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

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СКАЧАТЬ are calamitous – when they are not merely farcical. A crucial temporal framework in this book is the one in which sexually driven individuals strive to find things out about each other. And in this pursuit, their expenditure of time is reckless.

      I have chosen from among the numerous scenes of sexual enquiry that are to be found in the early volumes of the novel an elaborate intellectual comedy which prefigures much that is to be fully explored later. This is the episode in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs where the narrator discovers a watercolour portrait of ‘Miss Sacripant’ in Elstir’s studio and is thwarted in his desire to be introduced to the ‘little band’ of young girls (II, 203–20; II, 493–514). At least four currents of feeling are running in parallel here; the narrator wants: to meet the girls, and expects Elstir to help him do so; to find out more about Elstir’s art, and about the subject of the portrait; to respect the rhythm of Elstir’s working day rather than press his own claims upon the painter’s time; and, above all, to seem casual and disengaged in the eyes of the girls themselves. The attempt to achieve some sort of equilibrium between these incompatible wishes involves him in a distended cost-benefit analysis, and a delirium of excuses and explanations. Four stories are being told simultaneously in this episode, which is a tour de force of polyphonic invention, and any one of them may suddenly gather bulk at the expense of the others. Slowness in one narrative may permit a new access of speed in another; opening up a gap in one causal sequence may permit a gap in another to be closed. For example, between the last rekindling of the narrator’s hope that an introduction can be arranged and the definitive extinction of that hope, for today at least, Elstir proceeds with tiresome deliberation to complete his own work: he alone has the power to usher the narrator into the force-field of the eternal feminine, but devotes himself instead to the lesser magic that is his painting. The narrator not only describes this delay, but performs a complementary delaying manoeuvre of his own: a long excursus on self-love and altruism, and on the little heroisms of ordinary life, intervenes between Elstir’s last brush-stroke and the beginning of their walk together (II, 208–9; II, 499–501). Material that is in itself dignified and serious-minded intrudes hilariously upon the narrator’s sentimental adventure; within the unfolding drama, an elaborate moral discussion has the status of a simple accidental misfortune.

      By now Proust’s narrative architecture has become dangerously elastic. Time may be measured as a connected series of physical events, sense-perceptions, and mental promptings – ‘Le soir tombait; il fallut revenir; je ramenais Elstir vers sa villa …’ (II, 210; ‘Dusk was falling; it was time to be turning homewards. I was accompanying Elstir back to his villa’ (II, 502)) – or by the key ideas which fuel speculation, rumination or reasoning, or by the inflections of prose discourse itself. In a passage of this kind, Proust moves with gaiety and assured improvisatory skill from one system of measurement to another. Thinking, sensing, acting, writing are given a common pulse, and made into the co-equal modes of a single, encompassing transformational experiment. A sentence which begins with the words ‘Le soir tombait’ can end well, and with no note of impropriety, upon a supposition enclosed in a hypothesis: ‘[les jeunes filles qui] avaient l’air de ne pas me voir, mais sans aucun doute n’en étaient pas moins en train de porter sur moi un jugement ironique’ (II, 210; ‘[the girls] who looked as though they had not seen me but were unquestionably engaged in passing a sarcastic judgement on me’ (II, 502)). The discrepancy between public time, measurable by events, and mental time, measurable by the development of an individual’s ideas or by his changing intensities of feeling, is laid bare by Proust. Dramatic opportunities abound in the disputed territory between outside and inside, and Proust’s fluid transpositions between outer and inner time-scales are thoroughly ironic in character. These are the events, the narrator says; this, he adds, is how they look if you change your viewpoint on the scene; and this again is how they look if you remove yourself from the scene altogether and concentrate on the larger tendency of my tale. Yet despite all the attention paid by the narrator to those local repositionings of himself and his addressee, Proust’s reader is still encouraged to read ‘for the plot’, to find things out, and still invited to be seduced by secrets in the footsteps of the hero. And the scale on which this kind of reading occurs is, as I have said, very large indeed. Elstir’s painting travels back and forth both in event-time and in mind-time; it is a tight cluster of time-effects, and a time-measuring device for use in the book as a whole.

      The image of ‘Miss Sacripant’ – who, it emerges after a long delay, is the youthful Odette dressed as a boy – is subjected to a barrage of reinterpretations, and gradually becomes a hypnotic sexual icon. The initial description of the portrait already hints at the uncontainable fecundity of the image:

       La blancheur du plastron, d’une finesse de grésil et dont le frivole plissage avait des clochettes comme celles du muguet, s’étoilait des clairs reflets de la chambre, aigus eux-mêmes et finement nuancés comme des bouquets de fleurs qui auraient broché le linge. Et le velours du veston, brillant et nacré, avait çà et là quelque chose de hérissé, de déchiqueté et de velu qui faisait penser à l’ebouriffage des œillets dans le vase. Mais surtout on sentait qu’Elstir, insoucieux de ce que pouvait présenter d’immoral ce travesti d’une jeune actrice pour qui le talent avec lequel elle jouerait son rôle avait sans doute moins d’importance que l’attrait irritant qu’elle allait offrir aux sens blasés ou dépravés de certains spectateurs, s’était au contraire attaché à ces traits d’ambiguïté comme à un élément esthétique qui valait d’être mis en relief et qu’il avait tout fait pour souligner.

      (II, 204–5)

       The whiteness of the shirt-front, as fine as soft hail, with its gay pleats gathered into little bells like lilies of the valley, was spangled with bright gleams of light from the room, themselves sharply etched and subtly shaded as if they were flowers stitched into the linen. And the velvet of the jacket, with its brilliant sheen, had something rough, frayed and shaggy about it here and there that recalled the crumpled brightness of the carnations in the vase. But above all one felt that Elstir, heedless of any impression of immorality that might be given by this transvestite costume worn by a young actress for whom the talent she would bring to the role was doubtless of less importance than the titillation she would offer to the jaded or depraved senses of some of her audience, had on the contrary fastened upon this equivocal aspect as on an aesthetic element which deserved to be brought into prominence, and which he had done everything in his power to emphasise.

      (II, 495)

      Elstir was particularly attracted, the narrator suggests, by the undecidability of this girl-boy, but he has prepared the way for the exquisite indecision that his figure provokes in the spectator by sexualising the entire space of his picture. Light itself has two separate pictorial roles. On the one hand it is a uniform radiance emanating from objects, or an elucidating flow of energy passing across their surface and removing disparities as it goes. On the other hand, here and on numerous occasions elsewhere in the novel, light plays upon surfaces and inscribes them with its momentary messages: the outside world survives into the domestic interior as a series of ghostly reflections; a wide roomful of light is concentrated into a pattern of dancing flecks upon a bodice. Then again, Elstir’s brush has located tangles and raggedness where other artists, less daring and less ingenious in their sexual explorations, would have settled for a simple sheen: inside the close-cropped fabric of a jacket, or between smoothly enfolded carnation-petals, secret places with an unkempt covering of hair have been found. The figure of ‘Miss Sacripant’, so exhaustively boyish and girlish at the same time, and by way of the same sequence of brushstrokes, reclaims for the human body and for the arts of couture, an eroticism that is everywhere anyway, as readily available as light and air in the natural world.

      Proust turns an imaginary painting into a tableau vivant; the central image and its accompanying furniture are motionless yet constantly reanimated by the narrator’s observing eye. He tells stories as he looks. He free-associates and, from a purely iconographical viewpoint, behaves badly: the art object is casually folded back into the ‘ordinary life’ of the narrator’s nascent sexual desires, and then abandoned with equal nonchalance for a semi-theoretical СКАЧАТЬ