Parsifal I

Several persons have identified Wagner’s Parsifal as the template for Search. In both a young man engages in an epic quest. We know that Proust first heard the opera after its copyright expired in 1914 (Wagner had forbidden its performance anywhere but at Bayreuth), either in person or by his telephone music service. But the score and libretto would have been available earlier and concert versions were performed across Europe.

I am struck by the number of echos of the opera found in the novel:

Parsifal’s mentor is Gurnemanz. Is this the medieval root of the Guermantes name?

Parsifal makes his entrance with a dead swan over his shoulder that he has shot with his bow. Swann?

The evil Klingsor fills the valley with flower-girls to tempt the knights. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower?

But the clincher is Gurnemantz’ advice to Parsifal as he prepares to search for the spear: “Time here has become space.”

The Stones of Venice

I may be the last one to get the joke here, so excuse me if that is so. Marcel enters the Guermantes courtyard and trips over an uneven paving stone. He is flooded with a happy sensation, one that he quickly traces to standing on the uneven floor of the baptistery of St. Marks in Venice. The joke: John Ruskin, who Proust translated, was the author of The Stones of Venice, a study of Venetian architecture. Proust dedicates this definitive passage on unforced memory to Ruskin.

Revolving the gloomy thoughts which I have just recorded, I had entered the courtyard of the Guermantes mansion and in my absent-minded state I had failed to see a car which was coming towards me; the chauffeur gave a shout and I just had time to step out of the way, but as I moved sharply backwards I tripped against the uneven paving-stones in front of the coach-house. And at the moment when, recovering my balance, I put my foot on a stone which was slightly lower than its neighbor, all my discouragement vanished and in its place was that same happiness which at various epochs of my life had been given to me by the sight of trees which I had thought I recognised in the course of a drive near Balbec, by the sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, by the flavour of a madeleine dipped in tea, and by all those last works of Vinteuil had seemed to me to combine the quintessential character. Just as, at the moment when I tasted the madeleine, all anxiety about the future, all intellectual doubts had disappeared, so now those that a few seconds ago had assailed me on the subject of the reality of my literary gifts, the reality even of literature, were removed as if by magic.

…Every time that I merely repeated this physical movement, I achieved nothing; but if I succeeded, forgetting the Guermantes party, in recapturing what I had felt when I first placed my feet on the ground in this way, again the dazzling and indistinct vision fluttered near me, as if to say: “Seize me as I pass if you can, and try to solve the riddle of happiness which I set you.” and almost at once I recognised the vision: it was Venice, of which my efforts to describe it and the supposed snapshots taken by my memory had never told me anything, but which the sensation which I had once experienced as I stood upon the two uneven stones in the baptistery of St Marks’s had , recurring a moment ago, restored to me complete with all the other sensations linked on that day to that particular sensation, all of which had been waiting in their place–from which with imperious suddenness a chance happening had caused them to emerge–in the series of forgotten days. (VI,255-256)

Cattleyas

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has a painting by Martin Johnson Heade titled Cattleya Orchid, Two Hummingbirds and a Beetle (ca. 1875-1890).

Cattleya Orchid, Two Hummingbirds and a Beetle

She found something ‘quaint’ in the shape of each of her Chinese ornaments, and also in her orchids, the cattleyas especially (these being, with chrysanthemums, her favourite flowers), because they had the supreme merit of not looking in the least like other flowers, but of being made, apparently, out of scraps of silk or satin. “It looks just as though it had been cut out of the lining of my cloak,” she said to Swann, pointing to an orchid, with a shade of respect in her voice for so ‘smart’ a flower, for this distinguished, unexpected sister whom nature had suddenly bestowed upon her, so far removed from her in the scale of existence, and yet so delicate, so refined, so much more worthy than many real women of admission to her drawing-room. As she drew his attention, now to the fiery-tongued dragons painted upon a bowl or stitched upon a fire-screen, now to a fleshy cluster of orchids, now to a dromedary of inlaid silver-work with ruby eyes, which kept company, upon her mantelpiece, with a toad carved in jade, she would pretend now to be shrinking from the ferocity of the monsters or laughing at their absurdity, now blushing at the indecency of the flowers, now carried away by an irresistible desire to run across and kiss the toad and dromedary, calling them ‘darlings.’ 

