The Strange M. Proust 9781905981977

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Title Page......Page 6
Copyright Page......Page 7
Table of Contents......Page 8
Dedication......Page 9
Preamble......Page 10
1 The Disquieting Strangeness of Marcel Proust......Page 21
2 The Formalist, the Spider, and the Phenomenologist: Proust in the Magic Mirror of the Twentieth Century......Page 32
3 'Quel Marcel!' (And Other Oddities of the Narrator's Designations in A la recherche du temps perdu)......Page 45
4 Strange Jewishness: Essay on the Treatment of Jewish Identity in Proust......Page 54
5 Proust's Singhalese Song (A Strange Little Story)......Page 66
6 A Proustian 'Metterza'......Page 80
7 Da capo: Accumulations and Explosions......Page 95
8 Other Eyes: Proust and the Myths of Photography......Page 110
9 'Truth and Justice'......Page 121
10 Reading Proust Between the Lines......Page 134
Works Cited......Page 144
Index......Page 149

Citation preview

The Strange M. Proust

legenda egena , founded in 1995 by the european Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research association and Routledge. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, including works on arabic, Catalan, english, French, german, greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. an editorial Board of distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly bodies such as the Society for French Studies and the British Comparative literature association.

MHRa

The Modern Humanities Research Association ( ) encourages and promotes advanced study and research in the field of the modern humanities, especially modern European languages and literature, including English, and also cinema. It also aims to break down the barriers between scholars working in different disciplines and to maintain the unity of humanistic scholarship in the face of increasing specialization. The Association fulfils this purpose primarily through the publication of journals, bibliographies, monographs and other aids to research.

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Editorial Board Chairman Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford Professor John Batchelor, University of Newcastle (English) Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French) Professor Colin Davis, Royal Holloway University of London (Modern Literature, Film and Theory) Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish) Professor Paul Garner, University of Leeds (Spanish) Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret, Queen Mary University of London (French) Professor Catriona Kelly, New College, Oxford (Russian) Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (Linguistics) Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (Linguistics) Dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese) Professor Ritchie Robertson, St John’s College, Oxford (German) Professor Lesley Sharpe, University of Exeter (German) Professor David Shepherd, University of Sheffield (Russian) Professor Alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish) Professor David Treece, King’s College London (Portuguese) Professor Diego Zancani, Balliol College, Oxford (Italian) Managing Editor Dr Graham Nelson 41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK [email protected] www.legenda.mhra.org.uk

Marcel à Paris (2001), by Ann Baldwin

The Strange M. Proust ❖ Edited by André Benhaïm

Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2009

First published 2009 Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

LEGENDA is an imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2009, except: Chapter 7 first appeared in Proust in Perspective (University of Illinois Press, 2002) and is © Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 2002: reproduced here by kind permission Chapter 10 is © the Estate of Malcolm Bowie 2009 ISBN 978-1-905981-9-77 (hbk) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recordings, fax or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Contents ❖

Preamble  andré benhaïm (princeton university)

1

1 The Disquieting Strangeness of Marcel Proust david ellison (university of miami)

12



2

The Formalist, the Spider, and the Phenomenologist: Proust in the Magic Mirror of the Twentieth Century anne simon (cnrs/université paris–3)

3 ‘Quel Marcel!’ (And Other Oddities of the Narrator’s Designations in A la recherche du temps perdu) eugène nicole (new york university)

23

36

4 Strange Jewishness: Essay on the Treatment of Jewish Identity in Proust joseph brami (university of maryland)

45

5 Proust’s Singhalese Song (A Strange Little Story) andré benhaïm (princeton university)

57

6 A Proustian ‘Metterza’ raymonde coudert (université paris–7)

71

7 Da capo: Accumulations and Explosions christie mcdonald (harvard university)

86

8 Other Eyes: Proust and the Myths of Photography michael wood (princeton university)

101

9 ‘Truth and Justice’ antoine compagnon (collège de france/columbia university)

112

10 Reading Proust Between the Lines malcolm bowie (cambridge university)

125



Works Cited

135



Index

140

this book is dedicated to the memory of malcolm bowie 1943–2007

PREAMBLE v

The present volume stems from an international symposium convened at Princeton University on 22 and 23 April 2006.1 This event was aimed at questioning Proust’s work, as well as its reception. Although A la recherche du temps perdu has become a canonical work, and its author is often considered the first and the greatest of the twentieth century, the monument of Proust remains, in many regards, ‘strange’. Often ‘obvious’ to its first readers, this strangeness has been forgotten or occulted by public and institutional recognition. Odd indeed is the subject of this ‘semiautobiographical’ novel, with a narrator whose anonymity and omnipresent but fragmented subjectivity have disoriented many readers. Odd too is the very form of this book, made of autonomous yet intricately related books; and yet, over the course of more than three thousand pages, it tells in the end one thing really: how the man who wrote it became a writer. But La Recherche is a tale where many extraordinary and often incredible things happen, where the author never ceases to challenge (often with seemingly playful intent) the reason, attention, and the trust of his public. Strange tale whose generating principle and perpetual motion seem to be constantly questioning the ‘truth’ and the ‘general laws’ that its author/hero says he is seeking: questioning time (through an a-chronological History), space (in an often unrecognizable France), and even language itself (with a French that is hardly ‘classical’). Exploring the diverse aspects of the strangeness fundamental to Proust means not simply rekindling the interest in a work that now enjoys the fascination of an amazingly broad public, from the Académie Française to Hollywood, but reassessing how this in many ways imperfect masterpiece was canonized, and what may have incited such a universal enthusiasm, in France and especially (another paradox) abroad, where Proust was recognized earlier than in his homeland. It thus seemed fitting that scholars should have gathered ‘overseas’ to discuss Proust’s strangeness. To discuss, or rather, to muse. Indeed, this collective ref lection was principally intended to enable us to grapple with this classic work in a new way, reactivating the sense of peculiarity inherent in its newness when it first appeared. In this context, Proust scholars shared personal interpretations of what they considered surprising aspects of Proust’s work in a free exercise of criticism, akin to the original form of the essay. The following readings therefore present a broad range of interpretations pertaining to very diverse aspects of the work and stemming from a number of fields of interpretations, from philosophy to psychology, from anthropology to musicology, from art history to the judiciary, from onomastics to politics. This ball of rejuvenating readings, hopefully as revelatory as the eerie ‘Bal de têtes’ closing La Recherche, is opened by David Ellison who offers an insightful

2

Preamble

interpretation of Proust’s ‘disquieting strangeness’, his propensity for subjective dispossession, ‘where one is expelled from one’s dwelling and thrown into the world’, in a modality evocative of Heidegger’s conception of ethos (‘the open space where man dwells’) and of Freud’s Unheimlichkeit (‘the uncanny’) — that in the familiar which is (or becomes) unsettling. After this reading which follows the narrator’s wanderings through Venice, Anne Simon proposes another kind of philosophical interpretation of Proust by examining the puzzling metamorphoses he has endured in the work of numerous philosophers from Sartre to Ricoeur, thereby creating (or mirroring) Proust’s extra­ ordinary ‘plasticity’. The multifariousness of Proust’s figure in the philosophers’ ref lections seems to echo the malleability of his hero’s identity. This, of course, stems foremost from the subtle effacement of limits between autobiography and fiction, the blurring of boundaries between author and narrator which begins, as Eugène Nicole demonstrates, with a name made almost completely elusive — and the few ‘Marcels’ which remain in the text may not be as odd as the other designations that point to the strange identity of the narrator. Beyond the name, though, other f luctuating yet still recognizable signs of identity f licker in Proust’s creations. In this cosmogony, Jewishness occupies a paramount position here explored by Joseph Brami who suggests that, notwithstanding the biographical evidence of Proust’s mother’s own Judeity, in La Recherche it is rather the narrator’s paternal figures (the biological father and Swann, the symbolical one) who embody the complexity of a Jewishness rendered strange in many ways. Jewishness, however, cohabits with other traits of cross-cultural identity in La Recherche. Occurrences of geographical remoteness and ethnical foreignness intervene, sometimes in unexpected and seemingly random scenes with actors whose appearance may look gratuitous (even accidental). I examine just such a scene and such a character in the encounter of a ‘Singhalese’ man whose avatars summarize Proust’s conception of estrangement as an exoticism itself rendered infinitely exotic, permanently foreign. Other surprising discoveries also arise through different kinds of encounters, such as in intertextual occurrences or in more or less implicit references to artists and their works. Raymonde Coudert thus proposes deciphering the Proustian ‘Metterza’, evocatively similar to the original by Leonardo da Vinci who could thus be seen, through the aura of a tripartite familial tableau (mother–son–other), as a surprising guest — or ghost — in La Recherche, with a relevance more significant than previously thought (and perhaps even more than in Freud’s own explicit tribute to the Renaissance genius). Indeed, Proust’s strangeness also stems from ‘foreign’ materials used to create the work, explicit interweaving of cultural references or tacit borrowings from other artists. And this fruitful mode of mélange that can lead to stunning revelations also lies at the heart of the manifold and multifaceted acts of reading displayed in La Recherche. As Christie McDonald shows in her essay, the Proustian experiences of ‘reading’ implicate a genuine, wholesome, and violent experience of (self-) estrangement.

Preamble

3

And, from Swann to the Narrator, whether ‘reading’ pertains to the interaction with text or music, it always only prefigures its own repetition. What many readers have believed for so long (without a doubt prompted by the very form of the book which ends on the premise of its own invention), that one may only reread Proust, also appears as a generative mode within the novel where rereading appears as the vital condition for transcending the lower stages of creation. This realization, which stems from McDonald’s ref lections on writing and music, is not foreign to what Michael Wood uncovers in his reading of the photo­g raphic motif in Proust’s creation. But although writing and music seem to coexist in a com­ plementary albeit competitive relation, Proust’s rapport to the image appears more ambivalent if not outright paradoxical with a writer who both loves and loathes, fears and admires photography — while less equivocally rejecting cinematography. To be sure, Proust’s odd positions vis-à-vis printed images, from photography to cinema, originate in his conception of their potential for conveying or deforming what lies at the core (or at least what he claims does) of his work: the search for ‘truth’. The continuous endeavour of balancing (and confronting) ethics and aesthetics is among the most exposed of the manifold tensions and contradictions essential to the creative process of La Recherche. To this extent, Antoine Compagnon offers a puzzling insight into the contradictions that seem to sustain Proust’s conceptions of ‘Truth and Justice’, which appear as relative as hollow, thus forcing a re-evaluation of a Proustian ethics inseparable from perplexing morals. No matter how disquieting they may appear, however, the paradoxes that emerge from the reading of Proust ought not be considered as redhibitory defects (to borrow again from the legal lexicon), nor as signs of a reprehensible creativity, nor even as obstacles to a ‘positive’ interpretation. On the contrary, contradiction is not only inherent in Proust’s writing and thought, it is fundamental. And amongst the infinite modes of contradiction inherent to La Recherche, none may be as pervasive and as fundamental as the principle of simultaneity.2 And it is one of the most forceful variations of this generative principle that Malcolm Bowie contemplates in his wonderfully suggestive reading of the motif of superposition in Proust. But it is not just for its sheer beauty that this essay holds a special place in this volume, for Malcolm Bowie passed away on 28 January 2007, and this is the last of his original essays to be published posthumously. Alison Finch, Malcolm Bowie’s widow, was instrumental in the editing of this text, faithful to the original version delivered at Princeton University, and incorporating the author’s manuscript notes. To Professor Finch goes the most heartfelt gratitude of all the Proust readers who participated in this collection, and of all those who now have the fortunate opportunity to read Malcolm Bowie’s own take on Proust. Malcolm Bowie was an inspiring and inf luential reader, and this book is dedicated to his memory. Through its evocative powers, with writing as poetic as its argument is compelling, this last essay offers a brilliant conclusion to the contributions that compose the present volume devoted to presenting various facets of the strange — l’étrange — M. Proust. *

*

*

4

Preamble

Strange, étrange, M. Proust If we were to ask what could be so strange about M. Proust, we would begin by pointing to the oddity of the initial assertion stating that there may be a ‘strange M. Proust’. At the same time, we ought to also acknowledge the double oddity at play here, not only in the assertion of the existence of a ‘strange’ M. Proust, but also in the very strangeness stemming from the incomplete identity of the so-called ‘M. Proust’. To be sure, ‘M.’ is meant to encapsulate the strangeness of Proust as conceived in this book. That said, this initial enigma, whether ‘M.’ stands for Marcel or for Monsieur, whether the strangeness hereby invoked refers to the man or the author, shall not be resolved (yet). For now, suffice it to say what is already known: Proust is the greatest (French) writer of the twentieth century.3 He is to the French in literature and culture what Shakespeare is to the English, or Dante to the Italians. Much more than a writer in fact, ‘Proust’ is a cultural icon, his book a national monument — a true lieu de mémoire: a space for the collective memory.4 Thus stands Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Icon or trademark,5 ‘Proust(-and-his-Recherche)’ has thus become an immutable image. An image that is so fixed — almost sacred, almost untouchable — that few now would question or scrutinize it. Certainly, one may fathom the canonical dimension of ‘Proust’ in the assertion that ‘all French literature seems to be contained in this single vast work’, by an author who seems ‘to have swallowed the whole of France’s cultural memory’.6 But to have a more faithful idea of Proust’s importance, one must look beyond his dazzling, imposing presence among books, and the superficial question of numbers; beyond the millions of copies sold; beyond the countless editions and the dozens of translations. One even ought to look beyond the highly unusual fact that publishers, in France and abroad, were not satisfied to consecrate Proust only once, but felt compelled to republish him (even in the most prestigious editions)7 and retranslate him8 — as if one could never have enough of Proust; as if one Proust was never enough. And, indeed, one Proust is never enough. It could be difficult today to believe Proust when, a few months before its publication, he called La Recherche: ‘Mon gros livre (qui est d’une haleine)’ [‘My big book (that was written in one breath)’].9 Our incredulity would come from the apparent irreconcilability of Proust’s impossibly long sentences and his endless book, and the asthma from which the author suffered. Our amazement would come also from the evident incompatibility between a man who complained endlessly, sometimes in pathetic lamentations, sometimes in very comical self-deprecations, about his fragile health and weak constitution, and the superhuman strength and skills obviously required to achieve such a titanic work. To fathom the multiplicity of Proust’s image, one must also look beyond ‘Proust’ himself. ‘Proust’ exceeds ‘Proust’. His work does appear impossible to confine, from its very origins, as beginning and end were redacted together, at the same time,10 only to be augmented thereafter, by books appearing in between them, turning the initial two volumes of La Recherche into sides of a hill rising inexorably from the centre, infinitely amplified by unbounded magma surges. Before Proust himself

Preamble

5

(apparently) knew it, the projected three books became seven, many of them in more than one volume. One thousand pages eventually grew to three thousand and some hundreds — not counting the unpublished drafts. Had he had time to finish revising his last two instalments,11 who could say how much larger still it would be? As unlikely as it may seem, however, Proust has been, and still is, very much read. In fact — and there may lie the definitive evidence of the importance it has attained — once one looks beyond the book itself, and its readership, ‘Proust’ (the work, the man, their joint image) has been so much read (that is, has been so well assimilated), that it has transcended the canonical library and has been adopted into the culture at large. ‘Proust’, as an icon or a trademark, has migrated onto casual wear apparel and paraphernalia, journeyed through pop songs,12 morphed into comic books,13 ballets,14 plays,15 and (arduously) films.16 But if one were looking for another undeniable sign of Proust’s universal transcendental consecration, attention would have to be turned to the sanctuaries of mainstream culture where Proust has insinua­ ted himself too: Hollywood and television. But how could one not find it odd that one of the most canonical writers, reputed for the difficulty of his writing, famous for his oft indecipherable prose and the frequently impenetrable intricacy of his thought, was judged relevant, sometimes irreplaceable, in movies, series, and pro­ grammes otherwise deemed trivial — and, what is more, works foreign to France?17 On the other hand, it may be only fitting that this success of Proust in mainstream culture came foremost from overseas, and through the Anglo-Saxon world in particular. For it is there that Proust encountered fame to a higher degree than in his homeland, or at least faster. Difficult as it may be to believe, this monumental French oeuvre was not fully recognized until after the Second World War. To be sure, it had gained some recognition when it appeared on the eve of the Great War, and it did (barely) win the prestigious Prix Goncourt just after.18 But Proust was not exactly a best-seller. Worse still, it almost never appeared. After being rejected by a number of (for the most part) prestigious publishers (including Gallimard’s André Gide, who would quickly repent), and published finally only at Proust’s own expense, it was then greeted, at best, with indifference. Criticism was often blunt. Many readers felt like Rachilde, a journalist and critic, who wrote: ‘J’ai commencé le livre avec enthousiasme, puis j’ai fini par le laisser tomber avec effroi, comme on refuserait de boire un soporifique’ [‘I began to read the book with enthusiasm, but then I eventually dropped it in terror, as one would refuse to drink a sleeping potion’].19 Time has passed. Many now savour this potion, some not even realizing that they are, like the narrator in the first pages of the novel, being overtaken by slumber, transformed into the very book that they are holding, succumbing to the author’s surreptitious spell. Its strange accents are now so familiar that few would think of rejecting the prose of Proust. Yet, let us recall the most laudatory of his reviews: ‘M. Marcel Proust a, sans aucun doute, beaucoup de talent. C’est précisément pourquoi l’on déplorera qu’il gâte de si beaux dons par tant d’erreurs.’ [‘M. Marcel is undoubtedly very talented. This is precisely why one will deplore that he spoils his beautiful gifts with so many grammatical errors.’] — as if Proust did not fully

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Preamble

possess his own language. Further (still in the same favourable review) it was judged that, ‘le gros volume de M. Proust n’est pas composé, et qu’il est aussi démesuré que chaotique, mais qu’il renferme des éléments précieux dont l’auteur aurait pu former un petit livre exquis’ [‘M. Proust’s big volume is not composed, and that it is as disproportionate as it is chaotic, but that it contains precious elements with which the author could have formed an exquisite little book’].20 In many ways, the present volume is intended to answer these ‘favourable’ criticisms or show how ‘M. Proust’ responded, or sometimes had pre-emptively already replied in anticipation, or even incited these reactions. This collection of essays will unveil within the monumental novel parts of the strange ‘exquisite little book’ that ‘M. Proust’ wrote nevertheless, but which often passes unnoticed. Yet strangeness can be seen as the governing principle of Proust’s work, a work full of surprises, paradoxes, and contradictions. But these contradictions are not a sign of weakness, or imperfection — unless one thinks of Proust as redefining imperfection, turning f laws into qualities, making awkwardness a gift to cultivate. In a letter to Jean Cocteau praising his book Le Coq et l’Arlequin, which celebrates the avant-garde (Parade, Nijinsky, ...), and disparages Saint-Saens (whom we thought was one of the primary models for Vinteuil’s petite phrase), Proust tells his reader how glad he was to find a number of contradictions in his essay because contradictions contribute to the richness of a work: ‘Je me contredis tout le temps. J’aime qu’on montre toutes les faces.’21 [‘I contradict myself all the time. I like when one shows all sides.’] Showing all sides also means showing all faces — exposing all of one’s ‘I’s’. Thus, one only believes partly in the distinction ‘Marcel’/Proust, and it is mostly so as not to contradict him that we pretend not to notice when he makes a lapsus, when his tongue or his pen slips, when he lets his secret escape.22 But if I seek to ‘put the text in contradiction with itself ’ (as Proust said of Cocteau’s book), it is with a similar benevolence, in the spirit of Reynaldo Hahn, who, on the publication of Du côté de chez Swann, said: ‘Le livre de Proust n’est pas un chefd’œuvre si l’on appelle chef-d’œuvre une chose parfaite et de plan irréprochable’23 [‘Proust’s book is not a masterpiece if one calls masterpiece a thing that is perfect and with an irreproachable structure’]. To be sure, this masterful disorder which itself springs from the desire to show all sides, to show all ‘I’s’, relates to the multiplicity of the speaking subject who appears in the overture of the novel. Proust’s oeuvre is a book whose narrator is also the hero, who will become the author of the book which in the end we have just read but which, for him, remains to be written. Threefold (at least), the man who says ‘I’ thus grants his readers hospitality for thousands of pages without ever revealing his name or unveiling his face. But rather than asking who, the principal question seems to be when the ‘I’ is. The insomniac man remembering (first stage) that he used to wake during the night (in a not so distant past) and reminisce (second stage) about his childhood (third and final stage, a more distant past) is setting up a triple temporal dimension where the ‘narrator–writer’ (perhaps still to be, therefore linking present and future) relates to the character (himself as a child, about to become the hero of the novel, from Combray on). And between the adult and the child, the writer and the hero, there is this third ‘I’, the ‘dormeur éveillé’

Preamble

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[‘awake sleeper’] as Antoine Compagnon calls him, who embodies ‘the nucleus of the narrative system of A la recherche du temps perdu’.24 The composition of Proust’s book resembles a constellation with multiple centres. And if one were tempted to believe that the work is not in proper order (or even out of order) one should be reminded that disorder is precisely what governs the work.25 Only one thing remains certain: the story is about a man. But even this certitude does not resist challenges. Thus, it is quite startling what becomes of Proust when he writes not to Reynaldo Hahn but to his dog, Zadig, to make a scene: ‘Il n’y a que quand je suis redevenu chien, un pauvre Zadig comme toi, que je me mets à écrire et il n’y a que les livres écrits ainsi que j’aime’ [‘It is only when I have become a dog again, a poor Zadig like you, that I begin to write and I only like books written like this’]. 26 Portrait of the artist as a dog... This may seem incongruous, even puerile. However the gravity of this confidence which is also a wish remains: to begin writing one must unlearn how to read — to unlearn one’s own language. And this letter is to be taken all the more seriously because it is written in the midst of the redaction of La Recherche. In order to write and to read, perhaps one should also believe that a dog could write, and that we may be able to read like a dog. Believe the incredible. And besides this metamorphosis of the author into a dog (or the osmosis between them), there are all the instances where the chercheur himself takes over the stage — in one way or another. Proust as a bee, a spider, a pony, a dog, a fish, a finch... And, lest we forget it: ‘Moi, l’étrange humain, qui, en attendant que la mort le délivre, vit les volets clos, ne sait rien du monde, reste immobile comme un hibou et comme celui-ci, ne voit un peu clair que dans les ténèbres’ [‘I, the strange human, who, while he waits for death to release him, lives behind closed shutters, knows nothing of the world, sits motionless as an owl, and like that bird can only see things at all clearly in the darkness’] (iii, 371; 2, 1014). The man who makes this puzzling (and unique) confession is the man who spoke in the first lines and who has been trying since then to have himself forgotten. This strange human is the narrator, feather in hand, the insomniac writer who, in the blink of an eyelid, reveals himself as a nocturnal bird, a night owl. The owl, with his revolving head (some might find it revolting), a spinning head which in the blink of an eye can, like Janus, Brahma or another foreign deity, show us another face — another side. For thus Proust defines the visage: Le visage humain est vraiment comme celui du Dieu d’une théogonie orientale, toute une grappe de visages juxtaposés dans des plans différents et qu’on ne voit pas à la fois. Mais pour une grande part, notre étonnement vient surtout de ce que l’être nous présente aussi une même face (ii, 270). [The human face is indeed, like the face of the God of some oriental theogony, a whole cluster of faces juxtaposed on different planes so that one does not see them all at once. But to a great extent our astonishment springs from the fact that the person presents to us also a face that is the same as before.] (1, 978) 27

Other case of paradoxical simultaneity (or superposition), as only one Proust is

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Preamble

simply impossible to envisage, all these dimensions render the author and his characters both familiar and elusive, at once spectacular and unrecognizable. This remoteness of the Proustian proximity is accounted for in Malcolm Bowie’s reading showing Proust among the stars, revealing the infinite dimension of the elusiveness of the Proustian ‘self ’: All his heavenly configurations are poised undecidably between coherence and dispersal, just as the real nebulae themselves may contain powerful intimations of structure (here a crab, there a spiral) while continuing to impress us by their sheer nebulosity. Problems posed in these terms can have and need have no solutions. The Proustian imaginist leads a nomadic life. He is at home inside his comet-tail of images...28

Like this comet that f lies but never fades, A la recherche du temps perdu is a book of passages. Passages, that is, in all senses of the word. The passage of Time, to be sure, is the first meaning one hears in this context. After all, La Recherche is but a book made of, and by, a writing Time passing and having passed. Stranger yet, this book also tells a story where characters and places seem at times to only have in common a nomadic quality, with people of all kinds, visitors and exiled alike, roaming and wandering in a world where no matter is ever definitely settled, where no place seems to ever stay still. And within the very fabric of the text, the act of writing itself appears to be particularly uncertain, made of fragments, digressions, scenes, episodes — all sorts of passages. All this contributes to the particular strangeness of Proust’s novel, a strangeness whose double nature echoes that of the universe, both macrocosmic (the inherent conception of the whole book as an unfinished masterpiece) and microcosmic (the discrete yet fundamental detail of Vermeer’s little patch of yellow wall). Echoing the title Proust once intended for it, A la recherche du temps perdu is made of a strangeness that is also ‘intermittent’.29 It is a strangeness that comes and goes, that is not the same for all readers, at all times. As its writer–narrator claims both in the beginning and in the end, A la recherche du temps perdu is a nocturnal book. Mysterious and beautiful, it is a summer night peopled by firef lies. Alone, the reader is left to witness and to grasp these creatures, mesmerizing and disquieting, suddenly enf laming the darkness or remaining forever unseen. As for the following passages, they will suggest that there is indeed a strange M. Proust. With ‘M’ standing for Marcel and for Monsieur; for marvellous and for melancholic; for mediocre and for masterful. Standing for many, ‘M’ also stands for aime. For like ‘M’, strangeness likes Proust. Notes to the Preamble 1. Some of the original conference papers were given in French. They were translated into English for this volume by Caitlin Killian and Nancy Regalado with additional assistance from Lauretta Clough and Volker Schröder. 2. Simultaneity encompassing many variations, many of which are illustrated by the seminal concept of involuntary memory, especially in the pivotal passage of the Madeleine, where the subject experiences ubiquity (at once able to think of himself as here (in Paris) and there (in Combray)) and temporality (being at the same time now (a middle-age man about to find his vocation) and then (a fragile, tentative child)).

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3. It is put in just these simple, direct terms by one of Proust’s greatest scholars, Jean-Yves Tadié, in the very first line of his synthetic essay, entitled Proust (Paris: Belfond, 1983): ‘Marcel Proust est le plus grand écrivain du XXe siècle.’ 4. It is a Lieu de mémoire in the sense in which French historian Pierre Nora has conveyed: a site, realm or object where French national memory or sentiment has been ‘crystallized, symbolically embodied’. Pierre Nora, Introduction to Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. ed. by P. Nora and L. Kritzman, trans. by A. Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. xvii. 5. For Antoine Compagnon, ‘ “Marcel Proust” a acquis la reconnaissance d’une marque déposée’ [“Marcel Proust” has acquired the name recognition of a trademark]. ‘A la recherche du temps perdu de Marcel Proust’, in Les Lieux de mémoire, ed. by Pierre Nora, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–93), vol. 3, part 2 (1992), p. 965. ‘Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past’, in Nora and Kritzman (eds), Realms of Memory, p. 212. 6. Ibid., p. 236. 7. About Proust’s editions in France, we must recall that he was inducted not once but twice into the publishing pantheon of Gallimard’s ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. The first edition dates from 1954, and was produced in three volumes under the direction of Pierre Clarac and André Ferré, with a preface by André Maurois. The new edition, which now serves as the definitive reference, was published between 1987 and 1989 by a large team of experts under the general direction of Jean-Yves Tadié. It is augmented by a very profuse quantity of erudite notes and introductions, and most notably by hundreds of pages of previously unpublished material from Proust’s manuscripts and notebooks in the forms of variants and drafts. These ‘esquisses’ [sketches] are so numerous that they are about as long as the already massive novel, in fact doubling it (from more than 3,000 to over 6,000 pages); this, along with the vast critical apparatus, increased the new Pléiade edition of A la recherche du temps perdu by one volume, and thousands of pages. In this volume, we use this edition: A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1987–89). [i: Du côté de chez Swann, and the first part of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. ii: The second part of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs and Le Côté de Guermantes. iii: Sodome et Gomorrhe and La Prisonnière. iv. Albertine disparue and Le Temps retrouvé.] References to this edition are given by the Roman numeral of the volume, followed by the page number. 8. As for the translations, attention must be brought the English ones, an epic story of sorts, as dynamic and full of revisions as the original redaction of Proust’s work itself. The first translator was C. K. Moncrieff who began his work while Proust was still alive (Swann’s Way appeared in 1922). As Moncrieff died before completing the last volume of Remembrance of Things Past, Frederick Blossom finished the endeavour. After a corrected French version appeared, Terence Kilmartin published a revision of the Moncrieff translation, and in the wake of the new Pléiade edition D. J. Enright offered further corrections and a new title, with In Search of Lost Time. Most recently (2002), Penguin Books published a new translation in an edition directed by Christopher Prendergast overseeing a team of seven translators (one for each volume of La Recherche). To be sure, in a book on Proust’s strangeness it would have seemed fit to use this fresher, sometimes bold translation of his work. But, despite its f laws and shortcomings, the Moncrieff translation is still by far the most familiar to the English readership, a familiarity which may highlight by contrast the oddities we wish to present here. This is therefore the edition which will be used here: Remembrance of Things Past, trans. by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (except Time Regained, trans. by A. Mayor), 3 vols (New York: Vintage Books, 1982) [1: Swann’s Way and Within a Budding Grove. 2: The Guermantes Way and Cities of the Plain. 3: The Captive, The Fugitive and Time Regained]. References to this edition are given by the Arabic numeral of the volume, followed by the page number. 9. Proust, Letter to Anna de Noailles, in Correspondance (1880–1922), 21 vols (Paris: Plon, 1973–93), vol. xii (1913), p. 72. 10. Le Temps perdu (soon to morph into Du côté de chez Swann) and Le Temps retrouvé — or at least the final part of the final volume, often referred to as ‘L’Adoration perpétuelle’, which narrates the revelation of the writer’s vocation and the advent of the book to come — were composed around 1909–10.

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11. Albertine disparue (1925) and the amended version of Le Temps retrouvé (1927) were not proof-read by Proust who died only a few days after the definitive version of La Prisonnière appeared in 1922. 12. From variety pop hit Dave’s ‘Du côté de chez Swann’ (1978) to comeback ‘pop punk’ star Plastic Bertrand’s new album ‘Edgar Allan Proust’ (2007). 13. See the laborious series, drawn à la Tintin, that Stéphane Heuet began to publish with Delcourt in 1998 (now available in English translation). 14. Roland Petit’s Proust ou les intermittences du cœur (2 acts, 13 tableaux on music by Beethoven, Debussy, Fauré, Franck, Hahn, Saint-Saëns, and Wagner) opened in Paris in 1988, and entered into the repertoire of the Paris Opéra Ballet in 1990. It was performed as recently as 2007, and will be staged again at the Palais Garnier in 2009. 15. Of course, the most famous stage adaptation may come from Harold Pinter’s Proust Screenplay (written in 1972 and published in 1977) which was never filmed, but was adapted for the radio (BBC, 1995), and more recently for the stage (by Pinter and Di Travis), being produced at the National Theatre (London) in 2000–01. In France, theatres produce almost yearly adaptations of Proust’s works or words, with actors simply reading some of his writings, or in more elaborate productions such as in Délivrez Proust! by Philippe Honoré (2006). 16. Proust has always resisted film. The author himself claimed to have never been in a movie theatre, let alone seen a film (Correspondance, vol. xix (1920), p. 76). And the novel seems to reject cinema as well. In the overture, the drafts show that Proust properly erased cinema from his poetics, substituting the word ‘cinématographe’ with the more artisanal ‘kinétoscope’ to sustain an analogy for nocturnal disorientation. (i, 7; 1, 7). Not content to reject cinema from within, the novel also opposes it metatextually, posing the greatest challenges to its adaptations on the silver screen. The exhaustive adaptations planned for years by Luchino Visconti and Joseph Losey (on the screenplay by Pinter) never saw the light of day. Only loose, partial adaptations could be completed, with more or less fortune: Volker Schlöndorff ’s obsolescent Un amour de Swann (1984), Raoul Ruiz’s magically artisanal, visually stunning Le Temps retrouvé (1999), and Chantal Akerman’s intimately oppressive La Captive (2001). See Martine Beugnet and Marion Schmid, Proust at the Movies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 17. There is only space here to mention in passing Proust’s seminal presence in Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946) (with Lauren Bacall musing on the potential resemblance between Proust and Humphrey Bogart); an almost supporting role in Little Miss Sunshine ( J. Dayton and V. Faris, 2006) where the suicidal main character agonizes about life in general, and being the ‘number two’ American Proust scholar in particular; a guest appearance in the major American crime drama series Homicide: Life on the Street (‘Something Sacred — part 2’, Season 6, Episode 13, NBC, 1997), as the reading of choice (on the job) of one of the lead detectives; a key reference in a breakthrough for mob leader Tony Soprano during a psychotherapy session (The Sopranos, ‘Fortunate Son’, Season 3, Episode 4, HBO, 2001); and, of course, the famously impossible challenge posed in a mock game show by the satirical Monty Python’s Flying Circus (‘The AllEngland Summarize Proust Competition’ (in 15 seconds or less), Season 3, Episode 31, BBC, 1972). 18. A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs won the Prix Goncourt in 1919, against war veteran Roland Dorgelès’s testimony, Les Croix de Bois. This provoked outrage from patriots, while the socialist daily L’Humanité protested against giving the prize (supposedly to encourage new writers) to a middle-aged man, with the headline ‘Place aux vieux!’ [‘Here come the Ancients!’]. Dorgelès still sold many more copies than Proust. 19. Mercure de France, 15 January 1914. 20. Paul Souday, ‘Du côté de chez Swann’, Le Temps, 10 December 1913. 21. Proust, Letter to Jean Cocteau, Correspondance, vol. xviii (1919), p. 267–68. 22. Very often in his letters, Proust himself confuses his own self with the ‘I’ of his narrator. See for instance Correspondance, vol. xii (1913), p. 204 and vol. xiii (1914), p. 99. 23. Reynaldo Hahn to Madame Duglé, in Proust, Correspondance, vol. xii (1913), p. 333. 24. Antoine Compagnon, Proust entre deux siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1989), p. 5. 25. Antoine Compagnon, ‘Un classique moderne’, Le Siècle de Proust. Magazine Littéraire, Hors Série no. 2 (2000), p. 7.

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26. Proust, Letter to Zadig, Correspondance, vol. x (1911), p. 373. 27. On Proust’s ethical and aesthetical conceptions of the human face, see André Benhaïm, Panim. Visages de Proust (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2006). 28. Bowie, Proust Among the Stars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 2. 29. Proust had thought of naming his book ‘Les Intermittences du cœur’.

C h ap t er 1

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The Disquieting Strangeness of Marcel Proust David Ellison, University of Miami Heidegger and Proust In his 1946 essay entitled ‘Brief über den “Humanismus” ’ (translated into English as ‘Letter on Humanism’), Martin Heidegger answers questions that his French colleague Jean Beaufret had asked him, including one particular question which constitutes the philosophical core of the ‘Letter’: ‘Comment redonner un sens au mot “humanisme”?’1 Implicit in this formulation, as Heidegger reads it, are two fundamental ideas: 1. that the word ‘humanism’ has a meaning and a conceptual value worthy of preservation; 2. that this word, or concept, through a certain evolution in the history of ideas, has lost its original meaning. Whatever one might think of Heidegger’s essay — with its somewhat convoluted argument based upon a reinterpretation of the vexed transition from Greek to Roman thought, and its poetic style which displeased many philosophers — there remains, at its foundation, something of interest to the interpretive reader of texts, namely, its dialogical character: the essay would not have existed without Beaufret’s questions. Heidegger’s lengthy answer is no simple embroidery on his French interlocutor’s theoretical and methodological concerns, but rather an attempt to bring into the light the philosophical potential underlying Beaufret’s inquiry. The reader of Heidegger will not have forgotten that, towards the end of the essay, when the topic of ethics is broached — Beaufret had written: ‘Ce que je cherche à faire, depuis longtemps déjà, c’est préciser le rapport de l’ontologie avec une éthique possible’ (‘Letter’, 231) — Heidegger, in order to demonstrate that ontology must precede any possible ethics, has recourse to etymology. He affirms that the Greek word ethos means ‘dwelling’, or more precisely, ‘the open region in which man dwells’ (‘Letter’, 233). In the same way that, with the passage of time and the fall of primordial thought outside itself into the narrow and purely technical domain of philosophy, there is, according to Heidegger, a loss of conceptual acuity and an intellectual decline; in the same way, in the evolution towards the creation of a sub-field within philosophy called ‘ethics’, there is also considerable loss — loss of the initial meaning of the word ethos, whose resonance one finds in a rereading, or corrected reading, of one of Heraclitus’s fragments, ethos anthropoi daimon. This

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fragment, traditionally translated as ‘A man’s character is his daimon’, becomes, in Heidegger’s reinterpretation: ‘The (familiar) abode is for man the open region for the presencing of god (the unfamiliar one)’ (‘Letter’, 233–34). In the Heideggerian ref lection on Being, it is thus evident that the question ‘Who are we?’ implies a second, no less important question: ‘Where are we?’ — i.e., ‘What is, and where is, our dwelling?’ The question of one’s dwelling or abode, of one’s place in the historical itinerary of thought, emerges when the thinker reverses course and moves back through time to discover, underneath the accumulations and accretions of past ref lection, the first meaning, surprising in its simplicity and familiarity, of the term ethos. We should not forget that, for Heidegger, Being is difficult of access not because it is situated far from us, but rather that, in a paradoxical sense, it is too close to be recognized or apprehended easily: ‘Das Sein ist das Nächste’ (‘Brief ’, 331). If I have allowed myself this short excursion into Heideggerian territory, it is because I think that certain ideas I have highlighted here resonate with and emerge within Proust’s writings. Just as Heidegger took Jean Beaufret’s questioning seriously, in the same way, in the context of a colloquium organized around the theme ‘The Strange M. Proust’, one should also attempt to answer those questions its organizer has posed, and which, in my view, also presuppose a backwards movement through time and a certain textual labour which includes an etymological dimension and the difficulty of translation from German to French and to English.2 This textual labour has as its point of departure and its point of arrival the entire question of dwelling as such, and of the familiar in its dialectical relation with the strange and the unfamiliar. In the short description of his colloquium which was sent as a f lyer to speakers and participants before the event, André Benhaïm reminded us of the fundamental strangeness, or étrangeté, of Proust’s work — ‘a strangeness that was forgotten or occulted by public and institutional recognition’ (‘une étrangeté qui a été oubliée ou occultée par la reconnaissance publique et institutionnelle’). Therefore, to translate what I have just said about Heidegger into Proustian terms, and to respond proleptically to André Benhaïm’s question, I would say that one must move backwards through time and reach that point which lies before the accumulation of critical knowledge about A la recherche du temps perdu and before the construction of the myths that surround and obfuscate the person Marcel Proust, in order to find that initial strangeness which permeates the novel. In this return to the sources of Proustian creativity which implies an uncovering of the fundamental strangeness of Proust’s text, it seems to me that the reader necessarily inscribes him- or herself in a certain Heideggerian modality of interpretation, not only in the temporal movement of a return to origins as such, but also, more concretely, in a problematizing of the question of dwelling — an ethical question, says Heidegger, a question concerning the notion of ethos. But in the case of Proust, this inquiry must be made in relation to the movement of subjective dispossession which accompanies those moments, so numerous in the Recherche, in which one is expelled from one’s dwelling and thrown into the world, into the cold and the strangeness of a place which both resembles and does not resemble the familiar world of home. I am alluding here to a fundamental and foundational Unheimlichkeit in Proust.

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Freud and Proust To pronounce the word Unheimlichkeit (in English, ‘uncanniness’, or in the over­ abundant French translation, inquiétante étrangeté, ‘disquieting strangeness’), is to refer, of course, to Freud and to his 1919 essay entitled ‘Das Unheimliche’.3 I am therefore obliged to take a second excursion, this time in the territory of psychoanalytical theory, before confronting, more or less head-on, the fictional landscape of Marcel Proust. The essay ‘Das Unheimliche’, which for a long time was considered to be an interesting and somewhat curious pendant to the brilliant revolutionary text Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), began to engage the interest of literary critics and theoreticians in the 1970s and 1980s. Without entering into the detail of the debates which arose from the close reading of Freud’s short meditation on the uncanny, I will simply mention here the important studies of Hélène Cixous (‘Fiction and its Phantoms’) and of Sarah Kofman (The Childhood of Art).4 Both Cixous and Kofman were interested in the jerky pace of ‘Das Unheimliche’, and both critics brought to light the ‘symptomatic’ qualities of an essay in which form and substance mirrored (uncannily) the intellectual uncertainty and anxiety of its author, precisely where Freud was analysing these same themes in a variety of texts he chose to illustrate the phenomenon of Unheimlichkeit, especially the bizarre and unsettling tale of E. T. A. Hoffmann entitled ‘The Sandman’ (1817). For the modest purposes of my own essay, I would like to limit myself to two aspects of ‘Das Unheimliche’: 1. the importance of the return to etymological sources and to the semantic field of the words heimlich and unheimlich in the first part of the essay, a meditation on language and its connotative potential which unleashes Freud’s interpretive reading; 2. the question of translation considered both in its literal sense (how does one ‘render’ a word or a text originally written in one language in another) and in its etymological sense (traducere, translate, übertragen: to carry or transport something, for example, a meaning, from one place to another; traverse a territory, go beyond established borders to create meaning where that meaning did not yet exist). In the development that follows, I shall leave aside the question of territory and territoriality as such, along with the problem of intellectual fields, and the ways in which literary criticism and psychoanalysis divide the domain of Unheimlichkeit among themselves: I have studied this elsewhere, and it is ein weites Feld.5 Although Freud’s essay is complicated and tortuous in its analytical meanderings, its initial thematic statement could hardly be clearer: ‘the uncanny is that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar. How this can be — under what conditions the familiar can become uncanny and frightening — will emerge in what follows’ (The Uncanny, 124). Especially interesting in the formulation of this theme is its temporal or narrative dimension. At first, there was the familiar (the dwelling place, das Heim). But this familiar place, through a historical movement that lends itself to narration, becomes its opposite (the unfamiliar or disquieting, das Unheimliche). One moves, therefore, from domestic cosiness towards that which is hidden, secret, terrifying, according to the logic of translation, or Übertragung. In the conclusion to the first section of his essay, Freud writes: ‘Heimlich thus becomes increasingly ambivalent, until it

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finally merges with its antonym unheimlich’ (The Uncanny, 134). That which is truly disquieting inhabits language before emerging in literary texts through terrifying effects (like those of E. T. A. Hoffmann, with his Doppelgänger, his automata, and his mad protagonists). It is disquieting that a word can signify its opposite, even if this fact of signifying-its-opposite comes to the surface only in the differential spacing of narration. We find this very movement in the Proustian context in the passage from ‘Noms de pays: le nom’ to ‘Noms de pays: le pays’, whereby an act of referential veri­ fication by the protagonist shows that the same signifier, Balbec, can point both to a mythical territory lost in the fog of the Finistère and to a quite prosaic place where one finds the intersection of two tramway lines.6 But for Proust, this kind of play with opposites, with linguistic and geographical antonyms, has considerable (or extensive) consequences: if one allows the signifier ‘Balbec’ to resonate freely, one can ascertain a curious acoustic resemblance between the imaginary Norman site of the Recherche and the real ancient city of BAALBEK, now situated in Lebanon, whose name comes from Baal, Phoenician god of the sun (the Greeks called this city Heliopolis, city of the sun). Here one finds a development which is strangely parallel to that which Freud evokes in his ref lections on the movement from the familiar to the non-familiar. In Proust’s case, there is an amalgam between the exotic Orient (Baal, god of the rising sun) and of the Occident (the Finistère, the setting sun, the limit of European civilization, which seems familiar to us, but can one speak of familiarity if a word like ‘Balbec’ can point to opposing referents?). Thus narrative movement, whether Proustian or Freudian, seems inscribed in the pathway which leads from the known to the unknown, from domestic to foreign territory. One should add that in the case of the Recherche, the narrative leads initially from a known area (the Paris of the Champs-Elysées and of Gilberte) to an unknown and disquieting Normandy (Balbec, the Grand-Hôtel, Albertine and her friends); but the story later leads its reader towards the narrator’s meditations on his room at the Grand-Hôtel, a place that is, at first, disquieting (with its ceiling too low, its furniture askew), then familiar, thanks to the anaesthetizing force of Habit.7 What Proust adds to Freud, therefore, is a ref lection, via John Ruskin, on what one could call the labour of Habit.8 This labour opens up a narration which moves in the opposite direction to that proposed by Freud in his analysis of Unheimlichkeit: namely, a narration of the passage from the foreign and the disquieting to the domestic and the familiar. But herein lies a problem, which I shall develop brief ly in a focused reading of the conclusion of the Venice episode in Albertine disparue: can one affirm that Proust is merely adding to Freud’s insights while remaining within the territory that Freud explored? Does this voyage en sens inverse constitute in itself Proust’s only contribution or minor correction to the pathway traced by the psychoanalyst between das Heimliche and das Unheimliche? Or could one say that this narrative scheme, even in its complicated Proustian form, is a vast simplification, even an error of interpretation, and that, in fact, the unheimlich as such, as disquieting strangeness, inhabits the heimlich from within? In other words, perhaps the familiarity of the external world is not a factual state, but a construction elaborated by the thinking

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subject whose function is to mask the fundamental Unheimlichkeit in which he or she lives, the dispossessing and disquieting strangeness which, from the beginning of all possible narration, will have dislocated the universe of things and people, providing them with their (strange) initial movement, their state of dizziness and of chaos that pre-exists narrative order as such. The reader of Proust will have recognized, in my paraphrase, a sentence from the sixth paragraph of the novel: ‘Peut-être l’immobilité des choses autour de nous leur est-elle imposée par notre certitude que ce sont elles et non pas d’autres, par l’immobilité de notre pensée en face d’elles.’ [‘Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them.’] (i, 6; 1, 6) This Overture of the Recherche is truly strange: an Overture in which a man who sleeps imagines not only that he is a church or a string quartet — that is, things or aesthetic objects — but even an abstraction: ‘la rivalité de François Ier et de Charles Quint’ [‘the rivalry between François I and Charles V’] (i, 4; 1, 3). The novel begins strangely, perhaps because strangeness is not simply or essentially part of a larger developmental process, but rather the very locus of the text and of its performativity. In order to see the unfolding or textualization of Unheimlichkeit, of disquieting strangeness in its Proustian specificity, I turn now to the examination of certain key moments of the Venice episode (iv, 202–35). Proust and Venice Although it is difficult to reduce the notion of the uncanny to one clearly defined meaning or precise definition, one of the aspects of this phenomenon which has struck readers of both Hoffmann and Freud is the subtle play between resemblance and dissemblance, similarity and difference, which characterizes it. What is striking or bizarre in the figure of the Doppelgänger? That it is both similar to and different from its model. If the Doppelgänger resembled its model completely, it would be the model and would no longer surprise or dismay us; if it were clearly different from its model, it would be other from the model and, from the beginning, would have no power to disquiet us. Resemblance-and-Difference strangely coupled produces the shock effect which makes it impossible for the observer to decide between resemblance and difference: the territory of Unheimlichkeit is thus the domain of the undecidable. And also of a certain f luid or f loating beauty. The reader of Proust will have recognized, from the aforementioned traits, the very foundation of the Venice episode — a much-differed, fragmented narrative block which is constructed on a number of avant-textes, not only from Contre SainteBeuve, but also from Jean Santeuil.9 The Venice of Proust is not to be confused with the city imagined by so many writers, artists, and musicians, for whom the Queen of the Adriatic represents the exotic other. For Proust, Venice is both same and other, and therein resides its charm, in the original sense of that word, in the sense of magic power. The reader of Proust will remember the first sentence of the episode: Ma mère m’avait emmené passer quelques semaines à Venise et — comme il peut y avoir de la beauté, aussi bien que dans les choses les plus humbles, dans les plus précieuses — j’y goûtais des impressions analogues à celles que j’avais

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si souvent ressenties autrefois à Combray, mais transposées selon un mode entièrement différent et plus riche. (iv, 202) [My mother had taken me to spend a few weeks [in Venice], and — as beauty may exist in the most precious as well as in the humblest things — I received there impressions analogous to those which I had felt so often in the past at Combray, but transposed into a wholly different and far richer key.] (3, 637)

