“From Bergson to Sebald, Prendergast’s new book demonstrates his brilliant reach. Delving into the smallest details and largest ideas, as well as Proust’s own ‘truth written with the aid of figures, ‘ this investigation of his skeptic perspective is as deep as it is wide.”–Mary Ann Caws, author of Marcel Proust

“Christopher Prendergast extracts new and original meanings out of the best-known pages in Proust. This is the rewarding upshot of close and perspicuous readings that reveal ambiguities and paradoxes in passages whose interpretations are often taken for granted. Prendergast’s admiration, far from blinding him, leads to his discovering the strength in Proust’s loose ends.”–Antoine Compagnon, Collège de France and Columbia University

“Through exemplary close reading and remarkable attention to textual detail, this book offers a high-powered critical argument that essentially pits Proust against himself–the romantic aesthete against the ironic doubter, the writer who conquers time against the one who understands how thoroughly lost it can be. This work will challenge and alter many current readings of Proust and, by implication, other writers.”–Michael Wood, Princeton University

“In Mirages and Mad Beliefs, Prendergast identifies a skeptical strain in Proust’s writing marking the novelist’s resistance to his own apparent beliefs. This is the work of a major critic at the top of his game: witty, profound, and highly readable, while meeting top standards of scholarship in its display of erudition and respect for sources. It deserves to be widely read.”–Michael Sheringham, University of Oxford

Christopher Prendergast is professor emeritus of French at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of King’s College and the British Academy. He is the general editor of the Penguin translation of In Search of Lost Time.

Mirages and Mad Beliefs

PROUST THE SKEPTICBy Christopher Prendergast

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15520-3

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………….viiReferences and Abbreviations……………………………………ixCHAPTER ONE Mad Belief…………………………………………1CHAPTER TWO Proustian Jokes…………………………………….29CHAPTER THREE Magic……………………………………………60CHAPTER FOUR Éblouissement…………………………………84CHAPTER FIVE What’s in a Comma?…………………………………104CHAPTER SIX Walking on Stilts…………………………………..130CHAPTER SEVEN Bodies and Ghosts…………………………………161CHAPTER EIGHT The Citizen of the Unknown Homeland…………………189Index………………………………………………………..217

Chapter One

Mad Belief

À la recherche du temps perdu is so constructed as to invite an argument about it to begin where it itself ends (more precisely, with that portion of the last volume occupied by the narrator’s lengthy meditation on the nature of the literary vocation, the section Proust baptized as “L’Adoration perpétuelle”). This would not, however, be simply to recapitulate its own internal movement on the plausible (though contested) inference that at the end the narrator is set to embark on the writing of the novel we have just read. Nor would, or should, it be to begin at the end in the “external” sense implied by the fact that the main ideas informing the terminal meditation were there at an early stage of Proust’s writing life, prior to the composition of À la recherche in the “essayistic” forms subsequently gathered together and published under the title Contre Sainte-Beuve. As Vincent Descombes explains, this would be to ignore the reasons why Proust, while proleptically hinting at them throughout, deferred the fully developed statement of these ideas until late in the novel; it was to ensure that the relation between Contre Sainte-Beuve and À la recherche would not produce a reading of the latter as just a transposition of the former. On the contrary, it was to ensure that the work would be read for what it is: a novel, family member, however errant, of a genre based on a narrative through-movement and irreducible to mere derivative illustration of a schematic a priori. To begin at the end has therefore little to do with the order in which Proust wrote certain things. It is rather—banal though the remark may seem—because of a commitment built into the type of critical reading the following pages instantiate. An argued account of À la recherche will be, among other things, an attempt to persuade. Other kinds of less pointed account are, of course, possible, for example, commentary as pure description, or as a kind of impressionistic patchwork, or as a quasi-symbolist tone poem, forms of commentary with which the Proustian critical archive is amply stocked, the last two modes favored in particular by the Proust-cult, historically dominated by the swooning tendencies of that unhappily influential coterie bent on construing À la recherche as a storehouse of delicate epiphanies laced with a strong dose of class-bound aestheticism. Since Proust’s own text offers the best diagnosis, part analytical, part symptomatic, of what is wrong with this construal of him as a purveyor of high-grade cultural narcotics, it is as well to have done with it once and for all.

