Here’s Tom Raworth reading ‘Proust From The Bottom Up’, a poem featured in his expansive collected works, which is essential reading for any student of post-war British writing and/or avant-garde poetics.
I did my Masters thesis on Raworth, but only remembered this one after finishing A la recherche recently, a rather nice connection which drew together two of my favourite writers.
More from Clive James’ indispensable book Cultural Amnesia – this time a few selections from his short essay on Proust, with whom I’ve been recently so occupied. I can now well appreciate James’ point about A la recherche being a book that requires of its readers that they take notes; my own add up to nearly 20,000 words and I feel that they barely scratch the surface!
My complete set of A la recherche du temps perdu
Warning: contains spoilers
When I think back to the small town in which I grew up, I’m struck by the way in which that great Proustian symbol, the parish church, is a thing that resonates still. In my case, not St Hilaire, but St James’, designed by John Nash in the Norman style around 1831. It was my first church, the template upon which all others were built; I knew nothing then of the great gothic cathedrals I so adore now, but would my appreciation of them be anything without those early hours and days spent in St James’?
My belief or non-belief in Christianity at the time was an irrelevance; the truth is that I don’t think I ever questioned it. But I did understand that this was a designated sacred space, where one was encouraged to foster a different mode of thought. This way of thinking was aimed at something beyond the immediate material world, given the name God by the adults, and articulated by an expansive mythos, which even then seemed incredible.
The narrative fabric woven around this transformative practice seemed most unecessary to me; the feeling of immanence was ample. The stories were a means of imparting moral lessons of course, but I knew even then that the feeling alone was enough to engender a robust morality. The sacred space of the church grew and spread out for me across the entire town, in fact it had always been this way, so that every brick wall, kerbstone and breakwater, every stream, glade and oak tree resonated with the truth of shared origins and infrastructure.
St James' Church, East Cowes
At night I would often sleep in my grandmother’s bed and it was then, alone, in the hinterland between consciousness and oblivion, that this knowledge most frequently made its claim upon me, the inverse corollary of the opening of A la recherche where the narrator describes the manner in which the room gradually reconstitutes itself upon waking, this was a spatial and temporal dissolution, a breaking apart of the material objects about me, a revelatory glimpse of reality beyond the bounds of Time.
Might we think of Proust’s conception of time as a prefiguration of Heidegger’s? Of the narrator as kind of proto-Dasein? Reading the novel one is perhaps encouraged to think of oneself this way; it is at its heart a work of ontology – and the act of immersion required is in its own way a stepping out of time, a questioning of being and Being. The more and more I moved forward, the more I was drawn back into the threaded fabric of my own Lost Time and into questioning my place within it.
Just as there is one church, out of which all others grew, so there is one bedroom, where darkness seemed to act as a kind of corrosive force, tempered only by the oblique waves of light, the reflection of car headlights as they turned the corner from Victoria Grove on to Adelaide Grove, that moved across the ceiling, as intangible as the the feeling I am trying to articulate, but as meaningful to me now as they were thirty years ago.
By the time we reach ‘Time Regained’ Marcel has all but given up on his grand ambition to become a writer. The war has ended; unwell, he has been away from Paris for some time, away from society drawing rooms. We are somewhat surprised then, after the shadows and fog of the preceding section, to seem him attend an afternoon party at the Princess de Guermantes. But it is here that the final revelation unfolds. In quick succession he is struck by three attacks of involuntary memory which invoke the same vertiginous happiness that he experiened when dipping the madeleine in tea and which lead to an articulation of the nature of Lost Time and a profession of faith in the absolute necessity of the creative act.