The first part of the episode (iv, 202–09) is constructed musically, as a series of variations on this fundamental theme of analogical resemblance between Venice and Combray, in which there is a striking repetition of the word comme. As we see Venice for the first time through the eyes of the narrator, we see Combray again: Combray reappears as Venice appears. And in the same way that the first pages of Combray are evocations of the rooms that will be progressively inhabited by the novel’s protagonist, in the same way the first part of ‘Venice’ is a series of dwellings viewed from the exterior by the protagonist as he takes gondola rides through the Italian city. What adds a sense of mystery to the episode as a whole is what one could call the permeability of inside and outside. On the one hand, through the rich intertext of the Arabian Nights, we have the theme of a mystery to be discovered, a veil to be lifted — that is, of the Orient in its exoticism: Ma gondole suivait les petits canaux; comme la main mystérieuse d’un génie qui m’aurait conduit dans les détours de cette ville d’Orient, ils semblaient, au fur et à mesure que j’avançais, me pratiquer un chemin, creusé en plein cœur d’un quartier qu’ils divisaient en écartant à peine, d’un mince sillon arbitrairement tracé, les hautes maisons aux petites fenêtres mauresques; et comme si le guide magique eût tenu une bougie entre ses doigts et m’eût éclairé au passage, ils faisaient briller devant eux un rayon de soleil à qui ils frayaient sa route. (iv, 206) [My gondola followed the course of the small canals; like the mysterious hand of a genie leading me through the maze of this oriental city, they seemed, as I advanced, to be cutting a path for me through the heart of a crowded quarter which they bisected, barely parting, with a slender furrow arbitrarily traced, the tall houses with their tiny Moorish windows; and as though the magic guide had been holding a candle in his hand and were lighting the way for me, they kept casting ahead of them a ray of sunlight for which they cleared the route.] (3, 641)

On the other hand, however, one page later, more mysterious than the somewhat facile Orientalist exoticism, beyond a simple sense of mystery considered as lieu autre, and in the domain of Unheimlichkeit, there is an analogy between the inside and the outside, an interpenetration between exteriority and interiority: J’avais l’impression, qu’augmentait encore mon désir, de ne pas être dehors, mais d’entrer de plus en plus au fond de quelque chose de secret, car à chaque fois je trouvais quelque chose de nouveau qui venait se placer de l’un ou de l’autre côté de moi, petit monument ou campo imprévu, gardant l’air étonné des belles choses qu’on voit pour la première fois et dont on ne comprend pas encore bien la destination et l’utilité. (iv, 207) [I had the impression that my desire was growing stronger still, to not be outside, but to go ever deeper into something secret, because each time I

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David Ellison found something new that came to take place on either side of myself, a small monument or an unforeseen campo, keeping the surprised look because of things one sees for the first time, and the destination and utility of which are not yet quite well understood.] (3, 642)

In other words, here we have a repetition of the initial situation of the novel’s Overture, where the narrator, voyager without baggage and without identity, in a state of radical uncertainty, experiences the deepening and hollowing-out of space, before things can assume their proper place and differentiate according to the logic of ‘destination’ and ‘utilité’. The theme of radical uncertainty, which is expressed either by the permeability of the self to external impressions, or by a generalized f loating of things between inside and outside, self and other, can be found in the final pages of the episode (after the intercalated fragment of the conversation between Monsieur de Norpois, Mme de Villeparisis, and Prince Foggi, pp. 209–18), which stages the dialectic of memory and forgetfulness in relation to Albertine and the narrator’s anguish as he faces his imminent departure from Venice (pp. 218–35). Once again, this textual block begins with a thematic statement upon which numerous variations will unfold in the following pages: Parfois au crépuscule en rentrant à l’hôtel je sentais que l’Albertine d’autrefois, invisible à moi-même, était pourtant enfermée au fond de moi comme aux ‘plombs’ d’une Venise intérieure, dont parfois un incident faisait glisser le couvercle durci jusqu’à me donner une ouverture sur ce passé. (iv, 218) [Sometimes at dusk as I returned to the hotel I felt that the Albertine of long ago, invisible to my eyes, was nevertheless enclosed within me as in the Piombi of an inner Venice, the tight lid of which some incident occasionally lifted to give me a glimpse of that past.] (3, 654)

The pages that follow alternate between the narrator’s obsessive meditation on the life of an Albertine who is, in fact, already dead (despite a brief and uncanny ‘resuscitation’ through an error in reading), and lovely descriptions of palaces, churches, and museums in Venice and environs (notably the baptistery of SaintMark’s and the Virtues and Vices of Giotto at the Arena Chapel in Padua). This constant coming and going between inside and outside, between a psychological examination of the phenomenon of forgetfulness and an opening upon the visual elegance of a city, forms the narrative rhythm of this portion of the text. The hesitation between a mental world characterized by an almost insane obsessiveness, on the one hand, and an enchanted exterior reality bathed in the watery haze of the sun is the very rhythm of Unheimlichkeit. (In this context, it would be interesting to compare such alternations in the Venice episode of the Recherche with strangely similar oppositional patterns in Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’, where the protagonist lives through moments of sanity characterized by the lucidity of his reasoning and the ease of his insertion into good society, followed by moments in which, left to his own devices in solitude and isolation, he succumbs to depression, then folly). At the risk of succumbing myself to a perhaps excessively subtle subtlety, as I reach my conclusion, I would like to come back to a theme I mentioned in passing earlier, but without developing it: namely, that of the textual location of the uncanny in

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Proust, in its relation to narrative movement. The question I would like to pose for final ref lection can be formulated as follows: can one say that the uncanny (das Unheimliche, l’inquiétante étrangeté) as such can be enclosed or framed narratively, even in a narrative that functions as an alternation between sanity and madness, sun and water, triumphant exterior reality and abject interiority? Or, on the contrary, could one say that Proustian uncanniness is something else — perhaps even that thing that shocks reason, that thing which, in resisting narrative enclosure, causes textual movement to come to an abrupt and very strange stop. I see the possibility of such an interpretation of Unheimlichkeit in its specifically Proustian guise in the conclusion of the episode, where the protagonist hesitates in deciding between two options: either remain in Venice (to pursue the ever elusive chambermaid of the baronne Putbus), or depart (to join his mother in the train). It seems to me that the strangest moment of the episode, the moment in which the narrator is himself obliged to use the word étrange, is that of the emergence of Unheimlichkeit as interruption of the narrative f low. I shall cite the passage in question respecting its complexity, its length, and its contextual location. We find ourselves at the moment at which, with his mother nearing the train station, the protagonist listens to a musician who is singing Sole mio (a strange and out-of-place Neapolitan song, a song of the mezzogiorno which does not belong, in any sense, to the physical or spiritual geography of the Adriatic): Le soleil continuait de descendre. Ma mère ne devait pas être maintenant bien loin de la gare. Bientôt elle serait partie, je serais seul à Venise, seul avec la tristesse de la savoir peinée par moi, et sans sa présence pour me consoler. L’heure du train s’avançait. Ma solitude irrévocable était si prochaine qu’elle me semblait déjà commencée et totale. Car je me sentais seul, les choses m’étaient devenues étrangères, je n’avais plus assez de calme pour sortir de mon cœur palpitant et introduire en elles quelque stabilité. La ville que j’avais devant moi avait cessé d’être Venise. Sa personnalité, son nom, me paraissaient comme des fictions mensongères, que je n’avais plus le courage d’inculquer aux pierres. Les palais m’apparaissaient réduits à leurs simples parties et quantités de marbre pareilles à toutes autres, et l’eau comme une combinaison d’hydrogène et d’azote, éternelle, aveugle, antérieure et extérieure à Venise, ignorante des doges et de Turner. Et cependant ce lieu quelconque était étrange comme un lieu où on vient d’arriver, qui ne vous connaît pas encore, comme un lieu d’où l’on est parti et qui vous a déjà oublié. (iv, 231; my emphasis) [The sun continued to sink. My mother must be nearing the station. Soon, she would be gone, and I should be alone in Venice, alone with the misery of knowing that I had distressed her, and without her presence to comfort me. The hour of the train’s departure was approaching. My irrevocable solitude was so near at hand that it seemed to me to have begun already and to be complete. For I felt myself to be alone; things had become alien to me; I no longer had calm enough to break out of my throbbing heart and introduce into them a measure of stability. The town that I saw before me had ceased to be Venice. Its personality, its name, seemed to me to be mendacious fictions which I no longer had the courage to impress upon its stones. I saw the palaces reduced to their basic elements, lifeless heaps of marble with nothing to choose between them, and the water as a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, eternal, blind, anterior and exterior to Venice, oblivious of Doges or of Turner. And yet this

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The moment of emergence of the uncanny is thus a moment of interruption and of destruction of appearances in which cultural values and points of reference crumble: this is a Venice before Giotto, Turner, Ruskin, Thomas Mann and all the others, but also (and this is the radical dimension of Unheimlichkeit) before the name ‘Venice’ itself, the name which designates the ancient stones we call, for the sake of convenience, ‘Venice’. The reader of Proust apprehends l’inquiétante étrangeté as a moment of unveiling in which he or she discovers the nothingness behind the ‘fictions mensongères’ on which Venice is constructed. This radical strangeness, which has nothing to do with simple exoticism, is the very locus of solitude, a place that reminds all individuals, however sociable they might aspire to be, that they are fundamentally, and irremediably, alone. Places do not remember us; they forget us as soon as we depart. In an important sense, the moment in which uncanniness emerges, in an interruption of the narrative f low, is the moment of discovery, or of rediscovery, of the thinking subject’s solitude. When the poet of the ‘Tableaux parisiens’ sees the fascinating woman passing by him in the street (la passante), or the little old ladies (les petites vieilles), or the strange multiplication of the seven old men (les sept vieillards), he has the disquieting and dispossessing experience of Unheimlichkeit: he freezes, in an instant of deafness and blindness to his immediate environment; and in that instant, which escapes the laws of quotidian temporality, he is brought back to his essential solitude; he is alone within the crowd that envelops him.10 The Venice episode does not conclude, however, in an atmosphere of dejection or melancholy. Narrative inevitability returns to the fore: the protagonist leaves the disenchanted city of Venice and joins his mother in the train, in that mechanical mode of transport that so perfectly symbolizes narrative movement per se. The reader is compelled to appreciate the return of a comic tone at this juncture, especially in the description of the protagonist’s rather undignified f light: Mais enfin, d’antres plus obscurs que ceux d’où s’élance la comète qu’on peut prédire — grâce à l’insoupçonnable puissance défensive de l’habitude invétérée, grâce aux réserves cachées que par une impulsion subite elle jette au dernier moment dans la mêlée — , mon action surgit enfin: je pris mes jambes à mon cou et j’arrivai, les portières déjà fermées, mais à temps pour retrouver ma mère rouge d’émotion, se retenant pour ne pas pleurer, car elle croyait que je ne viendrais pas. (iv, 233–34) [But at last, from caverns darker than that from which f lashes the comet which we can predict — thanks to the unsuspected defensive force of inveterate habit, thanks to the hidden reserves which by a sudden impulse it hurls at the last moment into the fray — my will to action arose at last; I set off in hot haste and arrived, when the carriage doors were already shut, but in time to find my mother f lushed with emotion and the effort to restrain her tears, for she thought that I was not coming.] (3, 670)

Narrative movement becomes possible once again when the protagonist returns to

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his preference for sociability over isolation, for verisimilitude and the predictability of narrative lawfulness over the strangeness that seizes us when we are no longer protected by our defensive strategies — those of enlightened reason as well as of anaesthetizing habit. It is perhaps no coincidence that the episode as a whole concludes on the resolution of an enigma: the deciphering of the telegram that the protagonist believed to be sent by Albertine, but which turns out to be from Gilberte. It is reassuring to learn that the dead can no longer write; one is tempted, with this knowledge, to breathe a sigh of relief and move on. The problem, however, is that the dead live in us, and that our contact with the world is not always reassuring, especially before we have learned to insert ourselves into the established social order and allow ourselves to be carried along in the story that others write of our existence. The text (and life) continues, with or without us. The resumption of the train’s forward movement represents not the victory of a certain narration over the threat of the uncanny, but rather the forgetfulness into which all stories must relegate the experience of Unheimlichkeit in order to continue. Notes to Chapter 1 1. Martin Heidegger, ‘Brief über den “Humanismus” ’, Gesamtausgabe I. Abteilung: Veröffentlichte Schriften 1914–1970, ed. by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 90 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), ix: Wegmarken, 313–64 (p. 315). In the present paper I shall also refer to the English translation: Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Basic Writings, ed. by David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 193–242 (p. 195). Abbreviations: ‘Brief ’ for the original German text; ‘Letter’ for the English translation. 2. I refer here to the colloquium ‘L’Etrange M. Proust / The Strange M. Proust’ organized by André Benhaïm which took place at Princeton University, 21–22 April 2006. The present essay originated in that colloquium. 3. Sigmund Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’, Gesammelte Werke Chronologisch Geordnet, ed. by Anna Freud et al. (London: Imago, 1947), xii (1917–20), 227–68. In the present paper I shall refer to the 2003 English translation by David McLintock as contained in: Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. by David McLintock and intro. by Hugh Haughton (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 123–62. 4. See Hélène Cixous, ‘Fiction and its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The ‘Uncanny’)’, New Literary History, 7 (Spring 1976), 525–48; and Sarah Kofman, The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freud’s Aesthetics, trans. by Winifred Woodhull (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). See also my own detailed reading of ‘Das Unheimliche’, which takes into account the contributions of Cixous and Kofman, in the third chapter of David Ellison, Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature: From the Sublime to the Uncanny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 52–84. 5. See pp. 53–58 of Ellison, Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature. 6. The episode in which the place name ‘Balbec’ is emptied of its poetic charm is to be found at the beginning of the second section of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, in which the protagonist leaves the familiar ground of Paris and travels to the foreign territory of Normandy. See A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, in A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié and others, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard–Pléiade, 1987–89), ii (1988), 3–21. All further references to the Recherche in the present essay will be to the 1987–89 Pléiade edition. 7. See the opening section of ‘Noms de pays: le pays’ in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, in which the narrator remarks upon his initial sense of alienation in a room which, only much later, can become ‘his own’: ‘C’est notre attention qui met des objets dans une chambre, et l’habitude qui les en retire et nous y fait de la place. De la place, il n’y en avait pas pour moi dans ma chambre de Balbec (mienne de nom seulement), elle était pleine de choses qui ne me connaissaient pas’

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(ii, 27) [‘It is our noticing them that puts things in a room, our growing used to them that takes them away again and clears a space for us. Space there was none for me in my bedroom (mine in name only) at Balbec; it was full of things which did not know me’] (1,717). 8. For an analysis of the relation between John Ruskin’s concept of ‘custom’ and Proust’s complex variations on the theme of habit (habitude), see David Ellison, The Reading of Proust (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 52–55. 9. For a detailed study of the ways in which Proust incorporated early fragments of his writings into the definitive Venice episode, see David Ellison, ‘Proust’s “Venice”: The Reinscription of Textual Sources’, Style, 22: 3 (Autumn 1988), 432–49. For an excellent introduction to the theory of critique génétique, including a rigorous critical examination of the term avant-texte, see Almuth Grésillon, Eléments de critique génétique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994). 10. See the three poems by Charles Baudelaire, ‘A une passante’, ‘Les Petites Vieilles’, and ‘Les Sept Vieillards’ in the ‘Tableaux parisiens’ section of Les Fleurs du Mal, ed. by John E. Jackson (Paris: Classiques de poche, 1999), pp. 145, 141–44, and 139–41.

C h ap t er 2

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The Formalist, the Spider, and the Phenomenologist Proust in the Magic Mirror of the Twentieth Century Anne Simon, CNRS/Université Paris-3 In the mirror that ref lects his image, the drunk narrator of Le Côté de Guermantes perceives ‘un homme spécial’ [‘a special kind of man’], un ‘buveur [...] hideux, inconnu, qui [le] regardait’ [‘a drinker, hideous stranger staring at [him]’] and who is none other than his ‘moi affreux’ [‘hideous self ’] (ii, 469; 2, 174). The ‘sadness’ that f lows from this vision for the narrator comes perhaps less from the discovery of this exteriorized abjection than from the realization that he will surely never again meet ‘this stranger’, as negative as he is, who is none other than himself — or at least a part of himself. Mirror, mirror on the wall, tell me who is the strangest of them all — my ref lection, or I who do not recognize myself in my own ref lection. Proust thus includes, in the heart of his novel, a scene of misrecognition or even ‘impossible ressemblance’1 where the narrator finds himself abject and yet regrets to see this strange aspect (literally ‘outside of himself ’, because it is precisely a ref lection or a projected image) of his personality slip away forever. More positively, in Le Temps retrouvé, the narrator realizes, at the very moment when his vocation of writer is revealed, that time is running out and that he has a ‘rendez-vous urgent, capital, avec [lui-même]’ [‘an urgent, a supremely important appointment with [himself ]’] (iv, 564; 3, 1035). The self is thus mentioned several times as that which has escaped, and which is found or built only through introspection and writing. The scriptural practice, well understood by Roland Barthes, is therefore the only way for Proust to not simply accede to the self but rather to create a self that did not exist before this construction, before, literally, this undertaking, this mise en œuvre. This plasticity of personality, that Proust inserts in this era of suspicion deciphered by Nathalie Sarraute, joins a more general lability of the relationship to the world and to truth, which would explain the surprising plasticity of the philosophical reception of Proust in France. My thesis is that this plasticity is not simply due to the brilliant side of Proust, or to the universal side of his work. Other talented writers have not led to such an infatuation by twentieth-century thinkers and philosophers, and this despite the fact that his work is largely anchored in his century — genius and historicity

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are not opposed. This plasticity is deeper because it is in a sense programmed by A la recherche du temps perdu, which from its title announces the idea of a quest as a movement in act, a quest that obviously touches on the internal dialectic of the self, pulled between familiarity and strangeness, knowledge of self and misknowledge of self. The hermeneutic malleability of La Recherche is not only programmed from a thematic point of view or from the point of view of the ‘contents’: it is also by its style, by the indetermination of the voices responsible for the speech, by the narrative construction of the work. From this perspective, it is not unimportant that words derived from plastikos in Greek relate to creation and imagination.2 I am therefore using the idea of plasticity on two levels here: that of its reception by philosophers, and that of the philosopher (more than philosophy) within the work of Proust. We can also question this term, plasticity: it is used by certain researchers in neurobiology,3 notably to underscore the adaptable character of our brains, programmed to transform given life’s experiences. I have consequently decided to use it to highlight two paradoxes: on one hand, in order to suggest how much La Recherche is fictively anchored in the body — in the f lesh of a subject who writes in first person and who is transformed over time — and, on the other hand, to evoke the malleable character of the Proustian text that the author, nevertheless, explicitly compares to a dogmatic work in a famous letter to Jacques Rivière. In the first section I will focus on the different types of philosophical reactions Proust’s work received, that served for a number of authors as experiences of thought, or as models constructed by them a posteriori — and there is nothing illegitimate in this procedure, on the contrary. In fact, I hear this term, ‘model’,4 not in the sense of an author of reference, but rather as the author having created a work where the fundamental structures can serve as the elaboration of a different way of thinking. In the second part I will examine the truly literary reasons for the philosophical plasticity of La Recherche, basing my work predominately on the motif of sleep. From Complicity to Strangeness: Typology of Proust’s Philosophical Reception With some humour, let us return to the variety of receptions as reconstructions of La Recherche. It is considered the work of an idealist by Henri Bonnet, of a bourgeois snob by Sartre, a formalist by Ricardou, a writing adventurer by Riffaterre, a novelist of the automatic distributor desire to write by Barthes, a spider by Deleuze, a phenomenologist by Merleau-Ponty and Alain de Lattre, an institutional writer by Foucault, a Schopenhauerian by Anne Henry, a psychoanalyst by Kristeva, a metaphysician by Ricoeur, an experimental psychologist by Edward Bizub or a male lesbian novelist by Elisabeth Ladenson... La Recherche thus furnishes an amazingly malleable terrain to everyone, more, no doubt, than any other literary work. It is not my intent here to judge these diverse positions, summarized very superficially, especially because Proust himself, as we saw in the introduction, makes strangeness, displacement and even invention legitimate modes of knowing for a perpetually changing subject:

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Grave incertitude, toutes les fois que l’esprit se sent dépassé par lui-même; quand lui, le chercheur, est tout ensemble le pays obscur où il doit chercher et où tout son bagage ne lui sera de rien. Chercher ? pas seulement : créer. Il est en face de quelque chose qui n’est pas encore et que seul il peut réaliser, puis faire entrer dans la lumière. (i, 45) [What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time in the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not exist to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light.] (1, 49)

My objective, therefore, in displacing the questioning, is to understand how a literary work (why will be dealt with afterwards) can be integrated into a philosophical or, more globally, a theoretical ref lection. Numerous contemporary thinkers have worked on the question of the fruitful tension between literature and philosophy, and on their heterogeneous, or at least different, modes of functioning. Five opposing approaches deserve to be mentioned for the value of their example, in that they directly concern the different ways that thinkers have of reading Proust and through him integrating literary work — more than literature — in their philosophical activity. From travel companion to deformed double of oneself, not to mention stranger, alter ego or ‘fraternal foe’ ( frère ennemi), Proust’s model is so malleable that it becomes almost unrecognizable... The first attitude, that of Merleau-Ponty, who made Proust into a travel companion and La Recherche an incessantly annotated bedside table book,5 defines literature as a place of thematization and imaginary incarnation of concepts that do not exist as such outside of this thematization. The novel manages here to give form and structure to the life that the philosopher would have a tendency to analyse through abstraction and argumentation. These two approaches are thus in a permanent dialogue because they relate to two different sides, where neither one takes precedent over the other but where they feed off of one another, to search for truth: truth not of essence but of relationship, truth not of metaphysics, but situated and immanent. In both cases it is a question of confronting a completely new (inédit) language: Merleau-Ponty, like Proust, uses language less than he attacks it.6 He tries, via his readings of poetry or novels, to arrive at the creation of an oblique style capable of taking into account the complex horizons of our relationship to the real.7 Each approach, that of the novelist and that of the phenomenologist, thus use the symbolic — language — to respond to the call of the world and of things. The Proustian sign is never disassociated from a sensory (tea) or bodily support (la Berma’s or those of the musicians), simply because the symbolic itself is part of reality. The position of Paul Ricoeur may be partially opposed to the complicity and intersubjectivity that forms Merleau-Ponty’s framework. Ricoeur has a tendency to give Proust the position of stranger — held in esteem and profoundly admired, but a stranger nonetheless. Philosophy thus has the task of reducing the strangeness of literature by alchemically transforming it into a clear concept.

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Yet the writer, in writing a fable about time (or more exactly, in my opinion, a fable about temporalization) ends up joining the fundamental questionings of metaphysics. Truth, according to Ricoeur — adopting Deleuze’s thesis on the learning of signs — is less in lived life (which, nevertheless, is not rendered obsolete) than in what it leads to: a time regained by the powers of narration and a deepening of the relationship between sense and the sensory (‘le sensible’) via the ‘referential’ powers of metaphor.8 Unlike Merleau-Ponty who, to use a Proustian term, makes emulation a driving force of thought in act, Ricoeur tries in explicit fashion and according to a well-established tradition (notably Hegelian?) to base the difference between philosophy and literature on a hierarchy.9 The last chapter of La Métaphore vive, just like certain passages of Temps et Récit, contends that the literary text, which of course is first in order of appearance, cannot exhibit its specifically philosophical foundations: the literary text is therefore a stranger to itself, writing without knowing what in it is being written... Given this, it is the philosopher’s responsibility to spell out the order of reasons and to uncover what Ricoeur calls the underlying ‘concept’. To philosophy belongs the text, to literature belongs the pre-text. Philosophy here is a stranger to literature in the sense that they do not belong to the same symbolic place: philosophy is on par with, or more exactly above literature. Proust, obviously, would not agree with Ricoeur’s position; he who writes: les idées formées par l’intelligence n’ont qu’une vérité logique, une vérité possible, leur élection est arbitraire [...]. Seule l’impression, si chétive qu’en semble la matière, si insaisissable la trace, est un critérium de vérité. (iv, 458) [the ideas formed by the pure intelligence have no more than a logical, a possible truth, they are arbitrarily chosen. [...] Only the impression, however trivial its material may seem to be, however faint its traces, is a criterion of truth.] (3, 914)

We see the notion of truth, which for Proust always indicates reality — and never metaphysics. The third approach, the alter ego, could be represented by someone who never considered himself a philosopher. For a long time, perhaps until the middle of the 1970s, it was as if Roland Barthes had been reading Proust with the same optical lenses, varying little in his references to the work. He uses the novelist as a privileged example to demonstrate the death of the author or the adventure of writing, or even as a critical weapon. Barthes will thus use Proust as a safeguard to take on his adversaries during the quarrel between the nouveaux Anciens and the nouveaux Modernes10 by mentioning the imbecile Norpois-Picard executing the innovator Bergotte-Barthes (university professor Picard criticized Barthes’s Sur Racine). ‘Marcel Proust by Roland Barthes’, or Marcel Proust transformed by Roland Barthes, this seems to me to be the subject of Barthes during the years that preceded the great turnaround provoked by what lies beyond knowledge: feeling mortal.11 We witness a change in the relationship both to creation and to Proust. Henceforth we move on to this great adventure, cut short by a van,12 which was the outline of the story: ‘Roland Barthes by Marcel Proust’. In effect, Proust becomes a model of writing as much as a model of living: ‘Proust peut être ma mémoire, ma culture,

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mon langage; je puis à tout instant rappeler Proust, comme le faisait la grand-mère du narrateur avec Mme de Sévigné’13 [‘Proust may be my memory, my culture, my language; I can recall Proust at any time, as did the narrator’s grandmother with Mme de Sévigné’]. Proust belongs to the order of ‘une consultation biblique’ [‘a biblical reading’] and his ‘sagesse’ infuses our most immediate life. From this moment on, Proust inhabits Barthes’s prose to the point that he no longer needs to cite him, unlike the author of Fragments d’un discours amoureux: ‘Une recherche n’est intéressante [...] que si elle implique et fait deviner une vision; car c’est par la vision qu’elle cesse d’être une simple technique et prend place dans l’Histoire, c’est-à-dire dans le f lux des morts et des résurrections.’14 [‘A search is interesting only [...] if it implies and suggests a vision; for it is through this vision that it ceases to be just a technique and takes its place in History, that is to say in the f lux of the dead and of the resurrected.’] This sentence is obviously inhabited by reminiscences of Le Temps Retrouvé: ‘le style [...] est une question non de technique mais de vision’ [‘style [...] is a question not of technique but of vision’] (iv, 474; 3, 931). ‘Proust and me’15 is what Barthes was dreaming of at the Collège de France in 1978: that the conjunctive copula would become a copula of state [‘Proust is me’], that the ‘practice’ of one could engage that of the other. Nothing is more Proustian, of course, than the conception of reading as ‘[incitation]’.16 First we must take on the task and leave behind idolatry. ‘(Regardant des photos du monde proustien, je tombe amoureux de Julia Bartet, du duc de Guiche).’17 The tutelary alter ego is not far from becoming an obstacle to self realization, and perhaps Barthes should be compared more to the first Proust, the one who venerated Ruskin, or to Swann, a non-producing aesthete, than to the writer of La Recherche. As Antoine Compagnon demonstrated, preparing a novel, dreaming of a novel, Barthes was maybe unaware that he was ‘made’, if we can say it, for poetry.18 Or even that he was made (and why must we create a hierarchy of genres?) for essays — and for their deconstruction. To these approaches that make their relationship to Proust explicit, and regardless of the validity we give them, we need to compare a fourth type of articulation to literature, like that of Sartre, or, in an even more secret way, that of Foucault, a position that oscillates between denial and recognition. Proust turns out to be a model, in the strict sense this time, but also more of a stranger as Sartre would like to have us believe, an enemy, and in the case of the philosopher, an internal (even internalized) enemy, to the extent that bourgeois Proust makes us question bourgeois Sartre. Les Mots can thus be read as a copy of ‘Combray’ and a response to ‘Combray’ in which, perhaps, Sartre himself cannot fully see the extremely critical nature — with Proust we are always worlds away from the green paradise of childish loves. After all, in both cases, the point is to decipher the hypocrisies of the world of children, and both works develop similar themes: hypocrisies and poor social relations, symbolic and familial violence, rituals that falsely protect, fascination for the world of books, cloistering in the feminine sphere and idealization of the masculine sphere. If Proust is perceived as an enemy, it is an enemy who is attached not to a strange psychic space but rather to a troubling familiarity, where the reading of La Recherche is measured against Sartre’s genealogical and familial fantasies.

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The philosopher thus lives with Proust more than he admits, often limiting himself to calling him a major writer of the twentieth century — end of story. We find in effect in Proust and in Sartre the temptation or the risk of a solipsistic isolation that is not negligible,19 and that ends up being for both a conception of the gaze as conf lict. This leads to conf lict between two subjects, who, instead of being accomplices sharing the same sensory field, trample one another, reify each other, oversee and spy on each other, from the bottom of their reciprocated strangeness. We can think here of the narrator’s remark about the aesthetic progress of Albertine, that he had in a way formed in the aesthetic perception of the sensory.20 Rather than this progress being an occasion for sharing, it is lived as a theft: Albertine admira, et par sa présence m’empêcha d’admirer, les ref lets de voiles rouges sur l’eau hivernale et bleue, une maison de tuiles blottie au loin comme un seul coquelicot dans l’horizon clair. (iii, 680) [Albertine admired, and by her presence prevented me from admiring the ref lections of red sails upon the wintry blue of the water, and a tiled house nestling in the distance like a single red poppy against the clear horizon.] (3, 172)

As for the famous scene, in L’Etre et le Néant, of the voyeur seen as he is looking through the keyhole, it reminds us of the tragic farce of Maineville where Charlus, who spies on Morel through the crack of a door opening into a room, discovers at the same time that Morel sees him seeing him. The petrified young musician in effect looks at the baron eyeing him in the mirror in a truly medusa-like and deadly triangular relationship.21 The differences between Proust and Sartre are no less numerous, notably concerning their relationship to literature. Sartre thus affirmed that he often had to double his fiction with philosophical essays, a question resolved by Proust in the beginning of the 1910s. Finally, a fifth way to integrate Proust’s work into philosophy in action can be represented by Gilles Deleuze, who presents Proust et les Signes as an external, objective analysis of philosophy at work in La Recherche, but that we can easily describe as appropriation. In effect, in Proust et les Signes, are we dealing with an analysis of signs according to Proust, or an analysis of signs according to Deleuze? The philosopher oscillates between a theory of the fusion of the signified and the signifier, and a dualistic theory, antagonistic theories that derive more from the philosophical heritage of Deleuze than from Proustian theories themselves. The latter in fact affirm that form and content are indissociable, which explains why he chose the novel as his genre rather than a study of manners or a philosophical essay. Although I do not always agree with what Deleuze explicitly says about Proust, I do not disavow the philosopher. On the contrary, it seems to me that Proust so fully innervates his work that we find resurgences of it in other aspects of his thought, and not simply in Proust et les Signes. L’Abécédaire, peppered with allusions to Proust, and Différence et Répétition, in a certain way more Proustian than Proust et les Signes, thus reinforce the idea that the novelist’s style creates an interplay between what Jean Milly calls ‘les formes de la répétition et de la variation, c’està-dire du déploiement’22 [‘the forms of repetition and those of variation, that is to say deployment’]. As for the Proustian definition of the world and social life as grid and framework, it can only be enriched by the Deleuzian rhizome.

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In a sense, Proust is digested, his otherness and strangeness are diminished in order to integrate them into a totally different mode of thinking. In Deleuze, Proust is not a travelling companion, but a deformed doppelgänger, a projection that allows him to express his philosophical progression. La Recherche becomes a mirror that ref lects not the Proustian world but the Deleuzian world. And this is the mark of the fecundity of Deleuze’s thought: this integration of the other into oneself does not correspond to a cognitive or hermeneutic diminishing but paradoxically leads us to a richer reading of Proust. As we have seen, contemporary philosophers have a multiplicity of approaches to the work of Proust. Proust is without a doubt closer to Foucault than the latter wanted or could have admitted, and could very well join the camp of these ‘fondateurs de discursivité’ [‘founders of discursivity’] mentioned by the author of ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’23 In fact these founders ‘ont établi une possibilité indéfinie de discours’ [‘they have established an endless possibility of discourse’]: l’œuvre de ces instaurateurs ne se situe pas par rapport à la science et dans l’espace qu’elle dessine; mais c’est la science ou la discursivité qui se rapporte à leur œuvre comme à des coordonnées premières.24 [the work of initiators of discursivity is not initiated in the space that science defines; rather, it is the science or the discursivity which refers back to their work as primary coordinates.] 25

We begin to understand why the novelist was so totally assimilated by French thinkers of the twentieth century. We know that around 1908, when he begins to work on what will become La Recherche, Proust asks himself, among other generic questions, if he should write a philosophical essay or a novel.26 The latter solution imposes itself little by little, but Proust still seems, in Le Temps retrouvé, to subscribe to a vague idealism or at the very least ambivalence.27 This ambivalence is shown in the curious disavowal of Kantian philosopher Alphonse Darlu in Carnet de 1908, ‘aucun homme n’a jamais eu d’inf luence sur moi (que Darlu et je l’ai reconnue mauvaise)’28 [no man ever had any inf luence on me (except for Darlu, and I admitted it was a bad one’)]. Inf luence turns into strangeness, and we know that for Proust idolatry is one of the most vicious ways of escaping oneself without realizing it, as he showed about Ruskin. In effect, a hiatus forms between the shocking phrases of the sort of ‘leçon d’idéalisme’ (iv, 429) [‘lesson in idealism’] that the narrator says he received, or certain Platonic references, and the treatment that is given to them in the context in which they appear which is often ironic, comic, or off hand.29 Proust’s philosophical theory itself therefore cannot be subsumed under a precise denomination, which also explains the diversity of philosophical readings of La Recherche. From here on I will discuss the question of the relationship between Proustian narration and the hermeneutic plasticity of his work, a question that I think is inseparable from a central issue of the twentieth century, that of the reconfiguration of identity.

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Strangeness of the self and identity reconfiguration One of the reasons why philosophers are attracted to La Recherche seems to me to be because Proust, on a very conscious level, planned if not misunderstanding, betrayal or disrespect (after all, in Proust, homage is often mixed with blasphemy and desacralization), then at least hermeneutic openness and appropriation. In fact, he does not restrict himself from using this appropriation at all levels, even, in appearance at least, the lowest: copying entire phrases from Emile Mâle (L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France); plagiarism not mentioned as such and presented as his own by Proust, like this one, spotted by Edward Bizub, from the experimental psychologist Etienne Eugène Azam;30 a desire to compete with the largest figures of the twentieth century, from Balzac to Wagner; direct inf luences at the same time both mentioned and masked, like those of Arabian Nights, Schopenhauer, Flaubert, etc. There is therefore within La Recherche and taken to an extreme degree, a polyphony, a practice of citation and dialogue that define the novel according to Mikhail Bakhtin. This practice allows a circulation of ideals and of formulas, of structures and of voices. The Proustian irony itself is part of this potential circulation. It is usually a question, in ironic discourse, of saying the opposite of what one thinks in order to make what is really thought heard; in Proust, it is often the case that irony is in the second degree, consisting of saying what one thinks in a way that we believe the opposite of what is thought. Thus the narrator first believes Charlus to be a spy or a mental patient: the reader who advances in La Recherche cannot help but relish the young protagonist’s error of appreciation when he discovers only later that he is dealing with an aristocrat of la race des ‘tantes’, social and sexual position that well explains the baron’s attitudes. But, epitome of ironic double meaning, it turns out that Charlus is also a sort of spy (we can think of the scene of the house of pleasures in Maineville that I mentioned, or the passage of Le Temps retrouvé where the baron, a Germanophile, is considered a traitor to the homeland). It also turns out that Charlus is indeed a raging madman (Morel almost fears assassination at his hands, and the narrator finds himself confronted by his truly hysterical fits of anger). Roland Barthes already noted this aesthetic of surprise and generalized and indeterminate homosexuality — in the sense that there is no prescribed end to the possibilities of interpretations.31 The different modelizations of La Recherche, which at the same time allow Proust to be a formalist, a spider stuck in a world of rhizomes, or on the contrary, with JeanPierre Richard, Georges Poulet ou Gaëtan Picon, a phenomenologist in tune with the physical world and referentiality, show just how much the novel is characterized by an extremely broad hermeneutic potential. For, as Jean-Yves Tadié showed, it is the Proustian style itself that, in privileging plural causality, the alternative supposition (‘either ... or’), the process of the hypothesis or the underlining of the discrepancy between corporal expression and linguistic affirmation,32 leads to a vision of the indeterminate reality — no subject can have a vision that encompasses the world and the real. We understand that the use of ‘I’, by authorizing each reader to take his or her place inside the fictive me, leads to an incarnation of

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subjectivity that seems to me to be Proust’s major contribution to contemporary philosophy. If Proust is a philosopher, as Vincent Descombes noted,33 it is not in spite of his status as a novelist; it is because he is a novelist. Philosophy, even if it were metaphysics (but is Time necessarily a metaphysical subject?), can only be practiced if it is established outside of the internal situation of the ‘I’, in a position of strangeness and extraterritoriality. On the contrary, it inhabits a subject tuned in not only to the world but to the complexity, even the impasses, of its own constitution. As an example of the indissociable character of familiarity and strangeness as a central theme in Proust’s work, I will use the example of sleep. Sleep is not simply an important theme in La Recherche: the means of describing it, or more exactly, describing it as if escaping seizure, suggest the extent to which subjectivity is irreducible to a stable and definitive state. The stacking of rooms that make personal interiority into an apartment first and foremost allows the sometimes conf lictual or troubling embedding of different lived egos to be brought into relief. But this spatialization of the self does not aim to represent a simple succession of heterogeneous states. On the contrary, in discovering itself as apartment, convent (in the context of a dream, it’s not bad...), garden of a thousand f lowers, ‘quarry’, (iv, 386) the self is transmuted into a wanderer or a surveyor; and it is no longer a question of taking a trip around one’s room, like for Xavier de Maistre, but rather a voyage inside the rooms that are superimposed upon each other.34 This is a trip inside the interior world that we are without realizing it, and that turns out to be as vast, if not more vast, than the conscious world. For if there is indeed a conscious self and a hidden self for Proust, these two selves are not content to oppose each other as it is often affirmed. The ‘superficial self ’ in continual charge of a life that is certainly sometimes perceived as a waste of time, nourishes the ‘profound self ’, and these two aspects of personality are fashioned in a relationship of reciprocal implication that means that any discovery about one allows the advancement of discovery about the other. Time in sleep is thus perceived as a-chronistic, and even (but Proust submits this ref lection to a modalization),35 as if beyond time. Sleep, in bringing the individual to a perception of him- or herself that is preindividual, prehistoric, even animal, but also to an androgenous corporal perception,36 leads to a relationship/experience that is pre-thetic to the self — anterior to all categorization of identity by judgement. The experience of brute existence is above all not constrained by the familiar order of Kantian categories a priori of time and space. In effect, sleep makes time reversible and space ubiquitous, reversals that are found again in the waking world when the narrator finds himself confronted by the experience of unexpected conjunction by the perpendiculars of le côté de Méséglise et le côté de Guermantes, or the trying experience of reminiscences in Le Temps retrouvé, or two spaces issuing from two heterogeneous temporalities that meet (it is already strange that two different spaces can be superimposed; it is even more disconcerting that they do it when they are located in two different time periods). This novel redeployment of the types of existence is also found in the fact that sleep puts us in contact with an identity that escapes the traditional categories of sex and human filiations, or ordinary ontological categories (like those of life and death

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which are normally exclusive). In this vein we remember the most delightful dream in La Recherche, where the narrator’s parents, at the same time both alive and dead, resemble very small mice covered ‘de gros boutons rouges, plantés chacun d’une plume’ [‘with big red spots out of each of which a feather sprouts’] carefully caged by their son... who for his part tries to enter a house ‘détruite depuis cinquante ans’ [‘pulled down fifty years ago’] (ii, 386–87; 2, 85). This redefinition of identification, which also benefits the diurnal self, occurs through in praesentia metaphors and comparison which allow precisely, as Ricoeur firmly states in La Métaphore vive,37 the juxtaposition of fields of experience that seem to be ontological strangers. The Proustian description of sleep thus leads to a distortion of the classic conceptions of the self — to the most extreme degree it becomes a cerebral ‘attack’ (iii, 628) where the resulting upheavals permit the revelation of a totally unknown part of the self. The Proustian images, therefore, do not simply aim to ‘translate’ the author’s thought or theory about sleep: they are, on the other hand, the only method of bearing witness to the incorporation of dreams, risks also incurred by the conscious self through this sort of death of the self that can come from disappearing into an internal world and an apparent depersonalization. We return here to my introductory remarks on the relationship between knowledge and misunderstanding of the self: the ‘accès d’aliénation mentale’ [‘attack of mental alienation’] (ii, 387; 2, 86) that constitutes sleep is characterized as ‘beneficent’ alienation that obviously must be heard in the psychological sense (the self includes within it a becoming-another, and notably a becoming-animal) as well as the philosophical sense (the sleeping self becomes a prisoner of itself ). It nonetheless remains ‘beneficent’ because it engenders a major reconfiguration of identity. In dreams, Proust explains, ‘on a eu du plaisir dans une vie qui n’est pas la nôtre’ [‘We have had pleasure in another life which is not ours’] (iii, 372; 2, 1015) and which is at the same time the most deeply, the most intimately ours. That being the case, this life becomes one of the key leitmotifs of La Recherche which begins precisely with a story of falling asleep, of dreams and insomnia. It is therefore this extreme individualization, this work of internal probing, that after an ultimate, ‘capital rendez-vous’, allows one to meet ‘[one]self ’ (iv, 564) But it is also this meeting of the apparently most intimate self, the most strange to others, that allows communication with the other — individualization and universalization are actually two sides of the same reality, alterity is no stranger to us, but rather turns out to be an inescapable path of self-realization. What is it that really interests Proust in the private worlds of Renoir, Elstir, and Whistler, worlds that are opened to us through their paintings and that transmit to us ‘essences qualitatives des sensations d’un autre’ [‘that essential quality of another person’s sensations’] (iii, 665; 3, 156)? Not just boats, even if the narrator points out that Elstir taught him to see the beauty of the contemporary world by painting yachts, men in twill, or bathers in swimsuits (ii, 255). What interests him is first and foremost an aesthetic of shining possibility, of ref lection and mirage, revealed by these painters’ ontological and phenomenological pertinence: it is a question of seeing the world as it is, poetically (ii, 192), in other words unbound by categories of comprehension. He is also interested in the fact that these painters teach us to see

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the world differently, to see it in a manner that did not exist before them. Finally, they teach us that the invisible haunts and underlies the sensory world. Shadows and ref lections in effect establish the visible in visible and the mirage is part of the entire being. Dans ce jour où la lumière avait comme détruit la réalité, celle-ci était concentrée dans des créatures sombres et transparentes qui par contraste donnaient une impression de vie plus puissante, plus proche: les ombres. (ii, 254) [On this day when the sunlight had, so to speak, destroyed reality, reality concentrated itself in certain dusky and transparent creatures which, by contrast, gave a more striking impression of life: the shadows.] (1, 962)

We can therefore understand why Proust, more than any other author, spoke to philosophers: the virtual and the potential, whether we call them fantasy, night­ mare, illusion, error, desire, plan, non-being or strangeness,38 constitute the para­ doxical roots of the real world, roots creating the possibility of its manifestation. A permanent and unified fountain can exist because the drops from Hubert Robert’s fountain are discontinuous and discrete; love with Albertine can take root because fantasy and misunderstanding form their relationship. The narrator could decipher the causes of the beauty of the fountain or those of the impossibility of knowing another, even the impossibility of knowing whom we would like to haunt and possess like a demon or an incubus, the fact still remains that the deciphering and explanation come only after the experience, and that it cannot, as Merleau-Ponty following Husserl shows, be either rubbed out or erased.39 It is the fantastic character of our familiar link to the world that Proust is, in my opinion, trying to express, and it is the troubling strangeness of his questioning that fascinated the thinkers of the twentieth century: Proust, whether he is a model or whether he is repressed, whether his ref lection is faithful or, on the contrary, deformed, has not finished appearing in today’s philosophical mirror. Notes to Chapter 2 1. André Benhaïm, Panim. Visages de Proust (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2006), p. 186. 2. ‘Plastic’ from the Greek plastikos, ‘malleable, that serves to sculpt, relating to sculpting’. Plastikos is derived from plassein (plattein) ‘to fashion (from clay, from wax)’, to the figurative ‘to train (someone)’ and ‘to educate’, ‘to imagine, to create’ etc. The words in this family are also used in ways that relate to creation and imagination. 3. Not all: the thematic index of Le Cerveau et la Pensée. La Révolution des sciences cognitives, ed. by Jean-François Dortier (Auxerre: Sciences humaines editions, [1999] 2003) does not mention it, whereas Cerveau, Sexe et Pouvoir, by Catherine Vidal and Dorothée Benoit-Browaeys (Paris: Belin, 2005), uses it frequently. 4. In the sense of a system representing the essential structures of a reality. 5. I thank Mme Suzanne Merleau-Ponty for this information. 6. Letter to Mme Straus: ‘Les seules personnes qui défendent la langue française [...] sont celles qui “l’attaquent” ’. [‘The only people who defend French language [...] are those who “attack” it’]. In Correspondance (Paris: Plon, 1981), viii (1908), 276. 7. On this obliqueness of style, see the foreword in Nicolas Castin and Anne Simon (eds.), MerleauPonty et le littéraire (Paris: Presses de l’Ecole normale supérieure, 1998), pp. 9–19. 8. See Paul Ricoeur, ‘Métaphore et Référence’, in La Métaphore vive (Paris: Seuil, 1975), pp. 273–321.

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9. For more details see Anne Simon, ‘Proust et Ricœur: L’Herméneutique impossible’, Esprit, ‘La Pensée Ricœur’, 323 (Mar–Apr 2006), pp. 122–37. 10. Phrase borrowed from Antoine Compagnon, Le Démon de la théorie (Paris: Seuil, 1998). 11. Roland Barthes, ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure’ [1982], in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Eric Marty, 3 vols (Paris: Seuil, 1995), iii, 827–36. 12. Roland Barthes was hit and fatally injured by a van in 1980. 13. Roland Barthes, ‘Roland Barthes contre les idées recues’, in Œuvres complètes, iii, 72–87 (p. 74). 14. Barthes, ‘Preface to “Parole intermédiaire” by François Flahault’, Œuvres complètes, iii, 850–51 (p. 851). I underline the Proustian terms. 15. Barthes, ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure’, p. 827. 16. Marcel Proust, ‘Journées de lecture’ [appeared in 1905 under the title ‘Sur la lecture’], in Pastiches et Mélanges, in Contre Sainte-Beuve, ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1971), pp. 160–94 (p. 176). On this question see, Anne Simon, ‘Proust et l’acte psychologique original appelé Lecture’, in Etudes de linguistique appliquée, 119 ( July–Sept 2000), 331–44. 17. Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire, in Œuvres complètes, iii, 1190. 18. Antoine Compagnon, ‘Le Roman de Roland Barthes’, Critique, 678 (Nov 2003), 789–802. 19. See Roland Breeuer, Singularité et Sujet: Une lecture phénoménologique de Proust (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2000). 20. And of art: Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, iii, 572–73, 635–36, and 672–73. 21. See Anne Simon, ‘Regard et voyeurisme dans Sodome et Gomorrhe’, Textuel, 23 (2001), 181–93. 22. Jean Milly, ‘Style’, in Dictionnaire Marcel Proust (Paris: Champion, 2005), p. 970. 23. Michel Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’ [1969], in Dits et Ecrits, ed. by Daniel Defert and François Ewald, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), i, 789–821 (p. 804). 24. Id., p. 806. 25. Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. by Paul Rabinow, trans. by Josue V. Harari (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 101–20 (p. 116). 26. Proust, Le Carnet de 1908, ed. by Philip Kolb, Cahiers Marcel Proust, 8 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 61. 27. See Vincent Descombes, Proust. Philosophie du roman (Paris: Minuit, 1987), and Anne Simon, ‘La Crise des dualismes’, in Proust ou le réel retrouvé (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2001), pp. 23–63. 28. Le Carnet de 1908, ed. cit. folio 40v. 29. See La Recherche, iv, 477: we must ‘peupler joyeusement notre vie de divinités’ [‘joyously people our life with divinities’ (3, 935)] (Platonic ideas)... 30. ‘Viennent une odeur, un air de musique, un paysage, et le souvenir, rebel à l’appel, surgira de lui-même. Emmagasiné dans les tiroirs de la mémoire, il en sortira tout seul au moment où, souvent, nous nous en soucions le moins. Tout le monde sait cela’. ‘Discussion au sujet de Félida X’ [‘May an odor, a melody, or a countryside come, and the memory, resistant to the calling, shall surge forth on its own. Stored in the drawers of memory, it will come out by itself usually at the moment when we are thinking about it the least. Everyone knows this.’ ‘Discussion about Félida X’] in Hypnotisme, double conscience et altérations de la personnalité [1887] (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). Cited by Edward Bizub, Proust et le moi divisé. ‘La Recherche’: Creuset de la psychologie expérimentale (1874–1914) (Geneva: Droz, 2006), p. 13. 31. Roland Barthes, ‘Une idée de recherche’ [1971], in Œuvres complètes, ii, 1218–21. 32. Jean-Yves Tadié, ‘Le Monde du langage’, in Proust et le roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), particularly p. 135, p. 138, p. 158. 33. In Descombes, Proust. Philosophie du roman. Ed. cit. 34. On the ‘kaleidoscope’ of rooms at the beginning of ‘Combray’, see Julia Kristeva, Le Temps sensible. Proust et l’expérience littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). 35. La Recherche, iii, 373: ‘Le sommeil ignore peut-être la loi du temps’ [‘Sleep ignores the laws of time.’ (2, 1016)]. On this subject see Isabelle Serça and Anne Simon, ‘Sommeil’, in Dictionnaire Marcel Proust (ed. cit.), pp. 947–50. 36. La Recherche, iii, 370.

