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

d’être percés par une pointe invisible, tandis que le reste de la prunelle réagissait en sécrétant des flots d’azur.

      (I, 125–6)

       I saw in the middle of each of our friend’s blue eyes a little brown nick appear, as though they had been stabbed by some invisible pin-point, while the rest of the pupil reacted by secreting the azure overflow.

      (I, 152)

      Later in ‘Combray’, when the narrator’s own worldly ambition is at stake, his eye undergoes a similar but more pleasurable violence from the eyes of Mme de Guermantes:

       en même temps, sur cette image que le nez proéminent, les yeux perçants, épinglaient dans ma vision (peut-être parce que c’était eux qui l’avaient d’abord atteinte, qui y avaient fait la première encoche, au moment où je n’avais pas encore le temps de songer que la femme qui apparaissait devant moi pouvait être Mme de Guermantes), sur cette image toute récente, inchangeable, j’essayais d’appliquer l’idée: «C’est Mme de Guermantes» sans parvenir qu’à la faire manoeuvrer en face de l’image, comme deux disques séparés par un intervalle.

      (I, 173)

       at the same time, I was endeavouring to apply to this image, which the prominent nose, the piercing eyes pinned down and fixed in my field of vision (perhaps because it was they that had first struck it, that had made the first impression on its surface, before I had had time to wonder whether the woman who thus appeared before me might possibly be Madame de Guermantes), to this fresh and unchanging image, the idea: ‘It’s Madame de Guermantes’; but I succeeded only in making the idea pass between me and the image, as though they were two discs moving in separate planes with a space between.

      (I, 210)

      In the scene with Rachel, Saint-Loup’s eyes record his sudden switches of mood: ‘il était tellement rempli par son indignation contre le danseur, qu’elle venait adhérer exactement à la surface de ses prunelles […] une zone disponible et souple parut dans ses yeux […] ses yeux étincelaient encore de colère’ (II, 479–80; ‘he was so full of his indignation with the dancer that it clung to the very surface of his eyeballs […] a zone of accessibility appeared in his eyes […] his eyes were still blazing with anger’ (III, 204–6)). In such cases as these the eyeball is a transmitter rather than a receiver of information, and a new set of hallucinatory anatomical and physiological features are ascribed to it: the eye may release coloured secretions, emit or receive arrows or pins, contain notches or unsuspected empty zones, and be coated in an adhesive glaze. The windows of the soul and the ‘speaking’ eyes of popular fiction have here been superseded by an entirely reorganised organ of sight. The price to be paid for this varied repertory of more-than-ocular effects, this uncanny ability of the eye to materialise mental states upon its outer surface, is extreme brevity and discontinuity in the messages it emits. For the eye, like any other object of sight, is a moving configuration of planes, volumes and textures, and it has almost no retentive power. Albertine’s eyes – ‘qui […] semblent faits de plusieurs morceaux’ (III, 599; ‘which […] seem to be composed of several pieces’ (V, 96)) – are an unreadable encyclopaedia of fears, impulses, schemes and deceptions, while those of la princesse de Nassau – ‘yeux stellaires, semblables à une horloge astronomique’ (IV, 557; ‘stellar eyes, like an astronomical clock’ (VI, 363)) – are a flickering chronicle of her remembered and half-remembered sexual encounters. This dismanding and reassembly of the visual apparatus is a source of pathos at certain moments in the novel and of creative affirmation at others; the eye is a miniature world that now slips from the perceiver’s grasp, now offers him a new speculative adventure. But in either event, Proust’s account speaks of perception without a core, of daily pattern-making that no higher pattern guides.

      The narrator’s wish to see clearly and to draw reliable inferences from what he sees is often outpaced by other emotional demands. His science fails even as he protests its strong-mindedness and rigour. Some obscure yet powerful drive requires the newly achieved explanation or paradigm to fall apart, to return to the ‘several pieces’ from which it had been made. Science must be present in the book, but without becoming cumulative or developing any significant power of prediction. He wants coherence, and does not want it.

      Such indecision can be intensely disruptive. During his reverie on the cries of Paris in La Prisonnière, for example, the narrator remarks that the local fruit-and-vegetable seller probably knew nothing of the plainsong that her melodious cries resembled. Although Leo Spitzer, in a celebrated essay, has pointed out that her medieval predecessors are indeed likely to have known certain Gregorian cadences well, it is unreasonable to expect a modern street-trader to have any detailed knowledge of medieval musical theory. Yet this is what the narrator seems for a moment to wish when he speaks of her being ignorant of ‘l’antiphonaire et [les] sept tons qui symbolisent, quatre les sciences du quadrivium et trois celles du trivium’ (III, 625; ‘the antiphonary, or of the seven notes that symbolise, four the arts of the quadrivium and three those of the trivium’ (V, 127)). Beneath the seeming condescension of this, an urgent Proustian impulse towards exact measurement is finding expression. The cry itself:

       A la tendresse, à la verduresse

       Artichauts tendres et beaux

       Arti-chauts

       Tender and green,

       Artichokes tender and sweet,

       Ar … tichokes

      is dizzily overdetermined at this point in the novel. Tenderness has begun to retreat from the human to the vegetable world, and artichokes now possess a freshness that the relationship between Albertine and the narrator does not. The intoned phrases rising from the street connect modern Paris to its medieval past, commerce to religious observance, popular song to elevated musical culture, and eating to the arts and sciences of mankind. This is one of many points at which Proust’s text, so richly apparelled in the language-based sciences of the trivium, suddenly becomes aware of the role that the sciences of number and measurement also play in its analytic fabric. His quadrivium is to be found not simply in the scientific imagery of the novel but in the calculating intelligence with which seemingly remote areas of experience are brought into conjunction. But where arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy were, for the Pythagorean tradition, akin to one another as co-equal and mutually confirming manifestations of Number, for Proust no underlying principle firmer than that of analogy unites them. The ‘stellar eyes’ of la princesse de Nassau, like Saint-Loup’s constellated fists, promise not an ultimate congruence between the minute and the vast but an endless journey from one moment of resemblance, and one relativistic act of measurement, to the next. And this journey in turn promises not a philosophical emancipation from the passions but a new way of measuring their force. Speaking of his infatuation with Mme de Guermantes, the narrator recalls: ‘Pour moi ce n’était plus seulement les étoiles et la brise, mais jusqu’aux divisions arithmétiques du temps qui prenaient quelque chose de douloureux et de poétique’ (II, 419; ‘For me it was no longer the stars and the breeze alone, but the arithmetical divisions of time that assumed a dolorous and poetic aspect’ (III, 132)).

      Proust’s scansions often cross vast distances, and move with an assured step between microcosm and macrocosm. They show him to have been a metaphysical wit possessed of a strong liking for physics, and an ‘interdisciplinarist’ beyond the dreams of the modern university. In this passage from Le Temps retrouvé, for example, a future astronomy of social life is sketched:

       si dans ces périodes de vingt ans les conglomérats de coteries se défaisaient et se reformaient selon l’attraction d’astres nouveaux destinés d’ailleurs eux aussi à s’éloigner, puis à reparaître, des cristallisations puis des émiettements suivis de cristallisations nouvelles avaient lieu dans l’âme des êtres.

      (IV, 570)

       If in a period of twenty years […] the conglomerations of social groups had disintegrated and re-formed under the magnetic influence of new stars destined themselves also to fade away and then to reappear, the same sequence of crystallisation followed by dissolution and again by a fresh crystallisation might have been observed to take place within the consciousness of