Time As a Constellation
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Time As aConstellation Alena Roreitnerová University of Pardubice, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies alena.tesko[email protected] SYNOPSIS The paper attempts to take seriously one of the main claims of the final part of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, where the hero-narrator announces his intention to give his work aform that usually remains invisible, namely the form of time. Our question will therefore be what structure this form has and how it permeates the whole novel. Starting from the hypothesis that the Proustian conception of time can be metaphorically described as aconstellation, Iwill try to show that this constellation can be understood as aconnection of two forms of temporality that are clearly present in the book: (1) the simultaneous qualitative time of ‘the hour’ on the one hand, and (2) the successive temporality, with its related destructive effects, on the other. If those aspects of time are considered together, the reader is confronted with amore complex idea of time as achanging constellation of relations. In the main part of the paper, Iwill try to show that this conception admits to thinking of time regained not only as rediscovery of the solipsistic time of the hero-narrator but also as time shared on adeeper level with others. And since the notion of joint attention is, at least Isuppose, necessary for the constitution of genuine intersubjective time, Iwill try to show that at the central place of the novel, namely the Venice episode, Proust is concerned precisely with the question of the emergence of time from asingular moment of shared attention. KEYWORDS Marcel Proust; time; shared attention; involuntary memory; constellation; Maurice Merleau-Ponty; qualitative time; intentionality; succession; relational conception of time; Gérard Genette; intersubjectivity. DOI https://doi.org/10.14712/23366680.2024.2.9 Let life be similar to aperfect piece of music or to apoem— in spite of the fact that events are partly brought in from outside, and without rhythm— but how? That is the whole problem. To make time amoving image of eternity, for it is not so naturally (Simone Weil 1956, p.12). The artist is atelescope— very marvellous in himself, as an instrument. But Ithink, on the whole, the stars are the principal part of the affair (John Ruskin, p.213). OPEN ACCESS
ALENA ROREITNEROVá 183 In this paper Iwould like to try to take seriously one of the main statements of the final part of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, where the hero-narrator announces his intention to give his work aform that usually remains invisible, namely the form of Time (IV, p.622).1 If Iprefer the phenomenological approach to others, it is because it is closest to Proustian impressionist poetics (cf. II, p.14; III, pp.880–881), which does not investigate things as causes of our perceptions but focuses on phenomena as such and on their inherent laws. The same poetics applies to the representation of time, because, according to Proust, time is born out of acertain ‘relation to things’, as MerleauPonty (1958, p.478) puts it, and other beings, especially beings to whom we are not indifferent. As the hero-narrator says in an unusually laconic way: ‘Love, what is it but space and time rendered perceptible by the heart’ (III, p.887). And it is not impossible that the special sensitivity to time (and space) induced by this feeling has something to do with that ‘special sense’ of which Proust speaks in one of his last letters where he briefly explains what he would like people to understand about his book: the image […] which seems to give the best idea of this special sense is that of atelescope trained on time, for atelescope brings into focus stars invisible to the naked eye, and Ihave tried […] to make visible to the conscious mind those unconscious phenomena which, completely forgotten, are sometimes located in the distant past (SL 1983, IV, n.162). Therefore, in the poetics of The Search, things, and especially beings to which we have the most differentiated attitude, are portrayed in various transformations of perspective and in the greatest possible spatio-temporal extension. As the Proustian narrator famously puts it at the end of the novel: And […] if Ihad not the leisure to prepare the hundred masks suitable to asingle face, were it only as the eyes see it and in the sense in which they read its features […], if Icould not introduce these changes and many others (the need for which, if one means to portray the truth has constantly been shown in the course of this narrative) into the transcription of auniverse which had to be completely redesigned, at all events Ishould not fail to depict therein man, as having the extension, not of his body but of his years […] (IV, pp.622–623). But why is the task of depicting time so important for Proust? The first immediate answer— contained, after all, in the passage quoted above— is that this poetic instrument is the only way in which reality can be truthfully represented. However, beyond that, it seems to me that the novel keeps asking the same question over and over again: whether that to which we attach the greatest importance in life, namely our love for an individual human being, can in any sense persist— even after that being, and seemingly also our feeling, has disappeared. Ithink that for Proust the ‘solution’ to this ques1 Iquote Proust’s In Search of Lost Time from the English translation by C.K.Scott Moncrieff. Irefer, however, to the original: Àla recherche du temps perdu, vol. I–IV, Pléiade, Paris 1987–1989. Icontinue to quote only the Roman numeral of the volume and the page of this edition. OPEN ACCESS
