Blooms Modern Critical Views

African American Poets: Wheatley Tolson African American Poets: Hayden Dove Edward Albee Dante Alighieri American and Canadian Women Poets, 1930 present American Women Poets, 16501950 Maya Angelou Asian-American Writers Margaret Atwood Jane Austen Paul Auster James Baldwin Honor de Balzac Samuel Beckett Saul Bellow The Bible William Blake Jorge Luis Borges Ray Bradbury The Bronts Gwendolyn Brooks Elizabeth Barrett Browning Robert Browning Italo Calvino Albert Camus Truman Capote Lewis Carroll Willa Cather Cervantes Geoffrey Chaucer Anton Chekhov Kate Chopin Agatha Christie Samuel Taylor Coleridge Joseph Conrad Contemporary Poets Stephen Crane Daniel Defoe Don DeLillo Charles Dickens Emily Dickinson John Donne and the 17th-Century Poets Fyodor Dostoevsky W.E.B. DuBois George Eliot T.S. Eliot Ralph Ellison Ralph Waldo Emerson William Faulkner F. Scott Fitzgerald Sigmund Freud Robert Frost William Gaddis Johann Wolfgang von Goethe George Gordon, Lord Byron Graham Greene Thomas Hardy Nathaniel Hawthorne Ernest Hemingway Hermann Hesse Hispanic-American Writers Homer Langston Hughes Zora Neale Hurston Aldous Huxley Henrik Ibsen John Irving Henry James James Joyce Franz Kafka John Keats Jamaica Kincaid Stephen King Rudyard Kipling Milan Kundera D.H. Lawrence Doris Lessing Ursula K. Le Guin Sinclair Lewis Norman Mailer Bernard Malamud David Mamet Christopher Marlowe Gabriel Garca Mrquez Cormac McCarthy Carson McCullers Herman Melville Arthur Miller John Milton Molire Toni Morrison Native-American Writers Joyce Carol Oates Flannery OConnor Eugene ONeill George Orwell Octavio Paz Sylvia Plath Edgar Allan Poe Katherine Anne Porter Marcel Proust Thomas Pynchon Philip Roth Salman Rushdie J.D. Salinger Jean-Paul Sartre William Shakespeare George Bernard Shaw Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Percy Bysshe Shelley

Blooms Modern Critical Views

Alexander Solzhenitsyn Sophocles John Steinbeck Tom Stoppard Jonathan Swift Amy Tan Alfred, Lord Tennyson Henry David Thoreau J.R.R. Tolkien Leo Tolstoy Ivan Turgenev Mark Twain John Updike Kurt Vonnegut Derek Walcott Alice Walker Robert Penn Warren Eudora Welty Edith Wharton Walt Whitman Oscar Wilde Tennessee Williams Thomas Wolfe Tom Wolfe Virginia Woolf William Wordsworth Jay Wright Richard Wright William Butler Yeats Emile Zola

Blooms Modern Critical Views

MARCEL PROUST

Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University

2004 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of Haights Cross Communications.

Introduction 2004 by Harold Bloom. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Printed and bound in the United States of America. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Applied For ISBN: 0-7910-7659-8

Chelsea House Publishers 1974 Sproul Road, Suite 400 Broomall, PA 19008-0914 http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing Editor: Janyce Marson Cover designed by Terry Mallon Cover photo by Bettmann/CORBIS Layout by EJB Publishing Services

Contents
Editors Note Introduction Harold Bloom vii 1 17 37

Proust and Time Embodied Julia Kristeva

The Lamp of Truth: Proust and George Eliot Robert Fraser Zipporah: A Ruskinian Enigma Appropriated by Marcel Proust Cynthia J. Gamble Prousts japonisme: Contrastive Aesthetics Jan Hokenson Prousts Turn from Nostalgia Susan Stewart 105 63 83

Orpheus and the Machine: Proust as Theorist of Technological Change, and the Case of Joyce Sara Danius Introduction to Proustian Passions Ingrid Wassenaar The Vast Structure of Recollection: from Life to Literature 165 William C. Carter Albertines Bicycle, or: Women and French Identity during the Belle Epoque 185 Sin Reynolds 137

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CONTENTS

The Ending of Swann Revisited Anthony R. Pugh

201

Jean Santeuil and the Notion of avant-texte: A Case for an Extension of the Term? 221 Maureen A. Ramsden Ethics, Meaning, and the Work of Beauty Gabrielle Starr Chronology Contributors Bibliography Acknowledgments Index 285 267 273 277 283 243

Editors Note

This revised volume has only my Introduction in common with the earlier Marcel Proust: Modern Critical Views (1987), since all the essays included here date from 1993 on. My Introduction compares Proust and Freud on the psychosexual origins of jealousy, and then centers upon the odysseys of sexual jealousy in Swann and in Marcel. Julia Kristeva, with authentic charm, rightfully gives us a Proust who is closer to Spinoza than to Heideger, while Robert Fraser contrasts George Eliots powers of observation with Flauberts moral withdrawal, antithetical inuences upon Proust. John Ruskin, another crucial Proustian precursor, is shown by Cynthia J. Gamble to have provided a model for Odette, Swanns provocation to selfdestruction, after which Jan Hokenson traces the limits of Japanese aestheticism in Prousts vast saga. Susan Stewart usefully sees Proust turning from a study of the nostalgias to the happiness of aesthetic apprehension, while Sara Danius sets Joyce against Proust in their effort to absorb technological change. For Ingrid Wassenaar, In Search of Lost Time joins itself to the history of self-justication, after which Prousts biographer, William C. Carter, examines his subjects grand edice of recollection. Sin Reynolds subtly presents the fear of women embedded in the French culture of Prousts era, while Anthony R. Pugh claries the ending of Swanns Way. Maureen A. Ramsden nds Prousts early Jean Santeuil a guide to the aesthetics of In Search of Lost Time, while Gabrielle Starr concludes with a fresh vision of the Proustian aesthetics.

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HAROLD BLOOM

Introduction

exual jealousy is the most novelistic of circumstances, just as incest, according to Shelley, is the most poetical of circumstances. Proust is the novelist of our era, even as Freud is our moralist. Both are speculative thinkers, who divide between them the eminence of being the prime wisdom writers of the age. Proust died in 1922, the year of Freuds grim and splendid essay, Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality. Both of them great ironists, tragic celebrants of the comic spirit, Proust and Freud are not much in agreement on jealousy, paranoia, and homosexuality, though both start with the realization that all of us are bisexual in nature. Freud charmingly begins his essay by remarking that jealousy, like grief, is normal, and comes in three stages: competitive or normal, projected, delusional. The competitive or garden variety is compounded of grief, due to the loss of the loved object, and of the reactivation of the narcissistic scar, the tragic rst loss, by the infant, of the parent of the other sex to the parent of the same sex. As normal, competitive jealousy is really normal Hell, Freud genially throws into the compound such delights as enmity against the successful rival, some self-blaming, self-criticism, and a generous portion of bisexuality. Projected jealousy attributes to the erotic partner ones own actual unfaithfulness or repressed impulses, and is cheerfully regarded by Freud as being relatively innocuous, since its almost delusional character is highly amenable to analytic exposure of unconscious fantasies. But delusional jealousy proper is more serious; it also takes its origin in repressed impulses towards indelity, but the object of those impulses is of ones own sex, and this, for Freud, moves one across the border into paranoia. What the three stages of jealousy have in common is a bisexual component, since even projected jealousy trades in repressed impulses, and

Harold Bloom

these include homosexual desires. Proust, our other authority on jealousy, preferred to call homosexuality inversion, and in a brilliant mythological fantasia traced the sons of Sodom and the daughters of Gomorrah to the surviving exiles from the Cities of the Plain. Inversion and jealousy, so intimately related in Freud, become in Proust a dialectical pairing, with the aesthetic sensibility linked to both as a third term in a complex series. On the topos of jealousy, Proust is fecund and generous; no writer has devoted himself so lovingly and brilliantly to expounding and illustrating the emotion, except of course Shakespeare in Othello and Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter. Prousts jealous loversSwann, Saint-Loup, above all Marcel himselfsuffer so intensely that we sometimes need to make an effort not to empathize too closely. It is difficult to determine just what Prousts stance towards their suffering is, partly because Prousts ironies are both pervasive and cunning. Comedy hovers nearby, but even tragicomedy seems an inadequate term for the compulsive sorrows of Prousts protagonists. Swann, after complimenting himself that he has not, by his jealousy, proved to Odette that he loves her too much, falls into the mouth of Hell: He never spoke to her of this misadventure, and ceased even to think of it himself. But now and then his thoughts in their wandering course would come upon this memory where it lay unobserved, would startle it into life, thrust it forward into his consciousness, and leave him aching with a sharp, deep-rooted pain. As though it were a bodily pain, Swanns mind was powerless to alleviate it; but at least, in the case of bodily pain, since it is independent of the mind, the mind can dwell upon it, can note that it has diminished, that it has momentarily ceased. But in this case the mind, merely by recalling the pain, created it afresh. To determine not to think of it was to think of it still, to suffer from it still. And when, in conversation with his friends, he forgot about it, suddenly a word casually uttered would make him change countenance like a wounded man when a clumsy hand has touched his aching limb. When he came away from Odette he was happy, he felt calm, he recalled her smiles, of gentle mockery when speaking of this or that other person, of tenderness for himself; he recalled the gravity of her head which she seemed to have lifted from its axis to let it droop and fall, as though in spite of herself, upon his lips, as she had done on the rst evening in the carriage, the languishing looks she had given him as she lay in

Introduction

his arms, nestling her head against her shoulder as though shrinking from the cold. But then at once his jealousy, as though it were the shadow of his love, presented him with the complement, with the converse of that new smile with which she had greeted him that very eveningand which now, perversely, mocked Swann and shone with love for anotherof that droop of the head, now sinking on to other lips, of all the marks of affection (now given to another) that she had shown to him. And all the voluptuous memories which he bore away from her house were, so to speak, but so many sketches, rough plans like those which a decorator submits to one, enabling Swann to form an idea of the various attitudes, aame or faint with passion, which she might adopt for others. With the result that he came to regret every pleasure that he tasted in her company, every new caress of which he had been so imprudent as to point out to her the delights, every fresh charm that he found in her, for he knew that, a moment later, they would go to enrich the collection of instruments in his secret torturechamber. Jealousy here is a pain experienced by Freuds bodily ego, on the frontier between psyche and body: To determine not to think of it was to think of it still, to suffer from it still. As the shadow of love, jealousy resembles the shadow cast by the earth up into the heavens, where by tradition it ought to end at the sphere of Venus. Instead, it darkens there, and since the shadow is Freuds reality principle, or our consciousness of our own mortality, Prousts dreadfully persuasive irony is that jealousy exposes not only the arbitrariness of every erotic object-choice but also marks the passage of the loved person into a teleological overdetermination, in which the supposed inevitability of the person is simply a mask for the inevitability of the lovers death. Prousts jealousy thus becomes peculiarly akin to Freuds death drive, since it, too, quests beyond the pleasure/unpleasure principle. Our secret torture-chamber is furnished anew by every recollection of the beloveds erotic prowess, since what delighted us has delighted others. Swann experiences the terrible conversion of the jealous lover into a parody of the scholar, a conversion to an intellectual pleasure that is more a deviation than an achievement, since no thought can be emancipated from the sexual past of all thought (Freud), if the search for truth is nothing but a search for the sexual past:

Harold Bloom

Certainly he suffered as he watched that light, in whose golden atmosphere, behind the closed sash, stirred the unseen and detested pair, as he listened to that murmur which revealed the presence of the man who had crept in after his own departure, the perdy of Odette, and the pleasures which she was at that moment enjoying with the stranger. And yet he was not sorry he had come; the torment which had forced him to leave his own house had become less acute now that it had become less vague, now that Odettes other life, of which he had had, at that rst moment, a sudden helpless suspicion, was denitely there, in the full glare of the lamp-light, almost within his grasp, an unwitting prisoner in that room into which, when he chose, he would force his way to seize it unawares; or rather he would knock on the shutters, as he often did when he came very late, and by that signal Odette would at least learn that he knew, that he had seen the light and had heard the voices, and he himself, who a moment ago had been picturing her as laughing with the other at his illusions, now it was he who saw them, condent in their error, tricked by none other than himself, whom they believed to be far away but who was there, in person, there with a plan, there with the knowledge that he was going, in another minute, to knock on the shutter. And perhaps the almost pleasurable sensation he felt at that moment was something more than the assuagement of a doubt, and of a pain: was an intellectual pleasure. If, since he had fallen in love, things had recovered a little of the delightful interest that they had had for him long agothough only in so far as they were illuminated by the thought or the memory of Odettenow it was another of the faculties of his studious youth that his jealousy revived, the passion for truth, but for a truth which, too, was interposed between himself and his mistress, receiving its light from her alone, a private and personal truth the sole object of which (an innitely precious object, and one almost disinterested in its beauty) was Odettes life, her actions, her environment, her plans, her past. At every other period in his life, the little everyday activities of another person had always seemed meaningless to Swann; if gossip about such things was repeated to him, he would dismiss it as insignicant, and while he listened it was only the lowest, the most commonplace part of his mind that was engaged; these were the moments when he felt at his most inglorious. But in this strange phase of love the personality

Introduction

of another person becomes so enlarged, so deepened, that the curiosity which he now felt stirring inside him with regard to the smallest details of a womans daily life, was the same thirst for knowledge with which he had once studied history. And all manner of actions from which hitherto he would have recoiled in shame, such as spying, to-night, outside a window, to-morrow perhaps, for all he knew, putting adroitly provocative questions to casual witnesses, bribing servants, listening at doors, seemed to him now to be precisely on a level with the deciphering of manuscripts, the weighing of evidence, the interpretation of old monumentsso many different methods of scientific investigation with a genuine intellectual value and legitimately employable in the search for truth. In fact, poor Swann is at the wrong window, and the entire passage is therefore as exquisitely painful as it is comic. What Freud ironically called the overevaluation of the object, the enlargement or deepening of the beloveds personality, begins to work not as one of the enlargements of life (like Prousts own novel) but as the deepening of a personal Hell. Swann plunges downwards and outwards, as he leans in impotent, blind, dizzy anguish over the bottomless abyss and reconstructs the petty details of Odettes past life with as much passion as the aesthete who ransacks the extant documents of fteenth-century Florence in order to penetrate further into the soul of the Primavera, the fair Vanna or the Venus of Botticelli. The historicizing aesthete, John Ruskin say, or Walter Pater, becomes the archetype of the jealous lover, who searches into lost time not for a person, but for an epiphany or moment-of-moments, a privileged ction of duration: When he had been paying social calls Swann would often come home with little time to spare before dinner. At that point in the evening, around six oclock, when in the old days he used to feel so wretched, he no longer asked himself what Odette might be about, and was hardly at all concerned to hear that she had people with her or had gone out. He recalled at times that he had once, years ago, tried to read through its envelope a letter addressed by Odette to Forcheville. But this memory was not pleasing to him, and rather than plumb the depths of shame that he felt in it he preferred to indulge in a little grimace, twisting up the corners of his mouth and adding, if need be, a shake of the head which

Harold Bloom

signied What do I care about it? True, he considered now that the hypothesis on which he had often dwelt at that time, according to which it was his jealous imagination alone that blackened what was in reality the innocent life of Odettethat this hypothesis (which after all was benecent, since, so long as his amorous malady had lasted, it had diminished his sufferings by making them seem imaginary) was not the correct one, that it was his jealousy that had seen things in the correct light, and that if Odette had loved him more than he supposed, she had also deceived him more. Formerly, while his sufferings were still keen, he had vowed that, as soon as he had ceased to love Odette and was no longer afraid either of vexing her or of making her believe that he loved her too much, he would give himself the satisfaction of elucidating with her, simply from his love of truth and as a point of historical interest, whether or not Forcheville had been in bed with her that day when he had rung her bell and rapped on her window in vain, and she had written to Forcheville that it was an uncle of hers who had called. But this so interesting problem, which he was only waiting for his jealousy to subside before clearing up, had precisely lost all interest in Swanns eyes when he had ceased to be jealous. Not immediately, however. Long after he had ceased to feel any jealousy with regard to Odette, the memory of that day, that afternoon spent knocking vainly at the little house in the Rue La Prouse, had continued to torment him. It was as though his jealousy, not dissimilar in that respect from those maladies which appear to have their seat, their centre of contagion, less in certain persons than in certain places, in certain houses, had had for its object not so much Odette herself as that day, that hour in the irrevocable past when Swann had knocked at every entrance to her house in turn, as though that day, that hour alone had caught and preserved a few last fragments of the amorous personality which had once been Swanns, that there alone could he now recapture them. For a long time now it had been a matter of indifference to him whether Odette had been, or was being, unfaithful to him. And yet he had continued for some years to seek out old servants of hers, to such an extent had the painful curiosity persisted in him to know whether on that day, so long ago, at six oclock, Odette had been in bed with Forcheville. Then that curiosity itself had disappeared, without, however, his abandoning his investigations.

Introduction

He went on trying to discover what no longer interested him, because his old self, though it had shrivelled to extreme decrepitude, still acted mechanically, in accordance with preoccupations so utterly abandoned that Swann could not now succeed even in picturing to himself that anguishso compelling once that he had been unable to imagine that he would ever be delivered from it, that only the death of the woman he loved (though death, as will be shown later on in this story by a cruel corroboration, in no way diminishes the sufferings caused by jealousy) seemed to him capable of smoothing the path of his life which then seemed impassably obstructed. Jealousy dies with love, but only with respect to the former beloved. Horribly a life-in-death, jealousy renews itself like the moon, perpetually trying to discover what no longer interests it, even after the object of desire has been literally buried. Its true object is that day, that hour in the irrevocable past, and even that time was less an actual time than a temporal ction, an episode in the evanescence of ones own self. Paul de Mans perspective that Prousts deepest insight is the nonexistence of the self founds itself upon this temporal irony of unweaving, this permanent parabasis of meaning. One can remember that even this deconstructive perspective is no more or less privileged than any other Proustian trope, and so cannot give us a truth that Proust himself evades. The bridge between Swanns jealousy and Marcels is Saint-Loups jealousy of Rachel, summed up by Proust in one of his magnicently long, baroque paragraphs: Saint-Loups letter had come as no surprise to me, even though I had had no news of him since, at the time of my grandmothers illness, he had accused me of perdy and treachery. I had grasped at once what must have happened. Rachel, who liked to provoke his jealousy (she also had other causes for resentment against me), had persuaded her lover that I had made sly attempts to have relations with her in his absence. It is probable that he continued to believe in the truth of this allegation, but he had ceased to be in love with her, which meant that its truth or falsehood had become a matter of complete indifference to him, and our friendship alone remained. When, on meeting him again, I tried to talk to him about his accusations, he merely gave me a benign and affectionate smile which seemed to be a sort of apology, and

Harold Bloom

then changed the subject. All this was not to say that he did not, a little later, see Rachel occasionally when he was in Paris. Those who have played a big part in ones life very rarely disappear from it suddenly for good. They return to it at odd moments (so much so that people suspect a renewal of old love) before leaving it for ever. Saint-Loups breach with Rachel had very soon become less painful to him, thanks to the soothing pleasure that was given him by her incessant demands for money. Jealousy, which prolongs the course of love, is not capable of containing many more ingredients than the other products of the imagination. If one takes with one, when one starts on a journey, three or four images which incidentally one is sure to lose on the way (such as the lilies and anemones heaped on the Ponte Vecchio, or the Persian church shrouded in mist), ones trunk is already pretty full. When one leaves a mistress, one would be just as glad, until one had begun to forget her, that she should not become the property of three or four potential protectors whom one pictures in ones minds eye, of whom, that is to say, one is jealous: all those whom one does not so picture count for nothing. Now frequent demands for money from a cast-off mistress no more give one a complete idea of her life than charts showing a high temperature would of her illness. But the latter would at any rate be an indication that she was ill, and the former furnish a presumption, vague enough it is true, that the forsaken one or forsaker (whichever she be) cannot have found anything very remarkable in the way of rich protectors. And so each demand is welcomed with the joy which a lull produces in the jealous ones sufferings, and answered with the immediate dispatch of money, for naturally one does not like to think of her being in want of anything except lovers (one of the three lovers one has in ones minds eye), until time has enabled one to regain ones composure and to learn ones successors name without wilting. Sometimes Rachel came in so late at night that she could ask her former lovers permission to lie down beside him until the morning. This was a great comfort to Robert, for it reminded him how intimately, after all, they had lived to-together, simply to see that even if he took the greater part of the bed for himself it did not in the least interfere with her sleep. He realised that she was more comfortable, lying close to his familiar body, than she would have been elsewhere, that she felt herself by his sideeven in an

Introduction

hotelto be in a bedroom known of old in which one has ones habits, in which one sleeps better. He felt that his shoulders, his limbs, all of him, were for her, even when he was unduly restless from insomnia or thinking of the things he had to do, so entirely usual that they could not disturb her and that the perception of them added still further to her sense of repose. The heart of this comes in the grandly ironic sentence: Jealousy, which prolongs the course of love, is not capable of containing many more ingredients than the other products of the imagination. That is hardly a compliment to the capaciousness of the imagination, which scarcely can hold on for long to even three or four images. Saint-Loup, almost on the farthest shore of jealousy, has the obscure comfort of having become, for Rachel, one of those images not quite faded away, when he felt that his shoulders, his limbs, all of him, were for her, even when he has ceased to be there, or anywhere, for her, or she for him. Outliving love, jealousy has become loves last stand, the nal basis for a continuity between two former lovers. Saint-Loups bittersweet evanescence as a lover contrasts both with Swanns massive historicism and with the novels triumphant representation of jealousy, Marcels monumental search after lost time in the long aftermath of Albertines death. Another grand link between magnicent jealousies is provided by Swanns observations to Marcel, aesthetic reections somewhat removed from the pain of earlier realities: It occurred to me that Swann must be getting tired of waiting for me. Moreover I did not wish to be too late in returning home because of Albertine, and, taking leave of Mme de Surgis and M. de Charlus, I went in search of my invalid in the card-room. I asked him whether what he had said to the Prince in their conversation in the garden was really what M. de Braut (whom I did not name) had reported to us, about a little play by Bergotte. He burst out laughing: Theres not a word of truth in it, not one, its a complete fabrication and would have been an utterly stupid thing to say. Its really incredible, this spontaneous generation of falsehood. I wont ask who it was that told you, but it would be really interesting, in a eld as limited as this, to work back from one person to another and nd out how the story arose. Anyhow, what concern can it be of other people, what the Prince said to me? People are very inquisitive. Ive never been inquisitive, except when I was in love, and when I was jealous. And a lot I ever

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Harold Bloom

learned! Are you jealous? I told Swann that I had never experienced jealousy, that I did not even know what it was. Well, you can count yourself lucky. A little jealousy is not too unpleasant, for two reasons. In the rst place, it enables people who are not inquisitive to take an interest in the lives of others, or of one other at any rate. And then it makes one feel the pleasure of possession, of getting into a carriage with a woman, of not allowing her to go about by herself. But thats only in the very rst stages of the disease, or when the cure is almost complete. In between, its the most agonising torment. However, I must confess that I havent had much experience even of the two pleasures Ive mentionedthe rst because of my own nature, which is incapable of sustained reexion; the second because of circumstances, because of the woman, I should say the women, of whom Ive been jealous. But that makes no difference. Even when one is no longer attached to things, its still something to have been attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didnt grasp. The memory of those feelings is something thats to be found only in ourselves; we must go back into ourselves to look at it. You mustnt laugh at this idealistic jargon, but what I mean to say is that Ive been very fond of life and very fond of art. Well, now that Im a little too weary to live with other people, those old feelings, so personal and individual, that I had in the past, seem to meits the mania of all collectorsvery precious. I open my heart to myself like a sort of showcase, and examine one by one all those love affairs of which the rest of the world can have known nothing. And of this collection, to which Im now even more attached than to my others, I say to myself, rather as Mazarin said of his books, but in fact without the least distress, that it will be very tiresome to have to leave it all. But, to come back to my conversation with the Prince, I shall tell one person only, and that person is going to be you. We are in the elegy season, ironically balanced between the death of jealousy in Swann and its birth in poor Marcel, who literally does not know that the descent into Avernus beckons. When the vigor of an affirmation has more power than its probability, clearly we are living in a ction, the metaphor or transference that we call love, and might call jealousy. Into that metaphor, Marcel moves like a sleepwalker, with his obsessions central to The

Introduction

11

Captive and insanely pervasive in The Fugitive. A great passage in The Captive, which seems a diatribe against jealousy, instead is a passionately ironic celebration of jealousys aesthetic victory over our merely temporal happiness: However, I was still at the rst stage of enlightenment with regard to La. I was not even aware whether Albertine knew her. No matter, it came to the same thing. I must at all costs prevent her from renewing this acquaintance or making the acquaintance of this stranger at the Trocadro. I say that I did not know whether she knew La or not; yet I must in fact have learned this at Balbec, from Albertine herself. For amnesia obliterated from my mind as well as from Albertines a great many of the statements that she had made to me. Memory, instead of being a duplicate, always present before ones eyes, of the various events of ones life, is rather a void from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables one to resuscitate dead recollections; but even then there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into that potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain forever unveriable. One pays no attention to anything that one does not connect with the real life of the woman one loves; one forgets immediately what she has said to one about such and such an incident or such and such people one does not know, and her expression while she was saying it. And so when, in due course, ones jealousy is aroused by these same people, and seeks to ascertain whether or not it is mistaken, whether it is indeed they who are responsible for ones mistresss impatience to go out, and her annoyance when one has prevented her from doing so by returning earlier than usual, ones jealousy, ransacking the past in search of a clue, can nd nothing; always retrospective, it is like a historian who has to write the history of a period for which he has no documents; always belated, it dashes like an enraged bull to the spot where it will not nd the dazzling, arrogant creature who is tormenting it and whom the crowd admire for his splendour and cunning. Jealousy thrashes around in the void, uncertain as we are in those dreams in which we are distressed because we cannot nd in his empty house a person whom we have known well in life, but who here perhaps is another person and has merely borrowed the features of our friend, uncertain as we are even more after we awake when we

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Harold Bloom

seek to identify this or that detail of our dream. What was ones mistresss expression when she told one that? Did she not look happy, was she not actually whistling, a thing that she never does unless she has some amorous thought in her mind and nds ones presence importunate and irritating? Did she not tell one something that is contradicted by what she now affirms, that she knows or does not know such and such a person? One does not know, and one will never know; one searches desperately among the unsubstantial fragments of a dream, and all the time ones life with ones mistress goes on, a life that is oblivious of what may well be of importance to one, and attentive to what is perhaps of none, a life hagridden by people who have no real connexion with one, full of lapses of memory, gaps, vain anxieties, a life as illusory as a dream. Thrashing about in the void of a dream in which a good friend perhaps is another person, jealousy becomes Spensers Malbecco: who quite/Forgot he was a man, and jealousy is hight. Yet making life as illusory as a dream, hagridden by lapses and gaps, is Marcels accomplishment, and Prousts art. One does not write an other-than-ironic diatribe against ones own art. Proust warily, but with the sureness of a great beast descending upon its helpless prey, approaches the heart of his vision of jealousy, his sense that the emotion is akin to what Freud named as the defense of isolation, in which all context is burned away, and a dangerous present replaces all past and all future. Sexual jealousy in Proust is accompanied by a singular obsessiveness in regard to questions of space and of time. The jealous lover, who, as Proust says, conducts researches comparable to those of the scholar, seeks in his inquiries every detail he can nd as to the location and duration of each betrayal and indelity. Why? Proust has a marvelous passage in The Fugitive volume of Remembrance: It is one of the faculties of jealousy to reveal to us the extent to which the reality of external facts and the sentiments of the heart are an unknown element which lends itself to endless suppositions. We imagine that we know exactly what things are and what people think, for the simple reason that we do not care about them. But as soon as we have a desire to know, as the jealous man has, then it becomes a dizzy kaleidoscope in which we can no longer distinguish anything. Had Albertine been

Introduction

13

unfaithful to me? With whom? In what house? On what day? On the day when she had said this or that to me, when I remembered that I had in the course of it said this or that? I could not tell. Nor did I know what her feelings were for me, whether they were inspired by self-interest or by affection. And all of a sudden I remembered some trivial incident, for instance that Albertine had wished to go to Saint-Martin-le-Vtu, saying that the name interested her, and perhaps simply because she had made the acquaintance of some peasant girl who lived there. But it was useless that Aim should have informed me of what he had learned from the woman at the baths, since Albertine must remain eternally unaware that he had informed me, the need to know having always been exceeded, in my love for Albertine, by the need to show her that I knew; for this broke down the partition of different illusions that stood between us, without having ever had the result of making her love me more, far from it. And now, since she was dead, the second of these needs had been amalgamated with the effect of the rst: the need to picture to myself the conversation in which I would have informed her of what I had learned, as vividly as the conversation in which I would have asked her to tell me what I did not know; that is to say, to see her by my side, to hear her answering me kindly, to see her cheeks become plump again, her eyes shed their malice and assume an air of melancholy; that is to say, to love her still and to forget the fury of my jealousy in the despair of my loneliness. The painful mystery of this impossibility of ever making known to her what I had learned and of establishing our relations upon the truth of what I had only just discovered (and would not have been able, perhaps, to discover but for her death) substituted its sadness for the more painful mystery of her conduct. What? To have so desperately desired that Albertinewho no longer existedshould know that I had heard the story of the baths! This again was one of the consequences of our inability, when we have to consider the fact of death, to picture to ourselves anything but life. Albertine no longer existed; but to me she was the person who had concealed from me that she had assignations with women at Balbec, who imagined that she had succeeded in keeping me in ignorance of them. When we try to consider what will happen to us after our own death, is it not still our living self which we mistakenly project at that moment? And is it much

14

Harold Bloom

more absurd, when all is said, to regret that a woman who no longer exists is unaware that we have learned what she was doing six years ago than to desire that of ourselves, who will be dead, the public shall still speak with approval a century hence? If there is more real foundation in the latter than in the former case, the regrets of my retrospective jealousy proceeded none the less from the same optical error as in other men the desire for posthumous fame. And yet, if this impression of the solemn nality of my separation from Albertine had momentarily supplanted my idea of her misdeeds, it only succeeded in aggravating them by bestowing upon them an irremediable character. I saw myself astray in life as on an endless beach where I was alone and where, in whatever direction I might turn, I would never meet her. The regrets of my retrospective jealousy proceeded none the less from the same optical error as in other men the desire for posthumous fameis that not as much Prousts negative credo as it is Marcels? Those other men include the indubitable precursors, Flaubert and Baudelaire, and Proust himself as well. The aesthetic agon for immortality is an optical error, yet this is one of those errors about life that are necessary for life, as Nietzsche remarked, and is also one of those errors about art that is art. Proust has swerved away from Flaubert into a radical confession of error; the novel is creative envy, love is jealousy, jealousy is the terrible fear that there will not be enough space for oneself (including literary space), and that there never can be enough time for oneself, because death is the reality of ones life. A friend once remarked to me, at the very height of her own jealousy, that jealousy was nothing but a vision of two bodies on a bed, neither of which was ones own, where the hurt resided in the realization that one body ought to have been ones own. Bitter as the remark may have been, it usefully reduces the trope of jealousy to literal fears: where was ones body, where will it be, when will it not be? Our ego is always a bodily ego, Freud insisted, and jealousy joins the bodily ego and the drive as another frontier concept, another vertigo whirling between a desperate inwardness and the injustice of outwardness. Proust, like Freud, goes back after all to the prophet Jeremiah, that uncomfortable sage who proclaimed a new inwardness for his mothers people. The law is written upon our inward parts for Proust also, and the law is justice, but the god of law is a jealous god, though he is certainly not the god of jealousy. Freud, in The Passing of the Oedipus Complex, writing two years after Prousts death, set forth a powerful speculation as to the difference

Introduction

15

between the sexes, a speculation that Proust neither evades nor supports, and yet illuminates, by working out of the world that Freud knows only in the pure good of theory. Freud is properly tentative, but also adroitly forceful: Here our materialfor some reason we do not understand becomes far more shadowy and incomplete. The female sex develops an Oedipus-complex, too, a super-ego and a latency period. May one ascribe to it also a phallic organization and a castration complex? The answer is in the affirmative, but it cannot be the same as in the boy. The feministic demand for equal rights between the sexes does not carry far here; the morphological difference must express itself in differences in the development of the mind. Anatomy is Destiny, to vary a saying of Napoleons. The little girls clitoris behaves at rst just like a penis, but by comparing herself with a boy play-fellow the child perceives that she has come off short, and takes this fact as illtreatment and as a reason for feeling inferior. For a time she still consoles herself with the expectation that later, when she grows up, she will acquire just as big an appendage as a boy. Here the womans masculine complex branches off. The female child does not understand her actual loss as a sex characteristic, but explains it by assuming that at some earlier date she had possessed a member which was just as big and which had later been lost by castration. She does not seem to extend this conclusion about herself to other grown women, but in complete accordance with the phallic phase she ascribes to them large and complete, that is, male, genitalia. The result is an essential difference between her and the boy, namely, that she accepts castration as an established fact, an operation already performed, whereas the boy dreads the possibility of its being performed. The castration-dread being thus excluded in her case, there falls away a powerful motive towards forming the super-ego and breaking up the infantile genital organization. These changes seem to be due in the girl far more than in the boy to the results of educative inuences, of external intimidation threatening the loss of love. The Oedipus-complex in the girl is far simpler, less equivocal, than that of the little possessor of a penis; in my experience it seldom goes beyond the wish to take the mothers place, the feminine attitude towards the father. Acceptance of the loss of a penis is not endured without some attempt at

16

Harold Bloom

compensation. The girl passes overby way of a symbolic analogy, one may sayfrom the penis to a child; her Oedipuscomplex culminates in the desire, which is long cherished, to be given a child by her father as a present, to bear him a child. One has the impression that the Oedipus-complex is later gradually abandoned because this wish is never fullled. The two desires, to possess a penis and to bear a child, remain powerfully charged with libido in the unconscious and help to prepare the womans nature for its subsequent sex rle. The comparative weakness of the sadistic component of the sexual instinct, which may probably be related to the penis-deciency, facilitates the transformation of directly sexual trends into those inhibited in aim, feelings of tenderness. It must be confessed, however, that on the whole our insight into these processes of development in the girl is unsatisfying, shadowy and incomplete. Anatomy is destiny in Proust also, but this is anatomy taken up into the mind, as it were. The exiles of Sodom and Gomorrah, more jealous even than other mortals, become monsters of time, yet heroes and heroines of time also. The Oedipus complex never quite passes, in Freuds sense of passing, either in Proust or in his major gures. Freuds castration complex, ultimately the dread of dying, is a metaphor for the same shadowed desire that Proust represents by the complex metaphor of jealousy. The jealous lover fears that he has been castrated, that his place in life has been taken, that true time is over for him. His only recourse is to search for lost time, in the hopeless hope that the aesthetic recovery of illusion and of experience alike, will deceive him in a higher mode than he fears to have been deceived in already.

J U L I A K R I S T E VA

Proust and Time Embodied

1. TIME
AND TIMELESSNESS

arcel Proust (18711922) composed A la recherche du temps perdu between 1913 (the year of the publication of Du ct de chez Swann by Grasset) and 1922. The last volume, Le Temps retrouv, published like its predecessors by Gallimard, was to appear in 1927. Proust is often seen as being closer in spirit to the symbolists, dandies and assorted decadents of the fin de sicle than to the sardonic and playful activities of the dadaists, surrealists and futurists propagated by the First World War, not to mention the nightmarish cult of the absurd which followed the Second. Yet it was this man of the nineteenth century who inaugurated the modern aesthetic, and established a completely new form of temporality. Its function is to sum up, and make explicit, the ambitions of all the novels that have gone before, through creating a distinctively new type of Bildungsroman (the German genre which deals with the heros education and intellectual development); in this case the learning process involves a return journey from the past to the present and back again. This new form of temporality, furthermore, gives an X-ray image of memory, bringing to light its painful yet rapturous

From Proust and the Sense of Time, translated and with an introduction by Stephen Bann. 1993 by Julia Kristeva. English translation 1993 by Stephen Bann.

17

18

Julia Kristeva

dependence on the senses. It offers modern readers the chance to identify the fragments of disparate time which are nowadays dragging them in every direction, with a greater force and insistence than ever before. So I would like to begin by putting a question to you, and to myself as well. What is the time-scale that you belong to? What is the time that you speak from? In the modern world, you might catch an impression of the medieval Inquisition from a nationalist dictator who soon nished spreading the message of integration. (I refer to the Gulf War.) Then you might be rejuvenated by 150 or 200 years by a Victorian president whose stiff, puritanical attitudes belong to the great age of the Protestant conquest of the New World, tempered by an eighteenth-century regard for human rights. But you are also an onlooker, even if you are not a participant, when people demonstrate their regression to infancy through civil violence, as in the recent events in Los Angeles; you witness the futurist breakthroughs of new musical forms like rap, without for a moment forgetting the wise explanatory discourses with which the newspapers and the universities try to explain this sort of thing. Newspapers and universities, by the way, continuing their role of transmitting and handing down knowledge, also belong to totally different time-scales. Yes, we live in a dislocated chronology, and there is as yet no concept that will make sense of this modern, dislocated experience of temporality.

PSYCHIC

T I M E A S A S PA C E O F R E C O N C I L I AT I O N

Living on the threshold of this disturbing epoch, Proust managed to put together the shattered fragments in the form of the life of his narrator, who experiences love and society in accordance with a number of themes which we may think of as archaic, but are in fact our very own, because of their polarized and discontinuous logic. For Proust, time is to be psychic time, and consequently the factor which determines our bodily life. I will argue that time in fact persists as the only surviving imaginative value which can be used by the novel to appeal to the whole community of readers. Things come to have meaning when the I of the writer rediscovers the sensations underlying them, which are always linked together in at least a series of two (as in the case of the madeleine offered to me by my mother and the one offered by Aunt Lonie; the paving stones of the Guermantes courtyard and those at St Marks, Venice). Time is this bringing together of two sensations which gush out from the signs and signal themselves to me. But since bringing things together is a metaphor, and sensation implies a body,

Proust and Time Embodied

19

Proustian time, which brings together the sensations imprinted in signs, is a metamorphosis. It is all too easy to rely on just one word of the title and conclude that this is a novel about time. Proust uses time as his intermediary in the search (A la recherche) for an embodied imagination: that is to say, for a space where words and their dark, unconscious manifestations contribute to the weaving of the worlds unbroken esh, of which I is a part. I as writer; I as reader; I living, loving and dying. From Homer to Balzac, ction creates and modies its own destiny by offering those who receive it a special eld of participation, a distinctive type of communion: it shows us human passions inextricably bound up with the unpredictability of nature and the harshnesses of society. Man, society and being are, for ction, indissociable. Hence over the period from Rabelais and Shakespeare to Balzac, ction has blended the serious with the ridiculous, and managed to extract from its chosen area the idea of a time which is specic to the individualthis so-called modern individual whose inner life, in all its different phases of sorrow, joy or ridicule, weaves its own form of continuity which is the thread of a destiny. Proust in no way abandons the ambition of Balzac and Homerwhich is sociological in an explicit way, but conceals a transcendental aim at its basis. He is concerned to establish a world in which his readers can come and communicate as if they were in a sacred place: a world where they can discover a coherence between time and space and their dreams can be realized, a place which is sadly lacking in modern reality. His Faubourg Saint-Germain (which in fact corresponds more closely to the Faubourg Saint-Honor) fulls this aim of establishing a social space, which is the very denition of the sacred in literature. Here it is, majestic as it approaches its demise, glorious and at the same time ridiculous, no less desirable in the rst pages of the opening volumes than it will be perverted and intolerable by the nal stage, when we see the very impulse that brought it into being by claiming to draw inspiration from it come full circle in the concept of a Temps retrouv (Time Regained). From the start, social life is offered as a spectacle. We must not take our eyes off it, but we can overtake it by a strategy that enables us to pass far beyond the social; this strategy consists in delving deep down into ourselves, in regaining the time of our inner lives, which has been so subtly reordered that this time now comes to seem the only reality worth taking into account. So Proust does not relinquish the obsession of authors from Homer to Balzac. But he tones it down by linking it with a project which traditionally belongs to poetry: this is the exploration of memory, with the I unfolding ideas and images, recalling avours, smells, touches, resonances, sensations,

20

Julia Kristeva

jealousies, exasperations, griefs and joysif it succeeds in articulating them. But to the extent that he offers us the space of memory as a residual area of value leading beyond the spectacle of worldly life in its drama, Proust also aligns himself with a tendency of philosophy contemporary with him: one which, from Bergson to Heidegger, in different ways but with signicant points in common, seeks to understand Being by exploring the obscurities of Time. Proust goes further indeed, since he puts into words a category of felt time which cuts through the categories of metaphysics, bringing together opposites like idea, duration and space, on the one hand, and force, perception, emotion and desire, on the other; he proposes a psychic universe of the maximum degree of complexity as the favourable locationthe place of sacred communionwhere lovers of reading can meet. Do we want tales of passion? Of money? Of war? Of life and death? Without any doubt, we have enough in Proust to keep up with the official statistics. But this is something quite different. If you will only be so good as to open up your memories of felt time, there will rise the new cathedral. Upon the plinth of a project which is by tradition secular and dates back to the Greeks, Prousts novel sets up a huge edice which has instead a biblical and evangelical provenance. And within this network of interminable social events, of endless plots, plots and more plots, he situates a person, I, a subject whose memory cannot be impugned, who is there to bring out the convulsive truth of this seeming history, to tear off its hundred masks. I invites you to do as I does. Read me, and you will be part of the world but without being taken in by it. I can give you the Divine Comedy of the life of the psyche, not just mine, but yours as well, ours, that is, the absolute. In creating this synthesis, in using memory to construct A la recherche in this way, Proust is adopting an ethical position. He is contrasting the disarray of the world and of the self with the unending search for that lost temple, that invisible temple, which is the felt time of our subjective memories. In taking up his aesthetic stance, he is also adopting a moral position vis-vis the cult of decadence, which he has passed through and, to a great extent, emerged from; Proust is a moralist therefore, but he is a moralist of outrage. The felt time in which he invites us to participate is one of sensual excess and extravagant eroticism, of ruses and betrayals. His sacredness is a sacredness of ill repute. In bringing it to light with the delicate touches of a Saint-Simon or a Mme de Svign, Proust the dandy of the belle poque makes contact with us in our contemporary, but also timeless, obsessions. There have been many people, since Proust, who have applied themselves to enlarging a fragment of felt timewriters of the nouveau roman have enhanced such fragments as if they were installing them in a stained-glass window. They may appear to be

Proust and Time Embodied

21

more modern, more elliptical, provocative and transgressive. But Proust remains the only one to keep the balance between the violence implicit in the marginal status of the main character (and the author) of A la recherche, and the graceful capacity for creating a world, a place of communion in worldly time. It is this fragile balance that we seem to have lost. Perhaps that is another reason why Proust, our contemporary, is also so difficult to reach in his intimate life.

PLANTS

A N D S E E D S : T H E V O C AT I O N

Prousts notebooks, and his Against Sainte-Beuve (composed between 1905 and 1909), tell us that the plan of A la recherche was xed by 19089. The eventual text proceeds through successive alterations and adjustments between 1909 and 1911; then from 1916 onwards we see the nal manuscript notebooks emerging. These had not yet been typed out at the time of Prousts death in 1922. In a letter dated 16 August 1908, he confesses to Mme Straus: I have just begun, and nished, a whole book. Unfortunately, leaving for Cabourg has interrupted my work. I am just about to get back to it. Maybe part of it will appear in serial form in Le Figaro, but only part of it, for it is too long and unsuitable to be published in its entirety. But I do want to nish it, to make an end. Everything is written down, but there is a lot to go over again.1 Unsuitable, longProust already knows how his work will begin and end, and what will be its chief featuresits outrageous contents and its disproportionate style. The First World War and his illness would delay and modify his original plan: Proust evidently could not have been aware in 1909 of the various changes that would be introduced in the course of time. But the central schemethe approach and the vision, as he would later refer to it when speaking of his styleare already in place. In the cork-lined bedroom on the Boulevard Haussmann, in the month of July 1909, there begins the metamorphosis of Against Sainte-Beuve into that starting point of A la recherche which will be Du ct de chez Swann (Swanns Way). Notebook 3, which dates from this stage, actually contains eight versions of the narrators famous awakening scenehis mind invaded by formless sensations seeming to come from an adjacent room, just before the appearance of the

22

Julia Kristeva

familiar sounds and lights will bring him to full consciousness.2 Involuntary memory is already there, causing the boiling lava of memories and desires from the past to coagulate around a present sensation, however slight, however intense. So what has been happening between the commencement of Against Sainte-Beuve and the emergence of this fully edged projectbetween 1905 and 1909?

2. THE
DEAD MOTHER

At the end of Time Regained, after bringing up yet again the way in which the narrators experience is structured by the alternation of love and death, with death darkening love but love wiping out the fear of death, Proust quotes a line from Victor Hugo: The grass must grow and children have to die.3 And he describes the cruel law of art which amounts in the rst instance to the romantic notion that suffering and death are necessary for the gestation of works of art, but concludes with a light-hearted apologia for Manet, considered as the Giorgione of a period of open-air painting: To me it seems more correct to say that the cruel law of art is that people die and we ourselves die after exhausting every form of suffering, so that over our heads may grow the grass not of oblivion but of eternal life, the vigorous and luxuriant growth of a true work of art, and so that thither, gaily and without a thought for those who are sleeping beneath them, future generations may come to enjoy their djeuner sur lherbe. (III. 1095) In this context, it is Albertine who is the object of so much love and so much jealousy. It is her accidental and premature death which has detached the narrator from sexual desire in the same measure as it has made him indifferent to death, and has entrenched him all the more securely within another reality: that of my book. The vigorous and luxuriant grass of the work requires a death. A childs death? And if so, which child? Albertine? Or the narrator himself, who has died many times, so he believes, since his childhood: dying at every parting, every separation, every bedtime which tears him away from his parents, from his mummy? And what if the child remained in existence only as long as

Proust and Time Embodied

23

there was a mother there? In that event, the mother would have to die in order for the child to break with his childhood, for him to turn it into a memory, a time regained. Were he nally to regain all his time, set out in the space of a book, then the book would indeed be a djeuner sur lherbe: it would transform the graveyard of the dead children into a pleasure garden, dedicated to the ambiguous, loving and vengeful memory of a mother who always loved excessively and not enoughand made you into a child who is still dying, perhaps, but who has a chance of ultimate resurrection and maturity in the luxuriant grass of the book. Mme Proust, ne Jeanne-Clemence Weil, died on 26 September 1905, following a short visit to Evian with her son Marcel, in the course of which, while staying at the Htel Splendide, she suffered an attack of uraemia. The sudden illness and death agony of the narrators grandmother in A la recherche du temps perdu recall the remorse felt by Proust as a result of his feeble behaviour at this juncture. Mme Proust rst asked to be photographed, hesitated, and later called it off: She wanted and she didnt want to be photographed, wishing to leave me one last image, and yet afraid that it would be too distressing ... 4 A collector of photographs, Proust would later put his family snapshots to blasphemous use, showing them around at the Le Cuziat brothel. On her return to the Rue de Courcelles, the dying woman could think only of her elder son. How would he survive without her? She died while Proust stayed alone in his room, unable to cope with the sight of his mothers death agony. There is no event that can explain the genesis of a work, not even the death of a woman like Mme Proust. The book had been maturing for ages, yet it was mourning his mother that marked the start of a new time-scale and a new way of life. Since I lost my mother ... Proust often refers to the event in his correspondence, and he does not attempt to hide his wounds in his letters to Montesquiou, Barrs and Maurice Duplay.5 The second volume of Le Ct de Guermantes (The Guermantes Way; 1921) continually harps on the illness, suffering and nally death agony of the narrators grandmother, as if intending to lend to salon life, which the young man nds attractive and empty by turns, an unreal and hallucinatory quality. Yet it is in Sodome et Gomorrhe (Sodom and Gomorrah), published in 1921 and 1922, that the note of black remorse, anticipated in the earlier works, nally strikes home. This is the novel of sexual inversion, no less distinct from the childhood memories of Swanns Way than it is from the aesthetic theory of Time Regained. It is in this work, which has been called the most Balzacian of the series, that Proust makes the clearest allusion, in the form of allusions to the death of the

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Julia Kristeva

narrators grandmother, to the sense of guilt brought about by his mothers death. As the years go on, and the work progresses with them, the scenes of sexual inversion occupy a more and more important place. Albertines lesbianism is the major stimulus for the blend of jealousy and fascination which the narrator feels for this young woman. Society gures, not excluding the irreproachable Prince de Guermantes, turn out to have perverse habits. The adventures of Charlus with Jupien and Morel reach a high point of moral and physical cruelty, culminating in the agellation scene in the brothel. This homosexual, explicitly erotic mise-en-scne becomes possible only in Sodom and Gomorrah, and in it the vision which we can now appreciate to be the real kernel of Prousts imaginary world, its albumen and seed, crystallizes. The sado-masochism of Sodom and Gomorrah is the truth underlying eroticism and feeling and, on a deeper level, sado-masochism is the very bond that brings society together.

CRUCIAL EPISODE

The inclusion, in a section entitled The Intermittencies of the Heart, of the (grand-)mothers death gives the narrator the chance not only to recall childhood memories (his boots and his dressing-gown), but also to discourse at length on two of the fundamental themes of A la recherche. On the one hand, the joyful experience of passion is invariably accompanied by a sense of the nothingness, the mortality and the foreign nature of the loved one, a combination which engenders delightful forms of suffering. On the other hand, the faculty of memory which reveals this exquisite duality to us is lodged in an unknown domain, in the entire existence of our bodies, with the effect that a series of different and parallel states of the self are superimposed, and consequently the self of today can rediscover the previous self intact, provided that the underlying sensations have the character of intermittencies: being both violent enough and null at the same time, tender and listless, combining joy with grief and remorse: For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart ... But if the context of sensations in which they are preserved is recaptured, they acquire in turn the same power of expelling everything that is incompatible with them, of installing alone in us the self that originally lived them ... without any solution of continuity, immediately after the rst evening at Balbec

Proust and Time Embodied

25

long ago ... I clung to the minute in which my grandmother had stooped over me. The self that I then was, that had disappeared for so long, was once again so close to me that I seemed still to hear the words that had just been spoken, although they were now no more than a phantasm ... (II. 784) [my italics] My commentary on this extract is that we are offered a foretaste of memory as comprising the successive states of the self, and of time regained, even to the very sensations: the narrator experiences grief, ecstasy and even indifference in unison with the dramas of sexuality to be made manifest by the two biblical cities. This implies that the (grand-)mothers death makes it possible for violence and remorse to be inserted into the very heart of the child-narrators sensibility, and at the same time it is implied that cruelty is omnipresent, even in the purity of childhood. Time will be truly regained only if he rediscovers the particular form of violencethe violence that is, initially, one of archaic loss and vengeance. That which delights me and abandons me also kills me; but I am capable of putting to death that which is my delight. Yet in this crucial year, 1905, when Proust has already anticipated and indeed sketched out the theme of inversion (in Jean Santeuil, and Les Plaisirs et les jours), he has apparently not made a close connection between inversion and memorys remarkable capacity of regaining sensations by way of signs. Nor has he connected this remarkable aspect of memory with the shock inicted by his mothers losswith her death or her being put to death. The full intensity of his remorse has to wait for its expression until 1921, the publication of Sodom and Gomorrah. And yet his sense of guilt echoes throughout his private correspondence, and gives itself away in the initial volumes through a number of characters who nd their place there, such as Mlle Vinteuil, before nally, and with a minimal attempt at disguise, installing the gure of the mother at the heart of all the intermittencies of the heart. The mother is at the heart of a primal sado-masochism.

LOVE

IS ANGUISH, ANGUISH IS THE PUTTING T O D E AT H O F W H O M ?

The well-known scene of the kiss withheld at the little boys bedtime, already told in Jean Santeuil and repeated in Swanns Way, has given generations of readers the image of a mother who is loved voraciously and selshly. This was a love which involved, right from the start, a struggle for power, a

26

Julia Kristeva

mingling of violence and passivity, of desire and contrition. For the moment she yielded, the moment the kiss was granted, the narrators anticipated triumph turned to bitter regret, and suffering began to colour his pleasure in a foretaste of sado-masochism.6 As early as 1896, in Les Plaisirs et les jours, Proust had written the Confession of a young girl whose voluptuous and blameworthy eroticism, though remaining heterosexual, is the cause of her mothers death.7 Sex is shown to be intrinsically sadistic, as cruel to the lovers themselves as it is to their mothers. Proust writes: Now I was beginning to realize in a confused way that every act which is both voluptuous and blameworthy involves in equal measure the ferocity of the body taking its pleasure, and the tears and martyrdom of our good intentions and our guardian angels.8 It is through witnessing an erotic scene that the mother of the young girl who speaks these words is struck with apoplexy and dies. After the death of Prousts own mother, we nd him on 4 December 1905 at the clinic of Dr Sollier, a specialist in mental and nervous diseases, with the rm intention of proving that medicine can do nothing in his particular case. He succeeds, and leaves the establishment after six weeks. Social and literary life, so it would appear, are better at turning the activity of mourning into literature. Proust sets up house at 102 Boulevard Haussmann, and the architect Louis Parent lines his bedroom walls with cork in 1909: his cell is ready at just the same time as his plan for the work which will necessitate breaking open this shell, and dominating himself by a massive act of willpower which will be as delightful to experience as it is relentless in its effect on others. From 1905 to 1909, Proust publishes little. Yet one thing that takes our attention is the article appearing in Le Figaro of 1 February 1907 under the title Filial Sentiments of a Parricide. Prousts notice had been drawn, shortly after his mothers death, to an incident in which a person of his acquaintance, Henri Van Blarenberghe, had killed his mother and then committed suicide. Proust interpreted this as the aggressiveness of an Oedipus or an Orestes, known in cruel detail from the Greek texts. The further commentary which he added from Shakespeare and Dostoevsky was hardly less cruel. Obviously the murdering son is a criminal, but Proust the writer seems to be on the point of absolving him when he exclaims: what was the religious atmosphere of moral beauty in which this explosion of madness and slaughter took place? (CSB, 157). He seems tempted to include himself in this crime: What have you made of me? he asks. What have you made of me?:

Proust and Time Embodied

27

If we put our minds to it, there would perhaps be not one truly loving mother who was not able, on her last day, and often long before, to address this reproach to her son. Basically, as we grow old, we all kill those who love us by the preoccupation we cause in them, by that very restless tenderness which we breathe in and put ceaselessly on its guard. (CSB, 1589) In January 1908 Proust writes Robert and the Kid. Mother leaves on a journey, a text which is now lost. The metamorphosis is under way: in 1909, the plan for a book on Sainte-Beuve turns into a genuine novel. Writing Against Sainte-Beuve, Proust the essayist explains that it is not through biography that the work of authors can be explained; talent has its own rationale, which society cannot comprehend. Here it is not just a matter of doing away with biography but, more exactly, of going into mourning for it. Proust takes up the project of Jean Santeuil again and transposes it. He searches for lost time in the innermost signs of his experience, infusing the singularity of his own grief into the universal pattern of an intelligence which is accessible to all. He starts working hard; his reclusiveness increasingly takes him over. In 1912 the rst part of A la recherche reaches its completed form. In 1913 Swanns Way is published. At this stage, Cleste Albaret enters Prousts service and makes it possible for him to live in perfect retirement in spite of his very demanding social life: through this means, and both through and in spite of his asthma, Proust is able to achieve the extraordinary ascetic life which will enable him to trace, with a sick but authoritative hand, the word END at the conclusion of Time Regained.

THE

GOVERNESS: A DAUGHTER AND A MOTHER

Straight away, the writer recognizes in his female servant the marks of motherly love: that of a daughter for her mother, and that of a mother for her daughter. Your young wife is bored without her mother, Albaret, thats all, he says to his chauffeur, Clestes husband, before taking her into his service.9 Cleste describes herself, in the year 1913, as a child in spite of my 22 years [Proust was 32] above all because I had only just left my mothers tender care behind.10 Master and servant will combine together in joint homage to the maternal. I was very fond of Papa. But Mama, the day she died, took her little Marcel with her.11 The nice thing about him was that I sometimes felt like his mother, and at others like his child.12 Everything

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affecting mothers and their experiences reminded him of his own and affected him deeply.13 It was particularly about my mother that he used to ask me questions. He would say to me: It is easy to see that your father was a good man. But even with the best of men, the bread of human kindness will never be what it can be with a woman; there is always an outer shell of roughness. A man can never be the soul of kindness, as your mother seems to have been. 14 This kindness was, however, in Clestes estimation, what Proust had managed to realize in himself, making him behave in such a way that the housekeeper, who was herself always taking innite pains to seek out for him sole, smelts, gudgeons and fumigating powder, felt herself to be under the maternal care of her master. Monsieur, I nd my mother again in you. And, as Proust explained to Cleste: The thing is, you were made for devotion like your mother, even if you knew nothing about it. Otherwise, you would not be here.15 Never can two beings more disparate in their background and level of education have been thus brought together in their devotion to the good mother, who would ll them both, alternately, with the sublimated love that binds a child to its mother, and no doubt the writer to his work. The mother who brings desire and guilt is dead; there remains complicity and the benet of mutual silence. Cleste becomes the living relay between the female body and the book, between the turbulence of eroticism and the denitive form of the signed text. With a charming navet, she admits to having taken the place of a possible Albertine, an ideal Albertine, who, in her maternal devotion to the most motherly of sons, allows him not to marry her but to absorb her into a book: Not only did I live at his rhythm, but you could say that, twentyfour hours out of twenty-four, and seven days out of seven, I lived exclusively for him. I have nothing to do with the person in his books whom he called The Captive, and yet I really deserved the title.16 Proust leans on her, and against her, he watches her but does not see her, he speaks to her and his words rebound off her. This is not a dialogue, she simply activates the monologue, by relaying and starting it up again; he forgets her, he gathers her up, she vanishes, as, moreover, does he. There is no longer any self , just the I that speaks across her. So Cleste and the cork lining of his apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann, guarantee the air-tightness of the protected environment in

Proust and Time Embodied

29

which involuntary memory remakes and unmakes its tentacular sentences, on the look-out for sounds, colours and avours; and at the same time there is another stage on which the great world keeps up its pretence, sex spends its fury and, soon enough, the war will arrive to turn existing hierarchies upside down. A number of authors talk of Proust at this period as being curious to witness scenes of debauchery. Maurice Sachs mentions rats pierced with hatpins; M. Jouhandeau the photos of Prousts mother which were profaned in front of gigolos, the family furniture which was carried to the Le Cuziat brothel, the masturbation sessions where the voyeur hid in bed, with a naked young man before him, responding only to the pleasure of seeing rats devour one another.17 This entire world expands and stages in the most grotesque fashion the sado-masochism which the narrator of A la recherche re-creates in a muted, psychological colouring; it unfolds as a kind of antithesis which works in conjunction with the writing laboratory where Cleste is the vestal virgin. The physical stimulus of debauchery serves to excite the senses and the emotions, with their blend of exaltation and abasement. No one can state categorically, however, that the pleasure of the childhood memory which has been given a nameand that of the scraps of paper which are mounting up all the time in his manuscriptis not as great as, or even greater than, the sexual intoxication.

S U B L I M AT I O N /

P R O FA N AT I O N

So the mother is dead, I have killed her, my grief turns to remorse, I speak of it before another, I speak to myself, I speakand all is regained, eternity. The way has been prepared for the profanation which becomes possible after two or three years of mourning, in the course of which the loved person has become blurred in the memory, with no lessening in the mean time of the ambivalence of a guilt-ridden love. As early as 1908, in Notebook 1, the hero dreams that his grandmother is dead, but the actual episode, Death of my grandmother, is forecast only in the plan of the 1912 version of the novel. The theme of inversion becomes steadily more important from 1908 onwards; sketches for the character of Charlus help to achieve the separation between essay and novel in the writing of Against Sainte-Beuve, and at the same time this project takes second place to the strictly narrative undertaking which is to be A la recherche. Meanwhile, over the years 1908 to 1912, the Proustian idea of profaning the mother takes root: Notebook 1 refers to the mothers face in a debauched grandson.18 Profanation is seen as a condition of sublimation. In Against

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Sainte-Beuve we read: The face of a son who lives on, like a monstrance in which a sublime mother, now dead, placed all her faith, is like the profanation of a sacred memory. In Sodom and Gomorrah, nally, there is this late addition to the text: Moreover, was it possible to separate M. de Charluss appearance completely from the fact that, as sons do not always bear a likeness to their fathers, even when they are not inverts and go after women, they consummate in their faces the profanation of their mothers? But let us leave at this point what would be worth a chapter on its own: profanation of the mother. (III. 300) The interweaving of the two themesinversion on the one hand, and on the other ambivalence towards the mother resulting in profanation comes clearly into view, for example in Notebook 47, which opens with M. Charlus and the Verdurins and continues with the grandmothers illness. When he later draws the connection between the death of his grandmother and that of Albertine, the narrator feels himself to be soiled with a double assassination; at least, as Georges Bataille has pointed out, he believes himself to be responsible for profaning his mother in just the same way as Mlle Vinteuil profaned the memory of her father: the young girl makes him die of sorrow, and just a few days later, while still in mourning, enjoys the embraces of a lesbian lover who spits on the dead mans photograph. The sufferings of Vinteuil, who is shocked by his daughters sexuality, are presented to us in place of the description which the reader expects, but will never receive, of the sorrows experienced by the narrators mother in the face of Albertine (or Albert) coming on the scene: he saw himself and his daughter in the lowest depths, and his manners had of late been tinged with that humility, that respect for persons who ranked above him and to whom he now looked up ... that tendency to search for some means of rising again to their level, which is an almost mechanical result of any human downfall. (1. 162) In a similar way, however, the narrators mother is said to be so aware of the sufferings of the old piano teacher that she seems to share them from the inside. At times when pleasure overtakes him, the narrator feels that he makes his mothers soul weep. Like Mlle Vinteuil, who is an artist in sadism, he

Proust and Time Embodied

31

even comes to believe that sensual pleasure is a form of wickedness in which he can engulf himself and bury his ideal. For the ideal, which is uncompromisingly maternal, is so scrupulous and coercive that, to escape from it, you have to profane it, and drag it down into the bestial world of pleasure. The complicity which Proust discovers between the requirements of an ideal tenderness and the depths of transgression which it imposes is what renders the pervert miserable and, by the same token, deserving of love. Georges Bataille recognizes the kinship with his own inner experience of the ecstasies of sin and profanation when he writes: This wish for limitless horror reveals itself in the end for what it is: the true measure of love.19 As for Albertine, she appears in the novel only around 1913, almost exactly at the same time as Cleste is becoming established in the apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann. Thanks to these two, Albertine and Cleste, the inversion can be concealedthere is a woman to embody the passion of the narrator, transposing the feeling that Proust reserves for menand the element of profanation gets toned down. Certainly the narrators mother would have no time for Albertinebut surely it is inicting on her no more than a polite and conventional form of cruelty that he should desire a woman in this completely natural way? Everything conspires in favour of sublimation: the grievous experience of passion, which has been ltered through mourning and trapped by the cork-lined wall of the motherly Cleste, can now break out in joy: Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure our heart; the transformation itself, even, for an instant, releases suddenly a little joy. (III. 944) The imagination, the reective faculty may be admirable machines in themselves but they may also be inert. Suffering sets them in motion. And then at least the woman who poses for us as grief favours us with an abundance of sittings, in that studio which we enter only in these periods and which lies deep within us. (III. 946)

A C C I D E N T,

A G E I N G A N D WA R

In the last volume of A la recherche, we are presented with three different forms of death: Albertines accident, the ageing of the main characters, and the upheaval caused in society by the First World War. Without pausing to

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look at the aspects of this concern in detail, we can certainly show how Proust turns didactic, and outlines the way in which linear time can be transformed into the timelessness of literature. We can follow in Time Regained the successive stages through which he imposes his logic upon the innumerable ashbacks, condensations, plots and digressions which made up the earlier volumes of A la recherche. As it restores my various, different, relationships with people and things, my memory fastens upon particular sites and places. But, incapable of placing them in succession to one another, it sets up revolutions around me as it does around them. In order to take account of this assembly of revolutions, the book would have to use not the two-dimensional psychology which we normally use but a quite different sort of three-dimensional psychology (III. 1087). So through juxtaposing the opposing facetsas in the face of Mlle de Saint-Loup, the masterpiece which combines the features of a Swann and a Guermantes, an Odette and a GilberteProust discovers what will be (and indeed already has been) the spur of the book. This will impel the narrator (it already has impelled him) to create a world as vast as a cathedral, or on a more modest scale to arrange the pieces of material among themselves as if making a dress (III. 1090). The process of reasoning now reaches its fullment, and the formula of A la recherche, its alchemical key, is waiting to be spoken. What the narrator calls an enhanced place in timeperceived by the senses, inaccessible no doubt but, as the prepositional form la indicates, always beckoning to us, remaining open and disposable as the self revolves around itis the notion of embodied time. The time in which all of our sensations are reected upon, as they tie the knot between subjectivity and the external world and recover once again the sounds that lie beneath the masks of appearance: This notion of Time embodied, of years past but not separated from us, it was now my intention to emphasize as strongly as possible in my work. And at this very moment, in the house of the Prince de Guermantes, as though to strengthen me in my resolve, the noise of my parents footsteps as they accompanied M. Swann to the door and the pealresilient, ferruginous, interminable, fresh and shrillof the bell on the garden gate which informed me that at last he had gone and that Mamma would presently come upstairs, these sounds rang again in my ears, yes, unmistakably I heard these very sounds, situated though they were in a remote past. And as I cast my mind over all the events

Proust and Time Embodied

33

which were ranged in an unbroken series between the moment of my childhood when I had first heard its sound and the Guermantes party, I was terried to think that it was indeed this same bell which rang within me and that nothing that I could do would alter its jangling notes. On the contrary, having forgotten the exact manner in which they faded away and wanting to relearn this, to hear them properly again, I was obliged to block my ears to the conversations which were proceeding between the masked gures all round me ... (III. 1105) Then, without warning, appearing like a confession a few lines before the word END is inserted, there comes into play once again the notion of desire, and nothing less than the desire to destroy, on the extreme boundaries of cruelty. There is the sense of something coming into view and then being annihilated, of love and hate: the avowal that desire is in essence a perverse desire is what makes time regained come full circle: And it is because they contain thus within themselves the hours of the past that human bodies have the power to hurt so terribly those who love them, because they contain the memories of so many joys and desires already effaced for them, but still cruel for the lover who contemplates and prolongs in the dimension of Time the beloved body of which he is jealous, so jealous that he may even wish for its destruction ... Albertine deep down, whom I saw sleeping and who was dead.20 (III. 1106) [my italics] And yet, after this avowal of cruelty, it is formal language that passes on the message of the perversity at the root of all desire: the monsters which take up their places within us come to form a kind of polytopiaa place ... prolonged past measurefor simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch epochs that are immensely far apart, separated by the slow accretion of many, many daysin the dimension of Time. The End. (III. 1107) The End. Over and beyond the time of jealousy, the time for the construction of the work now takes over, in so far as the book is itself the direct replacement for the loved personcould we therefore refer to this Proustian time (of cruelty, sensation and writing) as a temporality of concern? Heideggers temporality of concern incorporates several different stages: the temporality of disclosedness, the temporality of understanding, the temporality of state of mind and the temporality of falling.21 Yet desire,

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in its cruelty, goes beyond the temporality of concern, and opens up a place in which signs can develop a spatial dimension by building up sensations. The writer is no philosopher: memory regained bears the imprint of colour, taste, touch and other forms of experience, whilst a distinctive type of writing which transgresses all bounds in its richness of metaphor and its embedding of clauses one within one another at the same time destroys and reconstructs the world. In the Proustian text the non-temporal nature of the unconscious (as Freud would have it) goes side by side with an overpowering awareness of Being. The psychic absorbs the cosmic and, beyond it, Being itself is diluted in style. So imaginary experience is not unaware of the temporality of concern. But it goes beyond it, in a search for joy. Closer in this sense to Spinoza than to Heidegger, Prousts ction reveals fundamental features of the human psyche. Personally, I enjoy this revelation; I hope that you do too.

NOTES
1. Marcel Proust, Correspondance, ed. Philip Kolb (Paris, Plon, 197083), vol. IX, p. 163. 2. Cf. M. Bardche, Marcel Proust romancier, Les Sept Couleurs (Paris, 1971), vol. I, p 204. 3. Victor Hugo, Oeuvres compltes, Posie II (Paris, Laffont, 1985), p. 412: A Villequier. 4. Proust, Correspondance, Proust to Mme Catusse, vol. X, p. 215. 5. Ibid., vol. V, p. 238; vol VI, p. 28: letters to Maurice Duplay cited in Q. de Diesbach, Marcel Proust (Paris, Perrin, 1991). 6. Cf. 1.41: It struck me that my mother had just made a rst concession which must have been painful to her, that it was a rst abdication on her part from the ideal she had formed for me, and that for the rst time she who was so brave had to confess herself beaten. It struck me that if I had just won a victory it was over her, that I had succeeded, as sickness or sorrow or age might have succeeded, in relaxing her will, in undermining her judgment; and that this evening opened a new era, would remain a black date in the calendar. 7. Proust, Jean Santeuil prcd de Les Plaisirs et les jours (Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothque de la Pliade, 1971), pp. 912. 8. Ibid., p. 95. 9. Cleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust (Paris, Laffont, 1973), p. 19. 10. Ibid., p. 32. 11. Ibid., p. 30. 12. Ibid., p. 117. 13. Ibid., p. 133. 14. Ibid., p. 139.

Proust and Time Embodied

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15. Ibid., p. 140. 16. Ibid., p. 64. 17. Cf. H. Bonnett, Les Amours et la sexualit de M. Proust (Paris, Nizet, 1985), p. 80. 18. Quoted in Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, ed. B. de Fallois (Paris, 1954), p. 282. 19. Georges Bataille, Marcel Proust et la mre profane, in Critique, no. 47 (1946), p. 609. 20. The last sentence of this quotation is not to be found in the Penguin Classics edition, which relies on the earlier Pliade text. 21. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans J. Macquarie and Edward Robinson (London, SCM Press, 1962), pp. 383ff.

R O B E RT F R A S E R

The Lamp of Truth: Proust and George Eliot

n holiday with his grandmother in Balbec the adolescent boy of A lombre des jeunes filles en eurs is prey to sundry appearances. Balbec itself is an appearance, the successive projections of which disguise its reality: a rather ordinary upper-middle-class resort on the coast of Normandy. As these illusions or perceptions peel back, he creeps closer to the truth, or rather to a stable perception of that which confounds the successive masks which concealed it. One of more perplexing of these illusions concerns the jeunes lles themselves, who at rst sight, swanning along the promenade in happy abandon, appear to possess a certain uniformity of manner: a devilmay-care athleticism, an almost callous condence, a careless and concerted cruelty. At one point one of the girls whose name, he later learns, is Andre, skips on to the edge of the bandstand, and discovering in her path the head of an elderly man of the law settled in a deckchair beneath, executes a leap that carries her within a few inches of his ears, to the abject terror of the octogenarian judge but the explosive delight of her companions. But Andre is an enigma: at once the most popular and the most introverted of the band. It is not long before the boy begins to suspect in her the inverse of the happy physicality she has adopted principally for the

From Proust and the Victorians: The Lamp of Memory. 1994 by Robert Fraser.

