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

The temporality of these later references and allusions is in one sense very simple. They are chronological markers within the overall teleology of the book. A la recherche du temps perdu is not only ‘about’ time but about the linear process of uncovering new time-truths: the plot leads slowly towards a grandly orchestrated redemptive view, and time envisaged in these terms is emphatically distinguished from the dimension in which hours and days are merely spent, lost or frittered away. The declared direction of the book, until the threshold of its final revelations is reached, is downhill into darkness. It is entirely fitting that the image of Odette should be fuzzied and frittered as the narrative proceeds, and that its repeated appearances should mark out the graduated stages of a much more general decline, for such is the worldly lesson that Proust seeks to impose: things fall apart and the clockwork runs down. The narrator’s journey takes him to an extreme limit, at which decay is visible on every human face and nullity speaks from behind every eye, and it is only when this limit has been reached and its intolerable pain felt that an apocalyptic arrest of time becomes possible.

Yet the book would be a very thin affair if its long, ruminative unfolding were readable only in this way. Proust does of course handle linear time supremely well: the stations on the narrator’s journey provide the book with huge, unmistakable calibrations; questions that need answers in due course find them; causes precede effects; and although the flow of time may almost congeal during a protracted soirée, or be accelerated mercilessly by a sudden recital of marriages and deaths, it is for the most part reliably unidirectional. Events that occur latterly occur only because former events have prepared the way for them. Within subsequence consequence is to be found. The final apocalypse itself is fully motivated by what has gone before, and the buildup to it is presented as a sub-divisible process, a phased dawning of new awareness. Yet the broad intentional structure of the book catches up within itself a dancing array of materials that are not subduable to any overall project. Proust offers his reader a simultaneous web of associations, as well as the undeflected flight of time’s arrow. Across the canvas of the book points of special intensity are scattered, and we are invited by the narrator, who is a virtuoso in such matters, to scan back and forth between them, making improbable connections as we go. Proust’s text rebels against the smooth linear temporality to which his narrator for the most part adheres in the telling of his tale, and incorporates into itself not just the vibrant internal reflections that typify Elstir’s art but its raggedness and its rough patches.

The webs, the tangles and the improvised cross-stitchings that Proust’s writing contains speak not of timeliness or timelessness but of an alternative and glaringly familiar temporality. And, although it would no doubt require topological schemata of great subtlety to model this temporality satisfactorily, its main features can be enumerated with ease. It ordains that past, present and future are composites rather than simples; that recapitulations of the past are projections into the future too; that synchronicity comprises, and may be broken down into, myriad diachronic sequences; that certain time-effects are intelligible only if spatially extended; that parallel universes may be conflated into a single newly conceived space–time continuum; and that any temporally extended system of differences may collapse into an undifferentiated flux. This is the time of human desire, and the time that Proust’s book inhabits sentence by sentence. It is defiantly non-linear, and runs counter both to the plot of the book, and to much of its ‘theory’. If we place Miss Sacripant, or any other elaborately recurring motif, within this alternative temporality we discover not a disconsolate ebbing away of meaning as time passes but a restoration of meaning within a temporal manifold. Odette en travesti becomes not just a static emblem of the desirable woman, but an intersection point in a moving network of desiring pathways. Against the pessimism of linear time and its losses, the book provides us – and not just in its ending, but all through and even in its darkest hours – with an optimistic view of time as connection-making and irrepressible potentiality. This time is not a concept, or a connected series of points, or a fixed scale against which geological epochs or human life-spans can be measured. It is a stuff and there for the handling.

