III

Art

                  The whole universe takes part in the dancing.

The Acts of John

Mary McCarthy once memorably rebelled against the residual cult of ‘art for art’s sake’ in prose fiction by pointing out that novels were often lumpy with undisguised ‘fact’ and could be put to use for all manner of everyday purposes: ‘you can learn how to make strawberry jam from Anna Karenina and how to reap a field and hunt ducks’. For some of Proust’s admirers such an idea will seem impious. They will see in A la recherche du temps perdu a triumph of the aesthetic over the merely useful, and wish to protect Proust’s good name from the taint of commerce or cookery. There is something about the transforming energy of Proust’s style, they will perhaps claim, that belongs unashamedly to high art. They might even murmur, remembering the dithyramb upon which Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (1873) ends, that Proust in his style has achieved the aesthete’s dream par excellence: ‘To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.’ No jam, no ducks.

Proust’s narrator sees things very differently. Although he is repeatedly drawn back, mothlike, to the Pateresque aesthetic flame, he is also fascinated by art-objects as commodities, and by the changing valuations that are placed upon them as they circulate in social space. When Bergotte dies, his afterlife of literary fame is firmly anchored to the spending power of individual consumers:

        On l’enterra, mais toute la nuit funèbre, aux vitrines éclairées, ses livres, disposés trois par trois, veillaient comme des anges aux ailes éployées et semblaient pour celui qui n’était plus, le symbole de sa résurrection.

(III, 693)

        They buried him, but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.

(V, 209)

In due course, Bergotte’s books may begin to resemble Rilkean angels, winged messengers from a transcendent sphere provisionally called Art, but for the time being they remain caught inside a system of trading arrangements: their angelic look is the product of a window-dresser’s artistry, and has a solid commercial motive behind it. Bergotte is dead, and already immaterially resurrected in the minds of his admirers, but the booksellers are still alive and need to earn a living. Throughout the novel Proust dwells on the socio-economic conditions of artistic production: works of art are prized and have prices, and the mechanisms by which they are bought and sold are for practical purposes quite separate from the labour of hand and brain which produces them. The art-work may have a glorious public career while its producer lives and dies in destitution. The market forces which govern the lives and the posthumous standing of artists operate on a broad front, generically, and have little respect for individual merit or distinctiveness: ‘Comme à la Bourse, quand un mouvement de hausse se produit, tout un compartiment de valeurs en profitent’ (III, 210; ‘As on the Stock Exchange, when a rise occurs, a whole group of securities profit by it’ (IV, 248)).

Proust’s narrator distinguishes firmly between the use value and the exchange value of artistic commodities, and gives a personal twist to the teachings of classical political economy. Art has use value in so far as it procures delight, joy, intellectual certainty or a general sense of emotional well-being for its consumer or its proprietor, and exchange value when its characteristic products move around in the fickle world of opinion. Individual works are valued highly because they are capable of serving human wants and producing pleasurable sensation, but any moment during which they are successfully used for these purposes is hedged about by stubborn questions of social status and prestige. Art is a weapon in the salon wars. Mme Verdurin enacts rapture for the benefit of her ‘little clan’, drives herself towards the extremes of aesthetic sensitivity which will identify her as a charismatic personage in their eyes, and presents her own artistic experience as a special form of suffering nobly and altruistically borne. Listening to a sonata or a septet is always a social act in Proust, and extravagantly so when Mme Verdurin buries her head in her hands in seeming retreat from her fellow hearers.

Although this stage management of artistic response runs as a comic leitmotif throughout the novel, Proust extracts a more complex poetry from the rise and fall of entire artistic reputations. ‘Poussin’ or ‘Chopin’ are commodities like rubber, copper or coffee, and a diffuse but effective international machinery regulates their prices. Among many satirical set-pieces on this theme none more completely overreaches the task of correcting human folly than the episode in Sodome et Gomorrhe where the narrator brings news of Chopin’s revived market fortunes to Mme de Cambremer, who has paid him a visit at Balbec. The full extent of Chopin’s rehabilitation is revealed to the narrator’s victim not directly but, ‘as in a game of billiards’, by bouncing the latest state of informed opinion off her mother-in-law, the aged, music-loving marquise de Cambremer, who has accompanied her:

        Ses yeux brillèrent comme ceux de Latude dans la pièce appelée Latude ou trente-cinq ans de captivité et sa poitrine huma l’air de la mer avec cette dilatation que Beethoven a si bien marquée dans Fidelio, quand ses prisonniers respirent enfin «cet air qui vivifie». Je crus qu’elle allait poser sur ma joue ses lèvres moustachues. «Comment, vous aimez Chopin? Il aime Chopin, il aime Chopin», s’écria-t-elle dans un nasonnement passionné, comme elle aurait dit: «Comment, vous connaissez aussi Mme de Francquetot?» avec cette différence que mes relations avec Mme de Francquetot lui eussent étés profondément indifférentes, tandis que ma connaissance de Chopin la jeta dans une sorte de délire artistique. L’hypersécrétion salivaire ne suffit plus. N’ayant même pas essayé de comprendre le rôle de Debussy dans la réinvention de Chopin, elle sentit seulement que mon jugement était favorable. L’enthousiasme musical la saisit. «Élodie! Élodie! il aime Chopin.» Ses seins se soulevèrent et elle battit l’air de ses bras. «Ah! j’avais bien senti que vous étiez musicien, s’écria-t-elle. Je comprends, hhartiste comme vous êtes, que vous aimiez cela. C’est si beau!» Et sa voix était aussi caillouteuse que si, pour m’exprimer son ardeur pour Chopin, elle eût, imitant Démosthène, rempli sa bouche avec tous les galets de la plage. Enfin le reflux vint, atteignant jusqu’à la voilette qu’elle n’eut pas le temps de mettre à l’abri et qui fut transpercée, enfin la marquise essuya avec son mouchoir brodé la bave d’écume dont le souvenir de Chopin venait de tremper ses moustaches.

(III, 212–13)

        Her eyes shone like the eyes of Latude in the play entitled Latude, or Thirty-five Years in Captivity, and her bosom inhaled the sea air with that dilatation which Beethoven has depicted so well in Fidelio, at the point where his prisoners at last breathe again ‘this life-giving air’. I thought that she was going to press her hirsute lips to my cheek. ‘What, you like Chopin? He likes Chopin, he likes Chopin,’ she cried in an impassioned nasal twang, as she might have said: ‘What, you know Mme de Francquetot too?’, with this difference, that my relations with Mme de Francquetot would have been a matter of profound indifference to her, whereas my knowledge of Chopin plunged her into a sort of artistic delirium. Her salivary hyper-secretion no longer sufficed. Not having even attempted to understand the part played by Debussy in the rediscovery of Chopin, she felt only that my judgment of him was favourable. Her musical enthusiasm overpowered her. ‘Elodie! Elodie! He likes Chopin!’ Her bosom rose and she beat the air with her arms. ‘Ah! I knew at once that you were a musician,’ she cried, ‘I can quite understand your liking his work, hhartistic as you are. It’s so beautiful!’ And her voice was as pebbly as if, to express her ardour for Chopin, she had imitated Demosthenes and filled her mouth with all the shingle on the beach. Then came the ebb-tide, reaching as far as her veil which she had not time to lift out of harm’s way and which was drenched, and finally the Marquise wiped away with her embroidered handkerchief the tidemark of foam in which the memory of Chopin had steeped her moustaches.

(IV, 250)

Debussy’s favourable opinion of Chopin, funnelled downwards by the narrator into the dimly lit world of the Cambremers, triggers a violent physical reaction: the throat, the nasal membranes and the salivary ducts of the old marquise, which have already been sketched at some length, are now so energised by the narrator’s announcement that she begins to resemble an impersonal natural force. She secretes, but in the manner of the ocean nearby. The pebbled shore, the incoming tide, the foaming waves, remove her from a mere social encounter and give her a place in the conversation of the elements. From the viewpoint of breeding and decorum, her reaction to a risen-again composer is as grotesque and uncomely as her moustache.

This is caricature reaching towards sublimity. The excellence of Beethoven’s music and of Demosthenes’s oratorical style are by stealth co-opted into the narrator’s portrait of incontinent old age. High art, represented by Chopin, Debussy and the great chorus, ‘O welche Lust!’ which opens the Act I finale of Fidelio, is brought into alignment with the very low art of a sensational boulevard melodrama, and the expressive power of art itself with embarrassing bodily functions. A revolutionary hymn to freedom is interwoven with the free growth of facial hair and the free expression of spit. Writing of this kind passes beyond simple vitriol and disgust and moves towards a lofty vision of art as necessarily inclusive, heterogeneous and impure. From within a malicious account of exchange value a new usefulness is discovered for the artistic commodity: it produces delight from the most improbable raw materials. An abject beauty is born.

Proust’s account of the art market is as much a celebration as a critique. Commercial motives and financial transactions are ‘low’ materials, but ones upon which the high-toned Proustian novel thrives. The narrator keeps on reminding himself of these, reserving a special place in his own prospective novel for getting and spending, and the exploitation of art for other than artistic ends. A la recherche du temps perdu thus anticipates in detail one of the destinies to which it has been subject since its publication. The novel has been pressed into service as a source-book for the social history of late nineteenth-century France, and has acted as an informal guide to the sensibilities, manners, tastes and fashions of the period. It has come to resemble the Voyage artistique à Bayreuth (1897) that was so popular in Proust’s own day. This volume, by Albert Lavignac, was the complete vade mecum for those setting out on their Wagnerian pilgrimage, and combined operatic plot-summaries and music-examples with advice on travel, including railway ticket prices and journey times, hotel accommodation and local dishes. Proust’s novel is regularly treated as a voyage in space and time to a lost Faubourg Saint-Germain, and valued because it tells us what books its inhabitants were reading, what plays they were seeing and what coiffures and evening gowns they wore:

        le visage d’Odette paraissait plus maigre et plus proéminent parce que le front et le haut des joues, cette surface unie et plus plane était recouverte par la masse de cheveux qu’on portait alors prolongés en «devants», soulevés en «crêpés», répandus en mèches folles le long des oreilles; et quant à son corps qui était admirablement fait, il était difficile d’en apercevoir la continuité (à cause des modes de l’époque et quoiqu’elle fût une des femmes de Paris qui s’habillaient le mieux), tant le corsage, s’avançant en saillie comme sur un ventre imaginaire et finissant brusquement en pointe pendant que par en dessous commençait à s’enfler le ballon des doubles jupes, donnait à la femme l’air d’être composée de pièces différentes mal emmanchées les unes dans les autres; tant les ruchés, les volants, le gilet suivaient en toute indépendance, selon la fantaisie de leur dessin ou la consistance de leur étoffe, la ligne qui les conduisait aux nœuds, aux bouillons de dentelle, aux effilés de jais perpendiculaires, ou qui les dirigeait le long du busc, mais ne s’attachaient nullement à l’être vivant, qui selon que l’architecture de ces fanfreluches se rapprochait ou s’écartait trop de la sienne s’y trouvait engoncé ou perdu.

(I, 194)

        Odette’s face appeared thinner and sharper than it actually was, because the forehead and the upper part of the cheeks, that smooth and almost plane surface, were covered by the masses of hair which women wore at that period drawn forward in a fringe, raised in crimped waves and falling in stray locks over the ears; while as for her figure – and she was admirably built – it was impossible to make out its continuity (on account of the fashion then prevailing, and in spite of her being one of the best-dressed women in Paris) so much did the corsage, jutting out as though over an imaginary stomach and ending in a sharp point, beneath which bulged out the balloon of her double skirts, give a woman the appearance of being composed of different sections badly fitted together; to such an extent did the frills, the flounces, the inner bodice follow quite independently, according to the whim of their designer or the consistency of their material, the line which led them to the bows, the festoons of lace, the fringes of dangling jet beads, or carried them along the busk, but nowhere attached themselves to the living creature, who, according as the architecture of these fripperies drew them towards or away from her own, found herself either strait-laced to suffocation or else completely buried.

