by Harold Bloom
This extraordinary passage is a hymn to the two lost legions, homosexuals and Jews. The poet of the first sentence is Oscar Wilde, sublime genius and eternal martyr. The vision of Wilde as Samson turning the mill at Gaza quotes from Alfred de Vigny’s “La Colère de Samson”: “Les deux sexes mourront chacun de son côté” (“The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!”). For Proust, the two sexes are one, even if they die in diverse regions.
Proust came to believe that in the double aspect of time, destruction and creation, he had found his quest for meaning fulfilled. To understand death was to understand his calling as a novelist. At once he beheld the spirit realized in the fusion of love and pain. Like Schopenhauer, Proust avoids mere concepts. Wittgenstein, in the mode of Schopenhauer, observed, “What the solipsist says is wrong but what the solipsist means is right.” Proust is a solipsist only in that sense. He pursues the world as will and idea and creates a new world as his Representation.
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Samuel Beckett related Proust’s art to Schopenhauer’s remark that the artist contemplates the world independently of the rules of reason. On that basis, Beckett concluded that in Proust there is no collapse of the will. There is a subtle element in Proust’s will that refuses power over the interpretation of his own novel.
Meditating upon Albertine, long after her death, Marcel says of himself, “I was not one man only, but as it were the march-past of a composite army in which there were passionate men—jealous men not one of whom was jealous of the same woman.” There is no cure for jealousy in Proust or in our lives. What saves Marcel from his dark inertia and useless passion is the lucidity that comes in his privileged moments:
But it is sometimes just at the moment when we think that everything is lost that the intimation arrives which may save us; one has knocked at all the doors which lead nowhere, and then one stumbles without knowing it on the only door through which one can enter—which one might have sought in vain for a hundred years—and it opens of its own accord.
Revolving the gloomy thoughts which I have just recorded, I had entered the courtyard of the Guermantes mansion and in my absent-minded state I had failed to see a car which was coming towards me; the chauffeur gave a shout and I just had time to step out of the way, but as I moved sharply backwards I tripped against the uneven paving-stones in front of the coach-house. And at the moment when, recovering my balance, I put my foot on a stone which was slightly lower than its neighbour, all my discouragement vanished and in its place was that same happiness which at various epochs of my life had been given to me by the sight of trees which I had thought that I recognised in the course of a drive near Balbec, by the sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, by the flavor of a madeleine dipped in tea, and by all those other sensations of which I have spoken and of which the last works of Vinteuil had seemed to me to combine the quintessential character. Just as, at the moment when I tasted the madeleine, all anxiety about the future, all intellectual doubts had disappeared, so now those that a few seconds ago had assailed me on the subject of the reality of my literary gifts, the reality even of literature, were removed as if by magic.
I had followed no new train of reasoning, discovered no decisive argument, but the difficulties which had seemed insoluble a moment ago had lost all importance. The happiness which I had just felt was unquestionably the same as that which I had felt when I tasted the madeleine soaked in tea. But if on that occasion I had put off the task of searching for the profounder causes of my emotion, this time I was determined not to resign myself to a failure to understand them. The emotion was the same; the difference, purely material, lay in the images evoked: a profound azure intoxicated my eyes, impressions of coolness, of dazzling light, swirled round me and in my desire to seize them—as afraid to move as I had been on the earlier occasion when I had continued to savour the taste of the madeleine while I tried to draw into my consciousness whatever it was that it recalled to me—I continued, ignoring the evident amusement of the great crowd of chauffeurs, to stagger as I had staggered a few seconds ago, with one foot on the higher paving-stone and the other on the lower. Every time that I merely repeated this physical movement, I achieved nothing; but if I succeeded, forgetting the Guermantes party, in recapturing what I had felt when I first placed my feet on the ground in this way, again the dazzling and indistinct vision fluttered near me, as if to say: “Seize me as I pass if you can, and try to solve the riddle of happiness which I set you.” And almost at once I recognised the vision: it was Venice, of which my efforts to describe it and the supposed snapshot taken by my memory had never told me anything, but which the sensation which I had once experienced as I stood upon two uneven stones in the baptistery of St. Mark’s had, recurring a moment ago, restored to me complete with all the other sensations linked on that day to that particular sensation, all of which had been waiting in their place—from which with imperious suddenness a chance happening had caused them to emerge—in the series of forgotten days. In the same way the taste of the little madeleine had recalled Combray to me. But why had the images of Combray and of Venice, at these two different moments, given me a joy which was like a certainty and which sufficed, without any other proof, to make death a matter of indifference to me?