184 SLOVO A SMYSL 45 tion is the realisation of the work itself, precisely as an image of time. Why as an image of time? Because in his reflections on love, he concludes that what really matters to us may not be the other being ‘in itself’ but the time we have shared. In this sense, the hero-narrator says of himself that what he had unconsciously sought— after he had somewhat forgotten his girlfriend— in other beings, he could not find in them, for what he sought in this way was only ‘Albertine herself, the time during which we had lived together, the past in quest of which Ihad unconsciously gone’ (IV, p.135). It is obvious to any reader that the matinée in the final part of The Search is meant to show that lost time is— against our expectations— somehow regained. But in order to say that also the love for the other (or even mutual love— if such athing exists in the Proustian world)2 is preserved, it remains to be decided whether what is thus regained is only the solipsistic time of the hero-narrator or time that is also in asignificant way formed by others. For such athing to be possible, two things are required. First, time cannot be represented only on the hero-narrator’s story but must be essentially relational3— and since it can never remain just an isolated relation between self and other (since we are always part of a‘vaster system’, IV, p.137), The Search will be arepresentation of time as achanging constellation of relations. As Proust wrote already in 1914 (to Ghéon), his novel ‘has for object to show the various positions that anumber of people take in relation to one another in the course of their lives, to do for psychology what ageometer would do by going from plane geometry to geometry in space, to do, Imean, psychology in Time’ (C, XIII 3, p.371).4 Second, in order to think of time regained also as time shared with others, we must first see whether the idea of shared time is even conceivable in the Proustian universe. And since the notion of shared attention is, at least Isuppose, necessary for the constitution of genuine intersubjective time, we need to focus on whether Proust is interested in the phenomenon of shared attention in the first place. After all, who else among the novelists emphasises so much that the worlds of the others— especially if we love them— are unknowable and inaccessible; that they are ‘planetary’ different worlds and that art offers the only way out of this loneliness?5 Ibelieve that despite this general emphasis on the ‘monadological’ nature of the Proustian world, there are places in The Search where the hero-narrator reflects on the possibilities of ashared attention that is not limited to the dialogue between art2 The question of the reality of love in The Search was addressed by Merleau-Ponty in his lectures on Institution and Passivity (1954–1955); specifically in his lectures entitled The Institution of Feeling, where he confronts Sartre’s reading of Proust. See also Annabelle Dufourcq (2005) on this topic. 3 Ideliberately do not use the term ‘relative’ time (referring to Leibniz and, in Proust’s time, also to Einstein) as the opposite of ‘absolute’ time (referring to Newton), but Iuse the term ‘relational’ time as time based on arelationship (this concept can also be attributed to Leibniz, but it certainly has older predecessors). 4 The English translation Iam working with here is from Pascal Ilfri (2012, s.44). 5 In this context, Georges Poulet (1982, pp.52–74) draws aprecise parallel between the separateness of islands of spatiality and the separateness of different times and beings. It would be appropriate to interpret the concept of time as achanging constellation of relations also in its spatial dimension, but such an interpretation would be too extensive. Iwill therefore limit myself to areference to Poulet’s illuminating book. OPEN ACCESS
ALENA ROREITNEROVá 185 ists mediated by awork of art. The experience of art is certainly paradigmatic because there we can really share ‘vision’, or the focus of the artist’s attention on new relations between things.6 But such attention is always sedimented in the medium of expression or in the ‘style’ of the work.7 However, Iwill try to show that at the central place of the novel, namely the scene in the Baptistery of St Mark in Venice— to which the famous series of unconscious recollections from the final matinée refer— Proust is concerned precisely with the question of the possibility of shared attention.8 In other words, the motif of time regained— through reference to the object of the involuntary recollection— indirectly evokes the question of time that is, in adeeper sense, shared. Moreover, this emergence of intersubjective time from asingular moment of shared attention can be understood as the original foundation (Urstiftung) of the specific temporality of an artwork, which is able to arouse the attention of others (readers) and is itself animated by it. It is clear that these motives can only be followed rather briefly within the limited space of this paper. Iwill therefore proceed from the hypothesis that the Proustian conception of time can be metaphorically described as aconstellation. Iwill try to show that this constellation can be understood as aconnection of two forms of temporality that are clearly present in the book: (1) the simultaneous qualitative temporality on the one hand; and (2) successive temporality (with its related destructive effects) on the other. Athird motif of time, that of achanging constellation, establishes an adequate relationship between the two sides of temporality by showing how even seemingly untouchable (as if solipsistic) qualitative time is shaped by the presence (albeit negative) of others. THE QUALITATIVE DIMENSION OF TIME Proust’s notion of qualitative time has been extensively explored, so Iwill present it here only in brief. This idea of time appears at first glance to be aparticular qualitative dimension of experience that arises in contemplation, usually focused on natural or artistic beauty (such as acertain mood evoked by reading in the Combray garden, awalk in the Bois de Boulogne, etc.). The narrator tells us about this form of time: ‘An 6 Cf. ‘[…] the world around us (which was not created once and for all, but is created afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears to us entirely different from the old world, but perfectly clear’ (III, pp.622–623). 7 For the wider context of shared attention, which is embodied in awork of art in such away that it can transform our vision of the world, cf. Antony Fredriksson (2022, pp.131–163). 8 Inote in passing that shared attention is one of the topics that contemporary phenomenology is intensely concerned with, in dialogue with the cognitive sciences. Interesting in this context is the article by Étienne Bimbenet, who argues, somewhat paradoxically, that the experience of shared attention is not aconjunction but adisjunction, since it shows my view of the world as one of the possible ‘views’ among others. As aresult, the other emerges before me in its otherness, and at the same time the world is multiplied as the object of aplurality of perspectives (Bimbenet 2010, pp.93–110). Regarding the constitution of intermonadic temporality, see Ichiro Yamaguchi (2018). OPEN ACCESS
