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

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СКАЧАТЬ Proust turns a banal psychological mechanism into a major source of dramatic interest and energy, however, by concentrating the attention of his narrator on only a limited number of cases and by giving large-scale structural importance only to those cases involving the sexuality of his characters. The most celebrated of these is perhaps the episode of the ‘lady in pink’, seen briefly by the narrator in the home of his great-uncle Adolphe in the early pages of the novel (I, 75; I, 89) and still continuing to fascinate him at the very end (IV, 607; VI, 427). The ‘lady in pink’, like Miss Sacripant, is Odette during the heyday of her career as a courtesan, but the unveiling of her identity takes an inordinately long time, during which the narrator reveals to the reader what his earlier, narrated self still does not know. A respectable woman has had an enticingly disreputable past, and knowing this, when he eventually does know it, changes the adult narrator’s childhood, especially as Odette’s sexual magnetism had played upon a member of his otherwise harmonious and upright family circle.

      Much more remarkable, however, is the case of Saint-Loup’s homosexuality, which is first intimated in gossip, and then firmly attested as fact, at the end of Albertine disparue (IV, 241; V, 762). As we saw in the preceding chapter, this discovery prompts in the narrator an elegy to lost friendship – built on the bizarre assumption that friends who come out or are ‘outed’ are automatically lost – and a protracted examination, cog by cog, of the machinery of retroactive remembering. So many aspects of Saint-Loup’s past behaviour that had previously seemed obscure now make a familiar and dispiriting kind of sense. His relationship with Rachel in particular is summoned up as a procession of episodes all demanding to be reconstrued. The evidence was all there long ago, but the narrator had no eyes with which to see it. Once the knowledge is out that Saint-Loup is ‘comme ça’, he, Rachel, and the narrator himself take up their positions in a new narrative sequence, and the switching of the narrator’s emotional investments from an old story to a new is a hugely laborious and painful affair.

      Retroaction is not only a feature of Proust’s sentences and of his plot, but serves also to characterise one aspect of the narrator’s personality: his combined strength and vulnerability. At certain watershed moments in the novel he is withheld from decision-making and from action; his personal history seems to rewrite itself spontaneously, and to turn him into the plaything of an inscrutable impersonal force. This can happen benignly, when a new access of happiness removes pain and doubt from the remembered past, as in this passage, which contains a perfect dictionary illustration of the unusual intransitive verb rétroagir (‘to retroact’) in use:

       la pensée ne peut même pas reconstituer l’état ancien pour le confronter au nouveau, car elle n’a plus le champ libre: la connaissance que nous avons faite, le souvenir des premières minutes inespérées, les propos que nous avons entendus, sont là qui obstruent l’entrée de notre conscience et commandent beaucoup plus les issues de notre mémoire que celles de notre imagination, ils rétroagissent davantage sur notre passé que nous ne sommes plus maîtres de voir sans tenir compte d’eux, que sur la forme, restée libre, de notre avenir.

      (I, 528)

       our thoughts cannot even reconstruct the old state in order to compare it with the new, for it has no longer a clear field: the acquaintance we have made, the memory of those first, unhoped-for moments, the talk we have heard, are there now to block the passage of our consciousness, and as they control the outlets of our memory far more than those of our imagination, they react more forcibly upon our past, which we are no longer able to visualise without taking them into account, than upon the form, still unshaped, of our future.

      (II, 128)

      Or it can happen in the manner of a nightmare, when ever more pretexts for pain begin to assail the jealous mind:

       On n’a pas besoin d’être deux, il suffit d’être seul dans sa chambre à penser pour que de nouvelles trahisons de votre maîtresse se produisent, fût-elle morte. Aussi il ne faut pas ne redouter dans l’amour, comme dans la vie habituelle, que l’avenir, mais même le passé qui ne se réalise pour nous souvent qu’après l’avenir, et nous ne parlons pas seulement du passé que nous apprenons après coup, mais de celui que nous avons conservé depuis longtemps en nous et que tout d’un coup nous apprenons à lire.

      (III, 595)

       There is no need for there to be two of you, it is enough to be alone in your room, thinking, for fresh betrayals by your mistress to come to light, even if she is dead. And so we ought not to fear in love, as in everyday life, the future alone, but even the past, which often comes to life for us only when the future has come and gone – and not only the past which we discover after the event but the past which we have long kept stored within ourselves and suddenly learn how to interpret.

      (V, 91)

      What these passages have in common, the one taken from A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs and involving Gilberte and the other from La Prisonnière and involving Albertine, is the extraordinary assurance with which the analysis is conducted. This recreation of the past is a mental automatism which the narrator reportedly merely underwent in his experience of love, but it is one which he takes in hand and magisterially dissects in the elaboration of his text. There is little to be done about a mechanism as powerful as this, apart from rediscovering one’s strength in writing about it. Constructing sentences is already a form of retroactive play for Proust, and constructing sentences like these allows him to create an eerie match between suspended syntax and being in love: both involve an incessant remaking of the past; and both allow, in the words of the apparent paradox on which the first of these quotations ends, retroaction to be carried forward into a ‘free’ future.

      But even if the Proust time-map is extended in this way, to include the backwash of the present into the past as well as the irresistible encroachments of an unquiet past into the onwards flow of present time, a last element in the workaday complexity that Proust’s reader has to cope with is still missing. In living our lives forwards, hurling ourselves headlong into an ever-receding future, we take our reminiscences with us. Sometimes as obliging friends, and sometimes as demons. And these reminiscences have only to be hardened somewhat into a pattern to acquire considerable prefigurative force: they not only accompany later events but can help them to happen. A ‘certain slant of light’, in the words of a great poem by Emily Dickinson, can bring an unanswerable intimation of death into an ordinary winter afternoon. But that same light, made memorable by who knows what conjunction of place, mood and memory, can tell us how to inhabit later afternoons, visited by different rays, differently slanted. A sudden savage word from Albertine, finding its way into an otherwise even-tempered conversation, can bring anxiety and suspicion into the narrator’s later social encounters. An anonymous actress, alive with erotic provocation, can become the very model of the temptress and the tease and begin strangely to determine an apprentice lover’s later choice of partner.

      Templates are being created, and futures foretold, throughout the first two volumes of the novel. The scene of voyeurism at Montjouvain, the episode of the withheld goodnight kiss, the first ecstatic experience of involuntary memory, together with the entire forensic reconstruction in ‘Un Amour de Swann’ of the early relationship between Swann and Odette, are the embryonic forms from which complex later narratives are to spring. In some early episodes of this kind, including the decipherment of Miss Sacripant, Proust uses a special compressed form of dramatic irony. Rather than allow the reader to glimpse a future state of affairs and then oblige him or her to wait patiently for this to be actualised at an appointed later moment, he interconnects two parallel stories and allows one to illuminate the other. Odette as Miss Sacripant prefigures Albertine, just as Swann in the guise of jealous lover prefigures the adult narrator. But by this stage in the development of the plot, Albertine, still only fitfully distinguishable from her companions on the Balbec shore, is already an object of desire. The failed encounter with her occurs within the larger drama of Elstir’s watercolour portrait, between the announcement of its enigma and the discovery of a key. All the materials СКАЧАТЬ