37

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Robert Fraser

approbation of others. The attraction she possesses for him is thus that of an opposite and is of short duration, since at the heart of her lies a personality at odds with the demonstrativeness that rst drew him; something too closely akin to himselffebrile, neurotic, enclosed: But for me truly to be able to love Andre she was too intellectual, too nervous, too delicate, too similar to me. If Albertine now struck me as empty, Andre on the other hand was replete with something I recognized only too well. I had thought the rst day to have met some cyclists mistress on the beach, eaten up with a love of sport which Andre now informed me that she had taken up on the advice of her doctor to ease her neurasthenia and gastric complaints, but that her nest hours were those she devoted to translating the novels of George Eliot. My deception, founded on a misunderstanding as to her nature, had little importance. But it was the sort of blunder which can cause love to be born and, if unrecognized and uncorrected, be the cause of much suffering. (NP, II, 295) Thus the only kind of suffering Andre is capable of causing him is one founded on a categorical mistake. His spiritual alter persona, she will herself be drawn to her opposite, the very Albertineshallow and self-servingthat he must learn to love. In a later volume, La Prisonnire, she will accordingly occasion the pangs of jealously, but not on her own behalf, for how could she who beguiles the afternoon hours translating the novels of George Eliot sustain a threat to one whose self-immersion, whose tastes in reading, so closely resemble her own? The ambit of those tastes, intense and self-enclosed, recalls a parallel passage in Jean Santeuil: Already when we were tiny there was always some particular book which we took with us when going to the park, and which we perused with that extra special love which no other love has ever since been able to supplant. And even at that very moment we were attached less exclusively to what the book said than we were to the texture of the pages we were turning. Today in a manuscript, in a journal supplement, we will be delighted to discover a few additional pages of George Eliot or Emerson. But when we were young the book itself was never distinct in our minds from that which it was saying. (JS, II, 190)

The Lamp of Truth: Proust and George Eliot

39

The passage occurs in the Begmeil chapter, just after Jean is described striding on to the sand dunes bearing a volume of Carlyles French Revolution, Prousts own holiday reading at the time. Unlike the Balbec sections of A la recherche, this is a form of ctionalised autobiography, and the enthusiasms adduced are very much the authors own. It is not for nothing that in A la recherche de Marcel Proust Andr Maurois cites George Eliot among the passions of Prousts childhood, long before English was one of his accomplishments.1 If the adolescent of A lombre des jeunes filles en eurs shared the young Prousts incapacities as well as his enthusiasms, he might well have appreciated, if not Andres love, at least her offices as translator.

II

In that capacity, however, she had been anticipated by fty years. We are very anxious to get an accomplished translator for Adam Bede Eliot wrote to Geneva in December 1859: Hitherto I have rejected propositions of translators, for a dread of having ones sentences metamorphosed into an expression of somebody elses meaning instead of ones own. I particularly wish my books to be translated into French, because the French read so little English; and if there is any healthy truth in my art, surely they need it to purify their literary air.2 The suspicion of Gallic impurity was one that she constantly expressed (half poisoned by the French theatre is how she once described herself to her publisher John Blackwood), but her correspondent on this occasion, Franois DAlbert-Durade, was French Swiss and exempt from the contagion. Ten years earlier, stricken with grief after the death of her father, she had arrived in Geneva in the company of Charles Bray and his wife Cara. The stay was only partially successful in allaying her loss, and it was with some foreboding that the Brays turned homeward, leaving her in Geneva for the winter. But in October she wrote to them describing the family with whom she had found lodgings: M. and Mme. DAlbert are really clever peoplepeople worth sitting up an hour longer to talk to .... M. DAlbert plays and sings, and in the winter he tells me they have parties .... In fact, I think that I am in just the right place.

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Again, For M. DAlbert, I love him already as if he were father and brother both. You must know that he is no more than 4 feet high with a deformed spinethe result of an accident in his boyhoodbut on this little body is placed a nely formed head, full in every direction. The face is plain with small features, and rather haggard-looking, but all the lines and the wavy grey hair indicate the temperament of an artist. I have not heard a word or seen a gesture from him yet that was not perfectly in harmony with an exquisite moral renement.3 Stolidly bourgeois in a respectable Genevan mould, the DAlberts possessed for Marian Evans a combination she had seldom before encountered, and of much use to her at this stage of her life, newly released from the constraints of her family and an unwelcome friction with her father, with whom her newfound emancipation of views had brought her at times into open conict. For the DAlberts were Calvinists, heir to an Evangelical faith free of the mental narrowness she had come to associate with the superstitious Evangelicalism of the English Midlands, which she was later to parody in the Dodson aunts in The Mill on the Floss, an Evangelicalism unknown to Bossuet. Franois DAlbert in particular, an artist of no mean accomplishment and later conservateur of the Athene, possessed a generosity of culture she was never to forget. The Brays, who met him on his one brief visit to the Midlands, thought him a model for Philip Wakeham, whose bodily affliction he shared along with a certain fawn-like capacity for devotion. His portrait of her in oils, from a sketch made in Geneva shortly before her departure, hangs now in Coventry Library (Plate 5). Slender and tranquil, with none of the magisterial grandeur of the novelist she was later to become, she looks out from eyes that are both calm and knowing. The large chin softened and dimpled, the nose tapered and aquiline, she has a patient and delicate homeliness that might have recommended itself to Proust, lover of the exceptional in the ordinary, the wayside ower. When in time DAlbert came to translate ve of her booksAdam Bede, Scenes from Clerical Life, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner and Romola something of the same softening was apparent. Adam Bede in particular, with its Warwickshire dialect, its portrayal of English Nonconformism, was never going to be easy. As simple, biblical French as possible will be the best vehicle she advised, and of The Mill on the Floss:

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I can well imagine that you nd the Mill more difficult to render than Adam. But would it be inadmissible to represent in French, at least to some degree, those intermdiaires entre le style commun et le style lgant to which you refer? It seems to me that I have discerned such shades very strikingly rendered in Balzac and occasionally in George Sand. Balzac, I think, dares to be thoroughly colloquial in spite of French strait-lacing. Even in English this daring is far from being general. The writers who dare to be thoroughly familiar are Shakespeare, Fielding, Scott (where he is expressing the popular life with which he is familiar) and indeed every other writer of ction of the rst class. Even in his loftiest tragediesin Hamlet for exampleShakespeare is intensely colloquial. One hears the accents of living men.4

III This vernacular robustness of Eliotaccents of living menproved very appealing to Marcel Proust, who fty years later read Scenes from Clerical Life (Scenes de la vie du Clerg), Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss (Le Moulin sur la Floss) and Silas Marner, all in DAlberts translations. To him it spoke of a certain healthy levity of spirit akin to that which Carlyle had discerned among spokesmen of reformed religions: Cromwell, Knox, Luther, Mahommet. In a footnote appended to La Bible dAmiens he speaks of this frankness, this healthy and life-accepting wholeness, le rire de Luther (Luthers laugh) as a peculiarly Ruskinian trait, the very quality that led his master to direct Amiens pilgrims to call in at the patisserie in the high street before paying their respects to the cathedral of St Firmin.5 Then, with a keen manoeuvre of the sensibility, but in seeming logical irrelevance, he quotes Eliots description of the curate Mr Gill from Scenes of Clerical Life, followed by a collage of phrases descriptive of Mr Irwine, the vicar of Hayslope from Adam Bede, some culled from Eliots narrative, others from Adam in old age. But it is characteristic of the softening effect of DAlberts translation on Midlands speech that in French it is hard to distinguish the accents of Adam, one living man, from those of the author: M. Irwine navait effectivement ni tendances leves, ni enthousiasme religieux et regardait comme une vraie perte de temps de parler doctrine et rveil chrtien au vieux pre Taft ou Cranage, le forgeron .... Il ntait ni laborieux, ni oublieux de

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lui-mme, ni trs abondant en aumnes et sa croyance mme tait assez large. Ses gots intellectuels taient plutt paens .... Mais il avait cette charit chrtienne qui a souvent manqu dillustres vertus. Il tait indulgent pour les fautes du prochain et peu enclin supposer le mal .... Si vous laviez rencontr mont sur sa jument grise, ses chiens courant ses cts, avec un sourire de bonne humeur .... Linuence de M. Irwine dans sa paroisse fut plus utile que celle de M. Ryde qui insistait fortement sur les doctrines de la Rformation, condamnait svrement les convoitiscs de la chair ... qui tait trs savant. M. Irwine tait aussi diffrent de cela que possible, mais il tait si pntrant; il comprenait ce quon voulait dire la minute, il se conduisait en gentilhomme avec les fermiers .... Il ntait pas un fameux prdicateur ... mais ne disait rien qui ne ft propre vous rendre plus sage si vous vous en souveniez. He really had neither lofty aims, no theological enthusiasm: if I were closely questioned, I would be obliged to confess that he felt no serious alarms about the souls of his parishioners, and would have thought it a mere loss of time to talk in a doctrinal and awakening manner to old Feyther Taft, or even to Chad Cranage the blacksmith .... He was neither laborious, nor obviously self-denying, nor very copious in alms-giving, and his theology you perceive, was lax. His mental palate, indeed, was rather pagan ... he had that charity which has sometimes been lacking to the very illustrious virtuehe was tender to other mens failings, and unwilling to impute evil .... But if you had met him that June afternoon riding on his grey cob, with his dogs running beside himwith a good-natured smile on his nely turned lips .... I must believe that Mr Irwines inuence in his parish was a more wholesome one than that of the zealous Mr Ryde who ... insisted strongly on the doctrines of the Reformation ... and was severe in rebuking the aberrations of the esh .... Now Mester Irwine was as different as could be; as quick!he understood what you meant in a minute. And he behaved as much like a gentleman to the farmers ... nobody has ever heard me say that Mr Irwine was much of a preacher ... nothing but what was good and what youd be the wiser for remembering.6

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Regarding England and the English from afar, Proust seems to have regarded this worldly tolerance of Eliots clergymen as intrinsic to AngloSaxon Protestantism: something rounded, eshy, wholesome, integrity combined with an avoidance of extremes. For whatever else of her he had sacriced, DAlbert had kept the life-accepting humour, to which Proust was quick to respond, perceiving it as her essence. In an essay on literary fallacies, Sainte-Beuve et Balzac, he mocks fashionable readers who call themselves intelligent while mistaking the very nature of the books that they read: But for so-called intelligent readers, the fact that a book is untrue or depressing is like some personal fault in the writer, which they are as astonished as gratied to encounter again, even exacerbated in each succeeding work as if it is something he has been unable to rectify in himself and which nally lends him in their eyes the unsavoury character of a person without judgement who cultivates gloomy ideas and whom it is inadvisable to meet, with the result that each time the bookseller hands them a Balzac or an Eliot they reject it saying Oh no. Its always untrue or morose [sombre], the last one more so than the others, I dont want any more. (CS-B, 285) The blunder into which the putative intelligent reader has fallen here is one that Proust thought intrinsic to nineteenth-century culture, and a vicious one at that. In his mind it was epitomised by Sainte-Beuves weekly literary column Causerie de Lundi, which regularly contained observations on the literary world in which an authors public demeanour was wilfully, and perversely, confused with the nature of his work. The intelligent reader here is one informed by this perspective, assuming from the Puritanical reputation attached to the name of Eliot, for example, that her works must consistently be morose. A literary Sainte-Beuviste is one who confounds an author with his or her work, assuming that the experience of reading a work of ction is very much the same as a meeting with its author: that, just as we come to expect a certain temperamental consistency in our friends and acquaintances, and indeed most of those whom we meet on social occasions, every time we open the cover of a book by a particular writer, the spiritual sensations to be discovered will recognisable and very much the same. For Proust, few authors illustrated the futility of this point of view more poignantly than Eliot. Eliots work was no more sombre than were her clerics. Indeed, what Proust seems rst to have responded to in it was a

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gentleness and lightness of touch common to subject and narrator. Affectionate and frank in their social relations, Irwine and Adam are portrayed with both tenderness and truth. And, playing the Sainte-Beuviste card in his turnsince none of us is consistentthese were the very range of sensations that he seems, at least at one stage of his work, to have seen as being part and parcel of English culture in general. Eliot and Ruskin, for example, seemed to share them. They were the very qualities found by Ruskin in the later phases of medieval art as exemplied by the Vierge Dore of Amiens: truthful, tender, suggestive, though it came to seem to Ruskin as if tenderness were the greater and more durable of these qualities, rst since tenderness was a precondition of the perception of truth, and second since in the eyes of a compassionate but fallible artist, truth could never be anything but partial. In a passage from The Two Paths translated by Proust, he plays with these notions and with a certain ambiguity latent in the word Truth: I nd this more and more every day: an innitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all truly great men (C&W, XVI, 281). IV This kinship between Ruskin and herself, so essential to Prousts appreciation of her, was one to which Eliot was herself alive, even if the enthusiasm was not always reciprocated. I venerate him as one of the chief teachers of the day, she wrote. The grand doctrine of truth and sincerity in art, the inspiration of a Hebrew prophet, must be stirring up young minds in a promising way.7 This doctrine of truth was the subject of her review of the third volume of Modern Painters, published in the Westminster Review in 1856 where, praising Ruskins realismthe doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of natureshe goes on to paraphrase his distinction between versions of the True Ideal: Purist Idealism, in which only the noble is portrayed; Naturalist Idealism, in which the unworthy is portrayed in a ratio harmonious with the worthy.8 She was working on Scenes from Clerical Life at the time, and devising her own theory of ction, to which her appreciation of Ruskin has no little relevance. Two years later, in the great seventeenth chapter of Adam Bede, she expounded her own doctrine of realism as, amongst other things, the avoidance of a certain kind of selectivity in art. This is the chapter from which Proust culls those phrases of Adams concerning Mr Irwine: an imperfect cleric perhaps, short on exhortation and the exposition of doctrine, no more than moderately learned, preaching no more than maxims. Should he not have been rendered more perfect, more stringent in teaching and in

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life? Adams rejoinder is that he is tted to both time and place, but beforehand the narrator makes another point: that human imperfection is itself a comely thing, and seemly to be represented in ction: So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of ones best efforts, there is reason to dread. Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffinthe longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility which we forsake for genius, is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion. Examine your words well, and you will nd that even when you have no motive to be false, it is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your immediate feelingsmuch harder than to say something ne about them which is not the exact truth.9 Like much of the early portions of Adam Bede, this was written in Munich in 1858 where Eliot spent the mornings at her desk and the afternoons in the art galleries viewing Rubens, whose breathing men and women she appreciates in a letter to Sara Hennell,10 but also the minor Dutch mastersGerard Dou, Teniers, van Ostade, Breughel, Metsu. These are the many Dutch paintings whose precious quality of truthfulness she praises in Adam Bede, full of homely subjects, domestic humility, plainness and grossness of the esh. The taste for Dutch seventeenth-century painting is something she shared with Proust, whose essay on Rembrandt emphasises 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 manuscript notes on her work was published, left behind by Proust at his death. They open: What strikes me in Adam Bede is the paintingattentive, minute, respectful and sympatheticof the humblest, most industrious life. To keep ones kitchen clean is an essential duty, an almost religious duty and one full of charm (CSB, 656). 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:

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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 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 ame. On its broad and shining chest the pot bore a bright impression of the ery 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 re 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, I, 1878) For sumptuousness of physical detail, a sort of ethical cum aesthetic wholesomeness, this rivals the passage in chapter 7 of Adam Bede that describes the Poysers dairy where Arthur Donnithorne meets Hetty Sorrel: such coolness, such purity, such fresh fragrance of new-pressed cheese, of rm butter, of wooden vessels perpetually bathed in pure water. Yet where Eliots talents are tactile, Prousts drive us towards the chiaroscuro of light as a starting point for the conversion of the mundane into magic. It was the heightened use of such chiaroscuro, one remembers, that in the rst volume of Modern Painters Ruskin decried as a vice particular to the Dutch painting. If, in Prousts manuscript essay on Rembrandt, Ruskin is falsely portrayed as an admirer, the explanation may well lie in Eliots praise of Dutch painters, and a certain communality of attitude, a stout but jocund homeliness, Proust sensed between Eliot, Ruskin and the Dutch school: joined, improbably, in the pantheon of his esteem.

V But realism is a difficult term, and there is more than one version of it. If for Proust the tender truth of Ruskin and of Eliot represented one kind of realism, French literature offered others. All the signs are that for much of

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the period of his literary gestation Proust was preoccupied by these alternatives. If Eliot exemplied the realist as ethical commentator, a more austere and self-denying kind of realism is explored by Proust in his essays on Flaubert. 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 specically are eliminated are the personality and views of the authorwe never discover directly, for example, what Flaubert thinks of the adultery of Emma Bovaryand the volition of the characters, whose actions are observed without their wishes being stated. The characteristic Flaubertian sentence is thus one in which the physical object, the res, and the externally observed pattern of behaviour 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 re. Here is how it is described: Madame Bovary (nowhere has it been mentioned that she was cold) approached the replace ... (CSB, 300) 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 the maze of the soul. The single largest difference between them lay in their articulation of ethical judgement, which in Flaubert was held in reserve. There was even for Proust a certain delicious barbarity in this reticence, as with meticulous excision the authors sensibility edited itself out. Falling short of the impersonalas the bee-mouth sipped, a certain pollen of subjectivity was left on the factsthe result was none the less a discipline of truthfulness without comment, the neutral imposition of the actual. The tender realism of Eliot, by contrast, like that of Ruskin, was one that called attention to its own judgements. Arthur Donnithorne and Godfrey Cass were not, could never be, seen with the lidless impersonality with which Flaubert viewed Emma Bovary. For if truth was an attribute of character as much as of judgement, turpitude in others was the absence of that truth. And, though Eliot was insistent, along with

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Ruskin, that the unworthy was matter for art as long as it existed in harmonious equipoise with the worthy, the inclusion was dependent upon the unworthy being viewed as such. How else then was the world to be viewed except with judgement, a lm that drifted before the eyes, an ethical varnish on the ctive canvas? In Eliot the objectivity of the fact is embarrassed less because the conditions of viewing are themselves unstableas in the later aesthetic of Monet and Elstirthan because a certain moral partiality is a qualication of seeing as much as of judging. These observations may help us to make sense of two different claims of Andr Maurois: that the Proust of Jean Santeuil was still captive to the inuence of Flaubert with his passages of measured, external description, and that C, the putative narrator of the book, derives another aspect of his manner from a reading of the great nineteenth-century English novelists: Dickens, Hardy and Eliot.11 One may go further: that which C, seems to share with Eliot is a willingness to dilate upon the facts, a constant reaching out from the particular case to the general maxim. In the preamble that the two friends who have supposedly rescued the manuscript of the novel after Cs death append at the beginning, they speak of this discursiveness as something intrinsic to Cs bearing, both in his work and in his life, and a noticeable element in the recitations from passages of the book which he gives for their benet. It was a tendency they say in the manner of certain English novelists which he had previously loved (JS, I, 53). C is diffident enough concerning his abilities to consider such digressiveness a weakness, though for the friends who publish his work posthumously, it is quite evidently one of its charms. To some extent Jean Santeuil is offered as a novel in the English manner, the manner I would suggest pre-eminently of Eliot. Nor does the discursiveness Proust clearly considers intrinsic to this style represent for the writers of its putative preface any faltering of narrative focus; the great strength of Cs work, they say, is its ability to portray events just as they happened: the things that he wrote were rigorously true. For the young Proust, trying out his hand at this apprentice novel, we can only assume that the digressiveness, the ethical candour, was an aspect of that truth. And yet, stylistically, the spirit of Flaubert is never far absent. Two ghosts, one English and one French, seem to hover over the text: Jean Santeuil is a work that is doubly begotten. At times, especially in the early chapters, the two mannersFlaubertian and Elioticourish side by side. Many paragraphs, indeed, move from one to the other, as in the description of Jeans evening in the kitchen at Etreuilles, immediately before that evocation of the cooking range:

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Plenty of other moments besides were enjoyable at Etreuilles. For example when just before dinner Jean went to warm his feet in the cooks room, a sort of auxiliary kitchen adjoining the rst, and where, worn out with reading, he listened to her coming and going while she brushed the boots. It was one of those peaceful moments when everything seems robed in such beauty as mere being affords, the charm of which resides within the shadow crowding the far end of the room where the younger childrens bed is, in the mellow light bleaching the beds foot, in the tic-toc of the clock, in the face of the cook as she gossips in the lamplight, in the mysterious depths of the kitchen, lit up by the red glow from the unseen brazier, where delectable operations are being executed suggested only by the creaking of casserole under the fall of spent charcoal, or the sound of frying food sizzling in the pan. At such moments the voice of the cook droning How damp your shoes are! affects you agreeably because the sound of her voice is something that exists; just as the sight of the old pharmacist standing at his window in the glare of the lamp, preoccupied with making up some compound, is pleasing since he too exists. The unceasing babble of the stove is even more pleasant than the cooks voice since there is no need to reply to itbut there is hardly any need to pay attention to what the cook is saying, and in the sprightliness of her look lies something no less soothing than the warmth of the re. It is even delightful to be able to talk to her when one has had too much of the silence and feels like letting fall a few desultory words. Things are beautiful for being just what they are, and existence a calm beauty spread about them. (JS, I, 1856)

VI

In Eliot such reaching for the philosophical or reective is invariably connected with an another tendency: an interest in laws of moral causality which might serve as equivalents of scientic cause and effect. For the master key to the understanding of human history, she wrote in 1851, is the recognition of the presence of undeviating law in the material and spiritual worldof that invariability of sequence which is

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acknowledged to be the basis of physical science, but which is still perversely ignored in our social organization, our ethics and religion .... The divine yea and nay, the seal of prohibition and sanction, are effectually impressed on human deeds and aspirations, not by means of Greek and Hebrew, but by that inexorable law of consequences, whose evidence is conrmed instead of weakened as the ages advance.12 Eliots yea and nay here are from Carlyle and Sartor Resartus, but an interest in law in the wider sense is deeply textured into her later work, where it emerges as a constant reaching for analogy and example within which the tergiversations of individual conduct may be enclosed. Prousts manuscript notes on Eliot recognise this preoccupation with spiritual law, of which he seems to have thought her a supreme exponent. For Proust, she inhabited a universe of patent moral meaning ruled over by a Protestant providence, severe yet well disposed: above the chain of our vices and mishaps, a sort of superior order of a omnipotent providence which converts our evil incomprehensibly into the implement of our wellbeing (cf. Silas Marner). Adam loses Hetty, which was necessary if he was to nd Dinah. Silas loses the gold, which was necessary if he was to be open to the love of the child (cf. Emerson, Compensation and Man proposes but God disposes.) (CS-B, 656) Few notions of spiritual law had a stronger inuence on literature of the mid-Victorian period, or at one stage on Eliot, than Emersons Law of Compensation. Eliot had met Emerson during one of his rare visits to England in July 1848, when she seems to have felt some kind of kinship for this former Unitarian minister, whose search for a secularised equivalent for Christian morality closely mirrored her own. Towards the Law of Compensation itself her feelings, however, were ultimately more mixed, wary as she became of its debasement into some kind of secular barter and exchange whereby all forms of renunciation were automatically made up by some kind of celestial but anonymous accountant. It is against this soothing notion of compensation with its feeble reaching out for comfort at all costs that the ethical severity of the closing chapters of Adam Bede is to some extent aimed. With this feckless and irresponsible version of Emersons law, not so much compensation as consolation, the mature Eliot would have no truck, discerning in it the

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shadow of a false hope stemming from the Christianity she had abandoned. Yet Proust is right in nding in her work a version of the law perhaps closer to the spirit of Emerson: a series of equivalences stretching from one plane to another, suggesting affinities within the physical and spiritual world. Thus, though Silas Marner cannot be said to lose his gold in order that he may nd Eppie, it remains true that Eppie is rather a translation of his avarice, itself a distortion of the need to love, on to a higher plane where she may serve as his redemption. Nor does Adam Bede lose Hetty in order that he may gain Dinah. This solution to the plot was suggested to Eliot by G. H. Lewes after she had begun work on the novel13 and, though from that moment she worked with this resolution constantly in view, the death of Hetty and the unexpectedly blossoming love between Adam and Dinah are in fact quite separate strands. Yet instincts that are starved in Adam by his early attachment to Hetty are to some extent realised in Dinah, a psychological gain that, however, stops short of the providential or judicial. There are many instances of such compensation through elevation in A la recherche. It is not true to say that Mme Vinteuil loses her father in order that she may learn to love him; yet his death propels her into an excess of sadistic hatred, temporarily expressed through her desecration of his photograph but ultimately rareed into the devotion that causes her to edit his manuscripts and thus to bring the Vinteuil septet into being. The narrator of Albertine disparue does not lose Albertine so that he should learn to write; it remains true, however, that through losing her he learns of the fragile nature of the human affections, refractions of an energy that for him will nd itself fullment only through the imagination. Compensation of this subtler sort is frequent in A la recherche and deeply built into the structure of the work. The true spiritual laws are for Proust thus variants of the psychological. This applies equally to the second of his manuscript observations on Eliot: Progressive nature of capitulations of the will: we leave the mother of the child in Silas resolved never again to take opium, and next see her with the bottle empty. X ... resolved never again to see Hetty, immediately afterwards in her arms. (CS-B, 657) X is Arthur Donnithorne, who in chapter sixteen of Adam Bede wends his way to Hayslope parsonage to make a clean breast of his affair with Hetty Sorrel, but at the crucial moment baulks his confession, and is later found by Adam with Hetty in his arms. Donnithorne is one of Eliots great studies of the dilatory conscience; another is Godfrey Cass in Silas Marner. A third is

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Bulstrode in Middlemarch who sets himself up as a paragon of virtue and good deeds while hiding the dreadful secrets of his exploitative past. Like Donnithorne, Bulstrode is unmasked, but terrifyingly, and in public. Both men suffer the kind of nemesis that Mr Irwine indicates to Arthur as the destiny of those who too energetically delude themselves as to the nature of their own motivations. Such nemesis, a negative variant of Compensation, is an aspect too of the inexorable law of consequences of which Eliot speaks. The consequences may be material or they may be temperamental, the surrender to weakness being its own castigation. In this variety of psychological nemesis Jean Santeuil in particular abounds. Madame Lawrence, whom Jean and Henri visit in book eight, possesses a ferocious reputation as a snob to which she has blinded herself through a systematic deprecation of snobbery in others: Bit by bit, under the impossibility of passing in her own eyes for a liar, she nished by believing that what she was saying was the plain unvarnished truth. She did not think herself a snob for pursuing duchesses, nor ighty for sleeping with Monsieur de Ribeaumont. The substantive conduct of her life continued to carry the mark of these two vices. But when she thought about them they took on the same colours as her conversation: lively and engaging. She did not think of herself as doing wrong by Monsieur Lawrence because she invariably spoke well of him, and the loyal and heartfelt manner in which she referred to him always took precedence in her soul when she thought about her deeds. So she felt quite at ease with her feelings, her species of delity, her way of carrying on. And the words which she so frequently reiterated were like the tiny dose of morphine which anaesthetizing her conscience, putting it at peace and spurring her on to fresh indiscretions, the harsher aspects of which, previously so glaring, she henceforth quite unnecessarily excused. (JS, III, 589) A more frivolous punishment for snobbery occurs to the vainglorious Madame Cresmeyer who, determined to attract to herself the cachet of having hosted the illustrious artist Bergotte to dinner, submits her own guest list to Le Figaro, only to wake up the following morning and nd to her chagrin that the typesetter has misread her handwriting and attributed the honour to another.

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The nemesis inicted on Madame Lawrence is softened by her unconsciousness of itshe is ridiculous merely in the eyes of otherswhile Madame Cressmayers is conned to a mild social embarrassment. Both are spared the worst extremes of that remorse which Mr Irwine describes to Arthur as the sharpest punishment reserved for sinners. (But surely you dont think a man who struggles against a temptation into which he falls at last, as bad as a man who never struggles a tall. No, my boy, I pity him, in proportion to his struggles, for they foreshadow that inward suffering which is the worst form of Nemesis.) The most extreme example of such inner torment in Jean Santeuil is the Marie scandal in book ve. Marie is an old family friend of the Santeuils who, while building for himself a position of honour as a pillar of the community and mainstay of the parliamentary Chamber, has for years been associating with dubious business acquaintances and indulging in shady speculations. Maries nemesis arrives in the form of a summons to the Ministry of Justice, followed by an abrupt arrest. Like Bulstrode he has to live to see his deeds denounced in public, in his case in the Chamber, his feeble efforts to justify himself before which are compared by the novelist to an unconvincing performance in front of the Convention by Carlyles Saint-Just. But it is in the peculiar quality of his hypocrisy that he most resembles Bulstrode, a hypocrisy probed before it is judged, and in the way in which he employs his piety as a way of dulling to himself the consequences of his acts: Confronted with himself and the full force of his conscience, he no longer said I have stolen twenty ve thousand francs, words which would have been very painful to hear and would have diminished him in his own eyes, but rather God, I am nought but a miserable sinner, words with a more emollient effect. And since for some time he had listed under the vague words sin or trespass his own particular sins and trespasseshandling shady money, embezzlement etc.the words touching shady money, embezzlement were more and more replaced in his mind by the words sin and trespass. And since the conditions which separate us more and more from the rest of our kind never eradicate from our hearts the desire to be at one with them, to be accounted of equal worth, the words sin and trespass had in his mind the immense advantage of reconciling him to the rest of the human race, since he had only to feel that he shared their common lot, their collective, original sin. (JS, II, 87)

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VI In the way in which it gravitates from the particular to the general, in its pitiless moralism, exposing the misuse of Catholic doctrine as mercilessly as Eliot unstrips Bulstrodes specious Evangelicalism, in its uncomfortable evocation of a sort of inner writhing, the Marie episode is perhaps the most Eliotic moment in Jean Santeuil. Indeed, at one point the narrator compares the stupendous wasted effort of writing Jean Santeuil to the gigantic and abortive effort of Mr Casaubon in Middlemarch to produce a comprehensive Key to All Mythologies, a mosaic wrought from crushed ruins. Especially in matters of work, remarks the novels narrator ruefully, we are all to some extent like Mr Casaubon in Middlemarch who devoted the whole of his life to labours the results of which were merely trivial or absurd.14 Jean Santeuil indeed marks the high point of Prousts involvement with the work of George Eliot, but there is an important sequel. In January 1910 after heavy rains the Seine rose and burst its banks, ooding the wide boulevards of the Right Bank. Perched in his second-oor at at 102, Boulevard Haussmann, Proust watched apprehensively as the waters poured across la Place Saint Augustin, threatening to engulf him. Nervously he wrote to Simone de Caillavet: I will write to your mother acknowledging her adorable letter when I feel a little better. By then I shall doubtless have been drowned. In this connection have you read The Mill on the Floss? If not, I implore you: read it (Cor, X, 42) George Eliots tale of a brother and sister growing up in a rural paradise ruined by mutual dissension and nancial crisis would have appealed strongly to Proust, who probably knew the novel since his boyhood days, but seems to have re-read it, or at least to have it constantly in mind, in 1910 when he was working on Du ct de chez Swann, whose Combray sequence evokes its own land of lost content. In May of that year, writing to his diplomat friend Robert de Billy about various English writers in whom he was interested, he concluded German, Italian and very often French literature leaves me indifferent. But two pages of The Mill on the Floss have made me cry. I know that Ruskin detested this particular novel, but I reconcile these two foes in the Pantheon of my imagination. (Cor, X, 55) He had been reading volume 34 of the giant Library Edition of Ruskins Works, where in Fiction, Fair and Foul he would have found Ruskins

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stout defence of Scott and equally savage attack on Eliot, and The Mill on the Floss in particular: There is not a single person in the book of the smallest importance to anybody in the world but themselves, or whose qualities deserved so much as a line of printers ink in their description. There is no girl alive, fairly clever, half educated, and unluckily related, whose life has not at least as much in it as Maggies, to be described and pitied. Tom is a cruel and clumsy lout, with the making of better things in him (and the same may be said of nearly every Englishman at present smoking and elbowing his way through the ugly world his blunders have contributed to the making of); while the rest of the characters are simply sweepings out of a Pentonville omnibus. (C&W, XXXIV, 377) Ruskins ire had been drawn by the scene in which Maggie Tulliver and Stephen Guest forget themselves on a boat which carries them further and further from familiar loyaltiesStephen from his ance Lucy Deane, and Maggie from her senses: The pride of a gentleman of the old school, he spluttered, used to be in his power of saying what he meant, and being silent when he ought ... but the automatic amours and involuntary proposals of recent romance acknowledged little further law of morality than the instinct of an insect, or the effervescence of a chemical mixture. In speaking of Maggie forgetting herself, Ruskin spoke truer than he knew. There is in The Mill on the Floss a peculiar congruency between the themes of memory and of identity since, supremely in Eliots work, memory here assumes a moral dimension. Of much pertinence to Proust is the sensation of an authorial presence revisiting its own past, which is composed, as it were, out of a picture thrown on some inner retina. The pictorial tactility of the opening, Eliots use of the present tense, embody this sense I remember those large dipping willows ... I remember the stone bridge. For Proust this passage was not simply admirable; it was also a model to be followed. At one point in his notebook of 1908 he simply scrawls himself a curt reminder: First page of The Mill on the Floss (Carnet, 94). The page was exemplary, I would suggest, for two reasons. First, Eliots writing here, with its feeling of a disembodied memorial presence that is at once congruent with the protagonist yet evidently distinct from her, is a fragmentary anticipation of Prousts own method. Secondly, the territory around the eponymous mill is, like the Combray that Prousts narrator evokes in Du ct de chez Swann, a

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landscape since radically altered by circumstance, the ood recounted at the end of the book having swept much away. The meticulous iteration of particulars at the beginning, the constant half quotations from Wordsworths Immorality Ode, are thus, like the painstaking reconstruction of a bygone way of life throughout Combray, attempts to x a past that has gone for ever. In both, nostalgia and a necessary renunciation march hand in hand. Towards the beginning of Le Temps retrouv the narrator receives a letter from Gilberte recounting the changes that have engulfed Combray, now occupied by the Germans and scene of a battle in the Great War which has since devastated the environment so painstakingly evoked in Du ct de chez Swann: The battle of Msglise lasted more than eight months; in it Germans lost more than six hundred thousand men, they destroyed Msglise but they didnt take it. The little path you loved so dearly and that we called the hawthorn track and where you pretended to have fallen in love with me during your childhood .... I cannot convey to you the signicance that it has taken on .... The hill of wheat on which it comess out is the celebrated Hill 307 so often mentioned in despatches. The French blew up the little bridge over the Vivonne ... and the Germans have thrown up others. For a year and a half they held one half of Combray and the French held the other. (NP, IV, 335) The loving re-creation of Combray in the Swann volume, undertaken in full knowledge of these facts, is thus an attempt to restore the self through a reconstruction of a sense of place. Yet this is not all. In both Eliot and Proust this attempt to reconstruct with painstaking physicality what is no longer there is part of a larger scheme: the xing of the self. In both works an ability to reconstitute the past is viewed as a test of moral essence. When Maggie forgets herself in a boat she is doubly untrue to herself, not merely because in a prim Victorian sense she forgets her higher nature, but because, in a strong and literal sense, she forgets who she is. Since for Eliot, tutored by the psychologism of George Henry Lewes, personal identity was none other than this: a cluster of mental associations produced by the inuence of early environment. Each biological organism possessed a memory, which in turn delineated its identity, the existential but also ethical traits that made each person him or herself. In Eliot, moral truth is loyalty to this essence, which existence alone precedes. The theme of The Mill on the Floss is the creation of Maggie Tulliver; once created, she is essence what she has been.

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In The Great Temptation, the successive nature of which is explored during her temporary elopement with Stephen Guest, she eventually turns back to face certain moral obloquy in Dorcotte. In explaining her decision to Stephen, it is this desire to restore identity through reconnection with her past that she stresses: If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? By acting differently, with what Ruskin saw as untutored instinct (a mode of unhistoric and hence pre-moral freedom), she has no possibility of fullling herself, since she is simply ceasing to be her. This is the substance of the debate between her and Stephen at Coleport, the thematic rather than dramatic climax of the novel, in which Stephen asserts the natural law of inclination: that she is, and could only ever be, what she has been, the product of her past. The stress on recollection as essence is something Eliot shares with Proust, whose own psychologism is derived from Bergson with his emphasis on sudden involuntary inuxes of the memory. The narrator experiences several such moments of revelation, each of which bring him closer to himself, the self that must write the book. From this destiny his successive fadsinvolvement with the aristocratic principle through the Guermantes, his love for successive women, even his friendshipscome gradually to wear the aspect of distractions. The recognition that they are so comes to the narrator at the nal soire at the htel de Guermantes with the force of a complete revelation. Only by restoring the past, reworking within himself the mental associations that make him what he is, will be break from the cycle and assume the stature of the artist he is capable of becoming. Yet no sooner is this congruity stated than the immense gap between Prousts project and Eliots make themselves felt. For the identity reestablished by the narrator at the end of A la recherche is no self-justifying phenomenon. The narrator only remembers his past so that he may rearrange it in the dimensions of art. In Proust, nally, the life exists so that the art may exist. The supremacy of this projectits ascendancy over any mediocre or intermediary element of realismis a major component in the argument of Le Temps retrouv, which acts, among other things, as a nal and conclusive renunciation of all forms of realism, more especially those that erect delity to everyday fact as the criterion of truth. Here Proust is shrugging off not simply Zola, with his political interpretation of reality, but implicitly shrugging off something else that been of greater importance to him in his own writing, namely the sense, common to both Flaubert and of Eliot, of everyday life as the focus and touchstone of art. In thus rening his own philosophy of art as truth to some inner vision, the narrator is conrmed by the contemplation of

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the very falsity of pretending realist art, which would not be half so mendacious did we not adopt the custom in life of giving to our feelings a turn of expression quite other that that of reality, which nonetheless we eventually take for reality itself. I felt that I should have no need to embrace the various literary theories which at one time had distracted menotably those which criticism had evolved at the time of the Dreyfus Scandal and had been taken up again during the war, which tended to drive the artist from his ivory tower and to avoid frivolous or sentimental themes in favour of great industrial movements, or failing the mass at least to deal no longer with literary idlers as in the past (I must confess that the portrayal of these useless types makes me yawn, Bloch used to remark), but with committed intellectuals or heros. Besides, even before discussing their logical content, these theories seemed to me proof positive of the mental inferiority of those who espoused themlike a well brought-up child who hears some people at whose house he has been sent to dine declare: we are straightforward people. There are no secrets in this house, and feels that the this denotes a moral quality inferior to good deeds which do not speak their name. (NP, IV, 45960) True art, he continues, having no need for such declarations of intent, fulls itself in silence. Such statements are a self-evident attempt to separate out the notion of truth from that of the real. The culminating aesthetic of Le Temps retrouv is, therefore, a renunciation neither of truth nor of detachment. Both ideals are, however, reworked, for truth becomes truth to an inner vision, and detachment is achieved through the most revolutionary of means. It is the nal paradox of Le Temps retrouv that it is through his very reimmersion in the details of his own past, which must be reworked into material for art, that the narrator achieves the detachmentboth from his surroundings and from the pressures of the selfthat he needs. In The Mill on the Floss the narrator and Maggie are separate; in A la recherch the narrator (who is, needless to say, not Proust) and his subject are one. The paradoxical result of this is to turn the narrators past into a self-generated subject that he himself controls. The resulting closeness to his subject matter confers upon the narrator a peculiar mastery. Thus while the narrator of The Mill on the Floss is attempting to re-enter a past from which she (or hethe identity of the teller is left indenite) is now excluded, the narrator of A la recherche is also trying to break into the past, but only that he may then subdue it and

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turn it into something that transcends itself: the book which, through this unlooked for access to the privileges of memory, he is enabled to compose. But as in A la recherche the consciousness of the narrator swells to ll the whole foreground of the canvas, something else very odd and seemingly perverse occurs. An interest in the laws governing behaviour is, to be sure, more marked in A la recherche, where it is responsible for a highly distinctive structure of interpolation and parenthesis, much of which moves, as in Jean Santeuil, from the particular to the general, from the ctive to the normative. Again there is, if anything, a more searching interest than earlier in the successive nature of surrenders of the will. Yet at the very point when the whole eld of human conduct is opened up to the narrator for judgement, precisely here does he stay his hand. Apart from the new narrative perspective, the largest single innovation separating A la recherche from Jean Santeuil is its subjugation of the ethical to the psychological, its preference for implicit over explicit moral comment. Few individuals in literature surrender their wills more absolutely to the demands of temperament, for example, than does Monsieur de Charlus. The effeminacy of his temperament is at rst heavily masked by an assumed virility; it is when in Sodome et Gomorrhe he joins the little band of the Verdurin faithful that minute mannerisms betray his inversion, disclosed by the chemistry of his body or perhaps by heredity, some remote memory of the mother. On his return to Paris at the beginning of Le Temps retrouv, the narrator intercepts a grotesquely camp invert waddling down the street: it is M. de Charlus. And in a sorry episode several pages later, the narrator observes the same M. de Charlus, every scrap of shame gone, being beaten in chains by soldiers hired for the purpose in a brothel run and maintained by the ex-tailor Jupien, and waxes Eliot-like on the depravity that causes a man of sense to chain himself to the rock of pure matter. But this reection, religious in its gravity, is immediately overlaid by another: at the bottom of it all there lingered in M. de Charlus all his dream of virility, to be realized if necessary in acts of brutality, all that interior illumination, invisible to us, but reecting certain beams from the cross of judgement, from feudal tortures, lit up by his medieval imagination .... In short his desires to be bound in chains, to be beaten, in all their ugliness, betrayed a dream as poetic as the desire in other men to visit Venice or maintain ballet-dancers. (NP, IV, 419)

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Tout comprendre est tout pardoner. There is, in this systematic narration of the decline of a great man, no less of a sense of moral consequences than in Prousts earlier work, but this sense is everywhere subordinate to a fascination with the workings of the mind. It is indeed difficult to resist the impression that the narrator of A la recherche regards the foibles of his human comedy with something approaching relish. The characteristic mode in which the narrator comments upon the external social world is thus one of fastidious observation. The difference between the younger and the older Proust is this: where the narrator of Jean Santeuil, schooled perhaps by Eliot, watches each surrender of the will with loaded indictment and regret, the narrator of A la recherche, remembering Flaubert, ultimately just watches. At the very end of Le ct de Guermantes there is an episode profoundly revealing of this difference. The Duc and Duchesse are entertaining Swann immediately prior to their departure for a soire at the salon of the Prince. As they sweep out of the door towards an appointment for which they are already late, Swann announces in his off-hand manner the diagnosis of his imminent death. The Duchesse pauses. Should she continue onwards to her appointment, or pause for anticipatory condolence? She sweeps on, yet as she enters her carriage the Duc notices that she is wearing black shoes at variance with her dress. All is delayed so that she should go upstairs to change them. But as, correctly attired, the couple and their retinue sweep out of the gates of the Htel de Guermantes, the Duke shouts back at Swann And you now, you, dont get into a ap over these idiots of doctors, damn it. Theyre a pack of donkeys. Youre built like the Pont Neuf. Youll live to bury us all! (NP, II, 884). For Proust, the prime exemplars of the moralistic and the impartial methods were, forever and inalienably, Eliot and Flaubert. Of equal weight with Flaubert, however, were those who imbibed his method. Among such, no writer exemplied the starkness of his self-denying ordinance more emphatically than his disciple and rumoured son: Guy de Maupassant. The disapproval of the members of the Rouen bourgeoisie who rst take advantage of and then dismiss the prostitute in the story Une Boule de Suif is something that hangs heavy in the air, yet not once is it stated, or even verbally hinted at. This lesson was one that Proust ultimately took to heart. In the 1908 notebook he writes himself another curt reminder: Objections to maxims. | Boule de Suif and Flaubert | [say] as much as preacherly tones (preface to Middlemarch) (Carnet, 92). There are, says the narrator in connection with the Marie scandal in Jean Santeuil, two tribes, to one of which each of us by temperament and

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inclination belongs: those who wear their morality on their sleeve and those who do not. Finally, nothing in the work of Proust more effectively discriminates between the nature of his genius and that of Eliot than his authorial restraint in the closing moments of Le ct de Guermantes. For nothing in Felix Holt the Radical, or in her work as a whole, shouts more loudly of the callousness of the aristocratic code than that momentary oversight of the Duc and Duchesse, their failure of the most basic kind of empathy; yet on its import the author is silent. Thus even as, in his later work, Proust assumes an Eliotic amplitude of observation, precisely here does the austerity of his method prove him, in the delicacy of its moral discretion, a pupil of Flaubert.

NOTES
1. Andr Maurois, A la recherche de Marcel Proust (Paris: Hachette, 1949) p. 16. 2. Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford; Clarendon, 1968) p. 332. 3. The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Yale University Press and Oxford University Press, 1954-5) vol. I, pp. 31617; quoted in Haight, George Eliot, pp. 756. 4. The George Eliot Letters, vol. III, p. 374. 5. CS-B, 723, citing Ruskin in The Bible of Amiens: stopping as you go, so as to get into a cheerful temper, and buying some bonbons or tarts for the children in one of the charming patissiers shops to the left (C&W, xxxiii, 128). 6. CS-B, 74. The quotations from Eliot are from Albert Durades translation of Adam Bede, pp. 84, 85, 226, 227, 228, 230. 7. J. W. Cross, Life of George Eliot (1885) vol. II, p. 7. 8. Westminster Review, April 1856; cited in Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, ed. A. S. Byatt (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1990) p. 368. 9. George Eliot, Adam Bede (London: Blackwood, 1859) vol. II, pp. 45. 10. Haight, George Eliot, p. 259, citing The George Eliot Letters, vol. II, p. 451. 11. Preface to JS, 1, 1314, citing JS, 1, 534. 12. Review of Robert Mackays Progress of the Intellect, Westminster Review, January 1851; cited Byatt, Selected Essays, p. 271. 13. Cross, Life of George Eliot, vol. II, p. 68. 14. JS, II, 252, which, however, has M. Cabusson.

CYNTHIA J. GAMBLE

Zipporah: A Ruskinian Enigma Appropriated by Marcel Proust1

ohn Ruskin rst visited the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican in April 1841 and noted in his diary: Our last day in Rome I devoted to Sistine Chapel, and received real pleasure from it.2 His pleasure on that occasion was due to his appreciation of Michelangelos use of colour, but no mention is made of Sandro Botticelli. That visit was almost a valediction to Rome: there is something about it which will make me dread to return, he also wrote.3 Indeed, Ruskin was not to return to Rome, and the Sistine Chapel in particular, until 1872, some 31 years later.

I. Z I P P O R A H

IN CONTEXT

Ruskins Zipporah4 (gure 1) is a copy of a fragment of a large fresco by Botticelli, measuring 348.5 by 558 cm on the South Wall of the Sistine Chapel, about 5.5 metres from the ground, and in some degree of shade. The fresco is entitled Le Prove di Mos, literally The Trials of Moses. However, in English, it is variously denominated: The Temptation of Moses, The Temptation of Moses: Bearer of the Written Law, The Life of Moses, Scenes from the Life of Moses, Moses in Egypt and Midian, Youth of Moses. Botticelli painted this scene at the request of Sixtus IV, who summoned him to Rome in 1481,

From Word & Image 15, no. 4 (OctoberDecember 1999). 1999 by Taylor & Francis Limited.

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along with Domenico Ghirlandaio, Cosimo Rosselli and Pietro Perugino to decorate the walls of the papal electoral chapel with frescoes. Scenes from the lives of Moses and Christ were executed on the long walls of the chapel. The scenes contain typological references to one another, with, for example, Moses appearing as the preguration of Christ. The Trials of Moses is to be read from right to left, as a Hebrew script, commencing in the bottom right-hand corner. It conveys different points in time and in two places (Egypt and Midian, in the Arabian desert near the Gulf of Akabah): it is a mosaic of the spiritual and the profane, encompassing human and animal life, murder, contrasting emotions of terror, hatred, tenderness, compassion. It is a busy canvas, with lots of movement and activities in contrast to the solid piece of architecture on the right (is it a synagogue, or a loggia?) which might provide some degree of protection. In the background, beyond the trees, the hilly landscape of Biblical Egypt and the wilderness of Midian are visible, and they provide a frame for the activities. It is also a story related in eight episodes of the life of Moses, as a circular narrative moving around the well in the centre.

IN EGYPT 1. The story begins in the right foreground of the fresco, where the young, angry and impetuous Moses, brandishing a sword, is murdering the Egyptian taskmaster, whose head has hit the ground and whose face is convulsed with pain, agony and horror: And it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, that he went out unto his brethren, and looked on their burdens: and he spied an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, one of his brethren. And he looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand. (Exodus 2:1115).5 Contrary to the Biblical story, Botticelli depicts two witnesses who are retreating from the murder. Walking away, to the right, and contrary to the ow of movement of the painting, a woman in a blue garment puts her arms protectively around a man: is he the Hebrew youth who the Egyptian was smiting, or is this a scene of two frightened spectators, such as a mother and son, or a husband and wife?

2.

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IN MIDIAN 3. Moses ees into the wilderness in Midian for his safety. He is depicted by Botticelli almost suspended in ight, turning to the left and thereby re-establishing the ow of the movement of the painting. Moses ... dwelt in the land of Midian (Exodus 2:15). The Biblical story continues as follows: Moses ... sat down by a well. Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters: and they came and drew water, and lled the troughs to water their fathers ock. And the shepherds came and drove them away: but Moses stood up and helped them, and watered their ock (Exodus 2: 1517). On the left of Moses in the wilderness, Moses can be seen driving away from the well the Midianite shepherds who had been a nuisance to Jethros daughters. We do not know exactly what happened, but the girls had obviously complained to their father. In the centre foreground, the focal point of the fresco or the pivot of the composition, the youthful Moses is assisting two of Jethros seven daughters. He is hauling water from a deep well with a silvery coloured bucket or pitcher on a rope and lling a trough for the sheep of the two girls who stand watching: Zipporah is on the left facing the reader and her sister is on the right. The black sheep among the ock is perhaps an omen of trials to come. The meeting place is portrayed as idyllic and symbolic, with the water of the well symbolizing life and re-birth, and the well being the place at which marriages were arranged, and business and other deals concluded. It was also the scene of revelations and announcements.6

4.

5.

Not recorded in the fresco are several important events in the life of Moses, such as Jethro welcoming him to his home, Moses marriage to Zipporah and the birth of a son named Gershom, meaning foreigner or exile in Hebrew: And Moses was content to dwell with the man: and he gave Moses Zipporah his daughter. And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land (Exodus 2:212). 6. Upwards, in the left half of the fresco, Moses is guarding Jethros sheep on Mount Horeb, better known today as Mount Sinai: Now Moses kept the ock of Jethro his father in law, the priest

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7.

8.

of Midian; and he led the ock to the backside of the desert, and came to the mountain of God, even to Horeb (Exodus 3:1). He is dressed in a short, yellow tunic, not a long robe, and is removing his shoes,7 for he is on Holy Ground, in obedience to the Lords command from the Burning Bush, which burned but was not consumed. Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground (Exodus 3:5). In the top left-hand corner, Moses, now barefoot, is kneeling before the Lord who appears above a burning bush. The Lord told Moses that he was destined to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt into the promised land of milk and honey. And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a ame of re out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with re, and the bush was not consumed (Exodus 3:2). In the bottom left-hand corner, Moses, now fourscore years old (Exodus 7:7), leads the Exodus of the Jews carrying their various belongings and the spoils of the Egyptians as they had been instructed by God: Every woman shall borrow of her neighbour, and of her that sojourneth in her house, jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment: and ye shall put them upon your sons, and upon your daughters: and ye shall spoil the Egyptians (Exodus 3:22 and cf. 12:356). The Bible story details other possessions they took: ocks, and herds, even very much cattle (Exodus 12:38). Among this departing crowd, with its variety of characters, Botticellis fresco depicts an older, rather matronly Zipporah in a blue dress, accompanied by her two sons, Gershom, holding a little dog, and, beside him, the younger son, Eliezer, mentioned in Exodus 18:4.

From Botticellis Le Prove di Mos, Ruskin copied four scenes: Zipporah (RF 880), Sheep (RF 879),8 Sheep (RF 1167) and Gershoms Little Dog (whereabouts unknown). Charles Fairfax Murray also copied two scenes: Gershom and His Dog (private collection) and Moses and His Family Leaving Midian (Sheffield R 312).

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II. W H E N

AND HOW DID

RUSKIN

PA I N T

ZIPPORAH?

Ruskin, the Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, records his progress on painting Zipporah in his Diary of 1874, during a 7-month tour of the Continent, of which 6 months were spent in Italy. He started work in 1874 and on 17 April wrote: A delightful day yesterday at Sistine ... , followed by Still pleasanter day of work on Botticelli on 18 April. His entries for May record his progress, and single-mindedness, and to a lesser extent his method of work: Tuesday 5 May 1874: Y[esterday] began sheep in Sistine Chapel, successfully. Wednesday 6 May: Y[esterday] began Zipporah in pencil. Thursday 7 May: Y[esterday] good work in Sistine. Saturday 9 May: A good day y[esterday] on Zipporah; deciphered her pretty hem of dress. Sunday 10 May: Up in good time, after sound sleep, my work prospering. If only I can keep myself in good temper and health .... Y[esterday] after standing from ten to two at work on Zipporah, I walked up Monte Mario. Tuesday 12 May: An utterly dark day, and main difficulties in Zipporah, tired me dreadfully yesterday. I must not let this happen again. Thursday 14 May: Finished Zipporah down to her feet yesterday. Friday 22 May: ... I sadly tired, necessarily, in nishing Zipporah, and all despondent and wrong minded in evening. Saturday 23 May: Y[esterday] a singularly good dayon Zipporah. Whit-Sunday 24 May: Y[esterday] practically nished Zipporah, though I shall retouch here and there. She has taken me altogether 15 days, begun on the 6th and three Sundays, one festa, and a lost Monday intervening. The paper added to the difficulty not a little, and not being quite near enough for measurementand at least a week of dark days. So that, well prepared and under ordinarily favourable circumstances, I can assuredly do such a gure in a fortnight.9 Ruskin seemed well satised with his fortnights work for he wrote to Charles Eliot Norton on 19 June 1874: Ive done Botticellis Zipporah successfully.10 Details of particular artistic problems Ruskin encountered during the copying of Zipporah are, unfortunately, singularly lacking: but one special

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difficulty seems to have been that of deciphering the hem of her dress, already referred to in his diary of 9 May. Later in that same year Ruskin drew particular attention to Zipporahs dress and to what he considered as Botticellis ill done lettering around the border, a characteristic he had observed in several of Botticellis pen drawings with so-called inscriptions, beautifully drawn, but which could not be read: In copying Botticellis Zipporah this spring, I found the border of her robe wrought with characters of the same kind, which a young painter, working with me, who already knows the minor secrets of Italian art better that I [Ruskin is referring to Charles Fairfax Murray], assures me are lettersand letters of a language hitherto undeciphered.11 Ruskin was a talented linguist who could read Greek, Latin, Italian and French: his unwillingness to decipher the characters or even to attempt to identify them is, therefore, all the more surprising. I have examined closely Ruskins copy of Zipporah, and the lettering resembles Etruscan to some extent, thus reinforcing the Etruscan tradition and presence in Italian art. Since the Etruscan alphabet is based on Greek, Ruskin would have had no difficulty in deciphering the lettering. His uncharacteristically casual approach to the problem suggests that he did not wish to decipher the message and preferred to maintain the aura of mystery and ambivalence around Zipporah. He did not want to see the message on the border of her robe which may have destroyed his reconstruction of Zipporah-Athena.

III. J O H N R U S K I N S Z I P P O R A H -AT H E N A Ruskins lecture on 4 December 1874, on Botticelli,12 revealed an important discovery he had made earlier that year, that Botticelli was a pivotal link between the civilization of pre-Christian Greek-inuenced Etruria and Christianity: Ruskin had observed the striking similarity between the olive leaves on a cornice of the church of the Badia of Fiesole, the old capital of Etruria and birthplace of Botticelli, and in Botticellis work: Theres no gap and scarcely any difference between these garlands of golden olive of Etruria before Christ and the utmost beauty of leaf drawing of ... Botticelli.13 This conjunction of two seemingly disparate elements, the Etruscan and Christian traditions, co-existed in Botticellis Zipporah, the Gooddess-shepherdess or shepherd maiden,14 a gure from Greek mythology and from a Biblical story: she is Ruskins Etruscan Athena, becoming queen of a household in Christian humility.15 Ruskin lent his facsimile of Zipporah to an exhibition in Brighton in 1876, together with his woodcut of Athena copied from a Neck Amphora in

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the British Museum, London (gure 2).16 His explanatory note for the catalogue is a particularly pertinent, focused expos of the interconnectedness of Zipporah and Athena. The powerful masculinity of Athena, the Greek virgin Goddess of Wisdom, War and Weaving, the protectress of eternal virginity and the embodiment of chastity, is usually depicted in classical Greco-Roman art as an imposing and physically strong, fearless woman, a warrior ready and dressed to ght with her breastplate, helmet, carrying a shield and a spear as Goddess of War (or a distaff as the Goddess of Weaving and the Domestic Arts). This may appear at rst sight to be in stark contrast with Zipporahs timid nature as witnessed at the well when Zipporah, together with her sisters, was unable to cope with some troublesome shepherds. For Ruskin, Botticellis Zipporah is a closer representation of Athena as Goddess of Weaving and Domestic Arts. Ruskin, in his Brighton catalogue entry of 1876, states clearly t importance to him of Zipporah: Botticelli, trained in the great Etruscan Classic School, retains in his ideal of the future wife of Moses every essential character of the Etrurian Pallas, regarding her as the Heavenly Wisdom given by inspiration to the Lawgiver for his helpmate; yet changing the attributes of the goddess into such as become a shepherd maiden.17 He then examines in considerable detail the dresses of Athena and of Zipporah and shows that every piece of the dress [of Athena] will be found to have its corresponding piece in that of Zipporah.18 About the chiton or linen robe with the peplus or mantle, Ruskin writes: There is rst the sleeved chiton or linen robe, falling to the feet, looped up a little by the shepherdess; then the peplus or covering mantle, very nearly our shawl, but tting closer; Athenas, crocus coloured, embroidered by herself with the battle against the giants; Zipporahs, also crocus coloured, almost dark golden, embroidered with blue and purple, with mystic golden letters on the blue ground; the fringes of the aegis are, however, transposed to the peplus; and these being of warm crimson complete the sacred chord of colour (blue, purple, and scarlet), Zipporah being a priests daughter.19 Ruskins transposition and his detection of what Jeanne Clegg calls iconographical resonances20 continue as he compares Athenas aegis, often represented in mythology as a goatskin fringed with snakes, with Zipporahs goatskin satchel, her lance to Zipporahs reed.

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The aegis of Pallas becomes for Zipporah a goatskin satchel, in which she carries apples and oak (for pleasure and strength); her lance becomes a reed, in which she carries her wool and spindle; the tresses of her hair are merely softened from the long black falling tresses of Athena; a leaf of myrtle replaces the olive [leaf]. The scarcely traceable thin muslin veil over her breast represents the part of the aegis which, in the Pallas, is drawn with dots, meaning soft dew instead of storm.21 The effect of this deconstruction and reconstruction of Zipporah, and to a lesser extent Athena, is to redene her as her uncertain identity begins to emerge. The fusion of these two virgins results in the charged and heightened sexuality of Zipporah-Athena, and consequent lesbian proclivities. Simultaneously, the androgynous nature of the women is suggeste by the phallic symbolism of the lance-reed. A detailed examination of Zipporahs feet in Ruskins copy reveals a heavy masculine shape and form, and her lower legs appear hirsute: characteristics not apparent in Zipporahs sister. This interpretation, this overwhelming desire to see Athena in Zipporah, and vice-versa, is an act of Ruskinian idolatry that pregures Swanns idolatry of Zipporah-Odette in Prousts A la Recherche du Temps perdu. A close reading of Ruskins text, with its echoes of Queen of the Air, as the red gure of Athena on the amphora becomes a blaze of colour, raises some questions and doubts. For example, is Zipporah really carrying a goatskin satchel? Or is it a wreath? Is Zipporah wearing a chiton? Her lower garment looks more like Oriental trousers. Is Zipporah at the well carrying apples and oak? In this partial misreading of Zipporahs garments, Ruskin projects onto Zipporah what he wants to see, reminiscent of his and Prousts misreading, of the hawthorn at Amiens Cathedral.22 The warrior aspect of Athena, so prominent on the amphora, has been sublimated by Ruskin who has given pre-eminence to nobility and domesticity, juxtaposed in his moral interpretation of Zipporah. His initial interest in Zipporah during his 1872 visit to Rome was as a model of his ideal woman combining the noble qualities of a princess with those of a workwoman.23 He then compared Zipporah with Ursula, the industrious princess in a plain house-wifely dress [who] talks quietly [to her father, while] going on with her needlework all the time24 depicted by the Venetian artist Vittore Carpaccio in his triptych of 149095, LArrivo degli Ambasciatori inglesi presso il Re di Bretagna, which opens the Saint Ursula cycle in the Accademia, Venice. Ruskins interpretation of Ursula is in terms not

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dissimilar to those used for Zipporah: but other art historians have understood Ursula to be ticking off on her ngers the conditions for her marriage, while her father listens wearily.25 Ruskin had focused on Zipporahs housewifely qualities in letter 20, 5 July 1872, in Fors Clavigera, when he remarked that the girl who is to be the wife of Moses, when he rst sees her at the desert-well, has fruit in her left hand, but a distaff in her right.26 In a note to this letter, Ruskin modied this initial observation and commented: More accurately a rod cloven into three at the top, and so holding the wool. The fruit is a branch of apples; she has golden sandals, and a wreath of myrtle round her hair.27 The evergreen myrtle was a symbol of love and peace in the classical Greco-Roman period, and in the Renaissance it represented conjugal love and delity: it was often part of a bridal headpiece. The unreal bride that Ruskin was seeking and idealising was always inaccessible, in a Carpaccio or a Botticelli painting.

IV. M A R C E L P R O U S T S Z I P P O R A H -O D E T T E Botticellis Zipporah was, therefore, a fascinating subject for Ruskin, consciously and unconsciously, with her duality at different levels and heightened tension due to these juxtaposed elements. For Proust, also, this very same Zipporah played an important role in A la Recherche du Temps perdu, translated by Terence Kilmartin as In Search of Lost Time. Charles Swann is a rich dilettante, a hedonist who prefers High Society to High Art, an art collector who nevertheless has a sensitive appreciation of art and who is writing a book on Ver Meer but who lacks the application to complete it. Works of art, therefore, play a not unimportant role in his life. The focus of Swann in Love is the analysis of Swanns relationship with Odette de Crcy, tracing the rise and fall of his love culminating in his marriage to Odette at a point when he realises he no longer loves her and about whom he exclaims: To think that Ive wasted years of my life, that Ive longed to die, that Ive experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didnt appeal to me, who wasnt even my type.28 It is also the story of the selfdestruction of Swann. Swanns disappointment, indeed agony, in love is in part due to his manner of conducting his articially created love-affair. Only when he realises 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 features, her defects to which he had been blind, or which he had assigned to oblivion during his passionate pursuit, become

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apparent: Odettes 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.29 Other features of Odettes that Swann had repressed were her cheeks ... sometimes mottled with little red spots that distressed him as proving that the ideal is unattainable and happiness mediocre.30 Julia Kristeva maintains that Swanns imagined love for Odette starts the moment he dissociates her from her real body, with its many defects, and replaces it with the virgin Zipporah: the chair abme becomes a museum piece with which he has a sexual relationship.31 Swann begins to construct an articial Odette when, on his second visit to her apartment, he is struck by her resemblance to the gure of Zipporah, Jethros daughter, which is to be seen in one of the Sistine frescoes.32 On that occasion, Odette, not very well, receives him in a dressing-gown of mauve crpe de Chine, drawing its richly embroidered material over her bosom like a cloak. Standing there beside him, her loosened hair owing down her cheeks, bending one knee in a slightly balletic pose in order to be able to lean without effort over the picture at which she was gazing, her head on one side, with those great eyes of hers which seemed so tired and sullen when there was nothing to animate her.33 There are distinct echoes of Zipporah in this portrait of Odette, in the depiction of the hair, and the tilt of the head, the richly embroidered cloaklike garment, the pose and the eyes. Swanns feelings for Odette are, from that moment, developed and regulated uniquely through the intermediary of art and especially Botticellis Zipporah. He had created an articial woman. He placed on his study table, as if it were a photograph of Odette, a reproduction of Jethros daughter.34 This must be a reproduction of Ruskins copy of Zipporah, isolated from the rest of the Biblical story (as Odette is presented out of context, without a family or a past) and which was reproduced, in black and white, as a frontispiece to Volume XXIII, published in 1906, of The Complete Works of John Ruskin, edited by Cook and Wedderburn, and which Proust owned. Prousts mother had already given him the Cook and Wedderburn set so far published for his New Years present in January 1905. Proust had on several occasions praised the magnicent pictures in these volumes.35 Was the absence of colour in the Odette-Zipporah metaphor, apart from the reference to the mauve dressing-gown, due to the fact that Proust was basing his observations on the black-and-white reproduction? Proust never visited Rome: neither did he see Ruskins original watercolour copy.

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Swann reconstructs Odette la Zphora and gazes in admiration at the large eyes, the delicate features in which the imperfection of the skin might be surmised, the marvellous locks of hair that fell along the tired cheeks.36 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, Swanns desire for Odette is realised and a kind of compensatory mechanism is released: The vague feeling of sympathy which attracts one to a work of art, now that he knew the original in esh and blood of Jethros daughter, became a desire which more than compensated, thenceforward, for the desire which Odettes physical charms had at rst failed to inspire in him.37 The more Swann looks at the black-and-white reproduction of Botticellis 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.38 This is not dissimilar to Ruskins absolute desire to read Athena in Zipporah, and viceversa, and beneath this surface mask can be substituted the name and personage of Rose La Touche. For Zipporah had certainly been an object of desire or at least irtation for Ruskin, clearly evident in his letters to Joan Severn in which Zipporah is an enchantress, a pretty Zipporah who should make some people jealous.39 Ruskin writes in a sexually explicit way revealing his repressed sexual desires: he confesses that he has nearly driven [himself] quite wild today with drawing little Zipporahs chemisette with his urge to see Zipporahs breasts.40 And vice versa, the more Swann looks at Odettes face, the more he remarked Odettes resemblance to the Zipporah of ... Botticelli ... He no longer based his estimate of the merit of Odettes face on the doubtful quality of her cheeks and the purely eshy softness which he supposed would greet his lips there should he ever hazard a kiss, but regarded it rather as a skein of beautiful, delicate lines which his eyes unravelled, following their curves and convolutions, relating the rhythm of the neck to the effusion of the hair and the droop of the eyelids, as though in a portrait of her in which her type was made clearly intelligible.41 After the face, Odettes entire body is imbued with Botticellis Zipporah, as perfection incarnate: [Swann] stood gazing at her; traces of the old fresco

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were apparent in her face and her body, and these he tried incessantly to recapture thereafter, both when he was with Odette and when he was only thinking of her in her absence; and, although his admiration for the Florentine masterpiece was doubtless based upon his discovery that it had been reproduced in her, the similarity enhanced her beauty also, and made her more precious.42 Odette is becoming more and more unreal, as she is transformed from cocotte into a Botticelli maiden, in what Richard Bales described as a rush for substitutes.43 The magic contained in the words Florentine masterpiece enabled Swann like a title, to introduce the image of Odette into a world of dreams and fancies which, until then, she had been debarred from entering, and where she assumed a new and nobler form.44 In the connes of Odettes carriage, as it rumbles along a Paris street, Swanns rst physical contact with this tart [and] a kept woman45 who feigns coyness and virginity, is also conducted through the metaphor of Botticellis paintings of women: [Swann] ran his other hand upwards along Odettes cheek; she gazed at him xedly, with that languishing and solemn air which marks the women of the Florentine master in whose faces he had found a resemblance with hers; swimming at the brink of the eyelids, her brilliant eyes, wide and slender like theirs, seemed on the verge of welling out like two great tears. She bent her neck, as all their necks may be seen to bend, in the pagan scenes as well as in the religious pictures.46 On other occasions, when Swann, metaphorically transformed by Proust as a blind, mythical unicorn,47 is listening with enhanced hearing to Vinteuils sonata with its little phrase being played over and over again, vilely48 on the piano by Odette, she would look at him sulkily, and he would see once again a face worthy to gure in Botticellis Life of Moses; he would place it there, giving to Odettes neck the necessary inclination; and when he had nished her portrait in tempera, in the fteenth century, on the wall of the Sistine, the idea that she was none the less in the room with him still, by the piano, at that very moment, ready to be kissed and enjoyed, the idea of her material existence, would sweep over him with so violent an intoxication that, with eyes starting from his head and jaws tensed as though to devour her,

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he would ing himself upon this Botticelli maiden and kiss and bite her cheeks.49 Odette-Zipporah creates a dialectical tension in Swann: on the one hand he wants to treat her as a virgin; on the other hand his carnal appetite, his desire to rape and violate her as an object (the museum piece to which I have already referred) are overwhelming. Swann felt many misgivings about Odette at the beginning of their relationship, regarding the quality of her face, her body, the whole of her beauty, which were constantly revived at the mere sight of her in the esh; however, those misgivings were swept away and that love conrmed now that he could re-erect his estimate of her on the sure foundations of aesthetic principle.50 So making love to Odette, which for Swann would have seemed natural and but moderately attractive, now takes on a different dimension and as if to crown his adoration of a masterpiece in a gallery, ... [became] supernaturally delicious51 in the supreme act of consummation like the Perpetual Adoration in the Mass. To cope with Odettes secret life when she is not with Swann, he suppresses its very existence by means of painting, so that it becomes with its neutral and colourless background, like those sheets of sketches by Watteau upon which one sees here, there, at every corner and at various angles, traced in three colours upon the buff paper, innumerable smiles.52 So Swann weaves a fantasy world of his love for Odette, built solely on his imagination and the superimposition of Zipporah onto Odette and substitution of Odette for Zipporah. It is a fragile delusion destined to lead to disappointment. The metamorphosed Odette is imbued with qualities that she does not and can never possess: an inestimably precious work of art, cast for once in a new, a different, an especially delectable metal.53 Swann enjoys the romantic idea of being in love, for he was once more nding in things, since he had fallen in love, the charm that he had found when, in his adolescence, he had fancied himself an artist; with this difference, that the charm that lay in them now was conferred by Odette alone.54 By being in love, Swann feels that he acquires an identity. Proust is severely critical of Swann for debasing a work of art to elevate both the idea of love and a woman with a dubious past and present. Although Swann has found erotic, yet ephemeral excitement via Zipporah, he has failed to plumb the meaning of the original paintingin fact he has not even tried. Similarly, he has failed to comprehend the layers of personality that comprise Odette. Swann has failed because he is a diletante and aesthete, with a ne knowledge of art which he squanders. The fact that Swann, this

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clibataire de lart,55 is condemned to a sterile life and early death from cancer serves to emphasize his wasted and artistically barren life. There is a chilling analogy with Prousts early life. This fantasy world serves to conceal the true identity, to Swann, of Odette, a woman without a past. As George Stambolian commented: By comparing Odette with Zipporah Swann attempts to hide her different reality.56 This also confuses the readers perception of his character, thus paralleling life itself and the problems of identity and communication. Swann too deliberately conceals his identity from Odettehe wears a mask, as he does on so many other occasions such as during his visits to the narrators family in Combray, and when at the Verdurins. Like Zipporah, Odette is an amalgam of contradictory and contrasting tendencies, such as her bisexuality and unclear sexual orientation, her ugliness and charm which coexist and create tension. Botticellis Zipporah and Ruskins copy of Zipporah had a crucial role in the development of Swanns love affair with Odette, by inciting and inaming Swanns desires, yet at the same time creating a screen which concealed the true nature of the woman.

