PROUST

T
HE Proustian equation is never simple. The
unknown, choosing its weapons from a hoard
of values, is also the unknowable. And the
quality of its action falls under two signatures.
In Proust each spear may be a spear of Ttlephus.
This dualism in multiplicity will be examined more
closely in relation to Proust's ' perspectivism.' For
the pur­poses of this synthesis it is convenient to
adopt the inner chronology of the Proustian
demonstration, and to examine in the first place that
double-headed monster of damnation and
salvation-Time.

The scaffolding of his structure is revealed to the

narrator in the library of the Princesse de Guer­
mantes ( one time Mme. Verdurin), and the nature
ofits materials in the matinee that follows. His book
takes form in his mind. He is aware of the many
concessions required of the literary artist by· the
shortcomings of the literary convention. As a
writer he is not altogether at liberty to detach effect
from cause. It will be necessary, for example, to
interrupt (disfigure) the luminous projection of sub­
ject desire with the comic relief of features.· It will
be impossible to prepare the hundreds of masks that
rightly belong to the objects of even his most dis­
interested scrutiny. He accepts regretfully the
sacred ruler and compass of literary geometry. But
he will refuse to extend his submission to spatial
scales, he will refuse to measure the length and
weight of man in terms of his body instead of in
terms of his years. In the closing words of his book
he states his position: 'But were I granted time to
accomplish my work, I would not fail to stamp it
with the seal of that Time, now so forcibly present
to my mind, and in it I would describe men, even
at the risk of giving them the appearance of mon­
strous beings, as occupying in Time a much greater
place than that so sparingly conceded to them in
Space, a place indeed extended beyond measure,
because, like giants plunged in the years, they touch
at once those periods of their lives-separated by so
many days-so far apart in Time.'
Proust's creatures, then, are victims of this pre­
dominating condition and circumstance-Time ;
victims as lower organisms, conscious only of two
dimensions and suddenly confronted with the mys­
tery of height, are victims : victims and prisoners.
There is no escape from the hours and the days.
Neither from to-morrow nor from yesterday. There
is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has
deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood
is of no importance. Deformation has taken place.
2
 Yesterday is not a milestone that has been passed,
but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and
irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dan­
gerous. We are not merely more weary because of
yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were
before the calamity of yesterday. A calamitous day,
but calamitous not necessarily in content. The
good or evil disposition of the object has neither
reality nor significance. The immediate joys and
sorrows of the body and the intelligence are so many
superfoetations. Such as it was, it has been assimi­
lated to the only world that has reality al'ld signifi­
cance, the world of our own latent consciousness,
and its cosmography has suffered a dislocation. Sa
that we are rather in the position of Tantalus, with
this difference, that we allow ourselves to be tanta­
lised. And possibly the perpetuum mobile of our
disillusions is subject to more variety. The aspira­
tions 0f yesterday were valid fur yesterday's ego, not
for to-day's. We are disappointed at the nullity of
what we are pleased to call attainment. Buf what
is attainment ? The identification of the subject
with the object of his desire. The subject has died­
and perhaps many times-on the way. For subject
B to be disappointed by the banality of an object
chosen by subject A is as illogical as to expect one's
hunger to be dissipated by the spectacle of Uncle
eating his dinner. Even suppose that by one of those

3
rare miracles of coincidence, when the calendar of
facts runs parallel to the calendar of feelings, realisa­
tion takes place, that the object of desire (in the
strictest sense of that malady) is achieved by the sub­
ject, then the congruence is so perfect, the time-state
of attainment eliminates so accurately the time-state
of aspiration, that the actual seems the inevitable,
and, all conscious intellectual e:ffort to reconstitute
the invisible and unthinkable as a reality being fruit­
less, we are incapable of appreciating our joy by
comparing it with our sorrow. Voluntary memory
(Proust repeats it ad nauseam) is of no value as an
instrument of evocation, and provides an image as
far removed from the real as the myth of our imagina­
tion or the caricature furnished by direct perception.
There is only one real impression and one adequate
mode of evocation. Over neither have we the least
control. That reality and that mode will be dis­
cussed in their proper place.
But the poisonous ingenuity of Time in the science
of affliction is not limited to its action on the subject,
that action, as has been shown, resulting in an un­
ceasing modification of his personality, whose per­
manent reality, if any, can only be apprehended as a
retrospective hypothesis. The individual is the seat
of a constant process of decantation, decantation from
the vessel containing the fiuid of future time, sluggish,
pale and monochrome, to the vessel containing the
4.
 fluid of past time, agitated and multicoloured by the
phenomena of its hours. Generally speaking, the
former is innocuous, amorphous, without character,
without any Borgian virtue. Lazily considered in
anticipation and in the haze of our smug will to live,
of our pernicious and incurable optimism, it seems
exempt from the bitterness of fatality : in store for
us, not in store in us. On occasions, however, it is
capable of supplementing the labours of its colleague.
It is only necessary for its surface to be broken by a
date, by any temporal specification allowing us to
measure the days that separate us from a menace--or
a promise. Swann, for example, contemplates with
doleful resignation the months that he must spend
away from Odette during the summer. One day
Odette says: 'Forcheville (her lover, and, after the
death of Swann, her husband) is going to Egypt at
Pentecost.' Swann translates : ' I am going with
Forcheville to Egypt at Pentecost.' The fl u id of
future time freezes, and poor Swann, face to face
with the future reality of Odette and Forcheville in
Egypt, suffers more grievously than even at the
misery of his present condition. The narrator's de­
sire to see La Berroa in Ph.Ure is stimulated more
violently by the announcement ' Doors closed at two
o'clock ' than by the mystery of Bergotte's 'Jansenist
pallor and solar myth.' His indifference at parting
from Albertine at the end of the day in Balbec is
5
 transformed into the most horrible anxiety by a
simple remark addressed by her to her aunt or to a
friend : ' To-morrow, then, at half-past eight.' The
tacit understanding that the future can be controlled
is destroyed. The future event cannot be focussed,
its implications cannot be seized, until it is definitely
situated and a date assigned to it. When Albertine
was his prisoner, the possibility of her escape did not
seriously disturb him, because it was indistinct and
abstract, like the possibility of death. Whatever
opinion we may be pleased to hold on the subject of
death, we may be sure that it is meaningless and
valueless. Death has not required us to keep a day
free. The art of publicity has been revolutionised by
a similar consideration. Thus I am exhorted, not
merely to try the aperient of the Shepherd, but to
try it at seven o'clock.
So far we have considered a mobile subject before
an ideal object, immutable and incorruptible. But
our vulgar perception is not concerned with other
than vulgar phenomena. Exemption from intrinsic
flux in a given object does not change the fact that it
is the correlative of a subject that does not enjoy such
immunity. The observer infects the observed with
his own mobility. Moreover, when it is a case of
human intercourse, we are faced by the problem of
an object whose mobility is not merely a function of
the subject's, but independent and personal : two
6
separate and immanent dynamisms related by no
system of synchronisation. So that whatever the
object, our thirst for possession is, by definition, in­
satiable. At the best, all that is realised in Time (all
Time produce), whether in Art or Life, can only be
possessed successively, by a series of partial annexa­
tions-and never integrally and at once. The tragedy
of the Marcel-Albertine liaison is the type-tragedy of
the human relationship whose failure is preordained.
My analysis of that central catastrophe will clarify
this too abstract and arbitrary statement of Proust's
pessimism. But for every tumour a scalpel and a
compress. Memory and Habit are attributes of the
Time cancer. They control the most simple Prous­
tian episode, and an understanding of their mechan­
ism must precede any particular analysis of their
application: They are the flying buttresses of the
temple raised to commemorate the wisdom of the
architect that is also the wisdom of all the sages, from
Brahma to Leopardi, the wisdom that consists not in
the satisfaction but in the ablation of desire !'
' In noi di earl inganni
non che la speme, ii desiderio e spento.'
* *
*
The laws of memory are subject to the more general
laws of habit. Habit is a compromise effected be­
tween the individual and his environment, or be-

