The Mystery of Human Desire

Among the many brilliant developments in Malcolm Bowie’s book on Marcel Proust, the most striking may be the one that concerns the novelist’s moral imagination. It leads to an unexpected redefinition of virtue. The central chapter of “Proust Among the Stars” argues convincingly that the narrator’s self-centered aestheticism in “A la Recherche du temps perdu,” and his seemingly inexhaustible attraction to what he himself terms vice give rise to a concern for others, compassion and a vision of moral life that extols sympathy and communion. Pietas and caritas are virtues attained by sounding the depth of suffering, and they in turn account for the narrator’s “almost sacramental tone.” Bowie compares Proust’s all-embracing novel of cruel desire, commemoration and forgiveness to Victor Hugo’s grandest and most compassionate poetry in “Les Contemplations.”

Bowie’s very personal voice, his ability to be tersely abstract while remaining closely bound to the sensuous rhythms of the narrative, suffices to renew one’s faith in the value of literary criticism. He can say more in three sentences than many a scholar in a belabored chapter. His erudition is graceful, and his references, including classical sources, are not presented to flaunt his knowledge but to bring the reader into more meaningful contact with the text under discussion. This is criticism motivated by intellectual joy, creatively sustained by felicities of expression. Whether Bowie writes of the narrator’s many voices, his talents as mimic or magpie, the teasing and caressing syntax of the Proustian sentence or the sexual and social labyrinth of exacerbated desires, there is aphoristic pleasure to be derived from almost every page of this book. Bowie clearly relishes the act of writing. He comes up with especially telling formulations when discussing Proust’s satirical genius and powers of derision.

There are, however, more substantial reasons for admiring this study, though these very same reasons--avoidance of conclusions, syncopations in the development of ideas, revealing ambiguities--may also unsettle readers who are not already familiar with Proust’s elastic and cunning narration. While never exactly deconstructive, the trains of thought and overall method are polyphonic in nature. Like Proust’s, and much like his narrator’s, Bowie’s voice contains any number of voices. It is at times willfully unstable in its defense and illustration of plurality. Not infrequently, Bowie qualifies and challenges his own provisional inferences.

The structure of the book is deceptively thematic. Reading the table of contents, one expects a conventional treatment of shopworn categories--self, time, art, politics, morality, sex, death--but one is in for a surprise. Each chapter multiplies and even contradicts its thematic premise, leaving the reader with the task of putting together the disassembled pieces. Meaning is not served on a platter. What is more, a blending and blurring occurs between the chapters, so that ultimately, in an overlapping and telescoping manner reminiscent of Proust’s artistic processes, no single theme is allowed to stand in isolation.

Each chapter highlights some crucial aspect but always with excellent lateral vision. The first chapter, titled “Self,” brings out from the beginning the unrestrained plurality at the core of Proust’s fictional world, the gradual discovery, by means of discontinuous simultaneities, of “uncharted moral territories.” In discussing the temporal dimension of the novel, Bowie establishes a link between loss and redemption, but at the same time he points to the inertness of the vaunted involuntary memory and shows how unredeemable the Proustian temporal process really is. As for the chapter on art, instead of rehearsing the usual banalities about Marcel’s artistic vocation, it offers some searching pages on the appropriation of Homer (the perilous descent to hell, Odysseus’ addiction to storytelling) but suggests almost in the same breath how this self-deflating modern epic represents a difficult journey toward silence. A fundamental paradox is thereby established. Art is surely all-important to Proust as the highest human achievement, yet its sublime value is somehow linked, tragically in fact, to its nothingness. A disturbing chapter indeed.

Equally disturbing, but for other reasons, is the chapter on politics, especially its references to the Dreyfus case. As a sociological observer interested in the broader picture, Proust understood that the entire episode unleashed on all sides visceral emotions that excluded the very notion of objectivity. As extreme illustrations of bias and unreliability, these emotions interested Proust as creator of a fictional world more than the expression of his own unequivocal commitment to the case of Dreyfus and justice. In his mimetic ability to imagine, experience and formulate the most despicable anti-Semitic sentiments, Proust’s narrator displays an alarming chameleon-like disposition to articulate reprehensible views, to appropriate anti-Semitic feelings and opinions and echo in subtle ways venomous racist stereotypes. Here it must be added that by reproducing such views, Proust risked more than paying a price for using one value system to degrade another. Insidious anti-Semitic views, imitating the cliches of their enemies, often contaminated, if only ironically, the language of the Jewish bourgeoisie in France.

The savagery, sense of loss and yearning for communion that inform the chapter on morality are endowed with an even keener sense of pathos in the final chapters on sex and death. Eros in the Proustian context may at first seem solipsistic--a refined form of sensation-hunting--and a voyeuristic manifestation of curiosity. But a deeper curiosity is involved. Sex becomes an instrument of cognition, as the narrator explores the fertile realm of pain. The ultimate desire is for desire not to be fulfilled. Deferred pleasure is bound up with deferred narration. Both are conditioned by the relentless awareness of death. Proust invites his reader to a grand carnival in which his characters wear the mask of their mortality. The death-defying story becomes a death-delaying story. Bowie appropriately invokes the figure of Scheherazade in “Thousand and One Nights” as a metaphor for the recourse to narration as postponement, a repeated stay of execution.

A close reader, Bowie provides incisive commentaries of selected passages. Even his paraphrase tends to be analytical. Nimbly, he reveals the workings of complex issues, proving himself at all junctures well attuned to Proust’s rhetorical twists and turns, his masterful shifts from the colloquial to the archaic, from high style to prosaic speech patterns. Bowie brings to bear on his analyses a rich arsenal of references to music, painting and, of course, literature. But whether he mentions Mozart’s Cherubino, Richard Strauss’ Oktavian or Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” or alludes to Lucretius, Alessandro Manzoni, Hugo von Hoffmansthal or Robert Musil, his references are never intrusive or pedantic. The profusion of such references, totally appropriate in the case of Proust, might awe a reader who has just come to “A la Recherche du temps perdu.” At no point, however, is Bowie out to overwhelm.

Hardly any aspect of Proust’s skills and vision remains untouched, not even how self-analysis and self-belief, essential to the artist’s vocation, are related to the self-assurance of the professional bourgeoisie. Another critic might have chosen to displace the emphasis, laying stress on the links between jealousy and fictional creation, between memory and fantasy, the fecundity of illness, the struggle against the anaesthetizing virtue of habit or the various modes of transmutation. Religious imagery could have been given a different treatment, and so could the act of reading as a descent into the self and travel as a doomed search for total vision. I have in mind the scene in which the narrator feverishly attempts to possess the fleeting landscape as he rushes from window to opposite window in the compartment of the train, without managing to gather the fragments of a mobile vision into a comprehensive view. But such variations in the critics’ perspective prove only the need for a continued critical discourse. The slightest rotation of the kaleidoscope--an image dear to Proust--transforms the vision.

Bowie’s own handling of the kaleidoscope is especially valuable because it unfailingly serves the greatness of Proust. There was hardly any need to be defensive about the anti-Semitic and pedophiliac motifs or strains. They are part of an immensely complex music modulated by a polymorphous narrative voice that sings of the mystery of human desire. “Proust Among the Stars” is a well-chosen title, if only because on almost every page it offers a paean to Proust as a great epic poet of the modern age.