Proust’s «In Search of Lost Time»: The History of a Vocation [New ed.] 3631629311, 9783631629314

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Marcel Proust (1871-1922) grew up in the fin de siècle, a period associated with melancholy and decadence. He knew the temptations of decadence, but freed himself by developing a new conception of art: Perspectivism becomes the aesthetic and philosophical principle of In Search of Lost Time. The novel traces out the path to becoming an artist. It is the history of a “vocation”. The main figure is initiated into the hidden beauty of the universe by various artists and by “signs” from his own life, like involuntary memory. A variety of dangers however, lie along the path of the artist. Besides aestheticism, there is the siren call of worldly life which has to be resisted. In the end, art triumphs. For Proust art is not a refuge from life, but the only way to do justice to the modern world. The fascinating and equally disturbing consequence of Proust’s radical conception of art is the complete absence of cultural criticism. An advertisement for soap may contain as much poetry as the Pensées of Pascal.

The author Meindert Evers, born in 1944, a former lecturer at the Radboud University of Nijmegen (The Netherlands), has lived in Munich since 2005 and gives lectures on cultural history at the LudwigMaximilians-Universität München.

Meindert Evers

Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: The History of a Vocation

Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: The History of a Vocation

Meindert Evers

Meindert Evers

Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: The History of a Vocation

ISBN 978-3-631-62931-4

262931_evers_gr-A5HCk PLE edition new.indd 1

08.02.13 11:33

Meindert Evers

Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: The History of a Vocation

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Photo on front cover: the Eiffel tower 1889 (Library of Congress)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Evers, Meindert. Proust’s In search of lost time : the history of a vocation / Meindert Evers. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-631-62931-4 1. Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922. A la recherche du temps perdu. I. Title. PQ2631.R63Z584 2013 843’.912--dc23 2013004836 ISBN 978-3-653-03113-3 (E-Book) DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-03113-3 ISBN 978-3-631-62931-4 (Print) © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2013 All rights reserved. Peter Lang Edition is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. www.peterlang.de

TABLE OF CONTENTS

7

PREFACE

CHAPTER I

Proust and the Fin de Siècle; influences and affinities

Short biography of the writer. Description of the atmosphere of the fin de siècle Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) John Ruskin (1819-1900) Proust and France Symbolism

CHAPTER II

A la Recherche as the history of a vocation

Swann and Charlus: against aestheticism Art and life: the temptation of the world Art and life: Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann Art and life: Commitment Proust and friendship: contra Nietzsche Possibility and reality

CHAPTER III

A la Recherche as a search for beauty

La mémoire involontaire (involuntary memory) Dreaming and awakening Modern means of communication

11 11 20 26 29 39 44

51 62 75 83 93 94 100

105 109 119 121

6 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’

CHAPTER IV

The re-creation of reality: perspectivism and metaphor

Perspectivism The metaphor

CHAPTER V

129 129 142

Representation of the modern age

153

Absence of cultural criticism The Dreyfus Affair The First World War Homosexuality The aristocracy and high society

153 160 165 168 174

EPILOGUE

179

NOTES

181

BIBLIOGRAPHY

201

INDEX OF NAMES

203

Preface

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time has become a lifelong occupation and love of mine. In my penultimate year as a student of history and philosophy in Amsterdam, a friend recommended to me the author who was to have such a strong influence on my idea of art and life. It was on the 25th of September 1967 that I bought A la Recherche du Temps Perdu in the three volume Pléiade edition. At the beginning I was perplexed and confused, it took half a year before I began to feel that I understood that work. I travelled to Venice but left Proust behind. Reading him, so difficult and hard to understand as he appeared to me, had never ceased to fascinate me; his ideas continued to work inside me, and when I took A la Recherche in my hands again, I was thrilled by the feeling that I understood him. From then on a growing love for the author began to demand expression. In 1974 I wrote my dissertation as a historian on Proust’s aesthetics. A thoroughly revised edition appeared in 1997, and a second edition in 2004, the same year as a German translation. I am very pleased that an English edition can now appear, thanks to the sensitive and conscientious work of Chris Costello. I was and remain convinced that the core of his aesthetics can liberate us from the ambivalent legacy of historicism. I had earlier believed that art and life are necessarily opposed, as Thomas Mann in particular presents it. But Proust showed me that life is only justified through art. He also showed me that beauty can also be found in the modern era, and that cultural criticism is often the result of an idolatrous clinging to outdated forms. This powerful, albeit disturbing message of Proust seems to me to have lost none of its value. Although there is a huge and still growing literature on Proust, and his fame has ascended to the skies, leaving figures like Gide far behind, he is still an author wh o can easily be misunderstood. His aesthetics are still often confused with the aestheticism of his time. Or it is his lifestyle, in particular his homosexuality, which attracts attention. Too little notice is taken of his opposition to the spirit of his era, that of the fin de siècle (when used to signify the melancholy and morbidity of the turn of the century). No, the author is in no way a representative of this era; quite the opposite. One can say that he resisted the siren song of the fin de siècle and that his work A la Recherche du Temps Perdu has vanquished the decadent spirit of his age once and for all.

8 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’

Certainly, Proust knew the temptations of decadence, but he could free himself from the deadly embrace of his time. It was mainly outside France that he found the writers who helped him to develop a new view of the relation between life and art: Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin and, last but not least, Leibniz – are the midwives of his aesthetics. In the first chapter we sketch his life and outline the atmosphere of the fin de siècle, in which he grew up, before examining the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin. Their ‘leçons d’idealisme’ stimulate him to become an artist and to fulfill his life in art. The result will be A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. The main theme of the novel is the process, at the end of which the protagonist, the alter ego of Proust, will be an artist. A la Recherche is, as chapter II will describe in more detail, the history of a vocation as an artist. In the novel various artists appear as mentors, primarily the painter Elstir and the composer Vinteuil. They convince him that it is only in art that the most intimate part of his Self can be realised and expressed. But still the dangers that stand in the way of his vocation are numerous. In particular aestheticism represents a threat to the artist. Proust’s figures Swann and Charlus incorporate this danger, but there are still further obstacles: high society, political commitment and love. Proust sees friendship too as an inadequate sort of communication. In this respect his position is opposed to that of Nietzsche. Between art and life there is a perpetual tension, though different from that in Thomas Mann. A comparison demonstrates that the two writers make diametrically opposed assumptions. Should one now conclude, from the omnipotence that Proust attributes to art, that on closer examination Proust is really an aesthete? Not at all! Proust believes in art as the only means to make life “real”. That is for him the highest justification for art. In search of the beauty of things he wonders whether there are special circumstances, whether there are special phenomena which are conducive to a poetic experience of the world. This is the theme of the third chapter. Proust discovers an infallible means in the spontaneous memory; in the “souvenir involontaire”, which reveals the essence of what is experienced. In addition he is fascinated by phenomena which suspend for a moment the factors falsifying our relationship to reality, like habit and convention. He pays great attention to dreaming, falling asleep and waking up, sudden changes in space and time. Modern means of transport and communication, like the train, the car, the aeroplane and the telephone, fascinate him because they create new dimensions and so prefigure art. In the fourth chapter we will examine the two stylistic devices which Proust uses to re-create reality. These are perspectivism and the metaphor. Perspectivism is the aesthetic principle on which A la Recherche is built. In this connec-

Preface 9

tion the significance of Leibniz for Proust is discussed. People and events are represented in a perspectivistic view. This is the only way for the artist to do justice to reality. Out of respect for the contingent, Proust uses the metaphor in a very original way; as an essential means for presenting the multifarious and fragmented reality in a new and surprising context. In the fifth chapter we finally concern ourselves with the question – what is the main implication of Proust’s aesthetics? It is the transfiguration of the modern world. The complete absence of cultural criticism will be disturbing or even shocking for many a reader. The main significance of his book is, in our opinion, that it shows that beauty is also to be found in our modern world. In the present edition the French quotations from Proust all appear in English, with the original as a footnote. I have gratefully used In Search of Lost Time, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, London-New York 1992. For other works of Proust in translation, see the bibliography. I hope my book will encourage people to read Proust’s work, so that it will not be said of him, as Voltaire said of Dante: “un fort grand auteur, personne ne le lit” – a really great author, nobody reads him.

CHAPTER I

Proust and the Fin de Siècle. Influences and affinities

Short biography of the writer. Description of the atmosphere of the fin de siècle Marcel Proust was born on the 10 July 1871, the son of Adrien Proust and Jeanne Weil, in Anteuil, a suburb of Paris. He grows up in a bourgeois milieu in Paris. At the age of nine he suffers his first attack of asthma, an ailment which will dog him his whole life long, and finally contribute to his early death. From 1882 to 1889 he attends the Lycée Condorcet. In this period he contributes to the pupils’ paper Revue Lilas. Towards the end of this period he begins attending the salons of Paris; thus starting the “fashionable” stage of his life. From 18891890 he voluntarily performs his military service, after which he attends lectures irregularly at the Sorbonne. In 1892 he starts his career as a writer with contributions to the Revue Blanche. 1896 marks the appearance of his first substantial publication, Les Plaisirs et les Jours (Pleasures and Days), with a foreword by Anatole France. In the years from 1896 to 1899 he works, without telling anyone, on a novel which won’t be published till long after his death, under the title Jean Santeuil. In the year 1899 he discovers the work of Ruskin: in 1904 and 1906 his translations of two books by Ruskin appear: La Bible d’Amiens and Sésame et les Lys. 26 September 1905 marks the death of his mother, with whom he was very close. A short time later, in the year 1906, he started to live an isolated life in an apartment in the Boulevard Haussmann. Here, and from 1919 in an apartment in the Rue Hamelin, he lives cut off from the world until his death in 1922. Attended by his housekeeper, Céleste Albaret, he devotes himself to his work on A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time), the central idea of which I regard as having been conceived in the year 1907.2 1913 the first part, Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way) appears at his own expense! 1918 he completes the second part: A l’ombre des jeunes filles en

12 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’

fleurs (Within a Budding Grove), for which he is awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt. In the same year Pastiches et mélanges (Pastiches and Mixtures) appears – a secondary work. In the meanwhile he devotes his remaining time to his main work A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. In 1920 the first part of Le côté de Guermantes (The Guermantes Way) appears, and in 1921 the second part, as well as the first part of Sodome et Gomorrhe (Sodom and Gomorrha). In the same period, 1920-21, he also publishes his profound contributions on Flaubert (A propos du “style” de Flaubert) and Baudelaire (A propos de Baudelaire), which really belong together with A la Recherche. Proust himself uses the word “épingler”, “pinning together” for his method of work: he keeps adding new sections to drafts, he continually revises his work or, to his publisher’s despair, rewrites whole sections. In the year of his death the second part of Sodom and Gomorrha appears. On the 18 November 1922 he dies at the early age of 51. The final parts of his life’s work appear posthumously: 1923 La Prisonnière (The Captive), 1925 La Fugitive (The Fugitive) – with the former title Albertine disparue (The Sweet Cheat Gone)3 – and finally in the year 1927 Le Temps Retrouvé (Time Regained). 1952 Jean Santeuil4, 1954 Contre Sainte-Beuve (Against Sainte-Beuve)5 were published. Both works recognizably belong to A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, which remains, despite its apparent completeness, unfinished. Had he lived longer, Proust would not only have revised his work completely, he would also have extended it considerably. From a higher viewpoint, however, it can be regarded as complete. His conviction that the world was not created once and forever, but just as often as a new artist is born, finds monumental expression in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. In this he is swimming against the tide of his era. His book appears in a period of pessimism and decadence. Fatalism, nostalgia and epigonism characterise the fin de siècle. “Destin”: fate or destiny? Until the appearance of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant man knew his God-given destiny. The Christian Enlightenment, in particular, regarded man as a being whose duty is to apply the means of reason and social sense in the service of human happiness. Happiness was seen as the purpose of human life. Kant was the first to question the teleological world view which was so characteristic of the eighteenth century. Although Kant did not abandon the idea of a meaningful world, for moral reasons, he leaves us in no doubt that such an optimistic idea is not in the least supported by the evidence. For the serious-minded Heinrich von Kleist Kant’s solution was a rather weak consolation. After reading Criticism of Pure Reason (some say it was Criticism of Practical Reason), he fell

Proust and the fin de siècle 13

into a deep crisis; life no longer had any meaning for him. In romanticism, to which Kleist belongs, man is conscious that he is on his own, that the Gods are dead. From this moment on, modern man is in search of a substitute for the lost meaning: in nature, among “the people”, in history, in art, in free love. The human being, suffering under his loneliness, and under his individuality, tries desperately to escape from himself, to lose himself in something greater. He wants to escape from himself and yet he cannot. The nineteenth century human is thrown back on himself, but unlike in earlier times, he has no confidence in his own abilities. It is not by chance that the drama Hamlet, whose eponymous hero Goethe so aptly described as “rich in thought and poor in deed”, is the one of Shakespeare’s works which was most often performed in the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century person admired the man of action; admiration for the “condottiere”, who challenged “Fortuna”, as Machiavelli named fate, with his own vitality, energy and dynamism. But he himself felt increasingly weak as the century progressed; weak because he no longer had faith in reason – this was no longer possible – weak, too, because he is led by his passions, his character, his origins, and his history. The philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer now has its opportunity; in the ’50s his main work, The World as Will and Representation, which he had written in 1818, finally begins to attract appreciable attention. Schopenhauer will influence artists in particular, like Tolstoy, Wagner, Nietzsche and Thomas Mann. Schopenhauer describes a world unmasked. With satanic glee and in brilliant style he exposes the irrational character of life. Schopenhauer believes in nothing any more, in no ideology and no system, and he is at his most convincing in his description of the misery of the world. This world, far removed from the best of all possible worlds, is, he shows, the worst conceivable. His descriptions of earthly suffering are cutting and powerful. Mercilessly he pillories the evil, the stupidity, the vanity of all things; more with satisfaction than horror. As a young man he undertook a tour of Europe in 1803/04, and was fascinated by the public executions in Paris and the galley slaves in Toulon. Looking back later on these experiences, he sees himself rather like Buddha in his youth, when he was exposed at the age of seventeen to the miseries of life. After that he could no longer see the world as the creation of a wise and just god, but only as the work of the devil who gave creatures life only to revel in their suffering. The fundamental force in and over all things is, according to Schopenhauer, the blind will which – without reason – demands manifestations which it later, just as pointlessly, destroys. What pessimism, what a “destruction of reason” this philosophy represents!6 Reason, Hegel’s highest power, is disarmed by Schopenhauer and relegated to a

14 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’

position of slavery to the will and the drives. Sigmund Freud is not far away! The intellect, in the centuries since Aristotle the master of the will, the lord of the passions, is reduced to slavery in a dramatic “revaluation of all values”. Reason legitimises the drives. This world of blind drives means endless suffering, need, insufficiency for humanity. The active will is at the same time the self-alienated will, dissatisfied with its own work, which is always inadequate, always insufficient, ultimately to be destroyed by its own creator, just as Chronos eats his own children; in the same way as plants serve as food for animals, which in turn feed humans, so are humans wolves for other humans. Is there a way out of this vicious circle? Not even suicide can serve as a means of escape. All death does is terminate the individual existence, but not the underlying phenomenon, the blind life force which realises itself again in another form, plays with it for a while, before destroying it too. Is there any way out? Only in the aesthetic view of the world, only in the brief moments of pure observation, when we see the world beneath us as sublime theatre, in which we can enjoy for a moment the “rapture of disinterested observation”, in art and in asceticism, as an artist or a saint. Only art, and in particular music, can make the world tolerable for a short while, can transfigure the suffering. What sort of an era that must have been, for such a dark philosophy to gain popularity! Nietzsche, deeply influenced by his reading of Schopenhauer, carried Schopenhauer’s implicit nihilism to its logical conclusion. Nietzsche’s cultural criticism destroys everything. Where Schopenhauer debunked everything apart from art, Nietzsche questions also the artist. The artist, for the romantics a visionary, a prophet, this artist acquires a guilty conscience under the influence of Nietzsche. Everything intellectual is called into question by Nietzsche. Is intellectualism perhaps a symptom of resentment against life, he asks. Nietzsche’s central idea is life, the right to life, life as a Dionysian power. Life as action, as intoxication. All theory must be in the service of life. The question for every intellectual, for every scientist, but also for every artist must be: does your scholarship, your art, serve life or damage it? Could it even deny life? Life and power are identical for Nietzsche. Reason, truth, morality, science – everything is called into question. Are they perhaps signs of decay, of decadence? Nietzsche interprets these traditional values as expressions of a life that is on the retreat. His penetrating question is always the same: How much science, how much truth can a person, a people, a culture bear, before the creativity of life, life as “will to power” suffers damage? This naturally gives rise to cultural criticism: Nietzsche exposes everything that hinders the unfolding of life – everything that secretly denies life – and de-

Proust and the fin de siècle 15

nounces it. Any attitude or person denying life and practising escapism, however subtly that may be done, is “decadent.”7 He detects decay in Platonism, in Schopenhauer’s pessimism, he sees it in Wagner’s music, in romanticism, but particularly in Christianity. Nowhere is the negation of life so complete as in Christian morality. Nietzsche’s cultural criticism gains enormous influence in Europe. Together with Schopenhauer, he is the fashionable philosopher of the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. But isn’t it paradoxical that the likes of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche become popular at a time of the most sensational inventions and discoveries? And they are not alone in their vehement cultural criticism. In the second half of the nineteenth century numerous important artists turn against the new age, afraid of its materialism, its banality. They deliberately withdraw from society, they devote themselves to their art. This appears paradoxical because Europe simultaneously displays evidence of extreme self confidence in its political and economic power; this is the age of colonialism, of imperialism. But Thomas Carlyle had a feel for the changes to come: “Consider now, if they asked us, will you give up your Indian Empire or your Shakespeare, you English … Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakespeare does not go, he lasts forever with us.”8 Technical achievements are the order of the day: in 1869 the Suez Canal is opened; its engineer, Ferdinand de Lesseps, is one of the greatest celebrities of his time. Paris is the first city to be provided with a complete electricity supply network, and is known for a long time as the “city of light”. The railway, the automobile and aeroplane make their appearance. They are optimistically called “means of communication” which suggests that they will strengthen peace and prosperity, support the brotherhood of man and unify the world. The artists greet all these technical advances with a feeling of fascination, which, however, is often tinged with horror rather than enthusiasm. John Ruskin, the English cultural critic, for example, thunders like no other against the railway and the mechanisation of his country. International exhibitions, which take place every four years from 1851, alternating between London and Paris – and occasionally other capitals – are the visible expression of this strong faith in progress, in liberation through science and technology. Liberal society celebrates itself. At the Paris Exhibition in 1867, incidentally, Krupp displays the latest cast steel cannon, which is to be successfully employed by Germany in the war of 1870. And the artist? He is appalled by progress, by the wonders of science, because he cannot feel at home in the increasingly mechanised world. Currents

16 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’

like Symbolism in France, the Arts and Crafts Movement in England, are reactions against the increasing rationalisation of the world. The justification for rationalisation is freedom, the self realisation of man. Why does the artist resist this? Is he on the side of the opponents of progress, of the reactionaries? He is in fact accused of this, and he really has a guilty conscience. Or maybe he is just talked into this? From Nietzsche up to Freud, art itself is thrown into question. Freud himself, in Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), portrayed art as a product of the sublimation of psychological complexes which would otherwise produce illness and neurosis. Freud’s work comes towards the end of the debate of the second half of the nineteenth century, concerning the connection between art and illness. This period was marked by the appearance of medical studies of genius, madness and degeneration. Great interest was paid to the question of the heritability of nervous diseases, as in the work of the physician J.J. Moreau, with his contribution in 1859 on the relation between genius and madness – one of the first such studies from a medical point of view. The studies and investigations by the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his Italian colleague Cesare Lombroso are in the same area and have great influence even beyond their specialty These studies of genius and madness are connected with the great medical interest in the nervous system, which is considered the seat of emotional life. At the end of the eighteenth century the real function of the nerves was discovered; then in the nineteenth century they were seen as the centre of the emotions. The cause of depression and neurosis (neuros = nerve) began to be seen in a damaged and distorted nervous system, so that during the course of the nineteenth century the nerves displaced the heart as the centre of emotional life. Our use of language still reflects this image: in words like “nervous”, “enervating”; and in expressions like “getting on my nerves” and “touching a nerve”. The Dutch writer Louis Couperus and many other fin de siècle novelists fill their books with “nervous ailments”. Hugo von Hofmannsthal mocked at this, talking about a “fashion for old furniture and new nervosities” in connection with D’Annunzio.9 The idea that art was not possible without illness, without deviancy, without decadence, without signs of bodily or mental weakness, was current in the nineteenth century. Dostoyevsky and Thomas Mann illustrate this, and Proust did not remain aloof from this discussion. The artist of the fin de siècle, this “nervous” person, cannot feel at home in a mechanised world of steam locomotives. He is melancholic. Full of Weltschmerz, he can discover beauty only in evil, in the perverse.

Proust and the fin de siècle 17

Charles Baudelaire is a prime example in this respect: the great Parisian poet published his work under the title Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers Of Evil) (1857). This brought him great influence both inside and outside France, and he became the forerunner and ground breaker for the “poètes maudits”. He is unmatched in his description of cultural unease. The central theme of Les Fleurs du Mal is the modern human, unhappy with himself, in a world of ennui and spleen. What Baudelaire and the Symbolists knew as “spleen” and is known today as “frustration” was earlier known as tentatio tristitiae, the temptation of melancholy. To give in to the temptation was a sin. It was only after the late eighteenth century that melancholy became acceptable under the name Weltschmerz or spleen. The artist savoured it like sweet poison until he was overcome by its deadly power, without making any serious use of it for his etheric art. The artist of the fin de siècle felt weak and powerless. Unable to face life, he withdrew to his ivory tower, his artificial world, his – to use Baudelaire’s phrase – paradis artificiel. A typical representative of this attitude is des Esseintes, the protagonist of A Rebours (Against the Grain) (1884) by J.K. Huysmans. Des Esseintes is the “décadent” par excellence, and he revels in his decadence. He does not want to be otherwise; he derives subtle pleasure from the feeling of being an epigone. He is an aesthete, radical in his rejection of the “vulgar” world. He substitutes for reality, which is too much for him and which he despises, a dream, a hallucination, a perfect illusion: instead of travelling to London, he surrounds himself with the elements of such a journey, including the cries of sea birds. He uses drugs, known then as excitants or stimulants, to facilitate his entry to an artificial world. Only exquisite stimuli, only macabre or perverse delights still have any effect on him. Among the most shocking passages of the book is that where des Esseintes picks a poverty-stricken boy from the street, dresses him and feeds him, introduces him to the world of the rich, lets him taste the most exotic dishes, fulfills his every wish, only to leave him, after he has been totally spoilt, back on the street. After that he scours the morning newspaper every day, in the perverse hope of reading about a robbery with murder that his pupil has committed. So far can belief in fate, in decadence, go; such excesses can be the result of the love of decline. And Huysmans’ fate: suicide? No, conversion to the Roman Catholic faith, return to the mother church – even if one must wonder about the role of decadent motivation in this. In England Oscar Wilde is the representative of aestheticism, of the mentality of the fin de siècle in its purest form – in his lifestyle and his writings, and in particular in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The main character of

18 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’

the book is Lord Henry Wotton, a dandy who sees life as the composition of a work of art. He forms an association with the handsome twenty year old Dorian Gray and projects onto him his artificial ideal: his life should become a work of art. Dorian Gray does not age; his portrait gets older in his place. However, his wild life of debauchery, his pursuit of pleasure with its demand for ever stronger stimuli, does age him quickly. His decay is only visible to an outside observer, he notices nothing of it and delights narcissistically in his own beauty, contrasting it with his picture which carries the burden of his shame. But when he meets the painter of his portrait, who accuses him of ruining his life, he is shaken. He attempts to suppress this feeling by murdering the painter, by smoking opium, but it does not work, he cannot free himself from his growing unease. One day, tired of life and full of self hate, he plunges a knife into his own picture and so destroys himself. When the room is opened, the portrait is in its original condition, and beneath it is lying the bloody body of an old, withered man in evening dress, covered in wrinkles and disgusting to look at. Dorian Gray and A Rebours are extreme and not even particularly subtle literary examples of decadence. The “decadents” are immediately recognisable by the attributes with which they surround themselves: their favourite flower is the exotic, sumptuous orchid. The portrait by the fashionable painter of the time Jacques-Emile Blanche, of the young Proust, includes an orchid. At the time Proust was leading the life of a dandy, or to be more precise: he was seen as a dandy. The “decadents” love peacocks and the iridescence of their plumage; they love the colours violet and lilac and metallic effects, they surround themselves with luxury – “luxe, calme, volupté” (Baudelaire) – they wear exquisite materials, especially silk, they are interested in other periods of decline like the Hellenistic age, the late Roman and the Byzantine empires. “Je suis l’Empire à la fin de la Décadence”, wrote Verlaine in his sonnet Langueur. Normal love is not intended for them, the women are all androgynous in the paintings of Aubrey Beardsley, Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.10 Their interest in Salome is striking. This minor character from the New Testament acquires an enormously inflated significance for the writer Oscar Wilde, the composer Richard Strauss or the painter Gustave Moreau. The “decadents” recognise no normal relationship with a woman: she is always a “femme fatale”. In reality most of the “decadents” are openly or secretly homosexual: Wilde, Beardsley, Couperus. They regard death with a mixture of lust and horror. Possessed by “Todessehnsucht”, they are the ones who, since 1876, make the pilgrimage to Bayreuth for a performance of the Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan and Isolde, Parsifal or another of the “master’s” operas.

Proust and the fin de siècle 19

Richard Wagner is the great, the powerful musical figure of the second half of the nineteenth century. His music expresses all the elements already mentioned of the fin de siècle: death yearning, perversity, luxury, sexual ambiguity. All the themes of the fin de siècle are combined in Wagner’s music; fate is the driving force throughout. Wagner found passionate devotees in the whole of Europe, but especially in France, where a special Revue Wagnérienne was founded in 1885. The great admirers of Wagner included poets and writers like Moréas, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and also Proust himself. And the first great admirer of Wagner in France was Baudelaire. When in 1860 he heard pieces from Tannhäuser, Lohengrin and Der Fliegende Holländer, he fell under the spell of this new music from the first bar. Almost all the writers of the fin de siècle were fascinated by Wagner, and anyone who was not would hardly dare to admit it. Couperus too was a great admirer of Wagnerian music, as well as Thomas Mann, who remained fascinated by him his whole life long. Wagner fulfilled all the requirements of an over-refined nature. For the sensitive person who pines for darkness and death, he offers complete satisfaction; with his operas he establishes a new religion, a new mythology; his music has the effect of a narcotic. Under the influence of the overwhelming power of the “eternal melody”, the “decadent” forgets his own frailty; his suffering in this world receives its confirmation. The fin de siècle artist suffers and feels his own weakness, and his characters are created in his own image. The protagonists of the novels of the fin de siècle, the Hannos [from the novel Buddenbrooks], the Eline Veres, waste away, age quickly, fear getting old, cannot measure up to the demands of the world. The artist feels himself “déraciné” – uprooted – an expression from the novel Les Déracinés by the French writer Maurice Barrès. But the artist is not the only one who feels his weakness: especially in France there are many rightwing writers possessed by the fear that their nation is old and declining and threatened by collapse. These writers were under the influence of the traumatic débâcle of 1870-71, the disastrous and humiliating defeat of France by the Germany of Bismarck. On top of that, the birth rate had fallen sharply, which was seen as biological evidence for the degeneration of France. In the works of these right-wing writers France was portrayed like the Athens of the fourth century, in decline, threatened by a strong, barbaric Sparta, in this case Germany. The works of Maurice Barrès, of Charles Maurras, the leading light of the Action Française, express this concern and fear of the threatening presence of Germany. These writers are desperately seeking a curative, which Maurras sees in an emphasis on Latinness and the ancient virtues of the “French race” at the time of

20 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’

the ancien regime. That is supposedly the only way to new energy, to new vitality – but it is absolutely obvious that this proposed cure is itself an expression of decadence and fatalism. Latinness, Roman and Germanic “races”: these expressions have entered history to play their fatal role. The idea that races, just like individuals, can possess higher or lower character traits, that there can be higher or lower races, starts to spread: the Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau claims to show in his Sur l’inégalité des races humaines (An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) (1853) that racial mixing is what causes the decline of a people, or, to be more exact, the mixing of “higher” races with “lower”. This is also supposed to be the case when the dominant, conquering race absorbs the defeated race. In his opinion the Germanic race had maintained its “aryan” and superior core the most purely and persistently. That meant for France that it could remain vital as long as the Germanic element dominated. But according to Gobineau, that had long since ceased to be the case. To him the future of the French people looked dark. For Charles Maurras the higher, noble element was not the Germanic, but the Roman. This had to be strengthened by all available means – degenerate factors like socialists, Jews and Germans had to be eliminated. The word “degenerate”, by the way, is a racist expression that fits with the thinking of the fin de siècle. The discussion about the “health” of a culture or a people did not arise by chance. In the nineteenth century a people was seen as an organism, as a biological phenomenon. A wide range of fin de siècle intellectuals saw western culture as decadent and degenerate. An individual like Nietzsche could declare himself the physician of the culture, but many just enjoyed the approaching downfall like a classical tragedy: the “decadents”. This was the time in which Proust grew up. In the following we will show which means he used to avoid suffocating in this atmosphere. As will become clear, it was primarily three English speaking cultural thinkers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin who helped him to free himself from his decadent milieu.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) Up to now the possible influence of the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson on Proust’s thinking has not received much attention. Cattaui may have spoken of Emerson as “his real master”11, but that’s as far as he went.

Proust and the fin de siècle 21

The first question to approach is exactly when Proust became aware of Emerson. In Les Plaisirs et les Jours we find four quotations from Emerson’s Essays (1841-1844). They appear as a kind of motto at the beginning of a story. The first edition of Les Plaisirs et les Jours was published in 1896 – though most of the stories in the book had already appeared in journals like Le Banquet, La Revue Blanche and La Revue Hebdomadaire, starting from 1892. But the passages quoted from Emerson did not yet appear there.12 It may have been the 1894 translation by I. Will that woke Proust’s interest in Emerson. This translation of the Essays includes a foreword by Maurice Maeterlinck, and also some essays, such as The Poet, which were omitted from the earlier (1851) translation of Emerson’s Essays.13 Perhaps relevant in this connection is a passage in a letter that Proust wrote to Reynaldo Hahn, on 18 January 1895: “I am still in bed, drunk with reading Emerson.” a 14 So we assume that Proust did not discover and read Emerson before 1894, which does not mean that he had not heard his name earlier than that. In the year 1895 Proust started work on Jean Santeuil.15 Was reading Emerson a stimulus? The four quotations are not only typical of Emerson, but also, as we will see later, of Proust himself. He uses them to mark the new direction his thoughts are taking. The epigraph to La mort de Baldassare Silvande goes: “Apollo kept the flocks of Admetus, said the poets. Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.”16 The Emerson quotation to Fragments de comédie italienne goes: “And as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance and the water pot, lose all their meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline.”17 The epigraph to Les Regrets, rêveries couleur du temps goes: “So the poet’s habit of living should be set on a key so low and plain, that the common influences should delight him. His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water.”18 Before La Fin de la jalousie stands this quotation from Emerson: “The soul may be trusted to the end. That which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations, must be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful, and so on for ever.”19 In the unfinished work Jean Santeuil Emerson is mentioned twice and each time with great admiration: Proust calls him a fellow spirit, a friend in whom he

a Je suis encore couché lisant Emerson avec ivresse.

22 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’

recognises himself. And his sympathy and admiration for the American are so great that he longs for new works from him.20 Also during the time when Proust is concerning himself intensively with Ruskin (between 1900 and 1906), he talks about Emerson repeatedly and with great respect. Despite his veneration for the author of the Essays, the weaknesses of Emerson’s monistic philosophy do not escape his notice. Monism is an essential part of Emerson’s thought. This idea of cosmic unity seems to have its origins in magical thinking. Reality is represented as an endlessly varied universe, as a living unity. This teaching keeps recurring in the course of cultural development, and so represents a constant in the spiritual history of humankind. E.R. Curtius rightly remarks that this teaching cannot really be regarded as a philosophy, even if it sometimes presents itself in a philosophical form. It is just as little a religion, even when it expresses itself in myths and mysteries. It manifests itself in art and literature, without being a figment of the imagination. It appears in theories of physics, chemistry and biology, but is not a science. Its origin lies deeper; it outlives all philosophies, religions, systems. “It is spread over the world like a seed that can germinate at any time and in any place.” 21 Monism is of oriental origin and permeates the thinking of antiquity. It can be found in Neoplatonic and Hermetic thought, and in the Kabbalah. It stands out in the spiritual movement of the Renaissance and mixes with the flowering of the sciences and humanism. In the seventeenth century it can be detected in the work of Leibniz and in heterodox mysticism, in the eighteenth century in the natural philosophers and the world reformers. It is one of the components of the spiritual syncretism of the nineteenth century. Swedenborg is one of the most important representatives of this teaching. Monism has its own symbolism. Its highest symbol is the circle or sphere: closed but unlimited, completeness as unity. In accordance with this, his thinking is cyclic. This is how Curtius describes this important minor current in European culture, which regularly breaks through, particularly in the work of artists and writers.22 Proust also felt strongly attracted in the ‘90s to this thinking, which he met in the Emersonian variant. It helped him to free himself from the pessimistic and naturalistic atmosphere of the fin de siècle, from its paralysing determinism. Emerson is an “eye opener” for Proust: it opens his eyes for a new, transcendental aesthetic, a learning process in which both Carlyle and Ruskin will also play a great part. Without an understanding of the tradition which Emerson represented, the background and the message of A la Recherche will remain a mystery. As Curtius correctly remarks, Emerson did not reveal any new truths. But he dis-

Proust and the fin de siècle 23

covers a new, subtle tone in which to present eternal truths, allowing him to act as a guide for Proust and many of his contemporaries.23 Emerson, Carlyle and Ruskin – to anticipate some of the following – provide philosophical depth and legitimation for Proust’s “search”. Proust must have read Emerson, as the young Thomas Mann read Schopenhauer, with deep and intense satisfaction. But what a difference between the two philosophers: Emerson’s philosophy is based on a strong faith in the abilities of humankind: its atmosphere is not that of late autumn, but of an early morning in summer which tempts us out: “Come out into the azure. Love the day.”24 The world is full of hidden beauty and harmony, which continually seeks new expression through every individual. One theme keeps recurring in diverse forms in his Essays: humankind and nature are complementary. The individual is a microcosmos. Every object, even the smallest, reflects the universe. Everything is symbolic, everything is “correspondence”. Happy the person who discovers this harmony and carries it further. “The world globes itself in a drop of dew (…). God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb.”25 This quotation is from the essay Compensation. For Proust the whole philosophy of Emerson is contained in the expression “compensation”. Precisely because the world forms a unity, every part produces its opposite, every separation is negated at the same time. Everything in nature works to restore balance. In the life of man, too, this complementarity is at work. “Our strength grows out of our weakness (…) every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor.”26 The heaviest blow does not have to paralyse us. Even the death of a loved one, which throws us into such a deep sorrow that we threaten to drown, can later cause our lives to take a new and more fitting form. This central idea of Emerson’s, that the evil which we encounter may be the condition for a higher good, left a lasting impression on Proust. He finds it in the works of the English writer George Eliot, whom he so respected, in particular in Adam Bede.27 He will also express it in his own work, A la Recherche. Here Proust repeatedly talks of his conviction – of which more later28 – that suffering and illness are necessary in order to reach a deeper insight, that they have a complementary effect which is beneficial. Emerson celebrates the great reconciliation. The world and the self are not opposed to one another, nor do they dissolve into each other, but they illuminate, they celebrate each other. Everyone who is true to himself and realises himself, realises the general order. The essays Self-Reliance and Spiritual Laws cover this, and say, Proust-like, “each man has his own vocation.” 29 Emerson’s monist view of the universe is connected with a pronounced consciousness of individuality and progress. His circle is a spiral. Our path is a slow climb, step by step, of a mysterious ladder: “There is no virtue which is final; all are initial.” 30 There

24 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’

is no place in his thinking for scepticism as a negation of life. In a calm, balanced, poetic and metaphorical style he develops his thoughts which are striking in their expressiveness without forming a system. His logic is simple and direct. He takes his images from nature, from daily life and from high art. One can well imagine what an effect these lively reflections must have had in the cloying atmosphere of the fin de siècle, exemplified here by Maeterlinck’s Serres Chaudes: O pity me that wander hence To haunt the precincts of intent, My soul is pale with impotence, Colorless and indolent.31 In Couperus’ novel Eline Vere the depressive Eline is prescribed Emerson’s vital philosophy as medicine: her cousin’s American friend recounts Emerson’s thoughts, which however are not powerful enough to cure Eline’s melancholy. She has already sunk too deep into a fatal depression. Emerson’s work issues an appeal, which calls on us: Have faith in yourself, don’t look back, work! “These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them.”32 We make the mistake of looking back full of nostalgia. “But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past.” 33 Emerson wants to drive out this melancholy. When we come face to face with the truth, time no longer plays a role. “It is the highest power of divine moments that they abolish our contrition also. I accuse myself of sloth and unprofitableness, day by day; but when these waves of God flow into me, I no longer reckon lost time.”34 The present and the future are all that count. The truth continually demands new incarnations. “We are idolaters of the Old.”35 “We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in its proper eternity and omnipresence (…). We linger in the ruins of the old tent (…). But we sit and weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty saith, “Up and onward for evermore”. We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither will we rely on the New. And so we walk ever with reverted eyes, like those monsters who look backwards.”36 History should not be seen as a justification for our weaknesses, but should be taken as a personal challenge.37 This resonates with Nietzsche’s heroic concept of history: Since greatness was once possible, so it will be possible again.38 It also reminds us of Proust’s delight over the new universes that each new artist adds to those which already exist, as so many incarnations of the truth.39 Emer-

Proust and the fin de siècle 25

son’s rousing call seems to echo this delight, in the words of Nietzsche “There are so many dawns that have not yet broken (glowed).”40 Emerson appeals insistently for us to remain true to ourselves and to give form to the self. The world, society, demands above all conformity; it does not love the real and the creative, but convention and habit.41 But for self-realisation, nonconformity is always necessary: “My life should be unique; it should be (…) a battle, a conquest, a medicine.”42 Again and again he emphasises the uniqueness of the individual, the duty and the joy of realizing oneself, in the here and now. “The fact that I am here, certainly shows me that the soul had need of an organ here. Shall I not assume the post?” 43 Finally we come to Emerson’s statements about art and artists. Emerson sees the world, fully in the sense of Neo-Platonism, as a symbol, as a “cipher”. The world does not exist solely for itself, but points beyond itself. It may be true that it usually appears to us cold and untouched like a monument; its great symbols which surround us, are not symbols for us but prosaic and banal trivia.44 As soon as we see with the eye of the soul or of the artist, however, what seemed banal is revealed in its full meaning. “Then cometh the god, and converts the statues into fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil which shrouded all things.”45 Every object is part of the Godly; every thing is part of the soul of the universe. Our task is to make this inner beauty visible. Every one in their own way. “Look in thy heart, and write.” 46 We must find the beauty in ourselves, not in others. Emerson stresses that art should not be more than an initiation.47 The Iliad, Dante and Shakespeare exist mainly to form new artists. Art which is pursued through egoism, through hedonism, degrades us. 48 Art becomes a refuge from the evil in life. Emerson speaks out against those people who “reject life as prosaic, and create a death which they call poetic.”49 No aestheticism! Existing art should challenge us to achieve the same, to celebrate this world and its phenomena in our own way, to express its godly character. The poet above all is called to this task. He is the one who makes everything holy. He can express the beauty of every phenomenon, because he sees beauty everywhere.50 “We are symbols, and inhabit symbols; workmen, work and tools, words and things, birth and death, all are emblems; but we sympathise with the symbols, and, being infatuated with the economical uses of things, we do not know that they are thoughts.” That is why we need the poet. “The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives them a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes, and a tongue, into every dumb and inanimate object.”51 Every age, including the present, needs its poet. It is not the case that train tracks and factories have driven poetry from the landscape “for these works of

26 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’

art are not yet consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the great order not less than the bee-hive, or the spider’s geometrical web.”52 These are the thoughts that led Emerson to issue his tremendous appeal to the future poets of America: “I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not, with sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare we chaunt our own times and social circumstances. If we filled the day with bravery, we should not shrink from celebrating it. Time and nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await. Dante’s praise is, that he dared to write his autobiography in colossal cipher, or into universality. We have yet no genius in America (…) which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture it so much admires in Homer; then in the middle age; then in Calvinism.”53 It is known how moved Walt Whitman was by these lines. He was to become the poet of America whom Emerson sought.54 Whitman was not the only one who followed Emerson’s appeal, but also Proust. We will seek to demonstrate that the modern age has found its poet in Proust.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) The transition from Emerson to Carlyle is not abrupt. Their mental worlds are not far from one another. But their tone is different. Emerson’s style is relaxed, cheerful and mystical, where Carlyle sounds more critical and tortured. They were friends and carried out an intensive correspondence. Proust concerned himself intensively with Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841). All references to Carlyle concern this work.55 In a letter from the year 1905 he writes that there hangs in his spartanly furnished room only one reproduction of a work of art, that of a portrait of Carlyle. “Tell your friend that in my intentionally naked room there is only one reproduction of a work of art: an excellent photograph of Whistler’s Carlyle in a serpentine overcoat like the dress in his portrait of his mother.” a 56 Proust must have read Carlyle’s writings somewhat later than those of Emerson. Although it is evident from an exchange of letters that he first came across the French translation of On Heroes in September 1895, references to this a Dites à votre ami que dans ma chambre volontairement nue, il y a une seule réproduction d’oeuvre d’art, une admirable photographie du ‘Carlyle’ de Whistler au pardessus serpentin comme la robe de sa ‘Mère’.

Proust and the fin de siècle 27

work do not appear until after he was already acquainted with Ruskin’s work.57 What did Proust see in Carlyle? On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History was written against the sceptical and unbelieving spirit of his time, against materialism and utilitarianism, against “Voltaire”, “persifleur par excellence”, who was called the most French of all Frenchmen, against the principles of the French Revolution: “No people ever were so little prone to admire at all as those French of Voltaire. Persiflage was the character of their whole mind; adoration had no-where a place in it.”58 Carlyle is opposed to the scepticism of the eighteenth century: “Scepticism means not intellectual Doubt alone, but moral Doubt; all sorts of infidelity, insincerity, spiritual paralysis (…) That was not an age of Faith, – an age of Heroes.”59 When he writes about Scandinavian mythology or Islam, in The Hero as Divinity and The Hero as Prophet, not only does he defend the justification of nonChristian religions, he also refutes materialistic explanations of their origins. He takes issue with those who see the world as a machine, as a mechanism.60 Against the spirit of his age, he defends the conviction that the world is a permanent wonder, an open secret. “This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.”61 He emphasises the need for “heroes”, for “great men”, who inform the rest of humanity about the wonder of the world. “The Great Man was always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame.” 62 Carlyle’s world has, apart from a strong Calvinist component, a Neoplatonic character. His philosophy is marked by a holistic view which also characterises Emerson’s and Ruskin’s thinking – as we shall see. His thinking includes the idea that the world perceived by the senses is just a symbol for a higher world; it is, in Carlyle’s words: “a Garment, a Clothing of the higher, celestial Invisible.”63 This quote is taken from the philosophical novel Sartor Resartus (1836). It is probable that Proust knew this work as well. In 1896-97 a French translation appeared.64 Here Carlyle developed a “philosophy of garments”: people and the world are symbols. They are like the garments of the invisible. They show and hide the spiritual. Garments all too quickly lose their meaning, becoming clichés. There is a danger that people will get attached to these emblems in idolatrous worship. “Symbols, like all terrestrial Garments wax old (…) It needs a scientific telescope, it needs to be reinterpreted and artificially brought near us, before we can so much know that it was the Sun.”65 For this reason Carlyle places great emphasis on “sincerity”, to which he attributes a value higher than that of “grace”. His “hero” confronts the essence of things, “bare before it face

28 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’

to face!”66 The beginning of all wisdom is “to look fixedly on Clothes, or even with armed eyesight, till they become transparent”.67 Only the eye of the soul can do this, not the bodily eye.68 So the world is not what it appears to be, it is not what the instruments of science can measure. In the course of history people have lost the feeling for the divine in their environment, they have become blind. “The world, which is now divine only to the gifted, was then divine to whosoever would turn his eye upon it.”69 It is the mission of the artist – the only “hero” of all time who can undergo continuous rebirth, while the “hero” as God or prophet definitely belongs to the past – to open the eyes of humanity to the beauty of the universe. He is necessary “to teach us (…) the stripping-off of those poor undevout wrappages, nomenclatures and scientific hearsays.”70 Proust must have followed with particular interest Carlyle’s treatment of the poet in The Hero as Poet, one of the most beautiful chapters in On Heroes.71 Carlyle begins by saying that our present mentality can no longer conceive of poet and prophet as the same. In some ancient languages, on the other hand, the words are synonymous, for example in the Latin expression “vates”. They are essentially the same, in that “they have penetrated both of them into the sacred mystery of the Universe; what Goethe calls “the open secret” (…) open to all, seen by almost none!”72 The poet is a messenger who makes visible for us mortals the divine mystery that lies behind all appearances. The art that he creates makes visible the hidden harmony of things, for everything that exists “has a harmony in the heart of it, or it would not hold together and exist.”73 We pay so much attention to Emerson, Carlyle, and then Ruskin, in order to illuminate the philosophical background before which Proust’s work should be seen. In addition we want to show that Proust’s idea of art and artists – a conception that is widespread in the Europe of the nineteenth century, particularly in German romanticism – in his case received considerable impulse from the English-speaking world. Proust read Carlyle and internalised him. All the same, his admiration is not uncritical. The highly abstract nature of Carlyle’s view disturbs him as an artist. The same criticism applies to Emerson. They don’t differentiate sufficiently. In an essay on Ruskin he writes: “Carlyle, in his Heroes, draws no distinction between Shakespeare and Cromwell, between Mahomet and Burns. Emerson includes among his Representative Men, both Swedenborg and Montaigne. Where this system goes wrong is in laying all the stress on the singleness of the reality

Proust and the fin de siècle 29

interpreted, in not allowing sufficiently for differences between the varying modes of interpretation”.a 74 As an artist, Proust is particularly sensitive for qualitative differences. “Art breathes only in the particular”, he could have said with André Gide.75 As a result he detects a certain disagreeable monotony in Emerson as well as Carlyle. Their variations are not independent enough, the danger of repetition is always threatening. The first impression they give is that of guides, of moralists. For Claudel, Rimbaud was the great revelation, for Gide it was initially Schopenhauer. 76 Proust became a pupil of the Anglo-Saxons. A further difference should be noticed between Emerson and Carlyle on the one hand, and Proust on the other. Carlyle was once characterised by the words “quest for the miraculousness of each moment.”77 This can be equally applied to Emerson. But there can be no talk of a real recherche in either case; from the beginning, the plurality of appearances is summed up as a unity. Emerson, in particular, is religious. He is fulfilled by the yearning to become one with the universe. A mystical tendency can be detected in him, which may be opposed by a strong sense of individuality, but not strongly enough to escape the dangers named by Proust. Emerson and also Carlyle have a kind of faith that Proust cannot share. For them the miracle has already occurred, and they report on it, with enthusiasm and delight. The words of both writers offer a view into that heaven which for Proust is only open for moments at a time. The garment of the world in A la Recherche is more stubborn and less easy to make transparent. As a result, Proust concentrates on the how, on the paths that lead to the discovery of these hidden “correspondences”. His work really is a recherche, really a search.

John Ruskin (1819-1900) John Ruskin and his work are more important for Proust than Emerson and Carlyle. Ruskin gave Emerson’s thinking a more concrete cast, which must have been very attractive for the artist Proust. Emerson’s main message, the reflection of the Godly in every particle of the universe, finds practical application with Ruskin, in relation to towns, churches and landscapes: The Stones of Venice, Ariadne Florentina, The Bible of Amiens carry the reader off into the beauty of a new, as yet unknown part of the world. Proust is quite clear about the difference a Dans ses Héros, Carlyle ne distingue pas entre Shakespeare et Cromwell, entre Mahomet et Burns. Emerson compte parmi ses Hommes réprésentatifs de l’humanité aussi bien Swedenborg que Montaigne. L’excès du systeme, c’est, à cause de l’unité de la réalité traduite, de ne pas différencier assez profondément les divers modes de traduction.

30 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’

between Emerson and Ruskin: Emerson’s thought is pure, Ruskin’s less so, since materialised. For Proust this is no disadvantage. Ruskin’s thought has taken form, is embodied in paintings, towns and churches. The Englishman’s writings have made accessible for him the beauty of towns like Venice, paintings like those of Carpaccio, churches like the Cathedral of Amiens. Ruskin has increased his desire for life.78 His exclamation: “ I suddenly saw the universe as something of infinite value,” a 79 must be understood in the light of the above. Proust first learned to see through the eyes of Ruskin. Ruskin reveals to him the beauty whose ubiquity Emerson had proclaimed. Ruskin finds it in the Swiss Alps just as in the paintings of Giotto. In Mornings in Florence he asks about the nature of Giotto’s greatness and his reinvigoration of the art of painting. “He defines, explains and exalts, every sweet incident of human nature and makes dear to daily life every mystic imagination of natures greater than our own. He reconciles, while he intensifies, every virtue of domestic and monastic thought. He makes the simplest household duties sacred and the highest religious passions serviceable and just.”80 Giotto’s principles are: “You shall see things as they are. And the least with the greatest, because God made them. And the greatest with the least, because God made you, and gave you eyes and a heart.”81 Giotto’s art is religious since the artist celebrates not his own work, but the work of God. The quotation clearly reveals the deepest root of Ruskin’s thinking, which is: “All great art is praise.”82 Ruskin shows the reader the beauty of the world in his own personal way. In Amiens he meets him at the station, takes him by the arm and leads him to the cathedral, after a stop at the baker to try a local speciality. He takes him in through the southern entrance, and then he begins his explanations. Radiant, competent, lively and with reverence – interrupting himself, deviating so widely that he seems to have lost the thread entirely, and then … with one leap he is back, re-linking his train of thought in an entirely unexpected way, its unity now visible in retrospect. This aspect of Ruskin immediately struck Proust. In a remark on his translation of Sesame and Lilies (1865) he writes: “That is his method. He passes from one idea to another without any apparent pattern. But in fact the imagination that leads him follows deep affinities which impose, independently of him, a higher logic.” b 83 Incidentally, Ruskin does not quite manage to restore this retrospective unity every time, Proust notes. As so often, the description applies better to a L’univers reprit tout d’un coup à mes yeux un prix infini. b C’est son procédé. Il passe d’une idée à l’autre sans aucun ordre apparent. Mais en réalité la fantaisie qui le mène suit ses affinités profondes qui lui imposent malgré lui une logique supérieure.

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Proust himself than to Ruskin. All the same, Proust’s analysis of Ruskin’s style suggested to Philip Kolb that Ruskin might have been the source of Proust’s idea of retrospective unity.84 Ruskin is unrestrained, wild, moody, but always fascinating. In Modern Painters he covers thirty pages about the sea in an uninterrupted state of ecstasy. “There is the strong instinct in me, which I cannot analyse, to draw and describe the things I love (…), a sort of instinct like that for eating and drinking.”85 The poetry that he unfolds in Modern Painters is unmatched in his works, save perhaps for some passages from The Stones of Venice. For example the section where the author conjures up the town as approached from the sea.86 Even now that poetic and yet precise description does not leave the reader unmoved. He immediately feels the need to explore Venice in Ruskin’s footsteps. And that is what Proust did. Under Ruskin’s spell he visited the Italian towns of Venice, Padua, Verona and the cathedrals of France. Ruskin’s books were what opened for him, and for many others, the beauty of art and nature. In his own words: “Like The Muses leaving their Father Apollo to carry Light into the World, Ruskin’s ideas left, one by one, the divine brain which bore them, and, incarnate in living books, went forth to instruct peoples.” a 87 When did Proust first come into contact with Ruskin’s world? Probably the first occasion was in Le Bulletin de l’Union pour l’action morale, which, under the editorship of Paul Desjardins, published a selection of the Englishman’s writings in French between 1893 and 1903. Around 1896 he received from Robert de Montesquiou Ruskin’s outspoken review of Whistler’s Nocturnes, entitled The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. At about the same time he met Marie Nordlinger. Originally from England, she lived in Paris from 1896 to 1898 and provided him with much valuable information.88 But his main introduction to Ruskin’s thinking was Robert de la Sizeranne’s Ruskin et la religion de la Beauté, which was serialised in the Revue des Deux Mondes from December 1895 to April 1897, in which year it appeared as a book. 89 He was soon so enthusiastic that he decided, also under pressure from his mother, to translate some of Ruskin’s works. Given that he spoke hardly any English, he had to rely on those around him who knew the language, including Marie Nordlinger and his mother.90 After Ruskin’s death in 1900, Proust published several articles which attest to an interpretation which was profound and yet personal. One can feel how he is alternately critic and author, most sharply in his foreword to Sésame et les Lys, Sur la lecture (On Reading), which we will return to later.91 a Comme les ‘Muses quittant Apollon leur père pour aller éclairer le monde’ [Title of a painting by Gustave Moreau], une à une les idées de Ruskin avaient quitté la tête divine qui les avait portées et, incarnées en livres vivants, étaient allées enseigner les peuples.

32 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’

First he started work on the translation of The Bible of Amiens, which he completed in 1904. The notable philosopher Henri Bergson, who presented the translation to the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques, described it as an important contribution to the psychology of Ruskin.92 Even before the Bible d’Amiens had appeared, Proust started on the translation of Sésame et Lilies, which appeared in 1906. 93 Around the same time, Proust’s thinking ceased to be dominated by Ruskin. In a letter to Marie Nordlinger, whose help with the translation was of incalculable value, he wrote (in late 1904 or early 1905) that the old man was starting to bore him.94 He did not take up a suggestion of translating St Mark’s Rest with the justification: “Otherwise I shall die without ever haven written anything of my own.” a 95 And in December 1906 he wrote in a letter “I’ve closed forever the era of translations, which Mama encouraged.” b 96 She had died in 1905. His mother was the main driving force behind the translations. As early as 1902 he wrote to a friend that he did not see translating as his real work: hundreds of fictional characters demanded to become flesh and blood, thousands of ideas flitted around him like the shadows around Odysseus, demanding to be allowed to take form.97 After his mother’s death he must have felt even more insistently the duty to give shape to his own life. About 1907 the outline of the novel that he wanted to write took definite form. Perspectivism, as will be examined in detail in Chapter IV, is the illuminating idea that marks the conclusion of his hesitant attempts. It would have obstructed him in his own work if he had spent any more time on the work of the English cultural philosopher. The point was not to be an expert on Ruskin, but to realise his own life. From 1907/1908 on, he worked on what was to become A la Recherche.98 Still, Ruskin’s influence was enduring. In particular Proust owed him his knowledge of French Gothic and the Italian early Renaissance. The role and significance of Giotto, of Botticelli, of Carpaccio and generally the art of the Middle Ages in Proust’s work are unthinkable without Ruskin’s mediation. In connection with the art of the Middle Ages, we should mention Emile Mâle, whose book L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France Proust knew and loved.99 In A la Recherche one comes across passages which are clearly inspired by the work of the French art historian.100 We will not go into it further, but we will mention a second aspect of Ruskin’s influence. After Emerson and Carlyle, Ruskin once again brought to Proust’s attention the ethos of the artist. His involvement with Ruskin allowed Proust to clarify his idea of art and distinguish it from the dominant aestheticism. To demonstrate this, there follows an analysis of an article by Proust about a Je mourrais sans avoir rien écrit de moi. b J’ai clos à jamais l’ère des traductions que maman favorisait.

Proust and the fin de siècle 33

Ruskin. What makes this essay relevant is the exposition there of both the reasons for his admiration and also his criticism.101 Proust begins by saying that Ruskin provides grounds for widely divergent opinions. His books are considered contradictory. To some, he appears to be a realist. “And it is true that he often declared that the artist ought to devote himself to the pure imitation of nature – ‘rejecting nothing, despising nothing, selecting nothing’.” a 102 To others, he appears to be an idealist. Here, too, appropriate quotations could be found. Some accuse him of sacrificing art to science. Did he not say that every rock formation, every type of earth and every cloud form should be investigated with geological and meteorological precision?103 On the other hand he grants the imagination too high a status. In fact it cannot be denied that a certain naive finalism not unlike the style of Bernardin de SaintPierre can be detected in the assertion that God divided the orange into slices so that people could eat it more easily. Ruskin also said that God had created the primary colours in order to distinguish everything pure and precious from things that are merely useful or even harmful, for which grey and ordinary colours were reserved. That is why the crocodile is grey, but the innocent lizard bright green.104 Proust notes with amusement and a touch of mockery all these contradictory opinions which gave Ruskin a reputation for inconsistency.105 Unjustly, according to Proust; it is not the contradictions which are characteristic of Ruskin’s works, but their main quality is the culte de beauté, the cult of beauty.106 The only religion that Ruskin knew was (according to Proust) the adoration of beauty. And this reverence must not be misunderstood as dilettantism, as amateurish devotion, Proust warned his contemporaries. For they showed all too great an inclination to this attitude: “To a dilettante and aesthetic age, a man who adores Beauty is one who, observing no other religion, and regarding her as his sole Divinity, passes his life in the enjoyment to be found in the voluptuous contemplation of works of art.” b 107 Proust opposes this lascivious, hedonistic interpretation: one cannot love beauty creatively, if one loves her only for the pleasure she provides. One must love her “as something real that exists outside us, something infinitely more important than the pleasure it affords.” c 108 Ruskin was far from being a dilettante. a Et, en effet, il a souvent répété que l’artiste devrait s’attacher à la pure imitation de la nature, ‘sans rien rejeter, sans rien mépriser, sans rien choisir’. b Pour un âge (…) de dilettantes et d’esthètes, un adorateur de la Beauté, c’est un homme qui, ne pratiquant pas d’autre culte que le sien et ne reconnaissant pas d’autre dieu qu’elle, passerait sa vie dans la jouissance que donne la contemplation voluptueuse des oeuvres d’art. c comme quelque chose de réel existant en dehors de nous et infiniment plus important que la joie qu’elle nous donne.