(I, 236)

This portrait of the young Odette from the beginning of ‘Un Amour de Swann’ already speaks of her as a construction, an unstable precipitate of other people’s desires, and artfully suggests, in its cascading three-item lists of detachable decorative elements, the difficulty that Swann is soon to experience in his attempts to immobilise and control her. But even if we train ourselves to be suspicious of such descriptions, and remind ourselves of the ways in which their brilliant literary art overlays and obscures the art of the hairdresser or the couturier, they do still have enough of the documentary record about them to serve at least as corroborative evidence for the professional social historian. For the amateur, Proust’s dresses will of course be close enough to the real thing for no pedantic questions about their evidential status to be asked. Indeed Proust’s novel tells us so crisply about so many aspects of social life – from bicycles and telephone exchanges to modes of address and hotel accommodation – that most modern readers will be happy to treat its curious lore as simple fact. Why shrink away from the novel’s utilitarian role as an encyclopaedia of its times?

This posthumous treatment of Proust’s novel really does seem to have been authorised by Proust himself, for whom prose fiction should no more be shorn of fact and utility than the marquise de Cambremer’s upper lip should be depilated. Just as the narrator of Le Temps retrouvé is propelled towards creative action by the unevenness of paving stones or the rigidity and roughness of a table-napkin (IV, 446–7; VI, 218–19), so the book in which he figures seems to crave a constant contact with the recalcitrant particularity of material things. In order to produce new knowledge, the human sensorium needs to be goaded, stung, taken aback. From a moment’s disequilibrium between the writer’s sense-fields, from a snag, a discrepancy or an overload, comes first a new power of vision, and then writing. ‘Please handle me roughly’ is the writer’s request to the world.

When Proust inserts imaginary works of art, minutely described, into the fabric of his narration, these are at one and the same time disruptive, in that they slow the plot down, and facilitating, in that they tell the reader in the form of a self-contained allegory what manner of plot the book as a whole has. In recounting his experience of Elstir’s painting ‘Le port de Carquethuit’ in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (II, 192–4; II, 480–82) or of the Vinteuil septet posthumously performed at a Verdurin soirée in La Prisonnière (III, 752–69; V, 279–300), for example, the narrator pays tribute to the integrative power of artistic imagination as it exercises itself on a mass of unruly and short-lived particulars. Whatever sensations of grace or ease the work of art may eventually cause, it is not allowed to forget that it is the product of hard work upon resistant stuff and that the artist can properly feed on the hard work of others when he comes to choose his subject matter:

        Des hommes qui poussaient des bateaux à la mer couraient aussi bien dans les flots que sur le sable, lequel, mouillé, réfléchissait déjà les coques comme s’il avait été de l’eau […] des femmes qui ramassaient des crevettes dans les rochers, avaient l’air, parce qu’elles étaient entourées d’eau et à cause de la dépression qui, après la barrière circulaire des roches, abaissait la plage (des deux côtés les plus rapprochés des terres) au niveau de la mer, d’être dans une grotte marine surplombée de barques et de vagues, ouverte et protégée au milieu des flots écartés miraculeusement. Si tout le tableau donnait cette impression des ports où la mer entre dans la terre, où la terre est déjà marine et la population amphibie, la force de l’élément marin éclatait partout; et près des rochers, à l’entrée de la jetée, où la mer était agitée, on sentait, aux efforts des matelots et à l’obliquité des barques couchées à angle aigu devant la calme verticalité de l’entrepôt, de l’église, des maisons de la ville, où les uns rentraient, d’où les autres partaient pour la pêche, qu’ils trottaient rudement sur l’eau comme sur un animal fougueux et rapide dont les soubresauts, sans leur adresse, les eussent jetés à terre.

(II, 193)

        The men who were pushing down their boats into the sea were running as much through the waves as along the sand, which, being wet, reflected the hulls as if they were already in the water […] women gathering shrimps among the rocks had the appearance, because they were surrounded by water and because of the depression which, beyond the circular barrier of rocks, brought the beach (on the two sides nearest the land) down to sea-level, of being in a marine grotto overhung by ships and waves, open yet protected in the midst of miraculously parted waters. If the whole picture gave this impression of harbours in which the sea penetrated the land, in which the land was already subaqueous and the population amphibian, the strength of the marine element was everywhere apparent; and round about the rocks, at the mouth of the harbour where the sea was rough, one sensed, from the muscular efforts of the fishermen and the slant of the boats leaning over at an acute angle, compared with the calm erectness of the warehouse, the church, the houses in the town to which some of the figures were returning and from which others were setting out to fish, that they were riding bareback on the water as though on a swift and fiery animal whose rearing, but for their skill, must have unseated them.

(II, 480–81)

The muscular efforts of fishermen and shrimp-collecting women are echoed in the transpositional labour of Elstir’s brush, which moves land-features seawards and sea-features landwards, and re-echoed in the animation and bustle of the narrator’s prose. Writing immerses itself in the interplay of natural forces and human trades, and improves upon the art of the painter in one essential respect: by way of its syntax, writing offers not a still effigy of movement but movement itself. It inhabits time, and in its goal-driven effortfulness rejoins the time-bound seafarers as they push out their boats or steer them among the waves. A novel in headlong motion towards a distant goal offers the reader a sudden model of itself in its completed state, and of the navigational prowess required to get it there.

Proust’s prefigurative sketches of his own finished book reach their culmination in the episode of Vinteuil’s septet, which is a large double portrait of art and labour. What is so remarkable about this celebrated scene is that it brings together, and interconnects, a pure strain of Pateresque aesthetic ecstasy on the one hand and a prosy view of the artisan’s workshop on the other. The septet is repeatedly differentiated from the earlier violin sonata by Vinteuil, which had supplied Odette and Swann with the ‘national anthem of their love’ (I, 262; ‘l’air national de leur amour’ (I, 215)), as if the contrast between the two works contained a clue to the enigma of all artistic perception. First of all the main difference is stated in the empurpled language that a programme-note writer might use to endow abstract music with an accessible content of images:

        Tandis que la sonate s’ouvrait sur une aube liliale et champêtre, divisant sa candeur légère mais pour se suspendre à l’emmêlement léger et pourtant consistant d’un berceau rustique de chèvrefeuilles sur des géraniums blancs, c’était sur des surfaces unies et planes commes celles de la mer que, par un matin d’orage, commençait au milieu d’un aigre silence, dans un vide infini, l’œuvre nouvelle, et c’est dans un rose d’aurore que, pour se construire progressivement devant moi, cet univers inconnu était tiré du silence et de la nuit. Ce rouge si nouveau, si absent de la tendre, champêtre et candide sonate, teignait tout le ciel, comme l’aurore, d’un espoir mystérieux. Et un chant perçait déjà l’air, chant de sept notes, mais le plus inconnu, le plus différent de tout ce que j’eusse jamais imaginé, à la fois ineffable et criard, non plus roucoulement de colombe comme dans la sonate, mais déchirant l’air, aussi vif que la nuance écarlate dans laquelle le début était noyé, quelque chose comme un mystique chant du coq, un appel ineffable mais suraigu, de l’éternel matin.

(III, 754)

        Whereas the sonata opened upon a lily-white pastoral dawn, dividing its fragile purity only to hover in the delicate yet compact entanglement of a rustic bower of honeysuckle against white geraniums, it was upon flat, unbroken surfaces like those of the sea on a morning that threatens storm, in the midst of an eerie silence, in an infinite void, that this new work began, and it was into a rose-red daybreak that this unknown universe was drawn from the silence and the night to build up gradually before me. This redness, so new, so absent from the tender, pastoral, unadorned sonata, tinged all the sky, as dawn does, with a mysterious hope. And a song already pierced the air, a song on seven notes, but the strangest, the most remote from anything I had ever imagined, at once ineffable and strident, no longer the cooing of a dove as in the sonata, but rending the air, as vivid as the scarlet tint in which the opening bars had been bathed, something like a mystical cock-crow, the ineffable but ear-piercing call of eternal morning.

(V, 282–3)

This is supercharged ‘programmatic’ description in that it offers a battery of special effects – sunrises, flower arrangements and a transcendentalised farmyard – in lieu of musical analysis proper, but it is also, by the very floridity and excess of its language, something more. The gap between the pale dawn of a violin sonata and the red dawn of a septet is rediscovered endlessly and everywhere: between repose and action, cooing and shrieking, doves and cocks, pastoralism and farming, the ordinary calendrical procession of days and a new apocalypse. The paragraph continues lengthily in the same vein, and spawns further alternative versions of what seems to be a single underlying difference. Difference itself, the fact and principle of it, has become the mystery of mysteries and sends the writing in mad pursuit of its key.

This rapturous recreation of musical hearing is interrupted by social reportage of one kind or another – Mme Verdurin is restaging her martyrdom to art, and Charlus is negotiating for sexual favours with members of the domestic staff – but when music itself returns the binary pair ‘sonata v. septet’ is again given a central expressive role. So many other pairs are available from within the language of Western music – melody v. harmony, major v. minor, treble v. bass, homophony v. polyphony, sonata form v. baroque ritornello form – but none has the strange undeserved prestige of two instruments v. seven. At the climactic moment of this episode, music is drained of all sensuous content and its entire thrust and dynamic are handed over to a group of almost synonymous abstract terms. The play of difference and similarity, which had previously been embodied in music, heard, touched and visualised as note followed note, is now reinvented in the bare alternation of the terms difference and similarity, and their synonyms:

        c’était justement quand [Vinteuil] cherchait puissamment à être nouveau, qu’on reconnaissait, sous les différences apparentes, les similitudes profondes et les ressemblances voulues qu’il y avait au sein d’une œuvre, quand Vinteuil reprenait à diverses reprises une même phrase, la diversifiait, s’amusait à changer son rythme, à la faire reparaître sous sa forme première, ces ressemblances-là, voulues, œuvre de l’intelligence, forcément superficielles, n’arrivaient jamais à être aussi frappantes que ces ressemblances dissimulées, involontaires, qui éclataient sous des couleurs différentes, entre les deux chefs-d’œuvre distincts; car alors Vinteuil, cherchant puissamment à être nouveau, s’interrogeait lui-même, de toute la puissance de son effort créateur atteignait sa propre essence à ces profondeurs où, quelque question qu’on lui pose, c’est du même accent, le sien propre, qu’elle répond.

(III, 760)

        it was precisely when [Vinteuil] was striving with all his might to create something new that one recognised, beneath the apparent differences, the profound similarities and the deliberate resemblances that existed in the body of a work; when Vinteuil took up the same phrase again and again, diversified it, amused himself by altering its rhythm, by making it reappear in its original form, those deliberate resemblances, the work of his intellect, necessarily superficial, never succeeded in being as striking as the disguised, involuntary resemblances, which broke out in different colours, between the two separate masterpieces; for then Vinteuil, striving to do something new, interrogated himself, with all the power of his creative energy, reached down to his essential self at those depths where, whatever the question asked, it is in the same accent, that is to say its own, that it replies.

(V, 289)

Again, this is only part of a long careering paragraph in which a single polarity is tirelessly recast. Beneath a phenomenal surface in which difference reigns supreme, an underlying similarity or self-identity gathers force. Although the later work is unassimilable to the earlier, and boasts about its own stridencies and its refusal to blend voice smoothly into voice, an uncontrollable, non-volitional Vinteuil manner speaks up for sameness even as difference has its day. But this is not the end of the story, for the more Vinteuil becomes an individual and the more recognisable his stylistic fingerprints prove to be, the more he removes himself from those with whom he shares a mere period style. No sooner is difference lost from view inside an individual corpus of creative works than it re-emerges within a larger community of artists: a great composer sounds like himself and no one else. An abstract language which talks insistently of difference has been given propulsive force and become the vehicle of an unquenchable Dionysian vision. Music overspills the page, the stave and the recital room, and floods the entire scene of thought and action; it seizes everything in its path and becomes, in Pater’s words, ‘the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy’.

