Metaphors and Images

Chernowitz recognizes Proust’s frequent use of paintings in his metaphors.

We must remember that Proust is opposed to merely “describing” objects: it is his “impressions” he wished to convey, since for him an abstract thought is less valuable, less profound than a truth or an image derived from one’s impressions. Is there a better syntactical formula than the simile to express the component parts of an impression, that is, the relation of sensations and memories, or, as Proust defines reality, “un certain rapport entre ces sensations et ces souvenirs qui nous entourent simultanément”? Proust’s search for his impressions and their recapture in literary imagery will therefore proceed by juxtaposing in an analogical relation the sensations of the present with the memories of the past. Thanks to comparison, these elements from different periods of time are harmonized in the sentence almost simultaneously, just like notes in a broken chord.

“…and the life of Odette at all other times, since he knew nothing of it, appeared to him upon a neutral and colorless background, like those sheets of sketches by Watteau upon which one sees, here and there, in every corner and in all directions, traced in three colors and upon the buff paper, innumerable smiles.” (130)

Watteau Sketch of Women’s Faces

Natural Metaphor

An academic writer, Lois Marie Jaeck, has given me a new insight into the Proustian metaphor. Here is part of Proust’s famous declaration on metaphor:

An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates, and what we call reality is a certain connexion between these immediate sensations and the memories which envelop us simultaneously with them–a connexion that is suppressed in a simple cinematographic vision, which just because it professes to confine itself to the truth in fact departs widely from it–a unique connexion which the writer has to rediscover in order to link for ever in his phrase the two sets of phenomena which reality joins together. (VI,289)

Jaeck comments:

In this key passage, Proust describes metaphor as a duplication or re-presentation of reality. He does not refer to an external reality or one readily perceived by our sense, but to an internal, essential reality that constitutes the inexpressible connection between apparently dissimilar phenomena, which allows us to apprehend intuitively their innate similarity, even though this common factor eludes expression through logic, intelligence, or ordinary language. (17)

 Proust does not declare in a preface that one discovers oneself through metaphor, but he does write a seven-volume book about a man who did just that: he discovers his true self–his vocation to be a writer–at the moment that his three experiences of involuntary memory (classifiable as natural metaphors) led him to an awareness of the metaphorical process. (16)

Metaphor gives rise to a field of signification that originates neither from one word nor the other but from an element common to both, which is beyond discourse and reason, in the realm of the inexpressible. (20)

This capacity of metaphor to provide unmediated understanding is what provokes the intense pleasure the narrator feels when experiencing a “natural metaphor.”

Having discerned precisely why the three ‘intimation’ experiences gave him the same inexplicable happiness (they fed the being in him that could nourish itself only on the essence of things), the narrator  proceeds to investigate other phenomena which produced an effect similar to that engendered by his experiences of involuntary memory. (21)

 And the writer emerges.

Bergotte’s Organ

When the narrator gives an aesthetic judgement, its total lack of irony signals that this view is also that of the author. Here Bergotte is redeemed and in a way that may be read as Proust’s apologia for his writing style. At first Bergotte’s speech seems annoyingly mannered.

 I understood then the impression that M. de Norpois had formed of him. He had indeed a peculiar “organ”; there is nothing that so alters the material qualities of the voice as the presence of thought behind what is being said: the resonance of the diphthongs, the energy of the labials are profoundly affected, as is the diction. (II,169)

More than intelligence, Marcel hears in his speech something of the brilliance of his writing.

So it is with all real writers: the beauty of their sentences is as unforeseeable as is that of a woman whom we have never seen; it is creative, because it is applied to an external object which they have thought of–as opposed to thinking about themselves–and to which they have not yet given expression….Moreover the quality, always rare and new, of what he wrote was expressed in his conversation by so subtle a manner of approaching a question, ignoring every aspect of it that was already familiar, that he appeared to be seizing hold of an unimportant detail, to be off the point, to be indulging in paradox, so that his ideas seemed as often as not to be confused, for each of us sees clarity only in those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own. Besides, as all novelty depends upon the prior elimination of the stereotyped attitude to which we had grown accustomed, and which seemed to us to be reality itself, any new form of conversation, like all original painting and music, must always appear complicated and exhausting. It is based on figures of speech with which we are not familiar, the speaker appears to us to be talking entirely in metaphors; and this wearies us, and gives us the impression of a want of truth. (II,171)

Another fine characterization of reading Proust.