Читать книгу Proust Among the Stars: How To Read Him; Why Read Him? - Malcolm Bowie - Страница 9
Оглавлениеmi kirjavaista tähiksi taivaalle,
ne tahiksi taivaalle.
Kalevala
All that in the egg was mottled
Now became the stars in heaven.
The narrator of A la recherche du temps perdu is a splendid example of the human type that Jane Austen called ‘the imaginist’. This was her word for the person who spent too much time fantasising and seemed always to be in flight from real events and binding obligations. Yet where Emma Woodhouse and Catherine Morland are gradually cured of their imaginative excesses and wishful misperceptions, Proust’s character is presented not simply as an untreatable case, but as one whose power of fantasy, even when debilitating, is still essentially a strength. And while Austen’s imaginists devote themselves to personal relationships, paying special attention to matters of rank, taste and marriageability, Proust’s narrator returns tirelessly to the structure, texture, density, consistency and continuity of the isolated human self. He imagines selfhood lost, and found, and again lost.
His questions about personal identity sound strict and soluble when they are formulated in philosophical or psychological terms: is the self one or many, concentrated or dispersed, continuous or fragmented, a rule-governed psycho-physical entity with its own integrative capacities or a side-effect of natural language in daily use? But for all his fluency in the handling of such concepts, the narrator’s ruling passion is for images, or for abstractions that have an exposed nerve of imagery running through them. He looks to nature in his search for figurative representations of selfhood, and has a special fondness for the planets and stars. Albertine is a nebula, the little band a constellation; the face of an actress seen in close-up is a Milky Way, and family relationships are the scattered segments of a single exploding star. Whether he looks outwards to his sexual partner or the social group or inwards to the tissue of his own memories and desires, his characteristic task is that of ‘modelling nebulae’ (III, 874; V, 425). All his heavenly configurations are poised undecidably between coherence and dispersal, just as the real nebulae themselves may contain powerful intimations of structure (here a crab, there a spiral) while continuing to impress us by their sheer nebulosity. Problems posed in these terms can have and need have no solutions. The Proustian imaginist leads a nomadic life. He is at home inside his comet-tail of images.
Modern computational scholarship has revealed that the word moi, as noun or pronoun (‘self’, ‘me’ or ‘myself’), occurs on average 1.1996 times per page in Proust’s novel. Few readers, of course, will be surprised by this scrap of statistical information, for the novel is still widely thought of as being concerned above all else with the splendours and miseries of the self-absorbed human individual. Even those who dislike the notion of ‘self’, and think of it as the sign of a dangerously unhistorical attitude to the study of the human subject, are likely to grant Proust’s vast and intricate discussion of the notion an important historical place: the modern, secular, psychological moi, launched upon its spectacular European career in the sixteenth century, reaches in Proust a moment of extraordinary power and authority. For a moment, indeed, the human self and its vicissitudes become the essential subject-matter of art. And even if Proust’s novel, in its insistent and sometimes deranged talk of the moi, contains the seeds of the self’s decay, his achievement is none the less a splendid one. The notion of self may seem antiquated, and it may often be used to draw attention away from the interpersonal and social worlds in which the human sense of personal identity is constructed, but in Proust’s account the notion is flexible, hospitable to experience, thoroughly immersed in society, and obdurately problematic.
The narrator wonders at the beginning of Le Côté de Guermantes how the human personality acquires its improbable power of endurance. How is it, for example, that, having once fallen into deep sleep, one is able to become again the individual one once was? Why does one not wake up in the morning as someone else?
On appelle cela un sommeil de plomb, il semble qu’on soit devenu, soi-même, pendant quelques instants après qu’un tel sommeil a cessé, un simple bonhomme de plomb. On n’est plus personne. Comment, alors, cherchant sa pensée, sa personnalité comme on cherche un objet perdu, finit-on par retrouver son propre moi plutôt que tout autre? Pourquoi, quand on se remet à penser, n’est-ce pas alors une autre personnalité que l’antérieure qui s’incarne en nous? On ne voit pas ce qui dicte le choix et pourquoi, entre les millions d’êtres humains qu’on pourrait être, c’est sur celui qu’on était la veille qu’on met juste la main.
(II, 387)
We call that a leaden sleep, and it seems as though, even for a few moments after such a sleep is ended, one has oneself become a simple figure of lead. One is no longer a person. How then, searching for one’s thoughts, one’s personality, as one searches for a lost object, does one recover one’s own self rather than any other? Why, when one begins again to think, is it not a personality other than the previous one that becomes incarnate in one? One fails to see what dictates the choice, or why, among the millions of human beings one might be, it is on the being one was the day before that unerringly one lays one’s hand.
(III, 93–4)
Seeking the self as one might seek a lost object is here submitted to one limitation only, but that is a daunting one. The object cannot not be found. Still baffled by sleep, still dispersed and nebulous, the newly awake individual homes in upon, and efficiently reassumes, his accustomed form. He cannot do otherwise. Descriptions of this kind are not unfamiliar in Proust’s book, and they offer an optimistic allegory of its overall ontological project. After battlement, understanding; after dispersal, concentration and self-knowledge.
