OXFORD MODERN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE MONOGRAPHS Editorial Committee C. H. GRIFFIN A. KAHN K. M. KOHL M. L. MCLAUGHLIN...
10 downloads
539 Views
959KB Size
Report
This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form
OXFORD MODERN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE MONOGRAPHS Editorial Committee C. H. GRIFFIN A. KAHN K. M. KOHL M. L. MCLAUGHLIN I. W. F. MACLEAN R. A. G. PEARSON
This page intentionally left blank
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche ‘le délire de la lecture’ A D A M WAT T
CLARENDON PRESS
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Adam Watt 2009 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Watt, Adam. Reading in Proust’s A la recherche : ‘le delire de la lecture’ / Adam Watt. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–956617–4 1. Proust, Marcel, 1871–1922. À la recherche du temps perdu. 2. Books and reading in literature. I. Title. PQ2631.R63A9435 2009 843 .912–dc22 2009002680 Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–956617–4 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For ADW and ALW, TC and EMC
Acknowledgements The doctoral thesis upon which this book is based was completed under the supervision of Malcolm Bowie and Roger Pearson at the University of Oxford. It was a great privilege to work with two such gifted and generous supervisors. Although Malcolm is no longer with us, his mark, indelibly, is everywhere in the pages that follow. I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford, to the Queen’s College, Jesus College, and Christ Church for material and financial support. I should like to thank Alison Finch, Anthony Pilkington, and Christopher Robinson for reading and commenting on early versions of parts of the book; my examiners, Edward J. Hughes and Michael Sheringham; the two anonymous readers for OUP, whose comments helped enormously in shaping what follows; and Stace and my family for their support.
Contents Abbreviations
viii
Introduction
1
1. Primal Scenes of Reading
17
2. Learning to Read
45
3. Lessons in Reading
73
4. Reading Between the Lines or ‘le délire de la lecture’
101
5. Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading
130
Epilogue
170
Bibliography Index
178 191
Abbreviations References to A la recherche du temps perdu are to the Pléiade edition in four volumes, edited by Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–9) and are incorporated in the text using a roman numeral to indicate the volume, followed by a page reference in arabic numerals (e.g. II, 123). CSB refers to Contre SaintBeuve précédé de Pastiches et mélanges et suivi de Essais et articles, edited by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
Introduction Il me semblait que j’étais moi-même ce dont parlait l’ouvrage. (I, 3)
There are many ways to avoid reading Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. One might read a primer or a guide, watch a film, or browse the comic books. One might make a trip to Illiers-Combray, to Cabourg, to the Boulevard Haussmann, or the Père Lachaise cemetery. One might buy the tea-towels, the cake-tins, the postcards, bookmarks, stationery . . . Reading, for all that, is the subject of this book. This is a book about reading A la recherche du temps perdu and primarily it is about the act of reading as portrayed in that novel. A la recherche, quite aside from its oft-mentioned, much commodified author, has provoked an unrelenting stream of articles, monographs, biographies, critical studies, appraisals, reappraisals, ‘readings’, critiques, and what one might loosely term ‘spin-offs’ since its first publication in Paris between 1913 and 1927. The Proust industry, in its commercial and academic guises, is big business. 1 1 Of the many introductions to A la recherche and its author that exist, Derwent May’s Proust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) remains a reliable starting point. For a more recent addition to the corpus, see Ingrid Wassenaar’s Marcel Proust: A Beginner’s Guide (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2000). Recent filmic adaptations include Raul Ruiz’s Le Temps retrouvé (1999) and Chantal Akerman’s La Captive (2000). To date four volumes of the ‘bande dessinée’ Proust have appeared, ‘Combray’, adapted and illustrated by Stéphane Heuet, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 2 vols., and Un amour de Swann adapted by Stanislas Brézet and Stéphane Heuet, illustrated by Stéphane Heuet (Luçon: Delcourt, 1998–2006). Proust’s life and times are well documented. In French, André Maurois’s A la recherche de Marcel Proust (Paris: Hachette, 1949) was widely read but has now been superseded by Jean-Yves Tadié’s Marcel Proust: biographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). In English, George Painter produced the first ‘standard’ work, Marcel Proust, 2 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959–65). William C. Carter’s more recent Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) stretches to almost a thousand pages; brisker recent lives include Edmund White’s Proust (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999) and Mary Ann Caws’s handsomely
2
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
Reading Proust’s novel, to be sure, is not to everyone’s taste. Reading about Proust, however, his idiosyncratic habits, his foibles, illnesses, ticks, and perversions, for reasons of prurience seems more the taste of our age. In the times of ‘reality television’, this type of voyeuristic curiosity is widespread and enthusiastically promulgated by the media. Another reason for the life, the myth (and often the dark corners) of Proust’s existence predominating over the texts he produced is one central to those works themselves: time. Throughout the years of the novel’s publication and since, time has been a constant, indeed dominant, preoccupation of Proust criticism; it is similarly pervasive in received opinions about Proust and his novel. Reading takes time. Reading A la recherche takes a lot of time. So far so obvious. 2 This book aims to highlight quite how rewarding the time spent reading Proust’s daunting, weighty volumes can be. Reading is the subject of the book, and through concatenated textual analyses of scenes of reading in A la recherche du temps perdu it brings into relief how important Proust deemed reading to be, that process learned in childhood which, for the rest of our lives, now underpins and now undermines our being in the world. Reading reading in Proust’s novel opens our eyes to the interconnection of passages in it whose mutually illuminating qualities have hitherto gone unremarked. A la recherche is concerned throughout its duration with the communication and interpretation of messages; 3 its movements are motivated by desirous drives which are plural, often inseparably hermeneutic, epistemological, libidinal. 4 Reading is revelatory, it is invigorating, devastating, and mundane. Reading the scenes of reading in A la recherche shows us an act which by turns sharpens the senses to phenomenological experience and blunts them to it, ‘lifting’ illustrated short study Marcel Proust (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2003). Margaret Gray has admirably scrutinized the appropriation and ‘commodification’ of Proust in ‘Proust, Narrative, and Ambivalence in Contemporary Culture’, the closing section of her excellent study Postmodern Proust (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 152–76. 2 Time—‘temps perdu’, ‘temps retrouvé’, ‘temps incorporé’—has stimulated writing which is incisive and engaging: see, e.g., Georges Poulet, ‘Proust’ in Essais sur le temps humain I (Paris: Plon, 1952), 400–38 and Julia Kristeva, Le Temps sensible: Proust et l’expérience littéraire (1994) (Paris: Gallimard, 2000). 3 Gilles Deleuze was an influential and ground-breaking proponent of this view. See Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964; 4th edn., rev. 1970). 4 Joshua Landy explores the interplay of epistemological and libidinal drives in his recent Philosophy and Fiction: Self, Deception, and Jealousy in Proust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), but Malcolm Bowie’s more subtly complex Freud, Proust, Lacan: Theory as Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) remains the touchstone in this area.
Introduction
3
the reader out of this world and into that of the book. 5 It reveals an activity which is habitual, effortless, and humdrum, yet capable of communication far beyond the realm of printed words. The scenes of reading in Proust’s novel are maieutic and heuristic; they reveal the human capacity for error as much as our capacity for understanding. The centrality of reading in Proust’s novel is no real surprise, given the views expressed in ‘Journées de lecture’, the essay he originally wrote as a Preface to his translation of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies. 6 This essay emphasizes the importance of childhood reading, the highly subjective, creative nature of the act and the ceaseless, complex interaction between the reader, the text, and the environment in which reading takes place. It is possible to consider ‘Journées de lecture’ as a seed from which Proust’s novel grew, for it contains in embryonic form many of what would become memorable scenes in A la recherche: the observation of familial mores, becoming acquainted with sleeping quarters, reading inside, reading outside in the open air, being gripped by certain texts to the point of obsession, and so on. Proust identifies reading as ‘cette jouissance à la fois ardente et rassise’ (CSB, 171), anticipating Barthes’s Le Plaisir du texte by almost seventy years. 7 The recollection of days spent reading is heavily marked not by what was read, but by ‘l’image des lieux et des jours’ (CSB, 172). ‘L’acte psychologique original appelé Lecture’ as described in Proust’s essay (ibid.) is crucial to personal development yet is strongly believed (by contrast to Ruskin’s views on the matter) to be an ‘incitation’ to thought and the life of the intelligence, rather than a replacement for it. 8 Critics, discussed below, who have acknowledged Proust’s preoccupation with reading have concentrated on this essay and the statement at its core which summarizes his main contention: ‘La lecture est au seuil de la vie spirituelle; elle peut nous 5 As Emma Wilson argues in the Introduction to her stimulating study Sexuality and the Reading Encounter: Identity and Desire in Proust, Duras, Tournier and Cixous (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), ‘Proust has created a tortured phenomenology of reading which traces the intertwining of text and experience, imagination and sensation’ (3). One of the concerns of this book will be to examine this phenomenology of reading. 6 First published in La Renaissance latine in 1905 as ‘Sur la lecture’, the essay was subsequently entitled ‘Journées de lecture’ in the Pastiches et mélanges. See CSB, 160– 94. For a recent, highly insightful, examination of this essay, see Philippe Chardin, ‘Splendeur et misère de la lecture selon Marcel Proust préfacier de Ruskin’, in Proust ou le bonheur du petit personnage qui compare (Paris: Champion, 2006), 101–17. 7 See Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973). 8 Proust suggests that reading, rather than providing answers to questions, provokes desire; it has ‘[un] rôle à la fois essentiel et limité [. . . ] dans notre vie spirituelle’ (CSB, 176).
4
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
y introduire: elle ne la constitue pas’ (CSB, 178). Indeed, according to Proust, reading is a sort of friendship, superior to interpersonal relations in that: ‘L’atmosphère de cette pure amitié est le silence, plus pur que la parole. Car nous parlons pour les autres, mais nous nous taisons pour nous-mêmes’ (CSB, 187). The ‘atmosphere’ of reading, which so fascinated Proust, will be a recurring concern of the chapters that follow. Many books have been written about A la recherche, but only a handful of studies, or parts of studies, deal with reading in Proust’s novel. In the chapter on Proust in his Forme et signification, Jean Rousset includes a section titled ‘Les livres de chevet des personnages’. 9 Here Rousset concentrates on the reading matter of Proust’s characters, listing which books feature most prominently and suggesting what the influence of these texts is on their fictional readers and on the novel in which they appear. That Rousset should devote fourteen of his thirty-five pages on A la recherche to the characters’ reading matter gives an indication of the significance he attributed to the act of reading in the novel. What is surprising is that so few critics should have followed Rousset’s lead. 10 Roland Barthes was greatly influenced by Proust’s novel and his writing often bears the marks of this influence. 11 He was also greatly preoccupied by the act of reading. 12 Curiously, however, he does not in his writings bring these two of his passions/obsessions together to write about how Proust depicts reading. Rather he concentrates on the effects of reading Proust’s novel itself, or the effects of having read Proust’s novel on other, subsequent, readings. 13 9 Jean Rousset, Forme et signification: Essais sur les structures littéraires de Corneille à Claudel (Paris: José Corti, 1962), 150–64. 10 Although not in the context of Proust studies, Jacques Derrida recognized the import of Rousset’s book and took issue with it in his essay ‘Force et signification’, which sheds important philosophico-theoretical light on the acts of reading and writing; see L’Ecriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 9–51. 11 Barthes’s most explicit statement of the role played by Proust’s novel in his thinking and writing comes in Le Plaisir du texte (58–9). See also the critical essay ‘Proust et les noms’, in Le Degré zéro de l’écriture suivi de nouveaux essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 121–34. The following essays concerned with the effects of reading Proust are published in Barthes’s Œuvres complètes (hereafter O.c .), ed. by Eric Marty, 3 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1993–5): ‘Une idée de recherche’, O.c ., ii. 1218–21; «Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure », O.c ., iii. 827–36. 12 S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970) is implicitly concerned with the act of reading from start to finish. See also the following, lively, shorter works: ‘Écrire la lecture’, O.c ., ii. 961–3; ‘Pour une théorie de la lecture’, O.c ., ii. 1455–6; ‘Plaisir/écriture/lecture’, O.c ., ii. 1478–89; ‘Sur la lecture’, O.c ., iii. 377–84. 13 For Barthes at his ebullient best on reading, Proust, and reading Proust, see ‘Roland Barthes contre les idées reçues’, O.c ., iii. 70–4. For a recent parallel study of Proust and Barthes, see Johnnie Gratton, Expressivism: The Vicissitudes of a Theory in the Writing of
Introduction
5
In the year of Barthes’s death, Leslie Hill published an insightful, sensitive essay entitled ‘Proust and the Art of Reading’. 14 Hill’s tantalizingly brief study sees reading in A la recherche as a means by which Proust’s text seeks to influence the attitude of its readers, who are outside, but implicated within, its pages. ‘The story of a reading becomes the writing of a story’, writes Hill, 15 and it is A la recherche’s story of reading that the present study explores. Hill’s essay is an excellent, balanced introduction to the story, and his contribution to our awareness of reading’s import in A la recherche is substantial. Indeed he reacts against a far better known essay by Paul de Man, ‘Reading (Proust)’, which may well be one reason why reading in Proust’s novel has never properly been laid bare and anatomized. This study aims to redress the balance. 16 David Ellison’s book-length study The Reading of Proust has a distinctly de Manian flavour (de Man supervised Ellison’s thesis) and concentrates not so much on the acts of reading depicted in the novel, but on the influence of Proust’s reading (of Ruskin primarily) on A la recherche. 17 The present study diverges from Ellison’s in a number of ways, not least in methodology: Ellison’s work draws substantially on Freudian psychoanalysis and carries on de Man’s deconstructive undertaking; he seeks to construct a theoretical conception of reading combining the notion that Proust’s reading of Ruskin was a possessiontaking exercise, and the idea that the reading of metaphor is always misreading, the wilful taking of one thing for another; these ideas he maps on to the wider development of narrative practice in the Recherche. Ellison writes that ‘reading is based upon a potentially infinite series of erroneous, subjectively motivated transfers and substitutions’. 18 An assessment of the error-ridden nature of the reading process is begun below in Chapter 3 and fully developed in Chapter 4. In Ellison’s view ‘Proust’s theory and practice of reading are understandable only Proust and Barthes (Oxford: Legenda, 2000); readers interested in Barthes’s relation to Proust should read Malcolm Bowie’s elegant and characteristically acute essay ‘Barthes on Proust’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14 (2001), 513–18. 14 Leslie Hill, ‘Proust and the Art of Reading’, Comparative Criticism, 2 (1980), 167– 85. I am grateful to Professor Stephen Bann for alerting me to the existence of this essay. 15 Ibid., 183. 16 Paul de Man, ‘Reading (Proust)’, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietszche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 57–78. I shall consider de Man’s position in this essay, and Hill’s relation to it, in more detail in Ch. 1 below. 17 David Ellison, The Reading of Proust (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). 18 Ibid., 74.
6
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
in opposition to the ideas of Ruskin on the same subject’. 19 This is not a methodological path that this book will follow, but it is one that still provides interest for many critics. 20 The late seventies and early eighties were very much the heyday of reader-oriented literary studies. In 1980 two books were published that were to become standard texts in the field: The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, and Reader Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. 21 Literary theoretical writing in the Anglo-American academy was developing with and in the wake of European developments (Wolfgang Iser’s classic The Act of Reading appeared in translation in 1978 and Umberto Eco’s The Role of the Reader appeared the year after). 22 In 1983 Jonathan Culler published On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, an influential book whose opening chapter, ‘Readers and Reading’, makes clear the crucial role of the practice of reading in what we might call the deconstructive enterprise. 23 By 1984, when Robert C. Holub’s Reception Theory appeared, literary studies, for all their diversity, variety, and conflict, were largely agreed on the importance, and instability, of the act of reading. 24 The reading-oriented mindset of the early eighties did map onto the Proust criticism of the time to a certain degree, but only in small measure did a preoccupation with reading stimulate thinking about how 19 20
Ibid., p. x. See, for instance, Nathalie Aubert’s recent study Proust: la traduction du sensible (Oxford: Legenda, 2002). 21 See Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (eds.), The Reader in the Text (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); and Jane P. Tompkins (ed.), Reader-Response Criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); although appearing in print after these books, W. Daniel Wilson’s article ‘Readers in Texts’, PMLA, 96 (1981), 848– 63, was written slightly before them and gives a brief survey of the field. For a broader sweep of related material, see Bibliography. 22 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979). 23 Jonathan Culler, ‘Readers and Reading’, On Deconstruction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 31–83. 24 Robert C. Holub, Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Methuen, 1984). In France around the same time a colloquium was held in ClermontFerrand, whose proceedings are published under the title Le Lecteur et la lecture dans l’œuvre, ed. by Alain Montandon (Clermont-Ferrand: Faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines de l’Université de Clermont-Ferrand II, 1982). For a concise review of the main currents and exchanges of this period in the Anglo-Saxon academy, see Inge Wimmers’s review article ‘To read or Not to Read: Deconstruction and Reader-oriented Criticism’, Semiotica, 89 (1992), 89–101.
Introduction
7
the act is portrayed in A la recherche. 25 Antoine Compagnon is one of the few critics to consider Proust’s pioneering attention to the act. In his La Troisième république des lettres: de Flaubert à Proust, Compagnon devotes thirty pages to Proust, in which he concentrates on Proust’s depictions of reading in the Recherche, stating that ‘la lecture est un motif fondamental de la Recherche, un nœud de significations.’ 26 As this book progresses, it is hoped that this knot might be loosened and some of the reading-related threads of the novel untangled. Shortly before Compagnon’s book appeared, Walter Kasell published the first of only two studies in English that treat the role of reading in Proust’s work. 27 This brief book centres on ‘Journées de lecture’, and on the influence on A la recherche of Proust’s own reading (of SainteBeuve, Ruskin, and Nerval). Phillip Bailey’s Proust’s Self-Reader: The Pursuit of Literature as Privileged Communication is the second Englishlanguage book to date that deals with the subject. 28 Bailey has more to say about A la recherche: he challenges simplistic interpretations of the often quoted notion that ‘chaque lecteur est quand il lit le propre lecteur de soi-même’ (IV, 489), arguing that there is no good reason to accept literature as a means of ‘privileged communication’ when throughout the novel ‘successful’ communication is seen to be all but impossible. The notion of reading being successful or flawed communication is considered below in Chapter 4. Between them, then, Ellison, Roloff, Kasell, and Bailey have assessed ‘Journées de lecture’, the ‘avant-textes’, some of Proust’s influences 25 Volker Roloff published a study concerned with representations of the literary work of art and of reading in Proust’s writings: Werk und Lektüre: Zur Literarästhetik von Marcel Proust (Frankfurt: Insel, 1984). The first four chapters deal with the notion of reading in the ‘fin de siècle’ period; the representation of the work of art and reception in Proust’s early writings; the theme of reading in ‘Sur la lecture’; the conception and representation of reading in the ‘cahiers’, CSB, and the ‘avant-textes’ of the Recherche. Roloff ’s final chapter assesses the treatment of François le Champi in ‘Cahier 10’ and as it appears in the Recherche; he addresses reading as part of the literary aesthetics of the Recherche, in the context of the narrator’s comments on Balzac and Dostoevsky, and Proust’s essay on Flaubert; he deals briefly with the scenes (the Figaro article and the Goncourt pastiche) he regards as transitional passages between reading and writing; he concludes with analysis of what he sees as the flux and uncertainty of the future-oriented statements about readers of the narrator’s unwritten work in Le Temps retrouvé. The study has not been translated into English: I am grateful to Mark Elliott for his assistance in relation to this work. 26 Antoine Compagnon, ‘Proust 1: contre la lecture’, in La Troisième république des lettres: de Flaubert à Proust (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 221–52 (223). 27 Walter Kasell, Proust and the Strategy of Reading (Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V., 1980). 28 Phillip Bailey, Proust’s Self-Reader: The Pursuit of Literature as Privileged Communication (Birmingham, Ala.: Summa Publications, Inc., 1997).
8
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
(Ruskin, Nerval), and have acknowledged the prominence of reading in the ‘Combray’ section of Du côté de chez Swann. 29 Reading is undoubtedly a means or, to use Kasell’s term, a ‘strategy’ of communication, and whilst it is certainly privileged by Proust’s narrator it remains volatile and unpredictable for much of the novel. The creation, communication, and interpretation of messages form a substantial part of the Recherche and have been the subject of critical attention in several studies, notably in Emma Wilson’s perceptive account of the narrator in Sexuality and the Reading Encounter. She highlights precisely the sort of reading experience that stimulates the thinking behind the present work: We may wonder whether, in creating a hermeneut as hero whose decoding and remembering we as readers perhaps inevitably imitate, Proust demands that readers question not only the validity of our interpretive method, but also the fragility and temporality of our identities and our desire. 30
This reflexive aspect of the depiction of the act of reading in A la recherche is one which is emphasized throughout the present study. As we read about reading, we are constantly interpellated, questioned by the text, and provoked into questioning: how do we create sense? How do we choose which elements of a text to prioritize in our interpretation of it? Can we trust the narrative with which we are presented? Can we trust our own capacity to read it? Proust’s novel tells of as many (if not more) errors in interpretation as it does triumphs. As this book progresses, examining the narrator’s development as he learns to read for himself, gaining lessons in reading from others and in a variety of situations, making mistakes, getting confused, becoming distraught, and finally reaching a kind of clarity of vision as a knowledge-seeker, what will always remain in focus is the uncertainty and instability of the reading encounter. Where and when does reading begin? What sort of process is reading? Can it be described? What is the relation between the reader and the text read? Do we read, or do we ‘misread’? Can we read at all? These sorts 29 Dominique Jullien, in her Proust et ses modèles: ‘Les Mille et Une Nuits’ et les ‘Mémoires’ de Saint-Simon (Paris: José Corti, 1989) deals in exhaustive detail with the relation of these two works of art to A la recherche. Jullien argues that Proust’s familiarity with these works permitted him, despite their significant generic differences, to borrow, adapt and inlay stylistic and thematic features from both: ‘c’est la rencontre des Mille et Une Nuits et des Mémoires de Saint-Simon qui donne naissance à la Recherche du temps perdu, laquelle apparaît moins comme le résultat d’une influence que comme le produit d’un croisement’, 54. 30 Emma Wilson, Sexuality and the Reading Encounter, 63.
Introduction
9
of questions have fuelled many volumes of literary theoretical writing and will no doubt continue so to do for years to come. 31 One risk with theorizing or thinking abstractly about reading is that the writing it produces can soon become dislocated from reality, from the tangible, everyday processes of interpreting written messages, as it moves off into a realm of lability, provisionality, impossibility, and deferral. It is possible to read. You are doing it now. It can be hard work, but the rewards make the effort worth while. Another risk is that in studying reading we attempt (and the temptation is great) to sweep all interpretive activity into one big net and call it ‘reading’. Proust’s novel, however, is obsessively concerned with interpretation of every sort, and whilst a study that understood ‘reading’ in that vast sense would undoubtedly fetch up some intriguing connections and revelations, it is beyond the scope of this book. The ‘acts of reading’ I shall concern myself with are acts of textual interpretation depicted in A la recherche, save a small number of exceptions (notably Elstir’s ‘reading’ of the church façade at Balbec and Bergotte’s scrutiny of Vermeer’s View of Delft) when the scenes studied involve reading of a more figurative sort. These may at the outset seem like very strict limitations on the material available for consideration; it will become clear, however, quite how rich and engaging are the novel’s scenes of reading. 32
31 I shall draw particular attention to just a handful of works from what is a wide and varied field. These works have in common a problematizing of the reader’s relation to the phenomenal world, and of the relation of reading to writing. See Maurice Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955); Georges Perec, ‘Lire: esquisse sociophysiologique’ (1976), in Penser/classer (Paris: Hachette, 1985), 109–28; George Steiner, ‘The Uncommon Reader’ (1978), in No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1996 (London: Faber, 1996), 1–19; Andrew Bennett (ed.) Reading Reading: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Reading (Tampere: University of Tampere, 1993); Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (London: Faber, 1996); and Julian Wolfreys’s excellent Readings: Acts of Close Reading in Literary Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). 32 Although she does not concern herself with Proust’s novel, Karin Littau covers a great deal of ground in her recent, engaging study Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania (Cambridge: Polity, 2006). See, in particular, her chapter ‘The Reader in Fiction’ for an assessment of the trope of the reader in the European novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Christine Montalbetti’s Images du lecteur dans les textes romanesques, Collection ‘Parcours de lecture’ (Paris: Bertrand Lacoste, 1992), is much less sophisticated, but contains a number of sample texts of scenes of reading from European novels (Tristram Shandy, Madame Bovary, and others). See also Joëlle Gleize, Le Double miroir: le livre dans les livres de Stendhal à Proust (Paris: Hachette Supérieur, 1992), whose chapter ‘Proust: négation et assomption du livre’ (217–43) touches very briefly on several of the scenes we shall examine in the present study.
10
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
What sets Blanchot, Perec, Steiner, et al., apart is, firstly, that they are all exceptionally attentive close readers. Further, not only do they display a keen awareness of the complexity of an act we take for granted, and resist the universalizing temptation (‘all interpretation is reading’), they also share a concomitant desire to understand reading by discovering what might be ‘other’ to it, equal and opposite, complimentary or antagonistic. Like laughter, reading is a defining human capacity, setting us apart from the lower orders of the animal kingdom. That reading is a fundamental human characteristic, and a characteristic tool of freedom, is nowhere more evident than in the powerful emotional response provoked by images of book-burning. 33 Once one has learned to read, the impulse is not one which can be repressed. Reading becomes constant activity, a faculty always engaged, without choice or desire: reading, for literate people, is involuntary. 34 This for Proust, as for citizens of the media-saturated twenty-first century, poses a problem: that of information overload. Proust has often been characterized as an individual given to excess, and in many ways his novel is one of excess. What is less often acknowledged is the excessive nature of reading. Whether one prefers haiku or Hegel, the reading eye is insatiable, taking in any written matter it can, greedily absorbing whatever textual nourishment is before it. Julien Gracq wrote that ‘on ne rêve guère à partir de Proust, on s’en repaît: c’est une nourriture plus qu’un apéritif ’, and his point is an important one. 35 In culinary terms, Proust is a full banquet which is never really finished. We never quite finish reading Proust, for in the time it takes to read him through, the parts of the text we think we have picked to the bones with our 33 Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 (London: HarperCollins, 2004) imaginatively explores the affective power of the destruction of books and the persecution of readers; for a recent study of the subject, see Matthew Fishburn, Burning Books (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Many histories of reading track the development of the act and its symbolic value. See Alberto Manguel’s lively, illustrated A History of Reading (London: HarperCollins, 1996) and Steven Roger Fischer, A History of Reading (London: Reaktion Books, 2003). For a highly detailed historic account of reading in France from the start of the nineteenth century to the end of the Third Republic, see James Smith Allen, In the Public Eye: A History of Reading in Modern France, 1800–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Allen’s chapter ‘Artistic Images’ (143–76) is a particularly valuable account of pictorial representations of reading in the period; in this regard, see also Garrett Stewart’s comprehensive and stunningly illustrated work, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006). 34 As this book develops we shall explore further parallels between reading and the workings of that other key involuntary action in Proust’s work—involuntary memory. 35 Julien Gracq, En lisant en écrivant in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Bernhild Boie, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1989–95), ii. 553–768 (628).
Introduction
11
critical fingers seem, like Prometheus’s liver, to renew themselves, fill out their pages with further nuance, more delicate flavours than we had previously discerned. As Julian Wolfreys puts it: ‘what is read is only a momentary recognition. It is perhaps a fleeting response to a certain pulse or rhythm. . . . What is read is never wholly read. Something remains, something is left behind, something is missed altogether, something other is still yet to be read.’ 36 One’s task of reading is never completed, never comprehensive. A study of A la recherche which is sensitive to the act of reading must constantly be aware of this incompletion, this ‘something other . . . still to be read.’ My book will, through a series of close readings, hold scenes of reading up to scrutiny in an attempt to unravel the ‘nœud de significations’ identified by Compagnon. 37 This method aims to do justice to the riches (semantic, ideational, phonic) of Proust’s prose; to borrow Julian Wolfreys’s words: ‘with citation, we seek through the double motion of incision and excision, to open reading to itself ’. 38 With this I return to the question posed earlier: where, and when, does reading begin? Proust’s novel begins in the dark, a penumbral bedroom scene, into which the subject of reading, and the reading subject, are soon introduced: ‘je n’avais pas cessé en dormant de faire des réflexions sur ce que je venais de lire’ (I, 3). We are told that the young narrator’s great aunt reads him the story of Golo and Geneviève de Brabant to accompany the images of the magic lantern (I, 9). It is not until slightly later in ‘Combray’, however, with the ‘drame du coucher’, that we come to the narrator’s genuine initiation into the world of reading, what I shall call the Primal Scene of reading. 39 In his case history An Infantile Neurosis (1918) Freud proposes the notion of the ‘Urszene’, or Primal Scene, in which (in phantasy or in reality) an infant witnesses his parents having sex. The Primal Scene is dramatic and traumatic, charged with shock and recoil at the unknown. It marks, inter alia, the awakening of independent intellectual enquiry, and figures as a troubling mark in 36 37 38 39
Wolfreys, Readings: Acts of Close Reading, p. vii. Compagnon, ‘Proust.’, 1 p. 223. Wolfreys, Readings: Acts of Close Reading, p. ix. Volker Roloff, in his essay ‘Desire, Imaginary, and Love: Erotic Readings of the Recherche’, trans. by Jane Kuntz, has also made the connection between desire and reading in Proust and the Freudian Primal Scene: ‘It is obvious that Proust’s analysis of desire assigns a special place to figures of reading, or more precisely, to a series of paradigmatic readings that we might call “initiatory scenes” (“Urszenen”)’. See Armine Kotin Mortimer and Katherine Kolb (eds.), Proust in Perspective: Visions and Revisions, (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 157–71 (158).
12
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
the unconscious until such time as it can be fully assessed and comprehended by the subject. In conclusion to the case history, based upon treatment that took place between 1910 and 1914, Freud remarks: ‘It is hard to dismiss the view that some sort of hardly definable knowledge, something, as it were, preparatory to an understanding, was at work in the child at the time.’ 40 The formative, traumatic scene bears the trace of an inchoate epistemology, the beginnings of an understanding of something greater than the actual event itself. Approaching the inaugural act of reading described in ‘Combray’ (I, 38–43) and treating it as a Primal Scene, or literary avatar of such a scene, provides us with a profitable critical distance from which to broach and begin to analyse the workings of the Proustian imagination. The Freudian Primal Scene provides an incomplete and problematic introduction to the sexual act, and stimulates the child’s mind into self-interrogation and analysis of what he has ‘seen’. In the Primal Scenes of reading examined in Chapter 1, Proust’s narrator experiences psycho-sexual and intellectual awakenings of a similar sort. In the initial scene of reading stemming from the ‘drame du coucher’ the novel’s oedipal currents fully emerge. 41 On one level is the son’s usurping of the father, but at a deeper level the Primal Scene describes the narrator witnessing not the coitus of his parents, but his adored mother’s problematic, lacunary reading-cum-performance of 40 Sigmund Freud, An Infantile Neurosis, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1953–74), xvii. 120. Hereafter SE. A vast amount has been written about this case history and its central figure, known as the ‘Wolfman’. The best assessment of the ideas Freud develops in the case history is Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis’s essay ‘Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origines, origine du fantasme’, in Les Temps modernes, 215 (1964), 1833–68. 41 The oedipal current is already present in the story of Golo read to him earlier by his great-aunt; as Jean-Francis Reille summarizes:, ‘Les crimes de Golo sont donc: d’avoir désiré la femme de son prochain; repoussé, d’avoir haï l’objet de son désir au point de souhaiter sa mort’ (Proust: le temps du désir. Une lecture textuelle (Paris: Les Editeurs français réunis, 1979), 46). Reille argues that the narrator’s sense of guilt in the pages concerning his night-time routine in Combray derives from the fact of his sharing Golo’s position in relation to his parents. Ultimately the reading scene, with its gaps, ambiguities, and imperfectly grasped knowledge, is optimal, according to Reille, for the production of desire. See ‘Le baiser du soir’, 35–68. Serge Doubrovsky also attends to the import of the oedipal theme in this scene in La Place de la madeleine: écriture et fantasme chez Proust (Paris: Mercure de France, 1974): ‘Il est évident que, dans la structure de l’œdipe, la satisfaction de la «lecture», qu’on lui accorde, fonctionne, pour l’enfant, comme substitut de la gratification sexuelle, qu’on lui refuse—et qu’il se refusera plus tard, dans la vie adulte, valorisant toujours, dans les rapports sexuels, les satisfactions imaginaires’ (59).
Introduction
13
François le champi, a novel which he, in turn, will read himself. 42 As his mother reads to him from Sand’s oedipal love story, the narrator’s experience is one of instability, excitement, and uncertainty. Reading from this point on is charged with a powerful destabilizing force, which makes it a privileged and beguiling aspect of the narrative of Proust’s novel. After consideration of the Primal Scenes, the focus of my analyses moves on in Chapter 2 to the narrator’s learning to read for himself. Chapter 2 examines scenes in which the narrator reads on his own: what emerges is a complex phenomenology of reading, communicated through elaborately cadenced language, rhyme, sound echoes, unacknowledged cross-references, and mirrorings. In interpreting these highly nuanced accounts of reading, light is shed on the act we are carrying out as well as on the developing intellect and discernment of the narrator. It would be tempting to think of the narrator’s learning to read as a Bildung, a progressive development in which wisdom and know-how are gradually accumulated and refined. Whilst there is (retrospectively evident) design and pattern to Proust’s narrative, his narrator’s heuristic reading encounters, now euphoric, now traumatic, are borne of contingency. Chapter 2 highlights how reading is shown to bring about a state of mind and body which permits—indeed increases—acute analytical thinking and sensory receptiveness to the phenomenal world around the reader. The riches of the act of reading contrast strikingly with the experiential paucity of ‘mondain’ activity yet, paradoxically perhaps, it is in societal situations that the narrator will receive some vital ‘Lessons in Reading’, the subject of Chapter 3. Swann, Elstir, Norpois, and Mlle Vinteuil’s friend all provide case studies in reading under different circumstances and with different expectations. Reading is but one of the interpretive models in the novel (one thinks equally of listening to music, considering works of visual art or architecture) and it is revealed to be subject to the transfiguring force of desire. Indeed, reading is a manifestation of the desire for knowledge that characterizes so many of the individuals we meet in the pages of A la recherche. However diverse they may be, and whether or not they wish 42 A great many critical interpretations of this scene exist. See Margaret Gray, ‘Skipping Love Scenes: Marcel’s Repression of Literature’, in Postmodern Proust, 138–51; Béatrice Didier has suggested that ‘François le Champi se trouve-t-il associé au souvenir de la jouissance et de la faute, à cet inceste imaginaire que symbolise pour le narrateur cette nuit’, ‘François le Champi et les délices de l’inceste’, in L’Ecriture-femme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981), 139–52 (140).
14
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
to admit it, readers who choose to take up Proust’s time-consuming, self-obsessed brute of a novel have something in common with its knowledge-seekers, its hermeneutists, its jealous lovers. In closely following the narrator’s lessons in reading, we gain a sense of fellow feeling, feel better about our errors and our ignorance. In such a gallingly long novel, whose apparently endless reserves of energy constantly dwarf our best, concerted efforts of readerly stamina, it is comforting to be in the presence of a protagonist and characters who seem now and then to be as fallible and fragile as we so often feel while we read A la recherche. 43 One of the greatest reading-related challenges in the novel is presented by a ‘volume du journal inédit des Goncourt’ lent to the narrator by Gilberte (IV, 287). Proust’s prose in this section of A la recherche is a self-referential network of allusions and echoes. The passage ‘quoted’ from the journal is, of course, a highly accomplished pastiche by Proust. As readers, we must somehow balance the dizzying levels of fictionality with the commentary from the narrator, who states that his reaction to the text is that of feeling certain of his own sheer artistic incapacity. We are interpellated by a questioning text never confident in its expressive capacity, yet which pushes thought and its expression in language to their limits. Chapter 3 identifies an aporia reached in the narrator’s thinking: reading the Goncourt brand of ‘littérature de notation’ brings into question two apparently distinct entities: ‘la vie’ and ‘la lecture’. Reading is undeniably part of life, yet is somehow different from it; life experience is more ‘real’, more vivid than that about which we read, yet the experience of reading can render the experience of life more acute, more ‘real’. 44 The narrator suggests that someone with the sensibility of a Goncourt has greater access to the world than has the average individual: ‘Goncourt savait écouter, comme il savait voir; je ne le savais pas’ (IV, 299). This sensibility is patent in Goncourt’s writing, but the narrator feels that when he was part of the Verdurin circle he was never the slightest bit aware of the details Goncourt picked up on in his written version. The narrator is uncertain whether he will ever have what it takes to see the ‘truth’ in things that Goncourt seems to communicate, and once again reflexively his doubts spread to Proust’s 43 On the presence of a fictional interpreter in texts, see Naomi Schor’s essay ‘Fiction as Interpretation/Interpretation as Fiction’, in Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (eds.), The Reader in the Text, 165–82. 44 As Ann Jefferson has recently put it in relation to these issues:, ‘a life is lived, at one level or another, in books as well as in the world’; see ‘Proust and the Lives of the Artists’, in Biography and the Question of Literature in France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 233–48 (241).
Introduction
15
readers: we must reassess the vocabulary we use to talk about art and its interpretation, humbly question our own suitedness to the interpretive task posed by the ‘truths’ of A la recherche. Chapter 4 begins this project of reassessment by taking a fresh look at ‘misreading’, a widely used and little-questioned critical term which misrepresents the act of reading and oversimplifies the processes that occur when our eyes follow the marks of a written text over a page. I explore the notion of ‘le délire’, or readerly delirium, the powerful, vertiginous effects of so many of the reading encounters in the novel. So complex are its effects that any reading, however ‘wrong-headed’, has its measure of profit. In Proust mistakes tend to be as instructive and beneficial as things done ‘correctly’. The main focus of Chapter 4 is Albertine disparue, whose psychologically fraught pages have been comparatively neglected by critics of A la recherche, and in which the opposition of ‘la vie’ and ‘la lecture’ is seen to be tortuously complex, if not false. The scenes of reading letters and telegrams that stand out from the pages of relentless hypothesis-building and self-scrutiny in Albertine disparue are treated as knots to be untied in an attempt to enter a little further into the narrator’s frantically active mind. The ‘séjour à Venise’ culminates in the revelation of Gilberte’s marriage in a letter which explains a telegram received earlier, apparently from Albertine beyond the grave. Reading is shown repeatedly to be unreliable and uncertain, yet read we must. As the only means we have of interpreting Proust’s novel are debunked (‘on devine en lisant, on crée; tout part d’une erreur initiale’, IV, 295), again the text has more in reserve, somehow recuperating some of its signifying potential acoustically, addressing itself, through our eyes, to our readerly ear: ‘une bonne partie de ce que nous croyons . . . vient d’une première méprise sur les prémisses’ (IV, 235). Our faith in understanding is comprehensively shaken, yet the prose which does so nevertheless suggests something more, a sensory return at least for our intellect-driven investments. The memories provoked by reading a ‘carte d’invitation’ are what send the ailing narrator back into society one last time. Chapter 5 assesses the extended period of reflection that takes place, suitably enough, in the Prince de Guermantes’s library as the narrator prepares for his final sally. The various strands of this study of reading come together in the final chapter: lessons have been learned; mistakes have been made; judgements are considered and adjusted. Buoyed by a succession of experiences of involuntary memory, the narrator recognizes the vocation that is his and the enormity of the task that lies ahead.
16
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
Readers at this point may take stock, searching back in our memories, realizing that perhaps we too have unwittingly (or otherwise) discovered aspects of our selves, our psyches, during and as a result of our endeavours in reading. The narrator’s drive is now towards the task of writing, a task that requires of him the renunciation of society life as well as the renunciation of conventional book-based reading. This idea of renunciation, in conjunction with the trope of translation which recurs repeatedly in these densely packed pages, is explored within the context of the narrator’s wide-ranging, at times self-contradictory soliloquy in the library. Translation is considered not just as the ‘mode’ of A la recherche, but as a model of all acts of language, all acts of reading. Time, identified earlier as a central pillar of Proust’s architecture, and of any reader’s interaction with his work, again installs itself as the dominant concern of the closing movement of the novel. The name it travels under now is that of death and the narrator’s awareness of death and human finitude are examined in the Epilogue. The positively exuberant tone of much of the narrator’s thinking in the library is in contrast with the almost chthonic atmosphere of the ‘matinée Guermantes’. Entering into the society scene, the narrator and his readers are struck and struck again by shattering intimations of mortality. Reading has permitted and satisfied much of the novel’s knowledge-seeking drive. To end here, however, with the narrator ready to write would be to acknowledge only one part-conclusion among many in Le Temps retrouvé. Bookish reading is ‘renounced’: before the narrator can write his novel, he must apply the lessons he has learned one last time and decipher, before it is too late, the wretched faces of his old acquaintances at the final Guermantes’s matinee. The novel’s closing scene has been read as straightforwardly redemptive; in re-examining it, however, in the light of this study’s arguments, the Epilogue shows how it is written with a thoroughgoing sense of humility, an awareness of human limitations coupled with an honest dose of horror at the ravages of ageing, the unavoidable and threatening proximity of death.
1 Primal Scenes of Reading Some sort of hardly definable knowledge, something, as it were, preparatory to an understanding, was at work in the child at the time. Freud 1
The narrator’s Primal Scene of reading (I, 37–43) takes place in ‘Combray’, on the night that his father curiously insists to his mother that she should sleep in his room (I, 36). 2 In this scene, as in Freud’s case history, an infant in bed is witness to a dramatic event whose effects are unpredictable and long-lasting. In ‘Combray’ what is witnessed is not an act of coitus (the father is absent from this Primal Scene), but an act of reading, the ambiguous, suggestive, transgressive performance of a literary text by the narrator’s mother. 3 Before his departure, the father is likened to Abraham, the biblical patriarch, ‘disant à Sarah qu’elle a à se départir du côté d’Isaac’ (I, 36), but this portrayal is equivocal. 4 The repercussions of the scene are undoubtedly wide-ranging. Most 1 2
Freud, An Infantile Neurosis, SE, xvii. 120. Candace Lang studies the precursors of this scene that exist in Les Plaisirs et les jours, Jean Santeuil, and elsewhere, and on the scene in A la recherche itself, focusing on the role played by François le champi in the narrator’s artistic development in Irony/Humor: Critical Paradigms (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988): see Ch. 5: ‘Proust: Forgetting Things Past’, 132–66. 3 The mother’s reading aloud in this sexually suggestive scene establishes an early, implicit link to the Mille et Une Nuits, a book which is repeatedly referred to within the narrative fabric (see especially III, 230). The notion that she ‘performs’ her own version of the text links her to Mlle Vinteuil’s friend’s interpretive transcription of the septet: for a development of this parallel, see Ch.3 below. 4 As the Pléiade editors note, ‘l’emploi archaïsant du verbe « se départir » . . . favorise une ambiguïté lexicale significative’ (I, 1114): it denotes separation, yet the father’s order is that the mother remain with her son. Freud, for his part, also alludes to Abraham when noting ‘the ambivalent feelings towards the father which are an underlying factor in all religions’ (SE, xvii. 65–6).
18
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
straightforwardly, he judges the Primal Scene retrospectively to be the moment ‘d’où je pouvais faire dater le déclin de ma santé et de mon vouloir, mon renoncement chaque jour aggravé à une tâche difficile’ (IV, 465). The Primal Scene represents a double inauguration: the start of the narrator’s inquiring intellectual life, and the beginning, as it were, of the end. The narrator’s wish for his mother’s presence is fulfilled, yet he foresees that this event will mark ‘une triste date’ (I, 38); he is more distraught than before, since although youthfulness still shone from his mother’s face, he believes nevertheless that ‘je venais d’une main impie et secrète de tracer dans son âme une première ride et d’y faire apparaître un premier cheveu blanc’ (I, 38). This is an early image of inscription, of marking (‘tracer’, ‘faire apparaître’), in a novel which will become implicitly concerned throughout its duration with the act of writing and, of course, its counterpart: reading. The narrator’s guilt redoubles his sadness and, to combat this, his mother is forced into what one might term a moment of hamartia, which will mark the narrator for the rest of his life. ‘Puisque tu n’as pas sommeil ni ta Maman non plus, ne restons pas à nous énerver’, she suggests, ‘faisons quelque chose, prenons un de tes livres’ (I, 38). Reading is an activity chosen to alleviate emotional strain, to pass the time, perhaps even to provoke sleep. The suggestion of reading brings with it a moment of maturation for the young narrator: since he has no books to hand, if he wishes to read he must open the parcel of books bought for his ‘fête’ by his grandmother, thus forgoing that pleasure when the actual day comes. 5 He remarks of the parcel of books: ‘je ne pus deviner, à travers le papier qui les enveloppait, que la taille courte et large, mais qui, sous ce premier aspect, pourtant sommaire et voilé, éclipsaient déjà la boîte à couleurs du Jour de l’An et les vers de soie de l’an dernier’ (I, 39). Colour and the visual are an integral part of the experience of reading in A la recherche: the comment that the books, even unread, ‘éclipsaient déjà la boîte à couleurs’ is not without significance. As the novel progresses, the narrator’s experiences and memories of reading to an extent become his 5 In her excellent and wide-ranging study The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Kate Flint quotes from an article of 1883 aimed at a young female readership, which is germane to our considerations here: ‘A well selected book, given by some near one, may prove a turning point in life. It may say to them what we cannot say, may advise where we cannot, and the voice will be as our own’ (85). The Primal Scene is indeed a ‘turning point’, but not for the reasons hoped for in the Girl’s Own Paper. On the ambiguities of the Sand text, and the import given to the mother’s voice, see below.
Primal Scenes of Reading
19
figural paint box, raw materials with which his imagination can create artistic representations of its own. 6 The four books chosen by the grandmother are pastoral novels by George Sand: La Mare au diable, François le Champi, La Petite Fadette, and Les Maîtres sonneurs. Immediately the books are named, the narrator provides an alternative list of the books he was almost given: ‘ma grand’mère, ai-je su depuis, avait d’abord choisi les poésies de Musset, un volume de Rousseau et Indiana’ (I, 39). The insistence on the original choices which are rejected by the father is evidence of the influential role attributed to reading by the narrator’s family. The description of the grandmother’s attitude towards reading relates to notions of health and well-being, and is tinged with irony in a novel whose narrator, from this scene onward, is marked by ill health: ‘si elle jugeait les lectures futiles aussi malsaines que les bonbons et les pâtisseries, elle ne pensait pas que les grands souffles du génie eussent sur l’esprit même d’un enfant une influence plus dangereuse et moins vivifiante que sur son corps le grand air et le vent du large’ (I, 39). For the grandmother bad reading is harmful in the way that pastries and confectionery can be: it might seem appealing but can do more harm than good. By contrast, the effects of inspired writing, powerful as they may be (note the parallel between ‘les grands souffles du génie’ and ‘le grand air’), cannot be any more harmful than the wind-buffeted glow felt after a bracing walk. Wasteful reading being analogous with eating unhealthy foods sounds a contrastive note to the later image of daily newspapers being ‘pain spirituel’ (IV, 148), which is examined below in Chapter 2. The passage relating the grandmother’s selection of reading matter closely follows Swann’s disapproving comments about newspapers, ‘les assommants journaux que nous nous croyons obligés de lire matin et soir’ (I, 25). He continues: ‘Ce que je reproche aux journaux c’est de nous faire faire attention tous les jours à des choses insignifiantes tandis que nous lisons trois ou quatre fois dans notre vie les livres où il y a des choses essentielles’ (I, 25–6). Swann goes on to suggest that a more profitable use of newspaper column inches would be to scrap the ‘news’ element and print Pascal’s Pensées instead. His comments stem from a re-reading of Saint-Simon and suggest that literature is capable of conveying ‘des choses essentielles’; it is a powerful medium to which 6 Colour, moreover, is central to the narrator’s rediscovery of François le Champi in Le Temps retrouvé. For an incisive analysis of this scene, with considerable attention paid to the role of colour and desire, see Geneviève Henrot, ‘Marcel Proust et le signe « Champi » ’, in Poétique, 78 (1989), 131–50.
20
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
the narrator is yet fully to be introduced. Swann implies the existence of crucial, canonical texts, which counter the banal and can contribute to a life fully lived. 7 Saint-Simon, one may assume, is an author of such works, and Pascal equally must be a candidate for this exclusive ‘palmarès’, given that his Pensées are suggested as a palliative to the usual offerings of the newspaper presses. The books we read, then, may be formative, significant, ‘essential’. The question of which books his grandmother deems suitable is used as a means for the narrator to digress on her idiosyncratic conceptions of art and aesthetics, her liberal views on education, and her literary tastes, as well as to highlight the censorial power of the father at work. Rousseau, Musset, and Sand’s Indiana are deemed unsuitable for a reader of the narrator’s age. 8 This ‘non du père’ excises a blend of Enlightenment thought and Romantic meditation from the narrator’s early curriculum, and jettisons an early novel by George Sand, the author whose work eventually gains approval. 9 The grandmother chooses Sand because the thought of letting her grandson read ‘quelque chose de mal écrit’ is anathema to her. The scene of reading is deferred and an array of artists and media is alluded to during an explicatory excursus on the grandmother’s notions of « épaisseurs » d’art’ (I, 40). Even if she is to give a piece of furniture as a gift, the old or antique will always be chosen over the recently produced: ‘même ce qui dans ces meubles répondait à un besoin, comme c’était d’une façon à laquelle nous ne sommes plus habitués, la charmait comme les vieilles manières de dire où nous voyons une métaphore, effacée, dans notre 7 Swann’s view is echoed by Richard Rorty in an essay entitled ‘The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature’. See Achieving our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-century America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998), 125–40. 8 The grandmother’s choice of texts provides material enough for a study in itself. The father’s rejection of Indiana, for example, is unsurprising given the radical ideas there presented regarding gender roles, marriage, and the family, not to mention suicide, violence, and adultery. François le Champi, however, has its own share of material which might be deemed unsuitable for a young reader, most famously the central oedipal love story. That Indiana, along with Musset and Rousseau, is the grandmother’s first choice underlines her forward-thinking desire to have her grandson roundly and liberally educated. 9 The censorial power of the father here recalls that of Indiana’s husband, Colonel Delmare. When he strikes her after she has absconded to see Raymon, she asserts herself as follows: ‘Vous pouvez m’imposer silence, mais non m’empêcher de penser’, Indiana (Paris: Roret & Dupuy, 1832; Gallimard, 1984), 232. Indiana’s voice of revolt is still heard a century later in Virginia Woolf ’s foundational text about writing and reading as a woman, A Room of One’s Own (London: The Hogarth Press, 1929; Penguin, 1993): ‘Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind’, 69.
Primal Scenes of Reading
21
moderne langage, par l’usure de l’habitude’ (I, 40). This analogy in fact underpins her choice of reading matter: ‘Or, justement, les romans champêtres de George Sand qu’elle me donnait pour ma fête, étaient pleins ainsi qu’un mobilier ancien, d’expressions tombées en désuétude et redevenues imagées, comme on n’en trouve plus qu’à la campagne’ (I, 40–1). 10 As the paragraph comes to a close, the narrator expresses what the grandmother considers to be the goal of art. She buys him George Sand novels because they share with old things the ability to ‘exerce[r] sur l’esprit une heureuse influence en lui donnant la nostalgie d’impossibles voyages dans le temps’ (I, 41). It is tempting to see in this image the essential goals of A la recherche in summary form. Retrospectively, one can recognize that Proust’s novel asserts the possibility through art of such journeys through time and affirms the positive, heuristic role of literature. The image recalls the sentiments of the opening stanza of Baudelaire’s ‘Le Voyage’, which prefigure those of the young narrator, particularly as he is revealed to be in the episode with the ‘madeleine’ which immediately follows this scene of reading: Pour l’enfant, amoureux de cartes et d’estampes, L’univers est égal à son vaste appétit. Ah! que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes! Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit! 11 To the eyes of memory, the world indeed is small (‘tout Combray et ses environs, tout cela . . . , est sorti de ma tasse de thé’, I, 47) and with the narrator’s return to the scene of reading another ‘world’ is encountered, the mysterious and alluring world of Sand’s fiction. 12 10 The association here of past habits and memory with ‘un mobilier ancien’ recalls Baudelaire’s analogy in the second of the ‘Spleen’ poems, in which the mind is compared to ‘un gros meuble à tiroirs encombré de bilans/De vers, de billets doux, de procès, de romances’, Œuvres completes, ed. Claude Pichois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), i., 73, hereafter O.c .. Proust’s novel, in many ways, can be seen as such a ‘meuble’. On the traces of Baudelaire in Proust’s writing, see Antoine Compagnon, Proust entre deux siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1989), particularly ch. 7. 11 Baudelaire, O.c ., i., 129. 12 Besides the readings of Doubrovksy, Reille, Didier, and Henrot already cited, for a psychoanalytic interpretation of Sand’s text and its functioning in Proust’s novel, see also Julia Kristeva, Le Temps sensible, 20–36. ‘La lecture de Sand’, Kristeva remarks most pertinently, ‘devient un lien privilégié entre le fils et sa mère’ (20). Later in the Recherche, the reading of Mme de Sévigné will become a privileged bond between the narrator’s mother and grandmother, particularly after the death of the latter. Reading in this case is seen to be a defining characteristic of the individual; in immersing herself in her mother’s books, the narrator’s mother appears to seek to recuperate her material loss through
22
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
The title and the ‘couverture rougeâtre’ of François le Champi inaugurate a vocabulary of uncertainty and intrigue. 13 The young narrator does not understand the title, which, being a proper noun coupled with an (as yet unknown) epithet, lends to the book a human character or personality. As he will experience with the duchesse de Guermantes, Gilberte, Albertine, and indeed Balbec, an unknown name has for him ‘un attrait mystérieux’ (I, 41). ‘Je n’avais jamais lu encore de vrais romans’, we are told in an unusually short sentence indicating the young narrator’s candidness before the written text. He relies on hearsay (‘J’avais entendu que George Sand était le type du romancier’) and, crucially, on his imagination: ‘Cela me disposait déjà à imaginer dans François le Champi quelque chose d’indéfinissable et de délicieux’. As the narrator’s mother reads to him from the novel, he is aware that what he is experiencing will change him irrevocably, yet he cannot fully comprehend its significance; since he is not yet sexually mature, he transfers the erotic intrigue and ambiguity with which the situation (and the text being read) are imbued onto the act of reading. The narrator’s instinctive awareness of the transgressive nature of what is going on leads to a comprehension of the scene which is partial, yet underpinned by ‘some sort of hardly definable knowledge’. 14 Taking on A la recherche we are unlikely to be cutting our teeth as readers. One assumes readers of Proust’s novel to have a certain literary culture or reading experience. That said, and as Adorno suggests, no bulk of intellectual muscle is realistically a match for Proust’s sui generis monster. 15 Nevertheless, at this early stage in the book and on the narrator’s path towards being a writer, readers may be tempted into a rare moment of feeling as if they have one up on he who until then ‘n’avai[t] jamais lu encore de vrais romans’, and who considered a new book ‘non comme une chose ayant beaucoup de semblables, mais comme une personne unique, n’ayant de raison d’exister qu’en soi’ reading. For an analysis of the narrator’s strategies for dealing with the loss of Albertine, and the problematic role of reading in them, see Chapters 4 and 5 below. 13 François le Champi (first published serially 31 December 1847–14 March 1848; Paris: Gallimard, 1976) is the tale of the eponymous foundling (‘champi’) brought up by a miller’s wife, whom, after the miller’s death and a long absence, he eventually marries. For details of the genesis of the novel’s role in A la recherche, see the Pléiade notes (I, 1118). 14 Freud, SE, xvii. 120. 15 In Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. by E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), Adorno remarks that ‘it is Proust’s courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author’ (49).
Primal Scenes of Reading
23
(I, 41). We witness the narrator naively experiencing narrative strategies for the first time, as if they and the novel in which they appear were like no other. They strike him, the uninitiated reader, as ‘une émanation troublante de l’essence particulière à François le Champi’ (I, 41). His choice of words: ‘incompréhensible’, ‘mystérieux’, ‘indéfinissable’, ‘délicieux’, ‘curiosité’, ‘troublante’, ‘étrange’, ‘obscure’, ‘bizarres’, ‘inconnu’ emphasizes the turmoil of emotions experienced in the Primal Scene, this highly problematic moment of apparent union between the mother and the text, and, transgressively, between mother and son. The language used underlines the relational instability of the triangle formed by reader, listener, and text; the first, Primal Scene of reading sets up the activity as one implicitly connected with uncertainty, provisionality, guilt, and potential revelation. 16 The narrator is new to a game his readers must have been playing for some time, and his experience is summarized as a perceptual uneasiness somehow suggestive of a latent or inchoate understanding: ‘sous . . . ces mots si courants, je sentais comme une intonation, une accentuation étrange’; with this, the narrator shifts the emphasis of his account of the Primal Scene to the aural aspect of this ‘reading’. In his description of the act of reading, he uses the sort of vocabulary cited above: the action of the book is obscure to him, but the tones of his mother’s voice are what hold his attention. Does he read or is he in fact read to? In the Primal Scene he is read to, but some of his comments must pertain to subsequent occasions of independent reading: ‘Quand je lisais, je rêvassais souvent, pendant des pages entières, à tout autre chose’ (I, 41). 17 As a reader, then, the narrator’s beginnings are inauspicious: this is an encounter with an incomprehensibly titled book which is read to him, whose actions are mysterious, and whose grip on him when he reads it for himself is not sufficient to stop him from drifting off into quite unrelated daydreams. Moreover, he comments that in addition to his own lapses of attention that create lacunas in the text, when his mother reads aloud she skips the ‘scènes d’amour’, in 16 Dominique Jullien’s chapter, ‘Filiations’, although not in relation to this scene, refers to the Girardian model of desire as always triangular, a notion we see in action in the present scene: see Proust et ses modèles, 57–98 (63). 17 The notion that a plurality of experience may lie at the root of the Primal Scene is acknowledged by Ned Lukacher: ‘What the primal scene establishes is that at the origin one discovers not a single event that transpires in one temporal sequence but a constellation of events that transpire in several discrete temporal sequences’, Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), 36.