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37. Notably in the essays ‘Le Travail de la resemblance’ and ‘Métaphore et Référence’. Ricoeur, La Métaphore vive, pp. 221–72; pp. 273–321. 38. See La Recherche, iii, 630 (Remembrance, 3, 119) where Proust speaks of a ‘mer d’irréel’ [‘a sea of unreality’], a ‘montagne de néant’ [‘mountain of non-existence’] to characterize sleep. 39. In Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’Invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 65.

C h ap t er 3

v

‘Quel Marcel!’ And Other Oddities of the Narrator’s Designations in A la recherche du temps perdu Eugène Nicole, New York University One of the troubling elements of the Proustian work resides in what Mario Lavagetto has called the almost absent name of the hero–narrator of La Recherche. This formulation ref lects first the extraordinary rarity of onomastic designations denoting the hero–narrator: only one passage of La Prisonnière, a message from Albertine addressed to the hero, testifies without doubt, though not without oddness, that his first name is ‘Marcel’. This occurrence is not exceptional just because it is unique. It stands in opposition to an entire paradigm of nominative evasion that is comprised of two aspects. The first, and the most constant, shows us that the name of the hero, never uttered by any character in the many dialogues in the text, is the object of an evident dissimulation, of an erasure accomplished at the price of heavy narrative circumvolutions. Let us look at the inventory of these well-known sentences which reveal the narrative device of this anonymity. (1) Et il y eut un jour aussi où elle me dit : ‘Vous savez, vous pouvez m’appeler Gilberte, en tous cas moi je vous appellerai par votre nom de baptême. C’est trop gênant’... et construisant une phrase comme celles qui dans les grammaires étrangères n’ont d’autre but que de nous faire employer un mot nouveau, elle la termina par mon petit nom. (i, 396) [And there was another day when she said to me: ‘You know, you may call me “Gilberte”. In any case, I’m going to call you by your first name. It’s too silly not to.’ Yet she continued for a while to address me by the more formal ‘vous’, and when I drew her attention to this, she smiled and, composing, constructing a phrase like those that are put into the grammar-books of foreign languages with no other object than to teach us to make use of a new word, ended it with my Christian name.] (1, 437) (2) Je l’embrassais, je lui disais que j’allais faire quelques pas dehors, elle entrouvrait les yeux, me disait d’un air étonné — et en effet c’était déjà la nuit — ‘Mais où vas-tu comme cela mon chéri ?’ et en me donnant mon prénom, et aussitôt se rendormait. (La Prisonnière, iii, 622) [I would kiss her, tell her that I was going to take a turn outside, and she would

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half-open her eyes and say to me with a look of surprise — for the hour was indeed late — ‘But where are you off to, my darling —’ (calling me by my Christian name), and at once fall asleep again.] (3, 110) (3) ... ayant entendu ses camarades plus anciens faire suivre quand ils me parlaient, le mot de Monsieur de mon nom... [...having heard his comrades of longer standing supplement the word ‘Mon­ sieur’ with my surname...] (3, 200) (4) et on assura que le personnel m’avait bien reconnu. Ils avaient chuchoté mon nom, et même, ‘dans leur langage’, raconta une dame, elle les avait entendu dire ‘voilà le père’ (cette expression était suivie de mon nom). (Le Temps retrouvé, iv, 507) [I was assured also that some of the servants had recognised me. They had whispered my name and had even, as a lady informed me, been heard by her to say: ‘Look, there’s father...’ (and then my surname).] (3, 969)

The second aspect of this obvious erasure appears in another passage of The Captive, where it is complicated by a hypothetical reference to Marcel Proust: (5a) Elle retrouvait la parole, elle disait: ‘Mon’ ou ‘Mon chéri’ suivis l’un ou l’autre de mon nom de baptême, ce qui en donnant au narrateur le même prénom qu’à l’auteur de ce livre, eût fait: ‘Mon Marcel’, ‘Mon chéri Marcel’. (iii, 583) [Then she would find her tongue and say: ‘My — ’ or ‘My darling — ’ followed by my Christian name, which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would be ‘My Marcel’, or ‘My darling Marcel’.] (3, 69)

This formulation is followed by a commentary, equally worthy of interest: (5b) Je ne permettais plus dès lors qu’en famille mes parents, en m’appelant aussi ‘chéri’, ôtassent leur prix d’être uniques aux mots délicieux que me disait Albertine. (iii, 583) [After this I would never allow a member of my family, by calling me ‘darling’, to rob of their precious uniqueness the delicious words that Albertine uttered to me.] (3, 69)

In wanting to restrict the use of the word ‘chéri’ to Albertine, the narrator echoes a theme already expressed in La Recherche. The socialization of language involves a scandalous intrusion in the lovers’ exchange. The lover would like the words that he uses for the beloved to be taken out of collective usage. What about the first name joined to this word ‘chéri’, however? What if it is Marcel? What if it is not Marcel? Another disequilibrium comes into play here between Albertine and the hero who, for his part, makes up for, in relation to her, the fault from which all first names suffer, namely not being the unique property of either the person who utters it or who bears it. The name ‘Albertine’ — by far the most frequent in La Recherche and in certain passages repeated with an incantatory frequency — is indeed pronounced by the narrator in a manner that gives her the feeling of ‘being unique’ and of belonging only to him... As it often is the case in La Recherche, this proposition is a sign within a broader paradigm where we continue to understand it while still wondering about the

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evidence it seemed to release in its context. To which name, uttered with the feeling that it is unique, will Albertine thus respond, she, a f leeting being who goes on multiplying herself to the point where, the narrator having said it in all possible ways, the writer Marcel Proust does not hesitate to break a French spelling rule to designate it, pluralizing Albertine’s first name by bestowing on it in a few passages the final morphologic ‘s’ of the plural? The allusion to the first name of the author of La Recherche also belongs to the same paradigm which, in Le Temps retrouvé echoes ‘the author’s first book,’ Les Plaisirs et les Jours (iv, 618). La Recherche itself is mentioned three times in the text, creating a mise en abyme: ‘Cet ouvrage’ [‘This work’] (iii, 697); ‘ce récit’ [this story] (iv, 351); ‘ce livre’ [this book] (iv, 424).1 Lacking the obliqueness of the previous occurrences, the given name ‘Marcel’ appears in the message that, urgently called back from Trocadéro where the hero fears she might meet Lea, Albertine sends him by a cyclist who precedes her: (6) ‘Mon et cher Marcel, j’arrive moins vite que ce cycliste dont je voudrais bien prendre la bécane pour être plus tôt près de vous. Ce sera gentil de sortir tous les deux, ce serait encore plus gentil de ne jamais sortir que tous les deux. Quelles idées vous faites-vous donc? Quel Marcel! Quel Marcel! Toute à vous. Ton Albertine.’ (iii, 663) [‘My darling dear Marcel, I return less quickly than this cyclist, whose bike I should like to borrow in order to be with you sooner. How could you imagine that I could be angry or that I could enjoy anything better than to be with you? It will be nice to go out, just the two of us together; it would be nicer if we never went out except together. The ideas you get into your head! What a Marcel! What a Marcel! Always and ever yours, Albertine.’] (3, 153–54)

The idea prevailed for a while that this occurrence of the Christian name ‘Marcel’ belonged to the archaic state of the redaction witnessed in a note in the 1908 Note­ book (Carnet) no. 1, a passage in Contre Sainte-Beuve attributing to Marcel Proust the article that appeared in Le Figaro, and in a draft in the 1908 Copybook (Cahier) no. 5 intended for the portrait of Françoise and not kept in the definitive text: ‘Ah! Gelos, Gelos (c’était le nom de son pays) quand est-ce que je te reverrai, que je verrai l’aubépine en f leurs dans le jardin de mon père et que je pourrai y passer toute la sainte journée sans entendre la satanée sonnette de Monsieur ou de Monsieur Marcel. Et: Tout Monsieur Bloch qu’il est, Monsieur Marcel est mieux que lui’. (Le Côté de Guermantes, Esquisses, ii, 1036–38) [‘Alas! Gelos, Gelos (it was the name of her village) when will I see you again? When will I see the hawthorns bloom again in my father’s garden? When will I be able to spend the whole day long without hearing that accursed ringing of Monsieur or of master Marcel’s bell?’ and: ‘He may be M. Bloch, and all that, but M. Marcel is better than him’.]2

The mentions in The Captive of the first name, however, are late additions that appear in a note in the Copybook (Cahier) no. 61 and in three additions in Copy­ books (Cahiers) VIII and IX of the finalized manuscript.3 Certainly, in the typed manuscript, a restriction was placed on each of these first two mentions of the first name, by parenthetical clause and by parenthesis: ‘by giving the narrator the same

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name as the author’s’; ‘and by giving myself my first name.’4 Yet we see, as Anne Chevalier notes in the Pléiade edition, that ‘this initiative is for Proust the complete opposite of the suppression of autobiography (a suppression which had been already performed) but rather expresses the desire to underscore both the proximity and the estrangement of the author vis-à-vis his narrator.’5 Given the extensive anaphoric power of proper names, this single occurrence identifies the hero–narrator as Marcel, corroborating the numerous notes showing that Proust identified all but systematically with him in the drafts of the novel.6 The attribution of the first name Marcel to the hero does not, however, invalidate those critical readings which consider the quasi-constant anonymity of the narrator and the first person narrative as fundamental choices in the writing of La Recherche. Doubrovsky makes it a centrepiece of his interpretation in La Place de la Madeleine (1973). In the grammatical shifter, ‘I’, he sees the linguistic instrument the hero–narrator uses to escape both the order of the body and of sexual designation. According to Doubrovsky, however, a trace of the author’s name can be found elsewhere in the text. In a process similar to the Freudian ‘return of the repressed’, Marcel Proust’s initials can be read in the ‘Petite Madeleine’ (with capital P and M in the text of ‘Combray’.) From this name that he qualifies as ‘almost absent’, Mario Lavagetto undertakes a study founded on the centrality of the ‘I’ which he immediately takes to be a sign of ‘the weak connotation of a system in continual transformation’ and ‘a grammatical instrument much more than the affirmation of an identity’ (p. 31). Contrary to Doubrovsky, however, he does not neglect the importance of the hapax legomenon:7 ‘For Proust, the identification between the character and the narrator is natural and the invisible barrier of varying thickness separating the narrator and the author seems to collapse.’8 Thus is set in motion the investigation to which we are invited in Lavaggeto’s essay: in spite of his denials and precautions, the auto-diegetic author does all he can to situate himself outside of the realm of homosexuality. This contract of plausibility, Lavagetto notes, is already severely tested in numerous passages of the novel. The improbable short-sightedness of the hero concerning Charlus’s homosexuality in Les Jeunes Filles gives way to his extraordinary and very informed clairvoyance in the matter regarding the union of Charlus and Jupien in Sodome et Gomorrhe. This contract of plausibility will finally shatter in the wartime episode in Paris in Le Temps retrouvé by the lapsus that confuses the room in Jupien’s brothel where M. de Charlus is f lagellated (no. 43) and the one that had already been given to the hero (no. 14 bis), arriving by the greatest chance in this venal dispensary of Sodom. The relationship between the anonymity (or the quasi-anonymity) of the hero and the exclusive use of ‘I’, that, according to Doubrovsky makes him a ‘being of Logos’, brings us among other things to wonder about the question of the body. Peripheral yet undeniable in Lavagetto’s crucial observation, it underlies most profoundly Anne Henry’s reading. Whether or not her interpretation goes back to an intuition of Schopenhauer’s concerns us less here than its novelty for the Proustian novel: ‘La Recherche exploite la zone jamais explorée jusque-là du corps

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dans sa réalité intime, tantôt discrète, tantôt envahissante.’ [‘La Recherche exploits a never-before explored zone of the body in its intimate reality, sometimes discreet, sometimes invasive.’]9 While still noting (as does Doubrovsky) that Proust here is perhaps the precursor of the empty self that will characterize Beckett’s heroes, Anne Henry mocks at the idea that the narrator’s authority resides in ‘the grammatical person.’ Proust is the author of an identity in question, his hero is the subject of a ‘drama of the split’10 that grafts itself on the bildungsroman: D’un côté s’affirme une positivité, la constitution progressive d’un univers personnel, une façon de voir à nulle autre pareille — et dans le même temps se profile le doute qui jette son ombre sur la plénitude des instants au moment où le personnage se sent le plus lui-même.11 [On one hand, a positivity asserts itself, the progressive constitution of a personal universe, a way of seeing unlike all others — while at the same time looms a doubt that casts its shadow on the fullness of instants where the character feels the most himself.]

The erasure of the hero’s name is indeed inscribed within an ensemble of ‘oddities’ that translate the liberties taken by Proust vis-à-vis the form of the novel, and the way in which he made La Recherche a text impossible to imitate. But we must note that the ‘oddity’ of La Recherche, or of certain of its aspects may sometimes be felt as an incoherence or a dissimulation. This was Lavagetto’s hypothesis that we mentioned earlier, and this was also Anne Henry’s hypothesis when she entitles one of her chapters ‘Etrange histoire d’une vocation’ [‘Strange story of a vocation’].12 Let us return to the erasure of the hero’s name, to the phenomenology of this almost absent name to first note that it is inscribed in a diffuse yet extremely coherent appellative system where hypocoristic connotations dominate. The grandmother designates the hero by the name ‘mon petit fils’ [‘my grandson’] but also ‘ce petit-là’ [‘the little one’] and ‘petite souris’ [‘little mouse’]. The mother calls him ‘mon pauvre fils’ [‘my poor son’], ‘mon petit loup’ [‘my little pet’], ‘mon pauvre petit’ [‘my poor little thing’], ‘son grand loup’ [‘my big pet’]. The ledger of Albertine’s terms, amorous designations apart, covers largely the same ground: ‘mon petit bonhomme’ [‘my little man’], ‘mon pauvre petit’ [‘my poor little thing’], ‘mon petit’ [‘my little one’], ‘grand méchant’ [‘big naughty boy’], ‘mon petit chéri’ [‘my little dear’], ‘mon cher grand’ [‘my big dear’], ‘adieu petit, adieu petit’ [‘farewell little one, farewell little one’]. But these also find an echo in Saint-Loup’s designations ‘mon pauvre petit’ [‘my poor lad’], ‘mon petit’ [‘my little one’], in the duke of Guermantes’s ‘mon petit voisin’ [‘my little neighbour’], ‘mon petit’ [‘my little one’], and in Mme de Guermantes’s ‘ce pauvre petit’ [‘this poor little one’], ‘ce jeune homme’ [‘this young man’], ‘mon pauvre petit’, ‘mon petit’, ‘ce petit’ [‘my little one’], ‘ce petit-là’ [‘the little one there’]. These last four occurrences were uttered during the last morning at the princesse de Guermantes’s. Brichot refers to hims as ‘notre jeune ami’ [‘our young friend’], while the narrator calls himself ‘un jeune homme’ [‘a young man’] or ‘le pauvre garçon que j’étais’ [‘the poor boy I was’]. Only Charlus distinguishes himself from this paradigm: although he addresses the hero with ‘mon enfant’ [‘my child’] and ‘hein, petit ami’ [‘Eh, little friend’] he

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also uses more derogatory forms of address, such as ‘jeune polisson’ [‘young rascal’] and ‘petite fripouille’ [‘little scoundrel’]. He is also the only character whose terms change over the course of the narrative. During the episode in wartime Paris, he says of the hero: ‘Mon cher ami’ [‘My dear friend’] or ‘Monsieur’. It is tempting to say that Albertine’s message distinguishes itself doubly from this paradigm insofar as the first name is uttered and inscribed in writing. We could add to this point of view that nowhere in La Recherche does the hero hear his name uttered in the intimacy of conversation and within earshot. The ban weighing on this first name is therefore only exceptionally lifted by the detour of writing. The name Marcel resounds no less in Albertine’s note where it is the object of a repeated exclamation scarcely compatible with its standing as a unique reference: It will be nice to go out, just the two of us together; it would be nicer if we never went out except together. The ideas you get into your head! What a Marcel! What a Marcel! Always and ever yours, Albertine.13

This phrase has been linked with that in a letter from Proust to Albert Nahmias in November 1911: ‘Dear Albert, what an idea you have of me!’ This plausible parallel ‘in echo’ does not take into account the transformation or the transgression thus undergone. In Des mots à la pensée, Damourette and Pichon note that the word ‘Quel’ ‘would be barely acceptable with a proper name, leading to the supposition that such a proper name designates a plurality of individuals and that some of them would not possess the quality inherent to the name, whereas the category of the “proper name” only contains an individual who possesses this quality.’ In positive terms, Marcel is a singular Marcel. Thus the unique occurrence where we are given the hero’s first name is immediately followed by a construction whose weak grammatical admissibility, as we would say today, diverts it from its function of identification and nomination. Let us note along the way that this is not the first time that Proust carries out this type of diversion. He demonstrated this for the three fictional artists, and especially beginning with Charlus’s name. A transformative process thus leads Bergotte, Elstir, Brichot to the Bergottes, the Elstirs and the Brichots. But here it concerns the well-listed figure of the antonomasia. Its illustration is even more clear in the case of Charlus. Here we read, among numerous examples: ‘Jupien avait remarqué que les Charlus sont en général supérieurs aux Guermantes’ [‘Jupien had noticed that Charluses are in general superior to Guermantes’] (Esquisse, iv, 953). Or: ‘Un Charlus autre que n’était le baron...’ The effect in this rare case is to inscribe the antonomasia inside the fiction itself. Contrary to Pipelet in the Mystères de Paris or Tartuffe, they have remained — and we will not complain — fictional antonomasias. Alone perhaps, found in some texts, ‘Verdurinage’ stands within inches of the dictionary. At any rate, the absent first name is contrasted to the first name with its unique occurrence in La Prisonnière which, as soon as it is given, exceeds the limitations recognized by the onomastic signification: from the realm of denotation it reaches the sphere of connotation. Such is the effect of this diversion. Could we cast light on it not by invoking a piece of Proustian biography but rather La Recherche itself? In the immediate context which motivates her message, a loving and attentive

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Albertine is surprised that Marcel could think she would not respond right away to the pressing call that he sent her through Françoise. Let us skip the strategy he used to justify the urgency of his request: Dans ce mot, je lui disais que j’étais bouleversé par une lettre reçue à l’instant de la même dame à cause de qui elle savait que j’avais été si malheureux une nuit à Balbec. Je lui rappelais que le lendemain, elle m’avait reproché de ne pas l’avoir fait appeler. Aussi je me permettais, lui disais-je, de lui demander de me sacrifier sa matinée et de venir me chercher pour aller prendre un peu l’air ensemble afin de tâcher de me remettre. (iii, 658) [In this note, I told Albertine that I was greatly upset by a letter which I had just received from the same lady on whose account she would remember that I had been so wretched one night at Balbec. I reminded her that, on the following day, she had reproached me for not having sent for her. And so I was taking the liberty, I told her, of asking her to sacrifice her matinee and to join me at home so that we might take the air together, which might help me to recover from the shock.] (3, 149)

‘What a Marcel!’ thus first connotes Albertine’s reaction. The repeated exclamation conveys the disapproving surprise of the young girl who comes back double-quick scolding the over-complicated Marcel for knowing his Albertine so poorly. Yet, this linguistic powerhouse, this expression that is at the very least audacious, is that of an Albertine who a few pages earlier demonstrated her true verbal virtuosity in an eloquent disquisition on the subject of ices (iii, 635) that Marcel greeted with mixed feelings: profoundly moved because his deep inf luence on the girl was revealed: ‘sans moi elle ne parlerait pas ainsi [...] elle ne peut donc pas ne pas m’aimer, elle est mon œuvre’ [‘but for me, she wouldn’t be speaking like that. [...] she cannot therefore help but love me, she is my creation’] (iii, 636; 3, 125); also a little disapproving of her use of literary forms in the conversation, finally worried: Peut-être l’avenir ne devait-il pas être le même pour Albertine et pour moi. J’en eus le pressentiment en la voyant se hâter d’employer en parlant des images si écrites et qui me semblaient réservées pour un autre usage plus sacré et que j’ignorais encore. (iii, 637) [Perhaps the future was not destined to be the same for Albertine and for myself. I had almost a presentiment of this when I saw her eagerness to employ in speech images so ‘bookish’, which seemed to me to be reserved for another, more sacred use, of which I was still in ignorance.’] (3, 125)

And having interrupted Albertine in her tirade because she was making an allusion to Montjouvain, the hero adds: Quel changement depuis Balbec où je défie Elstir lui-même d’avoir pu deviner en Albertine ces richesses de poésie. D’une poésie moins étrange, moins personnelle que celle de Céleste Albaret, par exemple, laquelle, la veille encore était venue me voir et m’ayant trouvé couché, m’avait dit: ‘O majesté du ciel déposée sur un lit! — Pourquoi du ciel, Céleste? — Oh! parce que vous ne ressemblez à personne’. (iii, 637) [What a change from Balbec, where I would defy Elstir himself to have been able to divine in Albertine this wealth of poetry, though a poetry less strange, less personal than that of Céleste Albaret, for instance, who, the day before,

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had come again to see me and, finding me in bed, had told me: ‘O majesty of heavens deposed on a bed! — Why ‘of the heavens’, Céleste? — Oh! but because you look like no one else!’] (3, 126–27)

Without feeling compelled to continue the very singular dialogue under way between Marcel and ‘l’enjoleuse’ [‘the wheedler’], we can see, outlined in the expanded context of La Prisonnière, the affirmation of Marcel’s singularity. The theme is announced in the numerous hypocoristic designations that I listed above. In particular they convey the stunning privilege the hero enjoys at the Guermantes’s. It appears in Albertine’s double exclamation and three times in La Prisonnière; it is fully illustrated in the praises that the narrator says he does not want to cut in order that Céleste Albaret’s natural poetic talent can be appreciated (iii, 241). Strangeness is indeed a trait of La Recherche’s singular hero, this Ahasuerus to whom is contrasted and joined the tortured, jealous man who does not seem to perceive at all the mixture of awe and tenderness involved in Albertine’s exclamation: ‘Quel Marcel!’ This exceptional aspect of the hero–narrator who deciphers the general laws of the world and society, is actually heard in a chorus of praises dispersed throughout the novel: Gilberte: ‘Je nage dans le bonheur, vous avez conquis mon ami Bergotte’ [‘You can’t think how overjoyed I am, because you’ve made a conquest of my great friend Bergotte’] (i, 559; 1, 612); Bergotte: ‘Vous êtes malade mais je ne vous plains pas. Vous avez les joies de l’intelligence.’ [‘Our friends were telling me that you had been ill. I am very sorry. And yet, after all, I’m not so sorry, because I can see quite well that you are able to enjoy the pleasures of the mind.’] (i, 559; 1, 613); the mother: ‘Ce n’est pas un plaisir de te faire chercher un nom, tu trouves tout de suite’ [‘It’s no fun making you guess a name; you hit on it at once’] (iv, 192; 5, 702). ‘Quel Marcel!’ Beyond its familiarity, doesn’t Albertine’s exclamation resonate in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Image of Proust’,14 or in Georges Bataille’s chapter on La Recherche in La Litté­rature et le Mal? Visibly, both have been struck by a confidence by Emmanuel Berl in­sist­ ing on the strange force emanating from this moribund man suffering of asthma. This strangeness was not that of what some other friends like Cocteau or Morand may have seen as a maniac in Proust, but a strangeness rather superhuman, inspired by a force the intransigence of which stemmed directly from his search for truth. Notes to Chapter 3 1. While exceptional in the novel, this particular form of narrator intrusion is not totally without precedent. Remember the commentary that the narrator delivers about Pontmercy in Les Misérables: ‘At Eylau, he was in the cemetery where the heroic Captain Louis Hugo, uncle of the author of this book, withstood, with his company of eighty-three men, for two hours, the whole effort of the enemy’s army’. (Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, Part Three, Book Three, Chapter II; my translation.) 2. My translation. 3. In Proustian scholarship, the preparatory notebooks of La Recherche are designated by Arabic numerals and the notebooks which form the ‘final’ manuscript by Roman.

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4. ‘En donnant au narrateur le même prénom qu’à l’auteur de ce livre’, ‘et en me donnant mon prénom’. 5. ‘Cette démarche, chez Proust, est tout le contraire d‘une suppression de l’autobiographie, suppression d’ailleurs déjà accomplie, mais plutôt le désir de souligner à la fois la proximité et l’éloignement de l’auteur du roman par rapport à son narrateur.’ [This initiative, in Proust, is the absolute contrary to the suppression of autobiography, a suppression that was incidentally already accomplished; rather, the initiative shows a desire to highlight both the author’s proximity and his likeness to his narrator.] (La Recherche, iii, 1718) 6. See Eugène Nicole: ‘Les Notations marginales dans les Cahiers de Proust’, in Sur la génétique textuelle, ed. by D. G. Bevan and P. M. Wetherill (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), pp. 125–32. 7. This is a hapax legomenon, insofar as names of characters belong to the ‘language’ of the text, and since there is only one occurrence of ‘Marcel’ as the hero’s Christian name. 8. ‘Pour Proust, l’identification entre personnage et narrateur va donc de soi et la barrière invisible et de consistance variable séparant narrateur et auteur semble s’effondrer’. Mario Lavagetto, Chambre 43. Un lapsus de Marcel Proust (Paris: Belin, 1996), p.11. 9. Anne Henry, La Tentation de Marcel Proust, (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000) p. 63. 10. ‘drame de la fêlure’ ; idem. 11. Ibid, p. 62. 12. Ibid., p. 147–98. 13. See quotation no. 6 above. 14. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Image of Proust’, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 201–16.

C h ap t er 4

v

Strange Jewishness: Essay on the Treatment of Jewish Identity in Proust Joseph Brami, University of Maryland Like most Jews and half-Jews of his milieu, Proust was the product of an ideology of assimilation that he shared. His work of fiction, like his correspondence, bears the very clear mark of a highly displayed French identity. But precisely as a proponent of assimilation, he could have turned away completely, as did so many other Jewish and half-Jewish French people for so long, from making any reference to Jews, or have referred to them only with extreme prudence. Yet Proust makes the subject of assimilation and anti-Semitism, and the questioning of Jewish identity that they imply, one of the bases of his work. Certainly, his were not the first Jewish characters in French literary novels, as a certain number had appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century. But as far as I can tell, they were the first whose representation was not entirely founded on the characteristics of a traditional typology, usually anti-Semitic, or sometimes also (but truly very rarely) philoSemitic. Proust’s new contribution was to portray his Jewish characters with the goal of neither stigmatizing nor embellishing them, but rather of understanding and showing through them the difficulty of being Jewish or of Jewish origin in French society during his time, both for the anti-Semite and for the assimilated Jew. I would add, without wanting to be paradoxical, that this difficulty must not have been easy for him to handle. It is important to point out that for Proust the treatment of Jewish identity as a literary object was truly a terra incognita, a strange object, new in French literature. And it is from the angle of Proust’s treatment of Jewish identity as a strange literary object that I will develop my argument. ‘Puis-je appeler ce livre un roman?’ [‘Should I call this book a novel?’] — we read this in a fragment placed by the editor as a kind of epigraph to the pages gathered in Jean Santeuil.1 Can we say that Proust asked himself this question as the author of the book he was writing at that time, or was his intention rather to have the Narrator of these pages pose it? This question, of course, is destined to remain unanswered. Be that as it may, when focusing on the work in progress we can think that the question asked in the fragment illustrates all the editing phases that we easily imagine coming not from indecision in the course of writing (because Proust

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never really stopped writing) but from phases of incomprehension, uncertainty, regarding, in his own eyes, the exact naming of the terrain onto which he was advancing. In the literary space he was trying to open up, these phases clearly reveal all the incoherencies that stand out precisely when reading Jean Santeuil. Of these incoherencies, I will highlight two or three which concern the Jewish dimension in order to show its apparent strangeness even at the movement of its development over the course of the redaction. While in general it is said that the autobiographical Jewish dimension disappears between Jean Santeuil and La Recherche, it is not always said that Jewishness is in no way isolated, but rather (even in Jean Santeuil) always closely linked to a clearly Christian dimension. Proust was not a realist writer in the aesthetic sense of the word but, without a doubt, he only spoke of realities he knew. And, son of a Jewish mother and a Catholic father — she assimilated, he secular — we can understand how from the moment he tried to speak of Jewish identity, he did so by approaching his subject through Judeo-Christian references. These two dimensions, Jewish and Christian, are intertwined throughout the work and the correspondence. This is perhaps already something to be considered as strange, new in French literature at that time, this Judeo-Christian mixing, being included not as a simple example but as a well-worked theme in the work. These two dimensions can intertwine in a sort of communion, but this seems to be rare. For example, in a fragment of Contre Sainte-Beuve, edited by Bernard de Fallois, in one of the passages2 where we can think that the distinction between fantasy projection in writing and autobiographical reality must have been rather small, we can read a scene of true idyllic happiness, where ‘Maman’, ‘Papa’ and their sick child in bed listen to a choral tune composed by Reynaldo Hahn for Esther, and sung by him for them that evening. Maman sings it herself comme une des jeunes filles de Saint-Cyr essayant devant Racine. Et les belles lignes de son visage juif, tout empreint de douceur chrétienne et de courage janséniste, en faisaient Esther elle-même, dans cette petite représentation de famille, presque de couvent, imaginée par elle pour distraire le despotique malade qui était là dans son lit.3 [like one of the girls from Saint-Cyr trying out for Racine. And the beautiful lines on her Jewish face, imprinted with Christian gentleness and Jansenist courage made her into Esther herself in this little family — almost convent — performance which she invented to distract the despotic sick child in his bed.]4

This gem of a sentence is a true icon of an intertwined Judeo-Christian theme, with the series of Christian and Jewish references that follow each other, phrase after phrase, in the felicitous, successful f low of the sentence: Christian reference, the young girls of Saint-Cyr, then Jewish reference, the lines on Maman’s face, then her Christian softness and her Jansenist courage, followed by the name of Esther — all of it rendering a quasi-monastic atmosphere. And, I would add, this idyllic Judeo-Christian dimension is further strengthened in this passage by the other aspect of Jewishness in Proust, homosexuality, implicitly incarnated here by the couple of Reynaldo Hahn and the sick boy. Here I will

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only brief ly mention this aspect of the novel which constitutes another side of the treatment of Jewish identity beyond that examined in this study. Pursuing the Judeo-Christian dimension of my subject, Jewish strangeness as literary object, I wish to emphasize that most often, particularly in Jean Santeuil, the Judeo-Christian double dimension is (unlike this scene) a source of inconsistencies and contradictions in the inventive process. And there will be traces of this in La Recherche itself. As with the Narrator’s family later in La Recherche, Jean’s family in Jean Santeuil is apparently Catholic. But the fictional construction of its Catholicism leaves something to be desired, as Jean seems to discover a faith that was not taught to him. We learn that he did not receive a Catholic education, and that ‘célébrer Noël [...] semblait une puérilité’ [‘to celebrate Christmas had seemed to him mere childishness’] ( JS, 265; Hopkins, 227). But one day after listening to his teacher explain the meaning of the holiday, Jean places a sprig of mistletoe in a glass and announces to his mother that this will be his little Christmas. Jean’s gesture and his declaration themselves constitute an intimate moment of conversion. Further on, another scene seems to confirm this new frame of mind for the child. His teacher reads him passages of a book by Joubert and explains to him that the very fact that he is reading them with him, instead of giving him the book for Christmas, should be considered a spiritual gift. And Jean, even in the gesture of the teacher taking back his book, finds ‘la douceur de certaines paroles de l’Evangile’ [‘the sweetness of [...] those Gospel words’] ( JS, 269; Hopkins, 232). Jean has perhaps truly found faith, but a reader watching the scene from the outside might ask what Proust was trying to show in making his character feel an evangelical sweetness there while the teacher’s act actually means the taking back of a gift, a Christmas gift to a child, no less! And this question on this subject could also be asked about other passages, marking the Catholic characterization of Jean and his father, mingling representations of gestures of faith and acts that do not necessarily confirm these. In one of these passages, the Santeuils leave Paris on Maundy Thursday, to spend the Easter holidays in Eteuilles. This already fictional Eteuilles, which still sounds a bit like Uncle Weil’s Jewish Auteuil, is not yet the completely Christian Combray of Du côté de chez Swann. In Eteuilles, which represents a pronounced Catholicism, M. Santeuil ‘fait parfois couper des lilas et des iris et les fait porter à l’église pour célébrer le mois de Marie’ [‘sometimes has lilacs and irises cut and taken to the church to celebrate the month of Mary’] ( JS, 326; Hopkins, 135). But, strangely, when his wife and his son are in church, ‘il fait un tour dans la campagne’ [‘he had gone for a walk’] ( JS, 336; Hopkins, 140). And even, ‘[le père] apercevant tout le monde qui revenait de l’église, a pris le chemin de la ferme pour ne rencontrer personne’ [‘catching sight of all the people coming out of church, he takes a farm path so as not to meet anybody’] ( JS, 336-37; Hopkins, 140). Without imitating his father, Jean goes to church, but he can arrive ‘très en retard, parce qu’il a f lâné dans son lit tout en prenant son chocolat, et puis parce que les messieurs n’ont pas besoin d’entendre toute la messe’ [‘very late, because he had dawdled in bed over his chocolate and because there was no need for men to hear the whole of the Mass’] ( JS, 336; Hopkins, 140). And when he was in church, ‘immobile sur son banc, et n’ayant

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à penser à rien, il pouvait à son aise penser au gigot qu’il avait vu livrer aux f lammes domestiquées et industrieuses’ [‘seated motionless upon his bench, with nothing to think about, he could brood at leisure on the joint which he had seen delivered to the tamed, industrious f lames’] ( JS, 338; Hopkins, 141) in Felicie’s kitchen which he passed by before coming. Sensitive to the evangelical spirit elsewhere at Christmas, Jean, just where he should be practising it, is caught in a daydream rather out of keeping with the setting. Even at Easter! That said, in church Jean sits next to his mother, and when they come out, each has ‘son livre de messe à la main’ [‘with his prayer-books in his hands’] ( JS, 339; Hopkins, 143). But in church, Mme Santeuil does not seem to behave naturally. Upon arriving at church, Jean goes ‘près de sa mère sans lui dire bonjour parce que ça ne serait pas convenable à l’église’ [‘Jean would sit down next his mother, though without saying ‘good morning’ since that would not have been good manners in such a place’] ( JS, 337; Hopkins, 141). If we interpret this as meaning that it would be unacceptable to disturb the service by making a noise, we can understand him. But a little later, the narrator says that Mme Santeuil speaks softly to her son ‘Mme Santeuil disait bas à son fils que jusque là elle avait fait semblant de ne pas reconnaître’ [‘whom, until then, she had pretended not to recognize’] ( JS, 338; Hopkins, 142). Not speaking so as not to bother someone but then speaking anyway can happen to anyone, but why not recognize her child even momentarily? And who, moreover, is in church? Perhaps these questions would not be asked if in reading this page we were not also taking into account the Jewish side of the mother’s character and that of her parents. The link is so tight between these two aspects, however, that we cannot do otherwise. This mother who can pretend not to recognize her child in church is the same one who, in another fragment, one day when her son breaks a Venetian glass (the ‘verre de Venise’), kisses him and whispers in his ear the same words, or almost — and we know this from the correspondence5 — taken from those which Jewish Mme Proust says in reality one day to her son Marcel during a serious argument between them: ‘Ce sera comme au temple le symbole de l’indestructible union’ [‘It shall be, as in the Temple, the symbol of an indestructible union’] ( JS, 423; Hopkins, 218). Indeed, between a fragment where the Catholic Mme Santeuil finds in Jewish tradition a symbolic argument to justify forgiving her son, and another where, precisely in church, she pretends not to recognize this very son, it seems that (considering her at the level of the novelistic creation) she stands as a strange figure when present in a church, where not recognizing her child is also a way to not recognize herself. And furthermore, the problem, it seems to me, is not there, or not only there. It is not simply in terms of the psychology of the character that I would highlight the difficulty that Mme Santeuil experiences in being what she should be, but in terms of the object of novelistic creation that she represents for Proust as a writer. It seems to me that what appears here to Proust is the potential strangeness that the creation of her character could represent. And this feeling of strangeness, this feeling of being unable to discern what is to come, f lowed in the ink of his pen right from the beginning of this long work whose coherence would take him so many years to grasp and to try to render as a ‘construction’, as he later liked to ask that his work be called.6

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The strangeness of this Jewishness in the birth of the novelistic world to which Proust tries to give consistency stands out even more, perhaps, in another passage: ‘Jean sortit à dix heures de la classe après avoir remis au pion la traduction de l’Odyssée qu’il avait terminée et emportant sous sa veste les tables de la loi qui lui étaient tombées du ciel...’ ( JS, 256) [‘Jean left his class at ten after having turned in to the monitor the translation of the Odyssey that he had finished and carrying under his jacket the Tablets of the Law that had fallen to him from the heavens...’]. The sentence is thus interrupted. It is important to note that nothing earlier in the text, not a phrase, a word, or an image, prepares the reader for these Tablets of the Law falling from the sky precisely on Jean. It seems that we are witnessing here one of these moments that Montaigne mentions when, while his mind acts ‘like a runaway horse’, he produces all this ‘ineptitude and strangeness’ which, once archived (put ‘en rolle’), constitutes his Essais.7 In Proust also the mind is productive; the sentence turns out as it comes, sometimes. Proust works on it. The Tablets of the Law are part of the following scene. Henri de Réveillon, Jean’s friend, approaches him: ‘ “Qu’est-ce que vous avez de gros là?”, lui dit-il en lui tirant un paquet de sous sa veste. Mais Jean le lui arracha des mains. Il voulait garder toute sa vie les tables de la loi qui, ce matin béni, lui étaient tombées du ciel.’ ( JS, 257) [‘ “What is that big thing you’ve got there?’, he says to him while pulling on the package under his jacket. But Jean yanks it out of his hands. He wanted to keep for his whole life these Tablets of the Law that had, this blessed morning, fallen from the sky for him.’]. Of course we must take into account that in both the Jewish and Christian traditions, the Tablets of the Law have their function and their meaning. But we must also recognize that in this passage the way that Jean hides them from his best friend, a boy with whom he shares everything else,8 can make one think that these Tablets of the Law, like truly strange meteorites, must have fallen on him after having ricocheted off the Sinai. If they were Christian, most likely Jean would not have had to hide them from Henri de Réveillon, this novelistic embryo of the future Guermantes, lords of the Christian lands of Combray. Jean’s Tablets of the Law, the gesture he makes to hide them, his mother’s recourse to the symbolic breaking of the glass in the temple, or, elsewhere, ‘ “l’habitude d’esprit” de M. Sandré, père de Mme Santeuil, qui le portait à rendre compte des prescriptions du christianisme par de pures raisons hygiéniques’ ( JS, 216) [‘ “the spiritual habit” of Monsieur Sandré, Mme Santeuil’s father, that brought him to follow the prescriptions of Christianity for purely hygienic reasons’] (which could also evoke, at any rate in the context that I describe, the Jewish dietary laws), all relate to the same type of curious information in the text, strange objects, that Proust cannot yet seize and constitute as a coherent fiction. Hence they are abandoned, along with all of Jean Santeuil. Again, we can find this kind of strange Jewish presence in the text of La Recherche, when, for example, the Narrator, despite his Catholic appearance, hides his head in a rug, swallowing dust and tears, likening himself ‘aux Juifs qui se couvraient la tête de cendres dans le deuil’ [‘as the Jews used to cover their heads with ashes in times of mourning’] (ii, 688; 2, 409) As for his reason for doing so, it is because Mme de Stermaria stood him up. I use this expression to highlight, if it were needed, the incongruity of the comparison. Surely, one cannot say that the breaking off of Jean

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Santeuil is solely due to the oddity of Jewishness as a literary object at work within the author and which he worked out. I have just shown one example of how the theme remains a strange object in parts of La Recherche itself. In fact, a hundred other elements in the text, a thousand reasons from the unconscious at work, have obviously played their part in Proust’s abandoning Jean Santeuil. It is often said that what freed Proust to write La Recherche was his mother’s death. Maybe so. And if it is true, then so are the other reasons. One other reason, I will argue, is that once he discovered the adequate means of treating Jewishness in his writing, Proust entered the time of La Recherche. Indeed, of all the possible threads that are offered to the narrator as a wakened sleeper at the beginning of Du côté de chez Swann, it is, in the very heart of Christian Combray, the thread of Jewishness that Proust makes him pull out first, through the character of Swann. Coming out of the shadows of the garden, brought into the familial circle by the maternal grandmother, it is Swann whose name will ultimately serve as a partial eponym to the first volume that launches La Recherche. In this sense, it is according to Swann that the temporality of the first naming of the work is crystallized. This does not mean that the character of Swann does not carry in him, and does not bring to the work, a dimension of Jewish strangeness — as early, even, as the scene of the maternal goodnight kiss in Combray. But I would say that contrary to the Jewish strangeness of the Jean Santeuil period, the use of this strangeness in this scene is connected to the possibility of fictional writing itself. Readings of this scene are usually based on an Oedipal interpretation; this will also be my own starting point. But I will focus less on studying the role of the relation­ ship between the child and his mother than on the role of the triangular relationship that develops between the child, his father and Swann. Not, of course, because the role of the mother is not also equally essential, but simply because developing it would take me away from the perspective that I am trying to set out here. I will therefore limit myself to the role of the father and Swann. And on this subject, I argue that it can seem strange all the same that the father of the Oedipal triangle wears two faces here: the real father — the Narrator’s father — and Swann. Most interpretations make the case that Swann takes the child away from his mother. And indeed, it is during the whole time that the story is centred on Swann that the child’s desires are affirmed. Swann is, symbolically, from this point of view, and throughout the time of this moment, in the position of castrating father. It is first in relation to Swann that the child feels ‘ridicule’ [‘ridiculous’] (i, 29; 1, 31). But actually the real father is also feared implicitly the whole way. Moreover, just before he finally urges his wife to join their child, the latter is ‘terrifié’ [‘terrified’] (i, 37; 1, 39) at the idea of his father coming upstairs. And it is in the context of the presence of two fathers that the scene takes on a Jewish dimension by the representation through which the child perceives his real father at the moment that he authorizes him to spend the night with the mother. Used to seeing him decide on everything — and always arbitrarily, easily forbidding this or that — the child cannot believe it: Je restai sans oser faire un mouvement; il était encore devant nous, grand, dans sa robe de nuit blanche sous le cachemire de l’Inde violet et rose qu’il nouait autour de sa tête depuis qu’il avait des névralgies, avec le geste d’Abraham dans

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la gravure d’après Benozzo Gozzoli que m’avait donnée M. Swann, disant à Sarah qu’elle a à se départir du côté d’Isaac. (i, 36) [I stood there, not daring to move; he was still in front of us, a tall figure in his white nightshirt, crowned with the pink and violet cashmere scarf which he used to wrap around his head since he had begun to suffer from neuralgia, standing like Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli which M. Swann had given me, telling Sarah that she must tear herself away from Isaac.] (1, 39)

Critics who have studied this passage have noted the inaccuracies in the reference to this engraving, concerning both its content and the original biblical version.9 The Old Testament does not contain any scene where Abraham asks Sarah to let go of the child. In fact, in the Old Testament (Genesis, 22), the episode starts with the moment when God, wanting to test Abraham’s faith, orders him to sacrifice his son Isaac.10 Abraham is ready to obey. But just before the sacrifice, God, by sending an angel, stops him. Abraham does not have to go any further, as he has given proof of his total submission, and God announces to him that his descendants will be multiplied. In a certain sense, it is the beginning of the Jewish people. Moreover, Gozzoli’s engraving in fact takes a different biblical episode as its subject, one that concerns neither Sarah nor Isaac;11 it is called Hagar’s Departure, and depicts Abraham sending away Hagar, his servant and concubine, and Ishmael, the son he has had by her. In the Old Testament this episode is followed by the wandering in the desert of the mother and child, though God then protects the boy, who later will also father ‘a great nation.’ Did Proust make a mistake? Or, on the contrary, were the inaccuracies voluntary in the sense that, as any writer may do, he exploited a literary and cultural fact by transforming it, in order to give it the meaning he wanted it to yield in his work? Proust could no doubt, if he had wished, have verified the original source of the scene, but these questions are destined to go unanswered. On the other hand, we can say that the fact that Proust made his Narrator think not of Ishmael but of Isaac is certainly significant because, of the two children, it is precisely the second one who will incarnate Abraham’s Jewish progeny. Error or voluntary act, Proust at any rate is preoccupied with the theme of Jewish identity and does not cease working on it. And I will add that this introduction of the figure of a Jewish Trinity (if I may say) in this narrative — Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac — belongs to the same strange ‘meteorite’ order as the Tablets of the Law fallen from the sky. Why indeed, in this very Christian Combray, in an apparently Catholic family, does Proust attribute to the child a biblical Jewish image, indirect and inexact as it may be? And why does he do it through Swann, the grandson of a convert, and therefore Christian, whose Jewish descent, in this pre-Dreyfus era in which we can situate the chronology of the Combray evenings, has not yet been worked through? Swann is explicitly portrayed as Jewish in the drafts,12 but this identification is modified in the published version. Why doesn’t Proust have Swann give the child only the photographs of the Charity of Giotto, as we learn a little later he has done as well (i, 80; 1, 110)? Unlike the passage of the Tablets of the Law, appearing at the beginning of the work leading to La Recherche and then disappearing, the drafts this time show that the reference to

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the engraving after Gozzoli were introduced in one of the later versions.13 Not only does Proust not miss his chosen target — the treatment of Jewish identity — but he magnifies its strangeness by inserting it in the very heart of his representation of the Christian universe of Combray. It is no longer a sentence or an image sprung to mind: it is a calculated reference. When Proust makes Swann, and not someone else, give the young Narrator the engraving, and thus makes him think of Abraham, he conveys the representation of absolute paternal authority — an authority obviously absent in the experience of that evening. But how could this paternal authority not be absent in this JudeoChristian crossover that Proust makes the two fathers play out in this scene? The child sees Abraham where he is not or where he cannot be. Neither the real father nor Swann can be Abraham. The real father and Swann are so barely fathers that it is to the mother that Proust applies the precise and heavy word ‘abdication’ in the reconstructed memory that the Narrator gives of the scene (i, 38; 1, 51) — she who, in a sense, did nothing but obey her husband and who, even if she gave the kiss, clearly did not give anything other than her usual measure of maternal love. This is what is also proven (if need be) when she censors the symbolic incest in Françoisle-Champi when reading it to the child (i, 41; 1, 56). With Proust, as with Freud, in this scene it is not the adult who does the seducing but the child who fantasizes. On the question of the fathers and their failure to assume their role, if the model of authority projected through the engraving is Jewish, the real father cannot, by definition, convey its full weight as he is not Jewish. The child, who has become the Narrator, will chief ly remember that his father gave in. Life will go by and the son, at the end of Le Temps retrouvé, will clearly point out that it is from that very evening that dates his own decline ‘avec la mort lente de ma grand-mère, le déclin de ma volonté, de ma santé’ [‘together with the slow death of my grandmother, the decline of my health and my will’] (iv, 621; 3, 1102). This real father, kind for once that particular evening, is not a ‘good’ father, symbolically speaking. It is the other father, Swann, who, even without knowing it, will inf lict anguish and sadness, who could have truly played the role of a symbolic authority figure, being ‘mean’, severe, during the evening in question, but, by the same token, being ‘good’, being a father who would have later promoted the force of will and health, according to the psychological system of explanation to which Proust has the Narrator adhere. But, on the one hand, Swann himself has nothing Jewish left, in the strict sense of the word — at most what he can give to the child from the point of view of a representation of this identity is an engraving where Abraham, sacrificing, does not know the epilogue of Jewish identity of the future descendants of Isaac — and, on the other hand, he is not the true father who can be there at the crucial moment of authorization or interdiction. Swann must leave the familial circle and go home at the end of the evening. Abundance does not lead to happiness: having one father is already difficult; having two must make things even more complicated. But here, to be specific, this strange, unexpected surplus of fathers leads to the constitution of a subject Narrator whom Proust certainly characterizes by a precarious identity, without force and without will throughout his whole life — because of what happened that night, he has him say — but which,

