Marcel’s Ode to Mlle Vinteuil’s Friend

Marcel realizes that he shares something with Vinteuil: Mlle Vinteuil’s friend has made them both miserable. And perhaps she is also the key to creativity in each of them. Marcel has just heard Vinteuil’s septet, a posthumous work completed by this same woman.

And I for whom, albeit not so much, perhaps, as for Vinteuil, she had also been, had just been once more this very evening by reawakening my jealousy of Albertine, was to be above all in the future, the cause of so many sufferings, it was thanks to her, in compensation, that I had been able to apprehend the strange summons which I should henceforth never cease to hear, as the promise and proof that there existed something other, realisable no doubt through art, than the nullity that I had found in all my pleasures and in love itself, and that if my life seemed to me so futile, at least it had not yet accomplished everything. (V,350)

And the promise that opens to him may be a new mode of communication, one based on the “unanalysed.”

And, just as certain creatures are the last surviving testimony to a form of life which nature has discarded, I wondered whether music might not be the unique example of what might have been–if the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas had not intervened–the means of communication between souls. It is like a possibility that has come to nothing; humanity has developed along other lines, those of spoken and written language. But this return to the unanalysed was so intoxicating that, on emerging from that paradise, contact with more or less intelligent people seemed to me of an extraordinary insignificance. (V,344)

 

 

Fertilizer for the Mind

Music is the most time-like of the arts, so little wonder that it plays such a major role in this novel. The narrator muses on why it is so hard to appreciate a musical work the first time you hear it.

If one had indeed, as one supposes, received no impression from the first hearing, the second, the third would be equally “first hearings” and there would be no reason why one should understand it any better after the tenth. Probably what is wanting, the  first time, is not comprehension but memory. For our memory, relative to the complexity of the impressions which it has to face while we are listening, is infinitesimal….But that picture gradually takes shape in the memory. (II,140)

Since I was able to enjoy everything that this sonata had to give me only in a succession of hearings, I never possessed it in its entirety: it was like life itself. But, less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us the best of themselves. (II,141)

The time, moreover, that a person requires–as I required in the case of this sonata–to penetrate a work of any depth is merely an epitome, a symbol, one might say, of the year, the centuries even, that must elapse before the public can begin to cherish a masterpiece that is really new….The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It is his work itself that, by fertilising the rare minds capable of understanding it, will make them increase and multiply. (II,142)

Not a bad description of Proust and the reading of his novel.

 

Star to Star

I finally got around to reading Alex Ross’s piece on “fictional music” in The New Yorker (Aug. 24, 2009), where he talks about Proust’s Vinteuil and Mann’s Leverkühn. I could not find the full text of the article on-line but here is a link to a podcast where Ross is interviewed: 

http://www.newyorker.com/online/2009/08/24/090824on_audio_ross

He nominates Fauré’s Piano Quintet in D Minor as the likely source of  Vinteuil’s “little phrase” and you can hear the theme here. (I listened also to several interpretations on YouTube by student groups which I liked.)

Ross, in referring to the long passage on music in The Captive (V, 335), notes how little Proust thinks of biography as a source of understanding a work of art. Vinteuil, who Ross points out has no first name, is known by the narrator as ”so timid and sad.” Yet he “had been capable–when he had to choose a timbre and to blend another with it–of an audacity, and in the full sense of the word a felicity, as to which the hearing of any of his works left one in no doubt.” I believe Proust is speaking for himself (as well as the Narrator) as someone to be judged by his art and not by the impressions he has given others of being a social butterfly, charming but inconsequential. Those who know the artist only through social interactions in fact know next to nothing about the person. Proust revisits this theme several more times when he dismisses the value of time spent cultivating friendships. While this may disappoint his friends, they are more than recompensed by the deeper connections they may form if they attend to his art.

A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for it we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to  see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star. (V, 343)