by Harold Bloom
The Fugitive
The Proustian question is: did he ever meet her in the first place? Germaine Bree, who died in 2001 at the age of ninety-three, wisely remarked that Proust divests his characters of everything explicable, so that we have to confront their inner essence, an act that can be performed only by aesthetic vision. The narrator does not achieve that summit until the closing segment of Time Regained.
As a lifelong admirer of Proust, I like to compare his capacity for the creation of character with Shakespeare’s overwhelming invention of personality. Shakespeare is richer. He does not close off his characters as Proust does. In his cosmos, friendship, love, rivalry, remorse, and self-destruction are abundant. We learn from him that each of us is her or his own worst enemy. Deliberately, Proust excludes all of that. Shakespeare is not in search of lost time.
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All of Proust is a sacrifice upon the altar of time. He worships an unknown God who yet is knowable. Curiously, Proust seems a more Biblical writer than Shakespeare or even Tolstoy. That may be partly because he is haunted by the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. He chronicles the jealousies of the exiles from the Cities of the Plains and intimates that these are more turbulent and creative than the erotic envies of heterosexuals. This becomes yet more complex when he deals with a bisexual figure like Saint-Loup:
In homosexuals like Saint-Loup the ideal of virility is not the same, but it is just as conventional and just as false. The falsehood consists for them in the fact that they do not want to admit to themselves that physical desire lies at the root of the sentiments to which they ascribe another origin. M. de Charlus had detested effeminacy. Saint-Loup admired the courage of young men, the intoxication of cavalry charges, the intellectual and moral nobility of friendships between man and man, entirely pure friendships, in which each is prepared to sacrifice his life for the other. War, which turns capital cities, where only women remain, into an abomination for homosexuals, is at the same time a story of passionate adventure for homosexuals if they are intelligent enough to concoct dream figures, and not enough to see through them, to recognise their origin, to pass judgment on themselves. So that while some young men were enlisting simply in order to join in the latest sport—in the spirit in which one year everybody plays diabolo—for Saint-Loup, on the other hand, war was the very ideal which he imagined himself to be pursuing in his desires (which were in fact much more concrete but were clouded by ideology), an ideal which he could serve in common with those whom he preferred to all others, in a purely masculine order of chivalry, far from women, where he would be able to risk life to save his orderly and die inspiring a fanatical love in his men. And this, though there were many elements in his courage, the fact that he was a great nobleman was one of them, and another, in an unrecognisable and idealized form, was M. de Charlus’s dogma that it was of the essence of a man to have nothing effeminate about him. But just as in philosophy and in art ideas acquire their value only from the manner in which they are developed, and two analogous ones may differ greatly according to whether they have been expounded by Xenophon or by Plato, so, while I recognise how much, in his behaviour, the one has in common with the other, I admire Saint-Loup, for asking to be sent to the point of greatest danger, infinitely more than I do M. de Charlus for refusing to wear brightly coloured cravats.
Time Regained
I wonder why Proust, who detested public violence, allows the Narrator to admire the courage of a warrior in preference to an aesthetic sensibility, however depraved? Part of the answer must be that Proust is both a classical moralist, in the mode of Montaigne, and a wisdom writer, in the normative tradition of Koheleth. He values courage of any kind even though his own life and work are founded upon an audacity peculiar to his own life history. His attachment to his Jewish mother was absolute. She worried always how he could survive her, so great was his dependence.
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Anyone going on eighty-eight is likely to have lost both parents. My father died at seventy-three, my mother at eighty-nine. Something in me became numb after both losses. A kind of exuberance departed and has never returned. Proust died at only fifty-one of pneumonia, after suffering from asthma all his life. The last third of his life took place after his mother’s death, and was marked by the heroic creation of In Search of Lost Time, from 1909 to the end in 1922. It has to be called valiant, since he labored in exhaustion and illness and endless mourning for his mother. Here is a salient passage from the superb biography Marcel Proust: A Life by William C. Carter:
On September 2, Marcel wrote to Anna de Noailles and described his mother in death: “She has died at fifty-six, looking no more than thirty since her illness made her so much thinner and especially since death restored to her the youthfulness of the day before her sorrows; she hadn’t a single white hair. She takes away my life with her, as Papa had taken away hers.” Marcel explained that because his mother had not given up “her Jewish religion on marrying Papa, because she regarded it as a token of respect for her parents, there will be no church, simply at the house tomorrow Thursday at 12 o’clock…and the cemetery….Today I have her still, dead but still receiving my caresses. And then I shall never have her again.” Reynaldo Hahn, whose memoirs are strangely reticent about his famous friend, recorded this scene of Marcel grieving by his mother’s body: “I still see him by Mme Proust’s bed, weeping and smiling through his tears at her body.”