V. M I S S S A C R I PA N T O D E T T E To what extent does Swann know Odette through the mediation of Zipporah? Swann marries an imagined OdetteZipporah without a known past that he can reconstruct, like the faade of a building without foundations and rooms. In a later volume of Prousts novel, Within a Budding Grove, Odettes hidden past will be revealed through the medium of another painting, not Zipporah, but Miss Sacripant, and through the vision of the ctitious artist, Elstir. The events take place many years before Swann in Love when Prousts polymorphous/polytemporal narrator, as an adolescent, visits Elstirs studio for the rst time. His attention is caught by one painting in particular, entitled Miss Sacripant and dated October 1872. It is a painting of a young woman in a close-tting hat not unlike a bowler, trimmed with a ribbon of cerise silk; in one of her mittened hands was a lighted cigarette, while the other held at knee-level a sort of broadbrimmed garden hat .... On a table by her side, a tall vase lled with pink carnations.57 As the young narrator looks, his doubts grow and he wonders whether the strange attire of a female model is her costume for a fancy-dress ball, or whether, ... the scarlet cloak which an elderly man looks as though he had put on in response to some

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whim of the painters is his professors or aldermans gown or his cardinals cape. The older narrator posits an explanation for the uncertainty: The ambiguous character of the person whose portrait now confronted me arose, without my understanding it, from the fact that it was a young actress of an earlier generation half dressed up as a man. But the younger narrator, standing in front of the watercolour, is confused by the fact that the bowler beneath which the hair was uffy but short, the velvet jacket, without lapels, opening over a white shirt-front, made me hesitate as to the period of the clothes and sex of the model, so that I did not know exactly what I had before my eyes, except that it was a most luminous piece of painting.58 The sexuality of the person oscillates, revealing the androgynous nature of Odette: her sexuality does not have xed boundaries, as in many of Elstirs seascapes. This transvestite costume is worn by a young actress, with the lines of the face [along which] the latent sex seemed to be on the point of confessing itself to be that of a somewhat boyish girl, ... vanished, and reappeared further on with a suggestion rather of an effeminate, vicious and pensive youth, then ed once more and remained elusive.59 The contrast between the dreamy sadness in the expression of the eyes and the provocative costume belonging to the world of debauchery and the stage disturbed the young narrator who could only interpret the facial expression as feigned in order to enhance the provocation.60 The contemplation is abruptly and unexpectedly interrupted by Mme Elstir, at which moment Elstir hastily and furtively hides this painting of a woman with whom he had had a relationship. It is some time later before the moment of revelation when the young narrator utters: It couldnt be Mme Swann before she was married?61 Elstirs stunning silence spoke loudly, for the portrait was indeed that of Odette de Crcy.62 The very title of the painting suggests the sitters connections with the world of the Music Hall where it was fashionable to use the title Miss, implying a degree of titillating erotica. Miss Sacripant was also the stage character that Odette played in Paris when she was introduced to Swann by the homosexual, and previously married, Baron de Charlus. The name Sacripant is derived from the Italian male character Sacripante in Boiardos Orlando innamorato and has now acquired the meaning in French of a rogue or good for nothing. Through the choice of name, the bisexuality is very explicit, but hidden owing to its connotations with the world of fashion and the Music Hall.63 The Miss also suggests the unmarried status of the subject, or at least the implied status in this case for Odette de Crcy was the estranged wife of the Comte de Crcy, and enables the subject sexual freedom of choice, if so desired, without the constraints of marriage.

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It was Odettes unclear and ill-dened sexuality that tortured Swann during his pursuit and courtship: he suspected her of lesbian proclivities and he also suspected her of relationships with other men. Both counts he found impossible to prove, yet his instincts were correct. In the course of Prousts novel, the truth about Odette and her dubious past would gradually unfold and would reveal that Swanns doubts were well-founded. Yet the truth about Odettes inner self had been captured by the artist Elstir, and read and understood correctly by the narratorwriter of In Search of Lost Time who had deciphered the portrait of Miss Sacripant. Elstir had succeeded in discomposing the contrived, supercial appearance of Odette, what Proust calls the articial harmony,64 to reveal her multiple layers and the harsh truth she wished to dissimulate. After the publication of Du Ct de chez Swann, Proust revealed in an interview with Andr Arnyvelde in 1913: I have tried to imitate life, where the unsuspected aspects of a person suddenly reveal themselves to our eyes. We live next to beings whom we think we know. What is lacking is the event that will make them suddenly appear different from the way we know them.65 The event that revealed to the narrator unsuspected facets of Odette was seeing Elstirs painting of Miss Sacripant. The event that revealed to Ruskin the critical role of Botticelli was the conjunction of two unexpected things, the Etruscan olive branch on the Badia in Fiesole and in Botticellis paintings.

EPILOGUE Botticellis Zipporah was enigmatic for Ruskin and for Prousts Swann. Whereas Ruskin, the real-life art critic, provides an in-depth analysis and interpretation through Athena, bringing out the tension of the dialectical nature of the painting, its conjunction of two civilizations, religions, yet at the same time expressing continuity, Swann is unable to delve deeply and to interpret Zipporah as a Renaissance masterpiece; he uses this painting solely to obtain ephemeral satisfaction in love. Swanns is a fruitless act of idolatry and one which will be severely reprimanded and condemned by Proust. It is the adolescent narrator in Prousts novel who experiences a moment of revelation when, through his critical abilities, he identies Miss Sacripant as Odette de Crcy.

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NOTES
1. This is an extended version of a lecture given to the Ruskin Programme, University of Lancaster on 12 February 1998. I am grateful to Professor Robert Hewison for the initial invitation and to all members of the Ruskin Programme who contributed to the stimulating and challenging discussion that followed the seminar. 2. Joan Evans and John Howard Whitehouse (eds), The Diaries of John Ruskin, 18351889 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), p. 175. 3. Ibid., p. 173. 4. The Ruskin Foundation, (The Ruskin Library, University of Lancaster) [hereafter RF ], 880. 5. The Biblical quotations throughout are from the authorised King James version of The Holy Bible. 6. For a discussion of the role of the well, see A. Abcassis, La Pense Juive, vol. 1. Du Dsert au Dsir (Paris: Librairie Gnrale Franaise, 1987), pp. 7882. 7. It is interesting to note that his shoes appear more comtemporaneous with the time of Botticelli than with that of Moses. 8. For a discussion of Ruskins copying of sheep, see Cynthia Gamble, Ruskins sheep, in The Ruskin Programme Bulletin, no. 16 (University of Lancaster, April 1998), pp. 1315. 9. I am grateful to The Ruskin Foundation for permission to consult the manuscripts in The Ruskin Library, and to compare the manuscript with the Diaries edited by Evans and Whitehouse. The only obvious small change in the diary quoted above is the fact that Ruskin does not underline Zipporah, italicized in Evans and Whitehouse. 10. E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (eds), The Complete Works of John Ruskin, in 39 vols (London: George Allen, 190312). This edition will, henceforth, be referred to as cw, followed by the volume number and the page(s); ibid., XXXVII, p. 112. 11. CW, XXII, p. 427. 12. Ibid., XXIII, pp. 26579. 13. Ibid., pp. 26970. 14. Ibid., p. 479. 15. Ibid., p. 275. 16. Reproduced, in reverse, in CW, XX, p. 242, pl. IV. The woodcut was produced by Burgess, who no doubt cut it from a drawing Ruskin made, hence Ruskins reference to my woodcut of the Attic Pallas (ibid., XXIII, p. 479). The Neck Amphora, reference GR 1837.69.28 (E268), is in the Canino Collection, in Room 11, at the British Museum. It is about 2 feet high, and has been dated as c. 480 BC. It is from Nola in Southern Italy. 17. Ibid., pp. 4789. 18. Ibid., p. 479. 19. Ibid. 20. Jeanne Clegg and Paul Tucker, Ruskin and Tuscany (Sheffield: Ruskin Gallery, Collection of The Guild of St George in association with Lund Humphries, 1993), p. 112. 21. CW, XXIII, p. 479.

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22. Cynthia Gamble, ProustRuskin perspective on La Vierge Dore at Amiens Cathedral, Word & Image, IX/3 (1993), pp. 27086. 23. CW, XXVII, p. 347; Fors Clavigera, letter 20, August 1872. 24. CW, XXVII, p. 347. 25. For example, Frederick Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art, 4th edn (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994 [1970]), p. 407. 26. CW, XXVII, p. 347. 27. Ibid. 28. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. I. Swanns Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), p. 460. 29. Ibid., 1, pp. 45960. 30. Ibid., p. 267. 31. Julia Kristeva, Le Temps sensible, Proust et lexprience littraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 42. 32. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, In Search of Lost Time, 1, p. 267. 33. Ibid., p. 267. 34. Ibid., p. 270. 35. Correspondance de Marcel Proust, 21 vols, vol. 5, ed. Philip Kolb (Paris: Plon, 197093, vol. 5 1979), p. 42; IV, p. 326, n.3: VI, pp. 756. 36. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, In Search of Lost Time, 1, p. 270. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Manuscripts quoted in Clegg and Tucker, Ruskin and Tuscany, p. 94. 40. Ibid. 41. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, In Search of Lost Time, 1, pp. 2689. 42. Ibid., p. 269. 43. Richard Bales, Proust: A la Recherche du Temps perdu. Critical Guides to French Texts (London: Grant & Cutler, 1995), p. 57. 44. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, In Search of Lost Time, 1, p. 269. 45. Ibid., p. 288. 46. Ibid., p. 280. 47. Juliette Hassine, Esotrisme et Ecriture dans luvre de Proust (Paris: Minard, 1990), pp. 14355. 48. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, In Search of Lost Time, 1, p. 284. 49. Ibid., p. 286. 50. Ibid., p. 269. 51. Ibid., pp. 26970. 52. Ibid., p. 289. 53. Ibid., p. 270. 54. Ibid., p. 287. 55. Marcel Proust, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu [edition publie sous la direction de Jean-Yves Tadi, Bibliothque de la Pliade] (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), p. 470. 56. George Stambolian, Marcel Proust and the Creative Encounter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 128. 57. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, In Search of Lost Time, II, p. 494.

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58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., p. 495. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., p. 508. 62. Ibid., p. 509. 63. Jean-Yves Tadi, Marcel Proust (Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1996), p. 496, n.2. 64. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, In Search of Lost Time, II, p. 509. 65. Quoted by Stambolian, Marcel Proust, p. 245. The text of the interview is in Philip Kolb and Larkin B. Price (eds), Marcel Proust: Textes Retrouvs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), p. 222.

JAN HOKENSON

Prousts japonisme: Contrastive Aesthetics

o detail is single in Prousts A la Recherche du temps perdu, that stately cycle of repetition, as Henry Sussman termed the novel. Large motifs and minute details recur, in patterns that establish a duologue of particular and general, layering thematic constructs and interweaving such rhetorics of stratication as those of law, science, ethnicity (Sussman 2133). The particular is freighted with thematics and, since Prousts protagonist is also an apprentice learning his art, the largest aesthetic themes inform the least detail. As Sussman suggests, aspects of an orchid or a brothel, for instance, t into the intertwined narratives of heterosexual and homosexual romances. These in turn interrelate to comprise entire counter-systems of thought and structuration operational throughout the text, and produce, among other things, parables of reproduction and autofecundity, or models of writing (222). To read the Recherche as counter-systems of thought in this way is particularly useful when considering one pattern of details that has rarely been noted in the Recherche: Prousts many references to Japanese arts. Jean Rousset has shown how the allusions to the Mille et une nuits, those childhood tales fantastically free of the time-space constraints of canonical French ction, provide Marcel with a literary model, rst encountered on the dinner plates at Combray and only much later understood as a prose alternative to

From Modern Language Studies 29, no. 1 (Spring 1999). 1999 by Northeast Modern Language Association.

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realist ction. However, to assume that every reference to orient indicates Proche-Orient is to miss the parallel pattern of allusions to the ExtrmeOrient of Japanese visual arts. Prousts larger, overarching structure combines both sets of Oriental arts, the Arab tales and the Japanese arts, into a counter-system of non-European aesthetics active throughout the text. The Japanese allusions in particular function contrastively to highlight the impasse in canonical Western aesthetics (thus replicating the Impressionists experience in discovering ukiyo-, the Japanese prints) and to reveal to Marcel new possibilities for writing. Klaus Berger describes a moment of stylistic crisis in Western painting at the end of the illusionist or mimetic tradition (with Renoir, for example, admitting, I had come to the end of Impressionism .... I was in a blind alley, 2). Like Gabriel Weisberg and Siegfried Wichmann, Berger depicts japonisme as a sudden visual inux of completely new and original form, prompting the recognition, admiration, adoption, and reinterpretation of an Eastern way of seeing (3). When the rst woodblock prints arrived in Paris in about 1862 they set off a wave of enthusiasm for Japanese art that crested decades later, moving out from the ateliers to sweep across Europe like a craze in the fin-de-sicle. Impressionism, the poster movement, art nouveau, were currents in the widening stream of japonisme.1 The rst prints were dazzling: the strange discordant compositions, the brilliant reds and yellows, the simple stylized gures, the odd cropping and silhouetting, the indifference to frame, the decentered perspective, the bold overlays and transparences. Edmond de Goncourt was the rst to realize that the phenomenon known as japonisme was far more than a fashion. Contemporaries described it as the discovery of a new aesthetic continent, and Goncourt pronounced it a revolution in European aesthetics. Today art historians echo Klaus Bergers judgment that japonisme was a shift of Copernican proportions, marking the end of European illusionism and the beginning of the modern.2 Like the painters, whom they often defended in art reviews and criticism, writers also exulted at the new Japanese art. Huysmans extols things Japanese in A Rebours. Zola praises the woodblock as naturaliste in Le Naturalisme au Salon, and incorporates Japanese prints into Au Bonheur des dames and LOeuvre. The Goncourts painter-protagonist in Manette Salomon tries and fails to equal the art of the prints, and Les Frres Zemganno among other texts contains pointed reference to Japanese artworks.3 But Proust overshadows all such precedents in his magisterially reexive use of the Japanese aesthetic. Through the three thousand pages of the Recherche, the monumental dimensions of Prousts novel are so vast and complex that they often seem to

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conceal, beneath the brilliant details of French social comedy, Marcels purpose of aesthetic innovation. During the ctional years of apprenticeship, learning the lessons of the traditional and the new French painters, composers, and writers, Marcel despairs of ever nding a subject for a unique literary creation of his own, until at the nal Matine he discovers unconscious memory, then metaphor, then a method for rendering this text as his book of human subjectivity in Time. By that point most readers have forgotten that in Combray the entire verbal edice emerged, in metaphor, from a single cup of tea, and that the only analogy for the processand the implied aestheticwas Japanese: comme dans ce jeu o les Japonais samusent tremper dans un bol de porcelaine rempli deau, de petits morceaux de papier jusque-l indistincts qui, peine y sont-ils plongs, stirent, se contournent, se colorent, se diffrencient, deviennent des eurs, des maisons, des personnages consistants et reconnais sables, de mme maintenant ... lglise et tout Combray et ses environs, tout cela qui prend forme et solidit, est sorti, ville et jardins, de ma tasse de th. (I.4748) The narrator had been struggling in vain to pinpoint his memories, wondering whether the past would ever reach the clear surface of his consciousness. It is not surprising that Proust invokes Japanese arts at perhaps the single most crucial moment in the novel. Thereafter the whole relationshipmemory, metaphor, genreremains to be worked out. But it is here, at the gateway to the recherche, in the rst full operation of involuntary memory, that Proust constructs a japoniste metaphor for the bringing to consciousness. The Japanese porcelain bowl is homologue to the modernists cup of linden tea. As becomes clear in the course of the novel, what matters most in this scene, aside from the initiatory invocation of the Japanese aesthetic, is the sudden transformation of banal matter (paper bits) magically metamorphosed into a new order of reality, at once imaginative, imagistic, and in uid motion. As gure for the mans art, this is a Japanese childs game, preface in metaphor for a French childhood resurrected from time and given living reality in art, in the equally uid elements of consciousness and language. Proust weaves the vast tapestry of the Recherche with such japoniste allusions. Readers have usually levelled the orientalisms together as historical markers of the era 18801915, to show that Proust accurately chronicles the popular fancies of his age.4 With both Odette and Albertine slinking in

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kimonos, Madame Verdurin crowing about her salade la japonaise, even Monsieur de Norpois ranting about Bergottes chinoiseries de forme, one can easily dismiss it all as yet another modernists Orientalism, trite and faintly racist. Previously, however, in the 1920s when japonisme was still prevalent in Paris arts and literature, William Leonard Schwartz included the Recherche in his survey of Far-Eastern similes by French writers, The Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in Modern French Literature: 18001925 (1927). He too saw Proust as primarily a social chronicler and complimented his historical accuracy (in 1879 Odettes apartment teems with Oriental bric--brac, in 1887 she mixes Japanese lanterns and silks with Chinese procelains and French eighteenth-century furniture, and by the end of the Dreyfus affair she has only French eighteenth-century dcor). But Schwartz added that Proust, like Goncourt and Huysmans, makes occasional use of similes which depend for their effect upon an acquaintance with Japanese art (106), quoting two examples without further comment. And indeed it would have been difficult for Proust not to have encountered Japanese art. It was pervasive in a variety of forms in the salons he visited,5 in the concerns of Le Mensuel, La Revue Blanche, and other reviews he wrote for,6 in the lives and the work of painters, composers, friends he used as models for his own characters.7 Young Proust in 1890 sent japoniste comic verses to his friends, including the more somber Ton esprit, divin Chrysanthme (Cahier Marcel Proust 120), which is a noteworthy bit of japonaiserie only because it shows Proust engaging, as more than passive spectator, in the Belle-Epoque craze and casting his engagement into a proto-japoniste quatrain. Proust personally went to at least one japoniste painters studio, Vuillards atelier in Cabourg (the original of Elstirs laboratoire), and Vuillard made a drawing, now lost, of Proust, Montesquiou, and Delafosse at dinner in the Bois in 1903. Japanese artistic interests were so strong among these groups circulating around Montesquiou, Painter reports, that the Comte de Gruffulhes patriotism (and probably homophobia) was outraged. Theyre a lot of Japs, he said, meaning esthetes (I.149). As a young man Proust was surrounded by things Japanese, and, from the evidence of his novel, learned to discern basic principles of the aesthetic. His good friend Marie Nordlinger, the Englishwoman who helped him translate Ruskin, worked on Japanese cloisonn and enamels in Bings atelier (Cahier Marcel Proust 191n).8 Proust was devastated when Nordlinger left France for America in 1905 to arrange exhibits of Japanese prints for Bing (Painter II.25). She often sent Proust Japanese gifts from the gallery when he was feeling particularly ill, and he was fascinated by them. It was she who

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gave him the cut-paper pellets to immerse in water. Proust was suffering from asthma, and this uvatile and inoffensive spring, these miraculous and hidden owers touched him profoundly, amid the desolation of the season he dared not see, with a memory of seasons buried in childhood. Thanks to you, he wrote, my dark electric room has had its Far-Eastern spring (qtd Painter II.15). He was so impressed with the bonsai that in 1907 he ordered three more from Bings when struggling to write a review of Anna de Noailless Les blouissements. In that review and later in his novel (III.130), he alludes to the bonsai as emblems of the immensity that can be held within a single line of poetry. Proust concisely and accurately identies their chief aesthetic property when he replies to Nordlinger, the Japanese dwarf trees at Bings are trees for the imagination (qtd Painter I.3). In the review he wrote: Je ne sais si vous me comprendrez et si le pote sera indulgeant ma rverie. Mais bien souvent les moindres vers des blouissements me rent penser ces cyprs gants, ces sophoras roses que lart du jardinier japonais fait tenir, hauts de quelques centimtres, dans un godet de porcelaine de Hizen. Mais limagination qui les contemple en mme temps que les yeux, les voit, dans le monde des proportions, ce quils sont en ralit, cest--dire des arbres immenses. Et leur ombre grande comme la main donne ltroit carr de terre, de natte, ou de cailloux o elle promne lentement, les jours de soleil, ses songes plus que centenaires, ltendue et la majest dune vaste campagne ou de la rive de quelque grand euve.9 Why does Proust even mention Hizen (the Kyushu region famous for Japanese procelain), the provenance of the ceramic container? What matters to him is the conjunction of nature and art. The small tree, shaped to resemble the giant cypress, is set or based in the nest example of Japanese porcelain artistry. As art the bonsai is greater than nature because free of time (in ses songes plus que centenaires), set in art to invite the imagination to recreate the centuries-old cypress in the mind. And even as nature the bonsai is less than real, being an iconic representation of the other, greater reality of the giant tree. The art of bonsai, particularly its dual essence as art-nature, induces in Proust in 1907 a rverie which he will continue to develop in his contrastive aesthetics in the Recherche.10 Among the leading Impressionists who were fervent japonistes, Proust singled out Whistler, Moreau, and especially Monet. In the 1890s, in

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Monets period of serial paintings, Proust was quite ill but he made an effort to attend the Monet exhibit at the Durand-Ruel gallery, and as late as 1907, during Monets period of water-lily paintings (and in the same year as the visit to Vuillards studio), Proust still hoped to visit Monet and his garden at Giverny.11 In the Recherche Proust uses Monets work as model for Elstirs studies of cathedrals and Normandy cliffs and for his own descriptions of water-lilies on the Vivonne. One of Monets rare explanatory comments on his work, made to La Revue Blanches art critic Roger Marx about the water-lily studies, indicates the aesthetic perspective that Proust shared and developed in the novel: If you insist on forcing me into an affiliation with anyone else for the good of the cause, then compare me with the old Japanese masters; their exquisite taste has always delighted me, and I like the suggestive quality of their aesthetic, which evokes presence by a shadow and the whole by a part .... The vague and indeterminate are expressive resources that have a raison dtre and qualities of their own; through them, the sensation is prolonged, and they form the symbol of continuity (qtd Berger 312). Like Monets, Prousts japonisme proceeds not from specic artworks or even art forms. It is rather an affiliation with an entire aesthetic, and it is rendered as such in the novel, in cumulative allusions and reexive import. Proust embraces particularly the evocative power of suggestion, the rendering of fugitive impressions, the crucial blanks or incompleteness indeterminacies opening imaginative possibilties (for narrator and reader), and the sensory appeal in swift delicate strokes of line and color. Proust is astute at mining the comparative possibilities of Japanese arts, the prints and paintings in particular, and the subtlety and complexity of his allusions reect Marcels progress as the proto-artist. Marcels japoniste initiation into a new aesthetic, probably mirroring Prousts own experience, is not as overt as the structured allusions to Saint-Simon, Racine, and the rest of Marcels pantheon of French writers. For it is less exclusively literary, thus less intimately webbed with Marcels specically literary ambitions, and is more connected to other arts, as an inter-arts phenomenon, that is, an aesthetic. Marcel is something of a pilgrim through his European heritage, beginning with Giotto and the gothic cathedrals and proceding through the centuries to Anatole France and the Impressionists. Proust positions the Recherche as the acme of European arts and Marcel as the literary innovator. The Japanese aesthetic appears intermittently, working like a counter-system to clarify the limitations of Marcels inherited Occidental aesthetics. Prousts japonisme operates at two levels in the Recherche, in discourse and in story, to use Emile Benvenistes terms. As in the scene of the madeleine, the deft japonisme in the narrators own discourse is reexive of the texts large

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goals as artwork in its own right, and occurs chiey in Combray and Le Temps retrouv, in the origins and in the apotheosis of the text. Also, when the characters comically repeat the worst abuses of the Japanese aesthetic, as in the Verdurins mawkish jokes about la salade japonaise, the narrator mocks mercilessly, as he always derides the mere social uses of art. Like a code within a code, the comic targets are indexes of value, and form a counterdiscourse to the narrators own aesthetic judgment and practice. At the level of story, the dozens of allusions to Japanese woodcut prints, paintings, language, gardens, costumes, toys and games, can be sorted into three types. First, Proust satirizes the socialites frivolous abuses of japonisme, chiey in the boudoirs and the salons. Swann is appalled at Odettes craze for chrysanthemums but, on his rst visit to her apartments, he ultimately lets himself be inveigled by her Orientalisms, including her silk cushions and her grande lanterne japonaise suspendue une cordelette de soie (mais qui, pour ne pas priver les visiteurs des derniers conforts de la civilisation occidentale, sclairait au gaz, I.220). Swann particpates in this travesty of the Japanese object, and its relation to light, as the narrator suggests by casting into japoniste allusion his refrain that comfort and art are incompatible. As lover, Marcel replicates Swann in dithering over the beloveds inane enactments of the worst abuses of the Japanese aesthetic which, again, is invoked at the decisive origin of the affair. Marcel has scruples but, always attracted to corrupt women and decadent men, ce qui me dcida fut une dernire dcouverte philologique (II.357). He is both aghast and excited by her corrupt speech, including the worst gibberish from Pierre Lotis Madame Chrysanthme (Oui, me rpondit Albertine, elle a lair dune petite mousm). To Marcel the proto-japoniste writer, the linguistic hybrid mousm is like ice in the mouth (nul [mot] nest plus horripilant). The whole scene burlesques Lotis colonialist erotics, and Marcel is titillated despite himself: Mais devant mousm ces raisons tombrent ... The affair begins on a distinct note of japoniaiserie. Marcel is more self-aware than Swann, and he does not participate in Orientalist fakery so much as manipulate it, remaining, he thinks, superior to its degradations. A similar set of satiric allusions proceeds from the Verdurins salon. Aside from predictably garbled judgments on such japonistes as Whistler, the most recurrent travesty concerns the running joke about la salade japonaise, which begins as a silly in-joke, the characters coy way of letting others know they have been to see Dumas ls play Francillon.12 But soon we learn that the Verdurin salad contains western potatoes. It is another aesthetic hash, on a par with the Japanese porcelains jostling among the

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Verdurins Louis XIII vases, mindlessly making counter-systems inter changeable. Unschooled in the integrity of French traditions and following Orientalist fashions, the petit clan degrade both. By the time of the Goncourt pastiche, this tiresome salad13 had become so hyperbolically Japanese that even the Verdurins potatoes are (in Prousts satire of Edmond de Goncourts dilettantish japonisme) des pommes de terre ayant la fermet de boutons divoire japonais (III.712). In the culinary as in the erotic realms (always subtended by literary targets, chiey Loti and Goncourt), such witless abuses of japonisme produce contemptible hybrids and deformations. They enable amusing satire while contrasting with others more serious uses of things Japanese. Such comic japonisme is clever, and consistently aimed at stupidity or ignorance, forms of the idolatry of art which entices Swann and which Marcel learns to disavow. The second type of japoniste allusion at the level of story occurs among the artistocrats. Almost everyone but Marcels mother, his grandmother, and the artists Elstir and Vinteuil are guilty of japonisant folly at some point in the Recherche. The Guermantes characters are just as prey to fashion, although they are associated with its creative aspects that will engage Marcel. At her soire in Le Ct des Guermantes Madame de Villeparisis is painting a japoniste view, which no one can identify until the Duchesse de Guermantes points out that it resembles the apple blossoms on a Japanese screen. Later even Charlus, in a rare creative endeavor that associates him with the artistic sensibility if not with true painting, paints a fan for the Duchesse, notably a japoniste scene of black and yellow irises. The Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes collect paintings from Elstirs japoniste period, which Marcel studies in their library. In such ways they exhibit more aesthetic discrimination in things Japanese than the Verdurins and the lovers. The third set of allusions, still at the level of story, appears in the subtext of Marcels artistic aprenticeship. These concern the japonisme of the nest painters of the period, chiey Whistler, Degas, Manet, Monet, Moreau, and of course Elstir. They have attained the Japanese way of seeing, in Bergers phrase, that Marcel is only slowly acquiring. On one occasion, for instance, just before his rst visit to Elstirs studio, he makes a (retrospectively) signicant association with the prints but foolishly does not pursue it. In his room at Balbec, lying in bed and musing on the images of the sea reected in the glass on the bookcases, Marcel considers the natural beauty of the sunset over the sea and ponders various artistic analogues. But he miscontrues the relationship between the world reected and the reections that shift with the light like changing exhibits of paintings:

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Une fois ctait une exposition destampes japonaises: ct de la mince dcoupure du soleil rouge et rond comme la lune, un nuage jaune paraissait un lac contre lequel des glaives noirs se prolaient ainsi que les arbres de sa rive, une barre dun rose tendre que je navais jamais revu depuis ma premire bote de couleurs senait comme un euve sur les deux rives duquel des bateaux semblaient attendre sec quon vint les tirer pour les mettre ot. Et avec le regard ddaigneux, ennuy et frivole dun amateur ou dune femme parcourant, entre deux visites mondaines, une galerie, je me disais: Cest curieux, ce coucher de soleil, cest diffrent, mais enn jen ai dj vu daussi dlicats, daussi tonnants que celui-ci. (I.8045) Wisely, Marcel recognizes the link between the Japanese couleurs si vives and his childhood, but then (ddaigneux, ennuy et frivole) he dismisses the thought. In the Japanese model, Marcel has just seen for himself that cloud and lake lack a line of demarcation; this is the famous lesson of the Elstir seascapes, that water and sky lack a line of demarcation like the two interchangeable halves of literary metaphor, but Marcel cannot apprehend the importance of what he is seeing nor of the Japanese association. He discerns analogies in the seascapes with Monet and Whistler, even noting the buttery signature that Whistler developed to mime the Japanese hanka (or seal). But it is only thirty pages later, after his visit to Elstirs studio, that Marcel can assimilate Japanese analogies to his own aesthetic development. The structure of this visual perception in his hotel room continues to structure Marcels nascent japonisme: vaguely associated with the purity of childhood impressions and artistic beginnings (of Marcel, and primitively of Art), it is reected against books, on the vitrines de la bibilothque, in interreections of literature and painting that he alone can make real, in ultimately writing this book. Elstirs fictional career repeats those of Whistler and other Impressionists, beginning in historical or mythological studies and moving into an extended period of japonisme, then developing a mature style. Marcel regrets that none of the paintings in Elstirs studio reect his Japanese period, celle o il avait subi linuence du Japon, which Marcel had read about in an English art review and which he knows is represented in the Guermantes collection (II.835). His momentary delight at the japoniste sunset, when he was unable to isolate the metaphoric land-water relations from his own reality, anticipated this aesthetic discovery in the studio. He sees it clearly in Elstirs painting of the Port of Carquethuit which

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comparant la terre la mer, supprimait entre elles toute dmarcation. Proust positions Japanese art as a new way of seeing, which Elstir has already assimilated in painting and which Marcel intermittently experiences. In such ways, Proust portrays Belle Epoque japonisme as a social amusement, grotesque in the worst salons or dilletantish in the best, but always a fashionable contrast to its concurrent role as formative apprenticeship in art. At the level of discourse, it is after this point in A lOmbre des jeunes filles en eur that the narrators japoniste practice, initiated in Combray, begins to merge with Marcels own artistic reections. In Combray, after ending his prologue on the japoniste magic of the madeleine, the narrator then moves immediately into evocations of Combray and its environs, as remembered. These scenes and sites so impress the child Marcel as to constitute his moi essentiel, and in their description Japanese references evoke (a) a nonEuropean relation to nature, (b) imaginative activity in the mind, and (c) evanescence and fugitive impressions in art. Initially the narrator carries the burden of both Orientalisms, the Near-Eastern and Far-Eastern, sowing the text with allusions that the child is too young to understand. Thus for instance in Combray, in the long passages describing the water-lilies on the Vivonne, the narrator lingers over each color, form, and glint of light in the oating ower-beds. He notes that in late evening the bed of the stream seems no longer green but blue, dun bleu clair et cru, tirant sur le violet, dapparence cloisonn et dun got japonais (I.169). Elsewhere pinks and whites are so clear they seen laves comme de la porcelaine, and forms are so visible in the clear water they seem midway between uidity and xity in permanent form. The narrator is practising a literary impressionism that transposes Monets nnuphars into text, as such terms as jardin cleste and the japoniste allusions suggest, while rendering the literal impressions Marcel is receiving as those of a generic got japonais. Crucial moments in the narrators discursive passages on Marcels aesthetic apprenticeship often contain such japoniste allusions. In the moment when Marcel is still joyous at having experienced the spires at Martinville dancing free of time-space constraints, and has just initiated his literary career with his rst composition, the narrator notes the boys sudden pleasure at a japoniste vision of apple blossoms silhouetted against the sunset. But this profound aesthetic joy is inextricably associated with the single most painful loss in the novel, his mothers goodnight kiss, and the bridge between them is again Japanese:

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Mais quand sur le chemin de retour ... il ny avait plus qu prendre une alle de chnes borde dun ct de prs appartenant chacun un petit clos et plants intervalles gaux de pommiers qui y portaient, quand ils taient claires par le soleil couchant, le dessin japonais de leurs ombres, brusquement mon coeur se mettait battre, je savais quavant une demi-heure nous serions rentrs et que ... on menverrait me coucher sitt ma soupe prise, de sorte que ma mre, retenue table comme sil y avait du monde dner, ne monterait pas me dire bonsoir dans mon lit. La zone de tristesse o je venais dentrer tait aussi distincte de la zone o je mlanais avec joie, il y avait un moment encore, que dans certains ciels une bande rose est spare comme par une ligne dune bande verte ou dune bande noire. (II.1823) The narrator depicts the familiar japoniste view of silhouetted blossoms at sunset as signal for the childs greatest fear and loss. The dessin japonais de leurs ombres is the hinge between artistic joy and emotional pain, a focal aesthetic midpoint between these two zones that will constitute the dual worlds of the novel. Proust practises a literary japonisme for its imagery of indeterminate demarcations. As though to underscore the association, he continues to elaborate this visual got japonais in the balance of the passage, using a well-known motif from the woodblocks by Hokusai and Hiroshige:14 On voit un oiseau voler dans le rose, il va en atteindre la n, il touche presque au noir, puis il y est entr .... Et de la sorte cest du ct de Guermantes que jai appris distinguer ces tats qui se succdent en moi ... It is rst in japoniste imagery and terms of description that Marcel learns the essential realitywhat he will later term the vrit profondeof his successive selves. However deeply interior the truths to which they point him, the japoniste analogues remain pictural and exterior, integral with the natural scene. Marcel learns in A lOmbre des jeunes filles en eur to use the familiar spears of apple blossoms in the Japanese manner, keeping a branch in his Paris room so that he may imagine the trees at Combray. The iconography of japoniste blossoms and silhouetted light has acquired considerable force by the time of Marcels visit to Elstirs studio. By the end of Sodome et Gomorrhe he can instantly perceive how lhorizon lointain de la mer fournissait aux pommiers comme un arrire plan destampe japonaise (II.781). In exaltation at such natural beauty summoning associations with Japanese art, the aesthetic role of the estampe japonaise is now overt, and the associated sense of pain remains: Mais elle [cette beaut] touchait jusquaux larmes

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parce que, si loin quelle allt dans ces effets dart raffin, on sentait quelle tait naturelle ... The pain in this scene of resplendent springtime, producing Marcels last moment of almost unalloyed joy in nature, procedes from the knowledge that it will vanish and die because it is not art, even the Japanese art that catches nature on the wing and in the instant, but nature. These are the vanishing moments that Marcel must learn to record in writing (as the narrator is doing in japoniste prose) to preserve them from time. The allusions to the woodblock prints are increasingly associated with artistic creation. It is the narrator who points out in japoniste terms how badly Marcel blunders with Gilberte on the Champs Elyses (he should have been content to love her at a distance without worrying whether the image corresponds to the reality, imitant ces jardiniers japonais qui, pour obtenir une plus belle eur, en sacrient plusieurs autres, I.401). In Du Ct de chez Swann Marcel is too young to envision love like a Japanese garden, which cultivates representations of absence rather than entrammelling realities.15 But later in Le Temps retrouv, by the time he visits Gilberte de Saint Loup at Swanns old house (un peu trop campagne), it is Marcel who implicitly criticizes her for not having japoniste wallpaper: ces grandes dcorations des chambres daujourdhui o sur un fond dargent, tous les pommiers de Normandie sont venus se proler en style japonais (III.697). This particular allusion operates, like the wooblock sunset reected on the glass at Balbec, to introduce an aesthetic problem and its imminent resolution. In this scene, Marcel is again musing in bed, on the eve of his retreat from Paris into a sanitorium, and remembers seeing a sun-splashed image of the Combray church spire reected that morning on the bedroom windowpane. Like the absent japoniste wallpaper that he only imagines, the Church spire was only an image, yet more real in its suggestiveness than the actual church, than the orid realistic European wallpaper on the walls: Non pas une guration de ce clocher, ce clocher lui-mme, qui, mettant ainsi sous mes yeux la distance des lieues et des annes, tait venu ... sinscrire dans le carr de ma fentre (III.6978). He now sees imagined and remembered images as superior ones, and the language for the Japanese wallpaper and the crucially telescopic Combray spire are interchangeable (sont venus se proler, tait venu ... sinscrire). Marcel is still unaware of the importance of this perception for his later aesthetic of metaphor as timespace telescope. Instead of pursuing the thought, he turns to read the Journal of the Goncourts, and nds it so banal that he abandons his literary ambition. With Prousts extraordinary skill at literary mimicry, he could have used several contemporary writers for the nal pastiche. It is no accident

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that, against the background of Marcels increasing sophistication in Japanese aesthetics, he uses Frances leading, if pompous and outdated japoniste.16 Following Marcels wide readings in French literature and his disquisitions on Tolstoy and Dostoevski, the Goncourt Journal brings him to the European literary present and notably to the rst instance in the Recherche of literary japonisme. The Loti was only burlesqued, but the Goncourt is ostensibly quoted. As Jean-Yves Tadi says, this pastiche le plus important ... confronte deux moments du temps, deux mondes, deux esthtiques [la littrature classique et le roman proustien], deux genres littraires (606). As such a focal moment in the apprenticeship, the Goncourt pastiche is also the last bit of satirical japonaiserie and the main literary link between Marcels story and the narrators japoniste discourse. The narrator uses their hamsted japonisme as an index of the Goncourts failure as writers to reach deeper truths about the social comedy and to discern aesthetic value. The Goncourt text inverts the basic features of japonisme. The rst indication occurs immediately, when the Goncourts dither over Verdurins book on Whistler by praising the surface joliesses. Then they adore the way the Verdurin table is decorated, rien quavec des chrystanthmes japonais, and of course the Japanese salad, even its presentation on Chinese plates. Most telling, by contrast with Marcels later reections, Proust has the Goncourts comparing the light effects of sunset on Trocadero buildings to pink pastries (III.712). The pastiche scrambles some two dozen Orientalist allusions (including a movable room in the Mille et une nuits) with neither taste nor any aesthetic discrimination. The Goncourts japonisme, far from adding to French literature new artistic perspectives or methods, is merely decorative veneer and boring. The pastiche ends abruptly and, without transition, the narrator resumes years later, as Marcel is strolling through wartime Paris one evening during the black-out. The wartime prologue introduces the novels nal section, leading to Marcels apotheosis as an artist in his own right, and its rst long (three-page) paragraph is largely a function of literary japonisme. The Japanese allusions are prominent not only in Marcels visual apprehensions of the capitol but also in his French and European aesthetic references articulating what he sees in artistic terms. The rst sentence adapts a familiar motif from Hokusai, that of small dark smudges against a distant sky which, upon close examination, are revealed to be birds in ight (III.734). But then these smudges become airplanes. The japonisme once restricted to natural beauty now obtains in the wartime city. Moonlight now silhouettes buildings and treesnot in the precious Goncourt style of a social japonisme producing pink pastries, but

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actually en style japonais, in an authentic transposition of the Japanese aesthetic to the scenes of Paris in snow and this entire vision dOrient (III.737). The emphasis is no longer on resplendence but on simplicity, purity of line and form, spare vivid contrasting colors, delicacy of method, and suggestion of unstated essence; moreover, the Japanese aesthetic is allied with the European, in one mature dual vision: Les silhouettes des arbres se retaient nettes et pures sur cette neige dor bleut, avec la dlicatesse quelles ont dans certaines peintures japonaises ... The focus on nettes et pures is exact and aesthetically accurate, as is the balance of the passage equilibrating the japoniste silhouettes with those familiar from the high backgrounds in Italian Renaissance painting: ... ou dans certains fonds de Raphal; elles taient allonges terre au pied de larbre lui-mme, comme on les voit souvent dans la nature au soleil couchant ... The silhouetted trees again slvent intervalles rguliers, but on a city prairie, une prairie paradisiaque, non pas verte mais dun blanc si clatant cause du clair de lune qui rayonnait sur la neige de jade, quon aurait dit que cette prairie tait tissue seulement avec des ptales de poiriers en eurs. (III.736) Like a pendant to the narrators rst extended japoniste prose in Combray, on the uid water-lilies of the Vivonne with their effulgent sunlight and with their Dantesque undertones, this is a glacial landscape approaching xity, not infernal now but paradisiacal, dazzling in its simplicity and grace. The white pear blossoms and the neige de jade keep the aesthetics of the japoniste perspective clear, as does the rest of the long description of icy fountains, starkly silhouetted houses, the woman at the window, ending on le charme mystrieux et voil dune vision dOrient. Taken out of context, the nal words are often cited as an allusion to the Arab tales, but they are an integral part of Prousts japonisme in which the aesthetic of the Japanese prints amplies Marcels vision. Marcel now commands the entirety of his aesthetic heritage, which includes the japonisme that trained Elstirs vision and has now helped train his.

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Following immediately after the Goncourt pastiche, overleaping years left in silence or in literally blank space on the page, this extended passage counters it like a rebuttal. This is what japonisme can do in verbal art: reunite scattered motifs in a tight iconography of seeing and rework them in a new vision of a cityscape compounded of anterior thematics, from Combray to Balbec and from natural images to rened artice, lending the modern writer the amalgamated vision of East and West for use in his own unique creation. As Marcel proceeds to the Matine, fully prepared for the discoveries he is to make, there are no more Japanese allusions until the novel recommences, coming to consciousness in the japoniste cup of tea. In the modernist round of the novel, then, Prousts japonisme serves subtly and recurrently to advance the apprentices progress preparatory to the writing of this text. In society, in love, in paintings and in artworks, the diverse japonisme of other characters trains his eye and challenges his aesthetic and literary judgment to develop an authentic got japonais. The narrators prose japonisme in Combray is painterly, imbedding the boys rst strong visual and emotional impressions, and his rst efforts at writing, in visual imagery often derived from the prints. Certain iconic images, such as japoniste apple blossoms and silhouetted trees, later reappear in typically Proustian fashion, threading childhood memories through adult impressions and, increasingly, artistic reections. Isolated japoniste views, including seascapes and sunsets, grow in intensity and complexity until Marcel learns to plumb, rather than dismiss their uniqueness in his visual and artistic experience. In artistic method, indeterminacy holds the lesson of metaphor. Contrast offers a depiction of successive selves. Suggestion reects the truth of imaginative completion of absent wholes from parts. Throughout his japonisme Proust stresses two continuous refrains, an emotional sadness in pain at impending loss (associated with the evanescence of beauty in nature) and an imaginative reconstruction of absent or concealed essence, that is, anticipatory grief and retrospective creation. In both cases, as in the Recherche as a whole, Japanese art delicately depicts natural beauty that is completed by the mind in revery, rst on the artwork then on itself. Prousts several uses of japoniste imagery reected on glass recapitulate in graphic terms the mental process, the inward turning from Japanese art which is always positioned between nature and imagination. Many elements fuel Marcels apprenticeship, and japonisme is only a minor vein running through the whole. The care and consistency with which Proust deploys it, however, signal its importance to the texts primary artistic aims and methods. To miss Prousts japonisme can lead to skewed readings, particularly of such focal components as the madeleine, the Vivonne, the

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wartime prologue. In her ne analysis of oral elements in the teacake, for instance, Julia Kristeva notes the Japanese metonymy but like most readers overlooks its artistic import, and instead infers a geographical function aimed at establishing a maximum distance between the birthplace and a foreign country (Kristeva 489). Several such puzzling references fall into place once Japan is recognized as the provenance of a new aestheticnot only to the Impressionists but also to Marcel. Such Japanese allusions work together to build a counter-system to the impasse Marcel has reached in his heritage as a modern Western writer. The artist-gures, for instance, rise or fall in japoniste terms. Because Marcel must become the only great writer, the literary equivalent of Elstir in painting and Vinteuil in music, Marcel twice repeats that the painter spent years studying Japanese art (the second time occurs apropos of the Guermantes collection, when Marcel reiterates that Elstir avait t longtemps impressionn par lart japonais, II.125). But the novelist Bergotte is not allowed a japoniste period, being instead insistently associated with mere chinoiserie. Norpois refers to his chinoiseries de forme, and even the petit pan de mur jaune in the Vermeer painting, which exposes to him his own limitations as a writer, is likened to a specimen of Chinese art, revealing to Bergotte the pointlessness and aridity of all art, including his own. It is again Norpois who dismisses such symboliste writing (in terms once used by Proust) as hothouse products of Mallarms chapel.17 Bergotte and the previous generation are relegated to an arid Orientalism, quite notably not japoniste. Ultimately, it is the literary gures who matter most to Marcels success. Proust positions him to succeed where others fail, dismissing Bergottes Orientalism as superficial and mocking the horripilant japonisme of his most celebrated predecessors in this vein, Loti and the Goncourts. Unlike them, but like Elstir, Marcel enjoys a true japoniste apprenticeship. He learns the way of seeing present in Japanese arts, and integrates it into his own novelistic vision and historical reections. The global aesthetic summa that is the Recherche becomes, in turn, his legacy as a writer. Prousts contrastive use of Japanese arts to articulate Marcels aesthetic originality helps explain, I think, why some readers nd the Recherche Buddhistic. Paul Claudel, French ambassador to Japan (192127) and a literary japoniste himself, was the rst to note that Marcels posture toward nature recalls religious properties of the Japanese aesthetic. In 1912, in the course of explaining the concept of mono no aware in Japanese painting and poetry, Claudel wrote:

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[La nature] tremble tous moments sur la limite de lineffable! Il sagit de la surprendre linstant voulu, si fragile! .... Cest ce que certains mystiques japonais appellent le sentiment du Ah! en anglais le Ah! awareness. (Il y a aussi certains pages ce sujet dans loeuvre de Marcel Proust.)18 Marguerite Yourcenar called the Recherche cette oeuvre si bouddhiste, par la constation du passage [du temps], par lmiettement de toute personnalit extrieure, par la notion du nant et du dsir ... 19 Yourcenar recognized that such observations are useful only to a point, and that most Buddhists would dispute such basic Proustian concepts as la psychologie dans lespace or the ontic function of metaphor. Recently, however, the art historian Yann Le Pichon has suggested that Marcels rapt attention to the natural object (such as the hawthorns) might be the result of Zen teachings in la disponsibilit intrinsque du peintre pour sadonner lveil parfait, or in Proustian terms [au] moi essentiel.20 Obviously Proust is a major gure in the shift from mimetic to affective poetics in French narrative. But I doubt that he actually considered the Buddhist metaphysics underlying Japanese aesthetics, beyond perhaps general queries about the notion of an impersonal subject.21 At the least, however, it is certain that in A la Recherche du temps perdu Proust uses the formal properties of the Japanese aesthetic contrastively, to challenge outworn mimetic assumptions and to point the way for new ambitions in French literature.

NOTES
1. Philippe Burty coined the word in his article Japonisme (La Renaissance artistique et littraire [May 1872] 256) to designate a new eld of study in Japanese art and aesthetics (see Weisberg xi). Although popular usage today scarcely differentiates between terms, art historians make the useful distinction that japonisant designates someone who collects or studies Japanese arts without creatively reworking them, and japoniste denotes someone who applies Japanese principles and models in Western creative works. Thus the gallery-owner Durand-Ruel was a japonisant but Monet was a japoniste. Champeury coined the noun japoniaiserie in 1872 as a pejorative term for what he considered mindless popular enthusiasm for Japanese arts and curios, but the only surviving pejorative is japonaiserie; thus Toulouse-Lautrec did not lapse into mere japonaiserie. See Berger 210. 2. See Edmond de Goncourt, Journal for 9 April 1884; Berger 12. 3. The only extensive survey of such Japanese allusions by French writers is William Leonard Schwartzs The Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in French Literature: 18001925 (Paris: Champion, 1927) which is primarily a catalogue of

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similes and includes mention of Huysmans and the Goncourts Les Frres Zemganno. In 1981 Elwood Hartman amplied Schluartzs Japanese section in his article Japonisme and Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Comparative Literature Studies 18.2 [June 1981]: 14166). Earl Miner surveyed British writers usage in The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1958). More recently, Michel Butor sketched a few French writers ideas of Japan in Le Japon depuis la France (Paris: Hachette, 1995). After the present article was completed, Yann le Pichon published a short meditation LInuence du japonisme dans loeuvre de Proust (Revue des Deux Mondes [October 1996]: 12539), outlining a notion of Prousts inspiration by Zen; see note 19 below. 4. In 1997, while this article was in press, Luc Fraisse published his monograph Proust et le japonisme (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1997) showing in ne detail the japonisant milieu of Paris in the Belle Epoque (Fortuny gowns, Gall glass) as social background to the novel; Fraisse does not pursue Prousts use of the Japanese aesthetic as a whole, primarily because of what he considers Prousts habitual mixture of OrientsJapanese, Persian, Chineseand consequent absence of an emploi exclusif du motif japonais (37). 5. For instance, it was at Hlne Bibescos salon that he met Pierre Loti (whom young Proust had proclaimed his favorite novelistalong with Anatole France, another japonisantand who was the author of the wildly popular Madame Chrystanthme) and that he regularly talked with the japoniste painters Bonnard and Vuillard (Painter I.54, 57, 195). So reverent was his admiration for the great japoniste Whistler, one of the originals for Elstir, that Proust surreptitiously kept a pair of gloves the painter had left behind after their meeting at Mry Laurents villa. She and her famed lovers, Degas then Mallarm, had become converted, says Painter, to Japanese art, and Proust was not the only one who went to the villa to meet the leading practitioners of japonisme (Painter I.218, Tadi 308). 6. For example, during the period when Proust was a member of the rdaction of Le Mensuel (November 1890 to September 1891) the review published, among other japonisant pieces, an article in July of 1891 by Prousts friend Raymond Koechlin about Edmond de Goncourts new book Outamaro (Tadi 144 n.4). It was Flix Fnon, long-time editor of La Revue Blanche, who coined the phrase Bonnard japonard, and who directed many of the japonisant interests of the review; see Joan Ungersma Halperin, Flix Fnon, Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Sicle Paris, New Haven: Yale UP, 1988: 2324. 7. Robert de Montesquiou, for example, had been a noted collector of Japanese art since rst encountering it at the Exposition of 1878, schooling his taste with the advice of Heredia, the Goncourts, and Sarah Bernhardt, as he recounts in his memoirs Les Pas effacs. Montesquiou created a notoriously effete oriental sanctum in his apartments on the Quai dOrsay, possessed a wealth of ne Japanese artworks plus ve major books of Japanese art history by the 1920s, and employed the gardener Hata to build a Japanese garden at his later residence in the Rue Franklin, which Proust often visited, and then another at Versailles. (See Montesquiou 118, 123, 1814, 21624; Schwartz 923). Montesquiou is remembered less for such japonisant poems as Thrapeutique than for other writings and his role as literary model to Huysmans and Proust. 8. Samuel Bing was the leading importer of Japanese art from about 1874 to

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1914, as well as owner of one of the nest, and most often exhibited, private collections of classical and modern Japanese art in Paris; it was he who founded the inuential review Le Japon artistique (188891). Proust apparently bought Japanese artworks from Bings as gifts, including une garde de sabre pour [Robert de] Billy (Tadi 424). See Gabriel Weisberg. Art Nouveau Bing: Paris Style 1900, Catalogue for the travelling Smithsonian Exhibition, New York: Abrams, 1986. 9. Prousts review Les blouissements par la comtesse de Noailles was rst published in Le Figaro (15 June 1907), and reprinted in Nouveaux Mlanges in 1954; the text quoted here is from Proust, Essais et articles, ed. Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre, Paris: Gallimard, 1994, pp.22941:237. Proust notes that one poem so well renders sensation, fugace but prolonged in the text, that it seems to him une des plus tonnantes russites, le chef-doeuvre peut-tre, de limpressionnisme littraire (my emphasis, 239). 10. Without referring to the bonsai metaphor, Jean-Yves Tadi suggests that this review of Eblouissments contient une esthtique, based on metaphor used as impressionnisme littraire, quoting the review: cest la mtaphore qui recompose et nous rend le mensonge de notre premire impression, la comparaison qui substitue la constation de ce qui est, la rsurrection de ce que nous avons senti (la seule ralit intressante) (Tadi 5812). 11. At Giverny Proust would have seen the Japanese bridge over the waterlilies, not to mention the hundreds of Japanese prints that still hang in the painters house. There is no record of whether Proust ever carried out this intention; see Painter I.207, II.94; Tadi 598. Monet began the water-lily studies around the turn of the century, exhibited some of them periodically in Paris then many of them in Paris in 1909, and completed them in 1922. On Prousts relations to the painters, see the still useful study by Maurice Chernowitz, Proust and Painting (NY: International University Press, 1945), and Marine Blanches Poetique des tableaux chez Proust et chez Matisse (Birmingham, AL: Summa, 1996). 12. In this play from 1887, at a dinner party one character asks why the salad is called la salade japonaise, and receives the comic reply, Pour ce quelle ait un nom; tout est japonais, maintenant (Act I, Scene 2) 13. This mise en abme, of the Verdurins Japanese salad within a pastiche of a famous japoniste describing the Verdurins Japanese salad, is a common structure in Prousts passages on artworks. See Peter Collier, La mise en abyme chez Proust, in Philippe Delaveau, ed., Ecrire la peinture (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1991) 12540. 14. The Japanese motif of the bird ying from shadow into light or vice versa was used by several French painters and by such writers as the Goncourts in Manette Salomon and Paul Claudel in LOiseau noir dans le soleil levant. Other common motifs include the eddying waters, the cresting wave, the silhouetted blossoms, the bridge, the snow-dusted branch, the alighting bird, the slanting rain; on such motifs, see Wichmann 74153. 15. The narrator replicates this japoniste lesson in La Prisonnire, with love letters and a kimono. After Marcel watches Albertine sleeping, he stares at her kimono draped over a chair; the interior pocket contains her letters, and Marcel is alternately desperate to read them and fearful of discovering proof of her indelities, Mais (et peut-tre jai eu tort) jamais je nai touch au kimono .... ce kimono qui

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peut-tre met dit bien des choses (III.734). The contrasting Japanese associations, around the two women and two sets of letters, measure the distance from childish hopes to cynicism. 16. Jules and Edmond de Goncourt were prominent collectors of Japanese art and defenders (inventors, they once claimed) of japonisme, as described in their autobiographical La Maison dun artiste; following Juless death, Edmond de Goncourt published Outamaro, le peintre des maisons vertes (1891) and Hokousa (1896). See Hubert Juin, Prface to Edmond de Goncourt, Outamaro, Hokusa (Paris: Union Gnrale dEditions, 1986) 516. Although they were early pioneers in the japonisant movement along with Flix Braquemond and Philippe Burty, they disliked modern japoniste painting and were soon sidelined as interpreters of the Japanese aesthetic by Louis Gonse, Samuel Bing, Henri Focillon and others less committed to the Goncourts focus on the miniature and the exotic. See Berger, Wichmann; also Deborah Johnson, Reconsidering Japonisme: The Goncourts Contribution, Mosaic 24.2 (Spring 1991): 5971. 17. In Contre lobscurit, originally published in La Revue Blanche (15 July 1896), Proust inveighs against the willed obscurities of the Symbolists; rpt in Proust, Essais et articles 8691. 18. Paul Claudel, Oeuvres en Prose, eds. Jacques Petit and Charles Galprine, coll. Pliade (Paris: Gallimard, 1965): 524. 19. Letter of Marguerite Yourcenar to Jean Mouton (7 April 1968), Yourcenar Archive, Harvard University; qtd. in Elyane Dezon-Jones, De luniversalit des inuences: un crivain peut en cacher un autre, in Maria Jose Vazquez de Parga, ed., LUniversalit dans loeuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar. 2 vols. Tours: Socit Internationale des Etudes Yourcenariennes, 1994 and 1995; II [1995]. 2333: 32 20. Yann Le Pichons brief essay on LInuence du japonisme dans loeuvre de Proust (Revue des Deux Mondes [October 1996]: 12539), appearing after the NEMLA session on Proust and the completion of this article, cites some additional letters referring to Japanese art, some references in Jean Santeuil, mentions Odettes furnishings, but focuses on the japonisme of the Impressionists as Prousts models and on the Zen-like motions esthtiques of Marcel in nature. Le Pichon perhaps overstates the case for Zen in Proust, but clearly the Japanese concept of the artist as translator of affect into signs of the natural world merits consideration in studies of Prousts aesthetic ideas. As Le Pichon says, Prousts japonisme is a sujet quasi indit et pourtant vident (125). 21. For a discussion of Japanese affective-expressive poetics, versus Western mimetic traditions, see Earl Miner, Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990)

WORKS CITED

Berger, Klaus. Japonismus in der westlichen Malerei: 18601920. Munich: PrestelVerlag, 1980. Trans. David Britt. Japonisme in Western Painting From Whistler to Matisse. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.

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Butor, Michel. Le Japon depuis la France. Paris: Hatier, 1995. Cahier Marcel Proust 10: Pomes, ed. Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier. Paris: Gallimard/NRF, 1982. Kristeva, Julia. Proust and the Sense of Time. Trans. Stephen Bann. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Le Pichon, Yann. LInuence du japonisme dans loeuvre de Proust. Revue des Deux Mondes (October 1996): 12539. Martins Janeira, Armando. Japanese and Western Literature, A Comparative Study. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1970. Montesquiou, Robert de. Les Pas effacs. 3 vols. Paris: Emile-Paul, 1923. Painter, George D. Marcel Proust: A Biography. 2 vols. NY: Random House, 1959. Proust, Marcel. A la Recherche du temps perdu. 3 vols. Eds. Pierre Clarac and Andr Ferr. Paris: Pliade/Gallimard: 1954 Rousset, Jean. Forme et signification. Paris: Jose Corti, 1984. Schwartz, William Leonard. The Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in Modern French Literature: 18001925. Paris: Champion, 1927. Sussman, Henry. The Hegelian Aftermath: Readings in Hegel, Kierkegaard, Proust, and James. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. Tadi, Jean-Yves. Marcel Proust. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Weisberg, Gabriel et al. Japonisme: Japanese Inuence on French Art 18451910. Catalogue for the Exhibition, Cleveland, 1975. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1975. Rpt 1988. Wichmann, Siegfried. Japonisme. Trans. Olivier Schan. Paris: Chne: 1982.

S U S A N S T E WA RT

Prousts Turn from Nostalgia

ou can return to a book, but you cannot return to yourself. I had remembered Prousts In Search of Lost Time as a memoir driven by a nostalgic yearning for the past. Yet when I went back to it after a period of twenty years, Prousts research, in fact, turned out not to be about nostalgia at all. Rather, he frames a critique of such willful yearning and poses a certain form of aesthetic practice as counter to it. Prousts many-volumed book bears an analogue to memory, but not to experience; it opens on a world already shaped by desire, but in its manifold of sensual particulars it reveals far more than the reader would expect it to reveal, and in its layers of coincidence it creates an art that is counter to the temporality of everyday life. Through such detail and coincidence, Proust draws us out of our social conventions for structuring time. Those structures themselves are created in light of the inimitable fact of death and the inevitable transformation of the world around us from a world inhabited and engaged by the living to a world haunted and inected by the dead. Our relations to the dead, unlike our relations to the articulated systems of time consciousness, take place under the opposed, yet interconnected, conditions perhaps most clearly and rigorously explored in Prousts research: the forms of voluntary and involuntary memory. Proust makes evident the futility of volitional memory as expressed in nostalgia. He shows how nostalgias willfulness is

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compensatory to our submission to time and, simultaneously, how nostalgia, as a dream of the recreation of what is lost in the ongoing ow of experience, is doomed to an inauthentic form. Proust himself claims, in Within a Budding Grove, that the names designating things in the world correspond only to the intellect and thus remain alien to our true impressions. But it may be useful to trace the etymology of nostalgia as it gives evidence to an evolution out of the original Greek words nostos, or return home, and algia, a painful conditionan evolution from physical to emotional symptoms, rather than a continuing state. In a famous passage in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton discussed nostalgia as a childish humour to hone after home, arguing against those base Icelanders and Norwegians who prefer their own ragged islands to Italy and Greece, the gardens of the world. In the late seventeenth century, nostalgia was diagnosed by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer as an extreme homesickness suffered by his fellow countrymen as they fought as mercenaries far from their native mountains. The symptoms Hofer described were lability of emotion, ready weeping, wasting away, despondency, and, in some cases, suicide. In the early modern period the notion continues that nostalgia involves not merely a desire for return in time, but also a condition consequent to a severing from a place of origin. Thus nostalgia is linked to conditions of exilewhether exile from place or from childhood itself. Such varieties of nostalgia based upon a longing for return might be addressed by a psychoanalytic model of the replete relation the infant bears to the mothers body. Yet when we juxtapose these descriptions of an early modern illness to many twentieth-century versions of nostalgia, we nd a transformation from a singular, yet potentially universal, emotion, based on an individuals attachment to a site of origin and plentitude, to a somewhat ironic link between nostalgia and noveltythe capacity of contemporary culture to recycle history as commodity. This may not indicate a change in emotionperhaps the authentic emotion remains in all of usbut now we have an attempt to market or package an emotion. Before we accept nostalgia under such packaged terms, terms that could only illumine the varieties of voluntary memory, we might give further attention to the dialectic between conscious and unconscious forms of return. From Freud, we receive a model of return based upon the emergence of what has been repressed. From the work of various social theoristsfor example, Vladimir Janklvitchs LIrrversible et la nostalgie and Fred Daviss Yearning for Yesterdaywe receive a model of return prompted by alienation from modernity and tending toward collective and legitimating forms of

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identication such as nationalism. And in Nietzsche, as in Proust, return is linked to the happiness consequent to the pursuit of truth, a truth only inferable in the recursive conditions of the retrospective view. In each of these models, we nd a search for nite conditions of contingency. Such models imply a theological aspect, for they seek to mediate the separations between nite objects, nite subjects, and the innite power of whatever is outside of human consciousness. Nevertheless, when theorists of nostalgia think of this emotion in relation to history, and to the chronological formation of history, they may be beginning without giving adequate consideration to our conventions of time. The philosophy of time in the West has turned continually to the problem of times status as a derived order of being. Plato, for example, argued in the Timaeus that time was not an aspect of eternity or a dimension of space and matter, but rather a product of our sensations working in combination with our beliefs, for time is something that becomes and changes rather than something belonging to the unchanging realm of reality. Aristotle dissented from Platos view, arguing that time was not so much created out of a timeless eternity as that eternity is an endless series of moments and time is a measure applied to motion. In Aristotle, the continuity of our awareness of our own being is necessary for our recognition of moments constituting the time-continuum. Whether following Plato, and later Plotinus, and arguing for time as a rational ordering of eternity, or following Aristotle and arguing for time as a measure of motion, each model of time consciousness implicates a corresponding model of subjectivity. Augustine presents a radical turn when he stops seeing time as a mark of change in nature and begins to see time as a mode of human perception. He departs from temporal description in terms of xed before-and-after sequences to account for the moving experiential perspective of past, present, and future. In Augustines argument, works of art are models of temporal order. By means of his famous discussion of a hymn by St. Ambrose, Augustine links a sound that starts, continues, and stops resonating to the past; the not yet under which we speak of the stopping of resonance exemplies the future spoken of as the past and the present under which we are able to say that the sound is resonating. This present is already disjunctive to the presence of resonance, and thus we speak of the very passing of the present already in the past tense. In reciting Ambroses hymn, Augustines expectations regarding the anticipated closure of the work turn continually toward what remains of it, enacting the process by which the present relegates the future to the past. In Augustines model the individual soul must provide the continuity of such change. He argues

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that it is not really accurate to speak of separate perceptual moments because we only become aware of them through the continuity of past, present, and futurethe continuity of the desiring self. For Augustine, memory reminds humans of their opacity, of their difficulty in understanding and reecting upon themselves as minds and as thinking subjects. Descartes was to borrow Augustines notion of the thinking subject, but he rejected memory proper and the tradition of the arts of memory since he considered a mathematical method to be a better alternative. In Descartes, the concept of order must supersede the less systematic and experiential type of knowledge achieved through memory. Descartess identication of the self-identity of human reason with sunlight is parallel to his rejection of temporality in favor of instant certitude. In Cartesianism, resemblance and difference are the grounds for authority and error. Proust, we will see, conducts his research as a kind of correction of this Cartesian model. In Prousts search for lost time, forms of order and the instant certitude of resemblance and difference are the very sources of error; in scene after scene, Proust shows us that rst impressions are the weakest, least reliable impressions. Only knowledge as a recursive aggregation leads to truth. Contemporary philosophers of time have continued to struggle with the relation between time consciousness and subjectivity. Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of perception argues in Kants shadow that the experience of time presupposes a view of time. But Merleau-Ponty also suggests that the subject has the capacity to introduce nonbeing into time experience: subjects have awareness of the past no longer lived and of a future not yet lived. By introducing nonbeing into the plenitude of being, subjects adumbrate perspectives and bring to the present that which is not there. Like Augustine, Merleau-Ponty opens up our sense of our relation to objects of nature and made thingsobjects that we animate in accordance with our memories and expectations of time consciousness. All theories of time confront two inevitabilities: rst, the inevitability of sequentiality and the impossibility of repetition and, second, the inevitability of death and forgetting as symptoms not just of loss of the past, but of the decay of the self. Indeed, social conventions structuring time consciousness are the secular equivalents of Platonic eternity: by submitting ourselves to the constraints of the social order of time, we enter into a grid of temporal order that continues regardless of the interruptions posed by death. Such a grid, with its increasing distance from the uneven uctuations of natural bases of temporal change, truly evades human intention and consequence. In the end the perpetuity of the mechanical clock becomes a second, more perfect nature, yet, in the absence of differentiating marks or

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periods, the hum of its repetitions signies nothing at all. In his essay on Time, an unnished and posthumously published work, Norbert Elias writes that the notion that time takes on the character of a universal dimension is nothing other than a symbolic expression of the experience that everything which exists is part of an incessant sequence of events. Time is an expression of the fact that people try to dene positions, the duration of intervals, the speed of changes and such like in this ow for the purpose of orientation. The sun, moon, stars, and irregular movements of nature as sources of measure are replaced by a mesh of human inventions which then in turn appear as mysterious components of their own nature. This drift toward the eternalization of time, the imagination of a permanent form for time, Elias writes, is no doubt necessary in light of our fear of transience and death. Eliass ideas are useful for considering the functions of voluntary memory. In discussing the conformity of the subject to social conventions of time, he further links our voluntary compliance with time control to our voluntary compliance with violence control; as social beings, we are willing to surrender our subjective experience of time and our capacity for physical extension. Voluntary memory creates generations, reinforces bonds, produces retrospective conformity, and molds social forms of ego ideals. Voluntary memory here is the foundation of social forms of nostalgia as well. As willed emotions, social nostalgias subjugate the senses and emotions to certain techniques of memory that are readily adapted into conventions of aesthetic forms. Although we may think of nostalgia as an emotion structured by prior, historical circumstances, we nd, in fact, that the forms of nostalgia are quite codied. Further, the conventions of nostalgia often transcend the historical specicity that is nostalgias claim to particularity. Prominent among these conventions is the creation of a bounded context. This binding of circumstance and environment is readily yoked to ideologies of patriotism and nationalism that are the social forms of homesickness. The patriots claim regarding an unambiguous relation to a point of origin is a claim regarding the social authenticity of the self. Experience, in fact, is denigrated in such an ideology, for it is the steady identication of self and place that creates the authenticity of the patriots being. Colonialism rather than travel, village typicality rather than cosmopolitan uxthese nostalgic forms posit a mastery over context that nds its means in the politics of fascism and imperialism. Here nostalgia takes on its function of contributing to the distinctness of generations and social groups; in its demotion of individual experience, it produces retrospective conformity to a certain form of ego ideal.

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Nostalgic forms are also bound to a slowed temporality, whether the slow-motion effects of video and cinema or the slowing of tempo long associated with sentiment in music. We might consider the various slowed reunions in advertisements on television or, on a slightly more highbrow note, the deliberating funereal effects of Ravels Pavanne for a Dead Princess, played to the point of stupefaction in the autumn of 1997. Slowing down the view is a cue for affect. And in video and cinema, slow motion depends upon the distancing technique of a switch to the purely pictorial. Slow-motion speech, of course, is reciprocally comic! Nostalgias bounded slowness characterizes the backward view of a consumer society condemned to faster and faster demands for judgment and action. The speeding-up of experience in truth makes a parody of the very notions of judgment and action. Thus to speak of the willed aspect of nostalgia is to realize that nostalgia itself may stand in the background of contemporary life as a vestigial sphere of agency. Further nostalgic effects include the metonymic substitution of part for whole, as in the workings of souvenirs and fetishistic objects linked to prior contexts; the xing of types within bounded contexts or landscapes, as in genre painting; the expression of mastery of nature and skill, as in miniaturization; an emphasis upon the repression of trauma, as in the positing of a moment of integrity before such traumathink of all the nostalgia accruing around periods known as prewar; a presentation of idealized bodies as bodies ripe for reproduction; an emphasis upon appearances that is consequent to the shallowness of any world ensuing in the absence of temporal depth. The codication of nostalgic forms paradoxically helps to undermine the authenticity of nostalgic feeling: once nostalgia can be worked up, it transcends particular contexts and is unable to connect to what is specic in lived experiences. Proust reminds us, continually and quite literally, of this inevitable collapse of the stage of voluntary memory. In his work, willed memory is linked to the artificiality of simulation. The Verdurins demonstrate the register of simulation throughout the novel: their conformity to social models of time requires a constant modication of truth to convention and even a modication of truth to the knowing lie. Madame Verdurin takes on the task of continually reifying the boundary of her social world and manipulating the fates of others in the interest of articulating that limit. She is described as an actor in what is quite literally a dumb show: She would descend with the suddenness of the insects called ephemerids upon Princess Sherbatoff; were the latter within

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reach, the Mistress would cling to her shoulder, dig her nails into it, and hide her face against it for a few moments like a child playing hide and seek. Concealed by this protecting screen, she was understood to be laughing until she cried, but could as well have been thinking of nothing at all as the people who, while saying a longish prayer, take the wise precaution of burying their faces in their hands. Mme. Verdurin imitated them when she listened to Beethoven quartets, in order at the same time to show that she regarded them as a prayer and not to let it be seen that she was asleep. The great social success of Mme. Verdurin, who ascends in the end to the rank of the Guermantes, stems from her capacity to manipulate the bounds of context and her mastery of the social system of signs. As Gilles Deleuze noted in his Proust and Signs, the simulation of laughter was her particular speciality. The narrator, a gure from whom all things are hidden, intuits this register of simulation, and is at the same time tormented, even made paranoid, by sexual jealousy. This jealousy is bound to an inevitable illegibility of language and gesture, an illegibility built into the very arbitrariness of the relation between sign and meaning. Descartes was forced to admit in the Meditations that only memory can separate the states of waking and sleeping. In distinguishing between states of waking and sleeping, memory provides the continuity of the thinking subject. Prousts critique of voluntary memory further erodes the certainty of immediate apprehension, collapsing the Cartesian model by showing the false bottoms of resemblance and the distorting lenses of what Proust calls habit. Consider, for example, two famous scenes in the novel of the Cartesian sorting between waking and sleeping: the initial waking at the beginning of Swanns Way and the waking to the grandmothers death. In the works well-known opening, the narrator describes the false start of waking in the night: [M]y eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself: Im falling asleep. And half an hour later the thought that it was time to look for sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; 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 that immediate subject of my book.