This is not the past rendered so much within the present, but the past and present as congruent phenomena:
Yes: if, owing to the work of oblivion, the returning memory can throw no bridge, form no connecting link between itself and the present minute, if it remains in the context of its own place and date, if it keeps its distance, its isolation in the hollow of a valley or upon the highest peak of a mountain summit, for this very reason it causes us suddenly to breathe new air, an air which is new precisely because we have breathed it in the past, that purer air which the poets have vainly tried to situate in paradise and which could induce so profound a sensation of renewal only if it had been breathed before, since true paradises are the paradises we have lost. (TR, 228)
And as if to answer the earlier question regarding Dasein, the narrative evokes the spectre of another being, a being that apprehends the moments as “fragments of existence withdrawn from Time”, that exists within and throughout them all and facilitates what Marcel calls “the only genuine and fruitful pleasure that I had known”.
The fidelity of this being is to the essence, the impression and to the work, as it must become for Marcel himself and for any artist worth his/her salt, to discover wether it is possible to attain what has always been unrealisable, a field of practice in which “instinct dictates duty”, not intellectualism or cold rationality.
For the truths which the intellect apprehends directly in the world of full and unimpeded light have something less profound, less necessary than those which life communicates to us against our will in an impression which is material because it enters through the senses but yet has a spiritual meaning which it is possible for us to extract. (TR, 239)
And then:
I had arrived then at conclusion that in fashioning a work of art we are by no means free, that we do not choose how we shall make it but that it is pre-existent to us and therefore we are obliged, since it is both necessary and hidden, to do what we should have to do if it were a law of nature, that is to say to discover it. But this discovery which art obliges us to make, is it not, I thought, really the discovery of what, though it ought to be more precious to us than anything in the world, yet remains ordinarily for ever unknown to us, the discovery of our true life, of reality as we have felt it to be, which differs so greatly from what we think it is that when a chance happening brings us an authentic memory of it we are filled with an immense happiness? (TR, 242)
And this work of art, this book of which he speaks… well it is of course the book we are holding in our hands; the work and the life are wrought of the same material, they seek the same truth, the one enabling the other. Never forget that Proust fought on a daily basis with death to bring us this book. At its end we see the pattern of the narrator’s life resolved; we realise that the “two ways” were not opposite paths but in fact led to the same place, that Swann’s Way and the Guermantes Way are conjoined (personified in the figure of Mlle Saint-Loup) and meet at day’s end.
I seemed to see that this life that we live in half darkness can be illumined, this life that at every moment we distort can be restored to its true pristine shape, that a life, in short, can be realised within the confines of a book! How happy would he be, I thought, the man who had the power to write such a book! What a task awaited him! (TR, 451)
Here again it is repeated – the word ‘happy’ – the lifting of the veil, the diligence of the work ethic, both engender this state of happiness, which was part of Proust’s endeavour – what Walter Benjamin termed his “explosive will to happinness” – and this we must never forget either, that we participate in this as a reader of his, and in all its paradoxical magnificence, be it the happiness of a shamen or ascetic or of a gambler or lover – those that join the search might be considered thus, as:
… not ‘my’ readers but the readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician at Combray used to offer his customers – it would be my book, but with its help I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves. (TR, 452)
A la recherche is ultimately emblematic of our own quest for the bedrooms, parish churches and country paths lost to us; in Proust’s hands we become not so much the reader but the daydreamer ourselves. If modern life too often prohibits us from taking a journey such as this, then it is in want of reform; Time, that most precious of commodities is forever in short supply, and it is Time that this great novel gives back to us.
John Malkovich as Baron de Charlus in Raoul Ruiz’s adaptation of Le temps retrouvé
Previous volumes have hinted at the oncoming war – as diplomatic murmurings mainly – but it is not until “Le temps retrouvé” (Time Regained) that we are thrown into its midst in what seems a stark and sudden transition to the modern era and to a Paris subject to the Biblical fire and brimstone of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Marcel wanders the streets in a manner that, for the cineaste at least, brings Carol Reed’s The Third Man to mind. La Ville-Lumière, now subject to enforced blackouts, has become a dark and gloomy place, peopled no longer by the bright young things of high society, but by male prostitutes, criminals, soldiers on leave, and of course the ageing, but no less predatory, Baron de Charlus.
