33291071-Marcel-Proust

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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views

MARCEL PROUST

Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University

©2004 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of Haights Cross Communications.

Introduction © 2004 by Harold Bloom. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Printed and bound in the United States of America. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Applied For ISBN: 0-7910-7659-8

Chelsea House Publishers 1974 Sproul Road, Suite 400 Broomall, PA 19008-0914 http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing Editor: Janyce Marson Cover designed by Terry Mallon Cover photo by Bettmann/CORBIS Layout by EJB Publishing Services

Contents Editor’s Note

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Introduction Harold Bloom

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Proust and Time Embodied Julia Kristeva

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The Lamp of Truth: Proust and George Eliot Robert Fraser Zipporah: A Ruskinian Enigma Appropriated by Marcel Proust Cynthia J. Gamble

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Proust’s japonisme: Contrastive Aesthetics Jan Hokenson Proust’s Turn from Nostalgia Susan Stewart

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Orpheus and the Machine: Proust as Theorist of Technological Change, and the Case of Joyce Sara Danius Introduction to Proustian Passions Ingrid Wassenaar

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The Vast Structure of Recollection: from Life to Literature 165 William C. Carter Albertine’s Bicycle, or: Women and French Identity during the Belle Epoque 185 Siân Reynolds

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CONTENTS

The Ending of Swann Revisited Anthony R. Pugh

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Jean Santeuil and the Notion of avant-texte: A Case for an Extension of the Term? 221 Maureen A. Ramsden Ethics, Meaning, and the Work of Beauty Gabrielle Starr Chronology

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Contributors

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Bibliography

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Acknowledgments Index

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Editor’s Note

This revised volume has only my Introduction in common with the earlier Marcel Proust: Modern Critical Views (1987), since all the essays included here date from 1993 on. My Introduction compares Proust and Freud on the psychosexual origins of jealousy, and then centers upon the odysseys of sexual jealousy in Swann and in Marcel. Julia Kristeva, with authentic charm, rightfully gives us a Proust who is closer to Spinoza than to Heideger, while Robert Fraser contrasts George Eliot’s powers of observation with Flaubert’s moral withdrawal, antithetical influences upon Proust. John Ruskin, another crucial Proustian precursor, is shown by Cynthia J. Gamble to have provided a model for Odette, Swann’s provocation to selfdestruction, after which Jan Hokenson traces the limits of Japanese aestheticism in Proust’s vast saga. Susan Stewart usefully sees Proust turning from a study of the nostalgias to the happiness of aesthetic apprehension, while Sara Danius sets Joyce against Proust in their effort to absorb technological change. For Ingrid Wassenaar, In Search of Lost Time joins itself to the history of self-justification, after which Proust’s biographer, William C. Carter, examines his subject’s grand edifice of recollection. Siân Reynolds subtly presents the fear of women embedded in the French culture of Proust’s era, while Anthony R. Pugh clarifies the ending of Swann’s Way. Maureen A. Ramsden finds Proust’s early Jean Santeuil a guide to the aesthetics of In Search of Lost Time, while Gabrielle Starr concludes with a fresh vision of the Proustian aesthetics.

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exual jealousy is the most novelistic of circumstances, just as incest, according to Shelley, is the most poetical of circumstances. Proust is the novelist of our era, even as Freud is our moralist. Both are speculative thinkers, who divide between them the eminence of being the prime wisdom writers of the age. Proust died in 1922, the year of Freud’s grim and splendid essay, “Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality.” Both of them great ironists, tragic celebrants of the comic spirit, Proust and Freud are not much in agreement on jealousy, paranoia, and homosexuality, though both start with the realization that all of us are bisexual in nature. Freud charmingly begins his essay by remarking that jealousy, like grief, is normal, and comes in three stages: competitive or normal, projected, delusional. The competitive or garden variety is compounded of grief, due to the loss of the loved object, and of the reactivation of the narcissistic scar, the tragic first loss, by the infant, of the parent of the other sex to the parent of the same sex. As normal, competitive jealousy is really normal Hell, Freud genially throws into the compound such delights as enmity against the successful rival, some self-blaming, self-criticism, and a generous portion of bisexuality. Projected jealousy attributes to the erotic partner one’s own actual unfaithfulness or repressed impulses, and is cheerfully regarded by Freud as being relatively innocuous, since its almost delusional character is highly amenable to analytic exposure of unconscious fantasies. But delusional jealousy proper is more serious; it also takes its origin in repressed impulses towards infidelity, but the object of those impulses is of one’s own sex, and this, for Freud, moves one across the border into paranoia. What the three stages of jealousy have in common is a bisexual component, since even projected jealousy trades in repressed impulses, and

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these include homosexual desires. Proust, our other authority on jealousy, preferred to call homosexuality “inversion,” and in a brilliant mythological fantasia traced the sons of Sodom and the daughters of Gomorrah to the surviving exiles from the Cities of the Plain. Inversion and jealousy, so intimately related in Freud, become in Proust a dialectical pairing, with the aesthetic sensibility linked to both as a third term in a complex series. On the topos of jealousy, Proust is fecund and generous; no writer has devoted himself so lovingly and brilliantly to expounding and illustrating the emotion, except of course Shakespeare in Othello and Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter. Proust’s jealous lovers—Swann, Saint-Loup, above all Marcel himself—suffer so intensely that we sometimes need to make an effort not to empathize too closely. It is difficult to determine just what Proust’s stance towards their suffering is, partly because Proust’s ironies are both pervasive and cunning. Comedy hovers nearby, but even tragicomedy seems an inadequate term for the compulsive sorrows of Proust’s protagonists. Swann, after complimenting himself that he has not, by his jealousy, proved to Odette that he loves her too much, falls into the mouth of Hell: He never spoke to her of this misadventure, and ceased even to think of it himself. But now and then his thoughts in their wandering course would come upon this memory where it lay unobserved, would startle it into life, thrust it forward into his consciousness, and leave him aching with a sharp, deep-rooted pain. As though it were a bodily pain, Swann’s mind was powerless to alleviate it; but at least, in the case of bodily pain, since it is independent of the mind, the mind can dwell upon it, can note that it has diminished, that it has momentarily ceased. But in this case the mind, merely by recalling the pain, created it afresh. To determine not to think of it was to think of it still, to suffer from it still. And when, in conversation with his friends, he forgot about it, suddenly a word casually uttered would make him change countenance like a wounded man when a clumsy hand has touched his aching limb. When he came away from Odette he was happy, he felt calm, he recalled her smiles, of gentle mockery when speaking of this or that other person, of tenderness for himself; he recalled the gravity of her head which she seemed to have lifted from its axis to let it droop and fall, as though in spite of herself, upon his lips, as she had done on the first evening in the carriage, the languishing looks she had given him as she lay in

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his arms, nestling her head against her shoulder as though shrinking from the cold. But then at once his jealousy, as though it were the shadow of his love, presented him with the complement, with the converse of that new smile with which she had greeted him that very evening—and which now, perversely, mocked Swann and shone with love for another—of that droop of the head, now sinking on to other lips, of all the marks of affection (now given to another) that she had shown to him. And all the voluptuous memories which he bore away from her house were, so to speak, but so many sketches, rough plans like those which a decorator submits to one, enabling Swann to form an idea of the various attitudes, aflame or faint with passion, which she might adopt for others. With the result that he came to regret every pleasure that he tasted in her company, every new caress of which he had been so imprudent as to point out to her the delights, every fresh charm that he found in her, for he knew that, a moment later, they would go to enrich the collection of instruments in his secret torturechamber. Jealousy here is a pain experienced by Freud’s bodily ego, on the frontier between psyche and body: “To determine not to think of it was to think of it still, to suffer from it still.” As the shadow of love, jealousy resembles the shadow cast by the earth up into the heavens, where by tradition it ought to end at the sphere of Venus. Instead, it darkens there, and since the shadow is Freud’s reality principle, or our consciousness of our own mortality, Proust’s dreadfully persuasive irony is that jealousy exposes not only the arbitrariness of every erotic object-choice but also marks the passage of the loved person into a teleological overdetermination, in which the supposed inevitability of the person is simply a mask for the inevitability of the lover’s death. Proust’s jealousy thus becomes peculiarly akin to Freud’s death drive, since it, too, quests beyond the pleasure/unpleasure principle. Our secret torture-chamber is furnished anew by every recollection of the beloved’s erotic prowess, since what delighted us has delighted others. Swann experiences the terrible conversion of the jealous lover into a parody of the scholar, a conversion to an intellectual pleasure that is more a deviation than an achievement, since no thought can be emancipated from the sexual past of all thought (Freud), if the search for truth is nothing but a search for the sexual past:

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Certainly he suffered as he watched that light, in whose golden atmosphere, behind the closed sash, stirred the unseen and detested pair, as he listened to that murmur which revealed the presence of the man who had crept in after his own departure, the perfidy of Odette, and the pleasures which she was at that moment enjoying with the stranger. And yet he was not sorry he had come; the torment which had forced him to leave his own house had become less acute now that it had become less vague, now that Odette’s other life, of which he had had, at that first moment, a sudden helpless suspicion, was definitely there, in the full glare of the lamp-light, almost within his grasp, an unwitting prisoner in that room into which, when he chose, he would force his way to seize it unawares; or rather he would knock on the shutters, as he often did when he came very late, and by that signal Odette would at least learn that he knew, that he had seen the light and had heard the voices, and he himself, who a moment ago had been picturing her as laughing with the other at his illusions, now it was he who saw them, confident in their error, tricked by none other than himself, whom they believed to be far away but who was there, in person, there with a plan, there with the knowledge that he was going, in another minute, to knock on the shutter. And perhaps the almost pleasurable sensation he felt at that moment was something more than the assuagement of a doubt, and of a pain: was an intellectual pleasure. If, since he had fallen in love, things had recovered a little of the delightful interest that they had had for him long ago—though only in so far as they were illuminated by the thought or the memory of Odette—now it was another of the faculties of his studious youth that his jealousy revived, the passion for truth, but for a truth which, too, was interposed between himself and his mistress, receiving its light from her alone, a private and personal truth the sole object of which (an infinitely precious object, and one almost disinterested in its beauty) was Odette’s life, her actions, her environment, her plans, her past. At every other period in his life, the little everyday activities of another person had always seemed meaningless to Swann; if gossip about such things was repeated to him, he would dismiss it as insignificant, and while he listened it was only the lowest, the most commonplace part of his mind that was engaged; these were the moments when he felt at his most inglorious. But in this strange phase of love the personality

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of another person becomes so enlarged, so deepened, that the curiosity which he now felt stirring inside him with regard to the smallest details of a woman’s daily life, was the same thirst for knowledge with which he had once studied history. And all manner of actions from which hitherto he would have recoiled in shame, such as spying, to-night, outside a window, to-morrow perhaps, for all he knew, putting adroitly provocative questions to casual witnesses, bribing servants, listening at doors, seemed to him now to be precisely on a level with the deciphering of manuscripts, the weighing of evidence, the interpretation of old monuments—so many different methods of scientific investigation with a genuine intellectual value and legitimately employable in the search for truth. In fact, poor Swann is at the wrong window, and the entire passage is therefore as exquisitely painful as it is comic. What Freud ironically called the overevaluation of the object, the enlargement or deepening of the beloved’s personality, begins to work not as one of the enlargements of life (like Proust’s own novel) but as the deepening of a personal Hell. Swann plunges downwards and outwards, as he leans “in impotent, blind, dizzy anguish over the bottomless abyss” and reconstructs the petty details of Odette’s past life with “as much passion as the aesthete who ransacks the extant documents of fifteenth-century Florence in order to penetrate further into the soul of the Primavera, the fair Vanna or the Venus of Botticelli.” The historicizing aesthete, John Ruskin say, or Walter Pater, becomes the archetype of the jealous lover, who searches into lost time not for a person, but for an epiphany or moment-of-moments, a privileged fiction of duration: When he had been paying social calls Swann would often come home with little time to spare before dinner. At that point in the evening, around six o’clock, when in the old days he used to feel so wretched, he no longer asked himself what Odette might be about, and was hardly at all concerned to hear that she had people with her or had gone out. He recalled at times that he had once, years ago, tried to read through its envelope a letter addressed by Odette to Forcheville. But this memory was not pleasing to him, and rather than plumb the depths of shame that he felt in it he preferred to indulge in a little grimace, twisting up the corners of his mouth and adding, if need be, a shake of the head which

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signified “What do I care about it?” True, he considered now that the hypothesis on which he had often dwelt at that time, according to which it was his jealous imagination alone that blackened what was in reality the innocent life of Odette—that this hypothesis (which after all was beneficent, since, so long as his amorous malady had lasted, it had diminished his sufferings by making them seem imaginary) was not the correct one, that it was his jealousy that had seen things in the correct light, and that if Odette had loved him more than he supposed, she had also deceived him more. Formerly, while his sufferings were still keen, he had vowed that, as soon as he had ceased to love Odette and was no longer afraid either of vexing her or of making her believe that he loved her too much, he would give himself the satisfaction of elucidating with her, simply from his love of truth and as a point of historical interest, whether or not Forcheville had been in bed with her that day when he had rung her bell and rapped on her window in vain, and she had written to Forcheville that it was an uncle of hers who had called. But this so interesting problem, which he was only waiting for his jealousy to subside before clearing up, had precisely lost all interest in Swann’s eyes when he had ceased to be jealous. Not immediately, however. Long after he had ceased to feel any jealousy with regard to Odette, the memory of that day, that afternoon spent knocking vainly at the little house in the Rue La Pérouse, had continued to torment him. It was as though his jealousy, not dissimilar in that respect from those maladies which appear to have their seat, their centre of contagion, less in certain persons than in certain places, in certain houses, had had for its object not so much Odette herself as that day, that hour in the irrevocable past when Swann had knocked at every entrance to her house in turn, as though that day, that hour alone had caught and preserved a few last fragments of the amorous personality which had once been Swann’s, that there alone could he now recapture them. For a long time now it had been a matter of indifference to him whether Odette had been, or was being, unfaithful to him. And yet he had continued for some years to seek out old servants of hers, to such an extent had the painful curiosity persisted in him to know whether on that day, so long ago, at six o’clock, Odette had been in bed with Forcheville. Then that curiosity itself had disappeared, without, however, his abandoning his investigations.

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He went on trying to discover what no longer interested him, because his old self, though it had shrivelled to extreme decrepitude, still acted mechanically, in accordance with preoccupations so utterly abandoned that Swann could not now succeed even in picturing to himself that anguish—so compelling once that he had been unable to imagine that he would ever be delivered from it, that only the death of the woman he loved (though death, as will be shown later on in this story by a cruel corroboration, in no way diminishes the sufferings caused by jealousy) seemed to him capable of smoothing the path of his life which then seemed impassably obstructed. Jealousy dies with love, but only with respect to the former beloved. Horribly a life-in-death, jealousy renews itself like the moon, perpetually trying to discover what no longer interests it, even after the object of desire has been literally buried. Its true object is “that day, that hour in the irrevocable past,” and even that time was less an actual time than a temporal fiction, an episode in the evanescence of one’s own self. Paul de Man’s perspective that Proust’s deepest insight is the nonexistence of the self founds itself upon this temporal irony of unweaving, this permanent parabasis of meaning. One can remember that even this deconstructive perspective is no more or less privileged than any other Proustian trope, and so cannot give us a truth that Proust himself evades. The bridge between Swann’s jealousy and Marcel’s is Saint-Loup’s jealousy of Rachel, summed up by Proust in one of his magnificently long, baroque paragraphs: Saint-Loup’s letter had come as no surprise to me, even though I had had no news of him since, at the time of my grandmother’s illness, he had accused me of perfidy and treachery. I had grasped at once what must have happened. Rachel, who liked to provoke his jealousy (she also had other causes for resentment against me), had persuaded her lover that I had made sly attempts to have relations with her in his absence. It is probable that he continued to believe in the truth of this allegation, but he had ceased to be in love with her, which meant that its truth or falsehood had become a matter of complete indifference to him, and our friendship alone remained. When, on meeting him again, I tried to talk to him about his accusations, he merely gave me a benign and affectionate smile which seemed to be a sort of apology, and

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then changed the subject. All this was not to say that he did not, a little later, see Rachel occasionally when he was in Paris. Those who have played a big part in one’s life very rarely disappear from it suddenly for good. They return to it at odd moments (so much so that people suspect a renewal of old love) before leaving it for ever. Saint-Loup’s breach with Rachel had very soon become less painful to him, thanks to the soothing pleasure that was given him by her incessant demands for money. Jealousy, which prolongs the course of love, is not capable of containing many more ingredients than the other products of the imagination. If one takes with one, when one starts on a journey, three or four images which incidentally one is sure to lose on the way (such as the lilies and anemones heaped on the Ponte Vecchio, or the Persian church shrouded in mist), one’s trunk is already pretty full. When one leaves a mistress, one would be just as glad, until one had begun to forget her, that she should not become the property of three or four potential protectors whom one pictures in one’s mind’s eye, of whom, that is to say, one is jealous: all those whom one does not so picture count for nothing. Now frequent demands for money from a cast-off mistress no more give one a complete idea of her life than charts showing a high temperature would of her illness. But the latter would at any rate be an indication that she was ill, and the former furnish a presumption, vague enough it is true, that the forsaken one or forsaker (whichever she be) cannot have found anything very remarkable in the way of rich protectors. And so each demand is welcomed with the joy which a lull produces in the jealous one’s sufferings, and answered with the immediate dispatch of money, for naturally one does not like to think of her being in want of anything except lovers (one of the three lovers one has in one’s mind’s eye), until time has enabled one to regain one’s composure and to learn one’s successor’s name without wilting. Sometimes Rachel came in so late at night that she could ask her former lover’s permission to lie down beside him until the morning. This was a great comfort to Robert, for it reminded him how intimately, after all, they had lived to-together, simply to see that even if he took the greater part of the bed for himself it did not in the least interfere with her sleep. He realised that she was more comfortable, lying close to his familiar body, than she would have been elsewhere, that she felt herself by his side—even in an

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hotel—to be in a bedroom known of old in which one has one’s habits, in which one sleeps better. He felt that his shoulders, his limbs, all of him, were for her, even when he was unduly restless from insomnia or thinking of the things he had to do, so entirely usual that they could not disturb her and that the perception of them added still further to her sense of repose. The heart of this comes in the grandly ironic sentence: “Jealousy, which prolongs the course of love, is not capable of containing many more ingredients than the other products of the imagination.” That is hardly a compliment to the capaciousness of the imagination, which scarcely can hold on for long to even three or four images. Saint-Loup, almost on the farthest shore of jealousy, has the obscure comfort of having become, for Rachel, one of those images not quite faded away, when “he felt that his shoulders, his limbs, all of him, were for her,” even when he has ceased to be there, or anywhere, for her, or she for him. Outliving love, jealousy has become love’s last stand, the final basis for a continuity between two former lovers. Saint-Loup’s bittersweet evanescence as a lover contrasts both with Swann’s massive historicism and with the novel’s triumphant representation of jealousy, Marcel’s monumental search after lost time in the long aftermath of Albertine’s death. Another grand link between magnificent jealousies is provided by Swann’s observations to Marcel, aesthetic reflections somewhat removed from the pain of earlier realities: It occurred to me that Swann must be getting tired of waiting for me. Moreover I did not wish to be too late in returning home because of Albertine, and, taking leave of Mme de Surgis and M. de Charlus, I went in search of my invalid in the card-room. I asked him whether what he had said to the Prince in their conversation in the garden was really what M. de Bréauté (whom I did not name) had reported to us, about a little play by Bergotte. He burst out laughing: “There’s not a word of truth in it, not one, it’s a complete fabrication and would have been an utterly stupid thing to say. It’s really incredible, this spontaneous generation of falsehood. I won’t ask who it was that told you, but it would be really interesting, in a field as limited as this, to work back from one person to another and find out how the story arose. Anyhow, what concern can it be of other people, what the Prince said to me? People are very inquisitive. I’ve never been inquisitive, except when I was in love, and when I was jealous. And a lot I ever

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learned! Are you jealous?” I told Swann that I had never experienced jealousy, that I did not even know what it was. “Well, you can count yourself lucky. A little jealousy is not too unpleasant, for two reasons. In the first place, it enables people who are not inquisitive to take an interest in the lives of others, or of one other at any rate. And then it makes one feel the pleasure of possession, of getting into a carriage with a woman, of not allowing her to go about by herself. But that’s only in the very first stages of the disease, or when the cure is almost complete. In between, it’s the most agonising torment. However, I must confess that I haven’t had much experience even of the two pleasures I’ve mentioned—the first because of my own nature, which is incapable of sustained reflexion; the second because of circumstances, because of the woman, I should say the women, of whom I’ve been jealous. But that makes no difference. Even when one is no longer attached to things, it’s still something to have been attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didn’t grasp. The memory of those feelings is something that’s to be found only in ourselves; we must go back into ourselves to look at it. You mustn’t laugh at this idealistic jargon, but what I mean to say is that I’ve been very fond of life and very fond of art. Well, now that I’m a little too weary to live with other people, those old feelings, so personal and individual, that I had in the past, seem to me—it’s the mania of all collectors—very precious. I open my heart to myself like a sort of showcase, and examine one by one all those love affairs of which the rest of the world can have known nothing. And of this collection, to which I’m now even more attached than to my others, I say to myself, rather as Mazarin said of his books, but in fact without the least distress, that it will be very tiresome to have to leave it all. But, to come back to my conversation with the Prince, I shall tell one person only, and that person is going to be you.” We are in the elegy season, ironically balanced between the death of jealousy in Swann and its birth in poor Marcel, who literally does not know that the descent into Avernus beckons. When the vigor of an affirmation has more power than its probability, clearly we are living in a fiction, the metaphor or transference that we call love, and might call jealousy. Into that metaphor, Marcel moves like a sleepwalker, with his obsessions central to The

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Captive and insanely pervasive in The Fugitive. A great passage in The Captive, which seems a diatribe against jealousy, instead is a passionately ironic celebration of jealousy’s aesthetic victory over our merely temporal happiness: However, I was still at the first stage of enlightenment with regard to Léa. I was not even aware whether Albertine knew her. No matter, it came to the same thing. I must at all costs prevent her from renewing this acquaintance or making the acquaintance of this stranger at the Trocadéro. I say that I did not know whether she knew Léa or not; yet I must in fact have learned this at Balbec, from Albertine herself. For amnesia obliterated from my mind as well as from Albertine’s a great many of the statements that she had made to me. Memory, instead of being a duplicate, always present before one’s eyes, of the various events of one’s life, is rather a void from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables one to resuscitate dead recollections; but even then there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into that potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain forever unverifiable. One pays no attention to anything that one does not connect with the real life of the woman one loves; one forgets immediately what she has said to one about such and such an incident or such and such people one does not know, and her expression while she was saying it. And so when, in due course, one’s jealousy is aroused by these same people, and seeks to ascertain whether or not it is mistaken, whether it is indeed they who are responsible for one’s mistress’s impatience to go out, and her annoyance when one has prevented her from doing so by returning earlier than usual, one’s jealousy, ransacking the past in search of a clue, can find nothing; always retrospective, it is like a historian who has to write the history of a period for which he has no documents; always belated, it dashes like an enraged bull to the spot where it will not find the dazzling, arrogant creature who is tormenting it and whom the crowd admire for his splendour and cunning. Jealousy thrashes around in the void, uncertain as we are in those dreams in which we are distressed because we cannot find in his empty house a person whom we have known well in life, but who here perhaps is another person and has merely borrowed the features of our friend, uncertain as we are even more after we awake when we

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seek to identify this or that detail of our dream. What was one’s mistress’s expression when she told one that? Did she not look happy, was she not actually whistling, a thing that she never does unless she has some amorous thought in her mind and finds one’s presence importunate and irritating? Did she not tell one something that is contradicted by what she now affirms, that she knows or does not know such and such a person? One does not know, and one will never know; one searches desperately among the unsubstantial fragments of a dream, and all the time one’s life with one’s mistress goes on, a life that is oblivious of what may well be of importance to one, and attentive to what is perhaps of none, a life hagridden by people who have no real connexion with one, full of lapses of memory, gaps, vain anxieties, a life as illusory as a dream. Thrashing about in the void of a dream in which a good friend perhaps is another person, jealousy becomes Spenser’s Malbecco: “who quite/Forgot he was a man, and jealousy is hight.” Yet making life “as illusory as a dream,” hagridden by lapses and gaps, is Marcel’s accomplishment, and Proust’s art. One does not write an other-than-ironic diatribe against one’s own art. Proust warily, but with the sureness of a great beast descending upon its helpless prey, approaches the heart of his vision of jealousy, his sense that the emotion is akin to what Freud named as the defense of isolation, in which all context is burned away, and a dangerous present replaces all past and all future. Sexual jealousy in Proust is accompanied by a singular obsessiveness in regard to questions of space and of time. The jealous lover, who, as Proust says, conducts researches comparable to those of the scholar, seeks in his inquiries every detail he can find as to the location and duration of each betrayal and infidelity. Why? Proust has a marvelous passage in The Fugitive volume of Remembrance: It is one of the faculties of jealousy to reveal to us the extent to which the reality of external facts and the sentiments of the heart are an unknown element which lends itself to endless suppositions. We imagine that we know exactly what things are and what people think, for the simple reason that we do not care about them. But as soon as we have a desire to know, as the jealous man has, then it becomes a dizzy kaleidoscope in which we can no longer distinguish anything. Had Albertine been

Introduction

unfaithful to me? With whom? In what house? On what day? On the day when she had said this or that to me, when I remembered that I had in the course of it said this or that? I could not tell. Nor did I know what her feelings were for me, whether they were inspired by self-interest or by affection. And all of a sudden I remembered some trivial incident, for instance that Albertine had wished to go to Saint-Martin-le-Vêtu, saying that the name interested her, and perhaps simply because she had made the acquaintance of some peasant girl who lived there. But it was useless that Aimé should have informed me of what he had learned from the woman at the baths, since Albertine must remain eternally unaware that he had informed me, the need to know having always been exceeded, in my love for Albertine, by the need to show her that I knew; for this broke down the partition of different illusions that stood between us, without having ever had the result of making her love me more, far from it. And now, since she was dead, the second of these needs had been amalgamated with the effect of the first: the need to picture to myself the conversation in which I would have informed her of what I had learned, as vividly as the conversation in which I would have asked her to tell me what I did not know; that is to say, to see her by my side, to hear her answering me kindly, to see her cheeks become plump again, her eyes shed their malice and assume an air of melancholy; that is to say, to love her still and to forget the fury of my jealousy in the despair of my loneliness. The painful mystery of this impossibility of ever making known to her what I had learned and of establishing our relations upon the truth of what I had only just discovered (and would not have been able, perhaps, to discover but for her death) substituted its sadness for the more painful mystery of her conduct. What? To have so desperately desired that Albertine—who no longer existed—should know that I had heard the story of the baths! This again was one of the consequences of our inability, when we have to consider the fact of death, to picture to ourselves anything but life. Albertine no longer existed; but to me she was the person who had concealed from me that she had assignations with women at Balbec, who imagined that she had succeeded in keeping me in ignorance of them. When we try to consider what will happen to us after our own death, is it not still our living self which we mistakenly project at that moment? And is it much

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more absurd, when all is said, to regret that a woman who no longer exists is unaware that we have learned what she was doing six years ago than to desire that of ourselves, who will be dead, the public shall still speak with approval a century hence? If there is more real foundation in the latter than in the former case, the regrets of my retrospective jealousy proceeded none the less from the same optical error as in other men the desire for posthumous fame. And yet, if this impression of the solemn finality of my separation from Albertine had momentarily supplanted my idea of her misdeeds, it only succeeded in aggravating them by bestowing upon them an irremediable character. I saw myself astray in life as on an endless beach where I was alone and where, in whatever direction I might turn, I would never meet her. “The regrets of my retrospective jealousy proceeded none the less from the same optical error as in other men the desire for posthumous fame”—is that not as much Proust’s negative credo as it is Marcel’s? Those “other men” include the indubitable precursors, Flaubert and Baudelaire, and Proust himself as well. The aesthetic agon for immortality is an optical error, yet this is one of those errors about life that are necessary for life, as Nietzsche remarked, and is also one of those errors about art that is art. Proust has swerved away from Flaubert into a radical confession of error; the novel is creative envy, love is jealousy, jealousy is the terrible fear that there will not be enough space for oneself (including literary space), and that there never can be enough time for oneself, because death is the reality of one’s life. A friend once remarked to me, at the very height of her own jealousy, that jealousy was nothing but a vision of two bodies on a bed, neither of which was one’s own, where the hurt resided in the realization that one body ought to have been one’s own. Bitter as the remark may have been, it usefully reduces the trope of jealousy to literal fears: where was one’s body, where will it be, when will it not be? Our ego is always a bodily ego, Freud insisted, and jealousy joins the bodily ego and the drive as another frontier concept, another vertigo whirling between a desperate inwardness and the injustice of outwardness. Proust, like Freud, goes back after all to the prophet Jeremiah, that uncomfortable sage who proclaimed a new inwardness for his mother’s people. The law is written upon our inward parts for Proust also, and the law is justice, but the god of law is a jealous god, though he is certainly not the god of jealousy. Freud, in “The Passing of the Oedipus Complex,” writing two years after Proust’s death, set forth a powerful speculation as to the difference

Introduction

15

between the sexes, a speculation that Proust neither evades nor supports, and yet illuminates, by working out of the world that Freud knows only in the pure good of theory. Freud is properly tentative, but also adroitly forceful: Here our material—for some reason we do not understand— becomes far more shadowy and incomplete. The female sex develops an Oedipus-complex, too, a super-ego and a latency period. May one ascribe to it also a phallic organization and a castration complex? The answer is in the affirmative, but it cannot be the same as in the boy. The feministic demand for equal rights between the sexes does not carry far here; the morphological difference must express itself in differences in the development of the mind. “Anatomy is Destiny,” to vary a saying of Napoleon’s. The little girl’s clitoris behaves at first just like a penis, but by comparing herself with a boy play-fellow the child perceives that she has “come off short,” and takes this fact as illtreatment and as a reason for feeling inferior. For a time she still consoles herself with the expectation that later, when she grows up, she will acquire just as big an appendage as a boy. Here the woman’s “masculine complex” branches off. The female child does not understand her actual loss as a sex characteristic, but explains it by assuming that at some earlier date she had possessed a member which was just as big and which had later been lost by castration. She does not seem to extend this conclusion about herself to other grown women, but in complete accordance with the phallic phase she ascribes to them large and complete, that is, male, genitalia. The result is an essential difference between her and the boy, namely, that she accepts castration as an established fact, an operation already performed, whereas the boy dreads the possibility of its being performed. The castration-dread being thus excluded in her case, there falls away a powerful motive towards forming the super-ego and breaking up the infantile genital organization. These changes seem to be due in the girl far more than in the boy to the results of educative influences, of external intimidation threatening the loss of love. The Oedipus-complex in the girl is far simpler, less equivocal, than that of the little possessor of a penis; in my experience it seldom goes beyond the wish to take the mother’s place, the feminine attitude towards the father. Acceptance of the loss of a penis is not endured without some attempt at

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compensation. The girl passes over—by way of a symbolic analogy, one may say—from the penis to a child; her Oedipuscomplex culminates in the desire, which is long cherished, to be given a child by her father as a present, to bear him a child. One has the impression that the Oedipus-complex is later gradually abandoned because this wish is never fulfilled. The two desires, to possess a penis and to bear a child, remain powerfully charged with libido in the unconscious and help to prepare the woman’s nature for its subsequent sex rôle. The comparative weakness of the sadistic component of the sexual instinct, which may probably be related to the penis-deficiency, facilitates the transformation of directly sexual trends into those inhibited in aim, feelings of tenderness. It must be confessed, however, that on the whole our insight into these processes of development in the girl is unsatisfying, shadowy and incomplete. Anatomy is destiny in Proust also, but this is anatomy taken up into the mind, as it were. The exiles of Sodom and Gomorrah, more jealous even than other mortals, become monsters of time, yet heroes and heroines of time also. The Oedipus complex never quite passes, in Freud’s sense of passing, either in Proust or in his major figures. Freud’s castration complex, ultimately the dread of dying, is a metaphor for the same shadowed desire that Proust represents by the complex metaphor of jealousy. The jealous lover fears that he has been castrated, that his place in life has been taken, that true time is over for him. His only recourse is to search for lost time, in the hopeless hope that the aesthetic recovery of illusion and of experience alike, will deceive him in a higher mode than he fears to have been deceived in already.

J U L I A K R I S T E VA

Proust and Time Embodied

1. TIME

AND TIMELESSNESS

M

arcel Proust (1871–1922) composed A la recherche du temps perdu between 1913 (the year of the publication of Du côté de chez Swann by Grasset) and 1922. The last volume, Le Temps retrouvé, published like its predecessors by Gallimard, was to appear in 1927. Proust is often seen as being closer in spirit to the symbolists, dandies and assorted decadents of the fin de siècle than to the sardonic and playful activities of the dadaists, surrealists and futurists propagated by the First World War, not to mention the nightmarish cult of the absurd which followed the Second. Yet it was this man of the nineteenth century who inaugurated the modern aesthetic, and established a completely new form of temporality. Its function is to sum up, and make explicit, the ambitions of all the novels that have gone before, through creating a distinctively new type of Bildungsroman (the German genre which deals with the hero’s education and intellectual development); in this case the learning process involves a return journey from the past to the present and back again. This new form of temporality, furthermore, gives an X-ray image of memory, bringing to light its painful yet rapturous

From Proust and the Sense of Time, translated and with an introduction by Stephen Bann. © 1993 by Julia Kristeva. English translation © 1993 by Stephen Bann.

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dependence on the senses. It offers modern readers the chance to identify the fragments of disparate time which are nowadays dragging them in every direction, with a greater force and insistence than ever before. So I would like to begin by putting a question to you, and to myself as well. What is the time-scale that you belong to? What is the time that you speak from? In the modern world, you might catch an impression of the medieval Inquisition from a nationalist dictator who soon finished spreading the message of integration. (I refer to the Gulf War.) Then you might be rejuvenated by 150 or 200 years by a Victorian president whose stiff, puritanical attitudes belong to the great age of the Protestant conquest of the New World, tempered by an eighteenth-century regard for human rights. But you are also an onlooker, even if you are not a participant, when people demonstrate their regression to infancy through civil violence, as in the recent events in Los Angeles; you witness the futurist breakthroughs of new musical forms like rap, without for a moment forgetting the wise explanatory discourses with which the newspapers and the universities try to explain this sort of thing. Newspapers and universities, by the way, continuing their role of transmitting and handing down knowledge, also belong to totally different time-scales. Yes, we live in a dislocated chronology, and there is as yet no concept that will make sense of this modern, dislocated experience of temporality.

PSYCHIC

T I M E A S A S PA C E O F R E C O N C I L I AT I O N

Living on the threshold of this disturbing epoch, Proust managed to put together the shattered fragments in the form of the life of his narrator, who experiences love and society in accordance with a number of themes which we may think of as archaic, but are in fact our very own, because of their polarized and discontinuous logic. For Proust, time is to be psychic time, and consequently the factor which determines our bodily life. I will argue that time in fact persists as the only surviving imaginative value which can be used by the novel to appeal to the whole community of readers. Things come to have meaning when the I of the writer rediscovers the sensations underlying them, which are always linked together in at least a series of two (as in the case of the madeleine offered to me by my mother and the one offered by Aunt Léonie; the paving stones of the Guermantes courtyard and those at St Mark’s, Venice). Time is this bringing together of two sensations which gush out from the signs and signal themselves to me. But since bringing things together is a metaphor, and sensation implies a body,

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19

Proustian time, which brings together the sensations imprinted in signs, is a metamorphosis. It is all too easy to rely on just one word of the title and conclude that this is a novel about time. Proust uses time as his intermediary in the search (A la recherche) for an embodied imagination: that is to say, for a space where words and their dark, unconscious manifestations contribute to the weaving of the world’s unbroken flesh, of which I is a part. I as writer; I as reader; I living, loving and dying. From Homer to Balzac, fiction creates and modifies its own destiny by offering those who receive it a special field of participation, a distinctive type of communion: it shows us human passions inextricably bound up with the unpredictability of nature and the harshnesses of society. Man, society and being are, for fiction, indissociable. Hence over the period from Rabelais and Shakespeare to Balzac, fiction has blended the serious with the ridiculous, and managed to extract from its chosen area the idea of a time which is specific to the individual—this so-called modern individual whose inner life, in all its different phases of sorrow, joy or ridicule, weaves its own form of continuity which is the thread of a destiny. Proust in no way abandons the ambition of Balzac and Homer—which is sociological in an explicit way, but conceals a transcendental aim at its basis. He is concerned to establish a world in which his readers can come and communicate as if they were in a sacred place: a world where they can discover a coherence between time and space and their dreams can be realized, a place which is sadly lacking in modern reality. His Faubourg Saint-Germain (which in fact corresponds more closely to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré) fulfils this aim of establishing a social space, which is the very definition of the sacred in literature. Here it is, majestic as it approaches its demise, glorious and at the same time ridiculous, no less desirable in the first pages of the opening volumes than it will be perverted and intolerable by the final stage, when we see the very impulse that brought it into being by claiming to draw inspiration from it come full circle in the concept of a Temps retrouvé (Time Regained). From the start, social life is offered as a spectacle. We must not take our eyes off it, but we can overtake it by a strategy that enables us to pass far beyond the social; this strategy consists in delving deep down into ourselves, in regaining the time of our inner lives, which has been so subtly reordered that this time now comes to seem the only reality worth taking into account. So Proust does not relinquish the obsession of authors from Homer to Balzac. But he tones it down by linking it with a project which traditionally belongs to ‘poetry’: this is the exploration of memory, with the ‘I’ unfolding ideas and images, recalling flavours, smells, touches, resonances, sensations,

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jealousies, exasperations, griefs and joys—if it succeeds in articulating them. But to the extent that he offers us the space of memory as a residual area of value leading beyond the spectacle of worldly life in its drama, Proust also aligns himself with a tendency of philosophy contemporary with him: one which, from Bergson to Heidegger, in different ways but with significant points in common, seeks to understand Being by exploring the obscurities of Time. Proust goes further indeed, since he puts into words a category of felt time which cuts through the categories of metaphysics, bringing together opposites like idea, duration and space, on the one hand, and force, perception, emotion and desire, on the other; he proposes a psychic universe of the maximum degree of complexity as the favourable location—the place of sacred communion—where lovers of reading can meet. Do we want tales of passion? Of money? Of war? Of life and death? Without any doubt, we have enough in Proust to keep up with the official statistics. But this is something quite different. If you will only be so good as to open up your memories of felt time, there will rise the new cathedral. Upon the plinth of a project which is by tradition secular and dates back to the Greeks, Proust’s novel sets up a huge edifice which has instead a biblical and evangelical provenance. And within this network of interminable social events, of endless plots, plots and more plots, he situates a person, I, a subject whose memory cannot be impugned, who is there to bring out the convulsive truth of this seeming history, to ‘tear off its hundred masks’. I invites you to do as I does. Read me, and you will be part of the world but without being taken in by it. I can give you the Divine Comedy of the life of the psyche, not just mine, but yours as well, ours, that is, the absolute. In creating this synthesis, in using memory to construct A la recherche in this way, Proust is adopting an ethical position. He is contrasting the disarray of the world and of the self with the unending search for that lost temple, that invisible temple, which is the felt time of our subjective memories. In taking up his aesthetic stance, he is also adopting a moral position vis-àvis the cult of decadence, which he has passed through and, to a great extent, emerged from; Proust is a moralist therefore, but he is a moralist of outrage. The felt time in which he invites us to participate is one of sensual excess and extravagant eroticism, of ruses and betrayals. His sacredness is a sacredness of ill repute. In bringing it to light with the delicate touches of a Saint-Simon or a Mme de Sévigné, Proust the dandy of the belle époque makes contact with us in our contemporary, but also timeless, obsessions. There have been many people, since Proust, who have applied themselves to enlarging a fragment of felt time—writers of the nouveau roman have enhanced such fragments as if they were installing them in a stained-glass window. They may appear to be

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21

more modern, more elliptical, provocative and ‘transgressive’. But Proust remains the only one to keep the balance between the violence implicit in the marginal status of the main character (and the author) of A la recherche, and the graceful capacity for creating a world, a place of communion in worldly time. It is this fragile balance that we seem to have lost. Perhaps that is another reason why Proust, our contemporary, is also so difficult to reach in his intimate life.

PLANTS

A N D S E E D S : T H E V O C AT I O N

Proust’s notebooks, and his Against Sainte-Beuve (composed between 1905 and 1909), tell us that the plan of A la recherche was fixed by 1908–9. The eventual text proceeds through successive alterations and adjustments between 1909 and 1911; then from 1916 onwards we see the final manuscript notebooks emerging. These had not yet been typed out at the time of Proust’s death in 1922. In a letter dated 16 August 1908, he confesses to Mme Straus: I have just begun, and finished, a whole book. Unfortunately, leaving for Cabourg has interrupted my work. I am just about to get back to it. Maybe part of it will appear in serial form in Le Figaro, but only part of it, for it is too long and unsuitable to be published in its entirety. But I do want to finish it, to make an end. Everything is written down, but there is a lot to go over again.1 ‘Unsuitable’, ‘long’—Proust already knows how his work will begin and end, and what will be its chief features—its outrageous contents and its disproportionate style. The First World War and his illness would delay and modify his original plan: Proust evidently could not have been aware in 1909 of the various changes that would be introduced in the course of time. But the central scheme—the approach and the ‘vision’, as he would later refer to it when speaking of his style—are already in place. In the cork-lined bedroom on the Boulevard Haussmann, in the month of July 1909, there begins the metamorphosis of Against Sainte-Beuve into that starting point of A la recherche which will be Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way). Notebook 3, which dates from this stage, actually contains eight versions of the narrator’s famous awakening scene—his mind invaded by formless sensations seeming to come from an adjacent room, just before the appearance of the

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familiar sounds and lights will bring him to full consciousness.2 ‘Involuntary memory’ is already there, causing the boiling lava of memories and desires from the past to coagulate around a present sensation, however slight, however intense. So what has been happening between the commencement of Against Sainte-Beuve and the emergence of this fully fledged project—between 1905 and 1909?

2. THE

DEAD MOTHER

At the end of Time Regained, after bringing up yet again the way in which the narrator’s experience is structured by the alternation of love and death, with death darkening love but love wiping out the fear of death, Proust quotes a line from Victor Hugo: ‘The grass must grow and children have to die.’3 And he describes the ‘cruel law of art’ which amounts in the first instance to the romantic notion that suffering and death are necessary for the gestation of works of art, but concludes with a light-hearted apologia for Manet, considered as the Giorgione of a period of open-air painting: To me it seems more correct to say that the cruel law of art is that people die and we ourselves die after exhausting every form of suffering, so that over our heads may grow the grass not of oblivion but of eternal life, the vigorous and luxuriant growth of a true work of art, and so that thither, gaily and without a thought for those who are sleeping beneath them, future generations may come to enjoy their déjeuner sur l’herbe. (III. 1095) In this context, it is Albertine who is the object of so much love and so much jealousy. It is her accidental and premature death which has detached the narrator from sexual desire in the same measure as it has made him indifferent to death, and has entrenched him all the more securely within another reality: that of ‘my book’. The vigorous and luxuriant grass of the work requires a death. A child’s death? And if so, which child? Albertine? Or the narrator himself, who has died many times, so he believes, since his childhood: dying at every parting, every separation, every bedtime which tears him away from his parents, from his mummy? And what if the child remained in existence only as long as

Proust and Time Embodied

23

there was a mother there? In that event, the mother would have to die in order for the child to break with his childhood, for him to turn it into a memory, a time regained. Were he finally to regain all his time, set out in the space of a book, then the book would indeed be a ‘déjeuner sur l’herbe’: it would transform the graveyard of the dead children into a pleasure garden, dedicated to the ambiguous, loving and vengeful memory of a mother who always loved excessively and not enough—and made you into a child who is still dying, perhaps, but who has a chance of ultimate resurrection and maturity in the luxuriant grass of the book. Mme Proust, née Jeanne-Clemence Weil, died on 26 September 1905, following a short visit to Evian with her son Marcel, in the course of which, while staying at the Hôtel Splendide, she suffered an attack of uraemia. The sudden illness and death agony of the narrator’s grandmother in A la recherche du temps perdu recall the remorse felt by Proust as a result of his feeble behaviour at this juncture. Mme Proust first asked to be photographed, hesitated, and later called it off: ‘She wanted and she didn’t want to be photographed, wishing to leave me one last image, and yet afraid that it would be too distressing ... ’4 A collector of photographs, Proust would later put his family snapshots to blasphemous use, showing them around at the Le Cuziat brothel. On her return to the Rue de Courcelles, the dying woman could think only of her elder son. How would he survive without her? She died while Proust stayed alone in his room, unable to cope with the sight of his mother’s death agony. There is no event that can explain the genesis of a work, not even the death of a woman like Mme Proust. The book had been maturing for ages, yet it was mourning his mother that marked the start of a new time-scale and a new way of life. ‘Since I lost my mother ... ’ Proust often refers to the event in his correspondence, and he does not attempt to hide his wounds in his letters to Montesquiou, Barrès and Maurice Duplay.5 The second volume of Le Côté de Guermantes (The Guermantes Way; 1921) continually harps on the illness, suffering and finally death agony of the narrator’s grandmother, as if intending to lend to salon life, which the young man finds attractive and empty by turns, an unreal and hallucinatory quality. Yet it is in Sodome et Gomorrhe (Sodom and Gomorrah), published in 1921 and 1922, that the note of black remorse, anticipated in the earlier works, finally strikes home. This is the novel of sexual inversion, no less distinct from the childhood memories of Swann’s Way than it is from the aesthetic theory of Time Regained. It is in this work, which has been called the most Balzacian of the series, that Proust makes the clearest allusion, in the form of allusions to the death of the

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narrator’s grandmother, to the sense of guilt brought about by his mother’s death. As the years go on, and the work progresses with them, the scenes of sexual inversion occupy a more and more important place. Albertine’s lesbianism is the major stimulus for the blend of jealousy and fascination which the narrator feels for this young woman. Society figures, not excluding the irreproachable Prince de Guermantes, turn out to have perverse habits. The adventures of Charlus with Jupien and Morel reach a high point of moral and physical cruelty, culminating in the flagellation scene in the brothel. This homosexual, explicitly erotic mise-en-scène becomes possible only in Sodom and Gomorrah, and in it the vision which we can now appreciate to be the real kernel of Proust’s imaginary world, its ‘albumen’ and ‘seed’, crystallizes. The sado-masochism of Sodom and Gomorrah is the truth underlying eroticism and feeling and, on a deeper level, sado-masochism is the very bond that brings society together.

A

CRUCIAL EPISODE

The inclusion, in a section entitled ‘The Intermittencies of the Heart’, of the (grand-)mother’s death gives the narrator the chance not only to recall childhood memories (his boots and his dressing-gown), but also to discourse at length on two of the fundamental themes of A la recherche. On the one hand, the joyful experience of passion is invariably accompanied by a sense of the nothingness, the mortality and the foreign nature of the loved one, a combination which engenders delightful forms of suffering. On the other hand, the faculty of memory which reveals this exquisite duality to us is lodged in an ‘unknown domain’, ‘in the entire existence of our bodies’, with the effect that ‘a series of different and parallel’ states of the self are superimposed, and consequently the self of today can rediscover the previous self intact, provided that the underlying sensations have the character of ‘intermittencies’: being both violent enough and null at the same time, tender and listless, combining joy with grief and remorse: For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart ... But if the context of sensations in which they are preserved is recaptured, they acquire in turn the same power of expelling everything that is incompatible with them, of installing alone in us the self that originally lived them ... without any solution of continuity, immediately after the first evening at Balbec

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long ago ... I clung to the minute in which my grandmother had stooped over me. The self that I then was, that had disappeared for so long, was once again so close to me that I seemed still to hear the words that had just been spoken, although they were now no more than a phantasm ... (II. 784) [my italics] My commentary on this extract is that we are offered a foretaste of memory as comprising the successive states of the self, and of time regained, even to the very sensations: the narrator experiences grief, ecstasy and even indifference in unison with the dramas of sexuality to be made manifest by the two biblical cities. This implies that the (grand-)mother’s death makes it possible for violence and remorse to be inserted into the very heart of the child-narrator’s sensibility, and at the same time it is implied that cruelty is omnipresent, even in the purity of childhood. Time will be truly regained only if he rediscovers the particular form of violence—the violence that is, initially, one of archaic loss and vengeance. That which delights me and abandons me also kills me; but I am capable of putting to death that which is my delight. Yet in this crucial year, 1905, when Proust has already anticipated and indeed sketched out the theme of inversion (in Jean Santeuil, and Les Plaisirs et les jours), he has apparently not made a close connection between inversion and memory’s remarkable capacity of regaining sensations by way of signs. Nor has he connected this remarkable aspect of memory with the shock inflicted by his mother’s loss—with her death or her being put to death. The full intensity of his remorse has to wait for its expression until 1921, the publication of Sodom and Gomorrah. And yet his sense of guilt echoes throughout his private correspondence, and gives itself away in the initial volumes through a number of characters who find their place there, such as Mlle Vinteuil, before finally, and with a minimal attempt at disguise, installing the figure of the mother at the heart of all the ‘intermittencies of the heart’. The mother is at the heart of a primal sado-masochism.

LOVE

IS ANGUISH, ANGUISH IS THE PUTTING T O D E AT H — O F W H O M ?

The well-known scene of the kiss withheld at the little boy’s bedtime, already told in Jean Santeuil and repeated in Swann’s Way, has given generations of readers the image of a mother who is loved voraciously and selfishly. This was a love which involved, right from the start, a struggle for power, a

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mingling of violence and passivity, of desire and contrition. For the moment she yielded, the moment the kiss was granted, the narrator’s anticipated triumph turned to bitter regret, and suffering began to colour his pleasure in a foretaste of sado-masochism.6 As early as 1896, in Les Plaisirs et les jours, Proust had written the ‘Confession of a young girl’ whose ‘voluptuous and blameworthy’ eroticism, though remaining heterosexual, is the cause of her mother’s death.7 Sex is shown to be intrinsically sadistic, as cruel to the lovers themselves as it is to their mothers. Proust writes: ‘Now I was beginning to realize in a confused way that every act which is both voluptuous and blameworthy involves in equal measure the ferocity of the body taking its pleasure, and the tears and martyrdom of our good intentions and our guardian angels.’8 It is through witnessing an erotic scene that the mother of the young girl who speaks these words is struck with apoplexy and dies. After the death of Proust’s own mother, we find him on 4 December 1905 at the clinic of Dr Sollier, a specialist in mental and nervous diseases, with the firm intention of proving that medicine can do nothing in his particular case. He succeeds, and leaves the establishment after six weeks. Social and literary life, so it would appear, are better at turning the activity of mourning into literature. Proust sets up house at 102 Boulevard Haussmann, and the architect Louis Parent lines his bedroom walls with cork in 1909: his cell is ready at just the same time as his plan for the work which will necessitate breaking open this shell, and dominating himself by a massive act of willpower which will be as delightful to experience as it is relentless in its effect on others. From 1905 to 1909, Proust publishes little. Yet one thing that takes our attention is the article appearing in Le Figaro of 1 February 1907 under the title ‘Filial Sentiments of a Parricide’. Proust’s notice had been drawn, shortly after his mother’s death, to an incident in which a person of his acquaintance, Henri Van Blarenberghe, had killed his mother and then committed suicide. Proust interpreted this as the aggressiveness of an Oedipus or an Orestes, known in cruel detail from the Greek texts. The further commentary which he added from Shakespeare and Dostoevsky was hardly less cruel. Obviously the murdering son is a criminal, but Proust the writer seems to be on the point of absolving him when he exclaims: ‘what was the religious atmosphere of moral beauty in which this explosion of madness and slaughter took place?’ (CSB, 157). He seems tempted to include himself in this crime: ‘What have you made of me?’ he asks. ‘What have you made of me?’:

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If we put our minds to it, there would perhaps be not one truly loving mother who was not able, on her last day, and often long before, to address this reproach to her son. Basically, as we grow old, we all kill those who love us by the preoccupation we cause in them, by that very restless tenderness which we breathe in and put ceaselessly on its guard. (CSB, 158–9) In January 1908 Proust writes ‘Robert and the Kid. Mother leaves on a journey’, a text which is now lost. The metamorphosis is under way: in 1909, the plan for a book on Sainte-Beuve turns into a genuine novel. Writing Against Sainte-Beuve, Proust the essayist explains that it is not through biography that the work of authors can be explained; talent has its own rationale, which society cannot comprehend. Here it is not just a matter of doing away with biography but, more exactly, of going into mourning for it. Proust takes up the project of Jean Santeuil again and transposes it. He searches for lost time in the innermost signs of his experience, infusing the singularity of his own grief into the universal pattern of an intelligence which is accessible to all. He starts working hard; his reclusiveness increasingly takes him over. In 1912 the first part of A la recherche reaches its completed form. In 1913 Swann’s Way is published. At this stage, Céleste Albaret enters Proust’s service and makes it possible for him to live in perfect retirement in spite of his very demanding social life: through this means, and both through and in spite of his asthma, Proust is able to achieve the extraordinary ascetic life which will enable him to trace, with a sick but authoritative hand, the word END at the conclusion of Time Regained.

THE

GOVERNESS: A DAUGHTER AND A MOTHER

Straight away, the writer recognizes in his female servant the marks of motherly love: that of a daughter for her mother, and that of a mother for her daughter. ‘Your young wife is bored without her mother, Albaret, that’s all,’ he says to his chauffeur, Céleste’s husband, before taking her into his service.9 Céleste describes herself, in the year 1913, as ‘a child in spite of my 22 years [Proust was 32] above all because I had only just left my mother’s tender care behind’.10 Master and servant will combine together in joint homage to the maternal. ‘I was very fond of Papa. But Mama, the day she died, took her little Marcel with her.’11 ‘The nice thing about him was that I sometimes felt like his mother, and at others like his child.’12 ‘Everything

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affecting mothers and their experiences reminded him of his own and affected him deeply.’13 ‘It was particularly about my mother that he used to ask me questions. He would say to me: “It is easy to see that your father was a good man. But even with the best of men, the bread of human kindness will never be what it can be with a woman; there is always an outer shell of roughness. A man can never be the soul of kindness, as your mother seems to have been.”’ 14 This kindness was, however, in Céleste’s estimation, what Proust had managed to realize in himself, making him behave in such a way that the housekeeper, who was herself always taking infinite pains to seek out for him sole, smelts, gudgeons and fumigating powder, felt herself to be under the maternal care of her master. ‘Monsieur, I find my mother again in you.’ And, as Proust explained to Céleste: ‘The thing is, you were made for devotion like your mother, even if you knew nothing about it. Otherwise, you would not be here.’15 Never can two beings more disparate in their background and level of education have been thus brought together in their devotion to the ‘good mother’, who would fill them both, alternately, with the sublimated love that binds a child to its mother, and no doubt the writer to his work. The mother who brings desire and guilt is dead; there remains complicity and the benefit of mutual silence. Céleste becomes the living relay between the female body and the book, between the turbulence of eroticism and the definitive form of the signed text. With a charming naïveté, she admits to having taken the place of a possible Albertine, an ideal Albertine, who, in her maternal devotion to the most motherly of sons, allows him not to marry her but to absorb her into a book: Not only did I live at his rhythm, but you could say that, twentyfour hours out of twenty-four, and seven days out of seven, I lived exclusively for him. I have nothing to do with the person in his books whom he called ‘The Captive’, and yet I really deserved the title.16 Proust leans on her, and against her, he watches her but does not see her, he speaks to her and his words rebound off her. This is not a dialogue, she simply activates the monologue, by relaying and starting it up again; he forgets her, he gathers her up, she vanishes, as, moreover, does he. There is no longer any ‘self ’, just the I that speaks across her. So Céleste and the cork lining of his apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann, guarantee the air-tightness of the protected environment in

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which involuntary memory remakes and unmakes its tentacular sentences, on the look-out for sounds, colours and flavours; and at the same time there is another stage on which the great world keeps up its pretence, sex spends its fury and, soon enough, the war will arrive to turn existing hierarchies upside down. A number of authors talk of Proust at this period as being curious to witness scenes of debauchery. Maurice Sachs mentions rats pierced with hatpins; M. Jouhandeau the photos of Proust’s mother which were profaned in front of gigolos, the family furniture which was carried to the Le Cuziat brothel, the masturbation sessions where the voyeur hid in bed, with a naked young man before him, responding only to the pleasure of seeing rats devour one another.17 This entire world expands and stages in the most grotesque fashion the sado-masochism which the narrator of A la recherche re-creates in a muted, psychological colouring; it unfolds as a kind of antithesis which works in conjunction with the writing laboratory where Céleste is the vestal virgin. The physical stimulus of debauchery serves to excite the senses and the emotions, with their blend of exaltation and abasement. No one can state categorically, however, that the pleasure of the childhood memory which has been given a name—and that of the scraps of paper which are mounting up all the time in his manuscript—is not as great as, or even greater than, the sexual intoxication.

S U B L I M AT I O N /

P R O FA N AT I O N

So the mother is dead, I have killed her, my grief turns to remorse, I speak of it before another, I speak to myself, I speak—and all is regained, eternity. The way has been prepared for the profanation which becomes possible after two or three years of mourning, in the course of which the loved person has become blurred in the memory, with no lessening in the mean time of the ambivalence of a guilt-ridden love. As early as 1908, in Notebook 1, the hero dreams that his grandmother is dead, but the actual episode, ‘Death of my grandmother’, is forecast only in the plan of the 1912 version of the novel. The theme of inversion becomes steadily more important from 1908 onwards; sketches for the character of Charlus help to achieve the separation between essay and novel in the writing of Against Sainte-Beuve, and at the same time this project takes second place to the strictly narrative undertaking which is to be A la recherche. Meanwhile, over the years 1908 to 1912, the Proustian idea of profaning the mother takes root: Notebook 1 refers to ‘the mother’s face in a debauched grandson’.18 Profanation is seen as a condition of sublimation. In Against

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Sainte-Beuve we read: ‘The face of a son who lives on, like a monstrance in which a sublime mother, now dead, placed all her faith, is like the profanation of a sacred memory.’ In Sodom and Gomorrah, finally, there is this late addition to the text: Moreover, was it possible to separate M. de Charlus’s appearance completely from the fact that, as sons do not always bear a likeness to their fathers, even when they are not inverts and go after women, they consummate in their faces the profanation of their mothers? But let us leave at this point what would be worth a chapter on its own: ‘profanation of the mother’. (III. 300) The interweaving of the two themes—inversion on the one hand, and on the other ambivalence towards the mother resulting in profanation— comes clearly into view, for example in Notebook 47, which opens with ‘M. Charlus and the Verdurins’ and continues with the grandmother’s illness. When he later draws the connection between the death of his grandmother and that of Albertine, the narrator feels himself to be ‘soiled with a double assassination’; at least, as Georges Bataille has pointed out, he believes himself to be responsible for profaning his mother in just the same way as Mlle Vinteuil profaned the memory of her father: the young girl makes him die of sorrow, and just a few days later, while still in mourning, enjoys the embraces of a lesbian lover who spits on the dead man’s photograph. The sufferings of Vinteuil, who is shocked by his daughter’s sexuality, are presented to us in place of the description which the reader expects, but will never receive, of the sorrows experienced by the narrator’s mother in the face of Albertine (or Albert) coming on the scene: he saw himself and his daughter in the lowest depths, and his manners had of late been tinged with that humility, that respect for persons who ranked above him and to whom he now looked up ... that tendency to search for some means of rising again to their level, which is an almost mechanical result of any human downfall. (1. 162) In a similar way, however, the narrator’s mother is said to be so aware of the sufferings of the old piano teacher that she seems to share them from the inside. At times when pleasure overtakes him, the narrator feels that he ‘makes his mother’s soul weep’. Like Mlle Vinteuil, who is an artist in sadism, he

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even comes to believe that sensual pleasure is a form of wickedness in which he can engulf himself and bury his ideal. For the ideal, which is uncompromisingly maternal, is so scrupulous and coercive that, to escape from it, you have to profane it, and drag it down into the bestial world of pleasure. The complicity which Proust discovers between the requirements of an ideal tenderness and the depths of transgression which it imposes is what renders the pervert miserable and, by the same token, deserving of love. Georges Bataille recognizes the kinship with his own inner experience of the ecstasies of sin and profanation when he writes: ‘This wish for limitless horror reveals itself in the end for what it is: the true measure of love.’19 As for Albertine, she appears in the novel only around 1913, almost exactly at the same time as Céleste is becoming established in the apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann. Thanks to these two, Albertine and Céleste, the inversion can be concealed—there is a woman to embody the passion of the narrator, transposing the feeling that Proust reserves for men—and the element of profanation gets toned down. Certainly the narrator’s mother would have no time for Albertine—but surely it is inflicting on her no more than a polite and conventional form of cruelty that he should desire a woman in this completely natural way? Everything conspires in favour of sublimation: the grievous experience of passion, which has been filtered through mourning and trapped by the cork-lined wall of the motherly Céleste, can now break out in joy: Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure our heart; the transformation itself, even, for an instant, releases suddenly a little joy. (III. 944) The imagination, the reflective faculty may be admirable machines in themselves but they may also be inert. Suffering sets them in motion. And then at least the woman who poses for us as grief favours us with an abundance of sittings, in that studio which we enter only in these periods and which lies deep within us. (III. 946)

A C C I D E N T,

A G E I N G A N D WA R

In the last volume of A la recherche, we are presented with three different forms of death: Albertine’s accident, the ageing of the main characters, and the upheaval caused in society by the First World War. Without pausing to

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look at the aspects of this concern in detail, we can certainly show how Proust turns didactic, and outlines the way in which linear time can be transformed into the timelessness of literature. We can follow in Time Regained the successive stages through which he imposes his logic upon the innumerable flashbacks, condensations, plots and digressions which made up the earlier volumes of A la recherche. As it restores my various, different, relationships with people and things, my memory fastens upon particular ‘sites’ and ‘places’. But, incapable of placing them in succession to one another, it sets up ‘revolutions’ around me as it does around them. In order to take account of this assembly of ‘revolutions’, the book would have to use ‘not the two-dimensional psychology which we normally use but a quite different sort of three-dimensional psychology’ (III. 1087). So through juxtaposing the ‘opposing facets’—as in the face of Mlle de Saint-Loup, the ‘masterpiece’ which combines the features of a Swann and a Guermantes, an Odette and a Gilberte—Proust discovers what will be (and indeed already has been) the ‘spur’ of the book. This will impel the narrator (it already has impelled him) to create a world as vast as a cathedral, or on a more modest scale to arrange the pieces of material among themselves as if making a dress (III. 1090). The process of reasoning now reaches its fulfilment, and the formula of A la recherche, its alchemical key, is waiting to be spoken. What the narrator calls an ‘enhanced’ place in time—perceived by the senses, inaccessible no doubt but, as the prepositional form ‘à la’ indicates, always beckoning to us, remaining open and disposable as the self revolves around it—is the notion of embodied time. The time in which all of our sensations are reflected upon, as they tie the knot between subjectivity and the external world and recover once again the sounds that lie beneath the masks of appearance: This notion of Time embodied, of years past but not separated from us, it was now my intention to emphasize as strongly as possible in my work. And at this very moment, in the house of the Prince de Guermantes, as though to strengthen me in my resolve, the noise of my parents’ footsteps as they accompanied M. Swann to the door and the peal—resilient, ferruginous, interminable, fresh and shrill—of the bell on the garden gate which informed me that at last he had gone and that Mamma would presently come upstairs, these sounds rang again in my ears, yes, unmistakably I heard these very sounds, situated though they were in a remote past. And as I cast my mind over all the events

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which were ranged in an unbroken series between the moment of my childhood when I had first heard its sound and the Guermantes party, I was terrified to think that it was indeed this same bell which rang within me and that nothing that I could do would alter its jangling notes. On the contrary, having forgotten the exact manner in which they faded away and wanting to relearn this, to hear them properly again, I was obliged to block my ears to the conversations which were proceeding between the masked figures all round me ... (III. 1105) Then, without warning, appearing like a confession a few lines before the word ‘END’ is inserted, there comes into play once again the notion of desire, and nothing less than the desire to destroy, on the extreme boundaries of cruelty. There is the sense of something coming into view and then being annihilated, of love and hate: the avowal that desire is in essence a perverse desire is what makes time regained come full circle: And it is because they contain thus within themselves the hours of the past that human bodies have the power to hurt so terribly those who love them, because they contain the memories of so many joys and desires already effaced for them, but still cruel for the lover who contemplates and prolongs in the dimension of Time the beloved body of which he is jealous, so jealous that he may even wish for its destruction ... Albertine deep down, whom I saw sleeping and who was dead.20 (III. 1106) [my italics] And yet, after this avowal of cruelty, it is formal language that passes on the message of the perversity at the root of all desire: the ‘monsters’ which take up their places within us come to form a kind of polytopia—‘a place ... prolonged past measure—for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch epochs that are immensely far apart, separated by the slow accretion of many, many days—in the dimension of Time. The End.’ (III. 1107) The End. Over and beyond the time of jealousy, the time for the construction of the work now takes over, in so far as the book is itself the direct replacement for the loved person—could we therefore refer to this Proustian time (of cruelty, sensation and writing) as a temporality of concern? Heidegger’s ‘temporality of concern’ incorporates several different stages: the temporality of disclosedness, the temporality of understanding, the temporality of state of mind and the temporality of falling.21 Yet desire,

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in its cruelty, goes beyond the temporality of concern, and opens up a place in which signs can develop a spatial dimension by building up sensations. The writer is no philosopher: memory regained bears the imprint of colour, taste, touch and other forms of experience, whilst a distinctive type of writing which transgresses all bounds in its richness of metaphor and its embedding of clauses one within one another at the same time destroys and reconstructs the world. In the Proustian text the non-temporal nature of the unconscious (as Freud would have it) goes side by side with an overpowering awareness of Being. The psychic absorbs the cosmic and, beyond it, Being itself is diluted in style. So imaginary experience is not unaware of the temporality of concern. But it goes beyond it, in a search for joy. Closer in this sense to Spinoza than to Heidegger, Proust’s fiction reveals fundamental features of the human psyche. Personally, I enjoy this revelation; I hope that you do too.

NOTES 1. Marcel Proust, Correspondance, ed. Philip Kolb (Paris, Plon, 1970–83), vol. IX, p. 163. 2. Cf. M. Bardèche, Marcel Proust romancier, Les Sept Couleurs (Paris, 1971), vol. I, p 204. 3. Victor Hugo, Oeuvres complètes, Poésie II (Paris, Laffont, 1985), p. 412: ‘A Villequier’. 4. Proust, Correspondance, Proust to Mme Catusse, vol. X, p. 215. 5. Ibid., vol. V, p. 238; vol VI, p. 28: letters to Maurice Duplay cited in Q. de Diesbach, Marcel Proust (Paris, Perrin, 1991). 6. Cf. 1.41: ‘It struck me that my mother had just made a first concession which must have been painful to her, that it was a first abdication on her part from the ideal she had formed for me, and that for the first time she who was so brave had to confess herself beaten. It struck me that if I had just won a victory it was over her, that I had succeeded, as sickness or sorrow or age might have succeeded, in relaxing her will, in undermining her judgment; and that this evening opened a new era, would remain a black date in the calendar.’ 7. Proust, Jean Santeuil précédé de Les Plaisirs et les jours (Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1971), pp. 91–2. 8. Ibid., p. 95. 9. Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust (Paris, Laffont, 1973), p. 19. 10. Ibid., p. 32. 11. Ibid., p. 30. 12. Ibid., p. 117. 13. Ibid., p. 133. 14. Ibid., p. 139.

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15. Ibid., p. 140. 16. Ibid., p. 64. 17. Cf. H. Bonnett, Les Amours et la sexualité de M. Proust (Paris, Nizet, 1985), p. 80. 18. Quoted in Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, ed. B. de Fallois (Paris, 1954), p. 282. 19. Georges Bataille, ‘Marcel Proust et la mère profanée’, in Critique, no. 47 (1946), p. 609. 20. The last sentence of this quotation is not to be found in the Penguin Classics edition, which relies on the earlier Pléiade text. 21. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans J. Macquarie and Edward Robinson (London, SCM Press, 1962), pp. 383ff.

R O B E RT F R A S E R

The Lamp of Truth: Proust and George Eliot

I

O

n holiday with his grandmother in Balbec the adolescent boy of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs is prey to sundry appearances. Balbec itself is an appearance, the successive projections of which disguise its reality: a rather ordinary upper-middle-class resort on the coast of Normandy. As these illusions or perceptions peel back, he creeps closer to the truth, or rather to a stable perception of that which confounds the successive masks which concealed it. One of more perplexing of these illusions concerns the ‘jeunes filles’ themselves, who at first sight, swanning along the promenade in happy abandon, appear to possess a certain uniformity of manner: a devilmay-care athleticism, an almost callous confidence, a careless and concerted cruelty. At one point one of the girls whose name, he later learns, is Andrée, skips on to the edge of the bandstand, and discovering in her path the head of an elderly man of the law settled in a deckchair beneath, executes a leap that carries her within a few inches of his ears, to the abject terror of the octogenarian judge but the explosive delight of her companions. But Andrée is an enigma: at once the most popular and the most introverted of the band. It is not long before the boy begins to suspect in her the inverse of the happy physicality she has adopted principally for the

From Proust and the Victorians: The Lamp of Memory. © 1994 by Robert Fraser.

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approbation of others. The attraction she possesses for him is thus that of an opposite and is of short duration, since at the heart of her lies a personality at odds with the demonstrativeness that first drew him; something too closely akin to himself—febrile, neurotic, enclosed: But for me truly to be able to love Andrée she was too intellectual, too nervous, too delicate, too similar to me. If Albertine now struck me as empty, Andrée on the other hand was replete with something I recognized only too well. I had thought the first day to have met some cyclist’s mistress on the beach, eaten up with a love of sport which Andrée now informed me that she had taken up on the advice of her doctor to ease her neurasthenia and gastric complaints, but that her finest hours were those she devoted to translating the novels of George Eliot. My deception, founded on a misunderstanding as to her nature, had little importance. But it was the sort of blunder which can cause love to be born and, if unrecognized and uncorrected, be the cause of much suffering. (NP, II, 295) Thus the only kind of suffering Andrée is capable of causing him is one founded on a categorical mistake. His spiritual alter persona, she will herself be drawn to her opposite, the very Albertine—shallow and self-serving—that he must learn to love. In a later volume, La Prisonnière, she will accordingly occasion the pangs of jealously, but not on her own behalf, for how could she who beguiles the afternoon hours translating the novels of George Eliot sustain a threat to one whose self-immersion, whose tastes in reading, so closely resemble her own? The ambit of those tastes, intense and self-enclosed, recalls a parallel passage in Jean Santeuil: Already when we were tiny there was always some particular book which we took with us when going to the park, and which we perused with that extra special love which no other love has ever since been able to supplant. And even at that very moment we were attached less exclusively to what the book said than we were to the texture of the pages we were turning. Today in a manuscript, in a journal supplement, we will be delighted to discover a few additional pages of George Eliot or Emerson. But when we were young the book itself was never distinct in our minds from that which it was saying. (JS, II, 190)

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The passage occurs in the Begmeil chapter, just after Jean is described striding on to the sand dunes bearing a volume of Carlyle’s French Revolution, Proust’s own holiday reading at the time. Unlike the Balbec sections of A la recherche, this is a form of fictionalised autobiography, and the enthusiasms adduced are very much the author’s own. It is not for nothing that in A la recherche de Marcel Proust André Maurois cites George Eliot among the passions of Proust’s childhood, long before English was one of his accomplishments.1 If the adolescent of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs shared the young Proust’s incapacities as well as his enthusiasms, he might well have appreciated, if not Andrée’s love, at least her offices as translator.

II

In that capacity, however, she had been anticipated by fifty years. ‘We are very anxious to get an accomplished translator for Adam Bede’ Eliot wrote to Geneva in December 1859: Hitherto I have rejected propositions of translators, for a dread of having one’s sentences metamorphosed into an expression of somebody else’s meaning instead of one’s own. I particularly wish my books to be translated into French, because the French read so little English; and if there is any healthy truth in my art, surely they need it to purify their literary air.2 The suspicion of Gallic impurity was one that she constantly expressed (‘half poisoned by the French theatre’ is how she once described herself to her publisher John Blackwood), but her correspondent on this occasion, François D’Albert-Durade, was French Swiss and exempt from the contagion. Ten years earlier, stricken with grief after the death of her father, she had arrived in Geneva in the company of Charles Bray and his wife Cara. The stay was only partially successful in allaying her loss, and it was with some foreboding that the Brays turned homeward, leaving her in Geneva for the winter. But in October she wrote to them describing the family with whom she had found lodgings: M. and Mme. D’Albert are really clever people—people worth sitting up an hour longer to talk to .... M. D’Albert plays and sings, and in the winter he tells me they have parties .... In fact, I think that I am in just the right place.

