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

était rené en moi […] languit dans l’observation du présent où les sens ne peuvent la [l’essence des choses] lui apporter, dans la considération d’un passé que l’intelligence lui dessèche, dans l’attente d’un avenir que la volonté construit avec des fragments du présent et du passé auxquels elle retire encore de leur réalité en ne conservant d’eux que ce qui convient à la fin utilitaire, étroitement humaine, qu’elle leur assigne. Mais qu’un bruit, qu’une odeur, déjà entendu ou respirée jadis, le soient de nouveau, à la fois dans le présent et dans le passé, réels sans être actuels, idéaux sans être abstraits, aussitôt l’essence permanente et habituellement cachée des choses se trouve libérée, et 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.

      (IV, 451)

       The being which had been reborn in me [languishes in] the observation of the present, where the senses cannot feed it [the essence of things] with this food […] as it does in the consideration of a past made arid by the intellect or in the anticipation of a future which the will constructs with fragments of the present and the past, fragments whose reality it still further reduces by preserving of them only what is suitable for the utilitarian, narrowly human purpose for which it intends them. But let a noise or a scent, once heard or once smelt, be heard or smelt again in the present and at the same time in the past, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, and immediately the permanent and habitually concealed essence of things is liberated and 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.

      (VI, 224)

      Proust sings of redeemed time in a language that is still restless and unsubdued. In the first of these sentences a familiar music is to be heard: the syntax continues to interconnect past, present and future, to manipulate memory and expectation, to tease out the paradoxes of desire-time and to pursue a broken path towards propositional fullness. We could almost be back, with the narrator, in the Swanns’ drawing room, or on the Cambremers’ yacht, or in the grievance-free mental half-light of the duchesse de Guermantes. But in the second sentence, which speaks of a past and a present ecstatically dissolved into each other and of a future which promises further increments of delight, this music also sounds. Here too the path is broken, and long. Both sentences end well, with their syntactic pattern closed and completed, and both are hungry for a future: beyond utility a new joy remains to be found; beyond the administering of ‘celestial food’ a new life of wakeful and risk-filled animation remains to be explored. Nothing in these closing pages of the novel shrinks away from the exactions of ordinary time, or of ‘embodied time’ as the narrator now calls it (VI, 449; ‘temps incorporé’ (IV, 623)). Indeed the last cadence of the book, its last well-made proposition, is a call back to the unredeemable temporal process which makes writing possible. At the close, closure is most to be resisted.

      There is of course a temporal hierarchy in Proust’s book. The time-patterning that holds the whole novel together is more impressive and does more work than the patterning that holds the individual sentences together, whatever the structural similarities the two orders display. ‘Ordinary time’ is much more ordinary on certain occasions than on others. And there are mountain-tops from which the pains and penalties which beset time-dwellers do seem to disappear. But Proust weaves between levels, distrusts summits, and has a special fondness for the small temporal effects that are to be found within the ‘rank vegetal proliferation’ of a literary text.

III

       Art

       The whole universe takes part in the dancing.

       The Acts of John

      Mary McCarthy once memorably rebelled against the residual cult of ‘art for art’s sake’ in prose fiction by pointing out that novels were often lumpy with undisguised ‘fact’ and could be put to use for all manner of everyday purposes: ‘you can learn how to make strawberry jam from Anna Karenina and how to reap a field and hunt ducks’. For some of Proust’s admirers such an idea will seem impious. They will see in A la recherche du temps perdu a triumph of the aesthetic over the merely useful, and wish to protect Proust’s good name from the taint of commerce or cookery. There is something about the transforming energy of Proust’s style, they will perhaps claim, that belongs unashamedly to high art. They might even murmur, remembering the dithyramb upon which Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (1873) ends, that Proust in his style has achieved the aesthete’s dream par excellence: ‘To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.’ No jam, no ducks.

      Proust’s narrator sees things very differently. Although he is repeatedly drawn back, mothlike, to the Pateresque aesthetic flame, he is also fascinated by art-objects as commodities, and by the changing valuations that are placed upon them as they circulate in social space. When Bergotte dies, his afterlife of literary fame is firmly anchored to the spending power of individual consumers:

       On l’enterra, mais toute la nuit funèbre, aux vitrines éclairées, ses livres, disposés trois par trois, veillaient comme des anges aux ailes éployées et semblaient pour celui qui n’était plus, le symbole de sa résurrection.

      (III, 693)

       They buried him, but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.

      (V, 209)

      In due course, Bergotte’s books may begin to resemble Rilkean angels, winged messengers from a transcendent sphere provisionally called Art, but for the time being they remain caught inside a system of trading arrangements: their angelic look is the product of a window-dresser’s artistry, and has a solid commercial motive behind it. Bergotte is dead, and already immaterially resurrected in the minds of his admirers, but the booksellers are still alive and need to earn a living. Throughout the novel Proust dwells on the socio-economic conditions of artistic production: works of art are prized and have prices, and the mechanisms by which they are bought and sold are for practical purposes quite separate from the labour of hand and brain which produces them. The art-work may have a glorious public career while its producer lives and dies in destitution. The market forces which govern the lives and the posthumous standing of artists operate on a broad front, generically, and have little respect for individual merit or distinctiveness: ‘Comme à la Bourse, quand un mouvement de hausse se produit, tout un compartiment de valeurs en profitent’ (III, 210; ‘As on the Stock Exchange, when a rise occurs, a whole group of securities profit by it’ (IV, 248)).

      Proust’s narrator distinguishes firmly between the use value and the exchange value of artistic commodities, and gives a personal twist to the teachings of classical political economy. Art has use value in so far as it procures delight, joy, intellectual certainty or a general sense of emotional well-being for its consumer or its proprietor, and exchange value when its characteristic products move around in the fickle world of opinion. Individual works are valued highly because they are capable of serving human wants and producing pleasurable sensation, but any moment during which they are successfully used for these purposes is hedged about by stubborn questions of social status and prestige. Art is a weapon in the salon wars. Mme Verdurin enacts rapture for the benefit of her ‘little clan’, drives herself towards the extremes of aesthetic sensitivity which will identify her as a charismatic personage in their eyes, and presents her own artistic experience as a special form of suffering nobly and altruistically borne. Listening to a sonata or a septet is always a social act in Proust, and extravagantly so when Mme Verdurin buries her head in her hands in seeming retreat from her fellow hearers.

      Although this stage management of artistic response runs as a comic leitmotif throughout the novel, Proust extracts a more complex poetry from the rise and fall of entire artistic reputations. ‘Poussin’ or ‘Chopin’