Professional Documents
Culture Documents
MARCEL PROUST
http://www.chelseahouse.com
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Proust and Time Embodied 17
Julia Kristeva
The Lamp of Truth: Proust and George Eliot 37
Robert Fraser
Zipporah: A Ruskinian Enigma
Appropriated by Marcel Proust 63
Cynthia J. Gamble
Proust’s japonisme: Contrastive Aesthetics 83
Jan Hokenson
Proust’s Turn from Nostalgia 105
Susan Stewart
Orpheus and the Machine: Proust as Theorist
of Technological Change, and the Case of Joyce 121
Sara Danius
Introduction to Proustian Passions 137
Ingrid Wassenaar
The Vast Structure of Recollection:
from Life to Literature 165
William C. Carter
Albertine’s Bicycle, or: Women and French
Identity during the Belle Epoque 185
Siân Reynolds
vi CONTENTS
Chronology 267
Contributors 273
Bibliography 277
Acknowledgments 283
Index 285
Editor’s Note
This revised volume has only my Introduction in common with the earlier
Marcel Proust: Modern Critical Views (1987), since all the essays included here
date from 1993 on.
My Introduction compares Proust and Freud on the psychosexual
origins of jealousy, and then centers upon the odysseys of sexual jealousy in
Swann and in Marcel.
Julia Kristeva, with authentic charm, rightfully gives us a Proust who is
closer to Spinoza than to Heideger, while Robert Fraser contrasts George
Eliot’s powers of observation with Flaubert’s moral withdrawal, antithetical
influences upon Proust.
John Ruskin, another crucial Proustian precursor, is shown by Cynthia
J. Gamble to have provided a model for Odette, Swann’s provocation to self-
destruction, after which Jan Hokenson traces the limits of Japanese
aestheticism in Proust’s vast saga.
Susan Stewart usefully sees Proust turning from a study of the
nostalgias to the happiness of aesthetic apprehension, while Sara Danius sets
Joyce against Proust in their effort to absorb technological change.
For Ingrid Wassenaar, In Search of Lost Time joins itself to the history
of self-justification, after which Proust’s biographer, William C. Carter,
examines his subject’s grand edifice of recollection.
Siân Reynolds subtly presents the fear of women embedded in the
French culture of Proust’s era, while Anthony R. Pugh clarifies the ending of
Swann’s Way.
Maureen A. Ramsden finds Proust’s early Jean Santeuil a guide to the
aesthetics of In Search of Lost Time, while Gabrielle Starr concludes with a
fresh vision of the Proustian aesthetics.
vii
HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
1
2 Harold Bloom
In fact, poor Swann is at the wrong window, and the entire passage is
therefore as exquisitely painful as it is comic. What Freud ironically called
the overevaluation of the object, the enlargement or deepening of the
beloved’s personality, begins to work not as one of the enlargements of life
(like Proust’s own novel) but as the deepening of a personal Hell. Swann
plunges downwards and outwards, as he leans “in impotent, blind, dizzy
anguish over the bottomless abyss” and reconstructs the petty details of
Odette’s past life with “as much passion as the aesthete who ransacks the
extant documents of fifteenth-century Florence in order to penetrate further
into the soul of the Primavera, the fair Vanna or the Venus of Botticelli.”
The historicizing aesthete, John Ruskin say, or Walter Pater, becomes
the archetype of the jealous lover, who searches into lost time not for a
person, but for an epiphany or moment-of-moments, a privileged fiction of
duration:
When he had been paying social calls Swann would often come
home with little time to spare before dinner. At that point in the
evening, around six o’clock, when in the old days he used to feel
so wretched, he no longer asked himself what Odette might be
about, and was hardly at all concerned to hear that she had people
with her or had gone out. He recalled at times that he had once,
years ago, tried to read through its envelope a letter addressed by
Odette to Forcheville. But this memory was not pleasing to him,
and rather than plumb the depths of shame that he felt in it he
preferred to indulge in a little grimace, twisting up the corners of
his mouth and adding, if need be, a shake of the head which
6 Harold Bloom
Jealousy dies with love, but only with respect to the former beloved.
Horribly a life-in-death, jealousy renews itself like the moon, perpetually
trying to discover what no longer interests it, even after the object of desire
has been literally buried. Its true object is “that day, that hour in the
irrevocable past,” and even that time was less an actual time than a temporal
fiction, an episode in the evanescence of one’s own self. Paul de Man’s
perspective that Proust’s deepest insight is the nonexistence of the self founds
itself upon this temporal irony of unweaving, this permanent parabasis of
meaning. One can remember that even this deconstructive perspective is no
more or less privileged than any other Proustian trope, and so cannot give us
a truth that Proust himself evades.
The bridge between Swann’s jealousy and Marcel’s is Saint-Loup’s
jealousy of Rachel, summed up by Proust in one of his magnificently long,
baroque paragraphs:
then changed the subject. All this was not to say that he did not,
a little later, see Rachel occasionally when he was in Paris. Those
who have played a big part in one’s life very rarely disappear from
it suddenly for good. They return to it at odd moments (so much
so that people suspect a renewal of old love) before leaving it for
ever. Saint-Loup’s breach with Rachel had very soon become less
painful to him, thanks to the soothing pleasure that was given
him by her incessant demands for money. Jealousy, which
prolongs the course of love, is not capable of containing many
more ingredients than the other products of the imagination. If
one takes with one, when one starts on a journey, three or four
images which incidentally one is sure to lose on the way (such as
the lilies and anemones heaped on the Ponte Vecchio, or the
Persian church shrouded in mist), one’s trunk is already pretty
full. When one leaves a mistress, one would be just as glad, until
one had begun to forget her, that she should not become the
property of three or four potential protectors whom one pictures
in one’s mind’s eye, of whom, that is to say, one is jealous: all those
whom one does not so picture count for nothing. Now frequent
demands for money from a cast-off mistress no more give one a
complete idea of her life than charts showing a high temperature
would of her illness. But the latter would at any rate be an
indication that she was ill, and the former furnish a presumption,
vague enough it is true, that the forsaken one or forsaker
(whichever she be) cannot have found anything very remarkable
in the way of rich protectors. And so each demand is welcomed
with the joy which a lull produces in the jealous one’s sufferings,
and answered with the immediate dispatch of money, for
naturally one does not like to think of her being in want of
anything except lovers (one of the three lovers one has in one’s
mind’s eye), until time has enabled one to regain one’s composure
and to learn one’s successor’s name without wilting. Sometimes
Rachel came in so late at night that she could ask her former
lover’s permission to lie down beside him until the morning. This
was a great comfort to Robert, for it reminded him how
intimately, after all, they had lived to-together, simply to see that
even if he took the greater part of the bed for himself it did not
in the least interfere with her sleep. He realised that she was more
comfortable, lying close to his familiar body, than she would have
been elsewhere, that she felt herself by his side—even in an
Introduction 9
Captive and insanely pervasive in The Fugitive. A great passage in The Captive,
which seems a diatribe against jealousy, instead is a passionately ironic
celebration of jealousy’s aesthetic victory over our merely temporal
happiness:
seek to identify this or that detail of our dream. What was one’s
mistress’s expression when she told one that? Did she not look
happy, was she not actually whistling, a thing that she never does
unless she has some amorous thought in her mind and finds one’s
presence importunate and irritating? Did she not tell one
something that is contradicted by what she now affirms, that she
knows or does not know such and such a person? One does not
know, and one will never know; one searches desperately among
the unsubstantial fragments of a dream, and all the time one’s life
with one’s mistress goes on, a life that is oblivious of what may
well be of importance to one, and attentive to what is perhaps of
none, a life hagridden by people who have no real connexion with
one, full of lapses of memory, gaps, vain anxieties, a life as illusory
as a dream.
between the sexes, a speculation that Proust neither evades nor supports, and
yet illuminates, by working out of the world that Freud knows only in the
pure good of theory. Freud is properly tentative, but also adroitly forceful:
Anatomy is destiny in Proust also, but this is anatomy taken up into the
mind, as it were. The exiles of Sodom and Gomorrah, more jealous even
than other mortals, become monsters of time, yet heroes and heroines of
time also. The Oedipus complex never quite passes, in Freud’s sense of
passing, either in Proust or in his major figures. Freud’s castration complex,
ultimately the dread of dying, is a metaphor for the same shadowed desire
that Proust represents by the complex metaphor of jealousy. The jealous
lover fears that he has been castrated, that his place in life has been taken,
that true time is over for him. His only recourse is to search for lost time, in
the hopeless hope that the aesthetic recovery of illusion and of experience
alike, will deceive him in a higher mode than he fears to have been deceived
in already.
J U L I A K R I S T E VA
1.
From Proust and the Sense of Time, translated and with an introduction by Stephen Bann. © 1993
by Julia Kristeva. English translation © 1993 by Stephen Bann.
17
18 Julia Kristeva
dependence on the senses. It offers modern readers the chance to identify the
fragments of disparate time which are nowadays dragging them in every
direction, with a greater force and insistence than ever before.
So I would like to begin by putting a question to you, and to myself as
well. What is the time-scale that you belong to? What is the time that you
speak from? In the modern world, you might catch an impression of the
medieval Inquisition from a nationalist dictator who soon finished spreading
the message of integration. (I refer to the Gulf War.) Then you might be
rejuvenated by 150 or 200 years by a Victorian president whose stiff,
puritanical attitudes belong to the great age of the Protestant conquest of the
New World, tempered by an eighteenth-century regard for human rights.
But you are also an onlooker, even if you are not a participant, when people
demonstrate their regression to infancy through civil violence, as in the
recent events in Los Angeles; you witness the futurist breakthroughs of new
musical forms like rap, without for a moment forgetting the wise explanatory
discourses with which the newspapers and the universities try to explain this
sort of thing. Newspapers and universities, by the way, continuing their role
of transmitting and handing down knowledge, also belong to totally different
time-scales. Yes, we live in a dislocated chronology, and there is as yet no
concept that will make sense of this modern, dislocated experience of
temporality.
PSYCHIC T I M E A S A S PA C E O F R E C O N C I L I AT I O N
PLANTS A N D S E E D S : T H E V O C AT I O N
familiar sounds and lights will bring him to full consciousness.2 ‘Involuntary
memory’ is already there, causing the boiling lava of memories and desires
from the past to coagulate around a present sensation, however slight,
however intense.
So what has been happening between the commencement of Against
Sainte-Beuve and the emergence of this fully fledged project—between 1905
and 1909?
2.
At the end of Time Regained, after bringing up yet again the way in which the
narrator’s experience is structured by the alternation of love and death, with
death darkening love but love wiping out the fear of death, Proust quotes a
line from Victor Hugo: ‘The grass must grow and children have to die.’3 And
he describes the ‘cruel law of art’ which amounts in the first instance to the
romantic notion that suffering and death are necessary for the gestation of
works of art, but concludes with a light-hearted apologia for Manet,
considered as the Giorgione of a period of open-air painting:
To me it seems more correct to say that the cruel law of art is that
people die and we ourselves die after exhausting every form of
suffering, so that over our heads may grow the grass not of
oblivion but of eternal life, the vigorous and luxuriant growth of
a true work of art, and so that thither, gaily and without a thought
for those who are sleeping beneath them, future generations may
come to enjoy their déjeuner sur l’herbe. (III. 1095)
there was a mother there? In that event, the mother would have to die in
order for the child to break with his childhood, for him to turn it into a
memory, a time regained. Were he finally to regain all his time, set out in the
space of a book, then the book would indeed be a ‘déjeuner sur l’herbe’: it
would transform the graveyard of the dead children into a pleasure garden,
dedicated to the ambiguous, loving and vengeful memory of a mother who
always loved excessively and not enough—and made you into a child who is
still dying, perhaps, but who has a chance of ultimate resurrection and
maturity in the luxuriant grass of the book.
Mme Proust, née Jeanne-Clemence Weil, died on 26 September 1905,
following a short visit to Evian with her son Marcel, in the course of which,
while staying at the Hôtel Splendide, she suffered an attack of uraemia. The
sudden illness and death agony of the narrator’s grandmother in A la recherche
du temps perdu recall the remorse felt by Proust as a result of his feeble
behaviour at this juncture. Mme Proust first asked to be photographed,
hesitated, and later called it off: ‘She wanted and she didn’t want to be
photographed, wishing to leave me one last image, and yet afraid that it
would be too distressing ... ’4 A collector of photographs, Proust would later
put his family snapshots to blasphemous use, showing them around at the Le
Cuziat brothel.
On her return to the Rue de Courcelles, the dying woman could think
only of her elder son. How would he survive without her? She died while
Proust stayed alone in his room, unable to cope with the sight of his mother’s
death agony.
There is no event that can explain the genesis of a work, not even the
death of a woman like Mme Proust. The book had been maturing for ages,
yet it was mourning his mother that marked the start of a new time-scale and
a new way of life. ‘Since I lost my mother ... ’ Proust often refers to the event
in his correspondence, and he does not attempt to hide his wounds in his
letters to Montesquiou, Barrès and Maurice Duplay.5 The second volume of
Le Côté de Guermantes (The Guermantes Way; 1921) continually harps on the
illness, suffering and finally death agony of the narrator’s grandmother, as if
intending to lend to salon life, which the young man finds attractive and
empty by turns, an unreal and hallucinatory quality. Yet it is in Sodome et
Gomorrhe (Sodom and Gomorrah), published in 1921 and 1922, that the note
of black remorse, anticipated in the earlier works, finally strikes home. This
is the novel of sexual inversion, no less distinct from the childhood memories
of Swann’s Way than it is from the aesthetic theory of Time Regained. It is in
this work, which has been called the most Balzacian of the series, that Proust
makes the clearest allusion, in the form of allusions to the death of the
24 Julia Kristeva
A CRUCIAL EPISODE
The well-known scene of the kiss withheld at the little boy’s bedtime, already
told in Jean Santeuil and repeated in Swann’s Way, has given generations of
readers the image of a mother who is loved voraciously and selfishly. This
was a love which involved, right from the start, a struggle for power, a
26 Julia Kristeva
mingling of violence and passivity, of desire and contrition. For the moment
she yielded, the moment the kiss was granted, the narrator’s anticipated
triumph turned to bitter regret, and suffering began to colour his pleasure in
a foretaste of sado-masochism.6
As early as 1896, in Les Plaisirs et les jours, Proust had written the
‘Confession of a young girl’ whose ‘voluptuous and blameworthy’ eroticism,
though remaining heterosexual, is the cause of her mother’s death.7 Sex is
shown to be intrinsically sadistic, as cruel to the lovers themselves as it is to
their mothers. Proust writes: ‘Now I was beginning to realize in a confused
way that every act which is both voluptuous and blameworthy involves in
equal measure the ferocity of the body taking its pleasure, and the tears and
martyrdom of our good intentions and our guardian angels.’8 It is through
witnessing an erotic scene that the mother of the young girl who speaks these
words is struck with apoplexy and dies.
After the death of Proust’s own mother, we find him on 4 December
1905 at the clinic of Dr Sollier, a specialist in mental and nervous diseases,
with the firm intention of proving that medicine can do nothing in his
particular case. He succeeds, and leaves the establishment after six weeks.
Social and literary life, so it would appear, are better at turning the activity
of mourning into literature. Proust sets up house at 102 Boulevard
Haussmann, and the architect Louis Parent lines his bedroom walls with
cork in 1909: his cell is ready at just the same time as his plan for the work
which will necessitate breaking open this shell, and dominating himself by a
massive act of willpower which will be as delightful to experience as it is
relentless in its effect on others.
From 1905 to 1909, Proust publishes little. Yet one thing that takes our
attention is the article appearing in Le Figaro of 1 February 1907 under the
title ‘Filial Sentiments of a Parricide’. Proust’s notice had been drawn,
shortly after his mother’s death, to an incident in which a person of his
acquaintance, Henri Van Blarenberghe, had killed his mother and then
committed suicide. Proust interpreted this as the aggressiveness of an
Oedipus or an Orestes, known in cruel detail from the Greek texts. The
further commentary which he added from Shakespeare and Dostoevsky was
hardly less cruel. Obviously the murdering son is a criminal, but Proust the
writer seems to be on the point of absolving him when he exclaims: ‘what was
the religious atmosphere of moral beauty in which this explosion of madness
and slaughter took place?’ (CSB, 157). He seems tempted to include himself
in this crime: ‘What have you made of me?’ he asks. ‘What have you made
of me?’:
Proust and Time Embodied 27
If we put our minds to it, there would perhaps be not one truly
loving mother who was not able, on her last day, and often long
before, to address this reproach to her son. Basically, as we grow
old, we all kill those who love us by the preoccupation we cause
in them, by that very restless tenderness which we breathe in and
put ceaselessly on its guard. (CSB, 158–9)
In January 1908 Proust writes ‘Robert and the Kid. Mother leaves on a
journey’, a text which is now lost. The metamorphosis is under way: in 1909,
the plan for a book on Sainte-Beuve turns into a genuine novel. Writing
Against Sainte-Beuve, Proust the essayist explains that it is not through
biography that the work of authors can be explained; talent has its own
rationale, which society cannot comprehend. Here it is not just a matter of
doing away with biography but, more exactly, of going into mourning for it.
Proust takes up the project of Jean Santeuil again and transposes it. He
searches for lost time in the innermost signs of his experience, infusing the
singularity of his own grief into the universal pattern of an intelligence which
is accessible to all. He starts working hard; his reclusiveness increasingly
takes him over. In 1912 the first part of A la recherche reaches its completed
form. In 1913 Swann’s Way is published.
At this stage, Céleste Albaret enters Proust’s service and makes it
possible for him to live in perfect retirement in spite of his very demanding
social life: through this means, and both through and in spite of his asthma,
Proust is able to achieve the extraordinary ascetic life which will enable him
to trace, with a sick but authoritative hand, the word END at the conclusion
of Time Regained.
Straight away, the writer recognizes in his female servant the marks of
motherly love: that of a daughter for her mother, and that of a mother for
her daughter. ‘Your young wife is bored without her mother, Albaret, that’s
all,’ he says to his chauffeur, Céleste’s husband, before taking her into his
service.9 Céleste describes herself, in the year 1913, as ‘a child in spite of my
22 years [Proust was 32] above all because I had only just left my mother’s
tender care behind’.10 Master and servant will combine together in joint
homage to the maternal. ‘I was very fond of Papa. But Mama, the day she
died, took her little Marcel with her.’11 ‘The nice thing about him was that I
sometimes felt like his mother, and at others like his child.’12 ‘Everything
28 Julia Kristeva
affecting mothers and their experiences reminded him of his own and
affected him deeply.’13 ‘It was particularly about my mother that he used to
ask me questions. He would say to me: “It is easy to see that your father was
a good man. But even with the best of men, the bread of human kindness will
never be what it can be with a woman; there is always an outer shell of
roughness. A man can never be the soul of kindness, as your mother seems
to have been.”’ 14
This kindness was, however, in Céleste’s estimation, what Proust had
managed to realize in himself, making him behave in such a way that the
housekeeper, who was herself always taking infinite pains to seek out for him
sole, smelts, gudgeons and fumigating powder, felt herself to be under the
maternal care of her master. ‘Monsieur, I find my mother again in you.’ And,
as Proust explained to Céleste: ‘The thing is, you were made for devotion
like your mother, even if you knew nothing about it. Otherwise, you would
not be here.’15
Never can two beings more disparate in their background and level of
education have been thus brought together in their devotion to the ‘good
mother’, who would fill them both, alternately, with the sublimated love that
binds a child to its mother, and no doubt the writer to his work. The mother
who brings desire and guilt is dead; there remains complicity and the benefit
of mutual silence. Céleste becomes the living relay between the female body
and the book, between the turbulence of eroticism and the definitive form of
the signed text. With a charming naïveté, she admits to having taken the place
of a possible Albertine, an ideal Albertine, who, in her maternal devotion to
the most motherly of sons, allows him not to marry her but to absorb her
into a book:
Not only did I live at his rhythm, but you could say that, twenty-
four hours out of twenty-four, and seven days out of seven, I lived
exclusively for him. I have nothing to do with the person in his
books whom he called ‘The Captive’, and yet I really deserved the
title.16
Proust leans on her, and against her, he watches her but does not see
her, he speaks to her and his words rebound off her. This is not a dialogue,
she simply activates the monologue, by relaying and starting it up again; he
forgets her, he gathers her up, she vanishes, as, moreover, does he. There is
no longer any ‘self ’, just the I that speaks across her.
So Céleste and the cork lining of his apartment on the Boulevard
Haussmann, guarantee the air-tightness of the protected environment in
Proust and Time Embodied 29
S U B L I M AT I O N / P R O FA N AT I O N
So the mother is dead, I have killed her, my grief turns to remorse, I speak
of it before another, I speak to myself, I speak—and all is regained, eternity.
The way has been prepared for the profanation which becomes
possible after two or three years of mourning, in the course of which the
loved person has become blurred in the memory, with no lessening in the
mean time of the ambivalence of a guilt-ridden love.
As early as 1908, in Notebook 1, the hero dreams that his grandmother
is dead, but the actual episode, ‘Death of my grandmother’, is forecast only
in the plan of the 1912 version of the novel. The theme of inversion becomes
steadily more important from 1908 onwards; sketches for the character of
Charlus help to achieve the separation between essay and novel in the
writing of Against Sainte-Beuve, and at the same time this project takes
second place to the strictly narrative undertaking which is to be A la recherche.
Meanwhile, over the years 1908 to 1912, the Proustian idea of profaning the
mother takes root: Notebook 1 refers to ‘the mother’s face in a debauched
grandson’.18 Profanation is seen as a condition of sublimation. In Against
30 Julia Kristeva
Sainte-Beuve we read: ‘The face of a son who lives on, like a monstrance in
which a sublime mother, now dead, placed all her faith, is like the
profanation of a sacred memory.’ In Sodom and Gomorrah, finally, there is this
late addition to the text:
he saw himself and his daughter in the lowest depths, and his
manners had of late been tinged with that humility, that respect
for persons who ranked above him and to whom he now looked
up ... that tendency to search for some means of rising again to
their level, which is an almost mechanical result of any human
downfall. (1. 162)
A C C I D E N T, A G E I N G A N D WA R
look at the aspects of this concern in detail, we can certainly show how
Proust turns didactic, and outlines the way in which linear time can be
transformed into the timelessness of literature. We can follow in Time
Regained the successive stages through which he imposes his logic upon the
innumerable flashbacks, condensations, plots and digressions which made up
the earlier volumes of A la recherche.
As it restores my various, different, relationships with people and
things, my memory fastens upon particular ‘sites’ and ‘places’. But, incapable
of placing them in succession to one another, it sets up ‘revolutions’ around
me as it does around them. In order to take account of this assembly of
‘revolutions’, the book would have to use ‘not the two-dimensional psychology
which we normally use but a quite different sort of three-dimensional
psychology’ (III. 1087).
So through juxtaposing the ‘opposing facets’—as in the face of Mlle de
Saint-Loup, the ‘masterpiece’ which combines the features of a Swann and a
Guermantes, an Odette and a Gilberte—Proust discovers what will be (and
indeed already has been) the ‘spur’ of the book. This will impel the narrator
(it already has impelled him) to create a world as vast as a cathedral, or on a
more modest scale to arrange the pieces of material among themselves as if
making a dress (III. 1090).
The process of reasoning now reaches its fulfilment, and the formula of
A la recherche, its alchemical key, is waiting to be spoken. What the narrator
calls an ‘enhanced’ place in time—perceived by the senses, inaccessible no
doubt but, as the prepositional form ‘à la’ indicates, always beckoning to us,
remaining open and disposable as the self revolves around it—is the notion
of embodied time. The time in which all of our sensations are reflected upon,
as they tie the knot between subjectivity and the external world and recover
once again the sounds that lie beneath the masks of appearance:
And yet, after this avowal of cruelty, it is formal language that passes on
the message of the perversity at the root of all desire: the ‘monsters’ which
take up their places within us come to form a kind of polytopia—‘a place ...
prolonged past measure—for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the
years, they touch epochs that are immensely far apart, separated by the slow
accretion of many, many days—in the dimension of Time. The End.’ (III.
1107)
The End. Over and beyond the time of jealousy, the time for the
construction of the work now takes over, in so far as the book is itself the
direct replacement for the loved person—could we therefore refer to this
Proustian time (of cruelty, sensation and writing) as a temporality of
concern? Heidegger’s ‘temporality of concern’ incorporates several different
stages: the temporality of disclosedness, the temporality of understanding,
the temporality of state of mind and the temporality of falling.21 Yet desire,
34 Julia Kristeva
in its cruelty, goes beyond the temporality of concern, and opens up a place
in which signs can develop a spatial dimension by building up sensations.
The writer is no philosopher: memory regained bears the imprint of colour,
taste, touch and other forms of experience, whilst a distinctive type of writing
which transgresses all bounds in its richness of metaphor and its embedding
of clauses one within one another at the same time destroys and reconstructs
the world. In the Proustian text the non-temporal nature of the unconscious
(as Freud would have it) goes side by side with an overpowering awareness of
Being. The psychic absorbs the cosmic and, beyond it, Being itself is diluted
in style.
So imaginary experience is not unaware of the temporality of concern.
But it goes beyond it, in a search for joy. Closer in this sense to Spinoza than
to Heidegger, Proust’s fiction reveals fundamental features of the human
psyche. Personally, I enjoy this revelation; I hope that you do too.
NOTES
1. Marcel Proust, Correspondance, ed. Philip Kolb (Paris, Plon, 1970–83), vol. IX,
p. 163.
2. Cf. M. Bardèche, Marcel Proust romancier, Les Sept Couleurs (Paris, 1971), vol.
I, p 204.
3. Victor Hugo, Oeuvres complètes, Poésie II (Paris, Laffont, 1985), p. 412: ‘A
Villequier’.
4. Proust, Correspondance, Proust to Mme Catusse, vol. X, p. 215.
5. Ibid., vol. V, p. 238; vol VI, p. 28: letters to Maurice Duplay cited in Q. de
Diesbach, Marcel Proust (Paris, Perrin, 1991).
6. Cf. 1.41: ‘It struck me that my mother had just made a first concession which
must have been painful to her, that it was a first abdication on her part from the ideal
she had formed for me, and that for the first time she who was so brave had to confess
herself beaten. It struck me that if I had just won a victory it was over her, that I had
succeeded, as sickness or sorrow or age might have succeeded, in relaxing her will, in
undermining her judgment; and that this evening opened a new era, would remain a
black date in the calendar.’
7. Proust, Jean Santeuil précédé de Les Plaisirs et les jours (Paris, Gallimard,
Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1971), pp. 91–2.
8. Ibid., p. 95.
9. Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust (Paris, Laffont, 1973), p. 19.
10. Ibid., p. 32.
11. Ibid., p. 30.
12. Ibid., p. 117.
13. Ibid., p. 133.
14. Ibid., p. 139.
Proust and Time Embodied 35
From Proust and the Victorians: The Lamp of Memory. © 1994 by Robert Fraser.
37
38 Robert Fraser
approbation of others. The attraction she possesses for him is thus that of an
opposite and is of short duration, since at the heart of her lies a personality
at odds with the demonstrativeness that first drew him; something too
closely akin to himself—febrile, neurotic, enclosed:
Thus the only kind of suffering Andrée is capable of causing him is one
founded on a categorical mistake. His spiritual alter persona, she will herself
be drawn to her opposite, the very Albertine—shallow and self-serving—that
he must learn to love. In a later volume, La Prisonnière, she will accordingly
occasion the pangs of jealously, but not on her own behalf, for how could she
who beguiles the afternoon hours translating the novels of George Eliot
sustain a threat to one whose self-immersion, whose tastes in reading, so
closely resemble her own?
The ambit of those tastes, intense and self-enclosed, recalls a parallel
passage in Jean Santeuil:
Already when we were tiny there was always some particular book
which we took with us when going to the park, and which we
perused with that extra special love which no other love has ever
since been able to supplant. And even at that very moment we
were attached less exclusively to what the book said than we were
to the texture of the pages we were turning. Today in a
manuscript, in a journal supplement, we will be delighted to
discover a few additional pages of George Eliot or Emerson. But
when we were young the book itself was never distinct in our
minds from that which it was saying. (JS, II, 190)
The Lamp of Truth: Proust and George Eliot 39
The passage occurs in the Begmeil chapter, just after Jean is described
striding on to the sand dunes bearing a volume of Carlyle’s French Revolution,
Proust’s own holiday reading at the time. Unlike the Balbec sections of A la
recherche, this is a form of fictionalised autobiography, and the enthusiasms
adduced are very much the author’s own. It is not for nothing that in A la
recherche de Marcel Proust André Maurois cites George Eliot among the
passions of Proust’s childhood, long before English was one of his
accomplishments.1 If the adolescent of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs
shared the young Proust’s incapacities as well as his enthusiasms, he might
well have appreciated, if not Andrée’s love, at least her offices as translator.
II
In that capacity, however, she had been anticipated by fifty years. ‘We are
very anxious to get an accomplished translator for Adam Bede’ Eliot wrote to
Geneva in December 1859:
The suspicion of Gallic impurity was one that she constantly expressed
(‘half poisoned by the French theatre’ is how she once described herself to
her publisher John Blackwood), but her correspondent on this occasion,
François D’Albert-Durade, was French Swiss and exempt from the
contagion. Ten years earlier, stricken with grief after the death of her father,
she had arrived in Geneva in the company of Charles Bray and his wife Cara.
The stay was only partially successful in allaying her loss, and it was with
some foreboding that the Brays turned homeward, leaving her in Geneva for
the winter. But in October she wrote to them describing the family with
whom she had found lodgings:
Again,
I can well imagine that you find ‘the Mill’ more difficult to render
than ‘Adam’. But would it be inadmissible to represent in French,
at least to some degree, those ‘intermédiaires entre le style
commun et le style élégant’ to which you refer? It seems to me
that I have discerned such shades very strikingly rendered in
Balzac and occasionally in George Sand. Balzac, I think, dares to
be thoroughly colloquial in spite of French strait-lacing. Even in
English this daring is far from being general. The writers who
dare to be thoroughly familiar are Shakespeare, Fielding, Scott
(where he is expressing the popular life with which he is familiar)
and indeed every other writer of fiction of the first class. Even in
his loftiest tragedies—in Hamlet for example—Shakespeare is
intensely colloquial. One hears the accents of living men.4
III
Regarding England and the English from afar, Proust seems to have
regarded this worldly tolerance of Eliot’s clergymen as intrinsic to Anglo-
Saxon Protestantism: something rounded, fleshy, wholesome, integrity
combined with an avoidance of extremes. For whatever else of her he had
sacrificed, D’Albert had kept the life-accepting humour, to which Proust was
quick to respond, perceiving it as her essence. In an essay on literary fallacies,
‘Sainte-Beuve et Balzac’, he mocks fashionable readers who call themselves
‘intelligent’ while mistaking the very nature of the books that they read:
The blunder into which the putative ‘intelligent’ reader has fallen here
is one that Proust thought intrinsic to nineteenth-century culture, and a
vicious one at that. In his mind it was epitomised by Sainte-Beuve’s weekly
literary column Causerie de Lundi, which regularly contained observations on
the literary world in which an author’s public demeanour was wilfully, and
perversely, confused with the nature of his work. The ‘intelligent’ reader
here is one informed by this perspective, assuming from the Puritanical
reputation attached to the name of Eliot, for example, that her works must
consistently be morose. A literary Sainte-Beuviste is one who confounds an
author with his or her work, assuming that the experience of reading a work
of fiction is very much the same as a meeting with its author: that, just as we
come to expect a certain temperamental consistency in our friends and
acquaintances, and indeed most of those whom we meet on social occasions,
every time we open the cover of a book by a particular writer, the spiritual
sensations to be discovered will recognisable and very much the same.
For Proust, few authors illustrated the futility of this point of view
more poignantly than Eliot. Eliot’s work was no more ‘sombre’ than were her
clerics. Indeed, what Proust seems first to have responded to in it was a
44 Robert Fraser
IV
life? Adam’s rejoinder is that he is fitted to both time and place, but
beforehand the narrator makes another point: that human imperfection is
itself a comely thing, and seemly to be represented in fiction:
Like much of the early portions of Adam Bede, this was written in
Munich in 1858 where Eliot spent the mornings at her desk and the
afternoons in the art galleries viewing Rubens, whose ‘breathing men and
women’ she appreciates in a letter to Sara Hennell,10 but also the minor
Dutch masters—Gerard Dou, Teniers, van Ostade, Breughel, Metsu. These
are the ‘many Dutch paintings’ whose ‘precious quality of truthfulness’ she
praises in Adam Bede, full of homely subjects, domestic humility, plainness
and grossness of the flesh.
The taste for Dutch seventeenth-century painting is something she
shared with Proust, whose essay on Rembrandt emphasises his solidity, his
respect for the physical world, his discovery of beauty in ordinary
circumstances. This sublime ordinariness, this tactility in transcendence, he
found too in Chardin, the objects in whose rooms seemed to him to conspire
in mutual acts of affinity, rendering the mundane timeless.
They are also qualities he thought essential to Eliot. In 1954 a set of
manuscript notes on her work was published, left behind by Proust at his
death. They open: ‘What strikes me in Adam Bede is the painting—attentive,
minute, respectful and sympathetic—of the humblest, most industrious life.
To keep one’s kitchen clean is an essential duty, an almost religious duty and
one full of charm’ (CSB, 656). One remembers the kitchen grange at
Combray, full of gleaming objects, calmness and industrious peace, a poetry
of the domestic. One remembers too, in Jean Santeuil, the night-time range
over which the maid Ernestine presides, offered as something to be
appreciated ‘because it exists’:
46 Robert Fraser
But realism is a difficult term, and there is more than one version of it. If for
Proust the tender truth of Ruskin and of Eliot represented one kind of
realism, French literature offered others. All the signs are that for much of
The Lamp of Truth: Proust and George Eliot 47
For the apprentice Proust there were thus two alternative varieties of
literary realism, almost contemporary though products of different linguistic
cultures. Both were attractive, and both dependent as much on what they
rejected as what they proposed: in Eliot, an ethereality that lost contact with
the gritty essence of things; in Flaubert, a subjectivity that proposed the artist
as unique observer, the coil of motive and the maze of the soul. The single
largest difference between them lay in their articulation of ethical
judgement, which in Flaubert was held in reserve. There was even for Proust
a certain delicious barbarity in this reticence, as with meticulous excision the
author’s sensibility edited itself out. Falling short of the impersonal—as the
bee-mouth sipped, a certain pollen of subjectivity was left on the facts—the
result was none the less a discipline of truthfulness without comment, the
neutral imposition of the actual. The tender realism of Eliot, by contrast, like
that of Ruskin, was one that called attention to its own judgements. Arthur
Donnithorne and Godfrey Cass were not, could never be, seen with the
lidless impersonality with which Flaubert viewed Emma Bovary. For if truth
was an attribute of character as much as of judgement, turpitude in others
was the absence of that truth. And, though Eliot was insistent, along with
48 Robert Fraser
Ruskin, that the unworthy was matter for art as long as it existed in
harmonious equipoise with the worthy, the inclusion was dependent upon
the unworthy being viewed as such. How else then was the world to be
viewed except with judgement, a film that drifted before the eyes, an ethical
varnish on the fictive canvas? In Eliot the objectivity of the fact is
embarrassed less because the conditions of viewing are themselves
unstable—as in the later aesthetic of Monet and Elstir—than because a
certain moral partiality is a qualification of seeing as much as of judging.
These observations may help us to make sense of two different claims
of André Maurois: that the Proust of Jean Santeuil was still captive to the
influence of Flaubert with his passages of measured, external description, and
that ‘C’, the putative narrator of the book, derives another aspect of his
manner from a reading of the great nineteenth-century English novelists:
Dickens, Hardy and Eliot.11 One may go further: that which C, seems to
share with Eliot is a willingness to dilate upon the facts, a constant reaching
out from the particular case to the general maxim. In the preamble that the
two friends who have supposedly rescued the manuscript of the novel after
C’s death append at the beginning, they speak of this discursiveness as
something intrinsic to C’s bearing, both in his work and in his life, and a
noticeable element in the recitations from passages of the book which he
gives for their benefit. It was a tendency they say ‘in the manner of certain
English novelists which he had previously loved’ (JS, I, 53). C is diffident
enough concerning his abilities to consider such digressiveness a weakness,
though for the friends who publish his work posthumously, it is quite
evidently one of its charms. To some extent Jean Santeuil is offered as a novel
in the English manner, the manner I would suggest pre-eminently of Eliot.