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Again, For M. D’Albert, I love him already as if he were father and brother both. You must know that he is no more than 4 feet high with a deformed spine—the result of an accident in his boyhood—but on this little body is placed a finely formed head, full in every direction. The face is plain with small features, and rather haggard-looking, but all the lines and the wavy grey hair indicate the temperament of an artist. I have not heard a word or seen a gesture from him yet that was not perfectly in harmony with an exquisite moral refinement.3 Stolidly bourgeois in a respectable Genevan mould, the D’Alberts possessed for Marian Evans a combination she had seldom before encountered, and of much use to her at this stage of her life, newly released from the constraints of her family and an unwelcome friction with her father, with whom her newfound emancipation of views had brought her at times into open conflict. For the D’Alberts were Calvinists, heir to an Evangelical faith free of the mental narrowness she had come to associate with the superstitious Evangelicalism of the English Midlands, which she was later to parody in the Dodson aunts in The Mill on the Floss, ‘an Evangelicalism unknown to Bossuet’. François D’Albert in particular, an artist of no mean accomplishment and later conservateur of the Athenée, possessed a generosity of culture she was never to forget. The Brays, who met him on his one brief visit to the Midlands, thought him a model for Philip Wakeham, whose bodily affliction he shared along with a certain fawn-like capacity for devotion. His portrait of her in oils, from a sketch made in Geneva shortly before her departure, hangs now in Coventry Library (Plate 5). Slender and tranquil, with none of the magisterial grandeur of the novelist she was later to become, she looks out from eyes that are both calm and knowing. The large chin softened and dimpled, the nose tapered and aquiline, she has a patient and delicate homeliness that might have recommended itself to Proust, lover of the exceptional in the ordinary, the wayside flower. When in time D’Albert came to translate five of her books—Adam Bede, Scenes from Clerical Life, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner and Romola— something of the same softening was apparent. Adam Bede in particular, with its Warwickshire dialect, its portrayal of English Nonconformism, was never going to be easy. ‘As simple, biblical French as possible will be the best vehicle’ she advised, and of The Mill on the Floss:

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I can well imagine that you find ‘the Mill’ more difficult to render than ‘Adam’. But would it be inadmissible to represent in French, at least to some degree, those ‘intermédiaires entre le style commun et le style élégant’ to which you refer? It seems to me that I have discerned such shades very strikingly rendered in Balzac and occasionally in George Sand. Balzac, I think, dares to be thoroughly colloquial in spite of French strait-lacing. Even in English this daring is far from being general. The writers who dare to be thoroughly familiar are Shakespeare, Fielding, Scott (where he is expressing the popular life with which he is familiar) and indeed every other writer of fiction of the first class. Even in his loftiest tragedies—in Hamlet for example—Shakespeare is intensely colloquial. One hears the accents of living men.4

III This vernacular robustness of Eliot—‘accents of living men’—proved very appealing to Marcel Proust, who fifty years later read Scenes from Clerical Life (Scenes de la vie du Clergé), Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss (Le Moulin sur la Floss) and Silas Marner, all in D’Albert’s translations. To him it spoke of a certain healthy levity of spirit akin to that which Carlyle had discerned among spokesmen of reformed religions: Cromwell, Knox, Luther, Mahommet. In a footnote appended to La Bible d’Amiens he speaks of this frankness, this healthy and life-accepting wholeness, ‘le rire de Luther’ (‘Luther’s laugh’) as a peculiarly Ruskinian trait, the very quality that led his master to direct Amiens pilgrims to call in at the patisserie in the high street before paying their respects to the cathedral of St Firmin.5 Then, with a keen manoeuvre of the sensibility, but in seeming logical irrelevance, he quotes Eliot’s description of the curate Mr Gilfil from Scenes of Clerical Life, followed by a collage of phrases descriptive of Mr Irwine, the vicar of Hayslope from Adam Bede, some culled from Eliot’s narrative, others from Adam in old age. But it is characteristic of the softening effect of D’Albert’s translation on Midlands speech that in French it is hard to distinguish the accents of Adam, one ‘living man’, from those of the author: M. Irwine n’avait effectivement ni tendances élevées, ni enthousiasme religieux et regardait comme une vraie perte de temps de parler doctrine et réveil chrétien au vieux père Taft ou à Cranage, le forgeron .... Il n’était ni laborieux, ni oublieux de

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lui-même, ni très abondant en aumônes et sa croyance même était assez large. Ses goûts intellectuels étaient plutôt païens .... Mais il avait cette charité chrétienne qui a souvent manqué à d’illustres vertus. Il était indulgent pour les fautes du prochain et peu enclin à supposer le mal .... Si vous l’aviez rencontré monté sur sa jument grise, ses chiens courant à ses côtés, avec un sourire de bonne humeur .... L’influence de M. Irwine dans sa paroisse fut plus utile que celle de M. Ryde qui insistait fortement sur les doctrines de la Réformation, condamnait sévèrement les convoitiscs de la chair ... qui était très savant. ‘M. Irwine était aussi différent de cela que possible, mais il était si pénétrant; il comprenait ce qu’on voulait dire à la minute, il se conduisait en gentilhomme avec les fermiers .... Il n’était pas un fameux prédicateur ... mais ne disait rien qui ne fût propre à vous rendre plus sage si vous vous en souveniez.’ He really had neither lofty aims, no theological enthusiasm: if I were closely questioned, I would be obliged to confess that he felt no serious alarms about the souls of his parishioners, and would have thought it a mere loss of time to talk in a doctrinal and awakening manner to old ‘Feyther Taft’, or even to Chad Cranage the blacksmith .... He was neither laborious, nor obviously self-denying, nor very copious in alms-giving, and his theology you perceive, was lax. His mental palate, indeed, was rather pagan ... he had that charity which has sometimes been lacking to the very illustrious virtue—he was tender to other men’s failings, and unwilling to impute evil .... But if you had met him that June afternoon riding on his grey cob, with his dogs running beside him—with a good-natured smile on his finely turned lips .... I must believe that Mr Irwine’s influence in his parish was a more wholesome one than that of the zealous Mr Ryde who ... insisted strongly on the doctrines of the Reformation ... and was severe in rebuking the aberrations of the flesh .... ‘Now Mester Irwine was as different as could be; as quick!—he understood what you meant in a minute. And he behaved as much like a gentleman to the farmers ... nobody has ever heard me say that Mr Irwine was much of a preacher ... nothing but what was good and what you’d be the wiser for remembering.’6

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Regarding England and the English from afar, Proust seems to have regarded this worldly tolerance of Eliot’s clergymen as intrinsic to AngloSaxon Protestantism: something rounded, fleshy, wholesome, integrity combined with an avoidance of extremes. For whatever else of her he had sacrificed, D’Albert had kept the life-accepting humour, to which Proust was quick to respond, perceiving it as her essence. In an essay on literary fallacies, ‘Sainte-Beuve et Balzac’, he mocks fashionable readers who call themselves ‘intelligent’ while mistaking the very nature of the books that they read: But for so-called ‘intelligent readers’, the fact that a book is ‘untrue’ or ‘depressing’ is like some personal fault in the writer, which they are as astonished as gratified to encounter again, even exacerbated in each succeeding work as if it is something he has been unable to rectify in himself and which finally lends him in their eyes the unsavoury character of a person without judgement who cultivates gloomy ideas and whom it is inadvisable to meet, with the result that each time the bookseller hands them a Balzac or an Eliot they reject it saying ‘Oh no. It’s always untrue or morose [sombre], the last one more so than the others, I don’t want any more.’ (CS-B, 285) The blunder into which the putative ‘intelligent’ reader has fallen here is one that Proust thought intrinsic to nineteenth-century culture, and a vicious one at that. In his mind it was epitomised by Sainte-Beuve’s weekly literary column Causerie de Lundi, which regularly contained observations on the literary world in which an author’s public demeanour was wilfully, and perversely, confused with the nature of his work. The ‘intelligent’ reader here is one informed by this perspective, assuming from the Puritanical reputation attached to the name of Eliot, for example, that her works must consistently be morose. A literary Sainte-Beuviste is one who confounds an author with his or her work, assuming that the experience of reading a work of fiction is very much the same as a meeting with its author: that, just as we come to expect a certain temperamental consistency in our friends and acquaintances, and indeed most of those whom we meet on social occasions, every time we open the cover of a book by a particular writer, the spiritual sensations to be discovered will recognisable and very much the same. For Proust, few authors illustrated the futility of this point of view more poignantly than Eliot. Eliot’s work was no more ‘sombre’ than were her clerics. Indeed, what Proust seems first to have responded to in it was a

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gentleness and lightness of touch common to subject and narrator. Affectionate and frank in their social relations, Irwine and Adam are portrayed with both tenderness and truth. And, playing the Sainte-Beuviste card in his turn—since none of us is consistent—these were the very range of sensations that he seems, at least at one stage of his work, to have seen as being part and parcel of English culture in general. Eliot and Ruskin, for example, seemed to share them. They were the very qualities found by Ruskin in the later phases of medieval art as exemplified by the Vierge Dorée of Amiens: ‘truthful, tender, suggestive’, though it came to seem to Ruskin as if tenderness were the greater and more durable of these qualities, first since tenderness was a precondition of the perception of truth, and second since in the eyes of a compassionate but fallible artist, truth could never be anything but partial. In a passage from The Two Paths translated by Proust, he plays with these notions and with a certain ambiguity latent in the word Truth: ‘I find this more and more every day: an infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all truly great men’ (C&W, XVI, 281). IV This kinship between Ruskin and herself, so essential to Proust’s appreciation of her, was one to which Eliot was herself alive, even if the enthusiasm was not always reciprocated. ‘I venerate him as one of the chief teachers of the day’, she wrote. ‘The grand doctrine of truth and sincerity in art, the inspiration of a Hebrew prophet, must be stirring up young minds in a promising way.’7 This ‘doctrine of truth’ was the subject of her review of the third volume of Modern Painters, published in the Westminster Review in 1856 where, praising Ruskin’s ‘realism’—‘the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature’—she goes on to paraphrase his distinction between versions of the True Ideal: Purist Idealism, in which only the noble is portrayed; Naturalist Idealism, in which the unworthy is portrayed in a ratio harmonious with the worthy.8 She was working on Scenes from Clerical Life at the time, and devising her own theory of fiction, to which her appreciation of Ruskin has no little relevance. Two years later, in the great seventeenth chapter of Adam Bede, she expounded her own doctrine of realism as, amongst other things, the avoidance of a certain kind of selectivity in art. This is the chapter from which Proust culls those phrases of Adam’s concerning Mr Irwine: an imperfect cleric perhaps, short on exhortation and the exposition of doctrine, no more than moderately learned, preaching no more than maxims. Should he not have been rendered more perfect, more stringent in teaching and in

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life? Adam’s rejoinder is that he is fitted to both time and place, but beforehand the narrator makes another point: that human imperfection is itself a comely thing, and seemly to be represented in fiction: So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of one’s best efforts, there is reason to dread. Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin—the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility which we forsake for genius, is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion. Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your immediate feelings—much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.9 Like much of the early portions of Adam Bede, this was written in Munich in 1858 where Eliot spent the mornings at her desk and the afternoons in the art galleries viewing Rubens, whose ‘breathing men and women’ she appreciates in a letter to Sara Hennell,10 but also the minor Dutch masters—Gerard Dou, Teniers, van Ostade, Breughel, Metsu. These are the ‘many Dutch paintings’ whose ‘precious quality of truthfulness’ she praises in Adam Bede, full of homely subjects, domestic humility, plainness and grossness of the flesh. The taste for Dutch seventeenth-century painting is something she shared with Proust, whose essay on Rembrandt emphasises his solidity, his respect for the physical world, his discovery of beauty in ordinary circumstances. This sublime ordinariness, this tactility in transcendence, he found too in Chardin, the objects in whose rooms seemed to him to conspire in mutual acts of affinity, rendering the mundane timeless. They are also qualities he thought essential to Eliot. In 1954 a set of manuscript notes on her work was published, left behind by Proust at his death. They open: ‘What strikes me in Adam Bede is the painting—attentive, minute, respectful and sympathetic—of the humblest, most industrious life. To keep one’s kitchen clean is an essential duty, an almost religious duty and one full of charm’ (CSB, 656). One remembers the kitchen grange at Combray, full of gleaming objects, calmness and industrious peace, a poetry of the domestic. One remembers too, in Jean Santeuil, the night-time range over which the maid Ernestine presides, offered as something to be appreciated ‘because it exists’:

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Often at such a moment, opening on tip-toes the kitchen door at the end of a dingy corridor, Jean was rewarded by a vision of the night unexpectedly raised at the far end, as if mysteriously supported by the darkness and the gleaming tiles of the range, like a balcony at the corner of already dark street lit up by the fading sun. Just above it drifted a pink vaporous cloud, sustained to all appearances over a pan by an invisible bed of steam; and, like sea ripples made diaphanous in the sunset, the quivering exhalation of a simmering casserole was as though shot through with flame. On its broad and shining chest the pot bore a bright impression of the fiery realms beneath, seen by it though invisible to Jean. Her eye steady in the night which with its red constellations had already engulfed her kitchen, Ernestine stood at her post, sagely ruling the fire with her rod of iron, moving the casserole hither and thither, momentarily prodding with her wooden spoon, replacing the lid of the stove, seeing that all was well. (JS, I, 187–8) For sumptuousness of physical detail, a sort of ethical cum aesthetic wholesomeness, this rivals the passage in chapter 7 of Adam Bede that describes the Poysers’ dairy where Arthur Donnithorne meets Hetty Sorrel: ‘such coolness, such purity, such fresh fragrance of new-pressed cheese, of firm butter, of wooden vessels perpetually bathed in pure water’. Yet where Eliot’s talents are tactile, Proust’s drive us towards the chiaroscuro of light as a starting point for the conversion of the mundane into magic. It was the heightened use of such chiaroscuro, one remembers, that in the first volume of Modern Painters Ruskin decried as a vice particular to the Dutch painting. If, in Proust’s manuscript essay on Rembrandt, Ruskin is falsely portrayed as an admirer, the explanation may well lie in Eliot’s praise of Dutch painters, and a certain communality of attitude, a stout but jocund homeliness, Proust sensed between Eliot, Ruskin and the Dutch school: joined, improbably, in the pantheon of his esteem.

V But realism is a difficult term, and there is more than one version of it. If for Proust the tender truth of Ruskin and of Eliot represented one kind of realism, French literature offered others. All the signs are that for much of

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the period of his literary gestation Proust was preoccupied by these alternatives. If Eliot exemplified the realist as ethical commentator, a more austere and self-denying kind of realism is explored by Proust in his essays on Flaubert. The Flaubertian realism he interprets as consisting in stylistic elimination from the sentence of any taint of subjectivity, its reduction to the status of observed fact, leaving the onus of interpretation upon reader. What specifically are eliminated are the personality and views of the author—we never discover directly, for example, what Flaubert thinks of the adultery of Emma Bovary—and the volition of the characters, whose actions are observed without their wishes being stated. The characteristic Flaubertian sentence is thus one in which the physical object, the res, and the externally observed pattern of behaviour assume the status of subjects: Where an action occurs whose various phases of which another writer would extrude from the motive behind them, we get a picture the various parts of which no more betray an intention than if he was describing a sunset. Madame Bovary wishes to warm herself at the fire. Here is how it is described: ‘Madame Bovary (nowhere has it been mentioned that she was cold) approached the fireplace ... ’ (CSB, 300) For the apprentice Proust there were thus two alternative varieties of literary realism, almost contemporary though products of different linguistic cultures. Both were attractive, and both dependent as much on what they rejected as what they proposed: in Eliot, an ethereality that lost contact with the gritty essence of things; in Flaubert, a subjectivity that proposed the artist as unique observer, the coil of motive and the maze of the soul. The single largest difference between them lay in their articulation of ethical judgement, which in Flaubert was held in reserve. There was even for Proust a certain delicious barbarity in this reticence, as with meticulous excision the author’s sensibility edited itself out. Falling short of the impersonal—as the bee-mouth sipped, a certain pollen of subjectivity was left on the facts—the result was none the less a discipline of truthfulness without comment, the neutral imposition of the actual. The tender realism of Eliot, by contrast, like that of Ruskin, was one that called attention to its own judgements. Arthur Donnithorne and Godfrey Cass were not, could never be, seen with the lidless impersonality with which Flaubert viewed Emma Bovary. For if truth was an attribute of character as much as of judgement, turpitude in others was the absence of that truth. And, though Eliot was insistent, along with

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Ruskin, that the unworthy was matter for art as long as it existed in harmonious equipoise with the worthy, the inclusion was dependent upon the unworthy being viewed as such. How else then was the world to be viewed except with judgement, a film that drifted before the eyes, an ethical varnish on the fictive canvas? In Eliot the objectivity of the fact is embarrassed less because the conditions of viewing are themselves unstable—as in the later aesthetic of Monet and Elstir—than because a certain moral partiality is a qualification of seeing as much as of judging. These observations may help us to make sense of two different claims of André Maurois: that the Proust of Jean Santeuil was still captive to the influence of Flaubert with his passages of measured, external description, and that ‘C’, the putative narrator of the book, derives another aspect of his manner from a reading of the great nineteenth-century English novelists: Dickens, Hardy and Eliot.11 One may go further: that which C, seems to share with Eliot is a willingness to dilate upon the facts, a constant reaching out from the particular case to the general maxim. In the preamble that the two friends who have supposedly rescued the manuscript of the novel after C’s death append at the beginning, they speak of this discursiveness as something intrinsic to C’s bearing, both in his work and in his life, and a noticeable element in the recitations from passages of the book which he gives for their benefit. It was a tendency they say ‘in the manner of certain English novelists which he had previously loved’ (JS, I, 53). C is diffident enough concerning his abilities to consider such digressiveness a weakness, though for the friends who publish his work posthumously, it is quite evidently one of its charms. To some extent Jean Santeuil is offered as a novel in the English manner, the manner I would suggest pre-eminently of Eliot. Nor does the discursiveness Proust clearly considers intrinsic to this style represent for the writers of its putative preface any faltering of narrative focus; the great strength of C’s work, they say, is its ability to portray events just as they happened: ‘the things that he wrote were rigorously true’. For the young Proust, trying out his hand at this apprentice novel, we can only assume that the digressiveness, the ethical candour, was an aspect of that truth. And yet, stylistically, the spirit of Flaubert is never far absent. Two ghosts, one English and one French, seem to hover over the text: Jean Santeuil is a work that is doubly begotten. At times, especially in the early chapters, the two manners—Flaubertian and Eliotic—flourish side by side. Many paragraphs, indeed, move from one to the other, as in the description of Jean’s evening in the kitchen at Etreuilles, immediately before that evocation of the cooking range:

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Plenty of other moments besides were enjoyable at Etreuilles. For example when just before dinner Jean went to warm his feet in the cook’s room, a sort of auxiliary kitchen adjoining the first, and where, worn out with reading, he listened to her coming and going while she brushed the boots. It was one of those peaceful moments when everything seems robed in such beauty as mere being affords, the charm of which resides within the shadow crowding the far end of the room where the younger children’s bed is, in the mellow light bleaching the bed’s foot, in the tic-toc of the clock, in the face of the cook as she gossips in the lamplight, in the mysterious depths of the kitchen, lit up by the red glow from the unseen brazier, where delectable operations are being executed suggested only by the creaking of casserole under the fall of spent charcoal, or the sound of frying food sizzling in the pan. At such moments the voice of the cook droning ‘How damp your shoes are!’ affects you agreeably because the sound of her voice is something that exists; just as the sight of the old pharmacist standing at his window in the glare of the lamp, preoccupied with making up some compound, is pleasing since he too exists. The unceasing babble of the stove is even more pleasant than the cook’s voice since there is no need to reply to it—but there is hardly any need to pay attention to what the cook is saying, and in the sprightliness of her look lies something no less soothing than the warmth of the fire. It is even delightful to be able to talk to her when one has had too much of the silence and feels like letting fall a few desultory words. Things are beautiful for being just what they are, and existence a calm beauty spread about them. (JS, I, 185–6)

VI

In Eliot such reaching for the philosophical or reflective is invariably connected with an another tendency: an interest in laws of moral causality which might serve as equivalents of scientific cause and effect. For ‘the master key to the understanding of human history’, she wrote in 1851, is the recognition of the presence of undeviating law in the material and spiritual world—of that invariability of sequence which is

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acknowledged to be the basis of physical science, but which is still perversely ignored in our social organization, our ethics and religion .... The divine yea and nay, the seal of prohibition and sanction, are effectually impressed on human deeds and aspirations, not by means of Greek and Hebrew, but by that inexorable law of consequences, whose evidence is confirmed instead of weakened as the ages advance.12 Eliot’s ‘yea’ and ‘nay’ here are from Carlyle and Sartor Resartus, but an interest in law in the wider sense is deeply textured into her later work, where it emerges as a constant reaching for analogy and example within which the tergiversations of individual conduct may be enclosed. Proust’s manuscript notes on Eliot recognise this preoccupation with spiritual law, of which he seems to have thought her a supreme exponent. For Proust, she inhabited a universe of patent moral meaning ruled over by a Protestant providence, severe yet well disposed: above the chain of our vices and mishaps, a sort of superior order of a omnipotent providence which converts our evil incomprehensibly into the implement of our wellbeing (cf. Silas Marner). Adam loses Hetty, which was necessary if he was to find Dinah. Silas loses the gold, which was necessary if he was to be open to the love of the child (cf. Emerson, ‘Compensation’ and ‘Man proposes but God disposes’.) (CS-B, 656) Few notions of spiritual law had a stronger influence on literature of the mid-Victorian period, or at one stage on Eliot, than Emerson’s ‘Law of Compensation’. Eliot had met Emerson during one of his rare visits to England in July 1848, when she seems to have felt some kind of kinship for this former Unitarian minister, whose search for a secularised equivalent for Christian morality closely mirrored her own. Towards the Law of Compensation itself her feelings, however, were ultimately more mixed, wary as she became of its debasement into some kind of secular barter and exchange whereby all forms of renunciation were automatically made up by some kind of celestial but anonymous accountant. It is against this soothing notion of compensation with its feeble reaching out for comfort at all costs that the ethical severity of the closing chapters of Adam Bede is to some extent aimed. With this feckless and irresponsible version of Emerson’s law, not so much compensation as consolation, the mature Eliot would have no truck, discerning in it the

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shadow of a false hope stemming from the Christianity she had abandoned. Yet Proust is right in finding in her work a version of the law perhaps closer to the spirit of Emerson: a series of equivalences stretching from one plane to another, suggesting affinities within the physical and spiritual world. Thus, though Silas Marner cannot be said to lose his gold in order that he may find Eppie, it remains true that Eppie is rather a translation of his avarice, itself a distortion of the need to love, on to a higher plane where she may serve as his redemption. Nor does Adam Bede lose Hetty in order that he may gain Dinah. This solution to the plot was suggested to Eliot by G. H. Lewes after she had begun work on the novel13 and, though from that moment she worked with this resolution constantly in view, the death of Hetty and the unexpectedly blossoming love between Adam and Dinah are in fact quite separate strands. Yet instincts that are starved in Adam by his early attachment to Hetty are to some extent realised in Dinah, a psychological gain that, however, stops short of the providential or judicial. There are many instances of such compensation through elevation in A la recherche. It is not true to say that Mme Vinteuil loses her father in order that she may learn to love him; yet his death propels her into an excess of sadistic hatred, temporarily expressed through her desecration of his photograph but ultimately rarefied into the devotion that causes her to edit his manuscripts and thus to bring the Vinteuil septet into being. The narrator of Albertine disparue does not lose Albertine so that he should learn to write; it remains true, however, that through losing her he learns of the fragile nature of the human affections, refractions of an energy that for him will find itself fulfilment only through the imagination. Compensation of this subtler sort is frequent in A la recherche and deeply built into the structure of the work. The true spiritual laws are for Proust thus variants of the psychological. This applies equally to the second of his manuscript observations on Eliot: Progressive nature of capitulations of the will: we leave the mother of the child in Silas resolved never again to take opium, and next see her with the bottle empty. X ... resolved never again to see Hetty, immediately afterwards in her arms. (CS-B, 657) X is Arthur Donnithorne, who in chapter sixteen of Adam Bede wends his way to Hayslope parsonage to make a clean breast of his affair with Hetty Sorrel, but at the crucial moment baulks his confession, and is later found by Adam with Hetty in his arms. Donnithorne is one of Eliot’s great studies of the dilatory conscience; another is Godfrey Cass in Silas Marner. A third is

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Bulstrode in Middlemarch who sets himself up as a paragon of virtue and good deeds while hiding the dreadful secrets of his exploitative past. Like Donnithorne, Bulstrode is unmasked, but terrifyingly, and in public. Both men suffer the kind of nemesis that Mr Irwine indicates to Arthur as the destiny of those who too energetically delude themselves as to the nature of their own motivations. Such nemesis, a negative variant of Compensation, is an aspect too of ‘the inexorable law of consequences’ of which Eliot speaks. The consequences may be material or they may be temperamental, the surrender to weakness being its own castigation. In this variety of psychological nemesis Jean Santeuil in particular abounds. Madame Lawrence, whom Jean and Henri visit in book eight, possesses a ferocious reputation as a snob to which she has blinded herself through a systematic deprecation of snobbery in others: Bit by bit, under the impossibility of passing in her own eyes for a liar, she finished by believing that what she was saying was the plain unvarnished truth. She did not think herself a snob for pursuing duchesses, nor flighty for sleeping with Monsieur de Ribeaumont. The substantive conduct of her life continued to carry the mark of these two vices. But when she thought about them they took on the same colours as her conversation: lively and engaging. She did not think of herself as doing wrong by Monsieur Lawrence because she invariably spoke well of him, and the loyal and heartfelt manner in which she referred to him always took precedence in her soul when she thought about her deeds. So she felt quite at ease with her feelings, her species of fidelity, her way of carrying on. And the words which she so frequently reiterated were like the tiny dose of morphine which anaesthetizing her conscience, putting it at peace and spurring her on to fresh indiscretions, the harsher aspects of which, previously so glaring, she henceforth quite unnecessarily excused. (JS, III, 58–9) A more frivolous punishment for snobbery occurs to the vainglorious Madame Cresmeyer who, determined to attract to herself the cachet of having hosted the illustrious artist Bergotte to dinner, submits her own guest list to Le Figaro, only to wake up the following morning and find to her chagrin that the typesetter has misread her handwriting and attributed the honour to another.

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The nemesis inflicted on Madame Lawrence is softened by her unconsciousness of it—she is ridiculous merely in the eyes of others—while Madame Cressmayer’s is confined to a mild social embarrassment. Both are spared the worst extremes of that remorse which Mr Irwine describes to Arthur as the sharpest punishment reserved for sinners. (‘But surely you don’t think a man who struggles against a temptation into which he falls at last, as bad as a man who never struggles a tall.’ ‘No, my boy, I pity him, in proportion to his struggles, for they foreshadow that inward suffering which is the worst form of Nemesis.’) The most extreme example of such inner torment in Jean Santeuil is the Marie scandal in book five. Marie is an old family friend of the Santeuils who, while building for himself a position of honour as a pillar of the community and mainstay of the parliamentary Chamber, has for years been associating with dubious business acquaintances and indulging in shady speculations. Marie’s nemesis arrives in the form of a summons to the Ministry of Justice, followed by an abrupt arrest. Like Bulstrode he has to live to see his deeds denounced in public, in his case in the Chamber, his feeble efforts to justify himself before which are compared by the novelist to an unconvincing performance in front of the Convention by Carlyle’s Saint-Just. But it is in the peculiar quality of his hypocrisy that he most resembles Bulstrode, a hypocrisy probed before it is judged, and in the way in which he employs his piety as a way of dulling to himself the consequences of his acts: Confronted with himself and the full force of his conscience, he no longer said ‘I have stolen twenty five thousand francs’, words which would have been very painful to hear and would have diminished him in his own eyes, but rather ‘God, I am nought but a miserable sinner’, words with a more emollient effect. And since for some time he had listed under the vague words sin or trespass his own particular sins and trespasses—handling shady money, embezzlement etc.—the words ‘touching shady money’, ‘embezzlement’ were more and more replaced in his mind by the words sin and trespass. And since the conditions which separate us more and more from the rest of our kind never eradicate from our hearts the desire to be at one with them, to be accounted of equal worth, the words sin and trespass had in his mind the immense advantage of reconciling him to the rest of the human race, since he had only to feel that he shared their common lot, their collective, original sin. (JS, II, 87)

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VI In the way in which it gravitates from the particular to the general, in its pitiless moralism, exposing the misuse of Catholic doctrine as mercilessly as Eliot unstrips Bulstrode’s specious Evangelicalism, in its uncomfortable evocation of a sort of inner writhing, the Marie episode is perhaps the most Eliotic moment in Jean Santeuil. Indeed, at one point the narrator compares the stupendous wasted effort of writing Jean Santeuil to the gigantic and abortive effort of Mr Casaubon in Middlemarch to produce a comprehensive ‘Key to All Mythologies’, ‘a mosaic wrought from crushed ruins’. ‘Especially in matters of work’, remarks the novel’s narrator ruefully, ‘we are all to some extent like Mr Casaubon in Middlemarch who devoted the whole of his life to labours the results of which were merely trivial or absurd.’14 Jean Santeuil indeed marks the high point of Proust’s involvement with the work of George Eliot, but there is an important sequel. In January 1910 after heavy rains the Seine rose and burst its banks, flooding the wide boulevards of the Right Bank. Perched in his second-floor flat at 102, Boulevard Haussmann, Proust watched apprehensively as the waters poured across la Place Saint Augustin, threatening to engulf him. Nervously he wrote to Simone de Caillavet: ‘I will write to your mother acknowledging her adorable letter when I feel a little better. By then I shall doubtless have been drowned. In this connection have you read The Mill on the Floss? If not, I implore you: read it’ (Cor, X, 42) George Eliot’s tale of a brother and sister growing up in a rural paradise ruined by mutual dissension and financial crisis would have appealed strongly to Proust, who probably knew the novel since his boyhood days, but seems to have re-read it, or at least to have it constantly in mind, in 1910 when he was working on Du côté de chez Swann, whose Combray sequence evokes its own land of lost content. In May of that year, writing to his diplomat friend Robert de Billy about various English writers in whom he was interested, he concluded German, Italian and very often French literature leaves me indifferent. But two pages of The Mill on the Floss have made me cry. I know that Ruskin detested this particular novel, but I reconcile these two foes in the Pantheon of my imagination. (Cor, X, 55) He had been reading volume 34 of the giant Library Edition of Ruskin’s Works, where in Fiction, Fair and Foul he would have found Ruskin’s

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stout defence of Scott and equally savage attack on Eliot, and The Mill on the Floss in particular: There is not a single person in the book of the smallest importance to anybody in the world but themselves, or whose qualities deserved so much as a line of printer’s ink in their description. There is no girl alive, fairly clever, half educated, and unluckily related, whose life has not at least as much in it as Maggie’s, to be described and pitied. Tom is a cruel and clumsy lout, with the making of better things in him (and the same may be said of nearly every Englishman at present smoking and elbowing his way through the ugly world his blunders have contributed to the making of); while the rest of the characters are simply sweepings out of a Pentonville omnibus. (C&W, XXXIV, 377) Ruskin’s ire had been drawn by the scene in which Maggie Tulliver and Stephen Guest ‘forget themselves on a boat’ which carries them further and further from familiar loyalties’—Stephen from his fiancée Lucy Deane, and Maggie from her senses: ‘The pride of a gentleman of the old school’, he spluttered, ‘used to be in his power of saying what he meant, and being silent when he ought ... but the automatic amours and involuntary proposals of recent romance acknowledged little further law of morality than the instinct of an insect, or the effervescence of a chemical mixture.’ In speaking of Maggie forgetting herself, Ruskin spoke truer than he knew. There is in The Mill on the Floss a peculiar congruency between the themes of memory and of identity since, supremely in Eliot’s work, memory here assumes a moral dimension. Of much pertinence to Proust is the sensation of an authorial presence revisiting its own past, which is composed, as it were, out of a picture thrown on some inner retina. The pictorial tactility of the opening, Eliot’s use of the present tense, embody this sense— ‘I remember those large dipping willows ... I remember the stone bridge.’ For Proust this passage was not simply admirable; it was also a model to be followed. At one point in his notebook of 1908 he simply scrawls himself a curt reminder: ‘First page of The Mill on the Floss’ (Carnet, 94). The page was exemplary, I would suggest, for two reasons. First, Eliot’s writing here, with its feeling of a disembodied memorial presence that is at once congruent with the protagonist yet evidently distinct from her, is a fragmentary anticipation of Proust’s own method. Secondly, the territory around the eponymous mill is, like the Combray that Proust’s narrator evokes in Du côté de chez Swann, a

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landscape since radically altered by circumstance, the flood recounted at the end of the book having swept much away. The meticulous iteration of particulars at the beginning, the constant half quotations from Wordsworth’s ‘Immorality Ode’, are thus, like the painstaking reconstruction of a bygone way of life throughout ‘Combray’, attempts to fix a past that has gone for ever. In both, nostalgia and a necessary renunciation march hand in hand. Towards the beginning of Le Temps retrouvé the narrator receives a letter from Gilberte recounting the changes that have engulfed Combray, now occupied by the Germans and scene of a battle in the Great War which has since devastated the environment so painstakingly evoked in Du côté de chez Swann: The battle of Méséglise lasted more than eight months; in it Germans lost more than six hundred thousand men, they destroyed Méséglise but they didn’t take it. The little path you loved so dearly and that we called the hawthorn track and where you pretended to have fallen in love with me during your childhood .... I cannot convey to you the significance that it has taken on .... The hill of wheat on which it comess out is the celebrated Hill 307 so often mentioned in despatches. The French blew up the little bridge over the Vivonne ... and the Germans have thrown up others. For a year and a half they held one half of Combray and the French held the other. (NP, IV, 335) The loving re-creation of Combray in the Swann volume, undertaken in full knowledge of these facts, is thus an attempt to restore the self through a reconstruction of a sense of place. Yet this is not all. In both Eliot and Proust this attempt to reconstruct with painstaking physicality what is no longer there is part of a larger scheme: the fixing of the self. In both works an ability to reconstitute the past is viewed as a test of moral essence. When Maggie ‘forgets herself in a boat’ she is doubly untrue to herself, not merely because in a prim Victorian sense she forgets her higher nature, but because, in a strong and literal sense, she forgets who she is. Since for Eliot, tutored by the psychologism of George Henry Lewes, personal identity was none other than this: a cluster of mental associations produced by the influence of early environment. Each biological organism possessed a memory, which in turn delineated its identity, the existential but also ethical traits that made each person him or herself. In Eliot, moral truth is loyalty to this essence, which existence alone precedes. The theme of The Mill on the Floss is the creation of Maggie Tulliver; once created, she is essence what she has been.

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In ‘The Great Temptation’, the successive nature of which is explored during her temporary elopement with Stephen Guest, she eventually turns back to face certain moral obloquy in Dorcotte. In explaining her decision to Stephen, it is this desire to restore identity through reconnection with her past that she stresses: ‘If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie?’ By acting differently, with what Ruskin saw as untutored instinct (a mode of unhistoric and hence pre-moral freedom), she has no possibility of fulfilling herself, since she is simply ceasing to be her. This is the substance of the debate between her and Stephen at Coleport, the thematic rather than dramatic climax of the novel, in which Stephen asserts the ‘natural law’ of inclination: that she is, and could only ever be, what she has been, the product of her past. The stress on recollection as essence is something Eliot shares with Proust, whose own psychologism is derived from Bergson with his emphasis on sudden involuntary influxes of the memory. The narrator experiences several such moments of revelation, each of which bring him closer to himself, the self that must write the book. From this destiny his successive fads—involvement with the aristocratic principle through the Guermantes, his love for successive women, even his friendships—come gradually to wear the aspect of distractions. The recognition that they are so comes to the narrator at the final soirée at the hôtel de Guermantes with the force of a complete revelation. Only by restoring the past, reworking within himself the mental associations that make him what he is, will be break from the cycle and assume the stature of the artist he is capable of becoming. Yet no sooner is this congruity stated than the immense gap between Proust’s project and Eliot’s make themselves felt. For the identity reestablished by the narrator at the end of A la recherche is no self-justifying phenomenon. The narrator only remembers his past so that he may rearrange it in the dimensions of art. In Proust, finally, the life exists so that the art may exist. The supremacy of this project—its ascendancy over any mediocre or intermediary element of realism—is a major component in the argument of Le Temps retrouvé, which acts, among other things, as a final and conclusive renunciation of all forms of realism, more especially those that erect fidelity to everyday fact as the criterion of truth. Here Proust is shrugging off not simply Zola, with his political interpretation of reality, but implicitly shrugging off something else that been of greater importance to him in his own writing, namely the sense, common to both Flaubert and of Eliot, of everyday life as the focus and touchstone of art. In thus refining his own philosophy of art as truth to some inner vision, the narrator is confirmed by the contemplation of

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the very falsity of pretending realist art, which would not be half so mendacious did we not adopt the custom in life of giving to our feelings a turn of expression quite other that that of reality, which nonetheless we eventually take for reality itself. I felt that I should have no need to embrace the various literary theories which at one time had distracted me—notably those which criticism had evolved at the time of the Dreyfus Scandal and had been taken up again during the war, which tended to ‘drive the artist from his ivory tower’ and to avoid frivolous or sentimental themes in favour of great industrial movements, or failing the mass at least to deal no longer with literary idlers as in the past (‘I must confess that the portrayal of these useless types makes me yawn’, Bloch used to remark), but with committed intellectuals or heros. Besides, even before discussing their logical content, these theories seemed to me proof positive of the mental inferiority of those who espoused them—like a well brought-up child who hears some people at whose house he has been sent to dine declare: ‘we are straightforward people. There are no secrets in this house’, and feels that the this denotes a moral quality inferior to good deeds which do not speak their name. (NP, IV, 459–60) ‘True art’, he continues, ‘having no need for such declarations of intent, fulfils itself in silence.’ Such statements are a self-evident attempt to separate out the notion of ‘truth’ from that of the ‘real’. The culminating aesthetic of Le Temps retrouvé is, therefore, a renunciation neither of truth nor of detachment. Both ideals are, however, reworked, for truth becomes truth to an inner vision, and detachment is achieved through the most revolutionary of means. It is the final paradox of Le Temps retrouvé that it is through his very reimmersion in the details of his own past, which must be reworked into material for art, that the narrator achieves the detachment—both from his surroundings and from the pressures of the self—that he needs. In The Mill on the Floss the narrator and Maggie are separate; in A la recherché the narrator (who is, needless to say, not Proust) and his subject are one. The paradoxical result of this is to turn the narrator’s past into a self-generated subject that he himself controls. The resulting closeness to his subject matter confers upon the narrator a peculiar mastery. Thus while the narrator of The Mill on the Floss is attempting to re-enter a past from which she (or he—the identity of the teller is left indefinite) is now excluded, the narrator of A la recherche is also trying to break into the past, but only that he may then subdue it and

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turn it into something that transcends itself: the book which, through this unlooked for access to the privileges of memory, he is enabled to compose. But as in A la recherche the consciousness of the narrator swells to fill the whole foreground of the canvas, something else very odd and seemingly perverse occurs. An interest in the laws governing behaviour is, to be sure, more marked in A la recherche, where it is responsible for a highly distinctive structure of interpolation and parenthesis, much of which moves, as in Jean Santeuil, from the particular to the general, from the fictive to the normative. Again there is, if anything, a more searching interest than earlier in the ‘successive nature of surrenders of the will’. Yet at the very point when the whole field of human conduct is opened up to the narrator for judgement, precisely here does he stay his hand. Apart from the new narrative perspective, the largest single innovation separating A la recherche from Jean Santeuil is its subjugation of the ethical to the psychological, its preference for implicit over explicit moral comment. Few individuals in literature surrender their wills more absolutely to the demands of temperament, for example, than does Monsieur de Charlus. The effeminacy of his temperament is at first heavily masked by an assumed virility; it is when in Sodome et Gomorrhe he joins the little band of the Verdurin faithful that minute mannerisms betray his inversion, disclosed by the ‘chemistry’ of his body or perhaps by heredity, some remote memory of the mother. On his return to Paris at the beginning of Le Temps retrouvé, the narrator intercepts a grotesquely camp invert waddling down the street: it is M. de Charlus. And in a sorry episode several pages later, the narrator observes the same M. de Charlus, every scrap of shame gone, being beaten in chains by soldiers hired for the purpose in a brothel run and maintained by the ex-tailor Jupien, and waxes Eliot-like on the depravity that causes a man of sense to ‘chain himself to the rock of pure matter’. But this reflection, religious in its gravity, is immediately overlaid by another: at the bottom of it all there lingered in M. de Charlus all his dream of virility, to be realized if necessary in acts of brutality, all that interior illumination, invisible to us, but reflecting certain beams from the cross of judgement, from feudal tortures, lit up by his medieval imagination .... In short his desires to be bound in chains, to be beaten, in all their ugliness, betrayed a dream as poetic as the desire in other men to visit Venice or maintain ballet-dancers. (NP, IV, 419)

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‘Tout comprendre est tout pardoner.’ There is, in this systematic narration of the decline of a great man, no less of a sense of moral consequences than in Proust’s earlier work, but this sense is everywhere subordinate to a fascination with the workings of the mind. It is indeed difficult to resist the impression that the narrator of A la recherche regards the foibles of his human comedy with something approaching relish. The characteristic mode in which the narrator comments upon the external social world is thus one of fastidious observation. The difference between the younger and the older Proust is this: where the narrator of Jean Santeuil, schooled perhaps by Eliot, watches each surrender of the will with loaded indictment and regret, the narrator of A la recherche, remembering Flaubert, ultimately just watches. At the very end of Le côté de Guermantes there is an episode profoundly revealing of this difference. The Duc and Duchesse are entertaining Swann immediately prior to their departure for a soirée at the salon of the Prince. As they sweep out of the door towards an appointment for which they are already late, Swann announces in his off-hand manner the diagnosis of his imminent death. The Duchesse pauses. Should she continue onwards to her appointment, or pause for anticipatory condolence? She sweeps on, yet as she enters her carriage the Duc notices that she is wearing black shoes at variance with her dress. All is delayed so that she should go upstairs to change them. But as, correctly attired, the couple and their retinue sweep out of the gates of the Hôtel de Guermantes, the Duke shouts back at Swann ‘And you now, you, don’t get into a flap over these idiots of doctors, damn it. They’re a pack of donkeys. You’re built like the Pont Neuf. You’ll live to bury us all!’ (NP, II, 884). For Proust, the prime exemplars of the moralistic and the impartial methods were, forever and inalienably, Eliot and Flaubert. Of equal weight with Flaubert, however, were those who imbibed his method. Among such, no writer exemplified the starkness of his self-denying ordinance more emphatically than his disciple and rumoured son: Guy de Maupassant. The disapproval of the members of the Rouen bourgeoisie who first take advantage of and then dismiss the prostitute in the story ‘Une Boule de Suif ’ is something that hangs heavy in the air, yet not once is it stated, or even verbally hinted at. This lesson was one that Proust ultimately took to heart. In the 1908 notebook he writes himself another curt reminder: ‘Objections to maxims. | Boule de Suif and Flaubert | [say] as much as preacherly tones (preface to Middlemarch)’ (Carnet, 92). There are, says the narrator in connection with the Marie scandal in Jean Santeuil, two tribes, to one of which each of us by temperament and

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inclination belongs: those who wear their morality on their sleeve and those who do not. Finally, nothing in the work of Proust more effectively discriminates between the nature of his genius and that of Eliot than his authorial restraint in the closing moments of Le côté de Guermantes. For nothing in Felix Holt the Radical, or in her work as a whole, shouts more loudly of the callousness of the aristocratic code than that momentary oversight of the Duc and Duchesse, their failure of the most basic kind of empathy; yet on its import the author is silent. Thus even as, in his later work, Proust assumes an Eliotic amplitude of observation, precisely here does the austerity of his method prove him, in the delicacy of its moral discretion, a pupil of Flaubert.

NOTES 1. André Maurois, A la recherche de Marcel Proust (Paris: Hachette, 1949) p. 16. 2. Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford; Clarendon, 1968) p. 332. 3. The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Yale University Press and Oxford University Press, 1954-5) vol. I, pp. 316–17; quoted in Haight, George Eliot, pp. 75–6. 4. The George Eliot Letters, vol. III, p. 374. 5. CS-B, 72–3, citing Ruskin in The Bible of Amiens: ‘stopping as you go, so as to get into a cheerful temper, and buying some bonbons or tarts for the children in one of the charming patissier’s shops to the left’ (C&W, xxxiii, 128). 6. CS-B, 74. The quotations from Eliot are from Albert Durade’s translation of Adam Bede, pp. 84, 85, 226, 227, 228, 230. 7. J. W. Cross, Life of George Eliot (1885) vol. II, p. 7. 8. Westminster Review, April 1856; cited in Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, ed. A. S. Byatt (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1990) p. 368. 9. George Eliot, Adam Bede (London: Blackwood, 1859) vol. II, pp. 4–5. 10. Haight, George Eliot, p. 259, citing The George Eliot Letters, vol. II, p. 451. 11. Preface to JS, 1, 13–14, citing JS, 1, 53–4. 12. Review of Robert Mackay’s Progress of the Intellect, Westminster Review, January 1851; cited Byatt, Selected Essays, p. 271. 13. Cross, Life of George Eliot, vol. II, p. 68. 14. JS, II, 252, which, however, has ‘M. Cabusson’.

CYNTHIA J. GAMBLE

Zipporah: A Ruskinian Enigma Appropriated by Marcel Proust1

J

ohn Ruskin first visited the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican in April 1841 and noted in his diary: ‘Our last day in Rome I devoted to Sistine Chapel, and received real pleasure from it’.2 His pleasure on that occasion was due to his appreciation of Michelangelo’s use of colour, but no mention is made of Sandro Botticelli. That visit was almost a valediction to Rome: ‘there is something about it which will make me dread to return’, he also wrote.3 Indeed, Ruskin was not to return to Rome, and the Sistine Chapel in particular, until 1872, some 31 years later.

I. Z I P P O R A H

IN CONTEXT

Ruskin’s Zipporah4 (figure 1) is a copy of a fragment of a large fresco by Botticelli, measuring 348.5 by 558 cm on the South Wall of the Sistine Chapel, about 5.5 metres from the ground, and in some degree of shade. The fresco is entitled Le Prove di Mosè, literally ‘The Trials of Moses’. However, in English, it is variously denominated: The Temptation of Moses, The Temptation of Moses: Bearer of the Written Law, The Life of Moses, Scenes from the Life of Moses, Moses in Egypt and Midian, Youth of Moses. Botticelli painted this scene at the request of Sixtus IV, who summoned him to Rome in 1481,

From Word & Image 15, no. 4 (October–December 1999). © 1999 by Taylor & Francis Limited.

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along with Domenico Ghirlandaio, Cosimo Rosselli and Pietro Perugino to decorate the walls of the papal electoral chapel with frescoes. Scenes from the lives of Moses and Christ were executed on the long walls of the chapel. The scenes contain typological references to one another, with, for example, Moses appearing as the prefiguration of Christ. The Trials of Moses is to be read from right to left, as a Hebrew script, commencing in the bottom right-hand corner. It conveys different points in time and in two places (Egypt and Midian, in the Arabian desert near the Gulf of Akabah): it is a mosaic of the spiritual and the profane, encompassing human and animal life, murder, contrasting emotions of terror, hatred, tenderness, compassion. It is a busy canvas, with lots of movement and activities in contrast to the solid piece of architecture on the right (is it a synagogue, or a loggia?) which might provide some degree of protection. In the background, beyond the trees, the hilly landscape of Biblical Egypt and the wilderness of Midian are visible, and they provide a frame for the activities. It is also a story related in eight episodes of the life of Moses, as a circular narrative moving around the well in the centre.

IN EGYPT 1.

2.

The story begins in the right foreground of the fresco, where the young, angry and impetuous Moses, brandishing a sword, is murdering the Egyptian taskmaster, whose head has hit the ground and whose face is convulsed with pain, agony and horror: ‘And it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, that he went out unto his brethren, and looked on their burdens: and he spied an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, one of his brethren. And he looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand’. (Exodus 2:11–15).5 Contrary to the Biblical story, Botticelli depicts two witnesses who are retreating from the murder. Walking away, to the right, and contrary to the flow of movement of the painting, a woman in a blue garment puts her arms protectively around a man: is he the Hebrew youth who the Egyptian was smiting, or is this a scene of two frightened spectators, such as a mother and son, or a husband and wife?

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IN MIDIAN 3.

4.

5.

Moses flees into the wilderness in Midian for his safety. He is depicted by Botticelli almost suspended in flight, turning to the left and thereby re-establishing the flow of the movement of the painting. ‘Moses ... dwelt in the land of Midian’ (Exodus 2:15). The Biblical story continues as follows: ‘Moses ... sat down by a well. Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters: and they came and drew water, and filled the troughs to water their father’s flock. And the shepherds came and drove them away: but Moses stood up and helped them, and watered their flock’ (Exodus 2: 15–17). On the left of Moses in the wilderness, Moses can be seen driving away from the well the Midianite shepherds who had been a nuisance to Jethro’s daughters. We do not know exactly what happened, but the girls had obviously complained to their father. In the centre foreground, the focal point of the fresco or the pivot of the composition, the youthful Moses is assisting two of Jethro’s seven daughters. He is hauling water from a deep well with a silvery coloured bucket or pitcher on a rope and filling a trough for the sheep of the two girls who stand watching: Zipporah is on the left facing the reader and her sister is on the right. The black sheep among the flock is perhaps an omen of trials to come. The meeting place is portrayed as idyllic and symbolic, with the water of the well symbolizing life and re-birth, and the well being the place at which marriages were arranged, and business and other deals concluded. It was also the scene of revelations and announcements.6

Not recorded in the fresco are several important events in the life of Moses, such as Jethro welcoming him to his home, Moses’ marriage to Zipporah and the birth of a son named Gershom, meaning foreigner or exile in Hebrew: ‘And Moses was content to dwell with the man: and he gave Moses Zipporah his daughter. And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land’ (Exodus 2:21–2). 6.

Upwards, in the left half of the fresco, Moses is guarding Jethro’s sheep on Mount Horeb, better known today as Mount Sinai: ‘Now Moses kept the flock of Jethro his father in law, the priest

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of Midian; and he led the flock to the backside of the desert, and came to the mountain of God, even to Horeb’ (Exodus 3:1). He is dressed in a short, yellow tunic, not a long robe, and is removing his shoes,7 for he is on Holy Ground, in obedience to the Lord’s command from the Burning Bush, which burned but was not consumed. ‘Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground’ (Exodus 3:5). In the top left-hand corner, Moses, now barefoot, is kneeling before the Lord who appears above a burning bush. The Lord told Moses that he was destined to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt into the promised land of milk and honey. ‘And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed’ (Exodus 3:2). In the bottom left-hand corner, Moses, now ‘fourscore years old’ (Exodus 7:7), leads the Exodus of the Jews carrying their various belongings and the spoils of the Egyptians as they had been instructed by God: ‘Every woman shall borrow of her neighbour, and of her that sojourneth in her house, jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment: and ye shall put them upon your sons, and upon your daughters: and ye shall spoil the Egyptians’ (Exodus 3:22 and cf. 12:35–6). The Bible story details other possessions they took: ‘flocks, and herds, even very much cattle’ (Exodus 12:38). Among this departing crowd, with its variety of characters, Botticelli’s fresco depicts an older, rather matronly Zipporah in a blue dress, accompanied by her two sons, Gershom, holding a little dog, and, beside him, the younger son, Eliezer, mentioned in Exodus 18:4.

From Botticelli’s Le Prove di Mosè, Ruskin copied four scenes: Zipporah (RF 880), Sheep (RF 879),8 Sheep (RF 1167) and Gershom’s Little Dog (whereabouts unknown). Charles Fairfax Murray also copied two scenes: Gershom and His Dog (private collection) and Moses and His Family Leaving Midian (Sheffield R 312).

A Ruskinian Enigma Approppriated by Marcel Proust

II. W H E N

AND HOW DID

RUSKIN

PA I N T

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ZIPPORAH?

Ruskin, the Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, records his progress on painting Zipporah in his Diary of 1874, during a 7-month tour of the Continent, of which 6 months were spent in Italy. He started work in 1874 and on 17 April wrote: ‘A delightful day yesterday at Sistine ... ’, followed by ‘Still pleasanter day of work on Botticelli’ on 18 April. His entries for May record his progress, and single-mindedness, and to a lesser extent his method of work: Tuesday 5 May 1874: ‘Y[esterday] began sheep in Sistine Chapel, successfully’. Wednesday 6 May: ‘Y[esterday] began Zipporah in pencil’. Thursday 7 May: ‘Y[esterday] good work in Sistine.’ Saturday 9 May: ‘A good day y[esterday] on Zipporah; deciphered her pretty hem of dress’. Sunday 10 May: ‘Up in good time, after sound sleep, my work prospering. If only I can keep myself in good temper and health .... Y[esterday] after standing from ten to two at work on Zipporah, I walked up Monte Mario’. Tuesday 12 May: ‘An utterly dark day, and main difficulties in Zipporah, tired me dreadfully yesterday. I must not let this happen again’. Thursday 14 May: ‘Finished Zipporah down to her feet yesterday’. Friday 22 May: ‘ ... I sadly tired, necessarily, in finishing Zipporah, and all despondent and wrong minded in evening’. Saturday 23 May: ‘Y[esterday] a singularly good day—on Zipporah’. Whit-Sunday 24 May: ‘Y[esterday] practically finished Zipporah, though I shall retouch here and there. She has taken me altogether 15 days, begun on the 6th and three Sundays, one festa, and a lost Monday intervening. The paper added to the difficulty not a little, and not being quite near enough for measurement—and at least a week of dark days. So that, well prepared and under ordinarily favourable circumstances, I can assuredly do such a figure in a fortnight’.9 Ruskin seemed well satisfied with his fortnight’s work for he wrote to Charles Eliot Norton on 19 June 1874: ‘I’ve done Botticelli’s Zipporah successfully’.10 Details of particular artistic problems Ruskin encountered during the copying of Zipporah are, unfortunately, singularly lacking: but one special

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difficulty seems to have been that of deciphering the hem of her dress, already referred to in his diary of 9 May. Later in that same year Ruskin drew particular attention to Zipporah’s dress and to what he considered as Botticelli’s ‘ill done’ lettering around the border, a characteristic he had observed in several of Botticelli’s pen drawings with so-called inscriptions, beautifully drawn, but which could not be read: ‘In copying Botticelli’s Zipporah this spring, I found the border of her robe wrought with characters of the same kind, which a young painter, working with me, who already knows the minor secrets of Italian art better that I [Ruskin is referring to Charles Fairfax Murray], assures me are letters—and letters of a language hitherto undeciphered’.11 Ruskin was a talented linguist who could read Greek, Latin, Italian and French: his unwillingness to decipher the characters or even to attempt to identify them is, therefore, all the more surprising. I have examined closely Ruskin’s copy of Zipporah, and the lettering resembles Etruscan to some extent, thus reinforcing the Etruscan tradition and presence in Italian art. Since the Etruscan alphabet is based on Greek, Ruskin would have had no difficulty in deciphering the lettering. His uncharacteristically casual approach to the problem suggests that he did not wish to decipher the message and preferred to maintain the aura of mystery and ambivalence around Zipporah. He did not want to see the message on the border of her robe which may have destroyed his reconstruction of Zipporah-Athena.

III. J O H N R U S K I N ’ S Z I P P O R A H -AT H E N A Ruskin’s lecture on 4 December 1874, on Botticelli,12 revealed an important discovery he had made earlier that year, that Botticelli was a pivotal link between the civilization of pre-Christian Greek-influenced Etruria and Christianity: Ruskin had observed the striking similarity between the olive leaves on a cornice of the church of the Badia of Fiesole, the old capital of Etruria and birthplace of Botticelli, and in Botticelli’s work: ‘There’s no gap and scarcely any difference between these garlands of golden olive of Etruria before Christ and the utmost beauty of leaf drawing of ... Botticelli’.13 This conjunction of two seemingly disparate elements, the Etruscan and Christian traditions, co-existed in Botticelli’s Zipporah, the Gooddess-shepherdess or ‘shepherd maiden’,14 a figure from Greek mythology and from a Biblical story: she is Ruskin’s ‘Etruscan Athena, becoming queen of a household in Christian humility’.15 Ruskin lent his facsimile of Zipporah to an exhibition in Brighton in 1876, together with his woodcut of Athena copied from a Neck Amphora in

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the British Museum, London (figure 2).16 His explanatory note for the catalogue is a particularly pertinent, focused exposé of the interconnectedness of Zipporah and Athena. The powerful masculinity of Athena, the Greek virgin Goddess of Wisdom, War and Weaving, the protectress of eternal virginity and the embodiment of chastity, is usually depicted in classical Greco-Roman art as an imposing and physically strong, fearless woman, a warrior ready and dressed to fight with her breastplate, helmet, carrying a shield and a spear as Goddess of War (or a distaff as the Goddess of Weaving and the Domestic Arts). This may appear at first sight to be in stark contrast with Zipporah’s timid nature as witnessed at the well when Zipporah, together with her sisters, was unable to cope with some troublesome shepherds. For Ruskin, Botticelli’s Zipporah is a closer representation of Athena as Goddess of Weaving and Domestic Arts. Ruskin, in his Brighton catalogue entry of 1876, states clearly t importance to him of Zipporah: ‘Botticelli, trained in the great Etruscan Classic School, retains in his ideal of the future wife of Moses every essential character of the Etrurian Pallas, regarding her as the Heavenly Wisdom given by inspiration to the Lawgiver for his helpmate; yet changing the attributes of the goddess into such as become a shepherd maiden’.17 He then examines in considerable detail the dresses of Athena and of Zipporah and shows that ‘every piece of the dress [of Athena] will be found to have its corresponding piece in that of Zipporah’.18 About the chiton or linen robe with the peplus or mantle, Ruskin writes: There is first the sleeved chiton or linen robe, falling to the feet, looped up a little by the shepherdess; then the peplus or covering mantle, very nearly our shawl, but fitting closer; Athena’s, crocus coloured, embroidered by herself with the battle against the giants; Zipporah’s, also crocus coloured, almost dark golden, embroidered with blue and purple, with mystic golden letters on the blue ground; the fringes of the aegis are, however, transposed to the peplus; and these being of warm crimson complete the sacred chord of colour (blue, purple, and scarlet), Zipporah being a priest’s daughter.19 Ruskin’s transposition and his detection of what Jeanne Clegg calls ‘iconographical resonances’20 continue as he compares Athena’s aegis, often represented in mythology as a goatskin fringed with snakes, with Zipporah’s goatskin satchel, her lance to Zipporah’s reed.

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The aegis of Pallas becomes for Zipporah a goatskin satchel, in which she carries apples and oak (for pleasure and strength); her lance becomes a reed, in which she carries her wool and spindle; the tresses of her hair are merely softened from the long black falling tresses of Athena; a leaf of myrtle replaces the olive [leaf]. The scarcely traceable thin muslin veil over her breast represents the part of the aegis which, in the Pallas, is drawn with dots, meaning soft dew instead of storm.21 The effect of this deconstruction and reconstruction of Zipporah, and to a lesser extent Athena, is to redefine her as her uncertain identity begins to emerge. The fusion of these two virgins results in the charged and heightened sexuality of Zipporah-Athena, and consequent lesbian proclivities. Simultaneously, the androgynous nature of the women is suggeste by the phallic symbolism of the lance-reed. A detailed examination of Zipporah’s feet in Ruskin’s copy reveals a heavy masculine shape and form, and her lower legs appear hirsute: characteristics not apparent in Zipporah’s sister. This interpretation, this overwhelming desire to see Athena in Zipporah, and vice-versa, is an act of Ruskinian idolatry that prefigures Swann’s idolatry of Zipporah-Odette in Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps perdu. A close reading of Ruskin’s text, with its echoes of Queen of the Air, as the red figure of Athena on the amphora becomes a blaze of colour, raises some questions and doubts. For example, is Zipporah really carrying a ‘goatskin satchel’? Or is it a wreath? Is Zipporah wearing a chiton? Her lower garment looks more like Oriental trousers. Is Zipporah at the well carrying ‘apples and oak’? In this partial misreading of Zipporah’s garments, Ruskin projects onto Zipporah what he wants to see, reminiscent of his and Proust’s misreading, of the hawthorn at Amiens Cathedral.22 The warrior aspect of Athena, so prominent on the amphora, has been sublimated by Ruskin who has given pre-eminence to nobility and domesticity, juxtaposed in his moral interpretation of Zipporah. His initial interest in Zipporah during his 1872 visit to Rome was as a model of his ideal woman combining the noble qualities of a princess with those of a ‘workwoman’.23 He then compared Zipporah with Ursula, the industrious princess ‘in a plain house-wifely dress [who] talks quietly [to her father, while] going on with her needlework all the time’24 depicted by the Venetian artist Vittore Carpaccio in his triptych of 1490–95, L’Arrivo degli Ambasciatori inglesi presso il Re di Bretagna, which opens the Saint Ursula cycle in the Accademia, Venice. Ruskin’s interpretation of Ursula is in terms not

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dissimilar to those used for Zipporah: but other art historians have understood Ursula to be ticking off on her fingers the conditions for her marriage, while her father listens wearily.25 Ruskin had focused on Zipporah’s housewifely qualities in letter 20, 5 July 1872, in Fors Clavigera, when he remarked that ‘the girl who is to be the wife of Moses, when he first sees her at the desert-well, has fruit in her left hand, but a distaff in her right’.26 In a note to this letter, Ruskin modified this initial observation and commented: ‘More accurately a rod cloven into three at the top, and so holding the wool. The fruit is a branch of apples; she has golden sandals, and a wreath of myrtle round her hair’.27 The evergreen myrtle was a symbol of love and peace in the classical Greco-Roman period, and in the Renaissance it represented conjugal love and fidelity: it was often part of a bridal headpiece. The unreal bride that Ruskin was seeking and idealising was always inaccessible, in a Carpaccio or a Botticelli painting.

IV. M A R C E L P R O U S T ’ S Z I P P O R A H -O D E T T E Botticelli’s Zipporah was, therefore, a fascinating subject for Ruskin, consciously and unconsciously, with her duality at different levels and heightened tension due to these juxtaposed elements. For Proust, also, this very same Zipporah played an important role in A la Recherche du Temps perdu, translated by Terence Kilmartin as In Search of Lost Time. Charles Swann is a rich dilettante, a hedonist who prefers High Society to High Art, an art collector who nevertheless has a sensitive appreciation of art and who is writing a book on Ver Meer but who lacks the application to complete it. Works of art, therefore, play a not unimportant role in his life. The focus of Swann in Love is the analysis of Swann’s relationship with Odette de Crécy, tracing the rise and fall of his love culminating in his marriage to Odette at a point when he realises he no longer loves her and about whom he exclaims: ‘To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type’.28 It is also the story of the selfdestruction of Swann. Swann’s disappointment, indeed agony, in love is in part due to his manner of conducting his artificially created love-affair. Only when he realises that he has ceased to be in love with Odette is he able to see her, as he had done at the very beginning of their acquaintance, in a transparent and rational way. Her true features, her defects to which he had been blind, or which he had assigned to oblivion during his passionate pursuit, become

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apparent: ‘Odette’s pallid complexion, her too thin cheeks, her drawn features, her tired eyes, all the things which ... he had ceased to notice since the early days of their intimacy’.29 Other features of Odette’s that Swann had repressed were ‘her cheeks ... sometimes mottled with little red spots’ that ‘distressed him as proving that the ideal is unattainable and happiness mediocre’.30 Julia Kristeva maintains that Swann’s imagined love for Odette starts the moment he dissociates her from her real body, with its many defects, and replaces it with the virgin Zipporah: the ‘chair abîmée’ becomes a ‘museum piece’ with which he has a sexual relationship.31 Swann begins to construct an artificial Odette when, on his second visit to her apartment, he is ‘struck by her resemblance to the figure of Zipporah, Jethro’s daughter, which is to be seen in one of the Sistine frescoes’.32 On that occasion, Odette, ‘not very well’, receives him in a dressing-gown of mauve crêpe de Chine, drawing its richly embroidered material over her bosom like a cloak. Standing there beside him, her loosened hair flowing down her cheeks, bending one knee in a slightly balletic pose in order to be able to lean without effort over the picture at which she was gazing, her head on one side, with those great eyes of hers which seemed so tired and sullen when there was nothing to animate her’.33 There are distinct echoes of Zipporah in this portrait of Odette, in the depiction of the hair, and the tilt of the head, the richly embroidered cloaklike garment, the pose and the eyes. Swann’s feelings for Odette are, from that moment, developed and regulated uniquely through the intermediary of art and especially Botticelli’s Zipporah. He had created an artificial woman. ‘He placed on his study table, as if it were a photograph of Odette, a reproduction of Jethro’s daughter’.34 This must be a reproduction of Ruskin’s copy of Zipporah, isolated from the rest of the Biblical story (as Odette is presented out of context, without a family or a past) and which was reproduced, in black and white, as a frontispiece to Volume XXIII, published in 1906, of The Complete Works of John Ruskin, edited by Cook and Wedderburn, and which Proust owned. Proust’s mother had already given him the Cook and Wedderburn set so far published for his New Year’s present in January 1905. Proust had on several occasions praised the magnificent pictures in these volumes.35 Was the absence of colour in the Odette-Zipporah metaphor, apart from the reference to the mauve dressing-gown, due to the fact that Proust was basing his observations on the black-and-white reproduction? Proust never visited Rome: neither did he see Ruskin’s original watercolour copy.

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Swann reconstructs Odette à la Zéphora and gazes ‘in admiration at the large eyes, the delicate features in which the imperfection of the skin might be surmised, the marvellous locks of hair that fell along the tired cheeks’.36 In this extreme form of iconolatry, Swann is overcome by fetishism as Zipporah becomes both a visual representation and a reincarnation of Odette as Swann takes hold of Zipporah-Odette and grasps her close to his heart. In this moment of illusionary physical possession, Swann’s desire for Odette is realised and a kind of compensatory mechanism is released: ‘The vague feeling of sympathy which attracts one to a work of art, now that he knew the original in flesh and blood of Jethro’s daughter, became a desire which more than compensated, thenceforward, for the desire which Odette’s physical charms had at first failed to inspire in him’.37 The more Swann looks at the black-and-white reproduction of Botticelli’s Zipporah, the more he believes he is in love with Odette: ‘When he had sat for a long time gazing at the Botticelli, he would think of his own living Botticelli, who seemed even lovelier still, and as he drew towards him the photograph of Zipporah he would imagine that he was holding Odette against his heart’.38 This is not dissimilar to Ruskin’s absolute desire to read Athena in Zipporah, and viceversa, and beneath this surface mask can be substituted the name and personage of Rose La Touche. For Zipporah had certainly been an object of desire or at least flirtation for Ruskin, clearly evident in his letters to Joan Severn in which Zipporah is an ‘enchantress’, a ‘pretty Zipporah’ who should ‘make some people jealous’.39 Ruskin writes in a sexually explicit way revealing his repressed sexual desires: he confesses that he has ‘nearly driven [himself] quite wild today with drawing little Zipporah’s chemisette’ with his urge to see Zipporah’s breasts.40 And vice versa, the more Swann looks at Odette’s face, the more he remarked Odette’s resemblance to the Zipporah of ... Botticelli ... He no longer based his estimate of the merit of Odette’s face on the doubtful quality of her cheeks and the purely fleshy softness which he supposed would greet his lips there should he ever hazard a kiss, but regarded it rather as a skein of beautiful, delicate lines which his eyes unravelled, following their curves and convolutions, relating the rhythm of the neck to the effusion of the hair and the droop of the eyelids, as though in a portrait of her in which her type was made clearly intelligible.41 After the face, Odette’s entire body is imbued with Botticelli’s Zipporah, as perfection incarnate: ‘[Swann] stood gazing at her; traces of the old fresco

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were apparent in her face and her body, and these he tried incessantly to recapture thereafter, both when he was with Odette and when he was only thinking of her in her absence; and, although his admiration for the Florentine masterpiece was doubtless based upon his discovery that it had been reproduced in her, the similarity enhanced her beauty also, and made her more precious’.42 Odette is becoming more and more unreal, as she is transformed from cocotte into a Botticelli maiden, in what Richard Bales described as a ‘rush for substitutes’.43 The magic contained in the words ‘Florentine masterpiece’ enabled Swann ‘like a title, to introduce the image of Odette into a world of dreams and fancies which, until then, she had been debarred from entering, and where she assumed a new and nobler form’.44 In the confines of Odette’s carriage, as it rumbles along a Paris street, Swann’s first physical contact with this ‘tart [and] a kept woman’45 who feigns coyness and virginity, is also conducted through the metaphor of Botticelli’s paintings of women: [Swann] ran his other hand upwards along Odette’s cheek; she gazed at him fixedly, with that languishing and solemn air which marks the women of the Florentine master in whose faces he had found a resemblance with hers; swimming at the brink of the eyelids, her brilliant eyes, wide and slender like theirs, seemed on the verge of welling out like two great tears. She bent her neck, as all their necks may be seen to bend, in the pagan scenes as well as in the religious pictures.46 On other occasions, when Swann, metaphorically transformed by Proust as a blind, mythical unicorn,47 is listening with enhanced hearing to Vinteuil’s sonata with its little phrase being played over and over again, ‘vilely’48 on the piano by Odette, she would look at him sulkily, and he would see once again a face worthy to figure in Botticelli’s Life of Moses; he would place it there, giving to Odette’s neck the necessary inclination; and when he had finished her portrait in tempera, in the fifteenth century, on the wall of the Sistine, the idea that she was none the less in the room with him still, by the piano, at that very moment, ready to be kissed and enjoyed, the idea of her material existence, would sweep over him with so violent an intoxication that, with eyes starting from his head and jaws tensed as though to devour her,

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he would fling himself upon this Botticelli maiden and kiss and bite her cheeks.49 Odette-Zipporah creates a dialectical tension in Swann: on the one hand he wants to treat her as a virgin; on the other hand his carnal appetite, his desire to rape and violate her as an object (the museum piece to which I have already referred) are overwhelming. Swann felt many misgivings about Odette at the beginning of their relationship, regarding ‘the quality of her face, her body, the whole of her beauty’, which were constantly revived at ‘the mere sight of her in the flesh’; however, ‘those misgivings were swept away and that love confirmed now that he could re-erect his estimate of her on the sure foundations of aesthetic principle’.50 So making love to Odette, which for Swann ‘would have seemed natural and but moderately attractive’, now takes on a different dimension and as if ‘to crown his adoration of a masterpiece in a gallery, ... [became] supernaturally delicious’51 in the supreme act of consummation like the Perpetual Adoration in the Mass. To cope with Odette’s secret life when she is not with Swann, he suppresses its very existence by means of painting, so that it becomes ‘with its neutral and colourless background, like those sheets of sketches by Watteau upon which one sees here, there, at every corner and at various angles, traced in three colours upon the buff paper, innumerable smiles’.52 So Swann weaves a fantasy world of his ‘love’ for Odette, built solely on his imagination and the superimposition of Zipporah onto Odette and substitution of Odette for Zipporah. It is a fragile delusion destined to lead to disappointment. The metamorphosed Odette is imbued with qualities that she does not and can never possess: ‘an inestimably precious work of art, cast for once in a new, a different, an especially delectable metal’.53 Swann enjoys the romantic idea of being in love, for he ‘was once more finding in things, since he had fallen in love, the charm that he had found when, in his adolescence, he had fancied himself an artist; with this difference, that the charm that lay in them now was conferred by Odette alone’.54 By being in love, Swann feels that he acquires an identity. Proust is severely critical of Swann for debasing a work of art to elevate both the idea of love and a woman with a dubious past and present. Although Swann has found erotic, yet ephemeral excitement via Zipporah, he has failed to plumb the meaning of the original painting—in fact he has not even tried. Similarly, he has failed to comprehend the layers of personality that comprise Odette. Swann has failed because he is a diletante and aesthete, with a fine knowledge of art which he squanders. The fact that Swann, this

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‘célibataire de l’art’,55 is condemned to a sterile life and early death from cancer serves to emphasize his wasted and artistically barren life. There is a chilling analogy with Proust’s early life. This fantasy world serves to conceal the true identity, to Swann, of Odette, a woman without a past. As George Stambolian commented: ‘By comparing Odette with Zipporah Swann attempts to hide her different reality’.56 This also confuses the reader’s perception of his character, thus paralleling life itself and the problems of identity and communication. Swann too deliberately conceals his identity from Odette—he wears a mask, as he does on so many other occasions such as during his visits to the narrator’s family in Combray, and when at the Verdurins’. Like Zipporah, Odette is an amalgam of contradictory and contrasting tendencies, such as her bisexuality and unclear sexual orientation, her ugliness and charm which coexist and create tension. Botticelli’s Zipporah and Ruskin’s copy of Zipporah had a crucial role in the development of Swann’s love affair with Odette, by inciting and inflaming Swann’s desires, yet at the same time creating a screen which concealed the true nature of the woman.