186 SLOVO A SMYSL 45 hour is not merely an hour, it is avase filled with perfumes, with sounds, with projects, with climates’ (IV, pp.467–468). And elsewhere he further develops this observation: ‘the most simple act or gesture remains enclosed as though in athousand jars of which each would be filled with things of different colours, odours and temperature […]’ (IV, p.448). According to Proust, the emergence of this type of simultaneous qualitative time has some presuppositions, which he explains in detail in his work. As for these presumptions, it seems to me that aclose reading of The Search makes it possible to take Proust at his word when he says that there is an elaborate theory behind his poetics, as he mentions in a1913 letter to Louis de Robert: ‘Something you could call imperceptible is for instance that taste of tea which Idon’t recognise at first and in which Irediscover the gardens of Combray. But it’s in no sense aminutely observed detail, it’s awhole theory of memory and knowledge […] not formulated directly in logical terms’ (SL, 1983, III, n.115).9 In his descriptions, Proust consistently follows the conviction that ‘all impression is two-fold, half-sheathed in the object, prolonged in ourselves by another half which we alone can know’ (IV, p.470). If this is so, then every hour is acertain encounter between us and things or others. But in order for such an encounter to occur, perceptions must be dematerialised. In Time Regained it is said literally: ‘[…] objects— abook bound like others in its red cover— as soon as they have been perceived by us become something immaterial within us, partake of the same nature as our preoccupations or our feelings at that time and combine, indissolubly with them.’ According to this logic, even aname read in abook ‘contains within its syllables the swift wind and the brilliant sun of the moment when we read it’ (IV, p.463). Under these circumstances, thoughts, feelings and perceptions necessarily form akind of mixture that comes together according to certain laws, which Proust’s narrator sometimes describes as ‘associations of ideas’ (I, p.193, etc.) or ‘associations of memories’ (I, p.184). It should be immediately qualified, however, that this conception will be very specific (since it differs significantly from classical empiricism). Isuggest— as ahypothesis— that specific Proustian associations or assemblages presuppose acertain differentiation of time (and space) that is performed precisely by the activity of attention. Iwill try to explain this hypothesis further. Proust’s hero-narrator believes that the primary source of knowledge (as well as artistic inspiration) is sensation— at first very vague and almost indiscernible:10 ‘our knowledge is not of the external objects which we try to observe, but of involuntary sensations’ (III, p.672). The fact that these sensations or impressions are involuntary is decisive not only for perception or cognition in abroader sense but also for memory, since the defining feature of the impressions that are also at the origin of Proustian reminiscences is precisely that the hero-narrator ‘was not free to choose them, that they had been given to [him] as they were’ (IV, p.457). It is therefore characteristic of these impressions that they come from acertain encounter with reality. And as such they form, in their totality, a‘book’ that has been ‘printed within us by reality itself’ (IV, p.458). However, if Proust at the same time claims that this book printed by reality is an ‘inner book’, the reason 9 Translation slightly modified. 10 Cf. for example the iconic observation of hawthorns: ‘the sentiment which they aroused in me remained obscure and vague […]’ (I, p.137). OPEN ACCESS
ALENA ROREITNEROVá 187 for this apparent contradiction is that the random impressions then demand aparticular attention that only makes it possible to read them, that is, to perform acertain creative act that brings them to expression (VI, p.461), while the result of such an effort always remains uncertain. Here Irecall only the emblematic passage where the hero-narrator suddenly notices the pink marble reflection of atiled roof upon the pond, areflection he had never paid attention to before, and cries aloud ‘damn, damn, damn, damn!’, at the same time feeling that he should not content himself ‘with these unilluminating words, but to endeavour to see more clearly into the sources of my enjoyment’ (I, p.153). The narrator then echoes these moments in Time Regained when he realises, that ‘as far back as at Combray, Iwas attempting to concentrate my mind on acompelling image (je fixais avec attention devant mon esprit quelque image), acloud, atriangle, abelfry, aflower, apebble, believing that there was perhaps something else under those symbols Iought to try to discover […]’ (IV, p.457). It is precisely these moments of solitary contemplation, in which things emerge in their full reality, at the same time becoming signs or symbols that refer to something else, since they require further searching, which can only be achieved ‘in ourselves’ (according to the logic of the duality of impressions already mentioned). It seems to me that this