The air of excitement and uplift that Proust confers upon these descriptions of Vinteuil’s late work may at first seem to sit oddly with his accompanying emphasis on the labour that art requires of its creators and recreative performers. But their co-ordinated efforts of mind and muscle, far from being noted in passing, are incorporated bodily in the narrator’s trance; the texture of his reverie on art is woven not only from a generalising speculative language but from memories of other people at work, menially applying themselves to the materials of their craft or trade:

        Le violoncelliste dominait l’instrument qu’il serrait entre ses genoux, inclinant sa tête à laquelle des traits vulgaires donnaient, dans les instants de maniérisme, une expression involontaire de dégoût; il se penchait sur sa contrebasse, la palpait avec la même patience domestique que s’il eût épluché un chou, tandis que près de lui la harpiste, encore enfant, en jupe courte, dépassée de tous côtés par les rayons horizontaux du quadrilatère d’or, pareil à ceux qui, dans la chambre magique d’une sibylle, figureraient arbitrairement l’éther, selon les formes consacrées, semblait aller y chercher çà et là, au point assigné, un son délicieux, de la même manière que, petite déesse allégorique, dressée devant le treillage d’or de la voûte céleste, elle y aurait cueilli, une à une, des étoiles.

(III, 755–6)

        The cellist was hunched over the instrument which he clutched between his knees, his head bowed forward, his coarse features assuming an involuntary expression of disgust at the more mannerist moments; he leaned over his double bass, fingering it with the same domestic patience with which he might have peeled a cabbage, while by his side the harpist, a mere child in a short skirt, framed behind the diagonal rays of her golden quadrilateral, recalling those which, in the magic chamber of a sibyl, arbitrarily denote the ether according to the traditional forms, seemed to be picking out exquisite sounds here and there at designated points, just as though, a tiny allegorical goddess poised before the golden trellis of the heavenly vault, she were gathering, one by one, its stars.

(V, 283–4)

Proust has arranged a delicious reversal of conventional musical values in this passage: the cellist, whose instrument – oddly called a contrebasse (‘double bass’) in the original French – has serious melodic and harmonic responsibilities in the instrumental music of the time, is consigned to the kitchen as a rude cabbage-stripper, while the harpist escapes from her customary supporting role to become a goddess plucking stars from the heavenly vault. Blessed are the meek, and those who merely tweak. But both instrumentalists are workers, practical folk, appliers of instrumental reason. From their scraping and twanging, from their devoted coaxing of wood, wire and gut, comes other people’s joy:

        Enfin le motif joyeux resta triomphant, ce n’était plus un appel presque inquiet lancé derrière un ciel vide, c’était une joie ineffable qui semblait venir du Paradis; une joie aussi différente de celle de la sonate que, d’un ange doux et grave de Bellini, jouant du théorbe, pourrait être, vêtu d’une robe d’écarlate, quelque archange de Mantegna sonnant dans un buccin. Je savais que cette nuance nouvelle de la joie, cet appel vers une joie supraterrestre, je ne l’oublierais jamais. Masi serait-elle jamais réalisable pour moi?

(III, 764–5)

        In the end the joyous motif was left triumphant; it was no longer an almost anxious appeal addressed to an empty sky, it was an ineffable joy which seemed to come from paradise, a joy as different from that of the sonata as some scarlet-clad Mantegna archangel sounding a trumpet from a grave and gentle Bellini seraph strumming a theorbo. I knew that this new tone of joy, this summons to a supraterrestrial joy, was a thing that I would never forget. But would it ever be attainable to me?

(V, 294)

The narrator’s plaintive question provides the cue for a further exorbitant disquisition on the sheer long-haul laboriousness that art may require of its disciples. It would of course be gratifying to find that artistic joys were there for the plucking, requiring little or nothing by way of training, preparatory study or technical address, but mostly they are not there in advance of the human appetite for them. They have to be elicited, and slowly. The writer, the painter, the composer, and the performing musician too, have to spend long hours in what Roland Barthes aptly called ‘the kitchen of meaning’ (‘la cuisine du sens’), sweating away to create a richly interfused semantic broth.

At this point in this extraordinary episode, the narrator, seeking an answer to his question, makes a bold sideways move, and speaks not about the writing of music but about its editing, arid about the skills and temperamental qualities that successful editors typically require. Vinteuil had died before completing his septet, and the task of producing a performable score had been hampered by the confused state in which the sketches had been left. The task had been taken on and brought to fruition by a woman who had, much earlier in the novel, figured with the composer’s daughter in a primal scene of perverse sexual play:

        en passant des années à débrouiller le grimoire laissé par Vinteuil, en établissant la lecture certaine de ces hiéroglyphes inconnus, l’amie de Mlle Vinteuil eut la consolation d’assurer au musicien dont elle avait assombri les dernières années, une gloire immortelle et compensatrice […] Comme dans les illisibles carnets où un chimiste de génie, qui ne sait pas la mort si proche, a noté des découvertes qui resteront peut-être à jamais ignorées, elle avait dégagé, de papiers plus illisibles que des papyrus ponctués d’écriture cunéiforme, la formule éternellement vraie, à jamais féconde, de cette joie inconnue, l’espérance mystique de l’ange écarlate du matin.

(III, 766–7)

        by spending years unravelling the scribblings left by him, by establishing the correct readings of those secret hieroglyphs, she had the consolation of ensuring an immortal and compensatory glory for the composer over whose last years she had cast such a shadow […] As in the illegible note-books in which a chemist of genius, who does not know that death is at hand, jots down discoveries which will perhaps remain for ever unknown, Mile Vinteuil’s friend had disentangled, from papers more illegible than strips of papyrus dotted with a cuneiform script, the formula, eternally true and for ever fertile, of this unknown joy, the mystic hope of the crimson Angel of the Dawn.

(V, 295–6)

The cruel passions of the woman have been magically transmuted into the patient, public-spirited, scholarly toil without which the red dawn of Vinteuil’s last work would have remained invisible, and its cock-crow unheard.

With his constant stress on the undecipherability of Vinteuil’s manuscripts, and on the co-responsibility of the composer and editor for the joy that the completed work can produce in its hearers, the narrator seems at first to be describing a hierarchical division of artistic labour. Editors are like cellists and harpists in that their efforts help to bring the art-work to birth as organised sound, but the composer himself still retains his major privileges, for the ideational and affective contents of the work are his alone. Inspiration belongs to him, and perspiration to useful lesser beings. It would have suited one of the narrator’s self-images well to leave matters there. Let other people do the work, get their hands dirty, have sexual eccentricities and other signs of character, and let the artist have brilliant ideas and a capacity to delegate. Yet the narrator does not settle for invisibility, or aloofness from mere work, during this, his supreme hymn to the potency of Art. On the contrary, he comes alive as a character precisely in his greed for work, and for eccentricity, and for other people’s specialised skills. The clarion-call that his writing sounds, its noisy dawn-song and its forward-rushing clamour, are born of a will-to-include that thrives equally on eloquence and babble, ecstasies and exertions, cabbages and stars. For a moment, even Mme Verdurin’s snoring dog is caught up in the enlarged acoustic space of Vinteuil’s work, and writing has a similar opportunistic power of absorption. These pages are a gloriously impure, lumber-filled rhapsody. In them Proust’s art reveals art, lays bare its inner workings, comes clean about its insecurities and low motives, and pins snapshots of the production-process on to the finished product. This combined description and reinvention has unparalleled summative force: it is an allegorical representation both of what the narrator’s book will eventually be like and of what Proust’s book has already been like from its first page.

While one tendency of the narrator’s voice throughout the novel takes him towards the seemingly disembodied labour of speculative thought, another, almost as insistent, moves him back into the company of full-time handworkers. Electricians, motor mechanics, porcelain repairers, dressmakers and switchboard operators are all caught up in the reflective texture of the narrator’s monologue, and their specialist skills are sometimes characterised at length:

        Dans une boucherie, où à gauche était une auréole de soleil et à droite un bœuf entier pendu, un garçon boucher très grand et très mince, aux cheveux blonds, son cou sortant d’un col bleu ciel, mettait une rapidité vertigineuse et une religieuse conscience à mettre d’un côté les filets de bœuf exquis, de l’autre de la culotte de dernier ordre, les plaçait dans d’éblouissantes balances surmontées d’une croix, d’où retombaient de belles chaînettes, et – bien qu’il ne fît ensuite que disposer pour l’étalage, des rognons, des tournedos, des entrecôtes – donnait en réalité beaucoup plus l’impression d’un bel ange qui au jour du Jugement dernier préparera pour Dieu, selon leurs qualités, la séparation des Bons et des Méchants et la pesée des âmes.

(III, 644–5)

        In a butcher’s shop, between an aureole of sunshine on the left and a whole ox suspended from a hook on the right, a young assistant, very tall and slender, with fair hair and a long neck emerging from a sky-blue collar, was displaying a lightning speed and a religious conscientiousness in putting on one side the most exquisite fillets of beef, on the other the coarsest parts of the rump, and placing them on glittering scales surmounted by a cross from which there dangled a set of beautiful chains, and – although he did nothing afterwards but arrange in the window a display of kidneys, steaks and ribs – was really far more reminiscent of a handsome angel who, on the Day of Judgement, will organise for God, according to their quality, the separation of the good and the wicked and the weighing of souls.

(V, 150)

Like the dyer’s hand in one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the nature of this butcher’s boy is ‘subdued to what it works in’. Raw meat is his expressive medium, and within this world of cuts and joints he is able to achieve an inventive patterning that is for a moment strictly comparable to the painter’s work with pigment or the composer’s with notes. (The handsome angel weighing souls is likely to have been borrowed from Rogier van der Weyden’s great ‘Last Judgement’ altarpiece in the Hôtel-Dieu at Beaune.) The narrator’s gentle humour in passages like this is based on a real sense of fraternity in toil, and the angelic cadence on which the sentence comes to rest speaks entirely of a this-worldly pride in a job well done. As if to reinforce the point that heavenly beings belong to the real world, the angels in Giotto’s Arena chapel are presented, later in the novel, as working messengers, expending their locomotive energy in robust contact with the oxygen-rich earthly air:

        Avec tant de ferveur céleste, ou au moins de sagesse et d’application enfantines, qu’ils rapprochent leurs petites mains, les anges sont représentés à l’Arena, mais comme des volatiles d’une espèce particulière ayant existé réellement, ayant dû figurer dans l’histoire naturelle des temps bibliques et évangéliques. Ce sont de petits êtres qui ne manquent pas de voltiger devant les saints quand ceux-ci se promènent; il y en a toujours quelques-uns de lâchés au-dessus d’eux, et comme ce sont des créatures réelles et effectivement volantes, on les voit s’élevant, décrivant des courbes, mettant la plus grande aisance à exécuter des loopings, fondant vers le sol la tête en bas à grand renfort d’ailes qui leur permettent de se maintenir dans des positions contraires aux lois de la pesanteur, et ils font beaucoup plutôt penser à une variété disparue d’oiseaux ou à de jeunes élèves de Garros s’exerçant au vol plané, qu’aux anges de l’art de la Renaissance.