Proust, Marcel (2004-12-01). Swann’s Way (Kindle Locations 3730-3739). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.

 

She had in her hand a bunch of cattleyas, and Swann could see, beneath the film of lace that covered her head, more of the same flowers fastened to a swansdown plume. She was wearing, under her cloak, a flowing gown of black velvet, caught up on one side so as to reveal a large triangular patch of her white silk skirt, with an ‘insertion,’ also of white silk, in the cleft of her low-necked bodice, in which were fastened a few more cattleyas. She had scarcely recovered from the shock which the sight of Swann had given her, when some obstacle made the horse start to one side. They were thrown forward from their seats; she uttered a cry, and fell back quivering and breathless. “It’s all right,” he assured her, “don’t be frightened.” And he slipped his arm round her shoulder, supporting her body against his own; then went on: “Whatever you do, don’t utter a word; just make a sign, yes or no, or you’ll be out of breath again. You won’t mind if I put the flowers straight on your bodice; the jolt has loosened them. I’m afraid of their dropping out; I’m just going to fasten them a little more securely.”

Proust, Marcel (2004-12-01). Swann’s Way (Kindle Locations 3923-3931). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.

Woolf and Proust on “The Little Phrase”

Virginia Woolf read Proust with a mix of delight and despair, despair over the point of writing when it had already been done so well (see Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Improve Your Life). She eventually paused her reading of Proust and wrote, among other books, To the Lighthouse.  I came across this passage in that novel which has a strong echo of Proust. The use of “little phrase” is the immediate connection, but the surrounding prose seems also to echo Proust’s use of the little phrase to probe Swann’s interiority. But note also how she has let go of Proust, especially in the ethereally shifting point of view. 

This passage is set at the end of the day, while Mrs. Ramsay has a few moments of private time after having tended all day to the needs of her family and guests.

No, she thought, putting together some of the pictures he had cut out— a refrigerator, a mowing machine, a gentleman in evening dress— children never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all the places she had not seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself pushing aside the thick leather curtain of a church in Rome. This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it. They could not stop it, she thought, exulting. There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability. Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles) but as a wedge of darkness. Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke. Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at—that light, for example. And it would lift up on it some little phrase or other which had been lying in her mind like that—”Children don’t forget, children don’t forget”—which she would repeat and begin adding to it, It will end, it will end, she said. It will come, it will come, when suddenly she added, We are in the hands of the Lord.

But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had said it? Not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean. She looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke and it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she alone could search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence that lie, any lie. She praised herself in praising the light, without vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like that light. It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself. There rose, and she looked and looked with her needles suspended, there curled up off the floor of the mind, rose from the lake of one’s being, a mist, a bride to meet her lover.

What brought her to say that: “We are in the hands of the Lord?” she wondered. The insincerity slipping in among the truths roused her, annoyed her. She returned to her knitting again. How could any Lord have made this world? she asked. With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that. She knitted with firm composure, slightly pursing her lips and, without being aware of it, so stiffened and composed the lines of her face in a habit of sternness that when her husband passed, though he was chuckling at the thought that Hume, the philosopher, grown enormously fat, had stuck in a bog, he could not help noting, as he passed, the sternness at the heart of her beauty. It saddened him, and her remoteness pained him, and he felt, as he passed, that he could not protect her, and, when he reached the hedge, he was sad. He could do nothing to help her. He must stand by and watch her. Indeed, the infernal truth was, he made things worse for her. He was irritable—he was touchy. He had lost his temper over the Lighthouse. He looked into the hedge, into its intricacy, its darkness.

Woolf, Virginia (2008-10-24). To the Lighthouse (pp. 45-47). Oak Grove. Kindle Edition.

The Human and the Octopus

Read http://www.thepointmag.com/2011/essays/the-human-and-the-octopus  for an elaboration of this Proust passage:

But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides.

For a contrasting opinion, read http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6474/

Sex Life of La Belle Époque

Paris for Perverts is a vivid account of a modern-day search for remnants of Parisian bordellos of the La Belle Époque. Proust’s favorite gets a mention. Prostitution was banned after WWII, ending an era when at least a few prostitutes could “monetize their erotic assets,” a term I read recently, and rise in society. This article by Tony Perrottet gives a good sense of that.

