrator’s emotional investments from an old story to a new is a hugely laborious and painful affair.
Retroaction is not only a feature of Proust’s sentences and of his plot, but serves also to characterise one aspect of the narrator’s personality: his combined strength and vulnerability. At certain watershed moments in the novel he is withheld from decision-making and from action; his personal history seems to rewrite itself spontaneously, and to turn him into the plaything of an inscrutable impersonal force. This can happen benignly, when a new access of happiness removes pain and doubt from the remembered past, as in this passage, which contains a perfect dictionary illustration of the unusual intransitive verb rétroagir (‘to retroact’) in use:
la pensée ne peut même pas reconstituer l’état ancien pour le confronter au nouveau, car elle n’a plus le champ libre: la connaissance que nous avons faite, le souvenir des premières minutes inespérées, les propos que nous avons entendus, sont là qui obstruent l’entrée de notre conscience et commandent beaucoup plus les issues de notre mémoire que celles de notre imagination, ils rétroagissent davantage sur notre passé que nous ne sommes plus maîtres de voir sans tenir compte d’eux, que sur la forme, restée libre, de notre avenir.
(I, 528)
our thoughts cannot even reconstruct the old state in order to compare it with the new, for it has no longer a clear field: the acquaintance we have made, the memory of those first, unhoped-for moments, the talk we have heard, are there now to block the passage of our consciousness, and as they control the outlets of our memory far more than those of our imagination, they react more forcibly upon our past, which we are no longer able to visualise without taking them into account, than upon the form, still unshaped, of our future.
(II, 128)
Or it can happen in the manner of a nightmare, when ever more pretexts for pain begin to assail the jealous mind:
On n’a pas besoin d’être deux, il suffit d’être seul dans sa chambre à penser pour que de nouvelles trahisons de votre maîtresse se produisent, fût-elle morte. Aussi il ne faut pas ne redouter dans l’amour, comme dans la vie habituelle, que l’avenir, mais même le passé qui ne se réalise pour nous souvent qu’après l’avenir, et nous ne parlons pas seulement du passé que nous apprenons après coup, mais de celui que nous avons conservé depuis longtemps en nous et que tout d’un coup nous apprenons à lire.
(III, 595)
There is no need for there to be two of you, it is enough to be alone in your room, thinking, for fresh betrayals by your mistress to come to light, even if she is dead. And so we ought not to fear in love, as in everyday life, the future alone, but even the past, which often comes to life for us only when the future has come and gone – and not only the past which we discover after the event but the past which we have long kept stored within ourselves and suddenly learn how to interpret.
(V, 91)
What these passages have in common, the one taken from A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs and involving Gilberte and the other from La Prisonnière and involving Albertine, is the extraordinary assurance with which the analysis is conducted. This recreation of the past is a mental automatism which the narrator reportedly merely underwent in his experience of love, but it is one which he takes in hand and magisterially dissects in the elaboration of his text. There is little to be done about a mechanism as powerful as this, apart from rediscovering one’s strength in writing about it. Constructing sentences is already a form of retroactive play for Proust, and constructing sentences like these allows him to create an eerie match between suspended syntax and being in love: both involve an incessant remaking of the past; and both allow, in the words of the apparent paradox on which the first of these quotations ends, retroaction to be carried forward into a ‘free’ future.
But even if the Proust time-map is extended in this way, to include the backwash of the present into the past as well as the irresistible encroachments of an unquiet past into the onwards flow of present time, a last element in the workaday complexity that Proust’s reader has to cope with is still missing. In living our lives forwards, hurling ourselves headlong into an ever-receding future, we take our reminiscences with us. Sometimes as obliging friends, and sometimes as demons. And these reminiscences have only to be hardened somewhat into a pattern to acquire considerable prefigurative force: they not only accompany later events but can help them to happen. A ‘certain slant of light’, in the words of a great poem by Emily Dickinson, can bring an unanswerable intimation of death into an ordinary winter afternoon. But that same light, made memorable by who knows what conjunction of place, mood and memory, can tell us how to inhabit later afternoons, visited by different rays, differently slanted. A sudden savage word from Albertine, finding its way into an otherwise even-tempered conversation, can bring anxiety and suspicion into the narrator’s later social encounters. An anonymous actress, alive with erotic provocation, can become the very model of the temptress and the tease and begin strangely to determine an apprentice lover’s later choice of partner.
