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

d’une finesse de grésil et dont le frivole plissage avait des clochettes comme celles du muguet, s’étoilait des clairs reflets de la chambre, aigus eux-mêmes et finement nuancés comme des bouquets de fleurs qui auraient broché le linge. Et le velours du veston, brillant et nacré, avait çà et là quelque chose de hérissé, de déchiqueté et de velu qui faisait penser à l’ebouriffage des œillets dans le vase. Mais surtout on sentait qu’Elstir, insoucieux de ce que pouvait présenter d’immoral ce travesti d’une jeune actrice pour qui le talent avec lequel elle jouerait son rôle avait sans doute moins d’importance que l’attrait irritant qu’elle allait offrir aux sens blasés ou dépravés de certains spectateurs, s’était au contraire attaché à ces traits d’ambiguïté comme à un élément esthétique qui valait d’être mis en relief et qu’il avait tout fait pour souligner.

      (II, 204–5)

       The whiteness of the shirt-front, as fine as soft hail, with its gay pleats gathered into little bells like lilies of the valley, was spangled with bright gleams of light from the room, themselves sharply etched and subtly shaded as if they were flowers stitched into the linen. And the velvet of the jacket, with its brilliant sheen, had something rough, frayed and shaggy about it here and there that recalled the crumpled brightness of the carnations in the vase. But above all one felt that Elstir, heedless of any impression of immorality that might be given by this transvestite costume worn by a young actress for whom the talent she would bring to the role was doubtless of less importance than the titillation she would offer to the jaded or depraved senses of some of her audience, had on the contrary fastened upon this equivocal aspect as on an aesthetic element which deserved to be brought into prominence, and which he had done everything in his power to emphasise.

      (II, 495)

      Elstir was particularly attracted, the narrator suggests, by the undecidability of this girl-boy, but he has prepared the way for the exquisite indecision that his figure provokes in the spectator by sexualising the entire space of his picture. Light itself has two separate pictorial roles. On the one hand it is a uniform radiance emanating from objects, or an elucidating flow of energy passing across their surface and removing disparities as it goes. On the other hand, here and on numerous occasions elsewhere in the novel, light plays upon surfaces and inscribes them with its momentary messages: the outside world survives into the domestic interior as a series of ghostly reflections; a wide roomful of light is concentrated into a pattern of dancing flecks upon a bodice. Then again, Elstir’s brush has located tangles and raggedness where other artists, less daring and less ingenious in their sexual explorations, would have settled for a simple sheen: inside the close-cropped fabric of a jacket, or between smoothly enfolded carnation-petals, secret places with an unkempt covering of hair have been found. The figure of ‘Miss Sacripant’, so exhaustively boyish and girlish at the same time, and by way of the same sequence of brushstrokes, reclaims for the human body and for the arts of couture, an eroticism that is everywhere anyway, as readily available as light and air in the natural world.

      Proust turns an imaginary painting into a tableau vivant; the central image and its accompanying furniture are motionless yet constantly reanimated by the narrator’s observing eye. He tells stories as he looks. He free-associates and, from a purely iconographical viewpoint, behaves badly: the art object is casually folded back into the ‘ordinary life’ of the narrator’s nascent sexual desires, and then abandoned with equal nonchalance for a semi-theoretical reverie on questions of artistic method. Yet what is remarkable in all this seeming flouting of the rules – whether of story-telling, or art history, or inferential argument – is that something strict and rule-governed is still going on sentence by sentence. Distinctions have to be clear if a coherent play of ambiguity, as distinct from mere semantic havering or fuss, is to be sustained. The machinery for making such distinctions is to be found in the bifurcating syntax of the long Proustian sentence, and it is the peculiar property of these sentences, placed end to end and seemingly so autonomous, to organise long stretches of text around relatively few underlying structural schemes. The sentences do many unruly things, of course: their syntax ramifies and proliferates; their meanings are sometimes amplified and embellished to the point of distraction. Yet they studiously repeat, almost in the manner of intellectual home truths, certain characteristic patterns of thought. Antithetical qualities are held against each other in equipoise. The alternative potentialities of a single situation are expounded. Surprising details yield large insights, and large insights, once they have been naturalised, seize upon the further surprising details they require to remain credible. Expectations are now confounded and now confirmed. Attention is dispersed and reconcentrated; increasing speed of perception leads to a plateau of immobilised absorption. And so forth.

      The typical thought-shapes that Proust’s long sentences endlessly mobilise provide secure bridges between the markedly different kinds of writing that his novel yokes together. By the time we reach the following passage, for example, the secret of Miss Sacripant’s identity and of her former relations with Elstir have been revealed, and reflections on the perceptual rather than the sexual dealings between artist and model are apparently in order:

       Mais d’ailleurs le portrait eût-il été, non pas antérieur, comme la photographie préférée de Swann, à la systématisation des traits d’Odette en un type nouveau, majestueux et charmant, mais postérieur, qu’il eût suffi de la vision d’Elstir pour désorganiser ce type. 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. Toute cette harmonie factice que la femme a imposée à ses traits et dont chaque jour avant de sortir elle surveille la persistance dans sa glace, chargeant l’inclinaison du chapeau, le lissage des cheveux, l’enjouement du regard, d’en assurer la continuité, cette harmonie, le coup d’œil du grand peintre la détruit en une seconde, et à sa place il fait un regroupement des traits de la femme, de manière à donner satisfaction à un certain idéal féminin et pictural qu’il porte en lui.

      (II, 216)

       But in any case, even if the portrait had been, not anterior, like Swann’s favourite photograph, to the systematisation of Odette’s features into a new type, majestic and charming, but subsequent to it, Elstir’s vision would have sufficed to discompose that type. 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. All that artificial harmony which a woman has succeeded in imposing upon her features, the maintenance of which she oversees in her mirror every day before going out, relying on the angle of her hat, the smoothness of her hair, the vivacity of her expression, to ensure its continuity, that harmony the keen eye of the great painter instantly destroys, substituting for it a rearrangement of the woman’s features such as will satisfy a certain pictorial ideal of femininity which he carries in his head.

      (II, 509)

      Artist and model are both masters of artifice, but where the model’s first move is to quell the disorder of her past conduct and present appearance by constructing a smooth social persona, the artist’s is to introduce disorder into the unreally tranquillised scene offered by the model’s face, hair and clothes. His aggression, however, comes not from a simple preference for the wild over the tame, or for energy over repose, but from a wish to install on the canvas a smooth construction of his own. One fabrication must be dismantled and cleared away to make room for another, and the newcomer is still more obsessionally preserved from ruin than the original: where the woman simply checks herself in the mirror to make sure that each effect of art is in place, the artist, we are soon to be told, pursues his ‘pictorial ideal of femininity’ with crazed consistency from one model to the next.

      On the face of it, this passage simply moves discussion of the artist’s passions from the sensuous to the conceptual plane and begins to speak of new things. We now read of systematisation, dissociation, harmony and continuity where before we were offered velvet, mother-of-pearl, brisdes and tousled heads. But the relation between the two paragraphs is in fact much closer than their divergences of diction would suggest. The second remembers and reinflects exactly the interplay between orderliness and an exciting, irruptive disorder that had given the