Possessed by Memory

by Harold Bloom

  Samuel Beckett’s monograph on Proust is haunted by his master Joyce, but also by the invisible line that goes from Wordsworth to Ruskin, and then from Ruskin to the novelist of In Search of Lost Time. Rather mordantly, Beckett terms Proust’s privileged moments “fetishes.” He lists eleven, but admits incompletion. My friend Roger Shattuck, who died in 2005 at the age of eighty-two, was a more accurate guide to Proust’s epiphanies than the magnificent Samuel Beckett. In Shattuck’s book Proust’s Binoculars (1963), he makes a superb observation:

  It might be possible now to define A la recherche as the dramatization of a set of moral and epistemological truths; but the weakest part of that description is the word “dramatization.” Marcel’s drama is so slow-paced, so extended and even attenuated between beginning and end, that we can use the word only in a restricted, nearly Oriental sense of an inward drama expressed in a few highly ritualized gestures. And the Oriental aspect of A la recherche goes very deep. A multiplicity of images, laws, and fleeting illuminations lie along the course of our existence, but only sustained and disciplined pursuit of ourselves inwardly, only life truly lived leads to wisdom. One of the greatest achievements in the Western tradition of the novel, A la recherche also joins the Oriental tradition of works of meditation and initiation into the mysteries of life. We can read as far into it as our age and understanding allow. A dedicated mondain in Paris for half his life, Proust went on to probe far beyond the culture that reared him, and far beyond Catholicism, Judaism, and idealist philosophy.

  Like Shattuck, I would not suggest that Marcel Proust had ever read the Bhagavad-Gita. I cannot read Sanskrit and have to rely upon translations and commentaries. R. C. Zaehner, in his translation (1969), gives an elaborate commentary based upon the original sources. I have a fondness for the version by Barbara Stoler Miller (1986). Brooding on the little I can apprehend in the Bhagavad-Gita, I tend to remember the three categories: lucidity, passion, dark inertia. The Gita defines memory as an intuition of the past transcending individual experience. It is not the recall of past happenings but the revival of latent impressions abandoned by earlier perceptions. Time in the Gita also means death.

  Proust, as his novel ends, has moved from dark inertia through passion into a sublime lucidity. His search for lost time is very close to the Gita. And for him also, time is both liberation and death. The most remarkable of the Good Moments has to be quoted in full:

  Upheavel of my entire being. On the first night, as I was suffering from cardiac fatigue, I bent down slowly and cautiously to take off my boots, trying to master my pain. But scarcely had I touched the topmost button than my chest swelled, filled with an unknown, a divine presence, I was shaken with sobs, tears streamed from my eyes. The being who had come to my rescue, saving me from barrenness of spirit, was the same who, years before, in a moment of identical distress and loneliness, in a moment when I had nothing left of myself, had come in and had restored me to myself, for that being was myself and something more than me (the container that is greater than the contained and was bringing it to me). I had just perceived, in my memory, stooping over my fatigue, the tender, preoccupied, disappointed face of my grandmother, as she had been on that first evening of our arrival, the face not of that grandmother whom I had been astonished and remorseful at having so little missed, and who I had nothing in common with save her name, but of my real grandmother, of whom, for the first time since the afternoon of her stroke in the Champs-Elysees, I now recaptured the living reality in a complete and involuntary recollection. This reality does not exist for us so long as it has not been recreated by our thought (otherwise men who have been engaged in a titanic struggle would all of them be great epic poets); and thus, in my wild desire to fling myself into her arms, it was only at that moment—more than a year after her burial, because of the anachronism which so often prevents the calendar of facts from corresponding to the calendar of feelings—that I became conscious that she was dead. I had often spoken about her since then, and thought of her also, but behind my words and thoughts, those of an ungrateful, selfish, cruel young man, there had never been anything that resembled my grandmother, because, in my frivolity, my love of pleasure, my familiarity with the spectacle of her ill health, I retained within me only in a potential state the memory of what she had been. No matter at what moment we consider it, our total soul has only a more or less fictitious value, in spite of the rich inventory of its assets, for now some, now others are unrealizable, whether they are real riches or those of the imagination—in my own case, for example, not only of the ancient name of Guermantes but those, immeasurably graver, of the true memory of my grandmother. For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart. It is, no doubt, the existence of our body, which we may compare to a vase enclosing our spiritual nature, that induces us to suppose that all our inner wealth, our past joys, all our sorrows, are perpetually in our possession. Perhaps it is equally inexact to suppose that they escape or return. In any case if they remain within us, for most of the time it is in an unknown region where they are of no use to us, and where even the most ordinary are crowded out by memories of a different kind, which preclude any simultaneous occurrence of them in our consciousness. But if the context of sensations in which they are preserved is recaptured, they acquire in turn the same power of expelling everything that is incompatible with them, of installing alone in us the self that originally lived them. Now, inasmuch as the self that I had just suddenly become once again had not existed since that evening long ago when my grandmother had undressed me after my arrival at Balbec, it was quite naturally, not at the end of the day that had just passed, of which that self knew nothing, but—as though Time were to consist of a series of different and parallel lines—without any solution of continuity, immediately after that first evening at Balbec long ago, that I clung to the minute in which my grandmother had stooped over me. The self that I then was, that had disappeared for so long, was once again so close to me that I seemed still to hear the words that had just been spoken, although they were now no more than a phantasm, as a man who is half awake thinks he can still make, out close, by the sound of his receding dream. I was now solely the person who had sought a refuge in his grandmother’s arms, had sought to obliterate the traces of his sorrows by smothering her with kisses, that person whom I should have had as much difficulty in imagining when I was one or other of those that for some time past I had successively been as now I should have had in making the sterile effort to experience the desires and joys of one of those that for a time at least I no longer was. I remembered how, an hour before the moment when my grandmother had stooped in her dressing-gown to unfasten my boots, as I wandered along the stiflingly hot street, past the pastry-cook’s, I had felt that I could never, in my need to feel her arms round me, live through the hour that I had to spend without her. And now that this same need had reawakened, I knew that I might wait hour after hour, that she would never again be by my side. I had only just discovered this because I had only just, on feeling her for the first time alive, real, making my heart swell to breaking-point, on finding her at last, learned that I had lost her forever. Lost forever; I could not understand, and I struggled to endure the anguish of this contradiction: on the one hand an existence, a tenderness, surviving in me as I had known them, that is to say created for me, a love which found in me so totally its complement, its goal, its constant lodestar, that the genius of great men, all the genius that might have existed from the beginning of the world, would have been less precious to my grandmother than a single one of my defects; and on the other hand, as soon as I had relived that bliss, as though it were present, feeling it shot through by the certainty, throbbing like a recurrent pain, of an annihilation that had effaced my image of that tenderness, had destroyed that existence, retrospectively abolished our mutual predestination, made of my grandmother, at the moment when I had found her again as in a mirror, a mere stranger whom chance had allowed to spend a few
years with me, as she might have done with anyone else, but to whom, before and after those years, I was and would be nothing.

  “The Intermittencies of the Heart,” between chapters 1 and 2 in Sodom and Gomorrah, Part Two

  I wrote about this passage fifteen years ago and confessed how it hurt me. The deaths of those we love bring an immediate grief, and yet mourning, unless it continues into a condition of melancholia, frequently heals itself over time. Proust is far subtler than that. He deals with the guilt of having forgotten and the mingled shock and joy of suddenly remembering a love that nurtured him. I recall how baffled I was that something so universal was given voice almost uniquely by Proust.

  At seventy-two I had experienced many losses, but at eighty-seven I feel abandoned by virtually everyone I loved in my own generation. They are all gone, perhaps into a world of light, or a final darkness. In the last month, a great poet and a magnificent critic have departed, both of them friends for more than sixty years.

