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

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.

II (#ulink_62279a6b-b970-5a6c-ab19-81cf6b39112f)

Time (#ulink_62279a6b-b970-5a6c-ab19-81cf6b39112f)

Wolą falszywą nutę od muzyki sfer.

WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

Out of tune suits them better than the music of the spheres.

From first word to last, Proust’s novel is about time. Everyone says so, including Proust himself. Within the dense texture of the narrator’s soliloquy, the theme rings out clamorously. Inside his accustomed voice, there is a time voice – urgent, serious, elevated, expansive, and given to sudden bursts of semi-philosophical speculation – whose sound is fashioned, as telephone voices are, by a sense of occasion and a need to impress. The passage of human time is a deadly business, the narrator often reminds his reader, and if the tide of meaning is ever to turn again from ebb to flow the individual must hold himself in readiness to seize time’s wonders. Time is no laughing matter. It is the fundamental enigma of living substance, and the artist who solves it has indeed found the philosopher’s stone.

The empirical evidence for this view of the novel is irresistible. Where do its principal landmarks come from if not from its temporal obsession? Le Temps retrouvé culminates in long passages of impassioned reverie that are doubly devoted to the time dimension: they are essays on time, almost free-standing disquisitions on its alternative registers and intensities, but they are also episodes in the long history of a fictional character’s consciousness and closely woven into its characteristic rhythms. What is more, Proust’s plot, while having many strands and many denouements, turns upon a central temporal conundrum to which, in the end, after countless diversions and delays, a convincing answer is found. On the first page of the novel, Proust takes aim at a very remote target, and with devastating accuracy he eventually strikes it. In due course, time will be redeemed. A lost past will be recovered, and the dying creature’s messianic hopes will be fulfilled.

Time, being highlighted in such ways both by Proust the would-be essayist and by Proust the consummate plotter, has seemed to many admirers of the book to be so clearly its main concern that other candidates for this office have scarcely been worth considering. Time matters to the book precisely because it is a ‘big’ controlling theme, calls forth an impressive philosophical diction and offers a satisfying overview of Proust’s narrative architecture. His last word (‘Temps’) distils an immutable quintessence from the imperfect world of temporal process to which his first word (‘Longtemps’) had referred.

Yet there is something not quite right about this view. It answers too many questions, and levitates too obligingly above the restless detail of Proust’s writing. A la recherche du temps perdu is one of those literary works that spell out at length the terms in which they are to be interpreted and understood. It can be intimidating and coercive when it does this: its author seems to have such clear-cut ideas about his own motives and long-range goals that only a fool or a wilful eccentric would seek other paths to understanding. The problem, however, is that time as presented by the narrator in his abstractly philosophising vein is too big for the ordinary time-bound business of reading Proust. The more instructive time becomes as an overall structuring idea, the more likely it is to disappear from the fabric of individual sentences and paragraphs. Yet it is here, down among Proust’s intricate propositional structures with their outrageous embeddings, suspensions and redundancies, that his boldest pieces of temporal architecture are to be found. Already in the second sentence of the book, his grammatical building materials are beginning to acquire a promising elasticity: ‘Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n’avais pas le temps de me dire: «Je m’endors.»’ (I, 3; ‘Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself: “I’m falling asleep’” (I, 1)). Two time-scales are in force at once here, and these set ‘real’ against ‘virtual’ time, things that happened against things that might have happened but did not. A proposition belonging to one time-world nests inside a proposition belonging to another, and between them a galvanic spasm passes.

