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From
Robert Fraser: Proust and The
Victorians: The Lamp Of Memory (Macmillan, 1994), republished by kind
permission. |
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Chapter 9.
The Lamp of Artifice: Proust, Darwin and Wilde |
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I |
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Marcel stands at the turn of the stairwell,
watching. The world revealed before his bedazzled eyes, fresh from Combray and
the blossoming nymphs of Balbec, is magnificent and puzzling. Having for so
long considered the profiles of the Guermantes from afar, their very presence
in the pews at Combray, like their effigies in the windows overhead,
mysterious, he is now living, in the Hôtel Guermantes, almost amongst them.
Although not of their tribe, his residence in the apartment adjoining the
quarters where the Duc and Duchesse themselves reside gives him extraordinary
visual access to the goings-on over the way. Like an anthropologist, he bides
his time and waits, taking stock in the meantime of what the servants tell
him, more especially Françoise whose position makes her privy to downstairs
secrets denied to him. Françoise is a listener; he a watcher. He is also a
sort of scientist: |
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In default of the geologist's prospect, I had at least
that of the botanist as through the blinds on the staircase I watched the
little flower-tree of the Duchesse and the plant exposed in the court-yard
with all the persistence with which parents bring their children out of the
marriage market, and I wondered whether the improbable insect would, by
providential chance, arrive to pay its visit to the offered, defenceless
pistil. (NP, |
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For observers are neutrals no more than scientists. In
the free zone that the staircase represents between the appanage of the
Guermantes and the rented domain of his own family, Marcel scours the
landscape like a scout, taking bearings to left and to right. At one point in
the text he compares himself to those Boer scouts who, in the recent South
African war, had needed to reconnoitre the veldt under the very eyes
of the enemy, that is to say the British. Scouts are there to elicit facts:
they are also there to confirm, since scouts, like spies, work on the basis
of hypotheses - as famously do scientists. |
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As did Charles Darwin when, on holiday with his
daughter Henrietta in Torquay the summer following the publication of The
Origin of Species, he squatted on all fours before the erect stem of the
wild orchid waiting as Marcel waits, to observe the style of the flower being
fertilised by a bee.1
Like Marcel, |
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A
hundred virgins join a hundred swains, |
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And
fond ADONIS leads the sprightly trains, |
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Pair
after pair, along the sacred groves |
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To
Hymen's fame the bright procession moves |
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Each
smiling youth a myrtle garland shades, |
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And
wreaths of robes veil the blushing maids.2 |
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'Many males and females live together in the same
flower', remarked Erasmus soberly in his notes, but grandson Charles was apt
to confirm the more decorous facts of monogamy. Where Erasmus had noted
amorous riot within the open bell of the flower, Charles awaited, with
curiosity and trepidation, the lone approach of a drone. |
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Orchids, in mid-Victorian Britain, were experiencing
something of a vogue. They were beautiful, they were exotic; their very
lusciousness and variety seemed evidence less of design than of the generous
profusion of nature, a spilling out of form in redundant and wanton excess.
They had all the gorgeousness, all the voluptuous superfluity in which
Erasmus Darwin's poetry, if not his prose, had once delighted. For his
grandson, however, in the aftermath of the controversy of his recent book,
the lurid beauty of the orchids had to be a functional thing germane to its
survival in a world of competing botanical types. The obscene shape of the
labellum, worn with such bravura by the poets of the Aesthetic movement, was
only justified if germane to the plant's survival, or in other words its
improvement since, transcending the classic classificatory systems of
Linnaeus, Darwin was bent on proving that flowers, like the beasts, evolved.
The shape of the flower could thus be seen as a trap to lure the
bee-messenger, laden with his burden of exogamous pollen, deep within, where
the unlikely mating of insect and flower, proboscis and anther, might occur. |
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Considering that orchids were hermaphrodite and, as
Erasmus had noted, rather interested in sex, what benefit could this
complicated, risky and infrequent form of intercourse possess? In prevailing
and uncertain circumstances of rain and wind, was not self-abuse not simply
more available, but better? Darwin had himself noted this rather obvious
point, and was determined to meet it. In The Origin of Species he had
noted the advantages to all life-forms of cross-fertilisation. In On
Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are fertilised by
insects (1862) he would prove it by illustrating the benefit that accrued
from this bizarre cross-generic courtship to distant generations of flowers,
if not of bees: |
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Considering how precious the pollen of the Orchids
evidently is, and what care has been bestowed on the organization of the
accessory parts - considering that the anther always stands close by and
above the stigma, self-fertilization would have been an incomparably safer
process than the transporting of pollen from flower to flower. It apparently
demonstrates that there must be something injurious in the process. Nature
tells us, in the most emphatic manner, that she abhors self-fertilization.
For we may further infer as probable in accordance with the belief of the
vast majority of the breeders of our domestic production, that marriage
between near relations is likewise in some ways injurious - that some unknown
great good is derived from the union of individuals which have been kept
distant for many generations.3 |
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More distant, we might add, than Charles Darwin |
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Hence it is that Marcel, tremulous behind shutters,
awaits the occurrence of an unlikely event: the fertilisation of the Duchess's
shrub by a common, wandering drone. But, attuned to one form of
improbability, he encounters another. For on the horizon there appears, not
the fragile questing form of the bee but the voluptuous and well-heeled one
of M. de Charlus, most assertive and virile-seeming of all the Guermantes.
The sequel was related many times by Proust in successive drafts of what was
to become the shortest and most concentrated of all the parts of A la
recherche, the first volume of Sodome et Gomorrhe, less a
furtherance of the action narrowly speaking than an essay on the homosexual
condition. The most enlightening of these drafts, 'La Race des Tantes', has a
M. de Guercy rather than a M. de Charlus, also on his way to visit an ailing
Mme de Villparisis (NP, |
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From the vexed and veiled loves of the plants to
those of Charlus was but a short and tripping step. Both were attended with
difficulty; both depended upon a complicated series of signs interpreted by
each party, a process prone to misunderstanding and blighted by accident. The
conjunction of Charles and Jupien seems to Proust's narrator, who has
coincidentally been drinking at the Darwinian source, the sort of beautifully
fortuitous coincidence in which 'nature' at her most devious excels. Charles
is inquisitive; Jupien receptive. In a complex and orchestrated dalliance, a
semiological pantomime as wondrous as it is comic, each adjusts itself to the
other - the hoverer to the pistil, the insect to the flower. For Jupien, no
ordinary blossom, is that miracle of floral organisation the Lythrum
salicaria or purple loosestrife. Darwin had described this plant at some
length in The Different Forms of Flowers;6 it was unusual in nature in that
self-fertilisation was not merely inadvisable for it, but impossible. There
were three forms: long-, mid- and short-styled. The pistil and stamens of
each were adapted both to the corresponding organs in the others and to the
body of the administering insect. The essential effective agent was
difference: the pistil of the long-styled, for example, being the same length
as the stamens of the short-styled, enabling the bee to fertilise the anthers
of the one from pollen collected by its body from the corresponding part of
the other. 'We may', wrote Darwin 'draw the remarkable conclusion that the
greater the inequality is between the pistil and the set of stamens, the
pollen of which is employed in the fertilization, by so much is the sterility
of the union decreased'. For year after year, planting out and separating hundreds
of examples, he proved the case: it was this difference within sameness that
produced the tallest and the finest flowers.7 |
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In his introduction to Les différentes formes de
fleurs, Coutance tells of the adjustment of posture and attitude of the
receiving flower in the face of the approaching bee. The stem writhes: the
petals curl, ooze, dilate, offer themselves to its advance. In this botanical
solicitation, none is more shameless than the purple loosestrife: |
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One would say that the plant has a presentiment of the
approach of the insect which must bring it life. Never content to remain
passive and inert, submitting to present its open and balmy corollas to the
messenger, or to scintillate its brilliantly coloured labella in the sun,
serving as signals to attract the bees from afar; here the stamens withdraw
so that the insect may more easily collect the pollen which it transports;
there they writhe and spread themselves along the path which leads to the
nectar, so that the insect must pass along their serried ranks, brushing
against them with its wing and collecting from each its message. In other
flowers, such as the Lythrum salicaria, it is ardently awaited, and
the styles are observed to arch themselves so as to brush against the belly
of the insect and collect the staminal dust.8
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If the potency of the purple loosestrife lies in its
ardour and difference, then Jupien is a perfect example of it. Like the Lythrum
salicaria he belongs to a unique floral tribe, one with exclusive and