24
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
a second act of parental censorship which renders Sand’s narrative still less complete, still more obscure to the narrator’s young mind. 18 A basic knowledge of the essentially oedipal plot of François le Champi gives one an understanding of the aptness of Sand’s novel as the formative tale within the tale, the subversive text which replaces the father figure in the Primal Scene yet comes with his blessing. Readers cannot be presumed to have a knowledge of Sand’s novel, but being in a position of ignorance with respect to the finer details of François le Champi does not necessarily put one at a disadvantage. The uninformed reader is on a similar footing to the young narrator approaching the curious novel for the first time, who assumes that the blossoming of an unorthodox sort of love between the eponymous hero and his adoptive mother must have something to do with the name the narrator does not understand (‘ce nom inconnu et si doux de « Champi » ’). The text is never quoted, nor fully explicated, nor, one might argue, fully understood; what results from this first highly ambivalent reading experience is an impression of what went on between the covers of the book, an impression coloured by and related to the incompletely understood, transgressive relation that develops between the narrator and his mother during the act of reading itself. 19 François is a character imbued with mystery, who gives his name (and its mystery) to the book. Reciprocally the physical book somehow becomes a concrete referent for the mysterious, enigmatic figure who emerges from the narrator’s lacunary reading/listening. The name is said to be of ‘[une] couleur vive, empourprée et charmante’, reminiscent of the book’s ‘couverture rougeâtre’. It is a combination of these sensory-intellectual factors which stimulate latent memories in the narrator in the Guermantes’s library at the novel’s close. There the colour 18 Margaret Gray, in her chapter ‘Skipping Love Scenes: Marcel’s Repression of Literature’, reads this scene as the beginnings of ‘the narrator’s refusal of literature’ (139), continuing ‘Marcel’s introduction to literature will thus be important not for what it tells the child about literature, but for what it doesn’t—what it withholds, producing the impression of strangeness and mystery that seems to excite the curiosity, desire, and fascination he will thereafter associate with literature’ (141). 19 Not only is the narrator’s uncertainty about what is happening in Sand’s novel similar to the child’s flawed understanding of his father’s actions in Freud’s case history; the Primal Scene for the narrator takes place ‘au moment où je venais de commettre une faute telle que je m’attendais à être obligé de quitter la maison’, which, of course, is the fate that befalls François in Sand’s novel. Phillip Bailey assesses this scene as a foundation of guilt in the narrator: ‘otherwise inclined to inspire Marcel to write, the act of reading here associates literature with a guilt that, when coupled with reading’s inherent potential to mislead, will erode his literary confidence’ (Bailey, Proust’s Self-Reader, 42–3).
Primal Scenes of Reading
25
becomes representative of the book and this first transgressive reading experience. 20 The second half of this long paragraph deals with how the narrator’s mother reads aloud. She is, because of her omissions, ‘une lectrice infidèle’, but this is balanced in a way by her interpretive powers, her intonation, the sound of her voice. 21 Sense experience, that of sound above all, is privileged throughout the novel’s subsequent descriptions and analyses of acts of reading. The mother’s sensitivity is evident in the beauty of her voice (I, 42); she seems to be in concert with the rhythms of the Sand text. The narrator’s chosen imagery is an interlace of respiration and interpretation: his mother’s reading mind is somehow able precisely to gauge the delivery and intonation each word requires: ‘Elle retrouvait pour les attaquer dans le ton qu’il faut, l’accent cordial qui leur préexiste et les dicta, mais que les mots n’indiquent pas’ (I, 42). It is as if the punctuation marks were musical notes that his mother alone was capable of picking up on, in accompaniment or counterpoint to the words. 22 This scene is one of instability, sexual awakening, and oedipal desire, yet Sand’s prose, ironically, is said to ‘respir[er] toujours cette bonté, cette distinction morale que maman avait appris de ma grand-mère à tenir pour supérieures à tout dans la vie’ (I, 42). The narrator’s mother is portrayed as a sort of divine afflatus (‘elle insufflait à cette prose si commune une sorte de vie sentimentale et continue’,
20 Ch. 5 considers the rediscovery of François le Champi in Le Temps Retrouvé, an experience which complements the present Primal Scene and contributes in a decisive manner to the narrator’s process of self-recognition as an artist. For a genetic analysis of the scenes involving François le Champi, see Volker Roloff, ‘« François le Champi » et le texte retrouvé’, trans. by Marc Muylaert, Etudes proustiennes, 3 (1979), 259–87. The recognition scene involving the book provokes sensations and reactions described using the same vocabulary used here. For a study of the treatment and philosophical role of concrete objects in the novel see Thomas Baldwin, The Material Object in the Work of Marcel Proust (Oxford, Bern: Peter Lang, 2005). 21 One might note also a secondary aspect to the mother’s infidelity: in conceding to her son’s (albeit paternally sanctioned) demands she is figuratively unfaithful to her husband within the oedipal framework of this scene. 22 cf. Raymond Jean’s novel La Lectrice (Paris: Actes Sud, 1986), adapted for the cinema by Michel Deville in 1988, in which the eponymous protagonist reads aloud to paying male customers, generally with erotic consequences. For a lively ‘reading’ of the film, see Paul Sutton’s ‘Reading La Lectrice’, Michael Syrotinski and Ian Maclachlan (eds.), in Sensual Reading: New Approaches to Reading in its Relations to the Senses (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 153–65. An erotic relation that develops into a sexual one between a young male character who reads aloud to an older woman is a central concern of Bernhard Schlink’s gripping novel The Reader, trans. by Carol Brown Janeway (London: Phoenix, 1997).
26
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
I, 42). 23 Indeed, this concluding phrase itself has life breathed into it through subtle echoes of |s| and |t|, and chiastic sound patterning and inversions around ‘prose si commune une sorte de vie sentimentale et continue’. Rather than details of narrative or plotting, it is desirous drives in the narrator, aspects of the novel’s physical appearance, and its delivery that create the mystique around Sand’s novel. His imagination, not his knowledge or analysis of it, is what creates the novel’s allure. 24 The scene here is one of reading without reading: it is a ‘being read to’. We bear witness to the actions of a reader whose reliability is dubious, an unusual text and a listener whose motives and attention are suspect. The text is not contingent: it has been passed by a censor figure whose authority ironically it undermines. It undergoes the mother’s further censorship to avoid offending the sensibilities of its auditor, yet he is marked for life by this inaugural sensory-intellectual experience. As Jean-Pierre Richard suggests, the Primal Scene of reading is a perplexing manifold of stimuli and realizations: ‘comme plus tard au milieu de la danse des clochers, l’enfant qui s’endort parmi ces phrases maternelles y réintègre l’espace, étiré, rendu fuyant par le fil de la lecture même, d’un texte corporel, ou d’un corps textuel.’ 25 Just as the name ‘Albertine’ in Albertine disparue becomes a label for a certain type of investigative thought process (see Chapter 4 below), hereafter François le Champi becomes a sort of emblem of the awakenings narrated in this Primal Scene. Subsequent references back to these moments in A la recherche bear the marks of transgression, intrigue, and guilt. At work in the child narrator in this formative scene is a ‘hardly definable knowledge’, the mysterious, suggestive beginnings of a budding epistemology which develops as the narrator’s sensibilities evolve. 26 In Freud’s An Infantile Neurosis, the Primal Scene is a punctual event in infancy whose significance is retrospectively acknowledged as formative 23 The aural element of this reading experience has a parallel in Freud’s case history: the obsessional neurosis is linked to the fact that the patient’s ‘mother told him the sacred story herself, and also made his Nanya read aloud to him’ (SE, xvii. 61–2). 24 One might compare here the role of Racine’s Phèdre in the novel. It is a less enigmatic text for the narrator and more extensively interwoven in the narrative: he knows it well, refers back to it, and sees/hears it, in performance. 25 Jean-Pierre Richard, Proust et le monde sensible (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 214–15. 26 The reality of the scene as it actually happened, as in Freud’s case history, cannot be definitively asserted, since (like the rest of the novel) it is retrospectively constructed. The question of psychoanalytic ‘construction’ is addressed by Freud in ‘Constructions in Analysis’, SE, xxiii. 255–69. See also Ned Lukacher’s chapter ‘Primal Scenes: Freud and the Wolf-Man’, in Primal Scenes, 136–67.
Primal Scenes of Reading
27
and influential. To speak of an individual having two Primal Scenes, then, may not be rigorously Freudian, but the term is used in this book to communicate the originary, foundational nature of the narrator’s earliest experiences of reading. The first Primal Scene analysed above is in many ways analogous with the Freudian scene, in that it marks the beginnings of the narrator’s psycho-sexual development (with attendant consequences regarding his relationship with his mother), which are inextricable from his introduction to literature. 27 The second Primal Scene (I, 82–9) is originary as much for Proust’s readers as for the narrator: in it for the first time we witness the narrator actually reading for himself, left to his own devices. We see reading creating in him a sensitivity and a receptiveness to the phenomenal world which will mark him, and the pages we read, for the rest of the novel. The second Primal Scene contains a passage which has provoked a great deal of critical comment. The passage in question here is that which is analysed by Paul de Man in his essay ‘Reading (Proust)’. 28 De Man asks what A la recherche tells us about reading, and whilst his conclusions are engaging, they ultimately limit the very act that he carries out and that Proust’s novel prioritizes. He argues for two mutually exclusive ways of reading (Proust)—the ‘aesthetically responsive’ and the ‘rhetorically aware’—whose exclusivity ‘asserts the impossibility of a true understanding, on the level of the figuration as well as of the themes’. 29 The analysis in this chapter will maintain that figures such as we meet in this Primal Scene, rather than being limiting, or ‘unreadable’, bring a fruitful tension, a polysemy to the text that enriches our readings of it. 30 Leslie Hill, in his ‘Proust and the Art of Reading’, comments on de Man’s position and his remarks are characteristically perceptive: ‘the posture of reading is a stance that is difficult to determine in simple logic. For it exists not as a space identical with itself, but as a deferred site of interchange on the edge of the body’s contact with the world’. 31 Rather than attempt to reassess, catalogue, or valorize the various critical 27 28
On this point, see Gray, ‘Skipping Love Scenes: Marcel’s Repression of Literature’. De Man, ‘Reading (Proust)’, 57–78. Thomas Baldwin analyses this passage and de Man’s reading of it, suggesting the existence of precursor passages from Jean Santeuil. See The Material Object in the Work of Marcel Proust, 115–19. 29 ‘Reading (Proust)’, 72. 30 For a robust critique of de Man’s arguments within the context of reader-related theory, see Inge Wimmers, ‘To Read or not to Read’. For a recent, even more robust treatment of de Man’s reading of this Proustian passage, see Frank B. Farrell, Why does Literature Matter? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 30 and 86–99 (esp. 90–2). 31 Hill, ‘Proust and the Art of Reading’, 177.
28
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
positions held in relation to this passage, the remainder of this chapter will scrutinize textual details of the second Primal Scene with the goal of determining what light it sheds on the narrator’s development and our own attitudes to reading. 32 In the second sustained consideration of reading in A la recherche, the narrator has withdrawn to read, alone, but not entirely isolated from sensually engaging stimuli (movements, climatic factors, odours): ‘je m’étais étendu sur mon lit, un livre à la main’ (I, 82). 33 The room is said to tremble in its efforts to protect its coolness from the harsh light and heat of the sun outside. Sound, from the outset, plays a predominant role in the narrator’s description. The sounds of the figural ‘tremblements’ of his room are redistributed in the sound patterning of the description itself: ‘ma chambre qui protégeait en tremblant sa fraîcheur transparente et fragile contre le soleil’ (I, 82, my emphases). The partial intrusion of sunlight which metaphorically manages to slide its ‘wings’ through the shutters introduces the figure of light as a butterfly, a symbol of movement and colour, but also of fragility, like the room’s ‘fraîcheur . . . fragile’. The image of wings of light anticipates the closing image of the first part of ‘Combray’, where in the same room the narrator is heartened by the intrusion of light on the ceiling above the window, whose mark is traced by ‘le doigt levé du jour’ (I, 184), as if the sunlight had undergone a sort of evolutionary metamorphosis, developing fingers from wings. We read that ‘il faisait à peine assez clair pour lire’, a reminder of the ‘action’ we have been drawn away from by the image of the butterfly, the details of surface, light, and colour. Attention is not initially paid to reading but, characteristically, to what is absent from the scene being described: the narrator’s focus is on the light outside the room which he cannot see. For him, cooped up inside, ‘la sensation de la splendeur de la lumière’ is experienced by a sort of synaesthetic transference: the noise that penetrates the shutters from outside somehow brings with it and intensifies the light. At work here is a chain of association such as 32 Reading and writing within and against a long-running critical debate is characteristic of assessing any widely studied author: it has been suggested that inescapably one’s readings are belated, are ‘readings after’ or re-readings, even if one has never read the text in question before. For a wide-ranging and stimulating, if uneven, exploration of the topic, including the notion that all reading is arguably ‘(re-)reading’, see Matei Calinescu’s Rereading (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), esp. 56, 111–20. 33 For a perceptive and entertaining summary of, among other things, the places and postures of reading, see Georges Perec’s essay ‘Lire: esquisse socio-physiologique’.
Primal Scenes of Reading
29
Deleuze describes in his consideration of Proustian reminiscence, which he terms ‘une chaîne associative hétéroclite [qui] n’est unifiée que par un point de vue créateur, qui joue lui-même le rôle de partie hétéroclite dans l’ensemble.’ 34 Indeed, the narrator reclining on his bed here is one part of the jumbled whole of light, darkness, heat, colours, sound. Summer is present inside through a mental association related to the noises off, which seem to make scarlet star-like sparks fly. Flies buzzing about suggest a chamber music recital in miniature that heralds of the summer. One might associate the buzzing flies with the ‘astres écarlates’ that precede them in the text. The sound of their wings evokes summer and verifies its essential qualities, again through absence or, to put it differently, through metonymy. Our reading mind seeks to reconcile flies and stars, heat and coolness, inside and outside, yet it will not quite all fit together. Deleuze argues that in passages which assemble so many varied elements, ‘Proust trouve le moyen de nous les faire penser tous, mais sans référence à une unité dont ils dériveraient, ou qui en dériverait elle-même.’ 35 In the present case, a complex picture emerges whose unity, if such a thing can be asserted, lies not in the narrator whose body houses the senses which are concurrently stimulated in this scene, but somewhere between him and the reader who assimilates the experiences he transcribes, in Hill’s ‘deferred site of interchange’. 36 This is a scene of stasis yet one full of figured activity. 37 By their proximity and sensual intrusion, the narrator can experience heat and light whilst remaining cool and sedate. His books function in a similar way: reading them brings action to him in repose without sacrificing any of the harmony of his reading environment. In short, his situation is like that of ‘une main immobile au milieu d’une eau courante’ (I, 82). The reader in the world of sense experience is like the still hand in running water, an image which inaugurates a series of water references which will be examined as we proceed. De Man uses this image to highlight the logical contradictions in Proust’s use of imagery here, and thus to support his view of the structural ‘unreadability’ of this scene. 34 35
Deleuze, Proust et les signes 138. Ibid., 149. Leslie Hill shares with Deleuze this view of a heteroclite, plural Proust: see Hill, 168–9. For an exploration of one particular set of such interconnected, plural references, see my essay ‘The Sign of the Swan in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu’, in French Studies, 59 (2005), 326–37. 36 Hill, ‘Proust and the Art of Reading’ 177. 37 Nathalie Aubert deals briefly with this scene in her Proust: la traduction du sensible, in which she seeks to sketch a Proustian phenomenology of perception rooted in lessons learned through translating Ruskin. See 49–50.
30
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
The tensions between inner and outer, coolness and warmth, shelter and exposure that de Man meticulously works through, leave us with rather a flattened impression of reading: by his account we can do it one way (being ‘aesthetically responsive’) or another (being ‘rhetorically aware’), but our reading minds cannot fling themselves down all the multiple paths opened up by the text. The imagery found in this passage might suggest unreadability if we seek, with de Man, to interpret the text in a strict and rigidly logical fashion. But the narrator is not interested in making logical claims here and if we are really interested in reading we should not feel bounded by a need to support them: reading can be a rich, plural, and highly unstable brand of experience; the instability de Man tries to level out is precisely the facet of the experience from which we have most to learn. At his grandmother’s request, the narrator goes outside, leaving the sanctuary of the cool room: ‘ne voulant pas renoncer à ma lecture, j’allais du moins la continuer dans le jardin’ (I, 82). Although he was alone in his bedroom, Camus, tante Léonie, Françoise, and a musical ensemble are all present by allusion, crowding into the room as will the furniture erroneously placed by his imagination in the darkness of the ‘tourbillon de réveil’ at the close of ‘Combray’ (I, 183–4). It is under the chestnut tree, then, in the protective ‘petite guérite’, that the narrator will find the solitude necessary for the act of reading. 38 The narrator compares thought to ‘une . . . crèche’, a sanctuary like the childhood retreat in which he positions himself to read. 39 What he describes, however, is not so much reading, or indeed thought, but the observation of ‘ce qui se passait dehors’. ‘Dehors’ is a term which will be repeated throughout the passage in opposition to ‘dedans’. This dyad is the structuring principle of the passage as a whole and an important device in many of the novel’s scenes of reading. The act of reading, as well as being read to, involves both introspection and observation. Our being in the world is coupled with the inescapable interiority of our minds, a dialectic of which Proust was acutely aware: ‘Nous sommes des êtres qui n’allons vers le dehors qu’en partant du dedans de nousmêmes et qui quand nous allons vers le dehors restons tout de même 38 For an assessment contemporary with Proust’s novel of the conditions required for writing and reading as a woman, see Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own (see n. 9, above). 39 The notion of a site from which, unnoticed, one may ‘regarder ce qui se passait dehors’ is reminiscent of the infant’s voyeuristic position in Freud’s Primal Scene, and is inverted in the scene at Montjouvain where the narrator looks in on Mlle Vinteuil and her friend from outside their open window.
Primal Scenes of Reading
31
en nous. De là viennent nos désirs et nos déceptions’ (I, 752). This dualistic situation is what we might call the paradox or dilemma of the reader, and is germane to the narrator’s broader concerns. 40 He is an individual given to indulgent introspection, fascinated and terrified by the ‘outside world’, captivated and formed by reading experiences which yoke the inner and the outer, the private and the ‘other’. Reading in the passage in hand once again is put on hold while the narrator takes in the world around him. An awareness of the act of perception as it happens creates for him ‘un mince liséré spirituel’ around things, which prohibits him from directly experiencing them. ‘Matière’—the stuff of material things—becomes volatile, troublesome to grasp or handle. In a passage in Le Temps retrouvé, assessed below in Chapter 5, the narrator recognizes having learned his early lessons over time: ‘Il y a entre nous et les êtres un liséré de contingences, comme j’avais compris dans mes lectures de Combray qu’il y en a un de perception et qui empêche la mise en contact absolue de la réalité et de l’esprit’ (IV, 553). 41 In the present passage, heat and light are reintroduced as the narrator extends his image: material things for him are like incandescent bodies with a zone of evaporation which stops them from ever touching the wetness of a damp object (I, 83). This complex image is one of non-present presence, of the narrator’s incapacity to experience material things despite their physical availability to him. Such a situation is the obverse of reading, where a real and present concrete object (the book) allows the reader access to the non-present and the immaterial (the ‘world in the book’). When he reads, the narrator’s conscience simultaneously unfurls a sort of ‘écran diapré d’états différents’ (I, 83). This figural screen, dappled with the light and colours of the imagination and the environment in which the narrator finds himself, recalls the wings of the figural butterfly and the music-generating wings of the flies. The ‘états différents’ encompass a vast range of perceptual experience, from his most carefully hidden aspirations, to the vanishing point at the bottom of the garden. In reading, his deepest thoughts are stirred up by ‘ma 40 Georges Perec is one of few writers to have been sensitive to this basic dilemma in the act of reading. In ‘Lire: esquisse socio-physiologique’, he writes of a desire for ‘quelque chose, en somme, comme une économie de la lecture sous ses aspects ergologiques (physiologie, travail musculaire) et socioécologiques (son environnement spatiotemporel)’, 110. 41 This acknowledgement of early lessons in reading which influence other spheres of experience recalls the scope and longevity of the effects of the Freudian Primal Scene (see SE, xvii. 93).
32
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
croyance en la richesse philosophique, en la beauté du livre que je lisais, et mon désir de me les approprier quel que fût ce livre’. Reading, then, is a form of epistemological enquiry, an unfolding and an agitation. It is revelatory of interior and worldly truths, produces aesthetic and intellectual stimulation, all within the garden walls and the covers of the book, ‘quel que fût ce livre’. 42 If the revelations of reading can be so profound, it seems unlikely that the choice of reading matter is entirely contingent, unless the revelations stem not from the text being read but from the heightened experiential or phenomenological states into which one is plunged by the act of reading itself. The import of the book is suggested by its being selected from ‘la mosaïque des brochures et des livraisons’ arranged around the door to Borange’s shop, which, significantly, is ‘plus mystérieuse, plus semée de pensées qu’une porte de cathédrale’ (I, 83). The books are ‘pensées’, goads to cerebral activity; alternatively, the verb ‘semer’ suggests they could be floral decorations, pansies, considered together etymologically as an anthology or florilegium of verse and prose. ‘Pensée’, whatever its interpretation, recalls the opening phrase of the paragraph, which metaphorized thought into a creche from which one might observe the outside world, an activity incompatible, surely, with an engaged act of reading? Reading can provoke thought, but once one is ‘lost’ in thought (or in reading), it seems that one becomes capable of quite different orders of experience. The prospect of exploring their contents gives the books around the shop doorway an allure more mysterious than the porch of a cathedral, which itself is a site of formative reading that will be examined in due course. 43 The goal of reading, to take possession of ‘le secret de la vérité et de la beauté à demi pressenties, à demi incompréhensibles’ (I, 83) is 42 Jacques Derrida, in L’Ecriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), takes up the question of the experience of presence raised tentatively here by Proust’s narrator. His characterization of writing chimes with the narrator’s description of the scene of reading: ‘Le propre de l’écriture, nous l’avons nommé ailleurs, en un sens difficile de ce mot, espacement: diastème et devenir-espace du temps, déploiement aussi, dans une localité originale, de significations que sa consécution linéaire irréversible, passant de point de présence en point de présence, ne pouvait que tendre et dans une mesure échouer à refouler’ (321). For Derrida, writing performs the unfolding or unfurling of revelations the narrator experiences while reading. His insistence on the space of writing (‘une localité originale’) mirrors Proust’s emphasis on the role of the environment in which one reads, and our concept of the ‘scène originaire’ or Primal Scene. 43 For an analysis of Elstir’s ‘tour de force’ reading of the church portals, ‘la plus belle Bible historiée’ available to the people of Balbec (II, 196), see Ch. 3: ‘Lessons in Reading’ below.
Primal Scenes of Reading
33
recognized, but only in outline form, like the narrator’s parcel of books from his grandmother (I, 39). This whole paragraph is an exposition of thought about thought and about thinking. It opens ‘Et ma pensée’ and closes symmetrically with ‘de ma pensée’; it is a passage which we might say is framed by ‘un mince liséré spirituel’, a border of thought. The paragraph is ‘plus sem[é] de pensées qu’une porte de cathédrale’, and in many ways it is a doorway to the epistemology of Proust’s cathedral-like novel. The question of motion and stasis is developed in the narrator’s description of his prevailing belief in the beauty of whatever it is he is reading which, during his sedentary reading session, ‘exécutait d’incessants mouvements du dedans au dehors, vers la découverte de la vérité’, where the repeated |ver| sound subtly emphasizes the continuous movement towards the chosen goal. This rephrases the image of his ‘états différents’, recalls the movements involved in the opening paragraph describing the coolness of the room in contrast to the heat and brightness outside and completes the pair of key terms identified above (‘dedans’/‘dehors’), which will become motivically repeated through the remainder of the passage. The narrator’s hermeneutic enquiry takes the form of an oscillation towards and away from his position, always in search of a truth he believes he can find. His afternoons spent reading are ‘plus remplis d’événements dramatiques que ne l’est souvent toute une vie’ (I, 83). This is a statement which may cause readers to consider their actions in the light of the scene they are reading. We are interrupted and addressed by the text, tacitly cajoled into lifting our eyes from Proust’s page reflexively to consider our act of reading. Proust, of course, writes with a ‘clin d’œil au lecteur’: these pages of long paragraphs and involved figural language are far from being filled with conventional ‘événements dramatiques’; they describe the sensory-cerebral experiences of a young day-dreamer, empty afternoons, and atmospheric phenomena. 44 Although the narrator never quite recounts to his readers ‘l’action à laquelle [il] prenai[t] part’, the experience he recounts is somehow event enough to compel us to read on, intrigued and engaged. The narrator’s account of his reactions to fictional events as well as to the sensory phenomena with
44 For a blithe survey of the weather in Proust, see Jean-Pierre Richard’s ‘Proust météo’, in Essais de critique buissonière (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 107–19.
34
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
which they are interwoven, become in turn the reading experience of the readers of A la recherche. 45 An excursus follows on the qualities of fiction and how it appeals to readers’ sensibilities despite, or because of, its evident artifice. The narrator argues that to arrive at a notion of the joy or unhappiness experienced by another person we create mental images. 46 The ingeniousness of the first novelist, he goes on, was to recognize the indirect nature of experience, to recognize that the imagination is in fact an essential force in our emotional lives. We perceive people with our senses and if our imagination does not bring its spark to them they remain opaque, offering only an immovable dead weight to our sensibility. Such comments on the weakness of our perceptual capacities will develop in significance as we read on. The assimilation of characters by readers is described as a process of appropriation: characters come to belong to readers, they are ours, their actions and emotions happen within us. ‘Nous tournons fiévreusement les pages du livre’ (I, 84) in the external world of objects, whilst internally the characters we have claimed as vectors of our own emotional life in turn create somatic effects, quicken our pulse, the rapidity of our breathing, the darting movement of our pupils as they process the information before them. Reading engages the mind, and the more intense the mental engagement, the more the body gets drawn into the act. To say, then, that reading is an ‘état purement intérieur’, is only a half-truth: the reader is as much a part of the phenomenal world as is the book held in her hands. Interiority is just one aspect of the reading experience, and it is valorized here in temporal terms: a new gearing of time becomes recognizable through the act of reading. 47 In a short space of time ‘bonheurs’ and ‘malheurs’ can be encountered which given a whole lifetime one might never experience first hand, since ‘la lenteur avec laquelle ils se produisent nous ôte la perception’ (I, 84). Reading can counter the force of Habit whilst remaining an inherently habitual action. ‘Les intermittences du cœur’ are a long way off, but this early scene of reading demonstrates a latent awareness of the processes at work in that section of the novel (III, 148–78). It is only in reading, the 45 As Compagnon puts it, ‘la passivité (la passion) de la lecture est en équilibre fragile entre la vie à la fois du dehors, l’activité du monde extérieur, et la vie du livre même, le récit d’une aventure. D’où le plaisir extrême’ (‘Proust 1’, 237). 46 For a study of imaging in relation to the act of reading, see Ellen J. Esrock, The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). 47 The evident parallels that begin to show here between reading and the experience of involuntary memory will be explored as we proceed.
Primal Scenes of Reading
35
narrator writes, that one can recognize that one’s heart changes, because of the temporal accelerations reading affects which serve to juxtapose what are normally quite disparate mental or emotional states: notre cœur change, dans la vie, et c’est la pire douleur; mais nous ne la connaissons que dans la lecture, en imagination: dans la réalité il change, comme certains phénomènes de la nature se produisent, assez lentement pour que, si nous pouvons constater successivement chacun de ses états différents, en revanche la sensation même du changement nous soit épargnée. (I, 84–5)
Reading, whose functional domain is that of the imagination (opposed here to ‘la vie’), is heuristic, but it is also potentially traumatic. Once one has learned to read; one can but read. As the passage quoted shows, the different calibration of reading time can bring about painful revelations; nevertheless, reading, this mundane, irrepressible, almost unconscious capacity, can bring about states of mind and body that permit access to levels of experience often closed off to ‘everyday’ perceptual processes which rely solely on the senses. Habit in Beckett’s terms is ‘the ballast that chains the dog to its vomit’; this scene suggests that reading, despite being for literate people as much a part of Habit as breathing, has a peculiar dynamism that can break that chain, or at least loosen it. 48 The following paragraph (‘Déjà moins intérieur . . . ’, I, 85) brings further into relief the narrator’s awareness of the duality of corporeal and intellectual experience in reading. After addressing the interiorizing of characters from books, now the narrator presents a projection or exteriorization of an image originating in the imagination. The projection in question is of ‘le paysage où se déroulait l’action’, a landscape which has a greater influence on the narrator than have his actual surroundings: the real is displaced by the read, but not entirely, for he remains aware of the heat of the summer afternoon. The Combray topography dissolves and gives way to the landscapes—mountainous, crossed by rivers, dotted with sawmills—evoked by his reading. The experience is such that he is able to remember (or re-imagine) the 48 Samuel Beckett, Proust (London: Calder and Boyars, 1965; repr. with Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, 1987), 19. Here as before we get a sense that Proust’s narrator is subtly creating connections between himself and his reader. The more we learn about his acts of reading, the more we stand to gain from our own. Indeed, one of the ways in which Proust tacitly encourages us to continue our reading of his wholly unusual, time-consuming work is by periodically, narcissistically teaching us, through his narrator’s experiences, about reading’s pitfalls and potentialities, so that by the time we reach the famous passage claiming that ‘chaque lecteur est quand il lit le propre lecteur de soimême’ (IV, 489–90), we are already a good measure of the way towards being trained in the activity of self-reading ourselves.
36
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
details, right down to what could be seen ‘au fond de l’eau claire’, which is reminiscent of the figure of water flowing around the ‘main immobile’ (I, 82). Indeed, prefiguring the pattern of association exhibited when, on discovering his article in Le Figaro, the colour of the morning sky reminds the narrator of ‘la petite station montagnarde où j’avais vu la laitière aux joues roses’ (IV, 148), here the narrator’s reading experience supplies a sense impression that complements his erotic image: ‘comme le rêve d’une femme qui m’aurait aimé était toujours présent à ma pensée, ces étés-là ce rêve fut impregné de la fraîcheur des eaux courantes’ (I, 85). Towards the end of Du côté de chez Swann, the narrator again displays this tendency to associate certain reading experiences with particular sensory stimuli, or memories of such, stating that ‘même au printemps, trouver dans un livre le nom de Balbec suffisait à réveiller en moi le désir des tempêtes et du gothique normand’ (I, 380). In brief, the effects and memories of reading, sense experience, and the imagination are intimately related and mutually illuminating. Colour and other sensory stimuli connect up the different landscapes. In an anticipation of a later, celebrated passage in ‘Combray’ (‘les fleurs qu’on me montre aujourd’hui . . . ’, I, 182), the narrator states that it is the fictional landscapes and not the Combray garden that ‘semblaient être . . . une part véritable de la Nature elle-même, digne d’être étudiée et approfondie’. Considering his afternoons reading at Combray demonstrates early on to him that remembering experiences, whether real or imagined, can be more vivid, more ‘real’ than life as we live it. Moreover, the colour of the flowers associated here with reading during the Combray summers adumbrates the closing scene of the first part of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs where the narrator describes the effects of the heart’s alterations on memory. He states that the unhappiness Gilberte caused him is outlived by ‘le plaisir que j’éprouve, chaque fois que je veux lire, en une sorte de cadran solaire, les minutes qu’il y a entre midi un quart et une heure, au mois de mai, à me revoir causant ainsi avec Mme Swann, sous son ombrelle, comme sous le reflet d’un berceau de glycines’ (I, 630). An image of reading is constructed to convey the pleasurable process of rememoration. The imagined woman of the earlier passage takes concrete form in Mme Swann; the imagined flowers (‘grappes de fleurs violettes et rougeâtres’, I, 85) associated with his early reading complement those imagined here (‘[le] berceau de glycines’), whose form in turn recalls the narrator’s
Primal Scenes of Reading
37
figural ‘crèche’ mentioned earlier in the present passage (I, 83). 49 Finally, the image of the ‘cadran solaire’ from A l’ombre serves to clarify an image examined below of the inscription of passing minutes as golden marks in the sky. ‘Si mes parents m’avaient permis’, the narrator continues, ‘quand je lisais un livre, d’aller visiter la région qu’il décrivait, j’aurais cru faire un pas inestimable dans la conquête de la vérité’ (I, 85). With this we return to truth and beauty, his earlier stated goals in reading. Existence is a perpetual flight, an insistent drive to ‘atteindre l’extérieur’. Again the image is one of movement and sound: this drive resounds with an inner sonority, a reverberation outwards from ‘dedans’ as opposed to being an echo from ‘dehors’ (I, 86). This involved image puts the movements of the intellect and senses, as they attempt to assimilate the experience of concrete objects, on a par with the sensory-intellectual movements of the reader as he or she attempts to assimilate the immaterial ideational content of a written text. The narrator makes explicit now the link between the ‘écran’ and his ‘élan’, his projected drive or flight. One tries to find in things what one’s imagination has projected on to them, but one fails, since the concrete reality cannot live up to the constructed image, just as a cinema screen is white and featureless without a film projected on to it. This occurs with the narrator’s experience of people (see for instance, the duchesse de Guermantes (I, 175–6) or Berma on stage (I, 440–3), inter alia). To counter this he returns to the vague ‘femme que j’aimais’ here, in parallel to ‘la femme qui m’aurait aimé’ (I, 85), a figure who will never in reality be possessed or properly encountered (rather like the figures of fiction) and who therefore does not disappoint like the figures of reality. 50 The paragraph builds to a libidinal climax, an ejaculation of words and desire. The fictional landscapes become inhabited by the imaginary love object, but her presence in these landscapes is not just dependent on a simple association of thoughts. To separate any part of the scene for analysis as he does in this passage is artificial, he argues, like trying to take stationary cross-sections of the constantly self-renewing water in a fountain. The woman, the landscape, and the ‘rêves de voyage’, are all ‘des moments . . . dans un même et infléchissable jaillissement de 49 The ‘fleurs violettes et rougeâtres’ also carry the sexual overtones of the ‘couverture rougeâtre’ of François le Champi in the first Primal Scene. 50 The exceptional case here is that of the narrator’s experience of the ‘fictionalized’ versions of his acquaintances in the Goncourt journal: characters who are ‘real’ and anything but prestigious in his eyes are altered by his reading about them (see IV, 287– 301). The magic of fiction (or the narrator’s incapacity to appreciate art) is revealed to him in this crucial problematization of reading, which is examined below in Chapter 2.
38
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
toutes les forces de ma vie’: they are products of the act of reading, the juncture of his imagination, the texts he reads, and the sensations concurrently experienced. The emphatic, wholehearted investment in what is described here (‘toutes les forces de ma vie’) underpins the development of the narrator’s character and his creative abilities throughout the rest of the novel. Substance-less imaginary scenes, fuelled by fictions and the intellect, acknowledged as such, yet believed in and tirelessly sought after, are described as a ‘jaillissement’, an ejaculation, at once a lifegiving dissemination and a fruitless masturbation. 51 Reading stimulates and eroticizes imagination to a point that renders reality incapable of provoking any sort of arousal, intellectual or erotic. In this Primal Scene readers witness the narrator’s libidinal formation in process: pleasure is there to be had, but only through the solitary mental constructions of the reading mind. There is a suggested masturbatory culmination to the eroticism that was introduced in the Primal Scene with the mother: what before was latent, suggestive, and mysterious now explicitly bursts forth in the first scene of solitary reading. His life force is figured in a dynamic image that incorporates many of the sensual elements alluded to throughout this passage: the ‘jet d’eau’ connotes coolness and wetness as well as figuratively suggesting the ejaculatory culmination of male sexual arousal; movement and stasis are brought together in the fountain’s ‘apparence immobile’; finally, the whole spectrum of colours alluded to piecemeal through the preceding pages converges in the ‘jet d’eau irisé ’ (my emphasis). The image, inserted casually in a parenthesis, reveals a great deal about the narrator’s underlying drives in this passage. That imagined scenes should hyperbolically represent the life force of the narrator points readers towards powerful creative capacities within him, which are as yet unrecognized or untapped. The image prefigures the more sustained eroticisation of the ‘jet d’eau Hubert-Robert’ in Sodome et Gomorrhe (III, 56–7), which is experienced sensually and erotically as art. Its water, too, is metaphorically solidified, ‘infléchissable’. 52 The recycling of water in a fountain is a model of an incessant movement from inside to outside and back again, mirroring that of the reader. 51 The solitude of reading is at times associated with the solitude of masturbation. See, for instance, the description in ‘Combray’ of the ‘petite pièce sentant l’iris, . . . la seule qu’il me fût permis de fermer à clef, à toutes celles de mes occupations qui réclamaient une inviolable solitude: la lecture, la rêverie, les larmes et la volupté’ (I, 12). 52 See Thomas Baldwin’s essay, ‘Proust, a Fountain and some Pink Marble’, for an extended, thought-provoking analysis of the ‘jet d’eau d’Hubert-Robert’ scene, French Studies, 59 (2005), 481–93.
Primal Scenes of Reading
39
The narrator relates his moment of ‘jaillissement’ (in its physiological sense another movement, this time irreversible, from ‘dedans au dehors’) to his more general consideration of such movements. The reminder of his situation in the Combray garden, the reality that borders the projected ‘états simultanément juxtaposés de ma conscience’, gives one the impression of returning to a frame narrative of sorts. Sensations and sensual pleasures are to the fore: the physical sensations he experiences are juxtaposed with the imagined ones he has been describing. It is possible to read and concurrently to be aware of the comfort of one’s seated position, the smell of the air, the sound of distant bells. The narrator’s gazing at the sky, judging what of the afternoon is gone and what part of it remained for him ‘pour lire jusqu’au bon dîner qu’apprêtait Françoise’ (I, 86), suggests both an eagerness to continue reading and a less than undivided attention to his book. Colour and sound are prominent again, and the narrator’s stasis is in contradistinction to Françoise’s endless bustle; her industry will provide a meal that will revivify him from his ‘fatigues prises, pendant la lecture du livre, à la suite de son héros.’ Reading is the sedentary, leisured pursuit of the bourgeois and aristocratic classes; Françoise does not have time to read, and when she does it arouses fear and confusion, as when she sobs, horrified to find that the family medical dictionary deems the kitchen girl’s malady more serious than her own empirically established diagnosis had led her to believe (I, 121). In a reflexive fashion, the essence of this paragraph lies in the auditory effects of its account of sounds which, through metaphor, are described as written text: ‘[l’heure] la plus récente venait s’inscrire tout près de l’autre dans le ciel . . . ’ (I, 86). The narrator remarks his disbelief, on hearing the bells, that time has passed so quickly, absorbed as he is in his reading. The narrator’s depiction of the effect of hearing the bells, which in its sound patterning communicates the sensory richness of the experience, reveals to his readers the state of alertness reading affords him. Reading, as Perec puts it, ce n’est pas seulement lire un texte, déchiffrer des signes, arpenter des lignes, explorer des pages, traverser un sens; ce n’est pas seulement la communion abstraite de l’auteur et du lecteur, la noce mystique de l’Idée et de l’Oreille, c’est, en même temps, le bruit du métro, ou le balancement d’un wagon de chemin de fer, ou la chaleur du soleil sur une plage et les cris des enfants qui jouent un peu plus loin, ou la sensation de l’eau chaude dans la baignoire, ou l’attente du sommeil . . . 53 53
Perec, ‘Lire: esquisse socio-physiologique’, 121–2, his ellipsis.
40
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
The narrator’s experience of the bells and the sky, then, is as much a part of his reading experience as the book itself. The textures of the passage show reading to be a catalyst among many in the novel which afford the narrator a hypersensitivity to the world around him. 54 Sometimes it seems to the narrator that the bells chime twice more than on the previous time he was aware of them. His conclusion is brief and logical: ‘il y en avait donc une que je n’avais pas entendue’; but then he changes tack: ‘. . . quelque chose qui avait eu lieu n’avait pas eu lieu pour moi’. Because of his absorption in reading, the narrator has missed something that did in fact take place. The passing hours are depicted spatially, figuratively mapped onto the sky like a punctuated text as ‘ce petit arc bleu entre leurs deux marques d’or’, the image reworked as the ‘cadran solaire’ at the close of the first part of A l’ombre des jeunes filles. When one is absorbed in reading, the body remains a part of the physical world, whether that be a darkened room or a garden underneath the expanse of the skies. The focusing of the mind that occurs in the act of reading, however, varies in intensity like an adjustable filter that, as we read, now allows in a certain measure of sensory stimulation (like the ‘wings’ of light through the shutters), now effectively shuts off our attention from everything but the text in hand. This combination of being in the world and yet being temporarily dislocated from it comes about from the reader’s inhabiting the Derridean ‘diastème et devenirespace’ of the text, the fragile, shifting, virtual reality of the reading encounter. The final clause of the sentence returns our attention to the act of reading itself, the process described by the narrator and simultaneously carried out by the reader of the novel. Whilst the sound of the bells sometimes distracts the narrator’s attention from his book, only to emphasize how absorbed he had been previously to have missed them altogether, here the sound of the words used by Proust engages our interpretive faculties in a most complex manner, conversely drawing us deeper into our own interpretive act:
54 Edward J. Hughes, in his Marcel Proust: A Study in the Quality of Awareness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), brings into relief the narrator’s hypersensitivity and the grandmother’s role in highlighting this quality in him. See particularly Ch. 3 ‘The Narrator’s Childhood and Adolescence: Formative Influences’, 57–93.
Primal Scenes of Reading
41
L’intérêt de la lecture, magique comme un profond sommeil, avait donné le change à mes oreilles hallucinées et effacé la cloche d’or sur la surface azurée du silence. (I, 87) 55
Like a deep sleep, the magical quality of reading recalls the narrator’s repeated use of the word ‘rêve(s)’ earlier in the passage (I, 85). Sound is everything in this phrase that describes silence and solitude. Colour, too, is foregrounded, with the golden colour that pervades the passage making its presence felt inset in ‘oreilles’ and then in its own right in the ‘cloche d’or’, in contrast to the sky’s azure surface, just as above with the ‘arc bleu entre . . . deux marques d’or’. The narrator describes how reading effaces sound in a phrase which maximally exploits sound itself. The keyword here, ‘silence’, is already present anagrammatically in ‘hallucinées’ and the repetition of the |sur| sound in the final phrase addresses itself to the reader’s ear, in a coercive whisper or murmur, a ‘susurrement’ of sound, only for the sentence to end in and on ‘silence’. This sentence describes light, sound, and colour, yet its subject is stated clearly: ‘l’intérêt de la lecture’. Being occupied with reading, according to the narrator’s account, can disconnect us from a certain register of sensory stimulus (‘avait donné le change à mes oreilles’). What he does in his rendering of this involuntary impairment of a perceptual faculty is to assault the very faculty described as disabled by the act of reading. Reading has an intimate and complex relation to the senses, and Proust has a remarkable sensitivity to the means by which they are (dis-)engaged by the act of reading itself. 56 After a master-class in the exploitation of sound to express the experience of not hearing, the narrator goes on to bombard our perceptual capacities in another sensual register: colour. To the gold and azure are added the shades of the ‘marronnier’ which blend with the subtler colour presence in ‘mediocre’; the associative pinkness of the ‘sein d’un pays arrosé d’eaux vives’; the greenness of the ‘feuillages’ and the figural ‘cristal ’ of the final clause together fuse into a colour symphony, completed in conclusion or coda by the insistent return of golden 55 Nathalie Aubert tracks the evolution of this image cluster from ‘Sur la lecture’ to its final form in A la recherche, focusing on the image construction and on synaesthesia (Proust: la traduction du sensible,118–20). 56 Simon Gray echoes the thrust of this passage uncannily with his remark that ‘One is still waiting, waiting, for the absolute immersion, the complete world-deafness of one’s childhood reading’; and this from someone who lists Proust among ‘[the] great writers I intend never to read again before I die’. See Antonia Fraser (ed.) The Pleasures of Reading, (London: Bloomsbury, 1994), 134, 137.
42
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
tones present in the sensory adjectives ‘sonores’ and ‘odorantes’, the former repeated from the opening paragraph (I, 82). As he stares at the black and white of his page before him, the narrator is surrounded by colour. He reads on, the heat of the day diminishes, and the hours pass: ‘silencieuses, sonores, odorantes et limpides’. This quartet of adjectives qualifying time spent reading forms a sense experience with a measure and cadence of its own: it is made up of a chiasmus ‘pour l’œil’ of double ‘i’s (‘silencieuses//limpides’), framing the doubly golden inner pairing (‘sonores, odorantes’) that celebrates the sound and scent of time, is a eulogy to the senses, rich in colour, yet tempered by the great overarching regulator: silence. 57 ‘Quelquefois j’étais tiré de ma lecture’, we are told, and the narrator describes the gardener’s daughter, rampaging like Ariosto’s Orlando into the peaceful tableau. Sound and movement take the scene by force. The garrison’s manœuvres are a ‘spectacle’, a performance to draw the non-readerly attention of the domestic servants of Combray. With the paragraph beginning ‘« Pauvres enfants . . . »’, we read a real-time interruption to the narrator’s reading, a transcription of the exchange between Françoise and the gardener followed by a description of precisely what goes on in the streets, what is debated, what can be seen and heard. 58 During this short passage, no acknowledgement is made of the narrator’s status as reader-in-suspension: the complexity of his sensoryintellectual meditations in the previous paragraph has almost vanished and there remain only a few details redolent of the highly charged scene describing the experience of the missed chimes. Still the sun beats down, and water imagery is reintroduced to describe the passing troops: the cantering horses and their riders spill on to the ‘trottoirs submergés’ as on to ‘des berges qui offrent un lit trop étroit à un torrent déchaîné’ 57 In Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), Adam Piette examines Proust’s prose rhymes. His work probes the verbal textures of A la recherche, and suggests valid, if not always entirely convincing, psychological arguments for the presence of sound repetitions and rhyme in the novel. See 81–141. 58 The garrison’s manœuvres interrupting the narrator’s aesthetic considerations may be seen as a fortuitous metonymic mirroring of the interruption of Proust’s original project for A la recherche by the First World War. The narrator’s interest in the military here anticipates the Doncières section later on where again his position is that of an external observer. For the best account of the development of Proust’s novel during the war, see Alison Winton (Finch), Proust’s Additions: The Making of ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). See also Christine M. Cano’s recent account of the development and publishing history of Proust’s novel, Proust’s Deadline (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
Primal Scenes of Reading
43
(I, 87). In the midst of this figural flood the narrator’s position once more recalls that of the motionless hand amid ‘le choc et l’animation d’un torrent d’activité’ (I, 82). Françoise’s departure from the procession scene serves as closure on it, and allows the narrator to steer attention back to the scene of reading. ‘Je retournais à mon livre’, we read (I, 88) and as the dust settles, people come out of their houses. They are ‘un flot [qui] noircissait . . . les rues’, a tributary to the system of water references: the hot water brought by the kitchen girl (I, 82); the figural running water (I, 82); the ‘objet mouillé’ (I, 83); the ‘pays montueux et fluviatile’ (I, 85); the fountain (I, 86); the ‘pays arrosé d’eaux vives’ (I, 87); and finally the ‘torrent déchaîné’ (I, 87). Now at the end of the scene, the spectators are ‘un liséré capricieux et sombre comme celui des algues et des coquilles dont une forte marée laisse le crêpe et la broderie au rivage, après qu’elle s’est éloignée’ (I, 89). ‘Algues’, ‘coquilles’, ‘crêpe’, and ‘broderie’ return us to the sensuality of texture and surface with which the passage began. Their organization (‘un liséré’) recalls the narrator’s early figuring of the effect perception and imagination have on everyday objects (I, 83). A second level of reworking and recycling is active in this image: the people who festoon the doorways are described in a fashion which recalls the books that decorate the doorway of the Combray ‘épicerie’. ‘Sauf ces jours-là,’ the narrator recounts, ‘je pouvais d’habitude, au contraire, lire tranquille’ (I, 89). Finally, after pages of exploration and excursus, we have an admission that his concentration was not entirely focused on his reading. The revelation here is of a fairly obvious sort, given the excess of ‘peripheral’ detail and the lack of reference made in the preceding pages to what he actually reads. The phrase ‘d’habitude’, however, brings a complexity to the otherwise straightforward statement. Normally the narrator can quietly get on with his reading uninterrupted. The garrison’s manœuvres are what are deemed exceptional, so we may conclude that what is described in such detail before the paragraph beginning ‘Quelquefois j’étais tiré de ma lecture . . . ’ is the norm. His reading, with its super-charging of the senses and jostling of perceptual powers, is not narrated as a completed event in the past historic tense. The dominant tense throughout is the imperfect, yet one cannot ascertain whether these were one-off happenings, or events that occurred many times but are described only once. 59 The imperfect tense suggests that reading frequently or habitually exerted 59
See Gérard Genette, ‘Discours du récit’, in Figures III, 65–273 (145–82).
44
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
the remarkable hold over the narrator we find in this passage. Even if, as the tense suggests, most or all of the narrator’s childhood reading experiences resembled what is described in these pages, an originary scene necessarily will have occurred in which for the first time the narrator’s act of reading fed into an intensely rich phenomenological experience. For readers of Proust these pages (I, 82–9) are precisely that Primal Scene: these pages inlaid with colour, sound, and sense provide readers with both the textual raw materials and the beginnings of a theoretical understanding with which they might experience an act of reading every bit as rich and rewarding as that which the words describe. The scene ends with the narrator’s introduction to the work of Bergotte by his friend Bloch, a character who will over the ‘longue durée’ of the text become an ‘auteur dramatique’ himself. Bloch’s vagueness of expression when speaking of Bergotte (‘paraît-il’, ‘m’a-t-on dit’) does not make him seem to be the most reliable of guides. He admits not having read the volume of Bergotte he lends to the narrator, but heaps hyperbolic praise upon it, and criticizes the narrator’s ‘dilection assez basse pour le sieur Musset’ (I, 89). He is an opinionated and self-styled ‘littéraire’ who talks of Racine, Leconte de Lisle, and others as if they were close friends (Voltaire, for example, is rather pretentiously ‘[le] sieur Arouet’, II, 234); but for all this, in lending Bergotte’s work to the narrator, he inaugurates a new phase in his life, and introduces him to an author who will be a defining influence on his developing artistic sensibilities. The Primal Scenes analysed above represent the inception of the narrator’s psycho-sexual development, his introduction to the potentialities of reading and independent intellectual inquiry. With his discovery of Bergotte’s work, and as the novel progresses, we see the narrator evolving: making errors of judgement, showing distrust, developing discernment and personal tastes, experiencing delights and disappointments. In short, we see him learning to read.
2 Learning to Read Interpréter un texte, ce n’est pas lui donner un sens (plus ou moins fondé, plus ou moins libre), c’est au contraire apprécier de quel pluriel il est fait. Roland Barthes 1
This chapter will examine the narrator’s development as a reader against the broader canvas of what we might call his more general ‘phenomenological becoming’, the evolutionary path of his psycho-sexual and intellectual character as he grows up, encounters various stimuli and experiences the world around him. These two broad aspects of the narrator’s development—the readerly and the phenomenological—are by no means mutually exclusive, and their interconnections enrich our experience of reading A la recherche. The readerly and phenomenological Bildungen move at different speeds, act on the narrator at different intensities, and at times can pull him in opposing directions. They also frequently intersect. This chapter examines the scenes in which we witness the narrator ‘learning to read’, with all the triumphs, disappointments, and shocks that this entails. With the exception of his reading Bergotte (I, 89–96), the scenes analysed here are remarkable for their relative brevity and the intensity of their impact. The scenes bear marks of the Primal Scenes’ influence and shed light on a maturing intellect and sensibility reading different sorts of texts with varying expectations. The analyses seek to trace any continuity, or lack of it, in the narrator’s reading encounters, and to map this against his developing phenomenological outlook, whilst monitoring the evolution of elements prominent in the Primal Scenes on both the thematic and formal levels. It is Bloch who introduces the narrator to the work of Bergotte. In his own inimitable, pompous way, as one reader to another, Bloch proffers 1
R. Barthes, S/Z, (Pari: Seuil, 1973), 11.
46
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
‘un livre que je n’ai pas le temps de lire en ce moment’ (I, 89). 2 Although he has not read the book, which is never named, Bloch vouches for its quality by remarking that it has received the approval of Leconte de Lisle. The message, for all its bombast, is simple: ‘Lis donc ces proses lyriques, et . . . tu goûteras . . . les joies nectaréennes de l’Olympos’ (I, 89). Although Bloch is full of exaggeration, bluster, and insecurity, in an emphatically short paragraph the narrator concedes that ‘au sujet de Bergotte il avait dit vrai’ (I, 92); thus the narrator begins a relationship with Bergotte’s works which will extend throughout the novel. Reading Bergotte for the first time represents an initiatory process of self-discovery for the narrator. ‘Je ne pouvais pas quitter le roman que je lisais de lui’, we are told (I, 92), yet the reasons for his initial fascination by the text are unclear. As he reads on, certain stylistic traits become apparent to the narrator. With pleasure, he notes Bergotte’s taste for ‘les expressions rares, presque archaïques’ and quotes some of the things Bergotte writes when indulging this penchant. The phrases ‘quoted’ are identified by Proust’s modern editors as echoes from two contemporary literary figures of renown: Leconte de Lisle and Anatole France (see I, 93, notes 1–4). These veiled borrowings suggest to readers a frame of reference in which they might situate the works of Bergotte, who is, after all, an invented figure. By quoting the phrases which stand out in his mind, the narrator’s reading experience becomes our reading experience. What he calls Bergotte’s philosophy, combined with his imagery, produces a musical effect summarized as ‘quelque chose de sublime’ (I, 93). This comment brings with it, unremarked, vast chapters of literary and intellectual history. It suggests, after Burke, a powerful amalgam of grandeur, beauty, passion, and fear, coupled with the Romantic notion, from Chateaubriand and Hugo in the French tradition, of the mind/body dualism of modern man. It is hard for Proust’s readers to taste this implicit atmosphere from what morsels we have been given of Bergotte’s ‘proses lyriques’, but as the passage continues, the narrator’s (and therefore our own) impressions become more refined. This scene is a rare one, in that it directly describes an act of reading in terms of a text’s impressions on the narrator, rather than those of 2 For a bold and entertaining consideration of the perhaps underexamined question of non-reading, see Pierre Bayard, Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? (Paris: Minuit, 2007), esp. 31–4, which deal with Paul Valéry’s ‘non-lecture de Proust’, which forms the basis of his appreciation of the latter published in 1923 in the Nouvelle Revue Française.
Learning to Read
47
the physical environment in which he reads. Reading is now described as providing a joy different from the initial exhilaration of encountering the novel; the components of Bergotte’s sublime equation divided through the narrator’s readerly prism give une joie que je me sentis éprouver en une région plus profonde de moi-même, plus unie, plus vaste, d’où les obstacles et les séparations semblaient avoir été enlevés. C’est que, reconnaissant alors ce même goût pour les expressions rares, cette même effusion musicale, cette même philosophie idéaliste qui avait déjà été les autres fois, sans que je m’en rendisse compte, la cause de mon plaisir, je n’eus plus l’impression d’être en présence d’un morceau particulier d’un certain livre de Bergotte, traçant à la surface de ma pensée une figure purement linéaire, mais plutôt du « morceau idéal » de Bergotte, commun à tous ses livres et auquel tous les passages analogues qui venaient se confondre avec lui, auraient donné une sorte d’épaisseur, de volume, dont mon esprit semblait agrandi. (I, 93)
The joy of reading a particular passage of Bergotte is a sensation felt at a still only vaguely expressed spiritual depth and the site of this joy, by comparison with the initial rush of experiencing his style, is ‘plus unie, plus vaste, d’où les obstacles et les séparations semblaient avoir été enlevés’. Reading somehow allows an uninterrupted access to the deeper reaches of the self in a similar fashion, we might say, to the experience of involuntary memory. The language and tone of the passage communicate an event which is apparently not based in concrete or material experience: reading here is a spiritual congress, an ethereal, conceptual, and highly complex activity of the mind. As the paragraph closes, however, a curious tension is created. Just as in ‘Journées de lecture’, where Proust’s favourite sentence from Gautier’s Le Capitaine Fracasse proves to be a hybrid of invention and appropriation, so here the narrator imagines an ideal passage of Bergotte. 3 The effect of reading Bergotte is described in terms of writing: it is an act of inscription which traces ‘à la surface de ma pensée une figure purement linéaire’. Reading is a process of writing, the inscription or tracing of figures on our minds; the ideal experience of Bergotte, however, transcends the actual texts and the narrator’s reading of them. His successive acts of reading form an accretion of lines traced, a fuller experience whose sum effect is to add volume and solidity to his reading mind. From vague joy, musical effusiveness, and idealist philosophy, the transformative process of reading has yielded a rich distillate: ‘une sorte d’épaisseur, de volume, dont mon esprit semblait agrandi’. 3
See ‘Journées de lecture’, in CSB, 160–94 (175–6).