V. M I S S S A C R I PA N T —O D E T T E To what extent does Swann know Odette through the mediation of Zipporah? Swann marries an imagined Odette–Zipporah without a known past that he can reconstruct, like the façade of a building without foundations and rooms. In a later volume of Proust’s novel, Within a Budding Grove, Odette’s hidden past will be revealed through the medium of another painting, not Zipporah, but Miss Sacripant, and through the vision of the fictitious artist, Elstir. The events take place many years before Swann in Love when Proust’s polymorphous/polytemporal narrator, as an adolescent, visits Elstir’s studio for the first time. His attention is caught by one painting in particular, entitled Miss Sacripant and dated October 1872. It is a painting of a young woman ‘in a close-fitting hat not unlike a bowler, trimmed with a ribbon of cerise silk; in one of her mittened hands was a lighted cigarette, while the other held at knee-level a sort of broadbrimmed garden hat .... On a table by her side, a tall vase filled with pink carnations’.57 As the young narrator looks, his doubts grow and he wonders whether ‘the strange attire of a female model is her costume for a fancy-dress ball, or whether, ... the scarlet cloak which an elderly man looks as though he had put on in response to some

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whim of the painter’s is his professor’s or alderman’s gown or his cardinal’s cape’. The older narrator posits an explanation for the uncertainty: ‘The ambiguous character of the person whose portrait now confronted me arose, without my understanding it, from the fact that it was a young actress of an earlier generation half dressed up as a man’. But the younger narrator, standing in front of the watercolour, is confused by the fact that ‘the bowler beneath which the hair was fluffy but short, the velvet jacket, without lapels, opening over a white shirt-front, made me hesitate as to the period of the clothes and sex of the model, so that I did not know exactly what I had before my eyes, except that it was a most luminous piece of painting’.58 The sexuality of the person oscillates, revealing the androgynous nature of Odette: her sexuality does not have fixed boundaries, as in many of Elstir’s seascapes. This transvestite costume is worn by a young actress, with ‘the lines of the face [along which] the latent sex seemed to be on the point of confessing itself to be that of a somewhat boyish girl, ... vanished, and reappeared further on with a suggestion rather of an effeminate, vicious and pensive youth, then fled once more and remained elusive’.59 The contrast between ‘the dreamy sadness in the expression of the eyes’ and the provocative costume ‘belonging to the world of debauchery and the stage’ disturbed the young narrator who could only interpret the facial expression as ‘feigned’ in order ‘to enhance the provocation’.60 The contemplation is abruptly and unexpectedly interrupted by Mme Elstir, at which moment Elstir hastily and furtively hides this painting of a woman with whom he had had a relationship. It is some time later before the moment of revelation when the young narrator utters: ‘It couldn’t be Mme Swann before she was married?’61 Elstir’s stunning silence spoke loudly, for ‘the portrait was indeed that of Odette de Crécy’.62 The very title of the painting suggests the sitter’s connections with the world of the Music Hall where it was fashionable to use the title Miss, implying a degree of titillating erotica. Miss Sacripant was also the stage character that Odette played in Paris when she was introduced to Swann by the homosexual, and previously married, Baron de Charlus. The name Sacripant is derived from the Italian male character Sacripante in Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato and has now acquired the meaning in French of a ‘rogue’ or ‘good for nothing’. Through the choice of name, the bisexuality is very explicit, but hidden owing to its connotations with the world of fashion and the Music Hall.63 The Miss also suggests the unmarried status of the subject, or at least the implied status in this case for Odette de Crécy was the estranged wife of the Comte de Crécy, and enables the subject sexual freedom of choice, if so desired, without the constraints of marriage.

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It was Odette’s unclear and ill-defined sexuality that tortured Swann during his pursuit and courtship: he suspected her of lesbian proclivities and he also suspected her of relationships with other men. Both counts he found impossible to prove, yet his instincts were correct. In the course of Proust’s novel, the truth about Odette and her dubious past would gradually unfold and would reveal that Swann’s doubts were well-founded. Yet the truth about Odette’s inner self had been captured by the artist Elstir, and read and understood correctly by the narrator–writer of In Search of Lost Time who had deciphered the portrait of Miss Sacripant. Elstir had succeeded in discomposing the contrived, superficial appearance of Odette, what Proust calls the ‘artificial harmony’,64 to reveal her multiple layers and the harsh truth she wished to dissimulate. After the publication of Du Côté de chez Swann, Proust revealed in an interview with André Arnyvelde in 1913: ‘I have tried to imitate life, where the unsuspected aspects of a person suddenly reveal themselves to our eyes. We live next to beings whom we think we know. What is lacking is the event that will make them suddenly appear different from the way we know them’.65 The event that revealed to the narrator unsuspected facets of Odette was seeing Elstir’s painting of Miss Sacripant. The event that revealed to Ruskin the critical role of Botticelli was the conjunction of two unexpected things, the Etruscan olive branch on the Badia in Fiesole and in Botticelli’s paintings.

EPILOGUE Botticelli’s Zipporah was enigmatic for Ruskin and for Proust’s Swann. Whereas Ruskin, the real-life art critic, provides an in-depth analysis and interpretation through Athena, bringing out the tension of the dialectical nature of the painting, its conjunction of two civilizations, religions, yet at the same time expressing continuity, Swann is unable to delve deeply and to interpret Zipporah as a Renaissance masterpiece; he uses this painting solely to obtain ephemeral satisfaction in love. Swann’s is a fruitless act of idolatry and one which will be severely reprimanded and condemned by Proust. It is the adolescent narrator in Proust’s novel who experiences a moment of revelation when, through his critical abilities, he identifies Miss Sacripant as Odette de Crécy.

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NOTES 1. This is an extended version of a lecture given to the Ruskin Programme, University of Lancaster on 12 February 1998. I am grateful to Professor Robert Hewison for the initial invitation and to all members of the Ruskin Programme who contributed to the stimulating and challenging discussion that followed the seminar. 2. Joan Evans and John Howard Whitehouse (eds), The Diaries of John Ruskin, 1835–1889 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), p. 175. 3. Ibid., p. 173. 4. The Ruskin Foundation, (The Ruskin Library, University of Lancaster) [hereafter RF ], 880. 5. The Biblical quotations throughout are from the authorised King James version of The Holy Bible. 6. For a discussion of the role of the well, see A. Abécassis, La Pensée Juive, vol. 1. Du Désert au Désir (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1987), pp. 78–82. 7. It is interesting to note that his shoes appear more comtemporaneous with the time of Botticelli than with that of Moses. 8. For a discussion of Ruskin’s copying of sheep, see Cynthia Gamble, ‘Ruskin’s sheep’, in The Ruskin Programme Bulletin, no. 16 (University of Lancaster, April 1998), pp. 13–15. 9. I am grateful to The Ruskin Foundation for permission to consult the manuscripts in The Ruskin Library, and to compare the manuscript with the Diaries edited by Evans and Whitehouse. The only obvious small change in the diary quoted above is the fact that Ruskin does not underline Zipporah, italicized in Evans and Whitehouse. 10. E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (eds), The Complete Works of John Ruskin, in 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12). This edition will, henceforth, be referred to as cw, followed by the volume number and the page(s); ibid., XXXVII, p. 112. 11. CW, XXII, p. 427. 12. Ibid., XXIII, pp. 265–79. 13. Ibid., pp. 269–70. 14. Ibid., p. 479. 15. Ibid., p. 275. 16. Reproduced, in reverse, in CW, XX, p. 242, pl. IV. The woodcut was produced by Burgess, who no doubt cut it from a drawing Ruskin made, hence Ruskin’s reference to ‘my woodcut of the Attic Pallas’ (ibid., XXIII, p. 479). The Neck Amphora, reference GR 1837.6–9.28 (E268), is in the Canino Collection, in Room 11, at the British Museum. It is about 2 feet high, and has been dated as c. 480 BC. It is from Nola in Southern Italy. 17. Ibid., pp. 478–9. 18. Ibid., p. 479. 19. Ibid. 20. Jeanne Clegg and Paul Tucker, Ruskin and Tuscany (Sheffield: Ruskin Gallery, Collection of The Guild of St George in association with Lund Humphries, 1993), p. 112. 21. CW, XXIII, p. 479.

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22. Cynthia Gamble, ‘Proust–Ruskin perspective on La Vierge Dorée at Amiens Cathedral’, Word & Image, IX/3 (1993), pp. 270–86. 23. CW, XXVII, p. 347; Fors Clavigera, letter 20, August 1872. 24. CW, XXVII, p. 347. 25. For example, Frederick Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art, 4th edn (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994 [1970]), p. 407. 26. CW, XXVII, p. 347. 27. Ibid. 28. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. I. Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), p. 460. 29. Ibid., 1, pp. 459–60. 30. Ibid., p. 267. 31. Julia Kristeva, Le Temps sensible, Proust et l’expérience littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 42. 32. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, In Search of Lost Time, 1, p. 267. 33. Ibid., p. 267. 34. Ibid., p. 270. 35. Correspondance de Marcel Proust, 21 vols, vol. 5, ed. Philip Kolb (Paris: Plon, 1970–93, vol. 5 1979), p. 42; IV, p. 326, n.3: VI, pp. 75–6. 36. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, In Search of Lost Time, 1, p. 270. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Manuscripts quoted in Clegg and Tucker, Ruskin and Tuscany, p. 94. 40. Ibid. 41. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, In Search of Lost Time, 1, pp. 268–9. 42. Ibid., p. 269. 43. Richard Bales, Proust: A la Recherche du Temps perdu. Critical Guides to French Texts (London: Grant & Cutler, 1995), p. 57. 44. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, In Search of Lost Time, 1, p. 269. 45. Ibid., p. 288. 46. Ibid., p. 280. 47. Juliette Hassine, Esotérisme et Ecriture dans l’æuvre de Proust (Paris: Minard, 1990), pp. 143–55. 48. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, In Search of Lost Time, 1, p. 284. 49. Ibid., p. 286. 50. Ibid., p. 269. 51. Ibid., pp. 269–70. 52. Ibid., p. 289. 53. Ibid., p. 270. 54. Ibid., p. 287. 55. Marcel Proust, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu [edition publiée sous la direction de Jean-Yves Tadié, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade] (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), p. 470. 56. George Stambolian, Marcel Proust and the Creative Encounter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 128. 57. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, In Search of Lost Time, II, p. 494.

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58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., p. 495. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., p. 508. 62. Ibid., p. 509. 63. Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust (Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1996), p. 496, n.2. 64. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, In Search of Lost Time, II, p. 509. 65. Quoted by Stambolian, Marcel Proust, p. 245. The text of the interview is in Philip Kolb and Larkin B. Price (eds), Marcel Proust: Textes Retrouvés (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), p. 222.

JAN HOKENSON

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o detail is single in Proust’s A la Recherche du temps perdu, that “stately cycle of repetition,” as Henry Sussman termed the novel. Large motifs and minute details recur, in patterns that establish a duologue of particular and general, layering thematic constructs and interweaving such rhetorics of stratification as those of law, science, ethnicity (Sussman 213–3). The particular is freighted with thematics and, since Proust’s protagonist is also an apprentice learning his art, the largest aesthetic themes inform the least detail. As Sussman suggests, aspects of an orchid or a brothel, for instance, fit into the intertwined narratives of heterosexual and homosexual romances. These in turn interrelate to “comprise entire counter-systems of thought and structuration operational throughout the text,” and produce, among other things, parables of reproduction and autofecundity, or models of writing (222). To read the Recherche as counter-systems of thought in this way is particularly useful when considering one pattern of details that has rarely been noted in the Recherche: Proust’s many references to Japanese arts. Jean Rousset has shown how the allusions to the Mille et une nuits, those childhood tales fantastically free of the time-space constraints of canonical French fiction, provide Marcel with a literary model, first encountered on the dinner plates at Combray and only much later understood as a prose alternative to

From Modern Language Studies 29, no. 1 (Spring 1999). © 1999 by Northeast Modern Language Association.

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realist fiction. However, to assume that every reference to “orient” indicates “Proche-Orient” is to miss the parallel pattern of allusions to the “ExtrêmeOrient” of Japanese visual arts. Proust’s larger, overarching structure combines both sets of Oriental arts, the Arab tales and the Japanese arts, into a counter-system of non-European aesthetics active throughout the text. The Japanese allusions in particular function contrastively to highlight the impasse in canonical Western aesthetics (thus replicating the Impressionists’ experience in discovering ukiyo-é, the Japanese prints) and to reveal to Marcel new possibilities for writing. Klaus Berger describes a moment of stylistic crisis in Western painting at the end of the illusionist or mimetic tradition (with Renoir, for example, admitting, “I had come to the end of Impressionism .... I was in a blind alley,” 2). Like Gabriel Weisberg and Siegfried Wichmann, Berger depicts japonisme as a sudden visual influx of completely new and original form, prompting “the recognition, admiration, adoption, and reinterpretation of an Eastern way of seeing” (3). When the first woodblock prints arrived in Paris in about 1862 they set off a wave of enthusiasm for Japanese art that crested decades later, moving out from the ateliers to sweep across Europe like a craze in the fin-de-siècle. Impressionism, the poster movement, art nouveau, were currents in the widening stream of japonisme.1 The first prints were dazzling: the strange discordant compositions, the brilliant reds and yellows, the simple stylized figures, the odd cropping and silhouetting, the indifference to frame, the decentered perspective, the bold overlays and transparences. Edmond de Goncourt was the first to realize that the phenomenon known as japonisme was far more than a fashion. Contemporaries described it as the discovery of a new aesthetic continent, and Goncourt pronounced it a revolution in European aesthetics. Today art historians echo Klaus Berger’s judgment that japonisme was a shift of Copernican proportions, marking the end of European illusionism and the beginning of the modern.2 Like the painters, whom they often defended in art reviews and criticism, writers also exulted at the “new” Japanese art. Huysmans extols things Japanese in A Rebours. Zola praises the woodblock as “naturaliste” in “Le Naturalisme au Salon,” and incorporates Japanese prints into Au Bonheur des dames and L’Oeuvre. The Goncourts’ painter-protagonist in Manette Salomon tries and fails to equal the art of the prints, and Les Frères Zemganno among other texts contains pointed reference to Japanese artworks.3 But Proust overshadows all such precedents in his magisterially reflexive use of the Japanese aesthetic. Through the three thousand pages of the Recherche, the monumental dimensions of Proust’s novel are so vast and complex that they often seem to

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conceal, beneath the brilliant details of French social comedy, Marcel’s purpose of aesthetic innovation. During the fictional years of apprenticeship, learning the lessons of the traditional and the new French painters, composers, and writers, Marcel despairs of ever finding a subject for a unique literary creation of his own, until at the final Matinée he discovers unconscious memory, then metaphor, then a method for rendering this text as his book of human subjectivity in Time. By that point most readers have forgotten that in “Combray” the entire verbal edifice emerged, in metaphor, from a single cup of tea, and that the only analogy for the process—and the implied aesthetic—was Japanese: comme dans ce jeu où les Japonais s’amusent à tremper dans un bol de porcelaine rempli d’eau, de petits morceaux de papier jusque-là indistincts qui, à peine y sont-ils plongés, s’étirent, se contournent, se colorent, se différencient, deviennent des fleurs, des maisons, des personnages consistants et reconnais sables, de même maintenant ... l’église et tout Combray et ses environs, tout cela qui prend forme et solidité, est sorti, ville et jardins, de ma tasse de thé. (I.47–48) The narrator had been struggling in vain to pinpoint his memories, wondering whether the past would ever reach the clear surface of his consciousness. It is not surprising that Proust invokes Japanese arts at perhaps the single most crucial moment in the novel. Thereafter the whole relationship—memory, metaphor, genre—remains to be worked out. But it is here, at the gateway to the “recherche,” in the first full operation of involuntary memory, that Proust constructs a japoniste metaphor for the bringing to consciousness. The Japanese porcelain bowl is homologue to the modernist’s cup of linden tea. As becomes clear in the course of the novel, what matters most in this scene, aside from the initiatory invocation of the Japanese aesthetic, is the sudden transformation of banal matter (paper bits) magically metamorphosed into a new order of reality, at once imaginative, imagistic, and in fluid motion. As figure for the man’s art, this is a Japanese child’s game, preface in metaphor for a French childhood resurrected from time and given living reality in art, in the equally fluid elements of consciousness and language. Proust weaves the vast tapestry of the Recherche with such japoniste allusions. Readers have usually levelled the orientalisms together as historical markers of the era 1880–1915, to show that Proust accurately chronicles the popular fancies of his age.4 With both Odette and Albertine slinking in

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kimonos, Madame Verdurin crowing about her “salade à la japonaise,” even Monsieur de Norpois ranting about Bergotte’s “chinoiseries de forme,” one can easily dismiss it all as yet another modernist’s Orientalism, trite and faintly racist. Previously, however, in the 1920’s when japonisme was still prevalent in Paris arts and literature, William Leonard Schwartz included the Recherche in his survey of Far-Eastern similes by French writers, The Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in Modern French Literature: 1800–1925 (1927). He too saw Proust as primarily a social chronicler and complimented his historical accuracy (in 1879 Odette’s apartment teems with Oriental bric-à-brac, in 1887 she mixes Japanese lanterns and silks with Chinese procelains and French eighteenth-century furniture, and by the end of the Dreyfus affair she has only French eighteenth-century décor). But Schwartz added that “Proust, like Goncourt and Huysmans, makes occasional use of similes which depend for their effect upon an acquaintance with Japanese art” (106), quoting two examples without further comment. And indeed it would have been difficult for Proust not to have encountered Japanese art. It was pervasive in a variety of forms in the salons he visited,5 in the concerns of Le Mensuel, La Revue Blanche, and other reviews he wrote for,6 in the lives and the work of painters, composers, friends he used as models for his own characters.7 Young Proust in 1890 sent japoniste comic verses to his friends, including the more somber “Ton esprit, divin Chrysanthème” (Cahier Marcel Proust 120), which is a noteworthy bit of japonaiserie only because it shows Proust engaging, as more than passive spectator, in the Belle-Epoque craze and casting his engagement into a proto-japoniste quatrain. Proust personally went to at least one japoniste painter’s studio, Vuillard’s atelier in Cabourg (the original of Elstir’s “laboratoire”), and Vuillard made a drawing, now lost, of Proust, Montesquiou, and Delafosse at dinner in the Bois in 1903. Japanese artistic interests were so strong among these groups circulating around Montesquiou, Painter reports, that the Comte de Gruffulhe’s patriotism (and probably homophobia) was outraged. “‘They’re a lot of Japs,’ he said, meaning esthetes” (I.149). As a young man Proust was surrounded by things Japanese, and, from the evidence of his novel, learned to discern basic principles of the aesthetic. His good friend Marie Nordlinger, the Englishwoman who helped him translate Ruskin, worked on Japanese cloisonné and enamels in Bing’s atelier (Cahier Marcel Proust 191n).8 Proust was devastated when Nordlinger left France for America in 1905 to arrange exhibits of Japanese prints for Bing (Painter II.25). She often sent Proust Japanese gifts from the gallery when he was feeling particularly ill, and he was fascinated by them. It was she who

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gave him the cut-paper pellets to immerse in water. “Proust was suffering from asthma, and this ‘fluvatile and inoffensive spring, these miraculous and hidden flowers’ touched him profoundly, amid the desolation of the season he dared not see, with a memory of seasons buried in childhood. ‘Thanks to you,’ he wrote, ‘my dark electric room has had its Far-Eastern spring’” (qtd Painter II.15). He was so impressed with the bonsai that in 1907 he ordered three more from Bing’s when struggling to write a review of Anna de Noailles’s Les Éblouissements. In that review and later in his novel (III.130), he alludes to the bonsai as emblems of the immensity that can be held within a single line of poetry. Proust concisely and accurately identifies their chief aesthetic property when he replies to Nordlinger, “the Japanese dwarf trees at Bing’s are trees for the imagination” (qtd Painter I.3). In the review he wrote: Je ne sais si vous me comprendrez et si le poète sera indulgeant à ma rêverie. Mais bien souvent les moindres vers des Éblouissements me firent penser à ces cyprès géants, à ces sophoras roses que l’art du jardinier japonais fait tenir, hauts de quelques centimètres, dans un godet de porcelaine de Hizen. Mais l’imagination qui les contemple en même temps que les yeux, les voit, dans le monde des proportions, ce qu’ils sont en réalité, c’est-à-dire des arbres immenses. Et leur ombre grande comme la main donne à l’étroit carré de terre, de natte, ou de cailloux où elle promène lentement, les jours de soleil, ses songes plus que centenaires, l’étendue et la majesté d’une vaste campagne ou de la rive de quelque grand fleuve.9 Why does Proust even mention Hizen (the Kyushu region famous for Japanese procelain), the provenance of the ceramic container? What matters to him is the conjunction of nature and art. The small tree, shaped to resemble the giant cypress, is set or based in the finest example of Japanese porcelain artistry. As art the bonsai is greater than nature because free of time (in “ses songes plus que centenaires”), set in art to invite the imagination to recreate the centuries-old cypress in the mind. And even as nature the bonsai is less than “real,” being an iconic representation of the other, greater reality of the giant tree. The art of bonsai, particularly its dual essence as art-nature, induces in Proust in 1907 a “rêverie” which he will continue to develop in his contrastive aesthetics in the Recherche.10 Among the leading Impressionists who were fervent japonistes, Proust singled out Whistler, Moreau, and especially Monet. In the 1890s, in

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Monet’s period of serial paintings, Proust was quite ill but he made an effort to attend the Monet exhibit at the Durand-Ruel gallery, and as late as 1907, during Monet’s period of water-lily paintings (and in the same year as the visit to Vuillard’s studio), Proust still hoped to visit Monet and his garden at Giverny.11 In the Recherche Proust uses Monet’s work as model for Elstir’s studies of cathedrals and Normandy cliffs and for his own descriptions of water-lilies on the Vivonne. One of Monet’s rare explanatory comments on his work, made to La Revue Blanche’s art critic Roger Marx about the water-lily studies, indicates the aesthetic perspective that Proust shared and developed in the novel: “If you insist on forcing me into an affiliation with anyone else for the good of the cause, then compare me with the old Japanese masters; their exquisite taste has always delighted me, and I like the suggestive quality of their aesthetic, which evokes presence by a shadow and the whole by a part .... The vague and indeterminate are expressive resources that have a raison d’être and qualities of their own; through them, the sensation is prolonged, and they form the symbol of continuity” (qtd Berger 312). Like Monet’s, Proust’s japonisme proceeds not from specific artworks or even art forms. It is rather an affiliation with an entire aesthetic, and it is rendered as such in the novel, in cumulative allusions and reflexive import. Proust embraces particularly the evocative power of suggestion, the rendering of fugitive impressions, the crucial blanks or incompleteness— indeterminacies opening imaginative possibilties (for narrator and reader), and the sensory appeal in swift delicate strokes of line and color. Proust is astute at mining the comparative possibilities of Japanese arts, the prints and paintings in particular, and the subtlety and complexity of his allusions reflect Marcel’s progress as the proto-artist. Marcel’s japoniste initiation into a new aesthetic, probably mirroring Proust’s own experience, is not as overt as the structured allusions to Saint-Simon, Racine, and the rest of Marcels’ pantheon of French writers. For it is less exclusively literary, thus less intimately webbed with Marcel’s specifically literary ambitions, and is more connected to other arts, as an inter-arts phenomenon, that is, an aesthetic. Marcel is something of a pilgrim through his European heritage, beginning with Giotto and the gothic cathedrals and proceding through the centuries to Anatole France and the Impressionists. Proust positions the Recherche as the acme of European arts and Marcel as the literary innovator. The Japanese aesthetic appears intermittently, working like a counter-system to clarify the limitations of Marcel’s inherited Occidental aesthetics. Proust’s japonisme operates at two levels in the Recherche, in discourse and in story, to use Emile Benveniste’s terms. As in the scene of the madeleine, the deft japonisme in the narrator’s own discourse is reflexive of the text’s large

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goals as artwork in its own right, and occurs chiefly in Combray and Le Temps retrouvé, in the origins and in the apotheosis of the text. Also, when the characters comically repeat the worst abuses of the Japanese aesthetic, as in the Verdurins’ mawkish jokes about “la salade japonaise,” the narrator mocks mercilessly, as he always derides the mere social uses of art. Like a code within a code, the comic targets are indexes of value, and form a counterdiscourse to the narrator’s own aesthetic judgment and practice. At the level of story, the dozens of allusions to Japanese woodcut prints, paintings, language, gardens, costumes, toys and games, can be sorted into three types. First, Proust satirizes the socialites’ frivolous abuses of japonisme, chiefly in the boudoirs and the salons. Swann is appalled at Odette’s craze for chrysanthemums but, on his first visit to her apartments, he ultimately lets himself be inveigled by her Orientalisms, including her silk cushions and her “grande lanterne japonaise suspendue à une cordelette de soie (mais qui, pour ne pas priver les visiteurs des derniers conforts de la civilisation occidentale, s’éclairait au gaz,” I.220). Swann particpates in this travesty of the Japanese object, and its relation to light, as the narrator suggests by casting into japoniste allusion his refrain that comfort and art are incompatible. As lover, Marcel replicates Swann in dithering over the beloved’s inane enactments of the worst abuses of the Japanese aesthetic which, again, is invoked at the decisive origin of the affair. Marcel has scruples but, always attracted to corrupt women and decadent men, “ce qui me décida fut une dernière découverte philologique” (II.357). He is both aghast and excited by her corrupt speech, including the worst gibberish from Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème (“Oui, me répondit Albertine, elle a l’air d’une petite mousmé”). To Marcel the proto-japoniste writer, the linguistic hybrid mousmé is like ice in the mouth (“nul [mot] n’est plus horripilant”). The whole scene burlesques Loti’s colonialist erotics, and Marcel is titillated despite himself: “Mais devant ‘mousmé’ ces raisons tombèrent ... ” The affair begins on a distinct note of japoniaiserie. Marcel is more self-aware than Swann, and he does not participate in Orientalist fakery so much as manipulate it, remaining, he thinks, superior to its degradations. A similar set of satiric allusions proceeds from the Verdurins’ salon. Aside from predictably garbled judgments on such japonistes as Whistler, the most recurrent travesty concerns the running joke about “la salade japonaise,” which begins as a silly in-joke, the characters’ coy way of letting others know they have been to see Dumas fils’ play Francillon.12 But soon we learn that the Verdurin salad contains western potatoes. It is another aesthetic hash, on a par with the Japanese porcelains jostling among the

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Verdurins’ Louis XIII vases, mindlessly making counter-systems inter changeable. Unschooled in the integrity of French traditions and following Orientalist fashions, the petit clan degrade both. By the time of the Goncourt pastiche, this tiresome salad13 had become so hyperbolically Japanese that even the Verdurins’ potatoes are (in Proust’s satire of Edmond de Goncourt’s dilettantish japonisme) “des pommes de terre ayant la fermeté de boutons d’ivoire japonais” (III.712). In the culinary as in the erotic realms (always subtended by literary targets, chiefly Loti and Goncourt), such witless abuses of japonisme produce contemptible hybrids and deformations. They enable amusing satire while contrasting with others’ more serious uses of things Japanese. Such comic japonisme is clever, and consistently aimed at stupidity or ignorance, forms of the idolatry of art which entices Swann and which Marcel learns to disavow. The second type of japoniste allusion at the level of story occurs among the artistocrats. Almost everyone but Marcel’s mother, his grandmother, and the artists Elstir and Vinteuil are guilty of japonisant folly at some point in the Recherche. The Guermantes characters are just as prey to fashion, although they are associated with its creative aspects that will engage Marcel. At her soirée in Le Côté des Guermantes Madame de Villeparisis is painting a japoniste view, which no one can identify until the Duchesse de Guermantes points out that it resembles the apple blossoms on a Japanese screen. Later even Charlus, in a rare creative endeavor that associates him with the artistic sensibility if not with true painting, paints a fan for the Duchesse, notably a japoniste scene of black and yellow irises. The Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes collect paintings from Elstir’s japoniste period, which Marcel studies in their library. In such ways they exhibit more aesthetic discrimination in things Japanese than the Verdurins and the lovers. The third set of allusions, still at the level of story, appears in the subtext of Marcel’s artistic aprenticeship. These concern the japonisme of the finest painters of the period, chiefly Whistler, Degas, Manet, Monet, Moreau, and of course Elstir. They have attained the Japanese “way of seeing,” in Berger’s phrase, that Marcel is only slowly acquiring. On one occasion, for instance, just before his first visit to Elstir’s studio, he makes a (retrospectively) significant association with the prints but foolishly does not pursue it. In his room at Balbec, lying in bed and musing on the images of the sea reflected in the glass on the bookcases, Marcel considers the natural beauty of the sunset over the sea and ponders various artistic analogues. But he miscontrues the relationship between the world reflected and the reflections that shift with the light like changing exhibits of paintings:

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Une fois c’était une exposition d’estampes japonaises: à côté de la mince découpure du soleil rouge et rond comme la lune, un nuage jaune paraissait un lac contre lequel des glaives noirs se profilaient ainsi que les arbres de sa rive, une barre d’un rose tendre que je n’avais jamais revu depuis ma première boîte de couleurs s’enflait comme un fleuve sur les deux rives duquel des bateaux semblaient attendre à sec qu’on vint les tirer pour les mettre à flot. Et avec le regard dédaigneux, ennuyé et frivole d’un amateur ou d’une femme parcourant, entre deux visites mondaines, une galerie, je me disais: “C’est curieux, ce coucher de soleil, c’est différent, mais enfin j’en ai déjà vu d’aussi délicats, d’aussi étonnants que celui-ci.” (I.804–5) Wisely, Marcel recognizes the link between the Japanese “couleurs si vives” and his childhood, but then (“dédaigneux, ennuyé et frivole”) he dismisses the thought. In the Japanese model, Marcel has just seen for himself that cloud and lake lack a line of demarcation; this is the famous lesson of the Elstir seascapes, that water and sky lack a line of demarcation like the two interchangeable halves of literary metaphor, but Marcel cannot apprehend the importance of what he is seeing nor of the Japanese association. He discerns analogies in the seascapes with Monet and Whistler, even noting the butterfly signature that Whistler developed to mime the Japanese hanka (or seal). But it is only thirty pages later, after his visit to Elstir’s studio, that Marcel can assimilate Japanese analogies to his own aesthetic development. The structure of this visual perception in his hotel room continues to structure Marcel’s nascent japonisme: vaguely associated with the purity of childhood impressions and artistic beginnings (of Marcel, and primitively of Art), it is reflected against books, on the “vitrines de la bibilothèque,” in interreflections of literature and painting that he alone can make real, in ultimately writing this book. Elstir’s fictional career repeats those of Whistler and other Impressionists, beginning in historical or mythological studies and moving into an extended period of japonisme, then developing a mature style. Marcel regrets that none of the paintings in Elstir’s studio reflect his Japanese period, “celle où il avait subi l’influence du Japon,” which Marcel had read about in an English art review and which he knows is represented in the Guermantes’ collection (II.835). His momentary delight at the japoniste sunset, when he was unable to isolate the metaphoric land-water relations from his own reality, anticipated this aesthetic discovery in the studio. He sees it clearly in Elstir’s painting of the Port of Carquethuit which

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“comparant la terre à la mer, supprimait entre elles toute démarcation.” Proust positions Japanese art as a new way of seeing, which Elstir has already assimilated in painting and which Marcel intermittently experiences. In such ways, Proust portrays Belle Epoque japonisme as a social amusement, grotesque in the worst salons or dilletantish in the best, but always a fashionable contrast to its concurrent role as formative apprenticeship in art. At the level of discourse, it is after this point in A l’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleur that the narrator’s japoniste practice, initiated in “Combray,” begins to merge with Marcel’s own artistic reflections. In “Combray,” after ending his prologue on the japoniste magic of the madeleine, the narrator then moves immediately into evocations of Combray and its environs, as remembered. These scenes and sites so impress the child Marcel as to constitute his “moi essentiel,” and in their description Japanese references evoke (a) a nonEuropean relation to nature, (b) imaginative activity in the mind, and (c) evanescence and fugitive impressions in art. Initially the narrator carries the burden of both Orientalisms, the Near-Eastern and Far-Eastern, sowing the text with allusions that the child is too young to understand. Thus for instance in “Combray,” in the long passages describing the water-lilies on the Vivonne, the narrator lingers over each color, form, and glint of light in the floating flower-beds. He notes that in late evening the bed of the stream seems no longer green but blue, “d’un bleu clair et cru, tirant sur le violet, d’apparence cloisonné et d’un goût japonais” (I.169). Elsewhere pinks and whites are so clear they seen “lavées comme de la porcelaine,” and forms are so visible in the clear water they seem midway between fluidity and fixity in permanent form. The narrator is practising a literary impressionism that transposes Monet’s “nénuphars” into text, as such terms as “jardin céleste” and the japoniste allusions suggest, while rendering the literal impressions Marcel is receiving as those of a generic “goût japonais.” Crucial moments in the narrator’s discursive passages on Marcel’s aesthetic apprenticeship often contain such japoniste allusions. In the moment when Marcel is still joyous at having experienced the spires at Martinville dancing free of time-space constraints, and has just initiated his literary career with his first composition, the narrator notes the boy’s sudden pleasure at a japoniste vision of apple blossoms silhouetted against the sunset. But this profound aesthetic joy is inextricably associated with the single most painful loss in the novel, his mother’s goodnight kiss, and the bridge between them is again Japanese:

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Mais quand sur le chemin de retour ... il n’y avait plus qu’à prendre une allée de chênes bordée d’un côté de prés appartenant chacun à un petit clos et plantés à intervalles égaux de pommiers qui y portaient, quand ils étaient éclairées par le soleil couchant, le dessin japonais de leurs ombres, brusquement mon coeur se mettait à battre, je savais qu’avant une demi-heure nous serions rentrés et que ... on m’enverrait me coucher sitôt ma soupe prise, de sorte que ma mère, retenue à table comme s’il y avait du monde à dîner, ne monterait pas me dire bonsoir dans mon lit. La zone de tristesse où je venais d’entrer était aussi distincte de la zone où je m’élançais avec joie, il y avait un moment encore, que dans certains ciels une bande rose est séparée comme par une ligne d’une bande verte ou d’une bande noire. (II.182–3) The narrator depicts the familiar japoniste view of silhouetted blossoms at sunset as signal for the child’s greatest fear and loss. The “dessin japonais de leurs ombres” is the hinge between artistic joy and emotional pain, a focal aesthetic midpoint between these two “zones” that will constitute the dual worlds of the novel. Proust practises a literary japonisme for its imagery of indeterminate demarcations. As though to underscore the association, he continues to elaborate this visual “goût japonais” in the balance of the passage, using a well-known motif from the woodblocks by Hokusai and Hiroshige:14 “On voit un oiseau voler dans le rose, il va en atteindre la fin, il touche presque au noir, puis il y est entré .... Et de la sorte c’est du côté de Guermantes que j’ai appris à distinguer ces états qui se succèdent en moi ... ” It is first in japoniste imagery and terms of description that Marcel learns the essential reality—what he will later term the “vérité profonde”—of his successive selves. However deeply interior the truths to which they point him, the japoniste analogues remain pictural and exterior, integral with the natural scene. Marcel learns in A l’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleur to use the familiar spears of apple blossoms in the Japanese manner, keeping a branch in his Paris room so that he may imagine the trees at Combray. The iconography of japoniste blossoms and silhouetted light has acquired considerable force by the time of Marcel’s visit to Elstir’s studio. By the end of Sodome et Gomorrhe he can instantly perceive how “l’horizon lointain de la mer fournissait aux pommiers comme un arrière plan d’estampe japonaise” (II.781). In exaltation at such natural beauty summoning associations with Japanese art, the aesthetic role of the “estampe japonaise” is now overt, and the associated sense of pain remains: “Mais elle [cette beauté] touchait jusqu’aux larmes

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parce que, si loin qu’elle allât dans ces effets d’art raffiné, on sentait qu’elle était naturelle ... ” The pain in this scene of resplendent springtime, producing Marcel’s last moment of almost unalloyed joy in nature, procedes from the knowledge that it will vanish and die because it is not art, even the Japanese art that catches nature on the wing and in the instant, but nature. These are the vanishing moments that Marcel must learn to record in writing (as the narrator is doing in japoniste prose) to preserve them from time. The allusions to the woodblock prints are increasingly associated with artistic creation. It is the narrator who points out in japoniste terms how badly Marcel blunders with Gilberte on the Champs Elysées (he should have been content to love her at a distance without worrying whether the image corresponds to the reality, “imitant ces jardiniers japonais qui, pour obtenir une plus belle fleur, en sacrifient plusieurs autres,” I.401). In Du Côté de chez Swann Marcel is too young to envision love like a Japanese garden, which cultivates representations of absence rather than entrammelling realities.15 But later in Le Temps retrouvé, by the time he visits Gilberte de Saint Loup at Swann’s old house (“un peu trop campagne”), it is Marcel who implicitly criticizes her for not having japoniste wallpaper: “ces grandes décorations des chambres d’aujourd’hui où sur un fond d’argent, tous les pommiers de Normandie sont venus se profiler en style japonais” (III.697). This particular allusion operates, like the wooblock sunset reflected on the glass at Balbec, to introduce an aesthetic problem and its imminent resolution. In this scene, Marcel is again musing in bed, on the eve of his retreat from Paris into a sanitorium, and remembers seeing a sun-splashed image of the Combray church spire reflected that morning on the bedroom windowpane. Like the absent japoniste wallpaper that he only imagines, the Church spire was only an image, yet more real in its suggestiveness than the actual church, than the florid realistic European wallpaper on the walls: “Non pas une figuration de ce clocher, ce clocher lui-même, qui, mettant ainsi sous mes yeux la distance des lieues et des années, était venu ... s’inscrire dans le carré de ma fenêtre” (III.697–8). He now “sees” imagined and remembered images as superior ones, and the language for the Japanese wallpaper and the crucially telescopic Combray spire are interchangeable (“sont venus se profiler,” “était venu ... s’inscrire”). Marcel is still unaware of the importance of this perception for his later aesthetic of metaphor as timespace telescope. Instead of pursuing the thought, he turns to read the Journal of the Goncourts, and finds it so banal that he abandons his literary ambition. With Proust’s extraordinary skill at literary mimicry, he could have used several contemporary writers for the final pastiche. It is no accident

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that, against the background of Marcel’s increasing sophistication in Japanese aesthetics, he uses France’s leading, if pompous and outdated japoniste.16 Following Marcel’s wide readings in French literature and his disquisitions on Tolstoy and Dostoevski, the Goncourt Journal brings him to the European literary present and notably to the first instance in the Recherche of literary japonisme. The Loti was only burlesqued, but the Goncourt is ostensibly quoted. As Jean-Yves Tadié says, this “pastiche le plus important ... confronte deux moments du temps, deux mondes, deux esthétiques [la littérature classique et le roman proustien], deux genres littéraires” (606). As such a focal moment in the apprenticeship, the Goncourt pastiche is also the last bit of satirical japonaiserie and the main literary link between Marcel’s story and the narrator’s japoniste discourse. The narrator uses their hamfisted japonisme as an index of the Goncourts’ failure as writers to reach deeper truths about the social comedy and to discern aesthetic value. The Goncourt text inverts the basic features of japonisme. The first indication occurs immediately, when the Goncourts dither over Verdurin’s book on Whistler by praising the surface “joliesses.” Then they adore the way the Verdurin table is decorated, “rien qu’avec des chrystanthèmes japonais,” and of course the Japanese salad, even its presentation on Chinese plates. Most telling, by contrast with Marcel’s later reflections, Proust has the Goncourts comparing the light effects of sunset on Trocadero buildings to pink pastries (III.712). The pastiche scrambles some two dozen Orientalist allusions (including a movable room in the Mille et une nuits) with neither taste nor any aesthetic discrimination. The Goncourts’ japonisme, far from adding to French literature new artistic perspectives or methods, is merely decorative veneer and boring. The pastiche ends abruptly and, without transition, the narrator resumes years later, as Marcel is strolling through wartime Paris one evening during the black-out. The wartime prologue introduces the novel’s final section, leading to Marcel’s apotheosis as an artist in his own right, and its first long (three-page) paragraph is largely a function of literary japonisme. The Japanese allusions are prominent not only in Marcel’s visual apprehensions of the capitol but also in his French and European aesthetic references articulating what he sees in artistic terms. The first sentence adapts a familiar motif from Hokusai, that of small dark smudges against a distant sky which, upon close examination, are revealed to be birds in flight (III.734). But then these smudges become airplanes. The japonisme once restricted to natural beauty now obtains in the wartime city. Moonlight now silhouettes buildings and trees—not in the precious Goncourt style of a social japonisme producing pink pastries, but

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actually “en style japonais,” in an authentic transposition of the Japanese aesthetic to the scenes of Paris in snow and this entire “vision d’Orient” (III.737). The emphasis is no longer on resplendence but on simplicity, purity of line and form, spare vivid contrasting colors, delicacy of method, and suggestion of unstated essence; moreover, the Japanese aesthetic is allied with the European, in one mature dual vision: Les silhouettes des arbres se reflétaient nettes et pures sur cette neige d’or bleuté, avec la délicatesse qu’elles ont dans certaines peintures japonaises ... The focus on “nettes et pures” is exact and aesthetically accurate, as is the balance of the passage equilibrating the japoniste silhouettes with those familiar from the high backgrounds in Italian Renaissance painting: ... ou dans certains fonds de Raphaël; elles étaient allongées à terre au pied de l’arbre lui-même, comme on les voit souvent dans la nature au soleil couchant ... The silhouetted trees again “s’élèvent à intervalles réguliers,” but on a city prairie, une prairie paradisiaque, non pas verte mais d’un blanc si éclatant à cause du clair de lune qui rayonnait sur la neige de jade, qu’on aurait dit que cette prairie était tissue seulement avec des pétales de poiriers en fleurs. (III.736) Like a pendant to the narrator’s first extended japoniste prose in “Combray,” on the fluid water-lilies of the Vivonne with their effulgent sunlight and with their Dantesque undertones, this is a glacial landscape approaching fixity, not infernal now but paradisiacal, dazzling in its simplicity and grace. The white pear blossoms and the “neige de jade” keep the aesthetics of the japoniste perspective clear, as does the rest of the long description of icy fountains, starkly silhouetted houses, the woman at the window, ending on “le charme mystérieux et voilé d’une vision d’Orient.” Taken out of context, the final words are often cited as an allusion to the Arab tales, but they are an integral part of Proust’s japonisme in which the aesthetic of the Japanese prints amplifies Marcel’s vision. Marcel now commands the entirety of his aesthetic heritage, which includes the japonisme that trained Elstir’s vision and has now helped train his.

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Following immediately after the Goncourt pastiche, overleaping years left in silence or in literally blank space on the page, this extended passage counters it like a rebuttal. This is what japonisme can do in verbal art: reunite scattered motifs in a tight iconography of seeing and rework them in a new vision of a cityscape compounded of anterior thematics, from Combray to Balbec and from natural images to refined artifice, lending the modern writer the amalgamated vision of East and West for use in his own unique creation. As Marcel proceeds to the Matinée, fully prepared for the discoveries he is to make, there are no more Japanese allusions until the novel recommences, coming to consciousness in the japoniste cup of tea. In the modernist round of the novel, then, Proust’s japonisme serves subtly and recurrently to advance the apprentice’s progress preparatory to the writing of this text. In society, in love, in paintings and in artworks, the diverse japonisme of other characters trains his eye and challenges his aesthetic and literary judgment to develop an authentic “goût japonais.” The narrator’s prose japonisme in “Combray” is painterly, imbedding the boy’s first strong visual and emotional impressions, and his first efforts at writing, in visual imagery often derived from the prints. Certain iconic images, such as japoniste apple blossoms and silhouetted trees, later reappear in typically Proustian fashion, threading childhood memories through adult impressions and, increasingly, artistic reflections. Isolated japoniste views, including seascapes and sunsets, grow in intensity and complexity until Marcel learns to plumb, rather than dismiss their uniqueness in his visual and artistic experience. In artistic method, indeterminacy holds the lesson of metaphor. Contrast offers a depiction of successive selves. Suggestion reflects the truth of imaginative completion of absent wholes from parts. Throughout his japonisme Proust stresses two continuous refrains, an emotional sadness in pain at impending loss (associated with the evanescence of beauty in nature) and an imaginative reconstruction of absent or concealed essence, that is, anticipatory grief and retrospective creation. In both cases, as in the Recherche as a whole, Japanese art delicately depicts natural beauty that is completed by the mind in revery, first on the artwork then on itself. Proust’s several uses of japoniste imagery reflected on glass recapitulate in graphic terms the mental process, the inward turning from Japanese art which is always positioned between nature and imagination. Many elements fuel Marcel’s apprenticeship, and japonisme is only a minor vein running through the whole. The care and consistency with which Proust deploys it, however, signal its importance to the text’s primary artistic aims and methods. To miss Proust’s japonisme can lead to skewed readings, particularly of such focal components as the madeleine, the Vivonne, the

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wartime prologue. In her fine analysis of oral elements in the teacake, for instance, Julia Kristeva notes the Japanese metonymy but like most readers overlooks its artistic import, and instead infers a geographical function aimed at establishing a maximum distance between the birthplace and a foreign country (Kristeva 48–9). Several such puzzling references fall into place once Japan is recognized as the provenance of a new aesthetic—not only to the Impressionists but also to Marcel. Such Japanese allusions work together to build a counter-system to the impasse Marcel has reached in his heritage as a modern Western writer. The artist-figures, for instance, rise or fall in japoniste terms. Because Marcel must become the only great writer, the literary equivalent of Elstir in painting and Vinteuil in music, Marcel twice repeats that the painter spent years studying Japanese art (the second time occurs apropos of the Guermantes collection, when Marcel reiterates that Elstir “avait été longtemps impressionné par l’art japonais,” II.125). But the novelist Bergotte is not allowed a japoniste period, being instead insistently associated with mere “chinoiserie.” Norpois refers to his “chinoiseries de forme,” and even the “petit pan de mur jaune” in the Vermeer painting, which exposes to him his own limitations as a writer, is likened to a specimen of Chinese art, revealing to Bergotte the pointlessness and aridity of all art, including his own. It is again Norpois who dismisses such “symboliste” writing (in terms once used by Proust) as hothouse products of Mallarmé’s chapel.17 Bergotte and the previous generation are relegated to an arid Orientalism, quite notably not japoniste. Ultimately, it is the literary figures who matter most to Marcel’s success. Proust positions him to succeed where others fail, dismissing Bergotte’s Orientalism as superficial and mocking the “horripilant” japonisme of his most celebrated predecessors in this vein, Loti and the Goncourts. Unlike them, but like Elstir, Marcel enjoys a true japoniste apprenticeship. He learns the “way of seeing” present in Japanese arts, and integrates it into his own novelistic vision and historical reflections. The global aesthetic summa that is the Recherche becomes, in turn, his legacy as a writer. Proust’s contrastive use of Japanese arts to articulate Marcel’s aesthetic originality helps explain, I think, why some readers find the Recherche “Buddhistic.” Paul Claudel, French ambassador to Japan (1921–27) and a literary japoniste himself, was the first to note that Marcel’s posture toward nature recalls religious properties of the Japanese aesthetic. In 1912, in the course of explaining the concept of mono no aware in Japanese painting and poetry, Claudel wrote:

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[La nature] tremble à tous moments sur la limite de l’ineffable! Il s’agit de la surprendre à l’instant voulu, si fragile! .... C’est ce que certains mystiques japonais appellent le sentiment du Ah! en anglais le Ah! awareness. (Il y a aussi certains pages à ce sujet dans l’oeuvre de Marcel Proust.)18 Marguerite Yourcenar called the Recherche “cette oeuvre si bouddhiste, par la constation du passage [du temps], par l’émiettement de toute personnalité extérieure, par la notion du néant et du désir ... ”19 Yourcenar recognized that such observations are useful only to a point, and that most Buddhists would dispute such basic Proustian concepts as “la psychologie dans l’espace” or the ontic function of metaphor. Recently, however, the art historian Yann Le Pichon has suggested that Marcel’s rapt attention to the natural object (such as the hawthorns) might be the result of Zen teachings in “la disponsibilité intrinsèque du peintre pour s’adonner à l’éveil parfait,” or in Proustian terms “[au] moi essentiel.”20 Obviously Proust is a major figure in the shift from mimetic to affective poetics in French narrative. But I doubt that he actually considered the Buddhist metaphysics underlying Japanese aesthetics, beyond perhaps general queries about the notion of an impersonal subject.21 At the least, however, it is certain that in A la Recherche du temps perdu Proust uses the formal properties of the Japanese aesthetic contrastively, to challenge outworn mimetic assumptions and to point the way for new ambitions in French literature.

NOTES 1. Philippe Burty coined the word in his article “Japonisme” (La Renaissance artistique et littéraire [May 1872] 25–6) to designate “a new field of study” in Japanese art and aesthetics (see Weisberg xi). Although popular usage today scarcely differentiates between terms, art historians make the useful distinction that japonisant designates someone who collects or studies Japanese arts without creatively reworking them, and japoniste denotes someone who applies Japanese principles and models in Western creative works. Thus the gallery-owner Durand-Ruel was a japonisant but Monet was a japoniste. Champfleury coined the noun japoniaiserie in 1872 as a pejorative term for what he considered mindless popular enthusiasm for Japanese arts and curios, but the only surviving pejorative is japonaiserie; thus Toulouse-Lautrec “did not lapse into mere japonaiserie.” See Berger 210. 2. See Edmond de Goncourt, Journal for 9 April 1884; Berger 1–2. 3. The only extensive survey of such Japanese allusions by French writers is William Leonard Schwartz’s The Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in French Literature: 1800–1925 (Paris: Champion, 1927) which is primarily a catalogue of

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similes and includes mention of Huysmans and the Goncourts’ Les Frères Zemganno. In 1981 Elwood Hartman amplified Schluartz’s Japanese section in his article “Japonisme and Nineteenth-Century French Literature” (Comparative Literature Studies 18.2 [June 1981]: 141–66). Earl Miner surveyed British writers’ usage in The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1958). More recently, Michel Butor sketched a few French writers’ ideas of Japan in Le Japon depuis la France (Paris: Hachette, 1995). After the present article was completed, Yann le Pichon published a short meditation “L’Influence du japonisme dans l’oeuvre de Proust” (Revue des Deux Mondes [October 1996]: 125–39), outlining a notion of Proust’s inspiration by Zen; see note 19 below. 4. In 1997, while this article was in press, Luc Fraisse published his monograph Proust et le japonisme (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1997) showing in fine detail the japonisant milieu of Paris in the Belle Epoque (Fortuny gowns, Gallé glass) as social background to the novel; Fraisse does not pursue Proust’s use of the Japanese aesthetic as a whole, primarily because of what he considers Proust’s habitual mixture of Orients—Japanese, Persian, Chinese—and consequent absence of an “emploi exclusif du motif japonais” (37). 5. For instance, it was at Hélène Bibesco’s salon that he met Pierre Loti (whom young Proust had proclaimed his favorite novelist—along with Anatole France, another japonisant—and who was the author of the wildly popular Madame Chrystanthème) and that he regularly talked with the japoniste painters Bonnard and Vuillard (Painter I.54, 57, 195). So reverent was his admiration for the great japoniste Whistler, one of the originals for Elstir, that Proust surreptitiously kept a pair of gloves the painter had left behind after their meeting at Méry Laurent’s villa. She and her famed lovers, Degas then Mallarmé, had become “converted,” says Painter, “to Japanese art,” and Proust was not the only one who went to the villa to meet the leading practitioners of japonisme (Painter I.218, Tadié 308). 6. For example, during the period when Proust was a member of the rédaction of Le Mensuel (November 1890 to September 1891) the review published, among other japonisant pieces, an article in July of 1891 by Proust’s friend Raymond Koechlin about Edmond de Goncourt’s new book Outamaro (Tadié 144 n.4). It was Félix Fénéon, long-time editor of La Revue Blanche, who coined the phrase “Bonnard japonard,” and who directed many of the japonisant interests of the review; see Joan Ungersma Halperin, Félix Fénéon, Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, New Haven: Yale UP, 1988: 232–4. 7. Robert de Montesquiou, for example, had been a noted collector of Japanese art since first encountering it at the Exposition of 1878, schooling his taste with the advice of Heredia, the Goncourts, and Sarah Bernhardt, as he recounts in his memoirs Les Pas effacés. Montesquiou created a notoriously effete “oriental” sanctum in his apartments on the Quai d’Orsay, possessed a wealth of fine Japanese artworks plus five major books of Japanese art history by the 1920’s, and employed the gardener Hata to build a Japanese garden at his later residence in the Rue Franklin, which Proust often visited, and then another at Versailles. (See Montesquiou 118, 123, 181–4, 216–24; Schwartz 92–3). Montesquiou is remembered less for such japonisant poems as “Thérapeutique” than for other writings and his role as literary model to Huysmans and Proust. 8. Samuel Bing was the leading importer of Japanese art from about 1874 to

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1914, as well as owner of one of the finest, and most often exhibited, private collections of classical and modern Japanese art in Paris; it was he who founded the influential review Le Japon artistique (1888–91). Proust apparently bought Japanese artworks from Bing’s as gifts, including “une garde de sabre pour [Robert de] Billy” (Tadié 424). See Gabriel Weisberg. Art Nouveau Bing: Paris Style 1900, Catalogue for the travelling Smithsonian Exhibition, New York: Abrams, 1986. 9. Proust’s review “Les Éblouissements par la comtesse de Noailles” was first published in Le Figaro (15 June 1907), and reprinted in Nouveaux Mélanges in 1954; the text quoted here is from Proust, Essais et articles, ed. Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre, Paris: Gallimard, 1994, pp.229–41:237. Proust notes that one poem so well renders sensation, “fugace” but prolonged in the text, that it seems to him “une des plus étonnantes réussites, le chef-d’oeuvre peut-être, de l’impressionnisme littéraire” (my emphasis, 239). 10. Without referring to the bonsai metaphor, Jean-Yves Tadié suggests that this review of Eblouissments “contient une esthétique,” based on metaphor used as “impressionnisme littéraire,” quoting the review: “c’est la métaphore qui ‘recompose et nous rend le mensonge de notre première impression,’ la comparaison qui ‘substitue à la constation de ce qui est, la résurrection de ce que nous avons senti (la seule réalité intéressante)’” (Tadié 581–2). 11. At Giverny Proust would have seen the Japanese bridge over the waterlilies, not to mention the hundreds of Japanese prints that still hang in the painter’s house. There is no record of whether Proust ever carried out this intention; see Painter I.207, II.94; Tadié 598. Monet began the water-lily studies around the turn of the century, exhibited some of them periodically in Paris then many of them in Paris in 1909, and completed them in 1922. On Proust’s relations to the painters, see the still useful study by Maurice Chernowitz, Proust and Painting (NY: International University Press, 1945), and Marine Blanche’s Poetique des tableaux chez Proust et chez Matisse (Birmingham, AL: Summa, 1996). 12. In this play from 1887, at a dinner party one character asks why the salad is called “la salade japonaise,” and receives the comic reply, “Pour ce qu’elle ait un nom; tout est japonais, maintenant” (Act I, Scene 2) 13. This mise en abîme, of the Verdurins’ Japanese salad within a pastiche of a famous japoniste describing the Verdurin’s Japanese salad, is a common structure in Proust’s passages on artworks. See Peter Collier, “La mise en abyme chez Proust,” in Philippe Delaveau, ed., Ecrire la peinture (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1991) 125–40. 14. The Japanese motif of the bird flying from shadow into light or vice versa was used by several French painters and by such writers as the Goncourts in Manette Salomon and Paul Claudel in L’Oiseau noir dans le soleil levant. Other common motifs include the eddying waters, the cresting wave, the silhouetted blossoms, the bridge, the snow-dusted branch, the alighting bird, the slanting rain; on such motifs, see Wichmann 74–153. 15. The narrator replicates this japoniste lesson in La Prisonnière, with love letters and a kimono. After Marcel watches Albertine sleeping, he stares at her kimono draped over a chair; the interior pocket contains her letters, and Marcel is alternately desperate to read them and fearful of discovering proof of her infidelities, “Mais (et peut-être j’ai eu tort) jamais je n’ai touché au kimono .... ce kimono qui

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peut-être m’eût dit bien des choses” (III.73–4). The contrasting Japanese associations, around the two women and two sets of letters, measure the distance from childish hopes to cynicism. 16. Jules and Edmond de Goncourt were prominent collectors of Japanese art and defenders (inventors, they once claimed) of japonisme, as described in their autobiographical La Maison d’un artiste; following Jules’s death, Edmond de Goncourt published Outamaro, le peintre des maisons vertes (1891) and Hokousaï (1896). See Hubert Juin, “Préface” to Edmond de Goncourt, Outamaro, Hokusaï (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1986) 5–16. Although they were early pioneers in the japonisant movement along with Félix Braquemond and Philippe Burty, they disliked modern japoniste painting and were soon sidelined as interpreters of the Japanese aesthetic by Louis Gonse, Samuel Bing, Henri Focillon and others less committed to the Goncourt’s focus on the miniature and the exotic. See Berger, Wichmann; also Deborah Johnson, “Reconsidering Japonisme: The Goncourts’ Contribution,” Mosaic 24.2 (Spring 1991): 59–71. 17. In “Contre l’obscurité,” originally published in La Revue Blanche (15 July 1896), Proust inveighs against the willed obscurities of the Symbolists; rpt in Proust, Essais et articles 86–91. 18. Paul Claudel, Oeuvres en Prose, eds. Jacques Petit and Charles Galpérine, coll. Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1965): 524. 19. Letter of Marguerite Yourcenar to Jean Mouton (7 April 1968), Yourcenar Archive, Harvard University; qtd. in Elyane Dezon-Jones, “De l’universalité des influences: un écrivain peut en cacher un autre,” in Maria Jose Vazquez de Parga, ed., L’Universalité dans l’oeuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar. 2 vols. Tours: Société Internationale des Etudes Yourcenariennes, 1994 and 1995; II [1995]. 23–33: 32 20. Yann Le Pichon’s brief essay on “L’Influence du japonisme dans l’oeuvre de Proust” (Revue des Deux Mondes [October 1996]: 125–39), appearing after the NEMLA session on Proust and the completion of this article, cites some additional letters referring to Japanese art, some references in Jean Santeuil, mentions Odette’s furnishings, but focuses on the japonisme of the Impressionists as Proust’s models and on the Zen-like “émotions esthétiques” of Marcel in nature. Le Pichon perhaps overstates the case for Zen in Proust, but clearly the Japanese concept of the artist as translator of affect into signs of the natural world merits consideration in studies of Proust’s aesthetic ideas. As Le Pichon says, Proust’s japonisme is a “sujet quasi inédit et pourtant évident” (125). 21. For a discussion of Japanese “affective-expressive” poetics, versus Western mimetic traditions, see Earl Miner, Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990)

WORKS CITED

Berger, Klaus. Japonismus in der westlichen Malerei: 1860–1920. Munich: PrestelVerlag, 1980. Trans. David Britt. Japonisme in Western Painting From Whistler to Matisse. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.

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Butor, Michel. Le Japon depuis la France. Paris: Hatier, 1995. Cahier Marcel Proust 10: Poèmes, ed. Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier. Paris: Gallimard/NRF, 1982. Kristeva, Julia. Proust and the Sense of Time. Trans. Stephen Bann. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Le Pichon, Yann. “L’Influence du japonisme dans l’oeuvre de Proust.” Revue des Deux Mondes (October 1996): 125–39. Martins Janeira, Armando. Japanese and Western Literature, A Comparative Study. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1970. Montesquiou, Robert de. Les Pas effacés. 3 vols. Paris: Emile-Paul, 1923. Painter, George D. Marcel Proust: A Biography. 2 vols. NY: Random House, 1959. Proust, Marcel. A la Recherche du temps perdu. 3 vols. Eds. Pierre Clarac and André Ferré. Paris: Pléiade/Gallimard: 1954 Rousset, Jean. Forme et signification. Paris: Jose Corti, 1984. Schwartz, William Leonard. The Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in Modern French Literature: 1800–1925. Paris: Champion, 1927. Sussman, Henry. The Hegelian Aftermath: Readings in Hegel, Kierkegaard, Proust, and James. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. Tadié, Jean-Yves. Marcel Proust. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Weisberg, Gabriel et al. Japonisme: Japanese Influence on French Art 1845–1910. Catalogue for the Exhibition, Cleveland, 1975. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1975. Rpt 1988. Wichmann, Siegfried. Japonisme. Trans. Olivier Séchan. Paris: Chêne: 1982.

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ou can return to a book, but you cannot return to yourself. I had remembered Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as a memoir driven by a nostalgic yearning for the past. Yet when I went back to it after a period of twenty years, Proust’s research, in fact, turned out not to be about nostalgia at all. Rather, he frames a critique of such willful yearning and poses a certain form of aesthetic practice as counter to it. Proust’s many-volumed book bears an analogue to memory, but not to experience; it opens on a world already shaped by desire, but in its manifold of sensual particulars it reveals far more than the reader would expect it to reveal, and in its layers of coincidence it creates an art that is counter to the temporality of everyday life. Through such detail and coincidence, Proust draws us out of our social conventions for structuring time. Those structures themselves are created in light of the inimitable fact of death and the inevitable transformation of the world around us from a world inhabited and engaged by the living to a world haunted and inflected by the dead. Our relations to the dead, unlike our relations to the articulated systems of time consciousness, take place under the opposed, yet interconnected, conditions perhaps most clearly and rigorously explored in Proust’s research: the forms of voluntary and involuntary memory. Proust makes evident the futility of volitional memory as expressed in nostalgia. He shows how nostalgia’s willfulness is

From Raritan 19, no. 2 (Fall 1999). © 1999 by Raritan: A Quarterly Review.

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compensatory to our submission to time and, simultaneously, how nostalgia, as a dream of the recreation of what is lost in the ongoing flow of experience, is doomed to an inauthentic form. Proust himself claims, in Within a Budding Grove, that the names designating things in the world correspond only to the intellect and thus remain alien to our true impressions. But it may be useful to trace the etymology of nostalgia as it gives evidence to an evolution out of the original Greek words nostos, or return home, and algia, a painful condition—an evolution from physical to emotional symptoms, rather than a continuing state. In a famous passage in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton discussed nostalgia as “a childish humour to hone after home,” arguing against those “base Icelanders and Norwegians” who prefer their own “ragged islands” to Italy and Greece, “the gardens of the world.” In the late seventeenth century, nostalgia was diagnosed by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer as an extreme homesickness suffered by his fellow countrymen as they fought as mercenaries far from their native mountains. The symptoms Hofer described were lability of emotion, ready weeping, wasting away, despondency, and, in some cases, suicide. In the early modern period the notion continues that nostalgia involves not merely a desire for return in time, but also a condition consequent to a severing from a place of origin. Thus nostalgia is linked to conditions of exile—whether exile from place or from childhood itself. Such varieties of nostalgia based upon a longing for return might be addressed by a psychoanalytic model of the replete relation the infant bears to the mother’s body. Yet when we juxtapose these descriptions of an early modern illness to many twentieth-century versions of nostalgia, we find a transformation from a singular, yet potentially universal, emotion, based on an individual’s attachment to a site of origin and plentitude, to a somewhat ironic link between nostalgia and novelty—the capacity of contemporary culture to recycle history as commodity. This may not indicate a change in emotion—perhaps the authentic emotion remains in all of us—but now we have an attempt to market or “package” an emotion. Before we accept nostalgia under such packaged terms, terms that could only illumine the varieties of voluntary memory, we might give further attention to the dialectic between conscious and unconscious forms of return. From Freud, we receive a model of return based upon the emergence of what has been repressed. From the work of various social theorists—for example, Vladimir Jankélévitch’s L’Irréversible et la nostalgie and Fred Davis’s Yearning for Yesterday—we receive a model of return prompted by alienation from modernity and tending toward collective and legitimating forms of

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identification such as nationalism. And in Nietzsche, as in Proust, return is linked to the happiness consequent to the pursuit of truth, a truth only inferable in the recursive conditions of the retrospective view. In each of these models, we find a search for finite conditions of contingency. Such models imply a theological aspect, for they seek to mediate the separations between finite objects, finite subjects, and the infinite power of whatever is outside of human consciousness. Nevertheless, when theorists of nostalgia think of this emotion in relation to history, and to the chronological formation of history, they may be beginning without giving adequate consideration to our conventions of time. The philosophy of time in the West has turned continually to the problem of time’s status as a derived order of being. Plato, for example, argued in the Timaeus that time was not an aspect of eternity or a dimension of space and matter, but rather a product of our sensations working in combination with our beliefs, for time is something that becomes and changes rather than something belonging to the unchanging realm of reality. Aristotle dissented from Plato’s view, arguing that time was not so much created out of a timeless eternity as that eternity is an endless series of moments and time is a measure applied to motion. In Aristotle, the continuity of our awareness of our own being is necessary for our recognition of moments constituting the time-continuum. Whether following Plato, and later Plotinus, and arguing for time as a rational ordering of eternity, or following Aristotle and arguing for time as a measure of motion, each model of time consciousness implicates a corresponding model of subjectivity. Augustine presents a radical turn when he stops seeing time as a mark of change in nature and begins to see time as a mode of human perception. He departs from temporal description in terms of fixed before-and-after sequences to account for the moving experiential perspective of past, present, and future. In Augustine’s argument, works of art are models of temporal order. By means of his famous discussion of a hymn by St. Ambrose, Augustine links a sound that starts, continues, and stops resonating to the past; the “not yet” under which we speak of the stopping of resonance exemplifies the future spoken of as the past and the present under which we are able to say that the sound “is resonating.” This present is already disjunctive to the presence of resonance, and thus we speak of the very passing of the present already in the past tense. In reciting Ambrose’s hymn, Augustine’s expectations regarding the anticipated closure of the work turn continually toward what remains of it, enacting the process by which the present relegates the future to the past. In Augustine’s model the individual soul must provide the continuity of such change. He argues

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that it is not really accurate to speak of separate perceptual moments because we only become aware of them through the continuity of past, present, and future—the continuity of the desiring self. For Augustine, memory reminds humans of their opacity, of their difficulty in understanding and reflecting upon themselves as minds and as thinking subjects. Descartes was to borrow Augustine’s notion of the thinking subject, but he rejected memory proper and the tradition of the arts of memory since he considered a mathematical method to be a better alternative. In Descartes, the concept of order must supersede the less systematic and experiential type of knowledge achieved through memory. Descartes’s identification of the self-identity of human reason with sunlight is parallel to his rejection of temporality in favor of instant certitude. In Cartesianism, resemblance and difference are the grounds for authority and error. Proust, we will see, conducts his research as a kind of correction of this Cartesian model. In Proust’s search for lost time, forms of order and the instant certitude of resemblance and difference are the very sources of error; in scene after scene, Proust shows us that first impressions are the weakest, least reliable impressions. Only knowledge as a recursive aggregation leads to truth. Contemporary philosophers of time have continued to struggle with the relation between time consciousness and subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception argues in Kant’s shadow that the experience of time presupposes a view of time. But Merleau-Ponty also suggests that the subject has the capacity to introduce nonbeing into time experience: subjects have awareness of the past no longer lived and of a future not yet lived. By introducing nonbeing into the plenitude of being, subjects adumbrate perspectives and bring to the present that which is not there. Like Augustine, Merleau-Ponty opens up our sense of our relation to objects of nature and made things—objects that we animate in accordance with our memories and expectations of time consciousness. All theories of time confront two inevitabilities: first, the inevitability of sequentiality and the impossibility of repetition and, second, the inevitability of death and forgetting as symptoms not just of loss of the past, but of the decay of the self. Indeed, social conventions structuring time consciousness are the secular equivalents of Platonic eternity: by submitting ourselves to the constraints of the social order of time, we enter into a grid of temporal order that continues regardless of the interruptions posed by death. Such a grid, with its increasing distance from the uneven fluctuations of natural bases of temporal change, truly evades human intention and consequence. In the end the perpetuity of the mechanical clock becomes a second, more perfect nature, yet, in the absence of differentiating marks or

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periods, the hum of its repetitions signifies nothing at all. In his essay on Time, an unfinished and posthumously published work, Norbert Elias writes that the notion that time “takes on the character of a universal dimension is nothing other than a symbolic expression of the experience that everything which exists is part of an incessant sequence of events. Time is an expression of the fact that people try to define positions, the duration of intervals, the speed of changes and such like in this flow for the purpose of orientation.” The sun, moon, stars, and irregular movements of nature as sources of measure are replaced by a mesh of human inventions which then in turn appear as mysterious components of their own nature. This drift toward the eternalization of time, the imagination of a permanent form for time, Elias writes, is no doubt necessary in light of our fear of transience and death. Elias’s ideas are useful for considering the functions of voluntary memory. In discussing the conformity of the subject to social conventions of time, he further links our voluntary compliance with time control to our voluntary compliance with violence control; as social beings, we are willing to surrender our subjective experience of time and our capacity for physical extension. Voluntary memory creates generations, reinforces bonds, produces retrospective conformity, and molds social forms of ego ideals. Voluntary memory here is the foundation of social forms of nostalgia as well. As willed emotions, social nostalgias subjugate the senses and emotions to certain techniques of memory that are readily adapted into conventions of aesthetic forms. Although we may think of nostalgia as an emotion structured by prior, historical circumstances, we find, in fact, that the forms of nostalgia are quite codified. Further, the conventions of nostalgia often transcend the historical specificity that is nostalgia’s claim to particularity. Prominent among these conventions is the creation of a bounded context. This binding of circumstance and environment is readily yoked to ideologies of patriotism and nationalism that are the social forms of homesickness. The patriot’s claim regarding an unambiguous relation to a point of origin is a claim regarding the social authenticity of the self. Experience, in fact, is denigrated in such an ideology, for it is the steady identification of self and place that creates the authenticity of the patriot’s being. Colonialism rather than travel, village typicality rather than cosmopolitan flux—these nostalgic forms posit a mastery over context that finds its means in the politics of fascism and imperialism. Here nostalgia takes on its function of contributing to the distinctness of generations and social groups; in its demotion of individual experience, it produces retrospective conformity to a certain form of ego ideal.

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Nostalgic forms are also bound to a slowed temporality, whether the slow-motion effects of video and cinema or the slowing of tempo long associated with sentiment in music. We might consider the various slowed reunions in advertisements on television or, on a slightly more highbrow note, the deliberating funereal effects of Ravel’s “Pavanne for a Dead Princess,” played to the point of stupefaction in the autumn of 1997. Slowing down the view is a cue for affect. And in video and cinema, slow motion depends upon the distancing technique of a switch to the purely pictorial. Slow-motion speech, of course, is reciprocally comic! Nostalgia’s bounded slowness characterizes the backward view of a consumer society condemned to faster and faster demands for judgment and action. The speeding-up of experience in truth makes a parody of the very notions of judgment and action. Thus to speak of the willed aspect of nostalgia is to realize that nostalgia itself may stand in the background of contemporary life as a vestigial sphere of agency. Further nostalgic effects include the metonymic substitution of part for whole, as in the workings of souvenirs and fetishistic objects linked to prior contexts; the fixing of types within bounded contexts or landscapes, as in genre painting; the expression of mastery of nature and skill, as in miniaturization; an emphasis upon the repression of trauma, as in the positing of a moment of integrity before such trauma—think of all the nostalgia accruing around periods known as “prewar”; a presentation of idealized bodies as bodies ripe for reproduction; an emphasis upon appearances that is consequent to the shallowness of any world ensuing in the absence of temporal depth. The codification of nostalgic forms paradoxically helps to undermine the authenticity of nostalgic feeling: once nostalgia can be “worked up,” it transcends particular contexts and is unable to connect to what is specific in lived experiences. Proust reminds us, continually and quite literally, of this inevitable collapse of the stage of voluntary memory. In his work, willed memory is linked to the artificiality of simulation. The Verdurins demonstrate the register of simulation throughout the novel: their conformity to social models of time requires a constant modification of truth to convention and even a modification of truth to the knowing lie. Madame Verdurin takes on the task of continually reifying the boundary of her social world and manipulating the fates of others in the interest of articulating that limit. She is described as an actor in what is quite literally a “dumb show”: She would descend with the suddenness of the insects called ephemerids upon Princess Sherbatoff; were the latter within

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reach, the Mistress would cling to her shoulder, dig her nails into it, and hide her face against it for a few moments like a child playing hide and seek. Concealed by this protecting screen, she was understood to be laughing until she cried, but could as well have been thinking of nothing at all as the people who, while saying a longish prayer, take the wise precaution of burying their faces in their hands. Mme. Verdurin imitated them when she listened to Beethoven quartets, in order at the same time to show that she regarded them as a prayer and not to let it be seen that she was asleep. The great social success of Mme. Verdurin, who ascends in the end to the rank of the Guermantes, stems from her capacity to manipulate the bounds of context and her mastery of the social system of signs. As Gilles Deleuze noted in his Proust and Signs, the simulation of laughter was her particular speciality. The narrator, a figure “from whom all things are hidden,” intuits this register of simulation, and is at the same time tormented, even made paranoid, by sexual jealousy. This jealousy is bound to an inevitable illegibility of language and gesture, an illegibility built into the very arbitrariness of the relation between sign and meaning. Descartes was forced to admit in the Meditations that only memory can separate the states of waking and sleeping. In distinguishing between states of waking and sleeping, memory provides the continuity of the thinking subject. Proust’s critique of voluntary memory further erodes the certainty of immediate apprehension, collapsing the Cartesian model by showing the false bottoms of resemblance and the distorting lenses of what Proust calls “habit.” Consider, for example, two famous scenes in the novel of the Cartesian sorting between waking and sleeping: the initial waking at the beginning of Swann’s Way and the waking to the grandmother’s death. In the work’s well-known opening, the narrator describes the false start of waking in the night: [M]y eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself: “I’m falling asleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to look for sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was that immediate subject of my book.