34 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’

Rather, he was one of those people in the mould of Carlyle, who are convinced, on the one hand, of the vanity of all pleasure, and on the other, of the existence of a higher reality which they perceive with the mind’s eyes.109 These people are granted their talent in order to portray this reality in their work, and they are prepared to sacrifice their brief existence for this reality, which they regard as of much greater value than life itself.110 Ruskin’s aesthetics grow from this underlying principle. The important stations of his life are marked by the discovery of a new movement in art or architecture, the year in which he grasps Abbéville, Rouen or the significance of Titian. Ruskin and Carlyle saw the poet as “a sort of scribe imparting, at the dictation of nature, a more or less important part of her secret.” a 111 It is therefore his duty to avoid adding anything from himself to the godly message he receives. This seems to dispose of the accusation of realism as well as that of intellectualism. The reality that the artist should record is both material and intellectual: “The matter is real because it is the expression of the spirit.” b 113 Ruskin also ridiculed a simple imitation of externals. The reason he attributed so much value to the external appearance, was that the essence of things manifested itself there: “The configuration of an object is not only the image of its nature, it is the keyword of its destiny, the epitome of its history.” c 113 If there is only one Reality and the artist, with his gift, can perceive it, then it does not matter what material he uses to express its being. But Proust warns the artist against too undifferentiated an approach. The relevant passages are quoted in the sections on Emerson and Carlyle. The artist must obey an inner voice which tells him what is important and is to be “translated”. Ruskin’s inner voice, his source of inspiration, was the Bible. “This is”, Proust continues, “the central point of his aesthetics”. His aesthetic perception was based on his religiosity, and so his aesthetics could not be distorted by his religious feelings. Quite the opposite: his religious respect protected him from mixing the impression a work of art made on him with anything separate from this impression. Since the Christian faith formed the basis for his intellectual being, it was natural for Ruskin to entertain a preference for Christian art: the medieval architecture, sculpture and painting of France and Italy. He loved them with a “disinterested passion”. And no other has felt the unity of the Christian Middle Ages a Une sorte de scribe écrivant sous la dictée de la nature une partie plus ou moins importante de son secret. b La matière est réelle, parce qu’elle est une expression de l’esprit. c La configuration d’une chose n’est pas seulement l’image de sa nature, c’est le mot de sa destinée et le tracé de son histoire.

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as he did. His great importance therefore rests on his discovery of the “PreRaphaelites”; that is to say, points out Proust – not without irony – he discovers the artists before Raphael, but not the artists after Turner. “His divine work consisted not in raising up the living but in breathing new life into the dead.” a 114 This love for Christian art has two sides: on the one hand it introduces us to the beauty of the art of the Middle Ages, allows us to appreciate this art and at the same time to share Ruskin’s enthusiasm. On the other hand, it encourages us to reject mechanisation and industrialised art. His studies on Christian art, Proust was convinced, confirm this aversion. Ruskin was convinced that “all beautiful things were made when the men of the Middle Ages believed in the pure, joyous and lovely lesson of Christianity.” b 115 As soon as faith in God was lost, the decline of art set in. One would now expect Proust to talk about the activities with which Ruskin filled the second half of his life: his work as a social reformer, his attempt to reestablish free, personal artisanship. Concerned about beauty, Ruskin will seek social conditions which allow the beautiful to develop. This aspect, which we will come back to later, does not seem to interest Proust. After enthusiasm and admiration: doubt, criticism, not of Ruskin’s theories, but of one aspect which Proust deals with critically in the second part of his article: Ruskin’s idolatry. Proust defines this quality, so typical of Ruskin, with the man’s own words as “the serving with the best of our hearts and minds, some dear or sad fantasy which we have made for ourselves, while we disobey the present call of the Master, who is not dead, and who is not now fainting under His cross, but requires us to take up ours.” c 116 At first, Proust had not recognised this quality in Ruskin, but now he sees this “internal dilettantism”, as he names his idolatry elsewhere, as fundamental to Ruskin’s thought. He shows that in Ruskin intellectual and moral honesty is in a continual struggle with a deeply rooted idolatry, with his aestheticism. In the space of a few months, Proust has become much more critical. He now understands that Ruskin’s ethical opinions have an aesthetic origin, which Ruskin himself did not recognise sufficiently clearly or which he denied. “The doctrines he professed were moral, not aesthetic, yet he chose them for their beauty. And because he did not wish to present them formally as things of

a Son oeuvre divine ne fut pas de susciter des vivants, mais de ressusciter des morts. b toutes les belles choses furent faites, quand les hommes du moyen-age croyaient la pure, joyeuse et belle leçon du christianisme. c le fait de servir avec le meilleur de nos coeurs et de nos esprits quelque chère ou triste image que nous nous sommes créée, pendant que nous désobéissons à l’appel présent du Maître, qui n’est pas mort, qui ne défaille pas en ce moment sous sa croix, mais nous ordonne de porter la nôtre.

36 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’

beauty, but as statements of truth, he was forced to lie to himself about the reasons that had let him to adopt them.” a 117 As an illustration of Ruskin’s aestheticism, Proust quotes a passage from The Stones of Venice about the causes of the decay of Venice. The text seems to subordinate the beautiful to the moral, but in reality the reverse is here the case. Ruskin’s idolatry consists here in that he condemns the sins of the Venetians the more severely because they are committed in the palace of the Doges – which neighbours a richly decorated cathedral – and because the Bible text – Know thou that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment – is not simply cut in stone, as in the church portals of the North, but is accompanied here by quotations from the gospels or the books of the prophets, in mosaics.118 Proust himself wants to try and resist this tendency to aestheticism, this “intellectual sin” par excellence, which he says is most widespread among artists in his time. He wants to remain sincere. His liking for hawthorn will not lead him to become a collector of pictures of hawthorns “I do not venerate the hawthorn: I go to see it and to inhale its scent.” b 119 His essay ends with the unexpected introduction of a new topic, but one which captives him: the impossibility of recalling the past by an effort of will. As already indicated, Proust does not lose a single word on Ruskin’s reform activities and social theories, although they are not unknown to him. But he does not find them important or essential to Ruskin.120 That is the side of Ruskin that appealed to him the least. This “engagement” – considered below in more detail – was seen by Proust as “not listening to the inner voice”, as rejection of the appeal to realise oneself. Still, Proust knew of Ruskin’s dislike of mechanisation and industrialised art. At first, Proust accounted for this distaste with Ruskin’s predilection for the Christian art of the Middle Ages, an epoch when, according to Ruskin, culture was borne by faith.121 There are, however, sufficient reasons to reconsider Proust’s view in the light of the second part of his observations, in which he discovered Ruskin’s idolatry as the core of his thinking. It is exactly this idolatry which is the cause of Ruskin’s distaste for the modern world. This becomes clear when we examine the content of his reform ideas more closely. The signs appear very early on, of Ruskin’s extreme worry about the possibilities for art within a mechanised, irreligious and sceptical age like that of the nineteenth century. This worry turned him into a utopian socialist. He wants to educate people to beauty. He wants to a Les doctrines qu’il professait étaient des doctrines morales et non des doctrines esthétiques, et pourtant il les choisissait pour leur beauté. Et comme il ne voulait pas les présenter comme belles, mais comme vraies, il était obligé de se mentir à lui-même sur la nature des raisons qui les lui faisait adopter. b Je ne vénère pas l’aubépine, je vais la voir et la respirer.

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preserve or restore the conditions which he believes are conducive to great art. In the first half of his life he was primarily interested in nature and art, then from the late 1850s he turned towards man, towards society.122 This change takes place in the middle of Modern Painters. “In Modern Painters I (1843) and II (1846) Ruskin looked at mountain peaks and saw God; in Modern Painters III, IV and V (ab1856) he looked at their bases and saw shattered rocks and impoverished villages. The face of the Creator gradually withdrew from the creation and in its place man emerged as a tragic figure in the foreground of a still potent, but flawed nature.”123 In The Two Paths (1859) he declares that fine art can only be produced by people who are surrounded by beautiful things and who have the time to look at them.124 But England has turned its towns into chimneys and its artisans into the slaves of machines. This accusation is the theme of Modern Architecture and Design and of many lectures that Ruskin delivered in the late ‘50s in the industrialised Midlands. In 1862 Unto this last expounded his message of social reform. The book had a great influence on William Morris and even into the twentieth century it influenced such disparate personalities as the politician Clement Attlee, the statesman Mahatma Gandhi, and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.125 The ire which asserts itself in Sesame and Lilies and The Crown of Wild Olive, is that of the Old Testament prophets. He detests, rages, curses. Fors Clavigera, a collection of uplifting letters to workers, is a chronicle of his suffering “between the longing for rest (…) and the sense of the terrific call of human crime for resistance and of human misery for help – though it seems to me as the voice of a river of blood which can sweep me down in the midst of its black clots, helpless.”126 Looking back at the time before Modern Painters, at the harmony that he enjoyed during this period, he writes: “That harmony is now broken and broken the world round: fragments, indeed, of what existed still exist, and hours of what is past still return; but month by month the darkness gains upon the day, and the ashes of the Antipodes glare through the night.”127 Only in Praeterita, his autobiography, which appeared between 1885 and 1889, and described his youth up to the death of his father in 1864, does his calm return.128 Proust had a predilection for this work of Ruskin.129 In Proust’s observations on Ruskin there is yet a third theme to be distinguished: Besides the theme of art and the question of the relation between real art and aestheticism, the theme of regaining the past (in its original form). Can the art of others help us with that? Yes, if it represents not a goal, but a point of departure. The art of others should release our own abilities. That is the main message of his foreword to Sésame et les Lys. This foreword, Sur la Lecture or Journées de lecture, which is as long as an essay, is a fine example of the mix-

38 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’

ing of “novel” and “criticism”. It would well be a part of A la Recherche. It begins with a precise and poetic description of the moments that he spent with a book in his youth: “No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.” a 130 Lines like that are reminiscent of the most beautiful passages in Du Côté de chez Swann. Here Proust expresses the idea that life, which may at the moment seem grey and boring, recovers its original value in the artistic re-creation. After he has breathed new life into the past, he assesses the “use and abuse” of literature. He expresses Ruskin’s view in Descartes’ words, that reading books is like a conversation with the most valuable figures of the past.131 Proust’s answer to that is both criticism and extension in depth. Critical, in that literature and conversation may not be regarded as of equal value: in conversation the aim, above all, is to shine with brilliant expressiveness or clever arguments; so conversation is a much more superficial activity than reading. Reading, this “solitude peuplée”, (populated loneliness), when a person is alone with a book, creates a receptivity and inward-directedness, in which the value of what is being read can unfold.132 A deepening inasfar as Proust summarises meaning of literature powerfully and compactly in the words like a motto: Books may be “conclusions” for the writer, but for the reader they must serve as “incitations”.133 He warns of the danger of seeing reading as a goal: “So long as reading is treated as a guide holding the keys that open the door to buried regions of ourselves, into which, otherwise, we should never penetrate, the part it can play in our lives is salutary. On the contrary, it becomes dangerous when, instead of waking us to the reality of our own mental processes, it becomes a substitute for them: when truth appears to us, not as an ideal which we can realise only as a result of our own thinking and our own emotional efforts, but as a material object which exists between the pages of a book, like honey made by others, to be possessed merely by stretching out our hands to a bookshelf and passively digesting it in a mood of bodily and mental torpor.” b 134 a Il n’y a peut-être pas de jours de notre enfance que nous ayons si pleinement vécus que ceux que nous avons cru laisser sans les vivre, ceux que nous avons passés avec un livre préféré. b Tant que la lecture est pour nous l’incitatrice dont les clefs magiques nous ouvrent au fond de nous-même la porte des demeures où nous n’aurions pas su pénétrer, son rôle dans notre vie est salutaire. Il devient dangereux au contraire quand, au lieu de nous éveiller à la vie personnelle de l’esprit, la lecture tend à se substituer à elle, quand la vérité ne nous apparaît plus comme un idéal que nous ne pouvons réaliser que par le progrès intime de notre pensée et par l’effort de notre coeur, mais comme une chose matérielle, déposée entre les feuillets des livres comme un miel tout préparé par les autres et que nous n’avons qu’à prendre la peine d’attein-

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In this essay it can already be seen how much the problem of beauty concerned Proust and how clearly aware he was of the danger of idolatry or aestheticism.135 Proust is profoundly convinced of Ruskins’s pronouncement: “All great art is praise.” He is essentially and permanently affected by the teaching of Emerson, Carlyle and Ruskin that nature – the universe – is Godly in all its manifestations. This Godliness is veiled, one must learn to perceive it. It is the task of the artist to fix what is seen and to create it anew. In principle Proust remains more true to Ruskin than Ruskin himself, since Ruskin’s “sincerity” is undermined by his deep-rooted idolatry. Proust takes the ideal core of Ruskin au sérieux and tries to avoid idolatry. He does not succumb to the error of Ruskin and so many other thinkers and artists, which consists in taking their criteria from a particular aesthetic movement, a particular period of civilisation, but rejecting the modern age and being unable to discover the beauty in modern art. Ruskin’s specific mistake is that he sees the “Truth” embodied solely in the Christian art of the Middle Ages, once and for all time. Proust fights against idolatry, for him the “Truth” always needs to be discovered anew. The task of each individual is to express “Reality” in his own way. If it is at first surprising that Proust should pay no attention to Ruskin’s reforming zeal, his founding of the Guild of St George, his attempts to revive artisanship, then it should be clear by now that Proust did get to grips with this aspect: not by questioning these theories, but by discovering the motivation for them, idolatry. Ruskin attributes an absolute and exemplary value to Gothic, to “pre-raphaelite” art, and thus betrays his own ideal that beauty is everywhere to be found and that no object can be seen as vulgar by the artist. It will be demonstrated in the following that Proust, in contrast, tried to put the teachings of Emerson, Carlyle and Ruskin into practice, both on himself and therefore in particular on the modern age.

Proust and France It is already clear that Proust expressed himself critically about the spirit of materialism and scepticism of his native land. But there were also intellectuals in France who demonstrated a “leçon d’idéalisme” and who influenced Proust. One

dre sur les rayons des bibliothèques et de déguster ensuite passivement dans un parfait repos de corps et d’esprit.

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of them was probably Proust’s philosophy teacher at the Lycée Condorcet, Alphonse Darlu (1849-1921).136 For want of material it is unfortunately impossible to determine exactly how much Darlu influenced Proust. Proust, however, does give some indications himself. The figure of the philosophy teacher in Jean Santeuil, Beulier, is very probably a representation of Darlu. Jean and his classmates wait tensely for the arrival of their new philosophy teacher. It will be their first philosophy lesson. Jean cannot imagine how the lesson might go. He tries to summon up an image with the help of descriptions from Renan and Barrès, who emanate a “disillusioned gentleness”(“douceur désenchantée”). Then Beulier enters the classroom. From his very first words he radiates energy and vitality. His bright red face is entirely free of scepsis or dilettantism. He speaks with a passion that quickly leaves Jean exhausted. “Not once did the words ‘vanity of life’ or ‘nirvana’ come like a familiar and delightful refrain to recall his wandering attention. Never through the whole course of the lessons did there occur any of those sublime and sweet-scented images before which, throughout this headlong intellectual race, he might have paused for rest as at a flower wayside shrine. Nor was that all. He, who knew that there was no such thing as the “good” or “true” was staggered to hear this man, about whose genius he had heard so much, speaking of goodness, truth and certainty.” a 137 In another scene – the return of homework – the type of role that Mr Beulier plays is again demonstrated. First of all Jean had used clichéd images in his philosophical essay. Then he had written: “There one could breathe in heady odours from lilac and from heliotrope, rich with a wealth of obscure suggestions.” b The expression “obscure suggestions” seemed inexcusable to Mr Beulier: if Jean was not capable of describing the scent of the lilac and heliotrope clearly, then it would have been better to say nothing. In addition, Jean had made the mistake of mentioning the scent of lilies and heliotropes in one breath, without considering that one of them releases its perfume in damp weather and the other only when the sun shines. But Jean had only walked through a garden reading a book; he had never put his nose to the flowers.138 a A aucun moment, les doux mots de ‘vanité de la vie’, de ‘nirvâna’ ne vinrent, comme un air connu et doux, rappeler son attention distraite. Et il ne trouva dans toute la leçon aucune de ces images splendides et parfumées auxquelles il aurait pu pendant cette rude course intellectuelle faire halte comme auprès de reposoirs de fleurs. Bien plus, lui qui savait qu’il n’y a ni bien ni vrai, il fut stupéfait d’entendre cet homme dont on lui avait vanté le génie, parler du bien, de la vérité, de la certitude. b On y respirait les senteurs enivrantes, pleines de suggestions obscures, du lilas et de l’héliotrope.

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During the extra lessons that Beulier gave him they read Michelet’s Bible de l’Humanité together, in which the author glorifies work like a Hercules. They compare this text with a passage from Xenophon’s Memorabilia. Socrates makes a bored family happy by setting them to work. At first the rather dry descriptions do not appeal to Jean. But Beulier leads him to an acceptance of the antique style: though it may be simple, it still says everything. “That was a time when writers were not concerned to develop their ideas. They offered them for what they were worth without labouring them, without extracting from them all that they contained.” a 139 Even as Beulier gets older, Jean keeps loyally visiting him, and always finds him a lively, youthful, and selfless person.140 The impression that Beulier-Darlu made on Proust was that of a strong, lively man, a wise man, more than a philosophy teacher. Someone brave enough, in sceptical times, to be an idealist. Proust had expected somebody different, someone who would express the “taedium vitae”. And is it by chance that Beulier reads Michelet with him, about work, as the best medicine against boredom, as a sacred duty? It seems that these traits of Darlu’s awoke Proust’s lasting admiration. In a note on the translation of Sésame et les Lys Proust even goes so far as to call him: “the most admirable master I have known, the man who has had the greatest influence on my thinking.” b 141 Proust’s admiring characterisation of Darlu matches the picture painted by another ex-pupil of this philosophy teacher, the philosopher Léon Brunschvicg. He praises Darlu for being able not only to make clear to his pupils such elements of philosophy as the strict rules of logic, but that he also brought over what can be understood by a truly philosophical way of life.142 His lessons with this beloved teacher clearly had the effect on Proust of an antidote against the widespread scepticism of his time, which threatened him too.143 The representation of Darlu as the fictional character Beulier indicates Proust’s struggle to find a counterweight to his own weakness of will and to the sceptical spirit of his times. In the ‘90s Proust drew a clear line between himself and the spirit of “dilettantism” and materialism of his age, which he felt all around him. He strives to keep himself free from the decadent spirit of the fin de siècle, which has already been sketched above. There are numerous passages from this period which illustrate his rebellion against the Zeitgeist. In an article from the year 1892 he writes: “But a generation principally sensitive to the useless splendour of things a C’est une époque où on ne développait pas les idées, on les présentait ainsi sans les ouvrir, sans faire sortir tout ce qu’elles contenaient. b Le maître le plus admirable que j’ai connu, l’homme qui a eu la plus grande influence sur ma pensée, M. Darlu.

42 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’

was succeeded by another concerned with rendering to life its aim, its significance, and to man the feeling of creating, to some extent, his own destiny.” a 144 In an article from the year 1893 he says: “If the new generation differs from the preceding one and improves upon it, it is assuredly through the intensity of its intellect, its soaring vision, the high ideal of restoring thought to its rightful place which the materialists had banished from the universe and naturalists from art, by the perhaps vague, but assuredly powerful aspirations, that strain to provide life with a background, to give a sense to our destiny, a sanction to our actions.” b 145 In the year 1895 he writes in a letter to Reynaldo Hahn: “Dinner yesterday at the Daudets with (…) M. de Goncourt, Coppée (…) Noted with sadness the frightful materialism, so surprising in ‘intellectuals’. They account for character and genius by physical habits or race. Differences between Musset, Baudelaire and Verlaine explained by the properties of the spirits they drank, the characters of certain persons by their race (anti-Semitism)!” c 146 Proust’s article from the same period, on the poet and dandy Robert de Montesquiou, is equally illuminating.147 At this time he still greatly admired this poet. We will not go into the question whether he overestimated him. What tells us more is the way he defends the poet against his time, which saw Montesquiou as a “sort of Prince of Decadence, ruling as a whimsical despot over every corruption of the mind and every refinement of the imagination. (..) There is nothing profound about elegance and vice. One soon comes to the end of Satanism, and of dandyism too.” d 148 He rejects indignantly this attempt to characterise Montesquiou. Proust draws a parallel with Baudelaire. The decadent generation was glad to see him too as the diabolical poet. His artificiality, his Satanism, his immorality were a Mais à une génération sensible surtout à la splendeur inutile des choses, en a succédé une soucieuse avant tout de rendre à la vie son but, sa signification, à l’homme le sentiment qu’il crée en une certaine mesure sa destinée. b Si la nouvelle génération diffère de la précédente et vaut mieux qu’elle, c’est assurément par l’intensité de la réflexion, l’essor du rêve, l’ambition très haute de restituer sa place à la pensée que les matérialistes avaient bannie de l’univers et les naturalistes de l’art, par des aspirations vagues peut-être, mais assurément puissantes, qui tendent à donner à la vie un arrière-plan, à notre destinée un sens, à nos actes une sanction. c Dîner hier chez les Daudet avec (…) M. de Goncourt, Coppée (…). Constaté avec tristesse (…) l’affreux matérialisme si extraordinaire chez des gens ‘d’esprit’. On rend compte du caractère, du génie par les habitudes physiques de la race. Différences entre Musset, Baudelaire, Verlaine expliquée(s) par la qualité des alcools qu’ils buvaient, caractère de telle personne par sa race (anti-sémitisme)! d Prince de la Décadence, régnant en despote capricieux sur toutes les corruptions de l’esprit et tous les raffinements de l’imagination (…) L’élégance et le péché ne sont pas des choses profondes. Le satanisme est assez court et le dandyisme aussi.

Proust and the fin de siècle 43

equated with genius and greatness. Proust saw this as an unfortunate legend which hindered a proper understanding of Baudelaire as the sole intellectual and classical poet of the nineteenth century. Montesquiou also seemed to be threatened with this fate. In addition, in Proust’s view, this legend had a bad influence on the following generation of epigones and decadents, who universally claim to be afflicted with a maladie de la volonté (weakness of will). Some boast about it, others complain about it, none of them overcomes it. Proust does not want to see Montesquiou simply as a “refined” person, but as an intellectual, as a thinker, and to discover a “spirit of Corneille” in his verses. This makes of him a man of will and thus the exact opposite of a decadent: “Now, the first thing that strikes me about M. de Montesquiou is a deft, tenacious, commanding, allpowerful will.” a 149 This passage, which says more about Proust than about Montesquiou, is a clear example of Proust’s critical attitude to the decadent spirit of the fin de siècle. Even so, he himself was for a long time a victim of this legend. Contemporaries like Paul Claudel saw in him the “raffiné”, the “décadent, or even the “snob”.150 André Gide, initially, also saw in Proust a decadent: “For me you had remained the man who frequented the houses of Mmes X, Y or Z, the man who wrote for the Figaro. I thought of you – shall I confess it? – ‘du côté de chez Verdurin’: a snob – the worst possible thing for our review.”151 Proust defends himself against these superficial opinions about him. Thus, in A la Recherche: “Those passages in which I was trying to arrive at general laws were described as so much pedantic investigation of detail.” b 152 The moralist, one might almost say the doctrinaire in him was overlooked. Edmund Wilson too, in his (incidentally very interesting) essay on Post-Symbolism, sees him above all as the last representative of a bygone era, a representative of an overrefined culture, and he goes as far as comparing the narrator in A la Recherche with the figure of des Esseintes from Huysmans’ A Rebours. “I believe therefore that the time is at hand when these writers (Yeats, Valéry, T.S. Eliot, Proust, Joyce, Stein), who have largely dominated the literary world of the decade 1920-1930, though we shall continue to admire them as masters, will no longer serve as guides.”153 This study will demonstrate, as far as Proust is concerned, the exact opposite.

a Ce qui frappe d’abord chez M. de Montesquiou c’est la volonté, adroite, tenace, impérieuse, toute-puissante. b Là où je cherchais les grandes lois, on m’appellait fouilleur de détails.

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Symbolism Literary criticism is only too eager to classify Proust’s work as belonging to the tradition of symbolism. “Proust inherits the mantle of Symbolism” writes the literary historian R. Galand, one of many.154 The question is: “which Symbolism”? In any case a distinction must be made between Symbolism as a literary movement of the ’80s and the further-reaching symbolism which can be understood as a revival of philosophical idealism. In broad terms, the last-mentioned movement is a reaction to the positivism of the nineteenth century, a renewal of idealism, a new form of rebellion. It joins the first, named romanticism, in opposition to the materialist and rational view of the universe. It postulates a hidden unity of individual and world. In regarding art as a medium in which this unity can be achieved, it restores the high status of art and artists. Here one finds the same body of thought as with Emerson, Carlyle and Ruskin. Proust’s work also belongs in this area. The influence of the symbolist movement, on the other hand, seems to us very limited. As a reaction to naturalism and the parnassiens they sought a poésie pure. Poetry should be freed of descriptive and didactic elements or value judgments, which romanticism also rejected. The ideal was music, leading Valéry to define the movement thus: “What was baptized Symbolism is summed up quite simply in the intention common to several families of poets to take back from music what belonged to them.” a 155 This is only one of the definitions of symbolism, the name of which has resulted in many interpretations and controversies. Alongside Valéry’s, Wilson’s verbose definition may be considered: “Symbolism may be defined as an attempt by carefully studied means – a complicated association of ideas represented by a medley of metaphors – to communicate unique feelings.”156 This led to the introduction of free verse, abandoning traditional metric and in general the French “clarté”. The Symbolists went so far in their experiments that they could hardly be understood any more. They cultivated obscurity and lost all connection with reality. They superimposed a realm of ethereal beauty on reality. One could quote several passages where Proust argues against this tendency. The main one is his article Contre l’obscurité (1896), in which his polemic is aimed not so much at the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, for whom he more than once a Ce qui fut baptisé: le symbolisme, se résume très simplement dans l’intention commune à plusieurs familles de poètes (d’ailleurs ennemies entre elles) de reprendre à la Musique leur bien.

Proust and the fin de siècle 45

showed great admiration, as for his imitators.157 Their greatest mistake, in his view, was in their neglect of “accidentia of time and place”.158 They want to realise the universal, the eternal, without having recognised that it can only be realised in the particular. Exactly to the extent that living people and fictional characters are individual, can they become expressions of the universal. As successful examples in art he gives Tolstoy’s War and Peace or The Mill On The Floss by George Eliot. The poems of the Symbolists, which are supposed to be living symbols, are not much more than cold allegories.159 Their art is too abstract, their Symbolism devoid of life. There are at least two passages where Symbolism is directly or indirectly criticised along these lines. His analysis of Giotto’s art is particularly interesting from this point of view. The main reason for Proust’s admiration for Giotto is the closeness of the symbols in his work to reality. The figures of angels are reminiscent of an extinct sort of bird, quite unlike the contrived angel figures of later times.160 In Elstir’s paintings one object is represented by another, which, in a first moment of optical illusion, appears to be it, “not from any artifice of Symbolism but from a sincere desire to return to the very root of the impression.” a 161 Later it becomes clear what Proust demands of metaphors – that they have a natural and spontaneous origin. The task of the artist is to represent reality in such a way that it is spiritualised, transfigured, without giving up any of its specificity. This is the central problem of mimesis. In Proust’s opinion the sin of the Naturalists is that they simply copy162, and on the other hand the Symbolists sin as well, in their subjectivity and abstraction. His views are illustrated in a letter to his friend, the poet Fernand Gregh, from the year 1904. Gregh belongs to the “humanist” movement, which, in a reaction against Symbolism, sought to re-establish the connection with life, nature and humanity.163 Proust uses Gregh’s poetry, which he had received from the poet, as the starting point for a discourse on his own aesthetics. What he admires in Gregh’s poems is that they are neither materialistically descriptive nor abstract, but distil the highly individual and transcendent spirit which lies hidden in every object, Ruskin’s “decisive moment”, from the form itself.164 Another point that Proust criticised in the Symbolist poets was the hermetic character of their poetry. Here too Proust distinguished himself from the Symbolists; even when he is difficult, he is never inaccessible. The impenetrability of the Symbolists is on the one hand arbitrary and artificial, and on the other a result of their subjectivity and their theory of the identity of form and content. Proust’s aim, however, is always to translate an impression into a comprehensible equivalent. a non par artifice de Symbolisme mais par retour sincère à la racine même de l’impression.

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The final difference is that the Symbolists hardly ever have anything positive to say about life, they are pessimists.165 For them, art is a refuge from the ugly experience of reality. Proust’s approach is quite different: he sees art as a means to do reality justice. The affinity to Stéphane Mallarmé, which is stressed above all by Cattaui, seems dubious to us.166 Mallarmé dreamed his whole life long about “Le Livre” (“the Book”): Proust is supposed to have realised it. That is a seductive but unproven “rapprochement”. But the ethos of the artist, the unconditionality with which the modest Mallarmé devoted his whole life to the realisation of unreachable artistic ideal; Proust will certainly have been touched by that. What he and Mallarmé have in common, and Baudelaire as well, incidentally – and perhaps every great artist – is the “will to artistic perfection”. Feeling and imagination alone are not enough.167 They must be transformed into a work of art. Both of them, Mallarmé and Proust, start with the most fleeting impression. They remain loyal to it, and strive to re-create only it. Their methods, however, are different: Proust seeks an intelligible equivalent of his impression, while Mallarmé consciously preserves in his artistic re-creation the mystery of the original experience.168 Mallarmé’s magic word is “suggestion”. He shrinks back from precision, in favour of allusion. Proust is not afraid of describing things explicitly and precisely, and what is impressive about this, is that he does not thereby suffocate the mystery. Perhaps there is an even more important difference between the two: Mallarmé places the illusion above the reality, whereas Proust goes further, past the illusion, which he too knows, and tries to transfigure the reality. In order to illustrate the approach of Mallarmé, there follows a passage from his Divagations. The poet is rowing a boat on a river, his eyes downcast, seeing nothing more than water and oars, which glisten in the sun. Suddenly the boat runs into dense reeds. He recognises that, without conscious intention, he has arrived at the garden of his girlfriend. Maybe she is even nearby. If he opened his eyes, he would be able to see her – the quietness is vibrant with possibilities. “Counsel me, o my dream: what shall I do? Summing up with a glance the virgin absence dispersed in this solitude and, as one gathers, in memory of a site, one of those magical, closed water lilies which spring up all of a sudden, enveloping nothingness with their hollow whiteness, formed from untouched dreams, from a happiness that will never take place, and from the breath that I am now holding in fear of an apparition, depart with it.” 169 And the poem that begins with “My old books closed on Paphos’ name” (“Mes bouquins refermés sur le nom de Paphos”), a meditation on two landscapes, one real, the other dreamed, ends with:

Proust and the fin de siècle 47

My books closed again on Paphos’ name, (…) I brood for a long time perhaps with distress On the other’s seared breast of an ancient Amazon.170 The relationship with Charles Baudelaire is closer. Baudelaire is interesting for two reasons. On the one hand as “peintre de la vie moderne” (painter of modern life), and on the other as an artist with his reflections about art and conscious search for experiences of beauty. When T.S. Eliot describes the significance of Baudelaire, he put the emphasis on his “technical mastery”171, in which he agreed with Valéry.172 Eliot continues “He gave new possibilities to poetry in a new stock of imagery of contemporary life.” Along with the stock in trade of the romantics (prostitutes, cats, mulattos), modern life was also adopted as a theme for fantasy. “Baudelaire is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language.”173 The diabolical Baudelaire is no longer the focus of attention174, but rather the Baudelaire of the “tableaux parisiens”, the painter of modernity. This refers in particular to an essay of Baudelaire’s on the artist Constantin Guys, to whom the poet owes his survival as M.G., entitled: The Painter of Modern Life.175 In particular the opening theoretical section of the essay is of great interest. Baudelaire expounds on his idea of an art which takes modern times as a theme, while he offers a glimpse of modern art itself at the end of the essay – with a description of carriages on the Champs Elysées and in the portraits of different types of women. An important part is Baudelaire’s call for a contemporary, modern art. He defines its beauty as a special kind of beauty, which arises from the intermixing of two elements: one eternal, unchanging and the other relative and temporary. “Without this second element, which might be described as the amusing, enticing, appetizing icing on the divine cake, the first element would be beyond our powers of digestion and appreciation, neither adapted nor suitable to human nature.”176 Baudelaire makes it clear that the charm of contemporary art also lies precisely in its being up to date: “The pleasure which we derive from the representation of the present is due not only to the beauty with which it can be invested, but also to its essential quality of being present.”177 Modern art distils, extracts from the surrounding world its mysterious essential beauty. To see this, the artist must have the eyes of someone who has just recovered from a serious illness, the concentrated stare of a convalescent behind the window of a café, who observes the crowd intensively and is keenly aware of all the thoughts that swirl around him. He must, as Baudelaire puts it, “épouser la foule”, espouse the crowd.178 The artist must see with the eyes of a child. For a child everything is

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new, and the genius of art is nothing other than conscious regaining of youth, for which there is no facet of life which does not sparkle.179 Baudelaire makes a plea, as already mentioned, for contemporary art. That is why he holds against an artist like Ingres his academicism and classicism. Ingres orientates himself along classical and conventional lines, his figures are in the style of his classical predecessors, which deprives them of the time stamp which provides an indelible individuality and naturalness. Even if Baudelaire was one of the first poets of modern life, still he often sees it as negative. His desire remains to distil the hidden beauty out of the ugliness.180 How is it possible for Baudelaire to become the poet of the modern city? It is his amour du Beau, his love of beauty, which he often writes about. In his essays on Wagner, Hugo and Poe he continually displays his closeness to Swedenborg’s idea of the physical world as a symbol for the spiritual. Thus he writes in L’art romantique: “It is this admirable, this immortal instinct of Beauty which makes us consider the earth and all its manifold forms as a hint of, and a correspondence to, Heaven.”181 In the same essay Baudelaire calls everything a hieroglyph, a pictorial symbol, which the poet has to decipher. The poet is nothing more than a “déchiffreur”, a “translater” with a sacred task.182 Since the Fall of Man, since Christianity, the world has been ugly or at least indifferent. The poetic person is needed to transfigure it – as mentioned in his article about Wagner, where he writes that since the advent of Christianity, Venus has been exiled beneath the earth.183 This is why Baudelaire turns his back on realism, an “art” which he sees as just copying.184 Another passage on Delacroix makes his attitude quite clear: in Baudelaire’s eyes, Delacroix is as great as Raphael or Veronese, or perhaps even greater since he achieves this height despite the age he lives in, while Raphael and Veronese were supported by a century that was itself artistic.185 Baudelaire saw the Renaissance, just like Antiquity, as a golden age out of which modern men have fallen, have been exiled. This theme recurs in his attack on the propagators of Neoclassicism. “Don’t they know”, he answers in an imaginary dialogue, “that the great Pan is dead?”186 The poet bears the burden of transfiguring the world. A related problem that Proust has with Baudelaire is the question: How do we discover beauty in the world, when are we sensitive for beauty? The organ that, according to Baudelaire, is responsible for beauty, is the “imagination”: “a quasi-divine faculty that perceives first of all, beyond philosophical methods, the intimate and secret relationships of things, correspondences and analogies.”187 The imagination is that extraordinary poetic and creative ability to discover the spiritual in the material. Unfortunately it does not always work. The moments are rare, “those wonderful hours, veritable festivals of the mind, when the keenest senses perceive the most resounding sensations, when the sky of a more

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transparent blue deepens into a more infinite abyss, when sounds ring musically, when colors speak, and scents tell of whole worlds of ideas.”188 Baudelaire’s conscious search for beauty explains his experiments with consciousness-expanding substances like hashish, opium and alcohol. In particular in Les Paradis Artificiels he investigates their possible power to reveal the hidden mysteries of things. Are they legitimate means to free people from their individual limitations and do they reveal the divine nature of our trivial reality? With an openness that was shocking for his contemporaries, his Le poëme du haschisch describes the effect of the drug and the various stages that follow one another in the course of a session. His criticism of the consumption of drugs is very matter of fact. The question was “Is hashish a means for the discovery of divine beauty?” His answer to this question is negative. First of all, Baudelaire remarks that hashish does not free one from oneself. The experience of oneself and ones environment are highly intensified, but one never leaves the “rêve naturel”, the natural dream. Consequently the consumption of hashish never leads to the “rêve surnaturel”, the divine dream that represents the supernatural, the dream that Baudelaire calls a hieroglyph, “a symbolic and moral picture begotten in the spirit itself of the sleeper.”189 The inspiration that hashish produces is not creative, but simply an intensification of the stimuli. The drugged mind is simply a mirror of the surroundings, but remains more strongly and tyrannically subordinate to the self. There is never any suggestion of communication with the supernatural, no self-transcendence at all. One of the later stages is “monomania”, a state in which the user takes himself for God, in which a voice speaks to him (“unfortunately his own voice”): “Thou hast now the right to consider thyself as superior to all men.” 190 His second point of criticism is that the drug-taker neither can nor wants to apply his intensified sensitivity in any way. He is not even capable of sharpening a pencil.191 Quite the opposite – and Baudelaire sees this as one of the saddest results of hashish consumption – the will is completely disabled. But the final condemnation of drug-taking can be traced – perhaps surprisingly for someone like Baudelaire – to his ethos as an artist, which has a Christian origin. This is illustrated in the closing lines of his “poëme du haschisch”: “These infortunate ones, who have neither fasted nor prayed, who have refused redemption by the means of toil, have asked of black magic the means to raise themselves at a single blow to transcendental life. Their magic dupes them, kindles for them a false happiness, a false light; while as for us poets and philosophers, we have begotten again our soul upon ourselves by continuous toil and contemplation; by the unwearied exercise of will and the unfaltering nobility of aspiration we have created for ourselves a garden of Truth (…). Confiding in the word which says that faith removeth mountains, we have accomplished the only miracle which

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God has licensed us to perform.”192 In Baudelaire’s eyes it is sinful to want to escape one’s allotted existence and to buy one’s way into paradise.193 One must pray, and work, and bear one’s cross. Proust would have agreed completely with Baudelaire’s conclusions. In A la Recherche he described the state of happiness resulting from excessive consumption of alcohol and contrasted it with the spiritual drunkenness resulting from a series of involuntary memories. “The happiness which I was feeling was the product not of a purely subjective tension of the nerves which isolated me from the past, but on the contrary of an enlargement of my mind, within which the past was re-forming and actualising itself, giving me – but alas! only momentarily – something whose value was eternal.” a 194 The interesting thing, both with Baudelaire and with Proust, is the conscious search for beauty. In this connection, yet another passage about Poe is relevant. Here Baudelaire defends his alcohol consumption as a way to help his memory: “I believe that, in many cases, not certainly in all, the intoxication of Poe was a mnemonic means, a method of work, a method energetic and fatal, but appropriate to his passionate nature.” 195 For both of them, for Baudelaire as for Proust, remembering is a means of regaining the past in its original poetry. Proust himself remarks upon this relationship in A la Recherche when he names the illustrious pedigree of his “mémoire involontaire”: Chateaubriand used it, as well as Gérard de Nerval, but Baudelaire the most consciously.196 In the previously discussed essay of Baudelaire’s Le peintre de la vie moderne he talks of a “memory that evokes and calls back to life – a memory that says to everything, ‘Arise, Lazarus’.”197 We are now very close to Proust!

a Le bonheur que j’éprouvais ne venait pas d’une tension purement subjective des nerfs qui nous isole du passé, mais au contraire d’un élargissement de mon esprit en qui se réformait, s’actualisait ce passé, et me donnait, mais hélas! momentanément une valeur d’éternité.

CHAPTER II

A la Recherche as the history of a vocation

A la Recherche has to be considered as what the Germans call a “Bildungsroman”. Proust himself calls his work the history of a “vocation”: “And I understood that all these materials for a work of literature were simply my past life. And thus my whole life up to the present day might (and yet might not) have been summed up under the title: A Vocation.” a 1 The book is the story of a learning process.2 In the novel, the main character, the narrator, receives “lessons” from various people – above all from artists – and from life itself. These open his eyes to the beauty of life, and ultimately to a realisation of the essential nature of art as “illumination”, as a means to realise life.3 His path is, however, not without its dangers and distractions. One of the greatest dangers is aestheticism. Proust combats its spirit by personifying it in Swann and Charlus. Other dangers are this worldly life, love, and even friendship. But every experience is also a learning experience. “When I considered my past life, I understood also that its slightest episodes had contributed towards giving me the lesson in idealism from which I was going to profit today.” b 4 For a long time he is unsure. He keeps putting off starting to write, from weakness of will. He envies the energy of the maid Françoise as she prepares a meal. He also has doubts about the reality of art. Gradually his “vocation” becomes clearer to him; his last doubts are dispelled when he experiences a series of spontaneous memories and goes into them in depth. At the end of the narrator makes the decision to write! In A la Recherche four arts are represented by four artists: drama by Berma, painting by Elstir, literature by Bergotte and music by Vinteuil. These characters

a Et je compris que tous ces matériaux de l’oeuvre littéraire, c’était ma vie passée, Ainsi toute ma vie jusqu’à ce jour aurait pu (et n’aurait pas pu) résumée sous ce titre: Une vocation. b De ma vie passée je compris encore que les moindres épisodes avaient concouru à me donner la leçon d’idéalisme dont j’allais profiter aujourd’hui.

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and their work fulfill an important function for the spiritual development of the narrator. First he comes into contact with Berma’s art.5 She is regarded as one of the greatest stage actresses of her time. The narrator has long felt a burning desire to see her perform. But his poor health – his parents are afraid that a visit to the theatre might overexcite him – does not allow the fulfillment of this wish. Only when an important guest speaks in favour of a visit to the theatre do his parents agree, which makes him extremely happy. His heroine is due to appear in a scene in Phèdre. The narrator knows that play by heart. But when Berma recites those familiar verses, he is disappointed. He cannot see any great beauty in her recital. It will be a long time before he becomes receptive to this beauty, when he goes to the theatre a second time. Now, however, not to see Berma, but only to get an impression of the world of Guermantes. And precisely because no expectations stand between him and her acting, precisely because he listens without any special intention, he is touched this time by the beauty of her playing. He recognises beauty as something distinct, something with its own character, which in this case is not to be found in the work of Racine – or in that of any other author – but far more in the inimitable style of Berma’s interpretation. At first Phèdre seems unthinkable to him without Berma, just as he feels the need to see Carpaccio in Venice, in order to experience fully the acting of the one and the paintings of the other.6 Elstir will put him straight.7 The painter Elstir is the character who most influences the narrator’s view of reality, by teaching him to see. Elstir initiates him into the beauty of the universe and shows him means for the transfiguration of reality; the writer Bergotte and the composer Vinteuil help him deepen and sharpen his conception of art. Literature and art as initiation: if they are seen as a goal in themselves, then their influence will be fatal, they will lead, as in Swann’s case, to aestheticism. But as initiation, art is healing and necessary. It becomes necessary when one has lost the faith of youth, when one no longer has the strength to impart reality to things, when a thick layer of habit has built up between oneself and the first true impression. A passage from Jean Santeuil illustrates this: Jean is thinking about his special fondness for the hawthorn, which has been with him since his earliest childhood; making this plant a symbol of his youth in later years. The hawthorn is the only flower whose love he has discovered for himself. Or if anyone else did open his eyes to this flower, it must have been the gardener or his mother. Later he was to get to know other flowers. But his feeling for their beauty always had to be awoken by an artist:” An artist it was, who, with the prestige of his authority and the power to reveal beauty to unsuspecting eyes, gave him

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the entrée to their loveliness, as he did to that of many works by writers and by painters.” a 8 Proust himself makes it clear why it is that art only begins to play a role, to be important, after the end of youth, at the start of adult life. The natural creativity of childhood is lost. From this moment on, artists are necessary as signposts for the narrator, to point out the direction for him. Without artists he would not be able to discover the beauty of a landscape, a church or a work of art.9 In Proust’s own adolescence this role was taken first by Anatole France, and later Ruskin similarly became an initiator for him, through which the universe suddenly acquired a new value. In 1889 he wrote a letter to Anatole France, after realizing that he had been reading his books for four years: “You have taught me to find a beauty I did not appreciate before in books, ideas, and people. You have beautified the universe for me.” b 10 The literary “translation” of this passage is to be found in Du côté de chez Swann, where the following is written about the writer Bergotte – who represents Anatole France among others: “Whenever he spoke of something whose beauty had until then remained hidden from me (…) by some piece of imagery he would make their beauty explode into my consciousness.” c 11 For a long time the narrator has difficulty discovering the beauty of Giotto’s art. The house-friend of his parents, Swann, had brought him reproductions of frescoes by this painter on which the virtues and sins are symbolised. At first he feels no interest at all in looking at prints like “this Charity without charity”.12 The narrator begins to understand their meaning when he visits his grandmother and sees the pregnant kitchen maid who carries beneath her apron that gradually expanding, mysterious bulge, simply as a burden which weighs more day by day, without reflecting this mysterious process in her face. Then he understands that “the arresting strangeness, the special beauty of these frescoes derived from the great part played in them by Symbolism, and the fact that this was represented not as a symbol (for the thought symbolised was nowhere expressed) but as a reality, actually felt or materially handled, added something more precise and more literal to the meaning of the work, something more concrete and more striking to the lesson it imparted.” d 13 a Et ce fut toujours un artiste qui, d’un mot, par le prestige d’une parole autorisée et révélatrice, l’initia à sa beauté, comme à la beauté d’un écrivain ou d’un peintre. b Vous m’avez appris à trouver dans les choses, dans les livres, dans les idées et dans les hommes, une beauté dont auparavant je ne savais pas jouir. Vous m’avez embelli l’univers. c Chaque fois qu’il parlait de quelque chose dont la beauté m’était restée jusque-là cachée (…) il faisait dans une image exploser cette beauté jusqu’à moi. d l’étrangeté saisissante, la beauté spéciale de ces fresques tenait à la grande place que le symbole y occupait, et que le fait qu’il fût représenté, non comme un symbole puisque la pen-

54 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’

In his description of this fresco by Giotto, Proust tries to convey its strange, alien beauty: “She [the figure of Charity] is trampling all the treasures of the earth beneath her feet, but exactly as if she were treading grapes in a wine-press to extract their juice, or rather as if she had climbed on to a heap of sacks to raise herself higher; and she is holding out her flaming heart to God, or shall we say “handing” it to him, exactly as a cook might hand up a corkscrew through the skylight of her basement kitchen to someone who has called down for it from the ground-floor window.” a 14 Before he gets to know Elstir, he feels no attraction for the sight of a table where one sits comfortably after a meal and engages in conversation, “that sordid moment when the knives are left littering the tablecloth among crumpled napkins.” b 15 The narrator is with his grandmother for the first time in the coastal resort of Balbec. They have finished eating, and while his mother is talking with Madame de Villeparisis he looks across the half cleared table at the sea beyond, looking for the effects that Baudelaire described. Only on the days when sea fish was served does he enjoy letting his gaze linger on the table: the fish, “some marine monster, which unlike the knives and forks was contemporary with the primitive epochs in which the Ocean first began to teem with life, at the time of the Cimmerians, a fish whose body with its numberless vertebrae, its blue and pink veins, had been constructed by nature, but according to an architectural plan, like a polychrome cathedral of the deep.” c 16 Initially he sought in Balbec the land of the Cimmerians, as described by authors like Anatole France.17 In this stage he paid no attention at all to the still uncleared table. Through his acquaintance with Elstir’s work his attention is redirected towards everyday reality. From now on he no longer seeks the beautiful only in the magnificent and the sublime, but equally in the day-to-day life around him. Now he is happy to remain seated at the table as it is cleared and does not alsée symbolisée n’était pas exprimée, mais comme réel, comme effectivement subi ou matériellement manié, donnait à la signification de l’oeuvre quelque chose de plus littéral et de plus précis, à son enseignement quelque chose de plus concret et de plus frappant. a Elle [the figure of Caritas] foule aux pieds les trésors de la terre, mais absolument comme si elle piétinait des raisins pour en extraire le jus ou plûtot comme elle aurait monté sur des sacs pour se hausser; et elle tend à Dieu son coeur enflammé, disons mieux, elle le lui ‘passe’, comme une cuisinière passe un tire-bouchon par le soupirail à quelqu’un qui le lui demande à la fenêtre du rez-de-chaussée. b Ce moment sordide où les couteaux traînent sur la nappe à côté des serviettes défaites. c monstre marine, qui au contraire des couteaux et des fourchettes, était contemporain des époques primitives où la vie commençait à affluer dans l’Océan, au temps des Cimmériens, et duquel le corps aux innombrables vertèbres, aux nerfs bleus et roses, avait été construit par la nature, mais selon un plan architectural, comme une polychrome cathédrale de la mer.

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ways look out at the sea: “Since I had seen such things depicted in water-colours by Elstir, I sought to find again in reality, I cherished as though for their poetic beauty, the broken gestures of the knives still lying across one another, the swollen convexity of a discarded napkin into which the sun introduced a patch of yellow velvet.” a 18 Earlier the narrator would have preferred taking a walk through Balbec during stormy weather, because he wanted to rediscover the land of the Cimmerians. After he had become acquainted with Elstir he would seek what he had previously excluded from his world: beach life, regattas, horse races: “I now sought out with ardour, for the same reason which formerly had made me wish only for stormy seas: namely, that they were now associated in my mind, as the others had once been, with an aesthetic idea.” b 19 The character Elstir stands for numerous painters: he is Moreau, Monet, Turner, as in relation to the beauty of a still life, Chardin too. In 1895 Proust began an essay on Chardin, never completed, which almost amounted to a short art-philosophical critique. He tried to interest the editor of the Revue Hebdomadaire, and sent him an outline. He was trying, he wrote, to show that it is always the great artists who awaken our love for the perceptible world. As an example he took the paintings of Chardin; he wanted to show what a spell they cast over the most ordinary things in daily life, by exposing to us the liveliness of a still life.20 Chardin teaches us, wrote Proust in his essay, that fruit and other objects have just as much life as people, that ordinary pottery is quite as beautiful as a jewel. He teaches us that beauty can be found everywhere, and that the beauty is to be found not in the objects, but in ourselves. The thought that Proust formulates here, namely that beauty is to be found everywhere, was to become the recurrent theme of A la Recherche.21 Proust does not remain one-sidedly attached to Chardin’s lesson, he does not fall victim to the idea that beauty is only to be found in the everyday. The magnificent, too, has its beauty. The artist feels the ubiquity of beauty; he can express the beauty of a glass of water just as well as that of a diamond.22 Gustave Moreau was the painter who initiated him into the beauty of the magnificent, the sumptuous, and also the artificial. “When one has seen Gustave a Depuis que j’en avais vu dans des aquarelles d’Elstir, je cherchais à retrouver dans la réalité, j’aimais comme quelque chose de poétique le geste interrompu des couteaux encore de travers, la rondeur bombée d’une serviette défaite où le soleil intercale un morceau de velours jaune. b Je l’eusse recherché avec passion pour la même raison qu’autrefois je n’aurais voulu que des mers tempétueuses, et qui était qu’elles se rattachaient, les unes comme autrefois autres, à une idée esthétique.

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Moreau, after having believed that things are only beautiful in their spontaneity, the flowers in their fields and the animals living their lives, scorning all kinds of object d’art (…) when one has seen Gustave Moreau, one acquires a taste for sumptuous costumes, for things deprived of their natural grace and understood as symbols.” a 23 In A la Recherche Proust speaks out against a modern tendency no longer to admire the magnificence of San Marco and the Palace of the Doges, but only to see the Venice of the narrow “calli” and the little “campi”. “In Venice it is works of art, things of priceless beauty, that are entrusted with the task of giving us our impressions of everyday life.” b 24 During his stay in Venice the impressions that he earlier experienced in Combray repeat themselves, though in a more magnificent frame: “Whereas in Combray on Sunday mornings one had the pleasure of stepping down into a festive street, but where that street was entirely paved with sapphire-blue water, cooled by warm breezes and of a colour so durable that my tired eyes might rest their gaze upon it in search of relaxation without fear of its blenching.” c 25 Not only the everyday, but also the world of high society becomes an object of Elstir’s art: “I realised that regattas, and race-meetings where well-dressed women might be seen bathed in the greenish light of a marine race-course, might be for a modern artist as interesting a subject as the festivities which they so loved to depict were for a Veronese or a Carpaccio.” d 26 Later Proust adopts as his maxim: “Everything is equally precious; the commonplace dress and the sail that is beautiful in itself are two mirrors reflecting the same image: their virtue is all in the painter’s eye.” e 27 In this way the “pupil” demonstrates himself more consistent than his “teacher”. When the name a Quand on a vu Gustave Moreau, après avoir cru que les choses n’étaient belles que dans leur spontanéité et les fleurs dans les champs et les bêtes dans leur vie, dédaignant toute espèce d’objets d’art (…) quand on a vu les Gustave Moreau, on se prend de goût pour les toilettes somptueuses, pour les choses détournées de leur grâce naturelle et prises comme symboles. b Puisque à Venise ce sont des oeuvres d’art, les choses magnifiques, qui sont chargées de nous donner les impressions familières de la vie. c Comme à Combray le dimanche matin, on avait bien le plaisir de descendre dans une rue en fête, mais cette rue était toute en une eau de saphir, rafraîchie de souffles tièdes, et d’une couleur si résistante que mes yeux fatigués pouvaient, pour se détendre et sans craindre qu’elle fléchît, y appuyer leurs regards. d Je compris que des régates, que des meetings sportifs où des femmes bien habillées baignent dans la glauque lumière d’un hippodrome marin, pouvaient être, pour un artiste moderne, un motif aussi intéressant que les fêtes qu’ils aimaient tant à décrire, pour un Véronèse ou un Carpaccio. e Il n’y a pas de choses plus ou moins précieuses, la robe commune et la voile en elle-même jolie sont deux miroirs du même reflet. Tout le prix est dans les regards du peintre.

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Marcouville-l’Orgueilleuse is mentioned in a discussion about the churches of Normandy, Elstir is incapable of finding this church beautiful. It is half new, half restored, and lacks the beautiful patina which only time can bestow. The narrator points out Elstir’s inconsistency here. His rejection of new buildings contradicts his own “impressionism”. He is cutting the building off from its environment, he does not notice the light which dissolves its shape. His appreciation of the building is limited to the archaeological view.28 The narrator and Albertine made a late afternoon visit to the church of Marcouville-l’Orgueilleuse. The setting sun bathed the partly renovated, partly restored church in a patina which was just as beautiful as that which is produced by time.29 He uses this to oppose Elstir’s fetishism. “What does it matter if a building is new when it does look old, or even if it does not look old at all?” As “proof” that the new has its beauty too, Proust tries to express the harsh poetry of new blocks of flats in Paris. If you look at some of the houses that have been built lately for well-to-do tradesmen in the new districts, the stone is all freshly cut and still too white, don’t they seem to rend the torrid midday air of July, at the hour when the shopkeepers go home to lunch in the suburbs, with a cry as sharp and acidulous as the smell of the cherries waiting for the meal to begin in the darkened dining-room (…)?” a 30 Towards the end of his life, as fatigue gradually robbed him of his creative powers, Elstir really does display certain idolatrous tendencies. In his old age, Elstir now believes he has found his ideal of beauty in his wife, that ideal which he had hitherto striven to realise as the deepest part of himself. What a relief for him to touch that beauty with his lips, after having to strive so hard to create it from himself. Proust sees it as the satisfaction of an inherent materialism in us that the beautiful can exist even without the intercession of an artist.31 “Elstir at this period was no longer at that youthful age in which we look only to the power of the mind for the realisation of our ideal. He was nearing the age at which we count on bodily satisfactions to stimulate the force of the brain, at which mental fatigue, by inclining us towards materialism, and the diminution of our energy, towards the possibility of influences passively received, begin to make us admit that there may indeed be certain bodies, certain callings, certain rhythms that are specially privileged, realising so naturally our ideal that even without genius, merely by copying the movement of a shoulder, the tension of a neck, we can achieve a masterpiece.” b 32 a Mais certaines maisons nouvellement bâties (…), où la pierre trop blanche est fraîchement sciée, ne déchirent-elles pas l’air torride de midi en juillet (…) d’un cri aussi acide que l’odeur des cerises attendant que le déjeuner soit servi dans la salle à manger obscure (…) ? b Elstir à cette époque n’était plus dans la première jeunesse où l’on n’attend que de la puissance de la pensée la réalisation de son idéal. Il approchait de l’âge où l’on compte sur les

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And thus the belief in the “beauty of life” – a stage lower than art, which Swann had not passed – took control over Elstir as well in his old age33, so that he was almost the only one to mourn the death of Monsieur Verdurin. With advancing age he clung ever more tightly to the world which had served him as a model, with an ever increasing attachment to the materialistic conviction that a significant part of beauty is to be found in things themselves.34 Several stages mark the influence of Elstir on the narrator. In the first phase Elstir’s art initiates him to the beauty of the universe. What the protagonist fails to fathom with his own powers, he tries to penetrate with the help of Elstir’s art.35 This has already been discussed in detail. In a later phase it is especially the originality of Elstir’s works that attracts the narrator, and which motivates him to see more of Elstir’s paintings.36 He seeks to grasp the qualitative, the specific beauty which characterises each of his paintings, he wants to identify the “new beauty” with which these works enrich the existing world.37 The narrator looks at the roses in a water painting in Madame Verdurin’s house, and compares them with the real roses on the table. There is only a slight resemblance between them, exactly as if the artist’s aim was to breed a new variety of rose. “‘Almost’ only, for Elstir was unable to look at a flower without first transplanting it to that inner garden in which we are obliged always to remain. He had shown in this water-colour the appearance of roses which he had seen, and which, but for him, no one would ever have known; so that one might say that they were a new variety with which this painter, like a skilful horticulturist, had enriched the rose family.” a 38 Here the emphasis is on the creation of a new universe: like a God the artist creates a new world, creates his own universe, accessible only through his art. For the narrator the significance of Elstir lies in the discovery or confirmation of the primacy of the optical illusion, or, put another way, Proust uses the example of Elstir to explain his thoughts about the optical illusion, whose equivalent in literature is the metaphor. The narrator finds himself in Elstir’s studio and stands before various seascapes. “I was able to discern from these that the satisfactions du corps pour stimuler la force de l’esprit, où la fatique de celui-ci en nous inclinant au matérialisme, et la diminution de l’activité, à la possibilité d’influences passivement reçues, commencent à nous faire admettre qu’il y a peut-être bien certains corps, certains métiers, certains rythmes privilégiés, réalisant si naturellement notre idéal que, même sans génie, rien qu’en copiant le mouvement d’une épaule, la tension d’un cou, nous férions un chefd’oeuvre. a A demi seulement, Elstir ne pouvant regarder une fleur qu’en la transplantant d’abord dans ce jardin intérieur où nous sommes forcés de rester toujours. Il avait montré dans cette aquarelle l’apparition des roses qu’il avait vues et que sans lui on n’eût connues jamais; de sorte qu’on peut dire que c’était une variété nouvelle dont ce peintre, comme un ingénieux horticulteur, avait enrichi la famille des Roses.

