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

The image of ‘Miss Sacripant’ – who, it emerges after a long delay, is the youthful Odette dressed as a boy – is subjected to a barrage of reinterpretations, and gradually becomes a hypnotic sexual icon. The initial description of the portrait already hints at the uncontainable fecundity of the image:

La blancheur du plastron, d’une finesse de grésil et dont le frivole plissage avait des clochettes comme celles du muguet, s’étoilait des clairs reflets de la chambre, aigus eux-mêmes et finement nuancés comme des bouquets de fleurs qui auraient broché le linge. Et le velours du veston, brillant et nacré, avait çà et là quelque chose de hérissé, de déchiqueté et de velu qui faisait penser à l’ebouriffage des œillets dans le vase. Mais surtout on sentait qu’Elstir, insoucieux de ce que pouvait présenter d’immoral ce travesti d’une jeune actrice pour qui le talent avec lequel elle jouerait son rôle avait sans doute moins d’importance que l’attrait irritant qu’elle allait offrir aux sens blasés ou dépravés de certains spectateurs, s’était au contraire attaché à ces traits d’ambiguïté comme à un élément esthétique qui valait d’être mis en relief et qu’il avait tout fait pour souligner.

(II, 204–5)

The whiteness of the shirt-front, as fine as soft hail, with its gay pleats gathered into little bells like lilies of the valley, was spangled with bright gleams of light from the room, themselves sharply etched and subtly shaded as if they were flowers stitched into the linen. And the velvet of the jacket, with its brilliant sheen, had something rough, frayed and shaggy about it here and there that recalled the crumpled brightness of the carnations in the vase. But above all one felt that Elstir, heedless of any impression of immorality that might be given by this transvestite costume worn by a young actress for whom the talent she would bring to the role was doubtless of less importance than the titillation she would offer to the jaded or depraved senses of some of her audience, had on the contrary fastened upon this equivocal aspect as on an aesthetic element which deserved to be brought into prominence, and which he had done everything in his power to emphasise.

(II, 495)

Elstir was particularly attracted, the narrator suggests, by the undecidability of this girl-boy, but he has prepared the way for the exquisite indecision that his figure provokes in the spectator by sexualising the entire space of his picture. Light itself has two separate pictorial roles. On the one hand it is a uniform radiance emanating from objects, or an elucidating flow of energy passing across their surface and removing disparities as it goes. On the other hand, here and on numerous occasions elsewhere in the novel, light plays upon surfaces and inscribes them with its momentary messages: the outside world survives into the domestic interior as a series of ghostly reflections; a wide roomful of light is concentrated into a pattern of dancing flecks upon a bodice. Then again, Elstir’s brush has located tangles and raggedness where other artists, less daring and less ingenious in their sexual explorations, would have settled for a simple sheen: inside the close-cropped fabric of a jacket, or between smoothly enfolded carnation-petals, secret places with an unkempt covering of hair have been found. The figure of ‘Miss Sacripant’, so exhaustively boyish and girlish at the same time, and by way of the same sequence of brushstrokes, reclaims for the human body and for the arts of couture, an eroticism that is everywhere anyway, as readily available as light and air in the natural world.

Proust turns an imaginary painting into a tableau vivant; the central image and its accompanying furniture are motionless yet constantly reanimated by the narrator’s observing eye. He tells stories as he looks. He free-associates and, from a purely iconographical viewpoint, behaves badly: the art object is casually folded back into the ‘ordinary life’ of the narrator’s nascent sexual desires, and then abandoned with equal nonchalance for a semi-theoretical reverie on questions of artistic method. Yet what is remarkable in all this seeming flouting of the rules – whether of story-telling, or art history, or inferential argument – is that something strict and rule-governed is still going on sentence by sentence. Distinctions have to be clear if a coherent play of ambiguity, as distinct from mere semantic havering or fuss, is to be sustained. The machinery for making such distinctions is to be found in the bifurcating syntax of the long Proustian sentence, and it is the peculiar property of these sentences, placed end to end and seemingly so autonomous, to organise long stretches of text around relatively few underlying structural schemes. The sentences do many unruly things, of course: their syntax ramifies and proliferates; their meanings are sometimes amplified and embellished to the point of distraction. Yet they studiously repeat, almost in the manner of intellectual home truths, certain characteristic patterns of thought. Antithetical qualities are held against each other in equipoise. The alternative potentialities of a single situation are expounded. Surprising details yield large insights, and large insights, once they have been naturalised, seize upon the further surprising details they require to remain credible. Expectations are now confounded and now confirmed. Attention is dispersed and reconcentrated; increasing speed of perception leads to a plateau of immobilised absorption. And so forth.

