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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ soi-même, pendant quelques instants après qu’un tel sommeil a cessé, un simple bonhomme de plomb. On n’est plus personne. Comment, alors, cherchant sa pensée, sa personnalité comme on cherche un objet perdu, finit-on par retrouver son propre moi plutôt que tout autre? Pourquoi, quand on se remet à penser, n’est-ce pas alors une autre personnalité que l’antérieure qui s’incarne en nous? On ne voit pas ce qui dicte le choix et pourquoi, entre les millions d’êtres humains qu’on pourrait être, c’est sur celui qu’on était la veille qu’on met juste la main.

      (II, 387)

       We call that a leaden sleep, and it seems as though, even for a few moments after such a sleep is ended, one has oneself become a simple figure of lead. One is no longer a person. How then, searching for one’s thoughts, one’s personality, as one searches for a lost object, does one recover one’s own self rather than any other? Why, when one begins again to think, is it not a personality other than the previous one that becomes incarnate in one? One fails to see what dictates the choice, or why, among the millions of human beings one might be, it is on the being one was the day before that unerringly one lays one’s hand.

      (III, 93–4)

      Seeking the self as one might seek a lost object is here submitted to one limitation only, but that is a daunting one. The object cannot not be found. Still baffled by sleep, still dispersed and nebulous, the newly awake individual homes in upon, and efficiently reassumes, his accustomed form. He cannot do otherwise. Descriptions of this kind are not unfamiliar in Proust’s book, and they offer an optimistic allegory of its overall ontological project. After battlement, understanding; after dispersal, concentration and self-knowledge.

      Le Temps retrouvé fulfils the promise of passages like this. It sets forth a tableau vivant in which the evanescent multitude of the narrator’s previous selves at last finds anchorage; in which every lost object is found; in which the conflicting dispositions of the human individual, and the endless varieties and sub-varieties of human passion, are assigned their place in an inclusive artistic design (‘comme une église […] comme un régime […] comme un monde’ (IV, 610); ‘like a church […] like a medical regime […] like a new world’ (VI, 431)); and in which the narrator, speaking on behalf of all men and women from the vantage-point of that design, can at last affirm as a source of certainty and clear moral vision the very self that had previously been so mobile and so scattered. Le Temps retrouvé describes a simple chain reaction: the sudden ecstatic rediscovery of a past that had been thought forever lost reveals the temporal architecture of the self, the invariant substratum that until then had been present but unrecognised beneath its fluid and accidental surface forms; this ontological discovery triggers an artistic one, which in turn creates an exhilarating sense of moral purpose. And this culminating sequence of mental events can easily be thought of as providing Proust’s plot with its denouement and the reader with a global answer to countless earlier riddles that may have teased her. In the slow unfolding of the book, she will have noticed a bewildering plurality of narrating selves, and may well have wondered what authorisation Proust had, what strange dispensation from the ordinary requirements of verisimilitude, when he brought together, in his portrayal of a supposed single individual, saint and scoundrel, eagle and dove, liar and exemplary truth-teller. The narrator in his last triumphantly stable form becomes a capacious container for all the waywardness, inconsistency and self-division that have marked his passage through the text.

      There seems to me something unsatisfactory about any reading of the book that does not resist as well as endorse Le Temps retrouvé in the performance of this harmonising and integrating role. Proust’s last volume is a guide for the perplexed and does indeed illuminate many corners left dark by earlier volumes. Moreover the supremely accommodating selfhood of Le Temps retrouvé, far from merely altering retroactively what has gone before, confirms and blazons forth a notion that has already made many premonitory appearances. We need a guiding, stabilising notion of human individuality with which to battle our way through the intricacies of Proust’s text, and, late in the book but also earlier, Proust provides us with one. But what do we lose when we adhere too closely to the ontological telos of the book? We lose, I shall be suggesting in what follows, a whole range of paradoxes, dissonances and unusual consonances, and with them a vein of disturbing moral speculation. We lose also the sheer oddity of Proust’s final volume. The reader who has felt his or her perplexities dissolve as the general teleological pattern of the book emerges is invited to look again, and more fondly, at certain of its perplexing details. It could be that Proust was in need of a resonant exit-speech when he promoted involuntary memory to its crowning role, and that his narrator’s celebrated ‘quest’ in fact gives no more than a lightweight intellectual superstructure and an air of righteous striving to a mental adventure of a less than public-spirited kind.

      The strangeness of this adventure, and the extravagant expenditure of time and ingenuity into which it periodically leads the narrator, may be observed with special clarity in Le Côté de Guermantes. Among many passages in which the supposedly overriding ontological programme of the novel is not only absent but unthinkable even as a premonition, I have chosen the scenes of jealousy and recrimination between Saint-Loup and Rachel in which the narrator figures as a singularly elastic terzo incomodo (II, 456–81; III, 176–207). The psychological drama here belongs quite as much to the narrator as to the enraged and acrimonious lovers whom he observes. Indeed his monologue is punctuated by silences on the one hand and by cascading repetitions on the other, and in each case displays the symptoms of an urgent undeclared passion. When a chance encounter with two of Rachel’s former fellow-prostitutes threatens to reveal to Saint-Loup more of her past than she would care to have him know, it is the anxiously repetitious narrator rather than either of his companions who dominates the scene:

       Il ne fit pas qu’entrevoir cette vie, mais aussi au milieu une Rachel tout autre que celle qu’il connaissait, une Rachel pareille à ces deux petites poules, une Rachel à vingt francs. En somme Rachel s’était un instant dédoublée pour lui, il avait aperçu à quelque distance de sa Rachel la Rachel petite poule, la Rachel réelle, à supposer que la Rachel poule fût plus réelle que l’autre. Robert eut peut-être l’idée alors que cet enfer où il vivait, avec la perspective et la nécessité d’un mariage riche, d’une vente de son nom, pour pouvoir continuer à donner cent mille francs par an à Rachel, il aurait peut-être pu s’en arracher aisément et avoir les faveurs de sa maîtresse, comme ces calicots celles de leurs grues, pour peu de chose. Mais comment faire?

      (II, 460)

       He not only glimpsed this life, but saw also in the thick of it a Rachel quite different from the one he knew, a Rachel like those two little tarts, a twenty-franc Rachel. In short, Rachel had for the moment duplicated herself in his eyes; he had seen, at some distance from his own Rachel, the little tart Rachel, the real Rachel, if it can be said that Rachel the tart was more real than the other. It may then have occurred to Robert that from the hell in which he was living, with the prospect and the necessity of a rich marriage, of the sale of his name, to enable him to go on giving Rachel a hundred thousand francs a year, he might easily perhaps have escaped, and have enjoyed the favours of his mistress, as the two counter-jumpers enjoyed those of their girls, for next to nothing. But how was it to be done?

      (III, 181)

      In a sense, of course, the narrator is simply adopting Saint-Loup’s uncertainties in the act of describing them, and allowing his own eloquence to be dulled by a passion that can do no more than impotently repeat the beloved’s name. But there is too much writing of this kind for such an explanation to be fully satisfactory. The economic dimension of this passage has already been set forth, and in similarly stammering terms: the ‘Rachel … Rachel’ refrain to be found here continues a lengthy ‘vingt francs … vingt francs’ refrain from a few pages earlier (II, 457; III, 177–8), and this trifling amount – Rachel’s prostitutional price – has been insistently played off against the excessive amounts that her lover must now expect to pay in order to keep her, or that he might now be tempted СКАЧАТЬ