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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