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As he finds, in waking, that the subject of his book separates itself from him, and his sight is restored to a state of darkness, he thinks of the error of the sleeper who mistakes a gas lamp at midnight for the dawn. The force that keeps him awake is the desire to be united with the mother; the approach of sleep, like the approach of death, marks the end of desire. In this scene the narrator awakens to the mother’s absence, an awakening to which the proper response is a return to sleep. The second awakening occurs some time later, during the grandmother’s final agony. The narrator is here in fact awakened by the appearance of his mother. When she asks his forgiveness for disturbing his sleep, he answers that he was not asleep. He explains, The great modification which the act of awakening effects in us is not so much that of ushering us into the clear life of consciousness, as that of making us lose all memory of the slightly more diffused light in which our mind had been resting, as in the opaline depths of the sea. The tide of thought ... kept us in a state of motion perfectly sufficient to enable us to refer to it by the name of wakefulness. But then our actual awakening produces an interruption of memory. At the moment of her death, the grandmother opens her eyes. And then the narrator finds that from that day forward his mother sleep-walks through life, carrying the books and accoutrements of her mother as if the grandmother’s spirit literally went on to inhabit the body of her daughter. In these scenes, Proust explores the abeyance between life and death characterizing the state of waking; until the dawning of memory, there is no continuity in consciousness—the very continuity that enables one truly to recognize experience. The everyday mind, conscious only within the patterns of habit, is hardly distinguishable here from the sleeping mind. Marcel’s mother literally incorporates her grief, subsuming her experience to the carrying forward of her own mother’s presence through the totems of her purse and, in a doubling of communication between dead and living generations, her volumes of Mme. de Sévigné’s letters to her own daughter. Marcel comments: “death is not in vain ... the dead continue to act upon us. They act upon us even more than the living because, true reality being discoverable only by the mind, being the object of a mental process, we acquire a true knowledge only of things that we are obliged to recreate by thought, things that are hidden from us in everyday life ....in this cult of grief for our dead, we pay an idolatrous worship to the things that they loved.”

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Marcel himself becomes aware of the grandmother’s death only later as he reaches down to unbutton his boots on the occasion of his second visit to the Grand Hotel at Balbec. Within the frame of the room, and the silence of the party-wall where previously he and his grandmother had communicated by means of a private language of knocks, he recreates the reality of her life— her sacrifices on his behalf and the nature of her personality. Within the retrospective consciousness made possible by her absence and his grief, she comes forward into view. And only retrospectively do we as readers come to see that Marcel’s initial waking out of fear of the absence of his mother was a kind of prolepsis of the trauma of the grandmother’s death. During Marcel’s childhood it is the grandmother who functions as the mother, and after the grandmother’s death it is the mother’s turn to take on reciprocally the function of the grandmother/mother figure. Awaking to the scene of the grandmother’s death, Marcel cannot grasp its reality; it is in the involuntary compulsion of his own repetition of the fact of death and the involuntary compulsion of his mother’s representation of the grandmother, the carrying forward of her belongings like objects severed from a tomb, that her death permeates his consciousness. The novel continually links the domain of habit to the unthinking, the forgetting, by which death is put aside in the midst of everyday activity. In returning to the alienated condition under which the “subject of the book” is no longer the self, the reward is this false security of mindlessness regarding death. During the grandmother’s deathbed agony, the Duke of Guermantes arrives and with him a social whirl oblivious to what is happening in the sickchamber. In the famous scene of the red shoes, the Duchess of Guermantes is unable and unwilling to absorb the fact of Swann’s imminent death, even though it is Swann himself who is informing her of its certainty. Madame Verdurin, who is most expert at ignoring the real conditions of others’ lives as well as their deaths, is destined to become the paragon of the Guermantes in this sense. In The Fugitive, the narrator specifically states that “the wordly life [robs] one of the power to resuscitate the dead.” In Proust, whatever is indeterminate in thought is overwhelmed by temporal contingency: truth appears, and grants us happiness, in moments of insight linked to the retrospective consideration of sensual experience, the “making strange” of what previously had been a matter of assumption and ready certainty. As Gilles Deleuze has noted, Proust presents a sustained critique of philosophical positions that remain blind to their own contingent relation to external forces. This is not simply a matter of returning philosophical certainty to the historical conditions of its appearance, for such a return would be a further enactment of the false confidence of voluntary

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memory and habitual modes of explanation. For Proust, causality is never a sufficient or adequate explanation. We have only to think of the recurring theme of false etymologies for place names and ideas in the novel. This is not simply a matter of the pronouncements of Brichot, the Sorbonne Professor who is a purveyor of a kind of know-nothing knowledge and yet who is, in the end, endowed with dignity by the journals of the Goncourt brothers. The theme of unstable origins is at the heart of the split between name and blood in the social sphere of the aristocracy and in the constantly mistaken revisions of history performed by the war-time and postwar salons of the Verdurins and Odette de Forcheville. The plot as a whole works out an elaborate etymological pun wherein the fantastic world of Geneviève de Brabant and Gilbert the Bad revealed in the lantern slide comes to life as the Duchess of Guermantes is seen after mass in the chapel of Gilbert the Bad at Combray. Then, as Gilberte Swann is transposed to Mademoiselle de Forcheville, then Madame de Saint-Loup, and finally the Duchess of Guermantes, the two initial figures of legendary time are merged in one historical character. Female sexuality, the tormented uncertainty of jealousy, and the ambiguity of paternity further this theme of misplaced or catechrestic cause. The uncertain paternity of Gilberte, hinted at by the narrator’s discussion of her filial resemblance in physical terms to her mother and moral terms to her father, is contrasted to the finite nominalism of Charlus’s adoption of Jupien’s niece. The madrepore, whose own etymology speaks to the birth opening of the mother and the coral’s fabulous branching growth, can be seen in retrospect as the symbol of a secret and fluid lineage of female sexuality: Odette’s resemblance to Rachel, Rachel’s to Albertine, Albertine’s to Gilberte as earlier Gilberte herself had been the pattern for Albertine, and, finally, the grandmother to the mother. The narrator’s frantic jealousy wherein only homosexual, or like to like fraternal and paternal, relations eventually yield up certain knowledge and closure, is perhaps not simply bound to the structures of modernist patriarchy so much as a symptom of the signal absence of the father throughout the text. The narrator’s anguished relation to Albertine’s unintelligibility is rooted in his equally anguished vigil as he awaits his mother’s kiss goodnight, uncertain as to whether she will come or not. Here we find a deep structural relation between jealousy and nostalgia: both involve the projection of possible scenes and such projections are motivated by desire. Yet these scenes are also prohibited from actualization and thus suffer a defining lack of authenticity. Paranoia and anxiety inevitably accompany this collapse of sources and ends. Causal explanation is only one of a variety of mental processes taken up in Proust’s experiential and layered process of critique. If habit is the enemy

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of knowledge and friendship, and if voluntary memory is the willed distortion of truth, Proust offers the mindfulness of artistic making, the reframing of experience through mental activity, as the alternative. Generalization and convention prohibit originality and judgment, and the axiomatic tradition in French philosophy is itself shown to be a kind of binding of perspective. It is here that Proust contrasts the forms of reified boundary-making, of which nostalgia is only one mode of thought, to the forms of art. As nostalgia engages in historical thinking it is conditioned by habit and typification; in contrast, art produces new knowledge by means of form. Hence the recurrence of haze and outline as a dimension of nostalgic forms represents an attempt to place a boundary upon ambiguity. Nostalgia works a fixed and unidirectional figure/ground shift in which the context of the past, those elements of scene taken for granted when the past is a present sphere of action, becomes the figure of the past, and action is thereby circumscribed by mere scene setting. When the nostalgic viewer enters into the frame—stepping into the image as Keats does in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” as the jealous lover falls into his or her imagination, and as the timetravelers of popular cinema arrive in other worlds—the past’s completeness is a foil to intervention. The anachronistic visitor is passively situated as a viewer or, perhaps more accurately, as a dreamer overcome by a plot he has himself created but within which he cannot make an intervening gesture. For Proust, the aesthetic is tied to a negative and self-revising process of perspectivalism that is the opposite of such a nostalgic process. Aesthetic activity requires the constant modification of frame and a transposition of reality from one scene to another. Fixed perspective results in blocked perspective, as we find in the scene of the “watch-tower” wherein the narrator observes the tryst between Charlus and Jupien. Issues of fixed perspective come in for particular criticism in the recurrence of the theme of antisemitism in the text, in the rigid nondiscursive positions assumed by the Dreyfusards and antiDreyfusards, and in the account of the static social world during the Great War. Fixed dates appear in the text for the first time during the discussion of the war and we see here, as Elias proposed, the cohesion of time control and the organization of violence. Proust describes the war itself as “the monstrous reality under which there is nothing else visible.” It can be said that there are no minor characters in the novel, for Proust’s interest continually and vividly turns to the location of minor action, the world of servants, as a site wherein one can observe the unfolding of monumental consequences. In his essay on “The Image of Proust,” Walter Benjamin cited

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a passage from the writings of Princess Clermont-Tonnerre on this predilection: “And finally we cannot suppress the fact that Proust became enraptured with the study of domestic servants—whether it be that an element which he encountered nowhere else intrigued his investigative faculties or that he envied servants their greater opportunities for observing the intimate details of things that aroused his interest.” Of course, as in Nietzsche’s thought, the most evident device for retrospective readjustment is irony. Proust reminds us of the complete absence of irony in nostalgic forms and correlatively of the involuntary dimension of true irony. But there is also a Kantian aspect to Proust’s aesthetics, for beauty emerges in situations where categories of thought are not sufficient to account for the image and where the relations between figure and ground are suspended. The paintings of Elstir, wherein the sea is a city and the city is a sea; the image of the sea in the bookcases at Balbec; the constant association of Albertine with the sea’s transient, metamorphozing form; the turn to organic images, the hawthorns, apple trees, and flowers—all as fleeting in their expression as human faces and vice versa: these are a few of the examples of an aesthetic presentation that itself never brings back images and symbols in any fixed system of metonymy or order. Rather than pursuing forms of the nostalgic in his research into lost time, Proust suggests the irony underlying the nostalgic impulse. Nostalgia’s futility makes possible the practice of aesthetics and rescues the narrator’s practice from dilettantism—here seen as an incomplete commitment to whatever is disorienting, and therefore possibly significant, in the experience of temporality. Such an incomplete commitment would be dominated by a teleology of habit: when we find Saint-Loup assuming the gestures of Charlus, and the narrator following in the footsteps of Swann, we watch for the gesture of thought, the decision to act, that will deliver the subject from the relentless force of plot and typification. In his famous metaphor of the frieze of girls, Proust explores the relations between the temporal experience of subjectivity and a practice of art embedded in its own temporality. The model here is a continual shift in figure/ground relations and specifically the aesthetic history of the frieze. Albertine appears for the first time within this frieze, but, significantly, she appears without relief or individuality. As Beckett describes her in his 1931 study of Proust, she is one aspect of a hedge of Pennsylvanian roses against the breaking line of the waves. The cortege appears in motion, like figures animated in process or, more precisely, like figures who have emerged from their proper background—the sarcophagus that would seal them within a

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frame. When Albertine is later separated and made a captive, the narrator’s jealousy enacts a futile project of reification and possession. Albertine’s physical presence nevertheless retains the amorphous movement of the sea that is her proper context. The narrator’s dream of fixed form and possession is ironically fulfilled in her ensuing death and the atrophy of his interest. Here we find Proust taking up the theme of death as a modeler or carver. At the time of her death, the grandmother’s face is “almost finished” and, at the same time, “On that funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the Middle Ages, had laid her down in the form of a young girl.” In his classic essay on The Life of Forms in Art, written in the 1930s, Henri Focillon similarly described sculptural carving as “starting from the surface and seeking for the form within the block.” The touches of the sculptor become progressively closer and joined in an intimate interlocking of relationships. Yet in Proust, as a face comes into full relief, it is also on the threshold of oblivion and subject to the distortions of memory. The narrator explains that it is “only after one has recognized, not without some tentative stumblings, the optical errors of one’s first impression that one can arrive at an exact knowledge of another person, supposing such knowledge to be ever possible. But it is not; for while our original impression of him undergoes correction, the person himself, not being an inanimate object, changes for his part too: we think that we have caught him, he shifts, and, when we imagine that at last we are seeing him clearly, it is only the old impressions which we had already formed of him that we have succeeded in clarifying, when they no longer represent him.” He goes on to say that this continual task of “catching-up” with reality, linked to the proleptic expectation brought to all exchanges with others, is what protects us from the dreariness of an overly presumptuous habit. Years later, when the narrator sees a photograph of the girls, their faces blurred by similarities and by the viewer’s temporal distance, they are distinguishable only by their costumes. The costumes themselves are metonymic to social categories and even elements of design that transcend the temporality of any given subject. Albertine wears a Fortuny cape that can be found in one of Carpaccio’s Venetian genre scenes; an Assyrian relief is the prototype of the frock coat. All that emerges in high relief, in particular detail, is bound to be abraded back into surface and barely intelligible fragments of signs. Proust’s use of the concept of the frieze coincides in suggestive ways with the use of the concept in the turn-of-the-century aesthetic theories of Alois Riegl, especially his 1893 Stilfragen and 1901 Spatromische Kunstindustrie. As Michael Podro has explained in his useful review of Riegl’s work in The Critical Historians of Art, Riegl suggests that in antiquity, and

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particularly in the art of ancient Egypt, a concept of self-containedness predominates. Represented objects are unconnected with other objects in their respective contexts. Objects appear as continuous unbroken forms enclosed within a boundary, as in an ideal of the self as internally continuous and distinct from its surroundings. Such self-containedness had implications not merely for the relation of the object to context, but also for the relation of the representation to the spectator. Riegl argues that the spectator is invited to comprehend such art immediately through sensual perceptions and to rely as little as possible upon past experience and subjective projections. In addition to the separation of the object from its context and the separation of representation from the spectator, Riegl suggests that space is either denied or suppressed; he sees a maximum correspondence between the depicted object and the real surface of the relief or painting, and spatial effects of depth and projection are refused in favor of a sense of surface. Riegl goes on to claim that the classical relief begins to make a profound shift in this paradigm of self-containedness. In classical relief, relations between figures are admitted, modeling and the mobility of turning forms give a sense of the space in which they turn. There is a continuity between the space of the viewer and the space of the representation. This continuity comes into full flower in late antiquity—here relief requires limbs and folds of drapery to be carved so deeply that the unity of the figure is dissolved. Coherence is created by means of an optical plan that unites figures and their surroundings and which suggests a continuous optical space between real and represented worlds. Such a continuous space will develop into various perspectival forms known to Roman painting and will later be renewed in the Renaissance. In Riegl’s account, the history of art is characterized by a coming to the fore of an awareness of relationality. And this is precisely the ontogeny recapitulated by Proust in the phylogeny of the narrator’s consciousness. The frieze is the paradigm of the foreground/background shifts placed in constant mutability and of which the aggregation of the novel itself is the only accessible form. Here the capacity of the bookcase to reflect the sea is the capacity of the novel to reflect the mutability of the experience of time in ever-shifting and retrospectively selfadjusting views. The Arena Chapel frescoes of Giotto are a locus classicus for the novel; they mark the reawakening of the gestural in representation. Uniting the space of appearance with the space of apprehension, they mark the moment when human figures emerge from the world of objects to move and signify, much as the narrator hears his grandmother’s voice for the first time when it comes forward in the “relief” of a telephone call. These are figures suspended between the death of inert form and the life of

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comprehension. The frieze of girls moves forward into the indefinite reification of the photograph. The spectacle of soldiers in formation erases their particular subjectivity and dooms them to be sacrificed. But Giotto’s Paduan figures appear to be released from bonds of stone; it is the mental and form-giving activities of the artist here that rework the rules and conventions of representation itself. In The Fugitive Proust presents a summary of his ideas on memory and forgetting. Memory has no power of invention. It is spiritual and not dependent upon the world for its stimulation. It stems from our desire for the dead—not out of a need for love, but out of a need for the absent person, for the place to be filled. The counterforce of memory, forgetting, is so powerful an instrument of adaptation to reality because it gradually destroys in us the surviving past—a past that is in perpetual contradiction to it. Following the logic of this dialectic, we can see that the willed or voluntary forms of nostalgia that so relentlessly surround us are devices of forgetting in the costume of memory. The brilliant contribution of Proust’s book is his view of the tragic, relentless course of social life once, by means of our own willed confusion, it takes on the power of a form of nature. He imagines works of art structured beyond our habitual, imitative capacities as encompassing a practice of opening the present to the nonbeing of thought—such a practice would involve whatever thought can achieve given the contingencies of habit and the inevitability of death. In Proust’s great work we find a rejection of the plenitude of Bergsonian duration and of the positive implications of perspectivalism. Proust’s practice is the accommodation of the involuntary and unintelligible in the pursuit of truth. In this activity of mind resides the sublimity of the art work—a Kantianism wherein particularities are not anchored to habitual concepts but return, estranged from their functions. Happiness here is synonymous with aesthetic apprehension—an aesthetic apprehension that bears the contradictions of form-giving and form-eroding activities undertaken in time.

SARA DANIUS

Orpheus and the Machine: Proust as Theorist of Technological Change, and the Case of Joyce

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egend has it that when Orpheus sang and played his lyre, not only fellow mortals but also trees and rocks, even wild beasts, were stirred by the sublime sounds he produced. After the premature death of his young wife Eurydice, the grieving hero descended to the netherworld in the hope of rescuing her. He sang so beautifully that Hell was moved; even the Furies were spellbound, shedding tears for the first time. Orpheus was allowed to take Eurydice away with him on one condition, that both of them refrain from looking back until they had reached the land of the living. Walking in silence, they had almost reached the upper world when Orpheus wanted to ensure that his beloved was still behind him. He turned around; his gaze met hers. “See, again the cruel Fates call me back,” Eurydice cried, “and sleep seals my swimming eyes. And now farewell!” She vanished from sight, absorbed for the second time by the regions of the dead. For months on end, Orpheus roamed the world voicing his grief, but in vain. His fate was sealed when the women of Thrace tore his body to pieces and threw the limbs into a river. In Virgil’s rendering of the myth, Orpheus’ head floated down the current, his “disembodied voice” calling “with departing breath on Eurydice—ah, poor Eurydice!” Whereupon the banks echoed: “Eurydice, Eurydice.”1 The Orpheus myth revolves around love and death, around the powers of the gods and the vanity of humans, but it also tells a story about the eye

From Forum for Modern Language Studies 37, no. 2 (April 2001). © 2001 by Oxford University Press.

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and the ear: about the all-pervasive desire to look and the deadly power of the gaze, about the pleasures of listening and the animating power of the voice. In short, it is an allegory of the senses and, hence, of aesthetics.2 Throughout the history of aesthetic discourse, sight and hearing have been privileged over taste, smell, and touch. Sight and hearing are more readily disposed to abstraction, and this is partly why they have enjoyed such prominence in the history of aesthetics. According to Hegel, for example, sight and hearing are essentially theoretical senses. For this reason, they are also ideal senses. Taste, smell, and touch, by contrast, are practical senses. They involve consumption of the work of art in one way or other, and this must not be, for Hegel thinks of the work of art as an ideal site where spirit (Geist) and matter intersect. A privileged blend of pure sensuousness and pure thought, exteriority and interiority, art for Hegel is the sensuous objectivation of spirit. Consequently, only the eye and the ear are capable of respecting the integrity and freedom of the work of art. Of sight and hearing, however, hearing is the most ideal sense. It is the ear, and the ear only, that may establish the ideal correspondence between the inner subjectivity of the perceiver and the spiritual interiority of the object perceived. In this way, the perceiving subject receives and so in a sense corresponds to the object whose ideal, because spiritual, interior is mediated by the sounds it emits. Unlike the eye, then, the ear succeeds in apprehending both material objectivity and interiority, all at once. Such an idealist theory of aesthetic perception is circumscribed by a long philosophical tradition—the metaphysics of presence. Consequently, it is also marked by a certain historicity. Discussing Hegel’s hierarchy of the senses, Jacques Derrida suggests that Hegel could not imagine the machine, that is, a machine that functions by itself and that works, not in the service of meaning [sens], but rather in the service of exteriority and repetition.3 Derrida does not state it explicitly, but it is clear that after the advent of devices for reproducing sound, the sense of hearing can no longer be thought of as a priori ideal. Devices such as the telephone and the phonograph strip sound of what Hegel would call its soulful interiority, and the sensory experience of acoustic phenomena henceforth has to resort to an everreproducible exteriority. Of course, the same is true of sight: its assumed ideality is exploded in the wake of inventions such as photographic means of recording visual data. In short, from now on the potentially sublime operations of the eye and the ear know an internal cleavage. Few early twentieth-century writers have dramatised this aesthetic crisis as effectively as Marcel Proust. Describing the advent of modern technology, from the telephone and electricity to the aeroplane and the

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automobile, Remembrance of Things Past (1913–1927) offers numerous reflections on how technology affects human experience, particularly sensory experience.4 The film-maker Raul Ruiz’s adaptation of Proust, Time Regained (1999), is particularly sensitive to these aspects of Proust’s tale. Ruiz even invents scenes not to be found in the novel: in one sequence, the young narrator operates a film camera, as though the entire novel springs out of a cinematographic vision; in another, Vinteuil’s sonata is broadcast over a socalled théâtrophone, a popular telephone service that served to transmit music performances to listeners in the privacy of their home. But Proust’s novel more than dramatises technological change; it also delineates a psychology of such transformation, a psychology that may be grasped as a theory in its own right. I am thinking, in particular, of two episodes in The Guermantes Way (1920–21), the one revolving around a telephone conversation, the other reflecting upon photography. Read together, these episodes offer a meditation on the historicity of habits of listening and seeing. Proust as theorist? Such a perspective has been elaborated before. Malcolm Bowie, in his brilliant study of the epistemology of jealousy in Remembrance of Things Past, maintains that Proust’s novel is “one of the most elaborate and circumstantial portrayals of the theorising mind that European culture possesses”.5 And Siegfried Kracauer, in his widely influential Theory of Film (1960), approaches Proust as theorist of photography, basing his ontology of the photographic image in an analysis of the episode where Proust’s narrator reflects upon how he beholds his grandmother with a photographic eye.6 But Proust as theorist of technological change? Surely nothing could be further removed from the great themes of the novel: the primacy of involuntary memory, the priority of subjective time, and the virtues of immediate sensory experience. Yet, such a perspective alerts us to the richness and intelligence that inform Proust’s book, demonstrating that vast portions of it hardly fit into that famous cup of tea. The second advantage—and this is what I shall dwell on in this essay—is that the theory embedded in Proust’s episodes on telephony and photography yields a convenient point of departure for distinguishing the complex ways in which technologies of perception help reconfigure habitual ways of listening and seeing in the modernist period at large and, ultimately, how such change makes available new sensory domains that open themselves to artistic exploration, particularly in the realm of the novel. James Joyce’s Ulysses is a case in point. Indeed, to juxtapose Proust and Joyce, as I propose to do in this essay, is to historicise some of the most characteristic formal aspects of Joyce’s 1922 epic.

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Proust’s telephone episode relates the narrator’s very first telephone conversation with his adored grandmother.7 Transported across vast distances, from Paris to Doncières, her voice hits his ear as though for the first time—“a tiny sound, an abstract sound”.8 What amazes the narrator is that although the two of them are spatially separated, their conversation is simultaneous; indeed, despite the spatial distance, they share one and the same temporality. Put differently, the aural impression of the grandmother’s voice fails to coincide spatially with the visual impression of her bodily presence. For the narrator, this insight is deeply unsettling, and it immediately acquires symbolic proportions. But it also awakens the theorising mind whose speculative intelligence animates long stretches of Remembrance of Things Past. Turning around the dissociation of the eye and the ear, of what can be seen and heard, the uncanny experience triggers a Proustian psychology of telecommunication that stretches over half a dozen pages: It is she, it is her voice that is speaking, that is there. But how far away it is! [ ... ] A real presence, perhaps, that voice that seemed so near—in actual separation! But a premonition also of an eternal separation! Many were the times, as I listened thus without seeing her who spoke to me from so far away, when it seemed to me that the voice was crying to me from the depths out of which one does not rise again, and I felt the anxiety that was one day to wring my heart when a voice would thus return (alone and attached no longer to a body which I was never to see again), to murmur in my ear words I longed to kiss as they issued from lips for ever turned to dust. (REM 2: 135 / RTP 2: 432) In short, the narrator discovers his grandmother’s voice. Detached and disembodied, it hits him in all its baffling abstraction. Meanwhile, he also realises that he used to identify what he now perceives as “voice” by matching it with her face and other visual features. It is a dialectic moment, for what henceforth appears as having been an organic system of signification has just been sundered; and at the same time, this horizon of signs stands before him, suddenly and visibly revealed, now that it has been lost: “for always until then, every time that my grandmother had talked to me, I had been accustomed to follow what she said on the open score of her face, in which the eyes figured so largely; but her voice itself I was hearing this afternoon for the first time” (REM 2: 135 / RTP 2: 433).

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The narrator discovers not merely his grandmother’s voice; now that he perceives her “without the mask of her face”, he also hears, for the first time, “the sorrows that had cracked [her voice] in the course of a lifetime”. Dwelling inside her is a figure whom he has never yet apprehended, a figure inhabited by time. The narrator realises that his grandmother will die, and die soon, and the psychological impact of this insight is irreversible: “Granny!” I cried to her, “Granny!” and I longed to kiss her, but I had beside me only the voice, a phantom as impalpable as the one that would perhaps come back to visit me when my grandmother was dead. “Speak to me!” But then, suddenly, I ceased to hear the voice, and was left even more alone [ ... ]. It seemed to me as though it was already a beloved ghost that I had allowed to lose herself in the ghostly world, and, standing alone before the instrument, I went on vainly repeating: “Granny! Granny!” as Orpheus, left alone, repeats the name of his dead wife. (REM 2: 137 / RTP 2: 434) In this remarkable passage, Proust explicitly inscribes the telephone episode in the Orpheus myth, thereby reworking the Greek tale in a number of unexpected yet characteristic ways. Indeed, it is Proust who interprets the myth, adapting it to the cultural imaginary of the machine age, and not the other way around. But there is more to the episode. What the narrator intimates is that a whole new matrix of perceptual possibilities is sliding into place, one that transforms both the perception of voice (forms of audibility) and the perception of visual appearance (forms of visibility). In other words, the narrator perceives her bodily appearance as though for the first time. The experience of the disembodied voice thus elicits a new understanding of that bodily entity from which the voice has been detached. This, indeed, is confirmed by the episode which follows a few pages later; I shall refer to this passage as the camera-eye episode. Once these two sections are read in tandem, as I believe they should be, and as I believe Proust meant them to be, an interesting pattern begins to emerge. The narrator is on his way to pay his grandmother a visit, compelled to do so by the telephone conversation and its uncanny revelation of a phantom grandmother, shaded by her age and future death: “I had to free myself at the first possible moment, in her arms, from the phantom, hitherto unsuspected and suddenly called into being by her voice, of a grandmother really separated from me, resigned, having [ ... ] a definite age” (REM 2: 141/RTP 2: 438). Upon his arrival, the narrator enters the drawing room, where he

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finds her busy reading a book. Because she fails to notice his presence, she appears to him like a stranger. He, too, feels like a stranger, observing her appearance as he would that of any old woman. To make matters worse, she appears precisely like that ghostly image which he so desperately wanted to banish from his mind: “Alas, it was this phantom that I saw when [ ... ] I found her there reading” (REM 2: 141/RTP 2: 438). The grandmother has become pure image. Why does this stand out to his naked eye? Because she has withdrawn her gaze; indeed, it is her failure to look at her grandson that makes him discover, for the second time, her double. During the telephone conversation, her eyes and face failed to accompany her voice, thus anticipating that eternal separation called death. Here, too, she is shrouded in invisibility, for sitting in the sofa is not the grandmother but her doppelgänger. Disembodied and deterritorialised, she literally emerges as a spectral representation of herself. I stress this point because Proust’s episode shares an affinity with Walter Benjamin’s notion of the aura. Benjamin approaches aura in two ways: in terms of spatio-temporal uniqueness, and in terms of the gaze; and these perspectives merge in his reflections on photography in the 1930s.9 In mechanically reproducing the visual real, the photographic image strips the object of its unique presence in time and space; at the same time, photography makes the past look at us, but—and this is Benjamin’s vital point—we cannot look back. For this reason, photography is linked to death. Yet there is nothing Orphic in a photograph. In Benjamin, it is not the gaze itself that is deadly; it is the failure to meet the gaze of the other that is deadly. The history of the decline of aura is also the history of an increasing inability to meet the intentional and unique gaze of the other, be it an object, a human being, or history. It is therefore all the more interesting that Proust’s narrator, in order to explain how the uncanny sight of the grandmother was possible, should draw on the language of photography. Not only does he create an analogy between himself and a professional photographer; he also proposes that during those brief moments before his grandmother realised his presence, his gaze was operating like a camera. The photographic metaphor then sparks a Proustian essay which sets out to explain why we perceive our loved ones the way we do, and why these perceptions are always and necessarily faulty. In the process, Proust the narrator is joined by Proust the psychologist. Their dialogue shuttles between experience and theory, between local observations and general laws: We never see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them,

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which, before allowing the images that their faces present to reach us, seizes them in its vortex and flings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it. How, since into the forehead and the cheeks of my grandmother I had been accustomed to read all the most delicate, the most permanent qualities of her mind, how, since every habitual glance is an act of necromancy, each face that we love a mirror of the past, how could I have failed to overlook what had become dulled and changed in her, seeing that in the most trivial spectacles of our daily life, our eyes, charged with thought, neglect, as would a classical tragedy, every image that does not contribute to the action of the play and retain only those that may help to make its purpose intelligible. (REM 2: 142 / RTP 2: 438–9) In order to drive home his point concerning the alienating vision inherent in the camera, Proust adds yet another example. This scenario, too, rehearses the contrast between what we expect to see, although we may not have realised it, and what we actually perceive: But if, instead of our eyes, it should happen to be a purely physical object, a photographic plate [plaque photographique], that has watched the action, then what we see, in the courtyard of the Institute, for example, instead of the dignified emergence of an Academician who is trying to hail a cab, will be his tottering steps, his precautions to avoid falling on his back, the parabola of his fall, as though he were drunk or the ground covered in ice. So it is when some cruel trick of chance prevents our intelligent and pious tenderness from coming forward in time to hide from our eyes what they ought never to behold, when it is forestalled by our eyes, and they, arriving first in the field and having it to themselves, set to work mechanically, like films [pellicules], and show us, in place of the beloved person who has long ago ceased to exist but whose death our tenderness has always hitherto kept concealed from us, the new person whom a hundred times daily it has clothed with a loving and mendacious likeness. (REM 2: 142 / RTP 2: 439) In an attempt to explain his grandmother’s sudden alienation before his gaze, the narrator splits the category of visual perception into two: the human eye

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and the camera eye. Marked by affection and tenderness, human vision is necessarily refracted by preconceptions; and such a lens prevents the beholder from seeing the traces of time in the face of a loved one. In effect, the beholder sees not the person, merely his or her preconceived images of the person, thus continuously endowing the loved one with a “likeness”. Memory thus prevents truth from coming forward. The camera eye, on the other hand, is cold, mechanical and undistinguishing. It carries no thoughts and no memories, nor is it burdened by a history of assumptions. For this reason, the camera eye is a relentless conveyor of truth, and so it is that the narrator catches sight of a new person, hitherto unknown and unseen, who now flashes into the present: “for the first time and for a moment only, since she vanished very quickly, I saw, sitting on the sofa beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, vacant, letting her slightly crazed eyes wander over a book, a dejected old woman whom I did not know” (REM 2: 143 / RTP 2: 440). The deadly power of the photographic gaze has struck the grandmother, that once so familiar and self-evident being who, like Eurydice on the verge of light, instantly vanishes from sight and disappears into the shadows. All that is left behind is a phantom image. To be sure, the narrator’s uncompromising image of his grandmother is bound to evaporate as soon as she lifts her eyes and recognises him. Yet for him those seconds have nevertheless hinted at her impending death. From now on the narrator’s perception of his grandmother is scarred by her difference from herself. Her persona is split into two, her uncanny double superimposed upon her seemingly ever-pre-given self. It should be clear by now just how intricate Proust’s treatment of technologies of perception is in Remembrance of Things Past. What starts as a reflection on telephony and the discovery of the disembodied voice ends as a meditation on photography and how it changes the perception of visual appearances. In other words, the narrator’s effort to grasp the experience of speaking to his grandmother on the telephone motivates a psychology of visual perception as well. Read in this way, Proust offers a germinal theory of how the emergence of technologies for transmitting sound such as the telephone paves the way for a new matrix of perception, in which not only sound but vision also turn into abstract phenomena. What is more, Proust suggests that the perceptual habits of the eye and the ear begin to function separately, each independent of the other, each in its own sensory register. An episode in the last volume of the novel, Time Regained (1927), testifies to the consequences of such technological change. Set in the mid1920s, the scene unfolds at a social gathering where the narrator is reintroduced to an old friend. The latter expresses delight at meeting again

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after so many years. A caesura follows, because the narrator, perplexed and confused, fails to identify the person in front of him, although the voice is familiar enough: I was astonished. The familiar voice seemed to be emitted by a gramophone [phonographe] more perfect than any I had ever heard, for, though it was the voice of my friend, it issued from the mouth of a corpulent gentleman with greying hair whom I did not know, and I could only suppose that somehow artificially, by a mechanical device [true de mécanique], the voice of my old comrade had been lodged in the frame of this stout elderly man who might have been anybody. (REM 3: 985 / RTP 4: 522) The gentleman’s voice, rising out of the body as though of its own accord, is here rendered as a non-corporeal, hence foreign, element. It is the defamiliarising image of the gramophone that so drastically disconnects the voice from its bodily source. What is more, the mechanical metaphor strips the old acquaintance of human qualities such as consciousness and agency, thus reducing him to a non-human entity, indeed, to a thing. These images serve to underscore the narrator’s insistent efforts to match his perception of the voice with his perception of the friend’s exterior and, at the same time, they prefigure his utter inability to do so: He stopped laughing; I should have liked to recognise my friend, but, like Ulysses in the Odyssey when he rushes forward to embrace his dead mother, like the spiritualist who tries in vain to elicit from a ghost an answer which will reveal its identity, like the visitor at an exhibition of electricity who cannot believe that the voice which the gramophone [phonographe] restores unaltered to life is not a voice spontaneously emitted by a human being, I was obliged to give up the attempt. (REM 3: 985–6 / RTP 4: 523) Rich in images and allusions, this passage turns on the tangible discrepancy between the narrator’s aural impressions and his visual experience. What marks the representation of this encounter, and what sets it apart from the telephone scenario, is that the dissociation of the eye and the ear, of what can be seen and heard, has already happened. The differentiation of seeing and hearing both precedes and inscribes the narrator’s account of the event. Whereas the telephone episode contemplated the experience of an abstract

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voice and, by implication, how the aural impression of the voice fails to coincide spatially with the visual impression of the speaking body, this scene contains within itself the very experiential effects that the previous one reflected upon. For if the telephone episode ultimately ponders the spacing of production and reception, of sonic origin and transmission, the present scenario both presupposes and enacts that logic of spacing. That is to say, the representation of the narrator’s failure to recognise his friend from long ago is organised precisely by that matrix of perception—the dissociation of the eye and the ear, the abstraction and reification of sensory experience— that the narrator, in The Guermantes Way, took upon himself to grasp and explain. In effect, then, the representation of the old friend’s voice presumes the essential internalisation of the very experiential effects that the telephone and camera-eye episodes set out to chart. The phonographic metaphor confirms the implicit dialectics at work. In the telephone episode, the narrator reflected upon the experience of the pure and abstract voice, intimating that it is enabled by a technology for communicating at a spatial distance. To this sound machine we may now add the phonograph, a mechanical device that makes it possible to strip sound not only of its spatial source but also of its temporal origin.10 From now on, the voice and other acoustic phenomena are, potentially, subject to endless reiteration and exteriorisation. In this way, then, Proust’s telephone and camera-eye episodes articulate a theory of how a new division of perceptual labour comes into play, one that bears on both the habits of the ear and those of the eye. For although each of these two processes of abstraction may be traced back to its own relatively distinct technological lineage, their experiential effects—reification, autonomisation and differentiation—are fundamentally interrelated. Mutually determining one another, the abstraction of the visual is inherent in the abstraction of the aural, and vice versa. Meanwhile, as Proust’s own phonographic imagery demonstrates, the new optical and acoustic worlds propelled by such technological change open up realms of representation that readily lend themselves to artistic experiments. From photography to telephony, from phonography to cinematography: technological transformation helps articulate new perceptual domains, charging the modernist call to make the phenomenal world new. Proust’s novel thus offers a way of understanding the mediated nature of so many characteristic formal innovations that are to be found in numerous modernist works. Joyce’s Ulysses offers a particularly rich example.

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II

In Ulysses, each sensory organ appears to operate independently and for its own sake. What is more, each sensory organ, particularly the eye, tends to perform according to its own autonomous rationality, as though detached from any general epistemic tasks. “His gaze,” Joyce writes, “turned at once but slowly from J. J. O’Molloy’s towards Stephen’s face and then bent at once to the ground, seeking” (U 7.819–20).11 The trivial activity of looking is here rewritten as an event in itself. To look is no longer a mere predicate to be attached to a subject; the predicate has been unhinged from the subject and operates independently, endowed with an agency all its own. By the same token, voices in Ulysses also tend to lead an utterly independent life, physiologically as well as syntactically: “The inner door was opened violently and a scarlet beaked face, crested by a comb of feathery hair, thrust itself in. The bold blue eyes stared about them and the harsh voice asked:—What is it?” (U 7.344–7). Or, to take another example: “Miss voice of Kennedy answered, a second teacup poised, her gaze upon a page:—No. He was not. Miss gaze of Kennedy, heard, not seen, read on” (U 11.237–40). The dissociation of the visual and the aural runs through Joyce’s narrative from beginning to end. Indeed, despite the stylistic variegation that characterises Ulysses, this feature persists throughout the eighteen episodes of the novel, coming to the fore especially in the first two episodes, “Telemachus” and “Nestor”. The opening of “Telemachus” dwells on how Stephen Dedalus and his two friends Buck Mulligan and Haines rise, chat and have breakfast in the Martello Tower. The first sentence introduces a perky Buck Mulligan and how he, “stately” and “plump”, comes down the staircase. Wearing a yellow dressing gown which flutters round his body like a priestly mantle, he greets his half-awake friends with loud cries. A few sentences later, Stephen Dedalus enters the scenario. At the same time, Joyce introduces a characteristic stylistic device, a trademark visualising technique which, in various ways and with varying intensity, will be deployed throughout Ulysses. This is how the implicit narrator details Stephen’s visual perception of Buck Mulligan: “Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak” (U 1.13–16). Within the space of a few paragraphs, the visual representation of Mulligan, whom we just observed proceeding from the stairhead and into the room as though in a full-length portrait, has shrunk to a face. In fact, his face has been turned into a thing which, furthermore, takes on a life of its own.

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The horselike face is said to shake and gurgle all by itself, even bless a somewhat irritated Stephen. Dehumanised and reified, Mulligan’s face floats like a hairy oval before the reader. Subsequently, Mulligan brings his shaving utensils to the parapet, lathers his cheeks and chin, and begins to shave, meanwhile chatting with Stephen. “His curling shaven lips laughed and the edges of his white glittering teeth. Laughter seized all his strong wellknit trunk” (U 1.131–3). Significantly, Joyce does not write that Mulligan is laughing, but that his lips are; likewise, Mulligan is not seized by laughter, but his stomach is. Joyce represents Buck Mulligan’s body—that is to say, his lips, teeth and torso—as responding to external stimuli as though its reactions were mere reflexes, bypassing the control of some centrally-operating intentionality. Mulligan’s physical appearance turns into a miniature spectacle before the reader. The aesthetic effect of such passages, so common in Joyce, depends upon the differentiation of the human body, whose various parts are then autonomised and, furthermore, endowed with an agency all their own. In this introductory episode, as so often in Ulysses, Joyce’s implicit narrator builds upon a narratological aesthetic that aims at defamiliarisation. The narrator, one could say, keeps to what he perceives, not to what he knows is there. In this way, Joyce’s aesthetics reveals deep affinities with that of Proust, although Joyce pushes that aesthetic program to an extreme. When Mulligan is about to descend into the tower, leaving Stephen to ruminate over his dead mother, Stephen’s visual perception of his roommate’s bodily movement is rendered as it presents itself to his eyes. Temporarily frozen by the entrance frame through which he is disappearing, Mulligan’s figure thus appears as an optical outline: His head halted again for a moment at the top of the staircase, level with the roof: —Don’t mope over it all day, he said. I’m inconsequent. Give up the moody brooding. His head vanished but the drone of his descending voice boomed out of the stairhead [ ... ]. (U 1.233–8) All Stephen perceives is a head. From a visual point of view, Buck Mulligan’s bodily whole has been bisected by the frame through which he passes. There is a striking affinity between Stephen’s image and a photographic frame, that instant freezing of time and movement. From a rhetorical point of view, Mulligan’s visual Gestalt has been substituted for a synecdoche, his thing-like head being the sign that stands in for the whole and whose shape can be

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observed for a few more moments.12 But what, exactly, is the whole, the Gestalt? The passage suggests that Stephen’s perceptual experience of Mulligan’s descent is processed in two different registers. On the one hand there is Stephen’s visual impression, and on the other, the auditory one. Each is distinct; indeed, each is separate and independent of the other: Buck Mulligan’s voice sang from within the tower. It came nearer up the staircase, calling again. Stephen, still trembling at his soul’s cry, heard warm running sunlight and in the air behind him friendly words. —Dedalus, come down, like a good mosey. Breakfast is ready. Haines is apologising for waking us last night. It’s all right. —I’m coming, Stephen said, turning. —Do, for Jesus’ sake, Buck Mulligan said. For my sake and for all our sakes. His head disappeared and reappeared. (U 1.281–9) What is heard is not joined together with what is seen; and what is seen is in its turn a mere slice of the whole. The multi-sensory hermeneutic horizon, the all-embracing Gestalt, refuses to take shape. Aligning himself with a modernist aesthetic that aims to render what is perceived rather than what is known, Joyce challenges traditional ways of describing movement, gestures and action, and with them, the idea of “organic” modes of perception. At the same time, such a pronounced desire to represent what is heard and, furthermore, to represent it in a register that is radically separate from what is seen, may usefully be considered in the light of those late nineteenthcentury acoustic technologies that mediate the new matrices of perception, turning the sense of sight and that of hearing into quasi-ideal senses. Indeed, Joyce’s mode of representing Stephen’s sharply differentiated sensory impressions in the Martello Tower scene is refracted through a perceptual matrix enabled by technologies for transmitting and reproducing the real, acoustic and visual technologies alike. No wonder, then, that Joyce’s novel abounds with reified voices and autonomous eyes. One further example will suffice, drawn from “Nestor”, the second episode. Stephen is in the classroom teaching his rather unwilling students history. All of a sudden they are alerted to a sound: A stick struck the door and a voice in the corridor called: —Hockey!

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They broke asunder, sidling out of their benches, leaping them. Quickly they were gone and from the lumberroom came the rattle of sticks and clamour of their boots and tongues. (U 2.118–22) This stylistically sophisticated miniature scene serves to characterise Stephen’s sensory apparatus. Beginning with a voice stripped of its author, the passage proceeds to render the students’ sudden movements in all their visual purity, only to close with sounds, more specifically, with the acoustic phenomena issuing from the lumberroom. Stephen stays behind with one of the students, Sargent, who needs extra assistance, until In the corridor his name was heard, called from the playfield. —Sargent! —Run on, Stephen said. Mr Deasy is calling you. He stood in the porch and watched the laggard hurry towards the scrappy field where sharp voices were in strife. [ ... ] Their sharp voices cried about [Mr Deasy] on all sides: their many forms closed round him, the garish sunshine bleaching the honey of his illdyed head. (U 2.181–98) Represented as thing-like and autonomous entities, the boys’ voices act on their own, as though bypassing screens such as the cortex, spreading their sharp vibrations all the way to the veranda where Stephen is standing. Meanwhile his visual impression of the boys’ appearances fades. Gradually, they blend into so many optical outlines surrounding the stingy headmaster whose hair-colour stands out as a sunny exclamation mark. A monument to the autonomy of the eye and the ear, Ulysses is both an index and an enactment of the increasing differentiation of sight and hearing in the modernist period. Joyce’s style thus registers the subterranean effects of those technological events that Proust reflects upon. Indeed, once we place Joyce’s mode of representing visual and acoustic impressions alongside the theory of sensory differentiation and reification embedded in Proust’s novel, we realise the great extent to which the very experiential effects that Proust’s narrator contemplates effectively inscribe some of the most persistent stylistic aspects of Ulysses. At the same time, the advent of modern technologies of perception fuels the pre-eminently modernist imperative to “make it new” (Ezra Pound), and nowhere as palpably as in Joyce. Technology emerges as an occasion for launching new idioms: it restructures the prose of the world,

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yielding opaque signatures that demand to be read and decoded. But this also means that Joyce’s aesthetics of perception comes into being as a solution to a historical problem—how to recover and represent the immediacy of lived experience in an age when modes of experience are continually reified by, among other things, the increasingly powerful emergence of technologies for reproducing the visual and audible real. In pursuing absolute immediacy, Joyce’s aesthetics of perception seeks to name the everyday anew; and this is why, in Ulysses, the imperative to make you see and hear is so often an aesthetic end in itself, utterly divorced from processes of knowledge and cognition. Joyce’s aesthetics of perceptual immediacy is thus inscribed by a historically specific discourse where the empirical materiality of the body is posited as the privileged site of aesthetics and where perception has become an aesthetically gratifying activity in its own right. Such a discourse, as I have argued, becomes possible in the period which sees the emergence of technologies for reproducing the visual and audible real. The highmodernist aesthetics of perception I have been discussing in this essay thus feeds on a historical irony that is as palpable as it is inevitable: the more abstract the world of observation becomes, the more corporeal is the notion of the perceiver. And this bodily realm is no longer necessarily of a generalised, transcendental order, as in the aesthetic theories of, say, Baumgarten, Kant and Hegel. Indeed, the sensory body is no longer a universal notion. Rather, the aesthetic now tends to be located in a particular body, a concrete, singular and mortal body.

NOTES 1. Virgil, Georgics, with an English translation by H. Rushton Fairclough, revised by G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 257. I have also relied on Bulfinch’s Mythology (New York: HarperCollins, 1991) and Mythologies, ed. Yves Bonnefoy, trans. Wendy Doniger (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991). 2. Etymologically, the meaning of the term “aesthetics” springs out of a cluster of Greek words that designate activities of sensory perception in both a strictly physiological sense, as in “sensation”, and a mental sense, as in “apprehension”. Aisthetikos derives from aistheta, things perceptible by the senses, from aisthethai, to perceive. For a full etymological explanation, see H. G. Liddell & R. Scott, GreekEnglish Lexicon, 9th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 3. Jacques Derrida, “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology”, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 71–108.

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4. For an inventory of the cultural imaginary of the telephone in Proust’s time, see Le Téléphone à la Belle Époque (Brussels: Éditions Libro-Sciences, 1976). 5. Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 65. 6. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 14–20 et passim. In Kracauer’s last work, Proust’s episode also plays an important role; see History: The Last Things Before the Last (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 49–52, 82–6, 92–3. 7. Proust’s telephone episode has a rich prehistory. An early version appears in Jean Santeuil, in the pages relating Jean’s first telephone conversation with his mother; see Jean Santeuil, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), Vol. 2, pp. 178–81. In 1907, Proust published an expanded version of the episode in a piece on reading in Le Figaro. He then revised the episode once again and made it a part of The Guermantes Way. On the genesis of the episode and its vital role in Remembrance, see Paul Martin, “Le Téléphone: Étude littéraire d’un texte de M. Proust”, parts 1–3, Information littéraire 21 (1969), 233–41; and 22 (1970), 46–52, 87–98. 8. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin, 3 vols (New York: Vintage, 1982), Vol. 2, p. 432; A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié et al, 4 vols (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1987–1989), Vol. 2, p. 135. Page references, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text, indicate first the English translation (REM) and then the French original (RTP). 9. See Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography”, in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott & Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, 1979), pp. 240–57; “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in: Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1988), pp. 217–51; and “Some Motifs in Baudelaire”, in: Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1973), pp. 109–54. 10. For a cultural history of the gramophone and its impact on notions of acoustic representation, see Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young & Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 21–114. See also Kittler’s Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 229–64. 11. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, with Wolfhard Steppe & Claus Melchior (New York: Random House, 1986). References cite episode number, followed by line number. 12. Alan Spiegel has usefully related Joyce’s visual style to cinematic modes of representation, focusing in particular on Joyce’s “method of fractured and cellular narration and description, of rendering wholes by their parts”. In Spiegel’s view, this feature represents “the characteristic formal procedure of Joyce’s modernism” (Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modern Novel [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976], p. 64).

I N G R I D WA S S E N A A R

Introduction to Proustian Passions

Les ‘quoique’ sont toujours des ‘parce que’ méconnus. (i. 430; tr. ii. 9)

1. A N A L L E G O R I C A L O P E N I N G

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he whole of A la recherche du temps perdu is a distension in pursuit of intention. When the adult Marcel recollects the impression he had had as a child of Giotto’s Vices and Virtues, from the Arena chapel in Padua, he tells us how Envy’s fat serpent ‘remplit si complètement sa bouche grande ouverte’ that ‘l’attention de L’Envie—et la nôtre du même coup—tout entière concentrée sur l’action de ses lèvres, n’a guère de temps à donner à d’envieuses pensées’ (i, 80; tr. i. 95). Hard to say whether the serpent is moving inwards or outwards, from this description. Hard also to say what Envy is. But the work of disgorging or being engorged with envy is surely strenuous and painful, and brings on an involuntary and empathetic imitation in those who look at it. The images of these allegories, among them the figures of Justice and Injustice, do not give the child much pleasure: Malgré toute l’admiration que M. Swann professait pour ces figures de Giotto, je n’eus longtemps aucun plaisir à considérer

From Proustian Passions: The Uses of Self-Justification for A la recherche du temps perdu. © 2000 by Oxford University Press.

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dans notre salle d’études, où on avait accroché les copies qu’il m’en avait rapportées, ... une Justice, dont le visage grisâtre et mesquinement régulier était celui-là même qui, à Combray, caractérisait certaines jolies bourgeoises pieuses et sèches que je voyais à la messe et dont plusieurs étaient enrôlées d’avance dans les milices de réserve de l’Injustice. (i, 80–1; tr. i. 95–6) Envy has her serpent to contend with and so can be contained within the framework of her allegorical representation. Between Justice and Injustice, however, despite their graphic separation in the Scrovegni chapel, where they are painted opposite one another, there is, for the child Marcel, some kind of dangerous seepage. For, briefly superimposed upon the plan of the Italian chapel (which the narrator of A la recherche has not seen at this moment in the narrative) is the church of Saint-Hilaire. In the middle ground between two allegories, two chapels, and two narratorial voices, separated both temporally and spatially, there is the confusing opportunity for an agon. The young Marcel, overwritten by the mature Marcel, sees that tragic contest played out by teams who seem to keep changing sides: ‘enrôlées d’avance dans les milices de réserve’ are the Just who are rehearsing as understudies for the infinitely divisible role of Injustice. Judith Shklar, in her brilliant essay The Faces of Injustice, describes Giotto’s Ingiustizia and La Giustizia, for the purposes of her liberal political argument in favour of listening to victims. She says ‘Injustice does not appear to suffer at all; he seems completely affectless’ (p. 48). Of Justice, she tells us: ‘Her face is benign. But apart from that it is expressionless, as one might expect of the impartiality appropriate to a personification of justice. We can certainly feel afraid of Injustice, but Justice radiates no emotional appeal’ (p. 103). Separated by a chapel floor in Italy, by many pages of Shklar’s reasoned argument against complacent models of justice that take the wrongdoer’s part over the suffering victim’s, Justice looks impassively on and Injustice looks impassively aside, as each performs their allotted role. These are modern allegories, a far cry from the Furies turned to Eumenides by Athena’s persuasive words (and her silky-voiced threat of violence: ‘No need of that, not here’) as retributive revenge was displaced by distributive justice in Aeschylus’ Oresteia.1 The balanced opposition of Justice and Injustice is a lateral one, rather than the threatening imposition of a vertical hierarchy: they seem to offer a human rather than an ideal choice of moral actions. Yet their similarity lies in their indifference. And when later in his life the adult narrator of A la recherche meets ‘des incarnations vraiment saintes de la charité active’, he finds that ‘elles avaient généralement un air allègre, positif,

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indifférent et brusque de chirurgien pressé’. The ‘visage antipathique et sublime de la vraie bonté’ is also indifferent (i, 81; tr. i. 97). Justice is aloof, Injustice couldn’t care less, and Goodness is a bossy matron. While we, Proust’s pampered readers and Giotto’s confident viewers, feel sure of being able to tell the difference between these three versions of indifference, we should perhaps remind ourselves that those telling differences only emerge through an act of interpretation. On the face of it, indifference will always look the same. Marcel the child’s confusion over which of the jolies bourgeoises are batting for which moral team is not only a Combray question, reserved for the innocence of unpolluted, idealized childhood and its revivification in comforting cups of tisane (i. 47; tr. i. 55).2 It is—or rather Proust is arguing it should be—a question that preoccupies and pervades the entire field of human experience. The question, and it is the governing question of this study, is how are we to judge self-justification?

2. C R I T I C S , P H I L O S O P H E R S , P S Y C H O L O G I S T S ,

AND

WORDS

The terms in which I will put forward the answer, or the answers, to this question, as Proust experiments with them throughout his novel, rely almost entirely on intimate readings of the text. This book puts forward an important component of the Proustian cognitive and conceptual apparatus, which has not been analysed before, and the consequences of which show A la recherche du temps perdu to be an impressive contribution to ethical debate. My study sets out the intensive hermeneutic endeavour undertaken by Proust’s narrator to push to its limits the possibilities of self-justification. Proust, we hardly need reminding, has chosen to write a first-person and retrospective fiction. He asks what judgement is, and how we arrive at our judgements, by way of the first-person voice. This reminder raises further questions about the approach I have taken to what I have to say about A la recherche du temps perdu, which I will take a few moments to answer now. The almost overwhelming difficulty facing Proust’s account-givers and his readers alike is the sheer volume, not only of his own output, but of studies written about both man and novel, studies upon studies of these things. Seventy-five years after the death of a writer who has taken on the stature of a Shakespeare or a Dante as one of European literature’s ‘greats’, so many brilliant novelists and critics have put forward the vital appraisals of A la recherche by now embedded as the fixed truths about this text: Wilson, Shattuck, Beckett, Bersani, Poulet ... the list goes on.3 To study the critical texts written about A la recherche is to realize with humility and amazement

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how well Proust’s novel was read even in the fizz of publishing hype during and just after his lifetime. There is, because of all this interest in the novel, a Proust currency, a set of keywords which mean Proust: madeleine, mère, grand-mère, jeunes filles, jealousy, Elstir, Bergotte, Vinteuil, mémoire involontaire, Time, Swann. A secondary and biographical swathe: snob, social satirist, neurotic, homosexual, Dreyfus Affair, crowd around behind. What more remains to be said? To propose a new study of A la recherche du temps perdu seems like an act of wilful idiocy. Yet, while every critic, of course, addresses the issue of Proust’s choosing to write in the first person, therefore shifting the focus of his novel with explosive force into the subjective mode, no one seemed to be answering to my satisfaction a very basic question: was this a morally good or bad decision? Proust’s novel is a vast, highly textured, minutely wrought exposition of what the world looks like from one point of view, a sophisticated, well-read, jealous, nervous, leisured point of view. That much is perfectly clear. But what of the fear, shuttled constantly between novelist and narrator, of boring a reader by going on at such length about one life? What of the strategies of persuasion by which a writer might try or expect to keep such a reader’s interest, or make her believe the account worthwhile, honourable, true? How to make the balance work between telling subjective and unverifiable truths, and allowing for counter-critique, contestation, rebuff, rejection? How much mileage might there be in a narrative strategy which sought to take account pre-emptively of all such counter-arguments: a supreme effort to work out a foolproof method of ensuring a reader’s trust by accommodating all her suspicions, fears, and hostility into the very point of view she might reject? This series of questions becomes more interesting with every further addition and permutation of it, for it raises difficult theoretical issues about the limits of answering questions about self-justification using the material of self-justification, along the lines of Alan Turing’s notorious Halting Problem. If you ask a piece of self-justification such as ‘but I didn’t mean to hurt you’, to justify itself, would you get an answer with a firm foundation, or a further piece of self-justification? One kind of answer would be ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you, I did x because I love you’. No firm foundation for truth or reliability is on offer, we must take on trust that the ‘I’ tells the truth, and either accept or reject the answer. The emphasis has been brought to bear upon the credibility of ‘I’ as a criterion for trustworthiness. Another kind of response, however, might be ‘I knew you were going to ask me to justify my self-justification “but I didn’t mean to hurt you”, and so here, before you say anything else, are x further justifications of that statement’. Here, the

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emphasis has been shifted onto the statement, away from the ‘I’. Straightaway we can see that acts of self-justification work hard to attribute and distribute intention, interpretation, and meaning-bearing emphasis to useful-looking parts of verbal utterances, in attempts to escape censure and judgement through apparent exposure. Attempts to confront and head off this selfjustificatory work of redistribution will themselves cause further evasion, mobility, internal division, and multiplication: like chasing mercury droplets around a petri dish with a knife and fork.4 The answer to the moral problem of self-justification, if there is one, then, is clearly not going to come from Proust himself, nor from his correspondence, nor from the testimony of any of his friends, because we would not be able to bracket lies and self-interest out of their ‘answers’. Discovering how to judge whether or not self-talk is justifiable, might, however, yet lie in listening to the way in which that question itself is treated within the confines of A la recherche du temps perdu, in hearing how a series of different kinds of linguistic experiment is set up to monitor either selfjustification or its by-products in language. Figuring the inquiring reader as a listener, of course, might introduce its own problems, but we will deal with these as we proceed, and should offer ourselves a dispensation from worry about them ahead of time. By the same token, no one ready-made critical methodology, or interpretative toolkit, seemed to me mobile or dynamic enough to generate a satisfactory answer about Proustian self-justification. A feminist reading of A la recherche, for example, while it would prove the undoubted misogyny in the novel, would not necessarily be able to answer questions about how judgements are made or should be made. In this book, theoretical concepts and methods have been considered and appropriated from a wide range of recent critical thinkers, without allegiance being sworn to any. Reference has been made to broadly structuralist and post-structuralist writers, to psychoanalysis, to narratology, and to writers on Proust whose aims have seemed, in the course of researching the concept of self-justification, to offer a springboard to my own. Any single explicit hermeneutic methodology (even if such an illusory beast were to exist) applied onto the text of A la recherche du temps perdu would sooner or later run up against its own formal constraints, would, in discovering that which it had sought, recover merely its own original premises. Self-justification describes a special area of speech act typified by the attempt to persuade a listener of the speaker’s credibility. But such a definition takes no account of the variety of such speech acts, or whether there are in fact important differences between them. It also seems to rule out of account the very subjectiveness, the messiness, of what it is to

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persuade, the arguments that might ensue, the pain of neediness, of not being believed, the sheer hard work that might go into finding watertight justifications for dubious actions, and just how much self-justification might be going on in the world. So the desire itself (to find out more about the functioning of self-justification inside Proust’s novel) is what should encourage us to listen flexibly to the workings of the text, to gather material for assessment, to be prepared to modify, or abandon experiments, or become very interested indeed in why certain kinds of experiment seem to throw up repetitious rather than different answers. W. V. Quine’s brilliant four-page essay, ‘On Simple Theories of a Complex World’, points out some ‘causes for supposing that the simpler hypothesis stands the better chance of confirmation’.5 He notes that if ‘we encompass a set of data with a hypothesis involving the fewest possible parameters, and then are constrained by further experiment to add another parameter, we are likely to view the emendation not as a refutation of the first result but as a confirmation plus a refinement’ (p. 245). This is not to be interpreted as a licence to produce only simple hypotheses, such as ‘if the earth is flat then we might fall off its edge’, but it does remind us to avoid putting all our own hypothetical parameters into one pre-emptive basket before hearing how Proust conducts his self-justificatory experiments. The obvious drawback to this kind of adaptive, flexible, and dynamic methodology is its undoubted potential to wander down garden paths, or fall into drowning pools of doubt and curlicues of minute adjustment. Yet experimental research into the linguistic functioning of the moi, of the kind that Proust undertakes in A la recherche du temps perdu, positively demands this kind of scientific protocol, and we should not be afraid to work with the problems it will cause us. I will be reading with an awareness that a first-person retrospective narrative implicitly seeks, in reconstructing a teleology which has already unfolded, to remember it, both in the sense of recalling a process, and that of putting a process back together. Blanchot reads this as Proust’s search to experience a quasi-mystical simultaneity of different temporalities: ‘certains épisodes ... semblent-ils vécus, à la fois, à des âges fort différents, vécus et revécus dans la simultanéité intermittente de toute une vie, non comme de purs moments, mais dans la densité mouvante du temps sphérique.’6 This is the kind of vision of Proust’s writing which, to my mind, most unfortunately reinforces the oft-touted idea that Proustian subjectivity is all about being bound up in a nostalgic contemplation of personal past. It also runs the risk of nudging A la recherche into the category of book in which other subjectivities count only for the material they might offer an experience-

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hoarding introspective first-person consciousness. A la recherche du temps perdu responds only partially to such a description. Nostalgia and introspection have their part to play in the Proustian psyche. But Proust himself does so much work with these aspects of human cognitive functioning that, unless we are very careful, even loving descriptions of his writing can come to sound like apologies for it. As commentators have been at pains to analyse, the Proustian narratorial voice is itself composed of many, sometimes ambiguously differentiated, even conflicting agencies.7 I do not intend to repeat the work of that important analysis here. Once we have seen and understood the elasticity and mobility built into Proust’s use of the narratorial convention, it is enough to carry it with us as we read, and to be prepared at times to signal instances of special relevance to points in hand about self-justificatory activity. No work on Proust can entirely avoid the question of who is speaking and when, but it should not be allowed to take over all forms of argument about A la recherche. Sartre, in 1943, offered the following analysis of what is meant by caractère, and used as an exemplary literary text Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Sartre’s brief comments brilliantly summarize and orchestrate one of the central questions that Proust experiments with in his work. I will quote Sartre’s points in full: le caractère n’a d’existence distincte qu’à titre d’objet de connaissance pour autrui. La conscience ne connaît point son caractère—à moins de se déterminer réflexivement à partir du point de vue de l’autre—elle l’existe [sic] en pure indistinction, non thématiquement et non thétiquement, dans l’épreuve qu’elle fait de sa propre contingence et dans la néantisation par quoi elle reconnaît et dépasse sa facticité. C’est pourquoi la pure description introspective de soi ne livre aucun caractère: le héros de Proust ‘n’a pas’ de caractère directement saisissable; il se livre d’abord, en tant qu’il est conscient de luimême, comme un ensemble de réactions générales et communes à tous les hommes (‘mécanismes’ de la passion, des émotions, ordre d’apparition des souvenirs, etc.), où chacun peut se reconnaître: c’est que ces réactions appartiennent à la ‘nature’ générale du psychique. Si nous arrivons (comme l’a tenté Abraham dans son livre sur Proust) à déterminer le caractère du héros proustien (à propos par exemple de sa faiblesse, de sa passivité, de la liaison singulière chez lui de l’amour et de l’argent) c’est que nous interprétons les

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données brutes: nous prenons sur elles un point de vue extérieur, nous les comparons et nous tentons d’en dégager des relations permanentes et objectives. Mais ceci nécessite un recul: tant que le lecteur, suivant l’optique générale de la lecture, s’identifie au héros de roman, le caractère de ‘Marcel’ lui échappe; mieux, il n’existe pas à ce niveau. Il n’apparaît que si je brise la complicité qui m’unit à l’écrivain, que si je considère le livre non plus comme un confident, mais comme une confidence, mieux encore: comme un document. Ce caractère n’existe donc que sur le plan du pourautrui et c’est la raison pour laquelle les maximes et les descriptions des ‘moralistes’, c’est-à-dire des auteurs français qui ont entrepris une psychologie objective et sociale, ne se recouvrent jamais avec l’expérience vécue du sujet.8 Marcel Muller quotes this passage, but his criticism of it, that Sartre’s comments are applicable to any first-person narrative, and therefore miss the specificity of ‘le véritable secret du je proustien’, itself misses Sartre’s point.9 What has been so coruscatingly pinpointed is the agonizing fulcrum across which the Proustian narrator—in all of his temporal manifestations, moods, and agencies—and the reader of first-person confessional texts are delicately poised and interlocked. Character appears only when complicity is broken, when reader–narrator identificatory patterns and cycles and compulsions are undone, when the narrator is seen no longer as everyman, but as a particular, neurasthenic, possibly hysterical, would-be novelist. Grateful as we must be to Muller for offering Proust criticism a multipartite taxonomy formalizing the interconnections between, and independent statuses of, the narratorial selves (Héros, Narrateur, Sujet Intermédiaire, Protagoniste, Romancier, Écrivain, Auteur, Homme, Signataire), these terms seem to deprive the first-person narrative of its relationships to external objects and selves, whether in or beyond the confines of the text, and it is upon these relationships and the kinds of processes they inaugurate that my study focuses. A retrospective first-person novel, as the narratologist Gérard Genette so convincingly demonstrates, will both manipulate and suffer from periodic attacks of prolepsis and paralepsis.10 Genette’s tough-minded and careful attention to the workings of Proust’s narrative offer a sound methodological principle informing the way in which I read, but my argument, in showing how self-justification works and is put to work, does not attempt to construct a new narratology of A la recherche. The main point I take from Genette’s work is that great attention must be paid, when studying works of confessional fiction, to what we might term a rhetoric of reliability. A

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temptation is automatically built into the reconstructive narrative enterprise to produce an improved and stylized version of the lost original (experience, or histoire). Like the genre of autobiography, first-person retrospective fiction strives to tell the truth of subjective experience, but yearns for the wider claim that such truth should be a universal truth. Augustine’s Confessions, Rousseau’s similarly titled Les Confessions, Constant’s Adolphe, Fromentin’s Dominique, Gide’s récits: all are characterized by, and to be included in an intertextual history of, first person retrospective fiction, confession narratives, and autobiography.11 I deliberately blur the distinction between the three genres here, because it is the confessional mode, and not its generic history or histories, which detains me: my focus is the human speaking subject in the movement and moment of offering a justification for his or her actions, thoughts, intentions, or motives—or indeed the attempts he or she might make to conceal them.12 Dennis Foster reads the act of confession by focusing on the aspect of complicity between confessing subject and listener: for Foster, confessional narrative takes place ‘between two substantial, unsettled subjects’. He goes on: ‘By “subject” I do not mean an autonomous, centred being that founds the individual, but that representation of the self, particularly as it is objectified through language. The subject is that aspect of the self available to understanding.’13 This is a useful working definition of the speaking subject, which I want to retain, although Foster’s emphasis, in other parts of his introduction, on guilt as prime motivation for confession is not part of my definition of self-justification. I define self-justification as an act of speech seeking pre-emptively to ward off attack which the subject fears might take the form of exclusion, rejection, deprivation, abandonment. The main prompting for an act of self-justification, then, is the desire to avoid pain, rather than the desire to confess guilt, although, of course, some kinds of self-justification might very well take the form of a confession of guilt. It would hardly constitute a discovery to announce that Proust wrote about guilt at ambivalence felt towards parents, particularly the mother. Nor would there be much of an argument in the assertion that A la recherche is a justification of Marcel Proust’s life to his mother. I will attempt to avoid that particularly well-trodden significatory matrix, but we should take a moment to see why the answer to self-justification does not, as it were, lie with the mother. It is, undeniably, psychoanalytic criticism of A la recherche that has been most concerned with the novel’s questions of morality, but these have tended to stay at the level of the subjective or individual quest for ‘self-discovery’, such as Lejeune’s disturbingly smug essay on narcissism, masturbation, and

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creativity, Doubrovsky’s La Place de la madeleine, or Baudry’s work.14 Their other main manifestation is as readings of castration/artistic sterility complexes, such as Riffaterre’s work on the ‘Med-’ tag: Add to this linguistic mechanism the diegesis of the myth; add the interplay of Andromeda and the monster, the strand as the stage of a plight common to her and to the jellyfish turned monstrous woman, top it with the homophony of Andromeda’s last syllables and Medusa’s first, and we understand how easy it is for the -medmorpheme to stand for woman and for the monstrous or negative component in the sign system designating a woman. Hence the displacement of androgyne, within which man and woman were united but equal, by Andromeda that opposes desirability in man and terror in woman, a terror suffered or a terror inflicted. Hence, a valorization of the mediating last syllables (meda) made into an egregious symbol of unhappy or dangerous femininity.15 Riffaterre’s work, which seeks to demonstrate ‘how fantasies and repressed drives are born of a lexical coincidence rationalized into semantic identity’, can quickly seem less like analysis than meddling, or worse, misogynistic muddling. Too many psychoanalytic readings of A la recherche concentrate on such maternally directed, guilt-riddled early nuggets of the Proustian textual palimpsest as ‘La Confession d’une jeune fille’, ‘Avant la nuit’, and ‘Sentiments filiaux d’un parricide’, reading these in combination with the Montjouvain scene (i. 157–63; tr. i. 190–7).16 These kinds of readings see enormous significance in the 1906 idée de pièce given to René Peter, a friend of Debussy’s, during a visit to Versailles, a play project also mentioned in a letter to Reynaldo Hahn.17 As Painter notes in his biography, with a typically bluff yet apologetic tone, this sketch for a play has: ‘a preposterous but significant plot, about a sadistic husband who, though in love with his wife, consorted with prostitutes, said infamous things about her to them, encouraged them to answer in kind, and was caught in the act by the injured lady, who left him, whereupon he committed suicide.’18 The list of ghostly avant-textes which might be (and are) triumphantly held aloft as proof of Marcel Proust’s ambivalence towards his mother goes on and on.19 These early texts are basically seized upon to license psychoanalytic readings informing us that Proust’s ‘œuvre faisait de lui sa propre mère’.20 But apart from telling us little about the way Proust’s writing behaves, the underlying

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misogyny at work in this kind of criticism risks reducing literary critical psychoanalytic discourse itself to a dubious grudge against what might be termed a Gestalt ready-made of the obstinately absent, love-denying Mother. If psychoanalytic readings of A la recherche do not tempt me as a methodological approach, then perhaps another critical discourse to step inside, this time one which certainly does not run the risk of leaving figural stones unturned, might be deconstructive literary criticism. It is precisely the foundationalist aspiration written into any first-person fiction or autobiography, for subjective truth to be apodictic or universal truth, which deconstructive literary criticism is at pains to expose and question. For Proust, some of the best deconstructive criticism remains Paul de Man’s demonstration (again, using the Giotto allegories) that Proust inscribes his text with its own unreadability.21 The careful attention de Man pays to rhetorical tropes in the genre of autobiographical confession, in ‘Excuses (Confessions)’, which looks at key childhood incidents in Rousseau’s autobiography, is part of a welcome return to the study of rhetoric in literary criticism generally.22 While the careful textual analysis of these thinkers attracts me, however, the aporia in which they sometimes find their endings, or the unwarranted hostility with which they sometimes treat literary texts, do not. Autobiography criticism, especially deconstructive criticism of autobiography, tends to pounce triumphantly on evidence of self-justification. Self-justificatory moments are, in general for this type of criticism, held to offer proof that the subject of autobiography has acknowledged, however fleetingly, the impossibility of telling the truth about the self, or of constituting selfhood as some whole and totalizable entity or quantity in writing. Self-justificatory moments can tend to function for deconstructive criticism as proof that autobiographers do not know themselves, or do not know that they will always fail to know themselves; that autobiographers are to be sternly told off for thus dallying with their readers’ sympathies, and that it is the task of deconstruction to unmask and reprimand this underhand connivance. This, however, begs the whole fascinating question of why acts of selfjustification attract such scapegoating, such a moral high tone, even if it is couched in the terms of seemingly objective or neutral criticism. After all, in A la recherche, Marcel is perfectly open about both the sources which might inspire him to write a novel, and the difficulties of maintaining personal selfbelief and public credibility when those sources are revealed as being entirely subjective:

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Grave incertitude, toutes les fois que l’esprit se sent dépassé par luimême; quand lui, le chercheur, est tout ensemble le pays obscur où il doit chercher et où tout son bagage ne lui sera de rien. Chercher? pas seulement: créer. Il est en face de quelque chose qui n’est pas encore et que seul il peut réaliser, puis faire entrer dans sa lumière. (i. 45; tr. i. 52) Deconstruction is certainly not a nihilistic or sceptical enterprise. Indeed in recent years, much thought has gone into its potential as an ethical discourse.23 The triumph of textual blind spots and their location can, however, without some willingness in the critic to be confused and moved by literary texts, lead to a type of complexity in critical writing which has not arisen in the texts themselves. There is complexity enough in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, together with vast tracts of it that are never read critically, and the sense of these two important points is another part of what motivates my study. Blanchot strays perhaps too near a repetition of the early understanding of A la recherche, which decided the novel was a celebration of interiority, solitary withdrawal, and wistfulness.24 Deconstructive analyses of A la recherche, on the other hand, too often repeat the problem, also that of much psychoanalytic writing on this text, of focusing too narrowly on only a handful of incidents in the text, rather than seeking to read across its span. Deconstruction has its own blind spot, which is a failure to allow the texts it reads to speak and be heard. Having spoken at such length about what I will not be doing, it is perhaps time to return to what will be included. This is certainly a study about psychological processes but it is also a phenomenological study that considers very closely the relations dramatized and given signification between speaking subjects and a variety of object-types. With that in mind, I will bring some of Freud’s metapsychological thinking into what I argue about self-justification, sometimes for comparative and sometimes for analytical purposes. Freud’s willingness as a thinker to undertake speculative forays into the wilder hinterlands of mental functioning, with all the risks of experimental failure that such a venture entails, offers sometimes astonishing points of purchase on Proust’s narrative experimentation.25 I will also have occasion to look at genetic material, earlier rough drafts so usefully published in the most recent Pléiade edition of A la recherche in the form of Esquisses. I am in general, however, suspicious of genetic criticism, since the task of sifting through variants sometimes results in readings which cannot move easily between early drafts and an interpretation of the ‘final’ state of a given text. But as a text-handling

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theory of some rigour, generated as an adjunct to the vast editorial operation of producing a variorum edition such as the new Pléiade Proust, it forces readers of A la recherche to bear in mind the fragility of any idea that texts are ‘finished’.26

3. A S H O RT H I S T O RY

OF

S E L F - J U S T I F I C AT I O N

Self-justification finds its definition, in French as in English, subsumed under the definitions given of justification. Le Grand Robert tells us that the noun justification comes from the medieval theological Latin justificatio, with appearances of Justificaciun around 1120. It denotes the ‘action de justifier quelqu’un, de se justifier’. Its synonyms include décharge, défense, excuse, compte, explication, argument, raison, apologie, preuve. Its theological usage is as the ‘rétablissement du pécheur en l’état d’innocence, par la grâce’. Justification also signifies, in the world of book-printing, the ‘action de donner aux lignes la longueur requise’; ‘longueur d’une ligne d’impression, définie par le nombre de caractères’. From around 1521, the expression justifier une ligne means ‘la mettre à la longueur requise au moyen de blancs’. Justifier, the transitive verb, signifies ‘rendre juste, conforme à la justice’ (rare, 1564); ‘innocenter (quelqu’un) en expliquant sa conduite’; ‘rendre (quelque chose) légitime’ (towards 1585); ‘faire admettre, ou s’efforcer de faire reconnaître comme juste’ (seventeenth century); ‘confirmer (un jugement, un sentiment)’; and ‘montrer comme vrai, juste, réel, par des arguments’ (1368, Ordonnances des Roys de France). Autojustification, ‘le fait de se justifier soimême’, makes its lexicographical début only in the midtwentieth century. In English, the noun justification stands generally for the ‘action of justifying or showing something to be just, right, or proper; vindication of oneself or another; exculpation; verification’.27 It also has specific theological connotations (‘the action whereby man is justified, or freed from the penalty of sin, and accounted or made righteous by God’); a judicial sense (‘the showing or maintaining in court that one had sufficient reason for doing that which he is called to answer; a circumstance affording grounds for such a plea’; and the same use in printing (1672) as its translation has in French. The OED tells us that ‘Protestant theologians regard justification as an act of grace ... through imputation of Christ’s righteousness’, while Roman Catholic theologians ‘hold that it consists in man’s being made really righteous by infusion of grace, such justification being a work continuous and progressive from its initiation’ (my emphasis).

