French Literature: A Very Short Introduction (15 page)

The endless change that seemed to Baudelaire to be the only
constant of Paris accelerated a decade after Le Cygne. The FrancoPrussian War of 1870-1 ended the Second Empire and brought
the insurrection known as the Paris Commune and its bloody
suppression. Paris almost tripled its surface area in the second
half of the century, and the continued development of the rail
network centred on the capital brought more workers.

it. Claude Monet, La Gare Saint-Lazare (1877)

One side of this change is reflected in the naturalist novels
of Emile Zola (1840-1902) with their attention to the gritty
underside of this prosperous period, the heyday of the French
colonial empire. These include LAssommoir (1877) and La Bete
humaine (1890), both about the ravages of alcoholism in workingclass families. But in reaction to naturalism in the novel and
theatre came Symbolism, which found in Baudelaire its harbinger
and in Stephane Mallarme its greatest exponent. Much of his
poetry, in appearance frivolous and occasional (for instance, a
series on women's fans, on a coiffure, etc.), concerns death and
memorialization, particularly monuments to poets. With Ronsard
and Hugo, Mallarme is probably the poet who most vigorously
championed the power of language itself to challenge death.
Mallarme's protagonists are therefore most often poets, celebrated
in a series of sonnet `tombs' such as Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe
(1876), but in time Mallarme reached the highest point of
abstraction with a protagonist named, simply, Igitur (Latin,
`therefore') in a posthumous prose text dating from around 1870,
Igitur, ou lafolie d'Elbehnon. The hero finishes in the tomb after
challenging Nothingness with a roll of the dice: `The character,
who, believing in the existence of the Absolute alone, imagines
himself everywhere in a dream [...] finds action unnecessary' (Le
personnage qui, croyant a l'existence du seulAbsolu, s'imagine
etre partout dans un rive [. ..] trouve l'acte inutile). This text may
be the earliest form of the great hermetic poem that Mallarme
published almost thirty years later, in which we seem to encounter
once again Igitur's roll of the dice: A Roll ofDice Will Never
Abolish Chance (Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard, 1897).
In its graphic disposition, apparently spattered across the page
in different fonts and type sizes, this is one of the most inventive
texts in all of French literature, and it was crucially important for
the following century.

12. A page of Stephan Mallarme's poem, Un coup de des jamais
n'abolira le hasard (1897)

The world of Proust's novel

The heady metaphysical aspirations of Mallarme's spare lyric,
which seem at times ready to leave language and the printed
page behind, appear at first to have little in common with the
roman fleuve, the immense, onward-streaming novel that marks
the emphatic beginning of the 20th century, In Search ofLost
Time (A la recherche du temps perdu, 1913-27) by Marcel Proust
(1871-1922). Yet these two authors of the belle epoque (a name
given after the First World War to the preceding period of peace
from the end of the Franco-Prussion War in 1870 until 1914)
have in common an intellectual adventurousness nourished
by the philosophical movements of the time. It is tempting to
consider Proust's novel as a Bildungsroman (or as a variant
thereof, the Kunstlerroman - the education of the artist), but
one in which the usual linearity of that form has yielded to an
extremely complex interplay of moments of experience and later
moments of interpretation. This complexity is augmented by
length, competing editions based on different opinions concerning
the proper use of posthumous material, and different English
translations with different titles. A la recherche du temps perdu,
which in the current French Pleaide edition runs (with extensive
notes) to more than 7,000 pages, is comprised of seven titled
sub-novels. The first of these (published at the author's expense in 1913), Swann's Way (Du cote de chez Swann), contains the further
subsections Combray, Swann in Love (Un amour de Swann),
and Noms de pays: le nom. The last of the seven sub-novels, Le
temps retrouve, was published in 1927, five years after Proust's
death. The novel - A la recherche du temps perdu - in terms of
the chronological range covered stretches from these childhood
memories of Combray, at the earliest, to the post-war Paris scenes
of the last novel in the series, The Past Recaptured (Le temps
retrouve, literally `time refound').