The rationale for the approach adopted here is that there is also something in the work itself that seeks to persuade (marching under the banner of such terms as “truth,” a term without which the whole edifice of À la recherche would collapse). Naturally, this does not mean that the persuasive ambitions of the account and those of the work are substantively identical, such that the former merely replicates the latter, albeit in a different idiom. What it means is that there is a match of ambitions in a purely formal sense. One might want to claim that this mischaracterizes À la recherche, that it is an enterprise geared not to persuasion but to another set of objectives and thus another kind of writing altogether. If that is so, then the proposed account self-defeatingly loses its point. In this scenario, the only thing coherently on offer would be to recommend reading the book, the rest being silence. However, if we can reasonably debate whether Proust’s novel in general conforms to this characterization, one place where its aims are indisputably rhetorical in the sense of addressing its reader with persuasive intent is the metatextual sequence of Le Temps retrouvé, so often taken as housing the coda to the work as a whole. Indeed, the discourse of this sequence operates as a high-octane persuasive machine, firing on all pistons to convince us of everything that is entailed by the startling claim (in Ian Patterson’s translation) from Le Temps retrouvé: “Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature” (189). This is not quite what Proust wrote: “La vraie vie, la vie enfin découverte et éclaircie, la seule vie par conséquent pleinement vécue, c’est la littérature” (À la recherche du temps perdu [ARTP], 4:474); while the translation makes perfect sense of the original, it is at the cost of substituting the word “real” for “true” (la vraie vie). While the expression “true life” falls awkwardly on English ears (as awkwardly as “true love,” a concept utterly alien to Proust’s world), it matters that we do not lose sight of the original French here. Combining the two versions gives us a set of propositions that bring together three very grand items from the Proustian lexicon: the “true,” the “real,” and the “lived.”

Truth, reality, life: we shall have occasion to return to the crucial place of these terms in the novel (in the strong sense of being crux-terms, load-bearing at key junctures of the novel’s articulation of its own aesthetic), along with the dense equations they sustain (to the point where “real,” “true,” and “lived” become virtually interchangeable). But since in its bald form the proposition is especially congenial to the swooners, let me begin irreverently, with a provocative question framed by a Proustian plaisanterie. There is a tongue-in-cheek joke slyly embedded in one of the many long stretches of narrative devoted to the Guermantes salon and their ilk: “I should never finish if I were to enumerate all the salons” (Sodome et Gomorrhe [SG], 144). The easy, and presumably intended, target is what is contemptuously referred to in the text as the “society novelist” (subspecies of that despised category, the “realist” writer), whose literary watchword is “I am observing” (Du côté de chez Swann [S], 329). But given that Proust himself makes a fair fist of exhaustively rendering all the minutiae of salon life, it is doubtless with not only a sigh of relief but also a raised eyebrow that we might find ourselves endorsing the self-denying ordinance, were it not for our sensing that the joke is in fact self-directed (“I am fully aware of my more manic writing habits and how they can tax the patience of even the most indulgent readers”). But what of the earnest longueurs of the coda in Le Temps retrouvé? No jokes of this type here. Am I alone (I doubt it) in the view that much of the prolonged meditation on the literary vocation and the redemptive conception of “literature” is simply wearing?

