By RONALDO TADEU DE SOUZA*
Proust did not want to write a book that merely described the passage of things that entangle the coexistence between individuals.
“Horizon of radical exteriority: excess; expropriation; an absolute other place”
(Denise Ferreira da Silva, the unpayable debt).
From the end of volume six to the beginning of volume seven, from The Fugitive protocols for Time Rediscovered, respectively, of the In Search of the Lost Time, the following passage is included. “— All this is long gone — he concludes —. I have never thought of anything but Robert since we became engaged. And, you see, not even this childhood whim is what I blame myself for the most… […] All day long, in the mansion in Tansoville, a little too rustic, with the feel of a place to rest between two walks or during a downpour, one of those houses whose living rooms resemble gazebos, and where, on the walls of the bedrooms, here the roses from the garden, there the birds from the trees, would come and keep us company — each in turn — because they were covered with old papers, on which each rose stood out so much that, if it were alive, it could be picked, each bird caged and domesticated, with none of the grand decorations of today’s bedrooms, where, against a silver background, all the pear trees from Normandy are lined up in Japanese style, to make the hours we spend in bed hallucinate, I would spend the whole day in the room, which overlooked the green foliage of the park and the lilacs at the entrance, the green leaves of the large trees by the water, shining in the sun, and the forest of Méséglise. I only looked at all this with pleasure, after all, because I said to myself: “It’s beautiful to have so much greenery in my bedroom window,” until the moment when, in the vast verdant picture, I recognized, painted backwards in dark blue, because it was further away, the bell tower of the church of Combray, not an image of a bell tower, but the bell tower itself, which, thus placing before my eyes the distance of leagues and years, had come, amid the luminous greenery and with an entirely different tone, so somber that it seemed only drawn, to inscribe itself in the diamond shape of my window. And if I left the room for a moment, at the end of the corridor, which was oriented in a different direction, I could perceive, like a scarlet strip, the lining of a small, simple room. muslin, but red, and ready to catch fire if a ray of sunlight touched it.”
The fate of the expressiveness of this passage by Marcel Proust, which as I said, is found in the passage from volume six to volume seven of In Search of the Lost Time, is in the narrator's ecstatic life scenes. Hence time cannot be more than — the instant of the wording of each sentence of the paragraph, of the immanence of the metaphors themselves and of the instant of articulation of the signs. In truth, what Marcel enunciates is the possibility of the duration of the things that constitute our experience not being established by the external framework of a non-authentic world; of the facts of irreconcilability with the ways of life imposing their determinations.
Let us note the content of the meanings of the last sentence of the paragraph below, in which the elements “mousseline” and “a ray of sun” are interchanged. Thus, the position of inert finesse of the fabric used to make clothing is disturbed by the incandescent presence of nature’s artifices. However, the character-narrator proposes a game of latent inversions; that which is not feasible to be engendered by human impulse, passes at the point of the sentence to moments of appropriation by the strength of Marcel’s self, and that which is in the order of handling expedients (human) is transformed into a naturalized object.
When Marcel Proust has his protagonist (who also weaves the plot reminiscent of the time he seeks) say that a ray of sunlight burns the warp of life (“about to burst into flames if a ray of sunlight touched it”) in such a way as to imagine in the meaning of the construction the earthly proximity posed by Marcel’s in-itself character — without first instituting adjectives, “brilliant” and “simple”, expressing sometimes the influx of varied perceptions, sometimes the immovable basis — which is represented as something metamorphosed into a fixed order and unmoved by interactive displacements, but ready to burst through the overflow of the self, he wanted his novel to be read as saps of exuberant temporality of the otherness in-us.
In effect; the structure of Proustian prose, through the narrator's resource, is transfigured into immediate articulation — which in Marcel's desperation to forge himself through the apprehension of the past through memory inverts and reverses (again) the experiential sign of human things and nature.
Within the paragraph the sequence of elaboration of the loquacity of the self is extended to the pleasant exaggeration that runs throughout the entire paragraph. In Search of the Lost Time. “I only looked at all this with pleasure, after all, because I said it from me to me […]”. The secret of this sentence lies in the outpouring of the self onto itself. Proust did not intend to limit Marcel’s self to bourgeois subjectivism (evidence of snobbish conventions); throughout the phrasing, thoughts about experience are infused — the saying “me to me” metamorphoses the massive oblique grammatical-pronominal form into lyricism fascinated by the (even) enthusiastic confrontation of the narrator.
We are no longer in the presence of a circular movement that folds in on itself; the sentence contains traces of ideal figures that speak of themselves for themselves as if they were, and for Marcel Proust they were…, the reality derived from the intrinsic meaning of literary composition itself. Now, the influx of secularity that the “after all” intersperses in the construction is not fortuitous. Certainly, the “look with pleasure” that as such would convey excitability of self-praise (always snobbish), passes into the conformation of the passage, symbolizing moments of enchantment intensified by the temporality of our feelings. In the course of this Proustian phrasing — the words are fiery undulations that express Marcel’s existential restlessness.
Marcel Proust's character, who forges his ego in otherness, the expression of himself, pulsed with poeticity. For he transmutes the unity of nature — into historical forms of subjectivities. Birds; trees; foliage; water; sun; forest; downpour (of rain). Isolated: they are elements determined in an ordered way without life, configuring positions of scarce aesthetic intuition. It did not occur to Marcel to appropriate these naturalized circumstances without ceasing to rush into them, enchanted realities.
In the immanent articulation of the paragraph, the entire poetic constellation of In Search of the Lost Time; the judgment that unfolds in each plot is dotted with living illusions — it is as if nature no longer represents itself, but rather the narrator's dreamy hope in the happiness of the self in the other self. However, Marcel Proust only manages to make nature different from itself because in the execution of the novel there is the indeterminate postulation of language.
In order to compose universal forms of literary essence articulated with the individuality of the narrator who, with each elaborated action, raises infinities of meanings. Thus, the birds are “there in the trees” (not in themselves); the green leaves are brought by Marcel to the peculiar angle of the bedroom window — “all day long I would stay in my room, which looked out onto the green foliage” —; the water, a chemical component with a final destination, begins to sparkle peculiarities, structuring time in small moments — sometimes it is close to “big trees”, sometimes it radiates the “brilliant rays of the sun” by itself —; the sun, always positioned in the cosmos, acquires, through the vivacity of the Proustian plot, features typical of an other of presence — the “brilliant moments of the sun […] only looked, after all, with pleasure at all this”. In the outpouring of poeticity of the passage, self-perceptions of the dissolubility of everything that stands far from the truth of time are explored.
For Marcel Proust did not want to write a book that merely described the passage of things that entangle the coexistence between individuals (and themselves); the remembrance of the self that emerges within his work is the repercussion of an anguish in throwing the most beautiful particles of subjectivity into the world — the dismantling of the self in material experience had the authentic hope of recognition, and this could only be achieved with the expression of the self in the course of experience.
In this way, it is at the heart of the interweaving of scenes that the passage analyzed exercises the sublime artifice of expressing itself in time. It (the passage, the paragraph), concerning the formal organization of the In Burka of Lost Time, begins Marcel's sentimental journey towards the time that is discovered. Philologically — Marcel Proust traces the passionate coexistence between praise and fable. These two constitutive instances of the core human vocabulary are recalled by Proust as displacements of the self in temporality. They are exuberant points to which the words that conceive the genesis, the opening, of Time Rediscovered go from being mere modes of linguistic interaction between individuals to sudden torrents of inspiration.
Marcel was always anxious to find that moment, in which, in the same instant of himself in time, he could preserve his compassionate phlegm and rise to the inflamed splendor of the unheard-of narrative; praising “the mansion of Tansonville”, “the pear trees of Normandy”, “the forest of Méséglise”, “the bell tower of the Church of Combray” — these were founding gestures of a character overcome by the need for subjective affirmation. The world of Marcel-and-Proust, however, only exhibits literary (and aesthetic…) meaning in the words that overflow its immediate identity — in the fable.
These are inventive arrangements, the very structure of the plot that is stylized, incited by the narrator's contingency. For, with each time that breaks through: it is no longer the muslin, “but the red [muslin]”, the bell tower is both its “image” and “the bell tower itself” immortalized in Marcel's inner reality, and the birds (concrete and real) “caged and domesticated” were elevated according to the passing of the days, hours and minutes to appreciable representations in the dialectic of becoming-who-one-is.
Within the passage, Marcel states, after commenting on the church of Combray; “thus placing before my eyes the distance of leagues and years”. In the superficial configuration, it is his life that is permanently entangled by “time” — not his authentic time — naturalized. The drama here was in being an undeserved object in the face of the various ways in which experience unfolds while hiding itself; which is what most tormented Marcel Proust’s character throughout the entire story. In Search of the Lost Time it was his suffering for not being able, in several parts of the narrative, to deflect from the whirlwinds into which he was thrown by the very circumstances of his existence.
