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

After the ecstasy of difference without end comes the quiet satisfaction of a connecting and unifying web.

The narrative breathes out, and the world is many. It breathes in again, and the world is one. Look at the book from one angle, and it is overflowing with characters and incidents. Look at it from another angle, and the characters begin to merge, while the incidents in which they figure begin to resemble the after-shocks caused by a very small group of primal events. The narrator of the novel, far from being an impersonal manipulator of this rhythm, is himself caught inside it. At one moment, he is a loose compendium of characteristics. His voice contains many voices. He is a magpie and a mimic. He veers this way and that, and takes the colouring of the company he keeps. At the next moment, he seems to stand above the social flux, to be an individual, a singularity, a legislator, the helmsman of an artistic project that is going somewhere and must be kept on course. Proust’s narrator is both chorus and soloist, a confusion of appetites and a single long-breathed desire.

Yet the sound of breathing that is to be heard in Proust’s book comes not simply from the larger rhythms of its plot or from the periodic concentration and dispersal of the narrator’s sense of selfhood, but from a language that is unique within the French literary tradition for its alternating copiousness and restraint. Proust’s language now takes risks and now plays safe. It is full of lexical curiosities and of residual deposits left by earlier literary works, but also does many ordinary things in plain words. It cultivates elegance, ornament, obliqueness and bel canto and then switches to linguistic rough trade. It speaks of exquisite intimations that can occur only in a half-light and only on the margins of consciousness and then babbles of chamber-pots, leg-irons, aeroplane factories and policemen.

A diction of this kind, especially when it is combined with a literary syntax that seems to offer a working model of speculative thought, has an optimistic underlying message for the reader. Proust’s writing – the fantastication of it, the fine-spun texture of it, the power, pace and percipience of it – is a song of intellectual gladness and an unwearying tribute to the muse of comedy. If there were no stubborn philosophical problems in the world, and no war, famine, disease or torture in it either, all thinking might resemble a gracious and disinterested Proustian paragraph. In the present sorry state of the world we may find ourselves returning to Proust for a new sense of mental largeness and potentiality. From within our dull, platitudinous everyday language, we may go back to Proust, as if to a great poet, to be reminded of the wonders that such language, under pressure, can still perform. Proust’s novel is a three-thousand-page incantation, an insolently protracted exercise in word-magic, a tonic, a restorative for any reader who has gone tired and listless under a late twentieth-century tide of verbal waste-matter. Perhaps Proust really is Europe’s last great writer, as some of his slogan-prone enthusiasts have claimed.

Yet Proust’s novel has another, less encouraging, story in it. Seeking to localise this, we might be tempted to say, in the words of Shakespeare’s Troilus, that the narrator’s ‘desire is boundless but his act a slave to limit’, and there would be evidence for this view. Proust’s protagonist, for all his wishfulness, seems to have limited energy and willpower, and an ailing sense of purpose. In the course of a very long tale told about himself, he does not do much. In society, he is immobilised by the spectacle of other people’s busy posturings. In the inner realm, he sees bright futures ahead of him, but often sinks back into an anxious torpor at the very moment when decisive action is required to actualise any one of those possible worlds. He havers. He maunders. He drugs himself with retrospection. Surely the narrator’s vision of a boundless, millionfold, endlessly self-transforming landscape of personal experience is a compensatory fantasy of precisely the kind that one would expect from someone who spent too long lazing indoors, refusing to pull himself together, venture forth and seize the day.

Well, yes. This is partly right. Proust’s narrator is a comic creation, and he belongs, with Goncharov’s Oblomov (1859), a variety of Chekhovian males, the hero of Svevo’s As a Man Grows Older (1898) and Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), to the company of those who, while seeming merely indolent and indecisive to the impatient observer, are withheld from action by what the connoisseur will recognise as an admirable reticence and pudeur. A la recherche du temps perdu is a comedy of hypertrophied appetites and shrunken deeds. But Proust is a tragedian, too, and the tragic vision that his novel sets forth is one in which desire itself is a slave to limit. Desire in Proust teases us with the promise of an unceasing plasticity, but underneath the changing array of its objects it is all the while subject to fixation. Early configurations of sexual feeling continue to haunt adult experience. Phobias, obsessions and fetishes keep turning the narrator’s prospective, forward-flung imaginings back towards the needs, the injuries and the blighted pleasures of infancy. Desire keeps on repeating itself. It nags and needles, and will not let the past go. And Proust’s lengthy book, even while it glitters with fantasy and invention, insists upon this bounded and fixated quality: a desolate pattern of recurrence, a sense of pre-ordained pain and dissatisfaction, governs the procession of its narrative episodes. All love affairs fail, and fail in the same way. All journeys end in disappointment. All satisfactions are too little and too late. Death picks off the narrator’s admired mentors one by one, rekindling and reinforcing his childhood feelings of abandonment.

In what follows, then, my travels will take me back and forth inside Proust’s novel rather than see me shuttling between my home and Cabourg, or between Cabourg and Balbec. As I travel I shall seek to recreate, in schematic and accessible form, the characteristic rhythms of the novel’s unfolding. Proust’s great work has ‘big’ themes, and its path-breaking author has one very old-fashioned way of handling these: his characters will announce a topic, warm to it, and hold forth upon it recklessly. I have chosen a cluster of these topics as my chapter-titles, not so much because Proust’s characters have wise things to say about time, sex or death, although they often have, as because the ebb and flow of Proust’s attention can be clearly observed against these featureless horizons. Such matters, singled out, have the further advantage of allowing us to look beneath the large tidal movements of the book and to rediscover the cross-currents and counter-rhythms that mark the individual Proust paragraph, and are the hallmark indeed of a speculative style that remains sui generis.

Let me not, however, sound too high-minded about the reflections gathered here. I do still long to feel the sand and shingle of the Cabourg shore between my toes, and I have not entirely given up hope of seeing the little band materialised before me as I wander there in the cold, Northern spray. But in the meantime Proust’s gritty, breezy and salty book has many wonders, and to these I now turn.

I (#ulink_9a149b1e-81c5-598d-aade-3fce96d5c7c3)

Self (#ulink_9a149b1e-81c5-598d-aade-3fce96d5c7c3)

mi 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: