Epilogue: Starlight on Balbec beach
povero gracile universo figlio della nulla, tutto
ciò che siamo e facciamo t’assomiglia.
poor, frail universe, born of nothing, all we are and do resembles you.
Numbers in the Dark
In Sodome et Gomorrhe, the narrator tells us that he and Albertine lay together at night among the dunes of Balbec beach and found that the sea beside them was breathing in time to the rhythm of their pleasurable sensations. Above them, the sky was ‘parcheminé d’étoiles’ (III, 408; ‘all “studied” with stars’ (IV, 484)). The phrase is reported by the narrator as one of the hotel manager’s verbal near-misses. He should of course have said ‘parsemé d’étoiles’ – scattered with stars – but, as so often happens in this novel of boundless curiosity about language, his malapropism could not be more apropos. The sky has become a writing surface, and the stars are signs inscribed upon it. While the embracing lovers for a moment find that their sexual feelings have been written as a single stable message into the book of nature, the astral world above them is multiple and contains messages without end. Yet again, Proust has found a way of linking the multifariousness of human experience with the kaleidoscopic variety of his own writing. Although the narrator of the book has among his enduring ambitions the construction of ‘great laws’, those regulatory principles with which he might finally control the remorseless daily flux of particulars and circumstances, the very language which he holds in readiness for this task has countless hair-triggers inside it. At any moment his sentences may run riot. The ‘drunkenness of things being various’ may be unleashed by any plain, simple and sober-seeming word.
Proust is at home among the stars, and accustomed to their disconcerting habits. At one moment, the stars are a pure scattering of luminous points, and turn the narrator into a scatterbrain. At the next moment, they are constellations, gigantic intimations of structure. And in either event the writer has his lessons to learn from them. Starscapes are everywhere, and from the viewpoint of the writer at work, it makes little difference whether the stars in question belong to the heavens or to the entertainment industry. Proust is perfectly familiar with ‘stars’ in the modern popular sense, which predates Hollywood by a good half-century, and trains a merciless eye upon them as their periods of ascendancy give way to decline. Structure and its loss are as readily available in the history of a reputation or in an ordinary convivial scene as in the contemplation of the firmament. The narrator, becoming tipsy during one of his dinners at Rivebelle in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, finds himself deliciously adrift in social space that is also interstellar space:
Toute cette activité vertigineuse se fixait en une calme harmonie. Je regardais les tables rondes dont l’assemblée innombrable emplissait le restaurant, comme autant de planètes, telles que celles-ci sont figurées dans les tableaux allégoriques d’autrefois. D’ailleurs, une force d’attraction irrésistible s’exerçait entre ces astres divers et à chaque table les dîneurs n’avaient d’yeux que pour les tables où ils n’étaient pas, exception faite pour quelque riche amphitryon, lequel ayant réussi à amener un écrivain célèbre, s’évertuait à tirer de lui, grâce aux vertus de la table tournante, des propos insignifiants dont les dames s’émerveillaient. L’harmonie de ces tables astrales n’empêchait pas l’incessante révolution des serveurs innombrables, lesquels parce qu’au lieu d’être assis, comme les dîneurs, ils étaient debout, évoluaient dans une zone supérieure. Sans doute l’un courait pour porter des hors-d’œuvre, changer le vin, ajouter des verres. Mais malgré ces raisons particulières, leur course perpétuelle entre les tables rondes finissait par dégager la loi de sa circulation vertigineuse et réglée.
(II, 167–8)
All this dizzy activity became fixed in a quiet harmony. I looked at the round tables whose innumerable assemblage filled the restaurant like so many planets, as the latter are represented in old allegorical pictures. Moreover, there seemed to be some irresistible force of attraction at work among these various stars, and at each table the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they were not sitting, with the possible exception of some wealthy Amphitryon who, having managed to secure a famous author, was endeavouring to extract from him, thanks to the magic properties of the turning-table, a few insignificant remarks at which the ladies marvelled. The harmony of these astral tables did not prevent the incessant revolution of the countless waiters who, because instead of being seated like the diners they were on their feet, performed their gyrations in a more exalted sphere. No doubt they were running, one to fetch the hors d’œuvre, another to change the wine or to bring clean glasses. But despite these special reasons, their perpetual course among the round tables yielded, after a time, to the observer the law of its dizzy but ordered circulation.
(II, 450–51)
The ‘famous author’ installed in the middle of these planetary orbits is not saying much, and certainly not performing as a writer, but the necessary tension that governs his creative writing is being allegorised around him even as he sits and says little: he must seek vertigo, yet seek to regulate it, drink himself silly with the sheer welter of things, yet establish a new calm and a new harmony among them.