I can personally attest that a least a few bordellos survived into the late sixties. My good friend, in an attempt to work out some sexual conflicts, dragged me into one such place in Pigalle. The walls were papered in a rich red velvet and a full length mirror was mounted in the ceiling over the bed. The room and bed were small and included an open sink which the ladies made us use beforehand. The four of us shared the little bed and the matter was soon concluded: my closeted friend could not perform and I was nearly as impotent due to the consumption of a large amount of vin rouge ordinaire. Soon after the ladies left the room we both fell sound asleep, lying on our backs with pants down. The next morning the cleaning lady walked into the room and woke us up with a loud scream. The manager rushed into the room and grabbed us both by our members and yanked us wide awake, harassing us all the way to the exit.

The Songs of Reynaldo Hahn

For some reason I have never sought out the music of Reynaldo Hahn until now. Listening to his songs sung by Susan Graham has given me new insight into the “little phrase” and Proust’s appreciation of music. The songs are exquisite. Proust and Hahn had different musical sensibilities; Hahn felt a close kinship to Mozart and Proust to Wagner. But it is easy, especially after reading Swann in Love, to see how the passionate stage of their love affair must have been suffused with and amplified by music. Proust would ask Hahn to play the theme from Saint-Saen’s Sonata for Violin and Piano over and over. He was 22 and Hahn 19 when they became lovers.

Be careful who you are with when you listen to Graham sing these songs.

The Little Phrase

At various times Proust provided different sources for the source of Vinteul’s “little phrase.” The original source, though, must have been the Saint-Saëns Sonata I for piano and violin. Proust would ask his lover Reynaldo Hahn to play the opening movement over and over (Carter, Marcel Proust, 207). Later he grew disenchanted with Saint-Saëns and would sometimes mention César Franck’s Sonata in A Major for piano and violin as a source. Both pieces of music are quite lovely. The only problem is that neither piece has music that lives up to this description:

At first he had appreciated only the material quality of the sounds which those instruments secreted. And it had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the delicate line of the violin-part, slender but robust, compact and commanding, he had suddenly become aware of the mass of the piano-part beginning to emerge in a sort of liquid rippling of sound, multiform but indivisible, smooth yet restless, like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight. (I,294)

Then they were silent; beneath the restless tremolos of the violin part which protected it with their throbbing sostenuto two octaves above it–and as in a mountainous country, behind the seeming immobility of a vertigious waterfall, one descries, two hundred feet below, the tiny form of a woman walking in the valley–the little phrase had just appeared, distant, graceful, protected by the long, gradual unfurling of it transparent, incessant and sonorous curtain. (I,374-375)

When, after that first evening at the Verdurins’, he had had the little phrase played over to him again, and had had sought to disentangle from his confused impressions how it was that, like a perfume or a caress, it swept over and enveloped him, he had observed that it was to the closeness of the intervals between the five notes which composed it and to the constant repetition of two of them that was due that impression of a frigid and withdrawn sweetness; but in reality he know that he was basing this conclusion not upon the phrase itself, but merely upon certain equivalents, substituted (for his mind’s convenience) for the mysterious entity of which he had become aware, before ever he knew the Verdurins, at that earlier party when for the first time he had heard the sonata played. He knew that the very memory of the piano falsified still further the perspective in which he saw the elements of music, that the field open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard (still almost entirely unknown) on which, here and there only, separated by the thick darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have been discovered by a few great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that vase, unfathomed and forbidding night of our soul which we take to be an impenetrable void. Vinteuil had been one of those musicians. (I,496-497)

How beautiful the dialogue which Swann now heard between piano and violin, at the beginning of the last passage! The suppression of human speech, so far from letting fancy reign there uncontrolled (as one might have thought), had eliminated it altogether; never was spoken language so inexorably determined, never had it known questions so pertinent, such irrefutable replies. At first the piano complained alone, like a bird deserted by its mate; the violin heard and answered it, as from a neighbouring tree. It was as at the beginning of th world, as if there were as yet only the two of them on the earth, or rather in this world closed to all the rest, so fashioned by the logic of its creator that in it there should never by any but themselves: the world of this sonata. (I,499-500)

But perhaps to hear music this intensely requires an altered state of mind. Swann’s barren life had eroded his ability to feel deeply. The little phrase changed that and Proust created some of his most startling metaphors to describe Swann’s new musical faculty.

