Reading Proust (Part 4)

The English Teacher's fourth commentary on Proust, first published December 2, 2006

I don't have a scholarly mind. By that I mean that I'm not inclined to make a careful study of a subject, to weigh competing considerations, to marshal my research in an even-handed way, and to delineate my arguments in precise and exacting detail. I tend to personalize the subjects I'm interested in and jump around at will, making the connections that appeal to me for emotional or intuitive reasons. I feel a little like the fox in Isaiah Berlin's famous essay in Russian Thinkers. The foxy style of mind—one "scattered or diffused," to borrow from Berlin—might not be useful for getting articles published in scholarly journals, but it's no impediment to commenting on Proust, as Proust himself might have agreed, even if Berlin did classify him as a hedgehog. In the October 9, 2006 edition of The New Yorker (not available, alas, online), the novelist Milan Kundera cites the following quote from Proust:

"Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth."

For one who sometimes has trouble seeing to read, I'm fascinated by the idea of reading to see. I recently finished Within a Budding Grove, and I found myself deliberately resisting seeing anything of myself in the climatic moments of the book's final pages. Instead, I focused on my regret at not having paid better attention to a relatively minor character, M. de Norpois. It was as if, on leaving a thoroughly enjoyable party, I pondered how I should have spent more time talking to an interesting but reticent guest of the host's. M. de Norpois was certainly not the star of the party, nor had he much to do with my enjoyment of it, but he was the one I wished I'd talked to.

On page 1002 of the Moncrieff-Kilmartin edition, in a very long passage in which Marcel is attempting to illustrate the contradictions of Albertine's character, he says the following about M. de Norpois:

Among the men who have struck me as practising most consistently this system of killing several birds with one stone must be included M. de Norpois. He would now and then agree to act as intermediary between two of his friends who had quarrelled, and this led to his being called the most obliging of men. But it was not sufficient for him to appear to be doing a service to the friend who had come to him to request it; he would represent to the other the steps which he was taking to effect a reconciliation as undertaken not at the request of the first friend but in the interest of the second, a notion of which he never had any difficulty in persuading an interlocutor influenced in advance by the idea that he had before him the "most obliging of men." In this way, laying both ends against the middle, what in stage parlance is known as "doubling" two parts, he never allowed his influence to be in the slightest degree imperilled, and the services which he rendered constituted not an expenditure of capital but a dividend upon some part of his credit. At the same time every service, seemingly rendered twice over, correspondingly enhanced his reputation as an obliging friend, and, better still, a friend whose interventions were efficacious, one who did not simply beat the air, whose efforts were always justified by success, as was shown by the gratitude of both parties. This duplicity in obligingness was—allowing for disappointments such as are the lot of every human being—an important element in M. de Norpois's character.

Although this kind of duplicity is hardly confined to Ambassador Norpois's character,—indeed, one might say that the Parisian society of Proust's novel is filled with such amateur ambassadors—M. de Norpois is marked by combining this finely honed skill with another one of professional application. On page 605 we read:

And when Bergotte's opinion was thus contrary to mine, he in no way reduced me to silence, to the impossibility of framing any reply, as M. de Norpois would have done. This does not prove that Bergotte's opinions were less valid than the Ambassador's; far from it. A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the man who contradicts it. Partaking of the universal community of minds, it infiltrates, grafts on to, the mind of him whom it refutes, among other contiguous ideas, with the aid of which, counter-attacking, he complements and corrects it; so that the final verdict is always to some extent the work of both parties to the discussion. It is to ideas which are not, strictly speaking, ideas at all, to ideas which, based on nothing, can find no foothold, no fraternal echo in the mind of the adversary, that the latter, grappling as it were with thin air, can find no word to say in answer. The arguments of M. de Norpois (in the matter of art) were unanswerable simply because they were devoid of reality.

M. de Norpois is in full possession of the politician's art of making an argument so detached from reality, and yet so formidably internal to itself, that it's unassailable by any reference to reality. M. de Norpois is a poet in the style that Charles Simic often writes about: one who constructs poems seemingly out of thin air, with no apparent preexisting frame of reference. This style of poet is, for example, the opposite of W.H. Auden in his public mode, where the purpose of his ceremonial, occasional poems is signaled from the first line, if not the title. The same is true of Yeats—one of Auden's more famous subjects—in his public art. M. de Norpois is more like Simic himself, whose purpose in a poem may never be revealed. All we know is that it does what it does, and we're not likely to succeed in critiquing it by references to reality.

With regard to Proust's novel, we might argue that references to Proust's life are equally useless. In the same New Yorker article, Kundera writes:

In "In Search of Lost Time," Proust is absolutely clear: "In this novel . . . there is not one incident that is not fictional . . . not one character à clef." However tightly bound to the life of its author, Proust's novel stands, without question, at the opposite pole from autobiography: there is in it no autobiographical intention; he wrote it not in order to talk about his life but to show his readers their own lives.

