Proust, Photography, and the Time of Life: Ravaisson, Bergson, and Simmel 9781350152229, 9781350152236, 9781350152267, 9781350152243

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Part One Grandmother: Habit, Death, and Photography (Attachment and Detachment)
1 The Double Work of Habit
2 Involuntary Memory and Involuntary Forgetting
3 Survival and Annihilation: The Intermittent Photograph
4 Camera Eyes: The Productive Estrangement of Mechanical Vision
5 The Photographer Is a Stranger: Dégonflage
Part Two Albertine Breaks the Frame
6 Albertine Emerges from a Blurry Photograph
7 Making Memories (Desire Is Photographic)
8 Déja Vu (Bergson)
9 Memory: Bergson versus Freud (and Walter Benjamin)
10 Art and Life: Improvisation
11 The Time of the Latent Image
12 Memory Is a Photographer
13 Photographic Logics and Genres
14 Breaking the Frame: Writing the Time of Life
15 The Desire to Write: The Time of Writing Never Comes
Part Three Odette (and Swann): Social Time, Photography, and Money
16 Swann’s Gift: Class, Money, and Photography
17 The Facialization of Odette
18 The Logic of the Pose
19 The Social Education of the Face
20 Immortal Youth
21 Money
22 Odette and Swann Are Made for Each Other
23 Social Symptoms: Desire and Money (Simmel and Proust)
24 Money, Truth, and Narrative Form
25 The Two Fables of Proust’s Novel
Conclusion
Notes
Works Consulted
Index

Citation preview

Proust, Photography, and the Time of Life

ALSO AVAILABLE AT BLOOMSBURY Félix Ravaisson: Selected Essays, ed. Mark Sinclair Henri Bergson and the Visual Arts: A Philosophy for a New Aesthetic, Paul Atkinson Jean-François Lyotard: The Interviews and Debates, ed. Kiff Bamford Laruelle and Art: The Aesthetics of Non-Philosophy, Jonathan Fardy The Meaning of Life and Death: Ten Classic Thinkers on the Ultimate Question, Michael Hauskeller

Proust, Photography, and the Time of Life Ravaisson, Bergson, and Simmel

Suzanne Guerlac

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Suzanne Guerlac, 2021 Suzanne Guerlac has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Charlotte Daniels Cover image © Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Ville de Chalon-sur-Saône All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Guerlac, Suzanne, 1950- author. Title: Proust, photography and the time of life : Ravaisson, Bergson and Simmel / Suzanne Guerlac. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2020029953 | ISBN 9781350152229 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350152236 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350152243 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350152250 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922. À la recherche du temps perdu. | Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922–Aesthetics. | Time in literature. | Memory in literature. | Photography in literature. Classification: LCC PQ2631.R63 A8143 2020 | DDC 843/.912–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029953 ISBN:

HB: 978-1-3501-5222-9 PB: 978-1-3501-5223-6 ePDF: 978-1-3501-5224-3 eBook: 978-1-3501-5225-0

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Contents

List of Illustrations  vii Acknowledgments  ix Abbreviations  xi

Introduction  1

Part One  Grandmother: Habit, Death, and Photography (Attachment and Detachment)  9 1 The Double Work of Habit  11 2 Involuntary Memory and Involuntary Forgetting  17 3 Survival and Annihilation: The Intermittent Photograph  22 4 Camera Eyes: The Productive Estrangement of Mechanical Vision  31 5 The Photographer Is a Stranger: Dégonflage  41

Part Two  Albertine Breaks the Frame  55 6 Albertine Emerges from a Blurry Photograph  57 7 Making Memories (Desire Is Photographic)  67 8 Déja Vu (Bergson)  72 9 Memory: Bergson versus Freud (and Walter Benjamin)  77

vi

Contents

10 Art and Life: Improvisation  85 11 The Time of the Latent Image  91 12 Memory Is a Photographer  94 13 Photographic Logics and Genres  98 14 Breaking the Frame: Writing the Time of Life  111 15 The Desire to Write: The Time of Writing Never Comes  119

Part Three  Odette (and Swann): Social Time, Photography, and Money  125 16 Swann’s Gift: Class, Money, and Photography  127 17 The Facialization of Odette  137 18 The Logic of the Pose  140 19 The Social Education of the Face  146 20 Immortal Youth  150 21 Money  156 22 Odette and Swann Are Made for Each Other  162 23 Social Symptoms: Desire and Money (Simmel and Proust)  167 24 Money, Truth, and Narrative Form  172 25 The Two Fables of Proust’s Novel  177 Conclusion  180 Notes  202 Works Consulted  220 Index  234

List of Illustrations

1

Edgar Degas, Louise Halévy Reclining, 1895. Open Source (http://www.getty.edu/about/ whatwedo/opencontent.html)  35

2

William Hope, spirit photograph, n.d. Public Domain  36

3

Osip Brik, Aleksandr Rodchenko (detail), 1924 © 2019 Estate of Alexander Rodchenko / UPRAVIS, Moscow / ARS, NY  44

4

Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Cousin “Bichonnade” in Flight, 1905 Photographie J. H. Lartigue © Ministère de la Culture (France), MAP-AAHL  46

5

Léon Gimpel, Les Souverains Belges, 1910 © Collection Société française de photographie (coll. SFP)  50

6

László Moholy-Nagy, Plongée Berlin Radio Tower, 1928 © 2019 Estate of László MoholyNagy / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)  51

7

Léon Gimpel, Page from L’Illustration 3471, September 4, 1909. Open Source (https:// onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/cinfo/ illusfr)  52

8

Anonymous, Photographie tremblée, n.d.  62

9a

 nonymous, Modiste de la rue, from Portes A et fenêtres, 1840 © Bibliothèque Nationale de France  102

viii

9b

List of Illustrations

A  nonymous, Va Julia ! … Va toujours, from Portes et fenêtres, 1840 © Bibliothèque Nationale de France  103

10a  A  nonymous, Au bord de la mer #2. Lauterbrunnen. Vue dans la vallée, around 1900  © Musée Nicéphore Niépce  106 10b  A  nonymous 6, Au bord de la mer, around 1900 © Musée Nicéphore Niépce  106 11

 runo Braquehais, Academic Study No. 6, B 1854 © Bibliothèque Nationale de France  109

12

 merican Journal of Numismatics,1882. Open A Source (https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id= cool.ark:/13960/t19k5jg10&view=1up&seq= 39#(p39))  129

13

André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, Madame Khan (carte de visite), 1858 Image courtesy Bibliothèque Nationale de France  142

14  Arthur Batut, Portrait-type obtenu avec 10 jeunes filles d’Arles, 1887 © Coll Espace photographique Arthur Batut / Archives Départementales du Tarn  144 15

Anonymous daguerreotype, n.d  152

16

J ules Marey, Cigogne en vol, 1882 © Bibliothèque Nationale de France  194

17

J ules Marey, Movements in Pole Vaulting (1885–1895) © Museum of Fine Arts, Houston  195

18

 nton Giulio Bragaglia, Change of Position, A 1911 © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome  198

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank UC Berkeley for supporting this project through UC Humanities Research Grants and also a Bridge Grant, offered through the Townsend Center. I would like to thank the George Eastman House, the Musée Nicéphore-Nièpce, and the Société française de photographie for providing extraordinary resources for my research, as well as ITEM (CNRS/ENS) Equipe Proust, with special thanks to Pyra Wise for her generous assistance. I am grateful for the opportunities I had to share my work as this book was in progress: thanks to Christie McDonald, François Proulx, Patrick Bray, Kathrin Yacavone, and all those who hosted me at Stanford, Oxford, and Brown universities, as well as SUNY Buffalo and Pomona College—I learned a lot on each occasion. I thank a number of friends and colleagues who have supported my work: the late Derek Yeld, who started the whole thing when he gave me the one-volume edition of the Recherche to keep me busy when my other research materials had not yet followed me to the South of France for my sabbatical year; the late Michael Sheringham, who made my invitation to Oxford memorable by hosting me ceremoniously at All Soul’s College; Anne Simon, who generously read my work; and Izidora Lethe, for her advice on visual matters. I warmly thank James Meyer, for carefully reading and responding to my work in progress on more than one occasion, and colleagues at UC Berkeley who supported this project in various ways: Judith Butler, Pheng Cheah, Eglantine Colon, and Michael Lucey. I reserve very special thanks for my colleague Elizabeth Abel, who took time to patiently read and discuss an early and awkward version of this manuscript and gave me much needed encouragement. Thank you for your generosity. I thank the graduate students at Berkeley who read Proust with me and challenged me and my undergraduate students, whose fascination with Proust surprised me

x

Acknowledgments

and convinced me that this book was, indeed, worth doing. Thanks also to Sokrat Postoli, Patrick Lyons, Anitra Grisales, and Cathy Hannabach for their invaluable editorial and technical assistance that made this book possible. I am deeply grateful to my editors at Bloomsbury for their commitment to this project and for seeing it through with great care. You have been a pleasure to work with. Finally, Stephen, thank you beyond words.

Abbreviations

All citations from Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) in English translation come from the Penguin Books edition, whose general editor was Christopher Prendergast. Swann’s Way was translated by Lydia Davis, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by James Grieve, The Prisoner and The Fugitive by Carol Clark and Peter Collier, respectively, and Finding Time Again by Ian Patterson. I have used the following abbreviations: F FTA GW GWII P SG SW SYG

refers to The Fugitive refers to Finding Time Again refers to The Guermantes Way I refers to The Guermantes Way II refers to The Prisoner refers to Sodom and Gomorrah refers to Swann’s Way refers to In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

xii

Introduction

Proust’s famous novel has been subjected to aesthetic capture for the last hundred years. À la recherche du temps perdu has been taken both to exemplify and to be principally about the powers of art. It is read as a vocation story—“Marcel becomes a writer”—that hinges on involuntary memory as the aesthetic instrument that makes both Marcel’s literary vocation and Proust’s art possible.1 Proust becomes a writer of enchantment: art redeems life, transmuting the dross of lived experience—disappointment, delay, repetition, and loss—into essences, glimmering truths held before the reader thanks to the bracing powers of reminiscence and the transmuting virtuosity of style. It is an old story, but a remarkably tenacious one, and it lurks even in interpretations that, at first glance, appear to reject it. The monumental myth of Proust’s work as a novel of artistic creation will retain its power until other Prousts are offered in its place. My ambition is to propose one here, fully aware that there can be no last word when it comes to Proust. “Only the impression,” Proust’s Narrator insists, “is a criterium of truth” (FTA 188, translation modified). Instead of taking Proustian impressions as effects of consciousness or language, I consider them photographically, as imprintings of light and so of time.2 It took a celebrated photographer, Brassai, to bring the scope and depth of Proust’s preoccupation with photography to our attention.3 I am interested in what photography can teach us about time in the Recherche and how it opens Proust’s novel out onto the world. Instead of being relegated to the rhetorical space of text, or situated in the dead time of remembrance (the stuff that art will transfigure into transcendental essences), impressions will introduce us into the time that marks us as it passes, as light might hit a photographic plate.

2

Proust, Photography, and the Time of Life

To approach Proust’s novel in this way is, from the start, to replace a framework of transcendence with one of immanence—“photography discloses the fundamental materiality of that formerly spiritual art of vision.”4 It is in this sense that photography can be said to have “changed most manners of seeing [and] feeling” at the turn of the twentieth century and to have brought about “a revision of all the values of visual knowledge,” modifying our very ways of seeing.5 In the spirit of Fox Talbot, who evokes the “mere action of light upon sensitive paper,” we might borrow Théophile Gautier’s phrase and speak of the “real touch [la touche réelle]” of Proustian impressions, which we consider as a touch of time.6 What is at stake here is not only contact but contact with time as it inflects our sense of the real. We consider photography a time art. This is not because it unfolds in time as music does, or cinema, but because time is the material of photography—its very substance.7 To read Proustian impressions photographically is to consider time’s difference from itself in the movement of becoming.8 In Proust’s novel, impressions cut into time photographically, yielding a force of “will have been past” that alters the present as it emerges narratively.9 To speak of Proustian impressions in this way is to invoke a variety of photographic processes and histories (as well as prehistories) that include the daguerreotype, the art photograph, pictorialism, the snapshot, commercial photography, pornography, recreational photography, and photojournalism—all of which are at play in the Recherche. It does not imply objectivity. On the contrary, as we shall see, Proust uses photography to problematize identity and recognition; to interrupt any smooth passage between sensory experience and stable meaning; and, perhaps most importantly, to affirm the time of anachronism—the difference, we could say, of time from itself in lived experience—and the objectifications of desire. Proust writes that memory is a photographer. His Narrator affirms that impressions are double; they exist both in the external world and in the subject who experiences them. They are received and live on as mental images, engendering an experience of things “real without being actually present, and ideal without being abstract” (FTA 181)— an experience very much like that of looking at photographs. Proust remains fundamentally suspicious of abstraction. His Narrator rejects writing that is not “loaded with reality [chargée de réalité]” (FTA 171, translation modified) and insists on contact with the (fictive) real that

Introduction

3

arrives in the flow of time. In the Recherche, visual impressions (fictively experienced) return as memory images that affect desire and alter the course of the narrative. Images animate desire and stimulate jealousy, and in so doing, they prompt turns in the novel’s plot. This means that Proust’s narrative is not so much an architecture (as Proust once claimed, to cajole his editor, Jacques Rivière) as a fictional construction that tends, at moments, toward improvisation.10 Proust’s narrative gives us the passage of time as it is lived by our first-person narrator through rhythms of surprise, remembering, forgetting, anticipating, and inventing that advance by moving forward and back across dynamic layers of time—in other words it presents to us “an individual’s possibilities,” as they “var[y] with the moment.”11 What about enchantment? Of course there is evidence to support the idealist interpretation of Proust’s novel; this is why it has so stubbornly persisted. But this evidence lies almost exclusively in the novel’s frame, not in the narrative itself. We find it in the celebrated madeleine episode of Combray, which introduces the workings of involuntary memory, and in Finding Time Again, where Proust stages a number of involuntary memory episodes that ostensibly shore up our Hero’s determination to become a writer. Taken together, these passages theorize the workings of involuntary memory and sketch the outlines of the vocation story that turns the Recherche into a bildungsroman: Marcel finds his place in society as the author of a novel about transcending life through art—the novel, as modernist critics would have it, that we have just read.12 But these passages, distributed across Combray and Finding Time Again, were composed concurrently when Proust first began to write his novel. As Antoine Compagnon explains, “from 1909–1911… Time Regained was integrated into Combray; the last chapter existed virtually [en puissance] in the first.”13 Combray and Time Regained were initially one. It was a brilliant move on Proust’s part to subsequently withhold crucial material from Combray and place it at the end of the novel he had only begun to write, before the Albertine story had even been envisaged.14 This decision gave him total freedom over the twenty-year period that he wrote what would become a 2,000-page work, enabling him to utterly transform the character of his novel as he went along, to introduce Albertine into it and to place her at its center. It made possible a literary space of contingency. Or perhaps we should say that it was a brilliant move to place the passages withheld from his first chapter in

4

Proust, Photography, and the Time of Life

lieu of an ending to his novel. For Finding Time Again cannot be said to conclude the vast work that Proust’s novel becomes, at least not in the usual sense in which an ending is said to constrain the action that leads up to it, and to resolve this action. As Jacques Rancière put it, the Recherche simply “defers… a truth that has always already been given by the poetics of impression.”15 This being the case, one wonders how the “ending” of this novel can continue to exert such interpretive authority. For Proust never stopped adding to the body of the novel held within its frame. He was projecting significant new narrative developments at the time of his death.16 His massive novel, in other words, is an unfinished work.17 Proust, Photography, and the Time of Life brackets the novel’s frame and examines what happens within it. Proust’s narrative gets fully under way once we leave Combray and return from the detour of Swann in Love, written in the third person. From here on, what matters most is not the time of remembrance but time as it happens. We hear very little about “involuntary memory” between Combray and Finding Time Again. The task of the narrative Proust launches in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is to present the fictive experiences that produce the memories Proust’s Narrator alludes to retrospectively, in his sleepy state, in the opening pages of the novel. This narrative presents the challenges—the pleasures and pains, the gains and losses, the misprisions, returns, inventions, anticipations, self-deceptions, and exhilarations—of living in time at a particular historical period: from the establishment of the Third Republic to the aftermath of the First World War, passing through world fairs, the Dreyfus Affair, and the Panama Scandal, as well as war. The concrete passing of time, on both the individual and the collective (or historical) level, not only drives this novel but, in all its concreteness, is its very subject. To attend to the forward movement of the Recherche, we need to examine narrative developments as well as impressions. Proust, Photography, and the Time of Life follows the stories of three characters as they move through the novel—three women: the Grandmother (Part I), Albertine (Part II), and Odette (Part III). The Grandmother was Marcel’s one great love, Roland Barthes claimed.18 Albertine, as Proust will eventually acknowledge, becomes the very center of his novel. And Odette is the one character that graces the novel with her presence

Introduction

5

from start to finish. It is in connection with these three women that Proust introduces photographic episodes of major importance. Proust’s characters are notoriously full of surprises—frequently changing color and reversing course. Traveling with them through the many volumes of the Recherche holds certain advantages. For one thing, it keeps the scale of Proust’s novel consistently in view, not only the number of pages it contains but, more importantly, the temporal reach and texture of the stories it tells. Tracking these characters as they move through the novel lets us feel the force of time as it passes. It foregrounds the experience of time as “embodied time” (FTA 356), or life time, exposing anachronism, temporal layers, and rhythms that might otherwise go unnoticed. What is more, cutting through the novel in this way draws attention to the telling of the stories told, including the breaks between narration and digressive commentary that open out, occasionally, onto moments of narrative improvisation—writerly engagements with the time of becoming. Following the careers of individual characters as they careen through the Recherche (instead of turning the novel into a timeless space of text to conveniently dip in and out of) keeps us focused on the movingness of the novel, in both senses of the term. Tracking these stories through the photographic elements they put into play foregrounds rhythms of time, qualities of attention, events of apparition, and times of development. It also discloses relations between individual time and social time within the novel. In each of these three parts, our reading appeals to a philosophical interlocutor to help us grasp the implications of specific temporal dynamics that photographic features reveal. In each case this involves a philosopher of life whose work was influential during Proust’s lifetime. In Part I, our engagement with the photographic portrait of the Grandmother encounters Félix Ravaisson’s reflections on habit. His famous study De L’habitude (Of Habit) (1894) theorizes habit as a strategy for coping with time, that is with the ongoing temporal dynamics of becoming past and becoming present. When Ravaisson’s temporal ontology informs our reading, we see that Proust rewrites Ravaisson’s double law of habit as a narrative dynamic of attachment and detachment. This operates throughout the Recherche, marking the difference of time from itself in lived experience, which is both the principal concern—and structure— of Proust’s novel.

6

Proust, Photography, and the Time of Life

In Part II, we examine desire and the vicissitudes of love through Albertine, who, as we shall see, emerges from a blurry snapshot. It is in connection with her that Proust’s Narrator characterizes memory as a photographer. This metaphor swivels our conception of memory from the retrospective perspective of memory retrieval Proust set up in Combray to the forward-looking perspective of memory production as it occurs narratively in the course of (fictive) experience. To elaborate this point further, we turn to the theory of memory production Henri Bergson presents in his 1908 essay “Le Souvenir du présent et la fausse reconnaissance (The memory of the present and false recognition),” a study of the phenomenon known as déjà vu that complements the theory of memory he advances in Matière et mémoire and aligns with the ontology of time as invention he presents in L’Evolution créatrice. Reading Proust from the perspective of Bergson’s radical ontology of time redirects our attention away from melancholy, recollection, and disenchantment toward the vitality of living in time that Proust presents to us in the many volumes of the Recherche. In Part III, which principally concerns Odette (though Swann comes into the picture too), our point of departure is the giant photograph of coins that Swann offers the Guermantes as a gift at the end of The Guermantes Way II. Our principal interlocutor here is Georg Simmel, whose Philosophy of Money (1900) supports an allegorical reading of Odette as a figure of money and invites us to consider the Recherche from the perspective of Simmel’s theory of modernity in lieu of Walter Benjamin’s aesthetic modernity of shock. Thanks to Simmel, we discover that the logic of desire we find in the Recherche is a social phenomenon, a symptom of the historical modernity of money. Through Simmel it becomes possible to reconcile the two principal layers of Proust’s novel: the individual story of Marcel/the Narrator and the collective story of social transformation. Just as importantly, for our concerns, Simmel’s philosophy of money belongs to the broader framework of a philosophy of life in which Simmel, like Ravaisson and Bergson, affirms an ontology of time. Echoing Bergson, Simmel affirms that “time is real only for life alone.”19 He adds that time becomes “unreal” only when “past, present, and future are separated with conceptual precision” by the grammatical tenses of language.20 In the Recherche, it is precisely by blurring the “conceptual precision” of these limits that Proust gives us the time of life. Photography is an instrument of this blurring (as we see in connection

Introduction

7

with the blurry snapshot of Albertine) which also occurs on the level of the Proustian sentence: Malcolm Bowie calls our attention to “the backwash of the present into the past and the irresistible encroachment of an unquiet past into the onwards flow of present time.”21 Ravaisson, Bergson, and Simmel were in dialogue with one another during Proust’s lifetime. Bergson, who replaced Ravaisson at the Collège de France, presents an official homage to his predecessor. A collegial relationship also existed between Bergson and Simmel, who oversaw the translation of each other’s works into German and French, respectively, until the First World War interrupted their association. The three philosophers present distinct versions of a philosophy of life whose common feature is an ontology of time. Bergson writes that one does not accede to the absolute by escaping from time but rather by moving more deeply into it. This is what Proust invites us to do in the Recherche. Life, in Proust’s novel, is not a scene of disenchantment—of dulling repetition—to be transcended by art. Art—or at least Proust’s art—does not imply a transcendence of time. In Proust’s fictive world, as in Simmel, life is time passing. Proust makes his art out of this, not out of time recollected and transmuted. In the Recherche, art and life are intertwined according to Simmel’s imperative of “more-life,” which for Proust also meant more writing (VL 13).22 Proust left us a massive unfinished work, interrupted by his death. To go on writing his novel, freely inventing within its enabling frame, was perhaps Proust’s most compelling and direct engagement with time.

8

PART ONE

Grandmother: Habit, Death, and Photography (Attachment and Detachment)

10

Chapter 1 The Double Work of Habit

The Grandmother is the character who dies in the Recherche. Unlike the many reported deaths in the novel—of Albertine, for example, and Swann, and all those whose passing Charlus intones in Finding Time Again, “Hannibal de Bréauté, dead! Antoine de Mouchy, dead! Charles Swann, dead! Adalbert de Montmorency, dead! Boson de Talleyrand, dead! Sosthène de Doudeauville, dead!” (FTA 171)—the Grandmother’s death is a major story event that falls smack in the middle of Proust’s novel (the first chapter of The Guermantes Way II). Her dying takes time. Proust draws out its telling over almost forty pages in one of the novel’s longest uninterrupted narrative sequences, one that bridges The Guermantes Way I and II with exceptional continuity on the level of story. The Grandmother dies slowly and, in a sense (as we shall see), more than once. Proust will turn to photography to write the long duration of her dying, which, as the reader eventually discerns, extends throughout most of the novel’s story time up to the point where the focus shifts definitively to Albertine in The Prisoner. But what happens to our Narrator as the Grandmother dies? His voice becomes strangely muted. His sentences become noticeably shorter and his style turns icy. The tone is not so much grave (at moments it is darkly comic) as coldly precise. And what happens to our Hero, Marcel? He seems to fade into the background after the first paragraph of this chapter, when, trying to get his Grandmother home from the Champs-Élysées after her stroke, he experiences a deep and abstract loneliness: I had always been accustomed to placing myself in her heart… but now she was a closed book for me, a part of the external world, and I was obliged to hide from her… what I thought about her state of health, and to betray no sign of my anxiety. I could not have

12

Proust, Photography, and the Time of Life

mentioned it to her with any more confidence than to a stranger. She had suddenly restored to my keeping the thoughts, the sorrows that I had entrusted to her forever, since I was a child. She was not yet dead. But I was already alone. (GW 309, translation modified) The chapter opens with this transitional moment—the Grandmother not yet dead, Marcel already alone. Mme Amédée will die some forty pages later. The next chapter opens on a quite different note: “Although it was simply a Sunday in autumn, I had just been reborn… a change in the weather is enough to create the world and ourselves afresh” (GWII 342). It is a new day. Marcel cheerfully turns his attention to the social world of the Guermantes. There will be no further mention of the Grandmother until an involuntary memory image brings her lively presence back to him many, many pages later, in Sodom and Gomorrah. “There was only one love affair in the Recherche,” Roland Barthes famously declared, “that of Marcel and his Grandmother.”1 Marcel’s apparent detachment immediately following her death is puzzling, given his extravagant love for her. A background figure who walks in the garden in Combray and a traveling companion to Balbec (where she is also a source of minor embarrassment at the Grand-Hôtel), she provides indispensable comfort during Marcel’s nighttime anxieties and illnesses. Mme Amédée is simply there in Marcel’s world—like the weather: But as for my grandmother, in all weathers, even in a downpour…, we would see her in the empty rain-lashed garden, pushing back her disordered gray locks so that her forehead could more freely drink in the salubriousness of the wind and rain. She would say: “At last, one can breathe!’ and would roam the soaked paths. (SW 11) She is breath, rain, and wind to Marcel’s confinement and asthmatic suffering. Her gaze is without irony. If she remains a somewhat hazy character (her face usually half veiled), it is because Marcel has not quite distinguished himself from her—“I, for whom my grandmother was still myself—I who had only seen her with my soul” (GW 135). She serves as Marcel’s container: he places his thoughts and feelings in her. Unable to hold these any longer at the moment of her stroke, she releases them back to him as a gap opens up between life and death: “She was not yet dead. But I was already alone” (GW 309).

Grandmother: Habit, Death, and Photography

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To understand Marcel’s reaction—or apparent lack of reaction—to his Grandmother’s death, we have to go all the way back to the first night Marcel spends in the Grand-Hôtel on his initial visit to Balbec in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. He and his Grandmother have traveled together by train from Paris. Upon their arrival at the hotel, Marcel announces he is not feeling well and might need to return to Paris immediately. As his Grandmother heads out to do some errands (in case they have to head right back home), Marcel takes the elevator up to his room. Feverish and “feeling exhausted” (SYG 245), he is nevertheless unable to rest. He panics. Grandmother eventually arrives and comforts him; she unlaces his boots to help him get ready for bed and gazes up at him tenderly. This event will return as a powerful involuntary memory image in Sodom and Gomorrah, a memory that will prompt Marcel to finally accept the reality of his Grandmother’s death, almost a year after her passing, and enable him, belatedly, to mourn her. The panic Marcel experienced in the hotel room that night was not simply an effect of his chronic asthma—his gasping for air—although that was part of it; it was also, the Narrator tells us, a response to the idea of death, a way of feeling it. The unfamiliar space of the hotel room makes Marcel anxious because its sheer newness implies separation. Marcel becomes aware that those we love will die one day, and, worse yet, we will eventually forget them and feel only indifference toward them. Familiarity, Proust’s Narrator suggests here in a lengthy and complex digression, is not so much a question of knowing (connaître) one’s surroundings as it is a matter of feeling known (connu) by them. This occurs when things seem to let themselves become part of us by moving inside us. At home, the familiar objects of Marcel’s daily life had become “nothing but accessories of my own organs, extensions of myself” (SYG 246). In the unfamiliar setting of the hotel room, however, objects remain resolutely external. Our Hero’s whole being is reduced to a “vigilant body [corps conscient]” (SYG 245, translation modified) that struggles to absorb the impressions that bombard him from the outside. Our Hero imagines himself perceived by the objects in the room, as by a stranger. “In that room of mine at Balbec, ‘mine’ in name only, there was no space for me: it was crammed with things which did not know me” (SYG 245). In the unfamiliar hotel room he feels aggressively crowded out by the sensory impressions of things, but

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“[a]s our attention furnishes a room, so habit unfurnishes it, making space in it for us” (SYG 245). In other words, habit helps us interiorize the objects of the external world so we can make space for ourselves, peacefully, within it. Marcel experiences a violence of unfamiliarity in that hotel room. Adapting to change becomes a matter of life or death: “Deprived of my universe, evicted from my room, I… wished I could die” (SYG 246). It is in connection with this anxiety about death (and desire for it) that Proust’s Narrator explains what he calls “the analgesia of habit” (SYG 250), its power to defend against the disconcerting impact of the new and the idea of death it carries. Habit engenders the comfort of familiarity that protects us from change by tying us to the past. As it does so, however, it erodes desire and flattens experience, inducing boredom or disappointment. As Beckett’s famous essay on Proust convincingly argued, this mechanistic understanding of habit supports a traditional interpretation of the Recherche according to which, because life dulls and disappoints, it needs art to redeem it.2 But the analgesia of habit works in two ways; habit, Proust’s Narrator explains, is a “double work [œuvre double]” (SYG 251, translation modified). Here Proust repeats the language of Félix Ravaisson (1813– 1900), who theorizes a “double law” of habit from the perspective of a philosophy of life and an ontology of time. This “double law” of habit follows from the two moments of passing time: present time becoming past, and future time becoming present. It corresponds to what Ravaisson calls the “double influence simply of the duration of change.”3 In time, he writes (alluding to Kant’s transcendental esthetic), “everything passes, nothing remains [demeure].”4 Habit concerns “the force of impressions,” as they pertain to our receptivity, our action, and our desire, which is to say as they pertain to intensity, understood as “degree of reality.”5 As a dual operation, then, habit is specific to living beings, as distinct from inorganic things; it accords with the structure of intermittence that, as the physiologist Xavier Bichat affirmed, characterizes animal life.6 If habit is a “double work” (SYG 251, translation modified), then mechanical repetition is only one side of it, the one that sticks us to the past to defend familiarity. As a dual operation, it involves both holding on to the past (through a repetition of attachment) and breaking with the past, in order to embrace the new as it arrives from the future. This

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other side of habit, we could say, is affirmatively analgesic (affirmative in Nietzsche’s sense); it supports us in adapting to change by making us forget past attachments, wrenching memories from the heart.7 In adapting to the new, Proust writes, we undergo “a death of our self, albeit followed by a resurrection, but a resurrection in the form of a different self” (SYG 250). This modality of habit invites death to operate within us through involuntary forgetting, “stripping off bits of us at every moment, which have no sooner mortified than new cells begin to grow” (SYG 250). It involves a process of “fragmentary death [mort fragmentaire] which attends to us throughout the duration of our lives [durée]” (SYG 250, translation modified). As an affirmative operation, then, habit alters the very structure of experience in Proust’s novel, rendering it fundamentally discontinuous. It produces its “analgesic effect” only through an automatic forgetting that leads to indifference. This explains Marcel’s apparent equanimity during the long episode that recounts the death of his Grandmother. It accounts for his cheerful energy immediately after her death, and the belatedness of his mourning. The self that had felt deeply attached to Grandmother (the self that still lived in the childlike modality of croyance—faith or trust) has died with her. Marcel is reborn as the social self we witness in The Guermantes Way II, which emerges with disconcerting suddenness after Mme Amédée’s death. To this new self, Grandmother’s death has very little meaning, because this Marcel comes into being with her death—we might even say this self is called into being by it. It is the affirmative modality of habit, then, that accounts for what Marcel will retrospectively refer to as the “forgetting of my grandmother” (SG 158, translation modified) that persists for over a thousand pages of Proust’s novel, that is, until the involuntary memory image of her tender presence breaks through the automatic forgetting imposed by habit and prompts an intense experience of mourning. The law of habit announces that the death of those we love leads to indifference. Ravaisson had affirmed this view, as did Xavier Bichat. This is a fundamental axiom of Proust’s most unsentimental novel. It governs Marcel’s immediate response to his Grandmother’s death, and, eventually, his response to the death of Albertine, the next object of his fierce attachment. Habit, then, on Proust’s analysis, involves a double work of life and death, such that “first death, then a new life would have done their dual work at the behest of Habit” (SYG 251).

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Living includes dying. This is the structure of intermittences du cœur, which introduces a temporality of discontinuous series into Proust’s novel, one that dislocates chronological progress, proposing instead “different and parallel series in time—without any break in continuity” (SG 156). This is the temporality of Proust’s novel—the time of death in life, of anachronism, and of intermittences du cœur—and it will guide our reading. To focus exclusively on the repetitive side of habit (the one that glues us to the past) is to construe time as a fixed horizon of Baudelairean ennui, which triggers a yearning to escape into an ideal world of essences. It is to miss Proust’s investment in the vitality of time. If habit is important to Proust, it is because, as Félix Ravaisson made clear, it concerns strategies for coping with time as it happens. What becomes present arrives from the future and is already on its way to becoming past. Living in time is the principal subject of Proust’s novel, and its dynamics dictate the novel’s form. Both Ravaisson and Proust appreciate that the challenge we face is not to escape time (in the wake of Kantian philosophy) but to enter more fully into it.8 Negotiating the dynamics of lived time requires both attachment and detachment—this is the lesson of the double law of habit.

Chapter 2 Involuntary Memory and Involuntary Forgetting

The hotel room scene in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower does not end when the Grandmother comforts Marcel, gazing at him tenderly as she helps him remove his boots. As soon as she leaves, Marcel begins to suffer again. In a densely packed digression, Proust’s Narrator offers an acute analysis of this suffering, one that confirms that habit concerns the passing of time and reveals that Proust transposes the double law of habit into the novelistic narrative register of dynamics of attachment and detachment: The trepidation that overwhelmed me at the prospect of sleeping in an unfamiliar bedroom… may be nothing more than the lowliest, most obscure, organic, and all-but-unconscious mode of the supreme and desperate refusal, by the things that make up the best of our present life, to countenance even our theoretical acceptance of a possible future without them: a refusal which was the core of the horror I had so often felt at the thought that my parents would one day be dead,… a refusal which lurked beneath the difficulty I found in trying to think about my own death or even the kind of afterlife promised by Bergotte in his books, in which there would be no place for my memories, my defects, my very character, all of which found unconscionable the idea of their own nonexistence and hoped on my behalf that I was fated neither to unbeing nor to an everlasting life that would abolish them. (SYG 249, my emphasis)

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This is an extraordinary sentence. It speaks from the vantage point of things—things that have moved inside a subject and feel threatened with annihilation because of the passage of time. These things have moved inside our Narrator/Protagonist thanks to the work of habit (the habit of repetition), which has rendered them familiar to him. The familiar objects to which he has grown attached—memories, loved ones, even his own defects of character, and, indeed, all the concrete features of his lived experience—convey, through Marcel’s panic, their refusal to submit to becoming past. Proust’s complicated sentence suggests that when these things rebel against change—against a future that would dispense with them—we experience their rebellion as our suffering. This passage reveals that this face of habit concerns change—or the passage of time—as it affects attachment. What it also states clearly, however, in the last words of this long sentence is that the Narrator does not consider flight into a realm of essences—an “everlasting life” that would efface the singularities of “my defects, my very character”—a desirable solution to the challenges of living in time. Nor, as we hope to demonstrate, is it a satisfactory way to make sense of Proust’s novel. Ravaisson elaborates what he calls the “double work” of habit philosophically in relation to intensity of impressions, time, being, receptivity, spontaneity, inertia, desire, and effort. In the Recherche, Proust trans­ poses this “double work” into terms that better accommodate narrative development. As we have just seen, habit engenders suffering in the face of the new and unfamiliar in response to pressures of attachment; it cures this suffering through a brutal detachment that makes new attachments possible. “Reason was aware that habit (which was going to set about making me like these unknown quarters… ) also… makes hearts grow fonder” (SYG 249–50), our Narrator remarks of Marcel’s experience in the hotel room. And he continues: The anguish and alarm I felt when lying beneath a ceiling that was unknown and too high was nothing but the protest of my surviving attachment to a ceiling that was known and lower. No doubt that attachment would end and be replaced by another… but until that end, this attachment would suffer every evening… in revolt against being confronted with a future which had already taken shape, in which there was no role for it. (SYG 250–1, my emphasis)

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But this side of habit makes new attachments possible only by triggering forgetting: “This liking for new places and people is of course worked into our forgetting of older ones… [T]he promise of forgetting which it held out, though intended as a consolation, was heartbreaking” (SYG 250). Suffering in the face of change continues until forgetting takes place—“Not that the heart does not also benefit, once such a divorce is consummated, from the analgesia of habit; but until that time comes, it goes on suffering without letup” (SYG 250). Eventually habit produces an “analgesic effect” by engendering a feeling of indifference with respect to the past; this indifference makes room for new attachments directed toward an anticipated future. It produces this indifference thanks to a “cruel” work of automatic forgetting which transforms one’s very self. The fear of a future deprived of the faces and voices of those we love, those who today give us our dearest happiness, rather than diminishing, may in fact be made worse by the thought that the pain of this deprivation is to be compounded by something which at the moment seems even more unbearable—our no longer being affected by it as a pain, but being indifferent to it—for that would mean our actual self had changed, and not just that we had lost the delight in our parents’ presence, the charm of a mistress, the warmth of a friend; it would mean that our affection for them had been so utterly obliterated from our heart, of which it is an integral part today, that we would be able to take pleasure in a life spent without them, horrible though that seems at present; it would amount to a death of our self, albeit followed by a resurrection, but a resurrection in the form of a different self, whose love will remain forever beyond the reach of those parts of the former self that have gone down to death. (SYG 250, my emphasis) The work of habit that prompts “a death of one’s self,” a death that is followed by a resurrection “in the form of a different self” (SYG 250), explains why Marcel appears to go cold in the episode of his Grandmother’s death. But the passages we have just cited also explain that detachment, which is heartbreaking, is necessary for joy, the joy that will be taken in new places and people, thanks to the formation of new attachments. This suggests not only that experience is discontinuous in Proust’s novel (folded, or interrupted, by forgetting)

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but that a dynamic tension exists between past and future on the affective level. What matters is not an aesthetic recuperation of lost time and its transmutation into essences but an ongoing dynamic structure of living in time, as it happens, that includes tensions between attachment and detachment and the heartbreak and joy associated with them. Habit is a temporal issue, not only as repetition but also, and more importantly, because this tension between heartbreak and joy concerns tensions produced by the present becoming past and the future becoming present. Proust rewrites the double law of habit as a play of attachment/detachment that includes a double work of life and death. Living includes dying. Proust reads Ravaisson’s theory through a European tradition of reflection on death as a force of transformation within life. It is at once a literary tradition (Barrès and Rilke figure here, among others), a philosophical tradition (Nietzsche and subsequently Paul Ricoeur), as well as the scientific one that proposes intermittence as an existential structure of animal life.9 In Proust’s novel, habit meets up with intermittence in that hotel room in Balbec. To articulate these terms, Proust transmutes Ravaisson’s philosophy of habit into dynamics of attachment/detachment and Bichat’s physiological term “intermittence” into “intermittences du coeur [intermittences of the heart, my emphasis],” a theme so central to Proust’s work that he initially proposed it as the title of his novel, when the work consisted of just three parts: Swann’s Way, The Guermantes Way, and Finding Time Again. It would be a mistake to take intermittences of the heart as a trivialization of Bichat’s scientific term. It is not to be understood as a psychological structure specific to our eccentric and high-strung protagonist. More than a mere symptom of inconstancy, fin de siècle moral failing, or aestheticism, it suggests a general law, an existential structure that meets up with the double law of habit. Proust turns Bichat’s physiological term into a structure of being, a lived, affective dynamic that operates according to Ravaisson’s logic of habit as it pertains to time as change. Habit, which runs through Proust’s novel from start to finish, operating through stories of joy and sorrow, reveals the intimate relation that exists between the involuntary forgetting it imposes in its work of detachment and what Proust calls involuntary memory. Indeed, the passages we have cited not only reveal that habit imposes forgetting; they suggest that this forgetting makes possible—or even requires—involuntary

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memory, a structure of experience Proust’s Narrator introduces in the famous madeleine episode of Combray. The specific virtue of involuntary memory, as Proust’s Narrator presents it there, depends upon a forgetting that safeguards the freshness, or specific vitality, of certain impressions, enabling them to return in their full affective and sensory force, when and if they do return, prompted by a chance encounter or reenactment. This is what ostensibly gives involuntary memory its aesthetic power. In other words, forgetting defends memory impressions against the two vitiating forces of abstraction and conventionality that are at work when an impression is transferred from the register of experience to the register of meaning. This is precisely what “voluntary” memory—the memory of intelligence—does. Forgetting protects the concrete, singular impressions of lived experience from becoming dulled, flattened, distorted, or rendered conventional through repetition. We could say that involuntary forgetting, associated with what we have called the affirmative face of habit, protects memory impressions from the effects of the other side of habit, the repetition associated with attachment that ties us to the past, blocking new experience and reducing the singularity of events to a dull sameness of meaning. In the Recherche, habit concerns the passage of time and the affective dynamics associated with it. It plays out through rhythms of remembering and forgetting, which, like the oscillation between sleep and wakefulness that Proust stages in the very opening paragraphs of his novel, implies intermittence. The play of memory and forgetting dictates not only the discontinuous identities of Proust’s characters— famously scattered subjects whose behavior is quite unpredictable— but also the form of Proust’s novel.10 The dynamics of intermittence, amplified through the various rhythms, or phases, of forgetting and remembering, are incompatible with a continuous narrative that would proceed according to chronological time. They solicit a form made up of temporal layers that dislocate steady narrative succession, as if “there were, in time, different and parallel series—without any break in continuity” (SG 156). This is the temporality of Proust’s novel, whose fundamental feature is anachronism.