Nor does the discursiveness Proust clearly considers intrinsic to this style
represent for the writers of its putative preface any faltering of narrative
focus; the great strength of C’s work, they say, is its ability to portray events
just as they happened: ‘the things that he wrote were rigorously true’. For the
young Proust, trying out his hand at this apprentice novel, we can only
assume that the digressiveness, the ethical candour, was an aspect of that
truth.
And yet, stylistically, the spirit of Flaubert is never far absent. Two
ghosts, one English and one French, seem to hover over the text: Jean
Santeuil is a work that is doubly begotten. At times, especially in the early
chapters, the two manners—Flaubertian and Eliotic—flourish side by side.
Many paragraphs, indeed, move from one to the other, as in the description
of Jean’s evening in the kitchen at Etreuilles, immediately before that
evocation of the cooking range:
The Lamp of Truth: Proust and George Eliot 49
VI
Eliot’s ‘yea’ and ‘nay’ here are from Carlyle and Sartor Resartus, but an
interest in law in the wider sense is deeply textured into her later work, where
it emerges as a constant reaching for analogy and example within which the
tergiversations of individual conduct may be enclosed. Proust’s manuscript
notes on Eliot recognise this preoccupation with spiritual law, of which he
seems to have thought her a supreme exponent. For Proust, she inhabited a
universe of patent moral meaning ruled over by a Protestant providence,
severe yet well disposed:
above the chain of our vices and mishaps, a sort of superior order
of a omnipotent providence which converts our evil
incomprehensibly into the implement of our wellbeing (cf. Silas
Marner). Adam loses Hetty, which was necessary if he was to find
Dinah. Silas loses the gold, which was necessary if he was to be
open to the love of the child (cf. Emerson, ‘Compensation’ and
‘Man proposes but God disposes’.) (CS-B, 656)
shadow of a false hope stemming from the Christianity she had abandoned.
Yet Proust is right in finding in her work a version of the law perhaps closer
to the spirit of Emerson: a series of equivalences stretching from one plane
to another, suggesting affinities within the physical and spiritual world.
Thus, though Silas Marner cannot be said to lose his gold in order that he
may find Eppie, it remains true that Eppie is rather a translation of his
avarice, itself a distortion of the need to love, on to a higher plane where she
may serve as his redemption. Nor does Adam Bede lose Hetty in order that
he may gain Dinah. This solution to the plot was suggested to Eliot by G. H.
Lewes after she had begun work on the novel13 and, though from that
moment she worked with this resolution constantly in view, the death of
Hetty and the unexpectedly blossoming love between Adam and Dinah are
in fact quite separate strands. Yet instincts that are starved in Adam by his
early attachment to Hetty are to some extent realised in Dinah, a
psychological gain that, however, stops short of the providential or judicial.
There are many instances of such compensation through elevation in A
la recherche. It is not true to say that Mme Vinteuil loses her father in order
that she may learn to love him; yet his death propels her into an excess of
sadistic hatred, temporarily expressed through her desecration of his
photograph but ultimately rarefied into the devotion that causes her to edit
his manuscripts and thus to bring the Vinteuil septet into being. The
narrator of Albertine disparue does not lose Albertine so that he should learn
to write; it remains true, however, that through losing her he learns of the
fragile nature of the human affections, refractions of an energy that for him
will find itself fulfilment only through the imagination. Compensation of this
subtler sort is frequent in A la recherche and deeply built into the structure of
the work.
The true spiritual laws are for Proust thus variants of the psychological.
This applies equally to the second of his manuscript observations on Eliot:
Bit by bit, under the impossibility of passing in her own eyes for
a liar, she finished by believing that what she was saying was the
plain unvarnished truth. She did not think herself a snob for
pursuing duchesses, nor flighty for sleeping with Monsieur de
Ribeaumont. The substantive conduct of her life continued to
carry the mark of these two vices. But when she thought about
them they took on the same colours as her conversation: lively
and engaging. She did not think of herself as doing wrong by
Monsieur Lawrence because she invariably spoke well of him,
and the loyal and heartfelt manner in which she referred to him
always took precedence in her soul when she thought about her
deeds. So she felt quite at ease with her feelings, her species of
fidelity, her way of carrying on. And the words which she so
frequently reiterated were like the tiny dose of morphine which
anaesthetizing her conscience, putting it at peace and spurring
her on to fresh indiscretions, the harsher aspects of which,
previously so glaring, she henceforth quite unnecessarily excused.
(JS, III, 58–9)
VI
In the way in which it gravitates from the particular to the general, in its
pitiless moralism, exposing the misuse of Catholic doctrine as mercilessly as
Eliot unstrips Bulstrode’s specious Evangelicalism, in its uncomfortable
evocation of a sort of inner writhing, the Marie episode is perhaps the most
Eliotic moment in Jean Santeuil. Indeed, at one point the narrator compares
the stupendous wasted effort of writing Jean Santeuil to the gigantic and
abortive effort of Mr Casaubon in Middlemarch to produce a comprehensive
‘Key to All Mythologies’, ‘a mosaic wrought from crushed ruins’. ‘Especially
in matters of work’, remarks the novel’s narrator ruefully, ‘we are all to some
extent like Mr Casaubon in Middlemarch who devoted the whole of his life to
labours the results of which were merely trivial or absurd.’14 Jean Santeuil
indeed marks the high point of Proust’s involvement with the work of
George Eliot, but there is an important sequel.
In January 1910 after heavy rains the Seine rose and burst its banks,
flooding the wide boulevards of the Right Bank. Perched in his second-floor
flat at 102, Boulevard Haussmann, Proust watched apprehensively as the
waters poured across la Place Saint Augustin, threatening to engulf him.
Nervously he wrote to Simone de Caillavet: ‘I will write to your mother
acknowledging her adorable letter when I feel a little better. By then I shall
doubtless have been drowned. In this connection have you read The Mill on
the Floss? If not, I implore you: read it’ (Cor, X, 42)
George Eliot’s tale of a brother and sister growing up in a rural paradise
ruined by mutual dissension and financial crisis would have appealed strongly
to Proust, who probably knew the novel since his boyhood days, but seems
to have re-read it, or at least to have it constantly in mind, in 1910 when he
was working on Du côté de chez Swann, whose Combray sequence evokes its
own land of lost content. In May of that year, writing to his diplomat friend
Robert de Billy about various English writers in whom he was interested, he
concluded
stout defence of Scott and equally savage attack on Eliot, and The Mill on the
Floss in particular:
Ruskin’s ire had been drawn by the scene in which Maggie Tulliver and
Stephen Guest ‘forget themselves on a boat’ which carries them further and
further from familiar loyalties’—Stephen from his fiancée Lucy Deane, and
Maggie from her senses: ‘The pride of a gentleman of the old school’, he
spluttered, ‘used to be in his power of saying what he meant, and being silent
when he ought ... but the automatic amours and involuntary proposals of
recent romance acknowledged little further law of morality than the instinct
of an insect, or the effervescence of a chemical mixture.’
In speaking of Maggie forgetting herself, Ruskin spoke truer than he
knew. There is in The Mill on the Floss a peculiar congruency between the
themes of memory and of identity since, supremely in Eliot’s work, memory
here assumes a moral dimension. Of much pertinence to Proust is the
sensation of an authorial presence revisiting its own past, which is composed,
as it were, out of a picture thrown on some inner retina. The pictorial
tactility of the opening, Eliot’s use of the present tense, embody this sense—
‘I remember those large dipping willows ... I remember the stone bridge.’
For Proust this passage was not simply admirable; it was also a model to be
followed. At one point in his notebook of 1908 he simply scrawls himself a
curt reminder: ‘First page of The Mill on the Floss’ (Carnet, 94). The page was
exemplary, I would suggest, for two reasons. First, Eliot’s writing here, with
its feeling of a disembodied memorial presence that is at once congruent with
the protagonist yet evidently distinct from her, is a fragmentary anticipation
of Proust’s own method. Secondly, the territory around the eponymous mill
is, like the Combray that Proust’s narrator evokes in Du côté de chez Swann, a
56 Robert Fraser
the very falsity of pretending realist art, which would not be half
so mendacious did we not adopt the custom in life of giving to
our feelings a turn of expression quite other that that of reality,
which nonetheless we eventually take for reality itself. I felt that
I should have no need to embrace the various literary theories
which at one time had distracted me—notably those which
criticism had evolved at the time of the Dreyfus Scandal and had
been taken up again during the war, which tended to ‘drive the
artist from his ivory tower’ and to avoid frivolous or sentimental
themes in favour of great industrial movements, or failing the
mass at least to deal no longer with literary idlers as in the past
(‘I must confess that the portrayal of these useless types makes
me yawn’, Bloch used to remark), but with committed
intellectuals or heros. Besides, even before discussing their
logical content, these theories seemed to me proof positive of
the mental inferiority of those who espoused them—like a well
brought-up child who hears some people at whose house he has
been sent to dine declare: ‘we are straightforward people. There
are no secrets in this house’, and feels that the this denotes a
moral quality inferior to good deeds which do not speak their
name. (NP, IV, 459–60)
turn it into something that transcends itself: the book which, through this
unlooked for access to the privileges of memory, he is enabled to compose.
But as in A la recherche the consciousness of the narrator swells to fill
the whole foreground of the canvas, something else very odd and seemingly
perverse occurs.
An interest in the laws governing behaviour is, to be sure, more marked
in A la recherche, where it is responsible for a highly distinctive structure of
interpolation and parenthesis, much of which moves, as in Jean Santeuil,
from the particular to the general, from the fictive to the normative. Again
there is, if anything, a more searching interest than earlier in the ‘successive
nature of surrenders of the will’. Yet at the very point when the whole field
of human conduct is opened up to the narrator for judgement, precisely here
does he stay his hand. Apart from the new narrative perspective, the largest
single innovation separating A la recherche from Jean Santeuil is its
subjugation of the ethical to the psychological, its preference for implicit
over explicit moral comment.
Few individuals in literature surrender their wills more absolutely to
the demands of temperament, for example, than does Monsieur de Charlus.
The effeminacy of his temperament is at first heavily masked by an assumed
virility; it is when in Sodome et Gomorrhe he joins the little band of the
Verdurin faithful that minute mannerisms betray his inversion, disclosed by
the ‘chemistry’ of his body or perhaps by heredity, some remote memory of
the mother. On his return to Paris at the beginning of Le Temps retrouvé, the
narrator intercepts a grotesquely camp invert waddling down the street: it is
M. de Charlus. And in a sorry episode several pages later, the narrator
observes the same M. de Charlus, every scrap of shame gone, being beaten
in chains by soldiers hired for the purpose in a brothel run and maintained
by the ex-tailor Jupien, and waxes Eliot-like on the depravity that causes a
man of sense to ‘chain himself to the rock of pure matter’. But this reflection,
religious in its gravity, is immediately overlaid by another:
inclination belongs: those who wear their morality on their sleeve and those
who do not. Finally, nothing in the work of Proust more effectively
discriminates between the nature of his genius and that of Eliot than his
authorial restraint in the closing moments of Le côté de Guermantes. For
nothing in Felix Holt the Radical, or in her work as a whole, shouts more
loudly of the callousness of the aristocratic code than that momentary
oversight of the Duc and Duchesse, their failure of the most basic kind of
empathy; yet on its import the author is silent. Thus even as, in his later
work, Proust assumes an Eliotic amplitude of observation, precisely here
does the austerity of his method prove him, in the delicacy of its moral
discretion, a pupil of Flaubert.
NOTES
J ohn Ruskin first visited the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican in April 1841 and
noted in his diary: ‘Our last day in Rome I devoted to Sistine Chapel, and
received real pleasure from it’.2 His pleasure on that occasion was due to his
appreciation of Michelangelo’s use of colour, but no mention is made of
Sandro Botticelli. That visit was almost a valediction to Rome: ‘there is
something about it which will make me dread to return’, he also wrote.3
Indeed, Ruskin was not to return to Rome, and the Sistine Chapel in
particular, until 1872, some 31 years later.
I. Z I P P O R A H IN CONTEXT
From Word & Image 15, no. 4 (October–December 1999). © 1999 by Taylor & Francis Limited.
63
64 Cynthia J. Gamble
IN EGYPT
1. The story begins in the right foreground of the fresco, where the
young, angry and impetuous Moses, brandishing a sword, is
murdering the Egyptian taskmaster, whose head has hit the
ground and whose face is convulsed with pain, agony and horror:
‘And it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, that
he went out unto his brethren, and looked on their burdens: and
he spied an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, one of his brethren.
And he looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there
was no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand’.
(Exodus 2:11–15).5
2. Contrary to the Biblical story, Botticelli depicts two witnesses
who are retreating from the murder. Walking away, to the right,
and contrary to the flow of movement of the painting, a woman
in a blue garment puts her arms protectively around a man: is he
the Hebrew youth who the Egyptian was smiting, or is this a
scene of two frightened spectators, such as a mother and son, or
a husband and wife?
A Ruskinian Enigma Approppriated by Marcel Proust 65
IN MIDIAN
Not recorded in the fresco are several important events in the life of
Moses, such as Jethro welcoming him to his home, Moses’ marriage to
Zipporah and the birth of a son named Gershom, meaning foreigner or exile
in Hebrew: ‘And Moses was content to dwell with the man: and he gave Moses
Zipporah his daughter. And she bare him a son, and he called his name
Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land’ (Exodus 2:21–2).
of Midian; and he led the flock to the backside of the desert, and
came to the mountain of God, even to Horeb’ (Exodus 3:1). He
is dressed in a short, yellow tunic, not a long robe, and is
removing his shoes,7 for he is on Holy Ground, in obedience to
the Lord’s command from the Burning Bush, which burned but
was not consumed. ‘Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from
off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground’
(Exodus 3:5).
7. In the top left-hand corner, Moses, now barefoot, is kneeling
before the Lord who appears above a burning bush. The Lord
told Moses that he was destined to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt
into the promised land of milk and honey. ‘And the angel of the
Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a
bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and
the bush was not consumed’ (Exodus 3:2).
8. In the bottom left-hand corner, Moses, now ‘fourscore years old’
(Exodus 7:7), leads the Exodus of the Jews carrying their various
belongings and the spoils of the Egyptians as they had been
instructed by God: ‘Every woman shall borrow of her neighbour,
and of her that sojourneth in her house, jewels of silver, and
jewels of gold, and raiment: and ye shall put them upon your
sons, and upon your daughters: and ye shall spoil the Egyptians’
(Exodus 3:22 and cf. 12:35–6). The Bible story details other
possessions they took: ‘flocks, and herds, even very much cattle’
(Exodus 12:38). Among this departing crowd, with its variety of
characters, Botticelli’s fresco depicts an older, rather matronly
Zipporah in a blue dress, accompanied by her two sons,
Gershom, holding a little dog, and, beside him, the younger son,
Eliezer, mentioned in Exodus 18:4.
Ruskin, the Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, records his progress on painting
Zipporah in his Diary of 1874, during a 7-month tour of the Continent, of
which 6 months were spent in Italy. He started work in 1874 and on 17 April
wrote: ‘A delightful day yesterday at Sistine ... ’, followed by ‘Still pleasanter
day of work on Botticelli’ on 18 April. His entries for May record his progress,
and single-mindedness, and to a lesser extent his method of work:
Ruskin seemed well satisfied with his fortnight’s work for he wrote to Charles
Eliot Norton on 19 June 1874: ‘I’ve done Botticelli’s Zipporah successfully’.10
Details of particular artistic problems Ruskin encountered during the
copying of Zipporah are, unfortunately, singularly lacking: but one special
68 Cynthia J. Gamble
difficulty seems to have been that of deciphering the hem of her dress,
already referred to in his diary of 9 May. Later in that same year Ruskin drew
particular attention to Zipporah’s dress and to what he considered as
Botticelli’s ‘ill done’ lettering around the border, a characteristic he had
observed in several of Botticelli’s pen drawings with so-called inscriptions,
beautifully drawn, but which could not be read: ‘In copying Botticelli’s
Zipporah this spring, I found the border of her robe wrought with characters
of the same kind, which a young painter, working with me, who already knows
the minor secrets of Italian art better that I [Ruskin is referring to Charles
Fairfax Murray], assures me are letters—and letters of a language hitherto
undeciphered’.11 Ruskin was a talented linguist who could read Greek, Latin,
Italian and French: his unwillingness to decipher the characters or even to
attempt to identify them is, therefore, all the more surprising. I have
examined closely Ruskin’s copy of Zipporah, and the lettering resembles
Etruscan to some extent, thus reinforcing the Etruscan tradition and presence
in Italian art. Since the Etruscan alphabet is based on Greek, Ruskin would
have had no difficulty in deciphering the lettering. His uncharacteristically
casual approach to the problem suggests that he did not wish to decipher the
message and preferred to maintain the aura of mystery and ambivalence
around Zipporah. He did not want to see the message on the border of her
robe which may have destroyed his reconstruction of Zipporah-Athena.
III. J O H N R U S K I N ’ S Z I P P O R A H -AT H E N A
the British Museum, London (figure 2).16 His explanatory note for the
catalogue is a particularly pertinent, focused exposé of the interconnectedness
of Zipporah and Athena.
The powerful masculinity of Athena, the Greek virgin Goddess of
Wisdom, War and Weaving, the protectress of eternal virginity and the
embodiment of chastity, is usually depicted in classical Greco-Roman art as
an imposing and physically strong, fearless woman, a warrior ready and
dressed to fight with her breastplate, helmet, carrying a shield and a spear as
Goddess of War (or a distaff as the Goddess of Weaving and the Domestic
Arts). This may appear at first sight to be in stark contrast with Zipporah’s
timid nature as witnessed at the well when Zipporah, together with her
sisters, was unable to cope with some troublesome shepherds. For Ruskin,
Botticelli’s Zipporah is a closer representation of Athena as Goddess of
Weaving and Domestic Arts.
Ruskin, in his Brighton catalogue entry of 1876, states clearly t
importance to him of Zipporah: ‘Botticelli, trained in the great Etruscan
Classic School, retains in his ideal of the future wife of Moses every essential
character of the Etrurian Pallas, regarding her as the Heavenly Wisdom
given by inspiration to the Lawgiver for his helpmate; yet changing the
attributes of the goddess into such as become a shepherd maiden’.17 He then
examines in considerable detail the dresses of Athena and of Zipporah and
shows that ‘every piece of the dress [of Athena] will be found to have its
corresponding piece in that of Zipporah’.18 About the chiton or linen robe
with the peplus or mantle, Ruskin writes:
There is first the sleeved chiton or linen robe, falling to the feet,
looped up a little by the shepherdess; then the peplus or covering
mantle, very nearly our shawl, but fitting closer; Athena’s, crocus
coloured, embroidered by herself with the battle against the
giants; Zipporah’s, also crocus coloured, almost dark golden,
embroidered with blue and purple, with mystic golden letters on
the blue ground; the fringes of the aegis are, however, transposed
to the peplus; and these being of warm crimson complete the
sacred chord of colour (blue, purple, and scarlet), Zipporah being
a priest’s daughter.19
dissimilar to those used for Zipporah: but other art historians have
understood Ursula to be ticking off on her fingers the conditions for her
marriage, while her father listens wearily.25 Ruskin had focused on
Zipporah’s housewifely qualities in letter 20, 5 July 1872, in Fors Clavigera,
when he remarked that ‘the girl who is to be the wife of Moses, when he first
sees her at the desert-well, has fruit in her left hand, but a distaff in her
right’.26 In a note to this letter, Ruskin modified this initial observation and
commented: ‘More accurately a rod cloven into three at the top, and so
holding the wool. The fruit is a branch of apples; she has golden sandals, and
a wreath of myrtle round her hair’.27 The evergreen myrtle was a symbol of
love and peace in the classical Greco-Roman period, and in the Renaissance
it represented conjugal love and fidelity: it was often part of a bridal
headpiece. The unreal bride that Ruskin was seeking and idealising was
always inaccessible, in a Carpaccio or a Botticelli painting.
IV. M A R C E L P R O U S T ’ S Z I P P O R A H -O D E T T E
apparent: ‘Odette’s pallid complexion, her too thin cheeks, her drawn
features, her tired eyes, all the things which ... he had ceased to notice since
the early days of their intimacy’.29 Other features of Odette’s that Swann had
repressed were ‘her cheeks ... sometimes mottled with little red spots’ that
‘distressed him as proving that the ideal is unattainable and happiness
mediocre’.30 Julia Kristeva maintains that Swann’s imagined love for Odette
starts the moment he dissociates her from her real body, with its many
defects, and replaces it with the virgin Zipporah: the ‘chair abîmée’ becomes
a ‘museum piece’ with which he has a sexual relationship.31
Swann begins to construct an artificial Odette when, on his second visit
to her apartment, he is ‘struck by her resemblance to the figure of Zipporah,
Jethro’s daughter, which is to be seen in one of the Sistine frescoes’.32 On
that occasion, Odette, ‘not very well’, receives him
After the face, Odette’s entire body is imbued with Botticelli’s Zipporah, as
perfection incarnate: ‘[Swann] stood gazing at her; traces of the old fresco
74 Cynthia J. Gamble
were apparent in her face and her body, and these he tried incessantly to
recapture thereafter, both when he was with Odette and when he was only
thinking of her in her absence; and, although his admiration for the
Florentine masterpiece was doubtless based upon his discovery that it had
been reproduced in her, the similarity enhanced her beauty also, and made
her more precious’.42 Odette is becoming more and more unreal, as she is
transformed from cocotte into a Botticelli maiden, in what Richard Bales
described as a ‘rush for substitutes’.43 The magic contained in the words
‘Florentine masterpiece’ enabled Swann ‘like a title, to introduce the image
of Odette into a world of dreams and fancies which, until then, she had
been debarred from entering, and where she assumed a new and nobler
form’.44
In the confines of Odette’s carriage, as it rumbles along a Paris street,
Swann’s first physical contact with this ‘tart [and] a kept woman’45 who feigns
coyness and virginity, is also conducted through the metaphor of Botticelli’s
paintings of women:
[Swann] ran his other hand upwards along Odette’s cheek; she
gazed at him fixedly, with that languishing and solemn air which
marks the women of the Florentine master in whose faces he had
found a resemblance with hers; swimming at the brink of the
eyelids, her brilliant eyes, wide and slender like theirs, seemed on
the verge of welling out like two great tears. She bent her neck,
as all their necks may be seen to bend, in the pagan scenes as well
as in the religious pictures.46
would look at him sulkily, and he would see once again a face
worthy to figure in Botticelli’s Life of Moses; he would place it
there, giving to Odette’s neck the necessary inclination; and when
he had finished her portrait in tempera, in the fifteenth century,
on the wall of the Sistine, the idea that she was none the less in
the room with him still, by the piano, at that very moment, ready
to be kissed and enjoyed, the idea of her material existence, would
sweep over him with so violent an intoxication that, with eyes
starting from his head and jaws tensed as though to devour her,
A Ruskinian Enigma Approppriated by Marcel Proust 75
he would fling himself upon this Botticelli maiden and kiss and
bite her cheeks.49
V. M I S S S A C R I PA N T —O D E T T E
EPILOGUE
Botticelli’s Zipporah was enigmatic for Ruskin and for Proust’s Swann.
Whereas Ruskin, the real-life art critic, provides an in-depth analysis and
interpretation through Athena, bringing out the tension of the dialectical
nature of the painting, its conjunction of two civilizations, religions, yet at
the same time expressing continuity, Swann is unable to delve deeply and to
interpret Zipporah as a Renaissance masterpiece; he uses this painting solely
to obtain ephemeral satisfaction in love. Swann’s is a fruitless act of idolatry
and one which will be severely reprimanded and condemned by Proust. It is
the adolescent narrator in Proust’s novel who experiences a moment of
revelation when, through his critical abilities, he identifies Miss Sacripant as
Odette de Crécy.
A Ruskinian Enigma Approppriated by Marcel Proust 79
NOTES
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid., p. 495.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., p. 508.
62. Ibid., p. 509.
63. Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust (Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1996), p. 496, n.2.
64. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, In Search of Lost Time, II, p. 509.
65. Quoted by Stambolian, Marcel Proust, p. 245. The text of the interview is
in Philip Kolb and Larkin B. Price (eds), Marcel Proust: Textes Retrouvés (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1968), p. 222.
JAN HOKENSON
Proust’s japonisme:
Contrastive Aesthetics
From Modern Language Studies 29, no. 1 (Spring 1999). © 1999 by Northeast Modern Language
Association.
83
84 Jan Hokenson
gave him the cut-paper pellets to immerse in water. “Proust was suffering
from asthma, and this ‘fluvatile and inoffensive spring, these miraculous and
hidden flowers’ touched him profoundly, amid the desolation of the season
he dared not see, with a memory of seasons buried in childhood. ‘Thanks to
you,’ he wrote, ‘my dark electric room has had its Far-Eastern spring’” (qtd
Painter II.15). He was so impressed with the bonsai that in 1907 he ordered
three more from Bing’s when struggling to write a review of Anna de
Noailles’s Les Éblouissements. In that review and later in his novel (III.130), he
alludes to the bonsai as emblems of the immensity that can be held within a
single line of poetry. Proust concisely and accurately identifies their chief
aesthetic property when he replies to Nordlinger, “the Japanese dwarf trees
at Bing’s are trees for the imagination” (qtd Painter I.3). In the review he
wrote:
Why does Proust even mention Hizen (the Kyushu region famous for
Japanese procelain), the provenance of the ceramic container? What matters
to him is the conjunction of nature and art. The small tree, shaped to
resemble the giant cypress, is set or based in the finest example of Japanese
porcelain artistry. As art the bonsai is greater than nature because free of time
(in “ses songes plus que centenaires”), set in art to invite the imagination to
recreate the centuries-old cypress in the mind. And even as nature the bonsai
is less than “real,” being an iconic representation of the other, greater reality
of the giant tree. The art of bonsai, particularly its dual essence as art-nature,
induces in Proust in 1907 a “rêverie” which he will continue to develop in his
contrastive aesthetics in the Recherche.10
Among the leading Impressionists who were fervent japonistes, Proust
singled out Whistler, Moreau, and especially Monet. In the 1890s, in
88 Jan Hokenson
Monet’s period of serial paintings, Proust was quite ill but he made an effort
to attend the Monet exhibit at the Durand-Ruel gallery, and as late as 1907,
during Monet’s period of water-lily paintings (and in the same year as the
visit to Vuillard’s studio), Proust still hoped to visit Monet and his garden at
Giverny.11 In the Recherche Proust uses Monet’s work as model for Elstir’s studies of
cathedrals and Normandy cliffs and for his own descriptions of water-lilies on the
Vivonne. One of Monet’s rare explanatory comments on his work, made to La Revue
Blanche’s art critic Roger Marx about the water-lily studies, indicates the aesthetic
perspective that Proust shared and developed in the novel: “If you insist on forcing me
into an affiliation with anyone else for the good of the cause, then compare me with
the old Japanese masters; their exquisite taste has always delighted me, and I like the
suggestive quality of their aesthetic, which evokes presence by a shadow and the whole
by a part .... The vague and indeterminate are expressive resources that have a raison
d’être and qualities of their own; through them, the sensation is prolonged, and they
form the symbol of continuity” (qtd Berger 312).
Like Monet’s, Proust’s japonisme proceeds not from specific artworks or
even art forms. It is rather an affiliation with an entire aesthetic, and it is
rendered as such in the novel, in cumulative allusions and reflexive import.
Proust embraces particularly the evocative power of suggestion, the
rendering of fugitive impressions, the crucial blanks or incompleteness—
indeterminacies opening imaginative possibilties (for narrator and reader),
and the sensory appeal in swift delicate strokes of line and color. Proust is
astute at mining the comparative possibilities of Japanese arts, the prints and
paintings in particular, and the subtlety and complexity of his allusions reflect
Marcel’s progress as the proto-artist. Marcel’s japoniste initiation into a new
aesthetic, probably mirroring Proust’s own experience, is not as overt as the
structured allusions to Saint-Simon, Racine, and the rest of Marcels’
pantheon of French writers. For it is less exclusively literary, thus less
intimately webbed with Marcel’s specifically literary ambitions, and is more
connected to other arts, as an inter-arts phenomenon, that is, an aesthetic.
Marcel is something of a pilgrim through his European heritage, beginning
with Giotto and the gothic cathedrals and proceding through the centuries
to Anatole France and the Impressionists. Proust positions the Recherche as
the acme of European arts and Marcel as the literary innovator. The Japanese
aesthetic appears intermittently, working like a counter-system to clarify the
limitations of Marcel’s inherited Occidental aesthetics.
goals as artwork in its own right, and occurs chiefly in Combray and Le Temps
retrouvé, in the origins and in the apotheosis of the text. Also, when the
characters comically repeat the worst abuses of the Japanese aesthetic, as in
the Verdurins’ mawkish jokes about “la salade japonaise,” the narrator mocks
mercilessly, as he always derides the mere social uses of art. Like a code
within a code, the comic targets are indexes of value, and form a counter-
discourse to the narrator’s own aesthetic judgment and practice.
At the level of story, the dozens of allusions to Japanese woodcut prints,
paintings, language, gardens, costumes, toys and games, can be sorted into
three types.
First, Proust satirizes the socialites’ frivolous abuses of japonisme,
chiefly in the boudoirs and the salons. Swann is appalled at Odette’s craze for
chrysanthemums but, on his first visit to her apartments, he ultimately lets
himself be inveigled by her Orientalisms, including her silk cushions and her
“grande lanterne japonaise suspendue à une cordelette de soie (mais qui,
pour ne pas priver les visiteurs des derniers conforts de la civilisation
occidentale, s’éclairait au gaz,” I.220). Swann particpates in this travesty of
the Japanese object, and its relation to light, as the narrator suggests by
casting into japoniste allusion his refrain that comfort and art are
incompatible. As lover, Marcel replicates Swann in dithering over the
beloved’s inane enactments of the worst abuses of the Japanese aesthetic
which, again, is invoked at the decisive origin of the affair. Marcel has
scruples but, always attracted to corrupt women and decadent men, “ce qui
me décida fut une dernière découverte philologique” (II.357). He is both
aghast and excited by her corrupt speech, including the worst gibberish from
Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème (“Oui, me répondit Albertine, elle a l’air
d’une petite mousmé”). To Marcel the proto-japoniste writer, the linguistic
hybrid mousmé is like ice in the mouth (“nul [mot] n’est plus horripilant”).
The whole scene burlesques Loti’s colonialist erotics, and Marcel is titillated
despite himself: “Mais devant ‘mousmé’ ces raisons tombèrent ... ” The affair
begins on a distinct note of japoniaiserie. Marcel is more self-aware than
Swann, and he does not participate in Orientalist fakery so much as
manipulate it, remaining, he thinks, superior to its degradations.
A similar set of satiric allusions proceeds from the Verdurins’ salon.
Aside from predictably garbled judgments on such japonistes as Whistler, the
most recurrent travesty concerns the running joke about “la salade
japonaise,” which begins as a silly in-joke, the characters’ coy way of letting
others know they have been to see Dumas fils’ play Francillon.12 But soon we
learn that the Verdurin salad contains western potatoes. It is another
aesthetic hash, on a par with the Japanese porcelains jostling among the
90 Jan Hokenson
Wisely, Marcel recognizes the link between the Japanese “couleurs si vives”
and his childhood, but then (“dédaigneux, ennuyé et frivole”) he dismisses
the thought. In the Japanese model, Marcel has just seen for himself that
cloud and lake lack a line of demarcation; this is the famous lesson of the
Elstir seascapes, that water and sky lack a line of demarcation like the two
interchangeable halves of literary metaphor, but Marcel cannot apprehend
the importance of what he is seeing nor of the Japanese association. He
discerns analogies in the seascapes with Monet and Whistler, even noting the
butterfly signature that Whistler developed to mime the Japanese hanka (or
seal). But it is only thirty pages later, after his visit to Elstir’s studio, that
Marcel can assimilate Japanese analogies to his own aesthetic development.
The structure of this visual perception in his hotel room continues to
structure Marcel’s nascent japonisme: vaguely associated with the purity of
childhood impressions and artistic beginnings (of Marcel, and primitively of
Art), it is reflected against books, on the “vitrines de la bibilothèque,” in
interreflections of literature and painting that he alone can make real, in
ultimately writing this book.
Elstir’s fictional career repeats those of Whistler and other
Impressionists, beginning in historical or mythological studies and moving
into an extended period of japonisme, then developing a mature style. Marcel
regrets that none of the paintings in Elstir’s studio reflect his Japanese
period, “celle où il avait subi l’influence du Japon,” which Marcel had read
about in an English art review and which he knows is represented in the
Guermantes’ collection (II.835). His momentary delight at the japoniste
sunset, when he was unable to isolate the metaphoric land-water relations
from his own reality, anticipated this aesthetic discovery in the studio. He
sees it clearly in Elstir’s painting of the Port of Carquethuit which
92 Jan Hokenson
Mais quand sur le chemin de retour ... il n’y avait plus qu’à
prendre une allée de chênes bordée d’un côté de prés appartenant
chacun à un petit clos et plantés à intervalles égaux de pommiers
qui y portaient, quand ils étaient éclairées par le soleil couchant,
le dessin japonais de leurs ombres, brusquement mon coeur se
mettait à battre, je savais qu’avant une demi-heure nous serions
rentrés et que ... on m’enverrait me coucher sitôt ma soupe prise,
de sorte que ma mère, retenue à table comme s’il y avait du
monde à dîner, ne monterait pas me dire bonsoir dans mon lit. La
zone de tristesse où je venais d’entrer était aussi distincte de la
zone où je m’élançais avec joie, il y avait un moment encore, que
dans certains ciels une bande rose est séparée comme par une
ligne d’une bande verte ou d’une bande noire. (II.182–3)
parce que, si loin qu’elle allât dans ces effets d’art raffiné, on sentait qu’elle
était naturelle ... ” The pain in this scene of resplendent springtime,
producing Marcel’s last moment of almost unalloyed joy in nature, procedes
from the knowledge that it will vanish and die because it is not art, even the
Japanese art that catches nature on the wing and in the instant, but nature.
These are the vanishing moments that Marcel must learn to record in
writing (as the narrator is doing in japoniste prose) to preserve them from
time. The allusions to the woodblock prints are increasingly associated with
artistic creation.
It is the narrator who points out in japoniste terms how badly Marcel
blunders with Gilberte on the Champs Elysées (he should have been content
to love her at a distance without worrying whether the image corresponds to
the reality, “imitant ces jardiniers japonais qui, pour obtenir une plus belle
fleur, en sacrifient plusieurs autres,” I.401). In Du Côté de chez Swann Marcel
is too young to envision love like a Japanese garden, which cultivates
representations of absence rather than entrammelling realities.15 But later in
Le Temps retrouvé, by the time he visits Gilberte de Saint Loup at Swann’s old
house (“un peu trop campagne”), it is Marcel who implicitly criticizes her for
not having japoniste wallpaper: “ces grandes décorations des chambres
d’aujourd’hui où sur un fond d’argent, tous les pommiers de Normandie sont
venus se profiler en style japonais” (III.697).
This particular allusion operates, like the wooblock sunset reflected on
the glass at Balbec, to introduce an aesthetic problem and its imminent
resolution. In this scene, Marcel is again musing in bed, on the eve of his
retreat from Paris into a sanitorium, and remembers seeing a sun-splashed
image of the Combray church spire reflected that morning on the bedroom
windowpane. Like the absent japoniste wallpaper that he only imagines, the
Church spire was only an image, yet more real in its suggestiveness than the
actual church, than the florid realistic European wallpaper on the walls:
“Non pas une figuration de ce clocher, ce clocher lui-même, qui, mettant
ainsi sous mes yeux la distance des lieues et des années, était venu ... s’inscrire
dans le carré de ma fenêtre” (III.697–8). He now “sees” imagined and
remembered images as superior ones, and the language for the Japanese
wallpaper and the crucially telescopic Combray spire are interchangeable
(“sont venus se profiler,” “était venu ... s’inscrire”). Marcel is still unaware of
the importance of this perception for his later aesthetic of metaphor as time-
space telescope. Instead of pursuing the thought, he turns to read the Journal
of the Goncourts, and finds it so banal that he abandons his literary ambition.