The typical thought-shapes that Proust’s long sentences endlessly mobilise provide secure bridges between the markedly different kinds of writing that his novel yokes together. By the time we reach the following passage, for example, the secret of Miss Sacripant’s identity and of her former relations with Elstir have been revealed, and reflections on the perceptual rather than the sexual dealings between artist and model are apparently in order:

Mais d’ailleurs le portrait eût-il été, non pas antérieur, comme la photographie préférée de Swann, à la systématisation des traits d’Odette en un type nouveau, majestueux et charmant, mais postérieur, qu’il eût suffi de la vision d’Elstir pour désorganiser ce type. Le génie artistique agit à la façon de ces températures extrêmement élevées qui ont le pouvoir de dissocier les combinaisons d’atomes et de grouper ceux-ci suivant un ordre absolument contraire, répondant à un autre type. Toute cette harmonie factice que la femme a imposée à ses traits et dont chaque jour avant de sortir elle surveille la persistance dans sa glace, chargeant l’inclinaison du chapeau, le lissage des cheveux, l’enjouement du regard, d’en assurer la continuité, cette harmonie, le coup d’œil du grand peintre la détruit en une seconde, et à sa place il fait un regroupement des traits de la femme, de manière à donner satisfaction à un certain idéal féminin et pictural qu’il porte en lui.

(II, 216)

But in any case, even if the portrait had been, not anterior, like Swann’s favourite photograph, to the systematisation of Odette’s features into a new type, majestic and charming, but subsequent to it, Elstir’s vision would have sufficed to discompose that type. Artistic genius acts in a similar way to those extremely high temperatures which have the power to split up combinations of atoms which they proceed to combine afresh in a diametrically opposite order, corresponding to another type. All that artificial harmony which a woman has succeeded in imposing upon her features, the maintenance of which she oversees in her mirror every day before going out, relying on the angle of her hat, the smoothness of her hair, the vivacity of her expression, to ensure its continuity, that harmony the keen eye of the great painter instantly destroys, substituting for it a rearrangement of the woman’s features such as will satisfy a certain pictorial ideal of femininity which he carries in his head.

(II, 509)

Artist and model are both masters of artifice, but where the model’s first move is to quell the disorder of her past conduct and present appearance by constructing a smooth social persona, the artist’s is to introduce disorder into the unreally tranquillised scene offered by the model’s face, hair and clothes. His aggression, however, comes not from a simple preference for the wild over the tame, or for energy over repose, but from a wish to install on the canvas a smooth construction of his own. One fabrication must be dismantled and cleared away to make room for another, and the newcomer is still more obsessionally preserved from ruin than the original: where the woman simply checks herself in the mirror to make sure that each effect of art is in place, the artist, we are soon to be told, pursues his ‘pictorial ideal of femininity’ with crazed consistency from one model to the next.

On the face of it, this passage simply moves discussion of the artist’s passions from the sensuous to the conceptual plane and begins to speak of new things. We now read of systematisation, dissociation, harmony and continuity where before we were offered velvet, mother-of-pearl, brisdes and tousled heads. But the relation between the two paragraphs is in fact much closer than their divergences of diction would suggest. The second remembers and reinflects exactly the interplay between orderliness and an exciting, irruptive disorder that had given the first its clarity and strength. There is a rhythm here, or a thought-shape, or a paradigmatic tension, that is preserved from one occasion to the next. The special virtuosity that Proust ascribes to his narrator allows him to begin his own thinking with hair and prickles, to pursue it with cognitive concepts and to give both dimensions the same underlying structure of articulate hesitation. Inside the sentence we are currently reading earlier sentences continue to sound. Present reading time is haunted by reading times past.

