This is our last chapter for which Proust is treated iconically as that through which we discern the lineaments of what enchantment might mean in a time such as ours and, therefore, what the work of enchantment—reading, listening, and gazing—might entail.
Let us just take stock for a moment and list what we have learned. Broadly, enchantment means to be captivated by a world not our own, one which is more beautiful than our own and which, indeed, captures our devotion. Such a world as this, Proust inhabited. He was captivated by his own world, humble though it really was; its grandiosity was just an illusion. And is not this always our reality? Humble in fact; any grandiosity, an illusion. Broadly again, enchantment is an attunement of our existence, one we must make if we are to live and die aright, that is, well.
Referring back to Bergotte, enchantment means a life in which devotion to art is pre-eminent. This is devotion to an art which has stood the test of time (Vermeer, in this case) rather than the trivia of the day, which will be forgotten tomorrow, and rightly so. Such art is art which one will stagger out to see on pain of death. Proust himself wrote like this, writing upon pain of death, writing himself in fact to death; but what more enchanted a way to live? No wonder he has so much to teach us.
And then, referring back to our account of the way words affect us. Sometimes, as in the case of Swann, enchantment itself can be delusory, for we can become enchanted in a way that leads to suffering and in fact causes us suffering; but in that case, even our suffering is blessed—that is, covered—by enchantment. We are enchanted sufferers. Suffering does not necessarily dispel enchantment; enchantment may overarch it. Sometimes we will be enchanted by the wrong things, by the wrong people. This is where “the moral compass” comes in to guide us. Swann’s saving grace is that in all his great delusion about Odette, he is charming and so is she. What is charming is as related to art as it is to religion, which is why Swann could equate his lover with a painting on the wall in the Vatican, Christendom’s holiest shrine. What we learn is that enchantment is bounded by what is charming and what is lovable here, and it is guided too by that. Only if we get completely lost will we require our moral compass, and so it is important to know where it is, at least, and not to lose it.
Finally, referring back to Vinteuil’s “little phrase,” it is music that speaks to the soul most directly, and, as Adorno thought too, it is the most “metaphysical” of the arts and, in that sense, the closest one to philosophy herself. Music, like the other arts, educates—in the sense of educes, which means brings out—our inner sensibility and sensitivity. In plain English, music is good for the soul, it steadies and nourishes the soul, and it opens the soul to the possibility of being enchanted. In other words, music tunes our emotions by eliciting the true feeling consonant with a note, chord, passage, etc. Good music does this, but bad music has the reverse effect: it deadens the soul and kills our inner sensibility and sensitivity. It is the soul that is the measure of good or bad music and, more precisely, the truth of emotions as value judgments. An emotion is also a judgment about something, not merely, as we are liable to believe, a “reaction.” Of course, accompanying these emotions are thoughts and ideas, and good music will create a harmony between them. This is not to say that harmonious music is necessarily good music, for music exists in time and is a child of time, and, in different times, people will have different ears for different things—for jazz, for instance. Art (classical) music itself recognizes these changes in time, as we see from its long history. Music can sensitize us in every conceivable way. But it is a primary source for enchantment and, of course, listening to music is the work of enchantment; this is the music, like Vinteuil’s little phrase, which really enters our soul and our life.1
Names have a music of their own, and to this notion we now turn. Certain names can vouch for enchantment. Proust devotes two sections of Remembrance of Things Past to names.
We have noted the significance of the name Auschwitz as a touchstone of reality.
Names are not only touchstones of reality but also they are touchstones of enchantment and metaphysical experience. The first book of Remembrance of Things Past is entitled Combray. A place-name. And the importance of names flows right through the whole work. The name is what connects the past to the present and to survival into the future. The name is caught up with being and time. The name also comes out from within, from our inner sensitivity and sensibility, the soul, to the outer world, where it becomes “common.” The name is a crossway, therefore, of the dynamic: from within to without, from past to future.
This is why names are important, and “proper” to reality. Even big capitalist corporations (and small ones too) see the point of this, even if not philosophically; hence brand names. Names resonate with our inner sensitivity and sensibility. Names heard, in the sense of “listened to,” are soul-making.