Theodor Adorno, in his ‘Short Commentaries on Proust’ (1958), wrote with great force about the relationship between the big-time temporality of Proust’s novel and spasmodic local time-events such as these. Surely, he began his essay by suggesting, a reader of any work as ‘rich and intricate’ as Proust’s novel must needs retreat from its detail at times and seek to gain an overview. And should not criticism help him in this endeavour? For Adorno, however, this view of criticism was based on a misperception of Proust’s work:

In Proust, however, the relationship of the whole to the detail is not that of an overall architectonic plan to the specifics that fill it in: it is against precisely that, against the brutal untruth of a subsuming form forced on from above, that Proust revolted. Just as the temperament of his work challenges customary notions about the general and the particular and gives aesthetic force to the dictum from Hegel’s Logic that the particular is the general and vice versa, with each mediated through the other, so the whole, resistant to abstract outlines, crystallizes out of intertwined individual presentations. Each of them conceals within itself constellations of what ultimately emerges as the idea of the novel. Great musicians of Proust’s era, like Alban Berg, knew that living totality is achieved only through rank vegetal proliferation. The productive force that aims at unity is identical to the passive capacity to lose oneself in details without restraint or reservation. In the inner formal composition of Proust’s work, however – and it was not only on account of its long, obscure sentences that Proust’s work struck the Frenchmen of his time as so German – there dwells, Proust’s primarily optical gifts notwithstanding and with no cheap analogy to composition intended, a musical impulse. It is evidenced most emphatically in the paradox that Proust’s great theme, the rescue of the transient, is fulfilled through its own transience, time.

What I shall be proposing is that the ‘rank vegetal proliferation’ of Proust’s text is the most puzzling and rewarding site for his experiments with time, and that the transient materials which Proust accumulates and adroitly manipulates sentence by sentence as his long tale unfolds are pregnant with meaning of a particularly uncomfortable sort. Such details not only make the overview difficult to achieve but tell a story about time that is alarmingly at odds with the official story told by Proust’s narrator in his didactic moods.

We must be thankful that it is not necessary to possess time concepts of particular subtlety in order to have time experiences that are complex and moving. Miracles of temporal construction-work can occur in a bar or a bus queue; and one does not need to activate the notions of retrospection and anticipation, and still less their rhetorical counterparts analepsis and prolepsis, to become aware that the living present of an individual’s experience is put together, concocted, from residues of the past and conjectural glimpses of the future. But even ‘past’ and ‘future’ sound too conceptual, too thought-about, for the rough-and-tumble of lived time, which can be made from whatever materials are to hand. This is a case in which the sensuous immediacy of art can remind us of something even more immediate-seeming that takes place in ordinary experience. Three brief examples will provide a route back to this feature of daily life, and to Proust as one of its unacclaimed guardians.

In the first movement of the Eroica symphony, Beethoven has one of the horns begin the recapitulation prematurely. Some unfathomable eagerness in the ranks of the orchestra, or so it sounds, has produced a solecism, and the listener is obliged to hesitate for a moment between two temporalities, one of them correct, proper and opportune and the other hasty and disjointed. In the closing sequence of The Spider’s Stratagem (1970), Bertolucci’s film adaptation of the Borges story ‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’, a man waits at a deserted railway station: a voice repeatedly announces over the loudspeaker that his train will be delayed, and grass sprouts between the tracks. In Washington, DC, on 13 February 1962, at the height of the North American craze for Brazilian music, Stan Getz plays ‘Desafinado’: towards the end of his solo he delays the return of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s out-of-tune tune by producing ghostly, near-miss alternatives to it. He flirts with his hearers: you can have your tune, but not yet.

What all three cases have in common is that time-effects of considerable complexity are made palpable in the expressive medium of the art form involved. There will be stories in the background, of course, and cunning calculations, and appropriate technical concepts, but the artistry of the artist in each instance lies in his ability to stand clear of all this and treat time as directly manipulable stuff: in the shocking proximity of grass and metal, in the sound of the horn arriving early or of the tenor saxophone arriving late, we rediscover the time of our desires and fears. Artists may choose at moments to confer special privileges on belated or precocious intensities of feeling, but the flexed, syncopated temporal medium that they thereby reveal belongs not to art in particular but to time-dwelling human creatures at large: we live like this, now too early and now too late.