Le Temps retrouvé fulfils the promise of passages like this. It sets forth a tableau vivant in which the evanescent multitude of the narrator’s previous selves at last finds anchorage; in which every lost object is found; in which the conflicting dispositions of the human individual, and the endless varieties and sub-varieties of human passion, are assigned their place in an inclusive artistic design (‘comme une église […] comme un régime […] comme un monde’ (IV, 610); ‘like a church […] like a medical regime […] like a new world’ (VI, 431)); and in which the narrator, speaking on behalf of all men and women from the vantage-point of that design, can at last affirm as a source of certainty and clear moral vision the very self that had previously been so mobile and so scattered. Le Temps retrouvé describes a simple chain reaction: the sudden ecstatic rediscovery of a past that had been thought forever lost reveals the temporal architecture of the self, the invariant substratum that until then had been present but unrecognised beneath its fluid and accidental surface forms; this ontological discovery triggers an artistic one, which in turn creates an exhilarating sense of moral purpose. And this culminating sequence of mental events can easily be thought of as providing Proust’s plot with its denouement and the reader with a global answer to countless earlier riddles that may have teased her. In the slow unfolding of the book, she will have noticed a bewildering plurality of narrating selves, and may well have wondered what authorisation Proust had, what strange dispensation from the ordinary requirements of verisimilitude, when he brought together, in his portrayal of a supposed single individual, saint and scoundrel, eagle and dove, liar and exemplary truth-teller. The narrator in his last triumphantly stable form becomes a capacious container for all the waywardness, inconsistency and self-division that have marked his passage through the text.
There seems to me something unsatisfactory about any reading of the book that does not resist as well as endorse Le Temps retrouvé in the performance of this harmonising and integrating role. Proust’s last volume is a guide for the perplexed and does indeed illuminate many corners left dark by earlier volumes. Moreover the supremely accommodating selfhood of Le Temps retrouvé, far from merely altering retroactively what has gone before, confirms and blazons forth a notion that has already made many premonitory appearances. We need a guiding, stabilising notion of human individuality with which to battle our way through the intricacies of Proust’s text, and, late in the book but also earlier, Proust provides us with one. But what do we lose when we adhere too closely to the ontological telos of the book? We lose, I shall be suggesting in what follows, a whole range of paradoxes, dissonances and unusual consonances, and with them a vein of disturbing moral speculation. We lose also the sheer oddity of Proust’s final volume. The reader who has felt his or her perplexities dissolve as the general teleological pattern of the book emerges is invited to look again, and more fondly, at certain of its perplexing details. It could be that Proust was in need of a resonant exit-speech when he promoted involuntary memory to its crowning role, and that his narrator’s celebrated ‘quest’ in fact gives no more than a lightweight intellectual superstructure and an air of righteous striving to a mental adventure of a less than public-spirited kind.
The strangeness of this adventure, and the extravagant expenditure of time and ingenuity into which it periodically leads the narrator, may be observed with special clarity in Le Côté de Guermantes. Among many passages in which the supposedly overriding ontological programme of the novel is not only absent but unthinkable even as a premonition, I have chosen the scenes of jealousy and recrimination between Saint-Loup and Rachel in which the narrator figures as a singularly elastic terzo incomodo (II, 456–81; III, 176–207). The psychological drama here belongs quite as much to the narrator as to the enraged and acrimonious lovers whom he observes. Indeed his monologue is punctuated by silences on the one hand and by cascading repetitions on the other, and in each case displays the symptoms of an urgent undeclared passion. When a chance encounter with two of Rachel’s former fellow-prostitutes threatens to reveal to Saint-Loup more of her past than she would care to have him know, it is the anxiously repetitious narrator rather than either of his companions who dominates the scene:
Il ne fit pas qu’entrevoir cette vie, mais aussi au milieu une Rachel tout autre que celle qu’il connaissait, une Rachel pareille à ces deux petites poules, une Rachel à vingt francs. En somme Rachel s’était un instant dédoublée pour lui, il avait aperçu à quelque distance de sa Rachel la Rachel petite poule, la Rachel réelle, à supposer que la Rachel poule fût plus réelle que l’autre. Robert eut peut-être l’idée alors que cet enfer où il vivait, avec la perspective et la nécessité d’un mariage riche, d’une vente de son nom, pour pouvoir continuer à donner cent mille francs par an à Rachel, il aurait peut-être pu s’en arracher aisément et avoir les faveurs de sa maîtresse, comme ces calicots celles de leurs grues, pour peu de chose. Mais comment faire?
(II, 460)
He not only glimpsed this life, but saw also in the thick of it a Rachel quite different from the one he knew, a Rachel like those two little tarts, a twenty-franc Rachel. In short, Rachel had for the moment duplicated herself in his eyes; he had seen, at some distance from his own Rachel, the little tart Rachel, the real Rachel, if it can be said that Rachel the tart was more real than the other. It may then have occurred to Robert that from the hell in which he was living, with the prospect and the necessity of a rich marriage, of the sale of his name, to enable him to go on giving Rachel a hundred thousand francs a year, he might easily perhaps have escaped, and have enjoyed the favours of his mistress, as the two counter-jumpers enjoyed those of their girls, for next to nothing. But how was it to be done?
(III, 181)
In a sense, of course, the narrator is simply adopting Saint-Loup’s uncertainties in the act of describing them, and allowing his own eloquence to be dulled by a passion that can do no more than impotently repeat the beloved’s name. But there is too much writing of this kind for such an explanation to be fully satisfactory. The economic dimension of this passage has already been set forth, and in similarly stammering terms: the ‘Rachel … Rachel’ refrain to be found here continues a lengthy ‘vingt francs … vingt francs’ refrain from a few pages earlier (II, 457; III, 177–8), and this trifling amount – Rachel’s prostitutional price – has been insistently played off against the excessive amounts that her lover must now expect to pay in order to keep her, or that he might now be tempted to pay in order to uncover her secrets. These calculations in francs proliferate in the text at this point and acquire a fantasmatic life of their own. And while it is not surprising to be told that passion has a price-structure and is subject to market forces, it is perfectly alarming to find these home truths reiterated and rephrased over several pages. A delirious monetary system has invaded the text and is busily translating its characteristic psychological idiom into cash terms. Why? What was it that worried the narrator so much, once upon a time, and that now so unsettles the telling of his tale?