Chapter 3 Survival and Annihilation: The Intermittent Photograph

A year after Mme Amédée’s death (we are in Sodom and Gomorrah), Marcel finds himself once again in a room at the Grand-Hôtel of Balbec, once again alone, feverish, and overcome with fatigue. As he bends down to unlace his boots, he sees his Grandmother’s face in his mind’s eye, alive and tender, just as it had appeared to him on his first visit to Balbec when they had traveled there together. This celebrated scene is the most fully narrated episode of involuntary memory in Proust’s novel. But in between these two events—his Grandmother looking up at him sweetly in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower during his panic attack and the spontaneous return of this image—she has died. When her tender gaze flashes before him in Sodom and Gomorrah, she has been dead for over a year. Marcel has not yet registered her loss in his feelings, however; he has simply forgotten about her. Now he finally feels her death and mourns her. Proust’s Narrator defines anachronism as a temporal disjunction between the time an event occurs and the time of feeling it. This episode in Sodom and Gomorrah is Proust’s most vivid narrative treatment of this structure that governs the Recherche as a whole, thanks to the double work of habit and its associated rhythms of forgetting and remembering that occur within the discontinuous (or intermittent) identities of our Hero, who is also our Narrator. This episode reveals that what the Narrator calls involuntary memory in Combray does not pertain solely to the vocation story (or to aesthetics), as the Narrator’s comments in

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Combray and in Finding Time Again have led readers to believe. Its effects are not limited to launching the narrative of the novel (when “all of Combray… emerged… from [the Narrator’s] cup of tea” (SW 48), to providing data to memory, or to enabling Marcel to finally commit to becoming a writer. The involuntary memory experience in Sodom and Gomorrah prompts a meditation not on writing but on death and mourning. Attachment, not art, is at stake in this dramatic episode of involuntary memory. What returns in Sodom and Gomorrah, then, is not merely an image peeled off from the action narrated in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower—the vision of the Grandmother’s tender face looking up at Marcel as she helped him remove his boots. The whole logic of the earlier episode is at play, for what returns, now rephrased as the paradox of survival and annihilation the Narrator identifies with mourning, is the dialectic of attachment and detachment—of life and death—that belongs to the double law of habit and the dynamics of intermittences du cœur.11 The memory vision of the Grandmother’s tender face revives the specific character of the self that experienced the loving gaze that now returns as an image: the boy still capable of tenderness and need. By restoring the affective world of this earlier self, the vision provisionally saves him from his “new” self, which he now judges to be “ungrateful, selfish and cruel” (SG 155), afflicted with an “aridity of soul [sécheresse de l’âme]” (SG 154). Overwhelmed by the vitality of the image that suddenly appears before him, which produced “a convulsion of my entire being” (SG 154), Marcel/the Narrator wants to leap into his Grandmother’s arms. The spontaneous vision that carries her vivid presence brings home the reality of her death because it prompts Marcel/the Narrator to viscerally feel his need for her, a need he is now forced to recognize he will never be able to satisfy again. With this affective realization, he begins to mourn her. “I could not understand,” the Narrator laments, and I forced myself to undergo the pain of the contradiction: on the one hand, an existence, a tenderness, surviving in me…; and, on the other hand, as soon as I had relived, as though present, that felicity, to feel it traversed by the certainty, shooting up like a repeated physical pain, of a nothingness that had erased my image of that tenderness, which had destroyed that existence, abolished

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retrospectively our mutual predestination, made of my grandmother, at the moment when I had found her again as if in a mirror, a mere stranger whom chance had led to spend a few years with me, as it might have been with anyone at all, but for whom, before and after, I was nothing, would be nothing. (SG 156–7) Avant et après—before and after. This is the reach of death in Proust’s novel. The figure of the “mere stranger” echoes the scene of the Grandmother’s stroke on the Champs-Élysées, prelude to the long narration of her death. If that transitional moment seemed to open a gap that suggested the time it would take for her to die—she was not yet dead, Marcel was already alone—here two narrative moments appear to collide and collapse into one. Pulled emotionally in two directions simultaneously, Marcel feels the full force of the two affective operations of habit, attachment and detachment, at the same time. This is what the Narrator calls “the contradiction of survival and annihilation” (SG 159, translation modified) and identifies as the structure of mourning. The Grandmother’s presence survives in the memory vision that came to him, but immediately—aussitôt—“at the very moment when I had found her again” (SG 157, translation modified, my emphasis)—she is annihilated. She becomes nothing, or worse yet, a stranger. Whereas attachment and detachment invite narrative treatment (think of the episodes that concern Gilberte, for example, in Swann’s Way), mourning, which takes the operations of both attachment and detachment to the extreme, evacuates narrative in a clash of contradiction. The Grandmother’s presence (her survival) is cut through with her absence (her annihilation). Detachment becomes an annihilation that bleeds over onto Marcel himself “for… [her] before and after, I was nothing, would be nothing” (SG 157). In this ultimate event of detachment—the separation of death—Marcel experiences his Grandmother’s annihilation as his own. “[I]t’s not true that the dead are no longer alive. It just can’t be true, despite what they say, since Grandmother still exists” (SG 160). Now Marcel is speaking to his father in a dream, thanks to which the contradiction between survival and annihilation is reworked as a synthesis—“the painful synthesis of survival and nothingness” (SG 159, my emphasis). Before the dream, Marcel looks at a photograph of his Grandmother that he has been carrying around distractedly for some time. As he studies it, he recalls the photo shoot that had

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produced this image, which we read about back in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. Mme Amédée, you will recall, has asked Saint-Loup to photograph her, and he has obliged. This initiative surprises and irritates Marcel, who is particularly disturbed by the pose his Grandmother appears to assume so deliberately. Uncharacteristically, she has carefully considered the details of her appearance: she wears a wide-brimmed hat, cocked at a particular angle, which casts a dramatic shadow over part of her face. Worse yet, she seems to be enjoying herself, to bask in the attention she receives. Marcel finds her behavior childish and annoying; for a moment he even calls his Grandmother’s moral character into question, suspecting her of coquettishness, or even vanity. Eventually he becomes exasperated and unleashes hurtful comments intended to destroy the pleasure she displays at having her photo taken and to shatter the illusion she has painstakingly constructed for her photographic image. He succeeds. “At least I managed to banish from her face the sense of joy that I ought to have been happy to share with her” (SYG 368), the Narrator comments after the fact. The narrative of the photo shoot presents both the young Marcel’s irritation at seeing his Grandmother sit for the portrait and the Narrator’s (retrospective) interpretation of this irritation, which includes, as we have just seen, a touch of remorse. The Narrator explains that Marcel’s ill temper was caused by resentment; he felt abandoned by his Grandmother, who had not been available to spend time with him. In Sodom and Gomorrah, however, we get a third perspective. When she watches Marcel study the photograph, Françoise reveals what even the Narrator had not known or perhaps had simply chosen not to tell us in connection with the photo shoot: Mme Amédée had been so ill during that first summer in Balbec that she was unable to spend time with her grandson. She had avoided him not because she did not want to see him (she very much did) but because she did not want him to see her. It would spoil his summer holiday to see how sick she was and to realize that she was dying. Nor does she want the picture she intends to give her grandson as a memorial to visibly fix an image of her dying. She has gone to great lengths to contrive a pose that would obscure all visible signs of her illness and the toll it has already taken on her—hence the soft lighting, the cock of the head which determines a constricting angle of the shot and the dramatic shadow that falls on her face, hiding the damage presumably inflicted by

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an earlier stroke (never recounted in the novel) with the brim of her hat. The Grandmother, in other words, had wanted the photograph to fix her living presence after her death, not to expose death at work during her lifetime. She intended her photograph to conceal what would become the past time of her future death—the time of her dying. Which leads us to ask: just when does the Grandmother die? When does she begin to die and when does she finish dying? Françoise’s account suggests that Mme Amédée knew she was dying when she asked Saint-Loup to photograph her. She would then already be dying during that first visit to Balbec when she came into Marcel’s hotel room, unlaced his boots, and gazed at him tenderly—the image that subsequently returns to delight and to haunt Marcel. And, in a sense, her dying will only become complete once Marcel has felt it, once he has experienced the emotional impact of her passing and become capable of mourning her, with the support of the photograph he will gaze at all day long. The photograph, in other words, retroactively externalizes the long time of the Grandmother’s dying. It performs both her survival—it serves as a memorial image and supports Marcel’s mourning—and her annihilation, since it marks the beginning of her awareness that she is dying and will become, as we shall see, an image of her death as much as of her life. Proust turns to photography, we could say, to write the synthesis of survival and annihilation as a process that takes time. Two moments of the photographic system—the taking and the viewing of the photograph—mark out the long arc of the time of the Grandmother’s dying, one that includes anachronism, “which so often prevents the calendar of facts from coinciding with that of our feelings” (SG 155). The photographic exposure carves out a slice of time that blurs distinct sequences of chronology by folding, or overlapping, them. This is what is interesting about following the story of a single character as it unfolds in time. If we pursue only a thematic reading that jumps from character to character, taking each episode only to mean something else (the meaning we ascribe to the theme), we miss this unfolding of lived time. Here, the photograph introduces a temporal rhythm into the novel and requires a complex narrative layering to tell its stories. The story of the photo shoot had been recounted authoritatively much earlier. We thought we had a picture of it. And then more than a year later, after the Grandmother’s death, Françoise fills in a crucial feature of it,

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which changes its meaning completely at the moment that Marcel/the Narrator finally views the photograph produced there—which has now become a memorial image that supports his work of mourning her. The Grandmother finally dies for Marcel, more than a year after her death. Nor is the photograph in question a simple thing. Even though it is not out of focus, it does not present a straightforward, readable image. And it does not merely support Marcel’s mourning, which had been triggered by the spontaneous memory vision that reminds Marcel of his Grandmother’s presence. It provokes a second involuntary memory vision, this one painful. To my knowledge, no critic has mentioned this small episode of involuntary memory that is discretely folded into the big one. This might be because it is so contrary to what we think involuntary memory is supposed to do. For this spontaneous memory presents a counter-image to the vision of radiant tenderness that had precipitated Marcel/the Narrator’s mourning earlier in the day. What he now sees in his mind’s eye is an image of his Grandmother’s face contracted by the wound his hurtful words had inflicted on her during the photo shoot: “I had allowed myself to murmur a few impatient and hurtful words, which, I had sensed from the way her face contracted, had struck home, had wounded her” (SG 157). It is the contracted face that now returns to him, and this memory image makes him suffer. He wishes he could retouch this image as one might retouch a photograph, but, he acknowledges, “Never again would I be able to erase that contraction from her face” (SG 157). Is Marcel/the Narrator unable to efface this expression from his Grandmother’s face because his remorse has indelibly burned it into his memory? Or might it also have left its trace on the photograph he studies so attentively? Did Saint-Loup chemically fix the contraction her grandson’s harsh words had caused to appear on her face in the photograph he took, and that Marcel/the Narrator studies in the course of his mourning? Or did the photo image simply precipitate the memory of the photo shoot and the vision of the face the Grandmother made that day (as our Narrator lets us know after the fact) when she felt the pain caused by his small act of cruelty? Is the image a memory image or a photograph? According to the commercial photographer Eugène Disdéri (1819–1889), about whom we shall hear more shortly, the art of the portrait photographer includes the ability to elicit a particular expression on the face of the photographic subject by manipulating the sitter’s emotions through

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conversation.12 Has Marcel inadvertently (or perhaps subversively) done just that? We will never be sure, because we do not know exactly when the click of Saint-Loup’s camera occurred in the episode that we read; we do not know whether the shutter closed before or after Marcel uttered the words that hurt his Grandmother’s feelings and produced the change in her expression. Proust dramatizes the ambiguity created by this uncertainty—an ambiguity he has artfully contrived—when Marcel finally studies the photograph in the course of his mourning. The photo is painful to look at, and yet Marcel cannot keep his eyes off it: “I suffered all that day by remaining in front of my grandmother’s photograph” (SG 176). At first the portrait presents the image of a stranger—the stranger his Grandmother has become by dying—the certainty of her death, we read in the passage cited above, “made of my grandmother a stranger whom chance had led to spend a few years with me… for whom… I was nothing.” Viewing her photo, he sees an image of annihilation. But habit sets to work and gradually the image becomes familiar: “I found comfort in looking at the photograph Saint-Loup had taken,” Marcel/the Narrator remarks; “I had become used to it” (SG 177). As the image becomes more familiar, it becomes happier. Soon it presents the Grandmother “looking so elegant, so carefree beneath the hat that partly hid her face that I saw her as less unhappy and in better health than I had imagined” (SG 177). With time (the time of Marcel’s mourning), the photograph becomes an image of survival, an image that presents the living presence Mme Amédée had intended for her memorial photograph when she contrived her pose. It becomes an image of tender, living presence like the image, brimming with vitality, that had returned to him earlier that day in the memory vision that had completely overwhelmed him. As the description of the image continues, however, the pendulum swings back; the photograph becomes once again an image of annihilation: And yet [et pourtant] her cheeks having, without her knowing it, an expression of their own, something leaden and haggard, like the look of an animal that feels itself already chosen and marked down, my grandmother wore the air of someone under a death sentence, an involuntary somber, unconsciously tragic air that had eluded me but which stopped Mamma from ever looking at this photograph not so

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much of her mother as of the latter’s illness, of an insult delivered by that illness to Grandmother’s brutally abused face. (SG 177) When Marcel’s mother looks at the photograph, she sees an image of sickness and death. So powerful is its effect that after one quick glance, she refuses to look at it ever again. The photograph has become an image of brutal detachment—of annihilation. Proust makes it quite clear that it is not a question of two different subjective impressions here, that of Marcel and that of his mother. For Marcel sees both versions of the image himself. Moreover, on a grammatical level, Proust hinges the opposing impressions of survival and annihilation together with the logical conjunction “and yet [et pourtant]” (SG 177), one that, as the Robert dictionary clearly indicates, “marks the opposition between… two aspects of the same thing.”13 Exploiting the narrative ambiguity he has lodged in his layered account of the photo shoot, Proust has succeeded in producing the fiction of an undecidable photograph. Like a daguerreotype that presents now a positive, now a negative image, depending on how it is held in the hand and directed toward a light source, the Grandmother’s photo is unstable; it presents now the radiant face she intended for her memorial image—an image of survival and attachment—now a contracted, wounded, expression—an image of separation and death. By leaving us in the dark concerning the exact timing of the photographic exposure, Proust creates the fiction of an intermittent photograph, one that imprints the workings of the intermittences of the heart, associated with the double law of habit. Proust’s intermittent photograph challenges basic assumptions about the nature of photography, and specifically what André Bazin calls its “essentially objective character.”14 Following Bazin, Roland Barthes identifies the essence of photography with an absolute claim to referential authority (the notorious “ça a été” [it was there, or it happened]).15 In the same spirit, Rosalind Krauss defines photography in terms of its semiological status as index, that is, its character of being like a footprint or fingerprint of the referent whose presence at a given time and place it registers through a light trace.16 Proust’s fiction of the Grandmother’s intermittent photograph challenges this whole tradition of critical reflection on the medium specificity of photography. It does so all the more ingeniously because Proust has already narrated the

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referential scene of the photo shoot by the time we see the photographic image; the reader was there as witness to the referent of the photograph and yet still cannot stabilize the image captured there. It comes down to what might have gone unnoticed by a witness—the involuntary gesture of a slight muscular contraction of the face—and this reinforces the idea, first defended by Henry Fox Talbot, that a photographic image can register more than what the photographer sees when he or she takes the picture. And it comes down to a question of timing, to lost instants, fleeting moments we don’t attend to, such as the instant this tiny facial gesture occurred and the exact instant the shutter clicked. All of this is amplified by Françoise’s news that Grandmother was dying at the time, and so, without our knowing it, the photo shoot that we witnessed involved the production of a memorial portrait for a death that hadn’t yet occurred, but now has. The image, we could say, fractured in an instant, holds too much time. It holds the time it takes for a portrait to become a memorial image, which is to say the time it takes for Mme Amédée to die and for Marcel to mourn her fully, as well as the time of a split-second change. It holds this time, and all this meaning, without any authoritative claim to resemblance. It holds it in the oscillating mode of intermittence, according to the double law of habit.

Chapter 4 Camera Eyes: The Productive Estrangement of Mechanical Vision

In his essay “On Photography” (1927), Sigmund Kracauer rehearses the claims of a realist view of photography. Seemingly out of the blue, he turns his attention to Proust. Alluding to George Eliot’s “Realist Manifesto of 1856,” Kracauer writes: According to the manifesto, the artist’s attitude toward reality should be so impersonal that he might reproduce the same subject ten times over without any of his copies showing the slightest difference. This is how Proust conceives of the photographer in that passage of Guermantes Way, where, after a long absence, the narrator enters, unannounced, the living room of his grandmother.17 Kracauer is alluding to the scene where Marcel makes a surprise visit to his Grandmother and, quietly entering her living room as she dozes over a book, has the experience of seeing her with camera eyes. With more or less nuance, and more or less qualification, critics from Kracauer on have consistently read this scene through some version of the “realist” perspective Kracauer embraces when he affirms that Proust “may have [been] led to adopt the credo of the extreme nineteenth century realists, according to which the photographer… holds up a mirror to nature.”18 To situate this scene, we need to back up a bit. Soon after the Grandmother’s photo shoot, Marcel visits his friend Saint-Loup, now stationed in Doncières, in the hope of obtaining a photograph of the

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Duchesse de Guermantes (Saint-Loup’s aunt), with whom Marcel has become infatuated. Aware that he is away from his Grandmother for the first time (she is in Paris) and perhaps aware of her fragile health (having taken her photograph in Balbec, and presumably complicitous in devising that strategic pose), Saint-Loup arranges for Marcel to telephone her. The ensuing conversation is a far cry from the immediate communication Marcel had with his Grandmother in Balbec, when he would knock on the wall three times if he needed her during an asthma attack in the night, and she, sleeping in the adjoining room, would signal back in kind to indicate she was on her way to comfort him. Over the telephone, Marcel barely recognizes the disembodied voice he hears on the other end of the line; his Grandmother sounds like a stranger. Not distracted by the familiar image of her face because of the distance that separates them, he hears her voice in a new way and “sees” her differently. He senses a familiar tenderness when he speaks with her, but he also hears something he had never discerned before—namely, that she has suffered and that she is old and fragile, a mere phantom of her earlier self: “All that I had beside me was her voice, a phantom as bodiless as the one that would perhaps come back and visit me when my grandmother was dead” (GW 129–30, translation modified), Marcel/ the Narrator laments, with a proleptic nod to the involuntary memory vision we have just discussed. Marcel hops on the next train to Paris. By closing the physical distance that separates them, he expects to regain his Grandmother’s full lively presence. He wants to leap into her arms (the trope of his attachment to her, as we have seen) to rid himself of the dreadful phantom that is (already) haunting him: “Now I had to free myself as quickly as possible, in her arms, from the ghostly image… of a grandmother who was really separated from me” (GW 134). What he sees when he arrives in Paris, however, is precisely the phantom whose voice he had heard on the phone: “Alas, it was this ghostly image that I saw [j’aperçus]” (GW 134). We are tempted to say that, in Paris, Marcel sees with his own eyes the phantom he had only heard on the telephone in Doncières when he looks at his Grandmother “on the sofa beneath the lamp, redfaced, heavy, and vulgar, ill, her mind a daze, the slightly crazed eyes wandering over a book, a crushed old woman whom I did not know” (GW 135). Except that, at the very moment he perceives her, Marcel’s eyes have become little cameras, and what he sees is something like a

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photograph: “What my eyes did, automatically, in the moment I caught sight of my grandmother, was take a photograph” (GW 134). With the camera gaze, the phantom becomes a photograph. Critics have commented on this intriguing and, of course, ironic episode of the Recherche, and in almost a single voice, they have concluded that the figure of the camera eyes implies objectivity.19 This stubborn interpretation depends on the idea of photography Kracauer proposed, one that goes back to the claims François Arago made for the new invention of the daguerreotype in 1839. In his speech before the Chamber of Deputies, Arago (member of the Academy of Sciences) sold the daguerreotype to the French people as a scientifically exact instrument of documentation.20 There followed a long tradition in the French context that identified photography with positivism, where it became an “emblem for… objectivity,” a “primary metaphor for objective truth.”21 When we look closely at the episode of the camera eyes, however, we find that it presents anything but a straightforward appeal to objectivity—indeed, there is nothing straightforward about this passage. Formally, it is neither a descriptive scene nor a narrative (or dramatic) episode. It involves just one action—“j’aperçus [I noticed/saw/ perceived]” (GW 134)—that Proust suspends in midair, cut out from any narrative background or any progress forward. Upon this single action, Proust superimposes a series of verbs—finding his Grandmother in her solitude, catching her in the act of dozing off in solitude, taking a photograph with his eyes—actions that all overlap in time with the initial statement: “j’aperçus.” Since in French the verb trouver (to find) also means “to catch or apprehend” and apercevoir (to see or notice) also has the meaning of enregistrer (to register or imprint)—which is what a photograph does—this passage telescopes a number of apparently distinct actions into a single event, doubling the temporal overlap with a semantic one, a lurking redundancy. In story time, all this occurs in the blink of an eye, as the flicker of a single, impersonal event: a capture of visual information. The little cameras supplement Marcel’s eyes in a rigorously Derridean fashion: they serve as a supplementary prosthesis that empowers the eyes to register an impression with the speed of light, even as they substitute for Marcel’s eyes, blinding them, or cutting off their vision.22 Marcel has momentarily become a cyborg. The camera eyes mechanize the natural function of seeing, but at the same time,

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the mechanical vision is naturalized, for the cameras here are eyes. Perhaps the image of Grandmother, taken in our Hero’s eyes, was never quite experienced; perhaps it remained on the photographic plate of Marcel’s eyes, undeveloped, like an invisible, or latent, image. Proust never mentions it again in the Recherche. This suggests a structure of trauma, which would introduce a problem of point of view: from whose perspective would the description of the registered image be given in this first-person narration? But something like this image might have returned to Proust’s memory as he was writing this episode. It is well known that Proust used photographs in his writing practice. The picture that takes itself in Marcel’s camera eyes might have been a found photograph that worked its way into his writing, taking itself, as it were, in the mind’s eye of the author who projected it onto the eyes of his protagonist. A photograph of a family friend, Louise Halévy (mother of Proust’s classmate Daniel Halévy), taken by their mutual friend the painter Edgar Degas, haunts this scene, interposing itself between the novel’s image and the fiction of any ostensibly objective referent. In the photograph (known to have been in Proust’s possession) the elderly woman lies on a sofa, eyes closed, with book in hand (Figure 1). The gas lamp that illuminates Mme Halévy produces a stark contrast that throws her into a dreamlike shadow world. She projects a sense of solitude, as if unaware that a photograph is being taken, just as the Grandmother in Proust’s novel is momentarily unaware of her grandson’s presence in the room. The description of the Grandmother that Marcel/the Narrator “photographs” with his eyes is also overdetermined within the fictive texture of the novel. It will be developed narratively (and slightly retouched) in Proust’s subsequent description of the Grandmother on her deathbed. The “crushed old woman” (GW 135) on the sofa who strikes Marcel as a phantom when he sees her with camera eyes becomes “a driveling old woman [une vieille femme qui radote]” (GW 329) in the last chapter of The Guermantes Way. Her gaze has become “anxious, doleful, wild… no longer the look we knew, but the sullen expression of a driveling old woman” (GW 329). The verb radoter (to drivel or ramble) intensifies (or develops) the “slightly crazed” and wandering eyes (yeux un peu fous, GW 135) of the old woman “in a daze [rêvassant]” (GW 135) that Marcel walked in on unannounced after his train ride from Doncières.23 The automatic photograph, then, the

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Figure 1  Edgar Degas, Louise Halévy Reclining, 1895.

mechanical image that forms itself in Marcel’s camera eyes in the tiniest instant before the Grandmother becomes aware of his presence, does not imply objectivity. On the one hand, it suggests the trace of another photograph; on the other, it yields a premonitory vision not only of the Grandmother’s death but more specifically of Proust’s Narrator’s telling of this episode of the novel’s fictive future. What is more the association of this image with a phantom introduces the code of spirit photography, a decidedly nonrealist photographic genre (Figure 2).

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Figure 2  William Hope, spirit photograph, n.d.

Proust does suggest that Marcel’s mechanical eyes register something that he could not otherwise have seen, just as, on the telephone from Doncières, he heard (or “saw”) something in his Grandmother’s voice that he had been unable to perceive when he was in her familiar presence. But it is not a question of objectivity as a corrective to subjective impressions. It is rather a matter of time, of the difference between past and present. In both these scenes Proust complains that natural vision is bound by habit, specifically by the repetitive side of habit we have identified with attachment. Proust’s Narrator insists that, because of feelings of attachment, natural vision fits new perceptions into the contours of past experience. “We never see those who are dear to us,” he comments,

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except in the animated workings, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which, before allowing the images their faces represent to reach us, draws them into its vortex, flings them back onto the idea of them we have always had, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it… every face we love [is] a mirror of the past. (GW 134) Not a mirror of nature, then, but a mirror of one’s affective past. In other words habit (in the mode of attachment) makes us read the present as a repetition, or continuation, of familiar impressions. It blocks us from perceiving change. This is why, when he saw her every day, Marcel had never noticed that his Grandmother was growing old and dying. “All perception is already memory,” Bergson writes.24 Proust, too, suggests that we only ever see the past, but he adds the affective dimension to his account: the pressure of love which reinforces attachment, the face of habit that glues us to the past. Proust insists that ordinary vision recycles old impressions, especially when people or things are dear to us, instead of registering fresh impressions as they arrive into the present from the future. Here it is natural vision that becomes mechanical, in that it is driven by a mechanistic operation of habit as repetition. Proust deftly reverses the roles of the natural and the mechanical here. And if natural vision would ordinarily serve as the benchmark for objectivity— seeing is believing—here it obscures, or renders inaccessible, what is really there before our eyes because it automatically replaces what is present before us with images from the past. Proust’s Narrator underscores this weakness of natural vision when he goes on to explicitly contrast mechanical with natural vision, as if commenting on Marcel’s camera eyes: But if, instead of our eyes, it should happen to be a purely material lens, a photographic plate, that has been watching things then what we see—in the courtyard of the Institute, for example—instead of an Academician emerging into the street to hail a cab, will be his tottering attempts to avoid falling on his back, the parabola of his fall, as though he were drunk or the ground covered in ice. (GW 135) The “material lens” replaces a static and repetitive vision with a temporal optic that openly looks to the future and sees what arrives

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into the present: the contingency of accident. Photography becomes a figure for perception that engages with the new, staying abreast with time as change. The camera operates according to the logic of the “analgesic effect” of detachment, not attachment; it sees what time brings as it happens. In Finding Time Again Proust mentions “one of the cinemas to which the men and women diners would soon be hurrying” (FTA 42). Comic short films were in fashion; the shorts Hal Roach made in 1915 and films by Mack Sennet were distributed through the French company Pathé, which established an American film exchange in 1910. The digressive vignette that characterizes mechanical vision is worthy of this sort of slapstick comedy. But the tiny fictive scene of the tottering man about to fall on an icy surface also recalls the mocking pleasure Baudelaire takes in the spectacle of a man falling in De l’essence du rire (On the Essence of Laughter): “What is more enjoyable than the spectacle of a man who slips on ice or on the pavement, who trips on the sidewalk, such that the face of his Christian brother contracts in a disorderly way, that the muscles of his face begin suddenly to move… like a mechanical toy.”25 Baudelaire opens his essay on laughter with these remarks: “I don’t want to write a treatise on caricature. I just want to convey to the reader some reflections that occurred to me concerning this strange genre [genre singulier]. These reflections became a sort of obsession for me.”26 As the Baudelaire intertext suggests, Proust seems to place mechanical vision more in the vicinity of caricature than objectivity. The point is not frivolous. For not only does the vignette of the distinguished man teetering in the street, about to fall before bemused spectators, call to mind Marcel’s attempt to hail a cab on the ChampsÉlysées after his Grandmother has been felled by a stroke, and the description of the aged Charlus that Marcel encounters on the street in Finding Time Again, it also rhymes with the Narrator’s account of the teetering (titubant) bourgeois about to fall and make a comic spectacle of himself that we encounter in Finding Time Again. This, of course, is none other than Marcel/the Narrator himself in the throes of a felicitous involuntary memory experience. “I had entered the Guermantes’ courtyard,” we read, and in my distraction had failed to see an approaching car; at the chauffeur’s shout I had time only to step smartly aside, and as

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I retreated I could not help tripping up against the unevenly laid paving-stones… [W]hen, regaining my balance, I set my foot down on a stone which was slightly lower than the one next to it… [A] deep azure intoxicated my eyes, impressions of coolness… and, in my desire to grasp them, without daring to move any more than when I had tasted the madeleine… I continued, even at the risk of making myself the laughing-stock of the huge crowd of chauffeurs, to stagger, as I had done a moment before, one foot on the raised paving-stone, the other foot on the lower one… And almost at once I realized that it was Venice. (FTA 174–5) Marcel/the Narrator teeters, about to fall; he becomes distracted by an involuntary memory of Venice, recalling the uneven steps of the Baptistery of Saint Mark’s Cathedral that Proust himself apparently first became aware of in a photograph taken by Ruskin.27 Proust’s exemplary scene of mechanical vision—the spectacle of the tottering gentleman falling in the street—returns, then, in his account of an exemplary experience of involuntary memory. As we argued earlier, the detachment associated with the “material lens” operates as one face of the double law of habit, the one that requires involuntary forgetting, which, in turn, imposes the structure of involuntary memory on our first-person narrator. Immediately prior to being set off balance where the street meets the curb, the Narrator compared the uninspiring memory images generated by his hard-won attempts to recall features of his Venice trip to an exhibit of boring snapshots. He makes the comparison to reinforce the logic of the opposition between voluntary and involuntary memory, which will explicitly be placed in the service of the vocation story in Finding Time Again. Critics have been all too quick to take this derogatory allusion to “boring snapshots” as proof that Proust had the same disregard for photography that the Grandmother displays in Swann’s Way, when she is uneasy about placing photographs on the walls of her grandson’s room, because (along with most people of her station in this period) she believes they are vulgar. Grandmother’s clever solution is to place photographs of works of art on the wall. Susan Sontag alludes to the Narrator’s “boring snapshot” remark when she writes, “Whenever Proust mentions photographs, he does so disparagingly: as a synonym for a shallow, too exclusively visual, merely voluntary relation to the past, whose yield is insignificant compared with the deep discoveries to be

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made by responding to cues given by all the senses—the technique he calls ‘involuntary memory.’”28 Her remarks are emblematic of the danger of generalizing when you read Proust and of how easily the opposition between voluntary and involuntary memory, presumed to be stable, becomes a template for interpreting the novel. For if the snapshots of Venice that Proust’s Narrator alludes to are lifeless and uninspiring images, this is not because they are photographs. It is because they represent a certain kind of photograph, snapshots taken with the intention of provoking thoroughly conventional memories, travel images, coded by social expectations. They serve as a kind of cultural currency. The boring snapshot, in other words, belongs to the structure of habit in its repetitive, conventional, and in this sense (as we have just seen) “mechanical” register. The (fictive) experience of the uneven paving stones, on the other hand, which serves to elucidate (and elicit) spontaneous memories, involves contingency. The accident of losing one’s footing arrives, as it were, from the future, not the past, and elicits a physical response to an unexpected circumstance. When we read the two episodes of teetering gentlemen together, it seems that what is at stake is not an attitude toward photography in general but a contrast between natural and mechanical perception that plays out the double law of habit (its dynamics of attachment and detachment) and its implications when it comes to time.

Chapter 5 The Photographer Is a Stranger: Dégonflage

But let’s return to the scene of the camera eyes. When, having rushed back to Paris out of concern for his Grandmother, Marcel breaks in on her, unannounced, as she dozes alone in her living room, he finds himself in an odd position: “I was there in the room, but in another sense, I was not there because she wasn’t aware I was there” (GW 134, translation modified). For a brief moment, Marcel/the Narrator experiences himself as a stranger, just where he would expect to feel most at home. The stranger becomes a photographer—an involuntary photographer, we could say: “The only part of myself that was present—in that privileged moment which does not last, and in which… we find ourselves able to perceive our own absence—was the witness, the observer,… the stranger… the photographer” (GW 134). It is through this moment of suspension between presence and absence that Marcel becomes an agent of “involuntary sight” with camera eyes.29 It is because he finds himself in what Georg Simmel called “the formal position of the stranger,” where “the one who is close by is remote, but… the one who is remote is near,” that he finds himself operating—quite automatically— as a photographer.30 Kracauer, too, identifies the photographer with the figure of the stranger. In an earlier version of his comments on Proust’s episode of the camera eyes (earlier than the one already discussed), Kracauer writes that “the arbitrary split second exposure of the photographic apparatus that for a moment suspends habit, interpretation and intention, epitomizes the view of a stranger, of eyes that obviate our love.”31 Kracauer suggests here that the detached perspective of the

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stranger/photographer suspends the repetitive work of habit, just as Proust proposes when he contrasts mechanical vision with natural vision. Miriam Hansen argues that for Kracauer (Simmel’s colleague, for a time), photography is not, in the final analysis, primarily a realist medium. It is “a medium of alienation or estrangement.”32 If Proust characterized mechanical vision by a vignette worthy of slapstick comedy, for Kracauer slapstick comedy epitomizes the virtue of estrangement, since it performs what he calls dégonflage (deflation). Dégonflage involves the capacity to undercut assumptions concerning the “coherent identical subject,” the subject position Kracauer associates with the ideology of bourgeois theatre. It restructures subjectivity by deflating the myths, ideals, and social conventions that have been built up around it through repetitive habit and ideology.33 This strikes me as precisely the effect Proust strives for in the comic vignette he presents to exemplify mechanical vision, the slapstick scene of the Academician who slips on the ice as he tries to hail a cab. Seen through a “purely material lens,” the proud bourgeois figure is comically alienated into various precarious, decentered, and disjointed positions. In this vignette Proust suggests that only a radically detached gaze could bear witness to such a contingency, which occurs in a time of becoming in which anything can happen. It is from the vantage point of a stranger, then, that the photographer opens to the time of life, enjoying access to “a new world, the world of Time, where the strangers live” (CG 135, translation modified). For Georg Simmel, too, the snapshot performs detachment, and it is in this sense that he associates the agency of the photographer/ stranger with what he calls objectivity. But Simmel transvalues the term; he identifies objectivity not with truth but freedom. Objectivity, he writes, “may also be defined as freedom: the objective individual is bound by no commitments which could prejudice his perception, understanding, and evaluation of the given.”34 Freedom, for Simmel, means not being constrained by “custom, piety and precedent.”35 It means, in other words, liberation from habit, the habit of repetition, which also implies the pressures of ideology. Simmel’s analysis of the stranger/photographer, in other words, includes precisely the tension between attachment and detachment we encountered in Proust’s analysis of the double law of habit, both as it informed the structure of mourning (where the contradiction between

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survival and annihilation in a mode of intermittence affected the fictive photograph of the Grandmother) and in Proust’s distinction between natural and mechanical vision. The stranger/photographer enjoys freedom from the obfuscation of the new that occurs not only as a function of the repetitive mode of habit generally but specifically because of the impact attachment has on vision, which it ties to the past—“every face we love is a mirror of the past” (GW 134), we remember that Proust wrote. Simmel shares Proust’s Narrator’s analysis: “When we love someone,” he writes, “it seems that we, at the outset, possess some kind of fixed image of him towards which our feelings are then directed.”36 Both Proust and Simmel suggest, then, that the vision of ordinary experience, subject to the pressures of habit as repetition, stops time for reasons of affective interest or attachment, substituting for the dynamism of experience what Simmel calls a “fixed image” and Proust characterizes as the uniform image he associates with voluntary memory.37 The freedom of the stranger/photographer has to do precisely with detachment, which enables us to separate the two sides of what Simmel refers to as “a perceiving and a feeling self.”38 The stranger detaches precisely the perceiving from the feeling self, liberating it (or alienating it) both from the habit of repetition and from conventional ideological demands. This is the program of the “camera eyes.” Proust’s protagonist walks in on his Grandmother unannounced, and his eyes—his camera eyes—automatically photograph her. In 1923, the Soviet experimental filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1896–1954), an artist who “made extensive use of unusual camera placement and viewing angles,” appealed to the notion of “an expanded ‘camera-eye’ no longer bounded by the limitations of human vision.”39 Six years later, the German photographer and art critic Franz Roh (1890–1965), an enthusiast of the New Vision movement of experimental photography that grew up around László Moholy-Nagy in the Bauhaus, published a book called Foto-Auge (Photo-Eye), which enjoined its readers to see with camera eyes. In his essay “The Value of Photography,” Roh speaks of the “enjoyment of seeing th[e]… same familiar world become strange, alien, remote,” thanks to the powers of photography (PME 162). The Russian avant-garde artist Aleksandr Rodchenko (1892–1956), associated both with Vertov and with Moholy-Nagy, writes in his essay “The Paths of Modern Photography”: “We who

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are accustomed to seeing the usual, the accepted, must reveal the world of sight. We must revolutionize our visual reasoning” (PME 262) (Figure 3). Complaining about the “conventional routine that educates man’s visual perception,” he concludes that “only the camera is capable of reflecting contemporary life” (PME 259). In “What the Eye Does Not See,” Rodchenko and Vertov’s colleague Osip Brik writes, “the camera… can see in ways that man is not accustomed to… suggest new points of view and demonstrate how to look at things differently.” In the same spirit, he adds: We must break out beyond the customary radius of the normal human eye, we must learn to photograph objects with the camera outside the bounds of that radius, in order to obtain a result other than the usual monotony. Then we will see our concrete reality… and we will see it as it has never been seen before. (PME 220)

Figure 3 Osip Brik, Aleksandr Rodchenko (detail),1924.

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The camera, he insists, must be used to “expand—not imitate—the ordinary optical radius of the human eye” (PME 220). Finally, art historian and critic Wolfgang Born (1883–1949) argues that “what is needed is the courage to tackle reality head-on. The eyes must be turned on the outer world without any inhibition, as if to forget all the sentiments that have attached themselves to forms of life” (PME 157). The task of the camera, he maintains, “is not to imitate the human eye, but to see and record what the human eye normally does not see” (PME 219). All these European artists, participating in various and sometimes overlapping avant-garde movements, appear not only to elaborate Proust’s trope of the camera eye but also to develop the logic of Proust’s distinction between mechanical and natural vision. It is a question of the camera’s capacity to break us free from the world of habit—the habit of repetition built up of old attachments. It is a question of inventing new ways of seeing and being in the world thanks to the detachment or rupture that photo technology implies. In every case, it seems that the appeal to revolutionize our ways of seeing through the alienating powers of the mechanical instrument has to do with change—including the radical historical change of revolution. It is a question of engaging with a contemporary world—a contemporary world to come, whose contours are not yet completely discernible—in its difference from the past. The crucial factor seems to be not just variety—new angles of vision on the given—but the fact that photography can catch up with the flow of time and let us invent new ways of seeing and doing. In other words, the camera is open to what time brings. If our unassisted eyes tie us to the past, because of attachments to people or things (as Proust’s Narrator suggests), the camera can free us from this backward undertow. Photography introduces a new relation to time: “The photographer can snap the phenomenon in its continuity,” writes Ossip Brik (PME 230). Aided by the new, instamatic, technologies, Christopher Phillips writes, “photography is able to render fleeting events at the very instant they occur” (PME 227) (Figure 4). In other words, what we have been calling the affirmative work of habit, with its rupture that operates through automatic forgetting, supports an estrangement, or alienation, of habitual vision, and brings us closer to the real. “The concept of alienation,” Hansen reminds us, “Entfremdung here sliding into Verfremdung, estrangement and defamiliarization— was… a staple of modernist thinking in the 1920s.”40 By this time an

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Figure 4 Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Cousin “Bichonnade” in Flight, 1905.

international Constructivist movement had emerged, and photography had become “part of the modern chic” across Europe and the United States.41 Because there was no linguistic barrier associated with them, developments in photography had international reach; they were more or less comparable, for example, in Germany and France.42 When Simmel, Kracauer, and, now we would have to add, Proust identify certain kinds of photography with estrangement, they do so in the name of a modernist aesthetic of photography, not a realist one. But, of course, there is a problem. Proust died in 1922, a year before Moholy-Nagy came to the Bauhaus (1923) and Vertov introduced the notion of the camera eye into avant-garde art theory where it would become a rallying cry. It was in 1927 that Kracauer signaled Proust’s episode of the camera eye in The Guermantes Way, writing, “This is how Proust conceives of the photographer.”43 Did Proust conceive of the photographer according to modernist aesthetic (and social) principles that had not yet been formulated? This seems to be the case. For even though he wrote before the emergence of an avant-garde art practice in photography and an avant-garde aesthetic theory of photography,

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Proust had a very clear idea of the alienating (and relativizing) powers of the camera, its capacity to challenge conventional images and to productively estrange them. In The Guermantes Way II, the Narrator compares the experience of kissing Albertine to “the latest developments in photography,” which, thanks to unexpected perspectives and different tonalities of light and shade, can “conjure up from what we believe to be something with one definite aspect, the hundred other things it may equally well be, since each is related to a no less valid perspective” (GW 361). He details just what he means, specifying photographs that “lay down at the foot of the cathedral all the houses that so often, from close up, seemed to us to be as high as towers,” and those that “deploy like a regiment, in file, in organized dispersion, in serried masses, the same monuments,” or those that, “on a pale and lifeless background, manage to contain an immense horizon beneath the arch of a bridge, in a single window frame, between the leaves of a tree in the foreground that is more vigorous in tone [and] frame a single church successively in the arcades of all the others” (GW 361). These are just the sort of practices avant-garde photographers and critics would soon encourage. “There was a time,” Brik recounts, “when we thought it was enough just to photograph objects at eye level, standing with both feet firmly on the ground. But then we began to move around, to climb mountains, to travel on trains, steamships and automobiles, to soar in airplanes and drop to the bottom of the sea. And we took our camera with us everywhere.” He invokes the power of the photo eye to “show us things from unexpected viewpoints and in unusual configurations,” affirming “we should exploit this possibility” (PME 219). More specifically, Brik invokes the experiments of “Comrade Rodchenko,” who “photographed a Moscow house from an unusual viewpoint,” such that “that familiar object (the house) suddenly turned into a never-before-seen structure”—a bit like Albertine’s face when Marcel kisses her—“a fire escape became a monstrous object, balconies were transformed into a tower of exotic architecture” (PME 220). Even though Proust’s camera-eye episode is separated from the kiss by many pages, we should read the two episodes together. The strange scene with the Grandmother should not be read to endorse photographic objectivity, a discourse of mimetic accuracy and documentary detail that emerged in the context of the daguerreotype. It should be read from the modernist, or avant-garde,

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perspective Proust’s Narrator suggests when he informs his readers about “the latest developments in photography” (GW 361). We need to look forward in time, not back. Still, we cannot evade the obvious problem: Proust died before the modernist aesthetic of photography emerged and made its presence felt all over Europe. Aleksandr Rodchenko, however, gives us the hint of a solution to this puzzle, when he praises press photography, which “photographs current events” and is way ahead of the “millions of stereotyped photographs” that were “floating around” (PME 260). Press photography, he writes, “is considered something of a lower order… But this applied photography, this lower order, has brought about a revolution in photography,” by taking pictures “in every kind of lighting and from every viewpoint,” which is to say by eagerly experimenting to see what the camera can do. “Only in so-called amateur cameras, have short-focus lenses been employed” (PME 260). The number of amateur photographers grew exponentially with the appearance in 1888 of the first Kodak point-and-shoot camera. The new snapshot technology, which made it possible to register events sur le vif (as they happened), encouraged a sense of play and formal experimentation.44 Amateur photographers began to experiment with scientific photographic procedures, which yielded strange results they exploited for comic effect in conjunction with motifs borrowed from popular culture. These so-called “recreational” photographers, who operated outside the art world, explored the formal (and comic) possibilities of superimposition, collage, and unusual perspectives that would eventually find their way from what Rodchenko calls “the lower order” of photography into avant-garde art practices and the discourses that supported them.45 We could say, then, that formal innovations subsequently anointed by avant-garde art photographers and critics emerged precisely in a context of dégonflage. They emerged from a milieu of recreational photography, associated with the emerging market for comic journalism toward the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth. These images, when taken by amateurs, were widely disseminated, first in popular photo-humor magazines and subsequently in mainstream illustrated magazines. A number of recreational photographers became press photographers in the early years of the twentieth century, bringing with them the formal inventiveness they had developed as playful

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amateurs.46 Léon Gimpel’s work, for example, appeared in popular venues such as L’Illustration and La Vie Illustrée, beginning in 1904. His innovative camera angles and perspectives en plongée earned him a reputation for formal audacity. He took pictures from the tops of buildings (the Arc de Triomphe, for example, and the Cathedral of Notre-Dame), generating effects of estrangement by the perspective of vertical drop onto his subjects below. Writing about a photo he took from an air balloon, Gimpel boasts, “I took an amusing picture [cliché], of a veritable human anthill [fourmilière humaine] with a shameless shadow of the balloon under foot”47 (Figure 5). His work exemplifies a combination of comic irreverence and the defamiliarization and perspectival experimentation that would become identified with the New Vision photographers of the 1920s and 1930s. “The most interesting viewpoints today,” Rodchenko writes in 1928, “are ‘from above down.’ And ‘from below up.’ And we should work at them” (PME 246). This is what Gimpel had already been doing twenty years earlier. The similarity between one of Gimpel’s images and a picture subsequently taken by Moholy-Nagy is striking (Figure 6). Moreover, to appeal to the public in a competitive market, magazine editors used Gimpel’s images (and those of other photojournalists) in formally innovative ways, sometimes juxtaposing two quite distinct images of one event on facing pages and sometimes producing montages of multiple images (Figure 7). Clément Chéroux argues that avant-garde artists in the milieux of the Bauhaus and Surrealism were enthusiasts of these illustrated magazines.48 They imported the formal innovations of the recreational photographers and photojournalists into the art context and theorized them in discourses of critical alienation and estrangement. This history of experimentation—which traveled from comic amateur photography to photojournalism and then to avant-garde contexts, from the world of popular culture’s dégonflage to high art theory—would explain Proust’s familiarity with the spirit, and practices, of a modernist aesthetic of photography before avant-garde artists and critics gave it critical authority in the 1920s and 1930s. It would explain Proust’s allusion to “the latest developments in photography” (GW 361) in his novel, his anticipation of Kracauer’s theory of dégonflage in the slapstick vignette he presents to convey the productively alienating force of mechanical vision, and the odd episode of the camera eyes.

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Figure 5  Léon Gimpel, Les Souverains Belges, 1910.

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Figure 6  Làszlò Moholy-Nagy, Plongée Berlin Radio Tower, 1928.

51

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Figure 7  Léon Gimpel, Page from L’Illustration 3471, September 4, 1909.

The positive value of detachment or alienation, which Proust’s Narrator identifies with photography in these passages, is one moment in a dialectic that refers us to the double work of habit. As we have seen, for Ravaisson habit concerns the impact of impressions on living beings, which is to say beings open to time. It involves what Ravaisson called “simply the double influence of the duration [durée] of change.”49 We have found these temporal concerns at play in a different way and on another level in the avant-garde aesthetic discourse of the camera eye, both when it comes to the fleeting moment of the event—seizing the contemporary—and when it comes to imagining social change, or the revolution to come. Although we introduced the issue of photography in the Recherche in relation to the Grandmother, the character who dies in the Recherche, photography is not itself on the side of death in Proust’s novel. It is not a realist, or mimetic, operation, as Bazin (who compared photography to a death mask) would have it. Nor is it complicit with death, as Barthes subsequently claims.50 The “intermittent” photo portrait of the Grandmother performs the double law of habit. It discloses that both living and dying happen in time, or, more rigorously, that dying,

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or separation, inhabits the time of life as Bichat made clear when he first proposed the term “intermittence.” The intermittent photograph exposes time’s workings revealing, in an especially dramatic fashion, that photography places us on the tightrope of time. “We see ourselves dying,” Proust writes, “not at the actual moment of death, but for months, or sometimes years before that” (GW 312). Proust presents this long time of dying, this se voir mourir (seeing oneself dying), through the Grandmother’s portrait. But this time of dying coincides with a time of living—it is the time of dinners at the Grand-Hôtel in Balbec, of meeting Charlus there, of riding through the countryside in an automobile, of train rides, and of giving and receiving comfort. And it is the time of Marcel/the Narrator’s first encounter with Albertine. What we learn from the story of the Grandmother is not the melancholy we associate with death, or an aspiration for eternal life that arises in the face of it, but rather the intertwining of living and dying, as of remembering and forgetting. Proust has his Narrator recount the Grandmother’s actual death and its various phases at considerable length. But he gives the full arc of the time of her dying, which is also the time of her living, through the multiple phases of the photo portrait—the layered accounts of the photo shoot, the time span between the taking of the photograph and the viewing of it, the long time of this viewing, and of the mourning it supports. The time of dying is also given through the uncontainable intermittence the photograph performs as it holds, precisely, the time of survival together with the time of annihilation. This, Proust suggests, is not simply the temporality of mourning—it is also the time of life. The dialectic between permanence and change that distinguishes the double law of habit in Proust’s novel requires losing one moment to embrace another. In the Recherche, as Malcolm Bowie put it, “losing is built in to having.”51 This is what Proust shows us by putting the double law of habit to work narratively, through affective rhythms of attachment and detachment and their associated rhythms of remembering and forgetting. The Grandmother dies, and, after an intense experience of mourning, her death resolves into indifference. This hard-won indifference opens the way for the Albertine story where it will inaugurate a new time series, one that will unfold in a register of desire. This will be no less subject to the double law of habit than the tender love between Marcel/the Narrator and the Grandmother, for habit, as Ravaisson

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reminds us, “is not a matter of external necessity and constraint but a necessity of attraction and desire.”52 This is the force Ravaisson places at the heart of the double law of habit. In the Albertine story, we will once again encounter the figures of the stranger, of photography, of nearness and distance, of attachment and detachment, of death within life, of memory and forgetting, that we examined in relation to the Grandmother—only in a slightly different register. We will also encounter the question of impressions and their intensity, which Ravaisson ties to something he calls “degree of reality” and associates with desire.53 After a painfully slow and ferocious achievement of indifference, the Albertine story will culminate in an experience of forgiveness.

PART TWO

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Chapter 6 Albertine Emerges from a Blurry Photograph

Albertine is a notoriously mysterious character, one that continues to fascinate in the twenty-first century. Chantal Akerman made a film about her. The poet Anne Carson takes her up in “The Albertine Workout.”1 Individual and multiple, queer and not, singular and allegorical—she is always, as Proust’s Narrator puts it, “a little bit different” from herself (SYG 410). Perhaps this is why Proust introduces her in the fuzzy register of the flou, an intensified version of the intermittence we examined in connection with the Grandmother’s photo portrait. She arrives straight out of a photographie tremblée (out-of-focus photograph) to throw Proust’s novel off-center—it will require several more volumes to tell her story (Sodom and Gomorrah, The Prisoner, and The Fugitive), and this will more than double the size of Proust’s work.2 We are in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. It is the day after the Grandmother’s photo session with Saint-Loup. As Marcel waits for his Grandmother outside the Grand-Hôtel, he catches sight of a group of girls moving along the beach; the narrator comments: “The girls eclipsed my grandmother” (SYG 413). Proust has launched the Albertine story. The group of adolescent girls advances toward Marcel/the Narrator in a blur. As they approach him he perceives “a singular blotch [tache] of moving shapes” (SYG 370, translation modified). The word tache is an interesting choice, since not only does it connote a mark or stain (which suggests a defect or shadow) but it derives from a root that signifies “to seem, or appear”—to come to light, as in an apparition.3 The impression creates a sense of “unstable, and elusive beauty” (SYG 371) that Marcel experiences as a promise of happiness. His gaze begins to organize the elements of

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the “dense, shapeless, mass” he perceives (SYG 373–4, translation modified), distributing specific traits to individual girls, such that “now, their charm was no longer blended into undifferentiated features” (SYG 374, translation modified). The image begins to sharpen, but the time of this “now” is far from clear. The fuzzy impression Marcel/ the Narrator experiences spills over to the reader, as Proust seems to strategically blur the difference between the Narrator’s voice and that of his protagonist, collapsing the time of description (or narrative enunciation) into the lived time of his protagonist’s gaze as it focuses, like a camera, and sharpens the image. The difference between our Hero and our Narrator (the two faces of Proust’s first-person narration) collapses here, as time unfolds. As soon as the blurred impression becomes crisp, Marcel sees himself being looked at by one girl in particular—who, of course, turns out to be Albertine. When he stares into her eyes he sees not the light of her soul but the shadow cast by her will and desire: “the black unfathomable shadows of the ideas she forms” (SYG 375); these are the shadows cast by Albertine’s sexual power and its mystery, the ones evoked in the title of this volume: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. Albertine’s gaze, trained on Marcel, draws out his desire for her and intensifies it: “I knew I could never possess the young cyclist [this alludes to Albertine’s clothing] unless I could also possess what lay behind her eyes. My desire for her was desire for her whole life” (SYG 376). The rest of the novel will be taken up with Marcel’s desire to possess Albertine completely, and the impossibility of doing so. “Être de fuite” (creature of flight) (P 80), she will always slip away from him, even after her death. With this quick exchange of glances, the visual impression stabilizes, as the girls continue on down the beach like “parading figures in an ancient frieze or fresco” (SYG 377), an image that breaks the blur down into a chronophotographic impression that has been brought to the very edge of stillness. Proust’s Narrator describes the girls as “an example of the countless occasions when young passersby had escaped my grasp” (SYG 378). As will become explicit a few pages on, Albertine’s glance alludes to the leitmotif of the passante (passerby) that Proust adapts from Baudelaire. In Baudelaire’s celebrated poem “À une passante” (To a Passerby), a dandy flâneur encounters a beautiful woman by chance on a crowded Parisian street. There is just time

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for a knowing exchange of glances before the woman is swept away by the moving crowd. She disappears instantly, without a trace, except for the powerful impression she leaves behind on the poet: the image of a beautiful woman who knows she is desired.4 At the turn of the twentieth century, the seaside resort had become a space of unexpected erotic encounter, just as the city street had been for Baudelaire. Proust invents bucolic yet modern variations on Baudelaire’s theme. On casual rides through the Normandy countryside, Marcel/the Narrator catches fleeting impressions of country girls who trigger his desire; he speeds on past them in Mme de Villeparisis’s car, losing them in a blur. He is content to let these passantes go—too much detail might reveal a disconcerting flaw that would spoil the illusion of encountering ideal beauty on country roads. But it is different with the group of girls he encounters on the beach. Marcel is determined not to let them get away. Disarmed by the blurry impression they have made on him, captivated by their seemingly eccentric charms, and seduced by their presence as a group—or multiple—Marcel wants to know who they are and how to find them again. He makes inquiries of the hotel staff, but no can identify them. “Some time later [plus tard],” the Narrator remarks, “a photograph would explain why” (SYG 404). The photograph in question is an old snapshot of these girls as children; they appear huddled together on the same Balbec beach Marcel has just watched them stroll across as adolescents. But unlike the photo portrait of the Grandmother, this snapshot attests to forgetting, not remembering; it confirms the girls’ presence within the Balbec community since childhood, even though no one recalls who they are. And the old snapshot is out of focus—it is a photographie tremblée—so one cannot make out the girls’ individual features. The reader wonders what sort of explanatory force such a photograph could possibly have, since it does not provide any clear visual information. “In the group as it now was,” the Narrator asks, could anyone have recognized the delightful, amorphous mass of little girls, still children, who only a few years before were to be seen sitting in a circle, on the sand, by a tent, a mischievous face, a head of fair hair, once noticed, would soon have gone unnoticed, blended back into the milky, indistinct nebula? (SYG 404)

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The Narrator comments that “the singular blotch [tache singulière]” that the little girls in the snapshot made was “remarkable enough to attract attention” (SYG 404). As just noted, Marcel himself had perceived just such a “singular blotch” (SYG 370) when he first observed the teenagers; the “absence of demarcations” (SYG 371) between them had created the impression of a “dense, shapeless, mass” (SYG 374) that had indeed riveted his attention. He had perceived the band of girls as “a shining comet” (SYG 372) with “the uninterrupted flow of a shared, unstable, and elusive beauty” (SYG 371). All of these features of Marcel’s blurred perception of the adolescents are present in the description of the out-of-focus snapshot, where Proust gathers the blur into the figure of a “milky indistinct nebula” (SYG 404). This figure will return at the very end of The Fugitive to characterize Albertine herself, described as a condensation of “scattered stardust of the galaxies” (F 526). Albertine, in other words, will eventually absorb the fuzzy multiple into herself as difference from herself. If the old photo only reinforces the visual impression Marcel/the Narrator had received on the beach the day before, what might it be said, belatedly (plus tard), to explain? Proust provides an answer in a sentence that slips past us slyly, as some of his most powerful sentences do: “No doubt,” Marcel/the Narrator remarks of the snapshot, “at that time, only a few years earlier, it was not the vision of the group that lacked clarity, as it had been the day before, when [the girls] first appeared to me, but the group itself” (SYG 404). The Narrator tells us here that the photograph explains not who the girls are—their identity—but that, as a group, they intrinsically lack identity. It explains, or confirms, that the blurry vision of the flock of girls that so charmed Marcel/the Narrator was not a mere subjective impression. The girls did not just seem indistinguishable from one another to Marcel; the impression they made “lacked clarity” because of an essential lack of differentiated identity. What the photograph eventually explains, in other words, is not who the girls were but why it was so hard to find out who they were. When the photo floats unexpectedly into the narrative of Marcel’s quest for the girls, as if from the future—“some time later [plus tard]”— it temporarily expels us from narrative time. According to the myth of photography as “a technical registration of reality,” a photograph that takes us back in time does so in the register of the real.5 The fiction of the old snapshot, then, ostensibly places the reader and the Narrator/ Hero before an image that enjoys the authority of a (fictively) real past.