Words present us with clear and familiar little pictures of things like the pictures hung on the walls of schools to give children an example of what a workbench is, a bird, an anthill, things conceived of as similar to all others of the same sort. But names present a confused image of people—and of towns, which they accustom us to believe are individual, unique, like people—an image which derives from them, from the brightness or darkness of their tone, the color with which it is painted uniformly, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, because of the limitation of the process used or by a whim of the designer, not only the sky and the sea are blue or entirely red, but the boats, the church, the people in the streets.2
Balbec, on the coast of Normandy, where the young Marcel in the book went on holiday as an adolescent with his family, is one such name in the novel—a name we become familiar with. I have never been there, and yet, through Proust’s words, it is dearer to me, more memorable to me, and better known to me, than many places I have been and did not like as much.
As for Balbec, it was one of those names in which, as on an old piece of Norman pottery that still keeps the color of the earth from which it is fashioned, one sees depicted still the representation of some long-established custom, of some feudal right, of the former condition of some place, of an obsolete way of pronouncing the language, which had shaped and wedded its incongruous syllables and which I never doubted that I should find spoken there at once, even by the inn-keeper who would pour me out coffee and milk on my arrival, taking me down to watch the turbulent sea, unchained, before the church; to whom I lent the aspect, disputatious, solemn and medieval, of some character in one of the old romances.3
Names unleash fantasy. This involves, though, real reading of them and listening to them. We have to allow them to conjure up for us all that they carry of unconscious national and ancestral and historic, and imaginative, memory. Names are not made up but are conferred. An example would be naming our children. Parents “try out” in their mind possible names, taking months sometimes to decide, imaginatively exploring all the resonances and meaning of the name being considered. Often they find they cannot decide upon a name simply because they become so “carried away” by all the imaginative connotations and possibilities any name calls up. And they can talk about it for hours and hours. This is often people’s first experience of the aura of names since childhood, when, invariably, names had aura, often stronger than the object; for example, “vegetable” for a young child that would not, without vigorous protest, have one on her plate; even then, its presence on the plate may contaminate the whole of the rest of what is on it, so that it all becomes uneatable. And to the frustration of the parent, the child has never even tasted the vegetable; and if they were to do so, the parent contends, they may even like it. But, for the child, the aura of the name is enough. Or the aura of “mummy” and “daddy” is stronger than almost any damage these actual personages may commit. And so on. All this is metaphysical experience and enchantment.
“I myself have had a similar experience with such names,” says Adorno, rather endearingly, given that, as a philosopher, he is an unrelenting heavyweight.
When one is on holiday as a child and reads or hears names like Monbrunn, Reuenthal, Hambrunn, one has the feeling: if only one were there, at that place, that would be it. This “it”—that the “it” is—is extraordinarily difficult to say; one will probably be able to say, following Proust’s tracks here too, that is happiness. When one later reaches such places, it is not there either, one does not find “it.” Often they are just foolish villages. If there is still a single stable door open in them and a smell of a real live cow and dung and such things, to which this experience is no doubt attached, one must be very thankful today. But the curious thing is that, even if “it” is not there, if one does not find in Monbrunn any of the fulfillment that is stored up in its name, nevertheless, one is not disappointed.4
And sometimes one finds more that “it.” I did when I went straight to Jerusalem as a young man. I found infinitely more than I could have imagined. So much so that many years later, having not had the opportunity to go back, and living too far away, I still thrive on the name. I am still enchanted.
Adorno finishes his little account referring to the experience of arriving and not finding “it”:
At such moments one has a curious feeling that something is receding—rather than that one has really been done out of it. I would say, therefore, that happiness—and there is an extremely deep constellation between metaphysical experience and happiness—is something within objects and, at the same time, remote from them.
So long as names exist, and people to say them, there can be poetry after Auschwitz.