If I insist upon the ordinariness that underlies these exquisite artistic contrivances, it is because I am conscious of an unusual burden that Proust places upon his reader. He expects his reader to proceed slowly, patiently, and with wide-ranging attention. In his characteristic long sentence, with its welter of subordinate material, he obliges us to pursue a number of associative chains at once and expects us all uncomplainingly to accumulate, and then at intervals deploy, large quantities of information. Self-contained propositional events take place against a relatively undifferentiated semantic mass. These qualities of the Proust text seem so clearly to side with contrivance, and against simplicity, that readers may feel themselves summoned to worship in a temple of high art, and somehow required to leave their awkward everyday selves at the door. The presence in the book of a psychology and a metaphysics of time may enhance this impression and suggest that time is an issue in Proust only when his text announces it as such. But ‘time-effects’, as I have been calling them, are present when the key theoretical ideas are veiled, or absent altogether. And such effects, which belong to the individual sentences of the work long before they are incorporated into any larger narrative scheme, are worth itemising. By doing so, we can begin to see how the ‘bottom-up’ approach recommended by Adorno might pay special dividends: from the temporality of the individual sentence, through that of the paragraph sequence or the self-contained narrative episode, we may ascend gradually to the temporality of the whole novel as prescribed in its doctrinal passages or enacted in its time-intoxicated plot, and yet not imagine as we rise that this arrangement of levels is a simple hierarchical one. Proust is too venturesome and too perverse to allow us merely to read upwards towards a promised apex.

The following is a sentence from Du côté de chez Swann in which the grand temporal design of the book’s plot is kept at a safe distance, and in which explicit time-theoretical references are of the thinnest. The narrator describes the Vivonne at the moment when its stream begins to accelerate on emerging from the grounds of a local property:

Que de fois j’ai vu, j’ai désiré imiter quand je serais libre de vivre à ma guise, un rameur, qui, ayant lâché l’aviron, s’était couché à plat sur le dos, la tête en bas, au fond de sa barque, et la laissant flotter à la dérive, ne pouvant voir que le ciel qui filait lentement au-dessus de lui, portait sur son visage l’avant-goût du bonheur et de la paix.

(I, 168)

How often have I watched, and longed to imitate when I should be free to live as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lay flat on his back in the bottom of his boat, letting it drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky gliding slowly by above him, his face aglow with a foretaste of happiness and peace!

(I, 204)

The overall design of the plot may be absent from this sentence, but the underlying emotional teleology of the book is not. The narrator describes his earlier childhood self as driven by an imagined future beatitude. Once the shackles of parental supervision have been untied, he will enjoy the free exercise of his desires and bask negligently in each new-found bliss. Literary ambition already has a part to play in this quest. Just as Dante hastened to rejoin Virgil when he strode on ahead of him in the Inferno (XXIII, 145–8), so I, the narrator has just announced, would run to catch up with my parents on the towpath. And Virgil’s destiny later in the Commedia, we may remember, was to be left behind … Such references are common in these early stages of the novel, and one happy vision of the future certainly involves a free and self-replenishing literary creativity, to be exercised perhaps on a Dantesque scale. But what is striking about this sentence is not so much its pre-echo of a later outcome as its choice in the here-and-now of a hard path towards ‘happiness and peace’.

At least three time-scales are present. The oarsman sinks back languorously after hard work with arms and legs; the narrator enjoys himself when he is finally able to break free from a constraining family; and Proust’s sentence arrives at its final visionary affirmation after much syntactic travail. No problem arises from the fact that two futures – ‘his’ and ‘mine’ – are being narrated simultaneously, nor from their being consigned to an epoch that is already long past at the moment of narration: we regularly consult other people’s hopes in order to understand our own, and will readily own that our past was as future-driven as our present now is. The problem – and the pleasurableness – of sentences on this model lies in their insistent intermixing of past, present and future. Their syntax and tense-pattern deal in prematurity and belatedness to the near-exclusion of linear succession. ‘Que de fois j’ai vu … un rameur, qui … portait sur son visage l’avant-gout du bonheur et de la paix’: such is the straightforward subject-predicate chronology of the sentence if one extracts it from the text, but, left inside the text, this chronology is subject to turbulence and fracture. The narrator blurts out the general import of his fantasy (‘quand je serais libre de vivre a ma guise’) before the object of his fantasy has been named, and then, having pre-empted his lolling oarsman, holds him back from his moment of abandonment and repose with a series of short staccato phrases.