7
 tween the individual and his own organic eccen­
tricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the
lightning-conductor of his existence. Habit is the
ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing
i s habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession
of habits, since the individual is a succession of
individuals ; the world 'being a projection of the
individual's consciousness (an objectivation of the
individual's will, Schopenhauer would say), the pact
must be continually renewed, the letter of safe-con­
duct brought up to date. The creation of the world
did not take place once and for all time, but takes
place every day. Habit then is the generic term for
the countless treaties concluded between the count­
less subjects that constitute the individual and their
countless correlative objects. The periods of transi­
tion that separate consecutive adaptations (because
by no expedient of macabre transubstantiation can
the grave-sheets serve as swaddling-clothes) represent
the perilous zones in the life of the individual, danger­
ous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when
for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by
the suffering of being. {At this point, and with a
heavy heart and for the satisfaction or disgruntlement
of Gideans, semi and integral, I am inspired to con­
cede a brief parenthesis to all the analogivorous,
who are capable of interpreting the ' Live danger­
ously,' that victorious hiccough in vacuo, as the
8
 national anthem of the true ego exiled in habit. The
Gideans advocate a habit of living-and look for an
epithet. A nonsensical bastard phrase. They imply
a hierarchy of habits, as though it were valid to speak
of good habits and bad habits. An automatic ad•
justment of the human organism to the conditions of
its existence has as little moral significance as the
casting of a clout when May is or is not out ; and the
exhortation to cultivate a habit as little sense as an
exhortation to cultivate a coryza.) The suffering of
being: that is, the free play of every faculty. Be.
cause the pernicious devotion of habit paralyses our
attention, drugs those handmaidens of perception
whose co-operation is not absolutely essential. Habit
is like Fram;:oise, the immortal cook of the Proust
household, who knows what has to be done, and will
slave all day and all night rather than tolerate any
redundant activity in the kitchen. But our current
habit of living is as incapable of dealing with the
mystery of a strange sky or a strange room, with any
circumstance unforeseen in her curriculum, as Fran•
c;oise of conceiving or realising the full horror of a
Duval omelette. Then the atrophied faculties come
to the rescue, and the maximum value of our being
is restored. But less drastic circumstances may pro•
duce this tense and provisional lucidity in the nervous
system. Habit may not be dead {or as good as dead,
doomed to die) but sleeping. This second and more
9
 fugitive experience may or may not be exempt from
pain. It does not inaugurate a period of transition.
But the first and major mode is inseparable from
suffering and anxiety-the suffering of the dying and
the jealous anxiety of the ousted. The old ego dies
hard. Such as it was, a minister of dulness, it was
also an agent of security. When it ceases to perform
that second function, when it is opposed by a pheno­
menon that it cannot reduce to the condition of a
comfortable and familiar concept, when, in a word,
it betrays its trust as a screen to spare its victim the
' ' spectacle of reality, it disappears, and the victim,
now an ex-victim, for a moment free, is exposed to
that reality-an exposure that has its advantages and
its disadvantages. It disappears-with wailing and
gnashing of teeth. The mortal microcosm cannot
forgive the relative immortality of the macrocosm.
The whisky bears a grudge against the decanter. The
narrator cannot sleep in a strange room, is tortured
by a high ceiling, being used to a low ceiling. What
is taking place? The old pact is out of date. It
contained no clause treating of high ceilings. The
habit of friendship for the low ceiling is ineffectual,
must die in order that a habit of friendship for the
high ceiling may be born. Between this death and
that birth, reality, intolerable, absorbed feverishly by
his consciousness at the extreme limit of its intensity,
by his total consciousness organised to avert the
IO
disaster, to create the new habit that will empty the
mystery of its threat-and also of its beauty. ' If
Habit,' writes Proust, 'is a second nature, it keeps us
in ignorance of the first, and is free of its cruelties and
its enchantments.> Our :first nature, therefore, corre­
sponding, as we shall see later, to a deeper instinct
than the mere animal instinct of self-preservation, is
laid bare during these periods of abandonment. And
its cruelties and enchantments are the cruelties and
enchantments of reality. ' Enchantments of reality '
has the air of a paradox. But when the object is
perceived as particular and unique and not merely
the member of a family, when it appears independent
of any general notion and detached from the sanity
of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of
ignorance, then and then only may it be a source of
enchantment. Unfortunately Habit has laid its veto
on this form of perception, its action being precisely
to hide the essence-the Idea--0f the object in the
haze of conception-preconception. Normally we
are in the position of the tourist (the traditional
specification would constitute a pleonasm), whose
aesthetic experience consists in a series of identifica­
tions and for whom Baedeker is the end rather than
the means. Deprived by nature of the faculty of
cognition and by upbringing of any acquaintance
with the Jaws of dynamics, a brief inscription im­
mortalisei! his emotion. The creature of habit turns
II
 aside from the object that cannot be made to corre­
spond with one or other of his intellectual prejudices,
that resists the propositions of his team of syntheses,
organised by Habit on labour-saving principles.
Examples of these two modes-the death of Habit
and the brief suspension of its vigilance-abound in
Proust. I will transcribe two incidents in the life
of the narrator. Of these the first, illustrative of
the pact renewed, is extremely important as pre­
paring a later incident that I will have occasion
to discuss in relation to Proustian memory and
Proustian revelation. The second exemplifies the
pact waived in the interests of the narrator's via
dolorosa.
The narrator arrives at Balbec-Plage, a holiday
resort in Normandy, for the first time, accompanied
by his grandmother. They are staying at the Grand
Hotel. He enters his room, feverish and exhausted
after his journey. But sleep, in this inferno of un­
familiar objects, is out of the question. All his
faculties are on the alert, on the defensive, vigilant
and taut, and as painfully incapable of relaxation as
the tortured body of La Balue in his cage, where he
could neither stand upright nor sit down. There is
no room for his body in this vast and hideous apart­
ment, because his attention has peopled it with
gigantic furniture, a storm of sound and an agony of
colour. Habit has not had time to silence the ex-
12
 plosions of the clock, reduce the hostility of the violet
curtains, remove the furniture and tower the in•
accessible vault of this belvedere. Alone in this room
that is not yet a room but a cavern of wild beasts,
invested on all sides by the implacable strangers
whose privacy he has disturbed, he desires to die.
His grandmother comes in, comforts him, checks the
stooping gesture that he makes to unbutton his bOots,
insists on helping him to undress, puts him to bed,
and before leaving him makes him promise to knock
on the partition that separates her room from his,
should he require anything during the night. He
knocks, and she comes again to him. But that night
and for many nights he suffered. That suffering he
interprets as the obscure, organic, humble refusal on
the part/of those elements that represented all that
was best in his life to accept the possibility of a for­
mula in which they would have no part. This re­
luctance to die, this long and desperate and daily
resistance before the perpetual ex.foliation of per­
sonality, explains also his horror at the idea .of ever
living without Gilberte Swann, of ever losing his
parents, at the idea of his own death. But this terror
at the thought of separation-from Gilberte, from his
parents, from himself-is dissipated in a greater
terror, when he thinks that to the pain of separation
will succeed indifference, that the privation will cease
to be a privation when the alchemy of Habit has
13
transformed the individual capable of suffering into a
stranger for whom the motives of that suffering are
an idle tale, when not only the objects of his affection
have vanished, but also that affection itself ; and he
thinks how absurd is our dream of a Paradise with
retention of personality, since our life is a succession
of Paradises successively denied, that the only true
Paradise is the Paradise that has been lost, and that
death will cure many of the desire for immortality.
The second episode that I have chosen as an illus­
tration of the pact waived engages the same two
characters, the narrator and his grandmother. He
has been staying at Doncieres with his friend Saint­
Loup. He telephones to his grandmother in Paris.
(After reading the description of this telephone call
and its hardly less powerful corollary, when, years
later, he speaks over the telephone with Albertine on
returning home late after his :first visit to the Princesse
de Guermantes, Cocteau's Voix Humaine seems not
merely a banality but an unnecessary banality.)
After the conventional misunderstanding with the
Vigilant Virgins {sic) of the central exchange, he
hears his grandmother's voice, or what he assumes to
be her voice, because he hears it now for the first
time, in all its purity and reality, so different from the
voice that he had been accustomed to follow on the
open score of her face that he does not recognise it as
hers. It is a grievous voice, its fragility unmitigated
and undisguised by the carefully arranged mask of
her features, and this strange real voice is the measure
of its owner's suffering. He hears it also as the
symbol of her isolation, of their separation, as im­
palpable as a voice from the dead. The voice stops.
His grandmother seems as irretrievably lost as Eury­
dice among the shades. Alone before the mouthpiece
he calls her name in vain. Nothing can persuade
him to remain at Donderes. He must see his grand­
mother. He leaves for Paris. He surprises her read­
ing her beloved Mme. de Sevigne. But he is not there
because she does not know that he is there. He is
present at his own absence. And, in consequence of
his journey and his anxiety, his habit is in abeyance,
the habit of his tenderness for his grandmother. His
gaze is no longer the necromancy that sees in each
precious object a mirror of the past. The notion of
what he should see has not had time to interfere its
prism between the eye and its object. His eye func­
tions with the cruel precision of a camera ; it photo-­
graphs the reality of his grandmother. And he
realises with horror that his grandmother is dead,
long since and many times, that the cherished familiar
of his mind, mercifully composed all along the years
by the solicitude of habitual memory, exists no longer,
that this mad old woman, drowsing over her book,
overburdened with years, flushed and coarse and
vulgar, is a stranger whom he has never seen.
 The respite is brie£ ' Of all human plants,' writes
Proust, 'Habit requires the least fostering, and is the
first to appear on the seeming desolation of the most
barren rock.' Brief, and dangerously painful. The
fundamental duty of Habit, about which it describes
the futile and stupefying arabesques of its supereroga­
tions, consists in a perpetual adjustment and readjust­
ment of our organic sensibility to the conditions of
its worlds. Suffering represents the omission of that
duty, whether through negligence or inefficiency, and
boredom its adequate performance. The pendulum
oscillates between these two terms : Suffering-that
opens a window on the real and is the main condition
of the artistic experience, and Boredom-with its host
of top-hatted and hygienic ministers, Boredom that
must be considered as the most tolerable because the
most durable of human evils. Considered as a pro­
gression, this endless series of renovations leaves us as
indifferent as the heterogeneity of any one of its
terms, and the inconsequence of any given me dis­
turbs us as little as the comedy of substitution. In­
deed, we take as little cognisance of one as of the
other, unless, vaguely, after the event, or clearly,
when, as in the case of Proust, two birds in the bush
are of infinitely greater value than one in the hand,
and because-if I may add this nox vomica to an
aperitif of metaphors-the heart of the cauliflower or
the ideal core of the onion would represent a more
16
appropriate tribute to the labours of poetical excava­
tion than the crown of bay. I draw the conclusion
of this matter from Proust's treasury of nutshell
phrases : ' If there were no such thing as Habit, Life
would of necessity appear delicious to all those whom
Death would threaten at every moment, that is to
say, to all Mankind.'
* *
*
Proust had a bad memory-as he had an inefficient
habit, because he had an inefficient habit. The man
with a good memory does not remember anything
because he does not forget anything. His memory is
uniform, a creature of routine, at once a condition
and function of his impeccable habit, an instrument
of reference instead of an instrument of discovery.
The prean of his memory : ' I remember as well as I
remember yesterday ... ' is also its epitaph, and
gives the precise expression of its value. He cannot
remember yesterday any more than he can remember
to-morrow. He can contemplate yesterday hung out
to dry with the wettest August bank holiday on record
a little further down the clothes-line. Because his
memory is a clothes-line and the images of his past
dirty linen redeemed and the infallibly complacent
servants of his reminiscential needs. Memory is obvi­
ously conditioned by perception. Curiosity is a non-
 conditioned reflex, in its most primitive manifesta­
tions a reaction before a danger-stimulus, and seldom
exempt, even in its superior and apparently most
disinterested form, from utilitarian considerations.
Curiosity is the hair of our habit tending to stand on
end. It rarely happens that our attention is not
stained in greater or lesser degree by this animal
element. Curiosity is the safeguard, not the death, of
the cat, whether in skirts or on all fours. The more
interested our interest, the more indelible must be its
record of impressions. Its booty will always be avail­
able, because its aggression was a form of self.defence,
i.e. the function of an invariable. In extreme cases
memory is so closely related to habit that its word
takes flesh, and is not merely available in cases of
urgency, but habitually enforced. Thus absence of
mind is fortunately compatible with the active pres­
ence of our organs of articulation. I repeat that
remem.oration, in its highest sense, cannot be applied
to these extracts of our anxiety. Strictly speaking,
we can only remember what has been registered by
our extreme inattention and stored in that ultimate
and inaccessible dungeon of our being to which Habit
does not possess the key, and does not need to, be­
cause it contains none of the hideous and useful
paraphernalia of war. But here, in tbat ' gouffre
interdit a nos sondes,' is stored the essence of our­
selves, the best of our many selves and their concre-
18
l tions that simplists call the world, the best because

