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

the narrator’s prospective, forward-flung imaginings back towards the needs, the injuries and the blighted pleasures of infancy. Desire keeps on repeating itself. It nags and needles, and will not let the past go. And Proust’s lengthy book, even while it glitters with fantasy and invention, insists upon this bounded and fixated quality: a desolate pattern of recurrence, a sense of pre-ordained pain and dissatisfaction, governs the procession of its narrative episodes. All love affairs fail, and fail in the same way. All journeys end in disappointment. All satisfactions are too little and too late. Death picks off the narrator’s admired mentors one by one, rekindling and reinforcing his childhood feelings of abandonment.

      In what follows, then, my travels will take me back and forth inside Proust’s novel rather than see me shuttling between my home and Cabourg, or between Cabourg and Balbec. As I travel I shall seek to recreate, in schematic and accessible form, the characteristic rhythms of the novel’s unfolding. Proust’s great work has ‘big’ themes, and its path-breaking author has one very old-fashioned way of handling these: his characters will announce a topic, warm to it, and hold forth upon it recklessly. I have chosen a cluster of these topics as my chapter-titles, not so much because Proust’s characters have wise things to say about time, sex or death, although they often have, as because the ebb and flow of Proust’s attention can be clearly observed against these featureless horizons. Such matters, singled out, have the further advantage of allowing us to look beneath the large tidal movements of the book and to rediscover the cross-currents and counter-rhythms that mark the individual Proust paragraph, and are the hallmark indeed of a speculative style that remains sui generis.

      Let me not, however, sound too high-minded about the reflections gathered here. I do still long to feel the sand and shingle of the Cabourg shore between my toes, and I have not entirely given up hope of seeing the little band materialised before me as I wander there in the cold, Northern spray. But in the meantime Proust’s gritty, breezy and salty book has many wonders, and to these I now turn.

I

       Self

       mi kirjavaista tähiksi taivaalle,

       ne tahiksi taivaalle.

       Kalevala

       All that in the egg was mottled

       Now became the stars in heaven.

      The narrator of A la recherche du temps perdu is a splendid example of the human type that Jane Austen called ‘the imaginist’. This was her word for the person who spent too much time fantasising and seemed always to be in flight from real events and binding obligations. Yet where Emma Woodhouse and Catherine Morland are gradually cured of their imaginative excesses and wishful misperceptions, Proust’s character is presented not simply as an untreatable case, but as one whose power of fantasy, even when debilitating, is still essentially a strength. And while Austen’s imaginists devote themselves to personal relationships, paying special attention to matters of rank, taste and marriageability, Proust’s narrator returns tirelessly to the structure, texture, density, consistency and continuity of the isolated human self. He imagines selfhood lost, and found, and again lost.

      His questions about personal identity sound strict and soluble when they are formulated in philosophical or psychological terms: is the self one or many, concentrated or dispersed, continuous or fragmented, a rule-governed psycho-physical entity with its own integrative capacities or a side-effect of natural language in daily use? But for all his fluency in the handling of such concepts, the narrator’s ruling passion is for images, or for abstractions that have an exposed nerve of imagery running through them. He looks to nature in his search for figurative representations of selfhood, and has a special fondness for the planets and stars. Albertine is a nebula, the little band a constellation; the face of an actress seen in close-up is a Milky Way, and family relationships are the scattered segments of a single exploding star. Whether he looks outwards to his sexual partner or the social group or inwards to the tissue of his own memories and desires, his characteristic task is that of ‘modelling nebulae’ (III, 874; V, 425). All his heavenly configurations are poised undecidably between coherence and dispersal, just as the real nebulae themselves may contain powerful intimations of structure (here a crab, there a spiral) while continuing to impress us by their sheer nebulosity. Problems posed in these terms can have and need have no solutions. The Proustian imaginist leads a nomadic life. He is at home inside his comet-tail of images.

      Modern computational scholarship has revealed that the word moi, as noun or pronoun (‘self’, ‘me’ or ‘myself’), occurs on average 1.1996 times per page in Proust’s novel. Few readers, of course, will be surprised by this scrap of statistical information, for the novel is still widely thought of as being concerned above all else with the splendours and miseries of the self-absorbed human individual. Even those who dislike the notion of ‘self’, and think of it as the sign of a dangerously unhistorical attitude to the study of the human subject, are likely to grant Proust’s vast and intricate discussion of the notion an important historical place: the modern, secular, psychological moi, launched upon its spectacular European career in the sixteenth century, reaches in Proust a moment of extraordinary power and authority. For a moment, indeed, the human self and its vicissitudes become the essential subject-matter of art. And even if Proust’s novel, in its insistent and sometimes deranged talk of the moi, contains the seeds of the self’s decay, his achievement is none the less a splendid one. The notion of self may seem antiquated, and it may often be used to draw attention away from the interpersonal and social worlds in which the human sense of personal identity is constructed, but in Proust’s account the notion is flexible, hospitable to experience, thoroughly immersed in society, and obdurately problematic.

      The narrator wonders at the beginning of Le Côté de Guermantes how the human personality acquires its improbable power of endurance. How is it, for example, that, having once fallen into deep sleep, one is able to become again the individual one once was? Why does one not wake up in the morning as someone else?

       On appelle cela un sommeil de plomb, il semble qu’on soit devenu, soi-même, pendant quelques instants après qu’un tel sommeil a cessé, un simple bonhomme de plomb. On n’est plus personne. Comment, alors, cherchant sa pensée, sa personnalité comme on cherche un objet perdu, finit-on par retrouver son propre moi plutôt que tout autre? Pourquoi, quand on se remet à penser, n’est-ce pas alors une autre personnalité que l’antérieure qui s’incarne en nous? On ne voit pas ce qui dicte le choix et pourquoi, entre les millions d’êtres humains qu’on pourrait être, c’est sur celui qu’on était la veille qu’on met juste la main.

      (II, 387)

       We call that a leaden sleep, and it seems as though, even for a few moments after such a sleep is ended, one has oneself become a simple figure of lead. One is no longer a person. How then, searching for one’s thoughts, one’s personality, as one searches for a lost object, does one recover one’s own self rather than any other? Why, when one begins again to think, is it not a personality other than the previous one that becomes incarnate in one? One fails to see what dictates the choice, or why, among the millions of human beings one might be, it is on the being one was the day before that unerringly one lays one’s hand.

      (III, 93–4)

      Seeking the self as one might seek a lost object is here submitted to one limitation only, but that is a daunting one. The object cannot not be found. Still baffled by sleep, still dispersed and nebulous, the newly awake individual homes in upon, and efficiently reassumes, his accustomed form. He cannot do otherwise. Descriptions of this kind are not unfamiliar in Proust’s book, and they offer an optimistic allegory of its overall ontological project. After battlement, understanding; after dispersal, concentration and self-knowledge.

      Le Temps retrouvé fulfils the promise of passages like this. It sets forth a tableau vivant in which the evanescent multitude of the narrator’s previous selves at last finds anchorage; in which every lost object is found; in which the conflicting dispositions of the human individual, and the endless varieties and