The temporality of Proust’s sentence is insistently heterogeneous: moment by moment, the flow of time is stalled, and unpacked into its backward- and forward-looking ingredients. The reader who does not hesitate is lost: ‘j’ai vu’, ‘j’ai désiré’ look as if they are co-ordinated and indeed are; ‘filait’ and ‘portait’ look as if they are co-ordinated and are not. Reading forwards involves backtracking, and checking, and measuring one possible syntactic pathway against others; the mutual attraction of ‘filait’ and ‘portait’ has first to be felt and then repudiated. The past of such sentences is constantly being revisited and remade. This is an extremely simple case of Proustian time in one of its typical textual incarnations: the reader reaches an anticipated goal, but only after a series of delays and only by an unexpected route. What is happening is that flux and dérive are threatening, but not in the end seriously damaging, propositional structure. Indeed, such structure, eventually repossessed and reproclaimed, emerges not just as well-made and obedient to grammatical rule but as the bearer of sensuous satisfaction: completing the syntactic pattern is strictly synchronised with the achievement of ecstasy. Diversion, detour, drift and discontinuity, all the untidy syncopations of lived time, are to be resolved into a sublime timeliness. The force of such writing is not at all in a theory of time, clearly not, but in its power of performance, and its readiness to pass the raw materials of fantasy through a strenuous process of syntactic dismantling and reassembly. By way of such artifice, the narrative rejoins the ordinary panic and disarray that are proper to desire-time.

Musicalised sentences of this kind, in which internal relations multiply, are in some ways especially suited to the rapt, supercharged nature description at which Proust was so adept. The mobile surfaces of the natural world, and the play of light upon them, and the slow, ineluctable processes of organic growth or decay, are themselves a stylistic lesson and may call forth from the writer an imitative tribute. What could be more natural than a prose which teemed with inner voices and fluent transformations? Yet Proust is a caustic social observer as well as a devoted dweller among fields and streams, and his syntax does not desert him when his attention turns to the human bestiary of the salon or the seaside hotel.

In this sentence from Sodome et Gomorrhe, the narrator begins to explain why he had felt obliged to refuse a tempting invitation from Mme de Cambremer. The invitation had arrived at a time when grief at his grandmother’s death had suddenly been revived:

Et certes il y a seulement deux jours, si fatigué de vie mondaine que je fusse, c’eût été un vrai plaisir pour moi que de la goûter transplantée dans ces jardins où poussaient en pleine terre, grâce à l’exposition de Féterne, les figuiers, les palmiers, les plants de rosiers, jusque dans la mer souvent d’un calme et d’un bleu méditerranéens et sur laquelle le petit yacht des propriétaires allait, avant le commencement de la fête, chercher dans les plages de l’autre côté de la baie, les invités les plus importants, servait, avec ses vélums tendus contre le soleil, quand tout le monde était arrivé, de salle à manger pour goûter, et repartait le soir reconduire ceux qu’il avait amenés.

(III, 164)

And indeed only two days earlier, tired as I was of social life, it would have been a real pleasure to me to taste it, transplanted amid those gardens in which, thanks to the exposure of Féterne, fig trees, palms, rose bushes grew out in the open and stretched down to a sea often as blue and calm as the Mediterranean, upon which the hosts’ little yacht would sail across, before the party began, to fetch the most important guests from the places on the other side of the bay, would serve, with its awnings spread to shut out the sun, as an open-air refreshment room after the party had assembled, and would set sail again in the evening to take back those whom it had brought.