specialised adaptations.If the Lythrum salicaria of the long style
mates most effectively with the Lythrum of the short style, Jupien
mates most satisfactorily with mature gentlemen, belonging to that exclusive,
beleaguered tribe: 'those men who are attracted not by all men, but by a
phenomenon of human correspondence comparable to that which regulates the
fertilization of the heterostyled trimorphic flowers like the Lythrum
salicaria - solely by men much older than themselves'. Jupien is a
nephew, or perhaps a niece, attracted exclusively to aunts, just as the
short-styled loosestrife is attracted predominantly to the long-styled. Humans, it appears, are trimorphic, or
perhaps more than trimorphic. There is no essential sexuality in men, just as
there is no essential -that is to say self-sufficient- flower, and no
essential -that is to say self-directed- bee. |
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II |
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In the second chapter of The Picture of Dorian
Gray Wilde's picturesque and gullible young protagonist listens
enraptured to the sugared blandishments of the wealthy and hedonistic sophist
Sir Henry Wotton. Abandon yourself, says Wotton, to all this beauty: live for
it, indulge it, seize the glorious hour. Fascinated, Dorian succumbs to the
logic, drinks in the suspect wisdom. The scene is set in the garden of Basil
Hallward’s house while the artist is within, putting the final touches to the
picture. It is June, and nature is at her most prolix. The poisonous blooms
of the laburnum stretch overhead; the stars of the clematis cluster and
cajole. As Wotton's words sink in, Dorian watches as a bee crawls into the
open mouth of a lilac blossom he has just carelessly dropped on to the path: |
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Dorian Gray listened, open-eyed and wondering. The spray
of lilac fell from his hand upon the gravel. A furry bee came and buzzed round
it for a moment. Then it began to scramble all over the oval stellated globe
of the tiny blossoms. He watched it with that strange interest in trivial
things that we try to develop when things of huge import make us afraid, or
when we are stirred by some new emotion of which we cannot find the
expression, or when some thought that terrifies us lays sudden siege to the
brain and calls on us to yield. After a time the bee flew away. He saw it
creeping into the stained trumpet of a Tyrian convolvulus. The flower seemed
to quiver, and swayed gently to and fro.9 |
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But this is a topsy-turvy world where triviality and
portentiousness stand on their heads. Dorian's seeming moment of distraction,
his eyes wandering ineluctably towards the bee, is in fact a fit of
abstraction, or rather perhaps extraction of the essence of a moment. The bee
will be off in a trice and so will Wotton, but in the meantime the latter has
deposited the pollen of a philosophy that will sustain and trouble Dorian for
the rest of his short life. Looking back at that life in an equivalent moment
of reflection towards the end, he confronts Wotton with a bitter truth: that
the message he once brought him was not pollen at all, but a sting. The venom
of this injection resided between the yellow covers of a book: 'You poisoned
me with a book once. I should not forgive that. Harry, promise me that you
will never lend that book to anyone. it does harm'. Asked at this trial what
book this was, Wilde indentified it readily enough as Huysman's A rebours,
with which typically enough Dorian's own citations fit imperfectly. None the
less it is on Duc Floressas Des Esseintes that Dorian all too clearly models
himself in successive fads for perfumes, pigments, varieties of faith. His
fads extend to his treatment of the book itself: |
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He procured from Paris no less than nine large-paper
copies of the first edition, and had them bound in different colours, so that
he might suit his changing moods and the changing fancies of a nature over
which he seemed, at times, to have lost control. The hero, the wonderful
young Parisian, in whom the Romantic and the scientific temperaments were so
strongly blended, became to him a sort of prefiguring type of himself. And,
indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life,
written before he had lived it.10 |
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The prefiguring shape that lies before Dorian as he
contemplates the parabolic graph of his existence is that of a life lived
according to the dictates of art: with the fastidiousness, courage, the delighted
sense of freedom, discipline and risk that art at its most intense brings
both to the creator and to the recipient. To some this has seemed a
back-handed compliment to life. It is, of course, the opposite: a recognition
of the complete semantic separation between the world of the everyday and the
medium that purports to convey it, and an insistence on the sacrosanct
autonomy in art which Dorian, with his befuddled application of Wotton's
philosophy, fails to recognise. The case would be different if Dorian were an
artist; the whole point is that he is not even a half-decent connoisseur like
Wotton. Wotton is just a rather potent bee, and Dorian a mediocre if pretty
flower - mediocre enough to think that, in a final whim of emancipation, he
can destroy the picture. But it is himself that he destroys. Against the
rebarbative surface of the art-object, his blow rebounds. Art, he thinks, is
soft; but it is harder, more resilient than he. Dorian is in fact yet another
Sainte-Beuviste: a pictorial and a literary one combined. Baulked in life, he
takes his revenge in futile fury against the portrait, because in his
irremediable ordinariness he flatters himself into believing that in some
sense it mimetically refers to him: 'The nineteenth century dislike of
realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass.' Dorian is
Caliban, but he thinks himself Ariel. And, as Ariel, he thinks that he ought
to be the dispenser of justice rather than its plaything. But fate plays him
a strange trick, placing him at a further remove from the ideal, the more he
travels towards it. When he looks at the picture for confirmation of his
progress, it simply and curtly refutes him. He is left with the only sort of
truth that art, for Wilde, can ever meaningfully convey - the immeasurable
gulf between itself and all mundane human striving. Frustrated once more, he
lunges: 'the nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban
not seeing his face in the glass'. |
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Seen from the literary, rather than the pictorial,
perspective, Dorian is an imitation of his favourite book. In fact, the case
is somewhat more complicated than he thinks since Des Esseintes, whom he
idolises, is himself a copy of Comte Robert de Montesquiou, Proust's friend
and correspondent and the doyen of the Parisian aesthetes.11
In that case, Dorian is a copy of art drawn from life. In that case too,
Dorian and Charlus are cousins, Charlus being partially drawn from
Montesquiou and Des Esseintes, Dorian's ideal, upon the same original. But if
Dorian idolises Montesquiou, Montesquiou too is an idolator. In a side-remark
in the preface to La Bible d'Amiens, Proust digresses on the
connection between Montesquiou, idolatry and Ruskin: |
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To finish with idolatry and yet to make sure at the same
time that no misunderstanding subsists between the reader and myself, I would
like to draw a comparison with one of our most famous contemporaries ...
whose conversation, if not his books, betrays this failing driven to such an
extent that it is easy to recognize and to demonstrate without having any
need to exaggerate to make the point. When he speaks he is afflicted
-magnificently afflicted- with idolatry. Those who have heard him will not be
satisfied with mere imitations which leave his merits unguessed at, but they
will know of whom I wish to speak, who my example is, when I say that he
identifies the stuff in which a tragic actress drapes herself with that worn
by the figure of Death in Gustave Moreau's Le jeune Homme et la Mort,
or the robe of one of his girl friends with 'the dress and hairstyle work by
the Princesse de Cadignan when she first saw d'Athez'. And when looking at
the tragedian's costume or his friends' dress he exclaims 'It's so beautiful'
not because the material itself is beautiful it is the material painted by
Moreau or described by Balzac and is therefore sacred ... to idolators.
(CS-B, 135) |
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If Montesquiou, like Dorian, justifies life by
referring it to art, Proust redeems the process by reversing it, turning the
life figure of Montesquiou into the art object, Charlus. It is a process of
transmutation on which his servant Céleste Albaret is more than usually
helpful, pointing to the mixture of flirtatious, sycophantic admiration and
plain insincerity in Proust's attitude to the Comte, both face to face and in
their many surviving letters. This is something that we can observe for
ourselves. In the correspondence, Proust is appreciative, deferential,
sometimes almost gushing. It is as with so many of his correspondents: an
adjustment of writer to recipient seems stylistically to occur at the
beginning of each and every missive. Correspondence, one is reminded, is a
social act. One can almost sense the muscles of ingratiating courtesy
tightening themselves along the side of the face. Proust's letters never
quite voice what they mean. It is a kind of empathy; it is also a kind of
mask. And if Wilde believed in 'The Truth of Masks', that is the sort of
truth the letters to Montesquiou convey. For Albaret, Proust cultivated
Montesquiou like this as long as he needed him; after the creation of
Charlus, however, there was a marked slackening of interest. From her
position of protective confidante and servant, Albaret registers all of this,
attributing it to a Wildean cause: the transmutation of Montesquiou as raw
material into the sculptured shape of Charlus: 'Besides, I believe that, for
a long time, the count had ceased to exist for Monsieur Proust. He had become
one of those "people of fancy" ["personnes de
songe"]
of which he speaks in his book Le Temps retrouvé.12
'La vie n'est elle-même qu'un songe -dont nous nous éveillons à la mort',
wrote Pascal: 'Life itself is nothing but a dream (or fancy) from which we
awaken at death'. In the case of Charlus, however, life was the crude
illusion from which, fictively, Montesquiou awakened into art. |
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Thus Proust succeeds where Wotton failed. There is a
complex, shifting relationship between signifier and signified here, of the
kind in which the fin de siècle, of all periods the most preoccupied with the
ontological status of the artistic, positively delighted. Dorian models
himself upon Des Esseintes, whom Huysmans in turn modelled upon Montesquiou.