This is not because I am not persuaded by many of these claims (though, along with many others, I am not). That, under the conditions that govern the functioning of involuntary memory, certain dead parts of ourselves can be brought back to life (“resurrected”) is good news, but scarcely the Good News of promised salvation, and, as a formula for the only life worth living (“life … lived to the full”), it is a somewhat exiguous version of the good life. Here we might find ourselves in sympathy with William Empson’s sardonic take on the great Proustian saga of remembrance and redemption: “you remember [how Empson must have savored using that talismanic Proustian verb!] how Proust, at the end of that great novel, having convinced the reader with the full sophistication of his genius that he is going to produce an apocalypse, brings out with pathetic faith, as a fact of absolute value, that sometimes when you are living in one place you are reminded of living in another place, and this, since you are now apparently living in two places, means that you are outside time, in the only state of beatitude he can imagine.” Empson is in no doubt that Proust is out to persuade us of something (“having convinced the reader”) and there is equally no doubt on his part as to the confusion of “sophistication” with a form of sophistry. But, while it would be disingenuous to deny that my own (far less withering) parti pris will exert some pressure on the arguments I wish to make, it is not the principal cause of a degree of weariness with these pages. Nor is it because the sequence in question is relentlessly cast in a “subjectivist,” theoretical idiom stamped by period tastes and tendencies unlikely to hold our attention for long today. We can, of course, approach many of the assumptions and assertions of the Recherche historically, in terms of that episteme of Proust’s age dominated by the array of idealist idioms in circulation, some of which came Proust’s way in his lycée philosophy class. But while interesting in its own terms, this sort of historical and biographical information will not take the concerns of the present book very far. In any case, as we shall see, the explicit quotation of these idioms in the novel itself suggests that, once in the mouths of his characters, they become suitably eligible candidates for inclusion in a Proustian version of Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues.

Dissatisfaction with the sequence in question may be said to derive from a property internal to it, namely, the fact that it is compulsively repetitive. “For nothing is ever repeated exactly,” opines the narrator in La Fugitive ([F], 465), but the validity of the proposition is put under some strain by the disquisitions of Le Temps retrouvé. The same point is made over and over again: there is a world, a “reality,” apart from our everyday world; it lies deep within us and is manifested as certain kinds of impressions, sensations, and memories, which it is the task of the work to express or “translate.” Since the repetition of the point is not invariably or even mostly a progressive deepening of it, we must ask what it is that motivates these reprises. It is certainly not because Proust is insistently dogmatic (he is the least dogmatic of writers). Perhaps it betrays the precise opposite of self-assurance, an uncertainty as to the security of his own doctrines; Proust repeats because he is trying to convince not only his reader but also himself. But who is “himself” here? It will doubtless have been noticed that I have already started shifting between “narrator” and “Proust,” thus opening a can of worms familiar to narrative theory; we will have to delve deeper into that can in due course. For now, let us simply countenance the possibility, as a working hypothesis, that the discursive machine of Le Temps retrouvé is itself working overtime to shore up a belief that defies rationality, a “mad belief,” vital to sustaining “life,” perhaps, but doing so as a pure fiction, somewhat in the spirit, if not the manner, of Nietzsche’s life-protecting fictions (in the Recherche Saint-Loup is an enthusiastic reader of Nietzsche), a spellbinding illusion, but illusory nonetheless (in connection with art Proust will come to call it an “optical illusion”).

II

Proust’s novel begins, dramatically, with a hallucination, although in the context of an entirely commonplace experience. The narrator recalls a time when, drifting in and out of sleep (the so-called hypnagogic state), he has imagined himself while sleeping to have been the “subject” of the bedtime book he has been reading (probably Mignet’s Rivalité de François 1er et Charles Quint). The experience is described, appositely, as “having taken a rather peculiar turn.” First, the imagining is not a dream-induced evocation of the world of Mignet’s book; rather, the narrator himself has become that world (“it seemed to me that I was myself what the book was talking about”). Second, it is not clear what it is that he has notionally “become.” Commonsensically, we might posit one or more of the characters (perhaps François 1er, given the echo of the name in François le Champi, the bedtime novel by George Sand read by the narrator’s mother). But no such restriction on the “subject” of the book applies. What the narrator actually says is that he has “become” everything (characters, settings, a building, a musical piece): “it seemed to me that I was myself what the book was talking about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry of François 1er and Charles V” (S, 7). This is prima facie unintelligible. It is true that in Le Temps retrouvé the narrator compares the self to a “book” (“the interior book of unknown signs”), but this is intended as a metaphor with a strictly semiotic import (the self as a collection of signs soliciting interpretation or “decipherment”). The opening moment is not metaphorical in this way; it is baldly literal. In what known or knowable worlds (including the more permissive worlds constructed by the dream-work) can one experience oneself as a building? There will be much more in À la recherche about the strange alternative domains opened up to us by sleep and dreaming, and much value is attached to them, as a counter to the dully habit-bound world of everyday conscious life. But, while here seminaturalized as an effect of the dreaming self, if these projections were carried over into the waking life, they would surely qualify as examples of the deranged. And if it is felt that this is to drag a deranged red herring across Proust’s “argument,” let us recall that the question is raised by the narrator himself in one of several other explorations of sleep where a loss of the sense of the “reality of the common objects that surround me” induces, as it had for Descartes, an alarm over the dividing line between dream and cognition: “I was alarmed to think, however, that this dream had had the clarity of a cognition. Could cognition, by the same token, have the unreality of a dream?” (SG, 381).