Still asking myself this question, and determined today to find the answer to it, I entered the Guermantes mansion, because always we give precedence over the inner task that we have to perform to the outward role which we are playing, which was, for me at this moment, that of guest. But when I had gone upstairs, a butler requested me to wait for a few minutes in a little sitting-room, next to the room used as a library, next to the room where the refreshments were being served, until the end of the piece of music which was being played, the Princess having given orders for the doors to be kept shut during its performance. And at that very moment a second intimation came to reinforce the one which had been given to me by the two uneven paving-stones and to exhort me to persevere in my task. A servant, trying unsuccessfully not to make a noise, chanced to knock a spoon against a plate and again that same species of happiness which had come to me from the uneven paving-stones poured into me; the sensation was again of great heat, but entirely different: heat combined with a whiff of smoke and relieved by the cool smell of a forest background; and I recognised that what seemed to me now so delightful was that same row of trees which I had found tedious both to observe and to describe but which I had found just now for a moment, in a sort of daze—I seemed to be in the railway carriage again, opening a bottle of beer—supposed to be before my eyes, so forcibly had the identical noise of the spoon knocking against the plate given me, until I had had time to remember where I was, the illusion of the noise of the hammer with which a railway man had done something to a wheel of the train while we stopped near the little wood. And then it seemed as though the signs which were to bring me, on this day of all days, out of my disheartened state and restore to me faith in literature, were thronging eagerly about me, for, a butler who had long been in the service of the Prince de Guermantes having recognised me and brought me in the library where I was waiting, so that I might not have to go to the buffet, a selection of petits fours and a glass of orangeade, I wiped my mouth with the napkin which he had given me; and instantly, as though I had been the character in the Arabian Nights who unwittingly accomplishes the very rite which can cause to appear, visible to him alone, a docile genie ready to convey him to a great distance, a new vision of azure passed before my eyes, but an azure that this time was pure and saline and swelled into blue and bosomy undulations, and so strong was this impression that the moment to which I was transported seemed to me to be the present moment: more bemused than on the day when I had wondered whether I was really going to be received by the Princess de Guermantes or whether everything round me would collapse, I thought that the servant had just opened the window on the beach and that all things invited me to go down and stroll along the promenade whi
le the tide was high, for the napkin which I had used to wipe my mouth had precisely the same degree of stiffness and starchedness as the towel with which I had found it so awkward to dry my face as I stood in front of the window on the first day of arrival at Balbec, and this napkin now, in the library of the Prince de Guermantes’s house, unfolded for me—concealed within its smooth surfaces and its folds—the plumage of an ocean green and blue like the tail of a peacock. And what I found myself enjoying was not merely these colours but a whole instant of my life on whose summit they rested, an instant which had been no doubt an aspiration towards them and which some feeling of fatigue or sadness had perhaps prevented me from enjoying Balbec but which now, freed from what is necessarily imperfect in external perception, pure and disembodied, caused me to swell with happiness.
Time Regained
Proust’s epiphanies, unlike everything before them except for Shakespeare, are tragicomic. From Marcel’s perspective, they are a kind of grace, but Marcel is not yet Proust. What would Saint Augustine, Goethe, Wordsworth, Ruskin, Walter Pater have made of degrees of stiffness and starchedness in a towel? Joyce, Beckett, and Kafka are perhaps closer to Proust’s good moments, since they too are tragicomedians of the awakened spirit.