(IV, 227)

        For all the celestial fervour, or at least the childlike obedience and application, with which their minuscule hands are joined, they are represented in the Arena chapel as winged creatures of a particular species that had really existed, that must have figured in the natural history of biblical and apostolic times. Constantly flitting about above the saints whenever the latter walk abroad, these little beings, since they are real creatures with a genuine power of flight, can be seen soaring upwards, describing curves, ‘looping the loop’, diving earthwards head first, with the aid of wings which enable them to support themselves in positions that defy the laws of gravity, and are far more reminiscent of an extinct species of bird, or of young pupils of Garros practising gliding, than of the angels of the Renaissance.

(V, 744)

The ‘reality’ of these winged creatures is repeatedly reinforced here, rather as if the stubborn rumour of their heavenly origin had to be scotched once and for all. They are a lost breed of bird, or trainee pilots under the supervision of the French air-ace Roland Garros (1888–1918), and the aerobatic adventures of these assembled air-workers belong unmistakably to the modern day. Looping in the sense of ‘looping the loop’ is recorded by Paul Robert’s dictionary as making its first appearance in French in 1911, and both examples given are from Proust’s novel. One trembles slightly at the thought of these very early aerial exploits, yet can only admire the speed with which both languages found an appropriate term for the most dangerous of them. No sooner had English adopted a vigorous expression from a fairground attraction of the day, than French had borrowed it in an abbreviated form. Proust, with characteristic historical long-sightedness, traces the gravity-defying insolence of the gesture back to the iconography of the Middle Ages, and, beyond that, to the bird-life of biblical times.

The work of art, according to the narrator’s prescription, must commemorate the labour from which it springs, or at the very least acknowledge within itself the comparable labours of those who, caring little or nothing for art, nevertheless contribute distinctively to the common good. The sculptural decoration of Laon cathedral contains a perfect emblem of this relationship: the narrator reminds us of ‘les tours où des boeufs, se promenant paisiblement sur la toiture, regardent de haut les plaines de Champagne’ (II, 313–14; ‘the towers, between which oxen grazing calmly on the roof look down over the plains of Champagne’ (III, 6)), and in so doing gives these working animals an afterlife of action. They had hauled stone blocks to the top of the knoll on which the cathedral was to be built, and now move around freely at their perpetual pasture. They have become part of the beauty which they helped to create. Similarly, Proust sweeps a workforce of modern fabricators into the fabric of his novel, naming them, specifying their crafts, keeping them in motion, and finding endless uncondescending ways of associating their skills with his.

One group of artisans has a special role in the long slow narrative of A la recherche du temps perdu: writers. Great writers, from Homer to Flaubert, modern men of letters, journalists, letter writers, lapidary inscription carvers and librettists crowd the scene. Real writers rub shoulders with imaginary ones, Mme de Sévigné with Mme de Beausergent, Anatole France, Pierre Loti and Edmond Rostand with the magnificent forename-shorn Bergotte. There is of course nothing surprising in the fact that the narrator should have chosen to populate his tale with authors, for reading books or claiming to have read them is a prominent feature of contemporary middle-class and aristocratic manners. Just as Freud’s patients had bookish dreams, which they reported to a clinician who was himself well-read and willing to put literature to work for the purposes of dream interpretation, so Proust’s characters use literary references and allusions as a versatile common currency in social exchange. Proust’s novel redreams European literature, giving a further lease of imaginative life to favourite characters from fiction and drama and new pungency to the memorable sayings of essayists. The monumental weight of a centuries-old literary tradition dissolves into the light-limbed dance of the narrator’s fantasies and talk.

While there is scarcely a page of Proust’s novel that is without its literary reference, the pressure exerted by earlier writers on his own literary technique is subject to wide variation. At one extreme, the narrative may be given over, for pages on end, to extempore critical effusions. Plot, character and dialogue are swallowed into a loosely associative essay form. Towards the end of La Prisonnière, for example, the narrator, who is beginning to wish himself free of his weighty captive, unleashes for her benefit a tirade of literary impressions. The roll-call is impressive: Barbey d’Aurevilly, Hardy, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Mme de Sévigné, Gogol, Paul de Kock, Laclos, Mme de Genlis, Baudelaire and Tolstoy. Two of these – Barbey d’Aurevilly and Hardy – are treated very much in the manner of an ingratiating reference work: first ‘Le rideau cramoisi’ from Les Diaboliques (1874), Une vieille maîtresse (1851) and L’Ensorcelée (1854), and then Jude the Obscure (1895), The Well-Beloved (1897) and A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), are listed with lively comments on each. Later the narrator’s attention switches to The Idiot (1868) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) and to an enthusiastic enumeration of their characters. Vermeer, Rembrandt, Carpaccio and the nameless sculptors who decorated Orvieto cathedral are enlisted in supporting roles.

The narrator is making a serious point, as one might say, in so far as he is again sketching the family resemblances between scenes and between entire works that create an overall sense of imaginative coherence and individuality for each of his great artists in turn. There is a Hardy tone of voice and an obsessional core of Hardy images. While disclaiming for the time being any personal wish to become a novelist, the narrator is setting out an ardstic programme for himself, continuing to reflect upon the double pull towards difference and sameness that he had earlier discovered in the music of Vinteuil, and recreating exactly that tension in his own rampaging spoken exercises in criticism and aesthetic theory. But for every ‘serious’ strain in Proust’s plot there is a comic descant. Proustian opera is seria and buffa at the same time. There is a massive failure of tact in the narrator’s erudite assault upon his partner. ‘Lock up your daughters when a literary critic comes wooing’, the muse of comedy seems to say as these speeches reach their airless cruising altitude. Albertine is a conversational foil in the manner of a docile minor participant in one of Plato’s dialogues:

        Je n’avais pas voulu vous interrompre, mais puisque je vois que vous quittez Dostoïevski, j’aurais peur d’oublier. Mon petit, qu’est-ce que vous avez voulu dire l’autre jour quand vous m’avez dit: «C’est comme le côté Dostoïevski de Mme de Sévigné.» Je vous avoue que je n’ai pas compris. Cela me semble tellement différent. – Venez, petite fille, que je vous embrasse pour vous remercier de vous rappeler si bien ce que je dis, vous retournerez au pianola après. Et j’avoue que ce que j’avais dit là était assez bête. Mais je l’avais dit pour deux raisons. La première est une raison particulière. Il est arrivé que Mme de Sévigné, comme Elstir, comme Dostoïevski, au lieu de présenter les choses dans l’ordre logique, c’est-à-dire en commençant par la cause, nous montre d’abord l’effet, l’illusion qui nous frappe. C’est ainsi que Dostoïevski présente ses personnages.

(III, 880)

        ‘I didn’t want to interrupt you, but now that I see that you’re leaving Dostoievsky, I’m afraid I might forget. My sweet, what was it you meant the other day when you said: “It’s like the Dostoievsky side of Mme de Sévigné.” I must confess that I didn’t understand. It seems to me so different.’ ‘Come, little girl, let me give you a kiss to thank you for remembering so well what I say. You shall go back to the pianola afterwards. And I must admit that what I said was rather stupid. But I said it for two reasons. The first is a special reason. What I meant was that Mme de Sévigné, like Elstir, like Dostoievsky, instead of presenting things in their logical sequence, that is to say beginning with the cause, shows us first of all the effect, the illusion that strikes us. That is how Dostoievsky presents his characters.’

(V, 432)

The narrator’s unforgettable mot on Mme de Sévigné and Dostoevsky, which is a pre-echo of the Borges story in which Céline and Joyce are imagined as the authors of the Imitation of Christ, leads him into an implicit self-description: he too, like his distinguished predecessors, will produce a literary work in which effects precede causes and illusions are entertained at length before being dispelled. But although the narrator is still composing a manifesto during his reply to Albertine, he is also, by the conceited virtuosity with which he addresses her on assorted literary topics, helping to provoke the catastrophe on which La Prisonnière ends. An affair must be nearing its end when it begins to be conducted as an academic seminar on the Russian novel. Love of literature has reached crisis level, and behaves like a predator or an asset-stripper towards love between persons.

At the other extreme from these highly exposed essays, lectures or seminars on literature is the power of implication or of irradiation that certain literary works possess. Such works go underground for long periods and, stored in the reader’s memory, continue to have an active, shaping role in the procession of key episodes. The most remarkable case of this kind is George Sand’s François le Champi (1850), for this short novel of country life and incestuous passion occupies a main buttressing position in the architecture of Proust’s plot yet at the same time speaks quietly, as a diffuse reminiscence. Sand’s novel is named and discussed in ‘Combray’ and rediscovered in the Guermantes library, and discussed again, in Le Temps retrouvé (I, 41–3, IV, 462–5; I, 47–9, VI, 239–43). It is the work with which the narrator’s mother had soothed him during the childhood incident involving a withheld goodnight kiss, and the work which, stumbled upon in adulthood, triggers one of his culminating involuntary memories. François le Champi is a slender and even, in the narrator’s judgement, a slightly derisory book, yet it sends a mighty echo from one end to the other of Proust’s voluminous edifice. Time is regained as the narrator holds the Guermantes copy of Sand’s novel in his hands.

Sand tells an Oedipal success story: a foundling is adopted by a miller’s wife, Madeleine Blanchet, leaves home, returns to support his adoptive mother when she is widowed and in due course marries her. As a child Proust’s narrator had not understood these events, for his mind had wandered during his mother’s reading and she had in any case omitted all the love-scenes. Yet without grasping the changing relationship between Madeleine and François, he was already experiencing in his own person the driving force of the foundling’s no longer simply filial devotion. For a moment, on that distant night, his main rival for his mother’s affection had been removed, and he had enjoyed his own intense sensation of amatory success:

        Mes remords étaient calmés, je me laissais aller à la douceur de cette nuit où j’avais ma mère auprès de moi. Je savais qu’une telle nuit ne pourrait se renouveler; que le plus grand désir que j’eusse au monde, garder ma mère dans ma chambre pendant ces tristes heures nocturnes, était trop en opposition avec les nécessités de la vie et le vœu de tous, pour que l’accomplissement qu’on lui avait accordé ce soir pût être autre chose que factice et exceptionnel.

(I, 42)

        My aching heart was soothed; I let myself be borne upon the current of this gentle night on which I had my mother by my side. I knew that such a night could not be repeated; that the strongest desire I had in the world, namely, to keep my mother in my room through the sad hours of darkness, ran too much counter to general requirements and to the wishes of others for such a concession as had been granted me this evening to be anything but a rare and artificial exception.

(I, 49)

This brief consummation of a male child’s love for his mother is overseen by a literary work, but a work which has the status of a bare mythical story rather than that of a full social or psychological canvas. François le Champi is the foundation myth, or the ‘national anthem’, for the entire Oedipal dimension of Proust’s book, and it resonates, without being named, throughout the love-scenes of the central volumes. The adult narrator changes his position within the family triangle: sometimes he desires as a child might, and sometimes, identifying with the maternal figure, he desires as a mother might; at moments he occupies the place of the absent third party, relegated to the margins of an amorous exchange. Allusions to Racine’s incestuously desiring Phèdre abound. Albertine is now a surrogate mother and now a substitute child, but even in the aftermath of their affair the narrator’s real mother continues to figure. The energy with which the narrator attributes possessiveness and desire to his mother during the Venice episode in Albertine disparue is a projective expression of his own still childlike feelings:

        ne m’ayant pas reconnu tout de suite, dès que de la gondole je l’appelais elle envoyait vers moi, du fond de son coeur, son amour qui ne s’arrêtait que là où il n’y avait plus de matière pour le soutenir, à la surface de son regard passionné qu’elle faisait aussi proche de moi que possible, qu’elle cherchait à exhausser, à l’avancée de ses lèvres, en un sourire qui semblait m’embrasser, dans le cadre et sous le dais du sourire plus discret de l’ogive illuminée par le soleil de midi.

