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

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been the national anthem, with the Crown Prince and the princesses in the imperial box, the Wacht am Rhein; one had to ask oneself whether they were indeed pilots and not Valkyries who were sailing upwards.’ He seemed to be delighted with this comparison of the pilots to Valkyries, and went on to explain it on purely musical grounds: ‘That’s it, the music of the sirens was a “Ride of the Valkyries”! There’s no doubt about it, the Germans have to arrive before you can hear Wagner in Paris.’ In some ways the simile was not misleading.

      (VI, 83–4)

      In some ways the simile was not misleading, but in others it was. Proust has here transferred from the narrator to Saint-Loup the task of recapitulating, in a burlesque manner, many of the narrator’s own metaphorical habits and, in particular, his stargazing, his inventive play with the quadrivium, and his hesitation between explosion and fixity. A sudden new relationship between music and astronomy is glimpsed – one in which measurement and pattern-making are caught up in the machinery of modern warfare. Saint-Loup is continuing to aestheticise violence as he had during the Doncières episode, but he is also prolonging, and recasting in millennial terms, a mode of perception that Proust’s narrator has displayed throughout the novel. Aerial combat produces new constellations, new displays of matter and kinetic energy, and these are in direct line of descent from the countless ‘astral phenomena’ that the narrator had previously recorded. Astral aircraft rise above the mere carnage of war, rather as Halévy’s exquisite salon melody in ‘Rachel quand du Seigneur’ rises above the impending brutality that Scribe’s text describes.

      In transferring these images to Saint-Loup, Proust is of course preparing the way for the ‘real’ apocalypse of the book and for the unimpeachable depth and seriousness of artistic perception and moral concern that the narrator, alone among its central characters, is eventually to acquire. Saint-Loup in becoming the supremely witty artist of scattered selfhood, the inventor of momentary geometries and ever-changing optical effects, leaves the way open for the narrator, that nebulous modeller of nebulae, to become a single self at last. But the clarity and complexity that the book’s earlier images of dispersal possess cannot simply be removed from the record by the last fortified version of selfhood upon which the narrator reports. On the contrary, those earlier explosions and starbursts have such imaginative authority that they may prove to be the feature of the book that we remember best and cherish most. If so, the centralised and resolved self on which the novel ends may be seen not as a redemption but as one momentary geometry among many others.

       Time

       Wolą falszywą nutę od muzyki sfer.

      WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

       Out of tune suits them better than the music of the spheres.

      From first word to last, Proust’s novel is about time. Everyone says so, including Proust himself. Within the dense texture of the narrator’s soliloquy, the theme rings out clamorously. Inside his accustomed voice, there is a time voice – urgent, serious, elevated, expansive, and given to sudden bursts of semi-philosophical speculation – whose sound is fashioned, as telephone voices are, by a sense of occasion and a need to impress. The passage of human time is a deadly business, the narrator often reminds his reader, and if the tide of meaning is ever to turn again from ebb to flow the individual must hold himself in readiness to seize time’s wonders. Time is no laughing matter. It is the fundamental enigma of living substance, and the artist who solves it has indeed found the philosopher’s stone.

      The empirical evidence for this view of the novel is irresistible. Where do its principal landmarks come from if not from its temporal obsession? Le Temps retrouvé culminates in long passages of impassioned reverie that are doubly devoted to the time dimension: they are essays on time, almost free-standing disquisitions on its alternative registers and intensities, but they are also episodes in the long history of a fictional character’s consciousness and closely woven into its characteristic rhythms. What is more, Proust’s plot, while having many strands and many denouements, turns upon a central temporal conundrum to which, in the end, after countless diversions and delays, a convincing answer is found. On the first page of the novel, Proust takes aim at a very remote target, and with devastating accuracy he eventually strikes it. In due course, time will be redeemed. A lost past will be recovered, and the dying creature’s messianic hopes will be fulfilled.

      Time, being highlighted in such ways both by Proust the would-be essayist and by Proust the consummate plotter, has seemed to many admirers of the book to be so clearly its main concern that other candidates for this office have scarcely been worth considering. Time matters to the book precisely because it is a ‘big’ controlling theme, calls forth an impressive philosophical diction and offers a satisfying overview of Proust’s narrative architecture. His last word (‘Temps’) distils an immutable quintessence from the imperfect world of temporal process to which his first word (‘Longtemps’) had referred.

      Yet there is something not quite right about this view. It answers too many questions, and levitates too obligingly above the restless detail of Proust’s writing. A la recherche du temps perdu is one of those literary works that spell out at length the terms in which they are to be interpreted and understood. It can be intimidating and coercive when it does this: its author seems to have such clear-cut ideas about his own motives and long-range goals that only a fool or a wilful eccentric would seek other paths to understanding. The problem, however, is that time as presented by the narrator in his abstractly philosophising vein is too big for the ordinary time-bound business of reading Proust. The more instructive time becomes as an overall structuring idea, the more likely it is to disappear from the fabric of individual sentences and paragraphs. Yet it is here, down among Proust’s intricate propositional structures with their outrageous embeddings, suspensions and redundancies, that his boldest pieces of temporal architecture are to be found. Already in the second sentence of the book, his grammatical building materials are beginning to acquire a promising elasticity: ‘Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n’avais pas le temps de me dire: «Je m’endors.»’ (I, 3; ‘Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself: “I’m falling asleep’” (I, 1)). Two time-scales are in force at once here, and these set ‘real’ against ‘virtual’ time, things that happened against things that might have happened but did not. A proposition belonging to one time-world nests inside a proposition belonging to another, and between them a galvanic spasm passes.

      Theodor Adorno, in his ‘Short Commentaries on Proust’ (1958), wrote with great force about the relationship between the big-time temporality of Proust’s novel and spasmodic local time-events such as these. Surely, he began his essay by suggesting, a reader of any work as ‘rich and intricate’ as Proust’s novel must needs retreat from its detail at times and seek to gain an overview. And should not criticism help him in this endeavour? For Adorno, however, this view of criticism was based on a misperception of Proust’s work:

       In Proust, however, the relationship of the whole to the detail is not that of an overall architectonic plan to the specifics that fill it in: it is against precisely that, against the brutal untruth of a subsuming form forced on from above, that Proust revolted. Just as the temperament of his work challenges customary notions about the general and the particular and gives aesthetic force to the dictum from Hegel’s Logic that the particular is the general and vice versa, with each mediated through the other, so the whole, resistant to abstract outlines, crystallizes out of intertwined individual presentations. Each of them conceals within itself constellations of what ultimately emerges as the idea of the novel. Great musicians of Proust’s era, like Alban Berg, knew that living totality is achieved only through rank vegetal proliferation. The productive force that aims at unity is identical to the passive capacity to lose oneself in details without restraint or reservation. In the inner formal composition of Proust’s work, however – and it was not only on account of its long, obscure sentences that Proust’s work struck the Frenchmen of his time as so German – there dwells, Proust’s primarily optical gifts notwithstanding and with no

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