“A little patch of yellow wall”
In this and the next three chapters we will turn our attention to the novelist Marcel Proust. He will be our first icon through which we will be enabled to discern the lineaments of our subject, enchantment, and the work of enchantment, just as, long ago (or perhaps still today in some homes and churches), through the icons on the wall or the iconostasis, one could discern from what was pictured the lineaments of divine beings. The icon is the descendent of the hieroglyph, where something significant is signified by a sign, and the holiest writing, where something of ultimate significance for us to know about life and death is written.
Death is one of the factors that radically disrupt enchantment. But within an enchanted life death loses its sting.
Until now we have followed some thoughts of the philosopher Adorno, and it is indeed he too who leads us to Proust. Adorno says, “A more decisive contribution to these matters [to do with metaphysical experience], I believe, is made by Marcel Proust, whose work, as a precipitate and an exploration of the possibility of experience, should be taken extremely seriously from a philosophical point of view.”1 And we shall take him extremely seriously for what he brings into view about enchantment. But we shall serve ourselves here in two ways, for to read Proust’s major novel is to engage the work of enchantment, the work of reading something properly worth reading. It is a work that invites us into another world in which we nonetheless can see our own world, and indeed we can see ourselves; it is a work which dispels useless anxiety by enabling us to see through it, so as suddenly to see through a delusion that has been besetting our imagination, or, in other cases, so as to see the funny side of something. To read Proust is an initiation and so, in this chapter and the next, we will serve ourselves in the first instance, as I said, by treating Proust as an icon to something else, and in the second instance, by being introduced to Proust and his world, if it is new to us and we have not read him already.
Proust’s major novel, believed by many to be the greatest novel ever written, is a multi-volume work entitled in French, À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time). It was published serially in eight parts in Paris between 1913 and 1927. Proust lived between 1871 and 1922, and so the last parts of his great novel were published posthumously. On the surface the novels are about fin de siècle high society in Paris, gently lampooning it; but that is the surface of the narrative. For Adorno, as for us, reading Proust is an induction into metaphysical experience, or enchantment, in the strong sense that we want to give it.
Proust is buried at the beautiful Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris alongside other family members. He was homosexual and never married, although he regretted rather than celebrated his homosexuality. He had mixed feelings over almost everything, except things such as really good coffee, and then he was extremely fussy. He was a man of “private means” which he devoted wholly to the work of literature. Information about him may easily be obtained and so I will not reiterate much here. Most famously, Proust lived as a recluse in his apartment at 102, Boulevard Haussmann, where he had the room where he spent most time, the bedroom, where he would write and sleep, writing at night, sleeping all day, lined in cork to block out noise and disturbance.2
The illustration of metaphysical experience or enchantment has to do with the death of the writer Bergotte in the volume entitled The Captive (1923). And here, at last, we will be entering into Proust’s world, letting it enter our own, letting it captivate us; for to be captivated by the right things is to be enchanted. A child can be enchanted by almost anything, and even quite terrible things will not disenchant a little girl or boy; but gradually, with time, disenchantment will dawn on them, if it is not forced upon them first. So we are prone from the first for enchantment, we are geared for it, and by that I do not mean a childish “magical” sense of enchantment with fairies or scary monsters, but enchantment in the strong sense, which we will also call metaphysical experience; it comes through art as the quintessence of life and the objectification of it, as this or that art object.
Bergotte had gone, in the worst of health, on his “last legs” as we say, to gaze once again at a painting on display in Paris, Vermeer’s Street in Delft, at an exhibition of Dutch paintings lent by the gallery at The Hague, “a picture which he adored and imagined that he knew by heart.” But he had learnt from one of the art critics that “a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself.”3 Not recalling the “little patch of yellow wall” and desiring to feast his eyes upon it, even if it was the last thing he did, he left the house and set out one fine morning for the art gallery. “At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else that he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic’s article, he remarked for the first time some small figures in blue, that the ground was pink, and finally the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His giddiness increased…” Bergotte, in a state of mortal dis-ease, reflects about his works, his great books, not without melancholy: “‘My last books are too dry. I ought to have gone over them with several coats of paint, made my language exquisite in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.’ Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition.” As his life hangs in the balance, Bergotte imagines all his life on one side of the scale and the little patch of yellow wall on the other side, outweighing his life, but “so beautifully painted in yellow.” Bergotte sinks down into death as he sits in the public gallery before the painting, muttering to himself, “Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof, little patch of yellow wall.” Perhaps now he, Bergotte, knows Vermeer’s Street in Delft perfectly. Absolutely. To know one thing absolutely, to know it even more intimately than one’s own creations, one’s own offspring; this is something great. It is an enchantment. It is metaphysical experience.
This is an exemplary death.