There was a deep repose, a mysterious refreshment for Swann–whose eyes, although delicate interpreters of painting, whose mind, although an acute observer of manners, must bear for ever the indelible imprint of the barrenness of his life–in feeling himself transformed into a creature estranged from humanity, blinded, deprived of his logical faculty, almost a fantastic unicorn, a chimeaera-like creature conscious of world through his hearing alone. And since he sought in the little phrase for a meaning to which his intelligence could not descend, with what a strange frenzy of intoxication did he strip bare his innermost soul of the whole armour of reason and make it pass unattended through the dark filter of sound! (I,336-337)

As though the musicians were not nearly so much playing the little phrase as performing the rites on which it insisted before it would consent to appear, and proceeding to utter the incantations necessary to procure, and to prolong for a few moments, the miracle of its apparition, Swann, who was no more able to see it than if it had belonged to a world of ultra-violet light, and who experienced something like the refreshing sense of a metamorphosis in the momentary blindness with which he was struck as he approached it, Swann felt its presence like that of a protective goddess, a confidante of his love, who, in order to be able to come to him through the crowd and to draw him aside to speak to him, had disguised herself in this sweeping cloak of sound. And as she passed, light, soothing, murmurous as the perfume of a flower, telling him what she had to say, every word of which he closely scanned, regretful to see them fly away so fast, he made involuntarily with his lips the motion of kissing, as it went by him, the harmonious, fleeting form. (I,494)

Eliot vs Flaubert

After having read Search, I believe I am not alone in saying that it is difficult to read Jean Santeuil, despite its moments of brilliance. The themes and characters of the two novels have much in common, but the voice of the earlier novel lacks the singularly distinctive tone of the latter. Reading Robert Frazier’s essay (in Bloom’s Marcel Proust) has allowed me to understand better the nature of that difference. The mature Proustian style could be called his unique synthesis of the realist styles of George Eliot and Gustave Flaubert.

Proust was attracted to Elliot’s style of realism and it is plainly evident in his first novel:

The taste for Dutch seventeenth-century painting is something she shared with Proust, whose essay on Rembrandt emphasizes his solidity, his respect for the physical world, his discovery of beauty in ordinary circumstances. This sublime ordinariness, this tactility in transcendence, he found too in Chardin, the objects in whose rooms seemed to him to conspire in mutual acts of affinity, rendering the mundane timeless.

They are also qualities he thought essential to Eliot. In 1954 a set of transcript notes on her work was published, left behind by Proust at his death. They open: ‘What strikes me in Adam Bede is the painting–attentive, minute, respectful and sympathetic–of the humblest, most industrious life. To keep one’s kitchen clean is an essential duty, an almost religious duty and one full of charm.’ One remembers the kitchen grange at Combray, full of gleaming objects, calmness and industrious peace, a poetry of the domestic. One remembers too, in Jean Santeuil, the night-time range over which the maid Ernestine presides, offered as something to be appreciated ‘because it exists’:

Often at such a moment, opening on tip-toes the kitchen door at the end of a dingy corridor, Jean was rewarded by a vision of the night unexpectedly raised at the far end, as if mysteriously supported by the darkness and the gleaming tiles of the range, like a balcony at the corner of an already dark street lit up by the fading sun. Just above it drifted a pink vaporous cloud, sustained to all appearances over a pan by an invisible bed of steam; and, like sea ripples made diaphanous in the sunset, the quivering exhalation of a simmering casserole was as though shot through with flame. On its broad and shining chest the pot bore a bright impression of the fiery realms beneath, seen by it though invisible to Jean. Her eye steady in the night which with its red constellations had already engulfed her kitchen, Ernestine stood at her post, sagely ruling the fire with her rod of iron, moving the casserole, hither and thither, momentarily prodding with her wooden spoon, replacing the lid of the stove, seeing that all was well. (JS) (45-46)

By the time he writes Search, Proust has come to appreciate Flaubert’s stripping subjectivity and overt moral judgment from the narrative voice, something very different from Eliot’s narrative voice.