Templates are being created, and futures foretold, throughout the first two volumes of the novel. The scene of voyeurism at Montjouvain, the episode of the withheld goodnight kiss, the first ecstatic experience of involuntary memory, together with the entire forensic reconstruction in ‘Un Amour de Swann’ of the early relationship between Swann and Odette, are the embryonic forms from which complex later narratives are to spring. In some early episodes of this kind, including the decipherment of Miss Sacripant, Proust uses a special compressed form of dramatic irony. Rather than allow the reader to glimpse a future state of affairs and then oblige him or her to wait patiently for this to be actualised at an appointed later moment, he interconnects two parallel stories and allows one to illuminate the other. Odette as Miss Sacripant prefigures Albertine, just as Swann in the guise of jealous lover prefigures the adult narrator. But by this stage in the development of the plot, Albertine, still only fitfully distinguishable from her companions on the Balbec shore, is already an object of desire. The failed encounter with her occurs within the larger drama of Elstir’s watercolour portrait, between the announcement of its enigma and the discovery of a key. All the materials from which the narrator’s future affair with Albertine is to be fashioned, even down to the tremor of indecision which her sexuality is to prompt and the artifice which she is to employ in constructing an innocuous social persona, are already to hand in this more than prophetic scene. There is no need to wait for the future, for the future is already here.
Anticipation as manipulated in the ingenious plotting of Proust’s novel enlarges and dramatises a far commoner range of mental activities. We invent futures from residues of the past. When we are not sunk in torpor or blocked by external circumstances, we strive to pre-empt the future rather than have it thrust upon us. We model our future selves on the predecessors we admire. Proust’s narrator is a tireless psychologising commentator on such matters. He sets against his lively account of the ‘open’ or still-to-be-invented future a gloomy picture of the future as biologically or culturally pre-ordained. The individual becomes what he or she already is:
Les traits de notre visage ne sont guère que des gestes devenus, par l’habitude, définitifs. La nature, comme la catastrophe de Pompéi, comme une métamorphose de nymphe, nous a immobilisés dans le mouvement accoutumé. De même nos intonations contiennent notre philosophie de la vie, ce que la personne se dit à tout moment sur les choses.
(II, 262)
The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit has made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph, has arrested us in an accustomed movement. Similarly, our intonation embodies our philosophy of life, what a person invariably says to himself about things.
(II, 565)
Excessively strong or pre-emptive anticipation of this kind is in its turn set against the retroactive tricks of the remembering mind: Proust attends minutely to the whorls and vortices that the joint action of these mechanisms produces in the here and now. Whether you are writing a novel, painting a portrait, or living a life from hand to mouth, the task is always to turn the past-and-future-haunted present moment to account and to shake off its air of fatedness. A terrifying powerlessness is never far away. In both directions the exits are closed, and only by a mad wager and an inspired suspension of temporal law can we ever expect them to open again.
What I have been describing here are time mechanisms that can be observed in miniature in individual sentences and on a grand scale in the unfolding of the novel as a whole. There is perhaps, nevertheless, too much symmetry in this account, and too much regularity in the flow of Proustian time pictured in this way. What about suddenness and surprise? What about all the swerves, short-cuts and ‘transversal threads’ (I, 490; ‘ligne […] transversale’ (I, 400)), as Proust calls them, that create improbable connections within the textual fabric? Time in this novel surely needs to be seized in its zig-zags and pointilliste stipplings as well as in the orderly inter-looping of its alternative zones.