Two new features of Proust’s temporality begin to emerge, then, when we look beyond the retrospective and prospective dispositions of the individual complex sentence. First, within paragraphs, the propulsive energy of the writing, the living sense of futurity that drives the narration on, comes from an astonishing power of recapitulation. An ambiguity in sexual identity refashions earlier ambiguous relations – between, say, light that shines and light that dances, or between smooth and rough in the painterly representation of fabrics. The way forward into a clear new future always involves revisiting the past. Secondly, within extended episodes, continuities of this sort are at work even when the narration insists upon irreversible change. Uncovering Elstir’s secret, or meeting the little band face to face for the first time, changes for ever the way the world looks. The whole map has to be redrawn. But the text carries along, from the before of unknowing into the afterwards of knowledge, not just a lively memory of key events and their affective colouring but the imprint of mental structures that have already proved themselves and can be expected to see active service again. The appetite to know survives the moment of its own satiation, and the instruments by which the world is made intelligible, far from being thrown away after use, remain importunately in place and demand further exercise. Whatever the ‘open’ future holds, its broad contours have already been foretold.

Yet when the large-scale temporal patterning of Proust’s text is described solely in these terms an important quality is still missing from the overall picture. For although recapitulation and recurrence give the narrative a range of captivating refrains – here in La Prisonnière are the tribulations of jealousy, as acute now, in the narrator’s manhood, as they were before his birth, and here in Albertine disparue is Legrandin being Legrandin, unchanged after all these years and pages – the past is not always treated as kindly as this, and simply revisited or revived at the narrator’s leisure. Retroaction rather than simple retrospection sometimes occurs. The past is not just subjected to an indefinite process of reinterpretation, but can be materially altered by the desiring intelligence of the narrator: armed with new information and switching the direction of his gaze, he can give the past new contents. That Miss Sacripant should be Odette rather than an anonymous actress for ever lost behind the name of a stage character, that she should be Odette rather than a fantasy figure in one of Elstir’s youthful caprices, changes the way the light had fallen, moments ago, in Elstir’s studio. In the wake of the narrator’s discovery, new sexual predilections spring into being for Elstir, Swann, and Odette herself, and a new element is added to the already troubled prehistory of the Swann-Odette marriage. A catalytic reaction spreads backwards from the very recent past of the narrator himself into the barely recoverable recesses of other people’s lives. All is altered.

We rewrite the history of our lives from moment to moment, of course, even those of us who cling steadfastly to an ‘official’ autobiography, and our retroactive inventions are for the most part tiny and unremarkable. They are certainly not the stuff of which great literary plots are made. Proust turns a banal psychological mechanism into a major source of dramatic interest and energy, however, by concentrating the attention of his narrator on only a limited number of cases and by giving large-scale structural importance only to those cases involving the sexuality of his characters. The most celebrated of these is perhaps the episode of the ‘lady in pink’, seen briefly by the narrator in the home of his great-uncle Adolphe in the early pages of the novel (I, 75; I, 89) and still continuing to fascinate him at the very end (IV, 607; VI, 427). The ‘lady in pink’, like Miss Sacripant, is Odette during the heyday of her career as a courtesan, but the unveiling of her identity takes an inordinately long time, during which the narrator reveals to the reader what his earlier, narrated self still does not know. A respectable woman has had an enticingly disreputable past, and knowing this, when he eventually does know it, changes the adult narrator’s childhood, especially as Odette’s sexual magnetism had played upon a member of his otherwise harmonious and upright family circle.

Much more remarkable, however, is the case of Saint-Loup’s homosexuality, which is first intimated in gossip, and then firmly attested as fact, at the end of Albertine disparue (IV, 241; V, 762). As we saw in the preceding chapter, this discovery prompts in the narrator an elegy to lost friendship – built on the bizarre assumption that friends who come out or are ‘outed’ are automatically lost – and a protracted examination, cog by cog, of the machinery of retroactive remembering. So many aspects of Saint-Loup’s past behaviour that had previously seemed obscure now make a familiar and dispiriting kind of sense. His relationship with Rachel in particular is summoned up as a procession of episodes all demanding to be reconstrued. The evidence was all there long ago, but the narrator had no eyes with which to see it. Once the knowledge is out that Saint-Loup is ‘comme ça’, he, Rachel, and the narrator himself take up their positions in a new narrative sequence, and the switching of the narrator’s emotional investments from an old story to a new is a hugely laborious and painful affair.