i
t
accumulated slyly and painfully and patiently under
the nose of our vulgarity, the fine essence of a
smothered divinity whose whispered ' disfazione ' is
drowned in the healthy bawling of an alI-embracing
appetite, the pearl that may give the lie to our cara-
pace of paste and pewter. May-when we escape
into the spacious annexe of mental alienation, in sleep
or the rare dispensation of waking madness. From
this deep source Proust hoisted his world. His work
is not an accident, but its salvage is an accident. The
conditions of that accident will be revealed at the
peak of this prevision. A second-hand climax is
better than none. But no purpose can be served by
withholding the name of the diver. Proust calls him
'involuntary memory.' The memory that is not
memory, but the application of a concordance to the
Old Testament of the individual, he calls ' voluntary
memory. 1 This is the uniform memory of intelli­
gence ; and it can be relied on to reproduce for
our gratified inspection those impressions of the past
that were consciously and intelligently formed. It
has no interest in the mysterious element of inatten­
tion that colours our most commonplace experiences.
It presents the past in monochrome. The images it
chooses are as arbitrary as those chosen by imagina­
tion, and are equally remote from reality. Its action
has been compared by Proust to that of turning the
I I

leaves of an album of photographs. The material

that it furnishes contains nothing of the past, merely
a blurred and uniform projection once removed of
our anxiety and opportunism-that is to say, nothing,
There is no great difference, says Proust, between
the memory of a dream and the memory of reality.
When the sleeper awakes, this emissary of his habit
assures him that his ' personality' has not disap�
peared with his fatigue. It is possible (for those that
take an interest in such speculations) to consider the
resurrection of the soul as a final piece of impertinence
from the same source. It insists on that most neces­
sary, wholesome and monotonous plagiarism-the
plagiarism of oneself. This thoroughgoing democrat
makes no distinction between the• Pensees' of Pascal
and a soap advertisement. In fact, if Habit is the
Goddess of Dulness, voluntary memory is Shadwell,
and of Irish extraction. Involuntary memory is ex­
plosive, • an immediate, total and delicious deflagra­
tion.' It restores, not merely the past object, but the
Lazarus that it charmed or tortured, not merely
Lazarus and the object, but more because less, more
because it abstracts the useful, the opportune, the
accidental, because in its flame it has consumed Habit
and all its works, and in its brightness revealed what
the mock reality of experience never can and never
will reveal-the real. But involuntary memory is an
unruly magician and will not be importuned. It
20
 chooses its own time and place for the performance of
its miracle. I do not know how often this miracle
recurs in Proust. I think twelve or thirteen times.
But the first-the famous episode of the madeleine
steeped in tea-would justify the assertion that his
entire book is a monument to involuntary memory
and the epic of its action. The whole of Proust's
world comes out of a teacup, and not merely Com­
bray and his childhood. For Combray brings us to
the two ' ways ' and to Swann, and, to Swann may be
related every element of the Proustian experience and
consequently its climax in revelation. Swann is be­
hind Balbec, and Balbec is Albertine and Saint­
Loup. Directly he involves Odette and Gilberte, the
Verdurins and their clan, the music of Vinteuil and
the magical prose ofBergotte; indirectly (via Balbec
and Saint-Loup) the Guermantes, Oriane and the
Duke, the Princesse and M. de Charlus. Swann is
the corner-stone of the entire structure, and the
central figure of the narrator's childhood, a childhood
that involuntary memory, stimulated or charmed by
the long-forgotten taste of a madeleine steeped in an
infusion of tea, conjures in all the relief and colour of
its essential significance from the shallow well of a
cup 's inscrutable banality.

* *
*
21
 From thisjanal, trinal, agile monster or Divinity
Time-a condition of resurrection because an instru•
ment of death ; Habit-an infliction in so far as it
opposes the dangerous exaltation of the one and a
blessing in so far as it palliates the cruelty of the
other ; Memory-a clinical laboratory stocked with
poison and remedy, stimulant and sedative: from
Him the mind turns to the one compensation and
miracle of evasion tolerated by His tyranny and vigi­
lance. This accidental and fugitive salvation in the
midst of life may supervene when the action of in•
voluntary memory is stimulated by the negligence or
agony of Habit, and under no other circumstances,
nor necessarily then. Proust has adopted this mystic
experience as the Leitmotiv of his composition. It
recurs., like the red phrase of the Vinteuil Septuor., a
neuralgia rather than a theme, persistent and mon�
tonous, disappears beneath the surface and emerges
a still finer and more nervous structure, enriched with
a strange and necessary incrustation of grace-notes, a
more confident and essential statement of reality, and ·
climbs through a series of precisions and purifications
to the pinnacle from which it commands and clarifies
the most humble incident of its ascent and delivers its
triumphant ultimatum. It appears for the first time
as the episode of the madeleine, and again on at least
five capital occasions before its final and multiple in­
vestment of the Guermantes Hotel at the opening of
22
 the second volume of Le Temps Retrouve, its culmin­
ating and integral expression. Thus the germ of the
Proustian solution is contained in the statement of the
problem itself. The source and point of departure of
this ' sacred action,' the elements of communion, are
provided by the physical world, by some immediate
and fortuitous act of perception. The process is
almost one of intellectualised animism. The follow­
ing is the list of fetishes :

r. The madeleine steeped in an infusion of tea.

(Du Cote de Chez Swann, i. 69-73.)
2. The steeples of Martinville, seen from Dr. Perce-
pied's trap. (Ibid., 258-262.)
3. A musty smell in a public lavatory in the Champs
Elysees.
(A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs, i. 90.)
4. The three trees, seen near Balbec from the carriage
of Mme. de Villeparisis. (Ibid., ii. 161.)
5. The hedge of hawthorn near Balbec.
(Ibid., iii. 215.)
6. He stoops to unbutton his boots on the occasion of
his second visit to the Grand Hotel at Baj.bee.
(Sodome et Gomorrhe, ii. 176.)
7. Uneven cobbles in the courtyard of the Guer-
mantes Hotel. (Le Temps Retrouvl, ii. 7.)
8. The noise of a spoon against a plate.
(Ibid., g.)
9. He wipes his mouth with a napkin.
(Ibid., 10.)
10. The noise of water in the pipes. (Ibid., 18.)
r I. George Sand's Franfois le Champi. (Ibid., 30.)
and as providing the key to his life and work. The
sixth capital experience is particularly important
(although less familiar than the famous madeleine,
which is invariably quoted as the type ofthe Proustian
revelation) as representing not only a central appear­
ance of the motif but also an application of the
erratic machinery of habit and memory as conceived
by Proust. Albertine and the Proustian Discours de
la Metlwde having waited so long can wait a little
longer, and the reader is cordially invited to omit
this summary analysis of what is perhaps the greatest
p assage that Proust ever wrote-Les Intermittences du
Cceur.

This incident takes place on the first evening of the

narrator's second visit to Balbec. On this occasion
he is v.i.th his mother, his grandmother having died a
year before. But the dead annex the quick as surely
as the Kingdom of France annexes the Duchy of
Orleans. His mother has become his grandmother,
whether through the suggestion of regret or an idola­
trous cult of the dead or the disintegrating effect of
loss that breaks the chrysalis and hastens the meta­
morphosis of an atavistic embryon whose maturation
is slow and imperceptible without the stimulus of
grief. She carries her mother's bag and her muff,
and is never without a volume of Mme. de Sevigne.
She who formerly chaffed her mother for never
 writing a letter without quoting Mme. de Sevigne or
Mme. de Beausergent, builds now her own to her son
around some phrase from the Letters or the Memoirs.
The narrator's motives for this second visit are not
those-furnished by Swann and his fantasy-that
granted him no peace while Balbec had still the
mystery and beauty of its name, before reality had
replaced the mirage of imagination by the mirage of
memory and explained away the value of the un­
known as Venice will in due course be explained
away and the odyssey of the local ' tacot ' through a
mythical land by the etymology of Brichot and the
appeasing contempt of familiarity. The Persian
church with its stained glass ' surfed in spray ' and
its steeple hewn out of the granite rampart of a
Norman cliff has been replaced by the Giorgionesque
chambermaid of Mme. de Putbus.
He arrives tired and ill, as on the former occasion
that has been analysed as an example of the death of
Habit. Now, however, the dragon has been reduced
to docility, and the cavern is a room. Habit has been
reorganised-an operation described by Proust as
' longer and more difficult than the turning inside out
of an eyelid, and which consists in the imposition of
our own familiar soul on the terrifying soul of our
surroundings.' He stoops down-cautiously, in the
interests of his heart-to unbutton his boots. Sud­
denly he is filled with a divine familiar presence.
26
 Once more he is restored to himself by that being
whose tenderness, several years earlier, in a similar
moment of distress and fatigue, had brought him a
moment's calm, by his grandmother as she had been
then, as she had continued to be until that fatal day
of her stroke in the Champs Elysees, after which
nothing remained of her but a name, so that her
death was of as little consequence to the narrator
as the death of a stranger. Now, a year after her
burial, thanks to the mysterious action of involuntary
memory, he learns that she is dead. At any given
moment our total soul, in spite of its rich balance­
sheet, has only a fictitious value. Its assets are never
completely realisable. But he has not merely ex­
tracted from this gesture the lost reality of his grand­
mother : he has recovered the lost reality of himself,
the reality of his lost self. As though the figure of
Time could be represented by an endless series of
parallels, his life is switched over to another line and
proceeds, without any solution of continuity, from
that remote moment of his past when his grand­
mother stooped over his distress. And he is as in­
capable of visualising the incidents that punctuated
that long period of intermittence, the incidents of the
past few hours, as in that interval he was inexorably
bereft of that precious panel in the tapestry of his
days representing his grandmother and his love for
her. But this resumption of a past life is poisoned by
27
 a cruel anachronism : his grandmother is dead. For
the first time since her death, since the Champs
Elysees, he has recovered her living an� complete, as
she was so many times, at Combray and Paris and
Balbec. For the first time since her death he knows
that she is dead, he knows who is dead. He had to
recover her alive and tender before he could admit
her dead and for ever incapable of any tenderness.
This contradiction between presence and irremediable
I
obliteration is intolerable. Not merely the memory
-the experience-of their mutual predestination :is
retrospectively abolished by the certainty that it is
folly to speak in such cases of predestination, that
his grandniother was a chance acquaintance and the
few years spent with her an accident, that as he
meant nothing to her before their meeting, so he can
mean nothing to her after her departure. He cannot
understand ' this dolorous synthesis of sun,ival and
annihilation.' And he writes : ' I did not know
whether this painful and for the moment incompre­
hensible impression would ever yield up any truth.
But I knew that if I ever did succeed in extracting
some truth from the world, it would be from such an
impression and from none other, an impression at
once particular and spontaneous, which had neither
been formed by my intelligence nor attenuated by my
pusillanimity, but whose double and mysterious fur­
row had been carved, as by a thunderbolt, within me,
28
 by the inhuman and supernatural blade of Death, or
the revelation of Death.' But already will, the will
to live, the will not to suffer, Habit, having recovered
from its momentary paralysis, has laid the founda­
tions of its evil and necessary structure, and the vision
of his grandmother begins to fade and to lose that
miraculous relief and clarity that no effort of de­
liberate rememoration can impart or restore. It is
redeemed for a moment by the sight of that party­
wall which, like an instrument, had transmitted the
faltering statement of his distress, and, some days
later, by the drawing of a blind in a railway carriage,
when the evocation of his grandmother is so vivid and
painful that he is obliged to abandon his visit to Mme.
Verdurin and leave the train. But before this new