With Proust’s extraordinary skill at literary mimicry, he could have
used several contemporary writers for the final pastiche. It is no accident
Proust’s japonisme: Contrastive Aesthetics 95
une prairie paradisiaque, non pas verte mais d’un blanc si éclatant
à cause du clair de lune qui rayonnait sur la neige de jade, qu’on
aurait dit que cette prairie était tissue seulement avec des pétales
de poiriers en fleurs. (III.736)
wartime prologue. In her fine analysis of oral elements in the teacake, for
instance, Julia Kristeva notes the Japanese metonymy but like most readers
overlooks its artistic import, and instead infers a geographical function aimed
at establishing a maximum distance between the birthplace and a foreign
country (Kristeva 48–9). Several such puzzling references fall into place once
Japan is recognized as the provenance of a new aesthetic—not only to the
Impressionists but also to Marcel. Such Japanese allusions work together to
build a counter-system to the impasse Marcel has reached in his heritage as
a modern Western writer.
The artist-figures, for instance, rise or fall in japoniste terms. Because
Marcel must become the only great writer, the literary equivalent of Elstir in
painting and Vinteuil in music, Marcel twice repeats that the painter spent
years studying Japanese art (the second time occurs apropos of the
Guermantes collection, when Marcel reiterates that Elstir “avait été
longtemps impressionné par l’art japonais,” II.125). But the novelist Bergotte
is not allowed a japoniste period, being instead insistently associated with
mere “chinoiserie.” Norpois refers to his “chinoiseries de forme,” and even
the “petit pan de mur jaune” in the Vermeer painting, which exposes to him
his own limitations as a writer, is likened to a specimen of Chinese art,
revealing to Bergotte the pointlessness and aridity of all art, including his
own. It is again Norpois who dismisses such “symboliste” writing (in terms
once used by Proust) as hothouse products of Mallarmé’s chapel.17 Bergotte
and the previous generation are relegated to an arid Orientalism, quite
notably not japoniste. Ultimately, it is the literary figures who matter most to
Marcel’s success. Proust positions him to succeed where others fail,
dismissing Bergotte’s Orientalism as superficial and mocking the
“horripilant” japonisme of his most celebrated predecessors in this vein, Loti
and the Goncourts. Unlike them, but like Elstir, Marcel enjoys a true
japoniste apprenticeship. He learns the “way of seeing” present in Japanese
arts, and integrates it into his own novelistic vision and historical reflections.
The global aesthetic summa that is the Recherche becomes, in turn, his legacy
as a writer.
Proust’s contrastive use of Japanese arts to articulate Marcel’s aesthetic
originality helps explain, I think, why some readers find the Recherche
“Buddhistic.” Paul Claudel, French ambassador to Japan (1921–27) and a
literary japoniste himself, was the first to note that Marcel’s posture toward
nature recalls religious properties of the Japanese aesthetic. In 1912, in the
course of explaining the concept of mono no aware in Japanese painting and
poetry, Claudel wrote:
Proust’s japonisme: Contrastive Aesthetics 99
NOTES
1. Philippe Burty coined the word in his article “Japonisme” (La Renaissance
artistique et littéraire [May 1872] 25–6) to designate “a new field of study” in Japanese
art and aesthetics (see Weisberg xi). Although popular usage today scarcely
differentiates between terms, art historians make the useful distinction that japonisant
designates someone who collects or studies Japanese arts without creatively
reworking them, and japoniste denotes someone who applies Japanese principles and
models in Western creative works. Thus the gallery-owner Durand-Ruel was a
japonisant but Monet was a japoniste. Champfleury coined the noun japoniaiserie in
1872 as a pejorative term for what he considered mindless popular enthusiasm for
Japanese arts and curios, but the only surviving pejorative is japonaiserie; thus
Toulouse-Lautrec “did not lapse into mere japonaiserie.” See Berger 210.
2. See Edmond de Goncourt, Journal for 9 April 1884; Berger 1–2.
3. The only extensive survey of such Japanese allusions by French writers is
William Leonard Schwartz’s The Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in French
Literature: 1800–1925 (Paris: Champion, 1927) which is primarily a catalogue of
100 Jan Hokenson
similes and includes mention of Huysmans and the Goncourts’ Les Frères Zemganno.
In 1981 Elwood Hartman amplified Schluartz’s Japanese section in his article
“Japonisme and Nineteenth-Century French Literature” (Comparative Literature
Studies 18.2 [June 1981]: 141–66). Earl Miner surveyed British writers’ usage in The
Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1958).
More recently, Michel Butor sketched a few French writers’ ideas of Japan in Le Japon
depuis la France (Paris: Hachette, 1995). After the present article was completed, Yann
le Pichon published a short meditation “L’Influence du japonisme dans l’oeuvre de
Proust” (Revue des Deux Mondes [October 1996]: 125–39), outlining a notion of
Proust’s inspiration by Zen; see note 19 below.
4. In 1997, while this article was in press, Luc Fraisse published his
monograph Proust et le japonisme (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg,
1997) showing in fine detail the japonisant milieu of Paris in the Belle Epoque
(Fortuny gowns, Gallé glass) as social background to the novel; Fraisse does not
pursue Proust’s use of the Japanese aesthetic as a whole, primarily because of what he
considers Proust’s habitual mixture of Orients—Japanese, Persian, Chinese—and
consequent absence of an “emploi exclusif du motif japonais” (37).
5. For instance, it was at Hélène Bibesco’s salon that he met Pierre Loti (whom
young Proust had proclaimed his favorite novelist—along with Anatole France,
another japonisant—and who was the author of the wildly popular Madame
Chrystanthème) and that he regularly talked with the japoniste painters Bonnard and
Vuillard (Painter I.54, 57, 195). So reverent was his admiration for the great japoniste
Whistler, one of the originals for Elstir, that Proust surreptitiously kept a pair of
gloves the painter had left behind after their meeting at Méry Laurent’s villa. She and
her famed lovers, Degas then Mallarmé, had become “converted,” says Painter, “to
Japanese art,” and Proust was not the only one who went to the villa to meet the
leading practitioners of japonisme (Painter I.218, Tadié 308).
6. For example, during the period when Proust was a member of the rédaction
of Le Mensuel (November 1890 to September 1891) the review published, among
other japonisant pieces, an article in July of 1891 by Proust’s friend Raymond Koechlin
about Edmond de Goncourt’s new book Outamaro (Tadié 144 n.4). It was Félix
Fénéon, long-time editor of La Revue Blanche, who coined the phrase “Bonnard
japonard,” and who directed many of the japonisant interests of the review; see Joan
Ungersma Halperin, Félix Fénéon, Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, New
Haven: Yale UP, 1988: 232–4.
7. Robert de Montesquiou, for example, had been a noted collector of
Japanese art since first encountering it at the Exposition of 1878, schooling his taste
with the advice of Heredia, the Goncourts, and Sarah Bernhardt, as he recounts in his
memoirs Les Pas effacés. Montesquiou created a notoriously effete “oriental” sanctum
in his apartments on the Quai d’Orsay, possessed a wealth of fine Japanese artworks
plus five major books of Japanese art history by the 1920’s, and employed the
gardener Hata to build a Japanese garden at his later residence in the Rue Franklin,
which Proust often visited, and then another at Versailles. (See Montesquiou 118,
123, 181–4, 216–24; Schwartz 92–3). Montesquiou is remembered less for such
japonisant poems as “Thérapeutique” than for other writings and his role as literary
model to Huysmans and Proust.
8. Samuel Bing was the leading importer of Japanese art from about 1874 to
Proust’s japonisme: Contrastive Aesthetics 101
1914, as well as owner of one of the finest, and most often exhibited, private
collections of classical and modern Japanese art in Paris; it was he who founded the
influential review Le Japon artistique (1888–91). Proust apparently bought Japanese
artworks from Bing’s as gifts, including “une garde de sabre pour [Robert de] Billy”
(Tadié 424). See Gabriel Weisberg. Art Nouveau Bing: Paris Style 1900, Catalogue for
the travelling Smithsonian Exhibition, New York: Abrams, 1986.
9. Proust’s review “Les Éblouissements par la comtesse de Noailles” was first
published in Le Figaro (15 June 1907), and reprinted in Nouveaux Mélanges in 1954;
the text quoted here is from Proust, Essais et articles, ed. Pierre Clarac and Yves
Sandre, Paris: Gallimard, 1994, pp.229–41:237. Proust notes that one poem so well
renders sensation, “fugace” but prolonged in the text, that it seems to him “une des
plus étonnantes réussites, le chef-d’oeuvre peut-être, de l’impressionnisme littéraire”
(my emphasis, 239).
10. Without referring to the bonsai metaphor, Jean-Yves Tadié suggests that
this review of Eblouissments “contient une esthétique,” based on metaphor used as
“impressionnisme littéraire,” quoting the review: “c’est la métaphore qui ‘recompose
et nous rend le mensonge de notre première impression,’ la comparaison qui
‘substitue à la constation de ce qui est, la résurrection de ce que nous avons senti (la
seule réalité intéressante)’” (Tadié 581–2).
11. At Giverny Proust would have seen the Japanese bridge over the water-
lilies, not to mention the hundreds of Japanese prints that still hang in the painter’s
house. There is no record of whether Proust ever carried out this intention; see
Painter I.207, II.94; Tadié 598. Monet began the water-lily studies around the turn of
the century, exhibited some of them periodically in Paris then many of them in Paris
in 1909, and completed them in 1922. On Proust’s relations to the painters, see the
still useful study by Maurice Chernowitz, Proust and Painting (NY: International
University Press, 1945), and Marine Blanche’s Poetique des tableaux chez Proust et chez
Matisse (Birmingham, AL: Summa, 1996).
12. In this play from 1887, at a dinner party one character asks why the salad
is called “la salade japonaise,” and receives the comic reply, “Pour ce qu’elle ait un
nom; tout est japonais, maintenant” (Act I, Scene 2)
13. This mise en abîme, of the Verdurins’ Japanese salad within a pastiche of a
famous japoniste describing the Verdurin’s Japanese salad, is a common structure in
Proust’s passages on artworks. See Peter Collier, “La mise en abyme chez Proust,” in
Philippe Delaveau, ed., Ecrire la peinture (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1991)
125–40.
14. The Japanese motif of the bird flying from shadow into light or vice versa
was used by several French painters and by such writers as the Goncourts in Manette
Salomon and Paul Claudel in L’Oiseau noir dans le soleil levant. Other common motifs
include the eddying waters, the cresting wave, the silhouetted blossoms, the bridge,
the snow-dusted branch, the alighting bird, the slanting rain; on such motifs, see
Wichmann 74–153.
15. The narrator replicates this japoniste lesson in La Prisonnière, with love
letters and a kimono. After Marcel watches Albertine sleeping, he stares at her
kimono draped over a chair; the interior pocket contains her letters, and Marcel is
alternately desperate to read them and fearful of discovering proof of her infidelities,
“Mais (et peut-être j’ai eu tort) jamais je n’ai touché au kimono .... ce kimono qui
102 Jan Hokenson
peut-être m’eût dit bien des choses” (III.73–4). The contrasting Japanese
associations, around the two women and two sets of letters, measure the distance
from childish hopes to cynicism.
16. Jules and Edmond de Goncourt were prominent collectors of Japanese art
and defenders (inventors, they once claimed) of japonisme, as described in their
autobiographical La Maison d’un artiste; following Jules’s death, Edmond de Goncourt
published Outamaro, le peintre des maisons vertes (1891) and Hokousaï (1896). See
Hubert Juin, “Préface” to Edmond de Goncourt, Outamaro, Hokusaï (Paris: Union
Générale d’Editions, 1986) 5–16. Although they were early pioneers in the japonisant
movement along with Félix Braquemond and Philippe Burty, they disliked modern
japoniste painting and were soon sidelined as interpreters of the Japanese aesthetic by
Louis Gonse, Samuel Bing, Henri Focillon and others less committed to the
Goncourt’s focus on the miniature and the exotic. See Berger, Wichmann; also
Deborah Johnson, “Reconsidering Japonisme: The Goncourts’ Contribution,” Mosaic
24.2 (Spring 1991): 59–71.
17. In “Contre l’obscurité,” originally published in La Revue Blanche (15 July
1896), Proust inveighs against the willed obscurities of the Symbolists; rpt in Proust,
Essais et articles 86–91.
18. Paul Claudel, Oeuvres en Prose, eds. Jacques Petit and Charles Galpérine,
coll. Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1965): 524.
19. Letter of Marguerite Yourcenar to Jean Mouton (7 April 1968), Yourcenar
Archive, Harvard University; qtd. in Elyane Dezon-Jones, “De l’universalité des
influences: un écrivain peut en cacher un autre,” in Maria Jose Vazquez de Parga, ed.,
L’Universalité dans l’oeuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar. 2 vols. Tours: Société
Internationale des Etudes Yourcenariennes, 1994 and 1995; II [1995]. 23–33: 32
20. Yann Le Pichon’s brief essay on “L’Influence du japonisme dans l’oeuvre
de Proust” (Revue des Deux Mondes [October 1996]: 125–39), appearing after the
NEMLA session on Proust and the completion of this article, cites some additional
letters referring to Japanese art, some references in Jean Santeuil, mentions Odette’s
furnishings, but focuses on the japonisme of the Impressionists as Proust’s models and
on the Zen-like “émotions esthétiques” of Marcel in nature. Le Pichon perhaps
overstates the case for Zen in Proust, but clearly the Japanese concept of the artist as
translator of affect into signs of the natural world merits consideration in studies of
Proust’s aesthetic ideas. As Le Pichon says, Proust’s japonisme is a “sujet quasi inédit
et pourtant évident” (125).
21. For a discussion of Japanese “affective-expressive” poetics, versus Western
mimetic traditions, see Earl Miner, Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on
Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990)
WORKS CITED
From Raritan 19, no. 2 (Fall 1999). © 1999 by Raritan: A Quarterly Review.
105
106 Susan Stewart
periods, the hum of its repetitions signifies nothing at all. In his essay on
Time, an unfinished and posthumously published work, Norbert Elias writes
that the notion that time “takes on the character of a universal dimension is
nothing other than a symbolic expression of the experience that everything
which exists is part of an incessant sequence of events. Time is an expression
of the fact that people try to define positions, the duration of intervals, the
speed of changes and such like in this flow for the purpose of orientation.”
The sun, moon, stars, and irregular movements of nature as sources of
measure are replaced by a mesh of human inventions which then in turn
appear as mysterious components of their own nature. This drift toward the
eternalization of time, the imagination of a permanent form for time, Elias
writes, is no doubt necessary in light of our fear of transience and death.
Elias’s ideas are useful for considering the functions of voluntary
memory. In discussing the conformity of the subject to social conventions of
time, he further links our voluntary compliance with time control to our
voluntary compliance with violence control; as social beings, we are willing
to surrender our subjective experience of time and our capacity for physical
extension. Voluntary memory creates generations, reinforces bonds,
produces retrospective conformity, and molds social forms of ego ideals.
Voluntary memory here is the foundation of social forms of nostalgia as well.
As willed emotions, social nostalgias subjugate the senses and emotions to
certain techniques of memory that are readily adapted into conventions of
aesthetic forms.
Although we may think of nostalgia as an emotion structured by prior,
historical circumstances, we find, in fact, that the forms of nostalgia are quite
codified. Further, the conventions of nostalgia often transcend the historical
specificity that is nostalgia’s claim to particularity. Prominent among these
conventions is the creation of a bounded context. This binding of
circumstance and environment is readily yoked to ideologies of patriotism
and nationalism that are the social forms of homesickness. The patriot’s
claim regarding an unambiguous relation to a point of origin is a claim
regarding the social authenticity of the self. Experience, in fact, is denigrated
in such an ideology, for it is the steady identification of self and place that
creates the authenticity of the patriot’s being. Colonialism rather than travel,
village typicality rather than cosmopolitan flux—these nostalgic forms posit
a mastery over context that finds its means in the politics of fascism and
imperialism. Here nostalgia takes on its function of contributing to the
distinctness of generations and social groups; in its demotion of individual
experience, it produces retrospective conformity to a certain form of ego
ideal.
110 Susan Stewart
reach, the Mistress would cling to her shoulder, dig her nails into
it, and hide her face against it for a few moments like a child
playing hide and seek. Concealed by this protecting screen, she
was understood to be laughing until she cried, but could as well
have been thinking of nothing at all as the people who, while
saying a longish prayer, take the wise precaution of burying their
faces in their hands. Mme. Verdurin imitated them when she
listened to Beethoven quartets, in order at the same time to show
that she regarded them as a prayer and not to let it be seen that
she was asleep.
The great social success of Mme. Verdurin, who ascends in the end to the
rank of the Guermantes, stems from her capacity to manipulate the bounds
of context and her mastery of the social system of signs. As Gilles Deleuze
noted in his Proust and Signs, the simulation of laughter was her particular
speciality. The narrator, a figure “from whom all things are hidden,” intuits
this register of simulation, and is at the same time tormented, even made
paranoid, by sexual jealousy. This jealousy is bound to an inevitable
illegibility of language and gesture, an illegibility built into the very
arbitrariness of the relation between sign and meaning.
Descartes was forced to admit in the Meditations that only memory can
separate the states of waking and sleeping. In distinguishing between states
of waking and sleeping, memory provides the continuity of the thinking
subject. Proust’s critique of voluntary memory further erodes the certainty of
immediate apprehension, collapsing the Cartesian model by showing the
false bottoms of resemblance and the distorting lenses of what Proust calls
“habit.” Consider, for example, two famous scenes in the novel of the
Cartesian sorting between waking and sleeping: the initial waking at the
beginning of Swann’s Way and the waking to the grandmother’s death. In the
work’s well-known opening, the narrator describes the false start of waking
in the night:
[M]y eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself:
“I’m falling asleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was
time to look for sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put
away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to
blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep,
about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken
a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was that
immediate subject of my book.
112 Susan Stewart
As he finds, in waking, that the subject of his book separates itself from him,
and his sight is restored to a state of darkness, he thinks of the error of the
sleeper who mistakes a gas lamp at midnight for the dawn. The force that
keeps him awake is the desire to be united with the mother; the approach of
sleep, like the approach of death, marks the end of desire. In this scene the
narrator awakens to the mother’s absence, an awakening to which the proper
response is a return to sleep.
The second awakening occurs some time later, during the
grandmother’s final agony. The narrator is here in fact awakened by the
appearance of his mother. When she asks his forgiveness for disturbing his
sleep, he answers that he was not asleep. He explains,
At the moment of her death, the grandmother opens her eyes. And then the
narrator finds that from that day forward his mother sleep-walks through
life, carrying the books and accoutrements of her mother as if the
grandmother’s spirit literally went on to inhabit the body of her daughter.
In these scenes, Proust explores the abeyance between life and death
characterizing the state of waking; until the dawning of memory, there is no
continuity in consciousness—the very continuity that enables one truly to
recognize experience. The everyday mind, conscious only within the
patterns of habit, is hardly distinguishable here from the sleeping mind.
Marcel’s mother literally incorporates her grief, subsuming her experience to
the carrying forward of her own mother’s presence through the totems of her
purse and, in a doubling of communication between dead and living
generations, her volumes of Mme. de Sévigné’s letters to her own daughter.
Marcel comments: “death is not in vain ... the dead continue to act upon us.
They act upon us even more than the living because, true reality being
discoverable only by the mind, being the object of a mental process, we
acquire a true knowledge only of things that we are obliged to recreate by
thought, things that are hidden from us in everyday life ....in this cult of grief
for our dead, we pay an idolatrous worship to the things that they loved.”
Proust’s Turn from Nostalgia 113
frame. When Albertine is later separated and made a captive, the narrator’s
jealousy enacts a futile project of reification and possession. Albertine’s
physical presence nevertheless retains the amorphous movement of the sea
that is her proper context. The narrator’s dream of fixed form and possession
is ironically fulfilled in her ensuing death and the atrophy of his interest.
Here we find Proust taking up the theme of death as a modeler or carver. At
the time of her death, the grandmother’s face is “almost finished” and, at the
same time, “On that funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the Middle Ages,
had laid her down in the form of a young girl.” In his classic essay on The Life
of Forms in Art, written in the 1930s, Henri Focillon similarly described
sculptural carving as “starting from the surface and seeking for the form
within the block.” The touches of the sculptor become progressively closer
and joined in an intimate interlocking of relationships. Yet in Proust, as a face
comes into full relief, it is also on the threshold of oblivion and subject to the
distortions of memory.
The narrator explains that it is “only after one has recognized, not
without some tentative stumblings, the optical errors of one’s first impression
that one can arrive at an exact knowledge of another person, supposing such
knowledge to be ever possible. But it is not; for while our original impression
of him undergoes correction, the person himself, not being an inanimate
object, changes for his part too: we think that we have caught him, he shifts,
and, when we imagine that at last we are seeing him clearly, it is only the old
impressions which we had already formed of him that we have succeeded in
clarifying, when they no longer represent him.” He goes on to say that this
continual task of “catching-up” with reality, linked to the proleptic
expectation brought to all exchanges with others, is what protects us from
the dreariness of an overly presumptuous habit. Years later, when the
narrator sees a photograph of the girls, their faces blurred by similarities and
by the viewer’s temporal distance, they are distinguishable only by their
costumes. The costumes themselves are metonymic to social categories and
even elements of design that transcend the temporality of any given subject.
Albertine wears a Fortuny cape that can be found in one of Carpaccio’s
Venetian genre scenes; an Assyrian relief is the prototype of the frock coat.
All that emerges in high relief, in particular detail, is bound to be abraded
back into surface and barely intelligible fragments of signs.
Proust’s use of the concept of the frieze coincides in suggestive ways
with the use of the concept in the turn-of-the-century aesthetic theories of
Alois Riegl, especially his 1893 Stilfragen and 1901 Spatromische
Kunstindustrie. As Michael Podro has explained in his useful review of Riegl’s
work in The Critical Historians of Art, Riegl suggests that in antiquity, and
118 Susan Stewart
L egend has it that when Orpheus sang and played his lyre, not only fellow
mortals but also trees and rocks, even wild beasts, were stirred by the sublime
sounds he produced. After the premature death of his young wife Eurydice,
the grieving hero descended to the netherworld in the hope of rescuing her.
He sang so beautifully that Hell was moved; even the Furies were
spellbound, shedding tears for the first time. Orpheus was allowed to take
Eurydice away with him on one condition, that both of them refrain from
looking back until they had reached the land of the living. Walking in silence,
they had almost reached the upper world when Orpheus wanted to ensure
that his beloved was still behind him. He turned around; his gaze met hers.
“See, again the cruel Fates call me back,” Eurydice cried, “and sleep seals my
swimming eyes. And now farewell!” She vanished from sight, absorbed for
the second time by the regions of the dead. For months on end, Orpheus
roamed the world voicing his grief, but in vain. His fate was sealed when the
women of Thrace tore his body to pieces and threw the limbs into a river. In
Virgil’s rendering of the myth, Orpheus’ head floated down the current, his
“disembodied voice” calling “with departing breath on Eurydice—ah, poor
Eurydice!” Whereupon the banks echoed: “Eurydice, Eurydice.”1
The Orpheus myth revolves around love and death, around the powers
of the gods and the vanity of humans, but it also tells a story about the eye
From Forum for Modern Language Studies 37, no. 2 (April 2001). © 2001 by Oxford University
Press.
121
122 Sara Danius
and the ear: about the all-pervasive desire to look and the deadly power of
the gaze, about the pleasures of listening and the animating power of the
voice. In short, it is an allegory of the senses and, hence, of aesthetics.2
Throughout the history of aesthetic discourse, sight and hearing have been
privileged over taste, smell, and touch. Sight and hearing are more readily
disposed to abstraction, and this is partly why they have enjoyed such
prominence in the history of aesthetics. According to Hegel, for example,
sight and hearing are essentially theoretical senses. For this reason, they are
also ideal senses. Taste, smell, and touch, by contrast, are practical senses.
They involve consumption of the work of art in one way or other, and this
must not be, for Hegel thinks of the work of art as an ideal site where spirit
(Geist) and matter intersect. A privileged blend of pure sensuousness and
pure thought, exteriority and interiority, art for Hegel is the sensuous
objectivation of spirit. Consequently, only the eye and the ear are capable of
respecting the integrity and freedom of the work of art. Of sight and hearing,
however, hearing is the most ideal sense. It is the ear, and the ear only, that
may establish the ideal correspondence between the inner subjectivity of the
perceiver and the spiritual interiority of the object perceived. In this way, the
perceiving subject receives and so in a sense corresponds to the object whose
ideal, because spiritual, interior is mediated by the sounds it emits. Unlike
the eye, then, the ear succeeds in apprehending both material objectivity and
interiority, all at once.
Such an idealist theory of aesthetic perception is circumscribed by a
long philosophical tradition—the metaphysics of presence. Consequently, it
is also marked by a certain historicity. Discussing Hegel’s hierarchy of the
senses, Jacques Derrida suggests that Hegel could not imagine the machine,
that is, a machine that functions by itself and that works, not in the service
of meaning [sens], but rather in the service of exteriority and repetition.3
Derrida does not state it explicitly, but it is clear that after the advent of
devices for reproducing sound, the sense of hearing can no longer be thought
of as a priori ideal. Devices such as the telephone and the phonograph strip
sound of what Hegel would call its soulful interiority, and the sensory
experience of acoustic phenomena henceforth has to resort to an ever-
reproducible exteriority. Of course, the same is true of sight: its assumed
ideality is exploded in the wake of inventions such as photographic means of
recording visual data. In short, from now on the potentially sublime
operations of the eye and the ear know an internal cleavage.
Few early twentieth-century writers have dramatised this aesthetic
crisis as effectively as Marcel Proust. Describing the advent of modern
technology, from the telephone and electricity to the aeroplane and the
Proust as Theorist of Technological Change 123
It is she, it is her voice that is speaking, that is there. But how far
away it is! [ ... ] A real presence, perhaps, that voice that seemed
so near—in actual separation! But a premonition also of an
eternal separation! Many were the times, as I listened thus
without seeing her who spoke to me from so far away, when it
seemed to me that the voice was crying to me from the depths out
of which one does not rise again, and I felt the anxiety that was
one day to wring my heart when a voice would thus return (alone
and attached no longer to a body which I was never to see again),
to murmur in my ear words I longed to kiss as they issued from
lips for ever turned to dust. (REM 2: 135 / RTP 2: 432)
The narrator discovers not merely his grandmother’s voice; now that
he perceives her “without the mask of her face”, he also hears, for the first
time, “the sorrows that had cracked [her voice] in the course of a lifetime”.
Dwelling inside her is a figure whom he has never yet apprehended, a figure
inhabited by time. The narrator realises that his grandmother will die, and
die soon, and the psychological impact of this insight is irreversible:
finds her busy reading a book. Because she fails to notice his presence, she
appears to him like a stranger. He, too, feels like a stranger, observing her
appearance as he would that of any old woman. To make matters worse, she
appears precisely like that ghostly image which he so desperately wanted to
banish from his mind: “Alas, it was this phantom that I saw when [ ... ] I
found her there reading” (REM 2: 141/RTP 2: 438).
The grandmother has become pure image. Why does this stand out to
his naked eye? Because she has withdrawn her gaze; indeed, it is her failure
to look at her grandson that makes him discover, for the second time, her
double. During the telephone conversation, her eyes and face failed to
accompany her voice, thus anticipating that eternal separation called death.
Here, too, she is shrouded in invisibility, for sitting in the sofa is not the
grandmother but her doppelgänger. Disembodied and deterritorialised, she
literally emerges as a spectral representation of herself. I stress this point
because Proust’s episode shares an affinity with Walter Benjamin’s notion of
the aura. Benjamin approaches aura in two ways: in terms of spatio-temporal
uniqueness, and in terms of the gaze; and these perspectives merge in his
reflections on photography in the 1930s.9 In mechanically reproducing the
visual real, the photographic image strips the object of its unique presence in
time and space; at the same time, photography makes the past look at us,
but—and this is Benjamin’s vital point—we cannot look back. For this
reason, photography is linked to death. Yet there is nothing Orphic in a
photograph. In Benjamin, it is not the gaze itself that is deadly; it is the
failure to meet the gaze of the other that is deadly. The history of the decline
of aura is also the history of an increasing inability to meet the intentional
and unique gaze of the other, be it an object, a human being, or history.
It is therefore all the more interesting that Proust’s narrator, in order
to explain how the uncanny sight of the grandmother was possible, should
draw on the language of photography. Not only does he create an analogy
between himself and a professional photographer; he also proposes that
during those brief moments before his grandmother realised his presence,
his gaze was operating like a camera. The photographic metaphor then
sparks a Proustian essay which sets out to explain why we perceive our loved
ones the way we do, and why these perceptions are always and necessarily
faulty. In the process, Proust the narrator is joined by Proust the
psychologist. Their dialogue shuttles between experience and theory,
between local observations and general laws:
We never see the people who are dear to us save in the animated
system, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them,
Proust as Theorist of Technological Change 127
In order to drive home his point concerning the alienating vision inherent in
the camera, Proust adds yet another example. This scenario, too, rehearses
the contrast between what we expect to see, although we may not have
realised it, and what we actually perceive:
and the camera eye. Marked by affection and tenderness, human vision is
necessarily refracted by preconceptions; and such a lens prevents the
beholder from seeing the traces of time in the face of a loved one. In effect,
the beholder sees not the person, merely his or her preconceived images of
the person, thus continuously endowing the loved one with a “likeness”.
Memory thus prevents truth from coming forward.
The camera eye, on the other hand, is cold, mechanical and
undistinguishing. It carries no thoughts and no memories, nor is it burdened
by a history of assumptions. For this reason, the camera eye is a relentless
conveyor of truth, and so it is that the narrator catches sight of a new person,
hitherto unknown and unseen, who now flashes into the present: “for the
first time and for a moment only, since she vanished very quickly, I saw,
sitting on the sofa beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick,
vacant, letting her slightly crazed eyes wander over a book, a dejected old
woman whom I did not know” (REM 2: 143 / RTP 2: 440). The deadly power
of the photographic gaze has struck the grandmother, that once so familiar
and self-evident being who, like Eurydice on the verge of light, instantly
vanishes from sight and disappears into the shadows. All that is left behind is
a phantom image. To be sure, the narrator’s uncompromising image of his
grandmother is bound to evaporate as soon as she lifts her eyes and
recognises him. Yet for him those seconds have nevertheless hinted at her
impending death. From now on the narrator’s perception of his grandmother
is scarred by her difference from herself. Her persona is split into two, her
uncanny double superimposed upon her seemingly ever-pre-given self.
It should be clear by now just how intricate Proust’s treatment of
technologies of perception is in Remembrance of Things Past. What starts as a
reflection on telephony and the discovery of the disembodied voice ends as a
meditation on photography and how it changes the perception of visual
appearances. In other words, the narrator’s effort to grasp the experience of
speaking to his grandmother on the telephone motivates a psychology of
visual perception as well. Read in this way, Proust offers a germinal theory of
how the emergence of technologies for transmitting sound such as the
telephone paves the way for a new matrix of perception, in which not only
sound but vision also turn into abstract phenomena. What is more, Proust
suggests that the perceptual habits of the eye and the ear begin to function
separately, each independent of the other, each in its own sensory register.
An episode in the last volume of the novel, Time Regained (1927),
testifies to the consequences of such technological change. Set in the mid-
1920s, the scene unfolds at a social gathering where the narrator is
reintroduced to an old friend. The latter expresses delight at meeting again
Proust as Theorist of Technological Change 129
after so many years. A caesura follows, because the narrator, perplexed and
confused, fails to identify the person in front of him, although the voice is
familiar enough:
The gentleman’s voice, rising out of the body as though of its own accord, is
here rendered as a non-corporeal, hence foreign, element. It is the
defamiliarising image of the gramophone that so drastically disconnects the
voice from its bodily source. What is more, the mechanical metaphor strips
the old acquaintance of human qualities such as consciousness and agency,
thus reducing him to a non-human entity, indeed, to a thing. These images
serve to underscore the narrator’s insistent efforts to match his perception of
the voice with his perception of the friend’s exterior and, at the same time,
they prefigure his utter inability to do so:
Rich in images and allusions, this passage turns on the tangible discrepancy
between the narrator’s aural impressions and his visual experience. What
marks the representation of this encounter, and what sets it apart from the
telephone scenario, is that the dissociation of the eye and the ear, of what can
be seen and heard, has already happened. The differentiation of seeing and
hearing both precedes and inscribes the narrator’s account of the event.
Whereas the telephone episode contemplated the experience of an abstract
130 Sara Danius
voice and, by implication, how the aural impression of the voice fails to
coincide spatially with the visual impression of the speaking body, this scene
contains within itself the very experiential effects that the previous one
reflected upon. For if the telephone episode ultimately ponders the spacing
of production and reception, of sonic origin and transmission, the present
scenario both presupposes and enacts that logic of spacing. That is to say,
the representation of the narrator’s failure to recognise his friend from long
ago is organised precisely by that matrix of perception—the dissociation of
the eye and the ear, the abstraction and reification of sensory experience—
that the narrator, in The Guermantes Way, took upon himself to grasp and
explain. In effect, then, the representation of the old friend’s voice presumes
the essential internalisation of the very experiential effects that the telephone
and camera-eye episodes set out to chart. The phonographic metaphor
confirms the implicit dialectics at work. In the telephone episode, the
narrator reflected upon the experience of the pure and abstract voice,
intimating that it is enabled by a technology for communicating at a spatial
distance. To this sound machine we may now add the phonograph, a
mechanical device that makes it possible to strip sound not only of its spatial
source but also of its temporal origin.10 From now on, the voice and other
acoustic phenomena are, potentially, subject to endless reiteration and
exteriorisation.
In this way, then, Proust’s telephone and camera-eye episodes articulate
a theory of how a new division of perceptual labour comes into play, one that
bears on both the habits of the ear and those of the eye. For although each
of these two processes of abstraction may be traced back to its own relatively
distinct technological lineage, their experiential effects—reification,
autonomisation and differentiation—are fundamentally interrelated.
Mutually determining one another, the abstraction of the visual is inherent
in the abstraction of the aural, and vice versa. Meanwhile, as Proust’s own
phonographic imagery demonstrates, the new optical and acoustic worlds
propelled by such technological change open up realms of representation
that readily lend themselves to artistic experiments. From photography to
telephony, from phonography to cinematography: technological
transformation helps articulate new perceptual domains, charging the
modernist call to make the phenomenal world new. Proust’s novel thus offers
a way of understanding the mediated nature of so many characteristic formal
innovations that are to be found in numerous modernist works. Joyce’s
Ulysses offers a particularly rich example.
Proust as Theorist of Technological Change 131
II
In Ulysses, each sensory organ appears to operate independently and for its
own sake. What is more, each sensory organ, particularly the eye, tends to
perform according to its own autonomous rationality, as though detached
from any general epistemic tasks. “His gaze,” Joyce writes, “turned at once
but slowly from J. J. O’Molloy’s towards Stephen’s face and then bent at once
to the ground, seeking” (U 7.819–20).11 The trivial activity of looking is here
rewritten as an event in itself. To look is no longer a mere predicate to be
attached to a subject; the predicate has been unhinged from the subject and
operates independently, endowed with an agency all its own. By the same
token, voices in Ulysses also tend to lead an utterly independent life,
physiologically as well as syntactically: “The inner door was opened violently
and a scarlet beaked face, crested by a comb of feathery hair, thrust itself in.
The bold blue eyes stared about them and the harsh voice asked:—What is
it?” (U 7.344–7). Or, to take another example: “Miss voice of Kennedy
answered, a second teacup poised, her gaze upon a page:—No. He was not.
Miss gaze of Kennedy, heard, not seen, read on” (U 11.237–40).
The dissociation of the visual and the aural runs through Joyce’s
narrative from beginning to end. Indeed, despite the stylistic variegation that
characterises Ulysses, this feature persists throughout the eighteen episodes of
the novel, coming to the fore especially in the first two episodes,
“Telemachus” and “Nestor”. The opening of “Telemachus” dwells on how
Stephen Dedalus and his two friends Buck Mulligan and Haines rise, chat
and have breakfast in the Martello Tower. The first sentence introduces a
perky Buck Mulligan and how he, “stately” and “plump”, comes down the
staircase. Wearing a yellow dressing gown which flutters round his body like
a priestly mantle, he greets his half-awake friends with loud cries. A few
sentences later, Stephen Dedalus enters the scenario. At the same time, Joyce
introduces a characteristic stylistic device, a trademark visualising technique
which, in various ways and with varying intensity, will be deployed
throughout Ulysses. This is how the implicit narrator details Stephen’s visual
perception of Buck Mulligan: “Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy,
leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking
gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light
untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak” (U 1.13–16).
