Cultural Interactions: Studies in the Relationship between the Arts 5

Proust’s Imaginary Museum

Reproductions and Reproduction in "À la recherche du temps perdu"

Bearbeitet von Gabrielle Townsend

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Introduction

This study examines Marcel Proust’s creative process through an investigation of an aspect of À la recherche du temps perdu that has been largely overlooked: the importance of secondary visual sources. I look at the use of reproductions – photographs or engravings of people, places and works of art – both by Proust himself for reference, and as narrative devices in their own right in the novel, and argue their fundamental importance as keys to the complex, layered structure, the palimpsest, that is À la recherche du temps perdu. I adduce factual information, readily available from biographical sources and Proust’s correspondence, but not previously collated, in order to support this proposal and combine it with an examination of the text in order to produce a differently angled reading. À la recherche du temps perdu is difficult to conceive of as a unified entity, partly because of its puzzling chronology, and the simultaneity, or apparent conflation, of past and present, and partly because of the sense of impermanence generated by a narrative that is constantly being revisited and reworked. Where and when is the Narrator’s Now – the moment and site of writing – and how does this slippery moment relate to the sometimes equally slippery place or time in the past that he is describing or reliving? In fact, on closer acquaintance, a narrative that at first reading may seem meandering and arbitrary gradually reveals itself as tightly controlled: small, apparently unimportant details in one volume swell to assume great significance in another, clues are planted that the reader must keep in mind, as in a detective story, and leitmotifs (a word Proust himself used) recur throughout the work to draw themes together. Through the careful use of such devices Proust gives a solid framework – what he calls ‘charpente romanesque’ – to his novel (Corr., XV, 56). Getting to the heart of it, however, is less a matter of following a straight path forward than delving down through layers. The search for linearity and direct causality is a red herring; the novel typically unfolds by means

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of a shift of perspective. The Narrator is now near, now far, from the objects of his observation, both in time and space. As I will show, it is remarkable how often reproduced images – the Giotto frescoes in the young Narrator’s schoolroom, the picture of a Botticelli figure that Swann identifies with Odette, and Saint-Loup’s photograph of the Narrator’s grandmother, for example – are the leitmotifs that hold the key to the development of plot, character or theme. At a deeper level, the innate quality of reproductions reflects closely the shifts of perspective created by Proust’s vision, now close up, now distant.1 The basic function of reproductions is, after all, to bring the distant near, make the large small – or a detail large – and make a moving image still. Not merely second-hand sources of inspiration but images that by their very nature condition Proust’s vision and expression, reproductions permeate every aspect of the novel. Their physical and ontological characteristics afford Proust his most telling means of capturing and analysing the transience of time, knowledge and desire. I have limited my study almost wholly to visual sources, although, as will be seen and as I will mention where relevant, Proust often used written descriptions to supplement the illustrations he used for reference. Proust’s literary citations, allusions and borrowings are a vast subject in their own right, too large to be included here; they have, in any case, already been studied in some detail.2 More importantly, in my view, to concentrate on pictorial sources is to foreground the primacy of the visual in Proust, an aspect that deserves to be given at least as much prominence as the cerebral and psychological 1

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The Narrator rejects the view of critics who judged his preliminary jottings as written with the aid of a microscope, when in fact he had used a telescope ‘pour apercevoir des choses, très petites en effet, mais parce qu’elle étaient situées à une grande distance […]’ (RTP IV, 618). But his vision can be ‘microscopic’ as well, as I shall discuss. See for example Annick Bouillaguet, Marcel Proust: Le Jeu intertextuel (Paris: Éditions du Titre, 1990); Jacques Nathan, Citations, références et allusions de Marcel Proust: Nouvelle édition corrigée et augmentée (Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1969); Michael R. Finn, Proust, the Body and Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). The extensive notes of the four-volume Pléiade edition also give detailed information about Proust’s sources.

dimensions of this work. Victor E. Graham has calculated that sixtytwo per cent of Proust’s images are visual (compared with nineteen per cent mental, nine kinaesthetic, five auditory and synaesthetic and less than one per cent gustatory and olfactory).3 Images to do with memory in particular are predominantly visual, and Graham quotes Proust’s own recognition of this in a remark from ‘Sentiments filiaux d’un parricide’ [‘The filial sentiments of a parricide’]: ‘Nos yeux ont plus de part qu’on ne croit dans cette exploration active du passé qu’on nomme le souvenir’ (CSB, 152) [‘Our eyes play a greater part than one would think in the active exploration of the past that we call memory’]. There are several other examples: Graham identifies six instances of memories being likened to works of art, and six where they are expressed in terms of photographs.4 In ‘Sentiments filiaux’, Proust writes of ‘ces étranges instantanés de la mémoire que notre cerveau, si petit et si vaste, emmagasine en nombre prodigieux’ [‘the strange snapshots of memory that our brain, so small and yet so vast, stores in prodigious number’]. To remember Henri van Blarenberghe, the subject of the piece, he scans his mental stock of images for ‘l’instantané qui me semble le plus net’ (CSB, 151) [‘the snapshot that looks clearest’], only to have to ‘retouch’ it – another photographic term – in the light of new knowledge. Graham also shows that the invention most frequently referred to by Proust is the camera, and gives many examples of photographic imagery.5 In spite of such evidence, although there is a vast number of studies of Proust and art6

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Victor E. Graham, The Imagery of Proust (Oxford, Blackwell, 1966), p. 8. Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., p. 151. I have not attempted to search for a complete bibliography of works devoted to Proust and art, but Marcel Proust: A Reference Guide 1950–1970 by Janet C. Stock (Boston MA: G. K. Hall, 1991) lists twelve references for those years alone, while Jean-Yves Tadié in Proust, le dossier (Paris: Pocket/Belfond, 1998) gives eight. However, there are very many more if articles are included: the catalogue of an exhibition entitled Proust et les peintres (Chartres: Musée de Chartres, 1991) lists 178 related publications and Le Musée retrouvé de Marcel Proust by Yann le Pichon (Paris: Stock, 1990) gives 173 (if I have counted the lengthy list of titles accurately).

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there has been little consideration given to reproduced images7 and photography.8 One of the most observant commentators is not a literary critic but the photographer Brassaï, whose short book offers some original insights into the role photography plays in Proust’s life and work.9 However, Roland Barthes’s moving study of photography, La Chambre Claire [Camera Lucida], which is both an examination of the ontology of the photograph and a memorial to his late mother, often cites Proust, whose presence can be felt behind the words, as in so much of Barthes’s work.10 In Chapter 3 I consider Barthes’s notion of the punctum in relation to involuntary memory. I also draw on Walter Benjamin’s well-known and influential essays on photography, mechanical reproduction and Proust.11 The only other major critical work to link Proust and photography is Mieke Bal’s The Mottled Screen, which I also discuss in Chapter 3.12 Though I argue, with these writers, for the importance of examining photography in À la recherche, I am concerned with the 7

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Exceptions are Pierre Jacquillard, paper given at the conference ‘Proust et la peinture’, 10 May and 31 August 1958, reprinted in BAMP 9, 1959, pp 126– 133, and Jacques Nathan, Citations, références et allusions de Marcel Proust, op. cit. Jean Autret examines Proust’s borrowings from both text and illustrations in the work of Ruskin and Émile Mâle in L’influence de Ruskin sur la vie, les idées et l’œuvre de Marcel Proust (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1955) and ‘La dette de Marcel Proust envers Emile Mâle’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, January 1958, pp 49–59. There are two relatively minor studies: Stephen C. Infantino, Photographic Vision in Proust (New York: Peter Lang, 1992) and Jean-François Chévrier, Écrit sur l’image: Proust et la photographie (Paris: Editions de l’Étoile, 1982). Brassaï, Marcel Proust sous l’emprise de la photographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., (Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), pp 507–30; ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, ‘The Image of Proust’ and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Fontana, 1973), pp 152– 96; pp 197–210; pp 211–44. Mieke Bal, The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually, trans. Anna-Louise Milne (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1997).