What is the connection between these various sorts of modelling, all of which
A la recherche contains? Years before sitting down to convert the
associates of his past into those 'personnes de songe' who will people his
work, the narrator has modelled his conduct upon sundry acquaintances who
cross his path: notably the Guermantes and Robert de Saint-Loup. It is all a
blind. In thus aspiring, he is succumbing to the same sort of category
mistake as he committed when mistaking Elstir's 'Baie d'Opal' for a real opal
bay, or worst still, a real Opal Bay for the 'Baie d'Opale'. It is the same
sort of fetishism that Ruskin commits in 'King's Treasuries', confusing
reading with conversation, a blunder for which Proust in his preface corrects
him. The equivalence that exists between art and life is not that which
pertains between individuals: in artistic modelling, the original vanishes
away; in life it (or he) is reinforced. Dorian confirms the power of Wotton
by living according to his edicts, and lives to confront his mentor with the
evidence of his influence. Artistic influence, as Proust very well knew, is
not of that kind. Hence his own meticulous fending off of all manner of
influence after a certain period -after 1907 certainly- including some of the
temporary manifestations of influence we have been considering earlier in
this book. |
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Was Wilde ever such an influence? We must return to
the phase of Proust's life when he was still susceptible to such things:
December 19891. It was the year of Dorian Gray, and Wilde was over in
Paris, being not a little lionised. He was invited to the house of Mme Arthur
Baignères, where Jacques-Emile Blanche introduced him to Proust. They were
about the same ages, respectively, as Wotton and Dorian: thirty-seven and
twenty. Perhaps for that reason, they seem to have fallen quite naturally
into the roles of idol and groupie. Proust, at his most mondain and
impressionable that year, was rather prone to such fits of adoration at the
time. In any case he was impressed enough by the Irishman to invite him to
dinner at 9, Boulevard Malesherbes. He meant dine en famille, but
Wilde, who seems to have been after intimacy of a different sort, thought he
meant à deux. He thus arrived like a ship in full sail at the hour
specified: in eager expectation, apparently, of a tête à tête. He was
then shown into a drawing-room at the end of which -very comfortable, very
domestic- sat M. et Mme Proust, the eminent doctor and his wife. Remarking
curtly upon the gross ugliness of the house (we can almost translate the
remark as 'What a cluttered, tasteless, Empire-influenced, old-fashioned,
bourgeois house'), he then took refuge in the lavatory which, one can only
assume, was just as ugly, to the door of which Proust, arriving in a fluster
and ten minutes late, followed him. Two of Mme de Baignères' grandsons, who
seem to have been privy of the incident, tell us what happened next. 'M.
Wilde, êtes-vous malade?' 'No, I am not in the slightest ill. I was under the
impression that I was to have the pleasure of dining alone, but I was is |
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Three years later, in April 1894, when Wilde was on
his final visit to Paris before his fall from grace, the two men met again at
the house of Madame de Cavaillet, where, according to one observer, they eyed
one another 'with a complex curiosity'.14 And no wonder. This time, nothing
untoward occured. |
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There are among the contrivances of nature, as
Darwin very well knew, some devastating mistimings. On this occasion one does
not know whether to sympathise more with the flatulent bumble-bee buzzing in
inappropriate places, or with the wilting and misplaced flower. On second
thoughts, certainly with the flower. Wilde deposited his verbal sting and
then left, departing with waddling and inept aplomb, and straight, as it
happened, into the arms of disaster. 'Possibly there is a little of Wilde in
Charlus', comments Painter; in that case, Charlus' timing, and his manner,
were no better. Whatever view one takes of the evening in question, it was a
misreading of signs, a pantomimic semiological ballet in which the lead
dancer in the intended pas de deux fell flat on his face, and did not,
it seems, recover. |
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But it is worthwhile dwelling for a moment on that
complicated double gaze, the look of 'complex curiosity' with which, as
Fernand Gregh noted, the whole affair concluded. Gazing, as Wilde very well
knew, was an extremely dense kind of act in which meaning, double-entendre,
violation and interpretation are tossed backwards and forwards between the
silvered, opaque-cum-transparent surfaces of two opposite mirrors. There is a
politics as well as a phenomenology of the gaze: Charlus looks at Marcel
inquisitorially when he first sees him; Robert de Saint-Loup with an arch and
haughty blankness that conceals spiritual sympathy. At Balbec, Marcel looks
at Albertine who pretends not to see him; Marcel ogles and then follows the
Duchesse de Guermantes. In A la recherche, and more especially A
l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, people gaze well before they speak;
and the look is the first gambit in a multivalent interaction in which
reflections, images and impressions -some true, some false- are exchanged.
Often such gazing is the source of those very misunderstandings under the
fertilizing influence of which subsequent relationships flourish; always they
are expressions of a give-and-take of power. There is majesty in a look;
there is command; there can also be a convoluted etiquette of obeisance. As
with Proust looking at Wilde, gazing can also be, in a double sense, an act
of regard. The whole of Charlus and Jupien's instinctual courtship is
contained within their looking. What they say is minimal (though it does not
have, as we shall soon see, a pertinent literary provenance). Their
transaction is a performance they believe to be private; they are unaware of
the narrator, now on the ground level of the staircase, looking on. What
occurs therefore is a complex visual choreography à trois: Marcel
looking at Jupien looking at Charlus; Marcel looking at Charlus looking at
Jupien; Jupien and Charlus looking at one another and failing to see Marcel,
who thus represents the blind alley in this particular ocular-cum-erotic
maze. Therein, it might be argued, lies Marcel's power; therein, we have
already argued, lies his weakness. |
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In Wilde, gazing is not only invariably both
informative and dangerous; it is also the subject of an intense, almost
anthropological, taboo. This is nowhere more evident than in Salomé,
first performed at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, Paris on 11 February 1896 during
Wilde's imprisonment. The play has been seen as many things: as erotic tease;
as feminist manifesto; as decadent holocaust; as gay codebook. To all of
these refining readings we must add that Salomé operates pre-eminently
as a voyeuristic tableau in which fatality is conferred by the gaze. It is
the young Syrian who begins the process with his visual obsession with
Salomé: 'Comme la princesse Salomé est belle ce soir'. But his friend, the page
of Herodias, grows jealous: 'Vous la regardez toujours. Vous la regardez
trop. Il ne faut pas regarder les gens de cette façon ... Il peut arriver un
malheur.'15 He
urges him to look instead at the moon, which in turn looks down on both of
them, Aubrey Beardsley's illustration of 1894 deciphering its face as a cross
between a transvestite Lady Bracknell's and Wilde's.16
(If the moon were saying 'A handbag!' it might be just that; in fact what it
seems to be saying is 'What an ugly house!', in which case the couple
cowering to the right of the picture are rather like Proust's parents.) But
in any case the gaze is fatal. The prophet Iochanaan adds his warning
concerning 'la concupiscence des yeux' - the lust of the eyes. When Salomé is
drawn into the picture, the young Syrian pays the penalty for his visual
fixation, for she has caught the contagion, and when Iochanaan, as requested,
is brought up from his dungeon, it is with her eyes that she devours him,
eyes that seem to speak both of penetrating desire and draconian tactual
restraint. 'Qui est cette femme qui
me regarde?' intones Iochanaan. 'Je ne veux pas qu'elle me regarde. Pourquoi
me regarde-t-elle avec les yeux d'or sous les paupières dorées?'17 But
when the young Syrian, out of jealousy or else horror at both her visual
effrontery and his own, upbraids the Princess for her ostentatious ogling, it
is he who pays the price for his earlier visual fixation upon her, killing
himself at her very feet. Meanwhile his earlier inability to take his eyes
off Salomé has transferred itself by some sort of contagious magic to Herod,
whose rooted stare toward Salomé provokes in Herodias a state of repetitive
shock that has to do both with straightforward jealousy, and less
straightforwardly with a kind of puritanical horror at his occular shamelessness;
'Vous regardez ma fille. Il ne faut pas la regarder. Je vous ai déjà dit cela.' And