(IV, 204)

        not having recognised me at first, as soon as I called to her from the gondola, she sent out to me, from the bottom of her heart, a love which stopped only where there was no longer any corporeal matter to sustain it, on the surface of her impassioned gaze which she brought as close to me as possible, which she tried to thrust forward to the advanced post of her lips, in a smile which seemed to be kissing me, within the frame and beneath the canopy of the more discreet smile of the arched window lit up by the midday sun.

(V, 717)

The narrator goes on to say that this maternal passion, displaying itself so fulsomely in Venice, left for ever its imprint on his memory of the local architectural style. The pointed Gothic arch becomes, one might say, a topological diagram of the Oedipal threesome. What is elaborated and reworked in such passages has already been stated in its primitive, kernel form during the earlier Combray episode. François le Champi has become the invisible schema from which all such later Oedipal fantasies derive. The ‘country matters’ of which Sand’s novel speaks underlie the metropolitan complications of modern love.

Between these extremes of explicitness and implicitness lies a broad middle territory where Proust grazes at leisure on the work of his predecessors. In this field he is to a large extent free from the demands of plot-making, and can enjoy fortuitous textual encounters without being cramped or coerced by his own emerging grand scheme. Virgil’s Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid are all here, and are joined, in a spirit of time-travelling literary festivity, by the Bible, the Divine Comedy, the tragedies of Corneille and Racine and the new epics in verse and prose of nineteenth-century France. The overall effect is one of benignly scattered literary enthusiasm, the more engaging because the narrator shares with an entire range of other characters, including the bores and the buffoons, the minor social art of surprise citation. The bores cite clumsily, while the narrator, Saint-Loup, Swann, Charlus and the duchesse de Guermantes do so with urbane dexterity, but they are all players in the same bantering and bartering textual game.

Proust’s Homer is a particularly fertile contributor to the novel’s allusive chorus, for although memories of the Iliad and the Odyssey seem often to be sprinkled as an archaising spice across the surface of the text, references to the supreme epic poems of Europe have by the end acquired their own logic and power of summation. Brief moments of poetic sarcasm abound. In Le Côté de Guermantes Mme de Villeparisis, whose intelligence is ‘almost that of a second-rate writer’ and whose memoirs seem likely to set her apart from rival hostesses, is already eligible to enter the company of the immortals:

        c’est le salon de Mme de Villeparisis […] qui sera considéré comme un des plus brillants du XIX^e siècle par cette postérité qui n’a pas changé depuis les temps d’Homère et de Pindare, et pour qui le rang enviable c’est la haute naissance, royale ou quasi royale, l’amitié des rois, des chefs du peuple, des hommes illustres.

(II, 492)

        it is the salon of Mme de Villeparisis […] which will be regarded as one of the most brilliant of the nineteenth century by that posterity which has not changed since the days of Homer and Pindar, and for which the enviable things are exalted birth, royal or quasi-royal, and the friendship of kings, of leaders of the people and other eminent men.

(III, 219)

The composite name borne by le prince de Faffenheim-Munsterburg-Weinigen reminds the narrator of vineyards whose products have a similar polysyllabic grandeur about them and are in their turn reminiscent of the conjoined epithets that Homer gave his heroes (II, 553; III, 293). A specialist visiting the narrator’s dying grandmother arrives ‘avec sa trousse chargée de tous les rhumes de ses clients, comme l’outre d’Eole (II, 620; ‘his bag packed with all the colds and coughs of his other patients, like Aeolus’s goatskin’ (III, 372)). Aeolus, in Book X of the Odyssey was

                                        the master of all the winds

           with power to calm them down or rouse them as he pleased.

Once opened, this pouch in which his winds were kept brought Odysseus and his crew close to drowning. The narrator’s warning about modern medicine is clear.

Homeric quotation is a dangerous weapon, as the narrator has already made plain, and can bring those responsible for it close to absurdity. Legrandin, declaiming to the narrator and his family upon the delights of the Normandy coast in ‘Combray’ had spoken of it as a true ‘land of the Cimmerians’ (I, 156; ‘le véritable pays des Cimmériens’ (I, 129)), and, by his reference to the opening of Book XI of the Odyssey, had provided a culminating instance of empty verbal embellishment and ostentation. Clearly, the narrator is in depraved company when he himself plays the quoting game. Yet poor, blustering, pretentious Legrandin has stumbled upon a precious fragment of true poetry in this speech, and Homer’s Cimmerians, ‘their realm and city shrouded in mist and cloud’, are to reappear in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs as a leitmotif within the narrator’s own reverie. He travels to Balbec as if into a land of myth and retains his sense of poetry and magic against considerable odds:

        je m’efforçais, pour penser que j’étais dans l’antique royaume des Cimmériens, dans la patrie peut-être du roi Mark ou sur l’emplacement de la forêt de Brocéliande, de ne pas regarder le luxe de pacotille des constructions qui se développaient devant moi et entre lesquelles la villa d’Elstir était peut-être la plus somptueusement laide.

(II, 190)

        I endeavoured, in order to persuade myself that I was in the ancient realm of the Cimmerians, in the country, perhaps, of King Mark, or on the site of the Forest of Broceliande, not to look at the gimcrack splendour of the buildings that extended on either hand, among which Elstir’s villa was perhaps the most sumptuously hideous.

(II, 477)

Somewhere between the eighteenth-century mock epic – perfectly embodied in Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1714) or Dunciad (1728) – and the failed or imploding epic of the modern age, a new genre seems to be coming into being in Proust’s appropriation of Homer. A la recherche du temps perdu is a work which worries about its own claims to epic status and in its ever-renewed hesitancy on the matter seems to acquire a strange tough-mindedness. A constant play of distance and recognition takes place between modern people, including writers, and the gods and heroes of antiquity, as in this passage from Le Côté de Guermantes:

        Les gens des temps passés nous semblent infiniment loin de nous. Nous n’osons pas leur supposer d’intentions profondes au-delà de ce qu’ils expriment formellement; nous sommes étonnés quand nous rencontrons un sentiment à peu près pareil à ceux que nous éprouvons chez un héros d’Homère.

(II, 710)

        The people of bygone ages seem infinitely remote from us. We do not feel justified in ascribing to them any underlying intentions beyond those they formally express; we are amazed when we come upon a sentiment more or less akin to what we feel today in a Homeric hero.

(III, 481)

The current of fellow feeling is blocked but then, without warning, it passes. The courtesy of the Guermantes seems at one moment to be part of an ancestral code, handed down from generation to generation, and, at the next, to be a fraudulent disguise for the disreputable conduct of their caste. In this antiquity or an artful sham? The narrator, thinking that he has made contact with Homer, may in fact have discovered the mock-antiquity of Ossian.

In Sodome et Gomorrhe a new version of the same anxiety is visible: the narrator discusses the modern fashion for correctness in the spelling of Homeric names, and a new preference for the original Greek names over their more familiar Latin equivalents (III, 230–31; IV, 272); on the slenderest of pretexts, he incorporates into his narrative a joyful catalogue of Greek names, plundered for the purpose from Leconte de Lisle’s translation (1869) of the Orphic hymns (III, 234; IV, 276). Can there be a prose epic of the contemporary world? The narrator puts the question in a variety of forms, and finds one convincing answer not in a nostalgic return to antiquity but in a militant espousal of the lowly, the transient and the topical. Zola had perhaps achieved something of the sort, he suggests, half-sharing Mme de Guermantes’s view that Zola is more a poet than a mere novelist of the realist school, and that: ‘il grandit tout ce qu’il touche […] il en fait quelque chose d’immense; il a le fumier épique. C’est l’Homère de la vidange!’ (II, 789; ‘he magnifies everything he touches […] he makes it into something colossal. His is the epic dungheap! He is the Homer of the sewers!’ (III, 576–7)).

It is in Le Temps retrouvé that the narrator comes closest to a realisable vision of a new epic style, to an Iliad that would be appropriate to the squalor and dishonourable carnage of modern warfare and to an Odyssey tailor-made for a bourgeois wanderer in aristocratic salons. The route he takes towards his new Homer is an improbable one. His further references to Book XI of the Odyssey, for example, have a poignancy almost worthy of Ronsard and Du Bellay in their learned imitation of Classical models. The narrator moves about at the final matinée of the work as a new Odysseus greeting ghost upon ghost during his journey to Hell. Odette seems in some respects to have been rejuvenated by the passing years, but there are signs on her person of an altogether different destiny: ‘Et pourtant, de même que ses yeux avaient l’air de me regarder d’un rivage lointain, sa voix était triste, presque suppliante, comme celle des morts dans l’Odyssée’ (IV, 528; ‘and yet, just as her eyes appeared to be looking at me from a distant shore, her voice was sad, almost suppliant, like the voice of the shades in the Odyssey’ (VI, 323)). The pathos of this is, however, a partial one. Odette’s voice speaks not only from the timeless realm of the already dead but from inside a lively local scene: it still has a hint of an English accent about it, and Odette still lards her talk with English expressions. Elsewhere, Homer brings not just the social manners of the contemporary world but a self-conscious technological modernity in his wake. The narrator had recognised, but not recognised, an old friend earlier in the same scene:

        j’aurais bien voulu reconnaître mon ami mais, comme dans l’Odyssée Ulysse s’élançant sur sa mère morte, comme un spirite essayant en vain d’obtenir d’une apparition une réponse qui l’identifie, comme le visiteur d’une exposition d’électricité qui ne peut croire que la voix que le phonographe restitue inaltérée soit tout de même spontanément émise par une personne, je cessai de reconnaître mon ami.

(IV, 523)

        I should have liked to recognise my friend, but, like Ulysses in the Odyssey when he rushes forward to embrace his dead mother, like the spiritualist who tries in vain to elicit from a ghost an answer which will reveal its identity, like the visitor at an exhibition of electricity who cannot believe that the voice which the gramophone restores unaltered to life is a voice spontaneously emitted by a human being, I was obliged to give up the attempt.

(VI, 315)

In remembering these lines from the Odyssey:

                And I, my mind in turmoil, how I longed
to embrace my mother’s spirit, dead as she was!

           Three times I rushed toward her, desperate to hold her, three times she fluttered through my fingers, sifting away like a shadow, dissolving like a dream, and each time the grief cut to the heart

the narrator sounds again his familiar maternal theme, and allows a dead mother, as distinct from a dead grandmother, into his ceremony of remembrance. His description of Carpaccio paintings had allowed him the same momentary licence in Albertine disparue (IV, 225; V, 742–3): in both cases an artwork prompts him to picture a still-living mother as dead. The switch from such solemnity to a trade fair of the present day is abrupt and unpitying. A common humanity links Odysseus facing his mother’s ghost to the overawed user of a new electrical gadget, but there are no shortcuts for the literary artist seeking solidarity with his pre-eminent predecessor. The distance separating them must itself be dramatised.

This distance yawns terrifyingly during the narrator’s second return visit to Paris at the beginning of Le Temps retrouvé. He meets Charlus, who is in disgrace in certain quarters for his apparent pro-German sympathies, and receives from him a series of characteristic conversational broadsides. Charlus upbraids his former allies for their simplistic views on the mind and temper of the German people, and singles out the new-found patriotism of Brichot for special blame:

        J’avoue que je partage son admiration pour certaines grandeurs de la guerre actuelle. Tout au plus est-il étrange qu’un partisan aveugle de l’Antiquité comme Brichot, qui n’avait pas assez de sarcasmes pour Zola trouvant plus de poésie dans un ménage d’ouvriers, dans la mine, que dans les palais historiques, ou pour Goncourt mettant Diderot au-dessus d’Homère et Watteau au-dessus de Raphaël, ne cesse de nous répéter que les Thermopyles, qu’Austerlitz même, ce n’était rien à côté de Vauquois. Cette fois du reste, le public qui avait résisté aux modernistes de la littérature et de l’art suit ceux de la guerre, parce que c’est une mode adoptée de penser ainsi et puis que les petits esprits sont écrasés, non par la beauté, mais par l’énormité de l’action.