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But Marcel/the Narrator could never have witnessed this past. He is on his first visit to Balbec and he encounters the girls as adolescents like himself. He would never have been able to see them as children in Balbec. And the snapshot carries an implied opening to the future. Not only is it given to the Narrator at a later date, but photography is generally acknowledged to capture time in a way that holds it open to new experiences of seeing. Since Fox Talbot (1800–1877), it has been understood that more might be discerned in a photograph in the future than was consciously perceived by the photographer who took the picture.6 The explanatory force of the snapshot, then, depends on the fact that it gives the novel a temporal reach that exceeds the novel’s formal structure. The photograph holds more time than either pole of our double first-person narrator—the adolescent protagonist Marcel or the adult Narrator—can access. Most importantly, as a blurry photograph, what it registers is unreadable, placed under a kind of erasure. This is just what “explains” the essential unrecognizability of the group of girls, one that will subsequently become lodged in Albertine herself. She will absorb into her protean self the indistinct character of this multiple, remaining fundamentally unknowable throughout Proust’s novel, despite everyone’s best efforts to pin her down. Albertine’s intrinsic blurriness—her flou—marks her as singular. But it also establishes her as what Proust will subsequently call: an “allegorical figure” (P 333) (Figure 8). She will stand for “all the girls whose sight had so often rooted me to the spot in the street or on the road… because she could provide me with the quintessence of their lives” (F 526). Albertine, in other words, allegorizes the deep mystery of otherness that Baudelaire captured in “À une passante.” Proust will open this figure up, however, to let it stand more broadly for: “that unknowable thing… the real life of another human being” (P 52). What is more, Albertine’s intrinsic nonidentity—her radical otherness even from herself—will have a contagious effect in the novel. By the time we get to The Fugitive, her formlessness will have rubbed off on Marcel—“my life appeared to me to be… lacking the support of an individual, identical and permanent self” (F 558) we read. Ultimately, her formlessness leaks out into the world. As the Narrator eventually concludes, “we have only formless, fragmented visions of the world” (F 538). It would be reasonable to assume that the snapshot was out of focus because little girls cannot sit still. But Proust’s Narrator proposes another hypothesis: children are intrinsically formless because they

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Figure 8  Anonymous, Photographie tremblée, n.d.

are internally in flux. They are still coming into their own; they have not yet settled into the contours of their individual identity. He compares childhood to the early phases of evolutionary development, evoking a mythic, formless origin that blurs the boundaries between the individual and the multiple. The little girls in the photograph, Proust writes, were too young to have gone beyond the elementary degree of formation of self, when personality has not yet stamped its seal on each face. Like primitive organisms in which the individual hardly exists, or, rather, in which it is constituted more by the polypary than by each of its component polyps, they lived in a close conglomerate, pressed one against the other. (SYG 404, my emphasis)7

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This is, at least in part, what the blur of the snapshot signifies here. Eager to push back against critics who would claim to find a key to Albertine in a man Proust had loved (his chauffeur Alfred Agnostelli), the distinguished Proust scholar Maurice Bardèche links the emergence of the Albertine character to an “obsessive leitmotif” of little girls discernible in early drafts of the Recherche. In Proust’s earliest notebooks, he points out, one can find five different presentations of the group of little girls that, according to Bardèche, Proust would subsequently “organize around” Albertine.8 In one of the notebooks, we read the following treatment of this leitmotif: I had noticed at Querqueville [an earlier name given to what becomes Balbec], one evening, sitting on chairs in front of a tent on the beach, an amorphous and delicious mass of little girls, sort of a vague constellation, of an indistinct milky way in which I only made out the features of one face to lose it again and forget it within the whole. Pressed one against the other, like those primitive organisms where individuality is to be found more in the polypary than by each of its component polyps [le polypier que dans le polype], they were still at that age, at the elementary stage of formation where individuality has not yet stamped its seal on the features of the face… small faces a bit twisted [grimaçant] as in a blurry photograph.9 The Narrator’s description of the old snapshot in the Recherche retains exact phrases from this notebook passage where it is a question of a metaphorical out-of-focus photograph—the little girls appear “as in a blurry photograph”—not a literal one. All the main elements of this passage, however—the tent on the beach, the amorphous mass of girls pressed one against the other, the figure of primitive organisms, the nebula, the laughter, and, especially, the allusion to the blurry photograph—return in Proust’s description of the fictive snapshot that finds its way into the Recherche. The snapshot in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower gives us something like a photograph of the metaphorical photograph we find in the notebook passage. As such, it provides terms for decoding Marcel’s own blurry vision of the band of girls on the beach in the novel. Proust transfers the gist of his notebook description, reconfigured as an ekphrasis of the old blurry snapshot, to his account of our Hero’s vision

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of the girls. With this return, an apparently casual, even gratuitous, feature of Proust’s description of little girls in his notebook, whose “small faces” were described as “a bit twisted [grimaçant] as in a blurry photograph,” takes on a certain explanatory force: “Some time later [plus tard], a photograph was to explain why” (SYG 404). Bardèche reveals that the early manuscript fragment he cites (the one quoted above) was followed by a blank in Proust’s notebook.10 He understands this blank to mark the site of a break between the old architecture of Proust’s novel (initially a work of only three parts: Swann’s Way, Guermantes Way, and Finding Time Again) and the new architecture, which will consist of the many additional volumes of the Recherche devoted to the Albertine story. According to Bardèche, Proust had originally composed the notebook passage for inclusion in Swann’s Way, corresponding to the time of Marcel’s childhood. In In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, which launches the expanded architecture of the novel by introducing the new character Albertine, Marcel is an adolescent. Any encounter with the band of girls would have to be adapted accordingly, and so the little girls who will be “organized” into the character Albertine become the adolescent girls whose apparition charms and astonishes Marcel in Balbec. Bardèche is not a fan of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. He complains that this volume of the Recherche lacks narrative interest and that the characterization of Albertine gets off to a bad start. “[It] is only a linking scene,” he writes dismissively, a kind of hinge, a device to establish continuity between the old structure of Proust’s novel and the new one.11 Bardèche does not mention either the figure of the photographie tremblée in the notebook passage or the actual blurry snapshot that suddenly appears in Proust’s novel. If he is right, however, that the Albertine character emerges from a reorganization of the little girl motif and that In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower operates as a kind of hinge (raccord) between the two architectures of Proust’s novel, then the puzzling—and apparently gratuitous—snapshot that finds its way into In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower takes on new interest. It appears to be more than a merely vestigial element from an earlier piece of writing that Proust has retained and repurposed. We could say that it not only sits on the fault line between the two architectures of Proust’s novel but also operates the hinge between them. We have already noted how the photograph dilates the narrative framework temporally in two directions, forward and backward, holding

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both these horizons open. According to a tradition inherited from the nineteenth century, the representational paradigm of photography consists of the “triad iconicity/exteriority/evidence.”12 Proust’s fuzzy snapshot simultaneously marks an iconic nonresemblance between the little girls and the adolescent ones, because it is out of focus (“who could have recognized” the adolescent girls in the image of the children?) and, at the same time, thanks to the indexical character of photography (which implies exteriority and evidence), it invites a presumption of real identity between the children and the adolescents. In other words, the success of the textual hinge or raccord (the term also signifies “continuity” in the language of film) depends upon the specific character of the photograph as a blurry image, a photographie tremblée. For only an unreadable photo impression could certify both identify and difference (or nonresemblance). While attesting to the indeterminacy that fundamentally characterizes Albertine, the photograph attaches her to the childhood register of the earlier volumes. In Part I, we saw Proust reflect on relations between vision, affect, and habit through a contrast between natural vision and the mechanical registration of impressions in devices such as the telephone and the camera that alienate habitual experience and expose something new. We saw that the modality of habit that glues us to the past—habit as repetition—undermines vision because our attachments program it, relaying incoming impressions through a loop of past ones, interposing a limited edition of existing images between us and what we see. Mechanical vision, on the other hand, frees us from this unconscious repetition, letting us really see what is there before us. Here, in the Albertine story, it is the multiple that defends against the disabilities of habit. “What I found delightful,” the Narrator explains of Marcel’s initial vision of the girls on the beach, “was really the whole group of girls,” because “my perceptions of the girls were… unsated by habit” (SYG 494). Any nascent attachment, in other words, would be immediately absorbed back into the multiple as a kind of virtual reserve—a “milky, indistinct nebula” (SYG 404)—into which a face “once noticed, would soon have gone unnoticed” (SYG 404), as it blended back into it. The multiple performs an equivalent to the work of defamiliarization that the flou (blur) momentarily performed in Marcel’s initial apparition of the girls and that the out-of-focus snapshot reinforces. “Whenever I was with them,” the Narrator explains, speaking of Albertine and her friends, “I was able to truly see, that is, to be profoundly astonished by setting eyes on

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them” (SYG 494, my emphasis). To really see occurs when our impression of what is given in the external world is refreshed, or reanimated, by being defamiliarized. The multiple—intensified by the flou—proposes a variant on the structure of estrangement examined in Part I. Proust intimates that the force of Marcel’s desire for the teenage girls is responsible for his blurry vision on the beach, because it made him tremble. Desire underwrites the flou, and, at the same time, it is desire that lets one really see. The feeling of astonishment that accompanies this act of really seeing also revitalizes desire, defending it against the vitiating effects of habit, that familiarity which only ever lets us see the past. What might it look like to capture the astonishment that occurs in, and as, an event of really seeing? It might look like a blurry photograph, an image not fixed into sharp contours by the repetitions of habit, or frozen in clock time. To really see might be to capture a bit of the world as a snapshot—an instantanée—that opens up the instant and lets it tremble. The blur conveys too much time by opening up the instant to let movement into it, inscribing the time that passes there. The blurriness of the fictive photograph proposes a trembling of lived time, a trembling across the positions of singularity and multiplicity, that will subsequently be internalized within Albertine, in whom, as the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas puts it, “psychological life… trembles in inimitable fashion.”13 If Bardèche is correct that Proust organizes the leitmotif of the little girls that runs through his notebooks into the character Albertine, if we are right to read the photograph that crops up in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower as a reprise of the notebook passage that evokes an impression of little girls smiling “as in a blurry photograph,” and if we are right that Proust operates the hinge between the threepart structure of his work and the emerging architecture of the vastly enlarged novel through the old out-of-focus snapshot, then we might say that Albertine emerges from a photograph. She emerges from the figure of a photographie tremblée, whose flou pushes the limits of the photographic still more deeply into the happening of time, giving us a condensed and accelerated—indeed an intensified—version of intermittence, a visible trace of time in its affective vitality. If Proust wrote the photo portrait of the Grandmother as an intermittent photograph, the blurry snapshot of the little girls, out of which Albertine emerges, inscribes intermittence as blur.

Chapter 7 Making Memories (Desire Is Photographic)

When François Arago presented Daguerre’s invention to the French Academy of Sciences in 1839, he emphasized its scientific value, its ability to produce minutely detailed, and absolutely accurate, images of the real, images that exceed the capability of ordinary vision. At world’s fairs, photographs were displayed in the Palace of Industry along with other instruments that do useful work or produce knowledge of the world. With the development of photography proper (the paper negative process that enabled the production of multiple prints from a single image registration), a new conception of the photographic arose: photography as art. In 1859, the world’s fair exhibited photography in the Palace of Fine Arts for the first time, instead of in the Palace of Industry. In his account of this International Salon of Photography, the critic Louis Figuier attempts to justify the institutional recognition of photography as art by affirming that photography does not simply transmit the material impressions that nature makes on us; through specific qualities of the image, he insists—tonalities and contrasts of light and shade, for example—it also records the feelings the photographer experiences at the moment of taking the picture, “the feeling that distinguishes him and animates him.”14 This is particularly true of portrait photography, Figuier adds, which reflects the photographer’s personal feelings toward the photographic subject. Proust’s Narrator speaks in similar terms when he insists that our desire is “the only thing that makes us take any interest in the existence or character of a person” (P 65–6) and that it affects the way we see. It is desire, he maintains, that makes the world, and other people,

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interesting to us. The gaze of desire establishes a kind of contact that Proust compares to photographic contact, the indexical impression of photons on a sensitive surface. Marcel’s first three encounters with Albertine consist of nothing more than a fleeting exchange of glances that suggests this sort of contact. The story will subsequently take up the problem of reconciling the distinct and varied still images these encounters produce and of constructing a fragile resemblance that will stand in for identity when it comes to this object of desire, this “être de fuite [creature of flight]” (P 80), Albertine. The day after the apparition of the Balbec girls on the beach, when Marcel felt a “black ray” emanate from Albertine’s eyes (SYG 375), he encounters one of the girls on the street while out for an evening walk with his Grandmother: “we passed a young girl, at the corner of one of the side streets that run perpendicular to the beach: hanging her head, like an animal being forced back to the stable, and carrying golf clubs, she was walking in front of an authoritative-looking person” (SYG 409). Free as a bird on the beach, within the magnetic field of her friends, the girl now heads reluctantly home under the stern gaze of a minder. “She shot me a quick glance” (SYG 410, translation modified). But which girl is she? Is she the one that had stood out amongst the others on the beach, the one with eyes like “little disks of mica” (SYG 375)? Marcel is not sure. The girl he sees on the street, Marcel/the Narrator puzzles, bore some resemblance to the one in the group whose chubby, motionless face, with its laughing eyes, had been topped by a black toque; this girl also wore a black toque, but she seemed much prettier than the other one, the line of her nose being straighter and the wings of her nostrils wider and more fleshy. The first one had looked like a pale and proud young lady; this one was more like a pink-faced child, grudgingly submissive. (SYG 410) The girl’s face appears “prettier… straighter… wider and more fleshy” (SYG 410) than the face of the girl he had seen from a greater distance the previous day. The sharper image suggests an intensification of Marcel’s desire, now trained exclusively on Albertine: “From that moment on… it was… the girl with the golf clubs, whom I assumed to be Mlle Simonet [Albertine] who preoccupied me” (SYG 410). If this description of Marcel’s street encounter suggests a photographic close-up, that is because, in a sense, it is one. The clue is

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the girl’s “rosy complexion [teint rose]” (SYG 410). Much later, Proust’s Narrator will reveal that a rosy glow on Albertine’s face is an effect of desire, or rather of her having become aware, like Baudelaire’s passante, that she is being desired. In The Prisoner, the Narrator tells us that when women in Balbec gazed lustfully at Albertine, her awareness of their desire “made her face rosy with delight” (P 134)—or so he thought. He describes the active gaze of desire as a mode of contact that Albertine experienced “with… feigned naturalness and hidden pleasure as if she were being photographed” (P 133–4). Here on the street in Balbec, it is Marcel who looks at Albertine and makes her blush. But the gaze of desire is always photographic. Albertine’s own desiring gaze (as Marcel imagines it trained on other women) also operates photographically, by a contact Proust’s Narrator describes as “so gluey and corrosive that you felt it would not be able to detach itself without removing a patch of skin” (P 134). This figure of visually flaying the object of desire suggests Balzac’s oft-cited reaction to the photographic act, which he imagined would peel off layers of the body.15 Marcel’s encounter with Albertine on the street opens with the phrase “we passed a young girl” (SYG 409). Temporarily suspended to zoom in on the description of the girl’s face, the narration resumes with “She shot me a quick glance” (SYG 410). She shot me a quick glance; and over the following days, each time I caught sight of the little gang of girls on the beach, and even later, after I had come to know all of them, I could never be absolutely sure whether any of them… was in fact this one I had seen that evening… this one who was hardly any different, but who was actually a little bit different, from the one I had noticed in their procession [on the beach]. (SYG 410, translation modified) In French, the past simple tense is the tense of narration, but here the narrative impetus immediately dissipates. Time disperses, sliding forward from the time of the action “she shot me a quick glance” to defuse into a progressively vague future time—“over the following days” and then “even later.” As the narrative sequence evaporates, action grinds to a halt, as in a kind of freeze-frame, a device that produces “instants that suspend the time of movement and open up, inside of time, another time,” engendering a “wavering between fixity

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and movement.”16 Walking on the beach with her friends, the Narrator remarks, Albertine “would often stop [faisant halte], forcing [forçant] her friends, who seemed to respect her greatly, to also come to a standstill” (SYG 410). Instead of giving us a sequence of events, Proust’s Narrator blurs the lines of narrative order bringing his narration to a halt as Albertine herself grows still, hovering in the grammatical mode of the present participle—“faisant halte… forçant” (SYG 410)—as Marcel/the Narrator captures a still impression of her, one that slides forward in time and transmutes into a memory image. He continues: That is how I see her to this day, standing there, her eyes shining under her toque, silhouetted against the backdrop of the sea… the first glimpse of her in my memory, a very thin image of a face first desired and pursued, then forgotten, then found again, a face that since then I have often projected into the past, so as to say to myself, of a girl with me in my bedroom, “That was her!” (SYG 410, translation modified) Embedded in what we might at first take as an unfolding story, Proust gives us a very compressed encounter between a becoming present and a becoming past, performing the structure of time, which, as we have seen, Ravaisson referred to as the “double influence… of the duration of change.”17 Faisant halte, Albertine is caught in the act of growing still, against the backdrop of the sea. Marcel sees her and, in the same moment, fixes a memory image of her—“the first glimpse of her in my memory, a very thin image” (SYG 410). It is as if he were taking a photograph of her—or a memory. Image capture and memory production occur at the same time. Albertine becomes a “silhouette against the background of the sea,” a silhouette that cuts her contour out from the group of other girls, detaching it from any narrative context. The silhouette displays Albertine’s form against the écran (screen) of the sea, where écran suggests the French expression écran de chambre noire, the light surface against which a camera obscura image appears when, from the outside world, it is projected into a dark room—a process comparable to the internalization of an external perception in memory. Marcel perceives Albertine as a still image, something like a photograph that fixes itself as a memory in his mind. Once the perception sets itself in as a memory image, recognition is no longer a problem. “That was

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her!” Marcel/the Narrator will be able to say, when in future this image is called up and revitalizes his desire for Albertine. Pulled out of an incipient narrative sequence and fixed like a photograph, this still image founds the maritime series of memory images that will carry and revive Marcel’s desire for Albertine throughout the Recherche. If we have given singular importance to this passage, and to this image, it is because Proust calls our attention to it. As indicated in the passage quoted above, this image of Albertine standing against the background of the sea will be “first desired and pursued, then forgotten, then found again” (SYG 410) in the course of the novel. This sequence corresponds quite precisely to the novel’s plot in the volumes that tell the Albertine story. Albertine is desired and pursued (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower), forgotten (The Guermantes Way II), and refound (Sodom and Gomorrah). It is as if this image had generative power, as if it held the development of the rest of the book in a virtual state.18 The image returns many times in the novel. Sometimes it is voluntarily conjured up; sometimes it pops up spontaneously or involuntarily. In The Guermantes Way II we read, “I remembered Albertine first of all against the seashore, almost painted upon a background of sea” (GW 357); on another occasion in that volume, Marcel/the Narrator sees “Albertine silhouetted against the sea” (GW 359) in his mind’s eye. In The Prisoner, he remembers “the young girl that I had seen for the first time at Balbec, with her bold, laughing eyes under her jockey-cap, still unknown to me, thin as a cut-out figure silhouetted on the waves” (P 57). The returns have affective impact; they produce effects of pleasure, which prompt turns of plot that seem to emerge out of fictive experience itself, as it moves forward in the elastic temporal modalities of anticipation and delay, remembering and forgetting, which develop lived impressions. According to the conventional interpretation of the Recherche, Proust’s Narrator (often considered a mask for Proust himself in an autobiographical project) presents what he has already remembered, thanks to the workings of involuntary memory whose force is unleashed in Combray when the cookie is dipped in tea and all of Combray emerges from the teacup. The image of Albertine by the sea is not compatible with this drama of reminiscence, for what Proust gives us here does not concern the retrieval of a memory impression. It concerns the production of one. We have caught our Hero/Narrator in the act of making a memory image out of experience as it happens, just as the narrative of the novel presents this experience to us.

Chapter 8 Déja Vu (Bergson)

Marcel/the Narrator perceives Albertine silhouetted against the sea and lays down a memory image of her at the same time; it is a productive memory image that will have repercussions in the story the novel tells. But can we say that memory occurs at the same time as perception? Don’t we usually assume that experience comes first, and the memory of that experience follows? In a discussion of this question, the philosopher Henri Bergson acknowledges that ordinarily we say that memory comes after experience—“first the psychological state of the present, then, when it is no longer, the memory of that absent state.”19 But he vigorously opposes this conventional view. He argues that memories are produced at the same time that perception occurs, just as we saw in the case of Albertine by the sea. Bergson understands memory as a survival of the past, defining past as “that which no longer acts [ce qui n’agit plus]” as one acts in the present.20 Memory, as Bergson famously explained in his classic study, Matière et mémoire, occurs either as a memory of the body (a neurological inscription that organizes sensory-motor systems) or as a spontaneous survival of past images.21 The latter, he says, is true memory, “the memory that sees again [la mémoire qui revoit]” (MM OC 234). This is the memory at work in Proust’s novel when the Narrator exclaims, of the image of Albertine now imprinted on his memory, “That is how I see her to this day” (SYG 410). Bergson presents his clearest account of the production of memories in “Le Souvenir du présent et la Fausse Reconnaissance” (The Memory of the Present and False Recognition), an essay first published in La Revue philosophique in 1908 that takes up the question of déjà vu. He characterizes déjà vu as a very slight aberration in the ordinary

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functioning of our mental faculties as they pertain to the becoming of time. In Bergson’s view, time happens as a flow that divides a present becoming past from a future becoming present. The present “doubles itself at every moment, in its very emergence, in two symmetrical streams, one of which falls back toward the past while the other reaches toward the future” (SP 914, my emphasis). Bergson understands the happening of time, then, very much as Ravaisson did when he spoke of “double influence simply of… the duration [de la seule durée] of change.” And for both Ravaisson and Bergson, this conception of time is linked to life. Ravaisson writes, “This successive unity in time, is Life.”22 According to Bergson, time opens a gap between the already and the not yet as it flows, a gap within which organisms live, carving out a fleeting present, which coincides with the time of their action. It is this doubling that explains the overlap of a perceptual image with a memory image, such that perception and memory “are formed together” (SP 904). “Even as perception happens,” Bergson writes, “its memory emerges at its side, like a shadow” (SP 914). Frédéric Worms explains it this way: It is as if a perception automatically became a memory [souvenir] by virtue of being placed in time, that is, in the unfolding [déroulement] of a personal history, by becoming… the perception… of someone… Each instant of time, each perception, thus takes on a double meaning, or takes on the sense of an intersection between the spectacle of an object which initially defines it, and the memory of a subject that it becomes right away.23 Bergson readily acknowledges that his view of memory formation runs counter to standard accounts. But it is crucial to his philosophical argument against determinism. Memory, he insists, is not just a weaker version of what perception gives us, coming after it. The doubling and differing that occur between perception and memory in the production of a memory image affirm an irreducible difference in kind between the past and the present, which is also to say between the virtual and the actual. For Bergson, this difference safeguards the irreducibility of mind to brain. “The memory appears as if doubling the perception at each instant, coming into being with it, developing at the same time as it, and surviving it, precisely because it is of a different nature than perception” (SP 917, my emphasis). The most important point is that, as the present

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moment arrives, it “splits in two at the same time that it lands” (SP 197). The time of becoming “consists in this very splitting, for the present instant, always on the move, fleeting limit between the immediate past that is no longer and the immediate future that is not yet, would be reduced to a simple abstraction were it not, precisely, the mobile mirror that reflects, ceaselessly, the perception in memory” (SP 197). This, we could say, is the time of life. In Matière et mémoire Bergson analyzed the temporal synthesis that articulates perception and memory, and the dynamics of attentive recognition that enable experiences ranging from action to dream.24 In “Le Souvenir du present,” he explains that the exceptional phenomenon of déjà vu involves a very minor slippage in the performance of this synthesis. Ordinarily, because of the demands of action, we respond to the pull to the future a bit more eagerly than to the fall into the past. We experience what comes from the future as just barely ahead of what drops into the past because of our pragmatic interest in action, which is what marks out a present within what arrives from the future. If the mechanism that articulates perception and memory (performing something like a temporal version of Kant’s schematism) is ever so slightly out of sync, however, this psychological sliver of time difference is suspended, and we end up actually experiencing the doubling, or self-differing, dynamic of time—the true ontological character of time that, under normal circumstances, we don’t notice. The overlap of pastness and presentness that we experience in the phenomenon of second sight turns déjà vu into a kind of blur—what Bergson refers to as a “memory of the present” (SP 191).25 When Proust describes the image of Albertine by the sea as “the first glimpse of her in my memory, a very thin image” (SYG 410, translation modified), his language suggests a photograph. This would be consistent with a long tradition that identifies memory with photographic processes. Léon d’Hervey de Saint-Denys introduced the term cliché souvenir in his 1867 study “Les Rêves et les moyens de les diriger” (Dreams and Ways to Direct Them) to suggest that memories are stored in our minds like photographic plates (clichés) and that we fix images in memory in the same way that photography fixes the fleeting images of the camera obscura on a sensitive surface. In Bergson’s own account of memory formation, the paradigm for the doubling of a perceptual

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image and a memory image is also photographic. Bergson refers to the “ingenious” explanation of F. W. H. Myers (a British theosophist), who analyzed the production of memories as the work of a subliminal self that photographs, in precise detail, what the conscious self perceives only vaguely. “Founded on the distinction between a conscious self and a ‘subliminal’ self,” Bergson writes: the first [the conscious self] only receives a global impression from the scene it witnesses, in which the details always come a bit after those of the external stimulus; the second [the subliminal self] photographs these details along the way, instantly. The latter is thus ahead of consciousness, and if it appears to it suddenly, it brings a Memory of that which it is busy perceiving. (SP 904)26 In Matière et mémoire Bergson appeals to a second photographic model for memory—the idea of memory as a “faculty of mental photography”—proposed by the British physician Mortimer Granville (1833–1900) (MM 233). Bergson cites Granville: The brain is undoubtedly a process analogous to instantaneous photography. It rarely performs this function at the behest of the will… the faculty of instantaneous photography is more commonly the agent of the subconsciousness than of the supreme consciousness, and it takes in the impressions we would gladly have effaced.27 Both thinkers that Bergson cites, then, insist on the unconscious nature of the process of memory formation, which they depict in photographic terms. Granville also specifically addresses the involuntary nature of the retrieval of such spontaneous memories, and he does so in terms that strikingly anticipate what Proust will call “involuntary memory” in the Recherche. A “piece of knowledge,” Granville adds, is often put away safely in the archives of memory, but no care has been taken to mark the place or leave a clue for its recovery when wanted. It may turn up at any moment but cannot be produced by the will, for the simple reason that the will has not been concerned in putting it away, or is not orderly in its action and trained in the art of recollection.28

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(For all the denials of a Bergsonian anticipation of Proust’s notion of involuntary memory, here we have it! It has been hiding in plain sight, in Matière et mémoire.) For Bergson, the parallel occurrence of perception (or experience) and memory formation implies a dynamic understanding of time. “Perception occupies a certain thickness of duration,” Bergson writes, “prolongs the past in the present and in this way belongs to [participe de] memory” (MM 274). The time of life does not radically separate past, present, and future, even as it implies a splitting, or difference, active within time itself as it happens.

Chapter 9 Memory: Bergson versus Freud (and Walter Benjamin)

Before we turn to the stakes of this emphasis on memory formation for our reading of Proust, it is important to acknowledge how disruptive this perspective is in the context of Proust criticism. To read Proust through Bergson’s account of memory formation is to read him against Walter Benjamin, for whom the crucial text for understanding Proust (and modernity generally) is Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). This is where Freud famously affirms that “becoming conscious and leaving behind a memory trace are processes incompatible with each other, within one and the same system.”29 First consciousness receives a perceptual impression (on the surface, as it were, of the mind or psyche), and then a memory trace inscribes itself in the unconscious system located beneath or behind it, where it will be stored. First perception, then memory—this is precisely the view Bergson rejects. Freud developed his scientific theory of memory on the basis of clinical work he conducted with veterans, soldiers who had survived the First World War. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, an “investigation of the mental reaction to external danger,” was motivated by this examination of traumatic neuroses—“the terrible war,” Freud writes, “which has just ended, gave rise to a great number of illnesses of this kind.”30 Analysis of traumatic shock is a core feature of psychoanalytic theory. Walter Benjamin will construe this shock not as an aberration, or exceptional circumstance, however, but as a defining feature of the very structure of modern experience. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud

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reworks what he calls the “old, naïve theory of shock” (a materialist, neurophysiological account that claims “direct damage to molecular structure or even histological structure”) into a theory that concerns only “effects produced on the organ of the mind.” It is a question, he maintains, of mind, not brain, and so does not reduce psychological experience to deterministic material causes.31 Freud is alluding here to his earlier study, Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), where the influence of the psychophysicist Gustav Fechner is strong and the “old, naïve” theory of shock would be at play. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, however, he presents a topographic model of the psychic apparatus, adding a new element to his theory of the memory trace. In the consciousness system, Freud writes, “excitatory processes do not leave behind any permanent change in its elements, but expire, as it were, in the phenomenon of becoming conscious.”32 Perception occurs in consciousness, which is located “on the borderland between outside and inside” and is “turned toward the external world.” Consciousness serves as a barrier that protects the psyche from “excessive amounts of stimulation or… unsuitable kinds of stimulation,” providing a “protective shield” against painful impressions. “This little fragment of living substance is suspended in the middle of an external world charged, with the most powerful energies. It would be killed by the stimulation emanating from these if it were not provided with a protective shield against stimuli,” a shield that results not from material causes but rather from the situation of consciousness at the limit of inside and outside the psyche. Consciousness can act as a shield because its “outermost surface ceases to have the structure proper to living matter… and henceforth functions as a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli.”33 The theory of topographical incompatibility of consciousness and the memory trace that Freud proposes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (modeled on traumatic neuroses) presents an account of experience that Benjamin will subsequently theorize as universal in character and designate as historically specific to modernity. He dates modernity from the mid-nineteenth century and identifies it with the advent of new technological capabilities that, he says, produced collective experiences of shock: the train, the tramway, the motorcar, for example, but also the telephone and the phonograph—and, of course, photography and film.34

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Benjamin plays Bergson against Freud in his analyses of modernity that move between his essays on Baudelaire and Proust. Though he notes that Bergson regarded “the structure of memory as decisive for the philosophical pattern of experience,” he turns to Freud to provide a theory of memory (of the shock experience and the memory trace) and to Bergson for a notion of durational experience.35 Benjamin charges that Bergson “rejects any specific historical determination of memory” and so “manages to… stay clear of that experience from which his own philosophy evolved, or rather, in reaction to which it arose” (OSM 157). In accordance with the general Frankfurt School critique of the French philosopher, Benjamin charges that Bergson’s notion of duration is “estranged from history” (OSM 185). At the same time, he writes that Bergson’s Matière et mémoire “defines the nature of experience in duration in such a way that the reader is bound to conclude that only a poet can be the adequate subject of such an experience” (OSM 157). Benjamin identifies Proust as just such a poet, claiming that the novelist “put Bergson’s theory of experience to the test” in the Recherche (OSM 156).36 He credits Proust with performing an immanent critique of Bergson, since Proust reveals that only involuntary memory can yield an experience of duration, while at the same time demonstrating that involuntary memory occurs only occasionally—if at all. Benjamin argues that this proves his main point: duration cannot be the horizon of modern experience because it is an exceptional experience; the modern structure of experience corresponds to Proust’s voluntary memory, whose effect is to reduce experience to the status of mere information (OSM 157–8). The modern structure of perception, Benjamin writes, “isolates… information from experience” (OSM 159). This “atrophy of experience” (which implies the traumatic model Freud theorized in Beyond the Pleasure Principle) is the distinguishing feature of modernity, one that only takes on affirmative value to the extent that it supports a revolutionary attitude. In other words, for Benjamin, Proust’s novel attests to the fact that Bergsonian duration, which Benjamin identifies with a premodern structure of experience, is lost to us; we encounter it, if at all, only in exceptional moments that arrive by chance. Everyday experience is so attenuated, so shallow, so disconnected from the impressions it registers that it amounts to a mode of consciousness alienated from itself.37 This, according to Benjamin, would be one of the most important lessons of Proust’s novel.

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We can now appreciate just how subtle things become as Benjamin shuttles between Freud and Bergson and the reader shuttles between his essays on Baudelaire and Proust which elaborate his esthetic theory of modernity. For one thing, Benjamin doubles the terms we met in Bergson’s dual structure of memory and experience. Memory (which Benjamin elaborates through Freud) is refracted through Proust’s distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory. And experience (which Benjamin explicitly elaborates with reference to Bergson) is divided into two historical registers broken apart by the rupture of modernity, such that a premodern, traditional, or “auratic” experience (Erfahrung) is distinguished from a modern one that Benjamin identifies with Freud’s theory of psychic defense against traumatic shock and refers to as Erlebnis. Benjamin needs Proust, then, to reveal that Bergson’s philosophy of experience (rooted in memory) is no longer viable. This supports Benjamin’s point that Bergson’s philosophy amounts to an unwitting confirmation of the modern transformation—and impoverishment— of experience. For Benjamin, Baudelaire’s statement to his reader in the opening poem of Les Fleurs du mal, the reader he addresses as his venal and, above all, hypocritical fellow man—“Hypocrite lecteur—mon semblable mon frère [hypocrite reader, my fellow, my brother]”—attests to this impoverishment of experience.38 Benjamin suggests that Bergson can help us read Baudelaire by giving us a point of contrast for the impoverished experience—the ennui—that his poetry reveals. Baudelaire in turn helps us see what was shut out in Bergson, that is, the loss of authentic experience. For Benjamin, the horizon of experience Proust associates with involuntary memory must be read through Bergson (Benjamin identifies it with Bergson’s notion of Pure Memory), and yet, in the end, Proust’s attempt to take Bergson at his word reveals that durational experience has been compromised by historical forces in modern conditions of perception. “In seeking a more substantial definition of what appears in Proust’s mémoire de l’intelligence [voluntary memory] as a byproduct of Bergson’s theory,” Benjamin concludes, “it is well to go back to Freud” (OSM 159). He turns to Freud to scientifically confirm the implications of Proust’s immanent critique of Bergson, most specifically the affirmation of the separation of consciousness from memory in the modern structure of experience that must defend

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itself against shock. It should be noted that Bergson never suggests that the experience of duration would be a general structure of experience. On the contrary, he characterizes it as an exceptional experience that demands intense philosophical effort. This is something quite different from Proust’s involuntary memory. The experience of duration necessitates work because it requires going against the grain of the whole tradition of Western philosophy, which effaces the force of time as invention of the new, and the practical demands of daily life in the social world. But to return to Benjamin: this is where the work of forgetting comes in, the forgetting Benjamin invokes as a counterpoint to memory in his essay “The Image of Proust,” where he speaks of “a Penelope work of forgetting.”39 According to Benjamin, the radical implication of Freud’s theory of the memory trace (and of the structure of traumatic experience it implies) is that, if “consciousness arises instead of a memory trace,” as Freud maintained, it could be said to occur thanks to a kind of forgetting.40 Conversely, if memory occurs in the unconscious, then what it holds there could be said to have never been (consciously) experienced. This is the structure of trauma, where the divorce between experience and memory is radical: conscious experience would amount to forgetting, and memory would store what consciousness never experienced. According to Freud, Benjamin writes, memory fragments are “often most powerful and most enduring when the incident which left them behind was one that never entered consciousness.” Put in Proustian terms, this means that only what has not been experienced explicitly and consciously, what has not happened to the subject as an experience, can become a component of the mémoire involontaire. (OSM 160–1) On this view, then, consciousness would not yield experience in Proust’s novel, where it would principally be a question of the unconscious forces associated with involuntary memory. And memory would hold on to what was too painful to experience at all, placing it out of reach. Benjamin wants to align Proust’s two types of memory—voluntary and involuntary—with Freud’s topographical distinction between consciousness and the unconscious.

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It is not so easy to pass between the discourses of Freud and Bergson, precisely because the status of what is conscious and what is unconscious is so different in each case. Freud not only proposes a topographic model of the psyche that includes the unconscious but also insists on the force of repression—a crucial concept in psychoanalytic theory—that totally isolates it from consciousness. Bergson proposes a more fluid account of consciousness and unconsciousness in a dynamic framework, where what matters are continuous differences in degree of tension which pertain to each along a scale that passes from action to dream. And what is at stake in these two registers are temporal differences between present and past, as well as the difference between body and mind. There is no absolute break between consciousness and unconsciousness but rather a continuous, differential flow between them. There is no equivalent to Freudian repression in Bergson. Consciousness and unconsciousness also pertain to the two types of memory Bergson proposes, a memory of the body which is different from, and supplementary to, a memory of imagination.41 It would be necessary to take all of this into account if one were to try to adjudicate the respective value of the positions of Freud and Bergson, which we do not undertake to do here. Rather, we are interested in showing that the way Benjamin characterizes Proust through Freud does not fit what Proust presents to us in the Albertine story of the Recherche, where memory images can be laid down through dynamics of attention at the very moment of conscious experience and return both willfully and spontaneously in the course of the novel where degree and tone of attention are always at play, and where various modes of lucidity are highly valued—including the really seeing that produces astonishment. But there is also more at play here. It is not just a question of choosing between two theories of memory and two understandings of unconsciousness. Two different conceptions of time and therefore also of being—or the real—are also at stake. Although Freud proposes a nonlinear time in his theory of Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action (which runs parallel to Proust’s crucial structure of anachronism), the topographic model he invokes in his theory of the memory trace (one that, as Bergson indicates, might plausibly be said to refer back to the psychophysics of Gustav Fechner) renders time spatially. As Ravaisson wrote, before Bergson, “everything that is in space is outside time.”42 Although Freud claims that his topography is a mental one, and does

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not necessarily coincide with brain locations, he nevertheless represents it in a manner consistent with depictions of topographies of the brain.43 Whereas Freud insists on a radical incompatibility between perception and memory, Bergson proposes that memories are produced alongside perceptual experience, such that, as we have seen, “even as perception happens, its memory emerges at its side, like a shadow” (SP 913). We have been arguing that Bergson’s account of déjà vu, where a blurring occurs between the horizons of the present and the past, gives a better account of the way memory operates in Proust’s novel than Freud’s theory of the memory trace. And this is to a large extent because it implies a way of thinking time. Insisting on the splitting and doubling of time as it arrives, where the “fleeting limit” of the present moment divides between an immediate past that is no longer and an immediate future that is not yet gives us the time of life, which cannot be represented spatially, though it can register itself as intermittence or in the trembling of a blur. Benjamin reads the Recherche as an autobiographical work, in which Proust describes a life “as it was remembered by the one who lived it” (IP 204). He affirms that an “elegiac” idea of happiness is what, for Proust, “transforms existence into a preserve of memory” (IP 204). When Benjamin reads Proust’s novel through Freud, he reads it elegiacally. The Recherche becomes a novel about loss on a grand scale, not the individual loss of our Hero’s personal past but the historical loss of a collective structure of authentic experience. As such, however nuanced and sophisticated Benjamin’s interpretation of Proust may be (Benjamin translated Proust and knew his work intimately), it can easily be put in the service of the traditional, idealist reading that places the vocation story at the novel’s core, insists on the centrality of loss, and proposes that loss can be recuperated aesthetically, through essences—or, as Benjamin might prefer to put it, through the image: the world of “homesickness,” he writes, “bears a fragile precious reality: the image” (IP 205). Reading Proust through Freud, with an emphasis on trauma and loss that is generalized as the historic condition of modernity, Benjamin implies that art is necessary—and necessarily redemptive—because modern lived experience, which occurs in time, is hollow and inauthentic. Finally, given that Benjamin aligns Proust’s notions of voluntary and involuntary memory with structures of modern and premodern experience, the conceptual opposition between them

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that Proust insists upon in the frame of his novel becomes essential to his reading of Proust. This oversimplifies the picture, since, as we shall see, Proust begins to complicate the opposition between voluntary and involuntary memory as soon as Albertine appears on the scene. This is not to say that Benjamin himself subscribed to an idealist aesthetics. It is to call attention to a certain compatibility—even, perhaps, a virtual complicity—between the terms of his analysis (specifically the dissociation of memory from experience that he grounds theoretically in Freud) and the aesthetic ideology that often seeps into interpretations of the Recherche when it is read only as a novel of remembrance.44 Instead of remembrance, we place invention at the heart of the Recherche and read it as a novel of adventure, where the adventure is living in time. Which is also to say, living with contingency.45 We emphasize memory production instead of memory retrieval, because this perspective uncovers dynamics of improvisation in the novel that engage with time in its becoming. In what follows we will examine how Marcel/the Narrator improvises the broad lines of his own story through a play of memory images generated in the course of his fictive experience.

Chapter 10 Art and Life: Improvisation

Having established the importance of a forward-looking temporal orientation in Proust’s novel and that producing memories is as important as retrieving them in the Recherche, it is time to return to Marcel’s quest for Albertine and to consider his deferral of it. On a visit to the painter Elstir’s studio (made at his Grandmother’s urging), Marcel sees Albertine walk by outside and greet the artist through the window. Elstir confirms her name—Albertine Simonet. Marcel then proposes a walk on the beach, hoping they will encounter the girls and that Elstir will introduce him to them. Marcel and Elstir do go for a walk, and they do encounter the girls. But, at the decisive moment, Marcel steps aside, leaving the painter to speak with the girls on his own. As they wander off, Marcel turns and catches Albertine’s eye as the other girls move on down the beach: “For an instant her eyes passed across mine… a momentary intersection of eyes” (SYG 436). This third encounter with Albertine to pass through a gaze (one Marcel has staged) marks a turning point. Marcel returns home alone. He thinks about his quest for this girl: “I could see in my mind all the unforeseeable improbability of what had taken place: that he [Elstir] in particular should turn out to know the girls” (SYG 444). Marcel/the Narrator imagines a series of plausible effects of this contingency, a sort of logic of action that might ensue, given that the probability of meeting Albertine is now high, thanks to the shared friendship with Elstir. The narrative suddenly goes slack. “This desire for them,” Marcel/the Narrator reveals, speaking of the girls, “could now be attenuated, kept in reserve, alongside so many others whose fulfillment, once I knew there was a real possibility, I postponed” (SYG 444). His pleasure at the prospect of meeting Albertine remains but, for the time being, will be kept hidden: “All of this had given me pleasure, but it was a pleasure that had remained hidden from me” (SYG 444). The quest

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is put on hold. We drop outside narrative time and slip into a discursive register, as desire is placed in reserve. If the notion of a secret pleasure is easy to grasp, that of a hidden pleasure—a pleasure hidden from oneself—is more challenging. Proust devotes several pages to the development of this idea. In an unusual digression (unusual because it is less an explicit commentary than a tiny story in its own right), the Narrator invents a little scene to dramatize his idea, comparing the pleasure we hide from ourselves to one of those visitors who do not approach us till all the others have gone and we can be alone together; that is when we notice them, when we can say, “I’m all yours,” and give them our full attention. Sometimes, between the moment when such pleasures have entered our mind and the moment when we too can withdraw into it, so many hours have elapsed… that we fear they may not have waited. But they are patient, they do not weary, and when the last visitor has gone, there they are looking at us. (SYG 444–5) The narrative quest is temporarily hijacked by this miniature fiction about an invited guest who awaits the attention of its host, one intended to explain the abrupt interruption of the principal narrative of Marcel’s desire to meet the girls. Trivial as it might seem, we should pay attention to it. We recognize the figure of the patient guest from Contre Sainte-Beuve (Against Sainte-Beuve), the writing project from which the Recherche is said to have emerged. There Proust opposed a “deep inner self [moi profond]” to social identity, or the “external self [le moi extérieur],” upon which Sainte-Beuve’s method of literary criticism depends, one that judges the poet by what friends and associates have to say about the writer as a person.46 The deep self is only to be found, Proust writes there, “by abstracting away the others and… the self that knows others”; it is “the self that waited while one was with the others” (CSB 224). In Contre Sainte-Beuve, then, the guest patiently awaiting the host’s attention at a social gathering is a certain part of the self—the profound, or authentic, self, “the only real one… and the only one for which artists end up living” (CSB 224). In Proust’s novel, a long and complicated digression follows the little story about the patient guest. It is one of those passages readers tend to skip because they are difficult to make sense of and seem beside the

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point. One soon learns, however, that these can be some of the richest moments in the novel, where many threads come together in what only appears to be a tangle. “And sometimes,” Proust continues, it is we who are so tired out that we feel we cannot find the strength in our weary mind to entertain these memories, these impressions for which our feeble self is the only habitable place, the sole medium of their realization. But this we would regret, for almost the only interest in existence lies in those days when a pinch of magic sand is mixed with the dust of reality, when a trite incident can become the spur of romance [le Romanesque]. An entire promontory of the inaccessible world suddenly takes shape, lit by a dream, and becomes part of our life, that life in which, like a sleepwalker [dormeur éveillé], we can see the people of whom we had dreamed with such longing that we had become convinced that it was only ever in dreams that we would see them. (SYG 445, my emphasis) This digression amplifies the story of the patient guest, adding new layers of meaning. The guest has morphed into impressions, virtual psychic entities, that arrive from the external world. It is now a question of whether “our weary mind” (SYG 445) has the force to hold on to these impressions, to “entertain” (SYG 445) (in the sense of retain) them, as one might retain a guest who threatens to slip out the door before receiving a proper greeting. In the passage cited above, the guest becomes “these memories, these impressions” (SYG 445); the apposition suggests that the impressions are at once memories and perceptions. The Narrator doubles down on this apposition with a second one, proposing our fragile self as “the only habitable place, the sole medium of [the] realization” (SYG 445) of these impressions. It is a question both of fixing the impressions in memory—“the only habitable place” (SYG 445) for them—and of actualizing an experience of them— being “the sole medium of their realization” (SYG 445). This digression appears to mull over precisely the dynamics of memory production we examined in relation to Bergson’s philosophy of time. The two modes of actualization—as experience and as memory image—occur at the same time here, as they do both in Proust’s narrative of seeing Albertine grow still by the sea and in Bergson’s account of déjà vu. Here again it is a question of producing memories in and through experience, not of retrieving them retrospectively by remembering. We move forward in time, not back.

