Slow Down!

Within a Budding Grove Vol 2 of In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust

Is life too quick? I don't mean, "Is life too brief?", I mean, "do things happen before you realise they've happened?" Blink and you'll miss it. Maybe it's better to miss things? Marcel Proust would not have agreed.

As far as I can work out - I have just finished the second of the seven novels in Proust's In Search of Lost Time (Within a Budding Grove) - Proust is trying, through the all-devouring consciousness of his narrator (Marcel) to arrest time. It all happens in slow motion. The thing is, life just passes too quickly to notice the things that he notices, to think the things he thinks and to feel the things he feels. Because his descriptions are so exhaustive and exhausting and because his prose is the most complex I have ever read (Henry James included) the slow motion has to be reciprocated in reading. This is a very slow dance.

One or two examples will have to suffice:

In the second half of Within a Budding Grove the narrator describes his extended holiday at the seaside in the fictional town of Balbec. Every conceivable detail of the place is forensically examined over and over again. For instance, sitting in a train carriage on the way to Balbec his attention is taken by a blue blind on the window:

But the contemplation of this blind appeared to me an admirable thing, and I should not have troubled to answer anyone who might have sought to distract me from contemplating it. The blue colour of this blind seemed to me, not perhaps by its beauty but by its intense vivacity, to efface so completely all the colours that had passed before my eyes from the day of my birth up to the moment in which I had gulped down the last of my drink and it had begun to take effect, that when compared with this blue they were as drab, as void as must be retrospectively the darkness in which he has lived to a man born blind whom a subsequent operation has at length enabled to see and to distinguish colours.
 (265)

I chose this example because it is, believe it or not, very short.

Another, extremely convoluted passage that slows time to a trickle is when he first sees the 'little band' of girls passing the sea front. "Never, among actresses or peasants or convent girls, had I seen anything so beautiful, impregnated with so much that was unknown, so inestimably precious, so apparently inaccessible". Fair enough; the standard lament of the adolescent pedant. However, he goes on to speculate that such voyeurism on his part is "no more than a projection, a mirage of desire". From this point on, after giving himself license to write about the girls and his desire in the most elaborate terms, the beauty of the writing itself becomes the end. He compares the girls to 'a bower of Pennsylvania roses' which, together with a flitting butterfly, frame the ocean and the slow passage of a ship.

For it was the one that I would have chosen above all others, convinced as I was, with a botanist’s satisfaction, that it was not possible to find gathered together rarer specimens than these young flowers that at this moment before my eyes were breaking the line of the sea with their slender heads, like a bower of Pennsylvania roses adorned a Cliffside garden, between whose blooms is contained the whole tract of ocean crossed by some steamer, so slow in gliding along the blue, horizontal line that stretches from one stem to the next that an idle butterfly, dawdling in the cup of a flower which the ship’s hull has long since passed, can wait, before flying off in time to arrive before it, until nothing by the tiniest chink of blue still separates the prow from the first petal of the flower towards which it is steering.
(437)

Who has time to think, feel, remember, observe in this way? And yet, the descriptions are for me accurate and beguiling. The effect of passages like these is just that one of slowing time down; of taking a moment and stretching it out to its limits, or rather since Proust is very much in control, it's better to say that he stretches time out to his limits. Of course, in a very real sense, all of this stretching time business is just an illusion and time will get us all in the end but what a way to make the most of whatever time there is! The question could just as easily be "Who can afford not to slow time down?"

But still I have been asking myself: why bother? What is to be gained by slowing down perception? What is to be gained by indiscriminately taking pains to represent every detail of perception? What is to be gained by describing trains of thought and exploring nuance upon nuance of feeling in such a complex way?

I try to put it in simple terms: Is Proust is trying to capture every single moment of consciousness because so much of what goes on in people's heads is disregarded, ignored, silenced? Maybe, just maybe, so much of immense value would not be lost if others learned how to see, how to listen and how to remember in the ways described in In Search of Lost Time. So is Proust a kind of people's avenger - helping the weak and powerless to find their voices in a hostile and indifferent world? A three thousand page version of Whitman's

"I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world"?

Hardly: I think Proust's concerns are primarily aesthetic; not ethical.

He may be an avenger of sorts but I think his mission is to see to it that wherever a ten page description of a bouquet of flowers goes unwritten Proust will come to rescue with one twice as long.

This book reads to me like a Noah's Ark of human consciousness. So much is included that it is hard to imagine that anything has been left out. The sheer weight of observation and thought, feeling and memory loaded into the hold of this vessel makes it hard to imagine that anything has been left behind.

This makes me think of the example (given by Baudrillard at the start of his Simulacra and Simulation) of “a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly”. Baudrillard's argument is of course, that the map is no longer a second order reality – today, models, simulacra are the real.

I think Proust would agree with this. He is the most radical of aesthetes. Who needs the real world if you have Proust?

At every point Proust rejects mimetic art. Or, more exactly, he rejects any tendency towards naive mimesis. For him, the world beyond representation is like a magnet of opposing polarity to that representation.

And so, In Search of Lost Time is a novel about artifice. It is a novel that makes visible the work of memory and imagination, prejudice and desire and shows how these always interpose themselves between the human subject and the world outside that person.

In addition it is a novel about representation itself; Proust was quite deliberate about this, telling a friend "My book is a painting".

There is no such thing as a direct experience of anything in Proust. Nothing appears in In Search of Lost Time as a simple unmediated fact. Everything - architecture, fashion, decoration, music, painting, conversations, the personalities of the men and women at all levels of society – is connected to everything else, there is no moment when Proust does not turn and face, turn and immerse himself into the entangled and entangling web formed by all of these aspects of human consciousness.