On the face of it, this is an elaborate Proustian conceit on the familiar themes of duplication and duplicity. Rachel is not what she seems. Or rather, like her namesake in La Juive (1835), the Halévy-Scribe opera from which the narrator extracts for her the nickname ‘Rachel quand du Seigneur’ (I, 567; ‘Rachel when from the Lord’ (II, 175)), she is two people at once and bears two different prices. Scribe’s Rachel is both Jew and Christian; Proust’s is both sexual commodity and an idolised lady ‘of great price’. But the social and financial dédoublement of Rachel prefigures another play of alternating perspectives, and one with which the novel is henceforth to be hugely preoccupied: the play between heterosexuality and homosexuality. And the martyrdom that awaits Scribe’s heroine in the closing scene of La Juive is to be assumed not by the modern Rachel of A la recherche but by the narrator himself, whose path towards knowledge of human sexuality is to be, in its later stages, slow, cruel and disconsolate. The disarray of the narrative during this episode, and its feverish fluctuations of tone, are so marked yet so little explained that we read on ‘for the plot’, demanding to know more.
The revelation that Saint-Loup is a homosexual prompts, it will be remembered, the long, melancholy coda of Albertine disparue. At the end of a volume in which an immitigable sense of loss has become the ground of consciousness – in which Albertine’s flight and death bring uncontrollably to the narrator’s mind the absences with which she had tormented him when present and alive – the discovery that Saint-Loup is ‘comme ça’ (IV, 241; ‘one of those’ (V, 762)) provides consciousness with its culminating loss, its final unthinkable extremity. At the very moment when it was impossible to imagine things worse, worse they became. The vulgar monosyllabic ‘comme ça’ rings out as a portent and a malediction. And, in a sentence from Albertine disparue that in many editions of the novel is used to bring the volume to a close, the narrator’s memory of himself, Saint-Loup and Rachel at a restaurant table moves him to tears that the ratiocinative texture of his monologue can do nothing to explain: ‘en repensant à ces histoires du lift et du restaurant où j’avais déjeuné avec Saint-Loup et Rachel j’étais obligé de faire un effort pour ne pas pleurer’ (IV, 266; ‘when I thought about those stories of the lift-boy and of the restaurant in which I had had lunch with Saint-Loup and Rachel, I was obliged to make an effort to restrain my tears’ (V, 793)); in a novel that is plotted and paced with astonishing skill throughout, the Saint-Loup sub-plot stands out as a particularly ingenious tale of mystery and suspense. In part, the beauty of its denouement lies simply in the light that the narrator’s banal discovery sheds upon earlier incidents in the novel, and in the outrageous expanse of text that separates behavioural effect from psychological cause. Saint-Loup behaves oddly during the restaurant scene and those that follow – he is by turns craven and defiant towards Rachel, and twice resorts to fisticuffs in her company – and it is only after 1,500 pages that this behaviour is at last seen as coherently motivated. This is architectonic plotting of a kind that Tom Jones (1749) and Tristram Shandy (1759–67) made familiar, although Proust’s edifice contains cantilevers, suspensions and buttresses still more audacious than those of Fielding or Sterne.
But this denouement is fine and imposing in another way too. The withheld weeping upon which Albertine disparue ends is reminiscent of Tennyson’s
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
The narrator’s tears are a symptom without a cause, or with a cause – a ‘divine despair’, as one might indeed call it – that is much too large to have exact explanatory force. They are lacrimae rerum provoked by the memory not of Priam slain but of a tiff and a street brawl. At this level, the ending does not so much solve earlier mysteries as echo and reinforce the narrator’s earlier puzzlement. An abiding residue of doubt surrounds the Rachel episode. This has to do not with Saint-Loup’s motives but with the narrator’s own, and not with a single sexual discovery but with the anxious speculation on sexuality for which the narrator is a perpetual vehicle. In the company of Saint-Loup and Rachel, he cannot say what is going on, for they kindle in him too many disparate desires. And selfhood, if it is here at all, lies not in a stable, adjudicating narrative voice but in the versatile play of appetite that the narrator displays. He is voluble and laconic, intrusive and discreet. He sides with man against woman and woman against man. He aligns himself both with the homosexual desire of the ‘promeneur passionné’ by whom Saint-Loup is accosted in this scene and with Saint-Loup’s seemingly wounded and seemingly heterosexual pride in refusing unwelcome advances. The ‘self’ on offer here is a vacancy awaiting substance and structure, a mobile force-field in which the desires of others meet and are inflected, a rapid sequence of reactive and imitative gestures.
The relationship between the narrator at the start of Le Côté de Guermantes and the narrator at the end of Albertine disparue is a strong one and creates a powerful effect of internal cohesion within the novel. But this effect is not produced by recreating at the later point a personality, an identity, a temperament or a pattern of connected psychological motifs that was already present earlier. It comes from the buttressing of one fragmentary psychological portrait against another of the same kind, and from a sense of perplexity and dispossession that becomes more pronounced as the plot unfolds.