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charm of each of them lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the objects represented, analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor.” a 39 In the painting Carquethuit Harbour, land and sea are reflected in each other. Proust’s description of the painting is adequate. The land is described in marine metaphors and vice versa. Characteristic of Elstir’s art is that he does not paint things as he sees them, but so that they conform to the optical illusion of the first impression.40 Elstir presents things as seen by him at first glance, even before reason can interpose its corrections. Proust defends this method as the only truly creative: “It is surely logical, not from any artifice of Symbolism but from a sincere desire to return to the very root of the impression, to represent one thing by that other for which, in the flash of a first illusion, we mistook it.” b 41 The first impression of a thing shows it as itself: it is still without a name. But as soon as we name it, we are carrying out an intellectual operation behind which the first direct impression disappears. “The names which designate things correspond invariably to an intellectual notion, alien to our true impressions, and compelling us to eliminate from them everything that is not in keeping with that notion.” c 42 A writer like Dostoyevsky uses the same procedure. Also the great épistolière of the seventeenth century, Madame de Sévigné, sometimes describes events from the optical point of view: “What I meant was that Mme de Sévigné (…), like Dostoievsky, instead of presenting things in their logical sequence, that is to say beginning with the cause, shows us first of all the effect, the illusion that strikes us.” d 43 Proust’s methods function in the same way: time and again he presents the (aesthetic) appearance – pure appearance – rather than the reality we know. Only afterwards does he identify things. He allows us first to taste the otherness of an event.44 But why this faithfulness to the first impression? Why pay so much attention to the “sensation initiale”, the initial perception? The first impression is always surprising, always different from what one’s expectations, and also different from one’s dreams. Reality shakes him, breaks through the uniformity of his a J’y pouvais discerner que le charme de chacune consistait en une sorte de métamorphose des choses représentées, analogue à celle qu’en poésie on nomme métaphore. b N’est-il pas logique, non par artifice de Symbolisme mais par retour sincère à la racine même de l’impression, de représenter une chose par cette autre que dans l’éclair d’une illusion première nous avons prise pour elle? c Les noms qui désignent les choses répondent toujours à une notion de l’intelligence, étrangère à nos impressions véritables, et qui nous force à éliminer tout ce qui ne se rapporte pas à cette notion. d Il est arrivé que Mme de Sévigné (…) comme Dostoievsky, au lieu de présenter les choses dans l’ordre logique, c’est-à-dire en commençant par la cause, nous montre d’abord l’effet, l’illusion qui nous frappe.

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seeing, is essentially heterogeneous. Seen through Proust’s eyes things reacquire their fascinating alienness, their “beauté spéciale”. An example of this way of seeing things, as it were through the eyes of a convalescent, is the following scene: Saint-Loup and the protagonist are walking in Paris. The narrator, deep in thought, is lagging behind. Saint-Loup has the sensitivity to walk ahead slowly. Suddenly the narrator notices something which he describes as follows “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, SaintLoup’s two fists, multiplied by the speed with which they were changing place in this – to all appearance ideal and decorative – arrangement.” a 45 On closer examination it becomes clear that the reality is not aesthetic, but aggressive. In broad daylight a man has forced his attention on Saint-Loup, whereupon the latter uses his fists to ward him off.46 Proust tries to free himself from what he knows, and to abstract from it. He describes the first impression as intensively as possible. Only then does he identify things. “A little tap on the window-pane, as though something had struck it, followed by a plentiful light falling sound, as of grains of sand being sprinkled from a window overhead, gradually spreading, intensifying, acquiring a regular rhythm, becoming fluid, sonorous, musical, immeasurable, universal: it was the rain.” b 47 This proustian technique follows from his perspectivism, which, as we shall show later, is the outstanding artistic principle of his novel. It is reserved for the music of the composer Vinteuil to dispose of the narrator’s remaining doubts about the truth of art. Vinteuil’s Sonata, and in particular his posthumously published work the Septet, serve as the final confirmation for the narrator of his belief in art. The passages which Proust devotes to the description of the Septet are among the most lyrical of A la Recherche – the ideas expressed there among the most profound.48 In his reflection on art he is afflicted now and then by uncertainty, whether art is not after all just a duplication of life, nothing more than its extension and a 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. b Un petit coup au carreau, comme si quelque chose l’avait heurté, suivi d’une ample chute légère comme de grains de sable qu’on eût laissés tomber d’une fenêtre au-dessus, puis la chute s’étendant, se réglant, adoptant un rythme, devenant fluide, sonore, musicale, innombrable, universelle: c’était la pluie.

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therefore just as unreal as life itself. Listening to Wagner’s music, the clearly audible “Vulcan-like skill” raises doubts: “Could it be this that gave to great artists the illusory aspect of a fundamental, irreducible originality, apparently the reflexion of a more than human reality, actually the result of industrious toil? If art is no more than that, it is no more real than life and I had less cause for regret.” a 49 After taking leave of Albertine, the narrator wonders what sense it could have to sacrifice that newly regained freedom to art, if the appearance of real individuality in works of art results simply from technical skill. “If art was indeed but a prolongation of life, was it worthwhile to sacrifice anything to it?” b 50 Listening once more to Vinteuil’s last work with great attention, his doubts fall silent. He had long had the feeling that music, that art which provides him an experience of depth and truth, must correspond to a spiritual reality. Now this speculation becomes conviction: The music of Vinteuil shows him that art is the only expression of reality. This reality is different for every artist “Each artist seems thus to be the native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten, and which is different from that whence another great artist, setting sail for the earth, will eventually emerge.” c 51 Vinteuil’s Septet, even more than the Sonata, brings him closer to this realm than ever before.52 Proust describes the heavenly, incandescent joy that this work radiates. Only art is capable of representing the deepest reality, “that ineffable something which differentiates qualitatively what each of us had felt,” d 53 that which can never be expressed even in the most intense conversation between friends. It took a Vinteuil, an Elstir, to make this clear to him. Art alone bestows on us the possibility of communication with the universe of another. “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.” e 54 Vinteuil’s music issues an appeal to him which he will never forget, and which, unlike Swann, he will follow “the strange summons which I should a Serait-ce elle qui donnerait chez les grands artistes l’illusion d’une originalité foncière, irréductible, en apparence reflet d’une réalité plus qu’humaine, en fait produit d’un labeur industrieux? Si l’art n’est que cela, il n’est pas plus réel que la vie. b Si l’art n’était vraiment qu’un prolongement de la vie, valait-il de lui rien sacrifier? c Chaque artiste semble ainsi comme le citoyen d’une patrie inconnue, oubliée de lui-même, différente de celle d’où viendra, appareillant pour la terre, un autre grand artiste. d cet ineffable qui différencie qualitativement ce que chacun a senti. e 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.

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henceforth never cease to hear, as the promise and proof that there existed something other, realisable no doubt through art, than the nullity that I had found in all my pleasures and in love itself, and that if my life seemed to me so futile, at least it had not yet accomplished everything.” a 55 Proust’s Platonism cannot be overlooked here.56 Life occupies a lower sphere than art, which borders on the Godly. The spiritualisation of life, its realisation, the raising of life to the sphere of light is indeed possible, but only through art. Proust belongs to that family of writers and thinkers like Dante and Nikolaus Cusanus, Montaigne and Leibniz and in recent times T.S. Eliot and Patrick White, who assume the primacy of art. Only in individual works of art can life be justified, can be expressed. These artists are distinct on the one hand from those philosophers who are too abstract, and are also distinct on the other hand from those intellectuals who see politics as primary and who want to improve the world. The artist is still faced with the accusation of doing nothing for the improvement of society. The “homo politicus” wrongly believes that the aesthetic path is mere dilettantism. That the path of art is difficult to tread and demands extreme effort, resolution and honesty is shown by the development of the narrator in A la Recherche. The narrator will not immediately follow the call. He is still too attached to earthly things, but an illumination like the music of Vinteuil, a revelation like “Martinville” – see below – represent for him “starting-points, foundation-stones for the construction of a true life.” b 57 They remind him that life, which seems empty and worthless to him, is really full of significance.58

Swann and Charlus: against aestheticism

One of the gravest dangers that threaten a developing artist is aestheticism. The name Swann occurs repeatedly in this connection. Swann embodies the aesthete. He represents an attitude which Proust recognised as a danger for himself. One could say the novel describes the victorious struggle of the narrator against Swann. Swann’s “dilettantism” is ultimately overcome by the creativity of the narrator. a l’étrange appel que je ne cesserais plus jamais d’entendre comme la promesse qu’il existait autre chose, réalisable par l’art sans doute, que le néant que j’avais trouvé dans les plaisirs et dans l’amour même, et que si ma vie me semblait si vaine, du moins n’avait-elle pas tout accompli. b les points de repère, les amorces pour la construction d’une vie véritable.

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Without Swann his life would have taken another direction. It was through him that the narrator got to know Balbec, Albertine and the Guermantes. In many ways, Swann is an earlier incarnation of the narrator.59 But while Swann remains where he is, the narrator advances. The sensitive and artistic Swann is not capable of freeing himself from the “world” in order to realise himself. His relationship to Odette symbolises this drama. The break with her at the end of Du côté de chez Swann, the bitter insight that he has wasted years of his life, that he would have given his life for a woman who was not his ideal; this did not result in any deep self-questioning, no inner decision to realise his life in art. To our amazement we read in the next part, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, that Swann is Odette’s husband. This surprising development is caused on the one hand by habit, and on the other by Swann’s aestheticism which misleads him into obstinately seeing Odette as Botticelli’s Sephora, after being struck at the start of the love affair by the likeness between her and Botticelli’s women. Albertine, the last and the most intensive love of the narrator, will die. Without this violent separation, without this accident, the narrator might have married her, despite the separation that had taken place shortly before, despite his knowledge that Albertine is unreachable and that love offers neither the possibility of communication with the other nor the possibility of the realisation of oneself. Nonetheless even Swann shows some of the elements of a new life; both in his love for Odette and also in his thoughts on the Sonata of Vinteuil, he reaches the limit beyond which leads the path to real life. Until then he had spent his life in high society and wasted his talent as expert and lover of art to advise his hostesses on the purchase of paintings. He has abandoned his study of Vermeer, his intellectual faith is weakened, and he consoles himself with the idea that life can be just as interesting as a novel.60 He has had many affairs with women, initially those from the upper class. Later he becomes increasingly blasé and is satisfied with servant girls. He does not care that they don’t correspond with his aesthetic taste.61 The meeting with Odette is a turning point. Initially he has no feeling at all for her special beauty. He does not understand her.62 In a second meeting she receives him wearing a mauve housecoat of crêpe de Chine, feeling not very well (“un peu souffrante”). As she stands next to him looking at an etching, he is struck by her similarity with Sephora, the daughter of Jethro, a fresco by Sandro Botticelli in the Sistine Chapel.63 From that moment on he understands and justifies being attracted to this woman. He feels comfortable to see in Odette a Botticelli, to discover his ideal of beauty in this creature, which he can possess.64 He falls in love. When he arrives late at a soirée at the Verdurins, to whose circle she belongs, and does not find her there, he doesn’t know what to do, and for the

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first time he feels a powerful longing for her (that is the most effective way to get “infected” by love, notes the writer, who tends to describe love as an infectious disease from which one seldom recovers and which can be fatal).65 He searches for Odette until late in the night in various restaurants – in vain. Everywhere places are closing and the lights being turned out. In the dark streets he encounters the shadows of solitary passers-by. “Anxiously he clutched at all these dim forms, as though, among the phantoms of the dead, in the realms of darkness, he had been searching for a lost Eurydice.” a 66 In this first phase of love a renewal takes place in him which, and this is also a limitation, is always connected only with Odette. “He felt the inspirations of his youth, which had been dissipated by a frivolous life, stirring again in him, but they all bore now the reflection, the stamp of a particular being.” b 67 Since he has fallen in love, things have regained that special meaning which he used to see in them, but only insofar as they are illuminated by the thought of Odette.68 His taste for life returns, but always remains connected with his love for Odette. His jealousy reawakens “the passion for truth, but for a truth which, too, was interposed between himself and his mistress, receiving its light from her alone, a private and personal truth the sole object of which (an infinitely precious object, and one almost disinterested in its beauty) was Odette’s life, her actions, her environment, her plans, her past.” c 69 In every other phase of his life, the little details of the daily life of another person seemed worthless to him; now the smallest detail acquires the greatest significance. A “recherche de la vérité”, an obstinate will to know takes possession of him, not without involving embarrassing mistakes. Driven by mistrust and jealousy he drives past her house one night, after she had cancelled a meeting on grounds of illness. The light is still on behind the shutters. He gets out some distance from her house and steals up to her window. He hears voices and believes he is listening to Odette’s lover. But when he knocks on the window, the faces of two complete strangers appear; it was the wrong window. Love reaches the stage where Swann becomes completely bound up with her, becomes one with her. But this all-enveloping love has the salutary effect of making him neglect all other worldly interests. If he revisits society, he feels a Il frôlait anxieusement tout ces corps obscurs comme si, parmi les fantômes des morts, dans le royaume sombre, il eût cherché Eurydice. b Il sentait renaître en lui les inspirations de la jeunesse qu’une vie frivole avait dissipées, mais elles portaient toutes le reflet, la marque d’un être particulier. c la passion de la vérité, mais d’une vérité, elle aussi, interposée entre lui et sa maîtresse, ne recevant sa lumière que d’elle, vérité toute individuelle qui avait pour objet unique, d’un prix infini et presque d’une beauté désintéressée, les actions d’Odette, ses relations, ses projets, son passé.

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“the same detached pleasure as he would have derived from a novel or a painting in which were depicted the amusements of a leisured class.” a 70 Full to the brim with his love for Odette, his longing for her, his suffering about her, he no longer views a soirée at the house of Madame de Saint-Euverte in a social, but in an aesthetic perspective. On this evening Odette is “guarded” by the homosexual Charlus, so that Swann can relax. The things of the world appear as themselves, when they are no longer objects of our will.71 This last is the condition for a poeticisation of the world. Through love he becomes, for the first time, receptive for the beauty of a soirée in high society: “On alighting from his carriage, in the foreground of that fictitious summary of their domestic existence which hostesses are pleased to offer to their guests on ceremonial occasions, and in which they show a great regard for accuracy of costume and setting, Swann was delighted to see the heirs and successors of Balzac’s “tigers” – now “grooms” – who normally followed their mistress on her daily drive, now hatted and booted and posted outside in the roadway in front of the house, or in front of the stables, like gardeners drawn up for inspection beside their flower-beds.” b 72 For the first time he regards the personnel from a new point of view: that of the artist. In the entrance hall he admires like a work of art “the scattered pack of tall, magnificent, idle footmen (…) and who, pointing their noble greyhound profiles, now rose to their feet and gathered in a circle round about him. One of them, of a particularly ferocious aspect, and not unlike the headsman in certain Renaissance pictures which represent executions, tortures and the like, advanced upon him with an implacable air to take his things.” c 73 From a fashionable hedonist Swann develops into an artistic observer, who transforms a soirée into a fascinating art gallery of renaissance characters: Mantegna, Dürer, Benvenuto Cellini are the references for the servants of the house. But he also sees the guests with new eyes. Their faces no longer serve merely to a le plaisir désintéressé qu’il aurait pris à un roman ou à un tableau où sont peints les divertissements d’une classe oisive. b Dès sa descente de voiture, au premier plan de ce résumé fictif de leur vie domestique que les maîtresses de maison prétendent offrir à leurs invités les jours de cérémonie et où elles cherchent à respecter la vérité du costume et celle du décor, Swann prit plaisir à voir les héritiers des ‘tigres’de Balzac, les grooms, suivants ordinaires de la promenade, qui, chapeautés et bottés, restaient dehors devant l’hotel sur le sol de l’avenue, ou devant les écuries, comme les jardiniers auraient été rangés à l’entrée de leurs parterres. c la meute éparse, magnifique et désoeuvrée des grands valets de pied (…) et qui, soulevant leurs nobles profils aigus de lévriers, se dressèrent et, rassemblés, formèrent le cercle autour de lui. L’un d’eux, d’aspect particulièrement féroce et assez semblable à l’exécuteur dans certains tableaux de la Renaissance qui figurent des supplices, s’avança vers lui d’un air implacable pour lui prendre ses affaires.

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identify individuals, but they appear to him for the first time as purely aesthetic phenomena. Even the monocles which many guests wear are not untouched by this perception: the monocle worn by General de Froberville “[stuck between his eyelids] like a shell-splinter in his vulgar, scarred and over-bearing face, in the middle of a forehead which it dominated like the single eye of the Cyclops, appeared to Swann as a monstrous wound which it might have been glorious to receive but which it was indecent to expose.” a 74 Is it by chance that the music this evening includes a piece from Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, Liszt’s Saint Francis preaching to the birds, one of Chopin’s Preludes and finally la petite phrase (the little phrase) from Vinteuil’s Sonata? Do they not both epitomise, Orpheus and Saint Francis, the artist? Much later, at the end of A la Recherche, Proust provides a matching scene. The narrator is attending a matinee at the house of the Princess de Guermantes, which is transfigured in a similar way. At this moment the protagonist is similarly filled with love, though with a different love, a higher love. He is pregnant with the idea of his work. The love which has ignited the narrator no longer concerns an individual but the immaterial, art. Swann and later his own experience have taught him that an ideal cannot be realised in an individual. Swann’s love remains material, tied to a person. His “rebirth” is predestined to failure. The high point of the evening is reached with the performance of the little phrase, that mysterious and magical musical piece that seems to speak directly to Swann. The first time he heard it was during an evening at the Verdurins, in the company of Odette. Inextricably intertwined with his love for Odette, it symbolised for him the happiness or the fragility of this love, and comforted him when he was suffering about it. When he now heard that piece once more, he felt its proximity like a “déesse protectrice et confidente de son amour”, like a protective goddess, a confidante of his love.75 Because, unlike those present, the little phrase took his love seriously; it deemed it more important than normal life and found this love precious enough to be expressed in musical notes. For a moment, Swann is aware that art alone is capable of expressing and realizing the most intimate feelings 76 The little phrase returns to him his faith in art. He rediscovers in the melody one of the invisible realities in which he no longer believed, and he feels the wish and the strength to dedicate his life to it.77 However that is as far as Swann gets. The little phrase remains simply connected with his love for Odette and accompanies him through the various stages of this love, the last of which is the vanity of his suffering. The appeal which the little phrase directs at him remains unanswered. The possibilities opened to him a comme un éclat d’obus dans sa figure vulgaire, balafrée et triomphale, au milieu du front qu’il éborgnait comme l’oeil unique du cyclope, apparut à Swann comme une blessure monstrueuse qu’il pouvait être glorieux d’avoir reçue, mais qu’il était indécent d’exhiber.

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by the music of Vinteuil remain possibilities. The promise made by the musical theme remains unfulfilled. Its fulfillment is reserved for the narrator, who seems in many respects to be the successor to Swann: in the sense, if the comparison is acceptable, that the Ecclesia follows the Synagogue.78 Swann’s life leads automatically to the problem of aestheticism. In A la Recherche, Swann is presented as a person who finds life as interesting as a novel, if not even more interesting, and who assumes that life itself has “beautiful things” to offer.79 This attitude to life relieves people like him of the duty to create, to rediscover reality with one’s own means. This theme acquires enormous dimensions for Proust. In Swann and Charlus the author portrays the aesthete and the dilettante, with whose help he frees himself from his own tendency to aestheticism. As already mentioned, it is a striking characteristic of Swann’s to discover the faces of people he knows in works of art, in portraits of old masters, and vice versa. In Odette he sees Botticelli’s Sephora, Giotto’s Charity he sees in a pregnant kitchen maid. This tendency goes so far that Odette is for him Sephora, and that he never asks about the kitchen maid with other words than “Well, how goes it with Giotto’s Charity?” a 80 The tendency to replace reality with a work of art is continuously and vehemently opposed by Proust, particularly because aestheticism is one of the most seductive approaches to life for those who suffer under reality. The path of the aesthete is not Proust’s path; life is too real for him, too demanding of commitment. Reality with its impenetrable, solid, opaque character appears to him as the greatest and most difficult challenge for the artist – as opposed to aestheticism, which is a danger for almost every artist. Proust escapes it only by splitting himself into two parts, Swann-Charlus and the narrator. This is the chief aspect which lends the work its character as a Bildungsroman.81 Proust discovers and describes aestheticism hidden behind various masks, he exposes it in the thinking of the Ruskin he so admired, he denounces it in Robert de Montesquiou, and displays it in the figures of Swann and Charlus, and even the later Elstir reveals himself as an aesthete. Ruskin has already been covered extensively. In the above-mentioned essay on Ruskin, Proust talked about Robert de Montesquiou, without, however, mentioning his name and always respectfully: the idolatry that he discovers in his illustrious contemporary, he finds in his conversation, his work is provisionally cleared of this accusation.82 To find beauty in a kind of fabric because one has seen it in a painting by Gustave Moreau, whom one admires; to feel enthusiasm about a dress because it was described by Balzac in his portrait of Madame de Cadignan, at her first meeting a Comment va la Charité de Giotto?

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with d’Arthez. Proust’s comment: Balzac’s description is functional and effective. We know exactly what impression Madame de Cadignan wanted to make on d’Arthez with this dress, “but take from it the intelligence which is one of her attributes, and it becomes a mere sign, stripped of all significance; in other words, nothing at all. To continue to adore it to the extent of going into raptures when one happens to see it on a woman’s back in real life, is nothing less than sheer idolatry”. a 83 Proust swears that he will not commit this sin. He resists the danger by transferring his own aestheticism into the characters Swann and Charlus. He also uses the writing of pastiches as a therapy. In a 1919 letter to R. Fernández he writes about his stylistic imitations of Saint-Simon, Balzac, Sainte-Beuve and others, which are to be found in Pastiches et Mélanges: “The whole thing was for me a matter of hygiene; one must purge oneself of the natural vice of idolatry and imitation.” b 84 Numerous examples illustrate Swann’s subtle and apparently innocent idolatry: He is interested in a lady because she was Liszt’s beloved or because Balzac dedicated a novel to her grandmother. He buys a drawing because Chateaubriand described it.85 He owns a magnificent Asian scarf in pink and blue, which be bought only because it resembles that of the Virgin Mary in Botticelli’s Magnificat.86 Swann continues to see in his wife a Botticelli, despite all the external changes, which make her into a celebrated beauty of her time – the narrator gets a bewitching impression of her during a walk in the Bois de Boulogne.87 While Swann’s aestheticism is innocent and subtle, this is not the case with the Baron de Charlus. Along with Robert de Montesquiou, he reflects Proust himself in many ways, and as a homosexual and aesthete comes to dominate the novel more and more. His aestheticism is increasingly dangerous, aggressive and perverse.88 For a time the Baron tries to make a match between his protégé, the young violinist Morel, and the niece of Jupien. This latter is a tailor and has his workshop in the back yard of the Guermantes’ house. The narrator happens to witness the wonderful encounter between Jupien and the Baron. Through his connection with Jupien’s niece he is able to retain his power over Morel and takes delight on boring evenings in stirring up discord between the young married couple, since “the Baron had always been fond of battle-pictures.” c 89 a mais une fois dépouillée de l’esprit qui est en elle [the dress], elle n’est plus qu’un signe dépouillé de sa signification, c’est-à-dire rien; et continuer à l’adorer, jusqu’à s’extasier de la retrouver dans la vie sur un corps de femme, c’est là proprement de l’idolâtrie. b Le tout était surtout pour moi une affaire d’hygiène; il faut se purger du vice naturel d’idolâtrie et d’imitation. c le baron n’avait jamais détesté les tableaux de bataille.

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After he has not seen Morel for a long time, he kisses him in public on both cheeks, for various reasons but probably in particular “for literary reasons, as upholding and illustrating the traditional manners of France, and just as he would have protested against the Munich (…) style of furniture by keeping old armchairs that had come to him from a great-grandmother, countering British phlegm with the affection of a warm-hearted eighteenth-century father who does not conceal his joy at seeing his son again.” a 90 When Madame Verdurin addresses him during one of her soirées, the nobleman does not stand up. One of the reasons is of a literary nature: “With the singular amalgam that he had made of his social conceptions at once as a great nobleman and as an art-lover (…) he invented as it were tableaux-vivants for himself after Saint-Simon; and at that moment he was amusing himself by impersonating the Maréchal d’Huxelles, who interested him for other aspects also, and of whom it is said that he was so arrogant as to remain seated, with an air of indolence, before all the most distinguished persons at Court.” b 91 Charlus simulates indignation over what he describes with profound satisfaction as the blasphemy of the Jews in Paris, who mostly live in squares and on streets that bear the names of Christian saints, and says of the Ghetto: “But after all a ghetto is all the finer the more homogeneous and complete it is.” c 92 Initially the Baron quakes at the thought that his relationship with Morel might become known and that his family could intervene. But in this situation too his aestheticism triumphs. He takes refuge in literature and identifies his situation with that of the Princess of Cadignan, from Balzac’s novel Les secrets de la princesse de Cadignan. Charlus consoles himself that the fate which threatens him is very balzacien.93 If he were ever to find himself in court, and this cannot be excluded due to his homosexuality – which takes extremely compromising forms – he would not express himself before the judges in clear sentences. Rather he would speak in Bergotte-like language, to which his literary talent predisposes him and the use of which gives him an aesthetic pleasure.94

a par littérature, pour maintien et illustration des anciennes manières de France, et comme il aurait protesté contre le style munichois (…) en gardant de vieux fauteuils de son arrièregrand-mère, opposant au flegme britannique la tendresse d’un père sensible du XVIIIe siècle qui ne dissimule pas sa joie de revoir un fils. b Avec le singulier amalgame qu’il avait fait de ses conceptions sociales, à la fois de grand seigneur et d’amateur d’art (…) il se faisait, d’après Saint-Simon, desespèces de tableaux vivants; et, en ce moment, s’amusait à figurer le maréchal d’Huxelles, lequel l’intéressait par d’autres côtés encore et dont il est dit qu’il était glorieux jusqu’à ne pas se lever de son siège, par un air de paresse, devant ce qu’il y avait de plus distingué à la Cour. c Mais enfin un ghetto est d’autant plus beau qu’il est plus homogène et plus complet.

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He is under the power of the same mechanism when he has an argument with Morel; he pretends that he wants to duel with him, in order to persuade him to return to him. When a shocked and frightened Morel really does return to Charlus, the Baron fundamentally regrets the lost opportunity to revive a historical spectacle with a duel.95 In his penitential talk with Morel he compares himself with the archangel Raphael and Morel with Tobit’s son. He gets so involved with this simile that he completely loses sight of his original goal to convince Morel to return together from Balbec to Paris.96 When in 1914 German troops march through Northern France in the direction of Paris and get dangerously close to the capital, Charlus secretly rubs his hands: not just because of his secret sympathy for the Germans, but also for aesthetic reasons. He is delighted by the thought of comparing Paris on the eve of a German invasion with Pompeii and Herculaneum on the eve of the eruption of Vesuvius. “How many points of resemblance leap to the eye!” he cries joyfully.97 His aestheticism is so perverse because he accepts the destruction of Paris in exchange for the pleasure of becoming an eye witness to a “classical” tragedy. The narrator notices in himself too a tendency to aestheticism, but criticises it and opposes it. He finds himself with Albertine who is kept prisoner like a bird in her room. She is sitting at the pianola. “Her fingers, at one time accustomed to handlebars, now rested upon the keys like those of a Saint Cecilia (…). The pianola which half concealed her like an organ-case, the bookcase, the whole of that corner of the room, seemed to be reduced to the dimensions of a lighted sanctuary, the shrine of this angel musician, a work of art which, presently, by a charming magic, was to detach itself from its niche and offer to my kisses its precious, rose-pink substance.” a 98 But then he interrupts his artistic meditation and corrects himself: Albertine is not at all a work of art for him. Swann’s example must be a warning to him against admiring a woman like a work of art. He would not make the same mistake.99 Still, Proust’s novel is full of aesthetic similes. But what is it that distinguishes Swann’s aestheticism from Proust’s view of things? For Swann Odette simply is Sephora, the kitchen maid is unalterably Giotto’s Charity and Bloch – another guest of the Guermantes family – is for Swann Bellini’s Mohammed II. For Proust however the metaphors serve to raise what is seen to a higher level, to brighten, to illuminate it. In the passage quoted above the narrator’s error is not to liken Albertine in a particular situation to Saint Cecilia, but that the simile a Ses doigts, jadis familiers du guidon, se posaient maintenant sur les touches comme ceux d’une sainte Cécile (…). Le pianola qui la cachait à demi comme un buffet d’orgue, la bibliothèque, tout ce coin de la chambre semblait réduit à n’être plus que le sanctuaire éclairé, la crêche de cet ange musicien, oeuvre d’art qui, tout à l’heure, par une douce magie, allait se détacher de sa niche et offrir à mes baisers sa substance précieuse et rose.

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leads a life of its own for a moment and replaces reality. Proust’s similes – discussed further down – are always directed towards the other, towards “la beauté spéciale”, the specific beauty of the other. He never speaks of an identity between them: once he likens the Prince de Guermantes to a courtier of Louis XIV, then with an Olympic god, but the Prince de Guermantes is never any other than the Parisian Prince de Guermantes around 1900. The metaphors serve simply to take particular characteristics of the Prince, his conception of politeness, his manners, and through the analogy to transfigure and clarify them. One could take the example of the various (sleeping) Albertines:100 sometimes she is an allegory for death, then she appears as a plant, another time she resembles the goddess of time. None of these metaphors negates her existence, as Sephora replaced Odette for Swann. Carefully embedded in the context, the metaphors grow naturally from the particular situation of the narrator and Albertine and express the changing relation between him and his lover. As an allegory for death she symbolises his indifference, as the goddess of time she represents the impossibility of knowing the other and the drive to do so, as a plant she symbolises the calm that he finds once more. Each of the metaphors fixes one of the many Albertines the narrator encountered, in each case in relation to the phase of his love for her. The metaphor disappears, but Albertine, the eternal, mysterious Other remains. The mistake of Swann and particularly Charlus is that they first poeticise the world, and then raise this poetic transformation to reality. A la Recherche shows in several places how the narrator, that is Proust, refuses this fatal aestheticism. One example out of many: It is war; a rumour makes the rounds that the Cathedral of Amiens has been heavily damaged in the fighting. This causes Charlus to remark that if the raised arm of Firmin [the first Bishop of Amiens] has been hit, then the highest proclamation of faith has disappeared from the world. The narrator’s answer is highly interesting and reads like a declaration of faith. He admits that in this case an old and venerated symbol of faith would really have been destroyed, which he too would regret. But on the other hand it would be absurd to sacrifice reality to the symbol which represents it. “Cathedrals are to be adored until the day when, to preserve them, it would be necessary to deny the truths which they teach. The raised arm of St Firmin said, with an almost military gesture of command: “Let us be broken, if honour requires.” Do not sacrifice men to stones whose beauty comes precisely from their having for a moment given fixed form to human truths.” a 101 a Les Cathédrales doivent être adorées jusqu’au jour où, pour les préserver, il faudrait renier les vérités qu’elles enseignent. Le bras levé de saint Firmin dans un geste de commandement presque militaire disait: "Que nous soyons brisés, si l’honneur l’exige.” Ne sacrifiez pas des

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For Proust, things exist thanks to a creation which continually renews itself. “The creation of the world did not take place once and for all (…), it is, of necessity, taking place every day.” a 102 The aesthete is the opposite of the creative person. After replacing reality with a symbol, and forgetting that the symbol was once the expression of a human statement about exactly that reality, he clings to it with fetishistic zeal. The aesthete believes in the “beauty of life”. Proust teaches that reality, our reality, must first be realised, must first be illuminated. The aesthete replaces the reality which surrounds him with existing symbols and images of this reality, which have been created by other people in other times. He worships them, without taking into consideration that they are only symbols and, as such, refer to something beyond themselves, to the one who created them. Actually, they should encourage him not to imitate, but to do what their creator did and create something himself so that reality once more finds an adequate expression. In A la Recherche Proust remarks that he would like to be able to write like a Saint-Simon or a Balzac, but he can only achieve any similarity to them by separating himself from these beloved examples.103 The aesthete leaves his first, personal impression in favour of a “beautiful” expression, which he has obtained from others; he does not follow the appeal which the individual impression addresses to him, to “redeem” this in a new and fitting form. How many are there who read Homer fifty times, hear the same piece of music, view a church, without deepening their personal impression, and at the most become erudite? “And how many art-lovers stop there, without extracting anything from their impression, so that they grow old useless and unsatisfied, like celibates of Art! They suffer, but their sufferings, like the sufferings of virgins and of lazy people, are of a kind that fecundity or work would cure.” b 104 The aesthete wants to see beauty materially and permanently realised. A la Recherche carries the lesson that it can only be recognised spiritually and intermittently. After these remarks, Paul Claudel’s unjust verdict stands out. He counted Proust among those who look backwards, among the dilettantes and the aesthetes.105 Whoever sees in A la Recherche just the search for the past, does not recognise the deeper meaning of the novel. A la Recherche is much more the story of a writer looking for possibilities to recreate reality, to rediscover the hommes à des pierres dont la beauté vient justement d’avoir un moment fixé des vérités humaines. a La création du monde n’a pas eu lieu une fois pour toutes (…) elle a nécessairement lieu tous les jours. b Aussi combien s’en tiennent là qui n’extraient rien de leur impression, vieillissent inutiles et insatisfaits, comme les célibataires de l’Art! Ils ont les chagrins qu’ont les vierges et les paresseux, et que la fécondité ou le travail guérirait.

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value that it must possess, even if it escapes him in the first moment – must escape him, since he almost always approaches reality as an active being full of demands and expectations and egoistic intentions. The narrator is most strongly affected by his tendency to idolatry as he returns on a November day to the Bois de Boulogne, in the hope of rediscovering the images of his youth there. This episode occurs at the end of Du côté de chez Swann as a kind of epilogue.106 In place of carriages, cars now drive there. Different pedestrians and different strolling ladies pass him by. The clothes Madame Swann wore have been replaced by a new fashion. He searches fruitlessly for the beauty which his memories had promised him. He does not find it, and the Bois de Boulogne turns from a magical, elysian garden back into a normal wood. Three times “Alas!” sounds for the irrecoverably departed time. This is the only occasion when Proust seems to look back with nostalgia and regret. But this looking back happens consciously and the sadness is intentional: they mark a phase in the development of the narrator. “How horrible! I exclaimed to myself. Can anyone find these motor cars as elegant as the old carriage-andpair?” a 107 At this moment the author intervenes and criticises the fetishistic attitude of his hero. In our youth we have faith in things as if they were individual people. Later we lose this belief. “But when a belief vanishes, there survives it – more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things – a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause – the death of the gods.” b 108 The epilogue marks a turning point, a “point de départ”. As soon as one reaches a spiritual point of view, as soon as one starts to believe that beauty is not an attribute of an object or a person, but is to be found in ourselves and can be recreated by ourselves, then there is no reason for melancholy. The lesson is: the gods are not dead, even if they no longer inhabit Olympus. They are hiding in normal people. We have to discover them. But do we have the means to do so?

a Quelle horreur! Me disais-je: peut-on trouver ces automobiles élégantes comme étaient les anciens attelages? b Mais quand disparaît une croyance, il lui survit, et de plus en plus vivace, pour masquer le manque de la puissance que nous avons perdue de donner de la réalité à des choses nouvelles, un attachement fétichiste aux anciennes qu’elle avait animées, comme si c’était en elles et non en nous que le divin résidait et si notre incrédulité actuelle avait une cause contingente, la mort des Dieux.

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A la Recherche is often interpreted as the search for lost youth, as a longing for the happiness of childhood.109 It cannot be denied that Proust always thought of his childhood with emotion and warmth, because it was the time when he believed things to be unique and individual, the phase of life in which he was to some extent an artist by nature.110 The disappearance of this talent fills him at first with melancholy and creates a tendency to idolatry. If one only reads Du côté de chez Swann, without prologue and epilogue, then one reads a deeply felt account of youthful years which is not fundamentally different from other, similar accounts, a story of youth in which the regret for the irrevocable past repeatedly finds expression, for that which is lost forever and will never come again … nevermore. Youth is represented here as the only thing of value, and seems to be the “lost time”. “It is because I believed in things and in people while I walked along those paths that the things and the people they made known to me are the only ones that I still take seriously and that still bring me joy. Whether it is because the faith which creates has ceased to exist in me, or because reality takes shape in the memory alone, the flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers. The Méséglise way (…) the Guermantes way (…) constituted for me for all time the image of the landscape in which I should like to live.” a 111 He will never love anything again the way he loved the church of Combray at this time. But still Proust does not remain stuck with the image of his youth. The painfully felt loss of childish belief which comes with adulthood (Proust speaks of l’âge de foi (the age of faith) and of l’âge de raison (the age of reason)), forms an important precondition for his recherche, for his search. A search for his youth? Should one understand by temps perdu just the period of youth? The spontaneous reminiscences, which “assail” the narrator at the end of A la Recherche – in the sensation of the uneven paving stones, of the rattling of cutlery – should be enough to show that the “lost time” does not refer to lost childhood or youth, but covers the whole of life as it has been lived up to then. Only when one recognises A la Recherche as a book about the search for a means with which to discover and restore the hidden beauty of the whole of life, has one grasped the meaning and the range of Proust’s work. Nonetheless, the impression often arises of an ambiguity in relation to the “lost time”.112 Proust himself seems to be warning us against it. When he disa C’est parce que je croyais aux choses, aux êtres, tandis que je les parcourais, que les choses, les êtres qu’ils m’ont fait connaître sont les seuls que je prenne encore au sérieux et qui me donnent encore de la joie. Soit que la foi qui crée soit tarie en moi, soit que la réalité ne se forme que dans la mémoire, les fleurs qu’on me montre aujourd’hui pour la première fois ne me semblent pas de vraies fleurs. Le côté de Méséglise (…) le côté de Guermantes (…) ont constitué à tout jamais pour moi la figure des pays où j’aimerais vivre.

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covers the “mémoire involontaire”, the spontaneous memory, as a means to rediscover the past, he specifies: “A moment of the past, did I say? Was it not perhaps very much more: something that, common both to the past and to the present, is much more essential than either of them? (…) the permanent and habitually concealed essence of things.” a 113 The overall purpose of A la Recherche is not the rediscovery of the past, but the “transfiguration” of the whole of life.114 The end of Du côté de chez Swann is, as already mentioned, full of melancholy and nostalgic longing for the past. But reading Swann alone is not enough to know Proust. In a letter to Jacques Rivière he writes: “It’s only at the end of the book, when the lessons of life have been grasped, that my design will become clear. The thought I express at the end of the first volume (…) is the opposite of my conclusion. It’s a stage, apparently subjective and dilettante, on the way towards the more objective and affirmative conclusions. If anyone were to infer therefrom that my philosophy is a disenchanted scepticism, it would just as though an opera-goer, having seen the end of the first act of Parsifal and being sent packing by Gurnemanz, were to imagine that Wagner meant to show that simplicity of heart leads nowhere. (…) No, if I had no intellectual beliefs, if I were simply trying to remember the past and to duplicate actual experience with these recollections, ill as I am I wouldn’t take the trouble to write.” b 115

Art and life: the temptation of the world Proust uses the word “life” in two senses. Sometimes he means the frivolous, worldly life, and sometimes the real, true life. The latter is the goal of his search. He will find it in art. His relation with reality is more complex than appears at a Rien qu’un moment du passé? Beaucoup plus, peut-être; quelque chose qui commun à la fois au passé et au présent, est beaucoup plus essentiel qu’eux deux (…) l’essence permanente et habituellement cachée des choses. b Ce n’est qu’à la fin du livre, et une fois les leçons de la vie comprises, que ma pensée se dévoilera. Celle que j’exprime à la fin du premier volume (…) est le contraire de ma conclusion. Elle est une étape, d’apparence subjective et dilettante, vers la plus objective et croyante des conclusions. Si on en induisait que ma pensée est un scepticisme désenchanté, ce serait absolument comme si un spectateur ayant vu, à la fin du premier acte de Parsifal ce personnage ne rien comprendre à la cérémonie et être chassé par Gurnemantz, supposait que Wagner a voulu dire que la simplicité du coeur ne conduit à rien (…). Non, si je n’avais pas de croyances intellectuelles, si je cherchais simplement à me souvenir et à faire double emploi par ces souvenirs avec les jours vécus, je ne prendrais pas, malade comme je suis, la peine d’écrire.

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first sight. When the narrator withdraws to his study, neglects and finally breaks off his contacts with the world, he justifies this with the argument that his withdrawal has the goal of “realizing” just that world.116 Only in solitude do the Muses come near. In his early literary work the writer already warns against the temptations of worldly life. The death of Baldassare Silvande117 gives the example of an “homme du monde”, who recognises, during the course of a lifethreatening illness, the vanity of life. A new life awakes in him. He becomes thoughtful and melancholy; death seems desirable, as his true origin. But when he recovers and his powers return, life also regains control. “He went out, began to live again and died a second time to his own self.” a 118 He once again pursues the pleasures that life offers. After two months, however, the symptoms of a general paralysis return, and this time death cannot be held off. Before he dies, the remote sounding of a church clock revives memories of his youth. The people he loved in his childhood appear before him. He sees his mother and remembers her hopes that he would become a musician, a wish that he can no longer fulfill: “All is over.” Violante ou la mondanité119 is the story of a girl who grows up cut off from the world. Her parents die early, and a guardian takes responsibility for her and for the administration of the manor. She grows up almost alone. Her best friends are her dreams, and she promises to remain faithful to them her whole life long. But as she gets older, she feels the awakening of a longing for love and success. She leaves her parental home for the court. Don’t worry (…) I shall come back”, she promises her old tutor. “But will you then be able to?” (…) “One can do what one wants to do” (…) “Perhaps you will not want the same things then” (…) “Why?” (…) “Because you will have changed”120 Her guardian turns out to be right. She never returned. Young, she stayed in the world to rule over the kingdom of fashion that, hardly more than a child, she had conquered. Grown old, she stayed on to defend it. All in vain. She lost it. And when she died she was still engaged in trying to re-conquer it. Augustin [her guardian] had counted on disgust. But he had counted without a force which, if nourished from the first by vanity, will overcome disgust, contempt and even boredom: and that is habit.” b 121 “The virtues of society are vices of the saint”, as Emerson puts it.122

a Il sortit, recommença à vivre et mourut une deuxième fois à lui-même. b Elle n’y revint jamais. Jeune, elle était restée dans le monde pour exercer la royauté d’élégance que presque encore enfant elle avait conquise. Vieille, elle y resta pour la défendre. Ce fut en vain. Elle la perdit. Et quand elle mourut, elle était encore en train d’essayer de la reconquérir. Augustin avait compté sur le dégoût. Mais il avait compté sans une force qui, si elle est nourrie d’abord par la vanité, vainc le dégoût, le mépris, l’ennui même: c’est l’habitude.

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In Jean Santeuil the theme of worldly seduction returns with greater emphasis. Here Madame Desroches is an artistically active woman before she gains an entrée to the “world”. But her successes in the higher circles bring her artistic efforts to a grinding halt.123 Jean will try to resist the worldly temptations and to realise himself. The attraction of worldly fame is strong. Only very few can resist it. In A la Recherche the circle of the Verdurins is portrayed as a domineering clan, as a tyrannical sect that demands absolute loyalty from the “faithful”. Non-appearance at their “jour” is, in the eyes of Madame Verdurin, la Patronne, an extremely culpable heterodoxy. She uses all possible means to ensure the obedience of her fidèles. Elstir is one of the few who dare to break out of this circle. In retrospect he counts himself lucky, “as converts bless the illness or misfortune that has caused them to withdraw from the world and has shown them the way of salvation.” a 124 When the narrator discovers in Balbec that Elstir used to be the laughable painter with the nickname “Biche”125 who was “adopted” by the Verdurins, the famous and widely admired artist explains to the narrator whose confusion had not escaped his notice: “We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us (…). The lives that you admire (…) represent a struggle and a victory.” b 126 Prophetic words, considering the later development of the narrator. Ski, Brichot and others lack the will power of an Elstir. But still Brichot, “sorbonnard” and extremely well educated, has talent. But the “world” means too much to him. He is one of those who, although they stand above the fashionable world, are not capable of realizing themselves outside this sphere.127 Once he did try to break out, but the attempt was short-lived. And although his devotion and loyalty to the Verdurins was less and less appreciated and his education was even ridiculed, so that his fate resembled ever more closely that of the tormented and tyrannised Saniette, he is unable to break free.128 The highest level of social recognition is promised by the world of the Guermantes, which is closed to outsiders and therefore all the more attractive for them. It is the highest ambition for some simply to be allowed access to this world. What a triumph it must have been for Madame X when she finally succeeded in gaining access to the salon of Madame de Guermantes – after she had been repeatedly refused entry and even humiliated. Madame Bontemps, whose bourgeois background is described to the reader early in A la Recherche, is esa comme les convertis bénissent la maladie ou le revers qui les a jetés dans la retraite et leur a fait connaître la voie du salut. b On ne reçoit pas la sagesse, il faut la découvrir soi-même après un trajet que personne ne peut faire pour nous (…) Les vies que vous admirez (…) représentent un combat et une victoire.

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tablished at the end of the novel as an important member of the Faubourg SaintGermain and one of the “queens” of Paris.129 Even more brilliant is the career of Madame Verdurin. Slowly but surely she climbs the social ladder; after the death of her second husband, the Duke of Duras, the course of her life is crowned by her marriage to the widowed Prince de Guermantes; from now on she is herself “Princess de Guermantes”. One of Swann’s dearest wishes is for his good friend Oriane de Guermantes to agree to receive his wife, Odette de Crécy, a former courtesan. He will not live to see this. One could really speak of a “tyranny of worldliness”, with power over even the most illustrious representatives of society. The princess de Guermantes is so strongly bound by worldliness that she cannot spend a single moment alone and cannot bear to see the most boring of her visitors take their leave.130 The danger emanating from the “world” becomes clear to the narrator after a dinner in Rivebelle near Balbec, in the company of Saint-Loup. For the sake of his work, which demands good health, the narrator undergoes several days of a strict regime. But the thought of a dinner with Saint-Loup in the elegant restaurant of Rivebelle makes him forget his restrictive rules. He allows himself to be drawn by the fascination of the fashionable, shimmering life. When he enters the restaurant and hears the gypsy music, he is immediately entranced. He delightedly takes in the world of the waiters and the guests.131 But the happiness that he experiences there is of a purely material nature and superficial. The effects of alcohol and snobbery have the dangerous result that he completely ceases to worry about the future: “I was enclosed in the present, like heroes, and drunkards.” a 132 As he sets off home in an alcoholic haze, he is totally indifferent to the possibility of having an accident; nor would he make any effort to avoid being killed, like “a bee drugged with tobacco smoke that had ceased to take any thought for preserving the accumulation of its labours and the hopes of its hive.” b 133 His temporary state of mind makes everything else seem quite unimportant. But he is aware that this state of “idéalisme subjectif” – as he scornfully names it some time later – is simply the result of too high a dose of alcohol.134 The experience, and the inherent potential, of a spontaneous reminiscence later make him similarly drunk with happiness. This underlines the subjectivity and profanity of the enthusiasm of Rivebelle, in contrast to the objective and higher joy which the experience of a spontaneous reminiscence confers on him. And his joy on discovering the idea of his work does not make him careless, but a J’étais enfermé dans le présent, comme les héros, comme les ivrognes. b abeille engourdie par la fumée du tabac, qui n’a plus le souci de préserver la provision de ses efforts accumulés et l’espoir de sa ruche.

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rather the opposite – fearful and anxious. “No longer was I indifferent to my fate as I had been on those drives back from Rivebelle; I felt myself enhanced by this work which I bore within me as by something fragile and precious which had been entrusted to me and which I should have liked to deliver intact into the hands of those for whom it was intended, hands which were not my own.” a 135 From this point on he is afraid of death. He worries himself with the questions “Is there still time? … Am I well enough?”136 The narrator feels the temptations of the world, the fascination of “life”, most intensely in the relationship to Albertine. So intensely, in fact, that Proust cloaked this relationship in a mythological atmosphere. A.H. Pasco, in a particularly interesting article137, lists the numerous mythological references in the love story of the protagonist Marcel with Albertine: allusions to the Icarus myth, to the tales of One Thousand And One Nights and to the Wagner opera Parsifal. The author discovers that many names symbolise the sun and light.138 He connects the name Balbec with the word Baalbec, the later Heliopolis, the site of a famous sun temple. In addition he points out that the prefix or suffix “bal”, which appears in many French place names, stems from the name Belenus, a Celtic sun god. It is quite possible that Proust knew this. His passion for etymology is well known!”139 In fact one can show that Proust chiefly identifies Balbec with sun, light and life: “For Marcel, despite his early expectations of fog and storm, Balbec came to represent the place of the sun”. Beg-Meil in JeanSanteuil is the opposite, always associated with storms and fog.140 Pasco also associates the name Albertine with light and sun: Albh (IndoEuropean) means “white” (cf. the Latin “albus”)141 Albertine is always associated by the narrator with vital, frenetic life. Against the background of the dark blue sea, she is almost luminous, her sylphlike figure appears to him “sur la plage en feu”, on the blazing beach, in the gleaming light of the sun142 In La Fugitive the slightest sunlight causes him pain, it cuts through his soul, because it reminds him of Albertine from whom he has just separated and who he believes to be dead. “And if Françoise, when she came in, accidentally disturbed the folds of the big curtains, I stifled a cry of pain at the rent that had just been made in my heart by that ray of long-ago sunlight which had made beautiful in my eyes the modern façade of Marcouville-l’Orgueilleuse when Albertine had said to me: “It’s restored”. (…) I told Françoise to draw the curtains together, so that

a Je n’avais plus mon indifférence des retours de Rivebelle, je me sentais accru de cette oeuvre que je portais en moi (comme par quelque chose de précieux et de fragile qui m’eût été confié et que j’aurais voulu remettre intact aux mains auxquelles il était destiné et qui n’étaient pas les miennes).

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I would no longer see that ray of sunlight. But it continued to filter through, just as corrosively, into my memory.” a 143 Between sunrise and sunset, on the way to Balbec, a milkmaid at a station seems to symbolise the sun.144 According to Pasco, the narrator is ruled by the present, by “la félicité de la minute présente.”145 In this period, the interests of the narrator are directed almost exclusively towards immediate gratification, to sensuality in all its forms, to friendship. In one word, to the “world”. In vain does he try to keep hold of Albertine, the symbol of “splendide” life. He feels her slipping away from him. Her “death” means for him that the Ideal cannot be realised in this life: “the solar movement supports this movement.”146 Swann is confronted with his inability to break with the Now. Marcel could also become a Swann. “This Hazard receives allusive support through a parallel with the Icarus myth.”147 Pasco refers to place names like Icarville (where the narrator, in company with Cottard, had seen Albertine dancing very intimately with Andrée), Parville (Paros) and Apollonville. Although the narrator does not fly too close to the sun, but he “plays with fire”; the allusion to the Icarus myth reveals the danger in which the protagonist finds himself. His vocation for art becomes even more pressing. One could call the young girl literally the blind spot in the emotional life of the narrator.148 With Albertine and Balbec the atmosphere of One Thousand And One Nights is evoked. Albertine awakes in the narrator “visions of mystery, magic and enjoyment of sensual pleasures.”149 Pasco sees in the relationship of the narrator to Albertine allusions to the story of Hassan and the Jinn “Splendour”. As the most beautiful of the ten, she is caught by Hassan when bathing in the form of a bird. He takes away her wings, but in his absence she recovers them. She flies away, leaving behind only her two rings. When Albertine flees, she too leaves behind only her ring.150 Shortly before her flight, she flings open the window and cries “This life is stifling me (…). I must have air.” b 151 Pasco sees a parallel to this passage in the text of One Thousand and One Nights: “I feel the intoxication of the air invade my soul and compelling me to throw myself into space” Pasco finally draws attention to some allusions to Wagner’s Parsifal. “Les jeunes filles en fleurs”, the young women in their bloom, refer to the flower girls who Klingsor sets to seduce Parsifal. It is good that Pasco himself indicates that a Si Françoise en revenant dérangeait sans le vouloir les plis de grands rideaux, j’étouffais un cri à la déchirure que venait de faire en moi ce rayon de soleil ancien qui m’avait fait paraître belle la façade neuve de Bricqueville l’Orgueilleuse, quand Albertine m’avait dit: “‘Elle est restaurée’(…). Je disais à Françoise de refermer les rideaux pour ne plus voir ce rayon de soleil. Mais il continuait à filtrer, aussi corrosif, dans ma mémoire. b Cette vie m’étouffe. (…) Il me faut de l’air.

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these motifs naturally do not make an allegory out of A la Recherche itself. They simply have a supporting function. “In every case they illustrate and illuminate the object of the artist’s attention. The Icarus myth helps to reinforce the terrible danger of Marcel standing in the heat of the Sun, prepared as he is, to make a sacrifice of himself, Splendour highlights the mystery, the magic of the marvellous Albertine; Parsifal joins Icarus in emphasizing the hazards of Marcel’s adventures, and, further, serves to suggest the final goal: for Parsifal, the grail, and for Marcel, art.”152 Some of his interpretations, however, go too far. For example, his association of the name Guermantes with Gurnemanz, a character in Wagner’s Parsifal.153 Here he falls victim to the danger against which he himself warned, of seeing A la Recherche itself as an allegory. The special strength of Proust’s work is that it can stand even without this background knowledge. A la Recherche contains the sum of French, even European literature, and it can be read and understood without learned commentary. All the same, it is to Pasco’s credit that he brought out the sun allusions in Proust. His study makes it clear how rich, how many-facetted Proust’s work is. Pasco’s study is also important because Albertine is generally seen simply as a transposition of a male person, for example of Proust’s chauffeur and secretary Alfred Agostinelli. Not that one should deny this biographical origin, but it says nothing about the content of the relationship of the narrator to love. This only becomes clear through the interaction with the myth. Gilberte and Albertine are the incarnations of light and life. The first glance that he catches of Gilberte and does not immediately understand, suggests “plaisir”, sensuality, eroticism. The prefiguration of the girl next door from the narrator’s youth is Marie Kossichef in Jean Santeuil: “He [Jean] made the acquaintance of a little Russian girl, with a mass of black hair, bright, mocking eyes and rosy cheeks, who was possessed of all the glowing vitality and joy of living which were so sadly lacking in Jean.” a 154 In Proust one feels a wild craving for the life in which he himself could not take part. Albertine and the other young girls the narrator meets in Balbec epitomise the impetuous, pre-intellectual, unreachable bacchanalian life. They embody Dionysian joy, intoxication, lust. When, for the first time, he sees Balbec from a distance, his initial impression is one of orgiastic life. He sees girls whose body language is enough to reveal their lifestyle – frivolous, bold and completely unsentimental; their merciless mockery of everything ugly and their total lack of absolutely all forms of a Il [Jean] avait (fait) la connaissance d’une jeune fille russe avec de grands cheveux noirs, des yeux clairs et moqueurs, des joues roses, et qui brillait de cette santé, de cette vie, de cette joie qui manquaient à Jean.

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intellectual interest.155 He describes the group as “a youthful society in which thoughtlessness, health, sensual pleasure, cruelty, unintellectuality and joy held sway.” a 156 They awake in him the longing to belong to them, to be one of them, even though he is aware at the same time of the irreconcilable contradiction of this idea, as if “standing before some Attic frieze or a fresco representing a procession, I had believed it possible for me, the spectator, to take my place, beloved of them, among the divine participants.” b 157 But this knowledge does not prevent him from doing everything he can to make contact with these godlike figures, to approach them, to touch them. But even when he has captured one of them, the godliness which her figure had promised him escapes him. Gilberte, Albertine – they are all symbols for life and light, they signify an initiation. Their figures ignite the desire for the unattainable. Their function is beneficial if they represent something beyond themselves, if they awake a longing for higher things. But there is always the danger that they will take over the narrator, that he will forget their mediatory function, that he will fall prey to the belief that he can capture light in a physical, bodily form.158 The beautiful is not yet there, in material form, it has first to be recreated. Their figures represent only a stage in a process, which has to be left behind as Parsifal has to free himself from Kundry if he is not to lose forever the possibility of finding the Grail. The temptations of life are strong. Does it not mean something in this connection, that the narrator says that he can only work at night?159 The voices from within can only be heard in the quiet and solitude of night. “And it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet about me that I hear them anew, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the street that one would suppose them to have stopped, until they ring out again through the silent evening air.” c 160

a une société rajeunissante où régnaient la santé, l’inconscience, la volupté, la cruauté, l’inintellectualité et la joie. b devant quelque frise attique ou quelque fresque figurant un cortège, j’avais cru possible, moi spectateur, de prendre place, aimé d’elles, entre les divines processionnaires. c Et c’est seulement parce que la vie se tait maintenant davantage autour de moi que je les entends de nouveau, comme ces cloches de couvents que couvrent si bien les bruits de la ville pendant le jour qu’on les croirait arrêtées mais qui se remettent à sonner dans le silence du soir.

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Art and life: Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann Proust’s attitude to life is more complicated than usually assumed. It would be one-sided to see his art as a refuge, a flight from the life that had disappointed him. One would also be forgetting that Proust saw art as the only way to discover and to express the real value of life, as well as illuminating its darker side. Unlike Thomas Mann, Proust sees no contradiction between art and life. The relation is not dualistic, but hierarchical: Art is the closest sphere to the divine, and also that which most nearly represents the inner life of the individual. Unlike art, friendship, love, life as “homme du monde” are simply “modes” which quite inadequately convey the individual manner in which every one of us perceives the world. One still regularly hears the opinion that an author like Proust is a fugitive from life, that the disappointments of life have driven him to flee into art. This is fundamentally wrong, and results from a failure to distinguish between aesthetics and aestheticism. The latter, as already demonstrated, is emphatically opposed by Proust. In addition, this interpretation denies the philosophical tradition in which Proust’s aesthetics stand. For Proust, what is generally known as “life” is nothing more than a lie. For him it is art which reveals what life means to each of us. For Proust, truth and art are inseparably connected. This is most concisely expressed in his statement that art is the real life. “Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated – the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived – is literature.” a 161 Hence his dictum: the “the true last judgment” is art.162 For him art restores the value of life. Earlier, during the walks in the direction of Guermantes and later in the area of Balbec, he had experienced brief, happy moments of illumination, when he felt the immeasurable value of life. This feeling of the value of life will become even stronger when his concept of art has matured. “How much more worth living did it appear to me now, now that 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.” b 163 He is convinced that we separate ourselves in normal life from our true impressions, from reality, to the extent that conventional knowledge displaces reality and becomes denser and more impenetrable. “Vanity and passion and the intela La vraie vie, la vie enfin découverte et éclaircie, la seule vie par conséquent réellement vécue, c’est la littérature. b Combien me le semblait-elle [la vie] davantage, maintenant qu’elle me semblait pouvoir être éclaircie, elle qu’on vit dans les ténèbres, ramenée au vrai de ce qu’elle était, elle qu’on fausse sans cesse, en somme réalisée dans un livre.

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lect, and habit too, when they smother our true impressions, so as entirely to conceal them from us, beneath a whole heap of verbal concepts and practical goals which we falsely call life.” a 164 Thus life appears to us increasingly mediocre and empty, since we evaluate it on the basis of images produced by an “undifferentiated memory”, and which therefore contains nothing of what we really experienced.165 Proust makes the discovery that life itself is not a mistake, but that the mistake lies in him: “So that my personality of today may be compared to an abandoned quarry, which supposes everything it contains to be uniform and monotonous, but from which memory, selecting here and there, can, like some sculptor of genius, extract innumerable different statues.” b 166 Now we can also understand his condemnation of the artistic approach, the form of art which delivers a film-like procession of objects and claims the title of “realism”. For Proust, this approach is the least “realistic” of all, offering only a miserable relief of lines and surfaces. It impoverishes and depresses us because it provides nothing more than that so-called life which he does not hesitate to call a “lie”, simply to copy it and to duplicate it, “since it abruptly severs all communication of our present self both with the past, the essence of which is preserved in things, and with the future, in which things incite us to enjoy the essence of the past a second time.” c 167 Thus it can be understood that he takes a stand against the opinion of those who see in him simply a chronicler: “If I were simply trying to remember the past and to duplicate actual experience with these recollections, (…) I wouldn’t take the trouble to write” d, he writes in a letter to Jacques Rivière, a quotation from which appears earlier in another connection.168 From that moment on, when he is convinced that art is no “continuation of life”, he commits himself to it unconditionally for all the time that still remains to him. But Proust is quite aware of the fact that the “job” of an artist also involves a certain cruelty and a particular egoism. It causes him pain to treat everyone he knows, including those dearest to him, as models, like a painter; to use them as experimental objects and to distil the general from them.169 The narrator catches a L’amour-propre, la passion, l’intelligence, et l’habitude amassent au-dessus de nos impressions vraies, pour nous les cacher entièrement, les nomenclatures, les buts pratiques que nous appelons faussement la vie. b Et ma personne d’aujourd’hui n’est qu’une carrière abandonnée, qui croit que tout ce qu’elle contient est pareil et monotone, mais d’où chaque souvenir, comme un sculpteur de Grèce, tire des statues innombrables. c car elle coupe brusquement toute communication de notre moi présent avec le passé, dont les choses gardaient l’essence, et l’avenir, où elles nous incitent à la goûter de nouveau. d Si je cherchais simplement à me souvenir et à faire double emploi par ces souvenirs avec les jours vécus, je ne prendrais pas (…) la peine d’écrire.