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by the same token, will help him create his work. In this sense, it is after he has made him realize and name the source of this precariousness, at the end of Le Temps retrouvé, that the Narrator is supposed to begin to write. I do not know, and I will not try here to know what exactly is at work in Marcel Proust’s unconscious in this strange mixing that he fantasizes in the invention of the fathers of his Narrator, one a real Christian, the other a symbolic Jew. And of the Jew in particular, of this Swann whom he makes arrive like a ghost out of the garden shadows,14 unless we make some discovery of biographic archaeology,15 we will probably never know why Proust invented him and gave him the role of a father here. But even without knowing the real or subconscious cause of this invention16, it cannot be denied that in this fantasy self-portrait that is La Recherche, it is through working on these two father-figures together, a Christian and a Jew, that Proust finds the way to create, in part, his narrator as a writing subject. We may think that Proust, in reality, could have had a relationship with his father that anyone can have with his own, but the law of writing being what it is, and in any case being the law that he applies in La Recherche, the representation he gives of the two fathers in the novel is a matter of symbolic murder. From a literary standpoint, the case of the Christian father is solved quite quickly. The Narrator sees almost nothing else in him other than a quasi-vegetative character, in the sense that he just shows him living, like a plant or vegetable, off rain and sunshine. And yet, being a diplomat, this character could have been created (if nothing else) as a counterweight to the literary culture of the mother, for example. But it is not so. The father of the Narrator never finds anything more interesting to study than barometers. Among all the many engaging lightweight characters in La Recherche, this father must be one of the most striking. From this point of view, Swann, as a symbolic Jewish father, does not elude destruction either. Certainly, for many years the Narrator fantasizes about him frantically, in an obsession that even leads him to pull his nose and rub his eyes to look like Swann (i, 406; 1, 408). This detail would have been only a comical illustration if much more were not at stake, particularly concerning the treatment of Jewish identity which here is referred to through one of the most common anti-Semitic clichés. But, this magnificent Swann is tremendously generous to the Narrator, unconsciously, to be sure;17 but also directly, serving as a role model for so long, providing means of access to the world of high society and to the world of art and literature in particular, and giving him the very matter of his work and becoming the origin of the decision to undertake it (iv, 494; 3, 953). Swann is therefore a hero whose experience takes him from losing control in love to recognizing the limits of his aestheticism and his submission to the laws of society life, up to the judgement the Narrator gives of him: ‘cet homme, excellent, cultivé, que j’étais bien loin d’être ennuyé de rencontrer, je ne pouvais arriver à comprendre comment j’avais pu l’ensemencer autrefois d’un mystère’ [‘admirable and cultivated though he was, a man I was anything but bored to meet, I could not for the life of me understand how I had been able to invest him long ago with such mystery’] (iii, 89; 2, 715). In spite of an unfailing deep tenderness for him, the story of Swann that

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Proust has his Narrator tell is that of a long ebbing away of the character’s essence. On the evening at Combray, the fathers did not play their role — and the strange Jewish reference to non-assumed paternity is the fact that links by connotation their common destiny as characters. One must kill the father (or the two fathers in this case), kill them symbolically; one must detach from them to be able to rise — in other words, for the Narrator, to write. Proust did not read Freud, but as Malcolm Bowie showed in his essay,18 he understands like him, with a great effort of reason, the irrational element at work in men’s minds, and that childhood memories have something to say about the construction of the subject.19 In staging the Narrator as character, Proust brings him to realize and to name, at the end of Le Temps retrouvé, the causes of this lack of ‘force’ and ‘will’ (volonté) due in part to the poor fulfilment of the paternal roles (which by definition are impossible to fulfil), shortcomings of which he may have been the victim in a way during those past evenings in Combray. To conclude let us follow Proust, who after all made the decision at one point to introduce into his text the fantastical figure of an authoritarian Abraham, one who cannot in fact be either one of the fathers. And, likewise, the narrator fails to gain access either to the identity that could have been given by the real father,20 or to an identity that could have been given by Swann. The Narrator pulls on his nose in vain: he will never have one like Swann’s. His identity comes from neither father, neither the Christian nor the Jew. Nor from both at once. At any rate, it is the same thing. For to say ‘neither’ or ‘both’ refers to two situations that, though seemingly opposite, are nevertheless similar in relation to a unified model to which one cannot refer. By its strangeness, the Jewish element of the scene in Combray establishes a problematic identity for the Narrator. But this very characteristic (its problematic quality) enables the writing process, or at any rate allows it to be21 what it is in Proust: this long tale that seems always more and more drawn out in time, carried out through a defined character, but as if through an innate indefiniteness, expressed through the search for others — people and landscapes — whose essence remains impossible to grasp if only finally through their apprehension and crystallization in a work of art: La Recherche itself. Strange subject, indeed, is the one born of the night in Combray, a subject foreign to its origin, to its double or divided origin, really Christian and fantasized as Jewish, at least as it is represented, constructed only thanks to (beginning with, and in relation to) the work of writing, the work of literature. Strangeness of a subject who is neither this nor that, who is both this and that, or who comes to join or announces (if we accept to acknowledge his innovative effect) the subjects which our era, since thinkers like Blanchot or Derrida, encourages us to recognize as the most representative features of literary modernity, or of postmodernity. Strange subject, indeed, born of the strange Jewish element of a father who, for the narrator, is not one and cannot be one. Strange subject, because from that evening on perhaps, and because of and in relation to this fact, lacking a true father, he could only find one through books — the books of Bergotte, books about whose pages Proust has his Narrator say once that he cried with them ‘comme dans les bras d’un ‘père retrouvé’ [‘as in the arms of a long-

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lost father’] (i, 200; 1, 133)22 — with all the semantic importance that we must, of course, give to retrouvé in the Proustian lexicon. But Proust, as we know, will not permit Bergotte, as a ‘père retrouvé’, to come out any better in the mind of the Narrator who has become a writing subject. That, however, would be the theme of another essay. Notes to Chapter 4 1. Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil, ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1971), p. 181. Unless indicated otherwise (as in this particular instance), all further English translations of quotations from Jean Santeuil are by Gerard Hopkins: Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil, with a preface by André Maurois (New York: Clarion/Simon and Schuster, 1970), p. x. This first sentence does not appear in Hopkins’ translation of Proust’s text, but it appears in Maurois’ preface. 2. Quoted and studied notably by Antoine Compagnon in Proust entre deux siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1989), p. 86. 3. Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, preface by Bernard de Fallois (Paris: Gallimard, Collection Folio/Essais, 1954), p. 118. 4. This passage (up to ‘performance’) is translated in Compagnon, ‘Proust on Racine’, trans. by Richard Goodkin and Charles Gillepsie, Yale French Studies, 76 (1989), 21-58 (p. 39). 5. Correspondance de Marcel Proust, ed. by Philip Kolb, 21 vols (Paris: Plon, 1973-93). Letter from Mme Proust to Marcel, probably dated from 1897, in ii, 160-61. 6. There are several occurrences of this word in the Correspondance. See xiii, 98; xviii, 546; xix, 348 and 726; xxi, 241. 7. Montaigne, ‘De l’oisiveté’, in Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. by Pierre Villey and V.-L. Saulnier, 3 vols (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965), i, 33 (ch. 8); ‘Of idleness’, in The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. by Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967), pp. 20-21. 8. Sometimes in the morning he even comes ‘wearing a plush dressing-gown’ into his friend’s room to brush his teeth ( JS, 457). 9. Marcel Gutwirth, ‘La Bible de Combray’, Revue des sciences humaines, 22 (1971), 417-27. Robert Couffignal, L’Epreuve d’Abraham. Le Récit de la genèse et sa fortune littéraire (Toulouse: Publications de l’Université de Toulouse–Le Mirail, serie A, vol. 50, 1976). Albert Mingelgrün, Thèmes et structures bibliques dans l’œuvre de Marcel Proust (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1978), p. 94. Juliette Hassine, Marranisme et hébraïsme dans l’œuvre de Proust (Paris: Minard, Collection ‘La Thésothèque’, 1994). Alberto Beretta Anguissola, ‘Benozzo Gozzoli’, in Dictionnaire Marcel Proust, ed. by Annick Bouillaguet and Brian Rodgers (Paris: Champion, 2005), pp. 429-30. 10. Genesis, 22. 11. Genesis, 21. 12. See A la recherche du temps perdu, vol. I, Esquisses viii, pp. 667, ix, p. 669, and xii, pp. 681-83. 13. A la recherche du temps perdu, vol. i, Esquisse xii, vol. i, p. 692. 14. He is at first recognized only by his voice. 15. Why for instance is it the maternal grandmother who goes to greet him? Why is it the mother, who, more than anyone else, is always friendly with him? 16. We can at least say that it is the expression of this Jewish strangeness in himself that he obviously seems to want to decipher and to which he tries to give shape. 17. The narrator speaks of him as the ‘auteur inconscient de mes tristesses’ [‘unwitting author of my sufferings’] of his childhood ‘sufferings’ (I, 43, I, 45). 18. Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 19. Proust, however, may not have been able to think, as did Freud, that childhood memories could be screens. 20. Besides, as we know, the Narrator does not let us know his family’s name; in a sense, Proust creates a Narrator deprived of an essential part of an asserted identity.

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21. Along with many other reasons certainly — I am only focusing on the Jewish theme here. 22. The English translation of ‘long-lost father’ loses the sense of regained in the original French ‘retrouvé.’

C h ap t er 5

v

Proust’s Singhalese Song (A Strange Little Story) André Benhaïm, Princeton University Odyssey of another kind, A la recherche du temps perdu is an epic singing the remarkably dull deeds of a lone anti-hero who journeys between spectacular deceptions and banal revelations, with a predilection as much for failure as for inspiration, and who meets along the way people whose very existence seems at times as astonishing as his own position as protagonist. The most striking among all the odd passages that compose this oral tale may be those that seem to appear out of nowhere, especially out of the mist of conversation, revelatory in their unexpectedness, like Vinteuil’s musical phrases. These scenes that emerge out of nothingness by the sheer power of language alone are all the more surprising when they are embodied by characters who look as unlikely to be part of the story as they sound incapable of speaking altogether. Such a scene — one of the most improbable perhaps — will be heard here. In the guise of an anecdote, it arises in passing, as if seeking to remain unnoticed. But, like Aladdin with the magic lamp, if one should happen on this little story — not even one page-long, lost amid the thousands of others that make the stuff of the novel — its mystery begins to unfold expansively. Chaotic, cacophonic, fusing from different directions in patches without apparent order, the more one tries to seize it, the more it eludes comprehension. Out of nowhere, this story comes to tell us about distant beings. Some appear, others disappear. And while some change forms, others reveal their true colours. The strange story of a beautiful phrase Let us then wander ‘Autour de Madame Swann’, as Proust entitled the first part of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. At the Swanns’, the narrator is always all ears. The place, owned by people to whom he has come to attribute quasi-mythical and mystical initiatory powers, this ‘sanctuary’ as he calls it, always holds extraordinary oral and auditory revelations. One day, as Odette plays Vinteuil’s Sonata on the piano, the young narrator realizes he has just heard ‘for the first time’ the legendary ‘petite phrase’ (the musical spell that, long ago, brought the Swanns together). But here, the narrator’s

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‘epiphany’ does not spring from the musical premiere itself. Rather, it comes from a commentary by Charles Swann, and the extraordinary conversation that ensues with his wife. A bâtons rompus, the verbal exchange could sound as vivid as absurd. It begins inconspicuously when Swann likens Vinteuil’s music to the Parisian landmark of the Jardin d’Acclimatation. Through his musical analogy, the botanical and zoological park turns into something ever more surprising when Odette evokes a certain Madame Blatin. For Swann, who fails to see the connection, Mme Blatin has appeared out of nowhere. Here then is the full account of the Swanns’ conversation that the narrator–writer witnessed as a child, as the privileged addressee of the anecdote. He is ‘lui’ to whom, at Odette’s insistence, Swann tells the story (and who later repeats it to us): ‘Mais quel rapport a-t-elle avec le jardin d’Acclimatation? — Tous! — quoi, vous croyez qu’elle a un derrière bleu ciel comme les singes? — Charles, vous êtes d’une inconvenance! Non, je pensais au mot que lui a dit le Cinghalais. Racontez-le lui, c’est vraiment un ‘beau mot’. — C’est idiot. Vous savez que Mme Blatin aime à interpeller tout le monde d’un air qu’elle croit aimable et qui est surtout protecteur. — Ce que nos bons voisins de la Tamise appellent patronizing, interrompit Odette. — Elle est allée au jardin d’Acclimatation où il y a des noirs, des Cinghalais je crois, a dit ma femme qui est beaucoup plus forte en ethnographie que moi. — Allons Charles, ne vous moquez pas. — Mais je ne me moque nullement. Enfin, elle s’adresse à l’un de ces noirs: ‘Bonjour, négro!’ — C’est un rien! — En tout cas, ce qualificatif ne plut pas au noir: ‘Moi négro, dit-il à Mme Blatin, mais toi, chameau!’ — Je trouve cela très drôle! J’adore cette histoire. N’est-ce pas que c’est ‘beau’? On voit bien la mère Blatin: ‘Moi négro, mais toi chameau!’ (i, 526) [‘But what has she got to do with the Jardin d’Acclimatation?’ ‘Everything!’ ‘What? You don’t suggest that she’s got a sky-blue behind, like the monkeys?’ ‘Charles, you really are too dreadful! I was thinking of what the Singhalese said to her. Do tell him, Charles; it really is a gem.’ ‘Oh, it’s too silly. You know, Mme. Blatin loves accosting people, in a tone which she thinks friendly, but which is really condescending.’ ‘What our good friends on the Thames call “patronising”,” interrupted Odette. ‘Exactly. Well, she went the other day to the Jardin d’Acclimatation, where they have some blackamoors — Singhalese, I think I heard my wife say; she is much “better up” in ethnology than I am.’ ‘Now, Charles, you’re not to make fun of poor me.’ ‘I’m not making fun, I assure you. Well, to continue, she went up to one of these black fellows with “Good morning, nigger!”...’ ‘Oh, it’s too absurd!’ ‘Anyhow, this classification seems to have displeased the black. “Me nigger,” he [said] to Mme Blatin, “[but] you, old cow!” ’ ‘I do think that’s so delightful! I adore that story. [Don’t you think it’s a nice one?] Can’t you see old Blatin standing there, and hearing him: “Me nigger; you, old cow”?’] (1, 576)

I too, like Odette, love this story. I even think that, as the original English translation puts it, it is a ‘gem’. But, contrary to what the translation may lead us to believe, it is not the story that Odette calls a ‘gem’, but the Singhalese man’s ‘mot’. What she finds lovely is his wonderful repartee — a stunning comeback. What I would like to suggest is that this beautiful phrase is the story. I suggest that, in one of the most spectacular examples of his notorious use of metonymy, Proust had this phrase both represent and perform the entire scene. For more than a ‘story’, and far more than

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an anecdote, this passage is indeed a scene. It is a scene in the theatrical sense, and in the sense of a scandal. It is a scene that makes a scene; a scene that tells and shows the story of an outrageous outrage (that of the anonymous Singhalese), and, by contrast, an outrage that should have been, but was not (that of the infamous Mme Blatin). What is more, this passage performs and embodies what I consider to be the matter and the principle of the Proustian writing in its aesthetical and ethical dimensions: displacement and estrangement. The passage is strange not because it is exotic, but because its exoticism is itself altered, becoming infinitely exotic. To be sure, the passage may be called exotic because it stages, for the first time in the novel, a non-western character, a ‘black fellow’, the Cinghalais. But this ethnological exoticism is simultaneously multiplied by linguistic references at various levels, whether they are uttered by Swann in his narration, by Mme Blatin, or by the Singhalese man himself. And before we contemplate the beauty of his phrase, we first must wonder about his very presence: we must wonder how the encounter between Mme Blatin and the Singhalese man ever came to take place. The Exhibition of the Jardin d’Acclimatation How are we to understand this: ‘Au jardin d’Acclimatation où il y a des noirs’ [‘where there are Black people’]? The fact that the revised translation replaced ‘Jardin d’Acclimatation’ with ‘Zoo’ urges us to recall the origins of this Parisian landmark. The Jardin d’Acclimatation opened in 1860, at the initiative of the Société Impériale Zoologique d’Acclimatation. First designed as a botanical and zoological educational and recreational site, the Jardin was an institution, with its own scientific society whose charter ‘clearly presents its role of scientific populariser.’1 The Jardin was always conceived as a utopian (almost Eden-like) space meant not only to exhibit exotic plants and animals, but to actually ‘acclimatize’ them, familiarize them with and accustom them to the French climate and people — and vice-versa. As for ‘exotic’ peoples, a note in the new Pléiade edition of La Recherche explains: ‘C’est en 1883 que se tint une ‘Exposition’ (si l’on peut dire) de Cinghalais et d’Araucaniens au jardin d’Acclimatation. L’Exposition universelle de 1889, qui était doublée d’une Exposition coloniale, développa la vogue de ces manifestations d’un goût douteux.’ [‘In 1883 was held an ‘Exhibition’ (if one can call it that) of Singhalese and Araucanian people at the jardin d’Acclimatation. The 1889 World Fair, which was accompanied by a colonial exhibition, developed the vogue for such events, of questionable taste’] (i, 1380). Before being adopted by World Fairs, the events the editors are referring to here belonged to a socio-cultural phenomenon that attracted millions of people throughout Europe, starting in 1874 and persisting over half a century: ethnographic exhibitions.2 In these anthropo-zoological exhibits, wild animals were exposed along with the people native to the regions from where they had been taken. As a corollary of the ‘mission civilisatrice’ which justified the expanding colonization, these events partook in a ‘mission éducatrice’ whose goal was to present to the occidental public inhabitants of remote lands in their natural, original habitats. Everything was staged meticulously in vast outdoor spaces which were nonetheless carefully fenced to separate the visitors from the savages. From 1877 to 1912, these ethnographic exhibitions, which today are called ‘human zoos’,

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became a permanent feature of the Jardin d’Acclimatation, accounting for record admission figures (by the hundreds of thousands) and rescuing its finances, that had begun to wane. In other words, the exotic Jardin was saved by exotic peoples. Created only a few years before his birth and located in the Bois de Boulogne, in the posh West side of Paris, where his family often gravitated, the Jardin thus belongs to the cultural universe of Proust, and the imaginary context of his oeuvre. Although there is to my knowledge no evidence that he ever visited these events, here Marcel Proust is the one who exposes these hidden lieux de mémoire and saves them from oblivion. Indeed, the man that Mme Blatin saw at the Jardin d’Acclimatation came without a doubt as part of the exhibition of Ceylonese, or Singhalese, as were also called certain people from the island of Ceylon, the former name of Sri Lanka. The Singhalese man is thus one of these people who were exhibited behind fences, like human specimens in a zoo. We now begin to fathom the ‘beauty’ of his story. It is a beauty that lies in, and stems from, the sheer power of the Singhalese man. Colonized, then exhibited in a zoo, if one were to call him a ‘minority’ it might sound like a euphemism. Let me suggest though that ‘minority’, in this case, sounds more like an antiphrasis. Once and for all we must not consider the Singhalese man as a part of an improbable exotic décor, or as an ‘anecdotal,’ contingent character. First of all, as part of a historical event (the 1883 exhibit in the Jardin d’Acclima­ tation), the Singhalese man inscribes universal Time and history within a text that incidentally offers no explicit chronology. To a certain extent, Proust makes this perfect stranger the witness and the master of the authenticity of his text, a formidable guardian of the rapport between fiction and the world.3 Yet, despite the apparent indisputability of the historical reference, a doubt remains. The doubt relates to the choice of the particular ethnic group of the Singhalese people. As was sometimes the case, the Singhalese exhibition was staged not once, but repeated: after 1883, they came back in 1886. So contrary to what the Pléiade leads us to believe, the reference does not establish an undeniable chronology around a single date; we cannot be sure, in fact, to which exhibition Proust alludes: 1883 or 1886. If the intrusion of historical time is real, it remains approximate, and thus preserves the generative principle of subjectivity of the Proustian text. Moreover, the choice of the Singhalese exhibitions could also be linked to another element which makes them unique. In short, the two Singhalese exhibitions were the most successful exhibitions at the Jardin d’Acclimatation, the most spectacular — the beginning of exhibitions for pure entertainment. And to this spectacular aspect of human zoos corresponds the ‘beau mot’, the repartee of the Singhalese man. And as we get closer to unfolding the beauty of his word, we must consider the fate of the Singhalese man who seems so out of place. ‘Noir’, ‘Négro’ (or ‘Nigger’)? The Avatars of a Singhalese Man Incidentally, is ‘Singhalese’ the right word? No one seems to agree on his identity. According to who speaks about him, or to him, in other words, depending on whose discourse he belongs to, the Singhalese man is called a different name: for

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Odette he is a ‘Cinghalais’; for Swann he is a ‘noir’; and for Mme Blatin, he is a ‘négro’. But his outrage might not be due to the most obvious reason. The Singhalese man may be irate because ‘Négro’ is a derogatory term — much more than ‘Nègre’, which at the time of Proust was a taxonomic term referring to the ‘black race’ and was used in anthropology, ethnography, art history, etc. Whereas ‘Nègre’ had, for a long time, no intentional pejorative connotations, ‘négro’ as a popular variant of ‘nègre’, therefore a degraded form, was always condescending if not downright insulting. But perhaps his indignation comes from the fact that he is simply not, ‘properly speaking’, a ‘négro’ — nor a ‘nègre’, or even a ‘Noir’. When Proust wrote this passage, Singhalese people were also called Ceylonese, to designate certain peoples of Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then called. They were thus from Asia, not Africa — which ‘noir’, ‘nègre’, or ‘négro’ would tend to connote. Before being a matter of contempt and condescension, this story might then relate a case of mistaken (or even misgiven) identity. Or, to be precise, perhaps we should say of mistaken identities — and alienations. For the story is two-fold. As he has just been estranged, insulted as an other (ethnicity), and for an other, the stranger strikes back — instantly: ‘Moi négro, mais toi chameau!’4 When the insulted man retaliates, it is with even greater violence, introducing another degree of exoticism in the discourse, retorting with an epithet not related to race but to species. And, more drastically still, a species of an exotic animal: the camel. In your face, Mme Blatin. The retort comes with such force, that we do not even hear her reply and must imagine her dumbfounded — literally speechless, her mouth shut for good. But ‘mouth’, let alone ‘face’, might not quite be the right words either here. Facing the ‘Black’, Mme Blatin lost face. Her mouth has become a snout; as camel, there is nothing else she could say. But isn’t ‘camel’ an image? The beauty of the phrase is its power. This one simple sentence uttered by a stranger in barely correct grammar may well be the most performative discourse of the entire novel.5 The word is just. Mme Blatin is indeed a ‘chameau’. First, to be sure, she is a camel figuratively speaking, that is to say, in the popular idiom, a mean person, most frequently a woman, despite the masculinity of the gender of the animal.6 In a (single) word, Mme Blatin finds herself entirely alienated, excluded from everywhere — from her sex, her race, and her species. Once a camel, she has become male, exotic, animal: infinitely strange.7 In the series of displacements that operate in this passage, the principal modus operandi is inversion, especially powerful in the reversal of paradoxes. First, greeting the Singhalese man with ‘Bonjour’, Mme Blatin acknowledges the humanity of the man encaged like an animal. The paradox confirms the perversion of the space where it takes place (the human zoo), and the incongruity of the encounter. And this encounter soon turns into a face off when the Singhalese, transformed into a ‘Negro’, retorts by changing his interlocutor into a camel, thus reversing her performative power (which imposes an imaginary identity). As if the Singhalese man happened to be some sort of strange mirror. Whereas we think that what is ref lected is a grotesque illusion (woman/camel), what appears may also be the (unsuspected) original being. The foreigner, as a strange mirror, has the power to unveil the true — if uncanny — self. Mme Blatin is a camel.

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Revelation, revolution: for what it is worth, this upheaval is both poetical and political. Political, the encounter takes place between the master and the oppressed, the figure of the colonizer, and that of the colonized reversing the ideology of the colonial discourse which, founded in Manichaeism, is denounced by Frantz Fanon.8 However, if the ‘Black’ man reverses this dynamic, it is not by transforming the master into a beast (which would account for just another form of Manichaeism); rather, it shows the extent to which the power has always been unfounded, erroneous, by revealing the original animality. And this revelation is both confirmed and anticipated by Swann, the storyteller, who has preluded the narration of the encounter by referring to the ‘colonizer’ as a blue-behind monkey. In other words, the text has always presented the ‘colonizer’ (Mme Blatin) as an inverted figure: not dominant, not human. Proust shows us that she, in fact, is the animal that she thinks she has come to see at the Jardin d’Acclimatation’s Human Zoo. And this verbal act of turning the master into a beast creates a very close rapport, a commonality between Swann and the Singhalese man. As if they shared the same point of view, and spoke the same language. But Swann is not the only one who resembles the ‘Black’ avenger. Another passage of La Recherche suggests that the analogy applies to another character as well. It is further, in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, in Balbec, where the narrator will experience a situation quite similar to that of the Singhalese man in his human zoo in the Jardin d’Acclimatation. In Balbec, the young narrator suffers from a peculiar kind of homesickness where what causes pain is in fact both the feeling of being remote from what was familiar and also the feeling that this strange place is not exotic enough.9 Balbec is a strange place, indeed — a space of passage par excellence, and unfathomable. A sort of mythical space whose identity is in perpetual motion, Balbec is both in Normandy (inspired by the real model of Cabourg where Proust used to go in the summer) and in the Orient: for Swann, ‘L’église de Balbec, du XIIe et XIIIe siècle, encore à moitié romane, est peut-être le plus curieux échantillon du gothique normand, et si singulière, on dirait de l’art persan’ [‘the church there, built in the 12th and 13th centuries, and still half Romanesque, is perhaps the most curious example to be found of our Norman Gothic, and so singular that one is tempted to describe it as Persian in its inspiration’] (i, 377–78; 1, 417–18) — a hybridity that can be heard in the very name of Balbec, the origins of which one ought to consider, as David Ellison suggested, coming from Baalbek, the ancient Heliopolis, in modern-day Lebanon.10 In the image of Proustian exoticism, Balbec reveals the foreign origins or rather the strangeness of the origins of the familiar. Take, for example, the manager of the hotel where the narrator is staying as if in exile, and who regards him and his grandmother ‘as belonging to a race of pariahs’. The master of this domain, however, turns out to be a grotesque man with ‘diverse accents acquired from an alien ancestry and a cosmopolitan upbringing’ (1, 712), himself a stranger. In Balbec, the narrator must face marginality — his own and that of others who are even more exotic and to whom he feels ever closer. See how the denizens, the habitués of the Grand-Hotel, affected ‘une attitude d’une méprisante ironie à l’égard d’un Français qu’on appelait Majesté et qui s’était,

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en effet, proclamé lui-même roi d’un petit îlot de l’Océanie peuplé par quelques sauvages’ [‘an attitude of contemptuous irony with regard to a Frenchman who was called ‘His Majesty’ and who had indeed proclaimed himself king of a small island in the South Seas peopled only by a few savages’] (ii, 37; 1, 727). With his wife whom the local children hail as a queen because of her lavish donations of pennies, these ‘souverains de Guignol’ [‘pantomime princes’] as the dignitaries call them, are upsetting because they are more generous than authentic, French people from overseas disturbing the bourgeois order of the metropolitan. And if the narrator seeks a sympathetic response from l’aventurier qui avait été roi d’une île déserte en Océanie’ [‘the adventurer who had been king of a desert island in the South Seas’] (ii, 43; 3, 734) it might be to get on his side, the side of the ‘savages’ and the children. After all, before sending the narrator to Balbec, Swann had incited him to ‘partir pour ces délicieuses îles de l’Océanie, vous verrez que vous n’en reviendrez plus’ [‘to go off to one of those glorious islands in the Pacific, you’d never come back again if you did’] (ii, 31; 1, 721).11 As if the narrator of La Recherche could finally feel at home in Tahiti. As if, along with Baudelaire, Gauguin, Larbaud, or Michaux, travelling was Proust’s ultimate way of life, and overseas his true homeland. The narrator finds himself on Oceania’s Way, ‘du côté de l’Outre-mer’, we could say to paraphrase Proust’s titles, and on the side of its savages. On the side or ‘du côté’ of the Jardin d’Acclimatation, as well, where he seems to end up — but not in Paris: in Balbec. This displacement is due to the Princess of Luxembourg, an habituée of the Grand-Hôtel, who, with an even more patronizing attitude than Mme Blatin, treats his grandmother and him ‘comme deux bêtes sympathiques qui eussent passé la tête vers elle, à travers le grillage, au jardin d’Acclimatation’ [‘like two lovable beasts who had poked their heads out at her through the bars of our cage in the Zoo’] (ii, 59; 1, 752). In Balbec, the narrator who is seen as an irremediable stranger, even as an animal from the Zoo, gets ever closer to the Singhalese man where he could almost take his place. As for the roots of this rapprochement, they cannot be fully compelling until we acknowledge the resemblance between the narrator and Proust, and between Balbec and Cabourg in Normandy. For this is where the autobiographical anecdote in question originated, during the summer of 1914, when Proust was there visiting wounded soldiers: A Cabourg [...], comme j’apportais un jour des jeux de dames aux noirs (Sénégalais et Marocains) qui aiment beaucoup ce jeu, une dame très bête [...] vint regarder ces noirs comme des bêtes curieuses et dit à l’un d’eux: “Bonjour negro” [sic] ce qui le froissa horriblement. Il répondit: “Moi negro mais toi chameau”.12 [In Cabourg [...] as I was bringing some checkers games to the Black people (Senegalese and Moroccans) [...] a very stupid lady [...] came to look at them as she would have strange animals and said to one of them: ‘Bonjour négro’ which terribly vexed him. He replied: ‘Moi négro, mais toi chameau’.]

Proust continues, calling the event a ‘historiette’, a little story, diminishing its importance. But there is no such thing as an insignificant anecdote in La Recherche. Proust tells this ‘little story’ accurately, and repeats it in fiction word for word.

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Faithful witness, he conveys his sympathy for the injured and insulted soldier. If the generative motion of Proust’s work is made of an oscillation between displacements and rapprochements of origins (the movement that makes Balbec resemble Cabourg and Proust the narrator), it must also be acknowledged that far from explaining the fiction, the recourse to biography and history only complicates the reading. As a matter of fact, to the series of displacements and estrangements that the Singhalese man endured one must now add those operated by the author himself. Spatial displacement: Cabourg (in Proust’s account) moved to the Jardin d’Acclimatation (in the book). Historical displacement: 1914 was set back to 1883, and the Great War became a human zoo. Identity displacement: a soldier of the colonial troops (most likely a tirailleur sénégalais) metamorphosed into the subject of a Singhalese exhibition. If all these displacements have their ethical and aesthetical significations vis-à-vis the perception of the ‘exotic stranger’, the latter mutation is the most dramatic. Or, at the contrary, the least obvious. After all, who would not confuse, if not ethnically then at least phonetically, Senegalese and Singhalese? By 1919, when A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs came out, most readers had forgotten about the Singhalese exhibitions of the 1880s; but none could have ignored the sacrifice of the Senegalese in the war that had just ravaged France. As if the paronomasia ‘Cinghalais/Sénégalais’ had been intended by Proust as a lure — or a test. The phonetic proximity is only proportionate to the ethnic difference and the geographical distance that separate Senegal and Sri Lanka. From Senegalese to Singhalese, Proust’s poetical displacement conveys an ethical charge. The minute difference (barely more than a vowel) is nonetheless enough for a huge misstep, a blunder of abysmal consequences as Mme Blatin could testify, telling of the futility and fragility of naming, of the hazard of presuming the other’s identity. More than mistaken identity, Proust, with his fictitious Singhalese ‘Négro’ doppelgänger, loathes simple identification, the process that imprisons the being in one, inescapable cage of meaning. For Proust, the greatest insult, ethically and aesthetically, is to be called a single name. A coup de théâtre As Proust’s ‘historiette’ and Swann’s little story of the ‘beau mot’ show, each word, each phrase may lead to a misstep. The author himself does not seem immune to a mistake, as the conclusion of the passage leads us to believe. The narrator has the last word when he finally speaks again to share his reaction to the extraordinary story Swann has just told: Je manifestai un extrême désir d’aller voir ces Cinghalais dont l’un avait appelé Mme Blatin: chameau. Ils ne m’intéressaient pas du tout. Mais je pensais que pour aller au jardin d’Acclimatation et en revenir nous traverserions cette allée des Acacias où j’avais tant admiré Mme Swann, et peut-être le mulâtre ami de Coquelin à qui je n’avais jamais pu me montrer saluant Mme Swann, me verrait à côté d’elle au fond d’une Victoria. (i, 526) [I expressed an intense desire to go there and see these Singhalese, one of whom had called Mme Blatin an old cow [a camel]. They did not interest me

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in the least. But I ref lected that on the way to the Zoo, and again on our way home, we should pass through the Allée des Acacias in which I used to gaze so admiringly at Mme Swann, and that perhaps Coquelin’s mulatto friend, to whom I had never managed to exhibit myself in the act of saluting her, would see me there, seated at her side, as the Vicoria swept by.] (1, 576)

This astonishing scene, one of the most theatrical of La Recherche, ends on a true coup de théâtre, with the unexpected in extremis appearances of obscure characters who, in spite of their secondary dimension, are said to play a significant role in the hero’s eyes. Indeed, who are Coquelin and his anonymous ‘mulatto friend’? The former is a real, historical figure: Benoît-Constant Coquelin (1841–1909), also known as Coquelin aîné [the elder], was one of the most celebrated actors of the Comédie Française from the 1860s through the early 1880s, retiring only three years after the Singhalese exhibition in the Bois de Boulogne. He is also a character of La Recherche: in Du côté de chez Swann, he is one of the actors the narrator admires the most although, to his great regret, he has not been able to see him on stage. (i, 73) In the last pages of the novel, however, he does eventually see him, not in the theatre, but in the Bois de Boulogne. And not in the Jardin d’Acclimatation next to the Singhalese, but in the allée des Acacias where he passed but where the young narrator missed him because he was so enthralled by the extraordinary spectacle of Odette’s promenade (i, 412; 1, 454). Oddly enough, however, the narrator later does not say he wants to make good the missed opportunity of seeing Coquelin in person, but rather expresses the desire to be seen by his ‘mulâtre ami’. And if the narrator seems so keen on being seen by this man, it is because he wants an injustice to be repaired. He remembers the day he missed Coquelin in the Bois, and when he first witnessed Odette’s celebrity among the strollers who paid no attention to him. And among the people riveted to Odette’s glamorous silhouette who were ignoring ‘le jeune homme inconnu’ [‘the unknown youth’] who was about to salute her, he remembers ‘remarque[r] avec désolation que n’était pas un certain banquier mulâtre par lequel [il] [se] sentai[t] méprisé’ [‘[being] dismayed not to find a certain mulatto banker by whom [he] felt despised’] (i, 413; 1, 455). This man’s role is thus as astounding as it is unique. For even though Proust does not say that he is indeed among the group walking with Coquelin in the Bois, we must assume that this mulatto banker is the same person as Coquelin’s friend mentioned retrospectively by the narrator. In addition, the phrasing suggests that the young man knew him, or at least had come across him several times, enough times to feel permanently despised by him. If ‘Blacks’ are rare in Proust’s novel,13 ‘mulattos’ are far scarcer still: in fact, this ‘friend’ of Coquelin’s is the only one. He is as unique as the Singhalese man. A mulâtre, from the Spanish mulato, designates in French a person who was born of an interracial relation between a Black person and a White person. Contrary to métisse which may convey positive (albeit patronizing) connotations, mulâtre is no longer used in French and is widely recognized as pejorative. This negative reputation may come from its cultural and political usage; but it undoubtedly originates in the first meaning of mulato: a mule — that is to say, a hybrid animal. The hybridity of the mulatto may thus, if not justify, at least reinforce the semantic

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and narrative rapprochement to the Singhalese, exposed in a zoo. A mix of multiple races and, taken literally, of different species, even in his ephemeral existence (calling him a secondary character would be a major overstatement), the mulatto embodies Proust’s writing, made of estrangement and union, the poetics of métissage par excellence: the metaphor. As for ‘chameau’, is it a metaphor? To say the least, it is an overpowering image, as Odette testifies: ‘On voit bien la mère Blatin’; one, indeed, pictures her quite well... If his phrase is indeed a metaphor, this means that the ‘Black’ man speaks the way Proust likes to write: ‘La vérité ne commencera qu’au moment où l’écrivain prendra deux objets différents, posera leur rapport [...] et les enfermera dans les anneaux nécessaires d’un beau style’ [‘truth will be attained by [the writer] only when he takes two different objects, states the connection between them [...] and encloses them in the necessary links of a well-wrought style’] (iv, 468; 3, 925). As if this elusive mulatto and his counterpart, the spectacular ‘Black’, ‘negro’ Singhalese were one and the same person: the absolute stranger. This mulatto who haunts the text with his evanescent presence may be the ultimate ref lection of his author — in French a nègre (literally a ‘negro’ or, in today’s equivalence, a ‘nigger’) has come to mean a ghost-writer, suggesting not only servitude but total invisibility and nonexistence. And when I say that the apparition of the interracial man generates the ultimate displacement in this story, I am mistaken. The last displacement is that of the narrator who very much desires to go not to see the Singhalais, but to be seen by a mulatto. That is to say that in the end the narrator becomes the actor and transforms himself (even in imagination) into an object of spectacle. In other words, the narrator wishes to take the place of the other actor — the Singhalese. In other words, the words of the other But will the narrator ever be able to respond like this nameless man? Could he ever articulate a phrase as compelling as ‘Moi négro, mais toi chameau’? It remains to be said about this phrase that it is, if not the most beautiful, at least the most strange of Proust’s work. Both poetically and musically, as far as both prosody and melody are concerned, his phrase is remarkable. It is a marvel of symmetry and asymmetry, of a perfectly harmonious awkwardness. Moi and Toi, Négro and Chameau echo and rhyme, respond to each other, eventually corresponding in their dissemblance, creating an indissoluble rapport. The Singhalese man, to be sure, is a poet. But there lies the greatest mystery perhaps yet. Unlike the Senegalese, the Singhalese, not being the subject of a French colony (but of an English one), should not, in principle, be proficient in French. Nonetheless, he responds with a phrase typically associated with the sub-Saharan idiom that the French colonialist discourse called ‘petit nègre’. And this is what makes this sentence unique in the work of Proust — a work that is as oral as it is musical, where one hears time and again idioms, patois, altered French, and occasionally foreign words. From the regional proverbs and habitual mispronunciations of Françoise, the narrator’s maid,14 to Odette’s

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compulsive anglicisms; from the cries of Parisian street vendors to the accent of Jewish immigrants on the beach of Balbec; from Latin to English, from Racine’s alexandrines to popular songs, Proust relishes offering us words, phrases, or just tones from all places and times, making A la recherche du temps perdu sound like a Babel opera. But the apparitions of these strange tones or foreign languages do not serve a mere aesthetical purpose: they often sustain (as in the rapport between text and music in an opera) a revelation. Comparing street cries to the works of Moussorgsky, Debussy or Maeterlinck, or even to the Latin of the Gregorian chants,15 Proust reveals (again) the universality (or democratic randomness) of poetical potential beauty. When the narrator discloses that the man who is ranting against the ‘Jewish colony’ ‘infesting Balbec’ by mocking their accents16 is none other than his ( Jewish) friend Bloch, he shows hatred knows no boundaries and can be blindly aimed at oneself. And when he occasionally reveals that he himself has at least some knowledge of foreign languages,17 he may also be hinting at his inclination for the word of the other. As for the phrase of the Singhalese, it is not, as in the case of Bloch viciously ‘imitating’ Jews, mocking its author nor mocking its object. It is not a falsified, racist discourse, but an authentic phrase uttered by a real foreigner. ‘Moi Négro, mais toi chameau’ is a sentence of an exotic familiarity — the only phrase of the work that is at the same time French and not French: a foreign French sentence. In many ways, again, the Singhalese man speaks like Proust. Further: he speaks for him. In other words, the anonymous, ephemeral foreigner is the author’s best spokesman.18 After all, one must remember how Proust began to be read, as suggests the most laudatory review of Du côté de chez Swann: les incorrections pullulent [...] Visiblement, les jeunes ne savent plus du tout le français. La langue se décompose, se mue en un patois informe et glisse à la barbarie. Il serait temps de réagir. [...] Cependant, M. Marcel Proust a, sans aucun doute, beaucoup de talent. C’est précisément pourquoi l’on déplorera qu’il gâte de si beaux dons par tant d’erreurs.19 [errors abound [...] Visibly, young people do not know [how to write or speak] French any more. The language disaggregates, mutates into a shapeless dialect, and deteriorates into a barbaric idiom. It is time we reacted. [...] Nonetheless, there is no doubt that M. Marcel Proust has a lot of talent. This is precisely why one regrets he spoils such notable gifts with so many errors.]

For a long time Proust, now the paragon of French literature, used to be read as a ‘barbare’, a French speaker who violated his native language. A Barbarian, that is to say a barbaros, the absolute stranger for the Greeks, he who lives outside the boundaries of civilization, and does not even speak the civilized language — of the Sanskrit barbara, who stutters and stammers, cannot speak any language. Perhaps the beautiful phrase of the Singhalese says nothing more: to write, like stuttering, is to be looking for the right word. And for Proust, it is to write the right word, but imperfectly — to preserve and cultivate a certain awkwardness, a vital error. It is again what Gilles Deleuze understands when he writes ‘un style, c’est arriver à bégayer dans sa propre langue. [...] Non pas être bègue dans sa parole, mais être bègue du langage lui-même, être comme étranger dans sa propre langue.’ [‘to

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have a style is to be able to stutter in one’s own language [...] It is not to stutter in one’s speech, but to stammer in language itself, to be like a stranger in one’s own language.’]20 Strangely, to the first readers’ criticisms of altering his own language, Proust had already responded, by anticipation, and privately, in a letter he wrote years before Swann was published, and in which he defines his poetic art by inventing his personal Defence and Illustration of French Language: Les seules personnes qui défendent la langue française [...] ce sont celles qui ‘l’attaquent’. Cette idée qu’il y a une langue française existant en dehors des écrivains, et qu’on protège, est inouïe. Chaque écrivain est obligé de se faire sa langue comme chaque violoniste est obligé de se faire son ‘son’. Et entre le son de tel violoniste médiocre, et le son (pour la même note) de Thibaut, il y a un infiniment petit qui est un monde! Je ne veux pas dire que j’aime les écrivains originaux qui écrivent mal. Je préfère — et c’est peut-être une faiblesse — ceux qui écrivent bien. Mais ils ne commencent à écrire bien qu’à condition d’être originaux, de faire eux-mêmes leur langue. La correction, la perfection du style existe, mais au-delà de l’originalité, après avoir traversé les fautes. [The only people who defend the French language [...] are those who ‘attack’ it. The idea that there is a French language that exists apart from writers and that we protect, is unbelievable. Each writer is forced to create his own language just as each violinist must create his own ‘sound’. And between the sound of a mediocre violinist, and the sound (for the same note) of a Thibaut, there is an infinitesimal difference that is a world! I do not want to say that I like original writers who write poorly. I prefer — and this might be a weakness — those who write well. But they begin to write well only if they are original, if they make their own language. The accuracy of language, the perfection of style exist, but beyond originality, after having gone through mistakes.] 21

If Proust always thought of writing in terms of music, it was no doubt because of what he conceived as its paradoxical quality — both communicable and unanalysable, profoundly sympathetic and utterly strange. And, as Proust announces in this (secret, intimate) self-prophecy, writing, like music, ought to be conceived mainly in the minor mode. Minor, that is, in the musical but also in the literary sense, as used by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their reading of Kaf ka: the production of a minority within a major language, which then ‘deterritorializes’ that major language.22 This is the position that Proust assumes: ‘Être dans sa propre langue comme un étranger’ [‘a sort of stranger within his own language’].23 With his very minor character as his spokesman, a stranger arisen from a musical transmigration (from Vinteuil’s sonata to the Jardin d’Acclimatation), a tenuous tenor capable of wonders with only one phrase — poetic, subverted, transgressive — perhaps Proust as well ought to be heard as a ‘minor’ author. Perhaps we should read him as an author writing like a minority in the major language. Perhaps we should experience A la recherche du temps perdu as a work born of estrangement, a foreign ‘French’ novel, inventing its own language, with new ‘beautiful words — always from elsewhere.

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Notes to Chapter 5 1. ‘The object of the Société is the exploitation of a zoological garden established on a concession of land in the Bois de Boulogne given by the city of Paris for the purpose of applying and furthering views of the Société Impériale Zoologique d’Acclimatation, to acclimate, breed and disseminate to the public the animal and vegetal species which are or will later be newly introduced to France.’ William H. Schneider, An Empire for the Masses: The French Popular Image of Africa, 1870–1900 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 127. The author is quoting and translating the Acte consultatif de la Société du Jardin zoologique d’Acclimatation du Bois de Boulogne. (Paris: Imprimerie Martinet, 1859), p. 1. 2. The first ethnographic exhibition took place in Hamburg in 1874, on a very modest scale (six Laplanders with reindeer), but was a phenomenal success. See Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, et al. (eds), Zoos humains: Au temps des exhibitions humaines (Paris: La Découverte, 2004), p.11. 3. However, this power must be nuanced as the link remains both discrete and somewhat obscure: it is up to the readers to do their own research to discover what truth the Singhalese man embodies. 4. ‘Me negro, [but] you old cow!’ ‘You camel!’, it should have read, to be completely accurate. 5. A performance in the sense of efficacity; in the theatrical sense; and in the linguistic sense as well: the sentence performs what it expresses. 6. Although ‘chameau’ refers to the male camel (‘chamelle’ being the female/feminine), when it is used in the metaphorical sense of an obnoxious, callous person it mostly pertains to women, at least in the nineteenth century when the phrase on took this connotation. 7. And if we should insist, we would underscore that the phrase used to translate chameau, namely ‘old cow’, misses crucial dimensions of Mme Blatin’s alienating metamorphoses by replacing the male exotic animal with a female domestic one. 8. ‘At times, this Manichaeism goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanizes the native, or so to speak plainly, it turns him into an animal. In fact, the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms. When the settler seeks to describe the native fully in exact terms he constantly refers to the bestiary’. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. by Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press City: 1968), p. 42. 9. On Balbec’s exoticism see André Benhaïm, ‘From Baalbek to Baghdad and Beyond: Marcel Proust’s Foreign Memories of France’, in Cultural Memory in France, ed. by Alec Hargreaves et al. (= Journal of European Studies, 35 (2005)), pp. 87–101. 10. See David Ellison, Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 143. 11. In the manuscript, the narrator is also advised to go to South America (See Esquisse xxxiii, ii, 904). 12. Proust, Letter to Maria de Madrazo [1915], Correspondance, xiv, 45. 13. One should not forget, of course, the ‘petit nègre’ page who accompanies the Princess of Luxembourg in Balbec (ii, 60), and the Senegalese troops admired by Charlus in the nocturnal streets of Paris in Le Temps retrouvé (iv, 388; 3, 837). 14. Françoise recalls her mother’s patois, for instance, when she sneers at the pregnant kitchenmaid: ‘ “Qui du cul d’un chien s’amourose, Il lui paraît une rose.” ’ (i, 122; see 1, 134 for the equivalent English proverb). 15. For example, ‘ “Habits, marchands d’habits, ha...bits” ’ [‘ “Old clothes, any old clothes, old... clothes” ’] is said to be chanted ‘with the same pause between the final syllables as if he had been intoning in plain chant: “Per omnia saecula saeculo... rum” or “requiescat in pa... ce” ’. (iii, 625; 3, 113) 16. ‘ “Dis-donc Apraham, ch’ai fu Chakop’” [‘ “I thay, Apraham, I’ve just theen Chacop’”] (ii, 97; 1, 793). 17. We learn, for example, that his mother admired the German language (despite his father’s loathing for that nation), and had explained to him the difference between ‘genuine sensibility’ or ‘Empfindung’, and ‘sentimentality’ (sensiblerie) or ‘Empfindelei’ (iii, 615; 3, 103). And in Venice, the narrator reveals knowing enough Italian to translate conversations between waiters: ‘Deux garçons causaient en un Italien que je traduis: “... C’est assommant, je ne sais jamais si je dois

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garder leur table (non si bisogna conservar loro la tavola)” ’ [‘Two waiters were conversing in an Italian which I translate: “... It’s annoying; I never know whether I ought to keep their table for them” ’]. (iv, 209; 3, 644) 18. We could even imagine that Proust had anticipated and answered the question of the pivotal essay by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ Here, Proust suggests that not only he can speak to, but that he also speaks for the ‘master’, empowered not only to talk, but to talk back. The writer’s voice here must be understood as comprised of both the minority and the dominating discourses, thereby imploding the ideological binary opposition Spivak criticizes. 19. Paul Souday, ‘Du côté de chez Swann’, Le Temps, 10 December 1913. 20. Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues (with Claire Parnet) (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), p.10. We should add here one last note on the beauty of the Singhalese’s phrase. By calling Mme Blatin a ‘chameau’, he makes us hear what she was doing perhaps unknowingly: déblatérer [to rant and rave]. Figuratively déblatérer is often used with an object, in expressions such as ‘déblatérer des bêtises’ [to talk nonsense], or ‘déblatérer des injures’ [to f ling abuse]. Used ‘absolutely’, without complements, it means ‘to speak with violence and profusion against someone or something.’ And the aggressiveness that it signifies is found in its origins. Déblatérer comes from the Latin deblaterare which means to speak thoughtlessly, randomly, a verb that itself comes from blaterare, to chatter, or to gossip. And if blaterare has also been linked to balbus, ‘stuttering’, it first referred (in low Latin) to the cry of the camel (blatérer). This kind of onomastic paronomasia (Blatin/blatere), of course, fits perfectly with Proust’s ideas about the suggestive powers of proper names. 21. Proust, Letter to Mme Straus (6 November 1908). Correspondance, viii, 276–77. My translation. 22. ‘Une littérature mineure n’est pas celle d’une langue mineure, plutôt celle qu’une minorité fait dans une langue majeure. Mais le premier caractère est de toute façon que la langue y est affectée d’un fort coefficient de déterritorialisation’ [‘A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. But the first characteristic of a minor literature in any case is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization.’] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit, 1975), p. 29; Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. by Dana Polan (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 16. Although Deleuze’s ‘Proust’ remains the polymorphic figure of his major work Proust et les signes, much may be argued for a systematic reading of Proust as the counterpoint (or the subtext) of his ‘Kaf ka’ (a project which is to be undertaken). On Deleuze’s strange ‘Proust’, see Anne Simon’s essay in this volume. 23. Ibid., p. 48; trans. p. 26.

