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

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СКАЧАТЬ Tender and green,

       Artichokes tender and sweet,

       Ar … tichokes

      is dizzily overdetermined at this point in the novel. Tenderness has begun to retreat from the human to the vegetable world, and artichokes now possess a freshness that the relationship between Albertine and the narrator does not. The intoned phrases rising from the street connect modern Paris to its medieval past, commerce to religious observance, popular song to elevated musical culture, and eating to the arts and sciences of mankind. This is one of many points at which Proust’s text, so richly apparelled in the language-based sciences of the trivium, suddenly becomes aware of the role that the sciences of number and measurement also play in its analytic fabric. His quadrivium is to be found not simply in the scientific imagery of the novel but in the calculating intelligence with which seemingly remote areas of experience are brought into conjunction. But where arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy were, for the Pythagorean tradition, akin to one another as co-equal and mutually confirming manifestations of Number, for Proust no underlying principle firmer than that of analogy unites them. The ‘stellar eyes’ of la princesse de Nassau, like Saint-Loup’s constellated fists, promise not an ultimate congruence between the minute and the vast but an endless journey from one moment of resemblance, and one relativistic act of measurement, to the next. And this journey in turn promises not a philosophical emancipation from the passions but a new way of measuring their force. Speaking of his infatuation with Mme de Guermantes, the narrator recalls: ‘Pour moi ce n’était plus seulement les étoiles et la brise, mais jusqu’aux divisions arithmétiques du temps qui prenaient quelque chose de douloureux et de poétique’ (II, 419; ‘For me it was no longer the stars and the breeze alone, but the arithmetical divisions of time that assumed a dolorous and poetic aspect’ (III, 132)).

      Proust’s scansions often cross vast distances, and move with an assured step between microcosm and macrocosm. They show him to have been a metaphysical wit possessed of a strong liking for physics, and an ‘interdisciplinarist’ beyond the dreams of the modern university. In this passage from Le Temps retrouvé, for example, a future astronomy of social life is sketched:

       si dans ces périodes de vingt ans les conglomérats de coteries se défaisaient et se reformaient selon l’attraction d’astres nouveaux destinés d’ailleurs eux aussi à s’éloigner, puis à reparaître, des cristallisations puis des émiettements suivis de cristallisations nouvelles avaient lieu dans l’âme des êtres.

      (IV, 570)

       If in a period of twenty years […] the conglomerations of social groups had disintegrated and re-formed under the magnetic influence of new stars destined themselves also to fade away and then to reappear, the same sequence of crystallisation followed by dissolution and again by a fresh crystallisation might have been observed to take place within the consciousness of individuals.

      (VI, 379)

      For a moment the natural and human sciences have become intelligible to each other, and a single dynamism – that of alternating dispersal and concentration – is seen to govern the stars in their courses, the growth of crystals, the structure of the human mind, and Mme Verdurin in her successive salons. This is a vision both of order within the cosmos and of the ungovernable plurality of mental worlds. The self reels between an outer world that is too big for it, and an inwardness that has too many transient shapes.

      In La Prisonnière, this plurality had already received its loftiest encomium, and had been quite disconnected from any focusing device or principle of order:

       Des ailes, un autre appareil respiratoire, et qui nous permissent de traverser l’immensité, ne nous serviraient à rien. Car si nous allions dans Mars et dans Vénus en gardant les mêmes sens, ils revêtiraient du même aspect que les choses de la Terre tout ce que nous pourrions voir. Le seul véritable voyage, le seul bain de Jouvence, ce ne serait pas d’aller vers de nouveaux paysages, mais d’avoir d’autres yeux, de voir l’univers avec les yeux d’un autre, de cent autres, de voir les cent univers que chacun d’eux voit, que chacun d’eux est; et cela nous le pouvons avec un Elstir, avec un Vinteuil, avec leurs pareils, nous volons vraiment d’étoiles en étoiles.

      (III, 762)

       A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.

      (V, 291)

      This interlacing of optics, astronomy and music, which is also an indefinite sequence of displacements between small and vast, not only promises no selfhood to the artist and to those who follow his example, it presents selfhood as an impediment to creative perception. The only conception of self that can usefully remain in force is that of a discontinuous itinerary, leading towards but never reaching that moment of plenitude at which the entire range of possible world-forms would stand revealed and realised. When each human being has become a hundred universes, who will then be the gentleman, the liar, the thief or the novelist? Such visions of an ideally dispossessed and characterless human individuality occur often as Proust’s novel moves grandly towards the apotheosis of self upon which Le Temps retrouvé ends, as if those last moments of potency and moral resolve could be attained only by way of an emptiness within the self resembling that of interstellar space. The ‘«nous» qui serait sans contenu’ (III, 371; ‘a we that is void of content’ (IV, 440)) of which the narrator had spoken in Sodome et Gomorrhe has now become an essential precondition for artistic creativity.

      What is set out as a credo in La Prisonnière has been present from an early stage in the narrator’s practical performances both as a social observer and as an introspective. The narrator makes his presence felt by his special habit of removing himself from the scene, becoming weightless, ‘without content’, sine materia. In this as in so many other respects, Swann is his model. Swann passes through social gatherings without leaving his imprint. At the Saint-Euverte soirée in ‘Un Amour de Swann’, he is an all-transforming eye. Grooms become greyhounds as he looks at them, and guests become carp. The domestic staff are a living embodiment of European art history: some of them seem to have emerged three-dimensionally from paintings by Mantegna, Dürer or Goya, and others are animated statues from classical antiquity or from the workshop of Benvenuto Cellini. The assembled males arrange themselves into a procession of highly individualised monocles (I, 317–22; I, 388–94). This vertiginous outward scene is matched by an inconstant inner world thinly disguised as a unified self:

       ce que nous croyons notre amour, notre jalousie, n’est pas une même passion continue, indivisible. Ils se composent d’une infinité d’amours successifs, de jalousies différentes et qui sont éphémères, mais par leur multitude ininterrompue donnent l’impression de la continuité, l’illusion de l’unité. La vie de l’amour de Swann, la fidélité de sa jalousie, étaient faites de la mort, de l’infidélité, d’innombrables désirs, d’innombrables doutes, qui avaient tous Odette pour objet.

      (I, 366)

       what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity. The life of Swann’s love, the fidelity of his jealousy, were formed of the death, the infidelity, СКАЧАТЬ