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As he nds, in waking, that the subject of his book separates itself from him, and his sight is restored to a state of darkness, he thinks of the error of the sleeper who mistakes a gas lamp at midnight for the dawn. The force that keeps him awake is the desire to be united with the mother; the approach of sleep, like the approach of death, marks the end of desire. In this scene the narrator awakens to the mothers absence, an awakening to which the proper response is a return to sleep. The second awakening occurs some time later, during the grandmothers nal agony. The narrator is here in fact awakened by the appearance of his mother. When she asks his forgiveness for disturbing his sleep, he answers that he was not asleep. He explains, The great modication which the act of awakening effects in us is not so much that of ushering us into the clear life of consciousness, as that of making us lose all memory of the slightly more diffused light in which our mind had been resting, as in the opaline depths of the sea. The tide of thought ... kept us in a state of motion perfectly sufficient to enable us to refer to it by the name of wakefulness. But then our actual awakening produces an interruption of memory. At the moment of her death, the grandmother opens her eyes. And then the narrator nds that from that day forward his mother sleep-walks through life, carrying the books and accoutrements of her mother as if the grandmothers spirit literally went on to inhabit the body of her daughter. In these scenes, Proust explores the abeyance between life and death characterizing the state of waking; until the dawning of memory, there is no continuity in consciousnessthe very continuity that enables one truly to recognize experience. The everyday mind, conscious only within the patterns of habit, is hardly distinguishable here from the sleeping mind. Marcels mother literally incorporates her grief, subsuming her experience to the carrying forward of her own mothers presence through the totems of her purse and, in a doubling of communication between dead and living generations, her volumes of Mme. de Svigns letters to her own daughter. Marcel comments: death is not in vain ... the dead continue to act upon us. They act upon us even more than the living because, true reality being discoverable only by the mind, being the object of a mental process, we acquire a true knowledge only of things that we are obliged to recreate by thought, things that are hidden from us in everyday life ....in this cult of grief for our dead, we pay an idolatrous worship to the things that they loved.

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Marcel himself becomes aware of the grandmothers death only later as he reaches down to unbutton his boots on the occasion of his second visit to the Grand Hotel at Balbec. Within the frame of the room, and the silence of the party-wall where previously he and his grandmother had communicated by means of a private language of knocks, he recreates the reality of her life her sacrices on his behalf and the nature of her personality. Within the retrospective consciousness made possible by her absence and his grief, she comes forward into view. And only retrospectively do we as readers come to see that Marcels initial waking out of fear of the absence of his mother was a kind of prolepsis of the trauma of the grandmothers death. During Marcels childhood it is the grandmother who functions as the mother, and after the grandmothers death it is the mothers turn to take on reciprocally the function of the grandmother/mother gure. Awaking to the scene of the grandmothers death, Marcel cannot grasp its reality; it is in the involuntary compulsion of his own repetition of the fact of death and the involuntary compulsion of his mothers representation of the grandmother, the carrying forward of her belongings like objects severed from a tomb, that her death permeates his consciousness. The novel continually links the domain of habit to the unthinking, the forgetting, by which death is put aside in the midst of everyday activity. In returning to the alienated condition under which the subject of the book is no longer the self, the reward is this false security of mindlessness regarding death. During the grandmothers deathbed agony, the Duke of Guermantes arrives and with him a social whirl oblivious to what is happening in the sickchamber. In the famous scene of the red shoes, the Duchess of Guermantes is unable and unwilling to absorb the fact of Swanns imminent death, even though it is Swann himself who is informing her of its certainty. Madame Verdurin, who is most expert at ignoring the real conditions of others lives as well as their deaths, is destined to become the paragon of the Guermantes in this sense. In The Fugitive, the narrator specically states that the wordly life [robs] one of the power to resuscitate the dead. In Proust, whatever is indeterminate in thought is overwhelmed by temporal contingency: truth appears, and grants us happiness, in moments of insight linked to the retrospective consideration of sensual experience, the making strange of what previously had been a matter of assumption and ready certainty. As Gilles Deleuze has noted, Proust presents a sustained critique of philosophical positions that remain blind to their own contingent relation to external forces. This is not simply a matter of returning philosophical certainty to the historical conditions of its appearance, for such a return would be a further enactment of the false condence of voluntary

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memory and habitual modes of explanation. For Proust, causality is never a sufficient or adequate explanation. We have only to think of the recurring theme of false etymologies for place names and ideas in the novel. This is not simply a matter of the pronouncements of Brichot, the Sorbonne Professor who is a purveyor of a kind of know-nothing knowledge and yet who is, in the end, endowed with dignity by the journals of the Goncourt brothers. The theme of unstable origins is at the heart of the split between name and blood in the social sphere of the aristocracy and in the constantly mistaken revisions of history performed by the war-time and postwar salons of the Verdurins and Odette de Forcheville. The plot as a whole works out an elaborate etymological pun wherein the fantastic world of Genevive de Brabant and Gilbert the Bad revealed in the lantern slide comes to life as the Duchess of Guermantes is seen after mass in the chapel of Gilbert the Bad at Combray. Then, as Gilberte Swann is transposed to Mademoiselle de Forcheville, then Madame de Saint-Loup, and nally the Duchess of Guermantes, the two initial gures of legendary time are merged in one historical character. Female sexuality, the tormented uncertainty of jealousy, and the ambiguity of paternity further this theme of misplaced or catechrestic cause. The uncertain paternity of Gilberte, hinted at by the narrators discussion of her lial resemblance in physical terms to her mother and moral terms to her father, is contrasted to the nite nominalism of Charluss adoption of Jupiens niece. The madrepore, whose own etymology speaks to the birth opening of the mother and the corals fabulous branching growth, can be seen in retrospect as the symbol of a secret and uid lineage of female sexuality: Odettes resemblance to Rachel, Rachels to Albertine, Albertines to Gilberte as earlier Gilberte herself had been the pattern for Albertine, and, nally, the grandmother to the mother. The narrators frantic jealousy wherein only homosexual, or like to like fraternal and paternal, relations eventually yield up certain knowledge and closure, is perhaps not simply bound to the structures of modernist patriarchy so much as a symptom of the signal absence of the father throughout the text. The narrators anguished relation to Albertines unintelligibility is rooted in his equally anguished vigil as he awaits his mothers kiss goodnight, uncertain as to whether she will come or not. Here we nd a deep structural relation between jealousy and nostalgia: both involve the projection of possible scenes and such projections are motivated by desire. Yet these scenes are also prohibited from actualization and thus suffer a dening lack of authenticity. Paranoia and anxiety inevitably accompany this collapse of sources and ends. Causal explanation is only one of a variety of mental processes taken up in Prousts experiential and layered process of critique. If habit is the enemy

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of knowledge and friendship, and if voluntary memory is the willed distortion of truth, Proust offers the mindfulness of artistic making, the reframing of experience through mental activity, as the alternative. Generalization and convention prohibit originality and judgment, and the axiomatic tradition in French philosophy is itself shown to be a kind of binding of perspective. It is here that Proust contrasts the forms of reied boundary-making, of which nostalgia is only one mode of thought, to the forms of art. As nostalgia engages in historical thinking it is conditioned by habit and typication; in contrast, art produces new knowledge by means of form. Hence the recurrence of haze and outline as a dimension of nostalgic forms represents an attempt to place a boundary upon ambiguity. Nostalgia works a xed and unidirectional gure/ground shift in which the context of the past, those elements of scene taken for granted when the past is a present sphere of action, becomes the gure of the past, and action is thereby circumscribed by mere scene setting. When the nostalgic viewer enters into the framestepping into the image as Keats does in Ode on a Grecian Urn, as the jealous lover falls into his or her imagination, and as the timetravelers of popular cinema arrive in other worldsthe pasts completeness is a foil to intervention. The anachronistic visitor is passively situated as a viewer or, perhaps more accurately, as a dreamer overcome by a plot he has himself created but within which he cannot make an intervening gesture. For Proust, the aesthetic is tied to a negative and self-revising process of perspectivalism that is the opposite of such a nostalgic process. Aesthetic activity requires the constant modication of frame and a transposition of reality from one scene to another. Fixed perspective results in blocked perspective, as we nd in the scene of the watch-tower wherein the narrator observes the tryst between Charlus and Jupien. Issues of xed perspective come in for particular criticism in the recurrence of the theme of antisemitism in the text, in the rigid nondiscursive positions assumed by the Dreyfusards and antiDreyfusards, and in the account of the static social world during the Great War. Fixed dates appear in the text for the rst time during the discussion of the war and we see here, as Elias proposed, the cohesion of time control and the organization of violence. Proust describes the war itself as the monstrous reality under which there is nothing else visible. It can be said that there are no minor characters in the novel, for Prousts interest continually and vividly turns to the location of minor action, the world of servants, as a site wherein one can observe the unfolding of monumental consequences. In his essay on The Image of Proust, Walter Benjamin cited

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a passage from the writings of Princess Clermont-Tonnerre on this predilection: And nally we cannot suppress the fact that Proust became enraptured with the study of domestic servantswhether it be that an element which he encountered nowhere else intrigued his investigative faculties or that he envied servants their greater opportunities for observing the intimate details of things that aroused his interest. Of course, as in Nietzsches thought, the most evident device for retrospective readjustment is irony. Proust reminds us of the complete absence of irony in nostalgic forms and correlatively of the involuntary dimension of true irony. But there is also a Kantian aspect to Prousts aesthetics, for beauty emerges in situations where categories of thought are not sufficient to account for the image and where the relations between gure and ground are suspended. The paintings of Elstir, wherein the sea is a city and the city is a sea; the image of the sea in the bookcases at Balbec; the constant association of Albertine with the seas transient, metamorphozing form; the turn to organic images, the hawthorns, apple trees, and owersall as eeting in their expression as human faces and vice versa: these are a few of the examples of an aesthetic presentation that itself never brings back images and symbols in any xed system of metonymy or order. Rather than pursuing forms of the nostalgic in his research into lost time, Proust suggests the irony underlying the nostalgic impulse. Nostalgias futility makes possible the practice of aesthetics and rescues the narrators practice from dilettantismhere seen as an incomplete commitment to whatever is disorienting, and therefore possibly signicant, in the experience of temporality. Such an incomplete commitment would be dominated by a teleology of habit: when we nd Saint-Loup assuming the gestures of Charlus, and the narrator following in the footsteps of Swann, we watch for the gesture of thought, the decision to act, that will deliver the subject from the relentless force of plot and typication. In his famous metaphor of the frieze of girls, Proust explores the relations between the temporal experience of subjectivity and a practice of art embedded in its own temporality. The model here is a continual shift in gure/ground relations and specically the aesthetic history of the frieze. Albertine appears for the rst time within this frieze, but, signicantly, she appears without relief or individuality. As Beckett describes her in his 1931 study of Proust, she is one aspect of a hedge of Pennsylvanian roses against the breaking line of the waves. The cortege appears in motion, like gures animated in process or, more precisely, like gures who have emerged from their proper backgroundthe sarcophagus that would seal them within a

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frame. When Albertine is later separated and made a captive, the narrators jealousy enacts a futile project of reication and possession. Albertines physical presence nevertheless retains the amorphous movement of the sea that is her proper context. The narrators dream of xed form and possession is ironically fullled in her ensuing death and the atrophy of his interest. Here we nd Proust taking up the theme of death as a modeler or carver. At the time of her death, the grandmothers face is almost nished and, at the same time, On that funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the Middle Ages, had laid her down in the form of a young girl. In his classic essay on The Life of Forms in Art, written in the 1930s, Henri Focillon similarly described sculptural carving as starting from the surface and seeking for the form within the block. The touches of the sculptor become progressively closer and joined in an intimate interlocking of relationships. Yet in Proust, as a face comes into full relief, it is also on the threshold of oblivion and subject to the distortions of memory. The narrator explains that it is only after one has recognized, not without some tentative stumblings, the optical errors of ones rst impression that one can arrive at an exact knowledge of another person, supposing such knowledge to be ever possible. But it is not; for while our original impression of him undergoes correction, the person himself, not being an inanimate object, changes for his part too: we think that we have caught him, he shifts, and, when we imagine that at last we are seeing him clearly, it is only the old impressions which we had already formed of him that we have succeeded in clarifying, when they no longer represent him. He goes on to say that this continual task of catching-up with reality, linked to the proleptic expectation brought to all exchanges with others, is what protects us from the dreariness of an overly presumptuous habit. Years later, when the narrator sees a photograph of the girls, their faces blurred by similarities and by the viewers temporal distance, they are distinguishable only by their costumes. The costumes themselves are metonymic to social categories and even elements of design that transcend the temporality of any given subject. Albertine wears a Fortuny cape that can be found in one of Carpaccios Venetian genre scenes; an Assyrian relief is the prototype of the frock coat. All that emerges in high relief, in particular detail, is bound to be abraded back into surface and barely intelligible fragments of signs. Prousts use of the concept of the frieze coincides in suggestive ways with the use of the concept in the turn-of-the-century aesthetic theories of Alois Riegl, especially his 1893 Stilfragen and 1901 Spatromische Kunstindustrie. As Michael Podro has explained in his useful review of Riegls work in The Critical Historians of Art, Riegl suggests that in antiquity, and

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particularly in the art of ancient Egypt, a concept of self-containedness predominates. Represented objects are unconnected with other objects in their respective contexts. Objects appear as continuous unbroken forms enclosed within a boundary, as in an ideal of the self as internally continuous and distinct from its surroundings. Such self-containedness had implications not merely for the relation of the object to context, but also for the relation of the representation to the spectator. Riegl argues that the spectator is invited to comprehend such art immediately through sensual perceptions and to rely as little as possible upon past experience and subjective projections. In addition to the separation of the object from its context and the separation of representation from the spectator, Riegl suggests that space is either denied or suppressed; he sees a maximum correspondence between the depicted object and the real surface of the relief or painting, and spatial effects of depth and projection are refused in favor of a sense of surface. Riegl goes on to claim that the classical relief begins to make a profound shift in this paradigm of self-containedness. In classical relief, relations between gures are admitted, modeling and the mobility of turning forms give a sense of the space in which they turn. There is a continuity between the space of the viewer and the space of the representation. This continuity comes into full ower in late antiquityhere relief requires limbs and folds of drapery to be carved so deeply that the unity of the gure is dissolved. Coherence is created by means of an optical plan that unites gures and their surroundings and which suggests a continuous optical space between real and represented worlds. Such a continuous space will develop into various perspectival forms known to Roman painting and will later be renewed in the Renaissance. In Riegls account, the history of art is characterized by a coming to the fore of an awareness of relationality. And this is precisely the ontogeny recapitulated by Proust in the phylogeny of the narrators consciousness. The frieze is the paradigm of the foreground/background shifts placed in constant mutability and of which the aggregation of the novel itself is the only accessible form. Here the capacity of the bookcase to reect the sea is the capacity of the novel to reect the mutability of the experience of time in ever-shifting and retrospectively selfadjusting views. The Arena Chapel frescoes of Giotto are a locus classicus for the novel; they mark the reawakening of the gestural in representation. Uniting the space of appearance with the space of apprehension, they mark the moment when human gures emerge from the world of objects to move and signify, much as the narrator hears his grandmothers voice for the rst time when it comes forward in the relief of a telephone call. These are figures suspended between the death of inert form and the life of

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comprehension. The frieze of girls moves forward into the indenite reication of the photograph. The spectacle of soldiers in formation erases their particular subjectivity and dooms them to be sacriced. But Giottos Paduan gures appear to be released from bonds of stone; it is the mental and form-giving activities of the artist here that rework the rules and conventions of representation itself. In The Fugitive Proust presents a summary of his ideas on memory and forgetting. Memory has no power of invention. It is spiritual and not dependent upon the world for its stimulation. It stems from our desire for the deadnot out of a need for love, but out of a need for the absent person, for the place to be lled. The counterforce of memory, forgetting, is so powerful an instrument of adaptation to reality because it gradually destroys in us the surviving pasta past that is in perpetual contradiction to it. Following the logic of this dialectic, we can see that the willed or voluntary forms of nostalgia that so relentlessly surround us are devices of forgetting in the costume of memory. The brilliant contribution of Prousts book is his view of the tragic, relentless course of social life once, by means of our own willed confusion, it takes on the power of a form of nature. He imagines works of art structured beyond our habitual, imitative capacities as encompassing a practice of opening the present to the nonbeing of thoughtsuch a practice would involve whatever thought can achieve given the contingencies of habit and the inevitability of death. In Prousts great work we nd a rejection of the plenitude of Bergsonian duration and of the positive implications of perspectivalism. Prousts practice is the accommodation of the involuntary and unintelligible in the pursuit of truth. In this activity of mind resides the sublimity of the art worka Kantianism wherein particularities are not anchored to habitual concepts but return, estranged from their functions. Happiness here is synonymous with aesthetic apprehensionan aesthetic apprehension that bears the contradictions of form-giving and form-eroding activities undertaken in time.

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Orpheus and the Machine: Proust as Theorist of Technological Change, and the Case of Joyce

egend has it that when Orpheus sang and played his lyre, not only fellow mortals but also trees and rocks, even wild beasts, were stirred by the sublime sounds he produced. After the premature death of his young wife Eurydice, the grieving hero descended to the netherworld in the hope of rescuing her. He sang so beautifully that Hell was moved; even the Furies were spellbound, shedding tears for the rst time. Orpheus was allowed to take Eurydice away with him on one condition, that both of them refrain from looking back until they had reached the land of the living. Walking in silence, they had almost reached the upper world when Orpheus wanted to ensure that his beloved was still behind him. He turned around; his gaze met hers. See, again the cruel Fates call me back, Eurydice cried, and sleep seals my swimming eyes. And now farewell! She vanished from sight, absorbed for the second time by the regions of the dead. For months on end, Orpheus roamed the world voicing his grief, but in vain. His fate was sealed when the women of Thrace tore his body to pieces and threw the limbs into a river. In Virgils rendering of the myth, Orpheus head oated down the current, his disembodied voice calling with departing breath on Eurydiceah, poor Eurydice! Whereupon the banks echoed: Eurydice, Eurydice.1 The Orpheus myth revolves around love and death, around the powers of the gods and the vanity of humans, but it also tells a story about the eye

From Forum for Modern Language Studies 37, no. 2 (April 2001). 2001 by Oxford University Press.

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and the ear: about the all-pervasive desire to look and the deadly power of the gaze, about the pleasures of listening and the animating power of the voice. In short, it is an allegory of the senses and, hence, of aesthetics.2 Throughout the history of aesthetic discourse, sight and hearing have been privileged over taste, smell, and touch. Sight and hearing are more readily disposed to abstraction, and this is partly why they have enjoyed such prominence in the history of aesthetics. According to Hegel, for example, sight and hearing are essentially theoretical senses. For this reason, they are also ideal senses. Taste, smell, and touch, by contrast, are practical senses. They involve consumption of the work of art in one way or other, and this must not be, for Hegel thinks of the work of art as an ideal site where spirit (Geist) and matter intersect. A privileged blend of pure sensuousness and pure thought, exteriority and interiority, art for Hegel is the sensuous objectivation of spirit. Consequently, only the eye and the ear are capable of respecting the integrity and freedom of the work of art. Of sight and hearing, however, hearing is the most ideal sense. It is the ear, and the ear only, that may establish the ideal correspondence between the inner subjectivity of the perceiver and the spiritual interiority of the object perceived. In this way, the perceiving subject receives and so in a sense corresponds to the object whose ideal, because spiritual, interior is mediated by the sounds it emits. Unlike the eye, then, the ear succeeds in apprehending both material objectivity and interiority, all at once. Such an idealist theory of aesthetic perception is circumscribed by a long philosophical traditionthe metaphysics of presence. Consequently, it is also marked by a certain historicity. Discussing Hegels hierarchy of the senses, Jacques Derrida suggests that Hegel could not imagine the machine, that is, a machine that functions by itself and that works, not in the service of meaning [sens], but rather in the service of exteriority and repetition.3 Derrida does not state it explicitly, but it is clear that after the advent of devices for reproducing sound, the sense of hearing can no longer be thought of as a priori ideal. Devices such as the telephone and the phonograph strip sound of what Hegel would call its soulful interiority, and the sensory experience of acoustic phenomena henceforth has to resort to an everreproducible exteriority. Of course, the same is true of sight: its assumed ideality is exploded in the wake of inventions such as photographic means of recording visual data. In short, from now on the potentially sublime operations of the eye and the ear know an internal cleavage. Few early twentieth-century writers have dramatised this aesthetic crisis as effectively as Marcel Proust. Describing the advent of modern technology, from the telephone and electricity to the aeroplane and the

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automobile, Remembrance of Things Past (19131927) offers numerous reections on how technology affects human experience, particularly sensory experience.4 The lm-maker Raul Ruizs adaptation of Proust, Time Regained (1999), is particularly sensitive to these aspects of Prousts tale. Ruiz even invents scenes not to be found in the novel: in one sequence, the young narrator operates a lm camera, as though the entire novel springs out of a cinematographic vision; in another, Vinteuils sonata is broadcast over a socalled thtrophone, a popular telephone service that served to transmit music performances to listeners in the privacy of their home. But Prousts novel more than dramatises technological change; it also delineates a psychology of such transformation, a psychology that may be grasped as a theory in its own right. I am thinking, in particular, of two episodes in The Guermantes Way (192021), the one revolving around a telephone conversation, the other reecting upon photography. Read together, these episodes offer a meditation on the historicity of habits of listening and seeing. Proust as theorist? Such a perspective has been elaborated before. Malcolm Bowie, in his brilliant study of the epistemology of jealousy in Remembrance of Things Past, maintains that Prousts novel is one of the most elaborate and circumstantial portrayals of the theorising mind that European culture possesses.5 And Siegfried Kracauer, in his widely inuential Theory of Film (1960), approaches Proust as theorist of photography, basing his ontology of the photographic image in an analysis of the episode where Prousts narrator reects upon how he beholds his grandmother with a photographic eye.6 But Proust as theorist of technological change? Surely nothing could be further removed from the great themes of the novel: the primacy of involuntary memory, the priority of subjective time, and the virtues of immediate sensory experience. Yet, such a perspective alerts us to the richness and intelligence that inform Prousts book, demonstrating that vast portions of it hardly t into that famous cup of tea. The second advantageand this is what I shall dwell on in this essayis that the theory embedded in Prousts episodes on telephony and photography yields a convenient point of departure for distinguishing the complex ways in which technologies of perception help recongure habitual ways of listening and seeing in the modernist period at large and, ultimately, how such change makes available new sensory domains that open themselves to artistic exploration, particularly in the realm of the novel. James Joyces Ulysses is a case in point. Indeed, to juxtapose Proust and Joyce, as I propose to do in this essay, is to historicise some of the most characteristic formal aspects of Joyces 1922 epic.

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Prousts telephone episode relates the narrators very first telephone conversation with his adored grandmother.7 Transported across vast distances, from Paris to Doncires, her voice hits his ear as though for the rst timea tiny sound, an abstract sound.8 What amazes the narrator is that although the two of them are spatially separated, their conversation is simultaneous; indeed, despite the spatial distance, they share one and the same temporality. Put differently, the aural impression of the grandmothers voice fails to coincide spatially with the visual impression of her bodily presence. For the narrator, this insight is deeply unsettling, and it immediately acquires symbolic proportions. But it also awakens the theorising mind whose speculative intelligence animates long stretches of Remembrance of Things Past. Turning around the dissociation of the eye and the ear, of what can be seen and heard, the uncanny experience triggers a Proustian psychology of telecommunication that stretches over half a dozen pages: It is she, it is her voice that is speaking, that is there. But how far away it is! [ ... ] A real presence, perhaps, that voice that seemed so nearin actual separation! But a premonition also of an eternal separation! Many were the times, as I listened thus without seeing her who spoke to me from so far away, when it seemed to me that the voice was crying to me from the depths out of which one does not rise again, and I felt the anxiety that was one day to wring my heart when a voice would thus return (alone and attached no longer to a body which I was never to see again), to murmur in my ear words I longed to kiss as they issued from lips for ever turned to dust. (REM 2: 135 / RTP 2: 432) In short, the narrator discovers his grandmothers voice. Detached and disembodied, it hits him in all its baffling abstraction. Meanwhile, he also realises that he used to identify what he now perceives as voice by matching it with her face and other visual features. It is a dialectic moment, for what henceforth appears as having been an organic system of signication has just been sundered; and at the same time, this horizon of signs stands before him, suddenly and visibly revealed, now that it has been lost: for always until then, every time that my grandmother had talked to me, I had been accustomed to follow what she said on the open score of her face, in which the eyes gured so largely; but her voice itself I was hearing this afternoon for the rst time (REM 2: 135 / RTP 2: 433).

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The narrator discovers not merely his grandmothers voice; now that he perceives her without the mask of her face, he also hears, for the rst time, the sorrows that had cracked [her voice] in the course of a lifetime. Dwelling inside her is a gure whom he has never yet apprehended, a gure inhabited by time. The narrator realises that his grandmother will die, and die soon, and the psychological impact of this insight is irreversible: Granny! I cried to her, Granny! and I longed to kiss her, but I had beside me only the voice, a phantom as impalpable as the one that would perhaps come back to visit me when my grandmother was dead. Speak to me! But then, suddenly, I ceased to hear the voice, and was left even more alone [ ... ]. It seemed to me as though it was already a beloved ghost that I had allowed to lose herself in the ghostly world, and, standing alone before the instrument, I went on vainly repeating: Granny! Granny! as Orpheus, left alone, repeats the name of his dead wife. (REM 2: 137 / RTP 2: 434) In this remarkable passage, Proust explicitly inscribes the telephone episode in the Orpheus myth, thereby reworking the Greek tale in a number of unexpected yet characteristic ways. Indeed, it is Proust who interprets the myth, adapting it to the cultural imaginary of the machine age, and not the other way around. But there is more to the episode. What the narrator intimates is that a whole new matrix of perceptual possibilities is sliding into place, one that transforms both the perception of voice (forms of audibility) and the perception of visual appearance (forms of visibility). In other words, the narrator perceives her bodily appearance as though for the rst time. The experience of the disembodied voice thus elicits a new understanding of that bodily entity from which the voice has been detached. This, indeed, is conrmed by the episode which follows a few pages later; I shall refer to this passage as the camera-eye episode. Once these two sections are read in tandem, as I believe they should be, and as I believe Proust meant them to be, an interesting pattern begins to emerge. The narrator is on his way to pay his grandmother a visit, compelled to do so by the telephone conversation and its uncanny revelation of a phantom grandmother, shaded by her age and future death: I had to free myself at the rst possible moment, in her arms, from the phantom, hitherto unsuspected and suddenly called into being by her voice, of a grandmother really separated from me, resigned, having [ ... ] a denite age (REM 2: 141/RTP 2: 438). Upon his arrival, the narrator enters the drawing room, where he

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nds her busy reading a book. Because she fails to notice his presence, she appears to him like a stranger. He, too, feels like a stranger, observing her appearance as he would that of any old woman. To make matters worse, she appears precisely like that ghostly image which he so desperately wanted to banish from his mind: Alas, it was this phantom that I saw when [ ... ] I found her there reading (REM 2: 141/RTP 2: 438). The grandmother has become pure image. Why does this stand out to his naked eye? Because she has withdrawn her gaze; indeed, it is her failure to look at her grandson that makes him discover, for the second time, her double. During the telephone conversation, her eyes and face failed to accompany her voice, thus anticipating that eternal separation called death. Here, too, she is shrouded in invisibility, for sitting in the sofa is not the grandmother but her doppelgnger. Disembodied and deterritorialised, she literally emerges as a spectral representation of herself. I stress this point because Prousts episode shares an affinity with Walter Benjamins notion of the aura. Benjamin approaches aura in two ways: in terms of spatio-temporal uniqueness, and in terms of the gaze; and these perspectives merge in his reections on photography in the 1930s.9 In mechanically reproducing the visual real, the photographic image strips the object of its unique presence in time and space; at the same time, photography makes the past look at us, butand this is Benjamins vital pointwe cannot look back. For this reason, photography is linked to death. Yet there is nothing Orphic in a photograph. In Benjamin, it is not the gaze itself that is deadly; it is the failure to meet the gaze of the other that is deadly. The history of the decline of aura is also the history of an increasing inability to meet the intentional and unique gaze of the other, be it an object, a human being, or history. It is therefore all the more interesting that Prousts narrator, in order to explain how the uncanny sight of the grandmother was possible, should draw on the language of photography. Not only does he create an analogy between himself and a professional photographer; he also proposes that during those brief moments before his grandmother realised his presence, his gaze was operating like a camera. The photographic metaphor then sparks a Proustian essay which sets out to explain why we perceive our loved ones the way we do, and why these perceptions are always and necessarily faulty. In the process, Proust the narrator is joined by Proust the psychologist. Their dialogue shuttles between experience and theory, between local observations and general laws: We never see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them,

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which, before allowing the images that their faces present to reach us, seizes them in its vortex and ings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it. How, since into the forehead and the cheeks of my grandmother I had been accustomed to read all the most delicate, the most permanent qualities of her mind, how, since every habitual glance is an act of necromancy, each face that we love a mirror of the past, how could I have failed to overlook what had become dulled and changed in her, seeing that in the most trivial spectacles of our daily life, our eyes, charged with thought, neglect, as would a classical tragedy, every image that does not contribute to the action of the play and retain only those that may help to make its purpose intelligible. (REM 2: 142 / RTP 2: 4389) In order to drive home his point concerning the alienating vision inherent in the camera, Proust adds yet another example. This scenario, too, rehearses the contrast between what we expect to see, although we may not have realised it, and what we actually perceive: But if, instead of our eyes, it should happen to be a purely physical object, a photographic plate [plaque photographique], that has watched the action, then what we see, in the courtyard of the Institute, for example, instead of the dignied emergence of an Academician who is trying to hail a cab, will be his tottering steps, his precautions to avoid falling on his back, the parabola of his fall, as though he were drunk or the ground covered in ice. So it is when some cruel trick of chance prevents our intelligent and pious tenderness from coming forward in time to hide from our eyes what they ought never to behold, when it is forestalled by our eyes, and they, arriving rst in the eld and having it to themselves, set to work mechanically, like lms [pellicules], and show us, in place of the beloved person who has long ago ceased to exist but whose death our tenderness has always hitherto kept concealed from us, the new person whom a hundred times daily it has clothed with a loving and mendacious likeness. (REM 2: 142 / RTP 2: 439) In an attempt to explain his grandmothers sudden alienation before his gaze, the narrator splits the category of visual perception into two: the human eye

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and the camera eye. Marked by affection and tenderness, human vision is necessarily refracted by preconceptions; and such a lens prevents the beholder from seeing the traces of time in the face of a loved one. In effect, the beholder sees not the person, merely his or her preconceived images of the person, thus continuously endowing the loved one with a likeness. Memory thus prevents truth from coming forward. The camera eye, on the other hand, is cold, mechanical and undistinguishing. It carries no thoughts and no memories, nor is it burdened by a history of assumptions. For this reason, the camera eye is a relentless conveyor of truth, and so it is that the narrator catches sight of a new person, hitherto unknown and unseen, who now ashes into the present: for the rst time and for a moment only, since she vanished very quickly, I saw, sitting on the sofa beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, vacant, letting her slightly crazed eyes wander over a book, a dejected old woman whom I did not know (REM 2: 143 / RTP 2: 440). The deadly power of the photographic gaze has struck the grandmother, that once so familiar and self-evident being who, like Eurydice on the verge of light, instantly vanishes from sight and disappears into the shadows. All that is left behind is a phantom image. To be sure, the narrators uncompromising image of his grandmother is bound to evaporate as soon as she lifts her eyes and recognises him. Yet for him those seconds have nevertheless hinted at her impending death. From now on the narrators perception of his grandmother is scarred by her difference from herself. Her persona is split into two, her uncanny double superimposed upon her seemingly ever-pre-given self. It should be clear by now just how intricate Prousts treatment of technologies of perception is in Remembrance of Things Past. What starts as a reection on telephony and the discovery of the disembodied voice ends as a meditation on photography and how it changes the perception of visual appearances. In other words, the narrators effort to grasp the experience of speaking to his grandmother on the telephone motivates a psychology of visual perception as well. Read in this way, Proust offers a germinal theory of how the emergence of technologies for transmitting sound such as the telephone paves the way for a new matrix of perception, in which not only sound but vision also turn into abstract phenomena. What is more, Proust suggests that the perceptual habits of the eye and the ear begin to function separately, each independent of the other, each in its own sensory register. An episode in the last volume of the novel, Time Regained (1927), testies to the consequences of such technological change. Set in the mid1920s, the scene unfolds at a social gathering where the narrator is reintroduced to an old friend. The latter expresses delight at meeting again

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after so many years. A caesura follows, because the narrator, perplexed and confused, fails to identify the person in front of him, although the voice is familiar enough: I was astonished. The familiar voice seemed to be emitted by a gramophone [phonographe] more perfect than any I had ever heard, for, though it was the voice of my friend, it issued from the mouth of a corpulent gentleman with greying hair whom I did not know, and I could only suppose that somehow articially, by a mechanical device [true de mcanique], the voice of my old comrade had been lodged in the frame of this stout elderly man who might have been anybody. (REM 3: 985 / RTP 4: 522) The gentlemans voice, rising out of the body as though of its own accord, is here rendered as a non-corporeal, hence foreign, element. It is the defamiliarising image of the gramophone that so drastically disconnects the voice from its bodily source. What is more, the mechanical metaphor strips the old acquaintance of human qualities such as consciousness and agency, thus reducing him to a non-human entity, indeed, to a thing. These images serve to underscore the narrators insistent efforts to match his perception of the voice with his perception of the friends exterior and, at the same time, they pregure his utter inability to do so: He stopped laughing; I should have liked to recognise my friend, but, like Ulysses in the Odyssey when he rushes forward to embrace his dead mother, like the spiritualist who tries in vain to elicit from a ghost an answer which will reveal its identity, like the visitor at an exhibition of electricity who cannot believe that the voice which the gramophone [phonographe] restores unaltered to life is not a voice spontaneously emitted by a human being, I was obliged to give up the attempt. (REM 3: 9856 / RTP 4: 523) Rich in images and allusions, this passage turns on the tangible discrepancy between the narrators aural impressions and his visual experience. What marks the representation of this encounter, and what sets it apart from the telephone scenario, is that the dissociation of the eye and the ear, of what can be seen and heard, has already happened. The differentiation of seeing and hearing both precedes and inscribes the narrators account of the event. Whereas the telephone episode contemplated the experience of an abstract

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voice and, by implication, how the aural impression of the voice fails to coincide spatially with the visual impression of the speaking body, this scene contains within itself the very experiential effects that the previous one reected upon. For if the telephone episode ultimately ponders the spacing of production and reception, of sonic origin and transmission, the present scenario both presupposes and enacts that logic of spacing. That is to say, the representation of the narrators failure to recognise his friend from long ago is organised precisely by that matrix of perceptionthe dissociation of the eye and the ear, the abstraction and reication of sensory experience that the narrator, in The Guermantes Way, took upon himself to grasp and explain. In effect, then, the representation of the old friends voice presumes the essential internalisation of the very experiential effects that the telephone and camera-eye episodes set out to chart. The phonographic metaphor conrms the implicit dialectics at work. In the telephone episode, the narrator reected upon the experience of the pure and abstract voice, intimating that it is enabled by a technology for communicating at a spatial distance. To this sound machine we may now add the phonograph, a mechanical device that makes it possible to strip sound not only of its spatial source but also of its temporal origin.10 From now on, the voice and other acoustic phenomena are, potentially, subject to endless reiteration and exteriorisation. In this way, then, Prousts telephone and camera-eye episodes articulate a theory of how a new division of perceptual labour comes into play, one that bears on both the habits of the ear and those of the eye. For although each of these two processes of abstraction may be traced back to its own relatively distinct technological lineage, their experiential effectsreification, autonomisation and differentiationare fundamentally interrelated. Mutually determining one another, the abstraction of the visual is inherent in the abstraction of the aural, and vice versa. Meanwhile, as Prousts own phonographic imagery demonstrates, the new optical and acoustic worlds propelled by such technological change open up realms of representation that readily lend themselves to artistic experiments. From photography to telephony, from phonography to cinematography: technological transformation helps articulate new perceptual domains, charging the modernist call to make the phenomenal world new. Prousts novel thus offers a way of understanding the mediated nature of so many characteristic formal innovations that are to be found in numerous modernist works. Joyces Ulysses offers a particularly rich example.

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II

In Ulysses, each sensory organ appears to operate independently and for its own sake. What is more, each sensory organ, particularly the eye, tends to perform according to its own autonomous rationality, as though detached from any general epistemic tasks. His gaze, Joyce writes, turned at once but slowly from J. J. OMolloys towards Stephens face and then bent at once to the ground, seeking (U 7.81920).11 The trivial activity of looking is here rewritten as an event in itself. To look is no longer a mere predicate to be attached to a subject; the predicate has been unhinged from the subject and operates independently, endowed with an agency all its own. By the same token, voices in Ulysses also tend to lead an utterly independent life, physiologically as well as syntactically: The inner door was opened violently and a scarlet beaked face, crested by a comb of feathery hair, thrust itself in. The bold blue eyes stared about them and the harsh voice asked:What is it? (U 7.3447). Or, to take another example: Miss voice of Kennedy answered, a second teacup poised, her gaze upon a page:No. He was not. Miss gaze of Kennedy, heard, not seen, read on (U 11.23740). The dissociation of the visual and the aural runs through Joyces narrative from beginning to end. Indeed, despite the stylistic variegation that characterises Ulysses, this feature persists throughout the eighteen episodes of the novel, coming to the fore especially in the first two episodes, Telemachus and Nestor. The opening of Telemachus dwells on how Stephen Dedalus and his two friends Buck Mulligan and Haines rise, chat and have breakfast in the Martello Tower. The rst sentence introduces a perky Buck Mulligan and how he, stately and plump, comes down the staircase. Wearing a yellow dressing gown which utters round his body like a priestly mantle, he greets his half-awake friends with loud cries. A few sentences later, Stephen Dedalus enters the scenario. At the same time, Joyce introduces a characteristic stylistic device, a trademark visualising technique which, in various ways and with varying intensity, will be deployed throughout Ulysses. This is how the implicit narrator details Stephens visual perception of Buck Mulligan: Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak (U 1.1316). Within the space of a few paragraphs, the visual representation of Mulligan, whom we just observed proceeding from the stairhead and into the room as though in a full-length portrait, has shrunk to a face. In fact, his face has been turned into a thing which, furthermore, takes on a life of its own.

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The horselike face is said to shake and gurgle all by itself, even bless a somewhat irritated Stephen. Dehumanised and reied, Mulligans face oats like a hairy oval before the reader. Subsequently, Mulligan brings his shaving utensils to the parapet, lathers his cheeks and chin, and begins to shave, meanwhile chatting with Stephen. His curling shaven lips laughed and the edges of his white glittering teeth. Laughter seized all his strong wellknit trunk (U 1.1313). Signicantly, Joyce does not write that Mulligan is laughing, but that his lips are; likewise, Mulligan is not seized by laughter, but his stomach is. Joyce represents Buck Mulligans bodythat is to say, his lips, teeth and torsoas responding to external stimuli as though its reactions were mere reexes, bypassing the control of some centrally-operating intentionality. Mulligans physical appearance turns into a miniature spectacle before the reader. The aesthetic effect of such passages, so common in Joyce, depends upon the differentiation of the human body, whose various parts are then autonomised and, furthermore, endowed with an agency all their own. In this introductory episode, as so often in Ulysses, Joyces implicit narrator builds upon a narratological aesthetic that aims at defamiliarisation. The narrator, one could say, keeps to what he perceives, not to what he knows is there. In this way, Joyces aesthetics reveals deep affinities with that of Proust, although Joyce pushes that aesthetic program to an extreme. When Mulligan is about to descend into the tower, leaving Stephen to ruminate over his dead mother, Stephens visual perception of his roommates bodily movement is rendered as it presents itself to his eyes. Temporarily frozen by the entrance frame through which he is disappearing, Mulligans gure thus appears as an optical outline: His head halted again for a moment at the top of the staircase, level with the roof: Dont mope over it all day, he said. Im inconsequent. Give up the moody brooding. His head vanished but the drone of his descending voice boomed out of the stairhead [ ... ]. (U 1.2338) All Stephen perceives is a head. From a visual point of view, Buck Mulligans bodily whole has been bisected by the frame through which he passes. There is a striking affinity between Stephens image and a photographic frame, that instant freezing of time and movement. From a rhetorical point of view, Mulligans visual Gestalt has been substituted for a synecdoche, his thing-like head being the sign that stands in for the whole and whose shape can be

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observed for a few more moments.12 But what, exactly, is the whole, the Gestalt? The passage suggests that Stephens perceptual experience of Mulligans descent is processed in two different registers. On the one hand there is Stephens visual impression, and on the other, the auditory one. Each is distinct; indeed, each is separate and independent of the other: Buck Mulligans voice sang from within the tower. It came nearer up the staircase, calling again. Stephen, still trembling at his souls cry, heard warm running sunlight and in the air behind him friendly words. Dedalus, come down, like a good mosey. Breakfast is ready. Haines is apologising for waking us last night. Its all right. Im coming, Stephen said, turning. Do, for Jesus sake, Buck Mulligan said. For my sake and for all our sakes. His head disappeared and reappeared. (U 1.2819) What is heard is not joined together with what is seen; and what is seen is in its turn a mere slice of the whole. The multi-sensory hermeneutic horizon, the all-embracing Gestalt, refuses to take shape. Aligning himself with a modernist aesthetic that aims to render what is perceived rather than what is known, Joyce challenges traditional ways of describing movement, gestures and action, and with them, the idea of organic modes of perception. At the same time, such a pronounced desire to represent what is heard and, furthermore, to represent it in a register that is radically separate from what is seen, may usefully be considered in the light of those late nineteenthcentury acoustic technologies that mediate the new matrices of perception, turning the sense of sight and that of hearing into quasi-ideal senses. Indeed, Joyces mode of representing Stephens sharply differentiated sensory impressions in the Martello Tower scene is refracted through a perceptual matrix enabled by technologies for transmitting and reproducing the real, acoustic and visual technologies alike. No wonder, then, that Joyces novel abounds with reied voices and autonomous eyes. One further example will suffice, drawn from Nestor, the second episode. Stephen is in the classroom teaching his rather unwilling students history. All of a sudden they are alerted to a sound: A stick struck the door and a voice in the corridor called: Hockey!

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They broke asunder, sidling out of their benches, leaping them. Quickly they were gone and from the lumberroom came the rattle of sticks and clamour of their boots and tongues. (U 2.11822) This stylistically sophisticated miniature scene serves to characterise Stephens sensory apparatus. Beginning with a voice stripped of its author, the passage proceeds to render the students sudden movements in all their visual purity, only to close with sounds, more specically, with the acoustic phenomena issuing from the lumberroom. Stephen stays behind with one of the students, Sargent, who needs extra assistance, until In the corridor his name was heard, called from the playeld. Sargent! Run on, Stephen said. Mr Deasy is calling you. He stood in the porch and watched the laggard hurry towards the scrappy eld where sharp voices were in strife. [ ... ] Their sharp voices cried about [Mr Deasy] on all sides: their many forms closed round him, the garish sunshine bleaching the honey of his illdyed head. (U 2.18198) Represented as thing-like and autonomous entities, the boys voices act on their own, as though bypassing screens such as the cortex, spreading their sharp vibrations all the way to the veranda where Stephen is standing. Meanwhile his visual impression of the boys appearances fades. Gradually, they blend into so many optical outlines surrounding the stingy headmaster whose hair-colour stands out as a sunny exclamation mark. A monument to the autonomy of the eye and the ear, Ulysses is both an index and an enactment of the increasing differentiation of sight and hearing in the modernist period. Joyces style thus registers the subterranean effects of those technological events that Proust reects upon. Indeed, once we place Joyces mode of representing visual and acoustic impressions alongside the theory of sensory differentiation and reication embedded in Prousts novel, we realise the great extent to which the very experiential effects that Prousts narrator contemplates effectively inscribe some of the most persistent stylistic aspects of Ulysses. At the same time, the advent of modern technologies of perception fuels the pre-eminently modernist imperative to make it new (Ezra Pound), and nowhere as palpably as in Joyce. Technology emerges as an occasion for launching new idioms: it restructures the prose of the world,

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yielding opaque signatures that demand to be read and decoded. But this also means that Joyces aesthetics of perception comes into being as a solution to a historical problemhow to recover and represent the immediacy of lived experience in an age when modes of experience are continually reied by, among other things, the increasingly powerful emergence of technologies for reproducing the visual and audible real. In pursuing absolute immediacy, Joyces aesthetics of perception seeks to name the everyday anew; and this is why, in Ulysses, the imperative to make you see and hear is so often an aesthetic end in itself, utterly divorced from processes of knowledge and cognition. Joyces aesthetics of perceptual immediacy is thus inscribed by a historically specic discourse where the empirical materiality of the body is posited as the privileged site of aesthetics and where perception has become an aesthetically gratifying activity in its own right. Such a discourse, as I have argued, becomes possible in the period which sees the emergence of technologies for reproducing the visual and audible real. The highmodernist aesthetics of perception I have been discussing in this essay thus feeds on a historical irony that is as palpable as it is inevitable: the more abstract the world of observation becomes, the more corporeal is the notion of the perceiver. And this bodily realm is no longer necessarily of a generalised, transcendental order, as in the aesthetic theories of, say, Baumgarten, Kant and Hegel. Indeed, the sensory body is no longer a universal notion. Rather, the aesthetic now tends to be located in a particular body, a concrete, singular and mortal body.

NOTES
1. Virgil, Georgics, with an English translation by H. Rushton Fairclough, revised by G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 257. I have also relied on Bulfinchs Mythology (New York: HarperCollins, 1991) and Mythologies, ed. Yves Bonnefoy, trans. Wendy Doniger (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991). 2. Etymologically, the meaning of the term aesthetics springs out of a cluster of Greek words that designate activities of sensory perception in both a strictly physiological sense, as in sensation, and a mental sense, as in apprehension. Aisthetikos derives from aistheta, things perceptible by the senses, from aisthethai, to perceive. For a full etymological explanation, see H. G. Liddell & R. Scott, GreekEnglish Lexicon, 9th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 3. Jacques Derrida, The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegels Semiology, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 71108.

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4. For an inventory of the cultural imaginary of the telephone in Prousts time, see Le Tlphone la Belle poque (Brussels: ditions Libro-Sciences, 1976). 5. Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 65. 6. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 1420 et passim. In Kracauers last work, Prousts episode also plays an important role; see History: The Last Things Before the Last (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 4952, 826, 923. 7. Prousts telephone episode has a rich prehistory. An early version appears in Jean Santeuil, in the pages relating Jeans rst telephone conversation with his mother; see Jean Santeuil, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), Vol. 2, pp. 17881. In 1907, Proust published an expanded version of the episode in a piece on reading in Le Figaro. He then revised the episode once again and made it a part of The Guermantes Way. On the genesis of the episode and its vital role in Remembrance, see Paul Martin, Le Tlphone: tude littraire dun texte de M. Proust, parts 13, Information littraire 21 (1969), 23341; and 22 (1970), 4652, 8798. 8. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin, 3 vols (New York: Vintage, 1982), Vol. 2, p. 432; A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadi et al, 4 vols (Paris: Bibliothque de la Pliade, 19871989), Vol. 2, p. 135. Page references, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text, indicate rst the English translation (REM) and then the French original (RTP). 9. See Walter Benjamin, A Small History of Photography, in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott & Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, 1979), pp. 24057; The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in: Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1988), pp. 21751; and Some Motifs in Baudelaire, in: Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1973), pp. 10954. 10. For a cultural history of the gramophone and its impact on notions of acoustic representation, see Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young & Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 21114. See also Kittlers Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 22964. 11. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, with Wolfhard Steppe & Claus Melchior (New York: Random House, 1986). References cite episode number, followed by line number. 12. Alan Spiegel has usefully related Joyces visual style to cinematic modes of representation, focusing in particular on Joyces method of fractured and cellular narration and description, of rendering wholes by their parts. In Spiegels view, this feature represents the characteristic formal procedure of Joyces modernism (Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modern Novel [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976], p. 64).

I N G R I D WA S S E N A A R

Introduction to Proustian Passions

Les quoique sont toujours des parce que mconnus. (i. 430; tr. ii. 9)

1. A N A L L E G O R I C A L O P E N I N G

he whole of A la recherche du temps perdu is a distension in pursuit of intention. When the adult Marcel recollects the impression he had had as a child of Giottos Vices and Virtues, from the Arena chapel in Padua, he tells us how Envys fat serpent remplit si compltement sa bouche grande ouverte that lattention de LEnvieet la ntre du mme couptout entire concentre sur laction de ses lvres, na gure de temps donner denvieuses penses (i, 80; tr. i. 95). Hard to say whether the serpent is moving inwards or outwards, from this description. Hard also to say what Envy is. But the work of disgorging or being engorged with envy is surely strenuous and painful, and brings on an involuntary and empathetic imitation in those who look at it. The images of these allegories, among them the gures of Justice and Injustice, do not give the child much pleasure: Malgr toute ladmiration que M. Swann professait pour ces gures de Giotto, je neus longtemps aucun plaisir considrer

From Proustian Passions: The Uses of Self-Justification for A la recherche du temps perdu. 2000 by Oxford University Press.

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dans notre salle dtudes, o on avait accroch les copies quil men avait rapportes, ... une Justice, dont le visage gristre et mesquinement rgulier tait celui-l mme qui, Combray, caractrisait certaines jolies bourgeoises pieuses et sches que je voyais la messe et dont plusieurs taient enrles davance dans les milices de rserve de lInjustice. (i, 801; tr. i. 956) Envy has her serpent to contend with and so can be contained within the framework of her allegorical representation. Between Justice and Injustice, however, despite their graphic separation in the Scrovegni chapel, where they are painted opposite one another, there is, for the child Marcel, some kind of dangerous seepage. For, briey superimposed upon the plan of the Italian chapel (which the narrator of A la recherche has not seen at this moment in the narrative) is the church of Saint-Hilaire. In the middle ground between two allegories, two chapels, and two narratorial voices, separated both temporally and spatially, there is the confusing opportunity for an agon. The young Marcel, overwritten by the mature Marcel, sees that tragic contest played out by teams who seem to keep changing sides: enrles davance dans les milices de rserve are the Just who are rehearsing as understudies for the innitely divisible role of Injustice. Judith Shklar, in her brilliant essay The Faces of Injustice, describes Giottos Ingiustizia and La Giustizia, for the purposes of her liberal political argument in favour of listening to victims. She says Injustice does not appear to suffer at all; he seems completely affectless (p. 48). Of Justice, she tells us: Her face is benign. But apart from that it is expressionless, as one might expect of the impartiality appropriate to a personication of justice. We can certainly feel afraid of Injustice, but Justice radiates no emotional appeal (p. 103). Separated by a chapel oor in Italy, by many pages of Shklars reasoned argument against complacent models of justice that take the wrongdoers part over the suffering victims, Justice looks impassively on and Injustice looks impassively aside, as each performs their allotted role. These are modern allegories, a far cry from the Furies turned to Eumenides by Athenas persuasive words (and her silky-voiced threat of violence: No need of that, not here) as retributive revenge was displaced by distributive justice in Aeschylus Oresteia.1 The balanced opposition of Justice and Injustice is a lateral one, rather than the threatening imposition of a vertical hierarchy: they seem to offer a human rather than an ideal choice of moral actions. Yet their similarity lies in their indifference. And when later in his life the adult narrator of A la recherche meets des incarnations vraiment saintes de la charit active, he nds that elles avaient gnralement un air allgre, positif,

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indiffrent et brusque de chirurgien press. The visage antipathique et sublime de la vraie bont is also indifferent (i, 81; tr. i. 97). Justice is aloof, Injustice couldnt care less, and Goodness is a bossy matron. While we, Prousts pampered readers and Giottos condent viewers, feel sure of being able to tell the difference between these three versions of indifference, we should perhaps remind ourselves that those telling differences only emerge through an act of interpretation. On the face of it, indifference will always look the same. Marcel the childs confusion over which of the jolies bourgeoises are batting for which moral team is not only a Combray question, reserved for the innocence of unpolluted, idealized childhood and its revivication in comforting cups of tisane (i. 47; tr. i. 55).2 It isor rather Proust is arguing it should bea question that preoccupies and pervades the entire eld of human experience. The question, and it is the governing question of this study, is how are we to judge self-justication?

2. C R I T I C S , P H I L O S O P H E R S , P S Y C H O L O G I S T S ,

AND

WORDS

The terms in which I will put forward the answer, or the answers, to this question, as Proust experiments with them throughout his novel, rely almost entirely on intimate readings of the text. This book puts forward an important component of the Proustian cognitive and conceptual apparatus, which has not been analysed before, and the consequences of which show A la recherche du temps perdu to be an impressive contribution to ethical debate. My study sets out the intensive hermeneutic endeavour undertaken by Prousts narrator to push to its limits the possibilities of self-justication. Proust, we hardly need reminding, has chosen to write a rst-person and retrospective ction. He asks what judgement is, and how we arrive at our judgements, by way of the rst-person voice. This reminder raises further questions about the approach I have taken to what I have to say about A la recherche du temps perdu, which I will take a few moments to answer now. The almost overwhelming difficulty facing Prousts account-givers and his readers alike is the sheer volume, not only of his own output, but of studies written about both man and novel, studies upon studies of these things. Seventy-ve years after the death of a writer who has taken on the stature of a Shakespeare or a Dante as one of European literatures greats, so many brilliant novelists and critics have put forward the vital appraisals of A la recherche by now embedded as the xed truths about this text: Wilson, Shattuck, Beckett, Bersani, Poulet ... the list goes on.3 To study the critical texts written about A la recherche is to realize with humility and amazement

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how well Prousts novel was read even in the zz of publishing hype during and just after his lifetime. There is, because of all this interest in the novel, a Proust currency, a set of keywords which mean Proust: madeleine, mre, grand-mre, jeunes filles, jealousy, Elstir, Bergotte, Vinteuil, mmoire involontaire, Time, Swann. A secondary and biographical swathe: snob, social satirist, neurotic, homosexual, Dreyfus Affair, crowd around behind. What more remains to be said? To propose a new study of A la recherche du temps perdu seems like an act of wilful idiocy. Yet, while every critic, of course, addresses the issue of Prousts choosing to write in the rst person, therefore shifting the focus of his novel with explosive force into the subjective mode, no one seemed to be answering to my satisfaction a very basic question: was this a morally good or bad decision? Prousts novel is a vast, highly textured, minutely wrought exposition of what the world looks like from one point of view, a sophisticated, well-read, jealous, nervous, leisured point of view. That much is perfectly clear. But what of the fear, shuttled constantly between novelist and narrator, of boring a reader by going on at such length about one life? What of the strategies of persuasion by which a writer might try or expect to keep such a readers interest, or make her believe the account worthwhile, honourable, true? How to make the balance work between telling subjective and unveriable truths, and allowing for counter-critique, contestation, rebuff, rejection? How much mileage might there be in a narrative strategy which sought to take account pre-emptively of all such counter-arguments: a supreme effort to work out a foolproof method of ensuring a readers trust by accommodating all her suspicions, fears, and hostility into the very point of view she might reject? This series of questions becomes more interesting with every further addition and permutation of it, for it raises difficult theoretical issues about the limits of answering questions about self-justication using the material of self-justication, along the lines of Alan Turings notorious Halting Problem. If you ask a piece of self-justication such as but I didnt mean to hurt you, to justify itself, would you get an answer with a rm foundation, or a further piece of self-justication? One kind of answer would be I didnt mean to hurt you, I did x because I love you. No rm foundation for truth or reliability is on offer, we must take on trust that the I tells the truth, and either accept or reject the answer. The emphasis has been brought to bear upon the credibility of I as a criterion for trustworthiness. Another kind of response, however, might be I knew you were going to ask me to justify my self-justication but I didnt mean to hurt you, and so here, before you say anything else, are x further justications of that statement. Here, the

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emphasis has been shifted onto the statement, away from the I. Straightaway we can see that acts of self-justication work hard to attribute and distribute intention, interpretation, and meaning-bearing emphasis to useful-looking parts of verbal utterances, in attempts to escape censure and judgement through apparent exposure. Attempts to confront and head off this selfjusticatory work of redistribution will themselves cause further evasion, mobility, internal division, and multiplication: like chasing mercury droplets around a petri dish with a knife and fork.4 The answer to the moral problem of self-justication, if there is one, then, is clearly not going to come from Proust himself, nor from his correspondence, nor from the testimony of any of his friends, because we would not be able to bracket lies and self-interest out of their answers. Discovering how to judge whether or not self-talk is justiable, might, however, yet lie in listening to the way in which that question itself is treated within the connes of A la recherche du temps perdu, in hearing how a series of different kinds of linguistic experiment is set up to monitor either selfjustication or its by-products in language. Figuring the inquiring reader as a listener, of course, might introduce its own problems, but we will deal with these as we proceed, and should offer ourselves a dispensation from worry about them ahead of time. By the same token, no one ready-made critical methodology, or interpretative toolkit, seemed to me mobile or dynamic enough to generate a satisfactory answer about Proustian self-justication. A feminist reading of A la recherche, for example, while it would prove the undoubted misogyny in the novel, would not necessarily be able to answer questions about how judgements are made or should be made. In this book, theoretical concepts and methods have been considered and appropriated from a wide range of recent critical thinkers, without allegiance being sworn to any. Reference has been made to broadly structuralist and post-structuralist writers, to psychoanalysis, to narratology, and to writers on Proust whose aims have seemed, in the course of researching the concept of self-justication, to offer a springboard to my own. Any single explicit hermeneutic methodology (even if such an illusory beast were to exist) applied onto the text of A la recherche du temps perdu would sooner or later run up against its own formal constraints, would, in discovering that which it had sought, recover merely its own original premises. Self-justication describes a special area of speech act typied by the attempt to persuade a listener of the speakers credibility. But such a denition takes no account of the variety of such speech acts, or whether there are in fact important differences between them. It also seems to rule out of account the very subjectiveness, the messiness, of what it is to

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persuade, the arguments that might ensue, the pain of neediness, of not being believed, the sheer hard work that might go into nding watertight justications for dubious actions, and just how much self-justication might be going on in the world. So the desire itself (to nd out more about the functioning of self-justification inside Prousts novel) is what should encourage us to listen exibly to the workings of the text, to gather material for assessment, to be prepared to modify, or abandon experiments, or become very interested indeed in why certain kinds of experiment seem to throw up repetitious rather than different answers. W. V. Quines brilliant four-page essay, On Simple Theories of a Complex World, points out some causes for supposing that the simpler hypothesis stands the better chance of conrmation.5 He notes that if we encompass a set of data with a hypothesis involving the fewest possible parameters, and then are constrained by further experiment to add another parameter, we are likely to view the emendation not as a refutation of the rst result but as a conrmation plus a renement (p. 245). This is not to be interpreted as a licence to produce only simple hypotheses, such as if the earth is at then we might fall off its edge, but it does remind us to avoid putting all our own hypothetical parameters into one pre-emptive basket before hearing how Proust conducts his self-justicatory experiments. The obvious drawback to this kind of adaptive, exible, and dynamic methodology is its undoubted potential to wander down garden paths, or fall into drowning pools of doubt and curlicues of minute adjustment. Yet experimental research into the linguistic functioning of the moi, of the kind that Proust undertakes in A la recherche du temps perdu, positively demands this kind of scientic protocol, and we should not be afraid to work with the problems it will cause us. I will be reading with an awareness that a rst-person retrospective narrative implicitly seeks, in reconstructing a teleology which has already unfolded, to remember it, both in the sense of recalling a process, and that of putting a process back together. Blanchot reads this as Prousts search to experience a quasi-mystical simultaneity of different temporalities: certains pisodes ... semblent-ils vcus, la fois, des ges fort diffrents, vcus et revcus dans la simultanit intermittente de toute une vie, non comme de purs moments, mais dans la densit mouvante du temps sphrique.6 This is the kind of vision of Prousts writing which, to my mind, most unfortunately reinforces the oft-touted idea that Proustian subjectivity is all about being bound up in a nostalgic contemplation of personal past. It also runs the risk of nudging A la recherche into the category of book in which other subjectivities count only for the material they might offer an experience-

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hoarding introspective rst-person consciousness. A la recherche du temps perdu responds only partially to such a description. Nostalgia and introspection have their part to play in the Proustian psyche. But Proust himself does so much work with these aspects of human cognitive functioning that, unless we are very careful, even loving descriptions of his writing can come to sound like apologies for it. As commentators have been at pains to analyse, the Proustian narratorial voice is itself composed of many, sometimes ambiguously differentiated, even conicting agencies.7 I do not intend to repeat the work of that important analysis here. Once we have seen and understood the elasticity and mobility built into Prousts use of the narratorial convention, it is enough to carry it with us as we read, and to be prepared at times to signal instances of special relevance to points in hand about self-justicatory activity. No work on Proust can entirely avoid the question of who is speaking and when, but it should not be allowed to take over all forms of argument about A la recherche. Sartre, in 1943, offered the following analysis of what is meant by caractre, and used as an exemplary literary text Prousts A la recherche du temps perdu. Sartres brief comments brilliantly summarize and orchestrate one of the central questions that Proust experiments with in his work. I will quote Sartres points in full: le caractre na dexistence distincte qu titre dobjet de connaissance pour autrui. La conscience ne connat point son caractre moins de se dterminer rexivement partir du point de vue de lautreelle lexiste [sic] en pure indistinction, non thmatiquement et non thtiquement, dans lpreuve quelle fait de sa propre contingence et dans la nantisation par quoi elle reconnat et dpasse sa facticit. Cest pourquoi la pure description introspective de soi ne livre aucun caractre: le hros de Proust na pas de caractre directement saisissable; il se livre dabord, en tant quil est conscient de luimme, comme un ensemble de ractions gnrales et communes tous les hommes (mcanismes de la passion, des motions, ordre dapparition des souvenirs, etc.), o chacun peut se reconnatre: cest que ces ractions appartiennent la nature gnrale du psychique. Si nous arrivons (comme la tent Abraham dans son livre sur Proust) dterminer le caractre du hros proustien ( propos par exemple de sa faiblesse, de sa passivit, de la liaison singulire chez lui de lamour et de largent) cest que nous interprtons les

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donnes brutes: nous prenons sur elles un point de vue extrieur, nous les comparons et nous tentons den dgager des relations permanentes et objectives. Mais ceci ncessite un recul: tant que le lecteur, suivant loptique gnrale de la lecture, sidentie au hros de roman, le caractre de Marcel lui chappe; mieux, il nexiste pas ce niveau. Il napparat que si je brise la complicit qui munit lcrivain, que si je considre le livre non plus comme un condent, mais comme une condence, mieux encore: comme un document. Ce caractre nexiste donc que sur le plan du pourautrui et cest la raison pour laquelle les maximes et les descriptions des moralistes, cest--dire des auteurs franais qui ont entrepris une psychologie objective et sociale, ne se recouvrent jamais avec lexprience vcue du sujet.8 Marcel Muller quotes this passage, but his criticism of it, that Sartres comments are applicable to any rst-person narrative, and therefore miss the specicity of le vritable secret du je proustien, itself misses Sartres point.9 What has been so coruscatingly pinpointed is the agonizing fulcrum across which the Proustian narratorin all of his temporal manifestations, moods, and agenciesand the reader of rst-person confessional texts are delicately poised and interlocked. Character appears only when complicity is broken, when readernarrator identicatory patterns and cycles and compulsions are undone, when the narrator is seen no longer as everyman, but as a particular, neurasthenic, possibly hysterical, would-be novelist. Grateful as we must be to Muller for offering Proust criticism a multipartite taxonomy formalizing the interconnections between, and independent statuses of, the narratorial selves (Hros, Narrateur, Sujet Intermdiaire, Protagoniste, Romancier, crivain, Auteur, Homme, Signataire), these terms seem to deprive the rst-person narrative of its relationships to external objects and selves, whether in or beyond the connes of the text, and it is upon these relationships and the kinds of processes they inaugurate that my study focuses. A retrospective rst-person novel, as the narratologist Grard Genette so convincingly demonstrates, will both manipulate and suffer from periodic attacks of prolepsis and paralepsis.10 Genettes tough-minded and careful attention to the workings of Prousts narrative offer a sound methodological principle informing the way in which I read, but my argument, in showing how self-justication works and is put to work, does not attempt to construct a new narratology of A la recherche. The main point I take from Genettes work is that great attention must be paid, when studying works of confessional ction, to what we might term a rhetoric of reliability. A

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temptation is automatically built into the reconstructive narrative enterprise to produce an improved and stylized version of the lost original (experience, or histoire). Like the genre of autobiography, rst-person retrospective ction strives to tell the truth of subjective experience, but yearns for the wider claim that such truth should be a universal truth. Augustines Confessions, Rousseaus similarly titled Les Confessions, Constants Adolphe, Fromentins Dominique, Gides rcits: all are characterized by, and to be included in an intertextual history of, rst person retrospective ction, confession narratives, and autobiography.11 I deliberately blur the distinction between the three genres here, because it is the confessional mode, and not its generic history or histories, which detains me: my focus is the human speaking subject in the movement and moment of offering a justication for his or her actions, thoughts, intentions, or motivesor indeed the attempts he or she might make to conceal them.12 Dennis Foster reads the act of confession by focusing on the aspect of complicity between confessing subject and listener: for Foster, confessional narrative takes place between two substantial, unsettled subjects. He goes on: By subject I do not mean an autonomous, centred being that founds the individual, but that representation of the self, particularly as it is objectied through language. The subject is that aspect of the self available to understanding.13 This is a useful working denition of the speaking subject, which I want to retain, although Fosters emphasis, in other parts of his introduction, on guilt as prime motivation for confession is not part of my denition of self-justication. I dene self-justication as an act of speech seeking pre-emptively to ward off attack which the subject fears might take the form of exclusion, rejection, deprivation, abandonment. The main prompting for an act of self-justication, then, is the desire to avoid pain, rather than the desire to confess guilt, although, of course, some kinds of self-justication might very well take the form of a confession of guilt. It would hardly constitute a discovery to announce that Proust wrote about guilt at ambivalence felt towards parents, particularly the mother. Nor would there be much of an argument in the assertion that A la recherche is a justication of Marcel Prousts life to his mother. I will attempt to avoid that particularly well-trodden signicatory matrix, but we should take a moment to see why the answer to self-justication does not, as it were, lie with the mother. It is, undeniably, psychoanalytic criticism of A la recherche that has been most concerned with the novels questions of morality, but these have tended to stay at the level of the subjective or individual quest for self-discovery, such as Lejeunes disturbingly smug essay on narcissism, masturbation, and

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creativity, Doubrovskys La Place de la madeleine, or Baudrys work.14 Their other main manifestation is as readings of castration/artistic sterility complexes, such as Riffaterres work on the Med- tag: Add to this linguistic mechanism the diegesis of the myth; add the interplay of Andromeda and the monster, the strand as the stage of a plight common to her and to the jellysh turned monstrous woman, top it with the homophony of Andromedas last syllables and Medusas rst, and we understand how easy it is for the -medmorpheme to stand for woman and for the monstrous or negative component in the sign system designating a woman. Hence the displacement of androgyne, within which man and woman were united but equal, by Andromeda that opposes desirability in man and terror in woman, a terror suffered or a terror inicted. Hence, a valorization of the mediating last syllables (meda) made into an egregious symbol of unhappy or dangerous femininity.15 Riffaterres work, which seeks to demonstrate how fantasies and repressed drives are born of a lexical coincidence rationalized into semantic identity, can quickly seem less like analysis than meddling, or worse, misogynistic muddling. Too many psychoanalytic readings of A la recherche concentrate on such maternally directed, guilt-riddled early nuggets of the Proustian textual palimpsest as La Confession dune jeune fille, Avant la nuit, and Sentiments liaux dun parricide, reading these in combination with the Montjouvain scene (i. 15763; tr. i. 1907).16 These kinds of readings see enormous signicance in the 1906 ide de pice given to Ren Peter, a friend of Debussys, during a visit to Versailles, a play project also mentioned in a letter to Reynaldo Hahn.17 As Painter notes in his biography, with a typically bluff yet apologetic tone, this sketch for a play has: a preposterous but signicant plot, about a sadistic husband who, though in love with his wife, consorted with prostitutes, said infamous things about her to them, encouraged them to answer in kind, and was caught in the act by the injured lady, who left him, whereupon he committed suicide.18 The list of ghostly avant-textes which might be (and are) triumphantly held aloft as proof of Marcel Prousts ambivalence towards his mother goes on and on.19 These early texts are basically seized upon to license psychoanalytic readings informing us that Prousts uvre faisait de lui sa propre mre.20 But apart from telling us little about the way Prousts writing behaves, the underlying

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misogyny at work in this kind of criticism risks reducing literary critical psychoanalytic discourse itself to a dubious grudge against what might be termed a Gestalt ready-made of the obstinately absent, love-denying Mother. If psychoanalytic readings of A la recherche do not tempt me as a methodological approach, then perhaps another critical discourse to step inside, this time one which certainly does not run the risk of leaving gural stones unturned, might be deconstructive literary criticism. It is precisely the foundationalist aspiration written into any first-person fiction or autobiography, for subjective truth to be apodictic or universal truth, which deconstructive literary criticism is at pains to expose and question. For Proust, some of the best deconstructive criticism remains Paul de Mans demonstration (again, using the Giotto allegories) that Proust inscribes his text with its own unreadability.21 The careful attention de Man pays to rhetorical tropes in the genre of autobiographical confession, in Excuses (Confessions), which looks at key childhood incidents in Rousseaus autobiography, is part of a welcome return to the study of rhetoric in literary criticism generally.22 While the careful textual analysis of these thinkers attracts me, however, the aporia in which they sometimes nd their endings, or the unwarranted hostility with which they sometimes treat literary texts, do not. Autobiography criticism, especially deconstructive criticism of autobiography, tends to pounce triumphantly on evidence of self-justication. Self-justicatory moments are, in general for this type of criticism, held to offer proof that the subject of autobiography has acknowledged, however eetingly, the impossibility of telling the truth about the self, or of constituting selfhood as some whole and totalizable entity or quantity in writing. Self-justicatory moments can tend to function for deconstructive criticism as proof that autobiographers do not know themselves, or do not know that they will always fail to know themselves; that autobiographers are to be sternly told off for thus dallying with their readers sympathies, and that it is the task of deconstruction to unmask and reprimand this underhand connivance. This, however, begs the whole fascinating question of why acts of selfjustication attract such scapegoating, such a moral high tone, even if it is couched in the terms of seemingly objective or neutral criticism. After all, in A la recherche, Marcel is perfectly open about both the sources which might inspire him to write a novel, and the difficulties of maintaining personal selfbelief and public credibility when those sources are revealed as being entirely subjective:

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Grave incertitude, toutes les fois que lesprit se sent dpass par luimme; quand lui, le chercheur, est tout ensemble le pays obscur o il doit chercher et o tout son bagage ne lui sera de rien. Chercher? pas seulement: crer. Il est en face de quelque chose qui nest pas encore et que seul il peut raliser, puis faire entrer dans sa lumire. (i. 45; tr. i. 52) Deconstruction is certainly not a nihilistic or sceptical enterprise. Indeed in recent years, much thought has gone into its potential as an ethical discourse.23 The triumph of textual blind spots and their location can, however, without some willingness in the critic to be confused and moved by literary texts, lead to a type of complexity in critical writing which has not arisen in the texts themselves. There is complexity enough in Prousts A la recherche du temps perdu, together with vast tracts of it that are never read critically, and the sense of these two important points is another part of what motivates my study. Blanchot strays perhaps too near a repetition of the early understanding of A la recherche, which decided the novel was a celebration of interiority, solitary withdrawal, and wistfulness.24 Deconstructive analyses of A la recherche, on the other hand, too often repeat the problem, also that of much psychoanalytic writing on this text, of focusing too narrowly on only a handful of incidents in the text, rather than seeking to read across its span. Deconstruction has its own blind spot, which is a failure to allow the texts it reads to speak and be heard. Having spoken at such length about what I will not be doing, it is perhaps time to return to what will be included. This is certainly a study about psychological processes but it is also a phenomenological study that considers very closely the relations dramatized and given signication between speaking subjects and a variety of object-types. With that in mind, I will bring some of Freuds metapsychological thinking into what I argue about self-justication, sometimes for comparative and sometimes for analytical purposes. Freuds willingness as a thinker to undertake speculative forays into the wilder hinterlands of mental functioning, with all the risks of experimental failure that such a venture entails, offers sometimes astonishing points of purchase on Prousts narrative experimentation.25 I will also have occasion to look at genetic material, earlier rough drafts so usefully published in the most recent Pliade edition of A la recherche in the form of Esquisses. I am in general, however, suspicious of genetic criticism, since the task of sifting through variants sometimes results in readings which cannot move easily between early drafts and an interpretation of the nal state of a given text. But as a text-handling

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theory of some rigour, generated as an adjunct to the vast editorial operation of producing a variorum edition such as the new Pliade Proust, it forces readers of A la recherche to bear in mind the fragility of any idea that texts are nished.26

3. A S H O RT H I S T O RY

OF

S E L F - J U S T I F I C AT I O N

Self-justication nds its denition, in French as in English, subsumed under the denitions given of justification. Le Grand Robert tells us that the noun justification comes from the medieval theological Latin justificatio, with appearances of Justificaciun around 1120. It denotes the action de justier quelquun, de se justier. Its synonyms include dcharge, dfense, excuse, compte, explication, argument, raison, apologie, preuve. Its theological usage is as the rtablissement du pcheur en ltat dinnocence, par la grce. Justification also signies, in the world of book-printing, the action de donner aux lignes la longueur requise; longueur dune ligne dimpression, dnie par le nombre de caractres. From around 1521, the expression justifier une ligne means la mettre la longueur requise au moyen de blancs. Justifier, the transitive verb, signies rendre juste, conforme la justice (rare, 1564); innocenter (quelquun) en expliquant sa conduite; rendre (quelque chose) lgitime (towards 1585); faire admettre, ou sefforcer de faire reconnatre comme juste (seventeenth century); confirmer (un jugement, un sentiment); and montrer comme vrai, juste, rel, par des arguments (1368, Ordonnances des Roys de France). Autojustification, le fait de se justier soimme, makes its lexicographical dbut only in the midtwentieth century. In English, the noun justification stands generally for the action of justifying or showing something to be just, right, or proper; vindication of oneself or another; exculpation; verication.27 It also has specic theological connotations (the action whereby man is justied, or freed from the penalty of sin, and accounted or made righteous by God); a judicial sense (the showing or maintaining in court that one had sufficient reason for doing that which he is called to answer; a circumstance affording grounds for such a plea; and the same use in printing (1672) as its translation has in French. The OED tells us that Protestant theologians regard justication as an act of grace ... through imputation of Christs righteousness, while Roman Catholic theologians hold that it consists in mans being made really righteous by infusion of grace, such justication being a work continuous and progressive from its initiation (my emphasis).