But there is a direct link between metaphysical experience and immortality, and resurrection—noting that immortality and resurrection are usually ideas at odds that do not fit together. Normally, immortality is seen as an idea where the body is dispensable as far as the immortal soul is concerned; and resurrection is a notion that indicates the unity of body and soul that dies or comes back to life together: body and soul cannot survive apart from each other. Yet, they do here. This link between Bergotte’s death and metaphysical experience (basically Bergotte’s legitimate enchantment with the art of Vermeer) is the reason why Adorno draws our attention to Proust’s account—although, as we will go on to see, Proust’s whole work has to do with metaphysical experience, and in a profound sense. Proust is not to be thought “un-philosophical” because, as we shall see directly, he combines immortality with resurrection, which metaphysicians and theologians religiously keep apart. In 1927 Heidegger published Being and Time, indeed an influential philosophical tome, but Proust, in the judgment of Adorno, had better things to say on the subject of being and time. And the greatest of modern philosophers, Hegel, is reversed by Proust, in that Hegel’s idealism—his conceptuality and universalism—are totally lacking in Proust, whose focus is ever on the absolute uniqueness of the trivial and particular. And then, his unselfconscious philosophical prowess to one side, at the literary level, Proust exhibits as no writer had ever done before him at such uninterrupted length, and with such astonishing veracity, what one critic has called “versatility in depth.” In other words, Proust is both a philosopher and a psychologist. To do philosophy or psychology without him is to make a big mistake.
But does he speak to a time such as ours? I raise this question because we have said in the last chapter that a time such as ours is described as “post-modern” because it is characterized by uncertainty about those things which drove modernity from the Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century to the wars of the twentieth. We are uncertain about modernity’s strong sense of self, its belief in progress, and its idealism. Perhaps we are disillusioned with modernism, perhaps a lot of things are questionable to us; a later age will have to write our history and humankind will be wise in retrospect. However, we must attest that an artwork can speak diachronically, across time, to a time not its own. Proust’s work is such a work. It spoke to the literary elites in his time; it speaks much more broadly, to almost any literate person of our culture, in our time. Some works are like this: over time they gain power to speak and they keep speaking into the times. The optimum example is those writings regarded by our culture as Scriptures. The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel does not go out of date. It was written for a time but has a sense, in retrospect, of being written for all time: it stands therefore as a “testament,” not merely of “what was,” but of what should be; and it continues to be a revelation, serving to wake us up, to bring us to our senses, and so on. This is a strong example, but other writings have the same quality: they speak across the periods of history with a message that it is our peril to forget; the Greek tragedies, Shakespeare’s plays, the Russian novel are such examples. And Proust belongs to this ilk. Yes, he wrote in another time from ours, but what he wrote bears on our time. Rilke and Goethe, the other two writers who are our icons by which we may discern enchantment, are like this too. Doubtless, time has many hidden rules, “time-bends,” as Arthur Miller memorably called them.
From the point of view of our time, after so much disaster, with the kind of consciousness of disaster we have now and the sense of responsibility for ourselves and others that we have learned, we are well positioned to appreciate works that stand the test of time. This is ultimately the criterion for true art: work which stands the test of time; work which, after centuries, can and indeed must enchant us, if we are to flourish.
Bergotte had seen the little patch of yellow wall and died doing so: “He was dead. Permanently dead? Who shall say? Certainly our experiments in spiritualism prove no more than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying the burden of obligation contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be fastidious, to be polite even, nor to make a talented artist consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his body devoured by worms like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much knowledge and skill by an artist who must for ever remain unknown and is barely identified under the name of Vermeer. All these obligations which have not their sanction in our present life seem to belong to a different world, founded upon kindness, scrupulosity, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this, which we leave in order to be born into this world, before perhaps returning to the other to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we have obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, knowing not whose hand had traced them there—those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only—and still!—to fools. So that the idea that Bergotte was not wholly and permanently dead is by no means improbable.
They buried him, but all through the night of mourning, in the lighted windows, his books arranged three by three kept watch like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.”4
Of course, we cannot help thinking of Proust and his books lined on our shelves, three by three, and of the burden of obligation he carried into life and which is set forth in those volumes.
This painting by Vermeer really exists. What is so extraordinary, and so Proustian, as once again his art outsmarts life, is that critics are divided on exactly where this little patch of yellow wall actually is in the painting. There are three main theories, each pointing to a different patch of yellow wall. So Proust defies the objectivists, even in death. Perhaps (this is my surmise) those art critics do not know the painting in the depth Bergotte knew it, and they would not recognize that little patch of yellow wall until they do; then they will find it, not before. But there is a catch. To know that painting as Bergotte knew it, one must be prepared to suffer unto death, as he did.
Enchantment is that little patch of yellow wall. By reading, listening, or gazing, we must find that little patch of yellow wall for ourselves, by which of course I mean, what it is for us. Short of a tragedy or a ruinous childhood, we die of what we live for; and the enchanted life is one that can live for a painting, such as that by Vermeer, and know it by heart, so that, despite all consequences, even the most ultimate, we are moved, literally moved, if we hear something about it that we cannot remember and do not think we ever knew. That is to be moved by the wisdom of love, philosophy herself. For philosophy in this case is feminine, and she leads us on. She is feminine because she speaks to our soul; and only in our soul, thanks to our senses, do we hear her.
Notes
1. Adorno, Metaphysics, 463. (Italics added to original) Adorno brushes aside misgivings about “literature” and “philosophy,” naming poor Herr Bollnow, now forgotten, and adding that if he is qualified to contribute seriously to discussion on metaphysics, why should Marcel Proust not be? Of course, for Herr Bollnow, we can fill in names better known to us and ask the same question. But today, thankfully, in the mainstream at least, these justifications are hardly necessary.
2. The best work about him in my view remains that by André Maurois, À la recherche de Marcel Proust (1949), translated into English by Gerard Hopkins as The Quest for Proust (London: Penguin Books, 1962).
3. Proust, The Captive, Part One, trans. C.K. Scott-Montcrieff (London: Chatto & Windus, 1951), 249ff.
4. Ibid., 251.