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The Teller & The Tale
Essays On Literature & Culture 1990â"2015
By Gabriel Josipovici Carcanet Press Ltd
Copyright © 2016 Gabriel Josipovici
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78410-213-5
CHAPTER 1
Proust and I
MY DEAR DEPARTED FRIEND Gamini Salgado entitled his inaugural lecture as Professor of English at the University of Exeter 'Shakespeare and I', because, he said, that was his one chance of finding his name yoked to that of the writer he admired above all others. A similar impulse has led to my choice of title for this essay, but there are also deeper reasons (as, indeed, there were for Gamini). Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, like Dante's Divina Commedia, leads you in a spiral to the point where a door opens and you are invited – and find yourself able – to cross a threshold into a new life. You are able to do so because you have been trained for this purpose, much as a gymnast is trained, in the course of the three thousand pages that separate beginning and end. The book, like Dante's poem, is as much about us, the readers, as it is about Marcel. Proust was clear about this and often alluded to it in the course of the novel, and he was also clear, from the first, that the role of all art was to lead us forward to a place or a form of life we are all in search of but cannot by ourselves attain. When, for example, Swann first hears the Vinteuil sonata, it takes hold of him in a quite literal way: 'D'un rhythme lent elle le dirigeait ici d'abord, puis là, puis ailleur, vers un bonheur noble, inintelligible et précis.' ['With a slow and rhythmical movement it led him first this way, then that, towards a state of happiness that was noble, unintelligible, and yet precise.']
If this is the case then a response to the novel that is personal and biographical need not be merely anecdotal or self-preening but could, on the contrary, lead one into the very heart of Proust. For just as Marcel's story is seen (in the first instance by the relationship Proust establishes between Marcel and Swann) to be not merely the story of one person but of all human beings, so my personal response may turn out to be just one instance of a universal one. That, at any rate, is my hope for what follows.
I first read À la recherche at seventeen, in the year between school and university. In the mornings I was trying to write a novel and in the evenings I was reading my way through the great literature of the world, all borrowed from the wonderful Putney and Wandsworth public libraries. I read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Dickens and George Eliot, Yeats and Rilke – and then I read Proust. I felt at once that Proust was true in ways the others simply were not; they might be profound, tragic, funny, moving and many other things, but Proust's book had this peculiar quality of touching on my life at every turn, of actually being about me. Why did I feel this? What was it in the book that made me feel this?
At one level it was a plethora of tiny details, such as the pillow that appears in the second paragraph of the novel: 'J'appuyais tendrement mes joues contre les belles joues de l'oreiller qui, pleines et fraîches, sont comme les joues de nôtre enfance.' ['I would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my pillow, as plump and fresh as the cheeks of childhood.'] This is the kind of observation that tends to pass below the radar of most writers, but it catches in one short sentence the way a freshly ironed pillow-case, as one lays one's head to rest on it, brings flooding into one's body the sense of the protected nature of childhood, how in that blessed period we slept so well because we had no responsibilities, our lives taken care of by our loving parents. It doesn't tell us this but conveys it with that wonderful shorthand which is the privilege of great art – 'comme les joues de nôtre enfance'. When I first read it I did not pause to think all this, and I did not see how it related to the theme of those opening pages and of the novel as a whole – it was just 'felt in the blood, and felt along the heart', as Wordsworth, who knew a thing or two himself about memory and the body, put it in Tintern Abbey.
Then there were the details of social behaviour, such as we get in the third paragraph of Un amour de Swann:
Les Verdurin n'invitaient pas a dîner: on avait chez eux 'son couvert mis'. Pour la soirée, il n'y avait pas de programme. Le jeune pianiste jouait, mais seulement si 'ça lui chantait', car on ne forçait personne et comme disait M. Verdurin, 'Tout pour les amis, vivent les camarades!' Si le pianiste voulait jouer la chevauchée de La Walkyrie ou le prélude de Tristan, Mme Verdurin protestait, non que cette musique lui déplût, mais au contraire parce qu'elle lui causait trop d'impression. 'Alors vous tenez à ce que j'aie ma migraine? Vous savez bien que c'est la même chose chaque fois qu'il joue ça. Je sais ce qui m'attend! Demain quand je voudrai me lever, bonsoir, plus personne!' S'il ne jouait pas, on causait, et l'un des amis, le plus souvent leur peintre favori d'alors, 'lâchait', comme disait M.Verdurin, 'une grosse faribole qui faisait s'esclaffer tout le monde', Mme Verdurin surtout, a qui – tant elle avait l'habitude de prendre au propre les expressions figurées des emotions qu'elle éprouvait – le docteur Cottard (un jeune débutant a cette époque) dut un jour remettre sa mâchoire qu'elle avait décrochée pour avoir trop ri.