48
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
This claim for the effects of reading brings about something of a strain in the narrator’s prose: suddenly the language of concrete things (‘épaisseur’, ‘volume’) confers solidity on that most substance-less of entities, ‘l’esprit’. Moreover, the agent of this conferral is reading, a process which occurs precisely in the ethereal space between thinking beings (readers) and certain concrete things (books). This apparent contradiction may in fact highlight a continuity in the narrator’s perceptual powers: when he sees an external object, we were told, ‘la conscience que je le voyais restait entre moi et lui, le bordait d’un mince liséré spirituel qui m’empêchait de jamais toucher directement sa matière’ (I, 83). 4 The experience of even the most inconsequential material things is never quite fulfilled, yet through reading, such barriers (however fine) are abolished within the self (‘les obstacles et les séparations semblaient avoir été enlevés’) and even mind, the mental centre of the sentient individual, is injected with solidity and tangible form in a process which is the obverse of that which inserts around things a ‘mince liséré spirituel’. 5 Reading, in sum, like involuntary memory, is a powerful transformative process that yokes two entities which maintain the material and the spiritual in tension. On the material level are the book and the body of the reader; on a more ethereal level are the interpretive capacity or ‘esprit’ housed in the reader’s body, and the conceptual, ideational potential, housed in the book. At this stage in the narrator’s development, his awareness of this dynamic is barely inchoate, but it will develop within him as he matures. As I have already shown, transformative, creative processes are already taking place, as evinced by the description of the effects of reading as an inscription. 6 4 5
For a consideration of the passage including this statement, see Ch. 1 above. Reading also indirectly serves to sharpen the narrator’s experience of the phenomenal world: later in Du côté de chez Swann we read that ‘mes promenades de cet automnelà furent d’autant plus agréables que je les faisais après de longues heures passées sur un livre’ (I, 152). The enclosed, solitary nature of the act of reading sharpens his worldly receptiveness on his walks, but leaves him at this early stage still none the wiser as to the reasons for his resulting ‘ravissement’ (I, 153). 6 Continuing the parallelism between reading and writing suggested here, one might cite the narrator’s experience of the Martinville bell towers: material things take on volume and accessibility through a writing made possible, Charles du Bos argues, by a process of spiritual ‘exaltation’: see ‘Marcel Proust’(1921) in Approximations (Paris: Editions des Syrtes, 2000), 73–122 (73–87). Du Bos’s pages relating to the Martinville episode tellingly come under the title ‘Le Courage de l’esprit’. For a more recent assessment of the epistemological import of the episode, see Joshua Landy’s Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception and Knowledge in Proust, esp. Ch. 1, ‘Perspective (Marcel’s Steeples)’, 51–84.
Learning to Read
49
Bergotte’s digressive style appeals greatly to the narrator, who is disappointed when the former returns to the thread of his narrative. At this point the narrator’s role as a reader is that of a passive disciple awaiting instruction, to the extent that he looks to Bergotte’s printed views for verification of his own personal experience: ‘sentant combien il y avait de parties de l’univers que ma perception infirme ne distinguerait pas s’il [Bergotte] ne les rapprochait de moi, j’aurais voulu posséder une opinion de lui, une métaphore de lui, sur toutes choses, surtout sur celles que j’aurais l’occasion de voir moi-même’ (I, 94). Bergotte’s words are like pronouncements from a higher plane, and only they can render any experience valid or useful. From time to time, however, the narrator discovers in Bergotte a thought that he feels he had already had himself. The effect of this coincidence of the reader’s idea with that of his master is powerful: ‘mon cœur se gonflait comme si un Dieu dans sa bonté me l’avait rendue, l’avait déclarée légitime et belle’. 7 To read his own thoughts, as it were, from the pen of Bergotte is to gain assurance, legitimation of his own mental processes, an experience of the same order as that of tasting the tea-soaked madeleine, which provides the narrator with assurance of the continuity of his past in Combray in a similarly felicitous, vertiginous moment of realization. The importance of reading Bergotte is signposted as the narrator suggests that when later he began writing his own book as an adult, certain of his phrases would only seem passable and pleasurable once he had read similar ones in the pages of Bergotte: ‘ce n’était qu’alors, quand je les lisais dans son œuvre, que je pouvais en jouir’ (I, 95). Whilst in the Primal Scene of reading, Sand’s François le Champi takes the place of the father and forms a sort of enigmatic, transgressive bridge between the child narrator and his mother, here we have a scenario which constructs something like a Freudian family romance, at the same time as highlighting the centrality of reading in the narrator’s psychosexual development. In the ‘family romance’, the subject imagines that his relation to his parents is a modified one, that his ‘real’ father was noble, and/or that he is a foundling. 8 When the narrator comes across 7 For thorough analyses of religious language in Proust, see Margaret Topping, Proust’s Gods: Christian and Mythological Figures of Speech in the works of Marcel Proust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Stéphane Chaudier, Proust et le langage religieux: la cathédrale profane (Paris: Champion, 2004). 8 See the entry ‘Family Romance’, in Jean Laplanche and J-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books, 1973), 160–1, and Freud’s article, ‘Family Romances’, SE, ix. 235–41. See also Marthe Robert’s
50
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
remarks in a book by Bergotte which are analogous or related to some he has made himself, he comments that ‘il me sembla soudain que mon humble vie et les royaumes du vrai n’étaient pas aussi séparés que j’avais crus, qu’ils coïncidaient même sur certains points.’ 9 It is common enough to feel satisfaction and fellow feeling upon reading words one might have written one’s self, 10 but in the narrator’s language we find a trace (‘royaume’) of Freud’s family romance: Bergotte’s domain is the kingdom of truth, from which the narrator feels he may in fact himself have hailed. Indeed, he tells us that ‘de confiance et de joie je pleurai sur les pages de l’écrivain comme dans les bras d’un père retrouvé’ (I, 95), a remark not without significance in a novel where the father figure is conspicuously absent, the narrator’s mother and grandmother featuring far more prominently. Moreover, it should be noted that besides the relationship of Gilberte to her father, A la recherche is a novel fascinated by genealogy and heredity yet largely devoid of conventional family groupings. It is significant, then, that reading Bergotte is presented as being not just like encountering a father figure, but rediscovering one. The narrator, discovering Bergotte’s writing, invents for him a paternal role. In eventually producing his novel, it might be said that the narrator overcomes the textual father and asserts himself as capable of engendering his own valid thoughts in writing. 11 Further, characteristically for A la recherche, gender roles are ambiguous here: the writing of Bergotte, the textual father figure, is scorned by Norpois for displaying stylistic traits which are not traditionally ‘masculine’. He is a delicate ‘joueur de flûte’ who plays with ‘bien du maniérisme, de l’afféterie’ (I, 464); his works are weak: ‘jamais on ne trouve dans ses ouvrages sans muscles ce qu’on pourrait nommer la charpente’; in brief, his work is ‘bien mièvre, bien mince, et bien peu viril’ (I, 465). Such is the subjective nature of study of the family romance in fiction, Roman des origines et origines du roman (Paris: Grasset, 1972), esp. 41–78. 9 This comment highlights once again the similarity between the narrator’s experience of reading Bergotte and that of involuntary memory, when the past and present ‘coincide’, yielding ‘un peu de temps à l’état pur’. 10 Such sentiments are expressed in Wittgenstein’s Preface to the Tractatus, a work first published the year before Proust’s death: ‘Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already had the thoughts that are expressed in it—or at least similar thoughts’; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 3. 11 The oedipal overthrowing of, or writing against, one’s literary forebears is germane to Harold Bloom’s theory of poetic influence. See The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
Learning to Read
51
Norpois’s criticisms, which bring a notable degree of comedy to the text, delivered as they are with grave sincerity. 12 In parallel to his opening comments, the narrator’s final words about reading Bergotte relate to the musical quality of his prose: ‘Aussi je lisais, je chantais intérieurement sa prose, plus dolce, plus lento peut-être qu’elle n’était écrite, et la phrase la plus simple s’adressait à moi avec une intonation attendrie’ (I, 95–6). These words are no less subjective than those of Norpois above and, of course, are therefore not necessarily any more valid, but they serve to question once again what sort of aesthetic experience reading really is. 13 In A l’ombre des jeunes filles, when he has made the acquaintance of Bergotte, the narrator tells him that he feels comfortable in his company due to having ‘pris avec lui, depuis des années (au cours de tant d’heures de solitude et de lecture où il n’était pour moi que la meilleure partie de moi-même), l’habitude de la sincerité, de la franchise, de la confiance’ (I, 557–8). One notices the inclusion in this sentence of ‘confiance’, the feeling, coupled with joy, with which the narrator weeps over Bergotte’s pages in the present scene (I, 95). Moreover, we are reminded of the paradoxical nature of reading: through hours spent in isolation, in ‘solitude’, the narrator feels as if he has grown acquainted with another individual. As Proust has it elsewhere, reading can be just this, ‘une communication au sein de la solitude’, 14 quite at odds with the ‘communication’ we see so much of in the societal scenes of the novel, conversations like those so disparaged in CSB, where information is continually being transmitted, yet is seldom interpreted as the speakers intend. 12 That Bergotte should be characterized as effeminate fits him comfortably into the narrator’s broader frame of readerly reference, where texts by women (George Sand, Mme de Sévigné, Mme de Beausergent) or ‘about’ women (Phèdre) are prominent. For prominent figures among Proust’s own (male) influences, see Dominique Jullien, Proust et ses modèles; Annick Bouillaguet, L’Imitation cryptée: Proust lecteur de Balzac et de Flaubert (Paris: Champion, 2000); and Brian Rogers, Le Dessous des cartes: Proust et Barbey d’Aurevilly (Paris: Champion, 2000). See Rousset’s subsection ‘Les livres de chevet des personnages’, in Forme et signification, for a survey of what is read in the novel (150–64). For a wide-ranging conspectus of the field of reading in relation to gender, containing an excellent bibliography, see Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts and Contexts, by Patrocinio P. Schweickart and Elizabeth A. Flynn (eds.), (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); see also Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley, (eds.), Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2005). 13 The ‘intonation attendrie’ of Bergotte’s writing recalls the mother’s measured delivery of the Sand text: ‘elle insufflait à cette prose . . . une sorte de vie sentimentale et continue’ (I, 42). 14 ‘Journées de lecture’, CSB, 174.
52
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
Attention in the passage shifts from reading Bergotte’s work to his character as a person, a shift mirrored in the development of the novel as a whole. By reading Bergotte, the narrator strengthens his own belief in his fledgling artistic sensibility: in him he senses a kindred spirit and in his works he can feel confident and at home, in contrast to the feelings of uncertainty which were provoked by the initial reading experience of François le Champi. With Bergotte the narrator develops as a reader: ‘Je n’avais jamais lu encore de vrais romans’, we read early on (I, 41), yet in A l’ombre des jeunes filles the narrator is already capable of knowledgeably remarking with reference to Bergotte on the ‘transparente beauté de ses livres’ (I, 538). An education through reading takes place, evinced in casual asides, for example concerning ‘les œuvres anciennes que je savais par cœur’ (I, 433). In a similar fashion, Albertine develops the habit of reading a good deal when alone and reading out loud to the narrator when they are together (III, 572); indeed, she admits: ‘Pendant que vous dormez je lis vos livres’ (III, 673). Finally, although it is made as a self-effacing expression of embarrassment at his naivety when he is introduced into ‘le monde’, the narrator’s self-designation as ‘moi qui connaissais à cette époque plus de livres que de gens et mieux la littérature que le monde’ (II, 761) in fact represents an authentic realization of his personal and intellectual development since his beginnings as a reader (or rather as a listener) in Combray. He has become a reader, only to abjure the pleasures of reading for worldly entertainment: gone but remembered with fondness are the rich and spiritually enhancing afternoons spent reading in the garden at Combray (II, 345), which are replaced by what, with retrospect, the narrator terms ‘le stérile plaisir d’un contact mondain qui exclut toute pénétration’ (IV, 564). Whilst the novels of Bergotte and George Sand mark the beginnings of the narrator’s Bildung as a reader of literature, subsequent incidents provide challenging and illuminating conditions for the act of reading to occur in different contexts; it is to these scenes of reading that this chapter will now turn. From Balbec the narrator takes trips in the surrounding area with the ‘petite bande’, and on one of these trips engages in an act of reading which, for all its brevity, anticipates what will arguably become the mainspring of the novel he will write. ‘Quelquefois au lieu d’aller dans une ferme, nous montions jusqu’au haut de la falaise’, we read (II, 257), and on the cliff top one day Albertine gets paper and a pencil and ‘après s’être appliquée à bien tracer chaque lettre, le papier appuyé à ses genoux, elle me l’avait passé en me disant:
Learning to Read
53
« Faites attention qu’on ne voie pas. » Alors je l’avais déplié et j’avais lu ces mots qu’elle m’avait écrits: « Je vous aime bien » ’ (II, 264). This incident, an unprecedented, unprovoked expression of affection, gives an unequivocal statement of Albertine’s hitherto inscrutable feelings. One would expect some analysis from the narrator, a hermeneutist’s scrutiny of the manuscript text, a psychologist’s investigation of its motivation and effects; this, however, is not to be. The crucial act of reading goes unremarked by the narrator and immediately the text’s author debunks its merits: ‘ « Mais au lieu d’écrire des bêtises », criat-elle en se tournant . . . vers Andrée et Rosemonde, « il faut que je vous montre la lettre que Gisèle m’a écrite ce matin » ’. And so follow two pages of conversation and debate regarding Gisèle’s letter ‘from Sophocles to Racine’ in which the narrator plays next to no part. In a short paragraph which closes the scene he understatedly expresses the importance of this briefest of reading encounters: ‘Pendant ce temps je songeais à la petite feuille de bloc-notes que m’avait passée Albertine: « Je vous aime bien », et une heure plus tard, tout en descendant les chemins qui ramenaient, un peu trop à pic à mon gré, vers Balbec, je me disais que c’était avec elle que j’aurais mon roman’ (II, 268). This remark is indeed highly prescient as well as ironic: the ‘bloc-notes’ resurfaces in an image of reading with which the narrator communicates his jealous angst in the fraught pages of La Prisonnière. Gone is the sweet simplicity of the ‘billet doux’: Albertine’s connivances and prevarications leave a bitter taste in the narrator’s mouth. In that later scene, first, by analogy, he relates that ‘parfois l’écriture où je déchiffrais les mensonges d’Albertine, sans être idéographique, avait simplement besoin d’être lue à rebours’ (III, 598). As his thirst for knowledge grows, increasingly channelled into jealous inquisitions, he summarizes his state as follows: ‘j’aurais voulu non pas arracher sa robe pour voir son corps, mais à travers son corps voir tout ce blocnotes de ses souvenirs et de ses prochains et ardents rendez-vous’ (III, 601). Albertine’s note was easily deciphered and satisfied the narrator’s ‘amour propre’; Albertine as text, however, is a far harder interpretive proposition. Indeed, her very ‘unreadability’ could be said to be one of the central motors of much of the narrative. 15 His desire in La 15 In his ‘Translator’s Introduction’ to The Fugitive, Peter Collier emphasizes this point: the narrator’s desire for knowledge leads him ‘to a continual process of interpretation . . . of all the surface signs of meaning inscribed by individuals in their relations with him and society. . . . Marcel’s attempts to interpret Albertine are constantly deflected—by Aimé’s unreliable letters, by Albertine’s misinterpreted telegrams, by Marcel’s failure to
54
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
Prisonnière equates to a lust for knowledge: not a physical, phenomenal experience, but a more slippery intellectual knowledge, symbolized by a text, a notepad whose secret contents he yearns to read. 16 If the narrator’s ‘à la lettre’ reading of Albertine’s note highlights his naivety, his subsequent awareness of which is underlined by the echo of the incident in La Prisonnière, then the following similarly brief act of reading is evidence of his development into a more discerning type of reader. In Sodome et Gomorrhe, while ‘chez’ Verdurin, the narrator takes a moment ‘pour aller jeter un coup d’œil sur la lettre que M. de Cambremer m’avait remise, et où sa mère m’invitait à dîner’ (III, 336). The informational content of the letter is thus summarized in an instant; just six words suffice: ‘sa mère m’invitait à dîner’. The letter is described as ‘ce rien d’encre’, yet its true content according to the narrator is far greater than a simple dinner invitation. ‘L’écriture’, he tells us, ‘traduisait une individualité désormais pour moi reconnaissable entre toutes’, a statement itself not without significance when we consider the problems of confused identities caused by the ‘translation’ of Gilberte’s very individual handwriting by a telegraph employee in Albertine disparue. Here, though, reading for the narrator is not a simple process of equating arbitrary linguistic signs or signifiers with their conceptual referents or signifieds; rather, this reading takes place on the linguisticsemiotic plane, but what is conveyed (beyond the invitation to dinner) is heredity, culture, and social distinction. Written script gains a secondary semiotic function beyond the linguistic: même un paralysé atteint d’agraphie après une attaque et réduit à regarder les caractères comme un dessein sans savoir les lire, aurait compris que Mme de Cambremer appartenait à une vieille famille où la culture enthousiaste des lettres et des arts avait donné un peu d’air aux traditions aristocratiques. (III, 336) 17 recognize Gilberte at the Guermantes’. ‘All of these misreadings’, he continues, ‘could be seen as part of a general comedy or tragedy of social misunderstanding and psychological failure to grasp the nature of other people, as well as one’s own self ’, The Prisoner and The Fugitive (London: Penguin, 2002), p. xx. For a consideration of the troublesome notion of misreading, see Ch. 4 below. 16 For a reading of jealousy in La Prisonnière as knowledge-seeking, see Malcolm Bowie, ‘Proust, Jealousy, Knowledge’, in Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction, 46–65. For a counter-reading concentrating on self-deception, see Landy, Philosophy as Fiction, 85–100. See also Philippe Chardin’s chapter ‘La jalousie ou la fureur de lire’ for an engaging study of reading as an analogy for the actions of the jealous individual in ‘Un amour de Swann’, Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata and Svevo’s Senilità, in Proust ou le bonheur du petit personnage qui compare, 201–16. 17 Strictly speaking, someone ‘atteint d’agraphie’ would be incapable of writing; the condition that entails the inability to recognize writing is ‘alexia’. That said, the narrator’s
Learning to Read
55
Whilst one might well acknowledge the humour of the rather hyperbolic suggestion made as he continues that such an afflicted person would not only recognize the distinction of the de Cambremer family, but would also divine ‘vers quelles années la marquise avait appris simultanément à écrire et à jouer Chopin’, such suggestions, reflecting and parodying attitudes to education and upbringing in aristocratic circles in the nineteenth century, tell us at a deeper level a lot about the narrator’s interpretive faculties. First, he performs an unremarkable act of reading, then follows it with a complex and detailed analysis of the improbable fruits of his fleeting labour. Following a close reading of Mme de Cambremer’s stylistic traits (the three adjectives, for instance) the societal backdrop to the act of reading prises him from his reflection: ‘J’étais d’ailleurs gêné pour lire par le bruit confus des conversations que dominait la voix plus haute de M. de Charlus’ (III, 337). We are pulled back into the buzz of salon chatter, but we return furnished with evidence of a new side to our narrator: confused by François le Champi, and delighted by the crystalline musicality of Bergotte, he is now suddenly capable of reading between the lines, creating a nuanced ‘reading’ from a text with virtually no substantive content. He is able to get more out of a text, but the value of what he can discern as a reader is doubtful. Reading has been appropriated by the narrator for societal ends, and whilst his interpretation of the letter illuminates his sensitivity to style, for the moment, at least, it seems to do little to further his development as an artist. The question of what might be ‘other’ to reading has already been raised in the Introduction, and this particular scene sheds some further light on the matter. Occurring as reading does on the borderline between the material/corporeal realm of things and the immaterial/conceptual realm of ideas, it seems almost impossible to assert what it is one might consider as its other, or opposite. A la recherche presents many scenes of reading characterized by solitude and quiet ‘recueillement’, which facilitate the fruitful, illuminating quality of the act. Society life is not without what one might term ‘aesthetic opportunities’ (one thinks of musical recitals or theatrical performances), but these tend to be tainted by the occasion, coloured in some way by an awareness in the perceiving subject of the societal ‘arrière-plan’ against which they take place. The present scene might be interpreted as an example of message is clear: some written texts provide more inlaid interpretive markers than do others. For a consideration of this medical mix-up, see Donald Wright, Du discours medical dans ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’: Science et souffrance (Paris: Champion, 2007), 38–42.
56
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
the infiltration of the act of reading not just by an element of the environment in which it occurs (the loud voice of Charlus) but also by the standards and values of that environment: what the narrator gleans from the letter is all surface, substance-less societal froth in contrast to the far richer sensory-aesthetic returns of his earlier, solitary reading experiences. Society and reading are not mutually exclusive; indeed they are mutually illuminating and exist in tension, reciprocally providing counterweight and balance within the narrative. In the present scene societal mores prevail over the powers of reading, but, as will be seen in Chapter 5, in Le Temps retrouvé we see reading in a lasting manner shaping the narrator’s final society experience at the Guermantes’s matinee. Before that, in La Prisonnière, there occurs a scene of reading which in a way is a companion piece to the Cambremer letter scene. While Albertine is out, the narrator has Françoise bring to his room young girls he has observed from his window. He pays them extravagantly to perform pointless tasks or to run often spurious, invented errands and is highly susceptible to their youthful allure. One girl in particular, a milk maid, appeals to him until she is in the intimate proximity of his room: then she disappoints when ‘[elle] se trouva réduite à elle-même’ (III, 650). Having requested her assistance, the narrator cannot send her on her way without giving her a task to do, so he pretends to look in Le Figaro for an address to which he must send her. At this she grows petulant, and her attitude revitalizes his interest: ‘Je levai les yeux sur les mèches flavescentes et frisées et je sentis que leur tourbillon m’emportait, le cœur battant, dans la lumière et les rafales d’un ouragan de beauté’ (III, 650). This Baudelairean exaltation is soon cut short, however, by an act of reading which is at odds with itself, conventional yet illuminating because of its strangeness: Je continuais à regarder le journal, mais bien que ce ne fût que pour me donner une contenance et me faire gagner du temps, tout en ne faisant que semblant de lire, je comprenais tout de même le sens des mots qui étaient sous mes yeux, et ceux-ci me frappaient : « Au programme de la matinée que nous avons annoncée et qui sera donnée cet après-midi dans la salle des fêtes du Trocadéro, il faut ajouter le nom de Mlle Léa qui a accepté d’y paraître dans Les Fourberies de Nérine. Elle tiendra, bien entendu, le rôle de Nérine où elle est étourdissante de verve et d’ensorceleuse gaieté. » (III, 650–1)
With this there is a real surge in the epistemological current of the novel, which is intimately related to the dynamics of the act of reading. Once one has learned to read, when presented with a text written in a
Learning to Read
57
language one knows, one can but read, such is the conditioned nature of the connections made between the eyes and the brain when confronted with a textual stimulus. Through so much of the novel, Proust’s narrator is a searcher, a seeker of knowledge, a curtain-twitcher ever prying into others’ lives, as well as his own. This scene is characteristic of Proust’s remarkable ability to show us life in those moments when contingency muscles in on our ordered existence, on apparently anodyne or straightforward situations, and through a mundane process like reading a newspaper reveals and unleashes emotional and psychological energies quite unexpected in the circumstances. 18 This act of reading alerts us to what Beckett calls ‘the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, [in which] for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being.’ 19 Reading has been recognized as a reliable and efficacious mode of communication, instruction, and empowerment, yet the narrator is not actively engaged in seeking any such ends at the time of this upheaval: ‘Ce fut comme si on avait brutalement arraché de mon cœur le pansement sous lequel il avait commencé depuis mon retour de Balbec à se cicatriser. Le flux de mes angoisses s’échappa à torrents’ (III, 651). And these torrents spread initially over three dense pages of questions and jealous conjecture before the narrator remembers what he was doing before the floodgates opened: ‘Je m’aperçus que la petite laitière était toujours là’ (III, 654). She is paid five francs and sent packing, entirely unaware of the vast machinery of jealousy she has silently set in motion by her brief presence. By contrast to a paralytic afflicted by alexia, the narrator cannot look at the words before him and see just a blur of black and white. ‘Tout en ne faisant que semblant de lire, je comprenais tout de même le sens des mots qui étaient sous mes yeux’ (III, 650–1): thus the narrator articulates the same trauma of consciousness symbolized in Sartre’s Huis clos by the protagonists’ atrophied eyelids. As readers we are condemned to read, whether we want to or not. Whilst Mallarmé, privileging the text over the reader, depicted this situation from a different perspective, suggesting that ‘un livre ne commence ni finit: tout au plus 18 Concerned that she has an ulterior motive for going ‘chez’ Verdurin, the narrator has encouraged Albertine instead to go to the Trocadéro. The discovery that Léa, the illreputed actress of whom Albertine had spoken evasively at Balbec, will be there suggests to the narrator that Albertine had prior knowledge of this and has called his bluff. 19 Beckett, Proust, 19. Reading in this scene is a face of Habit, a symptom of the ontological dilemma Beckett describes. With his usual prescience and lucidity, Beckett describes this suffering as ‘the free play of every faculty’ (20), a comment whose importance will become apparent in the later chapters of this study.
58
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
fait-il semblant’, 20 a formulation which finds a contemporary avatar in Derrida’s assertion that ‘il n’y a pas de hors texte’, 21 the present scene from A la recherche underlines that it is impossible to ‘faire semblant de lire’. Reading is a process we can but be party to as long as our eyes can see, and its complexity lies in its simplicity, its automatic, conditioned nature. Finally, the interest in this scene lies in its showing us how reading is instinctual and potentially highly harmful. To read ‘for’ an aspect or detail of a text can be frustrating, depressing, exhausting; not to read is impossible, and the discoveries of ‘involuntary reading’ can be as tortuous as those of involuntary memory are edifying. 22 Beyond his own empirical experience of the act, the young narrator learns about reading from older, more experienced, readers. Before turning to these lessons in reading, which are illuminating in their own way, a crucial instance of the narrator himself reading remains to be analysed. The scene in question occurs in Albertine disparue and differs from those examined so far in one fundamental respect: in coming to his article in Le Figaro (IV, 147–52), the narrator reads not just as a reader but as an author. 23 We have seen him being read to, seen him reading in the sensorily charged atmosphere of the Combray garden, seen him immersed in Bergotte, bewitched by Albertine’s ‘billet doux’, charmed by the stylistic niceties of a courteous invitation letter, and bulldozed by the revelations of an act of involuntary reading. Now the narrator, not simply content with finally being a published ‘auteur’, struggles with attempts to read as an ‘autre’. 24 This final formative scene stages the psychological, intellectual tensions in the phenomenology of reading, an experiential process of communication, which is inherently rooted in the individual subjectivities involved. In this scene, we find the narrator 20
Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bertrand Marchal, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1998–2003), i. 1036; hereafter O.c .. 21 Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 227. 22 In this respect, then, we might see involuntary reading of this ‘negative’ sort as a homology of ‘les intermittences du cœur’ and the positive sort of revelation or experience of ‘coincidence of mind’ felt whilst reading Bergotte as a homology of the ‘moments bienheureux’. Moreover, note how the qualities of Léa’s performance (‘étourdissante’, ‘ensorceleuse’) connote instability and delirium: for an exploration of these central tenets of the experience of reading, see below, Ch. 4. 23 It should also be noted that this scene is remarkable in that it is a positive, relatively upbeat, passage from the otherwise dark pages of Albertine disparue. See Ch. 4 below for an analysis of the acts of reading which punctuate that volume of A la recherche. 24 Emmanuel Lévinas, in his essay ‘L’autre dans Proust’, does not touch on the act of reading, but argues nevertheless that ‘Le mystère chez Proust est le mystère de l’autre’; see Noms propres (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1976), 147–56 (152).
Learning to Read
59
in many ways attempting to emulate the actions and perspective of the readers of A la recherche, an endeavour which sheds much light both on his development as an artist and on our role as receivers and interpreters of written text. 25 As in the darkened bedroom at Combray, or indeed in the reading of François le Champi with his mother, in this scene the narrator is recumbent and withdrawn from physical activity. His mother deposits his mail on the bed and quickly exits: the space of reading is deemed a quiet and private one, and allow the narrator to be alone and undisturbed, Françoise is made to leave (IV, 147); with this once again the ‘dehors’/‘dedans’ division is set up, which featured so prominently in the Combray garden scene. However, before there is any actual reading, almost a complete page of digression intervenes, on the servant mentality and the narrator’s matitudinal movements. He is initially non-plussed by the sight of the post, which seems to consist only of newspapers, the reading of which is less than urgent (IV, 147). As he opens the curtains, with the light of day from outside comes a sentence charged with sensory references and reminiscence. ‘Dehors’ and ‘dedans’ are linked by colour and heat, and simultaneously different levels of time are connected and interwoven by dint of their common sensory denominator: ‘le ciel qui était rose comme sont à cette heure dans les cuisines les fourneaux qu’on allume, me remplit d’espérance et du désir de passer la nuit et de m’éveiller à la petite station montagnarde où j’avais vu la laitière aux joues roses’ (IV, 147–8, my emphases). From the containment of the bedroom the narrator opens up the compass of his description, out to the skies and into the kitchens and ovens of unknown houses; diachronically, also, he reaches back to a vague mountain resort and the object of a fleeting erotic encounter. After this sudden expansion, the narrator inserts the simplest of sentences announcing a refocusing of attention and the main business of the scene: ‘J’ouvris Le Figaro’ (IV, 148). 26 25 A number of aspects of this scene make it most intriguing: the narrator’s attempted projection into the position of the readers outside the novel creates a fascinating set of conceptual issues with which to grapple; further, the text in question (the Martinville vignette), although not reproduced in this passage, is one we have in fact read before in an earlier form in ‘Combray’, a fact that distances us from the hypothetical ‘firsttime’ readers whose responses the narrator is at such pains imaginatively to recreate here; finally, the narrator’s account of the text, his view of its qualities, and its impact on him as its creator are quite at odds with the account given of the exultation and euphoria of its genesis in ‘Combray’. 26 Jean Milly provides a genetic account of this scene and an analysis of some of its implications in his short essay ‘L’article dans Le Figaro’, published 14 February
60
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
This moment of reading is one for which the narrator and his readers are well prepared. In Le Côté de Guermantes he tells us: ‘J’avais rejeté à mes pieds Le Figaro que tous les jours je faisais acheter consciencieusement depuis que j’y avais envoyé un article qui n’y avait pas paru’ (II, 643). Later, in La Prisonnière, once again we read: ‘J’ouvrais Le Figaro. J’y cherchais et constatais que ne s’y trouvait pas un article ou prétendu tel, que j’avais envoyé à ce journal et qui n’était, un peu arrangée, que la page récemment retrouvée, écrite dans la voiture du docteur Percepied’ (III, 523). Finally, just a hundred pages later we read: ‘Françoise m’apporta Le Figaro. Un seul coup d’œil me permit de me rendre compte que mon article n’avait toujours pas passé’ (III, 626). The words ‘J’ouvris Le Figaro’ have become a marker of a sort of ‘scène manquée’ we have already encountered a number of times. 27 Readerly anticipation is minimal, then, in the present scene and still not quite ignited by the narrator’s reaction on opening his newspaper: ‘Quel ennui!’ is his initial response to the title of the main article, which is the same as that which he had submitted for publication. The conjunction ‘mais’ begins the narrator’s next sentence (the third of eight which begin in that fashion in just three pages), whose syntax suggests reported thoughts, marked by his dismay at apparently being plagiarized. As he reads, he is shocked: ‘Cela, c’était trop fort. J’enverrais une protestation’, but then he cuts himself short again. A new sense stimulus—the noise of Françoise outside the door—steals his attention from the text in hand. Just as the narrator’s thoughts on the servant mentality interrupted his concentration before, now we have Françoise’s grumbles cited in full, a corroboration of his earlier comments, and a detail which suggests a complete switch of his attention from a visual stimulus back to an auditory one. A fourth leading ‘Mais . . . ’ returns us to the act of reading, and yet more indignation: ‘Mais ce n’était pas quelques mots, c’était tout, c’était ma signature . . . ’. The narrator’s sentence comes to an uncertain finish with an ellipsis, a sort of hiatus after his revelation of what is of most significance to him: in his eyes, the authenticity of the article is provided by the signature, the mark of origin. A final short sentence peaking with an exclamation mark completes the moment of 2007 on Acta Fabula, A la recherche d’Albertine disparue, www.fabula.org/colloques/ document476.php Accessed 16 April 2007. 27 For an examination of the development of these scenes of reading Le Figaro from CSB through to the Recherche see Christie McDonald, ‘Da Capo: Accumulations and Explosions’, in Proust in Perspective: Visions and Revisions, 116–32, esp. 117–22.
Learning to Read
61
revelation and recognition: ‘C’était mon article qui était enfin paru!’ (IV, 148). Almost predictably the moment of joy is undercut by another ‘but’, which introduces yet another digression, an analysis of his mind’s slowness to register what was before his eyes. What Proust’s readers experience here is something equivalent to just what the narrator’s words describe. His mind’s perceptual slowness is described in terms of an old man who must carry out movements or actions, once begun, to their completion, even if their unnecessariness is recognized before that time. In quite the same fashion, primed by the anticipatory scenes detailed above, readers may realize by this stage that what the narrator has before him must be his article, published in Le Figaro, yet we are ‘obligé[s] de terminer jusqu’au bout [notre] mouvement commencé’. This movement is our reading of the narrator’s extended metaphorical rendering of his interpretive slowness. The contrast is marked between this sluggishness and the sudden incisive nature of the interpretive actions carried out in the previous Figaro scene, that of the ‘involuntary reading’. It is as if Proust were telling us that under no circumstances can we control the act of reading, even when the text in question is by our own hand. Finally, a sense of forward movement returns with the progressive ‘Puis je considérai’; the digression is over, or perhaps suspended, and attention (ours and that of the narrator) may return to the act of reading proper. The narrator’s chosen image connects us back to the ovens being lit in kitchens up and down the country. His figuring of the newspaper is at once culinary, religious, and intellectual: je considérai le pain spirituel qu’est un journal, encore chaud et humide de la presse récente et du brouillard du matin où on le distribue dès l’aurore aux bonnes qui l’apportent à leur maître avec le café au lait, pain miraculeux, multipliable, qui est à la fois un et dix mille, et reste le même pour chacun tout en pénétrant à la fois, innombrable, dans toutes les maisons. (IV, 148)
The newspaper is nourishing, edifying, somehow organic and vital (‘encore chaud et humide’). The religious parallels are clear; as the new century develops, citizens of the secular age look to the presses for their daily bread. Newspapers are ‘pain miraculeux, multipliable’, like the biblical loaves and fishes, but representative of a modern age of commerce, mechanical reproduction, and consumption. 28 The nature 28 The feeding of the five thousand is itself a multiplied event in the Bible: it is the only one of Christ’s miracles to appear in all four gospels, just as the narrator’s scenes
62
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
of the newspaper as physical object features initially, as has been noted, but what emerges as the narrator’s main focus is the disseminating power of the printing press: the newspaper is at once one and ten thousand. This force of multiplication, inset with its echo (‘pli’) of the repeated mechanical folding involved in newspaper production, intrigues the narrator all the more because it is his own thoughts that are being reproduced. What previously had remained interior and private has become public property, divulged and disseminated by Le Figaro. Reading, then, is a mode of consumption for the masses, and the process on which authors rely as a means, simply put, of entering the minds of others. The process of reading another person’s thoughts fascinates the narrator: he recognizes the magnitude of the event of publication and wants to understand it as profoundly as he can. What follows is an attempt at constructing, or at least identifying, a general phenomenology of the act of reading. This is no simple task and its difficulty is increased by the narrator’s eagerness to read as an other: ‘Pour apprécier exactement le phénomène qui se produit en ce moment dans les autres maisons, il faut que je lise cet article non en auteur, mais comme un des autres lecteurs du journal’ (IV, 148). Implicit in this statement is a belief that an author does not read his or her own work in the same way as he or she would the work of someone else. The phrases that frame this sentence, ‘Ce que je tenais en main ce n’est . . . ’/‘Ce que je tenais en main ce n’était . . . ’, emphasize the tangible physicality and concreteness of the newspaper, the previously ethereal thoughts made flesh, as it were, in manipulable printed pages. The idea of embodiment is introduced by the narrator to suggest that written or printed texts are introjected by their readers: ‘Ce n’était pas seulement ce que j’avais écrit, c’était le symbole de l’incarnation dans tant d’esprits’ (IV, 148). 29 If reading is the incorporation of thoughts, the assimilation of written text by the brain, to elucidate the phenomenology of an act so different for each individual will be a daunting task. ‘Aussi pour le lire’, the narrator excitedly continues, ‘fallait-il que je cessasse un moment d’en être l’auteur, que je fusse l’un quelconque of reading the Figaro are multiple. Moreover the article, when it appears, transpires to be the Martinville vignette, ‘the written account: produced in the first volume, shown to the diplomat Norpois in the second, revised and sent to the Figaro in the third, anxiously awaited in the fifth, published and circulated in the sixth’ (Landy, Philosophy as Fiction, 54). 29 We might read in this phrase a distant echo of the effects of reading Bergotte, which give a sense of volume and solidity ‘dont [son] esprit semblait agrandi’ (I, 93).
Learning to Read
63
des lecteurs du journal.’ The narrator sets up a syntactical parallel here between his copy of the newspaper—‘l’un quelconque des dix mille’— and the notional individual whose reading he would like to emulate: ‘l’un quelconque des lecteurs du journal’. He believes that to experience the phenomenon occurring in other houses at the same time he must somehow take on the character of ‘just any one’ of the paper’s many readers, in the same way that his copy of the paper is ‘just any one’ of the ten thousand-odd published. This, however, is a false parallelism: these two apparently equivalent ‘quelconque’s are in fact quite opposite. A copy of a daily newspaper is ‘quelconque’ in that it is no different from any of the other copies from that day’s print run; by contrast, a ‘lecteur quelconque’, however much that individual may have in common with his or her fellow readers of a daily paper, is inherently idiosyncratic, subjective, ‘autre’. The phenomenology of the act of reading is different for every single reading subject, and every single act of reading; newspapers, like printed books, on the other hand, are mechanically reproduced artefacts with no individuating characteristics between copies. 30 The project of discovering ‘le phénomène qui se produit’ is doomed to failure from the outset, then, on every level save the subjective: I can only read as and for myself, never as ‘un lecteur quelconque’, for the simple reason that this figure does not (cannot) exist. 31 In his attempt to objectify the reading experience, the narrator in fact renders its subjective nature more acutely recognizable to us. Walter Benjamin, by contrast, casts reading in a different light when he offers an interpretation of the functioning of newspapers quite at odds with the narrator’s consideration of them here. ‘Man’s inner concerns’, writes Benjamin, do not have their issueless private character by nature. They do so only when he is increasingly unable to assimilate the data of the world around him by way of 30 For a consideration of the narrator’s remarks concerning the specificity of particular exemplars of books one has read, in the context of ‘rediscovering’ François le Champi in the Guermantes’s library, see Ch. 5 below. 31 Just as the question of writing and (gender) difference in literature in French has brought about the notion (among others) of ‘écriture féminine’, so the study of reading has seen its share of difference-/gender-oriented theorizing. See Badia and Phegley (eds.), Reading Women; Flynn and Schweickart (eds.), Gender and Reading; and Emma Wilson Sexuality and the Reading Encounter; as well as Hermione Lee, Reading in Bed: An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 21 October 1999 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Jonathan Culler, ‘Reading as a Woman’, in On Deconstruction, 43–63; and, above all, Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (London: Methuen, 1986), esp. ‘Reading Woman (Reading)’, 1–24.
64
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
experience. Newspapers constitute one of many evidences of such an inability. If it were the intention of the press to have the reader assimilate the information it supplies as part of his own experience, it would not achieve its purpose. 32
Reading newspapers for Benjamin, then, is a sort of second order experience, not really an experience at all. To seek to discover the phenomenon that occurs during acts of reading for him would clearly be futile, and would miss the point of the purpose newspapers serve. This is not the view of the narrator, however, and he continues in his quest. Reading for him resembles writing: a necessarily subjective, self-centred act, whatever the motives behind it. Before this act can be analysed, however, the narrator interrupts himself with yet another ‘but’, this time introducing a concern he has, voiced as a straightforward question: ‘le lecteur non prévenu verra-t-il cet article?’. The notion of preparedness, being ‘prévenu’, is central to thinking about reading and plays a prominent role in the error-ridden scenes during the Venice episode later in Albertine disparue (IV, 230–5) which are considered in Chapter 4. Intent on imitating the ‘lecteur quelconque’, the narrator tells us that he unfolds his newspaper distractedly, ‘comme ferait ce lecteur non prévenu’ (IV, 148–9). In this detail one recognizes the impossibility and therefore the comedy of what he seeks to achieve in this scene. Like a child, he tries to playact the situations of the readers he cannot be. The impossibility of this pursuit is underlined by two further interruptive ‘mais’. The first introduces an ironic remark on the article’s length: ‘Mais mon article est si long que mon regard, qui l’évite (pour rester dans la vérité et ne pas mettre la chance de mon côté, comme quelqu’un qui attend compte trop lentement exprès) en accroche un morceau au passage’ (IV, 149). The parenthetical explanation of why he wishes to avoid his article verges, again, on the comical. The narrator in his moments of playacting oddly wants to remain within the bounds of truth, a notion which recalls what he described as his goal in ‘Combray’: ‘le secret de la vérité et de la beauté . . . dont la connaissance était le but vague mais permanent de ma pensée’ (I, 87). The parenthesis states his desire to leave nothing to chance, contradicting his wish to be ‘non prévenu’, but perhaps also bears the mark of the trauma caused by the chance reading which revealed Léa’s presence at the Trocadéro. 32 Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 152–96 (155).
Learning to Read
65
With the second ‘mais’, however, the narrator highlights the futility of this urge to overcome contingency, since with regard to those who do notice the main article, and who do actually read it, many of them, he opines, will pay no heed to the signature. This signature is the mark of authentication as far as the narrator is concerned, yet by trying to read as ‘l’un quelconque des lecteurs du journal’, it is precisely the identity, character, and subjectivity represented by this signature that he wishes, albeit briefly, to rescind. Personal experience confirms his fears (‘je serais bien incapable de dire de qui était le premier article de la veille’, IV, 149), and this reaffirms to Proust’s readers what progressively stands out more and more in this passage: that reading is habitually and inescapably subjective. The more the narrator tries to scrutinize the act of reading and understand its workings from the outside, the more inscrutable we realize it is and the more impossibly challenging seems his task. 33 Indeed, in future, devote his attention as he might to the identity of leader writers, his pledge of allegiance to a rule of more careful reading is futile. His digressive image, introduced by yet another reluctant ‘mais’, which acknowledges the rather pointless nature of his pledge, is typical of the narrator’s image selection in such situations. It figures a jealous lover unsure of his partner’s fidelity, and reminds us of the broader canvas beyond the microcosm of the Figaro scene, which is the labyrinthine landscape of La Prisonnière and Albertine disparue. After voicing his fears about possible ‘lecteurs manqués’ (those who rise too early to catch the paper, those who have set off hunting), finally we reach an ‘Enfin’, which indicates perhaps the approach of a conclusion to these remarks, which we might summarize as the verbalized insecurities of a fledgling author. ‘Enfin’, we read, ‘quelques-uns tout de même le liront’. The bathos of this short line is powerful, as the grandeur of the putative ten thousand copies of the paper, penetrating so many homes and infiltrating so many minds, is now reduced to a rather humble handful, just ‘quelques-uns’. The narrator cannot pick these readers: they are contingent, but he seems resigned to this, and 33 Laying bare the complexities of what we normally take to be a straightforward action in this way has a forceful and challenging reflexive function here for readers of the Recherche. Deliriously we sit back and consider just what a plurality of demands are being made of us, just how fallible are the faculties on which we rely in our interpretive acts. Despite the narrator’s exposure here of the manifold difficulties of the hermeneutist, we his readers must mirror his resilience and push blindly onwards, trusting our instinct and drawing as best we can on the lessons learned on the journey so far.
66
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
even these (happy?) few are qualified with a concessive ‘tout de même’. Resigned as he may be, finally, and after several false starts, the narrator begins to read: ‘Je fais comme ceux-là, je commence’ (IV, 149). His reading is naive and short-sighted, not unlike his attitude in the inaugural scene with François le Champi in ‘Combray’, or when he receives Albertine’s note. His status as author-reader blinds him to the very subjectivity that inheres in interpretation, against which he has been battling until now in his quest for the impossible status of ‘lecteur quelconque’. He believes that ‘la pensée de l’auteur est directement perçue par le lecteur’, whilst in fact ‘c’est une autre pensée qui se fabrique dans son esprit’. This remark highlights the multiple points of narratorial perspective in A la recherche du temps perdu, but perhaps more importantly it serves reflexively to interpellate the reader in her task, to ask questions of the act in which she is engaged. How do we perceive the thoughts of the narrator? Can we process them efficiently? Do we assimilate or adapt? The narrator’s supporting image here is one of communication, or more aptly miscommunication. The belief that authors’ thoughts are directly grasped by readers is akin to believing that ‘c’est la parole même qu’on a prononcée qui chemine telle quelle le long des fils du téléphone’ (IV, 149). The transformational processes of telecommunication, which render the voice into immaterial pulses of electrical energy, are implicitly equated to the dynamic performance, the synapses of the reading mind, and with this image again Proust’s readers are implicitly questioned: are we reading naively?; are we ‘prévenus’?; can our practice of reading do justice to our author’s intentions? What becomes central in the narrator’s description here is the ‘moment’ of reading. The discovery of how it is to read as another proving impossible, the narrator now turns in on himself, ‘au moment où je lis’. As he reads, he notices that ‘au moment même où je veux être un lecteur quelconque, mon esprit refait en lisant mon article’ (IV, 149). By identifying the agent of this rewriting as his ‘esprit’, the narrator recalls the site of his article’s effects on its readers—‘c’était le symbole de l’incarnation dans tant d’esprits’ (IV, 148)—as well as the imagined effects of the ‘ideal’ Bergotte: ‘[qui] auraient donné une sorte d’épaisseur, de volume, dont mon esprit semblait agrandi’ (I, 93). Reading and writing, then, are both rooted in the fertile soil of ‘l’esprit’. The latter may be seen as the individual’s central communications exchange where different lines in and lines out intermingle, constantly carrying and processing streams of information, both psychical-intellectual and
Learning to Read
67
sensory-somatic. 34 Now that the narrator recognizes this and identifies the subjective nature of reading, he gives a more positive analysis than was conveyed by the earlier, somewhat downcast, ‘tout de même’: ‘Ainsi pour chaque partie que le lecteur précédent semblait délaisser, un nouvel amateur se présentant, l’ensemble de l’article se trouvait élevé aux nues par une foule’ (IV, 149). A great crowd of readers, all independent of spirit, now replaces the ‘lecteur quelconque’ and the ‘quelques-uns’. Far from concluding with this apotheosis, the narrator’s paragraph simply carries on in its vast flow, expanding like dough under kneading hands. He will go on to imagine some of his acquaintances reading his article, and, introducing this theme, he states that ‘il en est de la valeur d’un article si remarquable qu’il puisse être, comme de ces phrases des comptes rendus de la Chambre . . . : une partie de sa beauté . . . réside dans l’impression qu’elle produit dans ses lecteurs’ (IV, 149–50). 35 If this is the case, then what of the text that tells us so? The comment comes in a lengthy and intricate sentence, almost exactly halfway through a paragraph some three pages long. The effect of Proust’s text on his reader at this point, as at many points in the novel, is one of strain, of interpretive difficulty. Much of Albertine disparue challenges its readers, and now it goads them into an analysis of their own act. According to the narrator, an author’s thinking ‘ne se réalise complète que dans l’esprit de ses lecteurs’, and this assertion arrests our reading at a moment of tension: are we capable of this final process in the act of creation? An author’s accomplishment is at a remove from her writing desk or computer terminal: it comes in the form of connections made between the components and circuits of the most complex of information storage and processing systems: the reading mind. This being the case, Proust here displays the gamble he takes by 34 Charles du Bos characterized Proust by what he called the latter’s ‘courage de l’esprit’, his intellectual persistence, the ‘éternel recommencement’ of his analyses, his unstinting mental stamina. The following remarks are germane to the present passage: ‘On trouverait difficilement des textes où soit poussée plus avant l’étude de l’effort intellectuel, du va-et-vient d’opérations multiples dont il s’accompagne et auxquelles l’organisme tout entier participe’, Approximations, 80. 35 In the abridged form given here, this image seems straightforward enough; it is, however, trimmed down to its bare bones, with some seven or eight lines of fleshingout removed. The text omitted here, the ‘Chambre des députés’ imagery, is a reworking of earlier reading-related material which appears in Le Côté de Guermantes (II, 764–5), where the narrator refers to a notional ‘lecteur de bon sens’ and to how the way newspapers report the spoken word can effect one’s interpretation of it. The subtlety of politicians is a ‘finesse d’interprétation souvent désignée par la locution “lire entre les lignes” ’. By contrast, the reading practice of the masses is one which tends to ‘prend[re] tout à la lettre’. This same material is itself reworked from CSB, 227–8.
68
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
writing in such a sinuous, demanding fashion, writing sentences whose full comprehension (if such a thing exists any more than a ‘lecteur quelconque’), can come about only through patient and attentive rereadings. 36 Still the paragraph continues as the narrator imagines readers of different social positions and occupations (Mme de Boigne, ‘le chancelier’, le duc de Noailles) taking in literary nourishment in their own ways. After describing imagined conversations regarding the reading of the newspaper, the narrator returns to his moment of reading. Once again, the point of view voiced by him is unavoidably that of the article’s author: ‘je puisais autant de sentiment de ma force et d’espoir de talent dans la lecture que je faisais en ce moment que j’y avais puisé de défiance quand ce que j’avais écrit ne s’adressait qu’à moi’ (IV, 150). The narrator somehow now feels confident as a reader in the company of the reinstated ‘dix mille approbations qui me soutenaient’, despite earlier in the paragraph voicing his concerns about those who would misinterpret or pass over his article. In his moment of confidence, his faith in reading is ballasted by a rare showing of self-belief. His imagery returns to the sensual register we now associate with some of the scenes of reading in the novel. The narcissism of the name returns (he imagines ‘la répétition de mon nom’), and now he visualizes the reading experience of others as a phenomenon driven by him, or at least by his name: to read his article is to experience sensually charged moments of illumination, to be as if possessed by his luminous presence. His authorial monomania subliminally redistributes the letters and sounds of the palindromic phrase ‘mon nom’ liberally throughout the sentence: Je voyais à cette même heure pour tant de gens, ma pensée ou même à défaut de ma pensée pour ceux qui ne pouvaient la comprendre, la répétition de mon nom et comme une évocation embellie de ma personne briller sur eux, colorer leur pensée en une aurore qui me remplissait de plus de force et de joie triomphante que l’aurore innombrable qui en même temps se montrait rose à toutes les fenêtres. (IV, 150, my emphases)
In his imagination the scene is observed (‘je voyais’), as well as being verbally constructed (note the etymological presence of the narrative voice 36 Roland Barthes remarks on the necessity of re-reading in S/Z: ‘Ceux qui négligent de relire s’obligent à lire partout la même histoire’, 70. Calinescu studies this passage from Barthes, and relates it to Proust in Rereading, 51–6; see also Christine Cano’s remarks that Proust’s unfulfilled desire at the end of his life was to be able to reread his entire manuscript, Proust’s Deadline, 111–12.
Learning to Read
69
in ‘une évocation’). The sounds of ‘embellie’ are picked up approximately in ‘personne briller’, an effect one might deem synaesthetic, given the visual image the words themselves convey of the signature as an illumination or star. Sound echoes are exploited again in the second visual figuring of the effects of the signature: the golden sound of ‘colorer’ reappears in ‘force’, and is twice present in the ‘aurore’, itself a repetition from early on in the passage (‘on le distribue dès l’aurore’, IV, 148). The doubling of gold in this word (homophonically ‘or-or’) adds to the accretion of colour which was begun with the quasi-Homeric rosefingered dawn, the impression of which struck the narrator as he opened his curtains at the start of the passage, and which brings the description to its conclusion here (‘se montrait rose à toutes les fenêtres’). The focus on the visual is maintained (‘Je voyais Bloch, les Guermantes’) as the narrator continues the imagined tour of his acquaintances reading his piece. His two central concerns (the ‘lecteur quelconque’ and the ‘moment même’ of reading) resurface in the same sentence. The narrator attempts to read from outside his subjective self, cannot, and in realizing this implicitly acknowledges the multiple nature of the self: ‘au moment même où j’essaie d’être un lecteur quelconque, je lis en auteur, mais pas en auteur seulement’; he cannot be just a reader or just an author. One cannot be one, it seems, without being, on some level at least, the other. 37 Finally, the ‘lecteur quelconque’ is recognized as an invention, ‘l’être impossible’ of the narrator’s imagination. When he read his sentences through as he wrote them, they seemed so far from the ideal he had envisaged and was attempting to express that all they do is ‘accentuer en moi le sentiment de mon impuissance et de mon manque incurable de talent’ (IV, 151). Now, however, the narrator changes his angle of approach. Rather than attempting to read his own article as a ‘lecteur quelconque’, he tries to read the piece for himself, but while imagining it to have been written by someone else. This change in strategy in his self-deception seems to yield far more agreeable results: maintenant, en m’efforçant d’être lecteur, si je me déchargeais sur les autres du devoir douloureux de me juger, je réussissais du moins à faire table rase de ce que j’avais voulu faire en lisant ce que j’avais fait. Je lisais l’article en m’efforçant de me persuader qu’il était d’un autre. Alors toutes mes images, toutes mes réflexions, toutes mes épithètes prises en elles-mêmes et sans le souvenir de 37 As George Steiner has argued, ‘latent in every complete act of reading is the compulsion to write a book in reply’. See ‘The Uncommon Reader’, No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1996 (London: Faber., 1996), 8.
70
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
l’échec qu’elles représentaient pour mes visées, me charmaient par leur éclat, leur imprévu, leur profondeur. (IV, 151)
Having first felt ‘impuissance’ and ‘manque de talent’, now he can feel charmed by his work from a superficially objective point of view. 38 Of the three nouns representing facets of the narrator’s writing, two (‘éclat’ and ‘profondeur’) are commonly associated with colour and sound, whilst the third, yet again, is taken from the lexis of the visual— ‘imprévu’. The narrator’s reading and his vast paragraph come to an end at last; but not for long. Amusingly, his immediate concern is with starting over: ‘à peine eus-je fini cette lecture réconfortante . . . que . . . je souhaitai de la recommencer immédiatement’ (IV, 151). That a single newspaper article should require re-reading in order that it might fully be appreciated underlines the vastness of the task set to the reader of A la recherche by the novel as a whole and by its intricately related component parts. Proust’s is a work which benefits from re-reading, requires re-reading for its myriad accomplishments to be appreciated, from the nuance of the single word to the ‘majestic respiratory rhythm’ of whole volumes within the work. 39 The narrator in summary describes his act of reading here as reassuring: despite only satisfying himself, he has apparently annulled his earlier voiced concern about not reaching an audience. He mentions getting Françoise to buy him further copies of the paper, so as to massage his ‘amour-propre’ (that quality affected by Albertine’s ‘billet doux’) by touching with his own hands ‘le miracle de la multiplication de ma pensée’. As if this were not enough, he elaborates that opening further copies of the paper would be to ‘lire, comme si j’étais un autre monsieur qui vient d’ouvrir Le Figaro dans un autre numéro les mêmes phrases.’ And with this it becomes evident that the message has not sunk in: the narrator still yearns, impossibly, to read as another. However, such are the tensions within the individual that it is often difficult simply to read without the act being impinged upon or affected by other areas of our life, by contingency or obligation. ‘L’intérêt de la lecture’, mentioned in the 38 His initial disappointment on writing the article reported here is rather at odds with the earlier account of the article’s joyous inception during the ride in Doctor Percepied’s carriage. See I, 177–80. 39 For the development of this image, see Malcolm Bowie, Proust Among the Stars (London: HarperCollins, 1998), pp. xiv–xvi. See also Christine Cano’s remarks regarding the reading time required for Proust’s novel, prompted by Anatole France’s notorious complaint that ‘Life is too short and Proust is too long’: ‘the brevity of life and the length of Proust remain fatally pitted against one another, underscoring the inevitable implication of actual lived temporality in the reading process’, Proust’s Deadline, 1.
Learning to Read
71
Primal Scene in the garden, still grips the narrator. By this point in the novel he is undoubtedly much further down the path towards his artistic vocation than when he read in the ‘petite guérite d’osier’, but a long distance remains to be travelled. 40 George Sand was an introduction to the mysteries of literature; the summer afternoons opened the narrator’s eyes to the competing demands made by life on the mind, body, and senses; Bergotte gave him faith in his creative capacities, only for them to be stultified by society life, whose mores he recognized in his reading of Mme de Cambremer’s letter. With his article finally published in Le Figaro, however, the narrator’s literary path ultimately seems clearer, more plausible and alluring. Hereafter, he thinks, it may be the act of reading that will link him to worldly society: ‘si l’état de ma santé continuait à s’aggraver et si je ne pouvais plus les voir, il serait agréable de continuer à écrire, pour avoir encore par là accès auprès d’eux, pour leur parler entre les lignes, les faire penser à mon gré, leur plaire, être reçu dans leur cœur’ (IV, 152). 41 These are high expectations indeed, pinned on an act whose difficulties and unpredictability have just been narrated at length. Showing maturity quite at odds with the myopia of the earlier comments on the ‘lecteur quelconque’, now the narrator changes tack somewhat, voices his actual disdain for ‘le monde’ and comes to a conclusion which at this stage is hypothetical, but once again will prove to be prescient when the revelations of Le Temps retrouvé come to light: ‘peut-être écrire m’ôterait l’envie de les voir, et la situation que la littérature m’aurait peut-être faite dans le monde, je n’aurais plus envie d’en jouir, car mon plaisir ne serait plus dans le monde mais dans la littérature’ (IV, 152). Reading his own work seems not only to shed light on the functioning of reading in general but also permits the narrator to reflect on the dynamics of self/other relations. ‘Interpréter un texte’, writes Barthes, ‘ce n’est pas lui donner un sens . . . c’est au contraire apprécier de quel pluriel il est fait’. 42 Reading the Figaro article alerts the narrator to the plurality of his own text and the intricately subjective nature of the reading encounter. This in turn alerts him—and his readers—to the parallel plurality of the self, miniaturized here in the conundrum that one is never just author, reader, or observer. As a reader one is, to a degree, always self and always 40 As Jean Milly has it in ‘L’article dans Le Figaro’, this scene represents ‘un point nodal entre le passé du héros et la résurrection littéraire de ce passé.’ 41 For a development of the notion of reading between (or straying from) the lines, see Ch. 4 below. 42 Barthes, S/Z, 11.
72
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
other, a lesson the narrator is not yet fully ready to take on board. It is not, however, solely by his own heuristic explorations that he learns to read: crucial in his formation are the lessons he learns from acts of reading carried out by other individuals (Swann, Elstir, Norpois, ‘l’amie de Mlle Vinteuil’) whose respective practices serve as models—good and bad—of the beguiling interpretive process we call reading. It is to these ‘lessons’ that I shall now turn.