(IV, 193)

Again, certain of the time-relations here are straightforward: this is the future I would have enjoyed, in prospect and in actuality, if I had received the invitation earlier and if the pain of my bereavement had not returned. Futures, even unrealised ones, have their history. But the copious elaborations of the sentence sketch a much more impulsive and diversified passage of time too. Time is measured by criss-crossing spatial journeys, held together in a single propositional structure. Two kinds of transplantation occur at Féterne, the Cambremers’ château: exotic plants have been taken there and flourish thanks to its favourable position, and exotic social creatures, seasonally removed from the capital to this seaside neighbourhood, are gathered up into a shimmering matinée. Transport is provided for guests of appropriate rank or status, and the morning and evening journeys of the Cambremer yacht trace a thoroughly socialised map of local space and time. This is the double portrait of a society and one of its members, and the syntax of the sentence fuses into a single drama the advance and recoil of the narrator’s sympathy for his would-be hosts. A single proposition scans, enumerates, explores lateral relationships, arranges improbable encounters, allows fantasy to take wing, yet reaches finally a point of narrative and syntactic closure: the party is over, the yacht bears the privileged guests away, and a grand amplificatory linguistic mechanism is brought to rest.

In so far as Proust reconstructs the temporality of daily living, then, we may already safely say that syntax has a main role in providing his account with a sense of phenomenological fullness. The particular ingenuity of his syntax in this respect is that it brings together into one complex pattern a continuous forward-flung intention and a simultaneous host of retrospective or sideways vistas. It seeks stability and finality, celebrates these qualities with its emphatic final cadences, yet leaves the door open too: riddles remain to be solved, curiosity to be satisfied, and a larger narrative syntax to be pursued. A balance must be kept between completion and a necessary provisionality. The reader must be fed, yet kept hungry.

Even during the narrator’s lengthy philosophical or psychological discussions of time, even as he deploys his rich vocabulary of chronological terms, his syntax is often quietly performing a quite different and seemingly unauthorised set of tasks. The last of my three single-sentence examples is thoroughly ‘time-theoretical’ in that it discusses a curious human present largely washed clean of its own past. It is taken from Le Côté de Guermantes and concerns Mme de Guermantes’s slightly improbable incapacity to bear grudges and nurse grievances:

Non seulement elle ne s’attardait pas à des explications rétrospectives, à des demi-mots, à des sourires ambigus, à des sous-entendus, non seulement elle avait dans son affabilité actuelle, sans retours en arrière, sans réticences, quelque chose d’aussi fièrement rectiligne que sa majestueuse stature, mais les griefs qu’elle avait pu ressentir contre quelqu’un dans le passé étaient si entièrement réduits en cendres, ces cendres étaient elles-mêmes rejetées si loin de sa mémoire ou tout au moins de sa manière d’être, qu’à regarder son visage chaque fois qu’elle avait à traiter par la plus belle des simplifications ce qui chez tant d’autres eût été prétexte à des restes de froideur, à des récriminations, on avait l’impression d’une sorte de purification.

(II, 676)

Not only did she waste no time in retrospective inquiries, in hints, allusions or ambiguous smiles, not only was there in her present affability, without any harking back to the past, without the slightest reticence, something as proudly rectilinear as her majestic stature, but any resentment which she might have felt against someone in the past was so entirely reduced to ashes, and those ashes were themselves cast so utterly from her memory, or at least from her manner, that on studying her face whenever she had occasion to treat with the most exquisite simplicity what in so many other people would have been a pretext for reviving stale antipathies and recriminations, one had the impression of a sort of purification.

