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

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image caught at a third remove from the ‘real’ Odette, but still more impalpably as a figment of other people’s gossip. Charlus, in the course of his long harangue on the history and sociology of homosexuality, begins to speak about Swann’s sexual character, and, prompted by Brichot, about Swann’s wife:

       Mais voyons, c’est par moi qu’il l’a connue. Je l’avais trouvée charmante dans son demi-travesti, un soir qu’elle jouait Miss Sacripant; j’étais avec des camarades de club, nous avions tous ramené une femme, et bien que je n’eusse envie que de dormir, les mauvaises langues avaient prétendu, car c’est affreux ce que le monde est méchant, que j’avais couché avec Odette. Seulement, elle en avait profité pour venir m’embêter, et j’avais cru m’en débarrasser en la présentant à Swann. De ce jour-là elle ne cessa plus de me cramponner, elle ne savait pas un mot d’orthographe, c’est moi qui faisais les lettres.

      (III, 803)

       Why, it was through me that he came to know her. I had thought her charming in her boyish get-up one evening when she played Miss Sacripant; I was with some club-mates, and each of us took a woman home with him, and although all I wanted was to go to sleep, slanderous tongues alleged – it’s terrible how malicious people are – that I went to bed with Odette. In any case she took advantage of the slanders to come and bother me, and I thought I might get rid of her by introducing her to Swann. From that moment on she never let me go. She couldn’t spell the simplest word, it was I who wrote all her letters for her.

      (V, 339–40)

      Odette is a woman about whom tongues wag. She flits from anecdote to anecdote, and the chronicle of her lovers, which Charlus proceeds to rehearse, enhances this sense of multiformity. She is a creature called into being by other people’s desires, fantasies and projections. The renaming of Miss Sacripant at this point in the novel makes her into a passing effect of speech inside an indefinitely loquacious community.

      The temporality of these later references and allusions is in one sense very simple. They are chronological markers within the overall teleology of the book. A la recherche du temps perdu is not only ‘about’ time but about the linear process of uncovering new time-truths: the plot leads slowly towards a grandly orchestrated redemptive view, and time envisaged in these terms is emphatically distinguished from the dimension in which hours and days are merely spent, lost or frittered away. The declared direction of the book, until the threshold of its final revelations is reached, is downhill into darkness. It is entirely fitting that the image of Odette should be fuzzied and frittered as the narrative proceeds, and that its repeated appearances should mark out the graduated stages of a much more general decline, for such is the worldly lesson that Proust seeks to impose: things fall apart and the clockwork runs down. The narrator’s journey takes him to an extreme limit, at which decay is visible on every human face and nullity speaks from behind every eye, and it is only when this limit has been reached and its intolerable pain felt that an apocalyptic arrest of time becomes possible.

      Yet the book would be a very thin affair if its long, ruminative unfolding were readable only in this way. Proust does of course handle linear time supremely well: the stations on the narrator’s journey provide the book with huge, unmistakable calibrations; questions that need answers in due course find them; causes precede effects; and although the flow of time may almost congeal during a protracted soirée, or be accelerated mercilessly by a sudden recital of marriages and deaths, it is for the most part reliably unidirectional. Events that occur latterly occur only because former events have prepared the way for them. Within subsequence consequence is to be found. The final apocalypse itself is fully motivated by what has gone before, and the buildup to it is presented as a sub-divisible process, a phased dawning of new awareness. Yet the broad intentional structure of the book catches up within itself a dancing array of materials that are not subduable to any overall project. Proust offers his reader a simultaneous web of associations, as well as the undeflected flight of time’s arrow. Across the canvas of the book points of special intensity are scattered, and we are invited by the narrator, who is a virtuoso in such matters, to scan back and forth between them, making improbable connections as we go. Proust’s text rebels against the smooth linear temporality to which his narrator for the most part adheres in the telling of his tale, and incorporates into itself not just the vibrant internal reflections that typify Elstir’s art but its raggedness and its rough patches.

      The webs, the tangles and the improvised cross-stitchings that Proust’s writing contains speak not of timeliness or timelessness but of an alternative and glaringly familiar temporality. And, although it would no doubt require topological schemata of great subtlety to model this temporality satisfactorily, its main features can be enumerated with ease. It ordains that past, present and future are composites rather than simples; that recapitulations of the past are projections into the future too; that synchronicity comprises, and may be broken down into, myriad diachronic sequences; that certain time-effects are intelligible only if spatially extended; that parallel universes may be conflated into a single newly conceived space–time continuum; and that any temporally extended system of differences may collapse into an undifferentiated flux. This is the time of human desire, and the time that Proust’s book inhabits sentence by sentence. It is defiantly non-linear, and runs counter both to the plot of the book, and to much of its ‘theory’. If we place Miss Sacripant, or any other elaborately recurring motif, within this alternative temporality we discover not a disconsolate ebbing away of meaning as time passes but a restoration of meaning within a temporal manifold. Odette en travesti becomes not just a static emblem of the desirable woman, but an intersection point in a moving network of desiring pathways. Against the pessimism of linear time and its losses, the book provides us – and not just in its ending, but all through and even in its darkest hours – with an optimistic view of time as connection-making and irrepressible potentiality. This time is not a concept, or a connected series of points, or a fixed scale against which geological epochs or human life-spans can be measured. It is a stuff and there for the handling.

      A significant advantage is to be had from thinking of Proust as an artful manipulator of ordinary time rather than as the harbinger of an unusual, specialised or occult temporal vision. By this route more of his text remains readable, and its overall account of time becomes richer and more provoking. Involuntary memory, which is the gateway to Proust’s apocalypse – to his time of redemption – is ordinary enough, of course. The phrase itself would scarcely have enjoyed its remarkably successful career if it had not encapsulated a common experience, and ‘Proustian moments’, like ‘Freudian slips’, would not have entered the vernacular if their import had been in any way obscure. But when it comes to the experience of reading the successive pages of Proust’s novel and taking time over them, involuntary memory is oddly inert and unhelpful. Applying it as a key to the understanding of Proustian time is rather like looking at the working day from the viewpoint of weekends and holidays, or at the lives of plain-dwellers from the neighbouring mountain-tops. The time that is proper to Proust’s long sentences, however, and to his extended episodes and to the long-range patterns of expectation and remembrance which organise the novel as a whole, is both ordinary and extremely complex. Ordinary in that it belongs to the everyday world of mortal, desire-driven creatures, and complex in that its many criss-crossing dimensions are mobile and difficult to construe. Past, present and future are intricately conjoined within sentences, and reconjoined still more intricately during extended narrative sequences. Sentences come to rest upon a recovered sense of propositional fullness and completion, only to have certain of their elements wrested from them and driven into new associative configurations by what follows. The temporality of a narrative which is made from unstable building blocks of this kind is one of continuous scattering and concentration. Temporality is retemporalised endlessly, and time-features that are awkward and obtuse are given special prominence in the fabrication of the text. Snags, discrepancies, prematurities, belatednesses, prophetic glimpses, misrecognitions, and blocked or incongruous memories – these tragi-comical indignities are the mainspring of Proust’s vast fictional contrivance. He finds the plenitude of his book in this epic catalogue of unsatisfactory moments.

      Such impure and unsimple ordinary time accompanies the narrator, enfolds him, to the very end of his narrative. When he recounts his culminating discoveries, during which he discerned a celestial exit from loss and waste at last

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