Beneath the prowling zeppelins and coruscating anti-aircraft fire we find Saint-Loup, exiting with haste from the only lit building on a darkened block. Marcel, who is tired and thirsty, watches from a distance, then enters. Inside he finds Charlus bound in chains being viciously beaten by a young ruffian, whom the Baron soon dismisses for being too lacklustre in his work.
The brothel is run by Jupien as a place to sate the old man’s every whim. The ruffian bears a passing resemblance to Morel, the Baron’s former lover. In war torn-Paris, Proust’s most capricious, Dickensian character is a man who has passed out of the temporal mode, the result of a castration of the bodily ego. The physical form is only good for chastisement; the mind is now in search of lost time.
There is something of the Grand Guignol about the bordello scene; it can certinly be read as a metaphor for the punishing nature of all human love relations, albeit taken to tragi-comic extremes. Charlus has become a forlorn figure, whose only hope of truth is to be found in the sado-masochistic dynamic.
Is it possible to be dead already but still fear death? Only if the former death is a symbolic (and thus prophetic) one. This is perhaps the Baron’s predicament, and perhaps that of all humanity. We beat a retreat from the brimstone, the artillery shells, but we know in our hearts that such efforts are futile. And yet still we run.
Just days after Saint-Loup has satisfied his desire at Jupien’s establishment, we learn that he has been killed on the front-line. For one of Proust’s most endearing characters time has stopped.
Albertine disparue
“Mademoiselle Albertine has gone!”
If Albertine in some way stands for the philosophical conundrum at the heart of A la Recherche, what are we to make of her departure?
It is a departure doubled, by flight and then by death. The end of her material existence complicates the narrator’s understanding of their relationship. He wants her to know that he knows about her infidelities… but this is impossible. The secret life revealed to him retains its uncertainty – and he has no way of true confirmation – because she is dust.
Death cures us of our desire for immortality, a savage Proustian irony, made worse for those poor fools left alive, because not only do they remain infected but they must live with the travails of the dead in their hearts.
Of all the novels I’ve read this one has led me back to the sparkling spider-thread images of my youth more than any other – the Vivonne comes to stand for the Medina, the Meseglise Way for the trail across the fields to the Folly Inn; this one has made revenants of my dead (what Proust calls a “thoroughly Pagan survival”) and made past lovers intrude upon my dreams. It brings these things back into my possession.
We exist only by virtue of what we possess, we possess only what is really present to us, and so many of our memories, our humours, our ideas set out to voyage far away from us, until they are lost to sight! Then we can no longer make them enter into our reckoning of the total which is our personality. But they know of secret paths by which to return to us.
Proust’s secret paths are psychological, neurological and symbolic. But the eruption of involuntary memory is complicated by the retrospective and unavoidable imposition of narrative. Dependent therefore on the genesis of fiction; on the fiction that we are dealing with, and thus in their essence representative of epistemological problems. If the novel is a search for lost time, it is also a search for lost truth. We cannot be certain of Albertine’s affairs any more than we can be certain of our own past; we cannot be certain of personality, we cannot really be certain of anything.
Albertine no longer existed; but to me she was the person who had concealed from me that she had assignations with women in Balbec, who imagined that she had succeeded in keeping me in ignorance of them. When we try to consider what will happen to us after our own death, is it not still our living self which we mistakenly project at that moment? And is it much more absurd, when all is said, to regret that a woman who no longer exists is unaware that we have learned what she was doing six years ago than to desire that of ourselves, who will be dead, the public shall still speak with approval a century hence? If there is more real foundation in the latter than in the former case, the regrets of my retrospective jealousy proceeded none the less from the same optical error as in other men the desire for posthumous fame. And yet, if this impression of the solemn finality of my separation from Albertine had momentarily supplanted my ideas of her misdeeds, it only succeeded in aggravating them by bestowing upon them an irremediable character. I saw myself astray in life as on an endless beach where I was alone and where, in whatever directions I might turn, I would never meet her.