(III, 440)

The comedy of this sentence, and the subcutaneous malice which permeates its apparent act of homage, stem from the disproportion between the supposed candour of the duchesse and the hard labour that her virtue seems to entail. Far from being a natural grace of personality, or a fortunate psychological tic, her freedom from grudges is achieved by a triple process of incineration, grinding and scattering, and may even then be an effect of social self-presentation rather than an emotional reality. The narrator puts his syntax to work in the same showily laborious vein: here are all the afterthoughts and retrospective mental retouchings that the duchesse knows nothing of, all deliciously listed at the beginning of the sentence, and wrapped up in an incriminating double negative; and at the end of the sentence, with full cadential force, here is the strange moment of catharsis by which all gritty residues are removed from the scene. It should not be necessary for this region of her soul to be purified over time, for purity is its native condition, but some demon in Proust’s writing wants all states, moral or physical, to become transformational processes.

Again, two presentations of time are in play at once in sentences of this kind, and one of them, on the face of it, has a superior claim to generality. Certain mental types enjoy an almost magical ability to forget, just as others are haunted by memories or given to fantastical anticipations of the future, and for a moment Mme de Guermantes has become the emblem of the first group, and a caractère almost in the manner of La Bruyère. The narrator’s proposition, if we distil it in this way, is simple, self-limiting and cogent. But the second presentation, which belongs to the long, undistilled scansional sentence we in fact possess, has its own general force. It has of course the roughness and waywardness of temps vécu. It is assembled from a procession of discrete Janus-faced moments, and the recrudescence inside it of past into present cannot be legislated for or predicted. Yet this presentation has as much of a logic to it as the first: the interplay that it creates between the backwards and forwards glances of the time-bound individual, between his slowness and his precipitation, between spinning a yarn and calling a halt – and especially this interplay as controlled by a single dilated propositional structure – begins indeed to resemble a universal key to the understanding of human time, applicable on terms of strict equality to oarsmen, yachtsmen, noblewomen and novelists.

Proust’s novel contains innumerable complex sentences that are built in this way, and many that call for more intensive scanning activity on the reader’s part than does any one of these three specimens. His time-drama is in his individual sentences and in the underlying structures they reiterate. But these models of timeliness and epistemic success achieved in the teeth of distraction and anxiety do not simply sit as outliers on the margins of Proust’s narrative. They are the carriers of that narrative, and the internal echoes that give certain isolated sentences their combined quality of cohesion and dispersal are to be heard passing between the larger units of the work too. The temporality of propositions is constantly being caught up into larger narrative segments, and retemporalised in the process. Once the reader has penetrated some distance into the book, it begins to acquire its own internal dynamic of past, present and future relationships. The book allows its reader to relive, in the present moment of reading, pasts that it alone has created for him, and to breathe an air of multiple potentiality that is native to this slowly unfolding textual fabric. It is to this larger pattern of recurrences and expectations that I shall now turn, attending principally to a single highly charged nexus of motifs.

Among secrets and enigmas in the Proust world, those that involve sexuality have a special prestige. They are more resistant to the narrator’s powers of decipherment than other mysteries of social life, and solutions to them, once discovered, are more likely to falter and decay. Such questions as ‘which were his real preference, men or women?’ or ‘what did she really do in her younger years?’ have a lingering atmosphere of infantile curiosity about them in this novel, yet prompt the narrator to a series of ingenious experimental studies in cognition: Proust echoes Freud’s account of the child’s wish to know about sex as the prototypical form of all later intellectual endeavour. What is surprising, however, about Proust’s handling of sexual secrets is not simply that so much of his plot turns on their solution but that the panic they inspire should be entertained on such a lavish scale. The uncertainties which surround Uncle Toby’s wound in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) or the hero’s parentage in Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) are positively short-winded in comparison with those surrounding the sexuality and sexual prehistory of Odette, Albertine and Saint-Loup. In simple time-and-motion terms, the quantities of intelligent attention that these investigations require of the narrator are calamitous – when they are not merely farcical. A crucial temporal framework in this book is the one in which sexually driven individuals strive to find things out about each other. And in this pursuit, their expenditure of time is reckless.