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Self-justification is thus neatly contained, for lexicographers, by the definition of justification, as just one among many of the forms the latter might take. The ‘self ’ is treated as one more unit to be shifted from a minus to a plus rating by the activity of justification. We should bear in mind, however, that self-justification is a term with an active philosophical as well as a psychological history, albeit a fragmentary one. André Lalande’s 1926 Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie tells us that the primitive use of justification was to ‘rendre ou de se rendre juste’. His definition goes on: ‘Puis, par affaiblissement du sens primitif, se dit de tout acte par lequel on réfute une imputation ou même par lequel on la devance, en montrant qu’on est dans son droit (soit moral, soit logique), qu’on avait raison de dire ce qu’on a dit, ou de faire ce qu’on a fait’ (i. 552). Justification, then, has apparently lost its medieval emphasis on justice, and seems to have come to be used for a situation in which self-defence, refutation, or pre-emptive assertion of any kind take place in language. Lalande gives as his examples two thinkers. Nicolas Malebranche, theologian, scientist, and philosopher (1638–1715), considers justification in De la recherche de la vérité.28 Théodule Ribot (1839–1916), the influential experimental psychologist, subsequently refers to Malebranche’s writing when discussing justification in La Logique des sentiments.29 Understanding their views is crucial to discovering how Proust deals with this slippery concept, since it serves to emphasize how revolutionary Proust’s treatment of self-justification is. The limitations and exclusions which comfortably shield Malebranche and Ribot are essentially Proust’s starting-point. They have no equipment to deal with the rigours of self-justification—Proust effortlessly goes on building it. Both Malebranche and Ribot examine justification from the perspective, not of its linguistic manifestations, but of its connection to the workings of reason. Malebranche is interested in how we make reasons for ourselves to support feelings; in other words, of how we construct a mental foundation to suit our underlying desires. Ribot, writing two centuries later, is keen to delineate a strict compartmentalization of the reasoning produced by different kinds of affect, in order to classify (but in the process, distribute moral worth to) psychological functioning. Malebranche did not make a distinction between faith and reason. Although an admirer of Descartes, he held that God was the sole cause and source of divine reason, surpassing our own imperfect reason; and that God was the operator of some kind of correspondence between external objects and human ideas. But he also held, to a certain degree, that the human will is free. In ‘Que toutes les passions se justifient’, he starts with the assumption

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that human desire, once ignited, seeks justification from reason, in order to achieve its ends (those of pleasure) in human actions. His introduction enacts a mini-allegory: ‘L’esprit est tellement esclave de l’imagination, qu’il lui obéit toujours lorsqu’elle est échauffée. Il n’ose lui répondre lorsqu’elle est en fureur, parce qu’elle le maltraite s’il résiste, et qu’il se trouve toujours récompensé [de quelque plaisir], lorsqu’il s’accommode à ses desseins’ (p. 146). In fact, Malebranche’s seemingly general introduction relies on exclusion. The difference between esprit and imagination turns out to have, not a universal, but an ideological bent: the self-effacing, humorous introductory allegory neatly shifts its author out of the line of fire, into alignment with the audience to whom the ensuing discussion is addressed, by allowing the gender of esprit to signify a personality-type: that of the henpecked man. The discussion seems to proceed from the assumption that no one is exempt from justification’s effects, when actually a split has been introduced into the conception of ‘one’ that relies on the French grammatical tradition of gendering nouns: that part of ‘one’ which is esprit is implicitly also ‘masculine’, while that which is imagination is implicitly feminized. His categories of mental functioning are thus also implicitly anthropomorphized and thrust into a narrative context of the amorous relation. But let us not be too concerned for the moment with the difficulties of finding a neutral language in which to speak about mental functioning. There is still Malebranche’s argument to follow. Building upon his model of the cringing esprit, his aim is apparently to expose the dependencies that exist, but that are disguised, between the promptings of désir, and the judgements that are passed in order that désir may be satisfied and also securely justified: ‘le désir nous doit porter par luimême à juger avantageusement de son objet, si c’est un désir d’amour; et désavantageusement, si c’est un désir d’aversion. Le désir d’amour est un mouvement de l’âme excité par les esprits, qui la disposent à vouloir jouir ou user des choses qui ne sont point en sa puissance’ (p. 146). A continuous circuit must be set up, in which it is desire’s responsibility to act as dynamic current, in order that supporting moral judgement may continue to prompt the step between impulse and action in the world. In this triangular structure, the âme, having fallen a prey to les esprits, first of all creates and then disowns désir, or the dynamic of justification. The justificatory circuit must operate independently once it has been set up. Positive moral judgements thus become a function of the plaisir that the ‘objet de nos passions’ affords us, since l’esprit can form no judgements by itself: ‘l’esprit ne peut concevoir que la chaleur et la saveur soient des

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manières d’être d’un corps’ (p. 147). Yet by the same token, ‘il est très facile de reconnaître par la raison, quels peuvent être les jugements que les passions qui nous agitent forment en nous’ (p. 147). Precisely because raison, in opposition to the esprits, is unable to make a subjective link between an object and its inherent moral worth, it is simultaneously, Malebranche asserts, the perfect instrument for recognizing a situation in which desire has initiated the judgement-forming circuit, and for calculating the étendue (p. 147) of the judgements and thus the violence of the desire. Desire takes over responsibility from the esprits and even from passion, for instigating moral judgements. Reason, on the other hand, is still supposed to be able to judge in a detached manner the justificatory judgements it has itself offered desire. Désir finds itself helplessly in the middle. It is judged by raison, from which it is simultaneously deriving justifications to support the actions of the âme. Yet the âme, which has been excité par les esprits, refuses to declare itself the real initiator of the justificatory loop. Malebranche tries to make this complex and highly allusive model work by turning to empirical examples: ‘L’expérience prouve assez ces choses, et en cela elle s’accommode parfaitement avec la raison’ (p. 147). A discursive switch shifts the argument from the erotic to an apparently neutral epistemological domain: ‘le désir de savoir, tout juste et tout raisonnable qu’il est en lui-même, devient souvent un vice très dangereux par les faux jugements qui l’accompagnent’ (p. 147). ‘Le désir de savoir’ is another name for curiosité, and Malebranche adopts the position of the moraliste to condemn its falsifying dangers. Every form of knowledge, he maintains, has ‘quelque endroit qui brille à l’imagination, et qui éblouit facilement l’esprit par l’éclat que la passion y attache’ (p. 149), but the light of truth only appears when passion subsides. This would seem clear enough, but his most important point is yet to come. The most serious impediment to detached reasoning, for Malebranche, is when an animating passion ‘se sent mourir’, because it seems to contract ‘une espèce d’alliance avec toutes les autres passions qui peuvent la secourir dans sa faiblesse’: Car les passions ne sont point indifférentes les unes pour les autres. Toutes celles qui se peuvent souffrir contribuent fidèlement à leur mutuelle conservation. Ainsi, les jugements qui justifient le désir qu’on a pour les langues ou pour telle autre chose qu’il vous plaira, sont incessamment sollicités et pleinement confirmés par toutes les passions qui ne lui sont pas contraires. (p. 149; my emphasis)

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It is this mutuelle conservation of passions which is the real source of danger to reason. If the passion of desire operated on its own, he argues, the only judgement it would be able to obtain from reason would be one agreeing that possession of the desired object was a real possibility; in other words, passion would only be able to slip the most basic feasibility study past reason: Mais le désir est animé par l’amour; il est fortifié par l’espérance; il est augmenté par la joie; il est renouvelé par la crainte; il est accompagné de courage, d’émulation, de colère et de plusieurs autres passions qui forment à leur tour des jugements dans une variété infinie, lesquels se succèdent les uns aux autres et soutiennent ce désir qui les a fait naître. (p. 150) Stylistically the most impressive sentence in Malebranche’s text, it also complexifies the dynamic looping it has described desire as performing, by splitting désir into a fully interconnecting set of moving passion parts. But the very impressiveness and dynamism of this textual demonstration do much to undermine his careful progression towards rejecting justification as a corrupting influence on reasoning. In Malebranche’s justification model, desire is expected to keep a circuit going between the âme and raison, which was supplying the âme with justificatory reasoning for the pursuit of its goal. The responsibility for the functioning and maintenance of this circuit can then be disowned by both the âme and raison, the former by pretending to be passive, the latter by pretending to be detached. Reason benefits, by being released from the pestering by desire for justificatory reasoning, and the âme benefits from that justificatory reasoning. If the desiring circuit were to suffer some kind of intermittent fault, a kind of desiring short-circuit, or power failure, however, reason and the âme would suddenly be deprived of their mutually beneficial but unacknowledged relationship. The two components of mental functioning would be linked, paradoxically, only by indifference. And we might speculate that, however short this period of linkage of âme and raison by indifference, it is too closely imitative of a state of inertia, or death, to be borne, which is why other types of link, not always justificatory, are imported as soon as possible to replace it. Malebranche represents mutuelle conservation as an irritating side-effect introduced by the passions, since to approve it would sound too much like approving justification over reason. Yet this mutual conservation practised by the passions might have much more to tell us about human survival than moralizing disapproval can allow into its modelling.

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The final section of Malebranche’s discussion of justification is at once uncannily astute and highly suspect. He uses a physiological model of how sense impressions travel to the brain, ‘d’une manière propre à former des traces profondes qui représentent cet objet’ (p. 150): [Ils plient] et rompent même quelquefois par leur cours impétueux les fibres du cerveau, et l’imagination en demeure [longtemps] salie et corrompue; car [les plaies du cerveau ne se reprennent pas aisément, ses traces ne se ferment pas à cause que les esprits y passent sans cesse] .... Ainsi les passions agissent sur l’imagination, et l’imagination corrompue fait effort contre la raison en lui représentant à toute heure les choses, non selon ce qu’elles sont en elles-mêmes afin que l’esprit prononce un jugement de vérité, mais selon ce qu’elles sont par rapport à la passion présente afin qu’il porte un jugement qui la favorise. (p. 150) This fascinating model of interconnection between a neurological and a moral vision of the human mind remains inextricably involved in the rhetorical and metaphoric signifying systems by which it is represented. No firm purchase seems possible upon either a purely material explanation of the workings of the brain, or upon the explanatory metaphors by which names for these workings also escape back into theological and moral interpretative traditions. Explanation is suspended between spirit, flesh, and language. And when Malebranche, whose text so successfully enacts the interdependence of explanatory metaphor with what it seeks to explain, tries to leap clear of his own language, in order to propose a kind of empirical sociological study which would divide people into different kinds of justifying groups, we find his text meshed up in what it had seemed merely to be describing from an external perspective: Si [l’]on considère maintenant quelle peut être la constitution des fibres du cerveau, l’agitation et l’abondance des esprits et du sang dans les différents sexes et dans les différents âges, il sera assez facile de connaître à peu près à quelles passions certaines personnes sont plus sujettes, et, par conséquent, quels sont les jugements qu’elles forment des objets. (p. 151) In wanting justification to be read off from physiology, Malebranche suddenly seems to deny the sophisticated interconnective cognitive

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modelling he has just been attempting. Malebranche has been caught in his own self-justificatory noose. His starting-point had been empirical: ‘Il n’est pas nécessaire de faire de grands raisonnements pour démontrer que toutes les passions se justifient; ce principe est assez évident par le sentiment intérieur que nous avons de nous-mêmes, et par la conduite de ceux que l’on voit agités de quelque passion: il suffit de l’exposer afin qu’on y fasse réflexion’ (p. 146). His conclusion tries to rejoin a supposedly empirical science, that of physiology. Yet his exposition, or his exposure, of how the passions justify themseves, has required speculative leaps of investigative imagination, and brave conclusions about cognitive modelling. His argument implodes when he tries to make cognitive models fit with the physical brain, because there is no flexibility in his model which would allow in subjectivity. Malebranche’s exposition of justification fails by screening out the writer and intended readership. Théodule Ribot, philosopher and experimental psychologist, who later concentrated on psychopathology, writing in Proust’s lifetime, profers a very different reading of justification. In La Logique des sentiments, he seeks to divide affective modes of reasoning into five distinct groups: ‘passionnel, inconscient, imaginatif, justificatif, mixte ou composite’.30 ‘Le raisonnement de justification’ opens with a categorical and unambiguous denigration of this kind of affective reasoning: it is, Ribot sneers, ‘la plus simple, la plus enfantine, la plus banale de toutes’ (p. 111). For Ribot, justification is: ‘engendrée par une croyance ferme et sincère qui se refuse à être troublée et aspire au repos. Le raisonnement de justification est nettement téléologique. Malgré quelques apparences de rationalisme, il appartient au type affectif pur se manifestant dans sa plus grande pauvreté’ (p. 111). For Malebranche, the act of justification had been an animating, if corrupting, influence connecting, however inappropriately, the âme to reason. But for Ribot, exactly the opposite is true: justification appears to be an agent of death and destruction in human reasoning. The croyance aveugle which causes the justificatory act, he says, is itself prompted by a need for ‘l’affirmation de l’individu dans son désir et son sentir les plus intimes’ (p. 111). He calls justification’s tenacity ‘une manifestation partielle de l’instinct de la conservation’ (p. III; Ribot’s emphasis): ‘Mais si inébranlable qu’elle paraisse, le doute la traverse au moins par moments. Il s’ensuit une rupture d’équilibre mental qui appelle un remède. C’est le raisonnement de justification’ (p. 112). Justification, he asserts, is what happens when our instinct for selfpreservation is overcome, or interfered with by doubt. Justification, instead of functioning as the connective circuitry between two kinds of mental

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functioning, desire and reason, as it did for Malebranche, is here the name given only to what causes ruptures and intermittences in mental circuitry. Ribot takes as examples political fervour, theoretical moralizing, and religious faith. He argues that moral thinkers rely on ‘une tendance maîtresse, une préférence individuelle, une subjectivité qui, dissimulée sous cet appareil logique, guide vers une fin posée d’avance’ (p. 112). They wish to found their thought on a priori concepts that do not need empirical justification, and yet smuggle in subjective and teleological material along the way of their reasoning. ‘Les vrais croyants’, on the other hand, take the events thrown at the world by God, and interpret them according to a fixed pattern: ‘Sans s’inquiéter d’un double illogisme, ils déclarent que les voies de la Providence sont impénétrables, mais ils essaient de les justifier’ (p. 113). They try to work backwards, justifying disaster after the event, so that they can continue to cling to their belief systems. A sudden shift takes place in Ribot’s argument here, from the relatively safe ground of people he calls normal (but justificatory), to the quicksands of reasoning among aliénés, people with persecution complexes. For them, apparently, ‘le raisonnement de justification est sans cesse en action’ (p. 113). He refuses, however, to go further into this subject, although he is willing to assert that justificatory reasoning operates at the same pitch in both the sane and the mad, an assertion which would seem to require more qualification: is justificatory reasoning, then, a function of insanity? Might the states of madness and health be linked through justificatory reasoning? He next asserts that, because his study is ‘consacré au raisonnement affectif ’ (p. 113), he does not intend to pursue a line of reasoning which would take him into an examination of the unconscious prejudice affecting all so-called pretence at scientific objectivity: historians, theologians, and philosophers, he says, are all prey to this. He accuses, for example, Nietzsche of falling into the same dialectic trap which the latter accuses Kant of doing: Dans tous les cas de ce genre, la forme est celle de la logique rationnelle. La structure du raisonnement est ferme, sans lacunes, irréprochable; mais c’est un état d’âme extra-rationnel qui a l’initiative et la haute direction. Ce qui paraît démonstration n’est que justification. La logique de la raison semble maîtresse; en réalité, elle est servante. On s’y trompe, parce que l’édifice logique, bâti par des ouvriers habiles et subtils, n’a pas les apparences naïves du raisonnement affectif où le dénouement est connu d’avance. (p. 114)

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His final section is a grudging afterthought on raisonnement de consolation, which is ‘né du besoin de trouver un remède à la douleur morale’ (p. 114): ‘un effort pour restituer, par des moyens artificiels, la quantité de vie et d’énergie perdues’, in order to combat the effects of ‘les malheurs de l’existence’ (p. 115). It consists in ‘la mise en valeur d’états passés ou futurs propres à compenser le présent’ (p. 115). The genre of compensatory writing, the ‘Consolation’, he attributes to Seneca and other rhetoricians, but ‘le simulacre de raisonnement qui le constitue reste vivace dans toutes les formes de condoléance journalière’ (p. 115). Casually, Ribot dispenses with an entire area of human activity, our everyday dealings with pain, sorrow, and misery. Justificatory reasoning, even if it helps soothe pain? Away with it, ‘tis false. Ribot has no hesitation in using an accusatory language which hopes to place justification well outside his own position as arbiter and judge. But beginning with unequivocal rejection of the concept, and a description of it as parasitic on the poorest kind of rationality, he proceeds to undermine his own statement with every succeeding example brought in. The more categories he includes as using justificatory procedures to obtain their ends, the more complex and multi-jointed the concept becomes, and the more its separable but interconnected forms and parts rebound on Ribot’s text. His own logic relies explicitly on separation: his very attempt at divisive categories of affective reasoning demonstrates his belief that language consists in neutral semantic units, whose combination does not result in a self-reflexive flow, which starts to mean more than its producer intended. In Ribot’s short essay, the whole of philosophy, indeed the activity of thought attempts of any kind, seems to disappear into an underworld of impossibility. No one, no one at all, knows how to think. Except perhaps the one man left standing, the exclusive omniscient, Ribot himself? This is wildness of a totalitarian kind, disturbingly persuasive in its scathing sweeps, yet reduced to a precarious foothold in serious danger of undermining itself so completely that it too disappears into the gulf left by the implosion of philosophy. There is a good reason for having examined so deeply two bad analyses of self-justification. As part of Proust’s exposure to and immersion in a long history of philosophy and psychology, these two close commentators on my governing concept are also part of the overall history of ideas soundlessly informing A la recherche du temps perdu and against which the novel project slowly took shape.31 Malebranche the philosopher who tolerates but gently mocks a conceptual category of reasoning, and Ribot the psychologist who strives to hold at bay a threatening component of mental functioning, may

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be seen as two kinds of hook holding up the intellectual backdrop upon which Proust’s experimentation in subjectivity is conducted. Their analysis contributes a set of thoughts, attitudes, and terminologies which will recur as the study proceeds, and to which the main missing ingredient supplied by Proust’s rigorous investigation of justification is, very precisely, self.

4. A N I N T R O D U C T O RY O V E RV I E W

OF THE

STUDY

I need to make just two more points before going on to summarize my book’s argument. The first is a kind of bookmark, to tell us how far we have already come in getting to grips with the concept of self-justification. ‘A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.’32 Conrad’s injunction to the artist seems to refer to a perfectionism which is also bound up in the relation between the art-maker and the artreceiver, or reader, or consumer, or viewer. Proust, sometime in the murky Contre Sainte-Beuve gestation period of 1908–9, has a similar note, but it is a self-directed one, a goad and a goal. ‘Au fond’, he says, ‘toute ma philosophie revient, comme toute philosophie vraie, à justifier, à reconstruire ce qui est.’33 Proust’s emphasis, at this melting-pot period out of which emerges a firstperson narrator, is vitally different from Conrad’s: for Proust, it is an ontological drive which spurs him to completion; for Conrad, completion is arrived at by satisfactorily arranging the presentation of the artwork. The perfectionism injected into the whole course of the Proustian narrator’s experience, and his concurrent or retrospective writing about it, is massive, general, total; Conrad’s is local, measured, focused. Among the plethora of other lustrous subjects Proust inspects: the functioning of Time, the workings of Memory, the needs met and dispatched by Habit, the language of flowers, the Dreyfus Affair, monocles, manacles, the Pompeian Métro, the calle of Venice, he has rigorously analysed, articulated and then run to ground the multiform modes of a very particular set of cognitive functions and relations. Proust, of course, though it is a very felicitous ‘of course’, and my second point, has thus built into his narrator’s perfectionism its own greatest blind spot. Wittgenstein puts it this way: ‘Justification by experience comes to an end. If it did not it would not be justification.’34 For Marcel, ontological considerations are inextricably meshed with empirical methods of analysis, which translates, as we will hear, into a powerful capacity to split open apparently stable justifications into their component self-justificatory parts. How then am I going to show you self-justification in action? Making use of the new Pléiade edition of A la recherche du temps perdu, Brunet’s

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concordance of the novel, Le Vocabulaire de Proust, and the electronic concordancing capacities of FRANTEXT (both of which are based on the previous 1954 Pléiade edition of the text), it is the purpose of this study to show the contents of various Proustian textual laboratories, each conducting separate, but ultimately interconnected, linguistic, psychological and moral experiments upon the possibilities offered by self-justification.35 The book divides into three parts. The first section examines the workings of three of the set-piece salon and soirée scenes. Party-going, that most unlikely of domains for research purposes, yields up some strange selfjustificatory performances which are almost always passed over or giggled at without their vital significance as notes on acceptability being analysed. If self-justification towards an external world perceived as intolerant and indifferent is clearly important in A la recherche, occupying large swathes of Le Côté de Guermantes and Sodome et Gomorrhe, other questions arise from its study. The second part of the book divides into three subsections. They look, in bald terms, at rhetoric, metaphor, and characterization. Digression is the subject of Chapter 2. One of the most beloved of Proustian stylistic features, digression is a trope which builds a seductive play into rhetorical organization. Alarmingly, however, it is not far from seductive play to defensive strategy of avoidance or evasion. Stopping in the middle of digressions, rather than announcing triumphantly that there are digressions in the novel, enables us to pursue a surprising, and painful line of argument from parties to people, in other words, between group functioning and relationships with individuals. This line of argument that moves via the bulges of digression in A la recherche resolves itself in the third chapter into a model for self-justification. My model shows how self-justification works in two directions in A la recherche. Vulnerability and doubt might be said to facilitate a dynamic engagement with the outside world, to the extent that admission to inadequacy opens a channel for the admission of alterity. They are also, clearly, mental states prone to blockage. The figure of the cloison is suggested as a focus of narratorial engagement with an intimate external reality, which demonstrates Marcel’s investigative skills but also the site of their potential failure. The cloison is a semi-permeable partition, a temporary screen which divides spaces internally, and enables the transmission of sound but not of light. It is used in the text both figurally and literally. Chapter 3 shows how, while justifying himself to the outside world can be seen as a learnable skill, even a necessary defence mechanism, based on imitation and disguise, selfjustification in relation to the discovery of homosexuality at the beginning of Sodome et Gomorrhe, or the narrator’s realization that he has lost a source of

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unconditional love with the death of his grandmother, hints at its potential to mutate into wilful self-protection. We now have a great deal of evidence about self-justification going on, so to speak, outside the narrator: mindstuff he can see or hear, and only very occasionally feel. So far, self-justification has been safely contained as something that happens to other people. The final subsection, however, continues work begun in the cloison chapter, to question the safety of that detached spectacle. It investigates a particular difficulty apparent in the matter of Proust’s characterization. Characters in the text who seem at first sight straightforwardly comic, or one-dimensional, turn out to represent a potential threat to the narratorial self, and we will need to spend some time considering what Marcel does about this. The first two sections of the study, then, show how Marcel justifies himself in relation to external criteria. But when all of these external means of measurement are removed, self-justification takes on an entirely new aspect. In the final section of the argument, an investigation of the processes of mourning is undertaken. Marcel mourns Albertine throughout Albertine disparue in a solitary narrative of distress. It is a section of the text rarely analysed, and reveals how Proust allows the different aspects of selfjustification to fuse, with devastating results. This is a very new vision of how A la recherche du temps perdu works, an epistemological and hermeneutic dilemma on active duty in the novel. And, in due course, the claims that Proust makes about the uses of selfjustification, as they are presented in the text, will themselves suggest some deeply troubling and painful conclusions. These will be conclusions first about what Proust has written. In the second place, my conclusions are about how literature makes an impact upon the world only and precisely to the extent that it arises from intimacy with the world.

NOTES 1. Aeschylus, The Oresteia: The Eumenides, l. 839. 2. Vital as the madeleine moment is, I do not intend to dwell upon it in this study. Too many others have preceded me. Perhaps the most noteworthy of recent times is Serge Doubrovsky’s psychoanalytic account, La Place de la madeleine (1974), which has done a great deal to direct psychoanalytic literary criticism away from ‘psychobiography’, and promoted, along with the profoundly important narratological work carried out by Gérard Genette, delicate attention to Proust’s use of language. 3. Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle (1931); Roger Shattuck, Proust’s Binoculars (1964); Samuel Beckett, Proust (1965); Leo Bersani, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (1965); Georges Poulet, L’Espace proustien (2nd edn. 1982).

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4. Compare J.L. Austin’s ‘A Plea for Excuses’, Philosophical Papers (1961). Austin points out that flaws in linguistic functioning show how that functioning takes place: ‘the breakdowns signalized by ... various excuses are of radically different kinds, affecting different parts or stages of the machinery, which the excuses consequently pick out and sort out for us’ (p. 128). 5. See The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (1966), 245. 6. Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre à venir (1959), 32–3. 7. See principally Marcel Muller, Les Voix narratives dans la recherche du temps perdu (1983). 8. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Être et le néant (1943), 398–9. 9. Les Voix narratives, 15–16. 10. See Gérard Genette, Figures III (1972). For ‘prolepsis’ (anticipation), see p. 82; for ‘paralepsis’ (here the narrator knowing too much for the formal, temporal, and epistemological constraints within which he seems to be functioning), Genette’s own neologism, see pp. 211–12. For more of Genette’s narratological work on Proust, see ‘Métonymie chez Proust’, Figures III, 41–63, and of course the much more detailed ‘Discours du récit’ in the same book, pp. 65–273; but also other essays, such as ‘Proust palimpseste’, Figures I (1966), 39–67; and ‘Proust et le langage indirect’, Figures II (1969), 223–94. 11. Augustine’s Confessions, c. 397; Rousseau’s monumental Les Confessions, composed between 1764 and 1770, appeared posthumously from 1782; and his Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire and three dialogues, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques supplemented this vast autobiographical exercise; Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe was published in 1816; Fromentin’s Dominique was first published in serial form in La Revue des Deux Mondes (April–May 1862); André Gide published L’Immoraliste in 1902, La Porte étroite in 1909, and La Symphonie pastorale in 1919. 12. See, however, for more detailed analysis of the genre of autobiography in France and Europe than I can give here: Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (1975) and his Je est un autre (1980); John Sturrock, The Language of Autobiography (1993); Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography (1993); Paul Jay, Being in the Text (1984). This is an ever more fully theorized (and circumscribed) critical field, drawing its methodologies particularly from speech act theory, psychoanalysis and deconstruction. Autobiography has fascinating siblings in witness or testament narrative, particularly of the Holocaust; see e.g., Elie Wiesel, La Nuit (1958). Michel Foucault is the obligatory starting-point for critique of confession, see Histoire de la sexualité, i, La Volonté de savoir (1976). 13. Dennis A. Foster, Confession and Complicity in Narrative (1987), 3. 14. Philippe Lejeune, ‘Écriture et sexualité’, Europe (1971); Jean-Louis Baudry, Proust, Freud et l’autre (1984). 15. Michael Riffaterre, ‘Compelling Reader Responses’, in A. Bennet (ed.), Reading Reading (1993), 100. 16. To be found, respectively, in JS 85–96 (written between 1892 and 1895, for Les Plaisirs et les jours); JS 167–70 (1893); CSB 150–9 (based on the van Blarenberghe matricide in 1907). Compare also ‘Violante ou la mondanité’ (1892), JS 29–37. A novella suppressed from Les Plaisirs et les jours was L’Indifférent (1896), ed. Philip Kolb (Gallimard, 1978), which has received renewed interest recently. See Julia Kristeva, Le Temps sensible (1994), 21–3. Kristeva’s interest is in the name of its

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heroine, who suffers from a man’s indifference (because of his secret obsession with brothels and prostitutes): it is, naturally, Madeleine. 17. 18 or 19 Sept., 1906 (Corr. vi. 127). See Baudry, Proust, Freud, 29. 18. George D. Painter, Marcel Proust (1990), ii. 64. 19. Here is Proust’s comment on the reversible transmission of characteristics between mother and son in Jean Santeuil: ‘Peu à peu, ce fils dont elle avait voulu former l’intelligence, les mœurs, la vie, avait insinué en elle son intelligence, ses mœurs, sa vie même et avait altéré celles de sa mère’ (JS 871). 20. Baudry, Proust, Freud, 41. Antoine Compagnon demonstrates how casually ingrained this maternal guilt topos has become in readings of Proust’s work, with uncritical commentary on Proust’s so-called Baudelairean fascination with the love–hate maternal relationship (see Proust entre deux siècles (1989), 160–5). 21. In ‘Reading (Proust)’, Allegories of Reading (1979), 57–78. See also ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’, MLN 94 (1979), 919–30, on prosopopoeia as the trope of autobiography. Jonathan Culler has also written brilliantly on individual rhetorical devices. See among other writings, his essay, ‘Apostrophe’, diacritics, 7 (1977), 59–69. 22. De Man, Allegories of Reading, 278–301. 23. See, for an example of this trend, Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction (1992). 24. For a good overview of early responses to Proust’s writing, see Leighton Hodson (ed.), Marcel Proust: The Critical Heritage (1989). For responses by contemporary writers, see Jean-Yves Tadié, Proust (1983), 153–231. 25. See Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan (1987), for excellent analysis of these points of theoretical crossover, fusion, and complementarity. 26. See the journal series Bulletin d’informations proustiennes. Genesis is the organ of the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (ITEM/CNRS). A measure of the recent interest in the critical and theoretical possibilities offered by genetic criticism can be seen in the publication of an issue of Yale French Studies, 89 (1996), devoted to the subject. 27. It comes from late Latin, justification -em, in Augustine, etc.; comparable with the 12th-cent. French justification (in Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française, perhaps the immediate source). 28. Nicolas Malebranche, ‘Que toutes les passions se justifient, et des jugements qu’elles [nous] font [faire] pour leur justification’, De la recherche de la vérité (1674–5), 3 vols. (Vrin, 1962), ii. 146–51. 29. Théodule Ribot, ‘Le Raisonnement de justification’, La Logique des sentiments (1906; 5th edn. Alcan, 1920), 111–15 (p. 111). 30. André Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (1993), i. 552. 31. See Kristeva, Le Temps sensible, 307–37, for an excellent summary and analysis of Proust’s exposure to contemporary philosophy and psychology through his school and university education, an exposure which took in a range of approaches from the idealism of Schopenhauer’s concentration on Will, to Gabriel Tarde’s resolutely cultural interpretation of society. 32. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897; preface, 1914), 3. 33. Cahier 29. N. a. fr. 16669, publ. in CSB as part of ‘Notes sur la littérature et la critique’, p. 309.

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34. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe (1953), 136, §485. 35. Étienne Brunet, Le Vocabulaire de Proust, 3 vols. (1983); Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, 3 vols. (Gallimard, 1954), Online, FRANTEXT Base de données textuelles du francais (http://www.ciril.fr/~mastina/FRANTEXT), Internet. FRANTEXT has an extremely useful concordancing programme. Its use as a labourand time-saving device cannot be over-estimated. The concordancing programme can search not only for single-word instances, but also for word clusters, verb declensions, and collocations. Lists of pertinent quotations may then be conveniently downloaded and studied. At this time, the only difficulty is the subsequent pagereferencing work required in order to locate the word-pattern discoveries in the 1987–9 edn. of A la recherche, but this will be resolved when the first CD-ROM hypertext edition of the text is put together, with esquisses, a publishing event that cannot be far off.

W I L L I A M C . C A RT E R

The Vast Structure of Recollection: from Life to Literature

I

n Paris, on Saturday, 3 September 1870, as news of the humiliating defeat of the French by the invading Prussian army at Sedan spread throughout the capital, Dr Adrien Proust, a middle-aged Catholic bachelor, a grocer’s son originally from the small provincial town of Illiers, married Jeanne Weil, the Jewish daughter of a wealthy Parisian family. At twenty-one, the beautiful, dark-haired woman was fifteen years younger than the bridegroom. No one knows how they met, but it is likely they were introduced at a government sponsored event or social gathering. Adrien had recently risen to the top ranks in public health administration and Jeanne’s family had many connections in official circles. Marcel was born the following July at Uncle Louis Weil’s estate at Auteuil where Jeanne’s family usually spent the summer months. The house, built of quarrystones, was large, with spacious rooms, including a drawing room with a grand piano and a billiard room where the family sometimes slept to keep cool during heat waves.1 In fine weather Louis and his guests enjoyed the large garden with a pond surrounded by hawthorn trees, whose blossoms Marcel was also to admire in his other uncle, Jules Amiot’s garden in Illiers. Marcel’s mother possessed a lively mind, an unfailing sense of humour, a profound appreciation of literature and music, combined with common

From The Cambridge Companion to Proust, edited by Richard Bales. © 2001 by Cambridge University Press.

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sense and a firm belief in traditional bourgeois values. Her influence would be the most important in Proust’s life. Jeanne and her mother, Adèle, supervised his cultural education, exposing him to what they considered the best works in literature. In Jean Santeuil, the mother initiates Jean into the love of poetry by reading to him from Lamartine’s Méditations, Corneille’s Horace and Hugo’s Contemplations. Jean’s mother believes that good books, even if poorly understood at first, provide the child’s mind with healthy nourishment that will later benefit him. When Marcel was older, his mother and grandmother read with him the great seventeenth-century works, of which he acquired a special understanding and appreciation. He came to love the tragedies of Jean Racine, whose masterpiece Phèdre in its depiction of obsessive, destructive jealousy haunts the pages of In Search of Lost Time. Adrien’s sister, Élisabeth, had married Jules Amiot, who operated a successful notions shop in Illiers at 14, place du Marché, opposite the church of Saint-Jacques. It was to the Amiots’ house in the rue du Saint-Esprit that Adrien returned with his wife and two young sons, Marcel and Robert, during the Easter holidays, when the town was at its best, offering wild flowers and trees in bloom that Marcel adored. The Prousts travelled by rail from Paris to Chartres, where they changed trains for the short ride to Illiers. Seen from afar as the train approached, Illiers was contained in its steeple, just as is Combray in the Search: Combray, de loin ... n’était qu’une église résumant la ville, la représentant, parlant d’elle et pour elle aux lointains, et, quand on approchait, tenant serrés autour de sa haute mante sombre, en plein champ, contre le vent, comme une pastoure ses brebis, les dos laineux et gris des maisons rassemblées. (I, 47) [Combray at a distance ... was no more than a church epitomising the town, representing it, speaking of it and for it to the horizon, and as one drew near, gathering close about its long dark cloak, sheltering from the wind, on the open plain, as a shepherdess gathers her sheep, the woolly grey backs of its huddled houses.] (I, 56/65) Jules indulged his passion for horticulture by creating a large pleasure garden, just beyond the banks of the gently flowing Loir River. He called it the Pré Catelan, after a section of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. On the south end of the garden a magnificent row of hawthorn trees rose up a slope, leading to a large white gate that opened onto fields of blue cornflowers and

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brilliant red poppies fanning out to the west and south on the plain towards Méréglise and the château of Tansonville. The Pré Catelan became the model in Swann’s Way for Charles Swann’s park at Tansonville near Combray.2 It must have seemed natural to Marcel, who often played in the Bois near Auteuil, for his Illiers uncle to name his own garden after the one in Paris. The name held in common by the two principal gardens of his childhood may have provided the first linking in Marcel’s mind of the two spaces, Auteuil and Illiers, that inspired Combray. In Illiers, Marcel visited his elderly grandmother Proust who lived in a modest apartment. Relatively little is known about her except that she was an invalid cared for by an old servant, which makes her a more likely model for the hypochondriacal Aunt Léonie in the Search than Élisabeth Amiot, generally considered the original. Adrien took his sons on walks to show them where he had played as a child. He pointed out how two different topographies join at Illiers: the Beauce, a flat, windy plain that, as it moves westward, meets Le Perche, whose hilly terrain is ravined by streams rolling down to feed the Loir River. The defining features of Combray’s fictional topography approximate those of Illiers where the two walks—one the landscape of an ideal plain, the other a captivating river view—embody, for the child Narrator, two separate worlds. As Adrien and his boys made their way back from Tansonville, it was the steeple of Saint-Jacques, appearing now and then in the sky as they mounted a hillock or rounded a bend, that beckoned them home. Proust later used a motif from the church’s sculpted wood as one of the most powerful symbols of his art. On either wall behind the altar stands a wooden statue of a saint above whose heads are placed scallop shells. Such shells are the emblem of Saint James (Jacques in French) and, in the Middle Ages, were worn by the pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela. The church of Saint Jacques was a stopping point on the route to Spain. The shells also provide the form of the little cakes known as madeleines, symbol of a key revelation in the Narrator’s quest to find his vocation as a writer. Proust would remember the connection between the pilgrims and the madeleines, when he described the cakes in the Search: ‘the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds’ (I, 46; I, 54/63). On his walks through the river country north of Illiers, Marcel spied on Mirougrain, the large manor house built on a slope overlooking a water-lily pond. Proust remembered the impressions evoked by this mysterious dwelling later when creating the composer Vinteuil’s house in the Search. He took the name of the old mill, Montjouvin, but used the setting and atmosphere of Mirougrain for the lesbian love scene between Vinteuil’s

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daughter and her friend. The names of the streets, old inns, manor houses and ruined churches of Illiers and its surroundings, such as Tansonville, Méréglise, Montjouvin, Saint-Hilaire, rue de l’Oiseau flesché, were to live in Proust’s memory and imagination, until he used them, with slight alterations or none at all, as part of the material out of which he constructed Combray, a place that exists only in his book. A story that Proust wrote in his early twenties depicts the goodnight kiss drama from his childhood, generally thought to have taken place at Auteuil.3 In ‘La Confession d’une jeune fille’ [‘A Girl’s Confession’], a woman, dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, confesses her weakness that led to tragedy. Although she had given up her lewd behaviour to become engaged to a fine young man, she succumbed one evening to the temptations offered by an attractive guest. Her mother, who happened to catch the daughter and visitor in a passionate embrace, fell dead from the shock. As the girl lies dying, she recalls her childhood and the tender, loving relationship with her mother. Until she reached fifteen, her mother left her every summer at a country home. The child, like Marcel, dreaded more than anything separation from her mother. Before departing, the mother used to spend two days with her, coming each evening to her bed to kiss her goodnight, a custom the mother had to abandon because ‘j’y trouvais trop de plaisir et trop de peine, que je ne m’endormais plus à force de la rappeler pour me dire bonsoir encore’ (JS, p.86) [‘it caused me too much pleasure and too much pain, because due to my calling her back to say goodnight again and again I could never go to sleep’].4 This is the prototype of the crucial goodnight kiss scene in the Search that sets in motion the Narrator’s long quest to regain his lost will and become a creative person. In the Search, it is the mother’s habit to give the child Narrator one last kiss before going to bed. On nights when company prevents her from coming to his room, he is particularly upset. On one such night, he waits up for her and then implores her to remain with him. She does not want to yield to his nervous anxiety, but the usually stern father intervenes and capriciously tells her to stay with the boy. The child, incredulous at the easy violation of a strict rule, feels guilty for having caused his mother to abandon her convictions. He will spend the rest of his life trying to recover the will he lost that night and to expiate the wrong done to his mother. This scene illustrates how Proust eventually learned to make his private demons serve the plot and structure of his novel. It was probably during the fall visit of 1886 to Illiers that Marcel, at fifteen, knew that he wanted to be a writer. He had brought along Augustin Thierry’s history, The Norman Conquest of England, considered a masterpiece

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of historical narration. As he read page after page of vivid, picturesque narration, he was captivated. In an early draft of Du côté de chez Swann, Proust evokes this reading in the context of the Narrator’s visit to Combray: Je lisais dans la ‘salle’ au coin du feu la ‘Conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normands’ d’Augustin Thierry; puis quand j’étais fatigué du livre, quelque temps qu’il fît, je sortais: mon corps resté immobile pendant ces heures de lecture où le mouvement de mes idées l’agitait sur place pour ainsi dire, était comme une toupie qui soudain lâchée a besoin de dépenser dans tous les sens la vitesse accumulée. (Textes retrouvés, pp.178–9.) [I read, in the ‘living room’ by the fireside, Augustin Thierry’s The Norman Conquest of England; then, when I tired of reading, I went out, no matter what the weather: my body, which in the long spell of immobility while reading for hours, during which the movement of my ideas kept it moving in place so to speak, was like a wound up top which, when suddenly released, felt the need to let go, to expend the accumulated energy in every direction.] (Translation mine.) In the final version, the situation is the same, but the book is unspecified. The Narrator realises, as he walks through the forest, that despite his great desire to express himself as forcefully as the authors he loves, he is incapable of doing so. He expels his pent-up energy and frustrations by shouting and beating the trees with his umbrella. The passage illustrates one of Proust’s most successful narrative tricks, used with variations throughout the Search: he tells us in dazzling prose about his inability to write! Voyant sur l’eau et à la face du mur un pâle sourire répondre au sourire du ciel, je m’écriai dans mon enthousiasme en brandissant mon parapluie refermé: ‘Zut, zut, zut, zut.’ Mais en même temps je sentis que mon devoir eût été de ne pas m’en tenir à ces mots opaques et de tâcher de voir plus clair dans mon ravissement. (I, 153) [Seeing upon the water, and on the surface of the wall, a pallid smile responding to the smiling sky, I cried aloud in my enthusiasm, brandishing my furled umbrella: ‘Gosh, gosh, gosh,

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gosh!’ But at the same time I felt that I was in duty bound not to content myself with these unilluminating words, but to endeavour to see more clearly into the sources of my rapture.] (I, 186/219) The ebullience Marcel felt during such readings created in him an urge to uncover and express the hidden secrets, the profound meaning of the impressions stored up during his walks. And he had made an invaluable discovery: he must devote his life to literature. But how? And what would he write about? One day while playing in the garden along the Champs-Élysées, Marcel met Marie de Benardaky and fell in love. Once he met Marie, nothing mattered more than the afternoon trek to the garden to find the ‘pretty, exuberant’ girl with the open, winsome smile whom he remembered as ‘the intoxication and despair of my childhood’ and one of ‘the great loves of my life’ (see Corr. XVII, 175, 194). In Jean Santeuil, where Proust describes his infatuation, Marie appears with her real name (JS, p.46). His crush on her evolved into the Narrator’s adolescent love for Gilberte. But Marcel was not attracted solely to girls. He wrote classmates letters expressing affection, recriminations and invitations to have sex (see Selected Letters, I, 10–11). Many of his adolescent letters are remarkable because he used them, not simply to express his emotions, but to analyse his feelings and try to comprehend his motivations and those of his classmates. He played roles and assigned different attitudes to his friends. This practice, begun at such a young age, combined with his extraordinary sensitivity, which allowed him to put himself in another’s place, served him well when, as a mature writer, he began creating fascinating, multifaceted characters. After high school, Marcel received invitations to Paris’s leading salons where he met many prominent socialites, such as Charles Ephrussi and Charles Haas, both successful Jews who moved at ease in the art world and in high society and who served as models for Charles Swann. At Madeleine Lemaire’s salon Proust met aristocrats, artists and political figures. Celebrated actors Sarah Bernhardt and Réjane, both models for the Search’s La Berma, often attended, as did writers Pierre Loti, Jules Lemaître and Anatole France. Madeleine, who loved music, offered her guests the occasion to listen to Paris’s most celebrated composers. One might hear Camille Saint-Saëns, Jules Massenet, or Gabriel Fauré at the piano playing their own works or accompanying a singer. Here Proust met the darkly handsome Reynaldo Hahn, only nineteen and already successful as a composer and performer. Soon he and Marcel were inseparable. Madeleine, who insisted

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upon silence during performances, provided the primary model for Proust’s domineering hostess Mme Verdurin, who, like Lemaire, refers to the members of her salon as the ‘faithful’. Madeleine introduced Proust to Robert de Montesquiou and begged the conceited, irascible count to be kind to the intimidated youth. Montesquiou, recognising Marcel’s potential as an admiring disciple, invited him to call. The count, arbiter of taste and epitome of aristocratic hauteur, poet, artist, and critic, supplied Proust, over the years, with the major ingredients for one of his most famous characters, the disdainful, vituperative, homosexual Baron de Charlus. Between his twentieth and twenty-fifth birthdays, Proust wrote many stories that were published in reviews or in the volume Les Plaisirs et les jours, illustrated by Madeleine Lemaire and prefaced by Anatole France. These stories present important themes that were fully developed and orchestrated in the mature novel. In L’Indifférent, a novella about desire, Marcel described the fear of imminent death from suffocation. He likened an asthmatic child’s experience of breathlessness to the feeling of panic and doom that overcomes the lover upon learning that the beloved is to depart on a long voyage: Un enfant qui depuis sa naissance respire sans y avoir jamais pris garde, ne sait pas combien l’air qui gonfle si doucement sa poitrine ... est essentiel à sa vie. Vient-il, pendant un accès de fièvre, dans une convulsion, à étouffer? Dans l’effort désespéré de son être, c’est presque pour sa vie, qu’il lutte, c’est pour sa tranquillité perdue qu’il ne retrouvera qu’avec l’air duquel il ne la savait pas inséparable.5 [A child who has been breathing since birth, without being aware of it, does not realise how essential to life is the air that swells his chest so gently ... But what happens if, during a high fever or a convulsion, he starts to suffocate? His entire being will struggle desperately to stay alive, to recapture his lost tranquillity that will return only with the air from which, unbeknownst to him, it was inseparable.] (My translation.) Asthma, first experienced by Proust at age ten, reminded him of the sheer terror that overtook him when he learned that his mother was leaving on a trip and, eventually—when he had become so dependent on her presence— even when she came to kiss him good night. L’Indifférent tells the story of Madeleine who falls helplessly in love with Lepré, a man who cannot return

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her affection. She finally learns that he leads a secret life that explains his indifference to decent women. He can only make love to prostitutes, whom he pursues relentlessly. A similar trait is given to Swann, a highly eligible bachelor who, rather than making a good marriage and settling down, prefers to seduce servant girls. ‘Avant la nuit’ [‘Before Nightfall’], written in 1893, was Proust’s first published work about a future major theme in the Search: same-sex love. The character Françoise incarnates and legitimises homosexuality; like the heroine of ‘La Confession d’une jeune fille’, she shoots herself. Before dying, Françoise observes that Socrates, a wise and just man, tolerated homosexuality. After acknowledging the superiority of procreative love, she argues that when the purpose of lovemaking is not procreative, there can be no ‘hierarchy among sterile loves’, and, therefore, it is no more immoral for a woman to find pleasure with another woman than with a man. Françoise’s final justification for such love is aesthetic. Since both female and male bodies can be beautiful, there is no reason why ‘une femme vraiment artiste ne serait pas amoureuse d’une femme. Chez les natures vraiment artistes l’attraction ou la répulsion physique est modifiée par la contemplation du beau’ (JS, p.170) [‘a woman who is truly an artist should not fall in love with another woman. Among those with truly artistic natures, physical attraction or repulsion is modified by the contemplation of beauty’: my translation]. These justifications for homosexual desire are refined and expanded in the Search, where Proust became the first novelist to depict the continuum of human sexual expression. In these early stories, Proust treated themes that he was to develop until they became uniquely his. In ‘L’Éventail’ [‘The Fan’] a lady paints on a fan memories of her salon, a ‘little universe ... that we shall never see again’. This notion of moments rescued from oblivion, illustrated by the minor art of fan painting, states his main theme: time lost—and regained. But, like the fan painter, Proust remained, until he was nearly forty, an artist in a minor genre, rendering exquisite little pieces that might easily go unnoticed. ‘La Fin de la jalousie’ [‘The End of Jealousy’] focuses on another major Proustian preoccupation. Honore is in love with Françoise, with whom he has enjoyed a passionate, secret liaison. A gentleman friend tells him that Françoise is easy to possess, but too arduous in her affairs. This remark transforms Honoré, who becomes extremely jealous and interrogates Françoise, who swears she has always been faithful. This story, Proust’s favourite from his early years, possesses the dynamics of nearly all the erotic relationships in the Search. The two most fully developed of these, Swann’s obsession with Odette and the Narrator’s with Albertine, follow the

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pattern of emotions that bind Honoré and Françoise. The lies that Honoré tells Françoise, as he attempts to trick her into making revelations, are the models for Swann’s jealous interrogations of Odette and the Narrator’s of Albertine. In 1895, Marcel and Reynaldo, vacationing in Brittany, reached the village of Beg-Meil where, on a hill overlooking the sea, they found a small hotel. It was here that Marcel most likely began drafting Jean Santeuil. Proust’s encounter with Thomas Alexander Harrison, an American expatriate, inspired the character known as the writer C, aspects of whom Proust would use in the Search for Elstir who, like Harrison, is a painter.6 A text combining Proust’s impressions of Beg-Meil and Lake Geneva sketches a key theme: the phenomenon of memory ignited by a physical sensation, the examination of which leads him to conclude that our true nature lies outside time. One day Jean is driving through farmland near Geneva, when he suddenly sees the lake: En apercevant ainsi la mer (c’est presque la mer à cette heure-là) au bout de la route ... Jean s’est aussitôt souvenu. Et voici qu’il la voit belle, qu’il en sent le charme, de cette mer d’autrefois, en la retrouvant là devant lui. Et soudain toute cette vie de là-bas qu’il croyait inutile et inutilisée lui apparaît charmante et belle ... quand le soleil baissait avec la mer devant soi. (JS, pp.398–9) [Looking at the sea (at this hour it had almost the appearance of the sea) at the end of the road ... Jean suddenly remembered. He saw it before him as the very sea he once had known, and felt its charm. In a flash, that life in Brittany which he had thought useless and unusable, appeared before his eyes in all its charm and beauty ... when the sun was setting and the sea stretched out before him.]7 Then he wonders about the nature of the extraordinary phenomenon he is experiencing and sees that what the poet needs to feed his imagination is memory experienced in the present, containing both the past and now. Jean then recalls a similar experience, provoked by the smell of a seaside villa where he and his family had vacationed: Toute cette vie, toutes ses attentes, ses ennuis, sa faim, son sommeil, son insomnie, ses projets, ses tentatives de jouissance esthétique et leur échec, ses essais de jouissance sensuelle ... ses

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essais de captation d’une personne qui plaît ... cette odeur a enveloppé tout cela. (JS, p.400) [The whole of that period of my life, with its hopes, its worries, its hungers, its hours of sleep or sleeplessness, its efforts to find joy in art—which ended in failure—its experiments in sensual gratification ... its attempts to win the love of someone who had taken my fancy ... all were caught up and made present in that smell.] (p.408) Shortly after 25 December 1898, Proust wrote to thank Marie Nordlinger for her Christmas card. In his meditative letter he touched on topics that pre-occupied him and would form the philosophical underpinnings of his future work: the soul and its encasement in the body, the passage of time and, through time, the slow, unconscious accumulation of memories, largely ignored by the superficial, egotistical self. Sounding the depths of his being, Proust perceived only a faint echo indicating the unknown treasures that might lie buried beneath the sands of time. The scent of tea and mimosa furnishes the sesame that opened, at least briefly in 1898, the door to the treasure trove. He spoke first about Christmas cards and other symbols and why we need them: Si nous n’étions que des êtres de raison nous ne croirions pas aux anniversaires, aux fêtes, aux reliques, aux tombeaux. Mais comme nous sommes faits aussi d’un peu de matière, nous aimons à croire qu’elle est quelque chose aussi dans la réalité et nous aimons que ce qui tient de la place dans notre cœur en ait aussi une petite autour de nous, qu’elle ait, comme notre âme l’a en notre corps, son symbole matériel. Et puis au fur et à mesure que Noël perd pour nous de sa vérité comme anniversaire, par la douce émanation des souvenirs accumulés il prend une réalité de plus en plus vive, où la lumière des bougies ... l’odeur de ses mandarines imbibant la chaleur des chambres, la gaité de ses froids et de ses feux, les parfums du thé et des mimosas nous réapparaissent enduits du miel délicieux de notre personnalité que nous y avons inconsciemment déposée pendant des années, alors que—fascinés par des buts égoïstes—nous ne la sentions pas, et maintenant tout d’un coup elle nous fait battre le cœur. (Corr. II, 269–70)

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[If we were creatures only of reason, we would not believe in anniversaries, holidays, relics or tombs. But since we are also made up in some part of matter we like to believe that it too has a certain reality and we want what holds a place in our hearts to have some small place in the world around us and to have its material symbol, as our soul has in our body. And while little by little Christmas has lost its truth for us as an anniversary, it has at the same time, through the gentle emanation of accumulated memories, taken on a more and more living reality, in which candlelight ... the smell of its tangerines imbibing the warmth of heated rooms, the gaiety of its cold and its fires, the scent of tea and mimosa, return to us overlaid with the delectable honey of our personality, which we have unconsciously been depositing over the years during which—engrossed in selfish pursuits—we paid no attention to it, and now suddenly it sets our hearts to beating.] (Selected Letters I, 180) Proust must have recognised the importance of these insights, since he transposed them for a scene in Jean Santeuil inspired by another of his muses, the young and beautiful poet Anna de Noailles, to whom he gave the fictional name Vicomtesse Gaspard de Réveillon. Proust attempted to state the importance of such intoxicating, fleeting episodes, like the one evoked by tea and mimosa, that inspire creativity: Nos poèmes étant précisément la commémoration de nos minutes inspirées, lesquelles sont déjà souvent une sorte de commémoration de tout ce que notre être a laissé de lui-même dans des minutes passées, essence intime de nousmême que nous répandons sans la connaître, mais qu’un parfum senti alors, une même lumière tombant dans la chambre, nous rend tout d’un coup jusqu’à nous en enivrer et à nous laisser indifférents à la vie réelle dans laquelle nous ne la sentons jamais, à moins que cette vie ne soit en même temps une vie passée, de sorte que dégagés un instant de la tyrannie du présent, nous sentons quelque chose qui dépasse l’heure actuelle, l’essence de nous-même. (JS, p.521) [Poems being precisely the commemoration of our inspired moments which in themselves are often a sort of communication of all that our being has left of itself in moments past, the concentrated essence of ourselves which we exude without

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realising that we are doing so, which a perfume smelled in that past time, a remembered light shining into our room, will suddenly bring back so vividly, that it fills us with ... intoxication, so that we become completely indifferent to what is usually called ‘real life’, in which it never visits us unless that life be at the same time a past life, so that freed for a moment from the tyranny of the present, we feel something that spreads out beyond the actual minute, the essence of our being.] (p.464; ‘the essence of our being’ is omitted from the English translation.) In the Search, Proust turns this around, as hinted here, and says that moments of vivid, spontaneous memory and their conscious application in the creative process form the real life and that our daily life in its habitual, vain actions is a life lived on the surface, and hence, a life lost. The letter to Marie and the draft in Jean Santeuil where Lake Geneva recalls Beg-Meil are Proust’s first known gropings for the elucidation of the key moment in his novel: the experience he called involuntary memory. These early attempts to describe and comprehend this phenomenon indicate there was not one extraordinary moment in Proust’s life when he bit into a madeleine and, in a frenzy of inspiration, began writing the Search. Proust recognised, as early as Jean Santeuil, that the key to his work lay submerged in the past. He saw the rich potential of such experiences, saying they were ‘alive on a higher level than memory or than the present so that they have not the flatness of pictures but the rounded fullness of reality, the imprecision of feeling’ (Jean Santeuil, p.409). But he was years away from discovering how to make them serve a novel’s plot. Around 1899, unable to create a plot and find the right point of view, he abandoned Jean Santeuil. From 1900–05 Proust translated John Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies. This arduous work, entailing the study of French history, geography, architecture and the Bible, proved crucial to the development of Proust’s own style and aesthetics. In ‘Sur la lecture’ [‘On Reading’], the preface to his translation of Sesame and Lilies, Proust wrote: ‘Il n’y a peutêtre pas de jours de notre enfance que nous ayons si pleinement vécus que ceux que nous avons cru laisser sans les vivre, ceux que nous avons passés avec un livre préféré’ (CSB, p.160) [‘There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we let slip by without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book’].8 Books were more than words on paper; the novels he had loved in childhood held the power to evoke the places in which he had first read them: ‘s’il nous arrive encore aujourd’hui de feuilleter ces livres d’autrefois, ce n’est pas que comme les seuls calendriers

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que nous ayons gardés des jours enfuis, et avec l’espoir de voir reflétés sur leurs pages les demeures et les étangs qui n’existent plus’ (CSB, p.160) [‘If we still happen today to leaf through those books of another time, it is for no other reason than that they are the only calendars we have kept of days that have vanished, and we hope to see reflected on their pages the dwellings and the ponds which no longer exist’].9 The beginning of the preface, with its shifts in time and place, is an early sketch for the first paragraph of the Search, where the Narrator in bed, falling asleep while reading, is uncertain of where he is, who he is, and even what he is, since in his slumbering state he confuses his own identity with that of the book he is trying to read. The preface ends with another resurrection of the past. Readers of the preface cannot have known—nor could Proust himself—that they were being given a foretaste of Combray. On New Year’s Day, 1908, Mme Straus gave Proust five little notebooks from a smart stationery shop. Thanking her in a February letter, he indicated that he had a new project and was eager to ‘settle down to a fairly long piece of work’ (Selected Letters II, p.348). The first of these notebooks, known as Le Carnet de 1908, bears annotations for various projects that slowly converge and lead to the Search.10 One episode, evoking childhood memories, shows his little brother Robert being forced to part with his pet kid. Robert was eventually written out of the story altogether and the lengthy scene reduced to twenty-five lines when the Narrator bids farewell to his beloved hawthorns at Combray (I, 143; I, 173–4/203–4). Other autobiographical elements are found here. The Narrator’s mother, encouraging him to be brave while she is away, quotes inspiring passages about courage from Latin and French authors. For several years, Proust made entries in the notebook regarding topics and themes, lists of names that might serve for characters, and sensations: odours of rooms, bed sheets, grass, perfume, soap, food, capable of reviving the past. The Carnet of 1908 served as a memo pad and, later, as an inventory of sections already written. As the 1908 text progressed from essay to fiction, the theme of homosexual love, nearly absent from Jean Santeuil, became a major topic. In the Search Proust analyses erotic love in heterosexual and homosexual couples, showing that the obsessions of desire and jealousy are the same and doomed to failure because they are based on illusions. In July, Proust listed the six episodes he had written (Le Carnet de 1908, p.56). The first was ‘Robert and the Kid’, followed by ‘the Villebon Way and the Méséglise Way’. The two place names, the first from a château near Illiers and the other from a nearby village, indicate he had found the ‘two ways’, one of the major unifying elements of the Search. Another key episode

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was the mother’s goodnight kiss. The last episode on the list concludes the story: ‘What I learned from the Villebon Way and the Méséglise Way’. Proust had conceived an apprentice novel, in which the neurotically dependent Narrator grows up to explore the two ways of his world—that of the landed gentry and Paris salons—fails to find happiness in erotic love, and explores the world of homosexuality. Proust’s novel would be circular in time and space. As a child the Narrator believed the two ways led in different directions and must remain forever separated, but as an adult, he discovers the ways are joined by a circular path. Having completed his quest, the Protagonist understands, at last, the true nature of his experience, is fully endowed as a creative person and ready to write the ideal version of the story we have just read. However, Proust’s latest efforts to write a novel were again undermined by self-doubt. Overwhelmed by all that he wanted to say and his inability to shape and focus the material, he felt a sense of urgency: ‘Warnings of death. Soon you will not be able to say all that.’ Then Proust judged himself severely: ‘Laziness or doubt or impotency taking refuge in the lack of certainty over the art form.’ He was stymied by the same challenges regarding plot, genre, and structure that had made him abandon Jean Santeuil. He asked the questions left unanswered a decade earlier: ‘Must I make of it a novel, a philosophical study, am I a novelist?’ (Le Carnet de 1908, pp.60–1). Before he felt confident that he had found his story, Proust made one more detour in pursuing his goal, this time by way of Sainte-Beuve. In late 1908, Proust bought a quantity of school notebooks. By August 1909, he had written nearly 700 pages of an essay attacking the eminent critic’s method and legacy. Some of these drafts anticipate the Search. By mid-December Proust found himself at an impasse. He wrote to Georges de Lauris and Anna de Noailles, whose literary judgement he trusted, and asked each to indicate the better of two ideas for attacking Sainte-Beuve: La chose s’est bâtie dans mon esprit de deux façons différentes ... La première est l’essai classique, l’Essai de Taine en mille fois moins bien (sauf le contenu qui est je crois nouveau). La deuxième commence par un récit du matin ... Maman vient me voir près de mon lit, je lui dis que j’ai l’idée d’une étude sur Sainte-Beuve, je la lui soumets et la lui développe. (Corr. VIII, 320–1) [The idea has taken shape in my mind in two different ways ... The first would be a classical essay, an essay in the manner of

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Taine, only a thousand times less good (except for the content which I think is new). The second begins with an account of a morning, my waking up and Mama coming to my bedside; I tell her I have an idea for a study of Sainte-Beuve; I submit it to her and develop it.] (Selected Letters II, 416) In drafts for the introduction to Against Sainte-Beuve, Proust wrote that his old cook ‘offered me a cup of tea, a thing I never drink. And as chance would have, she brought me some slices of dry toast.’ As soon as he dipped the toast in the tea and tasted it ‘je ressentis un trouble, des odeurs de géraniums, d’orangers, une sensation d’extraordinaire lumière, de bonheur’. [‘Something came over me—the smell of geraniums and orange-blossoms, a sensation of extraordinary radiance and happiness.’] He concentrated on the taste of the toast and tea ‘qui semblait produire tant de merveilles, quand soudain les cloisons ébranlées de ma mémoire cédèrent, et ce furent les étés que je passais dans la maison de campagne ... Alors je me rappelai ... ’ (CSB, p.212) [‘which seemed responsible for all these marvels; then suddenly the shaken partitions in my memory gave way, and into my conscious mind there rushed the summers I had spent in the ... house in the country. And then I remembered’].11 In his critical remarks about Sainte-Beuve, Proust is writing as himself in a fictional situation, imagining a conversation with his mother. This invented setting for a real person (Proust) commenting on another real person and his work (Sainte-Beuve) served as the incubator for the emergence of the Narrator’s full voice. In the Sainte-Beuve passages describing involuntary memory, Proust began to transmute his lived experience and his invented ones into the Narrator’s life. We can see the transition from essayist to novelist in many notations from Le Carnet de 1908. A strange but remarkably fecund symbiosis is being created in which Proust is himself and not himself as the Narrator. Although highly autobiographical, the Search is a true novel. The Narrator, who resembles Proust in many ways, is different in others. Although remarkably well informed about homosexuality, he desires only women. His mother, unlike Jeanne Proust, is not Jewish nor is the hero’s father a distinguished medical luminary. By the time he finished his novel, Proust would have created what is perhaps the richest narrative voice in literature, a voice that speaks both as child and as man, as actor and as subject, and that weaves effortlessly between the present, past and future. While writing about his dilemma as an author, Proust had been tracing, without seeing it, the answer to the question that had tortured him for so

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long. The Search is about a man who cannot write and spends his life pursuing the wrong paths (lost time, wasted time), until at the very end, ill, discouraged, and growing old, he discovers that his vocation is to write the experience of his life—now that he understands it at last and can transpose it into a work of fiction. This moment of illumination is described in Time Regained: Alors, moins éclatante sans doute que celle qui m’avait fait apercevoir que l’œuvre d’art était le seul moyen de retrouver le Temps perdu, une nouvelle lumière se fit en moi. Et je compris que tous ces matériaux de l’œuvre littéraire, c’était ma vie passée; je compris qu’ils étaient venus à moi, dans les plaisirs frivoles, dans la paresse, dans la tendresse, dans la douleur, emmagasinés par moi, sans que je devinasse plus leur destination, leur survivance même, que la graine mettant en réserve tous les aliments qui nourriront la plante ... je me trouvais avoir vécu pour elle sans le savoir, sans que ma vie me parût devoir entrer jamais en contact avec ces livres que j’aurais voulu écrire et pour lesquels, quand je me mettais autrefois à ma table, je ne trouvais pas de sujet. Ainsi toute ma vie jusqu’à ce jour aurait pu et n’aurait pas pu être résumée sous ce titre: Une vocation. (IV, 478) [And then a new light, less dazzling, no doubt, than that other illumination which had made me perceive that the work of art was the sole means of rediscovering Lost Time, shone suddenly within me. And I understood that all these materials for a work of literature were simply my past life, I understood that they had come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in indolence, in tenderness, in unhappiness, and that I had stored them up without divining the purpose for which they were destined or even their continued existence any more than a seed does when it forms within itself a reserve of all the nutritious substances from which it will feed a plant ... I began to perceive that I had lived for the sake of the plant without knowing it, without ever realising that my life needed to come into contact with those books which I had wanted to write and for which, when in the past I had sat down at my table to begin, I had been unable to find a subject. And thus my whole life up to the present day might and yet might not have been summed up under the title: A Vocation.] (VI, 258–9/304)

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In 1909, while vacationing at Cabourg, Proust wrote Mme Straus and told her: ‘ ... I’ve just begun—and finished—a whole long book’ (Selected Letters II, 445–6). This ‘whole long book’ was the earliest draft of the Search, the opening section ‘Combray’, which establishes the major characters, locations, themes, and the conclusion, in which the Narrator understands the lessons from his apprenticeship. The most important word in the letter is ‘finished’. Since the days when he struggled unsuccessfully to complete Jean Santeuil, Proust had never been able to finish any work of fiction because he lacked the story and point of view. He had at last found the ideal structure for his narrative skills. Proust never composed in a linear manner or according to an outline. He always worked like a mosaicist, taking a particular scene, anecdote, impression, image, and crafting it to completion. In his manuscripts, there are many notes to himself about such bits, ‘To be placed somewhere’, or, if a remark or trait, to give it to a certain character or perhaps to another. As he composed and orchestrated the rich Proustian music, the structure expanded to include the war years and the Albertine cycle, partly influenced by his love for the doomed chauffeur Alfred Agostinelli. In the summer of 1911, Proust wrote René Gimpel, who had connections with the Japanese art world, to inquire if he knew le petit jeu japonais ... qui consiste à mettre des petits papiers dans l’eau [lesquels] se contournent devenant des bonshommes etc. Pourriez-vous demander à des Japonais comment cela s’appelle, mais surtout si cela se fait quelquefois dans du thé, si cela se fait dans de l’eau indifféremment chaude ou froide, et dans les plus compliqués s’il peut y avoir des maisons, des arbres, des personnages, enfin quoi. (Corr. X, 321. Proust’s emphasis.) [the little Japanese ... game that consists in soaking little scraps of paper in water which then twist themselves round and turn into little men, etc. Could you ask someone Japanese what it’s called, and especially whether it’s sometimes done with tea, whether it’s done with either hot or cold water, and in the more complicated ones whether there can be houses, trees, persons, or what have you.] (Selected Letters III, 43–4, and n. I. Proust’s emphasis.) Proust had returned to the image of tea and toast (from the essay on SainteBeuve) for the passage on involuntary memory, adding the madeleine dipped in tea and expanding the metaphoric role of the Japanese pellets to explain

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this phenomenon that revived the past. He intended to place the scene in the Combray section where it is the first such episode. He was curious about the pellets’ capacity to form houses and people because when the Narrator bites into the tea-soaked cake, the sensations that overwhelm him evoke the entire village from his lost youth: Et comme dans ce jeu où les Japonais s’amusent à tremper dans un bol de porcelaine rempli d’eau, de petits morceaux de papier jusque-là indistincts qui, à peine y sont-ils plongés s’étirent, se contournent, se colorent, se différencient, deviennent des fleurs, des maisons, des personnages consistants et reconnaissables, de même maintenant toutes les fleurs de notre jardin et celles du parc de M. Swann, et les nymphéas de la Vivonne, et les bonnes gens du village et leurs petits logis et l’église et tout Combray et ses environs, tout cela qui prend forme et solidité, est sorti de ma tasse de thé. (1, 47) [And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.] (1, 54–5/64) The conclusion of the madeleine scene summarises the experience of involuntary memory, the means by which the Narrator can regain his past, whose elements he will, upon the discovery of his vocation, examine, comprehend, enrich and transpose into a work of art: Quand d’un passé ancien rien ne subsiste, après la mort des êtres, après la destruction des choses, seules, plus frêles mais plus vivaces, plus immatérielles, plus persistantes, plus fidèles, l’odeur et la saveur restent encore longtemps, comme des âmes, à se rappeler, à attendre, à espérer, sur la ruine de tout le reste, à

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porter sans fléchir, sur leur gouttelette presque impalpable, l’édifice immense du souvenir. (1, 46) [When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.] (1, 54/63–4)

NOTES 1. See Denise Mayer, ‘Le Jardin de Marcel Proust’, Cahiers Marcel Proust, nouvelle série 12, Études proustiennes 5 (1984), 14. 2. In 1971, on the centennial of Proust’s birth, Illiers officially changed its name to Illiers-Combray, in a brilliant public-relations initiative and unique example of reality yielding to fiction. 3. In a letter written after his mother’s death, Proust recalled his ‘childhood when she would refuse to come back ten times and tell me goodnight before going out for the evening’. See Corr. VI, 28. 4. Marcel Proust, Pleasures and Regrets, trans. Louise Varese (New York: Crown, 1948), p.32. 5. L’Indifférent, introduced and edited by Philip Kolb (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), pp.42–3. By coincidence, the last sentence quoted contains two words that are the keys to the Search: loss and recapture. 6. Philip Kolb, ‘Historique du premier roman de Proust’, in Saggi e ricerche di letteratura francese, IV, 1963, 224. 7. Jean Santeuil, trans. Gerard Hopkins (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), p.408. 8. On Reading Ruskin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p.99. Translation slightly modified. 9. On Reading Ruskin, pp.99–100. 10. Le Carnet de 1908 transcribed and edited by Philip Kolb, Cahiers Marcel Proust, nouvelle série 8, 1976. 11. See Marcel Proust, On Art and Literature, trans. Sylvia Townsend Warner and with an introduction by Terence Kilmartin (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1997), p.19. See also Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, translated with an introduction and notes by John Sturrock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), pp.3–4.