(IV, 358)

        I admit that I share his admiration for certain elements of greatness in the present war. I do, however, find it strange that a blind partisan of antiquity like Brichot, who could not be sarcastic enough about Zola for discovering more poetry in a working-class home or a coal-mine than in the famous palaces of history, or about Goncourt for elevating Diderot above Homer and Watteau above Raphael, should incessantly drum into our ears that Thermopylae and even Austerlitz were nothing compared with Vauquois. And this time, to make things worse, the public, after resisting the modernists of literature and art, is falling into line with the modernists of war, because it is an accepted fashion to think like this and also because little minds are crushed, not by the beauty, but by the hugeness of the action.

(VI, 110)

Homer has become a tiny spot on a remote horizon, and is visible only through a series of distorting lenses. This passage is the narrator’s transcript of Charlus on Brichot on the Goncourts on Homer. Layer upon layer of uncrossable distance separates the modern novelist from the monuments of antiquity. Homer has indeed fallen on hard times when Charlus, of all unlikely custodians of the European cultural archive, steps forward to defend him. Why, such treatment is almost as offensive as being quoted with approval by Legrandin.

But yet these speeches, for all Charlus’s conceit, self-interest and opportunism, have their own monumental quality, and their own contribution to make to the structure of Proust’s novel. Charlus brings the reader up to date with the fortunes of other characters, and circles back in a series of large retrospective loops into the detail of the preceding narrative. The narrator is soon to do the same thing in his own voice. The novel is becoming indefinitely aware of its own past. We may find ourselves remembering, and not incongruously, the penultimate book of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus recounts his adventures to Penelope. The suitors have been killed; husband and wife have been to bed; Odysseus tells his tale. While he spoke, Penelope

listened on, enchanted …

Sleep never sealed her eyes till all was told.

All through the poem the telling of tales has been an essential part of the tale being told, but towards the end the activity has a splendid closural power. While so much else in the closing stages of the existing Homeric epic suggests that the Odyssean adventure can never truly end, this long moment of recapitulation, this story made of stories, strives towards completeness and rest. Charlus’s retrospect contains no memorable exploits, and no heroic virtue or valour. On the contrary, it thrives on low motives, selfish deeds and an all-consuming mondain shallowness, and in it, adding fuel to the debate on Zola that had been sketched much earlier in the plot, Charlus simultaneously rules against all such baseness as subject matter for literature. Proust himself, at this stage of the novel, seems to be siding more plainly than before with Mme de Guermantes on the question of the ‘modern epic’, and to be envisaging if not a ‘Homer of sewage’ in the manner of Zola himself at the very least a grand work through which would run a tide of verbal waste bearing a silt of silliness and pomposity. High art, in Proust’s formula, must always begin low, be prepared to plunge from its summits back into the trivial and the everyday, and do this even as it reaches its moment of epic culmination. A la recherche du temps perdu is a self-deflating epic, but Homer, together with Virgil, Dante and Hugo, is an unexorcisable phantom within it. Great writers like these remind the reader of a heroism that has been lost, and of the new heroism from which Proust’s own novel sprang.

Proust devotes himself, then, for large tracts of time to opinions about art, and to the manipulation of artistic knowledge for worldly ends. As our gaze passes from the characters who hold forth about their aesthetic preferences, to those who smuggle their views into the conversation of society with a complicit nod or grimace, to the narrator’s own insinuating use of quotation and allusion, we find ourselves entering an artistically saturated space. Mme de Guermantes is a caricatural embodiment of a general tendency to art-talk among the characters of the novel, and is pursued by the narrator until the very end, lest the last fluctuation of her changing tastes remain unrecorded:

        Ce style Empire, Mme de Guermantes déclarait l’avoir toujours détesté; cela voulait dire qu’elle le détestait maintenant, ce qui était vrai car elle suivait la mode, bien qu’avec quelque retard. Sans compliquer en parlant de David qu’elle connaissait peu, toute jeune elle avait cru M. Ingres le plus ennuyeux des poncifs, puis brusquement le plus savoureux des maîtres de l’Art nouveau, jusqu’à détester Delacroix. Par quels degrés elle était revenue de ce culte à la réprobation importe peu, puisque ce sont là nuances de goût que le critique d’art reflète dix ans avant la conversation des femmes supérieures.

(IV, 602)

        Mme de Guermantes declared that she had always detested [the Empire style], a remark which meant merely that she detested it now, which was true, for she followed the fashion, even if she did not succeed in keeping up with it. To say nothing of David, whose work she hardly knew, when she was quite young she had thought M. Ingres the most boring and academic of painters, then, by a brusque reversal – which caused her also to loathe Delacroix – the most delectable of the masters revered by art nouveau. By what gradations she had subsequently passed from this cult to a renewal of her early contempt matters little, since these are shades of taste which the writings of an art critic reflect ten years before the conversation of clever women.

(VI, 421)

David, Ingres and Delacroix have become painters without characteristics. Their names are a rudimentary scansional system, designed to plot a specimen graph of the enthusiasms and antipathies of a social lioness, and nothing at all remains to be said about their brushwork or their handling of colour and line. Artists exist in order to become murmurings on the breeze of salon conversation. Opinion smothers judgement. True learning, insight and discernment, together with artistic rapture itself, disappear behind a barrage of affectations, snobberies and schemes.

What I have been saying so far about the use-value and exchange-value of artistic commodities in Proust places him firmly in the company of those whom Aldous Huxley in Music at Night called ‘Whole Truth’ artists. These were to be distinguished from artists who sought after chemically pure distillations of experience. Apostles of the Whole Truth had no qualms about impurity, and indeed were eager to accommodate din, fisticuffs, bad teeth, bad taste and street life into their works. A contemporary of Proust’s who fits Huxley’s description particularly well is Mahler, whose symphonic arguments contain a clutter and a clatter of extra-musical references. Sleigh-bells, cow-bells, posthorns, bugles and hurdy-gurdies, whether recruited into the orchestra or imitated by its standard instruments, speak out of turn. By the simplest association of ideas, travel, the farmyard, the postal services and military drills intrude upon the rarefied colloquy of strings, woodwind and brass. Proust, whom Huxley mentions in his essay as an exemplary figure, is magnificently impure in the same way. He could have been immaculate either as an introspective psychologist, or as a comedian of manners. He could have distilled a tragedy from his own unhappiness in love. But instead he infuses his book with tittle-tattle and its obnoxious sub-species title-tattle. Noises off are brought on to the stage. Air-aces are ushered into the Arena Chapel. Homer is passed from hand to hand as a blemished consumer durable.

Proust’s wittiest Whole-Truth account of the artistic imagination at work is to be found in a long excursus on Wagner’s Tristan in La Prisonnière. The narrator plays excerpts from the opera on the piano, and imagines, in the thick of his own work at the keyboard, the work that Wagner himself had performed during the act of composition:

        j’entendais redoubler le rire immortellement jeune et les coups de marteau de Siegfried, en qui du reste, plus merveilleusement frappées étaient ces phrases, l’habileté technique de l’ouvrier ne servait qu’à leur faire plus librement quitter la terre, oiseaux pareils non au cygne de Lohengrin mais à cet aéroplane que j’avais vu à Balbec changer son énergie en élévation, planer au-dessus des flots, et se perdre dans le ciel. Peut-être, comme les oiseaux qui montent le plus haut, qui volent le plus vite, ont une aile plus puissante, fallait-il de ces appareils vraiment matériels pour explorer l’infini, de ces cent vingt chevaux marque Mystère, où pourtant, si haut qu’on plane, on est un peu empêché de goûter le silence des espaces par le puissant ronflement du moteur!

(III, 667–8)

        I could hear the immortally youthful laughter and the hammerblows of Siegfried ring out with redoubled vigour; but the more marvellously those phrases were struck, the technical skill of the craftsman served merely to make it easier for them to leave the earth, birds akin not to Lohengrin’s swan but to that aeroplane which I had seen at Balbec convert its energy into vertical motion, glide over the sea and vanish in the sky. Perhaps, as the birds that soar highest and fly most swiftly have more powerful wings, one of these frankly material vehicles was needed to explore the infinite, one of these 120 horse-power machines – the Mystère model – in which nevertheless, however high one flies, one is prevented to some extent from enjoying the silence of space by the overpowering roar of the engine!

(V, 178)

There is no such thing as an immaterial art, the narrator proclaims, and the aviation industry provides him with an instructive, up-to-the-minute parable on this theme. Just as it takes the work of plane-makers and mechanics to send us soaring into the upper air, and the work of engines to keep us there, so the sublime intimations that art may bring are dependent upon tools and tackle, and a laborious production process. And the aeroplane of Art and Mystery hangs in space very much as Bergotte’s angelic books are soon to sit in the shop-windows – as a commodity with its price-tag attached. Proust writes all this into his own book with great glee, invents a prose which draws attention to the noise of its own engine, and finds ever-new ways of bringing the otherworldly pretensions of artists back down to earth.

Yet Proust’s novel has within it an ambitious alternative view of art. In this other dimension the material world is not forgotten and there is no idle talk of transcendence, but the impalpable construction work of intelligence and imagination is accorded its own mode of action and its own glamour. Proust, like Wagner and Vinteuil, is an artist who has specialist skills in chromatic modulation and the transformation of leitmotifs or thematic cells, and the movement between a matter-based and a mind-based view of art provides skills of this kind with vigorous exercise throughout the novel.

At the end of his ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’, Wallace Stevens’s last cadence can stand as a paradigm-case of such a transition. New Haven is full of particulars; Stevens’s verse brims over with peculiarities of diction; the ‘edgings and inchings of final form’, the definitive self-subsistent power of the art-work, seem destined to emerge within a real world that produces sense-events in humans. Nevertheless, Stevens concludes:

                  It is not in the premise that reality

                  Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses

                  A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

Take away the convenient bedrock afforded by solid material entities, and you are left with another world-ground, which may possibly be that of energy diffusing itself through dusty interstellar space but which is primarily that of shadowy, deathbound humankind exercising its capacity for thought. Thought is the necessary modulator or transformer of matter without which there is no New Haven, no Tristan, no aeroplane poised on the runway; its characteristic motions, for Proust as for Stevens, must be declared, and their drama seized, inside the work of art. In assembling his alternative, thought-suffused view of art, Proust uses a language that is still often artisanal – the composer thinking in timbres is as much a craftsman as the carpenter thinking in timbers, or the butcher in meat – but that has at the same time a vast store of psychodynamic concepts at its disposal. This is not at all a homogenous or ‘chemically pure’ philosophical diction, but an array of abstract terms in which the travail and creativity of mind can be experimentally recreated.

From a very early stage in the novel, works of art are essential aids to the narrator’s self-analysis. They are mental concentrates, devices whereby the mind’s self-revelation can be accomplished in conditions of urgency and intensity. The young narrator in the second part of ‘Combray’, for example, discovers in the prose of Bergotte a new sense of his own mental capacities. A Bergotte novel seems to objectify for him the very process of self-discovery:

        Un de ces passages de Bergotte, le troisième ou le quatrième que j’eusse isolé du reste, me donna une joie incomparable à celle que j’avais trouvée au premier, une joie que je me sentis éprouver en une région plus profonde de moi-même, plus unie, plus vaste, d’où les obstacles et les séparations semblaient avoir été enlevés. C’est que, reconnaissant alors ce même goût pour les expressions rares, cette même effusion musicale, cette même philosophie idéaliste qui avait déjà été les autres fois, sans que je m’en rendisse compte, la cause de mon plaisir, je n’eus plus l’impression d’être en présence d’un morceau particulier d’un certain livre de Bergotte, traçant à la surface de ma pensée une figure purement linéaire, mais plutôt du «morceau idéal» de Bergotte, commun à tous ses livres et auquel tous les passages analogues qui venaient se confondre avec lui, auraient donné une sorte d’épaisseur, de volume, dont mon esprit semblait agrandi.