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himself in this; that he does not love the intellectual, avant-garde intellectual in his friend Saint-Loup, which Saint-Loup himself would so much like to be and perhaps even superficially is, but the traditional nobleman “malgré-soi”. He feels uncomfortable using all these people for his book, taking a gesture from one and a tone of voice from another, almost denying their individual existence in the process: “A book is a huge cemetery in which on the majority of the tombs the names are effaced and can no longer be read.” a 170 The ultimate justification for this procedure is the work of art: only in art are the people of his life “realised”, only in art is their particular value expressed. So when the writer withdraws from the world and refuses all invitations, is this not done for the purpose of “bringing” this world “into the light”? He will have to submit to the unavoidable cruelty of art: “To me it seems more correct to say that the cruel law of art is that people die and we ourselves die after exhausting every form of suffering, so that over our heads may grow the grass not of oblivion but of eternal life (…) and so that thither, gaily and without a thought for those who are sleeping beneath them, future generations may come to enjoy their déjeuner sur l’herbe.” b 171 What is striking about all these contemplations on art and artists, is that Proust never brings into question the artist himself, as did Nietzsche and, after him, Thomas Mann. A comparison of Thomas Mann and Proust shows how different was the thinking of the two writers. We are confronted with two fundamentally different attitudes to life. Thomas Mann always connects art and artists with decay, with decadence. The original task of the artist was to glorify the world. Naive art praises and celebrates life and its beauty, holding up a mirror which displays a more beautiful reflection. Art, understood like this, is a stimulus of life. The problems arise when art connects with the mind, with “the critical, negative, and destructive principle”: such an art is no longer naive. It becomes sentimental or intellectual. But this means that from now on art includes criticism of life, that it becomes moralistic, even if its original function is never entirely lost.172 Thomas Mann’s view of art is ironic-pessimistic: “Art – is it not always a criticism of life made by a little Hanno?”173 Most people feel at home in life, as Hanno’s comrades feel at home in the school. The artist does not feel like this, but he does not a Un livre est un grand cimetière où sur la plupart des tombes on ne peut plus lire les noms effacés. b Moi je dis que la loi cruelle de l’art est que les êtres meurent et que nous-même mourions en épuisant toutes les souffrances, pour que pousse l’herbe non de l’oubli mais de la vie éternelle (…) sur laquelle les générations viendront faire gaîment, sans souci de ceux qui dorment en dessous, leur ‘déjeuner sur l’herbe’.

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raise his experience to the level of a general rule, “for he recognizes himself as a nervous exception”174 Daily life is crude and banal, but it is more robust than the sickly sensitivity of the artist. The idea of viewing art and spirit as signs of decadence, according to Mann, reached its peak in the thinking of Nietzsche, where the spirit denies itself in favour of the beauty and strength of life. This submission to life as ‘power’ was by now “no longer fatalistic but enthusiastic, erotically intoxicated.”175 According to Thomas Mann, Nietzsche offers two possible paths: one is “Renaissance aestheticism; hysterical cult of power, beauty, and life”, the other is “irony”. This is the path Mann will choose. This, too, involves the self-negation of the spirit in favour of life. However “life” is here only “he pleasant normality of inintellectuality”, and the self-negation is not complete: “Irony woos (…) even if in vain. It is not animal but intellectual, not gloomy but witty.”176 The quotations are from Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, published in 1918 and a product of the war years. The First World War marked a caesura for Mann. It is the great turning point of his life.177 It forced him to take a position on his own era. At first he takes the side of Germany at war, as in the intentionally ambiguous essay Friedrich und die große Koalition (December 1914). But soon he revises his position. In Reflections of an Unpolitical Man he critically assesses his political involvement during the war, he draws a balance for the old and tries to understand the new in a long, tortured examination of his conscience: “What more is this long monologue and writing than a glance back at what I was, what I was for a while with good reason and honor, and what I, without feeling old, will obviously no longer will be able to be? No, I am scarcely as ignorant as I can be about the significance of the hour, for I even know that he who does not succeed in coming to tolerable terms with the new times will be old and will always be a man of yesterday.”178 Reflections of an Unpolitical Man is an antithetical work. The pivotal contradictions are culture vs. civilisation and art vs. life, contradictions which Mann could hardly reconcile in this period of his life. Not until the twenties of the last century did he manage a brief synthesis, or at least an attempted synthesis. Irony, which he defines as “the pathos of the middle”179, allows him to build a bridge to the new era. He no longer emphasises the irreconcilable, the antithetical, which still please him in the Reflections, but now commits himself to the idea that “the aim is not decision, but harmony.”180 The figure of Goethe looms large in the foreground. Mann is driven by the hope that precisely in Germany, in the “central country”, this synthesis will be possible, in Germany, where the problem of the relationship between art and reality is felt more strongly than in any other European country.181 But one should not forget that Mann, despite this change of emphasis, continues to fight “in the conservative interest.”182 His

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problem is: how to preserve a conservative attitude to life in a modern era, which he sees as inevitable after the defeat of Germany in 1918. In 1924 Thomas Mann published The Magic Mountain, a Bildungsroman, which Lukács saw as “dedicated to an ideological battle between life and death.”183 But Lukács himself saw that the spiritual duel between the representatives of Light and of Darkness, between the Italian humanist Settimbrini and the perverse-nihilistic Jesuit Naphta for the soul of the German average citizen Hans Castorp, “life’s problem child”184, results in a draw. The positive, edifying element of the novel is that the German is aware of his position between two extremes and that he should mediate between them.185 The outcome, however, remains open. Many consider Mann’s thinking to have undergone a sharp change after the First World War.186 Wrongly. Mann simply tried to come to terms with the modern era. Superficially, Mann’s thoughts and opinions certainly appear to have changed. In Reflections politics and democracy continue to be heavily attacked and held to be irreconcilable with “culture”. After the publication of The German Republic (1922) they are integrated in Mann’s idea of humanity. But if one considers what the reason for this change of opinion is, the answer has to be: love for German culture. Here, as in the Reflections, Mann defends this German culture. Mann is afraid of nothing so much as radicalism, whether of the left or the right. In the 20s it becomes clear that a reaction from the right was more of a threat. His concern for balance forces him to fight for the Republic, which is more of an ideal for him than a reality.187 In the last analysis it is love for Germany, not love for democracy, which makes him commit himself to the defence of the Republic of Weimar. “His whole life long, Thomas Mann saw Germany with the eyes of this conservative love. Doktor Faustus is the child of his desperate passion.”188 Mann’s hope that Germany could realise a synthesis did not come true. Finis musicae is the invisible subtitle of Doktor Faustus! 189 To return to Mann’s thoughts about art. Since the “Nietzsche experience”, art has become questionable for Mann, the artist now has a bad conscience. Nietzsche’s influence started early and was powerful.190 Not the Dionysian, prophetic Nietzsche, Mann makes clear (he had never thought highly of Zarathustra191), but the psychologist, the moral critic. As the “psychologist of decadence” Nietzsche was extremely important for him, as a corrective for his longing for decay and death, as a counterweight to the tremendous influence of Schopenhauer and Wagner. For Mann, Schopenhauer and Wagner embody the atmosphere of death and decay. It is not Schopenhauer’s teaching as such which swept him away at the age of twenty four, but the pessimism, the desire for suffering and death, the

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hidden eroticism, the longing for deliverance. For Schopenhauer, art is a means of deliverance from life. Mann calls Schopenhauer’s philosophy the “artist’s philosophy” par excellence, a philosophy which has influenced many very different artists.192 One can see in Buddenbrooks what Schopenhauer meant to him. Thomas Buddenbrook, barely able to stand upright towards the end of his life, takes a book at random from the bookcase. Although he does not understand everything, he is captivated and deeply moved by what he reads. Finally he has found the justification for his suffering: “He was filled with a great, surpassing satisfaction. It soothed him to see how a master-mind could lay hold on this strong, cruel, mocking thing called life (…) and condemn it. His was the gratification of the sufferer who has always had a bad conscience about his sufferings and concealed them from the gaze of a harsh, unsympathetic world, until suddenly, from the hand of an authority, he receives, as it were, justification and license for his suffering.”193 This quotation illustrates the enormous chasm which separates Mann from Proust: Mann’s quietism and pessimism, against Proust’s lifeaffirming idealism. In A la Recherche one can find an interesting parallel to the above quotation from Buddenbrooks: the effect of the little phrase on Swann’s emotional life. He too finds in the sonate the justification for his suffering. But Swann is not the end of A la Recherche, while Buddenbrooks, just like Death in Venice, and even the Magic Mountain offer no perspectives at all. Proust also knew Schopenhauer. In his essay Journées de lecture, a passage from The World as Will and Representation is quoted.194 But Schopenhauer is not brought on to provide the justification for pessimism. Quite the reverse – Schopenhauer provides him with an example to show that erudition is no obstacle to originality: “Schopenhauer (…) provides an example of a temperament so vital that it can support without difficulty the burden of a vast amount of reading.” a 195 Of all the works he knew, Proust named Schopenhauer’s The Wisdom of Life the book of a writer who combined the widest possible reading with the greatest possible originality.196 It is also revealing to compare the two writers in their attitude to Wagner. It is known that Wagner was the second great influence on Mann. For Mann, his music meant “Todessehnsucht”, pessimism, eroticism. And even if he will, in the course of his life, become more critical of the Wagner phenomenon and will not shy from emphasizing his dilettantism, his domineering and tyrannical character, the pathos – all the same, he never denied his love for Wagner’s music: “If I ever hear anything of Wagner’s, I prick up my ears”197, as he wrote in a letter a Schopenhauer (…) nous offre l’image d’un esprit dont la vitalité porte légèrement la plus enorme lecture.

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of 14 July 1955. He is so much at home in the world of Wagner that he will never cease to regard Nietzsche as a reluctant Wagnerian.198 Proust’s admiration for Wagner was certainly no less. But for him, however, music and person are strictly separate. Proust is convinced that the most intimate in a person is expressed in his work. Wagner’s music, its “beauté spéciale”, is central to his view. One never gets the impression that he might associate Wagner’s music with pessimism or a death wish, or that it might appeal to a tendency to decadence in him. Proust doesn’t even know the expression decadence in this sense. In this connection it is not without significance that Proust compared the recherche of the hero of his book with Parsifal’s search for the Grail (cf. the letter to Jacques Rivière quoted above). Proust has no sympathy with the scruples of men like Nietzsche, who “are bidden by a sense of duty to shun in art as in life the beauty that tempts them, and who, tearing themselves from Tristan as they renounce Parsifal, and, in their spiritual asceticism, progressing from one mortification to another, succeed, by following the most bloody of the stations of the cross, in exalting themselves to the pure cognition and perfect adoration of Le Postillon de Longjumeau.” a 199 The reason for Proust’s lack of sympathy is that the idea of art as a phenomenon of decay is quite alien to him. As mentioned at the beginning of this essay, since Nietzsche, art and decadence have been associated by many intellectuals and in particular by Thomas Mann: “Intellectually, I belong to that race of writers throughout Europe who, coming from décadence, appointed to be chroniclers and analysts of décadence, at the same time have the emancipatory desire to reject it – let us say pessimistically: they bear the velleity of this rejection in their hearts and at least experiment with overcoming decadence and nihilism.” 200 In Nietzsche the artist has become “questionable”. Nietzsche poses the question whether art does not often arise from resentment against life. For many artists of the nineteenth century he had to answer in the affirmative. There is no such art criticism to be found in Proust. But this does not mean that Proust’s understanding of art was more naive. One might assert that, for him, the problem of art returns to the opposition aesthete vs. artist. The failure of the aesthete not in relation to life – since Proust did not know this Nietzschean opposition – but in relation to his own, inner task. In contrast, the real artist recreates life, revealing its truth for the first time.

a à qui (…) le devoir dicte de fuir, dans l’art comme dans la vie, la beauté qui les tente, qui s’arrachent à Tristan comme ils renient Parsifal et, par ascétisme spirituel, de mortification en mortification parviennent, en suivant le plus sanglant des chemins de croix, à s’élever jusqu’à la pure connaissance et à l’adoration parfaite du Postillon de Longjumeau.

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And here we come to the last and most important difference between Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann: the two writers represent completely different traditions. Proust’s thinking is monistic-pluralistic, Mann’s thinking is dualistic. Proust belongs to the neoplatonic tradition, Mann has inherited the ChristianLutheran cast of mind. There is also a significant difference in their conception of illness or suffering as possible stimuli for creativity. Proust knows none of the scruples (but also none of the perversions) of Thomas Mann. The Magic Mountain includes a discussion between the nihilist Naphta and the humanist Settembrini on the subject of illness. For Naphta illness is something that makes humans human, “for to be man [is] to be ailing”. It is illness that ennobles and spiritualises us, in his state of disease resides “his true nobility and his merit.”201 For Settembrini, however, illness chains people to their bodies and throws them back to the bodily level: “A human being who is first of all an invalid is all body; therein lies his inhumanity and his debasement.”202 This theme reaches the peak of its development in the main figure of Doctor Faustus, the composer Leverkühn, whose illness stands in direct connection with his creativity. The word illness here also includes moral degeneration and is connected with the devilish. Creativity is only possible with help from the forces of evil. This idea is quite foreign to Proust. Whoever had believed that Mann represents something European, will realise, after reading Proust, that Mann’s theme is a very German affair; those with a German background, like Ernst Robert Curtius, will feel the liberating nature of Proust’s way of looking at things. Proust had repeatedly expressed the view that there is a connection between illness or suffering of any kind and an artistic disposition. This viewpoint results from his thinking about the conditions which sharpen the “vision” of man, which intensify his sensitivity, to make him receptive for the beauty of things. His experience had shown him that suffering is more appropriate here than the intoxication of happiness. In all its forms, as deprivation, as vice, it keeps the spirit moving, it works against attachment to the appearance of things. Even gossip can be beneficial: “It [the gossip] prevents the mind from falling asleep over the factitious view which it has of what it imagines things to be and which is actually no more than their outward appearance.” a 203 A particular law of life is often discovered only through a great pain, “tearing up each new crop of the weeds of habit and scepticism and levity and indifference.” b 204

a Il [le potin] empêche l’esprit de s’endormir sur la vue factice qu’il a de ce qu’il croit les choses et qui n’est que leur apparence. b arrachant chaque fois les mauvaises herbes de l’habitude, du scepticisme, de la légèreté, de l’indifférence.

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Thus Charlus’ tendency – he is homosexual – prevent him from becoming fixated by a superficial and ironical view of things. The narrator regrets that Charlus does not write: he fulfills all the preconditions. On the other hand, his vice is only one element of his artistic nature, it alone is not enough to make an artist of him. Madame de Villeparisis would probably never have written her memoirs, had she not been a “persona non grata” in her social environment. “God, whose will it is that there should be a few well-written books in the world, breathes with that purpose such disdain into the hearts of the Mme Leroi, for he knows that if these should invite the Mme Villeparisis to dinner, the latter would at once rise from their writing tables and order their carriages to be round at eight.” a 205 In Proust’s view, habit is a force which distorts every true relation to reality. Illness and suffering are means of breaking through the power of habit: “Infirmity alone makes us take notice and learn, and enables us to analyse mechanisms of which otherwise we should know nothing.” b 206 The narrator meets a lady at a soirée, whose name he cannot immediately remember. This leads him into a digression about forgetfulness and about the effort of extracting a name from her. It is a wonderful and simultaneously profound description of the game of hide-and-seek that the memory plays with us when we try to remember a name. Proust shows that pain, no less than art, can lend magic to the smallest and least important things. Things that were so familiar that one did not notice them at all, become unknown, frightening or mysterious, through suffering, which he therefore calls a “powerful modifier of reality”. c 207 Proust sees suffering as an organ of perception. Through the depth of pain one forces one’s way to the essence of things.208 Every person who causes us pain – here, in particular, Albertine is meant – must be regarded as the lowest form of the divine, the sight of whom releases profound joy rather than the pain we have felt.209 “Indeed the whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer as a step enabling us to draw nearer to the divine form which they reflect and thus joyously to people our life with divinities.” d 210

a Dieu qui veut qu’il y ait quelques livres bien écrits souffle pour cela ces dédains dans le coeur de Mme Leroi, car il sait que si elles invitaient à dîner les Mme de Villeparisis, celles-ci laisseraient immédiatement leur écritoire et feraient atteler pour huit heures. b Le mal seul fait remarquer et apprendre et permet de décomposer les mécanismes que sans cela on ne connaîtrait pas. c puissant modificateur de la réalité. d Tout l’art de vivre, c’est de ne nous servir des personnes qui nous font souffrir que comme un degré permettant d’accéder à leur forme divine, et de peupler ainsi joyeusement notre vie de divinités.

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Proust’s understanding of suffering must have been strongly influenced by Emerson’s expression “compensation” (see above). The protagonist is described as a nervous, asthmatic young man who often has to keep to his bed and who is oversensitive to particular smells and impressions: one recognises Proust himself. Many times does the author suggest and openly state that the forced isolation resulting from his illness allows him to see more intensively and more poetically than others. Proust became conscious very early of this unexpected creative side of his illness. In the foreword to Les Plaisirs et les Jours, which he dedicated to a friend who died young211, he writes: “Life is a harsh thing which presses too close (…). Upon feeling its grip loosen for a moment, one can experience clear-sighted comforts. When I was a small child, the fate of no other character from the scriptures seemed to me to be quite so miserable as that of Noah, because of the flood which kept him trapped in the ark for forty days. Later on I was frequently ill, and for days on end I also had to remain in my “ark”. It was then that I understood that nowhere could Noah have had a better view of the world than from the ark, despite the fact that it was closed up and that night ruled over the earth.” a 212 Proust practised the idea he expresses here quite literally; from 1906 on, he shut himself up in his cork-lined room, in order to dedicate himself wholly to the re-creation of the world through art. One might regard his voluntary-involuntary isolation as his working method. In a 1913 interview he says: “This reclusion, I believe, has profoundly benefited my work. (…) My spiritual being no longer assails itself against the barriers of the visible and nothing impedes its freedom. (…). When it happens that a slender ray of sunlight manages to insinuate itself in here, like the ancient statue of Memnon which produces harmonious sounds when it is struck by the rays of the rising star, my whole being bursts with joy and I find myself transported into worlds of splendour.” b 213

a La vie est chose dure qui serre de trop près (…). A sentir ses liens un moment se relâcher, on peut éprouver de clairvoyantes douceurs. Quand j’étais tout enfant, le sort d’aucun personnage de l’histoire sainte ne me semblait aussi misérable que celui de Noé, à cause du déluge qui le tint enfermé dans l’arche pendant quarante jours. Plus tard, je fus souvent malade, et pendant de longs jours je dus rester aussi dans ‘l’arche’. Je compris alors que jamais Noé ne put si bien voir le monde que de l’arche, malgré qu’elle fût close et qu’il fît nuit sur la terre. b Cette réclusion, je la crois profondément profitable à mon oeuvre (…). Mon être spirituel ne se heurte plus aux barrières du visible et rien n’entrave sa liberté (…). Lorsque, par hasard, un mince rayon de soleil parvient à se glisser ici, pareil à l’antique statue de Memnon qui faisait entendre des sons harmonieux quand les rayons de l’astre levant la venaient frapper, tout mon être éclate de joie, et je me sens transporté dans des mondes resplendissants.

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Art and life: Commitment The problem of the relationship between art and society, in particular the question of the extent to which art should be committed, is a question that has concerned so many writers in modern times. It tortured Thomas Mann, but never appeared insoluble to Marcel Proust. Twice he was confronted with this problem in his career as a writer, during the Dreyfus Affair and during the First World War. On both occasions the calls for committed art rang out loud. The Dreyfus Affair, in particular, polarised and politicised the French intellectual elite. A reflection of these crises can be detected in A la Recherche, crises which seemed to put Proust’s nature as an artist in question. But in the end art triumphed. The protagonist shows an early interest in literature. His favourite author is Bergotte. The art of this writer means a sphere of a higher order than the reality surrounding him. He would also like to be a writer, he would also like to be a Bergotte. His parents, and especially his father who envisioned a diplomatic career for him, do not provide their son with much encouragement in this direction. Until an important guest, the retired ambassador Norpois, comes to his aid; he argues that literature is not incompatible with high social standing, but can even contribute to it. The narrator then gives Norpois, whom he regards as a great authority, a sample of his work to read. He would also very much like to hear his opinion about his favourite writer Bergotte. Norpois’ verdict on Bergotte is scathing. He calls Bergotte “a flute player”, an affected writer, his art too soft, too sweet. What we need, according to Norpois, is a manly art, a literature that stands at the service of the age, that builds us up. All these stylistic eccentricities, this mandarin language, these superfine subtleties, which he sees as characteristic of Bergotte’s art, are completely useless and decadent.214 Norpois’s attack, just like Brichot’s later wartime appeal for a nationally committed art 215, leave the narrator puzzled. But when he has deepened his own understanding of art, he has found the answer and will resolutely reject the demand for commitment in art. For Proust the primacy of the inward is so obvious that writers who place themselves at the service of politics have failed. They are evading their duty to decipher the inward book. “How many for this reason turn aside from writing! What tasks do men not take upon themselves in order to evade this task! Every public event, be it the Dreyfus case, be it the war, furnishes the writer with a fresh excuse for not attempting to decipher this book.” a 216 a Combien se détournent de l’écrire! Que de tâches n’assume-t-on pas pour éviter celle-là! Chaque événement, que ce fût l’affaire Dreyfus, que ce fût la guerre, avait fourni d’autres excuses aux écrivains pour ne pas déchiffrer ce livre-là.

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Proust similarly refuses to let himself be confused by the demand that art should avoid the frivolous and only deal with serious themes, and should describe no aristocratic idlers, but workers and noble intellectuals. It is exactly the art of a Bergotte that shows him that the greatness of a writer does not reside in the nobility and loftiness of his theme; art does not arise preferentially in higher circles, where intellectually stimulating conversations take place, where the people are educated and the style of life is refined. The only thing that counts is the ability to capture the surrounding life and to transpose it into an appropriate style.217 The style alone is the criterion for spirituality; whether the topic is trivial or intellectually significant is beside the point.218 For Proust that is all there is to say on this topic. It is simply not very important in his understanding of art and artists.

Proust and friendship: contra Nietzsche Finally we present, though still in relation to the theme of art and life, a digression on Proust’s view of friendship. Proust’s central question is: Can friendship express a person’s essential nature? Faced with this question we can also consider how well Proust knew Nietzsche, given that he sharply contradicts the German philosopher here. It may at first seem curious that Proust expresses a different opinion from Nietzsche, on an apparently secondary matter, which, however, is of great importance for him: what is the value of friendship? The fact that he keeps coming back to this question indicates the importance of the theme for Proust. The relevant passage in A la Recherche goes as follows: “Friendship (…) is so trivial a thing that I find it hard to understand how men with some claim to genius – Nietzsche, for instance – can have been so ingenuous as to ascribe to it a certain intellectual merit, and consequently to deny themselves friendships in which intellectual esteem would have no part.” a 219 Proust could never understand how Nietzsche could believe that the truth could be realised in such a confused and inadequate form of expression as friendship is by its very nature.220 In a remark from the year 1909, which B. de Fallois quotes in his foreword to Contre Sainte-Beuve, Proust writes: “My opina L’amitié (…) est si peu de chose que j’ai peine à comprendre que des hommes de quelque génie, et par exemple un Nietzsche, aient eu la naiveté de lui attribuer une certaine valeur intellectuelle et en conséquence de se refuser à des amitiés auxquelles l’estime intellectuelle n’eût pas été liée.

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ion of friendship is well known. I hold it in such low esteem that I don’t allow it to tax my intellect, and when Nietzsche denies the possibility of friendship without intellectual respect, that seems to me entirely deceitful for this detractor of Wagner, this ‘genius of deceit’.” a 221 This note, on which he wanted to expand in his book, was written on the basis of an article about Nietzsche and Wagner by Daniel Halévy in the year 1909.222 Halévy concentrates mainly on Nietzsche’s relationship with Wagner and Bayreuth and Nietzsche’s ideal of friendship, his idea of the lay society, the lay monastery, which often appeared in his letters.223 Nietzsche really valued friendship very highly, higher than love. For friendship may have all the characteristics of love, but moves in a much purer atmosphere. Zarathustra is entirely based on the idea of a master with friends, who are also his disciples and who prepare the new age. Nietzsche sees a spiritual elite as the means to restore the health to a rotten culture. In his eyes the Renaissance was also a culture that was borne by a “band of a hundred men”.224 Proust is therefore not unjustified in associating Nietzsche’s name with the question of the value of friendship. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche is the talk of numerous Parisian salons. Proust’s circle of friends was also early in concerning itself with the German philosopher. Daniel Halévy called himself one of the first Nietzsche readers. He read Nietzsche in the year 1892, and only a year later, in 1893, he cooperated with Robert Dreyfus, another close friend of Proust’s, in translating the Case of Wagner. In 1897 the same two authors published a biography of Nietzsche in the Revue Blanche. Fernand Gregh and the aforementioned Halévy dedicated the second edition of Le Banquet – a journal which appeared from 1892 to 1893, and in the founding of which Marcel Proust also participated – to the German philosopher. This edition included an essay and translations from Beyond Good and Evil. Other journals and other publishers also issued numerous publications about Nietzsche in this year.225 Did Proust also read Nietzsche himself, or did his information about Friedrich Nietzsche come from secondary sources? We can assume that his knowledge of German was not sufficient to enable him to read Nietzsche in the original.226 Thanks to the translations by, for example, Henri Albert (who translated the most important works of Nietzsche into French between 1899 and 1903), Proust would have been able to get to know Nietzsche’s ideas without difficulty.

a On sait ce que je pense de l’amitié. Je la crois si nulle que je ne suis même pas exigeant intellectuellement pour elle, et quand Nietzsche dit qu’il n’admet pas une amitié où il n’y ait pas estime intellectuelle, cela me semble bien mensonger pour ce détracteur de Wagner, ‘génie du mensonge’.

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So he could quite well have read the book Human, all too human, the first part of which was translated in 1899 by A. Desrousseaux, with the second part following in 1902 in Henri Albert’s translation under the title Opinions et sentences mêlées and Le Voyageur et son ombre. In the year 1904 Proust wrote a review of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, a work which he found too anthropomorphic. He wrote: “‘Human, all too human’ we might be tempted to repeat before this admirable book, without worrying about giving these insolent and sublime words the meaning they take in the book which made them famous.” a 227 The complete review is of great significance in this connection, since it leads the reader directly into the discussion of friendship, “this great debate staged between Goethe and Ruskin and which really provides the verdict, if it came to a conclusion, between the two sole great intellectual families which a classification (…) should recognise.” b 228 Proust’s words signify that the contradiction is not between catholic and protestant, between Roman and German or between capitalist and communist, but that humanity can be divided into those who defend the primacy of friendship and the group who champion love as the highest good. Plato, Montaigne, Schiller, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky: they all belong to the camp of the defenders of friendship. Klopstock, Goethe, Rodin, Monet, Tolstoy: they belong to the party of love. And Proust himself? Proust takes a statement of Goethe’s, which Carlyle quoted in a letter to Emerson, as his starting point in the discussion about friendship. The quotation says that the world would look terribly empty if we imagine only mountains, rivers and cities; the fact that there is also here and there a friend, with whom we are united in thought, makes a habitable garden out of the earthly globe. Ruskin’s answer to this statement goes in exactly the opposite direction: he claims never to have been happier than in the moments when nobody has thought about him, that his greatest happiness consists exactly in observing without himself being observed, and that his interest in people is no different from his interest in marmots, camels or trout. Precisely his love of nature is the source of his literary and social activities.229 What is Proust’s position in this debate? Proust takes Ruskin’s side: “As far as this – all too human – eighteenth century is concerned, which fills the world

a ‘Humain, trop humain’, serions-nous tentés de redire devant ce livre admirable, sans nous soucier d’ailleurs de donner à ces mots insolents et sublimes le sens qu’ils gardent dans le livre qui les a rendus fameux. b ce grand débat institué entre Goethe et Ruskin et qui départagerait, à vrai dire, s’il était tranché, les deux seules grandes familles d’esprit qu’une classification (…) doit reconnaître.

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with population in place of poetry, removes its mystery by anthropomorphising it, it appears to us that Ruskin was right.” a 230 His criticism of the glorification of friendship covers the whole of the eighteenth century with its pronounced sociability ideal. For Proust, loneliness is the real source of inspiration. Proust’s belief in friendship – and here he expresses himself categorically – is nil. Still, nobody has sought comradeship so strongly as this “atheist of friendship”; a letter to Jacques Rivière witnesses this: “If I am theoretically an atheist of friendship, I practice it with much greater fervour than many of its apostles.” b 231 Because no one has been so demanding of communication as Proust. Exactly because friendship is connected with two essential problems, that of communication and that of self-realisation, did this subject enjoy Proust’s greatest interest. He knew all the authorities on this question, like La Bruyère and Pascal.232 But human beings are creatures which cannot step out of their skin. A person is a monad: “Notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone.” c 233 The Other is unreachable. Nowhere is Otherness and the suffering from this Otherness – which however will give rise to the consciousness that he must devote himself to art – expressed more intensely than in the relationship of the narrator with Albertine, in La Prisonnière and La Fugitive. These volumes introduce no new themes; they are no more than a variation on the relationship Swann-Odette, but just as the first Diabelli Variations are simple and the last complex and intense, so we are presented here with something extreme, something final.234 His relationship to Albertine is the most determined attempt to understand the Other; for the sake of the experience of being loved by the Other, he would give his life. Only his relationship with Saint-Loup does he consider real friendship. An evening that he spends with him in a restaurant on the edge of Paris will always remain for him “the evening of friendship”, despite the doubt that he felt even then about the value of friendship.235 It is autumn. The narrator surrenders himself to melancholy thoughts; a dinner with Madame de Stermaria, which he was so looking forward to, was canceled at the last moment; his flat makes a bare impression, because the carpets are already rolled up for the winter. At that moment Saint-Loup arrives entirely a En regard de ce XVIIIe siècle trop humain, qui dépoétise le monde en le peuplant, lui retire son mystère parce qu’il l’anthropomorphise, il nous semble bien que Ruskin a raison. b Si théoriquement je suis un athée de l’amitié, je la pratique avec beaucoup plus de ferveur que tant d’apôtres d’amitié. c Malgré l’illusion dont nous voudrions être dupes et dont, par amour, par amitié, par politesse, par respect humain, par devoir, nous dupons les autres, nous existons seuls.

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unexpectedly, and invites him to dinner. The narrator is touched. The fog is thick outside, so thick that it is as if one is in another world. Progress can only be made at walking pace. After losing their way many times, they finally reach the crowded restaurant, the circumstances making it feel more intimate than ever. Here Saint-Loup leads the way to a free table, climbing over tables and chairs in an elegant and delicate manner as only a born aristocrat can. The narrator is deeply moved by so much attentiveness and consideration and gazes at his friend full of admiration. But he immediately wonders whether he admires Saint-Loup himself or something more general, namely the aristocrat in him.236 In yet another case, Saint-Loup shows himself to be a true friend. The protagonist is spending time as a guest in Doncières, where his friend is stationed in the garrison. When the narrator recounts an anecdote to a group of young officers and colleagues of Saint-Loup, the latter does not show that he has heard the story before, so that his friend can shine before the company. The narrator, touched by so much consideration, appears to have found the proof that pure friendship really exists and is characterised by selfless empathy.237 How painful must it therefore have been, when he later learns that SaintLoup was already involved in homosexual relationships at this time. With anyone else he would have been indifferent, but not with Saint-Loup, with whom he had been connected by such a close friendship in Balbec and Doncières. The words of his confidant Aimé besmirch this friendship for him in retrospect: “And although I did not believe in friendship, or that I had ever felt any real friendship for Robert, when I thought about those stories (..), I was obliged to make an effort to restrain my tears.” a 238 Why does this fact affect him so painfully? He had believed in the selflessness of Saint-Loup’s friendship, as he experienced it in Balbec and Doncières: “Saint-Loup was obviously sincere and disinterested, and it was this intense moral purity which (…) rendered him truly capable (…) of friendship.” b 239 Aimé’s revelation shows him that Saint-Loup’s friendship was probably less selfless than he had believed. Proust does not believe in the union of two human beings. It might possibly take place on the level of common ideas and thoughts; but essentially this is for him just a superficial form of communication. The opposite is also true: differences of ideas are not important for him. The question of whether art ought to be moral or not was much discussed at this time. On the difference of opinion between Whistler and Ruskin on this topic, Proust writes: “But in reality I think that although their theories, which are a Et bien que je ne crusse pas à l’amitié ni en avoir jamais véritablement éprouvé pour Robert, en repensant à ces histoires (…) j’étais obligé de faire un effort pour ne pas pleurer. b La sincérité et le désintéressement de Saint-Loup étaient (…) absolus et c’était cette grande pureté morale qui (…) le rendait vraiment capable (…) d’amitié.

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the least personal aspect of each one of us, were opposed, at a certain depth they agreed more often than they realized. (…) Whistler is right when he says in Ten O’Clock that Art is distinct from Morality. And yet Ruskin, too, utters a truth, on a different plane, when he says that all great art is morality.” a 240 He represents the point of view that a person is unconditionally himself, a monad, unique. And because each of us is alone, without any possible way of communication or self-realisation in this life, precisely because we are unique, the necessity of art forces itself upon us, whose justification arises from the fact that it is the only possibility of knowing the Other and expressing oneself. All other forms of expression like love and friendship contain a danger, the danger of believing in what Proust exposed as an illusion: “Friendship (..) is a simulacrum, since (…) the artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist.” b 241 For Proust, the debate about the value of friendship becomes a discussion about the ultimate question of existence. Nietzsche belongs to the school of thinkers whose faith in friendship is connected, in the last analysis, with the conviction that the world can be changed, and with the longing to raise humanity to a higher level. This also explains his social and cultural criticism. In Proust – this is treated in greater detail further down – the obvious absence of any criticism of our civilisation is one of the most striking aspects of his thinking. Proust is not concerned with improving the world, but with the transfiguration and realisation of life in art. The present work is intended to provide the justification for this view. In The Waning of the Middle Ages, in the chapter Pessimism and the Ideal of the Sublime Life, Huizinga distinguishes three paths to reach this goal open to man in all ages: beside the path of renunciation of the world, and the second path of improvement of the world, the third path “ to a world more beautiful, trodden in all ages and civilizations, the easiest and also the most fallacious of all, is that of the dream. A promise of escape from the gloomy actual is held out to all; we have only to colour life with fancy…”242 If this were Proust’s view we would have no reason to justify it. Huizinga, like many others, sees art as a consolation, a refuge from worldly suffering. But a Mais en réalité, je pense que si leurs théories, ce qui est la partie la moins intime de chacun de nous, furent opposées, à une certaine profondeur ils se rencontrèrent plus souvent qu’ils ne le croyaient (…). Whistler a raison de dire, dans Ten O’Clock, que l’Art est distinct de la Morale. Et pourtant, Ruskin émet aussi une vérité, d’un autre plan, quand il dit que tout grand art est moralité. b L’amitié (…) est une simulation (…) puisque l’artiste qui renonce à une heure de travail pour une heure de causerie avec un ami, sait qu’il sacrifie une réalité pour quelque chose qui n’existe pas.

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this is a pessimistic and decadent conception which Proust repeatedly opposes. Proust’s poetry is not an attempt to clothe the world in beautiful garments, but to discover the hidden harmony of life and to reveal the inner beauty of existence in art. His transfiguration of life is no poeticisation in the sense of colouring life with fancy, but it would claim to “realise” life. Proust’s conception of art is reflected in the provisional title that he originally toyed with when he was planning to publish his work in three parts: “The Age of Names” (l’Age des noms) “The Age of Words”(l’Age des mots), “The Age of Things” (l’Age des choses).243 The age of spontaneous imagination gives way to that of conventional reality; after this a phase must follow in which reality is recreated in its ideal character. A discussion of the opposition of possibility and reality should clarify Proust’s thinking.

Possibility and reality The spirit of the narrator is by nature more open for the possible than for the contingent.244 This is expressed in an unusually powerful imagination. The image which is evoked by so little as a name is often so intense that the reality behind this name disappoints him. It is then also very characteristic (though also consistent) that Proust’s art attributes to imagination as much reality, as much substance as to so-called reality. A good example is the description of the church in Balbec, once as it appears in his imagination and then as it exists in reality. The narrator had formed an image of this church from Swann’s account and Anatole France’s writing, and imagined a church standing on the edge of a cliff on a rocky coast, its walls lashed by foam from the waves at high tide.245 This fed his desire to see this Balbec and its church. But when he is confronted with the reality of the church in Balbec, he finds nothing in it that resembles the picture in his imagination. He is deeply disappointed. He sees a church on a busy square where two tramlines cross, opposite a café with a sign saying “billiards” in golden letters. The sculptures at the portal are weathered and barely recognizable. No coast, no waves. He sees a church “subjected to the tyranny of the Particular.”246 Although the narrator is disappointed, the writer still goes on to describe the real church so as to express the validity of this impression of reality. The description shows that the narrator has left behind the stage of pure imagination and no longer avoids the confrontation with reality. One feels his resolve to undertake the struggle against the density and impenetrability of reality. On the

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one hand Proust reclaims the reality of imagination, on the other, he dares to attempt to fill this so-called reality with light and spirit, even if it is initially disappointing compared with dreams, and does not prove easily accessible to his art. The writer’s aim is to show that mundane reality, a church in the centre of a provincial town, surrounded by traffic and situated opposite an ordinary café, has its own specific beauty. A second example is the description of Madame de Guermantes as she exists in his imagination, and the lady whom he sees for the first time in the church at Combray. He had imagined her as a figure from the Middle Ages, like those one sees in church windows, in the colours red, blue and yellow. The woman he sees bears no resemblance to the figure of his imagination. Unlike that figure, she is no outline which can be filled with arbitrary colours, but “was so real that everything, down to the fiery little spot at the corner of her nose, attested to her subjection to the laws of life.” a 247 The third time he speaks of the tyranny of reality is when he sees Berma’s performance in the theatre, which was mentioned earlier in another connection. The first time he saw her acting, he was unable to identify the nature of the beauty of her performance. He is too excited when he finally manages to see Berma. His disappointment with her performance results from his preconceptions about beauty which conflict with the special beauty of her performing art. The second time he sees Berma, he is struck by her beauty. Now he can explain the reason for this: this evening he did not come especially to see her, he is “disinterested”, and just for that reason he is susceptible for the specific in her art. “The impression given us by a person or a work (or an interpretation of a work) of marked individuality is peculiar to that person or work. (…) “Is that good? Is what I am feeling now admiration?” (…) And what answers it again is a sharp voice, a curiously questioning tone, the despotic impression, wholly material, caused by a person whom one does not know, in which no scope is left for ‘breadth of interpretation’.” b 248 The author repeatedly emphasises that real beauty is so specific, so novel, as often not to be recognised at all.249 Proust’s work is marked by a tension between the world of the possible and the world of the real. After his disappointment with his first experience of Berma on the stage, he notices that his interest becomes stronger at the end of a était si réelle que tout, jusqu’à ce petit bouton qui s’enflammait au coin du nez, certifiait son assujettissement aux lois de la vie. b L’impression que nous cause une personne, une oeuvre (ou une interprétation) fortement caractérisées, est particulière (…). Est-ce beau ? ce que j’éprouve, est-ce de l’admiration ? (…). Et ce qui lui répond (…) c’est une voix aiguë, c’est un ton curieusement questionneur, c’est l’impression despotique causée par un être qu’on ne connaît pas, toute matérielle, et dans laquelle aucun espace vide n’est laissé pour ‘la largeur de l’interprétation’.

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the performance, since “because it [my interest] was no longer compressed within the limits of reality.” a 250 His stubborn striving as an artist is aimed at discovering and reflecting the specific beauty of the Other: in this case the art of Berma, in another the frescoes of Giotto. And with these examples he seems to suggest that art is only worth its name when it succeeds in making reality transparent. There is a basic, insuperable difference between the realm of the possible and the realm of the real. Proust states categorically “Reality must therefore be something that bears no relation to possibilities.” b 251 Reality never corresponds exactly with one’s expectations: Saint-Loup’s descriptions awoke the narrator’s desire for a young prostitute, and also for the chambermaid of Mme Putbus: “But in vain did I fuse together all the most exquisite fleshly matter to compose, after the ideal outline traced for me by Saint-Loup, the young girl of easy virtue and Mme Putbus’s maid, my two possessable beauties still lacked what I should never know until I had seen them: individual character.” c 252 It is clear from these passages too, that Proust is not satisfied with pure imagination, but that he finds reality as such fascinating and challenging. This is the characteristic that distinguishes him from all the poets and writers who allow the dream into their life, like so many surrealists and all those who prefer the subjectivity of their own illusions to a fearless confrontation with reality. Significant too is the passage in which Proust describes the positive aspects of visiting brothels, however curious this might appear to some readers. They allow him to add to the beauty of women that element which we cannot invent, that is not derived from earlier beauties, “that present indeed divine, the only one that we cannot bestow upon ourselves, before which all the logical creations of our intellect pale, and which we can seek from reality alone: an individual charm.” d 253 When, for the first time, he stands face to face with Bergotte, who he had always imagined as a “the gentle Bard with the snowy locks” e, just as transparent as his books, he is astonished how little similarity there is between the figure he dreamed of and the concrete person Bergotte. Proust’s reaction is: “Names a parce qu’il [l’intérêt] ne subissait plus la compression et les limites de la réalité. b La réalité est donc quelque chose qui n’a aucun rapport avec les possibilités. c Mais j’avais beau fondre toute la matière charnelle la plus exquise pour composer, selon l’idéal que m’en avait tracé Saint-Loup, la jeune fille légère et la femme de chambre de Mme Putbus, il manquait à mes deux beautés possédables ce que j’ignorerais tant que je ne les aurais pas vues: le caractère individuel. d le présent vraiment divin, le seul que nous ne puissions recevoir de nous-même, devant lequel expirent toutes les créations logiques de notre intelligence et que nous ne pouvons demander qu’à la réalité: un charme individuel. e doux Chantre aux cheveux blancs.

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are whimsical draughtsmen, giving us of people as well as of places sketches so unlike the reality that we often experience a kind of stupor when we have before our eyes, in place of the imagined, the visible world.” a But the visible world, Proust hastens to add, is also not the real world; our senses are no more capable than our powers of imagination to represent reality as such.254 The restriction can be understood as follows: “the visible world” is the world of the senses, the world of the bodily eyes, the world perceived as the object of fear, of utility, of enjoyment. Thus for Proust illusion and conventional reality are equally “real” and “unreal”. The latter is not “reality”. It is neither beautiful nor true in itself, but must be processed, needs to be “realised” – by the artist. Normal reality is a kind of collective dream, a convention that can only be broken through when one sees with the mind’s eye. In this connection it is not insignificant that Elstir’s first works deal with mythical themes, while he devotes his art, in his later works, to day-to-day themes. This development symbolises Elstir’s relationship with reality. In the earlier phase there is barely a mention of mimesis, of the re-creation of reality. What is presented is a dream, is fiction. But in the later phase reality is “raised to a higher level” and illuminated until the least part is flooded with light, and even more: a new reality is created, which, without Elstir, would have remained unknown.255 For Proust, current reality represents the greatest challenge. To transfigure this requires the greatest effort. He knows that all mental activities are easy if they do not have to be subordinated to reality.256 In a formulation sharpened in the philosophy of Leibniz257 he enunciates the maxim “The ideas formed by the pure intelligence have no more than a logical, a possible truth, they are arbitrarily chosen. The book whose hieroglyphs are patterns not traced by us is the only book that really belongs to us. (…). This book, more laborious to decipher than any other, is also the only one which has been dictated to us by reality.” b 258

a Les noms sont des dessinateurs fantaisistes, nous donnant des gens et des pays des croquis si peu ressemblants que nous éprouvons souvent une sorte de stupeur quand nous avons devant nous, au lieu du monde imaginé, le monde visible. b Les idées formées par l’intelligence pure n’ont qu’une vérité logique, une vérité possible, leur élection est arbitraire. Le livre aux caractères figurés, non tracés par nous, est notre seul livre (…). Ce livre, le plus pénible de tous à déchiffrer, est aussi le seul que nous ait dicté la réalité.

CHAPTER III

A la Recherche as a search for beauty

“Voir poétiquement” (See poetically): this is the aim, this is the wish that Proust presents to the world. 1 How and when can the world be made poetic, poetic once again. The answer is: every time one is able to adopt an aesthetic point of view, to see with the mind’s eyes. This rarely happens. Normally one sees with the bodily eyes, one sees nothing, since our view of reality is determined by practical and utilitarian considerations, because the first impression is immediately schematised, because habit is at work. The narrator occasionally meets the Duchess de Guermantes in the courtyard on her way out. Even when the weather is bad, she just equips herself with a hat, a fur coat and an umbrella, and departs on foot. For most people she is just some lady or other, and her title – Duchess de Guermantes – means nothing to them since the abolition of duchies and princedoms. “But I had adopted a different point of view in my manner of enjoying people and places. This lady in furs braving the bad weather seemed to me to carry with her all the castles of the territories of which she was duchess, princess, viscountess, as the figures carved over a portal hold in their hands the cathedral they have built or the city they have defended.” a 2 But, he adds, only “my mind’s eyes” (“les yeux de mon esprit”) can see the castles in her gloved hand. “my bodily eyes” (“les yeux de mon corps”) saw only an umbrella. “Eyes of the soul”/“eyes of the body”: a distinction of idealistic thought. Curtius traces the origin of the topos, popular in neoplatonic circles, back to Plato. It is no surprise to reencounter this metaphor especially in writers like Emerson, Carlyle and Ruskin.3 For Proust the “aesthetic point of view”, the “point de vue esthétique”, is a higher form of seeing than the practical-utilitarian; only the former makes one receptive for the beautiful. To see with the mind’s eyes means the discovery of a hidden “correspondence”.

a Mais j’avais adopté un autre point de vue dans ma façon de jouir des êtres et des pays. Tous les châteaux des terres dont elle était duchesse, princesse, vicomtesse, cette dame en fourrures bravant le mauvais temps me semblait les porter avec elle, comme les personnages sculptés au linteau d’un portail tiennent dans leur main la cathédrale qu’ils ont construite, ou la cité qu’ils ont deféndue.

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An illustration: while the narrator is eating in a luxurious restaurant in Rivebelle near Balbec, the place undergoes a veritable metamorphosis. His imagination, intensified by alcohol, music and frivolous excitation, transforms the restaurant into a planetarium, in which the round tables are the planets. As he writes: “And I rather pitied all the diners because I felt that for them the round tables were not planets and that they had not cut through the scheme of things in such a way as to be delivered from the bondage of habitual appearances and enabled to perceive analogies.” a 4 In his digression on the subject of homosexuality, Proust compares the somewhat aged and lonely homosexual with a jellyfish expiring on the sand. A jellyfish? Wouldn’t orchids be more fitting? “When I followed my instinct only, the jellyfish used to revolt me at Balbec; but if I had the eyes to regard them, like Michelet, from the standpoint of natural history and aesthetics, I saw an exquisite blue girandole. Are they not, with the transparent velvet of their petals, as it were the mauve orchids of the sea?” b 5 And he thinks back at the chance meeting of the aristocratic Charlus with the tailor Jupien, two extremely different homosexuals both in age and social background. Their meeting in the inner courtyard of the Guermantes’ house seems to him just as special and wonderful as the almost simultaneous pollination of a house plant in the same inner courtyard of the house, by a bee: “As soon as I considered the encounter from this point of view, everything about it seemed to me instinct with beauty.” c 6 This theme will be treated further elsewhere, here it is enough to say that Proust’s discussion of homosexuality does nothing other than to raise it from the sphere of instinctive prejudice into that of science and beauty: as researcher, as ‘botaniste moral’, he describes and classifies the world of the homosexuals, distinguishes varieties and deduces from these the behavior which corresponds with their form. Moments of poetic vision are rare. Elstir’s paintings record such moments: “But the rare moments in which we see nature as she is, poetically, were those

a Et je plaignais un peu tous les dîneurs, parce que je sentais que pour eux les tables rondes n’étaient pas de planètes et qu’ils n’avaient pas pratiqué dans les choses un sectionnement qui nous débarasse de leur apparence coutumière et nous permet d’apercevoir des analogies. b Quand je ne suivais que mon instinct, la méduse me répugnait à Balbec; mais si je savais la regarder, comme Michelet, du point de vue de l’histoire naturelle et de l’esthétique, je voyais une délicieuse girandole d’azur. Ne sont-elles pas, avec le velours transparent de leurs pétales, comme les mauves orchidées de la mer?” c Dès que j’eus considéré cette rencontre de ce point de vue, tout m’y semblait empreint de beauté.

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from which Elstir’s work was created.” a 7 The optical illusion which underlayed his paintings: what was this other than the discovery of an analogy! The obstacles to the discovery of beauty are manifold. The disappointment which the narrator experienced when he saw Berma’s performance is mentioned above. The protagonist experiences repeated setbacks in his search for beauty: he works out for himself the reasons for this. Once he takes part in an soirée at the Guermantes. In his imagination it had taken on the dimensions of a council of the Gods; in reality he experiences disappointment and particularly – boredom. He is surprised at himself. If he had read about the same soirée in a work of literature, he would have been enthusiastic and felt the wish to belong to that company: “How often – and I was well aware of this even without being apprised of it by these pages of Goncourt – have I remained incapable of bestowing my attention upon things or people that later, once their image has been presented to me in solitude by an artist, I would have travelled many miles, risked death to find again!” b 8 What is the reason for indifference towards, for disappointment with reality? First of all there is certainly an element of idolatry, which has already been exhaustively discussed above: “We try to discover in things, which become precious to us on that account, the reflection of what our soul has projected on to them.” c 9 Secondly there is the fact that we are not capable of seeing “disinterestedly”. Very early on in Proust one comes across the idea that beauty can only be experienced when one sees the things in oneself. Most of the time we are wishing, striving, egoistic beings; things are seen in terms of their use, of the pleasure they can provide us. As stated in Jean Santeuil: “When frivolity directs us towards things as sources of pleasure and prevents us from perceiving them in themselves, it deprives us of the state of grace (…) for poetry (…)” d 10 The true value of things, their inner essence then escapes. This kind of explanation could be illustrated with many examples. When his attention is fully taken up by the young girls in Balbec, he lacks sufficient calm and disinterestedness to be receptive for impressions of beauty. The invitation to a dinner in Rivebelle intensifies this state of excitement still further. “The antica Mais les rares moments où l’on voit la nature telle qu’elle est, poétiquement, c’était de ceux-là qu’était faite l’oeuvre d’Elstir. b Que de fois, je le savais bien même si cette page de Goncourt ne me l’eût appris, je suis resté incapable d’accorder mon attention à des choses ou à des gens qu’ensuite, une fois que leur image m’avait été présentée dans la solitude par un artiste, j’aurais fait des lieues, risqué la mort pour retrouver! c On cherche à retrouver dans les choses, devenues par là précieuses, le reflet que notre âme a projeté sur elles. d La frivolité nous tournant vers les choses comme moyens de plaisir et nous empêchant de les sentir en elles-mêmes, elle nous retire l’état de grâce (…) pour la poésie (…).

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ipation of dinner at Rivebelle made my mood more frivolous still, and my mind, dwelling at such moments upon the surface of the body (…) was incapable of putting any depth behind the colour of things.” a 11 It is shortly after sunset. He is in his hotel room, which overlooks the sea. But the delicate harmony in grey and pink which the water and the air are now painting, escapes his attention. He just closes the curtains and changes his clothes; all his thoughts are already on the dinner. Only in short intervals of relative calm, in which he can banish Albertine from his thoughts, does the narrator gain the freedom to reflect on art. In these moments his sense of beauty returns to life.12 The causes mentioned are all of a subjective nature. Even when these hindrances are overcome, objective, unavoidable obstacles remain: “A real person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift.” b 13 Proust’s striving, the striving of an artist, is nothing other than to transfigure this opaque reality, to penetrate it with light: “The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable to the human soul, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which one’s soul can assimilate.” c 14 So it is very apt for Cazeaux to compare Proust’s method with “l’art du vitrail” (stained glass).15 It is also striking how often in A la Recherche words like “illuminate”, “transparent” are used, as opposed to words like “material”, “opaque”.16 Again art, literature, has an initiatory function. It teaches him why a soirée described by Saint-Simon or Goncourt gives an impression of beauty and awakes his enthusiasm, and why he is indifferent to it as a guest. Formulated as a law: “We are bored at the dinner-table because our imagination is absent, and, because it is keeping us company, we are interested in a book.” d 17 For it is an absolute law that one can only imagine that which is absent. “So often, in the course of my life, reality had disappointed me because at the instant when my senses perceived it my imagination, which was the only organ that I possessed a L’attente du dîner à Rivebelle rendait mon humeur plus frivole encore et ma pensée, habitant à ces moments-là la surface de mon corps (…) était incapable de mettre de la profondeur derrière la couleur des choses. b Un être réel, si profondément que nous sympathisions avec lui, pour une grande part est perçu par nos sens, c’est-à-dire nous reste opaque […], offre un poids mort que notre sensibilité ne peut soulever. c La trouvaille du romancier a été d’avoir l’idée de remplacer ces parties impénétrables à l’âme par une quantité égale de parties immatérielles, c’est-à-dire que notre âme peut s’assimiler. d On s’ennuie à dîner parce que l’imagination est absente, et, parce qu’elle nous y tient compagnie, on s’amuse avec un livre.

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for the enjoyment of beauty, could not apply itself to it, in virtue of that ineluctable law which ordains that we can only imagine what is absent.” a 18 Proust will discover in involuntary memory one of the most powerful means of temporarily suspending the applicability of this cruel law.

La mémoire involontaire (involuntary memory) Whenever the narrator thought back to his youth in Combray, all he could think of was the drama which repeated itself every evening; of the fatal moment when he had to go to bed and be deprived of his mother’s company for a long and frightening night. His only consolation was his mother’s tucking him into his bed and giving him a goodnight kiss. But when a visit was expected from Swann, a good friend of his parents, she would not come upstairs and he had to do without even this consolation. The narrator was the only one who flinched when he heard the ring on the doorbell announcing Swann’s arrival. One time he plucked up his courage to wait for his mother on the landing, until she came upstairs to bed late in the evening. But she reacted sternly, purely from fear of the reaction of her husband. But he, normally so strict, simply said: “Go with the little one. He is nervous, calm him down!” The narrator feels far more surprise than pleasure at his father’s reaction. On this evening his mother sat next to his bed and read to him from François le Champi. That is the only memory that he has of Combray, “This sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background (…) the bare minimum of scenery necessary (…) to the drama of my undressing” b 19, as if Combray consisted of two storeys connected by a narrow staircase, as if there had never been any other time than seven in the evening. The rest is dead to him. For the information that his rational memory could provide him contains nothing of the directness of his past. Dead for ever? According to a Celtic belief, the souls of the dead are enclosed in a lower being, an animal, a plant, an inanimate object. They are trapped there until the moment when we, the living, come near that place. Then they call to us, and as soon as a Tant de fois, au cours de ma vie, la réalité m’avait déçu parce qu’au moment où je la percevais, mon imagination, qui était mon seul organe pour jouir de la beauté, ne pouvait s’appliquer à elle, en vertu de la loi inévitable qui veut qu’on ne puisse imaginer que ce qui est absent. b cette sorte de pan lumineux, découpé au milieu d’indistinctes ténèbres (…) le décor strictement nécessaire (…) au drame de mon déshabillage.

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we have recognised them the spell is broken. Redeemed by us, they have overcome death and return to the realm of life. The same applies to our past. Without our suspecting this, it is hidden in a material object. It is a matter of chance whether we come across it or not. The author then describes how, years later, he comes home on a cold winter’s day and is offered a cup of tea by his mother. His mood is cool and indifferent. He raises to his lips a spoonful of tea in which he has placed a piece of “madeleine”, a small cake shaped like a scallop shell. And suddenly he feels a deluge of overwhelming joy. What is the cause? He recognises that the taste is connected with a memory, but he cannot identify it immediately. In vain he racks his brains, until the memory suddenly breaks the surface. The trigger was the little piece of madeleine. Whenever he had visited his aunt in Combray, she had offered him a small piece of this pastry. “And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the waterlilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.” a 20 It was much later that he discovered why this spontaneous memory had made him so happy: we have arrived at the last part of A la Recherche – Le Temps retrouvé. The initial tone is depressing, reminiscent of the end of Du côté de chez Swann. The narrator feels himself unsuited to literature, has doubts about its value. He finds himself on the way to the Guermantes, to take part in a matinee at their house after years of absence. A contributory reason for accepting the invitation was that he already has trouble occupying himself. He remembers sadly how he had seen a row of trees in the setting sun, when the train had briefly halted between stations. No poetic feelings had come to him. He finds the new residence of the Guermantes uninteresting, he recognises nothing of the mystery that the old place held for him. He has lost the “faith” of his youth. The a Et comme dans ce jeu où les Japonais s’amusent à tremper dans un bol de porcelaine rempli d’eau, de petits morceaux de papier jusque-là indistincts qui, à peine y sont- ils plongés, s’étirent, se contournent, se colorent, se différencient, deviennent des fleurs, des maisons, des personnages consistants et reconnaissables, de même maintenant toutes les fleurs de notre jardin et celles du parc de M. Swann, et les nymphéas de la Vivonne, et les bonnes gens du village, et leurs petits logis et l’église et tout Combray et ses environs, tout cela qui prend forme et solidité, est sorti, ville et jardins, de ma tasse de thé.