As for metaphysical experience and happiness, the word “enchantment,” I think, includes happiness. But not in the Aristotelian sense, which is, at the same time, self-satisfied, or at least self-standing, conscious that “this is happiness.” Such a consciousness of happiness is reification—its distortion into a quantifiable “something.” The happiness in the word “enchantment” has to do with “being transported.” Enchanted, we find suddenly we are not where we thought we were, and where we thought we were is not where we thought it was, or even what we thought it was. It is a pleasant disorientation. It is not that one is enraptured or ecstatic. It is like setting out to see the town, getting lost and ending up in fascinating parts of the town you had no idea of, but which are infinitely more interesting than what you had planned to see. Or it is like taking the wrong turn in the art gallery and, instead of seeing what you had gone to see, discovering rooms full of paintings that change your vision forever. When I first went to Rome, I walked, starting from Garibaldi’s statue, and I ended up walking around cobbled streets with amazing buildings and hidden churches and squares like something out of this world. I did not see any of the “sights,” but I had a time to cherish, an enchanted afternoon. Suddenly we can find ourselves transported, in the enchanted place. Such metaphysical experience falls.
And yet, we need to put ourselves in the way of it. Enchantment, as the name suggests, is a delicate business. Too heavy-handed, too noisy, and nothing happens. Too insouciant and laissez-faire, and nothing happens either. You cannot work to gain it any more than you can buy your way into heaven; on the other hand, if one is passive and inactive, nothing happens. Reading, listening, and gazing, all three involve deliberation, doing something about them, and then finding out, and then enjoying and learning. It is best if one can learn to read and listen and gaze in the sense we have been discussing (not the facile sense) with friends. If people who know more than we do can induct us into all that it involves and if we can talk it through with them, then all the better. Friendship based around reading, listening, and gazing is soul-making. We cannot earn enchantment or achieve it, but we do have to put ourselves in the way of it. We do so, to begin with, by attracting it, that is, by imagining it. I did not just go to Jerusalem: I imagined it for years before going there. And on the other side of the scale, the mistake I did not realize I was making in coming to Australia was that I had no imagination of it. For such lack of imagination, when it comes to life decisions, we pay a great price. Often we put it down to other “causes” and do not realize, actually, that it had to do with lack of enchantment. And, anyway, who is there to enlighten us? Enchantment is hardly understood.
Young Marcel in Remembrance of Things Past is too poorly to be sent by his parents to stay at Balbec, but he imagines taking the train there, “so as to become acquainted with the architecture and landscapes of Normandy and Brittany, that one twenty-two train into which I had so often clambered in imagination, I should have preferred to stop, and to alight from it, as at the most beautiful of its towns; but in vain might I compare and contrast them; how was one to choose, any more than between individual people, who are not interchangeable, between Bayeux, so lofty in its noble coronet of rusty lace, whose highest point caught the light of the old gold of its second syllable; Vitré, whose acute accent barred its ancient glass with wooden lozenges; gentle Lamballe, whose whiteness ranged from egg-shell yellow to a pearly grey; Coutances, a Norman Cathedral, which its final consonants, rich and yellowing, crowned with a tower of butter; Lannion with the rumble and buzz, in the silence of its village street, of the fly on the wheel of the coach; Questambert, Pontorson, ridiculously silly and simple, white feathers and yellow beaks strewn along the road to those well-watered and poetic spots; Benodet, a name scarcely moored that seemed to be striving to draw the river down into the tangle of its seaweeds; Pont Aven, the snowy, rosy flight of the wing of a lightly poised coif, tremulously reflected in the greenish waters of a canal; Quimperlé, more firmly attached, this, and since the Middle Ages, among the rivulets with which it babbled, threading their pearls upon a grey background, like the pattern made, through the cobwebs upon a window, by rays of sunlight changed into blunt points of tarnished silver?”5
We all have our place-names. The Cotswolds, outside Oxford, where I am from, was all that was meant by “the countryside” so that every book set in the countryside that I read, from The Country Child by Alison Uttley, in primary school, to The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy, later on, in secondary school, was set there, although The Country Child is set in Shropshire and the Hardy novels in a fictional Wessex, which corresponds to Wiltshire, Devonshire, and nearby counties; so I knew that more lustrous and wonderful countryside existed beyond the Cotswolds, which were too homely for Hardy, as even these words “homely” and Hardy already tell us. And the family Sunday afternoon drives into the countryside were continuous with this imaginative experience. From the book to the place was no distance; sight reinforced imagination and vice versa. In Wantage, where King Alfred “who burnt the cakes” came from, we would stop for something to eat. I never knew why he burnt the cakes but supposed he was in a hurry to escape; although, upon reflection now, I can see he would then have abandoned the cakes: but to me, then, it seemed unquestionable that Alfred burnt the cakes there in Wantage because he was in a hurry to escape his enemies. I took it for granted that kings always had enemies. And it always felt to me as though King Alfred was still hiding somewhere about the town. There were buildings with his name on them, like the old pub, and he could quite well be in one of those. I never needed to enquire which century King Alfred belonged to (it was the ninth!) because I knew it was our own. This is how metaphysical experience works, if we are lucky; and I was. The Cotswolds too was an area associated, no doubt, with early memories of my uncle’s farm, which had cows, sheep, pigs, dogs, a hay barn, roosters, and deep mud—everything a farm, before agribusiness, could be expected to contain. And, imaginatively, the Cotswolds remains for me an Arcadia that I can remember like yesterday; and I am pleased that I can remember it in all four seasons. As for the names of Cotswolds villages… for me they are irremediably associated with the enchantment of childhood: Hook Norton; Duns Tew and Little Tew; Deddington; Banbury, famous for its Cross in the market square; Burford; Bourton-on-the-water, which was my favorite because the clear running shallow stream bore the sky with it and its huge smooth flat pebbles felt beautifully cool to hot little feet. Every name was picturesque in its own way.