(I, 93)

        One of these passages of Bergotte, the third or the fourth which I had detached from the rest, filled me with a joy to which the meagre joy I had tasted in the first passage bore no comparison, a joy that I felt I was experiencing in a deeper, vaster, more integral part of myself, from which all obstacles and partitions seemed to have been swept away. For what had happened was that, while I recognised in this passage the same taste for uncommon phrases, the same musical outpouring, the same idealist philosophy which had been present in the earlier passages without my having recognised them as being the source of my pleasure, I now had the impression of being confronted not by a particular passage in one of Bergotte’s works, tracing a purely bi-dimensional figure upon the surface of my mind, but rather by the ‘ideal passage’ of Bergotte, common to every one of his books, to which all the earlier, similar passages, now becoming merged in it, had added a kind of density and volume by which my own understanding seemed to be enlarged.

(I, 111)

There are two two-dimensional models of the mind here: the explorer can descend through its strata to reach its deepest level and then, having reached that level, discover a vast obstacle-free interior landscape. Bergotte’s writing offers both a cross-section of the mind and a map of one of its regions. The experience of reading him is then shrunk to a single dimension – that of a unilinear figure traced ‘on the surface of thought’ – and finally expanded in triumph to three: the work now being read suddenly begins to summon up other works from the same pen; the volume in hand produces a sense of mental volume. A book helps the mind to a new sense of its own size and capacity, and the fourth dimension, that of time, provides an envelope for the entire discussion. Mind is at work, and time-dwelling change is its native condition.

Throughout the novel, real, imaginary, and real but entirely reimagined works of art are pressed into the service of the narrator’s voluminous introspective programme. But however concentrated and informative such works are they have no secure boundaries or watertight seals separating them from other mental products, and the programme itself, as we have seen, is a greedily inclusive one. The elementary structures of the mental life may become newly visible under the glare of Bergotte or Wagner or Virgil, but they do not have to wait upon a dignified prompting of this kind to declare themselves. The Verdurins will do. And the tone in which the mind speaks of its own deep structures does not have to be elevated or serious. Frivolity and sarcasm are illuminating too. In this passage from La Prisonnière the gifts bestowed upon the Verdurins by their grateful followers pass from one domicile to the next and provide all concerned with a sense of well-being:

        encombrement joli, désordre des cadeaux de fidèles qui a suivi partout la maîtresse de la maison et a fini par prendre l’empreinte et la fixité d’un trait de caractère, d’une ligne de la destinée; profusion des bouquets de fleurs, des boîtes de chocolat qui systématisait, ici comme là-bas, son épanouissement suivant un mode de floraison identique […] tous ces objets enfin qu’on ne saurait isoler des autres, mais qui pour Brichot, vieil habitué des fêtes des Verdurin, avaient cette patine, ce velouté des choses auxquelles, leur donnant une sorte de profondeur, vient s’ajouter leur double spirituel; tout cela, éparpillé, faisait chanter devant lui comme autant de touches sonores qui éveillaient dans son cœur des ressemblances aimées, des réminiscences confuses et qui, à même le salon tout actuel, qu’elles marquetaient çà et là, découpaient, délimitaient, comme fait par un beau jour un cadre de soleil sectionnant l’atmosphère, les meubles et les tapis, poursuivant d’un coussin à un porte-bouquets, d’un tabouret au relent d’un parfum, d’un mode d’éclairage à une prédominance de couleurs, sculptaient, évoquaient, spiritualisaient, faisaient vivre une forme qui était comme la figure idéale, immanente à leurs logis successifs, du salon des Verdurin.

(III, 789–90)

        the attractively disordered clutter of the presents from the faithful which had followed the lady of the house from place to place and had come in time to assume the fixity of a trait of character, of a line of destiny; the profusion of cut flowers, of chocolate-boxes, which here as in the country systematised their efflorescence in accordance with an identical mode of blossoming […] all those things, in short, which one could not have isolated from the rest but which for Brichot, an old habitué of Verdurin festivities, had that patina, that velvety bloom of things to which, giving them a sort of depth, a spiritual Doppelgänger has come to be attached – all this sent echoing round him so many scattered chords, as it were, awakening in his heart cherished resemblances, confused reminiscences which, here in this actual drawing-room that was speckled with them, cut out, defined, delimited – as on a fine day a shaft of sunlight cuts a section in the atmosphere – the furniture and carpets, pursued, from a cushion to a flower-stand, from a footstool to a lingering scent, from a lighting arrangement to a colour scheme, sculpted, evoked, spiritualised, called to life, a form which was as it were the idealisation, immanent in each of their successive homes, of the Verdurin drawing-room.

(V, 323)

But the accidental furniture of the Verdurin habitat speaks of something far more deeply interfused lying beneath the social and domestic scene, and of something resembling necessity in the activities of the mental apparatus. Two dimensions yield to three, as in Bergotte’s prose or Vinteuil’s music, and the surveying of physical space, with its discriminating professionalised vocabulary – marqueter, découper, délimiter, sectionner – gives way to a comedy of mental system-building. The Verdurins’ successive salons are a mindscape extended in time, and to that extent, despite their accumulated trinkets and baubles, they are strictly indistinguishable from works of art.

Proust navigates back and forth with tireless invention between art proper and an ordinary world lightly touched and animated by thought. In doing this he relies upon a special vocabulary of what might be called ‘switch-words’ or ‘crossover-terms’. These often originate in a localised semantic field, and seem in some cases to belong to the jargon of a single art, craft or intellectual pursuit, but their role is a mobile and diplomatic one. They make disparate fields of human activity intelligible to one another. Such negotiation has its own Proustian lexicon: transition, transposition, transmutation, substitution, transformation, transmigration, modulation, traduction (‘translation’). But the quicksilver of Proust’s writing on mental action and transaction is supplied by his cognitive terms: mesurer (‘measure’), calculer (‘calculate’), comprendre (‘understand’), constater (‘register’), induire (‘induce’), déduire (‘deduce’), scander (‘punctuate’), superposer (‘superimpose’), distinguer (‘distinguish’), deviner (‘guess’), établir (‘establish’) and countless others, with their cognates, are overseen by the ubiquitous connaître (‘know’) itself. Equally rich storehouses exist for sense-impressions, ideational constructs, memories and for the spasmodic world of feeling, desire and intention in which all such productions of the human mind bathe. The work of art triggers in the narrator as exemplary reader, hearer or beholder a sensuously enlivened process of construal and interpretation, but then so does sunlight falling on walls, the noise of gossip, the blossoming of shrubs, or the inscrutable behaviour of a lover, as in this passage from Sodome et Gomorrhe on the divergent desires prompted in him by Albertine:

        Cet effort de l’ancien sentiment pour se combiner et ne faire qu’un élément unique avec l’autre, plus récent, et qui, lui, n’avait pour voluptueux objet que la surface colorée, la rose carnation d’une fleur de plage, cet effort aboutit souvent à ne faire (au sens chimique) qu’un corps nouveau, qui peut ne durer que quelques instants. Ce soir-là, du moins, et pour longtemps encore, les deux éléments restèrent dissociés. Mais déjà aux derniers mots entendus au téléphone, je commençai à comprendre que la vie d’Albertine était située (non pas matériellement sans doute) à une telle distance de moi qu’il m’eût fallu toujours de fatigantes explorations pour mettre la main sur elle, mais de plus, organisée comme des fortifications de campagne et, pour plus de sûreté, de l’espèce de celles que l’on a pris plus tard l’habitude d’appeler «camouflées».

(III, 130–31)

        This effort on the part of the old feeling to combine and form a single element with the other, more recent, which had for its voluptuous object only the coloured surface, the flesh-pink bloom of a flower of the sea-shore, was one that often results simply in creating (in the chemical sense) a new body, which may last only a few moments. That evening, at any rate, and for long afterwards, the two elements remained apart. But already, from the last words that had reached me over the telephone, I was beginning to understand that Albertine’s life was situated (not in a physical sense, of course) at so great a distance from mine that I should always have to make exhausting explorations in order to seize hold of it, and moreover was organised like a system of earthworks which, for greater security, were of the kind that at a later period we learned to call ‘camouflaged.’

(IV, 153–4)

The desire for knowledge of the beloved, or of art, or of the photon-stream shedding a sudden radiance on brickwork, turns unfailingly into the would-be knower’s desire for knowledge of his own cognitive skills and disabilities. Unification, dissociation, organisation, exploration, combination … the quest for knowledge has many names and many aliases in this passage, and in numerous others resembling it, but the narrator’s emphasis is always on the process itself, on the dynamic interplay between alternative shapes and intensities, rather than on any form of finality or closure. Each happy intellectual outcome envisaged in the text is a transient hypothesis rather than a consummation of the will to know.

Although works of art thought about in this mentalising way are indefinitely porous, and always likely to be engulfed by what looks like a generalised phenomenology of thinking, Proust’s narrator does come to have decided views on the qualities that considerable works of art might be expected to possess. He plans the novel he is eventually to write by looking closely at the work of the artists with whom he already identifies, and sketches an ideal fictional work in the margins of his always alert and never disinterested critical commentaries. The species-specific characteristics of this still-to-be-realised novel are easily isolated. It will be dense, associative, contrapuntally layered, flecked with allusions. It will alternate between diffuseness and concentration, and be marked by long-range refrains and echo-effects. It will take chances, create discomfort for its reader by its combined levity and gravity, and set particular store by coincidences and other improbabilities. The bizarre, the startling and the excessive will have special rights within it. It will hesitate endlessly between unilinear development and a compacted motivic interlace. It will be all of a piece, close-woven all through, yet have passages of singular intensity that seem to gather into themselves pre-emptively the meanings of the emerging whole.

Listed in this way, these features of an imagined book seem unexceptionable, and many of them are indeed part of the copper-coinage of modern literature in Europe and the Americas. Yet the aesthetic discussions of Proust’s self-educating narrator can be signally disruptive within the novel itself, and can resonate outwards in astonishing ways from the art-works he discusses to the art-work we ourselves as readers are holding in our hands. In the celebrated death-scene of Bergotte, for example, intensity, layering, close-wovenness and long-range recall all figure prominently, but to whom do they belong? To Bergotte, to Vermeer, to the narrator, or to Proust himself? Prompted by a critic, Bergotte goes to an exhibition of Dutch painting in search of a detail he had not previously noticed in Vermeer’s View of Delft:

        Enfin il fut devant le Ver Meer qu’il se rappelait plus éclatant, plus différent de tout ce qu’il connaissait, mais où, grâce à l’article du critique, il remarqua pour la première fois des petits personnages en bleu, que le sable était rose, et enfin la précieuse matière du tout petit pan de mur jaune. Ses étourdissements augmentaient; il attachait son regard, comme un enfant à un papillon jaune qu’il veut saisir, au précieux petit pan de mur. «C’est ainsi que j’aurais dû écrire, disait-il. Mes derniers livres sont trop secs, il aurait fallu passer plusieurs couches de couleur, rendre ma phrase en elle-même précieuse, comme ce petit pan de mur jaune.» Cependant la gravité de ses étourdissements ne lui échappait pas. Dans une céleste balance lui apparaissait, chargeant l’un des plateaux, sa propre vie, tandis que l’autre contenait le petit pan de mur si bien peint en jaune. Il sentait qu’il avait imprudemment donné la première pour le second. «Je ne voudrais pourtant pas, se dit-il, être pour les journaux du soir le fait divers de cette exposition.» Il se répétait: «Petit pan de mur jaune avec un auvent, petit pan de mur jaune.»