C h ap t er 6

v

A Proustian ‘Metterza’ Raymonde Coudert, Université Paris-7 Léonard de Vinci, miroir profond et sombre, Où des anges charmants, avec un doux souris Tout chargé de mystère, apparaissent à l’ombre Des glaciers et des pins qui ferment leur pays Charles Baudelaire, ‘Les Phares’ [Leonardo, dark, unfathomable mirror, In which charming angels, with sweet smiles Full of mystery, appear in the shadow Of the glaciers and pines that enclose their country ‘Beacons’]1

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) as imagined between Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Marcel Proust (1871–1922) is the subject of the following study. Although they mutually ignored each other’s work, Marcel Proust and Sigmund Freud, who lived at the same time, had in common an admiration for Leonardo da Vinci. Freud is the author of an essay on the Renaissance Italian Painter, entitled ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood’,2 and Proust, in his work, cites some of the artist’s paintings and works.3 The following study of Leonardo in Proust was facilitated by the various inventories of occurrences of the name and the painter’s works in A la recherche du temps perdu.4 I am less concerned with these occurrences than with certain details of the text in which they take place, and notably with certain contents and themes of the context. I will try to collect and organize the elements that form, in my eyes, an ensemble. Or rather a series leading toward a Leonardesque figure, which has in particular that it does not appear explicitly as a reference in the Proustian text despite organizing — this is my hypothesis — a capital piece of this novel which the narrator said he wanted to ‘build like a cathedral.’ The occurrences of Leonardo da Vinci in La Recherche are not many for a writer who (at the age of twenty, to be sure) affirmed he was his favourite painter. More fortunate is the fate of Leonardo’s formula la pittura è cosa mentale, that Proust takes up, and that is at the centre of the preoccupations of many critics who have made it a linchpin of the Proustian aesthetic, even if its author never read Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting.

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I. The Study 1. Morghen’s print of Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper’ The evocation of ‘La gravure de la Cène de Léonard avant sa dégradation, par Morghen’ occurs in a fairly long segment of the ‘baiser du soir’ [‘goodnight kiss’] episode (i, 38–43), when we are told the story of the events that happened during the night of the mother’s ‘abdication,’ the ‘sad day’ when the father allowed her, and even ordered her to spend the night with his son in tears: ‘Voyons, nous ne sommes pas des bourreaux! Quand tu l’auras rendu malade, tu seras bien avancée! Puisque il y a deux lits dans sa chambre, dis donc à Françoise de te préparer le grand lit et couche pour cette nuit auprès de lui. Allons, bonsoir, moi qui suis moins nerveux que vous, je vais me coucher.’ (i, 36) [‘After all, we aren’t gaolers. You’ll end by making him ill, and a lot of good that will do. There are two beds in his room; tell Françoise to make up the big one for you, and stay with him for the rest of the night. Anyhow, I’m off to bed, I’m not so nervy as you.’] (1, 39)

However, this night for two (mother and son) is in reality a night for three — and the premises of a fruitful triangulation, as we will see. The mother, about to melt into tears herself, is of a ‘douceur nouvelle’ [‘new gentleness’] (1, 41). On this evening, she unites her habitual ‘sagesse pratique, réaliste’ [her ‘practical wisdom’] with ‘la nature ardemment idéaliste’ [‘the ardent idealism’] of her own mother, and proposes to her son, to make him stop crying, to get out the ‘four pastoral novels of George Sand’ the grandmother had planned to give him, and to read them. A successful subterfuge, or seduction: the son loves books and reading, both silently and out loud. We know it from the first page of the novel, when he wakes in the middle of the night, thinking he is still holding in his hands the volume he was reading when he fell asleep. We know it because of the sad story of Geneviève, told at night by the magic lantern, punctuated by the sententious patter of the greataunt who tries to reason the sinister Golo (i, 9). We know it because of the little room that smells of irises, propitious (because its door can be locked) to ‘la lecture, à la rêverie, aux larmes et à la volupté’ [‘reading or day-dreaming, tears or sensual gratification’] (i, 12; 1, 13). The tale of that night of maternal defeat is also the occasion to specify a theory not only about reading but simultaneously about art work. And this theory is announced and put into practice by the grandmother: she, who ‘jugeait les lectures futiles aussi malsaines que les bonbons et les pâtisseries’ [‘considered light reading as unwholesome as sweets and cakes’] (i, 38; 1, 42) is convinced that ‘the strong breath of genius’ has on the mind of a child, the same salutary and vivifying inf luence as that of ‘fresh air and see breezes’ on his body. ‘Ma fille, disait-elle à maman, je ne pourrais me décider à donner à cet enfant quelque chose de mal écrit’ [‘My dear,’ she had said to Mamma, ‘I could not bring myself to give the child anything that was not well written’] (i, 39; 1, 42). There it is, rapidly, as far as words are concerned. As for things: if ‘elle avait à faire à quelqu’un un cadeau, [...], un fauteuil, des couverts, une canne, elle les cherchait “anciens” ’ not reasonably solid or useful, but

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disposed to ‘raconter la vie des hommes d’autrefois’ [if ‘she had to make someone a present [...] when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or a walkingstick, she would choose “antiques,” as though [they were] fitted to instruct us in the lives of the men other days’] (i, 39; 1, 43). Things, therefore, possessing a voice, if not speech, capable of transmitting life, but on condition of beauty. On condition of art. And finally, for images: ‘Elle eût aimé que j’eusse dans ma chambre des photo­ graphies des monuments ou des paysages les plus beaux’ [‘she would have liked me to have in my room photographs of ancient buildings or of beautiful places’], or rather, not photographs, too mechanically reproducible, commercial, vulgar, petty. But views, nourished by ‘plusieurs “épaisseurs” d’art’ [‘several “thicknesses” of art’]. A view of Vesuvius — yes! But with ‘un degré d’art de plus’ [‘a stage higher in the scale of art’], by Turner. And not a photographic reproduction, but an engraving, and preferably old: ‘celles qui représentent un chef-d’œuvre dans un état où nous ne pouvons plus le voir [...], comme la gravure de la Cène de Léonard avant sa dégradation, par Morghen’ [‘such, for example, as show us a masterpiece in a state in which we can no longer see it to-day (like Morghen’s print of Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper’ before its defacement)’] (idem). The theory quickly shows its limits: such an ancient chair collapses under the weight of the one it was given to; such a representation of Venice after a drawing by Titian gives the apprentice voyager a false idea of the site of the town and the lagoon. The work of art is fragile, but also ‘inexact’; the very distance between art and reality is what one reproaches in the grandmother’s practice, carefree and even resistant to present time. But contrary to the trivial consequences of the fragility of art, remains its depth of humanity and its persistent presence, indestructible in sculpted wood, worm-eaten perhaps, but where ‘se distingu[ent] encore une f leurette, un sourire, quelquefois une belle imagination du passé’ [‘in which could still be discerned a f lourish, a smile, a brave conceit the past’] (i, 40; 1, 44). The lily and the smile are two Leonardesque ‘details’ that indicate the association, itself fragile, between the painter and the grandmother. Let us return to the book chosen by the grandmother and read by the mother during the fateful night: one of the ‘four pastoral novels of George Sand,’ François le Champi, enigmatic under its ‘couverture rougeâtre et [son] titre incompréhensible’ [reddish cover and incomprehensible title]. The mother reads it out loud. She ‘passe toutes les scènes d’amour’ [passes over all the love-scenes] (I highlight the ambiguousness of the verb passer: she skips (saute) and she transmits), making all the more incomprehensible for the son the respective attitudes of the adoptive mother (the miller’s wife, Madeleine Blanchet) and of the found child (François, the son conceived and abandoned in the fields), that she raises and who, after many events, will become her husband. The mother’s unfaithful reading of this novel consecrates this ‘nuit d’inceste’ [night of incest]. The censored subject (by the mother’s reading), the forbidden subject (prohibition that George Sand transgresses with her book at the same time scandalous and moral), is wisely (maternally) but ardently, passionately (grandmotherly) read and transmitted. The reading takes the place of incest, which remains a fiction, a fantasy not even uttered, nor represented, barely imaginable– imagined, if not by the missing words.

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The mention of the Last Supper5 will take me to the smile, by a detour. Why make an allusion to this fresco that tells in painting, in images, in portraits, in dispositions, in distances and proximities, the singular rapport of each apostle to the word of Christ? That of Judas is, as we know, crucial.6 Judas is the fourth person from the left in the fresco. He is leaning heavily on his elbows between Andrew and Peter. His right hand squeezes the purse containing the thirty pieces of silver that he has obtained from the High Priests for delivering Christ to them; his left is ready to seize a piece of bread in front of him. He is clearly in profile and looks at Jesus who he knows he has betrayed (I cite Matthew): ‘When evening came, He was at table with the twelve disciples, and the meal was proceeding, when Jesus said, “In solemn truth I tell you that one of you will betray me” [...] Then Judas, the disciple who was betraying Him, asked, “Can it be I, Rabbi?” “It is you,” He replied.’ (Matthew, 26. 20–25). After the meal, Jesus and his disciples go to Gethsemane to pray; but the disciples fall asleep without having the strength to wait up with their master, who reproaches them three times. Judas then arrives at the head of a menacing crowd; he has alerted the henchmen of the High Priests: ‘He had scarcely finished speaking when Judas came — one of the Twelve — accompanied by a great crowd of men armed with swords and bludgeons, sent by the High Priests and Elders of the People. Now the betrayer had agreed upon a sign with them, to direct them. He had said, “The one whom I kiss is the man: lay hold of him.” So he went straight to Jesus and said, “Peace to you, Rabbi!” And he kissed Him eagerly. “Friend,” said Jesus, “carry out your intention.” Then they came and laid their hands on Jesus and seized Him firmly.’ (Matthew, 26. 47–50). Could the kiss of the mother be written on the backdrop of the kiss of Judas? Could the mother’s kiss be a rewriting of Judas’s kiss? The kiss of the mother, given during the sad night beyond all expectations of the son, betrays the childhood love, to which it puts an end. Under cover of the mother’s consenting to the kiss, passionately desired by the son, the supreme betrayal of the bond is committed: the mother has thus (I cite Les Plaisirs et les Jours) ‘ouv[ert] la porte de l’arche’ [‘opened the door of the tabernacle’]7 and she came out; the son is henceforth separated from her, delivered to the exterior world and to exogamous loves, to strange/foreign loves. I will add, as a capital element in my brief study, that the central point of Freud’s reading of the enigma that constitutes Leonardo’s personality is precisely the maternal kiss. It is as if Catarina’s passionate kisses to her son Leonardo (as Freud imagined) would have been found again, translated, restored, and reinvented by the painter at the age of fifty-one in a work of sublimation no less enigmatic: on the lips of the Mona Lisa (1503–07) and of his Saint Anne, at about the same time period, in the form of what Georges Didi-Huberman calls the ‘discreet gaping openness’ (‘discrète béance’)8 of the smile, ‘remarkable, bewitching, enigmatic’ (‘remarquable, ensorcelant, énigmatique’), according to his reading of Freud. 2. The Lily (‘la fleurette’) In A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, Proust for the second time speaks about the painter’s lilies when describing the texture of Gilberte’s braids.9 Looking out the window with her at Mme Swann’s, the son is in heaven:

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Les nattes de Gilberte dans ces moments-là touchaient ma joue. Elles me semblaient, en la finesse de leur gramen, à la fois naturel et surnaturel, et la puissance de leurs rinceaux d’art, un ouvrage unique pour lequel on avait utilisé le gazon du paradis. [...] Mais n’espérant point obtenir un morceau vrai de ces nattes, si au moins j’avais pu en posséder une photographie, combien plus précieuse que celle de f leurettes dessinées par le Vinci! (i, 494) [At such moments Gilberte’s plaits used to brush my cheeks. They seemed to me, in the fineness of their grain, at once natural and supernatural, and in the strength of their skilfully woven tracery, a matchless work of art in the composition of which had been used the very grass of Paradise. [...] But since I never hoped to obtain an actual fragment of those plaits, if at least I had been able to have a photograph of them, how far more precious than one of a sheet of f lowers drawn by Leonardo!] (1, 542)

The grandmother’s theory of art is here thrown overboard. The son in love would like to invent a reliquary (châsse) for an adorable strand of Gilberte’s hair, but only on condition that the wisps are real. He crudely distinguishes art and life whereas the grandmother, on the contrary, tries to unite and make them cross-fertilize. Despite idolizing Mme de Sévigné, who presents things ‘dans l’ordre de nos perceptions au lieu de les expliquer d’abord par leur cause’ [‘in the order of our perception of them instead of first explaining them in relation to their several causes’] (ii, 14; 1, 702) the grandmother would not be able to bring herself to give her grandson access to the celestial grass. The son is not yet at the age of the ‘justification esthétique’. The grandmother and her theory on one side, and the tangible body of Gilberte on the other, are at opposite extremes. As will later be the mother and Albertine. But, like the two sides of Swann and the Guermantes, as opposite as they may be, the path that joins them is so simple that we do not see it. ‘Da Vinci’s lilies’ (‘Les f leurettes du Vinci’) were pointed out to Proust in the works of Ruskin.10 A long page of the writer’s homage to the art critic in Pastiches et Mélanges11 underscores the difference between the (very unliterary) real f lowers ‘si peu littéraires’ that the writer adores (apple blossoms, roses), even though every spring they cause him hay fever attacks, and f lowers in art, as they are found ‘dans tel dessin de Léonard’ [‘in this or that of Leonardo’s drawings’]. The first, the real ones, cannot be idolized under the pretext that they recall their likenesses in a work of art. Similarly, the f lowers in art deserve no cult under the pretence that they seem borrowed from life. The worshipper of a religion other than Catholicism could love the passionf lower despite the fact (and without knowing) that it ‘porte sur elle les instruments de la passion’ [‘bears on itself the instruments of passion’]. One can love all sorts of f lowers, whether or not they bear ‘the instruments’ of Leonardo or of Proust. ‘L’esprit’ of the grandmother is already present in the pages entitled ‘John Ruskin’ that date from 1908. The passage on f lowers and ‘the lilies of da Vinci’ contains the first name that the writer will give her in the novel, a striking shortcut of the critique of idolatry: ‘Devons-nous vraiment, autrement que pour lui faire un compliment esthétique, préférer une personne parce ce qu’elle s’appellera Bathilde comme [Mme de Chasteller] l’héroïne de Lucien Leuwen?’12 [‘Must we really, other than to give her an aesthetical compliment, prefer a person because she will be named Bathilde like the heroin of Lucien Leuwen?’] Could the grandmother’s

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first name, Bathilde, be one writer’s ‘compliment esthétique’ to another? From the writer for whom pleasures are in the mind (cosa mentale) to the writer for whom pleasures are in life?13 Or a compliment from the writer to his grandmother, Mme Nathé Weil, born Adèle Berncastel? 3. Leonardo’s caricatures After the legendary finesse of the ‘da Vinci lilies,’ it is the acidity of his stroke in caricature that is used by Proust in a portrait of Albertine: Il n’y avait que, quand elle était tout à fait sur le côté, un certain aspect de sa figure (si bonne et belle de face) que je ne pouvais souffrir, crochu comme en certaines caricatures de Léonard, semblant révéler la méchanceté, l’âpreté au gain, la fourberie d’une espionne, dont la présence chez moi m’eût fait horreur [...]. Aussitôt je prenais la figure d’Albertine dans mes mains et je la replaçais de face. (iii, 587) [When she was lying completely on her side, there was a certain aspect of her face (so sweet and beautiful from in front) which I could not endure, hookednosed as in one of Leonardo’s caricatures, seeming to betray the malice, the need for gain, the deceitfulness of a spy whose presence in my house would have filled me with horror [...]. At once I took Albertine’s face in my hands and [turned it toward me].] (3, 74)

Our investigation needs a context. Albertine is prisoner. The setting is the son’s room. The two ‘lovers’ (?) are in bed. Albertine wears neither nightgown nor robe. She is dozing, he is falling asleep. The fire is going out. The son rings Françoise for her to come and put more wood on the fire. Once again, the scene belongs to three characters: the son (invariably); the clandestine lover, forbidden, secret (in the series: the mother, the miller’s wife); and the eternal, or canonical mother (old Françoise, who beats all the records of longevity, successively cooks for Aunt Léonie, the mother and the son). Moreover, the whole passage evokes an intermixing of the generations and the roles: the son ‘ressemble peu à peu à tous [s]es parents’ [‘to resemble all [his] relations’] (iii, 586; 3, 72) like his mother; like his grandmother; like his father; like his Aunt Léonie ‘transmigrée’ [‘transmigrated’] into his own body. He talks to Albertine ‘tantôt comme l’enfant qu’[il a été] à Combray parlant à [s]a mère, tantôt comme [s]a grand-mère [lui] parlait [à lui]’ [‘at one moment as the child [he] had been at Combray used to talk to [his] mother, at another as [his] grandmother used to talk to [him]’] (iii, 587; 3, 73). And his ‘impur amour pour Albertine’ [‘impure love for Albertine’] is blended with ‘la douceur d’une tendresse à la fois filiale et maternelle’ [the tender charm of an affection at once filial and maternal’]. Further along in the text, in Albertine disparue, the mention of Albertine who ‘nouait ses bras derrière ses cheveux noirs, la hanche renf lée, la jambe tombante en une inf lexion de col de cygne qui s’allonge et se recourbe pour revenir sur luimême’ (iv, 108–09) evokes Leda, at once human and animal. Would Leonardo be hiding behind this allusion?14 Leonardo’s Leda is standing, facing outward, but her body, in a spiral movement, is a little lopsided. The swan, on the right side of the painting, is standing on its spread feet, grotesque, also facing front, which almost makes the volume of its body disappear in comparison to its disproportionate neck

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that forms a strange arabesque, like an backward S, and cutting with its spread-out left wing an oval opening through which Leda passes her left hand. Albertine, in the paragraph which precedes the description of the posture that I cited, is herself also standing and naked in her unbuttoned shirt. As if Proust, dislocating the painting that he could have seen in reproduction had first remembered the sensual Leda, her ‘petits seins haut remontés [...] si ronds qu’ils avaient l’air [...] d’y avoir mûri comme deux fruits’ [‘her two uplifted breasts [...] so round that they seemed [...] to have ripened there like a fruit’] (iii, 588; 3, 74), then the swan with the sinuous neck and the face in profile, and finally the physiognomic exercises of the painter that emerge in the crooked profile of the young girl.15 4. The glaze of Leonardo and the glaze of Elstir (ii, 254 and 277). The son is with Albertine in the studio of the painter. The conversation is about art. The painter shows a watercolour of Creuniers cliffs, of their beauty more architectural than natural: contrary to the Balbec church that resembles ‘une grande falaise, une grande levée de pierre du pays,’ ‘[...] [l]es rochers [des Creuniers] puissamment et délicatement découpés font penser à une cathédrale’ [‘Don’t those rocks [at the Creuniers], so powerfully and delicately modelled, remind you of a cathedral?’] (ii, 254–55; 1, 962). We recognize the theory of the Elstirian metaphor where the earth is painted like the sea, and the sea like the earth, without continuity as a solution. The description of the watercolour makes the ‘glaze’ appear (while Leonardo has not yet come up). Let us skip over the strangeness of this watercolour on ‘canvas’ where the warmth and the light seem to have ‘drunk up half the sea’ distilled ‘into a gaseous state’ (‘à demi bu la mer [...], passée à l’état gazeux’). Destroyed, the reality is concentrated in the blue varnish of the fresh shadows at the foot of the boulders, and the f lanks of the small boats that Proust compares to dark and transparent creatures, and to dolphins. Elstir has something of Monet and his painting, an aesthetic based on mythological symbolism, to be sure. But let us pursue the association, by referring to the vaporized backgrounds of Leonardo, his countrysides on the borderline of monochromism, the sfumato of his contours, his figures as if enveloped by their own colour, looming and caressed by the shadows, softly shining. This is how I see the shaft of the cave in The Virgin of the Rocks, the background contours of Saint Anne with the virgin and the Child, the countryside behind the Mona Lisa, and that which turns blue in the framing of the three windows of The Last Supper: as in the seascape invented by Elstir, ‘sans consistence ni couleur.’ A few pages after the visit to the studio of the painter in La Recherche, the cliffs of Creuniers are the site of a second aesthetic experience, no longer in painting but in figuration (ii, 277–78). After an unlucky game of ‘furet’ (or pass-the-slipper) with the young girls, the son is walking with Andrée: Nous étions sortis du petit bois et avions suivi un lacis de chemins assez peu fréquentés où Andrée se retrouvait fort bien: ‘Tenez, me dit-elle tout à coup, voici vos fameux Creuniers, et encore vous avez de la chance, juste par le temps, dans la lumière où Elstir les a peints.’ [...] Je pus distinguer [...] les Déesses marines qu’Elstir avait guettées et surprises, sous un sombre glacis aussi beau que celui d’un Léonard. (ii, 277)

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‘Sous le soleil émietteur de falaise et de l’Océan décoloré’ [‘beneath the sun that crumbled the cliffs and the etiolated ocean’] the shadows with slimy bodies and dark eyes are the guardians ready to f lee or to hide. Their analogy with the young girls is transparent. It is through her that one must go to find the association with the grandmother. Eager to take advantage of the young girls at his leisure and of Albertine in particular, in trying to divert Andrée from her fixation on Albertine the son uses the pretext of his duties to his grandmother to elude the propositions of a visit by his friend, Saint-Loup, stationed in Doncières. And during the dinner with his grandmother, while he waits for her to have her back turned in order to dash to Albertine’s room in the Grand-Hôtel, and in doing so in almost knocking over Françoise, he rejoices in the secret of going to find Albertine in her room. The tripartite structure is present in the whole passage: until the meeting in Albertine’s room, Andrée is always the third person between them (later, he himself will be the third one between them). The grandmother, Albertine and the son. As for the evening of the kiss at the Grand-Hôtel, Françoise, Albertine and the son are the trinities. Before proceeding to the terms of my hypothesis of a Leonardesque figure that runs through these occurrences, I should highlight that these signs alone do not suffice to form a picture. They are allied with other themes, contents, metaphors, veins of the novel, that tend toward a figure, a polarity that I propose to represent under the form of Leonardo’s Metterza–Saint Anne. This figure, like the latter, places the son’s mother’s mother (the grandmother) atop the pyramid as linchpin of the novel, in a move that is not the least strange part of the Proustian project. II. Hermeneutics 1. Leonardo and Freud I have to make a detour here, both by the painting of Saint Anne and by the gloss of Freud who in ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood’ spends a long time on La Metterza–The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. At the time when Proust was busy writing La Recherche, the father of the psychoanalyst was fascinated by the unfinished work of Leonardo entitled La Metterza.16 It is a painting on wood that represents the maternal line of Christ. It has been in the Louvre for several centuries already, probably brought to France by Leonardo himself when he came to reside in Amboise,17 in 1517, with his student and heir Francesco Melzi, at the invitation of Louis XII, who may have commissioned Saint Anne from the painter. Freud (like Proust, perhaps) admired the painting in the Louvre when he was in Paris, where he worked with Charcot at the Salepêtrière. The pictorial form of La

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Metterza is well represented in the tradition of Tuscan painting (but also German, which is called Selbdritt).18 It specifies the level of Saint Anne, mi è terza (literally ‘I am the third one’), in third position, behind the child Jesus and Saint Mary, thus portraying three generations, and alluding to three ages of life. In Leonardo’s painting, large and facing front, Saint Anne, Jesus’s grandmother, is holding on her lap a Saint Mary slightly smaller than herself. Mary has her arms outstretched and is leaning toward the Child, standing on the ground, on the right of the painting, his head turned toward his mother, but his whole body bent toward the right side of the frame toward the lamb whose ear he is holding. Grandmother, mother, and son thus form the trinity imagined by Leonardo. Freud, who writes his text on the painter from late 1909 to early 1910, interprets the painting in minute detail based on events, more or less known during his time, of the painter’s life. It is in this essay that he introduces the theme of narcissism,19 in his theory and his exploration of masculine homosexuality. But the last part of the essay focuses on the Leonardesque smile — that he underscores as a precocious autobiographical smile. He interprets it in effect as a mark of recognition of the love of the son, a bastard (but, importantly, a bastard cherished not only by his mother but also by his father, by his paternal grandparents and by the successive wives of his father). This recognition is thus that of the reciprocal love between the son and Catarina, the mother, who had become pregnant very young while she was working for the notary Ser Pierro, at the time twenty-four years old, and who will not have other sons for a long time. This smile is the physical trace of the filial–maternal love, reproduced on the lips of almost all the faces painted by the painter in his studio, female (the Mona Lisa in 1505, or Leda and the Swan) as well as male (Saint John the Baptist, 1513, Bacchus, 1511), and even on the lips of the archangel Uriel in the Virgin of the Rocks, around 1483. The trinity of ‘Saint Anne with her daughter and her grandson’ is, says Freud in his study, an original subject and rarely treated by Italian painting.20 Leonardo gave the child — the son — two mothers, both with the same ‘blessed smile of maternal happiness’.21 This happiness is to be understood as that of having a son, or a daughter who gives birth to a son, who gives birth to the mother of a son. There is much more to say on this ‘maternal happiness’ than I have time to say here, but it is important to note that the Freudian Metterza is lyrical and happy, in harmony, one would be tempted to say, mirroring Freud’s affect.22 I will rapidly describe the sketch by Leonardo that predated the painting:23 the confusion of the two mothers’ bodies is even more troubling than in the painting: thighs, knees and legs seem to form a single body, strange, and even monstrous. The disposition and orientation of the faces, smiling the famous smile, and the lower body parts are such that, at first glance, we don’t know to which of the two figures we should attach the two pairs of legs in the foreground. The error in perception does not last, but the difficulty returns each time we come back to the image. In the sketch, Anne and Mary are the same size. Anne is pointing her index finger to the sky like Saint John in the painting in the Louvre, but her overly large arm, is as if ‘emmanché’ [‘stuck’] on her own body. The extremity of Mary’s left arm melts into the child’s body, as if laying on her hand, and turned towards Saint John the Baptist,

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in place of the lamb. The sfumato that links the four bodies envelops them, leaving no way out, although Jesus is looking away. Quintessence or explosion of maternal happiness (in opposition to La Pietà, which the painter never drew), Leonardo’s construction, inscribed in a tendency if not an aesthetic tradition, cultural and religious, elaborates three centuries in advance the dogma of the immaculate conception, not made official until the nineteenth century. This dogma is of a conception without loss of virginity, and in this way, I would say, without woman: a conception where the mother engenders the mother who engenders the mother, and so on until infinity and for the glory of the son. This is what Freud underlines, and what Proust understood perfectly — without Freud. 2. Proustian Trinity It is therefore a similar maternal trinity that I believe is present in La Recherche, even though Leonardo’s Metterza is not mentioned. Or, if it present, it is ‘en creux’, by default, conspicuous by its absence. A little like the ‘incest’ in the mother’s reading of François le Champi. In the exposé of Leonardesque occurrences, I indicated each time the triads included the grandmother, the mother and the son; particularly in the inaugural episode of the ‘sad night’. The confusion of the two mothers’ bodies remarked by Freud in the sketch and the painting of the Metterza that he compares to ‘badly condensed dream-figures, so that in some places it is hard to say where Anne ends and where Mary begins’,24 also exists in La Recherche. The body of the grandmother is superimposed on that of the mother in a metamorphosis that the son spies from the window of his room in the Grand-Hôtel: Non seulement ma mère ne pouvait se séparer du sac de ma grand-mère, devenu plus précieux que s’il eût été de saphirs et de diamants, de son manchon, de tous ces vêtements [...], mais même des volumes de Mme de Sévigné [...]. Elle voulut descendre sur la digue voir cette plage dont ma grand-mère lui parlait tous les jours en lui écrivant. Tenant à la main l’“en-tout-cas” de sa mère, je la vis [...] s’avancer toute noire, à pas timides, pieux, sur le sable que des pieds chéris avaient foulé avant elle, et elle avait l’air d’aller à la recherche d’une morte que les f lots devaient ramener. (iii, 166–67) [My mother could not bear to be parted not only from my grandmother’s bag, which had become more precious than if it had been studded with sapphires and diamonds, from her muff, from all those garments which served to accentuate the physical resemblance between them, but even from the volumes of Mme de Sévigné which my grandmother took with her everywhere [...] She must at once go out on to the front to see that beach of which my grandmother had spoken to her every day in her letters. I saw her [...] dressed in black, and carrying her mother’s sunshade, advancing with timid, pious steps over the sand which beloved feet had trodden before her, and she looked as though she was going in search of a corpse which the waves would cast up at her feet.] (2, 797–98)

The Freudian ‘uncanny’ (unheimlich or that which is un-familiar, a disquieting strangeness within the familiar) is never as powerful as in this reversed substitution, this birth against nature, where the daughter becomes the exact double — the

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clone — of her own mother that she allows to be born again, or that she embodies. The mad resemblance and identification between them erases the generations and their own identity, the singularity of each one. The maternal begets the maternal. The mother only begets the daughter who herself is the mother of a son: it is the Christian option and the dogma (the emphasis is mine) of the immaculate conception. And it is the Freudian option, as we saw, that affirms that only the relationship with the son brings the mother satisfaction, as it is, of all human relationships, the most perfect, the most exempt of ambivalence:25 but as for the Proustian option, I am not completely sure what it is. The Proustian trinity maternity abolishes the distinction between the mother and the daughter, making them interchangeable for the son. In the first trip to Balbec, the grandmother replaces the absent mother; in the second, it is the mother who becomes the dead grandmother. However, Proust takes care to construct two mothers, in order to, like in the ‘pyramid’ grouping of the Metterza by Leonardo, literally, put them in perspective: one behind the other, one over the other, in space and in time — to distinguish the mother of the daughter (the grandmother) and the mother of the son (the mother). Here, Freud and psychoanalysis do not suffice anymore (just as the Freudian Oedipus does not suffice to explain the episode of the maternal kiss, as we saw). For the Proustian trinity is a device that reveals the bond and the place of the mother and the daughter, as ground, base, backdrop, archaeology of the Freudian Oedipus that is built on them until they are forgotten. The Proustian Metterza is more troubling because it is, if I dare say, modern, in that it understands or perceives differently the world, the human being, and the sexual. The father does not hold, or no longer holds, the key to comprehension. Leonardo, whose reserve or silence on religion and theology has been remarked, conceived, according to André Chastel, ‘le rapport de la madone et de l’enfant comme un mélange de tendresse et d’effroi, la mère redoutant la passion vers laquelle tend l’Enfant’ [‘the relationship between the Madonna and the Child as a mix of tenderness and fright, with the mother dreading the passion towards which the child is drawn’] — the passion of the father and for the father.26 Proust kept the tenderness and the fear, but radically modified the course, and the signification — in other words, the meaning. I will mention in this vein, to conclude, three variations of the strange and the Proustian uncanny stemming from his metterza. 1. The three portraits that Proust gives of the grandmother, the mother and the son; 2. The name and the country of Gomorrah; 3. The ‘metterza’ of Odette, Gilberte, Mlle de Saint-Loup. III. Three Variations 1. The Proustian trinity The composition of the grandmother, the mother and the son is the object, in the novel, of an altarpiece with scattered panels where the portraits27 of the grandmother, the mother and the son are represented: three forms that resemble each other and come together. There is in ‘Combray’ an image, a view of the mother: ‘[I]l me fallait pour que je puisse m’endormir heureux [...] que ce fût elle, [...] qu’elle inclinât vers moi ce visage où il y avait au-dessous de l’œil quelque chose qui était, paraît-il, un

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défaut, et que j’aimais à l’égal du reste’ [‘one thing necessary to send me to sleep contented [...] was that it should be she who came to me, that it should be her face that leaned over me, her face on which there was something below the eye that was apparently a blemish, and that I loved as much as all the rest’] (i, 183; 1, 201–02). The description evokes a self-portrait in that it signals a face to face where one is ref lected by the other, where the son sees himself in the mother, not separate from her, stuck even in the unique trait that composes or breaks down this face, a flaw under the eye. Could this be the ref lection of the son, and what makes it (the face of the mother, the son) unmistakable — as in the smile of Leonardo? The second tableau is the portrait of the grandmother in agony: ‘Sans proportion maintenant avec le reste de la figure’ [bearing ‘no relation now to the rest of her face’] (ii, 632; 2, 348) only her nose allows one to recognize the traits that hark back ‘à un modèle que nous ne connaissons pas’ [to a model we do not know] (ii, 439; 2, 143). Yet the photograph taken by Saint-Loup during the trip to Balbec, which shows the living face of the grandmother, already possesses this nose not described but marked off by a sign of recognition, ‘jusqu’à son bouton de beauté sur la joue’ [‘down to the beauty spot’] (iii, 173; 2, 803) that Françoise contemplates on the photograph, while the grandson keeps repeating ‘ “C’est ma grand-mère, je suis son petit-fils”, comme un amnésique retrouve son nom’ [‘ “It’s my grandmother, I am her grandson,” as a man who has lost his memory remembers his name’] (idem). Finally, in the last panel the portrait of the son appears, comme un malade qui, ne s’étant pas regardé depuis longtemps et composant à tout moment le visage qu’il ne voit pas d’après l’image idéale qu’il porte de soi-même dans sa pensée, recule en apercevant dans une glace, au milieu d’une figure aride et déserte, l’exhaussement oblique et rose d’un nez gigantesque comme une pyramide d’Egypte. (ii, 439) [like a sick man who, not having looked at his own ref lection for a long time, and regularly composing the features which he never sees in accordance with the ideal image of himself that he carries in his mind, recoils on catching sight in the glass, in the middle of an arid desert of a face, of the sloping pink protuberance of a nose as huge as one of the pyramids of Egypt.] (2, 142)

To be sure, the nose could not substitute for a smile. Here, we are bordering on Leonardesque caricature. The appendage, or identifying organ, is clearly designated as the mark of recognition, by resemblances, and therefore also of a deep anguish (it is not easy, it is painful to be unique). 2. Gomorrah I have already talked about this at length in my Proust au Feminin,28 and since. Here I will merely mention my hypothesis: Gomorrah is the name that Proust gives to the maternal-feminine sphere, understood as desire, affect, motion that turns the girl toward the mother; what I called the feminine (le féminin — in opposition to femininity, la féminité, as that which is turned from the daughter toward the father, the masculine). In Freudian theory, the mother is the first love object for the son, but also for the daughter, with specific implications of this ‘primary homosexuality’ discovered by Freud at the end of his life,29 called ‘endogenous’, ‘native’ or ‘original /

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innate / inherent.’ In Proust’s Gomorrah I tried to study the writer’s work on this dimension of the human being’s psychosexual development, and the implementation of a ‘how to desire’ aligned on the mother–daughter bond, on this psychic and real Metterza, with, as the result , the strange love object that Albertine presents for the son: she who is resistant to masculine desire, and who brings on just as strange a passion for the bite of Gomorrahean pleasure. 3. Odette-Gilberte-Mlle de Saint-Loup Here again I will simply touch upon a point brief ly: Odette de Crécy is the for­bidden mother, repudiated, denigrated in the narrow Oedipal enclosure of ‘Combray’. Importantly, she is the mother of a daughter who is also forbidden, who will be the first exogamous love object for the son. Moreover, this mother banned from maternity (the famous prostitute of La Recherche that Proust designated as the Woman, with a capital) not only has descendants (unlike almost all the other female characters in the novel), but has a daughter, herself prolific (Gilberte), and mother of a daughter (Mlle de Saint-Loup), whom we discover at the ‘bal de têtes’ [‘the masked ball’] (iv, 609; 3, 1084) in Le Temps retrouvé. Unique among the old people, she is the portrait of her mother (Gilberte) and her father (Saint-Loup), and her grandmother (Odette) and her grandfather (Swann), and yet singular and still to come. Like Leonardo’s Metterza, and because it is different, the Proustian Metterza is not a paradigm that organizes a constant and logical series. It is structural in a Lévi-Straussian way, in that it variations develop from it. This is why I referred to characters in the novel in terms that signal their place and status, not in fiction, in the narration or in the referential space of the novel, but ‘in the structure’: the mother, the grandmother, the son, the mother of the daughter, the mother of the son. Each variation of the Proustian Metterza poses and skirts, diverts and returns a modern question, not cut from tradition, but attached to it, and at the same time detached from it: question of insecure identity (identity given by filiation — determinism — endangers the singularity of the sexed subject); question of sexual insecurity (is sex definitive? And if in reality girls were born, who would make not mothers but women? The son father of a daughter, does this make sense?); question even of human insecurity (and if there really were two sexes? What if we had to speak of humanimality?). It is not only the painting that is cosa mentale, affair of thought, but love, the sexual, identity, but filiation. And every thing, like Leonardo’s smile, is only worth the part of the enigma30 that it preserves. Notes to Chapter 6 1. ‘Beacons’, in The Flowers of Evil, trans. by William Aggeler (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954). 2. Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood [1910], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. by James Strachey, vol. xi (1910) (London: Hogarth Press, 1964). 3. In actuality, there are very few in the novel itself: The Last Supper, The Lilies, The Mona Lisa. Saint John the Baptist is present in Les Plaisirs et les Jours, see infra. 4. In particular, see Alberto Beretta Anguissola, ‘Léonard de Vinci’, in Dictionnaire Marcel Proust,

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ed. by Annick Bouillaguet and Brian Rodgers (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005), pp. 1047–48. The occurrences are given in La Recherche, in Proust’s other texts and in La Correspondance. Anguissola’s inventory details, among others, ‘four themes’ that, according to him (and I may be somewhat stretching his reading) give form to Leonardo’s presence in the novel, around his much-commented formula: la pittura è cosa mentale. The four themes revealed by Anguissola are: 1. The fragility of artwork in time (i, 40); 2. The strength and the delicateness of Leonardo’s drawings (i, 494; Contre Sainte-Beuve, p. 137; Correspondance, xvii, 109 and xxi, 373); 3. The force of caricature as unveiling of moral character (iii, 587; Essais et Articles, p. 626); 4. Finally, ‘the most interesting of the references to da Vinci’ according to Anguissola is the particular quality of a certain glaze, referring to the softness of the gaze and the smile (ii, 254, 277; Correspondance, i, 214; ii, 229). 5. It is accepted that the fresco, very altered, was made between 1495 and 1497; it is in the SantaMaria delle Grazie Convent in Milan. 6. This passage is from a personal communication with Martin Rueff about the common theme of Proust and Leonardo, the kiss. I also owe him the stanza from Beacons by Baudelaire, in the epigraph. 7. ‘To my friend Willie Heath’, dedication of Les Plaisirs et les Jours (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1896). 8. This particularly suggestive expression is from Georges Didi-Huberman, Phasme. Essai sur l’apparition (Paris: Minuit, 1998), ch. 9, ‘Une ravissante blancheur’, p. 76. 9. Yasué Kato is the author of an astute study of the Lilies of Leonardo da Vinci entitled ‘Un dessin de Vinci et la chevelure de Gilberte. Une étude autour de Mme Swann’, Bulletin Marcel Proust, 52 (2002), 14–23. 10. Cited by A. B. Anguissola in the Dictionnaire. 11. Proust, Pastiches et Mélanges, in Contre Sainte-Beuve, ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1971), p. 137. 12. Posthumous and unfinished novel by Stendhal, 1834–36. Bathilde de Chasteller, royalist retired to her father’s house in Nancy after her husband’s death, falls in love with republican Lucien Leuwen. 13. Jean-Yves Tadié distinguishes in this way the pleasures of Proust and Stendhal. Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 336. 14. Leda and the Swan, 1503 or 1505; work destroyed or lost that is known only through copies made centuries ago. 15. In ‘A propos de Baudelaire’, Proust compares the poet’s ‘galerie de géniales caricatures de vieilles’ [‘the gallery of wonderful caricatures of old women’] to Leonardo da Vinci’s caricatures. Essais et Articles, p. 626. 16. La Metterza, or The Virgin and Child with St. Anne (1501–06), Louvre, Paris. A sketch by Leonardo da Vinci in the National Gallery, London, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist, shows a Metterza with the child Jesus and St John in place of the lamb. The child is held by Mary and is looking at Saint John standing to the right of the group. Saint Anne is looking at Mary who is looking at Jesus. 17. Leonardo’s destiny was linked to Charles d’Amboise, Louis XII, François the first. 18. Germany knows this figure, called Selbdritt (‘I am myself the third’), well; there are also some examples in Flemish painting, notably Hans Memling, Holbein, Dürer, Cornelius Jacob. 19. A concept that he will develop in 1914, in ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction,’ where he distinguishes, without untying them, the ego and the mother — in other words the two objects of libidinal investment. It is a concept that will also be used in the study of masculine homosexuality. 20. Which is not true. On the contrary, it is a frequent and characteristic theme. 21. Catarina, the biological mother, and Donna Albiera, the adoptive mother, married by Ser Piero the year of Leonardo’s birth. 22. This is the object of a study by Ilse Barande, Le Maternel singulier (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1977). 23. The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St John the Baptist, London, National Gallery. Freud expands his essay with a discussion of this sketch in his 1923 edition of Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood.

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24. Sigmund Freud, Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), vol. xi (1910), p. 113. Footnote added in 1919. ‘If an attempt is made to separate the figures of Anne and Mary in this picture and to trace the outline of each, it will not be found altogether easy. One is inclined to say that they are fused with each other like badly condensed dreamfigures, so that in some places it is hard to say where Anne ends and where Mary begins’. 25. See Freud, ‘Femininity’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. by J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), xxii, 112–35. 26. André Chastel, ‘Léonard de Vinci’ in Encyclopaedia universalis, vol. 6, p. 912. 27. Portraits, in La Recherche, are incomplete, changing, intermittent, even elusive. Pierre Bayard noted in Le Hors-Sujet, the absence, in particular, of that of the mother which he calls ‘the major portrait’. He makes it the prototypes of ‘the absence of digression(s),’ digressions that the writer multiplies, on the contrary, in the portraits of Albertine, the Duchess of Guermantes, Odette, the Baron de Charlus, etc.. 28. See S. Freud, ‘Femininity’, 1932, Op. Cit. 29. Raymonde Coudert, Proust au féminin (Paris: Grasset-Le Monde de l’Education, 1998). 30. Enigma of the two forms of the sexual also considered by Leonardo through the two sides feminine and masculine. It is worth returning to one of the first (and maybe the first) mentions of Leonardo by Proust in the text that follows the dedication of Les Plaisirs et les Jours, published in 1896, to Willie Heath. In 1893 Proust met the young man who died of typhus at the end of the same year. ‘Mais si la grâce de votre fierté appartenait de droit à l’art d’un Van Dyck, vous releviez plutôt du Vinci par la mystérieuse intensité de votre vie spirituelle. Souvent, le doigt levé, les yeux impénétrables et souriants en face de l’énigme que vous taisiez, vous m’êtes apparu comme le saint Jean-Baptiste de Léonard’ [‘But if the grace of your pride belonged to the art of a Van Dyck, you were rather more like a Da Vinci because of the mysterious intensity of your spiritual life. Often, your finger raised, your eyes impenetrable and smiling before the enigma you were concealing, you appeared to me as Leonardo’s Saint John the Baptist’.] Proust knew the painter’s work, which he had seen at the Louvre or in reproductions. The androgynous grace of the masculine figures surely did not leave him indifferent, nor did their resemblance to female faces.