  I love Proust but cannot incarnate his wisdom. He was the lucidity of his city and should be the joy of his nation. Sometimes at night my parents enter my dreams. It is two-thirds of a century since they died. Reading Proust, I try to realize an intermittence of the heart, yet it is still beyond me. Dante believed that the perfect age was eighty-one, nine nines. He died at fifty-six. At eighty-one he expected to realize everything, but it was not to be. I remember that at eighty-one I was four months in a hospital, having broken my back. At eighty-seven I struggle to recover from recent operations. Sometimes I play with the idea that if I reach ninety I will begin to understand much that is veiled from me. But I am a reader and a teacher, and not a creator. Vico said that we only know what we ourselves have made.

  Proust’s knowledge is In Search of Lost Time. Even seventy years of rereading have not given me a complete grasp of that creation. Returning to Proust is like again experiencing Dante, Cervantes, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Joyce. The Proustian difference is that his principal characters—Charlus, Morel, Albertine, Swann, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Saint-Loup, Françoise, Odette, Gilberte, Bloch, Marcel’s mother, most of all the unnamed narrator finally revealed as Marcel—change more radically for me than even the great Shakespearean figures. In Search of Lost Time is a whirligig of shifting perspectives. We see and hear Charlus, a cultured noble of high rank, decline into a pathetic victim of his masochistic fantasies. At moments he seems grotesque. At other times there are touches of his ebbing grandeur. Rereading now, I wince where once I felt a deep sympathy.

  * * *

  —

  I sense that I am still in my own alternations of passion and dark inertia. When the narrator and Marcel fuse, at the end of Time Regained, the authorial voice achieves lucidity:

  I understood now why it was that the Duc de Guermantes, who to my surprise, when I had seen him sitting on a chair, had seemed to me so little aged although he had so many more years beneath him than I had, had presently, when he rose to his feet and tried to stand firm upon them, swayed backwards and forwards upon legs as tottery as those of some old archbishop with nothing solid about his person but his metal crucifix, to whose support there rushes a mob of sturdy young seminarists, and had advanced with difficulty, trembling like a leaf, upon the almost unmanageable summit of his eighty-three years, as though men spend their lives perched upon living stilts which never cease to grow until sometimes they become taller than church steeples, making it in the end both difficult and perilous for them to walk and raising them to an eminence from which suddenly they fall. And I was terrified by the thought that the stilts beneath my own feet might already have reached that height; it seemed to me that quite soon now I might be too weak to maintain my hold upon a past which already went down so far. So, if I were given long enough to accomplish my work, I should not fail, even if the effect were to make them resemble monsters, to describe men as occupying so considerable a place, compared with the restricted place which is reserved for them in space, a place on the contrary prolonged past measure, for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch the distant epochs through which they have lived, between which so many days have come to range themselves—in Time.

  Like so many other people my age, I dread falling every time I get up to walk. I have lost several friends to falling and experienced four terrible falls myself. This final passage in Proust moves me on several levels. Aside from the merely personal, it makes me reflect on my desire to go on teaching and writing as a lesser instance of Proust’s drive toward searching for lost time. Though Proust had a Jewish mother, he seems to me neither Christian nor Jewish. His wisdom is his own, and though it has an analogue in Shakespeare’s detachment, I think it is indeed closer to Hindu philosophy. There is a curious difficulty here. All of Proust turns upon erotic relationships, yet in time all of these are renounced or abandoned. And yet, without them, In Search of Lost Time could not have been composed. Marcel observes that Albertine fertilized him through unhappiness.

  After many readings, one learns that Proust essentially is a great comic writer. He defines friendship as being “halfway between physical exhaustion and mental boredom.” Again, he remarks that being in love is “a striking example of how little reality means to us.” He exalted “the perfect lie” as our only chance for the revelation of surprise. I treasure his reflection that death cures us of the desire for immortality.