SIÂN REYNOLDS

Albertine’s Bicycle, or: Women and French Identity during the Belle Epoque

Seul, je restai simplement devant le Grand-Hôtel [ ... ] quand [ ... ] je vis avancer cinq ou six fillettes, aussi différentes, par l’aspect et par les façons, de toutes les personnes auxquelles on était accoutumé à Balbec, qu’aurait pu l’être, débarquée on ne sait d’où, une bande de mouettes [ ... ]. Une de ces inconnues poussait devant elle, de la main, sa bicyclette. —Marcel Proust, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs.1

I

t is often suggested that French identity was reconstructed during the early years of the Third Republic, after the trauma of the Franco-Prussian war and the gradual elimination of attempts to revive either the monarchy or the Empire. The consolidation of republican institutions, and the national and republican pride instilled in French children through the primary school under Jules Ferry in the 1880s, are convincingly portrayed by historians such as Eugen Weber, in his Peasants into Frenchmen (1977), as contributing to a unitary sense of nationhood.2 Weber’s very title, however, points to some gender trouble. This turns up again in Benedict Anderson’s analysis of ‘imagined communities’, in which France is a constant presence.3 The collectively imagined community often turns out in Anderson’s book to be male-centred, with a recurring note of ‘fraternity’, of violence (‘dying for the nation’), and even of ‘reassuring fratricide’, located in previous internal civil

From Literature & History 10, no. 1 (Spring 2001). © 2001 by Manchester University Press.

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strife. With the overtly masculine language of fraternity being so closely linked to identity, what kind of national identity, one might inquire, were women supposed to adhere to? Although during the period usually known as the Belle Epoque, French women were beginning to see some changes in their status, they were still excluded from citizenship and from many civil rights taken for granted by men. Fin-de siècle republican ideology explicitly viewed the role of women, as in the Jacobin republic a hundred years earlier, as reproductive. The French state asked them to produce citizens, not to be citizens themselves. Anticlerical politicians moreover considered women overly subject to the influence of the Catholic Church, a question which was long to bedevil their claims for the suffrage. But while historical discussion of French national identity has tended to marginalize women, they are extraordinarily present in the literary and iconographic history of Belle Epoque France. This was not a society without women, rather it was an age when relations between the sexes were a major and much-discussed preoccupation. This paper will argue that attempts to construct a unitary French identity were in conflict with an alien notion: that of the New Woman, ‘landed none knew whence’, as Proust described his first sight of Albertine and her friends. Let me start with a cultural event often viewed as emblematic of Belle Epoque France: the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. The entry to the site was marked by an ornamental gate (‘Porte Monumentale’) of a staggeringly lurid nature, covered with newly-invented electric light bulbs and topped by a statue described as ‘La Parisienne’. Paul Morand, a small boy at the time, later described this effigy, in Paris 1900, as ‘une sirène chapeautée au bateau de la Ville de Paris, à jupe plate, rejetant au vent un manteau du soir en fausse hermine’.4 The Parisienne departed from the familiar allegorical representations of women. Paris in the 1900s was filling up with statues, a process sometimes described as ‘la statuomanie’. They were either of fullyclothed men—politicians, scientists, heroes of the Republic—or of less than fully-clothed women, allegories of the Republic. But the Parisienne was a woman fully-clad in contemporary costume. Despite her symbolic hat, she was recognizable as a ‘real’ woman, significantly depicted as fashionable and frivolous: Belle Epoque iconography showed women as essentially decorative. At the same time, one of the pavilions at the Exhibition was the Palais de la Femme. This idea had originated in the United States, and had figured at the World’s Fairs of Philadelphia (1876), New Orleans (1884), and especially Chicago (1893), but it was the first time it had appeared in Paris. The French version of the Women’s Pavilion was less serious than its American counterparts: described

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in the official report as ‘delicately elegant’, it had a basement devoted to ‘woman’s dress, hygiene and coquetry’. A series of waxworks depicted ‘la journée d’une mondaine, depuis l’heure du thé matinal jusqu’à la parure pour le théatre ou pour le bal, en passant par la promenade au bois dans une victoria impeccablement attelée’.5 There was also a library stocked with books by women authors, a theatre, art gallery, and of course a patisserie and restaurant. Meanwhile in another building in Paris, an international conference about women’s rights was taking place—one of three women’s conferences organized under the aegis of the Exhibition. There was a strong American presence, though the American delegates complained that French issues had predominated, and pressed their French colleagues to constitute a branch of the International Council of Women—which they eventually did in 1901.6 My argument will concentrate on the French notion of ‘woman’ as symbolized by ‘la Parisienne’, and the clash with an American concept of ‘the woman question’. The hypothesis which underlies what follows is that the turn of the century was a time when France, the fashionable destination of so many travellers and tourists, was under insistent pressure as never before from Anglo-American culture. A number of destabilizing influences found their way in, but were very strongly resisted by the dominant French culture. This was neither the first nor the last time that this happened, but the cracks and contradictions introduced then would run through French culture to the present, creating areas of conflict and resistance, or reformulation of what Frenchness was. One of the principal ‘Trojan horses’ during the Belle Epoque was the New Woman. How much change in women’s status and identity could ‘Frenchness’ absorb? The New Woman was a genuinely Anglo-American creation, the label itself first coined in an article by Ouida in an American journal in 1894.7 She was a cultural construct, but the models had been in circulation some time. Literary sources include Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Chernichevsky’s What is to be done? In George Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs Warren’s Profession, written in 1894 (not performed until 1902 because too immoral), Mrs Warren’s daughter, Vivie, is instantly recognizable as a new woman. Shaw’s stage directions describe her as ‘a sensible, able, highly-educated young middleclass Englishwoman. Age 22. Prompt, strong, confident, selfpossessed’; she shakes hands with ‘a resolute and hearty grip’. Vivie rides a bicycle, prominently displayed on stage, has just ‘tied with the third wrangler at Cambridge’, but intends to be an actuary and make a lot of money—inspiring a male character to remark that she makes his blood run cold.8

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Some American scholars, notably Mary-Louise Roberts and Christine Stansell, have begun looking at the New Woman in a French context, but interestingly the Anglo-American version could not be said to transfer easily to France. To take just one aspect of the New Woman, her healthy athleticism was in part the result of organized sport in girls’ schools, something which was not on the whole to be found in France. There were of course plenty of strong, forceful individual French women, but Christine Stansell suggests that ‘New Women’ often take on the characteristics of the vamp or the femme fatale in Europe, inspiring fear rather than respect, let alone comradeship.9 The term ‘femme nouvelle’ does not appear to have caught on in France during this period, and when it does it appears to be associated with foreign influence. A Doll’s House was not performed in France until 1895, although it had been played in English in 1879; conservative critics associated it with an alien kind of modernism. As an article in the conservative L’Illustration put it on 10 February 1894, before Antoine’s Paris production had been seen: ‘Ibsen, Hauptman, Maeterlinck—Sweden, Germany, Belgium—a triple alliance against the spirit of France: it will resist them.’10 Was there any space for a new French woman? Putting it briefly, by the late 1890s, girls in France had started to receive a better education than ever before. The Jules Ferry laws had created not only state primary schooling for girls in every village, but also girls’ lycées and the superstructure of écoles normales and écoles normales supérieures. The woman schoolteacher becomes a core participant in almost any political and feminist activity from this period. The very first women were entering universities—in very small numbers, true, but it was no longer impossible. Thirty-two women were attending the Paris medical faculty in 1879, most of them foreign. By 1914, there were 578. In 1900, there was a total of 624 French women students in all faculties—their number exceeded that of foreigners only in 1912–13. One should not of course exaggerate the progress made by 1900–1905; educational change took more than one generation to work through. It was also a time when women’s economic activity began to become more statistically significant in jobs other than traditional farming or partnership in a small shop or firm. The post office for example was well on the way to being ‘feminized’ in 1906: 22% of its employees were women. In the same census, in 1906, 170 women per thousand were to be found in ‘commercial professions’, compared to 82 in 1866. Women clerks and typists were starting to appear, though not in dramatic numbers. Women worked in factories, in sweatshops and as outworkers, and in a range of fairly traditional jobs, as well as these new ones. In 1906, there were 206,000 domestic servants in Paris, 11% of the population, and 83% of these were women.

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They were hardly being emancipated by such work, but it meant that many were leaving their native villages to become Parisians, leading a very different life from their mothers and grandmothers.11 While the Belle Epoque could hardly be called an age of opportunity for Frenchwomen, it was nevertheless an age when old structures were starting to creak and leak. Very schematically, we could point to the inventions of those metallic geared machines, the typewriter, the sewing-machine and the bicycle, which had all arguably made more difference to women’s lives than to men’s. The sewing-machine was both a boon and a shackle—it made sewing easier, but swelled the numbers of women working at home for desperately low wages sewing garments. Similarly, training in typewriting soon became a woman’s passport to a white-collar office job (mainly after 1914), but it would confine most such women to subordinate positions as underpaid typists for years to come. The bicycle however really can be regarded as a symbol of liberation: it enabled women to get about in a fairly safe and rapid way, and it began to make a difference to their clothes and deportment. Ottilie McLaren, a Scottish pupil of Rodin’s who studied sculpture in Paris in the late 1890s, rode to the studio on her bike: I bike à l’américaine as the nicest French people do: a short skirt about 4 or 5 inches below the knee and long gaiters which go right to meet the knicker-bockers in case of one’s skirt blowing up. I always strap mine down.12 Note the American reference. Ottilie McLaren was an example of a phenomenon about which I have written elsewhere: the invasion of Paris by English, American and other foreign women art students in the 1890s and 1900s.13 These foreign students, who came to France as a land of freedom and excitement, disrupted the long-established studio tradition in which virtually the only women present were artists’ models (ironically, many models were Italian immigrants). Paradoxically, neither Paris nor any other city was liberty hall for most French women: foreign women in France were literally foreign bodies, operating by different rules. French bourgeois society in particular was still strongly marked by practices and habits of the nineteenth century, and the experience of foreign women in France is one of culture clash. Shari Benstock in Women of the Left Bank suggests that Edith Wharton and Natalie Barney, who in their various ways frequented avant-garde and bohemian circles, were ‘guests of a culture whose secret heart they never penetrated’.14

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A L B E RT I N E ’ S B I C Y C L E Is that secret heart to be glimpsed in Proust? Yes and no. The second part of this paper suggests that the New Woman, seen as in some sense non-French, sent a shudder through his world. Proust is at once a reliable and an unreliable source for a historian of the Belle Epoque. He did not of course set out to paint a realistic picture of his society, still less of ‘women’, in the style of Zola; nevertheless, we know him to have drawn on obsessive observation of those around him, consciously and unconsciously. Proust, as the photographic evidence tends to show, frequented the rarefied society of wellto-do Paris, in which women were important players. Unlike in most history books, women are everywhere in A la recherche, conducting games of power and love. The emotional economy of this novel, I would argue, provides us (rather surprisingly) with some kind of context for the New Woman. To illustrate the point, let us look briefly at four of the important women who appear in it, all of them French: Françoise, the family servant, Odette de Crécy, who becomes Mme Swann, Madame Verdurin, the society hostess, and Albertine, the narrator’s young lover. To give some chronological perspective, Proust himself was born in 1871. Gérard Genette’s projected chronology of his novel has the narrator (‘Marcel’) and his exact contemporary Gilberte Swann being born rather later than that, in 1878. Françoise, Odette and Mme Verdurin are from an older generation than the narrator, being adults before he was born, while Albertine is supposed to be a little younger than him.15 Françoise, a sort of compendium of la vieille France, with her picturesque habits of speech, her prejudices and her networks of power and communication among other servants, is a rather monstrous creation, for whom Proust probably drew on several family servants. But it is not difficult to locate her in a context where servants stayed many years with their families, becoming intimate with them and in time-honoured ways exerting the power of the powerless. J.-B. Duroselle, in his book re-titled La France de la Belle Epoque (1972 and 1995), has a section on domestic servants in which he cites several life-stories. For example, Françoise Remeniera, born in 1864 in the Corréze, was a sharecropper’s child who watched over the sheep as a girl. After her husband’s death from tuberculosis, she became a wet-nurse in a Parisian family, sending money back home to the village for her three children, who stayed with relatives, and whom she saw only in the summer. In 1899, she entered the service of another Paris household, where she stayed until her death in 1946, being completely devoted to this family and they to her. She had no real holidays or days off, apart from the three weeks in the

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year when she returned to the village. She reportedly ended up feeling more at home with the family she served.16 Duroselle remarks of this life-story that it is both touching and almost incomprehensible to us today—yet we can easily recognize Proust’s Françoise in this biography. She has a daughter for instance, who is only infrequently mentioned. In terms of a French identity, if I can put it this way, Françoise represents a countrywoman, a woman of the people, a source of mystery and fascination to the bourgeois narrator. Brusque and kind, devious and long-suffering, she could be recruited for a Barrèsian tradition of Frenchness rooted in ‘the people’ or ‘in the soil’, her attitude to her employers being loyal yet cynical, traditional, yet in obscure ways rebellious. Odette de Crécy is also a construct of a traditional kind, in its 1890s manifestation: the beautiful demi-mondaine, mistress to one or more rich and powerful men, but nevertheless received after a fashion in Parisian polite society—though not in the narrator’s bourgeois family home at Combray, even after she had married Charles Swann, the family friend. Originals whom Proust is said to have had in mind are Laure Hayman and Liane de Pougy. Odette is painted in a very hostile way much of the time, and the reader is left in no doubt about the superior intelligence, sophistication and to some extent moral fibre of Swann, who ends up reflecting that he has ‘gâché ma vie pour une femme qui n’était pas mon genre’, ruined his life ‘for a woman who wasn’t even my type’. Odette is unfaithful, ungrateful, silly, snobbish and so on. Yet at the same time, both for Swann and for the narrator, Odette holds an extraordinary fascination. In terms of the novel’s structure, she is located as the older sophisticated woman enchanting the narrator during his youth. In a passage at the end of Du côté de chez Swann, he remembers her with nostalgia in the Bois de Boulogne, either in simple elegance ‘à pied, dans une polonaise de drap, sur la tête un petit toquet agrémenté d’une aile de lophophore, un bouquet de violettes au corsage [ ... ] traversant l’allée des Acacias’, or in magnificent contrast lounging negligently in une incomparable victoria, [ ... ] ses cheveux maintenant blonds avec une seule mèche grise ceints d’un mince bandeau de fleurs, le plus souvent des violettes, d’où descendaient de longs voiles [ ... ] aux lèvres un sourire ambigu [ ... ].17 We are invited to think that this vision dates from the 1880s or 1890s, since this is one of the few passages in the novel where the narrator really steps out of the frame to look back. He has returned to the Bois de Boulogne

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in about 1912, trying to recall past visits, only to see in place of victorias motor-cars driven by moustachioed mechanics, and to find a horrifying transformation in women’s fashions: Mais comment ces gens qui contemplent ces horribles créatures sous leurs chapeaux couverts d’une volière ou d’un potager, pourraient-ils même sentir ce qu’il y avait de charmant à voir Mme Swann coiffée d’une simple capote mauve ou d’un petit chapeau que dépassait une seule fleur d’iris toute droite?18 The same passage, a page or two earlier, contains another precise historical reference in the form of a typical Proustian joke. The narrator recalls an older man remarking to him of Odette that he slept with her the day MacMahon resigned (that is, 30 January 1879, just after the narrator’s—and Gilberte Swann’s—birth, according to Genette’s chronology). However the overall tone of the passage is elegiac: the elegant procession of victorias (think of the 1900 Pavillon de la Femme) had vanished by 1912. Perhaps a few of the old demi-mondaines were still there, but like wraiths or damned spirits, shadows of what they were (‘vieilles et qui n’étaient plus que les ombres terribles de ce qu’elles avaient été’ [I, 427]). The narrator stands forlorn; the sun’s face is hidden. Proust here tells us quite directly that Odette is from the old world. She belongs with a society which would be completely swept away by the Great War, but which was already fading. In that world, the ‘pattern in the carpet’ of French urban society was a double standard for men and women, a kind of sexual tapestry which was not exactly prostitution, but a set of relationships between men and women based on money, adultery and hypocrisy. 14% of deaths in the 1900s were due to syphilis. It was a world of sex, lies and victorias, if you will; a world in which the Duc de Guermantes could boast of sending a telegram reading ‘Impossible venir, mensonge suit’. (This untranslatably brief formula could be decoded as: ‘Can’t make it: transparent excuse follows.’) It was still a world in which, as Charlotte Perkins Gilman reminded her readers in 1911, La Rochefoucauld had said there were thirty good stories in the world and twenty-nine of them could not be told to a woman. Proust was caught, like many of his generation, between nostalgia for this world and a reluctant attraction towards the new— his narrator treats both Françoise and Odette with wistful affection, but also with a critical eye. Indeed, he provides a transparently scornful narrative about Odette and her traditional feminine wiles. He shows even less sympathy for a tougher, and in a way more successfully modern character,

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Mme Verdurin; but he falls in love with an ‘thoroughly modern girl’, Albertine. Mme Verdurin is a monstrous creation, combining details from a number of society hostesses of the Belle Epoque. She likes to think she is of advanced views, particularly in art, and collects painters, writers and musicians, who are coded references to people like Whistler, Franck and so on, representing the modern. She is a bundle of contradictions, but after an initial wobble (‘she was ferociously antisemitic’), Proust decided that he would make her salon a Dreyfusard one, while Odette’s would be nationalistic. One of the models for Mme Verdurin’s salon was that of Mme Arman de Caillavet, whose ‘great man’ was Anatole France. She really was a Dreyfus supporter, like Proust himself, and suffered socially to some extent as a result, since the Faubourg Saint-Germain remained anti-Dreyfusard with only very rare exceptions (represented, rather unconvincingly, in the novel by the Prince and Princesse de Guermantes. It is not then so very strange—though the narrator expresses dismay at this ending—that Mme Verdurin should end up as the second Princesse de Guermantes in Le Temps retrouvé.) The point I would make about Mme Verdurin, however, is that it was from exactly this kind of person, and this pro-Dreyfus milieu—though predominantly from the Jewish and Protestant women of the upper bourgeoisie—that some of the leaders of the French feminist movement also came. Cécile Brunschvig, for instance, who later became the grande dame of French feminism, though younger, came into this category. It is a nice irony that her husband, Léon Brunschvicg, was a schoolfriend of Proust’s and one of the originals for the narrator’s annoying friend Bloch.19 Feminism is a particular aspect of the Verdurin type of modernism, but it never ruffles the surface in A la recherche—and one dreads to think what Proust would have done with it had he troubled to notice it. We shall return to feminism after looking at the last Proustian woman, Albertine. The story of the narrator’s agonizing relations with Albertine, in La Fugitive, La Prisonnière, etc., are to some extent marked by Proust’s relations with Monsieur Agostinelli, his chauffeur, and other young men. But it is as a particular kind of young woman that Albertine appears in the novel, in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. The narrator first meets her at the seaside resort of Balbec, as one of a ‘petite bande’ of frightening girls, full of energy, who jump over old gentlemen in deck chairs and thoroughly intimidate the asthmatic young Marcel. The girl later identified as Albertine is provided with a bicycle.

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Une de ces inconnues poussait devant elle de la main, sa bicyclette; deux autres tenaient des clubs de golf et leur accoutrement tranchait sur celui des jeunes filles de Balbec, parmi lesquelles quelques-unes, il est vrai, se livraient aux sports mais sans adopter pour cela une tenue spéciale.20 The reader is given several glimpses of this bicycle-pusher: une fille aux yeux brillants, sous un ‘polo’ noir, qui poussait une bicyclette avec un dandinement de hanches si dégingandé, en employant des terms d’argot si voyou et criés si fort quand je passais auprès d’elle parmi lesquels je distinguai cependant cette phrase fâcheuse de ‘vivre sa vie’ [que] je conclus [ ... ] que toutes ces filles appartenaient à la population qui fréquente les vélodromes, et devaient être les très jeunes maîtresses de coureurs cyclistes. En tous cas, dans aucune de mes suppositions, ne figurait celle qu’elles eussent pu être vertueuses.21 We might note several things about this passage. Firstly, Proust’s narrator is analysing these strange creatures according to the ‘old world’ of Odette. He reacts with hostility to the idea of games-playing and loud speech from a woman, the use of slang terms, and most of all the claim to independence (‘live my own life’). Secondly, the French text at this point is full of anglicisms: polo, golf, clubs. Incidentally, Albertine’s bicycle was probably English-made, since Britain was the world’s chief supplier of bicycles in 1895–1900. To make Albertine sufficiently threatening on her first appearance, Proust is using all the stage-props of the ‘New Young Woman’, including foreign, particularly English influence. A few pages further on, he reinforces this point with a description of the way Albertine speaks. Not only does she use slang terms like ‘tram’ and ‘bike’, but she affects an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ delivery: En parlant, Albertine gardait la tête immobile, les narines serrées, ne faisait remuer que le bout des lèvres. Il en résultait ainsi un son traînard et nasal dans la composition duquel entraient peut-être des hérédités provinciales, une affectation juvénile de flegme britannique, les lecons d’une institutrice étrangère et une hypertrophie congestive de la muqueuse du nez.22 Space forbids more examples, but I will hazard from these extracts the view that, whatever the relation between Proust’s writing and his

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environment, and whatever he later does with the poetics of desire, his initial depiction of Albertine and her friends as sporty aliens is significant. We see these female characters through a discursive narrative (Proust’s), one which is drawing on the discourses of others, while also challenging them by the way he writes his novel. But he is not challenging all the discourses of his day. In the male Parisian upper-class discourse of his time, women were, as Simone de Beauvoir would later put it, the Other. There was a certain agreement among men about that. In terms of the conceptualisation of French national identity, I could quote a parallel taken from Sharif Gemie’s book on nineteenth-century revolutions: Nationhood might be constituted around a shared sense of conflict or, less violently, diversity. In other words, while monarchists and republicans might disagree about every element of their respective interpretations of the French past, they might still both agree about which moments constituted the crucial moments of division.21 French men might disagree about many things during the Belle Epoque but arguably they shared a certain patriarchal discourse about women. Perhaps patriarchal is not quite the right word—it seems inappropriate for Proust, who consistently undermines his narrator and puts him in embarrassing situations. A better term is ‘fraternal’. We may not think of Proust as being a particularly ‘fraternal’ writer in the republican sense, but in practice he enjoyed the fraternity of various all-male groups: men about town, exsoldiers, ex-law-students, homosexuals, would-be young novelists, etc. The fraternal discourse about women encompasses la Parisienne and the cocotte in the Bois de Boulogne, and at some remove it shades into the political iconography which put up statues of beautiful (arguably maternal) goddesses of the Republic and Liberty all over Paris—but hardly any of real women. It does not extend to comradeship with sporty young women. Albertine’s role in A la recherche is that of an impossible partner for the narrator: she is eventually killed off in a riding accident. How could Belle Epoque women respond to such a discourse? They could accept it and work entirely within it (like Odette); they could seek to turn it to advantage by modifying it a little (Mme Verdurin); or they could break with it and challenge it. The challenge could be cultural (New Woman) or political (feminist). Proust’s generation, whether or not he noticed it, witnessed the growth of second-wave feminism in France. The movement had to contend with fairly entrenched antifeminism in political

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circles. Governments of the turn of the century celebrated many centenaries related to the 1789 Revolution. They put up the Eiffel Tower in 1889; in 1894, they celebrated the centenary of Condorcet’s death (without mentioning his championing of the rights of women). Ten years later, in 1904, the French Civil Code had its centenary and despite the fact that it had been composed by and for Napoleon, rather than by the revolutionaries, the occasion was used as yet another celebration of the Republic (on the eve of Separation from the Church). Contemporary feminists however saw the Code as enshrining principles which deprived women of their rights. In particular, it made a distinction, not applied to men, between married and unmarried women. The married woman had no real civil status in her own right, only through her husband. Feminists did organize protests at the time, though they were neither huge nor spectacular compared to what was happening in Britain. However most historians of French feminism are agreed that during the decade after 1900, feminism was attracting support in many quarters. A number of particular but real amendments were made to the Code Civil: for example, a wife was granted the right to do what she wanted with her earned income (1907). A head of steam for suffrage and other rights was gathering by the spring of 1914, and one of the biggest feminist demonstrations ever was held at the statue of Condorcet in July 1914—an unfortunate piece of timing.25 What the demonstrators chiefly had to contend with was the dread of ridicule among French women: the very idea of a demonstration for women’s rights in the world of A la recherche sends a shiver down the spine, when one thinks what Proust might do with it. The Condorcet demonstration, which the organizers tried to keep decorous, was very different in tone from the meeting of American women at Seneca Falls in 1848—over sixty years earlier—which had robustly declared: ‘In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misprepresentation and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object.’25

CONCLUSION The cementing of nationhood and republicanism that took place during the first half of the Third French Republic—the creation of an ‘imagined community’—was indeed based on a literal fraternity. One of the components that was taken for granted, and therefore virtually unmentioned, in creating French nationhood—at least as constructed in textbooks, books on republicanism, standard histories, histories of nationalism and national

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identity—was the unchanging nature of French women. They had to continue being what it was thought they had always been, and not change into something weird and modern, ‘landed none knew whence’. My concluding point therefore is that the kind of Frenchness which was voluntarily being constructed during the Belle Epoque had among its components a view of desired relations between the sexes which did not disturb fraternity. This went with some fear and distrust of contemporary women, is shown in Proust’s portraits of some of the women in his narrator’s life. Women were potentially disruptive and needed to be defused in some way. What happened at this time however was that an even more disruptive woman than the French variety—the English suffragette, the American New Woman, the foreign German or Russian art student—was arriving on the scene. Some of Proust’s best friends actually did marry American heiresses to industrial fortunes: Boni de Castellane married Anna Gould, and the prince le Polignac married Winnaretta Singer, of the sewing-machine family, whose sister also married a French aristocrat. There is a condescending and rather lighting reference to an American woman who has married into the French ‘beau monde’ in Le Temps retrouvé. But comradely equality, to which some lip service was paid in New Woman circles in American and Britain, in Shaw’s plays for example, was not an option. In the short term—and perhaps even in the long term—the resistance which French culture was able to put up to this gender-based threat was successful, subtle and determined. One method was to stave off women’s suffrage until it could be no more postponed, in 1944. We might even extend the argument of this article to suggest that the Anglo-Saxon Allies, whose support the French provisional government needed in 1944, were a not entirely negligible influence on the decision from the Consultative Assembly in Algiers. Secondly, there was a forceful cultural image of French women as being ‘not ridiculous’, hating excess, being sensible, pragmatic, having a special view of sexual relations which meant knowing how to deal with men, and avoiding the ideological stances of their Anglo-Saxon sisters. French feminists of the middle years of the century, who included many determined characters, were active in the various international women’s associations which held meetings in Paris or at the League of Nations in Geneva; but one often senses their discomfort at the cultural milieu in France which expected ‘sophisticated’ rather than ‘militant’ behaviour. This distinction can be traced through a rhetorical tradition, mostly masculine in origin, but nevertheless taken up even today by a number of French women who consider themselves feminists. I am thinking here of Elisabeth Badinter, Mona Ozouf, Françoise Giroud, who have all written in recent years of the

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gulf between American feminists—characterized as strident, man-hating, positive-discriminating, politically-correct—and the sensible, ‘feminine’, charmingly different Frenchwoman who can conduct a civilized conversation with men.26 One could argue that ‘French identity’ for much of the twentieth century, up to and including the 1960s, depended on an internalization of this dichotomy. Equally, it might be suggested that the most recent fin de siècle (from the 1970s to the present) has seen previously unthinkable changes in the status and life experience of French women, of which the very recent parity campaign is a rather striking example. The statue of the Parisienne shattered when it was taken down from its pedestal in the autumn of 1900. Might one suggest that a different Belle Epoque for French women has come a hundred years later, as the avant-garde Albertines of today ride off on their mountain bikes to become bankers and rocket scientists?

NOTES 1. Marcel Proust, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, in A la recherche du temps perdu (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1962), vol. I, p. 788. All further references to the French are from this edition. ‘I was simply hanging about in front of the Grand Hotel [ ... ] when I saw coming towards me five or six young girls, as different in appearance and manner from all the people whom one was accustomed to see in Balbec as could have been, landed there none knew whence, a flock of seagulls [ ... ]. One of these strangers was pushing, as she came, with one hand, her bicycle’ (tr. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Within a Budding Grove [London, 1922], p. 122). 2. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870–1914 (London, 1977). 3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1993). 4. ‘[A] siren clad in a tight skirt, her hat in the shape of a ship representing the city of Paris, caught in the pose of flinging back an evening cape of artificial ermine.’ Quoted in Pascal Ory, Les Expositions universelles de Paris (Paris, 1982), pp. 81–82 (my translation). 5. On the Palais de la Femme as it was called, see Alfred Picard, Rapport, Exposition Universelle de Paris 1900 (Paris, 1906), vol. IV, p. 212. [‘(T)he day of a society lady, from her morning cup of tea to dressing for an evening at the theatre or a ball, by way of a ride through the Bois [de Boulogne] in an impeccably turned-out victoria’—my translation.] A victoria was a light, open-topped, four-wheeled carraige. 6. On the 1900 women’s and feminist conferences, see Laurence Klejman, Florence Rochefort, L’Égalité en marche: le féminisme sous la IIIe République (Paris, 1989), p. 137 ff., also Steven Hause with Anne Kenney, Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic (Princeton, 1984), p. 36 ff. The founding conference of the Conseil National des Femmes Françaises, which affiliated to the International Council of Women, was held in April 1901.

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7. Ouida, ‘The New Woman’, North American Review, 158 (1894), 270–76. See Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de siècle (Manchester, 1997), pp. 2, 8, 35–36 and passim. 8. George Bernard Shaw, Mrs Warren’s Profession, in Plays Unpleasant (London, Penguin edn, 1946), pp. 212, 215. 9. Unpublished papers on the New Woman in France, delivered at the 1999 Berkshire conference on Women’s History, Rochester, NY. Cf. James F. McMillan, France and Women 1789–1914: Gender, Society and Politics (London, 2000), ch. 10, who also sees ‘the New Woman’ in the Anglo-American style as a doubtful presence in France. 10. Quoted in Christophe Charle, Paris fin de siècle: culture et politique (Paris, 1998). 11. For full details, based on up-to-date research on the social circumstances of women in fin-de-siècle France, see McMillan, France and Women, chs 10–12. 12. Manuscript letter from Ottilie McLaren to William Wallace, National Library of Scotland, Wallace Papers: MSS 21535, 27 November 1897. 13. S. Reynolds, ‘Running Away to Paris: Expatriate Women Artists of the 1900 Generation from Scotland and Points South’, Women’s History Review, 9:2 (2000), 327–44. 14. Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900–40 (London, 1987), p. 78. 15. Gérard Genette, Figures III (Paris, 1972). 16. J.-B. Duroselle, La France de la ‘Belle Epoque’, 2nd edn (Paris, 1992), pp. 65–66. 17. Proust, A la recherche, vol. I, p. 419. ‘[O]n foot, in a “polonaise” of plain cloth, a little toque on her head trimmed with a pheasant’s wing, a bunch of violets in her bosom, hastening along the Allée des Acacias’; ‘[in a] matchless victoria [ ... ] her hair now quite pale with one grey lock, girt with a narrow band of flowers, usually violets from which floated down long veils [ ... ], on her lips an ambiguous smile [ ... ]’ (tr. C. S. Scott Moncrieff, Swann’s Way (London, 1922), pp. 276–77. 18. Proust, A la recherche, vol. I, pp. 425–27. ‘How can the people who watch these dreadful creatures hobble by, beneath hats on which have been heaped the spoils of aviary or garden-bed—how can they imagine the charm that there was in the sight of Mme Swann, crowned with a close-fitting lilac bonnet, or with a tiny hat from which rose stiffly above her head a single iris?’ (tr. Swann’s Way, pp. 284–86). 19. On Proust’s circle and the so-called originals of some of the characters in A la recherche, see George Painter, Marcel Proust (London, 1965). Cécile Brunschvicg (née Kahn, 1877–1946) is referred to in all histories of French feminism in the twentieth century; see for example Hause and Kenny, Women’s Suffrage. 20. Proust, A la recherche, vol. I, p. 788. ‘One of these strangers was pushing as she came, with one hand, her bicycle; two others carried golf-clubs; and their attire generally was in contrast to that of the other girls at Balbec, some of whom, it is true, went in for games, but without adopting any special outfit’ (tr. Within a Budding Grove, p. 122). 21. Proust, A la recherche, vol. I, p. 793. ‘[A] girl with brilliant laughing eyes and plump colourless cheeks, a black polo-cap pulled down over her face, who was pushing a bicycle with so exaggerated a movement of her hips, with an air borne out

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by her language, which was so typically of the gutter and was being shouted so loud when I passed her (although among her expressions I caught that irritating “live my own life”) that [ ... ] I concluded [ ... ] that all these girls belonged to the population which frequents the racing-tracks, and must be the very juvenile mistresses of professional bicyclists. In any event, in none of my suppositions was there any possibility of their being virtuous’ (tr. Within a Budding Grove, p. 128). 22. Proust, A la recherche, vol. I, p. 877. ‘In speaking, Albertine kept her head motionless, her nostrils closed, allowing only the corners of her lips to move. The result of this was a drawling nasal sound, into the composition of which there entered perhaps a provincial descent, a juvenile affectation of British phlegm, the teaching of a foreign governess and a congestive hypertrophy of the nose’ (tr. Within a Budding Grove, p. 246). 23. Sharif Gemie, French Revolutions 1815–1914: An Introduction (Edinburgh 1999), p. 10. 24. On feminist campaigns of this period see Hause and Kenney, Women’s Suffrage, passim; McMillan, France and Women, ch. 12. 25. Quoted here from a facsimile of the Declaration, kindly sent me by my forme student Ingrid Omand. 26. On the unsuspected riches of French feminism between the wars, see Christine Bard, Les Filles de Marianne: histoire des féminismes 1914–40 (Paris, 1995); on international links, see S. Reynolds, France Between the Wars: Gender and Politic (London, 1996), ch. 7. On the debate over French vs American feminism, see ‘Femmes: une singularité francaise?’, Le Débat, 87 (Oct.–Nov. 1995), 117–46. Significantly these writers have on the whole been unsympathetic to the recent parity campaign, on the background to which see Danielle Haase-Dubosc, ‘Sexual Difference and Politics in France Today’, Feminist Studies, 25:1 (1999), 183–210; since that article appeared, new legislation has been introduced in France to ensure the equal representation of men and women in all elections where the list system is used (excluding therefore the National Assembly, but covering most other elections).

ANTHONY R. PUGH

The Ending of Swann Revisited

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o reader of Proust has reached the end of Du côté de chez Swann without being puzzled by the ending of the volume. After the 184 pages of “Combray” and 191 pages of “Un Amour de Swann” (in the Pléiade edition), both manifestly constructed with great care, the last part has a mere fortyfive pages, of which eleven form a prelude which seems to announce far more than what we read in the sequel, and twelve comprise a spectacular conclusion in two parts: in the first, the young protagonist drags the longsuffering Francoise to the Bois de Boulogne to see Odette Swann drive by; in the second, we are told that the man who is narrating the story in the present has recently (“cette année”) revisited the Bois to see the autumn leaves, and he looks back with poignant nostalgia to the days, now gone forever, when the Bois was colored by the elegance of Mme Swann and by his unconditional admiration for her.1 Between the prelude and this conclusion, there are just a few pages outlining the early stages of the protagonist’s calf-love for Gilberte. The reader who continues and opens the next volume, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, finds the sequel to the pages on Gilberte (“Autour de Madame Swann”), followed in turn by a section where the protagonist is in Normandy, coveting other girls, and we realize that the prelude we read in the first volume was preparing us for this new episode. The rigorous

From Modern Philology 99, no. 3 (February 2002). © 2002 by The University of Chicago.

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structure is again evident, and we are left wondering why Proust chose to break his first volume at such an awkward place, obliging himself to invent a conclusion at a point where the narrative line required none. The answer to the reader’s question was given over fifty years ago in a pioneering Modern Philology article by Robert Vigneron, who was able to show, using Proust’s correspondence, that the conclusion to the first volume was a makeshift affair, forced on Proust when his editor pointed out that the material Proust had supplied for volume 1 was too copious and that he would have to make the break between the volumes earlier.2 Vigneron demonstrated that part of the present ending was transferred from the ending of what we now call “Autour de Madame Swann,” and he argued that the pages about the Bois set in the present were added after November 1912, citing Proust’s (frustrated) desire to visit the park at that time. With meticulous precision, and much ingenuity, Vigneron reconstituted the route Proust had followed, the hesitations and the compromises he was obliged to tolerate. In general terms, Vigneron’s demonstration has stood the test of time, and one has to salute the insights of someone working from incomplete evidence. Now, however, the evidence at our disposal is massive. It is therefore time to revisit the question and give a fuller account than Vigneron was able to do, even if in the most general terms our conclusion (that the ending was due to the exigencies of commercial publication) is unchanged. The new evidence is of two kinds. Vigneron relied on what letters had been published, which he dated, and on secondhand information about the galley proofs, derived from Albert Feuillerat’s study and hypothetical reconstruction of the first version of the summer in Normandy.3 We now have far more letters than we had then, and as a consequence, we are more confident about the dates of the letters. Moreover, we have virtually all the exercise books that Proust used to elaborate and rework the various parts of his novel, along with the typescript that was the intermediary between the latest of the manuscript cahiers and the first proofs produced by his editor Bernard Grasset in 1913; these proofs are also accessible. These documents do not always yield their secrets without a struggle, but if we are as meticulous in our day as Vigneron was in his, we can reconstitute the stages which led to the text we are saddled with.

THE MANUSCRIPTS Proust began work on his novel in 1909. His method was to rewrite his novel several times, each time amplifying, augmenting, and rearranging. The first

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‘version,’ if we allow that term, simply noted ideas for key incidents, some of them elaborated for a few pages; there is nothing of Gilberte. Later in 1909 Proust produced a version of “Combray” which, although it was not complete, he felt ready to give to a typist at the end of the year. In this version, Swann has a daughter. She is mentioned in the first part (the protagonist’s mother inquires after her when Swann visits them at Combray).4 She also appears in the sketches for a continuation to the typescript, seen by the protagonist one day as he and his parents walk past Swann’s property.5 With the typescript behind him, Proust could tackle “Un Amour de Swann” and the Normandy episode, with the various “jeunes filles.” Gilberte emerges out of that double preoccupation. This is one of the few places where our documentation appears to be incomplete. In the cahier numbered 27,6 there are references such as “Voir [dans] manuscrit” or “dans le 1er Cahier” that imply a source which we do not have. Cahier 27 opens with material for “Un Amour de Swann,” after which Proust turned to Gilberte, beginning (fol. 13) with a “Plan,” which includes the two sentences “Emotion pour Swann[,] pour sa mère au bois” and “Je retrouve aux Champs-Elysées ses [amis del.] amies, son institutrice,” numbered 2 and 1, respectively. So we know that from the beginning, there was to be an incident taking place at the Bois. The narration that follows covers the first stages of the adolescent boy’s love for Gilberte. It includes (fols. 34–42a) an incident corresponding to the indication on the “Plan” “Emotion ... pour sa mère au bois,” reproduced in the Pléiade edition as Esquisse LXXXIV (Pléiade, pp. 983–86; cf. Pléiade, pp. 409–14). In this version the young boy first sees Mme Swann, attended by a group of admirers, at the Bois when he is with his father, and Swann greets them. This prompts the protagonist to enlist Françoise in his regular trips to the Bois, and he is sometimes fortunate enough to be noticed by Mme Swann. Once he is with his great-uncle, and his indiscreet effusive greeting embarrasses the older man. At the end of this sketch is the germ of M de Norpois’s revelations concerning Odette’s male friends and the reason that Swann married her, both subsequently developed in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (cf. Pléiade, p. 457). Here the informant is simply “un collègue de mon père.” Late in 1911, the typescript of “Un Amour de Swann” complete, Proust applied himself to the task of producing a manuscript of the sequel that could be typed out. For the section on Gilberte, he started with Cahier 20, ran into several obstacles, and began again in Cahier 21, continuing in Cahier 24. On those occasions when the text of Cahier 20 was deemed adequate, Proust would not bother to copy it out, and when he came to

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number his pages for his typist, he weaved from one exercise book to another in a complex way, which, to her credit, the typist (aided by Proust’s amanuensis Albert Nahmias) generally managed to follow. In Cahier 20 the first stages of the relationship are worked over many, many times. One incident, sketched quite early in the exercise book (fols. 24–29), tells us that on inclement days, the protagonist anxiously watched to see if the sun would come out (cf. Pléiade, p. 388). This phase includes his invitation to Gilberte’s house and (to precede that invitation) the dinner with a former ambassador, M de Monfort (later Norpois), who encourages the protagonist in his ambition to become a writer and who actually dines with the Swanns (cf. Pléiade, pp. 426 ff.). Proust then rewrote some of the earlier incidents. The youth is obsessed with all things to do with Swann: the maître d’hôtel (cf. Pléiade, p. 409, lines 7–12) and Gilberte’s parents, especially Swann himself (cf. Pléiade, p. 399, line 25, to p. 400, line 2). He tries to imitate Swann (cf. Pléiade, p. 406, line 36). He sees Mme Swann more rarely, he says, because she did not much like to be seen in public with a teenage daughter. But he did come across her once, by chance (cf. Pléiade, p. 411). At that point on folio 50, Proust wrote “Morceau sur le Bois,” but he did not follow it up. On the facing page, we find (centered) “[Morceau sur le Bois del.]” and then centered on the line below: “Paris.” We may assume that he had in mind to go back to the pages in Cahier 27 and revise them in order to use them here. From folio 50 to folio 58 of Cahier 20, Proust returned to the episode briefly sketched a few pages earlier: the visit of M de Monfort. Proust constantly reread Cahier 20 when he amplified and improved his text in Cahiers 21 and 24. The first of the amplifications was a completely new episode, preparing for the dinner, for which he created a new character, the actress La Berma. This gives a new thread to the tapestry of themes connected with the dinner and the conversation. When Proust went back to Cahier 20, in order to incorporate the nine pages describing the conversation, he decided that he would allow Monfort/Norpois a role in persuading his father to lift the interdiction on visits to the theater. Striking the words “Morceau sur le Bois” (that incident would have to come somewhat earlier), he copied the introductory remark of Cahier 21 (fol. 4; his mother suggested going to the theater to hear La Berma, Pléiade, p. 430, line 41, to p. 431, line 5), followed in turn by a new paragraph saying that Monfort had influenced his father’s decision to let him go to the theater (fols. 49v–50v, Pléiade, p. 431, lines 6–27). This leads smoothly into the existing sentence on Cahier 20, that Monfort influenced his father concerning the boy’s desire to write (fols. 50–51, Pléiade, p. 431, line 30 ff.). A one-sentence transition was all that was needed (Pléiade, p. 431, lines 28–29).

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In Cahier 24, the second of the exercise books in which Proust expanded the text of Cahier 20, he returned to the question of the boy’s fetishism for all things associated with Swann. The young boy trots Françoise round to the Bois, to the carriage entrance of the Swanns’ house, to the street where Swann goes to visit his dentist. This corresponds to the “Emotion pour Swann” in the 1910 plan. The allusion to the Bois is not elaborated. We see, then, that the intention of describing the spectacle of Mme Swann at the Bois de Boulogne was always part of the plan, and that the incident was in fact written, in the version preceding the mise-au-net of 1911. In 1911, however, it was reduced to a simple mention. In 1911 the only comparable incident to be written out came at the end of the episode, after the young man has become a familiar visitor at the Swanns’ house. We must count this as a second visit, independent of the one alluded to in Cahier 24 and drafted, in 1910, in Cahier 27. It comes, or came, at the very end of Cahier 24. The relevant pages were torn out, but we can identify them from a dossier of “fragments manuscrits” (NAF 16703) and reconstitute the original version. As we now have it, Cahier 24 ends with folio 65, just after Proust has begun to say that the protagonist’s parents did not appreciate his frequenting the Swanns, to say nothing of Bergotte. Two pages plus the flyleaf were removed from Cahier 24 at this point; all three have left their physical trace behind in the cahier. One is now in NAF 16703, fol. 208, mounted so that the recto side (which is what interests us here) appears to be the verso. It continues directly from the end of fol. 65 (“Cet homme pervers et qui n’appréciait pas M de Norpois/m’avait trouvé”; cf. Pléiade p. 563, line 27), and we can call it fol. 65.2. We do not appear to have the next page (fol. 65.3), but it was still there when these pages were typed, and the typescript went as far as the end of the discussion of Bergotte.7 The same dossier (NAF 16703, fol. 207) contains the missing flyleaf of Cahier 24 (which we can call fol. 65.4). If we put it together with fol. 208r (that is, the verso of the page we have identified as fol. 65.2 of Cahier 24), we find a text describing Mme Swann at the Bois de Boulogne. Once again the typescript enables us to reconstitute the missing page. We can see that Proust went from Pléiade, p. 564, line 41, immediately to a conclusion, beginning at Pléiade, p. 624, line 27, using the flyleaf (fol. 65.4) and the versos of folios 65.3 and 65.2. The conclusion leads off with the words “Quand j’eus commencé à connaître Mme Swann, une fois que les beaux jours furent venus, comme je savais qu’avant le déjeuner (etc),” as Pléiade, p. 624, lines 27–28, and it continues to Pléiade, p. 630, line 6, in a shorter version.8

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The ending just defined arrives somewhat abruptly, and it is not surprising to find that Proust wished to insert more material between the discussion of Bergotte and the conclusion. When he paginated Cahier 24, therefore, he left the conclusion unnumbered. The last page numbered is folio 65.2, although the next page, on which the episode was concluded, was probably also numbered in sequence. One would expect the typescript to have extended to the end of the episode, but the portion that was typed stops at the bottom of folio 65, in the middle of a sentence, and we see that Proust has explicitly written “finir ici.” On the following page he has written “Ne pas s’occuper de cette page,” evidently an instruction to Nahmias, who prepared the often confusing manuscripts for the typist. This is surprising; if the exercise book was still intact when Nahmias received it, one would expect each of the two instructions to be two pages further along; if he had already removed the three pages, in order to work further on the conclusion, the “finir ici” would be a way of avoiding unnecessary questions about what to do next, but there would then be no point in writing on the following page. It is possible to date this activity. Proust warned Nahmias on February 23 that he had more work for him, and on March 1 he said that he was just about ready to embark on this collaboration.9 Proust sent Nahmias the manuscript of the Gilberte section, with an explanation of the way he had paginated it, in a letter which may reasonably be assigned to the beginning of March (Correspondance 11:86 [letter 40]).10 On March 29, Proust sent Nahmias a check for him to settle with the typist (Correspondance 11:84 [letter 39]). Proust therefore spent some time on a new sequel and conclusion to the main text of Cahier 24. No text describing the first visit to the Bois was supplied to the typist, and the second visit was set aside. A whole new segment was written on the delights experienced by the protagonist once he has been accepted as a regular visitor to the Swann household. In this way a portrait of Mme Swann is insinuated into the text and prepares us for the closing incident. All of this happens in another exercise book, cataloged as Cahier 23, beginning at folio 10. At its end (fol. 18), Proust appears to be about to evoke a time when the protagonist knew Gilberte only at the Champs-Elysées and would admire Madame Swann’s toilette. Thus the first visit is given the status of a flashback, following the second in the narrative sequence, and pointing the contrast between now and then. The lines are struck, however, as Proust had second thoughts. The dossier NAF 16703 contains seventeen sheets, paginated from 1 to 17, taken from an unidentified exercise book (fols. 190–206).11 What we find there are the two passages not yet written: not only the first visit to the Bois,

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but what we can call the third visit, undertaken in the present by the narrator. The passage begins “Pour [l’del] apercevoir [Madame Swann add], sachant qu’elle s’y promenait autour du lac [sic]” (cf. Pléiade, p. 409, line 34), implying that it followed directly a text which ended with the name of Mme Swann. At the break where the true epilogue (the third visit) begins, Proust took a new sheet (“7,” fol. 196). The text of this final portion is not quite complete; it finishes at “une majesté dodonéenne” (Pléiade, p. 419, line 33).12 By concluding with the narrator, writing from the standpoint of the present, Proust neatly balances the opening of the entire novel: “Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure.”

THE TYPESCRIPT This new concluding portion was typed by Miss Hayward, the English stenographer who had typed the first part of “Un Amour de Swann” at Cabourg in 1911.13 When, exactly? The answer to this question depends on how we date a letter to Nahmias in which Proust is quite explicit about her first task (Correspondance 11:25–26 [letter 4]): “La chose commence par une vingtaine de pages détachées que j’ai mises dans le cahier rouge. Elles se suivent, elles ont une pagination spéciale (Ayez la bonté de paginer 560 la première feuille de dactylographie qui sera faite ... Cher Albert, y aurait-il possibilité de votre part à ce que vous choisissiez comme dactylographe Miss Hayward, celle de Cabourg, elle est à Paris et m’a demandé de la recommander.)”14 The letter has been variously assigned to October 1911 and to January 1912, but May 1912 seems a far more likely date.15 In view of the fact that the first typist appears to have been paid off at the end of March 1912, it would appear that Miss Hayward came back on the scene no earlier than the end of March or the beginning of April. The most plausible date is later still: mid-May. A gap of six weeks since having Cahier 24 typed would have allowed Proust time to work at “Noms de pays: le pays,” which is where he wanted Miss Hayward to start once she had typed the new ending to “Noms de pays: le nom.”16 Miss Hayward left Proust’s employ in June 1912, which puts paid to Vigneron’s hypothesis that the idea of including a nostalgic evocation of the Bois came to Proust only after he had tried unsuccessfully to go there in company with Mme Straus in November 1912.17 It is true that the first of the letters Proust wrote to Mme Straus on the subject seems to attribute the idea to her and that there are a couple of similarities between the text of the letter and that of the novel, but the hypothesis falls by virtue of the undoubted fact that the sentence in question had been typed in the spring of

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1912 and revised in the summer.18 A fortiori, we cannot postpone the visit to the following year, as the old Pléiade edition did.19 Miss Hayward typed this conclusion and “Noms de pays: le pays” before she tackled the new material on the protagonist’s cultivation of Mme Swann (Cahier 23, now greatly augmented). Because folios 65.2 and 65.3 had not been typed, they are paginated 1 and (presumably) 2, and the text of Cahier 23 starts with page 3 and runs to 17. This was to be followed by the second visit, those three pages detached from Cahier 24. They have been renumbered to follow the “17” of Cahier 23.20 The page numbers of the typescript are adjusted so that the pages Miss Hayward typed first, beginning at page 560, follow in sequence. The typescript therefore gives us the proper conclusion to the narrative of “Autour de Madame Swann” and a three-part coda: the second visit, the first visit remembered as a flashback, and the third visit. The first visit, we remember, had originally been conceived as part of the first half of the Gilberte story. That, of course, is where it will finally be located. The transition from the second series of visits to the Bois to the preadolescent pilgrim, found on the typescript, is uncommonly awkward.21 But for the time being, that is where it stays. The typescript was heavily corrected, but the organization was not altered. Subsequently, however, Proust added to the typescript a new transition to move from the second series of visits to the Bois into the earlier visits, before the protagonist knew Mme Swann. The text, which Proust improved when he himself copied it from one copy of the typescript to the other, is reproduced as part of variant b to Pléiade, p. 626 (from Pléiade, p. 1427, line 11: “Mais la beauté”). The idea is that he would not have found Mme Swann so elegant had he not had a predisposition to believe it: “Et cette croyance aurait dû naître en moi un peu plus tôt, quand mon amour pour Gilberte ... me faisait considérer22 tout ce qui entourait la fille de Mme Swann comme doué d’une existence extraordinaire, comme incomparable au reste.” He wonders if she recognized in him the young adolescent of two years before. This addition leads into the evocation of earlier excursions to glimpse Mme Swann. It was a last-minute correction to the typescript; the vast majority of the changes were made, in 1912, on what is conventionally called the “second” typescript, and copied to the “first” by Proust’s valet, Nicolas Cottin, but the change we are considering was sketched on the first typescript and copied by Proust himself onto the “second” one.23 The typescript Proust sent to Bernard Grasset in March 1913 therefore included the three visits at the end of the long section on Gilberte, with the

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first visit sandwiched between the second and third. Maybe Proust would have come to realize that the first visit would have been more fitting where he had originally located it, as part of the ritual followed by the young boy, attached to all that was part of Gilberte’s world. But we cannot know, for things took a different turn. THE GRASSET PROOFS It was soon obvious that the first volume was excessively long.24 The first run of galley proofs, begun on March 31 and finished June 7, comprised ninetyfive “placards” (hereafter “pl.”) or galleys (eight pages each).25 Allowing for the inevitable expansions that would take place when Proust corrected the galleys, we can understand why there are references to a volume of 800 pages. The pages concerning Gilberte run from pl. 53 to pl. 75, dated from May 15 to June 6. The necessity of breaking the first volume earlier than was intended surfaces in a letter Proust wrote to Grasset around June 24. Proust is sending back the first forty-five galleys, and he explains why he did not return the last fifty sheets earlier: “Comme je vous avais dit, j’étais très impatient de savoir à combien de pages nous allions ... Je vois maintenant que j’ai reçu toutes le premières épreuves, que le volume aurait plus de 700 pages, chiffre que nous avons dit de ne pas pouvoir dépasser. Je vais donc être obligé de reporter au commencement du deuxième volume ce que je croyais la fin de celui-ci (une bonne dizaine de placards) ... une fin n’est pas une simple terminaison et ... je ne peux pas couper cela aussi facilement qu’une motte de beurre. Cela demande réflexion et arrangement. Dès que j’aurai pu trouver comment finir, c’est-à-dire très prochainement, dans quelques jours, je vous renverrai les premières et les secondes épreuves.”26 In like vein, Proust told Louis de Robert that there were ninety-five galley sheets and that he would finish the volume at an earlier point (Correspondance 12:211 [letter 94]), and to Jean Cocteau he wrote: “J’ai dû couper la fin du premier volume car cela faisait 850 pages, et ainsi cela en fera 670” (Correspondance 12:222 [letter 99]). Proust was probably thinking of the passage identified earlier as page 633 of the typescript, which comes on pl. 83 of the galley proofs (see n. 24 above). At that point was a truly purple passage, on the view of the sunlit sea from the bedroom window of the hotel in Normandy where the protagonist is staying with his grandmother. The appropriateness of these paragraphs to conclude the volume is demonstrated by the fact that Proust moved them from that position to the actual end of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, leaving just two paragraphs in the original place.27

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Unfortunately, that very acceptable compromise had to be abandoned, as it would leave the first volume still too long. The letter to Cocteau, and several others from the first ten days of July, imply that Proust was thinking about ending the volume earlier still. Robert, he told Cocteau, wanted him to plan separate volumes of 400 pages each, but Proust refused to countenance breaking before page 500: “mais ce sera affreux.” He said something similar to Robert himself: “Le volume n’aura pas huit cents pages, mais environ six cent quatre-vingts. Si vous y attachez une énorme importance, je me résignerai peut-être à le couper pas tout à fait au milieu et à le faire de 500 pages environ” (Correspondance 12:217–18 [letter 97]). But soon after that he told Robert that it would be unthinkable to finish before page 550, so he might as well allow himself 660 (Correspondance 12:224 [letter 100]). Other correspondents were brought into the discussion, including Georges de Lauris, to whom Proust wrote on July 11: “La difficulté est que des petits volumes, la chose est trop en train pour que ce soit encore possible. Ce que je ferai comme petit volume si je m’y résigne, ce sont des volumes de 520 pages, chaque page étant le double d’une page ordinaire. Or je me demande si c’est la peine de tout bouleverser, d’avoir une fin de volume idiote pour cela, quand un premier volume de 700 pages allait si bien” (Correspondance 12:228–29 [letter 102]). By the next day, Proust had settled for a first volume of 500 pages. Grasset nailed him down: “Il est donc entendu que vous me renverrez corrigées les 500 premières pages destinées à constituer notre premier livre, après y avoir fait toutes les modifications destinées à en assurer l’unité” (Correspondance 13:396 [letter 228]). Proust does not seem to have considered breaking where “Noms de pays: le nom” yields to “Noms de pays: le pays” (pl. 75/7; the division is not signaled on typescript or galley proofs) nor at the point when the protagonist receives an invitation to have tea with Gilberte at her home (pl. 67). The break would come, he decided, before the long episode of the dinner with Norpois (Pléiade, p. 408, line 38, on pl. 59; the passage which now follows Pléiade, p. 408, line 38, was originally located at the beginning of the section, before Pléiade, p. 405, line 17). But he would have to rework the previous pages, so that the volume did not seem to end on a muted note. His first idea was to conclude with the “rayon de soleil sur le balcon.” In the end he abandoned this idea and returned the incident to its original place, but on the third proofs, it appears at the end of the volume.28 In the passage moved (from Pléiade, p. 388, line 40, to p. 392, line 21) there are two incidents, both moving from despondency to happiness. In the first incident, the transition to joy is effected by the sight of a shaft of sunlight on the balcony; in the second, by the arrival of Gilberte at the Champs-Elysées. The two incidents

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have been reversed in order to end with the poetic passage on the sunlight. The inversion is not very convincing. Proust had to add two new transitional sentences, both awkward (see Pléiade, p. 390 “variant a” and p. 392 “variant a”). The passage that had originally served as a transition between the two halves (Pléiade, p. 390, lines 13–32) was moved and attached to a later passage that brought in the same character, the old lady reading the Débats (Pléiade, p. 398, line 17, p. 398 “variant a”). The galleys preserved in NAF 16753 show something of this modification. The last columns of pl. 55 have been removed in order to paste pl. 55/6c–8a (Pléiade, p. 388, line 40, to p. 390, line 13) after pl. 56/2 (following Pléiade, p. 392, line 21).29 The new link connecting Pléiade, page 392, line 21, to page 388, line 40 (p. 392 “variant a”) has been added by hand. The rest of pl. 55/8 (bcd) was attached to pl. 56/1 (fol. 26v), and from it pl. 55/8c (the old lady reading the Débats) was struck. That was because the passage had originally served as a transition between the two halves and was no longer relevant. So Proust incorporated it in a later passage by attaching another copy of column 8c to pl. 58/2.30 A page number (59, changed to 60) has been written on pl. 55/8bcd, indicating that the newly organized passage was to go in after pl. 59 (from which columns 7b and 8 would have been removed).31 The number 56 has been written onto pl. 56/3. On this set, therefore, Proust’s intentions are to be inferred from the new page numbers. Proust may have made his new arrangement clearer on the set which went to the printer. We do have a trace of this other set. The break on Pléiade, p. 388, which comes at line 39 on the set we have been considering, was actually made three lines earlier on the third proofs (we call the bridging lines pl. 55/6b),32 and in NAF 16753 there is a second copy of pl. 55/3b–6a which does just that [NAF 16753 fol. 25]). We can assume, then, that when Proust sent the galleys back to Grasset, they concluded with the sunlight on the balcony, inserted after the description of the young boy’s fascination with the world of the Swanns. As we have said, at this stage the page on the “pilgrimages” (Pléiade, p. 408, line 39, to p. 409, line 33) came before the other examples of his fetishism (Pléiade, p. 405, line 17, to p. 408, line 38). Other evidence shows that Proust returned this material to Grasset at the end of July.33 He had already sent off the first forty-five galley sheets, on May 23 (Correspondance 13:384 [letter 218]), and they had formed the basis of the “second” proofs, going to p. 318, three-quarters of the way through “Un Amour de Swann,” and dated from May 30 to July 15.34 In his instructions sent on July 29 to Charles Colin, the printer, Louis Brun, Grasset’s secretary,

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speaks of “les premières épreuves corrigées des placards 45 au placard 60, au bas duquel se terminera le premier volume,” but he immediately adds “car les placards 60 à 95 feront partie d’un deuxième volume” (Correspondance 13:399 [letter 231]). It is unlikely that the galleys returned by Proust went beyond pl. 59/7a, augmented by the “rayon de soleil.” But we have seen that Proust numbered one copy of the transferred sunlight episode 60, and if he did the same on the copy sent to Grasset, that would make sense of Brun’s apparent contradiction. The printer set to work with a will, and the third set of proofs are dated from July 31 to September 1. The pages on the sunlight, with the two halves inverted, have of course been moved to follow after NP 408, where they would have closed the first volume in a poetic, if not very relevant, manner. By the time he corrected the page proofs, however, Proust had come up with a better idea. It may have been the passing reference to going to the Bois which suggested to Proust that a more effective solution still would be to use the first visit to the Bois, which figured on the galleys as a flashback at the very end of the Gilberte portion of the novel, to end the first volume. As we have seen, a place had always been reserved for a mention of the Bois at this point. Once Proust received the new proofs (at the beginning of September), he could incorporate his new ending into them. He restored the episode of the sunlight to its rightful place (toward the bottom of p. 478 of the proofs), with the two halves in their original order, and with the original transitional paragraph (pl. 55/8c) reinstated. Rather than use the last pages of the new proofs (pp. 500b–504), with complicated written indications to show the new order, he went back to his galleys and inserted into the set of proofs he returned to the printer (NAF 16756) a fresh copy of pl. 56, preceded by pl. 55/6c–8.35 On this set Proust included the whole of pl. 56, not just the first two sheets, and he cut pl. 55/6 after, and not before, the sentence we identify as pl. 55/6b (Pléiade, p. 388, lines 36–39).36 Pages 479–84 of the proofs are therefore replaced by the ten pages of the galley proof (pl. 55/6b–7 are considered a single page), and the text of the third proofs resumes with page 485.37 Proust had to copy a few lines at the end of the intercalation, as pl. 56/8 does not quite join onto page 485 of the proofs (fol. 106). The next modification involved moving the opening page of the concluding section and putting it at the end (pp. 408–9). This change was undoubtedly occasioned by the need to make a smooth transition into the new ending, which would have the protagonist waiting at the Bois de Boulogne to see Mme Swann pass. The switching back of the two halves of this section meant moving the second half of page 495 and the top half of page 496, and putting them into page 500.38

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As for the actual ending, we have seen that Proust had prepared his galleys, and so all he had to do was to attach them. So, following page 409, line 32, we have pl. 74/1b to 75/6. Because nothing is ever simple with Proust, we have to add that pl. 74/5–8 is missing, though it is needed for the coherence of the narrative.39 On the copy of pl. 74 which Proust transferred (NAF 16753, fols. 62v–63r), he wrote in blue pencil at the top of pl. 74/1, “ne fait pas partie de ma fin nouvelle,” and on pl. 74/2, “C’est à peu près ici que commence la nouvelle fin” (this indication should have come two lines before the bottom of pl. 74/1; again, Proust’s intentions would have been made more precise on the proofs sent to the printer). After pl. 75/6, Proust has added by hand the next lines (taken from pl. 75/7), followed by the word ‘Fin’. On the copy which would have stayed at the original place, Proust has conserved only pl. 74/1 and pl. 75/7–8, with the lines that were transferred struck out (NAF 16753, fol. 60v). The nine galley sheets that were transferred are paginated 501–9. The page proofs were not sent back to Grasset until October 10 (Correspondance 13:401 [letter 233]). Traces of the rethinking of the ending can be found in letters around the beginning of September. Toward the end of August, Proust offered to send Lucien Daudet “si cela pouvait vous amuser de parcourir les épreuves de mon premier volume (car hélas, le livre sera divisé—et stupidement sans qu’on puisse dès le premier volume se douter de ce que cela sera, en trois volumes)” (Correspondance 12:254 [letter 115]). He did send Daudet his proofs, within two days.40 Daudet read them immediately, and Proust replied to his comments at length. In his reply, he wrote: “J’avais justement envie de vous écrire parce que j’ai eu l’idée d’interpoler un peu les dernières pages que vous avez (ou plutôt de leur rendre leur ordre primitif) et d’ajouter pour la fin du volume quelques pages qui venaient plus loin et que vous n’avez pas” (Correspondance 12:257 [letter 116]). Shortly after this, Proust wrote to Robert: “Je ne laisserai pas la fin telle que vous l’avez lue. Je n’allongerai cependant pas le livre. J’ajouterai seulement cinq ou six pages qui se trouvent au milieu du second volume et qui feront un couronnement un peu plus étendu” (Correspondance 12:271 [letter 119]). Vigneron observed that the new ending went beyond “five or six” pages (“Structure,” p. 462) and assumed that only the first half (the first visit) was considered and that the epilogue proper (the third visit) was added later, to make the conclusion even stronger. The proofs, however, do not support this, and we know that the epilogue was always connected to the protagonist’s earliest memories of the Bois. One sympathizes with Vigneron all the same. The published ending of volume 1 is just too spectacular for the context.

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The next set of proofs, the fourth, incorporates the new ending. Proust sent Lucien Daudet a copy of the last pages, with an explanation of how the previous pages had been changed. “Je vois des inconvénients à finir par ce morceau, mais j’y vois de grands avantages ... Vous jugerez bien si cela termine mieux que le soleil sur le balcon.”41 He told Daudet that the only difference between the new text and the one Daudet had read was that “le jour de neige, les jours où je vois du soleil sur le balcon” would come “quelques pages plus haut,” and he continues, “Et ce n’est qu’après eux que je mettrais (ce qui en ce moment est un peu avant): ‘Les jours où Gilberte ne venait pas.’” This account of what he had done to his text does mention the two principal changes, but it is very elliptical, and it did not really help Daudet to reconstitute the full passage, of which he received only the new ending. Vigneron unfortunately had his own idea of the original order, based chiefly on internal evidence, and it has no basis at all in reality (“Structure,” pp. 440–42 and p. 442, n. 47). He deployed much ingenuity in showing how, when the last page was moved, it necessitated moving the others and redistributing them in order not to render incoherent some of the detail in what Proust had already in place.42 As I have said, the proofs tell a different tale; the order Vigneron finds incoherent was already there. The “inconvénients” which Vigneron details all go back to the time when Proust paginated his cahiers.

CONCLUSION Vigneron’s explanation of the ending of Du Côté de chez Swann, which overwhelms a narrative that had barely begun, is sound in its general thrust, but not in the details. What emerges when we marshall all the evidence now available to us is that Proust already had the solution to his problem, which was to end volume 1 with a first visit to the Bois—something already drafted in the very first sketches and alluded to in the typed version. But by bringing forward a third visit, admirably suited as a conclusion if the volume had been able to reach the climax of the second visit, and placing it at the end of “Autour de Madame Swann,” Proust frankly overstretched his material. It would be unethical to meddle with the text Proust approved, however reluctantly, but nothing prevents readers from postponing their reading of the third visit to the end of “Autour de Madame Swann.” It works extremely well. One could add a curious postscript. Another pioneer in the field of genetic studies on Proust, Albert Feuillerat, was able to track down a

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sufficient number of proofs of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs to demonstrate Proust’s original intentions for that volume (see n. 3 above). He too overstated his case, arguing that Proust’s modifications marked a decline in poetic sensibility, and Feuillerat lost credibility as a result. But in one respect his research has not been challenged: following Feuillerat, everyone assumes that the girls themselves were not intended by Proust for the first visit to Normandy, that they were introduced at a late stage in the elaboration of the second volume. But just as there was always an idea to have a “Morceau sur le bois” in the first pages of the section on Gilberte, so too do the manuscript cahiers show that Proust always thought of populating his seaside resort with a group of enigmatic schoolgirls. The exercise books of 1910 are full of experiments involving these girls. But Proust constantly came up against the difficulty of organizing the episodes suggested by his teeming brain, and when he was faced with the challenge of producing a readable draft of his novel, he shelved the idea. Only when he was tackling his second volume seriously did he reintroduce the girls. By that time, however, the contents of volume 2 had been announced, without the girls, and they do not figure in Grasset’s proofs. But they were there, waiting in the wings, and this time it was the freedom afforded by the war, and not the constraints of a publisher’s deadline, which pushed Proust into restoring his original intentions.

NOTES A shorter version of this article was delivered as a paper at the Proceedings of the Proust Colloquium held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in April 2000 and will appear in Proust in Perspective: Visions and Revisions, edited by Armine Kotin Mortimer and Katherine Kolb, to be published by the University of Illinois Press in 2002, copyright 2002 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 1. Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. J.-Y. Tadié et al., 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–89), 1:409–14 and 414–20, quotation on 1:414. Subsequent references to this edition appear in the text, cited parenthetically as Pléiade by page and line numbers; unless otherwise stated, all references are to vol. 1. 2. Robert Vigneron, “Structure de Swann: Prétentions et défaillances,” Modern Philology 44 (1946): 102–28; reprinted in his Etudes sur Stendahl et sur Proust (Paris: Nizet, 1978), pp. 430–66. Hereafter the 1978 reprint will be cited parenthetically in the text as “Structure.” 3. Albert Feuillerat, Comment Marcel Proust a composé son roman, Yale Romanic Studies 7 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1934). 4. This reference does not survive in the published novel, but it will be found in “variant a” to p. 21 of the Pléiade edition: see Pléiade, p. 1104.