And one can read Proust's work as the subject's incessant and courageous commitment to rising with poetic courage to the sublime virtues of time, since the recurrence in which we witness Marcel's distressing steps and his insistence on following them anyway expresses such a demand.
However, the immanent construction of the sentence means that the structuring elements of the real that has passed — “the distance”; “the leagues”; “the years” — are, with the fervor of modern subjectivity, the urgency to which the pursuit of happiness allows the eyes of the self to place under it — sometimes reaching intangibility in the ways of feeling, such is the beauty of the elaboration — the “chains of destiny” (Walter Benjamin); only by being desperate with himself, fascinated by the feminine otherness (Mrs. de Guermantes, Gilberte, Albertine, Andrée, the grandmother whose name we do not know), enchanted by the beauty that fades, affected by the brief opportunities for pleasure, uncontained before the possibility of weaving a story of passion — is what allowed Marcel Proust’s complement to symbolize the-invocation-of-who-he-is. (The by ding “distance”, the by ding “leagues” and the of the ding “years” were no longer the same after Marcel, and the desire for recognition he cherished, had looked at them: they were the becoming of itself made explicit in the whole of temporality. [The reference to “das ding” is the counterpoint to “die sache” that Hegel makes in the preface to Phenomenology of Spirit, this is the unity of the whole in the becoming of time and that is the thing, merely].)
The multifaceted framework established by Marcel Proust's protagonist is like a precious scaffolding that supports the trajectory of the self in crossing the abyss of the universalism of bourgeois (naturalized) civilization. Witnessing moments of emptiness in the fragile description of nature, in such a way as to feel involved in the non-human connections of our lives, Marcel glimpsed that the negation of this world could only be achieved through vehement mimicry.
It was necessary for the senses of the subject who is self-conforming throughout the pages of the novel, a disposition (allegorical) that would make it feasible for the reader to perceive that Marcel, and to that extent the entire narrative of the book do opportunity sought as a manifestation of-itself, was not spreading (subjectivist) affectations when impacted by the forms of inert exhibition of nature — in the circumstances of intersections of the peaks of passionate reconstruction of existence at that time, Marcel Proust made his literary creation demonstrate that it is in the excess of our sensibilities in the time of-itself in-otherness the hope of constituting ways of being that are not subject to the implacable universalisms (naturalized by the bourgeois era).
Marcel's aesthetic-emotional vicissitudes, present in the commented point, are the truth apprehended from a subjectivity expressed — and which takes hold of itself — in the course of existence, which never accepted the cynicism (it is the opposite of it...) to which Gilberte and Saint-Loup surrender when they get married in the final prose of volume VI, The Fugitive — “Gilberte”, the first eventuality of the desperate love of the Proustian self in its quest to achieve happiness, “was convinced that the name of the Marquis de Saint-Loup was a thousand times greater than that of Orleans”.
Time expressed in itself was the rebellion that Marcel Proust wanted us to understand and cultivate for the definitive overcoming of this class. Now, the first paragraph of Time Rediscovered that I analyzed, is the annihilation, the absolute expropriation to speak with Denise Ferreira da Silva, of a bourgeois civilization that crushes all possible modalities of self-recognition in non-identical freedom, which we all deserve, especially the Françoises* of our world.[1]
*Ronaldo Tadeu de Souza He has a post-doctorate in political science from USP.
Notes
[1] Certain interpretative formulations present in the text are stylizations based on the approach of some authors. Among them are: Antonio Candido – Reality and Realism (via Marcel Proust). In: cuts, ed. Gold on Blue, 2004; Denise Ferreira da Silva – The Unpayable Debt, ed. Political Imagination Workshop, 2019 [There is a more recent edition by Zahar Editores, 2024]; Derwent May – Proust, ed. Economic Culture Fund [Breviaries], 2001; Hegel – Preface and Introduction. In: The Phenomenology of Spirit (Col. The Thinkers), ed. April Cultural, 1974; Robert Pippin – On “Becoming Who One Is” (and Failing): Proust's Problematic Selves. In: The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath, ed. Cambridge University Press, 2005; Walter Benjamin – Two Poems on Friedrich Hölderlin, On Language in General and On the Language of Man, Destiny and Character. In: Writings on Myth and Language, ed. Editora 34. About the In Search of the Lost Time, the edition is from Editora Globo.
* Françoise was (and is) the eternal “maid” of Marcel, Proust’s narrator. She is the only character in the novel to accompany him throughout the more than two thousand and five hundred pages that make up the In Search of the Lost Time.
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