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In my long life I can recall only two or three moments from early youth in which I was caught up in a sudden radiance. They seem now to be heretical intimations of a lost gnosis. Proust’s crucial stimulus was John Ruskin’s gift for experiencing intimations of immortality.
Why did Proust find his earlier self in Ruskin? John Ruskin died in 1900. His beautiful and fragmentary autobiography Præterita was published posthumously in 1908. Proust read it, for his command of Ruskin was absolute, extending even to the extravagant The Queen of the Air. Præterita is the most Proustian of Ruskin’s works. It also tells us that the only paradises are the ones we have lost.
Proust’s reaction to Ruskin’s death was to say, “When I see how mightily this dead man lives…I know how slight a thing death is.” Proust had translated two of Ruskin’s books, and he argued with friends that Ruskin far outshone Walter Pater. His worship of Ruskin never ended; he made the charming remark that he did not claim to know English but that he did claim to know Ruskin.
The last words that Ruskin wrote for publication form the passage that concludes Præterita:
86. How things bind and blend themselves together! The last time I saw the Fountain of Trevi, it was from Arthur’s father’s room—Joseph Severn’s, where we both took Joanie to see him in 1872, and the old man made a sweet drawing of his pretty daughter-in-law, now in her schoolroom; he himself then eager in finishing his last picture of Marriage in Cana, which he had caused to take place under a vine trellis, and delighted himself by painting the crystal and ruby glittering of the changing rivulet of water out of the Greek vase, glowing into wine. Fonte Branda I last saw with Charles Norton, under the same arches where Dante saw it. We drank of it together, and walked together that evening on the hills above, where the fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shone! moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves. How they shone! through the sunset that faded into thunderous night as I entered Siena three days before, the white edges of the mountainous clouds still lighted from the west, and the openly golden sky calm behind the Gate of Siena’s heart, with its still golden words, “Cor magis tibi Sena pandit,” and the fireflies everywhere in sky and cloud rising and falling, mixed with the lightning, and more intense than the stars.
Brantwood,
June 19th, 1889.
My friend William Arrowsmith, who died twenty-five years ago at the age of sixty-seven, wrote an eloquent essay “Ruskin’s Fireflies” (1982). Arrowsmith emphasized that fireflies, an obsessive trope in Ruskin, were emblems both of joy and of menace. Increasingly, Ruskin’s thwarted love for Rose La Touche assimilated the fireflies to Dante’s Inferno, where in canto 17, the usurers are burned by flakes of fire. I cannot recall fireflies anywhere in Proust’s vast novel, and, unlike Ruskin, he was not haunted by Dante. If any precursor made him anxious, it would have been Baudelaire. Proust, in a late essay, ranked Baudelaire with Alfred de Vigny as the strongest poets of the nineteenth century. Baudelaire’s vision of Paris may have inspired the swerve by which Proust chose the aristocracy as his milieu, in contrast. Both men were inescapably bound to their mothers, but Proust was able to enjoy his mother’s undivided love.
Proust spiritually concludes In Search of Lost Time with a glorious passage beyond anxiety:
And I observed in passing that for the work of art which I now, though I had not yet reached a conscious resolution, felt myself ready to undertake, this distinctness of different events would entail very considerable difficulties. For I should have to execute the successive parts of my work in a succession of different materials; what would be suitable for mornings beside the sea or afternoons in Venice would be quite wrong if I wanted to depict those evenings at Rivebelle when, in the dining-room that opened on to the garden, the heat began to resolve into fragments and sink back into the ground, while a sunset glimmer still illumined the roses on the walls of the restaurant and the last water-colours of the day were still visible in the sky—this would be a new and distinct material, of a transparency and a sonority that were special, compact, cool after warmth, rose-pink.