[The Verdurins never invited you to dinner; you had your 'place laid' there. There was never any programme for the evening's entertainment. The young pianist would play, but only if 'the spirit moved him,' for no one was forced to do anything, and, as M. Verdurin used to say: 'We're all friends here. Liberty Hall, you know!' If the pianist suggested playing the Ride of the Valkyries or the Prelude to Tristan, Mme Verdurin would protest, not because the music was displeasing to her, but, on the contrary, because it made too violent an impression on her. 'Then you want me to have one of my headaches? You know quite well it's the same every time he plays that. I know what I'm in for. Tomorrow, when I want to get up – nothing doing!' If he was not going to play they talked, and one of the friends – usually the painter who was in favour there that year – would 'spin', as M.Verdurin put it, 'a damned funny yarn that made 'em all split with laughter,' and especially Mme Verdurin, who had such an inveterate habit of taking literally the figurative descriptions of her emotions that Dr Cottard (then a promising young practitioner) had once had to reset her jaw, which she had dislocated from laughing too much.]
At first sight this might be mistaken for Dickens, though it has a density perhaps alien to the Englishman's more expansive style. But it differs in a more fundamental way: in Dickens, all the time one is laughing one is pleasantly distanced from the object of laughter; in Proust, even in a grotesque passage like this, the uneasy feeling grows on one that the way Mme Verdurin behaves as she listens to music is only an exaggerated form of the way we all tend to behave. There is a deep mystery underlying this farcical scene: how do we express what we feel? What role do our bodies have in our attempts to convey to others – friends, acquaintances, lovers – how we feel about a particular thing? Put this way it is easy to see how this theme is central to the whole novel. But it is also something we all encounter every day. Is it intrinsically wrong, for example – hypocritical? condescending? – to grow solemn and nod without speaking when someone tells you they have lost a parent or that their marriage has imploded? We do this because we do not know how we feel about what we have just been told, so we reach out for what we know from our experience of the world we should be feeling, and then try out what we hope will be the expression appropriate for conveying this feeling. Scenes of this kind proliferate in Proust's novel; the paragraph about the Verdurins' musical evenings, climaxing in the hostess's dislocated jaw, is only one of the more extreme examples.
In this paragraph we are aware of the writer /observer, but we look past him, as it were, to Mme Verdurin and her salon. In other instances the laughter, the perception of truth and the awareness of the artist cannot be disentangled. Take this passage from the soirée at the Marquise de Saint-Euverte; Swann has just entered the hotel Saint-Euverte, thinking of Odette:
[p]our la première fois il remarqua, réveillée par l'arrivée inopinéed'un invité aussi tardif, la meute éparse, magnifique et désoeuvrée des grands valets de pied qui dormaient ça et la sur des banquettes et des coffres et qui, soulevant leur nobles profiles aigus de lévriers, se dressèrent et, rassemblés, formèrent le cercle autour de lui. L'un d'eux, d'aspect particulièrement féroce et assez semblable à l'exécuteur dans certains tableaux de la Renaisssance qui figurent des supplices, s'avança vers lui d'un air implacable pour lui prendre ses affaires. Mais la dureté de son regard d'acier était compensée par la douceur de ses gants de fil, si bien qu'en approchant de Swann il semblait témoigner de mépris pour sa personne et des égards pour son chapeau.
[(h)e now noticed for the first time, roused by the unexpected arrival of so belated a guest, the scattered pack of tall, magnificent, idle footmen who were drowsing here and there upon benches and chests and who, pointing their noble greyhound profiles, now rose to their feet and gathered in a circle about him. One of them, of a particularly ferocious aspect, and not unlike the headsman in certain Renaissance pictures which represent executions, tortures and the like, advanced upon him with an implacable air to take his things. But the harshness of his steely glare was compensated by the softness of his cotton gloves, so that, as he approached Swann, he seemed to be exhibiting at once an utter contempt for his person and the most tender regard for his hat.]
Note, again, how the pleasure, the sense of recognition, here comes from the combination of observation, invention of metaphor, and precision of language. The first of the three sentences, which we joined half-way through, is a long, typically Proustian one, which seems to meander interminably but knows exactly what it is doing as it suddenly swoops in on its real subject with the startling image of the tired footmen as greyhounds. The second is much shorter and drives to its conclusion from the start, but it still has time to loop out and remind us of Swann's habit of comparing the world about him to his beloved Renaissance paintings, though the comparison of the footman to the headsman at an execution only reinforces the threat of its forward march, which is abruptly and comically undercut by the final phrase, 'pour lui prendre ses affaires'. Just as we are trying to digest this we are thrust into a beautifully balanced passage in which two pairs of opposites are displayed, at the end, in a form of words which touches on the grotesque without quite tipping over into it: 'du mépris pour sa personne et des égards pour son chapeau.' How I love these bravura passages and feel that, had I the skill, the imagination and the linguistic resources, they are the kinds of passages I myself would like to have written.
But there were deeper reasons why I felt, in that magical first reading of the novel, that Proust was speaking to me in a way Dostoevsky, Dickens and the rest simply were not, that he was bringing to the surface truths I already knew but had not been able to articulate. These were less easy to pin down because they suffused the text, but that did not mean that I did not feel them at the time.