Within the space of a few paragraphs, the visual representation of
Mulligan, whom we just observed proceeding from the stairhead and into the
room as though in a full-length portrait, has shrunk to a face. In fact, his face
has been turned into a thing which, furthermore, takes on a life of its own.
132 Sara Danius
The horselike face is said to shake and gurgle all by itself, even bless a
somewhat irritated Stephen. Dehumanised and reified, Mulligan’s face floats
like a hairy oval before the reader.
Subsequently, Mulligan brings his shaving utensils to the parapet,
lathers his cheeks and chin, and begins to shave, meanwhile chatting with
Stephen. “His curling shaven lips laughed and the edges of his white
glittering teeth. Laughter seized all his strong wellknit trunk” (U 1.131–3).
Significantly, Joyce does not write that Mulligan is laughing, but that his lips
are; likewise, Mulligan is not seized by laughter, but his stomach is. Joyce
represents Buck Mulligan’s body—that is to say, his lips, teeth and torso—as
responding to external stimuli as though its reactions were mere reflexes,
bypassing the control of some centrally-operating intentionality. Mulligan’s
physical appearance turns into a miniature spectacle before the reader.
The aesthetic effect of such passages, so common in Joyce, depends
upon the differentiation of the human body, whose various parts are then
autonomised and, furthermore, endowed with an agency all their own. In
this introductory episode, as so often in Ulysses, Joyce’s implicit narrator
builds upon a narratological aesthetic that aims at defamiliarisation. The
narrator, one could say, keeps to what he perceives, not to what he knows is
there. In this way, Joyce’s aesthetics reveals deep affinities with that of Proust,
although Joyce pushes that aesthetic program to an extreme.
When Mulligan is about to descend into the tower, leaving Stephen to
ruminate over his dead mother, Stephen’s visual perception of his
roommate’s bodily movement is rendered as it presents itself to his eyes.
Temporarily frozen by the entrance frame through which he is disappearing,
Mulligan’s figure thus appears as an optical outline:
His head halted again for a moment at the top of the staircase,
level with the roof:
—Don’t mope over it all day, he said. I’m inconsequent. Give
up the moody brooding.
His head vanished but the drone of his descending voice
boomed out of the stairhead [ ... ]. (U 1.233–8)
All Stephen perceives is a head. From a visual point of view, Buck Mulligan’s
bodily whole has been bisected by the frame through which he passes. There
is a striking affinity between Stephen’s image and a photographic frame, that
instant freezing of time and movement. From a rhetorical point of view,
Mulligan’s visual Gestalt has been substituted for a synecdoche, his thing-like
head being the sign that stands in for the whole and whose shape can be
Proust as Theorist of Technological Change 133
observed for a few more moments.12 But what, exactly, is the whole, the
Gestalt?
The passage suggests that Stephen’s perceptual experience of
Mulligan’s descent is processed in two different registers. On the one hand
there is Stephen’s visual impression, and on the other, the auditory one. Each
is distinct; indeed, each is separate and independent of the other:
Buck Mulligan’s voice sang from within the tower. It came nearer
up the staircase, calling again. Stephen, still trembling at his soul’s
cry, heard warm running sunlight and in the air behind him
friendly words.
—Dedalus, come down, like a good mosey. Breakfast is ready.
Haines is apologising for waking us last night. It’s all right.
—I’m coming, Stephen said, turning.
—Do, for Jesus’ sake, Buck Mulligan said. For my sake and for
all our sakes.
His head disappeared and reappeared. (U 1.281–9)
What is heard is not joined together with what is seen; and what is seen is in
its turn a mere slice of the whole. The multi-sensory hermeneutic horizon,
the all-embracing Gestalt, refuses to take shape. Aligning himself with a
modernist aesthetic that aims to render what is perceived rather than what is
known, Joyce challenges traditional ways of describing movement, gestures
and action, and with them, the idea of “organic” modes of perception. At the
same time, such a pronounced desire to represent what is heard and,
furthermore, to represent it in a register that is radically separate from what
is seen, may usefully be considered in the light of those late nineteenth-
century acoustic technologies that mediate the new matrices of perception,
turning the sense of sight and that of hearing into quasi-ideal senses. Indeed,
Joyce’s mode of representing Stephen’s sharply differentiated sensory
impressions in the Martello Tower scene is refracted through a perceptual
matrix enabled by technologies for transmitting and reproducing the real,
acoustic and visual technologies alike.
No wonder, then, that Joyce’s novel abounds with reified voices and
autonomous eyes. One further example will suffice, drawn from “Nestor”,
the second episode. Stephen is in the classroom teaching his rather unwilling
students history. All of a sudden they are alerted to a sound:
In the corridor his name was heard, called from the playfield.
—Sargent!
—Run on, Stephen said. Mr Deasy is calling you.
He stood in the porch and watched the laggard hurry towards
the scrappy field where sharp voices were in strife. [ ... ]
Their sharp voices cried about [Mr Deasy] on all sides: their
many forms closed round him, the garish sunshine bleaching the
honey of his illdyed head. (U 2.181–98)
yielding opaque signatures that demand to be read and decoded. But this also
means that Joyce’s aesthetics of perception comes into being as a solution to
a historical problem—how to recover and represent the immediacy of lived
experience in an age when modes of experience are continually reified by,
among other things, the increasingly powerful emergence of technologies for
reproducing the visual and audible real. In pursuing absolute immediacy,
Joyce’s aesthetics of perception seeks to name the everyday anew; and this is
why, in Ulysses, the imperative to make you see and hear is so often an
aesthetic end in itself, utterly divorced from processes of knowledge and
cognition.
Joyce’s aesthetics of perceptual immediacy is thus inscribed by a
historically specific discourse where the empirical materiality of the body is
posited as the privileged site of aesthetics and where perception has become
an aesthetically gratifying activity in its own right. Such a discourse, as I have
argued, becomes possible in the period which sees the emergence of
technologies for reproducing the visual and audible real. The high-
modernist aesthetics of perception I have been discussing in this essay thus
feeds on a historical irony that is as palpable as it is inevitable: the more
abstract the world of observation becomes, the more corporeal is the notion
of the perceiver. And this bodily realm is no longer necessarily of a
generalised, transcendental order, as in the aesthetic theories of, say,
Baumgarten, Kant and Hegel. Indeed, the sensory body is no longer a
universal notion. Rather, the aesthetic now tends to be located in a particular
body, a concrete, singular and mortal body.
NOTES
1. A N A L L E G O R I C A L O P E N I N G
From Proustian Passions: The Uses of Self-Justification for A la recherche du temps perdu. © 2000
by Oxford University Press.
137
138 Ingrid Wassenaar
Envy has her serpent to contend with and so can be contained within the
framework of her allegorical representation. Between Justice and Injustice,
however, despite their graphic separation in the Scrovegni chapel, where
they are painted opposite one another, there is, for the child Marcel, some
kind of dangerous seepage. For, briefly superimposed upon the plan of the
Italian chapel (which the narrator of A la recherche has not seen at this
moment in the narrative) is the church of Saint-Hilaire. In the middle
ground between two allegories, two chapels, and two narratorial voices,
separated both temporally and spatially, there is the confusing opportunity
for an agon. The young Marcel, overwritten by the mature Marcel, sees that
tragic contest played out by teams who seem to keep changing sides:
‘enrôlées d’avance dans les milices de réserve’ are the Just who are rehearsing
as understudies for the infinitely divisible role of Injustice.
Judith Shklar, in her brilliant essay The Faces of Injustice, describes
Giotto’s Ingiustizia and La Giustizia, for the purposes of her liberal political
argument in favour of listening to victims. She says ‘Injustice does not appear
to suffer at all; he seems completely affectless’ (p. 48). Of Justice, she tells us:
‘Her face is benign. But apart from that it is expressionless, as one might
expect of the impartiality appropriate to a personification of justice. We can
certainly feel afraid of Injustice, but Justice radiates no emotional appeal’ (p.
103). Separated by a chapel floor in Italy, by many pages of Shklar’s reasoned
argument against complacent models of justice that take the wrongdoer’s
part over the suffering victim’s, Justice looks impassively on and Injustice
looks impassively aside, as each performs their allotted role. These are
modern allegories, a far cry from the Furies turned to Eumenides by Athena’s
persuasive words (and her silky-voiced threat of violence: ‘No need of that,
not here’) as retributive revenge was displaced by distributive justice in
Aeschylus’ Oresteia.1 The balanced opposition of Justice and Injustice is a
lateral one, rather than the threatening imposition of a vertical hierarchy:
they seem to offer a human rather than an ideal choice of moral actions. Yet
their similarity lies in their indifference. And when later in his life the adult
narrator of A la recherche meets ‘des incarnations vraiment saintes de la
charité active’, he finds that ‘elles avaient généralement un air allègre, positif,
Introduction to Proustian Passions 139
2. C R I T I C S , P H I L O S O P H E R S , P S Y C H O L O G I S T S , AND WORDS
The terms in which I will put forward the answer, or the answers, to this
question, as Proust experiments with them throughout his novel, rely almost
entirely on intimate readings of the text. This book puts forward an
important component of the Proustian cognitive and conceptual apparatus,
which has not been analysed before, and the consequences of which show A
la recherche du temps perdu to be an impressive contribution to ethical debate.
My study sets out the intensive hermeneutic endeavour undertaken by
Proust’s narrator to push to its limits the possibilities of self-justification.
Proust, we hardly need reminding, has chosen to write a first-person and
retrospective fiction. He asks what judgement is, and how we arrive at our
judgements, by way of the first-person voice. This reminder raises further
questions about the approach I have taken to what I have to say about A la
recherche du temps perdu, which I will take a few moments to answer now.
The almost overwhelming difficulty facing Proust’s account-givers and
his readers alike is the sheer volume, not only of his own output, but of
studies written about both man and novel, studies upon studies of these
things. Seventy-five years after the death of a writer who has taken on the
stature of a Shakespeare or a Dante as one of European literature’s ‘greats’,
so many brilliant novelists and critics have put forward the vital appraisals of
A la recherche by now embedded as the fixed truths about this text: Wilson,
Shattuck, Beckett, Bersani, Poulet ... the list goes on.3 To study the critical
texts written about A la recherche is to realize with humility and amazement
140 Ingrid Wassenaar
how well Proust’s novel was read even in the fizz of publishing hype during
and just after his lifetime. There is, because of all this interest in the novel, a
Proust currency, a set of keywords which mean Proust: madeleine, mère,
grand-mère, jeunes filles, jealousy, Elstir, Bergotte, Vinteuil, mémoire
involontaire, Time, Swann. A secondary and biographical swathe: snob, social
satirist, neurotic, homosexual, Dreyfus Affair, crowd around behind. What
more remains to be said? To propose a new study of A la recherche du temps
perdu seems like an act of wilful idiocy.
Yet, while every critic, of course, addresses the issue of Proust’s
choosing to write in the first person, therefore shifting the focus of his novel
with explosive force into the subjective mode, no one seemed to be
answering to my satisfaction a very basic question: was this a morally good
or bad decision? Proust’s novel is a vast, highly textured, minutely wrought
exposition of what the world looks like from one point of view, a
sophisticated, well-read, jealous, nervous, leisured point of view. That much
is perfectly clear. But what of the fear, shuttled constantly between novelist
and narrator, of boring a reader by going on at such length about one life?
What of the strategies of persuasion by which a writer might try or expect to
keep such a reader’s interest, or make her believe the account worthwhile,
honourable, true? How to make the balance work between telling subjective
and unverifiable truths, and allowing for counter-critique, contestation,
rebuff, rejection? How much mileage might there be in a narrative strategy
which sought to take account pre-emptively of all such counter-arguments: a
supreme effort to work out a foolproof method of ensuring a reader’s trust by
accommodating all her suspicions, fears, and hostility into the very point of
view she might reject?
This series of questions becomes more interesting with every further
addition and permutation of it, for it raises difficult theoretical issues about
the limits of answering questions about self-justification using the material of
self-justification, along the lines of Alan Turing’s notorious Halting Problem.
If you ask a piece of self-justification such as ‘but I didn’t mean to hurt you’,
to justify itself, would you get an answer with a firm foundation, or a further
piece of self-justification? One kind of answer would be ‘I didn’t mean to
hurt you, I did x because I love you’. No firm foundation for truth or
reliability is on offer, we must take on trust that the ‘I’ tells the truth, and
either accept or reject the answer. The emphasis has been brought to bear
upon the credibility of ‘I’ as a criterion for trustworthiness. Another kind of
response, however, might be ‘I knew you were going to ask me to justify my
self-justification “but I didn’t mean to hurt you”, and so here, before you say
anything else, are x further justifications of that statement’. Here, the
Introduction to Proustian Passions 141
emphasis has been shifted onto the statement, away from the ‘I’. Straightaway
we can see that acts of self-justification work hard to attribute and distribute
intention, interpretation, and meaning-bearing emphasis to useful-looking
parts of verbal utterances, in attempts to escape censure and judgement
through apparent exposure. Attempts to confront and head off this self-
justificatory work of redistribution will themselves cause further evasion,
mobility, internal division, and multiplication: like chasing mercury droplets
around a petri dish with a knife and fork.4
The answer to the moral problem of self-justification, if there is one,
then, is clearly not going to come from Proust himself, nor from his
correspondence, nor from the testimony of any of his friends, because we
would not be able to bracket lies and self-interest out of their ‘answers’.
Discovering how to judge whether or not self-talk is justifiable, might,
however, yet lie in listening to the way in which that question itself is treated
within the confines of A la recherche du temps perdu, in hearing how a series of
different kinds of linguistic experiment is set up to monitor either self-
justification or its by-products in language. Figuring the inquiring reader as
a listener, of course, might introduce its own problems, but we will deal with
these as we proceed, and should offer ourselves a dispensation from worry
about them ahead of time.
By the same token, no one ready-made critical methodology, or
interpretative toolkit, seemed to me mobile or dynamic enough to generate
a satisfactory answer about Proustian self-justification. A feminist reading of
A la recherche, for example, while it would prove the undoubted misogyny in
the novel, would not necessarily be able to answer questions about how
judgements are made or should be made. In this book, theoretical concepts
and methods have been considered and appropriated from a wide range of
recent critical thinkers, without allegiance being sworn to any. Reference has
been made to broadly structuralist and post-structuralist writers, to
psychoanalysis, to narratology, and to writers on Proust whose aims have
seemed, in the course of researching the concept of self-justification, to offer
a springboard to my own. Any single explicit hermeneutic methodology
(even if such an illusory beast were to exist) applied onto the text of A la
recherche du temps perdu would sooner or later run up against its own formal
constraints, would, in discovering that which it had sought, recover merely
its own original premises. Self-justification describes a special area of speech
act typified by the attempt to persuade a listener of the speaker’s credibility.
But such a definition takes no account of the variety of such speech acts, or
whether there are in fact important differences between them. It also seems
to rule out of account the very subjectiveness, the messiness, of what it is to
142 Ingrid Wassenaar
persuade, the arguments that might ensue, the pain of neediness, of not
being believed, the sheer hard work that might go into finding watertight
justifications for dubious actions, and just how much self-justification might
be going on in the world. So the desire itself (to find out more about the
functioning of self-justification inside Proust’s novel) is what should
encourage us to listen flexibly to the workings of the text, to gather material
for assessment, to be prepared to modify, or abandon experiments, or
become very interested indeed in why certain kinds of experiment seem to
throw up repetitious rather than different answers.
W. V. Quine’s brilliant four-page essay, ‘On Simple Theories of a
Complex World’, points out some ‘causes for supposing that the simpler
hypothesis stands the better chance of confirmation’.5 He notes that if ‘we
encompass a set of data with a hypothesis involving the fewest possible
parameters, and then are constrained by further experiment to add another
parameter, we are likely to view the emendation not as a refutation of the first
result but as a confirmation plus a refinement’ (p. 245). This is not to be
interpreted as a licence to produce only simple hypotheses, such as ‘if the
earth is flat then we might fall off its edge’, but it does remind us to avoid
putting all our own hypothetical parameters into one pre-emptive basket
before hearing how Proust conducts his self-justificatory experiments.
The obvious drawback to this kind of adaptive, flexible, and dynamic
methodology is its undoubted potential to wander down garden paths, or fall
into drowning pools of doubt and curlicues of minute adjustment. Yet
experimental research into the linguistic functioning of the moi, of the kind
that Proust undertakes in A la recherche du temps perdu, positively demands
this kind of scientific protocol, and we should not be afraid to work with the
problems it will cause us.
I will be reading with an awareness that a first-person retrospective
narrative implicitly seeks, in reconstructing a teleology which has already
unfolded, to remember it, both in the sense of recalling a process, and that
of putting a process back together. Blanchot reads this as Proust’s search to
experience a quasi-mystical simultaneity of different temporalities: ‘certains
épisodes ... semblent-ils vécus, à la fois, à des âges fort différents, vécus et
revécus dans la simultanéité intermittente de toute une vie, non comme de
purs moments, mais dans la densité mouvante du temps sphérique.’6 This is
the kind of vision of Proust’s writing which, to my mind, most unfortunately
reinforces the oft-touted idea that Proustian subjectivity is all about being
bound up in a nostalgic contemplation of personal past. It also runs the risk
of nudging A la recherche into the category of book in which other
subjectivities count only for the material they might offer an experience-
Introduction to Proustian Passions 143
Marcel Muller quotes this passage, but his criticism of it, that Sartre’s
comments are applicable to any first-person narrative, and therefore miss the
specificity of ‘le véritable secret du je proustien’, itself misses Sartre’s point.9
What has been so coruscatingly pinpointed is the agonizing fulcrum across
which the Proustian narrator—in all of his temporal manifestations, moods,
and agencies—and the reader of first-person confessional texts are delicately
poised and interlocked. Character appears only when complicity is broken,
when reader–narrator identificatory patterns and cycles and compulsions are
undone, when the narrator is seen no longer as everyman, but as a particular,
neurasthenic, possibly hysterical, would-be novelist. Grateful as we must be
to Muller for offering Proust criticism a multipartite taxonomy formalizing
the interconnections between, and independent statuses of, the narratorial
selves (Héros, Narrateur, Sujet Intermédiaire, Protagoniste, Romancier, Écrivain,
Auteur, Homme, Signataire), these terms seem to deprive the first-person
narrative of its relationships to external objects and selves, whether in or
beyond the confines of the text, and it is upon these relationships and the
kinds of processes they inaugurate that my study focuses.
A retrospective first-person novel, as the narratologist Gérard Genette
so convincingly demonstrates, will both manipulate and suffer from periodic
attacks of prolepsis and paralepsis.10 Genette’s tough-minded and careful
attention to the workings of Proust’s narrative offer a sound methodological
principle informing the way in which I read, but my argument, in showing
how self-justification works and is put to work, does not attempt to construct
a new narratology of A la recherche. The main point I take from Genette’s
work is that great attention must be paid, when studying works of
confessional fiction, to what we might term a rhetoric of reliability. A
Introduction to Proustian Passions 145
Add to this linguistic mechanism the diegesis of the myth; add the
interplay of Andromeda and the monster, the strand as the stage
of a plight common to her and to the jellyfish turned monstrous
woman, top it with the homophony of Andromeda’s last syllables
and Medusa’s first, and we understand how easy it is for the -med-
morpheme to stand for woman and for the monstrous or negative
component in the sign system designating a woman. Hence the
displacement of androgyne, within which man and woman were
united but equal, by Andromeda that opposes desirability in man
and terror in woman, a terror suffered or a terror inflicted.
Hence, a valorization of the mediating last syllables (meda) made
into an egregious symbol of unhappy or dangerous femininity.15
Grave incertitude, toutes les fois que l’esprit se sent dépassé par
luimême; 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; tr. i. 52)
3. A S H O RT H I S T O RY OF S E L F - J U S T I F I C AT I O N
that human desire, once ignited, seeks justification from reason, in order to
achieve its ends (those of pleasure) in human actions. His introduction enacts
a mini-allegory: ‘L’esprit est tellement esclave de l’imagination, qu’il lui obéit
toujours lorsqu’elle est échauffée. Il n’ose lui répondre lorsqu’elle est en
fureur, parce qu’elle le maltraite s’il résiste, et qu’il se trouve toujours
récompensé [de quelque plaisir], lorsqu’il s’accommode à ses desseins’ (p.
146).
In fact, Malebranche’s seemingly general introduction relies on
exclusion. The difference between esprit and imagination turns out to have,
not a universal, but an ideological bent: the self-effacing, humorous
introductory allegory neatly shifts its author out of the line of fire, into
alignment with the audience to whom the ensuing discussion is addressed, by
allowing the gender of esprit to signify a personality-type: that of the hen-
pecked man. The discussion seems to proceed from the assumption that no
one is exempt from justification’s effects, when actually a split has been
introduced into the conception of ‘one’ that relies on the French
grammatical tradition of gendering nouns: that part of ‘one’ which is esprit is
implicitly also ‘masculine’, while that which is imagination is implicitly
feminized. His categories of mental functioning are thus also implicitly
anthropomorphized and thrust into a narrative context of the amorous
relation. But let us not be too concerned for the moment with the difficulties
of finding a neutral language in which to speak about mental functioning.
There is still Malebranche’s argument to follow.
Building upon his model of the cringing esprit, his aim is apparently to
expose the dependencies that exist, but that are disguised, between the
promptings of désir, and the judgements that are passed in order that désir
may be satisfied and also securely justified: ‘le désir nous doit porter par lui-
même à juger avantageusement de son objet, si c’est un désir d’amour; et
désavantageusement, si c’est un désir d’aversion. Le désir d’amour est un
mouvement de l’âme excité par les esprits, qui la disposent à vouloir jouir ou
user des choses qui ne sont point en sa puissance’ (p. 146). A continuous
circuit must be set up, in which it is desire’s responsibility to act as dynamic
current, in order that supporting moral judgement may continue to prompt
the step between impulse and action in the world. In this triangular
structure, the âme, having fallen a prey to les esprits, first of all creates and
then disowns désir, or the dynamic of justification. The justificatory circuit
must operate independently once it has been set up.
Positive moral judgements thus become a function of the plaisir that
the ‘objet de nos passions’ affords us, since l’esprit can form no judgements
by itself: ‘l’esprit ne peut concevoir que la chaleur et la saveur soient des
152 Ingrid Wassenaar
manières d’être d’un corps’ (p. 147). Yet by the same token, ‘il est très facile
de reconnaître par la raison, quels peuvent être les jugements que les passions
qui nous agitent forment en nous’ (p. 147). Precisely because raison, in
opposition to the esprits, is unable to make a subjective link between an object
and its inherent moral worth, it is simultaneously, Malebranche asserts, the
perfect instrument for recognizing a situation in which desire has initiated
the judgement-forming circuit, and for calculating the étendue (p. 147) of the
judgements and thus the violence of the desire. Desire takes over
responsibility from the esprits and even from passion, for instigating moral
judgements. Reason, on the other hand, is still supposed to be able to judge
in a detached manner the justificatory judgements it has itself offered desire.
Désir finds itself helplessly in the middle. It is judged by raison, from which
it is simultaneously deriving justifications to support the actions of the âme.
Yet the âme, which has been excité par les esprits, refuses to declare itself the
real initiator of the justificatory loop.
Malebranche tries to make this complex and highly allusive model
work by turning to empirical examples: ‘L’expérience prouve assez ces
choses, et en cela elle s’accommode parfaitement avec la raison’ (p. 147). A
discursive switch shifts the argument from the erotic to an apparently neutral
epistemological domain: ‘le désir de savoir, tout juste et tout raisonnable qu’il
est en lui-même, devient souvent un vice très dangereux par les faux
jugements qui l’accompagnent’ (p. 147). ‘Le désir de savoir’ is another name
for curiosité, and Malebranche adopts the position of the moraliste to
condemn its falsifying dangers. Every form of knowledge, he maintains, has
‘quelque endroit qui brille à l’imagination, et qui éblouit facilement l’esprit
par l’éclat que la passion y attache’ (p. 149), but the light of truth only
appears when passion subsides. This would seem clear enough, but his most
important point is yet to come.
The most serious impediment to detached reasoning, for Malebranche,
is when an animating passion ‘se sent mourir’, because it seems to contract
‘une espèce d’alliance avec toutes les autres passions qui peuvent la secourir
dans sa faiblesse’:
Car les passions ne sont point indifférentes les unes pour les autres.
Toutes celles qui se peuvent souffrir contribuent fidèlement à leur
mutuelle conservation. Ainsi, les jugements qui justifient le désir
qu’on a pour les langues ou pour telle autre chose qu’il vous
plaira, sont incessamment sollicités et pleinement confirmés par
toutes les passions qui ne lui sont pas contraires. (p. 149; my
emphasis)
Introduction to Proustian Passions 153
Mais le désir est animé par l’amour; il est fortifié par l’espérance;
il est augmenté par la joie; il est renouvelé par la crainte; il est
accompagné de courage, d’émulation, de colère et de plusieurs
autres passions qui forment à leur tour des jugements dans une
variété infinie, lesquels se succèdent les uns aux autres et
soutiennent ce désir qui les a fait naître. (p. 150)
modelling he has just been attempting. Malebranche has been caught in his
own self-justificatory noose. His starting-point had been empirical: ‘Il n’est
pas nécessaire de faire de grands raisonnements pour démontrer que toutes
les passions se justifient; ce principe est assez évident par le sentiment
intérieur que nous avons de nous-mêmes, et par la conduite de ceux que l’on
voit agités de quelque passion: il suffit de l’exposer afin qu’on y fasse
réflexion’ (p. 146). His conclusion tries to rejoin a supposedly empirical
science, that of physiology. Yet his exposition, or his exposure, of how the
passions justify themseves, has required speculative leaps of investigative
imagination, and brave conclusions about cognitive modelling. His argument
implodes when he tries to make cognitive models fit with the physical brain,
because there is no flexibility in his model which would allow in subjectivity.
Malebranche’s exposition of justification fails by screening out the writer and
intended readership.
Théodule Ribot, philosopher and experimental psychologist, who
later concentrated on psychopathology, writing in Proust’s lifetime, profers
a very different reading of justification. In La Logique des sentiments, he seeks
to divide affective modes of reasoning into five distinct groups: ‘passionnel,
inconscient, imaginatif, justificatif, mixte ou composite’.30 ‘Le
raisonnement de justification’ opens with a categorical and unambiguous
denigration of this kind of affective reasoning: it is, Ribot sneers, ‘la plus
simple, la plus enfantine, la plus banale de toutes’ (p. 111). For Ribot,
justification is: ‘engendrée par une croyance ferme et sincère qui se refuse à
être troublée et aspire au repos. Le raisonnement de justification est
nettement téléologique. Malgré quelques apparences de rationalisme, il
appartient au type affectif pur se manifestant dans sa plus grande pauvreté’
(p. 111). For Malebranche, the act of justification had been an animating, if
corrupting, influence connecting, however inappropriately, the âme to
reason. But for Ribot, exactly the opposite is true: justification appears to be
an agent of death and destruction in human reasoning. The croyance aveugle
which causes the justificatory act, he says, is itself prompted by a need for
‘l’affirmation de l’individu dans son désir et son sentir les plus intimes’ (p.
111). He calls justification’s tenacity ‘une manifestation partielle de l’instinct de
la conservation’ (p. III; Ribot’s emphasis): ‘Mais si inébranlable qu’elle
paraisse, le doute la traverse au moins par moments. Il s’ensuit une rupture
d’équilibre mental qui appelle un remède. C’est le raisonnement de
justification’ (p. 112).
Justification, he asserts, is what happens when our instinct for self-
preservation is overcome, or interfered with by doubt. Justification, instead
of functioning as the connective circuitry between two kinds of mental
156 Ingrid Wassenaar
functioning, desire and reason, as it did for Malebranche, is here the name
given only to what causes ruptures and intermittences in mental circuitry.
Ribot takes as examples political fervour, theoretical moralizing, and
religious faith. He argues that moral thinkers rely on ‘une tendance
maîtresse, une préférence individuelle, une subjectivité qui, dissimulée sous
cet appareil logique, guide vers une fin posée d’avance’ (p. 112). They wish
to found their thought on a priori concepts that do not need empirical
justification, and yet smuggle in subjective and teleological material along
the way of their reasoning. ‘Les vrais croyants’, on the other hand, take the
events thrown at the world by God, and interpret them according to a fixed
pattern: ‘Sans s’inquiéter d’un double illogisme, ils déclarent que les voies de
la Providence sont impénétrables, mais ils essaient de les justifier’ (p. 113).
They try to work backwards, justifying disaster after the event, so that they
can continue to cling to their belief systems.
A sudden shift takes place in Ribot’s argument here, from the relatively
safe ground of people he calls normal (but justificatory), to the quicksands of
reasoning among aliénés, people with persecution complexes. For them,
apparently, ‘le raisonnement de justification est sans cesse en action’ (p. 113).
He refuses, however, to go further into this subject, although he is willing to
assert that justificatory reasoning operates at the same pitch in both the sane
and the mad, an assertion which would seem to require more qualification: is
justificatory reasoning, then, a function of insanity? Might the states of
madness and health be linked through justificatory reasoning?
He next asserts that, because his study is ‘consacré au raisonnement
affectif ’ (p. 113), he does not intend to pursue a line of reasoning which
would take him into an examination of the unconscious prejudice affecting
all so-called pretence at scientific objectivity: historians, theologians, and
philosophers, he says, are all prey to this. He accuses, for example, Nietzsche
of falling into the same dialectic trap which the latter accuses Kant of doing:
4. A N I N T R O D U C T O RY O V E RV I E W OF THE STUDY
I need to make just two more points before going on to summarize my book’s
argument. The first is a kind of bookmark, to tell us how far we have already
come in getting to grips with the concept of self-justification. ‘A work that
aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in
every line.’32 Conrad’s injunction to the artist seems to refer to a perfectionism
which is also bound up in the relation between the art-maker and the art-
receiver, or reader, or consumer, or viewer. Proust, sometime in the murky
Contre Sainte-Beuve gestation period of 1908–9, has a similar note, but it is a
self-directed one, a goad and a goal. ‘Au fond’, he says, ‘toute ma philosophie
revient, comme toute philosophie vraie, à justifier, à reconstruire ce qui est.’33
Proust’s emphasis, at this melting-pot period out of which emerges a first-
person narrator, is vitally different from Conrad’s: for Proust, it is an
ontological drive which spurs him to completion; for Conrad, completion is
arrived at by satisfactorily arranging the presentation of the artwork. The
perfectionism injected into the whole course of the Proustian narrator’s
experience, and his concurrent or retrospective writing about it, is massive,
general, total; Conrad’s is local, measured, focused. Among the plethora of
other lustrous subjects Proust inspects: the functioning of Time, the workings
of Memory, the needs met and dispatched by Habit, the language of flowers,
the Dreyfus Affair, monocles, manacles, the Pompeian Métro, the calle of
Venice, he has rigorously analysed, articulated and then run to ground the
multiform modes of a very particular set of cognitive functions and relations.
Proust, of course, though it is a very felicitous ‘of course’, and my second point,
has thus built into his narrator’s perfectionism its own greatest blind spot.
Wittgenstein puts it this way: ‘Justification by experience comes to an end. If
it did not it would not be justification.’34 For Marcel, ontological
considerations are inextricably meshed with empirical methods of analysis,
which translates, as we will hear, into a powerful capacity to split open
apparently stable justifications into their component self-justificatory parts.
How then am I going to show you self-justification in action? Making
use of the new Pléiade edition of A la recherche du temps perdu, Brunet’s
Introduction to Proustian Passions 159
unconditional love with the death of his grandmother, hints at its potential
to mutate into wilful self-protection.
We now have a great deal of evidence about self-justification going on,
so to speak, outside the narrator: mindstuff he can see or hear, and only very
occasionally feel. So far, self-justification has been safely contained as
something that happens to other people. The final subsection, however,
continues work begun in the cloison chapter, to question the safety of that
detached spectacle. It investigates a particular difficulty apparent in the
matter of Proust’s characterization. Characters in the text who seem at first
sight straightforwardly comic, or one-dimensional, turn out to represent a
potential threat to the narratorial self, and we will need to spend some time
considering what Marcel does about this.
The first two sections of the study, then, show how Marcel justifies
himself in relation to external criteria. But when all of these external means
of measurement are removed, self-justification takes on an entirely new
aspect. In the final section of the argument, an investigation of the processes
of mourning is undertaken. Marcel mourns Albertine throughout Albertine
disparue in a solitary narrative of distress. It is a section of the text rarely
analysed, and reveals how Proust allows the different aspects of self-
justification to fuse, with devastating results.
This is a very new vision of how A la recherche du temps perdu works, an
epistemological and hermeneutic dilemma on active duty in the novel. And,
in due course, the claims that Proust makes about the uses of self-
justification, as they are presented in the text, will themselves suggest some
deeply troubling and painful conclusions. These will be conclusions first
about what Proust has written. In the second place, my conclusions are about
how literature makes an impact upon the world only and precisely to the
extent that it arises from intimacy with the world.
NOTES
heroine, who suffers from a man’s indifference (because of his secret obsession with
brothels and prostitutes): it is, naturally, Madeleine.
17. 18 or 19 Sept., 1906 (Corr. vi. 127). See Baudry, Proust, Freud, 29.
18. George D. Painter, Marcel Proust (1990), ii. 64.
19. Here is Proust’s comment on the reversible transmission of characteristics
between mother and son in Jean Santeuil: ‘Peu à peu, ce fils dont elle avait voulu
former l’intelligence, les mœurs, la vie, avait insinué en elle son intelligence, ses
mœurs, sa vie même et avait altéré celles de sa mère’ (JS 871).
20. Baudry, Proust, Freud, 41. Antoine Compagnon demonstrates how casually
ingrained this maternal guilt topos has become in readings of Proust’s work, with
uncritical commentary on Proust’s so-called Baudelairean fascination with the
love–hate maternal relationship (see Proust entre deux siècles (1989), 160–5).
21. In ‘Reading (Proust)’, Allegories of Reading (1979), 57–78. See also
‘Autobiography as De-Facement’, MLN 94 (1979), 919–30, on prosopopoeia as the
trope of autobiography. Jonathan Culler has also written brilliantly on individual
rhetorical devices. See among other writings, his essay, ‘Apostrophe’, diacritics, 7
(1977), 59–69.
22. De Man, Allegories of Reading, 278–301.
23. See, for an example of this trend, Simon Critchley, The Ethics of
Deconstruction (1992).
24. For a good overview of early responses to Proust’s writing, see Leighton
Hodson (ed.), Marcel Proust: The Critical Heritage (1989). For responses by
contemporary writers, see Jean-Yves Tadié, Proust (1983), 153–231.
25. See Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan (1987), for excellent analysis
of these points of theoretical crossover, fusion, and complementarity.
26. See the journal series Bulletin d’informations proustiennes. Genesis is the
organ of the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (ITEM/CNRS). A measure
of the recent interest in the critical and theoretical possibilities offered by genetic
criticism can be seen in the publication of an issue of Yale French Studies, 89 (1996),
devoted to the subject.
27. It comes from late Latin, justification -em, in Augustine, etc.; comparable
with the 12th-cent. French justification (in Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue
française, perhaps the immediate source).
28. Nicolas Malebranche, ‘Que toutes les passions se justifient, et des
jugements qu’elles [nous] font [faire] pour leur justification’, De la recherche de la vérité
(1674–5), 3 vols. (Vrin, 1962), ii. 146–51.
29. Théodule Ribot, ‘Le Raisonnement de justification’, La Logique des
sentiments (1906; 5th edn. Alcan, 1920), 111–15 (p. 111).
30. André Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (1993), i. 552.
31. See Kristeva, Le Temps sensible, 307–37, for an excellent summary and
analysis of Proust’s exposure to contemporary philosophy and psychology through his
school and university education, an exposure which took in a range of approaches
from the idealism of Schopenhauer’s concentration on Will, to Gabriel Tarde’s
resolutely cultural interpretation of society.
32. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897; preface, 1914), 3.
33. Cahier 29. N. a. fr. 16669, publ. in CSB as part of ‘Notes sur la littérature
et la critique’, p. 309.
Introduction to Proustian Passions 163
From The Cambridge Companion to Proust, edited by Richard Bales. © 2001 by Cambridge
University Press.