There are lots of crazed or semicrazed beliefs in the Recherche. The narrator, for example, highlights our attachment to friendship and “society” (in the somewhat quaint sense of the latter term) as a mental aberration (douce folie), which “in our heart of hearts we know is like the wanderings of a madman who believes the furniture is alive and talks to it” (Le Temps retrouvé [T], 184). This, however, is but Proustian small change, a predictable flourish in the sustained and unbending exposure of the worthlessness of our immersion in the social world. As for the invocations of madness in connection with the certifiable condition of sexual jealousy, these are simply too numerous to mention. But things may start to look unnervingly different when the view in question implicates more sensitive areas, those that the narrator ostensibly values rather than those that he despises or rejects. The man who self-deludingly believes in friendship may resemble the lunatic who converses with his furniture, but that is not so far removed from the young narrator’s defamiliarized encounter with the items of furniture in his room as if they were hostile agents bent on malevolent purpose (À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs [JF], 245–46). However painfully disturbing, defamiliarization for Proust is, after all, the necessary condition of escaping the deadening tyranny of Habit, and it is thus at the very least something of a complication to find the subject of this emancipating experience aligned in some important way with the image of the madman who hallucinates his furniture as animate and speech-endowed (S, 12).

And what of the pressure of cognitive mishap in the one area where prima facie it could exert no conceivable pressure at all, the hallowed theme of Resurrection? Diana Knight has drawn our attention to the fact that the echo toward the end of Sodome et Gomorrhe of the “intermittences” episode (in which the narrator’s delayed grief over his grandmother’s death bursts upon him as a kind of “resurrection” of the dead) takes the form of a “hallucination.” This is the moment in the Balbec hotel when he “sees” his grandmother in his mother “as in one of those apparitions” (520). There is, of course, a causal explanation: the mother, caught unawares, her hair in disarray, reveals the gray streaks that are normally concealed. For a split second, his mother actually appears as his grandmother, and moreover does so by way of the biological fatalism that informs Proust’s treatment of the saga of the generations and the theme of “heredity,” whereby we come more and more to physically resemble our parents and ancestors. But these explanatory moves, while part of the point, miss the main point: in its initial occurrence, as distinct from its post facto clarification, the experience has the force of an “optical illusion” that is truly hallucinatory. Might we then find ourselves claiming something similar of the most privileged of the privileged moments, those on which in Le Temps retrouvé the narrator stakes all, as precisely moments when spontaneous recollection crosses over into the illusion of something that is immediately present to vision (not Combray, Balbec, or Venice recalled, but Combray, Balbec, and Venice “there” before him, literally a resurrection, the return of the past as the deluded witnessing of a kind of “ghost”)? Is there not another ghost at this feast of perceptual delights and redemptive meaning, a scene haunted by the specter of reasonable doubt? It is, of course, supposed to be the exact opposite: of the decisive epiphanies in Le Temps retrouvé, the narrator claims that they banish “all intellectual doubt” and bring “a joy akin to certainty” (175–76). This is what epiphany does in the ecstatic instant of its occurrence. But the moment is one thing; the totality of the narrative and the multifariousness of its voices another. Earlier I said that the naturalizing explanation of the mother/grandmother confusion, while part of the point, misses the essential point, but this requires some adjustment. That it is there at all tells us that at moments such as these Proust often has two voices speaking in counterpoint, one of them anxious to temper the intensities of the other by reference to that most prosaic of orders—the facts of the matter.

(Continues…)

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