whole conception corresponds to the double aspect of attention, which is both passive and active: attention here initially means acertain openness to external impressions (for example, to the correspondence between the light on the roof and in the pond), but then it becomes acreative faculty that dematerialises these impressions and makes them transparent.11 Only in this way can things, beings and even the variability of the weather become part of that mixture which fills the vessels of time, and only in this form can individual impressions contain whole landscapes: And if […] they were for me, in their capacity as aduke and aduchess, real people, though of an unfamiliar kind, this ducal personality was in its turn enormously distended, immaterialised, so as to encircle and contain that Guermantes of which they were duke and duchess, all that sunlit ‘Guermantes way’ of our walks, the course of the Vivonne, its water-lilies and its overshadowing trees, and an endless series of hot summer afternoons (I, pp.169–170). However, what is including and what is included are not entirely indifferent. For it seems that what encompasses everything else is usually what receives the most intense attention: in the first place, works of art, then beloved beings, aristocratic ladies, various environments and, last but not least, natural beauties. Moreover, everything suggests that these ‘gravitational centres’ of qualitative time carry more weight in Proust’s world than the diachronic identity of the characters: ‘All the memories 11 Similarly, Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception, speaks about two sides of the same operative intentionality: ‘We found beneath the intentionality of acts, or thetic intentionality, another kind which is the condition of the former’s possibility: namely an operative intentionality already at work before any positing or any judgement, a“Logos of the aesthetic world”, an “art hidden in the depths of the human soul”, one which, like any art, is known only in its results’ (Merleau-Ponty 1958, p.498). OPEN ACCESS
188 SLOVO A SMYSL 45 which composed the original Mlle Swann were, in fact, foreshortened by the Gilberte of now, held back by the magnetic attraction of another universe (par les forces d’attraction d’un autre univers), united to asentence of Bergotte and bathed in the perfume of hawthorn’ (VI, p.568). At the same time, however, the experience of involuntary memories shows that even the infinitesimal periphery of such auniverse has the ability to indicate acentre from which everything else can subsequently unfold. Proust’s qualitative time is thus arranged around certain foci of attention, to which other perceptions are associated in akind of ‘gravitation’. For this reason, associations are not mere representations of things as if passively imprinted in memory, which are only arbitrarily attached to aparticular time and space. Rather, they remain hidden clues to the deeper state of mind that caused them. When it comes to these deeper states, Proust knows different degrees of attention; one of the highest is undoubtedly the ability to contemplate awork of art (such as asonata): ‘Composers were warned not to strain the attention of their audience, as though we had not at our disposal different degrees of attention, among which it rests precisely with the artist himself to arouse the highest’ (III, p.210). And it hardly needs to be said that an even deeper state of mind than that which works of art evoke is, according to Proust, that which is capable of producing them. As he puts it: ‘in the state of mind in which we “observe” we are along way below the level to which we rise when we create’ (II, p.127). Yet the very ability to create presupposes the capacity to focus not just on external things but on that ‘inner book of signs’, as we have seen above; in other words, creation implies the ‘contemplation of the essence of things’ (IV, p.454), of ‘our true life’ (IV, p.459). TIME AS SUCCESSION This is what qualitative time looks like, structured more or less by the creative attention of someone who contemplates nature or awork of art, or who even creates it himself. But every reader of Proust knows that, in addition to this lyrical time, the narrator also portrays in every detail the destructive ‘effect of Time’ (VI, p.553), which, in accordance with the old mythological visions, is devouring what it itself has produced. One of the exemplary passages describing the horror of temporality as such is found quite early in The Search in connection with the hero’s anxious arrival in Balbec: And our dread of afuture in which we must forego the sight of faces, the sound of voices that we love, friends from whom we derive to-day our keenest joys, this dread, far from being dissipated, is intensified, if to the grief of such aprivation we reflect that there will be added what seems to us now in anticipation an even more cruel grief; not to feel it as agrief at all— to remain indifferent (yrester indifférent); for if that should occur, our ego would have changed […]; so that it would be in areal sense the death of ourselves, adeath followed, it is true, by resurrection but in adifferent ego, the life, the love of which are beyond the reach of those elements of the existing ego that are doomed to die (II, pp.31–32). OPEN ACCESS