165
166 William C. Carter
sense and a firm belief in traditional bourgeois values. Her influence would
be the most important in Proust’s life. Jeanne and her mother, Adèle,
supervised his cultural education, exposing him to what they considered the
best works in literature. In Jean Santeuil, the mother initiates Jean into the
love of poetry by reading to him from Lamartine’s Méditations, Corneille’s
Horace and Hugo’s Contemplations. Jean’s mother believes that good books,
even if poorly understood at first, provide the child’s mind with healthy
nourishment that will later benefit him. When Marcel was older, his mother
and grandmother read with him the great seventeenth-century works, of
which he acquired a special understanding and appreciation. He came to love
the tragedies of Jean Racine, whose masterpiece Phèdre in its depiction of
obsessive, destructive jealousy haunts the pages of In Search of Lost Time.
Adrien’s sister, Élisabeth, had married Jules Amiot, who operated a
successful notions shop in Illiers at 14, place du Marché, opposite the church
of Saint-Jacques. It was to the Amiots’ house in the rue du Saint-Esprit that
Adrien returned with his wife and two young sons, Marcel and Robert,
during the Easter holidays, when the town was at its best, offering wild
flowers and trees in bloom that Marcel adored. The Prousts travelled by rail
from Paris to Chartres, where they changed trains for the short ride to Illiers.
Seen from afar as the train approached, Illiers was contained in its steeple,
just as is Combray in the Search:
brilliant red poppies fanning out to the west and south on the plain towards
Méréglise and the château of Tansonville. The Pré Catelan became the
model in Swann’s Way for Charles Swann’s park at Tansonville near
Combray.2 It must have seemed natural to Marcel, who often played in the
Bois near Auteuil, for his Illiers uncle to name his own garden after the one
in Paris. The name held in common by the two principal gardens of his
childhood may have provided the first linking in Marcel’s mind of the two
spaces, Auteuil and Illiers, that inspired Combray.
In Illiers, Marcel visited his elderly grandmother Proust who lived in a
modest apartment. Relatively little is known about her except that she was an
invalid cared for by an old servant, which makes her a more likely model for
the hypochondriacal Aunt Léonie in the Search than Élisabeth Amiot,
generally considered the original. Adrien took his sons on walks to show
them where he had played as a child. He pointed out how two different
topographies join at Illiers: the Beauce, a flat, windy plain that, as it moves
westward, meets Le Perche, whose hilly terrain is ravined by streams rolling
down to feed the Loir River. The defining features of Combray’s fictional
topography approximate those of Illiers where the two walks—one the
landscape of an ideal plain, the other a captivating river view—embody, for
the child Narrator, two separate worlds.
As Adrien and his boys made their way back from Tansonville, it was
the steeple of Saint-Jacques, appearing now and then in the sky as they
mounted a hillock or rounded a bend, that beckoned them home. Proust
later used a motif from the church’s sculpted wood as one of the most
powerful symbols of his art. On either wall behind the altar stands a wooden
statue of a saint above whose heads are placed scallop shells. Such shells are
the emblem of Saint James (Jacques in French) and, in the Middle Ages, were
worn by the pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela. The church
of Saint Jacques was a stopping point on the route to Spain. The shells also
provide the form of the little cakes known as madeleines, symbol of a key
revelation in the Narrator’s quest to find his vocation as a writer. Proust
would remember the connection between the pilgrims and the madeleines,
when he described the cakes in the Search: ‘the little scallop-shell of pastry,
so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds’ (I, 46; I, 54/63).
On his walks through the river country north of Illiers, Marcel spied on
Mirougrain, the large manor house built on a slope overlooking a water-lily
pond. Proust remembered the impressions evoked by this mysterious
dwelling later when creating the composer Vinteuil’s house in the Search. He
took the name of the old mill, Montjouvin, but used the setting and
atmosphere of Mirougrain for the lesbian love scene between Vinteuil’s
168 William C. Carter
daughter and her friend. The names of the streets, old inns, manor houses
and ruined churches of Illiers and its surroundings, such as Tansonville,
Méréglise, Montjouvin, Saint-Hilaire, rue de l’Oiseau flesché, were to live in
Proust’s memory and imagination, until he used them, with slight alterations
or none at all, as part of the material out of which he constructed Combray,
a place that exists only in his book.
A story that Proust wrote in his early twenties depicts the goodnight
kiss drama from his childhood, generally thought to have taken place at
Auteuil.3 In ‘La Confession d’une jeune fille’ [‘A Girl’s Confession’], a
woman, dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, confesses her weakness that
led to tragedy. Although she had given up her lewd behaviour to become
engaged to a fine young man, she succumbed one evening to the temptations
offered by an attractive guest. Her mother, who happened to catch the
daughter and visitor in a passionate embrace, fell dead from the shock. As the
girl lies dying, she recalls her childhood and the tender, loving relationship
with her mother. Until she reached fifteen, her mother left her every summer
at a country home. The child, like Marcel, dreaded more than anything
separation from her mother. Before departing, the mother used to spend two
days with her, coming each evening to her bed to kiss her goodnight, a
custom the mother had to abandon because ‘j’y trouvais trop de plaisir et
trop de peine, que je ne m’endormais plus à force de la rappeler pour me dire
bonsoir encore’ (JS, p.86) [‘it caused me too much pleasure and too much
pain, because due to my calling her back to say goodnight again and again I
could never go to sleep’].4 This is the prototype of the crucial goodnight kiss
scene in the Search that sets in motion the Narrator’s long quest to regain his
lost will and become a creative person.
In the Search, it is the mother’s habit to give the child Narrator one last
kiss before going to bed. On nights when company prevents her from
coming to his room, he is particularly upset. On one such night, he waits up
for her and then implores her to remain with him. She does not want to yield
to his nervous anxiety, but the usually stern father intervenes and capriciously
tells her to stay with the boy. The child, incredulous at the easy violation of
a strict rule, feels guilty for having caused his mother to abandon her
convictions. He will spend the rest of his life trying to recover the will he lost
that night and to expiate the wrong done to his mother. This scene illustrates
how Proust eventually learned to make his private demons serve the plot and
structure of his novel.
It was probably during the fall visit of 1886 to Illiers that Marcel, at
fifteen, knew that he wanted to be a writer. He had brought along Augustin
Thierry’s history, The Norman Conquest of England, considered a masterpiece
From Life to Literature 169
In the final version, the situation is the same, but the book is
unspecified. The Narrator realises, as he walks through the forest, that
despite his great desire to express himself as forcefully as the authors he
loves, he is incapable of doing so. He expels his pent-up energy and
frustrations by shouting and beating the trees with his umbrella. The passage
illustrates one of Proust’s most successful narrative tricks, used with
variations throughout the Search: he tells us in dazzling prose about his
inability to write!
[Seeing upon the water, and on the surface of the wall, a pallid
smile responding to the smiling sky, I cried aloud in my
enthusiasm, brandishing my furled umbrella: ‘Gosh, gosh, gosh,
170 William C. Carter
gosh!’ But at the same time I felt that I was in duty bound not to
content myself with these unilluminating words, but to
endeavour to see more clearly into the sources of my rapture.]
(I, 186/219)
The ebullience Marcel felt during such readings created in him an urge to
uncover and express the hidden secrets, the profound meaning of the
impressions stored up during his walks. And he had made an invaluable
discovery: he must devote his life to literature. But how? And what would he
write about?
One day while playing in the garden along the Champs-Élysées,
Marcel met Marie de Benardaky and fell in love. Once he met Marie,
nothing mattered more than the afternoon trek to the garden to find the
‘pretty, exuberant’ girl with the open, winsome smile whom he remembered
as ‘the intoxication and despair of my childhood’ and one of ‘the great loves
of my life’ (see Corr. XVII, 175, 194). In Jean Santeuil, where Proust describes
his infatuation, Marie appears with her real name (JS, p.46). His crush on
her evolved into the Narrator’s adolescent love for Gilberte.
But Marcel was not attracted solely to girls. He wrote classmates letters
expressing affection, recriminations and invitations to have sex (see Selected
Letters, I, 10–11). Many of his adolescent letters are remarkable because he
used them, not simply to express his emotions, but to analyse his feelings and
try to comprehend his motivations and those of his classmates. He played
roles and assigned different attitudes to his friends. This practice, begun at
such a young age, combined with his extraordinary sensitivity, which allowed
him to put himself in another’s place, served him well when, as a mature
writer, he began creating fascinating, multifaceted characters.
After high school, Marcel received invitations to Paris’s leading salons
where he met many prominent socialites, such as Charles Ephrussi and
Charles Haas, both successful Jews who moved at ease in the art world and
in high society and who served as models for Charles Swann. At Madeleine
Lemaire’s salon Proust met aristocrats, artists and political figures.
Celebrated actors Sarah Bernhardt and Réjane, both models for the Search’s
La Berma, often attended, as did writers Pierre Loti, Jules Lemaître and
Anatole France. Madeleine, who loved music, offered her guests the occasion
to listen to Paris’s most celebrated composers. One might hear Camille
Saint-Saëns, Jules Massenet, or Gabriel Fauré at the piano playing their own
works or accompanying a singer. Here Proust met the darkly handsome
Reynaldo Hahn, only nineteen and already successful as a composer and
performer. Soon he and Marcel were inseparable. Madeleine, who insisted
From Life to Literature 171
upon silence during performances, provided the primary model for Proust’s
domineering hostess Mme Verdurin, who, like Lemaire, refers to the
members of her salon as the ‘faithful’.
Madeleine introduced Proust to Robert de Montesquiou and begged
the conceited, irascible count to be kind to the intimidated youth.
Montesquiou, recognising Marcel’s potential as an admiring disciple, invited
him to call. The count, arbiter of taste and epitome of aristocratic hauteur,
poet, artist, and critic, supplied Proust, over the years, with the major
ingredients for one of his most famous characters, the disdainful,
vituperative, homosexual Baron de Charlus.
Between his twentieth and twenty-fifth birthdays, Proust wrote many
stories that were published in reviews or in the volume Les Plaisirs et les jours,
illustrated by Madeleine Lemaire and prefaced by Anatole France. These
stories present important themes that were fully developed and orchestrated
in the mature novel. In L’Indifférent, a novella about desire, Marcel described
the fear of imminent death from suffocation. He likened an asthmatic child’s
experience of breathlessness to the feeling of panic and doom that overcomes
the lover upon learning that the beloved is to depart on a long voyage:
[A child who has been breathing since birth, without being aware
of it, does not realise how essential to life is the air that swells his
chest so gently ... But what happens if, during a high fever or a
convulsion, he starts to suffocate? His entire being will struggle
desperately to stay alive, to recapture his lost tranquillity that will
return only with the air from which, unbeknownst to him, it was
inseparable.] (My translation.)
Asthma, first experienced by Proust at age ten, reminded him of the sheer
terror that overtook him when he learned that his mother was leaving on a
trip and, eventually—when he had become so dependent on her presence—
even when she came to kiss him good night. L’Indifférent tells the story of
Madeleine who falls helplessly in love with Lepré, a man who cannot return
172 William C. Carter
her affection. She finally learns that he leads a secret life that explains his
indifference to decent women. He can only make love to prostitutes, whom
he pursues relentlessly. A similar trait is given to Swann, a highly eligible
bachelor who, rather than making a good marriage and settling down,
prefers to seduce servant girls.
‘Avant la nuit’ [‘Before Nightfall’], written in 1893, was Proust’s first
published work about a future major theme in the Search: same-sex love. The
character Françoise incarnates and legitimises homosexuality; like the
heroine of ‘La Confession d’une jeune fille’, she shoots herself. Before dying,
Françoise observes that Socrates, a wise and just man, tolerated
homosexuality. After acknowledging the superiority of procreative love, she
argues that when the purpose of lovemaking is not procreative, there can be
no ‘hierarchy among sterile loves’, and, therefore, it is no more immoral for
a woman to find pleasure with another woman than with a man. Françoise’s
final justification for such love is aesthetic. Since both female and male
bodies can be beautiful, there is no reason why ‘une femme vraiment artiste
ne serait pas amoureuse d’une femme. Chez les natures vraiment artistes
l’attraction ou la répulsion physique est modifiée par la contemplation du
beau’ (JS, p.170) [‘a woman who is truly an artist should not fall in love with
another woman. Among those with truly artistic natures, physical attraction
or repulsion is modified by the contemplation of beauty’: my translation].
These justifications for homosexual desire are refined and expanded in the
Search, where Proust became the first novelist to depict the continuum of
human sexual expression.
In these early stories, Proust treated themes that he was to develop
until they became uniquely his. In ‘L’Éventail’ [‘The Fan’] a lady paints on a
fan memories of her salon, a ‘little universe ... that we shall never see again’.
This notion of moments rescued from oblivion, illustrated by the minor art
of fan painting, states his main theme: time lost—and regained. But, like the
fan painter, Proust remained, until he was nearly forty, an artist in a minor
genre, rendering exquisite little pieces that might easily go unnoticed.
‘La Fin de la jalousie’ [‘The End of Jealousy’] focuses on another
major Proustian preoccupation. Honore is in love with Françoise, with
whom he has enjoyed a passionate, secret liaison. A gentleman friend tells
him that Françoise is easy to possess, but too arduous in her affairs. This
remark transforms Honoré, who becomes extremely jealous and
interrogates Françoise, who swears she has always been faithful. This story,
Proust’s favourite from his early years, possesses the dynamics of nearly all
the erotic relationships in the Search. The two most fully developed of these,
Swann’s obsession with Odette and the Narrator’s with Albertine, follow the
From Life to Literature 173
pattern of emotions that bind Honoré and Françoise. The lies that Honoré
tells Françoise, as he attempts to trick her into making revelations, are the
models for Swann’s jealous interrogations of Odette and the Narrator’s of
Albertine.
In 1895, Marcel and Reynaldo, vacationing in Brittany, reached the
village of Beg-Meil where, on a hill overlooking the sea, they found a small
hotel. It was here that Marcel most likely began drafting Jean Santeuil.
Proust’s encounter with Thomas Alexander Harrison, an American
expatriate, inspired the character known as the writer C, aspects of whom
Proust would use in the Search for Elstir who, like Harrison, is a painter.6 A
text combining Proust’s impressions of Beg-Meil and Lake Geneva sketches
a key theme: the phenomenon of memory ignited by a physical sensation, the
examination of which leads him to conclude that our true nature lies outside
time. One day Jean is driving through farmland near Geneva, when he
suddenly sees the lake:
[Looking at the sea (at this hour it had almost the appearance of
the sea) at the end of the road ... Jean suddenly remembered. He
saw it before him as the very sea he once had known, and felt its
charm. In a flash, that life in Brittany which he had thought
useless and unusable, appeared before his eyes in all its charm and
beauty ... when the sun was setting and the sea stretched out
before him.]7
Toute cette vie, toutes ses attentes, ses ennuis, sa faim, son
sommeil, son insomnie, ses projets, ses tentatives de jouissance
esthétique et leur échec, ses essais de jouissance sensuelle ... ses
174 William C. Carter
[The whole of that period of my life, with its hopes, its worries,
its hungers, its hours of sleep or sleeplessness, its efforts to find
joy in art—which ended in failure—its experiments in sensual
gratification ... its attempts to win the love of someone who had
taken my fancy ... all were caught up and made present in that
smell.] (p.408)
Si nous n’étions que des êtres de raison nous ne croirions pas aux
anniversaires, aux fêtes, aux reliques, aux tombeaux. Mais comme
nous sommes faits aussi d’un peu de matière, nous aimons à
croire qu’elle est quelque chose aussi dans la réalité et nous
aimons que ce qui tient de la place dans notre cœur en ait aussi
une petite autour de nous, qu’elle ait, comme notre âme l’a en
notre corps, son symbole matériel. Et puis au fur et à mesure que
Noël perd pour nous de sa vérité comme anniversaire, par la
douce émanation des souvenirs accumulés il prend une réalité de
plus en plus vive, où la lumière des bougies ... l’odeur de ses
mandarines imbibant la chaleur des chambres, la gaité de ses
froids et de ses feux, les parfums du thé et des mimosas nous
réapparaissent enduits du miel délicieux de notre personnalité
que nous y avons inconsciemment déposée pendant des années,
alors que—fascinés par des buts égoïstes—nous ne la sentions
pas, et maintenant tout d’un coup elle nous fait battre le cœur.
(Corr. II, 269–70)
From Life to Literature 175
In the Search, Proust turns this around, as hinted here, and says that
moments of vivid, spontaneous memory and their conscious application in
the creative process form the real life and that our daily life in its habitual,
vain actions is a life lived on the surface, and hence, a life lost.
The letter to Marie and the draft in Jean Santeuil where Lake Geneva
recalls Beg-Meil are Proust’s first known gropings for the elucidation of the
key moment in his novel: the experience he called involuntary memory.
These early attempts to describe and comprehend this phenomenon indicate
there was not one extraordinary moment in Proust’s life when he bit into a
madeleine and, in a frenzy of inspiration, began writing the Search. Proust
recognised, as early as Jean Santeuil, that the key to his work lay submerged
in the past. He saw the rich potential of such experiences, saying they were
‘alive on a higher level than memory or than the present so that they have
not the flatness of pictures but the rounded fullness of reality, the
imprecision of feeling’ (Jean Santeuil, p.409). But he was years away from
discovering how to make them serve a novel’s plot. Around 1899, unable to
create a plot and find the right point of view, he abandoned Jean Santeuil.
From 1900–05 Proust translated John Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens and
Sesame and Lilies. This arduous work, entailing the study of French history,
geography, architecture and the Bible, proved crucial to the development of
Proust’s own style and aesthetics. In ‘Sur la lecture’ [‘On Reading’], the
preface to his translation of Sesame and Lilies, Proust wrote: ‘Il n’y a peutêtre
pas de jours de notre enfance que nous ayons si pleinement vécus que ceux
que nous avons cru laisser sans les vivre, ceux que nous avons passés avec un
livre préféré’ (CSB, p.160) [‘There are perhaps no days of our childhood we
lived so fully as those we believe we let slip by without having lived them,
those we spent with a favorite book’].8 Books were more than words on
paper; the novels he had loved in childhood held the power to evoke the
places in which he had first read them: ‘s’il nous arrive encore aujourd’hui de
feuilleter ces livres d’autrefois, ce n’est pas que comme les seuls calendriers
From Life to Literature 177
que nous ayons gardés des jours enfuis, et avec l’espoir de voir reflétés sur
leurs pages les demeures et les étangs qui n’existent plus’ (CSB, p.160) [‘If we
still happen today to leaf through those books of another time, it is for no
other reason than that they are the only calendars we have kept of days that
have vanished, and we hope to see reflected on their pages the dwellings and
the ponds which no longer exist’].9 The beginning of the preface, with its
shifts in time and place, is an early sketch for the first paragraph of the Search,
where the Narrator in bed, falling asleep while reading, is uncertain of where
he is, who he is, and even what he is, since in his slumbering state he confuses
his own identity with that of the book he is trying to read. The preface ends
with another resurrection of the past. Readers of the preface cannot have
known—nor could Proust himself—that they were being given a foretaste of
Combray.
On New Year’s Day, 1908, Mme Straus gave Proust five little
notebooks from a smart stationery shop. Thanking her in a February letter,
he indicated that he had a new project and was eager to ‘settle down to a
fairly long piece of work’ (Selected Letters II, p.348). The first of these
notebooks, known as Le Carnet de 1908, bears annotations for various
projects that slowly converge and lead to the Search.10 One episode, evoking
childhood memories, shows his little brother Robert being forced to part
with his pet kid. Robert was eventually written out of the story altogether
and the lengthy scene reduced to twenty-five lines when the Narrator bids
farewell to his beloved hawthorns at Combray (I, 143; I, 173–4/203–4). Other
autobiographical elements are found here. The Narrator’s mother,
encouraging him to be brave while she is away, quotes inspiring passages
about courage from Latin and French authors. For several years, Proust
made entries in the notebook regarding topics and themes, lists of names that
might serve for characters, and sensations: odours of rooms, bed sheets,
grass, perfume, soap, food, capable of reviving the past. The Carnet of 1908
served as a memo pad and, later, as an inventory of sections already written.
As the 1908 text progressed from essay to fiction, the theme of homosexual
love, nearly absent from Jean Santeuil, became a major topic. In the Search
Proust analyses erotic love in heterosexual and homosexual couples, showing
that the obsessions of desire and jealousy are the same and doomed to failure
because they are based on illusions.
In July, Proust listed the six episodes he had written (Le Carnet de 1908,
p.56). The first was ‘Robert and the Kid’, followed by ‘the Villebon Way and
the Méséglise Way’. The two place names, the first from a château near
Illiers and the other from a nearby village, indicate he had found the ‘two
ways’, one of the major unifying elements of the Search. Another key episode
178 William C. Carter
was the mother’s goodnight kiss. The last episode on the list concludes the
story: ‘What I learned from the Villebon Way and the Méséglise Way’.
Proust had conceived an apprentice novel, in which the neurotically
dependent Narrator grows up to explore the two ways of his world—that of
the landed gentry and Paris salons—fails to find happiness in erotic love, and
explores the world of homosexuality. Proust’s novel would be circular in time
and space. As a child the Narrator believed the two ways led in different
directions and must remain forever separated, but as an adult, he discovers
the ways are joined by a circular path. Having completed his quest, the
Protagonist understands, at last, the true nature of his experience, is fully
endowed as a creative person and ready to write the ideal version of the story
we have just read.
However, Proust’s latest efforts to write a novel were again undermined
by self-doubt. Overwhelmed by all that he wanted to say and his inability to
shape and focus the material, he felt a sense of urgency: ‘Warnings of death.
Soon you will not be able to say all that.’ Then Proust judged himself severely:
‘Laziness or doubt or impotency taking refuge in the lack of certainty over the
art form.’ He was stymied by the same challenges regarding plot, genre, and
structure that had made him abandon Jean Santeuil. He asked the questions
left unanswered a decade earlier: ‘Must I make of it a novel, a philosophical
study, am I a novelist?’ (Le Carnet de 1908, pp.60–1).
Before he felt confident that he had found his story, Proust made one
more detour in pursuing his goal, this time by way of Sainte-Beuve. In late
1908, Proust bought a quantity of school notebooks. By August 1909, he had
written nearly 700 pages of an essay attacking the eminent critic’s method
and legacy. Some of these drafts anticipate the Search. By mid-December
Proust found himself at an impasse. He wrote to Georges de Lauris and
Anna de Noailles, whose literary judgement he trusted, and asked each to
indicate the better of two ideas for attacking Sainte-Beuve:
La chose s’est bâtie dans mon esprit de deux façons différentes ...
La première est l’essai classique, l’Essai de Taine en mille fois
moins bien (sauf le contenu qui est je crois nouveau). La
deuxième commence par un récit du matin ... Maman vient me
voir près de mon lit, je lui dis que j’ai l’idée d’une étude sur
Sainte-Beuve, je la lui soumets et la lui développe.
(Corr. VIII, 320–1)
[The idea has taken shape in my mind in two different ways ...
The first would be a classical essay, an essay in the manner of
From Life to Literature 179
Taine, only a thousand times less good (except for the content
which I think is new). The second begins with an account of a
morning, my waking up and Mama coming to my bedside; I tell
her I have an idea for a study of Sainte-Beuve; I submit it to her
and develop it.] (Selected Letters II, 416)
long. The Search is about a man who cannot write and spends his life
pursuing the wrong paths (lost time, wasted time), until at the very end, ill,
discouraged, and growing old, he discovers that his vocation is to write the
experience of his life—now that he understands it at last and can transpose it
into a work of fiction. This moment of illumination is described in Time
Regained:
Alors, moins éclatante sans doute que celle qui m’avait fait
apercevoir que l’œuvre d’art était le seul moyen de retrouver le
Temps perdu, une nouvelle lumière se fit en moi. Et je compris
que tous ces matériaux de l’œuvre littéraire, c’était ma vie passée;
je compris qu’ils étaient venus à moi, dans les plaisirs frivoles,
dans la paresse, dans la tendresse, dans la douleur, emmagasinés
par moi, sans que je devinasse plus leur destination, leur
survivance même, que la graine mettant en réserve tous les
aliments qui nourriront la plante ... je me trouvais avoir vécu pour
elle sans le savoir, sans que ma vie me parût devoir entrer jamais
en contact avec ces livres que j’aurais voulu écrire et pour
lesquels, quand je me mettais autrefois à ma table, je ne trouvais
pas de sujet. Ainsi toute ma vie jusqu’à ce jour aurait pu et n’aurait
pas pu être résumée sous ce titre: Une vocation. (IV, 478)
[And then a new light, less dazzling, no doubt, than that other
illumination which had made me perceive that the work of art
was the sole means of rediscovering Lost Time, shone suddenly
within me. And I understood that all these materials for a work of
literature were simply my past life, I understood that they had
come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in indolence, in tenderness, in
unhappiness, and that I had stored them up without divining the
purpose for which they were destined or even their continued
existence any more than a seed does when it forms within itself a
reserve of all the nutritious substances from which it will feed a
plant ... I began to perceive that I had lived for the sake of the
plant without knowing it, without ever realising that my life
needed to come into contact with those books which I had
wanted to write and for which, when in the past I had sat down at
my table to begin, I had been unable to find a subject. And thus
my whole life up to the present day might and yet might not have
been summed up under the title: A Vocation.] (VI, 258–9/304)
From Life to Literature 181
le petit jeu japonais ... qui consiste à mettre des petits papiers
dans l’eau [lesquels] se contournent devenant des bonshommes
etc. Pourriez-vous demander à des Japonais comment cela
s’appelle, mais surtout si cela se fait quelquefois dans du thé, si
cela se fait dans de l’eau indifféremment chaude ou froide, et
dans les plus compliqués s’il peut y avoir des maisons, des arbres,
des personnages, enfin quoi. (Corr. X, 321. Proust’s emphasis.)
[the little Japanese ... game that consists in soaking little scraps of
paper in water which then twist themselves round and turn into
little men, etc. Could you ask someone Japanese what it’s called,
and especially whether it’s sometimes done with tea, whether it’s
done with either hot or cold water, and in the more complicated
ones whether there can be houses, trees, persons, or what have you.]
(Selected Letters III, 43–4, and n. I. Proust’s emphasis.)
Proust had returned to the image of tea and toast (from the essay on Sainte-
Beuve) for the passage on involuntary memory, adding the madeleine dipped
in tea and expanding the metaphoric role of the Japanese pellets to explain
182 William C. Carter
this phenomenon that revived the past. He intended to place the scene in the
Combray section where it is the first such episode. He was curious about the
pellets’ capacity to form houses and people because when the Narrator bites
into the tea-soaked cake, the sensations that overwhelm him evoke the entire
village from his lost youth:
Quand d’un passé ancien rien ne subsiste, après la mort des êtres,
après la destruction des choses, seules, plus frêles mais plus
vivaces, plus immatérielles, plus persistantes, plus fidèles, l’odeur
et la saveur restent encore longtemps, comme des âmes, à se
rappeler, à attendre, à espérer, sur la ruine de tout le reste, à
From Life to Literature 183
NOTES
1. See Denise Mayer, ‘Le Jardin de Marcel Proust’, Cahiers Marcel Proust,
nouvelle série 12, Études proustiennes 5 (1984), 14.
2. In 1971, on the centennial of Proust’s birth, Illiers officially changed its
name to Illiers-Combray, in a brilliant public-relations initiative and unique example
of reality yielding to fiction.
3. In a letter written after his mother’s death, Proust recalled his ‘childhood
when she would refuse to come back ten times and tell me goodnight before going
out for the evening’. See Corr. VI, 28.
4. Marcel Proust, Pleasures and Regrets, trans. Louise Varese (New York:
Crown, 1948), p.32.
5. L’Indifférent, introduced and edited by Philip Kolb (Paris: Gallimard, 1978),
pp.42–3. By coincidence, the last sentence quoted contains two words that are the
keys to the Search: loss and recapture.
6. Philip Kolb, ‘Historique du premier roman de Proust’, in Saggi e ricerche di
letteratura francese, IV, 1963, 224.
7. Jean Santeuil, trans. Gerard Hopkins (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1956), p.408.
8. On Reading Ruskin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p.99.
Translation slightly modified.
9. On Reading Ruskin, pp.99–100.
10. Le Carnet de 1908 transcribed and edited by Philip Kolb, Cahiers Marcel
Proust, nouvelle série 8, 1976.
11. See Marcel Proust, On Art and Literature, trans. Sylvia Townsend Warner
and with an introduction by Terence Kilmartin (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1997),
p.19. See also Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, translated with an introduction
and notes by John Sturrock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), pp.3–4.
SIÂN REYNOLDS
I t is often suggested that French identity was reconstructed during the early
years of the Third Republic, after the trauma of the Franco-Prussian war and
the gradual elimination of attempts to revive either the monarchy or the
Empire. The consolidation of republican institutions, and the national and
republican pride instilled in French children through the primary school
under Jules Ferry in the 1880s, are convincingly portrayed by historians such
as Eugen Weber, in his Peasants into Frenchmen (1977), as contributing to a
unitary sense of nationhood.2 Weber’s very title, however, points to some
gender trouble. This turns up again in Benedict Anderson’s analysis of
‘imagined communities’, in which France is a constant presence.3 The
collectively imagined community often turns out in Anderson’s book to be
male-centred, with a recurring note of ‘fraternity’, of violence (‘dying for the
nation’), and even of ‘reassuring fratricide’, located in previous internal civil
From Literature & History 10, no. 1 (Spring 2001). © 2001 by Manchester University Press.
185
186 Siân Reynolds
They were hardly being emancipated by such work, but it meant that many
were leaving their native villages to become Parisians, leading a very
different life from their mothers and grandmothers.11
While the Belle Epoque could hardly be called an age of opportunity for
Frenchwomen, it was nevertheless an age when old structures were starting
to creak and leak. Very schematically, we could point to the inventions of
those metallic geared machines, the typewriter, the sewing-machine and the
bicycle, which had all arguably made more difference to women’s lives than
to men’s. The sewing-machine was both a boon and a shackle—it made
sewing easier, but swelled the numbers of women working at home for
desperately low wages sewing garments. Similarly, training in typewriting
soon became a woman’s passport to a white-collar office job (mainly after
1914), but it would confine most such women to subordinate positions as
underpaid typists for years to come. The bicycle however really can be
regarded as a symbol of liberation: it enabled women to get about in a fairly
safe and rapid way, and it began to make a difference to their clothes and
deportment. Ottilie McLaren, a Scottish pupil of Rodin’s who studied
sculpture in Paris in the late 1890s, rode to the studio on her bike:
A L B E RT I N E ’ S B I C Y C L E
Is that secret heart to be glimpsed in Proust? Yes and no. The second part of
this paper suggests that the New Woman, seen as in some sense non-French,
sent a shudder through his world. Proust is at once a reliable and an
unreliable source for a historian of the Belle Epoque. He did not of course set
out to paint a realistic picture of his society, still less of ‘women’, in the style
of Zola; nevertheless, we know him to have drawn on obsessive observation
of those around him, consciously and unconsciously. Proust, as the
photographic evidence tends to show, frequented the rarefied society of well-
to-do Paris, in which women were important players. Unlike in most history
books, women are everywhere in A la recherche, conducting games of power
and love. The emotional economy of this novel, I would argue, provides us
(rather surprisingly) with some kind of context for the New Woman. To
illustrate the point, let us look briefly at four of the important women who
appear in it, all of them French: Françoise, the family servant, Odette de
Crécy, who becomes Mme Swann, Madame Verdurin, the society hostess,
and Albertine, the narrator’s young lover. To give some chronological
perspective, Proust himself was born in 1871. Gérard Genette’s projected
chronology of his novel has the narrator (‘Marcel’) and his exact
contemporary Gilberte Swann being born rather later than that, in 1878.
Françoise, Odette and Mme Verdurin are from an older generation than the
narrator, being adults before he was born, while Albertine is supposed to be
a little younger than him.15
Françoise, a sort of compendium of la vieille France, with her
picturesque habits of speech, her prejudices and her networks of power and
communication among other servants, is a rather monstrous creation, for
whom Proust probably drew on several family servants. But it is not difficult
to locate her in a context where servants stayed many years with their
families, becoming intimate with them and in time-honoured ways exerting
the power of the powerless. J.-B. Duroselle, in his book re-titled La France de
la Belle Epoque (1972 and 1995), has a section on domestic servants in which
he cites several life-stories. For example, Françoise Remeniera, born in 1864
in the Corréze, was a sharecropper’s child who watched over the sheep as a
girl. After her husband’s death from tuberculosis, she became a wet-nurse in
a Parisian family, sending money back home to the village for her three
children, who stayed with relatives, and whom she saw only in the summer.
In 1899, she entered the service of another Paris household, where she stayed
until her death in 1946, being completely devoted to this family and they to
her. She had no real holidays or days off, apart from the three weeks in the
Women and French Identity during the Belle Epoque 191
year when she returned to the village. She reportedly ended up feeling more
at home with the family she served.16 Duroselle remarks of this life-story
that it is both touching and almost incomprehensible to us today—yet we can
easily recognize Proust’s Françoise in this biography. She has a daughter for
instance, who is only infrequently mentioned. In terms of a French identity,
if I can put it this way, Françoise represents a countrywoman, a woman of the
people, a source of mystery and fascination to the bourgeois narrator.
Brusque and kind, devious and long-suffering, she could be recruited for a
Barrèsian tradition of Frenchness rooted in ‘the people’ or ‘in the soil’, her
attitude to her employers being loyal yet cynical, traditional, yet in obscure
ways rebellious.
Odette de Crécy is also a construct of a traditional kind, in its 1890s
manifestation: the beautiful demi-mondaine, mistress to one or more rich and
powerful men, but nevertheless received after a fashion in Parisian polite
society—though not in the narrator’s bourgeois family home at Combray,
even after she had married Charles Swann, the family friend. Originals
whom Proust is said to have had in mind are Laure Hayman and Liane de
Pougy. Odette is painted in a very hostile way much of the time, and the
reader is left in no doubt about the superior intelligence, sophistication and
to some extent moral fibre of Swann, who ends up reflecting that he has
‘gâché ma vie pour une femme qui n’était pas mon genre’, ruined his life ‘for
a woman who wasn’t even my type’. Odette is unfaithful, ungrateful, silly,
snobbish and so on. Yet at the same time, both for Swann and for the
narrator, Odette holds an extraordinary fascination. In terms of the novel’s
structure, she is located as the older sophisticated woman enchanting the
narrator during his youth. In a passage at the end of Du côté de chez Swann,
he remembers her with nostalgia in the Bois de Boulogne, either in simple
elegance ‘à pied, dans une polonaise de drap, sur la tête un petit toquet
agrémenté d’une aile de lophophore, un bouquet de violettes au corsage [ ... ]
traversant l’allée des Acacias’, or in magnificent contrast lounging
negligently in
We are invited to think that this vision dates from the 1880s or 1890s,
since this is one of the few passages in the novel where the narrator really
steps out of the frame to look back. He has returned to the Bois de Boulogne
192 Siân Reynolds
in about 1912, trying to recall past visits, only to see in place of victorias
motor-cars driven by moustachioed mechanics, and to find a horrifying
transformation in women’s fashions:
The same passage, a page or two earlier, contains another precise historical
reference in the form of a typical Proustian joke. The narrator recalls an
older man remarking to him of Odette that he slept with her the day
MacMahon resigned (that is, 30 January 1879, just after the narrator’s—and
Gilberte Swann’s—birth, according to Genette’s chronology). However the
overall tone of the passage is elegiac: the elegant procession of victorias
(think of the 1900 Pavillon de la Femme) had vanished by 1912. Perhaps a few
of the old demi-mondaines were still there, but like wraiths or damned spirits,
shadows of what they were (‘vieilles et qui n’étaient plus que les ombres
terribles de ce qu’elles avaient été’ [I, 427]). The narrator stands forlorn; the
sun’s face is hidden.
Proust here tells us quite directly that Odette is from the old world.
She belongs with a society which would be completely swept away by the
Great War, but which was already fading. In that world, the ‘pattern in the
carpet’ of French urban society was a double standard for men and women,
a kind of sexual tapestry which was not exactly prostitution, but a set of
relationships between men and women based on money, adultery and
hypocrisy. 14% of deaths in the 1900s were due to syphilis. It was a world of
sex, lies and victorias, if you will; a world in which the Duc de Guermantes
could boast of sending a telegram reading ‘Impossible venir, mensonge suit’.