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The meditation on hidden pleasure, elaborated through the figures of invited guests and psychic impressions, includes a more general reflection in the same digression: “the only interest in existence lies in those days when a pinch of magic sand is mixed with the dust of reality, when a trite incident of lived experience can become a narrative device [ressort Romanesque]” (SYG 445, translation modified)—that is, a device for the invention of a story, or perhaps a daydream or improvisation. In this apparently jumbled digression we slide from a doubling of experience and memory to a doubling—or intermixing—of life (the “dust” of real experiences) and art (“a pinch of magic sand,” which suggests the work of imagination in fiction or dream). This implies a certain complicity—even an overt interaction—between life and art. Not only does art depend upon lived experience (“the dust of reality”) but life itself includes moments of invention or improvisation (a pinch of magic sand). Dream does not remove us from reality, transporting us elsewhere; it enters into our reality, bringing fictive moments with it. We become like sleep walkers or hypnotic subjects [dormeurs éveillés], who encounter in reality what they would expect to see only in their dreams. This, of course, is precisely the situation Marcel/the Narrator finds himself in—or on the brink of—with respect to his quest for Albertine, thanks to the contingency of a shared friendship. When life and art interact, Proust seems to be saying, both become more interesting. But how are we to understand this interweaving of dreaming and living? Proust gives us a clue when he evokes the figure of the dormeur éveillé while characterizing dream as a “promontory of the inaccessible world” (SYG 445). These expressions refer us to a short essay by Victor Hugo, Promontorium Somnii (Promontory of Dreams), that recounts Hugo’s 1834 visit to the Paris Observatory with François Arago, where the two men viewed the moon through a telescope. Seeing the moon becomes a figure for making poetry. The moon is at once magical and real—“the invisible seen.” The poet is a songeur (thinker/daydreamer), a dormeur éveillé, whose “eyes of the soul” are open.47 Hugo presents a manifesto for a visionary poetics in this short text where dream and reality mutually inform one another: “it is through the daydream [le songe],” he writes, “that we see reality,” adding, “as one dreams, so one makes one’s life [fait sa vie].”48 Proust’s phrase “an entire promontory of the inaccessible world takes sudden shape, lit by a dream, and becomes part of our life” (SYG 445) echoes

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Hugo’s visionary poetics, which he transposes into a narrative mode, endowing images that emerge from (narrative) experience with powers of dream—or of narrative invention and actualization.49 When memory images become the material of daydreams (as the image of Albertine silhouetted before the sea so often does in Proust’s novel), they become ressorts Romanesques (narrative devices). We have already noted that the Narrator’s comments concerning the image of Albertine by the sea suggest a summary of major plot developments to follow, as if the image generated them. What is at stake for Proust in this interweaving of seeing and dreaming, or dreaming and living, that he revives from the French Romantic tradition, is the forward movement of fictive experience and an articulation of art (understood as a process of invention) with life, which also requires invention, because of contingency. Far from Art compensating for life, life and narrative fiction are revealed to be mutually constitutive here in a mode of improvisation.50 What Proust’s Narrator suggests in this strange digressive passage—this virtual moment of narrative reserve and deferral—is not that pleasure is impossible in life (as some read Proust to say) but that pleasure is necessary to write, just as desire is required to live. In moments of songe—in the interval between dream and wakefulness (as between desire and its satisfaction)—pleasure can slip in. The “hidden pleasure” that seemed so puzzling a moment ago suggests a pleasure of invention that cuts through both life and art. It “becomes part of our life” when a “trite incident” becomes a fictional device or narrative episode, nourished by memory and dream (SYG 445). This is precisely what happens in the fictive life of our Hero, just here in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. A version of the small fiction of the patient guest, which hovered in a digressive zone of writing, enters the narrative plot when the very moment Marcel has both longed for and deferred—being introduced to Albertine—finally arrives. Marcel persuades Elstir to host a party and invite her. Once there, Marcel is reluctant to actually meet her. He takes his time before crossing the room to where Elstir stands with Albertine, prepared to make the introduction. He keeps Albertine waiting while he finishes eating his éclair. The Narrator explains Marcel’s behavior this way: “One becomes a different man” in a social setting, “each new salon being a new universe, in which… [one becomes subject] to the law of a new moral perspective” (SYG 450). This is the logic Proust proposed in Contre

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Sainte-Beuve, where it was a question of the difference between the private self (the moi profond) (CSB 224) and the social self. When the long-awaited introduction finally takes place, Marcel/the Narrator takes no pleasure in it, of course. Or, rather, his pleasure remains hidden from him for a time. “This is not to say,” he explains, “that the introduction that followed gave me no pleasure,” but “[t]he pleasure, of course, I did not experience till a little later, back at the hotel, when, having been alone for a while, I was myself again” (SYG 451). Albertine (and the pleasure he takes in meeting her) is cast in the role of the visitor who patiently awaits Marcel’s attention, until his deeper self comes home to itself from its alienations in the social world.

Chapter 11 The Time of the Latent Image

It is here that Proust reveals the photographic basis for this logic of virtual experience and its temporal rhythms. “Pleasures,” Marcel/the Narrator says, “are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have our inner darkroom at our disposal once more, to which entry is strictly forbidden while others are present” (SYG 451). In Contre Sainte-Beuve Proust compared the deep solitary self—the soul of the poet—to “a unique world, closed off, without any opening [communication] to the outside” (CSB 225). This sanctuary explicitly becomes a darkroom here. This is where the virtual impression, already registered on the sensitized plate of the self in the course of experience (or at Elstir’s party), is developed and becomes visible. This is where it is experienced. The pleasure of being introduced to Albertine at the party is belatedly felt, according to the temporality of anachronism we examined in Part I. The pleasure hidden from oneself involves a kind of micro-anachronism that operates here in relation to pleasure and desire, instead of pain of loss. The structure of anachronism moves into everyday experience, according to the photographic logic of the latent image. When Arago introduced Daguerre’s new invention to the Chamber of Deputies in 1839, he described the procedures necessary to prepare the metal plate that would receive the light impression required to produce an image. He explained that, after the impression was registered, it would remain invisible for a time: a number of minutes must pass, and the plate must be heated, before the “image [dessin],

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invisible up to that point, would gradually appear.”51 Only once the light impression had been taken (once the image had been received like an invited guest) could one begin to observe “the arrival of the image in the dark room sheltered from light.”52 People marveled at this experience of apparition as the image began to emerge out of sheer invisibility, just as Hugo had marveled with Arago at “the invisible seen” when they first observed the moon’s craters. Roland Recht evokes the magical impression the daguerreotype made when he recounts that the gradual arrival of the image on the metal plate was thought to occur “through the volatilization of the metal” on which it appeared.53 The sense of astonishment that accompanied the discovery of the daguerreotype (and subsequently of photography) was specifically tied to this strange temporality of apparition, the delayed time of the latent image, through which the image actualized itself.54 By the end of the nineteenth century, the magic of the latent image was lost to adepts of the new Kodak point-and-shoot camera. The general public was now able to take snapshots quickly, easily, and relatively inexpensively, with no awareness of photographic processes. But this technological shift coincided with a new interest in the history of photography. At the world’s fair of 1900, Jules Marey, the inventor of chronophotography, presented an exhibit that retraced the main steps in the history of photographic technologies.55 An accompanying brochure set forth an account of various photographic processes. This was the same year that the Gazette des Beaux-Arts first included photographic images. One could say that photography entered the world of high culture as a historical phenomenon. Perhaps a certain nostalgia for the mystery of photography—for the magical arrival of the image out of its invisible latent presence—accounts for the fact that, during the Third Republic, “it is no longer the photographic image and its positive relation to the world of objects that count as a model or counter model,” but “the economy or production” of photography and specifically processes that concern “the negative and its development.”56 Emphasis shifted from the specific virtues of the photographic image (the accuracy and minute detail of the daguerreotype, for example) to photographic processes, which became a popular metaphor for the “figurability” of “invisible realities” and mental processes.57 As François Brunet put it, photography becomes important as a metaphor, and the new metaphor of photographic production “becomes ontological.”58

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By the time Proust wrote In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, the mystery and astonishment associated with photographic processes, and specifically the latent image, had been put into words and widely circulated. Photographic processes had gained rhetorical currency. Proust borrows the romantic figure of the darkroom of the mind (already exploited by Hugo, among others), but he specifically emphasizes the temporal dimension of the photographic process, the time of the latent image. He uses the virtual aspect of the latent image to suggest that the pleasure of meeting Albertine at Elstir’s party registers on his sensitive being like a photographic light impression but does not become manifest (is not consciously experienced) until a certain kind of private attention bathes it like a developing solution. Proust uses it to render the pleasure hidden from oneself, associated with the deferral of satisfaction. Proust also does something else when he identifies the deep inner self with the darkroom. He reworks the romantic trope of interiority as a sealed-off subjective realm of imagination or hallucination (think of Hugo’s famous poem, “La Pente de la rêverie” [The Slope of Revery]) and gives it a new structure, one that includes the detour of contact with the outside world—contact with “little fragments of the real” (P 18). In Contre Sainte-Beuve Proust observed that Nerval’s madness was “only a sort of excessive subjectivism” (CSB, 158), one that resulted from this sealed-off interiority. His photographic treatment of impressions in the Recherche introduces an element of material contact with the outside world that checks this excess. The mind becomes not just a space of imagination but also a site of the development of impressions received from the outside world. Photography, which involves not only iconicity but also indexicality (contact with photons that have touched something real), marks a shift away from the hallucinatory inner vision of romanticism toward a modern engagement with material impressions. We could say that the photographic figure as Proust deploys it proposes a postromantic interiority, one that requires, precisely, that a “dust of reality” (SYG 445) be mixed in with the magic sand of interiority—with imagination or dream.59

Chapter 12 Memory Is a Photographer

We have proposed a philosophical perspective on Proust’s treatment of memory production in the Recherche and considered its ramifications, contrasting Bergson’s conception of memory formation with Freud’s theory of the memory trace to deepen our appreciation of the metaphor Bergson introduced, citing Granville—“Memory is a ‘faculty of mental photography.’” Proust explicitly proposes the same metaphor: Memory immediately begins to take snapshots that are quite independent of one another—abolishing all links and sequence among the scenes they show—in the collection of them that it displays, the latest does not necessarily obliterate the earlier ones. Beside the unremarkable and touching Albertine with whom I had chatted, I could see the mysterious Albertine against the backdrop of the sea. Both were now memories… neither seemed truer than the other. (SYG 454–5)60 Memory produces memory images from experience just as a photographer fixes images encountered there. This is what we observed in the episode when Marcel catches sight of Albertine by the sea. But here the Narrator explicitly declares it, transposing into a single metaphor the thrust of the philosophical detour we took through Bergson: memory takes snapshots. It is a photographer. What interests me in the short passage cited above, however, is not only Proust’s explicit identification of memory production with photographic image capture but the lucidity his Narrator displays concerning the specific virtues of a photographic logic for the kind of novel he writes. We saw in Part I that Proust advances a view of photography that aligns with modernist, or avant-garde, imperatives

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that officially emerged only after his death, but that photographers in France had been practicing during his lifetime. We find anticipations of an avant-garde photographic practice here as well. For when he writes (as above) that photographs (or memories produced like photographs) “abolish… all links and sequence among the scenes they show,” adding that the latest memory snapshot “does not necessarily obliterate the earlier ones,” Proust anticipates Moholy-Nagy, for whom formal effects of decontextualization, seriality, fragmentation, and multiplicity constitute “the logical result [aboutissement] of photography.”61 When Proust’s Narrator observes, speaking of the (photo) memory images he has organized in series, that “beside the unremarkable and touching Albertine with whom I had chatted,” he could see in his mind’s eye “the mysterious Albertine against the backdrop of the sea,” noting that “neither seemed truer than the other” (SYG 454–5), he anticipates Walter Benjamin, who will call our attention to photography’s capacity to produce an indefinite number of discrete, discontinuous views of one and the same thing. Moholy-Nagy, too, speaks of a “multiplicity, ad infinitum, of photographic plates/negatives,” a point Susan Sontag will succinctly rephrase: “The number of photographs that could be taken of anything is unlimited.”62 Proust seems to appreciate that photographic acts can never fully exhaust a referent, that there is no saturation, or completeness, when it comes to photography. This is because of an ampleness of time: the play of indefinite supplementation and variation, produced by differences in perspective, scale, detail, illumination, or nuances in tonality, that inscribes specific qualities of different fleeting moments of time. Photography, in other words, does not simply represent one optical technology among others in the Recherche; it has specific virtues. This becomes clear when, having identified memory with a photographic logic, Proust goes on to repudiate cinema as a model for novelistic creation. “Some even wanted the novel to be a sort of cinematographic stream of things,” Proust’s Narrator remarks in Finding Time Again. “This was an absurd idea” because “nothing sets us further apart from what we have really perceived than that sort of cinematographic approach” (FTA 191). Proust is contesting the conventions of the realist novel when he critiques this “cinematographic approach.” But what is at stake here is much bigger than a preference for one medium over another or the repudiation of a school of writing (naturalism, for

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example). What is at stake is the very nature of reality. “What we call reality,” the Narrator continues, is a certain relationship between these sensations and the memories which surround us simultaneously—a relationship which is suppressed in a simple cinematographic vision, which actually moves further away from truth the more it professes to be confined to it—a unique relationship which the writer has to rediscover in order to bring its two different terms together permanently in his sentence. (FTA 198) Literary critics have emphasized the allusion to metaphor in the last part of this long and complicated sentence, where it is a question of the writer’s bringing two different terms together, and read it as a nod to a Symbolist textuality, the possibility for language—or writing—to engender essences in a way that parallels the operations of involuntary memory, which unites sensations and memories. This of course is consistent with the traditional reading of Proust. But the principal issue here is the nature of the real. The value of metaphor is not that it removes us from a temporal realm of ordinary experience by transporting us aesthetically to a permanent realm of essences (as the traditional view would have it) but that it has the power to disrupt the linearity of time by folding one thing in with another (or even, as André Breton suggests, by making them collide in a Surrealist image).63 To this extent writing has the power to alter the factitious formatting of chronological time, to which narrative cinema is wedded by its very technical nature. As Bergson argues in his own critique of the cinematographic in L’Evolution créatrice, chronological time involves an abstract representation of time that he calls spatialized time. “When we speak of time we tend to think of a homogeneous milieu in which our facts of consciousness line up, juxtaposing themselves, as in space… Introducing space into our conception of duration corrupts, at their very source, our representations of external change and of internal change, of movement and of freedom.”64 Bergson’s view lines up with Ravaisson’s, cited earlier: “everything that is in space, is outside of time.”65 If chronological time corrupts, or undermines, our understanding of time, it is because it abstracts out lived time. In striking parallel with Bergson, Proust’s Narrator argues that cinema,

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which imposes a pre-regulated concatenation of images, constrained by the progress of chronological time, does not fit the dynamics of lived experience, which (as noted in Part I) can only be presented through “different and parallel series—without break in continuity” (SG 156). Proust’s solution is to disrupt the protocols of cinematographic representation with a photographic logic of series, one that he applies to the storage and ordering of the memory images his narrative has produced through impressions. “Proust’s universe is a universe in pieces,” Georges Poulet affirms.66 This effect can be attributed, at least in part, to this photographic logic that fragments and decontextualizes. “I held in my memory,” Marcel/the Narrator affirms in the Prisoner, “only isolated, incomplete sequences of Albertines, silhouettes, snapshots” (P 133). When memory stores the images it has taken, it curates them not in chronological order but, precisely, in “different and parallel series” (SG 156). At stake in Proust’s rejection of the cinematic (the framework of both chronophotography and narrative cinema) in favor of still photography as a model for novelistic practice is a vision of reality that is more imbued with time, not less, one in which relations between sensations and memories “surround us simultaneously” (FTA 198). This implies a notion of reality in which past, present, and future are in dynamic articulation with one another. As Malcolm Bowie insists, “past and future are intricately conjoined” even on the level of the sentence in Proust “and reconjoined still more intricately during extended narrative sequences” such that “temporality is re-temporalized endlessly.”67 This is how Proust writes the time of life. As we discussed in Part I, experience in the Recherche is pressured by the double law of habit in response to the passing of time. This remains true throughout Proust’s novel. Experience is susceptible to intermittences of the heart as well as to rhythms of anachronism and the temporal difference of the time of the latent image. These can vary in length. It took Marcel/the Narrator approximately a year to feel his Grandmother’s death, but only a few hours to feel the pleasure of meeting Albertine at Elstir’s party. To the dynamics of attachment and detachment between Marcel and his Grandmother, Proust adds rhythms of desire in the Albertine story. These arise as a function of the affects of douceur (sweet pleasure) and douleur (suffering) that align with love and jealousy, respectively, and play out dramas of attachment and detachment.

Chapter 13 Photographic Logics and Genres

If experience doesn’t happen in continuous time sequences in the Recherche, for all the reasons we have discussed, memory doesn’t either. Memory produces images in the discontinuous time of experience, and Marcel/the Narrator curates them in discontinuous series. Proust writes, Is it because we relive past years not in their continuous sequence day by day, but by fixing our memory on the coolness or sunshine of one particular morning or evening spent in the shade of some isolated setting, enclosed, static, arrested, lost, remote from everything else, and because the changes gradually effected not only in the world outside but in our dreams and in our developing personality, changes that have carried us along through life from one phase to a wholly different one without our noticing, are therefore nullified, that, if we relive another memory taken from a different year, the gaps, the immense stretches of forgetting [pans d’oubli] between the two, make us feel something like a huge gulf of difference in altitude or the incompatibility of two utterly dissimilar qualities of breathed atmosphere and surrounding coloration? But between the successive memories of Combray, Doncières and Rivebelle which had recently occurred, I now felt that, much more than a distance in time, there was the sort of distance there would be between different universes whose substance was not the same. (GW 394) The curation of memory images in series instead of chronological sequence is not done by whim. It is required by the “immense stretches

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of forgetting [pans d’oubli]” (GW 394) that separate images in the mind, pulling them out of chronological, narrative time and rearranging them in terms of qualitative affinities that bring together things that occurred at different times. The images in each independently constructed series are associated with one another on the basis of concrete qualities that have been experienced in lived time—micro-material features such as nuances of color, illumination, location, atmosphere, or feeling. In other words, if anachronism is the difference between when an event happened and when it was felt, image series respect a similar logic, to the extent that they concern how impressions are lived or felt, not only when they happened. And the series do more than just reshuffle the past; they also orient how the past acts on the present and pressures the future. Not long after his Grandmother’s death, Marcel sees Albertine again in Paris. She has shown up out of the blue—“Then, one fine day, in would burst Albertine” (GW 349). Time has passed. She is not the same girl he used to see on the beach: her face has changed and she appears grown up. Alone with Marcel in his room (his parents conveniently out of town), she invites the kiss she had refused him earlier, in Balbec. Marcel admits he would have kissed any girl who offered herself to him that day, but to kiss Albertine had special value because “[she] held in an unbroken ring around her all the impressions of a series of seascapes … I felt that, kissing this girl’s cheeks, I should be kissing the whole Balbec seashore” (GW 359). Proust shows us that desire loads the object of its attention with a thickness of lived time. To possess Albertine with this kiss involves spiritual, not merely carnal, possession, Proust’s Narrator insists, and this is precisely because she embodies the maritime memory series, the one founded by the “very thin image” of Albertine taken by Marcel/the Narrator’s perception of her by the sea. When Albertine is physically present in Marcel’s room, inviting his kiss, it is as if the thin (photo) memory he produced in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower—“the first glimpse of her in my memory” (SYG 419, translation modified)—becomes three-dimensional. “One sees a woman… like Albertine silhouetted against the sea,” the Narrator remarks, “and then it becomes possible to detach that image, bring it close, and gradually observe its volume, its colors, as though it had been placed behind the lenses of a stereoscope” (GW 358–9). Stereoscopic images were an important feature in the traffic of pornographic photographs, and Proust

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no doubt suggests this association when he compares Albertine’s cheeks to stereoscopic lenses. But what plumps up desire here is also the lived time imprinted in memory snapshots and gathered into series based on qualities that carry affective intensity. What ultimately gives volume to the flat, thin memory images is their concatenation in a series that lets them hold phases of lived time—including the time spent savoring them in reveries that enhance desire or, as the case may be, jealousy. Marcel kisses Albertine on the cheek. As his lips move toward her, his angle of vision shifts; he perceives multiple discrete images of her face, each one fragmentary and different from the last, because situated on a different physical plane and rendered from a different vantage point. “Now what I saw [je vis]… was ten Albertines” (GW 361). Proust emphasizes the simultaneity of these images by putting the verb voir in the past simple tense (je vis) instead of drawing out the continuity of action in the imperfect tense that he uses so freely. What matters here is multiplicity, not sequence: Albertine becomes “like a many-headed goddess” (GW 361). This figure suggests not the cinematographic sequence (or narrative structure) of chronophotography but a genre of carte de visite photo known as the mosaic format (popular since the mid-nineteenth century) that, using photomontage techniques, printed a number of different images of the same person on one small card.68 In a standard mosaic format there would be ten different portraits, gathered in a pattern such that nine small views, each taken from a different angle, would encircle a larger, central one. Proust’s figure of the “many-headed goddess,” which he elaborates as a figure of time, suggests numerous discrete and discontinuous images of Albertine that vary, relativize, and multiply instances of her presence. This is when Proust invokes “the latest developments in photography” (GW 361) we discussed in Part I, alluding to recent experimental practices that register unexpected views of historical monuments and architectural details by means of innovative camera angles and framing strategies. If the gaze of desire is photographic, so is this kiss, now in the expanded sense that Proust evokes when his Narrator declares: “I know of nothing, that is able, to the same degree as a kiss, to conjure up from what we believed to be something with one definite aspect, the hundred other things it may equally well be, since each is related to a no less valid perspective” (GW 361). We saw

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in Part I the avant-garde resonance of the examples of experimental photographic practices he gives here. When it comes to Albertine, there are two principal memory series: images of douceur (sweetness), which stimulate desire, and images of douleur (suffering), which provoke the pains of jealousy. The first is the maritime series founded, as we have seen, on the image of Albertine silhouetted against the sea, “taken” through our Hero’s gaze in In the Shadows of Young Girls in Flower. The second is based on the image of Montjouvain, which refers us to the episode recounted in Combray, when, peering through a window of Mlle de Vinteuil’s house, Marcel observed her in erotic play with her lesbian lover. If the maritime series prompts joy and rekindles desire for Albertine, the Montjouvain image crystallizes fears concerning her sexuality and triggers intensely painful feelings of jealousy. The last volumes of the Recherche swing wildly between the two poles of douceur and douleur. Back in Balbec, his belated mourning of his Grandmother having run its course, Marcel finds himself ready, once again, for happiness: he wants to see Albertine. When, watching her dance with Andrée at the Rivebelle restaurant, Dr. Cottard remarks to Marcel, “I can’t see properly, but they’re certainly at the height of arousal” (SG 193), the Albertine story swerves off course from the conventional romantic quest narrative: “I had ceased to look kindly on her” (SG 200), Marcel/the Narrator admits ominously. Welcome to Sodom and Gomorrah. The narrative of desire will henceforth be complicated by jealousy—“one of those intermittent maladies” (P 22, my emphasis), the Narrator comments—as Marcel begins to suspect Albertine of lesbian encounters. The energy of jealousy is erotic, and, like desire, it is provoked or exasperated by images—“my jealousy sprang from images” (P 17), Marcel/the Narrator observes. But sometimes the images get mixed up. When Marcel seeks “Albertine, the girl glimpsed that first year in front of the sea” (SG 400–1), he will sometimes find instead the “horrible image of Montjouvain” (SG 521–2) and succumb to a crisis of jealous suffering. The Montjouvain image alludes to an established genre of pornography called “doors and windows” that circulated in both heterosexual and homosexual versions (Figure 9a and 9b). In these lithographic images that date from the 1830s (photography had not yet been invented when the genre first took hold), the representations of a sexual scene were “hidden behind flaps, representing doors or

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windows, that the viewer opened—the buyer was transformed into an active voyeur… one who… surprised the couples … coyly hidden behind a protective cover.”69 This format corresponds quite precisely to the Montjouvain episode in Combray, which scandalized the public when Combray was initially published and has puzzled readers ever since.70 It seems less odd when we read it through this popular culture genre. In a celebrated episode of the Recherche, sometimes referred to as the sunrise scene, Proust updates this porno genre through a photomontage strategy he inserts into the “doors and windows” framework.71 Marcel/the Narrator is in Balbec. He has been crying, overwhelmed by jealousy ever since Albertine acknowledged having

Figure 9a Anonymous, Modiste de la rue, from Portes et fenêtres, 1840.

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Figure 9b Anonymous, Va Julia ! … Va toujours, from Portes et fenêtres, 1840.

been a childhood friend of Mlle Vinteuil, which Marcel/the Narrator takes as confirmation of her own lesbian activity. His mother, who has heard him sobbing, comes into his room to comfort him, as Grandmother used to do. To calm him, she invites him to look out the window at the beautiful sunrise over the Balbec beach. This is what he sees: But behind the beach of Balbec, the sea, and the sunrise, to which Mamma was pointing, I could see, in a fit of despair that did not escape her, the room in Montjouvain where Albertine, pink, curled up in a ball like a big cat, with her mischievous nose, had taken the place of Mlle Vinteuil’s friend and was saying, to peals of her voluptuous laughter: “Oh well, if we’re seen, that’ll only make it better. Me, I wouldn’t dare spit on that old ape?” This was the scene I could see behind the one spread out in the window, which was

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nothing more than a mournful veil, superimposed on the other like a reflection. It seemed indeed almost unreal, like a painted scene. (SG 513, translation modified) The involuntary memory image of the Montjouvain scene slips behind the seaside view creating an effect of double exposure: the picturesque marine sunrise appears layered over the memory image of lesbian lovemaking, superimposed over it like a thin veil.72 But the remembered image of Montjouvain that hovers just beneath the view of the sea has been altered: it now features Albertine as Mlle de Vinteuil’s erotic partner. It is as if the actual beach scene has conjured up a sweet, maritime memory image of Albertine (like the ones that came into play in the kiss), which Marcel’s jealousy and despair divert from the beach—the space of desire—to the room at Montjouvain, founding image for the memory series that carries feelings of suffering, jealousy, rupture, and betrayal. As the structure of attachment/detachment is transposed from the plane of tenderness to the plane of desire in the Albertine story, it plays itself out as a sometimes dizzying oscillation between the two memory image series that become entangled in the sunrise scene. Images produce desire and jealousy, which impact narrative developments or turns of plot. As Christine Cano writes, “The recollection of Montjouvain, reviving the narrator’s obsessive fears of real or imagined lesbian infidelities, transforms his plans for rupture [with Albertine] into a plan to keep Albertine under tight surveillance in his Paris apartment.”73 After the sunrise scene, then, which amplifies the “horrible” image of Montjouvain by bringing it so close to home, Marcel decides to extract Albertine from Gomorrah and bring her to live with him in Paris. He intends to keep her in his apartment, setting rules for her behavior, prescribing her fashion choices, and monitoring her activities, in an attempt to limit the erotic encounters he imagines she has with women. This phase of the Albertine story takes place in a volume titled The Prisoner. To call Albertine a prisoner, when she lives in a charming apartment in Paris and frequents the Guermantes, has always seemed a stretch, even a bit hysterical. But it makes a certain sense when we consider that in the late nineteenth-century prostitution was regulated through what was known as “the prison treatment”—a “carceral system … within which a woman moved throughout her prostitutional career.”74 Prostitution was legal but strictly controlled: officials set

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up houses of prostitution in designated neighborhoods and told the women who worked in them when they could go out (only at certain hours, such as dusk, when they would be least visible) and what they could wear when they did (hats were not allowed). They imposed regular health checks and arrested anyone who failed to show up for them. Perhaps most importantly, in connection with the Albertine story, “the prison treatment” specifically included strategies for isolating lesbians, the “lowest category of prostitutes” (WH 12), considered to have fallen into “the depths of abjection” (WH 6), in the hope of controlling their sexual behavior; for “in police cells in Marseilles and Paris … women lived without any rules whatsoever, playing cards, sharing food … and practicing homosexuality” (WH cited 108). The prison system, in other words, included a program of what Adrienne Rich calls “compulsory heterosexuality.”75 The regulation of sexuality was methodical and sought, in the words of its inventor, Parent-Duchâtelet, “to enclose in order to observe, to observe in order to know, to know in order to supervise and control” (WH 16). This is precisely the program of Marcel’s “imprisonment” of Albertine in Paris, which, however, hardly alleviates his jealousy. It is not easy to imprison an être de fuite in the best of circumstances. But bringing Albertine to Paris only enhances the risk of sexual activity on her part. As Alain Corbin indicates, sexual encounters could take place anywhere, at any time, in this modern city, which, during the Belle Époque, was known as the center of the world for lesbianism. “Busy public places were turned into anonymous meeting places,” Corbin notes, and women in a variety of social roles—governesses, piano teachers, wine shop workers, laundresses, shopkeepers, dressmakers, milliners— participated in prostitution networks (WH 210). This is the world of the Albertine story in The Prisoner, and more, broadly, of the Recherche. The world that Corbin describes—of networked sex for money that includes laundresses and shopkeepers—fuels our Narrator’s jealous imagination, once his suspicions concerning Albertine have been aroused and he brings her home to Paris as his prisoner. Outside the city, Corbin adds, train travel and seaside holidays became “opportunities for sexual adventure” (WH 193). Charlus finds Morel on a train trip in the resort area of Balbec; Marcel finds Albertine on the beach. Although a great deal of ink has been spilled in attempts to analyze the mysterious character of Albertine, it turns out that in

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Proust’s day sexualized images of robust girls at the seaside—even of girls in light sexual play with other girls—were routinely displayed for popular entertainment in the Jardin du Luxembourg (Figure 10a and 10b). It is hard to give up our idea of the singular, mysterious Albertine. It is very charming. But as these stereoscopes suggest, girls like Albertine were part of the social imaginary, a social type like any other.

Figure 10a Anonymous, Au bord de la mer #2, around 1900.

Figure 10b  Anonymous 6, Au bord de la mer, around 1900.

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The explicit theme of prostitution will be reserved for Odette, of course, and we don’t usually think of Albertine in these terms. But Proust gives us clues as to her status as a kept woman even before invoking the trope of the prisoner. She lets the Narrator know, for example, that she doesn’t have enough money to marry, and we are aware, even in Balbec, that her family situation is sketchy. But more importantly, if, as Maurice Bardèche proposed, the Albertine character was initially organized around the leitmotif of little girls that ran through Proust’s notebooks (and that Proust introduces into the Recherche through the blurry snapshot), it turns out that this motif is itself tied to the very idea of prostitution and its regulation. Not only did children work in maisons de tolérance (brothels)—special hours were set aside for them in the morning and afternoon—but the regulation of prostitution itself was ideologically underwritten by a claim that a prostitute of any age was developmentally “still something of a child, an immature creature, malleable and mobile” (WH 7), and therefore in need of surveillance. It was because prostitutes represent “the childhood of the human race,” because they remained “in the primitive state of nondevelopment,” that the prison system was considered necessary, as a form of guardianship (WH 374, note 35). And of course the prostitute also “represents a terrible threat to sexual order” because she “runs the risk of becoming a lesbian” (WH 7). We recall that in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower the Narrator describes the group of little girls huddled together in the old snapshot as a “primitive organism in which individuality hardly exists” (SYG 404). If the girls’ identity cannot be distinguished, it is because they were inherently unformed, unstable creatures. This, we recall, was what motivated the flou of this fuzzy snapshot, which carried over to the blurry, trembling impression the adolescent girls made on Marcel/the Narrator when he first saw them on the beach. It seems that the flou itself is implicitly written into the code of prostitution here. If the photograph of the little girls was out of focus, it is not because it was a failed photograph (as the photographie tremblée was often called) but because it was a photograph of little girls who were—like all prostitutes—inherently unformed, unstable creatures. It is because the girls were “too young to have gone beyond the elementary degree of formation of self, when personality has not yet stamped its seal on each face” (SYG 404), as Proust’s Narrator puts it. It was because they were little girls who

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represented the childhood of the human race, which is to say women in need of control, of being subjected to compulsory heterosexuality and the rigors of the prison system. This is what the blurry old photograph also explains through its flou that inscribes mobility and formlessness. The photo introduces the theme of little girls—coded for prostitution— into the Recherche in a lively manner that will stick to Albertine. When our adolescent Hero first saw Albertine and her friends, he was above all fascinated by the sense of mystery he experienced in their presence, one that stimulated his desire for Albertine and was only enhanced by the other girls with her. But once his jealousy has been fully aroused, and he has taken Albertine to Paris, she becomes a bit too mysterious. The relation between desire and imagination that fueled Marcel’s quest for her has become troubled by what Marcel/the Narrator finds literally unimaginable, love between women: “This love between women was something too unknown,” he admits, “nothing could allow me to picture … its pleasures” (P 356). He begins to yearn for a less mysterious Albertine: “The image I sought … was an Albertine I knew as thoroughly as a person could be known” (P 65). He finds such an image of her when he watches her naked and asleep. “Enclosed and summed up in her body” (P 356), her eyes shut, no mysterious interiority threatens. Marcel/the Narrator does not have to worry about “what lay behind her eyes … the black unfathomable shadows of the ideas she forms” (SYG 375). Perhaps because Albertine appears to hold no secret desires, she triggers his desire. Despite the Narrator’s painterly description—“Her hair, falling the length of her rosy face, lay beside her on the bed, and sometimes a stray lock, standing on end, gave the same perspective effect as those frail, pale lunar trees that stick up in the background of Elstir’s Raphaelesque paintings” (P 61)— or, perhaps because of it, Albertine becomes a pornographic image. Marcel/the Narrator “possesses her completely” (P 61), presumably masturbating before her. A pornographic photo genre provides the code we need to read this singular episode of the Recherche. The scene alludes to a type of photograph known as an académie (also called étude d’après nature [study after nature]) that photographers devised to get around censorship laws set up to control the circulation of pornographic photos that had begun to “flood the market” in the 1850s.76 The idea was to pass nude photographs off as painters’ models, their nudity becoming just an

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Figure 11  Bruno Braquehais, Academic Study No. 6, 1854.

instrument of the aesthetic vocation. Proust’s description of Albertine’s body suggests one famous example of this genre, Academic Study #6 by Braquehais (1854) (Figure 11), which presents a reclining nude on a bed, apparently asleep, covered by a transparent veil that picks up glints of moonlight, like the light that bathes the sleeping Albertine in Proust’s painterly description of her.

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Later, Proust’s Narrator will critique the very premise of this scene: We imagine that love has for its object a being which can lie down before us, enclosed in a body. Alas!, It is the extension of that body to every point in space and time which that being has occupied or will occupy. If we do not grasp its point of contact with a given place, a given time, then we do not possess it. But we cannot touch all these points. (P 88) Albertine’s sleeping body, with her laughing, provocative eyes now shut, prefigures her end. She will leave. She will die. After immense mental work—of remembering, forgetting, and inventing—Marcel/the Narrator will eventually achieve indifference toward Albertine, not before having—to the reader’s surprise—forgiven her for whatever sins she may have committed.

Chapter 14 Breaking the Frame: Writing the Time of Life

In his letter to Jacques Rivière at the Nouvelle Revue Française (1914), Proust writes of his novel: “In this first volume you have seen the pleasurable sensation the madeleine soaked in tea gives me—as I say, I cease to feel mortal etc and I can’t understand why. I’ll explain it only at the end of the third volume. The whole thing is constructed in this way.”77 When he speaks of “the end of the third volume,” Proust is referring to the end of his novel, for, in 1914, the Recherche consisted of only three parts: Combray, Guermantes Way, and Finding Time Again. Addressing the editor who will publish his work after the war, Proust sends a clear message: the novel may appear to wander (with its seemingly endless sentences and density of detail), but the author has it well in hand. Proust insists not only that everything has been carefully constructed, but that the novel’s frame—its beginning and its end—securely holds the work’s meaning. He also reveals the way the frame operates, namely, by interlocking the madeleine episode, which introduces the mechanism of involuntary memory at the beginning of the Recherche, and the series of involuntary memory experiences that occur in Finding Time Again at the end, which seal Marcel’s commitment to become a writer. Thanks to the way they echo the analysis provided in the madeleine episode, these incidents reveal both the redemptive power of art and how to achieve it. Everything has indeed been carefully constructed. As we have already mentioned, having written both parts of what will become the frame of his novel as he composed Combray, Proust decided to defer the narration of the involuntary memory episodes until the

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end of his book. This provides a through line for his story: Marcel becomes a writer. This was a brilliant move. By focusing on the formal mechanism of involuntary memory, the sturdy frame produces an illusion of architecture, even as it enables the author to avoid writing a narrative conclusion, a true denouement that would clarify, and give meaning to, the action that leads up to it. In Sartre’s novel Nausea, the (anti)hero Roquentin, who contemplates abandoning his career as a historian to become a novelist, expresses impatience with the idea of fictional progress toward a novelistic conclusion: since the ending of a novel retroactively determines the meaning of a character’s action, he complains, characters cannot act freely.78 Roquentin hesitates to become a writer. Proust’s protagonist appears to have no such scruples; his embrace of his vocation is steadfast. But this is precisely because Proust has solved the problem of freedom for him, thanks to the novel’s frame. By deferring part of the beginning of his novel to the end, and by keeping the focus of both beginning and end on the formal mechanism of involuntary memory, the frame does not constrain the course of narrative events in any way. They unfold within it in utter freedom and continue on indefinitely. What Finding Time Again offers by way of conclusion, in other words, does not affect the way we see Marcel’s adventures in the Guermantes’ salon, his infatuation with the Duchesse, his relationship with Gilberte, his love affair with Albertine, the ups and downs of his friendship with Saint-Loup, Charlus’s tryst with Jupien, society’s persecution of Charlus, Saint-Loup’s marriage to Gilberte or his adventures with Morel, or the fact that Morel betrays Charlus by sleeping with lesbians—not even on rereading. The ending that Proust contrives before he had even conceived of Albertine (and written the bulk of his novel) leaves the narrative utterly free to unfold any which way.79 It leaves room for Albertine’s story, and it leaves room for that story to swell into all its many volumes. Proust gave himself the freedom to interpolate new additions indefinitely and granted his characters what looks like the freedom to improvise their stories. This would explain why his novel could become so long and still remain a “finished/unfinished work,” as Blanchot put it, one Proust would go on writing till his dying day.80 The device of the frame, whose efficacity Proust explains to Jacques Rivière, is one of the novel’s most brilliant features, not because it gives

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Proust’s work meaning but because it enables a fictional production of contingency which throws meaning into question: “time passes,” Proust’s Narrator remarks toward the end of the novel, “and little by little the lies one has told become true” (F 429, translation modified). The open horizon of contingency coexists with what Blanchot calls “a concern for spontaneity” in the Recherche “that evokes automatic writing.” Blanchot ties this spontaneity (or improvisation) to the inner “imperative for growth” of Proust’s novel.81 This frame is a powerful device; it has held fast under the weight of all the pages Proust added to his work since he sent his now-famous letter to Jacques Rivière in 1914. But it is time to break the spell of its authority, which determines the meaning of the Recherche as a story of aesthetic vocation with a redemptive dimension that adds metaphysical heft to the protagonist’s decision to become a writer. In doing so it provides an alibi for not attending to the novel itself in all its richness and complexity. In 1917, near the end of the First World War, Proust confided in a letter to Gallimard that Albertine had become the “true center” of his novel.82 It is time to take this revelation seriously and to acknowledge that the Albertine story breaks the frame Proust set up when the novel consisted of only three volumes, before Albertine arrived on the scene. It is time to recognize that her story disrupts a number of major assumptions about the novel, assumptions that Proust strategically advanced to Rivière in 1914. To place Albertine at the center not only means that we cannot ignore her, as some critics have done, but also that we cannot restrict our interest in her exclusively to questions of gender and sexuality, as if Proust’s treatment of these questions could be examined independently from the network of other concerns that pertain to the novel as a whole: form, time, memory, habit, art, death, history, class, and even (as we shall see in Part III) money. For to do so is to tacitly accept the frame of Proust’s novel as the principle of its meaning, or, at least, to implicitly leave this meaning in place, along with other features of the idealist interpretation, even if one does not explicitly endorse them, and probably even if one might tend to doubt them. They remain in place to the extent that they go unchallenged. This is what the name “Proust” has come to signify and will continue to signify unless and until another perspective—another Proust—displaces it. Here, to recapitulate, are some of the assumptions about Proust’s novel that the Albertine story challenges. First, the Recherche does

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not simply remember, or recuperate, the past, as Proust suggests in Combray and Finding Time Again. It does not always look back. As soon as we leave the frame of the Recherche and enter the narrative itself, we recognize that the novel takes up the task of narrating the experiences that will become the memories the Narrator alludes to in Combray. Proust has to write the becoming past of specific experiences as the protagonist moves along in time, embracing the future as it arrives into the present. All of this begins when our Hero catches sight of Albertine in Balbec. Memory takes on a new function, namely, to produce memory images through which the lived (and narrated) past will act on the future that unfolds. Memory images, produced like photographs in the course of narrated events, become active forces within the novel. They impact desire, which pressures fictive events, precipitating decisive turns in the novel’s plot, such as Marcel’s decision to go back to Balbec, and then to leave it again, and to return to Paris with Albertine as his prisoner. Second, as we have already seen, art and life are not opposed to one another in the novel. Art requires “little fragments of the real” (P 18), and life includes invention. To these two points we add a third: once we enter the Albertine story, involuntary memory does not rule in the Recherche, at least not according to the logic Proust set up for it in the madeleine episode of Combray. The select incidents of involuntary memory we read in Finding Time Again—the steps, the napkin, the silverware—are endowed with revelatory, even redemptive, force. Marcel ostensibly finds his true literary vocation, thanks to them. But if the madeleine episode (together with passages from Finding Time Again) taught us to distinguish between the emptiness of voluntary memory and the authentic force of involuntary memory, which harnesses the impressions of sensation and memory, producing pleasure and assuaging the fear of death, The Fugitive dispels this myth. After Albertine’s death, and because of the specific nature of the problem of jealousy (the way it must negotiate the difference between fact and fiction and the way it motivates tireless speculation or invention), reminiscence becomes unhinged. A barrage of spontaneous memories overwhelms our protagonist, who experiences the “painful charge” of “thousands of invisible memories which erupted in the shadows around me at every moment” (F 446). Shadows precipitate memories in hordes. There is no neat doubling of sensory experience and memory, and the

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images that return hurt instead of giving pleasure. We find ourselves in a kind of fantastic tale where Marcel is literally taken over by memory forces beyond his control, like Mickey Mouse trying to sweep the water out of his house as it keeps flooding in. The Narrator speaks of “different years into which I found myself plunged once again” (P 20). This is what happens when love transmutes into jealousy, complicated by loss: spontaneous memory begins to chaotically usurp the place of experience, prompting endless imaginative invention in an attempt to solve the mystery of Albertine—the mystery of her desire and her otherness. With her passing, Albertine ceases to be a passante: “The idea of her uniqueness was no longer a metaphysical a priori deriving from Albertine’s individual qualities, as formerly for various passing women, but an a posteriori constituted by my contingent but inseparably entangled memories” (F 521). Albertine emerges as an assemblage of images that Marcel/the Narrator holds in his memory and imagination: “it was above all this fracturing of Albertine into many parts, into many Albertines, which constituted her sole mode of existence within me … [W]e create a person, we compose a character” (F 495–6). Albertine explicitly becomes what she always was implicitly: an assemblage, or a creation, constructed by the fictive Hero/Narrator—the one who has loved her. She has become, the Narrator explains with exceptional lucidity, “the outcome of a tangled confrontation and interplay of dreams, desires, habits and affections, duly disturbed by the intrusion of alternating pains and pleasures” (F 507). “Do we believe her to be unique? She is everywhere,” the Narrator remarks of Albertine, before launching into the following analysis: And yet she is consistent and indestructible before our loving eyes, irreplaceable for long after by anyone else. The reason is that this woman has done nothing but use all sorts of magic spells to invoke the thousands of elements of affection which exist within us in a fragmentary state, to assemble and unite them, bridging all the gaps between them; it is we ourselves who, in creating her features, have furnished all the solid substance of the beloved. (F 469–70) Albertine is perhaps also an artist here, who assembles herself out of the pieces Marcel/the Narrator furnished through his impressions of her.

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In the process of this—quite involuntary—remembering through which he mourns Albertine after his fashion (or works through his love, his loss, and his jealousy), Marcel/the Narrator discovers not some recuperated essence or purified version of the real but the fact that reality itself is partially fictive and that the woman he loved is his own creation: “she is my work [oeuvre]” (P 115, translation modified). He recognizes, in other words, that life is not so different from art: “a life,” we read, is “most like a dream,” in that it is “filled with forgetfulness, gaps, vain anxieties” (P 131–2). He realizes that Albertine never existed as a “unique being” separate from himself. She has become, for the Narrator, a “series of events … a series of insoluble problems” (P 92), in short a roman. This construction does not imply the modernist version of the vocation story, namely, that the novel we read is the one Proust’s protagonist vows he will write at the end of the Recherche. As his roman, Albertine holds together the stories he has improvised in the process of living, the constructions he has invented through the adventure of living, and loving, in time. Involuntary memory operates here in a mode of invention, not reproduction. Voluntary memory, such as occurs when Marcel chooses to call up his desire for Albertine by remembering the image of her by the sea, also has a role to play in this invention. We remember that in Combray, before the madeleine episode, the Narrator can only recall the staircase that leads to his childhood bedroom; his memory is limited to the obsessive scene of awaiting his mother’s goodnight kiss. After the taste of the madeleine dipped in tea, “all of Combray” seemed to flow out of “his ‘cup of tea’” (SW 48). A reader might think it is involuntary memory that grants the Narrator access to the past, that it enables him to tell his stories because it lets him remember more. In an early draft of this episode, however, the specific virtue of involuntary memory is not to enhance powers of memory but to produce pleasure, which in turn engenders a desire to write, because writing becomes pleasurable. The Narrator of early drafts of Combray indicates that If someone had posed me questions about this time [at] Combray … it is likely that I could have responded … but this would have been only thanks to … the memory of facts [mémoire des faits] … the memory of intelligence, the voluntary memory that would have

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responded … and I would have died of boredom before having finished transcribing my responses.83 These “bits of information [renseignements]” Proust writes, “couldn’t give me any pleasure. I wouldn’t have taken any pleasure in writing anything … I wouldn’t have any pleasure in day dreaming [songer] about them and even less in writing about them.”84 Involuntary memory, then, is an antidote to boredom because it nourishes invention. And it does so not only because it introduces the writer into a world of essences (it is in these notebooks that one finds the passage on essences that Proust will subsequently move to Finding Time Again) but also because it introduces the writer into a world of contingency. It prompts the writer to create and to seek “something that is not yet, that perhaps will be,” which Proust characterizes as a “super-réalité.”85 It engenders a desire to stay with what comes to mind—that is, to daydream—in a way that mixes memory with invention, as “when a pinch of magic sand is mixed with the dust of reality, when a trite incident of lived experience can become a narrative device [ressort Romanesque]” (SYG 445, translation modified). In these early drafts, the structure of involuntary memory concerns not just the past but also what might be. As Leo Bersani put it, “the narrator does not rediscover his past, he invents it.”86 In other words, as Proust first conceived it, involuntary memory can face either backward or forward in time. In The Fugitive, Marcel/the Narrator revealed precisely the interaction between these two capacities of spontaneous memory. When he writes, “[I]t was above all this fracturing of Albertine into many parts, which constituted her sole mode of existence for me … we create a person, we compose a character” (F 495–6), he tells us that the power of invention attaches to memory images that have been produced by memory, the photographer, in the act of living. Just as Marcel’s desire for Albertine was nourished by the images that adhered to her—the maritime images of Balbec—the desire to write, invent, or daydream is also nourished, or irrigated by his lived past. This is not a dead past time, however, but the past as it survives into the becoming present of the future. Proust reveals in The Fugitive that Albertine never existed as a unique, fixed individual and, at the same time, that this nonexistence has emerged only as a function of “little fragments of the real” (P 18),

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discontinuous bits of memory image that Marcel/the Narrator has taken from lived experience and constructed into this woman who, he now sees, has no unique being, who is only a mobile creature. In The Fugitive, then, Proust brings us back to the être de fuite that emerged from a blurry photograph of little girls—the flou of a photographie tremblée—in In the Shadows of Young Girls in Flower. Albertine ends in the flou of a densely constructed assemblage that is without any discernible unique being. And in this respect, Proust suggests, Albertine is fundamentally no different from anyone else, or at least from any other person who is loved by another. If, in the end, Marcel will stop loving Albertine, it is not because of this formlessness. His love, his jealousy, and her essential formlessness went hand in hand. Nor is it the case that he can no longer love Albertine because he finally sees what he takes to be her truth—that she is a lesbian, vicious, or unfaithful. Nor is it the case that he has chosen art over love. Marcel/the Narrator stops loving Albertine because, by virtue of strenuous mental and imaginative labor, he eventually succeeds in forgetting her, just as he eventually forgot his Grandmother. His love and his jealousy surrender “to the universal rule of oblivion” (F 609) that we analyzed in Part I in connection with the double law of habit. His ultimate indifference emerges through the “continual erosion caused by forgetting” (F 557) that occurs precisely as a function of (or in response to) the unrestrained, corrosive remembering of Albertine. Here spontaneous remembering operates in the service of forgetting. What memory has assembled, thanks to its discontinuous image series (in its transversal, layered sort of way), forgetting dismantles. And just as importantly, if Marcel no longer loves Albertine, it is because the self that loved her no longer exists (as was the case in the Grandmother story)—we marvel “at having become someone else, someone else for whom his predecessor’s suffering is no more than the suffering of a third party” (F 559). This, too, occurs as a function of “the universal rule of oblivion” (F 609), corollary to the double law of habit that exacts little deaths of the self and the rebirth of new selves as time passes. Marcel/ the Narrator has been altered by loving Albertine and by mourning her—and, perhaps, by his astonishing act of forgiving her. He has been altered by living in time.