What makes Proust’s polymorphous narrator such an improbable textual construction in these central volumes of the novel is the cult of scientific precision that he adheres to even as he records his losses and confusions. Not only is the narrator’s volatile and almost self-free consciousness not nebulous, but Proust, in describing its characteristic motions and the behaviour in which they issue, repeatedly turns to the exactitude of the exact sciences. When Saint-Loup unleashes blows upon a shabbily dressed sexual opportunist, the narrator reports having seen not fists but a non-human display of matter and kinetic energy:
tout à coup, comme apparaît au ciel un phénomène astral, je vis des corps ovoïdes prendre avec une rapidité vertigineuse toutes les positions qui leur permettaient de composer, devant Saint-Loup, une instable constellation. Lancés comme par une fronde ils me semblèrent être au moins au nombre de sept. Ce n’étaient pourtant que les deux poings de Saint-Loup, multipliés par leur vitesse à changer de place dans cet ensemble en apparence idéal et décoratif. Mais cette pièce d’artifice n’était qu’une roulée qu’administrait Saint-Loup et dont le caractère agressif au lieu d’esthétique me fut d’abord révélé par l’aspect du monsieur médiocrement habillé, lequel parut perdre à la fois toute contenance, une mâchoire, et beaucoup de sang.
(II, 480)
suddenly, as an astral phenomenon flashes through the sky, I saw a number of ovoid bodies assume with a dizzy swiftness all the positions necessary for them to compose a flickering constellation in front of Saint-Loup. Flung out like stones from a catapult, they seemed to me to be at the very least seven in number. They were merely, however, Saint-Loup’s two fists, multiplied by the speed with which they were changing place in this – to all appearance ideal and decorative – arrangement. But this elaborate display was nothing more than a pummelling which Saint-Loup was administering, the aggressive rather than aesthetic character of which was first revealed to me by the aspect of the shabbily dressed gentleman who appeared to be losing at once his self-possession, his lower jaw and a quantity of blood.
(III, 205–6)
The moment of misrecognition is arrested and lingered over, but not because the mental processes involved are complex ones. Indeed the first goal of this description seems to be that of expelling mind from the scene in favour of a pure science of behaviour: wishes, goals and intentions are replaced by the muscular movements of the human body and these then become the professional property of the astronomer, the geometer and the arithmetician.
This holding back of concern for the motivation and moral status of human action is of course a mainspring of much Proustian wit, and is often to be seen at work on a large scale. The social performances of the Guermantes clan become a fencing match, in which their cold, steely gaze turns to real steel (II, 736; III, 513). During the Doncières episode, Saint-Loup retells the history of human warfare as an exquisite tale of bloodless strategic schemes transmitted from age to age (II, 407–15; III, 118–28). Mme Verdurin, appalled at the mention of a ‘bore’, is transformed into a lifeless piece of civic sculpture (I, 254; I, 311). Legrandin’s sycophancy, as he bows to a local landowner’s wife in Combray, is perfectly expressed by, and dissolved into, the ‘undulation of pure matter’ that passes through his animated rump (I, 148; ‘ondulation de pure matière’ (I, 123)). In all these cases, the pleasures of scansion, measurement and formal description are rediscovered in the jungle of social life. The narrator removes himself from the savage contest of human desires into a handsomely equipped observatory from which greed, lust, ambition, violence and hatred may be viewed as so much matter extended in space. But Proust’s countless sudden excursions into natural science, for all the intellectual clarity that each of them individually displays, do not exert an integrative and centralising force upon his phenomenology of selfhood. His optical expertise is applied in what appears as a conscientiously indiscriminate fashion. This is not Newton’s optics, in which the machinery of vision guarantees the intelligibility of the universe, although Proust’s scientific phrasing often has an unmistakably Newtonian ring. It is an impatient, desiring optics, intent upon multiplying the opportunities for human sight and enlarging the field of vision, and readily able to accept that each visual constellation is short-lived. Stars become fists, and fists, once recognised as instruments of aggression, trace for a moment a further, more abstract, astronomical pattern. And then the whole contraption is lost from view.
A la recherche contains innumerable moments of intense vision that have no cumulative scientific force and pay no ontological dividend. Proust dramatises the brevity and singularity of these moments with a succession of images, running through the entire book, in which the eye itself becomes an object of sight. Legrandin’s eye receives the first of his many wounds when the limits of his social success begin to be revealed:
je vis au milieu des yeux bleus de notre ami se ficher une petite encoche brune comme s’ils venaient d’être percés par une pointe invisible, tandis que le reste de la prunelle réagissait en sécrétant des flots d’azur.
(I, 125–6)
I saw in the middle of each of our friend’s blue eyes a little brown nick appear, as though they had been stabbed by some invisible pin-point, while the rest of the pupil reacted by secreting the azure overflow.
(I, 152)
Later in ‘Combray’, when the narrator’s own worldly ambition is at stake, his eye undergoes a similar but more pleasurable violence from the eyes of Mme de Guermantes:
en même temps, sur cette image que le nez proéminent, les yeux perçants, épinglaient dans ma vision (peut-être parce que c’était eux qui l’avaient d’abord atteinte, qui y avaient fait la première encoche, au moment où je n’avais pas encore le temps de songer que la femme qui apparaissait devant moi pouvait être Mme de Guermantes), sur cette image toute récente, inchangeable, j’essayais d’appliquer l’idée: «C’est Mme de Guermantes» sans parvenir qu’à la faire manoeuvrer en face de l’image, comme deux disques séparés par un intervalle.