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Da capo: Accumulations and Explosions1 Christie McDonald, Harvard University In the act of reading the self through writing — Virginia Woolf called it life writing — there is part biography, part autobiography, part fiction. Proust combined them all, and created a place for the self unlike any other. Where Saint Augustine made a contingent self universal through conversion, Rousseau secularized the self in the modern confessional mode of a cogito of the senses (‘I feel therefore I am’). Proust, in rejecting Sainte-Beuve’s method, unfolds the meaning of the ‘I’ by pushing beyond Rousseau’s truth-seeking fiction, identifying memory as the foundation for a self, like Nietzsche’s, created. By engaging with the complexity of self-recognition, finding truth through connection to the past and to others in memory, Proust’s narrator discovers enormous power. The creation of the self as subject in narrative, like the creation of the work of art, depends on a structure of accumulation, which builds through the reiterated experiences to the very moment when the repetition of perceptions and memories is exhausted. It is then that an event explodes into meaning. Artistic models, in the analogy linking writing to music and art, provide a structure for recognizing destruction and creation as a necessary part of the fabric of the self. The search for meaning proceeds through a constant doubling of past and present: for example, memory inscribes the experience of love the way it does music. A well-known and nevertheless enigmatic passage locates reading as an act of self-knowledge: En réalité, chaque lecteur est quand il lit le propre lecteur de soi-même. [...] La reconnaissance en soi-même, par le lecteur, de ce que dit le livre, est la preuve de la vérité de celui-ci, et vice versa, au moins dans une certaine mesure, la différence entre les deux textes pouvant être souvent imputée non à l’auteur mais au lecteur. (iv, 489–90) [In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. [...] And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity, the contrary also being true, at least to a certain extent, for the difference between the two texts may sometimes be imputed less to the author than to the reader.] (3, 949)

Reading furnishes a tool for seeing what has not been previously seen, whereby the reading self is granted recognition of a hidden truth that may become conscious. Such reading both guarantees the self ’s truth and stands as the principle of discovery,

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announced in Le Temps retrouvé, which in a sense justifies the autobiographical exploration that has led up to it. Yet from the outset recognition, as a form of knowledge, is problematic, and it can be linked both to the central theme of the novel, writing as a vocation, and love as the most compelling and excruciatingly painful digression from art.2 Walking the line between the lessons of cumulative experience and the pitfalls of recognition, Proust experiments early on with linear sequences only to break their temporality through the dispersal of recurrent scenes when he writes the novel. Le Figaro: Accumulations In Contre Sainte-Beuve, Proust describes how his mother brings the newspaper Le Figaro to his room one day, and with seeming distraction and negligence puts it very near to him. The scene deals concretely with the limits of perception and the force of imagination in understanding: Je la vis, aussitôt cela fait, sortir précipitamment de la chambre, comme un anarchiste qui a posé une bombe, et repousser dans le couloir avec une violence inaccoutumée ma vieille bonne, qui entrait précisément à ce moment-là, et qui ne comprit pas ce qui allait se passer de prodigieux dans la chambre et à quoi elle ne devait pas assister, je compris immédiatement ce que Maman avait voulu me cacher, à savoir que l’article avait paru, qu’elle ne m’en avait rien dit pour ne pas déf lorer ma surprise, et qu’elle ne voulait pas que personne fût là qui pourrait troubler ma joie par sa présence, seulement m’obliger par respect humain à dissimuler. Maman n’a jamais déposé ainsi le courrier d’un air négligent près de moi, sans qu’il y eût soit un article de moi ou sur moi, ou sur quelqu’un que j’aime, soit une page de Jammes ou de Boylesve, qui sont pour moi un enchantement, soit une lettre d’une écriture aimée. (Contre Sainte-Beuve, p. 85) 3 [I saw her hurry out of the room like an anarchist who had put down a bomb and, with a violence quite unlike herself, thrust back my old servant, who at that same moment was coming in, and who did not understand what this extraordinary event was that was taking place in my room, nor why she should not be present at it, I understand at once what Mamma had wished to conceal from me and knew that my article had appeared, that she had said nothing about it because she did not want to take the bloom off my surprise, and that she intended to keep out anyone whose presence might cloud my joy, or even compel me for reasons of decorum. Mamma had never put down my letters with that free-and-easy demeanour unless there had been among them either an article by me, or about me or about someone I love, or something by Jammes or Boylesve that would spell enchantment for me, or an envelope addressed in some welcome handwriting.] (By Way of Sainte-Beuve, pp. 46–47)

Much of the commentary about this passage has dealt with the relation to SaintBeuve’s method, and the problem of passing from life to art. I am interested in the way in which the passage figures not so much the rupture of life into art, but the reverse: the return of art into life in the novel. As the narrator becomes his own reader, it is as though he were stepping into a minefield, a theatre of operations where anything might happen. The projection of his mother’s unusually violent intent signals an act whose outcome cannot be predicted: his mother plants the

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bomb and leaves him so that joy may explode from within. This event without precedent has erotic overtones, as though his mother were setting him up for a moment of auto-erotic love (‘pour ne pas déf lorer ma surprise’) in the experience of reading his own writing.4 But the effects are not immediate: J’ouvris le journal. Tiens, justement un article sur le même sujet que moi! Non, mais c’est trop fort, juste les mêmes mots... Je protesterai...mais encore les mêmes mots, ma signature...c’est mon article. Mais pendant une seconde ma pensée entraînée par la vitesse acquise et peut-être déjà un peu fatiguée à cette époque continue à croire que ce n’est pas lui, comme les vieux qui continuent un mouvement commencé; mais vite je reviens à cette idée: c’est mon article’ (Contre Sainte-Beuve, p. 86) [I unfolded the copy of the Figaro. Why, here is an article on my subject! No! This is too bad, my very words... I shall write to the editor... But I said this too, and here is my name at the bottom... It is my article. But for a moment my thoughts, swept on by the impetus of this reaction, and perhaps already at this date grown rather the worse for wear, continue to believe it isn’t, just as elderly people cannot arrest a movement once they have begun it. But quickly I return to the thought: it is my article!)] (By way of Sainte-Beuve, p. 47)

Recognition comes slowly. His own written words, taken in at first as those of another, are received with outrage: someone else has written on the same subject, in the same language. And even when he identifies his own signature, his reaction is delayed. It takes more than a first reading to comprehend that the writing his eyes have passed over is not someone else’s. It is his own article. And with this recognition comes the sense, not so much of the truth of this writing, but of the ability to reach millions of readers. He then pretends to become another in order to understand better what is happening: ‘Il faut que je sorte de soi.’ And he begins anew: Alors je prends le journal comme si je ne savais pas qu’il y a un article de moi; j’écarte exprès les yeux de l’endroit où sont mes phrases essayant de recréer ce qu’il y a plus de chance d’arriver... Je sens sur ma figure la moue de mon indifférence de lecteur non averti, puis mes yeux tombent sur mon article, au milieu, et je commence. Chaque mot m’apporte l’image que j’avais l’intention d’évoquer. A chaque phrase, dès le premier mot se dessine d’avance l’idée que je voulais exprimer; mais ma phrase me l’apporte plus nombreuse, plus détaillée, enrichie, car auteur, je suis cependant lecteur [...] et à la même idée qui se recrée en moi en ce moment, j’ai ajouté alors des prolongements symétriques, auxquels je ne pensais pas à l’instant en commençant la phrase, et qui m’émerveillent par leur ingéniosité. (Contre Sainte-Beuve, p. 86; emphasis added) [So I pick up the Figaro as if I did not know there was an article by me in it; I purposely avert my glance from the place where the words appear, trying to discover experimentally where it would be likeliest to fall... I feel my lips purse up in the grimace of my reader who expects to find nothing in particular, then my glance falls on my article, in the centre of the page, and I begin to read. Every phrase conveys the image I meant to call up. In every sentence the thought I wanted to express is made clear from the first words; but as it comes to me in the sentence it is more abundant, more detailed, enriched — since I, the author, am for the time being the reader [...] and to the same thought which is now

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re-shaping itself in my mind I then added harmonious amplifications which at the sentence’s beginning had not entered my head, and whose ingenuity now amazes me.] (By Way of Sainte-Beuve, pp. 47–48)

His admiration lasts only for a moment: this article is so far from his ideal that it will seem like nothing more than a ‘bégaiement d’aphasique en face d’une phrase délicieuse et suivie’ [‘palsied stammerings [...] instead of delightfully coherent passages’] (Contre Sainte-Beuve, p. 87; By Way of Sainte-Beuve, p. 48). The circularity of the moment is unavoidable. At the instant that publication separates him from his writing, when he should no longer need to judge himself, it is nevertheless he who still judges: ‘c’est moi qui me juge!’ (Contre Sainte-Beuve, p. 88). Writing for another doubles back and becomes writing to oneself. So difficult is it to believe that reality might correspond to his desire that the experience of reading the newspaper, as both writer and reader, becomes as devastating as writing to a mistress. Because he feels that no woman would write him just what he wants to read, he reins in his imagination, so that she might fill in that space and write him the very thing he wishes. By setting himself up for disappointment, as is so often the case for the protagonist of La Recherche, he is thrown back on his own desire: should she in fact write him the letter he wanted, he would believe himself to be reading a letter ‘écrite par moi-même’ [‘I had written myself ’] (Contre SainteBeuve, p. 91; By Way of Sainte-Beuve, p. 50). The analogy of reader and mistress in this passage is one of many in Proust’s work that suggest that the story of love in the Recherche (Swann and Odette, the narrator and Albertine) remains inseparable from the story of writing. In this early sketch from Contre Sainte-Beuve, however, it seems that the bomb planted by his mother failed to explode. To understand this failure, we will look at how the passage is taken up again and dispersed into the volumes of La Recherche. There are fragmented allusions to the hero’s own writing. A mention of an essay written by the narrator appears in Du côté de chez Swann (i, 179), as the first writing experience, set down during the scene of ‘Les clochers de Martinville.’ Then in La Prisonnière, the hero rings for Françoise and picks up Le Figaro, remarking that his article is not to be found in it. But it is not until Albertine disparue (iv, 147–51) that the scene of reading Le Figaro recurs in extended form from the pieces Proust sketched in 1908–09 and published in Contre Sainte-Beuve. In the version published in 1987 in the new Pléiade edition, his mother’s terrorist intent has been submerged in a smile, indicative of the pleasure he projects her reserving for him to enjoy in solitude; the only residue of brusqueness is her gesture forcing Françoise to leave the room. The tone describing the misperception of his writing in published form is calmer, though not without effect: J’ouvris Le Figaro. Quel ennui! Justement le premier article avait le même titre que celui que j’avais envoyé et qui n’avait pas paru. Mais pas seulement le même titre, voici quelques mots absolument pareils. Cela, c’était trop fort. J’enverrais une protestation. [...] Mais ce n’était pas quelques mots, c’était tout, c’était ma signature... C’est mon article qui avait enfin paru! (iv, 148) [I opened the Figaro. What a bore! The main article had the same title as the article which I had sent to the paper and which had not appeared. But not merely the same title... why, here were several words that were absolutely

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Interspersed into this version is commentary from Françoise, shocked that she, who had known him from childhood, should not be given entry to his room: ‘Si ce n’est pas malheureux, un enfant qu’on a vu naître. Je ne l’ai pas vu quand sa mère le faisait, bien sûr. Mais quand je l’ai connu, pour bien dire, il n’y avait pas cinq ans qu’il était naquis!’ [‘It’s a proper shame, a kid I saw brought into the world. I didn’t see him when his mother bore him, to be sure. But when I first knew him, to say the most, it wasn’t five years since he was birthed!’] (Albertine disparue, iv, 148; 3, 579). This is followed by mention of what the newspaper means to the narrator. In Combray, Swann considers spending time on the newspaper an act of trivia, compared with the few experiences in a lifetime when one reads something essential in a book: ‘Du moment que nous déchirons fiévreusement chaque matin la bande du journal, alors on devrait changer les choses et mettre dans le journal, moi je ne sais pas, les... Pensées de Pascal!’ [Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside — oh! I don’t know; shall we say Pascal’s Pensées?] (i: 26; 1, 214). The apparent blasphemy in Swann’s ironic comment becomes, when transferred to the narrator’s experience of reading, a creative source. In the continuation of the passage above, the newspaper takes the place of the genius of Françoise’s cooking, acknowledged early in the novel:5 Puis je considérai le pain spirituel qu’est un journal, encore chaud et humide de la presse récente . . . pain miraculeux, multipliable, qui est à la fois un et dix mille, et reste le même pour chacun tout en pénétrant à la fois, innombrable, dans toutes les maisons. (iv, 148) [Then I considered the spiritual bread of life that a newspaper is, still warm and damp from the press [...] a miraculous, self-multiplying bread which is at the same time one and ten thousand, which remains the same for each person while penetrating innumerably into every house at once.] (3, 579)

The transport of one article to many households and readers is as miraculous as Swann’s semi-serious suggestion of transforming journalistic information into quintessential revelation, in the reference to Pascal. Yet the contingency of events such as those revealed in the newspapers, founded not in an ultimate sense of truth but in secrets lodged within the humdrum of daily reality, becomes the possibility of history and self-transformation: ‘la Muse qui a recueilli tout ce que les Muses plus hautes de la philosophie et de l’art ont rejeté, tout ce qui n’est pas fondé en vérité, tout ce qui n’est que contingent mais révèle aussi d’autres lois: c’est l’Histoire’ [the Muse who has gathered up everything that the more exalted Muses of philosophy and art have rejected, everything that is not founded upon truth, everything that is merely contingent, but that reveals other laws as well: the Muse of History] (iv, 254; 3, 692–93). Proust disperses the scene of reading Le Figaro into the history of a life history and self-discovery so that the narrator makes way for his own creation. Music, bridging the broken connection between experience accumulated over time and the revelations of truth, serves as a guide through the labyrinths of love.

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Da Capo: Love and Music Initially, recognition of love through a musical metaphor promises transparency: Comme nous possédons sa chanson, gravée en nous tout entière, nous n’avons pas besoin qu’une femme nous en dise le début — rempli par l’admiration qu’inspire la beauté — pour en trouver la suite. Et si elle commence au milieu — là où les cœurs se rapprochent, où l’on parle de n’exister plus que l’un pour l’autre — nous avons assez l’habitude de cette musique pour rejoindre tout de suite notre partenaire au passage où elle nous attend. (i, 194) [Since we know its song, which is engraved on our hearts in its entirety, there is no need for a woman to repeat the opening strains — filled with the admiration which beauty inspires — for us to remember what follows. And if she begins in the middle — where hearts are joined and where it sings of our existing, henceforward, for one another only — we are well enough attuned to that music to be able to take it up and follow our partner without hesitation at the appropriate passage.] (1, 214)

This metaphor proliferates into a sequence of musical offerings just pages later, providing the celebrated crystallization of love for Odette and Swann. The extraordinary association of love with a musical phrase depends upon Swann’s prior hearing of a piece for violin and piano which he experiences as delicious and confusing (Albertine disparue, iv: 204). ( Jean-Jacques Nattiez has described the stages of musical reception.) Notes come and go before they can take on any discernible meaning. As the sensations of listening pass by, Swann’s mind transcribes the sensory impression: ‘Ainsi à peine la sensation délicieuse que Swann avait ressentie était-elle expirée, que sa mémoire lui en avait fourni séance tenante une transcription sommaire et provisoire, mais sur laquelle il avait jeté les yeux tandis que le morceau continuait’ [And so, scarcely had the exquisite sensation which Swann had experienced died away, before his memory had furnished him with an immediate transcript, sketchy, it is true, and provisional, which he had been able to glance at while the piece continued] (i, 206; 1, 228). The simultaneous transcription, following the temporal linearity of the musical phrase, sets the piece in memory, so that when the musical line comes back, it can be comprehended: ‘quand la même impression était tout d’un coup revenue, elle n’était déjà plus insaisissable’ [when the same impression suddenly returned, it was no longer impossible to grasp] (i, 206; 1, 228; emphasis added). And this creates a desire in Swann to ‘see’ the work again. But because he has not been able to find out who the composer is, and knows only that it is a new composition, he eventually forgets about it. Swann first falls in love with a piece of music, as one does a person passing in the street. When he hears the music again in the salon of the Verdurin, all of a sudden (‘tout d’un coup’), ‘il reconnut, secrète, bruissante et divisée, la phrase aérienne et odorante qu’il aimait’ [Swann [...] recognised, secret, murmuring, detached, the airy and perfumed phrase that he had loved] (Du côté de chez Swann, i, 208; 1, 230– 31). It was like meeting such a woman again in a friend’s salon. And the narrator continues to double the evocation of woman with the piece until he learns its name: the andante of the Sonata for piano and violin by Vinteuil. Now he can possess it,

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and he tells Odette of his love for the sonata (i, 209). Unsuspecting, he does not link this composer with the person Vinteuil whom he knows, and thus confirms the implausibility of Sainte-Beuve’s theory, in which understanding of the value of a work of art comes out of the life of its creator (i, 211). When the piano plays it again for Swann and Odette, soldering these two unlikely lovers into a single entity, a veritable country for which it serves as the national anthem, the ideal etched within this fragmentary movement (isolated by Odette as the part that is ‘theirs’) addresses itself to them. Swann’s regret that it cannot ‘know them’, that it cannot be only for them a sign of the singularity of love, is a mark of the greatness of this piece which will speak to many over the centuries. The association of Vinteuil’s little phrase with love signals a change, and Swann will never again be the same, as we know. Projecting what might have been, the narrator glimpses for Swann the promise of a life rejuvenated through the discovery of what the narrator calls ‘invisible realities’ (i, 208), in which Swann no longer thought he believed. But no conversion, no involuntary memory equivalent to the madeleine materializes for Swann. Rather, through complex circuitry in the experience of art (Vinteuil, Botticelli, de Hooch), another person becomes attached to him: ‘un être nouveau était là avec lui, adhérent, amalgamé à lui, duquel il ne pourrait peut-être pas se débarrasser, avec qui il allait être obligé d’user de ménagements comme avec un maître ou avec une maladie’ [a new person was there beside him, adhering to him, amalgamated with him, a person whom he might, perhaps, be unable to shake off, like a master or an illness] (Du côté de chez Swann, i, 225; 1, 249–50; emphasis added). The new alloy, Swann-and-Odette, the uneasy merging of a self constituted by affect made intelligible, yet tortured by inexorable uncertainty, exacts instability to exist. When later towards the end of the affair, the little phrase catches Swann off guard in Odette’s absence, it substitutes for her presence and produces a suffering so intense that he covers his heart, as the place of psychical as well as physical mortality (i, 339). The refrains, replayed, evoke happiness and mourning for its loss, and the distress of a self split and ref lected back at first incomprehensibly: ‘Et Swann aperçut, immobile en face de ce bonheur revécu, un malheureux qui lui fit pitié parce qu’il ne le reconnut pas tout de suite, si bien qu’il dut baisser les yeux pour qu’on ne vît pas qu’ils étaient pleins de larmes. C’était lui-même’ [And Swann could distinguish, standing motionless before that scene of remembered happiness, a wretched figure who filled him with such pity, because he did not at first recognise who it was, that he had to lower his eyes lest anyone should observe that they were filled with tears. It was himself ] (i, 341; 1, 377).6 ‘Seeing’ this happiness through the return of the phrase, he almost cannot recognize the earlier incarnation of a self, ‘un malheureux’, who could not stay the same, and yet who could not change: himself. Like the narrator reading the article in Le Figaro as the work of another writer, Swann empathizes with the projection of himself. The narrator affords comprehension. When Mme Swann plays the little phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata, he ref lects upon the importance of repetition: ‘Et pourtant quand plus tard on m’eut joué deux ou trois fois cette Sonate, je me trouvai la connaître parfaitement’ [And yet when, later on, this sonata had been played to me two or three times I found

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that I knew it perfectly well] (A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, i, 520; 1, 570). The understanding that comes from ‘seeing’, as discovery through memory, is similar to that of ‘hearing’ through memory, hearing for the ‘first time’ what one has heard before: Aussi n’a-t-on pas tort de dire ‘entendre pour la première fois.’ Si l’on n’avait vraiment [...] rien distingué à la première audition, la deuxième, la troisième seraient autant de premières. [...] Probablement ce qui fait défaut, la première fois, ce n’est pas la compréhension, mais la mémoire’. (A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, i, 520) [And so it is not wrong to speak of hearing a thing for the first time. If one had indeed [...] received no impression from the first hearing, the second, the third would be equally ‘first hearings’. [...] Probably what is wanting, the first time, is not comprehension but memory.] (1, 570)

It would seem that all innovation must in some paradoxical way be repetition of itself, as if one cannot experience newness. When in La Prisonnière the narrator hears a musical work at Mme Verdurin’s that he cannot recognize, he finds himself all of a sudden (and I will return to the importance of suddenness signalled by the words ‘tout à coup’) in Vinteuil’s sonata retracing the phrase that so intimately connected Swann and Odette. But he is led elsewhere. By this time, the sonata is so well known that its strong emotive association is worn out for him, whereas the new piece, moving away from the pastoral candour of the sonata, bursts into red colouring like a sunrise full of mysterious hope. No dove-like sound here, no soft sound, but seven notes piercing and tearing the air violently like a rooster crowing in the morning (La Prisonnière, iii, 754). It is Vinteuil’s great septet, the ideal model of the work of art, evoking personal and stable colors which would in future, the narrator ref lects, erupt anew each time the work is replayed (La Prisonnière, iii, 758), in what he calls, in a telling oxymoron, ‘durable nouveauté’, enduring newness. But the curious history of this piece is that it survived only because it was transcribed by Vinteuil’s daughter’s friend, the one seen with her in the act of profaning her father during a Sapphic and sadistic scene, at Montjouvain. The reminder of this scene, inserted into the epiphany of the septet, shows not only that works of art exist in history, but that they come into being materially by and through the labours of dedicated individuals. It shows further the surreptitious link between the ideal work of art and the surprising consequence of lesbian love: Mlle Vinteuil’s friend might have made the life of the composer painful in his last years (of which the scene at Montjouvain was but an example), but it was she who was to ensure the posterity of this work. And the narrator comments on the familial relations of people outside the legitimate bonds recognized by society: ‘De relations qui ne sont pas consacrées par les lois, découlent des liens de parenté aussi multiples, aussi complexes, plus solides seulement, que ceux qui naissent du mariage’ [Relations which are not sanctioned by the law establish bonds of kinship as manifold, as complex, and even more solid, than those which spring from marriage] (iii, 676; 3, 263). The reprise of certain phrases from the sonata in the septet brings with it slight changes of rhythm and accompaniment such that it is ‘la même et toujours pourtant

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autre, comme reviennent les choses dans la vie’ [the same and yet something else, as things recur in life] (La Prisonnière, iii, 763; 3, 261). The repeated phrases move from the single work to dispersion in place and time: this is as true of Elstir’s works dispersed in museums as of Vinteuil’s notes (La Prisonnière, iii, 761). Reiteration in the accumulation of experience shadows life itself. It makes change bearable. In the act of reading, on the other hand, Proust writes in a sketch, change can be tolerated because it is felt through the fiction of other peoples’ lives: Ce qui provoque notre plus grande anxiété c’est le sentiment du changement, du changement total non seulement des apparences mais même de notre volonté, de nos amours. Or ce sentiment nous ne l’avons jamais dans la vie, nous changeons trop lentement pour pouvoir nous en apercevoir, et quand le changement est accompli, l’état nouveau qui nous eût attristés est justement devenu le nôtre et celui que nous ne voudrions pas changer, même contre celui dont cela nous eût tant attristés de penser que nous ne le regretterions pas. Or le phénomène particulier de la lecture identifie notre volonté, nos affections avec ceux de personnages, et ceci fait, ces personnages l’auteur les fait mourir, cesser d’aimer, en un mot nous fait sentir le changement. (Esquisse xlviii, i, 791–92) [What provokes our greatest anxiety is the feeling of change, the total change not only of appearances but of our own will and our love life. Now, we never get this feeling in life, we can’t perceive it because of the slowness with which we change, and when the change has been made, the new state — which would have saddened us — has become our own, and the one that we would not wish to exchange, even for the state which would have been so sad to think that we would not regret. The particular phenomenon of reading identifies our will and our affections with the characters, and when this is done, the author makes them die or cease to love, in a word makes us feel the change.]

Explosion The slowness of imperceptible change contrasts with the dislocations of time and experience through intermittency and with the explosive potential in the novel. Certain fulgurant moments are marked explicitly. In A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the mention of Bergotte’s name makes our young hero jump as if ‘le bruit d’un revolver [...] a[vait] déchargé sur moi’ [the sound of a revolver [had] fired at me point blank] (i, 537; 1, 589). Yet the effect here is like that of a magician whose shot miraculously reveals in its trace a dove: Ce nom de Bergotte me fit tressauter comme le bruit d’un revolver qu’on aurait déchargé sur moi, mais instinctivement pour faire bonne contenance je saluai; devant moi, comme ces prestidigitateurs qu’on aperçoit intacts et en redingote dans la poussière d’un coup de feu d’où s’envole une colombe, mon salut m’était rendu par un homme jeune, rude, petit, râblé et myope, à nez rouge en forme de coquille de colimaçon et à barbiche noire’. (A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, i, 537) [The name Bergotte made me start, like the sound of a revolver fired at me point blank, but instinctively, to keep my countenance, I bowed: there, in front of me, like one of those conjurers whom we see standing whole and unharmed, in their frock coats, in the smoke of a pistol shot out of which a pigeon had

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just f luttered, my greeting was returned by a youngish, uncouth, thickset and myopic little man, with a red nose curled like a snail-shell and a goatee beard.] (1, 589)

Proust is thinking of Anatole France. Later, his own exaltation (ii, 173) can be violent, as is joy when it erupts not only in himself but in others: ‘la joie remplissait avec une violence si soudaine leur visage translucide en un instant devenu rouge que leur bouche n’avait pas la force de la retenir et pour la laisser passer, éclatait de rire’ [joy sprang with such sudden violence into their translucent faces, f lushed in an instant, that their lips had not the strength to hold it in, and, to allow it to escape, parted in a burst of laughter] (ii, 258; 1, 966). Others have commented on the violence of Proust’s language. Genette referred to a ‘détonateur analogique’;7 Deleuze to the ‘violence’ with which a chance encounter forces thought into being through the sign, concluding that ‘what does violence to us is richer than all the fruits of our good will or of our conscious work’.8 And Benjamin commented on the enigma of the work in its ‘paralyzing, explosive will to happiness’.9 For Sollers, violence is to be found under the surface: society is a disguised matriarchy which gradually feminizes males, just as ‘la patronne’ makes and unmakes reputations and couples. Dangerous hypocrisy is everywhere; knives glare under f lowers; social roles of the encrusted hierarchy are eaten away through time and submission.10 Even the narrator notices the excesses of his own violent reaction against Gomorrhe, in Andrée’s behavior, for example: ‘j’avais exprimé avec trop de violence mon dégoût pour ce genre de mœurs’ [I had expressed with undue violence my disgust at those proclivities] (Albertine disparue i, iv, 91; 3, 520). And rage can turn into shame or guilt, as when Albertine quotes Racine to express her intimidation at his anger: ‘Hélas! Sans frissonner quel cur audacieux / Soutiendrait les éclairs qui partent de vos yeux’ [Alas! Without a tremble what bold heart / Could withstand the lightning from your eyes] (La Prisonnière, iii, 897). Jeanne Proust writes to Marcel in 1897 concerning a Venetian glass that he had broken: ‘Le verre cassé ne sera plus que ce qu’il est au temple — le symbole de l’indissoluble union’ (Correspondance, ii, 160, letter 91). In Jean Santeuil, Jean breaks a Venetian glass because he cannot repress his anger, and trembling, he then grabs one of his mother’s dresses in gestures described as both violent and sexual (the cloth ‘meurtri par la violence du coup’ is like a woman whom a warrior has grabbed by the hair; and the touch and smell of the velvet remind him of embracing his mother). To conclude this passage, Proust quotes his mother’s letter: ‘Le verre cassé ne sera plus que ce qu’il est au temple — le symbole de l’indissoluble union’ [It shall be, as in the Temple, the symbol of an indestructible union] ( Jean Santeuil [1952], iii, 315; 218). (The word temple, unlike synagogue or église, could be considered an acceptable Christian euphemism, common at the time, by which Mme Proust alludes to the Jewish marriage ceremony and the breaking of a glass marking the moment that seals the marriage.) This expansion of his mother’s expression to an entire scene in Jean Santeuil contains within it both incestuous eroticism and violence. Proust replants his mother’s explosive not only in the relationship of the self to writing, but also in describing the chaotic connection of oneself to another person. In the Recherche he recounts his hero’s wrath about the relationship to Albertine, a

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result of the impossibility of knowing her: ‘C’est terrible d’avoir la vie d’une autre personne attachée à la sienne comme une bombe qu’on tiendrait sans qu’on puisse la lâcher sans crime’ [It is terrible to have the life of another person attached to one’s own like a bomb which one holds in one’s hands, unable to get rid of it without committing a crime] (La Prisonnière, iii, 686; 3, 179).11 Just as Swann and Odette were amalgamated in a love that might not have been, were it not for an analogy to art, so the narrator finds himself enmeshed with Albertine, repeating the destiny of love. The threat of annihilation to the self from detonation (not only in separation but in the continuation of the affair as well) puts both lover and mistress at high risk. Everything, from the family to sexual mores and social rank, may explode, leaving fractured a world that the narrator still holds dear. Benjamin situates this capacity for breaking everything into shards at a sociological level (2, 321). So it is that, in mourning Albertine’s death, the mere mention of a name associated with her — a street or road, or simply a phrase — can provoke violent shocks of unimaginable pain (iv, 118). The repetitive structures in love resurface in dreams and reinforce the painful misapprehensions between lovers, joyless memories associated neither with writing nor music. It is through the power of return in memory to a time and a place in dreaming and a doubling effect, rather than a ‘reality’ of the other, that the narrator explicitly evokes the musical sign indicating repetition from the beginning: Souvent c’était tout simplement pendant mon sommeil que ces ‘reprises,’ ces da capo du rêve tournant d’un seul coup plusieurs pages de la mémoire, plusieurs feuillets du calendrier, me ramenaient, me faisaient rétrograder à une impression douloureuse mais ancienne, qui depuis longtemps avait cédé la place à d’autres et qui redevenait présente. (Albertine disparue, iv, 119) [Often it was simply during my sleep that these ‘reprises,’ these ‘da capos’ of one’s dreams, which turn back several pages of one’s memory, several leaves of the calendar at once, brought me back, made me regress to a painful but remote impression which had long since given place to others but which now became present once more.] (3, 549; emphasis added)12

The narrator taunts the reader with a parodic da capo of reading when our hero says to Gilberte, quoting Mme de Cambremer: ‘Relisez ce que Schopenhauer dit de la musique’ [reread what Schopenhauer says about music], and Gilberte parrots Mme Cambremer’s statement ironically: ‘Relisez c’est un chef-d’ œuvre!’ [Rereading, that’s rich] (Le Temps retrouvé, iv, 569; 3, 1041, translation modified). Who is capable of rereading, what they read and how: these are the issues underlying the link between music, knowledge, and love. Within any second reading, like the second hearing, transference as a kind of false association may occur. Similar echoes of doubling back in order to recognize the return to a self within, on the other hand, signal the triumphant moments placed at the beginning and the end of the work. The recapitulation of reading the self in writing turns out to involve explosive transferential material. The act of rereading, taken in its largest sense to encompass the reception of writing, art and music, begins the work of life writing in a transference between self and other-as-self. The ‘I’ is found neither in identification nor fiction, but somewhere in between: between perception and thought, seeing

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and hearing, and their spiritual equivalents in art. It marks the points where time past and present, self and other coalesce to produce a narrator whose coherence comes out of a constant search and quest for the unity within disjunctive memory. While Jean Imbeault separates Freud and Proust by the context in which each worked — the difference between a man of letters and a man of science — and puts to use their work on memory, he nevertheless sees two areas in which their work overlaps: the split between perception and consciousness, on the one hand, and the focus on a centre for the perceiving subject in memory. I believe however that Imbeault comes closest to describing the process of moving from self-recognition to writing for Proust when he describes transference through dreamwork as thought. ‘The Interpretation of Dreams is not, in the end, about dreams, but rather about the act of thinking. The properly Freudian way of interpreting dreams should rather be formulated thus: what is a dream for someone (let’s say a human being) capable of thinking’; ‘Transference is in the interval between . . . two narratives, life events on the one hand, dreams on the other’.13 The narrator defines who he is by how he has arrived at his vocation, not how he will practise it. In order to love the work, as Sarah Kofman writes of Wagner and Nietzsche, ‘the artist must ‘forget’ its conception (genèse)’.14 Such forgetting is realized in the misperception of writing in Le Figaro such that Marcel cannot ‘see’ that what he has written is his own writing until it is blotted out through forgetting, then restored through recognition in otherness. That is perhaps why in the final version of the scene, the bomb has been taken out of the mother’s hands and scattered throughout the text at crucial moments when the narrator indicates an abrupt shift with the words ‘tout à coup’: for example, the sudden retroactive discovery that Wagner made of the unity of his work (iii, 666–67); the extraordinary vision of Gilberte’s eyes and the narrator’s erroneous memory (i, 139); the rediscovery of the sonata in the midst of the septet. Significant memory involves sudden retrieval by the narrator: le souvenir [...] nous fait tout à coup respirer un air nouveau, précisément parce que c’est un air qu’on a respiré autrefois, cet air plus pur que les poètes ont vainement essayé de faire régner dans le paradis et qui ne pourrait donner cette sensation profonde de renouvellement que s’il avait été respiré déjà, car les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus. (iv, 449) [the returning memory [...] causes us suddenly to breathe a new air, an air which is new precisely because we have breathed it in the past, that purer air which the poets have vainly tried to situate in paradise and which could induce so profound a sensation of renewal only if it had been breathed before, since the true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.] (3, 903; emphasis added)

One commonly associates the words ‘tout à coup,’ or ‘tout d’un coup,’ with the ontologically significant moments of the mémoire involontaire, paradigms of suddenness. But a search of the novel in the ARTFL database led to a startling discovery. The two phrases occur 819 times, of which perhaps 200 should be discounted as repetitions. For example, accumulated experience can be wiped out in one moment, as in the following example: ‘Tout à coup mon anxiété tomba, une félicité m’envahit comme quand un médicament puissant commence à agir et

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nous enlève une douleur: je venais de prendre la résolution de ne plus essayer de m’endormir sans avoir revu maman, de l’embrasser’ [Then, suddenly, my anxiety subsided, a feeling of intense happiness coursed through me, as when a strong medicine begins to take effect and one’s pain vanishes: I had formed a resolution to abandon all attempts to go to sleep without seeing Mamma, and had made up my mind to kiss her] (Du côté de chez Swann, i, 32; 1, 34; emphasis added). Or experience can return dramatically through memory: ‘d’avoir laissé mourir ma grand’mère; surgissant tout à coup du fond de la nuit où elle semblait à jamais ensevelie et frappant comme un Vengeur, afin d’inaugurer pour moi une vie terrible, méritée et nouvelle’ [for having allowed my grandmother to die; perhaps rising suddenly from the dark depths in which it seemed forever buried, and striking like an Avenger, in order to inaugurate for me a new and terrible and only too well-merited existence] (Sodome et Gomorrhe ii, iii, 499; 2, 1152; emphasis added). Memories can become themselves an event (here referring to the ravages of jealousy): ‘il arrive que des souvenirs, postérieurement à tout événement, se comportent tout à coup dans notre mémoire comme des événements eux aussi, souvenirs que nous n’avions pas éclairés jusquelà’ [it may happen that memories subsequent to any event suddenly materialise and behave in our minds as though they too were events, memories which hitherto we had never explored] (La Prisonnière, iii, 594; 3, 82; emphasis added). This capacity for overlay and dislocation makes irreversible time reversible in thought and art: ‘l’avenir, mais même le passé, qui ne se réalise pour nous souvent qu’après l’avenir, et nous ne parlons pas seulement du passé que nous apprenons après coup, mais de celui que nous avons conservé depuis longtemps en nous et que tout d’un coup nous apprenons à lire’ [the future alone, but even the past, which often comes to life for us only when the future has come and gone — and not only the past which we discover after the event but the past which we have long kept stored within ourselves and suddenly learn how to interpret] (La Prisonnière, iii: 594; 3, 82). This form of deciphering memories as events, and events as memories, comes to constitute a self projected as a whole through the fissured parts. Such disjunctive moments are not so much the exception as a constant in the cognitive process of the narrator: the repeated moves from peripeteia to recognition. These involve, as Terence Cave has convincingly shown, the acquisition of knowledge and recognition as the quintessence of all narrative.15 Things will change not according to reason or perception, but by seismic shifts or reversal of direction, such that one might conclude about the accumulations and explosions in the novel, in the move from da capo al fine, as T. S. Eliot implicitly did: music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts. (T. S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’, Four Quartets)

Notes to Chapter 7 1. This essay was previously published in Proust in Perspective: Visions and Revisions, ed. by Armine Mortimer and Katherine Kolb (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002).

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2. For an extensive history and analysis of the poetics of recognition, see Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 3. References to Contre Sainte-Beuve are to the Fallois edition (Paris: Gallimard, 1951); trans. by Sylvia Townsend Warner as By Way of Sainte-Beuve (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958). The 1987 Pléiade edition of the Recherche gives four esquisses, two of which are the same as the text published by de Fallois. See Esquisses xi, xii, in iv, 668–71. 4. My thanks to Antoine Compagnon for his comments about the erotics of this passage. 5. Françoise gives herself over ‘à cet art de la cuisine pour lequel elle avait certainement un don’ [‘to that art of cooking at which she was so gifted’] (i, 437; 1, 480). See my essay, ‘The Anxiety of Art and the Gift of Writing’, in The World and its Rival: Essays on Literary Imagination in Honor of Per Nykrog, ed. by Kathryn Karczewska and Tom Conley (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 249–63. 6. The note to this page signals a passage from Cahier 27 which announces the doubling of Swann: ‘Le motif était fini mais il allait revenir une dernière fois et Swann, sentant qu’il allait revenir, de nouveau un sanglot souleva sa gorge. Car l’attente de quelque chose même de médiocrement émouvant est en elle-même émouvante, car l’esprit qui attend ce retour sait qu’il va recevoir un choc, s’aperçoit lui-même comme un auditeur à qui il va causer une forte impression [...] De même que quelqu’un qui lit haut ou qui chante à quelqu’un quelque chose d’émouvant, quand arrive le moment où la parole émouvante va venir, il sent que non seulement son auditeur va être ému, mais va penser qu’il l’est lui-même; et dans ce retour sur lui-même et au moment où il prononce les mots émouvants, son œil se mouille, sa voix tremble du sanglot de pitié que l’auditeur doit éprouver pour lui; ainsi Swann dédoublé s’apercevait comme cet auditeur à qui il savait que le retour de la phrase devait paraître émouvant et émouvant pour lui aussi’ [The theme had come to an end but it was going to return one last time and Swann, sensing it was going to return, was overcome once again by a sob. For expectation, even of something only mildly moving, is itself moving, because the mind that is expecting this return knows that it is going to receive a shock and perceives itself as a listener upon whom the return will cause a strong impression. [...] Just as someone reading aloud or singing something moving to someone else, at the point where the moving words are about to come, feels not only that his listener will be moved, but will also think that he is himself; and in this turn inward upon himself and in the moment where he pronounces the moving words, his eye moistens, his voice trembles with the sob of pity that the listener must feel for him; so Swann, doubling himself, perceived himself as this listener for whom he knew that the return of the motif must seem moving and moving also for him] (fols. 48r–50r, i, 1241, n. 2). 7. Gérard Genette, ‘Métonymie chez Proust’, in Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 56 8. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: G. Braziller, 1972), p. 25, p. 29. 9. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Image de Proust’, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 201–16 (p. 203). 10. Philippe Sollers, L’Œil de Proust. Les Dessins de Marcel Proust (Paris: Stock, 1999), p. 21. 11. Philip Kolb recorded on his fiches a certain number of incidents involving bombs: ‘A bomb at the maison Rothschild, yesterday, rue Lafitte.’ Figaro, 6 September 1895; ‘Attack against the baron de Rothschild ‘yesterday’ at Trouville. An exploding envelope.’ Figaro, 25 August 1895; ‘A bomb explodes, rue de Rohan, after the gala at the Opera.’ Almanach Hachette, 1907, p. 258; Illustration, anarchist attack against Loubet, the President of the Republic, and Alfonso XIII, king of Spain; ‘a bomb at the Madeleine.’ Journal des Goncourt, 9 vols (Paris: Fasquelle, 1896–1907), ix, 200. 12. The New Grove Dictionary defines da capo as follows: ‘(It.: ‘from the head’). An instruction, commonly abbreviated D.C., placed at the end of the second (or other later) section of a piece or movement, indicating that there is to be a recapitulation of the whole or part of the first section. The word ‘fine’ (end) or a pause sign marks the point at which the recapitulation ends’ (p. 143). ‘The da capo aria became the standard form in the cantata and the opera seria of the late Baroque period. [...] Sometimes sets of variations (e.g. Bach’s Goldberg Variations) had a da capo of the theme at the end.’ (Signed ‘Jack Westrup’.) By the nineteenth century with Wagner, ‘one category of changes worked in the direction of avoiding small musical units; ends of phrases

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were obscured by eschewing conventional cadences, and arias and ensembles were merged into the f low of action. [...] Wagner experimented with merging the acts into one continuous unit, the opera’ (p. 566). According to The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, ‘The da capo aria came under increasing criticism from Gluck and others by the final third of the 18th century, for both musical and dramatic reasons. In some instances, it became merely a virtuoso singer’s plaything — not only undramatic but antidramatic. [...] Arias were also constructed along the lines of instrumental movements, in binary, sonata, or rondo forms’ (p. 49). 13. Jean Imbeault, Mouvements (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), p. 83; p. 86. 14. Sarah Kofman, L’Imposture de la beauté (Paris: Galilée, 1995), p. 95. 15. Cave, Recognitions, pp. 1–6.

C h ap t er 8

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Other Eyes: Proust and the Myths of Photography Michael Wood, Princeton University ‘Je décrétai’, Roland Barthes writes in La Chambre claire ‘que j’aimais la Photo contre le cinéma, dont je n’arrivais pas cependant à la séparer’ [I decided that I liked Photo­ graphy in opposition to Cinema].1 This sentence says many things that it doesn’t say, starting with the delicate exaggeration of its initial verb — I decreed rather than just decided or felt or said to myself — and ending with a persistence in a preference where what is preferred cannot really be distinguished from what is not preferred. In fact, the sentence contains almost everything I want to say here, so we could think of this essay as a sort of archaeological dig, an excavation of Barthes’s sentence. Of its mythology, to use Barthes’s key word. What’s strange about M. Proust in this context is that he is both for and against photography, and by extension for and against the cinema; and stranger still, that he is at his most lucid when he fails to separate them. And of course photography for Proust is all about strangeness. Liking photography Barthes has lots of company in his preference for photography. Here, for example, is the photographer Brassaï preferring photography (not surprisingly), but preferring it in the form of a critical comment on Proust. As a writer, Brassaï says, Proust is always looking for different angles — like a photographer. Like a film director too, surely? Absolutely not. Des critiques ont pu en déduire que c’était là la manière d’un cinéaste. Ils se trompent. Le procédé de Proust n’est jamais cinématographique. Rien n’est plus éloigné de son esprit que filmer, c’est-à-dire suivre l’incessante translation des images, leur glissement les unes dans les autres.2 [Some critics have thereby deduced that this was a cinematic procedure but they are mistaken. Proust’s method is never cinematic. Nothing is further from his mind than to film, that is, to follow the incessant translation of images, their metamorphosis into each other.] 3

Film is time passing, photography is time frozen, broken into pieces. Frozen but not killed; on the contrary, kept alive, a perpetual moment, ‘a sort of eternity’. Mieke Bal, similarly, tells us that the movement of images in Proust is ‘not cinematic, but

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rather recalls the effect of a “contact sheet” ’.4 Jean-Pierre Montier, in a fine essay on Brassaï’s book says the photographer is ‘probably right’: ‘Il n’y a pas chez Proust de vision cinématique’ [there is no cinematographic vision in Proust].5 In this view, most of us would have to like photography against film, because photography conquers time while film merely gives in to it. This view is well expressed by Jean-Francois Chevrier when he says that ‘Toute image fixe est d’abord une image de la fixité, d’un bonheur perdu et ressuscité’ [any fixed image is essentially an image of fixity itself, of a happiness lost and reborn].6 A moving image, by the same logic, would then be an image of movement. A photograph is a memento mori, as Barthes says: its message is that this person, caught in time, will never return to this moment and will one day die. A moving image offers the same message, but with a different pathos. ‘Motion is the essence of life’, Jules-Etienne Marey proclaimed, even though he was at the time busy freezing movement in order to see how it worked. Because film images move, they seem to certify active life as well as sheer existence, and they just go on living, weirdly and animatedly indifferent to the later avatars (and death) of their subject. It is as if film itself were a hollow immortality, a procession of former selves unable to die — like the Golo of the magic lantern, indifferent to the surfaces on to which he is projected: ‘Et rien ne pouvait arrêter sa lente chevauchée’ [And nothing could arrest his slow progress] (i, 10; 1, 10). Here’s another voice, this time objecting to both photography and film, but still just about managing to separate them. Writing of Proust’s drawings, collected in a book called L’Œil de Proust, Philippe Sollers says that ‘an eye accustomed to the film or television image’ will find the material disappointing or without interest. This is because Proust is not a ‘writer-sketcher’, ‘un écrivain-dessinateur’, like Goethe, Hugo, Blake, Baudelaire, Artaud or Michaux. Proust, for Sollers, has a ‘biblical eye’, he is a writer of hieroglyphics, and his doodles are a perfect complement to this project. ‘Rien n’est plus faux [...] que de replacer Proust dans son époque, celle du déferlement de la photographie ou, déjà, du cinéma’ [‘nothing is more inaccurate [...] than to place Proust within his time, the time of the unfolding of photography or, already, of cinema’]. ‘L’ œil de Proust est tournant, voit le relief, traduit, décrypte’ [‘Proust’s eye revolves, sees the relief, translates, deciphers’]. Vision in Proust is the reverse of what Sollers, in an accusing inventory, calls ‘cinematic profusion’: ‘réalisme, actualité, vécu, histoire, aveux, cris, profusion cinématographique et le reste...’ [‘realism, actuality, lived experience, history, confessions, screams, cinematic profusion and the rest’]. The camera is doubly deceptive, capturing only what Sollers calls ‘le faux-temps mort’ [‘dead false-time’], time that is false even before it dies.7 For Sollers as for Brassaï the cinema is mere time, suffered rather than resisted; but it is also mere appearance, the visual restricted to two dimensions, the screen you can’t get behind. Isn’t this true of photography too? Yes, but photography, it seems, if you like it, belongs to two moments in time, whereas film belongs only to one. In photography, there is the time of the shot and the time of the image, and you can get a little closer to the hieroglyphics. Don’t the same two times apply in the cinema? Yes, but not when we are preferring one over the other. In the more elaborate form of the story, photography means triple time — the time of

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the shot or click, the time in the dark room, and the time of the viewing — while cinema means just the one time, the time in the theatre, mere appearance, the parade of images. Or better: the myth of photography means remembering these multiple times, and photography’s myth of the cinema means forgetting them. For a long time I didn’t understand how this forgetting could have happened and keep happening. And then I reread Deleuze on the image-movement, and understood, or at least found something I could adapt into an understanding. In the development of any medium, what must be stressed is novelty, and not continuity. The great initial difference between cinema and photography was that the cinema’s images moved. Forgetting all the similarities and seeing only this one difference we decided that that is all they do: they just move. No wonder we think we absorb them passively, or that they seem mindless. Brassaï’s book appeared in 1997, and Sollers’s appeared in 1999, so we are not talking about old stories. Well, we are talking about old stories that are still current, since we can find precisely the same set of assumptions in Proust, a whole metaphorical system which sets unseen life against seen life, real life against actual life, photography against the cinema, and finally memory against perception, each construed as aspects of photography, in play against one another: mere photography, so to speak, the taking of snapshots, against the work in the dark room and the activity of contemplation. Towards the end of Le Temps retrouvé Proust casually picks up — I’m assuming he is borrowing rather than inventing the idea — the notion of cinema as mere appearance, the procession of visible things through time, precisely what will become Sollers’s claim, even in its turn of phrase. Some people, Proust’s narrator says, have wanted the novel to be ‘a sort of cinematic procession of things’, ‘une sorte de défilé cinématographique des choses’. This notion is absurd. ‘Rien ne s’éloigne plus de ce que nous avons perçu en réalité qu’une telle vue cinématographique’ [‘Nothing is further from what we have really perceived than the vision that the cinematograph presents’] (iv, 461; 3, 917). Proust’s narrator’s objection is to what he calls ‘the literature of notations’, that is, a literature which registers things the way a movie would but can’t say anything about what these things mean to us. But then, rather remarkably, our narrator uses photography to tell us what’s wrong with the cinema. There is a life, he says, which inhabits everyone, not just artists. People don’t see it, because they don’t seek to illuminate it, literally clear it up, ‘l’éclaircir’. ‘Et ainsi leur passé est encombré d’innombrables clichés qui restent inutiles parce que l’intelligence ne les a pas “développés” ’ [‘And therefore their past is like a photographic dark-room encumbered with innumerable negatives which remain useless because the intellect has not developed them’] (iv, 474; 3, 931). And a page or so later the narrator, having defined literature as ‘la vraie vie, la vie enfin découverte et éclaircie, la seule vie par conséquent pleinement vécue’ [‘Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated — the only life in consequence that can be said to be really lived’] returns to his photographic image and suggests that writing is like looking carefully at a negative: On éprouve, mais ce qu’on a éprouvé est pareil à certains clichés qui ne montrent que du noir tant qu’on ne les a pas mis près d’une lampe, et qu’eux

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There are all kinds of snags and contradictions in this argument — neither Proust nor his narrator is usually quite so fond of the intelligence — but we can leave them aside for the moment. What’s important for the present purpose is the idea of a sort of inert perception, a knowledge of the world which is dead or sleeping until it is awakened by the mind. And what’s odd, or maybe not so odd, is that the camera should provide the metaphor for awakening here, with the cinema playing the role of the inert stooge, perception unredeemed. Proust’s narrator, like Barthes, has decided he likes photography against the cinema, and for much the same reasons. Barthes says there is nothing Proustian about a photograph, a photograph doesn’t remember the past, and of course he is right. But Proust’s characters don’t remember the past either, they regain it, they find it again, they live it in the mind, and only in the mind, because all its other residences are gone. A last Proustian image along this track. Il en est des plaisirs comme des photographies. Ce qu’on prend en présence de l’être aimé, n’est qu’un cliché négatif, on le développe plus tard, une fois chez soi, quand on a retrouvé à sa disposition cette chambre noire intérieure dont l’entrée est “condamnée” tant qu’on voit du monde’ (ii, 227). [Pleasure is in this respect like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative, which we develop later, when we are back at home, and have found once again at our disposal that inner darkroom the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people.] (1, 932)

The point, to restate the mythology and rename the stakes, is not whether photo­ graphy and the cinema are really like this, or whether they can be got to play these roles in our thinking, since they manifestly can. The point is what happens when we picture the relations among perception, consciousness and memory in this seemingly irresistible way. Liking cinema And what would it mean to like cinema against photography, without managing to separate them? If we stay with the structure of the argument so far, with what offers itself as the logic of the myth, we would be preferring mere succession, time passing, a world of infinitely detailed appearance. An unrevised world, sheer ‘cinematic profusion’ in Sollers’s phrase, a ‘cinematographic procession’, in Proust’s phrase. We would be opposing cinema not to the camera — how could we? — but to what we might think of as the Cartesian camera, the camera that has found it has a mind. We would be celebrating the other camera, the camera quite without a mind and without a need or a desire for one. The recorder not only of the unexamined life but the unedited, unfalsified life.

