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

This recreation of the past is a mental automatism which the narrator reportedly merely underwent in his experience of love, but it is one which he takes in hand and magisterially dissects in the elaboration of his text. There is little to be done about a mechanism as powerful as this, apart from rediscovering one’s strength in writing about it. Constructing sentences is already a form of retroactive play for Proust, and constructing sentences like these allows him to create an eerie match between suspended syntax and being in love: both involve an incessant remaking of the past; and both allow, in the words of the apparent paradox on which the first of these quotations ends, retroaction to be carried forward into a ‘free’ future.

      But even if the Proust time-map is extended in this way, to include the backwash of the present into the past as well as the irresistible encroachments of an unquiet past into the onwards flow of present time, a last element in the workaday complexity that Proust’s reader has to cope with is still missing. In living our lives forwards, hurling ourselves headlong into an ever-receding future, we take our reminiscences with us. Sometimes as obliging friends, and sometimes as demons. And these reminiscences have only to be hardened somewhat into a pattern to acquire considerable prefigurative force: they not only accompany later events but can help them to happen. A ‘certain slant of light’, in the words of a great poem by Emily Dickinson, can bring an unanswerable intimation of death into an ordinary winter afternoon. But that same light, made memorable by who knows what conjunction of place, mood and memory, can tell us how to inhabit later afternoons, visited by different rays, differently slanted. A sudden savage word from Albertine, finding its way into an otherwise even-tempered conversation, can bring anxiety and suspicion into the narrator’s later social encounters. An anonymous actress, alive with erotic provocation, can become the very model of the temptress and the tease and begin strangely to determine an apprentice lover’s later choice of partner.

      Templates are being created, and futures foretold, throughout the first two volumes of the novel. The scene of voyeurism at Montjouvain, the episode of the withheld goodnight kiss, the first ecstatic experience of involuntary memory, together with the entire forensic reconstruction in ‘Un Amour de Swann’ of the early relationship between Swann and Odette, are the embryonic forms from which complex later narratives are to spring. In some early episodes of this kind, including the decipherment of Miss Sacripant, Proust uses a special compressed form of dramatic irony. Rather than allow the reader to glimpse a future state of affairs and then oblige him or her to wait patiently for this to be actualised at an appointed later moment, he interconnects two parallel stories and allows one to illuminate the other. Odette as Miss Sacripant prefigures Albertine, just as Swann in the guise of jealous lover prefigures the adult narrator. But by this stage in the development of the plot, Albertine, still only fitfully distinguishable from her companions on the Balbec shore, is already an object of desire. The failed encounter with her occurs within the larger drama of Elstir’s watercolour portrait, between the announcement of its enigma and the discovery of a key. All the materials from which the narrator’s future affair with Albertine is to be fashioned, even down to the tremor of indecision which her sexuality is to prompt and the artifice which she is to employ in constructing an innocuous social persona, are already to hand in this more than prophetic scene. There is no need to wait for the future, for the future is already here.

      Anticipation as manipulated in the ingenious plotting of Proust’s novel enlarges and dramatises a far commoner range of mental activities. We invent futures from residues of the past. When we are not sunk in torpor or blocked by external circumstances, we strive to pre-empt the future rather than have it thrust upon us. We model our future selves on the predecessors we admire. Proust’s narrator is a tireless psychologising commentator on such matters. He sets against his lively account of the ‘open’ or still-to-be-invented future a gloomy picture of the future as biologically or culturally pre-ordained. The individual becomes what he or she already is:

       Les traits de notre visage ne sont guère que des gestes devenus, par l’habitude, définitifs. La nature, comme la catastrophe de Pompéi, comme une métamorphose de nymphe, nous a immobilisés dans le mouvement accoutumé. De même nos intonations contiennent notre philosophie de la vie, ce que la personne se dit à tout moment sur les choses.

      (II, 262)

       The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit has made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph, has arrested us in an accustomed movement. Similarly, our intonation embodies our philosophy of life, what a person invariably says to himself about things.

      (II, 565)

      Excessively strong or pre-emptive anticipation of this kind is in its turn set against the retroactive tricks of the remembering mind: Proust attends minutely to the whorls and vortices that the joint action of these mechanisms produces in the here and now. Whether you are writing a novel, painting a portrait, or living a life from hand to mouth, the task is always to turn the past-and-future-haunted present moment to account and to shake off its air of fatedness. A terrifying powerlessness is never far away. In both directions the exits are closed, and only by a mad wager and an inspired suspension of temporal law can we ever expect them to open again.

      What I have been describing here are time mechanisms that can be observed in miniature in individual sentences and on a grand scale in the unfolding of the novel as a whole. There is perhaps, nevertheless, too much symmetry in this account, and too much regularity in the flow of Proustian time pictured in this way. What about suddenness and surprise? What about all the swerves, short-cuts and ‘transversal threads’ (I, 490; ‘ligne […] transversale’ (I, 400)), as Proust calls them, that create improbable connections within the textual fabric? Time in this novel surely needs to be seized in its zig-zags and pointilliste stipplings as well as in the orderly inter-looping of its alternative zones.

      The later destinies of the ‘Miss Sacripant’ motif are played out in a bewildering network of lateral connections and implied time-frames. Whereas in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the portrait was rapidly stabilised into an emblem, a potent and portable representation of sexual allure, in Le Côté de Guermantes it becomes fluid and fuzzy-edged again. A photograph of the portrait is sent to the narrator by the valet de chambre of his great-uncle Adolphe, who is now dead. The servant had judged this image, and a number of others from his employer’s collection of souvenirs, more likely to appeal to a young man than to older members of the family, and had sent his own son – one Charles Morel – to deliver it:

       Comme j’avais été très étonné de trouver parmi les photographies que m’envoyait son père une du portrait de Miss Sacripant (c’est-à-dire Odette) par Elstir, je dis à Charles Morel, en l’accompagnant jusqu’à la porte cochère: «Je crains que vous ne puissiez me renseigner. Est-ce que mon oncle connaissait beaucoup cette dame? […]»

      (II, 563)

       As I had been greatly surprised to find among the photographs which his father had sent me one of the portrait of Miss Sacripant (otherwise Odette) by Elstir, I said to Charles Morel as I accompanied him to the carriage gateway: ‘I don’t suppose you can tell me, but did my uncle know this lady well? […]’

      (III, 305)

      It is in the course of this episode that the reader is first introduced to Morel, who is to be a major presence in the remainder of the book, and there is more than a hint of prophecy in his being the bearer of the photograph: like Odette herself, and like the figure in Elstir’s watercolour, Morel is sexually ambiguous. Indeed he is Proust’s fullest representation of carefree bisexuality, and it is fitting that he should be given responsibility for the transportation of an icon that knits together his divergent sexual tastes. But the photograph has moved in quite different circles too: it served an aged libertine as a titillating reminder of his adventures in the demi-monde and, as we already know, was Swann’s favourite depiction of his wife. Miss Sacripant, during her momentary reappearance in Le Côté de Guermantes, connects narrative past to narrative future straightforwardly enough, but she also sends echoes racing through Proust’s socio-sexual labyrinth. Her travesti connects her to countless other characters trapped inside an unstoppable masked ball.

      Towards the end of La Prisonnière,