when in crude manipulation of this desire visually expressed -Herod's demand
that Salomé dance being only the climax of this- Salomé demands the head of
Iochanaan on a platter, Herod's self-accusation comes in the form, not of
acknowledgment of incestuous desire or marital waywardness, but of a
violation of this rather arcane visual taboo: 'Je vous ai regardée toute la
soirée... Je vous ai regardée toute la soirée, votre beauté m'a troublé... Mais
je ne le ferai plus. Il ne faut pas regarder que dans les miroirs.'18 Visual
harassment we might call it, but if so we would be missing the point that the
harm stems not so much from the looker as the looked upon. 'Il ne faut pas
regarder que dans les miroirs' could mean, 'one should only look at oneself
rather than others'; the context makes it clear however, that what is meant
is that only indirect gazing is safe from harm or rather from the destructive
magic, the evil eye of the one thus violated. At the culmination of the play
Herod walks upstage away from the audience, and as he does so, in a nice
reverse of Claudius's demand in Hamlet, act |
|
Six years before the performance of this grim and
stately pageant, and three years before Wilde first committed it to
paper, J.G. Frazer wrote in The
Golden Bough of the taboos that hedge around a king, including those of
seeing. The whole society depicted in Salomé seems to be one convulsed
by a sort of voyeuristic shame. It is pervaded by a sense of primitive dread
in which the mere act of looking is invested with extraordinary destructive
power. The inhibition that goes along with this is one with the style of the
piece, gorgeous and yet buttoned in, instinct throughout with a sort of
impacted ritual repetitiveness that brings it at times close to psalmodic
chant. We are not far from the world of Pelléas; but it is a Pelléas
in which the shadows have grown longer and more acrid. Wilde sent a copy of
the play to Maeterlinck, Debussy's setting on whose opera Proust was later to
parody.* He also sent a copy to Pierre Loüys, who had helped him with the
French text.19 The homo-erotic velleities of 'Les
Chants de Bilitis' linger somewhere in the background, for Salomé is a play
that derives its power not from a vaunted explicitness, but from visual and
dramatic restraint. But the politics of the eye is built into Wilde as
securely as it is built into A la recherche du temps perdu, in which
both Swann and later Marcel crucify their respective lovers by a demand to
know, to look upon and to gaze. |
|
|
|
IV |
|
|
|
Among the most celebrated instances of such gazing
occurs towards the end of Balzac's Illusions perdues in which the
fake-Spanish priest Carlos de Herrera stops the carriage in which he is bound
for Paris and looks longingly at the childhood home of Rastignac. The scene
is referred to with loaded admiration at the Vendurin soirée at la Raspalière
where Charlus, who has come down a notch in the social scheme, is obliged to
defend his knowledge of Balzac's fiction against the pushy pedantry of
Professor Brichot.20 Charlus has long since ceased
gazing at Jupien and has transferred his affection to Morel, his admiration
for whose beauty he is forced, especially in this new setting, to speak of in
veiled terms: |
|
How come! Don't you know Illusions perdues? It is
so fine that moment when Carlos Herrera asks the name of the château he is
passing in his carriage: it is Rastignac, the home of the young man he used
to love. And then the abbé falls into a reverie which Swann rather appositely
once called the 'Tristesse d'Olympio' of pederasty. (NP, |
|
* For
Proust's hilarious parody of Maeterlinck, see CS-B, 206-7, where what
appears, however, is by Proust's admission less a pastiche of Pelléas et
Mélisande than of Debussy's setting, achieved by the simple expedient of
combining the psalmodic style with banal subject matter. the participants are
'Markel' and 'Pelléas' but night as well be Proust and Reynaldo Hahn: |
|
MARKEL: You were wrong to mislay your hat. You will never
find it again. |
|
PELLÉAS:
Why will I never find it again? |
|
MARKEL: Things are never found again in this place. It is
mislaid for evermore, etc. |
|
On order to turn this into a feasible pastiche of Salomé,
merely substitute le regard: |
|
SALOMÉ:
You were wrong to gaze at my hat. you will never gaze at it again. |
|
HEROD:
Why will I never gaze at it again? |
|
SALOMÉ:
Hats are never gazed at again in this place. You are doomed for evermore,
etc. |
|
The
'Tristesse d'Olympio' of Victor Hugo is a poem of amorous regret to which the
narrator refers much later as summing up the languid appeal of the past: but
the terms in which Charlus speak of it betray an identification with Herrera
as gazer that is reflected even in his own actions. His encounter with Jupien
in the courtyard of the Hôtel Guermantes, for example, gains much by being
read against an adjacent scene in Illusions perdues, a first meeting
between mentor and protégé which seems too to possess some relevance to the
encounter between Wotton and Dorian that opens Dorian Gray.
The scene in question is the meeting of Herrera with Lucien de Rubempré.21
Herrera is supposedly an envoy from the Spanish court, in fact a convenient
and plausible enough disguise for out-and-out criminal Jacques Collin, who in
turn disguises the sinister human puppeteer Vautrin. Collin appears in his
true colours in the volume that follows, but in the meantime the abbé
provides the despairing young Lucien, en route for a suicide attempt
in the River Charente, with bogus spiritual sustenance, wordly hope and a
reason for carrying on living. |
|
Vautrin is a very persuasive bee, and Lucien a
rather desperate flower, willing, however, to be perked up if the occasion
arises. Even if he does not trail his petals along the path of the advancing
proboscis like the purple loosestrife, or like Jupien before the
blandishments of Charlus, he is like Dorian both intelligent and suggestible,
if initially suspicious. Like Wotton, the abbé advises his protégé to
dispense with commonplace ethics in the interests of higher claims. 'If your
way of treating morality resembles your way of regarding history', says
Lucien, fascinated and appalled, 'I would like to know what is the motivation
for your present apparent charity'. But then Vautrin/Herrera offers him a
cigar: '"Take a cigar and smoke it while waiting for the carriage."
Lucien took the cigar and lit it, as they do in Spain, against the priest's
own cigar, while thinking to himself, "He's right. There will always be
time for me to kill myself."' Meanwhile, in the Hôtel Guermantes, the
Baron de Charlus, rolling his eyes at the unfortunate Jupien, performs a
rather similar move: a pass dressed up as a ridiculously pointless request:
'I would ask a light from you, monsieur, but I have forgotten my cigars' (NP,
|
|
In Balzac, developments are more discreet, but not
so discreet as to put off Wilde or Proust, both of whom were devoted to Splendeurs
et misères and apparently for the same reasons. It is Vivian, putative author
of 'The Decay of Lying', who speaks Wilde's mind for him: 'One of the
greatest sorrows in my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempré. It is a grief
from which I have never been able to completely rid myself. It haunts me in
my moments of pleasure. I remember it even when I laugh.'22 |
|
The context, of course, is a defence of art against
life, artifice against naturalness, but still seems to echo Wilde's own
private feelings. Writing to his mother shortly after his return from
Beg-Meil (or speaking to her, since the remark is not recorded), Proust must
have said much the same thing, since in September 1896 we have her replying
in some astonishment: 'The death of Rubempré touched me less than that of
Esther' (Cor, II, 133). An inevitable response one would have thought,
and one which many readers will share, for Esther Gobseck, Lucien's lovelorn
mistress and once prostitute, is every bit as much Vautrin's plaything as is
the object of his sinister love, Lucien. Yet Wilde does not mention her
death, and neither apparently had Proust. |
|
Here are Wilde and Proust sounding exactly the same
plaintive note, but what can they have meant? In the first part of Sodome
et Gomorrhe the narrator speaks of the inverted reading of texts by
readers whose sexuality is not that of the author. This happens apparently
even at school, even perhaps in the Lycée Condorcet: |
|
The college boy who while committing to heart love poems,
or looking at obscene pictures, if he presses himself against his classmate,
thinks that he is merely sharing with him the desire for a woman. How should
he know himself different from all the rest when he evinces the substance of
what he reads in Mme de Lafayette, Racine, Baudelaire, Walter Scott, at a
time when he is too little able to analyse himself to take into account the
fact that he is adding something of his own, and that though the sentiment is
identical the object is different, that the person whom he desires is Rob-Roy
and not Diana Vernon? (NP, |
|
There is thus an available homosexual reading of the
text, something that in the context of an avowedly heterosexual author such
as Balzac is likely to play havoc with any notion of authorial intentionality
and raise receptivity to a commanding, even it seems an imperative, position.
