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

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СКАЧАТЬ it is not surprising to be told that passion has a price-structure and is subject to market forces, it is perfectly alarming to find these home truths reiterated and rephrased over several pages. A delirious monetary system has invaded the text and is busily translating its characteristic psychological idiom into cash terms. Why? What was it that worried the narrator so much, once upon a time, and that now so unsettles the telling of his tale?

      On the face of it, this is an elaborate Proustian conceit on the familiar themes of duplication and duplicity. Rachel is not what she seems. Or rather, like her namesake in La Juive (1835), the Halévy-Scribe opera from which the narrator extracts for her the nickname ‘Rachel quand du Seigneur’ (I, 567; ‘Rachel when from the Lord’ (II, 175)), she is two people at once and bears two different prices. Scribe’s Rachel is both Jew and Christian; Proust’s is both sexual commodity and an idolised lady ‘of great price’. But the social and financial dédoublement of Rachel prefigures another play of alternating perspectives, and one with which the novel is henceforth to be hugely preoccupied: the play between heterosexuality and homosexuality. And the martyrdom that awaits Scribe’s heroine in the closing scene of La Juive is to be assumed not by the modern Rachel of A la recherche but by the narrator himself, whose path towards knowledge of human sexuality is to be, in its later stages, slow, cruel and disconsolate. The disarray of the narrative during this episode, and its feverish fluctuations of tone, are so marked yet so little explained that we read on ‘for the plot’, demanding to know more.

      The revelation that Saint-Loup is a homosexual prompts, it will be remembered, the long, melancholy coda of Albertine disparue. At the end of a volume in which an immitigable sense of loss has become the ground of consciousness – in which Albertine’s flight and death bring uncontrollably to the narrator’s mind the absences with which she had tormented him when present and alive – the discovery that Saint-Loup is ‘comme ça’ (IV, 241; ‘one of those’ (V, 762)) provides consciousness with its culminating loss, its final unthinkable extremity. At the very moment when it was impossible to imagine things worse, worse they became. The vulgar monosyllabic ‘comme ça’ rings out as a portent and a malediction. And, in a sentence from Albertine disparue that in many editions of the novel is used to bring the volume to a close, the narrator’s memory of himself, Saint-Loup and Rachel at a restaurant table moves him to tears that the ratiocinative texture of his monologue can do nothing to explain: ‘en repensant à ces histoires du lift et du restaurant où j’avais déjeuné avec Saint-Loup et Rachel j’étais obligé de faire un effort pour ne pas pleurer’ (IV, 266; ‘when I thought about those stories of the lift-boy and of the restaurant in which I had had lunch with Saint-Loup and Rachel, I was obliged to make an effort to restrain my tears’ (V, 793)); in a novel that is plotted and paced with astonishing skill throughout, the Saint-Loup sub-plot stands out as a particularly ingenious tale of mystery and suspense. In part, the beauty of its denouement lies simply in the light that the narrator’s banal discovery sheds upon earlier incidents in the novel, and in the outrageous expanse of text that separates behavioural effect from psychological cause. Saint-Loup behaves oddly during the restaurant scene and those that follow – he is by turns craven and defiant towards Rachel, and twice resorts to fisticuffs in her company – and it is only after 1,500 pages that this behaviour is at last seen as coherently motivated. This is architectonic plotting of a kind that Tom Jones (1749) and Tristram Shandy (1759–67) made familiar, although Proust’s edifice contains cantilevers, suspensions and buttresses still more audacious than those of Fielding or Sterne.

      But this denouement is fine and imposing in another way too. The withheld weeping upon which Albertine disparue ends is reminiscent of Tennyson’s

       Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

       Tears from the depth of some divine despair

       Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

       In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,

       And thinking of the days that are no more.

      The narrator’s tears are a symptom without a cause, or with a cause – a ‘divine despair’, as one might indeed call it – that is much too large to have exact explanatory force. They are lacrimae rerum provoked by the memory not of Priam slain but of a tiff and a street brawl. At this level, the ending does not so much solve earlier mysteries as echo and reinforce the narrator’s earlier puzzlement. An abiding residue of doubt surrounds the Rachel episode. This has to do not with Saint-Loup’s motives but with the narrator’s own, and not with a single sexual discovery but with the anxious speculation on sexuality for which the narrator is a perpetual vehicle. In the company of Saint-Loup and Rachel, he cannot say what is going on, for they kindle in him too many disparate desires. And selfhood, if it is here at all, lies not in a stable, adjudicating narrative voice but in the versatile play of appetite that the narrator displays. He is voluble and laconic, intrusive and discreet. He sides with man against woman and woman against man. He aligns himself both with the homosexual desire of the ‘promeneur passionné’ by whom Saint-Loup is accosted in this scene and with Saint-Loup’s seemingly wounded and seemingly heterosexual pride in refusing unwelcome advances. The ‘self’ on offer here is a vacancy awaiting substance and structure, a mobile force-field in which the desires of others meet and are inflected, a rapid sequence of reactive and imitative gestures.

      The relationship between the narrator at the start of Le Côté de Guermantes and the narrator at the end of Albertine disparue is a strong one and creates a powerful effect of internal cohesion within the novel. But this effect is not produced by recreating at the later point a personality, an identity, a temperament or a pattern of connected psychological motifs that was already present earlier. It comes from the buttressing of one fragmentary psychological portrait against another of the same kind, and from a sense of perplexity and dispossession that becomes more pronounced as the plot unfolds.

      What makes Proust’s polymorphous narrator such an improbable textual construction in these central volumes of the novel is the cult of scientific precision that he adheres to even as he records his losses and confusions. Not only is the narrator’s volatile and almost self-free consciousness not nebulous, but Proust, in describing its characteristic motions and the behaviour in which they issue, repeatedly turns to the exactitude of the exact sciences. When Saint-Loup unleashes blows upon a shabbily dressed sexual opportunist, the narrator reports having seen not fists but a non-human display of matter and kinetic energy:

       tout à coup, comme apparaît au ciel un phénomène astral, je vis des corps ovoïdes prendre avec une rapidité vertigineuse toutes les positions qui leur permettaient de composer, devant Saint-Loup, une instable constellation. Lancés comme par une fronde ils me semblèrent être au moins au nombre de sept. Ce n’étaient pourtant que les deux poings de Saint-Loup, multipliés par leur vitesse à changer de place dans cet ensemble en apparence idéal et décoratif. Mais cette pièce d’artifice n’était qu’une roulée qu’administrait Saint-Loup et dont le caractère agressif au lieu d’esthétique me fut d’abord révélé par l’aspect du monsieur médiocrement habillé, lequel parut perdre à la fois toute contenance, une mâchoire, et beaucoup de sang.

      (II, 480)

       suddenly, as an astral phenomenon flashes through the sky, I saw a number of ovoid bodies assume with a dizzy swiftness all the positions necessary for them to compose a flickering constellation in front of Saint-Loup. Flung out like stones from a catapult, they seemed to me to be at the very least seven in number. They were merely, however, Saint-Loup’s two fists, multiplied by the speed with which they were changing place in this – to all appearance ideal and decorative – arrangement. But this elaborate display was nothing more than a pummelling which Saint-Loup was administering, the aggressive rather than aesthetic character of which was first revealed to me by the aspect of the shabbily dressed gentleman who appeared to be losing at once his self-possession, his lower jaw and a quantity of blood.

      (III, СКАЧАТЬ