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Self-justication is thus neatly contained, for lexicographers, by the denition of justification, as just one among many of the forms the latter might take. The self is treated as one more unit to be shifted from a minus to a plus rating by the activity of justication. We should bear in mind, however, that self-justication is a term with an active philosophical as well as a psychological history, albeit a fragmentary one. Andr Lalandes 1926 Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie tells us that the primitive use of justification was to rendre ou de se rendre juste. His denition goes on: Puis, par affaiblissement du sens primitif, se dit de tout acte par lequel on rfute une imputation ou mme par lequel on la devance, en montrant quon est dans son droit (soit moral, soit logique), quon avait raison de dire ce quon a dit, ou de faire ce quon a fait (i. 552). Justication, then, has apparently lost its medieval emphasis on justice, and seems to have come to be used for a situation in which self-defence, refutation, or pre-emptive assertion of any kind take place in language. Lalande gives as his examples two thinkers. Nicolas Malebranche, theologian, scientist, and philosopher (16381715), considers justication in De la recherche de la vrit.28 Thodule Ribot (18391916), the inuential experimental psychologist, subsequently refers to Malebranches writing when discussing justication in La Logique des sentiments.29 Understanding their views is crucial to discovering how Proust deals with this slippery concept, since it serves to emphasize how revolutionary Prousts treatment of self-justication is. The limitations and exclusions which comfortably shield Malebranche and Ribot are essentially Prousts starting-point. They have no equipment to deal with the rigours of self-justicationProust effortlessly goes on building it. Both Malebranche and Ribot examine justification from the perspective, not of its linguistic manifestations, but of its connection to the workings of reason. Malebranche is interested in how we make reasons for ourselves to support feelings; in other words, of how we construct a mental foundation to suit our underlying desires. Ribot, writing two centuries later, is keen to delineate a strict compartmentalization of the reasoning produced by different kinds of affect, in order to classify (but in the process, distribute moral worth to) psychological functioning. Malebranche did not make a distinction between faith and reason. Although an admirer of Descartes, he held that God was the sole cause and source of divine reason, surpassing our own imperfect reason; and that God was the operator of some kind of correspondence between external objects and human ideas. But he also held, to a certain degree, that the human will is free. In Que toutes les passions se justient, he starts with the assumption

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that human desire, once ignited, seeks justication from reason, in order to achieve its ends (those of pleasure) in human actions. His introduction enacts a mini-allegory: Lesprit est tellement esclave de limagination, quil lui obit toujours lorsquelle est chauffe. Il nose lui rpondre lorsquelle est en fureur, parce quelle le maltraite sil rsiste, et quil se trouve toujours rcompens [de quelque plaisir], lorsquil saccommode ses desseins (p. 146). In fact, Malebranches seemingly general introduction relies on exclusion. The difference between esprit and imagination turns out to have, not a universal, but an ideological bent: the self-effacing, humorous introductory allegory neatly shifts its author out of the line of re, into alignment with the audience to whom the ensuing discussion is addressed, by allowing the gender of esprit to signify a personality-type: that of the henpecked man. The discussion seems to proceed from the assumption that no one is exempt from justications effects, when actually a split has been introduced into the conception of one that relies on the French grammatical tradition of gendering nouns: that part of one which is esprit is implicitly also masculine, while that which is imagination is implicitly feminized. His categories of mental functioning are thus also implicitly anthropomorphized and thrust into a narrative context of the amorous relation. But let us not be too concerned for the moment with the difficulties of nding a neutral language in which to speak about mental functioning. There is still Malebranches argument to follow. Building upon his model of the cringing esprit, his aim is apparently to expose the dependencies that exist, but that are disguised, between the promptings of dsir, and the judgements that are passed in order that dsir may be satised and also securely justied: le dsir nous doit porter par luimme juger avantageusement de son objet, si cest un dsir damour; et dsavantageusement, si cest un dsir daversion. Le dsir damour est un mouvement de lme excit par les esprits, qui la disposent vouloir jouir ou user des choses qui ne sont point en sa puissance (p. 146). A continuous circuit must be set up, in which it is desires responsibility to act as dynamic current, in order that supporting moral judgement may continue to prompt the step between impulse and action in the world. In this triangular structure, the me, having fallen a prey to les esprits, rst of all creates and then disowns dsir, or the dynamic of justication. The justicatory circuit must operate independently once it has been set up. Positive moral judgements thus become a function of the plaisir that the objet de nos passions affords us, since lesprit can form no judgements by itself: lesprit ne peut concevoir que la chaleur et la saveur soient des

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manires dtre dun corps (p. 147). Yet by the same token, il est trs facile de reconnatre par la raison, quels peuvent tre les jugements que les passions qui nous agitent forment en nous (p. 147). Precisely because raison, in opposition to the esprits, is unable to make a subjective link between an object and its inherent moral worth, it is simultaneously, Malebranche asserts, the perfect instrument for recognizing a situation in which desire has initiated the judgement-forming circuit, and for calculating the tendue (p. 147) of the judgements and thus the violence of the desire. Desire takes over responsibility from the esprits and even from passion, for instigating moral judgements. Reason, on the other hand, is still supposed to be able to judge in a detached manner the justicatory judgements it has itself offered desire. Dsir nds itself helplessly in the middle. It is judged by raison, from which it is simultaneously deriving justications to support the actions of the me. Yet the me, which has been excit par les esprits, refuses to declare itself the real initiator of the justicatory loop. Malebranche tries to make this complex and highly allusive model work by turning to empirical examples: Lexprience prouve assez ces choses, et en cela elle saccommode parfaitement avec la raison (p. 147). A discursive switch shifts the argument from the erotic to an apparently neutral epistemological domain: le dsir de savoir, tout juste et tout raisonnable quil est en lui-mme, devient souvent un vice trs dangereux par les faux jugements qui laccompagnent (p. 147). Le dsir de savoir is another name for curiosit, and Malebranche adopts the position of the moraliste to condemn its falsifying dangers. Every form of knowledge, he maintains, has quelque endroit qui brille limagination, et qui blouit facilement lesprit par lclat que la passion y attache (p. 149), but the light of truth only appears when passion subsides. This would seem clear enough, but his most important point is yet to come. The most serious impediment to detached reasoning, for Malebranche, is when an animating passion se sent mourir, because it seems to contract une espce dalliance avec toutes les autres passions qui peuvent la secourir dans sa faiblesse: Car les passions ne sont point indiffrentes les unes pour les autres. Toutes celles qui se peuvent souffrir contribuent dlement leur mutuelle conservation. Ainsi, les jugements qui justient le dsir quon a pour les langues ou pour telle autre chose quil vous plaira, sont incessamment sollicits et pleinement conrms par toutes les passions qui ne lui sont pas contraires. (p. 149; my emphasis)

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It is this mutuelle conservation of passions which is the real source of danger to reason. If the passion of desire operated on its own, he argues, the only judgement it would be able to obtain from reason would be one agreeing that possession of the desired object was a real possibility; in other words, passion would only be able to slip the most basic feasibility study past reason: Mais le dsir est anim par lamour; il est forti par lesprance; il est augment par la joie; il est renouvel par la crainte; il est accompagn de courage, dmulation, de colre et de plusieurs autres passions qui forment leur tour des jugements dans une varit innie, lesquels se succdent les uns aux autres et soutiennent ce dsir qui les a fait natre. (p. 150) Stylistically the most impressive sentence in Malebranches text, it also complexies the dynamic looping it has described desire as performing, by splitting dsir into a fully interconnecting set of moving passion parts. But the very impressiveness and dynamism of this textual demonstration do much to undermine his careful progression towards rejecting justication as a corrupting inuence on reasoning. In Malebranches justication model, desire is expected to keep a circuit going between the me and raison, which was supplying the me with justicatory reasoning for the pursuit of its goal. The responsibility for the functioning and maintenance of this circuit can then be disowned by both the me and raison, the former by pretending to be passive, the latter by pretending to be detached. Reason benets, by being released from the pestering by desire for justicatory reasoning, and the me benets from that justicatory reasoning. If the desiring circuit were to suffer some kind of intermittent fault, a kind of desiring short-circuit, or power failure, however, reason and the me would suddenly be deprived of their mutually benecial but unacknowledged relationship. The two components of mental functioning would be linked, paradoxically, only by indifference. And we might speculate that, however short this period of linkage of me and raison by indifference, it is too closely imitative of a state of inertia, or death, to be borne, which is why other types of link, not always justicatory, are imported as soon as possible to replace it. Malebranche represents mutuelle conservation as an irritating side-effect introduced by the passions, since to approve it would sound too much like approving justication over reason. Yet this mutual conservation practised by the passions might have much more to tell us about human survival than moralizing disapproval can allow into its modelling.

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The nal section of Malebranches discussion of justication is at once uncannily astute and highly suspect. He uses a physiological model of how sense impressions travel to the brain, dune manire propre former des traces profondes qui reprsentent cet objet (p. 150): [Ils plient] et rompent mme quelquefois par leur cours imptueux les bres du cerveau, et limagination en demeure [longtemps] salie et corrompue; car [les plaies du cerveau ne se reprennent pas aisment, ses traces ne se ferment pas cause que les esprits y passent sans cesse] .... Ainsi les passions agissent sur limagination, et limagination corrompue fait effort contre la raison en lui reprsentant toute heure les choses, non selon ce quelles sont en elles-mmes an que lesprit prononce un jugement de vrit, mais selon ce quelles sont par rapport la passion prsente an quil porte un jugement qui la favorise. (p. 150) This fascinating model of interconnection between a neurological and a moral vision of the human mind remains inextricably involved in the rhetorical and metaphoric signifying systems by which it is represented. No rm purchase seems possible upon either a purely material explanation of the workings of the brain, or upon the explanatory metaphors by which names for these workings also escape back into theological and moral interpretative traditions. Explanation is suspended between spirit, esh, and language. And when Malebranche, whose text so successfully enacts the interdependence of explanatory metaphor with what it seeks to explain, tries to leap clear of his own language, in order to propose a kind of empirical sociological study which would divide people into different kinds of justifying groups, we nd his text meshed up in what it had seemed merely to be describing from an external perspective: Si [l]on considre maintenant quelle peut tre la constitution des bres du cerveau, lagitation et labondance des esprits et du sang dans les diffrents sexes et dans les diffrents ges, il sera assez facile de connatre peu prs quelles passions certaines personnes sont plus sujettes, et, par consquent, quels sont les jugements quelles forment des objets. (p. 151) In wanting justication to be read off from physiology, Malebranche suddenly seems to deny the sophisticated interconnective cognitive

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modelling he has just been attempting. Malebranche has been caught in his own self-justicatory noose. His starting-point had been empirical: Il nest pas ncessaire de faire de grands raisonnements pour dmontrer que toutes les passions se justient; ce principe est assez vident par le sentiment intrieur que nous avons de nous-mmes, et par la conduite de ceux que lon voit agits de quelque passion: il suffit de lexposer an quon y fasse rexion (p. 146). His conclusion tries to rejoin a supposedly empirical science, that of physiology. Yet his exposition, or his exposure, of how the passions justify themseves, has required speculative leaps of investigative imagination, and brave conclusions about cognitive modelling. His argument implodes when he tries to make cognitive models t with the physical brain, because there is no exibility in his model which would allow in subjectivity. Malebranches exposition of justication fails by screening out the writer and intended readership. Thodule Ribot, philosopher and experimental psychologist, who later concentrated on psychopathology, writing in Prousts lifetime, profers a very different reading of justication. In La Logique des sentiments, he seeks to divide affective modes of reasoning into ve distinct groups: passionnel, inconscient, imaginatif, justificatif, mixte ou composite.30 Le raisonnement de justication opens with a categorical and unambiguous denigration of this kind of affective reasoning: it is, Ribot sneers, la plus simple, la plus enfantine, la plus banale de toutes (p. 111). For Ribot, justication is: engendre par une croyance ferme et sincre qui se refuse tre trouble et aspire au repos. Le raisonnement de justication est nettement tlologique. Malgr quelques apparences de rationalisme, il appartient au type affectif pur se manifestant dans sa plus grande pauvret (p. 111). For Malebranche, the act of justication had been an animating, if corrupting, inuence connecting, however inappropriately, the me to reason. But for Ribot, exactly the opposite is true: justication appears to be an agent of death and destruction in human reasoning. The croyance aveugle which causes the justicatory act, he says, is itself prompted by a need for laffirmation de lindividu dans son dsir et son sentir les plus intimes (p. 111). He calls justications tenacity une manifestation partielle de linstinct de la conservation (p. III; Ribots emphasis): Mais si inbranlable quelle paraisse, le doute la traverse au moins par moments. Il sensuit une rupture dquilibre mental qui appelle un remde. Cest le raisonnement de justication (p. 112). Justication, he asserts, is what happens when our instinct for selfpreservation is overcome, or interfered with by doubt. Justication, instead of functioning as the connective circuitry between two kinds of mental

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functioning, desire and reason, as it did for Malebranche, is here the name given only to what causes ruptures and intermittences in mental circuitry. Ribot takes as examples political fervour, theoretical moralizing, and religious faith. He argues that moral thinkers rely on une tendance matresse, une prfrence individuelle, une subjectivit qui, dissimule sous cet appareil logique, guide vers une n pose davance (p. 112). They wish to found their thought on a priori concepts that do not need empirical justication, and yet smuggle in subjective and teleological material along the way of their reasoning. Les vrais croyants, on the other hand, take the events thrown at the world by God, and interpret them according to a xed pattern: Sans sinquiter dun double illogisme, ils dclarent que les voies de la Providence sont impntrables, mais ils essaient de les justier (p. 113). They try to work backwards, justifying disaster after the event, so that they can continue to cling to their belief systems. A sudden shift takes place in Ribots argument here, from the relatively safe ground of people he calls normal (but justicatory), to the quicksands of reasoning among alins, people with persecution complexes. For them, apparently, le raisonnement de justication est sans cesse en action (p. 113). He refuses, however, to go further into this subject, although he is willing to assert that justicatory reasoning operates at the same pitch in both the sane and the mad, an assertion which would seem to require more qualication: is justicatory reasoning, then, a function of insanity? Might the states of madness and health be linked through justicatory reasoning? He next asserts that, because his study is consacr au raisonnement affectif (p. 113), he does not intend to pursue a line of reasoning which would take him into an examination of the unconscious prejudice affecting all so-called pretence at scientic objectivity: historians, theologians, and philosophers, he says, are all prey to this. He accuses, for example, Nietzsche of falling into the same dialectic trap which the latter accuses Kant of doing: Dans tous les cas de ce genre, la forme est celle de la logique rationnelle. La structure du raisonnement est ferme, sans lacunes, irrprochable; mais cest un tat dme extra-rationnel qui a linitiative et la haute direction. Ce qui parat dmonstration nest que justification. La logique de la raison semble matresse; en ralit, elle est servante. On sy trompe, parce que ldice logique, bti par des ouvriers habiles et subtils, na pas les apparences naves du raisonnement affectif o le dnouement est connu davance. (p. 114)

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His nal section is a grudging afterthought on raisonnement de consolation, which is n du besoin de trouver un remde la douleur morale (p. 114): un effort pour restituer, par des moyens articiels, la quantit de vie et dnergie perdues, in order to combat the effects of les malheurs de lexistence (p. 115). It consists in la mise en valeur dtats passs ou futurs propres compenser le prsent (p. 115). The genre of compensatory writing, the Consolation, he attributes to Seneca and other rhetoricians, but le simulacre de raisonnement qui le constitue reste vivace dans toutes les formes de condolance journalire (p. 115). Casually, Ribot dispenses with an entire area of human activity, our everyday dealings with pain, sorrow, and misery. Justicatory reasoning, even if it helps soothe pain? Away with it, tis false. Ribot has no hesitation in using an accusatory language which hopes to place justication well outside his own position as arbiter and judge. But beginning with unequivocal rejection of the concept, and a description of it as parasitic on the poorest kind of rationality, he proceeds to undermine his own statement with every succeeding example brought in. The more categories he includes as using justicatory procedures to obtain their ends, the more complex and multi-jointed the concept becomes, and the more its separable but interconnected forms and parts rebound on Ribots text. His own logic relies explicitly on separation: his very attempt at divisive categories of affective reasoning demonstrates his belief that language consists in neutral semantic units, whose combination does not result in a self-reexive ow, which starts to mean more than its producer intended. In Ribots short essay, the whole of philosophy, indeed the activity of thought attempts of any kind, seems to disappear into an underworld of impossibility. No one, no one at all, knows how to think. Except perhaps the one man left standing, the exclusive omniscient, Ribot himself? This is wildness of a totalitarian kind, disturbingly persuasive in its scathing sweeps, yet reduced to a precarious foothold in serious danger of undermining itself so completely that it too disappears into the gulf left by the implosion of philosophy. There is a good reason for having examined so deeply two bad analyses of self-justication. As part of Prousts exposure to and immersion in a long history of philosophy and psychology, these two close commentators on my governing concept are also part of the overall history of ideas soundlessly informing A la recherche du temps perdu and against which the novel project slowly took shape.31 Malebranche the philosopher who tolerates but gently mocks a conceptual category of reasoning, and Ribot the psychologist who strives to hold at bay a threatening component of mental functioning, may

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be seen as two kinds of hook holding up the intellectual backdrop upon which Prousts experimentation in subjectivity is conducted. Their analysis contributes a set of thoughts, attitudes, and terminologies which will recur as the study proceeds, and to which the main missing ingredient supplied by Prousts rigorous investigation of justication is, very precisely, self.

4. A N I N T R O D U C T O RY O V E RV I E W

OF THE

STUDY

I need to make just two more points before going on to summarize my books argument. The rst is a kind of bookmark, to tell us how far we have already come in getting to grips with the concept of self-justication. A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justication in every line.32 Conrads injunction to the artist seems to refer to a perfectionism which is also bound up in the relation between the art-maker and the artreceiver, or reader, or consumer, or viewer. Proust, sometime in the murky Contre Sainte-Beuve gestation period of 19089, has a similar note, but it is a self-directed one, a goad and a goal. Au fond, he says, toute ma philosophie revient, comme toute philosophie vraie, justier, reconstruire ce qui est.33 Prousts emphasis, at this melting-pot period out of which emerges a rstperson narrator, is vitally different from Conrads: for Proust, it is an ontological drive which spurs him to completion; for Conrad, completion is arrived at by satisfactorily arranging the presentation of the artwork. The perfectionism injected into the whole course of the Proustian narrators experience, and his concurrent or retrospective writing about it, is massive, general, total; Conrads is local, measured, focused. Among the plethora of other lustrous subjects Proust inspects: the functioning of Time, the workings of Memory, the needs met and dispatched by Habit, the language of owers, the Dreyfus Affair, monocles, manacles, the Pompeian Mtro, the calle of Venice, he has rigorously analysed, articulated and then run to ground the multiform modes of a very particular set of cognitive functions and relations. Proust, of course, though it is a very felicitous of course, and my second point, has thus built into his narrators perfectionism its own greatest blind spot. Wittgenstein puts it this way: Justication by experience comes to an end. If it did not it would not be justification.34 For Marcel, ontological considerations are inextricably meshed with empirical methods of analysis, which translates, as we will hear, into a powerful capacity to split open apparently stable justications into their component self-justicatory parts. How then am I going to show you self-justication in action? Making use of the new Pliade edition of A la recherche du temps perdu, Brunets

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concordance of the novel, Le Vocabulaire de Proust, and the electronic concordancing capacities of FRANTEXT (both of which are based on the previous 1954 Pliade edition of the text), it is the purpose of this study to show the contents of various Proustian textual laboratories, each conducting separate, but ultimately interconnected, linguistic, psychological and moral experiments upon the possibilities offered by self-justication.35 The book divides into three parts. The rst section examines the workings of three of the set-piece salon and soire scenes. Party-going, that most unlikely of domains for research purposes, yields up some strange selfjusticatory performances which are almost always passed over or giggled at without their vital signicance as notes on acceptability being analysed. If self-justication towards an external world perceived as intolerant and indifferent is clearly important in A la recherche, occupying large swathes of Le Ct de Guermantes and Sodome et Gomorrhe, other questions arise from its study. The second part of the book divides into three subsections. They look, in bald terms, at rhetoric, metaphor, and characterization. Digression is the subject of Chapter 2. One of the most beloved of Proustian stylistic features, digression is a trope which builds a seductive play into rhetorical organization. Alarmingly, however, it is not far from seductive play to defensive strategy of avoidance or evasion. Stopping in the middle of digressions, rather than announcing triumphantly that there are digressions in the novel, enables us to pursue a surprising, and painful line of argument from parties to people, in other words, between group functioning and relationships with individuals. This line of argument that moves via the bulges of digression in A la recherche resolves itself in the third chapter into a model for self-justication. My model shows how self-justication works in two directions in A la recherche. Vulnerability and doubt might be said to facilitate a dynamic engagement with the outside world, to the extent that admission to inadequacy opens a channel for the admission of alterity. They are also, clearly, mental states prone to blockage. The gure of the cloison is suggested as a focus of narratorial engagement with an intimate external reality, which demonstrates Marcels investigative skills but also the site of their potential failure. The cloison is a semi-permeable partition, a temporary screen which divides spaces internally, and enables the transmission of sound but not of light. It is used in the text both gurally and literally. Chapter 3 shows how, while justifying himself to the outside world can be seen as a learnable skill, even a necessary defence mechanism, based on imitation and disguise, selfjustication in relation to the discovery of homosexuality at the beginning of Sodome et Gomorrhe, or the narrators realization that he has lost a source of

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unconditional love with the death of his grandmother, hints at its potential to mutate into wilful self-protection. We now have a great deal of evidence about self-justication going on, so to speak, outside the narrator: mindstuff he can see or hear, and only very occasionally feel. So far, self-justication has been safely contained as something that happens to other people. The nal subsection, however, continues work begun in the cloison chapter, to question the safety of that detached spectacle. It investigates a particular difficulty apparent in the matter of Prousts characterization. Characters in the text who seem at rst sight straightforwardly comic, or one-dimensional, turn out to represent a potential threat to the narratorial self, and we will need to spend some time considering what Marcel does about this. The rst two sections of the study, then, show how Marcel justies himself in relation to external criteria. But when all of these external means of measurement are removed, self-justication takes on an entirely new aspect. In the nal section of the argument, an investigation of the processes of mourning is undertaken. Marcel mourns Albertine throughout Albertine disparue in a solitary narrative of distress. It is a section of the text rarely analysed, and reveals how Proust allows the different aspects of selfjustication to fuse, with devastating results. This is a very new vision of how A la recherche du temps perdu works, an epistemological and hermeneutic dilemma on active duty in the novel. And, in due course, the claims that Proust makes about the uses of selfjustication, as they are presented in the text, will themselves suggest some deeply troubling and painful conclusions. These will be conclusions rst about what Proust has written. In the second place, my conclusions are about how literature makes an impact upon the world only and precisely to the extent that it arises from intimacy with the world.

NOTES
1. Aeschylus, The Oresteia: The Eumenides, l. 839. 2. Vital as the madeleine moment is, I do not intend to dwell upon it in this study. Too many others have preceded me. Perhaps the most noteworthy of recent times is Serge Doubrovskys psychoanalytic account, La Place de la madeleine (1974), which has done a great deal to direct psychoanalytic literary criticism away from psychobiography, and promoted, along with the profoundly important narratological work carried out by Grard Genette, delicate attention to Prousts use of language. 3. Edmund Wilson, Axels Castle (1931); Roger Shattuck, Prousts Binoculars (1964); Samuel Beckett, Proust (1965); Leo Bersani, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (1965); Georges Poulet, LEspace proustien (2nd edn. 1982).

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4. Compare J.L. Austins A Plea for Excuses, Philosophical Papers (1961). Austin points out that aws in linguistic functioning show how that functioning takes place: the breakdowns signalized by ... various excuses are of radically different kinds, affecting different parts or stages of the machinery, which the excuses consequently pick out and sort out for us (p. 128). 5. See The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (1966), 245. 6. Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre venir (1959), 323. 7. See principally Marcel Muller, Les Voix narratives dans la recherche du temps perdu (1983). 8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Ltre et le nant (1943), 3989. 9. Les Voix narratives, 1516. 10. See Grard Genette, Figures III (1972). For prolepsis (anticipation), see p. 82; for paralepsis (here the narrator knowing too much for the formal, temporal, and epistemological constraints within which he seems to be functioning), Genettes own neologism, see pp. 21112. For more of Genettes narratological work on Proust, see Mtonymie chez Proust, Figures III, 4163, and of course the much more detailed Discours du rcit in the same book, pp. 65273; but also other essays, such as Proust palimpseste, Figures I (1966), 3967; and Proust et le langage indirect, Figures II (1969), 22394. 11. Augustines Confessions, c. 397; Rousseaus monumental Les Confessions, composed between 1764 and 1770, appeared posthumously from 1782; and his Les Rveries du promeneur solitaire and three dialogues, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques supplemented this vast autobiographical exercise; Benjamin Constants Adolphe was published in 1816; Fromentins Dominique was rst published in serial form in La Revue des Deux Mondes (AprilMay 1862); Andr Gide published LImmoraliste in 1902, La Porte troite in 1909, and La Symphonie pastorale in 1919. 12. See, however, for more detailed analysis of the genre of autobiography in France and Europe than I can give here: Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (1975) and his Je est un autre (1980); John Sturrock, The Language of Autobiography (1993); Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography (1993); Paul Jay, Being in the Text (1984). This is an ever more fully theorized (and circumscribed) critical eld, drawing its methodologies particularly from speech act theory, psychoanalysis and deconstruction. Autobiography has fascinating siblings in witness or testament narrative, particularly of the Holocaust; see e.g., Elie Wiesel, La Nuit (1958). Michel Foucault is the obligatory starting-point for critique of confession, see Histoire de la sexualit, i, La Volont de savoir (1976). 13. Dennis A. Foster, Confession and Complicity in Narrative (1987), 3. 14. Philippe Lejeune, criture et sexualit, Europe (1971); Jean-Louis Baudry, Proust, Freud et lautre (1984). 15. Michael Riffaterre, Compelling Reader Responses, in A. Bennet (ed.), Reading Reading (1993), 100. 16. To be found, respectively, in JS 8596 (written between 1892 and 1895, for Les Plaisirs et les jours); JS 16770 (1893); CSB 1509 (based on the van Blarenberghe matricide in 1907). Compare also Violante ou la mondanit (1892), JS 2937. A novella suppressed from Les Plaisirs et les jours was LIndiffrent (1896), ed. Philip Kolb (Gallimard, 1978), which has received renewed interest recently. See Julia Kristeva, Le Temps sensible (1994), 213. Kristevas interest is in the name of its

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heroine, who suffers from a mans indifference (because of his secret obsession with brothels and prostitutes): it is, naturally, Madeleine. 17. 18 or 19 Sept., 1906 (Corr. vi. 127). See Baudry, Proust, Freud, 29. 18. George D. Painter, Marcel Proust (1990), ii. 64. 19. Here is Prousts comment on the reversible transmission of characteristics between mother and son in Jean Santeuil: Peu peu, ce ls dont elle avait voulu former lintelligence, les murs, la vie, avait insinu en elle son intelligence, ses murs, sa vie mme et avait altr celles de sa mre (JS 871). 20. Baudry, Proust, Freud, 41. Antoine Compagnon demonstrates how casually ingrained this maternal guilt topos has become in readings of Prousts work, with uncritical commentary on Prousts so-called Baudelairean fascination with the lovehate maternal relationship (see Proust entre deux sicles (1989), 1605). 21. In Reading (Proust), Allegories of Reading (1979), 5778. See also Autobiography as De-Facement, MLN 94 (1979), 91930, on prosopopoeia as the trope of autobiography. Jonathan Culler has also written brilliantly on individual rhetorical devices. See among other writings, his essay, Apostrophe, diacritics, 7 (1977), 5969. 22. De Man, Allegories of Reading, 278301. 23. See, for an example of this trend, Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction (1992). 24. For a good overview of early responses to Prousts writing, see Leighton Hodson (ed.), Marcel Proust: The Critical Heritage (1989). For responses by contemporary writers, see Jean-Yves Tadi, Proust (1983), 153231. 25. See Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan (1987), for excellent analysis of these points of theoretical crossover, fusion, and complementarity. 26. See the journal series Bulletin dinformations proustiennes. Genesis is the organ of the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (ITEM/CNRS). A measure of the recent interest in the critical and theoretical possibilities offered by genetic criticism can be seen in the publication of an issue of Yale French Studies, 89 (1996), devoted to the subject. 27. It comes from late Latin, justification -em, in Augustine, etc.; comparable with the 12th-cent. French justification (in Godefroy, Dictionnaire de lancienne langue franaise, perhaps the immediate source). 28. Nicolas Malebranche, Que toutes les passions se justient, et des jugements quelles [nous] font [faire] pour leur justication, De la recherche de la vrit (16745), 3 vols. (Vrin, 1962), ii. 14651. 29. Thodule Ribot, Le Raisonnement de justication, La Logique des sentiments (1906; 5th edn. Alcan, 1920), 11115 (p. 111). 30. Andr Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (1993), i. 552. 31. See Kristeva, Le Temps sensible, 30737, for an excellent summary and analysis of Prousts exposure to contemporary philosophy and psychology through his school and university education, an exposure which took in a range of approaches from the idealism of Schopenhauers concentration on Will, to Gabriel Tardes resolutely cultural interpretation of society. 32. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897; preface, 1914), 3. 33. Cahier 29. N. a. fr. 16669, publ. in CSB as part of Notes sur la littrature et la critique, p. 309.

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34. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe (1953), 136, 485. 35. tienne Brunet, Le Vocabulaire de Proust, 3 vols. (1983); Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, 3 vols. (Gallimard, 1954), Online, FRANTEXT Base de donnes textuelles du francais (http://www.ciril.fr/~mastina/FRANTEXT), Internet. FRANTEXT has an extremely useful concordancing programme. Its use as a labourand time-saving device cannot be over-estimated. The concordancing programme can search not only for single-word instances, but also for word clusters, verb declensions, and collocations. Lists of pertinent quotations may then be conveniently downloaded and studied. At this time, the only difficulty is the subsequent pagereferencing work required in order to locate the word-pattern discoveries in the 19879 edn. of A la recherche, but this will be resolved when the rst CD-ROM hypertext edition of the text is put together, with esquisses, a publishing event that cannot be far off.

W I L L I A M C . C A RT E R

The Vast Structure of Recollection: from Life to Literature

n Paris, on Saturday, 3 September 1870, as news of the humiliating defeat of the French by the invading Prussian army at Sedan spread throughout the capital, Dr Adrien Proust, a middle-aged Catholic bachelor, a grocers son originally from the small provincial town of Illiers, married Jeanne Weil, the Jewish daughter of a wealthy Parisian family. At twenty-one, the beautiful, dark-haired woman was fteen years younger than the bridegroom. No one knows how they met, but it is likely they were introduced at a government sponsored event or social gathering. Adrien had recently risen to the top ranks in public health administration and Jeannes family had many connections in official circles. Marcel was born the following July at Uncle Louis Weils estate at Auteuil where Jeannes family usually spent the summer months. The house, built of quarrystones, was large, with spacious rooms, including a drawing room with a grand piano and a billiard room where the family sometimes slept to keep cool during heat waves.1 In ne weather Louis and his guests enjoyed the large garden with a pond surrounded by hawthorn trees, whose blossoms Marcel was also to admire in his other uncle, Jules Amiots garden in Illiers. Marcels mother possessed a lively mind, an unfailing sense of humour, a profound appreciation of literature and music, combined with common

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sense and a rm belief in traditional bourgeois values. Her inuence would be the most important in Prousts life. Jeanne and her mother, Adle, supervised his cultural education, exposing him to what they considered the best works in literature. In Jean Santeuil, the mother initiates Jean into the love of poetry by reading to him from Lamartines Mditations, Corneilles Horace and Hugos Contemplations. Jeans mother believes that good books, even if poorly understood at rst, provide the childs mind with healthy nourishment that will later benet him. When Marcel was older, his mother and grandmother read with him the great seventeenth-century works, of which he acquired a special understanding and appreciation. He came to love the tragedies of Jean Racine, whose masterpiece Phdre in its depiction of obsessive, destructive jealousy haunts the pages of In Search of Lost Time. Adriens sister, lisabeth, had married Jules Amiot, who operated a successful notions shop in Illiers at 14, place du March, opposite the church of Saint-Jacques. It was to the Amiots house in the rue du Saint-Esprit that Adrien returned with his wife and two young sons, Marcel and Robert, during the Easter holidays, when the town was at its best, offering wild owers and trees in bloom that Marcel adored. The Prousts travelled by rail from Paris to Chartres, where they changed trains for the short ride to Illiers. Seen from afar as the train approached, Illiers was contained in its steeple, just as is Combray in the Search: Combray, de loin ... ntait quune glise rsumant la ville, la reprsentant, parlant delle et pour elle aux lointains, et, quand on approchait, tenant serrs autour de sa haute mante sombre, en plein champ, contre le vent, comme une pastoure ses brebis, les dos laineux et gris des maisons rassembles. (I, 47) [Combray at a distance ... was no more than a church epitomising the town, representing it, speaking of it and for it to the horizon, and as one drew near, gathering close about its long dark cloak, sheltering from the wind, on the open plain, as a shepherdess gathers her sheep, the woolly grey backs of its huddled houses.] (I, 56/65) Jules indulged his passion for horticulture by creating a large pleasure garden, just beyond the banks of the gently owing Loir River. He called it the Pr Catelan, after a section of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. On the south end of the garden a magnicent row of hawthorn trees rose up a slope, leading to a large white gate that opened onto elds of blue cornowers and

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brilliant red poppies fanning out to the west and south on the plain towards Mrglise and the chteau of Tansonville. The Pr Catelan became the model in Swanns Way for Charles Swanns park at Tansonville near Combray.2 It must have seemed natural to Marcel, who often played in the Bois near Auteuil, for his Illiers uncle to name his own garden after the one in Paris. The name held in common by the two principal gardens of his childhood may have provided the rst linking in Marcels mind of the two spaces, Auteuil and Illiers, that inspired Combray. In Illiers, Marcel visited his elderly grandmother Proust who lived in a modest apartment. Relatively little is known about her except that she was an invalid cared for by an old servant, which makes her a more likely model for the hypochondriacal Aunt Lonie in the Search than lisabeth Amiot, generally considered the original. Adrien took his sons on walks to show them where he had played as a child. He pointed out how two different topographies join at Illiers: the Beauce, a at, windy plain that, as it moves westward, meets Le Perche, whose hilly terrain is ravined by streams rolling down to feed the Loir River. The dening features of Combrays ctional topography approximate those of Illiers where the two walksone the landscape of an ideal plain, the other a captivating river viewembody, for the child Narrator, two separate worlds. As Adrien and his boys made their way back from Tansonville, it was the steeple of Saint-Jacques, appearing now and then in the sky as they mounted a hillock or rounded a bend, that beckoned them home. Proust later used a motif from the churchs sculpted wood as one of the most powerful symbols of his art. On either wall behind the altar stands a wooden statue of a saint above whose heads are placed scallop shells. Such shells are the emblem of Saint James (Jacques in French) and, in the Middle Ages, were worn by the pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela. The church of Saint Jacques was a stopping point on the route to Spain. The shells also provide the form of the little cakes known as madeleines, symbol of a key revelation in the Narrators quest to nd his vocation as a writer. Proust would remember the connection between the pilgrims and the madeleines, when he described the cakes in the Search: the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds (I, 46; I, 54/63). On his walks through the river country north of Illiers, Marcel spied on Mirougrain, the large manor house built on a slope overlooking a water-lily pond. Proust remembered the impressions evoked by this mysterious dwelling later when creating the composer Vinteuils house in the Search. He took the name of the old mill, Montjouvin, but used the setting and atmosphere of Mirougrain for the lesbian love scene between Vinteuils

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daughter and her friend. The names of the streets, old inns, manor houses and ruined churches of Illiers and its surroundings, such as Tansonville, Mrglise, Montjouvin, Saint-Hilaire, rue de lOiseau esch, were to live in Prousts memory and imagination, until he used them, with slight alterations or none at all, as part of the material out of which he constructed Combray, a place that exists only in his book. A story that Proust wrote in his early twenties depicts the goodnight kiss drama from his childhood, generally thought to have taken place at Auteuil.3 In La Confession dune jeune lle [A Girls Confession], a woman, dying of a self-inicted gunshot wound, confesses her weakness that led to tragedy. Although she had given up her lewd behaviour to become engaged to a ne young man, she succumbed one evening to the temptations offered by an attractive guest. Her mother, who happened to catch the daughter and visitor in a passionate embrace, fell dead from the shock. As the girl lies dying, she recalls her childhood and the tender, loving relationship with her mother. Until she reached fteen, her mother left her every summer at a country home. The child, like Marcel, dreaded more than anything separation from her mother. Before departing, the mother used to spend two days with her, coming each evening to her bed to kiss her goodnight, a custom the mother had to abandon because jy trouvais trop de plaisir et trop de peine, que je ne mendormais plus force de la rappeler pour me dire bonsoir encore (JS, p.86) [it caused me too much pleasure and too much pain, because due to my calling her back to say goodnight again and again I could never go to sleep].4 This is the prototype of the crucial goodnight kiss scene in the Search that sets in motion the Narrators long quest to regain his lost will and become a creative person. In the Search, it is the mothers habit to give the child Narrator one last kiss before going to bed. On nights when company prevents her from coming to his room, he is particularly upset. On one such night, he waits up for her and then implores her to remain with him. She does not want to yield to his nervous anxiety, but the usually stern father intervenes and capriciously tells her to stay with the boy. The child, incredulous at the easy violation of a strict rule, feels guilty for having caused his mother to abandon her convictions. He will spend the rest of his life trying to recover the will he lost that night and to expiate the wrong done to his mother. This scene illustrates how Proust eventually learned to make his private demons serve the plot and structure of his novel. It was probably during the fall visit of 1886 to Illiers that Marcel, at fteen, knew that he wanted to be a writer. He had brought along Augustin Thierrys history, The Norman Conquest of England, considered a masterpiece

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of historical narration. As he read page after page of vivid, picturesque narration, he was captivated. In an early draft of Du ct de chez Swann, Proust evokes this reading in the context of the Narrators visit to Combray: Je lisais dans la salle au coin du feu la Conqute de lAngleterre par les Normands dAugustin Thierry; puis quand jtais fatigu du livre, quelque temps quil ft, je sortais: mon corps rest immobile pendant ces heures de lecture o le mouvement de mes ides lagitait sur place pour ainsi dire, tait comme une toupie qui soudain lche a besoin de dpenser dans tous les sens la vitesse accumule. (Textes retrouvs, pp.1789.) [I read, in the living room by the reside, Augustin Thierrys The Norman Conquest of England; then, when I tired of reading, I went out, no matter what the weather: my body, which in the long spell of immobility while reading for hours, during which the movement of my ideas kept it moving in place so to speak, was like a wound up top which, when suddenly released, felt the need to let go, to expend the accumulated energy in every direction.] (Translation mine.) In the nal version, the situation is the same, but the book is unspecied. The Narrator realises, as he walks through the forest, that despite his great desire to express himself as forcefully as the authors he loves, he is incapable of doing so. He expels his pent-up energy and frustrations by shouting and beating the trees with his umbrella. The passage illustrates one of Prousts most successful narrative tricks, used with variations throughout the Search: he tells us in dazzling prose about his inability to write! Voyant sur leau et la face du mur un ple sourire rpondre au sourire du ciel, je mcriai dans mon enthousiasme en brandissant mon parapluie referm: Zut, zut, zut, zut. Mais en mme temps je sentis que mon devoir et t de ne pas men tenir ces mots opaques et de tcher de voir plus clair dans mon ravissement. (I, 153) [Seeing upon the water, and on the surface of the wall, a pallid smile responding to the smiling sky, I cried aloud in my enthusiasm, brandishing my furled umbrella: Gosh, gosh, gosh,

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gosh! But at the same time I felt that I was in duty bound not to content myself with these unilluminating words, but to endeavour to see more clearly into the sources of my rapture.] (I, 186/219) The ebullience Marcel felt during such readings created in him an urge to uncover and express the hidden secrets, the profound meaning of the impressions stored up during his walks. And he had made an invaluable discovery: he must devote his life to literature. But how? And what would he write about? One day while playing in the garden along the Champs-lyses, Marcel met Marie de Benardaky and fell in love. Once he met Marie, nothing mattered more than the afternoon trek to the garden to nd the pretty, exuberant girl with the open, winsome smile whom he remembered as the intoxication and despair of my childhood and one of the great loves of my life (see Corr. XVII, 175, 194). In Jean Santeuil, where Proust describes his infatuation, Marie appears with her real name (JS, p.46). His crush on her evolved into the Narrators adolescent love for Gilberte. But Marcel was not attracted solely to girls. He wrote classmates letters expressing affection, recriminations and invitations to have sex (see Selected Letters, I, 1011). Many of his adolescent letters are remarkable because he used them, not simply to express his emotions, but to analyse his feelings and try to comprehend his motivations and those of his classmates. He played roles and assigned different attitudes to his friends. This practice, begun at such a young age, combined with his extraordinary sensitivity, which allowed him to put himself in anothers place, served him well when, as a mature writer, he began creating fascinating, multifaceted characters. After high school, Marcel received invitations to Pariss leading salons where he met many prominent socialites, such as Charles Ephrussi and Charles Haas, both successful Jews who moved at ease in the art world and in high society and who served as models for Charles Swann. At Madeleine Lemaires salon Proust met aristocrats, artists and political figures. Celebrated actors Sarah Bernhardt and Rjane, both models for the Searchs La Berma, often attended, as did writers Pierre Loti, Jules Lematre and Anatole France. Madeleine, who loved music, offered her guests the occasion to listen to Pariss most celebrated composers. One might hear Camille Saint-Sans, Jules Massenet, or Gabriel Faur at the piano playing their own works or accompanying a singer. Here Proust met the darkly handsome Reynaldo Hahn, only nineteen and already successful as a composer and performer. Soon he and Marcel were inseparable. Madeleine, who insisted

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upon silence during performances, provided the primary model for Prousts domineering hostess Mme Verdurin, who, like Lemaire, refers to the members of her salon as the faithful. Madeleine introduced Proust to Robert de Montesquiou and begged the conceited, irascible count to be kind to the intimidated youth. Montesquiou, recognising Marcels potential as an admiring disciple, invited him to call. The count, arbiter of taste and epitome of aristocratic hauteur, poet, artist, and critic, supplied Proust, over the years, with the major ingredients for one of his most famous characters, the disdainful, vituperative, homosexual Baron de Charlus. Between his twentieth and twenty-fth birthdays, Proust wrote many stories that were published in reviews or in the volume Les Plaisirs et les jours, illustrated by Madeleine Lemaire and prefaced by Anatole France. These stories present important themes that were fully developed and orchestrated in the mature novel. In LIndiffrent, a novella about desire, Marcel described the fear of imminent death from suffocation. He likened an asthmatic childs experience of breathlessness to the feeling of panic and doom that overcomes the lover upon learning that the beloved is to depart on a long voyage: Un enfant qui depuis sa naissance respire sans y avoir jamais pris garde, ne sait pas combien lair qui gone si doucement sa poitrine ... est essentiel sa vie. Vient-il, pendant un accs de vre, dans une convulsion, touffer? Dans leffort dsespr de son tre, cest presque pour sa vie, quil lutte, cest pour sa tranquillit perdue quil ne retrouvera quavec lair duquel il ne la savait pas insparable.5 [A child who has been breathing since birth, without being aware of it, does not realise how essential to life is the air that swells his chest so gently ... But what happens if, during a high fever or a convulsion, he starts to suffocate? His entire being will struggle desperately to stay alive, to recapture his lost tranquillity that will return only with the air from which, unbeknownst to him, it was inseparable.] (My translation.) Asthma, rst experienced by Proust at age ten, reminded him of the sheer terror that overtook him when he learned that his mother was leaving on a trip and, eventuallywhen he had become so dependent on her presence even when she came to kiss him good night. LIndiffrent tells the story of Madeleine who falls helplessly in love with Lepr, a man who cannot return

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her affection. She nally learns that he leads a secret life that explains his indifference to decent women. He can only make love to prostitutes, whom he pursues relentlessly. A similar trait is given to Swann, a highly eligible bachelor who, rather than making a good marriage and settling down, prefers to seduce servant girls. Avant la nuit [Before Nightfall], written in 1893, was Prousts rst published work about a future major theme in the Search: same-sex love. The character Franoise incarnates and legitimises homosexuality; like the heroine of La Confession dune jeune lle, she shoots herself. Before dying, Franoise observes that Socrates, a wise and just man, tolerated homosexuality. After acknowledging the superiority of procreative love, she argues that when the purpose of lovemaking is not procreative, there can be no hierarchy among sterile loves, and, therefore, it is no more immoral for a woman to nd pleasure with another woman than with a man. Franoises nal justication for such love is aesthetic. Since both female and male bodies can be beautiful, there is no reason why une femme vraiment artiste ne serait pas amoureuse dune femme. Chez les natures vraiment artistes lattraction ou la rpulsion physique est modie par la contemplation du beau (JS, p.170) [a woman who is truly an artist should not fall in love with another woman. Among those with truly artistic natures, physical attraction or repulsion is modied by the contemplation of beauty: my translation]. These justications for homosexual desire are rened and expanded in the Search, where Proust became the rst novelist to depict the continuum of human sexual expression. In these early stories, Proust treated themes that he was to develop until they became uniquely his. In Lventail [The Fan] a lady paints on a fan memories of her salon, a little universe ... that we shall never see again. This notion of moments rescued from oblivion, illustrated by the minor art of fan painting, states his main theme: time lostand regained. But, like the fan painter, Proust remained, until he was nearly forty, an artist in a minor genre, rendering exquisite little pieces that might easily go unnoticed. La Fin de la jalousie [The End of Jealousy] focuses on another major Proustian preoccupation. Honore is in love with Franoise, with whom he has enjoyed a passionate, secret liaison. A gentleman friend tells him that Franoise is easy to possess, but too arduous in her affairs. This remark transforms Honor, who becomes extremely jealous and interrogates Franoise, who swears she has always been faithful. This story, Prousts favourite from his early years, possesses the dynamics of nearly all the erotic relationships in the Search. The two most fully developed of these, Swanns obsession with Odette and the Narrators with Albertine, follow the

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pattern of emotions that bind Honor and Franoise. The lies that Honor tells Franoise, as he attempts to trick her into making revelations, are the models for Swanns jealous interrogations of Odette and the Narrators of Albertine. In 1895, Marcel and Reynaldo, vacationing in Brittany, reached the village of Beg-Meil where, on a hill overlooking the sea, they found a small hotel. It was here that Marcel most likely began drafting Jean Santeuil. Prousts encounter with Thomas Alexander Harrison, an American expatriate, inspired the character known as the writer C, aspects of whom Proust would use in the Search for Elstir who, like Harrison, is a painter.6 A text combining Prousts impressions of Beg-Meil and Lake Geneva sketches a key theme: the phenomenon of memory ignited by a physical sensation, the examination of which leads him to conclude that our true nature lies outside time. One day Jean is driving through farmland near Geneva, when he suddenly sees the lake: En apercevant ainsi la mer (cest presque la mer cette heure-l) au bout de la route ... Jean sest aussitt souvenu. Et voici quil la voit belle, quil en sent le charme, de cette mer dautrefois, en la retrouvant l devant lui. Et soudain toute cette vie de l-bas quil croyait inutile et inutilise lui apparat charmante et belle ... quand le soleil baissait avec la mer devant soi. (JS, pp.3989) [Looking at the sea (at this hour it had almost the appearance of the sea) at the end of the road ... Jean suddenly remembered. He saw it before him as the very sea he once had known, and felt its charm. In a ash, that life in Brittany which he had thought useless and unusable, appeared before his eyes in all its charm and beauty ... when the sun was setting and the sea stretched out before him.]7 Then he wonders about the nature of the extraordinary phenomenon he is experiencing and sees that what the poet needs to feed his imagination is memory experienced in the present, containing both the past and now. Jean then recalls a similar experience, provoked by the smell of a seaside villa where he and his family had vacationed: Toute cette vie, toutes ses attentes, ses ennuis, sa faim, son sommeil, son insomnie, ses projets, ses tentatives de jouissance esthtique et leur chec, ses essais de jouissance sensuelle ... ses

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essais de captation dune personne qui plat ... cette odeur a envelopp tout cela. (JS, p.400) [The whole of that period of my life, with its hopes, its worries, its hungers, its hours of sleep or sleeplessness, its efforts to nd joy in artwhich ended in failureits experiments in sensual gratication ... its attempts to win the love of someone who had taken my fancy ... all were caught up and made present in that smell.] (p.408) Shortly after 25 December 1898, Proust wrote to thank Marie Nordlinger for her Christmas card. In his meditative letter he touched on topics that pre-occupied him and would form the philosophical underpinnings of his future work: the soul and its encasement in the body, the passage of time and, through time, the slow, unconscious accumulation of memories, largely ignored by the supercial, egotistical self. Sounding the depths of his being, Proust perceived only a faint echo indicating the unknown treasures that might lie buried beneath the sands of time. The scent of tea and mimosa furnishes the sesame that opened, at least briey in 1898, the door to the treasure trove. He spoke rst about Christmas cards and other symbols and why we need them: Si nous ntions que des tres de raison nous ne croirions pas aux anniversaires, aux ftes, aux reliques, aux tombeaux. Mais comme nous sommes faits aussi dun peu de matire, nous aimons croire quelle est quelque chose aussi dans la ralit et nous aimons que ce qui tient de la place dans notre cur en ait aussi une petite autour de nous, quelle ait, comme notre me la en notre corps, son symbole matriel. Et puis au fur et mesure que Nol perd pour nous de sa vrit comme anniversaire, par la douce manation des souvenirs accumuls il prend une ralit de plus en plus vive, o la lumire des bougies ... lodeur de ses mandarines imbibant la chaleur des chambres, la gait de ses froids et de ses feux, les parfums du th et des mimosas nous rapparaissent enduits du miel dlicieux de notre personnalit que nous y avons inconsciemment dpose pendant des annes, alors quefascins par des buts gostesnous ne la sentions pas, et maintenant tout dun coup elle nous fait battre le cur. (Corr. II, 26970)

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[If we were creatures only of reason, we would not believe in anniversaries, holidays, relics or tombs. But since we are also made up in some part of matter we like to believe that it too has a certain reality and we want what holds a place in our hearts to have some small place in the world around us and to have its material symbol, as our soul has in our body. And while little by little Christmas has lost its truth for us as an anniversary, it has at the same time, through the gentle emanation of accumulated memories, taken on a more and more living reality, in which candlelight ... the smell of its tangerines imbibing the warmth of heated rooms, the gaiety of its cold and its res, the scent of tea and mimosa, return to us overlaid with the delectable honey of our personality, which we have unconsciously been depositing over the years during whichengrossed in selsh pursuitswe paid no attention to it, and now suddenly it sets our hearts to beating.] (Selected Letters I, 180) Proust must have recognised the importance of these insights, since he transposed them for a scene in Jean Santeuil inspired by another of his muses, the young and beautiful poet Anna de Noailles, to whom he gave the ctional name Vicomtesse Gaspard de Rveillon. Proust attempted to state the importance of such intoxicating, eeting episodes, like the one evoked by tea and mimosa, that inspire creativity: Nos pomes tant prcisment la commmoration de nos minutes inspires, lesquelles sont dj souvent une sorte de commmoration de tout ce que notre tre a laiss de lui-mme dans des minutes passes, essence intime de nousmme que nous rpandons sans la connatre, mais quun parfum senti alors, une mme lumire tombant dans la chambre, nous rend tout dun coup jusqu nous en enivrer et nous laisser indiffrents la vie relle dans laquelle nous ne la sentons jamais, moins que cette vie ne soit en mme temps une vie passe, de sorte que dgags un instant de la tyrannie du prsent, nous sentons quelque chose qui dpasse lheure actuelle, lessence de nous-mme. (JS, p.521) [Poems being precisely the commemoration of our inspired moments which in themselves are often a sort of communication of all that our being has left of itself in moments past, the concentrated essence of ourselves which we exude without

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realising that we are doing so, which a perfume smelled in that past time, a remembered light shining into our room, will suddenly bring back so vividly, that it lls us with ... intoxication, so that we become completely indifferent to what is usually called real life, in which it never visits us unless that life be at the same time a past life, so that freed for a moment from the tyranny of the present, we feel something that spreads out beyond the actual minute, the essence of our being.] (p.464; the essence of our being is omitted from the English translation.) In the Search, Proust turns this around, as hinted here, and says that moments of vivid, spontaneous memory and their conscious application in the creative process form the real life and that our daily life in its habitual, vain actions is a life lived on the surface, and hence, a life lost. The letter to Marie and the draft in Jean Santeuil where Lake Geneva recalls Beg-Meil are Prousts rst known gropings for the elucidation of the key moment in his novel: the experience he called involuntary memory. These early attempts to describe and comprehend this phenomenon indicate there was not one extraordinary moment in Prousts life when he bit into a madeleine and, in a frenzy of inspiration, began writing the Search. Proust recognised, as early as Jean Santeuil, that the key to his work lay submerged in the past. He saw the rich potential of such experiences, saying they were alive on a higher level than memory or than the present so that they have not the flatness of pictures but the rounded fullness of reality, the imprecision of feeling (Jean Santeuil, p.409). But he was years away from discovering how to make them serve a novels plot. Around 1899, unable to create a plot and nd the right point of view, he abandoned Jean Santeuil. From 190005 Proust translated John Ruskins The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies. This arduous work, entailing the study of French history, geography, architecture and the Bible, proved crucial to the development of Prousts own style and aesthetics. In Sur la lecture [On Reading], the preface to his translation of Sesame and Lilies, Proust wrote: Il ny a peuttre pas de jours de notre enfance que nous ayons si pleinement vcus que ceux que nous avons cru laisser sans les vivre, ceux que nous avons passs avec un livre prfr (CSB, p.160) [There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we let slip by without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book].8 Books were more than words on paper; the novels he had loved in childhood held the power to evoke the places in which he had rst read them: sil nous arrive encore aujourdhui de feuilleter ces livres dautrefois, ce nest pas que comme les seuls calendriers

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que nous ayons gards des jours enfuis, et avec lespoir de voir rets sur leurs pages les demeures et les tangs qui nexistent plus (CSB, p.160) [If we still happen today to leaf through those books of another time, it is for no other reason than that they are the only calendars we have kept of days that have vanished, and we hope to see reected on their pages the dwellings and the ponds which no longer exist].9 The beginning of the preface, with its shifts in time and place, is an early sketch for the rst paragraph of the Search, where the Narrator in bed, falling asleep while reading, is uncertain of where he is, who he is, and even what he is, since in his slumbering state he confuses his own identity with that of the book he is trying to read. The preface ends with another resurrection of the past. Readers of the preface cannot have knownnor could Proust himselfthat they were being given a foretaste of Combray. On New Years Day, 1908, Mme Straus gave Proust five little notebooks from a smart stationery shop. Thanking her in a February letter, he indicated that he had a new project and was eager to settle down to a fairly long piece of work (Selected Letters II, p.348). The rst of these notebooks, known as Le Carnet de 1908, bears annotations for various projects that slowly converge and lead to the Search.10 One episode, evoking childhood memories, shows his little brother Robert being forced to part with his pet kid. Robert was eventually written out of the story altogether and the lengthy scene reduced to twenty-ve lines when the Narrator bids farewell to his beloved hawthorns at Combray (I, 143; I, 1734/2034). Other autobiographical elements are found here. The Narrators mother, encouraging him to be brave while she is away, quotes inspiring passages about courage from Latin and French authors. For several years, Proust made entries in the notebook regarding topics and themes, lists of names that might serve for characters, and sensations: odours of rooms, bed sheets, grass, perfume, soap, food, capable of reviving the past. The Carnet of 1908 served as a memo pad and, later, as an inventory of sections already written. As the 1908 text progressed from essay to ction, the theme of homosexual love, nearly absent from Jean Santeuil, became a major topic. In the Search Proust analyses erotic love in heterosexual and homosexual couples, showing that the obsessions of desire and jealousy are the same and doomed to failure because they are based on illusions. In July, Proust listed the six episodes he had written (Le Carnet de 1908, p.56). The rst was Robert and the Kid, followed by the Villebon Way and the Msglise Way. The two place names, the rst from a chteau near Illiers and the other from a nearby village, indicate he had found the two ways, one of the major unifying elements of the Search. Another key episode

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was the mothers goodnight kiss. The last episode on the list concludes the story: What I learned from the Villebon Way and the Msglise Way. Proust had conceived an apprentice novel, in which the neurotically dependent Narrator grows up to explore the two ways of his worldthat of the landed gentry and Paris salonsfails to nd happiness in erotic love, and explores the world of homosexuality. Prousts novel would be circular in time and space. As a child the Narrator believed the two ways led in different directions and must remain forever separated, but as an adult, he discovers the ways are joined by a circular path. Having completed his quest, the Protagonist understands, at last, the true nature of his experience, is fully endowed as a creative person and ready to write the ideal version of the story we have just read. However, Prousts latest efforts to write a novel were again undermined by self-doubt. Overwhelmed by all that he wanted to say and his inability to shape and focus the material, he felt a sense of urgency: Warnings of death. Soon you will not be able to say all that. Then Proust judged himself severely: Laziness or doubt or impotency taking refuge in the lack of certainty over the art form. He was stymied by the same challenges regarding plot, genre, and structure that had made him abandon Jean Santeuil. He asked the questions left unanswered a decade earlier: Must I make of it a novel, a philosophical study, am I a novelist? (Le Carnet de 1908, pp.601). Before he felt condent that he had found his story, Proust made one more detour in pursuing his goal, this time by way of Sainte-Beuve. In late 1908, Proust bought a quantity of school notebooks. By August 1909, he had written nearly 700 pages of an essay attacking the eminent critics method and legacy. Some of these drafts anticipate the Search. By mid-December Proust found himself at an impasse. He wrote to Georges de Lauris and Anna de Noailles, whose literary judgement he trusted, and asked each to indicate the better of two ideas for attacking Sainte-Beuve: La chose sest btie dans mon esprit de deux faons diffrentes ... La premire est lessai classique, lEssai de Taine en mille fois moins bien (sauf le contenu qui est je crois nouveau). La deuxime commence par un rcit du matin ... Maman vient me voir prs de mon lit, je lui dis que jai lide dune tude sur Sainte-Beuve, je la lui soumets et la lui dveloppe. (Corr. VIII, 3201) [The idea has taken shape in my mind in two different ways ... The rst would be a classical essay, an essay in the manner of

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Taine, only a thousand times less good (except for the content which I think is new). The second begins with an account of a morning, my waking up and Mama coming to my bedside; I tell her I have an idea for a study of Sainte-Beuve; I submit it to her and develop it.] (Selected Letters II, 416) In drafts for the introduction to Against Sainte-Beuve, Proust wrote that his old cook offered me a cup of tea, a thing I never drink. And as chance would have, she brought me some slices of dry toast. As soon as he dipped the toast in the tea and tasted it je ressentis un trouble, des odeurs de graniums, dorangers, une sensation dextraordinaire lumire, de bonheur. [Something came over methe smell of geraniums and orange-blossoms, a sensation of extraordinary radiance and happiness.] He concentrated on the taste of the toast and tea qui semblait produire tant de merveilles, quand soudain les cloisons branles de ma mmoire cdrent, et ce furent les ts que je passais dans la maison de campagne ... Alors je me rappelai ... (CSB, p.212) [which seemed responsible for all these marvels; then suddenly the shaken partitions in my memory gave way, and into my conscious mind there rushed the summers I had spent in the ... house in the country. And then I remembered].11 In his critical remarks about Sainte-Beuve, Proust is writing as himself in a ctional situation, imagining a conversation with his mother. This invented setting for a real person (Proust) commenting on another real person and his work (Sainte-Beuve) served as the incubator for the emergence of the Narrators full voice. In the Sainte-Beuve passages describing involuntary memory, Proust began to transmute his lived experience and his invented ones into the Narrators life. We can see the transition from essayist to novelist in many notations from Le Carnet de 1908. A strange but remarkably fecund symbiosis is being created in which Proust is himself and not himself as the Narrator. Although highly autobiographical, the Search is a true novel. The Narrator, who resembles Proust in many ways, is different in others. Although remarkably well informed about homosexuality, he desires only women. His mother, unlike Jeanne Proust, is not Jewish nor is the heros father a distinguished medical luminary. By the time he nished his novel, Proust would have created what is perhaps the richest narrative voice in literature, a voice that speaks both as child and as man, as actor and as subject, and that weaves effortlessly between the present, past and future. While writing about his dilemma as an author, Proust had been tracing, without seeing it, the answer to the question that had tortured him for so

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long. The Search is about a man who cannot write and spends his life pursuing the wrong paths (lost time, wasted time), until at the very end, ill, discouraged, and growing old, he discovers that his vocation is to write the experience of his lifenow that he understands it at last and can transpose it into a work of ction. This moment of illumination is described in Time Regained: Alors, moins clatante sans doute que celle qui mavait fait apercevoir que luvre dart tait le seul moyen de retrouver le Temps perdu, une nouvelle lumire se t en moi. Et je compris que tous ces matriaux de luvre littraire, ctait ma vie passe; je compris quils taient venus moi, dans les plaisirs frivoles, dans la paresse, dans la tendresse, dans la douleur, emmagasins par moi, sans que je devinasse plus leur destination, leur survivance mme, que la graine mettant en rserve tous les aliments qui nourriront la plante ... je me trouvais avoir vcu pour elle sans le savoir, sans que ma vie me part devoir entrer jamais en contact avec ces livres que jaurais voulu crire et pour lesquels, quand je me mettais autrefois ma table, je ne trouvais pas de sujet. Ainsi toute ma vie jusqu ce jour aurait pu et naurait pas pu tre rsume sous ce titre: Une vocation. (IV, 478) [And then a new light, less dazzling, no doubt, than that other illumination which had made me perceive that the work of art was the sole means of rediscovering Lost Time, shone suddenly within me. And I understood that all these materials for a work of literature were simply my past life, I understood that they had come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in indolence, in tenderness, in unhappiness, and that I had stored them up without divining the purpose for which they were destined or even their continued existence any more than a seed does when it forms within itself a reserve of all the nutritious substances from which it will feed a plant ... I began to perceive that I had lived for the sake of the plant without knowing it, without ever realising that my life needed to come into contact with those books which I had wanted to write and for which, when in the past I had sat down at my table to begin, I had been unable to nd a subject. And thus my whole life up to the present day might and yet might not have been summed up under the title: A Vocation.] (VI, 2589/304)

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In 1909, while vacationing at Cabourg, Proust wrote Mme Straus and told her: ... Ive just begunand nisheda whole long book (Selected Letters II, 4456). This whole long book was the earliest draft of the Search, the opening section Combray, which establishes the major characters, locations, themes, and the conclusion, in which the Narrator understands the lessons from his apprenticeship. The most important word in the letter is nished. Since the days when he struggled unsuccessfully to complete Jean Santeuil, Proust had never been able to nish any work of ction because he lacked the story and point of view. He had at last found the ideal structure for his narrative skills. Proust never composed in a linear manner or according to an outline. He always worked like a mosaicist, taking a particular scene, anecdote, impression, image, and crafting it to completion. In his manuscripts, there are many notes to himself about such bits, To be placed somewhere, or, if a remark or trait, to give it to a certain character or perhaps to another. As he composed and orchestrated the rich Proustian music, the structure expanded to include the war years and the Albertine cycle, partly inuenced by his love for the doomed chauffeur Alfred Agostinelli. In the summer of 1911, Proust wrote Ren Gimpel, who had connections with the Japanese art world, to inquire if he knew le petit jeu japonais ... qui consiste mettre des petits papiers dans leau [lesquels] se contournent devenant des bonshommes etc. Pourriez-vous demander des Japonais comment cela sappelle, mais surtout si cela se fait quelquefois dans du th, si cela se fait dans de leau indiffremment chaude ou froide, et dans les plus compliqus sil peut y avoir des maisons, des arbres, des personnages, enn quoi. (Corr. X, 321. Prousts emphasis.) [the little Japanese ... game that consists in soaking little scraps of paper in water which then twist themselves round and turn into little men, etc. Could you ask someone Japanese what its called, and especially whether its sometimes done with tea, whether its done with either hot or cold water, and in the more complicated ones whether there can be houses, trees, persons, or what have you.] (Selected Letters III, 434, and n. I. Prousts emphasis.) Proust had returned to the image of tea and toast (from the essay on SainteBeuve) for the passage on involuntary memory, adding the madeleine dipped in tea and expanding the metaphoric role of the Japanese pellets to explain

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this phenomenon that revived the past. He intended to place the scene in the Combray section where it is the rst such episode. He was curious about the pellets capacity to form houses and people because when the Narrator bites into the tea-soaked cake, the sensations that overwhelm him evoke the entire village from his lost youth: Et comme dans ce jeu o les Japonais samusent tremper dans un bol de porcelaine rempli deau, de petits morceaux de papier jusque-l indistincts qui, peine y sont-ils plongs stirent, se contournent, se colorent, se diffrencient, deviennent des eurs, des maisons, des personnages consistants et reconnaissables, de mme maintenant toutes les eurs de notre jardin et celles du parc de M. Swann, et les nymphas de la Vivonne, et les bonnes gens du village et leurs petits logis et lglise et tout Combray et ses environs, tout cela qui prend forme et solidit, est sorti de ma tasse de th. (1, 47) [And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by lling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become owers or houses or people, solid and recognisable, so in that moment all the owers in our garden and in M. Swanns park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.] (1, 545/64) The conclusion of the madeleine scene summarises the experience of involuntary memory, the means by which the Narrator can regain his past, whose elements he will, upon the discovery of his vocation, examine, comprehend, enrich and transpose into a work of art: Quand dun pass ancien rien ne subsiste, aprs la mort des tres, aprs la destruction des choses, seules, plus frles mais plus vivaces, plus immatrielles, plus persistantes, plus dles, lodeur et la saveur restent encore longtemps, comme des mes, se rappeler, attendre, esprer, sur la ruine de tout le reste,

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porter sans chir, sur leur gouttelette presque impalpable, ldice immense du souvenir. (1, 46) [When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear uninchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.] (1, 54/634)

NOTES
1. See Denise Mayer, Le Jardin de Marcel Proust, Cahiers Marcel Proust, nouvelle srie 12, tudes proustiennes 5 (1984), 14. 2. In 1971, on the centennial of Prousts birth, Illiers officially changed its name to Illiers-Combray, in a brilliant public-relations initiative and unique example of reality yielding to ction. 3. In a letter written after his mothers death, Proust recalled his childhood when she would refuse to come back ten times and tell me goodnight before going out for the evening. See Corr. VI, 28. 4. Marcel Proust, Pleasures and Regrets, trans. Louise Varese (New York: Crown, 1948), p.32. 5. LIndiffrent, introduced and edited by Philip Kolb (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), pp.423. By coincidence, the last sentence quoted contains two words that are the keys to the Search: loss and recapture. 6. Philip Kolb, Historique du premier roman de Proust, in Saggi e ricerche di letteratura francese, IV, 1963, 224. 7. Jean Santeuil, trans. Gerard Hopkins (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), p.408. 8. On Reading Ruskin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p.99. Translation slightly modied. 9. On Reading Ruskin, pp.99100. 10. Le Carnet de 1908 transcribed and edited by Philip Kolb, Cahiers Marcel Proust, nouvelle srie 8, 1976. 11. See Marcel Proust, On Art and Literature, trans. Sylvia Townsend Warner and with an introduction by Terence Kilmartin (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1997), p.19. See also Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, translated with an introduction and notes by John Sturrock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), pp.34.