Retroaction is not only a feature of Proust’s sentences and of his plot, but serves also to characterise one aspect of the narrator’s personality: his combined strength and vulnerability. At certain watershed moments in the novel he is withheld from decision-making and from action; his personal history seems to rewrite itself spontaneously, and to turn him into the plaything of an inscrutable impersonal force. This can happen benignly, when a new access of happiness removes pain and doubt from the remembered past, as in this passage, which contains a perfect dictionary illustration of the unusual intransitive verb rétroagir (‘to retroact’) in use:

la pensée ne peut même pas reconstituer l’état ancien pour le confronter au nouveau, car elle n’a plus le champ libre: la connaissance que nous avons faite, le souvenir des premières minutes inespérées, les propos que nous avons entendus, sont là qui obstruent l’entrée de notre conscience et commandent beaucoup plus les issues de notre mémoire que celles de notre imagination, ils rétroagissent davantage sur notre passé que nous ne sommes plus maîtres de voir sans tenir compte d’eux, que sur la forme, restée libre, de notre avenir.

(I, 528)

our thoughts cannot even reconstruct the old state in order to compare it with the new, for it has no longer a clear field: the acquaintance we have made, the memory of those first, unhoped-for moments, the talk we have heard, are there now to block the passage of our consciousness, and as they control the outlets of our memory far more than those of our imagination, they react more forcibly upon our past, which we are no longer able to visualise without taking them into account, than upon the form, still unshaped, of our future.

(II, 128)

Or it can happen in the manner of a nightmare, when ever more pretexts for pain begin to assail the jealous mind:

On n’a pas besoin d’être deux, il suffit d’être seul dans sa chambre à penser pour que de nouvelles trahisons de votre maîtresse se produisent, fût-elle morte. Aussi il ne faut pas ne redouter dans l’amour, comme dans la vie habituelle, que l’avenir, mais même le passé qui ne se réalise pour nous souvent qu’après l’avenir, et nous ne parlons pas seulement du passé que nous apprenons après coup, mais de celui que nous avons conservé depuis longtemps en nous et que tout d’un coup nous apprenons à lire.

(III, 595)

There is no need for there to be two of you, it is enough to be alone in your room, thinking, for fresh betrayals by your mistress to come to light, even if she is dead. And so we ought not to fear in love, as in everyday life, the future alone, but even the past, which often comes to life for us only when the future has come and gone – and not only the past which we discover after the event but the past which we have long kept stored within ourselves and suddenly learn how to interpret.

(V, 91)

What these passages have in common, the one taken from A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs and involving Gilberte and the other from La Prisonnière and involving Albertine, is the extraordinary assurance with which the analysis is conducted. This recreation of the past is a mental automatism which the narrator reportedly merely underwent in his experience of love, but it is one which he takes in hand and magisterially dissects in the elaboration of his text. There is little to be done about a mechanism as powerful as this, apart from rediscovering one’s strength in writing about it. Constructing sentences is already a form of retroactive play for Proust, and constructing sentences like these allows him to create an eerie match between suspended syntax and being in love: both involve an incessant remaking of the past; and both allow, in the words of the apparent paradox on which the first of these quotations ends, retroaction to be carried forward into a ‘free’ future.