I have chosen from among the numerous scenes of sexual enquiry that are to be found in the early volumes of the novel an elaborate intellectual comedy which prefigures much that is to be fully explored later. This is the episode in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs where the narrator discovers a watercolour portrait of ‘Miss Sacripant’ in Elstir’s studio and is thwarted in his desire to be introduced to the ‘little band’ of young girls (II, 203–20; II, 493–514). At least four currents of feeling are running in parallel here; the narrator wants: to meet the girls, and expects Elstir to help him do so; to find out more about Elstir’s art, and about the subject of the portrait; to respect the rhythm of Elstir’s working day rather than press his own claims upon the painter’s time; and, above all, to seem casual and disengaged in the eyes of the girls themselves. The attempt to achieve some sort of equilibrium between these incompatible wishes involves him in a distended cost-benefit analysis, and a delirium of excuses and explanations. Four stories are being told simultaneously in this episode, which is a tour de force of polyphonic invention, and any one of them may suddenly gather bulk at the expense of the others. Slowness in one narrative may permit a new access of speed in another; opening up a gap in one causal sequence may permit a gap in another to be closed. For example, between the last rekindling of the narrator’s hope that an introduction can be arranged and the definitive extinction of that hope, for today at least, Elstir proceeds with tiresome deliberation to complete his own work: he alone has the power to usher the narrator into the force-field of the eternal feminine, but devotes himself instead to the lesser magic that is his painting. The narrator not only describes this delay, but performs a complementary delaying manoeuvre of his own: a long excursus on self-love and altruism, and on the little heroisms of ordinary life, intervenes between Elstir’s last brush-stroke and the beginning of their walk together (II, 208–9; II, 499–501). Material that is in itself dignified and serious-minded intrudes hilariously upon the narrator’s sentimental adventure; within the unfolding drama, an elaborate moral discussion has the status of a simple accidental misfortune.

By now Proust’s narrative architecture has become dangerously elastic. Time may be measured as a connected series of physical events, sense-perceptions, and mental promptings – ‘Le soir tombait; il fallut revenir; je ramenais Elstir vers sa villa …’ (II, 210; ‘Dusk was falling; it was time to be turning homewards. I was accompanying Elstir back to his villa’ (II, 502)) – or by the key ideas which fuel speculation, rumination or reasoning, or by the inflections of prose discourse itself. In a passage of this kind, Proust moves with gaiety and assured improvisatory skill from one system of measurement to another. Thinking, sensing, acting, writing are given a common pulse, and made into the co-equal modes of a single, encompassing transformational experiment. A sentence which begins with the words ‘Le soir tombait’ can end well, and with no note of impropriety, upon a supposition enclosed in a hypothesis: ‘[les jeunes filles qui] avaient l’air de ne pas me voir, mais sans aucun doute n’en étaient pas moins en train de porter sur moi un jugement ironique’ (II, 210; ‘[the girls] who looked as though they had not seen me but were unquestionably engaged in passing a sarcastic judgement on me’ (II, 502)). The discrepancy between public time, measurable by events, and mental time, measurable by the development of an individual’s ideas or by his changing intensities of feeling, is laid bare by Proust. Dramatic opportunities abound in the disputed territory between outside and inside, and Proust’s fluid transpositions between outer and inner time-scales are thoroughly ironic in character. These are the events, the narrator says; this, he adds, is how they look if you change your viewpoint on the scene; and this again is how they look if you remove yourself from the scene altogether and concentrate on the larger tendency of my tale. Yet despite all the attention paid by the narrator to those local repositionings of himself and his addressee, Proust’s reader is still encouraged to read ‘for the plot’, to find things out, and still invited to be seduced by secrets in the footsteps of the hero. And the scale on which this kind of reading occurs is, as I have said, very large indeed. Elstir’s painting travels back and forth both in event-time and in mind-time; it is a tight cluster of time-effects, and a time-measuring device for use in the book as a whole.