Combray, the very first section, opens with the narrator's
account of going to sleep and waking - the startling first
sentence is `For a long time, I went to bed early' (Longtemps,
je me suis couche de bonne heure). The reader has no way of
knowing who is making this statement - and, in fact, the given
name of the protagonist is mentioned only rarely throughout
the seven narratives that make up the work as a whole - but
it becomes clear very quickly that there is something very
capacious and mysterious about this `I'. Having fallen asleep
while reading, he writes, he would sometimes wake a halfhour later still thinking about the book he was reading. But
these thoughts often took a peculiar form: `it seemed to me
that I was the thing the book was about: a church, a quartet,
the rivalry between Francois I and Charles V' (il me semblait
que j etais moi-meme cc dontparlait l'ouvrage: une eglise, un
quatuor, la rivalite de Francois ler et de Charles-Quint). For
several pages, the narrator pursues this investigation into the
contents of the mind at its awakening, with comments on the
identification of the thinking subject with a series of radically
heterogeneous objects. The fact that the mind does not at first
see them as objects but simply as part of itself is, for the reader,
most striking. The narrator continues by tracing the phases of
disengagement as the thinker rejoins the world of wakefulness
and can no longer understand the dream thoughts that at first
seemed so innocently obvious.

These opening pages of the novel, with the radical questioning
of the boundaries of the self, have roots with a deep hold on the
tradition of French literature. Montaigne, in a famous passage of
the Essais, recounted his experience of returning to consciousness
after a fall in the chapter `On Practice' (De l'exercitation), as did
Rousseau in one of his Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Reveries
du promeneur solitaire). Descartes, in his Discourse on Method
(Discours de la methode, 1637) had also tried stripping the
consciousness of the self back to the simple awareness of being
that precedes any actual knowledge of the qualities of that
thinking self. In Proust's day, this Cartesian questioning had been
given a new currency by the teachings of Franz Brentano and his
two brilliant students, Edmund Husserl and Sigmund Freud. And
Proust was certainly aware of the work of Henri Bergson, whose
writings on the awareness of time have been frequently compared
with Proust's work. Though Proust probably reached his interest
in the phenomenology of the waking self independently, it is hard
to deny that he brought a new vigour and concreteness to the
exploration of consciousness, sensation, and memory.

He also gave a new prominence to childhood. The opening
meditation on going to bed and waking leads into an account of
the bedtime ritual during family summer vacations in Combray.
To distract the child from the anguished separation from his
mother that bedtime entailed, his family would let him project a
magic lantern display onto the walls of his room, where Golo, the
hero of the legendary tale represented by the images, exhibits the
ability to morph himself according to the object on which he is
projected - door knob, curtains, walls: `Gob's body itself... dealt
with any material obstacle, with any bothersome object that it
encountered, by taking it as its skeleton, incorporating it, even
the doorknob' (Le corps de Golo lui-meme... s'arrangeait de tout
obstacle materiel, de tout objet genant qu'il rencontrait en be
prenant comme ossature et en se be rendant interieur, fut-ce be
bouton de la porte...). Thus Marcel's ability, as the adult narrator, to imagine his waking self as a church or as the rivalry between
the king and the emperor is prefigured in the child's experience
of the hero's image in the lantern display as it transcends times
and places in order to be himself. While Freud was, by another
approach, teaching the long-term impact of childhood experience,
Proust knit together childhood and adulthood in this persistence
of narrative patterns and in the ability of people to identify - and
to identify with - the protagonist's role.

This ability appears in the narrator's account of Swann, an adult
friend of young Marcel's family, a Parisian who, like Marcel's
parents, has a country house in Combray. As a child, Marcel
dreads Swann's arrival for dinner parties because this means that
his bedtime ritual will be perturbed, his mother will be occupied
with her duties as hostess. In short, Swann appears as the cause
of the terrible suffering due to the absence of the loved one. As an
adult, however, Marcel sees that Swann would have known better
than anyone what that suffering was like, for he suffered also from
his love for Odette de Crecy. This treatment of Swann is simply
an example of Marcel's characteristic plasticity as narrator - but
also as protagonist - to focus on a wide range of people, of whom
he discovers different aspects as he grows older. The fascination
that appears in the early realization that 'Golo' could be himself
but also a doorknob is the force that gives value to the subsequent
realizations that people, attitudes, actions, and places that at first
seemed entirely distinct and incompatible are, in fact, united. For
instance, the paths in Combray that lead towards Swann's house
(that is, that go du cote de chez Swann) seem at first to be entirely
opposite those that go towards the chateau de Guermantes,
and Swann and the aristocratic Guermantes family seem quite
separate, but they are later shown to be connected. However,
as even his perception of the spatial organization shows, the
narrator's greatest talent is in creating unforgettable people. So
that any reader ofA la recherche du temps perdu is likely to carry
around a mental repertory with characters such as Francoise the cook, Tante Leonie, Baron Charlus, Saint-Loup, Albertine,
Elstir the painter, and so forth. These all flow out of the moi of
the narrator himself, who becomes a super-character and the
repository of the entire world that he recounts. Among the most
moving pages of the novel are in the concluding section, Le temps
retrouve, where he realizes that the past is not gone because it still
lives in him.