This astral imagery, and the two-way pull between order and disorder that it embodies, reach their culmination as the narrator looks at the night sky over Paris in Le Temps retrouvé. Saint-Loup had recently extemporised with gleeful abandon on the pleasures of aerial warfare, and the narrator now, for a moment, catches that manic voice into his own:
Après le raid de l’avant-veille, où le ciel avait été plus mouvementé que la terre, il s’était calmé comme la mer après une tempête. Mais comme la mer après une tempête, il n’avait pas encore repris son apaisement absolu. Des aéroplanes montaient encore comme des fusées rejoindre les étoiles, et des projecteurs promenaient lentement, dans le ciel sectionné, comme une pâle poussière d’astres, d’errantes voies lactées. Cependant les aéroplanes venaient s’insérer au milieu des constellations et on aurait pu se croire dans un autre hémisphère en effet, en voyant ces «étoiles nouvelles».
(IV, 380)
After the raid of two days earlier, when it had become more full of movement than the earth, the sky had become calm again as the sea becomes calm after a storm. But like the sea after a storm, it had not yet recovered absolute tranquillity. Aeroplanes were still mounting like rockets to the level of the stars, and searchlights, as they quartered the sky, swept slowly across it what looked like a pale dust of stars, of errant milky ways. Meanwhile the aeroplanes took their places among the constellations and seeing these ‘new stars’ one might well have supposed oneself to be in another hemisphere.
(VI, 137–8)
The scene unfolds in a city, but a city resembling the open sea. Man-made searchlights travel across the sky, but create new milky ways as they go. Aircraft, man-made and steered by men, flash upwards to join the stars in their courses. All is changed on the face of nature by these intrusions of human craft and skill. Engineering takes its place among the elements, and the literary engineer makes his own immodest bid for a place among the heroes. The paragraph ends upon a brief quotation from Heredia’s ‘Les Conquérants’ (‘The Conquerors’):
Ou penchés à l’avant des blanches caravelles,
Ils regardaient monter en un ciel ignoré
Du fond de l’Océan des étoiles nouvelles.
Or, leaning forward at the prow of the white caravels, they watched as new stars arose, in an unknown sky, from the depths of the Ocean.
Whereas Heredia’s sonnet is a brilliantly concentrated footnote to a lost age of heroic grandeur, a nod towards an epic vision that the modern poet can no longer share, Proust’s paragraph is made of more ambitious stuff. The modern writer can indeed emerge a hero from his own gluttonous appetite for experience. The epic poet of the modern age cannot shy away from the low, the mechanical and the mundane. He must want them. He must want aeroplanes, searchlights, cars and telephones. Above all he must allow his book to become corpulent from its ceaseless voracity.
In the process of gathering its epic weight and bulk, Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu absorbs into itself, as we have seen, an ever-changing comic pageant of human individuals and types. Garros the air-ace, Peary the explorer, Rosita and Doodica the Siamese twins, assorted politicians and princes, a president of the Republic, a tribe of largely nameless footmen, waiters and mechanics, a bevy of minor aristocrats, many of them famous only for a moment or two, and only on the strength of a fleeting fatuity, writers and musicians by the score, heroes and villains from the four corners of European history – all of them move forward inside the text as a variegated throng. This is astral multiplicity in the human sphere. And although Proust has limitless reserves of sarcasm and derision at his disposal, and shows unerring precision in shooting his satirical darts, he also has the underlying tenderness and generosity that all the greatest comic writers share. Follies and foibles define our humanity, and must be safeguarded. Proust’s narrator clings to his airy Albertine as tenaciously as Don Quixote clings, even upon his deathbed, to his delusional Dulcinea. And, in a certain light, Proust is closer to the inimitable Cervantes than to any other writer, ancient or modern. Erich Auerbach, in his Mimesis (1946), that great critical overview of the ‘Representation of Reality in Western Literature’, writes of Quixote in terms that seem already to announce the Proustian comedy: ‘As God lets the sun shine and the rain fall on the just and the unjust alike, so Don Quijote’s madness, in its bright equanimity, illumines everything that crosses his path and leaves it in a state of gay confusion.’ In Sodome et Gomorrhe the narrator describes the social antics of Charlus as those of a modern-day Don Quixote tilting at windmills (III, 53; IV, 62), but the narrator himself is a still more perfect embodiment of the quixotic temperament: his bright equanimity is brought to bear not only upon the changing procession of personalities and sexualities which pass across the social stage but upon the polymorphous variety of his own ‘self’. Proust’s protagonist is a man with too many qualities.
This plurality of the Proustian narrator will raise a problem for many readers. He catalogues his own follies and misperceptions with lucid discriminating intelligence, but he is also a social, political and moral chameleon whose many colourings will at times make his intelligence seem simply promiscuous. Equanimity is all very well, Proust’s reader may find himself or herself protesting, but certain kinds of company should not be kept, and certain forms of conduct should not, even in a spirit of disinterested intellectual experimentation, be tolerated. Homophobia, antisemitism and paedophilia are handled, many will feel, with an excess of empathising generosity, and with a fixated imaginative engagement that is alien to the broader comic vision of the book.