To what extent is Proust's collégien misreading his book? And assuming
that he is so, to what extent does it matter? Proust's narrator, who for once
seems to be talking on the author's behalf, talks of the boy 'adding'
something to the text, as if this supplementary reading somehow amounted to a
mislaying of one definitive sense, which in turn is the monopoly of the
majority, that is as much as to say the numerically preponderant heterosexual
readership. Are texts, is meaning, defined in this way? The question is of some
relevance to Proust's procedures, especially to that supposed one according
to which female characters are substituted for male originals, so that
Albertine is a stand-in for Agostinelli. The corollary of this view seems to
be that much of Proust's text is in a sort of cipher, its sexual charge
reversed according to a morse code that its homosexual readers will translate
with some alacrity and its heterosexual readers only with some difficulty.
The implication therefore is this: that throughout A la recherche
Proust is busy outdoing the normal construction of texts, that generic or
gender bias that excludes or marginalises certain constituencies of
readership. According to this theory, Albertine is a man, and the homosexual
reader will respond to her as such, falling in love with him in consequences.
It is as if Sir Walter Scott had made of Rob Roy an Amazonian leader called
Diana Vernon, letting it be understood by certain gentlemen in Edinburgh that
a rugged highlander was in fact intended, and enabling Caledonian
proto-Proustians legitimately to fall in love with him while purporting to do
the opposite. |
|
Much as this appears to fall in with the argument of
Sodome et Gomorrhe, it is important to realise that it simplifies
Proust's fictive procedures very considerably. For we need not be afraid of
insisting upon it too loudly: the narrator is not Proust. He is also
heterosexual, just as he is Gentile. The sexual gaze that engrosses Sodome
et Gomorrhe, just as it absorbs large parts of 'Un Amour de Swann' and La
Prisonnière, is a three-way affair, a triangle. And in that triangle the
Marcel of the novel is involved as reflector, not as agent? 'One should not
look, except in mirrors', exclaims Herod. 'It is the spectator, and not life,
that art really mirrors', wrote Wilde. All of this, as have already argued,
is true, but it is vital to distinguish between levels. The reader of A la
recherche contemplates a work of art within which the narrator observes
life. To convert Albertine into a man would be to convert the narrator into a
homosexual, which emphatically he is not. It would make of his disquiet at
Albertine's adventures a sort of homosexual jealousy; as it is, he is
disturbed less by the existence and allure of such as Andrée than by the fact
of inversion itself. More that this: if the reader is in the position of the
observerof that art inside which both Marcel and Albertine perform, and if
Proust's own rule is applied, then a heterosexual reading that has Albertine
as an only too pulchritudinous young woman has a validity all of its own.23
To subvert all of this in the interests of a militantly homosexual reading
would be to do considerable violence to the delicacy of Proust's art. It
would also be to undermine the organisation that the wondrous first section
of Sodome et Gomorrhe is designed to set up: the distancing of the
homosexual condition in the interests of a variety of art that is also a
variety of science. It would be to turn Darwin into a Lythrum salicaria,
or else into a bee. |
|
|
|
IV |
|
|
|
In a recent study of homosexual literature 'from
Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault' Jonathan Dollimore deploys a
classification that is very interesting.24 His whole study, covering more
than a millennium, affords Proust one passing mention - and that a remark ascribed
to Monique Wittig that Proust 'made homosexual the axis of a categorisation
from which to generalise'.25 Whether because this claim is so
patently untrue or whether because, for the reason just outlined, Proust is
rather a slippery customer to handle, Dollimore devotes no more space to him
in a book which deals trenchantly and at lengths with his contemporary and
associate, André Gide. Gide was a homosexual apologist, and Proust was no
more that than he was a Zionist. For all that, Dollimore's argument invites
application to Proust's case: homosexual literature, he says, is polar. At
one pole, Gide portrays homosexuality as an authentic condition on a par with
the heterosexual state. This is the 'essentialist' view of the matter. At the
other pole you have Wilde rejecting the rhetoric of depth and authenticity,
and replacing it with a eulogy of surface and of revolt. The
'anti-essentialist' pose thus maintained is easy to support by reference to
Wilde's aphorisms, as Dollimore is not slow to do: |
|
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal
of it absolutely fatal. |
|
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. |
|
In matters of grave importance, style not sincerity is the
vital thing. |
|
Only shallow people do not judge by appearances.26 |
|
Such emphasis on surface throughout Wilde is only an
aspect of something much wider: a rejection of the discourse of 'truth',
'sincerity' and authentic feeling -'natural facts'- which the late Victorians
had inherited from their parents and grandparents, notably from Carlyle and
Ruskin, and which much of the fin de siècle, orchestrated by Wilde and
to a more concerted extent by Whistler, was busy shrugging off. Out of the
discarded skin of such sanctimoniousness they slide, their brand new,
jade-tinted epidermis gleaming. For Wilde, this advance was Darwinian.
'Aesthetics are higher than ethics', remarks Gilbert in 'The Critic as
Artist': |
|
They belong to a more spiritual sphere. To discern the
beauty of a thing is the finest point at which we can arrive. Even a colour-sense
is more important, in the development of an individual, than a sense of right
or wrong. Aesthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious
civilization, what, in the sphere of the external world, sexual is to natural
selection. Ethics, like natural selection, makes existence possible,
Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make it lovely and wonderful, fill it with
new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.27 |
|
Bees, then, are efficient aesthetes, but where does
Proust stand in this process? Some enlightenment can be found from his
articles on the cult of aestheticism in France, especially in so far as it
coalesced around the bejewelled figure of his friend Robert de Montesquiou.
In a unpublished article on his friend, later collected in Contre
Sainte-Beuve, Proust addresses the phenomenon of the aesthetic movement
as something that confuses and conceals reputations. Aestheticism has
prevented others from appreciating the considerable merits of Montesquiou's
verse -which for Proust has the adamantine clarity and hardness of a
Corneille or a Racine- just as for a previous generation the satanic
trappings of decadence had obfuscated the no less hard-centred merits of
Baudelaire. Truth, he says, is not gained by the easy path of turning ethical
platitudes on their head, nor is the flagrant novelty of such attitudes
anything but skin-deep: |
|
Such theories, which appear so novel are in fact well and
truly superannuated, and to them one would apply that profound saying of
Dostoievski: 'a paradox is the inverse of a prejudice, but is none the truer
for all that'. (CS-B, 406) |
|
If Charlus is the inversion of a heterosexual male,
is he in any sense truer? At what level of the self, for Proust, does sexual
'truth' lie? Once more we must return to the narrator, portrayed not simply
as heterosexual but innocent enough in the Montjouvain experience not quite
to recognise what is happening, his tergiversations concerning lesbianism and
sadism there being by way of extrapolations with the benefit of hindsight. It
is not in fact until after he has observed the homo-erotic dalliance of
Charlus and Jupien that the narrator is able, in retrospect, to construe the
Montjouvain episode at all. His enlightenment is retarded by the fact that
the homosexual world with which he gradually recognises himself as being
surrounded is fairly consistently under wraps, there being not one single
declaration of partiality except between consenting parties in the whole
book. Charlus, for example, makes veiled overtures to Marcel, but he speaks
of a freemasonry of souls (NP, II, 586-7). Robert de Saint-Loup hides his
proclivities under the guise firstly of a besotted admirer of Rachel,
subsequently under those of a bourgeois homme de famille and virile
gentleman-at-arms. Throughout her period of residence with Marcel, Albertine
consistently denies her lesbianism, as earlier Odette had before Swann.
Throughout, the narrator is consumed with a desire to ascertain the truth
that lies beneath these surfaces. Only when he receives at second hand the
confessions of the young laundress with whom Albertine has shared moments of
dalliance does he feel himself to be in possession of the truth about her
nature. When, in Albertine disparue, he discovers that Albertine died
as a result of an accident by the Vivonne, he feels that he has plumbed the
facts, not simply of her nature but of Mme Vinteuil's. There is a remarkable
collusion in all this between desire and knowledge, as if Marcel's desire for
Albertine has been transmuted into a desire to know. It is almost as if he
can give expression to his thwarted love for Albertine by learning the truth
about her. There is an essence to Albertine's nature, just as there was an
essence to the nature of Charlus. |
|
In all of this, Proust is closer to Gide than he is
to Wilde. But there are complicated factors. Throughout his observer's
odyssey through the cities of the plain, the narrator comes across
brilliantly turned surfaces that not so much mirror their depths as deny
them. This they do partly for reasons of survival, and partly because the
depths themselves are contradictory. For the narrator, the homosexual
condition is one deeply at variance with itself, for the simple reason that
what the invert seeks in a partner is not a being of the same sex as himself,
but precisely of the other sex, the authentic gender of the seeker being
precisely the opposite of that conventionally ascribed.28
Charlus desires Jupien, not because he is another male, but because being a
woman himself he is looking for his complement, that is to say a man. And
Albertine desires Andrée not because she is, like her, womanly, but because,
being male herself, she is looking for her opposite, that is to say a girl.