ALENA ROREITNEROVá 189 The narrator sometimes connects this conflict between our self, which adheres to past or present beings and experiences, and an imagined future self, which will be indifferent to them, with the temporal process of the blind organic life of nature, in which old cells are constantly replaced by new ones that feed and multiply from their dead matter (II, p.32). However, the passage quoted above is exemplary for several reasons: first, we know that long passages of The Fugitive will be devoted to recounting the hero’s long struggle with forgetting Albertine (we will return to this losing battle later). Second, it shows well the implications of Proust’s impressionistic description of things in terms of their effects. As we shall see, Proust depicts time at crucial points in his novel in terms of a‘double intentionality’ (if we may borrow this Husserlian distinction; see Husserl 1990, § 39, pp.84–88, and also Merleau-Ponty 1958, p.486): on the one hand, he shows our relation to objects, that is, to things and beings that perish or disappear, but immediately afterwards he shows what this means for the self. In other words, he shows that, along with things and beings, the aspect of our own self that is most determinative of who we are at agiven interval disappears as well. And what is essential is that we are usually not aware of these changes because they are too slow to be noticed. As Iwill try to show, this concern with double intentionality (one directed towards the object and the other towards the subjective structure of retentions and protentions) is also characteristic of descriptions of the concrete articulation of temporality. We find it, for example, in the reflection on listening to amusical composition, in which it is clearly stated that the elusiveness of acertain temporal object is ultimately determined by the subject’s elusiveness to himself. Hence the particular melancholy associated with the temporal sequence as such: When the least obvious beauties of Vinteuil’s sonata were revealed to me, already, borne by the force of habit beyond the reach of my sensibility, those that Ihad from the first distinguished and preferred in it were beginning to escape, to avoid me. Since Iwas able only in successive moments to enjoy all the pleasures that this sonata gave me, Inever possessed it in its entirety: it was like life itself (I, p.521). The hero-narrator observes that it is impossible to grasp the complex composition as awhole, namely, awhole in the sense of what it has meant to us over time. The problem, then, is ultimately not so much the impossibility of grasping the duration of the object as the impossibility of grasping the duration of the hero-narrator for himself. However, it is peculiar to Proustian depictions of temporal succession that they are very often modelled on the hero’s relationship to his loved ones, and therefore they also show this dimension of time as asphere of genuine openness to the other as opposed to solitary contemplation. More precisely, it is not just an openness (as it belongs to the passive aspect of attention in general) but an affective involvement that has aprofound impact on the hero-narrator’s perception of time. In one passage, the narrator points out that this interest in the very otherness of the other, which he then seeks in his loves (only to suffer for it), was founded in his childhood: ‘Ihad in me astore of old dream-memories which dated from my childhood, and in which all the tenderness (tenderness that existed in my heart, but, when my heart felt it, was not distinguishable from anything else) was wafted to me by aperson as different as possible from myself’ (II, p.164). The feeling of love has its origin (its Urstiftung; see OPEN ACCESS
190 SLOVO A SMYSL 45 Merleau-Ponty 2010, p.25) in another being as profoundly different, while this need for difference is itself unconsciously repeated in other loves. More relevant to our question of the representation of time, however, is that affective involvement brings about asignificant multiplication of the hero, also described as afragmentation in time. This is how the hero-narrator describes his relationship with Albertine: […] each of these Albertines was different […]. It was perhaps because they were so different, the persons whom Iused to contemplate in her at this period, that later on Ibecame myself adifferent person, corresponding to the particular Albertine to whom my thoughts had turned; ajealous, an indifferent, avoluptuous, amelancholy, afrenzied person […]. To be quite accurate Iought to give adifferent name to each of the ‘me’s’ who were to think about Albertine in time to come (je devrais donner un nom différent àchacun des moi qui dans la suite pensa àAlbertine) […] (II, p.299). At this point we can clearly see what it means to put a‘hundred masks’ on the same face, depending on which eyes are seeing it. Here, too, time appears as adimension experienced together, for the hero does not contemplate Albertine as aspectacle but is himself transformed by his relation to her. The multiplication of the facets of Albertine is here the correlate of the multiplication of the hero. Elsewhere, Proust goes so far in this hyperbole of fragmentation or ‘refraction’ of the self in time that he allows his hero-narrator to declare of himself that he was not ‘one man only, but the steady advance hour after hour of an army in close formation’; he even says that ‘it was not Albertine alone that was simply aseries of moments, it was also myself’ (IV, p.71). In this context it is even possible to think— in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s late working notes— of ‘the influence of the “contents” on time which passes “more quickly” or “less quickly”, of Zeitmaterie on Zeitform’ (see Merleau-Ponty 1968, p.184). However, this image of interconnected fragments of two temporalities is not sufficient to understand succession, since Proust works with amultiplicity of timelines: ‘as though there were in time different and parallel series’ (III, p.154). When, after Albertine’s death, the hero-narrator asks himself how it is possible that, despite his stubborn resistance, he has mentally separated himself from Albertine, he considers the following: ‘And so my love for Albertine […] would never have altered appreciably […] had it not been drawn into avaster system in which souls move in time as bodies move in space.’ What primarily characterises this ‘vaster system’ of Time, then, is forgetting: ‘oblivion, the force of which Iwas beginning to feel and which is so powerful an instrument of adaptation to reality because it gradually destroys in us the surviving past which is aperpetual contradiction of it’ (IV, p.137).12 Here as well, the problem of the multiplicity of the other and the correlative multiplicity of the self returns: the narrator again formulates it in such away that forgetting the other is at the same time forgetting the self (the former self). At acertain point, however, the overall situation changes in aremarkably sudden way: ‘Ifelt myself still reliving apast which was no longer anything more than the history of another person’ (IV, p.114). The ability to adapt to atime in which some things, beings and events are irrevocably past thus entails the need to constantly reassess who the 12 See the above letter to Ghéon (1914). OPEN ACCESS