3 Lessons in Reading On ne découvre aucune vérité, on n’apprend rien, sinon par déchiffrage et interprétation. Gilles Deleuze 1
The earliest instructive scene of reading in which the narrator is not directly involved takes place in ‘Un amour de Swann’ (I, 273–79). It is fundamental to our understanding of the development of Swann’s relationship with Odette and the way in which his actions adumbrate those of the narrator. One afternoon, quite by chance, Swann decides to call on Odette at home, unannounced. Advised by the concierge that she is in, he rings, thinks he hears a noise, but gets no response: ‘Anxieux, irrité, il alla dans la petite rue où donnait l’autre face de l’hôtel, se mit devant la fenêtre de la chambre d’Odette; les rideaux l’empêchaient de rien voir, il frappa avec force aux carreaux, appela; personne n’ouvrit’ (I, 273). Angered and suspicious, he leaves, returning an hour later, when he is received and given an excuse for the earlier lack of response. Odette had been sleeping, she claims, and although Swann’s ringing woke her, she did not get to the door in time. His suspicions will not allow him to accept this story and immediately he sets about imagining what it could be that she tries so hard to conceal with feigned annoyance at having missed his visit. The reality that his mind strives silently to imagine as they talk is one ‘de laquelle il ne posséderait jamais que ces mensonges, illisibles et divins vestiges’ (I, 274). In moments like this we encounter in Swann’s character the great thirst for knowledge which also develops in the narrator as he matures. Swann’s concerns are grave: ‘Il eut l’idée que ce n’était pas seulement la vérité sur l’incident de l’aprèsmidi qu’elle s’efforçait de lui cacher, mais quelque chose de plus actuel, 1 Gilles Deleuze, Proust et les signes, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964; 4th edn. rev., 1970), 11.
74
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
peut-être de non encore survenu et de tout prochain, et qui pourrait l’éclairer sur cette vérité’ (I, 276). The notion of truth, whether or not it is ascertainable, and its desired demonstration or concealment, is problematic to say the least. Swann displays symptoms in this scene of the near-pathological condition that in Albertine disparue leads the narrator to describe his predicament as that of being ‘ballotté . . . toujours entre le désir de savoir et la peur de souffrir’ (IV, 102). 2 In the present scene Proust shows us contingency revealing tensions and trauma for which the individuals involved could not hope to prepare. When Swann tries to leave, Odette keeps him from the door, and shortly afterwards he hears a sound ‘comme si repartait une personne’. Suspicious, Swann reflects that ‘rien qu’en venant à une heure où il n’en avait pas l’habitude, il s’était trouvé déranger tant de choses qu’[Odette] ne voulait pas qu’il sût’ (I, 277). A break from habit plunges Swann into one of Beckett’s ‘perilous zones in the life of the individual,’ 3 and the disturbance and disequilibrium of the scene will only increase. Odette takes up ‘plusieurs lettres qu’elle avait sur sa table et lui demanda s’il ne pourrait pas les mettre à la poste.’ Ruffled by his jealous concerns, Swann omits to post the letters; realizing this, ‘il retourna jusqu’à la poste, les tira de sa poche et avant de les jeter dans la boîte regarda les adresses’ (I, 277). Thus is narrated the fateful moment, the crucial, unintended, involuntary act of reading whose force shapes the rest of the scene, and Swann’s future relationship with Odette. Among letters for merchants one stands out: it is addressed to Forcheville, Swann’s rival, and to read its contents might be to discover the reality of Odette’s relations with him. To open the letter, however, would be to betray a confidence, to intrude; yet at the same time, Swann reflects: ‘c’est la seule manière de me délivrer d’un soupçon peut-être calomnieux pour elle, destiné en tous cas à la faire souffrir et que rien ne pourrait plus détruire, une fois la lettre partie’ (I, 277). 4 Odette has put Swann in the position of the ‘facteur de la vérité’, in several senses, but he is unable to dispatch the 2 The parallels which will be highlighted here between Swann, the narrator, and Proust’s readers in their respective acts of interpretation, are implicitly acknowledged by Gilles Deleuze: ‘Le chercheur de vérité, c’est le jaloux qui surprend un signe mensonger sur le visage de l’aimé. C’est l’homme sensible, en tant qu’il rencontre la violence d’une impression. C’est le lecteur, c’est l’auditeur, en tant que l’œuvre d’art émet des signes qui le forcera peut-être à créer, comme l’appel du génie à d’autres génies’ (119). 3 Beckett, Proust, 19. 4 This suggestion reflects an attitude to reading in A la recherche identified by David Ellison in an analysis of a different scene: ‘that which reading seems to promise as the logical result of its unfolding—the unveiling of truth in the luminosity of a successful hermeneutics—is in fact the hopeful projection of a subjectivity that prefers not to
Lessons in Reading
75
letter, desirous as he is to discover for himself the truth or truths it may contain, despite its not being addressed to him. 5 Reading the address is just a first step, a rudimentary process of identification; the act of reading proper lies ahead. The potential repercussions of reading the letter to Forcheville make Swann uncertain of how to proceed. He returns home with it, and the illumination referred to figuratively in describing Swann’s desire to discover the truth of Odette’s actions (‘quelque chose . . . qui pourrait l’éclairer sur cette vérité’, I, 276) returns in his actual manoeuvres: ‘Il alluma une bougie et en approcha l’enveloppe qu’il n’avait pas osé ouvrir’ (I, 277). The structuring of the scene of reading takes on a form we have already seen. The opposition of ‘dehors’ and ‘dedans’ is implicit here, but privileged above all else is the notion of opening, the verb ‘ouvrir’. When Swann first called, Odette did not dare ‘open’, and now as Swann stands on the brink of discovering her reasons for this, he himself dares not carry out an equivalent act. The opening does not take place; instead we are presented with a ‘reading through’ which bears some of the traits (but not the same outcome) of the scene only a few pages earlier in which Swann jealously tries to check up on Odette by knocking on her window at night: ‘Il savait que la réalité de circonstances qu’il eût donné sa vie pour restituer exactement, était lisible derrière cette fenêtre striée de lumière, comme sous la couverture enluminée d’or d’un de ces manuscrits précieux à la richesse artistique elle-même desquels le savant qui les consulte ne peut rester indifférent’ (I, 270). In that scene, in which the notion of discovering the truth also figures strongly, Swann’s ‘reading’ is grossly flawed: the window that he thinks will open to offer up the true ‘réalité de circonstances’ is not in fact Odette’s. In miniature in the present scene Swann has more success in negotiating the barrier to his discoveries, the envelope in which the letter is stored: ‘D’abord il ne put rien lire, mais l’enveloppe était mince, et en la faisant adhérer à la carte dure qui y était incluse, il put à travers sa abdicate its control over the complexity of the sign or become overwhelmed by the rhetoric of lying’ (The Reading of Proust, 93). 5 ‘Le facteur de la vérité’ is the title of Derrida’s critique of Lacan’s seminar on Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’, published in La Carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 439–524. The concerns of Derrida’s complex, many-layered text are informative and germane to this Proustian scene; see also the sui generis opening section of La Carte postale, ‘Envois’ (5–273), where the nature of communication, of love, of the relation between Socrates and Plato, and the efficacity of the postal service are painstakingly assessed and interrogated in fragmentary texts that form one side of a lengthy correspondence.
76
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
transparence lire les derniers mots’ (I, 277). And with this, the envelope, apparently opaque but in fact transparent, takes on the characteristics of an aperture or opening. Swann’s reading is doubly transgressive, crossing the line of Odette’s trust, and the protective enclosure of the envelope. Like the narrator excitedly feeling the contours of the books given to him in a parcel for his ‘fête’, Swann sets about his surreptitious deciphering of Odette’s letter. 6 His initial reactions suggest a positive outcome to his preliminary prying: ‘C’était une formule finale très froide’. Swann’s reading tells him what he wants it to, which is that Odette, in writing at least, is less familiar with Forcheville than with him. However, it seems doubtful that Swann should be able to come to such a conclusion so quickly from what the narrator emphasizes is a very complicated manipulative act (his conclusion, indeed, may be based on a ‘première méprise sur les prémisses.’) He can read only a small section of writing at a time, by shifting the card in its envelope so that the script shows ‘sous la partie de l’enveloppe qui n’était pas doublée, la seule à travers laquelle on pouvait lire’. Progressively it seems that Swann’s attempted reading of the letter is a re-enactment not only of the earlier scene where he knocked on the wrong window but also of his movements that afternoon, when his call was not answered. Hours before, unanswered upon ‘addressing’ Odette, Swann moved outside her house (or ‘envelope’) to inspect ‘l’autre face de l’hôtel’, but like the double thickness of the envelope the curtains of Odette’s room ‘ne laissaient rien voir’. The contents of the letter reveal Odette’s motivation for her actions, and are veiled by the envelope as her actions were by the curtains. From what he can gather at first from the thinner section, or ‘window’ in the envelope, Swann has nothing to worry about; or so he tries to assure himself: ‘il s’agissait d’un petit événement sans importance et qui ne touchait nullement à des relations amoureuses’ (I, 278). This assertion is based on suddenly managing to decipher a previously unclear word which illuminates the sense of the whole phrase. And the word that creates Swann’s interpretive opening? ‘[O]uvrir’. ‘« J’ai eu raison d’ouvrir’, he reads, ‘c’était mon oncle »’. The 6 Cf. J. Hillis Miller’s remark: ‘Reading is not of the text as such, but of the thing that is latent and gathered within it as a force to determine in me a re-vision of what has been the latent law of the text I read’, which is highly appropriate here, where the text ‘as such’ is not read, but its driving force—Odette’s infidelity—is teased out through the semi-transparency of the envelope by Swann’s frantically active mind. See The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 120.
Lessons in Reading
77
view through the window becomes a little clearer: Odette’s opening on Swann’s return marked Forcheville’s hasty departure. With this revelation the paragraph ends, and, given the context, that which follows it begins with the most enigmatic of openings: ‘Alors’, we read, ‘il lut toute la lettre’. Without being told that Swann did in fact open the letter, and given the bit-by-bit, fragmentary nature of his reading up to this point, the verb ‘lire’ is placed under a lot of pressure here. Given the unlikeliness of Swann actually being able to read ‘toute la lettre’ through a small section of its envelope, ‘lire’ here takes on a broader sense of understanding or comprehension. The physical opening, the breaking of the letter’s seal (if such an opening takes place), is omitted, elided like so many crucial details of Swann’s life, 7 yet it is the word ‘ouvrir’ that permits the completion of Swann’s reading. Does the letter (or card), despite (or because of ) its interception, reach its destination? We do not know if Swann dispatches the letter to its intended recipient, or if he discards it, unopened, but nevertheless stripped of its secret content: on these details the text is left ‘open’. What is certain is that just as Swann’s reading re-enacted his afternoon visit to Odette, her letter to Forcheville recycles elements from her earlier letters to Swann, which he almost certainly read less attentively than the present piece of correspondence. 8 Once again his first reported reactions to his reading of the ‘entire’ letter are positive, but clearly led by his desire to have the upper hand over Forcheville. He tries to convince himself that this is so, since Odette sent Forcheville away, and wrote a mendacious letter covering up the identity of her caller. This view, however, neglects to account for why Odette prior to this lied to Swann about what she had been doing when he first called. His self-deception does not last for long, and the painful reality of the situation is narrated in terms of ‘opening’: ‘Et pourtant, s’il n’y avait rien entre Odette et Forcheville, pourquoi n’avoir pas ouvert tout de suite . . . ?’ (I, 278). This question can be seen to function on various levels. It might be interpreted as a reflection from Swann: if nothing was going on between Odette and Forcheville, he could have opened the letter straight away and proved 7 8
His marriage and his death, for example. cf. Swann’s reading of Odette’s handwriting, which is made up of ‘des caractères informes qui eussent signifié peut-être pour des yeux moins prévenus le désordre de la pensée, l’insuffisance de l’éducation, le manque de franchise et de volonté’ (I, 219): this earlier experience of reading a letter from the same correspondent is blurred by his preparedness for what is contained in the letter. For a consideration of the role of being ‘prévenu’ in reading, see Ch. 2, above; for remarks on Freud’s acknowledgement of this habit in reading, see Ch. 4 below.
78
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
his suspicions wrong; equally, if Forcheville’s presence in Odette’s room was innocent, why were the curtains not open when Swann rang? Vertiginous possibilities, explanations, and obfuscations all leave Swann in a delirious state comparable to that of the narrator after the Primal Scene: ‘Swann restait là, désolé, confus, et pourtant heureux’. Indeed, there are some suggestive parallels to note here: Swann seeks to decipher a mysterious and lacunary discourse, ‘delivered’ to him by the object of desire, just like the narrator in the Primal Scene with his mother; similarly, the complex, unstable, yet highly compelling act of reading takes place in the context of a triangular relationship, darkened for Swann/the narrator by the threat of a rival. 9 In sending Odette’s letter, he should have been the purveyor of a false message to Forcheville. By reading this falsehood, however, Swann unearths the truth obscured by the other lies (‘illisibles et divins vestiges’) Odette had told him; thus, the hidden truth of the ‘lettre volée’ arrives all the same at its destination. 10 Swann studies the letter in its envelope, ‘à travers le vitrage transparent de laquelle se dévoilait à lui, avec le secret d’un incident qu’il n’aurait jamais cru possible de connaître, un peu de la vie d’Odette, comme dans une étroite section lumineuse pratiquée à même l’inconnu’ (I, 278). 11 His act of reading, then, has been the illumination he had somehow envisaged before even being aware of the existence of the bundle of letters. He had hoped to shed light on the ‘truth’ of his afternoon visit and, for all his confusion, the language used (‘vitrage transparent’, ‘dévoilait’) is that of illumination and revelation. He believes he has discovered, as through ‘une étroite section lumineuse’, the truth he sought, Miller’s ‘latent law of the text’, proof of Odette’s infidelity. 12 Unfortunately for Swann, however slim this incision or opening into the unknown may have been, 9 The heady, ‘delirious’ nature of the act of reading as seen here might be considered as an avatar of the scenes of readerly ‘délire’ discussed below in Ch. 4. 10 It should be noted that the narrator himself later goes through a similar scene with the letters Albertine keeps in her kimono. He finds himself in the position of being able illicitly to access the letters as Albertine sleeps, but he does not yield to temptation, for the fear of what his discoveries might entail. In Philosophy as Fiction, Joshua Landy analyses this scene in some detail in his section ‘The Unpurloined Letter’ (85–91), identifying a possible model in Musset’s La confession d’un enfant du siècle. 11 Another parallel suggests itself here: the substitution of ‘Mlle Vinteuil’ for ‘Odette’ in this phrase would succinctly describe the narrator’s voyeuristic discovery made from his position outside the window at Montjouvain. 12 Indeed, ‘lumineux’ has the metaphoric meaning of ‘ce qui répand la vérité dans l’esprit’: see Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, ed. by Alain Rey, 3 vols. (Paris: Dictionnaires le Robert, 1998), ii. 2067.
Lessons in Reading
79
from it emerges the contagion-like spread of his jealous feelings, which dominate the remainder of the paragraph (I, 278–9). ‘Sa jalousie s’en réjouissait’, we read, and this jealousy will take a grip on his existence that nothing will be able to loosen. Suffering will stem from his jealousy, his suspicion of moments when Odette may have been able to deceive him, and such is the deep-rootedness of these feelings, that no palliative is to be found. This scene of reading, like the Combray garden scene, is structured by the opposition of ‘dehors’ and ‘dedans’. When Swann notices Forcheville’s address on the envelope, his desire is to know ‘ce qu’il y a[vait] dedans’ (I, 277) and, by extension, to discover the inner workings of Odette’s relations. Now that reading has unearthed a truth (Odette’s mendacious nature, if not her infidelity) from among the lies, what Swann derives above all from his discovery is a sort of exogenous punishment: ‘Swann ne savait pas inventer ses souffrances. Elles n’étaient que le souvenir, la perpétuation d’une souffrance qui lui était venue du dehors’ (I, 279). Inquisitive reading is shown to be a fairly sure means of discovering information which would otherwise be kept hidden; however, as Swann discovers to his cost here, there is no guarantee of the nature of the revelations one’s reading will facilitate. For Lacan the ‘lettre volée’ in Poe’s text was a ‘lettre en souffance’; for Swann we might say it becomes a ‘lettre de souffrance’. 13 Swann’s reading of the letter here, the narrator’s reading scenes on his own and with his mother in ‘Combray’, and his later act of ‘involuntary reading’ in Le Figaro all point towards reading’s potential as an activity that can be both powerfully compelling and highly threatening: it can enlighten us and just as often destabilize us, shake our preconceptions, and question our relations with others and with the environment in which we live. Swann is a man of learning and intelligence, yet he is quite unprepared for the revelations of this act of reading. 14 He is left in a tangle of conflicting emotions, whose prevailing effect is to swell his jealousy; the affective, emotive power of the reading encounter is not to be underestimated. Indeed, when the narrator is far from full intellectual 13 For Derrida’s reading of the concept of the ‘lettre en souffrance’ on which Lacan ends his seminar, see La Carte postale, 472. 14 Charlus in La Prisonnière suffers in a similar way from reading a letter not addressed to him: he happens across and reads ‘par mégarde’ a letter to Morel from Léa, the notorious lesbian actress (III, 720), but the circumstances of the reading are not given in anything like the detail of the scene just examined; rather, it is the enigmatic nature of the contents of the letter that attracts most narrative attention.
80
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
maturity, yet already partially aware of his artistic potential, comments made by Norpois provide a lesson in reading which leaves him highly disturbed. He relates how his father, when Norpois was at the house, ‘n’hésita . . . pas à m’envoyer chercher un petit poème en prose que j’avais fait autrefois à Combray en revenant d’une promenade. Je l’avais écrit avec une exaltation qu’il me semblait devoir communiquer à ceux qui le liraient’ (I, 447). This communication, however, does not take place: Norpois returns the vignette without passing judgement. His diplomatic silence expresses his feelings clearly enough, however, much to the narrator’s disappointment. Norpois’s criticisms of Bergotte were noted above in Chapter 2, and although the following passage, which immediately precedes them, does not narrate an act of reading as such, it gives an idea of contemporary notions of the role played by art and reading in life: Dans un temps comme le nôtre où la complexité croissante de la vie laisse à peine le temps de lire, où la carte de l’Europe a subi de remaniements profonds et est à la veille d’en subir de plus grands encore peut-être, où tant de problèmes menaçants et nouveaux se posent partout, vous m’accorderez qu’on a le droit de demander à un écrivain d’être autre chose qu’un bel esprit qui nous fait oublier dans des discussions oiseuses et byzantines sur des mérites de pure forme, que nous pouvons être envahis d’un instant à l’autre par un double flot de Barbares, ceux du dehors et ceux du dedans. (I, 464–5) 15
In this statement, plainly marked by Norpois’s instinctive recourse to rhetoric, the ‘dehors’/‘dedans’ binarism is now used by him to enforce his point about the contemporary climate of political instability. He eventually remarks on the narrator’s piece: ‘On voit dans ce que vous m’avez montré la mauvaise influence de Bergotte’ (I, 465), and with this comes more disdainful critique. In Bergotte, Norpois perceives ‘chinoiseries de style’ and ‘subtilités de mandarin déliquescent’, readings quite removed from the narrator’s joyous, epiphany-like impressions of spiritual kinship experienced upon reading the words of his putative ‘père retrouvé’. He is distraught: ‘Atterré par ce que M. de Norpois venait de me dire du fragment que je lui avais soumis, songeant d’autre part aux difficultés que j’éprouvais quand je voulais écrire un essai ou seulement me livrer à des réflexions sérieuses, je sentis une fois de plus ma nullité 15 For a contemporary treatise on what, how, and why one should read, see Emile Faguet, L’Art de lire (Paris: Hachette, 1912). At times his sentiments echo Norpois: ‘il est évident que notre temps n’est pas et ne peut pas être celui des liseurs’ (108). Faguet was an ‘académicien’, author, and critic, whose work Proust pastiched: see ‘Dans un feuilleton dramatique de M. Emile Faguet’ (published 1922), CSB, 29–31.
Lessons in Reading
81
intellectuelle et que je n’étais pas né pour la littérature’ (I, 466). Where previously the writings of Bergotte had offered hope to the narrator, given a sense of solidity and volume to his fledgling mind (I, 93), now his father’s companion strips him of that hope: ‘Je me sentais consterné, réduit; et mon esprit comme un fluide qui n’a de dimensions que celles du vase qu’on lui fournit, de même qu’il s’était dilaté jadis à remplir les capacités immenses du génie, contracté maintenant, tenait tout entier dans la médiocrité étroite où M. de Norpois l’avait soudain enfermé et restreint’ (I, 466). The language of limitation and compression is striking (‘réduit’, ‘contracté’, ‘enfermé’, ‘restreint’) and the constrained fluidity of the narrator’s reading mind ironically recalls and contrasts with Norpois’s figurative ‘flot de Barbares’. Reading is mentioned in this scene by Norpois because he suggests that it is unsuited to the demands of modern life (‘la complexité croissante de la vie laisse à peine le temps de lire’). It is evident, however, that Norpois is a perceptive (if prejudiced) reader, no stranger to the act he vehemently denounces. The crippling effect of Norpois’s comments here goes some way towards explaining the narrator’s frantic urge, when his ‘poème en prose’ is finally published in Le Figaro (see Chapter 2 above), to imagine being a ‘lecteur quelconque’: such considerations serve as a screen or barrier to recalling Norpois’s scathing critique, the only readerly feedback he had until then on the piece. 16 While Swann’s jealousy and desire for Odette’s fidelity drive him to jump to conclusions in his reading which quickly prove ill-founded, and while Norpois’s remarks show the narrator how differently two individuals can react to the same text, we find in the painter Elstir someone who demonstrates that patience, precision, and attention to detail can be the difference between a disappointing reading experience and an exhilarating one. Before he first visits the church at Balbec, the narrator characteristically has imagined all its details for himself, has mentally sculpted the famous ‘Vierge du porche’. When he encounters the church 16 Indeed, later in Le Côté de Guermantes Norpois remembers the prose poem and describes it to the narrator as ‘une œuvrette un peu tarabiscotée où vous coupiez les cheveux en quatre’, something which ‘ne valait pas la peine que vous le posiez sur le papier’ (II, 519). He again criticizes the delicacy of Bergotte’s prose, stating that ‘le propre du romancier est plutôt de nouer une intrigue et d’élever les cœurs que de fignoler à la pointe sèche un frontispice ou un cul-de-lampe’ (II, 519–20). Norpois disparagingly detects in Bergotte’s prose what Mallarmé, in response to Proust’s charge of obscurity against the symbolists, believed to be ‘l’air ou chant sous le texte’ which ‘y applique son motif en fleuron et cul-de-lampe invisibles’. See ‘Contre l’obscurité’, in CSB, 390–5, and Mallarmé’s response, ‘Le Mystère dans les lettres’, in O.c ., ii. 229–34 (234).
82
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
façade in reality it is a gross disappointment. He finds it tarnished with the soot of the local baker’s ovens, bordered on by residential buildings, illuminated by the same light that shines over the humdrum frontage of the ‘Comptoir d’escompte’. In short, the church is ‘soumise à la tyrannie du Particulier’ (II, 20), mundane and too accessible, quite devoid of the exotic allure with which his imagination had invested the words so long lodged in his mind: ‘une église presque persane’. He mentions his disappointment to Elstir, he who ‘eut une influence si profonde sur ma vision des choses’ (II, 14), and the painter is quite taken aback: ‘Comment . . . vous avez été déçu par ce porche, mais c’est la plus belle Bible historiée que le peuple ait jamais pu lire’ (II, 196). What follows (II, 196–8) is a virtuosic ‘reading’ of this ‘Bible’, a sort of recitation or reading aloud of the sculptures and statuary that decorate the porch of the church. Elstir is an artist with a fine sensitivity to detail and craftsmanship, and his account of the church façade is a work of art in itself, a creative reconstruction given in the terms of poetry and translation. The porch, he claims, depicts a long poem of adoration, and, he exhorts, ‘Si vous saviez, à côté de l’exactitude la plus minutieuse à traduire le texte saint, quelles trouvailles de délicatesse a eues le vieux sculpteur, que de profondes pensées, quelle délicieuse poésie’ (II, 196). Elstir’s reading mirrors the original creative act of the sculptor; it is transformational, precise, ‘artisanale’. In a long paragraph (II, 196–7) he holds forth on the intricacies of the sculpted ‘text’, so little of which had been perceived by the narrator’s blinkered eyes. Proust’s source for the bulk of the description here is a detailed reading of Emile Mâle’s L’Art religieux du XIIIè siècle en France (1898); 17 put into the mouth of Elstir, the language of art history fuses scripture, sculpture, poetry, and painting in layer upon layer of detail. He summarizes in Dantesque fashion, contrasting starkly with the narrator’s earlier experience: ‘c’est tous les cercles du ciel, tout un gigantesque poème théologique et symbolique que vous avez là’. He had been incapable of seeing beyond the preformed mental image of his object of desire and thus unable to appreciate what his eyes actually had before them: ‘quand mes yeux pleins de désirs s’étaient ouverts devant la façade, ce n’est pas eux [‘cette vaste vision céleste’, ‘ce gigantesque poème théologique’] que j’avais vus’ (II, 197). Partially blinded, or ‘prévenu’, we might say, by desire, the narrator could not read the ‘text’ before him. Reading is shown to be a far more 17
See (II, 198), n. 1.
Lessons in Reading
83
nuanced process than the simple absorption of the signs and symbols with which one is presented, and the contrast of the two readings of the church façade shows that although reading is not a perceptual capacity we can activate or disengage at will, its achievements are without a doubt subject to blurring, interference, and distortion brought about by the powerful psychological forces of desire and over-determination. The two principal scenes of reading examined so far in this chapter are not conventional ones involving a reader and a written text, yet both provide vital evidence of the complexity of the act in which the narrator so frequently engages, and my analyses, particularly of the reading of the letter for Forcheville, show how intimately Proust’s scenes of reading interconnect with, and echo, each other as the narrative develops. The third of the narrator’s lessons in reading is unconventional but similarly enmeshed in the novel’s network of scenes of intense interpretive activity. It comes in La Prisonnière (III, 763–7) and highlights for the narrator just how powerful the creative capacities of the human mind can be when appropriately harnessed. ‘Chez’ Verdurin, listening to a piece of music being played for the first time, the narrator has a curious feeling of recollection. The music awakens in him feelings of joy, of sheer exaltation, whose source seems familiar, yet distant. Can this piece of music be by Vinteuil, composer of the sonata so dear to Swann? It is said of Vinteuil that ‘quand il était mort il n’avait laissé que sa Sonate, que le reste demeurait inexistant en d’indéchiffrables notations’ (III, 765). Vinteuil’s work, hitherto deemed non-existent because unreadable, is brought to life through an act of (re-)creative reading: his notes were ‘indéchiffrables, mais . . . pourtant avaient fini à force de patience, d’intelligence et de respect, par être déchiffrées par la seule personne qui avait assez vécu auprès de Vinteuil pour bien connaître sa manière de travailler, pour deviner ses indications d’orchestre: l’amie de Mlle Vinteuil’ (III, 765). The narrator explicitly reminds us of the events he saw through the open window at Montjouvain (I, 157–63); he clarifies that Mlle Vinteuil’s friend inherited the latter’s cult of her father and that, consequently, ‘c’est à cause de ce culte que dans ces moments où l’on va à l’opposé de ses inclinations véritables, les deux jeunes filles avaient pu trouver un plaisir dément aux profanations qui ont été racontées’ (III, 765). These ‘profanations’, our first introduction to the character of Mlle Vinteuil and her friend, played, as we know, an important role in the narrator’s psycho-sexual development. Lesbianism, sadism, and the profanation of a dead father are revealed ‘en bloc’ to the unsuspecting
84
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
narrator. The Montjouvain episode can be interpreted as a sort of Primal Scene whose dizzying initial impact is on a par with that of the night his mother reads to him in ‘Combray’: the narrator awakens in the undergrowth outside the window that frames the scandalous goings on, assumes the role of voyeur (like the infant in Freud’s case history), and witnesses the prelude to an act of sexual intercourse. The actions of the two young women are veiled in euphemistic terms of untold significance: ‘«Laisse donc tout ouvert, j’ai chaud, dit son amie.—Mais c’est assommant, on nous verra», répondit Mlle Vinteuil’ (I, 159). Immediately she utters these words, Mlle Vinteuil expresses a sort of feigned embarrassment that she may have been over-presumptuous with regard to her friend’s intentions; to imply discretion she adds: ‘«Quand je dis nous voir, je veux dire nous voir lire, c’est assommant, quelque chose insignifiante qu’on fasse, de penser que des yeux nous voient.» Needless to say, what is seen before the shutters are closed is not an act of reading. Lesbian relations and the horrors they will come to represent for the narrator become intertwined with the act of reading on an almost subliminal level. 18 The Montjouvain scene is a crucially important one in the narrator’s development and its relation to the Primal Scene with his mother becomes clearer here, since in both scenes reading is directly associated with unforeseen and incompletely comprehended discoveries of a sexual nature—brief and intense localized moments of revelation that translate into a set of perceptions and preoccupations that shape the subsequent development of his character and his attitude towards others. In both scenes discovery, transgression, uncertainty, and incompletion are dizzyingly conjoined, leaving the narrator reeling, or delirious, one might say. The room at Montjouvain is described as containing what was left of Vinteuil’s œuvre: ‘pauvres morceaux d’un vieux professeur de piano’, of which ‘quelques-uns inscrits sur des feuillets épars, illisibles, resteraient inconnus’ (I, 158). This, however, is not quite accurate: according to the narrator, through reading or ‘déchiffrement’, Mlle Vinteuil’s friend 18 The shadow presence of the Montjouvain ‘Primal Scene’ in the present scene corroborates Barbara Johnson’s interpretation of the Freudian scenario in her essay ‘The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida’: ‘the “primal scene” is not a scene but an interpretative infelicity whose result was to situate the interpreter in an intolerable position’. See The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 110–46 (142). It might indeed be argued that the ‘intolerability’ of the narrator’s uncertainty as to the origins of the septet brings about the ‘primal’ acuteness of perception that here renders his listening experience so intense.
Lessons in Reading
85
goes some way towards redeeming herself for the suffering she imposed on Vinteuil while he was alive. From a reading and translation of these sheets stems the music that stimulates the narrator’s revelation, ‘la plus étrange que j’eusse encore reçue’, at the Verdurin concert. He relates the remarkable fruits of the girl’s labours: ‘en passant des années à débrouiller le grimoire laissé par Vinteuil, en établissant la lecture certaine de ces hiéroglyphes inconnus, l’amie de Mlle Vinteuil eut la consolation d’assurer au musicien dont elle avait assombri les dernières années, une gloire immortelle et compensatrice’ (III, 766). Reading and transcription are described in terms of mysticism and magic (‘débrouiller le grimoire’, ‘hiéroglyphes inconnus’, ‘gloire immortelle’), which to an extent draw one’s attention away from some rather troubling jumps in the narrator’s reasoning at this point. He quite unquestioningly asserts that Mlle Vinteuil’s friend establishes a ‘lecture certaine’ of Vinteuil’s manuscripts and that this act is a redemptive one. How is it possible suddenly to claim certainty or authority for one’s reading? Moreover, in judging the friend’s act of translation a redemptive one, the narrator implicitly valorizes artistic endeavour as some kind of ‘higher plane’ activity capable of making good for actions carried out in other areas of life. The assumption upon which this value judgement is based is that somehow art is worth while, wholesome, and beneficial. Perhaps carried away by the dizzying experience of hearing Vinteuil’s septet for the first time, we see the narrator’s mind momentarily lose its ever-inquisitive edge, settling for comfortable, untested propositions. His presumptuousness as regards the effect and achievement of Mlle Vinteuil’s friend’s actions shows what we might call his aesthetic bias, manifested here by a blind, or at least blinkered, faith in transformational processes. In this vein he gives his description a further boundary-crossing twist: Comme dans les illisibles carnets où un chimiste de génie, qui ne sait pas la mort si proche, a noté des découvertes qui resteront peut-être à jamais ignorées, elle avait dégagé, de papiers plus illisibles que des papyrus ponctués d’écriture cunéiforme, la formule éternellement vraie, à jamais féconde, de cette joie inconnue, l’espérance mystique de l’ange écarlate du matin. (III, 766–7) 19
From being a ‘grimoire’ of hieroglyphs, Vinteuil’s manuscripts transmute through different textual incarnations as the narrator seeks to relay the grandeur and wonder of their translator’s alchemic performance. The prose deployed here mirrors this performance: the |k| sound with 19 Note again the unquestioned ‘value’ of what (‘la formule éternellement vraie’) Mlle Vinteuil’s friend achieves.
86
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
which the sentence begins returns twelve times, gives it its cadence, in ‘comme’, ‘carnets’, ‘découvertes’, et cetera; the |k| sound then dovetails with the staccato arrangement of |p| sounds that concatenates ‘papiers plus illisibles que des papyrus ponctués d’écriture cunéiforme’, a clause built around rich yet economical echoes of sound and sense. The semiotic riches of written expression and its translation are communicated in prose which strains at its moorings on the page, as sound units seemingly spawn those that succeed them, as in the taut patterning of ‘l’écriture cunéiforme, la formule éternellement vraie’, where syllables coalesce, cleave, and transmute, a phrase of forty-six characters which is in fact the expansion of an equation formed of just fourteen letters. Indeed, the sounds of ‘féconde’, the adjective that describes the characteristic of written communication so fruitfully exposed here, are anticipated in ‘ponctués’, ‘cunéiforme’, and ‘formule’, and echoed in ‘inconnue’, ‘mystique’, and ‘écarlate’. The labours of Mlle Vinteuil’s friend show reading to be a process of translation and formulation, at once gruelling and exhilarating; a close reading of the narrator’s description of this process involves us in a parallel performance of sensoryintellectual ‘déchiffrement’. Here Proust’s detailed patterning of his text draws us in and, as in the Figaro passage examined in Chapter 2 where the narrator explores the phenomenology of reading, having alerted us to the complexities of the activity in question he then puts our own interpretive capacities to the test, requiring of us a performance similar to that being described in these very lines. It was thanks to Mlle Vinteuil’s friend, he concludes, qu’avait pu venir jusqu’à moi l’étrange appel que je ne cesserais plus jamais d’entendre—comme la promesse qu’il existait autre chose, réalisable par l’art sans doute, que le néant que j’avais trouvé dans tous les plaisirs et dans l’amour même, et que si ma vie me semblait si vaine, du moins n’avait-elle pas tout accompli. (III, 767)
Before being exposed to Elstir’s reading of the Balbec church, the narrator’s own attempt leaves him painfully aware of his own ‘incapacité de savoir regarder’ (II, 21); subjected to Norpois’s criticism, his feeling is that of mediocrity and ‘nullité intellectuelle’ (I, 466). By contrast, the interpretive industry of Mlle Vinteuil’s friend turns the tables and reveals a new possibility, an alternative to the featureless ‘néant’ of his experiences to date. Attentive reading leads to illuminating writing, the effects of which are just what Swann had hoped for from his interpretation of Odette’s lies: from ‘illisibles et divins vestiges’
Lessons in Reading
87
(I, 274), come truth and enlightenment. That this display of the powers of the human mind to create art should stem from an act of reading-cum-translation is fundamental to the narrator’s belief in his own creative powers that grows through the closing stages of the novel. Indeed, when he announces in confident, aphoristic tone in Le Temps retrouvé that ‘le devoir et la tâche d’un écrivain sont ceux d’un traducteur’ (IV, 469), we can trace the development of this notion back, in part at least, to the present scene. To write is to read from one’s inner store of experience and to translate and transcribe that experience into textual form, just as Mlle Vinteuil’s friend translated the ‘illegible’ scrawls into discernable musical notation, which in turn may be interpreted and enjoyed. Readers might note a parallel here between Mlle Vinteuil’s friend and the narrator’s mother in the Combray Primal Scene: the friend’s reading of the ‘grimoire’ produces harmony and life-affirming aesthetic value as a form of redemption for transgressive behaviour at an earlier time; the mother’s reading, on the other hand, is described as if it were a successful reading of musical notation—she finds the correct yet unwritten tone and accent, not for a complex or unintelligible text but for Sand’s ‘prose si commune’ (I, 42). Her reading, however, is not redemptive but in fact rendered transgressive, through both its incompletion (she is, we recall, ‘une lectrice infidèle’) and the context in which it occurs. Each act of reading is superficially simple, yet each springs from wholly unstraightforward circumstances; below the surface each one catalyses and prolongs complex chains of effects, in which we find identity, sexuality, writing, and understanding intoxicatingly commingled. Reading and writing are not distinct: they are complementary strands of a rich and bewildering continuum. Although the closing section of Le Temps retrouvé is rich with readingrelated material, theorizing as the narrator does on the act itself as well as its role in his life and in those of the imagined readers of his as yet unwritten novel, the final, and influential instance of him reading a literary text occurs quite some time before his musings in the Guermantes’s library. 20 The scene (IV, 287–301) which forms a coda to the foregoing considerations of the narrator’s ‘lessons in reading’ sees the effects of the earlier scenes brought to bear on his reading of a literary text, ‘un 20 As Ch. 5 shows, it is significant that in the Guermantes’s library, although François le Champi provokes extensive commentary on reading and its role in his life, the narrator does not actually read any of the book; rather, his experience of it is an associative and sensory one.
88
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
volume du journal inédit des Goncourt’ (IV, 287). 21 Proust frames his pastiche (IV, 287–95) with the narrator describing the circumstances of his reading, which recall the incipit of A la recherche. The reading takes place ‘avant d’éteindre ma bougie . . . ce soir des veilles de départ où l’engourdissement des habitudes qui vont finir cessant, on essaie de se juger’. The Goncourt text is a sort of catalyst for a revealing selfanalysis that addresses the problematics of surface and depth, of ‘être’ and ‘paraître’, arising from a comparison of society life and the dynamics of reading a literary depiction of such a life. 22 After the pastiche comes an extended, highly thoughtful assessment of what reading the journal reveals of the narrator’s character and of the reading process itself. Before ‘transcribing’ what he reads, the narrator adumbrates what in part is the effect of reading the journal: ‘mon absence de dispositions pour les lettres, pressentie jadis du côté de Guermantes, . . . me parut quelque chose de moins regrettable, comme si la littérature ne révélait pas de vérité profonde; et en même temps il me semblait triste que la littérature ne fût pas ce que j’avais cru’ (IV, 287). With the intrusion of the Goncourt passage, Proust’s readers also find that literature is not quite what they had thought. Reading the journal crystallizes the narrator’s belief in his lack of ability in ‘the literary’ and suggests to him that the revelation of truth, the goal of his early reading at Combray, is one which is unattainable for him, yet we as readers outside the novel must recognize the complex meta-literary layering of this scene which, at every level, speaks of considerable ‘literary’ capacities in both its creator and narrator. The reflexive aspect of his concerns with reading becomes quickly apparent once the Goncourt passage ends: immediately the narrator begins reflecting on the grip sleep has over him, the grammatical 21 The status of the text in question here is problematic, as R. A. Sayce notes: ‘there is perhaps no point in the whole novel where the interplay of fiction and reality is so complex and so surprising’, ‘The Goncourt Pastiche in Le Temps retrouvé ’, in (ed.), Larkin B. Price (ed.), Marcel Proust: A Critical Panorama, (Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 102–23 (102). On this rich and intriguing passage of the novel, see also Jean Milly, ‘Le Pastiche Goncourt dans Le Temps retrouvé ’, which concentrates on the genesis and evolution of the pastiche (Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France, 71 (1971), 815–35); and Annick Bouillaguet, Proust et les Goncourt: le pastiche du ‘Journal’ dans ‘Le Temps retrouvé’ (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1996), which comprehensively assesses the role of the pastiche in Le Temps retrouvé and the relation of Proust’s work to that of the Goncourt brothers more generally. 22 As Vincent Descombes neatly summarizes in Proust: philosophie du roman (Paris: Minuit, 1987), ‘En lisant le récit par Goncourt de la soirée chez Verdurin, Marcel est accablé de constater que les habitués du petit clan paraissent remarquables dans le livre, alors qu’ils lui ont semblé nuls dans la réalité. Il ne sait que conclure, se demandant si c’est la littérature qui ment ou si c’est lui qui n’a pas su observer’ (306).
Lessons in Reading
89
subject of his sentence (‘Je m’arrêtai là’) slips into the first person plural form: ‘l’autre maître au service de qui nous sommes chaque jour’ (IV, 295). ‘Nous’ or ‘notre’ returns ten times in the short paragraph, tying its readers into the observations on sleep, and more importantly putting us on a level with the narrator: we have just read, unprepared, the same passage which, out of the blue, he read, having been lent the journal by Gilberte. The reflections that follow, then, may be in tension or in harmony with our own reactions to the Goncourt text. Whichever is the case, Proust’s readers and his narrator are in the same position vis-à-vis a literary text, and this commonality is exploited over the pages examined below. 23 ‘Je fermai donc le journal des Goncourt’, we are informed (IV, 295), in a fashion which echoes with a slight alteration the various scenes of opening the Figaro detailed above in Chapter 2. The structure of these scenes is reversed. When his article is published, what is presented is the narrator’s account of the effects of his reading experience as they occur to him; here, the narrator’s thoughts come retrospectively, once his reading is finished. ‘Prestige de la littérature!’, he exclaims on closing the book but this initial reaction may not be as positive as it seems: ‘prestige’ stems etymologically from the Latin praestigiae—‘jugglers’ tricks’, and originally had the sense of ‘deceptiveness’. Art as deception, or as a beautiful lie, is an age-old literary topos and is a prominent thread in the thematics of this scene. Indeed, it was present in the paragraph that introduced the pastiche: ‘il me semblait triste que la littérature ne fût pas ce que j’avais cru’ (IV, 287). The notion of reading as a process of discovering truth has long been present in A la recherche, and now there is a palpable tension in the text between the hermeneutic truth-seeking of the narrator-reader and the deceptive strategies of writers (Proust included), once thought to be simple revealers of the beautiful and the true. Understandably the narrator is perturbed—‘j’éprouvais un vague trouble’—again in a manner which reinforces the sense of instability, the headiness of reading that we shall explore further in Chapter 4 below. The details in which the journal revels were scarcely noticed by the narrator when he kept the company of the characters there depicted 23 Sayce ‘The Goncourt Pastichea’ in Le Temps retrouv´e ’, succinctly draws attention to the complex transactions going on between the different layers of fiction in the text, remarking that ‘of all the œuvres d’art imaginaires in the novel it [the pastiche] is perhaps the most dazzling because it is created and not merely described’ (120).
90
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
(‘Proust’s gallery of grotesques’, as Sayce puts it). 24 The remarks in the journal, the fiction enfolded within the fiction of A la recherche, add unprecedented complication to our reading experience. ‘Basin’, for instance, we are told, entered the realms of the literary as the young hero of the writings of (the also fictional) Mme de Beausergent. For the narrator, the impressions left by the Verdurins and their clan were by turns those of vulgarity and insipidness, quite in contrast to the charm discerned by Goncourt. The narrator’s ignorance of the ‘real’ qualities revealed by the journal is summarized by a line borrowed from Hugo which is quoted erroneously: ‘Et que tout cela fasse un astre dans la nuit! ’ (IV, 296). 25 The inaccurate quotation has a double edge to it, in that its error seems to support the narrator’s general belief that he has no literary talent, whilst at the same time the fact that he quotes at all, and from such a revered author, suggests an active readerly mind, albeit with a flawed memory. ‘Je résolus de laisser provisoirement de côté les objections qu’avaient pu faire naître en moi contre la littérature les pages de Goncourt lues la veille de mon départ’, we read (IV, 296), and with this the narrator takes an affirmative turn in his meditations: ‘je pouvais d’ailleurs me rassurer à divers points de vue. D’abord en ce qui me concernait personnellement, mon incapacité de regarder et d’écouter, que le journal cité avait si péniblement illustrée pour moi, n’était pourtant pas totale’ (IV, 296). This statement represents a rephrasing of the promise present in the conclusion to the septet ‘déchiffrement’ scene: ‘si ma vie me semblait si vaine, du moins n’avait-elle pas tout accompli’ (III, 767). In describing the character within him who is capable of observing and assimilating the world (again the ‘dedans’/‘dehors’ dyad), the narrator uses a keyword of the novel’s vocabulary of psychological theorizing: ‘c’était un personnage intermittent’. The narrator with an eye for detail is an intermittent character, activated only, he argues, when exposed to ‘quelque essence générale, commune à plusieurs choses’. However, this character, who recalls the ‘petit personnage intermittent’ within the narrator who is sensitive to changes in the weather (III, 519), and the ‘petit personnage intérieur’ subsequently likened to a philosopher happy only when he discovers a common trait between two works of art or two sensations (III, 522), is also activated and energized by the 24 25
Ibid., 117. The line, which should end ‘dans les cieux!’, concludes a poem from Hugo’s Contemplations. See (IV, 296), n. 1.
Lessons in Reading
91
act of reading. 26 Whilst Mlle Vinteuil’s friend was likened to someone deciphering the ‘illisibles carnets’ of a gifted chemist, now the narrator’s observant self is equated to ‘un géomètre qui dépouillant les choses de leurs qualités sensibles ne voit que leur substratum linéaire’ (IV, 296). Observation, interpretation, and assessment, when they occur in the course of everyday life, seldom remain everyday in their inscription in Proust’s novel. When such activities are undertaken, their agents become experts by analogy in fields of great specialization (after being a geometer, the narrator soon ‘becomes’ a surgeon, and a radiographer, IV, 296–7). After alluding to his geometer’s delight in the underlying lines that lend pattern to conversation, the narrator reveals that what he seeks in social intercourse is not what is said, but ‘un objet qui avait toujours été . . . le but de ma recherche parce qu’il me donnait un plaisir spécifique, le point qui était commun à un être et à un autre’. And so the shared characteristic, the constructional principle of metaphor, is announced as what maintained the narrator’s interest in ‘le monde’, and, indeed, it is what creates the dynamic of our reading of this scene. As readers of the narrator’s account of his life and his reading experiences, we share common ground with him: we have ‘met’ and become acquainted with the Verdurin circle through his eyes, and therefore we share his shock and uneasiness at being presented with such an unexpected picture of them in the journal. In this scene, being a reader of the Goncourt journal is a ‘point commun’ shared by Proust’s narrator and his readers. Fiction, reality, reading, and writing converge as we realize further that the text we share with the narrator is itself a sort of ‘point commun’, an accomplished pastiche of a literary commonplace well known to characters inside and readers outside Proust’s novel. The experience readers of A la recherche share with its narrator here is that of reading the features common to genuine Goncourt texts and to the pastiche. In grafting such a pastiche into his novel, Proust offers his readers a rare opportunity to evaluate their own reading performance over against that of the narrator in a way that does not occur with Bergotte, since his (imagined) works are never quoted at any length. It can be argued that reflexively the narrator’s self-evaluation in the light of his reading invites us to assess how far our own capacities as readers 26 Inge Crosman Wimmers comments on the first of these images in the context of a discussion of impressions that make a lasting impact on the narrator in her Proust and Emotion: The Importance of Affect in ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 121–2. See also Philippe Chardin, Proust ou le bonheur du petit personnage qui compare (Paris: Champion, 2006).
92
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
have developed: are we any closer to understanding our interpretive strengths? How clear is our readerly vision and our ability to understand ourselves in relation to the world we are continually attempting to read? Proust’s purpose in such reflexive moments seems to be coaxingly to assist in our development as readers, to put us in a better position to deal with the demands of reading and specifically to cope with the multiple challenges of his own beguiling book. The qualities of observation roused in the narrator by the act of reading, however, are distinct from those he displays in society life. Wearing his socialite mask, he ignores the external ‘qualités sensibles’ of his interlocutors, being more interested in the essence beneath, yet when reading, the intense cerebral engagement in the act often in fact provokes a heightened awareness of the sensory qualities of the environment in which he reads, rather as the moments of involuntary memory at once lift one out of and revitalize one’s connections with the environment in which they occur. The narrator moves on to consider the role of his mind in social interaction. With reference to the ‘point commun’ that provides his pleasure in such situations, he states that: ‘Ce n’était que quand je l’apercevais que mon esprit—jusque-là sommeillant, même derrière l’activité apparente de ma conversation dont l’animation masquait pour les autres un total engourdissement spirituel—se mettait tout à coup joyeusement en chasse, mais ce qu’il poursuivait alors . . . était situé à mi-profondeur, au delà de l’apparence elle-même, dans une zone un peu plus en retrait’ (IV, 296). In the paragraph preceding the Goncourt passage, the narrator refers to the mental state that comes about when one is on the verge of a departure: at such times the imminent cessation of habits developed in a certain place brings an end to the ‘engourdissement’ of these habits and provokes a heightened activity of the mind. Do all habits instil a sluggishness of thought? All habits save that of reading, it seems, for, when we read, the act itself serves as a sort of sharpener to our perceptions, setting our mind ‘en chasse’ in a way similar to the effects of eves of departures when the promise of new beginnings brings about clearheaded self-assessment, and access to previously indistinct ‘zones’ of our minds. The narrator’s description of his attitude in social situations now closely echoes Swann’s actions with Odette’s letter for Forcheville. He did not open the envelope, but went beyond that outer covering to reveal the inner truth; here the narrator’s eyes and prying mind perform quite the same process: ‘Aussi le charme apparent, copiable, des êtres
Lessons in Reading
93
m’échappait parce que je n’avais pas la faculté de m’arrêter à lui, comme un chirurgien qui, sous le poli d’un ventre de femme, verrait le mal interne qui le ronge. J’avais beau dîner en ville, je ne voyais pas les convives, parce que, quand je croyais les regarder, je les radiographiais’ (IV, 296–7). The narrator’s attitude allies him with the geometer, the surgeon, and the radiographer, and now he changes tack again. 27 The Goncourt journal has clarified for him just what his role in society amounts to: ‘en réunissant toutes les remarques que j’avais pu faire dans un dîner sur les convives, le dessin des lignes tracées par moi figurait un ensemble de lois psychologiques où l’intérêt propre qu’avait eu dans ses discours le convive ne tenait presque aucune place’ (IV, 297). The narrator’s sketching and analysis of psychological laws recalls the effects of Bergotte’s text on his reading mind (‘traçant à la surface de ma pensée une figure purement linéaire’, I, 93). The sketching of lines, writing, and later drawing and painting are recruited analogically to depict analysing and observing as well as reading. With this recurring trope of tracing in Proust’s text, it is possible to identify a sort of latent presence ‘avant la lettre’ of the narrator’s hybrid calling. As an observer of social events, he probes beyond the surface chitchat to unearth and depict the motivational forces behind people’s talk; in reading, his mind is similarly active, constructing or reconstructing the patterns and procedures that drive and are produced by the written text. Unless he had gone out with the express purpose of learning about something which had occupied his mind beforehand, the narrator was happy to entertain with chatter. The Goncourt journal awakens him to the flaws in this attitude: the heuristic quality of reading is greater than what meagre intellectual instruction one might glean from ‘le monde’. ‘Stay in and read me!’, we can almost hear Proust’s text shout to its readers from between the lines: ‘you’ve more to learn from an evening in with me than from one spent at some social gathering’. The narrator earlier remarked with regard to his relation to Bergotte’s work that: ‘j’aurais voulu posséder une opinion de lui, une métaphore de lui, sur toutes choses, surtout sur celles que j’aurais l’occasion de voir moi-même’ (I, 94). In the present passage he echoes these sentiments, with the difference that now there is a creative capacity of his own involved, which is stimulated by 27 Proust is a mixture of his models, at once geometer and surgeon, and much more besides. This hybridity was recognized by one of his earliest commentators, Charles du Bos, in ‘Points de repère’, an essay of November 1922: ‘c’est parce que l’originalité de Proust était en profondeur . . . qu’il pouvait se permettre de jouer si librement à la surface et avec toutes les surfaces’ (Approximations, 423–8 (427) ).
94
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
reading: ‘j’étais incapable de voir ce dont le désir n’avait pas été éveillé en moi par quelque lecture, ce dont je n’avais pas d’avance dessiné moimême le croquis que je désirais ensuite confronter avec la réalité’ (IV, 297). The act of reading or the contemplation of a work of art that takes place in solitude has a catalytic quality that charges the subject with a new capacity to perceive the world: ‘une fois que leur image m’avait été présentée dans la solitude par un artiste . . . mon imagination était partie, avait commencé à peindre.’ 28 Once again the act of reading provokes the desire that so often drives the narrator’s actions: ‘Et ce devant quoi j’avais bâillé l’année d’avant, je me disais avec angoisse, le contemplant d’avance, le désirant: « Sera-t-il vraiment impossible de le voir? Que ne donnerais-je pour cela! » ’ (IV, 297). With this exclamation he moves into a more discursive mode in which we discover a return to the highly textured, meticulously wrought, prose that described the effects of reading in the Primal Scenes. The narrator reflects that our curiosity about our contemporaries is often ignited only when we read about them. To do so is to be made to ‘see’ them differently, or in a new light. Preoccupations (in the narrator’s case his concerns with Gilberte or Albertine, for example) can blind us, it seems, to what writers are able to perceive in our contemporaries, leaving us frustrated at our inattention to detail: ‘ « Quel malheur’, we think, ‘que . . . je n’aie pas fait plus attention à ce monsieur! Je l’avais pris pour un raseur du monde, pour un simple figurant, c’était une figure! » ’ (IV, 298). Such was the narrator’s ‘disposition’ before happening across the journal; so doing makes him regret that attitude and he proceeds to outline two potential conclusions his analysis might afford him with regard to reading and to literature in general. The conclusions are apparently quite distinct, yet prove to be intimately connected on several levels. In a structure familiar by now to Proust’s readers, the narrator places two possible situations in apposition, following a ‘peutêtre . . . ’ clause with a ‘mais aussi . . . ’ clause. Reproducing the clauses in parallel below gives a sense of the striated complexity Proust produces 28 The creative drive here produced by reading bears a strong resemblance to that energized by involuntary memory. Compare, for example, the vivid visual resurrection of Combray from the narrator’s teacup with the ability, suggested here, that reading has to render us capable of richer or more clear-sighted vision. We are encouraged, implicitly, not just to stay in and read, then, but to apply what we learn from our contemplative interpretive acts to our subsequent worldly interactions. Once more a scene of reading is used by Proust to channel our energies into developing the sensibilities and capacities in us that are the subjects of consideration in the pages we read.
Lessons in Reading
95
using sound patterning, oppositions and echoes across two statements whose senses are closely related and under high tension: peut-être j’aurais pu conclure d’elles [les pages de Goncourt] que la vie apprend à rabaisser le prix de la lecture, et nous montre que ce que l’écrivain nous vante ne valait pas grand-chose;
mais je pouvais tout aussi bien en conclure que la lecture au contraire nous apprend à relever la valeur de la vie, valeur que nous n’avons pas su apprécier et dont nous nous rendons compte seulement par le livre combien elle était grande. (IV, 298, my emphases)
With the first conclusion, reading comes off badly: literature is not an exposition of truth and reading therefore represents time wasted; with the second, again ‘life’ comes out best, but reading this time is a positive, instructive process that sends us receptively back to life itself, ready for stimulation. The status of reading is explicitly problematized for the first time, and epistemologically a lot is at stake. At the core of the narrator’s investigation is the notion of value: ‘life’ and ‘reading’ in their own ways each effect a ‘mise en valeur’ of the other. The dialectic is an involved, imbricated one, for reading is part of life, which it reveals as under-examined and under-exploited. Syntactic and linguistic parallelisms between the two possible conclusions at first stand out: either ‘la vie nous apprend à rabaisser le prix de la lecture’; or ‘la lecture . . . nous apprend à relever la valeur de la vie’ (IV, 298). The enigmatic centrality of reading looms out of this chiastic structure. The first conclusion or ‘hemistich’ is marked by a sound echo between ‘vie’ and ‘prix’, which highlights a conflict: life’s mundanity in fact shows reading (or more properly what we read) to be a deception. An internal off-rhyme on long vowel sounds again emphasizes the same conflict, the contrast between what ‘[la vie] nous montre’ and what ‘l’écrivain nous vante’ (my emphases). These verbs of exposition and presentation themselves expose a parallelism between the experience of life, and that of reading written texts. Life and literature present us with ‘realities’. Life shows us that ‘ce que l’écrivain nous vante ne valait pas grand-chose’, a phrase whose closure is echoed by that of the second conclusion (‘combien elle était grande’) and in which the narrator performs the very role of ‘l’écrivain’ that his words debunk. In doing so, he adds ‘value’ and charm to them with not just the near rhymes and echoes mentioned above but
96
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
a thrice repeated |va| sound, and word clusters which anagrammatically reproduce ‘la vie’, the driving force in the clause: ‘l ’écrivain . . . ne valait’. Reading, by contrast, according to the second conclusion, teaches us to confer a higher value on life. The sound patterning connects up the different elements of the second ‘hemistich’: the |va| sound now appears in a scherzando arrangement with ‘p’, ‘r’, and ‘l’ sounds: ‘la lecture nous apprend à relever la valeur de la vie, valeur que nous n’avons pas su apprécier’ (my emphases). Significantly, the final appearance of the rhyme cluster emphasizes the paradoxical or aporetic nature of reading revealed in this scene: the words ‘par le livre’ anagrammatically and conceptually ‘contain’ ‘la vie’, yet going by the second conclusion, we ought to cease reading and turn back to life itself once the book has shown us what joys (what ‘valeur’) we forgo whilst engaged in reading. This scene collapses any inkling we might have had that lived experience and read experience were clearly distinguishable and distinctive from each other. If reading and writing are complementary processes that form a continuum, reading and living, or reading and life show themselves here to be equally entangled: both are empirical, both are instructive and imperfect; notions of the ‘other’ begin to lose some of the conceptual clout they have traditionally held. Life devalues reading and thereby devalues itself; reading valorizes life, and indirectly devalues itself, by necessitating its own abandonment in favour of the empirical. The reader must live, but the necessity of reading, after the realization either of its deceptive, illusory value (conclusion one) or of the greater value of ‘life outside the book’ (conclusion two), is far more problematic. 29 Is it possible, one might ask, to carry on reading? As Kristeva puts it: ‘à la recherche de la jouissance, à la recherche de l’expérience: n’est-ce pas cela A la recherche du temps perdu? Pouvons-nous encore la lire?’ 30 29 Virginia Woolf makes remarks similar to the narrator’s second conclusion: reality, she writes, ‘would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable’, which manifests itself in unpredictable ways. Her conclusion echoes Proust’s narrator as well as striking a chord with his readers: ‘Now the writer . . . has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us. So at least I infer from reading Lear or Emma or La Recherche du Temps Perdu. For the reading of these books seems to perform a curious couching operation on the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given an intenser life’, A Room of One’s Own, 1–103 (99). A world intensified and ‘bared of its covering’ by reading calls to mind the parallel revelation of the world effected by involuntary memory. 30 Le Temps sensible, 347.