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Albertines Bicycle, or: Women and French Identity during the Belle Epoque

Seul, je restai simplement devant le Grand-Htel [ ... ] quand [ ... ] je vis avancer cinq ou six llettes, aussi diffrentes, par laspect et par les faons, de toutes les personnes auxquelles on tait accoutum Balbec, quaurait pu ltre, dbarque on ne sait do, une bande de mouettes [ ... ]. Une de ces inconnues poussait devant elle, de la main, sa bicyclette. Marcel Proust, A lombre des jeunes filles en eurs.1

t is often suggested that French identity was reconstructed during the early years of the Third Republic, after the trauma of the Franco-Prussian war and the gradual elimination of attempts to revive either the monarchy or the Empire. The consolidation of republican institutions, and the national and republican pride instilled in French children through the primary school under Jules Ferry in the 1880s, are convincingly portrayed by historians such as Eugen Weber, in his Peasants into Frenchmen (1977), as contributing to a unitary sense of nationhood.2 Webers very title, however, points to some gender trouble. This turns up again in Benedict Andersons analysis of imagined communities, in which France is a constant presence.3 The collectively imagined community often turns out in Andersons book to be male-centred, with a recurring note of fraternity, of violence (dying for the nation), and even of reassuring fratricide, located in previous internal civil

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strife. With the overtly masculine language of fraternity being so closely linked to identity, what kind of national identity, one might inquire, were women supposed to adhere to? Although during the period usually known as the Belle Epoque, French women were beginning to see some changes in their status, they were still excluded from citizenship and from many civil rights taken for granted by men. Fin-de sicle republican ideology explicitly viewed the role of women, as in the Jacobin republic a hundred years earlier, as reproductive. The French state asked them to produce citizens, not to be citizens themselves. Anticlerical politicians moreover considered women overly subject to the inuence of the Catholic Church, a question which was long to bedevil their claims for the suffrage. But while historical discussion of French national identity has tended to marginalize women, they are extraordinarily present in the literary and iconographic history of Belle Epoque France. This was not a society without women, rather it was an age when relations between the sexes were a major and much-discussed preoccupation. This paper will argue that attempts to construct a unitary French identity were in conict with an alien notion: that of the New Woman, landed none knew whence, as Proust described his rst sight of Albertine and her friends. Let me start with a cultural event often viewed as emblematic of Belle Epoque France: the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. The entry to the site was marked by an ornamental gate (Porte Monumentale) of a staggeringly lurid nature, covered with newly-invented electric light bulbs and topped by a statue described as La Parisienne. Paul Morand, a small boy at the time, later described this effigy, in Paris 1900, as une sirne chapeaute au bateau de la Ville de Paris, jupe plate, rejetant au vent un manteau du soir en fausse hermine.4 The Parisienne departed from the familiar allegorical representations of women. Paris in the 1900s was lling up with statues, a process sometimes described as la statuomanie. They were either of fullyclothed menpoliticians, scientists, heroes of the Republicor of less than fully-clothed women, allegories of the Republic. But the Parisienne was a woman fully-clad in contemporary costume. Despite her symbolic hat, she was recognizable as a real woman, signicantly depicted as fashionable and frivolous: Belle Epoque iconography showed women as essentially decorative. At the same time, one of the pavilions at the Exhibition was the Palais de la Femme. This idea had originated in the United States, and had gured at the Worlds Fairs of Philadelphia (1876), New Orleans (1884), and especially Chicago (1893), but it was the rst time it had appeared in Paris. The French version of the Womens Pavilion was less serious than its American counterparts: described

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in the official report as delicately elegant, it had a basement devoted to womans dress, hygiene and coquetry. A series of waxworks depicted la journe dune mondaine, depuis lheure du th matinal jusqu la parure pour le thatre ou pour le bal, en passant par la promenade au bois dans une victoria impeccablement attele.5 There was also a library stocked with books by women authors, a theatre, art gallery, and of course a patisserie and restaurant. Meanwhile in another building in Paris, an international conference about womens rights was taking placeone of three womens conferences organized under the aegis of the Exhibition. There was a strong American presence, though the American delegates complained that French issues had predominated, and pressed their French colleagues to constitute a branch of the International Council of Womenwhich they eventually did in 1901.6 My argument will concentrate on the French notion of woman as symbolized by la Parisienne, and the clash with an American concept of the woman question. The hypothesis which underlies what follows is that the turn of the century was a time when France, the fashionable destination of so many travellers and tourists, was under insistent pressure as never before from Anglo-American culture. A number of destabilizing inuences found their way in, but were very strongly resisted by the dominant French culture. This was neither the rst nor the last time that this happened, but the cracks and contradictions introduced then would run through French culture to the present, creating areas of conict and resistance, or reformulation of what Frenchness was. One of the principal Trojan horses during the Belle Epoque was the New Woman. How much change in womens status and identity could Frenchness absorb? The New Woman was a genuinely Anglo-American creation, the label itself rst coined in an article by Ouida in an American journal in 1894.7 She was a cultural construct, but the models had been in circulation some time. Literary sources include Ibsens A Dolls House and Chernichevskys What is to be done? In George Bernard Shaws play Mrs Warrens Profession, written in 1894 (not performed until 1902 because too immoral), Mrs Warrens daughter, Vivie, is instantly recognizable as a new woman. Shaws stage directions describe her as a sensible, able, highly-educated young middleclass Englishwoman. Age 22. Prompt, strong, confident, selfpossessed; she shakes hands with a resolute and hearty grip. Vivie rides a bicycle, prominently displayed on stage, has just tied with the third wrangler at Cambridge, but intends to be an actuary and make a lot of moneyinspiring a male character to remark that she makes his blood run cold.8

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Some American scholars, notably Mary-Louise Roberts and Christine Stansell, have begun looking at the New Woman in a French context, but interestingly the Anglo-American version could not be said to transfer easily to France. To take just one aspect of the New Woman, her healthy athleticism was in part the result of organized sport in girls schools, something which was not on the whole to be found in France. There were of course plenty of strong, forceful individual French women, but Christine Stansell suggests that New Women often take on the characteristics of the vamp or the femme fatale in Europe, inspiring fear rather than respect, let alone comradeship.9 The term femme nouvelle does not appear to have caught on in France during this period, and when it does it appears to be associated with foreign inuence. A Dolls House was not performed in France until 1895, although it had been played in English in 1879; conservative critics associated it with an alien kind of modernism. As an article in the conservative LIllustration put it on 10 February 1894, before Antoines Paris production had been seen: Ibsen, Hauptman, MaeterlinckSweden, Germany, Belgiuma triple alliance against the spirit of France: it will resist them.10 Was there any space for a new French woman? Putting it briey, by the late 1890s, girls in France had started to receive a better education than ever before. The Jules Ferry laws had created not only state primary schooling for girls in every village, but also girls lyces and the superstructure of coles normales and coles normales suprieures. The woman schoolteacher becomes a core participant in almost any political and feminist activity from this period. The very rst women were entering universitiesin very small numbers, true, but it was no longer impossible. Thirty-two women were attending the Paris medical faculty in 1879, most of them foreign. By 1914, there were 578. In 1900, there was a total of 624 French women students in all facultiestheir number exceeded that of foreigners only in 191213. One should not of course exaggerate the progress made by 19001905; educational change took more than one generation to work through. It was also a time when womens economic activity began to become more statistically signicant in jobs other than traditional farming or partnership in a small shop or rm. The post office for example was well on the way to being feminized in 1906: 22% of its employees were women. In the same census, in 1906, 170 women per thousand were to be found in commercial professions, compared to 82 in 1866. Women clerks and typists were starting to appear, though not in dramatic numbers. Women worked in factories, in sweatshops and as outworkers, and in a range of fairly traditional jobs, as well as these new ones. In 1906, there were 206,000 domestic servants in Paris, 11% of the population, and 83% of these were women.

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They were hardly being emancipated by such work, but it meant that many were leaving their native villages to become Parisians, leading a very different life from their mothers and grandmothers.11 While the Belle Epoque could hardly be called an age of opportunity for Frenchwomen, it was nevertheless an age when old structures were starting to creak and leak. Very schematically, we could point to the inventions of those metallic geared machines, the typewriter, the sewing-machine and the bicycle, which had all arguably made more difference to womens lives than to mens. The sewing-machine was both a boon and a shackleit made sewing easier, but swelled the numbers of women working at home for desperately low wages sewing garments. Similarly, training in typewriting soon became a womans passport to a white-collar office job (mainly after 1914), but it would conne most such women to subordinate positions as underpaid typists for years to come. The bicycle however really can be regarded as a symbol of liberation: it enabled women to get about in a fairly safe and rapid way, and it began to make a difference to their clothes and deportment. Ottilie McLaren, a Scottish pupil of Rodins who studied sculpture in Paris in the late 1890s, rode to the studio on her bike: I bike lamricaine as the nicest French people do: a short skirt about 4 or 5 inches below the knee and long gaiters which go right to meet the knicker-bockers in case of ones skirt blowing up. I always strap mine down.12 Note the American reference. Ottilie McLaren was an example of a phenomenon about which I have written elsewhere: the invasion of Paris by English, American and other foreign women art students in the 1890s and 1900s.13 These foreign students, who came to France as a land of freedom and excitement, disrupted the long-established studio tradition in which virtually the only women present were artists models (ironically, many models were Italian immigrants). Paradoxically, neither Paris nor any other city was liberty hall for most French women: foreign women in France were literally foreign bodies, operating by different rules. French bourgeois society in particular was still strongly marked by practices and habits of the nineteenth century, and the experience of foreign women in France is one of culture clash. Shari Benstock in Women of the Left Bank suggests that Edith Wharton and Natalie Barney, who in their various ways frequented avant-garde and bohemian circles, were guests of a culture whose secret heart they never penetrated.14

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A L B E RT I N E S B I C Y C L E Is that secret heart to be glimpsed in Proust? Yes and no. The second part of this paper suggests that the New Woman, seen as in some sense non-French, sent a shudder through his world. Proust is at once a reliable and an unreliable source for a historian of the Belle Epoque. He did not of course set out to paint a realistic picture of his society, still less of women, in the style of Zola; nevertheless, we know him to have drawn on obsessive observation of those around him, consciously and unconsciously. Proust, as the photographic evidence tends to show, frequented the rareed society of wellto-do Paris, in which women were important players. Unlike in most history books, women are everywhere in A la recherche, conducting games of power and love. The emotional economy of this novel, I would argue, provides us (rather surprisingly) with some kind of context for the New Woman. To illustrate the point, let us look briey at four of the important women who appear in it, all of them French: Franoise, the family servant, Odette de Crcy, who becomes Mme Swann, Madame Verdurin, the society hostess, and Albertine, the narrators young lover. To give some chronological perspective, Proust himself was born in 1871. Grard Genettes projected chronology of his novel has the narrator (Marcel) and his exact contemporary Gilberte Swann being born rather later than that, in 1878. Franoise, Odette and Mme Verdurin are from an older generation than the narrator, being adults before he was born, while Albertine is supposed to be a little younger than him.15 Franoise, a sort of compendium of la vieille France, with her picturesque habits of speech, her prejudices and her networks of power and communication among other servants, is a rather monstrous creation, for whom Proust probably drew on several family servants. But it is not difficult to locate her in a context where servants stayed many years with their families, becoming intimate with them and in time-honoured ways exerting the power of the powerless. J.-B. Duroselle, in his book re-titled La France de la Belle Epoque (1972 and 1995), has a section on domestic servants in which he cites several life-stories. For example, Franoise Remeniera, born in 1864 in the Corrze, was a sharecroppers child who watched over the sheep as a girl. After her husbands death from tuberculosis, she became a wet-nurse in a Parisian family, sending money back home to the village for her three children, who stayed with relatives, and whom she saw only in the summer. In 1899, she entered the service of another Paris household, where she stayed until her death in 1946, being completely devoted to this family and they to her. She had no real holidays or days off, apart from the three weeks in the

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year when she returned to the village. She reportedly ended up feeling more at home with the family she served.16 Duroselle remarks of this life-story that it is both touching and almost incomprehensible to us todayyet we can easily recognize Prousts Franoise in this biography. She has a daughter for instance, who is only infrequently mentioned. In terms of a French identity, if I can put it this way, Franoise represents a countrywoman, a woman of the people, a source of mystery and fascination to the bourgeois narrator. Brusque and kind, devious and long-suffering, she could be recruited for a Barrsian tradition of Frenchness rooted in the people or in the soil, her attitude to her employers being loyal yet cynical, traditional, yet in obscure ways rebellious. Odette de Crcy is also a construct of a traditional kind, in its 1890s manifestation: the beautiful demi-mondaine, mistress to one or more rich and powerful men, but nevertheless received after a fashion in Parisian polite societythough not in the narrators bourgeois family home at Combray, even after she had married Charles Swann, the family friend. Originals whom Proust is said to have had in mind are Laure Hayman and Liane de Pougy. Odette is painted in a very hostile way much of the time, and the reader is left in no doubt about the superior intelligence, sophistication and to some extent moral bre of Swann, who ends up reecting that he has gch ma vie pour une femme qui ntait pas mon genre, ruined his life for a woman who wasnt even my type. Odette is unfaithful, ungrateful, silly, snobbish and so on. Yet at the same time, both for Swann and for the narrator, Odette holds an extraordinary fascination. In terms of the novels structure, she is located as the older sophisticated woman enchanting the narrator during his youth. In a passage at the end of Du ct de chez Swann, he remembers her with nostalgia in the Bois de Boulogne, either in simple elegance pied, dans une polonaise de drap, sur la tte un petit toquet agrment dune aile de lophophore, un bouquet de violettes au corsage [ ... ] traversant lalle des Acacias, or in magnificent contrast lounging negligently in une incomparable victoria, [ ... ] ses cheveux maintenant blonds avec une seule mche grise ceints dun mince bandeau de eurs, le plus souvent des violettes, do descendaient de longs voiles [ ... ] aux lvres un sourire ambigu [ ... ].17 We are invited to think that this vision dates from the 1880s or 1890s, since this is one of the few passages in the novel where the narrator really steps out of the frame to look back. He has returned to the Bois de Boulogne

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in about 1912, trying to recall past visits, only to see in place of victorias motor-cars driven by moustachioed mechanics, and to nd a horrifying transformation in womens fashions: Mais comment ces gens qui contemplent ces horribles cratures sous leurs chapeaux couverts dune volire ou dun potager, pourraient-ils mme sentir ce quil y avait de charmant voir Mme Swann coiffe dune simple capote mauve ou dun petit chapeau que dpassait une seule eur diris toute droite?18 The same passage, a page or two earlier, contains another precise historical reference in the form of a typical Proustian joke. The narrator recalls an older man remarking to him of Odette that he slept with her the day MacMahon resigned (that is, 30 January 1879, just after the narratorsand Gilberte Swannsbirth, according to Genettes chronology). However the overall tone of the passage is elegiac: the elegant procession of victorias (think of the 1900 Pavillon de la Femme) had vanished by 1912. Perhaps a few of the old demi-mondaines were still there, but like wraiths or damned spirits, shadows of what they were (vieilles et qui ntaient plus que les ombres terribles de ce quelles avaient t [I, 427]). The narrator stands forlorn; the suns face is hidden. Proust here tells us quite directly that Odette is from the old world. She belongs with a society which would be completely swept away by the Great War, but which was already fading. In that world, the pattern in the carpet of French urban society was a double standard for men and women, a kind of sexual tapestry which was not exactly prostitution, but a set of relationships between men and women based on money, adultery and hypocrisy. 14% of deaths in the 1900s were due to syphilis. It was a world of sex, lies and victorias, if you will; a world in which the Duc de Guermantes could boast of sending a telegram reading Impossible venir, mensonge suit. (This untranslatably brief formula could be decoded as: Cant make it: transparent excuse follows.) It was still a world in which, as Charlotte Perkins Gilman reminded her readers in 1911, La Rochefoucauld had said there were thirty good stories in the world and twenty-nine of them could not be told to a woman. Proust was caught, like many of his generation, between nostalgia for this world and a reluctant attraction towards the new his narrator treats both Franoise and Odette with wistful affection, but also with a critical eye. Indeed, he provides a transparently scornful narrative about Odette and her traditional feminine wiles. He shows even less sympathy for a tougher, and in a way more successfully modern character,

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Mme Verdurin; but he falls in love with an thoroughly modern girl, Albertine. Mme Verdurin is a monstrous creation, combining details from a number of society hostesses of the Belle Epoque. She likes to think she is of advanced views, particularly in art, and collects painters, writers and musicians, who are coded references to people like Whistler, Franck and so on, representing the modern. She is a bundle of contradictions, but after an initial wobble (she was ferociously antisemitic), Proust decided that he would make her salon a Dreyfusard one, while Odettes would be nationalistic. One of the models for Mme Verdurins salon was that of Mme Arman de Caillavet, whose great man was Anatole France. She really was a Dreyfus supporter, like Proust himself, and suffered socially to some extent as a result, since the Faubourg Saint-Germain remained anti-Dreyfusard with only very rare exceptions (represented, rather unconvincingly, in the novel by the Prince and Princesse de Guermantes. It is not then so very strangethough the narrator expresses dismay at this endingthat Mme Verdurin should end up as the second Princesse de Guermantes in Le Temps retrouv.) The point I would make about Mme Verdurin, however, is that it was from exactly this kind of person, and this pro-Dreyfus milieuthough predominantly from the Jewish and Protestant women of the upper bourgeoisiethat some of the leaders of the French feminist movement also came. Ccile Brunschvig, for instance, who later became the grande dame of French feminism, though younger, came into this category. It is a nice irony that her husband, Lon Brunschvicg, was a schoolfriend of Prousts and one of the originals for the narrators annoying friend Bloch.19 Feminism is a particular aspect of the Verdurin type of modernism, but it never ruffles the surface in A la rechercheand one dreads to think what Proust would have done with it had he troubled to notice it. We shall return to feminism after looking at the last Proustian woman, Albertine. The story of the narrators agonizing relations with Albertine, in La Fugitive, La Prisonnire, etc., are to some extent marked by Prousts relations with Monsieur Agostinelli, his chauffeur, and other young men. But it is as a particular kind of young woman that Albertine appears in the novel, in A lombre des jeunes filles en eurs. The narrator rst meets her at the seaside resort of Balbec, as one of a petite bande of frightening girls, full of energy, who jump over old gentlemen in deck chairs and thoroughly intimidate the asthmatic young Marcel. The girl later identied as Albertine is provided with a bicycle.

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Une de ces inconnues poussait devant elle de la main, sa bicyclette; deux autres tenaient des clubs de golf et leur accoutrement tranchait sur celui des jeunes lles de Balbec, parmi lesquelles quelques-unes, il est vrai, se livraient aux sports mais sans adopter pour cela une tenue spciale.20 The reader is given several glimpses of this bicycle-pusher: une lle aux yeux brillants, sous un polo noir, qui poussait une bicyclette avec un dandinement de hanches si dgingand, en employant des terms dargot si voyou et cris si fort quand je passais auprs delle parmi lesquels je distinguai cependant cette phrase fcheuse de vivre sa vie [que] je conclus [ ... ] que toutes ces filles appartenaient la population qui frquente les vlodromes, et devaient tre les trs jeunes matresses de coureurs cyclistes. En tous cas, dans aucune de mes suppositions, ne gurait celle quelles eussent pu tre vertueuses.21 We might note several things about this passage. Firstly, Prousts narrator is analysing these strange creatures according to the old world of Odette. He reacts with hostility to the idea of games-playing and loud speech from a woman, the use of slang terms, and most of all the claim to independence (live my own life). Secondly, the French text at this point is full of anglicisms: polo, golf, clubs. Incidentally, Albertines bicycle was probably English-made, since Britain was the worlds chief supplier of bicycles in 18951900. To make Albertine sufficiently threatening on her rst appearance, Proust is using all the stage-props of the New Young Woman, including foreign, particularly English inuence. A few pages further on, he reinforces this point with a description of the way Albertine speaks. Not only does she use slang terms like tram and bike, but she affects an Anglo-Saxon delivery: En parlant, Albertine gardait la tte immobile, les narines serres, ne faisait remuer que le bout des lvres. Il en rsultait ainsi un son tranard et nasal dans la composition duquel entraient peut-tre des hrdits provinciales, une affectation juvnile de egme britannique, les lecons dune institutrice trangre et une hypertrophie congestive de la muqueuse du nez.22 Space forbids more examples, but I will hazard from these extracts the view that, whatever the relation between Prousts writing and his

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environment, and whatever he later does with the poetics of desire, his initial depiction of Albertine and her friends as sporty aliens is signicant. We see these female characters through a discursive narrative (Prousts), one which is drawing on the discourses of others, while also challenging them by the way he writes his novel. But he is not challenging all the discourses of his day. In the male Parisian upper-class discourse of his time, women were, as Simone de Beauvoir would later put it, the Other. There was a certain agreement among men about that. In terms of the conceptualisation of French national identity, I could quote a parallel taken from Sharif Gemies book on nineteenth-century revolutions: Nationhood might be constituted around a shared sense of conflict or, less violently, diversity. In other words, while monarchists and republicans might disagree about every element of their respective interpretations of the French past, they might still both agree about which moments constituted the crucial moments of division.21 French men might disagree about many things during the Belle Epoque but arguably they shared a certain patriarchal discourse about women. Perhaps patriarchal is not quite the right wordit seems inappropriate for Proust, who consistently undermines his narrator and puts him in embarrassing situations. A better term is fraternal. We may not think of Proust as being a particularly fraternal writer in the republican sense, but in practice he enjoyed the fraternity of various all-male groups: men about town, exsoldiers, ex-law-students, homosexuals, would-be young novelists, etc. The fraternal discourse about women encompasses la Parisienne and the cocotte in the Bois de Boulogne, and at some remove it shades into the political iconography which put up statues of beautiful (arguably maternal) goddesses of the Republic and Liberty all over Parisbut hardly any of real women. It does not extend to comradeship with sporty young women. Albertines role in A la recherche is that of an impossible partner for the narrator: she is eventually killed off in a riding accident. How could Belle Epoque women respond to such a discourse? They could accept it and work entirely within it (like Odette); they could seek to turn it to advantage by modifying it a little (Mme Verdurin); or they could break with it and challenge it. The challenge could be cultural (New Woman) or political (feminist). Prousts generation, whether or not he noticed it, witnessed the growth of second-wave feminism in France. The movement had to contend with fairly entrenched antifeminism in political

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circles. Governments of the turn of the century celebrated many centenaries related to the 1789 Revolution. They put up the Eiffel Tower in 1889; in 1894, they celebrated the centenary of Condorcets death (without mentioning his championing of the rights of women). Ten years later, in 1904, the French Civil Code had its centenary and despite the fact that it had been composed by and for Napoleon, rather than by the revolutionaries, the occasion was used as yet another celebration of the Republic (on the eve of Separation from the Church). Contemporary feminists however saw the Code as enshrining principles which deprived women of their rights. In particular, it made a distinction, not applied to men, between married and unmarried women. The married woman had no real civil status in her own right, only through her husband. Feminists did organize protests at the time, though they were neither huge nor spectacular compared to what was happening in Britain. However most historians of French feminism are agreed that during the decade after 1900, feminism was attracting support in many quarters. A number of particular but real amendments were made to the Code Civil: for example, a wife was granted the right to do what she wanted with her earned income (1907). A head of steam for suffrage and other rights was gathering by the spring of 1914, and one of the biggest feminist demonstrations ever was held at the statue of Condorcet in July 1914an unfortunate piece of timing.25 What the demonstrators chiey had to contend with was the dread of ridicule among French women: the very idea of a demonstration for womens rights in the world of A la recherche sends a shiver down the spine, when one thinks what Proust might do with it. The Condorcet demonstration, which the organizers tried to keep decorous, was very different in tone from the meeting of American women at Seneca Falls in 1848over sixty years earlierwhich had robustly declared: In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misprepresentation and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object.25

CONCLUSION The cementing of nationhood and republicanism that took place during the rst half of the Third French Republicthe creation of an imagined communitywas indeed based on a literal fraternity. One of the components that was taken for granted, and therefore virtually unmentioned, in creating French nationhoodat least as constructed in textbooks, books on republicanism, standard histories, histories of nationalism and national

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identitywas the unchanging nature of French women. They had to continue being what it was thought they had always been, and not change into something weird and modern, landed none knew whence. My concluding point therefore is that the kind of Frenchness which was voluntarily being constructed during the Belle Epoque had among its components a view of desired relations between the sexes which did not disturb fraternity. This went with some fear and distrust of contemporary women, is shown in Prousts portraits of some of the women in his narrators life. Women were potentially disruptive and needed to be defused in some way. What happened at this time however was that an even more disruptive woman than the French varietythe English suffragette, the American New Woman, the foreign German or Russian art studentwas arriving on the scene. Some of Prousts best friends actually did marry American heiresses to industrial fortunes: Boni de Castellane married Anna Gould, and the prince le Polignac married Winnaretta Singer, of the sewing-machine family, whose sister also married a French aristocrat. There is a condescending and rather lighting reference to an American woman who has married into the French beau monde in Le Temps retrouv. But comradely equality, to which some lip service was paid in New Woman circles in American and Britain, in Shaws plays for example, was not an option. In the short termand perhaps even in the long termthe resistance which French culture was able to put up to this gender-based threat was successful, subtle and determined. One method was to stave off womens suffrage until it could be no more postponed, in 1944. We might even extend the argument of this article to suggest that the Anglo-Saxon Allies, whose support the French provisional government needed in 1944, were a not entirely negligible inuence on the decision from the Consultative Assembly in Algiers. Secondly, there was a forceful cultural image of French women as being not ridiculous, hating excess, being sensible, pragmatic, having a special view of sexual relations which meant knowing how to deal with men, and avoiding the ideological stances of their Anglo-Saxon sisters. French feminists of the middle years of the century, who included many determined characters, were active in the various international womens associations which held meetings in Paris or at the League of Nations in Geneva; but one often senses their discomfort at the cultural milieu in France which expected sophisticated rather than militant behaviour. This distinction can be traced through a rhetorical tradition, mostly masculine in origin, but nevertheless taken up even today by a number of French women who consider themselves feminists. I am thinking here of Elisabeth Badinter, Mona Ozouf, Franoise Giroud, who have all written in recent years of the

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gulf between American feministscharacterized as strident, man-hating, positive-discriminating, politically-correctand the sensible, feminine, charmingly different Frenchwoman who can conduct a civilized conversation with men.26 One could argue that French identity for much of the twentieth century, up to and including the 1960s, depended on an internalization of this dichotomy. Equally, it might be suggested that the most recent n de sicle (from the 1970s to the present) has seen previously unthinkable changes in the status and life experience of French women, of which the very recent parity campaign is a rather striking example. The statue of the Parisienne shattered when it was taken down from its pedestal in the autumn of 1900. Might one suggest that a different Belle Epoque for French women has come a hundred years later, as the avant-garde Albertines of today ride off on their mountain bikes to become bankers and rocket scientists?

NOTES
1. Marcel Proust, A lombre des jeunes filles en eurs, in A la recherche du temps perdu (Bibliothque de la Pliade, Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1962), vol. I, p. 788. All further references to the French are from this edition. I was simply hanging about in front of the Grand Hotel [ ... ] when I saw coming towards me ve or six young girls, as different in appearance and manner from all the people whom one was accustomed to see in Balbec as could have been, landed there none knew whence, a ock of seagulls [ ... ]. One of these strangers was pushing, as she came, with one hand, her bicycle (tr. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Within a Budding Grove [London, 1922], p. 122). 2. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 18701914 (London, 1977). 3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1993). 4. [A] siren clad in a tight skirt, her hat in the shape of a ship representing the city of Paris, caught in the pose of inging back an evening cape of articial ermine. Quoted in Pascal Ory, Les Expositions universelles de Paris (Paris, 1982), pp. 8182 (my translation). 5. On the Palais de la Femme as it was called, see Alfred Picard, Rapport, Exposition Universelle de Paris 1900 (Paris, 1906), vol. IV, p. 212. [(T)he day of a society lady, from her morning cup of tea to dressing for an evening at the theatre or a ball, by way of a ride through the Bois [de Boulogne] in an impeccably turned-out victoriamy translation.] A victoria was a light, open-topped, four-wheeled carraige. 6. On the 1900 womens and feminist conferences, see Laurence Klejman, Florence Rochefort, Lgalit en marche: le fminisme sous la IIIe Rpublique (Paris, 1989), p. 137 ff., also Steven Hause with Anne Kenney, Womens Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic (Princeton, 1984), p. 36 ff. The founding conference of the Conseil National des Femmes Franaises, which affiliated to the International Council of Women, was held in April 1901.

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7. Ouida, The New Woman, North American Review, 158 (1894), 27076. See Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de sicle (Manchester, 1997), pp. 2, 8, 3536 and passim. 8. George Bernard Shaw, Mrs Warrens Profession, in Plays Unpleasant (London, Penguin edn, 1946), pp. 212, 215. 9. Unpublished papers on the New Woman in France, delivered at the 1999 Berkshire conference on Womens History, Rochester, NY. Cf. James F. McMillan, France and Women 17891914: Gender, Society and Politics (London, 2000), ch. 10, who also sees the New Woman in the Anglo-American style as a doubtful presence in France. 10. Quoted in Christophe Charle, Paris fin de sicle: culture et politique (Paris, 1998). 11. For full details, based on up-to-date research on the social circumstances of women in fin-de-sicle France, see McMillan, France and Women, chs 1012. 12. Manuscript letter from Ottilie McLaren to William Wallace, National Library of Scotland, Wallace Papers: MSS 21535, 27 November 1897. 13. S. Reynolds, Running Away to Paris: Expatriate Women Artists of the 1900 Generation from Scotland and Points South, Womens History Review, 9:2 (2000), 32744. 14. Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris 190040 (London, 1987), p. 78. 15. Grard Genette, Figures III (Paris, 1972). 16. J.-B. Duroselle, La France de la Belle Epoque, 2nd edn (Paris, 1992), pp. 6566. 17. Proust, A la recherche, vol. I, p. 419. [O]n foot, in a polonaise of plain cloth, a little toque on her head trimmed with a pheasants wing, a bunch of violets in her bosom, hastening along the Alle des Acacias; [in a] matchless victoria [ ... ] her hair now quite pale with one grey lock, girt with a narrow band of owers, usually violets from which oated down long veils [ ... ], on her lips an ambiguous smile [ ... ] (tr. C. S. Scott Moncrieff, Swanns Way (London, 1922), pp. 27677. 18. Proust, A la recherche, vol. I, pp. 42527. How can the people who watch these dreadful creatures hobble by, beneath hats on which have been heaped the spoils of aviary or garden-bedhow can they imagine the charm that there was in the sight of Mme Swann, crowned with a close-tting lilac bonnet, or with a tiny hat from which rose stiffly above her head a single iris? (tr. Swanns Way, pp. 28486). 19. On Prousts circle and the so-called originals of some of the characters in A la recherche, see George Painter, Marcel Proust (London, 1965). Ccile Brunschvicg (ne Kahn, 18771946) is referred to in all histories of French feminism in the twentieth century; see for example Hause and Kenny, Womens Suffrage. 20. Proust, A la recherche, vol. I, p. 788. One of these strangers was pushing as she came, with one hand, her bicycle; two others carried golf-clubs; and their attire generally was in contrast to that of the other girls at Balbec, some of whom, it is true, went in for games, but without adopting any special outt (tr. Within a Budding Grove, p. 122). 21. Proust, A la recherche, vol. I, p. 793. [A] girl with brilliant laughing eyes and plump colourless cheeks, a black polo-cap pulled down over her face, who was pushing a bicycle with so exaggerated a movement of her hips, with an air borne out

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by her language, which was so typically of the gutter and was being shouted so loud when I passed her (although among her expressions I caught that irritating live my own life) that [ ... ] I concluded [ ... ] that all these girls belonged to the population which frequents the racing-tracks, and must be the very juvenile mistresses of professional bicyclists. In any event, in none of my suppositions was there any possibility of their being virtuous (tr. Within a Budding Grove, p. 128). 22. Proust, A la recherche, vol. I, p. 877. In speaking, Albertine kept her head motionless, her nostrils closed, allowing only the corners of her lips to move. The result of this was a drawling nasal sound, into the composition of which there entered perhaps a provincial descent, a juvenile affectation of British phlegm, the teaching of a foreign governess and a congestive hypertrophy of the nose (tr. Within a Budding Grove, p. 246). 23. Sharif Gemie, French Revolutions 18151914: An Introduction (Edinburgh 1999), p. 10. 24. On feminist campaigns of this period see Hause and Kenney, Womens Suffrage, passim; McMillan, France and Women, ch. 12. 25. Quoted here from a facsimile of the Declaration, kindly sent me by my forme student Ingrid Omand. 26. On the unsuspected riches of French feminism between the wars, see Christine Bard, Les Filles de Marianne: histoire des fminismes 191440 (Paris, 1995); on international links, see S. Reynolds, France Between the Wars: Gender and Politic (London, 1996), ch. 7. On the debate over French vs American feminism, see Femmes: une singularit francaise?, Le Dbat, 87 (Oct.Nov. 1995), 11746. Signicantly these writers have on the whole been unsympathetic to the recent parity campaign, on the background to which see Danielle Haase-Dubosc, Sexual Difference and Politics in France Today, Feminist Studies, 25:1 (1999), 183210; since that article appeared, new legislation has been introduced in France to ensure the equal representation of men and women in all elections where the list system is used (excluding therefore the National Assembly, but covering most other elections).

ANTHONY R. PUGH

The Ending of Swann Revisited

o reader of Proust has reached the end of Du ct de chez Swann without being puzzled by the ending of the volume. After the 184 pages of Combray and 191 pages of Un Amour de Swann (in the Pliade edition), both manifestly constructed with great care, the last part has a mere fortyve pages, of which eleven form a prelude which seems to announce far more than what we read in the sequel, and twelve comprise a spectacular conclusion in two parts: in the rst, the young protagonist drags the longsuffering Francoise to the Bois de Boulogne to see Odette Swann drive by; in the second, we are told that the man who is narrating the story in the present has recently (cette anne) revisited the Bois to see the autumn leaves, and he looks back with poignant nostalgia to the days, now gone forever, when the Bois was colored by the elegance of Mme Swann and by his unconditional admiration for her.1 Between the prelude and this conclusion, there are just a few pages outlining the early stages of the protagonists calf-love for Gilberte. The reader who continues and opens the next volume, A lombre des jeunes filles en eurs, nds the sequel to the pages on Gilberte (Autour de Madame Swann), followed in turn by a section where the protagonist is in Normandy, coveting other girls, and we realize that the prelude we read in the rst volume was preparing us for this new episode. The rigorous

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structure is again evident, and we are left wondering why Proust chose to break his rst volume at such an awkward place, obliging himself to invent a conclusion at a point where the narrative line required none. The answer to the readers question was given over fty years ago in a pioneering Modern Philology article by Robert Vigneron, who was able to show, using Prousts correspondence, that the conclusion to the rst volume was a makeshift affair, forced on Proust when his editor pointed out that the material Proust had supplied for volume 1 was too copious and that he would have to make the break between the volumes earlier.2 Vigneron demonstrated that part of the present ending was transferred from the ending of what we now call Autour de Madame Swann, and he argued that the pages about the Bois set in the present were added after November 1912, citing Prousts (frustrated) desire to visit the park at that time. With meticulous precision, and much ingenuity, Vigneron reconstituted the route Proust had followed, the hesitations and the compromises he was obliged to tolerate. In general terms, Vignerons demonstration has stood the test of time, and one has to salute the insights of someone working from incomplete evidence. Now, however, the evidence at our disposal is massive. It is therefore time to revisit the question and give a fuller account than Vigneron was able to do, even if in the most general terms our conclusion (that the ending was due to the exigencies of commercial publication) is unchanged. The new evidence is of two kinds. Vigneron relied on what letters had been published, which he dated, and on secondhand information about the galley proofs, derived from Albert Feuillerats study and hypothetical reconstruction of the rst version of the summer in Normandy.3 We now have far more letters than we had then, and as a consequence, we are more condent about the dates of the letters. Moreover, we have virtually all the exercise books that Proust used to elaborate and rework the various parts of his novel, along with the typescript that was the intermediary between the latest of the manuscript cahiers and the rst proofs produced by his editor Bernard Grasset in 1913; these proofs are also accessible. These documents do not always yield their secrets without a struggle, but if we are as meticulous in our day as Vigneron was in his, we can reconstitute the stages which led to the text we are saddled with.

THE MANUSCRIPTS Proust began work on his novel in 1909. His method was to rewrite his novel several times, each time amplifying, augmenting, and rearranging. The rst

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version, if we allow that term, simply noted ideas for key incidents, some of them elaborated for a few pages; there is nothing of Gilberte. Later in 1909 Proust produced a version of Combray which, although it was not complete, he felt ready to give to a typist at the end of the year. In this version, Swann has a daughter. She is mentioned in the rst part (the protagonists mother inquires after her when Swann visits them at Combray).4 She also appears in the sketches for a continuation to the typescript, seen by the protagonist one day as he and his parents walk past Swanns property.5 With the typescript behind him, Proust could tackle Un Amour de Swann and the Normandy episode, with the various jeunes lles. Gilberte emerges out of that double preoccupation. This is one of the few places where our documentation appears to be incomplete. In the cahier numbered 27,6 there are references such as Voir [dans] manuscrit or dans le 1er Cahier that imply a source which we do not have. Cahier 27 opens with material for Un Amour de Swann, after which Proust turned to Gilberte, beginning (fol. 13) with a Plan, which includes the two sentences Emotion pour Swann[,] pour sa mre au bois and Je retrouve aux Champs-Elyses ses [amis del.] amies, son institutrice, numbered 2 and 1, respectively. So we know that from the beginning, there was to be an incident taking place at the Bois. The narration that follows covers the rst stages of the adolescent boys love for Gilberte. It includes (fols. 3442a) an incident corresponding to the indication on the Plan Emotion ... pour sa mre au bois, reproduced in the Pliade edition as Esquisse LXXXIV (Pliade, pp. 98386; cf. Pliade, pp. 40914). In this version the young boy rst sees Mme Swann, attended by a group of admirers, at the Bois when he is with his father, and Swann greets them. This prompts the protagonist to enlist Franoise in his regular trips to the Bois, and he is sometimes fortunate enough to be noticed by Mme Swann. Once he is with his great-uncle, and his indiscreet effusive greeting embarrasses the older man. At the end of this sketch is the germ of M de Norpoiss revelations concerning Odettes male friends and the reason that Swann married her, both subsequently developed in A lombre des jeunes filles en eurs (cf. Pliade, p. 457). Here the informant is simply un collgue de mon pre. Late in 1911, the typescript of Un Amour de Swann complete, Proust applied himself to the task of producing a manuscript of the sequel that could be typed out. For the section on Gilberte, he started with Cahier 20, ran into several obstacles, and began again in Cahier 21, continuing in Cahier 24. On those occasions when the text of Cahier 20 was deemed adequate, Proust would not bother to copy it out, and when he came to

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number his pages for his typist, he weaved from one exercise book to another in a complex way, which, to her credit, the typist (aided by Prousts amanuensis Albert Nahmias) generally managed to follow. In Cahier 20 the rst stages of the relationship are worked over many, many times. One incident, sketched quite early in the exercise book (fols. 2429), tells us that on inclement days, the protagonist anxiously watched to see if the sun would come out (cf. Pliade, p. 388). This phase includes his invitation to Gilbertes house and (to precede that invitation) the dinner with a former ambassador, M de Monfort (later Norpois), who encourages the protagonist in his ambition to become a writer and who actually dines with the Swanns (cf. Pliade, pp. 426 ff.). Proust then rewrote some of the earlier incidents. The youth is obsessed with all things to do with Swann: the matre dhtel (cf. Pliade, p. 409, lines 712) and Gilbertes parents, especially Swann himself (cf. Pliade, p. 399, line 25, to p. 400, line 2). He tries to imitate Swann (cf. Pliade, p. 406, line 36). He sees Mme Swann more rarely, he says, because she did not much like to be seen in public with a teenage daughter. But he did come across her once, by chance (cf. Pliade, p. 411). At that point on folio 50, Proust wrote Morceau sur le Bois, but he did not follow it up. On the facing page, we nd (centered) [Morceau sur le Bois del.] and then centered on the line below: Paris. We may assume that he had in mind to go back to the pages in Cahier 27 and revise them in order to use them here. From folio 50 to folio 58 of Cahier 20, Proust returned to the episode briey sketched a few pages earlier: the visit of M de Monfort. Proust constantly reread Cahier 20 when he amplied and improved his text in Cahiers 21 and 24. The rst of the amplications was a completely new episode, preparing for the dinner, for which he created a new character, the actress La Berma. This gives a new thread to the tapestry of themes connected with the dinner and the conversation. When Proust went back to Cahier 20, in order to incorporate the nine pages describing the conversation, he decided that he would allow Monfort/Norpois a role in persuading his father to lift the interdiction on visits to the theater. Striking the words Morceau sur le Bois (that incident would have to come somewhat earlier), he copied the introductory remark of Cahier 21 (fol. 4; his mother suggested going to the theater to hear La Berma, Pliade, p. 430, line 41, to p. 431, line 5), followed in turn by a new paragraph saying that Monfort had inuenced his fathers decision to let him go to the theater (fols. 49v50v, Pliade, p. 431, lines 627). This leads smoothly into the existing sentence on Cahier 20, that Monfort inuenced his father concerning the boys desire to write (fols. 5051, Pliade, p. 431, line 30 ff.). A one-sentence transition was all that was needed (Pliade, p. 431, lines 2829).

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In Cahier 24, the second of the exercise books in which Proust expanded the text of Cahier 20, he returned to the question of the boys fetishism for all things associated with Swann. The young boy trots Franoise round to the Bois, to the carriage entrance of the Swanns house, to the street where Swann goes to visit his dentist. This corresponds to the Emotion pour Swann in the 1910 plan. The allusion to the Bois is not elaborated. We see, then, that the intention of describing the spectacle of Mme Swann at the Bois de Boulogne was always part of the plan, and that the incident was in fact written, in the version preceding the mise-au-net of 1911. In 1911, however, it was reduced to a simple mention. In 1911 the only comparable incident to be written out came at the end of the episode, after the young man has become a familiar visitor at the Swanns house. We must count this as a second visit, independent of the one alluded to in Cahier 24 and drafted, in 1910, in Cahier 27. It comes, or came, at the very end of Cahier 24. The relevant pages were torn out, but we can identify them from a dossier of fragments manuscrits (NAF 16703) and reconstitute the original version. As we now have it, Cahier 24 ends with folio 65, just after Proust has begun to say that the protagonists parents did not appreciate his frequenting the Swanns, to say nothing of Bergotte. Two pages plus the yleaf were removed from Cahier 24 at this point; all three have left their physical trace behind in the cahier. One is now in NAF 16703, fol. 208, mounted so that the recto side (which is what interests us here) appears to be the verso. It continues directly from the end of fol. 65 (Cet homme pervers et qui napprciait pas M de Norpois/mavait trouv; cf. Pliade p. 563, line 27), and we can call it fol. 65.2. We do not appear to have the next page (fol. 65.3), but it was still there when these pages were typed, and the typescript went as far as the end of the discussion of Bergotte.7 The same dossier (NAF 16703, fol. 207) contains the missing yleaf of Cahier 24 (which we can call fol. 65.4). If we put it together with fol. 208r (that is, the verso of the page we have identied as fol. 65.2 of Cahier 24), we nd a text describing Mme Swann at the Bois de Boulogne. Once again the typescript enables us to reconstitute the missing page. We can see that Proust went from Pliade, p. 564, line 41, immediately to a conclusion, beginning at Pliade, p. 624, line 27, using the yleaf (fol. 65.4) and the versos of folios 65.3 and 65.2. The conclusion leads off with the words Quand jeus commenc connatre Mme Swann, une fois que les beaux jours furent venus, comme je savais quavant le djeuner (etc), as Pliade, p. 624, lines 2728, and it continues to Pliade, p. 630, line 6, in a shorter version.8

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The ending just dened arrives somewhat abruptly, and it is not surprising to nd that Proust wished to insert more material between the discussion of Bergotte and the conclusion. When he paginated Cahier 24, therefore, he left the conclusion unnumbered. The last page numbered is folio 65.2, although the next page, on which the episode was concluded, was probably also numbered in sequence. One would expect the typescript to have extended to the end of the episode, but the portion that was typed stops at the bottom of folio 65, in the middle of a sentence, and we see that Proust has explicitly written nir ici. On the following page he has written Ne pas soccuper de cette page, evidently an instruction to Nahmias, who prepared the often confusing manuscripts for the typist. This is surprising; if the exercise book was still intact when Nahmias received it, one would expect each of the two instructions to be two pages further along; if he had already removed the three pages, in order to work further on the conclusion, the nir ici would be a way of avoiding unnecessary questions about what to do next, but there would then be no point in writing on the following page. It is possible to date this activity. Proust warned Nahmias on February 23 that he had more work for him, and on March 1 he said that he was just about ready to embark on this collaboration.9 Proust sent Nahmias the manuscript of the Gilberte section, with an explanation of the way he had paginated it, in a letter which may reasonably be assigned to the beginning of March (Correspondance 11:86 [letter 40]).10 On March 29, Proust sent Nahmias a check for him to settle with the typist (Correspondance 11:84 [letter 39]). Proust therefore spent some time on a new sequel and conclusion to the main text of Cahier 24. No text describing the rst visit to the Bois was supplied to the typist, and the second visit was set aside. A whole new segment was written on the delights experienced by the protagonist once he has been accepted as a regular visitor to the Swann household. In this way a portrait of Mme Swann is insinuated into the text and prepares us for the closing incident. All of this happens in another exercise book, cataloged as Cahier 23, beginning at folio 10. At its end (fol. 18), Proust appears to be about to evoke a time when the protagonist knew Gilberte only at the Champs-Elyses and would admire Madame Swanns toilette. Thus the rst visit is given the status of a ashback, following the second in the narrative sequence, and pointing the contrast between now and then. The lines are struck, however, as Proust had second thoughts. The dossier NAF 16703 contains seventeen sheets, paginated from 1 to 17, taken from an unidentied exercise book (fols. 190206).11 What we nd there are the two passages not yet written: not only the rst visit to the Bois,

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but what we can call the third visit, undertaken in the present by the narrator. The passage begins Pour [ldel] apercevoir [Madame Swann add], sachant quelle sy promenait autour du lac [sic] (cf. Pliade, p. 409, line 34), implying that it followed directly a text which ended with the name of Mme Swann. At the break where the true epilogue (the third visit) begins, Proust took a new sheet (7, fol. 196). The text of this nal portion is not quite complete; it nishes at une majest dodonenne (Pliade, p. 419, line 33).12 By concluding with the narrator, writing from the standpoint of the present, Proust neatly balances the opening of the entire novel: Longtemps je me suis couch de bonne heure.

THE TYPESCRIPT This new concluding portion was typed by Miss Hayward, the English stenographer who had typed the rst part of Un Amour de Swann at Cabourg in 1911.13 When, exactly? The answer to this question depends on how we date a letter to Nahmias in which Proust is quite explicit about her rst task (Correspondance 11:2526 [letter 4]): La chose commence par une vingtaine de pages dtaches que jai mises dans le cahier rouge. Elles se suivent, elles ont une pagination spciale (Ayez la bont de paginer 560 la premire feuille de dactylographie qui sera faite ... Cher Albert, y aurait-il possibilit de votre part ce que vous choisissiez comme dactylographe Miss Hayward, celle de Cabourg, elle est Paris et ma demand de la recommander.)14 The letter has been variously assigned to October 1911 and to January 1912, but May 1912 seems a far more likely date.15 In view of the fact that the rst typist appears to have been paid off at the end of March 1912, it would appear that Miss Hayward came back on the scene no earlier than the end of March or the beginning of April. The most plausible date is later still: mid-May. A gap of six weeks since having Cahier 24 typed would have allowed Proust time to work at Noms de pays: le pays, which is where he wanted Miss Hayward to start once she had typed the new ending to Noms de pays: le nom.16 Miss Hayward left Prousts employ in June 1912, which puts paid to Vignerons hypothesis that the idea of including a nostalgic evocation of the Bois came to Proust only after he had tried unsuccessfully to go there in company with Mme Straus in November 1912.17 It is true that the rst of the letters Proust wrote to Mme Straus on the subject seems to attribute the idea to her and that there are a couple of similarities between the text of the letter and that of the novel, but the hypothesis falls by virtue of the undoubted fact that the sentence in question had been typed in the spring of

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1912 and revised in the summer.18 A fortiori, we cannot postpone the visit to the following year, as the old Pliade edition did.19 Miss Hayward typed this conclusion and Noms de pays: le pays before she tackled the new material on the protagonists cultivation of Mme Swann (Cahier 23, now greatly augmented). Because folios 65.2 and 65.3 had not been typed, they are paginated 1 and (presumably) 2, and the text of Cahier 23 starts with page 3 and runs to 17. This was to be followed by the second visit, those three pages detached from Cahier 24. They have been renumbered to follow the 17 of Cahier 23.20 The page numbers of the typescript are adjusted so that the pages Miss Hayward typed rst, beginning at page 560, follow in sequence. The typescript therefore gives us the proper conclusion to the narrative of Autour de Madame Swann and a three-part coda: the second visit, the rst visit remembered as a ashback, and the third visit. The rst visit, we remember, had originally been conceived as part of the rst half of the Gilberte story. That, of course, is where it will nally be located. The transition from the second series of visits to the Bois to the preadolescent pilgrim, found on the typescript, is uncommonly awkward.21 But for the time being, that is where it stays. The typescript was heavily corrected, but the organization was not altered. Subsequently, however, Proust added to the typescript a new transition to move from the second series of visits to the Bois into the earlier visits, before the protagonist knew Mme Swann. The text, which Proust improved when he himself copied it from one copy of the typescript to the other, is reproduced as part of variant b to Pliade, p. 626 (from Pliade, p. 1427, line 11: Mais la beaut). The idea is that he would not have found Mme Swann so elegant had he not had a predisposition to believe it: Et cette croyance aurait d natre en moi un peu plus tt, quand mon amour pour Gilberte ... me faisait considrer22 tout ce qui entourait la lle de Mme Swann comme dou dune existence extraordinaire, comme incomparable au reste. He wonders if she recognized in him the young adolescent of two years before. This addition leads into the evocation of earlier excursions to glimpse Mme Swann. It was a last-minute correction to the typescript; the vast majority of the changes were made, in 1912, on what is conventionally called the second typescript, and copied to the rst by Prousts valet, Nicolas Cottin, but the change we are considering was sketched on the rst typescript and copied by Proust himself onto the second one.23 The typescript Proust sent to Bernard Grasset in March 1913 therefore included the three visits at the end of the long section on Gilberte, with the

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rst visit sandwiched between the second and third. Maybe Proust would have come to realize that the rst visit would have been more tting where he had originally located it, as part of the ritual followed by the young boy, attached to all that was part of Gilbertes world. But we cannot know, for things took a different turn. THE GRASSET PROOFS It was soon obvious that the rst volume was excessively long.24 The rst run of galley proofs, begun on March 31 and nished June 7, comprised ninetyve placards (hereafter pl.) or galleys (eight pages each).25 Allowing for the inevitable expansions that would take place when Proust corrected the galleys, we can understand why there are references to a volume of 800 pages. The pages concerning Gilberte run from pl. 53 to pl. 75, dated from May 15 to June 6. The necessity of breaking the rst volume earlier than was intended surfaces in a letter Proust wrote to Grasset around June 24. Proust is sending back the rst forty-ve galleys, and he explains why he did not return the last fty sheets earlier: Comme je vous avais dit, jtais trs impatient de savoir combien de pages nous allions ... Je vois maintenant que jai reu toutes le premires preuves, que le volume aurait plus de 700 pages, chiffre que nous avons dit de ne pas pouvoir dpasser. Je vais donc tre oblig de reporter au commencement du deuxime volume ce que je croyais la n de celui-ci (une bonne dizaine de placards) ... une n nest pas une simple terminaison et ... je ne peux pas couper cela aussi facilement quune motte de beurre. Cela demande rexion et arrangement. Ds que jaurai pu trouver comment nir, cest--dire trs prochainement, dans quelques jours, je vous renverrai les premires et les secondes preuves.26 In like vein, Proust told Louis de Robert that there were ninety-ve galley sheets and that he would nish the volume at an earlier point (Correspondance 12:211 [letter 94]), and to Jean Cocteau he wrote: Jai d couper la n du premier volume car cela faisait 850 pages, et ainsi cela en fera 670 (Correspondance 12:222 [letter 99]). Proust was probably thinking of the passage identied earlier as page 633 of the typescript, which comes on pl. 83 of the galley proofs (see n. 24 above). At that point was a truly purple passage, on the view of the sunlit sea from the bedroom window of the hotel in Normandy where the protagonist is staying with his grandmother. The appropriateness of these paragraphs to conclude the volume is demonstrated by the fact that Proust moved them from that position to the actual end of A lombre des jeunes filles en eurs, leaving just two paragraphs in the original place.27

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Unfortunately, that very acceptable compromise had to be abandoned, as it would leave the rst volume still too long. The letter to Cocteau, and several others from the rst ten days of July, imply that Proust was thinking about ending the volume earlier still. Robert, he told Cocteau, wanted him to plan separate volumes of 400 pages each, but Proust refused to countenance breaking before page 500: mais ce sera affreux. He said something similar to Robert himself: Le volume naura pas huit cents pages, mais environ six cent quatre-vingts. Si vous y attachez une norme importance, je me rsignerai peut-tre le couper pas tout fait au milieu et le faire de 500 pages environ (Correspondance 12:21718 [letter 97]). But soon after that he told Robert that it would be unthinkable to nish before page 550, so he might as well allow himself 660 (Correspondance 12:224 [letter 100]). Other correspondents were brought into the discussion, including Georges de Lauris, to whom Proust wrote on July 11: La difficult est que des petits volumes, la chose est trop en train pour que ce soit encore possible. Ce que je ferai comme petit volume si je my rsigne, ce sont des volumes de 520 pages, chaque page tant le double dune page ordinaire. Or je me demande si cest la peine de tout bouleverser, davoir une n de volume idiote pour cela, quand un premier volume de 700 pages allait si bien (Correspondance 12:22829 [letter 102]). By the next day, Proust had settled for a rst volume of 500 pages. Grasset nailed him down: Il est donc entendu que vous me renverrez corriges les 500 premires pages destines constituer notre premier livre, aprs y avoir fait toutes les modications destines en assurer lunit (Correspondance 13:396 [letter 228]). Proust does not seem to have considered breaking where Noms de pays: le nom yields to Noms de pays: le pays (pl. 75/7; the division is not signaled on typescript or galley proofs) nor at the point when the protagonist receives an invitation to have tea with Gilberte at her home (pl. 67). The break would come, he decided, before the long episode of the dinner with Norpois (Pliade, p. 408, line 38, on pl. 59; the passage which now follows Pliade, p. 408, line 38, was originally located at the beginning of the section, before Pliade, p. 405, line 17). But he would have to rework the previous pages, so that the volume did not seem to end on a muted note. His rst idea was to conclude with the rayon de soleil sur le balcon. In the end he abandoned this idea and returned the incident to its original place, but on the third proofs, it appears at the end of the volume.28 In the passage moved (from Pliade, p. 388, line 40, to p. 392, line 21) there are two incidents, both moving from despondency to happiness. In the rst incident, the transition to joy is effected by the sight of a shaft of sunlight on the balcony; in the second, by the arrival of Gilberte at the Champs-Elyses. The two incidents

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have been reversed in order to end with the poetic passage on the sunlight. The inversion is not very convincing. Proust had to add two new transitional sentences, both awkward (see Pliade, p. 390 variant a and p. 392 variant a). The passage that had originally served as a transition between the two halves (Pliade, p. 390, lines 1332) was moved and attached to a later passage that brought in the same character, the old lady reading the Dbats (Pliade, p. 398, line 17, p. 398 variant a). The galleys preserved in NAF 16753 show something of this modication. The last columns of pl. 55 have been removed in order to paste pl. 55/6c8a (Pliade, p. 388, line 40, to p. 390, line 13) after pl. 56/2 (following Pliade, p. 392, line 21).29 The new link connecting Pliade, page 392, line 21, to page 388, line 40 (p. 392 variant a) has been added by hand. The rest of pl. 55/8 (bcd) was attached to pl. 56/1 (fol. 26v), and from it pl. 55/8c (the old lady reading the Dbats) was struck. That was because the passage had originally served as a transition between the two halves and was no longer relevant. So Proust incorporated it in a later passage by attaching another copy of column 8c to pl. 58/2.30 A page number (59, changed to 60) has been written on pl. 55/8bcd, indicating that the newly organized passage was to go in after pl. 59 (from which columns 7b and 8 would have been removed).31 The number 56 has been written onto pl. 56/3. On this set, therefore, Prousts intentions are to be inferred from the new page numbers. Proust may have made his new arrangement clearer on the set which went to the printer. We do have a trace of this other set. The break on Pliade, p. 388, which comes at line 39 on the set we have been considering, was actually made three lines earlier on the third proofs (we call the bridging lines pl. 55/6b),32 and in NAF 16753 there is a second copy of pl. 55/3b6a which does just that [NAF 16753 fol. 25]). We can assume, then, that when Proust sent the galleys back to Grasset, they concluded with the sunlight on the balcony, inserted after the description of the young boys fascination with the world of the Swanns. As we have said, at this stage the page on the pilgrimages (Pliade, p. 408, line 39, to p. 409, line 33) came before the other examples of his fetishism (Pliade, p. 405, line 17, to p. 408, line 38). Other evidence shows that Proust returned this material to Grasset at the end of July.33 He had already sent off the rst forty-ve galley sheets, on May 23 (Correspondance 13:384 [letter 218]), and they had formed the basis of the second proofs, going to p. 318, three-quarters of the way through Un Amour de Swann, and dated from May 30 to July 15.34 In his instructions sent on July 29 to Charles Colin, the printer, Louis Brun, Grassets secretary,

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speaks of les premires preuves corriges des placards 45 au placard 60, au bas duquel se terminera le premier volume, but he immediately adds car les placards 60 95 feront partie dun deuxime volume (Correspondance 13:399 [letter 231]). It is unlikely that the galleys returned by Proust went beyond pl. 59/7a, augmented by the rayon de soleil. But we have seen that Proust numbered one copy of the transferred sunlight episode 60, and if he did the same on the copy sent to Grasset, that would make sense of Bruns apparent contradiction. The printer set to work with a will, and the third set of proofs are dated from July 31 to September 1. The pages on the sunlight, with the two halves inverted, have of course been moved to follow after NP 408, where they would have closed the rst volume in a poetic, if not very relevant, manner. By the time he corrected the page proofs, however, Proust had come up with a better idea. It may have been the passing reference to going to the Bois which suggested to Proust that a more effective solution still would be to use the rst visit to the Bois, which gured on the galleys as a ashback at the very end of the Gilberte portion of the novel, to end the rst volume. As we have seen, a place had always been reserved for a mention of the Bois at this point. Once Proust received the new proofs (at the beginning of September), he could incorporate his new ending into them. He restored the episode of the sunlight to its rightful place (toward the bottom of p. 478 of the proofs), with the two halves in their original order, and with the original transitional paragraph (pl. 55/8c) reinstated. Rather than use the last pages of the new proofs (pp. 500b504), with complicated written indications to show the new order, he went back to his galleys and inserted into the set of proofs he returned to the printer (NAF 16756) a fresh copy of pl. 56, preceded by pl. 55/6c8.35 On this set Proust included the whole of pl. 56, not just the rst two sheets, and he cut pl. 55/6 after, and not before, the sentence we identify as pl. 55/6b (Pliade, p. 388, lines 3639).36 Pages 47984 of the proofs are therefore replaced by the ten pages of the galley proof (pl. 55/6b7 are considered a single page), and the text of the third proofs resumes with page 485.37 Proust had to copy a few lines at the end of the intercalation, as pl. 56/8 does not quite join onto page 485 of the proofs (fol. 106). The next modication involved moving the opening page of the concluding section and putting it at the end (pp. 4089). This change was undoubtedly occasioned by the need to make a smooth transition into the new ending, which would have the protagonist waiting at the Bois de Boulogne to see Mme Swann pass. The switching back of the two halves of this section meant moving the second half of page 495 and the top half of page 496, and putting them into page 500.38

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As for the actual ending, we have seen that Proust had prepared his galleys, and so all he had to do was to attach them. So, following page 409, line 32, we have pl. 74/1b to 75/6. Because nothing is ever simple with Proust, we have to add that pl. 74/58 is missing, though it is needed for the coherence of the narrative.39 On the copy of pl. 74 which Proust transferred (NAF 16753, fols. 62v63r), he wrote in blue pencil at the top of pl. 74/1, ne fait pas partie de ma n nouvelle, and on pl. 74/2, Cest peu prs ici que commence la nouvelle n (this indication should have come two lines before the bottom of pl. 74/1; again, Prousts intentions would have been made more precise on the proofs sent to the printer). After pl. 75/6, Proust has added by hand the next lines (taken from pl. 75/7), followed by the word Fin. On the copy which would have stayed at the original place, Proust has conserved only pl. 74/1 and pl. 75/78, with the lines that were transferred struck out (NAF 16753, fol. 60v). The nine galley sheets that were transferred are paginated 5019. The page proofs were not sent back to Grasset until October 10 (Correspondance 13:401 [letter 233]). Traces of the rethinking of the ending can be found in letters around the beginning of September. Toward the end of August, Proust offered to send Lucien Daudet si cela pouvait vous amuser de parcourir les preuves de mon premier volume (car hlas, le livre sera diviset stupidement sans quon puisse ds le premier volume se douter de ce que cela sera, en trois volumes) (Correspondance 12:254 [letter 115]). He did send Daudet his proofs, within two days.40 Daudet read them immediately, and Proust replied to his comments at length. In his reply, he wrote: Javais justement envie de vous crire parce que jai eu lide dinterpoler un peu les dernires pages que vous avez (ou plutt de leur rendre leur ordre primitif) et dajouter pour la n du volume quelques pages qui venaient plus loin et que vous navez pas (Correspondance 12:257 [letter 116]). Shortly after this, Proust wrote to Robert: Je ne laisserai pas la n telle que vous lavez lue. Je nallongerai cependant pas le livre. Jajouterai seulement cinq ou six pages qui se trouvent au milieu du second volume et qui feront un couronnement un peu plus tendu (Correspondance 12:271 [letter 119]). Vigneron observed that the new ending went beyond ve or six pages (Structure, p. 462) and assumed that only the rst half (the rst visit) was considered and that the epilogue proper (the third visit) was added later, to make the conclusion even stronger. The proofs, however, do not support this, and we know that the epilogue was always connected to the protagonists earliest memories of the Bois. One sympathizes with Vigneron all the same. The published ending of volume 1 is just too spectacular for the context.

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The next set of proofs, the fourth, incorporates the new ending. Proust sent Lucien Daudet a copy of the last pages, with an explanation of how the previous pages had been changed. Je vois des inconvnients nir par ce morceau, mais jy vois de grands avantages ... Vous jugerez bien si cela termine mieux que le soleil sur le balcon.41 He told Daudet that the only difference between the new text and the one Daudet had read was that le jour de neige, les jours o je vois du soleil sur le balcon would come quelques pages plus haut, and he continues, Et ce nest quaprs eux que je mettrais (ce qui en ce moment est un peu avant): Les jours o Gilberte ne venait pas. This account of what he had done to his text does mention the two principal changes, but it is very elliptical, and it did not really help Daudet to reconstitute the full passage, of which he received only the new ending. Vigneron unfortunately had his own idea of the original order, based chiey on internal evidence, and it has no basis at all in reality (Structure, pp. 44042 and p. 442, n. 47). He deployed much ingenuity in showing how, when the last page was moved, it necessitated moving the others and redistributing them in order not to render incoherent some of the detail in what Proust had already in place.42 As I have said, the proofs tell a different tale; the order Vigneron finds incoherent was already there. The inconvnients which Vigneron details all go back to the time when Proust paginated his cahiers.

CONCLUSION Vignerons explanation of the ending of Du Ct de chez Swann, which overwhelms a narrative that had barely begun, is sound in its general thrust, but not in the details. What emerges when we marshall all the evidence now available to us is that Proust already had the solution to his problem, which was to end volume 1 with a rst visit to the Boissomething already drafted in the very rst sketches and alluded to in the typed version. But by bringing forward a third visit, admirably suited as a conclusion if the volume had been able to reach the climax of the second visit, and placing it at the end of Autour de Madame Swann, Proust frankly overstretched his material. It would be unethical to meddle with the text Proust approved, however reluctantly, but nothing prevents readers from postponing their reading of the third visit to the end of Autour de Madame Swann. It works extremely well. One could add a curious postscript. Another pioneer in the eld of genetic studies on Proust, Albert Feuillerat, was able to track down a

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sufficient number of proofs of A lombre des jeunes filles en eurs to demonstrate Prousts original intentions for that volume (see n. 3 above). He too overstated his case, arguing that Prousts modications marked a decline in poetic sensibility, and Feuillerat lost credibility as a result. But in one respect his research has not been challenged: following Feuillerat, everyone assumes that the girls themselves were not intended by Proust for the rst visit to Normandy, that they were introduced at a late stage in the elaboration of the second volume. But just as there was always an idea to have a Morceau sur le bois in the rst pages of the section on Gilberte, so too do the manuscript cahiers show that Proust always thought of populating his seaside resort with a group of enigmatic schoolgirls. The exercise books of 1910 are full of experiments involving these girls. But Proust constantly came up against the difficulty of organizing the episodes suggested by his teeming brain, and when he was faced with the challenge of producing a readable draft of his novel, he shelved the idea. Only when he was tackling his second volume seriously did he reintroduce the girls. By that time, however, the contents of volume 2 had been announced, without the girls, and they do not gure in Grassets proofs. But they were there, waiting in the wings, and this time it was the freedom afforded by the war, and not the constraints of a publishers deadline, which pushed Proust into restoring his original intentions.

NOTES
A shorter version of this article was delivered as a paper at the Proceedings of the Proust Colloquium held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in April 2000 and will appear in Proust in Perspective: Visions and Revisions, edited by Armine Kotin Mortimer and Katherine Kolb, to be published by the University of Illinois Press in 2002, copyright 2002 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 1. Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. J.-Y. Tadi et al., 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 198789), 1:40914 and 41420, quotation on 1:414. Subsequent references to this edition appear in the text, cited parenthetically as Pliade by page and line numbers; unless otherwise stated, all references are to vol. 1. 2. Robert Vigneron, Structure de Swann: Prtentions et dfaillances, Modern Philology 44 (1946): 10228; reprinted in his Etudes sur Stendahl et sur Proust (Paris: Nizet, 1978), pp. 43066. Hereafter the 1978 reprint will be cited parenthetically in the text as Structure. 3. Albert Feuillerat, Comment Marcel Proust a compos son roman, Yale Romanic Studies 7 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1934). 4. This reference does not survive in the published novel, but it will be found in variant a to p. 21 of the Pliade edition: see Pliade, p. 1104.