Chapter 15 The Desire to Write: The Time of Writing Never Comes

The final assumption that the Albertine story challenges is the myth of the vocation story itself. Not only does involuntary memory in the Albertine volumes not respect the terms set up in the madeleine episode, which supports the vocation story, but we learn in the Albertine story that our Hero does not wait until Finding Time Again to decide to write. He has been writing all along.87 In The Prisoner, the Narrator refers to “the original decision to start writing which I had made long ago, but which always seemed to date from the day before, since I treated each day, one after another, as if they did not count [comme non avenu]” (P 72). When it comes to writing, then, the issue is not the revelation, or embrace, of a calling or vocation. It is not a matter of the decision to write; the issue is actually writing. Some (like Charlus and the critics who follow his lead) label this problem one of “procrastination” (P 75), as if it were a psychological issue our Hero needs to resolve or—worse yet—a simple defect of character. It might be more accurate to say, however, that the problem concerns the fact that the time of writing never comes (est non avenu). The problem could be said to lie with time itself, and with how it arrives. This is what we learn in the Narrator’s accounts of his newfound joy in solitude. With the question of marriage looming (Marcel has announced to his mother, at the end of The Guermantes Way II, that he intends to marry his prisoner), Albertine no longer nourishes Marcel’s imagination as an object of desire. She has slipped into the social realm, the register

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that shuts the door on inner life. For his inner self to thrive (the deep self that artists live for), he needs time alone. He regularly sends Albertine out on supervised expeditions and stays home, purportedly on doctor’s orders but also on the pretext that he intends to write: “I had promised Albertine that if I did not go with her, I would start to work” (P 70–1). Instead of writing, however, Marcel/the Narrator relaxes alone in his room. Sunlight floods through the window, prompting a stream of memory images summoned by specific qualities of the light, which change in the course of the day. When the light strikes Marcel’s body— “the transparent barrier of my thin body” (P 20)—it is as if his interiority had migrated to his skin, which directly receives impressions of light and atmosphere from the outside, like a prepared photosensitive plate. “Only these inner changes”—the Narrator writes—“(though they came from outside) brought the outer world alive again for me” (P 18). This is how Proust develops the notion we referred to earlier as a postromantic interiority, one that depends upon photographic contact with the external world. Marcel’s inner self now directly feels the light and weather (nuances of atmospheric difference). They directly touch him such that his “inner violin” (P 18) sings the song of the outside world. “Its strings are tightened or slackened by simple variations in temperature, in exterior light” (P 18). During these mornings alone in The Prisoner, Marcel/the Narrator’s memory is not prompted by a contingent sensation that matches a previous experience, as stipulated of involuntary memory in Combray. What we have instead is a state of utter passivity. Marcel/the Narrator receives a stream of impressions that appear to carry memories just through the passage of time; he experiences these impressions as nuances of light and heat on his skin. They produce in him a powerful feeling of vitality—an intense desire to live, not melancholy or a yearning for essences. Still, he continues to put off writing. With perhaps greater insight than Charlus, the Narrator characterizes his own condition as one of paresse (idleness), which he defines as a kind of “perpetual postponement [ajournement]” (P 75). This is not the same thing as procrastination, however, which suggests putting something off from one day to the next, as if each day were the same as the last, and the thing deferred also remained the same. Postponement is something different. The word Proust uses—ajournement—derives from a medieval term for lever du jour (dawning). It suggests a coming into being of a new day

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in the time that passes, something like the state of attunement with the external world that happens when Marcel/the Narrator soaks up sunshine by the window. It is a question of receptivity to the everchanging impressions that arrive in time as the qualitative nuances that actualize time’s passing. It is an attunement to change itself—which is to say, to time. Blanchot, in his inimitable way of getting to the heart of things, evokes in Proust an “intimate, secret, patience through which he gives himself time.”88 The stream of spontaneously produced memory images in the scene of idleness presents an articulation of past and present that occurs as an attunement between inside and outside, as well as a sensitivity to the passing/emerging present that is ever refreshed and altered as the future arrives into it—and it moves into the past. This, we remember from Part I, was the very movement of time as change that led Ravaisson to theorize the double law of habit. Now Proust rephrases the issue of change at the core of the double law of habit through the structure of paresse and quickens its play on the micro scale of moment-to-moment temporal emergence. Paresse refines the play of the two operations of habit—attachment and detachment—pushing toward an attunement to change itself, just as in photographic terms the trembling of the flou, in the Albertine story, refines the structure of intermittence at play in the Grandmother’s photograph. Paresse is not fundamentally a psychological issue—or a question of moral failing. Like habit, and intermittences of the heart, it proposes an existential structure, this time posed in very fine grain. And this is the register in which the desire to write becomes a problem. I had promised Albertine that if I did not go out with her I would start work. But the next day … I found myself waking up to different weather, a different climate. No one works right after landing in a strange country; there are the new conditions to get used to. Now, for me, each new day was a new country. (P 71) Marcel/the Narrator promised Albertine the night before that he would write the following morning. But the time of writing never comes—it is non avenu—because, in a sense, it has nowhere to arrive. The one who makes the promise to write the next day is not the same one who would start writing when the time comes. The attunement of inside and

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outside occurs through a process of ongoing adaptation, which is also one of perpetual self-transformation in relation to each new atmosphere. The work of detachment that habit imposed (deaths of the self and resurrections) is vastly accelerated here. Death and resurrection as a different self becomes the norm in this reflection on the time of writing that never comes. It is no longer a question of something that changes—like the hotel room one sleeps in, for example. The focus is now on change itself, and how it happens: the next day, when it arrives, is different from the last—it is a whole new country. Adaptation not only happens in time but also literally takes (in) time, and so it requires the mode of open passivity that Marcel/the Narrator calls paresse and that Heidegger might call Gelassenheit.89 Paresse involves allowing what is happening around you to act in your place and, through this openness, making contact with the passage of time. It involves letting things pass, and registering the impressions of the atmosphere as they do. As openness to the passing of time, paresse itself cannot remain the same: “Even my idleness [paresse] constantly took on new forms: how could I have recognized it?” (P 71), our Hero asks. Idleness involves an embrace of what arrives, a tendency toward the future, as it approaches, a radical divestment of attachment. The structure or experience that Marcel/the Narrator calls paresse is rather like Albertine, the être de fuite—always a little bit different from herself—who arrives in Proust’s novel in a blur. Writing is a problem, in other words, not because of weakness of character that could be cured by resolve, or the embrace of a vocation. Writing is a problem because of the discontinuity of time, which presents the same kind of discontinuity we noted in connection with intermittences de cœur, the rhythms of anachronism, the time layers they engender, and the blur of the photographie tremblée from which Albertine can be said to have emerged. Instead of considering the Recherche as a novel about loss and recuperation through art, or, with Benjamin, as a novel about the loss of an authentic structure of experience, we might view it as a novel of experience. To approach the Recherche in this way, through the double action of perception (which marks the becoming present of an immediate future) and memory (which marks the becoming past of that present)—instead of through their radical separation—is to emphasize the concrete transformations that living in time performs within the novel, and not the (false) promise of an eventual eternal time. As Proust’s Narrator puts it, “Death will cure

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us of our desire for immortality” (F 609). Paradoxically, although the message carried by the frame of Proust’s novel—the vocation story and the redemptive power of art—no longer appears adequate, once we consider the centrality of Albertine, we realize that it is this frame that has enabled Proust to write the time of life precisely because the frame makes possible an open time of contingency within the novel. The structure of déjà vu, Bergson writes, “exerts … in advance, a retroactive effect on my present” (SP 919). We might consider replacing retrospection, the privileged term in traditional interpretations of Proust, with retroaction. This is the structure of the Narrator’s retroactive construction of Albertine in The Fugitive. It is what Proust’s Narrator hears in Wagner’s music, and it accords with the work of interpolation that Proust could not stop doing in an act of writing that increasingly came to coincide with his own livingness in time. If recollection and redemption imply a past as dead time, retroaction is the structure of a past that continues to pressure the present, and of an invention in the present that intervenes in the past, as when the Narrator constructs variations on Albertine’s identity after her death. Why is Proust’s novel so long? Perhaps because the very act of living in time involves this structure of retroaction, this doubling of memory and perception that engages the future as long as there is time.

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PART THREE

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Chapter 16 Swann’s Gift: Class, Money, and Photography

We have examined individual ways of negotiating the passing of time in the Recherche. Here, in connection with Odette, we will be concerned with the time of life on the scale of lived history. We will track the social transformations of Odette, and of the aristocratic culture she finds her way into, with specific reference to the story time of the novel: the years between the close of the Second Empire and the First World War. We will examine how Odette relies on commercial photography to transform her social identity, and, with the help of Georg Simmel’s celebrated work The Philosophy of Money, we will consider Odette’s entanglements with money as well as class. Our point of departure will be Swann’s gift to the Guermantes: a gigantic photograph of ancient coins. We are at the Hôtel des Guermantes. The Duc and Duchesse are preparing to go out to a dinner party. Marcel/the Narrator has stopped by to confirm his own invitation to a party their cousin (the Princesse de Guermantes) is hosting later that night. He learns that Swann is on his way over with a gift for Oriane, the Duchesse. The focus of this muchcommented scene (which concludes The Guermantes Way II and serves as a hinge to Sodom and Gomorrah) is the revelation that Swann is dying and his friends’ lack of response to this startling news. Swann states matter-of-factly that he will be unable to accompany Oriane on her trip to Italy because, by the time the trip takes place, “I shall have been dead for several months” (GW 59). This news falls on deaf ears. On their way to a party, the Guermantes’ attention is taken up with other things. The Duchesse has put on shoes that don’t match her dress; she needs to find her red ones. The Duc fears his plans to see

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his mistress later that night might be thwarted if they don’t get out the door soon. Even as the Guermantes do not appear to take in the news of their friend’s impending death, Proust doesn’t let the reader forget it. He weaves the theme of death through their conversation, in cringeworthy trivial asides. “There are evenings when one would sooner die!” (GW 584), Oriane remarks, to convey how boring certain social occasions are, from which Swann has been excluded because he is Jewish. “I’m dying of hunger” (GW 595), the Duc insists, to hurry things along, eager to leave for the evening before receiving official news of his cousin’s death, which would interfere with his plans to see his mistress. As he presses his wife out the door, he dismissively reassures Swann that his health is just fine, smugly quipping, “You’ll live to see us all in our graves!” (GW 595). The Guermantes Way II closes on this note. If the quiet announcement of Swann’s death is the dramatic center of this episode, what specifically interests us in this scene is his gift. Swann has had a gigantic photograph delivered to the Hôtel des Guermantes. Too big to fit through the door of the living quarters, it sits downstairs in the vestibule. On her way out, the Duchesse asks her valet to remove the envelope that covers it. Not tonight, her husband pleads, concerned about being late for dinner. “But where are you going to put such a huge silly thing?” (GW 591), he asks his wife. “In my bedroom,” she replies, “I want to have it where I can really look at it” (GW 591). We never see the photograph, and we never hear another word about it. The Duc does explain to Marcel, however, that Swann has abandoned the study of Vermeer we heard so much about in Swann’s Way and taken up research on the Templars. He chuckles at the fact that Swann, a Jew, should be studying the Crusades—“[it’s] amazing the passion people of one religion have for studying the religion of others” (GW 572), he muses. The Duchesse has expressed a desire to see portraits of the Knights of Rhodes. Swann’s gift, we learn from the Duc, is a photograph of portraits of these knights, impressed upon ancient coins. The gigantic photograph is a composite print that presents both sides of a number of coins (an illustration from the American Journal of Numismatics, dating from 1882, provides an idea of what such a photograph might look like, only of course much bigger) (Figure 12). To the Guermantes, the image represents a kind of family photograph, since their aristocratic bloodline goes all the way back to the Knights of Malta. As the Duc confides to Marcel/the Narrator, “Our family is very

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Figure 12  American Journal of Numismatics, 1882.

much mixed up in the whole thing” (GW 572). Because the portraits of the ancestral knights are impressed on ancient coins, however, it has been necessary to vastly enlarge the coins in order to make the portraits discernible. Swann’s last gift to the Guermantes, then, is, among other things, a comically enlarged photograph of money. “It was Proust’s aim,” Walter Benjamin famously declared, “to design the entire structure of society as a physiology of chatter” (IP 206).

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When he made that remark, Benjamin was perhaps alluding to the famous study by sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1843–1901), “L’Opinion et la Conversation” (Opinion and Conversation), which first appeared in 1899 and was subsequently republished many times.1 Tarde explains that “by conversation” he means “all useless dialogue” where “one talks just to talk, for pleasure, or play, or from politeness.”2 His interest in this question is not surprising in the context of the Third Republic. Much earlier, in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, Mme de Staël had recognized the critical role public opinion played in the political landscape, tying it to the new role of the press. Tarde also underscores this connection, commenting that the press “unifies and animates conversations” (OF 58). It was the Dreyfus Affair, however, and the culture of anti-Semitism that drove it, that intensified Tarde’s interest in what he calls “the sociology of conversation” (OF 49). For Tarde, social talk was not idle, for talk leads to action, which implies power. “The evolution of power,” he observes, “can be explained by the evolution of Opinion, which can itself be explained by the evolution of conversation”; without conversation, there is no opinion, “and without opinion, no value, a fundamental notion of political economy” (OF 69). The question of value leads the sociologist to this striking conclusion: “cafés, salons, boutiques, ordinary places, are the real factories of power [fabriques du pouvoir] … power emerges from them as wealth does from industrial workshops and factories [des manufactures et des usines]” (OF 73). Tarde reportedly frequented the same aristocratic salons as Proust and (in fictive stagings) his protagonist. It was perhaps not just snobbism that drove them but a fascination with the social dynamics of power. Here in the Hôtel des Guermantes, scattered bits of apparently idle chatter inform the meaning of Swann’s gift. Before Swann arrives, the Duc warns Marcel not to mention the party he and Oriane plan to attend later that evening because Swann has not been invited to it. We might wonder why not. Proust takes pains to describe the impeccable elegance of Swann’s dress when he shows up at the Hôtel des Guermantes “in a very fitted pearl-gray frock coat that enhanced his tall, slim figure, and white gloves with black stitching” (GW 576). He was wearing “a gray top hat of a flared shape that Delion now made only for him, for the Prince de Sagan, M. de Charlus, the Marquis de Modène, M. Charles Haas, and Comte Louis de Turenne” (GW 576). (In the French

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text the sounds of the word élégant whistle through this sentence in the words svelte, ganté, and gants.) Lest there be any doubt, the Narrator explicitly confirms that Swann was “an eminently confident master … of the social scene” (GW 577). Clearly, then, if he is to be excluded from this evening’s social event, it is not for reasons of class but because he is a Jew. The Duc recognizes that the host of the party in question—his cousin—“nearly has a stroke if he sees a Jew a mile off” (GW 575). And he acknowledges that the Dreyfus Affair has exacerbated his cousin’s anti-Semitism. Clearly not immune to it himself (having wryly commented on Swann’s religion in connection with his interest in the Templars), he complains that Swann has only made matters worse for himself by speaking out about the Affair, instead of quietly suspending relations with society until the whole thing blows over. “[Swann] says the most unfortunate things” (GW 575), the Duc complains. Indeed, when the Duc excuses himself to dress for dinner, and Swann finds himself alone with Marcel/the Narrator, he condemns the antiSemitism of the Guermantes’ world in the strongest terms: “All these people are anti-Semitic at heart,” he charges, “they belong to a different race, they can’t help it with a thousand years of feudalism in their blood. And, of course, they are under the impression that all that has absolutely no bearing on the views they hold” (GW 579). We don’t know what Marcel might have replied to Swann’s outburst in real time, for in place of a direct response to Swann, Proust’s Narrator offers the reader this subtle reflection: “Swann’s Dreyfusism had made him extraordinarily naïve and shifted his way of looking at the world toward an impulsiveness, an instability of judgment more pronounced even than the similar effects of his marriage to Odette in the past” (GW 579). This comment seems to side with the Duc and to view Swann’s vocal Dreyfusism (not the anti-Semitism directed at him) as the misstep responsible for his social exclusion. In the same breath, however, the Narrator reverses course. Still speaking of Swann, he continues: “This recent déclassement was more like a reassignment of class and something entirely to his credit, since it made him return to the path of his ancestors from which he had been led astray by the aristocratic company he kept” (GW 579–80). Swann may have derailed his social standing with his outspoken Dreyfusism, the Narrator now seems to be saying, but this has set him back on track (le faisait rentrer dans la voie), which is to say back on the path of his ancestors (la voie par laquelle étaient venus les siens), which

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he had lost track of due to his silent complicity with his aristocratic friends’ anti-Semitism. Proust is at his most dialectical here. Swann’s Dreyfusism, he suggests, is a (second) déclassement that negates the negation of the first—his marriage to Odette—through the dialectical overcoming of an honorable reclassement, the embrace of his Jewish identity. Swann, the blasé character whom the Narrator has criticized more than once for not voicing his opinions with conviction, has finally come into his own, revealing a lucidity and passion not displayed until now. Faced with his own imminent death, Swann affirms his position as Stranger, which is to say, as Jew, and, in so doing, ceases to be a stranger, in the sense of being alienated from his own identity.3 All of this informs the meaning of Swann’s gift because the image of the Knights of Rhodes attests precisely to the thousand years of feudalism in the Guermantes’ bloodline that Swann ties to their anti-Semitism. The portraits of Crusaders illustrate historical relations between the aristocratic class of the Guermantes, Christianity, and religious violence, all of which are pertinent to the aristocratic anti-Semitism Swann has just called out and specifically to the Dreyfus Affair. As Maurice Barrès pointed out at the time, the prestige of the aristocratic institution of the army (which unites interests of religion and class) had a lot to do with fervent loyalty to the cause of the anti-Dreyfusards even after Henri Dreyfus’ innocence had been amply demonstrated.4 In the course of their rambling conversations, which, at first glance, create an impression of chaos in this episode, the Guermantes quibble over bloodlines, complain about aristocratic marriages to commoners (marriages for money), and deride the false titles the two emperors (Napoleon I and Napoleon III) issued to commoners to consolidate their power. If Oriane wants Swann to accompany her to Italy in the coming months, it is because her husband’s claims to genealogical superiority bore her and no longer convince her: “I feel that even his claims to the throne of Naples and all that sort of thing would begin to interest me if they were explained by you,” she says to Swann, the aesthete, “in old Romanesque churches or in little villages perched on hills, as they are in primitive paintings” (GW 591). Oriane is aware that in the contemporary world celebrity has become more important than genealogy and that the power her husband expects his impressive bloodline to secure him is a thing of the past. Bassin (as the Duc is familiarly called) reminds her that the King of Sweden has no genuine aristocratic standing compared

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to that of his family, that “the King of Sweden’s grandfather was still tilling the soil in Pau,” whereas “we have been holding pride of place all over Europe for nine hundred years” (GW 587). In response, she mockingly quips (playing on his expression for “pride of place,” haut du pavé): “Which doesn’t alter the fact that if someone were to say in the street, ‘Look, there’s the King of Sweden,’ everyone would rush as far as the Place de la Concorde to see him, whereas if he said, ‘There’s M. de Guermantes,’ no one would know who he was talking about” (GW 587–8). It is not lost upon the sharp-witted Oriane that aristocratic distinction is being undermined and overtaken by the new phenomenon of celebrity. Read in the context of these bits of conversation, Swann’s gift takes on new meaning. The gigantic photograph attests to the glorious Christian past of the noble class to which the Guermantes so proudly belong and, at the same time, presents an emblem of the modern money economy that will undermine its distinction, precisely through the mechanisms the Guermantes have been complaining about in their idle conversation: marriage for money, the prestige of celebrity, and so on. Money, Georg Simmel writes, has a “leveling effect” that undermines privilege and “removes the distinctive formations of aristocratic classes.”5 In supremely economical fashion, Swann’s gift presents the dialectical opposition between aristocratic class privilege and the instrument that undermines it. Moreover, because of its exaggerated size and its visible display of specifically photographic techniques such as montage and photo enlargement, Swann’s gift calls attention to its material status as photograph. In other words, in addition to its juxtaposition of Crusaders and coins, it presents the articulation of money and photography that can be historically situated in the second half of the nineteenth century when photography became commercialized—transforming itself into an “image machine” that turned photographs into commodities and accommodated photography to the laws of the market. “It is the interiorization of money in the image,” André Rouillé writes, “that makes photography possible and that photography accomplishes; the double logic of technology and the money economy crystallizes in [photography].” Rouillé cites Deleuze to the effect that “what defines industrial art is not mechanical reproduction, but the interiorized relation to money,” and, he adds, “Disdéri gives the first impetus [élan].”6

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As a sign of the decadence of the times, the Duchesse complains about a visitor who passed by that morning and, apparently all out of calling cards, tore off part of an envelope addressed to herself and left it in lieu of a proper card. Displaying the wit she is known for, the Duchesse imagines returning the favor (and getting her revenge) by leaving the immense envelope in which Swann had delivered his gigantic photograph as her calling card for this person. There is a certain logic to this joke, one that takes up the themes that converge in Swann’s gift: class (or celebrity), money, and photography. Since the 1860s, when Eugène Disdéri found an economical way to produce small photo images that could be printed in series and pasted individually on cards, photo cartes de visite had become all the rage. Disdéri made a fortune. “Photography is also a fiduciary image,” André Rouillé insists, “photo calling cards resemble coins in a number of ways.”7 The cartes de visite put images of faces in circulation and exchange much as coins do. No longer associated with the higher values of art and science that François Arago had claimed for the daguerreotype in his 1839 speech before the Academy of Sciences, by the mid-nineteenth century, photography had become a hugely profitable industry that produced inexpensive photo portraits, art reproductions, and pornography, all of which circulate in the Recherche.8 When Swann’s gift displays coins by means of photographic technologies that exaggerate them, it suggests the commercialization of photography within a money economy. If money tends to undermine aristocratic privilege, so does commercial photography, which propels and amplifies the new factitious distinction of celebrity. Early in the nineteenth century, the historian François Guizot (1787– 1874), keenly aware of early signs of the emergence of mass culture in postrevolutionary France, wrote a pamphlet for the new Restoration monarch on capital punishment in cases of political crimes. He tried to convince the king that it was no longer useful—indeed, that it was even politically unwise—to chop off the heads of his political enemies because the very status of the human head—its value—had changed since the ancien régime. Previously, the head of an aristocratic enemy conspirator had intrinsic value; it was associated with a name, a family, and a history.9 To cut off such a head was both a literal and a symbolic act that served as an effective deterrent against future conspiracy. In the postrevolutionary world, he pointed out—in the context of an

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ostensibly constitutional monarchy and, especially, a powerful culture of the press—ideas no longer attach to individuals; they circulate freely through public opinion. “Modern society,” he wrote, “is an ‘electric society’ in which everything is known… one in which millions of men of similar social status who have analogous feelings without having ever seen or spoken to one another, know each other’s destiny.”10 Under these conditions, he counseled, if you cut off a head, you do nothing to eradicate a dangerous idea, for the idea will immediately find a way to circulate through the crowd, channeled through other bodies. Approximately forty years later, in the 1860s, when portrait photography was becoming big business, the historian Jules Michelet complained to the Goncourt brothers about the effects of image technology on individuality and distinction. Taking Guizot’s analysis a step further, Michelet diagnosed a loss not merely of distinction but of individual identity altogether, due to the impact of commercial photography. “Have you noticed,” he wrote to the Goncourt brothers, “that today famous men do not have the meaning of their physiognomy? Look at their portraits, their photographs … [D]o you recognize, on sight, M. de Lamartine for the author of his poems? … Today … our physiognomy is less our own [propre]. We have become more like portraits of a collectivity than portraits of ourselves.”11 As Philippe Ortel remarks (glossing Michelet’s comment), with photography, the analogical relation between the face and the soul, hallmark of a good painted portrait, is replaced by “a metonymic and horizontal relation between faces, which have become impressionable surfaces and the locus [matrice] of reproducible traits.”12 Once it undergoes the protocols of commercial photography, the human face becomes an instance of the social world to which it belongs. According to Gabriel Tarde, “the distinctive trait of any social relation” is imitation, and, on his account, social imitation operates photographically. He describes it as a kind of “action at a distance of one mind on another,” which he characterizes as a “quasi photographic reproduction of a cerebral photographic negative [cliché] by the sensible plate of another brain.”13 Doubling down on the photographic figure, he adds: “By imitation, I mean any inter-spiritual photographic imprinting, so to speak, whether intentional or not, whether passive or active … [W] herever there is any kind of social relation between two living beings, there is imitation in this sense.”14 If, as we remarked earlier, by the end of

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the nineteenth-century photography had become a guiding metaphor, Tarde moves this metaphor into the collective realm and places it at the very heart of the social fact. When money and technology come together in commercial photography, he suggests, the self becomes a socially constructed identity. In the Recherche, Odette de Crécy will claim this historical juncture as an opportunity, producing her social self through manipulations of her photographic image, registering the effects of society on her face and body in a meticulous, and strategic, appropriation of this alienated image.

Chapter 17 The Facialization of Odette

Odette, who swiftly climbs the social ladder, appears to forget, or efface, her past as she moves along. She acts as if she had no history and no memory. Proust provides only scattered hints of her personal story, which he presents out of sequence, offering just barely enough information to enable Marcel/the Narrator (and so the reader) to reconstruct the broad outlines of her story. Marcel first meets Odette as a child when he drops in unannounced on his Uncle Adolphe, transgressing the family rule that had been established to conceal from him the knowledge of his uncle’s libertine life. Although Adolphe makes every effort to compartmentalize his family life and his erotic adventures, the two worlds coexist in the photos on display in his house, which intermix family portraits with images of actresses and demi-mondaines (high-end prostitutes or call girls) he has known and loved. This last group includes Odette, whom Marcel encounters on his impromptu visit, without, however, being introduced to her. He does not know her name. She exists for him simply as La Dame en Rose (the lady in pink). Later, in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Marcel/the Narrator notices a watercolor in Elstir’s studio turned to face the wall. Its subject, “singular and delightful,” charms and fascinates him (SYG 427), though he feels baffled by it—“I could not tell what I was looking at” (SYG 428). The Narrator explains that this work, titled Miss Sacripant, depicts “a young actress of an earlier period, partly cross-dressed” (SYG 428). Marcel/the Narrator finds this “portrait of a woman who, though not pretty, was of a curious type” (SYG 428) to be supremely ambiguous and distinctly erotic; the cross-dressed actress “in the provocative

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costume,” Marcel/the Narrator remarks, “[was] seemingly asking to be fondled” (SYG 429). Although Elstir had turned the picture to the wall (out of consideration for his wife, apparently), the Narrator found him “unconcerned about what might appear immoral in this young actress dressed like a man, who was herself less interested in how well she would play her part in the performance than in the fascination and in the stimulation she presumably offered to the sensuality, surfeited or depraved, of certain spectators” (SYG 429). The painter dismisses his watercolor as “just a product of his youth,” a mere “entertaining memento of the theater of that period” (SYG 429–30). Having figured out that the watercolor must be an image of Odette before her marriage to Swann, Marcel asks Elstir for a photograph of it; the painter offers him a drawing of a flower instead. Much later, however, after Uncle Adolphe’s death, Morel (Charlus’ lover), who used to be in Adolphe’s employ, will bring Marcel/the Narrator his uncle’s collection of photographs, which includes a reproduction of Elstir’s Miss Sacripant. Only then, thanks to the photograph, will Marcel/the Narrator realize that the woman he had seen as a child at Uncle Adolphe’s house—La Dame en Rose—was, in fact, Odette de Crécy, the same young woman who appears in cross dress in Elstir’s watercolor and whom he knows as Mme Swann, the mother of Gilberte, the girl he used to have a crush on. Elstir’s watercolor, dated 1872, is not just a curiosity; it has documentary value. It identifies Odette as a lorette, a specific type of prostitute that emerged in the 1840s, superseding the grisette, current during the July Monarchy. The lorette was associated with crossdressing not only on stage (in the kind of variety show Elstir depicted) but sometimes even in daily life. Cross-dressing was taken as a sign of the lorette’s autonomy and ambition; gender ambiguity conveyed sexual self-possession. And unlike the grisette, a temporary mistress of a wealthy man, the lorette was something of an entrepreneur. Intent upon achieving social mobility and wealth, she maintained several liaisons at once (reportedly up to nine or ten) and played these men against each other to optimize her prestige and maximize her wealth. As we shall see, Odette’s status as lorette explains a lot about the jealousy at the heart of Swann in Love. The depiction of Miss Sacripant prompts Proust’s Narrator to make the following comment, which helps us fill in some of the blanks concerning Odette’s history. The image Elstir had painted, he remarks,

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dated from before the time when Odette, taking to designing [disciplinant] her own appearance, had made of her face and figure the creation from which, over the years, in its broad lines, for her dressmaker, her hairdressers, and for Odette herself, in her ways of standing, speaking, smiling, holding her hands, casting her glances, or even thinking, there could now be no departure. It required the degeneration of taste in the sated lover for Swann to reject the numerous photographs that were his beautiful wife, ne varietur, in favor of the little photo of her that he kept in his bedroom, showing a thinnish young woman wearing a straw hat adorned with pansies, rather plain, with puffed-out hair and drawn features. (SYG 440) In Elstir’s watercolor Odette was rather plain—“not pretty” (SYG 428). Her hair was visibly bouffant beneath her melon (a man’s hat, characteristic of period representations of the lorette), and she held a straw hat in her hand. This image (which dates from the 1870s) returns here when the Narrator describes the old daguerreotype of Odette that Swann preferred to her more recent photographs: it is an image of Odette as lorette. It is precisely this forlorn image (and presumably the history tied to it), that Odette succeeds in overriding in her new photo portraits, thanks to the codes and practices of commercial photography. As Proust explains in the passage cited above, Odette achieves her new look by designing—or “disciplining [disciplinant]”— not only her facial features, her hairstyle, and her fashion choices but also her posture, her gestures, her speech, her comportment, and even her thinking. This is how Odette produces herself as a social image, the image of the ravishing wife that Swann recognizes, impassively, in her numerous photographs—“the numerous photographs that were his beautiful wife, ne varietur” (SYG 440, my emphasis). As the sentence suggests, through that tricky play with the antecedent at which Proust is so adept, Odette has not only come to resemble her “numerous photographs,” she has (as we shall see) in a sense become them.

Chapter 18 The Logic of the Pose

In his “Essai sur l’art de la photographie esthétique” (1862), Eugène Disdéri explains the social construction of the commercial photo portrait through what he calls the “logic of the pose.”15 Unlike the portrait painter, he explains, the photographer is obliged to intervene in reality, not just to represent it; “he has to constitute the reality itself before thinking about representing it” (D 55). This constitution of reality (the reality that will be registered and fixed in the photographic image) is the work of the pose. Odette will take this process one step further, inserting the pose into the reality of her everyday life. She not only has a certain image of herself produced in her numerous photographs but also carries out an entire program of what Deleuze and Guattari call facialization (visagéification), an operation that turns not just the face but the whole body—including its accoutrements and gestures and comportment—into a kind of mask. “If the head and its elements are facialized,” Deleuze and Guattari explain, “the entire body can also be facialized… hand, breast, stomach, pelvis and vagina, thigh, leg, foot, all come to be facialized.”16 Facialization involves what Deleuze and Guattari call “the social production” (TP 181) of the whole being. Here the face does not wear a mask; the mask becomes the face and produces the entire persona: “The mask ensures … the construction of the face, the facialization of the head and the body: the mask is now the face itself, the abstraction or operation of the face. The inhumanity of the face” (TP 171). Internalizing the “logic of the pose” (D 71–2), then, Odette not only composes her image through the social practices of commercial photography but undergoes what Deleuze and Guattari call the “subjectivation” of facialization, that is, her constitution as a particular

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social type or being, by means of an “abstract machine” that “act[s] upon social subjects,” overcoding them to serve the imperatives of power (TP 180). Through facialization, Deleuze and Guattari maintain, the face becomes “a politics”—a politics that is “not an affair of ideology but of economy, and the organization of power” (TP 175). “[C]ertain assemblages of power,” they conclude, “require the production of a face” (TP 181). It is through just this sort of facialization that Odette’s image becomes fixed once and for all, “ne varietur” (SYG 440), and that Odette de Crécy assumes the public face of Mme Swann. Before Deleuze and Guattari, Disdéri explained how the machine of the camera, in the hands of a skilled operator, engages in the kind of social production of images and identities that Deleuze and Guattari would subsequently theorize. Disdéri explains just how and why commercial portrait photography involves subjectivation, understood as the social production of identities as types in response to economic power. He makes it clear that, in the case of commercial portrait photography, the kind of “exact imitation” (D 63) traditionally associated with the technology of the daguerreotype becomes both a practical liability and a theoretical problem for the commercial photographer. He suggests that, to stay in business, the photographer of the carte de visite must satisfy a paying customer in their dual role as subject (or model) of the photograph and consumer of an image of themselves, intended for social circulation and exchange, and that this requires balancing the sometimes conflicting demands of truth and beauty. Truth without beauty risks losing customers who won’t be satisfied with their portraits if they don’t recognize a pleasing image of themselves, while beauty without truth discredits the photographer, who will be suspected of excessive retouching and accused of inauthenticity. This specifically commercial problem prompts Disdéri to shift from the medium-specific discourse of exact imitation (the discourse of the daguerreotype that had been transferred to photography generally) to a more supple theorization of resemblance, one that yields a subtle distinction between two kinds of resemblance: “resemblance in beauty” and “resemblance in ugliness” (D 63). Concerning the photographic subject, Disdéri writes: “It is … necessary to grasp and represent the intentions of nature manifest in this individual, justifying and embellishing them with the modifications or essential developments introduced by habits, ideas, social life”

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(D 63). This opaque formulation (the problem is a delicate one) makes one thing clear: the social element of the pose is crucial in the commercial photo portrait. For unlike imitation, resemblance is not objective, not a matter of truthful imitation. It requires recognition, not merely self-recognition on the part of the subject (who must of course recognize oneself in the portrait taken) but recognition from the position of a third party: the subject’s friends and associates. Resemblance, in other words, must be collectively performed, built up from the mental ideas of “people who know the person being represented,” Disdéri explains, people who “have a clear idea of him or her that is the result of all the various impressions they have received, thousands of times” (D 64). Resemblance is a social operation that requires an accumulation of diverse, shared impressions through a thickness of time. According to Disdéri, this social component is necessary not just for resemblance to be confirmed after the fact (“yes, that’s her”) but to produce the

Figure 13 André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, Madame Khan (carte de visite), 1858.

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photographic portrait in the first place. It is a crucial factor in the disposition of the pose that will intervene in—or constitute—the reality that will subsequently be fixed in the photographic image. The truth of the commercial photo portrait, then, is not a singular truth (the truth of an individual); it is a social one (Figure 13). The first task of the good portrait photographer, Disdéri writes, is to discern “the real type and true character” (D 64–5) of the model. The photographer does this by imaginatively inserting oneself into the subject’s social community, conjuring up the social ideas that circulate within it, and selecting the one that best corresponds to the subject’s place in that community. The entire mise en scène of the portrait will be artfully devised on this basis—“the attitude and the gesture along with the expression, as well as distance, lighting, clothing and the accessories of the tableau” (D 65). This is how the facialization machine of commercial photography works. The first condition of the pose, then, is that it be in harmony with “the customs [moeurs] of the individual” (D 75), or, more precisely, with the norms of the community, taking into account the subject’s age, gender, stature, habits, social class, and milieu.17 In a second moment, the pose must offer “the greatest beauty of which the model is susceptible” (D 75). Beauty (specifically what Disdéri calls optical beauty) is the secret weapon of the photographer, who manipulates nuances of lighting, angle shot, and cropping. Thanks to the photographer’s artistry and skill, this optical beauty supplements both the natural truth of the model (their degree of attractiveness or unattractiveness) and the truth of the type. This is how the photographer negotiates the competing demands of truth and beauty. Disdéri’s theory of the social type is quite distinct from the one Arthur Batut (1846–1918) advanced. Batut’s concern is scientific, not commercial. He proposes techniques for the visualization of a statistically determined social idea. He creates a visual type by superimposing large numbers of photographic images of a designated category and produces what he calls a “portrait of the invisible” in the specific sense of modeling the abstract idea of a statistical average of individual portraits, considered as empirical data (Figure 14).18 For Disdéri, on the other hand, the type is a social idea. Although there is a vaguely ethnographic method at work in Disdéri’s procedures, there is nothing empirical about his approach. The type Disdéri theorizes—“the real type and the true character” (D 64–5) of the model—is socially imagined from the start.

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Figure 14 Arthur Batut, Portrait-type obtenu avec 10 jeunes filles d’Arles, 1887.

Because it depends upon recognition, it first has to be conjured up in the minds of others. If, as Disdéri put it, friends and associates of the photographic subject “possessed the means of expressing this idea” (D 64)—the idea of this type—it is because, having encountered this person innumerable times in various circumstances, they contribute something of their own to this idea or mental picture: their own desires, beliefs, and fears. It is thanks to this kind of interaction that they would be able to “paint the type” (D 64) of the photographic subject. We notice that in elaborating what is distinctive about commercial portrait photography, Disdéri falls back here on a metaphor of painting, which transmits a fictive moment (or, as Disdéri puts it, a rhetorical one) that is not tied to the real in the way a photograph ostensibly is, thanks to

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its indexical status. Resemblance means being true to a type that is not empirically given but is produced by a collective imaginary. Disdéri appeals to the social type as a strategy for coping with the need (specific to the commercial relationship) to satisfy the opposing demands of truth and beauty. This means that the truth of the type reflects the truth of the commercial market. Its fictive dimension concerns social desire or value, which translates into monetary value. This is the basis for the social education of the face that Odette performs in designing—or disciplining (disciplinant)—not only her facial features but her whole embodied presence, enlisting her coiffeurs and her couturiers in the effort to produce the concrete instantiation of a type from which, “in her ways of standing, speaking, smiling, holding her hands, casting her glances, or even thinking, there could now be no departure” (SYG 440).

Chapter 19 The Social Education of the Face

To succeed, Disdéri suggests, the commercial portrait photographer requires a talent not unlike that of a hypnotist. This brings us back to Tarde, who identifies the social subject with a hypnotic subject. “The social state of things, like the hypnotic state, is only a form of dream,” he writes. “To have ideas that have only been suggested to you and to believe them to be spontaneous, such is the illusion specific to the hypnotic subject and to the social being.”19 Tarde cites Maudsley, the author of “Pathologies de l’esprit” (Mental Pathologies), concerning the hypnotist’s “unconscious imitation” of the “attitude and … expression of the person whose muscular contractions he instinctively copies with great exactness,” through a sort of unconscious sympathy.20 Disdéri theorizes commercial photography as a practice of suggestion and sympathy in precisely this physiognomic sense. For what ultimately “finishes and completes the resemblance” the photographer aspires to, Disdéri tells us, is the dynamic physiognomy of the photographic subject and the photographer’s sympathetic response to it. Disdéri explains that the facial expression that will appear in the photograph needs to be curated, that is, harvested from among the many flickering nuances of expression that the subject actually displays before the photographer in real life. The photographer must choose, on the spot, “the one that in some way epitomizes the various ways that person’s face tends to appear” (D 77). It is an extremely challenging task, Disdéri insists, given that “the muscles of the face, in harmony with one another, form a network of infinite complication and mobility” (D 77–8). Indeed, physiognomic changes “are so rapid on the model’s face, the nuances so delicate and fleeting,” that it is extremely difficult

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to produce a mental still or snapshot from this live streaming of mobile expressivity. It is especially challenging to seize from this rich, dynamic flow the expression that best matches the social idea of the model that the photographer already has in mind and intends to fix in a still photograph. Even more challenging, however, is that once this expression has been selected, the photographer has to try to trigger a spontaneous reappearance of it on the subject’s face and to achieve this at precisely the moment they take the portrait. To accomplish this task the photographer will animate by a multifaceted conversation, the features of the person, in whom he hopes to prompt a number of varied expressions. He will take note of them in his mind, and when the moment comes to capture the image on the sensitive plate, he will try to reawaken, by whatever means possible, the expression chosen in passing. (D 78) And this is where a talent not unlike that of the hypnotist comes in, one of being able to “bring the chosen expression back to life again and to fix it for a moment on the features of the model” (D 78). Disdéri reverts to the photographic metaphor of “fixing” an image, but he is not yet talking about taking the photograph. He is talking about the relation between the photographer and the model in the very constitution of the face (or physiognomy) that the photographer will then literally fix as an image in the actual photographic portrait. His metaphor of fixing a fleeting image proposes the model’s face itself as a kind of photosensitive surface, onto which the photographer exposes his own mental image of the model’s face, one he has derived from his imagined participation in the subject’s social world and believes best manifests the subject’s social type. In other words, Disdéri suggests that the photographer registers an image on the model’s face before literally registering it in the photographic portrait. Disdéri’s metaphor anticipates Deleuze and Guattari’s characterization of the face of facialization as a surface that receives impressions. On the basis of a social idea, then, the photographer creates a mental image (which is like a photo image) in their own mind, that they then impress into the real by manipulating the pose (including the subject’s physiognomy) to elicit the real appearance of this image, which the photographer then “exactly imitates” through

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the mechanism of the camera. This is how commercial photography constitutes the real, instead of merely registering, or representing, it. Disdéri speaks of striving for organic harmony in the network of expressions facilitated by the muscles of the subject’s face, relating these back to emotions of the soul and to inner feeling (D 8). But, of course, the photographer does not experience these feelings and only imagines their deep roots in the soul. Instead, the photographer scrapes a surface off the “organic network” whose appearance on the client’s face they elicited through hypnotic manipulations, in order to fabricate a thin, flat photo image that will sell. As Rouillé puts it (in Deleuzian terms), the photographic portrait “is not the representation, copy, or simulacrum of a face which is a thing, a model thought to preexist the image, but the photographic actualization of a face.”21 The commercial photo portrait is not a “slice of the real” as the daguerreotype was said to be; it involves, rather, the “production of a new real” according to a social logic of the commercial type.22 When Proust’s Narrator (speaking in Swann’s voice) refers to the face of his “ravishing wife” that appears on the numerous photographs she has recently had taken, we understand that Odette’s facialization has occurred through the mechanism of commercial photography and that it depends upon the commercial determination of the social type of an elite bourgeois wife during the Third Republic, one that Odette has incorporated and henceforth consistently performs—ne varietur—in her life. Proust’s Latin phrase ne varietur suggests a sort of imprimatur: it is as if Odette had been minted like a coin, upon which she carries her own portrait as inhuman face. In the elegiac closing of Swann’s Way we see a triumphant Odette, flower of the Elysian Garden of Women, strut down the Allée des Acacias in the Bois de Boulogne like a supremely elegant automaton. She is the product of a social subjectivation to which she has been a most willing accomplice. But her facialization has not been one hundred percent effective. There is a tiny crack in the mask—or rather the face. The shadow of the demi-mondaine flickers across the magnificent appearance of the glamorous Mme Swann and lodges in her smile, “an ambiguous smile” (SW 436), which complicates Odette’s carefully composed features. Whereas Marcel sees in Odette’s smile only “the beneficence of a monarch” (SW 436), our Narrator perceives in it “a cocotte’s provocativeness” (SW 436). Upon this provocative smile,

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Proust superimposes a triumphant “idle smile” (SW 436), as well as “a bitter smile” (SW 436), directed at those men who remember her in less gracious circumstances. “I slept with her the day MacMahon resigned,” brags one longtime admirer (SW 437), implying a liaison in the late 1870s, a few years after Elstir had depicted Odette as a lorette in Miss Sacripant. Through the corner of Odette’s mouth, then, Proust reveals the various ways her smile has been socially coded in interaction with others. What matters most, though, is that, through the kind of overcoding Deleuze and Guattari theorize through facialization, Odette has achieved the status of celebrity. “I did perceive,” confides the Narrator, “the indistinct murmur of celebrity” around “that woman whose reputation for beauty, improper behavior, and elegance was universal” (SW 437). As a woman of the world she offers what Baudelaire might call “a last flash of heroism” in the new modernity of the money economy.23

Chapter 20 Immortal Youth

Odette de Crécy, “the youngest of the well-known tarts [le cadet des cocottes connues]” (SYG 442, translation modified), as Proust puts it with crunching alliterative force in the French text, has transformed herself into Mme Swann. She has changed her status and her style. If earlier, “at the Verdurins’ … she was seen as stupid,” now she can “pass as a high-minded woman” (SYG 192). When it comes to furnishings, “the Far East was giving way under the insistent pressures of the eighteenth century” (SYG 191); she has traded in her Japanese robes for silk peignoirs in the manner of Watteau. Only the chrysanthemums Mme Swann surrounds herself with as a kind of signature hearken back to the private quarters of the “very strange little house filled with Chinese bric-a-brac” (SW 437) where the cocotte (tart), Odette de Crécy, received the men who paid to have her. The most striking feature of Odette’s transformation into Mme Swann, however, is that “she seemed to have grown so many years younger” (SYG 192). Older now—on the Allée des Acacias we glimpse a lock of gray hair, mixed into her now blond coiffure—she appears much younger than before, as if she had slid backward in time. The Narrator advances a number of hypotheses to explain this strange fact, such as a slight weight gain (she used to be too skinny) or subtle changes in fashion that, more flattering to her body, might have made her appear more youthful. The definitive explanation, however, is that she has found her style, or, more precisely, she has found her type— which is to say, her face:

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Odette had now reached the middle years of life, where she found herself, or invented for herself a new personal physiognomy … a recognized pattern of beauty; and on her formerly undisciplined features (which for so many years had been left to the random whims of the responsive flesh, briefly aging by years at the slightest indisposition, managing somehow to collaborate with her moods and daily demeanors in the composition of her variable face, unfocused, formless and charming) she now wore this [face] like a sort of immortal youth. (SYG 192–3) Before the ne varietur of her photographic face, Odette used to have a “variable face” that displayed the kind of “infinite mobility” (D 78). Disdéri evoked in relation to the unstable physiologies of his photographic subjects, before their features were organized into a type and fixed in a commercial portrait. It is a strange formulation, though—to find or invent a new personal physiognomy—for one might imagine that nothing could be more definitive, more singular, than the signature of one’s face. But we recognize a version of Michelet’s complaint here, namely that, with photography, our physiognomy is no longer our own, that we become “more like portraits of a collectivity than portraits of ourselves.”24 If Michelet portrayed this as a liability, for Odette, it becomes a winning strategy. When she finds her face, it conveys an impression of “immortal youth” (SYG 193). This is the true meaning of the ne varietur that Swann alluded to dismissively in connection with the photographs of his beautiful wife that leave him cold. The first time Swann meets Odette (recounted in Swann’s Way), his impression of her is not flattering. In fact, it corresponds quite precisely to the characterization of the “undisciplined features” of the “variable face, unfocused, formless” (SYG 192–3) that distinguished Odette prior to the invention of her “new physiognomy.” When Swann first met Odette at the theater, we read in Swann’s Way, her clothes made her “look as though she were composed of different parts poorly fitted together [décousu]” (SW 205, translation modified)—she looks, in other words, like a patchwork coming apart at the seams. This disjointed aspect seems to migrate from her clothes to her face, which does not initially appeal to Swann. He finds her eyes heavy and her face worn, in spite of her youth. When she eventually finds her style, it is as if

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Odette had applied a beautiful mask over her homely, fluctuating, and formless features—that tired and wan face we encountered in Proust’s description of the old daguerreotype that Swann prefers to Odette’s more recent photographs (Figure 15). If Odette appears younger now, even though she is in fact older, it is because she has sewn her mobile features together into the image of a type that she sets over her incoherent features, a type that becomes fixed (like a photographic image) and lives on in a kind of dead time of “immortal youth” (SYG 193). It is precisely this immunity to time, the impenetrability of this face to any lived experience, that renders Odette at once grotesque and glamorous. In the paragraph that follows the comment about Odette’s new appearance of “immortal youth” (SYG 192–3), Proust makes the connection between her facialization and commercial photography explicit. “In Swann’s own bedroom,” Proust writes,

Figure 15  Anonymous daguerreotype, n.d.