There was the interconnection between love and need, which runs through the whole book from the initial scene of the mother's kiss to the disappearance of Albertine. Again, I sensed that what Proust was saying was 'true' in a way the other novelists and philosophers I had read were not, even though I could not at the time grasp – nor felt the need to – exactly in what this truth lay. Why, for example, does Marcel say, when his mother finally agrees to read to him that night:'J'aurais dû être heureux: je ne l'étais pas [...] il me semblait que je venais d'une main impie et secrête de tracer dans son âme une première ride et d'y fair apparaître un premier cheveux blanc.' ['I ought to have been happy; I was not [...] I felt that I had with an impious and secret finger traced a first wrinkle upon her soul and brought out a first white hair on her head.'] I didn't fully understand it at the time and yet, such is the way art works, I think I did: her giving in to him is the source of enormous relief for that one evening, makes the absolutely intolerable finally not just tolerable but pleasurable, but at the same time it heralds the end of his sense of his mother's absolute authority and therefore of her invulnerability. She can be swayed, she is human – but by that very fact she is suddenly vulnerable, subject to time like all of us and therefore will one day, eventually, die.
And then there is the extraordinary 'truth' with which Combray begins and ends:
Certes quand approchait le matin, il y avait bien longtemps qu'était dissipée la brêve incertitude de mon réveil. Je savais dans quelle chambre je me trouvais effectivement, je l'avais reconstruite autour de moi dans l'obscurité, et – soit en s'orientant par la seule mémoire, soit en m'aidant, comme indication, d'une faible lueur aperçue, au pied de laquelle je plaçais les rideaux de la croisée – je l'avais reconstruite tout entière et meublée comme un architecte et un tapissier qui gardent leur ouverture primitive aux fenètres et aux portes, j'avais reposé les glaces et remis la commode à sa place habituelle. Mais à peine le jour – et non plus le reflet d'une dernière braise sur une tringle de cuivre que j'avais pris pour lui – traçait-il dans l'obscurité, et comme à la craie, sa première raie blanche et rectificative, que la fenêtre avec ses rideaux, quittait le cadre de la porte où je l'avais situé par erreur, tandis que pour lui faire place, le bureau que ma mémoire avait maladroitement installé là se sauvait à toute vitesse, poussant devant lui la cheminée et écartant le mur mitoyen du couloir; [...] et le demeure que j'avais rebâtie dans les ténèbres était allée rejoindre les demeures entrevues dans le tourbillon du réveil, mise en fuite par ce pâle signe qu'avait tracé au-dessus des rideaux le doigt levé du jour.
[It is true that, when morning drew near, I would long have settled the brief uncertainty of my waking dream; I would know in what room I was actually lying, would have reconstructed it around me in the darkness, and – fixing my bearings by memory alone, or with the assistance of a feeble glimmer of light at the foot of which I placed the curtains and the window – would have reconstructed it complete and furnished, as an architect and an upholsterer might do, keeping the original plan of the doors and windows; would have replaced the mirrors and set the chest-of-drawers on its accustomed site. But scarcely had daylight itself – and no longer the gleam from a last, dying ember on a brass curtain-rod which I had mistaken for daylight – traced across the darkness, as with a stroke of chalk across a blackboard, its first white, correcting ray, than the window, with its curtains, would leave the frame of the doorway in which I had erroneously placed it, while, to make room for it, the writing-table, which my memory had clumsily installed where the window ought to be, would hurry off at full speed, thrusting before it the fireplace and sweeping aside the wall of the passage; [...] and the dwelling-place which I had built up for myself in the darkness would have gone to join all those other dwellings glimpsed in the whirlpool of awakening, put to flight by that pale sign traced above my window-curtains by the uplifted finger of dawn.]
We have all woken up in a strange bedroom and had to readjust rapidly our sense of where walls and cupboards and doors and windows were, but who before Proust had thought to talk about it? But of course this is more than the bringing to light of something well known and rarely discussed. It plays a positively Nabokovian role in the novel (Borges has written eloquently on how reading Kafka leads one to see the 'Kafkaesque' in earlier writers, and though Proust is a greater novelist than Nabokov, the particular artistic strategy I am exploring at this moment is more central to Nabokov's cruel imagination than it is to Proust's), forcing us, as happens so often in this book, to discover that firmly held beliefs are actually erroneous, and by so doing giving a solidity and 'reality' to the new beliefs which no Flaubertian realist could ever achieve. In Dreaming by the Book, a fascinating exploration of how writers, via their works, teach us to use our imaginations, Elaine Scarry argues that Proust gets us to imagine the solid surface of his bedroom precisely by concentrating on the immateriality of the images the magic lantern projects lightly over the walls: 'the perpetual mimesis of the solidity of the room', she says,
is brought about by the 'impalpable iridescence' of Golo fleeting across its surfaces [...] Taken in isolation, the walls, the curtains, the doorknob are for the reader (as opposed to Marcel inside the book) certainly as thick and impalpable as the bright coloured images issuing from the magic lantern. Yet by instructing us to move the one across the surface of the other, the transparency of one somehow works to verify the density of the other.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Teller & The Tale by Gabriel Josipovici. Copyright © 2016 Gabriel Josipovici. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
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