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

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СКАЧАТЬ not because the mental processes involved are complex ones. Indeed the first goal of this description seems to be that of expelling mind from the scene in favour of a pure science of behaviour: wishes, goals and intentions are replaced by the muscular movements of the human body and these then become the professional property of the astronomer, the geometer and the arithmetician.

      This holding back of concern for the motivation and moral status of human action is of course a mainspring of much Proustian wit, and is often to be seen at work on a large scale. The social performances of the Guermantes clan become a fencing match, in which their cold, steely gaze turns to real steel (II, 736; III, 513). During the Doncières episode, Saint-Loup retells the history of human warfare as an exquisite tale of bloodless strategic schemes transmitted from age to age (II, 407–15; III, 118–28). Mme Verdurin, appalled at the mention of a ‘bore’, is transformed into a lifeless piece of civic sculpture (I, 254; I, 311). Legrandin’s sycophancy, as he bows to a local landowner’s wife in Combray, is perfectly expressed by, and dissolved into, the ‘undulation of pure matter’ that passes through his animated rump (I, 148; ‘ondulation de pure matière’ (I, 123)). In all these cases, the pleasures of scansion, measurement and formal description are rediscovered in the jungle of social life. The narrator removes himself from the savage contest of human desires into a handsomely equipped observatory from which greed, lust, ambition, violence and hatred may be viewed as so much matter extended in space. But Proust’s countless sudden excursions into natural science, for all the intellectual clarity that each of them individually displays, do not exert an integrative and centralising force upon his phenomenology of selfhood. His optical expertise is applied in what appears as a conscientiously indiscriminate fashion. This is not Newton’s optics, in which the machinery of vision guarantees the intelligibility of the universe, although Proust’s scientific phrasing often has an unmistakably Newtonian ring. It is an impatient, desiring optics, intent upon multiplying the opportunities for human sight and enlarging the field of vision, and readily able to accept that each visual constellation is short-lived. Stars become fists, and fists, once recognised as instruments of aggression, trace for a moment a further, more abstract, astronomical pattern. And then the whole contraption is lost from view.

      A la recherche contains innumerable moments of intense vision that have no cumulative scientific force and pay no ontological dividend. Proust dramatises the brevity and singularity of these moments with a succession of images, running through the entire book, in which the eye itself becomes an object of sight. Legrandin’s eye receives the first of his many wounds when the limits of his social success begin to be revealed:

       je vis au milieu des yeux bleus de notre ami se ficher une petite encoche brune comme s’ils venaient d’être percés par une pointe invisible, tandis que le reste de la prunelle réagissait en sécrétant des flots d’azur.

      (I, 125–6)

       I saw in the middle of each of our friend’s blue eyes a little brown nick appear, as though they had been stabbed by some invisible pin-point, while the rest of the pupil reacted by secreting the azure overflow.

      (I, 152)

      Later in ‘Combray’, when the narrator’s own worldly ambition is at stake, his eye undergoes a similar but more pleasurable violence from the eyes of Mme de Guermantes:

       en même temps, sur cette image que le nez proéminent, les yeux perçants, épinglaient dans ma vision (peut-être parce que c’était eux qui l’avaient d’abord atteinte, qui y avaient fait la première encoche, au moment où je n’avais pas encore le temps de songer que la femme qui apparaissait devant moi pouvait être Mme de Guermantes), sur cette image toute récente, inchangeable, j’essayais d’appliquer l’idée: «C’est Mme de Guermantes» sans parvenir qu’à la faire manoeuvrer en face de l’image, comme deux disques séparés par un intervalle.

      (I, 173)

       at the same time, I was endeavouring to apply to this image, which the prominent nose, the piercing eyes pinned down and fixed in my field of vision (perhaps because it was they that had first struck it, that had made the first impression on its surface, before I had had time to wonder whether the woman who thus appeared before me might possibly be Madame de Guermantes), to this fresh and unchanging image, the idea: ‘It’s Madame de Guermantes’; but I succeeded only in making the idea pass between me and the image, as though they were two discs moving in separate planes with a space between.

      (I, 210)

      In the scene with Rachel, Saint-Loup’s eyes record his sudden switches of mood: ‘il était tellement rempli par son indignation contre le danseur, qu’elle venait adhérer exactement à la surface de ses prunelles […] une zone disponible et souple parut dans ses yeux […] ses yeux étincelaient encore de colère’ (II, 479–80; ‘he was so full of his indignation with the dancer that it clung to the very surface of his eyeballs […] a zone of accessibility appeared in his eyes […] his eyes were still blazing with anger’ (III, 204–6)). In such cases as these the eyeball is a transmitter rather than a receiver of information, and a new set of hallucinatory anatomical and physiological features are ascribed to it: the eye may release coloured secretions, emit or receive arrows or pins, contain notches or unsuspected empty zones, and be coated in an adhesive glaze. The windows of the soul and the ‘speaking’ eyes of popular fiction have here been superseded by an entirely reorganised organ of sight. The price to be paid for this varied repertory of more-than-ocular effects, this uncanny ability of the eye to materialise mental states upon its outer surface, is extreme brevity and discontinuity in the messages it emits. For the eye, like any other object of sight, is a moving configuration of planes, volumes and textures, and it has almost no retentive power. Albertine’s eyes – ‘qui […] semblent faits de plusieurs morceaux’ (III, 599; ‘which […] seem to be composed of several pieces’ (V, 96)) – are an unreadable encyclopaedia of fears, impulses, schemes and deceptions, while those of la princesse de Nassau – ‘yeux stellaires, semblables à une horloge astronomique’ (IV, 557; ‘stellar eyes, like an astronomical clock’ (VI, 363)) – are a flickering chronicle of her remembered and half-remembered sexual encounters. This dismanding and reassembly of the visual apparatus is a source of pathos at certain moments in the novel and of creative affirmation at others; the eye is a miniature world that now slips from the perceiver’s grasp, now offers him a new speculative adventure. But in either event, Proust’s account speaks of perception without a core, of daily pattern-making that no higher pattern guides.

      The narrator’s wish to see clearly and to draw reliable inferences from what he sees is often outpaced by other emotional demands. His science fails even as he protests its strong-mindedness and rigour. Some obscure yet powerful drive requires the newly achieved explanation or paradigm to fall apart, to return to the ‘several pieces’ from which it had been made. Science must be present in the book, but without becoming cumulative or developing any significant power of prediction. He wants coherence, and does not want it.

      Such indecision can be intensely disruptive. During his reverie on the cries of Paris in La Prisonnière, for example, the narrator remarks that the local fruit-and-vegetable seller probably knew nothing of the plainsong that her melodious cries resembled. Although Leo Spitzer, in a celebrated essay, has pointed out that her medieval predecessors are indeed likely to have known certain Gregorian cadences well, it is unreasonable to expect a modern street-trader to have any detailed knowledge of medieval musical theory. Yet this is what the narrator seems for a moment to wish when he speaks of her being ignorant of ‘l’antiphonaire et [les] sept tons qui symbolisent, quatre les sciences du quadrivium et trois celles du trivium’ (III, 625; ‘the antiphonary, or of the seven notes that symbolise, four the arts of the quadrivium and three those of the trivium’ (V, 127)). Beneath the seeming condescension of this, an urgent Proustian impulse towards exact measurement is finding expression. The cry itself:

       A la tendresse, à la verduresse

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