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5. Pléiade, p. 135. The typescript of 1909 did not go further than p. 134, line 2, although the manuscript cahier that Proust was following contained about twentyfive pages on the “deux côtés.” 6. The numbers attributed to the cahiers by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France classify the exercise books according to the part of the novel most implicated and within each division follow a chronological sequence. The numbers are therefore not in themselves a guide to the chronology, although they are not arbitrary. Cahier 27 has the call mark NAF [nouvelles acquisitions françaises] 16667, placed where it is because most of it has to do with Normandy, which will be part 4 of the novel. 7. Pléiade, p. 564, line 41. The previous page (fol. 65.2) took us to Pléiade, p. 564, line 16 (“tous les plus beaux raisonnements que j’aurais pu faire, toutes les”). The typescript shows that the next word was “louanges” (later changed to “tous les éloges”). 8. Pléiade, p. 624, line 27, to p. 625, line 23; p. 625, line 23, to p. 626, lines 22 and 26–39; then p. 629, lines 32–36, and p. 630, lines 3–6 differently ordered (see p. 626 var. b). The missing page evidently included Pléiade, p. 626, lines 7–19; as those dozen lines would not have filled a manuscript page, we know that there were lines scored out, possibly first versions of the passage that was typed, but we cannot speculate further. 9. Marcel Proust, Correspondance, ed. Philip Kolb, 21 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1970–93), 11:46, 51 [letters 17 and 20]. All subsequent references to the correspondence are cited parenthetically in the text as Correspondance by volume and page numbers followed by letter numbers in brackets. 10. Kolb places this letter at the very end of March. His argument is based on an allusion to Nahmias’s father (“J’ai tellement souffert que je n’ai pas encore écrit à Monsieur votre Père”), which he says appears to follow one made in a letter dated with certainty March 29 (“Avez-vous dit à monsieur votre père combine je lui étais reconnaissant. Je n’ose pas après si longtemps lui écrire”; Correspondance 11:85 [letter 39]). It seems to me more likely that the second reference must follow the first after a gap sufficiently long to have made Proust guilty for not having found time to write. 11. Folios 190–206. Nahmias indicates that the pages come from a “cahier noir,” which might point to Cahier 23. It is obvious from the appearance of the exercise book, however, that nothing is missing from Cahier 23 at this point. Most of the exercise books Proust used at this period were black. 12. The last two pages were much rewritten before Proust came to the version we read now. The text of all the second half of this epilogue (from the middle of p. 9 to the end) is reproduced as Esquisse LXXXVI, Pléiade, pp. 988–91. 13. The entire manuscript, which went as far as the end of “Noms de pays: le pays,” was typed out, with two carbon copies. Only a few pages of the third run survive, but most of the other two runs are in the Bibliothèque Nationale collection, NAF 16730–16732 (commonly, if inaccurately, known as the first typescript) and 16733–16735 (the so-called second typescript). It was typed in stages, in 1909 (16730 and 16733, three-quarters of “Combray”), 1911 (the rest of “Combray” plus 16731 and 16734; “Un Amour de Swann,” begun at Cabourg by Miss Hayward and completed and in part retyped in Paris by someone else), and 1912 (16732 and 16735; “Noms de pays: le nom,” typed as far as fol. 65 of Cahier 24 in March and completed

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by Miss Hayward in May–June; and “Noms de pays: le pays,” entirely typed by Miss Hayward in June). 14. The twenty loose pages are obviously the seventeen sheets we have just described, the typescript of which does indeed begin at p. 560. The “cahier rouge” is not Cahier 22, as Kolb suggests (see his n. 3), but Cahier 70, which was not known at the time vol. 11 of the Correspondance was published. Cahier 70 is the manuscript for “Noms de pays: le pays,” i.e., the Normandy section, which comes directly after “Autour de Madame Swann.” 15. The first editor, Henri Bonnet, in the Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Marcel Proust 7 (1957): 280–81, dated it September or October 1911; see also his study Comment a été conçu “A la recherche du temps perdu” (1959; reprint, Paris, 1971), p. 125. Kolb assigns it to early January. Kolb’s dating rests on a remark in a letter to Robert de Billy that Kolb plausibly dates January 19, in which Proust says, “il faut que je finisse pour la dactylographe les dernières pages de mon premier chapitre” (Correspondance 11:32 [letter 11]). But it seems reasonable to assume that Proust was referring there to the whole of the Gilberte Swann section, whereas the request to Nahmias accompanies another part of the typescript altogether, the one which starts at the end of “Noms de pays: le nom” and continues with “Noms de pays: le pays.” The traditional dating is accepted by the Pléiade editor: see Pléiade, pp. 1284–85; and J.-Y. Tadié, Marcel Proust (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 676. Françoise Leriche (“Une nouvelle datation des dactylographies du Temps perdu à la lumière de la Correspondance,” in Bulletin d’informations proustiennes 17 [1986]: 7–20) suggested early June (p. 12); and Shuji Kurokawa (“Remarques sur le manuscript et la dactylographie du ‘Récit de Cricquebec’” [Paris: unpublished memoir, 1988]) adopted this suggestion (p. 70). 16. Letters 4, 66, and 78 of Correspondance 11, addressed to Nahmias and dated January, May, and June by Kolb, should all, in my view, be reassigned to mid-May. They clearly belong in sequence. 17. Correspondance 11:239, 291 [letters 128 and 148]. See Vigneron, “Structure” (n. 2 above), p. 462, n. 69. The note in the Pléiade edition also implies the connection (Pléiade, pp. 1280, 414, n. 1). 18. The manuscript mentions “feuilles mortes” and his difficulty in sleeping (but in a different connection from letter 128). The word ‘nostalgie’ (letter 148) is not imported into the novel until the typescript is corrected (see Pléiade, p. 414 var. b), but that still antedates the letters to Mme Straus. 19. See the “chronologie de Marcel Proust” in Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdus, ed. Pierre Clarac and André Ferré, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 1:xxxix. In an article which counts as my opus 1 (“A Note on the Text of Swann,” Adam International Review 260 [1957]: 101–4), I pointed out (p. 104) that the statement that comparison of the fourth and fifth proofs shows that the passage was added in the autumn of 1913 is ill founded. The other piece of “evidence” accepted in that article, and the conjecture that Proust added the third visit when he made the transfer, can however no longer be sustained. 20. Cahier 23, fol. 18 is p. “17,” and the two sheets we have (65.4 and 65.2v) are pp. “18” and “20.” 21. 409 var. a, “Alors, rien ne me causait plus d’émoi ....” We need to restore the words omitted at the end of the sentence on p. 1278, which should read “et jouait aux barres avec sa fille.”

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22. Word omitted from the Pléiade transcription. 23. Copied from NAF 16732, fols. 157–58, to the margin of NAF 16735, fol. 163, continuing on fol. 164. On the identity of the copyist, see my article, “Sur le copiste de la première dactylographie,” in the Bulletin d’informations proustiennes 31 (2000): 23–30. 24. “Votre manuscript contient une matière formidable,” Grasset wrote on March 5 (Correspondance 20:632 [letter 368]). Proust had entertained doubts as early as the end of the previous October, when he told another editor he approached that if it should prove quite impossible to accommodate all the typescript in one volume, he would suggest breaking at p. 633 of the typescript (Correspondance 11:257 [letter 135]). I discuss this suggestion in the next paragraph of the main text. 25. The eight pages of each galley have been pasted on the two inside pages of a large double sheet. NAF 16753 contains several such sheets, of a run which Proust corrected. Consequently pl. 1 (for example) is on the sheets foliated 1v and 2r. NAF 16754 likewise contains several sheets, of a set Proust did not correct. Neither set is complete. These two sets are independent of the one which was corrected tidily and sent to the printer (see n. 36). We can see from the next proofs that the corrections received by the printer do not entirely coincide with those we read on the sets that we have. The first 52 galleys of the set which went to the printer’s were bought by the Bodmer Foundation in Geneva in June 2000, but unfortunately pl. 53–59 were not with them. We use the code pl. 56/1 (etc.) to indicate the first column of galley 56, and where we have to distinguish different portions of a column, we use suffixes, thus: pl. 55/6a, pl. 55/6b, and pl. 55/6bcd, where we include more than one unit. Vigneron’s argument that there were more than ninety-five galleys (“Structure,” p. 437, n. 43) does not hold water. 26. Correspondance 13:392 [letter 225]. Volume 13 of Kolb’s edition of the Correspondance is devoted to 1914, but several letters of 1913 came to light too late for inclusion in vol. 12 and are included in vol. 13 as an appendix. 27. Pléiade, 2:65, lines 20–21. We see from variant 64b that the passage began with the lines now at 305, lines 15–37 and (with a different link) 306, lines 11–17, and from 65c that it concluded, after several lines that have disappeared, with 306, lines 20–34. It can be conveniently read in Richard Bales, ‘Bricquebec’: Prototype d’ “A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs” (Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 115–21. Vigneron identified the allusion correctly (“Structure” [n. 2 above], pp. 459–60, n. 59, also p. 431, n. 4), though his conjecture that it came on pl. 88 was not quite right. See also Pléiade 2:1367, n. 2, 1490, and 306, n. 1. 28. The Bibliothèque Nationale has two runs of the third proofs, one uncorrected (NAF 16757) and one corrected (16756). 29. Placard 55 is NAF 16753, fols. 23v and 24r; pl. 56 is fols. 26v and 27r. 30. The pagination of the galleys skipped from pl. 56 to pl. 58. On fol. 28v of 16753 (pl. 58), traces remain of this half sheet: just the very end of each line, the rest having been cut out when this provisional solution was abandoned and the original text restored. It was taken from a virtually uncorrected set of galleys, NAF 16754, where col. 8 has been cut after 8a (fol. 95r). 31. The last two sheets of pl. 59 (NAF 16753 fol. 31r) are both missing. The

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first lines of pl. 59/7 would have been copied, one assumes, onto the following page (the one marked “60”). 32. The Pléiade variant (390a) records the new transition (between 408:38 and 390:33) as it appears on NAF 16753. One can see from the third proofs that the text sent to the printer gave a longer transition at this point, which included the three lines of 388, adapted to the new context. 33. Proust left Paris hastily on July 26, and the printer, Louis Brun, acknowledged receipt July 29 (Correspondance 12:236 [letter 106] and 13:398 [letter 230]). 34. This is recorded correctly on p. clix, but wrongly on p. cxxxii, where the final date is given as September 1. Kolb (n. 9 above) makes the same mistake (Correspondance 12:207, n. 2), as does Tadié (n. 1 above; p. 705, n. 7), and more spectacularly, the Pléiade editors, who speak of “les 95 placards des deuxièmes épreuves” (Pléiade, p. 1049). September 1 is the last date stamped on the third proofs. For the second proofs, the printer needed galley 46, returned July 13 (Correspondance 13:397 [letter 229]). 35. The antecedent of these transferred pages is in NAF 16753 (fols. 23v–24r, pl. 55/1–6b). 36. The most plausible explanation for the omission of pl. 55/6b is that Proust had his working copy, which broke at line 40, in front of him, and he made the same cut without thinking. He added the missing sentence by hand to p. 478 of the third proofs. It is surprising that he did not cut pl. 56 after the second column, as the text of pl. 56/3–8 had already been set by the printer. The only difference, which could have been handled simply by striking the lines he no longer wanted, was that the paragraph stuck onto pl. 56/7, which came from pl. 55/8, had to be restored to its original position as the transition between the two halves of the sunlight episode. It would not have had to be recopied, as it was in place on pl. 55/8. 37. The inserted galleys are paginated (by Proust) pp. 479–85, 485bis, 485ter, 485quater. Page 485 of the proofs is now renumbered 485quinque. 38. Proust took pp. 495–96 (each pair of pages is of course printed recto/verso), and cut it into two. Page 495a he attached to p. 494 (NAF 16757, fol. 110), with the result that p. 496a appears to be attached to p. 493 (it is struck out), and he turned the lower half round, so that one sees p. 496b first, with p. 495b, struck, on the back (fol. 111). Page 497 follows (fol. 112). Another copy of p. 495 (lower half) and p. 496 (top half) was inserted into p. 500, but only for a portion of p. 495; the rest is written in by hand. 39. They are still in 16753, as fol. 61r. NP says that pp. 411:28 to 414:39 were suppressed, suggesting it was to make space, but this seems arbitrary. Proust is not likely to have started his cut in the middle of a sentence which just happened to be where the two halves of the galley divided. I fancy that all that happened was that the pl. 74/5–8 got left behind by an oversight. 40. Lucien Daudet, Autour de soixante lettres de Marcel Proust, Cahiers Marcel Proust, vol. 5 (Paris: Gallimard, 1929), p. 67; quoted by Kolb in Correspondance 12:256, n. 6 (see n. 9 above). 41. Correspondance 12:287–88 [letter 128]. This letter is unfortunately difficult to date (see Kolb, p. 288, n. 2), but it was probably written toward the end of October. The reference to a mistake (“entêté” for “étêté,” 414:41) does not help, as the fourth

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proofs give “un seul, étêté, petit, trapu,” and Proust has simply moved the word so that it follows “trapu.” For a full list of the possible “inconvénients,” see Vigneron, “Structure” (n. 2 above), p. 464. 42. “Structure,” pp. 463–64. Vigneron posited an original order which was coherent, but which had to be upset when Proust revised his ending. But the original order is what Vigneron gives in his n. 72 (with the proviso that his units 4 and 5 were reversed), presented as if it were the result of the changes forced upon Proust.

MAUREEN A. RAMSDEN

Jean Santeuil and the Notion of avant-texte: A Case for an Extension of the Term?

[S]’il est facile de décrire négativement les brouillons par ce qu’ils ne sont pas, il est beaucoup plus difficile de définir leur véritable spécificité [ ... ]. (Lebrave 11) [L]a genèse d’un poème ou d’un roman n’obéit pas entièrement à un programme préexistant, et n’est régie ni par un processus unique, ni par un finalisme simple, ni même par le développement harmonieux d’un modèle; la perte, la dérive, l’imprévu ont une fréquence hautement plus probable que l’économie, la linéarité assurée, le prévisible. Genèse non pas organique, mais relevant plutôt de la combinatoire, d’une logique autre que celle du déterminisme de cause à effet. (Levaillant 13)

T

he definition of an avant-texte has undergone numerous changes on the way to what continues to be, in the case of some critics, a rather reluctant acceptance of the term and its import in literary criticism. The main debates have centred around the documents to be included in the term avant-texte, the relation of the avant-texte to the finished work or texte, the definition of the term texte, and the general purpose and validity of this branch of literary criticism. The aim in this discussion is twofold: to suggest, given the unstable boundaries dividing the texte from the avant-texte, a wider definition of the term avant-texte, and to examine, in the light of this discussion, the special case represented by Proust’s corpus, and in particular his early novel Jean

From Dalhousie French Studies 58, (Spring 2002). © 2002 by Dalhousie University.

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Santeuil which, it will be argued, had an important role in the macrogenesis of À la recherche du temps perdu. The liberation of the texte from its structuralist isolation led to a tacit acknowledgement of the possible value of sources outside the texte in elucidating its full significance. This meant that the texte could be viewed in a wider context—its historical, cultural, literary, linguistic, and finally, genetic perspective. The term avant-texte, coined by Jean Bellemin-Noël, appeared both to free the new area of genetic studies from its early association with the work on ancient manuscripts, and to establish the purpose and perimeters of this field of study. He defined the avant-texte as “l’ensemble constitué par les brouillons, les manuscrits, les épreuves, les « variantes », vu sous l’angle de ce qui précède matériellement un ouvrage, quand celui-ci est traité comme un texte, et qui peut faire système avec lui” (1972:15). However, although the term was taken up by most critics, there has been no consensus as to its exact meaning; the various assumptions it makes can be challenged. For example, the definition of a texte, in reference to which an avant-texte is usually defined, is itself problematic.1 Bellemin-Noël distinguishes between le texte, defined as “le texte « définitif » ou plus exactement le dernier état d’une élaboration, signé par l’écrivain” and l’ouvrage, defined as “un écrit particulier publié sous la signature de quelqu’un (l’écriture); les dimensions n’importent pas: livre, article, poème isolé—pourvu qu’il y ait un titre et un point final” (1972:17 and 14). However, difficulties over definitions immediately arise. At what point can a work, published or unpublished, finished or unfinished, be accepted as a texte? The texte has, for example, been seen as a chance occurrence, as simply the end, one possible end, of a series of avant-textes (Melançon 53). This is doubly the case when a work has not been given the final imprimatur by the author. An author can even move between different brouillons, back and forth, until one version is designated (by him/her or an editor) as texte. There are cases of changes in later editions and in the typed copies and the proofs. Baudelaire, for example, was forced by censorship to produce a very different second edition of the Fleurs du mal from the one he originally published, and the edition which is published today, with the “condemned” poems appearing in appendices, was not sanctioned by Baudelaire.2 The distinction made between a public (published) texte versus a private (unpublished) texte is equally problematic (Grésillon 1994:16). Pascal’s Pensées are an obvious, much-quoted case. Despite their original form as avant-textes, an unfinished work, they are now a much published, public texte and have acquired the status of a canonical work. What then of Bellemin-Noël’s idea that a finished, published work should be signed by the

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author (or given the final imprimatur) (1972:17)? The definition of a texte becomes increasingly problematic, leading Jacques Petit to state that “[l]e texte n’existe pas.”3 Rather than simply suggesting a closed and rather narrow definition of a texte, Marion Schmid has discussed different factors which are brought into play when an avant-texte is finally published and accepted as a canonical texte (1998). They include the style of a particular writer and the point at which he decides on publication. They can also involve the important role of an editor, who decides to present unfinished work for publication, and his involvement in its general presentation: “What we consider to be a text depends, first, on the literary æsthetics of individual authors (and, by extension, on which documents they decided to release to the public) and, second, on what has been established and presented as a text by publishers and editors” (Schmid 1998:20). Louis Hay cites four commonly received factors in the acceptance of a texte: “auteur, œuvre, lecteur, société” (153). He thus adds the dimension of the acceptance of the reading public, with its particular literary and cultural norms, to the factors already cited by Marion Schmid. Another useful approach to the problem is offered by Thanh-Vân Ton-That, in his discussion of Jean Santeuil.4 He suggests that the means of defining a work as a texte lies in the degree of completion at what he terms the external and internal level of the work: “l’inachèvement peut être externe, lorsque l’œuvre développée et bien construite semble brusquement interrompue, comme privée de sa fin attendue; ou bien l’inachèvement est interne et touche des unités plus réduites, non pas le texte dans sa globalité, mais un chapitre, une phrase, voire un mot, d’où l’impression d’éclatement et d’instabilité” (17). Thus the external level appears to relate to the overall plan and structure of the work, essential to its overall understanding, while the internal level concerns smaller units of the work—a level on which some incompletion does not upset the transmission of the essential meaning of the work. The definition of texte therefore seems to rely on a dynamic interplay concerning a combination of factors whose relative importance might change with the work of individual writers. The definition of an avant-texte is equally problematic. The avant-texte can appear in different guises. The material form which the avant-texte commonly takes—the plans, brouillons, ébauches—depends, as Marion Schmid has pointed out, on the particular writer and his style of writing. Most nineteenth-century writers such as Zola and Flaubert, known as “programmatic” writers, planned their work ahead in great detail, leaving large numbers’ of plans, scénarios, brouillons, mises au net and also notes on

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historical events (Schmid 1998:xv, and also 43-44, where she notes the importance of Louis Hay’s work in this area). Here the approach reflects a particular aim and genre. Writers such as Proust and Joyce, known as “immanent” writers (their method being described also as écriture à processus), seldom used written plans, but would allow their work to develop in the act of writing (Schmid 1998:xv and 43-44). Their avant-texte therefore mainly consists of brouillons. The definition of the avant-texte has also depended on its relation to the finished work or texte. As mentioned above, an avant-texte, for long not considered as publishable material, is often viewed essentially as a private texte, as opposed to the public nature of the published texte (see Grésillon 1994). The private texte can also be seen as inferior to the public texte. When the texte is considered to be the perfected version at the end of a period of trial and error, the brouillons are, by definition, the imperfect versions in this process. The avant-texte is therefore seen as unfinished, unclear, and therefore not worthy of publication. As Bellemin-Noël expresses it, “[les brouillons] portent témoignage d’un labeur et du passage de l’imperfection à la perfection” (1977:5). In addition, the avant-textes can be seen as part of a teleological process, as necessary workings and reworkings—recognisable different stages in the evolution of the final texte. Acknowledging the fact that the later brouillons are often potential units of texte, and can even change status several times in the course of revisions, corrections and editions, Bellemin-Noël has seen the avant-texte as being defined in retrospect—when the finished work has been established (1977:6). Furthermore, the public texte itself can be reclaimed by the writer as he makes changes in later editions and thus the texte can be said to revert to the status of an avant-texte. However, a narrow definition of avant-texte, seen from a teleological perspective, can also bring about the exclusion of large amounts of material which can appear to represent very different departures from the material admitted in the final texte, and of seemingly little relevance in the development of the texte. Nevertheless, the material which was rejected by the writer in the development of his final texte is important for the ideas, themes and stylistic methods he chose to leave aside when he embarked on new directions, and must therefore be included in the term avant-texte and given equal importance. As Grésillon remarks: Les manuscrits littéraires nous confrontent en effet bien souvent à cette image des sentiers qui bifurquent, indéfiniment, créant des réseaux et des trames, embrassant toutes les possibilités, toutes les

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virtualités, tous les excès jubilatoires qui ont existé pendant le temps de l’écriture et qui auraient pu, n’eût été la funeste biffure, devenir texte. (1994:12) A further problem relating to the definition of the avant-texte, which is not often considered, is that of the relation of earlier works of the writer to a later texte. Intertextual references and echoes are commonly studied, but are there any circumstances in which the earlier works of a writer should be included in the avant-texte of a later work? If the earlier works of a writer have been published with his/her consent, we would argue that they must be considered as discrete textes, with their own individual significance, rather than as avant-textes for a later work. However, although Flaubert wrote several such discrete works which were published before his L’éducation sentimentale in 1869, he also wrote an earlier work which was also called L’éducation sentimentale, in 1845, which he did not publish. He comments as follows on this work, written in his youth: “Novembre suivra le chemin de L’éducation sentimentale, et restera avec elle dans mon carton indéfiniment. Ah! Quel nez fin j’ai eu dans ma jeunesse de ne pas le publier! Comme j’en rougirais maintenant!”5 Flaubert thus points out the lack of maturity in his early work, but can it be said that the first Éducation sentimentale acted as an avant-texte for the later work? The question of this particular case cannot be answered in this discussion, but Bellemin-Noël suggests general criteria which might be adopted when analysing such cases. His definition of avanttexte, which includes material which can be seen to “faire système” with the finished texte, could encompass earlier unfinished works (1972:15). Although Bellemin-Noël’s definition is somewhat broad here, the questions it raises will be analysed later in the discussion, as the need to examine closely, and even to question past definitions of the term avant-texte is of particular importance in a study of the avant-texte in Proust’s corpus. Finally, a further important shift in critical thought meant that the avant-texte itself came to be viewed as an autonomous work by critics, a view which seemed to be strengthened by the publication of many avant-textes in recent years. Raymonde Debray-Genette, for example, describes this trend as follows: si l’on a pensé jusqu’ici la génétique en termes d’évolution, le plus souvent même en termes de progrès, il semble qu’il faudrait incliner à la penser en termes de différence, lui accorder un fonctionnement plus autonome, lui accorder sa propre poétique. (19)

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Thus the avant-texte appears as an important public texte in its own right, and even threatens to invade the literary space of the texte. In 1971, Ponge, for example, published the avant-texte of his own poem Le pré (poem of 1964), together with the poem itself in La Fabrique du pré. As Grésillon and Lebrave express it, “Ponge [ ... ] annule la frontière entre avant-texte et texte en publiant à côté le texte et son brouillon” (9).6 Thus when is a work a texte and when is it an avant-texte? There appear to be no very clear-cut distinctions between them. Not only are the frontiers continually changing, even the question of their literary hierarchy can be called into question. The finished texte can be said to mark out what is finally excluded as avant-texte (Bellemin-Noël 1977:6). Equally it can be stated that it is the avant-texte which has, by a process of evolution, given rise to the texte. Once we move away from the isolated, structuralist notion of texte, the borders between texte and avant-texte become less clearly defined: Sorti de sa clôture et de sa fixité, de son unicité et de la nécessité du ne varietur, le texte s’ouvrait sur l’ensemble mouvant et fragile des « avant-textes », sur la multiplicité des états possibles in statu nascendi. (Grésillon 1990:18) The problem of the boundaries between texte and avant-texte is particularly pertinent in Proust’s case, and a wider definition of the term avant-texte (and also of the term texte) would seem to be called for. As mentioned above, rather than drawing up detailed scénarios or plans (as in the case of Flaubert), Proust used mainly brouillons, many of which were very close to the “final” texte (Schmid 1998:xv and 44). In addition, the canonical work, À la recherche, was not finished when he died. There are also difficulties in establishing boundaries due to the particular temperament and health problems of the writer (one wonders whether he would ever have finally completed his opus), the method he used in writing, and also the nature of À la recherche—a modern work which has the potential to expand infinitely on an internal level. As Jean-Yves Tadié expresses it, “seule la mort l’a empêché de tout refaire, de tout métamorphoser—de ce qui n’était pas encore publié” (1986:84).7 Proust, who preserved a large quantity of the manuscripts of both his finished and unfinished works, was very aware of the importance the avanttexte might come to assume in the eyes of critics and he was wary of misinterpretations. In his correspondence Proust, alluding to his manuscripts, voices this concern: “Or la pensée ne m’est pas très agréable que n’importe qui (si l’on se soucie encore de mes livres) sera admis à

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compulser mes manuscrits, à les comparer au texte définitif, à en induire des suppositions qui seront toujours fausses sur la manière de travailler, sur l’évolution de ma pensée [ ... ].”8 It can be argued that such misunderstandings have indeed taken place concerning the status of Proust’s early works, and that the term avant-texte has been given too narrow a definition in regard to the works, and in particular Jean Santeuil, which preceded À la recherche. Proust’s work as a whole is commonly divided by the critics into the early works, Contre Sainte-Beuve, which is situated at the mid point and is seen as a turning point in the work as a whole, and the final, public texte, À la recherche du temps perdu. The early works include various articles, Les plaisirs et les jours (1896, 1924), and Jean Santeuil. Les plaisirs et les jours is usually dismissed as a dilettante work, whereas Jean Santeuil, though unfinished, is generally accepted as a texte, but one which is of little importance in comparison with À la recherche, and even Contre Sainte-Beuve, an unfinished work also seen as a public texte. Considering first of all the three major works as textes, Jean Santeuil has twice been published as a novel (1952, 1971b), and Contre Sainte-Beuve has been published twice as a work in its own right, with a different emphasis between the narrative and critical strands in each edition (1954, 1971a). For any reader who has no knowledge of the background to the publication of À la recherche, the work might be seen as a finished texte, with some obvious errata and omissions. Given this situation, is it possible to challenge the status of Jean Santeuil, Contre Sainte-Beuve and even À la recherche as textes? Is it also possible to class both earlier unfinished works, Jean Santeuil and Contre-Sainte-Beuve, as avant-textes for the “unfinished” À la recherche? Looking at the claims of À la recherche to be a canonical work, the most compelling argument for considering the published novel as a texte is the fact that Proust himself intended to publish this last work, and publication was already well advanced when he died in 1922. As Louis Hay expresses it, “[la décision de l’auteur] tranche le cordon ombilical de la genèse et fait basculer l’avant-texte dans le texte” (154). Thus the large amount of avant-texte which existed for the volumes published during Proust’s lifetime was excluded from the final texte, so creating the boundaries between texte and avant-texte. However, the imprimatur had not been given to the last volumes of À la recherche, from La prisonnière to Le temps retrouvé, when Proust died. Thus, although Proust’s intention to publish the final volumes of À la recherche was clear, the later volumes contained much material about which Proust had not always made a clear decision regarding publication, and much work was left for the editors before the texte could be presented to the public. Given the

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personality of the writer and the modernist cultural climate, Proust might indeed have continued to expand his novel. The final sentence of Le temps retrouvé, as Tadié has pointed out, was reworked several times and the word “fin” appears in an earlier version, before the fourth and final version of the sentence, so that it does not appear, physically, at the end of the manuscript (1986:84). As Gérard Genette expresses it, “[j]amais [Proust] n’aura connu l’authentique achèvement de cette œuvre, qu’il crut achevée en 1913, qui ne l’était plus en 1914, qui ne l’était pas encore en 1922, et qui ne le sera jamais” (9). On the other hand, a certain degree of incompletion does not mean that a work must be rejected as a texte. As Ton-That has pointed out, an important element in examining incompletion in a work is the level on which it is found—internal or external. However, the status of À la recherche as a texte can also be challenged on the level of the amount of intervention of the editors. The NRF completed publication of the posthumous works, having taken over responsibility for the whole work in 1919, when they published À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. The first editors, with the help of Proust’s brother, simply acted as intermediaries in an attempt to be true to Proust’s intentions. Pierre Clarac and André Ferré, in the Pléiade edition of 1954 (3 vols.), and later Jean-Yves Tadié, in the Pléiade edition published between 1987 and 1989, used the NRF edition for the work published during Proust’s lifetime. However they differed in the text they presented for the unfinished volumes. Tadié points out that all the latest corrections were not available to the editors in 1954: “Nous avons pu améliorer le texte posthume, en rétablissant des corrections voulues par Proust, en insérant des passages laissés en notes par nos prédécesseurs [ ... ]” (Proust 1987:I:clxxii). Speaking of Tadié’s edition, Marion Schmid has remarked that “most critics agree that the new Pléiade provides the most authoritative text of À la recherche du temps perdu to date” (1995:56). The published texte had thus on the whole been considerably improved at the internal level. Thus on the level of the near completion of the external structure (and to a lesser extent the internal structure), as well as the work’s acceptance by the public, there is considerable justification for calling À la recherche a texte. The overall shape and thrust of the novel had been clear from the first drafts and facilitated the editor’s work. As Proust himself explained, “[l]e dernier chapitre du dernier volume a été écrit tout de suite après le premier chapitre du premier volume. Tout l’ « entre-deux » a été écrit ensuite.”9 The strength and clarity of the novel’s external structure was largely in place when Proust died. As concerns the internal structure, in relation particularly to the unfinished volumes, the amount of material Proust might finally have

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included and any further additions he might have made cannot be known. The method of his writing, as described by Bernard Brun, shows a “stellar approach” (“écriture en étoile” [5]). This was reproduced in the structure of the novel so that any set of units or echoes could be added to in order to produce further links and echoes. The absence through incompletion of several links in the narrative, or some slight confusion regarding names and characters, is of little importance given the novel’s overall richness and coherence. As Bellemin-Noël expresses it, “[le texte] nous est offert comme un tout fixé dans son destin” (1979:116). Finally, the idea of the acceptance of a texte by the reader and the public is particularly helpful when considering À la recherche. Though at first it was misunderstood, even by the well-known publishing house NRF, the novel was finally published, and both the finished and unfinished volumes were accepted by the reading public. (Du côté de chez Swann was published by Grasset in 1913 and the NRF finally agreed to publish all of Proust’s novel to date in 1919. À la recherche was also awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1919.) At the literary and cultural level the special qualities of this modernist novel, which itself embraced incompleteness, were thus recognised by the editors and the reading public. The case of Contre Sainte-Beuve is more complex. Though Proust had intended to have the work published, he seemed unable to decide between writing a more formal essay of literary criticism and presenting his ideas in the form of a narrative piece, woven around the ideas of the literary critic, Sainte-Beuve, and it remained an unfinished project in Proust’s lifetime (Schmid 1998: Part II, chapter 2). Proust shows his hesitation over form in a letter to a friend, Madame de Noailles, in 1908: La première [étude] est l’essai classique, l’Essai de Taine en mille fois moins bien [ ... ]. La deuxième commence par un récit du matin, du réveil. Maman vient me voir près de mon lit, je lui dis que j’ai l’idée d’une étude sur Sainte-Beuve, je la lui soumets et la lui développe. (1981:321, no. 171). Proust did not resolve this problem for Contre Sainte-Beuve; he effectively abandoned the work, and both unfinished versions were left in manuscript form. Despite its unfinished state, Contre Sainte-Beuve was finally published in 1954 with a preface by Bernard de Fallois, and also in 1971, by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre. The editors of these editions played a much bigger role in presenting the unfinished material than did the editors of À la recherche. Bernard de Fallois, for example, even assigned a title to the work and to the

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different sections of it, and where there were several versions of a passage, he selected one for publication (Proust 1954:27). He also brought together, in his edition, the parts of Contre Sainte-Beuve which existed in the form of an essay, and those which had the form of a narrative. In the 1971 edition, Pierre Clarac retained both the title and the general arrangement of the fragments of text of the first edition. However, Clarac and Sandre focus on the manuscripts relating to the critic Sainte-Beuve, omitting the narrative elements of the manuscripts (Proust 1971a:829). However, the status of Contre Sainte-Beuve as texte might be challenged in relation to both editions. It can be argued that the work, in its original state, especially at the external level (the arrangement of the nucleus of the principal ideas), was not sufficiently advanced to categorise Contre SainteBeuve as a texte. In addition, the question of the form the work was to take had not been resolved. De Fallois, in his introduction to the texte, himself concludes that “Contre Sainte-Beuve au fond n’est pas un livre: c’est le rêve d’un livre, c’est une idée de livre” (Proust 1954:28). Tadié argues against both editions, seeing the first as being representative of Proust’s aims, but too selective, while the second presents only the argument against Saint-Beuve’s method of criticism and neglects the narrative elements of the work. In Tadié’s view it was Proust’s attempt to bring together such an abundance of material, while at the same time attempting to reconcile two very different stylistic approaches, which led him to abandon his original idea. Forme and fond were seemingly irreconcilable, with the result that “[c]e livre inachevé explosait sous l’effet des tensions internes” (1986:79). However, rather than setting all the material aside, Proust began to develop the narrative side of Contre Sainte-Beuve and parts of it reappear, often somewhat changed, in different episodes and parts of À la recherche. Maurice Bardèche describes the turning point as follows: “[Proust a essayé] d’illustrer en quelque sorte la théorie qu’il professait en en montrant des applications. Mais en montrant ces applications, c’était son roman que Proust écrivait sans le savoir très clairement peut-être” (168). De Fallois cites six episodes found among the feuillets intended for Contre Sainte-Beuve which reappear in À la recherche: “la description de Venise, le séjour à Balbec, la rencontre des jeunes filles, le coucher de Combray, la poésie des noms et les deux « côtés »” (Proust 1954:11). Thus Contre Sainte-Beuve assumes a rather schizophrenic existence. Parts of the work, presented in two very different editions, were published and given textual status, and parts of it have been claimed as avant-texte for À la recherche (Tadié 1983:19). However, it can be argued that these “textes”

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should have been published as avant-textes both because Proust did not intend them to be published as textes and because they remained incomplete on both the internal and the external level. Finally, and somewhat paradoxically, Contre Sainte-Beuve can also be considered to have been finished, rather than abandoned, because it becomes the novel À la recherche (Tadié 1986:83). What then of the status of the early “novel” Jean Santeuil, begun in 1895 and abandoned in 1900? Both the number of years that separate the writing of Jean Santeuil from that of À la recherche, and the very different reading experience they provide, mean that, to date, little work has been done on establishing links between À la recherche and Jean Santeuil, though there has been a lot of discussion concerning the links between Proust’s final novel and Contre Sainte-Beuve.10 Proust had intended to write a novel, but left the work unfinished and, more importantly, unpublished. It might therefore, as a private piece of writing and as an unfinished manuscript, appear to bear some of the important characteristics of an avant-texte. Tadié describes the original manuscript as “mille pages, réparties en chapitres inachevés, non classées, et finalement abandonnées par l’auteur” (1983:15). However, the manuscript was published posthumously in the guise of a novel, first by Bernard de Fallois in 1952, and then by Pierre Clarac in 1971. As in the case of Contre Sainte-Beuve, it was the first editor who gave the overall title of Jean Santeuil to the work, as well as subtitles to the many short sections in this confused mass of manuscripts. He also organised the work by reference to the finished novel À la recherche (Tadié 1983:123 and 139). Thus the canonical, finished work was, paradoxically, made to serve as an avanttexte to the earlier unfinished work. Clarac describes De Fallois’ approach as follows: Il a rassemblé ces pages détachées en chapitres suivis qu’il a groupés euxmêmes en dix parties. Pour donner à l’ouvrage ainsi agencé une cohésion apparente, il a dû procéder à des interversions et à des suppressions, amalgamer des développements distincts, modifier parfois les noms propres. (Proust 1971b:981) The 1971 edition is more faithful to the unfinished original, leading Clarac to express his reservations about the approach adopted as follows: “[ ... ] ce n’est pas sans scrupule que nous livrons au public une œuvre que son auteur a gardée pour luimême et n’a pas achevée” (Proust 1971b:986). There are numerous examples of unfinished sections and sentences and unfinished

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or missing words.11 Consequently, many of the different sections end abruptly and appear unfinished. In the section to which Clarac has given the title “[Le « parc » au petit jour]” not only is the last word incomplete, but the full meaning of the long sentence which attempts to express Jean’s impression of the effect of the weak sunlight in an overcast sky, both on himself and on his surroundings, is also unfinished: Il faisait lourd. Mais Jean avait beau se plaindre de ce temps: le long du chemin plutôt brillant qu’ensoleillé, dans les champs au bout desquels la présence du soleil se trahissait par un vague rayonnement [ ... ], et dans les iris pendant quelques instants éclairés de plus en plus jusqu’à étinceler, puis replongés dans l’ombre, il se sentait vivre à la fois dans cette journée et dans des journées pareilles d’autrefois; il avait le sentiment d.... (Proust 1971b:296-97)12 Titles have been suggested by the editor for the many sections and subsections of the novel to which Proust had not given a title or chapter heading. However, unlike the practice of the earlier edition, the titles invented by the editors are placed in square brackets, which once again highlights the incompletion of the text. For example the first “chapter,” as marked by Proust, becomes the prologue in the 1971 edition, and the unfinished introduction, consisting of no more than about twenty lines of text, is placed before the prologue (Tadié 1983:123). The first section is named “[Enfance et adolescence]” (1971b:202), with subsections such as: “[le baiser du soir]” (202), “[« Jean aimera la poésie »]” (211), “[le collège]” (230). The general rule used by Clarac in organising the material was a mixture of chronology and associated themes (Proust 1971b:982). However, some episodes do not have any clear point of insertion in the work, and these are presented in a separate section of “Fragments” at the end of the 1971 edition (880-98). Proust’s manuscript was not only incomplete, much of it had not been put in any order. As Clarac points out, “[d]ans la première phase de son travail Proust lui-même ignorait quelle place il assignerait aux diverses idées qui traversaient son esprit” (Proust 1971b:982, n. 2). More importantly, Proust reveals in his correspondence that, although he had written many pages of his first novel, it was not near completion because he had not discovered the overall “message” which he wished to convey. Thus in September 1896, in a letter to his mother, Proust wrote: “[ ... ] si je ne peux

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pas dire que j’aie encore travaillé à mon roman dans le sens d’être absorbé par lui, de le concevoir d’ensemble [ ... ], le Cahier que j’ai acheté et qui ne représente pas tout ce que j’ai fait, puisque avant je travaillais sur des feuilles volantes—ce cahier est fini et il a 110 pages grandes” (1976:124, no. 65). The result of the unfinished nature of the manuscripts and of the different editing styles is that the reader is presented with two rather different “textes” in the 1952 and 1971 editions. De Fallois and Clarac do not always agree on what material should be included or completed in their editions, or on the order and general mode of presentation of the material to be adopted. In the 1952 edition, the text is divided into both parts, which are numbered, and also into named chapters within the parts. There are in addition unnamed sections where a break in the text appears within a chapter. “Headings” or loose indications of the content of a part are given at the beginning of each new section of the text. Some of these headings are the same as the chapter titles. In Part I of the 1952 edition (61-131) the first four titles are “Les soirées de Saint-Germain,” “Les soirées de Dieppe,” “M. Sandré,” and “Marie Kossichef.” Three of these titles belong to a chapter but the exception, “M. Sandré,” belongs to a section within a chapter (probably in “Les soirées de Dieppe,” though M. Sandré is also mentioned in the chapter headed “Marie Kossichef”). The 1971 edition is divided into named parts and subsections (often in square brackets, showing that they are the work of the editor). There are no obvious divisions into chapters. The titles and content of these subsections do not always correspond with the divisions in the 1952 edition. However, the second part or section of the novel (concerning the Santeuil family’s stay with relations in the country), begins in the same way in both editions: “Quelquefois à Pâques, quand M, Santeuil n’avait pas trop à faire [ ... ]” (1952:135, 1971b:277). The first chapter of Part II of the 1952 edition is entitled “Étreuilles” and the second chapter is named “Journées de vacances” (135, 143). The material found in the first four divisions of the second part or section of the 1952 edition is given the titles “La maison d’Étreuilles,” “Lilas et pommiers,” “Les rues,” “Ernestine,” etc. (the titles being given at the beginning of the second section [133]). In the 1971 edition, the second section has the overall title of “[À Illiers]” and covers much of the same material as the earlier edition. The first five divisions or subsections, given in square brackets and thus added by the editor, are as follows: “[Arrivée],” “[Lilas et pommiers],” “[Lilas et aubépines],” “[Petite ville dévote],” and “[Ernestine]” (1971b:277, 278, 280, 281). However, the divisions into subsections within each part of the 1971 edition are much more numerous than in the 1952 edition; some sections only consist of half a page of material.

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Looking more closely at the placement of the material within the different sections, it is evident, as stated above, that the content and the order of the material, as well as the means of dividing it into chapters, parts and sections, differ in the two editions. An example of the different ordering of material in the two editions concerns the descriptions of the family gathering for lunch while staying at Étreuilles or Illiers, the changing position of the dining-room chairs before and during meals, and the description of the family’s leisurely digestion. In the 1952 edition, in Part II, chapter 2, entitled “Journées de vacances,” there is a reference to the fact that Jean often returns home for lunch to find the chairs already around the dining-room table (154). This is followed by a reference to the days when he spends much of the morning reading in front of the dining-room fire and the chairs, at this early hour, are still aligned against the wall (154). The description of the family enjoying a leisurely digestion follows this account without any obvious link (155-58). In the 1971 edition the order appears even less logical. The reference to the leisurely digestion comes immediately after the return of Jean and his grandfather from the park, just before the meal begins (Part II, “À Illiers,” section entitled “[Farniente après le repas]” [1971b:286-89), while the descriptions of the chairs, set either around the table, or against the wall in the dining-room, appear several sections later (in the section entitled “[Après le déjeuner”] [304-05]). Such differences in the text of the two editions of Jean Santeuil are largely due to the unfinished nature of the work which, as in the case of Contre Sainte-Beuve, was published posthumously, and which also owed much to the intervention of the different editors, who undertook to present the works in a readable form. However, it is questionable whether Proust’s intentions concerning this work were clear enough to warrant their publication as textes. More importantly, the texte lacks closure because Proust himself had not discovered any satisfactory overall plan for his novel. When Proust appears to abandon a project, as in the case of both Contre SainteBeuve and Jean Santeuil, it is not to begin something new, but to present the same nucleus of inspiration in a different way in an effort to translate his vision. Is it not therefore possible to argue that Proust later reworked the material of Jean Santeuil in À la recherche to the extent that it became an avant-texte of the canonical work? In fact Proust drew widely from the material of his first novel as he did from Contre Sainte-Beuve. Jean Santeuil reveals many echoes of À la recherche and could be said to pave the way for the later novel. As Clarac observes: Il n’y a pas à se demander pourquoi il a abandonné Jean Santeuil. Il ne l’a pas abandonné. Tous les thèmes qu’il portait en lui et

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autour desquels s’organisera son œuvre maîtresse y sont déjà posés, moins objectivement qu’ils ne le seront dans la Recherche, plus étroitement rattachés au détail et aux hasards de sa propre vie. C’est de Jean Santeuil (et non de Contre Sainte-Beuve !) que la Recherche est sortie [ ... ].” (Proust 1971b:983) Although Clarac might be said to be overstating the case here in seeing Jean Santeuil as a more important source for À la recherche than Contre SainteBeuve, many episodes and characters, as well as the method of their presentation, found in À la recherche, were prefigured in Jean Santeuil. Therefore, using the criteria discussed above, Jean Santeuil can be usefully analysed as an avant-texte for À la recherche. Looking first of all at the material of Jean Santeuil in comparison with that of À la recherche, it is evident that Proust reworked not only the characters and episodes of his early work, but also the themes.13 Thus many of the headings, which have been added by the editor to the different episodes in Jean Santeuil, find their echo in the résumé of the latest Pléiade edition of the novel (Proust 1987), although there are changes in both the names of the characters and of places. Many of the characters of À la recherche, particularly those found in “Combray,” were first introduced in Jean Santeuil. These include members of the child’s close family, such as his parents (the rather authoritarian, but unpredictably kind father, and the much-loved mother from whom the child can hardly bear to be separated, particularly at night), and the great-aunt (Madame Servan or Sureau in Jean Santeuil and tante Léonie in À la recherche).14 Many episodes and themes found in À la recherche are also prefigured in Jean Santeuil. Episodes which occur in both novels include the drame du coucher (sometimes referred to as “le baiser du soir”) and the description of wealthy arriviste social circles, such as the Cresmeyer family, which resembles, in its obsession with social prestige, the Verdurin clan in À la recherche. On the level of themes, many of the experiences in love described in À la recherche are prefigured in Jean Santeuil. These include the young hero’s visits to the Champs-Élysées, where he develops an obsession for a playmate (Marie Kossichef in Jean Santeuil and Gilberte Swann in À la recherche) who does not form part of his social circle. Thus both young heroes experience the way in which separation increases and even creates their feelings for the loved one. In terms of an artistic vocation, Marcel’s poetic sensibility is already apparent, to a limited extent, in Jean Santeuil as shown, for example, by the way in which Jean shares Marcel’s love for the hawthorns, particularly the pink variety (1971b:330-33). Although there are some allusions in Jean Santeuil to the

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hero’s desire to write, they are much less numerous and less emphasis is placed on them than in À la recherche (for example, 1971b:211-15). There are, of course, obvious differences between Jean Santeuil and À la recherche. In Jean Santeuil there is a much larger amount of biographical detail. There is also greater interaction between the hero and his family, including their often violent disagreements. In addition, in the early work we learn more of the hero’s days at the lycée, including Jean’s experiences in M. Beulier’s “classe de philosophie,” while there are few references to Marcel’s schooldays in À la recherche. Memory, one of the cornerstones of À la recherche, is treated only briefly in Jean Santeuil (for example, 1971b:247-48 and 897-98 in the “Fragments divers”), as are the generalisations, in the form of maxims, which are a more important part of À la recherche. An example in the earlier novel would be the comment on the lack of harmony in the feelings which people experience towards each other at different times: “Hélas! les heures n’apportent pas à chacun les mêmes pensées” (1971b:412). There are also some similarities and differences in the two novels on the level of technique. The early novel was a product of Proust’s youth when he was still searching for his material and, more importantly, for a means of expressing it. The structure of the early novel follows, to some extent, the chronological order of Jean’s life. In À la recherche, on the other hand, Marcel’s love of literature and his slow discovery of his artistic vocation are a more important part of the basic structure of the novel. One of Proust’s greatest difficulties in Jean Santeuil was to transform the particular experiences of life into the more widely familiar and useful material of fiction. In the quotation placed by the editors just before the opening of Jean Santeuil, Proust points out his difficulties over form: “Puis-je appeler ce livre un roman? C’est moins peut-être et bien plus, l’essence même de ma vie recueillie sans y rien mêler, dans ces heures de déchirure où elle découle. Ce livre n’a jamais été fait, il a été récolté.”15 Jean Santeuil is written in the third person, rather than the first person found in À la recherche. This point of view appears to distance the reader from the experiences of Jean, the central character. The preface (originally chapter one of the work) has a similar aim. In addition, some of the episodes are grouped, as in À la recherche, by association, in a stellar structure (cf. Brun). The many abrupt endings to the different sections can be seen as pointing to a structure designed by means of association. Tadié even suggests that this technique was not simply a manner of working, but points to an integral part of Proust’s style (1986:76). Such techniques are characteristic of a modernist work such as À la recherche. It is therefore possible to state that Jean Santeuil fulfils a very important criterion of an avant-texte—that of being part of the developmental process

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(“système,” to use Bellemin-Noël’s term) which gave rise to À la recherche. Not only are there similarities and differences between the two works on the level of both content and technique, but the differences can be seen as part of an overall development which made the later novel possible. In conclusion, therefore, the status of Proust’s major works, both as textes and as avant-textes, can be challenged. Both Jean Santeuil and Contre Sainte-Beuve have been published and largely accepted as textes, though this status, given their state of incompletion on the external as well as the internal level, is questionable. Both works were left mainly in the form of notes and brouillons by Proust, who did not intend to publish them. Their appearance as finished textes is mainly the work of editors. On the other hand, À la recherche can be accepted as a texte because it shows completion on the external, if not the internal level, and was intended for publication by Proust. The fact that Proust incorporated large parts of Contre Sainte-Beuve into À la recherche means that Contre Sainte-Beuve has quite rightly been considered as an avant-texte. Contre Sainte-Beuve was not completed or published mainly because Proust failed to find a suitable form for his material. He had experimented with both a narrative form and a dialogue, but continued to pose the question: “Faut-il faire un roman, une étude philosophique? Suis-je romancier?” (Carnet I, fol. 2, quoted by Bardèche 171). Given these circumstances, the important links between Jean Santeuil and À la recherche have been neglected for too long. Proust constantly drew on this earlier material on the level of both fond and forme. In Jean Santeuil it can be argued that Proust experimented with different forms, as in the pastiches, but failed to develop a suitable technique for presenting his ideas. At the same time he was impelled to move in yet another direction, to depart from the familiar chronological and causal structure of nineteenth-century realist fiction, and experiment with a more modern stellar structure in which groups of episodes develop out of one another by association. The fact that the experience of reading Jean Santeuil and Contre Sainte-Beuve is so different from that of reading À la recherche can be explained by the fact that, though Proust often worked and reworked the same material, his use of the material in terms of his style and vision changed quite radically. In Proust’s work the term avant-texte has thus a wider definition than is commonly the case. It includes not only the carnets, the cahiers and separate sheets of brouillons, but also an unfinished earlier work, Contre Sainte-Beuve, which evolved into the later novel before its own form had been finally established. More importantly, the avant-texte must include the early unfinished novel, Jean Santeuil, whose contribution, both in terms of content and the working out of a final form for À la recherche, is too often overlooked.

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À la recherche du temps perdu, which grew out of this material, is a narrative work underpinned by Proust’s theory of art. It is a work which broke away from the the realist Jean Santeuil, whose subject concerns the process of writing. The more didactic Contre Sainte-Beuve, which, in manuscript form, is both a discussion about Proust’s ideas on art and a narrative, can be seen as a crossroads. À la recherche is a modernist work which demonstrates its own æsthetic, rather than simply stating it as in Contre Sainte-Beuve. Bardèche’s description of the role of the different avanttextes for À la recherche can be applied both to Contre Sainte-Beuve and to Jean Santeuil: Était-il vraiment indifférent d’apprendre, en étudiant ces manuscrits, que Proust avait écrit la Recherche du temps perdu pendant toute sa vie [ ... ], et fallait-il négliger la constatation qu’on pouvait faire alors, que Proust avait construit son œuvre avec une certaine quantité d’éléments préfabriqués dont un grand nombre étaient déjà « fondus » et prêts dès les années de jeunesse de l’écrivain, qu’il essaya ensuite de combiner et de « monter » selon différentes formules et dont l’assemblage ne donna finalement un chef-d’œuvre que lorsque Proust eut découvert le « rythme » selon lequel ils allaient pouvoir s’ordonner? (12-13) Closer inspection also shows that the whole corpus of Proust’s work, and especially Jean Santeuil and Contre Sainte-Beuve, is a continual reworking of one novel, which itself barely emerges in canonical form from the mass of avant-textes. As Ton-That expresses it, “[ ... ] toute l’œuvre de Proust pourrait être placée sous le signe de l’inachèvement” (26). Contre Sainte-Beuve is a work of criticism which is turned in upon itself. It becomes self-reflexive; it contains the germ of explicit auto-criticism, which enables Proust to move on to the final phase in his writing. Both Contre Sainte-Beuve and also the early “novel,” Jean Santeuil, were instrumental in fashioning the final work, both by what they contributed, in reworked form, and by what they withheld, so that new routes could be pursued. This led to the emergence of a modern novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, part of which remained unfinished at the internal, but not at the external level, and which is itself a texte, characterised by its potential for the endless reworking of its boundaries.

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NOTES 1. In this discussion, a looser, working definition of a texte will be used as a starting point—that of the completed or nearly completed work which, if not published, was at least intended for publication by the author. 2. The first edition of Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, consisting of 100 poems and five sections, appeared in 1857. The second edition of 1861 contained 126 poems in all, and six divisions, including a new section, “Tableaux parisiens.” However, several poems from the first edition, censored by the courts, were omitted. They have, however, been included in some posthumous editions. 3. Petit in Les manuscrits, quoted by Hay 147. 4. Ton-That looks at different levels of incompletion in Proust’s first novel, Jean Santeuil, including whether the incompletion is internal or external. 5. Preface to his first Éducation sentimentale of 1845 (see Flaubert 19). 6. Grésillon refers here to the study by Anis. Proust also allowed publication of a page of his original manuscript in a volume of his work published as a special edition; he refers to it in a letter (1981:295). 7. However Proust, in a letter to Paul Souday in 1919, stated firmly that he would finish his work: “Je veux tout de même [ ... ] vous donner l’assurance qu’il n’y a pas besoin de ma mort, comme voulait bien le dire un critique, pour que je cesse d’écrire À la recherche du temps perdu” (1981:536). 8. Letter (1922) to M. and Mme Schiff (1993:372–73, no. 259). 9. Letter (1919) to Paul Souday (Proust 1981:536). 10. Many such studies have appeared in the Cahiers Marcel Proust and the Bulletin d’informations proustiennes. See also Clarac. 11. Proust had however numbered some parts of the work, including chapter 1, inserted as a prologue in the Pléiade edition. The page sequence, numbered by Proust in the manuscript, starts at page 1 and finishes at page 105 (numbered pp. 20–87 in the manuscript), or pp. 202–242 in Clarac’s edition. See Clarac in Proust 1971b:990. 12. For other examples, see the end of the section entitled “[Matinée au jardin]” (Proust 1971b:300). The sentence could be considered finished, but not the idea which is only broached. On p. 245, at the end of the section entitled “[M. Sandré],” the sentence is barely begun before it is broken off. 13. See other exemples in greater detail in Marc-Lipiansky 227–39. 14. See Ramsden on the evolution of the character of the great-aunt (Mme Servan or tante Léonie) from Jean Santeuil to À la recherche. 15. This fragment is used as a prefatory note in the printed texte in the 1952 and in the 1971 editions (1971 b:181), though a longer version is used in the latter.

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WORKS CITED Anis, J. “Préparatifs d’un texte : La fabrique du pré de F. Ponge.” Langages 69 (March 1983):73–83. Bardèche, Maurice. Marcel Proust romancier. Paris: Les Sept Couleurs, 1971. Bellemin-Noël, Jean. 1972 Le texte et l’avant-texte : les brouillons d’un poème de Milosz. Paris: Larousse. ——. 1977. “Reproduire le manuscrit, présenter les brouillons, établir un avanttexte.” Littérature 28:3–18. ——. 1979. “Lecture psychanalytique d’un brouillon de poème : « Été » de Valéry.” Essais de critique génétique. Paris: Flammarion. 103–49. Brun, Bernard. “Avant-propos.” Bulletin d’informations proustiennes 21 (1990):3–5. Clarac, Pierre. “La place du Contre Sainte-Beuve dans l’œuvre de Marcel Proust.” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 5–6 (1971):804–14. Debray-Genette, Raymonde. Métamorphoses du récit : autour de Flaubert. Paris: Seuil, 1988. Flaubert, Gustave. L’éducation sentimentale. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1980. Genette, Gérard. “La question de l’écriture.” Recherche de Proust. Paris: Seuil, 1980. 7–12. Grésillon, Almuth. 1990. Proust à la lettre: les intermittences de l’écriture. Charente: Du Lérot. ——. 1994. Éléments de critique génétique: lire les documents modernes. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Grésillon, Almuth, and Jean-Louis Lebrave. “Avant-propos.” Langages 69 (March 1983):5–10. Hay, Louis. “« Le texte n’existe pas » : réflexions sur la critique génétique.” Poétique 16 (1985):147–58. Lebrave, Jean-Louis. “Lecture et analyses des brouillons.” Langages 69 (March 1983):11–23. Levaillant, Jean, ed. Introduction. Écriture et génétique textuelle. Lille: Presses universitaires de Lille, 1982). 11–24. Les manuscrits : transcription, éditions, signification. Colloque. Paris: CNRS-ENS, 1975. Marc-Lipiansky, Mireille. La naissance du monde proustien dans Jean Santeuil. Paris: Nizet, 1974. Melançon, Robert. “Le statut de l’œuvre : sur une limite de la génétique.” Études françaises 28 (Autumn 1992):49–65. Proust, Marcel. 1896. Les plaisirs et les jours. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. ——. 1924. Les plaisirs et les jours. Paris: Gallimard. ——. 1952. Jean Santeuil. Pref. Bernard de Fallois. Paris: Gallimard. ——. 1954. Contre Sainte-Beuve. Ed. Bernard de Fallois. Paris: Gallimard. ——. 1971a. Contre Sainte-Beuve. Eds. Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard. ——. 1971b. Jean Santeuil. Eds. Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard. ——. 1976. Correspondance. Ed. Philip Kolb. Vol. II. Paris: Plon. ——. 1981. Correspondance. Ed. Philip Kolb. Vol. VIII. Paris: Plon.

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——. 1987. À la recherche du temps perdu. Ed. Jean-Yves Tadié. 4 vols. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1987–89. ——. 1990. Correspondance. Ed. Philip Kolb. Vol. XVIII. Paris: Plon. ——. 1993. Correspondance. Ed. Philip Kolb. Vol. XXI. Paris: Plon. Ramsden, Maureen A. “Un autre Marcel ? Analyse structurelle et génétique du rôle de la tante Léonie dans « Combray ».” Bulletin d’informations proustiennes (forthcoming). Schmid, Marion. 1995. “Teleology and Textual Misrepresentation: The New Pléiade Proust.” French Studies Bulletin (Autumn):15–17. ——. 1998. Processes of Literary Creation: Flaubert and Proust. Oxford: Legenda. Tadié, Jean-Yves. 1983. Proust. Paris: Belfond. ——. 1986. “Proust et l’inachèvement.” Le manuscrit inachevé : écriture, création, communication. Paris: CNRS. Ton-That, Thanh-Vân. “L’inachèvement dans Jean Santeuil.” Bulletin d’informations proustiennes 25 (1994):17–26.

G A B R I E L L E S TA R R

Ethics, Meaning, and the Work of Beauty

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iterary study may currently appear to be invested in a reexamination and revaluation of the aesthetic.1 The reasons for such a renewed interest in beauty and its kin equally may seem obvious from some perspectives. One narrative posits that aesthetics is the late-twentieth-century answer to ideology, a can’t-we-all-get-along response to the perceived fracturing of the academy brought about by ideological and critical conflict. Such an approach, though satisfying in the way of all neat reductions, is only about as accurate as one might expect; it is, like many a Victorian heroine, no better than it should be. In some cases, this explanation may be correct, but a turn to aesthetics can be differently explained and holds different value for critics who recall the powerful role aesthetics plays in Enlightenment philosophy, a legacy whose revision was at the heart of the critical theory of Jauss, Lyotard, Foucault, and their followers. The response in the 1990s to the barely accessible complexities of such theory has been, at its best, to resituate literary criticism, to integrate theoretical acuity within accessible writing about art and culture. In the drive to bring theory and practice closer together, the aesthetic, as a theory of the relationships between readers and texts, raises compelling interest. Hand in hand in recent years with a turn to history, the discontinuities and processes through which texts and meaning are made, we find a turn to beauty, a mode of sensibility through which texts

From Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (Spring 2002). © 2002 by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

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enter into and change the worlds of the people who read them. But the return to the aesthetic, like the return to history, raises significant questions about how literary studies as a discipline is constituted, and at the core of the conflicts surrounding turns to aesthetics—both in the eighteenth century and at the start of the twenty-first—are problems of labor and meaning. Recent work by critics like Elaine Scarry has made bold and intelligent statements about the potential of the aesthetic, but in turning to aesthetic theory, many contemporary critics tend to reenact the melding of categories at the heart of the emergence of eighteenth-century British aesthetics: aesthetic experience and aesthetic inquiry are compressed and frequently conflated, and aesthetic inquiry is, in turn, all but replaced by ethics or hermeneutics. This pattern is in part the result of giving precedence to the Shaftesburian tradition of aesthetic theory. As Ronald Paulson points out, most literary study of the aesthetic proceeds from Shaftesburian assumptions and suppresses or ignores the serious challenges offered to this strain within the eighteenth century by “less respectable” thinkers like Hogarth.2 This essay sketches a pattern common to ethical and hermeneutic approaches to the aesthetic both then and now, examining the reasons aesthetics tends to become an appealing object of contemporary theory-as-hermeneutics and a de facto domain within the larger field of ethics. In opposition to this tradition, I bring together works by Hogarth, Swift, and Proust—an unlikely grouping, perhaps—in order to explore what happens when the temptations of hermeneutic and ethical approaches to the aesthetic are held, even briefly, at bay. The pressing questions are those of discipline. First, if aesthetics matters, what does aesthetic inquiry produce that no other form of questioning can? And second, what role might both the question and its answers play in current reformulations of literary study? The merging of aesthetic inquiry with ethics or hermeneutics has its most explicit statement in the eighteenth century and is reinforced by latetwentieth-century critique. Major texts in the early years of British and continental aesthetics tend to emerge as answers to problems that on the surface do not concern the aesthetic at all. The theories of aesthetics promoted early in the century by Shaftesbury or Hutcheson are, in large part, a response to the perceived moral crudity and inadequacy of Hobbesian philosophy. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) undertakes to resolve the foundations of both public and private virtue as a rebuttal of “licentious systems” like Mandeville’s utilitarian approach to vice (and simultaneously provides the framework by which a capitalist economy can be made a civil one). Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) steps in to resolve the apparent conflict between the first and second Critiques and to reconcile or unite

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freedom and necessity.3 It is thus that Enlightenment aesthetics becomes tempting fruit: to quote Terry Eagleton, the aesthetic often seems ready or able to “intervene,” to function “as a dream of reconciliation,” but its peculiarities also make it seem an answer to scholarly dreams of interpretation.4 The apparent position of aesthetics as a cultural and intellectual in between—mediating questions of cognition, gender, economics, class, national identity, even ethics—means it seems the perfect, if overdetermined, subject for critical dissection. For twentieth-century critics like Derrida, De Man, or Eagleton, Enlightenment aesthetics is accordingly the object of a landmark hermeneutic enterprise. For De Man, aesthetics holds within itself a fracture “fatal” to the culturally enforced unity of philosophy and ideology. Derrida finds aesthetics at the heart of what he reads as the fundamental Enlightenment antipathy to insuperable difference. Eagleton argues that aesthetics provides a key support for the precarious stability of the bourgeois liberal subject.5 For these theorists, aesthetics does a lot of work, holding up precariously balanced philosophical projects and offering a way to challenge their integrity. Whatever aesthetics may be, its critical capital comes from the way it performs in larger systems. Aesthetics in this sense is a discipline par excellence, mediating larger cultural practices and concepts to shape knowledge so that it is eminently serviceable. Aesthetic theory then becomes a critique of this disciplinary role. Such an understanding of aesthetics makes a great deal of sense: the ease with which the aesthetic slips into other disciplinary modes seems one of its fundamental characteristics in the Shaftesburian vein of the tradition. When Shaftesbury turns to beauty, it is a turn to the social, the fruit of a care for the relationships between judging subjects.6 A judgment of beauty is the considered product of societal commitments, the actions and claims of a conversational circle of educated men and women. Aesthetic judgments signify the productive commerce of social beings; they take on meaning through their implications of community and can be made to build it. This is the essence of the Whiggish common sense Shaftesbury places at the basis of taste. Common sense signifies a “sense of public weal, and of the common interest; love of the community or society, natural affection, humanity, obligingness, or that sort of civility which rises from a just sense of the common rights of mankind, and the natural equality there is among those of the same species.”7 Shaftesbury’s grounding of beauty, even in “sense,” requires social support. What is intriguing here is an oft-noted characteristic of Shaftesbury’s thought: the relative indeterminacy of the borders of the philosophical or disciplinary areas surrounding taste (ethics in particular).

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It would not be amiss to wonder, given Shaftesbury’s arguments, whether for him there really could be any such thing as aesthetics at all. There is of course nothing in British philosophy called “aesthetics” (prior to Alexander Baumgarten’s 1750 treatise) in the same way that there is “ethics” or “metaphysics,” but noting neither the absence of a name nor the absence of a classical model gets at the heart of the peculiarity of aesthetics as it comes into being. It is also insufficient, though certainly correct, to note that Shaftesbury tended to combine disciplinary modes throughout his writing. The problem is at bottom one of ground: on what basis might one stake a claim to aesthetics, to its importance, disciplinary integrity, and coherence? This is not a Kantian question about the (supposed) autonomy of aesthetic objects, nor is it simply the more familiar Shaftesburian question about the status of an aesthetic judgment (as disinterested and, hence, independent). My concern here is rather the constitutive boundaries of the aesthetic as a mode of inquiry; it is also eventually, though not isomorphically, about the constitutive shape of aesthetic experience. If aesthetics is merely the lesser sibling of ethics, does it require its own tools, terms, or inquiry at all? Could we not merely be satisfied with its ontological and disciplinary superiors? And finally, as I stated the question above, the problem of aesthetics as discipline or branch of knowledge is this: what does aesthetic inquiry provide that ethical, political, historical, or hermeneutic inquiries do not? The recognized necessity of finding an aesthetic “ground”—sometimes as a basis for taste, sometimes as a basis for pleasure, sometimes as ontological principle—is apparent in almost every significant essay on the subject in the period. There are, in general, two methods of approaching the issue. First, as with much neoclassical literary criticism, there is the possibility that aesthetics, understood as a science of art, is rulebound. In cases such as this, aesthetics is less a philosophical discipline than a practicum for artists and viewers, and any need for grounding is satisfied by providing rules of creation or criticism.8 Aesthetics is grounded in natural law, and aesthetic judgments are justified by that law. In more theoretical treatises, the rules of art as juridical ground usually appear subordinate to the implications of taste as a cross-disciplinary principle, as in Hutcheson’s Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725). While Hutcheson does not equate the moral sense and the sense of beauty, he gives them the same ground, arguing that our internal perception of ideas and objects allows us to find beauty in actions (and hence in virtue) as well as in objects of sight or hearing: “The Author of Nature has much better furnish’d us for a virtuous Conduct, than our Moralists seem to imagine ... : He has made Virtue a lovely Form, to excite our pursuit of it; and has given us strong Affections to

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be the Springs of each virtuous Action.”9 Beauty in this formulation does not have a unique ground in the mind or the world; the perception of beauty is a specific result only of God’s interest in our motivations.10 While ethics may be closely related to aesthetics, God’s law of justice is spelled out with a clarity and precision that no aesthetic induction based on taste could ever match. The ground of aesthetic taste is analogic and relative to the ground of neighboring philosophical divisions. Even without an explicitly moralist standard of origin, early-eighteenthcentury theories of the aesthetic tend to make its ground relative and designate its primary field of jurisdiction as mediation between competing goods and values. This is true of Joseph Addison’s arguments in The Spectator; he links aesthetics and morality, but he grounds his discussion of beauty in faculty psychology.11 The imagination emerges as the faculty of perception most profoundly associated with the aesthetic. For Addison, the imagination is introspective, working through an inner eye, but it is also perceptual, oriented toward the outside world. As he puts it in The Spectator n. 411 (1712), “[T]he Pleasures of the Imagination ... arise from visible Objects, ... when we have them actually in our view” as well as “when we call up their Ideas into our Minds by Paintings, Statues, Descriptions, or any the like Occasion.”12 The pleasures of vision are pleasures of the imagination because they are not the result of qualities that inhere in objects but rather of things the mind does to our perceptions: producing the sensation of color from the perception of reflected light, for example. The imagination, even more than sight, is the faculty that has the potential to link our inner and outer worlds. Much like the sense of beauty, the Addisonian imagination is a mediating force, doing work that reconciles individual with community, inside with outside. However, the balance between the presumed privacy of any emotional or aesthetic experience and its communal properties is not an easy one—it must be elaborately theorized (by Shaftesbury or Smith) and carefully maintained, just as the balance between imagination as introspection and perception must be defended against the problems of the quixote and the solipsist (as in the cases of Charlotte Lennox or Samuel Johnson). Beauty, to take one aspect of aesthetic experience, must be saved for the ethical and communal because without due care, it seems to lead to private, unconsidered consumption. Unless beauty is absorbed into a discourse of use, discipline, and balance, it seems somehow incomplete—for critical purposes. To meet this problem, aesthetic experience is supposed by its theorists to work to create ethical community; by implication, aesthetic criticism seeks to make beauty produce some meaning that goes beyond itself. Aesthetic criticism disciplines beauty, assigning it duties of its own.