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instead of the more recent grand photographs of his wife, in which, however varied her different hats and dresses were, the same enigmatically imperious expression identified her triumphant figure and features, he kept a modest little old daguerreotype dating from the days before this unvarying image of Odette, in which she seemed devoid of her new youth and beauty, not yet discovered by her. (SYG 193) In the old daguerreotype Odette appears as “a slender young woman with pensive eyes and a forlorn look” (SYG 193). She is “caught in a posture between stride and stillness” (SYG 193), an image of virtual movement that echoes the scene in which Swann first thought of the similarity between her and Botticelli’s gracious Zephora—“when we don’t love we immobilize … the beloved model moves; one only ever has blurry pictures of them” (SYG 391). We remember that Swann is not immediately attracted to Odette but eventually takes to her once her resemblance to Zephora comes to mind. This does not necessarily imply that Swann, the art connoisseur, needs to aestheticize the fleshand-blood Odette to desire her. For if Odette is not Swann’s type (as we learn in the notorious line that concludes Swann in Love), it is not because she is not aesthetic enough. If anything, Odette appears to him as already too aestheticized, which is to say too decadent; she looks haggard, a mere waif, with eyes that “exhausted the rest of her face, and always gave her a look of being in ill health or ill humor” (SW 203). Swann is an inveterate womanizer, and he seeks out not the ethereal, pre-Raphaelite type but young, healthy, and overtly sexual women. It seems that Swann does not know what to make of Odette until he finds the social (or cultural) idea of her beauty—her cultural type, as it were— which he identifies once the resemblance to Botticelli’s Zephora strikes him. Swann is perhaps simply finding the type to which the individual belongs, according to Disdéri’s logic of the pose, in order to reconcile demands of truth and beauty. Swann is a collector and purveyor of art photography. In Swann in Love he placed a photo reproduction of Botticelli’s painting on his writing table: “as if it were a photograph of Odette” (SW 233). And “[w]hen he had looked at that Botticelli for a long time, he would think of his own Botticelli, whom he found even more beautiful, and, bringing the photograph of Zephora close to him, he would believe

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he was clasping Odette against his heart” (SW 233). The ambiguity of this comic sentence is carefully calibrated. Is “his own Botticelli”— Odette—“even more beautiful” to him than she was before, thanks to the identification with Botticelli? Or does Odette, once the resemblance has been established, appear to him “even more beautiful” than the painted image, precisely because she is a living woman he can desire and perhaps possess? This metaphorical substitution of one photograph for another—Swann gazes at the photograph of the painted figure “as if it were a photograph of Odette” (SW 233, my emphasis)—appears to be inadvertently literalized some fifty pages on when Proust refers to a photograph of Odette on Swann’s table. He writes that Swann’s “eyes fell upon the photograph of Odette [la photographie d’Odette] on the table” (SW 320, my emphasis). The definite article here—“the photograph”—suggests a reference to the one mentioned previously, the photo reproduction of Botticelli’s Zephora he had gazed at as if she were Odette. Swann substituted one photograph for another metaphorically, but it seems that Proust substitutes one photo for another quite literally, and unwittingly. As Georg Simmel observes, a photographic “copy of Bella di Tiziano is no more expensive than that of a cabaret singer.” Photography is a leveler; photographs are as exchangeable as coins (PM 369). In Swann in Love, Swann does not merely identify a photograph of Zephora with Odette. He reaches such a state of despair in his relationship with her—Odette is now so internal to him because of the torment of his jealousy—that she becomes indistinguishable from her photograph. When his eyes fell upon Odette’s photograph on the table, or when she came to see him … [Swann] had trouble identifying the figure of flesh or of cardboard with the painful and constant disturbance that inhabited him. He would say to himself almost with surprise: “It’s her!” as if suddenly someone were to show us in a separate, external form one of our own diseases and we found that it did not resemble what we were suffering from. (SW 320, my emphasis, translation modified) “Figure of flesh or of cardboard [figure de chair ou de Bristol]” (SW 320), it was all the same to Swann now. “Bristol,” a term for

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the cardboard backing of an album photograph or carte de visite, is a metonym for a photograph. Swann has reached a point where not only are photographs interchangeable but Odette has become interchangeable with one of her photographs; she has become, in other words, one of “the numerous photographs that were [Swann’s] beautiful wife, ne varietur” (SYG 440, my emphasis).

Chapter 21 Money

By the time Odette has found her “new physiognomy” in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, she does not want to hear anything more from her husband about Botticelli. She refuses to wear the blue scarf he had given her because the color reminded him of the painter. She has replaced this type, conjured up by the cultivated Swann, with one she prefers: a type with broader commercial appeal and more social power. She has disciplined her wobbly, formless features into the image of Swann’s ravishing wife—Odette ne varietur—thanks to the image machine of commercial photography. After the first part of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, “At Mme Swann’s,” we don’t see much of Odette until after Swann’s death. Remarried, she reappears as the aristocratic Mme de Forcheville at the Matinée des Guermantes in Finding Time Again. Marcel/the Narrator will hardly recognize her there, not because considerable time has passed and she has fallen into decrepitude, like the other guests, but because she has not changed at all. Odette has been strangely immune to the “destructive action of Time” (FTA 239). Looking “as if she had been injected with a liquid, something like paraffin, which soaks into the skin and prevents it changing” (FTA 256)—preserved, in other words, in her “immortal youth” (SYG 193)—Odette inhabits the still time of her image. Her timeless beauty is “a more miraculous defiance of the laws of chronology than the conservation of radium was of the laws of nature” (FTA 256). If anything could dissuade us from reading the Recherche as an invitation to escape from time, it would be this uncanny apparition of Odette at the Matinée des Guermantes! Commenting on her permanently youthful appearance, which contrasts so sharply with that of the other guests, ravaged by age, Marcel/the Narrator compares Odette to a kind of “large mechanical

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doll” (FTA 256) featured at the Exposition Universelle of 1878. This is not what she has become in old age; this is what she has been since she swept down the Allée des Acacias. But what matters more than the image of the doll itself (which introduces a comic element of the fantastic) is the identification of Odette with the spirit of the 1878 world’s fair, a cultural turning point for many contemporaries. As a writer for the art magazine Les Beaux-Arts put it, the fair announced a new civilization, one “quite different from the tradition conserved in … monuments and in history.”25 The industrial section of the exhibition, mostly sponsored by private firms, featured the newest products: sewing machines, telephones, phonographs, microphones, and so on. Its ironwork buildings, the same journalist writes, “seemed to open themselves up of their own accord to the desire and mad rush of the crowd”—the crowd of virtual consumers.26 When Proust identifies Odette with this world’s fair (the straw hat so often associated with Odette was a fashion item at the Exposition), he also identifies her with the new money economy that was coming into its own. The association with money becomes even more explicit when the Narrator refines his analysis: “To me,” he writes, “she did not seem to say: ‘I am the 1878 Exhibition’ so much as: ‘I am the Allée des Acacias, 1892.’ She looked as if she might still have been there. And precisely because she had not changed, she hardly seemed to be alive. She was like a sterilized rose” (FTA 256). It was on the Allée des Acacias that we saw Odette in all her facialized glory at the end of Swann’s Way—Odette the celebrity. What the Narrator now adds to this alluring figure when he puts the words “I am the Allée des Acacias, 1892” in her mechanical mouth is both the year 1892 and his observation that she has been frozen in that moment: “she looks as if she might still have been there”—there on the Allée des Acacias, and “there” in 1892. It might appear to be a gratuitous detail. But 1892 is the year of the Panama Affair, the greatest monetary corruption scandal of the century that almost brought down the government. Jean Jaurès (1859–1914), the socialist leader who would be assassinated in 1914, headed a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the scandal. In his report he announced that “a financial state, has taken control within the democratic one,” that “the power of money” had taken control of French institutions, and “distort[ed]… national consciousness.” In the wake of the Panama Scandal, he observed, it had become “impossible

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to clearly distinguish with certainty between what is honest and what is dishonest, between fair… practices and fraud.” “We are witnessing a kind of social decomposition,” he concluded.27 In his account of the modern iteration of the Guermantes’ salon, in which Odette occupies a certain pride of place, Proust puts it this way: “Ministers with tarnished reputations and former prostitutes were now regarded as paragons of virtue” (FTA 266). The moral confusion—or distortion of values—that Proust comically invokes in the same terms as Jaurès is explicitly tied to the Panama Scandal when the Narrator goes on to say that it is impossible to know whether “M. Loubet and M. Reinach are thieves or [whether] they are great citizens” (FTA 272). Loubet was indeed a minister with a tarnished reputation, having both authorized the investigation into the Panama Scandal and then, under pressure, blocked its progress. Reinach was the financier of the Panama Company who committed suicide in 1892. This is the Narrator’s comic way of speaking of what Jaurès called the “social decomposition” brought on by the corrupting powers of money which render it impossible to make stable ethical distinctions. Of course the “former prostitute” is none other than Odette, now an aristocrat in her own right, thanks to her remarriage. She is also now a member of the Guermantes family, because Saint-Loup has married her daughter Gilberte, for her money. “While the names were still the same,” Proust writes, “the… people… were different” (FTA 264). The Princesse de Guermantes, for example, is now played by the vulgar and ludicrous Mme Verdurin, whom we got to know well in Swann in Love; the Prince, financially ruined by the war, has married her for her money after the death of his first wife. The Narrator attributes this situation to what he calls a “perennial forgetting, which so rapidly covers over the most recent past” (FTA 270). Here, what Proust referred to as “stretches of forgetting [pans d’oubli]” that occurred on the level of individual consciousness in the Albertine story have taken on historical proportions on the level of social consciousness. What is lacking in the Guermantes’ new world, Proust writes, is “the sense… of History” (FTA 273). “This little world,” Proust’s Narrator observes, “in its inner composition which I had believed was stable, had itself undergone profound alteration” (FTA 265). “If there was one thing that really characterizes this social milieu, it was its prodigious capacity for coming down in the world” (FTA 265). What lies behind the words “I am

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the Allée des Acacias, 1892” that the Narrator puts in Odette’s mouth is, we might conclude, “I am money.” The destructive force of time, dramatized in Finding Time Again, is not an essential or metaphysical destructiveness of time in the abstract, one that touches individuals with mortality and calls for aesthetic recuperation by essential truths; it concerns the effects of sociohistorical processes at a particular juncture: the Third Republic. It is a question of the decades of the world’s fair of 1878, the Dreyfus Affair, the Panama Scandal, and the First World War. Shortly before the Panama Scandal, in 1890–91, Georg Simmel published the first of the essays that would become part of his great work, The Philosophy of Money, a study that proposes a quite different conception of modernism than Benjamin’s modernism of shock: a modernism of the money economy. In that book Simmel notes what he calls an “ominous analogy between money and prostitution” (PM 408). It is not just that prostitution involves money; Simmel maintains that it reveals something about the essence of money—“the economic counterpart of this kind of relationship,” Simmel says of prostitution, “is money” (PM 407). Just as prostitution implies the substitution of purely instrumental relations for the emotions and commitments of love, money represents the “pure instrument” (PM 227) of exchange, the “reification of means” (PM 227) that “crystallizes” (PM 294) it. As prostitution alters relations of love, so money alters relations of value and also, as we shall see, relations of desire. When we read the Recherche through Simmel, we recognize a striking analogy between Odette and money. Like Odette, whose facialization has effaced her personal history and extracted her from time, money, on Simmel’s analysis, displays an “eminently ahistorical character” and “lives in continuous self-alienation” (PM 554). Like Odette, who perpetually sheds her past as she climbs the social ladder and, in “miraculous defiance of the law of chronology” (FTA 256) never grows old, money, Simmel writes, lives “only in the emergent moment of the now” (cited in PM, xxiv). But there is more. Because of its purely formal character—it can be exchanged for anything—money is “absolutely formless” (PM 294), without specific quality or individual character. Money enjoys the flexibility “of an extremely liquid body which takes on any form” (PM 353); “like a liquid [it] lacks internal limits and accepts without resistance external limits… offered by any solid surroundings” (PM 537). In a moment of

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jealous rage toward the end of Swann in Love, Swann castigates Odette in precisely these terms: “You’re nothing but a formless stream of water running down whatever slope one offers it, a fish without memory,” he unleashes (SW 301), adding ferociously, “I realize that you’re not a person” (SW 301). If formlessness was initially built into Odette’s appearance, in the décousu quality of her dress and the formlessness of her mobile facial features, Swann objects here to a more essential formlessness in Odette, of which her features might serve as mere symptom. What concerns Swann is Odette’s fundamental lack of identity: her absence of memory, her willingness to mold herself to any promising external contour, which, of course, leads to her eagerness to respond to men’s solicitations, which inevitably provokes Swann’s jealousy. What Swann rages against, we could say, is the emptiness Odette shares with the purely formal, and irreducibly social, structure Simmel associates with money. It is this very formlessness that Odette conceals when she disciplines her features, according to the social codes of the logic of the pose as practiced in the business of photography. Through her facialization, however, when she fixes her features permanently into the social image of her type, she takes on the very form of money: she stamps herself with the socially produced portrait of herself as alienated object of desire, subject to exchange. Under the authority of the sovereignly blasé Charles Swann, who assures her fiduciary value by marrying her, Odette is minted like a coin by the impressions of commercial photography, through which she performs the facialization constituted by the photographic logic of the pose. Odette is a figure of money in the Recherche, specifically as Simmel theorizes it, that is, as a historical and philosophical structure he identifies with social modernism. Swann’s gift to the Guermantes (the huge photograph of ancient coins displaying the faces of the Guermantes’ noble ancestors) presents the terms of this historical rupture: money and social class. The money economy that Odette stands for is beginning to dissolve the historical identity—and the distinction—of the Guermantes’ world. “If there was one thing that really characterized this social milieu, it was its prodigious capacity for coming down in the world” (FTA 265), Proust’s Narrator remarks of the Guermantes world. Critics have read the Recherche as a novel of snobbism. The deeper subject is perhaps déclassement as a social phenomenon and a historical condition,

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which I understand through Jaurès, for whom, in the context of the corruption of the Panama scandal, this implies a general phenomenon of social, ethical, and institutional degradation.28 In the wake of the Panama Scandal, Jean Jaurès diagnosed a “dying social order” he attributed to the power of money.29 Something is dying at the end of the Recherche, and it is not just the individual guests at the Guermantes’ matinée. Proust’s Narrator compares the whole Faubourg Saint-Germain community to “a senile dowager” (FTA 266). With this figure Proust invites us to read the guests at the matinée, described with such dark humor, neither as ridiculous and pathetic individuals nor as representations of the universal human condition of vulnerability to a destructive force of time, but as emblems of social decline at a particular historical moment. If the guests have become, as Proust puts it, “snapshots of themselves” (FTA 250), the alienation this implies—and the reification—is an effect of the money economy. This is precisely what Odette stands for: she is both a symptom of the decline of the aristocratic world she has found her way into—the former prostitute now regarded as a paragon of virtue—and, as a figure of money, the instrument of that decline.

Chapter 22 Odette and Swann Are Made for Each Other

If Odette is tied up with money (if she could even be said to figure it), what about Swann? Swann and Odette’s union is mysterious from the start, when, in Combray, we learn of the social exclusion—the déclassement—Swann suffers because of his marriage to Odette. We expect Swann in Love to fill us in concerning the odd coupling of the sophisticated, discerning, and wealthy Charles Swann with Odette, the “ex-prostitute” (GW 257). It doesn’t. Proust even refuses to explain why Swann goes on to marry Odette after having realized, by the end of Swann in Love, that he no longer loves her and that, in any case, she is not his type. The very first pages of Swann in Love, however, go a long way to explaining the unlikely union. Proust opens this volume with a discussion of Swann’s social position. The Narrator presents him as an arriviste from a wealthy bourgeois family who has been accepted into high society and become one of the “true society men” (SW 198). The upper-crust aristocratic milieu Swann frequents excludes the likes of Mme Verdurin (whose pathetic gatherings Swann attends for a time because Odette is a regular there), even though her family background is very similar to Swann’s. A womanizer, Swann is cast in the conventional literary role of the world-weary aristocrat in search of novelty, the blasé man of the world who turns to the demi-monde for distraction.30 What is new in Proust’s treatment of this conventional theme is that Swann is not an aristocrat but a wealthy bourgeois and that the liaison ends in marriage. If he lives in idleness (SW 200) like his aristocratic friends, it is only because his family has made a fortune in the stock exchange, where, as

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Simmel puts it, “the money economy is crystallized” (PM 351). His blasé attitude, if we read Swann through Simmel, would reflect the leveling effect of money, for “whoever has become possessed by the fact that the same amount of money can procure all the possibilities life has to offer, must… become blasé” (PM 276). Simmel adds, As long as we are not yet in a position to buy things, they affect us with their particular, distinctive charms… Yet as soon as we easily acquire them with our money, those charms fade away, not only because we now own them and enjoy them, but also because we acquired them by an indifferent method which effaces their specific charm. (PM 277) The blasé Swann, in other words, is just as tied up with the money economy as Odette, only more discreetly. In the opening pages of Swann in Love we learn that Charles Swann has succeeded socially thanks to his aesthetic discernment (SW 198). But it is not this discernment alone that gains him admission into the highest social circles, it is also because he allows “his erudition… to be used to advise society ladies what artworks to buy” (SW 198). Swann is appreciated for his cultivation and good taste, but he gains social status by becoming indispensable as an adviser to aristocratic commercial activities. Art is not a vehicle of redemption here; it is a commodity. Aristocratic society rewards him for his efforts on their behalf with “naturalization papers, almost a patent of nobility” (SW 198). Swann treats these as so many “letter[s] of credit” (SW 198), which he then cashes in for pleasure, taking advantage of his newly elevated social status to seduce women from various social milieux. In other words, Swann exploits his social capital, which he has won by capitalizing his erudition for its value “as a sort of negotiable bond” (SW 198). He exchanges it for erotic pleasure, which he pays for in cash: he offered Odette 5,000 francs a month, not counting jewelry and other gifts. This is how he, like Odette, performs the money term. In an effort to get our attention, perhaps, Proust sustains the economic metaphors that establish the background for Swann’s relationship to Odette for another page or two. We are told that in his search for women, Swann recruits friends to act as “go-betweens” (SW 200) and that he pursues

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new conquests, “just as a starving man would barter a diamond for a piece of bread” (SW 200). The provincial bourgeois families of Combray are blind to Swann’s aristocratic associations; they are astonished to learn that he is a member of the exclusive Jockey Club. It is understandable that readers would not want to fall into the same provincial trap of misrecognition. But if, dazzled by Swann’s social credit, the reader identifies Swann exclusively with the aristocratic milieu he frequents, then his marriage to Odette makes no sense. It becomes tragic, ridiculous, or simply inexplicable. When we keep Swann’s bourgeois background in mind, however, we can appreciate that Swann and Odette—at least on a structural level—are made for each other. The figure of the lorette, associated with financial speculation, stages the prostitute as a menacing agent of social mobility tied up with the evils of money in the age of industrial capitalism. It was conventionally linked to that of the stockbroker, another actor in the furious project of upward mobility during the Second Empire. Hostility was directed at both “the bourgeois entrepreneur and his cohort, the lorette”—the two figures appear to be culturally wedded at the hip.31 As one historian notes, “doubts exist about how the lorette acquires her opulence in the same manner that concerns circulate about how stock market speculation and agiotage generate money.”32 If there is, as Simmel puts it, an “ominous analogy” between prostitution and money, it plays out here in the less obvious analogy between the prostitute and the stockbroker. If the “naturalization papers” the elite class offers Swann suggest more than a hint of anti-Semitism, Simmel (himself Jewish) explicitly links prostitution and money with the figure of the Jew, who is identified with the stranger in his Philosophy of Money. The very same line of attack aimed at the stockbroker and the upwardly mobile prostitute is also directed against the Jew in the tradition of French antiSemitism that runs from Toussenel (Les Juifs, rois de l’époque: histoire de la féodalité financière, 1847) to Drumont (La France juive, 1886), voices that carry increasing weight in public opinion during the years leading up to the Dreyfus Affair. Given this perspective of social complicity between the stockbroker and the entrepreneurial prostitute, the story of jealousy that Proust foregrounds in Swann in Love is something of a lure. We are invited to forget that Swann is a wealthy, womanizing bourgeois and that Odette is a lorette, even though Proust has made all this very clear.

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Swann himself does not appear to immediately grasp his position relative to Odette. In a particularly comic episode of Swann in Love, Proust dramatizes Swann’s utter shock at the idea that Odette might be a kept woman (femme entretenue). Literally unable to process this idea when it slowly begins to dawn on him (his mind blows a fuse), he eventually resolves the matter by deciding to give Odette more money than he had previously offered her—as a demonstration of his love. Swann is not only in denial concerning the realities of prostitution; he makes a sort of category mistake, taking Odette as his mistress on the model of the grisette, which he burnishes with the language of love, instead of recognizing that she operates in the more autonomous (and entrepreneurial) role of the lorette. One can expect fidelity from a grisette (who, like Albertine, would be financially dependent on the man who keeps her and would therefore choose to at least appear faithful to him), but the lorette or demi-mondaine knows how to leverage her gains. Swann suffers from jealousy in his love affair with Odette because he is blind to the social structure of the relationship, an improbable naïveté on his part, given the portrait Proust initially paints of him as a man of the world, but such are the contradictions and blind spots that make Proust’s characters so curious and so compelling. If Swann is in denial concerning Odette’s socially aggressive prostitution, readers and critics have tended to follow suit. The celebrity figure we see triumphant on the Allée des Acacias at the end of Swann’s Way—the “woman whose reputation for beauty, improper behavior, and elegance was universal” (SW 437)—is so seductive as a regendered version of Baudelaire’s figure of the dandy that critics have been reluctant to dispel her charms. And they can comfortably avoid doing so because Odette quickly takes on the acceptable role of wife to the wealthy and cultivated Swann and mother to Gilberte. It is only when we learn more about how, in her later years, she finagles additional income from her son-in-law, Saint-Loup, in exchange for silence concerning his infidelities to her daughter and when she becomes the Duc de Guermantes’ lover to ensure the continuation of her luxurious lifestyle, that we can appreciate both the importance of Elstir’s Miss Sacripant painting and the gesture Proust’s Narrator appears to make out of the blue when he identifies Odette with the Panama Scandal (“I am the Allée des Acacias, 1892” [FTA] 256). Only then do we fully grasp that Odette is not only a social-climbing prostitute, she is also a symbol of the very

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instrument of the social decomposition that Jaurès diagnosed as an effect of the money economy that has displaced the land economy. Emile Zola treated this subject at the end of his career in a magisterial epic novel, L’Argent (Money), first published in 1891. To say that Odette is a symbol of money, however, is not to say she is a symbol in the usual sense. Money is not a thing, Simmel holds, but rather “a material… for the presentation of relations” that exist between “the most profound currents of individual life and history” (PM 55). To say Odette is a symbol of money, then, is to say that she is a symbol of precisely the economic machine that, according to Deleuze and Guattari, operates the subjectivations of facialization that have produced her new physiognomy, giving her an “inhuman mask” as a face and an aspect of immortal youth.

Chapter 23 Social Symptoms: Desire and Money (Simmel and Proust)

Proust’s Narrator tells us that Swann in Love establishes the paradigm for the way love operates in the novel, setting up the structure that will also characterize Marcel/the Narrator’s love for Albertine, complicated and amplified by the element of lesbian desire. Through his jealousy and rage, Swann discovers the logic of his desire for Odette: it was only her unavailability, her infidelities, and his intense jealousy that kept him wanting her so badly. Desire requires obstacles to fulfillment in order to thrive. When he no longer desires Odette, he marries her. As already noted, Swann experiences such intense jealousy in part because he refuses to recognize that Odette is not only entangled with money, she performs its formal structure—the one revealed, as Simmel puts it, by money’s “ominous analogy” with prostitution. More precisely, however, we could say that Swann experiences jealousy—love in the mode of impossible satisfaction—precisely because Odette embodies the money term. For according to Simmel, the logic of desire Proust sets out through Swann’s paradigmatic love for Odette is the logic of money. It presents just what Simmel theorizes in the Philosophy of Money as the social effect of the money economy on value and desire. Walter Benjamin proposes that the historical rupture of modernity altered structures of experience and perception. Simmel argues that the historical installation of the money economy—a modernity of money— alters structures of desire and belief. Sounding ever so much like Proust’s Narrator, Simmel writes, “We desire objects only… to the extent that

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they resist our desire, we appreciate the value of our possessions only after we have lost them” (PM 63). Simmel’s comment is not a passing insight; it does not reflect a psychological state and cannot be explained away as a feature of the blasé attitude. It represents an essential feature of his philosophy of money because his theory of desire is based on his philosophical analysis of value—from an economic point of view, we desire what we value. Value is a central concern of German philosophers such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Dilthey. For Simmel it is a fundamental philosophical category, a “primary phenomenon” (PM 64), even a “counterpart” to the category of being (PM 62). Value, Simmel maintains, cannot be proven either logically or empirically and cannot be approached from the perspective of either ideas (idealism) or things (materialism). Like the ontological category of being, it concerns the unity of things. It can only be thought in terms of relations and interactions, which for Simmel means that it must ultimately be considered in social terms. In light of this fundamentally social status, Simmel argues, value is a category “beyond the strict meaning of subjectivity and objectivity” (PM 820). It is not intrinsic to an object, Simmel maintains, it is produced through an act of giving value. Exchange is the clearest example of this: we give value to one thing precisely by giving up something else to have it. More generally, however, Simmel distinguishes between cognitive objects, which concern truth or representation (the horizon of what we conventionally call “objectivity”), and volitional objects, which are constituted through acts of will, belief, or desire. They produce another mode of objectivity, an effect of the process Simmel calls objectification. Simmel explains that “the object of desire confronts us in a different way and has a quite different significance from the represented object” (PM 80); “the beloved person” is an object to us “in a completely different way from that of intellectual representation” (PM 80). This is also the case in the Recherche, where Proust uses photographs to expose precisely the difference between representational (or cognitive) objects and volitional ones. Rachel, for example, is a love object for Saint-Loup (all the more so since she resists him), but when Saint-Loup shows Marcel a photograph of her, Marcel perceives a representational or cognitive object: he recognizes a girl he had once met at a brothel and had found distinctly unappealing. Later, in The Fugitive, when Marcel/the Narrator sends Saint-Loup off to try to find Albertine, who has disappeared, he

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shows his friend a photograph of her to help in his search. When SaintLoup looks at the photograph, he doesn’t consider Albertine particularly attractive, and he can’t understand why Marcel is so upset at losing her. We could say that Marcel/the Narrator has shown Saint-Loup a photograph of his volitional object—the woman he loves—and SaintLoup has seen the image of a cognitive, or represented, object—the woman he has been asked to find. The two objects are the same on the representational level, but not on the affective level. Later, in The Fugitive (as we have seen in Part II) Marcel/the Narrator becomes aware, after learning of her death, that Albertine really had no single unique existence, that he has constructed her through his memory impressions that hold his experience of her—his desire and jealousy, his joy and his suffering. To translate this into Simmel’s terms, we could say that Marcel/the Narrator becomes aware after her death that Albertine has been a volitional object for him not a cognitive one. He has constructed her as an object of love or desire through objectification, which is to say through an affective work of invention that constructed Albertine from the varied bits and pieces of value he had given her in his experience. He has fixed these bits of value, linked to his desire, in the memory images these experiences produced, and which he has held in reserve and organized in image series. For Simmel, the objects we value (our volitional objects) cannot be dismissed as mere subjective impressions (here he disagrees with Gabriel Tarde).33 Giving value to something or someone, Simmel maintains, “produces a completely different kind of objectivity, because the conditions of reality withdraw the object of desire and enjoyment from the subjective realm” (PM 81). Volitional objects are real objects; they are just a different kind of real object from cognitive ones, as they concern value instead of truth. Valuation, Simmel writes, implies something like a “practical relation between man and his object” (PM 81). This suggests that we can understand Simmel’s distinction between cognitive and volitional objects on the model of the Kantian distinction between theoretical reason (which concerns truth and understanding, and is constrained by the transcendental esthetic) and practical reason (which concerns ethics and pertains to the realm of freedom). Just as Kant distinguishes between aesthetic pleasure and merely empirical enjoyment in the Critique of Judgment, Simmel holds that to give value to something (to desire it) is not the same as to enjoy it.

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Though he doesn’t speak in exactly these terms, we could say that for Simmel enjoyment implies an immediate, pre-reflective experience that involves a merely virtual subject (one not yet aware of itself as subject) and a merely virtual object (one not yet separated from what would become a subject through an act of valuation). Enjoyment “cannot be called subjective because there is no counterposed object that would justify the concept of subject” (PM 71). There is not yet, in other words, any clear separation between subject and object. What Simmel calls enjoyment, then, implies the kind of fusion with nature that Hegel posits prior to the work of negation that opens up a gap between subject and object.34 But instead of negation Simmel proposes resistance: resistance to our desire holds open a separation between object and subject that confers objectivity (through objectification) on whatever is valued and endows the agent who gives value with the status of subject. “If any object is valued rather than simply satisfying desire [i.e., being merely enjoyed],” Simmel explains, “it stands at an objective distance from us that is established by real obstacles and necessary struggles, by gain and loss” (PM 80). In other words, the object of desire must resist the subject in order for desire to occur (and value to be granted) without collapsing back into the immediacy (and indeterminate fusion) of enjoyment. “Only… the difficulties of attaining an object,” Simmel writes, “the waiting and the labor that stands between a wish and its fulfillment, drive the subject and the object apart” (PM 22) such that valuation, and desire, can occur. On the basis of this philosophical analysis of the act of valuation, Simmel arrives at the eminently Proustian conclusion that the mere withholding of a desired object, often endows it with a value quite disproportionate to any possible enjoyment that it could yield… [T]he remoteness, either literal or figurative, of the objects of our enjoyment shows them in a transfiguring light and with heightened attractions. (PM 68–9) Simmel’s analysis of desire informs the vicissitudes of love in the Recherche. It suggests that the maxim Proust’s Narrator proposes in Finding Time Again, to the effect that “the only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost” (FTA 179), should not be taken to suggest an idiosyncratic, melancholy, or ironic attitude and does not imply an

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aestheticization of desire. Instead, we should construe “Proustian” desire as a symptom of modern life. We should construe it as an effect of the modernism of money which refers us to the historical establishment of the money economy, where exchange enabled by money—the giving value to one thing through another—constitutes the central dynamic of social life. Having elaborated a general theory of value in philosophical terms— value “established by real obstacles and necessary struggles, by gain and loss” (PM 80)—Simmel turns to the special case of economic value, value established through exchange. Unlike Marx, whose labor theory of value determines value on the basis of a general calculation of labor time (and so, we could say, depends upon cognitive representations and clock time), Simmel considers value to be a special case of desire as objectification. In economic exchange, one item’s value is affirmed in relation to another whose value is lost by virtue of being given up in exchange for the first one. Exchange operates thanks to money, which serves as the measure of equivalence between what is lost and what is gained. Exchange, in other words, involves a “relationship between values” (PM 82) or volitional objects. This, for Simmel, is the meaning of money. To pass from value in general to economic value (or exchange value) requires abstraction: money implies “a realm of values that is more or less completely detached from the subjective-personal structure” (PM 82). Money alienates, making possible the field of substitution we noted in Proust’s final depiction of the Guermantes’ world in Finding Time Again, one that produces false equivalences and confusions of moral value, such that it becomes impossible to distinguish virtue from vice. This was what Jean Jaurès alluded to as the falsification of social consciousness that occurs when money controls everything. In the Recherche, we could say that Simmel’s general theory of value (his logic of desire) is at play on the individual level in the love stories, while his theory of economic value plays out through Odette as an utterly abstract figure, a formless character that facilitates transactions of equivalence, or substitution, that have a leveling effect in the social sphere. This is what Simmel would call the philosophical significance of Odette’s prostitution: desire is alienated by money.

Chapter 24 Money, Truth, and Narrative Form

“Not a single line” of The Philosophy of Money, Simmel declares, “is meant to be a statement of economics” (PM xv). Simmel insists that his work is a philosophical study that addresses sociological, epistemological, and even ontological effects of the modern money culture—the modernism of money. The money relation produces effects on truth, or belief, as well as desire. In 1914, Albert Mamelet published an account of Simmel’s epistemological thought in French, which included material from The Philosophy of Money. This work is titled Le Relativisme philosophique de Georg Simmel (The Philosophical Relativism of Georg Simmel), where “relativism” signifies not that all values are relative to one another, or amount to the same, but that reality consists of relations and interactions, not objects. (In discussing Simmel’s perspectives on truth and belief, I rely on Mamelet’s exposition, since this is the work Proust might have been able to consult, and, as we shall see, it speaks to central issues of Proust’s writing.) Mamelet sets up the perspective of relativism (or what I will henceforth call relationism) through a discussion of Simmel’s critique of history writing, presumed to be an objective representation, or faithful copy, of the real. Speaking for Simmel, Mamelet challenges historical realism from the perspective of autobiography (as Dilthey had done), a form that gives value to lived time instead of presupposing the abstract, homogeneous time of conventional historical discourse and traditional scientific inquiry.35 Speaking of autobiography, Mamelet writes (ventriloquizing Simmel): “If historical realism were true,” autobiography would be “the pure and simple transcription of the lived

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series. Something like its photographic registration.”36 It is just this kind of photographic documentation that Proust rejects in the celebrated passage where he compares the uninspiring memory images of his trip to Venice that Marcel/the Narrator has willfully called up to a boring set of album photos, a figure for voluntary, or “uniform,” memory (FTA 178). As we have already seen, this does not imply a disparagement of photography in general but rather a critique of the format and conventions of the photo album or conventional exhibition space which implies chronological sequence—one image is placed before or after another as if to mark out an itinerary. In other words, these remarks, which underscore the limits of the memory of intelligence in the Recherche, support Proust’s critique of the cinematographic model of writing (discussed earlier), which implies a format of historical realism. Autobiography, Mamelet insists (speaking for Simmel), does not work in this linear way; it cannot give “the pure and simple transcription of the lived series” as a steady progress of chronological time. Instead it “requires a choice among events, and their arrangement in a new order, so that the lived psychological series and the historical series appear as two different tones, in which the same melody is transposed.”37 These might be said to correspond to the two tones Proust harnesses through his dual first-person narration, together with the structure of anachronism. As we saw in Part I, Proust substitutes a dislocating temporal structure of “different and parallel” (SG 156) series for the linear succession of chronological time. He introduces this new order into his first-person narration through time layers and memory series. He insists on the temporal folds of anachronism that refer us to lived time—“the time an event is felt” as distinct from the time an event occurs. This is not to imply that Proust’s work is an autobiography (it is important to read it as fiction) but to suggest that Simmel’s appeal to the philosophical potential of the autobiographical form meets up with the formal choices Proust made in his novel, choices associated with the features we examined in Parts I and II of this study: intermittence and the indeterminacy of the flou, associated with the double law of habit and its play of attachment and detachment that concerns ways to cope with the passing of time, as well as rhythms of remembering and forgetting. Proust’s Narrator accuses literary naturalism of factitiousness, which he understands as a mode of abstraction. He finds it lacking in vitality because desire, as well

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as pleasure and pain, regret and anticipation, as they pertain to time as it happens, are missing from it. Proust’s rejection of the cinematographic model parallels Simmel’s complaint that historical realism synthesizes only a small portion of psychological reality, presenting an abstract psychology instead of the complex interaction between past and present, as between inside and outside, that occurs in lived experience. In lived time, Simmel argues, what is subjective includes engagements with the outside world, and what is objective includes projections of the inner world. This is the meaning of objectification, and it parallels the Narrator’s observation in the Recherche that impressions are double, that they refer to both subjective and objective horizons, and that they include features of the external world of their occurrence as well as the internal world of memory. More radically, however, Simmel holds that it is not just historical discourse (or literary practices of historical realism) that we must reconsider in terms of relations instead of objects, but historical reality itself—the real as it unfolds in time. This is why, from Simmel’s point of view, his study is a philosophy of money, not a work of economic science. Science must be supplemented by philosophy, Simmel insists (echoing Bergson), for philosophy is uniquely capable of recognizing the relational dynamics at work in the constitution of the real, including complex temporal relations. We are not altogether surprised, then, to find that Simmel arrives at the eminently Proustian conclusion that “perhaps understanding is nothing but remembering.”38 But this is not to suggest an aesthetic understanding that would be achieved by transcending time through remembering and turning life into art. I take Simmel to suggest (and Proust to intend) that memory, which (as Bergson has taught us) operates in relation to perception, introduces us into temporalities of experience that exceed the drive of chronological time. Remembering does not imply the recuperation of a dead past time but suggests the ongoing way in which the past lives on and acts on the present, as Bergson taught in his theory of duration. To suggest that understanding might be “nothing but remembering” would be to say, as Bergson does, that perception itself might simply be “an occasion for remembering,” given that perception and memory operate in tandem in the unfolding of experience in lived time and in memory production, as we have seen in relation to Albertine.39 When Proust’s Narrator observes in The Fugitive that Albertine has been his

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invention all along, he knows this does not imply that it is a work of the imagination—or at least not of the imagination alone. It includes what the Narrator calls the “dust” of real experience in the digression we analyzed in Part II and survives in memory images taken by memory, the photographer, in the course of past experience. When it comes to literary form, then, to say that “perhaps understanding is nothing but remembering” is to convey the need for multiple articulations of form and content, and of perception and memory production, in different time layers. It implies not that memory offers redemption, providing material for art, but that memory can free us from the constraints of historical realism that deals only with cognitive representations and their logics at the expense of the lived time of experience, where value and desire are centrally at play and contingency arrives. Writing can free us from the abstractions of chronological time to the extent that memory moves forward in time, as well as back, and that it continues to live on and to act on the present. Simmel characterizes the social real as an “intertwining of interests and values coming continually into correlation in a reciprocity of action [Wechselwirkung].”40 This is the framework not only of Simmel’s social thought but also of his epistemology (his epistemological relationism with its two kinds of objects, representational and volitional) and, ultimately, of his relational ontology—his ontology of time.41 These are overlapping frameworks. In Simmel you don’t leave the social world to get to the ontological register. This is because economic exchange, whose instrument is money, is the paradigm for the structure of reciprocal effect and the instrument of this exchange is money. According to Simmel, economic objectivity, transacted through money, dissolves absolute, cognitive, or scientific objectivity back into social processes. To say, as we have argued here, that Odette figures money in Proust’s novel, then, is to emphasize relations between desire and the social world that have ontological implications. Relationism, for Simmel, on all these levels, is “a reaction to a world that has become relative.”42 It is, in other words, an effect of the historical modernism of money. “What I mean by relativism,” Simmel insists, “is a thoroughly positive metaphysical representation of the world and no more a skepticism than is Einstein’s theory of relativity… For me, epistemological relativism does not at all mean that truth and untruth are relative to each other.”43 He argues that “truth is valid not in spite of relativity but precisely on

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account of it.”44 This modality of truth, which implies reciprocal action, requires attention to the temporality of becoming, that is, to the fact that we are always both in the past and in the future. Simmel makes this explicit in his last work, The View of Life, where, aligning himself with Bergson, he writes that “the reality of life at any moment carries its past within it in a very different way from that of a mechanical phenomenon.” And, he adds, “as long as past, present, and future are separated with conceptual precision”—as in the case in historical realism, for example—“time is unreal.” He concludes, “Time is real only for life alone.”45 We see that Simmel’s philosophy of money, which illuminates our reading of Odette, goes to the heart of Proust’s novelistic project: it not only ties together structures of desire and belief, and relates these to the project of writing, but it does so within the broader framework of an ontology of time.

Chapter 25 The Two Fables of Proust’s Novel

We have taken this long, and at moments difficult, philosophical detour through Simmel’s thought because it adds so much to our understanding of Proust, and on so many levels. One more particularly important contribution remains to be noted: it coherently links the two levels of Proust’s novel.46 In addition to the individual story of our protagonist as he grows up and ages—where issues of desire are staged in relation to family, love, memory, loss, jealousy, time, prestige, pleasure, anticipation, art, disappointment, and friendship, and where the story plays out as an individual drama of living in time—Proust presents the collective story that concerns the social time of what his Narrator calls History (with a capital “H”) and treats most visibly in the Guermantes Way volumes and in Finding Time Again. Simmel links both of these because his analysis of the modernity of money ties the operations of individual desire to the money economy as a social (and historical) structure. Marcel’s story plays out a logic of desire that Simmel theorizes as an effect of the historical modernity of the money economy, which, he maintains, alters the social world through alienation in precisely the ways Proust depicts for us. Simmel’s modernism of money suggests a more plausible interpretation of Proust’s historical fable than we have been given heretofore. Benjamin proposed that the “sociological theme” of Proust’s novel is the reassimilation of the bourgeoisie by the aristocracy—not a very convincing story, given that when Mme Verdurin becomes the Princesse de Guermantes, the aristocracy has already lost its

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distinction.47 Nor is it simply a question of an intermingling of bourgeois and aristocratic elements. Simmel invites us to go beyond the traditional framework of class alone to consider a broad range of social effects of the money factor. Proust suggests not only that money levels class distinction (think of the innumerable marriages for money that the Narrator comically recounts toward the end of the novel) but, as we have seen, that it also sets into motion social decomposition. When Proust sustains allusions to the Panama Scandal and performs the logic of Jaurès’ analysis of the money economy’s effects on the social world in Finding Time Again, he suggests more than a softening of class boundaries. Benjamin correctly suspected that Proustian desire has more to do with economic pressures than metaphysical ones, more to do with commodities than essences (IP 209). Yet he insisted that it was Proust’s treatment of snobbery—not capitalism, déclassement or decomposition—that was the “apogee of his criticism of society.” He identifies this snobbery with what he calls “the standpoint of the consumer,” but he insists that Proust veils the “one most vital mystery of his class: the economic aspect.” In other words, Benjamin suggests that Proust, along with the members of the elite class he portrays, camouflages the “material basis” of the elite class—a version of the charge Benjamin makes against Bergson (IP 210). Committed to a modernity of shock, he misses what Simmel invites us to see: a modernity of money that is to be construed in relation to a philosophy of money and, ultimately, the operations of capitalism. When we read Proust through Simmel, we see that desire in the Recherche is not the sad dynamic that would persuade us of art’s superiority over life. Desire is not always determined by a mechanical operation of habit as repetition; satisfactions of love are not necessarily impossible, requiring aesthetic redemption. Nor does desire in Proust’s novel propose a sophisticated, skeptical, or blasé attitude toward the banality of everyday life. Instead we should consider “Proustian” desire as a social symptom that exposes the form desire takes in the modern money economy. Swann’s gift (read through Simmel) suggests that money would eventually level the distinction of the aristocratic class that the Duc de Guermantes so nostalgically alludes to when he reads the gigantic photograph as a kind of family portrait. The Duc de

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Guermantes is surely right to murmur, “Our family is very much mixed up in the whole thing” (GW 572), but the gift is a poisonous one. It affixes the faces of ancestors that inscribe an ostensibly glorious past to the faces of coins, inglorious instruments that will drain distinction from this class and undermine its dominance in favor of the spectacular culture of celebrity—epitomized by Odette, Swan’s partner in crime and the figure of the money term.