ALENA ROREITNEROVá 197 At once, the glance which Ihad just cast at one or other of them was matched immediately by the curious, stealthy, enterprising glance, reflecting unimaginable thoughts, which Albertine had furtively cast at them and which […] wafted along these paths […] the tremor of an unknown element […] (IV, p.141). Asimilar change of vision is usually produced by works of art in The Search, but it seems that at least sometimes it can also be the effect of the mutual union of two beings. Thus, although the paradigm of metamorphosis of vision is represented by artists who express their own distinctive vision through their works, beloved beings sometimes achieve the same effect through their ability to incite and sustain the discerning attention of the lover. In addition to this figure of retrospective joint attention, Proust even considers the other, who, instead of shattering our own presence by his absence, rescues us— by his loving presence— from our own absence for ourselves. Thus, the hero-narrator was saved by the presence of his grandmother at amoment when there was nothing left of his self: ‘[…] in amoment when Iwas no longer in any way myself, [grandmother] had come in, and had restored me to myself, for that person was myself and more than myself (the container that is greater than the contents, which it was bringing to me)’ (III, p.153). The narrator does not hesitate to speak of this coming of the other— despite its factual absence— as an initially unknown ‘divine presence’ (présence inconnue, divine) that preserves us to ourselves. This reminiscence has the structure of involuntary memory as we already know it (perhaps with the difference that ‘the agonising synthesis of survival and annihilation’ is far from being apurely joyful anamnesis). But in this case the time is qualitatively different from any other time, not only because of the hero-narrator’s activity— since there was ‘nothing left of his self’ at that very moment— but, above all, because of the present attention of the other, here Marcel’s grandmother.21 Therefore, even from this passage, which is akind of parallel to the joyful reminiscences, it is evident that Proust is eminently interested in shared time and attention. However, we have seen that all cases of shared attention here are retrospective. Presumably this is because the hero-narrator believes that higher levels of attention are only possible in solitude (III, p.909).22 Yet there is at least one place where he hesitates and considers whether there is— in contrast to the social diversion that is omnipresent in The Search— adeeper shared attention in the present as well. This remarkable place is the depiction of the hero’s stay in Venice together with his mother. As is well known, the Venice episode has aspecial significance in The Search, for it is precisely the sensation ‘once felt on two uneven slabs in the Baptistery of St.Mark’ (IV, p.446) that the hero recalls when he steps out of the carriage into the courtyard of the Guermantes house and stumbles over the pavement, triggering awhole series of involuntary memories. Moreover, if we look at the context of the novel as awhole, Venice represents adesired city,23 acity that since childhood continually animated the hero’s imagination (inspired by Titian’s engravings and photographs of Giotto’s 21 Cf. ‘My grandmother’s attacks passed, often enough-unnoticed by the attention which she kept always diverted to ourselves’ (II, p.594). 22 See below, citation IV, p.225. 23 See especially I, pp.382–386; III, p.913. OPEN ACCESS
198 SLOVO A SMYSL 45 paintings).24 It is also the city about which the protagonist repeatedly dreams (II, pp.443–444). And it would not be Proustian Venice if something did not constantly prevent him from visiting it (illness,25 Albertine’s presence26), so it is also the place of adesired future (as such, it is reminiscent of the hero’s desire to begin writing his masterpiece). In asense, the Venetian episode forms the turning point of the narrative, also because it belongs to the earliest material of the novel, since Proust have been thinking about it from 1908 at the latest.27 It would be very interesting to trace the genesis of the Venice episode in more detail, which is not possible here. What is important for us is that it marks atransition between the original division into Time Lost and Time Regained.28 We also find an avant-texte called ‘Venice’ in his Seventy-five Folios (from October or November 1908); already here are anticipated: ‘the moments of our life that sensory perception, the tyranny of the present, the intervention of intelligence, the network of activity, the succession of selfish desires, prevents us from living but that become glorious again on the day, come at last, of the resurrection.’29 Amuch more explicit and detailed Urtext for this episode is then found in Against Sainte-Beuve in atext titled Conversation avec Maman.30 As is well known, the voyage to Venice is the final stage of the hero’s forgetting of Albertine and thus forms akind of gloomy framework from which intense impressions of the sunlit water town seem to emanate. This allegorical motif is embodied in the angel on the Campanile of St Mark’s, which brings apromise of joy in the middle of asunny morning: ‘[…] ajoy more certain than any that it could ever in the past have been bidden to announce to men of good will’ (IV, p.202).31 The angel is also an indicator of time, because it is the only thing the hero can see from his bed: ‘[…] as the whole world is merely avast sun-dial, asingle lighted segment of which enables us to tell what o’clock it is.’32 As we will see in more detail, the Venetian episode concludes with an evening split between the hero and his mother, which finally leads to afragmentation of the hero’s experience of the city and of himself. According to the experts, Proust extensively reworked this passage, while ‘the emotional tone of the episode, between sunrise and sunset, between joy and anxiety, has retained its original character’.33 Regarding time shared together, there are apparently in the Venice episode two attempts (one earlier and one later) to describe an analogous phenomenon: an in24 Cf. I, p.40; III, pp.895–896. 