But even if the Proust time-map is extended in this way, to include the backwash of the present into the past as well as the irresistible encroachments of an unquiet past into the onwards flow of present time, a last element in the workaday complexity that Proust’s reader has to cope with is still missing. In living our lives forwards, hurling ourselves headlong into an ever-receding future, we take our reminiscences with us. Sometimes as obliging friends, and sometimes as demons. And these reminiscences have only to be hardened somewhat into a pattern to acquire considerable prefigurative force: they not only accompany later events but can help them to happen. A ‘certain slant of light’, in the words of a great poem by Emily Dickinson, can bring an unanswerable intimation of death into an ordinary winter afternoon. But that same light, made memorable by who knows what conjunction of place, mood and memory, can tell us how to inhabit later afternoons, visited by different rays, differently slanted. A sudden savage word from Albertine, finding its way into an otherwise even-tempered conversation, can bring anxiety and suspicion into the narrator’s later social encounters. An anonymous actress, alive with erotic provocation, can become the very model of the temptress and the tease and begin strangely to determine an apprentice lover’s later choice of partner.

Templates are being created, and futures foretold, throughout the first two volumes of the novel. The scene of voyeurism at Montjouvain, the episode of the withheld goodnight kiss, the first ecstatic experience of involuntary memory, together with the entire forensic reconstruction in ‘Un Amour de Swann’ of the early relationship between Swann and Odette, are the embryonic forms from which complex later narratives are to spring. In some early episodes of this kind, including the decipherment of Miss Sacripant, Proust uses a special compressed form of dramatic irony. Rather than allow the reader to glimpse a future state of affairs and then oblige him or her to wait patiently for this to be actualised at an appointed later moment, he interconnects two parallel stories and allows one to illuminate the other. Odette as Miss Sacripant prefigures Albertine, just as Swann in the guise of jealous lover prefigures the adult narrator. But by this stage in the development of the plot, Albertine, still only fitfully distinguishable from her companions on the Balbec shore, is already an object of desire. The failed encounter with her occurs within the larger drama of Elstir’s watercolour portrait, between the announcement of its enigma and the discovery of a key. All the materials from which the narrator’s future affair with Albertine is to be fashioned, even down to the tremor of indecision which her sexuality is to prompt and the artifice which she is to employ in constructing an innocuous social persona, are already to hand in this more than prophetic scene. There is no need to wait for the future, for the future is already here.

Anticipation as manipulated in the ingenious plotting of Proust’s novel enlarges and dramatises a far commoner range of mental activities. We invent futures from residues of the past. When we are not sunk in torpor or blocked by external circumstances, we strive to pre-empt the future rather than have it thrust upon us. We model our future selves on the predecessors we admire. Proust’s narrator is a tireless psychologising commentator on such matters. He sets against his lively account of the ‘open’ or still-to-be-invented future a gloomy picture of the future as biologically or culturally pre-ordained. The individual becomes what he or she already is:

Les traits de notre visage ne sont guère que des gestes devenus, par l’habitude, définitifs. La nature, comme la catastrophe de Pompéi, comme une métamorphose de nymphe, nous a immobilisés dans le mouvement accoutumé. De même nos intonations contiennent notre philosophie de la vie, ce que la personne se dit à tout moment sur les choses.

(II, 262)

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit has made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph, has arrested us in an accustomed movement. Similarly, our intonation embodies our philosophy of life, what a person invariably says to himself about things.

(II, 565)

Excessively strong or pre-emptive anticipation of this kind is in its turn set against the retroactive tricks of the remembering mind: Proust attends minutely to the whorls and vortices that the joint action of these mechanisms produces in the here and now. Whether you are writing a novel, painting a portrait, or living a life from hand to mouth, the task is always to turn the past-and-future-haunted present moment to account and to shake off its air of fatedness. A terrifying powerlessness is never far away. In both directions the exits are closed, and only by a mad wager and an inspired suspension of temporal law can we ever expect them to open again.

What I have been describing here are time mechanisms that can be observed in miniature in individual sentences and on a grand scale in the unfolding of the novel as a whole. There is perhaps, nevertheless, too much symmetry in this account, and too much regularity in the flow of Proustian time pictured in this way. What about suddenness and surprise? What about all the swerves, short-cuts and ‘transversal threads’ (I, 490; ‘ligne […] transversale’ (I, 400)), as Proust calls them, that create improbable connections within the textual fabric? Time in this novel surely needs to be seized in its zig-zags and pointilliste stipplings as well as in the orderly inter-looping of its alternative zones.

