LITMIR.BIZ

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for this region of her soul to be purified over time, for purity is its native condition, but some demon in Proust’s writing wants all states, moral or physical, to become transformational processes.

      Again, two presentations of time are in play at once in sentences of this kind, and one of them, on the face of it, has a superior claim to generality. Certain mental types enjoy an almost magical ability to forget, just as others are haunted by memories or given to fantastical anticipations of the future, and for a moment Mme de Guermantes has become the emblem of the first group, and a caractère almost in the manner of La Bruyère. The narrator’s proposition, if we distil it in this way, is simple, self-limiting and cogent. But the second presentation, which belongs to the long, undistilled scansional sentence we in fact possess, has its own general force. It has of course the roughness and waywardness of temps vécu. It is assembled from a procession of discrete Janus-faced moments, and the recrudescence inside it of past into present cannot be legislated for or predicted. Yet this presentation has as much of a logic to it as the first: the interplay that it creates between the backwards and forwards glances of the time-bound individual, between his slowness and his precipitation, between spinning a yarn and calling a halt – and especially this interplay as controlled by a single dilated propositional structure – begins indeed to resemble a universal key to the understanding of human time, applicable on terms of strict equality to oarsmen, yachtsmen, noblewomen and novelists.

      Proust’s novel contains innumerable complex sentences that are built in this way, and many that call for more intensive scanning activity on the reader’s part than does any one of these three specimens. His time-drama is in his individual sentences and in the underlying structures they reiterate. But these models of timeliness and epistemic success achieved in the teeth of distraction and anxiety do not simply sit as outliers on the margins of Proust’s narrative. They are the carriers of that narrative, and the internal echoes that give certain isolated sentences their combined quality of cohesion and dispersal are to be heard passing between the larger units of the work too. The temporality of propositions is constantly being caught up into larger narrative segments, and retemporalised in the process. Once the reader has penetrated some distance into the book, it begins to acquire its own internal dynamic of past, present and future relationships. The book allows its reader to relive, in the present moment of reading, pasts that it alone has created for him, and to breathe an air of multiple potentiality that is native to this slowly unfolding textual fabric. It is to this larger pattern of recurrences and expectations that I shall now turn, attending principally to a single highly charged nexus of motifs.

      Among secrets and enigmas in the Proust world, those that involve sexuality have a special prestige. They are more resistant to the narrator’s powers of decipherment than other mysteries of social life, and solutions to them, once discovered, are more likely to falter and decay. Such questions as ‘which were his real preference, men or women?’ or ‘what did she really do in her younger years?’ have a lingering atmosphere of infantile curiosity about them in this novel, yet prompt the narrator to a series of ingenious experimental studies in cognition: Proust echoes Freud’s account of the child’s wish to know about sex as the prototypical form of all later intellectual endeavour. What is surprising, however, about Proust’s handling of sexual secrets is not simply that so much of his plot turns on their solution but that the panic they inspire should be entertained on such a lavish scale. The uncertainties which surround Uncle Toby’s wound in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) or the hero’s parentage in Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) are positively short-winded in comparison with those surrounding the sexuality and sexual prehistory of Odette, Albertine and Saint-Loup. In simple time-and-motion terms, the quantities of intelligent attention that these investigations require of the narrator are calamitous – when they are not merely farcical. A crucial temporal framework in this book is the one in which sexually driven individuals strive to find things out about each other. And in this pursuit, their expenditure of time is reckless.

      I have chosen from among the numerous scenes of sexual enquiry that are to be found in the early volumes of the novel an elaborate intellectual comedy which prefigures much that is to be fully explored later. This is the episode in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs where the narrator discovers a watercolour portrait of ‘Miss Sacripant’ in Elstir’s studio and is thwarted in his desire to be introduced to the ‘little band’ of young girls (II, 203–20; II, 493–514). At least four currents of feeling are running in parallel here; the narrator wants: to meet the girls, and expects Elstir to help him do so; to find out more about Elstir’s art, and about the subject of the portrait; to respect the rhythm of Elstir’s working day rather than press his own claims upon the painter’s time; and, above all, to seem casual and disengaged in the eyes of the girls themselves. The attempt to achieve some sort of equilibrium between these incompatible wishes involves him in a distended cost-benefit analysis, and a delirium of excuses and explanations. Four stories are being told simultaneously in this episode, which is a tour de force of polyphonic invention, and any one of them may suddenly gather bulk at the expense of the others. Slowness in one narrative may permit a new access of speed in another; opening up a gap in one causal sequence may permit a gap in another to be closed. For example, between the last rekindling of the narrator’s hope that an introduction can be arranged and the definitive extinction of that hope, for today at least, Elstir proceeds with tiresome deliberation to complete his own work: he alone has the power to usher the narrator into the force-field of the eternal feminine, but devotes himself instead to the lesser magic that is his painting. The narrator not only describes this delay, but performs a complementary delaying manoeuvre of his own: a long excursus on self-love and altruism, and on the little heroisms of ordinary life, intervenes between Elstir’s last brush-stroke and the beginning of their walk together (II, 208–9; II, 499–501). Material that is in itself dignified and serious-minded intrudes hilariously upon the narrator’s sentimental adventure; within the unfolding drama, an elaborate moral discussion has the status of a simple accidental misfortune.

      By now Proust’s narrative architecture has become dangerously elastic. Time may be measured as a connected series of physical events, sense-perceptions, and mental promptings – ‘Le soir tombait; il fallut revenir; je ramenais Elstir vers sa villa …’ (II, 210; ‘Dusk was falling; it was time to be turning homewards. I was accompanying Elstir back to his villa’ (II, 502)) – or by the key ideas which fuel speculation, rumination or reasoning, or by the inflections of prose discourse itself. In a passage of this kind, Proust moves with gaiety and assured improvisatory skill from one system of measurement to another. Thinking, sensing, acting, writing are given a common pulse, and made into the co-equal modes of a single, encompassing transformational experiment. A sentence which begins with the words ‘Le soir tombait’ can end well, and with no note of impropriety, upon a supposition enclosed in a hypothesis: ‘[les jeunes filles qui] avaient l’air de ne pas me voir, mais sans aucun doute n’en étaient pas moins en train de porter sur moi un jugement ironique’ (II, 210; ‘[the girls] who looked as though they had not seen me but were unquestionably engaged in passing a sarcastic judgement on me’ (II, 502)). The discrepancy between public time, measurable by events, and mental time, measurable by the development of an individual’s ideas or by his changing intensities of feeling, is laid bare by Proust. Dramatic opportunities abound in the disputed territory between outside and inside, and Proust’s fluid transpositions between outer and inner time-scales are thoroughly ironic in character. These are the events, the narrator says; this, he adds, is how they look if you change your viewpoint on the scene; and this again is how they look if you remove yourself from the scene altogether and concentrate on the larger tendency of my tale. Yet despite all the attention paid by the narrator to those local repositionings of himself and his addressee, Proust’s reader is still encouraged to read ‘for the plot’, to find things out, and still invited to be seduced by secrets in the footsteps of the hero. And the scale on which this kind of reading occurs is, as I have said, very large indeed. Elstir’s painting travels back and forth both in event-time and in mind-time; it is a tight cluster of time-effects, and a time-measuring device for use in the book as a whole.

      The image of ‘Miss Sacripant’ – who, it emerges after a long delay, is the youthful Odette dressed as a boy – is subjected to a barrage of reinterpretations, and gradually becomes a hypnotic sexual icon. The initial description

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