On the other hand, the name of London eclipsed all other names, for it was a proper city (whatever that meant, but I knew what it meant without thinking about it). London was always unaccommodating, like a hard heavy stone, and sounded powerful, but also London meant the stone of battlements, of castle walls, of borders, kingdoms, and of empire (a word which was, for some reason, a little frightening, for it meant having to leave, by ship of course, and go far away forever). London meant bigger, older, and richer, where the Queen lived in Buckingham Palace, and where they had real criminals such as I had seen in television serializations of Dickens. For me, London is always Dickensian, for even my experience of modern London when I revisit is filtered through Dickens, just as Salisbury and Winchester, where my cousins live, is filtered, when I am actually there, through Trollope’s fictional Barsetshire. And beyond the provincial market towns of fictional Barsetshire, if you go out in the country, say to Shaftesbury or Tisbury or down toward Plymouth and get stuck in the moors, Exmoor and Dartmoor, it is possible to die of exposure—and there is a special prison there, I was told, for mad people and murderers. I saw it from a distance once, a monolith of old stone with peep-hole windows and a wall. Then I am out of Trollope’s Barsetshire; I am in Thomas Hardy’s fictional Wessex, which is deeply green, between towering hedgerows and endless windy lanes that recall the walking tracks they once were, or where it suddenly breaks out barren and lonely on the moors, and where life is more rural and remote and rough than the towns of Barsetshire. As for Malmsbury or Glastonbury…I feel closer to another world in these spots. Joseph of Arimathea, who paid for the tomb where they laid the dead Jesus, had come to Glastonbury in the first century; and that oriental connection seems still to linger about the place. A descendant of the tree he planted is still there, not even fenced off, just with a plaque, so far as I recall along the lines of, “Joseph of Arimathea planted this tree. Please Do Not Touch…” A masterpiece of English understatement. But perhaps it has changed since my last visit.
With enchantment it is impossible to tell “fiction” and “reality” apart. They merely reinforce each other. Enchanted, we walk around in the past rather than the present, which does not really exist as such because, in all the great places of the earth, it simply cannot. When I left home I went to live in Jerusalem for a few years; now there is a place where the present is palpably the living past. To me that is why it is holy.
We all have our resonances with place-names and it a soul-making exercise to recall them, for our enchantment is wrapped up with them. Reading Proust, we learn to resonate again with metaphysical experience, and if we can read Proust’s work for all its worth, then too, we experience enchantment.
We may extend what we have said about place-names to naming words generally. Words have resonances, and these “resonances” refer to something happening within the unison of our inner sensibility and sensitivity, our soul.
We may just take one more example from Proust. Young Marcel is out for a walk with his father and grandfather near their home in the village of Combray. They have taken a route along the grounds of the home where Monsieur Swann and his wife, formerly Odette de Crécy, live, and are admiring the flowering pink hawthorn growing there.
Suddenly I stopped, I could not move, as happens when something we see does not merely address our eyes, but requires a deeper kind of perception and possesses our entire being. A little girl with reddish blonde hair, who appeared to be coming back from a walk and held a gardening spade in her hand, was looking at us, lifting towards us a face scattered with pink freckles.6
This is young Marcel’s first sight of the girl who will be his first love.