(This untranslatably brief formula could be decoded as: ‘Can’t make it:
transparent excuse follows.’) It was still a world in which, as Charlotte
Perkins Gilman reminded her readers in 1911, La Rochefoucauld had said
there were thirty good stories in the world and twenty-nine of them could
not be told to a woman. Proust was caught, like many of his generation,
between nostalgia for this world and a reluctant attraction towards the new—
his narrator treats both Françoise and Odette with wistful affection, but also
with a critical eye. Indeed, he provides a transparently scornful narrative
about Odette and her traditional feminine wiles. He shows even less
sympathy for a tougher, and in a way more successfully modern character,
Women and French Identity during the Belle Epoque 193
une fille aux yeux brillants, sous un ‘polo’ noir, qui poussait une
bicyclette avec un dandinement de hanches si dégingandé, en
employant des terms d’argot si voyou et criés si fort quand je
passais auprès d’elle parmi lesquels je distinguai cependant cette
phrase fâcheuse de ‘vivre sa vie’ [que] je conclus [ ... ] que toutes
ces filles appartenaient à la population qui fréquente les
vélodromes, et devaient être les très jeunes maîtresses de coureurs
cyclistes. En tous cas, dans aucune de mes suppositions, ne
figurait celle qu’elles eussent pu être vertueuses.21
We might note several things about this passage. Firstly, Proust’s narrator is
analysing these strange creatures according to the ‘old world’ of Odette. He
reacts with hostility to the idea of games-playing and loud speech from a
woman, the use of slang terms, and most of all the claim to independence
(‘live my own life’). Secondly, the French text at this point is full of anglicisms:
polo, golf, clubs. Incidentally, Albertine’s bicycle was probably English-made,
since Britain was the world’s chief supplier of bicycles in 1895–1900. To make
Albertine sufficiently threatening on her first appearance, Proust is using all
the stage-props of the ‘New Young Woman’, including foreign, particularly
English influence. A few pages further on, he reinforces this point with a
description of the way Albertine speaks. Not only does she use slang terms
like ‘tram’ and ‘bike’, but she affects an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ delivery:
Space forbids more examples, but I will hazard from these extracts the
view that, whatever the relation between Proust’s writing and his
Women and French Identity during the Belle Epoque 195
environment, and whatever he later does with the poetics of desire, his initial
depiction of Albertine and her friends as sporty aliens is significant. We see
these female characters through a discursive narrative (Proust’s), one which
is drawing on the discourses of others, while also challenging them by the
way he writes his novel. But he is not challenging all the discourses of his day.
In the male Parisian upper-class discourse of his time, women were, as
Simone de Beauvoir would later put it, the Other. There was a certain
agreement among men about that. In terms of the conceptualisation of
French national identity, I could quote a parallel taken from Sharif Gemie’s
book on nineteenth-century revolutions:
French men might disagree about many things during the Belle Epoque but
arguably they shared a certain patriarchal discourse about women. Perhaps
patriarchal is not quite the right word—it seems inappropriate for Proust,
who consistently undermines his narrator and puts him in embarrassing
situations. A better term is ‘fraternal’. We may not think of Proust as being
a particularly ‘fraternal’ writer in the republican sense, but in practice he
enjoyed the fraternity of various all-male groups: men about town,
exsoldiers, ex-law-students, homosexuals, would-be young novelists, etc.
The fraternal discourse about women encompasses la Parisienne and the
cocotte in the Bois de Boulogne, and at some remove it shades into the
political iconography which put up statues of beautiful (arguably maternal)
goddesses of the Republic and Liberty all over Paris—but hardly any of real
women. It does not extend to comradeship with sporty young women.
Albertine’s role in A la recherche is that of an impossible partner for the
narrator: she is eventually killed off in a riding accident.
How could Belle Epoque women respond to such a discourse? They
could accept it and work entirely within it (like Odette); they could seek to
turn it to advantage by modifying it a little (Mme Verdurin); or they could
break with it and challenge it. The challenge could be cultural (New
Woman) or political (feminist). Proust’s generation, whether or not he
noticed it, witnessed the growth of second-wave feminism in France. The
movement had to contend with fairly entrenched antifeminism in political
196 Siân Reynolds
CONCLUSION
The cementing of nationhood and republicanism that took place during the
first half of the Third French Republic—the creation of an ‘imagined
community’—was indeed based on a literal fraternity. One of the
components that was taken for granted, and therefore virtually unmentioned,
in creating French nationhood—at least as constructed in textbooks, books
on republicanism, standard histories, histories of nationalism and national
Women and French Identity during the Belle Epoque 197
NOTES
7. Ouida, ‘The New Woman’, North American Review, 158 (1894), 270–76. See
Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de siècle (Manchester,
1997), pp. 2, 8, 35–36 and passim.
8. George Bernard Shaw, Mrs Warren’s Profession, in Plays Unpleasant (London,
Penguin edn, 1946), pp. 212, 215.
9. Unpublished papers on the New Woman in France, delivered at the 1999
Berkshire conference on Women’s History, Rochester, NY. Cf. James F. McMillan,
France and Women 1789–1914: Gender, Society and Politics (London, 2000), ch. 10, who
also sees ‘the New Woman’ in the Anglo-American style as a doubtful presence in
France.
10. Quoted in Christophe Charle, Paris fin de siècle: culture et politique (Paris,
1998).
11. For full details, based on up-to-date research on the social circumstances
of women in fin-de-siècle France, see McMillan, France and Women, chs 10–12.
12. Manuscript letter from Ottilie McLaren to William Wallace, National
Library of Scotland, Wallace Papers: MSS 21535, 27 November 1897.
13. S. Reynolds, ‘Running Away to Paris: Expatriate Women Artists of the
1900 Generation from Scotland and Points South’, Women’s History Review, 9:2
(2000), 327–44.
14. Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900–40 (London, 1987), p.
78.
15. Gérard Genette, Figures III (Paris, 1972).
16. J.-B. Duroselle, La France de la ‘Belle Epoque’, 2nd edn (Paris, 1992), pp.
65–66.
17. Proust, A la recherche, vol. I, p. 419. ‘[O]n foot, in a “polonaise” of plain
cloth, a little toque on her head trimmed with a pheasant’s wing, a bunch of violets in
her bosom, hastening along the Allée des Acacias’; ‘[in a] matchless victoria [ ... ] her
hair now quite pale with one grey lock, girt with a narrow band of flowers, usually
violets from which floated down long veils [ ... ], on her lips an ambiguous smile [ ...
]’ (tr. C. S. Scott Moncrieff, Swann’s Way (London, 1922), pp. 276–77.
18. Proust, A la recherche, vol. I, pp. 425–27. ‘How can the people who watch
these dreadful creatures hobble by, beneath hats on which have been heaped the
spoils of aviary or garden-bed—how can they imagine the charm that there was in the
sight of Mme Swann, crowned with a close-fitting lilac bonnet, or with a tiny hat
from which rose stiffly above her head a single iris?’ (tr. Swann’s Way, pp. 284–86).
19. On Proust’s circle and the so-called originals of some of the characters in
A la recherche, see George Painter, Marcel Proust (London, 1965). Cécile Brunschvicg
(née Kahn, 1877–1946) is referred to in all histories of French feminism in the
twentieth century; see for example Hause and Kenny, Women’s Suffrage.
20. Proust, A la recherche, vol. I, p. 788. ‘One of these strangers was pushing
as she came, with one hand, her bicycle; two others carried golf-clubs; and their attire
generally was in contrast to that of the other girls at Balbec, some of whom, it is true,
went in for games, but without adopting any special outfit’ (tr. Within a Budding
Grove, p. 122).
21. Proust, A la recherche, vol. I, p. 793. ‘[A] girl with brilliant laughing eyes
and plump colourless cheeks, a black polo-cap pulled down over her face, who was
pushing a bicycle with so exaggerated a movement of her hips, with an air borne out
200 Siân Reynolds
by her language, which was so typically of the gutter and was being shouted so loud
when I passed her (although among her expressions I caught that irritating “live my
own life”) that [ ... ] I concluded [ ... ] that all these girls belonged to the population
which frequents the racing-tracks, and must be the very juvenile mistresses of
professional bicyclists. In any event, in none of my suppositions was there any
possibility of their being virtuous’ (tr. Within a Budding Grove, p. 128).
22. Proust, A la recherche, vol. I, p. 877. ‘In speaking, Albertine kept her head
motionless, her nostrils closed, allowing only the corners of her lips to move. The
result of this was a drawling nasal sound, into the composition of which there entered
perhaps a provincial descent, a juvenile affectation of British phlegm, the teaching of
a foreign governess and a congestive hypertrophy of the nose’ (tr. Within a Budding
Grove, p. 246).
23. Sharif Gemie, French Revolutions 1815–1914: An Introduction (Edinburgh
1999), p. 10.
24. On feminist campaigns of this period see Hause and Kenney, Women’s
Suffrage, passim; McMillan, France and Women, ch. 12.
25. Quoted here from a facsimile of the Declaration, kindly sent me by my
forme student Ingrid Omand.
26. On the unsuspected riches of French feminism between the wars, see
Christine Bard, Les Filles de Marianne: histoire des féminismes 1914–40 (Paris, 1995); on
international links, see S. Reynolds, France Between the Wars: Gender and Politic
(London, 1996), ch. 7. On the debate over French vs American feminism, see
‘Femmes: une singularité francaise?’, Le Débat, 87 (Oct.–Nov. 1995), 117–46.
Significantly these writers have on the whole been unsympathetic to the recent parity
campaign, on the background to which see Danielle Haase-Dubosc, ‘Sexual
Difference and Politics in France Today’, Feminist Studies, 25:1 (1999), 183–210; since
that article appeared, new legislation has been introduced in France to ensure the
equal representation of men and women in all elections where the list system is used
(excluding therefore the National Assembly, but covering most other elections).
ANTHONY R. PUGH
N o reader of Proust has reached the end of Du côté de chez Swann without
being puzzled by the ending of the volume. After the 184 pages of
“Combray” and 191 pages of “Un Amour de Swann” (in the Pléiade edition),
both manifestly constructed with great care, the last part has a mere forty-
five pages, of which eleven form a prelude which seems to announce far more
than what we read in the sequel, and twelve comprise a spectacular
conclusion in two parts: in the first, the young protagonist drags the long-
suffering Francoise to the Bois de Boulogne to see Odette Swann drive by;
in the second, we are told that the man who is narrating the story in the
present has recently (“cette année”) revisited the Bois to see the autumn
leaves, and he looks back with poignant nostalgia to the days, now gone
forever, when the Bois was colored by the elegance of Mme Swann and by
his unconditional admiration for her.1
Between the prelude and this conclusion, there are just a few pages
outlining the early stages of the protagonist’s calf-love for Gilberte. The
reader who continues and opens the next volume, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en
fleurs, finds the sequel to the pages on Gilberte (“Autour de Madame
Swann”), followed in turn by a section where the protagonist is in
Normandy, coveting other girls, and we realize that the prelude we read in
the first volume was preparing us for this new episode. The rigorous
From Modern Philology 99, no. 3 (February 2002). © 2002 by The University of Chicago.
201
202 Anthony R. Pugh
structure is again evident, and we are left wondering why Proust chose to
break his first volume at such an awkward place, obliging himself to invent a
conclusion at a point where the narrative line required none.
The answer to the reader’s question was given over fifty years ago in a
pioneering Modern Philology article by Robert Vigneron, who was able to
show, using Proust’s correspondence, that the conclusion to the first volume
was a makeshift affair, forced on Proust when his editor pointed out that the
material Proust had supplied for volume 1 was too copious and that he would
have to make the break between the volumes earlier.2 Vigneron demonstrated
that part of the present ending was transferred from the ending of what we
now call “Autour de Madame Swann,” and he argued that the pages about the
Bois set in the present were added after November 1912, citing Proust’s
(frustrated) desire to visit the park at that time. With meticulous precision,
and much ingenuity, Vigneron reconstituted the route Proust had followed,
the hesitations and the compromises he was obliged to tolerate.
In general terms, Vigneron’s demonstration has stood the test of time,
and one has to salute the insights of someone working from incomplete
evidence. Now, however, the evidence at our disposal is massive. It is
therefore time to revisit the question and give a fuller account than Vigneron
was able to do, even if in the most general terms our conclusion (that the
ending was due to the exigencies of commercial publication) is unchanged.
The new evidence is of two kinds. Vigneron relied on what letters had been
published, which he dated, and on secondhand information about the galley
proofs, derived from Albert Feuillerat’s study and hypothetical
reconstruction of the first version of the summer in Normandy.3 We now
have far more letters than we had then, and as a consequence, we are more
confident about the dates of the letters. Moreover, we have virtually all the
exercise books that Proust used to elaborate and rework the various parts of
his novel, along with the typescript that was the intermediary between the
latest of the manuscript cahiers and the first proofs produced by his editor
Bernard Grasset in 1913; these proofs are also accessible. These documents
do not always yield their secrets without a struggle, but if we are as
meticulous in our day as Vigneron was in his, we can reconstitute the stages
which led to the text we are saddled with.
THE MANUSCRIPTS
Proust began work on his novel in 1909. His method was to rewrite his novel
several times, each time amplifying, augmenting, and rearranging. The first
The Ending of Swann Revisited 203
‘version,’ if we allow that term, simply noted ideas for key incidents, some of
them elaborated for a few pages; there is nothing of Gilberte.
Later in 1909 Proust produced a version of “Combray” which,
although it was not complete, he felt ready to give to a typist at the end of
the year. In this version, Swann has a daughter. She is mentioned in the first
part (the protagonist’s mother inquires after her when Swann visits them at
Combray).4 She also appears in the sketches for a continuation to the
typescript, seen by the protagonist one day as he and his parents walk past
Swann’s property.5
With the typescript behind him, Proust could tackle “Un Amour de
Swann” and the Normandy episode, with the various “jeunes filles.” Gilberte
emerges out of that double preoccupation. This is one of the few places
where our documentation appears to be incomplete. In the cahier numbered
27,6 there are references such as “Voir [dans] manuscrit” or “dans le 1er
Cahier” that imply a source which we do not have. Cahier 27 opens with
material for “Un Amour de Swann,” after which Proust turned to Gilberte,
beginning (fol. 13) with a “Plan,” which includes the two sentences
“Emotion pour Swann[,] pour sa mère au bois” and “Je retrouve aux
Champs-Elysées ses [amis del.] amies, son institutrice,” numbered 2 and 1,
respectively. So we know that from the beginning, there was to be an incident
taking place at the Bois. The narration that follows covers the first stages of
the adolescent boy’s love for Gilberte. It includes (fols. 34–42a) an incident
corresponding to the indication on the “Plan” “Emotion ... pour sa mère au
bois,” reproduced in the Pléiade edition as Esquisse LXXXIV (Pléiade, pp.
983–86; cf. Pléiade, pp. 409–14). In this version the young boy first sees
Mme Swann, attended by a group of admirers, at the Bois when he is with
his father, and Swann greets them. This prompts the protagonist to enlist
Françoise in his regular trips to the Bois, and he is sometimes fortunate
enough to be noticed by Mme Swann. Once he is with his great-uncle, and
his indiscreet effusive greeting embarrasses the older man. At the end of this
sketch is the germ of M de Norpois’s revelations concerning Odette’s male
friends and the reason that Swann married her, both subsequently developed
in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (cf. Pléiade, p. 457). Here the informant
is simply “un collègue de mon père.”
Late in 1911, the typescript of “Un Amour de Swann” complete,
Proust applied himself to the task of producing a manuscript of the sequel
that could be typed out. For the section on Gilberte, he started with Cahier
20, ran into several obstacles, and began again in Cahier 21, continuing in
Cahier 24. On those occasions when the text of Cahier 20 was deemed
adequate, Proust would not bother to copy it out, and when he came to
204 Anthony R. Pugh
number his pages for his typist, he weaved from one exercise book to another
in a complex way, which, to her credit, the typist (aided by Proust’s
amanuensis Albert Nahmias) generally managed to follow.
In Cahier 20 the first stages of the relationship are worked over many,
many times. One incident, sketched quite early in the exercise book (fols.
24–29), tells us that on inclement days, the protagonist anxiously watched to
see if the sun would come out (cf. Pléiade, p. 388). This phase includes his
invitation to Gilberte’s house and (to precede that invitation) the dinner with
a former ambassador, M de Monfort (later Norpois), who encourages the
protagonist in his ambition to become a writer and who actually dines with
the Swanns (cf. Pléiade, pp. 426 ff.). Proust then rewrote some of the earlier
incidents. The youth is obsessed with all things to do with Swann: the maître
d’hôtel (cf. Pléiade, p. 409, lines 7–12) and Gilberte’s parents, especially
Swann himself (cf. Pléiade, p. 399, line 25, to p. 400, line 2). He tries to
imitate Swann (cf. Pléiade, p. 406, line 36). He sees Mme Swann more rarely,
he says, because she did not much like to be seen in public with a teenage
daughter. But he did come across her once, by chance (cf. Pléiade, p. 411).
At that point on folio 50, Proust wrote “Morceau sur le Bois,” but he did not
follow it up. On the facing page, we find (centered) “[Morceau sur le Bois
del.]” and then centered on the line below: “Paris.” We may assume that he
had in mind to go back to the pages in Cahier 27 and revise them in order to
use them here. From folio 50 to folio 58 of Cahier 20, Proust returned to the
episode briefly sketched a few pages earlier: the visit of M de Monfort.
Proust constantly reread Cahier 20 when he amplified and improved
his text in Cahiers 21 and 24. The first of the amplifications was a completely
new episode, preparing for the dinner, for which he created a new character,
the actress La Berma. This gives a new thread to the tapestry of themes
connected with the dinner and the conversation. When Proust went back to
Cahier 20, in order to incorporate the nine pages describing the
conversation, he decided that he would allow Monfort/Norpois a role in
persuading his father to lift the interdiction on visits to the theater. Striking
the words “Morceau sur le Bois” (that incident would have to come
somewhat earlier), he copied the introductory remark of Cahier 21 (fol. 4; his
mother suggested going to the theater to hear La Berma, Pléiade, p. 430, line
41, to p. 431, line 5), followed in turn by a new paragraph saying that
Monfort had influenced his father’s decision to let him go to the theater (fols.
49v–50v, Pléiade, p. 431, lines 6–27). This leads smoothly into the existing
sentence on Cahier 20, that Monfort influenced his father concerning the
boy’s desire to write (fols. 50–51, Pléiade, p. 431, line 30 ff.). A one-sentence
transition was all that was needed (Pléiade, p. 431, lines 28–29).
The Ending of Swann Revisited 205
but what we can call the third visit, undertaken in the present by the narrator.
The passage begins “Pour [l’del] apercevoir [Madame Swann add], sachant
qu’elle s’y promenait autour du lac [sic]” (cf. Pléiade, p. 409, line 34),
implying that it followed directly a text which ended with the name of Mme
Swann. At the break where the true epilogue (the third visit) begins, Proust
took a new sheet (“7,” fol. 196). The text of this final portion is not quite
complete; it finishes at “une majesté dodonéenne” (Pléiade, p. 419, line
33).12 By concluding with the narrator, writing from the standpoint of the
present, Proust neatly balances the opening of the entire novel: “Longtemps
je me suis couché de bonne heure.”
THE TYPESCRIPT
This new concluding portion was typed by Miss Hayward, the English
stenographer who had typed the first part of “Un Amour de Swann” at
Cabourg in 1911.13 When, exactly? The answer to this question depends on
how we date a letter to Nahmias in which Proust is quite explicit about her
first task (Correspondance 11:25–26 [letter 4]): “La chose commence par une
vingtaine de pages détachées que j’ai mises dans le cahier rouge. Elles se
suivent, elles ont une pagination spéciale (Ayez la bonté de paginer 560 la
première feuille de dactylographie qui sera faite ... Cher Albert, y aurait-il
possibilité de votre part à ce que vous choisissiez comme dactylographe Miss
Hayward, celle de Cabourg, elle est à Paris et m’a demandé de la
recommander.)”14 The letter has been variously assigned to October 1911
and to January 1912, but May 1912 seems a far more likely date.15 In view of
the fact that the first typist appears to have been paid off at the end of March
1912, it would appear that Miss Hayward came back on the scene no earlier
than the end of March or the beginning of April. The most plausible date is
later still: mid-May. A gap of six weeks since having Cahier 24 typed would
have allowed Proust time to work at “Noms de pays: le pays,” which is where
he wanted Miss Hayward to start once she had typed the new ending to
“Noms de pays: le nom.”16 Miss Hayward left Proust’s employ in June 1912,
which puts paid to Vigneron’s hypothesis that the idea of including a nostalgic
evocation of the Bois came to Proust only after he had tried unsuccessfully to
go there in company with Mme Straus in November 1912.17 It is true that the
first of the letters Proust wrote to Mme Straus on the subject seems to
attribute the idea to her and that there are a couple of similarities between the
text of the letter and that of the novel, but the hypothesis falls by virtue of the
undoubted fact that the sentence in question had been typed in the spring of
208 Anthony R. Pugh
1912 and revised in the summer.18 A fortiori, we cannot postpone the visit to
the following year, as the old Pléiade edition did.19
Miss Hayward typed this conclusion and “Noms de pays: le pays”
before she tackled the new material on the protagonist’s cultivation of Mme
Swann (Cahier 23, now greatly augmented). Because folios 65.2 and 65.3 had
not been typed, they are paginated 1 and (presumably) 2, and the text of
Cahier 23 starts with page 3 and runs to 17. This was to be followed by the
second visit, those three pages detached from Cahier 24. They have been
renumbered to follow the “17” of Cahier 23.20 The page numbers of the
typescript are adjusted so that the pages Miss Hayward typed first, beginning
at page 560, follow in sequence.
The typescript therefore gives us the proper conclusion to the narrative
of “Autour de Madame Swann” and a three-part coda: the second visit, the
first visit remembered as a flashback, and the third visit. The first visit, we
remember, had originally been conceived as part of the first half of the
Gilberte story. That, of course, is where it will finally be located. The
transition from the second series of visits to the Bois to the preadolescent
pilgrim, found on the typescript, is uncommonly awkward.21 But for the
time being, that is where it stays. The typescript was heavily corrected, but
the organization was not altered.
Subsequently, however, Proust added to the typescript a new transition
to move from the second series of visits to the Bois into the earlier visits,
before the protagonist knew Mme Swann. The text, which Proust improved
when he himself copied it from one copy of the typescript to the other, is
reproduced as part of variant b to Pléiade, p. 626 (from Pléiade, p. 1427, line
11: “Mais la beauté”). The idea is that he would not have found Mme Swann
so elegant had he not had a predisposition to believe it: “Et cette croyance
aurait dû naître en moi un peu plus tôt, quand mon amour pour Gilberte ...
me faisait considérer22 tout ce qui entourait la fille de Mme Swann comme
doué d’une existence extraordinaire, comme incomparable au reste.” He
wonders if she recognized in him the young adolescent of two years before.
This addition leads into the evocation of earlier excursions to glimpse Mme
Swann. It was a last-minute correction to the typescript; the vast majority of
the changes were made, in 1912, on what is conventionally called the
“second” typescript, and copied to the “first” by Proust’s valet, Nicolas
Cottin, but the change we are considering was sketched on the first
typescript and copied by Proust himself onto the “second” one.23
The typescript Proust sent to Bernard Grasset in March 1913 therefore
included the three visits at the end of the long section on Gilberte, with the
The Ending of Swann Revisited 209
first visit sandwiched between the second and third. Maybe Proust would
have come to realize that the first visit would have been more fitting where
he had originally located it, as part of the ritual followed by the young boy,
attached to all that was part of Gilberte’s world. But we cannot know, for
things took a different turn.
It was soon obvious that the first volume was excessively long.24 The first run
of galley proofs, begun on March 31 and finished June 7, comprised ninety-
five “placards” (hereafter “pl.”) or galleys (eight pages each).25 Allowing for
the inevitable expansions that would take place when Proust corrected the
galleys, we can understand why there are references to a volume of 800 pages.
The pages concerning Gilberte run from pl. 53 to pl. 75, dated from
May 15 to June 6. The necessity of breaking the first volume earlier than was
intended surfaces in a letter Proust wrote to Grasset around June 24. Proust
is sending back the first forty-five galleys, and he explains why he did not
return the last fifty sheets earlier: “Comme je vous avais dit, j’étais très
impatient de savoir à combien de pages nous allions ... Je vois maintenant que
j’ai reçu toutes le premières épreuves, que le volume aurait plus de 700 pages,
chiffre que nous avons dit de ne pas pouvoir dépasser. Je vais donc être obligé
de reporter au commencement du deuxième volume ce que je croyais la fin
de celui-ci (une bonne dizaine de placards) ... une fin n’est pas une simple
terminaison et ... je ne peux pas couper cela aussi facilement qu’une motte de
beurre. Cela demande réflexion et arrangement. Dès que j’aurai pu trouver
comment finir, c’est-à-dire très prochainement, dans quelques jours, je vous
renverrai les premières et les secondes épreuves.”26 In like vein, Proust told
Louis de Robert that there were ninety-five galley sheets and that he would
finish the volume at an earlier point (Correspondance 12:211 [letter 94]), and
to Jean Cocteau he wrote: “J’ai dû couper la fin du premier volume car cela
faisait 850 pages, et ainsi cela en fera 670” (Correspondance 12:222 [letter 99]).
Proust was probably thinking of the passage identified earlier as page 633 of
the typescript, which comes on pl. 83 of the galley proofs (see n. 24 above).
At that point was a truly purple passage, on the view of the sunlit sea from
the bedroom window of the hotel in Normandy where the protagonist is
staying with his grandmother. The appropriateness of these paragraphs to
conclude the volume is demonstrated by the fact that Proust moved them
from that position to the actual end of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs,
leaving just two paragraphs in the original place.27
210 Anthony R. Pugh
have been reversed in order to end with the poetic passage on the sunlight.
The inversion is not very convincing. Proust had to add two new transitional
sentences, both awkward (see Pléiade, p. 390 “variant a” and p. 392 “variant
a”). The passage that had originally served as a transition between the two
halves (Pléiade, p. 390, lines 13–32) was moved and attached to a later
passage that brought in the same character, the old lady reading the Débats
(Pléiade, p. 398, line 17, p. 398 “variant a”).
The galleys preserved in NAF 16753 show something of this
modification. The last columns of pl. 55 have been removed in order to paste
pl. 55/6c–8a (Pléiade, p. 388, line 40, to p. 390, line 13) after pl. 56/2
(following Pléiade, p. 392, line 21).29 The new link connecting Pléiade, page
392, line 21, to page 388, line 40 (p. 392 “variant a”) has been added by hand.
The rest of pl. 55/8 (bcd) was attached to pl. 56/1 (fol. 26v), and from it pl.
55/8c (the old lady reading the Débats) was struck. That was because the
passage had originally served as a transition between the two halves and was
no longer relevant. So Proust incorporated it in a later passage by attaching
another copy of column 8c to pl. 58/2.30 A page number (59, changed to 60)
has been written on pl. 55/8bcd, indicating that the newly organized passage
was to go in after pl. 59 (from which columns 7b and 8 would have been
removed).31 The number 56 has been written onto pl. 56/3. On this set,
therefore, Proust’s intentions are to be inferred from the new page numbers.
Proust may have made his new arrangement clearer on the set which went to
the printer. We do have a trace of this other set. The break on Pléiade, p.
388, which comes at line 39 on the set we have been considering, was actually
made three lines earlier on the third proofs (we call the bridging lines pl.
55/6b),32 and in NAF 16753 there is a second copy of pl. 55/3b–6a which
does just that [NAF 16753 fol. 25]).
We can assume, then, that when Proust sent the galleys back to
Grasset, they concluded with the sunlight on the balcony, inserted after the
description of the young boy’s fascination with the world of the Swanns. As
we have said, at this stage the page on the “pilgrimages” (Pléiade, p. 408, line
39, to p. 409, line 33) came before the other examples of his fetishism
(Pléiade, p. 405, line 17, to p. 408, line 38).
Other evidence shows that Proust returned this material to Grasset at
the end of July.33 He had already sent off the first forty-five galley sheets, on
May 23 (Correspondance 13:384 [letter 218]), and they had formed the basis of
the “second” proofs, going to p. 318, three-quarters of the way through “Un
Amour de Swann,” and dated from May 30 to July 15.34 In his instructions
sent on July 29 to Charles Colin, the printer, Louis Brun, Grasset’s secretary,
212 Anthony R. Pugh
As for the actual ending, we have seen that Proust had prepared his
galleys, and so all he had to do was to attach them. So, following page 409,
line 32, we have pl. 74/1b to 75/6. Because nothing is ever simple with
Proust, we have to add that pl. 74/5–8 is missing, though it is needed for the
coherence of the narrative.39 On the copy of pl. 74 which Proust transferred
(NAF 16753, fols. 62v–63r), he wrote in blue pencil at the top of pl. 74/1, “ne
fait pas partie de ma fin nouvelle,” and on pl. 74/2, “C’est à peu près ici que
commence la nouvelle fin” (this indication should have come two lines before
the bottom of pl. 74/1; again, Proust’s intentions would have been made
more precise on the proofs sent to the printer). After pl. 75/6, Proust has
added by hand the next lines (taken from pl. 75/7), followed by the word
‘Fin’. On the copy which would have stayed at the original place, Proust has
conserved only pl. 74/1 and pl. 75/7–8, with the lines that were transferred
struck out (NAF 16753, fol. 60v). The nine galley sheets that were
transferred are paginated 501–9. The page proofs were not sent back to
Grasset until October 10 (Correspondance 13:401 [letter 233]).
Traces of the rethinking of the ending can be found in letters around
the beginning of September. Toward the end of August, Proust offered to
send Lucien Daudet “si cela pouvait vous amuser de parcourir les épreuves
de mon premier volume (car hélas, le livre sera divisé—et stupidement sans
qu’on puisse dès le premier volume se douter de ce que cela sera, en trois
volumes)” (Correspondance 12:254 [letter 115]). He did send Daudet his
proofs, within two days.40 Daudet read them immediately, and Proust replied
to his comments at length. In his reply, he wrote: “J’avais justement envie de
vous écrire parce que j’ai eu l’idée d’interpoler un peu les dernières pages que
vous avez (ou plutôt de leur rendre leur ordre primitif) et d’ajouter pour la
fin du volume quelques pages qui venaient plus loin et que vous n’avez pas”
(Correspondance 12:257 [letter 116]). Shortly after this, Proust wrote to
Robert: “Je ne laisserai pas la fin telle que vous l’avez lue. Je n’allongerai
cependant pas le livre. J’ajouterai seulement cinq ou six pages qui se trouvent
au milieu du second volume et qui feront un couronnement un peu plus
étendu” (Correspondance 12:271 [letter 119]).
Vigneron observed that the new ending went beyond “five or six” pages
(“Structure,” p. 462) and assumed that only the first half (the first visit) was
considered and that the epilogue proper (the third visit) was added later, to
make the conclusion even stronger. The proofs, however, do not support
this, and we know that the epilogue was always connected to the
protagonist’s earliest memories of the Bois. One sympathizes with Vigneron
all the same. The published ending of volume 1 is just too spectacular for the
context.
214 Anthony R. Pugh
The next set of proofs, the fourth, incorporates the new ending. Proust
sent Lucien Daudet a copy of the last pages, with an explanation of how the
previous pages had been changed. “Je vois des inconvénients à finir par ce
morceau, mais j’y vois de grands avantages ... Vous jugerez bien si cela
termine mieux que le soleil sur le balcon.”41 He told Daudet that the only
difference between the new text and the one Daudet had read was that “le
jour de neige, les jours où je vois du soleil sur le balcon” would come
“quelques pages plus haut,” and he continues, “Et ce n’est qu’après eux que
je mettrais (ce qui en ce moment est un peu avant): ‘Les jours où Gilberte ne
venait pas.’” This account of what he had done to his text does mention the
two principal changes, but it is very elliptical, and it did not really help
Daudet to reconstitute the full passage, of which he received only the new
ending. Vigneron unfortunately had his own idea of the original order, based
chiefly on internal evidence, and it has no basis at all in reality (“Structure,”
pp. 440–42 and p. 442, n. 47). He deployed much ingenuity in showing how,
when the last page was moved, it necessitated moving the others and
redistributing them in order not to render incoherent some of the detail in
what Proust had already in place.42 As I have said, the proofs tell a different
tale; the order Vigneron finds incoherent was already there. The
“inconvénients” which Vigneron details all go back to the time when Proust
paginated his cahiers.
CONCLUSION
NOTES
A shorter version of this article was delivered as a paper at the Proceedings of the
Proust Colloquium held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in April
2000 and will appear in Proust in Perspective: Visions and Revisions, edited by Armine
Kotin Mortimer and Katherine Kolb, to be published by the University of Illinois
Press in 2002, copyright 2002 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
1. Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. J.-Y. Tadié et al., 3 vols.
(Paris: Gallimard, 1987–89), 1:409–14 and 414–20, quotation on 1:414. Subsequent
references to this edition appear in the text, cited parenthetically as Pléiade by page
and line numbers; unless otherwise stated, all references are to vol. 1.
2. Robert Vigneron, “Structure de Swann: Prétentions et défaillances,” Modern
Philology 44 (1946): 102–28; reprinted in his Etudes sur Stendahl et sur Proust (Paris:
Nizet, 1978), pp. 430–66. Hereafter the 1978 reprint will be cited parenthetically in
the text as “Structure.”
3. Albert Feuillerat, Comment Marcel Proust a composé son roman, Yale Romanic
Studies 7 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1934).
4. This reference does not survive in the published novel, but it will be found
in “variant a” to p. 21 of the Pléiade edition: see Pléiade, p. 1104.
216 Anthony R. Pugh
5. Pléiade, p. 135. The typescript of 1909 did not go further than p. 134, line
2, although the manuscript cahier that Proust was following contained about twenty-
five pages on the “deux côtés.”
6. The numbers attributed to the cahiers by the Bibliothèque Nationale de
France classify the exercise books according to the part of the novel most implicated
and within each division follow a chronological sequence. The numbers are therefore
not in themselves a guide to the chronology, although they are not arbitrary. Cahier
27 has the call mark NAF [nouvelles acquisitions françaises] 16667, placed where it is
because most of it has to do with Normandy, which will be part 4 of the novel.
7. Pléiade, p. 564, line 41. The previous page (fol. 65.2) took us to Pléiade, p.
564, line 16 (“tous les plus beaux raisonnements que j’aurais pu faire, toutes les”). The
typescript shows that the next word was “louanges” (later changed to “tous les
éloges”).
8. Pléiade, p. 624, line 27, to p. 625, line 23; p. 625, line 23, to p. 626, lines 22
and 26–39; then p. 629, lines 32–36, and p. 630, lines 3–6 differently ordered (see p.
626 var. b). The missing page evidently included Pléiade, p. 626, lines 7–19; as those
dozen lines would not have filled a manuscript page, we know that there were lines
scored out, possibly first versions of the passage that was typed, but we cannot
speculate further.
9. Marcel Proust, Correspondance, ed. Philip Kolb, 21 vols. (Paris: Plon,
1970–93), 11:46, 51 [letters 17 and 20]. All subsequent references to the
correspondence are cited parenthetically in the text as Correspondance by volume and
page numbers followed by letter numbers in brackets.
10. Kolb places this letter at the very end of March. His argument is based
on an allusion to Nahmias’s father (“J’ai tellement souffert que je n’ai pas encore
écrit à Monsieur votre Père”), which he says appears to follow one made in a letter
dated with certainty March 29 (“Avez-vous dit à monsieur votre père combine je lui
étais reconnaissant. Je n’ose pas après si longtemps lui écrire”; Correspondance 11:85
[letter 39]). It seems to me more likely that the second reference must follow the first
after a gap sufficiently long to have made Proust guilty for not having found time to
write.
11. Folios 190–206. Nahmias indicates that the pages come from a “cahier
noir,” which might point to Cahier 23. It is obvious from the appearance of the
exercise book, however, that nothing is missing from Cahier 23 at this point. Most of
the exercise books Proust used at this period were black.
12. The last two pages were much rewritten before Proust came to the version
we read now. The text of all the second half of this epilogue (from the middle of p. 9
to the end) is reproduced as Esquisse LXXXVI, Pléiade, pp. 988–91.