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Tom Gunning, in a very fine essay, writes of the camera as a ‘mute yet unassailable witness of a crime’, but adds that ‘a fascination with photographic evidence of misdeeds seems to predate considerably its widespread application in reality’.8 Before surveillance cameras, that is, there were fantasies of what a camera might survey, and what it would mean for the camera to do the surveying. Early films, for instance, are full of stories of what a camera will see when it is inadvertently left running, when the world stumbles into its view, so to speak. As if the camera were a kind of spy without a job who need only to wait to become employed. In 1870, a year before Proust’s birth, a Dr Vernois published his theory of the optogramme. This is the theory that the retina retains images even after death, so that in cases of murder, for example, the killer could be discovered by an inspection of the victim’s retina. In Britain, for a while, it was thought that Jack the Ripper might be identified in this way. What is such a fantasy about? Gunning, following Philippe Dubois, says ‘the very act of murder produces its own record’.9 This would be a fantasy about traces, about everything leaving traces, or the abolition of invisibility, and the retina/camera would be the recording instrument or, better, the instrument which could not not record what it saw. Much of what seems most mystifying and mystified in writing about photography is associated with this fantasy, I think. Both Barthes’s idea that ‘the referent adheres’ to the photograph, that photography is all contingency, singularity, adventure, and Benjamin’s idea that photography refuses or evades art because ‘the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search [...] a picture for the tiny spark of contingency [...] with which reality has so to speak seared the subject’, are versions of the fantasy.10 It’s not that the camera can’t lie — it lies all the time — but that it can’t close its eyes, or it is an eye which cannot close. Of course the camera can close its eyes in all kinds of ways. Every act of framing a shot is a closing of the eyes to something. And blanking out wrinkles from the finished photo, retouching waistlines, or airbrushing out whole casts of characters, might well seem just as good as closing one’s eyes. But the fantasy, forgetting these things, remembers something else: that a camera can be pictured as the opposite of the camera in Brassaï, and Barthes, and, some of the time, in Proust. As perfectly lacking in intelligence, and therefore unable to scrutinize or alter what it sees. The fantasy is not about the camera always doing this — no one thinks the posed studio photograph is anything other than a posed studio photograph. The fantasy is about the chance, once in a while, of catching mere contingency. If any instrument can do this, it will be the camera, and it will do it because it doesn’t think. The favourite contingency to be caught is a crime. We might even turn Gunning’s idea around. It’s not that murder produces its own record. It’s that the record, even of a humdrum event or an empty park, might show a murder taking place in the corner, as in Antonioni’s Blow-Up, cited by Chevrier in just this context. It’s what the camera catches by accident that makes the camera worth having. The camera sees what we see when we are not looking. This is the sort of suggestion we find in Benjamin when he cites the comparison of Atget’s photographs to those of the scene of a crime. ‘But is not every square inch of our cities the scene of a crime? Every passer-by a culprit?’ The answer is no, or at least not in every city. But of course

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any given square inch could be the scene of a crime, and any given passer-by could be a culprit, especially outside a cash machine. That’s why they have surveillance cameras there. Benjamin continues ‘Is it not the task of the photographer [...] to reveal guilt and to point out the guilty in his pictures?’,11 but this takes him back into the other fantasy, the one where consciousness and intelligence rule. We might say it’s the task of the camera to take pictures, and if crimes and culprits show up there, they will be democratically duplicated along with everyone else. Other eyes We gain other eyes through art, Proust’s narrator suggests. And we need other eyes, because without them we shall see only what are used to seeing, even if we travel to outer space. ‘Le seul véritable voyage, le seul bain de Jouvence, ce ne serait pas d’aller vers de nouveaux paysages, mais d’avoir d’autres yeux...’ [‘The only true voyage of discovery, the only really rejuvenating experience, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes’] (iii, 762; 3, 260). And the eyes the painter Elstir gives us turn out to be the very eyes photography gives to us too. Elstir’s art, his effort, the narrator says, is ‘ne pas exposer les choses telles qu’il savait qu’elles étaient, mais selon ces illusions optiques dont notre vision première est faite’ [‘the effort made by Elstir to reproduce things not as he knew them to be but according to the optical illusions of which our first sight of them is composed’] (ii, 194; 1, 897). And photography, Proust’s narrator says, popularizes (vulgarizes) as an industry what someone like Elstir had done as art: namely devise perspectives which foil the intelligence, make momentarily unavailable the rational organization of space as we know it. The result is that ‘l’art antérieur perd rétrospectivement un peu de son originalité’ [‘the art that was first in the field loses retrospectively a little of its originality’] (ii, 194; 1, 896). Until very recently I thought this argument was pretty much that of Benjamin, in his ‘Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’. Photography takes away the aura of paintings. But Proust’s narrator is not talking about the reproduction of works but about the multiplication of effects, and about something like the creation of a new aura, not in painting or photography, but through them, through their diffusion. When people say photographs are ‘admirable’, or ‘magnificent’, the narrator continues, they are referring to quelque image singulière d’une chose connue, image différente de celles que nous avons l’habitude de voir, singulière et pourtant vraie et qui à cause de cela est pour nous doublement saisissante parce qu’elle nous étonne, nous fait sortir de nos habitudes, et tout à la fois nous fait rentrer en nous-même en nous rappelant une impression. (II, 194) [Some unusual image of a familiar object, an image different from those that we are accustomed to see, unusual and yet true to nature, and for that reason doubly striking because it surprises us, takes us out of our cocoon of habit, and at the same time brings us back to ourselves by recalling to us an earlier impression.] (1, 896–97)

We gain other eyes, and we return to ourselves. But there is more. We can’t be

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sure what we shall see through those other eyes, because we can’t tell them what to see, they are not under the rule of the ordering self. The Cartesian camera always returns us to subjectivity, and Proust often writes as if there were no other camera — this is the story of liking photography against the cinema. But his work actually uses the other camera a lot, the one that makes metaphors because it is not amenable to rationality and order — not conscriptible for the normalizing projects of the intelligence. I come now to a very famous passage in La Recherche. Mieke Bal calls it ‘the longest and most sustained ref lection on photography in the entire work’.12 The narrator returns home and see his grandmother reading a book. She doesn’t see him, and he doesn’t recognize her; sees her without the armour, so to speak, of memory, need, affection, history and narrative. The instance is very close to the moments of nothingness that David Ellison describes so well elsewhere in this volume. But what the narrator sees here is not quite nothingness; rather something like the degree zero of a person. The passage ends with these devastating, impeccably chosen and delayed words: j’aperçus sur le canapé, sous la lampe, rouge, lourde et vulgaire, malade, rêvassant, promenant au-desssus d’un livre des yeux un peu fous, une vieille femme accablée que je ne connaissais pas. (ii, 440) [I saw, sitting on the sofa, beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, vacant, letting her slightly crazed eyes wander over a book, a dejected old woman whom I did not know.] (2, 143)

The whole passage has been much commented on, and I should like brief ly to evoke some of this commentary before giving the discussion, I hope, a slightly new turn. For Siegfried Kracauer, in The Theory of Film, the passage is a portrait of photography itself. The description is one-sided, Kracauer says, because it leaves out the structuring work of the photographer, but otherwise correct enough. ‘The ideal photographer is the opposite of the unseeing lover [...] he is identical with the camera lens’. A little later he says that for Proust ‘photographs [...] transmit raw material without defining it’.13 This is clearly our second camera, the one without a mind, although now the first camera, by implication, has tenderness as well as intelligence on its side, and even an intelligent tenderness, an ‘intelligente et pieuse tendresse’. For Bal the passage is about two phantoms: that of the grandmother (‘The grandmother is a specter to the extent that she is herself ’) and that of the narrator (‘who is devoid all substance [...] when he sees without being seen or known to be there’).14 Bal is picking up especially on the opening of the passage where the narrator says ‘J’étais là, ou plutôt je n’étais pas encore là puisqu’elle ne le savait pas...’ and ‘De moi par ce privilège qui ne dure pas et où nous avons, pendant le court instant du retour, la faculté d’assister brusquement à notre propre absence il n’y avait que le témoin, l’observateur, en chapeau et manteau de voyage, l’étranger qui n’est pas de la maison, le photographe qui vient prendre un cliché des lieux qu’on ne reverra plus’ [‘I was in the room, or rather, I was not yet in the room since she was not aware of my presence [...]’; ‘Of myself — thanks to the privilege which does not last but which gives one, during the brief moment of return, the faculty of being suddenly the spectator of one’s own absence — there was present only the witness,

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the observer, in travelling coat and hat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has been called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again.’] (ii, 438; 2, 141). This is certainly the second camera rather than the first, and indeed the language begins to suggest the cinema as Stanley Cavell describes it: we haunt the world of our own absence, or as Virginia Woolf puts it, ‘We see life as it is when we have no part in it’.15 Chevrier draws our attention to the ‘extraordinary fiction’ in the passage which imagines an eye that can see what the camera registers at the very moment of the registering, and then goes on to point out Proust’s very precise tense and mood: ‘Mais qu’au lieu de notre œil, ce soit un objectif purement materiel, une plaque photographique, qui ait regardé...’ [‘But if, instead of our eyes it should happen to be a purely physical object, a photographic plate, that has watched the action’] (ii, 439; 2, 142). It is not that the camera/eye sees but that it has seen, or will have or should have seen — I’m not sure how we translate the subjunctive here. Jean-Pierre Montier takes us back to Kracauer when he writes: ‘Coupant court aux ruses de l’intelligence et de l’affection, c’est le pur mécanisme photographique qui vient occasionner l’apparition prémonitoire de la mort...’ [‘Shortcutting the tricks of intelligence and affection, the pure photographic mechanism is what triggers the premonitory apparition of death’].16 The turn I want to take involves first of all a dropping of the mask, or a reminder of just where we are. We are not talking about photography and cinema, but about certain myths of photography and cinema; and even those myths, of course, are in the end only ways of picturing the human mind at its strange work. And as we remember this, we realize two things about the famous passage. First, both cameras are present in it, or if you like, both of the forms of consciousness we have been representing by the two cameras. One is precisely the suspension of the other, but we necessarily hear a lot about the suspended form too. Indeed, just as he is describing its suspension, Proust’s narrator tells us it is never suspended: ‘Nous ne voyons jamais les êtres chéris que dans le système animé, le mouvement perpétuel de notre incessante tendresse...’ [‘We never see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them’] (ii, 438; 2, 142) ‘Jamais, incessante’... Never, except now. Incessante, except when it stops. A little later the narrator uses ‘ jamais’ again, precisely to evoke what isn’t happening rather than what is: ‘cacher à nos regards ce qu’ils ne doivent jamais contempler’ [‘to hide from our eyes what they ought never to behold’] (ii, 439; 2, 142). Miracles are always happening in Proust, but not always happy ones. The second thing we notice when we drop the mask of analogy is that the operative contrast, although still strong enough, is much moderated, because both forms of consciousness are just that: forms of consciousness. Even the machine understands that the figure in front of it is an old lady reading a book; it just doesn’t have a grandmother, because it is a machine. Bergson cites a case studied by Charcot in which a man can’t recognize the streets of his home town but still knows they are streets. ‘Il ne reconnaissait plus sa femme et ses enfants; il pouvait dire cependant, en les apercevant, que c’était une femme, que c’était des enfants [...] Ce qui était aboli, c’était donc une certain espèce de reconnaissance...’ [‘He no

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longer recognized his wife and children; yet, when he saw them, he could say that this was a woman, that those were children [...] A certain kind of recognition, then [...] was obliterated’].17 There are several indications in the passage that we have slipped out of still photography and into the movies. Think of the jerky, brief lives of the characters in the films Proust will have seen at Cabourg and perhaps in Paris; much closer to the magic lantern than to Miramax. Then think of the academician trying not to fall and then falling: ‘ce que nous verrons par exemple dans la cour de l’Institut, au lieu de la sortie d’un academicien qui veut appeler un fiacre, ce sera sa titubation, ses précautions pour ne pas tomber en arrière, la parabole de sa chute comme s’il était ivre ou que le sol fût couvert de verglas’ (ii, 439). This looks like a movie to me, but you could get the same effect from the views in a kinetoscope, of course. In the next sentence the narrator uses the word ‘pellicules’, which may simply mean the reels of film you put in a camera (or used to), but may also, according to the Dictionnaire Robert, mean cinema films. My point, as you will guess, is not that it has to mean one or the other, but that the double possibility is intriguing. Finally the image of the grandmother is there only for an instant before it disappears as the moving image does and the still image doesn’t. Shall we say that Proust in the end liked cinema against photography? It would be as true and as false as saying he liked instinct against intelligence, or the involuntary against the voluntary. Proust was a great builder of such mythologies. But let’s remember the second half of Roland Barthes’s sentence, his failure to separate cinema from photography. The failure is as important at the declared attempt. In fact, neither makes sense without the other. In this instance, you can pit one medium against another, one mentality against another, only if you know the quarrel is going to collapse. You won’t have other eyes if you don’t realize this, you won’t have any eyes. Of course Proust is not waiting for what he calls a cruel ruse of chance to show him either optical illusions or things are they are (to use the narrator’s terms for Elstir’s work). He is himself the organizer of chance, a great writer of fairy tales as well as a builder of myths. Mais c’est quelquefois au moment où tout nous semble perdu que l’avertissement arrive qui peut nous sauver, on a frappé à toutes les portes qui ne donnent sur rien, et la seule par où on peut entrer et qu’on aurait cherchée en vain pendant cent ans, on y heurte sans le savoir, et elle s’ouvre. (iv, 445) [But it is sometimes when we think that everything is lost that the intimation arrives which may save us; one has knocked at all the doors which lead nowhere, and then one stumbles without knowing it on the only door through which one can enter — which one might have sought in vain for a hundred years — and it opens of its own accord.] (3, 898)

‘Quelquefois’ means always, within the story. In life, in Proust’s and everyone else’s, chance is what might not happen. In A la recherche it is what might not have happened but always does. ‘Jamais’ means: ‘when I need it’, or: ‘Just when you thought it was too late’. We cannot choose between cinema and photography because we can’t choose

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between things as they are and optical illusions, we can only rather shakily oscillate between them, scarcely ever sure which is which. What do we feel when we see things we should never see? Why should we never see them? Is the old lady the narrator doesn’t know the true grandmother or an optical illusion? From the standpoint of continuing life she is surely a form of truth which has to be remembered as an illusion. But the enveloping tenderness is true too. I find myself thinking of Chris Marker’s film La Jetée. This is a work shot entirely in stills except for one frame, where an apparently sleeping woman opens her eyes. In a note to the DVD set of La Jetée and Sans Soleil, Marker tells us which cameras he used, a Pentax for the stills, and an Arrif lex, borrowed for an hour, for the frame with movement.18 What happens when movement so stealthily invades a still world? The stealth is real, since many viewers have not noticed the shift, and indeed it is quite hard to see. The moving image follows a sequence of stills that dissolve into each other, and so already simulate movement. And what happens when the stillness returns? Is La Jetée a movie? Marker calls it a photo-roman. I’m not going to start a whole new essay here, but I do think these questions help us to think about the strange M. Proust’s ideas of strangeness and I do have a suggestion about our mythologies. We are tempted, I think, to prefer photography to cinema, or to prefer cinema to photography, for two reasons: because they are not different enough, and because each can be seen as the undoing of something truly haunting about the other. To put it quite schematically: every still photograph has just put an end to movement; every moving image can be frozen at any time. What we long to see and fear to see, what we should never see, in Proust’s terms, is the other side of each event, the ongoing life of the dead, and the oncoming death of the living. If the gaze of habit is a form of necromancy, as Proust’s narrator says: ‘tout regard habituel est une nécromancie’ [‘every habitual glance is an act of necromancy’] (ii, 439; 2, 142), then the other side of habit is a raising of the dead we did not know we had, both the ones who are too still and the ones who will not stop moving. Notes to Chapter 8 1. Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Eric Marty, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1980), iii, 13; Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 3. 2. Brassaï, Marcel Proust sous l’emprise de la photographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), p. 136. 3. Brassaï, Proust in the Power of Photography, trans. by Richard Howard (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 106. 4. Mieke Bal, The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually, trans. by Anna-Louise Milne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 201. 5. Jean-Pierre Montier, ‘Un photographe lecteur de Proust: Brassaï’, in Proust et les images, ed. by Jean Cléder and Jean-Pierre Montier (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2003), p. 181. 6. Jean-François Chevrier, Proust et la photographie (Paris: Editions de l’Etoile, 1982), p. 108. 7. Philippe Sollers, L’Œil de Proust (Paris: Stock, 1999), pp. 12, 22, 54, 48. 8. Tom Gunning, ‘Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives and Early Cinema’, in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. by Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwarz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 15–45 (p. 35). 9. Gunning, p. 37.

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10. Barthes, pp. 18, 38 and passim. Walter Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’, in One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1979), pp. 240–57, (p. 243). 11. Benjamin, op. cit., p. 256. 12. Bal, p. 199. 13. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 15, 20. 14. Bal, p. 199. 15. Virginia Woolf, The Captain’s Death-Bed and Other Essays (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 183. 16. Jean-Pierre Montier, ‘La Photographie dans le temps’, in Cléder & Montier (eds), op. cit., p. 110. 17. Henri Bergson, Matière et Mémoire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999), p. 100. Henri Bergson. Matter and Memory, trans. by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1911), p. 19. 18. Chris Marker, La Jetée/Sans Soleil (London: Argos Films 1983/1962).

C h ap t er 9

v

‘Truth and Justice’ Antoine Compagnon, Collège de France/Columbia University ‘Truth and justice’: this was the mot d’ordre, the watchword of the Dreyfus Affair. Proust must have believed in them, but the idea of justice and truth that emanate from A la recherche du temps perdu hardly conforms to this noble ideal. Here are called into question human justice and divine justice, crime and punishment, guilt and innocence. Yet, doubt and scepticism are constant when the issue arises in the novel. The dominant image of Justice is contradictory, as it figures very early in the allegories of Giotto at the Arena, ‘une Justice, dont le visage grisâtre et mesquinement régulier était celui-là même qui, à Combray, caractérisait certaines jolies bourgeoises pieuses et sèches que je voyais à la messe et dont plusieurs étaient enrôlées d’avance dans les milices de réserve de l’Injustice’ [‘a Justice whose greyish and meanly regular features were identical with those which identified the faces of certain pious desiccated ladies of Combray whom I used to see at mass and many of whom had long been enrolled in the reserve forces of Injustice’] (i, 81; 1, 88). Justice, like Charity, does not seem like it. It seems unjust, blind and worrisome: these are its principal traits. Justice is rarely brought into question as a direct object, as justice itself, but frequently by means of comparison, and always in a negative manner. This is the case, for instance, when Françoise puts in full view a letter she did not miss or when she spies on the narrator and Albertine: ‘En ce moment, tenant au-dessus d’Albertine et de moi la lampe allumée qui ne laissait dans l’ombre aucune des dépressions encore visibles que le corps de la jeune fille avait creusées dans le couvre-pieds, Françoise avait l’air de La Justice éclairant le crime.’ (‘On this occasion, holding over Albertine and myself the lighted lamp whose searching beams missed none of the visible depressions which the girl’s body had made in the counterpane, Françoise conjured up a picture of “Justice shedding light upon Crime” ’] (ii, 655; 2, 373), following a sinister allegory that alludes to Prud’hon’s painting, La Justice et la Vengeance poursuivant le Crime (1808).1 Justice, therefore, frequently serves as a reference. Thus, at the very beginning of Albertine disparue (The Fugitive), after Françoise — always Françoise — the allegory of impossible Justice, has just told him of the young girl’s leaving: après le nouveau bond immense que la vie venait de me faire faire, la réalité qui s’imposait à moi m’était aussi nouvelle que celle en face de quoi nous mettent la découverte d’un physicien, les enquêtes d’un juge d’instruction ou les trouvailles d’un historien sur les dessous d’un crime ou d’une revolution. (iv, 7)

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[after the immense new jolt which life had just given me, the reality which confronted me was as novel as that of which is presented to us by the discovery of a scientist, by the inquiries of an examining magistrate or the researches of a historian into the hidden aspects of a crime or a revolution.] (3, 429)

Remarkably, this series associates the physician, the historian, and the juge d’instruction (‘examining magistrate’),2 three decipherers of subterranean truth. Human justice is most frequently presented through the role of the juge d’instruction, who is not described in a neutral way as the penal code would have it. During the public rupture between Morel and Charlus at the Verdurins in La Prisonnière (The Captive): L’ambassadeur disgracié, le chef de bureau mis à la retraite, le mondain à qui on bat froid, l’amoureux éconduit examinent parfois pendant des mois l’événement qui a brisé leurs espérances; ils le tournent et le retournent comme un projectile tiré on ne sait d’où ni on ne sait par qui, pour un peu un aérolithe. Ils voudraient bien connaître les éléments composants de cet étrange engin qui a fondu sur eux, savoir quelles volontés mauvaises on peut y reconnaître. Les chimistes au moins disposent de l’analyse; les malades souffrant d’un mal dont ils ne savent pas l’origine peuvent faire venir le médecin. Et les affaires criminelles sont plus ou moins débrouillées par le juge d’instruction. (iii, 821) [The disgraced ambassador, the under-secretary placed suddenly on the retired list, the man about town who finds himself cold-shouldered, the lover who has been shown the door, examine, sometimes for months on end, the event that has shattered heir hopes; they turn it over and over like a projectile fired at them they know not from whence or by whom, almost as though it were a meteorite. They long to know the constituent elements of this strange missile which has burst upon them, to learn what animosities may be detected therein. Chemists have at least the means of analysis; sick men suffering from a disease the origin of which they do not know can send for the doctor; [and] criminal mysteries are more or less unravelled by the examining magistrate.] (3, 323)

The juge d’instruction appears here alongside the chemist and the doctor as a revealer of truth, yet with the proviso, ‘more or less’. He is seen in general like an inquisitor, proceeding arbitrarily, only to indict and not to exonerate, in the manner of a police officer, a detective or a spy, as in the strange passage of the grandmother’s agony, where a f leeting character, a priest, ‘a brother-in-law of my grandmother’s’, appears out of nowhere to watch over the hero: A un moment où ma grand-mère était sans connaissance, la vue de la tristesse de ce prêtre me fit mal, et je le regardai. Il parut surpris de ma pitié et il se produisit alors quelque chose de singulier. Il joignit ses mains sur sa figure comme un homme absorbé dans une méditation douloureuse, mais, comprenant que j’allais détourner de lui les yeux, je vis qu’il avait laissé un petit écart entre les doigts. Et, au moment où mes regards le quittaient, j’aperçus son œil aigu qui avait profité de cet abri de ses mains pour observer si ma douleur était sincère. Il était embusqué là comme dans l’ombre d’un confessionnal. Il s’aperçut que je le voyais et aussitôt clôtura hermétiquement le grillage qu’il avait laissé entrouvert. Je l’ai revu plus tard, et jamais entre nous il ne fut question de cette minute. Il fut tacitement convenu que je n’avais pas remarqué qu’il m’épiait. Chez le prêtre comme chez l’aliéniste, il y a toujours quelque chose du juge d’instruction. (ii, 635)

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The passage concludes with an unsettling sentence. The figure of the priest who penetrates consciences from behind the bars of his fingers as if behind those of his confessional, summons the two other great inquisitors who are the psychiatrist and the judge, in accordance with the épistémè exposed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. They belong to this series of roles always presented in series of threes — physician, chemist, historian, doctor, psychiatrist, priest, juge d’instruction — but without the judge ever missing / with the judge always present — triads very f leeting and anecdotal that are no less significant of an anxiety and vulnerability facing / before confession. Anxiety before what danger, what disclosure? Brichot’s attitude while interrogating Charlus on the homosexual milieu in Albertine disparue may suggest a lead: ‘Brichot, qui n’avait cessé de poursuivre son idée, avec une brusquerie qui rappelait celle d’un juge d’instruction voulant faire avouer un accusé’ [‘Brichot, who was still suffering of the shock of the proportion ‘three out ten’ which M. de Charlus had revealed to him, had continued to pursue the idea all this time, burst out with an abruptness which was reminiscent of an examining magistrate seeking to make a prisoner confess’] (iii, 805; 3, 305). All these clues underline the narrator’s distrust — and surely that of the author, of Proust himself — regarding justice, looking for and forcing the confession, inhumane and instrumentalized, brutal and arbitrary. Unlike so many bourgeois writers of the nineteenth century, Proust did not study law: he does not believe in the rule of law. This, in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (Within a Budding Grove), again in a comparison, because — as I said — it is rarely a question of justice in and of itself, before the arrival onstage of La Berma and while the narrator worries about the impatient public’s bad manners stamping their feet while waiting for the end of the intermission: J’en étais effrayé; car de même que dans le compte rendu d’un procès, quand je lisais qu’un homme d’un noble cœur allait venir, au mépris de ses intérêts, témoigner en faveur d’un innocent, je craignais toujours qu’on ne fût pas assez gentil pour lui, qu’on ne lui marquât pas assez de reconnaissance, qu’on ne le récompensât pas richement, et, qu’écœuré, il se mît du côté de l’injustice. (i, 439) [I was terrified at this; for just as in the report of a criminal trial, when I read that some noble-minded person was coming, in defiance of his own interests,

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to testify on behalf of an innocent man, I was always afraid that they would not be nice enough to him, would not show enough gratitude, would not recompense him lavishly, and that he, in disgust, would then range himself on the side of injustice.] (1, 482–83)

In the same way, the hero was afraid that La Berma would react to the expressions of the spectators by performing poorly. Here, the narrator sympathizes with the innocent man who risks being condemned because justice mistreated a called witness who strikes back: as earlier with the spying priest, here is another fugitive fantasy that reveals a poor confidence in the ability of justice to recognize the truth. It is a scene out of a nightmare: my fate depends on a witness, but justice dissuades him by its poor manners. We are not yet in Kaf ka, but justice is no less menacing and malicious. It is not there to protect me, but to incriminate me, attack me, and torment me. There is a nightmare of justice, often represented in La Recherche. When Françoise gives him Albertine’s letter announcing her departure, at the beginning of Albertine disparue, the narrator immediately assumes the worst, imagining that her departure does not result from a childish act but from a fatal action, and he adds, once again in a comparison: Je me l’étais dit presque avec une satisfaction de perspicacité dans mon désespoir, comme un assassin qui sait ne pouvoir être découvert mais qui a peur et qui tout d’un coup voit le nom de sa victime écrit en tête d’un dossier chez le juge d’instruction qui l’a fait mander. (iv, 15) [I had told myself this, almost with the self-satisfaction at my perspicacity in my despair, like a murderer who knows that he can not be found out but is nevertheless afraid and all of a sudden sees his victim’s name written at the top of a document on the table of the examining magistrate who has sent for him.] (3, 438)

The satisfaction at perspicacity in despair, this perverse joy, a kind of Schadenfreude of turning back on oneself and finding a pleasure in foreseeing one’s own punishment, is compared to a nightmare situation that itself brings to mind a tale by Edgar Allan Poe, something like the ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’ Unless it is an echo of the major scene in Crime and Punishment (Part II, Chapter 1), archetypal of guilt, where Raskolnikov, the day after his double murder, is called to the neighbourhood police station for a simple matter of debt to his landlady. Because no one suspects him of the old woman’s murder, he is overcome by a desire to confess, but, while he is thinking about the idea, he hears police officers speaking about the crime, and immediately heads towards the door where he faints before reaching it. The desire to confess: it is what gives away the criminal and causes him to throw himself into the fire. Justice gives nightmares. In La Recherche there is a continuous dread of justice. The narrator is questioned in Albertine disparue, but this role is destined to failure because he habitually places himself on the side of the guilty party and the criminal, not that of the victim, the suing party, the prosecutor, or the judge. Is justice there to defend me or to condemn me? Spontaneously, the narrator identifies with those it punishes, and all comparisons project him toward the condemned guilty of an unknown but incontestable crime.

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This is, in fact, what the narrator expressly admits shortly before Charlus’s execution at the Verdurins: le sentiment de la justice, jusqu’à une complète absence de sens moral, m’était inconnu. J’étais au fond de mon cœur tout acquis à celui qui était le plus faible et qui était malheureux. Je n’avais aucune opinion sur la mesure dans laquelle le bien et le mal pouvaient être engagés dans les relations de Morel et de M. de Charlus, mais l’idée des souffrances qu’on préparait à M. de Charlus m’était intolerable. (iii, 795) [the notion of justice, to the extent of a complete absence of moral sense, was unknown to me. I was in my heart of hearts entirely on the side of the weaker party, and of anyone who was in trouble. I had no opinion as to the proportion in which good and evil might be blended in the relations between Morel and Charlus, but the thought of the sufferings that were in store for M. de Charlus was intolerable to me.] (3, 294)

The narrator recognizes that he is totally lacking ‘moral sense’ and therefore any ‘notion [sentiment] of justice’. Yet, he shares this sense, or rather this absence of a sense of justice, with Charlus, in whom he pinpoints it in identical terms, this time in Le Temps retrouvé (Time Regained): M. de Charlus était pitoyable, l’idée d’un vaincu lui faisait mal, il était toujours pour le faible, il ne lisait pas les chroniques judiciaires pour ne pas avoir à souffrir dans sa chair des angoisses du condamné et de l’impossibilité d’assassiner le juge, le bourreau, et la foule ravie de voir que ‘justice est faite.’ (iv, 354) [M. de Charlus was merciful [pitoyable], the idea of a vanquished opponent caused him pain, he was always on the side of the underdog, he refrained from reading the law reports in the newspaper in order not to have to suffer in his own f lesh from the anguish of the condemned man and from the impossibility of assassinating the judge, the executioner and the crowd that stood gloating to see ‘justice done.’] (3, 800)

Thus is explained the baron’s feelings towards the Germans, having become losers, at the end of the war. The narrator and Charlus share a common natural identi­f ica­ tion, by instinct, with the guilty and the condemned, to the point of understanding that they want to assassinate the judge, the executioner and the crowd demanding vengeance, all those who put themselves, normally, on the side of the law. Could this negative image of justice be linked to the experience of the Dreyfus Affair? It is not inconceivable, even though an irrepressible feeling of guilt — as with Raskolnikov or in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ — could seem to cause the narrator’s fear of justice. In any case, he does not believe in it, and Françoise is in effect the allegory of its impossibility. The narrator must hide from her in order to cry for his grandmother, for Françoise does not like to see him cry: ‘Car il faut que ceux-là mêmes qui ont raison, comme Françoise, aient tort aussi, pour faire de la Justice une chose impossible’ [‘For it is necessary that even those who are right, like Françoise, should be wrong also, so that Justice may be made an impossible thing’] (iii, 174; 2, 805). This sententious conclusion perfectly summarizes the narrator’s point of view on human justice. * * *

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It is time to shift to another realm, that stems from an episode that takes place a little further on in Albertine disparue: the summoning of the narrator to the Sûreté3 for an enquiry into a behaviour that today would be categorised as paedophiliac. In fact, the passage comes right after the comparison that the narrator makes between his reaction to Albertine’s departure and the situation of a criminal who catches sight of the name of his victim in the chambers of the juge d’instruction, a fantasy that recalls Edgar Allan Poe or Dostoevsky. The narrator met ‘a little poor girl’: [elle] me regardait avec des grands yeux et [elle] avait l’air si bon que je lui demandai si elle ne voulait pas venir chez moi, comme j’eusse fait d’un chien au regard fidèle. Elle en eut l’air content. A la maison je la berçai quelque temps sur mes genoux, mais bientôt sa présence, en me faisant trop sentir l’absence d’Albertine, me fut insupportable. Et je la priai de s’en aller, après lui avoir remis un billet de cinq cents francs. (iv, 15–16) [[she] gazed at me with huge eyes and [she] looked so sweet-natured that I asked her whether she would care to come home with me, as I might have taken a dog with faithful eyes. She seemed pleased at the suggestion. When I got home, I held her for some time on my knee, but very soon her presence, by making me feel too keenly Albertine’s absence, became intolerable. And I asked her to go away, after giving her a five-hundred franc note.] (3, 440)

This episode allows us to make the transition from human justice to divine justice, for which punishment is always deserved. Not long afterwards, the narrator is in effect caught by the police. We enter into the universe of Lolita. I cite the passage in its entirety: Françoise me remit une convocation chez le chef de la Sûreté. Les parents de la petite fille que j’avais amenée une heure chez moi avaient voulu déposer contre moi une plainte en détournement de mineure. Il y a des moments de la vie où une sorte de beauté naît de la multiplicité des ennuis qui nous assaillent [...]. Je trouvai à la Sûreté les parents qui m’insultèrent, en me disant: ‘Nous ne mangeons pas de ce pain-là,’ me rendirent les cinq cents francs que je ne voulais pas reprendre, et le chef de la Sûreté qui, se proposant comme inimitable exemple la facilité des présidents d’assises à ‘reparties,’ prélevait un mot de chaque phrase que je disais, mot qui lui servait à en faire une spirituelle et accablante réponse. De mon innocence dans le fait il ne fut même pas question, car c’est la seule hypothèse que personne ne voulut admettre un instant. Néanmoins les difficultés de l’inculpation firent que je m’en tirai avec ce savon, extrêmement violent, tant que les parents furent là. Mais dès qu’ils furent partis, le chef de la Sûreté qui aimait les petites filles changea de ton et me réprimandant comme un compère: ‘Une autre fois, il faut être plus adroit. Dame, on ne fait pas des levages aussi brusquement que ça, ou ça rate. D’ailleurs vous trouverez partout des petites filles mieux que celle-là et pour bien moins cher. La somme était follement exagérée.’ Je sentais tellement qu’il ne me comprendrait pas si j’essayais de lui expliquer la vérité que je profitai sans mot dire de la permission qu’il me donna de me retirer. (iv, 27–28). [Françoise brought me a summons from the head of the Sûreté. The parents of the little girl whom I had brought into the house for an hour had decided to bring a charge against me for abduction of a minor. There are moments in life when a sort of beauty is born of the multiplicity of the troubles that assail us [...].

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Antoine Compagnon At the Sûreté, I found the girl’s parents, who insulted me and with the words: ‘We’d rather starve,’ handed me back the five hundred francs which I did not want to take, and the head of the Sûreté who, setting himself the inimitable example of the judicial facility in repartee, seized upon a word in each sentence that I uttered for the purpose of concocting a witty and crushing retort. My innocence of the alleged crime was never taken into consideration, for that was the sole hypothesis which nobody was willing to accept for an instant. Nevertheless the difficulty of proving the charge enabled me to escape with this castigation, which was extremely violent, for as long as the parents were in the room. But as soon as they had gone, the head of the Sûreté, who had a weakness for little girls, changed his tone and admonished me as man to man: ‘Next time, you must be more careful. Gad, you can’t pick them up as easily as that, or you’ll get into trouble. Anyhow, you’ll find dozens of little girls who are better looking than that one, and far cheaper. It was a perfectly ridiculous amount to pay.’ I was so certain that he would fail to understand me if I attempted to tell him the truth that without saying a word I took advantage of his permission to withdraw.] (3, 451–52)

This passage is as extravagant as the one where the narrator, watching the grand­ mother’s agony, was observed by a priest through the bars of his fingers. The narrator is summoned to the Sûreté after having, in order to distract himself from the suffering that Albertine’s disappearance caused him, brought home with him a poor young girl and having, totally innocently according to him, rocked her on his knees, while compensating her well: five hundred francs for an hour, or no less than fifteen hundred Euros today. The misadventure once again gives him this reversed schadenfreude, beauty ‘born of the multiplicity of the troubles that assail us’, a sort of feeling that the troubles we have are deserved. It also illustrates our impossibility of proving our innocence, an hypothesis instantly thrown out; a misunderstanding, however, like the one that occurs with the chief of the Sûreté, is often worth more than the truth: the narrator is violently reprimanded, but, as the Sûreté chief also likes young girls, things are taken no further. How can we not recall here the reputation of the most famous Sûreté chief, Vidocq, a criminal who was in charge of the Bureau from 1810 to 1825 and model for Vautrin, dear to Charlus? The Sûreté is also the ancestor of the criminal investigation brigade at the mythic address, 36 quai des Orfèvres. The narrator would have thus gone there with his act earning him a meeting with the Sûreté chief in person instead of one of his subordinates. Yet the affair does not end there: Malheureusement, pour moi qui croyais l’affaire de la Sûreté finie, Françoise vint m’annoncer qu’un inspecteur était venu s’informer si je n’avais pas l’habitude d’avoir des jeunes filles chez moi, que le concierge, croyant qu’on parlait d’Albertine, avait répondu que si, et que, depuis ce moment, la maison semblait surveillée. Dès lors il me serait à jamais impossible de faire venir une petite fille dans mes chagrins pour me consoler, ou d’avoir la honte devant elle qu’un inspecteur surgît et qu’elle me prît pour un malfaiteur. Et du même coup je compris combien on vit plus pour certains rêves qu’on ne croit, car cette impossibilité de bercer jamais une petite fille me parut ôter à la vie toute valeur à jamais, mais de plus je compris combien il est compréhensible que les gens aisément refusent la fortune et risquent la mort, alors qu’on se figure que l’intérêt et la peur de mourir mènent le monde. Car si j’avais pensé que

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même une petite fille inconnue pût avoir par l’arrivée d’un homme de la police une idée honteuse de moi, combien j’aurais mieux aimé me tuer ! Il n’y avait même pas de comparaison possible entre les deux souffrances. Or dans la vie les gens ne réf léchissent jamais que ceux à qui ils offrent de l’argent, qu’ils menacent de mort, peuvent avoir une maîtresse, ou même simplement un camarade, à l’estime de qui ils tiennent, même si ce n’est pas à la leur propre. Mais tout à coup, par une confusion dont je ne m’avisai pas (je ne songeai pas en effet qu’Albertine, étant majeure, pouvait habiter chez moi et même être ma maîtresse), il me sembla que le détournement de mineures pouvait s’appliquer aussi à Albertine.’ (iii, 29–30) [Unfortunately, although I had assumed that the business with the Sûreté was over and done with, Françoise came in to tell me that an inspector had called to inquire whether I was in the habit of having girls in the house, that the concièrge, supposing him to be referring to Albertine, had replied in the affirmative, and that since then it seemed as though the house was being watched. Henceforth it would be impossible for me ever to bring a little girl into the house to console me in my grief, without risking the shame of an inspector suddenly appearing, and of her taking me for a criminal. And in the same instant I realized how much more important certain longings are to us than we suppose, for this impossibility of my ever taking a little girl on my knee again seemed to me to strip life of all its value forever, but what was more, I realized how understandable it is that people will readily refuse wealth and risk death, whereas we imagine that pecuniary interest and the fear of dying rule the world. For, rather than think that even an unknown little girl might be given a bad impression of me given by the arrival of a policeman, I should have preferred to kill myself! Indeed there was no possible comparison between the two degrees of suffering. Yet in everyday life people never bear in mind that those to whom they offer money, or whom they threaten to kill, may have mistresses, or merely friends, whose respect they value even if they do not value their own. But, all of a sudden, by a confusion of which I was not aware (for it did not occur to me that Albertine, being of age, was free to live under my roof and even to be my mistress), it seemed to me that the charge of corrupting minors might apply to Albertine also.] (3, 454)

There is so much to say about this page, for example about the shame of a double life and the fear that it would be revealed before the loved one: ‘I should have preferred to kill myself!’ But let us first elucidate the ‘détournement de mineures’ accusation of which the narrator is afraid of being accused. To what does it pertain exactly? The law of 28 April 1832 introduced into the French criminal code a threshold for ‘sexual majority’, fixed at the time at eleven years old. This threshold was increased to thirteen years by the law of 13 May 1863, and did not change again until the Vichy regime.4 At the time of Albertine disparue, therefore, sexual majority was set at thirteen years old.5 When the narrator speaks of ‘détournement de mineures’, however, the lack of sexual majority is not the cause, but rather what these texts call ‘excitation de mineurs à la débauche’, in other words all cases of corruption, encouragement to prostitution, etc., where the criterion is not sexual majority but rather legal majority. This is why the narrator mentions that Albertine was of legal age (‘majeure’), that she was over twenty-one. The young girl, on the other hand, could have been between thirteen and twenty-one years old.

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Perhaps is it not without pertinence to mention here the misadventure that happened to Proust in 1918 at the Hôtel Marigny, with furnished rooms and two exits, situated at 11, rue de l’Arcade, and acquired by Albert Le Cuziat in 1917. During a police raid that followed an anonymous denunciation during the night of the 11–12 January 1918, several couples of adults and minors were caught in the rooms. Proust was drinking champagne in the salon with a corporal of twenty years and nine months, old enough to come back from the front but not old enough for the rest. The writer was put on file: ‘Proust, Marcel, 46 years old, person of independent means’, according to the card that was discovered by Laure Murat in the police archives in the dossier of Le Cuziat.6 These facts allow us to appreciate the narrator’s concern at being suspected of harbouring a minor. The conclusion of the passage is indeed dreadful: Alors la vie me parut barrée de tous les côtés. Et en pensant que je n’avais pas vécu chastement avec elle, je trouvai dans la punition qui m’était inf ligée pour avoir bercé une petite fille inconnue, cette relation qui existe presque toujours dans les châtiments humains et qui fait qu’il n’y a presque jamais ni condamnation juste, ni erreur judiciaire, mais une espèce d’harmonie entre l’idée fausse que se fait le juge d’un acte innocent et les faits coupables qu’il a ignorés. (iv, 30) [Thereupon my life appeared to me to be hedged in on every side. And ref lecting that I had not lived chastely with her, I saw, in the punishment that had been inf licted upon me for having dandled an unknown little girl on my knee, that relation which almost always exists in human sanctions, whereby there is hardly ever either a fair sentence or a judicial error, but a sort of compromise between the false idea that the judge forms of an innocent action and the culpable deeds of which he is unaware.] (3, 454–55)

Beyond or at the root of the pessimistic and fearful image that the narrator holds of justice there resides an even darker vision of human nature, so much so that the arbitrariness of human justice is counterbalanced by Evil in the absolute, and that the innocent acts that are punished and the guilty acts that are ignored eventually balance out. In his ignorance or his malice, the judge still does a providential act. For the narrator, as for Joseph de Maistre or for Baudelaire, there exists a ‘kind of harmony’ superior to human justice between infractions and penalties: every punishment is always deserved, says the narrator, or ‘almost always,’ as there has always been a crime, and there is therefore never a judiciary error, or ‘almost never’ following the lowly concession he allows himself. This vision of the world is similar to the ideas of Maistre, for whom judicial error does not exist either, because there are no innocents. After his famous page on the executioner and on justice as secular arm of Providence, Maistre refutes the objections drawn from errors of justice and the alleged Calas Affair: let us not exaggerate injustices, he says, for ‘il est [...] possible qu’un homme envoyé au supplice pour un crime qu’il n’a pas commis, l’ait réellement mérité pour un autre crime absolument inconnu’ [‘it is equally possible that a man tortured for a crime he did not commit really merited punishment for an absolutely unknown crime’].7 In short, there is always a crime to punish. Maistre rails against the un­believable pretentiousness of man in arguing with God about the misfortunes of the

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righteous; and he vituperates against this ‘inconcevable folie qui ose fonder des arguments contre la Providence, sur les malheurs de l’innocence qui n’existe pas’ [‘the inconceivable folly that dares to base arguments against Providence on the misfortunes of the innocent, who do not exist]. Maistre is sure of his facts: ‘Où est donc l’innocence, je vous en prie? Où est le juste?’ [‘Where are the innocent, I ask you? Where are the just?’].8 Even if there are appearances of injustice and even errors of justice — which, incidentally, happen less frequently than claimed — in reality, as no one is innocent, every punishment is always deserved. La Recherche presents a Maistrian or Baudelarian conception of evil. For the narrator, a ‘kind of harmony’ exists between crime and punishment: alongside the innocent act that is unjustly punished there are always other hidden and reprehensible acts; we are always guilty of something else. In short, judicial error does not exist, and the narrator shares this viewpoint again with Charlus. When Brichot reveals the existence of errors about reputed homosexuality, Charlus counts them as insignificant and counters the professor with a reasoning that reminds us even of Maistre’s syntax: he thus asserts that ‘pour une mauvaise réputation qui est injustifiée, il y en a des centaines de bonnes qui ne le sont pas moins’ [‘for one bad reputation that is unjustified there are hundreds of good ones which are no less so’] (iii, 806; 3, 306). As Méline said: ‘There is no Dreyfus Affair.’ * * *

If ‘there is hardly ever either a fair sentence or a judicial error’, if justice is arbitrary and at the same time providential, it is also the case that in La Recherche guilt is attached to vice and not only to crime. Since vice is at once congenital and unpardonable, it is as a vice, if not as a crime, that the narrator’s paedophilia deserved a reprimand. As a vice, if not as a crime, the narrator will track down Albertine’s intentions to infinity. The comparison between vice and crime — in other words desire — is constant in La Recherche. Thus, in regards to Legrandin, who mounts an incredibly brutal and offensive attack on the narrator at Mme de Villeparisis’s thus revealing his true nature, a nature that he usually tries to dissimulate under a policed comportment, the narrator has this generalizing commentary: Et tout d’un coup, c’est en nous une bête immonde et inconnue qui se fait entendre et dont l’accent parfois peut aller jusqu’à faire aussi peur à qui reçoit cette confidence involontaire, elliptique et presque irrésistible de votre défaut ou de votre vice, que ferait l’aveu soudain indirectement et bizarrement proféré par un criminel ne pouvant s’empêcher de confesser un meurtre dont vous ne le saviez pas coupable. (ii, 501) [And suddenly there is within us a strange and obscene animal making itself heard, whose tones may inspire as much alarm in the person who receives the involuntary, elliptical and almost irresistible communication of one’s defect or vice as would the sudden avowal indirectly and outlandishly proffered by a criminal who can no longer refrain from confessing to a murder of which one had never imagined him to be guilty.] (2, 209)

Crime appears once again as a form of comparison, presently for vice. We recognize again Dostoyevsky, for example when Raskolnikov admits the murder to Sonia

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Semyonovna. In the ‘coarse and angry voice’ with which Legrandin heckles the narrator, the latter hears the equivalent of a confession to an unsuspected crime, something as strong and convincing as evidence. The comparison is analogous in the famous scene of the strawberry juice (the ‘ fraisette’): en entendant M. de Charlus dire de cette voix aiguë et avec ce sourire et ces gestes de bras: ‘Non, j’ai préféré sa voisine, la fraisette’, on pouvait dire: ‘Tiens, il aime le sexe fort’, avec la même certitude que celle qui permet de condamner, pour un juge, un criminel qui n’a pas avoué, pour un médecin, un paralytique général qui ne sait peut-être pas lui-même son mal, mais qui a fait telles fautes de prononciation d’où on peut déduire qu’il sera mort dans trois ans. (iii, 356) [On hearing M. de Charlus say, in that shrill voice and with that smile and those gestures, ‘No, I preferred its neighbour, the strawberry-juice,’ one could say: ‘Ah, he likes the stronger sex,’ with the same certainty as enables a judge to sentence a criminal who has not confessed, or a doctor a patient suffering from general paralysis who himself is perhaps unaware of his malady but has made some mistake in pronunciation from which it can be deduced that he will be dead in three years.] (2, 999)

The judge and the doctor are once again brought in as experts, in the manner of Foucault, and as decoders of clues or of symptoms of vice classified as crime. Like when Legrandin exposes his snobbism by uncontrollable lapses of voice and gesture, the lexicon is still that of the criminal investigation unit (police judiciaire) when Charlus gives away his sexuality by maladroit allusions: Car le plus dangereux de tous les recels, c’est celui de la faute elle-même dans l’esprit du coupable. La connaissance permanente qu’il a d’elle l’empêche de supposer combien généralement elle est ignorée, combien un mensonge complet serait aisément cru, et en revanche de se rendre compte à quel degré de vérité commence pour les autres, dans des paroles qu’il croit innocentes, l’aveu. (iii, 113–14) [For the most dangerous of all forms of concealment [recels] is that of the crime itself in the mind of the guilty party. His constant awareness of it prevents him from imagining how generally unknown it is, how readily a complete lie would be accepted, and on the other hand from realising at what degree of truth other people will begin to detect an admission [aveu] in words he believes innocent.] (2, 741)

This is the unvarying thesis of the narrator: the possession/knowledge makes the confession inevitable, as in ‘The Tell-tale Heart’ or Crime and Punishment. Charlus hides the fact that he saw Morel, but his way of hiding it — saying one thing for another — lets it be heard better than a confession: ‘Entre ces deux faits la seule différence est que l’un est mensonger et l’autre vrai. Mais l’un est aussi innocent, ou, si l’on préfère, aussi coupable’ [‘Between these two facts the only difference is that one is false and the other is true. But [one] [is] equally innocent, or, if you prefer it, equally guilty’] (iii, 718; 2, 210). If the syntax of this passage is not totally clear, at any rate it once again confuses innocence and guilt, as in Maistre. Therefore it is the classification of crime as vice that makes justice impossible, as much from the standpoint of redemption as that of the sentence. Vice cannot be punished; it is cured — or rather, it is incurable. At the end of Time Regained, as he

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becomes engaged in his oeuvre, the narrator observes that he will withdraw from the world and be unavailable to others at a time when, after the labour of their day or in the evening of their lives, they would like to see him again, and he proposes this comparison: les cadrans intérieurs qui sont départis aux hommes ne sont pas tous réglés à la même heure. L’un sonne celle du repos en même temps que l’autre celle du travail, l’un celle du châtiment par le juge quand chez le coupable celle du repentir et du perfectionnement intérieur est sonnée depuis longtemps. (iv, 564) [The internal time-pieces which are allotted to different human beings are by no means synchronised: one strikes the hour of rest while another is striking that of work, one, for the judge, that of punishment when already for the criminal that of repentance and self-perfection has long since struck.] (3, 1035)

At the moment when justice delivers its verdict, the sanction may already have lost its pertinence. Human justice always happens at the wrong time. Once again, justice arises as a comparison. It is never about justice per se in La Recherche, except during the complaint against the narrator for corruption of a minor in Albertine disparue, and even then it concerns the criminal investigations unit, not the judges themselves. But the message is unmistakable, that crime is merely the visible facet of a deeper vice, making human justice vain and absurd, rather than providential and harmonious. Let us then conclude with the original sin, as this is what makes us all guilty, always, and why, for Proust as for Maistre, there is no judicial error. It has been said that it is hardly relevant for Proust; this is false, but Proust has a strange idea of it. In Albertine disparue, describing Albertine as simultaneously his ailment and his remedy, because the misdeeds of the young girl are also inseparable from her good deeds, the goodness by which she brings the narrator back to gentleness after she has pained him, he at once makes these general remarks: D’ailleurs, plus même que leurs fautes pendant que nous les aimons, il y a leurs fautes avant que nous les connaissions, et la première de toutes: leur nature. Ce qui rend douloureuses de telles amours, en effet, c’est qu’il leur préexiste une espèce de péché originel de la femme, un péché qui nous les fait aimer, de sorte que quand nous l’oublions nous avons moins besoin d’elle et que pour recommencer à aimer, il faut recommencer à souffrir. (iii, 657) [Besides, even more than their faults while we are in love with them, there are their faults before we knew them, and first and foremost their nature. For what makes this sort of love painful is the fact that there pre-exists it a sort of original sin of Woman, a sin which makes us love them, and to begin to love again we must begin to suffer again.] (3, 147)

Behind Albertine’s peccadilloes, there is ‘a sort of original sin of Woman’. Original sin is not universal, attributed to all of mankind since Adam and Eve, rather it breaks down into particular original sins, in this case the particular sin of women. The weight of original sin is therefore not absent in Proust, but it appears in an original and heterodox manner. In the course of the longest sentence in La Recherche, in ‘La race des tantes’ [‘the race of men–women’] scene of inversion that opens Sodome et Gomorrhe, the narrator once again points out the following: ‘certains juges

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supposent et excusent plus facilement l’assassinat chez les invertis et la trahison chez les Juifs pour des raisons tirées du péché originel et de la fatalité de la race’ [‘certain judges assume and are more inclined to pardon murder in inverts and treason in Jews from reasons derived from original sin and racial predestination’] (iii, 17; 3, 638). The proposition is troubling. What is original sin doing here? As if, this time, it affected only homosexuals — like, previously, the one that specifically affected women — at least in the minds of judges and without the narrator delivering the least bit of commentary this time. Are the others, who are neither Jews nor homosexuals, nor women, thus spared of original sin? Or redeemed? What would be an original sin unique to Jews, to homosexuals or to women? The only way to make these passages coherent is to say that Sodom and Gomorrah intensify the original sin, accomplish it without respite, that actual sin increases original sin. Original sin of women, original sin of homosexuals; likening crime to vice, or explaining crime by vice: here is after all what explains why in the end Proust does not distinguish between just and unjust, so that not only is Albertine fatally guilty, but the narrator too: ‘[...] rapprochant la mort de ma grand-mère et celle d’Albertine, il me semblait que ma vie était souillée d’un double assassinat que seule la lâcheté du monde pouvait me pardoner’ [‘[...] juxtaposing the deaths of my grandmother and of Albertine, I felt my life was defiled by a double murder from which only the cowardice of the world could absolve me’] (iv, 78; 3, 506) he admits in Albertine disparue. Notes to Chapter 9 1. Justice and Divine Vengeance pursuing Crime [editor’s note]. 2. In France, the juge d’instruction is a magistrate whose role is not to sentence but to oversee the judiciary investigation, using ‘any action useful to the manifestation of the truth’ [editor’s note]. 3. The Bureau of Criminal Investigation [editor’s note]. 4. The law of 6 August 1942, in one fell swoop, set the age at twenty-one years, equal to the age of legal majority. After the Liberation, the ordinance of 2 July 1945 lowered the age of sexual majority to fifteen years for heterosexual acts, but kept the 1942 law for homosexual relations. For these, sexual majority was lowered to eighteen years in 1975 (along with civil majority), and was finally brought down to fifteen years, the same as for heterosexual acts, by the law of 4 August 1982 (the age limit being eighteen years, for both homosexual and heterosexual relations, in the case of a person of inf luence or any person with authority by nature or by function). 5. In a letter to Robert de Flers of 3 November 1910, Proust questions his correspondent about a news item related in the papers: ‘Sais-tu quel est l’auteur dramatique et le consul qui ont été arrêtés pour avoir violé une jeune ouvrière etc.?’ [‘Do you know who are the playwright and the consul who were arrested for the rape of a young female worker, etc.?’] (Correspondance, x, 197 and n. 8). The incident in question concerned Count Peraldi, the consul in Jaffa, and a young girl, Mathilde, age twelve and a half. 6. Laure Murat, ‘Proust, Marcel, 46 ans, rentier,’ La Revue littéraire (May 2005), 82–92. 7. Joseph de Maistre, Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, ed. by Jean-Louis Darcel, 2 vols (Geneva: Slatkine, 1993), i, 108. St. Petersburg Dialogues; Or, Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence, ed. and trans. by Richard A. Le Brun (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1993), p. 21. 8. Ibid., i, 217 (English translation, p. 98).