But this is precisely what the partner selected cannot provide. It is for
this very reason that in Sodome et Gomorrhe the narrator dwells both
on the beauty of all mutual attraction and on the necessary frustration of
all homosexual desire. It is for this reason too that he rejects the very
term 'homosexual' as a misnomer. Since Jupien is himself a woman, he will
never properly satisfy Charlus; since Andrée is a man, she will never
properly satisfy Albertine. Hence that elaborate game of sexual musical
chairs described in the first book of Sodome et Gomorrhe: male homosexuals
choosing lesbians for their maleness, only to find that what their partner
seeks in them is a feminity they cannot properly provide, since it is a
female body as well as sexuality that she seeks. In botanical terms, it is as
if the short stamens of a long-styled trimorphic flower masked the longer
stamens of the short-styled, dispatching pollen intended for the long-styled,
only to find its partner was in turn so disguised, rejecting the proffered
pollen as not originating from the apparent form. Or vice versa. |
|
In all of this the narrator is an alien observer: a
voyeur, yes, but a scientific one - more Darwin than Vita Sackville-West.
What he uncovers is an essentialist, though contradictory underworld, tricked
out in the colours of anti-essentialism, or perhaps pretending to an essence
it does not have. The Baron de Charlus is a good case in point. Charlus is a
Wildean anti-essentialist masquerading as a man's man. He believes in an
implied freemasonry of homosexual affiliation, believes too, like Wilde
-though more privately- that such affiliation posits a superiority to the
self-defining norm. Such tendencies inspire in him an exaggerated contempt
for the mob. During the war his disdain takes the form of refusing to endorse
the prevailing Germanophobia. Unlike the average man in the street, Charlus
reveres the Boche for their mental refinement, their artistic and moral
excellence. It is an attitude of political eccentricity that mirrors his
isolated sexuality. Unlike his bourgeois and heterosexual compatriots, he
persists in loving the Germans, thus placing them in the paradoxical position
of the forbidden objects of a tabooed, sodomite desire (NP, IV, 352-68). |
|
There is a passage in Cahier 74 that bears on this.29
The narrator is talking about the divergent attitudes to the war taken up by
British writers treated to propaganda trips by the government and invited to
publish their conclusions. In War and the Future (1917) Wells
interprets the conflict as signal in a fundamental shift in human technology
on such a scale as to render war itself a potential impossibility. But
Kipling (whom Cahier 74 stigmatises as 'more imperialist than the whole of
German literature') portrays the same conflict in France at War (1915)
as confirmation of a deep-seated herd instinct, of which he takes a perverse
and rather grim pleasure in approving. For Kipling, the frontier between the
Allies and the Germans is that between civilisation and barbarianism. This,
says Proust, is rather like applying to human history the same evolutionary
model as Kipling employs in The Jungle Book, where two herds on
different rungs of the evolutionary ladder -the wolves and the monkeys-
outface one another. The Allies are the monkeys; the Boche, one assumes, the
wolves. Ironically in that case, Kipling is baying like a wolf. He even
adopts some wolfish attitudes, adopting the plain growling attitude of the
average (heterosexual) man-in-the-street, equally suspicious of foppishness
in man and Germanism in Europe. As for Charlus, to extend the argument, he is
neither wolf nor monkey but Mowgli, that highly sophisticated human creature
who elects to hunt with the wolves. There is, therefore, a semiology of
political and cultural allegiance, just as there is a semiology of evolution
and of desire. Germans and Allies, homosexual and heterosexual, are caught up
in a tangled bank in which signals flash across from side to side. Sometimes,
as with Wilde and Proust, the signals are misread. Nature's system of signs
is more complicated than any simple taxonomy of species can quite account
for. When signs are misread, such misreading can even be fatal. |
|
|
|
VI |
|
|
|
One such lethal misreading occurred within the
acquaintance of Proust in January 1907, in peculiarly distressing
circumstances. His mother had died a little more than eighteen months before,
leaving a wound that perhaps would never heal. His comforter on that occasion
had been his maternal uncle Georges Weil, generous and perhaps needful enough
to share memories with him. But in August 1906 Weil himself succumbed to an
agonising muscular paralysis. By this time Proust was convalescing from
sundry ills of his own in the Hôtel des Reservoirs in Versailles, from which
on the 22nd he made a journey up to pay his final respects. Deep in the
throes of an uraemia-induced coma, his uncle was too ill to recognise him, so
he set off to Versailles deep in gloom. At the Gare St Lazare he seems to
have had some kind of a turn. Drinking too much coffee in an attempt to
recover his composure, he wet himself while standing on the platform (that,
at least, is the most plausible account of what occurred) and had to be
helped by a young railwayman, who promptly disappeared into the night.30 |
|
'The nymphs have all departed, leaving no
addresses'. Proust made various attempts to identify and contact his saviour,
but to no avail. One possible avenue was M. van Blarenberghe, chairman of the
Chemins de Fer de l'Est, whose son Henri he had sometimes met at dinner
parties looking pert and decorative, and making occasional witty ripostes. So
Proust wrote, asking for the identity of his Good Samaritan. It proved a
cul-de-sac. The father had recently died and Henri was plunged into a vortex
of grief which he tried to share with Marcel, about whose own recent bereavements
they had spoken. By this time it was September, and Henri, in an attempt to
assuage his pain, was travelling in Brittany, writing on the 24th from
Morbihan: |
|
I regret acutely, monsieur, not having been able to thank
you sufficiently for the sympathy which you have extended to me in my bereavement.
You will have to excuse me; the desolation from which I have been suffering
is such that, on the advice of my doctors, I have been constantly on the move
for months. Only now, with the greatest difficulty, am I beginning to resume
my normal life. Albeit belatedly, I wish to convey to you today how extremely
sensible I am of our former excellent relationship and how touched by the
sentiments which inspired you to speak to me, as well as to my mother, in the
name of your parents, so prematurely departed (CS-B, 150-1) |
|
Seven days later, Proust was sitting up in bed in
his hotel in Versailles reading the morning newspapers when his eye was
caught by an article in Le Figaro. It concerned a certain Henri van
Blarenberghe who had murdered his mother the previous day, and then crudely
and ineptly committed suicide. The mother had been discovered by the maid
stumbling downstairs amid a welter of blood and unconsciously quoting the
Lamentations of Jeremiah: 'What have you done unto me?' When the police
arrived they found Henri lying on the bed downstairs with one half of his
face shot away and an eye swinging loose. He has attempted to slit his throat
and then finished himself off, nearly as inefficiently, with a bullet through
the head. He looked blankly at the gendarme who was attempting to raise him
for a moment, and then joined the spirits of his parents among the shades. |
|
On 30 January, still at Versailles, Proust received
an invitation from Gaston Calmette, editor of Le Figaro, to write the
incident up in the first is |
|
'What have you done to me? What have you done to me?' If
you wish to consider the matter, there is not one truly loving mother who
could not, on her final day, often well beforehand, level this reproach at
her son. At bottom we age, we kill the thing that loves us by the anxieties
we cause, by the restless solicitude we inspire, endlessly provoking alarm.