The later destinies of the ‘Miss Sacripant’ motif are played out in a bewildering network of lateral connections and implied time-frames. Whereas in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the portrait was rapidly stabilised into an emblem, a potent and portable representation of sexual allure, in Le Côté de Guermantes it becomes fluid and fuzzy-edged again. A photograph of the portrait is sent to the narrator by the valet de chambre of his great-uncle Adolphe, who is now dead. The servant had judged this image, and a number of others from his employer’s collection of souvenirs, more likely to appeal to a young man than to older members of the family, and had sent his own son – one Charles Morel – to deliver it:

Comme j’avais été très étonné de trouver parmi les photographies que m’envoyait son père une du portrait de Miss Sacripant (c’est-à-dire Odette) par Elstir, je dis à Charles Morel, en l’accompagnant jusqu’à la porte cochère: «Je crains que vous ne puissiez me renseigner. Est-ce que mon oncle connaissait beaucoup cette dame? […]»

(II, 563)

As I had been greatly surprised to find among the photographs which his father had sent me one of the portrait of Miss Sacripant (otherwise Odette) by Elstir, I said to Charles Morel as I accompanied him to the carriage gateway: ‘I don’t suppose you can tell me, but did my uncle know this lady well? […]’

(III, 305)

It is in the course of this episode that the reader is first introduced to Morel, who is to be a major presence in the remainder of the book, and there is more than a hint of prophecy in his being the bearer of the photograph: like Odette herself, and like the figure in Elstir’s watercolour, Morel is sexually ambiguous. Indeed he is Proust’s fullest representation of carefree bisexuality, and it is fitting that he should be given responsibility for the transportation of an icon that knits together his divergent sexual tastes. But the photograph has moved in quite different circles too: it served an aged libertine as a titillating reminder of his adventures in the demi-monde and, as we already know, was Swann’s favourite depiction of his wife. Miss Sacripant, during her momentary reappearance in Le Côté de Guermantes, connects narrative past to narrative future straightforwardly enough, but she also sends echoes racing through Proust’s socio-sexual labyrinth. Her travesti connects her to countless other characters trapped inside an unstoppable masked ball.

Towards the end of La Prisonnière, this aspect of Miss Sacripant reaches its apotheosis. She no longer circulates in photographic form, as a mere image caught at a third remove from the ‘real’ Odette, but still more impalpably as a figment of other people’s gossip. Charlus, in the course of his long harangue on the history and sociology of homosexuality, begins to speak about Swann’s sexual character, and, prompted by Brichot, about Swann’s wife:

Mais voyons, c’est par moi qu’il l’a connue. Je l’avais trouvée charmante dans son demi-travesti, un soir qu’elle jouait Miss Sacripant; j’étais avec des camarades de club, nous avions tous ramené une femme, et bien que je n’eusse envie que de dormir, les mauvaises langues avaient prétendu, car c’est affreux ce que le monde est méchant, que j’avais couché avec Odette. Seulement, elle en avait profité pour venir m’embêter, et j’avais cru m’en débarrasser en la présentant à Swann. De ce jour-là elle ne cessa plus de me cramponner, elle ne savait pas un mot d’orthographe, c’est moi qui faisais les lettres.

(III, 803)

Why, it was through me that he came to know her. I had thought her charming in her boyish get-up one evening when she played Miss Sacripant; I was with some club-mates, and each of us took a woman home with him, and although all I wanted was to go to sleep, slanderous tongues alleged – it’s terrible how malicious people are – that I went to bed with Odette. In any case she took advantage of the slanders to come and bother me, and I thought I might get rid of her by introducing her to Swann. From that moment on she never let me go. She couldn’t spell the simplest word, it was I who wrote all her letters for her.

(V, 339–40)

Odette is a woman about whom tongues wag. She flits from anecdote to anecdote, and the chronicle of her lovers, which Charlus proceeds to rehearse, enhances this sense of multiformity. She is a creature called into being by other people’s desires, fantasies and projections. The renaming of Miss Sacripant at this point in the novel makes her into a passing effect of speech inside an indefinitely loquacious community.