I
brightness, this old brightness revived and intensified,
can be finally extinguished, the Calvary of pity and
remorse must be trod. The insistent memory of
cruelties to one who is dead is a flagellation, because
the dead are only dead in so far as they continue to
exist in the heart of the survivor. And pity for_what
has been suffered is a more cruel and precise expres-
sion for that suffering than the conscious estimate of
the sufferer, who is spared at least one·despair-the
despair of the spectator. The narrator recalls an
incident that took place during his first stay at Balbec,
in the light of which he had considered his grand­
mother as a frivolous and vain old woman. She had
 insisted on having her photograph taken by Saint­
Loup, so that her beloved grandchild might have at
least that poor record of her latter days, a fusillade of
syncopes (called ' symcopes ' by the manager of the
Grand Hotel, who now reveals to the narrator this
first onslaught of his grandmother's malady and un- .
wittingly provides, in his absurd malapropism, yet
another instrument of painful evocation) and strokes
having allowed her to see death clearly at last as a
coming event. And she had been very particular
about her pose and the inclination of her hat, wishing
the photograph to be one of a grandmother and not
of a disease. All of which precautions the narrator
had translated as the futilities of coquetry. So, un­
like Miranda, he suffe� with her whom he had not
seen suffer, as though, for him as for Fran<;oise, whom
Giotto's charitable scullion in childbirth and the
violent translation of what is fit to live into what is fit
to eat leave indifferent, but who cannot restrain her
tears when informed that there has been an earth­
quake in China, pain could only be focussed at a
distance.
* *
*
The Albertine tragedy is prepared during the nar­
rator's first stay at Balbec, involved by their relations
in Paris, consolidated during his second stay at Bal-
30
 bee, and consummated by her imprisonment in Paris.
She appears to him for the first time, absorbed in the
radiance of the ' little band ' at Balbec, pushing a
bicycle, an item in that ineffable and inaccessible pro­
cession, winding and unwinding its gracious figures
against the sea, and seeming to the envious adoration
ofthe narrator as eternally and hermetically exclusive
as a frieze or a frescoed cortege. She has no indi­
viduality. She is merely one blossom in this fragile
hedge of Pennsylvanian roses breaking the line of the
waves, and this original collective mystery of the little
band enables him many years later, when Albertine
has been detached and made a captive, when the
nebulae of this constellation have been synthesised
into one single astral obsession, to deny, not merely
the objective reality (as was the case with Gilberte)
of his love for her, but also its subjective reality, by
co-ordinating her with another image. She looks at
him one day on the shore (the identification with
Albertine is retrospective}, and he writes : 'I knew
that I would not possess this young cyclist ifl did not
possess what was in her eyes.' His imagination
weaves its cocoon about this frail and almost abstract
chrysalis, this unit in an orgiac band of cycli�g
Bacchanti. He is introduced to her by the painter
Elstir, and proceeds to her acquaintance by a series
of subtractions, each fragment of his fantasy and de­
sire being replaced by an infinitely less precious
31
notion. Thus her relationship with Mme. Bontemp�
her early amiabilities, the effect of a declamator;
beauty-spot on her chin, her use of the adverb ' per•
fectly ' for ' quite,' the provisional inflammation of
her temple constituting an optical centre of gravity
about which the composition of her features is organ­
ised, are sufficient taken together to establish an
Albertine as remote from the first Albertine, the
beach flower, as yet a third aspect, characterised by a
pronounced nasal enunciation, a terrifying command
of slang, the disappearance of the inflamed temple,
and the miraculous transference of the beauty-spot
from her chin to her upper lip, is remote from the
second. Thus is established the pictorial multiplicity
of Albertine that will duly evolve into a plastic and
moral multiplicity, no longer a mere shifting super­
ficies and an effect of the observer's angle of approach
rather than the expression of an inward and active
variety, but a multiplicity in depth, a turmoil of
objective and immanent contradictions over which
the subject has no control. Yet already he concludes,
before the kaleidoscope of her expressions, before this
face that from being all surface, smooth and waxed,
passes to an almost fluid state of transludd gaiety,
and from the chiselled polish of an opal to the feverish
black-red congestion of a cyclamen, that the Name is
an example of a barbarous society's primitivism, and
as conventionally inadequate as ' Homer ' or ' sea.'
32
 His first vague gesture of approach is coldly repulsed.
He concludes that Albertine is virtuous and that his
original hypothesis-that she was possibly the mis­
tress of a racing cyclist or a champion boxer-was not
merely incorrect in its specific application but based
on an entirely false sense of her character. He con­
cludes that Albertine is virtuous, and his first stay at
. Balbec closes on that impression.
It is corrected by a visit from Albertine in Paris.
To a new vocabulary, garnished with such sophistica­
tions as ' distinguished,' ' to my mind,' ' mousme,'
' lapse of time; corresponds a new and sophisticated
Albertine, as lavish now of her favours as she was
formerly parsimonious. The narrator, while sup­
posing that Albertine has been the object of an initia­
tion, can establish no common measure between these
three main aspects of Albertine: the passionate un­
real Albertine of the shore, the real and virginal
Albertine such as she appeared to him at the end of
his stay at Balbec, and now this third Albertine that
fulfils the promise of the first in the reality of the
second. ' My surplus of knowledge ended in a pro­
visional agnosticism. What affirmation was possible
when the original hypothesis had first been refuted
and then confirmed ? ' And the pleasure he takes
with Albertine is intensified by the reaching out of
his spirit towards that immaterial reality tha; • she
seems to symbolise, Balbec and its sea-' as though

33
the material possession of an object, residence in a
town, were the equivalent of spiritual possession.'
This compound object of desire-a woman and the
sea-is simplified of its second element by the habit of
the :first. A secondary compound can be formed by
jealousy, and the amalgam of human and marine re­
stored, but as a cardiac and no longer as a visual
stimulus. But even this new Albertine is multiple,
and just as the most modern applications of photo­
graphy can frame a single church successively in the
arcades of all the others and the entire horizon in the
arch of a bridge or between two adjacent leaves, thus
decomposing the illusion of a solid object into its
manifold component aspects, so the short journey of
his lips to the cheek of Albertine creates ten Alber­
tines, and transforms a human banality into a many­
headed goddess. But the menace of what life with
her must be is announced to him more clearly when,
after his first visit to the Prlncesse de Guermantes, he
sits alone in his room waiting for Albertine (who,
momentarily eclipsed by the mysterious Mlle. de
Stermaria, has been absent from his mind all even­
ing), for Albertine who has promised to come and
who does not come and whose non-arrival exalts a
simple physical irritation into a flame of moral
anguish, so that he listens for her step or for the
sublime summons of the telephone, not with his ear
and mind, but with his heart. For in his anxiety he
34
 has added yet another crystal to this branch of Salz­
bourg, the crystal of a need, of that need that tortured
him at Combray and that only his mother could allay
with the host of her lips. But when she telephones to
explain, when he knows that she is on her way, then
he wonders how he could have seen in this vulgar
Albertine, similar, even inferior, to so many others,
a source of comfort and salvation that no miracle
could replace. 'One only loves that which is not
possessed, one only loves that in which one pursues
the inaccessible.'
The second visit to Balbec, inaugurated by the
retrospective loss and mourning of his grandmother,
completes the transformation of a creature of smface
into a creature of depth-unfathomable, accom­
plishes the solidification of a profile. From the mo­
ment that Dr. Cottard sees Albertine and her friend
Andree (one of the band) dancing together in the
Casino at Incarville, and pompously diagnoses a case
of sexual perversion, dates the' reciprocal torture ' of
their relations. From this point lies and counterlies,
pursuit and evasion, and on the part of the narrator a
love for Albertine whose intensity is related in direct
proportion to the success of her prevarications. Be­
cause Albertine is not only a liar as all those that
believe themselves loved are liars : she is a natural
liar. A succession of in.cidents consolidate the nar­
rator's doubt on the chapter of Albertine, that is to
35
say, exasperate his love for her. _She fails to keep an
appointment, she lies about an appointment with a
mythical friend of her aunt at lnfreville, she stares at
the reflection in a mirror of Mlle. Bloch and her
cousin, two practising Sapphists, and then denies
having seen them. Then, the narrator's jealousy and
sense of impotence being at their height, there follows
a lull, and he is calmed by the docility of an always
available Albertine. He becomes indifferent to this
new creature who opposes no further resistance. He
resolves to break with her, and announces his decision
to his mother. Returning one evening with Alber­
tine in the ' tacot ' from a party at La Raspeliere he
goes over in his mind the formulae of separation. He
happens to mention that he is interested in the music
of Vinteuil. Albertine, whose taste in music is as
primitive as her appreciation of painting and archi­
tecture is developed, hoping to create a favourable
impression, declares that she is perfectly familiar with
the music of Vinteuil, thanks to her intimacy with
Mlle. Vinteuil and her friend, the actress Lea. In a
paroxysm of jealousy the narrator is back again at
Montjouvain, the horrified spectator of these two
Lesbians flavouring their pleasure in a sadistic act of
desecration at the expense of M. Vinteuil himself,
who has been dead some time. 1 And this vision of
Montjouvain seems to come like Orestes to avenge
1 Du Cote de Chez Swann, i.