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pessimistic epilogue from Du côté de chez Swann is reflected even in the words used, and in fact we know that this part was written straight after Swann, as a counterpart, as a reply. “But it is sometimes just at the moment when we think that everything is lost that the intimation arrives which may save us; one has knocked at all the doors which lead nowhere, and then one stumbles without knowing it on the only door through which one can enter – which one might have sought in vain for a hundred years – and it opens of its own accord.” a 21 When he is walking across the inner courtyard of the Hôtel de Guermantes he has to get out of the way of a car; he quickly steps aside, and his foot lands on the uneven edge of two paving stones. At the same moment he is flooded with a feeling of happiness, which sweeps away all self-doubt, which even makes him indifferent to death itself. The feeling totally unexpectedly recalls a visit to San Marco in Venice, where he had stepped on uneven pavement in the baptistery of the cathedral. “Venice, of which my efforts to describe it and the supposed snapshots taken by my memory had never told me anything.” b 22 This town, whose special beauty he had struggled for years to describe, is suddenly created fresh and new in this spontaneous memory. He enters the Guermantes residence, and the maid asks him to wait a moment in the little library adjoining the buffet, until the end of the piece of music which is being performed. At this moment he receives a second revelation: one of the servants, who is trying to be quiet, accidentally knocks a piece of cutlery against a plate. And suddenly the narrator feels himself back on the train, opposite the row of trees which he had observed in reality without joy – as railway workers walked along the train with long hammers, tapping the wheels. A third signal reaches him shortly after, when he had consumed a glass of lemonade and a few petits fours, and wipes his mouth with a serviette. This time he has the hallucinatory sensation of being in Balbec, in his hotel room with its view over the sea. The stiffness of the starched serviette is the same as that of a towel, with which he had awkwardly dried himself on his first day in the hotel: “And what I found myself enjoying was (…) a whole instant of my life (…) which now, freed from what is necessarily imperfect in external perception, pure and disembodied, caused me to swell with happiness.” c 23 a Mais c’est quelquefois au moment où tout nous semble perdu que l’avertissement arrive qui peut nous sauver; on a frappé à toutes les portes qui ne donnent sur rien, et la seule par où on peut entrer et qu’on aurait cherchée en vain pendant cent ans, on y heurte sans le savoir, et elle s’ouvre. b Venise, dont mes efforts pour la décrire et les prétendus instantanés pris par ma mémoire ne m’avaient jamais rien dit. c Et je (…) jouissais (…) de tout un instant de ma vie (…) qui maintenant, débarrassé de ce qu’il y a d’imparfait dans la perception extérieure, pur et désincarné, me gonflait d’allégresse.

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And while he is still thinking about the origin of the happiness he is feeling, and trying to fathom the nature of the spontaneous memory, he receives a final revelation when his eye alights on the volume François le Champi by George Sand. At first it is not clear to him why the sight of something so trivial as the book of a writer he regards as second class should be connected with such heavenly joy; but then he recognises the memory which connects him with this book: in his youth his mother had often read to him from François le Champi at bedtime. He is moved and happy. Why do these consecutive spontaneous memories fill him with such profound happiness? Unlike the experience with the madeleine, he is now able, through the exertion of his whole will, to discover the cause of this happiness. Is it because spontaneous memory brings back the past? It does much more: it evokes something that is common to the present and the past. He discovers that spontaneous memory brings back the special quality of an event or an experience. Spontaneous memory reveals that which is always present – but usually hidden: the essence of things. “Our true self, which seemed – had perhaps for long years seemed – to be dead but was not altogether dead, is awakened and reanimated as it receives the celestial nourishment that is brought to it.” a 24 Spontaneous memory abolishes time for a moment: for a moment beauty shines out. In involuntary memory Proust has found a means of recovering the past entire, in its original “couleur locale”. For this the “mémoire des faits”, the rational and practical memory, is not suited. He formulated many times this difference between the two forms of memory.25 Life seemed to him colourless and worthless when he judged it by the images of a uniform and conscious memory. “Each day I attach less and less value to intelligence”, as he puts it in Contre SainteBeuve. b 26 Proust’s rejection of rational memory as a means to evoke the past is no isolated phenomenon, particularly in the humanities; his attack on reason is no longer either alien nor new, since the age of romanticism. But what is new and striking is that Proust does not replace reason with a new expression like “intuition” or “inspiration”.27 No, he looks for a scientific, precise and clear means; this is why his recherche sometimes takes on the curious air of a mixture of positivism and metaphysics. For Proust is convinced of the “scientific nature”, of the truth of his discovery, which he explains repeatedly. In a 1913 interview with Le Temps and in a letter to Bibesco28 one finds the same formulations that he uses in A la Recherche: the “mémoire involontaire” a notre vrai moi qui, parfois depuis longtemps, semblait mort, mais ne l’était pas entièrement, s’éveille, s’anime en recevant la céleste nourriture qui lui est apportée. b Chaque jour j’attache moins de prix à l’intelligence.

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cannot be invoked by force of will, but is random and inescapable. This guarantees the “truth” of the past and the images that are produced, while the joy that emotional remembrance provides is the proof of its truth. Only spontaneous memory guarantees “the trueness of the whole picture formed out of those contemporaneous impressions which the first sensation brings back in its train, with those unerring proportions of light and shade, emphasis and omission, memory and forgetfulness, to which conscious recollection and conscious observation will never know how to attain.” a 29 According to Jauss, Proust discovered this method as early as 1898, at the time of Jean Santeuil30 In this novel, incomplete and never published by Proust, one can find passages where spontaneous memory is viewed or assumed to be the most effective method for rediscovering the truth/beauty of the past. During a stay at Lake Geneva Jean goes for a walk in the mountains. When he is high up, he sees the sea through a curtain of trees. This view recalls to him his walks in Brittany, whose beauty and charm only now become clear to him.31 Spontaneous memory is also assumed in the passage where Jean comments on a word of Ruskin. He had said that we must describe everything, since there is poetry in everything. Still the question poses itself, when are we receptive for the poetry of things? What is the use of describing things one does not love? “I favour Renan’s advice ‘only ever to write about that which one loves’”. Later he writes: “One day we love something which we never thought we would ever love. But until that happens there is no need to write about it.” b 32 Many commentators share Proust’s sense of the importance of the “mémoire involontaire”. G. Deleuze is an exception here. In his book (mentioned above) Proust et les signes he views the signes of art as the highest, since they are the least material, the most transparent, followed by, in descending order, the signes of “spontaneous memory”, those of love, those of the everyday world. It is art which shows Proust (or the narrator) in a decisive manner the essence, “la différence ultime”.33 Here the following should be mentioned: On the one hand Picon rightly says34 that the narrator derives his own motivation from his own life, even if the art of an Elstir or a Vinteuil convinces him that he can only realise himself there, in art: through the signals that he receives from spontaneous memory. After he succeeds in deepening them, he arrives at the decision to dedicate his life to art, a [spontaneous memory guarantees] la vérité de tout le tableau, fait d’impressions contemporaines qu’elle ramène à sa suite avec cette infaillible proportion de lumière et d’ombre, de relief et d’omission, de souvenir et d’oubli que la mémoire ou l’observation conscientes ignoreront toujours. b J’aime mieux le conseil de Renan de ne ‘jamais écrire que de ce qu’on aime’. Un jour on aime une chose qu’on n’aurait cru jamais aimer. Mais jusque-là il ne faut pas en écrire.

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to the fixation of these moments. The “involuntary memories” are in this respect more decisive than the truths that the art of Elstir or Vinteuil reveals; the former concern his life, confront him with experiences he himself has been through, and whose value is now exposed to him. The world is “real for us all and dissimilar to each one of us.” a 35 On the other hand spontaneous memories, as Deleuze rightly stresses, are not the final and highest stage, in that the narrator has to translate them into a more intelligible equivalent, must re-create them by means of language. The living reality which is re-discovered in the spontaneous memory, truly exists only when it is re-created as art.36 Spontaneous memories do not provide all the material for the book. Proust is not one-sidedly directed towards the past, his efforts are more comprehensive and more essential: he also wants to spiritualise the most gloomy and intractable reality. As less pure material, but still penetrated by the spirit – to use neoplatonic words – he characterises the truths which also appear in his book, “[the truths] relating to Time in which (…) men and societies and nations are immersed.” b 37 Proust expresses this intention clearly when he writes “I was surrounded by symbols (Guermantes, Albertine, Gilberte, Saint-Loup, Balbec, etc.) and to the least of these I had to restore the meaning which habit had caused them to lose for me.” c 38 Reality appears as a “figure”, as the materialisation of a spiritual reality. His task as writer is to decipher it. For this purpose the “mémoire involontaire” is an important, but not the sole means. One must always remain aware that Proust’s aesthetics aims to discover the beauty/truth of the whole of reality. A person, as a living part of reality, is seldom receptive to its inner value; practical aims direct life which is seen with a utilitarian eye – he loves, he suffers, he enjoys. The relationship to life is always bound up with individual interests. Receptiveness to impressions of beauty requires the absence of personal interests. Spontaneous memory, with its accidental character and independence of the will, produces a state where things appear as themselves, “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.” d 39 Alongside this infallible, but not controllable means, Proust experiments with other possibilities to make a new, mysterious reality become visible. He has

a vrai pour nous tous et dissemblable pour chacun. b [les vérités] qui se rapportent au temps (…) dans lequel baignent et changent les hommes, les sociétés, les nations. c Il me fallait rendre aux moindres signes qui m’entouraient (Guermantes, Albertine, Gilberte, Saint-Loup, Balbec etc.) leur sens que l’habitude leur avait fait perdre pour moi. d réels sans être actuels, idéaux sans être abstraits.

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an eye for all those phenomena which break through the habitual relations with reality. Most people live under the spell of habit. For example the group of well-off regulars, “habitués” of the Grand Hotel in Balbec, who arrogantly avoid the least contact with other guests. Every newcomer is eyed with suspicion, no one survives their critical gaze, everyone else is laughable in their eyes.40 At the center of their gossip is an old lady, who later turns out to be Madame de Villeparisis. She too lives in her own world, which even without the mean and spiteful character of the group described above, is no less closed and ruled by convention. She too separates herself off from the world outside with “la cloison de ses habitudes”, the wall of her habits.41 In the hotel the narrator also often sees a group of four elegant young people. They behave like outsiders, not from bad motives, but because they maintain certain standards as far as conversation and culinary skills go. After a late breakfast they spend the day in their room and have dinner in an exquisite restaurant somewhat outside Balbec: “During their drive, the road bordered with apple-trees (…) was no more to them than the distance that must be traversed – barely distinguishable in the darkness from that which separated their homes in Paris from the Café Anglais or the Tour d’Argent.” a 42 And so nearly everyone in the hotel – reflection of society – lived strictly within the limitations of their own world. No one could do any more, whether from self love, as a result of mental routine or from principles of upbringing “the disturbing thrill of being involved in an unfamiliar way of life.” b 43 And still impressions of beauty are only to be found beyond the bounds of habit. Habit is a power whose beneficial and whose fatal side are both described by the author; it is a “two-headed monster”.44 Only through habit, described as “skilful but slow-moving arranger,” c 45 will the narrator overcome his fear of the big, strange hotel room. When he has to sleep for the first time in fully unknown surroundings, he feels fearful and apprehensive, rather like Cardinal La Balue shut up in his cage where he could neither sit nor stand. Thanks to habit the room becomes habitable: “Habit (…) was even now setting to work to make me like this unfamiliar lodging, to change the position of the mirror, the shade of the curtains, to stop the clock,” d 46 since, Proust discovers, it is always our atten-

a Pendant ce trajet la route bordée de pommiers (…) n’était pour eux que la distance qu’il fallait franchir — peu distincte dans la nuit noire de celle qui séparait leurs domiciles parisiens du Café Anglais ou de la Tour d’Argent b le trouble délicieux de se mêler à une vie inconnue. c aménageuse lente mais bien habile. d L’habitude (…) allait assumer maintenant l’entreprise de me faire aimer ce logis inconnu, de changer la place de la glace, la nuance des rideaux, d’arrêter la pendule.

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tiveness which fills a room with objects, and it is habit which allows them to disappear and which makes room for us.47 Through habit one can put oneself in any situation and in time come to tolerate even the most painful. If habit deserts us, as the narrator experienced in the sudden disappearance (in fact, the flight) of Albertine, we suffer terrible pain which is quite as cruel as death.48 Without habit we would be driven mad by the hallucination awoken by spontaneous memory, the illusion of living in the past.49 The perception of eternity is allowed us for no longer than a flash.50 To gaze any longer means death. Would it be too bold to see this symbolism in the death of Bergotte? Bergotte dies after he has seen the “little patch of yellow wall” (le petit pan jaune) in Vermeer’s painting View of Delft “The little yellow patch”, a recurring motif in A la Recherche, can be seen as a symbol of the pure, godly light that shines into the earthly realm, and so is also a symbol for the transfigurative power of the artist which illuminates even the darkest matter.51 But one can also read the Bergotte scene differently, more soberly, and quite reasonably assert that the writer, who was already feeling unwell, had suffered a stroke after the strenuous museum visit.52 Proust places more emphasis on the beneficial than the fatal side of habit, its “annihilating force which suppresses the originality and even awareness of one’s perceptions.” a 53 He compares it with a human plant which places the lowest demands on nutrition of all plants.54 The power of habit is what makes Violante a prisoner of her empty life (see above). Are there any means which can temporarily suspend its power? Are there moments in which convention and practical logic are not yet active? Sometimes a change in our habits is enough to restore the poetry of the outside world. “One’s sensibility, being no longer dulled by habit, receives from the slightest stimulus vivid impressions which make everything that has preceded them fade into insignificance, impressions to which, because of their intensity, we attach ourselves with the momentary enthusiasm of a drunkard.” b 55 One only needs to read the intermezzo of Doncières, where Saint-Loup is stationed, and where the narrator spends some time in winter.56 He writes about drunkenness with the present, about joy in direct experience, with an intensity that is unique in the life of the narrator. The ease with which things open themselves to him puts him in an almost continuous state of euphoria. The world of Doncières is experienced as a “hymeneal feast”57, and this enthusiasm produces a pouvoir annihilateur qui supprime l’originalité et jusqu’à la conscience des perceptions. b La sensibilité, n’étant plus amortie par l’habitude, reçoit des moindres chocs des impressions si vives qui font pâlir tout ce qui les a précédées et auxquelles, à cause de leur intensité, nous nous attachons avec l’exaltation passagère d’un ivrogne.

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an intensification of the imagination. Everything he touches turns to gold, the garrison town is decorated with the garlands of a dizzying imagination, without any loss of the individual character of the place. The narrator feels dynamic and full of life, perhaps infected by the vitality of the military environment. It is not by chance that he mentions the figure of Siegfried from Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen.58 The description of Donciéres owes something to Proust’s experience of his own military service, his time as a volunteer, which he regarded as one of the happiest periods of his life.59 “So strong a current of vitality coursed through my veins that no movement on my part could exhaust it; each step I took, after touching a paving-stone of the square, rebounded off it. I seemed to have the wings of Mercury growing on my heels. (…) I retained, in my lodgings, the same fullness of sensation that I had felt outside. It gave (…) an apparent convexity of surface to things which as a rule seem flat and insipid.” a 60 In Doncières he experiences for the first time in his life that he can sleep in a strange room without fear. As soon as he enters the hotel, an eighteenth century former palace, he has the feeling that he is not alone: corridors, doors, niches, they all keep him company, receive him in a hospitable, friendly way. The cause seems to him to be that his accommodation does not feel like a hotel.61 In the evening he goes for a walk through the unknown, quiet, wintry town, whose streets are not simply a means for getting from one place to another. He sees before the illuminated windows picturesque scenes which invite comparison with Dutch interior and genre paintings. “In a little curio shop a half-spent candle (…) made (…) of the whole hovel, in which there was nothing but pinchbeck rubbish, a marvellous composition by Rembrandt.” b 62 One should not think that Proust illuminated the town with his metaphors at random. He is not the street artist who paints a “trompe l’oeil” on blank walls. Reality always remains visible. He confides in the reader the causes or the accompanying conditions which have led to illumination. It is remarkable how the author always names the factors very precisely which lead the narrator to a “point de vue esthétique” from where he can see a person or an event with the mind’s eyes. He suggests that they might not be the direct cause of an experience of beauty, but certainly the accompanying conditions which favour an aesthetic view. In the section on the garrison town of Doncières, just referred to, it a Un tel courant de vie affluait à mes nerfs qu’aucun de mes mouvements ne pouvait l’épuiser; chacun de mes pas, après avoir touché un pavé de la place, rebondissait, il me semblait avoir aux talons les ailes de Mercure. (…) Je gardais, dans mon logis, la même plénitude de sensation que j’avais eue dehors. Elle bombait (…) l’apparence de surfaces qui nous semblent si souvent plates et vides. b Dans un petit magasin de bric-à-brac, une bougie à demie consumée (…) faisait (…) de ce taudis où il n’y avait que du toc et des croûtes, un inestimable Rembrandt.

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is the friendship of Saint-Loup, the temporary suspension of habit, and perhaps the wintry atmosphere which let him see the town with the eyes of an artist. The madeleine episode too, which was discussed above as the first example of spontaneous memory, is preceded by an exact and exhaustive description of the surrounding circumstances: momentary jadedness, doubt about his own calling, a cold winter’s day, chance.63 The narrator is particularly receptive for the poetry which Paris possesses during the war. But here too he investigates the reason for the rarity of the capacity for seeing with the mind’s eyes. The reader should not assume that the aesthetic perspective is easy to adopt. Quite the opposite: aesthetic seeing is a momentary blessing and does not last longer than an instant. Why is the protagonist receptive for the dramatic-poetic character of Paris during the war? He recounts that he was long absent from the city, staying in a recovery home, from which be visited the city only twice. It was 1916 before he returned for good. He sees this as a possible explanation for the particular consternation that he feels when Saint-Loup, who has a period of leave, comes for an unexpected visit: Saint-Loup appears to him as a ghostly figure, and the narrator approaches him with that feeling of awkwardness and the impression of something supernatural “which one feels when one enters the presence of a man suffering from a fatal disease, who still, nevertheless, leaves his bed, gets dressed, goes for walks.” a 64 The other inhabitants of Paris, he writes, are already far beyond being upset by the cruelty of such breaks. Familiarity is quickly established, “which cuts off from things which we have witnessed a number of times the root of profound impression and of thought which gives them their real meaning.” b 65 His attendance at a matinee of the Guermantes, at the end of A la Recherche, takes place after years of absence. For this reason too he is astonished about the changes in the guests, so that when he arrives he has the impression that the people around him are wearing masks.66 Sudden changes in time and habit create a new susceptibility. The novel Jean Santeuil already provides several examples of this: in the wintry month of January, suddenly a spring day is inserted. Jean experiences an unusual euphoria which seems to involve the whole town. His sensitivity is enormously intensified.67 In A la Recherche the discovery is made that a change of weather is enough to give the world a new face, or even more, to create it anew (“recréer”); and this is applied artistically throughout.68 The narrator is in his room in Paris. It is a qu’on éprouve quand on est introduit auprès d’une personne atteinte d’un mal mortel et qui cependant se lève, s’habille, se promène encore. b qui retranche aux choses que nous avons vues plusiers fois la racine d’impression profonde et de pensée qui leur donne leur sens réel.

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a Sunday in autumn which has been mild so far. When he awakes the outside world is filled with thick fog. And he immediately feels like another person, it is as if he is awakening on a foggy morning in Doncières. The new world in which he is plunged this morning, is in this case one already known (which increases its truth still further), and one forgotten for a long time, which allows it to be woken to life in its full original form.69 So a change in the weather has the same effect as a spontaneous memory. His contemplation about the possibility of raising our sensitivity and receptivity goes so far, that Proust philosophises about the advantages of a defect like temporary deafness or the absence of a sense of smell. As soon as the defect is cured, one is in a state in which one can see the world with the passion of a convalescent.70 He even imagines how the world takes on a magical character for the deaf. “And for this stone-deaf man, since the loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition, it is with ecstasy that he walks now upon an earth become almost an Eden, in which sound has not yet been created.” a 71 As already described earlier, Proust regarded his withdrawal from the world as an aid to re-creating this very world. It is not surprising that Proust’s search for the beauty of the universe led him to pay particular attention to all the phenomena which destroy the normal dimensions and disable habit: these are particularly dreams and awaking, and modern means of communication.

Dreaming and awakening Proust’s precise and poetic descriptions of these extremely transient phenomena have the charm of the investigation of an area that was previously ‘terra incognita’: “And I entered the realm of sleep, which is like a second dwelling (…). Then, in the chariot of sleep we descend into depths in which memory can no longer keep up with it, and on the brink of which the mind has been obliged to retrace its steps.” b 72 He discovers the poetry of sudden awakening from deep sleep. “Then from those profound slumbers we awake in a dawn, not knowing

a Et pour ce sourd total, comme la perte d’un sens ajoute autant de beauté au monde que ne fait son acquisition, c’est avec délices qu’il se promène maintenant sur une Terre presque édénique où le son n’a pas encore été créé. b Et j’entrais dans le sommeil, lequel est comme un second appartement (…) Alors, sur le char de sommeil, on descend dans des profondeurs où le souvenir ne peut plus le rejoindre et en deçà desquelles l’esprit a été obligé de rebrousser chemin.

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who we are, being nobody, newly born, ready for anything,” a 73 until memory comes to our aid and restores our consciousness and personality. In the uncertainty of the moment between sleeping and wakefulness, the world is fluid and undefined. One could not bear this performance for long, one would go mad, but for a moment it is as if one were present at the creation of the world, not yet stiffened by habit. The beginning of A la Recherche describes the “visions” of someone who goes to sleep, dreams, and wakes up again in his room; the firm, solid, unambiguous reality is replaced by a dizzying plurality, “spinning and indefinite impressions” b, confused, mixed up memories74 of other rooms he had occupied, uncertainty about the time of day, where he is at the moment, until the static, stiff and definite reality reestablishes itself with full wakefulness. “Often we have at our disposal, in those first minutes in which we allow ourselves to glide into the waking state, a variety of different realities among which we imagine that we can choose as from a pack of cards.” c 75 One is the victim of shocking illusions, as in the little drama of the invalid who is forced to travel and to spend the night in an unfamiliar hotel. He is woken by an attack of his illness, and is pleased to see light under the door: he can call for help. “Thank God, it is morning! (…) He is certain he heard footsteps: they come nearer, and then die away. The ray of light beneath his door is extinguished. It is midnight; someone has just turned down the gas.”76 In his sleep the narrator encounters people from the distant past, events that he had forgotten: a great uncle who used to pull him by the hair as a small child. He wakes up to free himself from his grip, and before returning to the world of dreams, takes the precaution of protecting his head with the pillow.77 The author does not ignore the phenomenon of dreams as an aid to the composition of his work; he hopes that dreams will bring back forgotten impressions which he will probably never experience again. Dreams, by calling back to his memory people and things from the distant past, can awaken his longing and nostalgic feelings – the first condition for his work – and free him from habit, free him from the present. So he calls dreaming “seconde muse (…) muse nocturne.”78 Dreaming can return to places and areas the particular beauty which their name had promised. Sometimes it is only during sleep that one rediscovers the original purity of people and things, which they have lost in reality. Sleep makes a Alors de ces sommeils profonds on s’éveille dans une aurore, ne sachant qui on est, n’étant personne, neuf, prêt à tout. b évocations tournoyantes et confuses. c On a souvent près de soi, dans ses premières minutes où l’on se laisse glisser au réveil, une variété de réalités diverses où l’on croit pouvoir choisir comme dans un jeu de cartes.

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us sensitive to people and things when it conjures up a gentler, more human image of them. According to Proust we have in our sleep several Pietàs. They remind us of someone’s better side which we tend to forget all too quickly “in the icy common sense, sometimes full of hostility, of the waking state.” a 79 Dreams fascinate him in the same way as spontaneous memory, with its “extraordinary effects which they achieve with time”b: widely separated times give way to one another in a matter of seconds, dazzle us with their actuality, as though they were gigantic aeroplanes and not the dim stars we thought they were, and bring the excitement, the shock of their direct presence – and then, when we wake up, take up again that remoteness from us which they had magically bridged. One might almost believe that dreaming is a means of finding the lost time again.80 But dreaming cannot fulfill this function; for Proust the artist, the rediscovery of time is always connected with a re-creation by means of art. In this respect, spontaneous memory is also inadequate. But it serves a useful purpose, inasfar as it drives the spirit towards art, and it provides a parallel to that which must be re-created by art.81

Modern means of communication Proust followed and analysed the phenomenon of cars, railways, aeroplanes and the telephone with the greatest of interest. They allow him to make valuable discoveries. They fascinate him as a means of liberating people from the present, of bridging the gap between widely separated places. They are figurations of time as “Time Regained”; they resemble the church tower of Saint-Hilaire in Combray, from which one can simultaneously see both The Guermantes Way and The Méséglise way, they are images of metaphor. Car, railway, aeroplane – they all function like an artist, just as time plays the role of an artist in le Temps retrouvé, since they establish new relations between things. That is precisely what characterises the essence of art. Proust is fascinated to note how means of communication, so to speak, spontaneously make real that which art can only produce through a wearisome process. When Proust writes that what is amazing about the car is how it makes neighbors of two places that he always imagined as widely separated, it is fulfilling the funca dans le bon sens glacé, parfois plein d’hostilité, de la veille. b le jeu formidable qui’il fait avec le temps.

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tion of a metaphor. And although this metaphor, the car, may not really be able to reduce the distance between the places, it still establishes a new relation between things: reality is suspended “in the flash of a first illusion” (“dans l’éclair d’une illusion”).82 The vehicle is the car, a dream or spontaneous memory. They establish new relations, they create a new world. Car and train: Proust subtly distinguishes the specific properties of each. The train makes a place into “a goal exempt from the contingencies of ordinary life, almost ideal at the moment of departure and remaining so at the moment of arrival in that great dwelling where nobody lives and which bears only the name of the town, the station, with its promise at last of accessibility to the place of which it is, as it were, the materialisation.” a 83 The car does not carry us quite so magically to a new place. But as compensation for the more humdrum means of locomotion, one experiences, when slowly approaching a town in a car, a different kind of poetry: “There are the gropings of the chauffeur himself, uncertain of his way and going back over his tracks; the “general post” of the perspective which sets a castle dancing about with a hill, a church and the sea, while one draws nearer to it however much it tries to huddle beneath its age-old foliage; those ever-narrowing circles described by the motor car round a spell-bound town which darts off in every direction to escape, and which finally it swoops straight down upon in the depths of the valley where it lies prone on the ground.” b 84 The car changes the dimensions of the landscape and with it our manner of seeing, “since a village which seemed to be in a different world from some other village becomes its neighbour in a landscape whose dimensions are altered.” c 85 The narrator is astonished and delighted to note how all the villages in Normandy, which used to be hermetically shut in and were prisoners of particular days, are now liberated by “the giant with the seven-league boots”, the car.86

a un but soustrait aux contingences de la vie ordinaire, presque idéal au départ et qui, le restant à l’arrivée, à l’arrivée dans cette grande demeure où n’habite personne et qui porte seulement le nom de la ville, la gare, a l’air d’en promettre enfin l’accessibilité, comme elle en serait la matérialisation. b Les tâtonnements mêmes du chauffeur incertain de sa route et revenant sur ses pas, les chassés-croisés de la perspective faisant jouer un château aux quatre coins avec une colline, une église et la mer, pendant qu’on se rapproche de lui, bien qu’il se blottisse vainement sous sa feuillée séculaire, ces cercles, de plus en plus rapprochés, que décrit l’automobile autour d’une ville fascinée qui fuyait dans tous les sens pour échapper, et sur laquelle finalement il fonce tout droit, à pic, au fond de la vallée où elle reste gisante à terre. c puisqu’un village, qui semblait dans un autre monde que tel autre, devient son voisin dans un paysage dont les dimensions sont changées.

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Compared with the train, the car has the advantage that the travellers can get to know the French landscape, with the individual charm of an area. Car journeys allow the rediscovery of churches which had sunk into obscurity since the invention of the railway. In some ways the motor car means a return to the days of horse-drawn carriages and stop-offs in villages. The car takes the place of the stagecoach and once again allows the tourist to stop at isolated churches.87 The special pleasure of a train journey consists in the impossibility of getting out along the way, so that everything between departure and arrival can be experienced as a complete whole, intact and unitary, as though we were transported to our destination in one jump.88 The car makes space relative, causes shifts in perspective, results in the disappearance from sight of an initially dominant aspect, for it to be temporarily replaced by another main focus: the monumental building which, seen from a distance, appears to dominate the town, seems, when approached in a car, to sink, to disappear, and when one has entered the town, to be destroyed, not to exist any more; it only becomes visible again when the car leaves the town. This phenomenon reminds him of the many faces which Albertine had shown him during the relationship, and which resulted from the various perspectives from which he had viewed her. His first impressions had seemed to him the most important and most significant, but these were buried, hidden from sight by those that followed.89 The aeroplane: Proust analyses and describes the particular beauty of this means of transport too, as the following example shows. Temporarily relaxed again with an apparently tolerant Albertine, the narrator is able to experience the special charm of an aeroplane flying high above him. He is lying in the grass and at first sees nothing at all, he only hears a buzzing like that of an insect; he is aware of the beauty which he experiences in the humming of an aeroplane flying at 2000 meters; he reflects that the two kilometers in the air is the same distance as two kilometers on the ground; that an aeroplane at this height is really just as far off as a train passing two kilometers away, even if the aeroplane seems much nearer to the observer because it is travelling in a purer sphere without any obstacles between the moving vehicle and the observer.90 In Proust’s work an aeroplane sometimes takes on a symbolic meaning. When he is riding a horse alone through the desolate landscape around La Raspelière, the Verdurins’ rural residence in Brittany, he sees an aeroplane for the first time. This sight grips and astonishes him in the same way as the sight of a demigod would affect the Greeks (one is almost tempted to propose another simile to Proust: the sight of the Argo to country folk). After some hesitant manoeuvres the aeroplane heads straight for the blue sky, as if towards its native

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land.91 This almost mythological image becomes for the narrator a symbol of his liberation, a symbol of his calling.92 For this reason he likes to choose the airport as the target of his walks with Albertine, which attracts him with its lively bustle and the continual taking off and landing of aeroplanes. An airport, he says, and not without a deeper meaning, is always fascinating “to those who love the sky” (“pour ceux qui aiment le ciel”93). The sight awakes in him a longing to travel, to set off into the unknown, to follow his vocation. Who can avoid being reminded by this passage of Baudelaire’s L’invitation au voyage, of Mallarmé’s Brise Marine? The telephone: Proust never tires of describing the wonder of the telephone. The telephonists, “the young ladies of the telephone” (“les démoiselles du téléphone”) – one must remember that in Proust’s time all calls, including local calls, were connected by telephonists – acquire mythical names like “Daughters of the Night” (“Filles de la Nuit”), “Messengers of the Word” (“Messagères de la parole”).94 They are “implacable deities” (“Divinités implacables”), whose verdict is expressed with “engaged” (“Pas libre”). They are quick to irritation if he waits too long after the line is clear: “Come along, I’ve been holding the line for you all this time!” (“Mais voyons, c’est libre!”), and they don’t waste words. They answer his expression of gratitude “for having kindly exercised on behalf of my humble words a power which made them a hundred times more rapid than thunder” a 95 by breaking the connection. One might think that the telephone was initially seen as a wonder since it was new and unusual at that time. But one should keep in mind that it became familiar very quickly and soon the only thought that concerned the narrator was whether the connection would be made quickly enough.96 Even when the telephone had become commonplace, Proust, who remains open to the wonderful and mysterious, and who still sees the phenomenon with the eyes of a child, remains receptive to its specific beauty. In A la Recherche the narrator’s telephone conversations provide the opportunity for important thoughts and discoveries. While he is staying with SaintLoup in Doncières, the narrator calls his grandmother. When the connection is finally set up and he hears her voice – so near and she herself so far away – it feels to him like the symbol of an eternal separation. The voice appears to him as if it came from inside him, arising from endless depths, like a spontaneous memory of a beloved person. “I longed to kiss her, a d’avoir bien voulu user en faveur de mes humbles paroles d’un pouvoir qui les rendait cent fois plus rapides que le tonnerre.

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but I had beside me only the voice, a phantom as impalpable as the one that would perhaps come back to visit me when my grandmother was dead.” a 97 The telephone works as a kind of scientific instrument, allowing him to measure voices in their various characteristics. Since the telephone separates the voice from the face, the narrator’s attention is directed towards what is specific, what is individual in every voice. It was with the telephone that he first discovers how soft the voice of his grandmother is, and how deeply worry has marked her in the course of her long life. After a telephone conversation with a friend of Albertine’s he becomes very conscious of the differences in their voices. This realisation sets off a meditation on the endless variety of voices: “I found them all dissimilar, moulded by a speech peculiar to each of them, each playing on a different instrument, and I thought to myself how thin must be the concert performed in paradise by the three or four angel musicians of the old painters, when I saw, mounting to the throne of God by tens, by hundreds, by thousands, the harmonious and multiphonic salutation of all the Voices.” b 98 Who cannot hear the enthusiasm for modern times in this passage worthy of the Futurist Manifesto? Who cannot hear the enthusiasm for multiplication and differentiation of reality thanks to these modern discoveries? Are modern means of communication in themselves creative? The same applies here as was said about spontaneous memory: they are nothing in themselves, without an artist to capture their effect in an artistic equivalent. This leads to the Martinville episode.99 The narrator and his parents go for a walk outside Combray; they return with Dr Percepied in his coach. The narrator sits on the box. A long way ahead he sees, as the sun sets, the towers of Martinville and Vieuxvicq; as the carriage travels along the winding road the towers sometimes overlap, then seem to stand far apart, and disappear abruptly. They lead him to a discovery which fills him with such enthusiasm that he takes a piece of paper and describes his impression; this time in such a way that he feels he has deepened his experience enough. The two towers of Martinville stand ahead of him, and the third tower of Vieuxvicq, which had initially lagged behind, positions itself next to them “with a bold leap” ( “par une volte hardie”). Despite the speed of the carriage the towers remain ahead of him “like three birds perched upon the plain” (“comme trois a J’aurais voulu l’embrasser, mais je n’avais près de moi que cette voix, fantôme aussi impalpable que celui qui reviendrait peut-être me visiter quand ma grand-mère serait morte. b Je les trouvai toutes dissemblables, moulées sur un langage particulier à chacune, jouant toutes sur un instrument différent, et je me dis quel maigre concert doivent donner au Paradis les trois ou quatre anges musiciens des vieux peintres, quand je voyais s’élever vers Dieu, par dizaines, par centaines, par milliers, l’harmonieuse et multisonore salutation de toutes les voix.

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oiseaux posés sur la plaine”). Since it had taken a long time to get near to the towers, he expects it to take some more time before they are finally reached, but after a curve in the road, the wagon unexpectedly delivers them to the foot of the towers. When they continue their journey the towers, seeing him drive away, wave their “sun-bathed pinnacles” (“leurs cimes ensoleillées”) in parting. Sometimes one of them keeps in the background, so that the other two can see him for a moment once more. When the direction of the road changes, they turn in the light of the setting sun like “like three golden pivots” (“comme trois pivots d’or”), and then disappear. He has now almost reached Combray; the sun has already set when he sees them for the last time “like three flowers painted upon the sky above the low line of the fields” (“comme trois fleurs peintes sur le ciel au-dessus de la ligne basse des champs”) or “like three maidens in a legend” (“comme trois jeunes filles d’une legende”) who are left behind in the loneliness of the enveloping darkness. And as the carriage recedes from them further and further, he sees them shyly seeking their path, and, after a few awkward movements of their silhouettes, pressing themselves together, one sliding behind the other to form, before the still red sky, “a single dusky shape, charming and resigned” (“une seule forme noire, charmante et résignée”) before being swallowed by the night. The impression of three towers from a speeding coach in a hilly landscape and on winding roads is expressed as completely as possible. The description indisputably reflects the beauty that Proust experienced. Before we examine the significance of this episode at Martinville, we should draw attention to an interesting fact: on the 19th November 1907 an article by Proust appears in le Figaro under the title “impressions of travelling by car”, which will later be included in Pastiches et Mélanges.100 When one reads the corresponding scene, the correspondence with the Martinville episode is striking. The same experience is described in almost identical words. But here it is about the towers of the churches Saint-Etienne and Saint-Pierre in Caen. And the means of transport is no coach, but a car! Without a doubt, the Martinville episode is a transposition of the car journey of 1907.101 In A la Recherche the Martinville episode takes a key position. It allows the narrator to make a discovery which makes him happy. Initially he cannot explain the reason for his euphoria. Then he sees more clearly what the towers are hiding: “I had a thought which did not exist for me the moment before, which composed itself in words in my head.” a 102

a J’eus une pensée qui n’existait pas pour moi l’instant avant, qui se formula en mots dans ma tête.

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What truth is hiding behind Martinville? Michel Butor’s interpretation does not appear quite to touch the heart of the matter. Butor sees in the Martinville episode a spatial parallel to the Madeleine experience; there the time difference is neutralised, in the scene with the church towers the spatial distance is abolished.103 As we showed, the aspect mentioned by Butor was one of the reasons for Proust’s interest in the car.104 But in this passage the emphasis lies elsewhere. Picon’s interpretation seems similarly incomplete; he sees the significance of this scene as lying in the metaphorical possibilities of the church towers.105 The narrator does in fact say that after describing this experience he felt he had expressed it adequately; in his description it is noticeable how the church towers go through various metamorphoses as a result of the changing perspectives – they are variously “like three birds perched upon the plain”, “like three golden pivots”, “like three flowers”, “like three maidens”. However, the deeper meaning of the Martinville experience is this: in Martinville the narrator makes the discovery that reality “in reality” is not one, but ten, a hundred realities, depending on the particular point of view, and that only a perspectivistic representation of the reality does justice to the other realities, which it also is. Only a perspectivistic approach can express the inexhaustible richness of one and the same reality.106 The Martinville episode fills the narrator, overwhelmed by his discovery, with profound joy; for the first time he feels the strength to represent this new experience adequately, which means perspectivistically. The difference between the Martinville experience and the Madeleine experience is as follows: the latter relates to an experienced past, a “déjà vu”, whereas the former relates to a spatial “here and now”, to a “jamais-vu” which, through the magic of modern means of communication – here figurations of the artist – multiplied, differentiated, becomes, not one, but ten realities. And each reality is equally valid, equally legitimate. In Martinville Proust expresses the aesthetic principle which underlies A la Recherche, at first without explaining this principle. This happens later in numerous places. In A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs he writes, pondering the different “faces” that one and the same person can show: “The qualities and defects which a person presents to us, exposed to view on the surface of his or her face, rearrange themselves in a totally different order if we approach them from a new angle – just as, in a town, buildings that appear strung in extended order along a single line, from another viewpoint are disposed in depth and their relative heights altered.” a 107 In this connection, Proust describes, in a very reveala Les qualités et les défauts qu’un être présente disposés au premier plan de son visage se rangent selon une formation tout autre si nous l’abordons par un côté différent, comme dans

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ing passage from Le côté de Guermantes, an effect of modern photography. The narrator moves his face towards Albertine’s, in order to kiss her. From each position her face looks different, each change of perspective creates a different face, as in “the most recent applications of photography – which huddle at the foot of a cathedral all the houses that so often, from close to, appeared to us to reach almost to the height of the towers, which drill and deploy like a regiment, in file, in extended order, in serried masses, the same monuments.” a 108 It sounds like a powerful credo: “I can think of nothing but that [the recent applications of photography, the kissing movement] which can (…) evoke out of what we believed to be a thing with one definite aspect the hundred other things which it may equally well be, since each is related to a no less legitimate perspective.” b 109 In an impressive way Proust declares his conviction that the perspectivistic view is the great, the true artistic principle for the re-creation of reality. What was not yet made explicit in the perspectivistic representation of the towers of Martinville is here put into words. Only in the perspectivistic representation do the other hundred aspects appear, which a thing also is. Only after Proust had reached this point of view could he write A la Recherche. Perspectivism is both the philosophical as well as the compositional principle of his novel.

une ville les monuments répandus en ordre dispersé sur une seul ligne, d’un autre point de vue s’échelonnent en profondeur. a les dernières applications de la photographie – qui couchent au pieds d’une cathédrale toutes les maisons qui nous parurent si souvent, de près, presque aussi hautes que les tours, font successivement manoeuvrer comme un régiment, par files, en ordre dispersé, en masses serrées, les mêmes monuments. b Je ne vois que cela qui puisse (…) faire surgir de ce que nous croyions une chose à aspect défini, les cent autres choses qu’elle est tout aussi bien, puisque chacune est relative à une perspective non moins légitime.

CHAPTER IV

The re-creation of reality: perspectivism and metaphor

Perspectivism Proust presents people and events in space and time perspectivistically, with each perspective being granted the same legitimacy. The people he had met and whose lives he had followed over the years, he compares with giants submerged in the depth of the years and “simultaneously” in contact with widely separated instances in time. When the narrator, at the end of his book, decides to make an artistic presentation of the people and events of his life, he seeks to describe them in their connection with time, i.e. perspectivistically. It is a conscious decision to use “time” as the first and the last word of A la Recherche. His aim is to present his life “in time”, i.e. perspectivistically. And it is not by chance that the first pages form the perspectivistic overture for his work, beginning as they do with: “For a long time I would go to bed early,”a where he lets the world spin like a top which he then examines as it slows down and admires the multiplicity of perspectives. Proust developed this perspectivistic method relatively late. Neither in Jean Santeuil nor in Contre Sainte-Beuve does he apply it. During the time he was working on Jean Santeuil, Proust describes the fountain of Saint-Cloud, which he knows from a painting by Hubert Robert.1 It is interesting to note the reappearance of this fountain in A la Recherche. But if one compares the earlier sketch with the final version, the difference is spectacular. In the 1899 article “a fountain” is evoked, one is faced with a literary description of “a fountain”. In A la Recherche the fountain is perspectivistically duplicated, several fountains are described from the points of view of the observers.2 “It [the famous a Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.

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Hubert Fountain] could be seen from a distance, slender, motionless, rigid (…); at this distance one had the impression of art rather than the sensation of water. (…) But from a closer view one realised that (…) it was a constantly changing stream of water that, springing upwards and seeking to obey the architect’s original orders, performed them to the letter only by seeming to infringe them, its thousand separate bursts succeeding only from afar in giving the impression of a single thrust. (…) From a little nearer, one saw that this continuity, apparently complete, was assured (…) by the entering into line, by the lateral incorporation, of a parallel jet which mounted higher than the first. (…) From close to, exhausted drops could be seen falling back from the column of water, passing their sisters on the way up, and at times, torn and scattered, caught in an eddy of the night air, disturbed by this unremitting surge, floating awhile before being drowned in the basin.” a Jean Santeuil deals with the Dreyfus affair in one piece; the same affair is diffracted a hundred times in A la Recherche and reflected in the various personalities. We will return to this point later. The perspectivistic method seems to have been first applied in Impressions de route en automobile, the 1907 article which was later transformed into the Martinville episode. Did Ruskin lead the way here? From 1899 to 1906, as already mentioned, Proust concerned himself intensively with Ruskin, and the car journey in Impressions follows Ruskin’s trail through the churches and cathedrals of Normandy.3 A perspectivistic method without the lesson of Turner-Ruskin is unthinkable; this means that the artist should work from what he sees, not what he knows. Proust recounts this anecdote in his 1900 article John Ruskin: Turner was once drawing Plymouth harbour with some battleships a mile or two out, seen against the light. When a naval officer sees his drawing, he is appalled that the ships appear to have no gunports. Turner confirms this and answers: “If you will walk up to Mount Edgecumbe, and look at the ships against sunset, you will find you can’t see the portholes.” “Well, but”, said the naval officer, still indig-

a On le voyait de loin, svelte, immobile, durci (…); à cette distance on avait l’impression de l’art plutôt que la sensation de l’eau. (…) Mais de près on se rendait compte que (…) c’était des eaux toujours nouvelles, qui, s’élançant et voulant obéir aux ordres anciens de l’architecte, ne les accomplissaient exactement qu’en paraissant les violer, leurs mille bonds épars pouvant seuls donner à distance l’impression d’un unique élan. (…) D’un peu près, on voyait que cette continuité, en apparence toute linéaire, était assurée (…) par l’entrée en ligne, par la repise latérale d’un jet parallèle qui montait plus haut que le premier. (…) De près, des gouttes sans force retombaient de la colonne d’eau en croisant au passage leurs soeurs montantes, et parfois, déchirées, saisies dans un remous de l’air troublé par ce jaillissement sans trêve, flottaient avant d’être chavirées dans le bassin.

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nant, “you know the portholes are there.” “Yes”, said Turner, “ I know that well enough; but my business is to draw what I see, and not what I know.”4 The context in which Proust refers to this anecdote is extremely interesting. He is discussing engravings based on Ruskin’s drawings in his book The Bible of Amiens. He observes what is characteristic in them, that Ruskin gives each stone the nuance of the hour together with the colouring of the centuries, and that Ruskin never separates a cathedral from the background landscape, as it appears to travellers approaching on foot or by car, as on a Flemish or medieval picture. He gives as an example the engraving “Amiens at Halloween”. Proust supposes that Ruskin rearranged the perspectives for the sake of aesthetic effect: “Are the cathedral and the church of St-Leu, we wonder, thus seen in perspective, quite like that? Is the Somme really so wide?” a 5 Proust answers the imaginary response with the Turner anecdote above. And Proust, who had visited Amiens in Ruskin’s footsteps, names a place with a view approximately as Ruskin describes it: “ If (…) you walk towards the municipal slaughterhouse (…), you will notice (…) that the effect of distance is to show the monuments in much the same distorted, satisfying, composition as the artist has recorded, though if you move closer they will resume their original relation to one another, and look quite different.” b 6 Ruskin as mediator, as Crémieux suggests?7 It is possible. However, the fact remains that the first application of this perspectivism can be found in the above-mentioned article of 1907. It is also known that Proust began writing A la Recherche in his sound-proofed room on the Boulevard Haussmann at the beginning of 1908. There is most probably a causal connection between his idea of perspectivism and his work on A la Recherche. Jean Santeuil does know spontaneous memory, but nothing like Martinville. Proust must have made this discovery between 1900 and 1907, which was so radical that it led to the final conception of his work. In the novel Proust’s main character, as we have seen, discovers in the course of a carriage ride that the same object or the same person become different objects or different persons dependent on the perspective. Doesn’t he write: “A thought came into my mind which had not existed for me a moment earlier”?8 In the novel “life” itself leads the narrator to this important discovery. But in reality?

a Est-ce la perspective seule, qui approche ainsi, des bords d’une Somme élargie, la cathédrale et l’église Saint-Leu? b Si (…) vous allez dans la direction de l’abattoir, (…) vous verrez l’éloignement disposer, à la façon mensongère et heureuse d’un artiste, des monuments, qui reprendront, si ensuite vous vous rapprochez, leur position toute différente.

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An important element of Proust’s perspectivism is his solipsism.9 The individual is completely alone; communication is only possible via the medium of art: “Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself.” a 10 The earlier quotation too, that “the universe is real for us all and dissimilar to each one of us”11 makes very clear this fundamental belief of Proust. A person is an individual and their perception of the world, the same world, is necessarily individual. Independently of the Emersonian connotation (see above) of this attitude, Proust’s conception of the individual shows a striking similarity to Leibniz’ expression of the monad, and implies the same perspectivism. Paragraph 57 of Leibniz’ Monadology goes: “And just as the same town when seen from different sides will seem quite different – as though it were multiplied perspectivally – the same thing happens here: because of the infinite multitude of simple substances it’s as though there were that many different universes; but they are all perspectives on the same one, differing according to the different points of view of the monads.”12 This agreement between Proust and the German philosopher Leibniz (16461716) is so striking that one must assume that Proust studied Leibniz’ philosophy; in his time, 1881, a new edition of the Monadology appeared, which was edited by the French philosopher E. Boutroux (1845-1921), whom Proust greatly admired. In addition, countless anthologies of Essays de Théodicée (1710) appeared in France in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.13 Various passages in A la Recherche do indeed indicate that Proust must have read Leibniz intensively.14 In the description of the specific character of the Duchess de Guermantes’ salon, Leibniz’ central idea appears: in his Monadology he had asserted that every monad reflects the entire universe, but always with the addition of something individual. In the case of the Duchess’ salon, the thing that distinguishes her salon from other Parisian salons is the presence of one or two very beautiful women, who are invited for this reason alone.15 Proust’s correspondence also shows in various places that Proust had concerned himself with Leibniz. Thus, in a letter from 1919, he emphasises the other central idea of Leibniz’ that the world of the possible is more extensive than that of the real.16 Would it be too bold to propose the thesis that Proust found his artistic principle in Leibniz? At the very least one can say that Leibniz’ philosophy has found its artistic equivalent in A la Recherche, given the profound similarity between Leibniz’ and Proust’s perspectivism. What is the core of Leibniz’ thinking? It is his holy respect before reality, as it is created, as it is. Leibniz had the misfortune to be born at the wrong time; his era was interested in the question whether reality could be understood through a L’homme est l’être qui ne peut sortir de soi, qui ne connaît les autres qu’en soi.

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mathematics. The logical understanding of reality stood at the center of the thinking of the seventeenth and a large part of the eighteenth century. But Leibniz proved that reality can never be explained completely in a logical and analytical way; something always remains outside. A priori analytical judgments are valid only in the realm of the possible. They do not exist in reality. Thus he distinguishes two sorts of truth, “vérités de raison” and “vérités de fait”. The latter are the more interesting – they are true, but in a different way from the logical truths. Contingent truths can even increase their truth value, but never reach the absolute degree of truth which applies to mathematical truths. The “discovery” of factual truths is connected with Leibniz’ respect for reality, is connected with his perspectivism. The world consists of “monads”, of “dynamic perspectives”; every monad reflects the world in its own way. But the reflection remains defective, necessarily incomplete, necessarily partial. A thousand monads reflect the world in their own way, but still the One is never completely captured in the many. For Leibniz the many, the pluriform should not be understood negatively, for us humans the One is only visible in fragments, only as a pluriform unity. The universe can only be understood and seen perspectivistically. The more perspectives, the more complete the view. The conception of the individual as a closed monad, as a limited being, appears both in Proust and in Leibniz. In neither case is it a reason for pessimism, or rather: the suffering it causes is overcome by the joy over the inexhaustible richness of the worlds that reality includes. Proust later complains about the “mendacious flimsiness” a of the beginning of his book, where he wakes up the world, his world, from his bed, since “it is not one universe, but millions, almost as many as the number of human eyes and brains in existence, that awake every morning.” b 17 Every person is an individual. That is the central point of Proust’s philosophy. The “suffering and greatness” of individuality are presented in his work, but the greatness outweighs the suffering. The law is beautiful (and cruel) which reflects the world differently in each individual, that there are not one, but ten, a hundred, innumerable worlds. Art does not deny the principle of individuality, but raises individuals to a level where they no longer suffer from their own individuality. Joy, holy astonishment at the unique nature of each person also determine his relationship with the past. For Proust the past is never an oppressive inheritance or a burden, as it is with countless writers of the fin de siècle. a minceur menteuse. b ce n’est pas un univers, c’est des millions, presque autant qu’il existe de prunelles et d’intelligences humaines, qui s’éveillent tous les matins.

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A clear example of a fin de siècle writer is provided by the Dutch author Louis Couperus. In Van Oude Menschen, de Dingen die voorbijgaan (1906) the past is an obsession. The shadow of the past exerts its power over all the main characters and determines their lives. The “thing” that pursues the two old people is a crime committed sixty years earlier, a “crime passionnel” that was never discovered by the authorities, which was hidden and kept secret by shared guilt. The “thing” is ever present for old Mrs Dercksz and her lover, old Mr Takma, who has the murder on his conscience. It exerts an unbearable pressure on their lives right up to their last day. In Boeken der Kleine Zielen (1900-1903) the past is an ever present pressure. At the beginning of Het Heilige Weten Constance reviews her life. Even after so many years, she does not feel at home in the big, gloomy house where she lives in Driebergen; it belonged to her father in law, the “old man”, who could never forgive her for destroying her son’s career. On Constance’s first visit, with her husband and son, to her parents in law, the past looms up like a wall between them.18 Proust, still seen by some as a representative of the fin de siècle, because his novel portrays this time, has none of the characteristics of a decadent author. Proust is radically different. His philosophy differs completely from that of a D’Annunzio, a Wilde, a Couperus, three examples of typical fin de siècle authors. Heredity, social antecedents, the past: in Proust they play nothing like their usual fatal role. In A la Recherche the past is not primarily something one drags behind one, which determines and burdens the present. The past is primarily one’s own past, that which distinguishes one from all others, that which one is and no other, that which confirms one’s unique identity. This – Emersonian – idea occurs early in Proust. A characteristic passage in Jean Santeuil goes: “It is said that nothing in our lives is ever lost, that nothing can prevent its having been. That is why, so very often, the weight of the past lies ineluctably upon the present. But that is why it is so real in memory, so wholly itself, so far beyond replacement.” a 19 His whole recherche, all his artistic searching is aimed at the realisation of this individuality in art. Individuality and the individual past, often regarded as a burden in the nineteenth century, are re-evaluated by Proust as the source of a higher joy. So his perspectivism is not only the artistic, but also the philosophical principle on which A la Recherche rests.20

a On dit que ce qui a été dans notre vie est irréparable (…). C’est pour cela que souvent sur notre vie présente le passé pèse d’un poids si inéluctable; mais aussi pour cela que dans notre souvenir il est si réel, il est si impossible qu’il soit autre chose: il est irremplaçable, il est quelque chose d’unique.

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Let us examine Proust’s perspectivism more closely. Sometimes a contradiction seems to exist in his conception: on the one hand he declares that each perspective has its own value, is just as valid as every other21, and on the other hand we hear him say that the first impression (of a person) is the true one, later fading into the background and almost disappearing, only to reappear anew, intact, in a spontaneous memory. Albertine initially represents for him the personification of sensual, bacchantine life. Later she exposes to him many different aspects which obscure the initial impression; until once, when he is separate from her, her girlfriend Andrée reveals Albertine’s “vice”, her lesbian nature; he immediately recognises that his first impression was correct, that of “the young Bacchante who had loomed up and at once been detected that first day, on the front at Balbec.” a 22 A second example: the narrator is musing about the different perspectives through which he has viewed one and the same name in the course of his life. Sometimes a chance event brings the initial colouring of a name back into view: “But even apart from rare moments such as these, in which suddenly we feel the original entity quiver and resume its form, carve itself out of syllables now dead, if in the dizzy whirl of daily life, in which they serve only the most practical purpose, names have lost all their colour, like a prismatic top that spins too quickly and seems only grey, when, on the other hand, we reflect upon the past in our day-dreams and seek, in order to recapture it, to slacken, to suspend the perpetual motion by which we are borne along, gradually we see once more appear, side by side but entirely distinct from one another, the tints which in the course of our existence have been successively presented to us by a single name.” b 23 The name Guermantes invoked for him seven or eight different images, though the first of these were the most beautiful: “Gradually my day-dream, forced by reality, to abandon a position that was no longer tenable, established

a la fille orgiaque surgie et devinée, le premier jour, sur la digue de Balbec. b Mais même en dehors des rares minutes comme celles-là, où brusquement nous sentons l’entité originale tressaillir et reprendre sa forme et sa ciselure au sein des syllabes mortes aujourd’hui, si dans le tourbillon vertigineux de la vie courante, où ils n’ont plus qu’un usage entièrement pratique, les noms ont perdu toute couleur comme une toupie prismatique qui tourne trop vite et qui semble grise, en revanche quand, dans la rêverie, nous réfléchissons, nous cherchons pour revenir sur le passé, à ralentir, à suspendre le mouvement perpétuel où nous sommes entraînés, peu à peu nous revoyons apparaître, juxtaposées mais entièrement distinctes les unes des autres, les teintes qu’au cours de notre existence nous présenta successivement un même nom.

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itself anew in one slightly less advanced until it was obliged to retire still further.” a 24 One, but not the most important cause of this ambiguity is Proust’s preference for his own youth, which means more to him than the later stages of his life. The pages he devotes to his youth – Combray, the walks in the direction of Méséglise and Guermantes – have a poetry, a lyrical character which is not to be found in his later work in this fullness and this richness. But, as said above, Du côté de chez Swann is not the book which characterises Proust the best. What is characteristic is that he did not stay with “some dear or sad fantasy”25 but went further, continually trying to discover beauty also later in his life. He makes the important and liberating discovery that reality does not have one, but ten, a hundred, innumerable faces. He is enthusiastic about the new insight, he experiences it in all its beauty, and sometimes also in its cruelty. The world is not created once and forever, but is new each time one views it perspectivistically.26 In perspectivism Proust possesses an infallible method of multiplying and differentiating reality; a perspectivistic view gives him the possibility of seeing the world through hundreds of eyes. A landscape, a person, an object continually become new landscapes, people, objects depending on the point of view taken, and each “realisation” is valid; his method consists of describing only what falls into the illuminating ray of the perspective.27 Proust’s polygonal way of seeing has often been commented on. But only E.R. Curtius recognises the last consequence of this new vision. In his 1925 essay on Marcel Proust28, which is still worth reading, he comments on Proust’s remark, quoted above, that every thing is equally well a hundred other things, since each is relative to a no less legitimate perspective; this he calls “modern”.29 Curtius sees this way of viewing things as a possibility of overcoming the “bad relativism” of the nineteenth century. In this century, relativism was a synonym for scepticism; “everything is relative” was understood as “nothing is true”. But Proust teaches: since everything is relative, every perspective is justified. His “relationism”, to use Curtius’s expression, does not mean any levelling down or annihilation of an object, but its immense enrichment.30 In a 1924 article about the Spanish philosopher J. Ortega y Gasset, whose philosophy defends the same perspectivism, Curtius writes “that this perspectivism is really the appropriate and convincing expression for the new mental attitude of our time. It is the framework for the consciousness of the a Peu à peu mon rêve, forcé par la réalité d’abandonner une position intenable, se retranchait à nouveau un peu en deçà jusqu’à ce qu’il fût obligé de reculer encore.