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5. Pliade, p. 135. The typescript of 1909 did not go further than p. 134, line 2, although the manuscript cahier that Proust was following contained about twentyve pages on the deux cts. 6. The numbers attributed to the cahiers by the Bibliothque Nationale de France classify the exercise books according to the part of the novel most implicated and within each division follow a chronological sequence. The numbers are therefore not in themselves a guide to the chronology, although they are not arbitrary. Cahier 27 has the call mark NAF [nouvelles acquisitions franaises] 16667, placed where it is because most of it has to do with Normandy, which will be part 4 of the novel. 7. Pliade, p. 564, line 41. The previous page (fol. 65.2) took us to Pliade, p. 564, line 16 (tous les plus beaux raisonnements que jaurais pu faire, toutes les). The typescript shows that the next word was louanges (later changed to tous les loges). 8. Pliade, p. 624, line 27, to p. 625, line 23; p. 625, line 23, to p. 626, lines 22 and 2639; then p. 629, lines 3236, and p. 630, lines 36 differently ordered (see p. 626 var. b). The missing page evidently included Pliade, p. 626, lines 719; as those dozen lines would not have lled a manuscript page, we know that there were lines scored out, possibly rst versions of the passage that was typed, but we cannot speculate further. 9. Marcel Proust, Correspondance, ed. Philip Kolb, 21 vols. (Paris: Plon, 197093), 11:46, 51 [letters 17 and 20]. All subsequent references to the correspondence are cited parenthetically in the text as Correspondance by volume and page numbers followed by letter numbers in brackets. 10. Kolb places this letter at the very end of March. His argument is based on an allusion to Nahmiass father (Jai tellement souffert que je nai pas encore crit Monsieur votre Pre), which he says appears to follow one made in a letter dated with certainty March 29 (Avez-vous dit monsieur votre pre combine je lui tais reconnaissant. Je nose pas aprs si longtemps lui crire; Correspondance 11:85 [letter 39]). It seems to me more likely that the second reference must follow the rst after a gap sufficiently long to have made Proust guilty for not having found time to write. 11. Folios 190206. Nahmias indicates that the pages come from a cahier noir, which might point to Cahier 23. It is obvious from the appearance of the exercise book, however, that nothing is missing from Cahier 23 at this point. Most of the exercise books Proust used at this period were black. 12. The last two pages were much rewritten before Proust came to the version we read now. The text of all the second half of this epilogue (from the middle of p. 9 to the end) is reproduced as Esquisse LXXXVI, Pliade, pp. 98891. 13. The entire manuscript, which went as far as the end of Noms de pays: le pays, was typed out, with two carbon copies. Only a few pages of the third run survive, but most of the other two runs are in the Bibliothque Nationale collection, NAF 1673016732 (commonly, if inaccurately, known as the rst typescript) and 1673316735 (the so-called second typescript). It was typed in stages, in 1909 (16730 and 16733, three-quarters of Combray), 1911 (the rest of Combray plus 16731 and 16734; Un Amour de Swann, begun at Cabourg by Miss Hayward and completed and in part retyped in Paris by someone else), and 1912 (16732 and 16735; Noms de pays: le nom, typed as far as fol. 65 of Cahier 24 in March and completed

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by Miss Hayward in MayJune; and Noms de pays: le pays, entirely typed by Miss Hayward in June). 14. The twenty loose pages are obviously the seventeen sheets we have just described, the typescript of which does indeed begin at p. 560. The cahier rouge is not Cahier 22, as Kolb suggests (see his n. 3), but Cahier 70, which was not known at the time vol. 11 of the Correspondance was published. Cahier 70 is the manuscript for Noms de pays: le pays, i.e., the Normandy section, which comes directly after Autour de Madame Swann. 15. The rst editor, Henri Bonnet, in the Bulletin de la Socit des Amis de Marcel Proust 7 (1957): 28081, dated it September or October 1911; see also his study Comment a t conu A la recherche du temps perdu (1959; reprint, Paris, 1971), p. 125. Kolb assigns it to early January. Kolbs dating rests on a remark in a letter to Robert de Billy that Kolb plausibly dates January 19, in which Proust says, il faut que je nisse pour la dactylographe les dernires pages de mon premier chapitre (Correspondance 11:32 [letter 11]). But it seems reasonable to assume that Proust was referring there to the whole of the Gilberte Swann section, whereas the request to Nahmias accompanies another part of the typescript altogether, the one which starts at the end of Noms de pays: le nom and continues with Noms de pays: le pays. The traditional dating is accepted by the Pliade editor: see Pliade, pp. 128485; and J.-Y. Tadi, Marcel Proust (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 676. Franoise Leriche (Une nouvelle datation des dactylographies du Temps perdu la lumire de la Correspondance, in Bulletin dinformations proustiennes 17 [1986]: 720) suggested early June (p. 12); and Shuji Kurokawa (Remarques sur le manuscript et la dactylographie du Rcit de Cricquebec [Paris: unpublished memoir, 1988]) adopted this suggestion (p. 70). 16. Letters 4, 66, and 78 of Correspondance 11, addressed to Nahmias and dated January, May, and June by Kolb, should all, in my view, be reassigned to mid-May. They clearly belong in sequence. 17. Correspondance 11:239, 291 [letters 128 and 148]. See Vigneron, Structure (n. 2 above), p. 462, n. 69. The note in the Pliade edition also implies the connection (Pliade, pp. 1280, 414, n. 1). 18. The manuscript mentions feuilles mortes and his difficulty in sleeping (but in a different connection from letter 128). The word nostalgie (letter 148) is not imported into the novel until the typescript is corrected (see Pliade, p. 414 var. b), but that still antedates the letters to Mme Straus. 19. See the chronologie de Marcel Proust in Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdus, ed. Pierre Clarac and Andr Ferr, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 1:xxxix. In an article which counts as my opus 1 (A Note on the Text of Swann, Adam International Review 260 [1957]: 1014), I pointed out (p. 104) that the statement that comparison of the fourth and fth proofs shows that the passage was added in the autumn of 1913 is ill founded. The other piece of evidence accepted in that article, and the conjecture that Proust added the third visit when he made the transfer, can however no longer be sustained. 20. Cahier 23, fol. 18 is p. 17, and the two sheets we have (65.4 and 65.2v) are pp. 18 and 20. 21. 409 var. a, Alors, rien ne me causait plus dmoi .... We need to restore the words omitted at the end of the sentence on p. 1278, which should read et jouait aux barres avec sa lle.

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22. Word omitted from the Pliade transcription. 23. Copied from NAF 16732, fols. 15758, to the margin of NAF 16735, fol. 163, continuing on fol. 164. On the identity of the copyist, see my article, Sur le copiste de la premire dactylographie, in the Bulletin dinformations proustiennes 31 (2000): 2330. 24. Votre manuscript contient une matire formidable, Grasset wrote on March 5 (Correspondance 20:632 [letter 368]). Proust had entertained doubts as early as the end of the previous October, when he told another editor he approached that if it should prove quite impossible to accommodate all the typescript in one volume, he would suggest breaking at p. 633 of the typescript (Correspondance 11:257 [letter 135]). I discuss this suggestion in the next paragraph of the main text. 25. The eight pages of each galley have been pasted on the two inside pages of a large double sheet. NAF 16753 contains several such sheets, of a run which Proust corrected. Consequently pl. 1 (for example) is on the sheets foliated 1v and 2r. NAF 16754 likewise contains several sheets, of a set Proust did not correct. Neither set is complete. These two sets are independent of the one which was corrected tidily and sent to the printer (see n. 36). We can see from the next proofs that the corrections received by the printer do not entirely coincide with those we read on the sets that we have. The rst 52 galleys of the set which went to the printers were bought by the Bodmer Foundation in Geneva in June 2000, but unfortunately pl. 5359 were not with them. We use the code pl. 56/1 (etc.) to indicate the rst column of galley 56, and where we have to distinguish different portions of a column, we use suffixes, thus: pl. 55/6a, pl. 55/6b, and pl. 55/6bcd, where we include more than one unit. Vignerons argument that there were more than ninety-ve galleys (Structure, p. 437, n. 43) does not hold water. 26. Correspondance 13:392 [letter 225]. Volume 13 of Kolbs edition of the Correspondance is devoted to 1914, but several letters of 1913 came to light too late for inclusion in vol. 12 and are included in vol. 13 as an appendix. 27. Pliade, 2:65, lines 2021. We see from variant 64b that the passage began with the lines now at 305, lines 1537 and (with a different link) 306, lines 1117, and from 65c that it concluded, after several lines that have disappeared, with 306, lines 2034. It can be conveniently read in Richard Bales, Bricquebec: Prototype d A lombre des jeunes filles en eurs (Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 11521. Vigneron identied the allusion correctly (Structure [n. 2 above], pp. 45960, n. 59, also p. 431, n. 4), though his conjecture that it came on pl. 88 was not quite right. See also Pliade 2:1367, n. 2, 1490, and 306, n. 1. 28. The Bibliothque Nationale has two runs of the third proofs, one uncorrected (NAF 16757) and one corrected (16756). 29. Placard 55 is NAF 16753, fols. 23v and 24r; pl. 56 is fols. 26v and 27r. 30. The pagination of the galleys skipped from pl. 56 to pl. 58. On fol. 28v of 16753 (pl. 58), traces remain of this half sheet: just the very end of each line, the rest having been cut out when this provisional solution was abandoned and the original text restored. It was taken from a virtually uncorrected set of galleys, NAF 16754, where col. 8 has been cut after 8a (fol. 95r). 31. The last two sheets of pl. 59 (NAF 16753 fol. 31r) are both missing. The

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rst lines of pl. 59/7 would have been copied, one assumes, onto the following page (the one marked 60). 32. The Pliade variant (390a) records the new transition (between 408:38 and 390:33) as it appears on NAF 16753. One can see from the third proofs that the text sent to the printer gave a longer transition at this point, which included the three lines of 388, adapted to the new context. 33. Proust left Paris hastily on July 26, and the printer, Louis Brun, acknowledged receipt July 29 (Correspondance 12:236 [letter 106] and 13:398 [letter 230]). 34. This is recorded correctly on p. clix, but wrongly on p. cxxxii, where the nal date is given as September 1. Kolb (n. 9 above) makes the same mistake (Correspondance 12:207, n. 2), as does Tadi (n. 1 above; p. 705, n. 7), and more spectacularly, the Pliade editors, who speak of les 95 placards des deuximes preuves (Pliade, p. 1049). September 1 is the last date stamped on the third proofs. For the second proofs, the printer needed galley 46, returned July 13 (Correspondance 13:397 [letter 229]). 35. The antecedent of these transferred pages is in NAF 16753 (fols. 23v24r, pl. 55/16b). 36. The most plausible explanation for the omission of pl. 55/6b is that Proust had his working copy, which broke at line 40, in front of him, and he made the same cut without thinking. He added the missing sentence by hand to p. 478 of the third proofs. It is surprising that he did not cut pl. 56 after the second column, as the text of pl. 56/38 had already been set by the printer. The only difference, which could have been handled simply by striking the lines he no longer wanted, was that the paragraph stuck onto pl. 56/7, which came from pl. 55/8, had to be restored to its original position as the transition between the two halves of the sunlight episode. It would not have had to be recopied, as it was in place on pl. 55/8. 37. The inserted galleys are paginated (by Proust) pp. 47985, 485bis, 485ter, 485quater. Page 485 of the proofs is now renumbered 485quinque. 38. Proust took pp. 49596 (each pair of pages is of course printed recto/verso), and cut it into two. Page 495a he attached to p. 494 (NAF 16757, fol. 110), with the result that p. 496a appears to be attached to p. 493 (it is struck out), and he turned the lower half round, so that one sees p. 496b rst, with p. 495b, struck, on the back (fol. 111). Page 497 follows (fol. 112). Another copy of p. 495 (lower half) and p. 496 (top half) was inserted into p. 500, but only for a portion of p. 495; the rest is written in by hand. 39. They are still in 16753, as fol. 61r. NP says that pp. 411:28 to 414:39 were suppressed, suggesting it was to make space, but this seems arbitrary. Proust is not likely to have started his cut in the middle of a sentence which just happened to be where the two halves of the galley divided. I fancy that all that happened was that the pl. 74/58 got left behind by an oversight. 40. Lucien Daudet, Autour de soixante lettres de Marcel Proust, Cahiers Marcel Proust, vol. 5 (Paris: Gallimard, 1929), p. 67; quoted by Kolb in Correspondance 12:256, n. 6 (see n. 9 above). 41. Correspondance 12:28788 [letter 128]. This letter is unfortunately difficult to date (see Kolb, p. 288, n. 2), but it was probably written toward the end of October. The reference to a mistake (entt for tt, 414:41) does not help, as the fourth

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proofs give un seul, tt, petit, trapu, and Proust has simply moved the word so that it follows trapu. For a full list of the possible inconvnients, see Vigneron, Structure (n. 2 above), p. 464. 42. Structure, pp. 46364. Vigneron posited an original order which was coherent, but which had to be upset when Proust revised his ending. But the original order is what Vigneron gives in his n. 72 (with the proviso that his units 4 and 5 were reversed), presented as if it were the result of the changes forced upon Proust.

MAUREEN A. RAMSDEN

Jean Santeuil and the Notion of avant-texte: A Case for an Extension of the Term?

[S]il est facile de dcrire ngativement les brouillons par ce quils ne sont pas, il est beaucoup plus difficile de dnir leur vritable spcicit [ ... ]. (Lebrave 11) [L]a gense dun pome ou dun roman nobit pas entirement un programme prexistant, et nest rgie ni par un processus unique, ni par un nalisme simple, ni mme par le dveloppement harmonieux dun modle; la perte, la drive, limprvu ont une frquence hautement plus probable que lconomie, la linarit assure, le prvisible. Gense non pas organique, mais relevant plutt de la combinatoire, dune logique autre que celle du dterminisme de cause effet. (Levaillant 13)

he denition of an avant-texte has undergone numerous changes on the way to what continues to be, in the case of some critics, a rather reluctant acceptance of the term and its import in literary criticism. The main debates have centred around the documents to be included in the term avant-texte, the relation of the avant-texte to the nished work or texte, the denition of the term texte, and the general purpose and validity of this branch of literary criticism. The aim in this discussion is twofold: to suggest, given the unstable boundaries dividing the texte from the avant-texte, a wider denition of the term avant-texte, and to examine, in the light of this discussion, the special case represented by Prousts corpus, and in particular his early novel Jean

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Santeuil which, it will be argued, had an important role in the macrogenesis of la recherche du temps perdu. The liberation of the texte from its structuralist isolation led to a tacit acknowledgement of the possible value of sources outside the texte in elucidating its full signicance. This meant that the texte could be viewed in a wider contextits historical, cultural, literary, linguistic, and nally, genetic perspective. The term avant-texte, coined by Jean Bellemin-Nol, appeared both to free the new area of genetic studies from its early association with the work on ancient manuscripts, and to establish the purpose and perimeters of this eld of study. He dened the avant-texte as lensemble constitu par les brouillons, les manuscrits, les preuves, les variantes , vu sous langle de ce qui prcde matriellement un ouvrage, quand celui-ci est trait comme un texte, et qui peut faire systme avec lui (1972:15). However, although the term was taken up by most critics, there has been no consensus as to its exact meaning; the various assumptions it makes can be challenged. For example, the denition of a texte, in reference to which an avant-texte is usually dened, is itself problematic.1 Bellemin-Nol distinguishes between le texte, dened as le texte dnitif ou plus exactement le dernier tat dune laboration, sign par lcrivain and louvrage, dened as un crit particulier publi sous la signature de quelquun (lcriture); les dimensions nimportent pas: livre, article, pome isolpourvu quil y ait un titre et un point nal (1972:17 and 14). However, difficulties over denitions immediately arise. At what point can a work, published or unpublished, nished or unnished, be accepted as a texte? The texte has, for example, been seen as a chance occurrence, as simply the end, one possible end, of a series of avant-textes (Melanon 53). This is doubly the case when a work has not been given the nal imprimatur by the author. An author can even move between different brouillons, back and forth, until one version is designated (by him/her or an editor) as texte. There are cases of changes in later editions and in the typed copies and the proofs. Baudelaire, for example, was forced by censorship to produce a very different second edition of the Fleurs du mal from the one he originally published, and the edition which is published today, with the condemned poems appearing in appendices, was not sanctioned by Baudelaire.2 The distinction made between a public (published) texte versus a private (unpublished) texte is equally problematic (Grsillon 1994:16). Pascals Penses are an obvious, much-quoted case. Despite their original form as avant-textes, an unnished work, they are now a much published, public texte and have acquired the status of a canonical work. What then of Bellemin-Nols idea that a nished, published work should be signed by the

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author (or given the nal imprimatur) (1972:17)? The denition of a texte becomes increasingly problematic, leading Jacques Petit to state that [l]e texte nexiste pas.3 Rather than simply suggesting a closed and rather narrow denition of a texte, Marion Schmid has discussed different factors which are brought into play when an avant-texte is nally published and accepted as a canonical texte (1998). They include the style of a particular writer and the point at which he decides on publication. They can also involve the important role of an editor, who decides to present unnished work for publication, and his involvement in its general presentation: What we consider to be a text depends, rst, on the literary sthetics of individual authors (and, by extension, on which documents they decided to release to the public) and, second, on what has been established and presented as a text by publishers and editors (Schmid 1998:20). Louis Hay cites four commonly received factors in the acceptance of a texte: auteur, uvre, lecteur, socit (153). He thus adds the dimension of the acceptance of the reading public, with its particular literary and cultural norms, to the factors already cited by Marion Schmid. Another useful approach to the problem is offered by Thanh-Vn Ton-That, in his discussion of Jean Santeuil.4 He suggests that the means of dening a work as a texte lies in the degree of completion at what he terms the external and internal level of the work: linachvement peut tre externe, lorsque luvre dveloppe et bien construite semble brusquement interrompue, comme prive de sa n attendue; ou bien linachvement est interne et touche des units plus rduites, non pas le texte dans sa globalit, mais un chapitre, une phrase, voire un mot, do limpression dclatement et dinstabilit (17). Thus the external level appears to relate to the overall plan and structure of the work, essential to its overall understanding, while the internal level concerns smaller units of the worka level on which some incompletion does not upset the transmission of the essential meaning of the work. The denition of texte therefore seems to rely on a dynamic interplay concerning a combination of factors whose relative importance might change with the work of individual writers. The denition of an avant-texte is equally problematic. The avant-texte can appear in different guises. The material form which the avant-texte commonly takesthe plans, brouillons, bauchesdepends, as Marion Schmid has pointed out, on the particular writer and his style of writing. Most nineteenth-century writers such as Zola and Flaubert, known as programmatic writers, planned their work ahead in great detail, leaving large numbers of plans, scnarios, brouillons, mises au net and also notes on

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historical events (Schmid 1998:xv, and also 43-44, where she notes the importance of Louis Hays work in this area). Here the approach reects a particular aim and genre. Writers such as Proust and Joyce, known as immanent writers (their method being described also as criture processus), seldom used written plans, but would allow their work to develop in the act of writing (Schmid 1998:xv and 43-44). Their avant-texte therefore mainly consists of brouillons. The denition of the avant-texte has also depended on its relation to the nished work or texte. As mentioned above, an avant-texte, for long not considered as publishable material, is often viewed essentially as a private texte, as opposed to the public nature of the published texte (see Grsillon 1994). The private texte can also be seen as inferior to the public texte. When the texte is considered to be the perfected version at the end of a period of trial and error, the brouillons are, by denition, the imperfect versions in this process. The avant-texte is therefore seen as unnished, unclear, and therefore not worthy of publication. As Bellemin-Nol expresses it, [les brouillons] portent tmoignage dun labeur et du passage de limperfection la perfection (1977:5). In addition, the avant-textes can be seen as part of a teleological process, as necessary workings and reworkingsrecognisable different stages in the evolution of the nal texte. Acknowledging the fact that the later brouillons are often potential units of texte, and can even change status several times in the course of revisions, corrections and editions, Bellemin-Nol has seen the avant-texte as being dened in retrospectwhen the nished work has been established (1977:6). Furthermore, the public texte itself can be reclaimed by the writer as he makes changes in later editions and thus the texte can be said to revert to the status of an avant-texte. However, a narrow denition of avant-texte, seen from a teleological perspective, can also bring about the exclusion of large amounts of material which can appear to represent very different departures from the material admitted in the final texte, and of seemingly little relevance in the development of the texte. Nevertheless, the material which was rejected by the writer in the development of his nal texte is important for the ideas, themes and stylistic methods he chose to leave aside when he embarked on new directions, and must therefore be included in the term avant-texte and given equal importance. As Grsillon remarks: Les manuscrits littraires nous confrontent en effet bien souvent cette image des sentiers qui bifurquent, indniment, crant des rseaux et des trames, embrassant toutes les possibilits, toutes les

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virtualits, tous les excs jubilatoires qui ont exist pendant le temps de lcriture et qui auraient pu, net t la funeste biffure, devenir texte. (1994:12) A further problem relating to the denition of the avant-texte, which is not often considered, is that of the relation of earlier works of the writer to a later texte. Intertextual references and echoes are commonly studied, but are there any circumstances in which the earlier works of a writer should be included in the avant-texte of a later work? If the earlier works of a writer have been published with his/her consent, we would argue that they must be considered as discrete textes, with their own individual signicance, rather than as avant-textes for a later work. However, although Flaubert wrote several such discrete works which were published before his Lducation sentimentale in 1869, he also wrote an earlier work which was also called Lducation sentimentale, in 1845, which he did not publish. He comments as follows on this work, written in his youth: Novembre suivra le chemin de Lducation sentimentale, et restera avec elle dans mon carton indniment. Ah! Quel nez n jai eu dans ma jeunesse de ne pas le publier! Comme jen rougirais maintenant!5 Flaubert thus points out the lack of maturity in his early work, but can it be said that the rst ducation sentimentale acted as an avant-texte for the later work? The question of this particular case cannot be answered in this discussion, but Bellemin-Nol suggests general criteria which might be adopted when analysing such cases. His denition of avanttexte, which includes material which can be seen to faire systme with the nished texte, could encompass earlier unnished works (1972:15). Although Bellemin-Nols denition is somewhat broad here, the questions it raises will be analysed later in the discussion, as the need to examine closely, and even to question past denitions of the term avant-texte is of particular importance in a study of the avant-texte in Prousts corpus. Finally, a further important shift in critical thought meant that the avant-texte itself came to be viewed as an autonomous work by critics, a view which seemed to be strengthened by the publication of many avant-textes in recent years. Raymonde Debray-Genette, for example, describes this trend as follows: si lon a pens jusquici la gntique en termes dvolution, le plus souvent mme en termes de progrs, il semble quil faudrait incliner la penser en termes de diffrence, lui accorder un fonctionnement plus autonome, lui accorder sa propre potique. (19)

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Thus the avant-texte appears as an important public texte in its own right, and even threatens to invade the literary space of the texte. In 1971, Ponge, for example, published the avant-texte of his own poem Le pr (poem of 1964), together with the poem itself in La Fabrique du pr. As Grsillon and Lebrave express it, Ponge [ ... ] annule la frontire entre avant-texte et texte en publiant ct le texte et son brouillon (9).6 Thus when is a work a texte and when is it an avant-texte? There appear to be no very clear-cut distinctions between them. Not only are the frontiers continually changing, even the question of their literary hierarchy can be called into question. The nished texte can be said to mark out what is nally excluded as avant-texte (Bellemin-Nol 1977:6). Equally it can be stated that it is the avant-texte which has, by a process of evolution, given rise to the texte. Once we move away from the isolated, structuralist notion of texte, the borders between texte and avant-texte become less clearly dened: Sorti de sa clture et de sa xit, de son unicit et de la ncessit du ne varietur, le texte souvrait sur lensemble mouvant et fragile des avant-textes , sur la multiplicit des tats possibles in statu nascendi. (Grsillon 1990:18) The problem of the boundaries between texte and avant-texte is particularly pertinent in Prousts case, and a wider denition of the term avant-texte (and also of the term texte) would seem to be called for. As mentioned above, rather than drawing up detailed scnarios or plans (as in the case of Flaubert), Proust used mainly brouillons, many of which were very close to the nal texte (Schmid 1998:xv and 44). In addition, the canonical work, la recherche, was not nished when he died. There are also difficulties in establishing boundaries due to the particular temperament and health problems of the writer (one wonders whether he would ever have nally completed his opus), the method he used in writing, and also the nature of la recherchea modern work which has the potential to expand innitely on an internal level. As Jean-Yves Tadi expresses it, seule la mort la empch de tout refaire, de tout mtamorphoserde ce qui ntait pas encore publi (1986:84).7 Proust, who preserved a large quantity of the manuscripts of both his nished and unnished works, was very aware of the importance the avanttexte might come to assume in the eyes of critics and he was wary of misinterpretations. In his correspondence Proust, alluding to his manuscripts, voices this concern: Or la pense ne mest pas trs agrable que nimporte qui (si lon se soucie encore de mes livres) sera admis

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compulser mes manuscrits, les comparer au texte dnitif, en induire des suppositions qui seront toujours fausses sur la manire de travailler, sur lvolution de ma pense [ ... ].8 It can be argued that such misunderstandings have indeed taken place concerning the status of Prousts early works, and that the term avant-texte has been given too narrow a denition in regard to the works, and in particular Jean Santeuil, which preceded la recherche. Prousts work as a whole is commonly divided by the critics into the early works, Contre Sainte-Beuve, which is situated at the mid point and is seen as a turning point in the work as a whole, and the nal, public texte, la recherche du temps perdu. The early works include various articles, Les plaisirs et les jours (1896, 1924), and Jean Santeuil. Les plaisirs et les jours is usually dismissed as a dilettante work, whereas Jean Santeuil, though unnished, is generally accepted as a texte, but one which is of little importance in comparison with la recherche, and even Contre Sainte-Beuve, an unnished work also seen as a public texte. Considering rst of all the three major works as textes, Jean Santeuil has twice been published as a novel (1952, 1971b), and Contre Sainte-Beuve has been published twice as a work in its own right, with a different emphasis between the narrative and critical strands in each edition (1954, 1971a). For any reader who has no knowledge of the background to the publication of la recherche, the work might be seen as a nished texte, with some obvious errata and omissions. Given this situation, is it possible to challenge the status of Jean Santeuil, Contre Sainte-Beuve and even la recherche as textes? Is it also possible to class both earlier unnished works, Jean Santeuil and Contre-Sainte-Beuve, as avant-textes for the unnished la recherche? Looking at the claims of la recherche to be a canonical work, the most compelling argument for considering the published novel as a texte is the fact that Proust himself intended to publish this last work, and publication was already well advanced when he died in 1922. As Louis Hay expresses it, [la dcision de lauteur] tranche le cordon ombilical de la gense et fait basculer lavant-texte dans le texte (154). Thus the large amount of avant-texte which existed for the volumes published during Prousts lifetime was excluded from the nal texte, so creating the boundaries between texte and avant-texte. However, the imprimatur had not been given to the last volumes of la recherche, from La prisonnire to Le temps retrouv, when Proust died. Thus, although Prousts intention to publish the nal volumes of la recherche was clear, the later volumes contained much material about which Proust had not always made a clear decision regarding publication, and much work was left for the editors before the texte could be presented to the public. Given the

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personality of the writer and the modernist cultural climate, Proust might indeed have continued to expand his novel. The nal sentence of Le temps retrouv, as Tadi has pointed out, was reworked several times and the word n appears in an earlier version, before the fourth and nal version of the sentence, so that it does not appear, physically, at the end of the manuscript (1986:84). As Grard Genette expresses it, [j]amais [Proust] naura connu lauthentique achvement de cette uvre, quil crut acheve en 1913, qui ne ltait plus en 1914, qui ne ltait pas encore en 1922, et qui ne le sera jamais (9). On the other hand, a certain degree of incompletion does not mean that a work must be rejected as a texte. As Ton-That has pointed out, an important element in examining incompletion in a work is the level on which it is foundinternal or external. However, the status of la recherche as a texte can also be challenged on the level of the amount of intervention of the editors. The NRF completed publication of the posthumous works, having taken over responsibility for the whole work in 1919, when they published lombre des jeunes filles en eurs. The rst editors, with the help of Prousts brother, simply acted as intermediaries in an attempt to be true to Prousts intentions. Pierre Clarac and Andr Ferr, in the Pliade edition of 1954 (3 vols.), and later Jean-Yves Tadi, in the Pliade edition published between 1987 and 1989, used the NRF edition for the work published during Prousts lifetime. However they differed in the text they presented for the unnished volumes. Tadi points out that all the latest corrections were not available to the editors in 1954: Nous avons pu amliorer le texte posthume, en rtablissant des corrections voulues par Proust, en insrant des passages laisss en notes par nos prdcesseurs [ ... ] (Proust 1987:I:clxxii). Speaking of Tadis edition, Marion Schmid has remarked that most critics agree that the new Pliade provides the most authoritative text of la recherche du temps perdu to date (1995:56). The published texte had thus on the whole been considerably improved at the internal level. Thus on the level of the near completion of the external structure (and to a lesser extent the internal structure), as well as the works acceptance by the public, there is considerable justication for calling la recherche a texte. The overall shape and thrust of the novel had been clear from the rst drafts and facilitated the editors work. As Proust himself explained, [l]e dernier chapitre du dernier volume a t crit tout de suite aprs le premier chapitre du premier volume. Tout l entre-deux a t crit ensuite.9 The strength and clarity of the novels external structure was largely in place when Proust died. As concerns the internal structure, in relation particularly to the unnished volumes, the amount of material Proust might nally have

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included and any further additions he might have made cannot be known. The method of his writing, as described by Bernard Brun, shows a stellar approach (criture en toile [5]). This was reproduced in the structure of the novel so that any set of units or echoes could be added to in order to produce further links and echoes. The absence through incompletion of several links in the narrative, or some slight confusion regarding names and characters, is of little importance given the novels overall richness and coherence. As Bellemin-Nol expresses it, [le texte] nous est offert comme un tout x dans son destin (1979:116). Finally, the idea of the acceptance of a texte by the reader and the public is particularly helpful when considering la recherche. Though at rst it was misunderstood, even by the well-known publishing house NRF, the novel was nally published, and both the nished and unnished volumes were accepted by the reading public. (Du ct de chez Swann was published by Grasset in 1913 and the NRF nally agreed to publish all of Prousts novel to date in 1919. la recherche was also awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1919.) At the literary and cultural level the special qualities of this modernist novel, which itself embraced incompleteness, were thus recognised by the editors and the reading public. The case of Contre Sainte-Beuve is more complex. Though Proust had intended to have the work published, he seemed unable to decide between writing a more formal essay of literary criticism and presenting his ideas in the form of a narrative piece, woven around the ideas of the literary critic, Sainte-Beuve, and it remained an unnished project in Prousts lifetime (Schmid 1998: Part II, chapter 2). Proust shows his hesitation over form in a letter to a friend, Madame de Noailles, in 1908: La premire [tude] est lessai classique, lEssai de Taine en mille fois moins bien [ ... ]. La deuxime commence par un rcit du matin, du rveil. Maman vient me voir prs de mon lit, je lui dis que jai lide dune tude sur Sainte-Beuve, je la lui soumets et la lui dveloppe. (1981:321, no. 171). Proust did not resolve this problem for Contre Sainte-Beuve; he effectively abandoned the work, and both unnished versions were left in manuscript form. Despite its unnished state, Contre Sainte-Beuve was nally published in 1954 with a preface by Bernard de Fallois, and also in 1971, by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre. The editors of these editions played a much bigger role in presenting the unnished material than did the editors of la recherche. Bernard de Fallois, for example, even assigned a title to the work and to the

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different sections of it, and where there were several versions of a passage, he selected one for publication (Proust 1954:27). He also brought together, in his edition, the parts of Contre Sainte-Beuve which existed in the form of an essay, and those which had the form of a narrative. In the 1971 edition, Pierre Clarac retained both the title and the general arrangement of the fragments of text of the rst edition. However, Clarac and Sandre focus on the manuscripts relating to the critic Sainte-Beuve, omitting the narrative elements of the manuscripts (Proust 1971a:829). However, the status of Contre Sainte-Beuve as texte might be challenged in relation to both editions. It can be argued that the work, in its original state, especially at the external level (the arrangement of the nucleus of the principal ideas), was not sufficiently advanced to categorise Contre SainteBeuve as a texte. In addition, the question of the form the work was to take had not been resolved. De Fallois, in his introduction to the texte, himself concludes that Contre Sainte-Beuve au fond nest pas un livre: cest le rve dun livre, cest une ide de livre (Proust 1954:28). Tadi argues against both editions, seeing the first as being representative of Prousts aims, but too selective, while the second presents only the argument against Saint-Beuves method of criticism and neglects the narrative elements of the work. In Tadis view it was Prousts attempt to bring together such an abundance of material, while at the same time attempting to reconcile two very different stylistic approaches, which led him to abandon his original idea. Forme and fond were seemingly irreconcilable, with the result that [c]e livre inachev explosait sous leffet des tensions internes (1986:79). However, rather than setting all the material aside, Proust began to develop the narrative side of Contre Sainte-Beuve and parts of it reappear, often somewhat changed, in different episodes and parts of la recherche. Maurice Bardche describes the turning point as follows: [Proust a essay] dillustrer en quelque sorte la thorie quil professait en en montrant des applications. Mais en montrant ces applications, ctait son roman que Proust crivait sans le savoir trs clairement peut-tre (168). De Fallois cites six episodes found among the feuillets intended for Contre Sainte-Beuve which reappear in la recherche: la description de Venise, le sjour Balbec, la rencontre des jeunes lles, le coucher de Combray, la posie des noms et les deux cts (Proust 1954:11). Thus Contre Sainte-Beuve assumes a rather schizophrenic existence. Parts of the work, presented in two very different editions, were published and given textual status, and parts of it have been claimed as avant-texte for la recherche (Tadi 1983:19). However, it can be argued that these textes

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should have been published as avant-textes both because Proust did not intend them to be published as textes and because they remained incomplete on both the internal and the external level. Finally, and somewhat paradoxically, Contre Sainte-Beuve can also be considered to have been nished, rather than abandoned, because it becomes the novel la recherche (Tadi 1986:83). What then of the status of the early novel Jean Santeuil, begun in 1895 and abandoned in 1900? Both the number of years that separate the writing of Jean Santeuil from that of la recherche, and the very different reading experience they provide, mean that, to date, little work has been done on establishing links between la recherche and Jean Santeuil, though there has been a lot of discussion concerning the links between Prousts nal novel and Contre Sainte-Beuve.10 Proust had intended to write a novel, but left the work unnished and, more importantly, unpublished. It might therefore, as a private piece of writing and as an unnished manuscript, appear to bear some of the important characteristics of an avant-texte. Tadi describes the original manuscript as mille pages, rparties en chapitres inachevs, non classes, et nalement abandonnes par lauteur (1983:15). However, the manuscript was published posthumously in the guise of a novel, rst by Bernard de Fallois in 1952, and then by Pierre Clarac in 1971. As in the case of Contre Sainte-Beuve, it was the rst editor who gave the overall title of Jean Santeuil to the work, as well as subtitles to the many short sections in this confused mass of manuscripts. He also organised the work by reference to the nished novel la recherche (Tadi 1983:123 and 139). Thus the canonical, nished work was, paradoxically, made to serve as an avanttexte to the earlier unnished work. Clarac describes De Fallois approach as follows: Il a rassembl ces pages dtaches en chapitres suivis quil a groups euxmmes en dix parties. Pour donner louvrage ainsi agenc une cohsion apparente, il a d procder des interversions et des suppressions, amalgamer des dveloppements distincts, modier parfois les noms propres. (Proust 1971b:981) The 1971 edition is more faithful to the unnished original, leading Clarac to express his reservations about the approach adopted as follows: [ ... ] ce nest pas sans scrupule que nous livrons au public une uvre que son auteur a garde pour luimme et na pas acheve (Proust 1971b:986). There are numerous examples of unnished sections and sentences and unnished

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or missing words.11 Consequently, many of the different sections end abruptly and appear unnished. In the section to which Clarac has given the title [Le parc au petit jour] not only is the last word incomplete, but the full meaning of the long sentence which attempts to express Jeans impression of the effect of the weak sunlight in an overcast sky, both on himself and on his surroundings, is also unnished: Il faisait lourd. Mais Jean avait beau se plaindre de ce temps: le long du chemin plutt brillant quensoleill, dans les champs au bout desquels la prsence du soleil se trahissait par un vague rayonnement [ ... ], et dans les iris pendant quelques instants clairs de plus en plus jusqu tinceler, puis replongs dans lombre, il se sentait vivre la fois dans cette journe et dans des journes pareilles dautrefois; il avait le sentiment d.... (Proust 1971b:296-97)12 Titles have been suggested by the editor for the many sections and subsections of the novel to which Proust had not given a title or chapter heading. However, unlike the practice of the earlier edition, the titles invented by the editors are placed in square brackets, which once again highlights the incompletion of the text. For example the rst chapter, as marked by Proust, becomes the prologue in the 1971 edition, and the unnished introduction, consisting of no more than about twenty lines of text, is placed before the prologue (Tadi 1983:123). The rst section is named [Enfance et adolescence] (1971b:202), with subsections such as: [le baiser du soir] (202), [ Jean aimera la posie ] (211), [le collge] (230). The general rule used by Clarac in organising the material was a mixture of chronology and associated themes (Proust 1971b:982). However, some episodes do not have any clear point of insertion in the work, and these are presented in a separate section of Fragments at the end of the 1971 edition (880-98). Prousts manuscript was not only incomplete, much of it had not been put in any order. As Clarac points out, [d]ans la premire phase de son travail Proust lui-mme ignorait quelle place il assignerait aux diverses ides qui traversaient son esprit (Proust 1971b:982, n. 2). More importantly, Proust reveals in his correspondence that, although he had written many pages of his rst novel, it was not near completion because he had not discovered the overall message which he wished to convey. Thus in September 1896, in a letter to his mother, Proust wrote: [ ... ] si je ne peux

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pas dire que jaie encore travaill mon roman dans le sens dtre absorb par lui, de le concevoir densemble [ ... ], le Cahier que jai achet et qui ne reprsente pas tout ce que jai fait, puisque avant je travaillais sur des feuilles volantesce cahier est ni et il a 110 pages grandes (1976:124, no. 65). The result of the unnished nature of the manuscripts and of the different editing styles is that the reader is presented with two rather different textes in the 1952 and 1971 editions. De Fallois and Clarac do not always agree on what material should be included or completed in their editions, or on the order and general mode of presentation of the material to be adopted. In the 1952 edition, the text is divided into both parts, which are numbered, and also into named chapters within the parts. There are in addition unnamed sections where a break in the text appears within a chapter. Headings or loose indications of the content of a part are given at the beginning of each new section of the text. Some of these headings are the same as the chapter titles. In Part I of the 1952 edition (61-131) the rst four titles are Les soires de Saint-Germain, Les soires de Dieppe, M. Sandr, and Marie Kossichef. Three of these titles belong to a chapter but the exception, M. Sandr, belongs to a section within a chapter (probably in Les soires de Dieppe, though M. Sandr is also mentioned in the chapter headed Marie Kossichef). The 1971 edition is divided into named parts and subsections (often in square brackets, showing that they are the work of the editor). There are no obvious divisions into chapters. The titles and content of these subsections do not always correspond with the divisions in the 1952 edition. However, the second part or section of the novel (concerning the Santeuil familys stay with relations in the country), begins in the same way in both editions: Quelquefois Pques, quand M, Santeuil navait pas trop faire [ ... ] (1952:135, 1971b:277). The rst chapter of Part II of the 1952 edition is entitled treuilles and the second chapter is named Journes de vacances (135, 143). The material found in the rst four divisions of the second part or section of the 1952 edition is given the titles La maison dtreuilles, Lilas et pommiers, Les rues, Ernestine, etc. (the titles being given at the beginning of the second section [133]). In the 1971 edition, the second section has the overall title of [ Illiers] and covers much of the same material as the earlier edition. The rst ve divisions or subsections, given in square brackets and thus added by the editor, are as follows: [Arrive], [Lilas et pommiers], [Lilas et aubpines], [Petite ville dvote], and [Ernestine] (1971b:277, 278, 280, 281). However, the divisions into subsections within each part of the 1971 edition are much more numerous than in the 1952 edition; some sections only consist of half a page of material.

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Looking more closely at the placement of the material within the different sections, it is evident, as stated above, that the content and the order of the material, as well as the means of dividing it into chapters, parts and sections, differ in the two editions. An example of the different ordering of material in the two editions concerns the descriptions of the family gathering for lunch while staying at treuilles or Illiers, the changing position of the dining-room chairs before and during meals, and the description of the familys leisurely digestion. In the 1952 edition, in Part II, chapter 2, entitled Journes de vacances, there is a reference to the fact that Jean often returns home for lunch to nd the chairs already around the dining-room table (154). This is followed by a reference to the days when he spends much of the morning reading in front of the dining-room re and the chairs, at this early hour, are still aligned against the wall (154). The description of the family enjoying a leisurely digestion follows this account without any obvious link (155-58). In the 1971 edition the order appears even less logical. The reference to the leisurely digestion comes immediately after the return of Jean and his grandfather from the park, just before the meal begins (Part II, Illiers, section entitled [Farniente aprs le repas] [1971b:286-89), while the descriptions of the chairs, set either around the table, or against the wall in the dining-room, appear several sections later (in the section entitled [Aprs le djeuner] [304-05]). Such differences in the text of the two editions of Jean Santeuil are largely due to the unnished nature of the work which, as in the case of Contre Sainte-Beuve, was published posthumously, and which also owed much to the intervention of the different editors, who undertook to present the works in a readable form. However, it is questionable whether Prousts intentions concerning this work were clear enough to warrant their publication as textes. More importantly, the texte lacks closure because Proust himself had not discovered any satisfactory overall plan for his novel. When Proust appears to abandon a project, as in the case of both Contre SainteBeuve and Jean Santeuil, it is not to begin something new, but to present the same nucleus of inspiration in a different way in an effort to translate his vision. Is it not therefore possible to argue that Proust later reworked the material of Jean Santeuil in la recherche to the extent that it became an avant-texte of the canonical work? In fact Proust drew widely from the material of his rst novel as he did from Contre Sainte-Beuve. Jean Santeuil reveals many echoes of la recherche and could be said to pave the way for the later novel. As Clarac observes: Il ny a pas se demander pourquoi il a abandonn Jean Santeuil. Il ne la pas abandonn. Tous les thmes quil portait en lui et

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autour desquels sorganisera son uvre matresse y sont dj poss, moins objectivement quils ne le seront dans la Recherche, plus troitement rattachs au dtail et aux hasards de sa propre vie. Cest de Jean Santeuil (et non de Contre Sainte-Beuve !) que la Recherche est sortie [ ... ]. (Proust 1971b:983) Although Clarac might be said to be overstating the case here in seeing Jean Santeuil as a more important source for la recherche than Contre SainteBeuve, many episodes and characters, as well as the method of their presentation, found in la recherche, were pregured in Jean Santeuil. Therefore, using the criteria discussed above, Jean Santeuil can be usefully analysed as an avant-texte for la recherche. Looking rst of all at the material of Jean Santeuil in comparison with that of la recherche, it is evident that Proust reworked not only the characters and episodes of his early work, but also the themes.13 Thus many of the headings, which have been added by the editor to the different episodes in Jean Santeuil, nd their echo in the rsum of the latest Pliade edition of the novel (Proust 1987), although there are changes in both the names of the characters and of places. Many of the characters of la recherche, particularly those found in Combray, were rst introduced in Jean Santeuil. These include members of the childs close family, such as his parents (the rather authoritarian, but unpredictably kind father, and the much-loved mother from whom the child can hardly bear to be separated, particularly at night), and the great-aunt (Madame Servan or Sureau in Jean Santeuil and tante Lonie in la recherche).14 Many episodes and themes found in la recherche are also pregured in Jean Santeuil. Episodes which occur in both novels include the drame du coucher (sometimes referred to as le baiser du soir) and the description of wealthy arriviste social circles, such as the Cresmeyer family, which resembles, in its obsession with social prestige, the Verdurin clan in la recherche. On the level of themes, many of the experiences in love described in la recherche are pregured in Jean Santeuil. These include the young heros visits to the Champs-lyses, where he develops an obsession for a playmate (Marie Kossichef in Jean Santeuil and Gilberte Swann in la recherche) who does not form part of his social circle. Thus both young heroes experience the way in which separation increases and even creates their feelings for the loved one. In terms of an artistic vocation, Marcels poetic sensibility is already apparent, to a limited extent, in Jean Santeuil as shown, for example, by the way in which Jean shares Marcels love for the hawthorns, particularly the pink variety (1971b:330-33). Although there are some allusions in Jean Santeuil to the

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heros desire to write, they are much less numerous and less emphasis is placed on them than in la recherche (for example, 1971b:211-15). There are, of course, obvious differences between Jean Santeuil and la recherche. In Jean Santeuil there is a much larger amount of biographical detail. There is also greater interaction between the hero and his family, including their often violent disagreements. In addition, in the early work we learn more of the heros days at the lyce, including Jeans experiences in M. Beuliers classe de philosophie, while there are few references to Marcels schooldays in la recherche. Memory, one of the cornerstones of la recherche, is treated only briey in Jean Santeuil (for example, 1971b:247-48 and 897-98 in the Fragments divers), as are the generalisations, in the form of maxims, which are a more important part of la recherche. An example in the earlier novel would be the comment on the lack of harmony in the feelings which people experience towards each other at different times: Hlas! les heures napportent pas chacun les mmes penses (1971b:412). There are also some similarities and differences in the two novels on the level of technique. The early novel was a product of Prousts youth when he was still searching for his material and, more importantly, for a means of expressing it. The structure of the early novel follows, to some extent, the chronological order of Jeans life. In la recherche, on the other hand, Marcels love of literature and his slow discovery of his artistic vocation are a more important part of the basic structure of the novel. One of Prousts greatest difficulties in Jean Santeuil was to transform the particular experiences of life into the more widely familiar and useful material of ction. In the quotation placed by the editors just before the opening of Jean Santeuil, Proust points out his difficulties over form: Puis-je appeler ce livre un roman? Cest moins peut-tre et bien plus, lessence mme de ma vie recueillie sans y rien mler, dans ces heures de dchirure o elle dcoule. Ce livre na jamais t fait, il a t rcolt.15 Jean Santeuil is written in the third person, rather than the rst person found in la recherche. This point of view appears to distance the reader from the experiences of Jean, the central character. The preface (originally chapter one of the work) has a similar aim. In addition, some of the episodes are grouped, as in la recherche, by association, in a stellar structure (cf. Brun). The many abrupt endings to the different sections can be seen as pointing to a structure designed by means of association. Tadi even suggests that this technique was not simply a manner of working, but points to an integral part of Prousts style (1986:76). Such techniques are characteristic of a modernist work such as la recherche. It is therefore possible to state that Jean Santeuil fulls a very important criterion of an avant-textethat of being part of the developmental process

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(systme, to use Bellemin-Nols term) which gave rise to la recherche. Not only are there similarities and differences between the two works on the level of both content and technique, but the differences can be seen as part of an overall development which made the later novel possible. In conclusion, therefore, the status of Prousts major works, both as textes and as avant-textes, can be challenged. Both Jean Santeuil and Contre Sainte-Beuve have been published and largely accepted as textes, though this status, given their state of incompletion on the external as well as the internal level, is questionable. Both works were left mainly in the form of notes and brouillons by Proust, who did not intend to publish them. Their appearance as nished textes is mainly the work of editors. On the other hand, la recherche can be accepted as a texte because it shows completion on the external, if not the internal level, and was intended for publication by Proust. The fact that Proust incorporated large parts of Contre Sainte-Beuve into la recherche means that Contre Sainte-Beuve has quite rightly been considered as an avant-texte. Contre Sainte-Beuve was not completed or published mainly because Proust failed to nd a suitable form for his material. He had experimented with both a narrative form and a dialogue, but continued to pose the question: Faut-il faire un roman, une tude philosophique? Suis-je romancier? (Carnet I, fol. 2, quoted by Bardche 171). Given these circumstances, the important links between Jean Santeuil and la recherche have been neglected for too long. Proust constantly drew on this earlier material on the level of both fond and forme. In Jean Santeuil it can be argued that Proust experimented with different forms, as in the pastiches, but failed to develop a suitable technique for presenting his ideas. At the same time he was impelled to move in yet another direction, to depart from the familiar chronological and causal structure of nineteenth-century realist ction, and experiment with a more modern stellar structure in which groups of episodes develop out of one another by association. The fact that the experience of reading Jean Santeuil and Contre Sainte-Beuve is so different from that of reading la recherche can be explained by the fact that, though Proust often worked and reworked the same material, his use of the material in terms of his style and vision changed quite radically. In Prousts work the term avant-texte has thus a wider denition than is commonly the case. It includes not only the carnets, the cahiers and separate sheets of brouillons, but also an unnished earlier work, Contre Sainte-Beuve, which evolved into the later novel before its own form had been nally established. More importantly, the avant-texte must include the early unnished novel, Jean Santeuil, whose contribution, both in terms of content and the working out of a nal form for la recherche, is too often overlooked.

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la recherche du temps perdu, which grew out of this material, is a narrative work underpinned by Prousts theory of art. It is a work which broke away from the the realist Jean Santeuil, whose subject concerns the process of writing. The more didactic Contre Sainte-Beuve, which, in manuscript form, is both a discussion about Prousts ideas on art and a narrative, can be seen as a crossroads. la recherche is a modernist work which demonstrates its own sthetic, rather than simply stating it as in Contre Sainte-Beuve. Bardches description of the role of the different avanttextes for la recherche can be applied both to Contre Sainte-Beuve and to Jean Santeuil: tait-il vraiment indiffrent dapprendre, en tudiant ces manuscrits, que Proust avait crit la Recherche du temps perdu pendant toute sa vie [ ... ], et fallait-il ngliger la constatation quon pouvait faire alors, que Proust avait construit son uvre avec une certaine quantit dlments prfabriqus dont un grand nombre taient dj fondus et prts ds les annes de jeunesse de lcrivain, quil essaya ensuite de combiner et de monter selon diffrentes formules et dont lassemblage ne donna nalement un chef-duvre que lorsque Proust eut dcouvert le rythme selon lequel ils allaient pouvoir sordonner? (12-13) Closer inspection also shows that the whole corpus of Prousts work, and especially Jean Santeuil and Contre Sainte-Beuve, is a continual reworking of one novel, which itself barely emerges in canonical form from the mass of avant-textes. As Ton-That expresses it, [ ... ] toute luvre de Proust pourrait tre place sous le signe de linachvement (26). Contre Sainte-Beuve is a work of criticism which is turned in upon itself. It becomes self-reexive; it contains the germ of explicit auto-criticism, which enables Proust to move on to the nal phase in his writing. Both Contre Sainte-Beuve and also the early novel, Jean Santeuil, were instrumental in fashioning the nal work, both by what they contributed, in reworked form, and by what they withheld, so that new routes could be pursued. This led to the emergence of a modern novel, la recherche du temps perdu, part of which remained unnished at the internal, but not at the external level, and which is itself a texte, characterised by its potential for the endless reworking of its boundaries.

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NOTES
1. In this discussion, a looser, working denition of a texte will be used as a starting pointthat of the completed or nearly completed work which, if not published, was at least intended for publication by the author. 2. The rst edition of Baudelaires Les eurs du mal, consisting of 100 poems and ve sections, appeared in 1857. The second edition of 1861 contained 126 poems in all, and six divisions, including a new section, Tableaux parisiens. However, several poems from the rst edition, censored by the courts, were omitted. They have, however, been included in some posthumous editions. 3. Petit in Les manuscrits, quoted by Hay 147. 4. Ton-That looks at different levels of incompletion in Prousts rst novel, Jean Santeuil, including whether the incompletion is internal or external. 5. Preface to his rst ducation sentimentale of 1845 (see Flaubert 19). 6. Grsillon refers here to the study by Anis. Proust also allowed publication of a page of his original manuscript in a volume of his work published as a special edition; he refers to it in a letter (1981:295). 7. However Proust, in a letter to Paul Souday in 1919, stated rmly that he would nish his work: Je veux tout de mme [ ... ] vous donner lassurance quil ny a pas besoin de ma mort, comme voulait bien le dire un critique, pour que je cesse dcrire la recherche du temps perdu (1981:536). 8. Letter (1922) to M. and Mme Schiff (1993:37273, no. 259). 9. Letter (1919) to Paul Souday (Proust 1981:536). 10. Many such studies have appeared in the Cahiers Marcel Proust and the Bulletin dinformations proustiennes. See also Clarac. 11. Proust had however numbered some parts of the work, including chapter 1, inserted as a prologue in the Pliade edition. The page sequence, numbered by Proust in the manuscript, starts at page 1 and nishes at page 105 (numbered pp. 2087 in the manuscript), or pp. 202242 in Claracs edition. See Clarac in Proust 1971b:990. 12. For other examples, see the end of the section entitled [Matine au jardin] (Proust 1971b:300). The sentence could be considered nished, but not the idea which is only broached. On p. 245, at the end of the section entitled [M. Sandr], the sentence is barely begun before it is broken off. 13. See other exemples in greater detail in Marc-Lipiansky 22739. 14. See Ramsden on the evolution of the character of the great-aunt (Mme Servan or tante Lonie) from Jean Santeuil to la recherche. 15. This fragment is used as a prefatory note in the printed texte in the 1952 and in the 1971 editions (1971 b:181), though a longer version is used in the latter.

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WORKS CITED
Anis, J. Prparatifs dun texte : La fabrique du pr de F. Ponge. Langages 69 (March 1983):7383. Bardche, Maurice. Marcel Proust romancier. Paris: Les Sept Couleurs, 1971. Bellemin-Nol, Jean. 1972 Le texte et lavant-texte : les brouillons dun pome de Milosz. Paris: Larousse. . 1977. Reproduire le manuscrit, prsenter les brouillons, tablir un avanttexte. Littrature 28:318. . 1979. Lecture psychanalytique dun brouillon de pome : t de Valry. Essais de critique gntique. Paris: Flammarion. 10349. Brun, Bernard. Avant-propos. Bulletin dinformations proustiennes 21 (1990):35. Clarac, Pierre. La place du Contre Sainte-Beuve dans luvre de Marcel Proust. Revue dhistoire littraire de la France 56 (1971):80414. Debray-Genette, Raymonde. Mtamorphoses du rcit : autour de Flaubert. Paris: Seuil, 1988. Flaubert, Gustave. Lducation sentimentale. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1980. Genette, Grard. La question de lcriture. Recherche de Proust. Paris: Seuil, 1980. 712. Grsillon, Almuth. 1990. Proust la lettre: les intermittences de lcriture. Charente: Du Lrot. . 1994. lments de critique gntique: lire les documents modernes. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Grsillon, Almuth, and Jean-Louis Lebrave. Avant-propos. Langages 69 (March 1983):510. Hay, Louis. Le texte nexiste pas : rexions sur la critique gntique. Potique 16 (1985):14758. Lebrave, Jean-Louis. Lecture et analyses des brouillons. Langages 69 (March 1983):1123. Levaillant, Jean, ed. Introduction. criture et gntique textuelle. Lille: Presses universitaires de Lille, 1982). 1124. Les manuscrits : transcription, ditions, signification. Colloque. Paris: CNRS-ENS, 1975. Marc-Lipiansky, Mireille. La naissance du monde proustien dans Jean Santeuil. Paris: Nizet, 1974. Melanon, Robert. Le statut de luvre : sur une limite de la gntique. tudes franaises 28 (Autumn 1992):4965. Proust, Marcel. 1896. Les plaisirs et les jours. Paris: Calmann-Lvy. . 1924. Les plaisirs et les jours. Paris: Gallimard. . 1952. Jean Santeuil. Pref. Bernard de Fallois. Paris: Gallimard. . 1954. Contre Sainte-Beuve. Ed. Bernard de Fallois. Paris: Gallimard. . 1971a. Contre Sainte-Beuve. Eds. Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre. Bibliothque de la Pliade. Paris: Gallimard. . 1971b. Jean Santeuil. Eds. Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre. Bibliothque de la Pliade. Paris: Gallimard. . 1976. Correspondance. Ed. Philip Kolb. Vol. II. Paris: Plon. . 1981. Correspondance. Ed. Philip Kolb. Vol. VIII. Paris: Plon.

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. 1987. la recherche du temps perdu. Ed. Jean-Yves Tadi. 4 vols. Bibliothque de la Pliade. Paris: Gallimard, 198789. . 1990. Correspondance. Ed. Philip Kolb. Vol. XVIII. Paris: Plon. . 1993. Correspondance. Ed. Philip Kolb. Vol. XXI. Paris: Plon. Ramsden, Maureen A. Un autre Marcel ? Analyse structurelle et gntique du rle de la tante Lonie dans Combray . Bulletin dinformations proustiennes (forthcoming). Schmid, Marion. 1995. Teleology and Textual Misrepresentation: The New Pliade Proust. French Studies Bulletin (Autumn):1517. . 1998. Processes of Literary Creation: Flaubert and Proust. Oxford: Legenda. Tadi, Jean-Yves. 1983. Proust. Paris: Belfond. . 1986. Proust et linachvement. Le manuscrit inachev : criture, cration, communication. Paris: CNRS. Ton-That, Thanh-Vn. Linachvement dans Jean Santeuil. Bulletin dinformations proustiennes 25 (1994):1726.

G A B R I E L L E S TA R R

Ethics, Meaning, and the Work of Beauty

iterary study may currently appear to be invested in a reexamination and revaluation of the aesthetic.1 The reasons for such a renewed interest in beauty and its kin equally may seem obvious from some perspectives. One narrative posits that aesthetics is the late-twentieth-century answer to ideology, a cant-we-all-get-along response to the perceived fracturing of the academy brought about by ideological and critical conflict. Such an approach, though satisfying in the way of all neat reductions, is only about as accurate as one might expect; it is, like many a Victorian heroine, no better than it should be. In some cases, this explanation may be correct, but a turn to aesthetics can be differently explained and holds different value for critics who recall the powerful role aesthetics plays in Enlightenment philosophy, a legacy whose revision was at the heart of the critical theory of Jauss, Lyotard, Foucault, and their followers. The response in the 1990s to the barely accessible complexities of such theory has been, at its best, to resituate literary criticism, to integrate theoretical acuity within accessible writing about art and culture. In the drive to bring theory and practice closer together, the aesthetic, as a theory of the relationships between readers and texts, raises compelling interest. Hand in hand in recent years with a turn to history, the discontinuities and processes through which texts and meaning are made, we nd a turn to beauty, a mode of sensibility through which texts

From Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (Spring 2002). 2002 by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

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enter into and change the worlds of the people who read them. But the return to the aesthetic, like the return to history, raises signicant questions about how literary studies as a discipline is constituted, and at the core of the conicts surrounding turns to aestheticsboth in the eighteenth century and at the start of the twenty-rstare problems of labor and meaning. Recent work by critics like Elaine Scarry has made bold and intelligent statements about the potential of the aesthetic, but in turning to aesthetic theory, many contemporary critics tend to reenact the melding of categories at the heart of the emergence of eighteenth-century British aesthetics: aesthetic experience and aesthetic inquiry are compressed and frequently conated, and aesthetic inquiry is, in turn, all but replaced by ethics or hermeneutics. This pattern is in part the result of giving precedence to the Shaftesburian tradition of aesthetic theory. As Ronald Paulson points out, most literary study of the aesthetic proceeds from Shaftesburian assumptions and suppresses or ignores the serious challenges offered to this strain within the eighteenth century by less respectable thinkers like Hogarth.2 This essay sketches a pattern common to ethical and hermeneutic approaches to the aesthetic both then and now, examining the reasons aesthetics tends to become an appealing object of contemporary theory-as-hermeneutics and a de facto domain within the larger eld of ethics. In opposition to this tradition, I bring together works by Hogarth, Swift, and Proustan unlikely grouping, perhapsin order to explore what happens when the temptations of hermeneutic and ethical approaches to the aesthetic are held, even briey, at bay. The pressing questions are those of discipline. First, if aesthetics matters, what does aesthetic inquiry produce that no other form of questioning can? And second, what role might both the question and its answers play in current reformulations of literary study? The merging of aesthetic inquiry with ethics or hermeneutics has its most explicit statement in the eighteenth century and is reinforced by latetwentieth-century critique. Major texts in the early years of British and continental aesthetics tend to emerge as answers to problems that on the surface do not concern the aesthetic at all. The theories of aesthetics promoted early in the century by Shaftesbury or Hutcheson are, in large part, a response to the perceived moral crudity and inadequacy of Hobbesian philosophy. Smiths Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) undertakes to resolve the foundations of both public and private virtue as a rebuttal of licentious systems like Mandevilles utilitarian approach to vice (and simultaneously provides the framework by which a capitalist economy can be made a civil one). Kants Critique of Judgment (1790) steps in to resolve the apparent conict between the rst and second Critiques and to reconcile or unite

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freedom and necessity.3 It is thus that Enlightenment aesthetics becomes tempting fruit: to quote Terry Eagleton, the aesthetic often seems ready or able to intervene, to function as a dream of reconciliation, but its peculiarities also make it seem an answer to scholarly dreams of interpretation.4 The apparent position of aesthetics as a cultural and intellectual in betweenmediating questions of cognition, gender, economics, class, national identity, even ethicsmeans it seems the perfect, if overdetermined, subject for critical dissection. For twentieth-century critics like Derrida, De Man, or Eagleton, Enlightenment aesthetics is accordingly the object of a landmark hermeneutic enterprise. For De Man, aesthetics holds within itself a fracture fatal to the culturally enforced unity of philosophy and ideology. Derrida finds aesthetics at the heart of what he reads as the fundamental Enlightenment antipathy to insuperable difference. Eagleton argues that aesthetics provides a key support for the precarious stability of the bourgeois liberal subject.5 For these theorists, aesthetics does a lot of work, holding up precariously balanced philosophical projects and offering a way to challenge their integrity. Whatever aesthetics may be, its critical capital comes from the way it performs in larger systems. Aesthetics in this sense is a discipline par excellence, mediating larger cultural practices and concepts to shape knowledge so that it is eminently serviceable. Aesthetic theory then becomes a critique of this disciplinary role. Such an understanding of aesthetics makes a great deal of sense: the ease with which the aesthetic slips into other disciplinary modes seems one of its fundamental characteristics in the Shaftesburian vein of the tradition. When Shaftesbury turns to beauty, it is a turn to the social, the fruit of a care for the relationships between judging subjects.6 A judgment of beauty is the considered product of societal commitments, the actions and claims of a conversational circle of educated men and women. Aesthetic judgments signify the productive commerce of social beings; they take on meaning through their implications of community and can be made to build it. This is the essence of the Whiggish common sense Shaftesbury places at the basis of taste. Common sense signies a sense of public weal, and of the common interest; love of the community or society, natural affection, humanity, obligingness, or that sort of civility which rises from a just sense of the common rights of mankind, and the natural equality there is among those of the same species.7 Shaftesburys grounding of beauty, even in sense, requires social support. What is intriguing here is an oft-noted characteristic of Shaftesburys thought: the relative indeterminacy of the borders of the philosophical or disciplinary areas surrounding taste (ethics in particular).

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It would not be amiss to wonder, given Shaftesburys arguments, whether for him there really could be any such thing as aesthetics at all. There is of course nothing in British philosophy called aesthetics (prior to Alexander Baumgartens 1750 treatise) in the same way that there is ethics or metaphysics, but noting neither the absence of a name nor the absence of a classical model gets at the heart of the peculiarity of aesthetics as it comes into being. It is also insufficient, though certainly correct, to note that Shaftesbury tended to combine disciplinary modes throughout his writing. The problem is at bottom one of ground: on what basis might one stake a claim to aesthetics, to its importance, disciplinary integrity, and coherence? This is not a Kantian question about the (supposed) autonomy of aesthetic objects, nor is it simply the more familiar Shaftesburian question about the status of an aesthetic judgment (as disinterested and, hence, independent). My concern here is rather the constitutive boundaries of the aesthetic as a mode of inquiry; it is also eventually, though not isomorphically, about the constitutive shape of aesthetic experience. If aesthetics is merely the lesser sibling of ethics, does it require its own tools, terms, or inquiry at all? Could we not merely be satised with its ontological and disciplinary superiors? And nally, as I stated the question above, the problem of aesthetics as discipline or branch of knowledge is this: what does aesthetic inquiry provide that ethical, political, historical, or hermeneutic inquiries do not? The recognized necessity of nding an aesthetic groundsometimes as a basis for taste, sometimes as a basis for pleasure, sometimes as ontological principleis apparent in almost every signicant essay on the subject in the period. There are, in general, two methods of approaching the issue. First, as with much neoclassical literary criticism, there is the possibility that aesthetics, understood as a science of art, is rulebound. In cases such as this, aesthetics is less a philosophical discipline than a practicum for artists and viewers, and any need for grounding is satised by providing rules of creation or criticism.8 Aesthetics is grounded in natural law, and aesthetic judgments are justied by that law. In more theoretical treatises, the rules of art as juridical ground usually appear subordinate to the implications of taste as a cross-disciplinary principle, as in Hutchesons Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725). While Hutcheson does not equate the moral sense and the sense of beauty, he gives them the same ground, arguing that our internal perception of ideas and objects allows us to nd beauty in actions (and hence in virtue) as well as in objects of sight or hearing: The Author of Nature has much better furnishd us for a virtuous Conduct, than our Moralists seem to imagine ... : He has made Virtue a lovely Form, to excite our pursuit of it; and has given us strong Affections to

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be the Springs of each virtuous Action.9 Beauty in this formulation does not have a unique ground in the mind or the world; the perception of beauty is a specic result only of Gods interest in our motivations.10 While ethics may be closely related to aesthetics, Gods law of justice is spelled out with a clarity and precision that no aesthetic induction based on taste could ever match. The ground of aesthetic taste is analogic and relative to the ground of neighboring philosophical divisions. Even without an explicitly moralist standard of origin, early-eighteenthcentury theories of the aesthetic tend to make its ground relative and designate its primary eld of jurisdiction as mediation between competing goods and values. This is true of Joseph Addisons arguments in The Spectator; he links aesthetics and morality, but he grounds his discussion of beauty in faculty psychology.11 The imagination emerges as the faculty of perception most profoundly associated with the aesthetic. For Addison, the imagination is introspective, working through an inner eye, but it is also perceptual, oriented toward the outside world. As he puts it in The Spectator n. 411 (1712), [T]he Pleasures of the Imagination ... arise from visible Objects, ... when we have them actually in our view as well as when we call up their Ideas into our Minds by Paintings, Statues, Descriptions, or any the like Occasion.12 The pleasures of vision are pleasures of the imagination because they are not the result of qualities that inhere in objects but rather of things the mind does to our perceptions: producing the sensation of color from the perception of reected light, for example. The imagination, even more than sight, is the faculty that has the potential to link our inner and outer worlds. Much like the sense of beauty, the Addisonian imagination is a mediating force, doing work that reconciles individual with community, inside with outside. However, the balance between the presumed privacy of any emotional or aesthetic experience and its communal properties is not an easy oneit must be elaborately theorized (by Shaftesbury or Smith) and carefully maintained, just as the balance between imagination as introspection and perception must be defended against the problems of the quixote and the solipsist (as in the cases of Charlotte Lennox or Samuel Johnson). Beauty, to take one aspect of aesthetic experience, must be saved for the ethical and communal because without due care, it seems to lead to private, unconsidered consumption. Unless beauty is absorbed into a discourse of use, discipline, and balance, it seems somehow incompletefor critical purposes. To meet this problem, aesthetic experience is supposed by its theorists to work to create ethical community; by implication, aesthetic criticism seeks to make beauty produce some meaning that goes beyond itself. Aesthetic criticism disciplines beauty, assigning it duties of its own.