36
 the murder of Agamemnon. And he thinks of his
grandmother and of his cruelties towards her. Alber­
tine, so remote and detached from his heart a moment
before, is now not merely an obsession, but part of
himself, within him, and the movement she makes to
descend from the train threatens to tear open his
body. He forces her to accompany him to Balbec.
The strand and the waves exist no more, the summer
is dead. The sea is a veil that cannot hide the horror
of Montjouvain, the intolerable vision of sadistic
lubricity and a photograph defiled. He sees in
Albertine another Rachel and another Odette, and
the sterility and mockery of an affection dictated by
interest. He sees his life as a succession of joyless
dawns, poisoned by the tortures of memory and isola­
tion. The next morning he brings Albertine to Paris
and locks her up in his house.
His life in common with Albertine is volcanic, his
mind torn by a series of eruptions : Fury, Jealousy,
Envy, Curiosity, Suffering, Pride, Honour and Love.
The form of this last is pre-established by the arbi­
trary images of memory and imagination, an artificial
fiction to which, and for his suffering, he forces the
woman to conform. The person of Albertine counts
for nothing. She is not a motive, but a notion, as far
removed from reality as the portrait of Odette by
Elstir, which is the portrait not of the beloved but of
the love that has deformed her, is removed from the

37
 real Odette. So that his anxiety cannot be argued
from Albertine, but from a whole processus of suffer­
ings and emotions that have been associated with her
person and attached to it by habit. His life with
Albertine, containing not one single positive advan­
tage, is no more than an appeasement, the token of a
monopoly. And not always an appeasement, be­
cause the mystery of Albertine persists, the mystery
that he sensed in her eyes when they first met before
the sea at Balbec, the mystery that charmed him then
and that now, because it represents the fragility of his
domination, he longs to efface. This last phase of his
association with Albertine bears the trace of its incep­
tion, its inception in his jealousy and her deceitfulness.
• How have we the courage to wish to live, how can we
make a movement to preserve ourselves from death,
in a world where love is provoked by a lie and consists
solely in the need of having our sufferings appeased
by whatever being has made us suffer ? ' Surely in
the whole of literature there is no study of that desert
of loneliness and recrimination that men call love
posed and developed ·with such diabolical unscrupu­
lousness. After this, Adolphe is a petulant drib­
bling, the mock epic of salivary hypersecretion, Mme.
de Cambremer (whose name, as Oriane de Guer­
mantes observes to Swann, stops just in time) in tears.
Every word and gesture of Albertine are caught up
in the vortex of jealousy and suspicion, translated and
mistranslated, reapplied and misapplied. Every re­
membered incident is decomposed in the acid of his
mistrust. 'My imagination provided equations for
the unknown in this algebra of desire.' But Alber­
tine is a fugitive, and no expression of her value can
be complete unless preceded by some such symbol as
that which in physics denotes speed. A static Alber­
tine would soon be conquered, would soon be com­
pared to all the other possible conquests that her
possession excludes, and the infinite of what is not
and may be preferred to the nullity of what is. Love,
he insists, can only coexist with a state of dissatisfac­
tion, whether born of jealousy or its predecessor­
desire. It represents our demand for a whole. Its
inception and its continuance imply the consciousness
that something is lacking. 'One only loves that
which one does not possess entirely.' And until the
rupture takes place-(and indeed long after it has
taken place, even when the object is dead, thanks to
a retrospective jealousy, a 'jalousie de l'escalier ')­
warfare. Albertine mentions casually that she may
visit the Verdurins. Anagram: 'I may go and see
the Verdurins to-morrow. I don't know. I don't
particularly want to.' Translation : 'It is abso­
lutely certain that I will go and see the Verdurins to­
morrow. It is of the greatest possible importance.'
He remembers that Morel has promised to conduct
the Vinteuil Septuor for Mme. Verdurin, and con-
39
 eludes that Mlle. Vinteuil and her friend will be
among the guests, and that by some infernal stroke of
cunning Albertine has made an appointment with
them for the following evening. Thus these rare
moments of relief that enable him to form the de­
termination to break with Albertine and to put an
end to this double slavery that prevents him from
going to Venice, prevents him from working, sepa­
rates him from his friends, and at most and grudgingly
affords him the bitter satisfaction of knowing that no
rival shall enjoy what he himself cannot enjoy-these
rare periods of relative ease are cut short by the inter­
vention of a new motive of jealousy or by the trans­
formation, in the tireless crucible of his mind, of some
insignificant detail of their past into a poison for the
exasperation of his love or hate or jealousy {inter­
changeable terms) and the corrosion of his heart.
For example, when he is at last resolved on separa­
tion, she swears that her aunt has no friend living at
Infreville. There is no limit to her deceit and none
to his faculty of suffering. And in the midst of this
Tolomea he knows that this woman has no reality,
that ' our most exclusive love for a person is always
our love for something else,' that intrinsically she is
less than nothing, but that in her nothingness there is
active, mysterious and invisible, a current that forces
him to bow down and worship an obscure and im­
placable Goddess, and to make sacrifices of himself
40
 before her. And the Goddess who requires this
sacrifice and this humiliation, whose sole condition of
patronage is corruptibility, and into whose faith and
worship all mankind is born, is the Goddess ofTime.
No object prolonged in this temporal dimension toler­
ates possession, meaning by possession total posses­
sion, only to be achieved by the complete identifica­
tion of object and subject. The impenetrability of
the most vulgar and insignificant human creature is
not merely an illusion of the subject's jealousy (al­
though this impenetrability stands out more clearly
under the Rontgen rays of a jealousy so fiercely
hypertrophied as was that ofthe narrator, a jealousy
that is doubtless a form of his domination complex
and his infantilism, two tendencies highly developed
in Proust). All that is active, all that is enveloped in
time and space, is endowed with what might be de­
scribed as an abstract, ideal and absolute imper­
meability. So that we can understand the position of
Proust : ' We imagine that the object ofour desire is
a being that can be laid down before us, enclosed
within a body. Alas ! it is the extension of that
being to all the points of space and time that it has
occupied and will occupy. Ifwe do not possess con­
tact with such a place and with such an hour we do
not possess that being. But we cannot touch all these
points.' And again : ' A being scattered in space
and time is no longer a woman but a series of events
on which we can throw no light, a series of problems
that cannot be solved, a sea that, like Xerxes, we
thrash with rods in an absurd desire to punish it for
having engulfed our treasure.' And he defines love
as : ' Time and Space made perceptible to the heart.'
He persuades Albertine to go to a special performance
at the Trocadero instead of to the Verdurin recep­
tion. She consents. The Vinteuil 'menace having
been averted, he thinks of Albertine as an impor­
tunity. He is idly turning the leaves of the Figaro
when he is suddenly galvanised by the announcement
that Lea is acting at that very gala performance to
which he has sent Albertine. Gala ! In a frenzy he
sends Fran�oise to bring her back. She returns with­
out having been able to speak to Lea. His calm is
restored and again shattered by an allusion made by
Albertine to the Buttes-Chaumont. He suspects
Andree. He sees that there can be no peace and no
rest until Albertine has gone. He will forget her as
he forgot Gilberte Swann and the Duchesse de Guer­
mantes. (But Gilberte is to Albertine what the
Sonata is to the Septuor-an experiment.) And the
idea that his suffering will cease is more unbearable
than that suffering itself. ' The lion of my love
trembled before the python of forgetfulness.' Early
one morning, during a period of calm, he makes up
his mind. Albertine must leave him. He loves her
no longer. He will go to Venice and forget her. He
42
rings for Franc;oise to send out for a guide and a time­
table. He will go to Venice to his dream of Gothic
time on a vernal sea. Enter Fran�oise. ' Mlle.
Albertine left at nine o'clock and gave me this letter
for Monsieur.' And like Phedre, he recognises the
ever-wakeful Gods.
• . . . ces dieux qui dans mon flanc
Ont allume le feu fatal a tout mon sang,
Ces dieux qui se sont fait une gloire cruelle
De reduire le creur d 'une faible mortelle. •
Shortly afterwards Albertine is killed in Touraine.
Her death, her emancipation from Time, does not
calm his jealousy nor accelerate the extinction of an
obsession whose rack and wheel were the days and
the hours. They and their love were amphibious,
plunged in the past and the present. There is a
moral climate and a sentimental calendar, where the
instrument ofcommensuration is not solar but cardiac.
To forget Albertine he must-like a man struck down
by hemiplegia-forget the seasons, their seasons,
and, like a child, learn them anew. 'In order t6 be
consoled I would have to forget, not one, but in­
numerable Albertines.' And not only 'I,' but the
many 'I's. For any given Albertine there exists a
correlative narrator, and no anachronism can put
apart what Time has coupled. He must return and
re-enact the stations of a diminishing suffering. Thus
his astonishment that Albertine, so alive within him,
43
 can be dead-the fact of her life assailed by the
notion of her death-gives way to the less painful
astonishment that one who is dead can continue to
concern him-the fact of her death assailed by the
notion of her life. But the stations of this inverted
Calvary retain their original dynamism, their cres­
cendo, their tension towards a cross. At each halt he
suffers from the hallucination that what has been left
behind is still before him. • Such is the cruelty of
memory.' He describes three of these stages, arranged
in descending powers of brutality. The first, a soli­
tary walk in the Bois de Boulogne, when every female
figure is an Albertine, the astral synthesis of the
bright and riotous band at Balbec paling now and
breaking up, with an inverse symmetry, into its
nebulae ; the second, a conversation with Andree,
who reveals the full treachery and misery of her
friend's life; and finally in Venice, when a telegram
from Gilberte announcing her engagement to Robert
de Saint-Loup is signed •Albertine' through a mis­
reading of Gilberte's vulgar and pretentious ortho­
graphy. But this Albertine risen from the dead can­
not trouble her real sepulchre, the only inviolate
sepulchre, in the unkempt cemetery of the heart.
Albertine is the first and the last, the Bacchante of the
shore, as seen by the narrator in that pure act of
understanding-intuition, and the captive that has
recovered liberty and life, possessed of herself among
44
 the young laundresses, bathing in the Loire. This
. final confirmation of the original perspective is typical
of Prouses characterisation. Thus there is a sugges­
tion of congruence between the final Duchesse de
Guennantes, as she appears at the matinee of her
cousin, and the gently wanton descendant of Gene­
vieve de Brabant, exposed for the first time • to the
narrator's adoration in the church of St. Hilaire at
Combray, following mass in the chapel of Gilbert the
Bad, her eyes of periwinkle smiling and restless and
the colour of the sunlight filtering through his window
or of the girdle of Genevieve herself, and bathed in
the mystery of Merovingian time and the amaranth
and legendary radiance of her name. And Gilberte
herself emerges from her successive transformations,
from the Gilberte Swann of the Champs Elysees,
Mlle. de Forcheville after the death of Swann, Mme.
de Saint-Loup, and finally, by the death of Robert,
Duchesse de Guermantes, as first seen at Tansonville
through a trellis of red hawthorn, an impudent
nymph leaning on her spade, amidst the jasmim;'and
the copper wallflowers. And he sees his love for
Albertine as a testimony to his original clairvoyance
and an affirmation, in spite of the denegations of his
reason, of diat vision of her as a rapacious and elusive
• gull, hostile and remote against the sea. 'In the
midst of the most complete blindness, perspicacity
subsists in the form of tenderness and predilection.