The Flaubertian realism he interprets as consisting in stylistic elimination from the sentence of any taint of subjectivity, its reduction to the status of observed fact, leaving the onus of interpretation upon reader. What specifically are eliminated are the personality and views of the author—we never discover directly, for example, what Flaubert thinks of the adultery of Emma Bovary—and the volition of the characters, whose actions are observed without their wished being stated. The characters, whose actions are observed without their wished being stated. The characteristic Flaubertian sentence is thus one in which the physical object, the res, and the externally observed pattern of behavior assume the status of subjects:

Where an action occurs whose various phases of which another writer would extrude from the motive behind them, we get a picture the various parts of which no more betray an intention than if he was describing a sunset. Madame Bovary wishes to warm herself at the fire. Here is how it is described: ‘Madam Bovary (nowhere has it been mentioned that she was cold) approached the fireplace…’ (Contre Saint-Beuve)

For the apprentice Proust there were thus two alternative varieties of literary realism, almost contemporary though products of different linguistic cultures. Both were attractive, and both dependent as much on what they rejected as what they proposed: in Eliot, an ethereality that lost contact with the gritty essence of things; in Flaubert, a subjectivity that proposed the artist as unique observer, the coil of motive and maze of the soul. The single largest difference between them lay in their articulation of ethical judgment, which in Flaubert was held in reserve. There was even for Proust a certain delicious barbarity in this reticence, as with meticulous excision the author’s sensibility edited itself out. Falling short of the impersonal—as the bee-mouth sipped, a certain pollen of subjectivity was left on the facts—the result was none the less a discipline of truthfulness without comment, the neutral imposition of the actual. (47)

Zipporah

Botticelli’s Zipporah fascinated Ruskin as much as it did Swann. In 1874 he spent over two weeks on a watercolor of her from the original in the Sistine Chapel.

John Ruskin: Zipporah

This image appeared as the frontispiece in the 1906 edition of Ruskin’s Collected Works owned by Proust. Cynthia J. Gamble, in Bloom’s Proust, makes a strong case that Ruskin himself is one of the models for the character Swann. The two share what Proust calls an “idolatrous” aesthetics.
Proust on Ruskin:

And at the very moment when he was preaching sincerity he lacked it in himself, not in what he said but in the manner in which he said it. The doctrines he was professing were moral and not aesthetic doctrines, yet he chose them for their beauty. And as he did not want to present them as beautiful but as true, he was obliged to lie to himself concerning the nature of the reasons which had led him to adopt them. (Days of Reading, 30)

Gamble shows how Swann, through a similar type of self-dishonesty, creates a woman he can love from someone not really his type.

Swann’s disappointment, indeed agony, in love is in part due to his manner of conducting his artificially created love-affair. Only when he realizes that he has ceased to be in love with Odette is he able to see her, as he had done at the very beginning of their acquaintance, in a transparent and rational way. Her true feature, her defects to which he had been blind, or which he had assigned to oblivion during his passionate pursuit, become apparent: ‘Odette’s pallid complexion, her too thin cheeks, her drawn features, her tired eyes, all the things which…he had ceased to notice since the early days of their intimacy.’…

Swann reconstructs Odette à la Zėphora and gazes ‘in admiration at the large eyes, the delicate features in which the imperfection of the skin might be surmised, the marvelous locks of hair that fell along the tired cheeks.’ In this extreme form of iconolatry, Swann is overcome by fetishism as Zipporah becomes both a visual representation and a reincarnation of Odette as Swann takes hold of Zipporah-Odette and grasps her close to his heart. In this moment of illusionary physical possession, Swann’s desire for Odette is realized and a kind of complementary mechanism is released: ‘The vague feeling of sympathy which attracts one to a work of art, now that he know the original in flesh and blood of Jethro’s daughter, became a desire which more than compensated, thenceforward, for the desire which Odette’s physical charms had at first failed to inspire in him.’ The Swann looks at the black-and-white reproduction of Botticelli’s Zipporah, the more he believes he is in love with Odette: ‘When he had sat for a long time gazing at the Botticelli, he would think of his own living Botticelli, who seemed even lovelier still, and as he drew towards him the photograph of Zipporah he would imagine that he was holding Odette against his heart.’  (72-73)

That black and white reproduction of Zipporah on Swann’s desk, Gamble surmises, must have been the Ruskin reproduction.