I can only see that the secrets of Albertine’s heart are the secrets denied to us by the impossibility of knowing anything outside ourself; perception of reality is prone to optical error; and the fact of our ignorance is one without remedy. If our understanding of life is condemned to resolve itself in supposition, the practice of art becomes of the greatest value, sign of our hapless quest for truth in a world forever at the beck and call of entropy.
The Sweet Cheat Gone
The sense of an imminent ending leaves me feeling somewhat uneasy. Where does one go after reading Proust? What does one do?
Seven hundred pages remain, which would exceed or constitute the bulk of any other novel, but with the Recherche, seem a pittance. Like no other book I’ve read (because to read it is an attritional process) it becomes internalised and through so doing internalises its reader. Along with Albertine I am held captive in a room somwhere in the narrator’s Parisian mansion; I experience my own internal narrative that accompanies and serves as a critique to my reading; the act becomes reciprocal, the book becomes my life, my life the book.
Proust’s concatenation of aesthetics, metaphysics and the emotional antinomies of interpersonal relationships leaves me reeling and confused on the one hand, enchanted on the other. This admixture sounds heady, but these are the nuts and bolts of our lives, our daily concerns, brilliantly connected within the linguistic matrix of the work.
For Marcel art is evidence against which he might determine the truth or otherwise of a profound philosophical proposition to which he is inclined: that of metaphysical idealism. This he weighs against an opposing force: materialism. It is between the poles of this conflict that the novel is played out. What’s more, there is a sense that Albertine is representative of this too; the life of Albertine has a material truth, but also a symbolic one, that, for the narrator (and reader?), takes on a psychological resonance, whether it is literally true or not.
Her presence in his house can be read in many ways, but the idea that she signifies a psychic eruption is not without its charms; is Albertine’s veiled life analagous with those things beyond the material realm? Might she be some kind of ghost, a harbinger of death even? Readers of Poe might make such an assumption… or Freud? I’ve heard it said that there is nothing Freud ever wrote that Proust hadn’t already written…
Toward the end of ‘The Captive’ we come upon Dostoyevsky, whom the narrator discusses at length with his mistress; the aesthetic corollary of the madeleine dipped in tea is outlined, the genius work of art can reveal the common fragments of an ideal world beyond the mere material, represented in this instance by “the Dostoyevsk[ian] woman with her mysterious face, whose engaging beauty changes abruptly, as though her apparent good nature had been by make-believe, to a terrible insolence…” (TC, 237). The point is extended to include the figurative idea of the “house” which is “blended with the woman’s face”, a combination that marks the Russian’s oeuvre, and in which we can discern a clear reflection of the domestic arrangements of Albertine and Marcel. This act of self-reflexivity is carried a step further when the narrative moves on to the peculiar construction of literary composition where scenes, characters and motifs reappear “if the novel is at all long”.
The idea that the duplicitous love-object represents in some way what is unknowable in this universe makes allies of desire and death once again. Lovers must be duplicitous by definition because they are both corporeally and psychically separate; it is impossible to have true knowledge of “the other”; the perverse rules of desire, as the novel demonstrates, would be broken by the establishment of a genuine trust; both parties would become bored and their desire wither.
Human relationships are haunted by the sense of an ending. We sleep with ghosts; and the mutual morning-time stare of longing affirms both parties’ mortality. ‘The Captive’ concludes with Albertine taking flight to meet her fate, the sweet cheat has gone, and the opening of this subsequent volume begins with a very real tragedy:
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
[We regret that Mr. Scott Moncrieff was not able to write this note before his death.
THE PUBLISHERS]
… for our work (the writing of the novel, the translation of the novel) in this life is a race against time. Proust makes the same demands of his readers that he made of himself, the book becomes the life, the life becomes the book, as Moncrieff knew, as all Proustian acolytes come to know. With Albertine gone, the veil has been lifted. The opening chapter of this volume is appropriately titled ‘Grief and Oblivion’.