(III, 692)

        At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic’s article, he noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. ‘That’s how I ought to have written,’ he said. ‘My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.’ Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition. In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter. ‘All the same,’ he said to himself, ‘I shouldn’t like to be the headline news of this exhibition for the evening papers.’ He repeated to himself: ‘Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof, little patch of yellow wall.’

(V, 207–8)

Bergotte discovers in Vermeer’s exquisite detail what the narrator had already found in Bergotte’s prose: a flat surface that is suddenly stratified and opened up into the dimension of depth. A small segment of a complex work suddenly begins to have more affective power than the work in its entirety. The Delft townscape is lost to this one fragment of illuminated wall. Proust’s novel is testing our powers of recall, telling us how to handle its fierce local intensities, and drawing our attention to its counterpoint. We are given a beautiful singularity that takes us back into the labyrinth of the text we have been reading but at the same time issues a warning of mortal danger. This layered beauty was the last thing Bergotte saw.

This sense of danger creates the strangest link between the book the narrator sketches and the book Proust actually wrote. In all other respects we could say that the link is a straightforward one: Proust kept his narrator’s promises and assembled his grand edifice in accordance with the narrator’s blueprint. A la recherche du temps perdu does indeed, as we have been invited to surmise, resemble an Elstir painting, a Vinteuil septet, a Gothic cathedral, a Wagnerian opera, an Odyssey, a Giotto interior or a Venetian townscape; the great novel teems with allegories of itself, contains within itself a shimmering population of homunculus novels, each claiming to speak for the gigantic whole. Its diffuseness, its gossip, its manic flights of verbal invention are controlled and eventually brought to rest by a solid pattern of refrains that seem to grow spontaneously from the people and places of the tale. Swann’s soul transmigrates into the narrator, and Odette’s into Albertine. The Méséglise and Guermantes worlds, having seemed originally to be so far apart, are in due course brought together and fused. Venice replicates certain features of Balbec, and Jupien’s Parisian brothel certain features of rural Montjouvain. Counterpoint, incongruity and dense associative textures are similarly present in Proust’s book in ways that have been prefigured by the narrator’s artistic commentaries. But Bergotte’s last gaze, and the painted surface that is lodged as an after-image inside his dying brain, create a different sort of complicity between author and character.

They become fellow artists in speaking of the unspeakable. If they are artisans still, their craft is of the most spectral. They look beyond the mind-forged art-work towards the grain and texture of its ceasing to be. Not walls but exits are their speciality. A shade traverses the dust that they are to become. Into Sodome et Gomorrhe the narrator slips one of those sudden cameos in which the novel abounds, but this is the self-portrait of a ghost: ‘moi l’étrange humain qui, en attendant que la mort le délivre, vit les volets clos, ne sait rien du monde, reste immobile comme un hibou et comme celui-ci, ne voit un peu clair que dans les ténèbres’ (III, 371; ‘I, the strange human who, while he waits for death to release him, lives behind closed shutters, knows nothing of the world, sits motionless as an owl, and like that bird can only see things at all clearly in the darkness’ (IV, 440–41)). Such are the burdens that the mind-based view of art imposes upon its practitioners: the whole wondrously proficient transformational device that the human mind is, and the unbroken fabric of meaning that it sometimes seems destined to produce for ever, is fragile and drawn towards its own breakdown. Proust himself and the would-be writer he places as a controlling intelligence at the centre of his fiction are alike in their appetite for negation and night. Each insists on placing destructiveness as well as creativity at the centre of his mindscape, and on infiltrating into his optimistic knowledge-seeking programme a demon of unknowing for whom the shutters are already closed and the outside world is invisible. This creature comes to know more about mental processes than about the rest of nature, and, knowing that minds in the end wane and die, rejoices in the impermanence of their constructions: image melts into image, and each new hypothesis or theorem requires that an earlier one be destroyed. The work of art that such an artist creates has an extreme kind of porosity. It is open pore by pore to its own extinction.

The artist trapped inside a death-shadowed mind-world of this kind seems at first to have two mutually exclusive futures: he can seek death, hasten its coming by obliterating the real world, or he can seek to rejoin that world as an object among objects. The creative process itself can begin to seem unsatisfactory and enervating precisely because it keeps him in an undecidable in-between-world: consciousness is caught between its futures, unable to make a definitive choice between two different forms of extinction. On the one hand it could wane away into emptiness, and on the other it could yield before the fullness and the self-evidence of nature newly revealed. But an artist of the kind that Proust’s narrator wants to become, and that Proust himself proudly is, cannot do more than imagine these exits, and bring the sensation of them, and of their incompatibility, back into the commotion of his text.

Stevens imagines them in lines from his ‘The Man on the Dump’ that combine doctrinal statement with a vertigo of the senses:

                  Now, in the time of spring (azaleas, trilliums,

                  Myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox),

                  Between that disgust and this, between the things

                  That are on the dump (azaleas and so on)

                  And those that will be (azaleas and so on)

                  One feels the purifying change.

The ‘purifying change’ taking place between a real world that blooms and flourishes and a real world that dies and decays has been brought about by a mere act of mind. This act is at once a simple apprehension and an elaborate recreation: there, boxed in by their brackets, are the emblems of a North American spring, and there also, trilling, vibrating, alliterating, rushing in flocks from a to z, are the inventive energies of a literary text spilling out from their confinement, performing the change that the Stevens aesthetic doctrine calls for. Stevens imagines the creative mental act taking place and simultaneously imagines it failing or being retracted.

On the last page of Du côté de chez Swann, Proust performs a similar feat of imagination, and again in a small space. The narrator revisits the Bois de Boulogne as an adult and sees women resembling the female figures who had peopled his childhood fantasies:

        Hélas! dans l’avenue des Acacias – l’allée de Myrtes – j’en revis quelques-unes, vieilles, et qui n’étaient plus que les ombres terribles de ce qu’elles avaient été, errant, cherchant désespérément on ne sait quoi dans les bosquets virgiliens. Elles avaient fui depuis longtemps que j’étais encore à interroger vainement les chemins désertés. Le soleil s’était caché. La nature recommençait à régner sur le Bois d’où s’était envolée l’idée qu’il était le Jardin élyséen de la Femme; au-dessus du moulin factice le vrai ciel était gris; le vent ridait le Grand Lac de petites vaguelettes, comme un lac; de gros oiseaux parcouraient rapidement le Bois, comme un bois, et poussant des cris aigus se posaient l’un après l’autre sur les grands chênes qui sous leur couronne druidique et avec une majesté dodonéenne semblaient proclamer le vide inhumain de la forêt désaffectée.

(I, 419)

        Alas! in the acacia-avenue – the myrtle-alley – I did see some of them again, grown old, no more now than grim spectres of what they had once been, wandering, desperately searching for heaven knew what, through the Virgilian groves. They had long since fled, and still I stood vainly questioning the deserted paths. The sun had gone. Nature was resuming its reign over the Bois, from which had vanished all trace of the idea that it was the Elysian Garden of Woman; above the gimcrack windmill the real sky was grey; the wind wrinkled the surface of the Grand Lac in little wavelets, like a real lake; large birds flew swiftly over the Bois, as over a real wood, and with shrill cries perched, one after another, on the great oaks which, beneath their Druidical crown, and with Dodonian majesty, seemed to proclaim the inhuman emptiness of this deconsecrated forest.

(I, 512–13)

Literary self-consciousness is first supplied and then artfully withdrawn. Proust’s myrtles, unlike Stevens’s, are the flowers of perpetual wintertime. They are borrowed from the sixth book of the Aeneid:

              nec procul hinc partem fusi monstrantur in omnem

              lugentes campi; sic illos nomine dicunt.

              hic, quos durus amor crudeli tabe peredit,

              secreti celant calles et murtea circum

              silva tegit; curae non ipsa in morte relincunt.

(VI, 440–14)

              Not far away, spreading on every side,

              The Fields of Mourning came in view, so called

              Since here are those whom pitiless love consumed

              With cruel wasting, hidden on paths apart

              By myrtle woodland growing overhead.

              In death itself, pain will not let them be.

As are the wandering shades:

              centum errant annos volitantque haec litora circum

(VI, 329)

              They flutter and roam this side a hundred years.

These lines pay homage to Book XI of the Odyssey and, alluded to by Proust in the last cadential paragraph of his first volume, provide the basis for a larger pattern of repetition in the novel as a whole. The wandering figures of the dead are to reappear, magnified and terrifying, in Le Temps retrouvé, and the narrator, as we have seen, is in that later cadence to reach backwards from Virgil to the original Homeric vision of hell. As we move further forwards in the time of the novel, gathering the litter of modernity about us as we go, we move further back in the time of Classical literature. It matters to Proust that his modern epic should travel towards the origins of the European literary tradition. But the very text that is so pointedly inlaid with literary reference is about to present us with a richly imagined retreat from art and its traditions. The Bois de Boulogne becomes, in Stevens’s sense, a ‘dump’. The work of the landscape gardeners who created this artificial urban pleasance is now lost from view. The fake lake and the would-be wood return to nature. The mind of the artist is removed from the scene, and an inhuman wind begins to blow.

This gesture of denial is often repeated. Even within the narrator’s recreative descriptions of Vinteuil’s compositions or Elstir’s canvases the pull towards the artless and the art-free is powerfully felt. Art matters, Proust suggests, because it takes us out of art and allows us, for a moment at least, to shed its complex mediations. In Proust, as in Stevens, the optimism of a literary language that seems bent on supplying ever more meaning yields from time to time before a much simpler emotional need. Beyond the busyness of sentences, the foolery of puns and the festive hubbub of texts that have other texts fluttering and roaming inside them, the writer craves contact with something that is quiet and plain and still and true. From within the boom-boom of literature the writer begins his perverse return journey to silence.

There is strangeness, then, at the heart of Proust’s theory and practice of art in A la recherche du temps perdu. While seeming to sanctify the art-object by ascribing redemptive powers to it, and while supporting its claims with a panoply of arguments and parables, Proust looks forward to an era in which the noise of art will finally have been stilled. He imagines a mode of artistic being in which there will be nothing left to imagine. He falls in and out of love with his own grand design. A tension of this kind runs also through Proust’s account of art as a social phenomenon. Art was born useful and delightful but is everywhere simply exchanged. Legrandin, Charlus, the Guermantes and the Cambremers transform sublime works into empty eloquence or opinionated chatter, yet art despoiled by these unflagging art-talkers is lively subject matter for a new art. A modern Homer will listen avidly to all that conversational tumult on the ringing plains of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

Yet the strangest and most haunting occupants of the interference-zone between art as supreme value and art as nullity are Proust’s artisans. On the one hand, they are gathered into the ecstatic flux of his fictional text, each contributing a dash of colour or a burst of propulsive energy to its ceaseless dithyrambic motion. Shrimp-collectors, music editors, cellists, harpists, dressmakers and aviators all add their labour and their professional skill to the Proustian pageant. They are honoured guests in the narrator’s exhaustive programme of speculative thinking. They help him towards that pure play of difference and similarity which might, in the end, be the creative artist’s best reward for his own labours. Yet, on the other hand, they stand outside art, stained like the dyer’s hand by what they work in. Cellists scratch at their instruments, editors fiddle with their variant readings, pilots loop the loop and the oxen of Laon drag their massive stones uphill, and in doing so they all recall the narrator to a real world with real stuff in it. Against a background of compulsive mental exertion, the motor activity of muscles acquires a new dignity. Art is a trap from which craftsmen and tradespeople have already escaped. They have achieved a necessary earthbound release from the otherworldly redemptions of art. These two views of art are each set out at heavenly length in the novel. Between them, Proust’s reader feels the purifying, and the impurifying, change.