implications of reproduced images of all types. Apart from the selective studies cited above I have not discovered any references to this subject, or any recognition of its significance, except in the catalogue to the exhibition Marcel Proust: l’écriture et les arts held in the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1999. This contains, among several excellent essays, two that propose the subject of reproductions as a worthy field of investigation for Proustian research: Jérôme Picon’s article ‘“Un degré d’art de plus”’ [‘“An extra degree of art”’] and ‘“Impressions et réimpressions”: Proust et l’image multiple’ [‘Impressions and reimpressions: Proust and the multiple image’] by Valérie Sueur.13 Both are invaluable sources of information that I refer to often and gratefully. *** Proust is best known, even (or particularly) among those who have not read him, for two things: the madeleine and the cork-lined room. The latter enshrines the image of the reclusive writer, cut off from the sights, sounds and smells of the real world; the former is an elixir for retrieving otherwise inaccessible memories. Somehow the two have come to be linked: it appears that Proust, in his self-imposed imprisonment, required a dose of madeleine dipped in a tisane to start him writing, almost in the way that other writers have used hallucinogenic drugs. Then the memories thus released only have to be written down, like an excessively long dictée, in order be turned into À la recherche du temps perdu. Of course, Proust does, in Le Temps retrouvé, write about the ‘livre intérieur’ he has to decipher and that has been dictated by reality, but he makes it clear that that this endeavour will be ‘un acte de création’, an active not a passive process (RTP IV, 458). Apart from deprecating the identification of Proust with his fictional hero, we may easily dismiss such a view as a grotesque oversimplification and distortion of Proust’s creative process. That this 13

Jérôme Picon, ‘“Un degré d’art de plus”’; Valérie Sueur ‘“Impressions et réimpressions”: Proust et l’image multiple’, in Marcel Proust: l’écriture et les arts (Paris: Gallimard/BNF/RMN, 1999), pp 81–7; pp 89–101.

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process is complex and sometimes self-contradictory is undeniable, and a major part of my study will be to investigate it. But does the clichéd view not have a germ of truth? What is the madeleine if not a mediating device? It provokes an instance of involuntary memory that in turn allows the creation (rather than transcription) of Proust’s fictional (rather than autobiographical) universe to begin. It is my contention that Proust’s writing of fiction did require the use of mediating devices for the retrieval and interpretation of reality and that among these, reproductions are crucially significant. It is well documented that Proust had a large collections of photographs, illustrated books and magazines and that he made constant use of them as he worked. I shall give a factual outline of the sources he used in my first chapter. But if we return to the stereotype: the spectacle of the haggard, dishevelled invalid writing all night and sleeping – if at all – by day, emerging only rarely, zombie-like, at midnight to haunt and cross-examine his friends and informants in the outside world, it will seem only too obvious that such a writer must inevitably have been reliant on a collection of references, of aides-mémoire, to help him recall the world he no longer inhabited. However, my purpose is not merely to show that Proust used a large number of reproductions, sometimes in preference to experiencing a real picture or object or place when such were available; I want rather to investigate why this tendency seems significant, not in order to propose a psychological theory, but rather to discover what it reveals about Proust’s creative process. As John Livingstone Lowes wrote in his investigation of Coleridge’s imagination, ‘This study […] is concerned with […] “sources” only in so far as they give us the crude substance which has undergone imaginative transformation […]. And if at the moment we are assiduously accumulating raw materials, it is in order to have a clearer understanding of the ways in which, through the operations of the shaping spirit, they are transformed into elements of beauty.’14 My first, most basic task is to question the nature of reproductions and photographs, in their difference from the originals, and to ask if and why they are particularly important to Proust’s work. I start 14

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John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (London: Pan Books, 1978 [1927]), pp 44–5.

from the premise that a reproduction of a work of art or a photograph is a sign. They are signs in that they represent a work of art or a person or place that is absent and so are devices that link the viewer to the subject through time and space. In the case of a work of art, the reproduction allows it a presence and permanence independent of its spatio-temporal existence. The original is recreated in a virtual museum (in André Malraux’s phrase that my title echoes) where it can be viewed far away from its actual physical location. The reproduction can also preserve works of art or buildings that time will destroy: as Malraux wrote ‘Le musée imaginaire apporte […] du moins une énigmatique délivrance du temps’ [‘The imaginary museum allows at the least an enigmatic deliverance from time’].15 (Baudelaire, who otherwise deplored the pernicious – in his view – influence of photography on art, conceded the usefulness of photographs as a means of preserving vulnerable artefacts: ‘Qu’elle sauve de l’oubli les ruines pendantes, les livres, les estampes et les manuscrits que le temps dévore, les choses précieuses dont la forme va disparaître et qui demandent une place dans les archives de notre mémoire, elle sera applaudie et remerciée’ [‘If it save falling ruins, books, prints and manuscripts that time is destroying, precious objects that will physically disappear and that claim a place in the archives of our memory, then it will be applauded and thanked’].)16 The Narrator likens his own memories of the Combray of his childhood to eighteenth-century engravings of da Vinci’s The Last Supper which show it in a state that no longer survives (RTP I, 40; see note 4 on p. 1117). Reproductions thus have a specific role in defying time, which surely justifies their examination in a Proustian context. The reproduction as sign has affinities with Proust’s characteristic motifs and devices. If the novel is about recapturing the past and redeeming lost/wasted time through art, claiming that literature is the only true life, real life must be transmuted via the imagination into 15 16

André Malraux, Le Musée imaginaire. (Paris: Gallimard, revised edition, 1965 [1947]), p. 233. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Le public moderne et la photographie’ in Salon de 1859, in Œuvres complètes, vol. II (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1976), pp 614–9 (pp 618–9).

