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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