(I, 173)
at the same time, I was endeavouring to apply to this image, which the prominent nose, the piercing eyes pinned down and fixed in my field of vision (perhaps because it was they that had first struck it, that had made the first impression on its surface, before I had had time to wonder whether the woman who thus appeared before me might possibly be Madame de Guermantes), to this fresh and unchanging image, the idea: ‘It’s Madame de Guermantes’; but I succeeded only in making the idea pass between me and the image, as though they were two discs moving in separate planes with a space between.
(I, 210)
In the scene with Rachel, Saint-Loup’s eyes record his sudden switches of mood: ‘il était tellement rempli par son indignation contre le danseur, qu’elle venait adhérer exactement à la surface de ses prunelles […] une zone disponible et souple parut dans ses yeux […] ses yeux étincelaient encore de colère’ (II, 479–80; ‘he was so full of his indignation with the dancer that it clung to the very surface of his eyeballs […] a zone of accessibility appeared in his eyes […] his eyes were still blazing with anger’ (III, 204–6)). In such cases as these the eyeball is a transmitter rather than a receiver of information, and a new set of hallucinatory anatomical and physiological features are ascribed to it: the eye may release coloured secretions, emit or receive arrows or pins, contain notches or unsuspected empty zones, and be coated in an adhesive glaze. The windows of the soul and the ‘speaking’ eyes of popular fiction have here been superseded by an entirely reorganised organ of sight. The price to be paid for this varied repertory of more-than-ocular effects, this uncanny ability of the eye to materialise mental states upon its outer surface, is extreme brevity and discontinuity in the messages it emits. For the eye, like any other object of sight, is a moving configuration of planes, volumes and textures, and it has almost no retentive power. Albertine’s eyes – ‘qui […] semblent faits de plusieurs morceaux’ (III, 599; ‘which […] seem to be composed of several pieces’ (V, 96)) – are an unreadable encyclopaedia of fears, impulses, schemes and deceptions, while those of la princesse de Nassau – ‘yeux stellaires, semblables à une horloge astronomique’ (IV, 557; ‘stellar eyes, like an astronomical clock’ (VI, 363)) – are a flickering chronicle of her remembered and half-remembered sexual encounters. This dismanding and reassembly of the visual apparatus is a source of pathos at certain moments in the novel and of creative affirmation at others; the eye is a miniature world that now slips from the perceiver’s grasp, now offers him a new speculative adventure. But in either event, Proust’s account speaks of perception without a core, of daily pattern-making that no higher pattern guides.
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:
A la tendresse, à la verduresse
Artichauts tendres et beaux
Arti-chauts
Tender and green,
Artichokes tender and sweet,
Ar … tichokes
is dizzily overdetermined at this point in the novel. Tenderness has begun to retreat from the human to the vegetable world, and artichokes now possess a freshness that the relationship between Albertine and the narrator does not. The intoned phrases rising from the street connect modern Paris to its medieval past, commerce to religious observance, popular song to elevated musical culture, and eating to the arts and sciences of mankind. This is one of many points at which Proust’s text, so richly apparelled in the language-based sciences of the trivium, suddenly becomes aware of the role that the sciences of number and measurement also play in its analytic fabric. His quadrivium is to be found not simply in the scientific imagery of the novel but in the calculating intelligence with which seemingly remote areas of experience are brought into conjunction. But where arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy were, for the Pythagorean tradition, akin to one another as co-equal and mutually confirming manifestations of Number, for Proust no underlying principle firmer than that of analogy unites them. The ‘stellar eyes’ of la princesse de Nassau, like Saint-Loup’s constellated fists, promise not an ultimate congruence between the minute and the vast but an endless journey from one moment of resemblance, and one relativistic act of measurement, to the next. And this journey in turn promises not a philosophical emancipation from the passions but a new way of measuring their force. Speaking of his infatuation with Mme de Guermantes, the narrator recalls: ‘Pour moi ce n’était plus seulement les étoiles et la brise, mais jusqu’aux divisions arithmétiques du temps qui prenaient quelque chose de douloureux et de poétique’ (II, 419; ‘For me it was no longer the stars and the breeze alone, but the arithmetical divisions of time that assumed a dolorous and poetic aspect’ (III, 132)).
Proust’s scansions often cross vast distances, and move with an assured step between microcosm and macrocosm. They show him to have been a metaphysical wit possessed of a strong liking for physics, and an ‘interdisciplinarist’ beyond the dreams of the modern university. In this passage from Le Temps retrouvé, for example, a future astronomy of social life is sketched:
si dans ces périodes de vingt ans les conglomérats de coteries se défaisaient et se reformaient selon l’attraction d’astres nouveaux destinés d’ailleurs eux aussi à s’éloigner, puis à reparaître, des cristallisations puis des émiettements suivis de cristallisations nouvelles avaient lieu dans l’âme des êtres.
(IV, 570)
If in a period of twenty years […] the conglomerations of social groups had disintegrated and re-formed under the magnetic influence of new stars destined themselves also to fade away and then to reappear, the same sequence of crystallisation followed by dissolution and again by a fresh crystallisation might have been observed to take place within the consciousness of individuals.
(VI, 379)
For a moment the natural and human sciences have become intelligible to each other, and a single dynamism – that of alternating dispersal and concentration – is seen to govern the stars in their courses, the growth of crystals, the structure of the human mind, and Mme Verdurin in her successive salons. This is a vision both of order within the cosmos and of the ungovernable plurality of mental worlds. The self reels between an outer world that is too big for it, and an inwardness that has too many transient shapes.
