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

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СКАЧАТЬ sketch a much more impulsive and diversified passage of time too. Time is measured by criss-crossing spatial journeys, held together in a single propositional structure. Two kinds of transplantation occur at Féterne, the Cambremers’ château: exotic plants have been taken there and flourish thanks to its favourable position, and exotic social creatures, seasonally removed from the capital to this seaside neighbourhood, are gathered up into a shimmering matinée. Transport is provided for guests of appropriate rank or status, and the morning and evening journeys of the Cambremer yacht trace a thoroughly socialised map of local space and time. This is the double portrait of a society and one of its members, and the syntax of the sentence fuses into a single drama the advance and recoil of the narrator’s sympathy for his would-be hosts. A single proposition scans, enumerates, explores lateral relationships, arranges improbable encounters, allows fantasy to take wing, yet reaches finally a point of narrative and syntactic closure: the party is over, the yacht bears the privileged guests away, and a grand amplificatory linguistic mechanism is brought to rest.

      In so far as Proust reconstructs the temporality of daily living, then, we may already safely say that syntax has a main role in providing his account with a sense of phenomenological fullness. The particular ingenuity of his syntax in this respect is that it brings together into one complex pattern a continuous forward-flung intention and a simultaneous host of retrospective or sideways vistas. It seeks stability and finality, celebrates these qualities with its emphatic final cadences, yet leaves the door open too: riddles remain to be solved, curiosity to be satisfied, and a larger narrative syntax to be pursued. A balance must be kept between completion and a necessary provisionality. The reader must be fed, yet kept hungry.

      Even during the narrator’s lengthy philosophical or psychological discussions of time, even as he deploys his rich vocabulary of chronological terms, his syntax is often quietly performing a quite different and seemingly unauthorised set of tasks. The last of my three single-sentence examples is thoroughly ‘time-theoretical’ in that it discusses a curious human present largely washed clean of its own past. It is taken from Le Côté de Guermantes and concerns Mme de Guermantes’s slightly improbable incapacity to bear grudges and nurse grievances:

       Non seulement elle ne s’attardait pas à des explications rétrospectives, à des demi-mots, à des sourires ambigus, à des sous-entendus, non seulement elle avait dans son affabilité actuelle, sans retours en arrière, sans réticences, quelque chose d’aussi fièrement rectiligne que sa majestueuse stature, mais les griefs qu’elle avait pu ressentir contre quelqu’un dans le passé étaient si entièrement réduits en cendres, ces cendres étaient elles-mêmes rejetées si loin de sa mémoire ou tout au moins de sa manière d’être, qu’à regarder son visage chaque fois qu’elle avait à traiter par la plus belle des simplifications ce qui chez tant d’autres eût été prétexte à des restes de froideur, à des récriminations, on avait l’impression d’une sorte de purification.

      (II, 676)

       Not only did she waste no time in retrospective inquiries, in hints, allusions or ambiguous smiles, not only was there in her present affability, without any harking back to the past, without the slightest reticence, something as proudly rectilinear as her majestic stature, but any resentment which she might have felt against someone in the past was so entirely reduced to ashes, and those ashes were themselves cast so utterly from her memory, or at least from her manner, that on studying her face whenever she had occasion to treat with the most exquisite simplicity what in so many other people would have been a pretext for reviving stale antipathies and recriminations, one had the impression of a sort of purification.

      (III, 440)

      The comedy of this sentence, and the subcutaneous malice which permeates its apparent act of homage, stem from the disproportion between the supposed candour of the duchesse and the hard labour that her virtue seems to entail. Far from being a natural grace of personality, or a fortunate psychological tic, her freedom from grudges is achieved by a triple process of incineration, grinding and scattering, and may even then be an effect of social self-presentation rather than an emotional reality. The narrator puts his syntax to work in the same showily laborious vein: here are all the afterthoughts and retrospective mental retouchings that the duchesse knows nothing of, all deliciously listed at the beginning of the sentence, and wrapped up in an incriminating double negative; and at the end of the sentence, with full cadential force, here is the strange moment of catharsis by which all gritty residues are removed from the scene. It should not be necessary for this region of her soul to be purified over time, for purity is its native condition, but some demon in Proust’s writing wants all states, moral or physical, to become transformational processes.

      Again, two presentations of time are in play at once in sentences of this kind, and one of them, on the face of it, has a superior claim to generality. Certain mental types enjoy an almost magical ability to forget, just as others are haunted by memories or given to fantastical anticipations of the future, and for a moment Mme de Guermantes has become the emblem of the first group, and a caractère almost in the manner of La Bruyère. The narrator’s proposition, if we distil it in this way, is simple, self-limiting and cogent. But the second presentation, which belongs to the long, undistilled scansional sentence we in fact possess, has its own general force. It has of course the roughness and waywardness of temps vécu. It is assembled from a procession of discrete Janus-faced moments, and the recrudescence inside it of past into present cannot be legislated for or predicted. Yet this presentation has as much of a logic to it as the first: the interplay that it creates between the backwards and forwards glances of the time-bound individual, between his slowness and his precipitation, between spinning a yarn and calling a halt – and especially this interplay as controlled by a single dilated propositional structure – begins indeed to resemble a universal key to the understanding of human time, applicable on terms of strict equality to oarsmen, yachtsmen, noblewomen and novelists.

      Proust’s novel contains innumerable complex sentences that are built in this way, and many that call for more intensive scanning activity on the reader’s part than does any one of these three specimens. His time-drama is in his individual sentences and in the underlying structures they reiterate. But these models of timeliness and epistemic success achieved in the teeth of distraction and anxiety do not simply sit as outliers on the margins of Proust’s narrative. They are the carriers of that narrative, and the internal echoes that give certain isolated sentences their combined quality of cohesion and dispersal are to be heard passing between the larger units of the work too. The temporality of propositions is constantly being caught up into larger narrative segments, and retemporalised in the process. Once the reader has penetrated some distance into the book, it begins to acquire its own internal dynamic of past, present and future relationships. The book allows its reader to relive, in the present moment of reading, pasts that it alone has created for him, and to breathe an air of multiple potentiality that is native to this slowly unfolding textual fabric. It is to this larger pattern of recurrences and expectations that I shall now turn, attending principally to a single highly charged nexus of motifs.

      Among secrets and enigmas in the Proust world, those that involve sexuality have a special prestige. They are more resistant to the narrator’s powers of decipherment than other mysteries of social life, and solutions to them, once discovered, are more likely to falter and decay. Such questions as ‘which were his real preference, men or women?’ or ‘what did she really do in her younger years?’ have a lingering atmosphere of infantile curiosity about them in this novel, yet prompt the narrator to a series of ingenious experimental studies in cognition: Proust echoes Freud’s account of the child’s wish to know about sex as the prototypical form of all later intellectual endeavour. What is surprising, however, about Proust’s handling of sexual secrets is not simply that so much of his plot turns on their solution but that the panic they inspire should be entertained on such a lavish scale. The uncertainties which surround Uncle Toby’s wound in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) or the hero’s parentage in Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) are positively short-winded in comparison with those surrounding the sexuality and sexual prehistory СКАЧАТЬ