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

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СКАЧАТЬ of story-telling, or art history, or inferential argument – is that something strict and rule-governed is still going on sentence by sentence. Distinctions have to be clear if a coherent play of ambiguity, as distinct from mere semantic havering or fuss, is to be sustained. The machinery for making such distinctions is to be found in the bifurcating syntax of the long Proustian sentence, and it is the peculiar property of these sentences, placed end to end and seemingly so autonomous, to organise long stretches of text around relatively few underlying structural schemes. The sentences do many unruly things, of course: their syntax ramifies and proliferates; their meanings are sometimes amplified and embellished to the point of distraction. Yet they studiously repeat, almost in the manner of intellectual home truths, certain characteristic patterns of thought. Antithetical qualities are held against each other in equipoise. The alternative potentialities of a single situation are expounded. Surprising details yield large insights, and large insights, once they have been naturalised, seize upon the further surprising details they require to remain credible. Expectations are now confounded and now confirmed. Attention is dispersed and reconcentrated; increasing speed of perception leads to a plateau of immobilised absorption. And so forth.

      The typical thought-shapes that Proust’s long sentences endlessly mobilise provide secure bridges between the markedly different kinds of writing that his novel yokes together. By the time we reach the following passage, for example, the secret of Miss Sacripant’s identity and of her former relations with Elstir have been revealed, and reflections on the perceptual rather than the sexual dealings between artist and model are apparently in order:

       Mais d’ailleurs le portrait eût-il été, non pas antérieur, comme la photographie préférée de Swann, à la systématisation des traits d’Odette en un type nouveau, majestueux et charmant, mais postérieur, qu’il eût suffi de la vision d’Elstir pour désorganiser ce type. Le génie artistique agit à la façon de ces températures extrêmement élevées qui ont le pouvoir de dissocier les combinaisons d’atomes et de grouper ceux-ci suivant un ordre absolument contraire, répondant à un autre type. Toute cette harmonie factice que la femme a imposée à ses traits et dont chaque jour avant de sortir elle surveille la persistance dans sa glace, chargeant l’inclinaison du chapeau, le lissage des cheveux, l’enjouement du regard, d’en assurer la continuité, cette harmonie, le coup d’œil du grand peintre la détruit en une seconde, et à sa place il fait un regroupement des traits de la femme, de manière à donner satisfaction à un certain idéal féminin et pictural qu’il porte en lui.

      (II, 216)

       But in any case, even if the portrait had been, not anterior, like Swann’s favourite photograph, to the systematisation of Odette’s features into a new type, majestic and charming, but subsequent to it, Elstir’s vision would have sufficed to discompose that type. Artistic genius acts in a similar way to those extremely high temperatures which have the power to split up combinations of atoms which they proceed to combine afresh in a diametrically opposite order, corresponding to another type. All that artificial harmony which a woman has succeeded in imposing upon her features, the maintenance of which she oversees in her mirror every day before going out, relying on the angle of her hat, the smoothness of her hair, the vivacity of her expression, to ensure its continuity, that harmony the keen eye of the great painter instantly destroys, substituting for it a rearrangement of the woman’s features such as will satisfy a certain pictorial ideal of femininity which he carries in his head.

      (II, 509)

      Artist and model are both masters of artifice, but where the model’s first move is to quell the disorder of her past conduct and present appearance by constructing a smooth social persona, the artist’s is to introduce disorder into the unreally tranquillised scene offered by the model’s face, hair and clothes. His aggression, however, comes not from a simple preference for the wild over the tame, or for energy over repose, but from a wish to install on the canvas a smooth construction of his own. One fabrication must be dismantled and cleared away to make room for another, and the newcomer is still more obsessionally preserved from ruin than the original: where the woman simply checks herself in the mirror to make sure that each effect of art is in place, the artist, we are soon to be told, pursues his ‘pictorial ideal of femininity’ with crazed consistency from one model to the next.

      On the face of it, this passage simply moves discussion of the artist’s passions from the sensuous to the conceptual plane and begins to speak of new things. We now read of systematisation, dissociation, harmony and continuity where before we were offered velvet, mother-of-pearl, brisdes and tousled heads. But the relation between the two paragraphs is in fact much closer than their divergences of diction would suggest. The second remembers and reinflects exactly the interplay between orderliness and an exciting, irruptive disorder that had given the first its clarity and strength. There is a rhythm here, or a thought-shape, or a paradigmatic tension, that is preserved from one occasion to the next. The special virtuosity that Proust ascribes to his narrator allows him to begin his own thinking with hair and prickles, to pursue it with cognitive concepts and to give both dimensions the same underlying structure of articulate hesitation. Inside the sentence we are currently reading earlier sentences continue to sound. Present reading time is haunted by reading times past.

      Two new features of Proust’s temporality begin to emerge, then, when we look beyond the retrospective and prospective dispositions of the individual complex sentence. First, within paragraphs, the propulsive energy of the writing, the living sense of futurity that drives the narration on, comes from an astonishing power of recapitulation. An ambiguity in sexual identity refashions earlier ambiguous relations – between, say, light that shines and light that dances, or between smooth and rough in the painterly representation of fabrics. The way forward into a clear new future always involves revisiting the past. Secondly, within extended episodes, continuities of this sort are at work even when the narration insists upon irreversible change. Uncovering Elstir’s secret, or meeting the little band face to face for the first time, changes for ever the way the world looks. The whole map has to be redrawn. But the text carries along, from the before of unknowing into the afterwards of knowledge, not just a lively memory of key events and their affective colouring but the imprint of mental structures that have already proved themselves and can be expected to see active service again. The appetite to know survives the moment of its own satiation, and the instruments by which the world is made intelligible, far from being thrown away after use, remain importunately in place and demand further exercise. Whatever the ‘open’ future holds, its broad contours have already been foretold.

      Yet when the large-scale temporal patterning of Proust’s text is described solely in these terms an important quality is still missing from the overall picture. For although recapitulation and recurrence give the narrative a range of captivating refrains – here in La Prisonnière are the tribulations of jealousy, as acute now, in the narrator’s manhood, as they were before his birth, and here in Albertine disparue is Legrandin being Legrandin, unchanged after all these years and pages – the past is not always treated as kindly as this, and simply revisited or revived at the narrator’s leisure. Retroaction rather than simple retrospection sometimes occurs. The past is not just subjected to an indefinite process of reinterpretation, but can be materially altered by the desiring intelligence of the narrator: armed with new information and switching the direction of his gaze, he can give the past new contents. That Miss Sacripant should be Odette rather than an anonymous actress for ever lost behind the name of a stage character, that she should be Odette rather than a fantasy figure in one of Elstir’s youthful caprices, changes the way the light had fallen, moments ago, in Elstir’s studio. In the wake of the narrator’s discovery, new sexual predilections spring into being for Elstir, Swann, and Odette herself, and a new element is added to the already troubled prehistory of the Swann-Odette marriage. A catalytic reaction spreads backwards from the very recent past of the narrator himself into the barely recoverable recesses of other people’s lives. All is altered.

      We rewrite the history of our lives from moment to moment, of course, even those of us who cling steadfastly to an ‘official’ autobiography, and our retroactive inventions СКАЧАТЬ