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twentieth century. It is perhaps the only way and the only tool which will allow us and our offspring to cope with the diversity of lifestyle choices and cultural impressions which are borne down upon us by the mental syncretism of the age.”31 Curtius did not maintain this cultural optimism, and never returned to this forward-looking formulation. Is it one of the expectations of the twenties which never came to fruition?32 The new humanism, which he supported in the thirties as medicine for the problems of the time, consists of “medievalism and restauration”.33 He withdraws more and more to traditional ground; in “Rome” he finds a “timeless scale for humanity”.34 In an essay on Virgil he describes him as “a singer who has the most original, the most direct tone for the main emotions of humanity. (…) All aspects of humanity (…) are represented by him in exemplary fashion”.35 It is not by accident that in the twenties André Gide and Aldous Huxley published novels written with a more or less perspectivistic method; Gide’s 1925 Les Faux-Monnayeurs and Huxley’s 1928 Point Counter Point. Huxley in particular regarded the perspectivism of the time as a new way of seeing things in accordance with the modern age: “The essence of the new way of looking is multiplicity. Multiplicity of eyes and of aspects seen.”36 A comparison with these authors would go too far and demand a closer examination. Here we will simply take note of the fact that perspectivism was propagated by various writers of the twenties as a new and promising way of looking at things. Would Proust, had he lived longer, have maintained his perspectivism? The Second World War made the Proustian vision impossible for decades. Only recently does there seem to be an increasing possibility of a revival of an aesthetic approach resembling Proust’s. As an example from Germany one could take Martin Walser’s novel Ein Springender Brunnen (A Gushing Fountain). Proust’s work provides plentiful examples of perspectivism. When, in Du côté de chez Swann, he describes the church and church tower of Saint-Hilaire in Combray, he does not describe one church but innumerable Saint-Hilaires, depending on weather conditions, distance and mental state of the narrator.37 It is evident that this episode, although it appears at the beginning of A la Recherche, was written late: it is a reworking of an article which Proust published in 1912 under the title L’église de village.38 Another fine example of perspectivism is the description of various hotel rooms, “in reality” the same hotel room in the Grand Hotel in Balbec, but occupied under different circumstances and at different times. Initially the room seems hostile, and only the arrival of his grandmother, who sleeps in the next room, relieves him from his oppressive fear. As habit grows he starts to love his

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room and the hotel: “We had now come in sight of the hotel, with its lights, so hostile that first evening on our arrival, now protective and kind, speaking to us of home.” a 39 His room overlooks the sea and becomes a frame for a variety of maritime scenes, dependent on season, weather and his own disposition. The moment arrives in which habit stops him from being aware of the room at all. His eyes are reopened for it when he falls in love with Albertine, if only from the egoistic point of view of love.40 And how great is the difference between his first stay in Balbec and the second! On his second visit to the coastal town he has barely arrived when he receives an invitation from Mme de Cambremer. In addition he is personally welcomed by the hotel manager. His second stay is dominated by social and fashionable life. Mystery and poetry are banished: “In this too social valley, along the flanks of which I felt that there clung, whether visible or not, a numerous company of friends, the poetical cry of the evening was no longer that of the owl or the frog, but the “How goes it” of M. de Criquetot or the “Khaire” of Brichot.” b 41 The place names along the railway line to Balbec, which had so inflamed his imagination when he first heard them, are now humanised; they had already lost their “singularité” when their etymology was explained to him and Albertine by the learned Brichot, and since then they have lost still more of their mystery.42 One feels a certain regret that those days are over, when the names were still mysterious and the hotel room frightening. Meanwhile the author gives a complete account of the characteristics of both of these Balbecs. People are treated no differently from landscapes, towns and places. There are innumerable examples of the application of perspectivism to people from the life of the narrator. When, after years of absence, he attends a matinee in the Guermantes’ house, it gives him “une vue optique des années”, a perspectivistic view of time.43 When he again meets the figures who are reassembled for the matinee, and whose identification sometimes causes him great difficulties after time has changed them so much, he remembers the various perspectives through which he had seen them: “As a bucket hauled up on a winch comes to touch the rope several times and on opposite sides, so there was not a character that had found a place in my life, scarcely even a thing, which hadn’t turn and turn about played in it a whole series of different roles.” c 44 His artistic aim is to bring out a Nous apercevions déjà l’hôtel, ses lumières si hostiles le premier soir, à l’arrivée, maintenant protectrices et douces, annonciatrices du foyer. b Dans cette vallée trop sociale, aux flancs de laquelle je sentais accrochée, visible ou non, une compagnie d’amis nombreux, le poétique cri du soir n’était plus celui de la chouette ou de la grenouille, mais le ‘Comment va?’ de M. de Criquetot ou le ‘Khairé!’ de Brichot. c comme un seau montant le long d’un treuil vient toucher à diverses reprises et sur des côtés opposés, il n’y avait pas de personnage, presque pas même de choses ayant eu place dans ma vie, qui n’y eût joué tour à tour des rôles différents.

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the differential quality of each name, of each person. In the book he is composing, he does not fail to follow the characters over time.45 Space-time is, for Proust, “the principle of individuation and of quality.”46 In Proust’s thinking – and this too reminds us strongly of Leibniz – space and time represent both obstacle and access. On the one hand they obscure the essence of things, and on the other they reveal things to us exclusively and necessarily in their unique identity.47 People change continually, they are always different from what we think. This means that we are not capable of knowing the other: “The human face is indeed, like the face of the God of some oriental theogony, a whole cluster of faces juxtaposed on different planes so that one does not see them all at once.” a 48 Here we see the cruel side of plurality. How shocked the narrator is to learn, through an indiscreet remark of Jupien’s, that Françoise, of whose affection he was certain, had said that he was not worth the rope to hang him: “I realised that it is not only the physical world that differs from the aspect in which we see it; that all reality is perhaps equally dissimilar from what we believe ourselves to be directly perceiving and which we compose with the aid of ideas that do not reveal themselves but are none the less efficacious.” b 49 Françoise is the first to teach him that a human being is beyond explanation. A person is “a shadow which we can never penetrate”. c 50 He will experience the cruel beauty of this truth in his love for Albertine, “a many-headed goddess” d 51 and in his friendship with Saint-Loup. He gives a lift boy a letter for Saint-Loup, so that he can receive an immediate reply; the recipient grasps this opportunity to start a relationship with the boy. The narrator is pained when he later learns of this. “For we never see more than one aspect of things, and had it not been that the thought distressed me, I should have found a certain beauty in the fact.” e 52 The often painful experience that a person appears quite different to different other people, is sometimes extremely entertaining.53 In a train the narrator and Albertine are sitting opposite a big, ugly and vulgar lady; she looks to him like the Madame of a brothel. She later turns out to be Princess Sherbatoff.54 In a Le visage humain est vraiment comme celui du Dieu d’une théogonie orientale, toute une grappe de visages juxtaposés dans des plans différents et qu’on ne voit pas à la fois. b Je compris que ce n’est pas le monde physique seul qui diffère de l’aspect sous lequel nous le voyons; que toute réalité est peut-être aussi dissemblable de celle que nous croyons percevoir directement et que nous composons à l’aide d’idées. c une ombre où nous ne pouvons jamais pénétrer. d une déesse à plusieurs têtes. e On ne voit jamais qu’un côté des choses, et si cela ne m’eût pas fait tant de peine, j’[y] eusse trouvé une certaine beauté.

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Cottard’s view she represents the aristocracy par excellence. In fact she is, princess or no princess, generally persona non grata in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. But what does that matter, Proust declares, if the Cottards are still able to maintain their dream of a noblewoman?55 The princess, for her part, maintains the fiction that the three families that accept her company were freely chosen by her. The opinion one has of someone is usually based on a mistake, on false information, is necessarily incomplete. Proust never tires of describing the illusions which determine human relationships. The narrator is invited to a soirée in La Raspelière, a country house rented by the rich bourgeois family the Verdurins from the Cambremers. Madame Verdurin is expecting the violinist Morel. Their house is regarded as a “Temple de la Musique”, and this reputation is one of the elements conducive to the conquest of high society. She becomes uneasy as Morel does not appear with the rest of the company. He has already missed one evening. Cottard supposes – Morel is doing his military service – that a difficult sergeant might be the cause of the problem. Only the author (or the reader) knows the real reason, which is a tryst with the homosexual Charlus. Later in the evening they will appear together. The narrator enthuses about the view from Raspelière, which is high enough to look out over both the valley and the sea. Mme Verdurin is much more restrained, regarding the view as primarily a background against which she can receive guests and give dinners, “like a magnificent painting (…) justifying the high rent they were paying for La Raspelière, furnished, without their having constantly to raise their eyes towards it.” a 56 The practical point of view prevails at the Verdurins. Finally Morel appears, followed by Charlus. And now the author provides the perspective of the aristocratic Charlus: “The latter, to whom dining with the Verdurins meant not so much going into society as going into a place of ill repute, was as apprehensive as a schoolboy entering a brothel for the first time and showing the utmost deference towards its mistress.” b 57 The Cambremers are also invited – incidentally, against the will of Mme Verdurin, or at least she claims this before her “faithful”. The Cambremers see it quite differently: they regard their presence as an expression of goodwill. And so the game goes on. Illusions, misunderstandings, as well as a genuine inability to see the motives of the other, rule people in their relations to one ana comme une magnifique peinture (…) justifiant le prix élevé auquel ils louaient la Raspelière toute meublée, mais vers lequel ils levaient rarement les yeux. b Celui-ci, pour qui dîner chez les Verdurin n’était nullement aller dans le monde, mais dans un mauvais lieu, était intimidé comme un collégien qui entre pour la première fois dans une maison publique et a mille respects pour la patronne.

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other. Should one conclude from this that Proust is a pessimist? Not at all! No more than Montaigne is a pessimist. And just as much as Montaigne, Proust is fascinated by the extent of human illusion.58 Aptly and precisely, Proust describes the hundred and one universes that each monad represents. The perspectives of the place one is located (social – psychological – geographical) determine our perception of the world. This is necessarily incomplete. “We see, we hear, we conceive the world in a lopsided fashion.” a 59 For twenty five years Françoise has heard people around her talking of Mme Sazerat; still she never stops talking about “Mme Sazerin”; not because she is stubborn, but because she really hears “Sazerin”. When we are lying on the slope of a hill, writes Proust, a blade of grass fluttering a few inches before our eyes can hide a mountain peak a few miles away;60 the same phenomenon, in this case the national perspective, led to the main news being printed small in the newspapers of neutral Switzerland in the First World War: “The World War, recent fighting, one million casualties” b, whereas the local news was printed in large letters, which might have given the impression that this news really was more important: “Success for Maison Zeiler Lausanne at the Grenoble Exhibition.” c 61 Not all representations, however legitimate, have the same content of truth. Curtius quite understood that Proust’s perspectivism meant no levelling out or annihilation of the truth, but enriched it a hundredfold. His perspectivism is no subjectivism. Proust himself rejects such an interpretation of his point of view in advance: “The pro-Germans [among them] had (…) the faculty of ceasing [for a moment to understand and even] to listen when one spoke about the German atrocities in Belgium (And yet they were real).” The subjective element that he himself noticed in hatred and generally speaking in each perspective, does not prevent an object from having real qualities and defects; reality does not dissolve into pure relativism.62 What raises Proust’s perspectivism to a level higher than “bad relativism”? Proust’s belief in an ultimate reality. The apparent contradiction remarked on above, will be explained and resolved as soon as one realises that Proust sees art as the highest level of expression.63 His relationism does not degenerate into a destructive scepticism, because his perspectivistic outlook is anchored in the highest perspective, that of art. Art exposes reality and the truth in their purest form, to return refracted and blurred in all other reflections. Every perspective is legitimate, but the perspective of art is more complete than that of society. a Nous voyons, nous entendons, nous concevons le monde tout de travers. b la Guerre mondiale, les récents combats, un million de pertes. c un Succès pour la Maison Zeiler de Lausanne à l’exposition de Grenoble.

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Proust recognises the primacy of the mind. For him the opposition is not: committed art vs. art for art’s sake; he leaves this discussion behind, it holds no interest for him; the starting point he has conquered for himself is in quite another region. Reality is only justified by art. Art is, or should be, the medium in which reality is transfigured. The highest level of art is reached when the dense and impenetrable reality is made transparent. Only in art is reality made real.

The metaphor One should always be aware that for Proust, the beauty of experience is only rediscovered when it has been translated into an intelligible equivalent: “The recreation by the memory of impressions which had then to be deepened, illumined, transformed into equivalents of understanding.” a 64 Only then is the truth of an experience sufficiently explored, adequately expressed. The Martinville experience and the perspectivistic description of the church towers make him happy, because he feels for the first time that he has sufficiently deepened and expressed an experience: “When (…) I had finished writing it, I was so filled with happiness, I felt that it had so entirely relieved my mind of its obsession with the steeples and the mystery which lay behind them, that, as though I myself were a hen and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top of my voice.” b 65 During a walk in the direction of Méséglise he becomes aware of the discrepancy which often exists between a great impression and its inadequate representation: when the sun returns after a shower and is reflected on the wet slate roof of a house, he knows no other way of expressing his enthusiasm than by swinging his umbrella up and down and calling: “Gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh! But at the same time I felt that I was in duty bound not to content myself with these unilluminating words, but to endeavour to see more clearly into the sources of my rapture.” c 66

a La récréation par la mémoire d’impressions qu’il fallait ensuite approfondir, éclairer, transformer en équivalents d’intelligence. b Quand (…) j’eus fini de l’écrire, je me trouvai si heureux, je sentais qu’elle m’avait si parfaitement débarrassé de ses clochers et de ce qu’ils cachaient derrière eux, que comme si j’avais été moi- même une poule et si je venais de pondre une oeuf, je me mis à chanter à tuetête. c Zut, zut, zut, zut. Mais en même temps je sentis que mon devoir eût été de ne pas m’en tenir à ces mots opaques et de tâcher de voir plus clair dans mon ravissement.

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The experience of beauty and its appropriate expression are for Proust inseparably connected, they form a unity. A la Recherche is the history of a vocation to be a writer. Nowhere is A la Recherche satisfied with a passive delight in beautiful pictures. As soon as the beautiful reveals itself, it is recorded in a precise and poetic form. Proust makes the highest demands on the form. He admires the artistic ability of Flaubert who, in his mature period, wrote in such a way that what he saw was completely and appropriately translated into language. There were no loose parts, everything moved together, every particle of reality was incorporated fluidly in the rhythm of his prose: “In Flaubert’s style (…) all the elements of reality are rendered down into one unanimous substance, into vast, unvaryingly polished surfaces. No flaw remains in it. It has been rubbed to lookingglass smoothness. Everything is shown there, but only in reflection, and without affecting its uniform substance.” a 67 Despite his admiration for Flaubert, Proust does not regard his style as ideal. He is convinced that only the metaphor can lend style a kind of timelessness.68 And precisely in Flaubert there is perhaps not a single apt metaphor to be found.69 He directs the same accusation at his friend the writer Paul Morand. In his foreword to Tendres Stocks Proust pointed out the defect that not all Morand’s comparisons were necessary and unavoidable; to clarify his standpoint, Proust pointed to a phenomenon from physics: water boils at 100 degrees centigrade; at 98 or 99 degrees this effect does not appear. The parallel is apt!70 In the representation and transfiguration of reality the metaphor plays for Proust an important role, where the word “metaphor” is to be understood in its widest sense, following his usage. For him the style of a writer more or less boils down to his metaphorical style: “He can describe a scene by describing one after another the innumerable objects which at a given moment were present at a particular place, but truth will be attained by him only when he takes two different objects, states the connexion between them – a connexion analogous in the world of art to the unique connexion which in the world of science is provided by the law of causality – and encloses them in the necessary links of a wellwrought style; truth – and life too – can be attained by us only when, by comparing a quality common to two sensations, we succeed in extracting their common essence and in reuniting them to each other, liberated from the contingencies of time, within a metaphor.” b 71 a Dans le style de Flaubert (…) toutes les parties de la réalité sont converties en une même substance, aux vastes surfaces, d’un miroitement monotone. Aucune impureté n’est restée. Les surfaces sont devenues réfléchissantes. Toutes les choses s’y peignent, mais par reflet, sans en altérer la substance homogène. b On peut faire se succéder indéfiniment dans une description les objets qui figuraient dans le lieu décrit, la vérité ne commencera qu’au moment où l’écrivain rendra deux objets différents,

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Very few works bear such a strong metaphorical character as A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. An investigation shows that the comparisons come from the most diverse domains. There are numerous metaphors from the areas of science (medicine, biology, in particular botany) and the history of art. In richness and boldness, a parallel can be found only in the work of the German author Jean Paul. A particularity of Proust’s use of metaphor is that he often compares nature with art:72 “Meanwhile winter was at an end; the fine weather returned, and often (…) my curtains and the wall above the curtains being still quite dark, in the nuns’ garden next door I could hear, rich and mellow in the silence like a harmonium in church, the modulation of an unknown bird which, in the Lydian mode, was already chanting matins, and into the midst of my darkness flung the rich dazzling note of the sun that it could see.” a 73 With this use of metaphor Proust aims to replace the mechanical view of the world, based on the law of causality, with an analogous world view. The world is destroyed and built up again with a new structure; this reconstruction is the task of the artist: “Artistic genius acts in a similar way to those extremely high temperatures which have the power to split up combinations of atoms which they proceed to combine afresh in a diametrically opposite order, corresponding to another type.” b 74 The nature of art as illusion, appearance, however, is always conserved. Deleuze rightly remarked that for Proust, “essence” is identical with “différence”.75 Although the most striking characteristic of A la Recherche lies in the continual metamorphoses which affect both things and people, the latter do not lose their own individual characteristics and do not dissolve into a new reality. On the contrary, the two entities compared remain independent of each other, and the connecting “like” (“comme”) confirms and legitimises the uniqueness of each.76 This little conjunction “comme” (“like”) saves Proust from

posera leur rapport, analogue dans le monde de l’art à celui qu’est le rapport unique de la loi causale dans le monde de la science, et les enfermera dans les anneaux nécessaires d’un beau style; même, ainsi que la vie, en rapprochant une qualité commune à deux sensations, il dégagera leur essence commune en les réunissant l’une et l’autre pour les soustraire aux contingences du temps, dans une métaphore. a L’hiver cependant finissait; la belle saison revint, et souvent (…) ma chambre, mes rideaux, le mur au-dessus des rideaux étant encore tout noirs, dans le jardin des religieuses voisines, j’entendais, riche et précieuse dans le silence comme un harmonium d’église, la modulation d’un oiseau inconnu qui, sur le mode lydien, chantait déjà matines, et au milieu de mes ténèbres mettait la riche note éclatante du soleil qu’il voyait. b Le génie artistique agit à la façon de ces températures extrêmement élevées qui ont le pouvoir de dissocier les combinaisons d’atomes et de grouper ceux-ci suivant un ordre absolument contraire, répondant à un autre type.

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mistaking illusion for reality; it is as if he uses the “comme” to express the ephemeral, rare, yet important nature of the transfiguration. A selection of his metaphors can be used to illustrate this. The narrator is in Venice with his mother. One particularly fine day they undertake an outing to Padua to see the Giotto frescoes in the Capella degli Scrovegni (the Arena Chapel). “After walking across the garden of the Arena in the glare of the sun, I entered the Giotto chapel, the entire ceiling of which and the background of the frescoes are so blue that it seems as though the radiant daylight has crossed the threshold with the human visitor in order to give its pure sky a momentary breather in the coolness and shade, a sky merely of a slightly deeper blue now that it is rid of the glitter of the sunlight.” a 77 In a second comparison the darkness of the blue is defined more precisely: “As in those brief moments of respite, when, though no cloud is to be seen, the sun has turned its gaze elsewhere and the azure, softer still, grows deeper.” b 78 The blue of the chapel and the blue of the sky are brought closer together and distinguished at the same time. In addition it is not without significance that Proust is made aware of the natural blue by Giotto in particular. According to Ruskin, Giotto is the first painter who abandoned byzantine gold backgrounds. He cast the Christian holy scenes in natural decor and painted them as reality.79 No convention, but real mimesis. That at least is the way Ruskin pronounced on Giotto, and Proust accepted this interpretation, as shown again in his little meditation upon Giotto’s angel figures. These appear to the artistic imagination of the painter not as symbols, but as reality. He elaborates: they remind him far less of the angels of Renaissance and later periods of art, where the wings are nothing more than emblems, than of an extinct variety of bird.80 In L’écriture de Proust et l’art du vitrail Cazeaux examines the metaphor: Legrandin – “the Saint Sebastian of snobbery”.81 The author collected all the passages in which Legrandin appears, a well read and educated engineer who is, above all – a snob. It becomes evident that the reference to Saint Sebastian is always implicitly present, to appear explicitly in one of the last scenes. Proust was almost certainly thinking of Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian which hangs in the Louvre and which he knew well.82 At the end of his analysis Cazeaux rightly concludes that the effect of the comparison consists in characterising both the art a Après avoir traversé en plein soleil le jardin de l’Arena, j’entrai dans la chapelle des Giotto où la voûte entière et le fond des fresques sont si bleus qu’il semble que la radieuse journée ait passé le seuil elle aussi avec le visiteur, et soit venue un instant mettre à l’ombre et au frais son ciel pur à peine un peu plus foncé d’être débarrassé des dorures de la lumière. b Comme en ces courts répits dont s’interrompent les plus beaux jours, quand, sans qu’on ait vu aucun nuage, le soleil ayant tourné ailleurs son regard pour un moment, l’azur, plus doux encore, s’assombrit.

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of the Renaissance as well as Legrandin’s snobbery. Snobbery is classified as “false” religion, Renaissance art as “false” painting in that it lends a Christian figure the features of Apollo and represents a martyr as beautiful.83 In his analysis Cazeaux clearly shows that Legrandin is not subsumed in Saint Sebastian, nor is the twentieth century snob cloaked by Renaissance art; each remains visible, each retains its independence which only obtains its depth through the metaphor. This example again shows that the Proustian metaphor expresses the special nature of what is seen, and in such a way that the disparate parts which are linked by the metaphor are confirmed in their specific character.84 In the following illustration as well, the analogy “transfigures” what is seen (a reliquary shrine and a sexton) without negating its reality. One afternoon the narrator returns to his hotel in Balbec. He does not go straight to his room, but walks along the corridor, at the end of which a window has been opened temporarily for ventilation, a window that was normally closed. (It must be remembered that windows in France normally have shutters which may remain closed during the day for protection from the sun). The narrator looks through the windows onto a valley in which a house is standing “to which the perspective and the evening light, while preserving its mass, gave a gem-like precision and a velvet casing, as though to one of those architectural works in miniature, tiny temples or chapels wrought in gold and enamel, which serve as reliquaries and are exposed only on rare and solemn days for the veneration of the faithful.” a 85 He feels as though he is in a church, kneeling for a moment before a reliquary shrine which is normally locked. But already the moment of worship has lasted too long. “The valet, who carried in one hand a bunch of keys and with the other saluted me by touching his sacristan’s skull cap (…) came and drew together, like those of a shrine, the two sides of the window.” b 86 This example is a particularly beautiful illustration of a metamorphosis which is deliberately interrupted. Reality is not abolished, but a new reality is created alongside and above it, two spheres which reinforce without interfering with each other – like those paintings where Daphne becomes a laurel tree while remaining a nymph, or like El Greco’s painting The Burial of Count Orgaz, where the earthly scene of his funeral plays out below while his entry into heaven is shown above.87 a à laquelle la perspective et la lumière du soir en lui conservant son volume donnaient une ciselure précieuse et un écrin de velours, comme à une de ces architectures en miniature, petit temple ou petite chapelle d’orfèvrerie et d’émaux qui servent de reliquaires et qu’on n’expose qu’à de rares jours à la vénération des fidèles. b Le valet de chambre qui tenait d’une main un trousseau de clefs et de l’autre me saluait en touchant sa calotte de sacristain (…) venait refermer comme ceux d’une châsse les deux battants de la croisée.

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The symbolic interpretation of the passage quoted is as follows: reality is more than it appears to be, even if the transcendence of reality can only be experienced by chance and briefly. The temporal limitation of the experience is symbolically expressed here in the servant who shuts the rarely opened window again and so puts an abrupt end to the narrator’s worshipful observation. The simile transfigures reality without abolishing it. Nicholas analyses the passage where Proust describes the view of the sea from his hotel room in Balbec as though it were a mountainous landscape.88 His analysis refutes that of Genette, who could not see how the masterful counterposing of sea and mountains should illuminate the nature of both; he could only recognise that sea and mountains had exchanged their characteristics; one had become the other.89 But Nicolas shows the Proustian simile makes clear both “ressemblance” as well as “différence”. The white peaks of the waves illuminated by bright sunlight make the sea look like a snowy mountain chain (similarity) but (difference) the waves are hills which are not to be found on any map, since their slopes rise and fall and the effect of lighting keeps displacing the sea’s peaks. Proust uses the simile in such a way that the difference is articulated at the same time. Neither the variable character of the sea nor the solidity of the mountains are lost.90 Proust’s metaphor is the stylistic equivalent of a sudden and brief sensation in which the narrator sees something through the eyes of the mind and discovers a “correspondance” there. Proust continually attempts to explain the miracle of an analogy. He is never content to say something like Swann’s “Well, how goes it with Giotto’s Charity?” Swann, surprised by the similarity of a pregnant kitchen maid with “Caritas”, replaces reality with a picture. Proust himself always maintains the nature of an analogy, and never forgets to mention the reasons and the conditions which lead to his discovery of the analogy; carefully and exactly, he prepares the reader for the metamorphosis. Proust does not impose the simile on reality, it is reality itself which points out the “correspondance” to him. His metaphors rarely have an arbitrary character, they usually arise naturally and necessarily. Sometimes the comparison is of a psychological, sometimes of a geographical nature, sometimes a combination of the two. A lift boy standing in his lift in the hotel, is sometimes likened to a photographer in his glazed studio, another time to an organist in his chamber.91 The author specifies the factors which have led him to this simile. The narrator goes into a hotel for the first time in his life; his grandmother has left him alone for a short while; he feels alien, uncertain and worried. The staff look at him, or at least so it seems to him, with the stern gaze of Minos, Aiakos and Rhadamanthys.92 The unusual and unknown nature of this situation increases his sensitivity and imagination. He has never seen a lift boy before. The comparison with a photographer or organist is explicable

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and understandable when one takes into account the fact that in Proust’s days lifts were a sort of cage with wooden panels, like those which can still be seen in unmodernised French hotels and apartments. The whole section is full of images of the unfamiliar, the unknown: habit has not yet done its work.93 The narrator and Albertine visit the church of Saint-Mars in Balbec. The church towers are likened to scaly fish, and this is how the comparison is prepared: the church stands near the coast, they visit it on a bright blue warm day, when one can only think of swimming; the two ancient towers are salmon pink and covered in diamond-shaped tiles. They are slightly curved as if they were in motion, and only after that is the comparison made. They “[looked like] a pair of old, sharp-snouted fish, moss-grown and coated with scales, which without seeming to move were rising in a blue, transparent water.” a 94 An analogous example is the transfiguration of the inland church of SaintAndré-des-Champs near Combray, in which the church towers, with an undulating corn field in the foreground, become “as two ears of wheat” (“comme deux épis”).95Genette, who discusses the second of the two examples in an investigation of the role of metonymy and metaphor, stresses that metaphor is never used arbitrarily by Proust, but is always prepared with care and precision, and, so to say, arises from the context itself.96 From the analysis of the Proustian metaphor it should have become clear that the accusation of aestheticism which some readers still throw at Proust, the accusation that he hides from reality in a beautiful image, in an unreal world, is untenable. Quite the opposite: Proust does not replace reality with an image, he returns to it the depth and mystery which is has lost through habit. One of the most finely worked transfigurations and at the same time one of the most grandiose representations of modern life, in which art and life illuminate one another, is without doubt the passage in which the calls of street hawkers are described. The narrator has recently moved to an upmarket part of the city. The calls of street traders hawking their wares, half spoken, half sung, sound to his ears like Gregorian chant, or the lines of verse sung in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov.97 The everyday reality allows him to understand the unusual beauty of the art of Debussy and Mussorgsky, and the art frees daily life of its banality. Here too the careful preparation of the similes is noticeable, with precise descriptions of the circumstances under which “the vision” occurs: awake early, still lying in bed, he notices joyfully that a spring day has been inserted into the winter. Perhaps this is also to be understood symbolically, since his relationship with a de vieux poissons aigus, imbriqués d’écailles moussus, et roux, qui, sans avoir l’air de bouger, s’élevaient dans une eau transparente et bleue.

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Albertine has become painful and sad; only rarely does he know moments of calm and of happiness. These are the factors which sharpen his sensitivity and stimulate his imagination, which make him receptive for the slightest happenings on the street. How poetically the raising of the metal roller blinds is described: “The iron shutters of the baker’s shop and of the dairy (…) were now being raised, like the canvas of a ship that is getting under way and about to set sail across the transparent sea, on to a vision of young shop girls.” a 98 Then all sorts of street hawkers come past. He indicates the reasons precisely why Debussy’s and Mussorgsky’s music on the one hand, and the half sung, half spoken calls of the street traders on the other show correspondences such that the one fills him with the special beauty of the other: “For after having almost “spoken” the refrain: ‘Who’ll buy my snails, fine, fresh snails?’ it was with the vague sadness of Maeterlinck, transposed into music by Debussy, that the snail vendor, in one of those mournful cadences in which the composer of Pelléas shows his kinship with Rameau: ‘If vanquished I must die, is it for thee to be my vanquisher?’ added with a singsong melancholy: ‘Only tuppence a dozen…’” b 99 And the clothing sellers extolling their wares remind him of Gregorian chant: “In his little cart drawn by a she-ass which he stopped in front of each house before entering the courtyard, the old-clothes man, brandishing a whip, intoned: ‘Old clothes, any old clothes, old clo…thes’ with the same pause between the final syllables as if he had been intoning in plainchant: ‘Per omnia saecula saeculo…rum’ or ‘requiescat in pa…ce’..” c 100 Anyone who sees aestheticism in this great representation of modern times does not understand Proust. In fact it is the opposite, Proustian metaphors achieve a mutual enrichment of art and life.101 Given that Proust laid so much weight on the metaphor, one must ask oneself about the justification for this means of expression, why the metaphor in particular should express the essence of an experience. Genette poses this question in ‘Proust palimpseste’, without, however, providing a satisfactory answer. Genette regards the search for the esa Les ‘rideaux’ de fer du boulanger, du crémier (…) se levaient (…) comme les légères poulies d’un navire qui appareille et va filer, traversant la mer transparente, sur un rêve de jeunes employées. b Car après avoir presque parlé: ‘Les escargots, ils sont frais, ils sont beaux,’ c’était avec la tristesse et le vague de Maeterlinck, musicalement transposés par Debussy, que le marchand d’escargots, dans un de ces douloureux finales par où l’auteur de Pelléas s’apparente à Rameau: ‘Si je dois être vaincue, est-ce à toi d’être mon vainqueur?’ ajoutait avec une chantante mélancolie: ‘On les vend six sous la douzaine….’ c Dans sa petite voiture conduite par une ânesse, qu’il arrêtait devant chaque maison pour entrer dans les cours, le marchand d’habits, portant un fouet, psalmodiait: ‘Habits, marchand d’habits, ha… bits’ avec la même pause entre les deux dernières syllabes d’habits que s’il eût entonné en plain-chant: ‘Per omnia saecula saeculo… rum’ ou ‘Requiescat in pa…ce’.

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sential, which directs Proust’s recherche, as incompatible with multiperspectivity. He sees perspectivism as negative and confusing. He sees nothing more in the Proustian vision than a collection of incongruent points of view102 and thus overlooks the enriching and positive function of Proustian perspectivism. For Proust the essence, as expounded repeatedly above, can only be recognised as difference, can only be represented perspectivistically. Once more: why does Proust regard it as the same, seeing things poetically and discovering an analogy which is expressed and captured in a metaphor? Why is the narrator happy when he sees a planetary system in the round tables where the dinner guests are sitting in the restaurant of Rivebelle?103 The reason must be sought in a philosophical-religious conception, like that found in Emerson, in which the universe is understood as an analogy, as a code. The hidden unity of the universe shines out of the analogy.104 While the metaphor is clichéd and purely decorative in the work of so many other authors, in Proust it represents an attitude which, without a doubt, can be seen as an expression of a religious cast of mind. Proust uses the metaphor as a means of connecting separated things, establishing a correspondence between them, sanctifying everyday life.105 Proust returns to the metaphor its original function, which (according to Jean Paul) consists in reestablishing the destroyed unity between the individual and the world.106 The metaphor expresses Proust’s wish to turn linear time into a circle, out of time to make an eternity. Whenever Proust discovers an analogy, he is filled with a celestial joy.107 The things which live their isolated lives and die alone, like a houseplant in a courtyard, suddenly find, through a sacred accident, a relation to the godly. Without ceasing to be real, reality at the same time becomes a symbol. Carved on a twelfteenth century pillar in the church of Vézelay is a man grinding corn with a hand mill, with another man collecting the fine flour in his hand. An agricultural scene? Yes and no. It also stands for the fulfillment of the Old Testament by the New Testament.108 “The désir premier that most profoundly characterises the narrator is not to be found in the recurrence of favourite metaphors (…), but rather in the constant effort we recognise in his writing to make every aspect of his experience enter into a metaphorical relation with every other aspect. His ambition is to portray a world in which nothing resists the imagination, in which every object of description has the depth, the soubassement of other objects with which it naturally suggests analogies. In this way his own work has the transparent unity which Proust defined as the absolute beauty of great works of art. All things having lost their original appearance as things are now lined up alongside of one another in a kind of order and penetrated with the same light. Everything can be seen

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through everything else, and not a single word resists or escapes from his assimilation.”109 Through the metaphor, reality is transfigured, the existence of each individual justified and people reconciled with themselves. The impenetrable is spiritualised, the contingent present made necessary and confirmed in its unique nature. In the metaphor, stubborn reality becomes transparent.

CHAPTER V

Representation of the modern age

Absence of cultural criticism “In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that toil was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate survey of the countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of the evening hours, when from the top of the last hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the long hoped for turn in the dusty perspective of the cause-way, saw, for the first time, the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset-hours of peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an equivalent, in those days, I say, when there was something more to be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each successive halting-place, then a new arrangement of glass roofing and iron girder (…).”1 The text is from The Stones of Venice (1851-1853), Ruskin’s “speculum morale” that held up a mirror to the England of his time: look what happens to cities that believe they can exist without God’s guidance. This passage is typical of Ruskin’s style, lyrical in its nostalgia but cutting in its attack on modern times. Later he will become ever more set in his ways and take issue with more and more contemporary developments. Ruskin is not the only one to bemoan the epoch of mechanisation, not the only one to gaze nostalgically back at the era of the mail coach. In fact his cultural pessimism could be said to be typical of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Is the modern age more difficult to represent, to mention Huizinga’s thesis?2 Do railway and automobile make it impossible to perceive the beauty of the landscape? “To right, to left, and ahead, the car windows, which I kept closed,

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produced the effect of, as it were, displaying under glass the lovely September day (…). No sooner did the old pot-bellied houses, leaning to one another across the road, see us in the distance, than they rushed to meet us with a proffered gift of scant, fresh-blooming roses, or displayed with pride young hollyhocks which they had tended, only to be out-topped by the stripling blooms. (…) I was beginning to give up all hope of arriving at Lisieux in time (…), when, about sundown, we found ourselves abruptly on a hill, at the bottom of which, in a basin turned blood-crimson by the sun, to which we raced at speed, I saw Lisieux, which, hastening ahead, had hurriedly set up its crumbling houses and chimneys stained with red. In an instant everything was just where it should be, and, when, some few seconds later, we drew up at the corner of the Rue aux Fèvres, the old houses (…) seemed not to have changed at all since the fifteenth century.” a 3 The above quotation is from Impressions de route en automobile4 mentioned earlier. It corresponds with the passage from Ruskin, and provides an answer to it. Proust shows that, seen from a motor car, town and landscape acquire a new and fascinating beauty. His evocations of car journeys in Normandy with his chauffeur Agostinelli are very poetical. Approaching the town of Caen at high speed and seeing it lying in the plain, he writes how it “began to develop in a mounting figure, a complex, clear-cut fugue of roofs”. b 5 After Caen they visit the cathedral of Lisieux which Ruskin talked about. The chauffeur, dressed in his white rubber coat and wearing a cap, looks to Proust like a pilgrim or “some nun, dedicated to the service of the God of Speed”c; the calm way he holds the steering wheel is reminiscent of an apostle holding in his hand a consecration cross, the drone of the motor sounds like the music of the spheres.6 When they get to the cathedral it is already dark, but the chauffeur enables Proust to examine the sculptures by directing the car headlights at the portal. a A ma droite, à ma gauche, devant moi, le vitrage de l’automobile, que je gardais fermé, mettait pour ainsi dire sous verre la belle journée de septembre (…). Du plus loin qu’elles nous apercevaient, sur la route où elles se tenaient courbées, de vieilles maisons bancales couraient prestement au-devant de nous en nous tendant quelques roses fraîches ou nous montraient avec fierté la jeune rose trémière qu’elles avaient élevée et qui déjà les dépassait de la taille (…). Je commençais de désespérer d’arriver assez tôt à Lisieux (…) quand vers l’heure du couchant nous nous engageames sur une pente rapide au bout de laquelle, dans la cuvette sanglante de soleil où nous descendions à toute vitesse, je vis Lisieux qui nous y avait précédés, relever et disposer à la hâte ses maisons blessées, ses hautes cheminées teintes de pourpre; en un instant tout avait repris sa place et quand quelques secondes plus tard nous nous arrêtames au coin de la rue aux Févres, les vieilles maisons (…) semblaient de ne pas avoir bougé depuis le XVe siècle. b développait d’aplomb et par montées verticales la fugue compliquée mais franche de ses toits. c quelque nonne de la vitesse.

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When the author returns from his viewing, he sees a group of children standing around the car “bending above the lamps their curly heads, which quivered in the unearthly glare, so that they looked like some little Nativity scene of angels, projected, as it were, from the cathedral in a beam of light”. a 7 When they arrive outside the parental home, the chauffeur sounds the horn twice: the penetratingly monotonous tone is reminiscent of Tristan and Isolde.8 And these impressions of beauty are certainly not limited to this one article: alongside the Martinville episode which, as has already been made clear, is based on a car journey, there are numerous other examples in A la Recherche of experiences of beauty connected with car and train. The narrator returns from Venice with his mother; they travel past Padua and Verona: “We saw Padua and Verona come to meet us, to speed us on our way, almost on to the platforms of their stations, and, when we had drawn away from them, return – they who were not travelling and were about to resume their normal life – one to its plain, the other to its hill.” b 9 When the narrator is separated from his mother for a long period for the first time – he travels to Balbec – he is especially receptive for the inexorability and drama of the departure from a station. It is described with reference to Dante’s account of the entrance to hell: “We must lay aside all hope of going home to sleep in our own bed,” c 10 once they have made their way into the steam-plagued grotto, “one of those vast, glass-roofed sheds, like that of Saint-Lazare (…) and which extended over the eviscerated city one of those bleak and boundless skies, heavy with an accumulation of dramatic menace, like certain skies painted with an almost Parisian modernity by Mantegna or Veronese, beneath which only some terrible and solemn act could be in process, such as a departure by train or the erection of the Cross.” d 11 Balancing this departure scene at one of the big Parisian stations is the amusing description of the arrival of a local train in Balbec-Plage: Waiting travellers step aside to make room, but without any sense of urgency. They know a qui, penchant sur le phare leurs têtes dont les boucles palpitaient dans cette lumière surnaturelle, recomposaient ici, comme projetée de la cathédrale dans un rayon, la figuration angélique d’une Nativité. b Nous vîmes sur le parcours Padoue puis Vérone venir au-devant du train, nous dire adieu presque jusqu’à la gare, et tandis que nous nous éloignions, regagner, elles qui ne partaient pas et allaient reprendre leur vie, l’une ses champs, l’autre sa colline. c Il faut laisser toute espérance de rentrer coucher chez soi. d un de ces grands ateliers vitrés, comme celui de Saint-Lazare (…) et qui déployait audessus de la ville éventrée un de ces immenses ciels crus et gros de menaces amoncelées de drame, pareils à certains ciels, d’une modernité presque Parisienne, de Mantegna ou de Véronèse, et sous lequel ne pouvait s’accomplir que quelque acte terrible et solennel comme un départ en chemin de fer ou l’érection de la Croix.

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that they are dealing with a “a good-natured, almost human stroller, who, guided like the bicycle of a beginner by the obliging signals of the station-master, under the capable supervision of the engine-driver, was in no danger of running over anybody, and would come to a halt at the proper place.” a 12 One might say that Proust is following Emerson’s call to find beauty everywhere, literally and honestly, and does not leave out modern times. Under particular circumstances, as Proust shows, even the smell of petrol from a passing automobile can acquire a special value: the narrator is in his room in Paris, the drapes are closed, it is spring, he would really like to be separated from Albertine and free. Beneath his window he hears a car driving past. He smells the petrol and breathes it in greedily. The odor transports him to the area of Balbec, brings back the summer days and his and Albertine’s outings in the car to various churches; it awakens his desire to visit new places in the company of new women. The despised odor of petrol becomes a precious means, through his memory capacity, of reconstructing the special beauty of the past: “This smell of petrol (…) called into blossom now on either side of me, for all that I was lying in my darkened bedroom, cornflowers, poppies and red clover.” b 13 From a particular point in our lives on, Proust writes, everything can be made fruitful, everything can be valuable, an advert for soap just as much as Pascal’s Pensées: “After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal’s Pensées in an advertisement for soap.” c 14 The smell of petrol and soap advertising put on the same level as the Pensées of Pascal? Proust is quite aware how disturbing his way of thinking is. He defends the smell of petrol and soap advertising not only as triggers for spontaneous memory, but he goes further and shows that aesthetes and cultural philosophers who believe people would be happier and more poetic if they saw more colours are materialists. Proust calls such a conviction the philosophical disguise of the extremely naive idea that life would be more beautiful if people wore luxa marcheur débonnaire, presque humain et qui, guidé comme la bicyclette d’un débutant, par les signaux complaisants du chef de gare, sous la tutelle puissante du mécanicien, ne risquait de renverser personne et se serait arrêté où on aurait voulu. b Cette odeur de pétrole (…) faisait fleurir maintenant de chaque côté de moi, bien que je fusse dans ma chambre obscure, les bleuets, les coquelicots et les trèfles incarnats. c A partir d’un certain âge nos souvenirs sont tellement entre-croisés les uns sur les autres que la chose à laquelle on pense, le livre qu’on lit n’a presque plus d’importance. On a mis de soi-même partout, tout est fécond, tout est dangereux, et on peut faire d’aussi précieuses découvertes que dans les Pensées du Pascal dans une réclame pour un savon.

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urious costumes instead of black clothing.15 In a 1919 foreword to his friend Jacque-Emile Blanche’s Propos de Peintre he expresses similar ideas. He accuses the painter of attributing, like Sainte-Beuve, too much value to the era or the models and goes on: “There may, I admit, be a not unpleasing fetishism in the belief that a considerable part of Beauty lies outside ourselves, and that we play no part in creating it. (…) But I am not sufficiently a materialist to hold that the fashions of Fantin’s day made it easier to paint beautiful portraits, that Manet’s Paris was more picturesque than our own, or that the fairy-like loveliness of London accounts for at least one half of Whistler’s genius.” a 16 One sees Proust repeatedly taking issue with the idea that life itself is already beautiful. In Proust’s conception reality is never beautiful in itself (“realised”): We are the ones, the artists are the ones who must discover beauty and re-create it. So it is a mistake to believe that the past possesses more beauty than the present. Proust declares with full conviction that the modern age possesses just as much poetry as any other time for those who are prepared to discover its beauty. While waiting for a telephone connection to be set up, the narrator ponders: “Why it was that none of our modern Bouchers (…) had yet painted, instead of “The Letter” or “The Harpsichord”, this scene which might be entitled “At the telephone”, in which there would come spontaneously to the lips of the listener a smile that is all the more genuine because it is conscious of being unobserved.” b 17 His description of a morning newspaper is precise and at the same time poetic: “Then I considered the spiritual bread of life that a newspaper is, still warm and damp from the press and the morning fog in which it is distributed, at daybreak, to the housemaids who bring it to their masters with their morning coffee, a miraculous, self-multiplying bread which is at the same time one and ten thousand, which remains the same for each person while penetrating innumerably into every house at once.” c 18 a Sans doute il est d’un bien agréable fétichisme de croire qu’une bonne partie du Beau est réalisée hors de nous et que nous n’aurons pas à la créer (…). Mais je ne suis pas si matérialiste que de croire que les modes du temps de Fantin rendaient plus facile de faire de beaux portraits, que le Paris de Manet était plus pictural que le nôtre, que la féerique beauté de Londres est une moitié du génie de Whistler. b comment aucun de nos modernes Boucher (…) ne peignit, au lieu de ‘la Lettre’, du ‘Clavecin’etc. cette scène qui pourrait s’appeler: ‘Devant le téléphone’, et où naîtrait si spontanément sur les lèvres de l’écouteuse un sourire d’autant plus vrai qu’il sait n’être pas vu. c Je considérai le pain spirituel qu’est un journal, encore chaud et humide de la presse récente et du brouillard du matin où on le distribue dès l’aurore aux bonnes qui l’apportent à leur maître avec le café au lait, pain miraculeux, multipliable, qui est à la fois un et dix mille, et reste le même pour chacun tout en pénétrant à la fois, innombrable, dans toutes les maisons.

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Proust is fascinated by modernity and convinced that the modern age has its own inherent beauty. His call for modern art to give expression to the poetry of modern times is similar to that of avant-garde movements in painting and literature of the first two decades of the twentieth century; it is noticeable that most of the provocative expressions occur in La Prisonnière and La Fugitive, parts which were written after 1913. Here one can think of the art of the Fauvists, the Futurists, Cubists and Orphists, in particular paintings by Robert Delaunay with titles like Hommage à Blériot (Homage to Blériot) and L’Equipe de Cardiff (The Cardiff Team), with motifs like the Eiffel Tower, that icon of modernity which was initially not uncontroversial. One could also mention someone like Guillaume Apollinaire; in his 1913 essay in defence of the Cubists he writes: “Reality can never be discovered once and for all. Truth will always be new. (…) The social role of great poets and artists is constantly to renew the way nature appears in the eyes of man.” a 19 Apollinaire saw cubism as the ideal means of expression for the modern age. He sees it as art par excellence, no longer – like the impressionists – imitating reality, but designing reality anew, designing a new reality. And does one not recognise Proust’s soap advert in the following provocative statement by the above-mentioned poet: “[the artist, the writer] can always start from an everyday event, so a falling of a handkerchief may for the poet be the lever with which he will lift a whole universe”.20 The same goes for the following poem: At last you’re tired of this elderly world Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower this morning the bridges are bleating You’re fed up living with antiquity (…) Flyers catalogs hoardings sing aloud Here’s poetry this morning and for prose you’re reading the tab Disposable paperbacks filled with crimes and police21 The surrealists of the twenties will follow this call and set out in search of the beauty of railway stations, the underground, advertising hoardings, although with a radicalism which shuts their eyes to Notre Dame, to art which has traditionally been regarded as beautiful. Proust lacks this polemical touch; he cannot be accused of one-sidedness: Combray, but Venice too; Tiepolo, but also Chardin. The frenetic applause with a On ne découvrira jamais la réalité une fois pour toutes. La vérité sera toujours nouvelle (…) Les grands poètes et les grands artistes ont pour fonction sociale de renouveler sans cesse l’apparence que revêt la nature aux yeux des hommes.

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which the avant-garde greeted his “dadaistic” passages in A la Recherche, he therefore received with a certain mockery.22 Proust celebrated the universality of the beautiful. In his walks or drives through Paris he could be moved by the most everyday trades: a butcher’s apprentice sorting meat with dizzying speed and devout attention; the best filets of beef on one side, the inferior cuts on the other, placing them in gleaming metal dishes in the shop window “was really far more reminiscent of a handsome angel who, on the Day of Judgment, will organise for God, according to their quality, the separation of the good and the wicked and the weighing of souls.” a 23 A shop assistant at the till or a washerwoman chatting in the street give him the feeling that he has seen goddesses. One is again reminded of Emerson, of the Emersonian quotation which Proust chose as a motto for his story La mort de Baldassare Silvande: Apollo kept the flocks of Admetus, said the poets; every man is divinity in disguise.24 Beauty is everywhere: “The streets, the avenues, are full of goddesses.” b 25 In the garden of a café Proust sees three young girls sitting next to the enormous wheels of their bicycles “like three immortals leaning against the clouds or the fabulous coursers upon which they perform their mythological journeys. c 26 But he adds: “The goddesses do not allow us to approach them.” d 27 Shop assistant and washerwoman are seen at a distance from a limousine at high speed. During an outing in Madame de Villeparisis’ car – they are travelling at high speed – he catches a glimpse of a country girl; the impression of her beauty directly wakes his longing for her. Was she so beautiful simply because he had only seen her briefly? “If night is falling and the carriage is moving fast, whether in town or country, there is not a single torso, disfigured like an antique marble by the speed that tears us away and the dusk that blurs it, that does not aim at our heart, from every crossing, from the lighted interior of every shop, the arrows of Beauty.” e 28 That prompts him to wonder whether beauty might, after all, be purely subjective, the result of imagination overheated by unfulfilled longing.29 Had he a donnait en réalité (…) plûtot l’impression d’un bel ange qui, au jour du Jugement dernier, préparera pour Dieu, selon leur qualité, la séparation des Bons et des Méchants et la pesée des âmes. b Les rues, les avenues sont pleines de Déesses. c comme trois immortelles accoudées au nuage ou au coursier fabuleux sur lesquels elles accomplissent leurs voyages mythologiques. d Les Déesses ne se laissent pas approcher. e Pour peu que la nuit tombe et que la voiture aille vite, à la campagne, dans une ville, il n’y a pas un torse féminin, mutilé comme un marbre antique par la vitesse qui nous entraîne et le crépuscule qui le noie, qui ne tire sur notre coeur, à chaque coin de route, du fond de chaque boutique, les flèches de la Beauté.

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stopped and talked with the girl he might have been disappointed, if she had turned out to be ugly or to have some affliction which he had not been able to see from the car. The goddesses do not allow us to approach them. Should one insist on nearing them, they betray their nature as normal mortals. But still Proust does not call into question their divine origin. He simply wants to emphasise that beauty in this world is never and nowhere to be found in realised form. Only in art, only through the act of re-creation do apparently common people receive back their divine character. Modern painters who get normal girls with the simplest jobs to pose as Venus or Ceres, have committed no sacrilege; on the contrary, so far from committing sacrilege “they have merely added or restored to them the quality, the divine attributes of which they had been stripped.” a 30 Proust’s credo goes as follows: “Now that Olympus no longer exists, its inhabitants dwell upon the earth.” b 31 But they live in the guise of humans and they cannot be recognised as long as one looks at them with the eyes of the body. – a surprising twist to the words “God is dead” ! The recognition that the world is more than it seems to be, is perhaps expressed most beautifully in the following scene. The narrator is in a suburb of Paris; in front of the ash-grey houses stand flowering pear and cherry trees. He is moved by the sight of them and calls: “Treasurers of our memories of the golden age, keepers of the promise that reality is not what we suppose, that the splendour of poetry, the wonderful radiance of innocence may shine in it and may be the recompense which we strive to earn, were they not, these great white creatures (…) rather angels?” c 32

The Dreyfus Affair Proust is not, as may have become clear by now, an example of a committed writer: the Dreyfus Affair and the First World War (see below) do not interest him in themselves, but inasmuch as they are catalysts which trigger new social a ils n’ont fait que leur ajouter, que leur rendre la qualité, les attributs divins dont elles étaient dépouillées. b Depuis que l’Olympe n’existe plus, ses habitants vivent sur la terre. c Gardiens des souvenirs de l’âge d’or, garants de la promesse que la réalité n’est pas ce qu’on croit, que la splendeur de la poésie, que l’éclat merveilleux de l’innocence peuvent y resplendir et pourront être la récompense que nous nous efforcerons de mériter, les grandes créatures blanches (…) n’était-ce pas plutôt des anges?

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constellations, cause shifts of perspective, give the social kaleidoscope a further turn.33 Proust follows the effects of this turn on the social relationships in great detail. His interest is of a purely sociological-aesthetic nature. But one should not conclude from this that current affairs remains for him just a vague, barely discernible background, as H.R. Jauss asserts.34 The Dreyfus Affair means a serious existential crisis for the Third Republic. In 1894 the Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus was accused of spying for the Germans, and in 1895 sentenced by the court martial, on the strength of a superficial handwriting comparison, to lifelong exile on Devil’s Island. Initially Dreyfus was almost the only one who believed in his innocence. In the year 1897, however, irregularities in the procedure of the trial came to light: some of the “evidence” was revealed to be falsified. The suspicion intensified that not Dreyfus, but Esterhazy, an army officer with a dubious background, was the guilty man. But still neither the military leadership nor the government showed any interest in a review of the trial. But when the well known writer Emile Zola backed Alfred Dreyfus with his famous article ‘J’accuse’ in l’Aurore in January 1898 and demanded the reopening of the trial, the case developed into an affair which split France into two camps; for Dreyfus, those demanding a retrial, and against Dreyfus, those who tried to prevent any such thing by all means available. Soon Dreyfus himself was pushed into the background. The first priority was the question of what was more important: the honour of France and the army or the principles of 1789 and the republic. The anti-Dreyfus camp (nationalists, anti-Semites, monarchists) fiercely resisted a reopening of the trial and saw in the actions of the pro-Dreyfus camp primarily attempts to besmirch the honour of France. The pro-Dreyfus numbered among themselves, besides Emile Zola, such prominent intellectuals as Anatole France and Henri Bergson. Among the anti-Dreyfus faction were writers like Maurice Barrès. The dramatic climax came in 1898 when the head of the intelligence service, Colonel Henry, after acknowledging participation in the falsification of the evidence against Dreyfus, committed suicide. Esterhazy, the real culprit, fled to England. A review of the case was now inescapable. In 1899 the case was reopened in Rennes, rather than Paris, for fear of disturbances. This was a time of enormous tension between Left and Right. As an answer to the Ligue des droits de l’homme, rightists founded a Ligue de la Patrie française in 1899, under the leadership of the respected literary historian Jules Lemaître. Other prominent members were the historian Albert Sorel and the poet François Coppée. The right-wing Action Française under the leadership of Charles Maurras was also founded in that year. In view of this tension it was understandable that the judges did not dare to acquit Dreyfus. They sentenced him in September 1899 to ten years imprisonment and pardoned him at the same

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time. Dreyfus accepted the pardon but continued his fight for complete rehabilitation, which he did not receive until the year 1906, by which time the case had lost its virulence.35 Although it is known that in private Proust was passionately on the side of Dreyfus36, there is no mention of this commitment in A la Recherche: the affair is treated perspectivistically in the novel, from the perspective of Swann, that of the Duke de Guermantes, or of Bloch. This method of reflection is not yet to be found in Jean Santeuil. There the affair still forms a connected whole, whereas it is individualised in A la Recherche: “It is evident that Proust did not complete his technique of simple reflection until after Jean Santeuil”, concludes Jauss.37 It has already been explained above that Proust in fact used the perspectivistic method only later. But when one reads what Jaust and others have to say about perspectivism, then it becomes clear that they regard this way of seeing things more negatively than positively. Jauss talks about “simple reflection”, “historical relativism”38, and Carassus remarks with disappointment that the Dreyfus Affair, whose significance is obvious, is only described fragmentarily and never as a whole.39 These authors fail to see the richness and the fertility of Proust’s perspectivistic method for the re-creation of reality. Precisely through the multiplication and the individualisation of the notorious case, it is made clear to the reader what an enormously important role this affair played in the French society of that time. The presentation of the affair as seen through the various perspectives of the characters of the novel is exactly what makes it concrete and comprehensible for the reader. At the same time the different reactions sharply delineate the characters. The way the aristocratic, homosexual and reactionary Baron de Charlus regards the affair is typical of him: “‘All this Dreyfus business,’ went on the Baron, still clasping me by the arm, ‘has only one drawback. It destroys society (…) by the influx of Mr and Mrs Cow and Cowshed and Cow-pat, whom I find even in the houses of my own cousins, because they belong to the Patriotic League, the Anti-Jewish League, or some such league, as if a political opinion entitled one to a social qualification.” a 40 Bloch, passionate Dreyfus defender of the first water and bad mannered as he is, tries to force anyone who mentions the case into taking a stand one way or the other. During a matinee he attaches himself to ex-ambassador Norpois who, a Toute cette affaire Dreyfus, reprit le baron qui tenait toujours mon bras, n’a qu’un inconvénient: c’est qu’elle détruit la société (…) par l’afflux de messieurs et de dames du Chameau, de la Chamellerie, de la Chamellière, enfin de gens inconnus que je trouve même chez mes cousines parce qu’ils font partie de la ligue de la Patrie Française, antijuive, je ne sais quoi, comme si une opinion politique donnait droit à une qualification sociale.

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diplomat through and through, dresses his opinion in extremely circumspect and ambiguous formulations so that Bloch is unable to determine on which side he stands: the typical in both the radical Bloch as well as the diplomatic Norpois is revealed here.41 For Proust it is impossible to know the “the political truth”. Even if the papers are lying open on the table they will still be read and interpreted differently.42 But this does not exclude the writer himself being convinced of Dreyfus’ innocence. In the novel this point of view is not hidden, but also not laboured: a passing mention indicates that the narrator’s sympathies lie with the pro-Dreyfus faction. The artist Proust is not concerned with the case in itself. What fascinates him and what never ceases to amaze him is the multiplication that the case experiences. The affair repeatedly evokes different, new, unpredictable reactions. As the narrator is returning home, still ruminating about the conversation between Bloch and Norpois, he hears a similar discussion, although in shortened, reversed and crueller form: An argument starts between his and the Guermantes’ butler. The former is pro-Dreyfus, the latter anti-. But what happens: “Ours insinuated that Dreyfus was guilty, the Guermantes’ that he was innocent. This was done not to conceal their personal convictions, but from cunning and competitive ruthlessness. Our butler, being uncertain whether the retrial would be ordered, wanted in case of failure to deprive the Duke’s butler in advance of the joy of seeing a just cause vanquished. The Duke’s butler thought that, in the event of a refusal to grant a retrial, ours would be more indignant at the detention of an innocent man on Devil’s Island.” a 43 Swann takes Dreyfus’ side so wholeheartedly that he subordinates everything to this criterion, for or against Dreyfus, including art.44 The portrayal of the last days of Swann is very disturbing. Swann, emaciated by his mortal illness and his passionate commitment for Dreyfus, now finally looks like the Jew he tried to avoid being his whole life long45 – similarly Saint-Loup becomes, at his funeral, once more the Guermantes he had tried his whole life long to hide behind his intellectual avant-gardism.46 Shortly before his death, Swann has a talk with the narrator in which he exposes his deepest feelings, leaving him something of a spiritual inheritance which he will make productive.47 During the same soirée at the Guermantes a Le nôtre laissa entendre que Dreyfus était coupable, celui des Guermantes qu’il était innocent. Ce n’était pas pour dissimuler leurs convictions, mais par méchanceté et âpreté au jeu. Notre maître d’hôtel, incertain si la révision se ferait, voulait d’avance, pour le cas d’un échec, ôter au maître d’hôtel des Guermantes la joie de croire une juste cause battue. Le maître d’hôtel des Guermantes pensait qu’en cas de refus de révision, le nôtre serait plus ennuyé de voir maintenir à l’île du Diable un innocent.

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where Swann takes the narrator aside, he tells him in confidence that the Prince de Guermantes is secretly pro-Dreyfus, without knowing that his wife is also secretly on Dreyfus’ side. This revelation is particularly surprising because we know the Prince de Guermantes, the brother of the Duke as an ultra-reactionary and committed conservative, an anti-democrat and monarchist. His salon is, if anything, even more exclusive than that of his brother. Proust clearly shows that in this case it is precisely his love of the army and his sense of honour which puts him on the side of Dreyfus.48 In the case of his brother, the Duke de Guermantes, the “abominable affair” which drove France to the verge of civil war results primarily in a linguistic expression. When the case happens to come up in his presence it evokes from him every time, even after years, a particular peculiarity of language: His commentary on the “abominable affair” is always accompanied by “well and truly”. a Why? Because, the narrator informs us, it had cost him his chance of becoming the Chairman of the genteel Jockey Club.49 Again the affair paints the figure, and vice versa. The form of the representation is highly lively and realistic. It is known that the Dreyfus Affair divided families, turned friends against each other and formed the basis for new alliances. But we don’t need to learn about this from history books; Proust also makes this clear: As soon as Madame Sazerat (a character from Combray) knew that the narrator’s father was antiDreyfus, “she put continents and centuries between herself and him. Which explains why, across such an interval of time and space, her greeting had been imperceptible to my father, and why it had not occurred to her to shake hands or to say a few words which would never have carried across the worlds that lay between.” b 50 In other words: she gave his father the cold shoulder from then on. The affair helped the salon of Madame Verdurin ascend the social ladder one rung. Every political crisis, every artistic controversy helped her building her “nest”, brought new people into her orbit: “The Dreyfus case had passed, Anatole France remained.” c 51 “Simple reflection?” Proust’s technique is reminiscent of Montaigne’s. In one of his essays he discusses the question whether one has better chances of survival in defeat if one humbly begs for mercy or if one remains proud, and shows with examples that there is no simple answer here since all possible variations have already occurred.52 This fact, however, is for Montaigne no reason to a Bel et bien. b elle mit entre elle et lui des continents et des siècles. Ce qui explique qu’à une pareille distance dans le temps et dans l’espace, son salut ait paru imperceptible à mon père et qu’elle n’eût pas songé à une poignée de main et à des paroles lesquelles n’eussent pu franchir les mondes qui les séparaient. c L’affaire Dreyfus avait passé, Anatole France lui restait.

