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

here is an early intimation of the ‘glorious lie’ that is art. And once the pursuit of new knowledge has been conceived of as an ethical imperative, lying itself – workaday lying, not the superior mendacities of art – may begin to reveal unsuspected virtues: ‘Le mensonge, le mensonge parfait […] est une des seules choses au monde qui puisse nous ouvrir des perspectives sur du nouveau, sur de l’inconnu, puisse ouvrir en nous des sens endormis pour la contemplation d’univers que nous n’aurions jamais connus’ (III, 721; ‘The lie, the perfect lie […] is one of the few things in the world that can open windows for us on to what is new and unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses for the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known’ (V, 239)). We must be prepared for the possibility that a new science, which is also a science of newness, may bring with it a new morality.

      Closely related to this, there is another form of supererogation towards which the narrator is continually drawn. Those who are in pursuit of pleasure – and especially those whose pleasures are familiarly thought of as perverse, aberrant or anti-social – are themselves pursued by the narrator’s relentless, inquisitive gaze. Sado-masochism, for example, which is discussed and theatricalised in numerous ways, from the Montjouvain episode of ‘Combray’ (I, 157–63; I, 190–98) to the scenes in Jupien’s brothel in Le Temps retrouvé (IV, 388–419; VI, 147–85), provides an exacting test for the moralist’s powers of discrimination. In each of these extended episodes, which together place an elaborate frame around the many plainer accounts of cruel sex that are to be found in the inner volumes, the narrator’s crisp expressions of disapproval free him to enjoy the pleasures of voyeurism guiltlessly. But the achievement of pleasure is no more his main goal than is the defence of rectitude. An ambitious moral experiment is in progress, and the narrator follows a clear experimental principle in conducting it: let my perception of life in, say, Jupien’s establishment be as delicately calibrated as that which I would bring to bear upon any other complex scene of social communication and commerce.

      His experimental results are presented with relish. Charlus, emerging in considerable discomfort from the flagellation chamber, is still able to inspect Jupien’s assembled staff with a discriminating eye and ear:

       Bien que son plaisir fût fini et qu’il n’entrât d’ailleurs que pour donner à Maurice l’argent qu’il lui devait, il dirigeait en cercle sur tous ces jeunes gens réunis un regard tendre et curieux et comptait bien avoir avec chacun le plaisir d’un bonjour tout platonique mais amoureusement prolongé […] Tous semblaient le connaître et M. de Charlus s’arrêtait longuement à chacun, leur parlant ce qu’il croyait leur langage, à la fois par une affectation prétentieuse de couleur locale et aussi par un plaisir sadique de se mêler à une vie crapuleuse.

      (IV, 403–4)

       Although his pleasure was at an end and he had only come in to give Maurice the money which he owed him, he directed at the young men a tender and curious glance which travelled round the whole circle, promising himself with each of them the pleasure of a moment’s chat, platonic but amorously prolonged […] Everybody […] seemed to know him, and M. de Charlus stopped for a long time before each one, talking to them in what he thought was their language, both from a pretentious affectation of local colour and because he got a sadistic pleasure from contact with a life of depravity.

      (VI, 165–6)

      The narrator takes his distance from Charlus, but not too much distance, for he has already described in propria persona and with a similar devotion to piquancy and local colour, the enlarged field of sexual opportunity that the war had created in Paris. Canadians were valued for the charm of their ambiguous accent, but ‘[à] cause de leur jupon et parce que certains rêves lacustres s’associent souvent à de tels désirs, les Ecossais faisaient prime’ (IV, 402; ‘The Scots too, because of their kilts and because dreams of a landscape with lakes are often associated with these desires, were at a premium’ (VI, 164)). But tracing out this spectrum of libidinal intensities is not a task for the mere voluptuary or tourist, for an equally differentiated value-spectrum crosses it at every turn. Although sadomasochistic transactions of the kind in which Jupien specialises can scarcely be thought of as possessing, in themselves, a complex moral content, the larger social world of the brothel can. Indeed its content is presented as strictly – iridescently – continuous with that of ‘society’ itself. In this low-life world the narrator finds again the hypocrisies, fidelities, betrayals and occasional unadvertised acts of philanthropy that are the volatile stuff of salon life, and he also finds ample new material with which to extend his discussion of such topics as lying, self-deception and envy. In the moral as in the epistemological domain, the narrator is a seeker after variety and novelty, and urges himself forward to the moment of completion – when the last possible modulation of the moral life will have become audible. He is not only a pluralising eye, a self constituted from all other selves, but an optimistic surveyor of human conduct – one who expects to discover new notions of virtue and vice at every point of the compass.

      Such dreams of plurality and plenitude were of course common among Proust’s contemporaries. Busoni – to take a strong but relatively neglected example – lamented in his Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music (c. 1911) that so much in the Western musical tradition, from tonality itself to the standard notational system and the mechanics of keyboard instruments, seemed to want to substitute discreteness for continuity and avoid hearing the true harmony of nature: ‘How strictly we divide “consonances” from “dissonances” – in a sphere where no dissonances can possibly exist! … Nature created an infinite gradation – infinite!’ Proust hears the true music of moral judgement and takes the risks appropriate to its pursuit. No act of judging can be final, for the continuous gradations of conduct and character flow on. It is not surprising, therefore, that after an adventure so protracted and so full of risk he should wish to stage an apocalypse in the last pages of his book. One could scarcely imagine a better reward at the end of it all than a single choice to make, a single project to execute, a single self to reassume and an overriding moral value to defend.

      But where does the novel end? With the narrator’s self-discovery, with the death in battle of Saint-Loup, or with the wartime night sky over Paris that each of them contemplates?

       Je lui parlai de la beauté des avions qui montaient dans la nuit. «Et peut-être encore plus de ceux qui descendent, me dit-il. Je reconnais que c’est très beau le moment où ils montent, où ils vont faire constellation, et obéissent en cela à des lois tout aussi précises que celles qui régissent les constellations car ce qui te semble un spectacle est le ralliement des escadrilles, les commandements qu’on leur donne, leur départ en chasse, etc. Mais est-ce que tu n’aimes pas mieux le moment où, définitivement assimilés aux étoiles, ils s’en détachent pour partir en chasse ou rentrer après la berloque, le moment où ils font apocalypse, même les étoiles ne gardant plus leur place? Et ces sirènes, était-ce assez wagnérien, ce qui du reste était bien naturel pour saluer l’arrivée des Allemands, ça faisait très hymne national, avec le Kronprinz et les princesses dans la loge impériale, Wacht am Rhein; c’était à se demander si c’était bien des aviateurs et pas plutôt des Walkyries qui montaient.» Il semblait avoir plaisir à cette assimilation des aviateurs et des Walkyries et l’expliqua d’ailleurs par des raisons purement musicales: «Dame, c’est que la musique des sirènes était d’un Chevauchée! Il faut décidément l’arrivée des Allemands pour qu’on puisse entendre du Wagner à Paris.» […] à certains points de vue la comparaison n’était pas fausse.

      (IV, 337–8)

       I spoke of the beauty of the aeroplanes climbing up into the night. ‘And perhaps they are even more beautiful when they come down,’ he said. ‘I grant that it is a magnificent moment when they climb, when they fly off in constellation, in obedience to laws as precise as those that govern the constellations of the stars – for what seems to you a mere spectacle is the rallying of the squadrons, then the orders they receive, their departure in pursuit, etc. But don’t you prefer the moment, when, just as you have got used to thinking of them as stars, they break away to pursue an enemy or to return to the ground after the all-clear, the moment of apocalypse, when even the stars are hurled from their courses? And then