A significant advantage is to be had from thinking of Proust as an artful manipulator of ordinary time rather than as the harbinger of an unusual, specialised or occult temporal vision. By this route more of his text remains readable, and its overall account of time becomes richer and more provoking. Involuntary memory, which is the gateway to Proust’s apocalypse – to his time of redemption – is ordinary enough, of course. The phrase itself would scarcely have enjoyed its remarkably successful career if it had not encapsulated a common experience, and ‘Proustian moments’, like ‘Freudian slips’, would not have entered the vernacular if their import had been in any way obscure. But when it comes to the experience of reading the successive pages of Proust’s novel and taking time over them, involuntary memory is oddly inert and unhelpful. Applying it as a key to the understanding of Proustian time is rather like looking at the working day from the viewpoint of weekends and holidays, or at the lives of plain-dwellers from the neighbouring mountain-tops. The time that is proper to Proust’s long sentences, however, and to his extended episodes and to the long-range patterns of expectation and remembrance which organise the novel as a whole, is both ordinary and extremely complex. Ordinary in that it belongs to the everyday world of mortal, desire-driven creatures, and complex in that its many criss-crossing dimensions are mobile and difficult to construe. Past, present and future are intricately conjoined within sentences, and reconjoined still more intricately during extended narrative sequences. Sentences come to rest upon a recovered sense of propositional fullness and completion, only to have certain of their elements wrested from them and driven into new associative configurations by what follows. The temporality of a narrative which is made from unstable building blocks of this kind is one of continuous scattering and concentration. Temporality is retemporalised endlessly, and time-features that are awkward and obtuse are given special prominence in the fabrication of the text. Snags, discrepancies, prematurities, belatednesses, prophetic glimpses, misrecognitions, and blocked or incongruous memories – these tragi-comical indignities are the mainspring of Proust’s vast fictional contrivance. He finds the plenitude of his book in this epic catalogue of unsatisfactory moments.

Such impure and unsimple ordinary time accompanies the narrator, enfolds him, to the very end of his narrative. When he recounts his culminating discoveries, during which he discerned a celestial exit from loss and waste at last coming into view, Proust’s writing has an enhanced rather than a diminished sense of temporal pulsation:

L’être qui était rené en moi […] languit dans l’observation du présent où les sens ne peuvent la [l’essence des choses] lui apporter, dans la considération d’un passé que l’intelligence lui dessèche, dans l’attente d’un avenir que la volonté construit avec des fragments du présent et du passé auxquels elle retire encore de leur réalité en ne conservant d’eux que ce qui convient à la fin utilitaire, étroitement humaine, qu’elle leur assigne. Mais qu’un bruit, qu’une odeur, déjà entendu ou respirée jadis, le soient de nouveau, à la fois dans le présent et dans le passé, réels sans être actuels, idéaux sans être abstraits, aussitôt l’essence permanente et habituellement cachée des choses se trouve libérée, et notre vrai moi qui, parfois depuis longtemps, semblait mort, mais ne l’était pas entièrement, s’éveille, s’anime en recevant la céleste nourriture qui lui est apportée.

(IV, 451)

The being which had been reborn in me [languishes in] the observation of the present, where the senses cannot feed it [the essence of things] with this food […] as it does in the consideration of a past made arid by the intellect or in the anticipation of a future which the will constructs with fragments of the present and the past, fragments whose reality it still further reduces by preserving of them only what is suitable for the utilitarian, narrowly human purpose for which it intends them. But let a noise or a scent, once heard or once smelt, be heard or smelt again in the present and at the same time in the past, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, and immediately the permanent and habitually concealed essence of things is liberated and our true self, which seemed – had perhaps for long years seemed – to be dead but was not altogether dead, is awakened and reanimated as it receives the celestial nourishment that is brought to it.

(VI, 224)

Proust sings of redeemed time in a language that is still restless and unsubdued. In the first of these sentences a familiar music is to be heard: the syntax continues to interconnect past, present and future, to manipulate memory and expectation, to tease out the paradoxes of desire-time and to pursue a broken path towards propositional fullness. We could almost be back, with the narrator, in the Swanns’ drawing room, or on the Cambremers’ yacht, or in the grievance-free mental half-light of the duchesse de Guermantes. But in the second sentence, which speaks of a past and a present ecstatically dissolved into each other and of a future which promises further increments of delight, this music also sounds. Here too the path is broken, and long. Both sentences end well, with their syntactic pattern closed and completed, and both are hungry for a future: beyond utility a new joy remains to be found; beyond the administering of ‘celestial food’ a new life of wakeful and risk-filled animation remains to be explored. Nothing in these closing pages of the novel shrinks away from the exactions of ordinary time, or of ‘embodied time’ as the narrator now calls it (VI, 449; ‘temps incorporé’ (IV, 623)). Indeed the last cadence of the book, its last well-made proposition, is a call back to the unredeemable temporal process which makes writing possible. At the close, closure is most to be resisted.

