Proust and the webcam

With grateful acknowledgements to Anna Goodman...

The real title of what follows ought to be "Proust and metaphor", since this is what has recently recaptured my interest in the writer whom I all too regularly cite as my favourite of all time. But since one can easily imagine (without needing to seek them out) a hundred academic essays bearing such a heading, all substantially more comprehensive than what I am about to offer, I decided on something a little more piquant. Proust and the webcam genuinely do have something to do with one another, and something surprising, namely the former uses the latter as a metaphor even though it does not exist yet. (All quotes with page numbers that follow are from the first volume of the Scott Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation, Remembrance of Things Past.)

"'I gather that Mme de Villeparisis', [Albertine] remarked to Octave, 'has been complaining to your father'. I could hear, underlying the 'I gather', one of those notes that were peculiar to Albertine; every time I realised that I had forgotten them, I would remember having already caught a glimpse behind them of Albertine's determined and typically Gallic mien. I could have been blind and yet have detected certain of her qualities, alert and slightly provincial, in those notes just as plainly as in the tip of her nose. They were equivalent and might have been substituted for one another, and her voice was like what we are promised in the photo-telephone of the future: the visual image was clearly outlined in the sound" (p.992)

Et voila, la webcam! Quite how a visual image could be "clearly outlined in sound" is clearer in the case of the Proustian imagination (the tenor of his metaphor) than in any conceivable "photo-telephonic" apparatus (the vehicle). The corresponding visual image here is surely not an accident: the narrator is picturing Albertine wrinkling the tip of her nose slightly just as she lets her voice take on the characteristic note of social disapproval. Perhaps the details of digital communication, the translation of both the tip of the nose and the tone of voice into identical binary strings, could form some sort of analogy - to us - for the way they blend in Proust's mind; needless to add, they were not accessible to him!

And with that example we get a sense of how unusual Proust's use of metaphor was. His images are very often as rechérché as the "lost time" of his title. Commentators have in fact suggested a connection: for Wallace Fowlie the juxtapositions of separated moments of time created by the workings of involuntary memory parallel the "function of a metaphor which brings together objects which have no relationship in ordinary life...explain[ing] the unknown by the known". This last is a very common observation about metaphor, particularly if we are allowed to equate knowledge and vision, and thus assume its equivalence to the other common observation that metaphor explains the invisible through the visible. It surely has some truth to it: why else do music and religion both so persistently invite metaphorical language? But Proust loves to disrupt this neat reasoning: even the very Proustian metaphor that Fowlie inserts just before his (proto-Rumsfeldian) identification of metaphorically known unknowns - the "waiters in the restaurant of Rivebelle, compared, in their agility and flight, to angels" - actually contradicts it. After all, we have much more definite knowledge of waiters than we do of angels.

In fact on turning to the passage that Fowlie appears to quote, one finds a metaphor even more extended and unusual. Proust only implies the angelic status of the waiters: the direct comparison is of the restaurant's round tables with heavenly bodies, which soon expands into an entire pre-prandial cosmological vision -

"I looked at the round tables whose infinite assemblage filled the restaurant like so many planets, as the latter are represented in old allegorical pictures. Moreover, there seemed to be some irresistible force of attraction at work among these divers stars, and at each table the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they were not sitting, with the possible exception of some wealthy Amphitryon who, having managed to secure a famous author, was endeavouring to extract from him...a few insignificant remarks, at which the ladies marvelled. The harmony of these astral tables did not prevent the incessant revolution of the countless waiters who, because they were on their feet instead of being seated like the diners, performed their gyrations in a more exalted sphere... Seated behind a bank of flowers, two horrible cashiers, busy with endless calculations, seemed two witches occupied in forecasting by astrological signs the disasters that might from time to time occur in this celestial vault fashioned according to the scientific conceptions of the Middle Ages" (p.868)

The incessant revolutions of the scene are elsewhere acknowledged to have been artifically enhanced, namely by the narrator's consumption of a "dose of beer, and a fortiori of champagne...adding...a few drops of port which I was too bemused to be able to taste"! In this case, then, the narrator's perceptions are not purely the result of perceptiveness: but that does not stop him "pitying all the diners, because I felt that for them the round tables were not planets and that 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" (p. 869). The situation makes light of a serious point, one which Alain de Botton (whose How Proust Can Change Your Life should not be disdained by the Proustophile: de Botton's style and succinctness are truly enviable) regards as a principle of Proustian philosophy - the need to destroy our habitual lack of sensitivity to the world. In this, the use of metaphors or analogies that begin with the usual and transfigure it by reference to the unusual is enormously helpful. They do not have to select a mundane subject and find a transcendent image for it, as with the astral tables. The relationship can go the other way too, as with an example cited by de Botton:

"Sometimes in the afternoon sky a white moon would creep up like a little cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have to 'come on' for a while, and so goes 'in front' in her ordinary clothes to watch the rest of the company for a moment, but keeps in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself."

An example like this is, as well as being exquisite, important in emphasizing that Proust's technique is not mere poetic hyperbole. The moon is a conventional "poetic" image, an actress waiting to come on stage is not, but this is irrelevant: the second is a more unusual and interesting sight, and thus a fit vehicle for refreshing our perceptions of the first.

On returning after many years to the most famous passage of Proust, which itself I expected to find no longer capable of making me hold my breath in the way it did at first reading - the tasting of the madeleine - I was after all captivated, and moved, by two extremely peculiar images that Proust employs, neither of which I have ever found reference to in their original context:

"I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have reognised their voice the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life.

And so it is with our past" (p.47)

"And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea" (p.51)

For all that the Japanese have been long known for their ingenuity with paper, one almost wonders whether this game really exists... But of course by this point in a first reading (this is the last paragraph of the passage), one has also ceased to pay attention to the literary means by which the epiphany is being communicated. The Proustian metaphor functions, as one blogger puts it in a suitably extravagant metaphor of his own, "like one of those massively complex atoms created in cyclotrons that disintegrates radioactively in milliseconds"; it catalyzes the reaction going on in the reader's own experience. New Critical readings of metaphor that analyze it as a "structural element" would surely find Proust wanting: frequently metaphors vanish mid-sentence, as happens even in an oft-quoted passage such as the following, in which the vase persists for no more than four or five words:

"An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates, and what we call reality is a certain connexion between these immediate sensations and the memories which envelop us simultaneously with them–a connexion that is suppressed in a simple cinematographic vision, which just because it professes to confine itself to the truth in fact departs widely from it–a unique connexion which the writer has to rediscover in order to link for ever in his phrase the two sets of phenomena which reality joins together."

But the pleasure created by the metaphor lasts much longer; for (to end with another technological Proustian metaphor) -

"Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative, which we develop later, when we are back at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people" (p. 932)