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Beauty is not enough in the early years of British aesthetics, and it remains so in recent aesthetic inquiries, even in those whose authors claim allegiance to beauty itself. One of the best of recent books on the subject, Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, seeks to defend beauty from antagonists who assert its ideological perversion or insufficiency. Scarry points out that latter-day critics of beauty tend to see the beautiful object as liable to ethical violation; in being wantonly seen and adored, it is objectified. From the other end, the judging subject is seduced without regard to the ethical demands of being in the world. In defending beauty against these attacks, Scarry and other critics like Emory Elliot and Isobel Armstrong follow the pattern of eighteenth-century critics before them, situating beauty in regard to community practices: for Scarry, justice and a foundational care for object and world (something like what Heidegger associates with Dasein); for Elliot, an inclusive literary practice and canon; for Armstrong, a radical, democratic aesthetic.13 Scarry does not equate beauty with justice (nor does she explicitly discuss Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hogarth, or many other theorists), but in a much more considerable move, argues that beauty prepares us for justice, providing training in features of ethical life that are indispensable to being and pursuing the just: “Through its beauty, the world continually recommits us to a rigorous standard of perceptual care.”14 Such perceptual care becomes the basis of a broadened and refined attention to justice: “Beauty seems to place requirements on us for attending to the aliveness ... of our world, and for entering into its protection.”15 This proposition, though attractive, is loose; the connection is temperamental, “voluntary,” tenuous, and nowhere near the clear call of necessity that generally belongs by right to ethical principles (although ethical necessity could be debated, too). There is potential for a category mistake here, and aesthetic experience and aesthetic inquiry may be collapsed. Beauty itself, I venture to uphold, teaches little about justice (history offers few examples to support a claim to such educative power); Scarry’s investigation of beauty, however, may be more productive. As Shaftesbury before her, Scarry holds that aesthetic inquiry and education step in to fill the gaps aesthetic experience appears to leave behind.16 The odd form of labor that Scarry posits—beauty’s work as preparation for justice—is not its only task. Scarry’s suture of beauty and justice goes side by side with her concern for the training and shaping of individuals responsive to the beautiful, eager participants in the imagined communities built around it. Beauty becomes the foundation of an academic community, too, one whose ethical standards are tied up in attitudes of care. In all of these cases, beauty is expected to be a workhorse of magnificent proportions, and

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it is to “work” in our discipline or in our lives by meaning something else. Aesthetic criticism here is both ethical and hermeneutic, interpreting beauty as object or experience and showing how it points to something else, to our capacities for justice or to our capacities to teach, learn, and read. What might the investigation of beauty offer on its own? Given the examples of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Smith, Scarry, Eagleton, De Man, or Derrida, it might appear that thinking the aesthetic all but requires its immediate translation into something else, whether it is ethics, ideology, or politics; aesthetics may well be uninteresting without such transformation. The problem begins with the fact that, as Armstrong puts it, aesthetics fundamentally involves affect, and for affect, “[W]e have no (or few) terms of analysis.”17 To think about what aesthetics “means”— usually a hermeneutic process—seems, perhaps tautologically, more “significant” than any other approach. The treatment of inquiry in the realm of aesthetics as interpretation of aesthetic relations is a tactical choice and as such has clear value even if, by translating aesthetics, it leaves the aesthetic behind. On the other hand, ethics trumps aesthetics, and this replacement may seem, also tautologically, “right.” If ethics is the supreme legislator of our existence as humans, there ought to be nothing wrong with ultimately referring the aesthetic to the ethical; but treating aesthetics as ethical inquiry fails to answer aesthetic questions—that is, if aesthetics makes sense at all. Hogarth believed it did, and his deferral of ethics and interpretation in favor of affect is probably one of the reasons that far fewer literature scholars pay serious attention to the Analysis of Beauty (1753) than to works more concerned with interpretation, works like Shaftesbury’s Characteristics (1711) or Burke’s Enquiry (1757).18 Against the assumptions of dominant strains of aesthetic inquiry, both then and now, Hogarth’s work is revolutionary. The strength of his contribution comes not only from his challenging the stance of disinterestedness fundamental to Shaftesbury’s aesthetics but also because he argues that the search for an ethical equivalent of beauty is the product of and leads to a misunderstanding: It is no wonder this subject [beauty] should have so long been thought inexplicable, since the nature of many parts of it cannot possibly come within the reach of mere men of letters; otherwise those ingenious gentlemen who have lately published treatises upon it ... would not so soon have been bewildered in their accounts of it, and obliged so suddenly to turn into the broad, and more beaten path of moral beauty; in order to extricate themselves out of the difficulties they seem to have met with in this.19

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Hogarth refuses the complicated and, for him, disingenuous stance of connoisseurship, a pretence toward knowledge that substitutes schema for experience. Hogarth will not displace the beautiful with anything else, especially with an ethics like Shaftesbury’s. Hogarth thinks and imagines in material terms—those of pleasure and of form. For him, form is not the suspiciously abstract entity contemporary scholars tend to associate with formalism; it is, at its best, always embodied, the material completion of a smokejack, a pineapple, or a woman (to use Hogarth’s examples). What is difficult about Hogarth, but centrally important, is that two things are in play. There is always a call to ethics in human life; this call (for some of us) insists that Hogarth’s pineapple, a line, and a woman are in no way equivalent, and that ignoring this inequality, even for a moment, is unacceptable. Yet, any automatic ethical condemnation of Hogarth’s ideals of beauty would be faulty because aesthetic relationships are not all-defining. Beauty is just one part of the complex web that ethical analysis works to resolve in any instance, and theorization of ethical standards based on an abstraction from aesthetic conduct ignores the contingency of the aesthetic and the boundedness of all emotional experience. Ethical condemnations of the aesthetic do it the disservice of granting it a legislative and definitive power it otherwise lacks. Beauty is smaller than that and is only one part of any encounter in the world. It would be foolish to argue that the beautiful, the sublime, or the ugly does not have ethical, social, or hermeneutic importance: Paulson’s critique of The Analysis reveals that with clarity. But what must be emphasized even more strongly is that neither ethics nor hermeneutics can answer aesthetic questions. The Analysis opens up the question of what happens if, even for a moment, the unique disciplinary potential of aesthetic experience is made central. Hogarth stops with what he considers irreducible—what he calls the serpentine line.20 If there is any significance to this line, any reason for its aesthetic value, it is its incitement to pursuit: It is a pleasing labour of the mind to solve the most difficult problems .... The eye hath this sort of enjoyment of winding walks, and serpentine rivers, and all sorts of objects, whose forms ... are composed principally of ... the waving and serpentine lines. Intricacy in form, therefore, I shall define to be that peculiarity in the lines, which compose it, that leads the eye a wanton kind of chace, and from the pleasure that gives the mind, intitles it to the name of beautiful. (33; italics original)

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Hogarth extends this criterion to the nonvisual from the start and puts the question of labor firmly onto the mind and not onto beauty itself. The mind’s desire to pursue challenges is the foundation of the pleasures of aesthetics. This has formal consequences, but coming from within (the mind) rather than from without (objects with definite form), it does not have a formal origin. The pleasure associated with a particular composition depends upon the mental response to visual or intellectual challenge; form itself is not legislative and is crafted in response only to a mental principle, the requirement that the mind be enticed to pursuit (or as Coleridge might say, drawn on by pleasure).21 The aesthetic is thus freed from dependence on its manifestation—problems can be as beautiful as waterfalls, and sensory perception does not rule the day. To return to the question I introduced earlier, the test that aesthetic inquiry must face is not how it violates, complicates, supports, or rewrites the ethical but what, if any, unique information aesthetic inquiry produces and what, if any, unique role aesthetics plays in human experience. Hogarth’s inquiry into aesthetics suggests that aesthetic experience involves a mental drive (something prefiguring perhaps Schiller’s play drive—a strain of investigation that has born excellent fruit in recent philosophical inquiry, most notably in the work of Kendall Walton). Hogarth argues that the unique role aesthetics plays is that it structures appetites (both physical and mental).22 An aesthetic structure of appetite is one that privileges pursuit over attainment.23 Aesthetics, then, is not grounded in objects or in perception but in the way individual subjects approach both ideas and things. Hogarth’s use of a mental principle to ground the aesthetic is suggestive, opening up broader possibilities for modeling aesthetic thought. Based on readings of the relationship between aesthetics and the imagination in Swift and Proust, I suggest it is possible to imagine other answers— literary answers—to the question of the possibilities of aesthetics. I here juxtapose eighteenth-and twentieth-century literary texts by making an appeal to eighteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetic theories that enact similar relations. The juxtaposition of Swift and Proust offers a literary dimension to the historical trace I pursue in aesthetic criticism. Scarry turns to Proust to support her claims about beauty, and in doing this, turns to a text that melds the two principal strains of early eighteenth-century approaches to the beautiful. Proust’s pursuit of memory is a pursuit of beauty that has passed away, a project deeply compatible with Hogarth’s The Analysis. However, while Proust celebrates the importance of pursuit in the experience of beauty, his work also participates in the Shaftesburian vein of aesthetic thought, valuing disinterest and connoisseurship. This double

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involvement is a useful reminder that theoretical oppositions are not always realized in their purity, and it offers a starting point for comparatist analysis. Scarry cites an excerpt from À la recherche du temps perdu to illustrate an attitude of care toward the beautiful, a desire to prolong contact with it, to keep it close and safe. For Scarry, the impulses to create art, to think in an aesthetic manner, and even to procreate, are born of a desire to make beauty eternal, to reproduce the beautiful both as something and as someone in the world, as in the opening of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence: “From fairest creatures we desire increase,/That thereby beauty’s rose might never die.” In her view, this is one of the basic reasons why beauty prepares us for justice. Proust’s ceaseless return to the beautiful valorizes care for both the fragility of aesthetic experience and the fragility of those of us who live it; human fragility is at the basis of Scarry’s ethics and Proust’s urgency. In the episode Scarry cites, Marcel sees a beautiful milkmaid on the train to Balbec: “Flushed with the glow of morning, her face was rosier than the sky. I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and happiness.”24 This woman is unlike any other Marcel has seen: So, completely unrelated to the models of beauty which I was wont to conjure up in my mind when I was by myself, this handsome girl gave me at once the taste for a certain happiness ... that would be realized by my staying and living there by her side .... Above her tall figure, the complexion of her face was so burnished and so glowing that it was as if one were seeing her through a lighted window .... I could not take my eyes from her face, which grew larger as she approached, like a sun which it was somehow possible to stare at and which was coming nearer and nearer, letting itself be seen at close quarters, dazzling you with its blaze of red and gold. She fastened on me her penetrating gaze, but doors were being closed and the train had begun to move. I saw her leave the station and go down the hill to her home; it was broad daylight now; I was speeding away from the dawn. (706–7; Pléiade 2: 17–18) Scarry draws some general hypotheses about experiences of beauty from this and similar passages. First, no two aesthetic experiences are alike. Second, an experience of beauty is unique not just because of the singular character of every object of beauty, but because each experience is tied to a unique moment of perception, whose exact terms can never come again, even in

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imagination. Proust, however, goes on to point out something about this episode that Scarry neglects: what happens when beauty encounters the pressures toward “general and disinterested” analysis? The train pulls out, and the sunlight of the girl’s face disappears: But alas, she must be forever absent from the other life towards which I was being borne with ever increasing speed, a life which I could resign myself to accept only by weaving plans that would enable me to take the same train again some day and to stop at the same station, a project which had the further advantage of providing food for the selfish [intéressée], active, practical, mechanical, indolent, centrifugal tendency which is that of the human mind, for it turns all too readily aside from the effort which is required to analyze and probe, in a general and disinterested [générale et désintéressée] manner, an agreeable impression which we have received. And since, at the same time, we wish to continue to think of that impression, the mind prefers to imagine it in the future tense, to continue to bring about the circumstances which may make it recur—which, while giving us no clue as to the real nature of the thing, saves us the trouble of recreating it within ourselves and allows us to hope that we may receive it afresh from without. (707–8; Pléiade 2:18) Human beings have problems with the unique; gripped in habit, we may want to make beauty like other things, and this is not always good. Having experienced a moment of beauty, we wish, in Proust’s view, to call it up wholesale; if we cannot get the thing itself, we want to be “practical” about it, to approximate it as closely as possible, and to keep thinking it is in our possession even if it is not. The drive to reproduce and hold on to beauty in words, images, art, memory, even theory (the drive at the core of Scarry’s argument), can transform beauty into something else. If beauty and truth, as Shaftesbury claims, are forever wrapped up together—“For all beauty is truth”—it is perhaps because beauty moves those who see it, feel it, or think it to the metaphorical or analogic, and it is also thus that beauty seems (but only seems) to resist the analytic.25 Making metaphors is good, even desirable—no one could regret Proust’s metaphors—but both maker and reader must recognize them for what they are. Each transformation through metaphor may produce new beauty, which itself may be interrogated, analyzed, and enjoyed, as long as viewers recognize that newness and transformation. However, when the impulse to

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transform and refigure shifts from the purely metaphorical to the analogic, problems multiply. If the metaphorical belongs to the experience of beauty, the analogic seems to belong to aesthetic criticism, where beauty is often placed in analogic relation to truth or justice.26 The movement that beauty may initiate—one toward metaphor, analogy, and even desire—is not itself beauty and can, in fact, turn us away from the aesthetic entirely. Proust gives us a reminder of the slippery relation of aesthetic experience to aesthetic criticism: as with the dreamer Marcel, in the desire to analyze and interpret, theorists can be drawn away from the goal and may end up doing something more like substitution than analysis. They—perhaps we—may only imagine, repeatedly, the figure of the milkmaid. The imagination, whether critical or creative, can be habitual, and instead of really linking us with the world, can just turn us closer in upon ourselves. This is what happens when theorists turn beauty into an ethical or hermeneutic shadow of itself. It is useful to think about what the resistance of metaphorical or analogic translation of aesthetic experience can produce. Scarry turns to Proust for a literary exemplar; in returning to the eighteenth-century origins of her Shaftesburian ethical position (and seeking an alternative to it), I turn to an eighteenth-century author, Swift, who has closer affinities to the aesthetic positions of Hogarth than those of Shaftesbury.27 Swift is acutely aware of the contests that may be staged between ethics and aesthetics (often framed for him in terms of real and imaginary value), and he provides a contemporary context for interrogating the tensions surrounding the aesthetic, whether political, literary, or ethical. At first glance, we find ugliness much more than beauty in Swift. Compare the ideal scene that appeared in Proust with what approximates a satirical version of it in Gulliver’s Travels (1726). In Brobdingnag, the land of the giants, Gulliver sees a horrible version of a milkmaid: The Nurse to quiet her Babe ... was forced to apply the last Remedy by giving it suck. I must confess no Object ever disgusted me so much as the Sight of her monstrous Breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with, so as to give the curious Reader an Idea of its Bulk, Shape and Colour. It stood prominent six Foot, and could not be less than sixteen in Circumference. The Nipple was about half the Bigness of my Head, and the Hue both of that and the Dug so varified with Spots, Pimples and Freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous: For I had a near Sight of her, she sitting down the more conveniently to give Suck, and I standing on the Table.28

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This milk bearer is no maid, and her breast, while being nearly large enough to make the simile work, is nothing like the sun. With Marcel, the milkmaid’s face produces elaborate similes born of or linked to the desire to prolong contact with the beautiful and renew it in the imagination. Marcel wants to make images for himself more and more like that of the woman, but the Nurse’s breast for Gulliver is beyond “compare.” The hermeneutic possibilities here are enormous. We have two images of women laden with milk, one an object of beauty and desire, the other, of loathing and fascination. Ethical complications are readily apparent—issues of objectification, distance, colonization.29 All of these compete for attention, and they come from the combination of aesthetic experiences with other aspects of the mind. Ethical and hermeneutic principles reveal some of the political and psychological implications of this passage as well as of the aesthetic experience that is depicted or that may be produced: but what happens once these strains of inquiry have come into play? The startling thing to realize is that Gulliver’s experience of disgust and the experience of reading about it approach an exaggeration of the experience of reading about Marcel’s experience of beauty. This is to say, the giant breast is only and can only ever be (in Swift’s world) an experience of the imagination, just as with the reader’s experience of Marcel’s maid. This is at bottom, merely a characteristic of the fictional that Swift’s scene intensifies. In the aesthetic terms I borrow from Proust, however, this basic characteristic of fiction has more precise implications for aesthetic sensation. Swift pushes us toward a breaking of habit within the mind’s eye (a not-quite-realist defamiliarization) to produce an image without compare. He breaks down the problem Proust identifies, the separation between experience and memory, experience and imagination, to focus simultaneously on the possibility of unique experience and on its eventual repeatability. We may pass from the unique via the pull of desire (to see again, to think again, to feel again), and this rather Hogarthian drive to pursuit can help produce (but never fully account for) the cultural or individual significance of fiction. The transformation from nothing— something unimagined, uncredited, nonexistent—to something one chooses to see again, read again, and feel again is at the heart of aesthetic experience. And whether that leads to justice or not it is one thing that ensures the viability of cultural artifacts. Swift thus calls on us to think the imagination as a preface to thinking beauty in a way Proust encourages and Hogarth might approve. A Swiftian detour through the ugly may seem like a roundabout way to get at the aesthetics of the beautiful, but it is both appropriate and functional, enabling me to break the habit of metaphorical thinking. What in Swift or Proust,

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during these moments of stunned apprehension, answers to the call of aesthetic inquiry? What might aesthetic inquiry reveal that no other mode of thought could? First, it should address how aesthetic experience is constructed or prepared by the text: the experience of the beautiful milkmaid’s face in imagination or that of the giant, bloated breast (something Scarry attempts successfully in another recent work, Dreaming by the Book). It should inquire how this experience is prepared for in the text, as well: how the responses of Marcel or Gulliver are sketched and structured. In Proust’s example, aesthetic experience is fundamentally timebound, limited in duration and extent, as we read a poem or view a painting and imaginatively return to it. It should also take as a fundamental condition of analysis and interpretation that aesthetic experience constantly evolves in the mind (and sometimes decays), and its power seems a power of substitution, of fixing attention subsequently on each new imaginative iteration—in constant pursuit. Aesthetic experience works in both these instances by using attention (focusing on the sun of the girl’s face, the cavernous surface of the breast) as a tool to create new images and new metaphors, for good and ill. Swift’s example has something else to say: it begins with the ability of the mind to fill itself completely with images that had previously seemed inconsequential or beyond the power of vision. Swift also reveals the potential of aesthetic experience to make the invisible matter by committing emotional response to imaginary creations. Both of these moments are experiences of magnification, where perception is structured so that figments of the imagination are confronted as sensible (but not material) particulars. In focusing on beauty as an aesthetic event, the inquiry shifts from what we expect aesthetically significant objects to mean, what labor they must do in showing us their significance, to how the aesthetic functions as a process of experience. To take one aspect of the aesthetic, the labor of beauty is not to produce or supplement meaning—this is the work of hermeneutics. The labor of beauty is not to produce justice—this is the work of ethics. Meaning, by comparison, is static, aesthetics is timebound. Justice concerns material conditions, while the result of aesthetic experience is harder to pin down. In an important sense, however, these are all mistaken formulations, for beauty’s labor, if it engages in any, is something different from the labor of aesthetic investigation, and it is on this level that fruitful contrast can be made. If aesthetic inquiry makes sense, pinning down some core part of aesthetic experience seems necessary; it is not enough to claim that the task is difficult. Hogarth would argue the fact of pursuit is paramount. But the analytic pursuit of beauty as object and experience can invite rather quixotic movements toward the concrete, like the bizarre Burkean determination that

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beauty can be recognized through the bodily experiences of “sinking, ... melting, [and] languor,”30 Hogarth’s elevation of the pineapple, or the rhapsodic poetry of The Moralists—Shaftesbury’s highly individual attempt to represent the process of aesthetic creation as the best means of approaching aesthetic experience itself. An element of quixotism also appears in Scarry’s recent work. Her postulation that an increase of care and a decentering of the self are the concrete result of experiencing beauty may reveal more about Scarry (and others of like mind) than about aesthetics in general. The problem is that aesthetic inquiry has to fold investigation of objects and experiences together, while keeping track of both and avoiding the pitfalls of introspection. It is here again that Swift may offer timely aid. Taking a single (and by no means legislative) example of poetry, he gives a sketch of the challenges to careful aesthetic inquiry. Swift always exhorts himself and his readers to look outward, not inward: Strange to conceive, how the same objects strike At distant hours the mind with forms so like! Whether in time, deduction’s broken chain Meets, and salutes her sister link again; Or hunted fancy, by a circling flight, Comes back with joy to his own seat at night; Or whether dead imagination’s ghost Oft hovers where alive it haunted most; Or if thought’s rolling globe her circle run, Turns up old objects to the soul her sun; Or loves the muse to walk with conscious pride O’er the glad scene whence first she rose a bride.31 The opening of the palinode Occasioned by Sir William Temple’s Late Illness and Recovery (1693) is a rare attempt in the Swiftian canon to address the problems of the muse.32 How is it that aesthetic and imaginative experience may be recreated? If emotion and inner vision are ephemeral, how can they ever return, as they seem to do, and how can they ever matter? The poem posits a problem about the continuity of emotional and aesthetic response in the face of frailty, maturity, and loss. The opening phrase is somewhat startling: most of the time, it is not strange to conceive that seeing the same object again and again produces similar sensations and similar associations of ideas. But for Swift, as for Proust, this persistence of the past may be a sign of illness and deception: accidents of perception hold us in their grip without

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a standard of judgment that could adequately explain any vision, any truth, or any perception of beauty at all. The attempt to ground aesthetic experience in metaphor, in the fictitious body of the muse, for example, is an unsatisfying self-deception, merely putting an outward dress of universality on the quixotic material of the poet’s own mind: Madness like this no fancy ever seized, Still to be cheated, never to be pleased; Since one false beam of joy in sickly minds Is all the poor content delusion finds.— There thy enchantment broke, and from this hour I here renounce thy visionary power; And since thy essence on my breath depends, Thus with a puff the whole delusion ends. (ll. 147–54) The problem is not just that the muse historically has become an awkward fiction, more likely to become Pope’s Goddess of Dulness than the spur of creativity, or that Swift is generally suspicious of the flattery of the imagination.33 The key here is that imagination can never hold anything in perpetuity, neither beauty nor disgust; even though the image may return, it is new and only “so like” (again, simile, metaphor). Swift sees the contours of the problem of aesthetic inquiry. Aesthetics leads to other things (analogic connections to ethics, shadowy attempts at reliving the past), things whose pursuit may turn attention away from beauty entirely. The metaphors and substitutions that aesthetic experience may promote balance on a cusp of ephemerality and permanence. The final lines of the ode insist on the acceptance of mutability, of self-difference (as the poet’s experience of maturity, mood, illness, recovery), forgetting, and closure in aesthetic experience. Swift’s poem—as both paean and palinode—has disciplinary echoes. For him, the muse and her temporality are tied up in the instability and precariousness of the poetic career. Attempts in literary study to refocus attention on aesthetics and on why aesthetics matters are also attempts to focus attention on why our discipline matters—why reading texts and teaching others how to read them is significant. But we must be careful to recall how much of an intervention aesthetic inquiry actually is. The sense of seamlessness that emotion is apt to produce—the way that the same objects may strike the mind at distant hours so like—may encourage critics and theorists to forget the changeability of aesthetic experience not just in one person from one hour to the next, but much more broadly, from one culture

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or time to another.34 Moreover, it is imperative to keep in mind that what theories accomplish and what their objects produce are two different things. If it is important to bring theory and practice closer together, it is foolhardy to forget that they remain distinct. In seeking to know beauty better, what it does and how it works, critics must be careful not to substitute acts of criticism for the effects of beauty at a given time. Aesthetic inquiry ought always emphasize the tenuous nature of connections between texts and world, no matter how significant those connections may be.35 It is useful for critics to remember that literary study and aesthetic inquiry can be important without having all the answers; academics outside of the humanities are certainly recognizing this now. A small but influential group of scientists is interested in the role aesthetics plays in human development and how the aesthetic, as a fundamental characteristic of mental life, can give clues to how the brain works, how we think, and what we choose to pursue.36 But getting at the significance of the aesthetic in any discipline requires first an awareness of the difference between aesthetic experience and aesthetic inquiry. For those who are skeptical of the teaching powers of beauty itself as they appear, for example, in Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, it is perhaps more clear that inquiry about beauty may teach us a great deal—as Scarry’s work also shows—by offering to increase our knowledge of and dialogue about what matters in our disciplines. I close with a final look at Hogarth in the hope of suggesting further how beauty may enter disciplinary inquiry. At the heart of The Analysis is Hogarth’s theory of what he calls the serpentine line. He begins with a waving line, a line moving sinuously on two axes, then imagines that line wrapped around a cone so that it curves and winds in all three dimensions (see Hogarth’s plate 1.26). Such a serpentine line invites pursuit, and it does so because it always disappears, passing up and behind and out of sight as it curves away from the eye. This for Hogarth is the foundation upon which the experience of beauty is laid. More than suggesting merely that objects of beauty are fragile, that beauty’s rose (like the rose of the world) may in fact die, Hogarth’s serpentine line suggests that the experience of beauty is predicated on transience. The serpentine line itself will not decay: it is an abstraction that continues into space even when one cannot see it, drawing one on to pursuit. The experience of beauty is a process structured by disappearance. Even in apprehending something as unbreakable (the serpentine line in the mind’s eye), beauty comes into being because we can imagine disappearance and presence together, folding into one another, as we follow the imagined curve of the line away into space. The certainty of disappearance is what leads the mind to pursue the object, and it is that drive

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to pursuit that structures beauty.37 Perhaps, then, the shift into metaphor or analogy, the exchange of one (sometimes beautiful) object for another, is a kind of homage to beauty’s ineluctable and indispensable disappearance. As beauty dissolves into ethics in Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, or Scarry, it is perhaps just doing what it does best. However, aesthetic experience and aesthetic inquiry involve different demands. Any move to analyze beauty should not wholly reenact the effects of substitution that Proust associates with the beautiful. Aesthetic inquiry can go farther than this, following the traces of beauty as it is transformed and reconfigured, if, as with the Hogarthian pursuit of the serpentine line, querents keep trying to keep beauty in sight.

NOTES I would like to thank John Guillory, Denis Donoghue, Martin Harries, Christopher R. Miller, Amy King, Erik Bond, Peter Fenves, and Jeffrey Freedman for their careful readings of this essay and helpful suggestions. I would also like to thank Elaine Scarry, whose gifts as teacher and thinker leave me deeply indebted. 1. See, among others, Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000); Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998); Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (New York: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999). I engage primarily with Scarry here. 2. Ronald Paulson, The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996), xi. 3. Smith attacks Mandeville in particular in part 7, chapter 4 of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), 306–314. On Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and the revision of Hobbes, see Ernest Tuveson, “Shaftesbury and the Age of Sensibility,” in Howard Anderson and John Shea, eds., Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, 1660–1800 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1967). For overviews of doctrines of sympathy and their relation to aesthetics, see Walter Jackon Bate, From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1949), chapter 5; and James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981). David Marshall gives a cogent discussion of Shaftesbury and Smith in The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), chapters 1–3 and 7. On the connection between The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, see Robert Boyden Lamb, “Adam Smith’s System: Sympathy Not Self Interest,” Journal of the History of Ideas35 (1974): 671–82; and Athol Fitzgibbons, Adam Smith’s System of Liberty, Wealth, and Virtue: The Moral and Political Foundations of The Wealth of Nations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). On the connection between the third Critique and the rest of Kant’s system, Kant writes, “Judgment ... in the order of our [specific] cognitive powers is a

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mediating link between understanding and reason,” Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 5 AK, 5:168. Judgments of taste are of importance to Kant because they appear both subjective and universal, pointing toward the possibility that pure reason, which deals with the form of perception and is hence universal, determinate, and necessary, can be linked in systematic terms with practical reason, which concerns the moral and is in its premises subjective, indeterminate, and founded in freedom. Jean-François Lyotard gives a rigorous interrogation of the reconciliation of freedom and necessity in Kant’s aesthetics in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994). 4. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 25. It is Eagleton’s thesis that in “the category of the aesthetic [there is] a way of gaining access to certain central questions of modern European thought— to light up, from that particular angle, a range of wider social, political and ethical issues” (1). 5. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Economimesis,’ Diacritics 11 (1981): 3–25; Paul De Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996), 70–90; Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Armstrong gives cogent readings of Derrida and De Man in The Radical Aesthetic (47–56). 6. I focus on the beautiful here, following Scarry. She is quite right to critique the gradual demotion of beauty from its place of Platonic preeminence. Beginning with the late-seventeenth-century revival of Pseudo-Longinus’s Peri Hypsous, the sublime gradually displaces beauty at the apex of aesthetic theory. The sublime does not appear as a critical juggernaut until after Burke midcentury. On other aesthetic categories, see Paulson as well as Scott Black, “Addison’s Aesthetics of Novelty,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 30 (2001): 269–88. 7. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 48. 8. This is more apparent in the French tradition than in the English: see Charles Batteux’s Les beaux arts réduit à un même principe, for example, or the theories of epic poetry of Le Bossu or Rapin. British contributions by Dennis, Roscommon, Buckingham, Pope, and other are also important. Ernst Cassirer, in The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1951), argues that both empiricist and classical models of the aesthetic “fail ... to account for the peculiar meaning and value of the beautiful; for the standard employed in both cases is on a different plane from that occupied by the pure phenomenon of beauty” (311). For him, Shaftesbury is the first to look to beauty for its own grounding by turning to “the midst of the artistic process” (324). As I have made clear, Shaftesbury also displaces aesthetic grounding onto that of its disciplinary neighbors—if aesthetics is understood primarily not as a factor of creativity but as one of reception. Response can approximate creation in The Moralists, where rhapsody emerges as the creative expression of aesthetic pleasure. However, this leaves the same problem; if we back up to the moments preceding articulate response, the grounding of aesthetic pleasure remains blurred with that of ethical community. The independence in Shaftesbury for which Cassirer argues refers to a second-order sense of beauty, one of aesthetic

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contemplation and not of aesthetic perception: “[F]orm can never be understood and assimilated unless it is distinguished from its mere effect and made an independent object of aesthetic contemplation. The intuition of the beautiful, which is to be distinguished carefully from the mere sensation of the beautiful, arises only from such contemplation, which is ... the purest sort of activity, namely, the activity peculiar to the soul” (326). This contemplation can only follow perception, and it is there that the problems lie. 9. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, in Collected Works of Francis Hutcheson (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1990), 1: vii. Hutcheson argues that the internal sense is constructed in the way it is because of “some Constitution of the AUTHOR of our Nature” (42), so that God’s aesthetic vision ratifies our own. 10. Although Hutcheson can describe the principle, namely, uniformity amid variety, by which the internal sense makes discriminations of beauty, it is a principle much like any other perceptual rule: just as our attention as humans is drawn by motion or we preferentially notice objects whose lighting suddenly shifts, the internal sense is tuned to objects exhibiting variety in uniformity. 11. Most works in early British aesthetics are essentially deist in origin and are loosely but not doxologically linked to Christian ethics and theology (Paulson, Beautiful, Novel, and Strange, x); Addison’s belief in God does little for him toward finding a rational or adequate explanation of the aesthetic itself. There are a variety of works that follow the pattern set by Shaftesbury, Addison, and Hutcheson in the first sixty or so years of the century. Many of them may be grouped together in terms of their approach to the question of aesthetic ground. Burke, for example, follows the general pattern of Addison in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990). 12. The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 3: 53637. 13. Emory Elliot’s work on beauty is not yet published but has been presented in talks at the MLA (1999) and elsewhere. He argues that an expanded and refreshed aesthetics, instead of being the ground of exclusion from the canon, can be the ground for including works by women, minority, and queer poets and novelists. Armstrong’s ethical argument is for—or at least works best with—the radical intervention of particular works when confronted in particular ways, not for aesthetic experience in general (which is in no way a fault). 14. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 81. 15. Ibid., 90. Cf. Burke: “I call beauty a social quality; for where women and men, and not only they, but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them, ... they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affection towards their persons; we like to have them near us, and we enter willingly into a kind of relation with them, unless we should have strong reasons to the contrary” (A Philosophical Enquiry, 39). 16. See Shaftesbury, “Miscellany III” in Characteristics, 414ff. 17. The Radical Aesthetic, 59. Armstrong adapts Hegel and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis in her quest for a language suited to analyzing the affective. She theorizes from “the broken middle,” a position that mediates cognition and affect and makes the aesthetic a particular “form” of coming to knowledge.

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18. A casual survey of the MLA database in January 2001 produced thirteen hits for Hogarth’s The Analysis. Of the greater than one hundred entries for Shaftesbury, over sixty refer to his aesthetic theories, and there are more than sixty entries on Burke’s theories of the sublime. 19. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997), 1. 20. The serpentine line is a two-dimensional waving line that has been twisted so that it spirals into three dimensions. Not all serpentine lines are beautiful; some are clumsy, some fatiguing, just like some problems (33). There is one particular configuration that is essential (41–42). The serpentine line itself is an abstraction from beauty in the world. The line makes sense less as a determinate form than as the physical incarnation of aesthetic desire: it mimics the processes the mind performs in searching for and in apprehending the beautiful. On the ethical question, see Paulson: “W.J.T. Mitchell has asked ... : ‘Does the Satanic character of the serpentine line suggest that beauty is simply independent of moral status? Or does it suggest that beauty is actively subversive of morality, order, and rationality, and that the ‘curiosity’ aroused by beauty is the same that lured Eve into her wanton, lustful fall?’ The fact that Hogarth raises these questions is probably more important than the answer” (46). For Hogarth, aesthetic operations can work on moral subjects, just as moral operations can work on aesthetic ones (Paulson, introduction to Analysis, xxxiii). 21. In chapter 14 of the Biographia Literaria (eds. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983]. vol.7, pt.2), Coleridge argues that the movement of the mind in reading a poem should be sinuous: “The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air; at every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward” (14). Hogarth’s serpentine line appears again, divorced from the visual and rendered a mental principle. 22. See Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990); and Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic. 23. Paulson argues that Hogarthian “[p]ursuit does not ... pass beyond the solution of a puzzle, the winning of a game. The chief object, to judge by the metaphors of sexual pursuit and the chase, is a woman or a fox; but when the pursuit passes beyond seduction or capture to possessing or killing, it is no longer within the range of the Beautiful” (Beautiful, Novel, and Strange, 44). This is resonant with Kant’s analysis of aesthetics based on the principle of purposiveness without purpose. 24. Remembrance of Things Past, trans. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Penguin, 1983), 1:705. The quotations that follow come from the pléiade edition of À la recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). 25. Shaftesbury, “Sensus Communis, an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour,” 65. 26. Eagleton argues that Burkean politics absorbs aesthetics via a metaphorical principle: “We become human subjects by pleasurably imitating

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practical forms of social life .... To mime is to submit to a law, but one so gratifying that freedom lies in such servitude. Such consensuality is less an artificial social contract ... than a kind of spontaneous metaphor or perpetual forging of resemblance” (53). 27. Swift is often read as being resistant to the aesthetic and to beauty in particular; see, for example, ee Carole Fabricant, Swift’s Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982). In Jonathan Swift: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), Denis Donoghue also argues that for Swift “[b]enevolists like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson” had little appeal (64–65). 28. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (New York: Norton, 1970), 71. 29. I here have in mind primarily psychoanalytic and feminist readings of Swift as well as other traditional readings of the Swiftian persona, including Norman Brown, Life against Death; The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1959); John Middleton Murry, Jonathan Swift: A Critical Biography (London; Cape, 1954); W.B. Carnochan, Lemuel Gulliver’s Mirror for Man (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968); and revisionist readings of Swift’s relationship to women and attitudes toward femininity by Carol Houlihan Flynn, The Body in Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990); Felicity Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women, 1660–1750 (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1984); Margaret Anne Doody, “Swift among the Women,” Yearbook of English Studies 18 (1988): 68–92; and Ellen Pollak, Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago: Univ.of Chicago Press, 1985). Feminist scholars in particular have offered significant ethical readings of Swift’s work that press beyond the traditional view of Swift as fearful misogynist. Although I place ethical or hermeneutic reading in abeyance here, I do not underestimate the complexity of such readings, a complexity summed up by Laura Brown: “The works of Jonathan Swift provide a critical test case for political criticism and a providing ground for the nature of the ‘politics’ of such a criticism .... Swift’s texts lend themselves equally to a negative and a positive hermeneutic, and a critic concerned with the political aim of her readings of literary culture might well pause between the exposure of misogyny in the canon and the discovery of an early ally in the struggle against colonialism. Which to choose?” “Reading Race and Gender: Jonathan Swift,” Critical Essays on Jonathan Swift, ed. Frank Palmeri (New York: G.K. Hall, 1993), 121. 30. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, 112. 31. Jonathan Swift, the Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers (New York: Penguin, 1983), 76; subsequent references to Swift’s poetry are to this edition. 32. A number of the small and poetically uneven group of early odes address what Swift perceives as the problems of poetry. John Irwin Fischer argues that these poems chronicle Swift’s gradual realization of human frailty and the contrast between that weakness and poetic grandeur, On Swift’s Poetry (Gainesville: Univ. Presses of Florida, 1978), chap. 1. See also Irwin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962), 1:111–41; Peter J. Schakel, The Poetry of Jonathan Swift (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978), chap. 1; and Nora Crowe Jaffe, The Poet Swift (Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New England, 1977), chap. 3.

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33. The poem is usually read as Swift’s youthful farewell to epideictic poetry in favor of satire or as a temporary adieu to fame (or hopes for Temple’s approval). See Jaffe, The Poet Swift, 74; Schakel, The Poetry of Jonathan Swift, 27–28; or Fabricant, who writes that the poem “is a scathing denunciation of the visionary muse, ... and affirms a resolve to turn away completely from the realm of murky imaginings, of chimeras rather than actualities .... The verse ends with a renunciation having profound implications for both the form and the content of Swift’s subsequent poetry, which becomes increasingly more topical and more dependent upon empirically observed detail, as well as increasingly less indulgent of the vagaries of the imagination” (Swift’s Landscape, 58). 34. See Fisher, 52. Fisher argues that she becomes an allegory for religious faith, and she transforms “each human experience ... [into] an emblem of god’s gracious presence” (Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences. 53). My argument in this paragraph builds on his (49–54). 35. Paul Hunter’s brilliant recent article in Eighteenth-Century Studies is an attempt to account for this problem: “Sleeping Beauties: Are Historical Aesthetics Worth Recovering?” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34, no. 1 (fall 2000): 1–20. 36. I suggested at the beginning of this essay that new historicism and the new aesthetics are related, that they are both responses to contemporary challenges about the relationship between theory and practice, texts and the world. At best, both of these impulses are pushing toward radical reconceptions of textual practice, but at worst, they assume a predictive and or constitutive relation between unique moments and constructs that overshadow and overpower them. 37. Among these are Patrick Cavanagh, Mark Tramo, and Semir Zeki, neuroscientists interested in perception, just to name a few. See especially Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999); a recent volume of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, “Art and the Brain,” 6, nos. 6–7 (1999), with articles by Zeki and V.S. Ramachandran; and Tramo’s recent work on music and the brain in Science, 291, no. 5501 (5 January 2001): 54–56. 38. Cf. Armstrong on Adorno: “[B]eauty is not a thing, an is, or even an ought; it is a want or wanting. Beauty conjures wanting because it is a promise of the as yet unsayable, a fleeting promise of new possibilities, of scarcely envisioned openings in experience emancipated from the world of exchange” (186; italics original). I don’t believe beauty conjures wanting but that “wanting” and beauty define each other reciprocally. Pursuit structures the experience of the beautiful, gives it the shape that is its being.

Chronology

1871

On July 10, Marcel Proust is born in the Paris suburb of Auteuil, to Valentin Louis Eugene Georges Proust, son of Adrien Proust, a distinguished professor of medicine, and Jeanne-Clemence Weil. His father is Catholic, his mother is Jewish. Marcel will always be financially independent.

1872

The Proust family takes up residence in the fashionable boulevard Malesherbes (Paris 8e). Proust will live in this area most of his life.

1878–86

Family holidays at Illiers (now Illiers-Combray) in the département of Eure-et-Loir.

1882–89

Attends the Lycée Fontanes (renamed Lycée Condorcet in 1883); poor health often keeps him absent. Suffers his first asthma attack at age nine.

1888

Proust is strongly influenced by his philosophy teacher, Alphonse Darlu.

1889

Receives his bachelor’s diploma. Meets Madame Albert Arman de Caillavet and attends her exclusive salon where he meets her love, Anatole France.

1889–90

Proust performs his military service at Orléans, a feat of which he is exceptionally proud. It is during this time only that Proust enjoys relatively good health.

1890–95

Enrolls simultaneously in the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris and in the independent Ecole Libre

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des Sciences Politiques. Earns his law license en droit in 1893 and degree in letters in 1894. 1892–93

Co-founds a short-lived journal, Le Banquet. Is an active contributor to this and other journals. Meets Henri Bergson, the French philosopher and 1927 recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature. With the disappearance of Le Banquet, the group begins to have material published in La Revue Blanche, a higher class avant-garde publication.

1894

Beginning of the Dreyfus affair. Around this time, Proust becomes obsessed with Emerson.

1895

Begins a novel, Jean Santeuil (unfinished). Enters the concours for an unpaid librarianship and, having succeeded, is appointed to the Bibliothèque Mazarine, the library of the Institut de France. Having seldom performed his duties and annually asking for leave on the pretext of bad health, he is finally dismissed in 1900. His real interest in life during the time is society.

1896

Publication of Les Plaisirs et les jours, a collection of stories, essays and miscellaneous pieces is published in Paris; translated by Louis Varese as Pleasures and Regrets in New York in 1948 and London in 1950.

1897

Proust becomes increasingly enthusiastic about the work of the English writer John Ruskin. Joseph Reinach, a close friend of Émile Straus, reveals that Dryefus is innocent.

1898

Publication of Zola’s ‘J’accuse’. Proust rallies to the Dreyfus cause and in December, he obtains the signature of Anatole France in favor of Zola. During the various trials which ensue, Proust is a passionate observer in the audience and records his experiences in Jean Santeuil.

1899

Dreyfus receives a presidential pardon. By December, Proust has begun translating some of Ruskins’ La Bible D’Amiens.

1900

Death of Ruskin. Proust devotes the next few years to translating La Bible D’Amiens (with the help of his mother) and annotating Ruskin’s selected works. Though the introduction closely follows Ruskin, Proust’s “postscript” denounces Ruskinian idolatry that confuses truth with beauty. Proust makes two trips to Venice to see firsthand what his English precedessor had written about. The family moves to the rue de Courcelles.

Chronology

269

1901

Becomes enamored of a dashing young noble and diplomat, Bertrand de Fénélon. During a trip to Holland the following year, Proust suffers intensely when he cannot communicate with Fénélon on an emotional level.

1902

Artistic trips to Belgium and Holland; sees Vermeer’s View of Delft.

1903

Death of Proust’s father.

1904

La Bible d’Amiens is published by Mercure de France. Proust’s translation is considered an outstanding literary achievement.

1905

Death of Proust’s mother on September 26. Proust is inconsolable. After reading what the psychiatrists say about asthma, he puts himself in Dr. Sollier’s sanatorium at Boulogne-sur-Seine from which he emerges, after a few weeks, convinced that there is no cure.

1906

Proust moves to 102, boulevard Haussmann. In June, Sésame et les lys (Sesame and Lilies), another translation of Ruskin, appears in volume form.

1907–14

Summer holidays at Cabourg, on the Normandy coast. It is here that he meets Alfred Agostinelli and hires him as a professional chauffeur.

1908

Writes Pastiches of other authors, based on an amusing extortion racket. Begins what is now known as Contre Sainte-Beuve, an essay.

1909

The essay transforms itself into a novel. It will eventually become A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past).

1910

Goes to the Ballets russes. Has his bedroom in the apartment of Boulevard Haussmann lined with cork to insulate himself from the noise of construction work in an adjoining apartment. He will live here until 1919 when the building is sold and he is obliged to move.

1911

The novel’s title at this time is Les Intermittences du coeur (Intermittences of the Heart). Proust employs a secretary to type up his work, more than 700 pages to date.

1912

Proust seeks a publisher, in vain.

1913

Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way) is published by Grasset, at Proust’s own expense. The general title of the

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novel is changed to A la recherche du temps perdu. Agostinelli turns up on Proust’s doorstep with a woman named Anna, whom he introduces as his wife, and Proust hires her as his secretary. 1914

Alfred Agostinelli, with whom Proust was emotionally involved, dies before the First World War. The second volume of A la recherche is at press when war breaks out, postponing publication indefinitely.

1914–18

During the war, with no possibility of publication, Proust vastly expands his novel, notably in respect of the character of Albertine.

1915

Publication rights are transferred from Grasset to Gallimard.

1919

Proust is forced to move from 102, boulevard Haussmann, firstly to the rue Laurent-Pichat, then to what will turn out to be his final residence, 44, rue Hamelin. He is controversially awarded the Prix Goncourt, France’s premier literary prize. Publication of Pastiches et mélanges and A l’ombre de des jeunes filles en fleurs in Paris.

1920

Proust is named Chevalier de la légion d’honneur. Publication of Le Cote de Guermantes I.

1921

Extracts from the novel are regularly published in journals, mainly La Nouvelle Revue française, continuing into 1922. Proust visits an exhibition of Dutch paintings at the Orangerie in May where he sees the View of Delft again. Le Cote de Guermantes II – Sodome et Gomorrhe I is published in Paris.

1922

Sodome et Gomorrhe II is published. Though Proust complains in January of a depression brought on by his physical pain, he nevertheless is able to attend a musical evening at Jacques Porel’s house. On May 18, he attends the first production of of Renard, a ballet by Nijinska, and attends a reception afterwards with Diaghilev, Stravinksy, Picasso and Joyce. Proust develops bronchitis, then pneumonia, and dies on November 18. He is buried in Père Lachaise cemetery on November 22.

1922

Swann’s Way is translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, 2 volumes, in London: Chatto & Windus, 1922 and New York: Holt, 1922.

Chronology

271

1923

Publication of Sodome et Gomorrhe III.

1924

Publication of Albertine disparue and Within a Budding Grove (translation of A l’ombre de des jeunes filles en fleurs) by Scott Moncrieff in London and New York.

1925

Publication of The Guermantes Way (translation of Le Cote de Guermantes I).

1927

Publication Cities of the Plain (translation of Sodome et Gomorrhe) (comprises Sodome et Gomorrhe I and Sodome et Gomorrhe II). Publication of Le temps retrouvé, 2 volumes and Chroniques, Paris.

1929

Publication of The Captive (Sodome et Gomorrhe III: La Prisonniere, 2 volumes) translated by Scott Moncrieff.

1930

Publication of The Sweet Cheat Gone (Albertine disparue, 2 volumes) translated by Scott Moncrieff in New York and London.

1932

Publication of The Past Recaptured (Le temps retrouvé) translated by Frederick A. Blossom in New York.

1954

Publication of Contre Sainte-Beuve, suivi de Nouveaux Melanges, edited by Bernard de Fallois, in Paris; translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner as On Art and Literature, 1896-1919 in New York.

1955

Publication of Jean Santeuil, translated by Gerard Hopkins, in London (1955) and New York (1956).

1981

Remembrance of Things Past, 3 volumes, translated by Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, in London.

Contributors

HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University and Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English at the New York University Graduate School. He is the author of over 20 books, including Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994), and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996). The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets forth Professor Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great writers and their predecessors. His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), a 1998 National Book Award finalist, How to Read and Why (2000), Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002), and Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003). In 1999, Professor Bloom received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism, and in 2002 he received the Catalonia International Prize. JULIA KRISTEVA is an internationally known psychoanalyst and critic and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Paris. She is the author of Intimate Revolt and The Future of Revolt (2002); Crisis of the European Subject (2000); and Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989). ROBERT FRASER is a Senior Research Fellow at the Open University and ahs previously taught at the Universities of Leeds and London and Trinity

273

274

Contributors

College, Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in English. He is the author of The Chameleon Poet: A Life of George Barker (2001); Victorian Quest Romance: Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling, and Conan Doyle (1998) and Lifting the Sentence: A Poetics of Postcolonial Fiction (2000). CYNTHIA J. GAMBLE is an Honorary Fellow of the Ruskin Programme, University of Lancaster and is the Honorary Secretary of the Ruskin Society. She is also on the Council of the Franco-British Society. She is the author of “From Belle Epoque to First World War: the Social Panorama” (2001); “Proust-Ruskin Perspectives on La Vierge Dorée at Amiens Cathedral” (1993); and is preparing an edition of La Bible d’Amiens. JAN HOKENSON is a Professor in the Department of Languages and Linguistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz where she is Director of Comparative Literature. Professor Hokenson is the author of “The Fictions of Lisa Alther” (1998) and is an editor of Forms of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Third International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film (1986). SUSAN STEWART teaches literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published an edition of Euripides’ Andromache (translated by Susan Stewart and Wesley D. Smith) (2001) and is the author The Forest (1995) and Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (1991). SARA DANIUS teaches in the Department of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. She is the author of The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics (2002) and “Novel Visions and the Crisis of Culture: Visual Technology, Modernism, and Death in The Magic Mountain” (2000). INGRID WASSENAAR is Scholl Teaching Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge. She is the author of “Le juste milieu ... : Proust’s Transmission” (2000) and has translated several articles published in the Yale French Studies (1996) on Gerard Genette, Louis Hay and Pierre-March De Biasi. WILLIAM C. CARTER is Professor of French at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, a member of the editorial board of the Bulletin Marcel Proust and a permanent member correspondent of the Centre de recherches proustiennes (Sorbonne nouvelle). He is the author of Marcel Proust: A Life (2000) and The Proustian Quest (1992).

Contributors

275

SIÂN REYNOLDS is a Professor in the French Department of Stirling University. She is the author of France Between the Wars: Gender and Politics (1996) and Britannica’s Typesetters: Women Compositors in Edwardian Edinburgh (1989). She has also translated The Wheels of Commerce by Fernand Braudel (1985) and Hannah’s Diary by Louise L. Lambrichs (1998). ANTHONY R. PUGH is Professor Emeritus in the French Department at the University of New Brunswick. He is the author of “Imagination and the Unity of the Pensées” (2002); “Proust’s Working Methods: The Importance of Structure” (1990) and The Birth of A La recherche du temps perdu (1987). MAUREEN A. RAMSDEN has held teaching appointments in French in American and England and most recently at the University of Hill. She is the author of “The Play and Place of Fact and Fiction in the Travel Tale” (2000) and “Literary Manifestations of the Self: Their Forms and Functions in Modern French Factual and Fictional Documentary Works” (1990). GABRIELLE STARR is an Assistant Professor of English at New York University. She is the author of “Clarissa’s Relics and the Lyric Community” (2001) and “Love’s ‘Proper Musick’: Lyric Inflection in Behn’s Epistles” (2000).

Bibliography

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Acknowledgments

“Proust and Time Embodied” by Julia Kristeva. From Proust and the Sense of Time translated and with an introduction by Stephen Bann. © 1993 by Julia Kristeva. English translation © 1993 by Stephen Bann. Reprinted by permission of Columbia University Press. “The Lamp of Truth: Proust and George Eliot” by Robert Fraser. From Proust and the Victorians: The Lamp of Memory. © 1994 by Robert Fraser. Reprinted by permission. “Zipporah: A Ruskinian Enigma Appropriated by Marcel Proust” by Cynthia J. Gamble. From Word & Image 15, no. 4 (October–December 1999): 381–394. © 1999 by Taylor & Francis Limited. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals. Reprinted by permission. “Proust’s japonisme: Contrasting Aesthetics” by Jan Hokenson. From Modern Language Studies 29, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 17–37. © 1999 by Jan Hokenson. Reprinted by permission. “Proust’s Turn from Nostalgia” by Susan Stewart. Reprinted by permission from Raritan 19, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 77–94. © 1999 by Raritan: A Quarterly Review. “Orpheus and the Machine: Proust as Theorist of Technological Change, and the Case of Joyce” by Sara Danius. From Forum for Modern Language

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Studies 37, no. 2 (April 2001): 127–140. © 2001 by Oxford University Press. Reprinted by permission. “Introduction” by Ingrid Wassenaar. From Proustian Passions: The Uses of Self-Justification for A la recherché du temps perdu.” Copyright © Ingrid Wassenaar, 2000. Reproduced by permission of the author, c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London WII IJN “The Vast Structure of Recollection: from Life to Literature” by William C. Carter. From The Cambridge Companion to Proust, edited by Richard Bales. © 2001 by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission. “Albertine’s Bicycle, or: Women and French Identity during the Belle Epoque” by Siân Reynolds. From Literature & History 10, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 28–41. © 2001 by Manchester University Press. Reprinted by permission of the author. “The Ending of Swann Revisited” by Anthony R. Pugh. From Modern Philology 99, no. 3 (February 2002): 357–375. © 2002 by Anthony R. Pugh. Reprinted by permission. “Jean Santeuil and the Notion of avant-texte: A Case for an Extension of the Term?” by Maureen Ramsden. From Dalhousie French Studies 58, (Spring 2002): 39–53. © 2002 by Dalhousie University. Reprinted by permission. Starr, Gabrielle, “Ethics, Meaning, and the Work of Beauty”. From Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (Spring 2002): 361–378. © American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Index Adam Bede (Eliot), 39–42, 44–46, 50–51 Addison, Joseph, 247 Adolphe (Constant), 145 Against Sainte-Beuve, 21–22, 27 criticism of, 227, 230, 238 image of mother in, 29–30, 179 memory in, 179, 181 writing of, 229, 231, 234–35, 237–238 Agostinelli, Monsieur, 193 A la recherché du Marcel Proust (Maurois), 39 A la recherché du temps perdu, 17 aging in, 31 allegory in, 137–39 allusions in, 23, 205 behavior in, 59 criticism of, 139–49, 227 cruelty in, 33–34 desire in, 33, 177, 195 first person narrative in, 140–45, 179, 236, 238 compared to Gulliver’s Travels, 254–56 imagination in, 31, 34, 254 Jean Santeuil influence on, 221–22, 227, 231–38 metaphors in, 116, 253 modernism in, 236, 238 moral consequences in, 60 relations to the dead in, 105 remorse in, 23 war in, 31, 56, 181, 192 women in, 190–98

writing of, 21–22, 27, 32, 176, 201–15, 230–31, 234 A la recherché du temps perdu, characters in Aimé in, 13 Albertine in. See Albertine in A la recherché du temps perdu Bergotte in, 98, 140, 205–6 Bloch in, 193 M. de Bréauté in, 9 Céleste in, 27–28, 31 M. de Charlus in. See Charlus, M. de in A la recherché du temps perdu Odette de Crécy in. See Crécy, Odette de in A la recherché du temps perdu Elstir in. See Elstir in A la recherché du temps perdu Forcheville in, 5–6 Francoise in, 190–92, 201, 203, 205 grandmother in, 23–25, 29–30, 123–28, 160 Guermantes, Duc de, 90–91, 93, 111, 113, 192 Guermantes, Duchesse, 90, 113, 114 Guermantes, Prince de, 24, 33, 90, 193 Jupien in, 24 Leonie, Aunt in, 167, 235 Marcel in. See Marcel in A la recherché du temps perdu Morel in, 24 Rachel in, 7–9, 114 285

286

Robert in, 8 Saint-Loup in, 2, 7–9, 116 Charles Swann in. See Swann, Charles in A la recherché du temps perdu Gilberte Swann in. See Swann, Gilberte in A la recherché du temps perdu Madame Verdurin in, 86, 89–90, 95, 110–11, 114, 193, 195 Verdurins in, 30, 113, 140, 171, 235 Mlle Vinteuil in, 25, 30, 51, 74, 123, 167 A la recherché du temps perdu, themes and theories in aesthetic theory in, 252–56 childhood memories theme in, 24, 29, 32, 34, 83, 97, 236 death theme in, 24, 117 faculty of memory theme in, 24–25, 119 inversion theme in, 29–31 japoniste practice in, 83–99 jealously theme in, 33, 123, 137–38, 166, 177 memory and the construction of in, 20–23, 176, 182, 236 nostalgia theme in, 105–6, 110, 143, 191, 201 the Orpheus myth in, 124 recurring motifs in, 83 satiric allusions in, 89–90, 94–95, 97–98 self-justification in, 137–49, 157–60 sexuality in, 83, 179 suffering theme in, 24, 26, 31 symbolism in, 124, 167 technology affecting human experience in, 123–29 time theme in, 25, 32–33, 140, 177–78, 180, 182 Zipporah idolatry in, 70–71 A la recherché du temps perdu, volumes and sections of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs in. See

Index

A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs Albertine disparue in. See Albertine disparue “Balbec” sections of, 39, 193, 252 The Captive in. See Captive, The “Combray” in, 89, 96–97, 138–39, 166–69, 177, 181–82, 191, 201, 203, 235 Le Côté de Guermantes in. See Côté de Guermantes, Le Goncourt text in, 95, 97, 114, 117 “The Intermittencies of the Heart” in, 24 Sodome et Gomorrhe in. See Sodome et Gomorrhe Swann’s Way in. See Swann’s Way “Swann in Love” in, 71, 76–77, 201, 203, 207 Le Temps retrouvé in. See Temps retrouvé, Le Time Regained in. See Time Regained Within a Budding Grove in. See Within a Budding Grove A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs in A la recherché du temps perdu, 185, 203, 209, 215, 228 Albertine in, 38, 193 Andrée in, 37–39 George Eliot in, 38 Gilberte in, 201 grandmother in, 37 illusions in, 37 Marcel in, 93 Albertine, 9, 11–14, 28, 30, 33, 38 accident of, 22, 31, 195 bicycle of, 194 character of, 194–95 death of, 9, 22, 195 jealousy and love of, 3, 22, 114–16 lesbianism of, 24 and Marcel, 22, 160, 172–73, 190, 193 maternal devotion of, 28 object of love and jealousy, 22

Index

Albertine disparue Albertine in, 51, 160 fragile human nature in, 51 narrative of distress in, 160 Analysis of Beauty (Hogarth) aesthetic theory in, 249–51, 259 Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton) narrator’s nostalgia in, 106 Anderson, Benedict, 185 Aristotle, 107 Armstrong, Isobel on aesthetic theory, 248–49 Arnyvelde, André, 78 Augustine, 107–8, 145 “Avant la nuit” Franoise in, 172 same-sex love in, 172

Badinter, Elisabeth, 197 Bales, Richard, 74 Balzac, Honoré de, 19, 23, 43 Bardèche, Maurice on A la recherché du temps perdu, 230, 238 Barney, Natalie, 189 Barrès, 23 Bataille, Georges, 30–31 Baudelaire, Charles, 14, 222 Baudry, 146 Baumgarten, Alexander, 135, 246 Beauvoir, Simone de, 195 “Before Nightfall. See “Avant la nuit” Belle Epoque France, 186, 189–90, 193, 195, 197–98 Bellemin-Noël, Jean on the definition of avant-texte, 222–25, 229 Benardaky, Marie de, 170 Benjamin, Walter, 115 and the notion of aura, 126 Benstock, Shari, 189 Berger, Klaus, 84 Bergson, Henri, 20, 57

287

Bible d’Amiens, La (Ruskin), 41, 176 Blanchot, Maurice, 148 Blarenberghe, Henri Van, 26 Bloom, Harold, 273 introduction, 1–16 on Proust compared to Freud, 1–3, 5, 12, 14–16 on jealousy in Proust’s work, 1–16 Botticelli, Sandro, 5 and Proust’s use of Zipporah, 70–78 and Ruskin’s use of Zipporah, 63–73, 76, 78 The Trials of Moses, 63–78 Boule de Suif (Flaubert), 60 Bowie, Malcolm on jealousy in A la recherché du temps perdu, 123 Burke, Edmund, 249 Brun, Bernard on Proust’s writing, 229 Brunet, Etienne, 158 Brunschicg, Cécile, 193 Brunschicg, Leon, 193 Burton, Robert, 106

Captive, The, 28, 227 jealousy in, 10–12, 38 Léa in, 11 Carlyle, Thomas, 39, 41, 50 Carnet de 1908, Le (notebook) annotations of childhood memories in, 177–79 Carpaccio, Vittore L’Arrivo degli Ambasciatori inglesi presso il Re di Bretagna, 70 Carter, William C., 165–83, 274 on Proust’s grand edifice of recollection, 165–83 Causerie de Lundi, 43 Caillavet, Arman de, 19. “Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality” (Freud), 1

288

Characteristics (Shaftesbury) aesthetic theory in, 249 Charlus, M. de in A la recherché du temps perdu, 9, 29–30 adventures of, 24 sexuality of, 171 temperament of, 59 Chernichevsky, 187 Clarac, Pierre, 228–32, 235 Claudel, Paul, 98 Clegg, Jeanne, 69 Cocteau, Jean, 209–10 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 251 Complete Works of John Ruskin (Cook & Wedderburn), 72 “Confession d’une jeune fille, La” goodnight kiss drama in, 168 Confessions (Augustine), 145 Confessions, Les (Rousseau), 145, 147 Conrad, Joseph, 158 Constant, Benjamin, 145 Contre Sainte-Beuve. See Against SainteBeuve Côté de Guermantes, Le illness, suffering and death in, 23 self-justification in, 159 technological change in, 123, 130 Crécy, Odette de (Swann) in A la recherché du temps perdu, 32, 190, 201 character of, 191–94 past life of, 5–6, 76 as Miss Sacripant, 76–78 secret life of, 4, 75 sexuality of, 77–78, 192 Swann’s love for, 2, 6, 172–73, 191, 203 as Swan’s Zipporah, 5

Critical Historians of Art, The (Podro), 117–18 Critique of Judgment (Kant) aesthetic theory in, 244

Index

Danius, Sara, 121–36, 274 on Joyce’s use of how technology affects human experiences, 130–35 on Proust’s use of how technology affects human experiences, 121–30, 134–35 Dante, 139 Daudet, Lucien, 213–14 Davis, Fred, 106 Debray-Genette, Raymonde on avante-texte, 225 Debussy, Claude, 146 Degas, Edgar, 90 Delafosse, 86 Deleuze, Gilles, 111, 113 Derrida, Jacques on enlightment aesthetics, 245, 249 on Hegel, 122 Descartes, René, 108, 111 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen), 187–88 Dominique (Fromentin), 145 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 26 Doubrovsky, Serge, 146 Dreaming by the Book (Scarry) aesthetic theory in, 256 Du côté dechez Swann. See Swann’s Way Duroselle, J.B., 190–91 Duplay, Maurice, 23

Eagleton, Terry on enlightment aesthetics, 245, 249 Elias, Norbert on time, 109 Eliot, George influence on Proust, 39, 41, 43–52, 54–61 realism in, 44–47, 57 Elliot, Emory on aesthetic theory, 248 Elstir in A la recherché du temps perdu, 140, 173 and Japanese aesthetics, 96, 98 paintings of, 116

Index

studies of, 88, 90–93 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 38, 50–51 “End of Jealousy, The.” See “Fin de la jalousie, La” Enquiry (Burke), 249

Faces of Injustice, The (Shklar), 138 Fallois, Bernard de, 229–31 “Fan, The.” See “L’Éventail” Ferré, André, 228 Ferry, Jules, 185 Feuillerat, Albert, 202, 214–15 Fiction, Fair and Foul (Ruskin), 54–55 “Filial Sentiments of a Parricide,” 26 “Fin de la jalousie, La” Francoise in, 172–73 Honore in, 172–73 jealousy and obsession in, 172–73 Flaubert, Gustave, 14, 60, 223, 225–26 influence on Proust, 47–48, 60–61 realism of, 47, 57 Fleurs du mal (Baudelaire), 222 Focillon, Henri, 117 Foster, Dennis, 145 France, Anatole, 171, 193 France de la Belle Epoque, La (Duroselle), 190–91 Franck, 193 Fraser, Robert, 37–61, 273–74 on Eliot’s influence on Proust, 39, 41, 43–52, 54–61 on Flaubert’s influence on Proust, 47–48, 60–61 on Ruskin’s influence on Proust, 41, 44, 46–48, 54–55, 57 French Revolution (Carlyle), 39 Freud, Sigmund, 148 irony of, 1 Proust compared to, 1–3, 5, 12, 14–16 on repression, 106 Fromentin, 145 Fugitive, The death in, 113

289

jealousy in, 11–14 memory in, 119

Gallimard publishers, 17 Gamble, Cynthia J., 63–81, 274 on Ruskin’s influence on Proust, 70–73, 76, 78 on Ruskin’s reproduction of Botticelli’s Zipporah, 63–73, 76, 78 on Proust’s use of Botticelli’s Zipporah in his work, 70–78 Gemie, Sharif, 195 Genette, Gérard, 144, 190, 192, 228 Gide, Andre, 145 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 192 Gimpel, René, 181 “Girl’s Confession, A.” See “Confession d’une jeune fille, La” Giroud, Francoise, 197 Grasset, Bernard, 202, 208–13, 215 Grasset publishers, 17, 229 Grésillon on avant-texte, 224–26 Guermantes Way, The. See Côté de Guermantes, Le Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) aesthetic theory in, 254 compared to A la recherché du temps perdu, 254–56

Harrison, Thomas Alexander, 173 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 2 Hay, Louis on texte, 223–24, 227 Hegel and the history of aesthetic discourse, 122, 135 Heidegger, 248 Proust compared to, 20, 34–35 Hofer, Johannes on nostalgia, 106 Hogarth, William

290

and aesthetic theory, 244, 248–51, 254–57, 259–60 Hokenson, Jan, 83–103, 274 on Proust’s use of Japanese aestheticism in A la recherche du temps perdu, 83–103 Homer, 19 Hugo, Victor, 22 Hutcheson and aesthetic theory, 244, 246, 248–49, 260

Ibsen, Henrik, 187 “Image of Proust, The” (Benjamin), 115 Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in Modern French Literature (Schwartz), 86 In Search of Lost Time. See A la recherché du temps perdu Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Hutcheson) aesthetic theory in, 246

Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 106 Jean Santeuil, 27, 181 allusions in, 235 Arthur in, 53 bed-time kiss in, 25 behavior in, 59 Madame Cresmeyer in, 52–53, 235 criticism of, 227, 237 George Eliot in, 38 Emerson in, 38 Ernestine in, 45 Experiences of love in, 235 fictionalized autobiography of, 39 Henri in, 52 image of mother in, 25 influence on A la recherché du temps perdu, 221–22, 227, 231–38 inversion theme in, 25, 177 Mr. Irwine in, 53

Index

Jean in, 39, 46, 49, 52, 166, 173, 235–36 Madame Lawrence in, 52–53 Marie scandal in, 53–54, 60, 170, 235 memory in, 173–76, 178, 236 narrator of, 48, 59–60, 235 publication of, 231, 237 realism in, 237–38 Monsieur de Ribaumont in, 52 Madame Servan in, 235 third-person narrative of, 236 writing of, 231, 234 Johnson, Samuel, 247 Jouhandeau, M., 29 Joyce, James, 224 and use of how technology affects human experiences, 123, 130–35 compared to Proust, 123, 130, 134–35

Kant, Immanuel, 108, 116, 119, 135 and aesthetic theory, 244, 246 Keats, John, 115 Kilmartin, Terence translator, 71 Kracaurer, Siegfried, 123 Kristeva, Julia, 17–35, 72, 98, 273 on the last volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, 31–34 on Proust compared to Heidegger, 20, 33–34 on Proust compared to Spinoza, 34 on Proust and the death of mother, 22–24, 29–31 on Proust and psychic time, 18–21 on the writing of A la recherche du temps perdu, 21–22, 24–29 Lalande, André Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, 150 Lauris, Georges de, 210 “Law of Compensation” (Emerson), 50 Lebrave, Jean-Louise, 226

Index

L’éducation sentimentale (Flaubert), 225 Lejeune, 145 Lemaire, Madeleine illustrator, 171 Lennox, Charlotte, 247 Lewes, G.H., 51, 56 “L’ Éventail” time lost and regained in, 172 Life of Forms in Art, The (Focillon), 117 L’Indifférent desire in, 171 fear of suffocation in, 171 Lepré in, 171–72 Madeleine in, 171–72 L’Irréversible et la nostalgie (Jankélévitch), 106

Malebranche, Nicolas and self-justification, 150–56 Man Paul de on enlightment aesthetics, 245, 249 on Proust’s insight, 7, 147 Mandeville, 244 Manet, Edouard, 22, 90 Marcel in A la recherché du temps perdu, 252, 255–56 accomplishments of, 12 aesthetic innovation of, 85 and Albertine, 22, 30, 33, 160, 172–73, 190, 193 artistic apprenticeship of, 90, 92, 96–98 awakening of, 111–13 and the bedtime kiss, 25–26, 168 childhood memories of, 91, 113, 178, 191–92, 236 dreams of, 117 experiences of, 22, 25, 57, 94 and his grandmother, 23–25, 29–30, 111–13, 123–27, 160 Japoniste initiation of, 88–99 jealousy of, 7, 9–14, 114, 117, 137–38 and justice, 139

291

mother of, 23, 27, 30, 90, 92, 112–13, 177, 203, 235 narrator of, 18, 22, 29–30, 32, 55, 57–60, 85, 88, 92–93, 95, 112–13, 115–17, 138, 177, 194–95 recollections of, 137 obsessions of, 10–11, 170, 204–6, 210–11, 235 passion of, 31 quest of, 168–69 self-awareness of, 89 self-justification in, 139, 147, 158–60 sexuality of, 179 and Gilberte Swann, 192, 201, 203, 208–9, 235 suffering of, 26, 85 and the telephone, 124–25 world, 32 Maupassant, Guy de, 60 Maurois, André, 39, 48 McLaren, Ottilie, 189 Meditations (Descartes) memory in, 111 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice on perception, 108 Michelangelo, 63 Middlemarch (Eliot), 52, 54, 60 Mill on the Floss, The (Eliot), 40–41, 54–58 Modern Painters (Ruskin), 44, 46 Monet, Claude, 87–88, 90–92 Montesquiou, Robert de 23, 86, 171 Moralists, The (Shaftesbury), 257 Moreau, 87, 90 Mrs. Warren’s Profession (Shaw), 187 Murray, Charles Fairfax, 66, 68

Nahmias, Albert, 204 Nietzsche, 107, 116 Nordlinger, Marie, 86 Norman Conquest of England, The (Thierry), 168–69 Norton, Charles Eliot, 67

292

Index

Occasioned by Sir William Temple’s Late Illness and Recovery (Swift) aesthetic theory in, 257–58 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats), 115 On Beauty and Being Just (Scarry) aesthetic theory in, 248, 259 Othello (Shakespeare), 2 Ozouf, Mona, 197

Pascal, Blaise, 222 “Passing of the Oedipus Complex, The” (Freud), 14–16 Pater, Walter, 5 Paulson, Ronald on aesthetic theory, 244, 250 “Pavanne for a Dead Princess” (Ravel), 110 Peasants into Frenchman (Weber), 185 Pensés (Pascal), 222 Peter, René, 146 Petit, Jacques on avant-texte, 223 Pichon, Yann Le, 99 Place de la madeleine, La (Doubrovsky), 146 Plaisirs et les jours, Les criticism of, 227 theme of inversion in, 25–26, 171 Plato, 107–8 Podro, Michael, 117 Ponge, Francis, 226 Pré, Le (Ponge), 226 Prisonnière, La. See Captive, The Proust, Adrien (father), 165–67 Proust, Mme, née Jeanne-Clemence Weil (mother), 165, 179 death of, 23–27, 29, 146 influence of, 166, 171 Proust, Marcel and aesthetic theory, 244, 251–55, 260 birth of, 165 chronology of, 267–71 criticism of, 7, 29, 139–49, 227

death of, 1, 14, 21, 139, 226, 228 and death of mother, 23–27, 29, 146 George Eliot’s influence on, 39, 41, 43–52, 54–61 ethics of, 20 first person narrative in, 140–45, 169, 181 Flaubert’s influence on, 47–48, 60–61 compared to Freud, 1–3, 5, 12, 14–16 compared to Heidegger, 20, 33–34 illnesses of, 21, 26, 86–88, 171, 193 imaginary world of, 24, 168, 254 insight of, 7 and inversion theories, 2 irony of, 1, 3, 9, 116 use of Japanese aestheticism, 83–103 and jealousy, 1–16 compared to Joyce, 123, 130, 134–35 and memory themes, 251 metaphors of, 16, 253 morality of, 61 mother’s influence of, 166, 171 and new form of temporality, 17 and nostalgia, 105–6, 108, 110–19 notebooks of, 21, 29–30, 55, 60, 177 and philosophy, 20, 113, 174, 178 and psychic time, 18–21, 32–33, 143, 174 and realism, 47, 57 and recollection ability, 165–83 remorse and guilt of, 25 as reviewer, 87 Ruskin’s influence on, 70–73, 76, 78 self-doubt of, 178 and self-justification, 137–49, 157–60 and sexuality, 1–2, 15, 31, 170–71 as social chronicler, 86 compared to Spinoza, 34 compared to Swift, 251, 254–57 and symbolism, 17 as theorist of technological change, 121–30, 134–35 Proust, Robert (brother), 166, 177, 228 Proust and Signs (Deleuze), 111

Index

Pugh, Anthony R., 201–20, 275 on the writing of A la recherché du temps perdu, 201–20

Quine, W.V. “On Simple Theories of a Complex World,” 142

Rabelais, Francois, 19 Ramsden, Maureen A., 221–41, 275 on avant-texte in literature, 221–41 on Jean Santeuil influence on A la recherché du temps perdu, 221–22, 227, 231–38 Ravel, Maurice, 110 Récits (Gide), 145 Remembrance of Things Past. See A la recherché du temps perdu Rembrandt Proust’s essay on, 45–46 Reynolds, Siân, 185–200, 275 on the depiction of women in Proust’s culture, 185–99 Ribot, Théodule and self-justification, 150, 155–57 Riegl, Alois aesthetic theories of, 117–18 Riffaterre, 146 “Robert and the Kid. Mother leaves on a journey,” 27, 177 Robert, Louis de, 209–10, 213 Roberts, Mary-Louise, 188 Rodin, Auguste, 189 Romola (Eliot), 40 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 145, 147 Rousset, Jean, 83 Ruiz, Raul film adaptation of Time Regained, 123 Ruskin, John, 5, 57, 86 influence on Proust, 41, 44, 46–48, 54–55, 57, 70–73, 76, 78 ire of, 55

293

realism of, 44, 46–48 and the reproduction of Botticelli’s Zipporah, 63–73, 76, 78 Sachs, Maurice, 29 “Sainte-Beuve et Balzac” the intelligent reader in, 43 Sandre, Yves, 229–30 Sartre, Jean-Paul on Proust, 143–44 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 2 Scarry, Elaine on aesthetic theory, 244, 248–49, 251–54, 256–57, 259–60 Scenes from Clerical Life (Eliot), 40–41, 44 Schmid, Marion on avant-texte, 223, 228 Schwartz, William Leonard, 86 Sesame and Lilies (Ruskin), 176 “Sur la lecture” preface in, 176–77 Shaftesbury and aesthetic theory, 244–51, 253–54, 257, 260 Shakespeare, William, 2, 19, 26, 139, 252 Shaw, George Bernard, 187, 197 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1 Shklar, Judith, 138 Silas Marner (Eliot), 40–41, 51 Smith, 244, 247, 249 Sodom and Gomorrah. See Sodome et Gomorrhe Sodome et Gomorrhe allusion in, 23 black remorse in, 23, 25 Japanese aesthetics in, 93 Monsieur de Charlus in, 59 profanation of the mother in, 30 self-justification in, 159 sexual inversion in, 23–24 Spatromische (Riegl), 117 Spectator, The (Addison) aesthetics and morality in, 247

294

Spinoza Proust compared to, 34 Stambolian, George, 76 Stansell, Christine, 188 Starr, Gabrielle, 243–65, 275 on aesthetic theory, 243–65 on Proustian aesthetics, 244, 251–55, 260 Stewart, Susan, 105–19, 274 on nostalgia theories in literature, 106–11, 117–8 on Proust’s use of nostalgia in his work, 105–6, 108, 110–19 Sussman, Henry, 83 Swann, Charles in A la recherché du temps perdu, 60, 78, 89, 140, 167, 203, 205–8, 211–12 death of, 113 as dilettante, 71 features of, 32, 172 idolatry of Zipporah-Odette, 70–77, 90 jealously of, 2–7, 9–10, 172–73 marriage of, 191, 203 self-destruction of, 71 Swann, Gilberte in A la recherché du temps perdu, 32, 56, 94, 190, 212, 215 and Marcel, 192, 201, 203–4, 206, 208–10, 235 sexuality of, 114, 170 Swann’s Way in A la recherché du temps perdu, 21, 54, 56, 167 bed-time kiss in, 25–26, 168, 177 childhood memories in, 23, 113, 191 “Combray” in, 89, 96–97, 138–39, 166–69, 177, 181–82, 191, 201, 203 death in, 112–13 image of mother in, 25 Japanese aesthetics in, 94 jealously in, 2–7, 9–10 Mazarin in, 10 narrator in, 55, 76–77, 169 publication of, 17, 27, 78, 229

Index

self-destruction of Swann in, 71 sexuality in, 77 “Swann in Love” in, 71, 76–77, 201, 203, 207 Swann’s relationship with Odette in, 71 Verdurins in, 30, 113 waking and sleeping in, 111–13 Swift, Jonathan and aesthetic theory, 244, 251, 254–58 compared to Proust, 251, 254–57

Tadié, Jean-Yves on avant-texte, 226, 228, 230 Temps retrouvé, Le in A la recherché du temps perdu, 17, 193, 197, 227–28 Monsieur de Charlus in, 59–60 death in, 31 Gilberte in, 56 inner vision in, 58 Japanese aesthetics in, 89, 94 the narrator in, 56, 58 realism in, 57 Theory of Film (Kracauer) on Proust as a theorist of photography, 123 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith) aesthetic theory in, 244 Thierry, Aungustin, 168 Timaeus (Plato), 107 Time Regained, in A la recherché du temps perdu, 32 aesthetic theory in, 23 alteration between love and death in, 22 film adaptation of, 123 moment of illumination in, 180 narrator in, 128–29 technological change in, 123, 128–29 Vinteuil’s sonata in, 123 Tolstoy, Leo, 95, 228 Ton-That, Thanh-Vân on Jean Santeuil, 223, 238 Turing, Alan, 140 Two Paths, The (Ruskin), 44

Index

Ulysses (Joyce) technological change in, 123, 131–35

Vigneron, Robert on the conclusion of Swann’s Way, 202, 213–14 “Villebon Way and the Méséglise Way, The,” 177 Virgil and the Orpheus myth, 121 Vocabulaire de Proust, Le (Brunet), 159 Vuillard, Edouard, 86, 88

Walton, Kendall, 251 Wassenaar, Ingrid, 137–63, 274 on allegory in A la recherché du temps perdu, 137–39 on Proust criticism, 139–49 on the history of self-justification, 149–58

295

on self-justification in A la recherché du temps perdu, 137–49, 157–60 on Proust and self-justification, 137–49, 157–60 Weber, Eugen, 185 Wharton, Edith, 189 What is to be done? (Chernichevsky), 187 Whistler, 87, 89–91, 95, 193 Within a Budding Grove in A la recherché du temps perdu artist Elstir in, 76–78 nostalgia in, 106 Odette’s past revealed in, 76 Miss Sacripant painting in, 76–78 Women of the Left Bank (Benstock), 189 Wordsworth, William, 56

Yearning for Yesterday (Davis), 106 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 99

Zola, Emile, 223