45
 So that it is a mistake to speak of an evil choice in
love, since the very fact of there having been a choice
implies that it has been an evil one.' And as before,
wisdom consists in obliterating the faculty of suffering
rather than in a vain attempt to reduce the stimuli
that exasperate that faculty. ' Non che la speme, il
desiderio .. : 'One desires to be understood because
one desires to be loved, and one desires to be loved
because one loves. We are indifferent to the under­
standing of others, and their love is an importunity.'
But if love, for Proust, is a function of man's sad­
ness, friendship is a function of his cowardice ; and,
if neither can be realised because of the impene­
trability (isolation) ofall that is not 'cosa mentale,' at
least the failure to possess may have the nobility of
that which is tragic, whereas the attempt to com­
municate where no communication is possible is
merely a simian vulgarity, or horribly comic, like the
madness that holds a conversation with the furniture.
Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of
that irremediable solitude to which every human
being is condemned. Friendship implies an almost
piteous acceptance of face values. Friendship is a
social expedient, like upholstery or the distribution of
garbage buckets. It has no spiritual significance.
For the artist, who does not deal in surfaces, the re­
jection of friendship is not only reasonable, but a
necessity. Because the only possible spiritual de-
46
velopment is in the seg1e of depth. The artistic
tendency is not expansive, but a contraction. And
art is the apotheosis of solitude. There is no com­
munication because there are no vehicles of com­
munication. Even on the rare occasions when word
and gesture happen to be valid expressions of person­
ality, they lose their significance on their passage
through the cataract of the personality that is opposed
to them. Either we speak and act for ourselves-in
which case speech and action are distorted and
emptied of their meaning by an intelligence that is
not ours, or else we speak and act for others-in which
case we speak and act a lie. ' One lies all one's life
long,' writes Proust, • notably to those that love one,
and above all to that stranger whose contempt would
cause one most pain-onesel£' Yet surely the scorn
of half a dozen-or half a million-sincere imbeciles
for a man of genius ought to cure us of our absurd
puntiglio and our capacity for being affected by that
abridged libel that we call an insult.
Proust situates friendship somewhere between
fatigue and ennui. He does not agree with the
Nietzschean conception that friendship must be based
on intellectual sympathy, because he does not see
friendship as having the least intellectual significance.
'We agree with those whose ideas (non-Platonic) are
at the same degree of confusion as our own.' For
him the exercise of friendship is tantamount to a

47
 sacrifice of that only real and incommunicable essence
of oneself to the exigencies of a frightened habit whose
confidence requires to be restored by a dose of atten­
tion. It represents a false movement of the spirit­
from within to without, from the spiritual assimila­
tion of the immaterial as provided by the artist, as ex­
tracted by him from life, to the abject and indigestible

l
husks of direct contact with the material and con­
crete, with what we call the material and the con­
crete. Thus he visits Balbec and Venice, meets
Gilberte and the Duchesse de Guermantes and Alber­
tine, attracted not by what they are but impelled by
their arbitrary and ideal equivalents. The only fer­
tile research is excavatory, immersive, a contraction
of the spirit, a descent. The artist is active, but
negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircum­
ferential phenomena, drawn in to the core of the
eddy. He cannot practise friendship, because friend­
ship is the centrifugal force of self-fear, self-negation.
Saint-Loup must be considered as more general than
himself; as a product of the oldest French nobility,
and the beauty and ease of his tenderness for the
narrator-as when, for example, he accomplishes the
most delicate and graceful gymnastics in a Paris
restaurant so that his friend shall not be disturbed­
are appreciated, not as the manifestations of a special
and charming personality, but as the inevitable ad­
juncts of excessively good birth and breeding. ' Man,
writes Proust, ' is not a building that can receive
additions to its superficies, but a tree whose stem and
leafage are an expression of inward sap.' We are
alone. We cannot know and we cannot be known.
' Man is the creature that cannot come forth from
himself, who knows others only in himself, and who,
if he asserts the contrary, lies.'

Here, as always, Proust is completely detached

from all moral considerations. There is no right and
wrong in Proust nor in his world. (Except possibly
in those passages dealing with the war, when for a
space he ceases to be an artist and raises his voice with
the plebs, mob, rabble, canaille). Tragedy is not
concerned with human justice. Tragedy is the state­
ment of an expiation, but not the miserable expiation
of a cod.ified breach of a local arrangement, organised
by the knaves for the fools. The tragic figure repre­
sents the expiation of original sin, of the original and
eternal sin of him and all his• soci malorum,' the sin
of having been born.
• Pues el delito mayor
Del hombre es haber nacido.'
* *
*
Driving to the Guermantes Hotel he feels that every-
thing is lost, that his life is a succession of losses,

49
 devoid of reality because nothing survives, nothing of
his love for Gilberte, for the Duchesse de Guermantes,
for his grandmother, and now nothing of his love
for Albertine, nothing of Combray and Balbec and
Venice except the distorted images of voluntary
memory, a life all in length, a sequence of disloca­
tions and adjustments, where neither mystery nor
beauty is sacred, where all, except the adamantine
columns of his enduring boredom, has been consumed
in the torrential solvent of the years, a life so pro­
tracted in the past and so meaningless in the future,
so utterly bereft of any individual and permanent
necessity, that his death, now or to-1,llorrow or in a
year or in ten, would be a termination but not a con­
clusion. And he thinks how empty is Bergotte's
phrase : ' the joys of the spirit.' For art, which he
had so long believed the one ideal and inviolate ele­
ment in a corruptible world, seems now, whether
because of his incurable lack of talent or its own in­
herent artificiality, as unreal and sterile as the con­
structions of a demented imagination-' that insane
barrel-organ that always plays the wrong tune ' ; and
the materials of art-Beatrice and Faust and the
' azur du ciel immense et ronde ' and the seagirt
cities-all the absolute beauty of a magic world, as
vulgar and unworthy in their reality as Rachel and
Cottard, and pale and. weary and cruel and incon­
stant and joyless as Shelley's moon. So, after years
 of fruitless solitude, it is without enthusiasm that he
drags himself back to a society that has long since
ceased to interest him. And now, on the outskirts of
this futility, favoured by the very depression and
fatigue that had appeared to his disgust as the after­
math of a minute and sterile lucidity (favoured, be­
cause the pretensions of a discouraged memory are
for the moment reduced to the most immediate and
utilitarian presentification), he is to receive the oracle
that had invariably been denied to the most exalted
tension of his spirit, which his intelligence had failed
to extract from the sismic enigma of tree and flower
and gesture and art, and suffer a religious experience
in the only intelligible sense of that epithet, at once an
assumption and an annunciation, so that at last he
will understand the promise of Bergotte and the
achievement of Elstir and the message of Vinteuil
from his paradise and the dolorous and necessary
course of his own life and the infinite futility-for the
artist-of all that is not art.
This matinee is divided into two parts. The mys­
tical experience and meditation of the narrator in the
Cartesian hotcupboard of the Guermantes library,
and the implications of that experience applied to the
work ofart that takes shape in his mind in the course
of the reception itself. From the victory over Time
he passes to the victory of Time, from the negation of
Death to its affirmation. Thus, at the end as in the
body of his work, Proust respects the dual significance
of every condition and circumstance of life. The
most ideal tautology presupposes a relation and the
affirmation of equality involves only an approximate
identification, and by asserting unity denies unity.
Crossing the courtyard he stumbles on the cobbles.
His surroundings vanish, wattmen, stables, carriages,
guests, the entire reality of the place in its hour, his
anxiety and doubts as to the reality of life and art dis­
appear, he is stunned by waves of rapture, saturated
in that same felicity that had irrigated so sparingly
the desolation of his life. Drabness is obliterated in
an intolerable brightness. And suddenly Venice
emerges from the series of forgotten days, Venice
whose radiant essence he had never been able to ex­
press because it had been rejected by the imperious
wlgarity of a working-day memory, but which this
chance reduplication of a precarious equilibrium in
the Baptistry of San Marco has lifted from its Adriatic
shore and set down, a bright and vehement inter­
loper, in the courtyard of the Princesse de Guer­
mantes. But already the vision has faded and he is
free to resume his social functions. He is ushered
into the library, because ex-Mme. Verdurin, at once
the Norn and Victim of Harmonic Megrims, is en­
throned in the midst of her guests, passionately ab­
sorbing Rino-Gomenol in the interests of her mucous
membrane and suffering the most atrocious ecstasies
of Stravinskian neuralgia. While he is waiting alone
for the music to be over, the miracle of the courtyard
is renewed under four different forms. They have
already been referred to. A servant strikes a spoon
against a plate, he wipes his mouth with a heavily
starched napkin, the water cries Bke a siren in the
pipes, he takes down Frtmfois le Champi. from the
shelves. And just as the Piazza di San Marco burst
its way into the courtyard and there asserted its
luminous and fleeting domination, so now the library
is successively invaded by a forest, the high tide
breaking on the shore at Balbec, the vast dining-room
of the Grand Hotel flooded, like an aquarium, with
the sunset and the evening sea, and lastly Combray
,
and its ' ways and the deferential transmission of a
sour and distinguished prose, shaped and stated by
his mother's voice, muted and sweetened almost to a
lullaby, unwinding all night long its reassuring foil of
sound before a child's insomnia.
The most successful evocative experiment can only
project the echo of a past sensation, because, being an
act of intellection, it is conditioned by the prejudices
of the intelligence which abstracts from any given
sensation, as being illogical and insignificant, a dis­
cordant and frivolous intruder, whatever word or
gesture, sound or perfume, cannot be fitted into the
puzzle of a concept. But the essence of any new ex­
perience is contained precisely in this mysterious elc-
53
 ment that the vigilant will rejects as an anachronism.
It is the axis about which the sensation pivots, the
centre ofgravity ofits coherence. So that no amount
of voluntary manipulation can reconstitute in its in­
tegrity an impression that the will has-so to speak­
buckled into incoherence. But if, by accident, and
given favourable circumstances ( a relaxation of the
subject's habit of thought and a reduction of the
radius of his memory, a generally diminished tension
of consciousness following upon a phase of extreme
discouragement), if by some miracle of analogy the
central impression of a past sensation recurs as an
immediate stimulus which can be instinctively identi­
fied by the subject with the model of duplication
( whose integral purit, has been retained because it has been
forgotten), then the total past sensation, not its echo
nor its copy, but the sensation itself. annihilating
every spatial and temporal restriction, comes in a
rush to engulf the subject in all the beauty of its in­
fallible proportion. Thus the sound produced by a
spoon struck against a plate is subconsciously identi­
fied by the narrator with the sound of a hammer
struck by a mechanic against the wheel of a train
drawn up before a wood, a sound that his will had
rejected as extraneous to its immediate activity. But
a subconscious and disinterested act ofperception has
reduced the object-the wood-to its immaterial and
spiritually digestible equivalent, and the record of
54
 this pure act of cognition has not merely been associ­
ated with this sound of a hammer struck against a
wheel, but centralised about it. The mood, as usual,
has no importance. The point of departure of the
Proustian exposition is not the crystalline agglomera­
tion but its kernel-the crystallised. The most trivial
experience-he says in effect-is encrusted with ele­
ments that logically are not related to it and have
consequently been rejected by our intelligence : it is
imprisoned in a vase filled with a certain perfume and
a certain colour and raised to a certain temperature.
These vases are suspended along the height of our
years, and, not being accessible to our intelligent
memory, are in a sense immune, the purity of their
climatic content is guaranteed by forgetfulness, each
one is kept at its distance, at its date. So that when
the imprisoned microcosm is besieged in the manner
described, we are flooded by a new air and a new
perfume (new precisely because already experienced),
and we breathe the true air of Paradise, of the only
Paradise that is not the dream of a madman, the
Paradise that has been losL
The identification of immediate with past experi­
ence, the recurrence of past action or reaction in the
present, amounts to a participation between the ideal
and the real, imagination and direct apprehension,
symbol and substance. Such participation frees the
essential reality that is denied to the contemplative
55
 as to the active life. What is common to present and
past is more essential than either taken separately.
Reality, whether approached imaginatively or em­
pirically, remains a surface, hermetic. Imagination,
applied-a priori-to what is absent, is exercised in
vacuo and cannot tolerate the limits of the real. Nor
is any direct and purely experimental contact pos­
sible between subject and object, because they are
automatically separated by the subject's conscious­
ne.,s of perception, and the object loses its purity and
becomes a mere intellectual pretext or motive. But,
thanks to this reduplication, the experience is at once
imaginative and empirical, at once an evocation and
a direct perception, real without being merely actual,
ideal without being merely abstract, the ideal real,
the essential, the extratemporal. But if this mystical
experience communicates an extratemporal e.,sence,
it follows that the communicant is for the moment an
extratemporal being. Consequently the Proustian
solution consists, in so far as it has been examined, in
the negation of Time and Death, the negation of
Death because the negation of Time. Death is dead
because Time is dead. (At this point a brief im­
pertinence, which consists in considering Le Temps
Retrouve almost as inappropriate a description of the
Proustian solution as Crime and Punishment of a master­
piece that contains no allusiop to either crime or
punishment. Time is not recovered, it is obliterated.
56
 Time is recovered, and Death with it, when he
leaves the library and joins the guests, perched in
precarious decrepitude on the aspiring stilts of the
former and preserved from the latter by a miracle of
terrified equilibrium. If the title is a good title the
scene in the library is an anticlimax.) So now in the
exaltation of his brief eternity, having emerged from
the darkness of time and habit and passion and in­
telligence, he understands the necessity of art. For
in the brightness of art alone can be deciphered the
baffled ecstasy that he had known before the in­
scrutable superficies of a cloud, a triangle, a spire, a
flower, a pebble, when the mystery, the essence, the
Idea, imprisoned in matter, had solicited the bounty
of a subject passing by within the shell ofhis impurity,
and tendered, like Dante his song to the ' ingegni
storti e loschi/ at least an incorruptible beauty :
• Ponete mente almm oom'io son bella.'

