Out of Character

The long passage on the nature of art is certainly didactic, but also much more graceful than similar such passages by Tolstoy and Mann. The voice is nominally that of Marcel/narrator, but the author’s voice is dominant. For instance, consider this statement on the bearing of real-life people to characters in the novel:

 By such tones of voice, such variations in the physiognomy, seen perhaps in his earliest childhood, has the life of other people been represented for him and when, later, he becomes a writer, it is from these observations that he composes his human figures, grafting on to a movement of the shoulders common to a number of people–a movement as truthfully delineated as though it had been recorded in an anatomist’s note-book, though the truth which he uses it to express is of a psychological order–a movement of the neck made by someone else, each of many individuals having posed for a moment as his model. (VI,306)

But the novel we are reading is in the form of a memoir, where the lead character learns from his experiences with the people of his life how to become a writer, so the characters cannot be composites of others. Unless, that is, this is Proust, the author, having his say. At the same time, nonetheless, it is a warning not to look for the author and his friends in this novel.

Robert Saint-Loup RIP

When Schiller translated Macbeth into German, he dropped all the comic scenes, deeming them unworthy of a high tragedy. Had Schiller had the opportunity to translate Proust’s account of the death of Saint-Loup, I’m sure he would have cut about half, for it is truly Shakespearean in its mix of the high and low, tragedy and comedy.

The scene may actually be said to begin back at the brothel, where Marcel glimpses a figure he suspects is Saint-Loup rushing out the door, so rushed that he drops his prized croix de guerre. When Marcel finally arrives home after his adventures with Charlus, Francoise reports that Saint-Loup had stopped in, looking for his missing medal. What follows is a long comic passage featuring Francoise and the butler and their reflections on the war and assaults on the French language.

“Heavens above, Mother of God,” cried Francoise, “aren’t they satisfied to have conquered poor Belgium? She suffered enough, that one, at the time of her innovation.”

“I cannot understand how everybody can be so stupid. You will see, Francoise, they are preparing a new attack with wider scoop than all the others.”

…though he had once been a gardener at Combray and was a mere butler, he was nevertheless a good Frenchman according to the rule of Saint-Andre-des-Champs and possessed, by virtue of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the right to use the pronunciation “scoop” in full independence and not to let himself be dictated to on a point which formed no part of his service and upon which in consequence, since the Revolution had made us all equals, he need listen to nobody. (VI,219-220)

A curious interlude follows, where the third “I” of the novel, the author (after the narrator and Marcel) speaks. He delivers a speech on true patriotism, illustrated by an account of a fictional family.

In this book in which there is not a single incident which is not fictitious, not a single character who is a real person in disguise, in which everything has been invented by me in accordance with the requirements of my theme, I owe it to the credit of my country to say that only the millionaire cousins of Francoise…are real people who exist. (VI,225)

This is Proust’s transition from the preceding comic pages to the announcement of the death of Saint-Loup, the most patriotic, brave character in the novel. Marcel is flooded with memories of his friend.

For several days I remained shut up in my room, thinking of him. I recalled his arrival the first time at Balbec, when, in an almost white suit, with his eyes greenish and mobile like the waves, he had crossed the hall adjoining the great dining-room whose windows gave on the to the sea. (VI,227)

The narrative focus continues this roving path. Next we return to Francoise and her elaborate performance of grief. Then Marcel reflects again on Robert, this time remarking on his character, flawed though it might be. The Duchessse de Guermantes’s genuine grief is acknowledged, though not without placing it in context.

But then when I recall all the little malicious utterances, all the ill-natured refusals to help each other which this friendship had not excluded, I cannot help reflecting that in society a great friendship does not amount to much. (VI,234)

In the final passage of this scene, we read a little story featuring Morel and a fresh example of his vile behavior, yet who seems to be indirectly redeemed by Saint-Loup when he is sent to the front lines and fights bravely.

This passage on the death of Saint-Loup cannot easily be defined as tragic or comic. It is quintessential Proust, a composition that circles a central theme, developing it through many sets of eyes and multiple emotional and psychological levels.

Sentenced by Proust

Why does Proust write in such long sentences? Aren’t they too long to keep their structure in our awareness? I don’t have answers to these questions. All I can do is take examples of long sentences, look at them more closely than we might when reading the novel and then seek to draw conclusions.