In La Prisonnière, this plurality had already received its loftiest encomium, and had been quite disconnected from any focusing device or principle of order:
Des ailes, un autre appareil respiratoire, et qui nous permissent de traverser l’immensité, ne nous serviraient à rien. Car si nous allions dans Mars et dans Vénus en gardant les mêmes sens, ils revêtiraient du même aspect que les choses de la Terre tout ce que nous pourrions voir. Le seul véritable voyage, le seul bain de Jouvence, ce ne serait pas d’aller vers de nouveaux paysages, mais d’avoir d’autres yeux, de voir l’univers avec les yeux d’un autre, de cent autres, de voir les cent univers que chacun d’eux voit, que chacun d’eux est; et cela nous le pouvons avec un Elstir, avec un Vinteuil, avec leurs pareils, nous volons vraiment d’étoiles en étoiles.
(III, 762)
A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.
(V, 291)
This interlacing of optics, astronomy and music, which is also an indefinite sequence of displacements between small and vast, not only promises no selfhood to the artist and to those who follow his example, it presents selfhood as an impediment to creative perception. The only conception of self that can usefully remain in force is that of a discontinuous itinerary, leading towards but never reaching that moment of plenitude at which the entire range of possible world-forms would stand revealed and realised. When each human being has become a hundred universes, who will then be the gentleman, the liar, the thief or the novelist? Such visions of an ideally dispossessed and characterless human individuality occur often as Proust’s novel moves grandly towards the apotheosis of self upon which Le Temps retrouvé ends, as if those last moments of potency and moral resolve could be attained only by way of an emptiness within the self resembling that of interstellar space. The ‘«nous» qui serait sans contenu’ (III, 371; ‘a we that is void of content’ (IV, 440)) of which the narrator had spoken in Sodome et Gomorrhe has now become an essential precondition for artistic creativity.
What is set out as a credo in La Prisonnière has been present from an early stage in the narrator’s practical performances both as a social observer and as an introspective. The narrator makes his presence felt by his special habit of removing himself from the scene, becoming weightless, ‘without content’, sine materia. In this as in so many other respects, Swann is his model. Swann passes through social gatherings without leaving his imprint. At the Saint-Euverte soirée in ‘Un Amour de Swann’, he is an all-transforming eye. Grooms become greyhounds as he looks at them, and guests become carp. The domestic staff are a living embodiment of European art history: some of them seem to have emerged three-dimensionally from paintings by Mantegna, Dürer or Goya, and others are animated statues from classical antiquity or from the workshop of Benvenuto Cellini. The assembled males arrange themselves into a procession of highly individualised monocles (I, 317–22; I, 388–94). This vertiginous outward scene is matched by an inconstant inner world thinly disguised as a unified self:
ce que nous croyons notre amour, notre jalousie, n’est pas une même passion continue, indivisible. Ils se composent d’une infinité d’amours successifs, de jalousies différentes et qui sont éphémères, mais par leur multitude ininterrompue donnent l’impression de la continuité, l’illusion de l’unité. La vie de l’amour de Swann, la fidélité de sa jalousie, étaient faites de la mort, de l’infidélité, d’innombrables désirs, d’innombrables doutes, qui avaient tous Odette pour objet.
(I, 366)
what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity. The life of Swann’s love, the fidelity of his jealousy, were formed of the death, the infidelity, of innumerable desires, innumerable doubts, all of which had Odette for their object.
(I, 448)
Whether the narrator looks outwards or inwards, he studies hard to become centreless and characterless in this way and to become, in Keats’s phrase, ‘a thoroughfare for all thoughts’.
The morally resolved artist into whom the narrator is transformed at the end of the novel is himself an improbable construction. He has of course been foreshadowed on numerous earlier occasions, as have the moral principles on which he is to base his critique of social man and woman. That he is eventually to be an altruist, a respecter of individual rights, a truth-teller and a trenchant prosecutor of corruption and folly has already been half-promised by the narrator’s elaborately textured social observation. What is more, the narrator has been shown to be capable both of energetic moral commitment and of firm self-criticism for his failures to act virtuously. But as a moralist he has other characteristics too, and these leave us only partially prepared for Proust’s exalted final perspectives.
Gilbert Ryle, in his essay on Jane Austen, speaks ‘with conscious crudity’ of moralists as belonging either to the Calvinist or to the Aristotelian camp. While members of the first group think of human beings ‘as either Saved or Damned, either Elect or Reject, either children of Virtue or children of Vice’, those of the second pursue distinctions of an altogether more delicate kind:
the Aristotelian pattern of ethical ideas represents people as differing from one another in degree and not in kind, and differing from one another not in respect just of a single generic Sunday attribute, Goodness, say, or else Wickedness, but in respect of a whole spectrum of specific week-day attributes. A is a bit more irritable and ambitious than B, but less indolent and less sentimental. C is meaner and quicker-witted than D, and D is greedier and more athletic than C. And so on. A person is not black or white, but iridescent with all the colours of the rainbow; and he is not a flat plane, but a highly irregular solid.
To some extent this may seem to fit the facts of Proust’s narrator’s case well. After all, he possesses to a remarkable degree the ability to make contrastive moral judgements, and he deploys his contrasts with such ingenuity that his discourse often seems dedicated to continuity – ‘iridescence’ – rather than discreteness in the handling of moral notions. Besides, few of Proust’s admirers would wish to remove him from the company of Aristotle and Jane Austen if this meant handing him over to Ryle’s dourly dichotomous Calvin. Yet a crucial quality of the moral life as lived by Proust’s narrator is entirely missing from Ryle’s paradigm. This is the quality that could be called supererogatory risk-taking; it involves finding limits and then seeking to transgress them; and it calls for naughtiness and mischief on a grand scale. In the pursuit of new knowledge, the narrator must be prepared to traverse uncharted moral territories and to improvise for himself a value-system commensurate with this or that moment of epistemological zeal or imaginative extravagance.