And he understands the meaning of Baudelaire's

definition of reality_as ' the adequate union of subject
and object/ and more clearly than ever the grotesque
fallacy of a realistic art-' that miserable statement
of line and surface,' and the penny-a-line vulgarity of
a literature of notations.
He leaves the library and is confronted by the
spectacle of Time made fiesh. And whereas a mo­
ment ago the bright cymbals of two distant hours,
57
paralysed at arm's length by the rigid spread of inter­
vening years, had obeyed an irresistible impulse of
mutual attraction, and clashed, like storm clouds, in
a flash and a brazen peal, now the measure of their
span from tip to tip is written on the face and frailty
of the dying, curved, like Dante's proud, under the
load of their years-' unwieldy, slow, heavy and pale
as lead/
'equal pin pazienza avea negli atti
piangendo parea dicer :-Piu non posso.'
We say farewell to M. de Charlus, the Baron Pala­
mede de Charlus, Duke of Brabant, Squire of Mon­
targis, Prince of Oleron, Carency, Viareggio and the
Dunes, the unspeakably insolent Charlus, now a
humble and convulsive Lear, crowned by the silver
torrent of his hair, Oedipus, senile and annulled,
stooped over a missal or scraping and bowing before
the astonishment of Mme. de Sainte-Euverte, scorned
in the full strength of his terrible pride as the Duchesse
de Gaea or the Princesse de Pipi, the Archangel
Raphael in his latter days, still furtively pursuing all
the sons of Toby, escorted by the faithful Jupien,
Lord of the Temple of Shamelessness. And the dirge
of his sepulchral whisper falls like clay from the spade
of a gravedigger. 'Hannibal de Breaute-dead !
Antoine de Mouchy-dead ! Charles Swann-dead !
Adalbert de Montmorency-dead ! Baron de Tall ey­
rand-dead ! Sosthene de Doudeauville-dead ! '
58
The narrator accomplishes a series of identifications,
of voluntary and arduous identifications-balancing
those of the library, involuntary and spontaneous.
From one sniggering and abject puppet, something
between a beggarly hawker and a moribund buffoon,
he elicits his enemy, M. d'Argencourt, as he knew
him, starched and haughty and impeccable : from a
stout dowager, whom he takes at first for Mme. de
Forcheville, Gilberte herself. So they drift past,
Oriane and the Due de Guermantes, Rachel and
Bloch, Legrandin and Odette, and many others,
carrying the burden of Saturn towards the light that
will rise, towards Uranus, the Sabbath star.
* *
*
In Time creative and destructive Proust discovers
himself as an artist : ' I understood the meaning of
death, of love and vocation, of the joys of th� spirit
and the utility of pain.' Allusion has been made to
his contempt for the literature that ' describes,' for
the realists and naturalists worshipping the offal of
experience, prostrate before the epidermis and the
swift epilepsy , and content to transcribe the surface,
the fa�ade, behind which the Idea is prisoner,
Whereas the Proustian procedure is that of Apollo
flaying Marsyas and capturing without sentiment the
essence, the Phrygian waters. ' Chi non ha la forza
59
 di uccidere la realta non ha la forza di crearla.' But
Proust is too much of an affectivist to be satisfied by
the intellectual symbolism of a Baudelaire, abstract
and discursive. TheBaudelarian unity is a unity 'post
rem,' a unity abstracted from plurality. His 'corre­
spondence ' is determined by a concept, therefore

I
strictly limited and exhausted by its own definition.
Proust does not deal in concepts, he pursues the Idea,
the concrete. He admires the frescoes of the Paduan
Arena because their symbolism is handled as a reality,
special, literal and concrete, and is not merely the
pictorial transmission of a notion. Dante, if he can
ever be said to have failed, fails with his purely
allegorical figures, Lucifer, the Griffin of the Purga­
tory and the Eagle of the Paradise, whose significance
is purely conventional and extrinsic. Here allegory
fails as it must always fail in the hands of a poet.
Spenser's allegory collapses after a few cantos. Dante,
because he was an artist and not a minor prophet,
could not prevent his allegory from becoming heated
and electrified into anagogy. The Vision of MirQJ is
good allegory because it is flat writing. For Proust
the object may be a living symbol, but a symbol of
itself. The symbolism of Baudelaire has become the
autovm,holism of Proust. Proust's point of departure
might be situated in Symbolism, or on its outskirts.
But he does not proceed pari passu with France, to­
wards an elegant scepticism and the marmorean
60
 modes, nor, as we have seen, with Daudet and the
Goncourts to the ' notes d'apre.s nature," nor, of
course, with the Pamassians to the ineffable gutter­
snippets of Fran�ois Coppee. He solicits no facts,
and he chisels no Cellinesque pommels. He reacts, IJll"I >
but in a different direction. He recedes from the i,JJ- 1t •
Szmboli$-back towards Hugo. And for that reason
he is a solitary and independent figure. The only
contemporary in whom I can discern something of
the same retrogressive tendency is Joris Karl Huys-
mans. But he loathed it in himself and repressed it.
He speaks bitterly of the ' ineluctable gangrene of
Romanticism,' and yet his des Esseintes is a fabulous
creature, an Alfred Lord Baudelaire.
We are frequently reminded of this romantic strain
in Proust. He is romantic in his substitution of affec­
tivity for intelligence, in his opposition of the par­
ticular affective evidential state to all the subtleties of
rational cross-reference, in his rejection of the Con­
cept in favour of the Idea, in his scepticism before
causality. Thus his purely logical-as opposed to his
intuitive-explanations of a certain effect invariably
bristle with alternatives. 1 He is a Romantic in his
anxiety to accomplish his mission, to be a good and
faithful servant. He does not seek to evade the im-
1
Cp. for this anti-intellectual tendency: Swann, i. 286,
ii. 29 and 234; Gumnantes, i. 162 {Saint-Loup's gesture e:x:
nihilo); ..4.lhertin, Disparra, i, 14 and passim.
6I
 plications of his art such as it has been revealed to
him. He will write as he has lived-in Time. The
classical artist assumes omniscience and omnipotence.
He raises himself artificially out of Time in order to
give relief to his chronology and causality to his de­
velopment. Proust's chronology is extremely diffi­
cult to follow, the succession of events spasmodic, and
his characters and themes, although they seem to
obey an almost insane inward necessity, are presented
and developed with a fine Dostoievskian contempt for
the vulgarity of a plausible concatenation. (Proust's
impressionism will bring us back to Dostoievski.)
Generally speaking, the romantic artist is very much
concerned with Time and aware of the importance of
memory in inspiration,
(' c'est toi qui dors clans l'ombre,
6 sacre souvenir ! ... )
but is inclined to sensationalise what is treated by
Proust with pathological power and sobriety. With
Musset, for example, the interest is more in a vague
extratemporal identification, without any real co­
hesion or simultaneity, between the me and not-me
than in the functional evocations of a specialised
memory. But the analogy is too blurred and would
lead nowhere, although Proust quotes Chateaubriand
and Amie! as his spiritual ancestors. It is difficult to
connect Proust with this pair of melancholy Pan­
theists dancing a fandango of death in the twilight.
62
 But Proust admired the poetry of the Comtesse de
Noailles. Saperlipopette !
The narrator had ascribed his ' lack of talent • to a
lack of observation, or rather to what he supposed
was a non-artistic habit of observation. He was in­
capable of recording surface. So that when he reads
such brilliant crowded reporting as the Goncourts'
Journal, the only alternative to the conclusion that he
is entirely wanting in the precious journalistic talent
is the supposition that between the banality of life and
the magic of literature there is a great gulf fixed.
• Either he is devoid of talent or art of reality. And he
describes the radiographical quality of his observa­
tion. The copiable he does not see. He searches for
a relation, a common factor, substrata. Thus he is
less interested in what is said than in the way in
which it is said. Similarly his faculties are more vio­
lently activated by intermediate than by terminal­
capital-stimuli. We find countless examples of these
secondary reflexes. Withdrawn in his cool dark room
at Combray he extracts the total essence of a iicorch­
ing midday from the scarlet stellar blows of a hammer
in the street and the chamber-music of files in the
gloom. Lying in bed at dawn, the exact quality of
the weather, temperature and visibility, is trans­
mitted to him in terms of sound, in the chimes and
the calls of the hawkers. Thus can be explained the
primacy of instinctive perception-intuition-in the
Proustian world. Because instinct, when not vitiated
by Habit, is also a reflex, from the Proustian point of
view ideallyremote and indirect, a chain-reflex. Now
he sees his regretted failure to observe artistically as
a series of 'inspired omissions ' and the work of art
as neither created nor chosen, but discovered, un­
covered, excavated, pre-existing within the artist, a
l aw of his nature. The only reality is provided by the
hieroglyphics traced by inspired perception (identifi­
cation of subject and object). The conclusions of the
intelligence are merely of arbitrary value, potentially
valid. 'An impression is for the writer what an ex­
periment is for the scientist-with this difference, that
in the case of the scientist the action of the intelli­
gence precedes the event and in the case of the
writer follows it.' Consequently for the artist, the
only possible hierarchy in the world of objective
phenomena is represented by a table of their respec�
tive coefficients of penetration, that is to say, in terms
of the subject. (Another sneer at the realists.) The
artist has acquired his text : the artisan translates it.
'The duty and the task of a writer (not an artist, a
writer) are those of a translator.' The reality of a
cloud reflected in the Vivonne is not expressed by
' Zut alors ' but by the interpretation of that inspired
criticism. The verbal oblique must be restored to
the upright: thus 'you are charming' equals 'it
gives me pleasure to embrace you.'
 Proust's relativism and impressionism are adjunc�
of this same anti-intellectual attitude. Curtius speaks
of Proust's' perspectivism ' and• positive relativism•
as opposed to the negative relativism of the late
nineteenth century, the scepticism of Renan and
France. I think the phrase ' positive relativism ' is
an oxymoron, I am almost sure that it does not apply
to Proust, and I know that it came out of the Heidel­
berg laboratory. We have seen how in the case of
Albertine (and Proust extends his experience to all
human relations) the multiple aspects (read Blick­
punkt for this. miserable word) did not bind into any
positive synthesis. The object evoh,:es, and by the
time the conclusion-if any-is reached, it is already
out of dat.e. In a sense Proust is a positivist, but his
positivism has nothing to do with his relativism,
which is as pessimistic and as negative as that of
France, and employed as an element of comedy. The
'book,' for Proust a literary statement, is for the
housekeeper a book of accounts and for Her Highn�
the visitors' register. Rachel Quand du Seigneur
represents for the narrator thirty francs and a· bored
satisfaction, for Saint-Loup a fortune and unending
misery. Similarly when Saint-Loup sees Albertine's
photograph he cannot conceal his astonishment that
such a vulgar nonentity should have attracted his
brilliant and popular friend. The Comte de Crecy
carves a turkey and establishes a calendar as surely
65
as the death of Christ or the departure out of Egypt.
For the Baron Musset's ' infidele ' must be a buttons
or a bus-conductor. This relativism is negative and
comic. He owes his exaltation on hearing Vinteuil's
music to the actress Lea, who alone could decipher
the composer's posthumous manuscripts, and to the
relations of Charlus with Charlie Morel, the violinist.
Proust is positive only in so far as he affirms the value
of intuition.
By his impressionism I mean his non-logical state­
ment of phenomena in the order and exactitude of
their perception, before they have been distorted into
intelligibility in order to be forced into a chain of
cause and e:ffect.1 The painter Elstir is the type of
the impressionist, stating what he sees and not what
he knows he ought to see : for example, applying
urban terms to the sea and marine terms to the town,
so as to transmit his intuition of their homogeneity.
And we are reminded of Schopenhauer's definition of
the artistic procedure as ' the contemplation of the
world independently of the principle of reason/ In
this connection Proust can be related to Dostoievski,
who states his characters without explaining them.
It may be objected that Proust does little else but

