LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

great theme, the rescue of the transient, is fulfilled through its own transience, time.

      What I shall be proposing is that the ‘rank vegetal proliferation’ of Proust’s text is the most puzzling and rewarding site for his experiments with time, and that the transient materials which Proust accumulates and adroitly manipulates sentence by sentence as his long tale unfolds are pregnant with meaning of a particularly uncomfortable sort. Such details not only make the overview difficult to achieve but tell a story about time that is alarmingly at odds with the official story told by Proust’s narrator in his didactic moods.

      We must be thankful that it is not necessary to possess time concepts of particular subtlety in order to have time experiences that are complex and moving. Miracles of temporal construction-work can occur in a bar or a bus queue; and one does not need to activate the notions of retrospection and anticipation, and still less their rhetorical counterparts analepsis and prolepsis, to become aware that the living present of an individual’s experience is put together, concocted, from residues of the past and conjectural glimpses of the future. But even ‘past’ and ‘future’ sound too conceptual, too thought-about, for the rough-and-tumble of lived time, which can be made from whatever materials are to hand. This is a case in which the sensuous immediacy of art can remind us of something even more immediate-seeming that takes place in ordinary experience. Three brief examples will provide a route back to this feature of daily life, and to Proust as one of its unacclaimed guardians.

      In the first movement of the Eroica symphony, Beethoven has one of the horns begin the recapitulation prematurely. Some unfathomable eagerness in the ranks of the orchestra, or so it sounds, has produced a solecism, and the listener is obliged to hesitate for a moment between two temporalities, one of them correct, proper and opportune and the other hasty and disjointed. In the closing sequence of The Spider’s Stratagem (1970), Bertolucci’s film adaptation of the Borges story ‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’, a man waits at a deserted railway station: a voice repeatedly announces over the loudspeaker that his train will be delayed, and grass sprouts between the tracks. In Washington, DC, on 13 February 1962, at the height of the North American craze for Brazilian music, Stan Getz plays ‘Desafinado’: towards the end of his solo he delays the return of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s out-of-tune tune by producing ghostly, near-miss alternatives to it. He flirts with his hearers: you can have your tune, but not yet.

      What all three cases have in common is that time-effects of considerable complexity are made palpable in the expressive medium of the art form involved. There will be stories in the background, of course, and cunning calculations, and appropriate technical concepts, but the artistry of the artist in each instance lies in his ability to stand clear of all this and treat time as directly manipulable stuff: in the shocking proximity of grass and metal, in the sound of the horn arriving early or of the tenor saxophone arriving late, we rediscover the time of our desires and fears. Artists may choose at moments to confer special privileges on belated or precocious intensities of feeling, but the flexed, syncopated temporal medium that they thereby reveal belongs not to art in particular but to time-dwelling human creatures at large: we live like this, now too early and now too late.

      If I insist upon the ordinariness that underlies these exquisite artistic contrivances, it is because I am conscious of an unusual burden that Proust places upon his reader. He expects his reader to proceed slowly, patiently, and with wide-ranging attention. In his characteristic long sentence, with its welter of subordinate material, he obliges us to pursue a number of associative chains at once and expects us all uncomplainingly to accumulate, and then at intervals deploy, large quantities of information. Self-contained propositional events take place against a relatively undifferentiated semantic mass. These qualities of the Proust text seem so clearly to side with contrivance, and against simplicity, that readers may feel themselves summoned to worship in a temple of high art, and somehow required to leave their awkward everyday selves at the door. The presence in the book of a psychology and a metaphysics of time may enhance this impression and suggest that time is an issue in Proust only when his text announces it as such. But ‘time-effects’, as I have been calling them, are present when the key theoretical ideas are veiled, or absent altogether. And such effects, which belong to the individual sentences of the work long before they are incorporated into any larger narrative scheme, are worth itemising. By doing so, we can begin to see how the ‘bottom-up’ approach recommended by Adorno might pay special dividends: from the temporality of the individual sentence, through that of the paragraph sequence or the self-contained narrative episode, we may ascend gradually to the temporality of the whole novel as prescribed in its doctrinal passages or enacted in its time-intoxicated plot, and yet not imagine as we rise that this arrangement of levels is a simple hierarchical one. Proust is too venturesome and too perverse to allow us merely to read upwards towards a promised apex.

      The following is a sentence from Du côté de chez Swann in which the grand temporal design of the book’s plot is kept at a safe distance, and in which explicit time-theoretical references are of the thinnest. The narrator describes the Vivonne at the moment when its stream begins to accelerate on emerging from the grounds of a local property:

       Que de fois j’ai vu, j’ai désiré imiter quand je serais libre de vivre à ma guise, un rameur, qui, ayant lâché l’aviron, s’était couché à plat sur le dos, la tête en bas, au fond de sa barque, et la laissant flotter à la dérive, ne pouvant voir que le ciel qui filait lentement au-dessus de lui, portait sur son visage l’avant-goût du bonheur et de la paix.

      (I, 168)

       How often have I watched, and longed to imitate when I should be free to live as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lay flat on his back in the bottom of his boat, letting it drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky gliding slowly by above him, his face aglow with a foretaste of happiness and peace!

      (I, 204)

      The overall design of the plot may be absent from this sentence, but the underlying emotional teleology of the book is not. The narrator describes his earlier childhood self as driven by an imagined future beatitude. Once the shackles of parental supervision have been untied, he will enjoy the free exercise of his desires and bask negligently in each new-found bliss. Literary ambition already has a part to play in this quest. Just as Dante hastened to rejoin Virgil when he strode on ahead of him in the Inferno (XXIII, 145–8), so I, the narrator has just announced, would run to catch up with my parents on the towpath. And Virgil’s destiny later in the Commedia, we may remember, was to be left behind … Such references are common in these early stages of the novel, and one happy vision of the future certainly involves a free and self-replenishing literary creativity, to be exercised perhaps on a Dantesque scale. But what is striking about this sentence is not so much its pre-echo of a later outcome as its choice in the here-and-now of a hard path towards ‘happiness and peace’.

      At least three time-scales are present. The oarsman sinks back languorously after hard work with arms and legs; the narrator enjoys himself when he is finally able to break free from a constraining family; and Proust’s sentence arrives at its final visionary affirmation after much syntactic travail. No problem arises from the fact that two futures – ‘his’ and ‘mine’ – are being narrated simultaneously, nor from their being consigned to an epoch that is already long past at the moment of narration: we regularly consult other people’s hopes in order to understand our own, and will readily own that our past was as future-driven as our present now is. The problem – and the pleasurableness – of sentences on this model lies in their insistent intermixing of past, present and future. Their syntax and tense-pattern deal in prematurity and belatedness to the near-exclusion of linear succession. ‘Que de fois j’ai vu … un rameur, qui … portait sur son visage l’avant-gout du bonheur et de la paix’: such is the straightforward subject-predicate chronology of the sentence if one extracts it from the text, but, left inside the text, this chronology is subject to turbulence and fracture. The narrator blurts out the general import of his fantasy (‘quand je serais libre de vivre a ma guise’) before the object of his fantasy has been named, and then, having pre-empted his lolling oarsman, holds him back from his moment of abandonment and repose with a series of short staccato phrases.

      The temporality of Proust’s sentence

Скачать книгу