13. The entire manuscript, which went as far as the end of “Noms de pays: le
pays,” was typed out, with two carbon copies. Only a few pages of the third run
survive, but most of the other two runs are in the Bibliothèque Nationale collection,
NAF 16730–16732 (commonly, if inaccurately, known as the first typescript) and
16733–16735 (the so-called second typescript). It was typed in stages, in 1909 (16730
and 16733, three-quarters of “Combray”), 1911 (the rest of “Combray” plus 16731
and 16734; “Un Amour de Swann,” begun at Cabourg by Miss Hayward and
completed and in part retyped in Paris by someone else), and 1912 (16732 and 16735;
“Noms de pays: le nom,” typed as far as fol. 65 of Cahier 24 in March and completed
The Ending of Swann Revisited 217
by Miss Hayward in May–June; and “Noms de pays: le pays,” entirely typed by Miss
Hayward in June).
14. The twenty loose pages are obviously the seventeen sheets we have just
described, the typescript of which does indeed begin at p. 560. The “cahier rouge” is
not Cahier 22, as Kolb suggests (see his n. 3), but Cahier 70, which was not known at
the time vol. 11 of the Correspondance was published. Cahier 70 is the manuscript for
“Noms de pays: le pays,” i.e., the Normandy section, which comes directly after
“Autour de Madame Swann.”
15. The first editor, Henri Bonnet, in the Bulletin de la Société des Amis de
Marcel Proust 7 (1957): 280–81, dated it September or October 1911; see also his
study Comment a été conçu “A la recherche du temps perdu” (1959; reprint, Paris, 1971),
p. 125. Kolb assigns it to early January. Kolb’s dating rests on a remark in a letter to
Robert de Billy that Kolb plausibly dates January 19, in which Proust says, “il faut que
je finisse pour la dactylographe les dernières pages de mon premier chapitre”
(Correspondance 11:32 [letter 11]). But it seems reasonable to assume that Proust was
referring there to the whole of the Gilberte Swann section, whereas the request to
Nahmias accompanies another part of the typescript altogether, the one which starts
at the end of “Noms de pays: le nom” and continues with “Noms de pays: le pays.”
The traditional dating is accepted by the Pléiade editor: see Pléiade, pp. 1284–85; and
J.-Y. Tadié, Marcel Proust (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 676. Françoise Leriche (“Une
nouvelle datation des dactylographies du Temps perdu à la lumière de la Correspondance,”
in Bulletin d’informations proustiennes 17 [1986]: 7–20) suggested early June (p. 12); and
Shuji Kurokawa (“Remarques sur le manuscript et la dactylographie du ‘Récit de
Cricquebec’” [Paris: unpublished memoir, 1988]) adopted this suggestion (p. 70).
16. Letters 4, 66, and 78 of Correspondance 11, addressed to Nahmias and dated
January, May, and June by Kolb, should all, in my view, be reassigned to mid-May.
They clearly belong in sequence.
17. Correspondance 11:239, 291 [letters 128 and 148]. See Vigneron,
“Structure” (n. 2 above), p. 462, n. 69. The note in the Pléiade edition also implies
the connection (Pléiade, pp. 1280, 414, n. 1).
18. The manuscript mentions “feuilles mortes” and his difficulty in sleeping
(but in a different connection from letter 128). The word ‘nostalgie’ (letter 148) is not
imported into the novel until the typescript is corrected (see Pléiade, p. 414 var. b),
but that still antedates the letters to Mme Straus.
19. See the “chronologie de Marcel Proust” in Marcel Proust, A la recherche
du temps perdus, ed. Pierre Clarac and André Ferré, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1954),
1:xxxix. In an article which counts as my opus 1 (“A Note on the Text of Swann,”
Adam International Review 260 [1957]: 101–4), I pointed out (p. 104) that the
statement that comparison of the fourth and fifth proofs shows that the passage was
added in the autumn of 1913 is ill founded. The other piece of “evidence” accepted
in that article, and the conjecture that Proust added the third visit when he made the
transfer, can however no longer be sustained.
20. Cahier 23, fol. 18 is p. “17,” and the two sheets we have (65.4 and 65.2v)
are pp. “18” and “20.”
21. 409 var. a, “Alors, rien ne me causait plus d’émoi ....” We need to restore
the words omitted at the end of the sentence on p. 1278, which should read “et jouait
aux barres avec sa fille.”
218 Anthony R. Pugh
first lines of pl. 59/7 would have been copied, one assumes, onto the following page
(the one marked “60”).
32. The Pléiade variant (390a) records the new transition (between 408:38
and 390:33) as it appears on NAF 16753. One can see from the third proofs that the
text sent to the printer gave a longer transition at this point, which included the three
lines of 388, adapted to the new context.
33. Proust left Paris hastily on July 26, and the printer, Louis Brun,
acknowledged receipt July 29 (Correspondance 12:236 [letter 106] and 13:398 [letter
230]).
34. This is recorded correctly on p. clix, but wrongly on p. cxxxii, where the
final date is given as September 1. Kolb (n. 9 above) makes the same mistake
(Correspondance 12:207, n. 2), as does Tadié (n. 1 above; p. 705, n. 7), and more
spectacularly, the Pléiade editors, who speak of “les 95 placards des deuxièmes
épreuves” (Pléiade, p. 1049). September 1 is the last date stamped on the third proofs.
For the second proofs, the printer needed galley 46, returned July 13 (Correspondance
13:397 [letter 229]).
35. The antecedent of these transferred pages is in NAF 16753 (fols. 23v–24r,
pl. 55/1–6b).
36. The most plausible explanation for the omission of pl. 55/6b is that Proust
had his working copy, which broke at line 40, in front of him, and he made the same
cut without thinking. He added the missing sentence by hand to p. 478 of the third
proofs. It is surprising that he did not cut pl. 56 after the second column, as the text
of pl. 56/3–8 had already been set by the printer. The only difference, which could
have been handled simply by striking the lines he no longer wanted, was that the
paragraph stuck onto pl. 56/7, which came from pl. 55/8, had to be restored to its
original position as the transition between the two halves of the sunlight episode. It
would not have had to be recopied, as it was in place on pl. 55/8.
37. The inserted galleys are paginated (by Proust) pp. 479–85, 485bis, 485ter,
485quater. Page 485 of the proofs is now renumbered 485quinque.
38. Proust took pp. 495–96 (each pair of pages is of course printed
recto/verso), and cut it into two. Page 495a he attached to p. 494 (NAF 16757, fol.
110), with the result that p. 496a appears to be attached to p. 493 (it is struck out),
and he turned the lower half round, so that one sees p. 496b first, with p. 495b, struck,
on the back (fol. 111). Page 497 follows (fol. 112). Another copy of p. 495 (lower half)
and p. 496 (top half) was inserted into p. 500, but only for a portion of p. 495; the rest
is written in by hand.
39. They are still in 16753, as fol. 61r. NP says that pp. 411:28 to 414:39 were
suppressed, suggesting it was to make space, but this seems arbitrary. Proust is not
likely to have started his cut in the middle of a sentence which just happened to be
where the two halves of the galley divided. I fancy that all that happened was that the
pl. 74/5–8 got left behind by an oversight.
40. Lucien Daudet, Autour de soixante lettres de Marcel Proust, Cahiers Marcel
Proust, vol. 5 (Paris: Gallimard, 1929), p. 67; quoted by Kolb in Correspondance 12:256,
n. 6 (see n. 9 above).
41. Correspondance 12:287–88 [letter 128]. This letter is unfortunately difficult
to date (see Kolb, p. 288, n. 2), but it was probably written toward the end of October.
The reference to a mistake (“entêté” for “étêté,” 414:41) does not help, as the fourth
220 Anthony R. Pugh
proofs give “un seul, étêté, petit, trapu,” and Proust has simply moved the word so
that it follows “trapu.” For a full list of the possible “inconvénients,” see Vigneron,
“Structure” (n. 2 above), p. 464.
42. “Structure,” pp. 463–64. Vigneron posited an original order which was
coherent, but which had to be upset when Proust revised his ending. But the original
order is what Vigneron gives in his n. 72 (with the proviso that his units 4 and 5 were
reversed), presented as if it were the result of the changes forced upon Proust.
MAUREEN A. RAMSDEN
From Dalhousie French Studies 58, (Spring 2002). © 2002 by Dalhousie University.
221
222 Maureen A. Ramsden
author (or given the final imprimatur) (1972:17)? The definition of a texte
becomes increasingly problematic, leading Jacques Petit to state that “[l]e
texte n’existe pas.”3
Rather than simply suggesting a closed and rather narrow definition of
a texte, Marion Schmid has discussed different factors which are brought into
play when an avant-texte is finally published and accepted as a canonical texte
(1998). They include the style of a particular writer and the point at which
he decides on publication. They can also involve the important role of an
editor, who decides to present unfinished work for publication, and his
involvement in its general presentation: “What we consider to be a text
depends, first, on the literary æsthetics of individual authors (and, by
extension, on which documents they decided to release to the public) and,
second, on what has been established and presented as a text by publishers
and editors” (Schmid 1998:20).
Louis Hay cites four commonly received factors in the acceptance of a
texte: “auteur, œuvre, lecteur, société” (153). He thus adds the dimension of
the acceptance of the reading public, with its particular literary and cultural
norms, to the factors already cited by Marion Schmid. Another useful
approach to the problem is offered by Thanh-Vân Ton-That, in his
discussion of Jean Santeuil.4 He suggests that the means of defining a work
as a texte lies in the degree of completion at what he terms the external and
internal level of the work: “l’inachèvement peut être externe, lorsque l’œuvre
développée et bien construite semble brusquement interrompue, comme
privée de sa fin attendue; ou bien l’inachèvement est interne et touche des
unités plus réduites, non pas le texte dans sa globalité, mais un chapitre, une
phrase, voire un mot, d’où l’impression d’éclatement et d’instabilité” (17).
Thus the external level appears to relate to the overall plan and
structure of the work, essential to its overall understanding, while the
internal level concerns smaller units of the work—a level on which some
incompletion does not upset the transmission of the essential meaning of the
work. The definition of texte therefore seems to rely on a dynamic interplay
concerning a combination of factors whose relative importance might
change with the work of individual writers.
The definition of an avant-texte is equally problematic. The avant-texte
can appear in different guises. The material form which the avant-texte
commonly takes—the plans, brouillons, ébauches—depends, as Marion Schmid
has pointed out, on the particular writer and his style of writing. Most
nineteenth-century writers such as Zola and Flaubert, known as
“programmatic” writers, planned their work ahead in great detail, leaving
large numbers’ of plans, scénarios, brouillons, mises au net and also notes on
224 Maureen A. Ramsden
historical events (Schmid 1998:xv, and also 43-44, where she notes the
importance of Louis Hay’s work in this area). Here the approach reflects a
particular aim and genre. Writers such as Proust and Joyce, known as
“immanent” writers (their method being described also as écriture à processus),
seldom used written plans, but would allow their work to develop in the act
of writing (Schmid 1998:xv and 43-44). Their avant-texte therefore mainly
consists of brouillons.
The definition of the avant-texte has also depended on its relation to
the finished work or texte. As mentioned above, an avant-texte, for long not
considered as publishable material, is often viewed essentially as a private
texte, as opposed to the public nature of the published texte (see Grésillon
1994). The private texte can also be seen as inferior to the public texte. When
the texte is considered to be the perfected version at the end of a period of
trial and error, the brouillons are, by definition, the imperfect versions in this
process. The avant-texte is therefore seen as unfinished, unclear, and
therefore not worthy of publication. As Bellemin-Noël expresses it, “[les
brouillons] portent témoignage d’un labeur et du passage de l’imperfection à
la perfection” (1977:5).
In addition, the avant-textes can be seen as part of a teleological process,
as necessary workings and reworkings—recognisable different stages in the
evolution of the final texte. Acknowledging the fact that the later brouillons are
often potential units of texte, and can even change status several times in the
course of revisions, corrections and editions, Bellemin-Noël has seen the
avant-texte as being defined in retrospect—when the finished work has been
established (1977:6). Furthermore, the public texte itself can be reclaimed by
the writer as he makes changes in later editions and thus the texte can be said
to revert to the status of an avant-texte.
However, a narrow definition of avant-texte, seen from a teleological
perspective, can also bring about the exclusion of large amounts of material
which can appear to represent very different departures from the material
admitted in the final texte, and of seemingly little relevance in the
development of the texte. Nevertheless, the material which was rejected by
the writer in the development of his final texte is important for the ideas,
themes and stylistic methods he chose to leave aside when he embarked on
new directions, and must therefore be included in the term avant-texte and
given equal importance. As Grésillon remarks:
personality of the writer and the modernist cultural climate, Proust might
indeed have continued to expand his novel. The final sentence of Le temps
retrouvé, as Tadié has pointed out, was reworked several times and the word
“fin” appears in an earlier version, before the fourth and final version of the
sentence, so that it does not appear, physically, at the end of the manuscript
(1986:84). As Gérard Genette expresses it, “[j]amais [Proust] n’aura connu
l’authentique achèvement de cette œuvre, qu’il crut achevée en 1913, qui ne
l’était plus en 1914, qui ne l’était pas encore en 1922, et qui ne le sera jamais”
(9). On the other hand, a certain degree of incompletion does not mean that
a work must be rejected as a texte. As Ton-That has pointed out, an important
element in examining incompletion in a work is the level on which it is
found—internal or external.
However, the status of À la recherche as a texte can also be challenged on
the level of the amount of intervention of the editors. The NRF completed
publication of the posthumous works, having taken over responsibility for
the whole work in 1919, when they published À l’ombre des jeunes filles en
fleurs. The first editors, with the help of Proust’s brother, simply acted as
intermediaries in an attempt to be true to Proust’s intentions. Pierre Clarac
and André Ferré, in the Pléiade edition of 1954 (3 vols.), and later Jean-Yves
Tadié, in the Pléiade edition published between 1987 and 1989, used the
NRF edition for the work published during Proust’s lifetime. However they
differed in the text they presented for the unfinished volumes. Tadié points
out that all the latest corrections were not available to the editors in 1954:
“Nous avons pu améliorer le texte posthume, en rétablissant des corrections
voulues par Proust, en insérant des passages laissés en notes par nos
prédécesseurs [ ... ]” (Proust 1987:I:clxxii). Speaking of Tadié’s edition,
Marion Schmid has remarked that “most critics agree that the new Pléiade
provides the most authoritative text of À la recherche du temps perdu to date”
(1995:56). The published texte had thus on the whole been considerably
improved at the internal level.
Thus on the level of the near completion of the external structure (and
to a lesser extent the internal structure), as well as the work’s acceptance by
the public, there is considerable justification for calling À la recherche a texte.
The overall shape and thrust of the novel had been clear from the first drafts
and facilitated the editor’s work. As Proust himself explained, “[l]e dernier
chapitre du dernier volume a été écrit tout de suite après le premier chapitre
du premier volume. Tout l’ « entre-deux » a été écrit ensuite.”9 The strength
and clarity of the novel’s external structure was largely in place when Proust
died. As concerns the internal structure, in relation particularly to the
unfinished volumes, the amount of material Proust might finally have
Jean Santeuil and the Notion of avant-texte 229
included and any further additions he might have made cannot be known.
The method of his writing, as described by Bernard Brun, shows a “stellar
approach” (“écriture en étoile” [5]). This was reproduced in the structure of
the novel so that any set of units or echoes could be added to in order to
produce further links and echoes. The absence through incompletion of
several links in the narrative, or some slight confusion regarding names and
characters, is of little importance given the novel’s overall richness and
coherence. As Bellemin-Noël expresses it, “[le texte] nous est offert comme
un tout fixé dans son destin” (1979:116). Finally, the idea of the acceptance
of a texte by the reader and the public is particularly helpful when
considering À la recherche. Though at first it was misunderstood, even by the
well-known publishing house NRF, the novel was finally published, and both
the finished and unfinished volumes were accepted by the reading public.
(Du côté de chez Swann was published by Grasset in 1913 and the NRF finally
agreed to publish all of Proust’s novel to date in 1919. À la recherche was also
awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1919.) At the literary and cultural level the
special qualities of this modernist novel, which itself embraced
incompleteness, were thus recognised by the editors and the reading public.
The case of Contre Sainte-Beuve is more complex. Though Proust had
intended to have the work published, he seemed unable to decide between
writing a more formal essay of literary criticism and presenting his ideas in
the form of a narrative piece, woven around the ideas of the literary critic,
Sainte-Beuve, and it remained an unfinished project in Proust’s lifetime
(Schmid 1998: Part II, chapter 2). Proust shows his hesitation over form in a
letter to a friend, Madame de Noailles, in 1908:
Proust did not resolve this problem for Contre Sainte-Beuve; he effectively
abandoned the work, and both unfinished versions were left in manuscript
form.
Despite its unfinished state, Contre Sainte-Beuve was finally published in
1954 with a preface by Bernard de Fallois, and also in 1971, by Pierre Clarac
and Yves Sandre. The editors of these editions played a much bigger role in
presenting the unfinished material than did the editors of À la recherche.
Bernard de Fallois, for example, even assigned a title to the work and to the
230 Maureen A. Ramsden
different sections of it, and where there were several versions of a passage, he
selected one for publication (Proust 1954:27). He also brought together, in
his edition, the parts of Contre Sainte-Beuve which existed in the form of an
essay, and those which had the form of a narrative. In the 1971 edition, Pierre
Clarac retained both the title and the general arrangement of the fragments
of text of the first edition. However, Clarac and Sandre focus on the
manuscripts relating to the critic Sainte-Beuve, omitting the narrative
elements of the manuscripts (Proust 1971a:829).
However, the status of Contre Sainte-Beuve as texte might be challenged
in relation to both editions. It can be argued that the work, in its original
state, especially at the external level (the arrangement of the nucleus of the
principal ideas), was not sufficiently advanced to categorise Contre Sainte-
Beuve as a texte. In addition, the question of the form the work was to take
had not been resolved. De Fallois, in his introduction to the texte, himself
concludes that “Contre Sainte-Beuve au fond n’est pas un livre: c’est le rêve
d’un livre, c’est une idée de livre” (Proust 1954:28).
Tadié argues against both editions, seeing the first as being
representative of Proust’s aims, but too selective, while the second presents
only the argument against Saint-Beuve’s method of criticism and neglects the
narrative elements of the work. In Tadié’s view it was Proust’s attempt to
bring together such an abundance of material, while at the same time
attempting to reconcile two very different stylistic approaches, which led him
to abandon his original idea. Forme and fond were seemingly irreconcilable,
with the result that “[c]e livre inachevé explosait sous l’effet des tensions
internes” (1986:79).
However, rather than setting all the material aside, Proust began to
develop the narrative side of Contre Sainte-Beuve and parts of it reappear,
often somewhat changed, in different episodes and parts of À la recherche.
Maurice Bardèche describes the turning point as follows: “[Proust a essayé]
d’illustrer en quelque sorte la théorie qu’il professait en en montrant des
applications. Mais en montrant ces applications, c’était son roman que
Proust écrivait sans le savoir très clairement peut-être” (168). De Fallois cites
six episodes found among the feuillets intended for Contre Sainte-Beuve which
reappear in À la recherche: “la description de Venise, le séjour à Balbec, la
rencontre des jeunes filles, le coucher de Combray, la poésie des noms et les
deux « côtés »” (Proust 1954:11).
Thus Contre Sainte-Beuve assumes a rather schizophrenic existence.
Parts of the work, presented in two very different editions, were published
and given textual status, and parts of it have been claimed as avant-texte for
À la recherche (Tadié 1983:19). However, it can be argued that these “textes”
Jean Santeuil and the Notion of avant-texte 231
should have been published as avant-textes both because Proust did not
intend them to be published as textes and because they remained incomplete
on both the internal and the external level. Finally, and somewhat
paradoxically, Contre Sainte-Beuve can also be considered to have been
finished, rather than abandoned, because it becomes the novel À la recherche
(Tadié 1986:83).
What then of the status of the early “novel” Jean Santeuil, begun in
1895 and abandoned in 1900? Both the number of years that separate the
writing of Jean Santeuil from that of À la recherche, and the very different
reading experience they provide, mean that, to date, little work has been
done on establishing links between À la recherche and Jean Santeuil, though
there has been a lot of discussion concerning the links between Proust’s final
novel and Contre Sainte-Beuve.10 Proust had intended to write a novel, but
left the work unfinished and, more importantly, unpublished. It might
therefore, as a private piece of writing and as an unfinished manuscript,
appear to bear some of the important characteristics of an avant-texte. Tadié
describes the original manuscript as “mille pages, réparties en chapitres
inachevés, non classées, et finalement abandonnées par l’auteur” (1983:15).
However, the manuscript was published posthumously in the guise of a
novel, first by Bernard de Fallois in 1952, and then by Pierre Clarac in 1971.
As in the case of Contre Sainte-Beuve, it was the first editor who gave the
overall title of Jean Santeuil to the work, as well as subtitles to the many short
sections in this confused mass of manuscripts. He also organised the work by
reference to the finished novel À la recherche (Tadié 1983:123 and 139). Thus
the canonical, finished work was, paradoxically, made to serve as an avant-
texte to the earlier unfinished work. Clarac describes De Fallois’ approach as
follows:
Titles have been suggested by the editor for the many sections and
subsections of the novel to which Proust had not given a title or chapter
heading. However, unlike the practice of the earlier edition, the titles
invented by the editors are placed in square brackets, which once again
highlights the incompletion of the text. For example the first “chapter,” as
marked by Proust, becomes the prologue in the 1971 edition, and the
unfinished introduction, consisting of no more than about twenty lines of
text, is placed before the prologue (Tadié 1983:123). The first section is
named “[Enfance et adolescence]” (1971b:202), with subsections such as: “[le
baiser du soir]” (202), “[« Jean aimera la poésie »]” (211), “[le collège]” (230).
The general rule used by Clarac in organising the material was a mixture of
chronology and associated themes (Proust 1971b:982). However, some
episodes do not have any clear point of insertion in the work, and these are
presented in a separate section of “Fragments” at the end of the 1971 edition
(880-98).
Proust’s manuscript was not only incomplete, much of it had not been
put in any order. As Clarac points out, “[d]ans la première phase de son
travail Proust lui-même ignorait quelle place il assignerait aux diverses idées
qui traversaient son esprit” (Proust 1971b:982, n. 2). More importantly,
Proust reveals in his correspondence that, although he had written many
pages of his first novel, it was not near completion because he had not
discovered the overall “message” which he wished to convey. Thus in
September 1896, in a letter to his mother, Proust wrote: “[ ... ] si je ne peux
Jean Santeuil and the Notion of avant-texte 233
pas dire que j’aie encore travaillé à mon roman dans le sens d’être absorbé
par lui, de le concevoir d’ensemble [ ... ], le Cahier que j’ai acheté et qui ne
représente pas tout ce que j’ai fait, puisque avant je travaillais sur des feuilles
volantes—ce cahier est fini et il a 110 pages grandes” (1976:124, no. 65).
The result of the unfinished nature of the manuscripts and of the
different editing styles is that the reader is presented with two rather
different “textes” in the 1952 and 1971 editions. De Fallois and Clarac do not
always agree on what material should be included or completed in their
editions, or on the order and general mode of presentation of the material to
be adopted. In the 1952 edition, the text is divided into both parts, which are
numbered, and also into named chapters within the parts. There are in
addition unnamed sections where a break in the text appears within a
chapter. “Headings” or loose indications of the content of a part are given at
the beginning of each new section of the text. Some of these headings are the
same as the chapter titles. In Part I of the 1952 edition (61-131) the first four
titles are “Les soirées de Saint-Germain,” “Les soirées de Dieppe,” “M.
Sandré,” and “Marie Kossichef.” Three of these titles belong to a chapter but
the exception, “M. Sandré,” belongs to a section within a chapter (probably
in “Les soirées de Dieppe,” though M. Sandré is also mentioned in the
chapter headed “Marie Kossichef”).
The 1971 edition is divided into named parts and subsections (often in
square brackets, showing that they are the work of the editor). There are no
obvious divisions into chapters. The titles and content of these subsections
do not always correspond with the divisions in the 1952 edition. However,
the second part or section of the novel (concerning the Santeuil family’s stay
with relations in the country), begins in the same way in both editions:
“Quelquefois à Pâques, quand M, Santeuil n’avait pas trop à faire [ ... ]”
(1952:135, 1971b:277). The first chapter of Part II of the 1952 edition is
entitled “Étreuilles” and the second chapter is named “Journées de vacances”
(135, 143). The material found in the first four divisions of the second part
or section of the 1952 edition is given the titles “La maison d’Étreuilles,”
“Lilas et pommiers,” “Les rues,” “Ernestine,” etc. (the titles being given at
the beginning of the second section [133]). In the 1971 edition, the second
section has the overall title of “[À Illiers]” and covers much of the same
material as the earlier edition. The first five divisions or subsections, given in
square brackets and thus added by the editor, are as follows: “[Arrivée],”
“[Lilas et pommiers],” “[Lilas et aubépines],” “[Petite ville dévote],” and
“[Ernestine]” (1971b:277, 278, 280, 281). However, the divisions into
subsections within each part of the 1971 edition are much more numerous
than in the 1952 edition; some sections only consist of half a page of material.
234 Maureen A. Ramsden
Although Clarac might be said to be overstating the case here in seeing Jean
Santeuil as a more important source for À la recherche than Contre Sainte-
Beuve, many episodes and characters, as well as the method of their
presentation, found in À la recherche, were prefigured in Jean Santeuil.
Therefore, using the criteria discussed above, Jean Santeuil can be usefully
analysed as an avant-texte for À la recherche.
Looking first of all at the material of Jean Santeuil in comparison with
that of À la recherche, it is evident that Proust reworked not only the
characters and episodes of his early work, but also the themes.13 Thus many
of the headings, which have been added by the editor to the different
episodes in Jean Santeuil, find their echo in the résumé of the latest Pléiade
edition of the novel (Proust 1987), although there are changes in both the
names of the characters and of places. Many of the characters of À la
recherche, particularly those found in “Combray,” were first introduced in
Jean Santeuil. These include members of the child’s close family, such as his
parents (the rather authoritarian, but unpredictably kind father, and the
much-loved mother from whom the child can hardly bear to be separated,
particularly at night), and the great-aunt (Madame Servan or Sureau in Jean
Santeuil and tante Léonie in À la recherche).14 Many episodes and themes
found in À la recherche are also prefigured in Jean Santeuil. Episodes which
occur in both novels include the drame du coucher (sometimes referred to as
“le baiser du soir”) and the description of wealthy arriviste social circles, such
as the Cresmeyer family, which resembles, in its obsession with social
prestige, the Verdurin clan in À la recherche. On the level of themes, many of
the experiences in love described in À la recherche are prefigured in Jean
Santeuil. These include the young hero’s visits to the Champs-Élysées, where
he develops an obsession for a playmate (Marie Kossichef in Jean Santeuil
and Gilberte Swann in À la recherche) who does not form part of his social
circle. Thus both young heroes experience the way in which separation
increases and even creates their feelings for the loved one. In terms of an
artistic vocation, Marcel’s poetic sensibility is already apparent, to a limited
extent, in Jean Santeuil as shown, for example, by the way in which Jean
shares Marcel’s love for the hawthorns, particularly the pink variety
(1971b:330-33). Although there are some allusions in Jean Santeuil to the
236 Maureen A. Ramsden
hero’s desire to write, they are much less numerous and less emphasis is
placed on them than in À la recherche (for example, 1971b:211-15).
There are, of course, obvious differences between Jean Santeuil and À
la recherche. In Jean Santeuil there is a much larger amount of biographical
detail. There is also greater interaction between the hero and his family,
including their often violent disagreements. In addition, in the early work we
learn more of the hero’s days at the lycée, including Jean’s experiences in M.
Beulier’s “classe de philosophie,” while there are few references to Marcel’s
schooldays in À la recherche. Memory, one of the cornerstones of À la
recherche, is treated only briefly in Jean Santeuil (for example, 1971b:247-48
and 897-98 in the “Fragments divers”), as are the generalisations, in the form
of maxims, which are a more important part of À la recherche. An example in
the earlier novel would be the comment on the lack of harmony in the
feelings which people experience towards each other at different times:
“Hélas! les heures n’apportent pas à chacun les mêmes pensées” (1971b:412).
There are also some similarities and differences in the two novels on
the level of technique. The early novel was a product of Proust’s youth when
he was still searching for his material and, more importantly, for a means of
expressing it. The structure of the early novel follows, to some extent, the
chronological order of Jean’s life. In À la recherche, on the other hand,
Marcel’s love of literature and his slow discovery of his artistic vocation are a
more important part of the basic structure of the novel. One of Proust’s
greatest difficulties in Jean Santeuil was to transform the particular
experiences of life into the more widely familiar and useful material of
fiction. In the quotation placed by the editors just before the opening of Jean
Santeuil, Proust points out his difficulties over form: “Puis-je appeler ce livre
un roman? C’est moins peut-être et bien plus, l’essence même de ma vie
recueillie sans y rien mêler, dans ces heures de déchirure où elle découle. Ce
livre n’a jamais été fait, il a été récolté.”15 Jean Santeuil is written in the third
person, rather than the first person found in À la recherche. This point of view
appears to distance the reader from the experiences of Jean, the central
character. The preface (originally chapter one of the work) has a similar aim.
In addition, some of the episodes are grouped, as in À la recherche, by
association, in a stellar structure (cf. Brun). The many abrupt endings to the
different sections can be seen as pointing to a structure designed by means of
association. Tadié even suggests that this technique was not simply a manner
of working, but points to an integral part of Proust’s style (1986:76). Such
techniques are characteristic of a modernist work such as À la recherche. It is
therefore possible to state that Jean Santeuil fulfils a very important criterion
of an avant-texte—that of being part of the developmental process
Jean Santeuil and the Notion of avant-texte 237
Closer inspection also shows that the whole corpus of Proust’s work,
and especially Jean Santeuil and Contre Sainte-Beuve, is a continual reworking
of one novel, which itself barely emerges in canonical form from the mass of
avant-textes. As Ton-That expresses it, “[ ... ] toute l’œuvre de Proust pourrait
être placée sous le signe de l’inachèvement” (26). Contre Sainte-Beuve is a
work of criticism which is turned in upon itself. It becomes self-reflexive; it
contains the germ of explicit auto-criticism, which enables Proust to move
on to the final phase in his writing. Both Contre Sainte-Beuve and also the
early “novel,” Jean Santeuil, were instrumental in fashioning the final work,
both by what they contributed, in reworked form, and by what they
withheld, so that new routes could be pursued. This led to the emergence of
a modern novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, part of which remained
unfinished at the internal, but not at the external level, and which is itself a
texte, characterised by its potential for the endless reworking of its
boundaries.
Jean Santeuil and the Notion of avant-texte 239
NOTES
WORKS CITED
——. 1987. À la recherche du temps perdu. Ed. Jean-Yves Tadié. 4 vols. Bibliothèque de
la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1987–89.
——. 1990. Correspondance. Ed. Philip Kolb. Vol. XVIII. Paris: Plon.
——. 1993. Correspondance. Ed. Philip Kolb. Vol. XXI. Paris: Plon.
Ramsden, Maureen A. “Un autre Marcel ? Analyse structurelle et génétique du rôle
de la tante Léonie dans « Combray ».” Bulletin d’informations proustiennes
(forthcoming).
Schmid, Marion. 1995. “Teleology and Textual Misrepresentation: The New Pléiade
Proust.” French Studies Bulletin (Autumn):15–17.
——. 1998. Processes of Literary Creation: Flaubert and Proust. Oxford: Legenda. Tadié,
Jean-Yves. 1983. Proust. Paris: Belfond.
——. 1986. “Proust et l’inachèvement.” Le manuscrit inachevé : écriture, création,
communication. Paris: CNRS.
Ton-That, Thanh-Vân. “L’inachèvement dans Jean Santeuil.” Bulletin d’informations
proustiennes 25 (1994):17–26.
G A B R I E L L E S TA R R
Ethics, Meaning,
and the Work of Beauty
From Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (Spring 2002). © 2002 by the Johns Hopkins
University Press.
243
244 Gabrielle Starr
enter into and change the worlds of the people who read them. But the
return to the aesthetic, like the return to history, raises significant questions
about how literary studies as a discipline is constituted, and at the core of the
conflicts surrounding turns to aesthetics—both in the eighteenth century
and at the start of the twenty-first—are problems of labor and meaning.
Recent work by critics like Elaine Scarry has made bold and intelligent
statements about the potential of the aesthetic, but in turning to aesthetic
theory, many contemporary critics tend to reenact the melding of categories
at the heart of the emergence of eighteenth-century British aesthetics:
aesthetic experience and aesthetic inquiry are compressed and frequently
conflated, and aesthetic inquiry is, in turn, all but replaced by ethics or
hermeneutics. This pattern is in part the result of giving precedence to the
Shaftesburian tradition of aesthetic theory. As Ronald Paulson points out,
most literary study of the aesthetic proceeds from Shaftesburian assumptions
and suppresses or ignores the serious challenges offered to this strain within
the eighteenth century by “less respectable” thinkers like Hogarth.2 This
essay sketches a pattern common to ethical and hermeneutic approaches to
the aesthetic both then and now, examining the reasons aesthetics tends to
become an appealing object of contemporary theory-as-hermeneutics and a
de facto domain within the larger field of ethics. In opposition to this
tradition, I bring together works by Hogarth, Swift, and Proust—an unlikely
grouping, perhaps—in order to explore what happens when the temptations
of hermeneutic and ethical approaches to the aesthetic are held, even briefly,
at bay. The pressing questions are those of discipline. First, if aesthetics
matters, what does aesthetic inquiry produce that no other form of
questioning can? And second, what role might both the question and its
answers play in current reformulations of literary study?
The merging of aesthetic inquiry with ethics or hermeneutics has its
most explicit statement in the eighteenth century and is reinforced by late-
twentieth-century critique. Major texts in the early years of British and
continental aesthetics tend to emerge as answers to problems that on the
surface do not concern the aesthetic at all. The theories of aesthetics
promoted early in the century by Shaftesbury or Hutcheson are, in large
part, a response to the perceived moral crudity and inadequacy of Hobbesian
philosophy. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) undertakes to resolve
the foundations of both public and private virtue as a rebuttal of “licentious
systems” like Mandeville’s utilitarian approach to vice (and simultaneously
provides the framework by which a capitalist economy can be made a civil
one). Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) steps in to resolve the apparent
conflict between the first and second Critiques and to reconcile or unite
Ethics, Meaning, and the Work of Beauty 245
be the Springs of each virtuous Action.”9 Beauty in this formulation does not
have a unique ground in the mind or the world; the perception of beauty is
a specific result only of God’s interest in our motivations.10 While ethics may
be closely related to aesthetics, God’s law of justice is spelled out with a
clarity and precision that no aesthetic induction based on taste could ever
match. The ground of aesthetic taste is analogic and relative to the ground
of neighboring philosophical divisions.
Even without an explicitly moralist standard of origin, early-eighteenth-
century theories of the aesthetic tend to make its ground relative and
designate its primary field of jurisdiction as mediation between competing
goods and values. This is true of Joseph Addison’s arguments in The Spectator;
he links aesthetics and morality, but he grounds his discussion of beauty in
faculty psychology.11 The imagination emerges as the faculty of perception
most profoundly associated with the aesthetic. For Addison, the imagination
is introspective, working through an inner eye, but it is also perceptual,
oriented toward the outside world. As he puts it in The Spectator n. 411 (1712),
“[T]he Pleasures of the Imagination ... arise from visible Objects, ... when we
have them actually in our view” as well as “when we call up their Ideas into
our Minds by Paintings, Statues, Descriptions, or any the like Occasion.”12
The pleasures of vision are pleasures of the imagination because they are not
the result of qualities that inhere in objects but rather of things the mind does
to our perceptions: producing the sensation of color from the perception of
reflected light, for example. The imagination, even more than sight, is the
faculty that has the potential to link our inner and outer worlds.
Much like the sense of beauty, the Addisonian imagination is a
mediating force, doing work that reconciles individual with community,
inside with outside. However, the balance between the presumed privacy of
any emotional or aesthetic experience and its communal properties is not an
easy one—it must be elaborately theorized (by Shaftesbury or Smith) and
carefully maintained, just as the balance between imagination as
introspection and perception must be defended against the problems of the
quixote and the solipsist (as in the cases of Charlotte Lennox or Samuel
Johnson). Beauty, to take one aspect of aesthetic experience, must be saved
for the ethical and communal because without due care, it seems to lead to
private, unconsidered consumption. Unless beauty is absorbed into a
discourse of use, discipline, and balance, it seems somehow incomplete—for
critical purposes. To meet this problem, aesthetic experience is supposed by its
theorists to work to create ethical community; by implication, aesthetic
criticism seeks to make beauty produce some meaning that goes beyond itself.