1 Examples : a napkin in the dust taken for a pencil of

light, the sound of water in the pipes for a dog barking or

the hooting of a siren, the noise of a spring-door dosing for
the orchestration of the Pilgrims' Chorus.
66
 explain his characters. But his explanations are
experimental and not demonstrative. He explains
them in order that they may appear as they are-in­
explicable. He explains them away. 1.
Prouses style was generally resented in French
literary circles. But now that he is no longer read,
it is generously conceded that he might have written
an even worse prose than he did. At the same time,
it is difficult to estimate with justice a style of which
one can only take cognisance by a process of deduc­
tion, in an edition that cannot be said to have trans­
mitted the writings of Proust, but to have betrayed a
tendency in that direction. For Proust, as for the
painter, style is more a question of vision than of
technique. Proust does not share the superstition
that form is nothing and content everything, nor that
the ideal literary masterpiece could only be communi­
cated in a seri�s of absolute and monosyllabic prow
positions. For Proust the quality oflanguage is more
important than any system of ethics or aesthetics.
Indeed he makes no attempt to dissociate forpt from
content. The one is a concretion of the other, the
revelation of a world. The Proustian world is ex­
pressed metaphorically by the artisan because it is
apprehended metaphorically by the artist : the in­
direct and comparative expression of indirect and
1 Cp. analogy between Dostoievski and Mme. de Sevigne :
A l'Ombr, du J,U114s Fillu m Fkurs, ii. 75.

67
 -
comparative perception. The rhetorical equivalent
of the Proustian real is the chain-figure of the meta­
phor. It is a tiring style, but it does not tire the
mind. The clarity of the phrase is cumulative and
explosive. One's fatigue is a fatigue of the heart, a
blood fatigue. One is exhausted and angry after an
hour, submerged, dominated by the crest and break
of metaphor after metaphor : but never stupefied.
The complaint that it is an involved style, full of
periphrasis, obscure and impossible to follow, has no
foundation whatsoever.
It is significant that the majority of his images are
botanical. He assimilates the human to the vegetal.
He is conscious of humanity as :flora, never as fauna.
(There are no black cats and faithful hounds in
Proust.) He deplores ' the time one wastes in uphol­
stering one's life with a human and parasitic vegeta­
tion.' The wife and son of the Sidaner amateur
appear to him on the shore at Balbec as two flowering
ranunculi. Albertine's laugh has the colour and
smell of a geranium. Gilberte and Odette are lilacs,
white and violet. He speaks of a scene in Pel/las et
Melisande that exasperates his rose-fever and makes
him sneeze. This preoccupation accompanies very
naturally his complete indifference to moral values
and human justices. 1 Flower and plant have no
conscious will. They are shameless, exposing their
1
Cp. La Prisonniere, ii. 119.
68
 genitals. And so in a sense are Proust's men and
women, whose will is blind and hard, but never self­
conscious, never abolished in the pure perception of
a pure subject. They are victims of their volition,
active with a grotesque predetermined activity,within
the narrow limits of an impure world. But shame­
less. There is no question of right and wrong.
Homosexuality is never called a vice : it is as devoid
of moral implications as the mode of fecundation of
the Primula veris or the Lythrum salicoria. And, like
members of the vegetable world, th�y seem to solicit
a pure subject, so that they may pass from a state of
blind will to a state of representation. Proust is that
pure subject. He is almost exempt from the im­
purity of will.1 He deplores his lack of will until he
understands that will, being utilitarian, a servant of
intelligence and habit, is not a condition of the
artistic experience. When the subject is exempt from
will the object is exempt from causality (Time and
Space taken together). And this human vegetation
is purified in the transcendental aperception �at can
capture the Model, the Idea, the Thing in itself.
So tllat there is no collapse of the will in Proust, as
there is for example in Spenser and Keats and
Giorgione. He sits up all night in Paris, with a
1 Cp. Swann, i. 22, 24, 59 and passim; Guermantes, i. 63;
SotloTIUI et Gomm-he, ii. 2, 188; Albertine DispartJJJ, ii. 149
(Paralysed by• 0 Sole Mfo • in Venice).

69
 branch ofapple-blossom laid beside his lamp, staring
at the foam ofthe white corollae until the dawn comes
to redden them. But this is not the terrible panic­
stricken stasis of Keats, crouched in a mossy thicket,
annulled, like a bee, in sweetness, ' drowsed with the
fume of poppies ' and watching ' the last oozings,
hours by hours ' ; nor yet the remote, still, almost
breathless passion of a Giorgione youth, the spirit
shattered in corruption, damp and rotting, so finely
suggested by d'Annunzio in his description of the
Concerto (' ma se io penso alle sue mani nascoste, le
immagino nell'atto di frangere le foglie del lauro per
profumarsene le dita ') and so grossly misinterpreted
by the same writer when he sees in the rapt doomed
figure of the Tempesta a vulgar Leander resting
between orgasms ; nor yet the horrible pomegranates
of' Il Fuoco,' bursting and bleeding, dripping the red
ooze of their seed, putrid on the putrid water. The
Proustian stasis is contemplative, a pure act ofunder­
standing, will-less, the ' amabilis insania ' and the
' holder Wahnsinn.'
A book could be written on the significance of
music in the work ofProust, in particular ofthe music
ofVinteuil : the Sonata and the Septuor. The influ­
ence of Schopenhauer on this aspect of the Proustian
demonstration is unquestionable. Schopenhauer re­
jects the Leibnitzian view of music as ' occult arith­
metic,' and in his aesthetics separates it from the
70
other arts, which can only produce the Idea with its
concomitant phenomena, whereas music is the Idea
itself, unaware of the world of phenomena, existing
ideally outside the universe, apprehended not in
Space but in Time only, and consequently untouched
by the teleological hypothesis. This essential quality
of music is distorted by the listener who, being an
impure subject, insists on giving a figure to that which
is ideal and invisible, on incarnating the Idea in what
he conceives to be an appropriate paradigm. Thus,
by definition, opera is a hideous corruption of this
most immaterial of all the arts : the words of a
libretto are to the musical phrase that they particu­
larise what the Vendome Column, for example, is to
the ideal perpendicular. From this point of view
opera is less complete than vaudeville, which at least
inaugurates the comedy of an exhaustive enumera­
tion. These considerations explain the beautiful con­
vention of the ' da capo ' as a testimony to the
intimate and ineffable nature of an art that is per­
fectly intelligible and perfectly inexplicable. Music
is the catalytic element in the work of Proust. It
asserts to his unbelief the permanence of personality
and the reality of art. It synthesises the moments of
privilege and runs parallel to them. In one passage
h e describes the recurrent mystical experience as ' a
purely musical impression, non-extensive, entirely
original, irreducible to any other order of impres-
sion, ... sine materia.' The narrator-unlike Swann
who identifies the ' little phrase ' of the Sonata with
Odette, spatialises what is extraspatial, establishes it
as the national anthem of his love-sees in the red
phrase of the Septuor, trumpeting its victory in the
last movement like a Mantegna archangel clothed in
scarlet, the ideal and immaterial statement of the
essence of a unique beauty, a unique world, the in­
variable world and beauty of Vinteuil, expressed
timidly, as a prayer, in the Sonata, imploringly, as
an aspiration, in the Septuor, the 'invisible reality'
that damns the life of'the body on earth as a pensum
and reveals the meaning of the word : 'defunctus.'