Conclusion

Is it a mere coincidence that Proust’s treatment of desire, his refusal of historical realism, his practice of relativism (usually referred to as perspectivism, or even literary impressionism), his interest in time as it happens, and, of course, his treatment of money in the Recherche all align with Simmel’s thinking, which provides a compelling articulation of the two principal features of Proust’s novel: the individual story and the social or historical one? Although Simmel belongs to a German intellectual tradition (he taught philosophy in Berlin and Strasbourg), he was a cosmopolitan intellectual whose work became well known in France during the early decades of the twentieth century when Proust was writing the Recherche. A distinctly interdisciplinary thinker, Simmel wrote in various genres and styles, from the densely philosophical to the charmingly journalistic. Interested in French philosophy, he supported the translation of Bergson into German. A sociologist, he not only founded the German Society of Sociology but participated in the French Institute of Sociology (a milieu dominated first by Tarde and then by Durkheim). He also wrote on art, fashion, and urban life and authored essays on the figure of the prostitute, the stranger, and the notion of landscape, as well as treatises on sociological method and philosophical studies of epistemology and ontology, including works on Kant, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. Simmel’s work was introduced into the French context in the early twentieth century by Bernard Groethuysen, who, as a student in Berlin, had taken part in the prestigious private seminar Simmel conducted in his home. The seminar was reportedly frequented by “almost all of the German philosophers of Jewish origin who would be forced to flee Nazi Germany,” including Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Karl Mannheim, and Siegfried Kracauer.1 Poets and artists (including Rilke and Rodin)

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regularly made an appearance. When Groethuysen came to Paris in 1904, he frequented the literary circles of Gide and Paulhan, who, at the time, edited the collection Bibliothèque des idées (Library of Ideas) at Gallimard. Groethuysen’s life partner, Alix Guillain, was Bergson’s student. She translated a number of Simmel’s essays into French and published them as Mélanges de philosophie relativiste: contribution à la culture philosophique in 1912. Groethuysen and Guillain brought Simmel’s thought into the French literary and philosophical communities, but, thanks to Célestin Bouglé, Simmel also made contact with the French Institute of Sociology. Bouglé published an important account of Simmel’s thought in L’Année sociologique (a journal Durkheim founded) and saw to the publication of other essays by Simmel (in French) in the Revue internationale de Sociologie, cofounded by Elie Halévy, the brother of Proust’s close friend Daniel Halévy and son of Mme Halévy, pictured in the photograph by Degas discussed in Part I. Proust, Elie Halévy, and Bouglé were students together at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, where they studied with Léon Brunschvicg. Elie Halévy, who became a historian by profession, cofounded L’Année Sociologique with Durkheim (which published Bouglé on Simmel) as well as the highly regarded Revue de métaphysique et de morale, which published essays by Bouglé as well as numerous discussions of Bergson’s work.2 Simmel sent a copy of his Philosophie des Geldes (Philosophy of Money) to Bouglé in 1901; Durkheim reviewed it in L’Année Sociologique in 1902. The milieu of the French Institute of Sociology was militantly Dreyfusard, as were the Halévy brothers during the affair. Bouglé authored a study of anti-Semitism, La Philosophie de l’antisémitisme (L’Idée de race), in 1899. If Proust became interested in Gabriel Tarde’s work because of Tarde’s involvement with the Dreyfus Affair, and his own interest in anti-Semitism (as Luc Fraisse has argued), he might well have read his old classmate Bouglé for the same reason and come to Simmel’s Philosophy of Money (which indirectly excavated issues tied to anti-Semitism) through this channel.3 We should also note Halévy’s interest in the philosophical tradition of French Socialism, which only intensified in the context of the Dreyfus Affair. He reportedly read and

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discussed works by socialist thinkers with his friend Bouglé.4 Although neither Halévy nor Bouglé supported Jaurès’ international socialism, they would surely have been familiar with his report on the Panama Scandal; this renders plausible Proust’s apparent reprise of elements from that text, which contribute significantly to the comic effect of those passages in Finding Time Again. Given Bouglé, Durkheim, and Tarde’s engagement in the Dreyfus Affair, Proust’s own interest in the problem of anti-Semitism, and his quirky involvement in financial speculation, it is likely that Proust would have been aware of Simmel’s thought and, specifically, of his Philosophy of Money.5 For Simmel, money is not a thing but rather “a material for the presentation of relations” that exist between “the most profound currents of individual life and history” (PM 55). This, it seems to me, is precisely what Proust’s immense novel examines. Money, for Simmel, lies at the heart of modern life, and must ultimately be considered in relation to a kind of philosophy of life, for which Simmel increasingly finds inspiration in Bergson. The perspectives of Simmel, Bergson, and Ravaisson represent complementary philosophies of life. All of them turn fundamentally on questions of lived experience, and so on the question of the time of life. “The subjectively lived life,” Georg Simmel writes in his last published work, The View of Life, “is felt… to be something real in a temporal dimension” (VL 6). This temporal dimension has a specific character. It does not isolate the present moment from the past and the future, for “as long as past, present, and future are separated with conceptual precision, time is unreal” (VL 8). Echoing Bergson’s early writings, Simmel affirms that “time is real for life alone” (VL 8). Consistent with Bergson’s perspective, he defines life as a “mode of existence,” whose “past actually exists into its present, and its present actually exists out into its future” (VL 8). Indeed, for Simmel, this temporal mode of existence “is what we call life” (VL 8, my emphasis). When we speak of Proust and the time of life, it is in just this sense. We have covered a lot of ground, and at the risk of repeating certain steps, it is time to look back at the path we have taken and to gather up the work we have done. We have read the Recherche as a novel of experience, of living in time. Living, as Proust writes it, means receiving, attending to, and generating impressions, which, as his Narrator explains, are double. They operate on the levels of perception and of

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memory (in the dimensions of present and past) and so include both an external (or objective) element and an internal (or subjective) one. In Proust’s novel, then, it is through impressions that the past survives and acts on the future as it becomes present, and it is through impressions that the subject (or the community) opens onto the world that touches it. Past impressions are held in memory and become reactivated as life proceeds, often, as we have seen, in ways that alter life’s course—or the novel’s plot. We have investigated Proust’s treatment of the past from this perspective, approaching it not as dead time—a lost territory to be aesthetically recuperated (all of Combray emerging from the teacup)—but as a living past, a pastness that survives and affects the becoming present of the future in its unfolding. Proust interweaves this living past with both the present and the future in such a way that, as we have seen, our Hero/Narrator seems to improvise his own story at times, even as he fictively lives it. This is how Proust writes contingency. We have singled out photographic impressions for special attention and looked to them to reveal structures of experience in the Recherche. We have considered the intermittent photograph of the Grandmother, as well as the Narrator’s “camera eyes,” the blurry photo of Albertine and her friends as little girls, and the photomontage of coins. We have considered photographic impressions in relation to social selffashioning in the case of Odette, and Swann’s impression of Odette as a photograph. We have also considered our protagonist’s impressions when he looked at Albertine and when he kissed her, his paresse (idleness) when he received light impressions on his body, as well as Proust’s trope of memory as a photographer and his metaphor for deferred experience: the time of the latent image. We have concluded that the way one sends and receives impressions activates desire in the Recherche, not because they are signs (as Deleuze proposes) but because they perform the work Simmel calls “objectification.”6 Our protagonist constructs Albertine through his memory images of her, images that hold his desire and jealousy. Odette constructs herself through the logic of the pose and the social performances of facialization. We have seen that even the time of writing that never comes (est non avenu) is a matter of impressions as they carry the time of life. Proust’s poetics of (photographic) impressions invites us to break out of the interpretive frames usually imposed on his novel. Proust does not relegate photographic impressions either to an aesthetic realm of

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beauty (or essences) or to a documentary regime of truth. Instead, treated photographically, impressions contribute to the reader’s sense of a temporal thickness of experience. We could say that Proust deploys impressions photographically precisely to block the separation of past, present, and future “with conceptual precision,” as Simmel puts it, and so to convey the time of life. The fait photographique, or photographic system, holds together many temporal horizons: the event time of taking a photo, the process time of development (which includes the virtual time of the latent image), the belated time(s) of viewing the photo (which can alter what one sees in the image) and the slow time of image storage.7 In Finding Time Again Proust’s Narrator writes that everyone’s past “is cluttered with countless photo plates/negatives [clichés]” that “remain useless because… intelligence has never ‘developed’ them” (FTA 204, translation modified). When he speaks of style, he says that it reveals “the qualitative difference that exists in the way the world appears to us” (FTA 204, translation modified). This suggests that style—or art—is not an independent practice, a natural gift, or something one can learn through imitation. Nor is it ultimately a vocation. Style or art attaches to life as we live “the qualitative difference that exists in the world” (FTA 204) because this difference passes through impressions. The photographic metaphor implies that art (or style) must not be isolated from lived experience, pulled outside time and relegated to a regime of essences, nor should it be reduced to effects of language or signs. Three philosophers of life (more or less contemporary with Proust) have informed our study: Félix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, and Georg Simmel. We have invited them into this account of Proust writing the time of life to sharpen—and deepen—the question of experience in Proust’s novel. Shifting from a mechanistic conception of habit (which produces effects of disenchantment that would solicit re-enchantment through art) to Ravaisson’s double law of habit, which depends upon his ontology of time, we have been able to discern a differential structure of attachment and detachment in the Recherche that operates narratively even as it hinges on the happening of time and its attendant qualities of experience, such as joy and suffering. This is the narrative structure that performs what Bergson has evoked as the splitting of time as it arrives. Shifting, in Part II, from Benjamin’s theoretical perspective (which depends upon Freud’s theory of the memory trace) to Bergson’s philosophy of

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memory enabled us to reorient our reading of the Recherche from the retrospective vantage point of recollection or reminiscence to a forwardlooking perspective that includes the formation of memories through (fictive) lived experience, where memory operates like a photographer. Instead of emphasizing spatialized scenes (think of the importance Proust gives to the staircase in Combray and the privileged attention this scene has received from critics), we consider dynamics of memory production that link the present and the past—or perception and memory—together narratively, thereby disrupting chronological time. In Part III, thanks to Simmel’s intertext, we shifted emphasis from the individual phenomenon of snobbery in the Recherche (so deliciously exemplified by Legrandin in Combray) toward collective dynamics of déclassement, or social decomposition, that respond to historical conditions, specifically the entrenchment of a money economy. Reading Proust with Simmel also displaces the question of desire. A theme of individual psychological idiosyncrasy, characterized by oversensitivity and disenchantment—one that locks into the vocation story because it cries out for aesthetic redemption—gives way to a collective change in the structure of experience, a symptom of the modernism of money. I have not attempted to demonstrate influence when it comes to these philosophers. Influence can be impossible to prove, since it often operates indirectly or even unconsciously, under cover of denial—“J’ai lu Bergson aussi mal que j’ai pu [I read Bergson as poorly/as little as I could],” Paul Valéry famously remarked, even as his observations on time in his Notebooks appear to engage energetically with Bergson’s concerns.8 Instead, I have worked from the assumption that the ideas of these thinkers were in the air in the many worlds Proust frequented, that they belonged to circles of opinion and conversation (as Gabriel Tarde might say) that Proust engaged with, and that, as extraordinarily attuned to cultural energies as he was, it is unlikely he would have missed. Vincent Descombes considered Proust’s critical digressions in the Recherche to be generally uninspiring, because, he said, they simply repeat idées reçues (received ideas) of the period.9 In the spirit of Tarde, we converted that complaint into an invitation to consider Proust’s fluency in the ideas and opinions that were the currency in his world and to examine his ability to manipulate or ventriloquize them—even to alter them. Proust’s intellectual and cultural curiosities were demonically wide-ranging. We could say he lives in conversation

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(to which his extensive correspondence attests). As Tarde reminds us, conversation concerns value, which concerns power. The social permeates Proust’s novel. What is more, each of our three thinkers was in a sense a public figure. Ravaisson spent most of his career in nonacademic cultural posts that carried public responsibility and exposure. For many years he was in charge of educational and library institutions in France; he served as curator of antiquities at the Louvre. Implicated in debates concerning approaches to teaching drawing (which had become obligatory during the Third Republic), he produced a photographic oeuvre of his own—Les Classiques d’Art—intended for pedagogical purposes.10 His widely circulated writings on drawing carry many of the ideas he elaborated philosophically in De L’habitude, a work that became a classic in philosophical circles and was important to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty as well as Bergson. Bergson, the most authoritative philosopher in France during the first two decades of the twentieth century, is notorious for attracting enormous and impressively eclectic crowds to his public lectures at the Collège de France. Bergsonisms proliferated; it was hard to avoid them. Moreover, it’s a small world: Bergson was married to one of Proust’s cousins, Louise Neuberger. Though less well known in France than the other two, Simmel’s work, as have seen, filtered through a number of intellectual and artistic milieux in Paris, and, as we have seen, numerous translations of his work in French appeared in the early decades of the twentieth century. And of course ideas circulated between these three thinkers: Ravaisson and Bergson were colleagues (Bergson replaced Ravaisson at the Collège de France), as were Bergson and Simmel, who supported each other’s work. Opening up channels between Proust and these three contemporary philosophers of life awakens intertextual resonances that invite us to read Proust differently. Instead of assuming that the Recherche summons us into a timeless universe of essences through the powers of art, we have found Proust’s novel to be a passionate engagement with the time of life at a particular historical juncture, from the establishment of the Third Republic through the First World War. As we saw in Part I, Proust introduces a notion of “intermittences of the heart” to convey the effects of the double law of habit. These “intermittences” are not subjective slippages of mood, or effects of

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personal failing or inconstancy; they involve a fundamental temporal structure of experience that reveals to us that the time of life includes death, ongoing in life. The double law of habit plays out narratively through operations of attachment/detachment. In the mode of attachment, habit generates anxiety in the face of change; it shores up the urgent desire to hold on to what is becoming past so that it might survive. Detachment, on the other hand, enables an embrace of the future as a horizon of the new. But it requires a violent break with the past, a sort of temporary annihilation of it, that occurs through involuntary forgetting. Thus, as we have seen, Marcel/the Narrator appears to forget his Grandmother the day after her death; he is resurrected into a new self that embraces his social ambitions and whatever opportunities the future might hold. He can only mourn his Grandmother much later, when a spontaneous memory vision reawakens his feelings of attachment to her. As we have seen, the process of mourning plays out the conflicting forces of attachment and detachment in the intimately felt contradiction of survival and annihilation. These are the forces condensed into what we have called the “intermittent photograph” of the Grandmother, which supports Marcel’s mourning, presenting to him now a serene image that fixes her living presence—her survival—now an image of disease, pain, and death that evokes her annihilation. Proust’s narrative treatment of the photo portrait episodes, separated by many volumes of the Recherche, dramatizes the dynamic of attachment and detachment that tells the story of habit, playing out its double law which concerns time as change. But this dynamic, which we examined in Part I, is not limited to Marcel’s childhood and his tender relationship to his Grandmother. It is a fundamental structure that operates throughout Proust’s novel. It produces effects on the level of novelistic character, which becomes radically discontinuous because of the forgetting that detachment imposes. It makes what Proust calls “involuntary memory” in Combray a necessary operation. If what Proust’s Narrator calls the “analgesic effect” of habit relieves our anxiety in the face of change by making us forget (performing the death of that self and its resurrection in another), then there would be no continuous self capable of telling its own story in a first-person voice without some form of spontaneous memory. Detachment, as a moment of the double law of habit that lets us embrace the future, makes involuntary memory a necessary feature

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of storytelling in the first person. A sporadic spontaneous memory is required by the involuntary forgetting that represents the detachment side of the work of habit. Involuntary memory (which I prefer to construe as a principle of interruption or discontinuity) is not limited to the aesthetic operation Proust identifies it with in the Madeleine episode of Combray. There, ostensibly restoring plenitude and overcoming feelings of mortality, it is set up as the enabling feature of the vocation story that Proust only makes explicit at the end of his novel. But it changes character quite radically as the novel proceeds. The spontaneous (and contingent) return of memory images induces pain as well as pleasure, as when the poignant memory image of the Grandmother morphs into an image of death, or when images of Montjouvain produce feelings of jealousy and anxiety. In moments of solitude and paresse, sunlight alone seems to awaken dormant memories. After Albertine’s disappearance and death, Marcel/the Narrator experiences a violent, corrosive, and destabilizing onslaught of memory images—quite involuntarily. More fundamentally, we have seen that memory does not merely recollect; it also moves forward in time, producing the past of the future that unfolds in what becomes present. The return of these memories, which have been generated from perceptions, which is to say out of the narrative itself, as in the case of the image of Albertine by the sea, does not appear to respect the opposition between voluntary and involuntary memory as expounded in Combray. It is as if Albertine releases involuntary memory from the structure set up in Combray and opens it up to new powers and possibilities. What holds these episodes together is not an aesthetic structure but a dialectic of attachment and detachment—of involuntary forgetting and involuntary return—that Proust derives from the double law of habit Ravaisson had theorized as a primordial law of being that concerns coping with time as change. As we saw in Part II it pertains not only to a memory of recollection but also to memory production. The time that matters in the Recherche is not lost time that needs to be recuperated through art but the time of change and alteration, the time of life that includes “fragmentary/ incomplete death [la mort fragmentaire],” which “inserts itself in the duration [durée] of our life” (SYG 250, translation modified). What matters, in other words, is time as it happens. Proust kept writing the

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Recherche until his dying day, inventing new developments that would carry the narrative forward and intervening in his past writing, detaching passages and attaching new ones. We could say that writing becomes a habit for Proust, but only in the most profound sense of the term: habit as a regulation of our relation to time, to the time of living and the time of dying. This might explain why Proust’s novel is so long—I see no other convincing explanation. We saw in Part II that when Albertine enters the novel, the frame of the Recherche, contrived for a much shorter work, can no longer hold the meaning of the narratives and commentaries that play out in the volumes that tell her story (Sodom and Gomorrah, The Prisoner, and The Fugitive). Proust introduces Albertine as a blur—in the mode of the flou—first through Marcel’s vision of the adolescent girls on the beach and then through the old out-of-focus photograph of the girls as children, the photographie tremblée. The old snapshot condenses and intensifies the structure of intermittence we examined in Part I in connection with the photograph of the Grandmother. The trembling, blurry image of Albertine and the little girls presents an equivalent of intermittence, a visible impression of time in its affective vitality. It inscribes intermittence not as alternation but, through a kind of acceleration, as blur. From the start, this flou situates Albertine as a challenge to the regime of chronological time and its rationality. Futurist artists valued the flou for this capacity of resistance and set it in opposition to chronophotography, which they rejected.11 Albertine is mobile, a “creature in flight [être de fuite]” not only because Marcel/ the Narrator cannot possess her (or because of her indeterminate sexuality) but also because, like time itself, she is always on the move—“hardly any different, but… actually a little different” (SYG 410) from herself. “To live the present of one’s experience as a future past” is the time of photography, which stages apparition in the Recherche.12 Capturing an act of seeing, the photographic apparatus produces an image of this capture as a coming into appearance. To the extent that photography fixes this impression, it turns apparitions into something like memory images. In the Albertine story, memories are produced at the same time perception occurs, which turns our sense of time around. The Recherche is not only a novel of recollection, for time moves forward when memory acts as a photographer. When we let Bergson’s thought

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inform our understanding of this figure, we grasp more precisely what it means: the faculty of memory produces memory images out of narrative experience as it happens. This implies an engagement with the happening of time, which is to say with a time of life that does not separate past, present, and future. Our reading of the Albertine story has also revealed that the gaze of desire is photographic in the Recherche. As light impressions, photographic processes have been construed as a mode of contact since the invention of the daguerreotype. But once the exposure time of photography proper was reduced, it became evident that the photographic image retains more than just the trace of the person or object photographed. It also conveys the feelings of the photographer at the moment the picture is taken. As we came to understand in Part III, thanks to Georg Simmel, this implies a structure of objectification, a process by which the volitional subject—the subject of desire and feeling—engenders singular objects through acts of valuation or desire. In Proust, as we have seen, what matters is the vitality of desire: “desire… the only thing that makes us take any interest in the existence or character of a person” (P 65–6). In the Albertine story, photography exposes the impact of desire on vision, which is to say, the work of objectification. In other words, what we called “attachment” in Part I (and read through the theory of habit) performs something like what Simmel calls “objectification” in the Albertine story, creating, as Proust puts it, an assemblage out of memories and impressions. Although we introduced Simmel’s perspective in Part III, in connection with the motif of money, his analysis of desire helps us understand that the impact of desire upon vision we tracked in Part II is not a matter of subjectivity overriding objectivity. Objectification, Simmel teaches us, is not the same thing as subjective illusion. It enjoys the status of another kind of objectivity. And this objectivity is associated with another kind of knowledge: relational knowledge, the knowledge of how one thing gives value or meaning to another. This is what ties Simmel’s philosophy of relationism back to his philosophy of money. Desire is a general existential structure in the Recherche, whether it be a question of erotic desire or a desire to write, a desire for beauty or for social inclusion. Photography serves to expose that the ostensibly objective, or “real,” world is made up of objectifications (either individual or collective). This is what gives us the world as a precipitate of social meanings. This is

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where Proust’s “relativism” becomes more than a question of aesthetic style or writerly practice (a matter of perspectivism or impressionism) and proposes that relational dynamics constitute worlds. Memory is a photographer. Pursuing the implications of this figure, we recognize that it introduces into the novel a photographic temporality of “will have been past” that conjugates with the articulation of perception and memory we examined through Bergson, yielding a practice of improvisation that crosses the boundaries separating récit and discours (story and critical digression) in Proust’s novel. This mode of invention applies not only to the vocation story (ostensibly made possible by involuntary memory), not only to Art (with a capital “A”), but also to living, that is, to the fictive life of our Hero as it unfolds within the narrative of the Recherche. What makes writing pleasurable is the same thing that makes living pleasurable: a freedom of improvisation, the admixture, as Marcel/the Narrator puts it, of the magic sand of the imagination with the dust of the real. We have seen that when Proust has Marcel/the Narrator put his quest for Albertine temporarily on hold, deferring its progress, the Narrator’s voice takes over in an extended commentary about this mixture which he elaborates specifically in terms of an equivalence between, or articulation of, perceptions and memories. Without the break between récit and discours (between narrative development and discursive commentary), we would be left with a continuous story (a chronological narration) and collapse back into what Simmel understands as “historical realism.” We would lose the tensions of philosophical relativism and objectification that require a disruption of linear time and a performance of that complex time of layers and series that yields anachronism and enables the past to act on the present. We see, then, that relations between narration and digressive commentary could themselves be said to be dictated by the double law of habit (the dynamics of attachment and detachment). The commentaries are both the instrument that breaks the narrative into fragments and the glue that holds the narrative together in a way that guards its freedom—its improvisatory character—keeping it, as it were, on the tightrope of time. We introduced Simmel’s Philosophy of Money as a way to think about Odette, her entanglements with money, and her self-fashioning as an object of desire, one she is able to perform thanks to the specific virtues of commercial photography and the social dynamics of its

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theory of the pose. Simmel helps us read the relations between coins and photographs that converge in Swann’s gift to the Duchesse de Guermantes. He contributes a philosophy of desire to our reading of Proust that emerges from his reflections on money, one that adds new meaning to what has traditionally been understood as an idiosyncratic, melancholy, and ultimately aesthetic attitude. Simmel opens this structure of desire up to a theory of modernity that hinges on the relational nature of the money economy. For Simmel, this logic of desire is not an individual attitude; it is a modern social structure, according to which the very meaning of society, defined in terms of interaction, derives from the money term. Simmel also contributes an epistemological critique (a critique of truth as objectivity when it comes to lived experience) and ultimately a philosophy of life that proposes an ontology of time, one that, as we have seen, meets up with the ontological perspective that underlies Ravaisson’s philosophy of habit and Bergson’s philosophy of duration. As we have suggested, Odette—the sterilized rose—stands as a grotesque warning against any reading of the Recherche that would immobilize it by appealing to a world of essences outside time. The Recherche, which moves both forward and backward in time, is a novel about temporal articulations of past, present, and future that visibly expose relations between time and being, performing what, for Bergson, is the livingness of the real. Instead of appealing to truth (either a truth of essences or a skeptical absence of truth), we have turned to impressions, “little fragments of the real” (P 18, translation modified) that attach to lived experience and that desire activates. What is at stake in the Recherche, then, is not only what kind of literature to make but also, and more importantly, how to construe the real. “What we call reality,” the Narrator comments in Finding Time Again, “is a certain relation between… sensations and… memories, a relation that a simple cinematographic vision does away with, thereby moving further and further away from the true even as it tries to restrict itself to the truth” (FTA 289). In the sentence just cited, Proust borrows the term “truth” from the discourse of chronophotography (the basis for the cinematographic) and displaces it toward a notion of “reality” which pertains to lived experience. Instead of phrasing the question of the meaning of Proust’s work in terms of an abstract conception of truth (or its opposite, skepticism) we should ask about the real. The distinction between the two is implicit in the critique of epistemology that Bergson

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presents most notably in L’Evolution créatrice, but which accompanies his elaboration of duration every step of the way. It is a distinction that pertains meaningfully to subsequent thinkers such as A. N. Whitehead, Gilbert Simondon, and Brian Massumi.13 The question of the real is precisely what is at stake in Proust’s rejection of the cinematographic model of literary representation already discussed. Given that it comes up twice in Finding Time Again—in the space of a few pages—it is more than casual and we are obliged to take it seriously. The cinematographe was a machine produced by the Lumière brothers in 1895. It amounted to a new and improved version of a “projecting chronophotographe,” a machine designed to project images taken by the chronophotographic apparatus Jules Marey had recently invented to study spontaneous animal movement.14 Marey produced a camera mechanism in the form of a gun that could shoot images at regular intervals at a very high speed. He could aim his photo gun at flying birds, bats, or bees and register traces of their movements. His camera was able to take twelve pictures at intervals of 1/720 of a second such that “the duration of the light impression and the interval time that separated one image from another were measured with satisfying precision.”15 Indeed, a small clock mechanism placed inside the photographic gun regulated the apparatus.16 The cinematographe simply added to Marey’s chronophotographic mechanism the capacity to project the images taken by this camera at a fixed speed, in a way that appeared to reconstitute the movement broken down, or abstracted, by the camera. This was the birth of cinema as mass entertainment. Marey exhibited a giant Lumière cinematographe at the photography pavilion of the Exposition Universelle of 1900.17 He staged the apparatus not as a new medium of popular entertainment, however, but as the culmination of his own scientific efforts to capture invisible features of the movements of living beings and translate them into “a kind of writing whose language… was that of life itself”18 (Figure 16). Marey claimed, in other words, to have achieved knowledge about life through his machine. Bergson presents a compelling critique of the cinematographic mechanism in L’Evolution créatrice (1907), where it serves as a striking (and strikingly contemporary) figure for a misguided way of thinking. Bergson might well have been provoked by Marey, whose claims ran directly contrary to his own central philosophical conviction that scientific methods (quantitative and abstract) could determine truths

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Figure 16  Jules Marey, Cigogne en vol,1882.

about inanimate things but could never yield knowledge of life or living beings. Perhaps Bergson couldn’t bear such public display of claims for the application of a scientific mode of knowledge to life itself and the subjection of life’s most lively aspect—spontaneous movement—to a mechanism of abstract clock time. What Bergson objects to, in any case, is not photographic processes per se, nor even the automatism of the camera that captures still pictures by registering light impressions on photosensitive materials. He objects to the chronophotographic apparatus itself, the machine that imposes clock time on spontaneous movement. Bergson argues that although chronophotography claims to present the reality of movement, its mechanism actually arrests movement at regular intervals, breaking it up into static bits, and then sequences these frozen moments spatially at mathematically determined intervals (Figure 17). The cinematographe produces only an artificial reconstitution of movement through a mechanism that actually immobilizes it, replacing live spontaneous motion with a mechanical simulation, a movement that occurs only within the apparatus. What is at stake here is a confrontation between two conceptions of time: on the one hand, what Bergson calls the time of things (chronolo­ gical or clock time), which can be represented spatially, and on the other, the durational time of invention, where past, present, and future are not

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Figure 17  Jules Marey, Movements in Pole Vaulting (1885–1895).

absolutely separate, where the present gnaws into the future and falls into the past, according to various rhythms that resist representation precisely because they are moving, whereas representation is still.19 This is lived time, the time that acts on, and alters, living beings who hold past time in memory and bring it to bear on the present time of their action and perception—a present that arrives from the future and immediately becomes past. From Bergson’s perspective, this is the only valid conception of time when it comes to living beings and the basis for his ontology of time: “time is invention,” he writes—invention and elaboration of the absolutely new—“or it is nothing at all.”20 For Bergson, the cinematographic epitomizes the cognitive protocols we deploy in the search for truth. It stands for the illusion of reality we get when we try to access the real through a “knowledge apparatus [appareil de la connaissance]” that suppresses time: The mechanism of our ordinary knowledge [connaissance usuelle] is cinematographic in nature. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them to artificially reconstitute their becoming. We take pictures that are almost instantaneous [des vues quasi instantanés] of the reality that passes, and, as they are characteristic of this reality [caractéristiques de cette réalité], all we have to do is string them together along an abstract becoming, invisible, situated in the depths of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what is characteristic in becoming itself.21 For Bergson, Herbert Spencer’s account of evolution, which leaves out the creative, or efficacious, force of time in the invention of the new,

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epitomizes the workings of this kind of epistemological apparatus. Spencer, he argues, works backward from the present and reconfigures the logic of evolution accordingly, like a child who works a puzzle knowing full well what the picture will look like when the pieces are put together.22 Whereas according to the time of invention—what we are calling the time of life—“the fluctuations of time [le flux du temps] becomes reality itself.”23 This problem of time has everything to do with novelistic form, and specifically with endings. The critique of the cinematographic that appears twice in the Recherche should be taken seriously precisely because, as already mentioned, Proust has found the perfect strategy for avoiding the cinematographic model in his own writing, thanks to the ending of his massive novel, which is a nonending. As Vincent Descombes maintains, Finding Time Again never provides true conclusions, it “doesn’t add any new lesson to what the narrator has already recounted.”24 Descombes makes a distinction between the philosophy of essences Proust presents in Finding Time Again and what Descombes calls the “apprenticeship in wisdom” that occurs in the course of the novel itself. He refers to the former as the “short path [la voie courte]” to “illumination” and he calls the “spiritual exercises” of the novelistic developments themselves the “long path [voie longue].”25 Although his phrasing is a bit tongue in cheek, Descombes implies a continuity between the two, and so implicitly shores up the “illuminations” of Finding Time Again. The truth of essences, his language suggests, is where both paths lead. My point is quite different. I want to emphasize the difference in kind between the conclusion that serves the interests of the early version of the novel in three parts and its investment in truth (the truth of essences) and the wisdom of the eventual novel, which, in its vastness, principally concerns a notion of the real as distinct from truth. The apprenticeship in wisdom concerns, as we have tried to show, the real dialectic of habit, the real of duration (which includes memory production), and social realities of objectification tied not to the literary modernism that Descombes discusses at length but to a modernism of money. Ironically, as I have already indicated, it is the illusion of a conclusion—the nonconclusion of Finding Time Again—that makes it possible for Proust to avoid the novelistic equivalent of the cinematographic apparatus as a puzzle just asking to be put back together and to enter novelistically into the time of life.

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In order to get around the epistemological apparatus of knowledge that the cinematographe figures, Bergson advises that one should “install [oneself] within change,” noting that in doing so “you will seize both change itself and the successive states into which it could at any moment be immobilized.” He adds that “there is more in the transition than in the series of states, that is to say the possible cuts, more in the movement than in the series of positions… the possible stopping points.”26 There is, Bergson reiterates in more general terms that help us grasp the force of his thought, “more in a movement than in the successive positions attributed to the moving object, more in the becoming than in the forms passed through one at a time, more in the evolution of the form than in the realized forms.”27 Real movement is not to be found in the frames that will be projected by the cinematographe; it “will slip into the interval”—which is to say it will register as flou.28 This is what the Futurist photographer (or photodynamist) Anton Giulio Bragaglia, a reader of Bergson and a proponent of an aesthetics of the flou, refers to as “intermovemental states”29 (Figure 18). We touch the real in the transitions, the fuzzy moments between the ordered frames of the chronophotographer. It is the flou that gives us what Bergson calls “the life of the real.”30 Which is perhaps why, instead of giving us Albertine clearly and distinctly, in an orderly manner, Proust presents her to us in the register of the flou. Serge Tisseron suggests that the blurry image escapes the logic of capture that is most easily appropriated by the chronological or chronophotographic model. “The deliberately blurry photograph,” he writes, “is a fragment of time whose impression has been blurred by the object, rather than an object blurred by time.”31 Reading Proust through Bergson, we grasp what is only implicit (and easily missed) in his Narrator’s rejection of the cinematographic model. For  Bergson, the cinematographic apparatus is a figure for the whole history of Western philosophy, which he believes has consistently suppressed the real force of time as invention. And this affects our conception of reality: “it is important to show what kind of representation of reality…this mechanism yields,” Bergson writes, explaining that we “end up with a philosophy of Ideas when we apply the cinematographic mechanism of intelligence to the analysis of the real.”32 When we read Proust through Bergson, we see that the novelist’s rejection of the cinematographic as a model for novelistic writing implies a refutation of the very truth of essences that serves

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Figure 18  Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Change of Position, 1911.

as the foundation of the redemptive aesthetic ideology so stubbornly imputed to him. What is at stake for Proust is not just a question of innovative literary form—of virtuoso manipulations of metaphor, metonymy, syntax, or even narrative—but a conception of reality as a living, and lived, reality. The real is not a mere shadowy reflection of essences, subject to the destructive force of time. It lives beyond the reach of both metaphysical ideas and the attribution of pure objectivity to objects that present themselves to intelligence, waiting to be known. This is what was at stake in Proust’s episode of the camera eyes as it anticipated avant-garde theories of photography. At the beginning of Finding Time Again, Proust describes wartime Paris, stressing (in Tardean fashion) the role of the press in forming public opinion, specifically when it comes to nationalist, anti-German sentiment. Proust’s Narrator takes this question up in more personal terms in a passage that addresses his friend Charlus’ shocking and transgressive love of Germany during the war: the germanophilia of Mr. Charlus like the gaze of Saint-Loup on the photograph of Albertine had helped me to distance myself [me dégager] for an instant, if not from my germanophobia, at least

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from my belief in the pure objectivity of it, and had made me think that perhaps it was with hatred as it was with love… that in the terrible judgement France passed at this moment on Germany that it deemed nonhuman [hors de l’humanité] there was above all an objectivation [une objectivation] of feelings like those that had let Rachel and Albertine appear so precious, the one to Saint-Loup and the other to me. (FTA 221, translation modified, my emphasis) “Perhaps it was with hatred as it was with love.” As the Narrator reflects on the force of anti-German sentiment and the way it feeds the violence of war, he seems to put Simmel’s concept of objectification explicitly into play. Charlus’ aberrant Germanophilia relativizes both the collective French hatred of Germans and the Narrator’s own Germanophobia and prompts reflection on both. It helps the Narrator understand that his own hatred is perhaps not his own, that it is conventional or ideological. The gap between his feelings and those of Charlus reminds him of the gap between his own feelings when he gazed at a photograph of Albertine and Saint-Loup’s experience when he saw the same image. The mediation of the photograph, in its relation to two different observers, taught him that there is no objective truth when value is at stake. As Simmel taught, when it comes to value or desire, it is a question of volitional objects, not cognitive or representational ones. The Narrator extends this analysis of objectification from individual love objects to socially constructed objects of hatred. He now understands “the terrible judgment France passed at this moment on Germany, that it deemed nonhuman” as an extreme, and inverted, version of “an objectivation of feelings like those that had let Rachel and Albertine appear so precious, the one to Saint-Loup and the other to me” (FTA 221). This reflection on objectification breaks the illusion of objectivity that had underwritten the Narrator’s own hatred of Germans and his nationalist sentiment more broadly. He now recognizes that nationalism (which has rubbed off on him) passes affect off as truth when it judges who is deemed to be of value—who is to be endowed with that bare value of a being considered a human being—and who is not. Collective hatred that treats its enemies as less than human authorizes any sort of violence that might rain down on them, intensifying war’s cruelty. Judith Butler asks, “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives… What makes for a grievable life?”33 These are the questions Proust’s Narrator appears to stumble

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into here, thanks to photography’s uncanny role as material support for acts of objectification, which, as Simmel teaches, are real but carry no truth. Proust is telling us that even if the truth of ideas or essences is illusory, and the truth of objects is abstract, it matters what notion of reality we commit to—or construct—at any given moment. Perhaps Proust’s decision to include the shocking episode of Jupien’s brothel in his account of wartime Paris can be understood as an extension of the logic he presents in the passage just cited. It dramatizes another unspeakable counter-perspective, not Germanophilia but a desire to observe homoerotic sadomasochistic scenes, which, performed by soldiers, could be said to fictionally reenact the violence of war on the level of desire. The violence performed by soldiers on paid male bodies can be read as a hyperbolic case of the structure of objectification (as distinct from objective truth) when it comes to a performance of what looks like hate, not love. If erotic objectifications can produce a shocking appearance of suffering as well as joy, Proust seems to be saying, in the end they are play, and recognized as such, whereas the violence perpetrated by war is catastrophic. This violence inflames, and is inflamed by, a hatred that justifies itself in the name of truth—the truth of pure objectivity—when it is actually a fiction that doesn’t recognize itself as such, as Jupien’s fictional scenes of violence do. Although the inclusion of the Jupien’s brothel episode has ironic force (because the performers are soldiers), there is no irony in the Narrator’s statements concerning the catastrophe of war and the “terrible judgements France passes at this moment on Germany… deemed nonhuman” (FTA 221), believing them to be founded on objective truth.34 The question of truth is not an aesthetic matter here. To reject both an idealist foundation of the truth of essences and the scientific truth of pure objectivity, as Proust does, is not to espouse a skeptical irony, however. What we take to be real still matters. In the spirit of Simmel, Proust proposes to replace a framework of idealist or scientific truth with a relational understanding of the real, one that presents the world in terms of dynamics of interaction and objectification that neither reduce to subjectivism (or skepticism) nor harden into a conviction of objective truth. The truth of relations—as Simmel indicated in his letter to Rickert—is not skepticism; it yields what Simmel calls general truths and what Proust calls general laws, which always take their point of departure from the concrete impressions of lived experience.35 “If our

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love is not only the love of a Gilberte,” the Narrator observes, “this is not because it is also the love of an Albertine, but because it is a part of our soul… a part of which must… detach itself from individuals and recreate its general nature and give this love, the understanding of this love, to everyone” (FTA 206). “Nothing can last unless it is generalized” (FTA 214). The impressions to be generalized do not transmit themselves simply. They are double, constituted through an interaction between subjective and objective features. They emerge through a synthesis of memories and perceptions, an effect, we could say, of the magic sand of the desiring imagination mixing with the dust of the real. “We sense that life is a little more complicated than people say,” we read in Finding Time Again. “And there is an urgent necessity to demonstrate this complexity” (FTA 225). Perhaps we now grasp something of the nature of this urgency. It would be tied to the lesson of giving up pure objectivity without falling into skepticism—the lesson, if you will, of the war, which also pertains to what Bergson called “the life of the real.”36 The complexity of life is just what Proust gives us in the Recherche. His novel becomes more interesting when, instead of confining its reach to essences or ironies, we read it to be speaking not only about art but, through its art, about the world as well.

Notes

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Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1990), 19. Jean-Pierre Richard proposes a phenomenological reading in Proust et le monde sensible (Paris: Seuil, 1974); Gilles Deleuze proposes a semiological one in Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006); Jacques Rancière characterizes Proustian impressions as “signs to be deciphered,” in Mute Speech, tr. James Swenson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 157. Vincent Descombes characterizes Proustian impressions, and Proustian experience as text, writing “For the book to translate experience, experience must already be a text,” Proust. Philosophie du roman (Paris: Minuit, 1987) (all translations from this work are mine). Brassai, Marcel Proust sous l’emprise de la photographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press), 124. Cited from Fromentin (Les Maîtres d’autrefois) by Lucien Goldschmidt and Weston J. Naef, The Truthful Lens: A Survey of the Photographically Illustrated Book, 1844–1914 (New York: The Grolier Club, 1980), 9, and in Marta Caraion, Pour fixer la trace: photographie, littérature et voyage au milieu du XIXe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2003), 143. William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (Chicago: KWS Publishers, in association with National Media Museum, 2011), 79. 158. Bernd Stiegler cites Gautier in “La surface du monde: note sur Théophile Gautier,” Romantisme 105 (1999): 91–5. In Mute Speech, Rancière, writes that “the double work of the [Proustian] impressions is only the myth of writing,” 172. I would like to displace this perspective by considering Proust’s appeal to photographic contact. In connection with Stieglitz, Jacques Rancière writes that photography takes time “as its proper object and matter,” Aisthesis: Scènes du régime

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esthétique de l’art (Paris: Galilée, 2011), 259 (all translations from this work are mine). This implies a problematic that has been elaborated from a number of perspectives: by Henri Bergson through duration (throughout all his writings); Jacques Derrida through auto-affection in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, tr. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1973), 82; Alfred North Whitehead as the time of realization in Science and the Modern World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 128–9; Paul Valéry in “Rochers,” in Poésie Perdue. Les poèmes en prose des Cahiers, ed. Michel Jarrety (Paris: Gallimard 2000), 147. Jean-François Chevrier cites the American photographer Robert Franck in Proust et la Photographie (Paris: L’Arachnéen, 2009), 9. The perspective of the photographer generally, he writes, is one of “a future retrospective gaze,” 25 (all translations from this work are mine). The action of the past on what is becoming present is a major theme of Bergson’s Matter and Memory, tr. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988). Passages from Proust’s February 1914 letter to Jacques Rivière are cited in Ifri, Pascal, “Proust’s Innovative Vision of Literature as Seen through His Correspondence,” Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 36, no. 1 (2012), Article 4, 11–12. https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1769. Cited in B. Ustun, “‘Time Is Production’: Process-Art, and Aesthetic Time in Paul Valéry’s Cahiers,” Humanities 7 (2018): 9. Bersani writes confidently: “the book we have been reading is the book the narrator speaks of writing in Le Temps retrouvé,” Marcel Proust, 244. Antoine Compagnon, Proust entre deux siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 10 (all translations from this work are mine). Ibid. “The Albertine story had not yet been envisaged when Swann’s Way was published in 1913.” Rancière, Mute Speech, 161. See Christine Cano, Proust’s Deadline (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006) and Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, Proust inachevé: le dossier “Albertine disparue” (Recherches Proustiennes, no 6. Paris: Champion, 2005). As Valéry writes: “the unfinished, the incomplete, is the basis of time.” Paul Valéry, Notebooks, Time, in v. 4, 365; Psychology, in v.3, 206. “Barthes said that there was only one love in the Recherche: that of Marcel and his grandmother.” Chevrier, Proust et la photographie, 38. Georg Simmel, The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms, tr. John A. Y. Andrews and Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 8. Subsequent references to this work will be given in parenthesis in the text marked VL. Ibid.

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21 Bowie, Proust among the Stars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 57. See also Gérard Genette’s chapter on Frequency in, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983) 113–61. Genette writes, “Proustian narrative does not leave any of the traditional narrative movements intact,” 113. 22 Simmel, View of Life, 13. Simmel’s notion of “more-life” will find an echo in Gilbert Simondon’s reconsideration of identity as “plus qu’un [more than one]” in the ontology of time (the ontogenesis) he presents in L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information [individuation in light of the notions of form and information] (Grenoble: Editions Jérôme Millon, 2017), 316.

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Cited in Chevrier, Proust et la photographie, 38. Samuel Beckett, Proust (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1990). Beckett speaks of habit as “the goddess of Boredom,” 44, and of the “glory of involuntary memory,” 45 (translation mine). Félix Ravaisson, De l’habitude (Paris: Imprimerie de H. Fournier et Cie., 1838), 13, 12. http://gallica.bnf.fr/rk/121481bptck3053900 (all translations from this work are mine). He specifies “the double law of the contrary influence of duration on change, depending on whether it only undergoes it or initiates it,” 13. Ravaisson’s study of habit has been misconstrued as repetitive and mechanical by philosophers (including Bergson) as well as by literary critics. See Mark Sinclair, “Is Habit the ‘Fossilized Residue of a Spiritual Activity’? Ravaisson, Bergson MerleauPonty,” Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology 24, no. 1 (2011): 33–52; Mark Sinclair, “Ravaisson and the Force of Habit,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 49, no. 1 (2011): 65–83; and Dominique Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique. Une généalogie du spiritisme français (Paris: Vrin, 1997), who discusses this point throughout his study. Ravaisson, De l’Habitude, 17. Ibid., 18. Ravaisson cites Bichat, Xavier, Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort (Paris: Brosson, 1805). “Someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix in Songs, tr Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 223. See also Nietzsche, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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For a discussion of Bergson’s Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience [Time and Free Will] on this point, see Guerlac, Thinking in Time (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 102–3. Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Xavier Bichat, Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort (Paris: Brosson, 1805). See Roland Barthes, “Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure,” in Oeuvres completes V, ed. Éric Marty (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002), 938–48, on the improbable reversals of Proust’s characters and their discontinuous identities. I borrow the notion of “scattered subjects” from Kathrin Yacavone’s “The ‘Scattered’ Proust: On Barthes’s Reading of the Recherche,” in “When Familiar Meanings Dissolve …”: Essays in French Studies in Memory of Malcolm Bowie, ed. Naomi D. Segal and Gill Rye (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), 219–31. For an interesting discussion of this scene, see Martin Hägglund’s chapter on Proust in Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Hägglund arrives at a conclusion similar to mine by a quite different path. I’m using “dialectic” here in the sense of what Gilbert Simondon calls a “dialectic of situations” in Sur la Philosophie 1950–1980 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2016), 104 (my translation). André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri, Essai sur l’art de la photographie, ed. Fabrice Masanès (Paris: Séguier, 2003), 78 (we discuss this at greater length in relation to Odette in Part III). Le Petit Robert (Paris: Dictionnaire le Robert, 1972),1365 (my translation, my emphasis). André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” tr. Hugh Gray, Film Quarterly 13, no. 4, 1960, 7. Bazin writes that in photography there occurs a “transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction,” 8. Roland Barthes, La Chambre Claire: note sur la photographie (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1980), 165, 180. In the Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1985), Krauss writes: “photography is an imprint or a transfer off the real; it is a photochemically processed trace causally connected to that thing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to that of fingerprints,” 110. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 14. George Eliot’s “realist manifesto” appears in ch, 17 of her Adam Bede, where she admires the mimetic exactness of seventeenth-century Dutch painters, with which the daguerreotype was conventionally associated. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 15. Mieke Bal discusses this scene in The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 198–203;

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Chevrier in Proust et la Photographie, 39–40; Dora Zhang in “A Lens for an Eye: Proust and Photography,” Representations 118, no. 1 (2012): 103–25; and Áine Larkin, in Proust Writing Photography: Fixing the Fugitive in “À la recherche du temps perdu,” who writes: “Photography as evoked here implies the truth of the visual image that Marcel records” (London: Legenda, 2011), 118. In La Naissance de l’idée de photographie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), François Brunet identifies this as a specifically French idea and contrasts it to a quite different idea of photography based on the practices and discourse of Fox Talbot, which were subsequently taken up by pictorialist photographers. Rosen and Zerner, Romanticism and Realism, cited in Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40 (1992): 120. In his Philosophie de l’art, Hippolyte Taine writes that photography “reproduces more completely, and without any possible error, the contour and the plasticity/modeling [le modelé] of the object that it imitates,” cited in Brunet, François. La Naissance de l’idée de la photographie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 282 (translation mine). Bazin’s remarks, cited earlier, belong to this tradition. The Derridean structure of the supplement both adds to and replaces. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1967), part 2, ch. 2, “Ce dangereux supplément,” and ch. 4, “Du supplément à la source: la théorie de l’écriture.” Larkin notes of this scene: “The photograph evoked in this passage prefigures Marcel’s grandmother’s death,” in Proust writing Photography, 117. It is not clear there is a photograph evoked in this scene, although there is a seeing that happens as a camera might see. What matters is not that the truth of a photograph prefigures the truth of a death but that what Marcel/the Narrator says he sees matches up with the text of the episode of the death. The earlier episode provides a code for narrating the subsequent one. In this sense it involves not merely a prefiguration, but also a figuration of her death. Bergson, Matter and Memory, cited in Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 148. Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes II (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 530–1 (my translation). Ibid., 525. Chevrier makes this point and reproduces Ruskin’s photograph in Proust et la Photographie. It is taken from his Pierres de Venise (Stones of Venice), which in the Library Edition of the Œuvres de Ruskin was illustrated by photographs. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 154. Miriam Hansen uses this term in her introduction to Kracauer, Theory of Film, xxvi.

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30 Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 143. 31 Cited in Miriam Hansen’s introduction to Kracauer, Theory of Film (my emphasis). Hansen writes that Kracauer identified photography with “a state of alienation” in the 1927 version of his essay, (xvi) (my emphasis). 32 Ibid., xxvii. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. Kracauer, who will repeat the gist of this message, attended Simmel’s private seminar in Berlin, as did Walter Benjamin. “Simmel was the first to open up for us the gateway to the world of reality,” Kracauer writes, referring to a certain materialist modernism he finds in Simmel, a liberation from idealist philosophies that had held sway. Cited by Hansen in Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 43. 35 Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971),146. The stranger, for Simmel, is also a figure for the cultural position of the Jew in an antiSemitic world (144). 36 Georg Simmel, “The Philosophy of Landscape,” Theory, Culture & Society 24 (2007): 27. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 29. 39 Christopher Phillips, ed., Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art: Aperture, 1989), 219. Subsequent references to this work will be given in the text, marked PME. 40 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 268. 41 Suzanne E. Pastor, “Photography and the Bauhaus,” The Archive 21 (March 1985): 6, 11. 42 Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” in The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1985), 91. 43 Kracauer, Theory of Film, 14. 44 On the aesthetics of the instantanée as genre, see André Gunthert, “Esthétique de l’occasion: naissance de la photographie instantanée comme genre,” Études photographiques 9 (2001): 64–87. See the photographs of J-H Lartigue in Boyhood Photos of J.-H. Lartigue: The Family Album of a Gilded Age (Lausanne, Switzerland: Ami Guichard), 1966. 45 I am indebted to the analyses of Clément Chéroux in “Les récréations photographiques: un répertoire de formes pour les avant-gardes,” Études photographiques 5 (1998). He references material from photo magazines from 1904 to 1908. https://journals.openedition.org/ etudesphotographiques/167.

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46 Ibid. 47 Léon Gimpel, “Mes grands reportages,” Études photographiques 19 (2006): 15. https://journals.openedition.org/ etudesphotographiques/935#text. 48 Ibid. 49 Ravaisson, De l’habitude, 12. 50 See Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Translated by Hugh Gray. Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1960): 4–9. and Barthes, La Chambre Claire: note sur la photographie. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1980. On Barthes, see Kathrin Yacavone, Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 51 Bowie, Proust among the Stars, 293. 52 Ravaisson, De L’habitude, 31. 53 Ibid.