At the simplest level, telling the truth to a truth-resistant audience may involve lying. In A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the narrator reports having given his parents an unverified account of the origins and the antiquity of the Swanns’ staircase. Without doing so, it would have been impossible for him to persuade them of its true worth: ‘[m]on amour de la vérité était si grand que je n’aurais pas hésité à leur donner ce renseignement même si j’avais su qu’il était faux’ (I, 496; ‘[my] regard for the truth was so great that I should not have hesitated to give them this information even if I had known it to be false’ (II, 89)). In the turbulent world of the child and his family, here is an early intimation of the ‘glorious lie’ that is art. And once the pursuit of new knowledge has been conceived of as an ethical imperative, lying itself – workaday lying, not the superior mendacities of art – may begin to reveal unsuspected virtues: ‘Le mensonge, le mensonge parfait […] est une des seules choses au monde qui puisse nous ouvrir des perspectives sur du nouveau, sur de l’inconnu, puisse ouvrir en nous des sens endormis pour la contemplation d’univers que nous n’aurions jamais connus’ (III, 721; ‘The lie, the perfect lie […] is one of the few things in the world that can open windows for us on to what is new and unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses for the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known’ (V, 239)). We must be prepared for the possibility that a new science, which is also a science of newness, may bring with it a new morality.
Closely related to this, there is another form of supererogation towards which the narrator is continually drawn. Those who are in pursuit of pleasure – and especially those whose pleasures are familiarly thought of as perverse, aberrant or anti-social – are themselves pursued by the narrator’s relentless, inquisitive gaze. Sado-masochism, for example, which is discussed and theatricalised in numerous ways, from the Montjouvain episode of ‘Combray’ (I, 157–63; I, 190–98) to the scenes in Jupien’s brothel in Le Temps retrouvé (IV, 388–419; VI, 147–85), provides an exacting test for the moralist’s powers of discrimination. In each of these extended episodes, which together place an elaborate frame around the many plainer accounts of cruel sex that are to be found in the inner volumes, the narrator’s crisp expressions of disapproval free him to enjoy the pleasures of voyeurism guiltlessly. But the achievement of pleasure is no more his main goal than is the defence of rectitude. An ambitious moral experiment is in progress, and the narrator follows a clear experimental principle in conducting it: let my perception of life in, say, Jupien’s establishment be as delicately calibrated as that which I would bring to bear upon any other complex scene of social communication and commerce.
His experimental results are presented with relish. Charlus, emerging in considerable discomfort from the flagellation chamber, is still able to inspect Jupien’s assembled staff with a discriminating eye and ear:
Bien que son plaisir fût fini et qu’il n’entrât d’ailleurs que pour donner à Maurice l’argent qu’il lui devait, il dirigeait en cercle sur tous ces jeunes gens réunis un regard tendre et curieux et comptait bien avoir avec chacun le plaisir d’un bonjour tout platonique mais amoureusement prolongé […] Tous semblaient le connaître et M. de Charlus s’arrêtait longuement à chacun, leur parlant ce qu’il croyait leur langage, à la fois par une affectation prétentieuse de couleur locale et aussi par un plaisir sadique de se mêler à une vie crapuleuse.
(IV, 403–4)
Although his pleasure was at an end and he had only come in to give Maurice the money which he owed him, he directed at the young men a tender and curious glance which travelled round the whole circle, promising himself with each of them the pleasure of a moment’s chat, platonic but amorously prolonged […] Everybody […] seemed to know him, and M. de Charlus stopped for a long time before each one, talking to them in what he thought was their language, both from a pretentious affectation of local colour and because he got a sadistic pleasure from contact with a life of depravity.
(VI, 165–6)
The narrator takes his distance from Charlus, but not too much distance, for he has already described in propria persona and with a similar devotion to piquancy and local colour, the enlarged field of sexual opportunity that the war had created in Paris. Canadians were valued for the charm of their ambiguous accent, but ‘[à] cause de leur jupon et parce que certains rêves lacustres s’associent souvent à de tels désirs, les Ecossais faisaient prime’ (IV, 402; ‘The Scots too, because of their kilts and because dreams of a landscape with lakes are often associated with these desires, were at a premium’ (VI, 164)). But tracing out this spectrum of libidinal intensities is not a task for the mere voluptuary or tourist, for an equally differentiated value-spectrum crosses it at every turn. Although sadomasochistic transactions of the kind in which Jupien specialises can scarcely be thought of as possessing, in themselves, a complex moral content, the larger social world of the brothel can. Indeed its content is presented as strictly – iridescently – continuous with that of ‘society’ itself. In this low-life world the narrator finds again the hypocrisies, fidelities, betrayals and occasional unadvertised acts of philanthropy that are the volatile stuff of salon life, and he also finds ample new material with which to extend his discussion of such topics as lying, self-deception and envy. In the moral as in the epistemological domain, the narrator is a seeker after variety and novelty, and urges himself forward to the moment of completion – when the last possible modulation of the moral life will have become audible. He is not only a pluralising eye, a self constituted from all other selves, but an optimistic surveyor of human conduct – one who expects to discover new notions of virtue and vice at every point of the compass.
