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

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СКАЧАТЬ Proust’s novel has another, less encouraging, story in it. Seeking to localise this, we might be tempted to say, in the words of Shakespeare’s Troilus, that the narrator’s ‘desire is boundless but his act a slave to limit’, and there would be evidence for this view. Proust’s protagonist, for all his wishfulness, seems to have limited energy and willpower, and an ailing sense of purpose. In the course of a very long tale told about himself, he does not do much. In society, he is immobilised by the spectacle of other people’s busy posturings. In the inner realm, he sees bright futures ahead of him, but often sinks back into an anxious torpor at the very moment when decisive action is required to actualise any one of those possible worlds. He havers. He maunders. He drugs himself with retrospection. Surely the narrator’s vision of a boundless, millionfold, endlessly self-transforming landscape of personal experience is a compensatory fantasy of precisely the kind that one would expect from someone who spent too long lazing indoors, refusing to pull himself together, venture forth and seize the day.

      Well, yes. This is partly right. Proust’s narrator is a comic creation, and he belongs, with Goncharov’s Oblomov (1859), a variety of Chekhovian males, the hero of Svevo’s As a Man Grows Older (1898) and Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), to the company of those who, while seeming merely indolent and indecisive to the impatient observer, are withheld from action by what the connoisseur will recognise as an admirable reticence and pudeur. A la recherche du temps perdu is a comedy of hypertrophied appetites and shrunken deeds. But Proust is a tragedian, too, and the tragic vision that his novel sets forth is one in which desire itself is a slave to limit. Desire in Proust teases us with the promise of an unceasing plasticity, but underneath the changing array of its objects it is all the while subject to fixation. Early configurations of sexual feeling continue to haunt adult experience. Phobias, obsessions and fetishes keep turning the narrator’s prospective, forward-flung imaginings back towards the needs, the injuries and the blighted pleasures of infancy. Desire keeps on repeating itself. It nags and needles, and will not let the past go. And Proust’s lengthy book, even while it glitters with fantasy and invention, insists upon this bounded and fixated quality: a desolate pattern of recurrence, a sense of pre-ordained pain and dissatisfaction, governs the procession of its narrative episodes. All love affairs fail, and fail in the same way. All journeys end in disappointment. All satisfactions are too little and too late. Death picks off the narrator’s admired mentors one by one, rekindling and reinforcing his childhood feelings of abandonment.

      In what follows, then, my travels will take me back and forth inside Proust’s novel rather than see me shuttling between my home and Cabourg, or between Cabourg and Balbec. As I travel I shall seek to recreate, in schematic and accessible form, the characteristic rhythms of the novel’s unfolding. Proust’s great work has ‘big’ themes, and its path-breaking author has one very old-fashioned way of handling these: his characters will announce a topic, warm to it, and hold forth upon it recklessly. I have chosen a cluster of these topics as my chapter-titles, not so much because Proust’s characters have wise things to say about time, sex or death, although they often have, as because the ebb and flow of Proust’s attention can be clearly observed against these featureless horizons. Such matters, singled out, have the further advantage of allowing us to look beneath the large tidal movements of the book and to rediscover the cross-currents and counter-rhythms that mark the individual Proust paragraph, and are the hallmark indeed of a speculative style that remains sui generis.

      Let me not, however, sound too high-minded about the reflections gathered here. I do still long to feel the sand and shingle of the Cabourg shore between my toes, and I have not entirely given up hope of seeing the little band materialised before me as I wander there in the cold, Northern spray. But in the meantime Proust’s gritty, breezy and salty book has many wonders, and to these I now turn.

I

       Self

       mi kirjavaista tähiksi taivaalle,

       ne tahiksi taivaalle.

       Kalevala

       All that in the egg was mottled

       Now became the stars in heaven.

      The narrator of A la recherche du temps perdu is a splendid example of the human type that Jane Austen called ‘the imaginist’. This was her word for the person who spent too much time fantasising and seemed always to be in flight from real events and binding obligations. Yet where Emma Woodhouse and Catherine Morland are gradually cured of their imaginative excesses and wishful misperceptions, Proust’s character is presented not simply as an untreatable case, but as one whose power of fantasy, even when debilitating, is still essentially a strength. And while Austen’s imaginists devote themselves to personal relationships, paying special attention to matters of rank, taste and marriageability, Proust’s narrator returns tirelessly to the structure, texture, density, consistency and continuity of the isolated human self. He imagines selfhood lost, and found, and again lost.

      His questions about personal identity sound strict and soluble when they are formulated in philosophical or psychological terms: is the self one or many, concentrated or dispersed, continuous or fragmented, a rule-governed psycho-physical entity with its own integrative capacities or a side-effect of natural language in daily use? But for all his fluency in the handling of such concepts, the narrator’s ruling passion is for images, or for abstractions that have an exposed nerve of imagery running through them. He looks to nature in his search for figurative representations of selfhood, and has a special fondness for the planets and stars. Albertine is a nebula, the little band a constellation; the face of an actress seen in close-up is a Milky Way, and family relationships are the scattered segments of a single exploding star. Whether he looks outwards to his sexual partner or the social group or inwards to the tissue of his own memories and desires, his characteristic task is that of ‘modelling nebulae’ (III, 874; V, 425). All his heavenly configurations are poised undecidably between coherence and dispersal, just as the real nebulae themselves may contain powerful intimations of structure (here a crab, there a spiral) while continuing to impress us by their sheer nebulosity. Problems posed in these terms can have and need have no solutions. The Proustian imaginist leads a nomadic life. He is at home inside his comet-tail of images.

      Modern computational scholarship has revealed that the word moi, as noun or pronoun (‘self’, ‘me’ or ‘myself’), occurs on average 1.1996 times per page in Proust’s novel. Few readers, of course, will be surprised by this scrap of statistical information, for the novel is still widely thought of as being concerned above all else with the splendours and miseries of the self-absorbed human individual. Even those who dislike the notion of ‘self’, and think of it as the sign of a dangerously unhistorical attitude to the study of the human subject, are likely to grant Proust’s vast and intricate discussion of the notion an important historical place: the modern, secular, psychological moi, launched upon its spectacular European career in the sixteenth century, reaches in Proust a moment of extraordinary power and authority. For a moment, indeed, the human self and its vicissitudes become the essential subject-matter of art. And even if Proust’s novel, in its insistent and sometimes deranged talk of the moi, contains the seeds of the self’s decay, his achievement is none the less a splendid one. The notion of self may seem antiquated, and it may often be used to draw attention away from the interpersonal and social worlds in which the human sense of personal identity is constructed, but in Proust’s account the notion is flexible, hospitable to experience, thoroughly immersed in society, and obdurately problematic.

      The narrator wonders at the beginning of Le Côté de Guermantes how the human personality acquires its improbable power of endurance. How is it, for example, that, having once fallen into deep sleep, one is able to become again the individual one once was? Why does one not wake up in the morning СКАЧАТЬ