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

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СКАЧАТЬ worldly lesson that Proust seeks to impose: things fall apart and the clockwork runs down. The narrator’s journey takes him to an extreme limit, at which decay is visible on every human face and nullity speaks from behind every eye, and it is only when this limit has been reached and its intolerable pain felt that an apocalyptic arrest of time becomes possible.

      Yet the book would be a very thin affair if its long, ruminative unfolding were readable only in this way. Proust does of course handle linear time supremely well: the stations on the narrator’s journey provide the book with huge, unmistakable calibrations; questions that need answers in due course find them; causes precede effects; and although the flow of time may almost congeal during a protracted soirée, or be accelerated mercilessly by a sudden recital of marriages and deaths, it is for the most part reliably unidirectional. Events that occur latterly occur only because former events have prepared the way for them. Within subsequence consequence is to be found. The final apocalypse itself is fully motivated by what has gone before, and the buildup to it is presented as a sub-divisible process, a phased dawning of new awareness. Yet the broad intentional structure of the book catches up within itself a dancing array of materials that are not subduable to any overall project. Proust offers his reader a simultaneous web of associations, as well as the undeflected flight of time’s arrow. Across the canvas of the book points of special intensity are scattered, and we are invited by the narrator, who is a virtuoso in such matters, to scan back and forth between them, making improbable connections as we go. Proust’s text rebels against the smooth linear temporality to which his narrator for the most part adheres in the telling of his tale, and incorporates into itself not just the vibrant internal reflections that typify Elstir’s art but its raggedness and its rough patches.

      The webs, the tangles and the improvised cross-stitchings that Proust’s writing contains speak not of timeliness or timelessness but of an alternative and glaringly familiar temporality. And, although it would no doubt require topological schemata of great subtlety to model this temporality satisfactorily, its main features can be enumerated with ease. It ordains that past, present and future are composites rather than simples; that recapitulations of the past are projections into the future too; that synchronicity comprises, and may be broken down into, myriad diachronic sequences; that certain time-effects are intelligible only if spatially extended; that parallel universes may be conflated into a single newly conceived space–time continuum; and that any temporally extended system of differences may collapse into an undifferentiated flux. This is the time of human desire, and the time that Proust’s book inhabits sentence by sentence. It is defiantly non-linear, and runs counter both to the plot of the book, and to much of its ‘theory’. If we place Miss Sacripant, or any other elaborately recurring motif, within this alternative temporality we discover not a disconsolate ebbing away of meaning as time passes but a restoration of meaning within a temporal manifold. Odette en travesti becomes not just a static emblem of the desirable woman, but an intersection point in a moving network of desiring pathways. Against the pessimism of linear time and its losses, the book provides us – and not just in its ending, but all through and even in its darkest hours – with an optimistic view of time as connection-making and irrepressible potentiality. This time is not a concept, or a connected series of points, or a fixed scale against which geological epochs or human life-spans can be measured. It is a stuff and there for the handling.

      A significant advantage is to be had from thinking of Proust as an artful manipulator of ordinary time rather than as the harbinger of an unusual, specialised or occult temporal vision. By this route more of his text remains readable, and its overall account of time becomes richer and more provoking. Involuntary memory, which is the gateway to Proust’s apocalypse – to his time of redemption – is ordinary enough, of course. The phrase itself would scarcely have enjoyed its remarkably successful career if it had not encapsulated a common experience, and ‘Proustian moments’, like ‘Freudian slips’, would not have entered the vernacular if their import had been in any way obscure. But when it comes to the experience of reading the successive pages of Proust’s novel and taking time over them, involuntary memory is oddly inert and unhelpful. Applying it as a key to the understanding of Proustian time is rather like looking at the working day from the viewpoint of weekends and holidays, or at the lives of plain-dwellers from the neighbouring mountain-tops. The time that is proper to Proust’s long sentences, however, and to his extended episodes and to the long-range patterns of expectation and remembrance which organise the novel as a whole, is both ordinary and extremely complex. Ordinary in that it belongs to the everyday world of mortal, desire-driven creatures, and complex in that its many criss-crossing dimensions are mobile and difficult to construe. Past, present and future are intricately conjoined within sentences, and reconjoined still more intricately during extended narrative sequences. Sentences come to rest upon a recovered sense of propositional fullness and completion, only to have certain of their elements wrested from them and driven into new associative configurations by what follows. The temporality of a narrative which is made from unstable building blocks of this kind is one of continuous scattering and concentration. Temporality is retemporalised endlessly, and time-features that are awkward and obtuse are given special prominence in the fabrication of the text. Snags, discrepancies, prematurities, belatednesses, prophetic glimpses, misrecognitions, and blocked or incongruous memories – these tragi-comical indignities are the mainspring of Proust’s vast fictional contrivance. He finds the plenitude of his book in this epic catalogue of unsatisfactory moments.

      Such impure and unsimple ordinary time accompanies the narrator, enfolds him, to the very end of his narrative. When he recounts his culminating discoveries, during which he discerned a celestial exit from loss and waste at last coming into view, Proust’s writing has an enhanced rather than a diminished sense of temporal pulsation:

       L’être qui était rené en moi […] languit dans l’observation du présent où les sens ne peuvent la [l’essence des choses] lui apporter, dans la considération d’un passé que l’intelligence lui dessèche, dans l’attente d’un avenir que la volonté construit avec des fragments du présent et du passé auxquels elle retire encore de leur réalité en ne conservant d’eux que ce qui convient à la fin utilitaire, étroitement humaine, qu’elle leur assigne. Mais qu’un bruit, qu’une odeur, déjà entendu ou respirée jadis, le soient de nouveau, à la fois dans le présent et dans le passé, réels sans être actuels, idéaux sans être abstraits, aussitôt l’essence permanente et habituellement cachée des choses se trouve libérée, et notre vrai moi qui, parfois depuis longtemps, semblait mort, mais ne l’était pas entièrement, s’éveille, s’anime en recevant la céleste nourriture qui lui est apportée.

      (IV, 451)

       The being which had been reborn in me [languishes in] the observation of the present, where the senses cannot feed it [the essence of things] with this food […] as it does in the consideration of a past made arid by the intellect or in the anticipation of a future which the will constructs with fragments of the present and the past, fragments whose reality it still further reduces by preserving of them only what is suitable for the utilitarian, narrowly human purpose for which it intends them. But let a noise or a scent, once heard or once smelt, be heard or smelt again in the present and at the same time in the past, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, and immediately the permanent and habitually concealed essence of things is liberated and our true self, which seemed – had perhaps for long years seemed – to be dead but was not altogether dead, is awakened and reanimated as it receives the celestial nourishment that is brought to it.

      (VI, 224)

      Proust sings of redeemed time in a language that is still restless and unsubdued. In the first of these sentences a familiar music is to be heard: the syntax continues to interconnect past, present and future, to manipulate memory and expectation, to tease out the paradoxes of desire-time and to pursue a broken path towards propositional fullness. We could almost be back, with the narrator, in the Swanns’ drawing room, or on the Cambremers’ yacht, or in the grievance-free mental half-light of the duchesse de Guermantes. But in the second sentence, which speaks of a past and a present ecstatically dissolved into each other and of a future which СКАЧАТЬ