There is of course a temporal hierarchy in Proust’s book. The time-patterning that holds the whole novel together is more impressive and does more work than the patterning that holds the individual sentences together, whatever the structural similarities the two orders display. ‘Ordinary time’ is much more ordinary on certain occasions than on others. And there are mountain-tops from which the pains and penalties which beset time-dwellers do seem to disappear. But Proust weaves between levels, distrusts summits, and has a special fondness for the small temporal effects that are to be found within the ‘rank vegetal proliferation’ of a literary text.

III (#ulink_17062270-ffef-59ec-b5c5-74c8094f0f23)

Art (#ulink_17062270-ffef-59ec-b5c5-74c8094f0f23)

The whole universe takes part in the dancing.

The Acts of John

Mary McCarthy once memorably rebelled against the residual cult of ‘art for art’s sake’ in prose fiction by pointing out that novels were often lumpy with undisguised ‘fact’ and could be put to use for all manner of everyday purposes: ‘you can learn how to make strawberry jam from Anna Karenina and how to reap a field and hunt ducks’. For some of Proust’s admirers such an idea will seem impious. They will see in A la recherche du temps perdu a triumph of the aesthetic over the merely useful, and wish to protect Proust’s good name from the taint of commerce or cookery. There is something about the transforming energy of Proust’s style, they will perhaps claim, that belongs unashamedly to high art. They might even murmur, remembering the dithyramb upon which Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (1873) ends, that Proust in his style has achieved the aesthete’s dream par excellence: ‘To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.’ No jam, no ducks.

Proust’s narrator sees things very differently. Although he is repeatedly drawn back, mothlike, to the Pateresque aesthetic flame, he is also fascinated by art-objects as commodities, and by the changing valuations that are placed upon them as they circulate in social space. When Bergotte dies, his afterlife of literary fame is firmly anchored to the spending power of individual consumers:

On l’enterra, mais toute la nuit funèbre, aux vitrines éclairées, ses livres, disposés trois par trois, veillaient comme des anges aux ailes éployées et semblaient pour celui qui n’était plus, le symbole de sa résurrection.

(III, 693)

They buried him, but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.

(V, 209)

In due course, Bergotte’s books may begin to resemble Rilkean angels, winged messengers from a transcendent sphere provisionally called Art, but for the time being they remain caught inside a system of trading arrangements: their angelic look is the product of a window-dresser’s artistry, and has a solid commercial motive behind it. Bergotte is dead, and already immaterially resurrected in the minds of his admirers, but the booksellers are still alive and need to earn a living. Throughout the novel Proust dwells on the socio-economic conditions of artistic production: works of art are prized and have prices, and the mechanisms by which they are bought and sold are for practical purposes quite separate from the labour of hand and brain which produces them. The art-work may have a glorious public career while its producer lives and dies in destitution. The market forces which govern the lives and the posthumous standing of artists operate on a broad front, generically, and have little respect for individual merit or distinctiveness: ‘Comme à la Bourse, quand un mouvement de hausse se produit, tout un compartiment de valeurs en profitent’ (III, 210; ‘As on the Stock Exchange, when a rise occurs, a whole group of securities profit by it’ (IV, 248)).

Proust’s narrator distinguishes firmly between the use value and the exchange value of artistic commodities, and gives a personal twist to the teachings of classical political economy. Art has use value in so far as it procures delight, joy, intellectual certainty or a general sense of emotional well-being for its consumer or its proprietor, and exchange value when its characteristic products move around in the fickle world of opinion. Individual works are valued highly because they are capable of serving human wants and producing pleasurable sensation, but any moment during which they are successfully used for these purposes is hedged about by stubborn questions of social status and prestige. Art is a weapon in the salon wars. Mme Verdurin enacts rapture for the benefit of her ‘little clan’, drives herself towards the extremes of aesthetic sensitivity which will identify her as a charismatic personage in their eyes, and presents her own artistic experience as a special form of suffering nobly and altruistically borne. Listening to a sonata or a septet is always a social act in Proust, and extravagantly so when Mme Verdurin buries her head in her hands in seeming retreat from her fellow hearers.