  Krishna’s final teaching in the Bhagavad-Gita instructs the warrior Arjuna in the natural qualities of all humans and gods:

  Arjuna, now hear about joy,

  the three ways of finding delight

  through practice

  that brings an end to suffering.

  The joy of lucidity

  at first seems like poison

  but is in the end like ambrosia,

  from the calm of self-understanding.

  The joy that is passionate

  at first seems like ambrosia

  when sense encounter sense objects,

  but in the end it is like poison.

  The joy arising from sleep,

  laziness, and negligence,

  self-deluding from beginning to end,

  is said to be darkly inert.

  There is no being on earth

  or among the gods in heaven

  free from the triad of qualities

  that are born of nature.

  Translated by Barbara Stoler Miller

  Palpably, this is Proustian to the core. And yet it darkens as much as illuminates if we interpret Marcel’s development as being from dark inertia in interplay with passion, to the sublimation of both in indubitable lucidity. The vast cavalcade of his characters does not follow so clear a pattern. Marcel eventually will become Proust, yet we never see precisely how he emerges from the labyrinth of his self.

  Frequently, in teaching Shakespeare, which I have done for more than sixty years, I have the realization or fantasy that simultaneously I know both everything and nothing about Hamlet, Falstaff, Cleopatra, Lear, Iago, Macbeth, and the other major characters. I have never taught Proust, but I read him and meditate upon him endlessly. How much do I know about the narrator, Charlus, Swann, Odette, Gilberte, Albertine, Saint-Loup, Marcel’s mother and grandmother, Françoise, Bloch, Bergotte, Cottard, Elstir, Oriane Guermantes, Basin Guermantes, Norpois, Morel, Madame Verdurin, the Marquise de Villeparisis? More than nothing, but rather less than everything that matters most.

  Proust’s scholars rightly tend to agree that psychological reduction is useless in apprehending his characters. That is one of his prime Shakespearean aspects. A Proustian reading of Freud is more productive than any psychoanalytical investigation of Charlus or Albertine. I have never found a word to describe Shakespeare’s stance toward his characters. You can call him detached or impartial, but that is very limited. Proust loves his characters, even Char
lus. There is an eloquent passage in Part One of Sodom and Gomorrah:

  Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet one day fêted in every drawing-room and applauded in every theater in London, and the next driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: “The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!”; excluded even, except on the days of general misfortune when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews round Dreyfus, from the sympathy—at times from the society—of their fellows, in whom they inspire only disgust at seeing themselves as they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them, accentuates every blemish that they have refused to observe in themselves, and makes them understand that what they have been calling their love (and to which, playing upon the word, they have by association annexed all that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism have contrived to add to love) springs not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable disease; like the Jews again (save some who will associate only with those of their race and have always on their lips the ritual words and the accepted pleasantries), shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not want their company, forgiving their rebuffs, enraptured by their condescensions; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism to which they are subjected, the opprobrium into which they have fallen, having finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel, with the physical and moral characteristic of race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with one who, more closely integrated with, better assimilated to the opposing race, is in appearance relatively less inverted, heaps upon one who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and even some support in their existence, so much so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of which is vilest of insults), they readily unmask those who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it, with a view less to injuring them, though they have no scruple about that, than to excusing themselves, and seeking out (as a doctor seeks out cases of appendicitis) cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Jews claim that Jesus was one of them, without reflecting that there were no abnormal people when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-Christians before Christ, that the opprobrium alone makes the crime because it has allowed to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to every example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so peculiar that it is more repugnant to other men (even though it may be accompanied by high moral qualities) than certain other vices which exclude those qualities, such as theft, cruelty, breach of faith, vices better understood and so more readily excused by the generality of men; less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity of taste, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic, vocabulary, and one in which even members who do not wish to know one another recognize one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs….