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

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The reader who does not hesitate is lost: ‘j’ai vu’, ‘j’ai désiré’ look as if they are co-ordinated and indeed are; ‘filait’ and ‘portait’ look as if they are co-ordinated and are not. Reading forwards involves backtracking, and checking, and measuring one possible syntactic pathway against others; the mutual attraction of ‘filait’ and ‘portait’ has first to be felt and then repudiated. The past of such sentences is constantly being revisited and remade. This is an extremely simple case of Proustian time in one of its typical textual incarnations: the reader reaches an anticipated goal, but only after a series of delays and only by an unexpected route. What is happening is that flux and dérive are threatening, but not in the end seriously damaging, propositional structure. Indeed, such structure, eventually repossessed and reproclaimed, emerges not just as well-made and obedient to grammatical rule but as the bearer of sensuous satisfaction: completing the syntactic pattern is strictly synchronised with the achievement of ecstasy. Diversion, detour, drift and discontinuity, all the untidy syncopations of lived time, are to be resolved into a sublime timeliness. The force of such writing is not at all in a theory of time, clearly not, but in its power of performance, and its readiness to pass the raw materials of fantasy through a strenuous process of syntactic dismantling and reassembly. By way of such artifice, the narrative rejoins the ordinary panic and disarray that are proper to desire-time.

      Musicalised sentences of this kind, in which internal relations multiply, are in some ways especially suited to the rapt, supercharged nature description at which Proust was so adept. The mobile surfaces of the natural world, and the play of light upon them, and the slow, ineluctable processes of organic growth or decay, are themselves a stylistic lesson and may call forth from the writer an imitative tribute. What could be more natural than a prose which teemed with inner voices and fluent transformations? Yet Proust is a caustic social observer as well as a devoted dweller among fields and streams, and his syntax does not desert him when his attention turns to the human bestiary of the salon or the seaside hotel.

      In this sentence from Sodome et Gomorrhe, the narrator begins to explain why he had felt obliged to refuse a tempting invitation from Mme de Cambremer. The invitation had arrived at a time when grief at his grandmother’s death had suddenly been revived:

       Et certes il y a seulement deux jours, si fatigué de vie mondaine que je fusse, c’eût été un vrai plaisir pour moi que de la goûter transplantée dans ces jardins où poussaient en pleine terre, grâce à l’exposition de Féterne, les figuiers, les palmiers, les plants de rosiers, jusque dans la mer souvent d’un calme et d’un bleu méditerranéens et sur laquelle le petit yacht des propriétaires allait, avant le commencement de la fête, chercher dans les plages de l’autre côté de la baie, les invités les plus importants, servait, avec ses vélums tendus contre le soleil, quand tout le monde était arrivé, de salle à manger pour goûter, et repartait le soir reconduire ceux qu’il avait amenés.

      (III, 164)

       And indeed only two days earlier, tired as I was of social life, it would have been a real pleasure to me to taste it, transplanted amid those gardens in which, thanks to the exposure of Féterne, fig trees, palms, rose bushes grew out in the open and stretched down to a sea often as blue and calm as the Mediterranean, upon which the hosts’ little yacht would sail across, before the party began, to fetch the most important guests from the places on the other side of the bay, would serve, with its awnings spread to shut out the sun, as an open-air refreshment room after the party had assembled, and would set sail again in the evening to take back those whom it had brought.

      (IV, 193)

      Again, certain of the time-relations here are straightforward: this is the future I would have enjoyed, in prospect and in actuality, if I had received the invitation earlier and if the pain of my bereavement had not returned. Futures, even unrealised ones, have their history. But the copious elaborations of the sentence sketch a much more impulsive and diversified passage of time too. Time is measured by criss-crossing spatial journeys, held together in a single propositional structure. Two kinds of transplantation occur at Féterne, the Cambremers’ château: exotic plants have been taken there and flourish thanks to its favourable position, and exotic social creatures, seasonally removed from the capital to this seaside neighbourhood, are gathered up into a shimmering matinée. Transport is provided for guests of appropriate rank or status, and the morning and evening journeys of the Cambremer yacht trace a thoroughly socialised map of local space and time. This is the double portrait of a society and one of its members, and the syntax of the sentence fuses into a single drama the advance and recoil of the narrator’s sympathy for his would-be hosts. A single proposition scans, enumerates, explores lateral relationships, arranges improbable encounters, allows fantasy to take wing, yet reaches finally a point of narrative and syntactic closure: the party is over, the yacht bears the privileged guests away, and a grand amplificatory linguistic mechanism is brought to rest.

      In so far as Proust reconstructs the temporality of daily living, then, we may already safely say that syntax has a main role in providing his account with a sense of phenomenological fullness. The particular ingenuity of his syntax in this respect is that it brings together into one complex pattern a continuous forward-flung intention and a simultaneous host of retrospective or sideways vistas. It seeks stability and finality, celebrates these qualities with its emphatic final cadences, yet leaves the door open too: riddles remain to be solved, curiosity to be satisfied, and a larger narrative syntax to be pursued. A balance must be kept between completion and a necessary provisionality. The reader must be fed, yet kept hungry.

      Even during the narrator’s lengthy philosophical or psychological discussions of time, even as he deploys his rich vocabulary of chronological terms, his syntax is often quietly performing a quite different and seemingly unauthorised set of tasks. The last of my three single-sentence examples is thoroughly ‘time-theoretical’ in that it discusses a curious human present largely washed clean of its own past. It is taken from Le Côté de Guermantes and concerns Mme de Guermantes’s slightly improbable incapacity to bear grudges and nurse grievances:

       Non seulement elle ne s’attardait pas à des explications rétrospectives, à des demi-mots, à des sourires ambigus, à des sous-entendus, non seulement elle avait dans son affabilité actuelle, sans retours en arrière, sans réticences, quelque chose d’aussi fièrement rectiligne que sa majestueuse stature, mais les griefs qu’elle avait pu ressentir contre quelqu’un dans le passé étaient si entièrement réduits en cendres, ces cendres étaient elles-mêmes rejetées si loin de sa mémoire ou tout au moins de sa manière d’être, qu’à regarder son visage chaque fois qu’elle avait à traiter par la plus belle des simplifications ce qui chez tant d’autres eût été prétexte à des restes de froideur, à des récriminations, on avait l’impression d’une sorte de purification.

      (II, 676)

       Not only did she waste no time in retrospective inquiries, in hints, allusions or ambiguous smiles, not only was there in her present affability, without any harking back to the past, without the slightest reticence, something as proudly rectilinear as her majestic stature, but any resentment which she might have felt against someone in the past was so entirely reduced to ashes, and those ashes were themselves cast so utterly from her memory, or at least from her manner, that on studying her face whenever she had occasion to treat with the most exquisite simplicity what in so many other people would have been a pretext for reviving stale antipathies and recriminations, one had the impression of a sort of purification.

      (III, 440)

      The comedy of this sentence, and the subcutaneous malice which permeates its apparent act of homage, stem from the disproportion between the supposed candour of the duchesse and the hard labour that her virtue seems to entail. Far from being a natural grace of personality, or a fortunate psychological tic, her freedom from grudges is achieved by a triple process of incineration, grinding and scattering, and may even then be an effect of social self-presentation rather than an emotional reality. The narrator puts his syntax to work in the same showily laborious vein: here are all the afterthoughts and retrospective mental retouchings that the duchesse knows nothing of, all deliciously listed at the beginning of the sentence, and wrapped up in an incriminating double negative; and at the end of the sentence, with full cadential

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