The later destinies of the ‘Miss Sacripant’ motif are played out in a bewildering network of lateral connections and implied time-frames. Whereas in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the portrait was rapidly stabilised into an emblem, a potent and portable representation of sexual allure, in Le Côté de Guermantes it becomes fluid and fuzzy-edged again. A photograph of the portrait is sent to the narrator by the valet de chambre of his great-uncle Adolphe, who is now dead. The servant had judged this image, and a number of others from his employer’s collection of souvenirs, more likely to appeal to a young man than to older members of the family, and had sent his own son – one Charles Morel – to deliver it:
Comme j’avais été très étonné de trouver parmi les photographies que m’envoyait son père une du portrait de Miss Sacripant (c’est-à-dire Odette) par Elstir, je dis à Charles Morel, en l’accompagnant jusqu’à la porte cochère: «Je crains que vous ne puissiez me renseigner. Est-ce que mon oncle connaissait beaucoup cette dame? […]»
(II, 563)
As I had been greatly surprised to find among the photographs which his father had sent me one of the portrait of Miss Sacripant (otherwise Odette) by Elstir, I said to Charles Morel as I accompanied him to the carriage gateway: ‘I don’t suppose you can tell me, but did my uncle know this lady well? […]’
(III, 305)
It is in the course of this episode that the reader is first introduced to Morel, who is to be a major presence in the remainder of the book, and there is more than a hint of prophecy in his being the bearer of the photograph: like Odette herself, and like the figure in Elstir’s watercolour, Morel is sexually ambiguous. Indeed he is Proust’s fullest representation of carefree bisexuality, and it is fitting that he should be given responsibility for the transportation of an icon that knits together his divergent sexual tastes. But the photograph has moved in quite different circles too: it served an aged libertine as a titillating reminder of his adventures in the demi-monde and, as we already know, was Swann’s favourite depiction of his wife. Miss Sacripant, during her momentary reappearance in Le Côté de Guermantes, connects narrative past to narrative future straightforwardly enough, but she also sends echoes racing through Proust’s socio-sexual labyrinth. Her travesti connects her to countless other characters trapped inside an unstoppable masked ball.
Towards the end of La Prisonnière, this aspect of Miss Sacripant reaches its apotheosis. She no longer circulates in photographic form, as a mere image caught at a third remove from the ‘real’ Odette, but still more impalpably as a figment of other people’s gossip. Charlus, in the course of his long harangue on the history and sociology of homosexuality, begins to speak about Swann’s sexual character, and, prompted by Brichot, about Swann’s wife:
Mais voyons, c’est par moi qu’il l’a connue. Je l’avais trouvée charmante dans son demi-travesti, un soir qu’elle jouait Miss Sacripant; j’étais avec des camarades de club, nous avions tous ramené une femme, et bien que je n’eusse envie que de dormir, les mauvaises langues avaient prétendu, car c’est affreux ce que le monde est méchant, que j’avais couché avec Odette. Seulement, elle en avait profité pour venir m’embêter, et j’avais cru m’en débarrasser en la présentant à Swann. De ce jour-là elle ne cessa plus de me cramponner, elle ne savait pas un mot d’orthographe, c’est moi qui faisais les lettres.
(III, 803)
Why, it was through me that he came to know her. I had thought her charming in her boyish get-up one evening when she played Miss Sacripant; I was with some club-mates, and each of us took a woman home with him, and although all I wanted was to go to sleep, slanderous tongues alleged – it’s terrible how malicious people are – that I went to bed with Odette. In any case she took advantage of the slanders to come and bother me, and I thought I might get rid of her by introducing her to Swann. From that moment on she never let me go. She couldn’t spell the simplest word, it was I who wrote all her letters for her.
(V, 339–40)
Odette is a woman about whom tongues wag. She flits from anecdote to anecdote, and the chronicle of her lovers, which Charlus proceeds to rehearse, enhances this sense of multiformity. She is a creature called into being by other people’s desires, fantasies and projections. The renaming of Miss Sacripant at this point in the novel makes her into a passing effect of speech inside an indefinitely loquacious community.
The temporality of these later references and allusions is in one sense very simple. They are chronological markers within the overall teleology of the book. A la recherche du temps perdu is not only ‘about’ time but about the linear process of uncovering new time-truths: the plot leads slowly towards a grandly orchestrated redemptive view, and time envisaged in these terms is emphatically distinguished from the dimension in which hours and days are merely spent, lost or frittered away. The declared direction of the book, until the threshold of its final revelations is reached, is downhill into darkness. It is entirely fitting that the image of Odette should be fuzzied and frittered as the narrative proceeds, and that its repeated appearances should mark out the graduated stages of a much more general decline, for such is the worldly lesson that Proust seeks to impose: things fall apart and the clockwork runs down. The narrator’s journey takes him to an extreme limit, at which decay is visible on every human face and nullity speaks from behind every eye, and it is only when this limit has been reached and its intolerable pain felt that an apocalyptic arrest of time becomes possible.