M. Verdurin has just died. Nowhere to this point in the novel have we seen him portrayed very sympathetically. In this passage we see him in a new way, through the eyes of the mature Elstir, the painter.

More and more he was inclined to believe materialistically that a not inconsiderable part of beauty is inherent in objects, and just as, at the beginning, he had adored in Mme Elstir the archetype of that rather heavy beauty which he had pursued and caressed in his paintings and in his tapestries, so now in the death of M. Verdurin he saw the disappearance of one of the last relics of the social framework, the perishable framework—as swift to crumble away as the very fashions in clothes which form part of it – which supports an art and certifies its authenticity, and he was as saddened and distressed by this event as a painter of fétes galantes might have been by the Revolution which destroyed the elegances of the eighteenth century, or Renoir by the disappearance of Montmartre and the Moulin de la Galette; but more than this, with M. Verdurin he saw disappear the eyes, the brain, which had had the truest vision of his painting, in which, in the form of a cherished memory, his painting was to some extent inherent. (VI, 116)

The first thing I do when I want to look more closely at a Proustian sentence is to do a simple diagram. I simply indent each sentence fragment so that those on the same indent and block can be read as a continuous thought.

More and more he was inclined to believe materialistically that a not inconsiderable part of beauty is inherent in objects, and

just as

at the beginning,             

he had adored in Mme Elstir the archetype of that rather heavy beauty which he had pursued and caressed in his paintings and in his tapestries,

so now in the death of M. Verdurin he saw the disappearance of one of the last relics of the social framework,

 the perishable framework—as swift to crumble away as the very fashions in clothes which form part of it –

 which supports an art and certifies its authenticity

and he was as saddened and distressed by this event as a painter of fétes galantes might have been by the Revolution which destroyed the elegances of the eighteenth century, or Renoir by the disappearance of Montmartre and the Moulin de la Galette;

but more than this, with M. Verdurin he saw disappear the eyes, the brain, which had had the truest vision of his painting,

 in which,

in the form of a cherished memory,

his painting was to some extent inherent.

So the sentence without any qualifiers or parenthetical remarks, reads:

More and more he was inclined to believe materialistically that a not inconsiderable part of beauty is inherent in objects, and so now in the death of M. Verdurin he saw the disappearance of one of the last relics of the social framework which supports an art and certifies its authenticity, and he was as saddened and distressed by this event as a painter of fétes galantes might have been by the Revolution which destroyed the elegances of the eighteenth century, or Renoir by the disappearance of Montmartre and the Moulin de la Galette; but more than this, with M. Verdurin he saw disappear the eyes, the brain, which had had the truest vision of his painting.

This shortend version of the sentence retains the essence of this meditation on the (non-Platonic) groundedness of beauty, that it depends not only in how it is substantiated but even in the confirmation of its beauty by the eyes of concrete individuals. But now consider the sentence with the parenthetical content and see how Proust transforms it into a moving and melancholic statement on the relation of time to beauty. Elstir recalls the beauty of his wife, “in the beginning,” a lost beauty that once inspired him to paint. His art is supported and authenticated by the social framework that discovered him and elevated him. But that framework perishes with time, “as swift to crumble away as the very fashions in clothes which form part of it.” And “to some extent” the beauty he had created existed “in the form of a cherished memory.” This slowing of the narrative mimics in form what he says time does to beauty.

The Artist as Mirror

At Tansonville Marcel pulls down a volume of the Goncourt brothers journal from Gilberte’s library. Proust here writes a delicious pastiche of a Goncourt entry on a dinner at the Verdurins. I enjoyed the passage, but I like the real Goncourt better. My favorite entry was about their discovery of the true life of their housekeeper, their “Francoise.” The brothers were devastated with grief at her death, which was tempered a bit when they learned from a household staff member that she had over the years stolen money from the house budget to pay for elaborate orgies, of which she was the center of attention. But back to Proust.

Marcel feels pangs of inadequacy as a would-be writer after reading the entry on the Verdurins. He had known them as insignificant social climbers, certainly, he thought, unworthy of being the object of serious art. What did he miss? Does he have an “illness” that keeps him from seeing the richness of the world around him? Why can’t he remember the kinds of sparkling conversations recorded by the Goncourts? His responses to these questions take him a giant step closer to knowing what and how to write, a process completed later in Time Regained.