25 Cf. I, p.386. 26 Cf. III, p.915; IV, p.6. 27 Acertain understanding of the origins of the Venice episode, based on asummary of Bernard Brun’s research, is provided, among others, by David R.Ellison (1988). 28 See Notice written by Anne Chevalier in edition Pléiade, vol. IV (1989), p.999. 29 Proust 2021, p.106 (transl. Sam Taylor, 2023). 30 In the Pléiade edition (1989) we find four variants of the central Venetian passage along with three variants of the departure from Venice, dating from the layers of 1908–1909 (in Cahier 3) to the 1914–1916 version (Cahier 48, 50), with the earliest strata of the departure motif referring to the novel Jean Santeuil (1895–1899). 31 As already mentioned, we would find avery similar description in Contre Sainte-Beuve. 32 Ibid. 33 Cf. Notice by A.Chevalier, Pléiade (1989), vol. IV, p.1001. OPEN ACCESS
ALENA ROREITNEROVá 199 tense loving encounter with the mother in the presence of a‘stone witness’, which in the first case is an arched Gothic window and in the second case the mosaic in the Baptistery of St Mark. Already in the first case, the motif of shared time is explicit: ‘[…] for these reasons, that window has assumed in my memory the precious quality of things that have had, simultaneously, side by side with ourselves, their part in acertain hour that struck, the same for us and for them’ (IV, p.204). It would be valuable to look at this first version more closely from the perspective of shared time and later recollection, as this passage ends with the stone witness saying: ‘Iremember your mother so well’ (IV, p.205). For the sake of brevity, however, we will focus only on the second version. The passage that interests us most here is in the middle of the early afternoon, ‘[…] at that hour when at Combray it was so pleasant to feel the sun close at hand in the darkness preserved by the closed shutters […]’ (IV, p.224). We know already that the hero-narrator has always considered attentive solitude to be acondition for true contemplation (this is related to his belief that adeeper appreciation of artistic beauty is difficult, if not impossible, to share). His visit to the Baptistery of St Mark in Venice, accompanied by his mother, represents one of the few places, where the possibility of joyfully shared contemplation of the same object in the presence of another is— despite all reservations— admitted. The narrator immediately adds, however, that even this presence delights him, especially in retrospect (but there is at least some hesitation). Let me provide alonger quotation here: My mother and Iwould enter the baptistery, treading underfoot the marble and glass mosaics of the paving […]. Seeing that Ineeded to spend some time in front of the mosaics representing the Baptism of Christ, and feeling the icy coolness that pervaded the baptistery, my mother threw ashawl over my shoulders. […] Today Iam sure that the pleasure does exist, if not of seeing, at least of having seen, abeautiful thing with aparticular person. Atime has now come when […], remembering the baptistery of St Mark’s— contemplating the waters of the Jordan in which St John immerses Christ, while the gondola awaited us at the landing-stage of the Piazzetta— it is no longer amatter of indifference to me that, beside me in that cool penumbra, there should have been awoman draped in her mourning […] and that that woman […], whom nothing can ever remove from that softly lit sanctuary of St Mark’s where Iam always sure to find her because she has her place reserved there as immutably as amosaic, should be my mother.34 This passage is not only rich in symbolic meaning but also stylistically follows aprinciple which Gérard Genette calls ‘diegetic metaphor’: in asingle image, it encompasses the vast space-time of the narrative, creating asort of story within astory centred in the baptistery with its ‘mosaic of the baptism, “in relation to the site”, where the Jordan is like asecond baptistery en abyme inside the first; replica of the Jordan’s waves by those of the lagoon in front of the Piazzetta, icy freshness falling on visitors 34 Cf. IV, p.225. In this case, the translation (by C.K.Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin) is taken from The Modern Library edition, since this passage does not appear in the edition in use. OPEN ACCESS
200 SLOVO A SMYSL 45 like baptismal water, awoman in mourning similar to that, nearby, in Carpaccio’s painting, itself an image en abyme of Venice within Venice […]’ (Genette 1972, p.49; my translation). This passage is aprivileged example of this type of metonymically emanating metaphor, which, according to Genette, is analogous in construction to Proustian reminiscence,35 where asingle ‘almost impalpable drop (gouttelette)’ of tea carries the ‘vast structure’ of recollection (I, p.46). By linking this passage with the final reminiscences in Time Regained, Proust seems at least to suggest the importance of the presence of others in the involuntary memories. Even though these memories appear at first glance as merely joyful atmospheric impressions, in fact they involve time differentiated with others. (Similar correspondences between involuntary memories and loving beings could be found in the case of other reminiscences, e.g. the presence of Tante Leonie in amemory triggered by acup of lime-flower tea, and so on.) This motif of the constitutive