I will add, parenthetically, that Kundera's view of Proust's view is very much the opposite of James Baldwin's. In "The Northern Protestant," his essay about meeting Bergman, Baldwin wrote:

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up. All of it, the literal and the fanciful.

Around Christmas of 1983, I had dinner with James Baldwin and a couple of his friends when they were staying at the Amherst home of James Tate, who was on sabbatical. Baldwin was a Five-College Professor and was teaching fiction classes to some of my colleagues. I'd made Baldwin's acquaintance through friends and had gotten myself invited to dinner when, it seemed, just about everyone else had vacated town for the Christmas holidays. I was at least as presumptuous then as I am now, and at dinner I talked about reading the "confessional" poets, assuming that Baldwin didn't know anything about them because he wasn't a poet. Little did I know that Baldwin would soon be coming out with a volume of his own poems and that among the poets I discussed was one who had been an important friend of his—Randall Jarrell. Baldwin responded to me by quibbling with the word "confessional," arguing that all art was confessional. I don't know if he added "more or less oblique," but he certainly could have—or so it seems in my less-than-reliable memory.

Naturally, I would like to have it both ways: all art is confessional, more or less oblique, but its intention, at least in the case of Proust, is not autobiographical. Rather, the intention of the more or less oblique confession is to provide us with the optical instrument with which to reveal ourselves to ourselves. In the case of Within a Budding Grove, the optical instrument appropriately begins with an anacoluthon regarding the ambassador:

My mother, when it was a question of our having M. de Norpois to dinner for the first time, having expressed her regret that Professor Cottard was away from home and that she herself had quite ceased to see anything of Swann, since either of these might have helped to entertain the ex-ambassador, my father replied that so eminent a guest, so distinguished a man of science as Cottard could never be out of place at a dinner-table, but that Swann, with his ostentation, his habit of crying aloud from the house-tops the name of everyone he knew, however slightly, was a vulgar show-off whom the Marquis de Norpois would be sure to dismiss as—to use his own epithet—a "pestilent" fellow.

The original French ends with the word puant, which seems more suited, if you'll forgive me for saying so, to the idiotic Cottard. Be that as it may be, Proust's optical instrument doesn't work like an optician's, letting us get a better look at the surface or inner recesses of the eye. Rather, it's like one of those periscopes that allows us to look around corners at our own characters, as Helen Vendler once said of Berryman's "Dream Songs." I think it's worth asking ourselves what this opening has to do with the climatic moment on page 995 when Marcel is about to fling himself on Albertine and partake of his hyper-imagined kiss. If an anacoluthon is reversal represented in syntax, then the foiled kiss is an anacoluthon of the imagination. Not heeding Albertine's threat to ring the bells, Marcel persists:

. . . Albertine's round face, lit by an inner flame as by a night-light, stood out in such relief that, imitating the rotation of a glowing sphere, it seemed to me to be turning, like those Michelangelo figures which are being swept away in a stationary and vertiginous whirlwind. I was about to discover the fragrance, the flavor which this strange pink fruit concealed. I heard a sound, abrupt, prolonged and shrill. Albertine had pulled the bell with all her might.

What the periscope of this passage revealed to me was not some disappointed kiss of years past. Rather, it called to mind its precise opposite. When I was twenty-six and old enough to know better, I went out on St. Patrick's Day with a bunch of colleagues from my proposal writing group at Boeing. I sat next to a young woman whose name we'll call Marcy. She worked in the data entry group—are there such things now?—and I didn't realize I was attracted to her until we'd both had several beers. Suddenly I was possessed with a desire to kiss her and promptly did so. She seemed to enjoy it as much as I did, and an entire table of colleagues was treated to the spectacle of the two of us going at it for several minutes.

The next day I felt giddy, despite the mild hangover. I checked my heart and detected no blot of shame. Rather, I remembered with pleasure the sensation of Marcy's lips pulling on mine, her tongue worming around in my mouth. At lunch, we took a walk out to the parking lot. I showed her the used Toyota Tercel I'd recently purchased. Her comment was that she'd preferred the bright-red 240-Z I'd been borrowing from my father. Then, out of the blue, she asked, "Did we kiss yesterday?" She went on to explain that it was just kissing and that it really didn't mean anything.

Far from disappointed, I simply moved on, soundly reasoning that someone who couldn't accept my Toyota Tercel was clearly not meant for me. In those days, I knew how to move on. I had not yet met my Albertine as, in a sense, Marcel has not. For the Albertine of Within a Budding Grove is simplicity itself compared to the Albertine of later books. It's one of the pleasures I have to look forward to in the following pages: the reencounter with Marcel's Albertine and mine.