Chapter 8 - Paris and the avant-garde

Summary

It does not require much imagination to picture Marcel Proust, absorbed by the creation of the Recherche, sipping his café au lait, and glancing at an article on the front page of the Figaro dated 20 February 1909, enigmatically entitled ‘Le Futurisme’. Its introit is preceded by a cautionary caption stipulating that the author, Marinetti, was the representative of the most advanced and mettlesome of all past and present ‘schools’. Proust reads on and becomes immersed in a swirl of garish images extolling the beauty of planes, locomotives and cars, before the young futurists start proclaiming the eleven commandments of their manifesto. Once past his initial surprise, he may have been laughing up his sleeve when hitting the fourth point: ‘We say that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath . . . is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.’ Proust was yet to write the apocalyptic passages of Le Temps retrouvé, whose images are suffused with futurist overtones (no longer induced by imagination, but by the shock of the aerial bombings of the First World War). However, fifteen months earlier (19 November 1907), he had himself published an article ‘Impressions de route en automobile’ on the front page of the Figaro, in which he rendered the lived experience of speed and movement during motoring trips in Normandy. This hymn to the motorcar was unequivocal: a new world of perceptions and sensations was offered to the budding artist, revealing aspects of reality which had been previously hidden from view. Not only are nature and its processes metamorphosed by the speed of the motorcar, but time and space are intertwined in order to reverse the pre-modern perception of the world. Nature, architecture and spatial hierarchies are ‘metaphorized’ (metaphor being the trope for ‘transport’): ‘Now, between the propagating steeples below which one saw the light which at this distance seemed to smile, the town, following their momentum from below without being able to reach their heights, developed steadily by vertical increments the complicated but candid fugue of its rooftops’ (CSB, 64).