The light in Saint-Sulpice, Paris
Saturday morning, coming round from the heavy wash of sleep again, rising up full fathom five, the murmur of traffic outside at once opressive and familiar; the tell-tale signs of spring in London, hollers on the street, eager car horns and desperate sirens that pierce the higher registers, sub-woofers that prowl the lower; the cracks of liquid sunlight through my curtains take on an almost religious aspect, like the light through the doorway at Saint-Sulpice.
Proust is the greatest writer we have on sleeping, waking and that delicious hinterland between them:
And often an extra hour of sleep is a paralytic stroke after which we must recover the use of our limbs, learn to speak. Our will would not be adequate for this task. We have slept too long, we no longer exist. Our waking is barely felt, mechanically and without consciousness, as a water pipe might feel the turning off of a tap. A life more inanimate than that of a jellyfish follows, in which we could all equally well believe that we had been drawn up from the depths of the sea or released from prison, were we but capable of thinking anything at all. But then from the highest heavens the goddess Mnemotechnia bends down and holds out to us in the formula “the habit of ringing for our coffee” the hope of resurrection.
‘The Captive’ recaptures the themes of earlier volumes of the novel in which the osmotic barrier that separates waking reality from the dreamworld is explored, the re-entry from other planets, other lives, into the illusion of a stable determinable universe, but here we are presented with an admixture of love and jealousy, and these seemingly disconnected themes are welded together. Albertine in sleep is a pure creature, shed of the deceptions that mark her conscious being. The narrator draws a parallel between her kisses and those of his mother all those years ago; these are the delights without which he cannot settle. In sleep, the cruelties we impose upon one another might be effaced, the storms that stir our briny hearts are calmed:
Her breathing, as it became gradually deeper, was now regularly stirring her bosom and, through it, her folded hands, her pearls, displaced in a different way by the same movement, like the boats, the anchor chains that are set swaying by the movement of the tide. Then, feeling that the tide of her sleep was full, that I should not ground upon reefs of consciousness covered now by the high water of profound slumber, deliberately, I crept without a sound upon the bed, lay down by her side, clasped her waist in one arm, placed my lips upon her cheek and heart, then upon every part of her body in turn laid my free hand, which also was raised, like the pearls, by Albertine’s breathing; I myself was gently rocked by its regular motion: I had embarked upon the tide of Albertine’s sleep.
You may think we live on dry land, but you’d be wrong. This world is water and without water we’d be nothing and our loves and desires and passions would be nothing. The tide that carries Marcel and Albertine carries us all; we are sub-mariners conceived and gestated in saline solutions and cast adrift as plankton might be, carried by currents over which we exert no control.
The River Medina
Albertine is first apprenheded as a silhouette against the sea at Balbec, and this image is one that reoccurs again and again, rising back up in the narrator’s mind, a perplexing vision which he cannot always resolve with the capricious Nereid he has taken ‘captive’ in his Paris flat.
I would make the journey across the River Medina almost every day between the ages of thirteen and eighteen; at night in my dreams I cannot count the times I have returned to this spot; dreams that take place in futuristic industrial wastelands, polluted waters, with vast swells that course across the Solent flooding the mouth of the river, and always here between the eastern and western headlands, I swim for my life in this place where my youth was played out and my first amourous adventures unfolded.
I’m sure the exertions of teenagers are the same the world over, and those that find themselves land-locked no doubt have other symbolic phenomena to which they can cling, but I cannot stress enough the peculiar joy of one’s first kisses when they are within earshot of the ocean. Those rhythms strike an eternal chord within us, we find ourselves enveloped in the salts released from restless waves breaking against the rocks, the salts essential for animal life, thick in the night air, on our skin, on our lips and tongues, passed between us. Without them we risk water intoxication, too much and death beckons. We must take heed of the story of Lot’s wife, turned into a pillar of salt when she turned to look back over the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, on which site we now find the Dead Sea.