Yet the book would be a very thin affair if its long, ruminative unfolding were readable only in this way. Proust does of course handle linear time supremely well: the stations on the narrator’s journey provide the book with huge, unmistakable calibrations; questions that need answers in due course find them; causes precede effects; and although the flow of time may almost congeal during a protracted soirée, or be accelerated mercilessly by a sudden recital of marriages and deaths, it is for the most part reliably unidirectional. Events that occur latterly occur only because former events have prepared the way for them. Within subsequence consequence is to be found. The final apocalypse itself is fully motivated by what has gone before, and the buildup to it is presented as a sub-divisible process, a phased dawning of new awareness. Yet the broad intentional structure of the book catches up within itself a dancing array of materials that are not subduable to any overall project. Proust offers his reader a simultaneous web of associations, as well as the undeflected flight of time’s arrow. Across the canvas of the book points of special intensity are scattered, and we are invited by the narrator, who is a virtuoso in such matters, to scan back and forth between them, making improbable connections as we go. Proust’s text rebels against the smooth linear temporality to which his narrator for the most part adheres in the telling of his tale, and incorporates into itself not just the vibrant internal reflections that typify Elstir’s art but its raggedness and its rough patches.
The webs, the tangles and the improvised cross-stitchings that Proust’s writing contains speak not of timeliness or timelessness but of an alternative and glaringly familiar temporality. And, although it would no doubt require topological schemata of great subtlety to model this temporality satisfactorily, its main features can be enumerated with ease. It ordains that past, present and future are composites rather than simples; that recapitulations of the past are projections into the future too; that synchronicity comprises, and may be broken down into, myriad diachronic sequences; that certain time-effects are intelligible only if spatially extended; that parallel universes may be conflated into a single newly conceived space–time continuum; and that any temporally extended system of differences may collapse into an undifferentiated flux. This is the time of human desire, and the time that Proust’s book inhabits sentence by sentence. It is defiantly non-linear, and runs counter both to the plot of the book, and to much of its ‘theory’. If we place Miss Sacripant, or any other elaborately recurring motif, within this alternative temporality we discover not a disconsolate ebbing away of meaning as time passes but a restoration of meaning within a temporal manifold. Odette en travesti becomes not just a static emblem of the desirable woman, but an intersection point in a moving network of desiring pathways. Against the pessimism of linear time and its losses, the book provides us – and not just in its ending, but all through and even in its darkest hours – with an optimistic view of time as connection-making and irrepressible potentiality. This time is not a concept, or a connected series of points, or a fixed scale against which geological epochs or human life-spans can be measured. It is a stuff and there for the handling.
A significant advantage is to be had from thinking of Proust as an artful manipulator of ordinary time rather than as the harbinger of an unusual, specialised or occult temporal vision. By this route more of his text remains readable, and its overall account of time becomes richer and more provoking. Involuntary memory, which is the gateway to Proust’s apocalypse – to his time of redemption – is ordinary enough, of course. The phrase itself would scarcely have enjoyed its remarkably successful career if it had not encapsulated a common experience, and ‘Proustian moments’, like ‘Freudian slips’, would not have entered the vernacular if their import had been in any way obscure. But when it comes to the experience of reading the successive pages of Proust’s novel and taking time over them, involuntary memory is oddly inert and unhelpful. Applying it as a key to the understanding of Proustian time is rather like looking at the working day from the viewpoint of weekends and holidays, or at the lives of plain-dwellers from the neighbouring mountain-tops. The time that is proper to Proust’s long sentences, however, and to his extended episodes and to the long-range patterns of expectation and remembrance which organise the novel as a whole, is both ordinary and extremely complex. Ordinary in that it belongs to the everyday world of mortal, desire-driven creatures, and complex in that its many criss-crossing dimensions are mobile and difficult to construe. Past, present and future are intricately conjoined within sentences, and reconjoined still more intricately during extended narrative sequences. Sentences come to rest upon a recovered sense of propositional fullness and completion, only to have certain of their elements wrested from them and driven into new associative configurations by what follows. The temporality of a narrative which is made from unstable building blocks of this kind is one of continuous scattering and concentration. Temporality is retemporalised endlessly, and time-features that are awkward and obtuse are given special prominence in the fabrication of the text. Snags, discrepancies, prematurities, belatednesses, prophetic glimpses, misrecognitions, and blocked or incongruous memories – these tragi-comical indignities are the mainspring of Proust’s vast fictional contrivance. He finds the plenitude of his book in this epic catalogue of unsatisfactory moments.