C h ap t er 10

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Reading Proust Between the Lines Malcolm Bowie, Cambridge University ‘Proust’s most accurate, most convincing insights fasten on their objects as insects fasten on leaves, blossoms, branches, betraying nothing of their existence until a leap, a beating of wings, a vault (‘ein Sprung, ein Flügelschlag, ein Satz’), show the startled observer that some incalculable individual life has imperceptibly crept into an alien world’. Thus wrote Walter Benjamin in 1929 in his celebrated essay on ‘The Image of Proust’.1 Ref lecting on the strangeness of Proust’s style, I fell to wondering whether Benjamin’s beautiful remark might contain a useful general principle for readers of A la recherche du temps perdu, a guideline on how to read the novel. Can it be read in such a way that the leaps and wing-beats of the text, its insect-like micro-movements, are preserved rather than overridden in the act of reading, and of critical reading in particular? Most admirers of Proust agree that the text of the novel is startling at every turn, but its length and copiousness, its polyphonic and polysemantic richness, often encourage us to reach for strong-arm interpretative methods and simplifying solutions: let us remember for a moment all those muscular themes, heavy-duty motifs and ponderous patterns of recurrent imagery that criticism routinely deploys, and those stabilizing external vantage points — ‘Proust and Music’, ‘Proust and Painting’, ‘Proust and Dreyfus’, ‘Proust and Gender’ — the adoption of which brings the whole mighty transformational machine to rest. Benjamin spoke of Proust’s novel as ‘[a] Nile of language’ (Benjamin, 203), and it is disappointing to find it so often reduced in criticism to a thin trickle or a dry river-bed. How seldom do Proustiens and Proustiennes even try to catch the shimmer of the text on the wing, to allow it to be multifarious, iridescent, and f lighty. It is almost as if Proust criticism has a civic-minded ambition to tame and tether the book, to solidify its quicksilver and muff le its din. Critics, feeling themselves, in the intimacy of their own writing, endlessly outpaced and upstaged by the supreme writer on whom they lavish their attention, settle for a serenely f lat tone, and begin to lose contact — even as observers — with his audacity at the level of syntax, lexis, plotting, and metaphor-making. Perhaps worst of all, they gravitate towards the same passages for analysis, seeking to pass into the richness of the text through the same strait gates — the madeleine, Montjouvain, the petite phrase, Albertine’s sleep, Gilberte’s telegram and so forth — as if the whole 3000-page edifice could be forcibly shrunk to a dozen or so familiar cruxes.

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What I shall be speaking up for here is the time-bound signifying process of Proust’s novel, its murmurings and echoings, its long-range insect life. In paying tribute to the ordinary strangeness of Proust at the textual level, I shall invite you to listen to just a few of those internal echoes, basing myself on a trope, a figure, a verb and its cognates, an image, a signifying nexus, one example among hundreds of the Proustian interlace at work. I shall approach my key examples indirectly, and mention as a preliminary two well-known passages (thus already breaking the rule I enunciated a moment ago, which held that the obvious should be avoided). The first involves the ‘petit pan de mur jaune’ [‘little patch of yellow wall’], and the second the reverie on Carpaccio in Albertine disparue. ‘C’est ainsi que j’aurais dû écrire,’ [‘That’s how I ought to have written,’] says Bergotte to himself as he casts a dying look upon Vermeer’s famous detail. ‘Mes derniers livres sont trop secs, il aurait fallu passer plusieurs couches de couleur, rendre ma phrase en elle-même précieuse, comme ce petit pan de mur jaune’ [‘My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall’] (iii, 692; 3, 185). The value of Bergotte’s characteristically elegant and inventive sentences could have been enhanced if he had only known how to layer them, to extend them into the dimension of depth. Why had he not been able to place meaning on meaning in his writing rather as Vermeer had placed paint on paint? In the later Carpaccio episode this simple device — placing one thing on top of another — begins to be woven into the verbal fabric of the novel even as it is asserted as a mundane fact of daily experience. No sooner has the narrator’s mother, fearing that he might be cold in the basilica of San Marco, placed a shawl over his shoulders than Albertine is remembered drawing a cape over her own shoulders, and Fortuny is remembered removing a version of the selfsame cape from Carpaccio’s fashionable early modern Venetian males in order to place it over the shoulders of fashionable modern Parisian females, including of course Albertine (iv, 225–26; 3, 646–47). The thrice-repeated act of placing garment upon body, of layering surface upon surface, introduces a complex figure into the narrative at this point, a semantic knot that sits athwart the f low of narrative time, connecting mothers with lovers, couturiers, painters and light-hearted men-abouttown. Proust has inserted a non-linear refrain, a palimpsest, into his Venetian tale of loss and mourning; instances of layering are themselves stratified in this passage; the aftermath of a love affair is arrested upon a cat’s cradle of erotic associations and verbal echoes stretching back in time. The feature of the novel that interests me here is not, however, so much these short-term echoes as its long-drawn-out patterns of recall, and to begin describing these I shall now name my verb and begin thinking about its peculiar Proustian resonance. The verb is superposer, and its appearances are legion. In many of these cases, English can help us towards a useful initial discrimination: the act concerned is the one known in that language as ‘superimposition’.2 In these instances, a simple spatial manoeuvre is often being specified: in Swann’s park at Tansonville the immemorial features of the countryside are adjacent to the inventions of the landscape designer, and the solitude of nature is ‘superposée à l’œuvre humaine’ [‘superimposed on the work of man’s hands’] (i, 135; 1, 149), while for Legrandin,

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bemoaning the new buildings of Balbec, the latest hotels are ‘superposés au sol antique et charmant qu’ils n’altèrent pas’ [‘superimposing them upon its ancient and charming soil which they are powerless to alter’] (i, 129; 1, 142). Subsequently Legrandin amplifies this tribute to a Nature impervious to the encroachments of the holiday trade: ‘quand bien même des hôtels s’y superposeraient maintenant sans pouvoir y modifier la plus antique ossature de la terre’ [‘and even though hotels are now being superimposed upon it, without power, however, to modify that oldest ossature of the earth’] (i, 377; 1, 417). But in all these cases, whether nature is superimposed on the works of man or those works superimposed on nature, a time-dimension is of course also in action: the transient spume of modernity is precariously attached to the ageless earth’s crust; the time of human invention is imprinted as a f lourish, a passing grace-note, upon the slow time of geology. We are now accustomed to spatial images that have a Proustian temporal pulse running through them, and one could already begin to guess, on the basis of the few examples I have given so far, that superposer and superposition have much timework to do in this novel, in the manner of the science of stratigraphy. Inside the narrator’s monologue, all manner of disparate elements are brought together under this rubric: memories, emotions, desires, motives, intentions, material deposits, social situations, physiognomic expressions, and stylistic habits can all be observed, and interpreted, in superimposition, in a spatio-temporal manifold. Proust’s refrain on superposer brings outer and inner weather, for example, into sometimes violent confrontation. While in Le Côté de Guermantes we read that ‘[...] des soirs migrateurs, dont une sorte de section conique pratiquée dans le ciel laissait voir la superposition rose, bleue et verte, étaient tout préparés à destination de climats plus beaux’ [‘And a stream of migrant evenings, of which a sort of conic section cut into the sky made visible the successive layers, pink, blue and green, were gathered in readiness for departure to warmer climes’] (ii, 684; 2, 404), in La Prisonnière the moral character of Morel is subjected to meteorological analysis of its own: ‘Certes, son premier désir initial, son projet criminel subsistaient, mais recouverts par tant de sentiments superposés que rien ne dit que le violoniste n’eût pas été sincère en disant que ce vicieux désir n’était pas le mobile véritable de son acte’ [‘True, his initial desire, his criminal intention remained, but concealed beneath so many superimposed feelings that there was nothing to prove that the violinist would not have been sincere in saying that this vicious desire was not the true motive of his action’] (iii, 560; 3, 45). Wherever the narrator looks he is a map-maker and a diagrammatist, and any one act of calibrated measurement can find itself chiming with, and complicating, other acts of the same kind. Not only this, but the sprung rhythms of desire, its tensed, f lexed, forward-moving character, are so ingrained in Proust’s writing that no map or diagram, no mere stratification of past human experience, can arrest the futuredriven time-f low of his narrator’s attention and analytic activity. Although these word-echoes are in a sense all equal, in that they all contribute to the grandiose choric murmur of the book, some of them occupy exposed places in the narrative, or nodal points at which the narrator brings various associative currents together, or self-consciously dramatizes the reading process. At the beginning of Le Côté de Guermantes, for example, La Berma becomes an emblematic artist, a worthy

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companion for Bergotte, Elstir and Vinteuil, and she rises to this status by a route that is similar to theirs: her genius lies in a power of inclusion, an ability to subsume into her artistry an entire range of skills and workshop practices that others have perfected and made their own. The ‘vastes nappes de terreur, de tendresse’ (‘great sheets of terror or tenderness’) that her declamatory style conjures into being are spread out upon the already subtle achievements of the dramatic poet: N’est-ce pas déjà un premier élément de complexité ordonnée, de beauté, quand en entendant une rime, c’est-à-dire quelque chose qui est à la fois pareil et autre que la rime précédente, qui est motivé par elle, mais y introduit la variation d’une idée nouvelle, on sent deux systèmes qui se superposent, l’un de pensée, l’autre de métrique? (ii, 351) [Is it not already a first element of ordered complexity, of beauty, when on hearing a rhyme, that is to say something that is at once similar and different from the preceding rhyme, which is prompted by it, but introduces the variety of a new idea, one is conscious of two systems overlapping each other, one intellectual, the other prosodic?] (2, 47–48)

The great actress is the supplier of a third system. Her language of hyper-expressive vocal gesture is superimposed on the ambiguously interrelated sound- and sensesystems that the poet has already deployed, and creates a ‘grand effet’ of plenitude and wholeness. La Berma, like Proust’s narrator, consumes and transmutes the art of others, and in her stacking of system upon system provides the novel with an allegory of its own process. Superposition, or the ability to think in layers and levels, is a necessary condition for artistic success. Writing a novel is a time-bound process, however, laden with retrospection and prophecy, and Proust not only acknowledges this in his narrator’s theoretical excursions but makes the self-remembering and self-anticipation of his text, as I have already suggested, into a mainspring of its drama. Memory is superimposed upon memory, and epoch upon epoch, and the narrator explains his own temporal tricks, educates his reader in the art of organized reminiscence. Albertine, for example, becomes Mnemosyne at the start of La Prisonnière, a goddess of memory and a modelling device for human time: Je la voyais aux différentes années de ma vie occupant par rapport à moi des positions différentes qui me faisaient sentir la beauté des espaces interférés, ce long temps révolu, où j’étais resté sans la voir, et sur la diaphane profondeur desquels la rose personne que j’avais devant moi se modelait avec de mystérieuses ombres et un puissant relief. Il était dû, d’ailleurs, à la superposition non seulement des images successives qu’Albertine avait été pour moi, mais encore des grandes qualités d’intelligence et de cœur, des défauts de caractère [...] qu’Albertine, en une germination, une multiplication d’elle-même, une eff lor­ escence charnue aux sombres couleurs, avait ajoutés à une nature jadis à peu près nulle, maintenant difficile à approfondir. (iii, 577) [I saw her in the different years of my life occupying, in relation to myself, different positions which made me feel the beauty of the intervening spaces, that long lapse of time during which I had remained without seeing her and in the diaphanous depths of which the roseate figure that I saw before me was carved with mysterious shadows and in bold relief. This was due also to the

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superimposition not merely of the successive images which Albertine had been for me, but also to the great qualities of intelligence and heart, and of the defects of character [...] which Albertine, in a germination, a multiplication of herself, a f leshy eff lorescence in sombre colours, had added to a nature that formerly could scarcely have been said to exist, but was now difficult to plumb.] (3, 63)

This is a triumphal moment in Proust’s scientific quest, for Albertine — stratified, intermittent, brought before the mind’s eye in her discontinuous incarnations — has become an immensely powerful algorithm. Suddenly, the f lashing of disparate memories on to a mental screen offers a new view of germination and f lowering in the natural world. Albertine is the principle of superposition given human form, and links the mathematical articulation of physical space with the study of organisms, seen both in their individual growth and in their propagation as species. Such are the epistemic rewards of obsessional jealousy. Later in the novel — in Albertine disparue — the narrator’s account of the mutable human self is brought into line with this description of his own principal partner; what holds for the object of perception holds also for the perceiver: Notre moi est fait de la superposition de nos états successifs. Mais cette superposition n’est pas immuable comme la stratification d’une montagne. Perpétuellement des soulèvements font aff leurer à la surface des couches anciennes. (iv, 125) [Our ego is composed of the superimposition of our successive states. But this superimposition is not unalterable like the stratification of a mountain. Incessant upheavals raise to the surface ancients deposits.] (3, 555)

This is moving, and clinching in the way Proust yet again enlists natural science as an aid in the elaboration of his introspective psychology: the view of human self hood his narrator propounds is a new, dynamic, accelerated geology, in which the stratified epochs of an individual life heave and buckle. But it would not be a good idea to settle for this powerful imagery as an adequate summary of Proust on the time-dwelling self, or as a summation of the layered thinking that the narrator recommends and enacts. To be sure, theoretical pronouncements of this kind can act as a perfectly reasonable mnemonic aid for those who want to remind themselves of the book’s extremely odd narrative structure: this is a well-plotted tale that for the most part follows the path of time’s arrow, but is at the same time full of uncanny repetitions and whispered refrains. The echoing song that Proust’s novel comprises does not sit comfortably with the forward tread of his plot, and superimposition — or the projection of ‘the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination’, as Roman Jakobson used to say — is a convenient way of remembering that particular strangeness in the book. It is the miniaturization of the coincidences and metempsychoses that govern so much of Proust’s large-scale plotting. But there is another way of looking at all this, and another meaning of the term superposition to take into account. The principle of superposition introduced by Vermeer’s (1632–75) great Dutch contemporary the mathematician and polymath Jan Huygens (1629–95) gives us a compelling view of systems co-present in a single physical or mental space. The question that Huygens addressed, and that is an active

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presence in quantum mechanics to this day, has to do first with the non-interaction between waves occupying the same physical location, and then with the conditions in which such superposition, or mutual non-interference, breaks down. Putting the matter simply: there comes a point when the contents of space begin to snarl each other up, when waves, for example, begin to alter each other’s shape and amplitude. Such a scenario takes us beyond the layering that so delighted Bergotte in Vermeer’s application of paint to canvas, and beyond the ordered complexity of the poet’s conjoint play with metre and syntax, and edges us towards crisis and breakdown. Two things happening at once in the same place can cause havoc: Cette Albertine-là n’était guère qu’une silhouette, tout ce qui s’y était superposé était de mon cru, tant dans l’amour les apports qui viennent de nous l’emportent — à ne se placer même qu’au point de vue de la quantité — sur ceux qui nous viennent de l’être aimé. (ii, 214) [That Albertine was scarcely more than a silhouette, all that had been superimposed upon her being of my own invention, to such an extent when we love does the contribution that we ourselves make outweigh — even in terms of quantity alone — those that come to us from the beloved object.] (1, 917–18) tout cela, voix, attitudes, gestes, voiles, n’était [...] que des enveloppes supplé­ mentaires qui au lieu de la cacher ne rendaient que plus splendidement l’âme qui se les était assimilées et s’y était répandue, comme des coulées de substances diverses, devenues translucides, dont la superposition ne fait que réfracter plus richement le rayon central et prisonnier qui les traverse et rendre plus étendue, plus précieuse et plus belle la matière imbibée de f lamme où il est engainée. (ii, 348) [All these, voices, posture, gestures, veils [...] were merely additional envelopes which, instead of concealing, showed up in greater splendour the soul that had assimilated them to itself and had spread itself to them, lava-f lows of different substances, grown translucent, the superimposition of which causes only a richer infraction of the imprisoned, central ray that pierces through them, and makes more extensive, more precious and more beautiful the f lame-drenched matter in which it is enshrined.] (2, 45)

While in some of the cases we have looked at ‘superposition’ involves the placing of like upon like, these extracts from A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs and Le Côté de Guermantes display the more disquieting characteristic of bringing radically dissimilar qualities into alignment: Albertine’s objectively observable features are set against the wishful fantasies that the narrator projects on to her person; heterogeneous emotional currents f low along contiguously, but without converging, as La Berma’s declamation brings dramatic verse to life. All cases of superposition of course involve an act of comparison, performed or implied, but in cases of this kind the measurement of dissimilarity has overtaken that of similarity. Failures of fit, and moments of logical discontinuity or discrepancy, have gained the upper hand over the analogy-maker’s quest for likenesses and counterparts. At this point we should perhaps pause to remind ourselves of Proust’s devotion to category mistakes, and the attention that he pays to the perturbations that aff lict the theorizing mind even as it seeks serenity and repose. Those who puzzle over the paradoxes of quantum space–time are fond of the fable of Schrödinger’s cat, who is

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simultaneously dead and alive — at least from the viewpoint of the observer who has yet to gain entry to the sealed box in which the creature is enclosed. Where gaining entry to the box breaks the spell of indeterminacy — the cat is either dead or alive and cannot in reality be both at once — certain events at the subatomic level perpetuate the paradox: a particle can be two places at once, or can simultaneously be both a particle and a wave. Although one should not overstate the premonitory power of Proust’s writing when it comes to the development of modern physics, there is something uncanny about his emphasis on indeterminacy, decked out as it often is in a richly nuanced scientific diction. Remembering, for example, the episode in which Swann and his coachman comb the nocturnal streets of Paris in search of Odette, who had left the Verdurins’ salon before Swann’s arrival, we discover an elaborate thought-experiment in which two incompatible futures are held in equipoise: Et ainsi il voyait la fin de la soirée devant lui, une et pourtant alternative, précédée soit par la rencontre d’Odette qui abolirait son angoisse, soit par le renoncement forcé à la trouver ce soir, par l’acceptation de rentrer chez lui sans l’avoir vue. (i, 226) [And so he saw the remainder of the evening stretching out in front of him, single and yet alternative, preceded either by the meeting with Odette which would put an end to his agony, or by the abandonment of all hope of finding her that evening, the acceptance of the necessity of returning home without having seen her.] (1, 250–51)

Swann is at once distressed and elated by these superposed states, and soon gleefully re-imagines the impossibility they enshrine; he behaves ‘comme si [...] il pouvait faire qu’Odette, au cas où elle fût déjà rentrée se coucher, se trouvât pourtant dans un restaurant du boulevard’ [‘as though [...] he could bring it to pass, by a miracle, that Odette — assuming that she had long since gone home to bed — might yet be found seated in some restaurant on the boulevards’ (i, 227; 1, 252). Swann’s mind, poised on a pourtant, is performing, that is to say, in exactly the quantum fashion that Schrödinger was to describe and illustrate in his famous paper of 1935: Odette is both at home and in the restaurant; the two Odettes are, in the language of Schrödinger’s paper, ‘mixed or smeared out in equal parts’.3 These superpositions and the paradoxes that attend them — these comparisons for dissimilarity’s sake — are to be found all through Proust’s novel and at many different levels, and in a sense the presence of the word superposer and its cognates is neither here nor there. But there is of course something very entertaining about a word that enacts its own meaning as completely as this one does in the unfolding of Proust’s highly wrought fiction: uses of the word accumulate as the novel proceeds, echo each other, are superposed upon each other. This refrain embodies in miniature one of the great structural principles to which the novel as a whole adheres: layering, whether in time or in space, binds it all together. By this means, the forward-moving speculative intelligence of the narrator — plotting its next move, travelling towards its next complete model or hypothesis — harks back also, reminds itself of earlier scenes, or insights, or models, of the same kind. This backwards-eddying in the narrative is to some extent a feature of Proust’s style

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sentence by sentence, recapitulation being a necessary clarifying mechanism when so much is happening, and so much subordinate material is being packed into the basic propositional syntax. In Proust’s rhetoric, as we know, amplificatio propels long stretches of the work and the resulting textual f lux is in need of landmarks and mooring points. Proust is not at all like his great contemporary Schoenberg, who in Erwartung (1909) wanted non-repetition to be a structural principle in its own right.4 Proust wants a reminiscent murmur to thread its way from page to page, wants his inexhaustible inventiveness, his cult of the new, always to have an equalizing music running through it. What I have been describing so far is, then, at the lexical level, a forward movement that is also a harking back, an interlace, a complex continuum of times and spaces. Yet somehow this does not describe fully the strangeness of the interplay Proust stages between discontinuity and continuity, and between the intelligible and the unintelligible in the life of the passions. In Proust’s ars amatoria, the desire-world of which is always tinged with Freud’s Wisstrieb, or Hobbes’s ‘Lust of the mind’,5 he dwells with astonishing intensity on those moments when the lover is teased out of thought by the behaviour of the beloved. To contemplate the stratified epochs of Albertine’s life, or the divergent sensations to which she gives rise, is to be brought to a new sense of intellectual limitation: Bref Albertine n’était, comme une pierre autour de laquelle il a neigé, que le centre générateur d’une immense construction qui passait par le plan de mon cœur. Robert, pour qui était invisible toute cette stratification de sensations, ne saisissait qu’un résidu qu’elle m’empêchait au contraire d’apercevoir. (iv, 22) [In short, Albertine was merely, like a stone round which snow has gathered, the generating centre of an immense structure which rose above the plane of my heart. Robert, to whom all this stratification of sensations was invisible, grasped only a residue which it prevented me, on the contrary, from perceiving.] (3, 445–46)

The pain of not being able to construe Albertine’s motives and intentions is the scientist’s pain when a recalcitrant zone of the real world causes his measuring devices and his model-building expertise to fail. It is as if snow had descended on a familiar shape, removing its detail and its character. The narrator returns to this non-construable construction half a page later, and to snowfall as the emblem of mental defeat, when he speaks of ‘l’énorme œuf douloureux qui l’engaine [le visage de la femme] et le dissimule autant qu’une couche de neige une fontaine’ [‘the huge egg of pain which encases it [the woman’s face] and conceals it as a mantle of snow conceals a fountain’] (iv, 22; 3, 446). Seeking to cope with its snowy weather, the mind is brought to a standstill, or rather to a great inscrutable egg of pain very much in the Magritte manner, a blockage that allows no consoling refrain to pass through it. Proust is uncompromising in his account of these standstill moments, of their density and their drama. And we can get at certain of the difficulties they present by remembering another moment from the ‘cat paradox’ paper, in which Schrödinger suddenly notes: ‘There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks’.6 The difference lies of course in the gap between the observer and his instruments on the one hand and the objects of his

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observation on the other. Proust’s narrator asks of his own uncertainty: ‘is this a feature of the world outside me, or of my own perceptual apparatus? has unreliable Albertine put the snowy covering over things or have I in my anguish and suspicion blown the snow there?’ The two possibilities, superposed, are given equal weight, produce rival hypotheses, and call upon the same composite analytic language, abstract at one moment and highly imaged the next. Superposition in this scenario is a thoroughly uncomfortable affair, and the more so because the narrator’s language, which is the vehicle of lucidity and control at one moment, spins him away into delusion and theoretical daydreaming the next. The time has come for me to tell you about the kind of reading between the lines that I am recommending as one of the chief delights that A la recherche makes available to us. On the one hand, Proust’s vocabulary, for all its huge range and resourcefulness, has its obsessive patterns of repetition, and these cause otherwise remote and dissimilar passages to rhyme with each other. Superposer and its cognates and synonyms allow improbable bridges to be built between episodes and characters that are quite separate at the level of plot. Between the lines, a bewitching music, a gamelan orchestra of chiming sounds and meanings, is to be heard. On the other hand, the novel dwells on paradoxes, undecidables and incommensurables. Superposition in this guise brings difficulty and unintelligibility to the fore: between the lines, even when they rhyme and chime, even when they seem to proclaim that ‘one equal music’ has been elicited by the act of writing, epistemic panic is never far away. Even as Proust’s scientific diction holds out the promise of a new physics, a new astronomy and an entire spectrum of new biological subdisciplines, his narrator’s fevered model-building and hypothesis-making seem intent on wrecking the very foundations of observational science. Incompatible states, superposed, may be a sign of impending success for quantum mechanics, but for the watchful lover they are often a sign of dawning madness. The miracle of course is that Proust has found an analytic language that works with great precision on two separate fronts — that of shaky, desire-suffused observational performances, and that of unclear states of affairs out there in the world — and that he binds them together into a phenomenology of thinking of incomparable power. I shall end by taking you back to the insect domain that Benjamin so memorably recreated in his pioneering Proust essay. The charm of his description lies in its two triads: the leap, the wing-beat and the jump that betray the presence of a creature, and the leaves, blossoms and branches on which the creature sits. How well the Blättern, Blüten and Ästen [‘leaves, blossoms, branches’] echo each other, and pre-echo the Sprung, the Flügelschlag and the Satz that follow them. Benjamin has taken us into a reverberant Proustian sound-chamber, has paid homage to Proust’s enumerative manner in his noun-strings, but has done so in order to highlight a strangeness, and an incalculability. My point in this paper has been simply that inside Proust’s repetitions, inside his rhymes of sound and meaning, a tension exists, something incalculable stirs, and that, oddly for the author of a very big book, it is perhaps in his handling of little local things that he is most strange.

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Notes to Chapter 10 1. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Image of Proust’, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 201–16 (p. 208). 2. [Note by Alison Finch, Malcolm Bowie’s widow and executor.] This article is the third and last of Malcolm Bowie’s posthumously published original essays, and was the one he had the least time to work on before his death on 28 January 2007. There were a number of handwritten notes or amendments on the typescript of this essay, all of which André Benhaïm and I have followed up and incorporated except here. At this point, Malcolm has written in the margin ‘incorporate Spitzer’s Ger. and the French trans.’; slightly earlier, at the start of this paragraph and in a fresh ink different from that of the other notes, he has written: ‘this is the pt at which to put Spitzer ref.’ It is not clear exactly where he wanted the reference to go nor what it would have been. However, as Proustians will know, Leo Spitzer’s essay on Proust’s style discusses illuminatingly a subject germane to Malcolm’s paper, Proust’s multidimensional and ‘layered’ sentences. (‘Le style de Marcel Proust’, in Etudes de style, trans. by Alain Coulon (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), pp. 397–473; original in Stilstudien (Munich: Max Hueber Verlag, 1961).) In Malcolm’s own annotated copy of Etudes de style, there was an envelope inserted at a point where Spitzer, describing the varying ways in which Proust extends periods, writes of ‘ces types différents [de phrase] (type à explosion, à superposition, en arc)’ (p. 407); here Malcolm has underlined ‘superposition’. Earlier in the essay, he underlined ‘type à plans superposés’ and wrote ‘plans superposés’ in the margin (p. 402). Other relevant underlinings and emphases were of Spitzer’s phrase ‘énumérations disparates’ (p. 426), and of a passage where Spitzer claims that Proust creates a ‘dimension de profondeur spirituelle’ by means of first, and principally, ‘la parenthèse’, and ‘Ensuite par de fréquentes gloses en comme si, qui démasquent, derrière les actions et les événements décrits, les fictions, les illusions insensées’ (p. 452; Spitzer’s italics). Here Malcolm has doubly underlined ‘comme si’, ‘fictions’ and ‘illusions insensées’, and has written in the margin: ‘depth [superposition]’. Finally, where almost at the end of the essay Spitzer talks of the ‘multiplications’ of, say, Albertine and Swann (as in ‘c’est dix Albertine que je vis’), Malcolm has underlined the word ‘multiplications’ and written ‘use in note to “Reading P. between the lines” ’ (p. 465). 3. [Editor’s note.] The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) devised the ‘Schrödinger’s cat’ thought-experiment in 1935, aiming to expose the discomfiting strangeness of the theory of quantum mechanics as it had emerged in the mid-1920s. The principle of superposition showed that sub-atomic particles must be considered to be in two states at once. Most physicists argued that this apparent ‘impossibility’ applied only to the very small scale, but Schrödinger demonstrated that this was an evasion, by imagining an apparatus which made the life of a hypothetical cat depend on the behaviour of a single atomic nucleus. In such a situation, the cat must be thought to be simultaneously dead and alive. See Erwin Schrödinger, ‘Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik [The present situation in quantum mechanics]’, in Naturwissenschaften, 23 (November 1935). 4. [Editor’s note.] Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) composed Erwartung (‘Expectation’), op. 17, in 1909, when Proust was in the preliminary stages of writing La Recherche. This one-act opera is a monodrama for soprano and orchestra with music written in an athematic, atonal style, and a fragmented text, reminiscent of the stream of consciousness. 5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. by Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett Press, 1994), p. 42. 6. Erwin Schrödinger, ‘The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics’, trans. by John D. Trimmer, in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 124, 323–38; repr. in Quantum Theory and Measurement, ed. by J. A. Wheeler and W. H. Zurek (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 152–67 (p. 152).

WORKS CITED v

Works by Marcel Proust A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1987–89). [I: Du côté de chez Swann and the first part of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. II: The second part of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs and Le Côté de Guermantes. III: Sodome et Gomorrhe and La Prisonnière. IV: Albertine disparue and Le Temps retrouvé.] References to this edition are given by the Roman numeral of the volume, followed by the page number. Remembrance of Things Past, trans. by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (except Time Regained, trans. by A. Mayor), 3 vols (New York: Vintage Books, 1982). [1: Swann’s Way, and Within a Budding Grove. 2: The Guermantes Way and Cities of the Plain. 3: The Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained]. References to this edition are given by the Arabic numeral of the volume, followed by the page number. Contre Sainte-Beuve, foreword by Bernard de Fallois (Paris: Gallimard, 1954) By Way of Sainte-Beuve (Contre Sainte-Beuve), trans. by Sylvia Townsend Warner (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958) Correspondance (1880–1922), ed. by Philip Kolb, 21 vols (Paris: Plon, 1973–93) Essais et articles, in Contre Sainte-Beuve, ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1971) Jean Santeuil, in Jean Santeuil preceded by Les Plaisirs et les Jours, ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1971) Jean Santeuil, trans. by Gerard Hopkins, with a preface by André Maurois (New York: Clarion/Simon and Schuster, 1970) Pastiches et Mélanges, in Contre Sainte-Beuve, ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1971) Le Carnet de 1908, ed. by Philip Kolb, Cahiers Marcel Proust, no. 8 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976)

Works on Marcel Proust Anguissola, Alberto Beretta, ‘Léonard de Vinci’, in Dictionnaire Marcel Proust, ed. by Annick Bouillaguet and Brian Rodgers (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005) —— , ‘Benozzo Gozzoli’, in ibid. Bal, Mieke, The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually, trans. by Anna-Louise Milne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997) Barthes, Roland, ‘Une idée de recherche’ [1971], in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Eric Marty, 3 vols (Paris: Seuil, 1995), ii, 1218–21 —— , ‘Roland Barthes contre les idées recues’, in Œuvres complètes, iii, 72–87 —— , ‘Preface to “Parole intermédiaire” by François Flahault’, Œuvres complètes, iii, 850–51 —— , ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure’ [1982], in Œuvres complètes, iii, 827–36 —— , La Chambre claire, in Œuvres complètes [1980], iii

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Milly, Jean, ‘Style’, in Dictionnaire Marcel Proust, ed. by Annick Bouillaguet and Brian Rodgers (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005) Mingelgrün, Albert, Thèmes et structures bibliques dans l’œuvre de Marcel Proust (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1978) Montier, Jean-Pierre, ‘Un photographe lecteur de Proust: Brassaï’, in Proust et les images, ed. by Jean Cléder and Jean-Pierre Montier (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2003) PAGES? —— , ‘La Photographie dans le temps’, in Cléder & Montier (eds), Proust et les images, as above. PAGES? Mortimer, Armine and Katherine Kolb (eds.), Proust in Perspective: Visions and Revisions (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002) Murat, Laure, ‘Proust, Marcel, 46 ans, rentier,’ La Revue littéraire, 14 (May 2005), 82–92 Nicole, Eugène, ‘Les Notations marginales dans les Cahiers de Proust’, in Sur la génétique textuelle, ed. by D. G. Bevan and P. M. Wetherill (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), pp. 125–32 Serça, Isabelle and Anne Simon, ‘Sommeil’, in Dictionnaire Marcel Proust, ed. by Annick Bouillaguet and Brian Rodgers (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005) Simon, Anne, ‘Proust et Ricœur: L’Herméneutique impossible’, Esprit, ‘La Pensée Ricœur’, 323 (March–April 2006), 122–37 —— , ‘Regard et voyeurisme dans Sodome et Gomorrhe’, Textuel, 23 (2001), 181–93 —— , Proust ou le réel retrouvé (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2001) —— , ‘Proust et l’acte psychologique original appelé Lecture’, in Etudes de linguistique appliquée, 119, ( July–Sept 2000), 331–44 Sollers, Philippe, L’Œil de Proust. Les Dessins de Marcel Proust (Paris: Stock, 1999) Souday, Paul, ‘Du côté de chez Swann’, Le Temps, 10 December 1913 Spitzer, Leo, ‘Le Style de Marcel Proust’, trans. by Alain Coulon, in Etudes de style (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), pp. 397–473; original in Stilstudien (Munich: Max Hueber Verlag, 1961) Tadié, Jean-Yves, Marcel Proust (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) —— , Proust (Paris: Belfond, 1983) —— , Proust et le roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1971)

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Le Visible et l’Invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) Montaigne, Michel de, ‘De l’oisiveté’, in Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. by Pierre Villey and V.-L.. Saulnier, 3 vols (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965), vol. i, ch. 8 —— , The Complete Works of Montaigne. Essays. Travel Journal. Letters, newly translated by Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967) Nora, Pierre (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, 3 vols (vols 2 and 3 each in three parts) (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–93) ——  and Lawrence Kritzman (eds), Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, trans. by A. Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) Ricoeur, Paul, La Métaphore vive (Paris : Seuil, 1975) Schneider, William H., An Empire for the Masses: The French Popular Image of Africa, 1870– 1900 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982) Schoenberg, Arnold, Erwartung, op. 17 (1909) Schrödinger, Erwin, ‘The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics’, trans. by John D. Trimmer, in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 124 (1935), 323–38, repr. in Quantum Theory and Measurement, ed. by J. A. Wheeler and W. H. Zurek (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 152–67; first publ. as ‘Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik’, Naturwissenschaften, 23 (November 1935) Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–313 Vidal, Catherine and Dorothée Benoit-Browaeys, Cerveau Sexe et Pouvoir (Paris: Belin, 2005) Woolf, Virginia, The Captain’s Death-Bed and Other Essays (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978)

index ❖

Albertine 15, 18, 21. 28, 33, 36-38, 40-43, 75-78, 83, 85 n. 27, 89, 95-96, 112, 115, 117-19, 121, 123-26, 128-30, 132-33, 134 n. 2 Anguissola, Alberto Beretta 55 n. 9, 83 n. 4 animals 7, 24, 30-32. 59, 61-65, 69 nn. 1, 7 & 8, 76, 83, 117, 121, 130-32 autobiography 1-2, 39, 44 n. 5, 46, 63, 79, 86-87 art 1-2, 7, 16, 30, 34 n. 20, 41, 53-54, 61-62, 68, 71-73, 75, 77, 85 n. 29, 86-87, 92-93, 96-98, 99 n. 5, 103, 105-06, 127-28 Artaud, Antonin 102 Bakhtin, Mikail 30 Bal, Mieke, The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually 101-02, 107 Balbec 15, 21-22 nn. 6 & 7, 42, 62-64, 67, 69 n. 13, 77, 81-82, 127 Barthes, Roland 23, 24, 26, 101, 102, 104, 105, 109 ‘Une idée de recherche’ 30 ‘Roland Barthes contre les idées recues’ 26 ‘Preface to “Parole intermédiaire” by François Flahault’ 34 n. 14 ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure’ 26, 27 La Chambre claire, 27, 101, 105 Baudelaire, Charles 63, 71, 84 nn. 6 & 15, 128 ‘Tableaux parisiens’ 22 n. 10 Bayard, Pierre, Le Hors-Sujet. Proust et la digression 85 n. 27 Benhaïm, André 13, 11 n. 27, 23 n. 1, 69 n. 9 Benjamin, Walter: ‘The Image de Proust’ 43, 95, 96 ‘A Small History of Photography’ 105, 106 Bergson, Henri, Matière et Mémoire 108-09 biography 41, 53, 64, 86 Bizub, Edward, Proust et le moi divisé. ‘La Recherche’: creuset de la psychologie expérimentale (1874-1914) 24, 30 book 1, 3-8, 9 n. 10, 11 n. 29, 25, 27, 36-38, 42, 45, 47-48, 54, 64, 72-73, 86, 90, 102-03, 107-08, 12527, 129, 133 Bowie, Malcolm 3 Proust Among the Stars 8 Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction 54 Brassaï 101, 102, 103, 105 Marcel Proust sous l’emprise de la photographie 101, 103

Cave, Terence, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics 99 n. 2, 100 n. 15 Chevrier, Jean-François, Proust et la photographie 102, 105, 108 Charlus 28, 30, 39-41, 69 n. 13, 113-14, 116, 118, 121-22 church 16, 18, 47-48, 62, 77 cinema 3, 10 n. 16, 101-04, 107-10 Cixous, Hélène, ‘Fiction and its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The ‘Uncanny’)’ 14 colonization 59-60, 62, 64, 66-67 Combray 8, 17, 27, 39, 47, 49-52, 54, 76, 81, 83, 112 for Combray see also 6, 90 comic 4-5, 20, 24 (humor), 29, 53 Compagnon, Antoine 3, 7, 27, 34 n. 10 ‘Un classique moderne’ 10 n. 25 ‘Proust on Racine’ 55 n. 4 Proust entre deux siècles 24, 55 n. 2 ‘A la recherche du temps perdu de Marcel Proust’ 9 n. 5, 10 n. 25 contradiction 3, 6, 47, 104, 112 crime 96, 105-06, 112-13, 115, 118, 120-24, 124 n. 1 criticism 1, 5-614, 68, 100 n. 12, 125 culture 2, 4-5, 20, 26-27, 51, 53, 59-60, 65, 80 Deleuze, Gilles 24, 26, 28-29, 67, 68, 95, 103 Proust and Signs 28-29, 95 Dialogues 67 Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure 68 Descombes, Vincent, Proust. Philosophie du roman 31, 35 n. 32 Dictionnaire Marcel Proust 55 n. 9, 84 n. 4 Didi-Huberman, Georges, Phasme. Essai sur l’apparition 74 Doubrovsky, Serge, La Place de la Madeleine. Ecriture et fantasme chez Proust 39, 40 Ellison, David, 1, 21 nn. 4 & 5, 22 n. 8, 62, 107 error 5, 15, 18, 30, 33, 51, 67-68, 79, 89, 120-23, 123 estrangement 2, 39, 59, 61, 64, 66, 68 ethics 3, 12-13, 59, 64 ethnology 58-59 ethnicity 2, 60-61, 64 exoticism 2, 15-17, 20, 59-62, 64, 67, 69 nn. 7 & 9 face 6-7, 11 n. 27, 46, 50, 61-62, 76-77, 79, 81-82, 95, 107, 112-14, 132

Index Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth 62 father 2, 37-38, 46-47, 49-55, 72, 76, 78-79, 81-83, 93 flaw, see imperfection Foucault, Michel: ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’ 24, 27, 29 Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison 114, 122 France, Anatole 95 Freud, Sigmund 2, 14-16, 39, 52, 54, 55 n. 19, 71, 97, 132 The Uncanny 2, 14-16 Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood 2, 71, 74, 78-85 Gauguin, Paul 63 Genette, Gérard, ‘Métonymie chez Proust’ 95 Goethe 102 Goncourt: Journal 99 Prix Goncourt 5 grandmother 27, 40, 50, 52, 62, 63, 72, 73, 75, 76, 78-83, 98, 107-10, 113, 114, 116, 118, 124 Guermantes 40-41, 43, 49, 75, 85 n. 27 Gunning, Tom, ‘Tracing the Individual Body: Photo­ graphy, Detectives and Early Cinema’ 105 Heidegger, Martin, ‘Brief über den “Humanismus” ’ (‘Letter on Humanism’) 2, 12, 13, 21 Henry, Anne, La Tentation de Marcel Proust 24, 39, 40, 44 history 1, 12-14, 23, 27, 60-61, 63-65, 90, 93, 102, 107, 112-14 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, 132 homosexuality 30, 39, 46, 79, 82, 114, 121, 123, 124 lesbianism 24, 93 Hugo, Victor 43 n. 1, 102 humanity 7, 12, 31, 59-62, 64, 73, 76, 81, 83, 97, 108, 112-14, 116-17, 120, 123, 127-29 identity 2, 4, 18, 29-32, 39-40, 45-47, 51-54, 55 n. 20, 60-62, 64, 81, 83 Imbeault, Jean, Mouvements 97 image 3-5, 8, 23, 32, 42-43, 49, 51-52, 61, 66, 71, 74, 79, 81-82, 88, 101-06, 109-10, 112, 116, 120, 12529, 133 imperfection 1, 6, 67, 82 Jewishness 2, 45-54, 55 n. 16, 67, 95, 124 justice 112-17, 119-23 Kofman, Sarah, The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freud’s Aesthetics 14, 97 Kracauer, Siegfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality 107, 108 Kristeva, Julia, Le Temps sensible. Proust et l’expérience littéraire 24 Larbaud, Valery 63

141

language 1, 6-7, 14-15, 25, 27, 36-37, 44 n. 7, 57, 62, 67-68, 69 n. 17, 70 n. 22, 88, 95, 108, 125-26, 128, 131, 133 Lavagetto, Mario, Chambre 43. Un lapsus de Marcel Proust 36, 39, 40 law 1, 3, 20-21, 34 n. 35, 43, 49, 51, 53, 90, 93, 114, 116, 119, 124 n. 4 literature 4, 14-15, 24-28, 42, 45-47, 50-51, 53-54, 61, 67-68, 70 n. 22, 103 Leonardo Da Vinci 71-83 Maistre, Joseph de, Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg 120-24 memory 3-4, 6, 8 n. 2, 9 n. 4, 18, 20, 26-27, 34 n. 30, 42, 52, 60, 65, 71, 77-78, 82, 86, 91-93, 96-98, 103-05, 107, 126, 128-29, 131-32 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Le Visible et l’Invisible 24, 25, 26, 33 metaphor 26, 32, 66, 69 n. 6, 77-78, 91, 103-04, 107, 125 Michaux, Henri 63, 102 Montaigne, Michel de, ‘De l’oisiveté’ 49 Montier, Jean-Pierre: ‘Un photographe lecteur de Proust: Brassaï’ 102 ‘La Photographie dans le temps’ 108 mother 2, 17, 19, 20, 40, 43, 46-53, 72, 74, 78-83, 87-90, 95, 97, 126; see also grandmother music 1, 3, 5, 10 n. 14, 16-17, 19, 25, 28, 57-58, 66-68, 86, 90-91, 93, 96, 98, 99-100 n. 12, 125, 129, 13233, 134 n. 4 name 2, 6, 15, 19-20, 36-41, 43, 46, 50, 60, 62, 64, 66, 71, 75-76, 82, 88, 91, 94, 96, 115, 117 Nicole, Eugène 2, 44 n. 6 night 6-8, 10 n. 16, 33, 42, 50-51, 53-54, 69 n. 13, 72-74, 80, 115, 120, 131 Nora, Pierre (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire 9 n. 4 Odette 57-58, 61, 65-66, 81, 83, 85 n. 27, 89, 91-93, 96, 131 orality 57, 66 Orientalism 7, 15, 17, 62 painting 32, 71, 73-74, 76-80, 83, 84 n. 18, 85 n. 29, 106, 112, 125-26, 130 paradox 1, 3, 6-7, 13, 33, 61, 68, 93, 130-33 philosophy 1-2, 12, 23-33, 90 photography 101-10 portrait 7, 38, 53, 74, 76, 81-83, 85 n. 27, 107 Proust, Marcel: life 4-11, 13, 37-39, 41, 45-55, 95, 97, 114, 120 A la recherche du temps perdu: 4-12, 45 1. Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way) 6, 8, 10 nn. 12 & 20, 47, 50, 65, 67-68, 70, n. 19, 89, 92, 98 2. A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (Within a Budding Grove) 7, 10 n. 18, 21 nn. 6 & 7, 57, 62, 64, 74, 93-94, 114, 130

142

Index

3. Le Côté de Guermantes 9 n. 8, 23, 31, 127, 130 4. Sodome et Gomorrhe (Cities of the Plain) 39, 98, 123-24 5. La Prisonnière (The Captive) 9 n. 7, 10 n. 11, 36, 41, 43, 89, 93-96, 98, 113, 127-28 6. Albertine Disparue (The Fugitive) 10 n. 11, 15, 89-91, 95-96, 112, 114-15, 117, 119, 123-24, 126, 129 7. Le Temps retrouvé (The Past Recaptured) 9 n. 10, 10 nn. 11 & 16, 23, 27, 29-31, 37-39, 52-55, 69 n. 13, 83, 87, 103, 116 Contre Sainte-Beuve (By Way of Sainte-Beuve) 16, 38, 46, 87-89, 92 Correspondence 4, 6, 7, 25, 41, 45, 46, 48, 63, 68, 84 n. 4, 95, 124 n. 5 Essais et articles 73, 77 Jean Santeuil 16, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 55, 95 Le Carnet de 1908 29 Pastiches et Mélanges 27, 75 race 30, 58-59, 61-63, 65-66, 123-24 Ricoeur, Paul, La Métaphore vive 24-26, 32

Proust ou le réel retrouvé 34 n. 27 ‘Proust et l’acte psychologique original appelé Lecture’ 34 n. 16 sleep 5-7, 16, 24, 31-32, 34 n. 35, 35 n. 38, 36-37, 50, 72, 74, 76, 81-82, 96, 98, 104, 110, 125 Sollers, Philippe, L’Œil de Proust 95, 102, 103, 104 Souday, Paul, ‘Du côté de chez Swann’ 10 n. 20, 70 n. 19 Spitzer, Leo, ‘Le Style de Marcel Proust’ 134 n. 2 subjectivity 1-2, 6, 8 n. 2, 13, 16, 20, 24-25, 28, 31, 52, 54, 60, 83, 86, 97, 102, 107 superposition 3, 7, 126-31, 133, 134 nn. 2 & 3 Swann 2-3, 27, 50-54, 57-59, 61-65, 74-75, 83, 89-93, 96, 99 n 6, 126, 131, 134 n. 2 Tadié, Jean-Yves: Marcel Proust 84 n. 13 Proust 9 n. 3 Proust et le roman 30 theater 2, 10 n. 15, 59, 64-66, 69 n. 5, 87, 103 time 1, 5, 8, 12-13, 23-24, 26, 31, 34 n. 35, 50, 54, 60, 73, 83-84 n. 4, 90, 94-98, 101-04, 126-32 uncanny (umheimlich) 2, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18-21, 80-81

Sartre, Jean-Paul 2, 24, 27, 28 Schoenberg, Arnold 132, 134 n. 4 Schrödinger, Erwin 130, 131, 132, 134 n. 3 Simon, Anne 2, 70 n. 22, 33 n. 7 ‘Proust et Ricoeur: L’Herméneutique impossible’ 34 n. 9 ‘Regard et voyeurisme dans Sodome et Gomorrhe’ 34 n. 21

Venice, 2, 15-22, 69 n. 17, 73 Vinteuil 6, 57-58, 68, 91-94, 128 voyage 15, 18, 21 n. 6, 25, 29, 31, 63, 73, 106-08 Woolf, Virginia 86, 108 Zoo 58-66, 69 nn. 1 & 8