Part II 1 2

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4 5

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Chantal Akerman, La Captive, a film (2000); Anne Carson, The Albertine Workout (New York: New Directions, 2014). See Elisabeth Ladenson, Proust’s Lesbianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Cano, Proust’s Deadline; Dyer, Proust inachevé; and Maurice Bardèche, Proust romancier (Paris: Les Sept couleurs, 1971) for the claim that the Albertine volumes destabilize the unity of Proust’s work. As per the Robert dictionary and the Collins Robert French-English, English-French dictionary. In Proust et le roman, Jean-Yves Tadié refers to the Recherche as a “roman d’apparition [novel of apparition]” (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 66. Baudelaire, Oeuvres Complete I, 92. “In general, we say that photography is a support for memory [un support de mémoire], a precious possibility for bearing witness and producing reference points [répères] for memory, because it involves a technical registration of reality.” Jean-Paul Curnier, Montrer l’invisible: écrits sur l’image (Paris: J. Chambon, 2009), 55 (my translation). Susan Sontag, resonating with Barthes, writes, “A photograph passes for the incontrovertible truth that a given thing happened.” On Photography, 5. I am alluding to the phenomenon Fox Talbot first observed in The Pencil of Nature, and which was subsequently rephrased, first by Walter Benjamin and then by Rosalind Krauss, as the “optical unconscious.” See Sophie Hedtmann, Philippe Poncet, William Henry Fox Talbot (Paris: Editions de l’Amateur). Concerning plate XIII of the Pencil of Nature Fox Talbot writes: “it frequently happens… that the photographer himself discovers, examining his images, and sometimes much later,

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many things he had not noticed at the moment of taking the picture [au moment de prise de vue],”103; In “A Short History of Photography” Walter Benjamin writes: “The spectator feels an irresistible compulsion… to find that imperceptible point at which in the immediacy of that long past moment, the future so persuasively inserts itself… instead of a space worked through by human consciousness there appears one which is affected unconsciously… photography makes aware for the first time the optical unconscious,” in On Photography, tr. Esther Leslie (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), 7 (translation mine). https://monoskop. org/images/7/79/Benjamin_Walter_1931_1972_A_Short_History_of_ Photography.pdf. See Cano, Proust’s Deadline, ch. 3, on the influence of aesthetic organicism on Proust and a discussion of Agnostelli. The description of the little girls “pressed one against the other” anticipates the issue of lesbian sexuality that will be raised concerning Albertine and her friends. Bardèche, Proust, romancier, vol. 2, 13 (all translations from this work are mine). Cano discusses the biographical hypothesis in Proust’s Deadline. Antoine Compagnon supports Bardèche’s theory in his introduction to Sodome et Gomorrhe. “Notice to Sodome et Gomorrhe, by Marcel Proust,” in À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. JeanYves Tadié, Antoine Compagnon, and Pierre-Edmond Robert (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 1185–261. Bardèche, Proust, romancier, vol. 2, 17 (my emphasis). Ibid., 13. Ibid., 30. Brunet, La Naissance de l’idée de la photographie, 285. Emmanuel Lévinas, “The Other in Proust,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Cambridge, MA: B. Blackwell, 1989), 163. Louis Figuier, La Photographie au salon de 1859 (Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette et Compagnie, 1986), 6. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ bpt6k114158k. Nadar writes: “according to Balzac, every body in nature is composed of a series of specters, in infinitely superimposed layers, foliated into infinitesimal pellicules, in all directions in which the optic perceives this body. Since man is unable to create—that is, to constitute from an apparition, from the impalpable, a solid thing, or to make a thing out of nothing—every Daguerreian operation would catch, detach, and retain, by applying onto itself one of the layers of the photographed body. It follows that for that body, and with every repeated operation, there was an evident loss of one of its specters, which is to say, of a portion of its constitutive essence.” Felix Nadar. When I Was a Photographer, tr. Eduardo Cadava and Liana Theodoratou (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 3. This passage is available online https://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/ document/file.php/PSPA254/NADAR-WHEN%20I%20WAS%20A%20 PHOTOGRAPHER.pdf.

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16 Raymond Bellour, “The Film Stilled,” in Time Expanded: Bleda Y Rosa, Tacita Dean, Roman Signer, Harold Edgerton, ed. Alberto Anaut (Madrid: La Fábrica, 2010), 111, 116, 117. 17 Ravaisson, De L’habitude, 13. 18 This sequence also corresponds to the operation of involuntary memory as Proust’s Narrator expounds it in the madeleine episode of Combray, where the Narrator first tries to remember the memory attached to the taste of the cookie dipped in tea, then abandons the effort, and then finds it again. 19 Bergson, “Le Souvenir du présent ou la fausse reconnaissance,” in Œuvres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 913. Subsequent references will be given in the text, in parentheses, as SP with page numbers that refer to Bergson, Oeuvres (all translations from the Oeuvres are mine). 20 Bergson, Matière et mémoire in OC, 216. Subsequent references to Matière et mémoire will be given in the text marked MM with page numbers that refer to Bergson, Oeuvres. See also Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 120–4. 21 For a discussion of the “two theoretically independent memories,” see MM 227. 22 Ravaisson, De L’habitude, 12, 13. 23 Fréderic Worms, Introduction à Matière et mémoire de Bergson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), 102–3 (my translation, my emphasis), cited in Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 127. 24 For the concept of attentive recognition (through which the present and the past, memory and perception, mutually inform one another), see Bergson, MM 244–57 and Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 130–3. 25 “A memory of the moment occurs in the actual moment. It is past, with respect to its form, and present, with the respect of the content. It is a memory of the present” (SP 919). 26 Bergson cites F. W. H. Myers, “The Subliminal Self,” Proceedings of the Society for Physical Research XI (1895): 343. 27 Ibid. Bergson cites the expression “mental photography” from Granville’s essay “Ways of Remembering,” 458. 28 Mortimer Granville, “Ways of Remembering,” The Lancet 114, no. 2926 (September 27, 1878), 458. 29 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, tr. James Strachey (Seattle: Pacific Publishing Studio, 2010), 37. Referring to the preconscious and unconscious systems, Freud adds that “the excitatory process becomes conscious in the system Cs. but leaves no permanent trace behind there… the excitation is transmitted to the systems lying next within, and … it is in them that its traces are left.” 30 Ibid., 10, 11. 31 Ibid., 49.

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32 Ibid., 38. Benjamin cites this passage in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, 160. 33 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 38, 42, 41. According to Freud’s account, consciousness cannot hold memory traces not only because the surface of consciousness is not sufficiently ample to receive an unlimited supply of new impressions and store old ones (if permanent traces of an external excitation “remained constantly conscious, they would very soon set limits to the system’s aptitude for receiving fresh excitations,” 31) but also because a principal function of consciousness is to defend the psyche against painful experience; it becomes unable to absorb new impressions because it is has taken on a hardened surface to defend against shock. Some commentators believe that Fechner, the psychophysicist, informed not only Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology but Beyond the Pleasure Principle as well, whose constancy principle, they maintain, was borrowed from Fechner. Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle after Bergson’s essay on second sight, but in this essay Bergson offers a critique of Fechner that might be pertinent to the issue of memory. Bergson characterizes the implications of Fechner’s position this way: “there would first be certain cells that would come into play, and this would be perception, then a trace left in these cells once the perception had disappeared, and this would be the memory” (SP 913). This is not so far from what we read in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and it is precisely the position Bergson rejects for what he considers a reductive physiology, which reduces mind to brain. 34 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, 251. 35 Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Illuminations, 157. Subsequent references will be given in the text in parenthesis, marked SMB; page references will refer to Illuminations. 36 Ibid., 156. 37 A recent critical account turns this around: it is the temporality of involuntary memory that is traumatic, writes Hägglund, for it is associated with a structure of “too soon” and “too late” that Hägglund finds in Freud’s temporality of Nachträglichkeit. See Hägglund, Dying for Time, 153. 38 Baudelaire, “Au Lecteur,” in Les fleurs du mal, OC I, 5–6 (my translation). 39 Benjamin, “The Image of Proust” in Illuminations, 202. Subsequent references will be given in the text marked IP; page references will refer to Illuminations. 40 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 38. 41 See Guerlac, “Bergson, The Time of Life, and the Memory of the Universe,” in Interpreting Bergson: Critical Essays, ed. Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schoot (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 104–21, which considers Bergson’s proximity to Ravaisson

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42 43

44

45

46

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when it comes to the memory of the body and the supplementarity of this memory to the spontaneous memory of the imagination. Ravaisson, De L’habitude, 17. Sullaway cites Freud in Freud the Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992): “I have always been open to the ideas of G. T. Fechner, and have followed that thinker upon many important points” (66). Sullaway argues that Fechner’s principle of constancy, derived from the physical law of the conservation of energy, influenced Freud’s analyses in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Bergson challenges Fechner’s associationism and its neurological basis in Time and Free Will and extends his challenge of the neurophysiological model in Matter and Memory. For more on Freud’s purported debt to Fechner, see Edward Erwin, ed., The Freud Encyclopedia: Theory, Therapy, and Culture (London: Routledge, 2001). Beryl Schlossman, for example, notes that the “moments of ecstasy” that involuntary memory enables in the Recherche “are the key to a descent into [the Narrator’s] past life… [and] to his renewed vocation”; she affirms that “the closure of the text consecrates the opening of the vocation to be consummated” (“Proust and Benjamin,” in Benjamin’s Ground: New Readings of Walter Benjamin, ed. Rainer Nägele [Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1988], 110, 112). Another critic who examines Benjamin’s treatment of Proust, likewise, concludes that, for Proust, “happiness could only lie in somehow recapturing the past” (John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990], 254). Even a sophisticated reading of Benjamin’s essay that appears to deflate the notion of art puts in its place an inflated notion of text, appealing to “pure metaphoricity” and claiming that in Proust “life was always already a textual image” (Carol Jacobs, “Walter Benjamin: Image of Proust,” Modern Language Notes 86, no. 6 [1971]: 923, 930). An idealist reading of Proust’s novel can take many forms; even the best critics can find themselves—often unwittingly—complicit with traditional assumptions or made to appear to be so by other critics who write in their name. The question of adventure is in the air in the years leading up to the First World War. See Jacques Rivière, “Le Roman d’Aventure,” published in three parts in nrf, I 1May, 1913, 748–65, II 1 June, 1913, 914–32, III, July, 1913, 56–77; Georg Simmel publishes Das Abentauer (The Adventure) in 1911, with a second edition in 1919, translated into French by Alix Guillain as “La Philosophie de l’Aventur,” in La Philosophie de l’Aventure. Essais (Paris: L’Arche, 2002), 71–88. Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve suivi de Nouveaux mélanges (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 224, 232. Subsequent references to this work will be marked CSB in parenthesis in the text (all translations are mine).

Notes

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47 Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare (Paris: GF Flammarion, 2003), 496 (all translations from this work are mine). 48 Ibid., 527. 49 Proust’s visionary poetics aligns with the “noble tradition” (FTA 229) that Marcel/the Narrator claims for himself in Finding Time Again: the preeminently romantic tradition of Chateaubriand, Baudelaire, and especially Nerval, for whom, as Proust notes in Contre Sainte-Beuve, real experiences produce “a pleasure of dream” (CSB 238). The structure of dream meeting reality is also crucial to Hugo’s account of traveling down the Rhine Valley in Le Rhin (Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire: Christian Pirot, 1996). 50 Bowie refers to Proust’s “improvised cross stitchings” in Proust among the Stars, 63. 51 François Arago, Rapport sur le Daguerréotype lu à la séance de la Chambre des Députés le 3 juillet 1839 (Paris: Bachelier ImprimeurLibraire, 1839), 26 (my translation, my emphasis). 52 Ibid., 22. 53 Roland Recht, La Lettre de Humboldt: du jardin paysager au daguerréotype (Paris: C. Bourgois, 1989), 24 (translation mine). 54 Proust most likely has the wet-collodion process in mind when he speaks of the cliché négatif in the passage cited above; this refers to a glass plate that has had the image impressed onto it but has not yet been developed so that the latent image might become visible. Gustave Le Gray invented this process, which enabled the photographer to wait up to a few days before developing an image that had been exposed onto the plate. Proust’s friend Robert de Montesquiou studied photography with Le Gray. 55 Alphonse Davanne, Musée rétrospectif de la classe 12: photographie (matériel, procédés et produits), à l’Exposition universelle de 1900 à Paris. Rapport du comité d’installation (Paris: Belin frères, 1903). See also Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 178–9. 56 Brunet, Naissance de l’idée de la photographie, 294–5. 57 Ibid., 295. 58 Ibid., 294. 59 On modernism’s response to romantic interiority, see Laurent Jenny, La fin de l’Intériorité: Théorie de l’expression et invention esthétique dans les avant-gardes françaises (1885–1935) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), 1–2, 89. 60 Bergson cites Granville’s essay Ways of Remembering, MM, 233. 61 László Moholy-Nagy, Peinture, photographie, film et autres écrits sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 43 (my translation). 62 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, 224 (my translation); Moholy-Nagy, Peinture, photographie, film, 43; Sontag, On Photography, 22.

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69 70

71 72

73 74

75

76

77 78

79

80

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André Breton, Œuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 338. Bergson, L’Evolution créatrice, OC, 761, 762–3. Ravaisson, De L’habitude, 17. Georges Poulet, L’Espace proustien (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 54 (my translation). Bowie, Proust among the Stars, 65. Mia Fineman tells us that the mosaic card was introduced in 1862. Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (New York: The Metropolitan Museum, 2012), 271. Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris 1848–1871 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 183. In Proust’s Lesbianism, Elisabeth Ladenson puzzles over the combination of voyeurism and exhibitionism in this scene; these are conventional features of the “doors and windows” genre. Cano refers to it as “Désolation au lever du soleil [Agony at sunrise]” in Proust’s Deadline, 76. Proust writes that it is like a painted view, which suggests a diorama image. These often presented the illusion of a sunset or a sunrise through carefully manipulated illumination, created by changes in natural light that interact with a very specific chemistry of paint layers; they were able to create an impression of passing time. Cano, Proust’s Deadline, 77. Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850, tr. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 94. Subsequent references will be given in the text in parenthesis, marked WH. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 227–54. See McCauley, Industrial Madness, ch. 4. Paper prints became available, making it possible to produce photographic images in multiples and to market them inexpensively to a large public. Photographic pornography became a lucrative business that eventually prompted censorship. Cited by Pascal Ifri in “Proust’s Innovative Vision of Literature as Seen through His Correspondence,” Article 4, 11–12. See Guerlac, “Sartre ‘au bord de l’image’,” in Situating Sartre 2005— Situation de Sartre 2005, ed. Tom Bishop and Coralie Girard (New York: Center for French Civilization and Culture, New York University, 2007), 75. On the reversals and inversions of Proust’s narrative, see Compagnon, Proust entre deux siècles, and Roland Barthes, Œuvres completes vol. V, ed. Éric Marty (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002) 459–70. “The work of Proust, as everyone knows, is a finished/unfinished work.” Maurice Blanchot, “Jean Santeuil,” La Nouvelle nouvelle Revue Française 2, no. 20 (August 1954): 486. Echoing Blanchot, Luc Fraisse makes the

Notes

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84 85 86 87

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point in “Une sociologie transfigurée: Marcel Proust lecteur de Gabriel Tarde.” Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France 88, no. 4 (1988): 736. Blanchot, “Jean Santeuil,” 482, 484. Cano, Proust’s Deadline, 102. Proust, Luzius Keller ed. Les Avant-textes de l’épisode de la Madeleine dans les cahiers debrouillon de Marcel Proust (Paris: Jean Michel Place, 1978), 29–30. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 47. Bersani, Marcel Proust, 18. Joshua Landy makes this point in Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 40–2. Blanchot, “Jean Santeuil,” 486. He speaks of the “idleness [ajournement] that … obliges him to live in time [durer], to incorporate duration and to hold himself suspended by it”; paresse, he writes, “becomes patience [se fait patience] and patience becomes tireless work” (486). Uniquely sensitive to paresse as ajournement in Proust and to the way it serves as a modality of contact with time, Blanchot compromises this insight to the extent that he brings everything back to the figure of a circle, insisting that “the space of the romanesque imaginary is a sphere” (484). Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, tr. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 54.

Part III 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Tarde’s 1899 essay reappears as chapter 2 of his book L’Opinion et la Foule (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1910, first published in 1901), a progressive response to Le Bon’s depiction of the dangerous masses in his Psychologie des Foules (1895). Tarde, L’Opinion et la foule, 48 (all translations are mine). Subsequent references will be given in the text, marked OF. On the figure of Jew as a stranger, see Simmel, “The Stranger,” 143–9. See Maurice Barrès, Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme in Œuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, Club de l’Honnête Homme, 1965). Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 416, 424. Subsequent references to this work will be given in the text, in parenthesis, marked PM. André Rouillé, La photographie en France: textes & controverses, une anthologie, 1816–1871 (Paris: Macula, 1989), 62, 63. Ibid., 58, 62. Françoise and Marcel shop for photographs together (she buys one of Pope Pius III and he one of the actress La Berma), Swann distributes photo art reproductions to his friends, and Uncle Adolphe collects

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13

14 15

16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

29 30

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photographs of actresses and cocottes, a genre that increasingly overlaps with a booming trade in pornography. François Guizot, De la peine de mort en matière politique (Paris: Béchet, 1822), 180 (my translation). Ibid., 31. Cited in Ortel, La Littérature à l’ère de la photographie, 318. Ibid. Ortel finds in Michelet’s remarks an echo of “the levelling effect [nivellement] observed by Gabriel Tarde when it comes to behaviors of modern imitation.” Gabriel Tarde, Les Lois de l’imitation: étude sociologique (Paris: Editions Kimé, 1993), 13 (all translations are mine). http://classiques.uqac.ca/ classiques/tarde_gabriel/lois_imitation/lois_imitation.html. Ibid. Eugène Disdéri, Essai sur l’art de la photographie, ed. Fabrice Masanès (Paris: Séguier, 2003), 71–2. Subsequent references to this work will be marked D in parentheses in the text (all translations are mine). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 179. Subsequent references to this work will be given in parenthesis in the text, marked TP. For Deleuze and Guattari, this aspect of the production of type implies the imposition of norms: “The Machine constitutes a facial unit … it is a man or a woman, a rich or a poor one … an x or a y” (TP 177). Arthur Batut, La Photographie appliquée à la production du type d’une famille, d’une tribu ou d’une race (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1887), 17. Gabriel Tarde, Les Lois de l’imitation, 83. Ibid., 85. Rouillé, La Photographie en France, 88. Ibid., 95. Baudelaire, “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” OC II, 711. Cited in Ortel, La Littérature à l’ère de la photographie, 418. Charles Blanc, Les Beaux-Arts à l’Exposition universelle de 1878 (Paris: H. Loones, 1878), 40–1. Ibid., 6. Jean Jaurès, L’Affaire de Panama: le devoir du Gouvernement (Paris: Assemblée Nationale, 1893). I have cited the portion of this text available online titled, “On the Panama Scandal,” which is not paginated: marxists. org/archive/Jaures/1893Panama-scndal.htm Roger Shattuck, René Girard, and Walter Benjamin, among others, have read the Recherche as a novel about snobbism and judged Proust to have been a snob. Jaurès, “On the Panama Scandal.” Courtney Ann Sullivan, “Classification, Containment, Contamination, and the Courtesan: The Grisette, Lorette, and Demi-Mondaine in NineteenthCentury French Fiction” (PhD diss., University of Texas, 2003), 228; she cites Dumas.

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31 Ibid., 112. 32 Sullivan, “Classification, Containment, Contamination, and the Courtesan,” 111. 33 Tarde wrote that value is “a quality that we attribute to things, like color, but which in reality exists only in us.” Psychologie économique (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1902), 54. 34 Hegel writes that “pure being is not in the form of something immediate, but of something in which the process of negation and mediation is essential,” The Phenomenology of Mind, tr. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper and Row), 153. 35 Speaking of “the reality of what is apprehended in experience,” Dilthey writes “life… is conditioned by the character of temporality… Autobiographies are the most direct expression of reflection about life,” W. Dilthey, Selected Writings, tr. and ed. H. P. Rickman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, n.d.) 208, 212–13. 36 Albert Mamelet, Le relativisme philosophique chez Georg Simmel (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1914), 109. 37 Ibid. (my emphasis). 38 Cited in Frederic Vandenberghe, “La Double dualité comme principe d’unité de la pensée Simmelienne,” Simmel Newsletter 9, no. 2 (1999), 17. 39 Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Time and Free Will), OC, 66. 40 Olli Pyyhtinen, Simmel and “the Social” (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 134. 41 Ibid., 41. 42 Ibid., 45. 43 Cited in Vandenberghe, “La Double dualité,”17. 44 Ibid. 45 Simmel, View of Life, 6, 8. 46 This is a central theme of Catherine Bidou-Zachariasen’s, Proust sociologue: de la maison aristocratique au salon bourgeois (Paris: Descartes & Cie., 1997). 47 Benjamin writes: “The pretensions of the bourgeoisie are shattered… their return and assimilation by the aristocracy is the sociological theme of his work” (IP 207).

Conclusion 1

2

Robert Maggiori, “Passages de Groethuysen,” Libération, April 27, 1995 (my translation). https://next.liberation.fr/livres/1995/04/27/passages-degroethuysen_129062 (no pagination). In 1903 Bergson published his important essay “Introduction to Metaphysics,” in the Revue de Métaphysique et de morale. Articles by

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Bergson and reviews of his work appeared in 1907 and 1908; Bouglé published an article on syndicalism, “Les Syndicats de Fonctionnaires et la Transformation de la Puissance Publique,” in 1907. 3 See Luc Fraisse, “Une sociologie transfigurée.” Concerning Bouglé’s Philosophie de l’antisémitisme, see Alain Policar, “Célestin Bouglé et le Modèle biologique,” Cahiers de psychologie politique 4 (2003), 4–15. http://classiques.uqac.ca/contemporains/policar_alain/bougle_et_ modele_biologique/modele_biologique.html. 4 See Joel Revill, “The Bitterness of Disappointed Expectations’. Elie Halévy and European Socialism,” The Western Journal of French Socialism 35 (2007), 233–45. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/ pod/dod-idx/bitterness-of-disappointed-expectations-elie-halevy. pdf?c=wsfh;idno=0642292.0035.015;format=pdf. Halévy’s friend Bouglé was the author of Socialisme français: du socialisme utopique à la démocratie industrielle, Chez les Prophètes socialistes, and Essai sur le régime des castes, as well as a book about German sociology (Simmel’s milieu). He edited Proudhon’s works. For a full bibliography of Bouglé’s publications, see Jean-Christophe Marcel, “Celestin Bouglé, un demi siècle de publications (1894–1940),” Les Etudes Sociales 1, no. 165 (2017): 77–109. 5 See Maurice Samuels, “Proust, Jews, and the Arts,” in Proust and the Arts, ed. Christie MacDonald and François Proulx (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 223–32. On Proust’s fascination with the stock market, see Hannah Freed-Thall, Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 6 Deleuze, Proust et les signes; Simmel, PM, 67,78,83. 7 Brunet speaks of the “fait photographique,” in La Naissance de l’Idée, 284. 8 Cited in Suzanne Guerlac, Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 194. 9 Descombes, Proust. Philosophie du roman, 34–5. 10 Félix Ravaisson, Les Classiques d’Art—modèles pour l’enseignement du dessin (Paris: Rapilly, 1875). Les Classiques d’Art, consisted of photographs of plaster casts of classical sculptures (and of fragments of them) to be used as aids in teaching students how to draw, according to a pedagogy committed to the kind of living vitality Ravaisson theorized in Of Habit. See Mouna Mekouar, “Étudier ou rêver l’antique: Félix Ravaisson et la reproduction de la statuaire antique,” Images Re-vues: Histoire, anthropologie et théorie de l’art 1 (2005). http://imagesrevues. revues.org/222?lang=en. 11 “Photodynamist photographers,” asserts Anton Giulio Bragaglia, “use blur and visual flux to suggest the experienced emotion of dynamic, continuous movement” (“Futurist Photodynamism” in Phillips,

Notes

12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35

36

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Photography in the Modern Era, 287). Bragaglia writes: “We are certainly not concerned with the aims and characteristics of cinematography and chronophotography” (288). Chevrier, Proust et la photographie, 28. For more on this distinction, see Guerlac, “Duration: Living Time,” in The Bergsonian Mind, ed. Mark Sinclair and Yaron Wolf (London: Routledge, forthcoming); and “Livingness and the Really Real” forthcoming in Theory and Event. Braun, Picturing Time, 193. Ibid., 57. Ibid. Ibid.,196. Ibid., 61. Bergson, L’Evolution créatrice in OC, 503. Ibid., 784. Ibid., 753. Ibid., 782. Ibid., 786. Descombes, Proust. Philosophie du roman, 311 (my translation). Ibid. Bergson, OC, 755, 760 (original emphasis). Ibid., 762 (original emphasis). Ibid., 755. Bragaglia, “Futurist Photodynamism,” 292. Ibid., 785 (original emphasis). Serge Tisseron, Le Mystère de la chambre claire: photographie et inconscient (Paris: Flammarion, 1999), 57 (translation mine). Bergson, OC, 761. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York and London: Verso, 2004), 20. See also Rancière’s interesting reading of the Jupien episode in “Proust: War, Truth, Book,” Part II ch. 2 of The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, tr. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). “Perspectivism, for Simmel, is not a skepticism, not a relativism that dissolves truth but a relationism that renders it possible,” writes Vendenberghe, “La Double Dualité,” 17 (my translation). Bergson, OC, 785.

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Index

affect 20–4 (see also attachment/ detachment, desire, mourning) affective past 37 douceur (sweetness) and douleur (suffering) 97 (see also memory in Proust) and habit 18–21, 24 joy and suffering 17–19, 20, 169 and intermittence 66 jealousy (see desire) and lived time 21 and memory 21, 71, 95, 100–1, 104 (see also memory in Proust) and natural vision 37, 43 (see also attachment) vitality 21, 66 of time 174, 184, 189 volitional objects (see objectification) Mme Amédée (see Grandmother) Albertine (see also architectures of the Recherche, desire) allegorical figure 61 and assumptions about Proust’s novel 113–23 blurriness 57–60, 61, 66, 70, 118 (see also the flou) and prostitution 107 center of the Recherche (see architectures of the Recherche)

childhood photo of 59–69, 107 (see also the flou) notebook passage 64 deferral of Marcel’s quest for her 85–6, 92 desiring her 58, 109–10 asleep 102, 108 pornographic genre of the Academic Study 108 Braquehais, Academic Study No. 6 (fig. 11), 109 emerges from a photograph 66 first encounters on the beach 57–8, 60 as passante (passerby) 58–9 (see also Baudelaire, see also le flou) at Elstir’s party 89 on the street 68 identity 61 être de fuite (creature of flight) 68, 118, 121, 189 formlessness 61, 62, 107, 118 Marcel/Narrator’s assemblage, 115–116 (see also objectification, Simmel) the multiple, 65–6 sexuality (see lesbianism) the kiss (see Marcel/Narrator) lesbian desire (see also lesbianism) jealousy 101–2, 114 sunrise scene 104

Index

little girls 63 in the Notebooks 63–4 codes of prostitution 106 making memories 70–2 (see also memory in Proust) mourning her 115–17 inventing her 115 the prisoner 115 as social type (fig. 10a) 106 (fig. 10b) 106 alienation automatic forgetting 15 (see also habit) estrangement 207 n31 (see also dégonflage) photographic estrangement (see avant-garde photography) self-alienation of money 159, 161, 171, 177 (see also money, Simmel) social world in the Recherche 90 stranger and Grandmother 12, 13, 24, 28, 32 as photographer 41–3, 54 subjectivation of facialization, 140–9 (see also celebrity) anachronism 2, 5, 16 memory and forgetting 21, 173 memory image series (see Marcel/Narrator) mourning Grandmother 22 her photo portrait 26 narrative discontinuity 191 and the everyday 91, 173 time of latent image (see photography) architectures of the Recherche letter to Jacques Rivière 3, 111–13 novelistic frame 3, 111–13, 189 Finding Time Again, essences 1 16, 18, 20, 83, 96, 117, 120, 178, 184, 192, 196–8, 200

235

involuntary memory incidents in (see memory in Proust) literary vocation (see vocation story) redemption through art 186 regime of truth 192, 196–8, 200 timelessness 186, 192 madeleine episode 3, 21, 39, 111, 116, 118, 200 n18 “true center” of Proust’s novel 3, 4, 113 Albertine breaks the frame 114 two architectures 64 unfinished work 4, 7 the ending in question 4, 112, 196 literary space of contingency 3, 113, 84, 175 (see also improvisation) attachment 5, 15–6 Grandmother (see Grandmother) and deficiency of natural vision 36, 65 habit 18, 21, 37, 187 objectification 117, 190 (see also objectification, Simmel) attachment/detachment 18–20, 24, 38, 40, 54 (see also double law of habit) desire 120 (see also desire) habit 16, 121 (see also habit) jealousy (see desire) lived time 16, 18, 173, 184, 187 love 97 mourning 187 (see also mourning) avant-garde photography 40, 52, 95, 100 (see also alienation, Moholy-Nagy)

236

Index

avant-garde esthetics 45–6, 49 Léon Gimpel, precursor 49 (fig. 5) 50 (fig. 7) 52 Foto-Auge (Frans Roh) 43 Moholy-Nagy 43, 46, 49 Berlin Radio Tower (fig. 6) 51 formal logic of photography, 95 New Vision movement 43, 49 Russian avant-garde photographers 44–9 Osip Brik 44 (fig. 3) 45 Aleksandr Rodchenko 43, 47–9 Roland Barthes 12, 29, 52, 203 n18 Baudelaire 16 De l’essence du rire (on the essence of laughter) 38 caricature 38 Benjamin on 80 hero of modern life 165, 149 “A une passante (To a Passerby),” 58, 61 André Bazin 29, 52, 205 n14 Walter Benjamin 77–9 esthetic modernity of shock 6, 77–8, 159, 167, 178 Proust via Baudelaire 80 “The Image of Proust” 81, 83 forgetting 81 loss and recuperation 83, 84, 122 physiology of chatter 129 Proust via Freud 82–3, 212 n44 Proustian desire 178 sociological theme 177 on memory (Freud vs. Bergson) 79–82 on photography 95 optical unconscious 208 n6 and Simmel 180 Bergson 6–7, 72–7, 87, 186 (see also the cinematographic)

and Benjamin 79–80 clock time 66, 171, 193–5 duration (see duration) Fechner 211 n33 Matière et mémoire 6, 72, 74–6 memory 6, 72–3, 82 memory production 72–3, 114 mental photography 75, 94, 210 n27 déjà vu 6, 72, 74, 83, 87, 123 ontology of time 73–4, 76, 84, 180, 182, 192, 195 time as invention 195 perception and memory, 37, 73, 83, 174 and Simmel 180 spatialized time 96 splitting of time 184 and Ravaisson 180 blur (see the flou) camera eyes episode 33–43, 49, 52, 198 (see also Grandmother) Foto Auge (see avant-garde photography) Kracauer on 33 mechanical vision: the falling academician 43 caricature (see Baudelaire) contingency 42 dégonflage 41, 42, 48 involuntary memory episode 38–40 natural vision/mechanical vision 36, 38, 40 (see also affect) overdetermination of 34 Louise Halévy Reclining (fig. 1), 35 prefiguring Grandmother’s death 34 spirit photography (fig. 2), 36

Index

photographer as stranger 41–2 (see also alienation) Charlus on procrastination 119–20 wartime germanophilia 198–9 chronophotography Bergson’s critique of (see the cinematographic) chronological time (see time) Futurism’s challenge, 198 (see also the flou) Jules Marey 19, 193, 194 (fig. 16) 195 (fig. 17) cinematographic (see also chronophotography) Bergson’s critique of 96, 192–7 Projecting chronophotography 193 Refutation of the truth of essences 196–7 the time of the interval (the flou) 197 Proust’s critique of 95–7, 100, 173–4, 192–3, 196 and the question of reality 193 Simmel’s critique of historical realism 173–4 (see also Simmel) Contre Sainte- Beuve 86, 91, 90 (see also interiority) Nerval’s madness 93 daguerreotype 2, 29, 47, 91–2, 134, 148, 152 anonymous daguerreotype (fig. 15) 153 Arago on 33, 67, 134, 141 of Odette 139, 152 death 52 (see also mourning) and desire for immortality 122–3 fragmentary death 15 of Grandmother (see Grandmother)

237

and indifference 13, 15, 19, 53–4, 110, 118 (see also habit) in life 16, 188 (see also intermittence) and photography (see Bazin, Barthes) of Swann 127 of the self 15 (see also habit) Gilles Deleuze 133, 148 Deleuze and Guattari 140, 166 facialization (visagéification) 140, 148–9, 166 (see also Disdéri, Odette) desire 6, 14, 53, 58, 67–8, 71, 99–100, 104, 108 (see also Simmel) for Albertine (see Albertine) deferral of satisfaction 86 pleasure hidden from oneself, 85 time of the latent image (see photography) gaze of desire is photographic 67–9 jealousy Marcel/Narrator’s 101–5, 108, 115 Swann’s 154, 160, 167 Jupien’s brothel 200 lesbian desire (see lesbianism) to live 120 money alienates desire 167–9, 170, 171, 178, 192 (see also Simmel, money) objectification 183 (see also Simmel) for Odette (see Odette) passante (passerby) 58, 59, 61, 69, 115 (see also Baudelaire) Simmel’s theory of 6, 168, 170, 171 to write 116, 121 (see also paresse)

238

Index

Eugène Disdéri 27, 133 carte de visite 134, 141, 100 coins 134 commercial photography 134 “image machine” 133 producing resemblance 141–2, 145, 153 logic of the pose 139–47 (see also Deleuze) Mme Kahn (fig. 13) 142 social type 141–5, 147 Dreyfus Affair (see history) duration (see also Bergson) Benjamin 79 Bergson 72, 75, 76, 81, 96, 174 lived time (see time) Proust 15 Ravaisson 15 duration of change 14

pans d’oubli (stretches of forgetting) 98 “universal rule of oblivion” 118 formlessness 61 Albertine 118 little girls 61 and prostitution 106–7 of money 159, 171 (see also Simmel) Odette 151, 156, 160 Sigmund Freud (see also Benjamin) and Bergson 82 Beyond the Pleasure Principle 77–8 and Gustave Fechner 82 memory trace 81 83 traumatic shock 79–80 Project for a Scientific Psychology 78 psychic impressions 78

Elstir 85, 89, 91, 108 Miss Sacripant 137–9, 149, 165 (see also prostitution)

Grandmother (Mme Amédée) 11 (see also camera eyes episode) attachment to 11, 12, 23, 29 camera eyes (see camera eyes episode) death of 11–12, 23 forgetting her (see forgetting in the Recherche) hotel episode (see habit) mourning her 23–8, 29 anachronism 22, 23 intermittent photograph 27–9, 52, 53, 183, 187 involuntary memory counter image 27 involuntary memory image 23 survival and annihilation 23–4, 26, 28–9 (see also habit) photoshoot 25, 26, 28, 53 telephone call 32, 36 time of her dying 26 and of the photographic system 26

the flou 57–8, 60–2, 118, 173, 189 (see also intermittence) and affect (see affect) defamiliarization 65 desire 66 futurism 197 habit 121, 173 and intermittence (see intermittence) and paresse 57 prostitution 107 time 121, 197 (see also the cinematographic) forgetting in the Recherche 59, 98–9, 116 (see also Benjamin) automatic forgetting 15, 17 (see also habit) of Grandmother 15 historical forgetting 158

Index

habit 14, 15, 18 (see also Ravaisson) disarming habit of repetition through photography 41, 42, 45 through the multiple 66 double law of habit 12, 14, 17, 20, 22, 29, 30, 40, 52–4, 97, 118, 199 affirmative mode of habit 15 analgesia of habit 14, 19, 38 involuntary forgetting 21, 187–8 dialectic of attachment/ detachment 16, 17 habit of repetition 14, 65–6 and natural vision 36, 65 dual operation 14 (see also attachment/detachment) Grand Hotel episode 13–20 and ideology (Kracauer) 42 and living beings (Ravaisson) 52 and time 20, 12 history 79 ahistorical character of money, 159 (see Simmel) Dreyfus Affair 130–2, 159, 164, 181–2 French socialism 181–2 “History” 158, 177 Panama Affair (see also Odette) Jean Jaurès on 157–8 and Guermantes world 158 philosophies of life (contextualization) 184–5 French reception of Simmel 172–3, 180–2 story time of the Recherche 4 world fairs 67, 92, 157 war 4, 7, 127, 201 impressions 54, 60, 65, 71, 97, 201 (see also affect, the real) of Albertine (see Albertine) desire and jealousy 183

239

faculty of mental photography (see Bergson) facialization (see Deleuze) and habit 14, 18, 52 (see also Ravaisson) intensity of (see Ravaisson) of light 1, 2, 91–3, 120, 183 material impressions 2, 93 photographic impressions 65, 67, 68, 91–3, 183–4 (see also camera eyes, photography) commercial photography (see Disdéri) Proust’s poetics of impressions 1–4, 14, 183 duality of Proustian impressions 174,182–3 memory impressions 2, 21, 99 (see also memory) visual impressions 37, 59, 68 (see also camera eyes) psychic impressions 87–8 (see also Freud) social imprinting (Gabriel Tarde) 135 of time 1, 120, 121, 182, 183, 184 (see also paresse) improvisation 3, 85, 89, 183–4 art and life 87, 88, 89, 116–17 magic sand mixed with dust of reality 88 invention 84, 116–17, 123, 195 time as invention 195 (see also Bergson) interiority (see also impressions, memory in Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve) dreaming and living 88–9 dormeur éveillé (hypnotic subject) 87–8

240

Index

dreaming and writing 117 (see also improvisation) songer (to daydream) 88, 117 Victor Hugo 88–9 moi profond (deep self) 86 (see also Contre Sainte-Beuve) darkroom figure for 91 Nerval 93, (see also Contre Sainte-Beuve) perception as occasion for remembering 174 (see Bergson) memory is a photographer (see memory in Proust) retroaction 123 postromantic interiority 120 “little fragments of the real” 117 solitude 119, 188 (see also paresse) and time 120 spontaneous memory (see memory in Proust) intermittence 16, 29, 30, 52, 66, 173 Xavier Bichat 14, 15, 20, 53, 204 n6 and habit 14, 20, 21, 186 intermittences du coeur (Intermittences of the heart) 16, 20–1, 29, 97, 121, 186 intermittent malady (jealousy) 101 (see also desire) “intermittent photograph” (see Grandmother) and the flou 57, 66, 73, 83, 189 Jean Jaurès 157, 161, 178 report on the Panama Affair 157–8 corrupting powers of money 158 and socialism 181–2 Sigmund Kracauer 180 (see also habit) dégonflage 46, 49

ideology 42 photography estrangement 41, 42, 46 (see also avant -garde photography) “On Photography” 31 modernist view of 41, 42 photographer as stranger (see alienation) realist view of 31, 33, 46 suspends habit 41 lesbianism 60, 105, 209 n7 anonymous stereoscope (fig. 10b) 107 compulsory heterosexuality 105 Cottard’s judgement of Albertine 101 doors and windows (fig. 9b) 103 Gomorrah 69 Mlle Vinteuil 101–4 Montjouvain 101–4 regulation of 105, 107 taking Albertine prisoner 104 sunrise scene 101–4 unimaginable 108 Marcel/Narrator (see also architectures of the Recherche, Albertine, Grandmother, affect) curating memory image series (see memory in Proust) jealousy (see desire) the kiss 47, 99–100, 104 and “latest developments in photography” 47 Narrating/commenting 185, 191 time of paresse 120–2 wartime reflections 199–201 (see also objectification) and writing 119, 120 (see also vocation story) memory in Proust (see also architectures of the novel)

Index

involuntary memory 1, 3–4, 12, 15, 21–3, 40, 71, 187–8 Finding Time Again, 111–12,   114 forgetting 21 and habit 20 invention 114–16 madeleine episode (see architectures of the Recherche) myth of 114 redemptive power of 111 vitality of 66, 189 vision of Albertine (see Albertine) visions of Grandmother (see Grandmother) curating memory images in series 71, 99, 104 memory is a photographer 94, 184 voluntary memory 21, 39, 40, 43, 79, 80, 173, 114, 116 boring snapshots 39 Benjamin on 83, 117 undoing the opposition voluntary/ involuntary 70, 72, 84, 116, 119, 188, 121–2 early drafts of the Madeleine episode 116–17 Moholy-Nagy 43, 46, 49, 95 (see also avant-garde photography) Berlin Radio Tower (fig. 6) 51 formal logic of photography 95 Sontag on, 45, 208 n5 money 129, 133, 157 (see also Simmel, Jean Jaurès, Swann’s gift, Odette) celebrity 132–3, 149, 157, 165, 179 commercial photography 133, 134

241

Exposition Universelle (world fair) of 1878 157 and Guermantes society 158, 161 modernism of the money economy (see Simmel) Odette as symbol of (see Odette) Panama Affair 157, 161 (see also Odette) Jean Jaurès report on (see Jaurès) Philosophy of Money (see Simmel) Swann class affiliations 163 Swann’s gift 127–36 (fig. 12, American Journal of Numismatics) 129 and the lorette, 164 (see also prostitution) mourning 13 Grandmother (see Grandmother) intermittent photograph (see Grandmother) survival and annihilation 23, 24, 26, 28–9 (see also attachment, detachment) objectification 2, 171, 174, 182–3, 190, 191, 196, 199, 200 (see also Simmel, desire) and Albertine 115–17 and anti-German hatred 199 and photography 169, 199, 200 volitional objects 168–9, 199–201 Odette 6, 137, 148 celebrity status (see money) facialization 140–9, 151–52, 159–60, 166 immortal youth 152, 156 as lorette 138, 139 (see also prostitution) Miss Sacripant (see Elstir)

242

Index

Mme de Forcheville 156, 157, 158 Mme Swann 138, 141, 148, 150, 156 Odette de Crécy 136, 138, 141, 150 as symbol of money 159, 160 Panama Affair 157 (see also Panama Affair) and Swann 162–5 at the Matinée des Guermantes 156–58, 161 Panama Affair 157, 159, 161, 178 (see also Jean Jaurès, money) photography 6, 26 (see also the flou, camera eyes episode, avant- garde photography, chronophotography, MoholyNagy, Albertine, Odette) blurry photographs (see the flou) carte de visite (see Disdéri) and death (Bazin, Barthes) 52 formal features of (see MoholyNagy) intermittent photograph (see Grandmother) Kodak cameras and amateur photography 46–8 Henri Lartigue (fig. 4) 46 objectivity (realist view of) 31, 33 (see also Bazin, daguerreotype) old snapshot of the little girls (see Albertine) photographic processes as metaphor 92 latent image 91–3, 183 figures for memory (see also memory in Proust) Granville’s “faculty of mental photography” 75 Léon d’Hervey de SaintDenys’ cliché souvenir 74

memory is a photographer (see memory in Proust) Finding Time Again 184 photojournalism (see avant-garde photography) photography and time 95 (see also the flou, intermittence, time) Gustave Le Gray 213 n54 time of freeze- frame 6 time of latent image (see time) recreational photography 48 representational paradigm 65 iconicity 65 indexicality 60, 93 pornography 2 académie 108 Braquehais, Academic Study No. 6 (fig. 11) 109 doors and windows 101–3 fig. 9a 102 fig. 9b 103 stereoscope 99, 106 prostitution 104, 106–7, 171 (see also Albertine, Odette) analogy with money 159, 171 (see also Simmel) grisette/lorette 138, 139, 164, 165 little girl leitmotif 63–6, 106–8 (see also the flou) Odette 137–8, 151 Regulation of (Prison treatment) 104–5 Félix Ravaisson 5, 6, 7, 14, 16, 18, 52, 53–4, 70, 96 (see also habit) habit (see habit) intensity of impressions 18, 54 ontology of time 184 public life of 186 drawing 186 photographic oeuvre (Les Classiques d’Art) 186 space and time 82, 95

Index

time and life 73, 121 (see also paresse) the real 96–7, 197, 200 (see also Ravaisson, Bergson) in Bergson, analysis of the real 192 life of the real 197 the real as fluctuations of time 97, 196 “degree of reality” (Ravaisson) 54 dust of the real 191, 193, 201 and photography 46, 60 constitution of the real in commercial photography 147 (see also Disdéri) the daguerreotype 148 photography as registration of the real 60 and photons 93 in Proust 96–7, 197 “little fragments of the real” 117 reality vs truth 196, 198–200 in Simmel 6, 172, 174–6 historical reality 174 social real 174–6 (see also Simmel) volitional objects 170 (see also Simmel Philosophy of Money) Georg Simmel 6, 7, 154, 180 (see also money) epistemological relativism 175–6 figure of the Jew 41, 164 figure of the stranger 41, 43 (see also stranger) and Marx 171 modernism of the money economy 149, 171, 172, 175, 177, 178, 185, 196, 199 “more life” 7 objectivity as freedom from habit 42 on money 159, 163, 171, 177, 182 alienation (see alienation)

243

analogy with prostitution 159, 164 blasé attitude 163, 168, 178 (see also Swann) exchange 171 leveling effect of 13 objectification (see objectification) structure of desire (see desire) value 168, 171, 175 ontology of time 176, 192 and Bergson 180, 182 View of Life 176, 182 Philosophy of Money 3, 6, 16, 127, 159, 167, 172, 176, 178, 181 on value and desire 167–71 reception in France 180–2 relationism 172, 175, 200 and the social 168, 171, 175 reciprocal effect (Wechselwirkung) 175 the social 61–2 (see also Dreyfus Affair, Panama Affair, Odette) anti-Semitism 132, 164, 181 and French sociologists, 181–2 celebrity 132–4 Odette 149, 165, 179 déclassement 132, 160, 162, 178 distinction 133, 135 Swann’s gift (see Swann) facialisation 140–1 (see also Deleuze, Disdéri) Gabriel Tarde 135, 143, 169, 185–6, 198 social talk 130 the social as imitation 135 “inter-spiritual photographic imprinting” 135 social class 133, 134, 143, 178

244

Index

social decomposition 158, 161, 166, 185 (see also Jaurès) and money 133, 160 social type 143–4 (see also Disdéri) Arthur Batut (fig. 14) 144 Swann 6, 131 anti-Semitism 131–2, 163 blasé attitude 163 (see Simmel) dying 127–8 jealousy 165 social position 162–5 and money 164 and Odette 164–5 Swann’s gift 128, 133, 134, 178, 191 time 1, 6, 36, 70 (see also Bergson, Ravaisson, Simmel, Photography) chronological time 21, 93, 96–7, 173, 175, 185 (see also clock time) cinematographic time 193 clock time 6, 171 dead time 1, 117, 123, 152, 174, 183 embodied time 5 historical time 152 inauthentic time 83 (see Benjamin) and intermittence (see intermittence) labor time 171 lived time 3, 5, 16, 18, 20–1, 26, 58, 66, 83, 96, 99, 100, 117, 172–5, 182, 195 (see also duration) the living past 183 ontology of time 6, 7, 14, 176 (see also Bergson, Simmel, Ravaisson) social time 177

spatialized time 96 time as change 20 (see also duration, Ravaisson) time of the flou 197 time as invention (see duration) time as it happens 16, 42, 76, 188 time of dying 26, 53 time of life 6, 53, 74, 76, 83, 97, 127, 182–4, 186–88, 190, 196 time of photography 2 (see also avant-garde photographers) will have been past 2, 191 of the photographic system 26, 189 time of writing 119–121 time of the double law of habit 14, 18, 20, 187–8 time of the interval 197 (see also the flou, the cinematographic) time of the latent image 91–3, 97 (see also anachronism) transcendence of time 7 value and economic exchange 171, 175 and economic value 171 and limits of objectivity 199 Marx theory of 171 Simmel’s theory of 168–171 (see also Simmel, Philosophy of Money) vocation story 1, 22, 39, 83, 108, 111, 112–14 (see also architectures of the Recherche) bildungsroman 3 modernist version 116, 203 n12 myth of 119–23, 184–5, 188, 191 writing (see time)