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

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      Whether the narrator looks outwards or inwards, he studies hard to become centreless and characterless in this way and to become, in Keats’s phrase, ‘a thoroughfare for all thoughts’.

      The morally resolved artist into whom the narrator is transformed at the end of the novel is himself an improbable construction. He has of course been foreshadowed on numerous earlier occasions, as have the moral principles on which he is to base his critique of social man and woman. That he is eventually to be an altruist, a respecter of individual rights, a truth-teller and a trenchant prosecutor of corruption and folly has already been half-promised by the narrator’s elaborately textured social observation. What is more, the narrator has been shown to be capable both of energetic moral commitment and of firm self-criticism for his failures to act virtuously. But as a moralist he has other characteristics too, and these leave us only partially prepared for Proust’s exalted final perspectives.

      Gilbert Ryle, in his essay on Jane Austen, speaks ‘with conscious crudity’ of moralists as belonging either to the Calvinist or to the Aristotelian camp. While members of the first group think of human beings ‘as either Saved or Damned, either Elect or Reject, either children of Virtue or children of Vice’, those of the second pursue distinctions of an altogether more delicate kind:

       the Aristotelian pattern of ethical ideas represents people as differing from one another in degree and not in kind, and differing from one another not in respect just of a single generic Sunday attribute, Goodness, say, or else Wickedness, but in respect of a whole spectrum of specific week-day attributes. A is a bit more irritable and ambitious than B, but less indolent and less sentimental. C is meaner and quicker-witted than D, and D is greedier and more athletic than C. And so on. A person is not black or white, but iridescent with all the colours of the rainbow; and he is not a flat plane, but a highly irregular solid.

      To some extent this may seem to fit the facts of Proust’s narrator’s case well. After all, he possesses to a remarkable degree the ability to make contrastive moral judgements, and he deploys his contrasts with such ingenuity that his discourse often seems dedicated to continuity – ‘iridescence’ – rather than discreteness in the handling of moral notions. Besides, few of Proust’s admirers would wish to remove him from the company of Aristotle and Jane Austen if this meant handing him over to Ryle’s dourly dichotomous Calvin. Yet a crucial quality of the moral life as lived by Proust’s narrator is entirely missing from Ryle’s paradigm. This is the quality that could be called supererogatory risk-taking; it involves finding limits and then seeking to transgress them; and it calls for naughtiness and mischief on a grand scale. In the pursuit of new knowledge, the narrator must be prepared to traverse uncharted moral territories and to improvise for himself a value-system commensurate with this or that moment of epistemological zeal or imaginative extravagance.

      At the simplest level, telling the truth to a truth-resistant audience may involve lying. In A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the narrator reports having given his parents an unverified account of the origins and the antiquity of the Swanns’ staircase. Without doing so, it would have been impossible for him to persuade them of its true worth: ‘[m]on amour de la vérité était si grand que je n’aurais pas hésité à leur donner ce renseignement même si j’avais su qu’il était faux’ (I, 496; ‘[my] regard for the truth was so great that I should not have hesitated to give them this information even if I had known it to be false’ (II, 89)). In the turbulent world of the child and his family, here is an early intimation of the ‘glorious lie’ that is art. And once the pursuit of new knowledge has been conceived of as an ethical imperative, lying itself – workaday lying, not the superior mendacities of art – may begin to reveal unsuspected virtues: ‘Le mensonge, le mensonge parfait […] est une des seules choses au monde qui puisse nous ouvrir des perspectives sur du nouveau, sur de l’inconnu, puisse ouvrir en nous des sens endormis pour la contemplation d’univers que nous n’aurions jamais connus’ (III, 721; ‘The lie, the perfect lie […] is one of the few things in the world that can open windows for us on to what is new and unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses for the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known’ (V, 239)). We must be prepared for the possibility that a new science, which is also a science of newness, may bring with it a new morality.

      Closely related to this, there is another form of supererogation towards which the narrator is continually drawn. Those who are in pursuit of pleasure – and especially those whose pleasures are familiarly thought of as perverse, aberrant or anti-social – are themselves pursued by the narrator’s relentless, inquisitive gaze. Sado-masochism, for example, which is discussed and theatricalised in numerous ways, from the Montjouvain episode of ‘Combray’ (I, 157–63; I, 190–98) to the scenes in Jupien’s brothel in Le Temps retrouvé (IV, 388–419; VI, 147–85), provides an exacting test for the moralist’s powers of discrimination. In each of these extended episodes, which together place an elaborate frame around the many plainer accounts of cruel sex that are to be found in the inner volumes, the narrator’s crisp expressions of disapproval free him to enjoy the pleasures of voyeurism guiltlessly. But the achievement of pleasure is no more his main goal than is the defence of rectitude. An ambitious moral experiment is in progress, and the narrator follows a clear experimental principle in conducting it: let my perception of life in, say, Jupien’s establishment be as delicately calibrated as that which I would bring to bear upon any other complex scene of social communication and commerce.

      His experimental results are presented with relish. Charlus, emerging in considerable discomfort from the flagellation chamber, is still able to inspect Jupien’s assembled staff with a discriminating eye and ear:

       Bien que son plaisir fût fini et qu’il n’entrât d’ailleurs que pour donner à Maurice l’argent qu’il lui devait, il dirigeait en cercle sur tous ces jeunes gens réunis un regard tendre et curieux et comptait bien avoir avec chacun le plaisir d’un bonjour tout platonique mais amoureusement prolongé […] Tous semblaient le connaître et M. de Charlus s’arrêtait longuement à chacun, leur parlant ce qu’il croyait leur langage, à la fois par une affectation prétentieuse de couleur locale et aussi par un plaisir sadique de se mêler à une vie crapuleuse.

      (IV, 403–4)

       Although his pleasure was at an end and he had only come in to give Maurice the money which he owed him, he directed at the young men a tender and curious glance which travelled round the whole circle, promising himself with each of them the pleasure of a moment’s chat, platonic but amorously prolonged […] Everybody […] seemed to know him, and M. de Charlus stopped for a long time before each one, talking to them in what he thought was their language, both from a pretentious affectation of local colour and because he got a sadistic pleasure from contact with a life of depravity.

      (VI, 165–6)

      The narrator takes his distance from Charlus, but not too much distance, for he has already described in propria persona and with a similar devotion to piquancy and local colour, the enlarged field of sexual opportunity that the war had created in Paris. Canadians were valued for the charm of their ambiguous accent, but ‘[à] cause de leur jupon et parce que certains rêves lacustres s’associent souvent à de tels désirs, les Ecossais faisaient prime’ (IV, 402; ‘The Scots too, because of their kilts and because dreams of a landscape with lakes are often associated with these desires, were at a premium’ (VI, 164)). But tracing out this spectrum of libidinal intensities is not a task for the mere voluptuary or tourist, for an equally differentiated value-spectrum crosses it at every turn. Although sadomasochistic transactions of the kind in which Jupien specialises can scarcely be thought of as possessing, in themselves, a complex moral content, the larger social world of the brothel can. Indeed its content is presented as strictly – iridescently – continuous with that of ‘society’ itself. In this low-life world the narrator finds again the hypocrisies, fidelities, betrayals and occasional unadvertised acts of philanthropy that are the volatile stuff of salon life, and he also СКАЧАТЬ