Sometimes I interpolate reading Proust with going back to Freud’s grand essay “Mourning and Melancholia.” A kind of dialogue commences between the two until it becomes a dialogue of one. In Search of Lost Time is ultimately tragicomic, and yet, in a more immediate sense, it performs the work of mourning. This is more than the mourning for Marcel’s mother. It is a celebratory lamentation for the look of things:
Certain people, whose minds are prone to mystery, like to believe that objects retain something of the eyes which have looked at them, that old buildings and pictures appear to us not as they originally were but beneath a perceptible veil woven for them over the centuries by the love and contemplation of millions of admirers. This fantasy, if you transpose it into the domain of what is for each one of us the sole reality, the domain of his own sensibility, becomes the truth. In that sense and in that sense alone (but it is a far more important one than the other), a thing which we have looked at in the past brings back to us, if we see it again, not only the eyes with which we looked at it but all the images with which at the time those eyes were filled. For things—and among them a book in a red binding—as soon as we have perceived them are transformed within us into something immaterial, something of the same nature as all our preoccupations and sensations of that particular time, with which, indissolubly, they blend. A name read long ago in a book contains within its syllables the strong wind and brilliant sunshine that prevailed while we were reading it. And this is why the kind of literature which contents itself with “describing things,” with giving of them merely a miserable abstract of lines and surfaces, is in fact, though it calls itself realist, the furthest removed from reality and has more than any other the effect of saddening and impoverishing us, since it abruptly severs all communication of our present self both with the past, the essence of which is preserved in things, and with the future, in which things incite us to enjoy the essence of the past a second time. Yet it is precisely this essence that an art worthy of the name must seek to express; then at least, if it fails, there is a lesson to be drawn from its impotence (whereas from the successes of realism there is nothing to be learnt), the lesson that this essence is, in part, subjective and incommunicable.
Time Regained
“Essence” here conveys the transformation of impressionism into knowledge. Proust’s Ruskinian heritage is affirmed and transcended by a memory that will not yield to time. The Narrator’s authentic respect for old age is a direct consequence:
; And now I began to understand what old age was—old age, which perhaps of all the realities is the one of which we preserve for longest in our life a purely abstract conception, looking at calendars, dating our letters, seeing our friends marry and then in their turn the children of our friends, and yet, either from fear or from sloth, not understanding what all this means, until the day when we behold an unknown silhouette, like that of M. d’Argencourt, which teaches us that we are living in a new world; until the day when a grandson of a woman we once knew, a young man whom instinctively we treat as a contemporary of ours, smiles as though we were making fun of him because to him it seems that we are old enough to be his grandfather—and I began to understand too what death meant and love and the joys of the spiritual life, the usefulness of suffering, a vocation, etc. For if names had lost most of their individuality for me, words on the other hand now began to reveal their full significance. The beauty of images is situated in front of things, that of ideas behind them. So that the first sort of beauty ceases to astonish us as soon as we have reached the things themselves, but the second is something that we understand only when we have passed beyond them.
The cruel discovery which I had just made could not fail to be of service to me so far as the actual material of my book was concerned. For I had decided that this could not consist uniquely of the full and plenary impressions that were outside time, and amongst those other truths in which I intended to set, like jewels, those of the first order, the ones relating to Time, to Time in which, as in some transforming fluid, men and societies and nations are immersed, would play an important part. I should pay particular attention to those changes which the aspect of living things undergoes, of which every minute I had fresh examples before me, for, whilst all the while thinking of my work, which I now felt to be launched with such momentum that no passing distractions could check its advance, I continued to greet old acquaintances and to enter into conversation with them.
Time Regained
Of all the novels I have read, I now find, in my own old age, the two most eminent to be Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) and In Search of Lost Time. They are about equal in their profound apprehension of human nature. If I had to choose between them, it would be Richardson, but only because Clarissa Harlowe and Lovelace, who rapes her and finally dies in a duel with her kinsman, are both more vital beings than even the Narrator (or Marcel) and Swann, Charlus, Albertine, and the other marvelous characters of In Search of Lost Time.
