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

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СКАЧАТЬ after variety and novelty, and urges himself forward to the moment of completion – when the last possible modulation of the moral life will have become audible. He is not only a pluralising eye, a self constituted from all other selves, but an optimistic surveyor of human conduct – one who expects to discover new notions of virtue and vice at every point of the compass.

      Such dreams of plurality and plenitude were of course common among Proust’s contemporaries. Busoni – to take a strong but relatively neglected example – lamented in his Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music (c. 1911) that so much in the Western musical tradition, from tonality itself to the standard notational system and the mechanics of keyboard instruments, seemed to want to substitute discreteness for continuity and avoid hearing the true harmony of nature: ‘How strictly we divide “consonances” from “dissonances” – in a sphere where no dissonances can possibly exist! … Nature created an infinite gradation – infinite!’ Proust hears the true music of moral judgement and takes the risks appropriate to its pursuit. No act of judging can be final, for the continuous gradations of conduct and character flow on. It is not surprising, therefore, that after an adventure so protracted and so full of risk he should wish to stage an apocalypse in the last pages of his book. One could scarcely imagine a better reward at the end of it all than a single choice to make, a single project to execute, a single self to reassume and an overriding moral value to defend.

      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

       Time

       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, СКАЧАТЬ