Lessons in Reading
97
To reach this point in the novel, two thousand-odd pages have been read and much has been sacrificed; value judgements and choices have been made. Should we, need we, go on? It takes a strong will to make the choice in either direction. The ‘staging of the aporetic experience in reading is precisely the moment of appearing to want to decide on the undecidable’. So writes Julian Wolfreys, who continues in a vein relevant to the concerns of this scene: ‘In the face of the undecidable, what remains except the reading of remains? What remains except the response and, with that, the responsibility, to continue reading? In Beckettian fashion, unable to go on, we go on, the moment of the reading being the retreating horizon towards which we attempt to read.’ 31 Although his readers may be pondering such testing issues, the narrator avoids confronting them, instead moving off into the territory charted by Proust in his Contre Sainte-Beuve, the project out of which A la recherche developed. ‘A la rigueur’, he writes, ‘nous pouvons nous consoler de nous être peu plu dans la société d’un Vinteuil, d’un Bergotte.’ Why? Because their worldly faults may be ignored if we accept that ‘leur génie est manifesté par leurs œuvres’ (IV, 298). If artists depict as charming a world we found disappointing, or which memoir writers deemed unremarkable, this is without importance, writes the narrator with a rhythmic, assonantal spring in his step: ‘cela ne prouverait rien contre la valeur de la vie qui produit de tels génies.’ With this the narrator inserts a lengthy illustrative parenthesis remarking on the vulgarity of Balzac’s correspondence by comparison with that of Swann, concluding that the latter’s regard for the niceties of expression in his letters does not make him capable of writing La Cousine Bette or Le Curé de Tours. This reference opens up a catalogue of artists recruited to illustrate the narrator’s subsequent disquisition on the intersection of the worldly and the aesthetic. 32 This expansion into broader artistic fields is typical of the polyvalent richness of the reading experience. By referring to Balzac, the narrator recalls an act of reading contemporaneous in the novel with that of the Goncourt journal: Gilberte reads and is shocked by Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or, of which she comments: ‘c’est absurde, invraisemblable, un beau cauchemar’ (IV, 284). She cannot believe what is depicted in the novella: ‘une femme peut peut-être être surveillée ainsi par une autre femme, 31 32
Wolfreys, Readings, p. ix. Besides Balzac, in just three pages he mentions Mme de Beausergent, Sainte-Beuve, Anna de Noailles, Titian, Renoir, Cot, Chaplin, Baudelaire, Recamier, and Pompadour (IV, 299–301).
98
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
jamais par un homme’ (IV, 284–5), yet precisely what she highlights as unbelievable resembles the life the narrator has lived with Albertine during his absence from Gilberte. 33 Upon encountering the reported repartee of the Verdurin clan, the narrator expresses disbelief similar to that provoked in Gilberte by Balzac’s novella. He nevertheless realizes that the worldly anecdotes recounted by Goncourt that provide the ‘divertissement des soirées solitaires’ for the journal’s readers may well stem from the socialites whose company he kept. Crucially, however, for the narrator: ‘Goncourt savait écouter, comme il savait voir; je ne le savais pas’ (IV, 299). Such a defeatist explanation seems simplistic, and laughably untrue. The (non-)effect on the narrator of the anecdotes recounted in ‘le monde’ is described in terms of inscription: ‘[elles] . . . ne m’avaient pas laissé à moi trace d’un souvenir intéressant’ (IV, 298–9); the rememoration of such traces when they are left bears a striking resemblance to reading. The passage closes with a paragraph spanning three pages, almost a third of which is taken up by one long, manylayered sentence, whose task is to intimate how the narrator chooses to negotiate the two possible conclusions drawn from reading the Goncourt passage. As his reflections draw to a close, he wonders if all the people who were depicted by Balzac, or were the subject of Sainte-Beuve’s or Baudelaire’s finest verse, would have nevertheless appeared entirely unalluring to him. The narrator gives two reasons in support of his probable lack of interest were he to have met them in person, this time using a familiar ‘soit . . . soit . . .’ construction. Firstly he suggests that he might have some inherent flaw that impedes his appreciation of interesting people or events: ‘soit par une infirmité de ma nature’. Secondly he suggests: ‘soit qu’elles [ces personnes] ne dussent leur prestige qu’à une magie illusoire de la littérature, ce qui forçait à changer de dictionnaire pour lire’ (IV, 301). Thus the framing of this scene is complete: the opening phrase (‘Prestige de la littérature!’) returns, fragmented, its negative connotations of deception and illusion openly acknowledged (‘une magie illusoire’). The idiomatic expression of the effect of reading such literature, the need to ‘changer de dictionnaire 33 Curiously, Gilberte’s reaction to La Fille aux yeux d’or betrays a misunderstanding, or at least a faulty recollection of the tale. The eponymous Paquita is sequestered by a woman, the Marquise de San-Réal, and not by a man. Gilberte’s confusion may reflect latent preoccupations with gender roles she has as a result of her husband’s suspected homosexuality. I am grateful to Anthony Pilkington for drawing my attention to this detail, which is not noted by the editors of the Pléiade text.
Lessons in Reading
99
pour lire’, underscores the importance of literature and the reading of it above the other forms of art and artistic interpretation referred to in the scene. This final suggestion of the effects of reading consoles the narrator, whose health will prevent him, he believes, from returning to society to reassess the people he previously deemed merely ‘insignifiantes’. Literature of the Goncourt sort, the narrator realizes, requires of him a change of approach, the use of a new critical-analytical toolkit, in order to appreciate its achievements. This conception of literature is quite at odds with that which the narrator ultimately develops. As he puts it later in Le Temps retrouvé: ‘l’ouvrage de l’écrivain n’est qu’une espèce d’instrument optique qu’il offre au lecteur afin de lui permettre de discerner ce que sans ce livre il n’eût peut-être pas vu en soi-même’ (IV, 489–90). The crucial difference between what will be the narrator’s literature and that of Goncourt, revealed by the different analogies used in these two scenes, is one of depth. Goncourt’s ‘littérature de notation’ absorbs and reproduces the details of materiality, of surfaces, and superficialities in a polished ‘écriture artiste’. In realizing that all he requires in order to understand and be able to replicate such chronicling (which is just what Proust has already done in his pastiche) are the appropriate lexis and terms of reference, the narrator indirectly learns a secondary, more important, lesson. His reading brings about a realization by negative theology of what his literature will be: it will not yield to a simple reference tool or instrument; it will be that instrument, and a far more delicately calibrated, specialized one than will suffice to read the Goncourt brothers. The narrator’s novel, whilst being read, will facilitate a reading of that most impenetrable of texts: our selves, going beyond the simple details of what we encounter day to day, to open up the more recondite matter of our inner ‘grimoire’ and explore the rich, manifold traces of sensory and intellectual experience. As Deleuze puts it: ‘on n’apprend rien, sinon par déchiffrage et interprétation’ 34 : whilst on the surface the lesson of this complex scene is centred on the Goncourt text, once again we see how Proust’s scenes of reading coach us, now directly, now in a round-about way, in the apprehension, the reading, of ourselves. The narrator’s various lessons in reading are multifaceted and instructive; like any individual, however, he is slow to learn these lessons, and before reaching the clear-sightedness evident in his later remarks (in the library scene in Le Temps retrouvé, for example: see Chapter 5) he 34
Proust et les signes, 11.
100
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
undertakes a variety of acts of reading which might be deemed flawed or wrong-headed, but which nevertheless provide fruitful case studies in the psychopathology of everyday life. 35 The possibility of reading in a way we might call ‘accurate’ or ‘successful’ has long engaged critics of literature. 36 ‘Misreading’—reading what is not there, or misinterpreting what is—is a complex area of human mental functioning, which can be revealing of usually hidden motivational forces which drive our everyday activities. A la recherche is laden with what criticism has hitherto been content to call ‘misreadings’. The foregoing pages demonstrate, however, that reading is all but impossible to define in terms as straightforward as success and failure, since even the most problematic or ‘disappointing’ of readings can be highly instructive and profitable in often unexpected ways. The following chapter suggests a new critical terminology for dealing with such slippery, unruly acts of reading, and explores further the powerful, destabilizing forces of reading as a form of delirium. 35 Freud’s much-read work of this name contains a highly insightful section on ‘misreading’; see The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, SE, vi. 106–16. 36 The following stand out among the many thousands of pages written on the subject: W. K.Wimsatt, Junior and Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 3–18; E. D. Hirsch, Junior, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading; Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading; Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980); Robert C. Holub, Reception Theory; Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart (eds.), Gender and Reading; Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism and Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Michael Syrotinski and Ian Maclachlan (eds.), Sensual Reading: New Approaches to Reading in its Relations to the Senses. See the Introduction for a review of the relation of this material to the present study, and the Bibliography for a more comprehensive list.
4 Reading Between the Lines or ‘le délire de la lecture’ Ni lu ni compris? Aux meilleurs esprits Que d’erreurs promises! Paul Valéry 1 Thinking and writing about reading is a complicated business. Reading, once we know how, becomes ‘second nature’, a habitual, effortless process from which we cannot extricate ourselves. To write objectively about reading, then, seems perhaps to go against the grain of this situation: to try to write ‘from the outside’ about a process from which we cannot disengage ourselves (especially in the act of writing), might seem paradoxical. Can we ever be ‘outside’ reading, outside the dynamic, transferential exchanges that structure and inform our lives without, for most of the time, our ever being aware of it? 2 And if we want to consider those of our acts of reading that seem to be problematic, erroneous, or misguided, how do we do that? The human trait of wanting to compare, contrast, and valorize our various mental performances has made the term ‘misreading’ common currency in English. To attempt to pin down the sense of the term, one is obliged to evaluate readings against each other, to confer significance or worth upon acts whose motivations, goals, and, particularly, whose achievements are far from clear cut or easily comparable. Dictionaries are not much help. Our English term ‘misreading’ is marked by the troublesome prefix ‘mis-’, which denotes something amiss, done wrongly, badly, perversely, or erroneously. These adverbs suggest equal and opposite acts of reading 1 2
‘Le Sylphe’, in Poésies (Paris: Gallimard, 1929), 83. Maurice Blanchot deals with the inescapability of reading in L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955): see ‘Lire’, 251–61. Julian Wolfreys also acknowledges the ongoing, unfinished nature of reading in his Introduction to Readings: Acts of Close Reading in Literary Theory, pp. vii–xii.
102
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
done well, correctly, properly, or accurately. The insufficiency of such a binary picture need not be dwelt on here, for the complication runs far deeper than this; our concerns deal thus far only with the English language; what of French? In French one cannot ‘mélire’, ‘malire’, or ‘maulire’; rather, to make the errors and interpretive faux pas connoted by our English term, in French one must ‘mal lire’, ‘mal interpréter’, or ‘se tromper sur ses faits’. A ‘misreading’ (whatever that may be) is ‘une interprétation/une lecture erronée’. These remarks highlight the critical unfitness of the frequently used term ‘misreading’, an insufficiency which comes about as a result of the connotative value it has by association with other similarly formed words—mistake, misunderstand, misapply, for example—which imply notions of intention regarding that which is taken, understood, or applied. In the case of ‘misreading’, these notions apply to the text being read, and whilst critics and theorists of literature have long argued vehemently from both sides of the debate over authorial intention, in Proust’s novel the indeterminacy of (often hand-written) texts and the idiosyncratic nature of their reading are not compatible with the rather two-dimensional affair that the encounter becomes if one settles for the term ‘misreading’. 3 Nietzsche argued that ‘philology “teaches to read well ” ’, 4 and whilst the notion of ‘reading well’ is as problematic as ‘misreading’, it is to philology and precisely to etymology that one might turn for a term not to ‘replace’ misreading, but more modestly to fill a terminological gap in the vocabulary used in approaches to reading (in English and French) and particularly reading that appears ‘wrong-headed’ or ‘misdirected’, to use just two more rather weighted terms. ‘Verse’ in English, and the French ‘vers’ stem from the Latin ‘versus’, the furrow or line made by a plough, from ‘vertere’, to turn. To deviate 3 Wimsatt and Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’; and Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation are seen as touchstones on either side of the debate over the assertion of intentional ‘meaning’ in the twentieth century, to which diverse writers and ‘movements’ reacted in Europe and in the United States. D. Newton-de Molina (ed.),On Literary Intention: Critical Essays (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1976), is a useful early conspectus; Séan Burke (ed.), Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), gives a comprehensive and accessible survey, combining a wide variety of texts with ample commentary and analysis. 4 Andrew Bennett cites Alan Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (New York: Routledge, 1990), 144, in his Introduction to Reading Reading, 8–9. Duncan Large, in Nietzsche and Proust: A Comparative Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) provides a thorough and lucid study of the two writers. See also Karin Littau’s Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania for the suggestive connection between reading and Nietzsche’s notion of art as intoxication (5, 75).
Reading Between the Lines
103
from the straight line, the ‘lira’ or ridge between two furrows, is to be deranged or ‘delirious’, giving the verb ‘délirer’ in French, which bears a felicitous, but chance relation to the verb to read (‘lire’ in fact stems from ‘legere’, to gather or collect). Rather than being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, or separable into ‘good’ reading and ‘misreading’, reading might better be described as deliriant, having the potential to produce temporary interpretive delirium, ‘le délire’. 5 Conventional reading practice is to read the lines of text, or ‘vers’, which are regulated by white space, the ridges or ‘lirae’ between them. Accordingly, when we speak idiomatically of ‘reading between the lines’, we imply a reading which extrapolates from the text, a reading not just of the furrows of text, but a filling out of the blank ridges in between. Etymologically, however, ‘délirer’, to be delirious, is to stray from the regulatory ridge (‘lira’) between the furrows; following the model ‘text = furrows’ arrived at etymologically from ‘le vers’, now it seems that ‘délirer’ is to stray into the text. Reading to a greater or lesser degree is delirium, in its medical and its new literary theoretical sense, and to consider it thus is to bring into relief the fine line we tread when reading between enlightenment and mania, ‘le délire’. ‘Toute lecture émet un coup de délire’, we might say, calquing on Mallarmé, an artist acutely sensitive to the complex transactions that occur between readers and texts. The diverse outcomes, or ‘délires’ of some of Proust’s less stable reading encounters will be explored in the present chapter. 6 5 Derrida (of course) toys with the chance proximity of ‘lire’ and ‘délire’ in his contribution to the multi-authored volume, Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. by Geoffrey Hartman (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979). Translated by James Hulbert and first published in that book as ‘Living On’ (75–176), the original French was later published as ‘Survivre’, in Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 117–218. There Derrida writes: ‘Cette demande du récit, je ne dirai pas . . . que Blanchot la met en scène dans La Folie du jour, il la donnerait peut-être à dé-lire’ (139). Tellingly in the English version this subtle play of language requires rather a long-winded (and therefore less striking) exposition: ‘this demand for narrative . . . is there to be read, “to the point of delireium”, as it throws the reader off track’ (94). Derrida’s play with ‘dé-lire’ recurs throughout La Carte postale, written at the same time as ‘Survivre’; for example: ‘tu m’accuses toujours de « délirer » et tu sais bien ce que ça veut dire, hélas, dans notre code . . . jamais je n’ai tant déliré’ (22). These Derridean references are noted by Andrew Bennett in his editor’s Introduction to Readers and Reading (New York: Longman, 1995), 12–14. 6 Whilst not suggesting that reading equals madness, it should be noted that for centuries people have feared the consequences of excessive reading. The delusions of Don Quixote are a standard example; by contrast to his ‘madness’ which manifests itself after he has long immersed himself in romances of chivalry, the deliriant quality of the act of reading which I am proposing here is a temporary but more immediate state brought about during and by the act itself and one which, as I have indicated in the previous chapters, is similar in many ways to the exhilarations of involuntary memory. See Alain
104
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
As I noted in the Introduction, from the very beginning reading is a part of A la recherche (‘je n’avais pas cessé en dormant de faire des réflexions sur ce que je venais de lire’, I, 3). It is shown to be complex, absorbing, troubling (‘mais ces réflexions avaient pris un tour un peu particulier’). The narrator reports believing that he himself is the subject of his book (‘une église, un quatuor, la rivalité de François Ier et de Charles Quint’): is this misreading or ‘délire’? 7 The scene is set early on for acts of reading which instruct and engage the narrator despite, or more probably because of, their being what critics have hitherto called ‘misreadings’. 8 The best known of the novel’s troubling, troublesome, acts of reading are related to a telegram the narrator receives when he is in Venice with his mother; I shall consider that scene towards the end of this chapter, but first it is profitable to examine, as with the Figaro scenes, the various anticipations and adumbrations which prepare the ground for the Venetian finale, and reveal not just the dicey nature and instability of reading but also show the narrator being repeatedly exposed to the uncertainties of the act well before the closing stages of Albertine disparue. Having been ill and absent from the Champs-Élysées, the narrator longs to see Gilberte and hopes for some communication from her (I, 490). Such contact seems improbable, since before his illness he wrote an embarrassingly long letter to her father in an attempt to gain his favour and assert himself, contrary to Swann’s beliefs, as an honourable, commendable friend of Gilberte (I, 482). Just as the Martinville vignette fails to impress Norpois, Swann is not won over by the letter Montandon (ed.), Le Lecteur et la lecture dans l’œuvre, in particular Charles Marcilly, ‘L’Odysée de la lecture dans le Quichotte ou les mirages d’une lecture fracturée’, 189–99. It should be noted that Georges Poulet, taking Mallarmé’s Igitur as his starting point, has addressed an aspect of reading’s deliriant power, suggesting that the act can entail a complete loss of one’s subjectivity. See ‘Criticism and the Experience of Interiority’, trans. by Catherine and Richard Macksey, in Jane P. Tompkins (ed.), Reader-Response Criticism, 41–9. See also Littau’s informative chapter ‘The Reader in Fiction’, Theories of Reading, 62–82. For a study of ‘délire’ in its more conventional, nineteenth-century sense, see Juan Rigoli, Lire le délire: Aliénisme, rhétorique et littérature en France au XIXè siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2001). 7 ‘Rivalité de François Ier et de Charles Quint’, as the Pléaide editors note (I, 3, n. 2), is the title of a book by François Mignet, a detail which introduces an early reading-related allusion into Proust’s text. 8 Walter Kasell, for instance, states that ‘Proust’s novel is in many ways the story of error, and as such cannot sustain a reading which effaces the traces of that error’s commission’ (10) and that ‘Proust’s Recherche is . . . the story of misreading and an allegory of error’ (102). Kasell’s use of the terms ‘reading’ and ‘misreading’ is very broad, referring to the narrator’s apprehension of the situations in which he finds himself.
Reading Between the Lines
105
and his reaction is one of disbelief: ‘[il] avait haussé les épaules en disant: « Tout cela ne signifie rien, cela ne fait que prouver combien j’ai raison »’ (I, 482). Deep in despair at the thought of never again seeing Gilberte, the narrator receives a letter in the same unobtrusive way that his newspaper arrives in the Figaro scene: ‘Un jour, à l’heure du courrier, ma mère posa sur mon lit une lettre’ (I, 490). In this, as in the Primal Scene where she ‘delivers’ the Sand text, the narrator’s mother takes on the role of ‘facteur de la vérité’. ‘Je l’ouvris distraitement’, he continues, ‘puisqu’elle ne pouvait pas porter la seule signature qui m’eût rendu heureux, celle de Gilberte avec qui je n’avais pas de relations en dehors des Champs-Élysées’ (I, 490). Thus we are prepared for an uninterested, distracted reading based on assumptions which have the status of truths in the narrator’s mind. Out of the blue, however, this inauspicious occasion becomes highly revelatory: Or, au bas du papier, timbré d’un sceau d’argent représentant un chevalier casqué sous lequel se contournait cette devise: Per viam rectam, au-dessous d’une lettre, d’une grande écriture, et où presque toutes les phrases semblaient soulignées, simplement parce que la barre des t étant tracée non au travers d’eux, mais au-dessus, mettait un trait sous le mot correspondant de la ligne supérieure, ce fut justement la signature de Gilberte que je vis. (I, 490–1)
In characteristic style the revelation of the name of the correspondent is deferred until the end of the many-layered sentence and for the first time the complexity of Gilberte’s writing is described in exacting detail. 9 For all of its scriptural convolution, the signature, that mark of authenticity the narrator will later seek as ‘verification’ of his own published article in Le Figaro, is recognizable as Gilberte’s. 10 The effects of this reading are complex and its deliriant quality is quickly brought into relief. The narrator’s reading does not bring the joy we might expect, for although he holds the letter in his hands before him, he ‘knows’ such an occurrence to be ‘impossible’; rather, he experiences what in short we might call ‘le délire’: ‘Pendant un instant elle [la vue de la lettre] ne fit que frapper d’irréalité tout ce qui m’entourait. Avec une vitesse vertigineuse, cette signature sans vraisemblance jouait aux quatre coins avec mon lit, ma cheminée, mon mur. 9 An almost identical description features in the explanation, many hundreds of pages later, of the erroneously transmitted telegram message (IV, 234). 10 Derrida ponders the effect of the signature in various places in his work: see, in particular, Signéponge/Signsponge, trans. by Richard Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), esp. 121, 133.
106
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
Je voyais tout vaciller comme quelqu’un qui tombe de cheval ’ (I, 491, my emphases). 11 He reads what is on the page before him and it is so at odds with his preconceptions that he begins to wonder if there is not ‘une existence toute différente de celle que je connaissais, en contradiction avec elle, mais qui serait la vraie’. The letter, a polite and amiable note inviting the narrator to tea should his health permit, is quoted in full and its effects (intellectual and somatic) create a tension within him: ‘Tandis que je lisais ces mots, mon système nerveux recevait avec une diligence admirable la nouvelle qu’il m’arrivait un grand bonheur. Mais mon âme, c’est-à-dire moi-même, et en somme le principal intéressé, l’ignorait encore’ (I, 491). This happiness, a Leonardesque cosa mentale, is felt bodily, but does not yet register in the depths of his ‘soul’. This distinction, the suggestion that reading might affect us not just (or at all) on the level of the intellect, but physically, points towards the sensual aspect of the reading encounter which will be explored in Chapter 5. Mme de Cambremer’s invitation letter, for all its revelations of class and social standing, is described as ‘ce rien d’encre’ (III, 336), and here the material simplicity of Gilberte’s letter is intimated in much the same way: it is simply ‘une feuille de papier couverte de caractères’, but, as we shall see, such textual trifles can be of great significance. For instance, in passing the narrator comments that ‘Françoise se refusa à reconnaître le nom de Gilberte parce que le G historié, appuyé sur un i sans point avait l’air d’un A, tandis que la dernière syllabe était indéfiniment prolongée à l’aide d’un paraphe dentelé’ (I, 493). Such a remark complements those mentioned above regarding Gilberte’s handwriting and, albeit across the ‘longue durée’ of the novel, provides the first and most straightforward explanation for the faulty transcription of the telegram received in Venice. 12 Gilberte’s motto here is ‘Per viam rectam’, ‘par la ligne droite’, which seems ironic in a novel so often characterized by long ways round. Implicit in the motto, one might argue, is a notional, desirable, interpretive straight line from which the narrator’s ‘délire’ causes him to deviate. Very few straight lines, whether in reading or any other aspect of life, are taken in A la recherche, and when it comes to letters, it seems 11 Long in advance of Albertine’s ‘accident’, and even before the two have met, the narrator’s image here eerily adumbrates the news of Albertine’s death brought in a telegram from Mme Bontemps (IV, 58). 12 Françoise’s involvement in this scene of reading prepares us for the role she will play in the narrator’s disabusal regarding his wilful misinterpretation or ‘misreading’ of the motifs on Albertine’s rings (IV, 45–8), to which I shall return below.
Reading Between the Lines
107
common practice to concentrate not on the lines of text that are there, but on the unsaid, the implicit, and the absent. 13 During his second stay at Balbec, for instance, one evening the narrator expects a visit from Albertine that does not materialize. The following day he receives a letter from her explaining her reasons for not appearing the previous night. The narrator reports that ‘derrière les mots de sa lettre comme derrière ceux qu’elle m’avait dit une fois au téléphone, je crus sentir la présence de plaisirs, d’êtres, qu’elle m’avait préférés’ (III, 194). He does not ‘misread’ the letter, but rather reads beyond the surface sense of the words, and his word choice in articulating his characteristic thirst for knowledge again evokes ‘délire’: ‘Encore une fois je fus agité tout entier par la curiosité douloureuse de savoir ce qu’elle avait pu faire’ (III, 194, my emphasis). 14 Despite his professed love for Albertine, and the jealousy expressed in scenes such as that just described, the narrator nevertheless has other, vague, amorous relationships. He mentions in passing that before meeting up with these acquaintances, he corresponds with them. ‘On ne peut pas, au début d’une amitié pour une femme’, we are told, ‘. . . se séparer de ces premières lettres reçues’ (III, 233). The intimacy implicit in sending and receiving personal letters enchants the narrator, whose tone is that of a smitten adolescent: ‘La phrase qu’on sait par cœur est agréable à relire’; but this habit reveals a stark truth about reading (and about love). He remarks that we tend to want to ‘vérifier le degré de tendresse d’une expression. A-t-elle écrit « Votre chère lettre »? Petite déception dans la douceur qu’on respire, et qui doit être attribuée soit à ce qu’on a lu trop vite, soit à l’écriture illisible de la correspondante; elle n’a pas mis « et votre chère lettre », mais: « en voyant cette lettre ». Mais le reste est si tendre’ (III, 233). These comments show that the narrator is aware that sometimes in reading, as in love, we see what we want to see rather than that which actually presents itself to our eyes. 15 His casual 13 e.g.: ‘j’avais été d’autant plus troublé par la lettre que Saint-Loup m’avait écrite du Maroc que je lisais entre les lignes ce qu’il n’avait pas osé écrire plus explicitement’ (II, 645). 14 Here again we have a scene of reading motivated and shaped by the fact that the narrator, as he later states, is constantly ‘ballotté . . . entre le désir de savoir et la peur de souffrir’ (IV, 102); in this, once again, his attitude echoes Swann’s predicament with the letter for Forcheville. 15 Freud was acutely aware of this tendency, as expressed in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: ‘In a very large number of cases it is the reader’s preparedness that alters the text and reads into it something which he is expecting or with which he is preoccupied. The only contribution towards a misreading which the text itself need make is that of affording some sort of resemblance in the verbal image, which the reader can
108
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
attitude to the detail of the text in this scene is in contrast to the great scrutiny of Albertine’s texts read when he is ‘in love’ with her. Moreover, the secondary explanation—‘l’écriture illisible de la correspondante’— shows an understanding of the practicalities of the act of reading, sends us back to Gilberte’s scrawl in her letter, and forward, once again, to the telegram message. Equally, for all its succinctness and proleptic qualities, this scene in fact revisits one already rehearsed in A l’ombre des jeunes filles, where the risks of hasty reading are acknowledged and pondered in an extended analogy that addresses the tendency of the desirous mind to fabricate detail during interpretive acts. The narrator considers his fascination with the ‘petite bande’ and particularly with their near-constant motion. He wonders whether, if they were slowed down, he would be able to pick out the exact details of their individual appearances and thus discern, perhaps, the disappointing reality of poor complexions and awkward expressions beneath the usual blur of their movement. This doubt enters his mind as he explores the powers of his imagination: il avait suffi d’une jolie ligne de corps, d’un teint frais entrevu, pour que de très bonne foi j’y eusse ajouté quelque ravissante épaule, quelque regard délicieux dont je portais toujours en moi le souvenir ou l’idée préconçue, ces déchiffrages rapides d’un être qu’on voit à la volée nous exposant aux mêmes erreurs que ces lectures trop rapides où, sur une seule syllabe et sans prendre le temps d’identifier les autres, on met à la place du mot qui est écrit, un tout différent que nous fournit notre mémoire. (II, 155) 16 alter in the sense he requires. Merely glancing at the text, especially with uncorrected vision, undoubtedly increases the possibility of such an illusion, but it is certainly not a necessary precondition for it’, SE, vi. 112–13. It is worth noting as a possible reason for the Anglo-American academy’s unquestioning use of the term ‘misreading’ that Freud’s original translators opted for it in rendering ‘Verlesen’, a subcategory of the ‘Fehlleistung’, faulty function or ‘parapraxis’. In the ‘New Penguin Freud’, the translator dispenses with ‘misreading’, opting instead for the phrase ‘slips in reading’. See ‘Slips in Reading and Slips of the Pen’, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans. by Anthea Bell, ed. by Adam Phillips (London: Penguin, 2002), 103–28. In La Carte postale Derrida acknowledges a similar interpretive situation to that identified by Proust and by Freud: ‘tu comprends, à l’intérieur de chaque signe déjà, de chaque marque ou de chaque trait, il y a éloignement, la poste, ce qu’il faut pour que ce soit lisible par un autre, une autre que toi ou moi, et tout est foutu d’avance, cartes sur table. La condition pour que ça arrive, c’est que ça finisse et même que ça commence par ne pas arriver. Voilà comment ça se lit, et ça s’écrit’ (34–5). 16 Michel de Certeau has pondered similar questions of speed and haste in reading. Speeding up our reading permits more coverage of material but less precision. Faster reading is like faster travel—we go further but our impressions of the intervening ground necessarily have to change: ‘Emancipé des lieux, le corps lisant est plus libre dans ses mouvements. Il gestue ainsi la capacité qu’a chaque sujet de convertir le texte par la
Reading Between the Lines
109
Striking here is how acutely aware the narrator is of our mind’s capacity to alter and wilfully mis-take written text. 17 These lines provide a simple explanation for the Venetian episode, but occur at such a distance from it that the fallibility of another factor in the reading encounter— our memory—may obscure the long-distance interconnection. 18 The quasi-scientific ring of ‘déchiffrages’ here connects the narrator’s lucid comments into the novel’s analytical, questing, frame of reference. Still at the level of lexis, the choice of ‘de très bonne foi’ is mirrored in the Cartesian critique in Albertine disparue of the faulty foundations that undermine our (reading) experience. 19 The perils of rapid reading are related again, however, as if to make sure that the message is clear. With new suspicions about the nature of the girls’ relations, the narrator must reassess his view of them: ‘Je tirais en ce qui concernait leur manière de vivre et la conduite à tenir avec elles, toutes les conséquences du mot innocence que j’avais lu, en causant familièrement avec elles, sur leur visage’ (II, 300). Careful reading in close-up like this is no more reliable, no freer from error than the more distant ‘déchiffrages rapides d’un être qu’on voit à la volée’ described above. Error, psychologically motivated, desire-driven error, is seen to underpin reading and therefore, paradoxically, constantly to destabilize it and any conclusions we seek to draw from it (‘[et] pas seulement . . . toute lecture’, IV, 235). That reading should so frequently be used analogically or metaphorically to depict interpretive scenes in the novel takes on a rather negative hue: if error is immanent in reading, and ‘reading’ is everywhere in life, then epistemologically things do not look too bright. 20 This negative strand is present throughout the novel in coexistence with acts of reading which might be said to constitute a positive strand (Mlle Vinteuil’s friend’s ‘déchiffrement’ of the septet, for instance). Involuntary memory’s epiphanic euphorias are counterbalanced by the lecture et de le « brûler » comme on brûle les étapes’, ‘Lire: un braconnage’, in L’Invention du quotidien 1. Arts de faire (Paris: Gallimard, 1980; repr. 1990), 239–55 (254). 17 Freud, too, was aware of this habit: ‘when I am on holiday and walking down the street in a foreign town . . . I read every shop sign that resembles it in any way at all as Antiques’, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans. by Anthea Bell, 106–7; SE, vi. 110. 18 As Malcolm Bowie remarks in Freud, Proust, Lacan, we necessarily forget ‘whole stretches’ of Proust’s novel: ‘Of course we do. How else, without a willingness and a capacity to forget, could we read it at all?’ (46). 19 cf. ‘Une bonne partie de ce que nous croyons, et jusque dans les conclusions dernières c’est ainsi, avec un entêtement et une bonne foi égales, vient d’un première méprise sur les prémisses’ (IV, 235). 20 This is the view taken by Walter Kasell: ‘error’, he writes, ‘is constitutive of Marcel’s world’ (11); ‘the body of the novel’, he goes on, ‘is an itinerary of error’ (13).
110
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
traumatic ‘intermittences du cœur’: the latter are every bit as important in shaping the narrator’s outlook and aesthetics as the better known, quasi-clichetic moments of involuntary memory. 21 Similarly, then, it is impossible to valorize ‘happy’ or ‘successful’ readings over against ‘traumatic’ or ‘disappointing’ ones. Whilst the tenor of the reading experiences that lend structure and momentum to Albertine disparue is, broadly speaking, ‘negative’, the yield or outcome—intellectual, emotional, artistic—of these experiences is invaluable. Malcolm Bowie’s lecture ‘Proust, Jealousy, Knowledge’, which would become part of his groundbreaking study Freud, Proust, Lacan: Theory as Fiction, goes some way towards refocusing critical attention on what already in 1978 he described as the ‘neglected volumes’ of A la recherche: ‘Sodome et Gomorrhe, La Prisonnière, and La Fugitive’. 22 His profound, sensitive study of Proust’s treatment of jealousy and the intricate weave of truths, untruths, deceptions, theories, and analyses that give form to the middle-to-end section of Proust’s novel focuses on La Prisonnière. Thirty years have passed since Bowie gave his lucid lecture, but critical attention to La Fugitive (what we now know as Albertine disparue), certainly since the late 1980s, has focused largely on the competing versions of the manuscript of this part of the novel. 23 In a modest attempt to redress the balance, the remainder of this chapter will seek to map the vacillating and resistant surface textures of Albertine disparue, using the rich (and often traumatic) acts of reading there narrated as nodal points. 24 21 In Proust and Emotion, Inge Crosman Wimmers emphasizes what she deems to be the unacknowledged role of the ‘intermittences’, in A la recherche (see 60–1, 120–2). 22 Proust, Jealousy, Knowledge: An Inaugural Lecture delivered at Queen Mary College, University of London on 24 October 1978 (London: Queen Mary College, 1978), 3; in Freud, Proust, Lacan, the adjective ‘neglected’ is replaced by ‘eclipsed’ (48). Interestingly, Christine Cano in a study published in 2006 is still able to refer to these volumes as ‘traditionally the most marginalized sections of A la recherche’, Proust’s Deadline, 82. 23 Cano provides a comprehensive account of this debate in Proust’s Deadline: see her chapter ‘Grasset’s Revenge’. Christie McDonald attends to the issues posed by the shortened version of Albertine disparue in The Proustian Fabric: Associations of Memory (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 132–53. See also Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, Proust inachevé. Le dossier « Albertine disparue » (Paris: Champion, 2005); Jean Milly, ‘Problèmes génétiques et éditoriaux à propos d’Albertine disparue’, in Jean Milly and Rainer Warning (eds.), Marcel Proust. Ecrire sans fin (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1996), 51–77 (this essay has an excellent bibliography of related material); Littérature, 88 (1992) contains a number of informative pieces collected under the title ‘Proust, éditions et lectures’, 44–94: see in particular Elyane Dezon-Jones, ‘Editer Proust: hier, aujourd’hui et peut-être demain’ (46–53). 24 This task has been begun in Ch. 2 above in my analysis of the Figaro scene, which represents some rare moments of happiness in Albertine disparue (IV, 147–52). Richard
Reading Between the Lines
111
‘[Albertine disparue] has been disowned by the collective memory of this novel’, writes Wassenaar, ‘we do not want to know about what takes place in the sombre outback that occupies the textual space between Marcel’s panicky sequestration of his beloved, and his dulled registering of the fact that the two ways were only ever one’; she goes on to comment on ‘the remote textual wasteland that follows upon the news that Albertine is dead’. 25 Undoubtedly, Albertine disparue, after the grand manner of the opening volumes of A la recherche, has a tonal quality which makes great demands on readers, who, realistically by this point in the novel, are fairly fatigued. As Richard Terdiman puts it, ‘this volume is Proust’s brilliant, bitter witness to the catastrophic hostility of the world outside the self, and to the irreducible isolation of the individual’. 26 The acts of reading that stud the surface of Albertine disparue, despite their ‘negativity’, their place in the machinery of mourning identified by Wassenaar and in the dramas of suffering examined by Luckhurst, nevertheless have an undeniable heuristic character which intimates hope against the bleakness of the ‘wasteland’. Examining these acts of reading will reveal rather a brighter picture than that painted by Wassenaar, one at least where the (at times admittedly tortuous) intellectual processes carried out bear the mark of artistic, critical capacities that will be essential to the narrator if he is to become a writer. Albertine leaves the narrator a letter when she flees, and as the volume opens the narrator briskly asserts that ‘le plus pressé était de lire la lettre d’Albertine’ (IV, 4). This he does, as do Proust’s readers, for the letter is quoted in full, and, like Swann before him (I, 482), the narrator’s reaction to reading unexpected or shocking news is an out-and-out denial of the letter’s contents: ‘Tout cela ne signifie rien me dis-je, c’est même meilleur que je ne pensais, car comme elle ne pense rien de tout cela, elle ne l’a évidemment écrit que pour frapper un grand coup’ (IV, 5). The blow struck is indeed a resonant one, and its impact reverberates throughout the several hundred pages that follow. Terdiman’s chapter ‘Narration in La Fugitive’, in The Dialectics of Isolation: Self and Society in the French Novel from the Realists to Proust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), 199–225, is an insightful critique of the volume’s structuring. Nicola Luckhurst considers what she terms ‘Theory-laden souffrance’, in Science and Structure in Proust’s ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 200–24; and in the final chapter of her Proustian Passions: The Uses of Self-justification for ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Ingrid Wassenaar examines mourning and vulnerability in the first section of Albertine disparue (171–208). 25 Wassenaar, Proustian Passions, 178, 179. 26 Terdiman, Narration in La Fugitive, 199.
112
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
As his reading of the letter sinks in, the narrator deliriously considers a wild spread of possible actions: should he have given Mme Bontemps half of his fortune? Would he have time to order the yacht and the Rolls Royce Albertine had desired? Such seeming divagation continues, the emotional turmoil of the sudden loss inscribing itself textually in questions and exclamations, and with them, as at many of the novel’s points of tension, several familiar components of the narrator’s hobby of hypothesis building, evaluating, and dismantling resurface: ‘souffrance’, ‘désir[er]’, ‘plaisirs’, ‘vie’, ‘esprit’, and ‘intelligence’ all crop up (IV, 6–7). Knowledge-seekers (the historian, the physician, the judge) are recruited metaphorically to the task of deciphering the ‘real’ message Albertine’s departure seeks to convey. The sense of ‘ressassement’ one gets from Albertine disparue, the endless questioning and model-building, may be regarded as a defence mechanism in the narrator. To survive on the edge of the abyss opened up by his sudden loss, which renders all conclusions unsatisfactory, the narrator’s mind takes over, displaying the virtuosic talents of a skilled and stubborn hermeneutist who will not acknowledge defeat and strives tirelessly and immoderately towards any form of conceptual elucidation of his loss. Within this exhausting project, the merits of reading are implicitly questioned when we read that ‘l’intelligence n’est pas l’instrument le plus subtil, le plus puissant, le plus approprié pour saisir le vrai’, yet to communicate the situation in which he finds himself, the narrator has recourse to an image of an act led by the intelligence, the faculty being comprehensively devalued: Le malheur imprévu avec lequel je me trouvais aux prises, il me semblait l’avoir lui aussi (comme l’amitié d’Albertine avec deux lesbiennes) déjà connue pour l’avoir lu dans tant de signes où (malgré les affirmations contraires de ma raison, s’appuyant sur les dires d’Albertine elle-même) j’avais discerné la lassitude, l’horreur qu’elle avait de vivre ainsi en esclave et qu’ils traçaient à l’envers des prunelles tristes et soumises d’Albertine, sur ses joues brusquement enflammées par une inexplicable rougeur, dans le bruit de la fenêtre qui s’était brusquement ouverte comme avec de l’encre invisible! (IV, 7)
‘Le malheur’, as evinced by the remainder of the sentence, is not ‘imprévu’: it has been there to be seen by the narrator in his lover’s eyes, her movements, her face. Having claimed that his loss is unexpected, the narrator lucidly realizes his refusal to ‘read’ what had been before him for some time. His realization compiles a sad catalogue of the effects of Albertine’s sequestration (‘lassitude’, ‘horreur’, ‘prunelles tristes et soumises’), which explodes ultimately in violence (‘brusquement
Reading Between the Lines
113
enflammées’, ‘brusquement ouverte’). The narrator suggests that his non-reading of these signs resulted from their being written in invisible ink, imperceptible to his unprimed eye. We have already seen, however, that messages need not be invisible for them to go unread, or to have something read ‘into’ them (as we shall see below with Albertine’s rings). Indeed, the unreliability of reading is acknowledged by the narrator as he comments that ‘pour se représenter une situation inconnue l’imagination emprunte des éléments connus et à cause de cela ne se la représente pas’ (IV, 8). The unread is as great an obstacle to understanding as is the ‘misread’. He continues as follows, his word choice tantalizingly pointing towards my etymological figuring of the reading encounter as ‘délire’: ‘Mais la sensibilité, même la plus physique, reçoit comme le sillon de la foudre, la signature originale et longtemps indélébile de l’événement nouveau’ (IV, 8). An unprecedented event leaves an impression on us—a signature—like a furrow or line of text. This impression is long lasting, indelible, in direct contrast to the ‘invisible’ traces or script of those things, people, or situations we see and experience every day without ever actually reading them. Developing the notion of experience as inscription, the narrator continues his reflections on ‘cette terrible puissance d’enregistrement qu’a le corps’ (IV, 8) by suggesting that the nature of jealousy condemns us always to suffer, and our relationships to end, in the same way. He narrates a complex scene of reading as an illustration of the fact that one’s lover’s departure is never ex nihilo: ‘Elle devait depuis quelque temps entretenir des relations écrites, ou verbales, par messagers, avec tel homme ou telle femme, attendre tel signal que nous avons peutêtre donné nous-même sans le savoir’ (IV, 10). The exasperation of his summative lament could stand as his epitaph, and goes some way towards expressing the underlying difficulty of Albertine disparue: ‘Que d’hypothèses possibles!’ In the illustrative anecdote, once again reading is shown to be unreliable; a logical, confident ‘explication de texte’ is made, only to be bluntly taken apart piece by piece and shown to be entirely without substance: Je construisais si bien la vérité, mais dans le possible seulement, qu’ayant un jour ouvert par erreur une lettre pour une de mes maîtresses, lettre écrite en style convenu et qui disait: Attends toujours signe pour aller chez le marquis de Saint-Loup, prévenez demain par coup de téléphone, je reconstituai une sorte de fuite projetée; le nom du marquis de Saint-Loup n’était là que pour signifier autre chose, car ma maîtresse ne connaissait pas Saint-Loup mais m’avait entendu parler de lui et d’ailleurs la signature était une espèce de surnom, sans
114
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
aucune forme de langage. Or la lettre n’était pas adressée à ma maîtresse, mais à une personne de la maison qui portait un nom différent mais qu’on avait mal lu. La lettre n’était pas en signes convenus mais en mauvais français parce qu’elle était d’une Américaine, effectivement amie de Saint-Loup comme celui-ci me l’apprit. Et la façon étrange dont cette Américaine formait certaines lettres avait donné l’aspect d’un surnom à un nom parfaitement réel mais étranger. Je m’étais donc ce jour-là trompé du tout au tout dans mes soupçons. (IV, 10) 27
In an ironic symmetry, each of the affirmations made in the first sentence with regard to his reading of the letter is negated after the pivotal ‘Or’, which acts as a caesura between the jealous fabrication and the empirical reality of the situation: ‘une lettre pour une de mes mâitresses’ / ‘la lettre n’était pas adressée à ma maîtresse’; ‘[une] lettre écrite en signes convenus’ / ‘la lettre n’était pas en signes convenus’; ‘le nom du marquis de Saint-Loup n’était là que pour signifier autre chose’ / ‘la lettre . . . était d’une Américaine, effectivement amie de Saint-Loup’; etc. From a note of less than twenty words, the narrator’s suspicion-driven reading proves to be a monumental error, not a ‘reconstitution’ of facts but a fabrication of a quite different situation. His blurred and blinkered vision strips reading of all its heuristic qualities (‘je m’étais . . . trompé du tout au tout’), or so, at first, it seems. With a final twist, however, the narrator concludes the glum tale by stating that, for all his false assumptions in the scene quoted above, when three months later his mistress did leave him, ‘ç’avait été d’une façon absolument identique à celle que j’avais imaginée la première fois’. Reality enacts what his imagination had created, and his reading takes on an eerie quality of prescience or augury. 28 The faulty reading as ‘reconstitution’ is itself reconstituted later on in Albertine disparue, where another hasty reading of handwritten script is described in terms of ‘re-establishing’ the detail of a text, again— of course—inaccurately (IV, 141–2). Before we reach that incident, however, there are a number of acts of reading which are eagerly anticipated by the narrator. After several days of waiting for communication from Saint-Loup, who is sent to seek out Albertine, the narrator 27 cf. Charlus’s ‘accidental’ interception of Léa’s incriminating letter to Morel in La Prisonnière (III, 720–2). 28 The uncanny interconnections of scenarios imagined or ‘over-read’ and those actually experienced is returned to below with reference to reading’s capacity to intensify our experience of reality (‘la lecture d’un roman un peu triste’, IV, 141). Moreover, it should be remembered that if one spends as much time as the narrator does hypothesizing, constructing, and working through imaginary events, reality is likely to begin to seem more predictable, its events more ‘inevitable’.
Reading Between the Lines
115
eventually receives a telegram from the latter, complaining at this tactic, asking: ‘POURQUOI NE PAS M’AVOIR ÉCRIT DIRECTEMENT? J’AURAIS ÉTÉ TROP HEUREUSE DE REVENIR’ (IV, 36). Reading this telegram could have been the spur for the narrator to play it straight and invite Albertine back into his life. Characteristically, he chooses not to and writes a mendacious letter, quoted in full (IV, 37–9), where, counter to his actual belief at the time, he states that ‘la vie nous a séparés’ and insists that their split be definitive, in order (so he thinks) to make Albertine’s desire to return all the greater. Her return, of course, never happens. A letter arrives in which she seems to have resigned herself to their separation. Still the narrator plays his games and writes first to Andrée, inviting her to come and stay with him, then he writes to Albertine, ‘comme si je n’avais pas encore reçu sa lettre’, claiming that he feels he may find happiness with Andrée. With that another period of hypothesis-filled waiting ensues, which is eventually shattered by a cascade of unforeseen communications. A telegram arrives first from Mme Bontemps, announcing Albertine’s death. Before this, however, while attending to Albertine’s abandoned room, Françoise discovers two rings that belonged to her in a drawer. There follows a scene of reading which is fraught with emotional tension. Françoise is uncertain about giving the narrator the rings: ‘Elle détestait Albertine, mais, me jugeant d’après elle-même, elle se figurait qu’on ne pouvait me remettre une lettre écrite par mon amie sans craindre que je l’ouvrisse’ (IV, 45). Thus we might relate the present scene to Swann’s actions with Odette’s letter to Forcheville, and to the narrator with Albertine’s kimono. The reading involved here ought to be rather less complex than Swann’s manoeuvres with the envelope, since the markings on the rings are in no way physically covered or concealed. The narrator, however, refuses to read what is before him: the engraving of a motif on both rings that makes clear their common origin, counter to Albertine’s claim to have received one from her aunt and to have bought the other. ‘Sur celle qui n’a pas de rubis’, the narrator claims, ‘il y a bien un aigle, mais sur l’autre c’est une espèce de tête d’homme qui est ciselée’ (IV, 46). 29 Françoise, the uneducated servant, disabuses 29 See Peter Collier’s incisive analysis of this scene in Proust and Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 87–9: ‘The narrator, Marcel, has obscured the true interpretation of the narrative, by misreading the motif as that of a grimacing face. But this misreading comes close to the truth concealed in this deliberately inscrutable eagle symbol, for the eagle represents the person who gave it to Albertine (probably Léa,
116
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
the narrator of his blindness, his refusal to read the eagles’ heads for what they are—evidence of Albertine’s infidelity. Collier argues persuasively that the ring inset with a ruby that needs to be deciphered is a mise en abîme, ‘a miniature work of art inset within the greater work, and which helps to decode it’. 30 We might add to this that the scene serves a further revelatory function. It underlines once more the instability and shock that reading is capable of bringing about, as well as how blinkered we can be in our interpretive acts by psychological forces within us. Françoise reads what is before her and unforgivingly compels the narrator, magnifying glass in hand, to accept that which hitherto he has not only ignored but wilfully corrupted. The effects of this enforced revelation provoke first an anxiousness in the narrator: ‘je haletais tandis que Françoise allait chercher ma loupe’ (IV, 46), before the full delirium of the act proper takes its toll: ‘Je me serais trompé de boîte de médicament et, au lieu de prendre quelques cachets de véronal un jour où je sentais que j’avais bu trop de tasses de thé, j’aurais pris autant de cachets de caféine, que mon cœur n’eût pas pu battre plus violemment’ (IV, 47). The traumatic reading of the telegram from Mme Bontemps shortly after this induces a similar shock and instability in the narrator, whose discourse becomes marked by a profusion of questions and exclamations. As the news sinks in, Françoise enters and the effect of her spoken words resembles that of the narrator’s childhood reading at Combray: ‘il y a quelquefois des mots qui mettent une réalité différente à la même place que celle qui est près de nous, ils nous étourdissent tout autant qu’un vertige’ (IV, 59). In this delirious state the narrator receives further revelation from Françoise: ‘Monsieur n’a pas besoin d’avoir l’air fâché. Il va être au contraire bien content. Ce sont deux lettres de mademoiselle Albertine’. Reading the telegram has already put the narrator in a state of ‘délire’ (‘j’avais dû avoir les yeux de quelqu’un dont l’esprit perd l’équilibre’, IV, 59), and the letters do little to improve the situation. 31 The pages that follow this body blow and complete the chapter ‘Le Chagrin et l’Oubli’ although this is never clearly established). Only this person is a woman. So that Marcel has only misread the gender of the symbol, as long as he misreads the equivocal sexual identity of Albertine. But the eagle also chokes this effort to decode, and thus the narrator in his strangulated misreading perfectly mirrors his own face’, 88. 30 Ibid., 89. 31 Richard Terdiman acknowledges the powerful effects of this act of reading. He writes of ‘the trance which began with [the narrator’s] first comprehension of Mme Bontemps’s telegram’ (‘Narration in La Fugitive’, 208): a trance or, we might say, ‘un délire’.
Reading Between the Lines
117
(IV, 59–138) are a stark diary of mourning sewn into which, here and there, are scenes and images of reading. 32 The narrator tells, for example, of the visions of Paris and Balbec that he likes to return to in his mind, but inevitably they remind him of Albertine: ‘c’étaient les pages encore si récentes, et si vite tournées, de sa courte vie’ (IV, 81). He goes on to suggest that ‘je n’aurais pas connu Albertine si je n’avais pas lu dans un traité d’archéologie la description de l’église de Balbec’ (IV, 82), a suggestion which adds another member to our set of foundational or ‘Primal’ scenes of reading and lends weight to the act’s importance in the genesis of the narrator’s existence-altering relationship. Reading, so often viewed as an escapist pursuit, proves to be quite the opposite, as the narrator seeks to free himself from his all-consuming suffering: ‘j’essayais de ne penser à rien, de prendre un journal’, he comments, ignoring that in reading one can never think of nothing. ‘Mais la lecture m’était insupportable de ces articles écrits par des gens qui n’éprouvaient pas de réelle douleur’ (IV, 103). As we shall see, the narrator’s pain and misery bring about a situation where reading is every bit as likely to bring on a new wave of suffering as a happening in the ‘real world’. Despite his unhappiness and fluctuating mental states, it is during the course of Albertine disparue that the narrator articulates a profound statement about reading, the gist of which has been implicitly present throughout much of the novel but never quite expressed. To come to terms with his new, solitary situation, he will have to live with the idea of Albertine’s death, something, unsurprisingly, which is easier said than done: ‘Je n’étais pas encore là. Tantôt c’était ma mémoire, rendue plus claire par une excitation intellectuelle, par exemple si j’étais en train de lire, qui renouvelait mon chagrin’ (IV, 117). Reading, as has been clear all along, stimulates the brain and with it the memory. As such, it can constitute experience both positive and negative, and is not altogether predictable in terms of its results. Bergotte’s work, for instance, would surely be comforting to the narrator during his anxious hours of mourning? ‘Je rouvris un roman de Bergotte que j’avais 32 Peter Collier perceptively draws our attention to these, and other, acts of interpretation in the novel: ‘The great creative power of reading, exercised by Marcel when faced with the Figaro article, Albertine’s rings, Aimé’s letters, Gilberte’s and Saint-Loup’s telegrams, or Ruskin’s art criticism, is a creative power shared by Proust’s reader, stitching away at these fragments of interpretation and already anticipating the patchwork aesthetic to be revealed in Finding Time Again’, translator’s Introduction, The Prisoner and The Fugitive, p. xxv.
118
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
particulièrement aimé’, we are told (IV, 121), but emotional succour is not at hand. Here, reading Bergotte provokes desperation: « Mais alors, m’écriai-je avec désespoir, de ce que j’attache tant d’importance à ce qu’a pu faire Albertine je ne peux pas conclure que sa personnalité est quelque chose de réel qui ne peut être aboli, que je la retrouverai un jour pareille, au ciel, si j’appelle tant de vœux, attends avec tant d’impatience, accueille avec des larmes le succès d’une personne qui n’a jamais existé que dans l’imagination de Bergotte, que je n’ai jamais vue, dont je suis libre de me figurer à mon gré le visage! » (IV, 121)
The experience of reading alerts the narrator to the permeability of the boundary that exists between ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’, which is one that has concerned him already: previously he remarked that ‘on ne peut lire un roman sans donner à l’héroïne les traits de celle qu’on aime’ (IV, 36). Earlier still he ponders the life he leads with Albertine, bringing into question the relative realities of lived and read experience: j’eus l’idée que le monde où étaient cette chambre et ces bibliothèques, et dans lequel Albertine était si peu de chose, était peut-être un monde intellectuel, qui était la seule réalité, et mon chagrin, quelque chose comme celui que donne la lecture d’un roman et dont un fou seul pourrait faire un chagrin durable et permanent et se prolongeant dans sa vie; qu’il suffirait peut-être d’un petit mouvement de ma volonté pour atteindre ce monde réel, y rentrer en dépassant ma douleur comme un cerceau de papier qu’on crève, et ne plus me soucier davantage de ce qu’avait fait Albertine que nous ne nous soucions des actions de l’héroïne imaginaire d’un roman après que nous en avons fini la lecture. (III, 510–11)
The reality of that which is read is distinct from, but highly similar to, the reality in which we read, that which Proust’s narrator often calls simply ‘la vie’. The passages quoted above bring into relief questions of the sort raised in a rather more complex fashion by the Goncourt pastiche. The prying, ever curious, mind of the narrator examines and evaluates every aspect of his life in his quest to find the words and concepts with which to express the sense of loss he experiences at Albertine’s death. When he touches on reading, however, a troubling realization occurs which casts doubt over the status of the ‘reality’, the empirically experienced life to which he looked for his answers. Reading generates emotional investments from readers which on the surface are no different from those of ‘real’, day-to-day life. Reading is no longer a comforting escapist haven of the imagination and the
Reading Between the Lines
119
intellect: the reading of fiction opens our eyes to the fragility of what we take to be ontological and epistemological certainties, and destabilizes the traditional distinctions between the intellectual and the empirical, between the real and the imaginary. 33 For a while, at least, the narrator manages to keep his mind from these grave doubts and insecurities by strolling through the ‘Bois’. As he wanders, his gaze is drawn to girls and young women, each resembling the absent Albertine to his roving, desirous eyes. Images of reading once more prop up the narrative: the girls whose sudden appearance causes him to contort himself in order to glimpse them as they pass ‘m’intéressaient, me touchaient comme ces pages purement descriptives au milieu desquelles un artiste, pour les rendre plus complètes, introduit une fiction, tout un roman’ (IV, 140). We might infer from this an explanation of the role of the anecdote regarding the intercepted letter from the ‘Américaine’. However, it communicates just one of the loops of jealousy and grief in which the narrator and his readers find themselves entangled. ‘Et parfois, la lecture d’un roman un peu triste’, he continues, me ramenait brusquement en arrière, car certains romans sont comme de grands deuils momentanés, abolissent l’habitude, nous remettent en contact avec la réalité de la vie, mais pour quelques heures seulement, comme un cauchemar, car les forces de l’habitude, l’oubli qu’elles produisent, la gaieté qu’elles ramènent par l’impuissance du cerveau à lutter contre elles et à recréer le vrai, l’emportent infiniment sur la suggestion presque hypnotique d’un beau livre, laquelle, comme toutes les suggestions, a des effets très courts. (IV, 141–2) 34
The effects of reading, the departure from reality it affords us, by which it is so commonly characterized, are turned on their head in a most unexpected way. 35 Spectating on life is—for a time—enough to keep 33 Antoine Compagnon seems to ignore this instability and rather sweepingly regards empirical life experiences as more valuable to the narrator than those of reading: ‘c’est toujours la relation de la lecture et de la vie qui est en cause, et c’est au regard de la vie que la lecture est insuffisante, limitée’, ‘Proust 1: contre la lecture’, 235. 34 Note that the conceptual vocabulary (‘la réalité’, ‘la vie’, ‘le vrai’) echoes that of the Goncourt scene and the impact of this reading—a sundering of habit, a renewed and intensified relation to life and the world around us—bears more than a passing resemblance to involuntary memory and ‘les intermittences du cœur’. 35 cf. Alain, in ‘Bonheur de lire’: ‘Entre lire et rêver, quelle différence? Il y a des temps où l’on est heureux de rêver; alors on ne lit point. Et au contraire la lecture est le remède de choix lorsque la rêverie est empoisonnée par quelque cause’, Les Arts et les dieux, ed. by Georges Bénézé (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), 931–4 (931).