Albertine’s sexual preferences stir the waters of the narrator’s jealousy. His early indifference toward her changes suddenly when he discovers her close acquaintance with the girlfriend of Mlle Vinteuil. From that point onward, like Swann before him, he is condemned to fantasise over every possible betrayal that she might commit whilst out of his company; his need to possess her is pathological and comes to define his love. As Proust points out: “…the possession of what we love is an even greater joy than love itself.”
In sleep we might revisit our ancient submarine dwellings for a time and take flight on the tide of shared atavisms; we are water and salt, our possessive natures are no more than a symptom of the desire to flow together, but the calcified form of human bodies and the strange truth of consciousness means we’ll never rest easy until that peculiar fire is doused once more.
Robert de Montesquiou - one of the chief models for Baron de Charlus
I woke this morning and instinctively reached for the volume of “Cities of the Plain” that lay next to my bed. I’d had a restless, dreamless sleep and was in need of the comfort which Proust has come to provide.
The narrator has returned to Balbec and in his room at the Grand Hotel bends down to untie his boots and is struck suddenly by the reality of his grandmother’s death. More properly he is revisited by his true grandmother, or can now fully recollect her being, as opposed to the imaginary thing she has become since returning to the earth; the dead are alive in the living once again; the living are left bereft, sorrowful, perplexed at how this can be.
And just then, at the very moment I read this passage, something returned for me: I had in fact dreamt, and the visions of it came swelling back up in my conscious mind, and Proust had been in my dream:
I’m in Germany and am attending a lecture on Proust. What is being said is academic and unenlightening and I am more interested in the numerous pretty women that make up the audience, each one as bright and distinctive as the next. I can make out their individual features so clearly; they seem more than real to me and I feel a profound desire for them all. Meanwhile, my anger at the lecturer’s lack of insight into Proust is increasing. I want to shout out “it’s all about gay sex”. Eventually, I do shout this out, but the words are not heeded and the lecture room dissolves and falls away. All of a sudden I am with my father; the usual antipathy between us when we meet in dreams is present. We are driving along Kastanienallee; we stop somewhere to eat, but I pay him scant attention, I want him to go away, for I am thinking only about the pretty women who have somehow followed me into the streets and cafes of Berlin.
There were supposedly five “cities of the plain”, including Sodom and Gomorrah, synonymous with impenitent sin and destroyed by God. The opening of this volume (in French “Sodome et Gomorrhe”) sees the narrator witness a liaison between the Baron de Charlus and the tailor Jupien, which gives us an insight into the former’s sexuality, but also reveals something telling about the genius of Proust’s method: for the Baron has been previoulsy known to us only through the rumours, half-truths and misinformation perpetuated by other characters and through occasional first-hand glimpses; Proust builds a portrait of Charlus as an inveterate womaniser, only to confound us at this point, which makes the impact of the revelation that much more intriguing, but also tells us that in our interactions with others perspectivism reigns, our knowledge is based upon myriad overlapping narratives, and that the truth of human character remains elusive.
The invocation of Sodomite lineage may sit uneasily with the modern reader, but one of Proust’s intentions is to mark the all-too-real pariah status accorded to homosexuality during the period. The transposition of his own attraction to men into the narrator’s attraction to women should not always be taken literally, and Proust’s own relationship to his homosexuality was never entirely straightforward, but the Recherche remains one of the seminal books about gay love, desire and sex.
Edmund White is one of the best of Proust’s biographers on the nature of his sexuality and points to the combination of the sacred with the profane, which we see writ large in the novel. The suggestion that the episode where Vinteuil’s photo is desecrated during the foreplay of his daughter with her girlfriend might be drawn from Proust’s own predilections provides an insight into the complex world of Proustian psychosexuality.
It’s the classic dual strands of sex and death that grease the wheels of the Recherche; the narrator’s epiphany about his grandmother comes in the same volume as his growing closeness to Albertine, as the ubiquity of “inverted” sexuality is described, and as the revelations about Charlus unfold.
