The Price

Richard H. Barker, in Marcel Proust, A Biography, is puzzled by Proust’s disparagement of the intellect when, in Time Regained, especially, he presses his intellectual concerns to the point of draining the life out of his characters.

The intellect has a curious history in Proust’s novel. Generally, in the earlier volumes, and even in Le Temps retrouvé, it is represented as an inferior function of the mind, one that falsifies and distorts. It is almost invariably contrasted with sensibility, which alone reveals the real world. But now, in discussing his novel, Proust suddenly remarks that the intellect is not after all contemptible. The truths that it draws from reality may at least supplement, may, as it were, “enchase in a grosser substance,” the impressions of sensibility or memory. But as he goes on, Proust indicates that these truths of the intellect are far more than a supplement: they are the very substance of a work of art. For the novelist is a man who instinctively, from his earliest years, has trained himself to see the general in the particular and to ignore everything that is not general. He observes what appear to be childish trifles–”the tone in which a sentence had been spoken, the facial expression and movement of the shoulders of someone about whom perhaps he knows nothing else”–but always because such trifles help him to formulate psychological laws. “He retains in his memory,” Proust says, “only what is of a general character.” There is no suggestion, at this point, that his memory is arbitrary or mystical, or that its exercise is always accompanied by unearthly happiness. In fact, the sense of relief that the novelist feels comes from his intellect, which enables him to understand his suffering, to represent it in its most general form, and thus, in some measure at least, to escape its strangling grip.

The importance that Proust now attaches to the intellect suggests that his ideas about art have undergone a profound change. The conception of involuntary memory, with which he started, was never a very promising one. But in the early drafts of the novel, of which Du Côté de chez Swann is a specimen, it seemed adequate because he chose to rely as little as possible on his intelligence and to give free rein to his sensibility. In the later drafts, however, first represented by A l’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, his sensibility became less evident and his intelligence much more so. No theory of intuitive perception could account for Sodome et Gomorrhe or La Prisonnière or Albertine disparue. Certainly no theory minimizing the part played by the intellect in art could account for the final chapter in Le Temps retrouvé. For this chapter is quite definitely written to a thesis; it is made up very largely of rather too pat examples designed to illustrate an abstract idea.

The idea is an old one, the Triumph of Time, one of the commonplaces of Renaissance poetry. Time is inexorable; everything changes and decays, including human beings. The scene is the drawing room of the Princesse de Guermantes, but it might well be the country of the Struldbrugs visited by Gulliver. The guests, people whom Marcel (who has long been in a sanatorium) has not seen for years, have suddenly become so old that they are often unrecognizable. Their beards are white; their cheeks are puffy and covered with red blotches; their expressions, once haughty, are now fixed in a perpetual smirk. Very ugly women have resisted old age best, for age is after all a human thing. “They were monsters and did not seem to have changed any more than whales.” Beautiful women sometimes seem to have resisted it too, but when Marcel approaches them he finds that they look quite different,

as happens with the outer surface of a vegetable or a drop of water or blood when placed under the microscope. Then I discerned a multitude of fatty splotches under the skin that I had thought so smooth, but which now sickened me. Nor did the lines of the face withstand this enlargement any better. When viewed at close range, the line of the nose was interrupted and weakened and the same oily spots were here as on the rest of the face, while the eyes were seen to be sunken behind pouches that destroyed the likeness which I thought I had discovered between this face and the one of former days.

The inspiration here seems more obviously Swift–a passage in “A Voyage to Brobdingnag.”

But the changes that Time brings are not only physical: society itself has changed. The old distinctions are no longer observed or even remembered; the aristocracy now mingles with the middle class. The social climbers have risen and the socially prominent have gone down. The Duchesse de Guermantes is one of the latter, having lost both her wit and her exclusiveness; she now runs after actresses, in particular the actress Rachel, her bête noireof other days. Charlus now bows obsequiously to Madame de Saint-Euverte–perhaps, however, without recognizing her, for he has had a stroke. His faculties have been impaired–or rather some of them, for he is still able, when left unguarded, to seduce a child of ten. Odette has risen considerably and is already in the process of descending. At a ripe age (calculations based on the novel seem to show that she must be at least seventy or eighty) she has become the mistress of the Duc de Guermantes. A kept woman in her youth, she is now a kept woman again. Such unlikely characters as Legrandin and Bloch have risen persistently. The latter, having changed his name and become famous, is received everywhere. An even more striking example is Madame Verdurin, once the epitome of the middle class. Since the death of her husband she has been remarrying to advantage. She was for a while the Duchesse de Duras, and she is now–perhaps Proust’s ultimate surprise–the Princesse de Guermantes.

Proust’s interest in Time is certainly not new. Since the beginning of the novel, he has been concerned with the social fluctuations that it brings; he has explored the rise of Odette and the decline of Madame de Villeparisis. But as he represents them, changes in social position often involve changes in character. The elegant aristocratic Swann of the first volume is the complacent middle-class Swann of the second. Despite all the elaborate explanations that are given, one sometimes doubts that he is really the same man. So it is here with the Duchesse de Guermantes and Madame Verdurin. The Duchess who dotes on Rachel can scarcely be identified with the elegant and malicious hostess of the earlier volumes; the Madame Verdurin who has neither a little nucleus to entertain nor a Saniette to torture is just no one at all. In Madame Verdurin’s case, Proust’s failure is particularly obvious since, in the course of a whole chapter devoted to a reception at her house, he gives her only a single remark. “That’s it!” she says, with a metallic rattle in her voice, caused by her false teeth. “We’ll get up a little clan! How I like these intelligent young people who take part in everything! Ah, what a muzhishian you are!” But even in this remark she is not the Madame Verdurin of old. One can scarcely help feeling that on the whole Proust’s interest in Time is too self-conscious, and that the sacrifices it involves are too great.