120
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
his suffering at bay; it is ‘un roman un peu triste’ which, through its fiction, renders more acute the pains of reality. Reading, whose effects have been likened to delirium (here it is ‘une suggestion presque hypnotique’), is now transfigured, ‘comme un cauchemar’, painfully igniting the imagination and memory, yet only fleetingly so, for its effects are less durable than the force which, ironically, and on one of very few occasions in Proust’s novel, comes to the narrator’s aid: Habit. This remarkable reversal sets the narrator pondering the associative workings of the mind, and these are demonstrated in action almost immediately. He sees ‘un groupe de trois jeunes filles, un peu plus âgées, peut-être des jeunes femmes, dont l’allure élégante et énergique correspondait si bien à ce qui m’avait séduit le premier jour où j’avais aperçu Albertine et ses amies’ (IV, 142). He tries to follow them, but without success. A few days later he sees them leaving the Guermantes’s porch ahead of him. He stares, fascinated, especially by the blonde figure who holds his gaze and turns back towards him as they make their way off. Ever curious, the narrator enquires as to their identity with the concierge, who replies ‘voici le nom, je ne sais pas si j’ai bien écrit’ (IV, 143). Keen to discover the identity of the mystery girl, he eagerly reads: ‘Et je lus: Mlle Déporcheville, que je rétablis aisément: d’Éporcheville, c’est-à-dire le nom ou à peu près, autant que je me souvenais, de la jeune fille d’excellente famille, et apparentée vaguement aux Guermantes, dont Robert m’avait parlé pour l’avoir rencontrée dans une maison de passe’ (IV, 143). Both the text and its interpretation have flimsy foundations to say the least (‘je ne sais pas si j’ai bien écrit’, ‘le nom ou à peu près, autant que je me souvenais’). Memory and cognition are clearly fallible, and soon the narrator realizes that his assumption about which of the girls is Mlle d’Éporcheville is unfounded; to ascertain which of them went by that (problematic) name he returns to the concierge, who confirms the narrator’s hunch: the blonde girl, much to his delight, is in fact Mlle d’Éporcheville (or so he thinks). In parallel to many of the scenes examined so far, the effects of reading here are compared to writing. The narrator describes the scenarios he imagines in the ‘knowledge’ of the girl’s identity, which are created ‘à la façon d’un romancier qui fond ensemble divers éléments empruntés à la réalité pour créer un personnage imaginaire’ (IV, 144–5). This analogy is delivered with a characteristic Proustian ‘clin d’œil au lecteur’: we must read with the awareness that Proust is precisely one such ‘romancier’ who is hugely
Reading Between the Lines
121
adept at the fusion of ‘l’imaginaire’ and ‘la réalité’. 36 With the news that ‘Mlle d’Éporcheville était bien la blonde’ begins ‘une journée d’une folle agitation’ (IV, 145) or ‘délire’, one might say. He cannot wait to meet the girl, his obsession with whom, he reflects, constitutes ‘love’ of a sort; he decides to send a telegram to Saint-Loup in order to confirm that he is remembering the right person. In anticipation of the reply he has ‘une nuit d’insomnie heureuse’ (IV, 146), further evidence of the strong somatic effects of our mental processes. Robert’s reply, however, does not bring the news the narrator had wished for: ‘DE L’ORGEVILLE, DE PARTICULE, ORGE LA GRAMINÉE COMME LE SEIGLE, VILLE COMME UNE VILLE, PETITE, BRUNE, BOULOTTE, EST EN CE MOMENT EN SUISSE’ (IV, 146–7). Without even starting, the ‘relationship’ ends as it (almost) began: with an act of reading. The comical, dictionarylike impersonality of the telegram contrasts with the heady excitement provoked by the initial reading of the concierge’s note. Nevertheless, the forward motion of the narrative ceases for no longer than the time taken by the narrator’s brief exclamation ‘Ce n’était pas elle!’, before attention shifts immediately to a landmark with which we are already familiar: the article in Le Figaro (IV, 147–52). The agitation and wonder which absorb the narrator in this scene are rather at odds with Wassenaar’s depiction of Albertine disparue as the ‘sombre outback’ of the novel. 37 Disappointment admittedly follows the exhilaration of the readings I have examined so far in this chapter, but this is not the case to the same degree in relation to the Figaro article. After the excitement of his being published, the narrator confidently sallies forth to a luncheon ‘chez Guermantes’, where he sees the girl whose name he had earlier mistaken. His various errors seem to gather cumulative force here, rather as meeting Mlle de Saint-Loup for the first time seems to allow his past to crystallize into a more easily assessable, quantifiable set of interconnections and relations in Le Temps retrouvé (IV, 605–9). To the narrator’s confusion, the girl asks to be re-introduced to him. Her name, that he still cannot recall? ‘Mlle de Forcheville’. The penny resoundingly drops and the error-stricken nature of our existence is laid bare. ‘En elle-même ma double erreur de nom, m’être rappelé de L’Orgeville comme étant d’Éporcheville et avoir reconstitué en Éporcheville ce qui était en réalité 36 For the most complex, nuanced instance of this in the novel, see the interpolation of the pastiche of the Goncourt journal that masquerades as a real literary work in Le Temps retrouvé (IV, 287–301). 37 Wassenaar, Proustian Passions, 178.
122
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
Forcheville, n’avait rien d’extraordinaire’ (IV, 153); errors of this sort, he finally recognizes, are commonplace, part of the everyday. 38 After the headlong rush and bluster of his sudden ‘love’ for Mlle d’Éporcheville (sic), the narrator’s tone established in conclusion here is one of calm recognition, his discovery presented as a sedate acknowledgement of our cognitive frailty before the kaleidoscopic nature of the experiential world: ‘Notre tort est de présenter les choses telles qu’elles sont, les noms tels qu’ils sont écrits, les gens tels que la photographie et la psychologie donnent d’eux une notion immobile. Mais en réalité, ce n’est pas du tout cela que nous percevons d’habitude. Nous voyons, nous entendons, nous concevons le monde tout de travers’ (IV, 153). Our perception of the world is cross-wise, ‘de travers’, from the Latin ‘transvertere’, to cross the furrows (or ‘vers’). Reading, as I have suggested, can be deliriant, throwing us off course in our daily business; here, however, a far broader range of engagement with the world is brought into question. Sight, hearing, and (troublingly) our ‘conception’ of the world are never straightforward, or linear. In life, as with texts, we not only read between the lines, but above, below, and beyond them. 39 These conclusions scarcely bring a spring to one’s readerly step; they are, however, fundamental to the development of what remains of A la recherche and how we read it. Reading ‘de travers’ is the norm, we realize, and although instinctively we might feel that a sequential, fine-tooth comb approach to the text would see our way to a ‘successful’ reading of it, the reporting of the root error on which perception is founded here (indeed, in the same paragraph the narrator refers to ‘cette perpetuelle erreur qui est précisément la « vie») does not preclude such errors from being profitable. Further, as Le Temps retrouvé draws to a close, the narrator informs us that ‘des transversales s’établissaient’ between the two distinct ‘ways’ he had perceived as a child (IV, 606). Physiologically speaking, all reading is done ‘de travers’, our eyes darting up, down, to, and fro across the page as we read. It is natural, then, to read more 38 In her excellent Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading, Mary Jacobus deals with psychoanalytic responses to the complexity that lurks beneath the mundane surface of the act of reading; see ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Reading’, 25–35. 39 Such a conception of the world is consistent with what is generally recognized as the characteristic ‘par excellence’ of Proust’s novel: metaphor. It is also redolent of one of metaphor’s many textual avatars in A la recherche: translation. Perec acknowledges the potential of reading ‘de travers’: ‘un certain art de la lecture . . . pourrait consister à lire de côté, à porter sur le texte un regard oblique mais déjà, il ne s’agit plus de la lecture à son niveau physiologique: comment pourrait-on apprendre aux muscles extra-oculaires à lire « autrement »? ‘Lire: esquisse socio-physiologique’, 115.
Reading Between the Lines
123
than just what is textually marked on the page in a conventional linear progression, and to impose shapes on words which we scarcely pause to identify and decipher. This usually imperceptible criss-crossing of reading resembles the underlying structures of Proust’s novel and puts one in mind of Deleuze’s image of the spider’s web at the close of his Proust et les signes, which stems in fact from a statement germane to our concerns here: ‘Le lecteur au moins est frappé par l’insistance avec laquelle Proust présente ce narrateur comme incapable de voir, de percevoir, de se souvenir, de comprendre’. 40 The reliability of the act of reading is provocatively dismantled in a text that relies on that act like no other in order to be understood. Whether we call it ‘délire’, ‘mis-taking’, or ‘misreading’, among the investigative procedures carried out by the narrator in Albertine disparue, it is the fallible act of textual ‘déchiffrement’ that leads us now directly, now by detour and digression, to the highly over-determined climax of the ‘Séjour à Venise’. 41 Much of the first chapter of Albertine disparue, ‘Le Chagrin et l’Oubli’, is spent waiting for written communications. The narrator impatiently awaits word from Saint-Loup, and from Albertine herself. Like buses, three messages arrive at once: the telegram from Mme Bontemps, and Albertine’s last two letters. After learning of her death, the narrator’s levels of mournful despair ebb and flow, and during this period Aimé’s investigations in Touraine promise revelations, and bring associated anticipation and excitement. Aimé’s letters (IV, 96–7), including the 40 Deleuze, Proust et les signes, 217. He depicts the narrator as ‘un énorme Corps sans organes’ (218), as a spider, ‘dont la toile même est la Recherche en train de se faire, de se tisser avec chaque fil remué par tel ou tel signe’. Moreover, in his consideration of madness in the characters of Charlus and Albertine, Deleuze notes that ‘A la fin du XIXè siècle et au début du XXè , la psychiatrie établissait une distinction très intéressante entre deux sortes de délires des signes, les délires de revendication du type érotomanie ou jalousie. Les premiers ont un début insidieux, un développement progressif qui dépendent essentiellement de forces endogènes, s’étendent en un réseau général qui mobilise l’ensemble des investissements verbaux. Les seconds ont un début beaucoup plus brusque, et sont liés à des occasions extérieures réelles ou imaginées; ils dépendent d’une sorte de « postulat » concernant un objet déterminé, et entrent dans des constellations limitées; ils sont moins délires d’idées passant par le système en extension des investissements verbaux, que délire d’acte animé par un investissement intensif d’objet’ (214–15). It would be unwise to try to squeeze the diverse effects of the narrator’s reading into one or other of these categories, but it should be noted that my sense of readerly delirium is not unrelated to the second of the two types of ‘délires des signes’ distinguished by Deleuze. 41 For a rich, sustained, and insightful assessment of Proust’s relation with Venice and its multifarious roles in A la recherche, see Peter Collier, Proust and Venice. See also Tony Tanner’s chapter ‘Marcel Proust: Threefold and Unique’, in Venice Desired (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 228–68.
124
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
prurient report he sends of his interview with the ‘blanchisseuse’, provoke tremulous agitation, followed by bitter jealous disappointment. The trip to Venice will bring fresh air, welcome distractions, and fulfil a long-held desire to visit that city, which is traceable back to the pictures on the narrator’s Combray bedroom wall (‘l’idée que je pris de Venise d’après un dessin [d’un] Titien’, I, 40). Days are spent studying architecture and works of art, but one day the routine is interrupted by an occurrence which makes things seem as if ‘mon amour aurait dû renaître’ (IV, 220). This occurrence is the arrival of yet another telegram, this one marked from the outset as doubtful, requiring an ‘accusé de réception certifiant que le télégramme était bien pour moi’ because of the inexactitude of the name of the intended recipient which the narrator nevertheless deciphers as his own, significantly ‘à travers les déformations des employés italiens’ (IV, 220, my emphasis). The act of reading this particular telegram is casual, unengaged, and without anticipation; its startling content somehow immediately dispels from our minds the uncertain accuracy of the message conveyed: jetant un coup d’œil sur un libellé rempli de mots mal transmis, je pus lire néanmoins: MON AMI VOUS ME CROYEZ MORTE, PARDONNEZ MOI, JE SUIS TRÈS VIVANTE, JE VOUDRAIS VOUS VOIR, VOUS PARLER MARIAGE, QUAND REVENEZ-VOUS? TENDREMENT, ALBERTINE. (IV, 220)
The name of the telegram’s addressee is tainted by ‘inexactitude’, bastardized by ‘déformations’ of language (recalling the letter from the ‘Américaine’), and as a whole the telegram amounts to a fairly pitiful ‘libellé rempli de mots mal transmis’, yet a mere glance suffices for the narrator to accept its contents and begin mentally to construct their future ramifications. Like Gilberte’s unexpected letter (I, 491) which initially ‘ne me causa pas de joie’, the telegram here ‘ne me causa pas la joie que j’aurais cru’. Like the ‘héroïne d’un roman’, Albertine, according to the newly reading-enlightened narrator, ‘n’avait été pour moi qu’un faisceau de pensées’. The abrupt realization that he no longer loves Albertine shocks him, provoking reflections which entail a comparison of physical ills that directly affect the body and those that ‘n’agissent sur le corps que par l’intermédiaire de l’intelligence’ (IV, 222–3). Time is the crucial factor, he realizes, as this ‘out of the blue’ reading has proved: ‘la pensée ayant un pouvoir de renouvellement ou plutôt une impuissance de conservation que n’ont pas les tissus’ (IV, 223). Reading this telegram, for the time being at least, provides the narrator with evidence that his
Reading Between the Lines
125
malady is cured. As such, the next morning, seeking closure on the events, he tries to return the communication to the porter, claiming that ‘on me l’avait remise par erreur et qu’elle n’était pas pour moi’. Once opened, the message cannot be returned; in a similar fashion to his mendacious manoeuvres while corresponding with Albertine, the narrator decides to pretend that he did not ever receive it. The telegram, however, unlike his love for Gilberte, will not be lost ‘dans la loi générale de l’oubli’ (IV, 223), and rears its head in the reading-related recognition scene that closes the third chapter of Albertine disparue. The beginning of the final movement of this chapter is signalled by an act of reading which, in common with many such acts already examined, serves as a stimulus and catalyst for a sudden surge of mental activity. The desire the narrator has for certain women ‘entretenait chez moi à Venise une agitation qui devint fébrile le jour où ma mère avait décidé que nous partirions’ (IV, 230). And what should provoke this feverish agitation, or ‘délire’? ‘Quand nos malles étaient déjà parties en gondole pour la gare, je lus dans un registre des étrangers attendus à l’hôtel: Baronne Putbus et suite.’ Four simple words, apprehended in a stolen glance, a characteristic moment of inquisitiveness, release the restraints on his desire. 42 The symptoms of ‘délire’ I have identified are subsumed into the narrator’s disappointment and frustration that his imminent departure will rob him of intimacy with the much heralded ‘femme de chambre de la Baronne Putbus’: ‘Aussitôt, le sentiment de toutes les heures de plaisir charnel que notre départ allait me faire manquer, éleva ce désir, qui existait chez moi à l’état chronique, à la hauteur d’un sentiment, et le noya dans la mélancolie et le vague’ (IV, 230, my emphases). At his emotional nadir, the narrator makes the snap decision (to the disbelief of his mother) to remain in Venice. Immediately his announcement is made, we are told that ‘le portier vint apporter trois lettres, deux pour elle, une pour moi que je mis dans mon portefeuille au milieu de toutes les autres sans même regarder l’enveloppe’ (IV, 230–1). We pay as little attention to these letters, subtly smuggled into the narrative under the cover of a moment of dramatic tension, as the narrator does, for no sooner are they stored away than his mother 42 This scene recalls the narrator’s studying the ‘dernières listes des étrangers’ at the Balbec hotel in order to satisfy his desire to ‘match up’ the name ‘Simonet’ with the girl who fascinates him in A l’ombre des jeunes filles (II, 164). For an analysis of earlier, variant versions of the scene, see Michael Maar, ‘The Sins of Padua: Proust meets Mme Putbus’s maid’, New Left Review, 10 (2001), 133–9.
126
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
leaves, and we are immersed in his plangent lament, alone with the world and the strains of ‘O sole mio’. 43 Over three subsequent pages, the narrator ‘[qui] n’étai[t] plus qu’un cœur qui battait’ (IV, 231) paints a picture of emptiness, isolation, and dissolution. 44 He cannot decide, cannot judge, consider, or make any resolution as long as the pitiful entertainer continues his song. An aporetic moment is arrived at here, agonizingly accompanied by a musical score: ‘j’assistais à la lente réalisation de mon malheur construit artistement, sans hâte, note par note’ (IV, 233). 45 This ‘réalisation’, enacts a dissolving and disassembly of his physical surroundings. Much of the difficulty of reading Albertine disparue comes from the narrator’s impulses of mind of the sort we encounter here, as he wilfully enters deeper and deeper into speculative thinking, disengaging part from hypothetical part. The process of mentally taking things apart as a sort of performance is what becomes the focus of this stretch of the novel, where very little of day-to-day human functioning retains any of its conventional value. The text reaches its saturation point of speculation at the close of the Venice scene: the narrator seems unable to escape from the mental freefall into which the thought of abandoning ‘Baronne Putbus et suite’ has thrown him; he is ‘avec une volonté dissoute, sans décision apparente’, but finally—improbably—habit comes to his aid. The sluggish passage of time during the rendition of the ‘vulgaire romance’, an effect of the exhausting, all-consuming concentration on musical phrases, anaesthetic in their already knownness, is powerfully contrasted with the sudden intervention of another face of habit, ‘l’insoupçonnable puissance défensive de l’habitude invétérée’, which galvanizes him into an eleventh-hour dash to the station. Once reunited with his mother, the narrative intensity is reduced: ‘Les heures passaient’ (IV, 234), and, to pass the time, they eventually turn to their earlier ignored correspondence. Before the narrator retrieves his letter, he observes the profound effects of what his mother reads: ‘[Elle] lisait 43 In ‘Proust and the Art of Brevity’, Malcolm Bowie brings into relief the rich texturing of this passage and that which precedes it in the text. See Richard Bales (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 216–29 (224–7). 44 The same heart, we should recall, that could not have beaten more violently at the thought of Albertine’s infidelity in the scene with her rings. 45 The singer musically ‘constructing’ the narrator’s unhappiness provides a distant, negative image of the mother’s quasi-musical performance of the François le Champi ‘score’ in the Primal Scene which serves to build up an uncertain—and fleeting—sort of happiness.
Reading Between the Lines
127
sa lettre avec étonnement, puis elle levait la tête, et ses yeux semblaient se poser tour à tour sur des souvenirs distincts, incompatibles et qu’elle ne pouvait parvenir à rapprocher’ (IV, 234). The degree of detail given to support what her eyes appear to do seems exaggerated, but again the impetus of the narrative swiftly carries us past this: ‘cependant j’avais reconnu l’écriture de Gilberte sur mon enveloppe’. The letter announces Gilberte’s marriage, about which, she writes, she had telegraphed him previously, ‘et n’avait pas eu de réponse’. Once again the fragments form an intelligible whole like the ‘mosaïques de marbre et de verre du pavage’ on which the narrator and his mother had walked at Saint Mark’s (IV, 223). 46 ‘Je n’avais jamais eu de dépêche’, asserts the narrator, as we might expect given his prior self-injunction to pretend he had not received a thing (IV, 223). Suddenly, however, reading effects a clearing of mental space not dissimilar to the workings of involuntary memory: ‘Tout d’un coup je sentis dans mon cerveau un fait qui y était installé à l’état de souvenir, quitter sa place et la céder à un autre’ (IV, 234). This cerebral shift brings about a realization that the message which he had thought to be from Albertine was, of course, from Gilberte. The mis-transcription of the latter’s handwritten signature as ‘Albertine’ by a telegraph employee is related by the narrator in a long sentence whose reading time far outweighs the matter of seconds taken for the momentary glance and subsequent transcription it explains. Moreover, the explanation closely resembles the initial identification of Gilberte’s troublesome script; cf: Presque toutes les phrases semblaient soulignées, simplement parce que la barre des t étant tracée non au travers d’eux, mais au-dessus, mettait un trait sous le mot correspondant de la ligne supérieure. (I, 490)
[elle faisait] figurer dans la ligne supérieure les barres de t qui avaient l’air de souligner les mots ou les points sur les i qui avaient l’air d’interrompre les phrases de la ligne d’au-dessus les queues et arabesques des mots qui leur étaient superposés. (IV, 234)
When the ridges of white space are not preserved between the furrows of text, the written page becomes treacherous ground for hasty readers, let 46 Peter Collier very suggestively explores the mosaic form as a structural model in Proust’s novel: ‘the whole structure is formed, and underpinned, by inter-related fragments; it is all one enormous three-dimensional mosaic’, Proust and Venice, 41. See also 115, 149.
128
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
alone time-pressed telegraphists attempting to unravel unfamiliar names in a hand that is far from easily legible. We were earlier warned about assumptions based ‘sur une seule syllabe’ (II, 155), and here we have just that: the employee, the narrator surmises, read ‘les boucles d’s ou d’y de la ligne supérieure comme un « ine » finissant le mot de Gilberte’ (IV, 234–5), which added to the ‘G historié, appuyé sur un i sans point [qui] avait l’air d’un A’ identified by Françoise (I, 493), gives the mistranscription a certain air of inevitability. By this point in the novel, readers of Proust have already been through this sort of scenario inscribed in the text, and in their own experience as readers. As a result, there is a degree of bathos in the finale to the stay in Venice, but this is short-lived, for the narrator’s conclusions, not just to this scene but to a lifetime, it seems, of such mis-takes or ‘délires’, strikes at the epistemological heart of his (and our) existence: ‘Combien de lettres lit dans un mot une personne distraite et surtout prévenue, qui part de l’idée que la lettre est d’une certaine personne? combien de mots dans la phrase?’ (IV, 235). Preconceptions, what Freud refers to simply as ‘preparedness’, thrust meaning onto words which are no more than shapes momentarily glimpsed by a roving eye. As the ‘Séjour à Venise’ ends, so apparently does all faith in our capacity as readers not only of written text but of life in general: On devine en lisant, on crée; tout part d’une erreur initiale; celles qui suivent (et ce n’est pas seulement dans la lecture des lettres et des télégrammes, pas seulement dans toute lecture), si extraordinaires qu’elles puissent paraître à celui qui n’a pas le même point de départ, sont toutes naturelles. (IV, 235, my emphasis)
Reading, and not just reading, but a (vaguely suggested) ‘everything else that makes up life as well’, is said to be founded on error. In Combray the narrator described his desire for the secret of two things—truth and beauty—which are ‘à demi pressenties, à demi incompréhensibles’ (I, 83), but now, even the half-chance implicitly suggested there seems to have gone. However, an ember of hope glows dimly beneath the smouldering remains of epistemological certainty: as the narrator summarizes the interpretive rock bottom he has reached, there is nevertheless a sensory level of engagement left to us, a sing-song narrative of hope: ‘Une bonne partie de ce que nous croyons . . . vient d’une première méprise sur les prémisses’ (IV, 235). There seems to be little hope for knowledge garnered from semiotics-based interpretive schemes, yet there remains a promise of meaning which surfaces as language goes into what Malcolm
Reading Between the Lines
129
Bowie calls ‘semantic and acoustic overdrive’. 47 Reading, even when shown to be based on unstable foundations, retains a heuristic quality and a capacity defiantly to show us, as we carry out the act, that at least on one level it still has something to offer. A la recherche, and Albertine disparue in particular, suggest that at times it is necessary to lose one’s way before one can properly recognize the path one should take, whether it be in love, in dealing with loss, or in reading. The narrator’s mind remains keen and lucid as it acknowledges its errors, and in this way affects a sort of gain through loss. The loss of Albertine, the loss of meaning and certainty, bring profit in the form of a thoroughgoing assessment, a stripping down and re-evaluation of the epistemological processes that underpin our being in the world. As the eye and ear pick up the connexity of ‘une première méprise sur les prémisses’, somehow the loss of sense or purpose in being is recuperated sensorily. Through echo and pattern meaning asserts itself and gently fans the flames of our will to interpret that instinctively resurrects itself, clinging to the most fundamental facet of language: sound. I have highlighted the recurring instances of sound patterning and prose rhymes that enrich and complement the texture of A la recherche. With the repeated debunking of the reading process throughout the novel, culminating in Albertine disparue, it could be argued that the sensory involvement in the reading encounter requires a renewed appraisal. Before the dark, fearsome finale of the ‘Bal de têtes’, Le Temps retrouvé has a lengthy pause for thought in the form of the narrator’s wait in the Prince de Guermantes’s library while a piece of music being played in the salon comes to an end. This neatly fabricated hiatus immediately follows the narrator’s renewed moments of involuntary memory in the courtyard, and the bulk of what we read thereafter is provoked by, and related to, his subsequent instances of epiphanic rememoration. A great deal of what is said bears on reading, and forms a sort of philosophical, literary-theoretical coda to the ‘real life’ experiences of reading that have been narrated throughout the novel. Chapter 5, then, through the framework of the library soliloquy, will address the ‘theory’ of reading that emerges from my reading of A la recherche in all its sensory richness, which is now in harmony with the grand pronouncements of Le Temps retrouvé, now in a highly fruitful tension with them. 47
Bowie, in Bales (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Proust, 222.
5 Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading J’ai la conviction qu’une théorie de la lecture (cette lecture qui a toujours été la parente pauvre de la création littéraire) est absolument tributaire d’une théorie de l’écriture: lire, c’est retrouver—au niveau du corps, et non à celui de la conscience—comment ça a été écrit: c’est se mettre dans la production non dans le produit. Roland Barthes 1
The narrator is reunited with Gilberte at Tansonville, and Le Temps retrouvé opens there, where many discoveries are made, including the revelations related to his reading of the Goncourt journal. After his stay at Tansonville, with his health deteriorating, the narrator moves between Paris and various (apparently ineffectual) ‘maisons de santé,’ during which time he receives letters from Gilberte that prompt acts of reading revealing the changes wrought by war on the landscapes of his youth (IV, 330–1; 334–5). These letters and sporadic forays into Paris reveal previously unseen aspects of the city and of his acquaintances (he takes refuge one night in a hotel run as a male brothel by Jupien, where he witnesses the flagellation of Charlus, IV, 389–412). As he returns to Paris after the war, from the train the narrator sees a bank of trees previously familiar to him; the paucity of his response renders acute his feeling of literary inability, an effect which strikes him ‘de nouveau et avec une force plus lamentable que jamais’ (IV, 433). Faced with a scene of beauty he feels nothing, and he despairs: ‘peut-on espérer transmettre au lecteur un plaisir qu’on n’a pas ressenti?’ (IV, 434). ‘Transmission’, carrying across, or translation for and by a reader is central to the long theorizing discourse (IV, 445–96) that follows this brief rhetorical question; equally, ‘plaisir’, one’s experience of it, and its transmissibility between writer and reader are seldom far from the surface of the narrator’s musings at this stage in Le Temps retrouvé. 1
‘Roland Barthes contre les idées reçues’, O.c ., iii. 71.
Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading
131
Following the series of involuntary recollections that begin with that provoked by the uneven paving stones in the Guermantes’s courtyard (IV, 445), focus shifts from the simplicity of the initial question, and a critical complexity is introduced: having empirically experienced the sensations (and attendant pleasures) which can give life to a work of art, the narrator now places emphasis on the risky, multi-directional interactions that take place between artist and reader, the channels of communication that open up, and crucially the barriers and dead ends met in the artistic encounter. An act of reading is the initial stimulus that propels the narrator back into the Parisian social life from which his mourning and illhealth caused him to withdraw. 2 As was demonstrated at the close of Chapter 4, reading, and interpretation in general, has been relied on and revered, yet finally stripped down, debunked, and laid bare as just another epistemologically flawed scheme, no more reliable at revealing truth and beauty than any of the novel’s other hermeneutic models. Several currents of A la recherche’s epistemology find a confluence, however, at a point shortly before halfway through Le Temps retrouvé. The narrator receives a ‘carte d’invitation’ for a matinee taking place the following day at the home of the prince de Guermantes (IV, 434). He reflects that it is pointless to deny himself the pleasures of society life ‘puisque le fameux «travail» auquel depuis si longtemps j’espère chaque jour me mettre le lendemain, je ne suis pas, ou plus, fait pour lui, et peut-être même il ne correspond à aucune réalité’ (IV, 435). The principal factor, however, that makes the narrator accept the invitation is ‘ce nom de Guermantes, depuis assez longtemps sorti de mon esprit pour que, lu sur la carte d’invitation, il réveillât un rayon de mon attention’. Reading a name, that central pillar of the Proustian architecture, takes the narrator back to Combray, to the ‘rue de l’ Oiseau’ and the ‘vitrail de Gilbert le Mauvais, sire de Guermantes’. 3 The deliriant power of reading the name is described in a way that reinforces the notion of the 2 Reading has been seen at various points throughout the novel to be spur to action. See, e.g., Bergotte, who is lured from his solitary retreat one final time as a result of ‘un critique ayant écrit que dans la Vue de Delft de Ver Meer . . . , tableau qu’il adorait et croyait connaître très bien, un petit pan de mur jaune (qu’il ne se rappelait pas) était si bien peint qu’il était, si on le regarde seul, comme une précieuse œuvre d’art chinoise d’une beauté qui se suffirait à elle-même . . . ’ (III, 692). The curiosity roused by this act of reading effectively brings about his death. I shall return to this scene below. 3 See Roland Barthes, in ‘Proust et les noms’: ‘Le nom proustien est à lui seul et dans tous les cas l’équivalent d’une rubrique de dictionnaire: le nom de Guermantes couvre immédiatement tout ce que le souvenir, l’usage, la culture peuvent mettre en lui’ (125–6).
132
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
loss of epistemological certainty narrated in the Venice climax: ‘j’avais continué à relire l’invitation jusqu’au moment où, révoltées, les lettres qui composaient ce nom si familier et si mystérieux, comme celui même de Combray, eussent repris leur indépendance et eussent dessiné devant mes yeux fatigués comme un nom que je ne connaissais pas’ (IV, 435). Thus, reading—flawed, problematic, habit-driven reading—somehow reignites the narrator’s inquisitiveness and re-establishes nearly forgotten links with his near and distant past. This ‘carte d’invitation’ doubles as a ‘carte d’embarquement’ for what will be the narrator’s last journey. He decides to accept the invitation and, after his revelatory stumble on the ‘pavés assez mal équarris’, the ecstatic narrator is ushered into ‘un petit salon-bibliothèque’ (IV, 446), which will serve as his departure lounge, or ‘salle d’attente’, a room for waiting, but also one full of expectations—and books. Once installed in this liminal space, the narrator voices characteristic time-related concerns: ‘le morceau qu’on jouait pouvait finir d’un moment à l’autre et je pouvais être obligé d’entrer au salon’ (IV, 448). The quiet isolation of the library provides the backdrop for the pages that follow, which recount the solitary ruminations of the narrator as he thinks through his work-to-be and its reception. The time constraint imposed by another work of art (‘le morceau pouvait finir d’un moment à l’autre’) creates an urgency in the narrator’s mind, yet the music lasts long enough to afford him fifty pages’ worth of cerebration. These pages maintain in tension sensation and intellect, and constantly hold up both faculties to scrutiny. The mind must do the processing work for the production of a work of art, but cannot itself ‘produce’ the ‘material’ for that work of art. The tone is set for the pages to come: the mind is lodged in a physical body that experiences things sensually, yet must process and report or reproduce them through the mediation of the intellect. The successive parts of his ‘œuvre’ will need to be constructed ‘dans une matière en quelque sorte différente, . . . dans une matière distincte, nouvelle, d’une transparence, d’une sonorité spéciales, compacte, fraîchissante et rose’ (IV, 449). The stuff of the narrator’s novel, a written text, will demand attention from all of our sensory receptors as well as from our intellect: it will be visual (‘transparence’), audible (‘d’une sonorité spéciale’), physical, olfactory, and even communicative of temperature (‘compacte, fraîchissante et rose’). 4 All of this sensory perceptual data must be 4 For an examination of this passage from Le Temps retrouvé, and the notion of ‘matière’ more generally in Proust’s work, see Thomas Baldwin’s chapter ‘The Matter of Proust’s Text’, The Material Object, 205–51 (esp. 217–20). See also Peter Collier: ‘the
Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading
133
processed by the interpreter of the narrator’s work of art. How? By reading. Earlier on in the novel we witnessed a scene of reading, unconventional in its circumstances and its outcomes, but one which is nevertheless undoubtedly germane to the lessons the narrator is learning in the present scene. Bergotte, as I have already noted, is lured out of the comfort and security of his home by an act of reading. This reading— of a critique of Vermeer’s View of Delft—leads to another reading (that of the painting itself ) which brings about a clear-sighted realization in the writer of what his art should have been. The stuff of the narrator’s novel will be ‘d’une transparence, d’une sonorité spéciales, compacte, fraîchissante et rose’; for Bergotte, reading Vermeer’s painting intimates in similar terms what he ought to have done. Note how the description evokes ‘délire’ and recalls the image used in the Combray bedroom scene for the light creeping in through the blinds: ‘Ses étourdissements augmentatient; il attachait son regard, comme un enfant à un papillon jaune qu’il veut saisir, au précieux petit pan de mur. « C’est ainsi que j’aurais dû écrire, disait-il. Mes derniers livres sont trop secs, il aurait fallu passer plusieurs couches de couleur, rendre ma phrase en elle-même précieuse, comme ce petit pan de mur jaune »´ (III, 692). 5 Bergotte’s dizziness and physical instability increase, whilst his mind grows more assured in its knowledge of the revelation it has so belatedly come by. In an inversion of the Primal Scene, this moment’s reading disentangles the conflicts of art and life in a fleeting, beatific instant of plenitude. This lesson in reading, of course, comes too late for Bergotte, who will indeed be the next day’s reading matter, a newspaper ‘fait divers’ as a result of his dying, rather ignominiously rolling to the floor, struck down by the beauty of art and the perils of less than perfectly cooked potatoes. This scene of delirious discovery and despair, which balances on the finest of edges between the sublime and the comic, serves to foreground the indiscriminate nature of death, which spares artists no more than humble consumers of art. If the narrator is to avoid the fate of Bergotte, he must set to work quickly, lest the ‘salon-bibliothèque’ clear, cool, compact, coloured material sounds very like the glass of the mosaic. And the key to recreating the whole self, through a process of artistic transposition, implies the search for the linguistic equivalent of the aesthetic restructuring of fragments operated by the mosaic’, Proust and Venice, 149. 5 For a brief, thoughtful consideration of the question of how art might offer a sort of afterlife to the artist, see Stéphane Chaudier’s section ‘La mort de Bergotte ou le pari de Proust’, in Proust et le langage religieux, 433–6.
134
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
become his final resting place and that of his rapidly accruing artistic insights. 6 We have seen reading as a spiritual enlightenment (Bergotte), as heuristic (Elstir at the Balbec church), as suffused with and driven by jealousy (Swann and the letter, the narrator and Albertine’s rings), as a creative endeavour (Mlle Vinteuil’s friend). 7 Reading, generally, has many of these traits any time it takes place. The creative reading and writing acts of Mlle Vinteuil’s friend are particularly fresh in the narrator’s mind as he enters the Guermantes’s library: the happiness which overwhelmed him in the courtyard is that which ‘les dernières œuvres de Vinteuil m’avaient paru synthétiser’ (IV, 445). Already, then, there is a suggestion that art is capable of capturing or communicating (reproducing?) the joys triggered by involuntary memory. Famously, of course, the narrator experiences a series of such moments, starting with the sound of a spoon on a plate (IV, 446), followed by the sensation of a starched napkin on his cheek (IV, 447), and ‘le bruit strident d’une conduite d’eau’ (IV, 452). A rare sense of uninterrupted access to the world is felt; he is ‘débarrassé de ce qu’il y a d’imparfait dans la perception extérieure’ (IV, 447); this feeling is ‘un étourdissement’ (IV, 447) redolent of the ‘délires’ of reading assessed above. The narrator does eventually gather his senses, however, and what follows is page after page of protracted, fine-spun ‘mise au point’, a tuning, focusing, and appraisal not just of the task in hand but how it was arrived at, and how it will be carried out. This final chapter will assess and analyse the narrator’s stance at this pivotal point in the text, which is at once summary and anticipation, review and adumbration. A picture emerges from the interplay of mind and body, spirit and senses, light and dark: it is a map and itinerary for the journey ahead, which palimpsest-like also bears the marks of the points passed through by the narrator and his readers on the journey so far. 6 We should note how Bergotte’s realizations before the Vermeer build on the lessons of Elstir’s lucid interpretation of the Balbec church statuary: Elstir’s reading sets up a model of avant la lettre interdisciplinarity, an ability to apply interpretive skills to material outside of one’s own specialism; Bergotte’s reading here confirms it. The acknowledgement of the fearsome threat to enlightenment posed by death is one Proust’s narrator and readers alike now must take with them into the remainder of the Guermantes’s matinee. 7 To this we might add the reflexive dimension of depictions of reading in Proust’s novel: through reading about reading we develop informed notions of the act itself that we are carrying out. Moreover, the acts of reading in the novel might be deemed to have a maieutic function, serving Proust’s desire to influence how we read.
Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading
135
It is not without significance that the narrator’s last moments of solitary reflection and thought are in a library. The setting is first described as ‘un petit salon-bibliothèque’; it is subsequently described simply as a ‘bibliothèque’ (see IV, 447, 452, 461, 462, 464, 465, and passim). The narrator has long been of a bookish nature: he is a reader, so one might expect that being in a library at such an important time is surely to find himself in a familiar, comfortable environment. However, little of the reading examined in A la recherche so far has been ‘conventional’: there are no scenes of quiet reading in armchairs by firesides, and certainly no scenes of studious endeavour in libraries. The most ‘straightforward’ scene of reading is that in which the narrator is read to in bed as a child but, for many reasons assessed in Chapter 1 and echoed thereafter, that Primal Scene is hardly conventional or ‘orthodox’. 8 A library is a space designed for the storage and reading of books, a closed space, dry, and sealed against potentially damaging or distracting elements, be they noise, weather, or excessive light. The ‘petit salon-bibliothèque’ is a curious liminal space: part (departure) lounge, part library, and therefore quite at odds, one would think, with the sorts of reading we have seen far—reading outside, reading private correspondence in contingent situations, reading buildings, paintings, people, musical notation—acts which stimulate and constantly engage both the mind and the senses. 9 By contrast, libraries, like galleries, museums, concert halls, and theatres, are designed to minimize sensory stimulation of unwanted sorts. Other than those of books, dust, leather, and wood, all of which, admittedly, are highly distinctive, one does not smell smells in traditional libraries; galleries and museums on the whole are places of contemplation and quiet. Such environments, designed to be conducive to the appreciation and ‘consumption’ of art, have an ambiguous place in Proust’s novel. Most famously, and as we have just seen, Bergotte dies in an art gallery, as if struck down by Vermeer’s ‘View of Delft’. The ‘Opéra’ is 8 The narrator’s hours spent reading in the Combray garden may seem to represent quite conventional, socially sanctioned reading that takes place in a comfortable, secluded location. Not so for the great aunt of the narrator, however; it is suggested that she would not have understood why he would spend his time there on any day other than Sunday, when ‘il est défendu de s’occuper à rien de sérieux’. To read during the week in her view is ‘enfantillage et . . . perte de temps’, mere amusement rather than worthwhile endeavour (I, 99). 9 cf. Antoine Compagnon’s section ‘La Bibliothèque’ (La Troisième république des lettres, 223–6), where he remarks that: ‘la bibliothèque n’est pas un lieu proustien’ (225). See also Syrotinski and Maclachlan’s collection Sensual Reading, which contains several interesting pieces related to the interaction of the senses during the act of reading.
136
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
less an artistic venue than a work of art itself, the activity in the grottolike boxes and stalls as gripping for the narrator as the actual events on stage (II, 337–58). 10 Perhaps, then, one ought not to be surprised that no actual reading takes place in the novel’s culminating library scene, save that of an embarrassing dedication in a volume by Bergotte. 11 In his recent history of the library, Matthew Battles writes that ‘in the library the reader is awakened from the dream of communion with a single book, startled into a recognition of the word’s materiality by the sheer number of bound volumes’. 12 These comments are true of the narrator’s experiences in the Guermantes’s library, but tell only half the story. He is awoken ‘from the dream of communion with a single book’ when he encounters an edition of François le Champi, and we shall examine that crucial episode below, but there is a dialectical aspect to the narrator’s discovery of the materiality of the word as represented by the book which Battles’s words do not capture. The materiality of books as things is in tension with their content’s capacity to create (and involve the reader in) non-material realities. The experience of things (not necessarily books) is problematic from the outset for the narrator as we saw in Chapter 1: ‘quand je voyais un objet extérieur, la conscience que je le voyais restait entre moi et lui, le bordait d’un mince liséré spirituel’ (I, 83). Having experienced a series of involuntary memories, however, the narrator now feels capable of crossing this ‘liséré’, and the question becomes that of communicating the essences with which he has come into contact. His medium will be the book, a concrete material object, yet across its tangible pages he must translate the ineffable, ethereal substance of his recollected experience. To be surrounded by books, then, is constantly to be reminded of the ultimate object of his desires. The narrator does not read, but the bulk of his thoughts bear on reading, the act which will measure the success 10 We witness the narrator’s first (disappointing) and second (enlightening) trips to the theatre to see Berma (I, 437–43, II, 337–58). As has been acknowledged by critics, the theatre and the library are both used repeatedly in the imagery of the novel. Most germane in the present context is the narrator’s equating the aristocratic and well-read Robert de Saint-Loup’s head to ‘ces tours d’antique donjon dont les créneaux inutilisés restent visibles, mais qu’on a aménagées intérieurement en bibliothèque’ (II, 176). Later, he notes a reversion to type during the war: ‘Débarrassée de ses livres, la tourelle féodale était redevenue militaire’ (IV, 429). 11 Bergotte has inscribed a book with ‘une dédicace d’une flagornerie et d’une platitude extrêmes’ (IV, 464–5). By including this remark the narrator implicitly derides reading once again: the only actual reading that takes place reveals not truth or beauty but vulgar ‘mondain’ sycophancy. 12 Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History (London: Heinemann, 2003), 4.
Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading
137
or failure of his eventual artistic endeavour. This rather odd situation points towards the message there transmitted: reading is a means to an end, but an imperfect one; the goal is to write and if one is capable of the transformative task required to create a literary work of art, the time must come when reading, the act that reveals both truths and its own fallibility, is abjured in favour of writing, the impression of impressions. In his history, Battles recognizes the role of the library in literature, concentrating as one might expect on Borges’s ‘The Library of Babel’, as well as acknowledging libraries and book collections in Rabelais, Donne, and Dickens. 13 One thinks equally of Casaubon’s shelves in Eliot’s Middlemarch, the ‘colossal storehouse of books’ that is the state library in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, 14 the calf-bound volumes of Dickens’s complete works that are Mr Todd’s instruments of torture in Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, 15 and the gloom of the Bouville public library in Sartre’s La Nausée. Sartre’s comment in Les Mots that ‘j’ai commencé la vie comme je la finirais sans doute: au milieu des livres’ is germane to the narrator’s situation in the present scene. 16 The parcel of books broken open to give solace during a night of misery marks the beginning of his life as we know it, and the central text, François le Champi, will in time make its return in Le Temps retrouvé. Sartre’s experience is not an exact match for the narrator’s youthful activities, which (ironically perhaps) are more vigorous and varied, but there are striking parallels, above all the recognition of the dual significance of the book as both physical object in the world, and communicator of knowledge. 17 Furthermore, a trait common to Proust’s narrator as reader and Sartre as he depicts himself as a child is solitude. Accordingly, in the present passage we find friendship getting short shrift from the narrator: ‘l’artiste qui renonce à une heure de travail pour une heure de causerie avec un ami sait qu’il sacrifie une réalité pour quelque chose qui n’existe pas’ (IV, 454). These blunt words evince 13 14
Ibid., 17–21. Robert Musil The Man Without Qualities, trans. by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (London: Picador, 1995), 500. 15 See Evelyn Waugh’s penultimate chapter ‘Du Côté de Chez Todd’, whose title at least bears the influence of Proust and where enforced reading aloud to a captor becomes an act of torture: A Handful of Dust (London: Chapman & Hall, 1934; Penguin, 1951), 204–17. 16 Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 35. 17 cf. Sartre’s remark that ‘je trouvais à l’idée plus de réalité qu’à la chose, parce qu’elle se donnait à moi d’abord et parce qu’elle se donnait comme une chose. C’est dans les livres que j’ai rencontré l’univers: assimilé, classé, étiqueté, pensé, redoutable encore’ (ibid., 44).
138
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
one of the narrator’s earliest conclusions drawn in the library: company cannot feed the work of art any more than willed acts of imagination. 18 Indeed, voluntary memory is disparagingly compared to a picture book, one whose ‘reading’ requires a minimum of effort, engagement, and concentration: ‘Certes, on peut prolonger les spectacles de la mémoire volontaire qui n’engage pas plus des forces de nous-mêmes que feuilleter un livre d’images’ (IV, 452). The narrator is implicitly seeking something which does engage our efforts, which does make demands of our interpretive capacities. He goes some way towards suggesting what might provoke such activity in describing the highly complex sensual nature of the ‘matière’ from which his work will be constructed. The appropriate means of reading such ‘matière distincte, nouvelle’ must measure up in terms of dynamism, complexity, and novelty. If an hour’s conversation is fruitless and wasted, what of an hour spent reading? How does one assure its maximum profitability, its full intellectual and sensory potential? ‘Une heure’, the narrator tells us a little later, ‘n’est pas qu’une heure, c’est un vase rempli de parfums, de sons, de projets et de climats’ (IV, 467–8). These words may serve as a guide to assessing our reading time, in an attempt to gauge what there might be for a reader who seeks to read ‘sensually’, in a way receptive to every facet of the narrator’s new ‘matière’. An hour spent reading, according to the vase metaphor, is never just that: it is an amalgam of all that is evoked, and set in motion during the interaction between reader and text. With this in mind, let us return to the initial moments in the library, and analyse what reading that section of Proust’s vase-like text fetches up. ‘Une heure n’est pas qu’une heure’, and when we are reading, even an instant becomes a vessel for the sensory or ideational content of what we read. The following sentence communicates, translated into written text, the richness of a moment’s sensory experience. For readers of A la recherche, our moment of reading becomes a vase whose form and content mirror those of the moment described: Sans doute, au moment où la raideur de la serviette m’avait rendu Balbec, pendant un instant avait caressé mon imagination, non pas seulement de la vue de la mer telle qu’elle était ce matin-là, mais de l’odeur de la chambre, de la vitesse du vent, du désir de déjeuner, de l’incertitude entre les diverses promenades, tout cela attaché à la sensation du linge comme les mille ailes des anges qui font mille tours à la minute. (IV, 454–5) 18 In CSB Proust develops the idea, counter to Ruskin, that reading is not a form of conversation with the great minds of the past. He believed that in reading one retains a greater autonomy than is permitted by conversation; readers benefit from the ‘travail fécond de l’esprit sur lui-même’. See CSB, 178.
Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading
139
The period described is just ‘un instant’, yet it is brimming with ‘parfums’ (‘l’odeur de la chambre’), ‘projets’ (‘le désir de déjeuner’, ‘diverses promenades’), ‘climats’ (‘la mer telle qu’elle était’, ‘la vitesse du vent’); above all, the sentence-vase brims over with ‘sons’. The |ã| sound of ‘moment’ is repeated in ‘pendant’ and ‘instant’, all three of which relate the temporal aspect of the sensations being described. Leading ‘v’s link the sound and speed of the wind, and a run of ‘d’s connects up the first of the narrator’s ‘projets’; |v|, |d|, and |r | sounds come together in the second ‘projet’: ‘d iver ses pr omenad es’. The sound content strikes us most as silently we read the text; to read it aloud is to gain a sense of its richness, its ‘matière distincte, nouvelle’. The ‘moment’ begun with the starched stiffness of a napkin culminates in the mellifluous wing beats of angels acoustically inlaid in the sentence’s closure which is at once alliterative and assonantal: ‘comme l es mille ail es des anges qui font mille tours à l a minute’. Buoyed by his experiences of involuntary memory, the narrator’s senses are charged with receptivity, and this revitalization is translated first in the narrator’s description, and secondly by our reading of that description. The difficulty in assessing just what the narrator is doing in this scene and, indeed, what Proust’s readers are doing, is that it is at once simple and highly complex. The narrator is thinking, and thinking hard. Musil laments that ‘unfortunately, nothing is so hard to achieve as a literary representation of a man thinking’; he continues: the solution of an intellectual problem comes about not very differently from a dog with a stick in his mouth trying to get through a narrow door; he will turn his head left and right until the stick slips through. We do much the same thing, but with the difference that we don’t make indiscriminate attempts but already know from experience approximately how it’s done. 19
As the foregoing chapters have illustrated, acts of reading structure and inform the development of the narrator’s life and our reading of it. Reading is one formative pursuit among many, and now that the narrator has arrived at a recognition of his vocation, these pages of Le Temps retrouvé show him ‘turn[ing] his head left and right’, drawing on the entirety of his life experiences (including reading) in order to come to an understanding of the intellectual problem that faces him. Concurrently, we as readers of A la recherche are struggling to get a similar stick through a similar door. In order fully to appreciate what 19
Musil, The Man Without Qualities, 115–16.
140
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
unfolds in these pages, we must aim to emulate the sensorily sharpened narrator and attune ourselves to his text. The recurring key words of the library scene are: ‘impression’, which occurs over forty times in fifty pages; and ‘sensation’, which occurs thirty-nine times. Sensation comes first and leaves an impression on the subject. The narrator seeks to identify and interpret his ‘impressions’ and communicate them, translated into written text: the impressions themselves are like signs to interpret. He believes that ‘il y avait peut-être sous ces signes quelque chose de tout autre que je devais tâcher de découvrir, une pensée qu’ils traduisaient à la façon de ces caractères hiéroglyphiques qu’on croirait représenter seulement des objets matériels. Sans doute ce déchiffrage était difficile mais seul il donnait quelque vérité à lire’ (IV, 457). Once again the concreteness of the written text is problematized in a troubling way. Hieroglyphs (which recall Mlle Vinteuil’s friend’s ‘translation’), once thought to represent only ‘things’, may after all represent abstract thoughts. The impressions of the narrator which are being considered are not yet written text, nor are they purely abstract thoughts; they are somewhere in between, and the process of rendering them textual is described in terms of ‘déchiffrage’. The latter term is frequently used in the narrator’s descriptions of scenes of reading and, not unusually, here ‘déchiffrage’, an interpretive procedure, is part of a creative process. Thus, the phrase ‘donnait quelque vérité à lire’ must be read in a double sense. The deciphering of one’s impressions figuratively produces ‘quelque vérité à lire’ in that it is a process of discovery revealing their motivation or stimulus. Equally ‘ce déchiffrage’ gives a truth to be read in that it is a crucial stage in the writing process envisaged by the narrator. This can be seen in the passage above (‘sans doute la raideur de la serviette . . . ’) which itself is the deciphering of a complex set of impressions derived from physical sensations. This deciphering in turn has created a text, given us a ‘truth’ to read. Our reading of this translated truth is itself, however, a translation of sorts, the ‘déchiffrage’ of a written text. Nothing is so hard to achieve as a literary representation of an individual thinking, but scenes like this make us realize quite what a remarkable achievement A la recherche is, for in fact a vast proportion of the novel is concerned with precisely that. Within this framework, the boundaries between reading and writing have been blurred, and grow less distinct by the minute. Somehow the stick just won’t fit through the door. The passage that follows narrates the further blurring of the two practices, but before
Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading
141
beginning an analysis of it, it is beneficial to consider for a moment the narrator’s keyword here: ‘l’impression’. 20 The noun derives etymologically from the Latin ‘impressum’, the supine of ‘imprimere’, to stamp or imprint. Reading and writing, it could be said, are bound up in the impression from the outset, just as is implied in the hieroglyph analogy and the narrator’s summary that his past impressions (for example, those provoked by the Martinville bell towers and by the uneven paving stones) ‘composaient un grimoire compliqué et fleuri’ (IV, 457). 21 The impression, however, is double: it can be created by ‘un procédé de reproduction par pression d’une surface sur une autre, qui en garde la marque’; that is, as by writing; 22 also it is this pressure of one surface on another. It is a mark and a marking, a trace and the leaving of a trace, a writing and the text written. ‘Il fallait tâcher d’interpréter les sensations comme les signes d’autant de lois et d’idées, en essayant de penser, c’est-à-dire de faire sortir de la pénombre ce que j’avais senti, de le convertir en un équivalent spirituel’ (IV, 457). Thus the narrator states his goals—‘interpréter’, ‘faire sortir de la pénombre’, ‘convertir’—and the language once again is that of elucidation and of translation. The ground is prepared for the library scene’s first large-scale consideration of the act of reading. However, on closely examining the passage beginning ‘Quant au livre intérieur de signes inconnus’, running to ‘. . . l’obscurité qui est en nous et que ne connaissent pas les autres’ (IV, 458–9), one discovers a disconcerting terminological slippage occurring and recurring throughout. The enigmatic ‘inner book’ is made up of signs whose meaning the narrator seeks out in his ‘inconscient’, in order to examine them ‘comme un plongeur qui sonde’ (IV, 458). The ideas of depth and surface involved in this image replace the ‘dedans’/‘dehors’ constructs of earlier scenes of reading and insistently return, emphasizing that the route he must take is turned inwards on the self, rather than outwards to the world. ‘Quant au livre intérieur de signes inconnus’, we are told, ‘. . . pour la lecture desquels personne ne pouvait m’aider d’aucune règle, cette lecture consistait en un acte de création où nul ne peut nous suppléer ni même collaborer 20 See Vincent Descombes’s illuminating chapter, ‘Le Livre intérieur des impressions’, in Proust: Philosophie du roman (Paris: Minuit, 1987), 235–56. 21 In his essay ‘Mallarmé et Proust’, Henri Mondor acknowledges the suggestion made by ‘M. Inoné’, a Japanese professor, that this image may be nourished by Proust’s reading of and admiration for Mallarmé’s ‘Prose (pour des Esseintes)’. See Hommage à Proust, various authors (Paris and Brussels: Le Disque Vert hors série, 1952), 22–30. 22 Dictionnaire Historique de la langue française, ii, 1796.
142
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
avec nous’ (IV, 458). Reading one’s self, this unrecognizable text, is an act which by necessity must be solitary and unaided. Reading, an act of reception, interpretation, and response, is described as ‘un acte de création’, one clearly parallel to Elstir’s summary of the development of wisdom: ‘On ne reçoit pas la sagesse, il faut la découvrir soi-même après un trajet que personne ne peut faire pour nous, ne peut nous épargner, car elle est un point de vue sur les choses’ (II, 219). 23 And so another rendering is given of what the narrator and his readers are going through here: we are arriving at a point of view and, at the same time, acquiring a particular artistic brand of ‘sagesse’. That the narrator’s image of reading this ‘livre intérieur’ should be so similar to Elstir’s view of how one comes by knowledge suggests that the narrator’s artistic development may be successfully approaching its completion. The conception put forward here of reading as a creative activity is one which has been developed in twentieth-century literary theory and criticism. 24 Proust’s readers are by this point in A la recherche familiar with conceptual complexity of this sort, yet the stability of the scene is undercut by a terminological overlap in the description of reading and writing, and a sudden switch of focus from reading the ‘livre intérieur’ to writing it: ‘aussi combien se détournent de l’écrire!’ Surely it is no more possible to write a book using ‘signes inconnus’ than it is for anyone else to discover ‘la sagesse’ for us? Just as the impressions the narrator keeps returning to are double (both the effect of an experience on us as well as our own interpretation of that experience), here we realize that the act of creation that reading our ‘livre intérieur’ represents can concurrently be a writing. 25 Writing a literary work of art involves translating the inner signs to make them comprehensible, as well as able to feed a writing process that traces, marks down our impressions of them. Reading, then, is interpretation is translation is creation. Writing leaves a mark which, when read, makes its own trace or mark (‘impression’) on the reading 23 This subjectivist view of epistemology and the creative process is recognized by Deleuze as fundamental to the functioning of the Recherche: ‘L’essence selon Proust . . . n’est pas quelque chose de vu, mais une sorte de point de vue supérieur sur les choses. Point de vue irréductible, qui signifie à la fois la naissance du monde et le caractère original d’un monde’ (133). 24 For a survey of various critical positions argued around this question, see Robert Crosman’s ‘Do readers make meaning?’, in The Reader in the Text, 149–64. 25 Robert Crosman notes the inverse of this situation: ‘the physical acts of pushing my pencil over the paper, and of casting my eye over the markings thus made, may be called by different names but in practice they are inseparable. The very act of writing includes reading’ (The Reader in the Text, 163).
Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading
143
mind, which may then be carried across, translated into a new writing or impression. Such processes are taxing, to say the least: ‘Que de tâches n’assume-t-on pour éviter celle-là!’ (IV, 458). The narrator argues that events (the Dreyfus affair, for example) provide writers with excuses not to undertake this troublesome, dual ‘déchiffrage’. ‘Mais ce n’était que des excuses’, he writes, parce qu’ils n’avaient pas, ou plus, de génie, c’est-à-dire d’instinct. Car l’instinct dicte le devoir et l’intelligence fournit les prétextes pour l’éluder. Seulement les excuses ne figurent point dans l’art, les intentions n’y sont point comptées, à tout moment l’artiste doit écouter son instinct, ce qui fait que l’art est ce qu’il y a de plus réel, la plus austère école de la vie, et le vrai Jugement dernier. (IV, 458)
It is only ungifted writers without the necessary ‘instinct’ who can ignore the demands of the inner book that calls out to be deciphered. Intelligence, rather than being the driving force of artistic endeavour, is seen to be a hindrance to it, a conniving dodge to avoid hard graft. The narrator creates a network of images of reading within which we find a sort of mission statement: ‘à tout moment l’artiste doit écouter son instinct’; and this also goes for the reader, who must follow her instinct and senses, and ‘listen’ to the great riches inlaid in the text. Our inner record of past experience, the ‘livre intérieur’, is a metaphor for our selves, and ‘reading’ this book is a metaphor for the individual’s quest for self-knowledge, the quest for which, in many ways we have examined, the Recherche’s scenes of reading prepare us. The inner book, we are told, is ‘le plus pénible à déchiffrer’, and is ‘le seul que nous ait dicté la réalité’. Being dictated by reality, this book has a far greater ‘truth value’ than any product of the intelligence: ‘les idées formées par l’intelligence pure n’ont qu’une vérité logique, une vérité possible, leur élection est arbitraire. Le livre aux caractères figurés, non tracés par nous, est notre seul livre’ (IV, 458). Again, troublingly, intelligence is intelligently criticized and put down, and over the subsequent lines some of the keywords I have followed throughout Proust’s novel flood back: ‘l’impression’, ‘la matière’, ‘la trace’, ‘vérité’, ‘l’esprit’. One could spend a great deal of time examining the philosophico-aesthetic questions raised and pondered in this paragraph, and throughout this section of the novel. For reasons of space, however, my comments will be restricted to local points of interest that shed light on reading-related matters.
144
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
The present paragraph concludes with the narrator’s boldest statement on the impression, which leads to a much less quoted but highly significant comment on reading: L’impression est pour l’écrivain ce qu’est l’expérimentation pour le savant, avec cette différence que chez le savant le travail de l’intelligence précède et chez l’écrivain vient après. Ce que nous n’avons pas eu à déchiffrer, à éclaircir par notre effort personnel, ce qui était clair avant nous, n’est pas à nous. Ne vient de nous-même que ce que nous tirons de l’obscurité qui est en nous et que ne connaissent pas les autres. (IV, 459)
These lines present a characteristic boundary-crossing comparison (‘l’écrivain’/‘le savant’) based on common ground, that of inquisitive model-building and knowledge-seeking. An ominous note is introduced in the two closing sentences which return to an assessment of the act of ‘déchiffrement’ that is self-scrutiny, and are structured by notions of light and dark (‘éclaircir’, ‘obscurité’). The importance of solitude surfaces again as, implicitly, does an acknowledgement that what lies ahead, for both the narrator and his readers, will not be easy. The inward turn required evokes distant echoes of Combray, suggesting that the narrator at that early stage was more aware of the demands of art than he realized. After tasting the ‘madeleine’, he sought to pinpoint the root of his pleasure: Je pose la tasse et me tourne vers mon esprit. C’est à lui de trouver la vérité. Mais comment? Grave incertitude, toutes les fois que l’esprit se sent dépassé par lui-même; quand lui, le chercheur, est tout ensemble le pays obscur où il doit chercher et où tout son bagage ne lui sera de rien. Chercher? pas seulement:créer. Il est en face de quelque chose qui n’est pas encore et que seul il peut réaliser, puis faire entrer dans sa lumière. (I, 45, my emphases)
Now the narrator is ready to explore his ‘pays obscur’, and his departure lounge ruminations reflect this growing maturity and readiness as they continue. That which does not yet exist and that the narrator alone can now realize is his work of art; at the same time, for readers of A la recherche, that which is as yet unrealized but only realizable by ourselves is our reading of the novel, now nearing its denouement. The terms which describe the writer’s task (‘déchiffrer’, ‘tirer de l’obscurité’) may also describe the task of the reader. Response to an experience, as to a text, is frequently related to responsibility, and, as the young narrator in Combray realized, for true discovery it is necessary to endeavour to ‘voir plus clair dans [notre] ravissement’ (I, 153). The intellect is deemed less trustworthy than instinct in the Temps retrouvé
Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading
145
passage, whereas in the ‘Combray’ passage, the faculty recognized as that which processes the sort of experience under scrutiny is the ‘esprit’. The latter in Proust’s novel appears in a positive light, is more useful to the artistic sensibility than intelligence, and is presented as both the interpretive faculty of the reader and the creative capacity of the writer. Much as we might wish to pause at this and many other points in the narrative of the library scene, its brisk pace and the narrator’s eagerness of mind propel us along. We cannot remain searching for long in the ontological dark within ourselves, for the narrator has already moved on, prompted once again by a sensory stimulus the sudden fruitfulness of which makes a mockery of our lumbering mental manoeuvres. ‘Un rayon oblique du couchant me rappela instantanément un temps auquel je n’avais jamais repensé’ (IV, 459), we read, this ‘rayon oblique’ contrasting brightly with the inner ‘obscurité qui est en nous’. The narrator’s fluid, ever expanding mind carries on apace, as if in time with the music being played beyond the closed doors of the library, that setting which provokes the next—and final—moments of involuntary rememoration. Among the theorizing and the thinking out loud, from the voice that praises mind, finds fault with intelligence, and lauds instinct, comes yet another weighty statement condemning the ‘intellectual’ work and likening theories in works of art to unsightly price tags (IV, 461). If anything here is certain, it is that the focus of art should be ‘à une profondeur’ (recalling the ‘plongeur qui sonde’, IV, 458) at which appearances and surface ‘realities’ (as symbolized by the theory-cum-price tag) count for nought. What some readers might count as ‘theories’ in this section of A la recherche are not those that lend a vulgar ‘price’ to a work of art; rather, the narrator’s theorizing is better read as the irrepressible workings of a hugely active mind in process, a mind at grips with a lifetime’s experiences, and a new set of mechanisms with which to assess them. As if to prove his point, the narrator drops down into the waters of his recent past in support of a recollection provoked by his presence in the library. He recalls reading the Goncourt journal (see Chapter 3 above): ‘je m’étais souvenu de ce que les Goncourt disent des belles éditions originales que [la bibliothèque] contient, je m’étais promis de les regarder tandis que j’étais enfermé ici’ (IV, 461). This casual browsing, however, does not represent a pause within the narrator’s lengthy cerebrations: ‘Et tout en poursuivant mon raisonnement, je tirais un à un, sans trop y faire attention du reste, les précieux volumes, quand, au moment où j’ouvrais distraitement l’un d’eux: François le Champi de George Sand, je me sentais désagréablement frappé comme par quelque
146
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
impression trop en désaccord avec mes pensées actuelles’ (IV, 461). The manner of his browsing (‘sans trop y faire attention’, ‘distraitement’) recalls the discovery of Léa’s performance at the Trocadéro while pretending to scan the newspaper (III, 650–1), as well as the disbelieving recognition of his own article in the Figaro (IV, 147–52). This similarity is not without significance: reading is not the central issue in this scene, it is a catalytic element that allows for others to come into play. Reading the title (and no more) of François le Champi is at first disagreeable, apparently at odds with the narrator’s ‘pensées actuelles’. A digressive image defers the revelation of the narrator’s discomfit, which alerts us to his constant awareness of the proximity of death (IV, 461–2), before finally the effects of this reading are made clear. The narrator realizes that François le Champi is ‘[un] titre qui m’avait donné l’idée que la littérature nous offrait vraiment ce monde de mystère que je ne trouvais plus en elle. Et pourtant ce n’était pas un livre bien extraordinaire, c’était François le Champi’ (IV, 462). The excitement and uncertainty of the Primal Scene are spontaneously rekindled by a chance act of reading: le souvenir de ce qui m’avait semblé inexplicable dans le sujet de François le Champi tandis que maman me lisait le livre de George Sand était réveillé par ce titre (aussi bien que le nom de Guermantes, quand je n’avais pas vu les Guermantes depuis longtemps, contenait pour moi tant de féodalité—comme François le Champi l’essence du roman—). (IV, 462) 26
Reading the lettering on the spine or title-page of a book is equated to reading the ‘carte d’invitation’ that propelled the narrator back into ‘le monde’, and brought about his presence in the library at this time. The convolutions continue: if he had not read the Goncourt journal, he might not have heard of the quality of the volumes contained in the library, and he might not have been tempted to start browsing . . . Memories evoked by reading just three words, ‘François le Champi’, once again transform the book-lined space into a departure lounge for journeys backward as well as forward in time. 27 The language used by the narrator recalls the Primal Scene (see I, 41–3) where he was, crucially, in the company of his mother. Now solitude is recognized as a 26 27
cf. Roland Barthes, ‘Proust et les noms’, 125–6. Indeed, as the scene comes to a close the narrator describes the library as ‘ce point de départ vers une vie nouvelle’ (IV, 496). In Combray, proleptically, the grandmother’s preference of old things over new is said to be in part founded on their ability to give ‘la nostalgie d’impossibles voyages dans le temps’ (I, 41); here such journeys finally become realized in the narrator’s mind.
Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading
147
privileged ingredient in the new experience: he suggests that in a social situation he might have been able disinterestedly to speak in general terms about the Guermantes or the Sand novel, his thoughts remaining at a superficial, surface level. ‘Mais quand j’étais seul’, however, ‘comme en ce moment, c’est à une profondeur plus grande que j’avais plongé’ (IV, 462). The depth of thought which solitude allows one confers associative weight on otherwise everyday objects; indeed, while earlier the book in his hand ‘n’était pas un livre bien extraordinaire’, now it is dubbed ‘cet extraordinaire François le Champi’ (IV, 462). He feels as if a stranger has just done him harm, but soon he arrives at an understanding of the experience which brings both happiness and a reliving of the original Primal Scene: Cet étranger, c’était moi-même, c’était l’enfant que j’étais alors, que le livre venait de susciter en moi, car de moi ne connaissant que cet enfant, c’est cet enfant que le livre avait appelé tout de suite, ne voulant être regardé que par ses yeux, aimé que par son cœur, et ne parler qu’à lui. Aussi ce livre que ma mère m’avait lu haut à Combray presque jusqu’au matin, avait-il gardé pour moi tout le charme de cette nuit-là. (IV, 463)
Thus the Primal Scene is revitalized in a way which anticipates the narrator’s later comparisons of his work to the Mille et Une Nuits (IV, 620) and connects into the framework of references to them already existing in the novel from ‘Combray’ onwards. 28 The Sand text ‘lu haut . . . presque jusqu’au matin’ recalls Scheherazade’s tales told through the night; like a Mille et Une Nuits in miniature, the novel retains all the ‘charme’ of the night of the Primal Scene. This cross-reference, like so much of the referential material in the library scene, is not dwelt on, but the atmosphere of Combray remains hanging over the narrator, to the extent that once again a certain circuit is completed across the entire span of the novel; ‘la « plume » de George Sand’ no longer seems magic, but electrically charged: ‘et voici que mille riens de Combray, et que je n’apercevais plus depuis longtemps, sautaient légèrement d’euxmêmes et venaient à la queue leu leu se suspendre au bec aimanté en une chaîne interminable et tremblante de souvenirs’ (IV, 463). The childlike language (‘à la queue leu leu’) recalls Combray, and the structure 28 For a thoroughgoing consideration of the role of the Mille et Une Nuits in A la recherche, see Dominique Jullien, Proust et ses modèles: les ‘Mille et Un Nuits’ et les ‘Mémoires’ de Saint-Simon, in particular her useful summary tabulation of the roles and associations of the two works (52).
148
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
echoes the resurrection of ‘tout Combray et ses environs . . . sorti, ville et jardins, de ma tasse de thé’ (I, 47). 29 One might criticize the narrator for judging a book by its cover, but the refreshing aspect of this scene is that judging books by their covers seems to be precisely the narrator’s message: if the book in question is one we already know and are returning to, an experientially richer time is to be had if we restrict our encounter with it to its spine and bindings. Indeed, the narrator confirms that things such as books ‘sitôt qu’elles sont perçues par nous, deviennent en nous quelque chose d’immatériel, de même nature que toutes nos préoccupations ou nos sensations de ce temps-là, et se mêlent indissolublement à elles’ (IV, 463). In this way a single original reading experience is transformed: first it is concretized in the book, then in characteristic style it is dissolved, diluted, and reshaped entirely, made akin to mental (‘nos préoccupations’) as well as somatic (‘nos sensations’) states. One is put in mind of the Venetian scene, the dissolution of the buildings, the touching of the spiritual abyss (IV, 232–4), and in a sense this book-related realization in the Guermantes library is a positive pendant to the negative tale accompanied by ‘O sole mio’. Now sensation is privileged: ‘tel nom lu dans un livre autrefois,’ continues the narrator, ‘contient entre ses syllables le vent rapide et le soleil brillant qu’il faisait quand nous le lisions’ (IV, 463). ‘La ruine de Venise’ (IV, 233) dissolved under the weight of mourning and solitary angst; the narrator could not gain any purchase on his present for it had no antecedent in his experience. François le Champi, by contrast, has an anchor in the narrator’s memory, and however puny the book may be in concrete terms compared with the physical expanses of Venice, it has been read and so the title alone suffices to reinstate the Combray of old in the narrator’s present and extend the distance between him and the edge of the ‘néant’ felt in Venice. ‘O sole mio’ brought an existential darkness, a rudderless incapacity, yet for being 29 In his essay ‘On Reading Old Books’, William Hazlitt describes a similar experience of reading which provokes ‘the pleasures of memory’. Reading a book read before ‘recals [sic] the same feelings and associations which I had in first reading it, and which I can never have again in any other way. Standard productions of this kind are links in the chain of our conscious being. They bind together the different scattered divisions of our personal identity.’ The objects which act as memory’s catalysts avail us anew of the sensation of past experience, and bring an associative baggage with them: ‘for myself ’, Hazlitt continues, ‘not only are the old ideas of the contents of the work brought back to my mind in all their vividness, but the old associations of the faces and persons of those I then knew, as they were in their life-time—the place where I sat to read the volume, the day when I got it, the feeling of the air, the fields, the sky—return, and all my early impressions with them’. See P. P. Howe, (ed.), The Complete Works of William Hazlitt in Twenty-one Volumes (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930–4), xii. 221–2.
Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading
149
read the words ‘François le Champi’ reignite the ‘soleil brillant’ of his childhood in the hush of the library. 30 Reignited also is the person who, with that sun on his back, last held Sand’s novel: Si je reprends dans la bibliothèque François le Champi, immédiatement en moi un enfant se lève qui prend ma place, qui seul a le droit de lire ce titre: François le Champi, et qui le lit comme il le lut alors, avec la même impression du temps qu’il faisait dans le jardin, les mêmes rêves qu’il formait alors sur les pays et sur la vie, la même angoisse du lendemain. (IV, 464)
These lines focus on reading and on a specific reader, but still no actual reading takes place in the library. Our reading of the lines is once again enriched, this time with an insistent riff combining |l| and |í| sounds, peaking with ‘l e droit de lire ce titre: François le Champi, et quil e lit comme il l e l ut al ors’: reading becomes a playful melody (IV, 464), perhaps echoing the ‘à la queue leu leu’ of the previous page. The ‘impression’ returns, and is here an amalgam or conflation of the scenes of reading examined above in Chapter 1. ‘Le temps qu’il faisait dans le jardin’ recalls the latter stages of the narrator’s Combray afternoons, having been moved outside by his grandmother (I, 82–9); ‘les mêmes rêves’ recall remarks made when recounting the Primal Scene (‘quand je lisais, je rêvassais souvent’, I, 41) as well as the Combray afternoons (I, 85); and finally the fear of the future, the unknown tomorrow after the revelations of the originary reading experience takes us spiralling back once more to the Primal Scene and the youthful narrator’s attempts at rationalization: ‘Je savais qu’une telle nuit ne pourrait se renouveler [. . . ]. Demain mes angoisses reprendraient et maman ne resterait pas là’ (I, 42). Like the fine gauged mesh of a sieve the words ‘François le Champi’ filter the intervening torrents of the narrator’s life experience and leave behind, washed clean of habit and forgetfulness, the sensations of the novel’s earliest scenes of reading. Mirroring the narrator’s subsequent image, the moment of reading these words is a full submersion in ‘un vase rempli de parfums, de sons, de projets et de climats’ (IV, 467–8). 30 The Mille et Une Nuits provides a further reading-related link between Venice, Combray, and the library scene, for the narrator senses in Venice the aura of Scheherazade’s tales, which in turn recalls his childhood: by Jullien’s account, the Mille et Une Nuits in the Venice episode aids the articulation of two systems of superimposition: ‘[celle] d’une ville fictive à une ville réelle, d’abord, de l’enfance au moment present, ensuite’ (47), a superimposition of precisely the sort brought about by François le Champi here.
150
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
A book, or its spine at least, is such a vase, not because of the words it contains, but rather for the memories and impressions it revitalizes in its beholder. Indeed, as the narrator progresses through a consideration of the physical ‘thing-value’ of books (‘leur dos’, ‘le grain du papier’), he even suggests that re-reading books can be harmful in that returning to their content may be or become at odds with the clarity and satisfaction of the sensory experience offered by their contours, colour, and smell. Some books we re-read as we might take a train in order to seek the solace and respite of distant, familiar places; ‘mais il arrive’, he admits, ‘que cette évocation recherchée se trouve entravée au contraire par la lecture prolongée du livre’ (IV, 464). To re-read a volume of Bergotte does not satisfy and reassure the narrator of the good times during which it was first read. ‘Mais du volume lui-même’, he concedes, ‘la neige qui couvrait les Champs-Élysées le jour où je le lus n’a pas été enlevée, je la vois toujours’ (IV, 465). 31 With this it is revealed that if the narrator were to have been tempted into being a bibliophile, it would have been because of this capacity of books to maintain such intense physical powers of association. One is put in mind of Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay on the subject, ‘Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting’, where he voices similar views about books and collecting of them for non-readerly motives. 32 The passage that follows (IV, 465–7) rehearses familiar arguments regarding the attachment readers develop for certain books and the different (personal) ways in which readers think of ‘first editions’ (IV, 465). The narrator’s voice is that of an individual familiar with books and reading, yet amongst the dry talk of tomes and bindings we sense the latent coruscations of his active mind, its gears still fearsomely turning over the possibilities of the bewildering future signalled by his series of involuntary memories. François le Champi continues to dominate his thoughts and, as if to dispel any doubts we might have had, the narrator reiterates his recognition of the import of the Primal Scene and the role of Sand’s novel in it. It is the book which he contemplated for the first time ‘pendant la nuit peut-être la plus douce et la plus 31 One might note a discrepancy here between the narrator’s beliefs and the ‘real world’ practicalities of reading Proust’s novel; as Margaret Gray in Postmodern Proust, puts it: ‘Proust is the scandalous imperative not only to read, but to reread’ (154). 32 Benjamin’s essay appears in Illuminations (61–9) and is also anthologized among much related and entertaining material in the tiresomely titled A Passion for Books: A Book Lover’s Treasury of Stories, Essays, Humor, Lore and Lists on Collecting, Reading, Borrowing, Lending, Caring for and Appreciating Books, ed. by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999), 4–12.
Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading
151
triste de ma vie’ (IV, 465). What is more, and here the narrator engages hyperbolic overdrive, his rediscovery of the talismanic novel not only reignites the uncertainties and tensions of the Primal Scene but also is seen to represent ‘le jour le plus beau et dont s’éclairaient soudain non seulement les tâtonnements anciens de ma pensée mais même le but de ma vie et peut-être de l’art’ (IV, 465). The Primal Scene is retrospectively said to mark the beginning of the end (‘le déclin de ma santé et de mon vouloir, mon renoncement chaque jour aggravé à une tâche difficile’), whilst it also marks the inauguration of independent intellectual inquiry, mental activity still ongoing at this late stage in the narrator’s life. After years of both social engagement and formative bookishness, the tables are turned and for the narrator the end (of social life and of reading) now marks a beginning, that of his endeavours as an artist. 33 Having rediscovered a book previously read, we were told, to read it again may spoil the impression we had of it, but its tangible physicality retains a strong associative value (IV, 466). Now, however, the balance shifts and the narrator admits that he knows only too well ‘combien les choses sont poreuses à l’esprit et s’en imbibent’ (IV, 466). After the sparks of the mind in motion, now the familiar language of liquids and absorbency returns to threaten the newly laid foundations of our epistemology. The narrator’s problem in Combray was that perception robbed the concrete of its materiality, interposing ‘un mince liséré spirituel’ between things and percipient beings (I, 83). Now the sensual experience of a concrete object (François le Champi) alerts him to a new aspect of things, their porosity, a daunting ability to absorb our mental investment in them. Where before his being conscious of looking at an object made it impermeable, now, ironically with a book whose written content also affords intellectual engagement quite detached from its physical existence, involuntary sensory enjoyment of an ‘objet extérieur’ has been experienced. ‘Things’ suddenly lose their untouchable aura and become dangerous again, threatening like the mobile Combray furniture. This threat, the rediscovered volatility of things, is different 33 It is possible to view the extended society scenes in the novel as something of a counterbalance, or, indeed, ‘other’ of the intensely focused, inward-looking scenes of reading and self-scrutiny. For a lucid account of the narrator’s role and function in society scenes, see Wassenaar’s chapter ‘Doing the Right Thing: A Study of Proustian Parties’ (Proustian Passions, 33–72) and her appendix ‘A Table of Proustian Parties’ (ibid., 215). See my analysis of (IV, 620) below for an assessment of the ‘end’ or renunciation of reading; as I shall also argue in what follows, however, the narrator’s activities in the final Guermantes’s matinee may well be considered as a continuation, indeed an apotheosis of his reading activity.
152
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
from the angst felt in the flux of the differently remembered bedrooms described in ‘Combray’ in that it comes about not through ignorance of the nature of things but through a combination of over-determination and hyper-investment in them. 34 As these ideas coalesce and throng around, yet more interconnected suggestions are aired. In deriding voluntary memory at the start of the library scene, the narrator mockingly likened it to ‘un livre d’images’ (IV, 452); the involuntary associations and impressions afforded him by François le Champi, however, lead him to suggest that the books he read in the past, enriched by the memories provoked by the sight of them, ‘seraient devenus dignes de ces «livres à images» , bibles historiées, livres d’heures que l’amateur n’ouvre jamais pour lire le texte mais pour s’enchanter une fois de plus des couleurs . . . qui font tout le prix de l’ouvrage’ (IV, 466). Books which have been read before, bolstered and filled out by the memories they bring with them, are not mere picture books (‘livres d’images’), but albums or scrapbooks, ‘livres à images’, that preserve the impressions first experienced when reading them; they are illuminated bibles like the Balbec church façade, and they are books of hours in the sense that sensually recorded in the grain of their paper and the solidity of their spines are the hours originally spent reading them. In this respect, they could be said to share with the Combray church a perceptible fourth dimension—that of time. Re-reading books is demoted in favour of a more sensory experience of them, yet typically no final word is pronounced: we can rely too much on concrete objects as emblems or avatars of past experience, we are told, as the narrator changes tack again, echoing and contradicting his comments on the porosity of things. What follows is worth quoting in full, for it pulls together a number of strands of the narrator’s musings, intermittently contradictory and incompatible as they may be: Je ne serais pas tenté d’être bibliophile. Je sais trop combien ces images laissées par l’esprit sont aisément effacées par l’esprit. Aux anciennes il en substitue de nouvelles qui n’ont plus le même pouvoir de résurrection. Et si j’avais encore le François le Champi que maman sortit un soir du paquet de livres que ma grandmère devait me donner pour ma fête, je ne le regarderais jamais; j’aurais trop peur d’y insérer peu à peu mes impressions d’aujourd’hui jusqu’à en recouvrir complètement celles d’autrefois, j’aurais trop peur de le voir devenir à ce point une chose du présent que, quand je lui demanderais de susciter une fois encore 34 For an analysis of Proust’s sentence structure in relation to the rooms evoked at the novel’s incipit, see Kristeva’s section ‘Le kinétoscope des sept chambres: enchâssements et intermittences’, in Le Temps sensible, (483–503).
Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading
153
l’enfant qui déchiffra son titre dans la petite chambre de Combray, l’enfant, ne reconnaissant pas son accent, ne répondît plus à son appel et restât pour toujours enterré dans l’oubli. (IV, 466)
Mind threateningly comes out on top here: the ‘esprit’ of the present moment is depicted as a force more powerful and more dynamic than voluntary memory, and capable of obliterating the traces or impressions interleaved in certain books in the past. Interwoven with the apparent simplicity of these sentences is a highly problematic implication: reading is revelatory and primes the reader somehow for invigorating sensory receptiveness. This is acknowledged in a passage in which re-reading is rejected, discarded as dangerous, despite being precisely the activity that most readers of Proust find necessary in order fully to appreciate and understand the achievements of his long and demanding novel. The narrator’s central insecurity (constantly being buffeted between the desire for knowledge and the fear of suffering) surfaces in the anaphoric repetitions of ‘j’aurais trop peur . . . ’. Predominant also, as it will be increasingly in Le Temps retrouvé, is time, which gives structure to the whole section (‘anciennes’, ‘jamais’, ‘aujourd’hui’, ‘autrefois’, ‘devenir’, ‘présent’, ‘toujours’). The narrator’s reflections on bibliophilia and not reading end, predictably perhaps, on rather a negative note. It is made clear that the self, its preservation and continuity, is what is important; reading seems to fade in importance, since to re-read is to risk introducing fresh impressions which might irrevocably displace the old ones and in so doing commit murder on the earlier selves who read the texts the first time round. To read was to access new horizons and set out towards new discoveries; to re-read, however, is to give in to a compulsion to repeat, whose ultimate price is the death of our transient, fractured, past ‘selves’, as well as of the past itself in a more general sense: voluntarily to re-read is involuntarily to forget. This warning is still resounding as the narrator’s next paragraph moves off in another direction, addressing the idea of ‘un art populaire’ (IV, 466–7), which is a return, at some distance, to the concern that contemporary writers are not engaging with the ‘livre intérieur de signes inconnus’ and are instead letting their intellect provide pretexts to avoid such engagement (IV, 458). The function of literature in society is considered and the narrator’s standpoint is unambiguous: ‘on cherche à se dépayser en lisant, et les ouvriers sont aussi curieux des princes que les princes des ouvriers’ (IV, 467). Reading is democratic and recreational.
154
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
The main fuel for the paragraph is the narrator’s own reading: the novels of Laclos and Flaubert are referred to, whilst the ironic reflexivity of the comment that ‘certains disaient que l’art d’une époque de hâte serait bref ’ cannot go unnoticed by Proust’s readers. 35 The brisk movements and juxtapositions within the narrative mirror the shifts described therein with reference to the recent arrival of the motorcar. The narrator skips from speed and travel back to his recurring theme, the sensory richness of first-hand empirical experience. He reiterates, yet again, the fertile physicality of books as catalysts: ‘la vue, par exemple, de la couverture d’un livre déjà lu a tissé dans les caractères de son titre les rayons de lune d’une lointaine nuit d’été’ (IV, 467). Reality, the name we give to the overarching arena in which the events of life take place, is said to be ‘un certain rapport entre ces sensations et ces souvenirs qui nous entourent simultanément’ (IV, 468). Reality is not a temporally marked entity, for it encompasses both the sensations of the present and the memories of the past. If a writer is successfully to communicate with an audience, he or she must understand the complex relation between ‘sensation’ and ‘souvenir’, which is said to be at the root of metaphor, of translation, and is arguably the lesson learned (now subliminally, now consciously) through reading, as the words on the page, through their distribution and combination, are remembered, connected, interpreted, and processed by the mind which at the same time does so for all the other stimuli bombarding the body. 36 The tensions arising in the reader who tries to maintain any sort of control over the mental and somatic stimulation experienced in reading are similar to those challenging the artist who seeks to release the ‘essence commune’ of different things, ‘en les réunissant l’une et l’autre pour les soustraire aux contingences du temps, dans une métaphore’ (IV, 468). Reading is a metaphor for the giddying plurality of processes that occur in the human subject when he or she sets about interpreting a written text. Reading in many ways frees us from the ‘contingences du temps’, transports us away from our surroundings and submerges us, temporarily, in different times and different places. One of the pleasures of reading comes from our ability to do it wherever and whenever we please, whether in the pregnant silence of a library or in the crowded carriage 35 It may, however, refer to the ‘rythmes poétiques inspirés des progrès de la vitesse, qui évoquent Cendrars, Cocteau, Morand, Larbaud, Giraudoux’ (IV, 467, n. 6). 36 Cf. Roger Chartier, ‘La lecture n’est pas seulement une opération abstraite d’intellection: elle est mise en jeu du corps, inscription dans un espace, rapport à soi ou aux autres’, L’Ordre des livres: lecteurs, auteurs, bibliothéques en Europe entre le XIV e et le XVIII e siècle (Aix-en-Provence: Alinea, 1992) 20.
Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading
155
of a commuter train. To spend an hour reading is to be suspended within that hour-vase, to take time and to take place on different planes while being part of reality, that ‘rapport entre ces sensations et ces souvenirs qui nous entourent simultanément’ (IV, 468). In the garden at Combray, surrounded by nature, reading provided the filter for all the peripheral phenomena with which the narrator was faced; now, surrounded by books in the library, books are rejected as a means of self- (and world-) discovery. There is now only one book of value: ‘ce livre essentiel, le seul livre vrai, un grand écrivain n’a pas, dans le sens courant, à l’inventer puisqu’il existe déjà en chacun de nous, mais à le traduire. Le devoir et la tâche d’un écrivain sont ceux d’un traducteur’ (IV, 469). 37 To be a writer is to shoulder the duty and the task of the translator, activities which surely share the same point of inception: the act of reading. Translation is described as a ‘mode’ by Walter Benjamin in his classic essay, and from our examination of scenes of reading in A la recherche it seems that to a large extent the mode of the novel could be said to be that of translation: translation of sensation into impression; emotion into action; impression into expression. 38 Proust’s novel is one in which messages are emitted and interpreted with seemingly endless energy. George Steiner has described the ‘receptive interpretation’ of messages as being ‘always translation, even within the same language’, a comment which reinforces our notion of the mode of the Recherche being translation. 39 What, then, of the creative act of the writer, the translation of the inner book of unknown signs, ‘le livre essentiel’? Steiner defines creation as ‘that which is enacted freedom and which includes and expresses in its incarnation the presence of what is absent from it or of what could be radically other’. 40 Involuntary memory accords the narrator the freedom from habit and from the (illusory) mental shackles of artistic incapacity necessary to create a work of art, which, reflexively, is intensely concerned with 37 As Kristeva notes, ‘La traduction d’un livre en un autre se fait uniquement par le seuil de l’expérience perceptuelle’ (Le Temps sensible, 188). 38 See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens’, in Illuminations, 70–82. For a recent study of how Proust’s translations of Ruskin influenced and informed the creation of A la recherche, see Nathalie Aubert, Proust: la traduction du sensible. 39 George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (London: Faber, 2001), 218. For a much more extended consideration of this and similar points, see Steiner’s landmark study After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975; 3rd edn. 1998), esp. Ch. 1, ‘Understanding as Translation’, 1–51: ‘Literature . . . has no chance of life outside of constant translation within its own language’ (31). 40 George Steiner, Grammars of Creation, 108 (Steiner’s italics).
156
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
the production of art, yet it also has ample space for ‘what could be radically other’, in the shape of society life, the Great War, the Dreyfus affair, jealousy, desire, architecture, cooking, and so on. Indeed, in the library scene, the creative function that makes present what is absent is hard at work: involuntary memory is the force behind the narrator’s recognition of his creative capacity in this scene. The act of reading is also absent from this scene, and yet, as has been demonstrated, it is a powerful shadow presence throughout. Reading is not what is radically other to the narrator’s act of creation or to the work of art in which it is described. The act of creation here produces text, which is to say reading matter. Translation is the vehicle in the narrator’s metaphor of the creative process and the sheer heterogeneity of the factors in play in the act of creation as presented in Proust’s novel makes Steiner’s definition seem all the more remarkable. Reading and writing together are creation, and at the same time they are both intrinsically concerned with that which is ‘absent’ and ‘radically other’. The act of literary creation for Proust functions as a dual essence, a rich solution of reading and writing, whose individual components are indissociably combined. Slowly, then, a complex and many-layered picture is beginning to form before us. Reading teaches us to see, to feel, to hear otherwise, to experience a new phenomenology of everyday life. By priming our minds and senses, reading enables a new scrutinizing streak in us, which looks inwards and out, bringing to life new worlds, real and imagined. Reading has formed a framework of becoming, a Bildung of trial and error, triumphs and failures, confusion and revelations. Now a shift is felt: the time of conventional, book-based reading is over and a new phase must begin, which figuratively is a sort of reading: artistic creation. For a few pages the tropes of translating recede and attention returns to the ‘impression’ (mentioned six times in just two pages, IV, 469–70). We tend to remain ignorant of the real basis of our impressions, argues the narrator, and focus instead on the pleasure they provide. Such comments are not without relevance for readers of Proust’s novel, who might at this late stage be tempted to read unquestioningly, skimming the surface without emulating the great scrutiny demonstrated by the narrator. Writing is a common metaphor for experience in A la recherche (recall the narrator’s comment that ‘la sensibilité, même la plus physique, reçoit comme le sillon de la foudre, la signature originale et longtemps indélébile de l’événement nouveau’, IV, 8). We are reluctant, however, to examine this quasi-textual trace: ‘le petit sillon que la vue d’une aubépine ou d’une église a creusé en nous,
Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading
157
nous trouvons trop difficile de tâcher de l’apercevoir’ (IV, 470). As selfreaders we are lazy and look outwards to things rather than inwards to the rich experiential deposits within us. Our task is made clearer, perhaps, if we consider the following thoughts of Roland Barthes from an essay titled ‘Ecrire la lecture’: ‘lire, c’est faire travailler notre corps (on sait depuis la psychanalyse que ce corps excède de beaucoup notre mémoire et notre conscience) à l’appel des signes du texte, de tous les langages qui le traversent et qui forment comme la profondeur moirée des phrases.’ 41 How many readers apply themselves holistically in this way? Barthes seems to be suggesting that to attain an understanding of a text the reader must engage bodily in the search for meaning, interrogating limbs and sense organs every bit as much as taxing the brain or intellect. The ‘successful’ outcome— if such a thing can be posited—from the Babel of ‘tous les langages qui . . . traversent [le texte]’ is suggested in Barthes’s ‘profondeur moirée des phrases’, a shimmering, quasi-organic prize of meaning that we really have to get our hands dirty to discover. Barthes’s sensual rendering of the act of reading is germane to Proust’s project. 42 Barthes, one of Proust’s most sensitive, attentive readers, belongs to a small group of critics who have acknowledged the full extent of Proust’s sensual, and sensualizing, discourse. 43 Memorably, for example, Barthes suggests that we might describe the semantic richness of the name in Proust as its « feuilleté ». 44 Richly sensual mirroring of Proust’s text in this way is not uncommon in the work of his best critics and commentators (one thinks of Benjamin’s image of the rolled-up sock, Malcolm Bowie’s critical Roland Barthes, ‘Ecrire la lecture’, O.c ., ii. 961–2 (962). This is no surprise for readers of Barthes who, in Le Plaisir du texte, cites Proust as his ‘œuvre de référence, la mathésis générale, le mandala de toute la cosmogonie littéraire’ (59). Indeed, in an article published the year after Le Plaisir du texte in Le Figaro, he takes his idolatry further still, and focuses, significantly, on reading: ‘Proust, c’est un système complet de lecture du monde. Cela veut dire que, si nous admettons tant soit peu ce système, ne serait-ce que parce qu’il nous séduit, il n’y a pas, dans notre vie quotidienne, d’incident, de rencontre, de trait, de situation, qui n’ait sa référence dans Proust: Proust peut être ma mémoire, ma culture, mon langage; je puis à tout instant rappeler Proust, comme le faisait la grand-mère du narrateur avec Mme de Sévigné. Le plaisir de lire Proust—ou plutôt de le relire—tient donc, le sacré et le respect en moins, d’une consultation biblique: c’est la rencontre d’une actualité et de ce qu’il faut bien appeler, au sens complet du terme, une sagesse: un savoir de la « vie » et son langage’ (O.c ., iii. 74). In short, for Barthes, reading Proust is a lesson in reading the world. 43 Jean-Pierre Richard, of course, broke new ground in his Proust et le monde sensible (Paris: Seuil, 1974); Julia Kristeva carries forward Richard’s work to an extent in Le Temps sensible: see particularly her section ‘La sensation est-elle un langage?’, 398–434. 44 Barthes, ‘Proust et les noms’, 126. 41 42
158
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
faculties keenly attuned to ‘Proust’s gritty, breezy and salty book’). 45 Such, it seems, can be an effect of reading, and rereading Proust’s novel: its challenge lies not just in its interpretation, but in the creative, critical activity this inevitably provokes, whether it is written, spoken or silently chewed over. Without a doubt A la recherche engages its readers’ intellects. Normally an unremarkable fact of the reading process, this becomes problematic and troubling in so far as Proust’s text actively discounts and dismantles the merits of intelligence as an interpretive faculty. The rejection or condemnation of the intellect, however, is not a blanket one. ‘Quant aux vérités que l’intelligence . . . cueille à claire-voie, devant elle, en pleine lumière, leur valeur peut être très grande’, we read (IV, 477), and sense a shift of the narrator’s critical position. 46 Not for long, however. The narrator continues: ‘mais elles ont des contours plus secs et sont planes, n’ont pas de profondeur parce qu’il n’y a pas eu de profondeurs à franchir pour les atteindre’ (IV, 477). According to Barthes, reading sensually, allowing the stimulation received by our bodies to feed into mental processes, we can arrive at an understanding which is neither dry nor flat and featureless, but which stems from ‘la profondeur moirée des phrases’. For Proust a purely intellectual engagement with the world is not altogether fruitless or sterile, but nor is it complete. Barthes’s ‘profondeur moirée’ is adumbrated in the narrator’s figuring of the work of writers who in later life write only with their intelligence: ‘les livres de leur âge mûr ont, à cause de cela, plus de force que ceux de leur jeunesse, mais ils n’ont plus le même velours’ (IV, 477). Writing fuelled only by the intellect can lack in texture and contour; similarly, individuals who seek knowledge and enlightenment only through bookish routes run the risk of leading an unfulfilled existence which the narrator summarizes as ‘cette fuite loin de notre propre vie que nous n’avons pas le courage de regarder et qui s’appelle l’érudition’ (IV, 470). Etymologically a process of instruction or training, erudition is a false friend, a means of avoiding what truly requires study and close examination: our selves. Concrete things have been evaluated and considered as aids and as hindrances to self-discovery; now in a strikingly short paragraph a single rhetorical question effectively dispenses 45 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Image of Proust’, 200; Malcolm Bowie, Proust Among the Stars, p. xix. 46 The action of the intelligence as described here is etymologically that of reading, ‘lire’ stemming from the Latin ‘legere’: ‘ « ramasser, cueillir », « rassembler, recueillir » ’, Le Robert dictionnaire historique de la langue française, ii. 2034.
Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading
159
with the brand of literary writing typified by the Goncourt journal that privileges ‘things’ and so troubled the narrator on the eve of his departure from Tansonville: Comment la littérature de notations aurait-elle une valeur quelconque, puisque c’est sous les petites choses comme celles qu’elle note que la réalité est contenue (la grandeur dans le bruit lointain d’un aéroplane, dans la ligne du clocher de Saint-Hilaire, le passé dans la saveur d’une madeleine, etc.) et qu’elles sont sans signification par elles-mêmes si on ne l’en dégage pas? (IV, 473)
Where the verb ‘déchiffrer’ and its cognates in the earlier scenes of reading marked the as yet only partially recognized process of essenceextraction from works of art, now that the narrator has identified the powerful catalytic quality of contingent ‘petites choses’, ‘dégager’ is its natural heir, suggesting a more robust activity, not only a deciphering, but a setting in motion, an activation or emancipation of hitherto restricted forces. The grandeur of ‘real’ art, the narrator continues, ‘c’était de retrouver, de ressaisir, de nous faire connaître cette réalité loin de laquelle nous vivons . . . cette réalité que nous risquerions fort de mourir sans avoir connue, et qui est tout simplement notre vie’ (IV, 474). Life, we might say, is like an article we have pawned, and true art provides us with the capital with which to buy it back, to discover it afresh and enjoy with renewed vigour its contours, its scent, the ‘velours’ of its surfaces. After the snappy disposal of ‘littérature de notation’ come several pages proposing what literature could, or should, be (IV, 474–7). Art has been heralded as a means of reclaiming our own lives, what we have lost or, as I suggested above, unwittingly pawned off, and is depicted as an inwards movement of recognition and reconciliation, like a period of meditative reflection while reading. 47 Now, however, art is depicted as a contrary phase of outward-looking contemplation and openness: ‘Par l’art seulement nous pouvons sortir de nous, savoir ce que voit un autre de cet univers qui n’est pas le même que le nôtre et dont les paysages nous seraient restés aussi inconnus que ceux qu’il peut y avoir dans la lune’ (IV, 474). The compass of the narrator’s concerns expands and contracts, as he ponders impressions stored up within as well as whole potential 47 Barthes writes of the pause we take, ‘en levant la tête’ when reading, ‘non par désintérêt, mais au contraire par afflux d’idées, d’excitations, d’associations’ (O.c ., ii. 961): although our head may be raised, we remain inwardly turned, cocooned by the act of reading.
160
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
experiential universes. Art alerts us to plurality, and by attuning ourselves to the manifestations of this plurality in art as well as in everyday life vast new fields—internal and external, ideational and practical, sensual and intellectual—offer up great yields to be reaped by the individual. If reading is a creative act akin to the work of the artist, then efficiently, successfully, to read may be to act as the narrator suggests in his new-found confidence. How should the reader-cum-artist work? Of what does her work consist? She must work against the grain of four familiar scourges which conceal her true impressions: ‘l’amour-propre, la passion, l’intelligence et l’habitude’. As regards the ‘work’ which must be done, ‘seul il exprime pour les autres et nous fait voir à nous-même notre propre vie, cette vie qui ne peut pas s’ « observer », dont les apparences qu’on observe ont besoin d’être traduites et souvent lues à rebours et péniblement déchiffrées’ (IV, 475). Just as ‘sagesse’ cannot be gained vicariously or without effort, life cannot just be observed: it must be lived, breathed, and physically suffered. The route to the depths of experience, to Barthes’s textual ‘profondeur moirée’, is through engaged self-translation, active interpreting not just forwards but crosswise and ‘à rebours’, guiding as we go our readerly plough along the phenomenological furrows of experience which, of course, not only contain the actual texts we read but also lead to the ‘livre aux caractères figurés, non tracés par nous’ (IV, 458). The traditional linear conception of reading is overhauled as the richer, more complex, form of holistic, sense-oriented reading described above emerges as central to the narrator’s development. Life is made up of appearances which often must be ‘lues à rebours’; the learning process is ‘[une] marche en sens contraire’; we are encouraged to ‘lire au travers’ and to ‘regarder à l’envers’ (IV, 475). 48 These figured acts of reading are evidence of the narrator channelling his questing, knowledge-seeking energies in the right direction, down beneath the surface of things, ‘où ce qui a existé réellement gît inconnu de nous’ (IV, 475). Literature, in contrast to ‘nature morte’ paintings that fix the appearance of things, capturing their surfaces and the effects of light upon them, is presented here as very much alive, as a vital force. Literature is ‘la vie enfin découverte et éclaircie, la seule vie par conséquent pleinement vécue’ (IV, 474). Remaining on the surface can be aesthetically satisfying and artistically successful, but truly to achieve as an artist, or as an 48 Note the presence in both of these adverbial phrases of the ‘vers’, the line or textual furrow from which our deliriant acts of reading always deviate.
Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading
161
interpreter of art, one must eschew straightforward progressions or linearity, and be receptive to the risk and uncertainty, the fruitful mistakes and the painful errors of approaching the world crosswise, of translating impressions and experience, whether textual or sensory, by embracing readerly ‘délires’ and looking keenly into the daunting reaches of the ‘livre intérieur’ (IV, 458). Artistic expression and interpretation, rather than smoothing over bumps and asperities in pursuit of comfortable homogeneity, should revel in the challenge of incommensurability and thrive on the contradictions and epistemological jagged edges of the heterogeneous fabric of life. Part of this rich but rough fabric is suffering, and the narrator shows himself to be well aware of the role it has played and still has to play in his life (IV, 475). He will return to the theme of suffering and its necessity in the life of the artist, but first he focuses on the conditions that are conducive to the creation of literary works of art. Again society life is denigrated; ‘les vrais livres’, he tells us, ‘doivent être les enfants non du grand jour et de la causerie mais de l’obscurité et du silence’ (IV, 476). This statement functions around two opposing pairs: ‘[le] grand jour’/‘l’obscurité’ and ‘la causerie’/‘[le] silence’. The ideal conditions for the production or birth of ‘real’ books are, in part at least, equivalent to those favoured for reading. 49 Reading takes place in many different situations, under many different conditions, but silence is seldom available for the reading subject to enjoy. If we recall the narrator’s reading in the garden at Combray, we shall remember that the hugely instructive scene which takes place in the partial shelter of the ‘guérite d’osier’ is without a doubt subject to the vicissitudes of ‘le grand jour’, and it is reported by a narrator who gives the impression of being a multi-tasker, assessing and processing all manner of sensory messages at the same time. Real books are the progeny of darkness and silence, yet our narrator’s life has been spent not just outside ‘au grand jour’ but also under the glittering chandeliers of society parties, surrounded by the tireless chatter of the ‘mondains’. This inconsistency, combined with the narrator’s assurance that he will produce a work of art, suggests that it is the writing process rather than the conception and gestation of the work which requires silence and darkness. The translation of impressions into written text needs a more strictly controlled environment than that in which reading can take place. The act of reading, as has been 49 Recall Mallarmé’s remark in ‘Mimique’ that silence is ‘condition et délice de la lecture’, O.c ., ii. 179.
162
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
suggested, seems to grow in complexity and richness the more external stimuli there are competing for the reader’s attention. If writing is always (even if only fractionally) belated, following from an act of readingcum-translation as well as consisting in part of such an act, then it is perhaps more understandable that silence, or at least solitude, should be the ‘condition et délice de [l’écriture]’, given the manifold complexity of the original impressions which are to be translated by the author. Moreover, the necessary ‘obscurité’ whence ‘real’ books are born need not be an external condition of light. ‘Ne vient de nous-mêmes’, it will be recalled, ‘que ce que nous tirons de l’obscurité qui est en nous et que ne connaissent pas les autres’ (IV, 459). We are never more productively in the dark than when reading allows us the necessary ‘recueillement’ to delve into our inner selves. Reading, whether in company, indoors, or ‘au grand jour’, provides the right conditions for this exploration to be undertaken. The narrator reports that ‘une nouvelle lumière se fit en moi. Et je compris que tous ces matériaux de l’œuvre littéraire, c’était ma vie passée; . . . toute ma vie jusqu’à ce jour aurait pu et n’aurait pas pu être résumée sous ce titre: Une vocation’ (IV, 478). 50 The reasons for which his life may be deemed a vocation are given in detail, in biological/botanical figurings of plant development. Why, however, should it not be possible for this life to be described as a vocation? ‘Elle ne l’aurait pas pu’, we are confidently told, ‘en ce sens que la littérature n’avait joué aucun rôle dans ma vie’ (IV, 478). Literature, we are supposed to believe, just four pages previously proclaimed as ‘la seule vie . . . pleinement vécue’ (IV, 474), has played no part in the narrator’s life. François le Champi, Phèdre, the tales of the Mille et Une Nuits, the novels of Bergotte, not to mention the works of Baudelaire, Hugo, Musset, Dostoevsky, and others repeatedly referred to, are all to be discounted, ignored as non-contributors to the narrator’s development. Troublingly, we are faced with this unqualified statement of denial which, in the light of his earlier remarks and experiences, readers of the novel might feel compelled to reject. However seriously we take the remark, its effect is to provoke a radical reassessment of just what is important to the narrator among the great constellation of experiences that make up his life as we have followed it in A la recherche. There is no reason for us unquestioningly to take the narrator at his word, but rather than getting 50 Note how the narrator’s chosen expression ‘ce titre’ is appropriately bookish: his life will be the ‘material’ that will fill the pages of his work, whose ‘titre’ at this point we do not know.
Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading
163
bogged down in questions of authorial or narratorial reliability, it seems prudent to take a different interpretive path here. It is, of course, an exaggeration to say that literature has played no role in the narrator’s life, but if we take ‘la littérature’ to represent the actual texts he reads and admires throughout the novel, it will perhaps be acknowledged that as literary works of art in their own right they were of little more than ancillary importance. The lessons involving literature were learned in the processing, the analysing, the translating of the effects of the texts: in short they were lessons in reading. ‘Qu’importe le flacon, pourvu qu’on ait l’ivresse?’ Musset asked, 51 a question we might echo in addressing the narrator’s implicit attitude to literature problematically expressed here: ‘Qu’importe le livre pourvu qu’on ait le délire?’ Literature may not have played a role in the narrator’s life in the same specific, almost tangible way that music has, as represented primarily by Vinteuil’s sonata and septet, but what it does do, almost imperceptibly over a longer period of time, is attune his mind to interpretive problems, to inconsistencies, to loss, to trauma, and to great happiness; in sum, reading has its part to play in teaching the narrator how to think, and therefore indirectly how to write. Over the subsequent pages (IV, 480–6), the successive loves, losses, and the suffering one inevitably endures in life are pondered as facets of the narrator’s vocation. Happiness and good health come together, but ‘c’est le chagrin qui développe les forces de l’esprit’. Where confused recollections of ‘clochers et herbes folles’ earlier were said to form ‘un grimoire compliqué et fleuri’ (IV, 457), now suffering is said to provide the key to these pages of the impenetrable inner text: ‘le chagrin’ reveals laws which give us clearer sight, let us return, pull up ‘les mauvaises herbes de l’habitude, du scepticisme, de la légèreté, de l’indifférence’ (IV, 485) and make sense of the previous confusion. An intricate readerly image communicates the profit of such illuminating suffering: as ‘chagrin’ slowly destroys our bodies, we need not worry: ‘puisque chaque nouvelle parcelle qui s’en détache vient, cette fois lumineuse et lisible, pour la compléter au prix de souffrances dont d’autres plus doués n’ont pas besoin, pour la rendre plus solide au fur et à mesure que les émotions effritent notre vie, s’ajouter à notre œuvre’ (IV, 485). Like cuts of meat into Françoise’s ‘bœuf mode’, the artist’s disaggregating body feeds, lump by lump, into the work of art, adding support and 51 ‘La Coupe et les lèvres’, in Poésies complètes, ed. by Maurice Allem (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 157.
164
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
solidity to its totality. ‘[N]otre œuvre’, deferred until the end of the sentence, has closural force: as suffering attacks the artist’s physically weak constitution, the literary work’s strength grows, bulked out by new raw materials which have become illuminating and ‘lisible[s]’. When faced with loss and the destructive force of suffering, artists are capable, by their nature, of investing their disintegrating selves in Art, and thus (for a time at least) deferring their dissolution; but what hope is there for the individual without creative leanings? An answer is offered in the closing pages of the library scene (IV, 489–90). When a reader reads a novel, making the story her own as she reads, the effects of reading are highly subjective. The narrator emphasizes the creative aspect inherent in interpretation and highlights a certain parallelism between the practice of readers and writers: a writer draws on many individuals and experiences in order creatively to mould a single character or situation; in a similar way, the reader apprehends and ‘translates’ these hybrid figures or scenarios through her own subjectivity, unconsciously inflecting them, connecting them into her own frame of reference. 52 ‘Racine avait été obligé’, we read pour lui donner ensuite toute sa valeur universelle, de faire un instant de la Phèdre antique une janséniste; de même, si M. de Charlus n’avait pas donné à l’« infidèle » sur qui Musset pleure dans La Nuit d’Octobre ou dans Le Souvenir le visage de Morel, il n’aurait ni pleuré, ni compris, puisque c’était par cette seule voie, étroite et détournée, qu’il avait accès aux vérités de l’amour’ (IV, 489).
Two men are unexpectedly united in their actions, one in writing plays, the other in reading them; the shared characteristic is that of interpretive creativity, which is evinced as much in the act of writing as it is in ‘just’ reading. With the narrator’s subsequent statement, it becomes clearer still how this overlap can occur: L’écrivain ne dit que par une habitude prise dans le langage insincère des préfaces et des dédicaces: « mon lecteur » En réalité, chaque lecteur est quand il lit le propre lecteur de soi-même. L’ouvrage de l’écrivain n’est qu’une espèce d’instrument optique qu’il offre au lecteur afin de lui permettre de discerner ce que sans ce livre il n’eût peut-être pas vu en soi-même. La reconnaissance en soi52 Dominique Jullien argues persuasively for the importance of the role of sexual inversion in what she sees as Proust’s project of rewriting Saint-Simon and the Mille et Une Nuits: ‘L’intertextualité proustienne prend donc la forme de l’inversion. Non seulement les invertis doivent être déchiffrés à l’envers . . . , non seulement ils « lisent » à l’envers— . . . mais plus généralement, toute lecture est une inversion’, Proust et ses modèles, 98.
Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading
165
même, par le lecteur, de ce que dit le livre, est la preuve de la vérité de celui-ci, et vice versa, au moins dans une certaine mesure, la différence entre les deux textes pouvant être souvent imputée non à l’auteur mais au lecteur. De plus, le livre peut être trop savant, trop obscur pour le lecteur naïf, et ne lui présenter ainsi qu’un verre trouble avec lequel il ne pourra pas lire. Mais d’autres particularités (comme l’inversion) peuvent faire que le lecteur a besoin de lire d’une certaine façon pour bien lire; l’auteur n’a pas à s’en offenser, mais au contraire à laisser la plus grande liberté au lecteur en lui disant: « Regardez vous-même si vous voyez mieux avec ce verre-ci, avec celui-là, avec cet autre. » (IV, 489–90)
The narrator leaves us in no doubt as to the central concern of this passage: ‘lire’ and its cognates recur thirteen times and the noun ‘livre’, in which we ‘hear’ reading is repeated three times. The discovery of self through reading is key, and ‘soi-même’ forcefully closes the second and third sentences, surfacing again in the fourth. Reading, after so many pages of effort on the part of Proust’s readers, is at last explicitly assessed: analogies and figures of reading are finished, and now we can read straightforwardly about reading, in so far as this is possible . . . Appropriately enough as the passage begins, it addresses our senses in an assonantal singsong on |í|, which culminates in the twice repeated sound of reading, |li|: ‘L’écrivain ne dit que par habitude prise dans le langage insincère des préfaces et des dédicaces:« mon lecteur » En réalité, chaque lecteur est quand il lit le propre lecteur de soi-même’. The language of sight and recognition is then privileged (‘l’instrument optique’, ‘discerner’, ‘vu’, ‘reconnaissance’). To an extent these lines represent the culmination of the narrator’s mental ‘mise au point’, the extensive cerebration we have been following over some thirty pages. The hiatus in the library is almost at an end and, although the ideas expressed are not without complication, the narrator’s expression has a clarity and confidence foreign to, say, much of Albertine disparue. Reading has travelled under many guises until now; most radically it has been revealed as a combination of delirium and sensory overdrive, a discovery of sensation and a teetering on the edge of the unknown and unknowable. To read is to read ourselves and to be awoken to the world around us; self-recognition through reading a text is deemed to reflect the truth value of that text: ‘et vice versa’, we are told, the Latin term aptly inlaid with the mark of the ‘furrows’ of text between and across which the reader’s eye flits on its deliriant path. Just as the suffering writer’s body figuratively reconstitutes the ‘body’ of his work, so the reader becomes text. Books are optical instruments with which to examine ourselves, but the book-cum-lens may be too complex to allow the necessary scrutiny;
166
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
in such situations, it may be too learned or too obscure for the ‘lecteur naïf ’. We can only call our own, readers will recall, ‘ce que nous tirons de l’obscurité qui est en nous’ (IV, 459): the overly complex text cannot help the naive reader to identify the detail, and the shock, of her inner ‘obscurité’. This is not to say that testing texts which do not reveal their riches at a first glance are not profitable; on the contrary, as the narrator attests, such texts are essential, but are not suitable for a ‘lecteur naïf ’. Reading, like so many things, is a gradual apprenticeship, a path towards knowledge which, as Elstir advised, is only discovered after travelling a path that no-one else can take for us (II, 219). If all of this has a faintly familiar feel to it, it is because the novel opens with considerations which are germane to the notion of reading and self-discovery. ‘Je n’avais pas cessé en dormant de faire des réflexions sur ce que je venais de lire’, we read (I, 3), but once these reflexions are over le sujet du livre se détachait de moi, j’étais libre de m’y appliquer ou non; aussitôt je recouvrais la vue et j’étais bien étonné de trouver autour de moi une obscurité, douce et reposante pour mes yeux, mais peut-être plus encore pour mon esprit, à qui elle apparaissait comme une chose sans cause, incompréhensible, comme une chose vraiment obscure. (I, 3)
The young narrator has the freedom his older self exhorts authors to grant their readers (IV, 490), but he remains benighted. What reigns around the fledgling narrator is ‘obscurité’, the darkness of the night, but also a more daunting ontological darkness which anticipates the image of the inner darkness whose depths are plumbed by the (mature) reading mind. In one respect, then, it may seem that little is achieved in the Recherche: the narrator takes some three thousand pages to progress from an ‘obscurité’ which he can describe only rather enigmatically as being ‘incompréhensible, comme une chose vraiment obscure’, to another ‘obscurité’, which (arguably just as unsatisfactory in its description) is one ‘que ne connaissent pas les autres’ (IV, 459). The darkness of the Combray bedroom at the novel’s incipit, as well as the ‘obscure fraîcheur’ it provides for the narrator on hot summer afternoons (I, 82), is a curious brand of pregnant darkness, full of potential discovery, which may be seen as a ‘mise en abyme’ or miniaturization of the novel’s larger project. It is difficult to read in the dark unless what you are reading is the darkness itself. The narrator’s fumblings in the opening pages of the novel announce the mature protagonist’s conclusions which, of course, are also his beginnings. To look out on the world with balanced and
Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading
167
penetrative vision is possible in the long run, if first we learn to read what lies within us and what lies between the lines that constitute our selves. A la recherche begins in darkness, for the narrator and his readers; with time, however, and re-reading, it becomes evident that throughout the novel, even (or especially) in its darkest corners, the narrator is in fact holding up lenses to us, allowing us to inflect our experience through the novel, to discover a new phenomenology founded on reading: ‘Regardez vous-même si vous voyez mieux avec ce verre-ci, avec celui-là’ . . . Proust’s narrator in this way figures in a long line of readeraddressing, question-anticipating writers in the French tradition. Baudelaire, as Benjamin puts it, in writing his Fleurs du Mal, famously ‘envisaged readers to whom the reading of lyric poetry would present difficulties’, and so addresses the first poem of his collection ‘Au lecteur’. 53 ‘Ainsi lecteur’, wrote Montaigne centuries earlier, ‘je suis moy-mesmes la matière de mon livre’. 54 The address we find in A la recherche at first seems far less explicit, more covert in its inscription than Montaigne’s announcement, yet retrospectively we hear the narrator’s prose now whisper, now shout in similar terms: ‘you and I, reader, are the “matière” of our book’. It must be stressed that many other interpretive frameworks (the study of architecture and the visual arts, or listening to music, for example) are built into the novel, but reading is the only one which offers the interpreter of the Recherche a genuinely reflexive handle on the text, opening up practical and theoretical aspects of an activity so habitual in everyday life that it goes virtually unnoticed. These considerations, led by the circularity of the novel’s structure, have drawn us away from the library scene and its imminent closure. Lessons have been learned and conclusions crystallize in the narrator’s mind, shimmering among the heterogeneous mass of his mental outpourings: ‘Je m’étais rendu compte’, he declares, ‘que seule la perception grossière et erronée place tout dans l’objet, quand tout est dans l’esprit’ (IV, 491). This conclusion, another part-culmination of the protracted spell of reflective thinking in the library, is shortly after repeated with emphatic variations (‘Il n’est pas une heure de ma vie qui n’eût servi à m’apprendre que seule la perception plutôt grossière et erronée place tout dans l’objet quand tout au contraire est dans l’esprit’, IV, 493, my emphases). This repetition may result from Proust’s incomplete editing of this section 53 54
Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Illuminations, 152. Michel de Montaigne, ‘Au lecteur’, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 2. See also Cathleen Bauschatz, ‘Montaigne’s Conception of Reading’, in The Reader in the Text, 264–91.
