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

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СКАЧАТЬ in an impassioned nasal twang, as she might have said: ‘What, you know Mme de Francquetot too?’, with this difference, that my relations with Mme de Francquetot would have been a matter of profound indifference to her, whereas my knowledge of Chopin plunged her into a sort of artistic delirium. Her salivary hyper-secretion no longer sufficed. Not having even attempted to understand the part played by Debussy in the rediscovery of Chopin, she felt only that my judgment of him was favourable. Her musical enthusiasm overpowered her. ‘Elodie! Elodie! He likes Chopin!’ Her bosom rose and she beat the air with her arms. ‘Ah! I knew at once that you were a musician,’ she cried, ‘I can quite understand your liking his work, hhartistic as you are. It’s so beautiful!’ And her voice was as pebbly as if, to express her ardour for Chopin, she had imitated Demosthenes and filled her mouth with all the shingle on the beach. Then came the ebb-tide, reaching as far as her veil which she had not time to lift out of harm’s way and which was drenched, and finally the Marquise wiped away with her embroidered handkerchief the tidemark of foam in which the memory of Chopin had steeped her moustaches.

      (IV, 250)

      Debussy’s favourable opinion of Chopin, funnelled downwards by the narrator into the dimly lit world of the Cambremers, triggers a violent physical reaction: the throat, the nasal membranes and the salivary ducts of the old marquise, which have already been sketched at some length, are now so energised by the narrator’s announcement that she begins to resemble an impersonal natural force. She secretes, but in the manner of the ocean nearby. The pebbled shore, the incoming tide, the foaming waves, remove her from a mere social encounter and give her a place in the conversation of the elements. From the viewpoint of breeding and decorum, her reaction to a risen-again composer is as grotesque and uncomely as her moustache.

      This is caricature reaching towards sublimity. The excellence of Beethoven’s music and of Demosthenes’s oratorical style are by stealth co-opted into the narrator’s portrait of incontinent old age. High art, represented by Chopin, Debussy and the great chorus, ‘O welche Lust!’ which opens the Act I finale of Fidelio, is brought into alignment with the very low art of a sensational boulevard melodrama, and the expressive power of art itself with embarrassing bodily functions. A revolutionary hymn to freedom is interwoven with the free growth of facial hair and the free expression of spit. Writing of this kind passes beyond simple vitriol and disgust and moves towards a lofty vision of art as necessarily inclusive, heterogeneous and impure. From within a malicious account of exchange value a new usefulness is discovered for the artistic commodity: it produces delight from the most improbable raw materials. An abject beauty is born.

      Proust’s account of the art market is as much a celebration as a critique. Commercial motives and financial transactions are ‘low’ materials, but ones upon which the high-toned Proustian novel thrives. The narrator keeps on reminding himself of these, reserving a special place in his own prospective novel for getting and spending, and the exploitation of art for other than artistic ends. A la recherche du temps perdu thus anticipates in detail one of the destinies to which it has been subject since its publication. The novel has been pressed into service as a source-book for the social history of late nineteenth-century France, and has acted as an informal guide to the sensibilities, manners, tastes and fashions of the period. It has come to resemble the Voyage artistique à Bayreuth (1897) that was so popular in Proust’s own day. This volume, by Albert Lavignac, was the complete vade mecum for those setting out on their Wagnerian pilgrimage, and combined operatic plot-summaries and music-examples with advice on travel, including railway ticket prices and journey times, hotel accommodation and local dishes. Proust’s novel is regularly treated as a voyage in space and time to a lost Faubourg Saint-Germain, and valued because it tells us what books its inhabitants were reading, what plays they were seeing and what coiffures and evening gowns they wore:

       le visage d’Odette paraissait plus maigre et plus proéminent parce que le front et le haut des joues, cette surface unie et plus plane était recouverte par la masse de cheveux qu’on portait alors prolongés en «devants», soulevés en «crêpés», répandus en mèches folles le long des oreilles; et quant à son corps qui était admirablement fait, il était difficile d’en apercevoir la continuité (à cause des modes de l’époque et quoiqu’elle fût une des femmes de Paris qui s’habillaient le mieux), tant le corsage, s’avançant en saillie comme sur un ventre imaginaire et finissant brusquement en pointe pendant que par en dessous commençait à s’enfler le ballon des doubles jupes, donnait à la femme l’air d’être composée de pièces différentes mal emmanchées les unes dans les autres; tant les ruchés, les volants, le gilet suivaient en toute indépendance, selon la fantaisie de leur dessin ou la consistance de leur étoffe, la ligne qui les conduisait aux nœuds, aux bouillons de dentelle, aux effilés de jais perpendiculaires, ou qui les dirigeait le long du busc, mais ne s’attachaient nullement à l’être vivant, qui selon que l’architecture de ces fanfreluches se rapprochait ou s’écartait trop de la sienne s’y trouvait engoncé ou perdu.

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