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

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have become intelligible to each other, and a single dynamism – that of alternating dispersal and concentration – is seen to govern the stars in their courses, the growth of crystals, the structure of the human mind, and Mme Verdurin in her successive salons. This is a vision both of order within the cosmos and of the ungovernable plurality of mental worlds. The self reels between an outer world that is too big for it, and an inwardness that has too many transient shapes.

      In La Prisonnière, this plurality had already received its loftiest encomium, and had been quite disconnected from any focusing device or principle of order:

       Des ailes, un autre appareil respiratoire, et qui nous permissent de traverser l’immensité, ne nous serviraient à rien. Car si nous allions dans Mars et dans Vénus en gardant les mêmes sens, ils revêtiraient du même aspect que les choses de la Terre tout ce que nous pourrions voir. Le seul véritable voyage, le seul bain de Jouvence, ce ne serait pas d’aller vers de nouveaux paysages, mais d’avoir d’autres yeux, de voir l’univers avec les yeux d’un autre, de cent autres, de voir les cent univers que chacun d’eux voit, que chacun d’eux est; et cela nous le pouvons avec un Elstir, avec un Vinteuil, avec leurs pareils, nous volons vraiment d’étoiles en étoiles.

      (III, 762)

       A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.

      (V, 291)

      This interlacing of optics, astronomy and music, which is also an indefinite sequence of displacements between small and vast, not only promises no selfhood to the artist and to those who follow his example, it presents selfhood as an impediment to creative perception. The only conception of self that can usefully remain in force is that of a discontinuous itinerary, leading towards but never reaching that moment of plenitude at which the entire range of possible world-forms would stand revealed and realised. When each human being has become a hundred universes, who will then be the gentleman, the liar, the thief or the novelist? Such visions of an ideally dispossessed and characterless human individuality occur often as Proust’s novel moves grandly towards the apotheosis of self upon which Le Temps retrouvé ends, as if those last moments of potency and moral resolve could be attained only by way of an emptiness within the self resembling that of interstellar space. The ‘«nous» qui serait sans contenu’ (III, 371; ‘a we that is void of content’ (IV, 440)) of which the narrator had spoken in Sodome et Gomorrhe has now become an essential precondition for artistic creativity.

      What is set out as a credo in La Prisonnière has been present from an early stage in the narrator’s practical performances both as a social observer and as an introspective. The narrator makes his presence felt by his special habit of removing himself from the scene, becoming weightless, ‘without content’, sine materia. In this as in so many other respects, Swann is his model. Swann passes through social gatherings without leaving his imprint. At the Saint-Euverte soirée in ‘Un Amour de Swann’, he is an all-transforming eye. Grooms become greyhounds as he looks at them, and guests become carp. The domestic staff are a living embodiment of European art history: some of them seem to have emerged three-dimensionally from paintings by Mantegna, Dürer or Goya, and others are animated statues from classical antiquity or from the workshop of Benvenuto Cellini. The assembled males arrange themselves into a procession of highly individualised monocles (I, 317–22; I, 388–94). This vertiginous outward scene is matched by an inconstant inner world thinly disguised as a unified self:

       ce que nous croyons notre amour, notre jalousie, n’est pas une même passion continue, indivisible. Ils se composent d’une infinité d’amours successifs, de jalousies différentes et qui sont éphémères, mais par leur multitude ininterrompue donnent l’impression de la continuité, l’illusion de l’unité. La vie de l’amour de Swann, la fidélité de sa jalousie, étaient faites de la mort, de l’infidélité, d’innombrables désirs, d’innombrables doutes, qui avaient tous Odette pour objet.

      (I, 366)

       what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity. The life of Swann’s love, the fidelity of his jealousy, were formed of the death, the infidelity, of innumerable desires, innumerable doubts, all of which had Odette for their object.

      (I, 448)

      Whether the narrator looks outwards or inwards, he studies hard to become centreless and characterless in this way and to become, in Keats’s phrase, ‘a thoroughfare for all thoughts’.

      The morally resolved artist into whom the narrator is transformed at the end of the novel is himself an improbable construction. He has of course been foreshadowed on numerous earlier occasions, as have the moral principles on which he is to base his critique of social man and woman. That he is eventually to be an altruist, a respecter of individual rights, a truth-teller and a trenchant prosecutor of corruption and folly has already been half-promised by the narrator’s elaborately textured social observation. What is more, the narrator has been shown to be capable both of energetic moral commitment and of firm self-criticism for his failures to act virtuously. But as a moralist he has other characteristics too, and these leave us only partially prepared for Proust’s exalted final perspectives.

      Gilbert Ryle, in his essay on Jane Austen, speaks ‘with conscious crudity’ of moralists as belonging either to the Calvinist or to the Aristotelian camp. While members of the first group think of human beings ‘as either Saved or Damned, either Elect or Reject, either children of Virtue or children of Vice’, those of the second pursue distinctions of an altogether more delicate kind:

       the Aristotelian pattern of ethical ideas represents people as differing from one another in degree and not in kind, and differing from one another not in respect just of a single generic Sunday attribute, Goodness, say, or else Wickedness, but in respect of a whole spectrum of specific week-day attributes. A is a bit more irritable and ambitious than B, but less indolent and less sentimental. C is meaner and quicker-witted than D, and D is greedier and more athletic than C. And so on. A person is not black or white, but iridescent with all the colours of the rainbow; and he is not a flat plane, but a highly irregular solid.

      To some extent this may seem to fit the facts of Proust’s narrator’s case well. After all, he possesses to a remarkable degree the ability to make contrastive moral judgements, and he deploys his contrasts with such ingenuity that his discourse often seems dedicated to continuity – ‘iridescence’ – rather than discreteness in the handling of moral notions. Besides, few of Proust’s admirers would wish to remove him from the company of Aristotle and Jane Austen if this meant handing him over to Ryle’s dourly dichotomous Calvin. Yet a crucial quality of the moral life as lived by Proust’s narrator is entirely missing from Ryle’s paradigm. This is the quality that could be called supererogatory risk-taking; it involves finding limits and then seeking to transgress them; and it calls for naughtiness and mischief on a grand scale. In the pursuit of new knowledge, the narrator must be prepared to traverse uncharted moral territories and to improvise for himself a value-system commensurate with this or that moment of epistemological zeal or imaginative extravagance.

      At the simplest level, telling the truth to a truth-resistant audience may involve lying. In A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the narrator reports having given his parents an unverified account of the origins and the antiquity of the Swanns’ staircase. Without doing so, it would have been impossible for him to persuade them of its true worth: ‘[m]on amour de la vérité était si grand que je n’aurais pas hésité à leur donner ce renseignement même si j’avais

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