Sex as a physical, material act in which the loss of self can be temporarily realised approaches the metaphysical mysteries dreams hint at and death conceals; both the dead and the objects of our desire meet us regularly in our dreams. Proust’s aim is to uncover the numinous in material reality and part of his methodology is to test the power of profanity against the power of what is held sacred.
If dreams might be said to represent involuntary attempts to uncover psychic truths, then in them this same contest is held night after night; how often do we find that conventional wisdom and the strictures of patriarchy come to nothing when tested against the attractions to be found in the shadow of budding groves? In the same breath we might say the unconscious mind acts as a haven for the dead – a place where desire and death clash, call it what you will: Sodom, Gomorrah, Paris… Berlin.
Theatrophone
Over the weekend I was rather delighted to discover that Proust was a subscriber to Theatrophone, an early twentieth century service that enabled people to listen to live concerts and theatrical productions over the telephone before the onset of broadcast radio. The UK had it’s own version called Electrophone.
This proof of Proust’s modernity has many corollaries (he was a fan of the motor car) and serves as a counterpoint to the vision of a man known for his excavation of the past. The surface of Proust’s writing can be deceptive, set in a world of nineteenth century drawing rooms, and dwelling as it does on the minutae of aristocratic life – but make no mistake, the Recherche is an ultra-modern work.
Even Gide fell for this when he first came across it; later he was compelled to confront the fact that he almost missed the opportunity of publishing the greatest novel in French history, that he almost took its author for a gossip and a snob.
In the first instance, I suppose, one can hardly blame him. Only Proust knew of his grand plan. And it would be easy for modern readers to think the same, to question the relevance of this portrait of a world so superficially disimilar to ours. They would be wrong. For Proust in many ways defined the shape of modern literary expression. As Graham Greene said:
Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth… For those who began to write at the end of the twenties or the beginning of the thirties, there were two great inescapable influences: Proust and Freud, who are mutually complementary.
Apparently, neither Proust nor Freud read the other’s work and yet Proust’s psychological insights are profound, and the conjunctions with Freudian theory are striking. Beyond this, we also see ideas that echo Jung’s notion of the anima and Bergson’s theory of the heterogenous nature of time.
Then we have his politics, which were not overt, but when it came to it, Proust demonstrated himself to be forward-thinking, just and humane. We can see this in “The Guermantes Way”, which shifts somewhat in tone from “Budding Grove”, moving from the expansive world of Elstirian seascape in Balbec to the more hermetic domain of Parisian high society. In the former we are free from the consciously political, but with the latter comes the ever present spectre of the Dreyfus Affair; a society riven in two, split into the conservative, anti-Semitic, reactionary anti-Dreyfusards, and the leftist, liberal, progressive Dreyfusards. Proust, clearly in the latter camp, chose the right side.
I would say it’s impossible to write such a book if one was not capable of a universal empathy. Proust’s genius lay firstly in his compassion; and I would argue that even those characters with the whiff of Dickensian grotesque about them are softened because of this; secondly, in his technique, for Proust, unlike Dickens, drew his most succesful characters over long stretches of time, many hundreds of pages in which we see them from any number of perspectives, their complexity fully rendered, though no less funny, horiffic or picaresque for it.
After a long time spent in the drawing room of Mme. de Villeparisis, in which we are lulled into a kind of literary somnambulism, in which the political undercurrent is palpable, as is the absurdity of much of the conversation, where we find much chuckle about, the scene switches and we’re suddenly confronted by the rapid decline and death of the narrator’s grandmother, where again Proust reveals this grand compassion but also his unflinching realist eye. As always, he aims for the truth, and whether he finds it in comedy or tragedy, it is no less striking.
His modernity finds its bedfellow in a form of latent didacticism; and by that I mean the kind of didacticism we find in, say, Musil or Mann – two of the other great modernist writers of the twentieth century. For his style suits it, as does his purpose. The lesson put simply is one of patience; on the one hand, a patience to study the conditions of the age; on the other, a preparedness to mine the protean territory that exists in the interaction between time and consciousness.
