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

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of his monologue can do nothing to explain: ‘en repensant à ces histoires du lift et du restaurant où j’avais déjeuné avec Saint-Loup et Rachel j’étais obligé de faire un effort pour ne pas pleurer’ (IV, 266; ‘when I thought about those stories of the lift-boy and of the restaurant in which I had had lunch with Saint-Loup and Rachel, I was obliged to make an effort to restrain my tears’ (V, 793)); in a novel that is plotted and paced with astonishing skill throughout, the Saint-Loup sub-plot stands out as a particularly ingenious tale of mystery and suspense. In part, the beauty of its denouement lies simply in the light that the narrator’s banal discovery sheds upon earlier incidents in the novel, and in the outrageous expanse of text that separates behavioural effect from psychological cause. Saint-Loup behaves oddly during the restaurant scene and those that follow – he is by turns craven and defiant towards Rachel, and twice resorts to fisticuffs in her company – and it is only after 1,500 pages that this behaviour is at last seen as coherently motivated. This is architectonic plotting of a kind that Tom Jones (1749) and Tristram Shandy (1759–67) made familiar, although Proust’s edifice contains cantilevers, suspensions and buttresses still more audacious than those of Fielding or Sterne.

      But this denouement is fine and imposing in another way too. The withheld weeping upon which Albertine disparue ends is reminiscent of Tennyson’s

       Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

       Tears from the depth of some divine despair

       Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

       In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,

       And thinking of the days that are no more.

      The narrator’s tears are a symptom without a cause, or with a cause – a ‘divine despair’, as one might indeed call it – that is much too large to have exact explanatory force. They are lacrimae rerum provoked by the memory not of Priam slain but of a tiff and a street brawl. At this level, the ending does not so much solve earlier mysteries as echo and reinforce the narrator’s earlier puzzlement. An abiding residue of doubt surrounds the Rachel episode. This has to do not with Saint-Loup’s motives but with the narrator’s own, and not with a single sexual discovery but with the anxious speculation on sexuality for which the narrator is a perpetual vehicle. In the company of Saint-Loup and Rachel, he cannot say what is going on, for they kindle in him too many disparate desires. And selfhood, if it is here at all, lies not in a stable, adjudicating narrative voice but in the versatile play of appetite that the narrator displays. He is voluble and laconic, intrusive and discreet. He sides with man against woman and woman against man. He aligns himself both with the homosexual desire of the ‘promeneur passionné’ by whom Saint-Loup is accosted in this scene and with Saint-Loup’s seemingly wounded and seemingly heterosexual pride in refusing unwelcome advances. The ‘self’ on offer here is a vacancy awaiting substance and structure, a mobile force-field in which the desires of others meet and are inflected, a rapid sequence of reactive and imitative gestures.

      The relationship between the narrator at the start of Le Côté de Guermantes and the narrator at the end of Albertine disparue is a strong one and creates a powerful effect of internal cohesion within the novel. But this effect is not produced by recreating at the later point a personality, an identity, a temperament or a pattern of connected psychological motifs that was already present earlier. It comes from the buttressing of one fragmentary psychological portrait against another of the same kind, and from a sense of perplexity and dispossession that becomes more pronounced as the plot unfolds.

      What makes Proust’s polymorphous narrator such an improbable textual construction in these central volumes of the novel is the cult of scientific precision that he adheres to even as he records his losses and confusions. Not only is the narrator’s volatile and almost self-free consciousness not nebulous, but Proust, in describing its characteristic motions and the behaviour in which they issue, repeatedly turns to the exactitude of the exact sciences. When Saint-Loup unleashes blows upon a shabbily dressed sexual opportunist, the narrator reports having seen not fists but a non-human display of matter and kinetic energy:

       tout à coup, comme apparaît au ciel un phénomène astral, je vis des corps ovoïdes prendre avec une rapidité vertigineuse toutes les positions qui leur permettaient de composer, devant Saint-Loup, une instable constellation. Lancés comme par une fronde ils me semblèrent être au moins au nombre de sept. Ce n’étaient pourtant que les deux poings de Saint-Loup, multipliés par leur vitesse à changer de place dans cet ensemble en apparence idéal et décoratif. Mais cette pièce d’artifice n’était qu’une roulée qu’administrait Saint-Loup et dont le caractère agressif au lieu d’esthétique me fut d’abord révélé par l’aspect du monsieur médiocrement habillé, lequel parut perdre à la fois toute contenance, une mâchoire, et beaucoup de sang.

      (II, 480)

       suddenly, as an astral phenomenon flashes through the sky, I saw a number of ovoid bodies assume with a dizzy swiftness all the positions necessary for them to compose a flickering constellation in front of Saint-Loup. Flung out like stones from a catapult, they seemed to me to be at the very least seven in number. They were merely, however, Saint-Loup’s two fists, multiplied by the speed with which they were changing place in this – to all appearance ideal and decorative – arrangement. But this elaborate display was nothing more than a pummelling which Saint-Loup was administering, the aggressive rather than aesthetic character of which was first revealed to me by the aspect of the shabbily dressed gentleman who appeared to be losing at once his self-possession, his lower jaw and a quantity of blood.

      (III, 205–6)

      The moment of misrecognition is arrested and lingered over, but not because the mental processes involved are complex ones. Indeed the first goal of this description seems to be that of expelling mind from the scene in favour of a pure science of behaviour: wishes, goals and intentions are replaced by the muscular movements of the human body and these then become the professional property of the astronomer, the geometer and the arithmetician.

      This holding back of concern for the motivation and moral status of human action is of course a mainspring of much Proustian wit, and is often to be seen at work on a large scale. The social performances of the Guermantes clan become a fencing match, in which their cold, steely gaze turns to real steel (II, 736; III, 513). During the Doncières episode, Saint-Loup retells the history of human warfare as an exquisite tale of bloodless strategic schemes transmitted from age to age (II, 407–15; III, 118–28). Mme Verdurin, appalled at the mention of a ‘bore’, is transformed into a lifeless piece of civic sculpture (I, 254; I, 311). Legrandin’s sycophancy, as he bows to a local landowner’s wife in Combray, is perfectly expressed by, and dissolved into, the ‘undulation of pure matter’ that passes through his animated rump (I, 148; ‘ondulation de pure matière’ (I, 123)). In all these cases, the pleasures of scansion, measurement and formal description are rediscovered in the jungle of social life. The narrator removes himself from the savage contest of human desires into a handsomely equipped observatory from which greed, lust, ambition, violence and hatred may be viewed as so much matter extended in space. But Proust’s countless sudden excursions into natural science, for all the intellectual clarity that each of them individually displays, do not exert an integrative and centralising force upon his phenomenology of selfhood. His optical expertise is applied in what appears as a conscientiously indiscriminate fashion. This is not Newton’s optics, in which the machinery of vision guarantees the intelligibility of the universe, although Proust’s scientific phrasing often has an unmistakably Newtonian ring. It is an impatient, desiring optics, intent upon multiplying the opportunities for human sight and enlarging the field of vision, and readily able to accept that each visual constellation is short-lived. Stars become fists, and fists, once recognised as instruments of aggression, trace for a moment a further, more abstract, astronomical pattern. And then the whole contraption is lost from view.

      A la recherche contains innumerable moments of intense vision that have no cumulative scientific force and pay no ontological dividend. Proust dramatises the brevity and singularity of these moments with a succession of images, running through the entire book, in which the eye itself becomes an object of sight. Legrandin’s eye receives the first of his many wounds when

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