presence of the other is reinforced by the elaborated contrast with the situation when the hero’s mother leaves Venice after adisagreement and he is left alone. Then their entire watery architecture turns into mere matter (‘Isaw the palaces reduced to their basic elements, lifeless heaps of marble with nothing to choose between them, and the water as acombination of hydrogen and oxygen, eternal, blind […]’), so that the hero-narrator eventually feels himself dispossessed from his dream city (IV, p.231). The Venetian episode as awhole makes clear— through the striking contrast between the morning and evening time— that it is precisely the presence of certain beings-planets which (at least sometimes and often without the consciousness of the hero-narrator) animates his creative attention, that is, the very ability to differentiate impressions: ‘For Ifelt myself to be alone; things had become alien to me; Ino longer had calm enough to break out of my throbbing heart and introduce into them ameasure of stability. The town that Isaw before me had ceased to be Venice’ (ibid.). So, the disintegration, which is depicted in greater extension (chronologically later) in connection with the forgetting of Albertine, is captured in miniature in the (chronologically earlier) scene of the mother leaving Venice. Thus, if the departure of Albertine brought afeeling of nothingness induced by the dissolution of temporal continuity, so too does the abandonment in Venice evoke successive time in its sinister form: ‘Iwas nothing more than aheart that throbbed, and an attention strained to follow the development of “sole mio”’ (ibid.). And alittle bit further, just before the hero decides at the last moment to go to his mother: ‘My mind, doubtless in order not to have to consider the question of making aresolution, was entirely occupied in following the course of the successive lines of “sole mio”’ (IV, p.232). The main scene from the baptistery is thus framed by adouble depiction of successive time, namely the forgetting of Albertine and the anxiety of the mother’s departure (with its symbolic meaning of the inevitability of death). Thus, in the Venetian episode, in the space of some thirty pages, both qualitative time and successive time 35 Cf. ‘[…] at the moment when the unevenness of the two pavements had prolonged in all directions and dimensions my arid and crude visions of Venice and St.Mark’s, and all the emotions Ihad then experienced, relating the square to the church, the landing-stage to the square, the canal to the landing-stage, to everything the eye saw, to that whole world of longings which is in reality only perceived by the spirit […]’ (IV, p.455). OPEN ACCESS
ALENA ROREITNEROVá 201 are concentrated in their most dense form. It is no coincidence, moreover, that related to the passage on ‘resurrection’ Proust, according to the available marginal notes to his Carnets, hesitated whether to associate the motifs of mourning with Albertine or with the grandmother (as the novel’s transposition of the mother).36 The episode thus includes both the painful and the joyful dimension of involuntary memory. We know, however, that Time Regained retains only the sunlit side of reminiscences (IV, p.453), since the recalled impressions are ‘disincarnated’ and ‘freed from the imperfections of exterior perceptions’ (IV, p.447). Moreover, this disincarnation is in line with the additional correction that refuses to leave the mother (as an archetypal other) in the sight of the stone witness and moves her into the hero’s inner self: ‘Ihad too clearly proved the impossibility of expecting from reality that which was within myself. It was not in the Square of St.Mark […] that Ishould find Lost Time […]’ (IV, p.455).37 This displacement finally leads to the necessity of realising awork of art (in which the joy and burden of animating time is in the end passed on to the reader). Regarding the motive of shared time, when the hero-narrator says that, after his mother’s departure, Venice ceased to be Venice for him, he implies that the other, in asense, gives ashape to the objects themselves, insofar as they have some value for him. We see, then, that in contrast to the considerations we followed initially in connection with qualitative time, according to which all the colour of time depends on the attention of the time-differentiating soul, the point of view now seems to be reversed. It turns out that this very activity of the individual soul is to be understood in relation to the presence of the other with whom it remains in connection or even in akind of harmony. This harmony, however, is mostly revealed when it is disturbed, when it only begins to be perceptible, otherwise it is— in accordance with ancient ideas— inaudible, since the sound is present straight from our birth, so that it is not distinguishable from its contrary silence, since sound and silence are distinguished in relation to each other:38 ‘As though our loveliest ideas were like musical airs which might come to us without our having ever heard them and which we force ourselves to listen to and write down’ (IV, pp.456–457). BIBLIOGRAPHY 36 Cf. Notice by A.Chevalier, Pléiade (1989), vol. IV, p.1011. 37 See also Esquisse XXIV; IV, p.816. 38 See Aristotle’s report in De caelo II, 9, 290b11–30. Aristotle: De caelo, trans. C.D.C.Reeve. Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis 2020. Bernet, Rudolf: L’encadrement du souvenir (Husserl, Proust et Barthes). In idem: La vie du sujet. Recherches sur l’interprétation de Husserl dans la phénoménologie. PUF, Paris 1994, pp.243–265. Bimbenet, Étienne: Pour une approche phénoménologique de l’attention conjointe. Alter. Revue de phénoménologie 18, 2010, pp.93–110. Caprioglio Panizza, Silvia: The Ethics of Attention: Engaging the Real with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil. Routledge, New York— London 2022. Dufourcq, Annabelle: Institution et imaginaire. La réflexion merleau-pontyenne sur les illusions amoureuses. Chiasmi OPEN ACCESS
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