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literature. The narrative must go back and forth in time: the past is brought into the present and the present has to delve back into the past. Three methods are employed to achieve this manipulation of time: leitmotifs, involuntary memory and metaphor, and I look at these in the light of what they share with reproductions. Leitmotifs can be themes with a symbolic function that progress through time and are changed by it. They also serve, as I shall argue, to unify disparate places and periods through time, conferring solidity and unity on the work. Involuntary memory links past and present in a diachronic relationship. Metaphor links elements in the plane of the present in a synchronic relationship in order to create a new synthesis between them that will lift them out of the perishable, contingent reality of the everyday. Leitmotifs are signs in that they are a short-hand designation of a person, incident or mood the memory of which they evoke, just as the agents of involuntary memory, such as the madeleine, achieve a short cut to the past via physical sensation. A metaphor is similarly a unifying sign. Given the central role of these elements in À la recherche du temps perdu the observation that reproductions and photographs serve as narrative devices in a remarkably similar way will again serve to underline the importance of the latter. As I have said, a reproduction allows the viewer to contemplate a work of art at will over a period of time without being affected by his or her physical location in relation to the original. The response can then be more considered and dispassionate than standing in front of the original in, say, a crowded gallery can allow; in such circumstances the viewer might experience only fatigue and irritation or conversely too vivid and strong an impression to allow the work to be recalled accurately later. For a writer describing a work of art such an impression is not useful unless the purpose is to describe a character’s reaction to the work. To use the work of art itself for a narrative purpose the painting, or whatever it may be, is better recollected in tranquillity by means of studying a reproduction or using someone else’s written description, provided that this is factual and accurate. I say ‘recollected’: I am not suggesting that seeing a black and white reproduction – as Proust would have done – or reading a catalogue is a substitute for the experience of seeing art at first hand, but merely the best way of approaching it as a literary subject. Proust’s hermit-like 22

existence, seemingly chosen by him as much as imposed on him by illness, was, he knew, the precondition for writing. There are parallels with what Paul de Man calls the ‘guilty pleasures of solitude’ sought by the young Narrator in reading instead of going out to play in the fresh air. These pleasures ‘are made legitimate because they allow for a possession of the world at least as virile and complete as that of the hero whose adventures he is reading’.17 Reading about the world is as valid an activity as living in it; similarly ‘reading’ images of the world in a darkened room is as valid a way of knowing it and having the authority to write about it. The reproduction has other advantages: it allows the viewer to tame and domesticate the image, or, to change the metaphor, to digest and incorporate the image more easily, because some pre-digestive work has already been done. The original, whether person or work of art, has undergone various transformations when rendered by the reproduction: in the case of a living subject, four dimensions (the fourth being time) have been reduced to three, in that a moving being has become static; then three dimensions are reduced to two – the flattening of reality; finally, colour is reduced to black and white. The writer has to perform all these operations in the process of expressing the real world in terms of static black and white marks on a page, so the reproduction can facilitate these reductive stages in ways I shall detail. There are examples in Proust’s text where a description is clearly based on the sight of a reproduction rather than on an original or a real place, and these will be analysed in the course of my argument. But far from suggesting that the writing process, in which I claim that the reproduction colludes, is a dreary draining of the colour and vitality of the subject, I shall argue that the reproduction liberates the artist to attempt a freer interpretation of the subject than when its insistent and dominant physical presence risks overwhelming his or her judgement and sensibilities. As an illustration supporting this view, I cite a fascinating example I found in the Correspondance: Proust asked a friend for details about a Fortuny dress he needed to 17

Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 64.