Such impure and unsimple ordinary time accompanies the narrator, enfolds him, to the very end of his narrative. When he recounts his culminating discoveries, during which he discerned a celestial exit from loss and waste at last coming into view, Proust’s writing has an enhanced rather than a diminished sense of temporal pulsation:
L’être qui était rené en moi […] languit dans l’observation du présent où les sens ne peuvent la [l’essence des choses] lui apporter, dans la considération d’un passé que l’intelligence lui dessèche, dans l’attente d’un avenir que la volonté construit avec des fragments du présent et du passé auxquels elle retire encore de leur réalité en ne conservant d’eux que ce qui convient à la fin utilitaire, étroitement humaine, qu’elle leur assigne. Mais qu’un bruit, qu’une odeur, déjà entendu ou respirée jadis, le soient de nouveau, à la fois dans le présent et dans le passé, réels sans être actuels, idéaux sans être abstraits, aussitôt l’essence permanente et habituellement cachée des choses se trouve libérée, et notre vrai moi qui, parfois depuis longtemps, semblait mort, mais ne l’était pas entièrement, s’éveille, s’anime en recevant la céleste nourriture qui lui est apportée.
(IV, 451)
The being which had been reborn in me [languishes in] the observation of the present, where the senses cannot feed it [the essence of things] with this food […] as it does in the consideration of a past made arid by the intellect or in the anticipation of a future which the will constructs with fragments of the present and the past, fragments whose reality it still further reduces by preserving of them only what is suitable for the utilitarian, narrowly human purpose for which it intends them. But let a noise or a scent, once heard or once smelt, be heard or smelt again in the present and at the same time in the past, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, and immediately the permanent and habitually concealed essence of things is liberated and our true self, which seemed – had perhaps for long years seemed – to be dead but was not altogether dead, is awakened and reanimated as it receives the celestial nourishment that is brought to it.
(VI, 224)
Proust sings of redeemed time in a language that is still restless and unsubdued. In the first of these sentences a familiar music is to be heard: the syntax continues to interconnect past, present and future, to manipulate memory and expectation, to tease out the paradoxes of desire-time and to pursue a broken path towards propositional fullness. We could almost be back, with the narrator, in the Swanns’ drawing room, or on the Cambremers’ yacht, or in the grievance-free mental half-light of the duchesse de Guermantes. But in the second sentence, which speaks of a past and a present ecstatically dissolved into each other and of a future which promises further increments of delight, this music also sounds. Here too the path is broken, and long. Both sentences end well, with their syntactic pattern closed and completed, and both are hungry for a future: beyond utility a new joy remains to be found; beyond the administering of ‘celestial food’ a new life of wakeful and risk-filled animation remains to be explored. Nothing in these closing pages of the novel shrinks away from the exactions of ordinary time, or of ‘embodied time’ as the narrator now calls it (VI, 449; ‘temps incorporé’ (IV, 623)). Indeed the last cadence of the book, its last well-made proposition, is a call back to the unredeemable temporal process which makes writing possible. At the close, closure is most to be resisted.
There is of course a temporal hierarchy in Proust’s book. The time-patterning that holds the whole novel together is more impressive and does more work than the patterning that holds the individual sentences together, whatever the structural similarities the two orders display. ‘Ordinary time’ is much more ordinary on certain occasions than on others. And there are mountain-tops from which the pains and penalties which beset time-dwellers do seem to disappear. But Proust weaves between levels, distrusts summits, and has a special fondness for the small temporal effects that are to be found within the ‘rank vegetal proliferation’ of a literary text.