I looked at her, at first with the sort of gaze that is not merely the messenger of the eyes, but a window at which all the senses lean out, anxious and petrified, a gaze that would touch the body it is looking at, capture it, take it away and the soul along with it…
Seeing young Marcel’s father and grandfather, “she turned away and with an indifferent and disdainful look, placed herself at an angle to spare her face from being in their field of vision.” Then as they passed, behind their backs, she gazed back at Marcel, “at full length in my direction, without any particular expression, without appearing to see me.” But she must have seen him, for she seems to have smiled secretly to herself and “at the same time her hand sketched an indecent gesture.”
—Gilberte, come here! What are you doing? came the piercing, authoritarian cry of a lady in white whom I had not seen…
The name!
So it was that this name Gilberte passed by close to me, given to me like a talisman that might enable me to find her again, this girl whom it had just turned into a person and who, a moment before, had been merely an uncertain image. So it passed, spoken over the jasmines and the stocks, as sour and as cool as the drops from the green watering hose; impregnating, coloring the portion of pure air that it had crossed—and that it isolated—with the mystery of the life of the girl that it designated…
And so they pass each other by. “And already the charm with which the incense of her name had imbued that place under the pink hawthorns where it had been heard by her and me together, was beginning to reach, to overlay, to perfume everything that came near it, her grandparents, whom my own had had the ineffable happiness of knowing, the sublime profession of stockbroker, the harrowing neighborhood of the Champs-Élysées where she lived in Paris.”
We filter out our experience in our social contexts today because this is how we learn and how we are taught, so that names mean next to nothing beyond their “function” to designate this or that. Proust, here, retrieves the truth of the real presence of words and names in particular. It is not merely as if Mrs. Swann calls her daughter’s name, as is in fact the case, but to one more deeply attentive, the girl’s name is called as if Adam himself had called it, as in the biblical story where Adam gives all things their names. As Proust says, the name turned the image into a person, and now the person may be present, by virtue of their name, where in fact they are absent; for instance, if Marcel’s parents are to talk about Gilberte at home. The girl’s presence is suddenly everywhere around in the world, perfuming everything, as Proust has it.
Of course we can take other examples, such as dreaded names. Then there are legendary names that come down through history and are timeless in the sense that they keep reverberating in one period of time after another. But, today, this sense of the importance of names for our inner sensibility, our soul, is narrowed to the nuclear family. Then there are the famous names bandied about in the media. But what is such fame? In Rilke, “Fame, after all, is but the sum of all the misunderstandings which gather around a new name.”7 Fame is categorically impersonal and depersonalizing, which is why, if one is sensitive and soulful and famous, fame can be destructive. Some names, pronounced between us, Rilke also says, may establish a friendship and cordiality and unanimity.8 These are important names.
Since Rilke’s day, or Proust’s, the world has changed, not in a natural or organic way, but it has been forced to change by powerful ideological interests, predominantly those of big capitalism, and now our world is infested and teeming with innumerable improper names, which are on everyone’s tongues, such as all those of which we have initialisms or acronyms, and “brand” names, all of which harness the power of the proper name for “economic” interests. Too few people in such a world realize the importance of names and can therefore regret the level of disenchantment brought about by the loss of proper names and their replacement by jargon, by technical language, professionalized language, brands, and initialisms; or the replacement of proper names by the dumb silence of those mindlessly occupied with staring at screens and playing some “game” or “messaging.” The loss of proper names marks the loss of sensitivity and sensibility within us and of the wonderful aura within which every name resonates. But unless we read Proust or some other author of his ilk, how can we know better?
Notes
1. For further reading, see Daniel Barenboim, Everything is Connected: The Power of Music (London: George Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2008), 1–23, 45–59.
2. Proust, “The Way by Swann’s,” 391.
3. Proust, Swann’s Way, Part Two, 236.
4. Adorno, Metaphysics, 464.
5. Proust, Swann’s Way, Part One, 236f.
6. Proust, “The Way by Swann’s,” 141ff.
7. Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin and Other Pieces, trans. G. Craig Houston (London: Quartet, 1986), 3.
8. Ibid., 45.