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

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      Anticipation as manipulated in the ingenious plotting of Proust’s novel enlarges and dramatises a far commoner range of mental activities. We invent futures from residues of the past. When we are not sunk in torpor or blocked by external circumstances, we strive to pre-empt the future rather than have it thrust upon us. We model our future selves on the predecessors we admire. Proust’s narrator is a tireless psychologising commentator on such matters. He sets against his lively account of the ‘open’ or still-to-be-invented future a gloomy picture of the future as biologically or culturally pre-ordained. The individual becomes what he or she already is:

       Les traits de notre visage ne sont guère que des gestes devenus, par l’habitude, définitifs. La nature, comme la catastrophe de Pompéi, comme une métamorphose de nymphe, nous a immobilisés dans le mouvement accoutumé. De même nos intonations contiennent notre philosophie de la vie, ce que la personne se dit à tout moment sur les choses.

      (II, 262)

       The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit has made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph, has arrested us in an accustomed movement. Similarly, our intonation embodies our philosophy of life, what a person invariably says to himself about things.

      (II, 565)

      Excessively strong or pre-emptive anticipation of this kind is in its turn set against the retroactive tricks of the remembering mind: Proust attends minutely to the whorls and vortices that the joint action of these mechanisms produces in the here and now. Whether you are writing a novel, painting a portrait, or living a life from hand to mouth, the task is always to turn the past-and-future-haunted present moment to account and to shake off its air of fatedness. A terrifying powerlessness is never far away. In both directions the exits are closed, and only by a mad wager and an inspired suspension of temporal law can we ever expect them to open again.

      What I have been describing here are time mechanisms that can be observed in miniature in individual sentences and on a grand scale in the unfolding of the novel as a whole. There is perhaps, nevertheless, too much symmetry in this account, and too much regularity in the flow of Proustian time pictured in this way. What about suddenness and surprise? What about all the swerves, short-cuts and ‘transversal threads’ (I, 490; ‘ligne […] transversale’ (I, 400)), as Proust calls them, that create improbable connections within the textual fabric? Time in this novel surely needs to be seized in its zig-zags and pointilliste stipplings as well as in the orderly inter-looping of its alternative zones.

      The later destinies of the ‘Miss Sacripant’ motif are played out in a bewildering network of lateral connections and implied time-frames. Whereas in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the portrait was rapidly stabilised into an emblem, a potent and portable representation of sexual allure, in Le Côté de Guermantes it becomes fluid and fuzzy-edged again. A photograph of the portrait is sent to the narrator by the valet de chambre of his great-uncle Adolphe, who is now dead. The servant had judged this image, and a number of others from his employer’s collection of souvenirs, more likely to appeal to a young man than to older members of the family, and had sent his own son – one Charles Morel – to deliver it:

       Comme j’avais été très étonné de trouver parmi les photographies que m’envoyait son père une du portrait de Miss Sacripant (c’est-à-dire Odette) par Elstir, je dis à Charles Morel, en l’accompagnant jusqu’à la porte cochère: «Je crains que vous ne puissiez me renseigner. Est-ce que mon oncle connaissait beaucoup cette dame? […]»

      (II, 563)

       As I had been greatly surprised to find among the photographs which his father had sent me one of the portrait of Miss Sacripant (otherwise Odette) by Elstir, I said to Charles Morel as I accompanied him to the carriage gateway: ‘I don’t suppose you can tell me, but did my uncle know this lady well? […]’

      (III, 305)

      It is in the course of this episode that the reader is first introduced to Morel, who is to be a major presence in the remainder of the book, and there is more than a hint of prophecy in his being the bearer of the photograph: like Odette herself, and like the figure in Elstir’s watercolour, Morel is sexually ambiguous. Indeed he is Proust’s fullest representation of carefree bisexuality, and it is fitting that he should be given responsibility for the transportation of an icon that knits together his divergent sexual tastes. But the photograph has moved in quite different circles too: it served an aged libertine as a titillating reminder of his adventures in the demi-monde and, as we already know, was Swann’s favourite depiction of his wife. Miss Sacripant, during her momentary reappearance in Le Côté de Guermantes, connects narrative past to narrative future straightforwardly enough, but she also sends echoes racing through Proust’s socio-sexual labyrinth. Her travesti connects her to countless other characters trapped inside an unstoppable masked ball.

      Towards the end of La Prisonnière, this aspect of Miss Sacripant reaches its apotheosis. She no longer circulates in photographic form, as a mere image caught at a third remove from the ‘real’ Odette, but still more impalpably as a figment of other people’s gossip. Charlus, in the course of his long harangue on the history and sociology of homosexuality, begins to speak about Swann’s sexual character, and, prompted by Brichot, about Swann’s wife:

       Mais voyons, c’est par moi qu’il l’a connue. Je l’avais trouvée charmante dans son demi-travesti, un soir qu’elle jouait Miss Sacripant; j’étais avec des camarades de club, nous avions tous ramené une femme, et bien que je n’eusse envie que de dormir, les mauvaises langues avaient prétendu, car c’est affreux ce que le monde est méchant, que j’avais couché avec Odette. Seulement, elle en avait profité pour venir m’embêter, et j’avais cru m’en débarrasser en la présentant à Swann. De ce jour-là elle ne cessa plus de me cramponner, elle ne savait pas un mot d’orthographe, c’est moi qui faisais les lettres.

      (III, 803)

       Why, it was through me that he came to know her. I had thought her charming in her boyish get-up one evening when she played Miss Sacripant; I was with some club-mates, and each of us took a woman home with him, and although all I wanted was to go to sleep, slanderous tongues alleged – it’s terrible how malicious people are – that I went to bed with Odette. In any case she took advantage of the slanders to come and bother me, and I thought I might get rid of her by introducing her to Swann. From that moment on she never let me go. She couldn’t spell the simplest word, it was I who wrote all her letters for her.

      (V, 339–40)

      Odette is a woman about whom tongues wag. She flits from anecdote to anecdote, and the chronicle of her lovers, which Charlus proceeds to rehearse, enhances this sense of multiformity. She is a creature called into being by other people’s desires, fantasies and projections. The renaming of Miss Sacripant at this point in the novel makes her into a passing effect of speech inside an indefinitely loquacious community.

      The temporality of these later references and allusions is in one sense very simple. They are chronological markers within the overall teleology of the book. A la recherche du temps perdu is not only ‘about’ time but about the linear process of uncovering new time-truths: the plot leads slowly towards a grandly orchestrated redemptive view, and time envisaged in these terms is emphatically distinguished from the dimension in which hours and days are merely spent, lost or frittered away. The declared direction of the book, until the threshold of its final revelations is reached, is downhill into darkness. It is entirely fitting that the image of Odette should be fuzzied and frittered as the narrative proceeds, СКАЧАТЬ