Aesthetic criticism disciplines beauty, assigning it duties of its own.
248 Gabrielle Starr
Hogarth extends this criterion to the nonvisual from the start and puts the
question of labor firmly onto the mind and not onto beauty itself. The mind’s
desire to pursue challenges is the foundation of the pleasures of aesthetics.
This has formal consequences, but coming from within (the mind) rather
than from without (objects with definite form), it does not have a formal
origin. The pleasure associated with a particular composition depends upon
the mental response to visual or intellectual challenge; form itself is not
legislative and is crafted in response only to a mental principle, the
requirement that the mind be enticed to pursuit (or as Coleridge might say,
drawn on by pleasure).21 The aesthetic is thus freed from dependence on its
manifestation—problems can be as beautiful as waterfalls, and sensory
perception does not rule the day.
To return to the question I introduced earlier, the test that aesthetic
inquiry must face is not how it violates, complicates, supports, or rewrites the
ethical but what, if any, unique information aesthetic inquiry produces and
what, if any, unique role aesthetics plays in human experience. Hogarth’s
inquiry into aesthetics suggests that aesthetic experience involves a mental
drive (something prefiguring perhaps Schiller’s play drive—a strain of
investigation that has born excellent fruit in recent philosophical inquiry,
most notably in the work of Kendall Walton). Hogarth argues that the
unique role aesthetics plays is that it structures appetites (both physical and
mental).22 An aesthetic structure of appetite is one that privileges pursuit
over attainment.23 Aesthetics, then, is not grounded in objects or in
perception but in the way individual subjects approach both ideas and things.
Hogarth’s use of a mental principle to ground the aesthetic is
suggestive, opening up broader possibilities for modeling aesthetic thought.
Based on readings of the relationship between aesthetics and the imagination
in Swift and Proust, I suggest it is possible to imagine other answers—
literary answers—to the question of the possibilities of aesthetics. I here
juxtapose eighteenth-and twentieth-century literary texts by making an
appeal to eighteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetic theories that enact
similar relations. The juxtaposition of Swift and Proust offers a literary
dimension to the historical trace I pursue in aesthetic criticism. Scarry turns
to Proust to support her claims about beauty, and in doing this, turns to a text
that melds the two principal strains of early eighteenth-century approaches
to the beautiful. Proust’s pursuit of memory is a pursuit of beauty that has
passed away, a project deeply compatible with Hogarth’s The Analysis.
However, while Proust celebrates the importance of pursuit in the
experience of beauty, his work also participates in the Shaftesburian vein of
aesthetic thought, valuing disinterest and connoisseurship. This double
252 Gabrielle Starr
Scarry draws some general hypotheses about experiences of beauty from this
and similar passages. First, no two aesthetic experiences are alike. Second, an
experience of beauty is unique not just because of the singular character of
every object of beauty, but because each experience is tied to a unique
moment of perception, whose exact terms can never come again, even in
Ethics, Meaning, and the Work of Beauty 253
But alas, she must be forever absent from the other life towards
which I was being borne with ever increasing speed, a life which
I could resign myself to accept only by weaving plans that would
enable me to take the same train again some day and to stop at
the same station, a project which had the further advantage of
providing food for the selfish [intéressée], active, practical,
mechanical, indolent, centrifugal tendency which is that of the
human mind, for it turns all too readily aside from the effort
which is required to analyze and probe, in a general and
disinterested [générale et désintéressée] manner, an agreeable
impression which we have received. And since, at the same time,
we wish to continue to think of that impression, the mind prefers
to imagine it in the future tense, to continue to bring about the
circumstances which may make it recur—which, while giving us
no clue as to the real nature of the thing, saves us the trouble of
recreating it within ourselves and allows us to hope that we may
receive it afresh from without. (707–8; Pléiade 2:18)
Human beings have problems with the unique; gripped in habit, we may
want to make beauty like other things, and this is not always good. Having
experienced a moment of beauty, we wish, in Proust’s view, to call it up
wholesale; if we cannot get the thing itself, we want to be “practical” about
it, to approximate it as closely as possible, and to keep thinking it is in our
possession even if it is not. The drive to reproduce and hold on to beauty in
words, images, art, memory, even theory (the drive at the core of Scarry’s
argument), can transform beauty into something else. If beauty and truth, as
Shaftesbury claims, are forever wrapped up together—“For all beauty is
truth”—it is perhaps because beauty moves those who see it, feel it, or think
it to the metaphorical or analogic, and it is also thus that beauty seems (but
only seems) to resist the analytic.25 Making metaphors is good, even
desirable—no one could regret Proust’s metaphors—but both maker and
reader must recognize them for what they are.
Each transformation through metaphor may produce new beauty,
which itself may be interrogated, analyzed, and enjoyed, as long as viewers
recognize that newness and transformation. However, when the impulse to
254 Gabrielle Starr
transform and refigure shifts from the purely metaphorical to the analogic,
problems multiply. If the metaphorical belongs to the experience of beauty,
the analogic seems to belong to aesthetic criticism, where beauty is often
placed in analogic relation to truth or justice.26 The movement that beauty
may initiate—one toward metaphor, analogy, and even desire—is not itself
beauty and can, in fact, turn us away from the aesthetic entirely. Proust gives
us a reminder of the slippery relation of aesthetic experience to aesthetic
criticism: as with the dreamer Marcel, in the desire to analyze and interpret,
theorists can be drawn away from the goal and may end up doing something
more like substitution than analysis. They—perhaps we—may only imagine,
repeatedly, the figure of the milkmaid. The imagination, whether critical or
creative, can be habitual, and instead of really linking us with the world, can
just turn us closer in upon ourselves. This is what happens when theorists
turn beauty into an ethical or hermeneutic shadow of itself.
It is useful to think about what the resistance of metaphorical or
analogic translation of aesthetic experience can produce. Scarry turns to
Proust for a literary exemplar; in returning to the eighteenth-century origins
of her Shaftesburian ethical position (and seeking an alternative to it), I turn
to an eighteenth-century author, Swift, who has closer affinities to the
aesthetic positions of Hogarth than those of Shaftesbury.27 Swift is acutely
aware of the contests that may be staged between ethics and aesthetics (often
framed for him in terms of real and imaginary value), and he provides a
contemporary context for interrogating the tensions surrounding the
aesthetic, whether political, literary, or ethical. At first glance, we find
ugliness much more than beauty in Swift. Compare the ideal scene that
appeared in Proust with what approximates a satirical version of it in
Gulliver’s Travels (1726). In Brobdingnag, the land of the giants, Gulliver sees
a horrible version of a milkmaid:
The Nurse to quiet her Babe ... was forced to apply the last
Remedy by giving it suck. I must confess no Object ever
disgusted me so much as the Sight of her monstrous Breast,
which I cannot tell what to compare with, so as to give the
curious Reader an Idea of its Bulk, Shape and Colour. It stood
prominent six Foot, and could not be less than sixteen in
Circumference. The Nipple was about half the Bigness of my
Head, and the Hue both of that and the Dug so varified with
Spots, Pimples and Freckles, that nothing could appear more
nauseous: For I had a near Sight of her, she sitting down the more
conveniently to give Suck, and I standing on the Table.28
Ethics, Meaning, and the Work of Beauty 255
This milk bearer is no maid, and her breast, while being nearly large enough
to make the simile work, is nothing like the sun. With Marcel, the milkmaid’s
face produces elaborate similes born of or linked to the desire to prolong
contact with the beautiful and renew it in the imagination. Marcel wants to
make images for himself more and more like that of the woman, but the
Nurse’s breast for Gulliver is beyond “compare.”
The hermeneutic possibilities here are enormous. We have two images
of women laden with milk, one an object of beauty and desire, the other, of
loathing and fascination. Ethical complications are readily apparent—issues
of objectification, distance, colonization.29 All of these compete for
attention, and they come from the combination of aesthetic experiences with
other aspects of the mind. Ethical and hermeneutic principles reveal some of
the political and psychological implications of this passage as well as of the
aesthetic experience that is depicted or that may be produced: but what
happens once these strains of inquiry have come into play? The startling
thing to realize is that Gulliver’s experience of disgust and the experience of
reading about it approach an exaggeration of the experience of reading about
Marcel’s experience of beauty. This is to say, the giant breast is only and can
only ever be (in Swift’s world) an experience of the imagination, just as with
the reader’s experience of Marcel’s maid. This is at bottom, merely a
characteristic of the fictional that Swift’s scene intensifies. In the aesthetic
terms I borrow from Proust, however, this basic characteristic of fiction has
more precise implications for aesthetic sensation. Swift pushes us toward a
breaking of habit within the mind’s eye (a not-quite-realist defamiliarization)
to produce an image without compare. He breaks down the problem Proust
identifies, the separation between experience and memory, experience and
imagination, to focus simultaneously on the possibility of unique experience
and on its eventual repeatability. We may pass from the unique via the pull of
desire (to see again, to think again, to feel again), and this rather Hogarthian
drive to pursuit can help produce (but never fully account for) the cultural or
individual significance of fiction. The transformation from nothing—
something unimagined, uncredited, nonexistent—to something one chooses
to see again, read again, and feel again is at the heart of aesthetic experience.
And whether that leads to justice or not it is one thing that ensures the
viability of cultural artifacts.
Swift thus calls on us to think the imagination as a preface to thinking
beauty in a way Proust encourages and Hogarth might approve. A Swiftian
detour through the ugly may seem like a roundabout way to get at the
aesthetics of the beautiful, but it is both appropriate and functional, enabling
me to break the habit of metaphorical thinking. What in Swift or Proust,
256 Gabrielle Starr
The opening of the palinode Occasioned by Sir William Temple’s Late Illness and
Recovery (1693) is a rare attempt in the Swiftian canon to address the
problems of the muse.32 How is it that aesthetic and imaginative experience
may be recreated? If emotion and inner vision are ephemeral, how can they
ever return, as they seem to do, and how can they ever matter? The poem
posits a problem about the continuity of emotional and aesthetic response in
the face of frailty, maturity, and loss. The opening phrase is somewhat
startling: most of the time, it is not strange to conceive that seeing the same
object again and again produces similar sensations and similar associations of
ideas. But for Swift, as for Proust, this persistence of the past may be a sign
of illness and deception: accidents of perception hold us in their grip without
258 Gabrielle Starr
a standard of judgment that could adequately explain any vision, any truth,
or any perception of beauty at all. The attempt to ground aesthetic
experience in metaphor, in the fictitious body of the muse, for example, is an
unsatisfying self-deception, merely putting an outward dress of universality
on the quixotic material of the poet’s own mind:
The problem is not just that the muse historically has become an awkward
fiction, more likely to become Pope’s Goddess of Dulness than the spur of
creativity, or that Swift is generally suspicious of the flattery of the
imagination.33 The key here is that imagination can never hold anything in
perpetuity, neither beauty nor disgust; even though the image may return, it
is new and only “so like” (again, simile, metaphor). Swift sees the contours of
the problem of aesthetic inquiry. Aesthetics leads to other things (analogic
connections to ethics, shadowy attempts at reliving the past), things whose
pursuit may turn attention away from beauty entirely. The metaphors and
substitutions that aesthetic experience may promote balance on a cusp of
ephemerality and permanence. The final lines of the ode insist on the
acceptance of mutability, of self-difference (as the poet’s experience of
maturity, mood, illness, recovery), forgetting, and closure in aesthetic
experience.
Swift’s poem—as both paean and palinode—has disciplinary echoes.
For him, the muse and her temporality are tied up in the instability and
precariousness of the poetic career. Attempts in literary study to refocus
attention on aesthetics and on why aesthetics matters are also attempts to
focus attention on why our discipline matters—why reading texts and
teaching others how to read them is significant. But we must be careful to
recall how much of an intervention aesthetic inquiry actually is. The sense of
seamlessness that emotion is apt to produce—the way that the same objects
may strike the mind at distant hours so like—may encourage critics and
theorists to forget the changeability of aesthetic experience not just in one
person from one hour to the next, but much more broadly, from one culture
Ethics, Meaning, and the Work of Beauty 259
to pursuit that structures beauty.37 Perhaps, then, the shift into metaphor or
analogy, the exchange of one (sometimes beautiful) object for another, is a
kind of homage to beauty’s ineluctable and indispensable disappearance. As
beauty dissolves into ethics in Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, or Scarry, it is
perhaps just doing what it does best. However, aesthetic experience and
aesthetic inquiry involve different demands. Any move to analyze beauty
should not wholly reenact the effects of substitution that Proust associates
with the beautiful. Aesthetic inquiry can go farther than this, following the
traces of beauty as it is transformed and reconfigured, if, as with the
Hogarthian pursuit of the serpentine line, querents keep trying to keep
beauty in sight.
NOTES
1. See, among others, Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Malden, Mass.:
Blackwell, 2000); Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare
Experiences (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998); Elaine Scarry, On Beauty
and Being Just (New York: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999). I engage primarily with
Scarry here.
2. Ronald Paulson, The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996), xi.
3. Smith attacks Mandeville in particular in part 7, chapter 4 of The Theory of
Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), 306–314. On Shaftesbury,
Hutcheson, and the revision of Hobbes, see Ernest Tuveson, “Shaftesbury and the
Age of Sensibility,” in Howard Anderson and John Shea, eds., Studies in Criticism and
Aesthetics, 1660–1800 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1967). For overviews
of doctrines of sympathy and their relation to aesthetics, see Walter Jackon Bate,
From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1949), chapter 5; and James Engell, The Creative
Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press,
1981). David Marshall gives a cogent discussion of Shaftesbury and Smith in The
Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), chapters 1–3 and 7. On the connection between The
Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, see Robert Boyden Lamb,
“Adam Smith’s System: Sympathy Not Self Interest,” Journal of the History of Ideas35
(1974): 671–82; and Athol Fitzgibbons, Adam Smith’s System of Liberty, Wealth, and
Virtue: The Moral and Political Foundations of The Wealth of Nations (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1995). On the connection between the third Critique and the rest of Kant’s
system, Kant writes, “Judgment ... in the order of our [specific] cognitive powers is a
Ethics, Meaning, and the Work of Beauty 261
contemplation and not of aesthetic perception: “[F]orm can never be understood and
assimilated unless it is distinguished from its mere effect and made an independent
object of aesthetic contemplation. The intuition of the beautiful, which is to be
distinguished carefully from the mere sensation of the beautiful, arises only from such
contemplation, which is ... the purest sort of activity, namely, the activity peculiar to
the soul” (326). This contemplation can only follow perception, and it is there that
the problems lie.
9. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and
Virtue, in Collected Works of Francis Hutcheson (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1990),
1: vii. Hutcheson argues that the internal sense is constructed in the way it is because
of “some Constitution of the AUTHOR of our Nature” (42), so that God’s aesthetic
vision ratifies our own.
10. Although Hutcheson can describe the principle, namely, uniformity amid
variety, by which the internal sense makes discriminations of beauty, it is a principle
much like any other perceptual rule: just as our attention as humans is drawn by
motion or we preferentially notice objects whose lighting suddenly shifts, the internal
sense is tuned to objects exhibiting variety in uniformity.
11. Most works in early British aesthetics are essentially deist in origin and are
loosely but not doxologically linked to Christian ethics and theology (Paulson,
Beautiful, Novel, and Strange, x); Addison’s belief in God does little for him toward
finding a rational or adequate explanation of the aesthetic itself. There are a variety
of works that follow the pattern set by Shaftesbury, Addison, and Hutcheson in the
first sixty or so years of the century. Many of them may be grouped together in terms
of their approach to the question of aesthetic ground. Burke, for example, follows the
general pattern of Addison in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of
the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990).
12. The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 3:
53637.
13. Emory Elliot’s work on beauty is not yet published but has been presented
in talks at the MLA (1999) and elsewhere. He argues that an expanded and refreshed
aesthetics, instead of being the ground of exclusion from the canon, can be the
ground for including works by women, minority, and queer poets and novelists.
Armstrong’s ethical argument is for—or at least works best with—the radical
intervention of particular works when confronted in particular ways, not for aesthetic
experience in general (which is in no way a fault).
14. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 81.
15. Ibid., 90. Cf. Burke: “I call beauty a social quality; for where women and
men, and not only they, but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in
beholding them, ... they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affection
towards their persons; we like to have them near us, and we enter willingly into a kind
of relation with them, unless we should have strong reasons to the contrary” (A
Philosophical Enquiry, 39).
16. See Shaftesbury, “Miscellany III” in Characteristics, 414ff.
17. The Radical Aesthetic, 59. Armstrong adapts Hegel and post-Lacanian
psychoanalysis in her quest for a language suited to analyzing the affective. She
theorizes from “the broken middle,” a position that mediates cognition and affect and
makes the aesthetic a particular “form” of coming to knowledge.
Ethics, Meaning, and the Work of Beauty 263
18. A casual survey of the MLA database in January 2001 produced thirteen
hits for Hogarth’s The Analysis. Of the greater than one hundred entries for
Shaftesbury, over sixty refer to his aesthetic theories, and there are more than sixty
entries on Burke’s theories of the sublime.
19. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 1997), 1.
20. The serpentine line is a two-dimensional waving line that has been twisted
so that it spirals into three dimensions. Not all serpentine lines are beautiful; some
are clumsy, some fatiguing, just like some problems (33). There is one particular
configuration that is essential (41–42). The serpentine line itself is an abstraction
from beauty in the world. The line makes sense less as a determinate form than as the
physical incarnation of aesthetic desire: it mimics the processes the mind performs in
searching for and in apprehending the beautiful. On the ethical question, see Paulson:
“W.J.T. Mitchell has asked ... : ‘Does the Satanic character of the serpentine line
suggest that beauty is simply independent of moral status? Or does it suggest that
beauty is actively subversive of morality, order, and rationality, and that the ‘curiosity’
aroused by beauty is the same that lured Eve into her wanton, lustful fall?’ The fact
that Hogarth raises these questions is probably more important than the answer”
(46). For Hogarth, aesthetic operations can work on moral subjects, just as moral
operations can work on aesthetic ones (Paulson, introduction to Analysis, xxxiii).
21. In chapter 14 of the Biographia Literaria (eds. James Engell and Walter
Jackson Bate [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983]. vol.7, pt.2), Coleridge argues
that the movement of the mind in reading a poem should be sinuous: “The reader
should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of
curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable
activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a
serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or like the path
of sound through the air; at every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the
retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward” (14).
Hogarth’s serpentine line appears again, divorced from the visual and rendered a
mental principle.
22. See Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the
Representational Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990); and Armstrong,
The Radical Aesthetic.
23. Paulson argues that Hogarthian “[p]ursuit does not ... pass beyond the
solution of a puzzle, the winning of a game. The chief object, to judge by the
metaphors of sexual pursuit and the chase, is a woman or a fox; but when the pursuit
passes beyond seduction or capture to possessing or killing, it is no longer within the
range of the Beautiful” (Beautiful, Novel, and Strange, 44). This is resonant with Kant’s
analysis of aesthetics based on the principle of purposiveness without purpose.
24. Remembrance of Things Past, trans. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Penguin,
1983), 1:705. The quotations that follow come from the pléiade edition of À la
recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard, 1988).
25. Shaftesbury, “Sensus Communis, an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and
Humour,” 65.
26. Eagleton argues that Burkean politics absorbs aesthetics via a
metaphorical principle: “We become human subjects by pleasurably imitating
264 Gabrielle Starr
practical forms of social life .... To mime is to submit to a law, but one so gratifying
that freedom lies in such servitude. Such consensuality is less an artificial social
contract ... than a kind of spontaneous metaphor or perpetual forging of
resemblance” (53).
27. Swift is often read as being resistant to the aesthetic and to beauty in
particular; see, for example, ee Carole Fabricant, Swift’s Landscape (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982). In Jonathan Swift: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), Denis Donoghue also argues that for Swift
“[b]enevolists like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson” had little appeal (64–65).
28. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (New York: Norton, 1970), 71.
29. I here have in mind primarily psychoanalytic and feminist readings of
Swift as well as other traditional readings of the Swiftian persona, including Norman
Brown, Life against Death; The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown,
Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1959); John Middleton Murry, Jonathan Swift: A
Critical Biography (London; Cape, 1954); W.B. Carnochan, Lemuel Gulliver’s Mirror
for Man (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968); and revisionist readings of Swift’s
relationship to women and attitudes toward femininity by Carol Houlihan Flynn, The
Body in Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990); Felicity
Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women, 1660–1750
(Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1984); Margaret Anne Doody, “Swift among
the Women,” Yearbook of English Studies 18 (1988): 68–92; and Ellen Pollak, Poetics of
Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago: Univ.of
Chicago Press, 1985). Feminist scholars in particular have offered significant ethical
readings of Swift’s work that press beyond the traditional view of Swift as fearful
misogynist. Although I place ethical or hermeneutic reading in abeyance here, I do
not underestimate the complexity of such readings, a complexity summed up by
Laura Brown: “The works of Jonathan Swift provide a critical test case for political
criticism and a providing ground for the nature of the ‘politics’ of such a criticism ....
Swift’s texts lend themselves equally to a negative and a positive hermeneutic, and a
critic concerned with the political aim of her readings of literary culture might well
pause between the exposure of misogyny in the canon and the discovery of an early
ally in the struggle against colonialism. Which to choose?” “Reading Race and
Gender: Jonathan Swift,” Critical Essays on Jonathan Swift, ed. Frank Palmeri (New
York: G.K. Hall, 1993), 121.
30. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, 112.
31. Jonathan Swift, the Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers (New York: Penguin,
1983), 76; subsequent references to Swift’s poetry are to this edition.
32. A number of the small and poetically uneven group of early odes address
what Swift perceives as the problems of poetry. John Irwin Fischer argues that these
poems chronicle Swift’s gradual realization of human frailty and the contrast between
that weakness and poetic grandeur, On Swift’s Poetry (Gainesville: Univ. Presses of
Florida, 1978), chap. 1. See also Irwin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the
Age (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962), 1:111–41; Peter J. Schakel, The
Poetry of Jonathan Swift (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978), chap. 1; and Nora
Crowe Jaffe, The Poet Swift (Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New England, 1977),
chap. 3.
Ethics, Meaning, and the Work of Beauty 265
33. The poem is usually read as Swift’s youthful farewell to epideictic poetry
in favor of satire or as a temporary adieu to fame (or hopes for Temple’s approval).
See Jaffe, The Poet Swift, 74; Schakel, The Poetry of Jonathan Swift, 27–28; or
Fabricant, who writes that the poem “is a scathing denunciation of the visionary
muse, ... and affirms a resolve to turn away completely from the realm of murky
imaginings, of chimeras rather than actualities .... The verse ends with a renunciation
having profound implications for both the form and the content of Swift’s subsequent
poetry, which becomes increasingly more topical and more dependent upon
empirically observed detail, as well as increasingly less indulgent of the vagaries of the
imagination” (Swift’s Landscape, 58).
34. See Fisher, 52. Fisher argues that she becomes an allegory for religious
faith, and she transforms “each human experience ... [into] an emblem of god’s
gracious presence” (Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences. 53). My
argument in this paragraph builds on his (49–54).
35. Paul Hunter’s brilliant recent article in Eighteenth-Century Studies is an
attempt to account for this problem: “Sleeping Beauties: Are Historical Aesthetics
Worth Recovering?” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34, no. 1 (fall 2000): 1–20.
36. I suggested at the beginning of this essay that new historicism and the new
aesthetics are related, that they are both responses to contemporary challenges about
the relationship between theory and practice, texts and the world. At best, both of
these impulses are pushing toward radical reconceptions of textual practice, but at
worst, they assume a predictive and or constitutive relation between unique moments
and constructs that overshadow and overpower them.
37. Among these are Patrick Cavanagh, Mark Tramo, and Semir Zeki,
neuroscientists interested in perception, just to name a few. See especially Semir Zeki,
Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999);
a recent volume of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, “Art and the Brain,” 6, nos. 6–7
(1999), with articles by Zeki and V.S. Ramachandran; and Tramo’s recent work on
music and the brain in Science, 291, no. 5501 (5 January 2001): 54–56.
38. Cf. Armstrong on Adorno: “[B]eauty is not a thing, an is, or even an ought;
it is a want or wanting. Beauty conjures wanting because it is a promise of the as yet
unsayable, a fleeting promise of new possibilities, of scarcely envisioned openings in
experience emancipated from the world of exchange” (186; italics original). I don’t
believe beauty conjures wanting but that “wanting” and beauty define each other
reciprocally. Pursuit structures the experience of the beautiful, gives it the shape that
is its being.
Chronology
267
268 Chronology
273
274 Contributors
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Adam Bede (Eliot), 39–42, 44–46, 50–51 writing of, 21–22, 27, 32, 176,
Addison, Joseph, 247 201–15, 230–31, 234
Adolphe (Constant), 145 A la recherché du temps perdu, characters
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allusions in, 23, 205 de in A la recherché du temps perdu
behavior in, 59 Elstir in. See Elstir in A la recherché du
criticism of, 139–49, 227 temps perdu
cruelty in, 33–34 Forcheville in, 5–6
desire in, 33, 177, 195 Francoise in, 190–92, 201, 203, 205
first person narrative in, 140–45, 179, grandmother in, 23–25, 29–30,
236, 238 123–28, 160
compared to Gulliver’s Travels, 254–56 Guermantes, Duc de, 90–91, 93, 111,
imagination in, 31, 34, 254 113, 192
Jean Santeuil influence on, 221–22, Guermantes, Duchesse, 90, 113, 114
227, 231–38 Guermantes, Prince de, 24, 33, 90,
metaphors in, 116, 253 193
modernism in, 236, 238 Jupien in, 24
moral consequences in, 60 Leonie, Aunt in, 167, 235
relations to the dead in, 105 Marcel in. See Marcel in A la recherché
remorse in, 23 du temps perdu
war in, 31, 56, 181, 192 Morel in, 24
women in, 190–98 Rachel in, 7–9, 114
285
286 Index
and aesthetic theory, 244, 248–51, Jean in, 39, 46, 49, 52, 166, 173,
254–57, 259–60 235–36
Hokenson, Jan, 83–103, 274 Madame Lawrence in, 52–53
on Proust’s use of Japanese Marie scandal in, 53–54, 60, 170, 235
aestheticism in A la recherche du memory in, 173–76, 178, 236
temps perdu, 83–103 narrator of, 48, 59–60, 235
Homer, 19 publication of, 231, 237
Hugo, Victor, 22 realism in, 237–38
Hutcheson Monsieur de Ribaumont in, 52
and aesthetic theory, 244, 246, Madame Servan in, 235
248–49, 260 third-person narrative of, 236
writing of, 231, 234
Johnson, Samuel, 247
Ibsen, Henrik, 187 Jouhandeau, M., 29
“Image of Proust, The” (Benjamin), 115 Joyce, James, 224
Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East and use of how technology affects
in Modern French Literature human experiences, 123, 130–35
(Schwartz), 86 compared to Proust, 123, 130, 134–35
In Search of Lost Time. See A la recherché
du temps perdu
Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Kant, Immanuel, 108, 116, 119, 135
Beauty and Virtue (Hutcheson) and aesthetic theory, 244, 246
aesthetic theory in, 246 Keats, John, 115
Kilmartin, Terence
translator, 71
Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 106 Kracaurer, Siegfried, 123
Jean Santeuil, 27, 181 Kristeva, Julia, 17–35, 72, 98, 273
allusions in, 235 on the last volume of A la recherche
Arthur in, 53 du temps perdu, 31–34
bed-time kiss in, 25 on Proust compared to Heidegger,
behavior in, 59 20, 33–34
Madame Cresmeyer in, 52–53, 235 on Proust compared to Spinoza, 34
criticism of, 227, 237 on Proust and the death of mother,
George Eliot in, 38 22–24, 29–31
Emerson in, 38 on Proust and psychic time, 18–21
Ernestine in, 45 on the writing of A la recherche du
Experiences of love in, 235 temps perdu, 21–22, 24–29
fictionalized autobiography of, 39
Henri in, 52 Lalande, André
image of mother in, 25 Vocabulaire technique et critique de la
influence on A la recherché du temps philosophie, 150
perdu, 221–22, 227, 231–38 Lauris, Georges de, 210
inversion theme in, 25, 177 “Law of Compensation” (Emerson), 50
Mr. Irwine in, 53 Lebrave, Jean-Louise, 226
Index 291
L’éducation sentimentale (Flaubert), 225 mother of, 23, 27, 30, 90, 92, 112–13,
Lejeune, 145 177, 203, 235
Lemaire, Madeleine narrator of, 18, 22, 29–30, 32, 55,
illustrator, 171 57–60, 85, 88, 92–93, 95, 112–13,
Lennox, Charlotte, 247 115–17, 138, 177, 194–95
Lewes, G.H., 51, 56 recollections of, 137
“L’ Éventail” obsessions of, 10–11, 170, 204–6,
time lost and regained in, 172 210–11, 235
Life of Forms in Art, The (Focillon), 117 passion of, 31
L’Indifférent quest of, 168–69
desire in, 171 self-awareness of, 89
fear of suffocation in, 171 self-justification in, 139, 147, 158–60
Lepré in, 171–72 sexuality of, 179
Madeleine in, 171–72 and Gilberte Swann, 192, 201, 203,
L’Irréversible et la nostalgie (Jankélévitch), 208–9, 235
106 suffering of, 26, 85
and the telephone, 124–25
world, 32
Malebranche, Nicolas Maupassant, Guy de, 60
and self-justification, 150–56 Maurois, André, 39, 48
Man Paul de McLaren, Ottilie, 189
on enlightment aesthetics, 245, 249 Meditations (Descartes)
on Proust’s insight, 7, 147 memory in, 111
Mandeville, 244 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice
Manet, Edouard, 22, 90 on perception, 108
Marcel in A la recherché du temps perdu, Michelangelo, 63
252, 255–56 Middlemarch (Eliot), 52, 54, 60
accomplishments of, 12 Mill on the Floss, The (Eliot), 40–41,
aesthetic innovation of, 85 54–58
and Albertine, 22, 30, 33, 160, Modern Painters (Ruskin), 44, 46
172–73, 190, 193 Monet, Claude, 87–88, 90–92
artistic apprenticeship of, 90, 92, Montesquiou, Robert de 23, 86, 171
96–98 Moralists, The (Shaftesbury), 257
awakening of, 111–13 Moreau, 87, 90
and the bedtime kiss, 25–26, 168 Mrs. Warren’s Profession (Shaw), 187
childhood memories of, 91, 113, 178, Murray, Charles Fairfax, 66, 68
191–92, 236
dreams of, 117
experiences of, 22, 25, 57, 94 Nahmias, Albert, 204
and his grandmother, 23–25, 29–30, Nietzsche, 107, 116
111–13, 123–27, 160 Nordlinger, Marie, 86
Japoniste initiation of, 88–99 Norman Conquest of England, The
jealousy of, 7, 9–14, 114, 117, 137–38 (Thierry), 168–69
and justice, 139 Norton, Charles Eliot, 67
292 Index
Occasioned by Sir William Temple’s Late death of, 1, 14, 21, 139, 226, 228
Illness and Recovery (Swift) and death of mother, 23–27, 29, 146
aesthetic theory in, 257–58 George Eliot’s influence on, 39, 41,
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats), 115 43–52, 54–61
On Beauty and Being Just (Scarry) ethics of, 20
aesthetic theory in, 248, 259 first person narrative in, 140–45, 169,
Othello (Shakespeare), 2 181
Ozouf, Mona, 197 Flaubert’s influence on, 47–48, 60–61
compared to Freud, 1–3, 5, 12, 14–16
compared to Heidegger, 20, 33–34
Pascal, Blaise, 222 illnesses of, 21, 26, 86–88, 171, 193
“Passing of the Oedipus Complex, The” imaginary world of, 24, 168, 254
(Freud), 14–16 insight of, 7
Pater, Walter, 5 and inversion theories, 2
Paulson, Ronald irony of, 1, 3, 9, 116
on aesthetic theory, 244, 250 use of Japanese aestheticism, 83–103
“Pavanne for a Dead Princess” (Ravel), and jealousy, 1–16
110 compared to Joyce, 123, 130, 134–35
Peasants into Frenchman (Weber), 185 and memory themes, 251
Pensés (Pascal), 222 metaphors of, 16, 253
Peter, René, 146 morality of, 61
Petit, Jacques mother’s influence of, 166, 171
on avant-texte, 223 and new form of temporality, 17
Pichon, Yann Le, 99 and nostalgia, 105–6, 108, 110–19
Place de la madeleine, La (Doubrovsky), notebooks of, 21, 29–30, 55, 60, 177
146 and philosophy, 20, 113, 174, 178
Plaisirs et les jours, Les and psychic time, 18–21, 32–33, 143,
criticism of, 227 174
theme of inversion in, 25–26, 171 and realism, 47, 57
Plato, 107–8 and recollection ability, 165–83
Podro, Michael, 117 remorse and guilt of, 25
Ponge, Francis, 226 as reviewer, 87
Pré, Le (Ponge), 226 Ruskin’s influence on, 70–73, 76, 78
Prisonnière, La. See Captive, The self-doubt of, 178
Proust, Adrien (father), 165–67 and self-justification, 137–49, 157–60
Proust, Mme, née Jeanne-Clemence and sexuality, 1–2, 15, 31, 170–71
Weil (mother), 165, 179 as social chronicler, 86
death of, 23–27, 29, 146 compared to Spinoza, 34
influence of, 166, 171 compared to Swift, 251, 254–57
Proust, Marcel and symbolism, 17
and aesthetic theory, 244, 251–55, 260 as theorist of technological change,
birth of, 165 121–30, 134–35
chronology of, 267–71 Proust, Robert (brother), 166, 177, 228
criticism of, 7, 29, 139–49, 227 Proust and Signs (Deleuze), 111
Index 293
Sachs, Maurice, 29
Quine, W.V. “Sainte-Beuve et Balzac”
“On Simple Theories of a Complex the intelligent reader in, 43
World,” 142 Sandre, Yves, 229–30
Sartre, Jean-Paul
on Proust, 143–44
Rabelais, Francois, 19 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 2
Ramsden, Maureen A., 221–41, 275 Scarry, Elaine
on avant-texte in literature, 221–41 on aesthetic theory, 244, 248–49,
on Jean Santeuil influence on A la 251–54, 256–57, 259–60
recherché du temps perdu, 221–22, Scenes from Clerical Life (Eliot), 40–41,
227, 231–38 44
Ravel, Maurice, 110 Schmid, Marion
Récits (Gide), 145 on avant-texte, 223, 228
Remembrance of Things Past. See A la Schwartz, William Leonard, 86
recherché du temps perdu Sesame and Lilies (Ruskin), 176
Rembrandt “Sur la lecture” preface in, 176–77
Proust’s essay on, 45–46 Shaftesbury
Reynolds, Siân, 185–200, 275 and aesthetic theory, 244–51, 253–54,
on the depiction of women in Proust’s 257, 260
culture, 185–99 Shakespeare, William, 2, 19, 26, 139,
Ribot, Théodule 252
and self-justification, 150, 155–57 Shaw, George Bernard, 187, 197
Riegl, Alois Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1
aesthetic theories of, 117–18 Shklar, Judith, 138
Riffaterre, 146 Silas Marner (Eliot), 40–41, 51
“Robert and the Kid. Mother leaves on Smith, 244, 247, 249
a journey,” 27, 177 Sodom and Gomorrah. See Sodome et
Robert, Louis de, 209–10, 213 Gomorrhe
Roberts, Mary-Louise, 188 Sodome et Gomorrhe
Rodin, Auguste, 189 allusion in, 23
Romola (Eliot), 40 black remorse in, 23, 25
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 145, 147 Japanese aesthetics in, 93
Rousset, Jean, 83 Monsieur de Charlus in, 59
Ruiz, Raul profanation of the mother in, 30
film adaptation of Time Regained, 123 self-justification in, 159
Ruskin, John, 5, 57, 86 sexual inversion in, 23–24
influence on Proust, 41, 44, 46–48, Spatromische (Riegl), 117
54–55, 57, 70–73, 76, 78 Spectator, The (Addison)
ire of, 55 aesthetics and morality in, 247
294 Index