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

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.