There is a real cause for anxiety here, and all new readers of Proust should expect to be embarrassed or offended at times as their journey through the book proceeds. But two of the book’s other qualities could be remembered at this point, and may go a long way towards restoring if not peace of mind then something approaching the calm vertigo of which the narrator speaks. The first quality that I have in mind is the overt and relentless desire-drivenness of the novel. It is a bacchanal that summons up, and recruits to its own purposes, an astonishing range of desiring styles and gambits. And Proust’s writing has a headlong, flyaway pace to it, and one which blends and fuses into a single animated process obsessions, ‘sexual orientations’, appetites and phobias that could easily, in other hands, have been allowed to accumulate as so much inert case-material. Proust’s book is a tribute to the waywardness and improbability of desire, and places upon itself, as a matter of principle, the requirement that it shock and provoke. Even Le Temps retrouvé, which spends so much time reviewing and reweaving materials from earlier in the novel, has, in the field of sexual desire, its major surprise: it eroticises the spectacle of impending death. Proust is to sexuality what Talleyrand is to diplomacy and statesmanship. He is a dextrous negotiator, makes pliability and plasticity into art forms, and relishes the passage from one tight corner to the next.
My second quality is related to the first, but is by no means always to be found among literary experimentalists upon human desire. It is the quality that the young narrator finds in Bergotte’s prose, and that the dying Bergotte finds in Vermeer’s View of Delft. The novel is built from a multitude of different layers or levels, and the ready communication between layers that is encouraged by Proust’s writing creates an astonishing sensation of semantic depth and resonance. Desire, given voice in prose of this kind, far from running a merely unilinear forward course, begins to develop echoes and harmonics. Desire is greedy, but at the same time full of shades and gradations; it flings itself forward in time yet constantly remembers its own past. It is the elaborate polyphonic texture of Proust’s prose, and its power of self-remembrance, that allows his reader to achieve a special ecstasy by way of the printed page. The cruel extremities of desire, together with the torments of the jealous imagination and the ill-adaptation of lover to lover, begin to dance with a new sense of openness and possibility.
And this quality is, of course, what makes Balbec beach for ever dissimilar to the beach at Cabourg, however prodigal that resort may become with its salt, its sand and its breezes. Balbec is not to be found on any map, for it migrates and mutates. The narrator may glimpse it for a moment in the Bois de Boulogne, as in this moment from Le Côté de Guermantes:
Nous fîmes quelques pas à pied, sous la grotte verdâtre, quasi sous-marine, d’une épaisse futaie sur le dôme de laquelle nous entendions déferler le vent et éclabousser la pluie. J’écrasais par terre des feuilles mortes qui s’enfonçaient dans le sol comme des coquillages et je poussais de ma canne des châtaignes, piquantes comme des oursins.
(II, 683)
We went a little way on foot into the greenish, almost submarine grotto of a dense grove on the dome of which we heard the wind howl and the rain splash. I trod underfoot dead leaves which sank into the soil like sea-shells, and poked with my stick at fallen chestnuts prickly as sea-urchins.
(III, 449)
Suddenly, while strolling in their urban pleasure-ground, Albertine and the narrator are back upon a Northern shore, treading on ghostly shells and sea-urchins; from a single point in the history of their love, a long vista opens up in geological time. Or again, the narrator may catch sight of the Balbec shore in the indoor domain of Albertine’s captivity:
Je pouvais bien prendre Albertine sur mes genoux, tenir sa tête dans mes mains, je pouvais la caresser, passer longuement mes mains sur elle, mais, comme si j’eusse manié une pierre qui enferme la salure des océans immémoriaux ou le rayon d’une étoile, je sentais que je touchais seulement l’enveloppe close d’un être qui par l’intérieur accédait à l’infini.
(III, 888)
I could, if I chose, take Albertine on my knee, hold her head in my hands, I could caress her, run my hands slowly over her, but, just as if I had been handling a stone which encloses the salt of immemorial oceans or the light of a star, I felt that I was touching no more than the sealed envelope of a person who inwardly reached to infinity.
(V, 441)
Beyond geological time and astronomical distance lies the inscrutable inwardness of human desire, which Proust maps endlessly. Balbec beach is a portion of that desire-map, and sustained in being by textual artifice and rhetorical cunning. But if Balbec beach in the end is a text and nothing more, it has the peculiarity of straining always to rejoin the real world. Writing as fine as this can be expected only from an author who has held stones in his hand, tasted salt on his tongue, and, even as his mental constellations dance within him, opened his eyes to the light of real stars.