Life is forever at one remove; it is the sound of a concert at the other end of a telephone wire; this was one of the great realisations of the modernist movement; how much more so now in our era, which demands no less attention to things past, out of which blossom new futures… time regained.
A Parisien diabolo
As day 49 draws to a close, I’m nearing the end of “À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs” – translated in my edition as “Within A Budding Grove” – but perhaps the more literal translation gives a greater sense of what volume two is about: “In the Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower”.
Much of the volume takes place in the seaside resort of Balbec and it is here that we first come across the wonderful characters of St Loup and Charlus, meet again the painter Elstir and discover the “little band” – the group of young girls Marcel is drawn to like the proverbial moth to a flame, and amongst whose number we find, as does he, the enigmatic Albertine.
A l’ombre reveals Proust at his comic best – and it is important to state here that Proust is a very funny writer with a benevolent prediliction for undermining the expectations of his characters. Never cruel, always compassionate, and possessed of an universal comprehension for the foibles the permeate human behaviour, he is a master of the art of “showing” personality in all its strange multiplicity.
As a child who was taken to the Glastonbury Festival at a very young age, where I became fascinated by the Circus Field and one item in particular called a diabolo, I was rather tickled by the fact that this is Albertine’s favourite plaything; young Marcel even ventures to suggest that such is its oddity that he cannot see much of a future for it.
The diabolo came up again earlier today, in a documentary I was watching about Lucien Freud, when his cousin, Carola Zentner, mentions how the Freud children would all vie for control of the toy in their nursery. And earlier still I had been to see the new David Cronenberg film, A Dangerous Method, about the relationship between Lucien’s grandfather, Sigmund, Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein.
The narrator’s doubts over the future popularity of the diabolo betray an ignorance of its origins (the Chinese yo-yo), which is centuries old. This is Proust at his most playful, clever and obscure, for he is no doubt aware of its provenance and the etymology of its name.
“Diabolo” is often mis-spelt as “diablo”, from which we assume a “devilish” connection. In reference to the toy the term was coined by a French engineer, and is from the Greek “dia bolo” – meaning “across throw”. Appropriately, its meaning is doubled, for it also means “liar”, “one that commits perjury” or, most tellingly, “to make someone fall”. It’s from this origin that our understanding of the word “diablo” as “devil” comes.
This is the toy Proust has Albertine play with on the beach when we, and Marcel, first see her (for Jung there are no coincidences). But Marcel could never apprehend such a veiled warning. How often love involves the fall of the lover; how often the beloved is compelled to be a liar. For when:
…love is born; one would like to remain, for her whom one loves, the unknown whom she may love in turn, but one has need of her, one requires contact not so much with her body as with her attention, her heart… and love, following an unvarying procedure, sets going an alternating movement the machinery in which one can no longer either refrain from loving or be loved.
This is the strange perversion, the “across throw” at the heart of human love relations, Freud’s ambivalence toward the love object, which Proust examines so brilliantly. Through this exposure to the shadow of the young girls in flower, we can trace the exploration of this territory; beyond the “anxious hypotheses” constructed around the beloved, the curiosity of his/her character, lies something “beyond our understanding”.
The object of our uneasy investigation is something more essential than those details of character comparable to the tiny particles of epidermis whose varied combinations form the florid originality of human flesh. Our intuitive radiography pierces them, and the images which it photographs for us, so far from being those of any single face, present rather the joyless universality of a skeleton. (as I type the word “skeleton”, I notice the word count is 666)
It is this universailty that Freud and Jung explored (just as osteologists do our bones), to give veracity to the existence of the unconscious mind, and establish the truth of common drivers for human action. For Jung the process of individuation requires a coming to terms with the anima/animus – the material corollary of this is beset by troubles; the human experience of love is one subject to persistent diabolic eruptions.
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