Proust had no anxieties in regard to the French tradition of the novel. He admired Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert, but owed much less to them than he did to Ruskin. Proust’s truth is compounded of perception, involuntary memory, impressionism, a search for spiritual meaning, and a kind of atheistic mysticism:
And then, after I had dwelt for some little time upon these resurrections of the memory, the thought came to me that in another fashion certain obscure impressions, already even at Combray on the Guermantes way, had solicited my attention in a fashion somewhat similar to these reminiscences, except that they concealed within them not a sensation dating from an earlier time, but a new truth, a precious image which I had sought to uncover by efforts of the same kind as those that we make to recall something that we have forgotten as if our finest ideas were like tunes which, as it were, come back to us although we have never heard them before and which we have to make an effort to hear and to transcribe. I remembered—with pleasure because it showed me that already in those days I had been the same and that this type of experience sprang from a fundamental trait in my character, but with sadness also when I thought that since that time I had never progressed—that already at Combray I used to fix before my mind for its attention some image which had compelled me to look at it, a cloud, a triangle, a church spire, a flower, a stone, because I had the feeling that perhaps beneath these signs there lay something of a quite different kind which I must try to discover, some thought which they translated after the fashion of those hieroglyphic characters which at first one might suppose to represent only material objects. No doubt the process of decipherment was difficult, but only by accomplishing it could one arrive at whatever truth there was to read. For the truths which the intellect apprehends directly in the world of full and unimpeded light have something less profound, less necessary than those which life communicates to us against our will in an impression which is material because it enters us through the senses but yet has a spiritual meaning which it is possible for us to extract. In fact, both in the one case and in the other, whether I was concerned with impressions like the one which I had received from the sight of the steeples of Martinville or with reminiscences like that of the unevenness of the two steps or the taste of the madeleine, the task was to interpret the given sensations as signs of so many laws and ideas, by trying to think—that is to say, to draw forth from the shadow—what I had merely felt, by trying to convert it into its spiritual equivalent. And this method, which seemed to me the sole method, what was it but the creation of a work of art? Already the consequences came flooding into my mind: first, whether I considered reminiscences of the kind evoked by the noise of the spoon or the taste of the madeleine, or those truths written with the aid of shapes for whose meaning I searched in my brain, where—church steeples or wild grass growing in a wall—they composed a magical scrawl, complex and elaborate, their essential character was that I was not free to choose them, that such as they were they were given to me. And I realised that this must be the mark of their authenticity. I had not gone in search of the two uneven paving-stones of the courtyard upon which I had stumbled. But it was precisely the fortuitous and inevitable fashion in which this and the other sensations had been encountered that proved the trueness of the past which they brought back to life, of the images which they released, since we feel, with these sensations, the effort that they make to climb back towards the light, feel in ourselves the joy of rediscovering what is real. And here too was the proof of the trueness of the whole picture formed out of those contemporaneous impressions which the first sensation brings back in its train, with those unerring proportions of light and shade, emphasis and omission, memory and forgetfulness to which conscious recollection and conscious observation will never know how to attain.
Time Regained
Proust did not come easily to this lucid stance: “For the truths which the intellect apprehends directly in the world of full and unimpeded light have something less profound, less necessary than those which life communicates to us against our will in an impression which is material because it enters us through the senses but yet has a spiritual meaning which it is possible for us to extract.” That sentence could exemplify Western and also Eastern wisdom. It adheres to the tradition of Augustinian epiphany, yet is also in consonance with Hindu scriptures.
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Here is another instance of Proustian epiphany, this one from Swann’s Way:
But it was in vain that I lingered beside the hawthorns—breathing their invisible and unchanging odour, trying to fix it in my mind (which did not know what to do with it), losing it, recapturing it, absorbing myself in the rhythm which disposed the flowers here and there with a youthful light-heartedness and at intervals as unexpected as certain intervals in music—they went on offering me the same charm in inexhaustible profusion, but without letting me delve any more deeply, like those melodies which one can play a hundred times in succession without coming any nearer to their secret. I turned away from them for a moment so as to be able to return to them afresh. My eyes travelled up the bank which rose steeply to the fields beyond the hedge, alighting on a stray poppy or a few laggard cornflowers which decorated the slope here and there like the border of a tapestry whereon may be glimpsed sporadically the rustic theme which will emerge triumphant in the panel itself; infrequent still, spaced out like the scattered houses which herald the approach of a village, they betokened to me the vast
expanse of waving corn beneath the fleecy clouds, and the sight of a single poppy hoisting upon its slender rigging and holding against the breeze its scarlet ensign, over the buoy of rich black earth from which it sprang, made my heart beat like that of a traveller who glimpses on some low-lying ground a stranded boat which is being caulked and made sea-worthy, and cries out, although he has not yet caught sight of it, “The Sea!”
