Proust Moment, May 17, 2003

Four Dimensions of Space, and a Sentence to Match

Like the porch, the holy water stoup, and the memorial stones, the colors of the church's two tapestries, depicting a somewhat local version of the coronation of Esther -- she looks like a guermantes -- show signs of age, of colors running, giving the picture a new dimension, just as light at different times of the day changes the look of the stained glass. The crenelations of age give the church a character to be nowhere seen in the town: by still withstanding the onslaught of history, the church has become history.

Here, quoted below, is a fine example of the Proustian sentence, of which have already seen many fine examples: the sentence which is bent on absorbing everything in its path before reader (or writer) is allowed to catch his breath. I sometimes think of Proust as I think of Faulkner, that in moments of inspiration they look at grammatical periods as stumbling-blocks, potential log-jams. Proust takes us from a) a brief catalogue of church artifacts to b) his own entrance into the church, which makes him think of being in a fairy-land, to a consideration of how c)the 11th Century church had withstood the ravages of time, and d) how it was built in a most barbarous age, although most signs of that time are hidden within the church walls, except for e) a deep groove on the tower stair (decapitation?), which f) -- a rather strained pathetic fallacy here -- is hidden from view by a gothic arcade, much as a sensible set of older sisters would keep an immature younger brother from the eyes of strangers (had Proust been reading Austen or Sand of late?), this very tower which g) once looked down upon Saint Louis and h) also has a crypt which i) you can tour under the direction of the caretaker Theodore or his sister, who will guide you by candle-light to j) the tomb of King Sigeburt's daughter, which has a deep hole in it, which k) according to legend, is from a church lamp, which flew from the apse of the church and buried itself in the stone on the night the girl was murdered. (If someone out there could fill me in on this bit of Merovingian history, I'd be most appreciative.)

Did I miss anything? Buckle your seatbelts:

"All these things and, still more than these, the treasures which had come to the church from personages who to me were almost legendary figures (such as the golden cross wrought, it was said, by Saint Eloi and presented by Dagobert, and the tomb of the sons of Louis the Germanic in porphyry and enamelled copper), because of which I used to go forward into the church when we were making our way to our chairs as into a fairy-haunted valley, where the rustic sees with amazement on a rock, a tree, a marsh, the tangible proofs of the little people's supernatural passage—all these things made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of the town; a building which occupied, so to speak, four dimensions of space—the name of the fourth being Time—which had sailed the centuries with that old nave, where bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and hold down and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which the whole building had emerged triumphant, hiding the rugged barbarities of the eleventh century in the thickness of its walls, through which nothing could be seen of the heavy arches, long stopped and blinded with coarse blocks of ashlar, except where, near the porch, a deep groove was furrowed into one wall by the tower-stair; and even there the barbarity was veiled by the graceful gothic arcade which pressed coquettishly upon it, like a row of grown-up sisters who, to hide him from the eyes of strangers, arrange themselves smilingly in front of a countrified, unmannerly and ill-dressed younger brother; rearing into the sky above the Square a tower which had looked down upon Saint Louis, and seemed to behold him still; and thrusting down with its crypt into the blackness of a Merovingian night, through which, guiding us with groping finger-tips beneath the shadowy vault, ribbed strongly as an immense bat's wing of stone, Theodore or his sister would light up for us with a candle the tomb of Sigebert's little daughter, in which a deep hole, like the bed of a fossil, had been bored, or so it was said, "by a crystal lamp which, on the night when the Frankish princess was murdered, had left, of its own accord, the golden chains by which it was suspended where the apse is to-day and with neither the crystal broken nor the light extinguished had buried itself in the stone, through which it had gently forced its way."

--"Combray," Swann's Way

From history to myth to history and back to myth. One moment, many impressions. No wonder these Proust moments take so long to digest.

On this matter, it's worth quoting Roger Shattuck in his 1974 book Marcel Proust:

No single theory or approach will make Proust easily or quickly available to all inquiring minds. The very resistance of his work to simplification and analysis constitutes its most evident general characteristic. Beyond this feature, however, we discover endless contradictions in the Search. Walt Whitman lived at peace with the fact that he contradicted himself. He said that he contained multitudes. Proust asks the next question. How much of his multitudinous self can a person be or embody at one time? The first answer is plain common sense: it all depends. It depends on many things, from chance and volition to memory and forgetting. The second answer is categorical. No matter how we go about it, we cannot be all of ourselves all at once. Narrow light beams of perception and of recollection illuminate the present and past in vivid fragments. The clarity of these fragments is sometimes very great. They may even overlap and reinforce one another. However, to summon our entire self into simultaneous existence lies beyond our powers. we live by synecdoche, by cycles of being. More profoundly than any other novelist, Proust perceived this state of things and worked as an economist of the personality. In himself and in others he observed its fluctuations and partial realizations. Through habit and convention we may find security in "the immobility of the things around us." Yet it affords only temporary refuge. We yield with excitement, apprehension, and a deeper sense of existence to the great wheeling motion of experience. On a single page Proust refers to that endless shifting process as both "the secret of the future" and "the darkness we can never penetrate." He also has a word for it: our lot is "intermittence," the only steady state we know.

As in life itself, the scope of action and reflection encountered in the Search exceeds the capacity of one mind to hold it all together at one time. Thus the novel embodies and manifests the principle of intermittence: to live means to perceive different and often conflicting aspects of reality. This iridescence never resolves itself completely into a unitive point of view. Accordingly, it is possible to project out of the Search itself a series of putative and intermittent authors. Precisely that has happened. The portraitist of an expiring society, the artist of romantic reminiscence, the narrator of the laminated `I,' the classicist of formal structure -- all these figures are to be found in Proust, approximately in that order of historical occurrence. All are present as discernible components of his vision and his creation. His principle of intermittence anticipates such veerings of critical emphasis. It is in the middle of a literary discussion that his Narrator observes, "On ne se realise que successivement." It really means: one finds, not oneself, but a succession of selves. Similarly, Proust's work is still going on in our gradual discovery of it."

(Want more? Go here. I've suddenly realized I could have saved myself a lot of typing if I had looked at it first.)