The chief weakness in Le Temps retrouvéis not, however, the transformations in character that occur at the end; it is the fact that the intellectual element in Proust’s art has become somewhat too prominent. It has been present, no doubt, since the beginning of the novel, and with each succeeding volume its importance has grown. A l’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs is more intellectual than Du Côté de chez Swann; La Prisonnière and Albertine disparue are more intellectual than Le Côté de Guermantes and Sodome et Gomorrhe. Yet in none of these volumes, even in the last of them, is the balance between sensibility and intellect quite upset. In Le Temps retrouvé it is. The starting point–as in some of Proust’s earliest pieces–is an abstract idea, a favorite theory of the author’s; the narrative, or what narrative remains, becomes little more than a convenient illustration. No one has condemned abstract ideas more strongly than Proust. “A book in which there are theories,” he says, “is like an article from which the price mark has not been removed.” (VI,278) Yet it would be difficult to deny that he himself has here written such a book. In Le Temps retrouvé the price mark is Time. (311-315)

Beckett on Proust: Time

Samuel Beckett’s Proust is brief, only 72 pages, but is dense with insight. It is loosely organized on the themes of time, memory, love and artistic vision. In this post, which will require little commentary on my part, I will select passages related to time.

He accepts regretfully the sacred ruler and compass of literary geometry. But he will refuse to extend his submission to spatial scales, he will refuse to measure the length and weight of man in terms of his body instead of in terms of his years….Proust’s creatures, then, are victims of this predominating condition and circumstance–Time; victims as lower organisms, conscious only of two dimensions and suddenly confronted with the mystery of height, are victims: victims and prisoners. There is no escape from the hours and days. There is no escape from  yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us.  (2)

We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday. A calamitous day, but calamitous not necessarily in content. The good or evil disposition of the object has neither reality nor significance. The immediate joys and sorrows of the body and the intelligence are so many superfoetations. [I looked it up for you: The conception of a second embryo, during the gestation of the first. JE] Such as it was, it has been assimilated to the only world that has reality and significance, the world of our own latent consciousness, and its cosmography has suffered a dislocation….The aspirations of yesterday were valid for yesterday’s ego, not for to-day’s. We are disappointed at the nullity of what we are pleased to call attainment. But what is attainment: The identification of the subject with the object of his desire. The subject has died–and perhaps many times–on the way. (3)

 The individual is the seat of a constant process of decantation, decantation from the vessel containing the fluid of future time, sluggish, pale and monochrome, to the vessel containing the fluid of past time, agitated and multicoloured by the phenomena of its hours. Generally speaking the former is innocuous, amorphous, without character, without any Borgian virtue. Lazily considered in anticipation and in the haze of our smug will to live, of our pernicious and incurable optimism, it seems exempt from the bitterness of fatality: in store for us, not in store in us. On occasions, however, it is capable of supplementing the labours of its colleague. It is only necessary for its surface to be broken by a date, by any temporal specification allowing us to measure the days that separate us from a menace–or a promise. Swann, for example, contemplates with doleful resignation the months that he must spend away from Odette during the summer. One day Odette says: ‘Forcheville (her lover, and, after the death of Swann, her husband) is going to Egypt at Pentecost.’ Swann translates: ‘I am going with Forcheville to Egypt at Pentecost.’ The fluid of future time freezes, and poor Swann, face to face the future reality of Odette and Forcheville in Egypt, suffers more grievously than even at the misery of his present condition. (4-5)

The future event cannot be focussed, its implication cannot be seized, until it is definitely situated and a date assigned to it. When Albertine was his prisoner, the possibility of her escape did not seriously disturb him, because it was indistinct and abstract, like the possibility of death. Whatever opinion we may be pleased to hold on the subject of death, we may be sure that it is meaningless and valueless. Death has not required us to keep a day free. (6)

Proust’s Monty Python Contest Entry

Swann’s Way opens with a prelude that prefigures the novel’s themes of time and establishing an authentic identity. Marcel is older, perhaps staying at Gilberte’s country estate. He describes what it is like to go to bed at a good hour and what it is like to awaken during the night without a secure knowledge to time and place.

…I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I awoke; it did not offend my reason, but lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. (I,1)

“Lay like scales upon my eyes” applies nicely to Marcel’s youthful struggles to see people and places as they are after first having imagined them, often in exalted terms. Imagination will also be central in how he loves; it might be said that his love exists only in imagination and only when time erodes the imaginative vision does love end.

Sometimes, too, as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, a woman would be born during my sleep from some misplacing of my thigh. Conceived from the pleasure I was on the point of enjoying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that pleasure. My body, conscious that its own warmth was permeating hers, would strive to become one with her, and I would awake….And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away. (I,3)

Marcel never finds a new bedroom inviting. The thought that its contents existed without him before his arrival awakens the fear of death because he is forced to imagine a world in which he does not exist. He is saved by the Janus-faced Habit, which will eventually keep him from seeing the strangeness of things. Good for getting used to new bedrooms but bad for seeing the world as an artist.

I was convinced of the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of a clock that chattered on at the top of its voice as though I were not there; in which a strange and pitiless rectangular cheval-glass, standing across one corner of the room, carved out for itself a site I had not looked to find tenanted in the soft plenitude of my normal field of vision; in which my mind, striving for hours on end to break away from its moorings, to stretch upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the room and to reach to the topmost height of its gigantic funnel, had endured many a painful night as I lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils flaring, my heart beating; until habit had changed the colour of the curtains, silenced the clock, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of the vetiver, appreciably reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling. Habit! that skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable. (I,8)

There you  have it: In Search of Lost Time in nine pages, though not quite a winner by Monty Python standards.