Although this stage management of artistic response runs as a comic leitmotif throughout the novel, Proust extracts a more complex poetry from the rise and fall of entire artistic reputations. ‘Poussin’ or ‘Chopin’ are commodities like rubber, copper or coffee, and a diffuse but effective international machinery regulates their prices. Among many satirical set-pieces on this theme none more completely overreaches the task of correcting human folly than the episode in Sodome et Gomorrhe where the narrator brings news of Chopin’s revived market fortunes to Mme de Cambremer, who has paid him a visit at Balbec. The full extent of Chopin’s rehabilitation is revealed to the narrator’s victim not directly but, ‘as in a game of billiards’, by bouncing the latest state of informed opinion off her mother-in-law, the aged, music-loving marquise de Cambremer, who has accompanied her:

Ses yeux brillèrent comme ceux de Latude dans la pièce appelée Latude ou trente-cinq ans de captivité et sa poitrine huma l’air de la mer avec cette dilatation que Beethoven a si bien marquée dans Fidelio, quand ses prisonniers respirent enfin «cet air qui vivifie». Je crus qu’elle allait poser sur ma joue ses lèvres moustachues. «Comment, vous aimez Chopin? Il aime Chopin, il aime Chopin», s’écria-t-elle dans un nasonnement passionné, comme elle aurait dit: «Comment, vous connaissez aussi Mme de Francquetot?» avec cette différence que mes relations avec Mme de Francquetot lui eussent étés profondément indifférentes, tandis que ma connaissance de Chopin la jeta dans une sorte de délire artistique. L’hypersécrétion salivaire ne suffit plus. N’ayant même pas essayé de comprendre le rôle de Debussy dans la réinvention de Chopin, elle sentit seulement que mon jugement était favorable. L’enthousiasme musical la saisit. «Élodie! Élodie! il aime Chopin.» Ses seins se soulevèrent et elle battit l’air de ses bras. «Ah! j’avais bien senti que vous étiez musicien, s’écria-t-elle. Je comprends, hhartiste comme vous êtes, que vous aimiez cela. C’est si beau!» Et sa voix était aussi caillouteuse que si, pour m’exprimer son ardeur pour Chopin, elle eût, imitant Démosthène, rempli sa bouche avec tous les galets de la plage. Enfin le reflux vint, atteignant jusqu’à la voilette qu’elle n’eut pas le temps de mettre à l’abri et qui fut transpercée, enfin la marquise essuya avec son mouchoir brodé la bave d’écume dont le souvenir de Chopin venait de tremper ses moustaches.

(III, 212–13)

Her eyes shone like the eyes of Latude in the play entitled Latude, or Thirty-five Years in Captivity, and her bosom inhaled the sea air with that dilatation which Beethoven has depicted so well in Fidelio, at the point where his prisoners at last breathe again ‘this life-giving air’. I thought that she was going to press her hirsute lips to my cheek. ‘What, you like Chopin? He likes Chopin, he likes Chopin,’ she cried in an impassioned nasal twang, as she might have said: ‘What, you know Mme de Francquetot too?’, with this difference, that my relations with Mme de Francquetot would have been a matter of profound indifference to her, whereas my knowledge of Chopin plunged her into a sort of artistic delirium. Her salivary hyper-secretion no longer sufficed. Not having even attempted to understand the part played by Debussy in the rediscovery of Chopin, she felt only that my judgment of him was favourable. Her musical enthusiasm overpowered her. ‘Elodie! Elodie! He likes Chopin!’ Her bosom rose and she beat the air with her arms. ‘Ah! I knew at once that you were a musician,’ she cried, ‘I can quite understand your liking his work, hhartistic as you are. It’s so beautiful!’ And her voice was as pebbly as if, to express her ardour for Chopin, she had imitated Demosthenes and filled her mouth with all the shingle on the beach. Then came the ebb-tide, reaching as far as her veil which she had not time to lift out of harm’s way and which was drenched, and finally the Marquise wiped away with her embroidered handkerchief the tidemark of foam in which the memory of Chopin had steeped her moustaches.