It did occur to me that this novel might well have been entitled In Flight from Lost Time because there never is a moment when some 'lost time' or other is not playing on the perception or thoughts of the present moment.

And yet, this is to misunderstand Proust. Proust is not in flight from mediated thinking or perception; he really does seem to be searching for it. That is why, I suppose, it seems that his descriptions of what takes place in the mind, body and outside world of his narrator are inventions rather than discoveries – he is describing incredibly complex experiences that could not conceivably appear in Nineteenth Century realism.

In fact, Proust is so consistent, so determined, so voracious that in the end what he reveals is the greater inauthenticity of realism. His descriptions, while they are incredibly complex, they are nonetheless, convincing. After reading Proust it is easy to be aware of how much is suppressed in order for realist fiction to be possible.

Just as abstract art reminds the observer that it is an artwork and thus gives the lie to the tendency to view representational art as a mirror onto the world, Proust never lets up with the exploration of the artifice standing between the person and the world, between fiction and experience; he never stops exposing precisely what realist fiction needs to hide.

For Proust there is so much going on in human consciousness, so much artifice between the person and the world, to say nothing of the relationships a person may have with herself that he more or less redefines literature. Of course, he didn't do this singlehandedly; Modernism does not equal Proust. And yet, while Joyce, for example, spent the first chapter of Ulysses parodying nineteenth century realism before launching into high modernism and therefore traced the same evolution followed by Proust, Proust's work is far, far more extreme.

It seems to me that the scope of Proust's work is in some ways wider, and in others, narrower than Ulysses. Proust's narrator is an exploration of the capacity of human consciousness to elaborate the aesthetic experience of reality.

Is there anything at all that Proust's narrator cannot experience in terms of art? Is there anything at all that does not involve labyrinths of thought, feeling, memory, ideals and ideas, fears and desires? So far, having read two of the seven novels, I don't think so.

So for me, Proust's work reads like a radical and prescriptive agenda for not only how literature should be written, but almost, for how life should be lived. Ulysses does not support such a radical view of art, literature or life. And yet, taking his previous novel,  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man  and the first three chapters of Ulysses as one work – the Bildungsroman of Stephan Dedalus – Joyce seemed to building towards a crescendo similar to Proust's. However, the narrower focus given by Leopold Bloom's 'everyman' view of the world means that Joyce's version of modernism has, in a different way, a much wider scope than Proust. Taxi drivers may laugh to hear that Joyce intended his work to be read by them, but there is not the remotest hope that Proust intended In Search of Lost Time to be read by people in such 'lowly' walks of life!

Where Joyce might be praised for his democratic impulse, rather than ridiculed for his vanity,  Proust should be admired for his commitment rather than scorned for his elitism.

I mentioned above that Proust rejected mimesis. This is not quite accurate. Within a Budding Grove is full of references to representational art. Some examples:

Detail from Botticelli's Trial of Moses - Jethro's daughter (to whom Swann had compared Odette)

Manet's Woman with Fans: one example "of the countless portraits that Manet or Whistler had painted of all those vanished models, models who already belonged to oblivion or history" that the narrator had used to show how Odette's beauty as captured by the fictional artist, Elstir would fade.

In each of these examples the narrator's experience of reality (in particular with Odette De Crecy/Swann) is had through the medium of artworks. This foregrounding of art as the antecedent of experience occurs throughout the novel.

As Eric Karpeles points out in the introduction to his brilliant book,  Paintings in Proust: a Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time, "In the novel, over one hundred artists are named, spanning the history of art". Art seems to be licensing medium of what is to be included in this novel. This has a kind of double exposure or extended 'dissolve' effect that makes the reader aware of the work of mediation in perception and thought, feeling and memory. Proust puts it in this way:

"Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists"

This constant sequencing of one artwork after another, filtering and, indeed constructing reality itself is the literary equivalent of Magritte's landscapes:

                              

The ability to stand back from one's experience of the immediate moment, to slow down time, to reflect on what one is experiencing, why and how it is being experienced is not a trivial one.

In one passage of Within a Budding Grove the narrator looks around at the other people in the hotel restaurant; none of whom is capable of standing back from the flux of the immediate moment and understanding more deeply what is going on. His key concept here is 'analogy':

"And I rather pitied the diners because...they had not cut through the scheme of things in such a way as to be delivered from the bondage of habitual appearances and enabled to perceive analogies"
(451)

What conclusions are to be drawn from the fact that most people do not live and love, see, hear, feel and remember with the ability to reflect deeply, to arrest time and see past the surface of things?

As I pointed out, Proust's concerns are not ethical. He is not saying that these are bad people. Neither are his concerns epistemic. He's not saying that they're stupid. His concerns are aesthetic and as such I think he's saying nothing more than life is a whole lot less pleasant, without these moments of deep perception, without the ability to slow time down to a trickle.

Of course, Proust's concerns are not everyone else's. His insights do have profound effects on how life can be lived in so many more ways than the purely aesthetic: "the bondage of habitual appearances" exists in more ways and for more people than even Proust could have imagined.

Cutting "through the scheme of things", slowing time down, perceiving analogies, searching, finding and engaging with lost time, exploring the mediation that is always the way in which anything is perceived, thought, remembered, produced is hard work but I think it's worth it.

Actually, when I think about it now I haven't really moved on from what I wrote last year after reading Volume 1 of In Search of Lost Time:

The lesson I’m taking from Proust brings me back to the reason for starting this blog. Life is infinitesimally short yet each second; each millisecond is full of meaning, full of life, full of pain and pleasure. How can I go on, dimly plodding on towards my ever approaching demise without opening my eyes, without trying to notice what is in front of me, without trying to remember?  I will be dead for a long, long time – I must try not to lose time.