Over all these thoughts I skimmed rapidly, for another inquiry demanded my attention more imperiously, the inquiry, which on previous occasions I had postponed, into the cause of this felicity which I had just experienced, into the character of the certitude with which it imposed itself. And this cause I began to divine as I compared these diverse happy impressions, diverse yet with this in common, that I experienced them at the present moment and at the same time in the context of a distant moment, so that the past was made to encroach upon the present and I was made to doubt whether I was in the one or the other. The truth surely was that the being within me which had enjoyed these impressions had enjoyed them because they had in them something that was common to a day long past and to the present, because in some way they were extra-temporal, and this being made its appearance only when, through one of these identifications of the present with the past, it was likely to find itself in the one and only medium in which it could exist and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say: outside time. This explained why it was that my anxiety on the subject of my death had ceased at the moment when I had unconsciously recognised the taste of the little madeleine, since the being which at that moment I had been was an extra-temporal being and therefore unalarmed by the vicissitudes of the future. This being had only come to me, only manifested itself outside of activity and immediate enjoyment, on those rare occasions when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. And only this being had the power to perform that task which had always defeated the efforts of my memory and my intellect, the power to make me rediscover days that were long past, the Time that was Lost.
Time Regained
When I stand back and contemplate Proust in relation to such diverse peers as Tolstoy and Walt Whitman, the immediate difference is that he is all flow, no ebb. In Search of Lost Time begins to seem an ocean-river relentless and without events. The book moves from perspective to perspective and renders us rapt with the wonder of its optics:
It is one of the faculties of jealousy to reveal to us the extent to which the reality of external facts and the sentiments of the heart are an unknown element which lends itself to endless suppositions. We imagine that we know exactly what things are and what people think, for the simple reason that we do not care about them. But as soon as we have a desire to know, as the jealous man has, then it becomes a dizzy kaleidoscope in which we can no longer distinguish anything. Had Albertine been unfaithful to me? With whom? In what house? On what day? On the day when she had said this or that
to me, when I remembered that I had in the course of it said this or that? I could not tell. Nor did I know what her feelings were for me, whether they were inspired by self-interest or by affection. And all of a sudden I remembered some trivial incident, for instance that Albertine had wished to go to Saint-Mars-le-Vêtu, saying that the name interested her, and perhaps simply because she had made the acquaintance of some peasant-girl who lived there. But it was useless that Aimé should have informed me of what he had learned from the woman at the baths, since Albertine must remain eternally unaware that he had informed me, the need to know having always been exceeded, in my love for Albertine, by the need to show her that I knew; for this broke down the partition of different illusions that stood between us, without having ever had the result of making her love me more, far from it. And now, since she was dead, the second of these needs had been amalgamated with the effect of the first: the need to picture to myself the conversation in which I would have informed her of what I had learned, as vividly as the conversation in which I would have asked her to tell me what I did not know; that is to say, to see her cheeks become plump again, her eyes shed their malice and assume an air of melancholy; that is to say, to love her still and to forget the fury of my jealousy in the despair of my loneliness. The painful mystery of this impossibility of ever making known to her what I had learned and of establishing our relations upon the truth of what I had only just discovered (and would not have been able, perhaps, to discover but for her death) substituted its sadness for the more painful mystery for her conduct. What? To have so desperately desired that Albertine—who no longer existed—should know that I had heard the story of the baths! This again was one of the consequences of our inability, when we have to consider the fact of death, to picture ourselves the person who had concealed from me that she had assignations with women at Balbec, who imagined that she had succeeded in keeping me in ignorance of them. When we try to consider what will happen to us after our own death, is it not still our living self which we mistakenly project at that moment? And is it much more absurd, when all is said, to regret that a woman who no longer exists is unaware that we have learned what she was doing six years ago than to desire that of ourselves, who will be dead, the public shall still speak with approval a century hence? If there is more real foundation in the latter than in the former case, the regrets of my retrospective jealousy proceeded none the less from the same optical error as in other men the desire for posthumous fame. And yet, if this impression of the solemn finality of my separation from Albertine had momentarily supplanted my idea of her misdeeds, it only succeeded in aggravating them by bestowing upon them an irremediable character. I saw myself astray in life as on an endless beach where I was alone and where, in whatever direction I might turn, I would never meet her.