We can begin with the question of his “incapacity for looking and listening”:

…which the passage from the Journal had so painfully illustrated to me, was nevertheless not total. … the stories that people told escaped me, for what interested me was not what they were trying to say but the manner in which they said it and the way in which this manner revealed their character or their foibles, or rather I was interested in what had always, because it gave me specific pleasure, been more particularly the goal of my investigations; the point that was common to one being and another.  As soon as I perceived this my intelligence–until that moment slumbering, even if sometimes the apparent animation of my talk might disguise from others a profound intellectual torpor–at once set off joyously in pursuit, but its quarry then…was situated in the middle distance, behind actual appearances, in a zone that was rather more withdrawn.  So the apparent copiable charm of things and people escaped me, because I had not the ability to stop short there–I was like a surgeon who beneath the smooth surface of a woman’s belly sees the internal disease which is devouring it. If I went to a dinner party I did not see the guests: when I thought I was looking at them, I was in fact examining them with X-rays. (VI, 39).

This discovery about himself frees Marcel to pursue a psychological rather than “copiable” descriptive language of society. His next puzzle is the proper subject of art. Recall Marcel’s frustration, in Combray, at not being able to imagine a subject for writing that was lofty enough. Some of this attitude  ”>carrys over from his childhood when he reads the Goncourt Journal and wonders how the Verdurins could a subject for art.

Marcel recalls paintings of drawing rooms and ladies in lace that left him with sense of longing to visit and see with his own eyes. Yet he knows that these are places and people that he has known to be common and boring. He recalls how the artist creates beauty:

For I had already realized long ago that it is not the man with the liveliest mind, the most well-informed, the best supplied with friends and acquaintances, the one who knows how to become a mirror and in this way can reflect his life, commonplace though it may be, who becomes a Bergotte (even if his contemporaries once thought him less witty than Swann, less erudite then Breaute)… Will not posterity, when it looks at our time, find the poetry of an elegant home and beautifully dressed women in the drawing-room of the publisher Charpentier as painted by Renoir, rather than in the portraits of the Princesse de Sagan or the Comtesse de La Rochefoucauld by Cot or Chaplin? (VI,44)

These two insights, the power of his psychological insights and the artist as mirror, still leave Marcel with self-doubt. He retreats to a sanatorium, leaving the final self-discoveries to come later, when he wrestles with time and memory.

Structure of Lost Time

 

This time rereading Proust I am going to read the volumes in more or less the order Proust wrote them, in the expectation that I will get new insights into how he wrote. Scholars who have had access to Proust’s notebooks generally agree that he began with sketches that he gradually shaped into Swann’s Way, Guermantes Way, Shadow of Young Girls (without Albertine) and Time Regained. The other volumes grew from the time Proust took advantage of the publishing moratorium imposed by WWI. (For this information I rely mostly on the essay “The Birth and Development of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu” by Marion Schmid in The Cambridge Companion to Proust, 2001.)

So I am following my reading of Swann’s Way with Time Regained. The Time Regained volume apparently has its origins in the unfinished Contra Saint Beuve, which concludes with a dialogue on aesthetics with his mother. My hunch is that Proust had to work through his aesthetic principles before he could justify to himself the worth of a novel so heavily infused with his own, seemingly insignificant,  life experiences. Before I return to reading the published sequence of volumes, I want to become clearer about what these aesthetic judgement were and to keep them in front of me as I read.

My first observation (more on this in other posts) is the parallelism between Swann’s Way and Time Regained. They both open with Marcel’s Combray childhood, though from different points of view. Marcel is visiting with Gilberte at Tansonville and she provides her view of their first meeting. She recalls giving him an obscene gesture,  out of a sense of juvenile sexual longing for him. Marcel, of course, had interpreted the gesture as one of defiant rejection. One more childish illusion overcome.

Marcel walks along some of the same paths around Combray that he had as a child. This time, though, the Vivonne is “ugly.”  He has lost the desire to walk into Combray. He sees what had once entranced him, but time has ravaged his vision.