Such dreams of plurality and plenitude were of course common among Proust’s contemporaries. Busoni – to take a strong but relatively neglected example – lamented in his Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music (c. 1911) that so much in the Western musical tradition, from tonality itself to the standard notational system and the mechanics of keyboard instruments, seemed to want to substitute discreteness for continuity and avoid hearing the true harmony of nature: ‘How strictly we divide “consonances” from “dissonances” – in a sphere where no dissonances can possibly exist! … Nature created an infinite gradation – infinite!’ Proust hears the true music of moral judgement and takes the risks appropriate to its pursuit. No act of judging can be final, for the continuous gradations of conduct and character flow on. It is not surprising, therefore, that after an adventure so protracted and so full of risk he should wish to stage an apocalypse in the last pages of his book. One could scarcely imagine a better reward at the end of it all than a single choice to make, a single project to execute, a single self to reassume and an overriding moral value to defend.
But where does the novel end? With the narrator’s self-discovery, with the death in battle of Saint-Loup, or with the wartime night sky over Paris that each of them contemplates?
Je lui parlai de la beauté des avions qui montaient dans la nuit. «Et peut-être encore plus de ceux qui descendent, me dit-il. Je reconnais que c’est très beau le moment où ils montent, où ils vont faire constellation, et obéissent en cela à des lois tout aussi précises que celles qui régissent les constellations car ce qui te semble un spectacle est le ralliement des escadrilles, les commandements qu’on leur donne, leur départ en chasse, etc. Mais est-ce que tu n’aimes pas mieux le moment où, définitivement assimilés aux étoiles, ils s’en détachent pour partir en chasse ou rentrer après la berloque, le moment où ils font apocalypse, même les étoiles ne gardant plus leur place? Et ces sirènes, était-ce assez wagnérien, ce qui du reste était bien naturel pour saluer l’arrivée des Allemands, ça faisait très hymne national, avec le Kronprinz et les princesses dans la loge impériale, Wacht am Rhein; c’était à se demander si c’était bien des aviateurs et pas plutôt des Walkyries qui montaient.» Il semblait avoir plaisir à cette assimilation des aviateurs et des Walkyries et l’expliqua d’ailleurs par des raisons purement musicales: «Dame, c’est que la musique des sirènes était d’un Chevauchée! Il faut décidément l’arrivée des Allemands pour qu’on puisse entendre du Wagner à Paris.» […] à certains points de vue la comparaison n’était pas fausse.
(IV, 337–8)
I spoke of the beauty of the aeroplanes climbing up into the night. ‘And perhaps they are even more beautiful when they come down,’ he said. ‘I grant that it is a magnificent moment when they climb, when they fly off in constellation, in obedience to laws as precise as those that govern the constellations of the stars – for what seems to you a mere spectacle is the rallying of the squadrons, then the orders they receive, their departure in pursuit, etc. But don’t you prefer the moment, when, just as you have got used to thinking of them as stars, they break away to pursue an enemy or to return to the ground after the all-clear, the moment of apocalypse, when even the stars are hurled from their courses? And then the sirens, could they have been more Wagnerian, and what could be more appropriate as a salute to the arrival of the Germans? – it might have been the national anthem, with the Crown Prince and the princesses in the imperial box, the Wacht am Rhein; one had to ask oneself whether they were indeed pilots and not Valkyries who were sailing upwards.’ He seemed to be delighted with this comparison of the pilots to Valkyries, and went on to explain it on purely musical grounds: ‘That’s it, the music of the sirens was a “Ride of the Valkyries”! There’s no doubt about it, the Germans have to arrive before you can hear Wagner in Paris.’ In some ways the simile was not misleading.
(VI, 83–4)
In some ways the simile was not misleading, but in others it was. Proust has here transferred from the narrator to Saint-Loup the task of recapitulating, in a burlesque manner, many of the narrator’s own metaphorical habits and, in particular, his stargazing, his inventive play with the quadrivium, and his hesitation between explosion and fixity. A sudden new relationship between music and astronomy is glimpsed – one in which measurement and pattern-making are caught up in the machinery of modern warfare. Saint-Loup is continuing to aestheticise violence as he had during the Doncières episode, but he is also prolonging, and recasting in millennial terms, a mode of perception that Proust’s narrator has displayed throughout the novel. Aerial combat produces new constellations, new displays of matter and kinetic energy, and these are in direct line of descent from the countless ‘astral phenomena’ that the narrator had previously recorded. Astral aircraft rise above the mere carnage of war, rather as Halévy’s exquisite salon melody in ‘Rachel quand du Seigneur’ rises above the impending brutality that Scribe’s text describes.
In transferring these images to Saint-Loup, Proust is of course preparing the way for the ‘real’ apocalypse of the book and for the unimpeachable depth and seriousness of artistic perception and moral concern that the narrator, alone among its central characters, is eventually to acquire. Saint-Loup in becoming the supremely witty artist of scattered selfhood, the inventor of momentary geometries and ever-changing optical effects, leaves the way open for the narrator, that nebulous modeller of nebulae, to become a single self at last. But the clarity and complexity that the book’s earlier images of dispersal possess cannot simply be removed from the record by the last fortified version of selfhood upon which the narrator reports. On the contrary, those earlier explosions and starbursts have such imaginative authority that they may prove to be the feature of the book that we remember best and cherish most. If so, the centralised and resolved self on which the novel ends may be seen not as a redemption but as one momentary geometry among many others.