168
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
of the text, but it points all the same towards its import in this crucial culminating scene. His double affirmation of his position, spilling over once again into hyperbole, serves as an unequivocal coda to a complex and ideationally fraught section of the novel. Initially the broad claim for ‘l’esprit’ over ‘l’objet’ seems rather contrary to the recent, highly sensory, encounter with François le Champi, where a book was experienced as a hermeneutic object—as a thing—rather than for its (textual) content. It will be recalled, however, that whilst the book stimulates an intense experience and triggers an extended chain of associations (IV, 461–7), the plane on which the narrator functions is very much that of the mind. The book as object is a sufficient trigger for thoughts, impressions, and memory traces to be charged with energy and combinatory force, but it is not a necessary one: sound- and scent-based sensations are equally capable of setting the machinery of recollection in motion. ‘Tout est dans l’esprit’ if one takes the view that life is experienced only as it is processed through our minds, whether in the form of thoughts, emotions, or sensations. This is the narrator’s position, arrived at in part by his consideration of dreams. Dreams and dreaming are embraced as productive, fertile facets of mental function, but are not deemed to be a genuine means of rediscovering ‘le temps perdu’, since their unconscious nature dictates that they afford the individual discoveries that are at best illusory and evanescent. Dreaming, like reading, serves to convince the narrator ‘du caractère purement mental de la réalité’ (IV, 493), however its fleeting and uncontrollable nature leaves it not without fascination, but nevertheless an unreliable means of unearthing the truth. The hiatus in the library comes to an end, ‘le premier morceau étant terminé’ (IV, 496), and the narrator boldly leaves his book-lined cell of contemplation and introspection. ‘Cela me fit ressouvenir où j’étais’, he confides, as if the ‘petit salon-bibliothèque’ were another realm of existence foreign to the ‘salons’ of the ‘Hôtel Guermantes’. And in a way it is: during the fifty-odd pages preceding his setting out into the matinee, the social world of appearances, conversation, and relationships could not be further from the planes on which the narrator was operating. Earlier, he described how he came across François le Champi: ‘tout en poursuivant mon raisonnement, je tirais un à un, sans trop y faire attention du reste, les précieux volumes’ (IV, 461). Now, as he leaves the library, we read that ‘Je ne fus nullement troublé dans le raisonnement que je venais de commencer’, and the parallelism is significant. The discovery of the book from his childhood enriched and enlightened the
Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading
169
narrator’s reflections, and was a central stimulus to his lengthy thought processes; now as he ventures forth into the final matinee the dense fabric of thought and counter-thought, conjectures, reflections, and hypotheses will continue, but reading, which was an act to be reflected upon in the library, is now an act to be carried out. The spell of thinking in the library is in fact merely a prelude, a first movement in a grander piece, like the ‘premier morceau’ of music whose completion removes him from his hermetic enclosure. As he moves among the puppet-like creatures at the matinee, his focus must change: the final lessons in reading and their attendant freight of realizations sustain and indeed increase his mind’s intensity of engagement. Now much of the enormous energy turned inwards in the library must be turned outwards to the guests at the matinee, the walking wrecks, the ‘grands seigneurs’ of whom it is said that ‘des taches brunes avaient envahi leurs joues, et leur figure avait jauni, s’était foncée comme un livre’ (IV, 524). The narrator’s readerly disposition remains, making of decrepit faces old tomes, spotted and foxed, fragile with age. His lessons of reading, thought to be finished, are only just coming into effect—for his work to be done, the narrator must read the guests as so many books, equivalent to François le Champi: each of the past acquaintances he meets is a tottering, crumbling chapter of his past that must be read before Time snatches its invaluable contents away for good (in this respect the narrator in the ‘Bal de têtes’ takes on the role of Mlle Vinteuil’s friend, piecing together what to others would seem like illegible remnants of an unknown œuvre). So time—Time— now is of the essence; indeed, time is the essence of what remains of the Recherche: for the narrator finally to reach his time of writing, he must pursue his path of reading for just a little while longer. The reading he will undertake, that of the last Guermantes matinee, is one whose every effort deliriously intimates the imminence of decay and death not just for the individuals whose wretched, ruinous faces he strives to decipher but also, all too acutely, for himself.
Epilogue Far from looking bored or absent-minded, her eyes concentrated almost sternly upon the page, and from her breathing, which was slow but repressed, it could be seen that her whole body was constrained by the working of her mind. At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world into the real world. . . . The landscape outside, because she had seen nothing but print for the space of two hours, now appeared amazingly solid and clear. . . . The morning was hot, and the exercise of reading left her mind contracting and expanding like the mainspring of a clock. The sounds in the garden outside joined with the clock, and the small noises of midday, which one can ascribe to no definite cause, in a regular rhythm. It was all very real, very big, very impersonal, and after a moment or two she began to raise her first finger and to let it fall on the arm of her chair so as to bring back to herself some consciousness of her own existence. She was next overcome by the unspeakable queerness of the fact that she should be sitting in an arm-chair, in the morning, in the middle of the world. Who were the people moving in the house—moving things from one place to another? And life, what was that? It was only a light passing over the surface and vanishing, as in time she would vanish, though the furniture in the room would remain. 1
These words from The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf ’s first novel, uncannily illustrate the powerful, formative, revelatory qualities with which the act of reading is imbued in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Woolf ’s young reader, Rachel Vinrace, is holistically absorbed by the experience, not just mentally invested in her reading: ‘her whole body was constrained by the working of her mind’. To cease reading is to 1 Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (London: Duckworth, 1915; Vintage, 1992), 125–7.
Epilogue
171
experience a transition into a world that is not unknown to you, but which may seem so, for the act of reading often facilitates a refocusing of vision in the world outside the book: ‘the landscape outside . . . now appeared amazingly solid and clear’. In the narrator’s case, his transition from the world of books is into the world of the ‘Bal de têtes’. What he sees is certainly clear, but it is far from solid: the social whirl is now scarcely a shuffle and the protagonists are feeble shadows of their former selves, hardly recognizable, crumbling wrecks. As we saw in the Sunday afternoon Primal Scene from ‘Combray’, the intense mental focusing required by the act of reading somehow sharpens the senses, renews our receptiveness to the stimuli of the world around us: ‘The morning was hot, and the exercise of reading left her mind contracting and expanding like the mainspring of a clock.’ This tensile charging of the reader’s receptors, either during the act of reading or immediately after, brings about a renewed sense of phenomenological participation in the world (recall the narrator’s remark in ‘Combray’ that after long sessions of reading his walks are all the more enjoyable, pent up with energies as he is ‘comme une toupie qu’on lâche’, I, 152). The reduced sense of self one has in reading can be a very positive side effect: a wholesome humility is felt almost involuntarily when one raises one’s eyes from a text in which one has been engrossed and realizes how slight one’s place on the earth is compared with the expansive landscapes that the imagination unfurls (recall the ‘écran diapré d’états différents’ of Combray, I, 83). In the case of Woolf ’s reader, this humility expresses itself straightforwardly: ‘it was all very real, very big, very impersonal’. In Proust’s case, at the close of the library scene when the narrator finally raises his eyes, after a lifetime spent reading, he has to acknowledge that the real landscape in which he has a place is profoundly marked by the threat of death. A great bulk of Proust criticism pays little attention to this situation, concentrating rather on the ‘happy ending’, the triumph over Time through the creation of art. 2 Woolf ’s reader, to ease herself, we might 2 Germaine Bree, for example, in The World of Marcel Proust (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967), argues that the purpose of the work the narrator will write is ‘not to recapture a lost past but to symbolize the capacity of the human mind to transcend the limitations of natural determinism and to relate to existence in an independent way’ (232). She continues ‘It is not a dogmatic work. It is rather a “proposition”, an urgent statement addressed to the reader. It raises the question of the reader’s own relation to the life he is leading. It is also a task of love. Proust aims at nothing less than the redemption of an entire society’ (246). Barbara Bucknall attends to the question of redemption from a number of different angles in The Religion of Art in Proust (Urbana, Chicago, and London: University of Illinois Press, 1969), particularly in her chapter ‘Ethics and Art’, 99–127. More recently, in ‘Death and Literary Authority: Marcel Proust
172
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
say, out of her readerly trance, ‘beg[ins] to raise her first finger and to let it fall on the arm of her chair so as to bring back to herself some consciousness of her own existence.’ The Guermantes’s matinee, without a doubt, and with repeated, painful stings of realization, is the narrator’s equivalent of this anodyne finger raising. As he encounters decrepit duchesses and haggard grandees, these encounters bring the narrator back into contact with his own existence, now fragile, aged, threatened. For her part, Rachel Vinrace had been ensconced in the Works of Henrik Ibsen, and felicitously Proust compares the guests at the matinee to dolls: Des poupées, mais que pour les identifier à celui qu’on avait connu, il fallait lire sur plusieurs plans à la fois, situés derrière elles et qui leur donnaient de la profondeur et forçaient à faire un travail d’esprit quand on avait devant soi ces vieillards fantoches, car on était obligé de les regarder en même temps qu’avec les yeux avec la mémoire, des poupées baignant dans les couleurs immatérielles des années, des poupées extériorisant le Temps, le Temps qui d’habitude n’est pas visible. (IV, 503)
This awareness of the unavoidably, at times shockingly, plural nature of experience, of the many levels on which we must concurrently engage with the world around us, has been developed throughout the narrator’s life in his reading encounters. Reading Proust’s novel undoubtedly hones this awareness in us: if we are to appreciate anything like the full richness and complexity of A la recherche, we must endeavour to approach it ‘sur plusieurs plans à la fois’. Woolf writes that Rachel is ‘overcome by the unspeakable queerness of the fact that she should be sitting in an armchair, in the morning, in the middle of the world’; subsequently she begins questioning the mundane, everyday activity going on around her: ‘Who were the people moving in the house—moving things from one place to another?’ 3 Rachel almost certainly knows the answer to her and Melanie Klein’, in his The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), 7–28, Leo Bersani has argued convincingly that Proust is a thinker with ‘a tendency to think of cultural symbolizations as essentially reparative’ (7); he continues that in A la recherche ‘art simultaneously erases, repeats, and redeems life. Literary repetition is an annihilating salvation’ (11). Bersani’s account of redemption in Proust does not occlude death. He sees the death of others as a condition of art—their death ‘both ends all resistance to Marcel’s voracious desire to appropriate them and allows him to reconstruct the objects of his desires as invulnerable truths. Experience destroys; art restores’, 14. 3 One is reminded here of Wallace Stevens’s reflections in ‘The House was Quiet and the World was Calm’, where an absence of movement and noise is said to contribute
Epilogue
173
question, but it is the fact that it is raised that is important. Reading is a catalyst, it is the cranking handle of the desirous mind. It instils in its agents a mode of inquisitive engagement with the world which may remain simplistic (‘who were the people in the house?’; ‘were the Verdurin clan just as Goncourt depicts them?’), but with a questing individual like Rachel Vinrace, or Proust’s narrator, the enquiring mind is unrelenting, passionate, driven: ‘And life, what was that?’ Woolf ’s heroine is young, inexperienced, and has been sheltered from the vicissitudes of worldly affairs. She is, however, a keen-eyed, critical, intelligent reader, and with her mind contracting and expanding after her hours with Ibsen, her abrupt question is met with an answer abrupt, frank, and startling in its simplicity: ‘It was only a light passing over the surface and vanishing, as in time she would vanish, though the furniture in the room would remain.’ One thinks of Bergotte’s life and death, his last breath expiring before the light passing over the surface of Vermeer’s ‘petit pan de mur jaune’ (III, 692–3). Just as philosophical reflection is somehow coupled by Woolf to the inescapably everyday (Rachel realizes she will be survived by the chair whose materiality assures her tapping finger of her existence), a similar straight-talking honesty that at times, by contrast, gives way to grim humour exists in the final movement of Le Temps retrouvé: Certains hommes boitaient dont on sentait bien que ce n’était pas par suite d’un accident de voiture, mais à cause d’une première attaque et parce qu’ils avaient déjà, comme on dit, un pied dans la tombe. Dans l’entrebâillement de la leur, à demi paralysées, certaines femmes semblaient ne pas pouvoir retirer complètement leur robe restée accrochée à la pierre du caveau, et elles ne pouvaient se redresser, infléchies qu’elles étaient, la tête basse, en une courbe qui était comme celle qu’elles occupaient actuellement entre la vie et la mort, avant la chute dernière. Rien ne pouvait lutter contre le mouvement de cette parabole qui les emportait et, dès qu’elles voulaient se lever, elles tremblaient et leurs doigts ne pouvaient rien retenir. (IV, 516) 4 to the reading experience: ‘The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind: The access to the perfection of the page.’ See Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1984), 358–9 (358). 4 Malcolm Bowie ends his chapter on death in Proust Among the Stars (267–318) with a consideration of this passage (see 317–18); he writes most illuminatingly about the prominence of the thanatological in Le Temps retrouvé: ‘The savagery of Proust’s writing on old age is part of a wider vehemence and disconsolateness in the book as a whole. It would be too easy to be comforted by a cult of artistic work-in-progress and by visions of
174
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
Reading has brought the narrator a long way, and it remains his crutch as he makes his way through the ‘Bal de têtes’, desperately trying to read the faces and gestures of those he meets. The revelations of the Guermantes’s courtyard and the library underpin the narrator’s coping with the grim procession of decaying humanity with which he is faced (‘Proust’s macabre vision of social man and woman herded together in death’s antechamber’, as Malcolm Bowie memorably puts it); 5 he is aware of death’s proximity, but comforted by the feeling that within him lie the materials for his long-anticipated work of art. But what about us: are we to keep on reading in the hope we might become writers, painters, composers, in the hundred-odd pages that remain of Proust’s work? Is that our goal, or should we merely be satisfied with the rewards of our reading experience to date, with the intellectual acumen and smugness that being someone who has actually read Proust can bring? Redemptive readings of the ending of A la recherche privilege artistic creation as a means of transcending time, reaching beyond the conventional limits of a human life. But ‘the Proustian equation’, as Beckett dryly noted, ‘is never simple.’ 6 We cannot all be artists, and it cannot be that only artists have ‘real’ access to the world, ‘genuine’ appreciation of what it is to be alive, and to face death. 7 My study of the role of reading in Proust’s novel has brought into relief the way the act revitalizes our perceptual capacities, injects energy into our often flagging powers of observation, our sense of participation in the world. It underlines for each of us the fragility of the construct we call reality; it appeals to us to be at once receivers and processors of information; it requires of us temporary absence from ourselves as well as the most intimate knowledge possible of our mental processes; it can put us, without the slightest bit of notice, beside ourselves, deliriously in the space between creator and creation. We have seen reading to be a potent force of discovery and destabilization, an access route to truth and a perilous road to perdition. The final movement of A la recherche sees the narrator and his readers being pulled in at least two directions: on the one hand towards an acknowledgement of our fleeting tenure on the earth and the imminence of death; and on the other hand towards the promise of art, the artwork itself as complete and consummated in the fullness of time, and the narrator, even as he feeds upon such visions, reminds himself of what art cannot conquer’, 286. 5 6 Proust Among the Stars, 269. Beckett, Proust, 11. 7 For a recent, frank, and engaging consideration of mortality, art and facing death, see Julian Barnes, Nothing to be Frightened of (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008).
Epilogue
175
transcendence, or at least momentary release from what Thomas Hardy called ‘this world of welterings’. 8 Towards the close of Le Temps retrouvé the narrator insists that in writing his book he will not try to rewrite Les Mille et Une Nuits or Saint-Simon’s Mémoires: 9 pas plus qu’aucun des livres que j’avais aimés dans ma naïveté d’enfant, superstitieusement attaché à eux comme à mes amours, ne pouvant sans horreur imaginer une œuvre qui serait différente d’eux. Mais, comme Elstir Chardin, on ne peut refaire ce qu’on aime qu’en le renonçant. Sans doute mes livres eux aussi, comme mon être de chair, finiraient un jour par mourir. Mais il faut se résigner à mourir. (IV, 620)
Whether or not the narrator succeeds in creating his work of art, and whether or not we muster the strength to read the four pages of A la recherche that remain after this passage, and complete Proust’s novel, if we understand and appreciate the gravity and humility of these words and the enormity of the thought processes on which they are founded, it seems clear that a remarkable feat of philosophical-intellectual endeavour has been achieved in A la recherche. Although we can never strictly stop reading, we must learn to recognize that a moment will come when reading must be renounced, abjured finally in favour of interaction with the world around us. ‘We must learn how to die’, wrote Wagner, ‘and to die in the most absolute sense of the word; the fear of death is the source of all lack of love and it is generated only when love itself has begun to fade.’ 10 In accepting death, in ‘learning how to die’, we accept the futility of our actions. 11 The closing of a book after time spent reading 8 Thomas Hardy, ‘Why do I?’ (1925), Selected Poems, ed. by Harry Thomas (London: Penguin, 1993), 182. 9 Dominique Jullien’s invaluable study, Proust et ses modèles, of course, flies in the face of this claim; she summarizes: ‘le passage de la lecture à l’écriture (en l’occurrence, des livres modèles à la Recherche) articule les notions de projection et de préfiguration. La lecture, et plus généralement tout acte herméneutique, est conçue sur le modèle de la projection’, 11. 10 Richard Wagner, letter to August Röckel, 25 January 1854, in John Louis DiGaetani, (ed.), Penetrating Wagner’s Ring: An Anthology (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978; New York, Da Capo, 1983), 44, Wagner’s emphasis. 11 Simon Critchley reiterates this point: ‘human beings are exceedingly limited creatures, a mere vapour or virus can destroy us. . . . We seem to have enormous difficulty in accepting our limitedness, our finiteness, and this failure is a cause, in my view, of much tragedy’, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge, 1997; 2nd rev. edn., 2004), p. xvii. Death as a literary topos is anthologized by Robert F. Weir, (ed.), in Death in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), which features scenes from Flaubert and Camus in the French tradition, but not Proust. Proust is similarly absent, save for a small number of passing references, in Michel Picard, La Littérature et la mort (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995).
176
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
is a model of the best sort of human recognition of our insurmountable limitations. Through reading, astonishing achievements and discoveries can be made, at times, even, concerning precisely what it was we were not doing while we were reading. We may never finish reading A la recherche, in the sense of categorically being done with it, but when we emerge from the darkness of the ‘Bal de têtes’ into the triumphant closure ‘dans le Temps’, the effect is characteristically plural: as well as feeling readerly satisfaction, we ponder the transience of our lives, our brief, easily frittered tenancy on earth, and somewhere in between we must sense the apparent absurdity of having chosen to spend so much of our fleeting time reading this vast catalogue of errors and insecurities teasingly titled A la recherche du temps perdu. Proust’s gamble was a big one, and in our time pressed age, his twenty-first century readers’ gamble may feel like an even greater one. ‘Autour des vérités qu’on a atteintes en soi-même’, the narrator writes, ‘flottera toujours une atmosphère de poésie, la douceur d’un mystère qui n’est que le vestige de la pénombre que nous avons dû traverser, l’indication, marquée exactement comme par un altimètre, de la profondeur de l’œuvre’ (IV, 476). These words implicitly defend our time investment. The qualities of Proust’s prose which I have highlighted and shown repeatedly in action, woven bewilderingly around the acts of reading depicted in A la recherche may comfortably be qualified as ‘vérités qu’on a atteintes en soi-même’ and, as my analyses have shown, their effect is frequently to create a rich, complex ‘atmosphère de poésie’. Marianne Moore, in the year Proust won the Prix Goncourt, wrote of poetry what sceptics might say of the privileging of reading in A la recherche and, indeed, of reading Proust at all: ‘I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.’ 12 However, and to borrow the conclusion to her poem: . . . if you demand on the one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, you are interested in poetry. 13
To be sure, Proust’s novel is interested in a lot more than just reading. But if we are interested in growing up, sexual discovery and 12 Marianne Moore, ‘Poetry’ (1919), in The Poems of Marianne Moore, ed. by Grace Schulman (London: Faber, 2003), 135.
Epilogue
177
transgression, love, jealousy, intellectual and aesthetic apprenticeship, psychological turmoil loss, and mourning, then we are interested in reading. Reading embodies the very uncertainties, the challenges, the aching boredoms, the shocks, and exhilarating revelations that human existence is all about. Proust’s book, as Malcolm Bowie has provocatively remarked, can be perceived as a ‘cabinet of curiosities inside which the reader’s attention is endlessly dispersed’; 14 following the acts of reading in A la recherche gives us an unexpectedly wide-ranging set of reference points in the book, helps us to counter this potentially overwhelming dispersal and gain purchase on the novel’s slippery textual surfaces. Above all, it reflexively guides our interpretive activity, taking us from the comforting enclosures of our youth, as it were, when we read ‘Combray’, into the treacherous territory, real and imagined, of our mature years in the closing stages of the novel. Thus giddily we emerge with the narrator from the library in Le Temps retrouvé, alert to the implacable ‘délires’, the ultimate uncontrollability of reading, yet boldly, undeterred, we go on. 14 Malcolm Bowie, ‘Barthes on Proust’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14 (2001), 513–18 (513).
Bibliography PRIMARY TEXTS Proust, M., A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–9). Jean Santeuil précédé de Les Plaisirs et les jours, ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). Contre Sainte-Beuve précédé de Pastiches et mélanges et suivi de Essais et articles ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). CRITICAL WORKS ON PROUST AND A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU Aubert, N., Proust: la traduction du sensible (Oxford: Legenda, 2002). Bailey, P., Proust’s Self-Reader: The Pursuit of Literature as Privileged Communication (Birmingham, Ala: Summa Publications, Inc., 1997). Baldwin, T., The Material Object in the Work of Marcel Proust (Oxford; Bern: Peter Lang, 2005). ‘Proust, a Fountain and some Pink Marble’, French Studies (hereafter FS), 59 (2005), 481–93. Bales, R., Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu (London: Grant & Cutler, 1995). (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Barthes, R., ‘Proust et les noms’, in Le Degré zéro de l’écriture suivi de Nouveaux essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 121–34. Baudry, J.-L., Proust, Freud et l’autre (Paris: Minuit, 1984). Beckett, S., Proust (London: Calder and Boyars, 1965; repr. with Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, 1987). ‘Proust in Pieces’, in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (London: Calder, 1983), 63–5. Bedriomo, E., Proust, Wagner et la coïncidence des arts (Paris: Editions Place, 1984). Benjamin, W., ‘The Image of Proust’, in Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn, ed. by Hannah Arendt (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970; Pimlico, 1999), 197–210. Bernard, A.-M., Le Monde de Proust vu par Paul Nadar (Paris: Editions du Patrimoine, 1999). Bersani, L., Marcel Proust: Fictions of Life and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965).
Bibliography
179
‘Death and Literary Authority: Marcel Proust and Melanie Klein’, in The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), 7–28. Botton, A. de, How Proust Can Change Your Life (London: Picador, 1997). Bouillaguet, A., Proust et les Goncourt: le pastiche du ‘Journal’ dans ‘Le Temps retrouvé’ (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1996). and Rogers, Brian G. (eds.), Dictionnaire Marcel Proust (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004). Bowie, M. M., Proust, Jealousy, Knowledge, An Inaugural Lecture delivered at Queen Mary College, University of London on 24 October 1978 (London: Queen Mary College, 1978). Freud, Proust, Lacan: Theory as Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Proust Among the Stars (London: HarperCollins, 1998). ‘Barthes on Proust’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14 (2001), 513–18. Bree, G., The World of Marcel Proust (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967). Brunet, E., Le Vocabulaire de Proust, 3 vols. (Geneva: Slatkine; Paris: Champion, 1983). Bucknall, B., The Religion of Art in Proust (Urbana, Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 1969). Cano, C. M., Proust’s Deadline (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006). Carter, W. C., The Proustian Quest (New York: New York University Press, 1992). Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Caws, M. A., Marcel Proust (New York and London: Overlook Duckworth, 2003). Chardin, P., Proust ou le bonheur du petit personnage qui compare (Paris: Champion, 2006). Chaudier, S., Proust et le langage religieux: la cathédrale profane (Paris: Champion, 2004). Cocking, J. M., Proust: Collected Essays on the Writer and his Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Collier, P., Proust and Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). —— ‘Translator’s Introduction: The Fugitive’, in Marcel Proust, The Prisoner and The Fugitive, trans. by Carol Clark and Peter Collier, ed. by Christopher Prendergast (London: Penguin, 2002), pp. xviii–xxv. Compagnon, A., ‘Proust 1: contre la lecture’, in La Troisième république des lettres: de Flaubert à Proust (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 221–52. Proust entre deux siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1989). Crosman Wimmers, I., Proust and Emotion: The Importance of Affect in ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).
180
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
Deleuze, G., Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964; 4th edn., rev., 1970). Descombes, V., Proust: philosophie du roman (Paris: Minuit, 1987). Dezon-Jones, E., ‘Editer Proust: hier, aujourd’hui et peut-être demain’, Littérature, 88 (1992), 46–53. Didier, B., ‘François le Champi et les délices de l’inceste’, in Ecriture-femme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1981), 139–52. Doubrovsky, S., La place de la madeleine: Ecriture et fantasme chez Proust (Paris: Mercure de France, 1974). Du Bos, C., ‘Marcel Proust’ and ‘Points de repère’, in Approximations (Paris: Editions des Syrtes, 2000), 73–122, 423–8. Ellison, D., The Reading of Proust (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). Fiser, E., L’Esthétique de Marcel Proust (Paris: Redier, 1933). Le Symbole littéraire: Essai sur la signification du symbole chez Wagner, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Bergson et Marcel Proust (Paris: Corti, 1941). La Théorie du symbole littéraire et Marcel Proust (Geneva: Slatkine, 1941; Slatkine reprints, 1992). Gamble, C., ‘Lecture’, in Bouillaguet and Rogers, (eds.), Dictionnaire Marcel Proust (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), 558–60. Germain, A., ‘Le Dernier livre de Marcel Proust’, ‘Regard sur l’œuvre de Marcel Proust’, ‘Marcel Proust: La Prisonnière’, in De Proust à Dada (Paris: Editions du Sagittaire, 1924), 11–15, 17–29, 31–6. Girard, R. (ed.), Proust: Twentieth Century Views (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1962). Gleize, J., ‘Proust: négation et assomption du livre’, in Le Double miroir: le livre dans les livres de Stendhal à Proust (Paris: Hachette supérieur, 1992), 217–43. Goodkin, R. E., ‘T(r)yptext: Proust, Mallarmé, Racine’, Yale French Studies, 76 (1989), 284–314. Graham, V. E., The Imagery of Proust (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966). Gratton, J., Expressivism: The Vicissitudes of a Theory in the Writing of Proust and Barthes (Oxford: Legenda, 2000). Gray, M. E., Postmodern Proust (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). Harlow, B., ‘Sur la lecture’, Modern Language Notes, 90 (1975), 849–71. Henrot, G., ‘Marcel Proust et le signe “Champi” ’, Poétique, 78 (1989), 131–50. Hill, L., ‘Proust and the Art of Reading’, Comparative Criticism, 2 (1980), 167–85. Hodson, L. (ed.), Marcel Proust: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1989). Hughes, E. J., Marcel Proust: A Study in the Quality of Awareness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Jefferson, A., ‘Proust and the Lives of the Artists’, in Biography and the Question of Literature in France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 233–48.
Bibliography
181
Jullien, D., Proust et ses modèles: Les ‘Mille et Une Nuits’ et les ‘Mémoires’ de SaintSimon (Paris: José Corti, 1989). Karlin, D., Proust’s English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Kasell, W., Proust and the Strategy of Reading (Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V., 1980). Kostis, N., ‘Albertine: Characterization Through Image and Symbol’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association (hereafter PMLA), 84 (1969), 125–35. Kotin, A., and Kolb, K., (eds.), Proust in Perspective: Visions and Revisions (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2002). Kristeva, J., Le Temps sensible: Proust et l’expérience littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1994; repr. 2000). Laget, T., L’ABCdaire de Proust (Paris: Flammarion, 1998). Landy, J., Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception and Knowledge in Proust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Lang, C. D., ‘Proust: Forgetting Things Past’, in Irony/Humor: Critical Paradigms (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 132–66. Large, D., Nietzsche and Proust: A Comparative Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Lévinas, E., ‘L’Autre dans Proust’, in Noms propres (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1976), 147–56. Luckhurst, N., Science and Structure in Proust’s ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Maar, M., ‘The Sins of Padua: Proust meets Mme Putbus’s Maid’, New Left Review, 10 (2001), 133–9. Mackenzie, R., ‘Hitting the Mine: Modulations of Narrative voice in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu’, in Narrative Voices in Modern French Fiction: Studies in Honour of Valerie Minogue on the Occasion of her retirement, ed. by Michael Cardy, George Evans, and Gabriel Jacobs (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), 165–82. Man, P. de, ‘Reading (Proust)’, in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 57–78. May, D., Proust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). McDonald, C., The Proustian Fabric: Associations of Memory (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). Milly, J., ‘Le Pastiche Goncourt dans Le Temps retrouvé ’, Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France, 71 (1971), 815–35. ‘L’article dans Le Figaro’, Acta Fabula, A la recherche d’Albertine disparue, http://www.fabula.org/revue/document476.php, accessed 16.04.2007. Mondor, H., ‘Mallarmé et Proust’, in Hommage à Marcel Proust (Paris and Brussels: Le Disque Vert hors série, 1952), 23–30.
182
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
Nabokov, V., ‘Marcel Proust: The Walk by Swann’s Place’, in Lectures on Literature ed. by Fredson Bowers (London: Picador, 1980), 206–49. O’Brien, J., ‘Fall and Redemption in Proust’, MLN, 79 (1964), 281–3. Painter, G., Marcel Proust: A Biography, 2 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959–65). Picon, G., Lecture de Proust (Paris: Gallimard, 1963). Piette, A., Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Poulet, G., ‘Proust’, in Etudes sur le temps humain I (Paris: Plon, 1952), 400–38. L’Espace Proustien (Paris: Gallimard, 1963). Price, L. B., (ed.), Marcel Proust: A Critical Panorama (Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 1973). Reille, J-.F., Proust: le temps du désir. Une lecture textuelle (Paris: Les Editeurs français réunis, 1979). Richard, J.-P., Proust et le monde sensible (Paris: Seuil, 1974). ‘Proust météo’, in Essais de critique buissonnière (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 107–19. Roloff, V., ‘François le Champi et le texte retrouvé’, in Etudes proustiennes, 3 (1979), 259–87. Werk und Lektüre: Zur Literarästhetik von Marcel Proust (Frankfurt: Insel, 1984). Rorty, R., ‘Self-creation and Affiliation: Proust, Nietzsche and Heidegger’, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 96–121. Rose, P., The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time (London: Vintage, 1998). Sansom, W., Proust (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973). Sayce, R. A., ‘The Goncourt Pastiche in Le Temps retrouvé ’, in Larkin B. Price (ed.), Marcel Proust: A Critical Panorama, (Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 1973) 102–23. Shattuck, R., Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to ‘In Search of Lost Time’ (London: Penguin, 2000). Soucy, R., ‘Proust’s Aesthetic of Reading’, French Review (hereafter FR), 41 (1967), 48–59. ‘Bad Readers in the World of Marcel Proust’, FR, 44 (1971), 677–86. Surprenant, C., ‘A Blatant Interrogative in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu’, FS, 57 (2003), 195–208. Tadié, J.-Y., Marcel Proust: biographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). et al., (eds.), Marcel Proust: L’Ecriture et les arts (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de la France, 1999). Terdiman, R., ‘Proust: Reconceiving the Tradition’, in The Dialectics of Isolation: Self and Society in the French Novel from the Realists to Proust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), 91–248.
Bibliography
183
Topping, M., Proust’s Gods: Christian and Mythological Figures of Speech in the work of Marcel Proust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). ‘The Proustian Harem’, MLR, 97 (2002), 300–11. ‘Proust’s Orient(alism)’, French Studies Bulletin, 84 (2002), 10–13. Valéry, P., ‘Hommage’, in Variété (Paris: Gallimard, 1924), 165–75. Wassenaar, I. P., Proustian Passions: The Uses of Self-Justification for ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Marcel Proust: A Beginner’s Guide (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2000). Watt, A. A., ‘The Sign of the Swan in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu’, FS, 59 (2005), 326–37. White, E., Proust (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999). Winton (Finch), A. M., Proust’s Additions: The Making of ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Wright, D., Du discours medical dans ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ (Paris: Champion, 2007).
WORKS ON READING Allen, J. S., In the Public Eye: A History of Reading in Modern France, 1800–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Alsop, D., and Walsh, C., The Practice of Reading: Interpreting the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1999). Badia, J. and J. Phegley, (eds.), Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2005). Bauschata, C., ‘Montaigne’s Conception of Reading’, in S. R. Suleiman and I. Crosman (eds.), The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 264–9. Bayard, P., Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus (Paris: Minuit, 2007). Bennett, A., (ed.), Reading Reading: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Reading (Tampere: University of Tampere, 1993). (ed.), Readers and Reading (New York: Longman, 1995). Birkerts, S., The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (London: Faber, 1996). Calinescu, M., Rereading (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993). Cecil, D., The Fine Art of Reading (London: The Souvenir Press, 2001). Certeau, M. de, ‘Lire: un braconnage’, in L’Invention du quotidien 1. Arts de faire (Paris: Gallimard, 1980 ; repr. 1990), 239–55. Chartier, R. (ed.), Pratiques de la lecture (Paris: Editions Rivage, 1985). L’Ordre des livres: Lecteurs, auteurs, bibliothèques en Europe entre le XIV e et le X VIII e siècle (Aix-en-Provence: Alinea, 1992).
184
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
Crosman Wimmers, I., Poetics of Reading: Approaches to the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). Dirda, M., Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005). Donoghue, D., The Practice of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Eco, U., The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979). Esrock, E. J., The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). Faguet, E., L’Art de lire (Paris: Hachette, 1912). Feagin, S. L., Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). Fischer, S. R., A History of Reading (London: Reaktion Books, 2003). Flint, K., The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Flynn, E. A., and Schweickart, P. P. (eds.), Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts and Contexts (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). Foale, S., ‘Reading’, Paragraph, 17 (1994), 25–9. Ford, P., and Jondorf, G. (eds.), The Art of Reading: Essays in Memory of Dorothy Gabe Coleman (Cambridge: Cambridge French Colloquia, 1998). Gleize, J., Le Double miroir: le livre dans les livres de Stendhal à Proust (Paris: Hachette supérieur, 1992). Hartman, G., ‘The Fate of Reading’, in The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1975), 248–74. Hazlitt, W., ‘On Reading Old Books’, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt in Twenty-one Volumes, ed. by P. P. Howe (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930–4), xii. 220–9. Hillis-Miller, J., The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). Holub, R. C., Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Methuen, 1984). Iser, W., The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Jacobus, M., ‘Reading Woman (Reading)’, and ‘Is There a Woman in this Text?’, in Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (London: Methuen, 1986), 1–24; 83–109. Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Jefferson, A., ‘Stendhal and the Uses of Reading: Le Rouge et le noir’, FS, 37 (1983) 168–83. Jouve, V., La Lecture (Paris: Hachette, 1993).
Bibliography
185
Lee, H., Reading in Bed: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on 21 October 1999 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Littau, K., Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania (Cambridge: Polity, 2006). Manguel, A., A History of Reading (London: HarperCollins, 1996). Montalbetti, C., Images du lecteur dans les textes romanesques, Collection ‘Parcours de lecture’ (Paris: Bertrand Lacoste, 1992). Montandon, A. (ed.), Le Lecteur et la lecture dans l’œuvre: actes du colloque international de Clermont-Ferrand (Clermond-Ferrand: Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines de l’université de Clermont-Ferrand II, 1982). Nägele, R., Reading after Freud: Essays on Goethe, Hölderlin, Habermas, Nietzsche, Brecht, Celan and Freud (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). Naipaul, V. S., Reading and Writing: A Personal Account (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2000). Perec, G., ‘Lire: esquisse socio-physiologique’, in Penser/classer (Paris: Hachette, 1985), 109–28. Picard, M., Lire le temps (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1989). (ed.), La lecture littéraire. Actes du colloque tenu à Reims du 14 au 16 juin 1984 (Paris: Clancier-Guénaud, 1987). Pound, E., ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960; first published 1934). Rabinowitz, H., and Kaplan, R. (eds.), A Passion for Books: A Book Lover’s Treasury of Stories, Essays, Humor, Lore, and Lists on Collecting, Reading, Borrowing, Lending, Caring for and Appreciating Books (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999). Spufford, F., The Child that Books Built: A Memoir of Childhood and Reading (London: Faber, 2002). Stewart, G., The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006). Strachey, J., ‘Some Unconscious Factors in Reading’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2 (1930), 322–31. Suleiman, S. R., and Crosman, I. (eds.), The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). Syrotinski, M., and Maclachlan, I. (eds.), Sensual Reading: New Approaches to Reading in its Relations to the Senses (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001). Tompkins, J. P. (ed.), Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to PostStructuralism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Voltaire, ‘De l’horrible danger de la lecture’ (1765), in Œuvres completes, ed. by Louis Moland, 52 vols. (Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprints, 1967–), xxv., 335–7. Wilson, E., Sexuality and the Reading Encounter: Identity and Desire in Proust, Duras, Tournier and Cixous (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
186
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
Wilson, W. D., ‘Readers in Texts’, PMLA, 96 (1981), 848–63. Wimmers, I., ‘To Read or Not to Read: Deconstruction and Reader-oriented Criticism’, Semiotica, 89 (1992), 89–101. Wolfreys, J., Readings: Acts of Close Reading in Literary Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). OTHER WORKS Adorno, T. W., Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. by E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974). Notes to Literature, trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholson, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991–2). Alain, ‘Bonheur de lire’, in Les Arts et les dieux, ed. by Georges Bénézé (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), 931–4. Barnes, J., Nothing to be Frightened of (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008). Barthes, R., S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970). Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973). Œuvres complètes, ed. by Eric Marty, 3 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1993–5). Battles, M., Library: An Unquiet History (London: Heinemann, 2003). Benjamin, W., ‘Unpacking my Library’, and ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn, ed. by Hannah Arendt (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970; Pimlico, 1999), 61–9; 152–96. The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin from the German vol. prepared by Rolf Tiedeman (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard, 2002). Blanchot, M., L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955). Bloom, H., The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Minds (London: Fourth Estate, 2002). Bradbury, R., Fahrenheit 451 (1953) (London: HarperCollins, 2004). Brewer, B., Perception and Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Brooks, P., Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Knopf, 1984; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Cave, T. C., Recognitions: A Study of Poetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Cohn, D., The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Critchley, S., Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge, 1997; 2nd rev. edn., 2004).
Bibliography
187
Culler, J., The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983). Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Derrida, J., L’Ecriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967). ‘Living On’, trans. by James Hulbert, ed. by G. H. Hartman, in Deconstruction and Criticism, (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979), 75–176. La Carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980). Signéponge/Signsponge, trans. by Richard Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). ‘Survivre’, in Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 117–218. DiGaetani, J., (ed.), Penetrating Wagner’s Ring: An Anthology (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978; New York: Da Capo, 1983). Eagleton, T., Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Farrell, F. B., Why does Literature Matter? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). Fish, S., Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). Fishburn, M., Burning Books (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Freud, S., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. and ed. by James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London and New York: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–74). Hereafter SE. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, SE, vi. ‘Family Romances’, SE, ix. 235–41. ‘Contribution to a Questionnaire on Reading’, SE, ix. 243–7. An Infantile Neurosis, SE, xvii. 1–122. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, SE, xviii. 1–64. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans. by Anthea Bell, The New Penguin Freud, ed. by Adam Phillips (London: Penguin, 2002). Gardiner, M., (ed.), The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1972). Genette, G., Figures I (Paris: Seuil, 1966). Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969). Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972). Gracq, J., En lisant en écrivant; Lettrines; Lettrines 2; Lecture; Lectures, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Bernhild Boie, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1989–1995), ii. 553–768, 139–245; 247–401; 672–85; 685–704.
188
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
Hardy, T., Selected Poems, ed. by Harry Thomas (London: Penguin, 1993). Hartman, G., (ed.), Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979). Hillis-Miller, J., On Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). Hirsch, E. D., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). Johnson, B., The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Johnson, C., Derrida: The Scene of Writing (London: Phoenix, 2000). Laplanche, J., and Pontalis, J-B., ‘Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origines, origine du fantasme’, Les Temps Modernes, 215 (1964), 1833–68. The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. by Donald Nicholson Smith (London: Karnac Books, 1973). Lodge, D., (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, rev. edn. by Nigel Wood (Harlow: Longman, 2000). Lukacher, N., Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1986). Mallarmé, S., Œuvres complètes, ed. by Bertrand Marchal, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1998–2003). Man, P. de, Blindness and Insight (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971; rev. edn., London: Methuen, 1983). Manguel, A., The Library at Night (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008). Mardrus, J. C. (trans.), Le Livre des Mille et Une Nuits, 16 vols. (Paris: Editions de la Revue Blanche, 1899–1904). Moore, M., The Poems of Marianne Moore, ed. by Grace Schulman (London: Faber, 2003). Musil, R., The Man Without Qualities, trans. by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (London: Picador, 1995). Musset, A. de, Poésies complètes, ed. by Maurice Allem (Paris: Gallimard, 1959). Obholzer, K., The Wolf-Man Sixty Years Later: Conversations with Freud’s Most Controversial Patient, trans. by Michael Shaw (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982). O’Brien, J., Contemporary French Literature, ed. by Leon S. Roudiez (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971). Perec, G., ‘Notes brèves sur la manière de ranger ses livres’, in Penser/classer (Paris: Hachette, 1985), 31–42. Picard, M., La littérature et la mort (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1995). Prendergast, C., The Triangle of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
Bibliography
189
Proust, M., ‘Combray’, adapted and illustrated by Stéphane Heuet; A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 2 vols., adapted by Stanislas Brézet and Stéphane Heuet, illustrated by Stéphane Heuet; Un amour de Swann adapted by Stanislas Brézet and Stéphane Heuet, illustrated by Stéphane Heuet (Luçon: Delcourt, 1998–2006). Rabaté, J.-M., The Future of Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). Rigoli, J., Lire le délire: Aliénisme, rhétorique et littérature en France au XIXè siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2001). Robert, M., Roman des origines et origines du roman (Paris: Grasset, 1972). Rorty, R., ‘The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature’, in Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 125–40. Rousset, J., Forme et signification: Essais sur les structures littéraires de Corneille à Proust (Paris: José Corti, 1962). Rey, A., (ed.), Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, 3 vols. (Paris: Dictionnaires le Robert, 1998). Sand, G., François le Champi (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). Indiana (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). Sartre, J.-P., La Nausée (Paris: Gallimard, 1938). Les Mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Schlink, B., The Reader, trans. by Carol Brown Janeway (London: Phoenix, 1997). Sowerwine, C., France Since 1870: Culture, Politics and Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Steiner, G., ‘In a Post-culture’, in Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (London: Faber, 1972), 155–71. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975; 3rd edn., rev., 1998). No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–96 (London: Faber, 1996). Grammars of Creation (London: Faber, 2001). Lessons of the Masters (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2003). Stevens, W., Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1984). Terdiman, R., Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993). Tooke, A., Flaubert and the Pictorial Arts: From Image to Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Valéry, P., Poésies (Paris: Gallimard, 1929). Waugh, E., A Handful of Dust (London: Chapman & Hall, 1934; Penguin, 1951). Weir, R. F., (ed.), Death in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).
190
Reading in Proust’s A la recherche
Wimsatt, W. K., and Beardsley, M. C., ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, in W. K. Wimsatt, (ed.), The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 3–18. Wittgenstein, L., Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961; rev. edn., 1974). Woolf, V., ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929), in A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas, ed. by Michèle Barrett (London: 1993), 1–103. The Voyage Out (London: Duckworth, 1915; Vintage, 1992).
Index Entries preceded by an asterisk refer to characters or places in A la recherche du temps perdu. Akerman, Chantal 1 Adorno, Theodor 22 Alain (Emile-Auguste Chartier) 119 Albertine disparue 15, 26, 54, 58, 60 n., 64, 65, 67, 74, 104, 109–14, 117, 121, 123, 125–6, 129, 165 A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs 1 n., 36, 37, 40, 51, 52, 108, 125 n. Aubert, Nathalie 6, 29 n., 41 n., 155 n. Badia, Janet 51 n., 63 n. Bailey, Phillip 7, 24 ∗Balbec 9, 22, 32 n., 36, 52, 53, 57, 81, 86, 107, 117, 125, 134, 138, 152 Baldwin, Thomas 25 n., 27 n., 38 n., 132 n. Bales, Richard 126 n., 129 n. Balzac, Honoré de 7 n., 51 n., 97–8 Barnes, Julian 174 n. Barthes, Roland 3, 4, 5, 45, 68 n., 71, 130, 131 n., 146 n., 157, 158, 159, 160, 177 n. Battles, Matthew 136, 137 Baudelaire, Charles 21, 56, 64 n., 97 n., 98, 155, 162, 167 Bayard, Pierre 46 Beardsley, Monroe C. 100 n., 102 n. Beckett, Samuel 35, 42 n., 57, 74, 97, 174 Benjamin, Walter 63, 64, 76 n., 150, 155, 157, 158 n., 167 Bennett, Andrew 9, 102 n., 103 n. ∗Bergotte 9, 44–7, 49–52, 55, 58, 62, 66, 71, 80, 81, 91, 93, 97, 117, 118, 131, 133–6, 150, 162, 173 Bersani, Leo 172 n. Birkerts, Sven 9 n. Blanchot, Maurice 9 n., 10, 101 n., 103 n. ∗Bloch 44, 45, 46, 69 Bloom, Harold 50 n., 100 n. Bos, Charles du 48 n., 67 n., 93 n. Bouillaguet, Annick 88 n.
Bowie, Malcolm 2 n., 5 n., 54 n., 70 n., 109 n., 110, 126 n., 129, 157, 158 n., 173 n., 174, 177 Bradbury, Ray 10 n. Bree, Germaine 171 n. Bucknall, Barbara 171 n. Burke, Séan 102 n. Calinescu, Matei 28 n., 68 n. Cano, Christine M. 42 n., 68 n., 70 n., 110 n. Carter, William C. 1 n. Caws, Mary Ann 1 n. Certeau, Michel de 108 n. Chardin, Philippe 3 n., 54 n., 91 n. ∗Charlus, Palamède de 55, 56, 79 n., 114 n., 123 n., 130, 164 Chartier, Roger 154 n. Chaudier, Stéphane 49 n., 133 n. Collier, Peter 53 n., 115 n., 116, 117 n., 123 n., 127 n., 132 n. ∗Combray 1 n., 8, 11, 12, 17, 21, 28, 30, 31, 35, 36, 38 n., 39, 42, 43, 49, 52, 58, 59, 64, 66, 79, 80, 84, 87, 88, 94, 116, 124, 128, 131, 132, 133, 135 n., 144–5, 146 n., 147–9, 151, 152, 153, 155, 161, 166, 171, 177 Compagnon, Antoine 7, 11, 21 n., 34 n., 119 n., 135 n. Contre Sainte-Beuve (CSB) 3–4, 7 n., 47 n., 51, 60 n., 67 n., 80 n., 81 n., 138 n. Critchley, Simon 175 n. Crosman, Inge 6 n., 14 n.; see also Wimmers, Inge Crosman Culler, Jonathan 6, 63 n. Deleuze, Gilles 2 n., 29, 73, 74 n., 99, 123, 142 n. Derrida, Jacques 4 n., 32 n., 58, 75 n., 79 n., 103 n., 105 n., 108 n. Descombes, Vincent 88 n., 141 n. Didier, Béatrice 13 n., 21 n.
192
Index
Doubrovsky, Serge 12 n. Du côté de chez Swann 8, 36, 48
Jullien, Dominique 8 n., 23 n., 51 n., 147 n., 149 n., 164 n., 175 n.
Eco, Umberto 6 Ellison, David 5, 6, 7, 74 n. ∗Elstir 9, 13, 32 n., 72, 81–2, 86, 134, 142, 166, 175
Kaplan, Rob 150 n. Kasell, Walter 7, 8, 104 n., 109 n. Kolb, Katherine 11 n. Kristeva, Julia 2 n., 21 n., 96, 152 n., 155 n., 157 n.
Faguet, Emile 80 n. Farrell, Frank B. 27 n. Fischer, Steven Roger 10 n. Fishburn, Matthew 10 n. ∗Forcheville, Comte de 74–9, 83, 92, 107 n., 115 Freud, Sigmund 5, 11–12, 17, 22 n., 24 n., 26, 27, 30 n., 31 n., 49–50, 77 n., 84, 100 n., 107 n., 108, 109 n., 128 Fish, Stanley 100 n. Flint, Kate 18 n. Flynn, Elizabeth A. 51 n., 63 n., 100 n. France, Anatole 46, 70 n. ∗Françoise 30, 39, 42, 43, 56, 59, 60, 70, 106, 115–16, 128, 163 François le Champi, see Sand, George Fraser, Antonia 41 n. Genette, Gérard 43 n. Gleize, Joëlle 9 n. Goncourt, Jules et Edmond de 7 n., 14, 37 n., 88–93, 95, 97–9, 118, 119 n., 121 n., 130, 145, 146, 159, 173 Gracq, Julien 10 Gratton, Johnnie 4 n. Gray, Margaret 2 n., 13 n., 24 n., 27 n., 150 n. Gray, Simon 41 n. Hardy, Thomas 175 Hazlitt, William 148 n. Henrot, Geneviève 19 n., 21 n. Heuet, Stéphane 1 n. Hill, Leslie 5, 27, 29 Holub, Robert C. 6, 100 n. Hughes, Edward J. 40 n. Hugo, Victor 46, 90, 162 Iser, Wolfgang 6, 100 n. Jacobus, Mary 63 n., 100 n., 122 n. Jean, Raymond 25 n. Jefferson, Ann 14 n. Johnson, Barbara 84 n.
Lacan, Jacques 75 n., 79 Landy, Joshua 2 n., 48 n., 62 n., 78 n. Lang, Candace 17 n. Laplanche, Jean 12 n., 49 n. La Prisonnière 53–4, 56, 60, 65, 79 n., 83, 110, 114 n. Leconte de Lisle, Charles Marie 44, 46 Le Côté de Guermantes 60, 67 n., 81 n. Lee, Hermione 63 n. Le Figaro 7 n., 36, 56, 58–62, 65, 70–1, 79, 81, 86, 89, 104, 105, 110, 117, 121, 146, 157 n. Le Temps retrouvé 1 n., 7 n., 16, 19 n., 31, 56, 71, 87, 88 n., 99, 121, 122, 129, 130–69, 173, 175, 177 Lévinas, Emmanuel 58 n. Littau, Karin 9 n., 102 n., 104 n. Luckhurst, Nicola 111 Lukacher, Ned 23 n., 26 n. Maar, Michael 125 n. McDonald, Christie 60 n., 110 n. Maclachlan, Ian 25 n., 100 n., 135 n. Mâle, Emile 82 Mallarmé, Stéphane 57, 58 n., 81 n., 103, 104 n., 141 n., 161 n. Man, Paul de 5, 27, 30, 100 n. Manguel, Alberto 10 n. Marcilly, Charles 104 n. Maurois, André 1 n. May, Derwent 1 n. Mille et Une Nuits 8 n., 17 n., 147, 149 n., 162, 164 n., 175 Miller, J. Hillis 76 n., 78 Milly, Jean 59 n., 71 n., 88 n., 110 n. Mondor, Henri 141 n. Montaigne, Michel de 167 Montalbetti, Christine 9 Montandon, Alain 6 n., 104 n. ∗Montjouvain 30 n., 78 n., 83, 84 Moore, Marianne 176 ∗Morel, Charles 79 n., 114 n., 164 Mortimer, Armine Kotin 11 n. Musil, Robert 137, 139
Index Newton-de Molina, D. 102 n. Nietzsche, Friedrich 102 ∗Norpois 13, 50–1, 62 n., 72, 80–1, 86, 104 Painter, George 1 n. Pascal, Blaise 19, 20 Perec, Georges 9 n., 10, 28 n., 31 n., 39, 122 n. Phèdre, see Racine, Jean Phegley, Jennifer 51 n., 63 n. Piette, Adam 42 n. Pilkington, Anthony 98 n. Poe, Edgar Allan 75 n., 79 Pontalis, J.-B. 12 n., 49 n. Poulet, Georges 2 n., 104 n. Price, Larkin B. 88 n. Rabinowitz, Harold 150 n. Racine, Jean 26 n., 44, 51 n., 53, 162, 164 Reille, Jean Francis 12 n., 21 n. Richard, Jean-Pierre 26, 27 n., 157 n. Rigoli, Juan 104 n. Robert, Marthe 49 n. Rorty, Richard 20 n. Roloff, Volker 7, 11 n., 25 n. Rousset, Jean 4, 51 n. Ruiz, Raul 1 n. Ruskin, John 3, 5–6, 7, 8, 29 n., 117 n., 138 n., 155 n. ∗Saint-Loup, Robert de 107 n., 113–14, 117 n., 120–1, 123, 136 n. Saint-Simon, Louis, Duc de 8 n., 19, 20, 147 n., 164 n., 175 Sand, George 13, 18–26, 37 n., 49, 51 n., 52, 55, 71, 87, 105, 126 n., 136–7, 145–52, 162, 168, 169 Sartre, Jean-Paul 57, 137 Sayce, R. A. 88 n., 89 n., 90 Schlink, Bernhard 25 n. Schor, Naomi 14 n. Schrift, Alan 102 n. Schweickhart, Patrocinio P. 51 n., 63 n., 100 n. Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de 21 n., 51 n., 157 n. ∗Simonet, Albertine 15, 22, 26, 52–4, 56, 57 n., 58, 66, 70, 78, 94, 98,
193
106–8, 111–18, 119, 120, 123–6, 127, 129, 134 Smith Allen, James 10 n. Sodome et Gomorrhe 38, 54, 110 Steiner, George 9 n., 10, 69 n., 155–6 Stevens, Wallace 172–3 n. Stewart, Garrett 10 n. Suleiman, Susan 6 n., 14 n. ∗Swann, Charles 13, 19–20, 72–9, 81, 83, 86, 92, 97, 104, 107 n., 111, 115, 134 ∗Swann, Gilberte 14, 15, 22, 36, 50, 54, 89, 94, 97, 98, 104–6, 108, 117, 124, 125, 127, 128, 130 ∗Swann, Odette 36, 73–9, 81, 86, 92, 115 Syrotinski, Michael 25 n., 100 n., 135 n. Tadié, Jean-Yves 1 n. Terdiman, Richard 111, 116 n. Tompkins, Jane P. 6 n., 104 n. Topping, Margaret 49 n. Un amour de Swann 1 n., 54 n., 73 n. Valéry, Paul 46 n., 101 Venice 15, 64, 104, 106, 115 n., 123–8, 132, 133 n., 148, 149 n. ∗Verdurin, M. et Mme 14, 54, 57 n., 83, 85, 88 n., 90, 91, 98, 173 Vermeer, Johannes 9, 131 n., 133, 134 n., 135, 173 ∗Vinteuil, M. 83–5, 97, 163 ∗Vinteuil, Mlle 13, 17 n., 30 n., 72, 78 n., 83–7, 91, 109, 134, 140, 169 Wagner, Richard 175 Wassenaar, Ingrid 1 n., 111, 121, 151 n. Waugh, Evelyn 137 White, Edmund 1 n. Wilson, Emma 3 n., 8, 62 n. Wilson, W. Daniel 6 n. Wimmers, Inge (Crosman) 6 n., 27 n., 91 n., 110 n.; see also Crosman, Inge Wimsatt, W. K. 100 n., 102 n. Winton (Finch), Alison 42 n. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 50 n. Wolfreys, Julian 9 n., 11, 97, 101 n. Woolf, Virginia 20 n., 30 n., 96 n., 170–3 Wright, Donald 55 n.