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write about. She offered to lend him a real dress to study but he rejected this option and asked instead for a written description of it, as flat and factual as possible, like a catalogue entry (Corr. XV, 63). Gérard Genette has noted Proust’s preference for representations of reality at one remove (and this is an idea that I explore further at the end of this book) and claims that scenes typically described in terms of projections or reflections show his predilection for indirect vision.18 The reproduction is of course a deformation of reality, and its very imperfection denotes absence and so embodies the desire, impossible to achieve, for possession of the original. At the same time this imperfection is a stimulus to creation: in rejecting the pale copy the writer is freed to recreate an enduring reality. In the light of these ideas the second chapter asks if there are significant differences between descriptions of works of art Proust had seen in real life and those he knew only from reproductions. An enquiry into the role of reproductions also requires an account of the prevalence in À la recherche of photographic imagery and vocabulary; might it be that Proust’s visual imagination was so conditioned by his reliance on photographs as reference material that he assimilated its language, for example cliché, instantané, chambre noire [negative, snapshot, darkroom], and its techniques, such as the framing and cropping of images, into his writing? Looking at these, as I do in the Chapter 3, allows the idea of the physical aspects of the reproduction to be mapped on to the novel. Typically, crucial scenes are viewed by the Narrator through windows that frame the events described. More than just a device – sometimes quite implausible, as at Montjouvain – allowing him to be an invisible voyeur, they seem to capture the immediate and the accidental, just as nearly contemporary paintings by Degas and Caillebotte of dancers, racecourses and Paris streets crop off parts of figures in a radically novel way undoubtedly influenced by photography.19 There are other examples 18 19

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Gérard Genette, ‘Proust palimpseste’, in Figures I (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp 39– 67 (p. 49). Degas took photographs himself and often used them for reference. See David Bomford et al., Art in the Making: Degas (exhibition catalogue) (London: National Gallery, 2004).

of a photographically-influenced vision at work, such as the way Albertine’s face, seen close to, dissolves like a reproduced image blown up to the point that the separate dots of the print screen become visible, or the description of Saint-Loup’s figure leaving the brothel, seemingly inspired by the contemporary experiments of Marey and Muybridge, who first captured movement in a rapid succession of photographic images. Furthermore, terms such as chambre noire are specifically used by Proust as metaphors for the way in which the imagination processes reality; to the double meaning of this term – photographer’s darkroom and camera obscura20, we can add two more darkened rooms: the child’s bedroom in Combray in which he first experiences projected (hence reproduced) images by means of a magic lantern, one of the many optical instruments that have a metaphoric function, and the dark sound-proofed bedroom in which, over years, the novel was written. Another relevant way to see the reproduction is as metonymy: it is a symbolic object, merely representative of the original, around which the viewer’s imagination can weave its own fantasies. No wonder the Narrator is disappointed when he encounters in real life a person (such as the Duchesse de Guermantes) or a place (such as the church at Balbec) that he has previously known from a reproduced image. It could be argued from this pattern that its logical conclusion is that travelling in the imagination is better than physical displacement. A review of an anthology of explorers’ stories begins, perhaps only half jokingly, ‘A perfectly good case can be made for the idea that explorers are people who suffer from a defective imagination. What the rest of us can accomplish in a daydream, they are compelled to act out – and so off they go, into the wild blue, to harvest the

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A darkened box with a lens or aperture through which an external image is projected on to an internal surface which the artist can trace as an aid to composition. Vermeer is thought to have used one in painting the View of Delft: ‘A camera obscura would also have helped Vermeer focus his view, foreshorten it, and cut out extraneous detail, making for a more intensely observed composition.’ Anthony Bailey, A View of Delft (London: Chatto and Windus, 2001), p. 111. I have suggested that reproductions and photographs serve the same purpose for Proust.

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sensations they were too literal-minded to feel at home.’21 However, as always with interpretations of Proust, one would be unwise to push a reductive view, in this case the idea of a deliberate avoidance of immediacy, too far. Many of the book’s most illuminating and memorable episodes describe the joy of immediacy, of physical sensation, of being in a particular place, such as Venice or Balbec, at a particular time and in particular conditions of the light and the weather. One has only to compare the Narrator to the depressing Des Esseintes in Huysmans’s À rebours (whose dislike of discomfort and the unfamiliar persuades him that reading a guidebook and eating English food in Paris is an adequate substitute for travelling to England) to appreciate the nuanced role that reproductions and secondary sources play in À la recherche. The way in which reproductions reduce and condense reality, and the analogies between these processes and Proust’s vision and practice are explored in Chapter 4, as is their metaphoric role. This oblique but rewarding approach to reading Proust will, I hope, offer a new way of appreciating the richness of his novel.

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Francis Spufford, reviewing The Faber Book of Exploration, ed. Benedict Allen. The Guardian, 16 November 2002.