If we could but recognize that slow process of destruction caused in the
beloved body by the sorrowing tenderness that animates it, witness the
straitened eyesight, the hair which has so long remained indomitably black
succumbing like everyone else's to whiteness, the hardened arteries, stopped
kidneys, overtaxed heart, courage vanquished before life, slackening stride.32 |
|
'I wanted', Proust wrote in the uncancelled section
of the article, 'to prove in what pure and pious an atmosphere of moral
beauty this bloody madness had taken place.' Blarenberghe's crime had been
not simply understandable but sacred. He was like Ajax, like Orestes, like
Oedipus: figures honoured by the Greeks. His death reminds us of Lear's, and
with Kent we well might say |
|
Vex not his ghost: O let him pass; he hates him |
|
That would upon the rack of this tough world |
|
Stretch him out longer. |
|
But, as Proust himself later acknowledged, the
deleted last paragraph of his article, restored in Pastiches et mélanges,
brings to mind another and more recent slayer: Trooper C.T. Woolridge,
committed on remand in Reading Gaol in 1895, accused of murdering his young
wife in a fit of passion. 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', Wilde's elegiac
meditation on his incarceration and subsequent hanging, had been translated
into French prose with great dispatch by Henry-D Davray in 1898, the year of
the poem's appearance, for the April is |
|
Pourtant chaque
homme tue ce qu'il aime, et que chacun le sache: les uns font avec un regard
de haine, d'autres avec des paroles caressantes, le lâche avec un baiser,
l'homme brave avec une épée. |
|
Les uns tuent
leur amour quand ils sont jeunes, les autres quand ils sont vieux; certains
l'étranglent avec les mains du Désir, d'autres avec les mains de l'or; les
meilleurs se servent d'un couteau, car si tôt les morts se refroidissent.33 |
|
In glossing his translation, Davray gallicised the
crime, the young wife victim becoming naturally 'sa maîtresse'. But Wilde's
lines refer too to his own circumstances: it was Lady Jane Francesca Wilde
('Speranza'), Irish nationalist and poet, who had died in the early months of
1896, weakened by bronchitis and broken by her son's disgrace. Constance
Wilde had travelled from Genoa to Reading to break the news, and by 1900 she
too was dead, succumbing to a disease of the spine.34
Wilde's disgrace and expulsion from polite society had decimated his family,
his wife and mother 'aged and killed' by it within a very few months. Strange
that in January 1907, eighteen months after his own mother's demise, Proust
should parrot these lines, stranger too that he should reverse the clausal
structure, turning rueful self-knowledge into affectionate remorse. |
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But the incident had touched a nerve. Way back in
1894, in Les Plaisirs et les jours, he had published a story in which
a young girl horrifies her mother on the eve of her marriage by being
discovered in flagrante with a moustachioed lover. Seeing them from a
balcony, the mother falls forward and dies later of heart pains brought by
the incident. The girl is not so much disturbed by the thought of any love
play her mother might have witnessed as by a suspicion that she might have
caught the expression of gloating pleasure in a looking-glass where, like
Dorian before the portrait, she saw for the first time her own callous nature
revealed (P&J, 95-6). For Proust, illicit love always seems to
have been connected with the violation of parental ties, or else with a
wilful urge towards cruelty. The autumn before Blarenberghe's suicide, he had
already written to Reynaldo Hahn suggesting a theatrical project based on a
scenario in which a callous though devoted husband brings prostitutes home,
where he is surprised by his wife in the act of cursing her behind her back.
The wife faints, then leaves him. After a futile attempt at reconciliation,
he kills himself (Cor, VI, 216). There were obscure analogies in
Proust's own life. Albaret has an ane |
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Ronald Hayman speaks of the tension in the Proust
household at the time of the cat-and-mouse affair with Comte Bertrand de
Salignac-Fenelon.36 There were quarrels about
furniture: a writing-desk that was moved out of his room and then back again.
Proust was up at all hours, and then could not see his mother during the day.
There were endless notes to and fro speaking both of contrition on his part,
and between them a slow process of attrition that could not have done her
health, nor his, much good. His brother Robert was about to get married, and
the sense of his own slow drift towards another mode of existence would have
caused him both guilt and pain. In the second part of Sodome et Gomorrhe
the narrator speaks of the invert's condition as one in which the presence of
the mother is reborn in the physique of her son: Charlus shows the face of
his mother unawares and thus betrays his femininity (NP, IV, 593-6). The last
turn of the knife is this: that in scorning the values of his parents, the
perpetrator manifests the symptoms of his pleasure on features on which the
parents' presence is written plain. Thus are ecstasy and betrayal
inextricably intertwined. Was this what caused Proust to interpret
Blarenberghe's crime as one in which a son murders his mother out of pure
devotion? The sentiment is much of its period, with its careful transposition
of values, converting filial love and piety -those most elusive and
compromising of virtues- into a poisonous condition. A questionable conjuring
trick we might think, even if, armed with a Freudianism that it is so
tempting and therefore so dangerous to apply, we are inclined to add that
Oedipus did in fact murder his father. |
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Wilde's fall from grace was noted by Davray in his
'Lettres anglaises' section of Le Mercure de France in the very same
month as the Ballad appeared. Oscar, who was soon in Paris once again, might
well have seen it, as almost certainly did Proust, an avid reader of the
monthly. Exempt from the moralising of certain sections of the British press,
Le Mercure attributes the peripeteia of Wilde's fortune, less to a besetting
hubris than to a sort of ethical vertico. Taken up to the pinnacle of the
Temple, Wilde defies Christ's example and leaps: |
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A poet, dazzling mind, marvellous artist, a being unique
and paradoxical, attains in a very short time the dizzy summit of universal
acclaim, glory even, that sovereignty of mind he sees no need to curb.
Caprices, fantasies, audacities he permits himself all, too complacent in his
supremacy, too certain that nobody can challenge him, irremediably isolated
on that eminence from which he cannot descend, he is visited by the spirit of
the Devil who, having shown him the impossibility of ever leaving his throne
and descending by the way by which he came up, reminds him of the ovations,
the praises, the adoration of which he has been the object and which he will
once more encounter as soon as he returns to the midst of those whose cries
once besieged him, and says unto him Mitte te deorsum [Cast thyself
down]. But the cries were not praises: already the murmur has turned hostile
though the poet in his trial longs for his fall whatever form it will take,
certain that regret will never come, that he would prefer a long and
variegated path to a pinnacle without limit or egress. When he reaches the
bottom the murmur turns to fury and to hate, the thurifers and worshippers
throw themselves on the recalcitrant idol, on the very poet who had once been
all refinement, paradox, artificiality, charm and seduction; they teach him
that there is indeed a reality, what atrocities and tragic sorrows it holds
in store for those who acknowledge nothing but the ideal, who outstrip moral
systems, hypocrisies and restraints, for those to whom are reserved
Calvaries, crucifixions and butcheries.37 |
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Davray's purple prose contains a serious point:
disgrace can be the last throw of the dice, the last expedient for those whom
fate has denied nothing. To adapt Barrie, 'failure would be an awfully big
adventure'. Is there some sense in regarding Charlus's less public
humiliation in this light? There was an immediate analogy to hand, since in
the years leading up the inception of la A la recherche Proust's mind
had been led to concentrate on the matter of homosexual disgrace by the Eulenburg
scandal in Germany. The Prince von Eulenburg (1847-1921) had been the close friend
and associate of the Kaiser Wilhelm II. He was secretary to the Prussian
mission in Munich and subsequently ambassador to Vienna, and was even at one
time offered the chancellorship in the power vacuum following the departure
of Bismarck. But in 1906 a series of allegations of homosexual misconduct in
the newspaper Die Zukunft rocked Prussia. Eulenburg was implicated,
failed to clear his name, and was forced to resign. In the aftermath of the
affair Proust was fascinated enough to propose 'an essay on pederasty' to
Robert Dreyfus, who had himself published a study of Eulenburg's friend
Gobineau. The project came to nothing, since its topicality proved in the end
too much of a deterrent at a time when he was learning to pour all of his
observations of the world into his forthcoming book. But Eulenburg retained
his compassion: 'You have been able to do for Gobineau', he wrote to Dreyfus,
'what ... the poor Eulenburg could not do'. In a later letter to Reynaldo
Hahn he makes reference to a letter to Montesquiou from the Prince von
Radolin, German ambassador in Paris, assuring him of his personal sympathy.
'He would have done better to have sympathized a bit with Eulenburg', he
wrote (Cor, VIII, 164). |
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Such incidents were not edifying. In the essay 'La
Race Maudite', employing the metaphor of circus lions, he speaks of the fate
of those who must go on |
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living on terms of household intimacy with those who at
the sight of his offence, should scandal break out, would turn and savage as
do wild animals at the sight of blood, but accustomed, seeing them at peace
with him on daily life, to talk homosexuality to provoke their growls (so
that nowhere does one talk homosexuality so freely as before a homosexual)
till that day comes, as sooner or later it must, when he will be torn to
pieces -like the poet to whom every London drawing room was open- he and his
works prosecuted, not able to find a drawing room to shelter him, and after
expiation and death to see his statue raised above his grave.38 |
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In Sodome et Gomorrhe the reference to the
banning of Salomé disappears, to be replaced by a quotation from
Alfred de Vigny: |
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Without any but the most precarious honour, without any
but the most provisional liberty until the discovery of the crime, within any
but the most unstable social position, like the poet feted the previous day
in all the salons of London, and on the morrow expelled from every lodging,
unable even to find a bolster on which to lay his head, at the mill like
Samson and saying too like him 'Two sexes shall die, each one apart.' (NP, |
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Proust had wished to dedicate Sodome et Gomorrhe
to that famous Gomorrhan the Princesse de Polignac, but she in embarrassment
declined. Wilde's disgrace, it seems, served as a pattern for the chronic
insecurity experienced by those who persist in exercising the 'contrivances
of nature' within a static Linnaean order governed by the simple sexual
typology of an Erasmus Darwin. |
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VIII |
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'Nature has good inclinations, of course, but as
Aristotle once said, she is quite incapable of carrying them out.' Thus
Vivian in ‘The Decay of Lying’, after refusing to lie on the grass and 'enjoy
nature'. Nature is in a muddle, and art redeems it. Nature's contrivances had
been part of Darwin's programme, but Wilde preferred to see art, like
sexuality, as at variance with the merely natural. the spray over which that
desultory bee hovers at the beginning of Dorian Gray is severed at the
stem. Dorian receives his epiphany in a garden exultant with summer flowers;
thereafter all the flowers are in vases; Lady Wotton cultivates orchids by
wearing them on her dress. 'A well-made buttonhole is the only link between
art and nature', said Wilde in an aphorism quoted in the French edition of Intentions.
If nature has her contrivances, those of men are greater, putting her to
shame. The point of literature is not to portray things as they are, but to
improve upon them. |
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Proust and Wilde are very different authors, but
they have a common starting point in the notion inherited from their
respective predecessors of art as species of mimesis. This was the view
central to Ruskin's philosophy, and both eventually turned their backs on it.
In an essay from Contre Sainte-Beuve Proust speaks of the peculiar
energy that informs Balzac's characters, a gusto stolen ultimately from the
author and his own crude love of life (CS-B, 263-95). Balzac's
characters walk around their fictive universe eructating, calculating,
behaving invariably in the most impeccable bad taste. Mme de Bargeton guffaws
shamelessly like battery of field artillery; Vautrin incontrollably sings;
Mme de Nucingen shamelessly pretends to intimacy with Mme de Grandlieu whom
she has not even met. It is this coarsegrained texture in Balzac, which
extends from social class to social class, from individual to the spluttering
author himself, which looks like realism, causing his less sophisticated
readers to view La Comédie Humaine as a literal representation of the
external world. In the middle of his essay Proust introduces a certain
Marquise, an inveterate reader of Balzac who is none the less critical of him
for distorting the social originals whom in her view he set out to portray:
'He claimed that he was portraying the society of Madame's ladies in waiting.
I knew them well. It wasn't like that at all.' In A la recherche the
same philistine attitudes are held by Mme de Villeparisis, endlessly
comparing the books she reads to their supposed models, very much to the
disadvantage of the former. |
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For Proust this is all the direct kind of
misunderstanding, a variety of the Sainte-Beuviste mistake of seeking the
clue to an author's work in his public bearing and conversation. At one point
the Marquise commits both mistakes at once: 'First of all it's untrue all
that he wrote about society. They didn't receive him. Why did he write about
what he did not know?' The irony is that the Marquise, like Mme de
Villeparisis, is trapped, like a crustacean under aspic, inside a work of art
from which she will never be able to extricate herself, hard as she might try.
When it comes to the portrayal of others, artists invariably have the last
laugh. We may complain as bitterly as we choose that Mme de Villeparisis
bears an insufficient resemblance to Madeleine Lémaire, whom Painter -not
immune to a Sainte-Beuvisme of his own- takes to be one of her originals.39
But like Dorian Gray Mme Lémaire has withered away, leaving her portrait. If,
with the virtue of hindsight, we read Proust's book and believe ourselves to
be recognising within it types known to us, we are doing no more than
recognising that weird ontological trick according to which life falls into
configurations previously traced by art. |
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Proust recognised this, as did Wilde. Halfway
through his essay Proust pays tribute to the shared insight: |
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In his early days (the days when he said 'It is only since
the Lake Poets that there have been fogs on the Thames'), Oscar Wilde, who
was later to learn from life that there are keener sorrows than those we get
from books, said 'The greatest sadness of my life. The death of Lucien de
Rubempré in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes'. (CS-B, 273) |
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About the Lakeland Poets, in fact, Wilde said no
such thing: what Proust has done is to run together two different remarks
from 'The Decay of Lying', the first of which has to do with an empirical
confirmation of a predisposition towards natural theology: |
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Wordsworth went to the lakes, but he was never a lake
poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there. He went
moralizing about the district, but his good work was produced when he
returned, not to nature, but to poetry... Poetry gave him 'Laodamia', and the
finest sonnets, and the great Ode, such as it is. Nature gave him 'Martha
Ray' and 'Peter Bell' and the address to Mr Wilkinson's spade.40 |
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'I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade',
remarks Gwendolen snappishly to Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest,
'It is obvious that our social spheres have been very different.' According
to this view, Wilde did not see spades so much as invent them, just as he
interprets the whole of nature according to his own neo-Platonic lights. Just
as, in a later section of 'The Decay of Lying', the Impressionists are said
to have invented London smogs: |
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At present people see fogs not because they are fogs, but
because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such
effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there
were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them.41 |
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Proust's confusion arose because Vivian is making
the same point about natural facts imitating art or, to put it in a different
way, art predisposing vision. The remark about fogs is one of Wilde's magpie
thefts from the source of the whole argument, Whistler's Ten O'Clock,
which Charlus too at one point paraphrases to some effect. In much the same
way, Balzac's vaunted realism is nothing but a trompe l'oeil. We see
the inhabitants of La Comédie Humaine as Second Empire types simply
because, armed with a general impression of Balzac's work, we have trained
ourselves to view the Second Empire in this way. The weakness of Zola, says
Vivian, is that he tries to give us reality undistilled: when accused of
untruthfulness, he is simply being forced to taste his own medicine. Truth
for Balzac is, by contrast, a subjective affair. 'The difference between such
a book as Zola's L'Assommoir and Balzac's Illusions Perdues is
the difference between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality.' |
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The real plays uncanny pranks, dissolving as one
looks at it. Any account of the external world based on a supposition of
authenticity (we may say relevance) is bound to fail. On 16 May 1908 Proust
wrote to Dreyfus explaining why, despite his compelling claim on his
attention, he would not after all be writing an essay on the Eulenburg
affair: |
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The same reason which makes me think that the importance
and the supersensible reality of art prevent certain ane |
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Those who confuse art with life invite the
consequences. Wilde's final weakness was that, preaching the complete
separation of art and life, he lived otherwise, presenting his own existence
as the perfect artefact in much the same way as did Montesquiou. Despite his
superior intelligence, Wilde was closer to Dorian than he thought, provoking
his own ruin as surely as Dorian provoked his. |
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Properly considered, mundane existence does not need
this kind of support from art. Neither does art need it from life, or authors
from one another. The very consideration which, in Le Temps retrouvé force
the narrator to dispense with any naïve reliance on life, forced Proust in
the end to refrain from any naïve reliance on Wilde. Towards the end of The
Effects of Cross-Fertilization in the Vegetable Kingdom Darwin explains
that after several generations of cross-fertilisation nature will
occasionally intervene to maintain a proper balance by one exceptional act of
self-fertilisation.42 Such acts are uncommon, though the
structure of hermaphrodite flowers makes them possible. There are even some
flowers that regularly fertilise themselves without the aid of others or the
intervention of any insect. Among them is a species of orchid that acts as
its own ministering drone. This lone exception to a general rule was of such
absorbing interest to Darwin that he was prepared to live for a thousand
years to have the pleasure of witnessing its extinction.43
But art is not life; nor is it sex. Finally Proust is a bee-orchid. |
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·
Robert
Fraser is a biographer and critic, dramatist and historian
of ideas. He has published on Marcel Proust (Proust
and the Victorians, 1994), and on Victorian Quest
Romance (for the Writers and Their Work Series, 1998), while his Making of the Golden Bough,
his study of the genesis of Sir James Frazer's anthropological classic, has
recently been re-is |
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·
The Editor thanks Mathilde Mazau for typing this
version. |
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