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doubt the existence of truth. It simply confirms him in his conviction that the truth is necessarily perspectivistically multiple.53 The reservations, perhaps even the discomfort which some readers feel at the use of perspectivism on such an emotionally charged matter as the Dreyfus Affair is intentional in Proust.

The First World War The World War of 1914-18 is what pushes the Dreyfus Affair into the background, together with Dreyfusism on the one side and anti-Semitism on the other. The only criterion which counts now is patriotism. The World War results in new twists of the social kaleidoscope.54 It promotes new people into the highest reaches of society, like the wife of Monsieur Bontemps, himself a fiery patriot and one of those behind the law requiring three year’s military service.55 The Verdurins’ salon ascends to the highest social class. The dream of la Patronne has come true: the exclusive, tightly closed Faubourg Saint-Germain has fallen. From now on Duchesses are part of her mercredi’s and it won’t be long before she herself becomes a Madame de Guermantes by marriage.56 The same laws and mainsprings result in new variations of the social pattern, each of which Proust attempts to describe. One cannot help noticing, however, that the war is less perspectivistically illuminated than the Dreyfus affair. Proust probably just did not have enough time. He did not live beyond 1922. The narrator is especially impressed by the metamorphoses in Parisian life in the course of the war. One special aspect is that the city becomes more poetic through wartime measures like the curfew. Since Paris, or at least particular parts of the town, were subject to the blackout, it is darker there than in the Combray of his youth; paying a visit was “like visiting country neighbours (…) in the streets, transformed into winding rustic lanes.” a 57 On clear winter evenings the snowy boulevards, which are no longer cleared, show effects of light and shadow as if the moon were pouring its beams onto an alpine glacier, and if one sees a lighted window in the otherwise complete darkness, it appears as “to be no more than a projection of light, an apparition without substance.” b 58 A woman in an illuminated window acquires the mysterious magic of an oriental

a un air de visites de voisins de campagne (…) dans les rues devenues de sinueux chemins rustiques. b comme une projection purement lumineuse, comme une apparition sans consistance.

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apparition. “Then one passed on and nothing more interrupted the rustic tramp, wholesome and monotonous, of one’s feet through the darkness.” a 59 Sometimes he is reminded of the wartime fashion which was current in 1795: young women in high cylindrical turbans which could have been worn by a Madame Tallien. Out of patriotism they wear “Egyptian tunics, straight and dark and very ‘war’, over very short skirts.” b 60 And instead of the jewellery which the Egyptian expedition had brought into circulation, they wear finger and arm rings made from shrapnel. But more than anything, Paris in wartime reminds him of the Orient: the colourful uniforms of allied Africans and Hindus in the French army give the city an exotic, oriental air, “an oriental scene which was at once meticulously accurate with respect to the costumes and the colours of the faces and arbitrarily fanciful when it came to the background, just as out of the town in which he lived Carpaccio made a Jerusalem or a Constantinople by assembling in its streets a crowd whose marvellous motley was not more rich in colour than that of the crowd around me.” c 61 It is the Orient of One Thousand and One Nights which catches his imagination when he, like Harun al Rashid in Baghdad, wanders through the labyrinth of dark streets in nightly Paris in search of adventure, as “the moon, narrow and curved like a sequin, seemed to have placed the sky of Paris beneath the oriental sign of the crescent,” d 62 like a symbol of the invasion prophesied by the pro-German Charlus, or as a symbol for the alliance of the Muslims with the French. For him the deepest impression of beauty is left by the sky – which one seldom looks at. Alongside “the ancient unalterable splendour of a moon cruelly and mysteriously serene, which poured down its useless beauty upon the still untouched buildings of the capital”e, during his second stay in Paris he discovers “lights from a different source, intermittent beams” f from aeroplane or searchlights, which he knows are protecting him.63

a Puis on passait et rien n’interrompait plus l’hygiénique et monotone piétinement rustique dans l’obscurité. b tuniques égyptiennes, droites, sombres, très ‘guerre’ sur des jupes très courtes. c un Orient à la fois minutieusement exact en ce qui concernait les costumes et la couleur des visages, arbitrairement chimérique en ce qui concernait le décor, comme de la ville où il vivait Carpaccio fit une Jérusalem ou une Constantinople en y assemblant une foule dont la merveilleuse bigarrure n’était pas plus colorée que celle-ci. d la lune étroite et recourbée comme un sequin semblait mettre le ciel parisien sous le signe oriental du croissant. e splendeur antique inchangée d’une lune cruellement, mystérieusement sereine, qui versait aux monuments encore intacts l’inutile beauté de sa lumière. f des lumières différentes, des feux intermittents.

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He experiences and describes the beauty of aeroplane climbing into the evening sky: “Aeroplanes were still mounting like rockets to the level of the stars, and searchlights, as they quartered the sky, swept slowly across it what looked like a pale dust of stars, of errant milky ways. Meanwhile the aeroplanes took their places among the constellations and seeing these “new stars” one might well have supposed oneself to be in another hemisphere.” a 64 If they appear against the still bright sky, then they look in the distance like “little brown dots which one might have taken, in the blue evening, for midges or birds.” b 65 The howling of the air raid sirens which sound on attack, he compares with the music of Wagner: “At intervals the siren rang out like the heart-rending scream of a Valkyrie – the only German music to have been heard since the war.” c 66 This comparison may seem shocking, but it is not without motivation. To characterise the monotony and sonority of Wagner’s music, Proust compares it with mechanical, penetrating, long lasting tones: the sound of vehicle horns, of the telephone, of sirens and the reverse.67 So the metaphor is based on purely musical considerations. But still, there may be another factor involved in this case: a certain amount of polemic against the narrow-minded patriotism of his compatriots, which, since the war started, resulted in every kind of German culture being taboo. That Proust did not share this chauvinism is apparent from a letter of his from August 1919. Here he defends Leibniz’ Monadology and Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen against the anti-German atmosphere of his country.68 In A la Recherche he leaves it to Saint-Loup and Charlus to denounce the nationalism of their surroundings. But the narrator does not identify with those committed neutralists whose motives are not entirely selfless: Charlus with his germanophilia, the ideal of virility, and both with their aestheticism.69 And one cannot accuse Proust of aestheticism. Repeatedly he makes clear that art for him is no elegant way of passing the time, but a matter of the highest duty for which he would be prepared to give his life. But the artists who dedicate themselves to politics betray their duty as artists.70 Many of his contemporaries were indeed upset. The jury for the 1919 Prix Goncourt was divided; Proust received the prize by a small majority. Many a Des aéroplanes montaient (…) comme des fusées rejoindre les étoiles, et des projecteurs promenaient lentement, dans le ciel sectionné, comme une pâle poussière d’astres, d’errantes voies lactées. Cependant les aéroplanes venaient s’insérer au milieu des constellations et on aurait pu se croire dans une autre hémisphère en effet, en voyant ces ‘étoiles nouvelles’. b petites taches brunes qu’on eût pu prendre, dans le soir bleu, pour des moucherons ou pour des oiseaux. c Parfois retentissait la sirène comme un appel déchirant de Walkure – seule musique allemande qu’on eût entendue depuis la guerre.

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would have liked to see the prize going to the patriotic writer Roland Dorgelès, who had written a book to Bergotte’s taste: manly, committed, patriotic. In addition the modern reader is puzzled by Proust’s artistic method. Even if his point of view is understandable, it is still alienating. Is it not offensive to compare the sound of a siren with the music of Wagner? Is it not horrifying, the way Proust reports the torpedoing of the Lusitania? Madame Verdurin is sitting with a cup of tea, in which she occasionally dips a croissant to help her migraine. Croissants were generally unavailable at this time of food shortage, but still she managed to get some through her connections. She is reading the report of the torpedoing: “‘How horrible! … This is something more horrible than the most terrible stage tragedy.’ But the death of all these drowned people must have been reduced a thousand million times before it impinged upon her, for even as, with her mouth full, she made these distressful observations, the expression which spread over her face, brought there (one must suppose) by the savour of that so precious remedy against headaches, the croissant, was in fact one of satisfaction and pleasure.” a 71 That is all! Is Proust conscious of the tension that his purely aesthetic perspective produces? He is conscious of it, when he talks about the cruel law of art that we and people in general must die so that the eternal life can blossom. Is his conception convincing? What is certain, is that Proust’s aesthetics lead to the threshold of the eternal question of art and life. His approach is wonderful and liberating when treating of the day to day, of a butcher’s apprentice sorting meat, of a girl on the telephone. He returns to these the halo which they have lost in time. His approach is shocking and challenging when he talks about the First World War or the question of homosexuality.

Homosexuality Homosexuality is a theme that interests Proust enormously. He himself was homosexual, even if he, unlike an André Gide, kept this hidden from the world. In A la Recherche he projects his tendencies onto Baron de Charlus; the narrator loves women even if he allows a certain manliness to shine through the

a ‘Quelle horreur! Cela dépasse en horreur les plus affreuses tragédies.’ Mais la mort de tous ces noyés ne devait lui apparaître que réduite au milliardième, car tout en faisant, la bouche pleine, ces réflections désolées, l’air qui surnageait sur sa figure, amené là probablement par la saveur du croissant, si précieux contre la migraine, était plutôt celui d’une douce satisfaction.

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Albertines and Gilbertes despite himself. In any case it cannot be overlooked that his lovers are slim, sporty and rather boyish figures. The question why Proust found it necessary to obscure his homosexuality in his novel will not be examined too deeply here. It can be assumed that aesthetic motives were decisive. However it cannot be excluded that the taboo nature of the theme also contributed. Both the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895 and the Eulenburg Affair in 1907-08, which drew international attention, underlined this. In 1895 the dandyish poet Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years imprisonment with hard labour for homosexual relationships with young men; the trial attracted great public interest. When Wilde was released he was a broken man. He wrote hardly anything more. Not long afterwards, in the year 1900, he died, deserted by most of his friends, in a hotel room in Paris.72 Proust didn’t think much of the work of Oscar Wilde – had the man not said of himself, that he put all his genius into his life, only his talent into his work? But Wilde’s fate affected him deeply. A la Recherche has several allusions to the ignominious end of the once so celebrated writer: Charlus – who else! – quotes in Sodome et Gomorrhe from an author whose name he pretends to have forgotten73. The reference is to Oscar Wilde, whose name appears in an earlier version of this passage, namely in Contre Sainte-Beuve.74 Asked which event in his life had grieved him most, Wilde replied “the death of Lucien de Rubempré”. “And Lucien de Rubempré in the prison of the Conciergerie, seeing all his brilliant worldly career in ruins about him, brought down by the proof that he had been living in close friendship with a convict, was but a foreshadowing – though of course Wilde did not know it at the time – of just what was going to happen to Wilde.” a 75 In the Eulenburg Affair too, besides high politics, homosexuality was an important factor. Philip Prince of Eulenburg and Hertefeld, a very educated and refined nobleman, was a close companion of Kaiser Wilhelm II and as a result was seen as very influential. In order to break the supposed influence of the courtly clique around this prince, the prominent journalist Maximilian Harden, on his own initiative or otherwise, launched a hard-hitting campaign against this coterie in 1906; he cast a bad light on their moral standing by accusing Eulenburg of sodomy. The latter was forced to take the matter to court, resulting in it taking the proportions of an affair which was to cause great physical and psychic stress to the prince. The accusation of homosexuality could not be proved one way or the other, but Eulenburg’s influence was finished and the a Et la fin de Lucien de Rubempré à la Conciergerie, voyant toute sa brillante existence mondaine écroulée sur la preuve qui est faite qu’il vivait dans l’intimité d’un forçat, n’était que l’anticipation – inconnue encore de Wilde il est vrai – de ce qui devait précisement arriver à Wilde.

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Kaiser dropped him.76 The case interested Proust enormously. The digression on “the cursed race” (“la race maudite”) is probably based on it.77 As in the case of Wilde it is once again Charlus, in Sodome et Gomorrhe, who mentions the then scandalous affair.78 Even if the subject of homosexuality was then taboo, Proust still approached it in all objectivity. He deals with sodomy, as homosexual tendencies were often called in those days, in the same way as the Dreyfus Affair and the First World War. He approaches them with a perspectivistic view. Proust removes the phenomenon from the sphere of morality and transfers it to that of science and art. There is no hint of condemnation, which makes Levin’s comment incomprehensible: “The biblical lamentations of Sodome et Gomorrhe, when we consider them with the elegiacs of Corydon [by André Gide], are unrelentingly severe in their moral condemnation.”79 On the contrary, Proust tries to discover beauty in particular here as well, a rare beauty, but one that also has the right to be represented: “Art extracted from the most familiar reality does indeed exist and its domain is perhaps the largest of any. But it is none the less true that considerable interest, not to say beauty, may be found in actions inspired by a cast of mind so remote from anything we feel, from anything we believe, that they remain incomprehensible to us, displaying themselves before our eyes like a spectacle without rhyme or reason. What could be more poetic than Xerxes, son of Darius, ordering the sea to be scourged with rods for having engulfed his fleet?” a 80 Nowhere else does the aesthetic perspective so effectively do justice to and transfigure a problem which in its time simply could not be discussed. The chance meeting of the young tailor Jupien and the older Charlus is foreshadowed in the wondrous fertilisation of a house plant by a bumble bee. The botanical metaphor throws into relief the meeting of the two men and bathes it in a mysteriously exotic light. When reading this section one is involuntarily led to think of War and Peace, of the arrival of Napoleon before the gates of Moscow when no one on the Russian side made themselves visible. Before the entry of the French emperor into the city Tolstoy inserts a masterful metaphor, comparing the abandoned Moscow with a beehive whose queen is dead. Or one might think of Illusions Perdues by Balzac, where the fall of Carlos Herrera alias Vautrin is introduced by a long comparison with metal which has become brittle. Here too the metaphor presages the meeting of the two men. What all three similes have in a L’art extrait du réel le plus familier existe, en effet, et son domaine est peut-être le plus grand. Mais il n’en est pas moins vrai qu’un grand intérêt, parfois de la beauté, peut naître d’actions découlant d’une forme d’esprit si éloignée de tout ce que nous sentons, de tout ce que nous croyons, que nous ne pouvons même arriver à les comprendre, qu’elles s’étalent devant nous comme un spectacle sans cause. Qu’y a-t-il de plus poétique que Xerxes, fils de Darius, faisant fouetter de verges la mer qui avait englouti ses vaisseaux?

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common is that they introduce their theme in a broad metaphorical overture and symbolise it. The title Sodome et Gomorrhe is itself typical. It places the reality of homosexuality under the higher protection of myth. Proust’s own connection with this theme probably explains why he forgets his perspectivistic method in this one passage, which has the character of a speech with elements of prayer, entreaty and analysis, and speaks for once as direct participant, as victim. The passage begins impressively with: “A race upon which a curse is laid and which must live in falsehood and perjury (…) sons without a mother (…) friends without friendship.” Their fate is likened to that of the Jews: scattered and persecuted.a 81 It is noticeable that Proust does not expect the restoration of Sodom, any more than that of Zion; in his opinion such an idea is evidence of a fatal error: “For, no sooner had they arrived there than the Sodomites would leave the town so as not to have the appearance of belonging to it, would take wives, keep mistresses in other cities where they could find, incidentally, every diversion that appealed to them.” b 82 Proust sees this “race” as afflicted by an eternal curse. His conception accepts only the homosexuality which, despite Christianity, asserts itself against all obstacles. He is not receptive to the argument that, in the time of Plato and Socrates, homosexuality was seen as normal and part of growing up; since Christianity arose, this sexual preference is something to be ashamed of. One cannot compare the one with the other, modern form. Where homosexuality was the norm, runs his counterargument, it did not exist.83 There is no point in talking about classical times, as Charlus does (and as André Gide did in his day). That era is over. “What survives and increases is only the involuntary, the neurotic kind, which one conceals from other people and misrepresents to oneself. (…) It is the homosexuality that survives in spite of obstacles, shameful, execrated, that is the only true form.” c 84 In this conception the homosexual is the modern person par excellence; he embodies the truth, for Proust tragic but clear, that people are monads and inexorably condemned to solitude. The passage is also very informative, in which Oscar Wilde’s fate is mythically enhanced by comparing the poet, once so celebrated and now excluded from society, with Samson in prison; like him he turns the mill and says: “The a Race sur qui pèse une malédiction et qui doit vivre dans le mensonge et le parjure (…) fils sans mère (…) amis sans amitiés. b A peine arrivés, les sodomistes quitteraient la ville pour ne pas avoir l’air d’en être, prendraient femme, entretiendraient des maîtresses dans d’autres cités où ils trouveraient d’ailleurs toutes les distractions convenables. c Seule surnage et multiplie l’involontaire, la nerveuse [inversion], celle qu’on cache aux autres et qu’on travestit à soi-même (…). C’est l’homosexualité survivante malgré les obstacles, honteuse, flétrie, qui est la seule vraie.

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two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!”85 Man’s loneliness, his windowless existence, the impossibility of communication – all become visible in the fate of the homosexual poet.86 With the exception of the section quoted, in which Proust’s personal suffering emerges almost eruptively, all the other passages in his novel where the problem of homosexuality is approached are objective and scientific. Put another way, by taking the point of view of the “herbalist of humanity”, Proust succeeds in according homosexuality a place “beyond good and evil” and extracting beauty from it87: he sees homosexuals as a “mistake” of nature; homosexuals of the Charlus type are “angelic women (…) included by mistake in the masculine sex.” a 88 The ideal they are attracted to is not feminine, but masculine. “There where each of us carries, inscribed in those eyes through which he beholds everything in the universe, a human form engraved on the surface of the pupil, for them it is not that of a nymph but that of an ephebe.” b 89 For a homosexual, sin starts when he sleeps with a woman.90 One should read the amusing sally in which the Baron expresses his perplexity about men who love a woman wanting to have a bit on the side as well: “‘I may be very old-fashioned, but I fail to understand’, he said in the tone of an old Gallican speaking of certain forms of Ultramontanism, of a liberal royalist speaking of the Action Française or of a disciple of Claude Monet speaking of the Cubists. ‘I don’t condemn these innovators. I envy them if anything. I try to understand them, but I simply can’t.’” c 91 Charlus, who represents the type of homosexual attracted by virility, is a real connoisseur in his area, and won’t listen to any nonsense. When Brichot starts talking about the reputations of particular men, an expression appears on Charlus’ face like that displayed by doctors or military experts when laymen start spouting garbage about medical or military matters.92 And when the narrator insinuates that the friends of an obvious homosexual share the same tendency, Charlus calls out: “‘Not at all’ (…) stopping his ears as though, in playing some instrument, I had struck a wrong note.” d 93

a Les deux sexes mourront chacun de son côté. femmes angéliques (…) comprises par erreur dans le sexe masculin. b Là où chacun porte, inscrite en ces yeux à travers lesquels il voit toutes choses dans l’univers, une silhouette intaillée dans la facette de la prunelle, pour [les sodomistes] ce n’est pas celle d’une nymphe, mais d’un éphèbe. c ‘Je suis bien vieux jeu, mais je ne comprends pas’, dit-il du ton d’un vieux gallican parlant de certaines formes d’ultramontanisme, d’un royaliste libéral parlant de l’Action Française, ou d’un disciple de Claude Monet des cubistes, ‘je ne blâme pas ces novateurs, je les envie plutôt, je cherche à les comprendre, mais je n’y arrive pas.’ d ‘Mais pas du tout’ (…) en se bouchant les oreilles comme si, en jouant d’un instrument, j’avais fait une fausse note.

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It is entirely consistent for Proust to present the relationship of Charlus with Morel as analogous to that of Saint-Loup with Rachel or the narrator’s relationship with Albertine. The so-called “unnatural love” follows the same laws as “natural love” “with slight discrepancies due to the identity of sex.” a 94 For someone like Charlus, access to the truths of love is only possible via a detour through homosexuality.95 Proust’s consistently objective, clinical treatment of homosexuality is surprising, or, perhaps, shocking. He describes it as an insidious, invasive illness whose progress he diagnoses coolly. It begins with a hardly visible sore, a swelling which one ignores and whose gravity one does not recognise.96 At first one is not aware of it at all, then when one can no longer ignore it, one is dumbfounded. At first one does everything to hide it, one gets used to it, even talking with others about it, initially without reference to oneself, as one talks about something normal or suggestive, just as widespread as laziness or hedonism97, until finally the disease spreads and completely occupies the afflicted person, like Charlus, so that he cannot stop talking about it – all these stages of the disease are described precisely and perspectivistically. The progress of his disease drags Charlus so far that he pays youths to whip him, tied to an iron bed. Even here Proust can still discover beauty: “His desire to be bound in chains and beaten, with all its ugliness, betrayed a dream as poetical as, in other men, the longing to go to Venice or to keep ballet-dancers. (…) At the bottom of all this there persisted in M. de Charlus his dream of virility, to be attested if need be by acts of brutality, and all that inner radiance, invisible to us but projecting in this manner a little reflected light, with which his mediaeval imagination adorned crosses of judgment and feudal tortures.” b 98 To the same extent that Charlus’ homosexuality appears ever clearer in the foreground, the topic of homosexuality takes up an ever-increasing space in A la Recherche, finally becoming monstrous, when it becomes clear that figures in whom one would never have expected it are infected with this “disease”.99 Behind the clinical attitude of the author one can feel his strong involvement; it is no accident that Charlus is the only really tragic figure in A la Recherche. In relation to this topic in particular the metaphor fulfills its real function, in which, according to Emerson, sins lose their meanness when they are regarded as Signs of the Zodiac.100 a avec cette légère différenciation due à la similitude du sexe. b Son désir d’être enchaîné, d’être frappé, trahissait, dans sa laideur, un rêve aussi poétique que, chez d’autres, le désir d’aller à Venise ou d’entretenir des danseuses (…). Au fond de tout cela il y avait chez M. de Charlus tout son rêve de virilité, attesté au besoin par des actes brutaux, et toute l’enluminure intérieure, invisible pour nous, mais dont il projetait ainsi quelques reflets, de croix de justice, de tortures féodales, que décorait son imagination moyenâgeuse.

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The aristocracy and high society Proust’s work is often seen as a satirical critique of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie of his time. This view is based in particular on the passages describing the “world” of the Guermantes. It is true that he provides many examples to illustrate the narrow-mindedness, the limitedness of the views, of the tastes and the judgments of a Madame Verdurin, of a Duke and a Duchess de Guermantes and numerous “fashionable” secondary figures of high society. Prestige, convention, status, vanity, snobbery – these seem to be the real motives of their cultural interests, their collecting of art, their musical evenings. Ignoring for the moment the fact that one can find just as effective social satire in other authors with less effort, this understanding, if regarded as complete, does not do justice to Proust’s work. Proust’s emphasis is less on criticism and satire and more on his striving to find sanctity and poetry in this world. In a letter to Lucien Daudet he writes: “I have always been careful in speaking of the Guermantes not to regard them as would a man of the world (…), but from the point of view of whatever there may be of poetry in snobbery.” a 101 Proust only very occasionally leaves the reader horrified by the cruelty of the aristocratic codex: Swann, connoisseur and art lover, was a regular visitor to the salon of the Duchess de Guermantes, and her house guest. She invites him to accompany her and her husband on a trip to Italy; Swann repeatedly defers giving an answer, but under pressure he eventually comes out with the reason: he is ill; the disease the doctors have diagnosed is fatal. The talk takes place in the early evening; the duke is impatient and wants to terminate the conversation, since he and his wife have a dinner invitation which requires them to arrive punctually. Swann’s announcement causes consternation; but neither the duke nor the duchess can find a formula in their codex which would serve as an answer. They give priority to their concerns of the day. When they walk to the waiting carriage in the company of Swann and the narrator, the duchess says: ‘You’re joking’ (…) ‘You know, we’ll talk about that another time; I don’t believe a word you’ve been saying, but we must discuss it quietly.’ b 102 As she is climbing into the carriage her dark red evening dress slips to reveal her shoes, which are black. ‘Oriane, what have you been thinking of, you wretch? You’ve kept on your black shoes! With a red dress!’c 103 calls the duke. a J’ai toujours eu soin, quand je parlais des Guermantes, de ne pas les considérer en homme du monde (…) mais avec ce qu’il peut y avoir de poésie dans le snobisme. b ‘Vous voulez plaisanter?’ (…) ‘Vous savez, nous reparlerons de cela, je ne crois pas un mot de ce qui vous dites, mais il faut en parler ensemble.’ c ‘Vous vous portez comme le Pont Neuf. Vous nous enterrerez tous!’

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He sends her back inside to change quickly into red shoes. Afraid that Swann might have heard, she objects weakly that there really is no time for that. ‘No, no, we have plenty of time. It won’t take us ten minutes’, answers the duke. She disappears back into the house and the duke takes leave from Swann and the narrator, calling after the mortally ill man in a voice of thunder: ‘You’re as sound as a bell. You’ll bury us all!’ a 104 Curtain. This is one of the passages which pronounce an annihilating verdict on the manners of the aristocracy. The scene is heartbreakingly cruel; the inhumanity of the Guermantes is exposed without mercy. Why did they not put off their appointment and talk with Swann? Why did they show no sympathy for their close friend? Stronger than his indignation is Proust’s feeling for beauty: in the codex of the Guermantes, an old French aristocratic house, and particularly in the duke’s family, he recognises the rigorous etiquette of the days of Louis XIV, as described by the Duke of Saint-Simon:105 “In the manners of M. de Guermantes, a man who was heart-warming in his graciousness and revolting in his hardness, a slave to the pettiest obligations and derelict as regards the most solemn pacts, I found still intact after more than two centuries that aberration, peculiar to the life of the court under Louis XIV, which transfers the scruples of conscience from the domain of the affections and morality to questions of pure form.” b 106 The narrator does not listen to the conversation of the aristocracy because he believes them particularly intelligent, but because they constitute a living dictionary of expressions which are sinking into disuse and which one comes across only “among those who have constituted themselves the amiable and benevolent custodians of the past”.c 107 The language of the Duchess de Guermantes, with her local, almost rustic accent,108 is particularly precious for the narrator. In it he rediscovers the old feudal France, more authentic than any modern reconstruction; just as he values the “involuntary memory” much more highly than the “voluntary memory”, so he appreciates the lively and spontaneous speech of the Guermantes more than an intentional, scholarly and cold reconstruction or pastiche.109 Besides that Proust is very much aware of the danger of incorporating old expressions in his work as if they were already beautiful in themselves.110

a ‘Oriane, qu’est-ce que vous alliez faire, malheureuse. Vous avez gardé vos souliers noirs! Avec une toilette rouge!’ (…) ‘Mais non, nous avons tout le temps (…) nous ne mettrons pas dix minutes (…).’ b Dans les manières de M. de Guermantes, homme attendrissant de gentillesse et révoltant de dureté, esclave des plus petites obligations et délié des pactes les plus sacrés, je retrouvais encore intacte après plus de deux siècles écoulés cette déviation particulière à la vie de cour sous Louis XIV et qui transporte les scrupules de conscience du domaine des affections et de la moralité aux questions de pure forme. c chez eux qui se font les aimables et bénévoles conservateurs du passé.

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For Proust the highest priority is what he called, in the letter to Lucien Daudet quoted above, “the aesthetic discovery of realities” a 111, the discovery of the aesthetic quality of reality. In high society too he seeks to discover beauty. Thus he always made an effort, as he writes in this letter, not to speak of the Guermantes in the light tone of a man of the world, but with the astonishment of an outside observer. Nonetheless the opinion remains widespread that Proust demystifies the aristocracy and high society. “I don’t suppose that anybody ever did so thorough a job of debunking the upper class as Proust did”, writes for example Hindus.112 They point to the innumerable disappointments and moments of boredom that the narrator experiences in their company, the disillusionment which reaches its climax when he attends a matinee at the Guermantes. Without much interest he listens to their conversation. Only when the topic of descent comes up, and he hears that various guests are the bearers of famous historical names, is his interest piqued. “The names cited had the effect of disembodying the Duchess’ guests whose masks of flesh and unintelligence or vulgar intelligence had transformed them into ordinary mortals.” b 113 The names have the effect, similarly to art and the metaphor, of transfiguring the people of the matinee. The faces lose for a moment their impenetrable materiality and are illuminated by a chemical reaction with the old names. The name Guermantes itself acquires a new poetry through the “correspondance” with old, extinct names.114 Since he has an appointment with Baron de Charlus, the narrator has to leave the matinee early. He is disappointed. He did not find much or anything of his dream. His exit consoles him: “At least my departure would allow the guests, once the interloper had gone, to form themselves into a closed group. They would be free to celebrate the mysteries for which they had assembled there.” c 115 Demystification? Proust suggests something different: disillusionment is the result of a perspectivistic “mistake”; the narrator has approached too near: “The fairy languishes if we come in contact with the real person to whom her name corresponds (…); the fairy may revive if we absent ourselves from the person.” d 116 One cannot approach the gods closely. Beauty cannot be found, it can only be created anew. a la découverte esthétique des réalités. b Les noms cités avaient pour effet de désincarner les invités de la duchesse que leur masque de chair d’inintelligence ou d’intelligence commune avait changés en hommes quelconques. c Du moins mon départ allait permettre aux invités, une fois que le profane ne serait plus là, de se constituer enfin en comité secret. Ils allaient pouvoir célébrer les mystères pour la célébration desquelles ils étaient réunies. d La fée dépérit si nous nous approchons de la personne réelle à laquelle correspond son nom (…); la fée peut renaître si nous nous éloignons de la personne.

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The criticism that he expresses, and Proust is self-critically aware of this, results from the fact that he sees with the eyes of the body instead of those of the mind. The following scene illustrates this very well: The narrator is attending a dinner at the Guermantes’ house. He denounces the ignorance and the bad taste of those present. A lady, supposedly very knowledgeable in the field of literature, asks who is the author of Salammbô and admits to finding the correspondence of this writer more interesting than his books.117 Madame de Guermantes thinks she is defending Wagner when she declares that she finds nothing more beautiful than the choir of the spinning fishermen’s wives in Der Fliegende Holländer.118 The demystification seems total, but then comes the reversal: One of the guests, Madame d’Arpajon, claims to find Victor Hugo just as difficult as Russian or Chinese (and that after a very early and very easily understood poem of Hugo’s was quoted). The reader would expect the narrator to find this statement completely ridiculous, but the opposite is the case: he succeeds in seeing Madame d’Arpajon with the eye of the mind: “Far from thinking Mme d’Arpajon ridiculous, I saw her (…) in my mind’s eye crowned with that lace cap (…), which was worn by Mme de Rémusat, Mme de Broglie, Mme de Saint-Aulaire, all those distinguished ladies who in their delightful letters quote with such learning and such aptness Sophocles, Schiller and the Imitation, but in whom the earliest poetry of the Romantics induced the alarm and exhaustion inseparable for my grandmother from the later verses of Stéphane Mallarmé.” a 119 Proust’s last word is never “debunking” but “transfiguration”; his conception necessarily excludes any kind of cultural criticism. If one retorts that the aesthetic stifles the ethical, one has overseen the ethos of the artist, which consists in “re-creating” the world and its inhabitants. When other people are horrified, the artist experiences beauty through the cruel and painful. Sometimes the tension between art and life is so great that one feels like speaking of a “frightening rift”.120

a Loin de trouver Madame d’Arpajon ridicule, je la vis (…) par les yeux de l’esprit, sous ce bonnet de dentelles (…) que portèrent Madame de Rémusat, Madame de Broglie, Madame de Saint-Aulaire, toutes les femmes si distinguées qui dans leurs ravissantes lettres citent avec tant de savoir et d’à-propos Sophocle, Schiller et l’Imitation, mais à qui les premières poésies des romantiques causaient cet effroi et cette fatigue inséparables pour ma grand-mère des derniers vers de Stéphane Mallarmé.

EPILOGUE

Proust and his work occupy an unusual position in modern times. From the Industrial Revolution up to and including our time, writers and thinkers are repeatedly complaining about the ugliness of the mechanised world. Nearly all of them are cultural pessimists. Proust is one of the very few who show no sign at all of this pessimism; the best refutation of The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig is to be found in this writer, who wrote: “And very soon it is we ourselves who are on the horizon for the generations that come after us; all the while the horizon retreats into the distance, and the world, which seemed to be finished, begins again.” a 121 One could even claim that his work has brought cultural pessimism into question, in that he has exposed it as a form of idolatry, of aestheticism. Anatole France was a prominent writer at that time and initially very much admired by Proust. When he complains that after the eighteenth century nobody can write any more, the basis of his complaint, Proust is convinced, lies in the idolatrous worship of literary forms which used to be once expressions of life and thought.122 Proust’s vitalistic answer goes: The great artist is reborn every time. But he is not immediately recognised as such, first he has to treat people’s eyes like an ophthalmologist: “‘Now look!’ and suddenly, the world, which, far from having been created once and for all, is created afresh each time that a new artist comes on the scene, is shown to us in perfect clarity – but looking very different from the one we knew before.” b 123 Proust demands of the artist that he “justify” his time by his art. Every age demands a new artist, whose work reconciles the age with itself. Proust has holy respect for reality as it is: there is no other than this necessarily individual reality for each of us. The view leads Proust, unlike many writers and intellectuals of the fin de siècle, not to pessimism, to eccentricity, but to vitalism: Since our life, since this reality is unique, it must be depicted. It is also worth depicting: this is proven to him by the spontaneous memories, this is proven to him by the work of great artists. The world is not what we normally take it to be. The duty of the a Et c’est bientôt nous-mêmes qui sommes à l’horizon pour les générations qui sont derrière nous; cependant l’horizon recule, et le monde, qui semblait fini, recommence. b Et voici que le monde, qui n’a pas été créé une fois, mais l’est aussi souvent que survient un nouvel artiste, nous apparaît – si différent de l’ancien – parfaitement clair.

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artist is to work on the world long enough until it loses its impermeability and becomes transparent. This is the ethos which sustains Proust’s art. During his development into an artist he is confronted with a spirit of decadence, hedonism and relativism. Especially in the France of his time, this fin de siècle mentality was very pervasive. It was foreigners like Emerson, Carlyle and Ruskin who offered the antidote in the shape of their vital philosophy. Proust’s own tendency to aestheticism, to idolatry, i.e. the tendency to content oneself with a “beautiful picture” of reality instead of accepting the duty to create it anew, stood in the way of his development into a writer. The thinking of Leibniz lent him special impulses. Perspectivism, which forms the artistic and philosophical principle of A la Recherche, was very probably the result of an intense study of Leibniz’ philosophy. In any case the inner relationship between Proust’s and Leibniz’ perspectivism is striking. Perspectivism is no aesthetic diversion, but a thought-out philosophy of art: Only a perspectivistic view can do justice to the world; this is the only way to express its multiple character without the loss of its unity. Proust’s motto could be: “Individuum est ineffabile”. A person, an appearance, contains inexhaustible riches; it is, as he himself says, a quarry that has been abandoned as unproductive, but out of which an artist can create hundreds, yes uncountable statues. Proust can not in any way be associated with soft pastel colours, with postimpressionistic painting, with ethereal tones. More apt for him is a vigorous, wild, untimely, uncomfortable art: Not by chance did the cover of the Dutch first edition of my book carry L’Equipe de Cardiff by the painter Robert Delaunay: the vitality, modernity and luminosity which characterises this picture also typifies the work of Proust. Proust’s point of view is radical and opposed to the spirit of his time and the spirit of the fin de siècle: his accomplished style has perhaps sometimes the effect that the reader is only dimly aware of this radical and deliberately challenging aesthetic perspective. Against the Zeitgeist Proust defends the primacy of art. “La vrai vie, c’est la littérature”, the true life is literature. Nothing outside of us is beautiful in itself. But neither is anything ugly. His credo is highly displeasing, uncomfortable and consciously provocative. Proust insistently defends his conception both against primitive realism and against a decadent conception of art. He does not allow the call for committed art to divert him from his path. The only art that has a right to the description “art” is that which justifies its own time. With A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Proust shows that beauty can be found everywhere, in an advertisement for soap as much as in the Pensées of Pascal.

NOTES

Notes on chapter I 1 Cf. M. Proust, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, ed. P. Clarac and A. Ferré, 3 vols, Paris 1954. Here referred to as Proust I, II, III. Between 1987-1989 a new edition of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu appeared in Paris in four volumes, published by J.-Y. Tadié. This edition is particularly interesting on account of the copious notes and the inclusion of variants and drafts. 2 The decisive point of this conception is the “discovery” of perspectivism as an aesthetic and compositional principle. See Chapter IV. 3 In the 1954 Pléiade edition this volume is entitled La Fugitive. The new 1987-1989 edition prefers the title Albertine disparue. 4 M. Proust, Jean Santeuil précédé de Les Plaisirs et les Jours, ed. P.Clarac and Y. Sandre, Paris 1971. Referred to here as Proust IV. 5 M. Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve suivi de Nouveaux Mélanges, ed. B. de Fallois, Paris 1954. In 1971 Pierre Clarac assembled a new edition of this work; M. Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve précédé de Pastiches et mélanges et suivi de Essais et Articles, ed. P. Clarac and Y. Sandre, Paris 1971. Referred to here as Proust V. For the relation of this work to A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, see note 98. 6 See G. Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, Darmstadt 1974, second edition. 7 The term “décadence” (Dekadenz), a key term in Nietzsche, he borrowed from P. Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine, Paris 1883. Cf. Meindert Evers, ‘Thomas Mann und Nietzsche’, in: Hans Ester and Meindert Evers (ed.), Zur Wirkung Nietzsches, Würzburg (Verlag Königshausen and Neumann) 2001, p.83 ff. 8 Th. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus. On

Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, London 1967, p.345. 9 Quoted from E. Koppen, Dekadenter Wagnerismus. Studien zur europäischen Literatur des Fin de siècle, New York 1973, p.288. 10 A good overview of the Decadent movement is offered by M. Praz, La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica, 1930. The English translation The romantic agony has appeared in several editions. 11 G. Cattaui, Marcel Proust, Paris 1958, p.37. Also in the study by P.-E. Robert, Marcel Proust lecteur des anglosaxons, Paris 1976, p.44 ff. the significance of Emerson for Proust is not acknowledged. 12 Proust IV, p.902; R. de Chantal, Marcel Proust critique littéraire, two volumes, Paris 1967, p.19. 13 M. Proust, Correspondance, volume I 1880-1895, ed. Ph. Kolb, Paris 1970, p.361, note 1. 14 M. Proust, Lettre à Reynaldo Hahn, ed. M. Kolb, Paris 1956, Letter no. XV. (Selected Letters, vol. 1, no. 65.) 15 G.D. Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography, two vols, London 1959-1965, volume I (1959), p.198 ff.; Proust I, p.XL; M. Proust, Correspondance avec sa mère, ed. Ph. Kolb, Paris 1953, p.IV. 16 Proust IV, p.9 and R.W. Emerson, Essays (Edition Everyman), London 1967, p.23 (“History”) Proust IV, p.108 and M. Proust, Lettres à Reynaldo Hahn, Nr. XXXV, March 1896. 17 Proust IV, p.38 and R.W. Emerson, op. cit., p.8 (“History”). 18 This quotation is taken from the translation by Will; the other Emerson quotations are from the translation by Montégut. Cf. Proust IV, p.955. Proust IV, p.104 and R.W. Emerson, op. cit., p.219,

182 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ (“The Poet”). 19 Proust IV, p.156 and R.W. Emerson, op. cit., p.109-110 (“Love”). 20 Proust IV, p.368 and p.556. 21 E.R. Curtius, ‘Emerson’, in: Kritische Essays zur europäischen Literatur, BernMünchen 1963 (first edition 1950), p.190 ff. 22 Thus Curtius demonstrates that this “Anschauungsform” is also found in Balzac’s work. E.R. Curtius, op. cit., p.193. Artists like Mondriaan, Kandinsky and Max Beckmann can not be understood without this idea of cosmic unity. 23 R. Michaud, La pensée américaine. Autour d’Emerson, Paris 1924. Michaud writes in his foreword (p.13) that Emerson was an early influence in the revival of idealism towards the end of the nineteenth century. Maeterlinck adopted Emerson’s ideas so completely that it became an inseparable part of his Trésor des Humbles (1896). 24 R.W. Emerson, op. cit., p.43 (“SelfReliance”). 25 Ibid., p.61-62 (“Compensation”). 26 Ibid., p.71. 27 Proust V, p.656-657. The Pléiade edition collects together the article about George Eliot and others under the title “Articles with an Unknown Date”. Proust enumerates the aspects of Eliot which struck him; they are significant for our author: 1. The finely detailed and poetic description of the most modest life; 2. The feeling of sin in weakness of will; 3. The mysterious majesty of human life; 4. The moral compensation which has already been mentioned. Proust loved the novels of George Eliot; in a letter to Robert de Billy of 1909-1910 he writes that no other literature moved him as much as the Anglo-Saxon: “Germany, Italy, quite often France, leave me indifferent. But two pages of The Mill on the Floss are enough to make me cry. “(Marcel Proust, Selected Letters, vol. 3, no. 3.) ( “L’Allemagne, l’Italie, bien souvent la France me laissent

indifférent. Mais deux pages du “Moulin sur la Floss” (von George Eliot) me font pleurer.” M. Proust, Choix de lettres (ed. Ph. Kolb), Paris 1965, p.171.) All the elements mentioned reappear in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu; in connection with his weakness of will: it is repeatedly pointed out that the narrator’s will was particularly weakened from that moment when his parents started to regard his lack of will as an illness and not a sin, Proust III, p.343. 28 See p.86 of this study. 29 R.W. Emerson, op. cit., p.82. 30 Ibid. p.176. 31 The translation is from M. Maeterlinck, Poems, English by Bernard Miall, New York 1965. 32 R.W. Emerson, op. cit., p.43. 33 Ibid., p.43. 34 Ibid., p.176. 35 Ibid., p.75. 36 Ibid., p.76. 37 Ibid., p.11. 38 F. Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History, New York 2005, p.13 39 Proust V, p.615; idem II, p.327; idem III, p.263. 40 Nietzsche adopts this quotation from the Rig Veda as the motto for his book The Dawn. 41 R.W. Emerson, op. cit., p.33. 42 Ibid., p.34. 43 Ibid., p.95. 44 Ibid., p.194. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., p.90. In the 1851 French translation by E. Montégut, p.210: “Descend dans ton coeur.” 47 R.W. Emerson, op. cit., p.199. 48 Ibid., p.200-201. 49 Ibid., p.202. 50 Ibid., p.12. 51 Ibid., p.214. 52 Ibid., p.213. 53 Ibid., p.224. 54 J. Huizinga, Mens en Menigte in Amerika, Verzamelde Werken, volume V, p.399-402.

Notes on chapter I 183 55 Th. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus; On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (Everyman), London 1967. French translation: Les héros, le culte des héros et l’héroïque dans l’histoire, translation and introduction by J.B.J. Izoulet-Loubatières (1888). The translator was professeur de philosophie at the Lycée Condorcet. Proust reads Les héros in Beg-Meil in September 1895: M. Proust, Correspondance I, 18801895, ed. Ph. Kolb, p.426 56 M. Proust, Lettres à une amie, Paris 1942, letter of 9. Februar 1905, p.85. The reference is to The Artist’s Mother by James Abbot McNeill Whistler (18341903), which today hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. 57 Proust V, p.172. 58 Th. Carlyle, op. cit., p.251. 59 Ibid., p.398. For Proust’s lack of interest in the eighteenth century, which he saw as too “anthropomorphic”, see: W.A. Strauss, Proust and Literature. The Novelist as Critic, Cambridge (Mass.) 1957, p.32-33. 60 Th. Carlyle, op.cit., p.398 ff. 61 Ibid., p.246. 62 Ibid., p.311. 63 Th. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, p.49. 64 The French translation of Sartor Resartus. Vie et opinions by Herr Teufelsdroeck, which appeared 1896-1897 in the Mercure de France, is the work of Edm. Barthélemy. 65 Th. Carlyle, op. cit., p.169. In particular the second part of this passage is amazingly “Proustian”. Cf. Proust III, p.1041. 66 Th. Carlyle, On Heroes, p.246. 67 Th. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, p.50. 68 Ibid., p.51. 69 Th. Carlyle, On Heroes, p.246. 70 Ibid., p.264. 71 Ibid., p.311 ff. 72 Ibid., p.313. 73 Ibid., p.337. 74 Marcel Proust, A selection from his miscellaneous writings, chosen and translated by Gerard Hopkins, London

1948, p.63. Proust V, p.112. 75 “L’art ne respire que dans le particulier”. A. Gide, Si le grain ne meurt, Paris 1955 (Collection Folio), p.224. 76 P. Claudel in his foreword to A. Rimbaud, Poèmes (Edition Livre de Poche), Paris 1960; A. Gide, op.cit., p.241. 77 E.L. Gilbert, Wondrous Contiguity. Anachronism in Carlyle’s Prophecy and Art, in: P.M.L.A. 87, 3, p.436. 78 Proust V, p.138. 79 Marcel Proust, A selection, p.93. Proust V, p.139. 80 J. Ruskin, Mornings in Florence (1915) (first edition 1877), p.51. 81 J. Ruskin, op. cit., p.36. 82 J. Ruskin, op. cit., p.72. Cf. “I have only one steady aim in all that I have ever tried to teach, namely to declare that whatever was great in human art was the expression of man’s delight in God’s work”: J. Ruskin, The Two Paths, London 1905 (first edition 1859), p.50. 83 M. Proust, Sésame et les Lys, Paris 1906, p.62, note 1. 84 Ph. Kolb, ‘Proust et Ruskin. Nouvelles perspectives’, in: Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises Nr. 12 (1960), p.259-273. Kolb points out that Proust wrote the last chapter of Le temps retrouvé straight after Swann. 85 Quoted from J.D. Rosenberg, The Genius of John Ruskin. Selections from his Writings, London 1963, p.13. 86 The passage is from The Stones of Venice, volume II, chapter I and is quoted by J.D. Rosenberg, p.150 ff. 87 Marcel Proust, A selection, p.56. Proust V, p.105-106. 88 Proust V, p.717; G.D. Painter, op. cit., p.256-257. 89 J. Autret, L’influence de Ruskin sur la vie, les idées et l’oeuvre de Marcel Proust, Paris 1955, p.16. Marie Nordlinger in her foreword to M. Proust, Lettres à une amie. Recueil de quarante et une lettres inédites adressées à Marie Nordlinger, 1899-1908, Paris 1942. 90 Proust V, p.719, besides his mother and

184 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ Marie Nordlinger, Proust also names Douglas Ainslie. Robert d’Humières, anglicist and translator of R. Kipling, is also mentioned. M. Proust, A un ami. Correspondance inédite, Paris 1948, p.21. 91 As the foreword to Sésame et les Lys this essay bears the title: ‘Sur la Lecture’(On Reading). In Pastiches et Mélanges the same essay appears at the end, slightly shortened under the title: ‘Journées de lecture’(Days of Reading) (Proust V, p.789). For the original version, see: Proust V, p.811 ff. 92 Proust V, p.721. 93 In 1907 La Bible d’Amiens. Traduction, notes et préface par Marcel Proust, was published by Mercure de France in Paris. 94 M. Proust, Lettres à une amie, p.58. 95 Marcel Proust, Letters of Marcel Proust, Translated and Edited, with Notes by Nina Curtiss, New York 1966, Nr. 59, p. 99. Letter from September 17, 1904. M. Proust, Lettres a une amie, p. 80. 96 Marcel Proust, Selected Letters, vol. 2, no. 170. M. Proust, Lettres a une amie, p.105. 97 M. Proust, Choix de lettres, ed. Ph. Kolb, Paris 1965. Letter to Antoine Bibesco (20 December 1902), p.87. 98 From 1895-1899, Proust works on Jean Santeuil, the novel that he will never complete. See M. Proust, Lettres à une amie, p.5 (Letter of 5 December 1899). Afterwards he concerned himself with Ruskin. The position of Contre SainteBeuve in relation to A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is slightly problematic. The question is whether one can talk of an independent work or a draft, as B. de Fallois suggests, who published Contre Sainte-Beuve in the year 1954. According to Pierre Clarac, who issued a new edition of Contre Sainte-Beuve in 1971, this “work” was intended as a critique, whereas the novel-like sections were drafts for A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. See Proust V, p.819 ff. and Ph. Kolb, Le Carnet de 1908, Paris 1976, p.7 ff. The latest research adds

still further detail: Proust hesitated a while about the form his ideas on aesthetics should take: in a critical treatise or integrated in the novel. The latter was chosen. For more detail see M. Proust, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, ed. J.-Y. Tadié, volume III, Paris 1988, p.1196. 99 The French art historian Emile Mâle (1862-1954) is mentioned several times in La Bible d’Amiens. In addition to his iconographic studies of French churches of the thirteenth century, he also described in a similar way the French Christian art of the twelfth century and the late Middle Ages. 100 See J. Autret, op. cit., p.138 ff., who mentioned, besides Emile Mâle, also Viollet-le-Duc. 101 The article was actually composed from two articles which were combined and published under the title “John Ruskin”. The first article originally appeared in April 1900, and the second, in which the critique of John Ruskin is formulated, a few months later in August 1900. Proust V, p.105-141. 102 M. Proust, A selection, p.57. Proust V, p.106. 103 Proust V, p.108. 104 Ibid. 105 Cf. Proust V, p.109. 106 Proust V, p.109. 107 M. Proust, A selection, p.61. Proust V, p.110. 108 Ibid., p.61 109 Ibid. 110 M. Proust, A selection, p.62. Proust V, p.110-111. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid., p.62. 113 Ibid., p.63. Proust V, p.112. 114 Ibid., p.67. Proust V, p.115. 115 Ibid., p.75. Proust V, p.123. 116 Proust V, p.129. Proust also points out Ruskin’s idolatry in numerous notes in La Bible d’Amiens and Sésame et les Lys: La Bible d’Amiens, p.232, note 1 and p.235, note 2. Sésame et les Lys, p.79, note 1 (“l’insincérité intellectuelle” (the

Notes on chapter I 185 intellectual insincerity) of Ruskin). 117 Ibid., p.84. Proust V, p.130. 118 Ibid., p.86 119 Ibid., p.92 120 La Bible d’Amiens, p.212, note 2; Proust is not interested in the ideas, but in what he calls the physiognomy of an artist, see La Bible d’Amiens, p.299, note 4 and p.338, note 1. 121 Ruskin is convinced that the decay of faith also means the collapse of art, culture and finally of the population. That is the theme of The Stones of Venice; cf. J.D. Rosenberg, op. cit., p.122-123 and p.204. 122 R. de La Sizeranne, Ruskin et la religion de la Beauté, Paris 1897, p.279 ff. 123 J.D. Rosenberg, op. cit., p.19. 124 J. Ruskin, The Two Paths, p.119. 125 J.D. Rosenberg, op. cit., p.9. Frank Lloyd Wright is influenced by the idea of “organic architecture” which Ruskin developed in The Seven Lamps and which he sees as perfectly embodied in the Gothic. Ruskin defends the thesis that architecture is only beautiful if it is honest, which means – if it is functional and expressive and uses local materials. For him architecture is no ivory-tower science, just ruler and compass, but a living indicator of the values of a people. However Ruskin himself showed absolutely no recognition of the aims of modern art. For example he hated the Crystal Palace which was constructed of steel and glass. 126 Quoted from J.D. Rosenberg, op. cit., p.222. 127 Quoted from J.D. Rosenberg, op. cit., p.445. 128 J.D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass. A Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius, New York 1961, p.216 ff. 129 A. Maurois, A la Recherche de Marcel Proust, Paris 1949, p.111; G.D. Painter, op. cit., p.282- 283. 130 Ibid., 107. 131 Proust V., p.173. 132 M. Proust, Sésame les Lys, p.70, note 1 and Proust V, p.174.

133 Proust V, p.176. 134 Marcel Proust, A selection, p.130. Proust V, p.180-181. 135 At the end of this essay the theme recurs of the réssurection du passé (the resurrection of the past). Proust wonders what it is that makes classical writers so charming. “A Racine tragedy, a volume of the Memoirs of Saint-Simon are gracious things the like of which we have not with us now. (…) The Divine Comedy, the plays of Shakespeare, also, give me the feeling that they have been inserted into the present though they keep their eyes fixed upon the past.” M. Proust, A Selection. 142-143, 145. The passage with which this essay originally ended is interesting: The two columns on the Piazzetta in Venice continue to maintain their days from the twelfth century amongst us, inserting them into the present. Proust V, p.812. 136 H. Bonnet, Alphonse Darlu, le maître de philosophie de Marcel Proust. Suivi d’une étude critique du “Contre SainteBeuve”, Paris 1961, p.10. Cf. Marcel Proust par lui-même. Mes héros dans la vie réelle: M. Darlu et M. Boutroux. Proust V, p.337. Cf. Proust V, p.915. (E. Boutroux (1845-1921) was an idealistic philosopher; one of his best known students was Henri Bergson.) 137 Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil, translated by Gerard Hopkins, New York 1956, p.160. Proust IV, p.260-261 138 Ibid., p.163 139 Ibid., p.230 140 Proust IV, p.270. 141 M. Proust, Sésame et les Lys, p.146, note 1. One should also read the letter by the young Proust which he wrote to Darlu directly after his first lessons. It is a kind of confession which he entrusts to his teacher, in: M. Proust, Correspondance I, 18801895, ed. Ph. Kolb, letter of 2 October 1889, p.119-120. In a letter to Anatole France of 15 May 1889, he writes: “Quelle joie j’ai eue à rencontrer cette année chez mon professeur de philosophie qui est un

186 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ grand penseur, un amour extrêmement intelligent de vos livres.” (How delightful it was for me to encounter this year, in my philosophy teacher – a great thinker – an extremely intelligent love of your books.) M. Proust, Selected Letters, vol 1, nr. 13. Quoted from R. de Chantal, op. cit., p.197198. Cf. also Ph. Kolb: M. Proust, Correspondance I, 1880-1895, p.125. 142 Quoted from R. Boirel, Léon Brunschvicg, sa vie, son oeuvre, avec un exposé de sa philosophie, Paris 1964, p.4. 143 H. Bonnet, op. cit., p.16 and p.68. 144 Proust V, p.351. 145 Online translation by Chris Taylor. Proust V, p.358. 146 M. Proust, Lettres à Reynaldo Hahn, p.41. The letter dates from around 1895; Proust used not to write the date on his letters. Marcel Proust, Selected Letters, vol.1, nr. 82 147 Proust V, p.405-409. 148 Marcel Proust, On art and literature, translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Greenwich, CT, 1958, p.384. Proust V, p.406. 149 Ibid., p.386. Proust V, p.407. 150 P. Claudel, Oeuvres en prose, Paris 1965 (Edition Pléiade), p.960 and p.1110. 151 “Pour moi, vous étiez resté celui qui fréquente chez Mme X… et Z…, celui qui écrit dans Le Figaro (…) Je vous croyais – vous l’avouerais-je – ‘du côté de chez Verdurin’. Un snob, un mondain amateur, quelque chose d’on ne peut plus fâcheux pour notre revue”. Letter of January 1914 in: M. Proust, Lettres à André Gide, Paris 1949, p.9-10. (Marcel Proust, Selected Letters, vol.3, nr. 139.) 152 Proust III, p.1041. 153 E. Wilson, Axel’s Castle, London 1969 (first edition 1931), p.231 and p.154. G. Picon, Lecture de Proust, Paris 1963 (coll. Idées), p.181: “Plus que l’accoucheur d’une nouvelle vie, il est ordonnateur de somptueuses funerailles.” 154 R. Galand, ‘Proust et Baudelaire’, in: P.M.L.A., volume 65 (1950), p.1034; in E. Wilson, Axel’s Castle, Proust, T.S.Eliot, J.

Joyce, P. Valéry, Gertrude Stein, W. Yeats are classified as belonging to a postsymbolistic tradition; G. Michaud, Message poétiques du symbolisme, Paris 1966 (first edition 1947-1951), p.575 ff.; R.M. Albérès, Histoire du roman moderne, Paris 1962 (New edition), p.157. 155 Paul Valéry, Oeuvres, Vol.1, Paris 1957 (Pléiade), p.1272. Translation from William Aspenwall Bradley The position of Baudelaire (1924) in the book Variety: Second Series, New York 1938 (online). 156 E. Wilson, op. cit., p.24. 157 Proust defends Mallarmé in a letter to Reynaldo Hahn; there he interprets a poem which is often regarded as obscure: “Méry”, M. Proust, Lettres à Reynaldo Hahn, p.64 (August 1895). M. Raymond, De Baudelaire au surréalisme, Paris 1963 (first edition 1933), p.55. 158 Proust V, p.394. 159 Ibid. 160 In Pre-Raphaelite painting (Hunt, Rossetti, Millais), according to Proust, the opposite is the case – which the reason for his criticism of this movement. 161 Proust II, p.419. 162 Proust IV, p.536: “Les romans impressionistes et naturalistes imitent la réalité en s’y substituant, mais sans la dépasser!” (Impressionist and naturalist novels imitate reality in substituting themselves for it without, however, going beyond it.), Proust III, p.882-883. 163 B. Delvaille, La poésie symboliste, Paris 1971, p.42 ff.; M. Décaudin, La crise des valeurs symbolistes. Vingt ans de poésie française 1985-1914, Paris 1960, p.123 ff. 164 F. Gregh, Mon amitié avec Marcel Proust, Paris 1958, Letter of 4 June 1904, p.93. 165 B. Delvaille, p.43, where he quotes André Gide’s authoritative opinion from his Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs: “La poésie devint pour eux un refuge; la seule échappatoire aux hideuses réalites; on s’y précipitait avec une ferveur désespérée.” (For them poetry became a refuge, the only

Notes on chapter I 187 escape from the horrors of reality; they threw themselves on it with a desperate fervour. ) 166 G. Cattaui, op. cit., p.23, p.90, p.93. 167 L.J. Austin, L’univers poétique de Baudelaire, Paris 1956, p.58. 168 J. Monnin-Hornung, op. cit., p.205. 169 The translations of the quotations from Mallarmé are taken from: “The White Water Lily”, translated by Catherine Wieder, online. 170 The translation is taken from Stéphane Mallarmé, Selected Poems, translated by A.S. Kline, 2004-2009. 171 T.S.Eliot, Selected Essays, London 1949 (first edition 1932), p.387. 172 P. Valéry, op. cit., p.598-613, in particular p.604-605. 173 T.S.Eliot, op. cit., p.387-388. M. Raymond, op. cit., p.24-25. 174 Proust V, p.406. 175 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne, London 1964. 176 Ibid., p.3. 177 Ibid., p.17. 178 See note 175. 179 See note 175. 180 L.-J. Austin, op. cit., p.100. 181 Ch. Baudelaire, L’art romantique, Paris 1964, p.126. The Life and Intimate Memoirs of Baudelaire (1868), translated by Guy Thorne (1915), p.9. 182 Cf. the poem Correspondances in Les Fleurs du Mal. 183 Ch. Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, Paris 1961, p.1225 (Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris). 184 Ibid., p.1119-1120 (L’oeuvre et la vie

d’Eugéne Delacroix). 185 Ibid., p.1050 (Salon de 1859); p.1117 (L’oeuvre et la vie d’Eugéne Delacroix). 186 Ibid., p.623 ff. (L’école païenne). 187 Ch. Baudelaire, L’art romantique, p.120. The translation is taken from James R. Lawler, Poetry and Moral Dialectic: Baudelaire’s “secret architecture”, London 1977, p.193. 188 Ch. Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, Paris 1961, p.974 (“Exposition universelle de 1855”). Translation from R.Lawler, see note 187. 189 Ch. Baudelaire, Oevres Complètes, (Poëme du Haschisch), p.354. The translation is taken from Aleister Crowley, Poem of Hashish. 190 Ibid. Ch. Baudelaire, Poëme du haschisch, Oeuvres Complètes, p. 380. 191 Ibid., p.339; p.355. 192 The Poem of Hashish. 193 Ibid., p.387. 194 Proust III, p.1036; cf. Ibid., p.124: “Pour un homme habitué à ne dormir qu’avec des drogues, une heure inattendue de sommeil naturel découvrira l’immensité matinale d’un paysage aussi mystérieux et plus frais.” (But to a man who is accustomed to sleeping only with the aid of drugs, an unexpected hour of natural sleep will reveal the vast, matutinal expanse of a landscape as mysterious and more refreshing.) 195 Ch. Baudelaire L’art romantique, p. 104. The translation is taken from John W. Robertson, Edgar A. Poe. A Study, San Francisco 1921. 196 Proust III, p.920. 197 Ch. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, p.43.