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Beauty is not enough in the early years of British aesthetics, and it remains so in recent aesthetic inquiries, even in those whose authors claim allegiance to beauty itself. One of the best of recent books on the subject, Elaine Scarrys On Beauty and Being Just, seeks to defend beauty from antagonists who assert its ideological perversion or insufficiency. Scarry points out that latter-day critics of beauty tend to see the beautiful object as liable to ethical violation; in being wantonly seen and adored, it is objectied. From the other end, the judging subject is seduced without regard to the ethical demands of being in the world. In defending beauty against these attacks, Scarry and other critics like Emory Elliot and Isobel Armstrong follow the pattern of eighteenth-century critics before them, situating beauty in regard to community practices: for Scarry, justice and a foundational care for object and world (something like what Heidegger associates with Dasein); for Elliot, an inclusive literary practice and canon; for Armstrong, a radical, democratic aesthetic.13 Scarry does not equate beauty with justice (nor does she explicitly discuss Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hogarth, or many other theorists), but in a much more considerable move, argues that beauty prepares us for justice, providing training in features of ethical life that are indispensable to being and pursuing the just: Through its beauty, the world continually recommits us to a rigorous standard of perceptual care.14 Such perceptual care becomes the basis of a broadened and rened attention to justice: Beauty seems to place requirements on us for attending to the aliveness ... of our world, and for entering into its protection.15 This proposition, though attractive, is loose; the connection is temperamental, voluntary, tenuous, and nowhere near the clear call of necessity that generally belongs by right to ethical principles (although ethical necessity could be debated, too). There is potential for a category mistake here, and aesthetic experience and aesthetic inquiry may be collapsed. Beauty itself, I venture to uphold, teaches little about justice (history offers few examples to support a claim to such educative power); Scarrys investigation of beauty, however, may be more productive. As Shaftesbury before her, Scarry holds that aesthetic inquiry and education step in to ll the gaps aesthetic experience appears to leave behind.16 The odd form of labor that Scarry positsbeautys work as preparation for justiceis not its only task. Scarrys suture of beauty and justice goes side by side with her concern for the training and shaping of individuals responsive to the beautiful, eager participants in the imagined communities built around it. Beauty becomes the foundation of an academic community, too, one whose ethical standards are tied up in attitudes of care. In all of these cases, beauty is expected to be a workhorse of magnicent proportions, and

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it is to work in our discipline or in our lives by meaning something else. Aesthetic criticism here is both ethical and hermeneutic, interpreting beauty as object or experience and showing how it points to something else, to our capacities for justice or to our capacities to teach, learn, and read. What might the investigation of beauty offer on its own? Given the examples of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Smith, Scarry, Eagleton, De Man, or Derrida, it might appear that thinking the aesthetic all but requires its immediate translation into something else, whether it is ethics, ideology, or politics; aesthetics may well be uninteresting without such transformation. The problem begins with the fact that, as Armstrong puts it, aesthetics fundamentally involves affect, and for affect, [W]e have no (or few) terms of analysis.17 To think about what aesthetics means usually a hermeneutic processseems, perhaps tautologically, more signicant than any other approach. The treatment of inquiry in the realm of aesthetics as interpretation of aesthetic relations is a tactical choice and as such has clear value even if, by translating aesthetics, it leaves the aesthetic behind. On the other hand, ethics trumps aesthetics, and this replacement may seem, also tautologically, right. If ethics is the supreme legislator of our existence as humans, there ought to be nothing wrong with ultimately referring the aesthetic to the ethical; but treating aesthetics as ethical inquiry fails to answer aesthetic questionsthat is, if aesthetics makes sense at all. Hogarth believed it did, and his deferral of ethics and interpretation in favor of affect is probably one of the reasons that far fewer literature scholars pay serious attention to the Analysis of Beauty (1753) than to works more concerned with interpretation, works like Shaftesburys Characteristics (1711) or Burkes Enquiry (1757).18 Against the assumptions of dominant strains of aesthetic inquiry, both then and now, Hogarths work is revolutionary. The strength of his contribution comes not only from his challenging the stance of disinterestedness fundamental to Shaftesburys aesthetics but also because he argues that the search for an ethical equivalent of beauty is the product of and leads to a misunderstanding: It is no wonder this subject [beauty] should have so long been thought inexplicable, since the nature of many parts of it cannot possibly come within the reach of mere men of letters; otherwise those ingenious gentlemen who have lately published treatises upon it ... would not so soon have been bewildered in their accounts of it, and obliged so suddenly to turn into the broad, and more beaten path of moral beauty; in order to extricate themselves out of the difficulties they seem to have met with in this.19

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Hogarth refuses the complicated and, for him, disingenuous stance of connoisseurship, a pretence toward knowledge that substitutes schema for experience. Hogarth will not displace the beautiful with anything else, especially with an ethics like Shaftesburys. Hogarth thinks and imagines in material termsthose of pleasure and of form. For him, form is not the suspiciously abstract entity contemporary scholars tend to associate with formalism; it is, at its best, always embodied, the material completion of a smokejack, a pineapple, or a woman (to use Hogarths examples). What is difficult about Hogarth, but centrally important, is that two things are in play. There is always a call to ethics in human life; this call (for some of us) insists that Hogarths pineapple, a line, and a woman are in no way equivalent, and that ignoring this inequality, even for a moment, is unacceptable. Yet, any automatic ethical condemnation of Hogarths ideals of beauty would be faulty because aesthetic relationships are not all-dening. Beauty is just one part of the complex web that ethical analysis works to resolve in any instance, and theorization of ethical standards based on an abstraction from aesthetic conduct ignores the contingency of the aesthetic and the boundedness of all emotional experience. Ethical condemnations of the aesthetic do it the disservice of granting it a legislative and denitive power it otherwise lacks. Beauty is smaller than that and is only one part of any encounter in the world. It would be foolish to argue that the beautiful, the sublime, or the ugly does not have ethical, social, or hermeneutic importance: Paulsons critique of The Analysis reveals that with clarity. But what must be emphasized even more strongly is that neither ethics nor hermeneutics can answer aesthetic questions. The Analysis opens up the question of what happens if, even for a moment, the unique disciplinary potential of aesthetic experience is made central. Hogarth stops with what he considers irreduciblewhat he calls the serpentine line.20 If there is any signicance to this line, any reason for its aesthetic value, it is its incitement to pursuit: It is a pleasing labour of the mind to solve the most difficult problems .... The eye hath this sort of enjoyment of winding walks, and serpentine rivers, and all sorts of objects, whose forms ... are composed principally of ... the waving and serpentine lines. Intricacy in form, therefore, I shall dene to be that peculiarity in the lines, which compose it, that leads the eye a wanton kind of chace, and from the pleasure that gives the mind, intitles it to the name of beautiful. (33; italics original)

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Hogarth extends this criterion to the nonvisual from the start and puts the question of labor rmly onto the mind and not onto beauty itself. The minds desire to pursue challenges is the foundation of the pleasures of aesthetics. This has formal consequences, but coming from within (the mind) rather than from without (objects with denite form), it does not have a formal origin. The pleasure associated with a particular composition depends upon the mental response to visual or intellectual challenge; form itself is not legislative and is crafted in response only to a mental principle, the requirement that the mind be enticed to pursuit (or as Coleridge might say, drawn on by pleasure).21 The aesthetic is thus freed from dependence on its manifestationproblems can be as beautiful as waterfalls, and sensory perception does not rule the day. To return to the question I introduced earlier, the test that aesthetic inquiry must face is not how it violates, complicates, supports, or rewrites the ethical but what, if any, unique information aesthetic inquiry produces and what, if any, unique role aesthetics plays in human experience. Hogarths inquiry into aesthetics suggests that aesthetic experience involves a mental drive (something preguring perhaps Schillers play drivea strain of investigation that has born excellent fruit in recent philosophical inquiry, most notably in the work of Kendall Walton). Hogarth argues that the unique role aesthetics plays is that it structures appetites (both physical and mental).22 An aesthetic structure of appetite is one that privileges pursuit over attainment.23 Aesthetics, then, is not grounded in objects or in perception but in the way individual subjects approach both ideas and things. Hogarths use of a mental principle to ground the aesthetic is suggestive, opening up broader possibilities for modeling aesthetic thought. Based on readings of the relationship between aesthetics and the imagination in Swift and Proust, I suggest it is possible to imagine other answers literary answersto the question of the possibilities of aesthetics. I here juxtapose eighteenth-and twentieth-century literary texts by making an appeal to eighteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetic theories that enact similar relations. The juxtaposition of Swift and Proust offers a literary dimension to the historical trace I pursue in aesthetic criticism. Scarry turns to Proust to support her claims about beauty, and in doing this, turns to a text that melds the two principal strains of early eighteenth-century approaches to the beautiful. Prousts pursuit of memory is a pursuit of beauty that has passed away, a project deeply compatible with Hogarths The Analysis. However, while Proust celebrates the importance of pursuit in the experience of beauty, his work also participates in the Shaftesburian vein of aesthetic thought, valuing disinterest and connoisseurship. This double

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involvement is a useful reminder that theoretical oppositions are not always realized in their purity, and it offers a starting point for comparatist analysis. Scarry cites an excerpt from la recherche du temps perdu to illustrate an attitude of care toward the beautiful, a desire to prolong contact with it, to keep it close and safe. For Scarry, the impulses to create art, to think in an aesthetic manner, and even to procreate, are born of a desire to make beauty eternal, to reproduce the beautiful both as something and as someone in the world, as in the opening of Shakespeares sonnet sequence: From fairest creatures we desire increase,/That thereby beautys rose might never die. In her view, this is one of the basic reasons why beauty prepares us for justice. Prousts ceaseless return to the beautiful valorizes care for both the fragility of aesthetic experience and the fragility of those of us who live it; human fragility is at the basis of Scarrys ethics and Prousts urgency. In the episode Scarry cites, Marcel sees a beautiful milkmaid on the train to Balbec: Flushed with the glow of morning, her face was rosier than the sky. I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and happiness.24 This woman is unlike any other Marcel has seen: So, completely unrelated to the models of beauty which I was wont to conjure up in my mind when I was by myself, this handsome girl gave me at once the taste for a certain happiness ... that would be realized by my staying and living there by her side .... Above her tall gure, the complexion of her face was so burnished and so glowing that it was as if one were seeing her through a lighted window .... I could not take my eyes from her face, which grew larger as she approached, like a sun which it was somehow possible to stare at and which was coming nearer and nearer, letting itself be seen at close quarters, dazzling you with its blaze of red and gold. She fastened on me her penetrating gaze, but doors were being closed and the train had begun to move. I saw her leave the station and go down the hill to her home; it was broad daylight now; I was speeding away from the dawn. (7067; Pliade 2: 1718) Scarry draws some general hypotheses about experiences of beauty from this and similar passages. First, no two aesthetic experiences are alike. Second, an experience of beauty is unique not just because of the singular character of every object of beauty, but because each experience is tied to a unique moment of perception, whose exact terms can never come again, even in

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imagination. Proust, however, goes on to point out something about this episode that Scarry neglects: what happens when beauty encounters the pressures toward general and disinterested analysis? The train pulls out, and the sunlight of the girls face disappears: But alas, she must be forever absent from the other life towards which I was being borne with ever increasing speed, a life which I could resign myself to accept only by weaving plans that would enable me to take the same train again some day and to stop at the same station, a project which had the further advantage of providing food for the selfish [intresse], active, practical, mechanical, indolent, centrifugal tendency which is that of the human mind, for it turns all too readily aside from the effort which is required to analyze and probe, in a general and disinterested [gnrale et dsintresse] manner, an agreeable impression which we have received. And since, at the same time, we wish to continue to think of that impression, the mind prefers to imagine it in the future tense, to continue to bring about the circumstances which may make it recurwhich, while giving us no clue as to the real nature of the thing, saves us the trouble of recreating it within ourselves and allows us to hope that we may receive it afresh from without. (7078; Pliade 2:18) Human beings have problems with the unique; gripped in habit, we may want to make beauty like other things, and this is not always good. Having experienced a moment of beauty, we wish, in Prousts view, to call it up wholesale; if we cannot get the thing itself, we want to be practical about it, to approximate it as closely as possible, and to keep thinking it is in our possession even if it is not. The drive to reproduce and hold on to beauty in words, images, art, memory, even theory (the drive at the core of Scarrys argument), can transform beauty into something else. If beauty and truth, as Shaftesbury claims, are forever wrapped up togetherFor all beauty is truthit is perhaps because beauty moves those who see it, feel it, or think it to the metaphorical or analogic, and it is also thus that beauty seems (but only seems) to resist the analytic.25 Making metaphors is good, even desirableno one could regret Prousts metaphorsbut both maker and reader must recognize them for what they are. Each transformation through metaphor may produce new beauty, which itself may be interrogated, analyzed, and enjoyed, as long as viewers recognize that newness and transformation. However, when the impulse to

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transform and regure shifts from the purely metaphorical to the analogic, problems multiply. If the metaphorical belongs to the experience of beauty, the analogic seems to belong to aesthetic criticism, where beauty is often placed in analogic relation to truth or justice.26 The movement that beauty may initiateone toward metaphor, analogy, and even desireis not itself beauty and can, in fact, turn us away from the aesthetic entirely. Proust gives us a reminder of the slippery relation of aesthetic experience to aesthetic criticism: as with the dreamer Marcel, in the desire to analyze and interpret, theorists can be drawn away from the goal and may end up doing something more like substitution than analysis. Theyperhaps wemay only imagine, repeatedly, the gure of the milkmaid. The imagination, whether critical or creative, can be habitual, and instead of really linking us with the world, can just turn us closer in upon ourselves. This is what happens when theorists turn beauty into an ethical or hermeneutic shadow of itself. It is useful to think about what the resistance of metaphorical or analogic translation of aesthetic experience can produce. Scarry turns to Proust for a literary exemplar; in returning to the eighteenth-century origins of her Shaftesburian ethical position (and seeking an alternative to it), I turn to an eighteenth-century author, Swift, who has closer affinities to the aesthetic positions of Hogarth than those of Shaftesbury.27 Swift is acutely aware of the contests that may be staged between ethics and aesthetics (often framed for him in terms of real and imaginary value), and he provides a contemporary context for interrogating the tensions surrounding the aesthetic, whether political, literary, or ethical. At rst glance, we nd ugliness much more than beauty in Swift. Compare the ideal scene that appeared in Proust with what approximates a satirical version of it in Gullivers Travels (1726). In Brobdingnag, the land of the giants, Gulliver sees a horrible version of a milkmaid: The Nurse to quiet her Babe ... was forced to apply the last Remedy by giving it suck. I must confess no Object ever disgusted me so much as the Sight of her monstrous Breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with, so as to give the curious Reader an Idea of its Bulk, Shape and Colour. It stood prominent six Foot, and could not be less than sixteen in Circumference. The Nipple was about half the Bigness of my Head, and the Hue both of that and the Dug so varied with Spots, Pimples and Freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous: For I had a near Sight of her, she sitting down the more conveniently to give Suck, and I standing on the Table.28

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This milk bearer is no maid, and her breast, while being nearly large enough to make the simile work, is nothing like the sun. With Marcel, the milkmaids face produces elaborate similes born of or linked to the desire to prolong contact with the beautiful and renew it in the imagination. Marcel wants to make images for himself more and more like that of the woman, but the Nurses breast for Gulliver is beyond compare. The hermeneutic possibilities here are enormous. We have two images of women laden with milk, one an object of beauty and desire, the other, of loathing and fascination. Ethical complications are readily apparentissues of objectification, distance, colonization.29 All of these compete for attention, and they come from the combination of aesthetic experiences with other aspects of the mind. Ethical and hermeneutic principles reveal some of the political and psychological implications of this passage as well as of the aesthetic experience that is depicted or that may be produced: but what happens once these strains of inquiry have come into play? The startling thing to realize is that Gullivers experience of disgust and the experience of reading about it approach an exaggeration of the experience of reading about Marcels experience of beauty. This is to say, the giant breast is only and can only ever be (in Swifts world) an experience of the imagination, just as with the readers experience of Marcels maid. This is at bottom, merely a characteristic of the ctional that Swifts scene intensies. In the aesthetic terms I borrow from Proust, however, this basic characteristic of ction has more precise implications for aesthetic sensation. Swift pushes us toward a breaking of habit within the minds eye (a not-quite-realist defamiliarization) to produce an image without compare. He breaks down the problem Proust identies, the separation between experience and memory, experience and imagination, to focus simultaneously on the possibility of unique experience and on its eventual repeatability. We may pass from the unique via the pull of desire (to see again, to think again, to feel again), and this rather Hogarthian drive to pursuit can help produce (but never fully account for) the cultural or individual signicance of ction. The transformation from nothing something unimagined, uncredited, nonexistentto something one chooses to see again, read again, and feel again is at the heart of aesthetic experience. And whether that leads to justice or not it is one thing that ensures the viability of cultural artifacts. Swift thus calls on us to think the imagination as a preface to thinking beauty in a way Proust encourages and Hogarth might approve. A Swiftian detour through the ugly may seem like a roundabout way to get at the aesthetics of the beautiful, but it is both appropriate and functional, enabling me to break the habit of metaphorical thinking. What in Swift or Proust,

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during these moments of stunned apprehension, answers to the call of aesthetic inquiry? What might aesthetic inquiry reveal that no other mode of thought could? First, it should address how aesthetic experience is constructed or prepared by the text: the experience of the beautiful milkmaids face in imagination or that of the giant, bloated breast (something Scarry attempts successfully in another recent work, Dreaming by the Book). It should inquire how this experience is prepared for in the text, as well: how the responses of Marcel or Gulliver are sketched and structured. In Prousts example, aesthetic experience is fundamentally timebound, limited in duration and extent, as we read a poem or view a painting and imaginatively return to it. It should also take as a fundamental condition of analysis and interpretation that aesthetic experience constantly evolves in the mind (and sometimes decays), and its power seems a power of substitution, of xing attention subsequently on each new imaginative iterationin constant pursuit. Aesthetic experience works in both these instances by using attention (focusing on the sun of the girls face, the cavernous surface of the breast) as a tool to create new images and new metaphors, for good and ill. Swifts example has something else to say: it begins with the ability of the mind to ll itself completely with images that had previously seemed inconsequential or beyond the power of vision. Swift also reveals the potential of aesthetic experience to make the invisible matter by committing emotional response to imaginary creations. Both of these moments are experiences of magnication, where perception is structured so that gments of the imagination are confronted as sensible (but not material) particulars. In focusing on beauty as an aesthetic event, the inquiry shifts from what we expect aesthetically signicant objects to mean, what labor they must do in showing us their signicance, to how the aesthetic functions as a process of experience. To take one aspect of the aesthetic, the labor of beauty is not to produce or supplement meaningthis is the work of hermeneutics. The labor of beauty is not to produce justicethis is the work of ethics. Meaning, by comparison, is static, aesthetics is timebound. Justice concerns material conditions, while the result of aesthetic experience is harder to pin down. In an important sense, however, these are all mistaken formulations, for beautys labor, if it engages in any, is something different from the labor of aesthetic investigation, and it is on this level that fruitful contrast can be made. If aesthetic inquiry makes sense, pinning down some core part of aesthetic experience seems necessary; it is not enough to claim that the task is difficult. Hogarth would argue the fact of pursuit is paramount. But the analytic pursuit of beauty as object and experience can invite rather quixotic movements toward the concrete, like the bizarre Burkean determination that

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beauty can be recognized through the bodily experiences of sinking, ... melting, [and] languor,30 Hogarths elevation of the pineapple, or the rhapsodic poetry of The MoralistsShaftesburys highly individual attempt to represent the process of aesthetic creation as the best means of approaching aesthetic experience itself. An element of quixotism also appears in Scarrys recent work. Her postulation that an increase of care and a decentering of the self are the concrete result of experiencing beauty may reveal more about Scarry (and others of like mind) than about aesthetics in general. The problem is that aesthetic inquiry has to fold investigation of objects and experiences together, while keeping track of both and avoiding the pitfalls of introspection. It is here again that Swift may offer timely aid. Taking a single (and by no means legislative) example of poetry, he gives a sketch of the challenges to careful aesthetic inquiry. Swift always exhorts himself and his readers to look outward, not inward: Strange to conceive, how the same objects strike At distant hours the mind with forms so like! Whether in time, deductions broken chain Meets, and salutes her sister link again; Or hunted fancy, by a circling ight, Comes back with joy to his own seat at night; Or whether dead imaginations ghost Oft hovers where alive it haunted most; Or if thoughts rolling globe her circle run, Turns up old objects to the soul her sun; Or loves the muse to walk with conscious pride Oer the glad scene whence rst she rose a bride.31 The opening of the palinode Occasioned by Sir William Temples Late Illness and Recovery (1693) is a rare attempt in the Swiftian canon to address the problems of the muse.32 How is it that aesthetic and imaginative experience may be recreated? If emotion and inner vision are ephemeral, how can they ever return, as they seem to do, and how can they ever matter? The poem posits a problem about the continuity of emotional and aesthetic response in the face of frailty, maturity, and loss. The opening phrase is somewhat startling: most of the time, it is not strange to conceive that seeing the same object again and again produces similar sensations and similar associations of ideas. But for Swift, as for Proust, this persistence of the past may be a sign of illness and deception: accidents of perception hold us in their grip without

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a standard of judgment that could adequately explain any vision, any truth, or any perception of beauty at all. The attempt to ground aesthetic experience in metaphor, in the ctitious body of the muse, for example, is an unsatisfying self-deception, merely putting an outward dress of universality on the quixotic material of the poets own mind: Madness like this no fancy ever seized, Still to be cheated, never to be pleased; Since one false beam of joy in sickly minds Is all the poor content delusion nds. There thy enchantment broke, and from this hour I here renounce thy visionary power; And since thy essence on my breath depends, Thus with a puff the whole delusion ends. (ll. 14754) The problem is not just that the muse historically has become an awkward ction, more likely to become Popes Goddess of Dulness than the spur of creativity, or that Swift is generally suspicious of the attery of the imagination.33 The key here is that imagination can never hold anything in perpetuity, neither beauty nor disgust; even though the image may return, it is new and only so like (again, simile, metaphor). Swift sees the contours of the problem of aesthetic inquiry. Aesthetics leads to other things (analogic connections to ethics, shadowy attempts at reliving the past), things whose pursuit may turn attention away from beauty entirely. The metaphors and substitutions that aesthetic experience may promote balance on a cusp of ephemerality and permanence. The nal lines of the ode insist on the acceptance of mutability, of self-difference (as the poets experience of maturity, mood, illness, recovery), forgetting, and closure in aesthetic experience. Swifts poemas both paean and palinodehas disciplinary echoes. For him, the muse and her temporality are tied up in the instability and precariousness of the poetic career. Attempts in literary study to refocus attention on aesthetics and on why aesthetics matters are also attempts to focus attention on why our discipline matterswhy reading texts and teaching others how to read them is signicant. But we must be careful to recall how much of an intervention aesthetic inquiry actually is. The sense of seamlessness that emotion is apt to producethe way that the same objects may strike the mind at distant hours so likemay encourage critics and theorists to forget the changeability of aesthetic experience not just in one person from one hour to the next, but much more broadly, from one culture

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or time to another.34 Moreover, it is imperative to keep in mind that what theories accomplish and what their objects produce are two different things. If it is important to bring theory and practice closer together, it is foolhardy to forget that they remain distinct. In seeking to know beauty better, what it does and how it works, critics must be careful not to substitute acts of criticism for the effects of beauty at a given time. Aesthetic inquiry ought always emphasize the tenuous nature of connections between texts and world, no matter how signicant those connections may be.35 It is useful for critics to remember that literary study and aesthetic inquiry can be important without having all the answers; academics outside of the humanities are certainly recognizing this now. A small but inuential group of scientists is interested in the role aesthetics plays in human development and how the aesthetic, as a fundamental characteristic of mental life, can give clues to how the brain works, how we think, and what we choose to pursue.36 But getting at the signicance of the aesthetic in any discipline requires rst an awareness of the difference between aesthetic experience and aesthetic inquiry. For those who are skeptical of the teaching powers of beauty itself as they appear, for example, in Scarrys On Beauty and Being Just, it is perhaps more clear that inquiry about beauty may teach us a great dealas Scarrys work also showsby offering to increase our knowledge of and dialogue about what matters in our disciplines. I close with a nal look at Hogarth in the hope of suggesting further how beauty may enter disciplinary inquiry. At the heart of The Analysis is Hogarths theory of what he calls the serpentine line. He begins with a waving line, a line moving sinuously on two axes, then imagines that line wrapped around a cone so that it curves and winds in all three dimensions (see Hogarths plate 1.26). Such a serpentine line invites pursuit, and it does so because it always disappears, passing up and behind and out of sight as it curves away from the eye. This for Hogarth is the foundation upon which the experience of beauty is laid. More than suggesting merely that objects of beauty are fragile, that beautys rose (like the rose of the world) may in fact die, Hogarths serpentine line suggests that the experience of beauty is predicated on transience. The serpentine line itself will not decay: it is an abstraction that continues into space even when one cannot see it, drawing one on to pursuit. The experience of beauty is a process structured by disappearance. Even in apprehending something as unbreakable (the serpentine line in the minds eye), beauty comes into being because we can imagine disappearance and presence together, folding into one another, as we follow the imagined curve of the line away into space. The certainty of disappearance is what leads the mind to pursue the object, and it is that drive

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to pursuit that structures beauty.37 Perhaps, then, the shift into metaphor or analogy, the exchange of one (sometimes beautiful) object for another, is a kind of homage to beautys ineluctable and indispensable disappearance. As beauty dissolves into ethics in Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, or Scarry, it is perhaps just doing what it does best. However, aesthetic experience and aesthetic inquiry involve different demands. Any move to analyze beauty should not wholly reenact the effects of substitution that Proust associates with the beautiful. Aesthetic inquiry can go farther than this, following the traces of beauty as it is transformed and recongured, if, as with the Hogarthian pursuit of the serpentine line, querents keep trying to keep beauty in sight.

NOTES
I would like to thank John Guillory, Denis Donoghue, Martin Harries, Christopher R. Miller, Amy King, Erik Bond, Peter Fenves, and Jeffrey Freedman for their careful readings of this essay and helpful suggestions. I would also like to thank Elaine Scarry, whose gifts as teacher and thinker leave me deeply indebted. 1. See, among others, Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000); Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998); Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (New York: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999). I engage primarily with Scarry here. 2. Ronald Paulson, The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996), xi. 3. Smith attacks Mandeville in particular in part 7, chapter 4 of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), 306314. On Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and the revision of Hobbes, see Ernest Tuveson, Shaftesbury and the Age of Sensibility, in Howard Anderson and John Shea, eds., Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, 16601800 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1967). For overviews of doctrines of sympathy and their relation to aesthetics, see Walter Jackon Bate, From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1949), chapter 5; and James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981). David Marshall gives a cogent discussion of Shaftesbury and Smith in The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), chapters 13 and 7. On the connection between The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, see Robert Boyden Lamb, Adam Smiths System: Sympathy Not Self Interest, Journal of the History of Ideas35 (1974): 67182; and Athol Fitzgibbons, Adam Smiths System of Liberty, Wealth, and Virtue: The Moral and Political Foundations of The Wealth of Nations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). On the connection between the third Critique and the rest of Kants system, Kant writes, Judgment ... in the order of our [specic] cognitive powers is a

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mediating link between understanding and reason, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 5 AK, 5:168. Judgments of taste are of importance to Kant because they appear both subjective and universal, pointing toward the possibility that pure reason, which deals with the form of perception and is hence universal, determinate, and necessary, can be linked in systematic terms with practical reason, which concerns the moral and is in its premises subjective, indeterminate, and founded in freedom. Jean-Franois Lyotard gives a rigorous interrogation of the reconciliation of freedom and necessity in Kants aesthetics in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994). 4. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 25. It is Eagletons thesis that in the category of the aesthetic [there is] a way of gaining access to certain central questions of modern European thought to light up, from that particular angle, a range of wider social, political and ethical issues (1). 5. See Jacques Derrida, Economimesis, Diacritics 11 (1981): 325; Paul De Man, Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996), 7090; Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Armstrong gives cogent readings of Derrida and De Man in The Radical Aesthetic (4756). 6. I focus on the beautiful here, following Scarry. She is quite right to critique the gradual demotion of beauty from its place of Platonic preeminence. Beginning with the late-seventeenth-century revival of Pseudo-Longinuss Peri Hypsous, the sublime gradually displaces beauty at the apex of aesthetic theory. The sublime does not appear as a critical juggernaut until after Burke midcentury. On other aesthetic categories, see Paulson as well as Scott Black, Addisons Aesthetics of Novelty, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 30 (2001): 26988. 7. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 48. 8. This is more apparent in the French tradition than in the English: see Charles Batteuxs Les beaux arts rduit un mme principe, for example, or the theories of epic poetry of Le Bossu or Rapin. British contributions by Dennis, Roscommon, Buckingham, Pope, and other are also important. Ernst Cassirer, in The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1951), argues that both empiricist and classical models of the aesthetic fail ... to account for the peculiar meaning and value of the beautiful; for the standard employed in both cases is on a different plane from that occupied by the pure phenomenon of beauty (311). For him, Shaftesbury is the rst to look to beauty for its own grounding by turning to the midst of the artistic process (324). As I have made clear, Shaftesbury also displaces aesthetic grounding onto that of its disciplinary neighborsif aesthetics is understood primarily not as a factor of creativity but as one of reception. Response can approximate creation in The Moralists, where rhapsody emerges as the creative expression of aesthetic pleasure. However, this leaves the same problem; if we back up to the moments preceding articulate response, the grounding of aesthetic pleasure remains blurred with that of ethical community. The independence in Shaftesbury for which Cassirer argues refers to a second-order sense of beauty, one of aesthetic

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contemplation and not of aesthetic perception: [F]orm can never be understood and assimilated unless it is distinguished from its mere effect and made an independent object of aesthetic contemplation. The intuition of the beautiful, which is to be distinguished carefully from the mere sensation of the beautiful, arises only from such contemplation, which is ... the purest sort of activity, namely, the activity peculiar to the soul (326). This contemplation can only follow perception, and it is there that the problems lie. 9. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, in Collected Works of Francis Hutcheson (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1990), 1: vii. Hutcheson argues that the internal sense is constructed in the way it is because of some Constitution of the AUTHOR of our Nature (42), so that Gods aesthetic vision raties our own. 10. Although Hutcheson can describe the principle, namely, uniformity amid variety, by which the internal sense makes discriminations of beauty, it is a principle much like any other perceptual rule: just as our attention as humans is drawn by motion or we preferentially notice objects whose lighting suddenly shifts, the internal sense is tuned to objects exhibiting variety in uniformity. 11. Most works in early British aesthetics are essentially deist in origin and are loosely but not doxologically linked to Christian ethics and theology (Paulson, Beautiful, Novel, and Strange, x); Addisons belief in God does little for him toward nding a rational or adequate explanation of the aesthetic itself. There are a variety of works that follow the pattern set by Shaftesbury, Addison, and Hutcheson in the rst sixty or so years of the century. Many of them may be grouped together in terms of their approach to the question of aesthetic ground. Burke, for example, follows the general pattern of Addison in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990). 12. The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 3: 53637. 13. Emory Elliots work on beauty is not yet published but has been presented in talks at the MLA (1999) and elsewhere. He argues that an expanded and refreshed aesthetics, instead of being the ground of exclusion from the canon, can be the ground for including works by women, minority, and queer poets and novelists. Armstrongs ethical argument is foror at least works best withthe radical intervention of particular works when confronted in particular ways, not for aesthetic experience in general (which is in no way a fault). 14. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 81. 15. Ibid., 90. Cf. Burke: I call beauty a social quality; for where women and men, and not only they, but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them, ... they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affection towards their persons; we like to have them near us, and we enter willingly into a kind of relation with them, unless we should have strong reasons to the contrary (A Philosophical Enquiry, 39). 16. See Shaftesbury, Miscellany III in Characteristics, 414ff. 17. The Radical Aesthetic, 59. Armstrong adapts Hegel and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis in her quest for a language suited to analyzing the affective. She theorizes from the broken middle, a position that mediates cognition and affect and makes the aesthetic a particular form of coming to knowledge.

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18. A casual survey of the MLA database in January 2001 produced thirteen hits for Hogarths The Analysis. Of the greater than one hundred entries for Shaftesbury, over sixty refer to his aesthetic theories, and there are more than sixty entries on Burkes theories of the sublime. 19. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997), 1. 20. The serpentine line is a two-dimensional waving line that has been twisted so that it spirals into three dimensions. Not all serpentine lines are beautiful; some are clumsy, some fatiguing, just like some problems (33). There is one particular conguration that is essential (4142). The serpentine line itself is an abstraction from beauty in the world. The line makes sense less as a determinate form than as the physical incarnation of aesthetic desire: it mimics the processes the mind performs in searching for and in apprehending the beautiful. On the ethical question, see Paulson: W.J.T. Mitchell has asked ... : Does the Satanic character of the serpentine line suggest that beauty is simply independent of moral status? Or does it suggest that beauty is actively subversive of morality, order, and rationality, and that the curiosity aroused by beauty is the same that lured Eve into her wanton, lustful fall? The fact that Hogarth raises these questions is probably more important than the answer (46). For Hogarth, aesthetic operations can work on moral subjects, just as moral operations can work on aesthetic ones (Paulson, introduction to Analysis, xxxiii). 21. In chapter 14 of the Biographia Literaria (eds. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983]. vol.7, pt.2), Coleridge argues that the movement of the mind in reading a poem should be sinuous: The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiey by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the nal solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air; at every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward (14). Hogarths serpentine line appears again, divorced from the visual and rendered a mental principle. 22. See Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990); and Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic. 23. Paulson argues that Hogarthian [p]ursuit does not ... pass beyond the solution of a puzzle, the winning of a game. The chief object, to judge by the metaphors of sexual pursuit and the chase, is a woman or a fox; but when the pursuit passes beyond seduction or capture to possessing or killing, it is no longer within the range of the Beautiful (Beautiful, Novel, and Strange, 44). This is resonant with Kants analysis of aesthetics based on the principle of purposiveness without purpose. 24. Remembrance of Things Past, trans. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Penguin, 1983), 1:705. The quotations that follow come from the pliade edition of la recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). 25. Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis, an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, 65. 26. Eagleton argues that Burkean politics absorbs aesthetics via a metaphorical principle: We become human subjects by pleasurably imitating

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practical forms of social life .... To mime is to submit to a law, but one so gratifying that freedom lies in such servitude. Such consensuality is less an articial social contract ... than a kind of spontaneous metaphor or perpetual forging of resemblance (53). 27. Swift is often read as being resistant to the aesthetic and to beauty in particular; see, for example, ee Carole Fabricant, Swifts Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982). In Jonathan Swift: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), Denis Donoghue also argues that for Swift [b]enevolists like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson had little appeal (6465). 28. Jonathan Swift, Gullivers Travels (New York: Norton, 1970), 71. 29. I here have in mind primarily psychoanalytic and feminist readings of Swift as well as other traditional readings of the Swiftian persona, including Norman Brown, Life against Death; The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1959); John Middleton Murry, Jonathan Swift: A Critical Biography (London; Cape, 1954); W.B. Carnochan, Lemuel Gullivers Mirror for Man (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968); and revisionist readings of Swifts relationship to women and attitudes toward femininity by Carol Houlihan Flynn, The Body in Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990); Felicity Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women, 16601750 (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1984); Margaret Anne Doody, Swift among the Women, Yearbook of English Studies 18 (1988): 6892; and Ellen Pollak, Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago: Univ.of Chicago Press, 1985). Feminist scholars in particular have offered signicant ethical readings of Swifts work that press beyond the traditional view of Swift as fearful misogynist. Although I place ethical or hermeneutic reading in abeyance here, I do not underestimate the complexity of such readings, a complexity summed up by Laura Brown: The works of Jonathan Swift provide a critical test case for political criticism and a providing ground for the nature of the politics of such a criticism .... Swifts texts lend themselves equally to a negative and a positive hermeneutic, and a critic concerned with the political aim of her readings of literary culture might well pause between the exposure of misogyny in the canon and the discovery of an early ally in the struggle against colonialism. Which to choose? Reading Race and Gender: Jonathan Swift, Critical Essays on Jonathan Swift, ed. Frank Palmeri (New York: G.K. Hall, 1993), 121. 30. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, 112. 31. Jonathan Swift, the Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers (New York: Penguin, 1983), 76; subsequent references to Swifts poetry are to this edition. 32. A number of the small and poetically uneven group of early odes address what Swift perceives as the problems of poetry. John Irwin Fischer argues that these poems chronicle Swifts gradual realization of human frailty and the contrast between that weakness and poetic grandeur, On Swifts Poetry (Gainesville: Univ. Presses of Florida, 1978), chap. 1. See also Irwin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962), 1:11141; Peter J. Schakel, The Poetry of Jonathan Swift (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978), chap. 1; and Nora Crowe Jaffe, The Poet Swift (Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New England, 1977), chap. 3.

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33. The poem is usually read as Swifts youthful farewell to epideictic poetry in favor of satire or as a temporary adieu to fame (or hopes for Temples approval). See Jaffe, The Poet Swift, 74; Schakel, The Poetry of Jonathan Swift, 2728; or Fabricant, who writes that the poem is a scathing denunciation of the visionary muse, ... and affirms a resolve to turn away completely from the realm of murky imaginings, of chimeras rather than actualities .... The verse ends with a renunciation having profound implications for both the form and the content of Swifts subsequent poetry, which becomes increasingly more topical and more dependent upon empirically observed detail, as well as increasingly less indulgent of the vagaries of the imagination (Swifts Landscape, 58). 34. See Fisher, 52. Fisher argues that she becomes an allegory for religious faith, and she transforms each human experience ... [into] an emblem of gods gracious presence (Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences. 53). My argument in this paragraph builds on his (4954). 35. Paul Hunters brilliant recent article in Eighteenth-Century Studies is an attempt to account for this problem: Sleeping Beauties: Are Historical Aesthetics Worth Recovering? Eighteenth-Century Studies 34, no. 1 (fall 2000): 120. 36. I suggested at the beginning of this essay that new historicism and the new aesthetics are related, that they are both responses to contemporary challenges about the relationship between theory and practice, texts and the world. At best, both of these impulses are pushing toward radical reconceptions of textual practice, but at worst, they assume a predictive and or constitutive relation between unique moments and constructs that overshadow and overpower them. 37. Among these are Patrick Cavanagh, Mark Tramo, and Semir Zeki, neuroscientists interested in perception, just to name a few. See especially Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999); a recent volume of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Art and the Brain, 6, nos. 67 (1999), with articles by Zeki and V.S. Ramachandran; and Tramos recent work on music and the brain in Science, 291, no. 5501 (5 January 2001): 5456. 38. Cf. Armstrong on Adorno: [B]eauty is not a thing, an is, or even an ought; it is a want or wanting. Beauty conjures wanting because it is a promise of the as yet unsayable, a eeting promise of new possibilities, of scarcely envisioned openings in experience emancipated from the world of exchange (186; italics original). I dont believe beauty conjures wanting but that wanting and beauty dene each other reciprocally. Pursuit structures the experience of the beautiful, gives it the shape that is its being.

Chronology

1871

On July 10, Marcel Proust is born in the Paris suburb of Auteuil, to Valentin Louis Eugene Georges Proust, son of Adrien Proust, a distinguished professor of medicine, and Jeanne-Clemence Weil. His father is Catholic, his mother is Jewish. Marcel will always be nancially independent. The Proust family takes up residence in the fashionable boulevard Malesherbes (Paris 8e). Proust will live in this area most of his life. Family holidays at Illiers (now Illiers-Combray) in the dpartement of Eure-et-Loir. Attends the Lyce Fontanes (renamed Lyce Condorcet in 1883); poor health often keeps him absent. Suffers his rst asthma attack at age nine. Proust is strongly inuenced by his philosophy teacher, Alphonse Darlu. Receives his bachelors diploma. Meets Madame Albert Arman de Caillavet and attends her exclusive salon where he meets her love, Anatole France. Proust performs his military service at Orlans, a feat of which he is exceptionally proud. It is during this time only that Proust enjoys relatively good health. Enrolls simultaneously in the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris and in the independent Ecole Libre

1872

187886 188289

1888 1889

188990

189095

267

268

Chronology

des Sciences Politiques. Earns his law license en droit in 1893 and degree in letters in 1894. 189293 Co-founds a short-lived journal, Le Banquet. Is an active contributor to this and other journals. Meets Henri Bergson, the French philosopher and 1927 recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature. With the disappearance of Le Banquet, the group begins to have material published in La Revue Blanche, a higher class avant-garde publication. Beginning of the Dreyfus affair. Around this time, Proust becomes obsessed with Emerson. Begins a novel, Jean Santeuil (unnished). Enters the concours for an unpaid librarianship and, having succeeded, is appointed to the Bibliothque Mazarine, the library of the Institut de France. Having seldom performed his duties and annually asking for leave on the pretext of bad health, he is nally dismissed in 1900. His real interest in life during the time is society. Publication of Les Plaisirs et les jours, a collection of stories, essays and miscellaneous pieces is published in Paris; translated by Louis Varese as Pleasures and Regrets in New York in 1948 and London in 1950. Proust becomes increasingly enthusiastic about the work of the English writer John Ruskin. Joseph Reinach, a close friend of mile Straus, reveals that Dryefus is innocent. Publication of Zolas Jaccuse. Proust rallies to the Dreyfus cause and in December, he obtains the signature of Anatole France in favor of Zola. During the various trials which ensue, Proust is a passionate observer in the audience and records his experiences in Jean Santeuil. Dreyfus receives a presidential pardon. By December, Proust has begun translating some of Ruskins La Bible DAmiens. Death of Ruskin. Proust devotes the next few years to translating La Bible DAmiens (with the help of his mother) and annotating Ruskins selected works. Though the introduction closely follows Ruskin, Prousts postscript denounces Ruskinian idolatry that confuses truth with beauty. Proust makes two trips to Venice to see rsthand what his English precedessor had written about. The family moves to the rue de Courcelles.

1894 1895

1896

1897

1898

1899

1900

Chronology

269

1901

Becomes enamored of a dashing young noble and diplomat, Bertrand de Fnlon. During a trip to Holland the following year, Proust suffers intensely when he cannot communicate with Fnlon on an emotional level. Artistic trips to Belgium and Holland; sees Vermeers View of Delft. Death of Prousts father. La Bible dAmiens is published by Mercure de France. Prousts translation is considered an outstanding literary achievement. Death of Prousts mother on September 26. Proust is inconsolable. After reading what the psychiatrists say about asthma, he puts himself in Dr. Solliers sanatorium at Boulogne-sur-Seine from which he emerges, after a few weeks, convinced that there is no cure. Proust moves to 102, boulevard Haussmann. In June, Ssame et les lys (Sesame and Lilies), another translation of Ruskin, appears in volume form. Summer holidays at Cabourg, on the Normandy coast. It is here that he meets Alfred Agostinelli and hires him as a professional chauffeur. Writes Pastiches of other authors, based on an amusing extortion racket. Begins what is now known as Contre Sainte-Beuve, an essay. The essay transforms itself into a novel. It will eventually become A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past). Goes to the Ballets russes. Has his bedroom in the apartment of Boulevard Haussmann lined with cork to insulate himself from the noise of construction work in an adjoining apartment. He will live here until 1919 when the building is sold and he is obliged to move. The novels title at this time is Les Intermittences du coeur (Intermittences of the Heart). Proust employs a secretary to type up his work, more than 700 pages to date. Proust seeks a publisher, in vain. Du ct de chez Swann (Swanns Way) is published by Grasset, at Prousts own expense. The general title of the

1902 1903 1904

1905

1906

190714

1908

1909

1910

1911

1912 1913

270

Chronology

novel is changed to A la recherche du temps perdu. Agostinelli turns up on Prousts doorstep with a woman named Anna, whom he introduces as his wife, and Proust hires her as his secretary. 1914 Alfred Agostinelli, with whom Proust was emotionally involved, dies before the First World War. The second volume of A la recherche is at press when war breaks out, postponing publication indenitely. During the war, with no possibility of publication, Proust vastly expands his novel, notably in respect of the character of Albertine. Publication rights are transferred from Grasset to Gallimard. Proust is forced to move from 102, boulevard Haussmann, rstly to the rue Laurent-Pichat, then to what will turn out to be his nal residence, 44, rue Hamelin. He is controversially awarded the Prix Goncourt, Frances premier literary prize. Publication of Pastiches et mlanges and A lombre de des jeunes lles en eurs in Paris. Proust is named Chevalier de la lgion dhonneur. Publication of Le Cote de Guermantes I. Extracts from the novel are regularly published in journals, mainly La Nouvelle Revue franaise, continuing into 1922. Proust visits an exhibition of Dutch paintings at the Orangerie in May where he sees the View of Delft again. Le Cote de Guermantes II Sodome et Gomorrhe I is published in Paris. Sodome et Gomorrhe II is published. Though Proust complains in January of a depression brought on by his physical pain, he nevertheless is able to attend a musical evening at Jacques Porels house. On May 18, he attends the rst production of of Renard, a ballet by Nijinska, and attends a reception afterwards with Diaghilev, Stravinksy, Picasso and Joyce. Proust develops bronchitis, then pneumonia, and dies on November 18. He is buried in Pre Lachaise cemetery on November 22. Swanns Way is translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, 2 volumes, in London: Chatto & Windus, 1922 and New York: Holt, 1922.

191418

1915 1919

1920 1921

1922

1922

Chronology

271

1923 1924

Publication of Sodome et Gomorrhe III. Publication of Albertine disparue and Within a Budding Grove (translation of A lombre de des jeunes lles en eurs) by Scott Moncrieff in London and New York. Publication of The Guermantes Way (translation of Le Cote de Guermantes I). Publication Cities of the Plain (translation of Sodome et Gomorrhe) (comprises Sodome et Gomorrhe I and Sodome et Gomorrhe II). Publication of Le temps retrouv, 2 volumes and Chroniques, Paris. Publication of The Captive (Sodome et Gomorrhe III: La Prisonniere, 2 volumes) translated by Scott Moncrieff. Publication of The Sweet Cheat Gone (Albertine disparue, 2 volumes) translated by Scott Moncrieff in New York and London. Publication of The Past Recaptured (Le temps retrouv) translated by Frederick A. Blossom in New York. Publication of Contre Sainte-Beuve, suivi de Nouveaux Melanges, edited by Bernard de Fallois, in Paris; translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner as On Art and Literature, 1896-1919 in New York. Publication of Jean Santeuil, translated by Gerard Hopkins, in London (1955) and New York (1956). Remembrance of Things Past, 3 volumes, translated by Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, in London.

1925 1927

1929 1930

1932 1954

1955 1981

Contributors

HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University and Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English at the New York University Graduate School. He is the author of over 20 books, including Shelleys Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blakes Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994), and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996). The Anxiety of Inuence (1973) sets forth Professor Blooms provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great writers and their predecessors. His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), a 1998 National Book Award nalist, How to Read and Why (2000), Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002), and Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003). In 1999, Professor Bloom received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism, and in 2002 he received the Catalonia International Prize. JULIA KRISTEVA is an internationally known psychoanalyst and critic and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Paris. She is the author of Intimate Revolt and The Future of Revolt (2002); Crisis of the European Subject (2000); and Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989). ROBERT FRASER is a Senior Research Fellow at the Open University and ahs previously taught at the Universities of Leeds and London and Trinity

273

274

Contributors

College, Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in English. He is the author of The Chameleon Poet: A Life of George Barker (2001); Victorian Quest Romance: Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling, and Conan Doyle (1998) and Lifting the Sentence: A Poetics of Postcolonial Fiction (2000). CYNTHIA J. GAMBLE is an Honorary Fellow of the Ruskin Programme, University of Lancaster and is the Honorary Secretary of the Ruskin Society. She is also on the Council of the Franco-British Society. She is the author of From Belle Epoque to First World War: the Social Panorama (2001); Proust-Ruskin Perspectives on La Vierge Dore at Amiens Cathedral (1993); and is preparing an edition of La Bible dAmiens. JAN HOKENSON is a Professor in the Department of Languages and Linguistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz where she is Director of Comparative Literature. Professor Hokenson is the author of The Fictions of Lisa Alther (1998) and is an editor of Forms of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Third International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film (1986). SUSAN STEWART teaches literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published an edition of Euripides Andromache (translated by Susan Stewart and Wesley D. Smith) (2001) and is the author The Forest (1995) and Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (1991). SARA DANIUS teaches in the Department of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. She is the author of The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics (2002) and Novel Visions and the Crisis of Culture: Visual Technology, Modernism, and Death in The Magic Mountain (2000). INGRID WASSENAAR is Scholl Teaching Fellow at Christs College, Cambridge. She is the author of Le juste milieu ... : Prousts Transmission (2000) and has translated several articles published in the Yale French Studies (1996) on Gerard Genette, Louis Hay and Pierre-March De Biasi. WILLIAM C. CARTER is Professor of French at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, a member of the editorial board of the Bulletin Marcel Proust and a permanent member correspondent of the Centre de recherches proustiennes (Sorbonne nouvelle). He is the author of Marcel Proust: A Life (2000) and The Proustian Quest (1992).

Contributors

275

SIN REYNOLDS is a Professor in the French Department of Stirling University. She is the author of France Between the Wars: Gender and Politics (1996) and Britannicas Typesetters: Women Compositors in Edwardian Edinburgh (1989). She has also translated The Wheels of Commerce by Fernand Braudel (1985) and Hannahs Diary by Louise L. Lambrichs (1998). ANTHONY R. PUGH is Professor Emeritus in the French Department at the University of New Brunswick. He is the author of Imagination and the Unity of the Penses (2002); Prousts Working Methods: The Importance of Structure (1990) and The Birth of A La recherche du temps perdu (1987). MAUREEN A. RAMSDEN has held teaching appointments in French in American and England and most recently at the University of Hill. She is the author of The Play and Place of Fact and Fiction in the Travel Tale (2000) and Literary Manifestations of the Self: Their Forms and Functions in Modern French Factual and Fictional Documentary Works (1990). GABRIELLE STARR is an Assistant Professor of English at New York University. She is the author of Clarissas Relics and the Lyric Community (2001) and Loves Proper Musick: Lyric Inection in Behns Epistles (2000).

Bibliography

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Acknowledgments

Proust and Time Embodied by Julia Kristeva. From Proust and the Sense of Time translated and with an introduction by Stephen Bann. 1993 by Julia Kristeva. English translation 1993 by Stephen Bann. Reprinted by permission of Columbia University Press. The Lamp of Truth: Proust and George Eliot by Robert Fraser. From Proust and the Victorians: The Lamp of Memory. 1994 by Robert Fraser. Reprinted by permission. Zipporah: A Ruskinian Enigma Appropriated by Marcel Proust by Cynthia J. Gamble. From Word & Image 15, no. 4 (OctoberDecember 1999): 381394. 1999 by Taylor & Francis Limited. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals. Reprinted by permission. Prousts japonisme: Contrasting Aesthetics by Jan Hokenson. From Modern Language Studies 29, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 1737. 1999 by Jan Hokenson. Reprinted by permission. Prousts Turn from Nostalgia by Susan Stewart. Reprinted by permission from Raritan 19, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 7794. 1999 by Raritan: A Quarterly Review. Orpheus and the Machine: Proust as Theorist of Technological Change, and the Case of Joyce by Sara Danius. From Forum for Modern Language

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Index
Adam Bede (Eliot), 3942, 4446, 5051 Addison, Joseph, 247 Adolphe (Constant), 145 Against Sainte-Beuve, 2122, 27 criticism of, 227, 230, 238 image of mother in, 2930, 179 memory in, 179, 181 writing of, 229, 231, 23435, 237238 Agostinelli, Monsieur, 193 A la recherch du Marcel Proust (Maurois), 39 A la recherch du temps perdu, 17 aging in, 31 allegory in, 13739 allusions in, 23, 205 behavior in, 59 criticism of, 13949, 227 cruelty in, 3334 desire in, 33, 177, 195 rst person narrative in, 14045, 179, 236, 238 compared to Gullivers Travels, 25456 imagination in, 31, 34, 254 Jean Santeuil inuence on, 22122, 227, 23138 metaphors in, 116, 253 modernism in, 236, 238 moral consequences in, 60 relations to the dead in, 105 remorse in, 23 war in, 31, 56, 181, 192 women in, 19098 285 writing of, 2122, 27, 32, 176, 20115, 23031, 234 A la recherch du temps perdu, characters in Aim in, 13 Albertine in. See Albertine in A la recherch du temps perdu Bergotte in, 98, 140, 2056 Bloch in, 193 M. de Braut in, 9 Cleste in, 2728, 31 M. de Charlus in. See Charlus, M. de in A la recherch du temps perdu Odette de Crcy in. See Crcy, Odette de in A la recherch du temps perdu Elstir in. See Elstir in A la recherch du temps perdu Forcheville in, 56 Francoise in, 19092, 201, 203, 205 grandmother in, 2325, 2930, 12328, 160 Guermantes, Duc de, 9091, 93, 111, 113, 192 Guermantes, Duchesse, 90, 113, 114 Guermantes, Prince de, 24, 33, 90, 193 Jupien in, 24 Leonie, Aunt in, 167, 235 Marcel in. See Marcel in A la recherch du temps perdu Morel in, 24 Rachel in, 79, 114

286

Index

Robert in, 8 Saint-Loup in, 2, 79, 116 Charles Swann in. See Swann, Charles in A la recherch du temps perdu Gilberte Swann in. See Swann, Gilberte in A la recherch du temps perdu Madame Verdurin in, 86, 8990, 95, 11011, 114, 193, 195 Verdurins in, 30, 113, 140, 171, 235 Mlle Vinteuil in, 25, 30, 51, 74, 123, 167 A la recherch du temps perdu, themes and theories in aesthetic theory in, 25256 childhood memories theme in, 24, 29, 32, 34, 83, 97, 236 death theme in, 24, 117 faculty of memory theme in, 2425, 119 inversion theme in, 2931 japoniste practice in, 8399 jealously theme in, 33, 123, 13738, 166, 177 memory and the construction of in, 2023, 176, 182, 236 nostalgia theme in, 1056, 110, 143, 191, 201 the Orpheus myth in, 124 recurring motifs in, 83 satiric allusions in, 8990, 9495, 9798 self-justication in, 13749, 15760 sexuality in, 83, 179 suffering theme in, 24, 26, 31 symbolism in, 124, 167 technology affecting human experience in, 12329 time theme in, 25, 3233, 140, 17778, 180, 182 Zipporah idolatry in, 7071 A la recherch du temps perdu, volumes and sections of A lombre des jeunes lles en eurs in. See

A lombre des jeunes lles en eurs Albertine disparue in. See Albertine disparue Balbec sections of, 39, 193, 252 The Captive in. See Captive, The Combray in, 89, 9697, 13839, 16669, 177, 18182, 191, 201, 203, 235 Le Ct de Guermantes in. See Ct de Guermantes, Le Goncourt text in, 95, 97, 114, 117 The Intermittencies of the Heart in, 24 Sodome et Gomorrhe in. See Sodome et Gomorrhe Swanns Way in. See Swanns Way Swann in Love in, 71, 7677, 201, 203, 207 Le Temps retrouv in. See Temps retrouv, Le Time Regained in. See Time Regained Within a Budding Grove in. See Within a Budding Grove A lombre des jeunes lles en eurs in A la recherch du temps perdu, 185, 203, 209, 215, 228 Albertine in, 38, 193 Andre in, 3739 George Eliot in, 38 Gilberte in, 201 grandmother in, 37 illusions in, 37 Marcel in, 93 Albertine, 9, 1114, 28, 30, 33, 38 accident of, 22, 31, 195 bicycle of, 194 character of, 19495 death of, 9, 22, 195 jealousy and love of, 3, 22, 11416 lesbianism of, 24 and Marcel, 22, 160, 17273, 190, 193 maternal devotion of, 28 object of love and jealousy, 22

Index

287

Albertine disparue Albertine in, 51, 160 fragile human nature in, 51 narrative of distress in, 160 Analysis of Beauty (Hogarth) aesthetic theory in, 24951, 259 Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton) narrators nostalgia in, 106 Anderson, Benedict, 185 Aristotle, 107 Armstrong, Isobel on aesthetic theory, 24849 Arnyvelde, Andr, 78 Augustine, 1078, 145 Avant la nuit Franoise in, 172 same-sex love in, 172

Badinter, Elisabeth, 197 Bales, Richard, 74 Balzac, Honor de, 19, 23, 43 Bardche, Maurice on A la recherch du temps perdu, 230, 238 Barney, Natalie, 189 Barrs, 23 Bataille, Georges, 3031 Baudelaire, Charles, 14, 222 Baudry, 146 Baumgarten, Alexander, 135, 246 Beauvoir, Simone de, 195 Before Nightfall. See Avant la nuit Belle Epoque France, 186, 18990, 193, 195, 19798 Bellemin-Nol, Jean on the denition of avant-texte, 22225, 229 Benardaky, Marie de, 170 Benjamin, Walter, 115 and the notion of aura, 126 Benstock, Shari, 189 Berger, Klaus, 84 Bergson, Henri, 20, 57

Bible dAmiens, La (Ruskin), 41, 176 Blanchot, Maurice, 148 Blarenberghe, Henri Van, 26 Bloom, Harold, 273 introduction, 116 on Proust compared to Freud, 13, 5, 12, 1416 on jealousy in Prousts work, 116 Botticelli, Sandro, 5 and Prousts use of Zipporah, 7078 and Ruskins use of Zipporah, 6373, 76, 78 The Trials of Moses, 6378 Boule de Suif (Flaubert), 60 Bowie, Malcolm on jealousy in A la recherch du temps perdu, 123 Burke, Edmund, 249 Brun, Bernard on Prousts writing, 229 Brunet, Etienne, 158 Brunschicg, Ccile, 193 Brunschicg, Leon, 193 Burton, Robert, 106

Captive, The, 28, 227 jealousy in, 1012, 38 La in, 11 Carlyle, Thomas, 39, 41, 50 Carnet de 1908, Le (notebook) annotations of childhood memories in, 17779 Carpaccio, Vittore LArrivo degli Ambasciatori inglesi presso il Re di Bretagna, 70 Carter, William C., 16583, 274 on Prousts grand edice of recollection, 16583 Causerie de Lundi, 43 Caillavet, Arman de, 19. Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality (Freud), 1

288

Index

Characteristics (Shaftesbury) aesthetic theory in, 249 Charlus, M. de in A la recherch du temps perdu, 9, 2930 adventures of, 24 sexuality of, 171 temperament of, 59 Chernichevsky, 187 Clarac, Pierre, 22832, 235 Claudel, Paul, 98 Clegg, Jeanne, 69 Cocteau, Jean, 20910 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 251 Complete Works of John Ruskin (Cook & Wedderburn), 72 Confession dune jeune lle, La goodnight kiss drama in, 168 Confessions (Augustine), 145 Confessions, Les (Rousseau), 145, 147 Conrad, Joseph, 158 Constant, Benjamin, 145 Contre Sainte-Beuve. See Against SainteBeuve Ct de Guermantes, Le illness, suffering and death in, 23 self-justication in, 159 technological change in, 123, 130 Crcy, Odette de (Swann) in A la recherch du temps perdu, 32, 190, 201 character of, 19194 past life of, 56, 76 as Miss Sacripant, 7678 secret life of, 4, 75 sexuality of, 7778, 192 Swanns love for, 2, 6, 17273, 191, 203 as Swans Zipporah, 5

Danius, Sara, 12136, 274 on Joyces use of how technology affects human experiences, 13035 on Prousts use of how technology affects human experiences, 12130, 13435 Dante, 139 Daudet, Lucien, 21314 Davis, Fred, 106 Debray-Genette, Raymonde on avante-texte, 225 Debussy, Claude, 146 Degas, Edgar, 90 Delafosse, 86 Deleuze, Gilles, 111, 113 Derrida, Jacques on enlightment aesthetics, 245, 249 on Hegel, 122 Descartes, Ren, 108, 111 Dolls House, A (Ibsen), 18788 Dominique (Fromentin), 145 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 26 Doubrovsky, Serge, 146 Dreaming by the Book (Scarry) aesthetic theory in, 256 Du ct dechez Swann. See Swanns Way Duroselle, J.B., 19091 Duplay, Maurice, 23

Critical Historians of Art, The (Podro), 11718 Critique of Judgment (Kant) aesthetic theory in, 244

Eagleton, Terry on enlightment aesthetics, 245, 249 Elias, Norbert on time, 109 Eliot, George inuence on Proust, 39, 41, 4352, 5461 realism in, 4447, 57 Elliot, Emory on aesthetic theory, 248 Elstir in A la recherch du temps perdu, 140, 173 and Japanese aesthetics, 96, 98 paintings of, 116

Index

289

studies of, 88, 9093 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 38, 5051 End of Jealousy, The. See Fin de la jalousie, La Enquiry (Burke), 249

jealousy in, 1114 memory in, 119

Faces of Injustice, The (Shklar), 138 Fallois, Bernard de, 22931 Fan, The. See Lventail Ferr, Andr, 228 Ferry, Jules, 185 Feuillerat, Albert, 202, 21415 Fiction, Fair and Foul (Ruskin), 5455 Filial Sentiments of a Parricide, 26 Fin de la jalousie, La Francoise in, 17273 Honore in, 17273 jealousy and obsession in, 17273 Flaubert, Gustave, 14, 60, 223, 22526 inuence on Proust, 4748, 6061 realism of, 47, 57 Fleurs du mal (Baudelaire), 222 Focillon, Henri, 117 Foster, Dennis, 145 France, Anatole, 171, 193 France de la Belle Epoque, La (Duroselle), 19091 Franck, 193 Fraser, Robert, 3761, 27374 on Eliots inuence on Proust, 39, 41, 4352, 5461 on Flauberts inuence on Proust, 4748, 6061 on Ruskins inuence on Proust, 41, 44, 4648, 5455, 57 French Revolution (Carlyle), 39 Freud, Sigmund, 148 irony of, 1 Proust compared to, 13, 5, 12, 1416 on repression, 106 Fromentin, 145 Fugitive, The death in, 113

Gallimard publishers, 17 Gamble, Cynthia J., 6381, 274 on Ruskins inuence on Proust, 7073, 76, 78 on Ruskins reproduction of Botticellis Zipporah, 6373, 76, 78 on Prousts use of Botticellis Zipporah in his work, 7078 Gemie, Sharif, 195 Genette, Grard, 144, 190, 192, 228 Gide, Andre, 145 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 192 Gimpel, Ren, 181 Girls Confession, A. See Confession dune jeune lle, La Giroud, Francoise, 197 Grasset, Bernard, 202, 20813, 215 Grasset publishers, 17, 229 Grsillon on avant-texte, 22426 Guermantes Way, The. See Ct de Guermantes, Le Gullivers Travels (Swift) aesthetic theory in, 254 compared to A la recherch du temps perdu, 25456

Harrison, Thomas Alexander, 173 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 2 Hay, Louis on texte, 22324, 227 Hegel and the history of aesthetic discourse, 122, 135 Heidegger, 248 Proust compared to, 20, 3435 Hofer, Johannes on nostalgia, 106 Hogarth, William

290

Index

and aesthetic theory, 244, 24851, 25457, 25960 Hokenson, Jan, 83103, 274 on Prousts use of Japanese aestheticism in A la recherche du temps perdu, 83103 Homer, 19 Hugo, Victor, 22 Hutcheson and aesthetic theory, 244, 246, 24849, 260

Ibsen, Henrik, 187 Image of Proust, The (Benjamin), 115 Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in Modern French Literature (Schwartz), 86 In Search of Lost Time. See A la recherch du temps perdu Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Hutcheson) aesthetic theory in, 246

Jean in, 39, 46, 49, 52, 166, 173, 23536 Madame Lawrence in, 5253 Marie scandal in, 5354, 60, 170, 235 memory in, 17376, 178, 236 narrator of, 48, 5960, 235 publication of, 231, 237 realism in, 23738 Monsieur de Ribaumont in, 52 Madame Servan in, 235 third-person narrative of, 236 writing of, 231, 234 Johnson, Samuel, 247 Jouhandeau, M., 29 Joyce, James, 224 and use of how technology affects human experiences, 123, 13035 compared to Proust, 123, 130, 13435

Janklvitch, Vladimir, 106 Jean Santeuil, 27, 181 allusions in, 235 Arthur in, 53 bed-time kiss in, 25 behavior in, 59 Madame Cresmeyer in, 5253, 235 criticism of, 227, 237 George Eliot in, 38 Emerson in, 38 Ernestine in, 45 Experiences of love in, 235 ctionalized autobiography of, 39 Henri in, 52 image of mother in, 25 inuence on A la recherch du temps perdu, 22122, 227, 23138 inversion theme in, 25, 177 Mr. Irwine in, 53

Kant, Immanuel, 108, 116, 119, 135 and aesthetic theory, 244, 246 Keats, John, 115 Kilmartin, Terence translator, 71 Kracaurer, Siegfried, 123 Kristeva, Julia, 1735, 72, 98, 273 on the last volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, 3134 on Proust compared to Heidegger, 20, 3334 on Proust compared to Spinoza, 34 on Proust and the death of mother, 2224, 2931 on Proust and psychic time, 1821 on the writing of A la recherche du temps perdu, 2122, 2429 Lalande, Andr Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, 150 Lauris, Georges de, 210 Law of Compensation (Emerson), 50 Lebrave, Jean-Louise, 226

Index

291

Lducation sentimentale (Flaubert), 225 Lejeune, 145 Lemaire, Madeleine illustrator, 171 Lennox, Charlotte, 247 Lewes, G.H., 51, 56 L ventail time lost and regained in, 172 Life of Forms in Art, The (Focillon), 117 LIndiffrent desire in, 171 fear of suffocation in, 171 Lepr in, 17172 Madeleine in, 17172 LIrrversible et la nostalgie (Janklvitch), 106

Malebranche, Nicolas and self-justication, 15056 Man Paul de on enlightment aesthetics, 245, 249 on Prousts insight, 7, 147 Mandeville, 244 Manet, Edouard, 22, 90 Marcel in A la recherch du temps perdu, 252, 25556 accomplishments of, 12 aesthetic innovation of, 85 and Albertine, 22, 30, 33, 160, 17273, 190, 193 artistic apprenticeship of, 90, 92, 9698 awakening of, 11113 and the bedtime kiss, 2526, 168 childhood memories of, 91, 113, 178, 19192, 236 dreams of, 117 experiences of, 22, 25, 57, 94 and his grandmother, 2325, 2930, 11113, 12327, 160 Japoniste initiation of, 8899 jealousy of, 7, 914, 114, 117, 13738 and justice, 139

mother of, 23, 27, 30, 90, 92, 11213, 177, 203, 235 narrator of, 18, 22, 2930, 32, 55, 5760, 85, 88, 9293, 95, 11213, 11517, 138, 177, 19495 recollections of, 137 obsessions of, 1011, 170, 2046, 21011, 235 passion of, 31 quest of, 16869 self-awareness of, 89 self-justication in, 139, 147, 15860 sexuality of, 179 and Gilberte Swann, 192, 201, 203, 2089, 235 suffering of, 26, 85 and the telephone, 12425 world, 32 Maupassant, Guy de, 60 Maurois, Andr, 39, 48 McLaren, Ottilie, 189 Meditations (Descartes) memory in, 111 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice on perception, 108 Michelangelo, 63 Middlemarch (Eliot), 52, 54, 60 Mill on the Floss, The (Eliot), 4041, 5458 Modern Painters (Ruskin), 44, 46 Monet, Claude, 8788, 9092 Montesquiou, Robert de 23, 86, 171 Moralists, The (Shaftesbury), 257 Moreau, 87, 90 Mrs. Warrens Profession (Shaw), 187 Murray, Charles Fairfax, 66, 68

Nahmias, Albert, 204 Nietzsche, 107, 116 Nordlinger, Marie, 86 Norman Conquest of England, The (Thierry), 16869 Norton, Charles Eliot, 67

292

Index

Occasioned by Sir William Temples Late Illness and Recovery (Swift) aesthetic theory in, 25758 Ode on a Grecian Urn (Keats), 115 On Beauty and Being Just (Scarry) aesthetic theory in, 248, 259 Othello (Shakespeare), 2 Ozouf, Mona, 197

Pascal, Blaise, 222 Passing of the Oedipus Complex, The (Freud), 1416 Pater, Walter, 5 Paulson, Ronald on aesthetic theory, 244, 250 Pavanne for a Dead Princess (Ravel), 110 Peasants into Frenchman (Weber), 185 Penss (Pascal), 222 Peter, Ren, 146 Petit, Jacques on avant-texte, 223 Pichon, Yann Le, 99 Place de la madeleine, La (Doubrovsky), 146 Plaisirs et les jours, Les criticism of, 227 theme of inversion in, 2526, 171 Plato, 1078 Podro, Michael, 117 Ponge, Francis, 226 Pr, Le (Ponge), 226 Prisonnire, La. See Captive, The Proust, Adrien (father), 16567 Proust, Mme, ne Jeanne-Clemence Weil (mother), 165, 179 death of, 2327, 29, 146 inuence of, 166, 171 Proust, Marcel and aesthetic theory, 244, 25155, 260 birth of, 165 chronology of, 26771 criticism of, 7, 29, 13949, 227

death of, 1, 14, 21, 139, 226, 228 and death of mother, 2327, 29, 146 George Eliots inuence on, 39, 41, 4352, 5461 ethics of, 20 rst person narrative in, 14045, 169, 181 Flauberts inuence on, 4748, 6061 compared to Freud, 13, 5, 12, 1416 compared to Heidegger, 20, 3334 illnesses of, 21, 26, 8688, 171, 193 imaginary world of, 24, 168, 254 insight of, 7 and inversion theories, 2 irony of, 1, 3, 9, 116 use of Japanese aestheticism, 83103 and jealousy, 116 compared to Joyce, 123, 130, 13435 and memory themes, 251 metaphors of, 16, 253 morality of, 61 mothers inuence of, 166, 171 and new form of temporality, 17 and nostalgia, 1056, 108, 11019 notebooks of, 21, 2930, 55, 60, 177 and philosophy, 20, 113, 174, 178 and psychic time, 1821, 3233, 143, 174 and realism, 47, 57 and recollection ability, 16583 remorse and guilt of, 25 as reviewer, 87 Ruskins inuence on, 7073, 76, 78 self-doubt of, 178 and self-justication, 13749, 15760 and sexuality, 12, 15, 31, 17071 as social chronicler, 86 compared to Spinoza, 34 compared to Swift, 251, 25457 and symbolism, 17 as theorist of technological change, 12130, 13435 Proust, Robert (brother), 166, 177, 228 Proust and Signs (Deleuze), 111

Index

293

Pugh, Anthony R., 20120, 275 on the writing of A la recherch du temps perdu, 20120

realism of, 44, 4648 and the reproduction of Botticellis Zipporah, 6373, 76, 78 Sachs, Maurice, 29 Sainte-Beuve et Balzac the intelligent reader in, 43 Sandre, Yves, 22930 Sartre, Jean-Paul on Proust, 14344 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 2 Scarry, Elaine on aesthetic theory, 244, 24849, 25154, 25657, 25960 Scenes from Clerical Life (Eliot), 4041, 44 Schmid, Marion on avant-texte, 223, 228 Schwartz, William Leonard, 86 Sesame and Lilies (Ruskin), 176 Sur la lecture preface in, 17677 Shaftesbury and aesthetic theory, 24451, 25354, 257, 260 Shakespeare, William, 2, 19, 26, 139, 252 Shaw, George Bernard, 187, 197 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1 Shklar, Judith, 138 Silas Marner (Eliot), 4041, 51 Smith, 244, 247, 249 Sodom and Gomorrah. See Sodome et Gomorrhe Sodome et Gomorrhe allusion in, 23 black remorse in, 23, 25 Japanese aesthetics in, 93 Monsieur de Charlus in, 59 profanation of the mother in, 30 self-justication in, 159 sexual inversion in, 2324 Spatromische (Riegl), 117 Spectator, The (Addison) aesthetics and morality in, 247

Quine, W.V. On Simple Theories of a Complex World, 142

Rabelais, Francois, 19 Ramsden, Maureen A., 22141, 275 on avant-texte in literature, 22141 on Jean Santeuil inuence on A la recherch du temps perdu, 22122, 227, 23138 Ravel, Maurice, 110 Rcits (Gide), 145 Remembrance of Things Past. See A la recherch du temps perdu Rembrandt Prousts essay on, 4546 Reynolds, Sin, 185200, 275 on the depiction of women in Prousts culture, 18599 Ribot, Thodule and self-justication, 150, 15557 Riegl, Alois aesthetic theories of, 11718 Riffaterre, 146 Robert and the Kid. Mother leaves on a journey, 27, 177 Robert, Louis de, 20910, 213 Roberts, Mary-Louise, 188 Rodin, Auguste, 189 Romola (Eliot), 40 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 145, 147 Rousset, Jean, 83 Ruiz, Raul lm adaptation of Time Regained, 123 Ruskin, John, 5, 57, 86 inuence on Proust, 41, 44, 4648, 5455, 57, 7073, 76, 78 ire of, 55

294

Index

Spinoza Proust compared to, 34 Stambolian, George, 76 Stansell, Christine, 188 Starr, Gabrielle, 24365, 275 on aesthetic theory, 24365 on Proustian aesthetics, 244, 25155, 260 Stewart, Susan, 10519, 274 on nostalgia theories in literature, 10611, 1178 on Prousts use of nostalgia in his work, 1056, 108, 11019 Sussman, Henry, 83 Swann, Charles in A la recherch du temps perdu, 60, 78, 89, 140, 167, 203, 2058, 21112 death of, 113 as dilettante, 71 features of, 32, 172 idolatry of Zipporah-Odette, 7077, 90 jealously of, 27, 910, 17273 marriage of, 191, 203 self-destruction of, 71 Swann, Gilberte in A la recherch du temps perdu, 32, 56, 94, 190, 212, 215 and Marcel, 192, 201, 2034, 206, 20810, 235 sexuality of, 114, 170 Swanns Way in A la recherch du temps perdu, 21, 54, 56, 167 bed-time kiss in, 2526, 168, 177 childhood memories in, 23, 113, 191 Combray in, 89, 9697, 13839, 16669, 177, 18182, 191, 201, 203 death in, 11213 image of mother in, 25 Japanese aesthetics in, 94 jealously in, 27, 910 Mazarin in, 10 narrator in, 55, 7677, 169 publication of, 17, 27, 78, 229

self-destruction of Swann in, 71 sexuality in, 77 Swann in Love in, 71, 7677, 201, 203, 207 Swanns relationship with Odette in, 71 Verdurins in, 30, 113 waking and sleeping in, 11113 Swift, Jonathan and aesthetic theory, 244, 251, 25458 compared to Proust, 251, 25457

Tadi, Jean-Yves on avant-texte, 226, 228, 230 Temps retrouv, Le in A la recherch du temps perdu, 17, 193, 197, 22728 Monsieur de Charlus in, 5960 death in, 31 Gilberte in, 56 inner vision in, 58 Japanese aesthetics in, 89, 94 the narrator in, 56, 58 realism in, 57 Theory of Film (Kracauer) on Proust as a theorist of photography, 123 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith) aesthetic theory in, 244 Thierry, Aungustin, 168 Timaeus (Plato), 107 Time Regained, in A la recherch du temps perdu, 32 aesthetic theory in, 23 alteration between love and death in, 22 lm adaptation of, 123 moment of illumination in, 180 narrator in, 12829 technological change in, 123, 12829 Vinteuils sonata in, 123 Tolstoy, Leo, 95, 228 Ton-That, Thanh-Vn on Jean Santeuil, 223, 238 Turing, Alan, 140 Two Paths, The (Ruskin), 44

Index

295

Ulysses (Joyce) technological change in, 123, 13135

Vigneron, Robert on the conclusion of Swanns Way, 202, 21314 Villebon Way and the Msglise Way, The, 177 Virgil and the Orpheus myth, 121 Vocabulaire de Proust, Le (Brunet), 159 Vuillard, Edouard, 86, 88

Walton, Kendall, 251 Wassenaar, Ingrid, 13763, 274 on allegory in A la recherch du temps perdu, 13739 on Proust criticism, 13949 on the history of self-justication, 14958

on self-justication in A la recherch du temps perdu, 13749, 15760 on Proust and self-justication, 13749, 15760 Weber, Eugen, 185 Wharton, Edith, 189 What is to be done? (Chernichevsky), 187 Whistler, 87, 8991, 95, 193 Within a Budding Grove in A la recherch du temps perdu artist Elstir in, 7678 nostalgia in, 106 Odettes past revealed in, 76 Miss Sacripant painting in, 7678 Women of the Left Bank (Benstock), 189 Wordsworth, William, 56

Yearning for Yesterday (Davis), 106 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 99

Zola, Emile, 223