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

one occasion to the next. The special virtuosity that Proust ascribes to his narrator allows him to begin his own thinking with hair and prickles, to pursue it with cognitive concepts and to give both dimensions the same underlying structure of articulate hesitation. Inside the sentence we are currently reading earlier sentences continue to sound. Present reading time is haunted by reading times past.

      Two new features of Proust’s temporality begin to emerge, then, when we look beyond the retrospective and prospective dispositions of the individual complex sentence. First, within paragraphs, the propulsive energy of the writing, the living sense of futurity that drives the narration on, comes from an astonishing power of recapitulation. An ambiguity in sexual identity refashions earlier ambiguous relations – between, say, light that shines and light that dances, or between smooth and rough in the painterly representation of fabrics. The way forward into a clear new future always involves revisiting the past. Secondly, within extended episodes, continuities of this sort are at work even when the narration insists upon irreversible change. Uncovering Elstir’s secret, or meeting the little band face to face for the first time, changes for ever the way the world looks. The whole map has to be redrawn. But the text carries along, from the before of unknowing into the afterwards of knowledge, not just a lively memory of key events and their affective colouring but the imprint of mental structures that have already proved themselves and can be expected to see active service again. The appetite to know survives the moment of its own satiation, and the instruments by which the world is made intelligible, far from being thrown away after use, remain importunately in place and demand further exercise. Whatever the ‘open’ future holds, its broad contours have already been foretold.

      Yet when the large-scale temporal patterning of Proust’s text is described solely in these terms an important quality is still missing from the overall picture. For although recapitulation and recurrence give the narrative a range of captivating refrains – here in La Prisonnière are the tribulations of jealousy, as acute now, in the narrator’s manhood, as they were before his birth, and here in Albertine disparue is Legrandin being Legrandin, unchanged after all these years and pages – the past is not always treated as kindly as this, and simply revisited or revived at the narrator’s leisure. Retroaction rather than simple retrospection sometimes occurs. The past is not just subjected to an indefinite process of reinterpretation, but can be materially altered by the desiring intelligence of the narrator: armed with new information and switching the direction of his gaze, he can give the past new contents. That Miss Sacripant should be Odette rather than an anonymous actress for ever lost behind the name of a stage character, that she should be Odette rather than a fantasy figure in one of Elstir’s youthful caprices, changes the way the light had fallen, moments ago, in Elstir’s studio. In the wake of the narrator’s discovery, new sexual predilections spring into being for Elstir, Swann, and Odette herself, and a new element is added to the already troubled prehistory of the Swann-Odette marriage. A catalytic reaction spreads backwards from the very recent past of the narrator himself into the barely recoverable recesses of other people’s lives. All is altered.

      We rewrite the history of our lives from moment to moment, of course, even those of us who cling steadfastly to an ‘official’ autobiography, and our retroactive inventions are for the most part tiny and unremarkable. They are certainly not the stuff of which great literary plots are made. Proust turns a banal psychological mechanism into a major source of dramatic interest and energy, however, by concentrating the attention of his narrator on only a limited number of cases and by giving large-scale structural importance only to those cases involving the sexuality of his characters. The most celebrated of these is perhaps the episode of the ‘lady in pink’, seen briefly by the narrator in the home of his great-uncle Adolphe in the early pages of the novel (I, 75; I, 89) and still continuing to fascinate him at the very end (IV, 607; VI, 427). The ‘lady in pink’, like Miss Sacripant, is Odette during the heyday of her career as a courtesan, but the unveiling of her identity takes an inordinately long time, during which the narrator reveals to the reader what his earlier, narrated self still does not know. A respectable woman has had an enticingly disreputable past, and knowing this, when he eventually does know it, changes the adult narrator’s childhood, especially as Odette’s sexual magnetism had played upon a member of his otherwise harmonious and upright family circle.

      Much more remarkable, however, is the case of Saint-Loup’s homosexuality, which is first intimated in gossip, and then firmly attested as fact, at the end of Albertine disparue (IV, 241; V, 762). As we saw in the preceding chapter, this discovery prompts in the narrator an elegy to lost friendship – built on the bizarre assumption that friends who come out or are ‘outed’ are automatically lost – and a protracted examination, cog by cog, of the machinery of retroactive remembering. So many aspects of Saint-Loup’s past behaviour that had previously seemed obscure now make a familiar and dispiriting kind of sense. His relationship with Rachel in particular is summoned up as a procession of episodes all demanding to be reconstrued. The evidence was all there long ago, but the narrator had no eyes with which to see it. Once the knowledge is out that Saint-Loup is ‘comme ça’, he, Rachel, and the narrator himself take up their positions in a new narrative sequence, and the switching of the narrator’s emotional investments from an old story to a new is a hugely laborious and painful affair.

      Retroaction is not only a feature of Proust’s sentences and of his plot, but serves also to characterise one aspect of the narrator’s personality: his combined strength and vulnerability. At certain watershed moments in the novel he is withheld from decision-making and from action; his personal history seems to rewrite itself spontaneously, and to turn him into the plaything of an inscrutable impersonal force. This can happen benignly, when a new access of happiness removes pain and doubt from the remembered past, as in this passage, which contains a perfect dictionary illustration of the unusual intransitive verb rétroagir (‘to retroact’) in use:

       la pensée ne peut même pas reconstituer l’état ancien pour le confronter au nouveau, car elle n’a plus le champ libre: la connaissance que nous avons faite, le souvenir des premières minutes inespérées, les propos que nous avons entendus, sont là qui obstruent l’entrée de notre conscience et commandent beaucoup plus les issues de notre mémoire que celles de notre imagination, ils rétroagissent davantage sur notre passé que nous ne sommes plus maîtres de voir sans tenir compte d’eux, que sur la forme, restée libre, de notre avenir.

      (I, 528)

       our thoughts cannot even reconstruct the old state in order to compare it with the new, for it has no longer a clear field: the acquaintance we have made, the memory of those first, unhoped-for moments, the talk we have heard, are there now to block the passage of our consciousness, and as they control the outlets of our memory far more than those of our imagination, they react more forcibly upon our past, which we are no longer able to visualise without taking them into account, than upon the form, still unshaped, of our future.

      (II, 128)

      Or it can happen in the manner of a nightmare, when ever more pretexts for pain begin to assail the jealous mind:

       On n’a pas besoin d’être deux, il suffit d’être seul dans sa chambre à penser pour que de nouvelles trahisons de votre maîtresse se produisent, fût-elle morte. Aussi il ne faut pas ne redouter dans l’amour, comme dans la vie habituelle, que l’avenir, mais même le passé qui ne se réalise pour nous souvent qu’après l’avenir, et nous ne parlons pas seulement du passé que nous apprenons après coup, mais de celui que nous avons conservé depuis longtemps en nous et que tout d’un coup nous apprenons à lire.

      (III, 595)

       There is no need for there to be two of you, it is enough to be alone in your room, thinking, for fresh betrayals by your mistress to come to light, even if she is dead. And so we ought not to fear in love, as in everyday life, the future alone, but even the past, which often comes to life for us only when the future has come and gone – and not only the past which we discover after the event but the past which we have long kept stored within ourselves and suddenly learn how to interpret.

      (V, 91)

      What these passages have in common, the one taken from A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs and involving Gilberte and the other from La