Notes on chapter II 1 Proust III, p.899. 2 G. Deleuze, Proust et les signes, Paris 1971 (second edition) p.8: “Il s’agit non

pas d’une exposition de la mémoire involontaire, mais du récit d’un apprentissage”; G. Brée, Du temps perdu au temps retrouvé. Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Proust, Paris 1969 (first edition

188 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ 1950), p.44; cf. G. Cattaui, op. cit.., p.64: “Il s’agit d’une véritable Quète de Graal.” Or conversely, M. Blanchot, Le Livre à venir, Paris 1959, p.24. 3 Proust III, p.895. 4 Ibid., p.910. 5 Proust I, p.440 ff. 6 Proust II, p.441. 7 Cf. Proust II, p.51. 8 Proust IV, p.332. 9 Cf. Proust I, p.393-394. In a passage which Proust later dropped, the reading of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister introduces the narrator to the beauty of the world of theatre. At the end of the play, in which the actress Rachel had a role, the narrator goes backstage with his friend Saint-Loup: “Yet in spite of the incoherence into which the woman’s face and likewise the painted backdrops dissolved when seen from close to, I was happy to be there, to stroll among the sets, in surroundings which in the past my love of nature would have made me find tiresome and artificial, but to which Goethe’s portrayal of them in Wilhelm Meister had given a certain beauty in my eyes.” (Malgré l’incohérence où se résolvaient de près, non seulement le visage féminin mais les toiles peintes, j’étais heureux d’être là, de cheminer parmi les décors, tout ce cadre qu’autrefois mon amour de la nature m’eût fait trouver ennuyeux et factice, mais auquel sa peinture par Goethe dans Wilhelm Meister avait donné pour moi une certaine beauté. Proust II, p.1146, note.) 10 Quoted in R.de Chantal, op. cit., p.197198. Chantal suggests that Proust distanced himself from Anatole France because he clung to his hedonistic view of art. Marcel Proust, Selected Letters, vol.1, no. 13. 11 Proust I, p.95. 12 Proust I, p.80 ff. 13 Proust I, p.81-82. 14 Proust I, p.81. J. Monnin-Hornung called the painting of the corkscrew ‘vulgar’, she is obviously not aware of Proust’s intention of giving expression to the special beauty of Giotto’s art. J.

Monnin-Hornung, op. cit., p.67. 15 Proust I, p.694. 16 Proust I, p.694-695. 17 See for example A. France, Pierre Nozière. See auch E. Renan, Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse, and R. de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe, cf. Proust I, p.386. Cf. Proust I, p.130-131; according to J. Nathan, Citations, références et allusions de Marcel Proust dans A la Recherche, Paris (nouv. éd.) 1969, p.47-48 it was not Anatole France, but Ernest Renan who first compared Britanny with the land of the Cimmerians, in his ‘Prière sur l’Acropole’. In Jean Santeuil, Britanny is more strongly associated with the land of the Cimmerians than in A la Recherche. 18 Proust I, p.809. 19 Proust I, p.897. 20 Proust V, p.885. 21 Proust V, p.380: “The painter had declared the divine equality of all things before the spirit which perceives them, before the light which embellishes them.” (Le peintre avait proclamé la divine égalité de toutes choses devant l’esprit qui les considère, devant la lumière qui les embellit.) The art of Rembrandt also clarifies this for him. 22 Proust V, p.418. 23 Proust V, p.419. 24 Proust III, p.626. 25 Proust III, p.623-624. 26 Proust I, p.898. 27 Proust II, p.421. 28 Proust III, p.167-168. 29 Proust II, p.1013. 30 See Proust III, p.168. 31 Proust I, p.847-848. 32 Proust I, p.851. 33 Proust I, p.852. 34 Proust III, p.770. 35 Proust I, p.847. 36 Proust II, p.125. 37 Cf. Proust III, p.378. 38 Proust II, p.943. 39 Proust I, p.835. 40 Proust I, p.838. Cf. “These pictures

Notes on chapter II 189 (…) re-created those optical illusions which prove to us that we should never succeed in identifying objects if we did not bring some process of reasoning to bear on them.” (Les tableaux (…) recréaient ces illusions d’optique qui nous prouvent que nous n’identifierions pas les objets si nous ne faisions pas intervenir le raisonnement.) Proust II, p.419. 41 Proust II, p.419. 42 Proust I, p.835. 43 Proust III, p.378. 44 Cf. G. Picon, op. cit., p.51. 45 Proust III, p.182. 46 But maybe Saint-Loup just pretends to be angry, because it later becomes clear that even in this period when he was together with Rachel, he also had homosexual relationships. Cf. Proust III, p.688. 47 Proust I, p.101-102. 48 Proust III, p.249 ff. The role of literature and of the writer Bergotte is discussed in connection with the question of “commitment”. See p.89 of this study. 49 Proust III, p.161-162. Cf. Proust III, p.198 and p.255. 50 Proust III, p.255. 51 Proust III, p.257. 52 It is not without its own symbolism, that Swann never gets to know Vinteuil’s last work. 53 Proust III, p.257-258. 54 Proust III, p.258. 55 Proust III, p.263. 56 Cf. G. Deleuze, op. cit., p.53, p.116 ff., who qualifies Proust’s Platonism. 57 Proust III, p.261. 58 Proust III, p.869; cf. Proust I, p.655656. 59 Proust III, p.915-916. 60 Proust I, p.193, p.247. 61 Proust I, p.193. 62 Proust I, p.195-196. 63 Proust I, p.222-223. 64 Proust I, p.225. 65 Proust I, p.230. 66 Proust I, p.230. 67 Proust I, p.239.

68 Proust I, p.273. 69 Proust I, p.273-274. 70 Proust I, p.309. 71 Proust I, p.322. 72 Proust I, p.322-323. 73 Proust I, p.323. 74 Proust I, p.326. 75 Proust I, p.348. 76 Cf. Proust III, p.440. 77 Proust I, p.349-350. 78 G. Brée, op. cit., p.233; H.R. Jauss, Zeit and Erinnerung in Marcel Prousts ‘A la Recherche du temps perdu’. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie des Romans, Heidelberg 1970 (first edition 1955), p.171. 79 Proust I, p.193. 80 Proust I, p.80. 81 Cf. G. Brée, op. cit., S 75: “La grande aventure qu’il vit (…) est de passer de la fiction mentale à la connaissance de la réalité. Le grand danger qu’il court est celui de se contenter, comme Ulysse et ses compagnons, de quelqu’île de Circé, que, pis est, il aurait créée lui-même.” 82 Proust V, p.135 ff. 83 Proust V, p.136. 84 Proust V, p.690. Translation from M. Proust, A Selection. 85 Proust I, p.520-521. 86 Proust I, p.617. 87 Proust I, p.617-618. 88 Proust III, p.1129 (note); G.D. Painter, op. cit., p.149, p.174. 89 Proust III, p.51. 90 Proust III, p.242. 91 Proust II, p.967. The maréchal d’Huxelles indulged, according to SaintSimon, in “Greek fornication” 92 Proust III, p.1106. 93 Proust II, p.1058. 94 Proust II, p.610. 95 Proust II, p.1070. 96 Proust II, p.1073-1074. 97 Proust III, p.806-807. 98 Proust III, p.382-383. 99 Ibid. 100 Proust III, p.67-71. 101 Proust III, p.795. 102 Proust III, p.796.

190 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ 103 Proust III, p.796. 104 Proust III, p.892. 105 P. Claudel, op. cit., p.960 and p.1110. After reading Contre Sainte-Beuve his verdict becomes somewhat milder. Cf. J.Y. Tadié, Lectures de Proust, Paris 1971, p.43. 106 Proust I, p.421-427. 107 Proust I, p.425. 108 Proust I, p.425. Cf. ibid., p.184-185; G.Picon, o.e., p.144. 109 This interpretation brought Claudel to his severe verdict. 110 Proust I, p.66; cf. Proust I, p.424, 425. 111 Proust I, p.184. 112 G. Picon, op. cit., p.144 ff. 113 Proust III, p.872 and 873. 114 Proust III, p.897; cf. Ibid., p.879. 115 Marcel Proust, Selected Letters, vol.3, nr. 144 116 Proust III, p.986. 117 La mort de Baldassare Silvande, vicomte de Sylvanie, in: Les Plaisirs et les Jours, Proust IV, p.9-28. 118 Proust, Pleasures and Regrets, p.2021. Proust IV, p.21. 119 Violante ou la mondanité, in: Les Plaisirs et les Jours, Proust IV, p.29-37. 120 Ibid.p. 93, Proust IV, p.33. 121 Ibid p.99, Proust VI, p.37. 122 R. W. Emerson, op. cit., p.176. 123 Proust IV, p.432. 124 Proust II, p.940. 125 Cf. Proust III, p.1208. 126 Proust I, p.864. 127 Proust II, p.951. 128 Cf. Proust II, p.867-869. 129 Proust III, p.723, p.726. 130 Proust II, p.706. 131 Proust I, p.811. 132 Proust I, p.815. 133 Proust I, p.816. 134 Proust I, p.816. 135 Proust III, p.1036. 136 Proust III, p.1044. 137 A.H. Pasco, ‘Marcel, Albertine and Balbec in Proust’s Allusive Complex’, in: Romanic Review, vol. LXII, Nr. 2 (1971), p.113-126.

138 The descriptions of Saint-Loup like ‘golden, blond’ etc. make him, according to Pasco, into a “sun figure”. Rachel, on the other hand, with her “visage mince” symbolises the Moon. 139 Analogously to M. Butor, Essais sur les Modernes, Paris 1964 (coll. idées), p.161. 140 A.H. Pasco, l.c., p.115. For Beg-meil, see the description of a walk along the coast in stormy weather, Proust IV, p.370 ff. In A la Recherche one still finds reminiscences of the Cimmerian coastline, for example: “This Balbec to which I had so looked forward because I imagined it only as battered by storms and buried in the mist.” (Ce Balbec que j’avais tant désiré parce que je ne l’imaginais que battu par la tempête et perdu dans les brumes Proust I, p.954.). 141 Cf. Proust II, p.516. 142 Cf. Proust III, p.68, p.173 and p.174. 143 In Proust II, p.1013 the church of Marcouville-l’Orgueilleuse is discussed. 144 Proust I, p.657, or III, p.479. 145 Proust I, p.815. 146 A.H. Pasco, op. cit., p.116. 147 Ibid., p.116. 148 M. Butor, op. cit., p.166; cf. A.H. Pasco, op. cit., p.118. 149 A.H. Pasco, op. cit., p.118. 150 Proust III, p.462-463. 151 A.H. Pasco, op. cit., p.120 quotes from the translation of One Thousand and One Nights by Mardrus. Proust III, p.402. 152 A.H. Pasco, op. cit., p.124. 153 Ibid. 154 Proust IV, p.216 155 Proust I, p.790. 156 Proust I, p.830; cf. I, p.873: “la bacchante à bicyclette”, “la muse orgiaque du golf” (the bacchante with the bicycle, the orgiastic muse of the golf-course). 157 Proust I, p.795. 158 Cf. Proust III, p.877. 159 Proust III, p.1043; cf. III, p.898, where Proust calls books “les enfants de l’obscurité et du silence” (the offspring of darkness and silence).

Notes on chapter II 191 160 Proust I, p.37.. The text is strongly reminiscent of a passage of Emerson’s, which goes: “These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.” R.W. Emerson, op. cit., p.32. Proust’s passage is a nice example of the independent and individual way he processes the teaching of his “master”. 161 Proust III, p.895. 162 Proust III, p.880. 163 Proust III, p.1032. 164 Proust III, p.896. “Nomenclature” a common word in Carlyle’s vocabulary. 165 Proust III, p.869. 166 Proust III, p.885. 167 Proust III, p.885. 168 Marcel Proust et Jacques Rivière. Correspondance 1914-1922, p.3. 169 Proust III, p.901-902. 170 Proust III, p.903. 171 Proust III, p.1038. “Déjeuner sur l’herbe”: an allusion to Manet’s wellknown painting. 173 Thomas Mann, Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, translated, with an introduction, by Walter D. Morris, New York 1983, 420. 172 Ibid., p. 424. The gifted, highly musical, but also extremely sensitive Hanno is the last, weak offspring of the house of the Buddenbrooks; he dies at an early age. 173 Ibid., p.424 174 Ibid., p.13 175 Ibid. 177 Th. Mann, Briefe 1937-1955, volume II, Frankfurt 1963, p.297. For Proust the First World War meant no more than a twist of the kaleidoscope. 178 Thomas Mann, Reflections, p.156 p.1(trail of suffering); p.156. 179 Th. Mann, Adel des Geistes. Sechzehn Versuche zum Problem der Humanität, Frankfurt 1945, p.311. 180 Ibid., p.311. 181 Th. Mann, Gesammelte Werke in twelve volumes, Frankfurt 1960, volume XII, p.593-603.

182 R. Baumgart, Das Ironische and die Ironie in den Werken Thomas Manns, Frankfurt a/M. 1964, p.95; J. Fest, Die unwissenden Magier, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Frankfurt 1993, passim. 183 G. Lukács, Thomas Mann, in: Deutsche Literatur in zwei Jahrhunderten, Werke, volume 7 (1964), p.523. 184 G. Lukács, op. cit., p.525. 185 Cf. Thomas Mann – Robert Faesi, Briefwechsel, Zürich 1962, Brief vom 21XI-1925. 186 For example G. Lukács, K. Sontheimer. 187 Th. Mann, Gesammelte Werke, volume XI, p.852, p.854; cf. Thomas Mann-Karl Kerenyi, Gespräch in Briefen, Frankfurt a/M. 1960, p.42. 188 E. Heller, Thomas Mann. Der ironische Deutsche, Frankfurt a/M. 1959, p.177. 189 Cf. Th. Mann, Gesammelte Werke, volume XI, p.397. 190 Ibid., p.110-111. 191 Th. Mann, Betrachtungen, p.42; cf. idem, Gesammelte Werke, volume IX, p.682-683. 192 Th. Mann, Adel des Geistes, p.339. Mann mentions Wagner, Nietzsche, Tolstoy. 193 Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks. The Decline of a Family. Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter, London 1930 (1924 first edition), p.256 194 The passage Proust quotes is from the chapter: On the Vanity and Suffering of Life. Supplements to the Fourth Book, in: Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, chapter 46. Translated by E.F.J. Payne, Indian Hills 1958. 195 Proust V, p.185. 196 Proust V, p.186. 197 Th. Mann, Briefe 1947-1955, Frankfurt a/M. 1965, p.413. 198 Th. Mann, Betrachtungen, p.37; Adel des Geistes, p.388-389. 199 Proust III, p.159. 200 Th. Mann, Reflections, p.144.

192 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ 201 Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter, New York 1946³ (1927 first published), p.465-466. 202 Ibid., p.100. 203 Proust II, p1048. 204 Proust III, p.906. 205 Proust II, p.195. 206 Proust II, p.65 (in this case the mechanism of memory). 207 Proust III, p.518-519. 208 Proust III, p.526. 209 Proust III, p.899. 210 Proust III, p.899. 211 “A mon ami Willie Heath, mort à Paris”, le 3 octobre 1893. Proust IV, p.5. 212 Proust IV, p.6. 213 Proust IV, p.937. 214 Proust I, p.473-474. 215 Proust II, p.956. 216 Proust III, p.879; cf III p.888. Cf. R. de Chantal op. cit. p.189. 217 Proust I, p.554-555. 218 Cf. Proust V, p.307 ff. Thus the writer Romain Rolland remains a materialist in Proust’s eyes, despite his idealistic subject, because his style is inadequate. 219 Proust II, p.394. 220 Ibid. 221 M. Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, Paris 1954, p.44. In Der Fall Wagner (1888) Wagner is described in a great variety of ways, as “a liar of genius”, as “the most astonishing genius of the theater”, as “an actor par excellence” and his music as “grandiose lies”, as “the art of lying”. The subtitle too, A Musician’s Problem, says a lot. The polemic was translated into French as early as 1893 (see below). 222 Ibid. 223 D. Halévy, La vie de Frédéric Nietzsche, Paris 1909, p.176: “Je rève une association d’hommes absolus.” Cf. p.199 ff. 224 F. Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, p.13. 225 F. Gregh, op. cit., p.29. R. Dreyfus, Souvenirs sur Marcel Proust, Paris 1926, p.79-80; in a letter of 19 April 1909, he suggests to Proust that he write pastiches

in Nietzsche’s style. (R. Dreyfus, op. cit., p.246). See also the Nietzsche studies by H. Lichtenberger, T. de Wyzewa, R. de Gourmont, P. Lasserre, E. Faguet etc; cf. M. Décaudin, op. cit., p.46. In A la Recherche Saint-Loup is a passionate Nietzsche reader. Proust I, p.732; cf. III, p.754. 226 Cf. The letter of 8 March 1922 to E.R. Curtius: “Votre langue ne m’est pas si familière.” (M. Proust, Choix de lettres, Paris 1965, p.271), but good enough at the time to read and review Broicher’s book of Ruskin. Proust V, p.478 ff. 227 Proust V, p.480. 228 Ibid., p.481. 229 Ibid., p.480. 230 Ibid. 231 Marcel Proust et Jacques Rivière, Correspondance 1914-1922, Letter of December 1919, p.67. Cf. Proust III, p.497. 232 Cf. Lettres de Marcel Proust à Bibesco, Paris 1949, p.79-80: Proust comments on a “brilliant passage” by La Bruyère about friendship, but finds more content in Pascal on this theme. 233 Proust III, p.450. 234 Proust III, p.875; cf. III, p.986-987. 235 Proust II, p.413. 236 Proust II, p.413; cf. Proust I, p.737. 237 Proust II, p.104. 238 Proust III, p.688. 239 Proust III, p.779. 240 M. Proust, Lettres à une amie, p.83, Letter of 9 February 1905. The artist and the art critic stand head to head. In the year 1877 Ruskin had vented insultingly and sarcastically about Whistler’s art, whereupon the latter brought a court case for libel. The damages he was awarded, all of one farthing, Whistler wore on his watch chain from then on. And that was not the last time the gentlemen touched blades. 241 Proust III, p.875. 242 J.H. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the

Notes on chapter II 193 Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth centuries, translated by Fritz Hopman, London 1987 (1924 first edition), p.37. 243 Cf. G. Genette, Figures II, Paris 1969, p.246 and H.R. Jauss, op. cit., p.145 ff. 244 “By nature I have always been more open to the world of potentiality than to the world of contingent reality.” (Par nature, le monde des possibles m’a toujours été plus ouvert que celui de la contingence réelle. Proust III, p.24) Notice the Leibnizian wording! 245 Proust I, p.384-385. 246 Proust I, p.660.

247 Proust I, p.175. 248 Proust II, p.49. 249 Cf. Proust II, p.252. 250 Proust I, p.457. 251 Proust I, p.363. 252 Proust II, p.723. 253 Proust I, p.576. 254 Proust I, p.548. 255 Cf. Proust II, p.943. 256 Proust II, p.650. 257 For the significance of the German philosopher for Proust see below. 258 Proust III, p.880.

Notes on chapter III 1 Cf. Letter to Lucien Daudet, in: Autour de soixante lettres de Marcel Proust (Les Cahiers Marcel Proust no. 5), Paris 1929, Nr. XXIX: “I have thought over our conversation of the other evening. Yes, I am sure that for the aesthetic discovery of realities we must place ourselves outside them (…). I have always been careful in speaking of the Guermantes not to regard them as would a man of the world (…), but from the point of view of whatever there may be of poetry [our italics] in snobbery. I have not spoken of them in the glib style of a man of the world, but in the dazzled tones of someone for whom it is all very remote” (J’ai repensé à notre conversation de l’autre soir. Oui, j’en suis certain, pour la découverte esthétique des réalités, il faut se mettre en dehors d’elles (…) j’ai toujours eu soin, quand je parlais des Guermantes, de ne pas les considérer en homme du monde (…) mais avec ce qu’il peut y avoir de poésie dans le snobisme. Je n’en ai pas parlé avec le ton degagé de l’homme du monde, mais avec le ton émerveillé de quelqu’un pour qui ce serait très loin.) Cf. chapter V of this work, pp. 180 ff. Letters of Marcel Proust, transl. by Nina Curtiss, nr. 171, 290. 2 Proust III, p.30-31.

3 E.R. Curtius, Europäische Literatur and Lateinisches Mittelalter, Bern-München 1969) (first edition 1948), p.146ff. 4 Proust I, p.810-811. 5 Proust II, p.626-627. 6 Proust II, p.628. 7 Proust I, p.835. Cf. G. Genette, Figures, Paris 1966, p.49. 8 Proust III, p.719. 9 Proust I, p.87. 10 Proust IV, p.522. 11 Proust I, p.804. 12 Proust I, p.804-806. 13 Proust I, p.85. 14 Proust I, p.85. 15 J. Cazeaux, L’écriture de Proust et l’art du vitrail, Paris 1971. 16 See for example Proust I, p.441-442; II, p.543. 17 Proust II, p.569. 18 Proust III, p.872. 19 Proust I, p.43-44. “the little luminous patch” and “the tiny patch” (“le petit pan lumineux” and “le petit pan jaune”) on Vermeer’s painting, are connected with one another and represent the same symbol; that of the divine light. See also p.110 of this study 20 Proust I, p.47-48. The madeleine has the shape of a sea shell, which is also a symbol; that of the scallop Pecten

194 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ jacobaeus, which pilgrims carry to Santiago di Compostella. The narrator is also on a pilgrimage. All these connotations make A la Recherche such a richly orchestrated work. 21 Proust III, p.866. 22 Proust III, p.867. 23 Proust III, p.869. 24 Proust III, p.873. 25 Cf. Proust I, p.44, III, p.873. 26 Proust V, p.211. 27 In contrast, the word “inspiration” appears often in Jean Santeuil, cf. Proust IV, p.523ff. 28 Proust V, p.558, Interview in 1913. Cf. Lettres de Marcel Proust à Bibesco, Paris 1949, p.175ff. 29 Proust III, p.879. 30 H.R. Jauss, ‘Proust auf der Suche nach seiner Konzeption des Romans,’ in: Romanische Forschungen, volume 66 (1955), p.276. 31 Proust IV, p.397-402. Cf. IV, p.537 and p.897-898. 32 Proust IV, p.556. 33 G. Deleuze, op. cit., p.36. 34 G. Picon, op. cit., p.162. 35 Proust III, p.191. 36 Cf. This reality does not exist for us so long as it has not been re-created by our thought. (Cette réalité n’existe pas pour nous tant qu’elle n’a pas été recréée par notre pensée.) Proust II, p.756 37 Proust III, p.932. 38 Proust III, p.897. 39 Proust III, p.873. 40 Proust I, p.678. 41 Proust I, p.679. 42 Proust I, p.682. 43 Proust I, p.678. 44 S.Beckett, Proust, London 1965 (first edition 1931), p.11. 45 Proust I, p.8. 46 Proust I, p.671. 47 Proust I, p.666. 48 Proust III, p.420. 49 Cf. Proust III, p.875: “I think I would have lost consciousness”. (Je crois que j’aurais perdu connaissance).

50 Proust III, p.872; cf. III, p.873: “But this species of optical illusion (…) could not last long.” (Ce trompe-l’oeil (…) ne durait pas). 51 See note 19 of this chapter. In defence one could point out that this little yellow patch cannot be found on Vermeer’s View of Delft. 52 Proust III, p.182-188. 53 Proust III, p.420. 54 Proust II, p.123. 55 Proust II, p.1035. 56 Proust II, p.71-140. 57 R.W. Emerson, op. cit., p.98: “The heart has its sabbaths and jubilees, in which the world appears as a hymeneal feast.” Cf. Ch. Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, p.974. 58 Proust II, p.87. 59 Cf. Marcel Proust V, p.337. Marcel Proust par lui-même. “Le fait militaire que j’admire le plus – Mon volontariat.” Proust performed his service from 1889-1890. Cf. G.D. Painter, op. cit., p.72. 60 Proust II, p.95. 61 Proust II, p.84. Cf. An earlier draft of Jean Santeuil, Proust IV, p.554ff. 62 Proust II, p.97. 63 Proust I, p.44. 64 Proust III, p.757. 65 Proust III, p.757. 66 Proust III, p.854, p.856. 67 Proust IV, p.777-778. 68 Proust II, p.345ff. 69 Proust II, p.346. 70 Proust II, p.76. A letter to Jacques Boulenger in November 1920 shows that the Dadaists received these pages with particular enthusiasm: “Without swooning like the ‘ Dadas ’ over my pages about deafness (which I find very mediocre in spite of the praise given them), they are nevertheless true.” (Sans me pâmer comme les ‘Dadas’ sur mes pages relatives à la surdité (que je trouve, malgré leurs éloges, très médiocres), néanmoins elles sont vraies.) Letters of Marcel Proust, transl. by Nina Curtiss, nr. 211, 358-359 71 Proust II, p.77.

Notes on chapter III 195 72 Proust II, p.980-981. 73 Proust II, p.981. 74 Proust I, p.7. Cf. G. Picon, Ibid., p.125. 75 Proust III, p.123. 76 Proust I, p.4. 77 Proust I, p.4. 78 Proust III, p.914. 79 Proust III, p.125. 80 Proust III, p.912. 81 Proust III, p.889. 82 Proust II, p.419. 83 Proust II, p.1005. 84 Proust II, p.1006. 85 Proust II, p.996-997. 86 Ibid. The train is compared with Seven League Boots elsewhere. Proust V, p.122. 87 Proust III, p.889. 88 Proust I, p.644. 89 Cf. Proust III, p.609. 90 Proust III, p.406. 91 Proust II, p.1028-1029. 92 Cf. Proust III, p.105. 93 Proust III, p.105-106. 94 Proust II, p.133, p.136. 95 Proust III, p.99-102. 96 Cf. Proust II, p.133. 97 When he arrived in his hotel room in Balbec and bent down to remove his shoes, the image of his dead grandmother appeared before his inner eye, close but still intangible. Proust II, p.136. Cf. II, p.755-756.

98 Proust III, p.102. 99 Proust I, p.181-182. 100 Proust V, p.63 ff. 101 Cf. G.D. Painter, op. cit., vol. II (1965), p.95. V, 716 (note); cf. Proust V, 64 (note by Proust). 102 Proust I, p.180-181. 103 M. Butor, op. cit., p.117. “Le rapprochement dans une même vue, par un effet de perspective, de deux objets très distants dans l’espace, mais qui semblent ici n’en former qu’un seul malgré le savoir que l’on a de leur séparation géographique (…) une figure spatiale de ce que sera la libération par rapport aux distances temporelles données bientôt par ce qu’il appelle ‘les réminiscences’.” 104 Cf. Proust II, p.997. 105 G. Picon, op. cit., p.141. “Ce sont les possibilités métaphoriques de ces clochers qui retiennent le narrateur (…) Ici, rien ne nous dit que le prix de l’expérience soit ailleurs que dans cette richesse analogique, dans cette virtualité transitive, ‘relationnelle’.” 106 Cf. E.R. Curtius, ‘Marcel Proust’, in: Französischer Geist im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert, Bern-München 1965 (third edition), p.339. 107 Proust I, p.873-874. 108 Proust II, p.364-365. 109 Proust II, p.365.

Notes on chapter IV 1 Proust V, p.427-428. 2 Proust II, p.656. 3 Cf. Proust V, p.66. 4 Proust V, p.121-122. 5 Proust V, p.120-121. 6 Proust V, p.121. 7 B. Crémieux, ‘Marcel Proust’, in: XX siècle (Première Série) (1924), p.61. 8 Proust I, p.180-181. 9 Cf. M. Raimond, op. cit., p.334. 10 Proust III, p.450. 11 Proust III, p.191.

12 G. W. Leibniz, The Principles of Philosophy known as Monadology, translated by Jonathan Bennett, 2007. The passage is not only extremely characteristic of Proust from the point of view of content, but stylistically too it would fit seamlessly into A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Cf. G. Deleuze, op. cit., p.179 note 1. 13 Edited by (among others) P. Janet (1874) and M. Fouillée (1875). See M. Proust, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu,

196 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ ed. J.-Y. Tadié, volume III (1988), p.1520. 14 Proust II p.769, p.924. In the new edition of 1987- 1989 (ed. J.-Y Tadié), volume II, p.413. 15 Proust II, p.479. 16 Letter to Mme Schiff, August 1919, in: Correspondance, III, p.12. Cf. M. Proust, Correspondance, I, p.140 note 5, and X, p.183, Letter to Robert Dreyfus, 8 October 1910. 17 Proust III, p.191. 18 L. Couperus, Boeken der Kleine Zielen, Amsterdam 1969, p.58. 19 Proust IV, p.319. 20 Nietzsche is the first to have used the expression perspectivism. In his theory of values perspectivism has a key function; every value is relative to the will to power. In his 1886 introduction to Human, All Too Human he addresses the new man: “You had to learn that all estimations have a perspective, to learn the displacement, distortion, apparent teleology of horizons, and whatever else is part of perspective; (…) You had to learn to grasp the necessary injustice in every For and Against; to grasp that injustice is inseparable from life, that life itself is determined by perspective and its injustice. Above all you had to see clearly wherever injustice is greatest, where life is developed least, most narrowly, meagerly, rudimentarily, and yet cannot help taking itself as the purpose and measure of things.” 21 Proust III, p.304-305. 22 Proust III, p.609. 23 Proust II, p.12. 24 Proust II, p.13. 25 Proust quotes from Ruskin’s Lectures on Art. 26 Cf. Proust V, p.615. 27 M. Raimond, op.cit. p.338-343. 28 E.R. Curtius, ‘Marcel Proust’, in: Französischer Geist im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert, p.274-365. 29 Ibid., p.343. 30 Ibid., p.343. 31 E.R. Curtius, Kritische Essays zur

Europäischen Literatur, Bern-München 1963, p.264. 32 Cf. E.R. Curtius, Kritische Essays, p.352. 33 Ibid., p.440. 34 Ibid., p.440. 35 Ibid., p.17. 36 Quoted from S.Dresden, Bezonken Avonturen, Amsterdam 1949, p.30. 37 Proust I, p.59-67. 38 Proust V, p.64, note 3. 39 Proust I, p.723. 40 Proust I, p.926. 41 Proust II, p.1112. 42 Proust II, p.1098, p.1109. 43 Proust III, p.925; cf. III, p.970. 44 Proust III, p.973. 45 Proust III, p.1048. 46 H.R. Jauss, Zeit and Erinnerung, p.1 84. 47 Cf. M. Raimond, op. cit., p.341. 48 Proust I, p.916-917. 49 Proust II, p.67. 50 Proust II, p.67. 51 Proust II, p.365. 52 Proust III, p.681. 53 Proust III, p.740. 54 Proust II, p.858, p.892. 55 Proust II, p.882. 56 Proust II, p.905. 57 Proust II, p.906. 58 See the episode in which Saint-Loup introduces his girlfriend Rachel to the narrator (Proust II, p.159-160): The narrator recognises Saint-Loup’s lover as a prostitute. 59 Proust III, p.573. 60 Proust III, p.497. 61 Proust III, p.1102 note. 62 Proust III, p.913. Cf. M. Hindus, The Proustian Vision, New York 1953, p.118. 63 Cf. S.Dresden, op. cit., p.31. 64 Proust III, p.1044. 65 Proust I, p.182. 66 Proust I, p.155. 67 Proust IV, p.269. Translation quoted from Marcel Proust On art and literature 1896-1919, translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner, New York 1958, 170.

Notes on chapter IV 197 68 Proust V, p.586. 69 Ibid. 70 Proust V, p.616. 71 Proust III, p.889. Cf. V.E. Graham, The Imagery of Proust, Oxford 1966. 72 Cf. F.X. Nicolas, ‘Du côté de la nature au côté de l’homme: Principes d’une étude thématique’, in: Europe (août-septembre 1970), p.74-84. Cf. V.E. Graham, op. cit., p.16. 73 Proust III, p.388. 74 Proust I, p.861. 75 G. Deleuze, op. cit., p.51ff.; G. Genette, Figures, Paris 1966, p.46. 76 Cf. G. Brée, op. cit., p.266: “Le rôle est important du comme proustien.(…) Grâce à lui Proust évoque autour et à l’intérieur de son monde toutes les réactions possibles sans jamais l’engager dans aucune, laissant ainsi à ce monde son intégrité.” Cf. L. Spitzer, ‘Zum Stil Marcel Prousts’, in: Stilstudien, volume II, München 1928, p.461. 77 Proust III, p.648. 78 Ibid. 79 Cf. J. Ruskin, Giotto and his works in Padua: being an explanatory notice of the frescoes in the Arena Chapel, London 1905 (first edition 1854) and idem, Mornings in Florence: being simple studies of Christian art for English travellers, London 1915 (first edition 1877), p.36, p.51. 80 Proust III, p.648-649. 81 J. Cazeaux, op. cit., p.189ff. 82 Cf. Proust III, p.199. 83 J. Cazeaux, op. cit., p.199: “Proust n’emprunte pas ici une comparaison à la peinture; celle-ci vient tout entière et conjointement. Cette communauté ne relève pas de l’abstraction: chaque ordre conserve sa tenue, la peinture et le snobisme sont tout entier agissants.” 84 Cf. G. Deleuze, op. cit., p.59: “L’essence ne se confond jamais avec un objet, mais au contraire rapproche deux objets tout à fait différents, dont on s’aperçoit justement qu’ils ont cette qualité dans le milieu révélateur.” 85 Proust I, p.802.

86 Ibid. 87 Cf. Proust III, p.759. 88 Proust I, p.672-675. 89 G. Genette, Figures, Paris 1966, p.48. 90 F.X. Nicolas, op. cit., p.76-77. 91 Proust I, p.665. 92 Proust I, p.663. Minos, Aiakos and Rhadamanthys: the judges of the dead in the Greek underworld. 93 Cf. Proust I, p.666. 94 Proust II, p.1014-1015. 95 Proust I, p.146. 96 G. Genette, Figures III, Paris 1972, p.45 note 1. 97 Proust III, p.116-119; 127-128; 136137. 98 Proust III, p.116. 99 Proust III, p.117. The words appear not in Rameau’s opera, but in Gluck’s Armide. 100 Proust III, p.118. 101 Cf. F.X. Nicolas, op. cit., p.83: “On ne peut parler d’esthétisme: la vision proustienne se situe au niveau où l’art et la vie s’enrichissent et s’affinent mutuellement, la connaissance de l’un passant par celle de l’autre.” 102 G. Genette, Figures, Paris 1966, p.51: “Ce palimpseste du temps et de l’espace, ces vues discordantes sans cesse contrariées et sans cesse rapprochées par un inlassable mouvement de dissociation douloureuse et de synthèse impossible, c’est sans doute cela, la vision proustienne.” 103 Proust I, p.811. The comparison is symbolic: Proust uses it to express the fact that people are monads, worlds of their own. 104 Cf. A. Béguin, L’âme romantique et le rêve, Paris 1963 (first edition 1937), p.401: “La chaîne des analogies (…) apparaît, par instants, comme le lien qui, rattachant toute chose à toute autre chose, parcourt l’infini et établit l’indissoluble cohésion de l’Etre.” 105 G. Picon, op. cit., p.134: “La métaphore [est] justement ce bondissement de l’image hors d’elle-même, ce fil d’or lancé de l’une à l’autre.”

198 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ 106 Jean Paul Richter, Vorschule der Ästhetik, ed. J. Müller, Leipzig 1923, Par. 50. 107 Proust III, p.871. 108 The capital is discussed in E. Mâle,

L’art religieux du XIIe siècle en France, Paris 1924 (1922 first edition), p.167-168. 109 L. Bersani, Marcel Proust. The Fictions of Life and Art, New York 1965, p.248.

Notes on chapter V 1 J. Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, London 1935 (first edition 1851-1853), volume II, p.1. 2 J.H. Huizinga, ‘Over vormverandering der geschiedenis’, in: Verzamelde Werken, volume VII, Haarlem 1950, p.192 f. 3 Proust V, p.63, p.65-66. 4 Proust V, p.63-69. 5 Proust V, p.64. 6 Proust V, p.67. 7 Proust V, p.66. 8 Proust V, p.69. 9 Proust III, p.655. 10 Proust I, p.645. 11 Proust I, p.645. 12 Proust II, p.856-857; cf. II, p.997. 13 Proust III, p.411 ff. 14 Proust III, p.543. 15 Proust III, p.411. 16 Proust V, p.580-581. 17 Proust III, p.99-100. 18 Proust III, p.568. This passage too has a Leibnizian basis. 19 The translation is from Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters, translated by Peter Read, Forest Row 2002, p.12 20 The translation is from Guillaume Apollinaire, Selected Writings. The New Spirit and the Poets, translated by Roger Shattuck, New York 1971, p.228. 21 The translation is from Guillaume Apollinaire, Zone, translated by Donald Revell. 22 Cf. Chapter III, note 70. 23 Proust III, p.138. 24 See section on Emerson in Chapter I. 25 Proust III, p.169. 26 Ibid. 27 Cf. Proust III, p.172.

28 Proust I, p.713. 29 Ibid. 30 Proust III, p.167. 31 Ibid. 32 Proust II, p.160-161. 33 Proust I, p.517. 34 M. Evers, ‘Nationalisme en cultuur in Frankreich, 1815-1918’, in: L.H.M. Wessels and A. Bosch (ed.), Veranderende grenzen. Nationalisme in Europa, 18151919, Nimwegen 1994, p.354-355. 35 M. Proust, Correspondance générale de Marcel Proust, III, p.19 (1920): “Est-ce que vous avez été dreyfusard jadis? Je l’ai été passionnément” (Were you for Dreyfus in those days? Yes I was, passionately); Ibid., p.71 (1919): “Je crois bien avoir été le premier dreyfusard” (I am fairly sure I was the first to take up Dreyfus’ cause); Ibid., p.167 (1919): “J’ai été le plus ardent dreyfusard” (I was the most ardent supporter of Dreyfus). Cf. M. Proust, Choix de lettres, Paris 1965, p.136, Letter to Madame de Noailles, 1906. See also Correspondance générale, III, p.275 (1921): “Je ne m’occupe pas de politique et ne m’en suis jamais occupé.” (I am not concerned with politics and never have been.) 36 H.R. Jauss, Zeit and Erinnerung, p.123. 37 H.R. Jauss, op. cit., p.123. 38 E. Carassus, ‘L’affaire Dreyfus et l’espace romanesque: De Jean Santeuil à la Recherche du Temps Perdu’, in: Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France, 71 année, no. 5-6, p.841-842. 39 Proust II, p.290. 40 Proust II, p.290. 41 Proust II, p.242.

Notes on chapter V 199 42 Cf. Proust II, p.152. 43 Proust II, p.297-298. 44 Proust II, p.581-582. 45 Proust II, p.689 ff. 46 Proust III, p.851. 47 Proust II, p.703 ff. 48 Proust II, p.708-709; p.711-712. 49 Proust III, p.41-42. 50 Proust II, p.152. 51 Proust III, p.236. 52 Montaigne, Oeuvres complètes, Paris 1965, p.11 ff. 53 See the excellent book on Montaigne: H. Friedrich, Montaigne, Bern-München 1967 (first edition 1949). 54 Proust III, p.727. 55 Proust III, p.728 ff. In 1913 military service in France was extended from two years to three. 56 Proust III, p.730 ff. 57 Proust III, p.735-736. 58 Proust III, p.737. 59 Ibid. 60 Proust III, p.723-724. 61 Proust III, p.763. Cf. III, p.800. 62 Proust III, p.809. 63 Proust III, p.801. 64 Proust III, p.801-802. 65 Proust III, p.734-735 66 Proust III, p.777 67 Cf. Proust III, p.162; Proust V, p.69 (car horn); II, p.731 (telephone); II, p.391 (automatic door). 68 M. Proust, Correspondance générale, III, p.12. 69 Cf. Proust III, p.778-779. 70 Proust III, p.879. 71 Proust III, p.772-773. 72 In 1898 he published The Ballad of Reading Gaol; in 1905 his posthumous De Profundis appeared. 73 Proust II, p.1050. 74 Cf. Proust V, p.273. 75 Ibid. 76 For a detailed overview of this affair, see A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, ed. J.Y. Tadié, Paris 1988, III, p.1196 ff. Cf. B. de Fallois in his foreword to Contre SainteBeuve, p.21-22, and G.D. Painter, op. cit.,

II, p.105 ff. 77 See note 76. Cf. R. de Vigneron, ‘Genèse de Swann’, in: Revue d’Histoire de la Philosophie et d’Histoire Générale de la Civilisation (1937), p.76. 78 Proust II, p.947. 79 H. Levin, The Gates of Horn. A Study of Five French Realists, New York 1963, p.412. 80 Proust III, p.47. Cf. R. de Chantal, op. cit., p.253. 81 Proust II, p.615 ff. 82 Proust II, p.632. 83 Proust II, p.616-617. 84 Proust III, p.205-206. Cf. II, p.954. 85 From the poem La colère de Samson by Alfred de Vigny. 86 Proust II, p.616. 87 Cf. Proust II, p.628. 88 Proust II, p.967. 89 Proust II, p.614-615. 90 Proust II, p.621. 91 Proust III, p.307. 92 Proust III, p.296. 93 Proust III, p.307. 94 Proust III, p.820. 95 Proust III, p.910-911. 96 Proust II, p.204. 97 Proust II, p.211. 98 Proust III, p.840. 99 Saint-Loup, the Prince de Guermantes, the young Cambremer, Legrandin. 100 See p. 21. 101 Letter to Lucien Daudet, in: Autour de soixante lettres de arcel Proust (Les Cahiers arcel Proust no. 5 (1929), Nr. XXIX. The letter is quoted in another connection in Chapter III note 1. 102 Proust II, p.595-596. 103 Proust II, p.596. 104 Proust II, p.597. 105 In Proust’s scene one is forcibly reminded of a parallel in Saint-Simon’s memoirs: the body of Louis XIV’s brother is not yet cold, when the King is heard singing arias at the top of his voice. 106 Proust II, p.437. Cf. II, p.417. 107 Proust II, p.551. 108 Proust III, p.35.

200 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ 109 Proust III, p.34 ff. Cf. II. p.535-536. 110 Proust II, p.551. 111 See note 101. 112 M. Hindus, op. cit., p.191. Cf. H. Moss, The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust, London 1963, p.89. 113 Proust II, p.542. 114 Proust, p.542-543. 115 Proust II, p.543. 116 Proust II, p.11.

117 Proust II, p.489-490. 118 Proust II, p.491. 119 Proust II, p.492. 120 Quoted from M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, volume I, Pfullingen 1961, p.88; cf. p.243 f. 121 Proust III, p.929. 122 Proust V, p.607 ff. 123 Proust V, 615. Translation from Marcel Proust, A selection, p.222.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1

Works by Marcel Proust

A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Published by Pierre Clarac and André Ferré, 3 vols, Paris 1954. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Published by Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols, Paris 1987-1989. Jean Santeuil, précédé de Les Plaisirs et les Jours. Published by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre, Paris 1971. Contre Sainte Beuve, précédé de Pastiches et Mélanges et suivi de Essais et Articles. Published by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre, Paris 1971. Le Carnet de 1908. Published by Philip Kolb, Paris 1976. Carnets. Published by Florence Callu and Antoine Compagnon, Paris 2002. Correspondance de Marcel Proust. Published by Philip Kolb, 21 vols, Paris 1970-1993. Marcel Proust et Jacques Rivière. Correspondance 1914-1922, Paris 1976.

2

Works by Marcel Proust in translation

In Search of Lost Time, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, London-New York 1992. Other works by Proust in translation, I used: Jean Santeuil, translated by Gerard Hopkins, New York 1956. Pleasures and Regrets, translated by Louise Varese, New York 1948. On art and literature 1896-1919, translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1958 (Meridian books) (originally published under the title Contre Sainte-Beuve). A selection from his miscellaneous writings, chosen and translated by Gerard Hopkins, London 1948. Selected Letters, vol. 1 1880-1903, vol. 2 1904-1909, vol.3 1910-1917. vol. 4 1918-1922, London 1983 ff. Letters of Marcel Proust, translated and edited by Nina Curtiss, New York 1966 (1949). Internet was also useful in some cases: we took advantage of the work of Chris Taylor who has filled many gaps in the translation. Where we could find no translation, we provide our own.

INDEX OF NAMES (covering pages 7 - 180) Characters in novels are shown in italics Admetus: 21, 159 Agostinelli, Alfred: 81, 154 Aiakos: 147 Aimé: 98 Albaret, Céleste: 11 Albert, Henri: 95 Albertine: 57, 61, 63, 70, 71, 79-82, 91, 97, 108, 114, 116, 123-125, 128, 135, 138, 139, 148, 149, 156, 169, 173 Alcibiades: 21 Andrée: 80, 135 Annunzio, Gabriele d’ – see D’Annunzio Apollinaire, Guillaume: 158 Apollo: 21, 31, 146, 159 Aristotle: 14 Arpajon, Mme d’: 177 Arthez, d’: 68 Attlee, Clement Richard: 37 Augustin: 76 Balzac, Honoré de: 65, 67-69, 72, 170 Barrès, Maurice: 19, 40, 161 Baudelaire, Charles: 12, 17, 18, 19, 42, 43, 46-50, 54, 124 Beardsley, Aubrey: 18 Belenus: 79 Bellini, Gentile: 70 Bergotte: 51-53, 69, 93, 94, 102, 116, 168 Bergson, Henri: 32, 161 Berma, la: 51, 52, 101, 102, 107 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri: 33 Beulier: 40, 41 Bibesco, Antoine: 112 Bismarck, Otto von: 19 Blanche, Jacques-Emile: 18, 157 Bloch: 70, 162, 163 Bontemps, Mme: 77 Bontemps, M.: 165 Botticelli, Sandro: 32, 63, 67, 68 Boucher, François: 157 Boutroux, Emile: 132 Brichot: 77, 93, 138, 172

Broglie, Mme de: 177 Brunschvicg, Léon: 41 Buddenbrook, Hanno: 19, 85 Buddenbrook, Thomas: 88 Buddha: 13 Burne-Jones, Edward: 18 Burns, Robert: 28, 29 Butor, Michel: 127 Cadignan, Mme de: 67-69 Cambremer, Mme de: 138 Cambremers, the: 140 Carassus, Emilien: 162 Carlyle, Thomas: 8, 15, 20, 22, 23, 26-29, 32, 34, 39, 44, 96, 105, 180 Carpaccio, Vittore: 30, 32, 52, 56, 166 Castorp, Hans: 87 Catiline: 21 Cattaui, Georges: 20, 46 Cazeaux, Jacques: 108, 145, 146 Cecilia (Saint): 70 Cellini, Benvenuto: 65 Ceres: 159 Charcot, Jean-Martin: 16 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste: 55, 158 Charlus, baron de: 8, 51, 62, 65, 67-71, 91, 106, 140, 162, 166-173, 176 Chauteaubriand, René de: 50, 68 Chopin, Frédéric: 66 Claudel, Paul: 29, 43, 72 Constance: 134 Coppée, François: 42, 161 Corneille, Pierre: 43 Costello, Chris: 7 Cottard: 80, 140 Couperus, Louis: 16, 18, 19, 24, 134 Crécy, Odette de: 63-67, 70, 71, 73, 78, 97 Crémieux, Benjamin: 131 Criquetot, M. de: 138 Cromwell, Oliver: 28, 29 Curtius, Ernst-Robert: 22, 90, 105, 136, 137, 141 Cusanus, Nicolaus: 62

204 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’

D’Annunzio: 16, 134 Dante: 9, 25, 26, 62, 155 Daphne: 146 Darius: 170 Darlu, Alphonse: 40, 41 Daudet, Lucien: 174, 176 Daudets, the: 42 Debussy, Claude: 148 Delacroix, Eugène: 48 Delaunay, Robert: 158, 180 Deleuze, Gilles: 113, 114, 144 Dercksz, Mrs: 134 Des Esseintes: 17, 43 Descartes, René: 38 Desjardins, Paul: 31 Desroches, Mme: 77 Desrousseaux, Alexandre-Marie: 96 Dorgelès, Roland: 168 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: 16, 59, 96 Dreyfus, Alfred: 93, 130, 160-165, 170 Dreyfus, Robert: 95 Duras, Duc de: 78 Dürer, Albrecht: 65 Eliot, George: 23, 45 Eliot, Thomas Stearns: 43, 47, 62 Elstir: 8, 45, 51, 52, 54-59, 61, 67, 77, 103, 106, 107, 113, 114 Emerson, Ralph Waldo: 8, 20-30, 32, 34, 39, 44, 76, 92, 96, 105, 150, 156, 159, 173, 180 Enright, D.J.: 9 Esterhazy, Marie Charles Ferdinand Walsin: 161 Eulenburg, Philipp, Prince of: 169 Eurydice: 64 Fallois, Bernard de: 94 Fantin-Latour, Henri: 157 Fernández, Ramón: 68 Firmin (Saint): 72 Flaubert, Gustave: 12, 143 France, Anatole: 11, 53, 54, 100, 161, 164, 179 Francis (Saint): 66 Françoise: 51, 79, 80, 139, 141 Freud, Sigmund: 14, 16 Froberville, General de: 66

Galand, René: 44 Gandhi, Mahatma: 37 Genette, Gérard: 147-149 Gide, André: 7, 29, 43, 137, 168, 170, 171 Gilberte: 81, 82, 114, 169 Giotto: 30, 32, 45, 53, 54, 67, 70, 102, 145, 147 Gluck, Christoph-Willibald: 66 Gobineau, Arthur de: 20 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: 13, 28, 86, 96 Goncourt, Edmond de: 42, 107, 108, 166 Gray, Dorian: 17, 18 Greco, El: 146 Gregh, Fernand: 45, 95 Guermantes, Duke de: 162, 164, 174, 175 Guermantes, Oriane, Duchess de: 77, 78, 101, 105, 132, 164, 174, 175, 177 Guermantes, Prince de: 71, 78, 164 Guermantes, Princess de: 66, 78, 164 Guermantes, the: 52, 63, 68, 70, 74, 77, 81, 83, 106, 107, 110, 111, 114, 118, 121, 135, 136, 138, 163, 174-177 Gurnemanz: 75, 81 Guys, Constantin: 47 Hahn, Reynaldo: 21, 42 Halévy, Daniel: 95 Harden, Maximilian: 169 Harun al Rashid: 166 Hassan: 80 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: 13 Henry, Colonel: 161 Hercules: 41 Herrera, Carlos: 170 Hindus, Milton: 176 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von: 16 Homer: 26, 72 Hugo, Victor: 48, 177 Huizinga, Johan: 99, 153 Huxelles, Marschall d’: 69 Huxley, Aldous: 137 Huysmans, Joris-Karl: 17, 43 Icarus: 79-81 Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique: 48 Jauss, Hans Robert: 113, 161, 162

Index 205 Jethro: 63 Joyce, James: 43 Jupien: 68, 106, 139, 170 Kant, Immanuel: 12 Kilmartin, Terence: 9 Kleist, Heinrich von: 12, 13 Klingsor: 80 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb: 96 Kolb, Philip: 31 Kossichef, Marie: 81 Krupp, Firm: 15 Kundry: 82 La Balue, Cardinal: 115 La Bruyère, Jean de: 97 La Sizeranne, Robert de: 31 Lazarus: 50 Legrandin: 145, 146 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm: 8, 9, 22, 62, 103, 132, 133, 167, 180 Lemaître, Jules: 161 Leroi, Mme: 91 Lesseps, Ferdinand de: 15 Leverkühn, Adrian: 90 Levin, Harry: 170 Liszt, Franz: 66, 68 Lombroso, Cesare: 16 Louis XIV: 71, 175 Lukács, Georg: 87 Machiavelli, Niccolò: 13 Maeterlinck, Maurice: 21, 24, 149 Mahomet: 28, 29 Mâle, Emile: 32 Mallarmé, Stéphane: 19, 44, 46, 124, 177 Manet, Edouard: 157 Mann, Thomas: 7, 8, 13, 16, 19, 23, 83, 8590, 93 Mantegna, Andrea: 65, 145, 155 Marcel: 79-81 Maurras, Charles: 19, 20, 161 Memnon: 92 Mercury: 117 Michelet, Jules: 41, 106 Minos: 147 Monet, Claude: 55, 96, 172 Montaigne, Michel de: 28, 29, 62, 96, 141, 164 Montesquiou, Robert de: 31, 42, 43, 67, 68

Morand, Paul: 143 Moréas, Jean: 19 Moreau, Gustave: 18, 31, 55, 56, 67 Moreau, Jacques-Joseph: 16 Morel, Charles: 68-70, 140, 173 Morris, William: 37 Musset, Alfred de: 42 Mussorgsky, Modest: 148 Naphta: 87, 90 Napoleon: 170 Nerval, Gérard de: 50 Nicolas, François-Xavier: 147 Nietzsche, Friedrich: 8, 13-16, 20, 24, 25, 85-87, 89, 94-96, 99 Noah: 92 Nordlinger, Marie: 31, 32 Norpois, Marquis de: 93, 162, 163 Odysseus: 32 Orpheus: 66 Ortega y Gasset, José: 136 Pan: 48 Parsifal: 80-82, 89 Pascal, Blaise: 97, 156, 180 Pasco, Allen H.: 79-81 Percepied, Dr: 125 Picon, Gaëtan: 113, 127 Plato: 96, 105, 171 Poe, Edgar Allen: 48, 50 Proust, Adrien: 11 Proust, Marcel, passim Putbus, Mme: 102 Rachel: 172 Racine, Jean: 52 Rameau, Jean-Philippe: 149 Raphael, archangel: 70 Raphael, painter: 35, 48 Rembrandt: 117 Rémusat, Mme de: 177 Renan, Ernest: 40, 113 Rhadamanthys: 147 Richter, Jean Paul: 144, 150 Rimbaud, Arthur: 29 Rivière, Jacques: 75, 84, 89, 97 Robert, Hubert: 129, 130 Rodin, Auguste: 96

206 Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ Rossetti, Dante Gabriel: 18 Rubempré, Lucien de: 169 Ruskin, John: 8, 11, 15, 20, 22, 23, 27-39, 44, 45, 53, 67, 96-99, 105, 113, 130, 131, 145, 153, 154, 180 Saint-Aulaire, Mme de: 177 Saint-Euverte, Mme de: 65 Saint-Loup, Robert de: 60, 78, 85, 97, 98, 102, 114, 116, 118, 124, 139, 163, 167, 173 Saint-Simon, Duc de: 68, 69, 72, 108, 175 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin: 68, 157 Salome: 18 Samson: 171 Sand, George: 112 Saniette: 77 Santeuil, Jean: 40, 41, 52, 77, 81, 113, 118 Sazerat, Mme: 141, 164 Schiller, Friedrich: 96, 177 Schopenhauer, Arthur: 13-15, 23, 29, 87, 88 Scott Moncrieff, C.K.: 9 Sebastian (Saint): 145, 146 Sephora: 63, 67, 70, 71 Settembrini: 90 Sévigné, Mme de: 59 Shakespeare, William: 13, 15, 25, 28, 29 Sherbatoff, Princess: 139 Siegfried: 117 Silvande, Baldassare: 76 Ski: 77 Socrates: 41, 171 Solomon: 21 Sophocles: 177 Sorel, Albert: 161 Stein, Gertrude: 43 Stermaria, Mme de: 97 Strauss, Richard: 18 Swann, Charles: 8, 51-53, 58, 61-68, 70, 71, 78, 80, 88, 97, 109-111, 147, 162-164, 174, 175 Swann, Mme – see Crécy, Odette de Swedenborg, Emanuel: 22, 28, 29, 48 Takma, Mr: 134 Tallien, Mme: 166 Tiepolo, Giambattista: 158

Titian: 34 Tobit: 70 Tolstoy, Leo: 13, 45, 96, 170 Turner, William: 35, 55, 130, 131 Valéry, Paul: 43, 44, 47 Vautrin – see Herrera, Carlos Venus: 48, 160 Verdurin, Mme: 58, 69, 77, 78, 140, 164, 168, 174 Verdurin, monsieur: 58 Verdurins, the: 43, 63, 66, 77, 123, 140, 147, 165 Vere, Eline: 19, 24 Verlaine, Paul: 18, 19, 42 Vermeer: 63, 116 Veronese, Paolo: 48, 56, 155 Villeparisis, Mme de: 54, 91, 115, 159 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste: 19 Vinteuil: 8, 51, 52, 60-63, 66, 67, 113, 114 Violante: 76, 116 Virgil: 137 Voltaire: 9, 27 Wagner, Richard: 13, 15, 18, 19, 48, 61, 75, 79, 80, 81, 87-89, 95, 117, 167, 168, 177 Walser, Martin: 137 Weil, Jeanne: 11, 32 Whistler, James Abbot McNeill: 26, 31, 98, 99, 157 White, Patrick: 62 Whitman, Walt: 26 Wilde, Oscar: 17, 18, 134, 169-171 Wilhelm II, Kaiser: 169, 170 Will, I.: 21 Wilson, Edmund: 43, 44 Wotton, Lord Henry: 18 Wright, Frank Lloyd: 37 Xenophon: 41 Xerxes: 170 Yeats, William Butler : 43 Zola, Emile: 161 Zweig, Stefan: 179