(IV, 250)

Debussy’s favourable opinion of Chopin, funnelled downwards by the narrator into the dimly lit world of the Cambremers, triggers a violent physical reaction: the throat, the nasal membranes and the salivary ducts of the old marquise, which have already been sketched at some length, are now so energised by the narrator’s announcement that she begins to resemble an impersonal natural force. She secretes, but in the manner of the ocean nearby. The pebbled shore, the incoming tide, the foaming waves, remove her from a mere social encounter and give her a place in the conversation of the elements. From the viewpoint of breeding and decorum, her reaction to a risen-again composer is as grotesque and uncomely as her moustache.

This is caricature reaching towards sublimity. The excellence of Beethoven’s music and of Demosthenes’s oratorical style are by stealth co-opted into the narrator’s portrait of incontinent old age. High art, represented by Chopin, Debussy and the great chorus, ‘O welche Lust!’ which opens the Act I finale of Fidelio, is brought into alignment with the very low art of a sensational boulevard melodrama, and the expressive power of art itself with embarrassing bodily functions. A revolutionary hymn to freedom is interwoven with the free growth of facial hair and the free expression of spit. Writing of this kind passes beyond simple vitriol and disgust and moves towards a lofty vision of art as necessarily inclusive, heterogeneous and impure. From within a malicious account of exchange value a new usefulness is discovered for the artistic commodity: it produces delight from the most improbable raw materials. An abject beauty is born.

Proust’s account of the art market is as much a celebration as a critique. Commercial motives and financial transactions are ‘low’ materials, but ones upon which the high-toned Proustian novel thrives. The narrator keeps on reminding himself of these, reserving a special place in his own prospective novel for getting and spending, and the exploitation of art for other than artistic ends. A la recherche du temps perdu thus anticipates in detail one of the destinies to which it has been subject since its publication. The novel has been pressed into service as a source-book for the social history of late nineteenth-century France, and has acted as an informal guide to the sensibilities, manners, tastes and fashions of the period. It has come to resemble the Voyage artistique à Bayreuth (1897) that was so popular in Proust’s own day. This volume, by Albert Lavignac, was the complete vade mecum for those setting out on their Wagnerian pilgrimage, and combined operatic plot-summaries and music-examples with advice on travel, including railway ticket prices and journey times, hotel accommodation and local dishes. Proust’s novel is regularly treated as a voyage in space and time to a lost Faubourg Saint-Germain, and valued because it tells us what books its inhabitants were reading, what plays they were seeing and what coiffures and evening gowns they wore:

le visage d’Odette paraissait plus maigre et plus proéminent parce que le front et le haut des joues, cette surface unie et plus plane était recouverte par la masse de cheveux qu’on portait alors prolongés en «devants», soulevés en «crêpés», répandus en mèches folles le long des oreilles; et quant à son corps qui était admirablement fait, il était difficile d’en apercevoir la continuité (à cause des modes de l’époque et quoiqu’elle fût une des femmes de Paris qui s’habillaient le mieux), tant le corsage, s’avançant en saillie comme sur un ventre imaginaire et finissant brusquement en pointe pendant que par en dessous commençait à s’enfler le ballon des doubles jupes, donnait à la femme l’air d’être composée de pièces différentes mal emmanchées les unes dans les autres; tant les ruchés, les volants, le gilet suivaient en toute indépendance, selon la fantaisie de leur dessin ou la consistance de leur étoffe, la ligne qui les conduisait aux nœuds, aux bouillons de dentelle, aux effilés de jais perpendiculaires, ou qui les dirigeait le long du busc, mais ne s’attachaient nullement à l’être vivant, qui selon que l’architecture de ces fanfreluches se rapprochait ou s’écartait trop de la sienne s’y trouvait engoncé ou perdu.