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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
When the world reveals a part of its beauty, what should our reaction be? How can we respond adequately? Is not our initial reaction one of a “discrepancy between our impressions and their habitual expression?” It is this question that Proust poses in one of the crucial passages early on in his masterpiece. Describing his walks along Méséglise's Way, and “the humble discoveries” he made there, the narrator details for us the overwhelming, decisive impression made on him by a shaft of sunlight:
After an hour of rain and wind, against which I had struggled cheerfully, as I came to the edge of the Montjouvain pond, beside a little hut with a tiled roof in which M. Vinteuil's gardener kept his tools, the sun had just reappeared, and its golden rays, washed clean by the shower, glittered anew in the sky, on the trees, on the wall of the hut and the still wet tiles of the roof, on the ridge of which a hen was strutting. The wind tugged at the wild grass growing from cracks in the wall and at the hen's downy feathers, which floated out horizontally to their full extent with the unresisting submissiveness of light and lifeless things. The tiled roof cast upon the pond, translucent again in the sunlight, a dappled pink reflection which I had never observed before. And, seeing upon the water, and on the surface of the wall, a pallid smile responding to the smiling sky, I cried out aloud in my enthusiasm, brandishing my furled umbrella: “Gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh!” But at the same time I felt that I was in duty bound not to content myself with these unilluminating words, but to endeavor to see more clearly into the sources of my rapture.
1. Proust, Marcel, Remembrance of Things Past, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, New York, 1981, p. 169.
2. Confessions, Book XII, Paris, Pléiade, Gallimard, 1959, p. 642.
3. “The walls of houses, the Tansonville hedge, the trees of Roussainville wood, the bushes adjoining Montjouvain, all must bear the blows of my walking-stick or umbrella, must hear my shouts of happiness, these being no more than expressions of the confused ideas which exhilarated me, and which had not achieved the repose of enlightenment, preferring the pleasures of a lazy drift towards an immediate out let rather than submit to a slow and difficult course of elucidation” (op. cit., p. 169). By opposing an “immediate outlet” to the painstaking work of “elucidation,” Proust makes use of a vocabulary that was common among the psychologists of the genera tion that preceded him. Freud, who for the most part uses the same metaphors as his contemporaries, insists on a distinction between the processes of derivation or dis charge (Ableitung, Entladung, which are far from being synonyms) and “sublima tion.”
4. In Proust's novel we are informed that the then-adolescent author had spent his day reading Augustin Thierry's Histoire de la conquête de l'Angleterre. His ecstatic reac tion to the rural landscape can thus be viewed as a kind of recompense.
5. In his superb allegorical novel La Beauté sur la terre (1928), C.F. Ramuz shows, for his part, how beauty escapes from anyone who wishes to hold it captive.
6. Proust, op. cit. volume III, p. 886. This description occurs in connection with a view of open country occasioned by the stoppage of a train. The author sees a “cur tain of trees illuminated by the light of the setting sun,” and a house “which appeared to be built out of a strange pink substance.” This view, however, is the source of nothing but a feeling of indifference, which convinces him that he lacks “an artist's soul.” The analogies with the description of the pond at Montjouvain are not, it seems to me, accidental. In addition, it should be pointed out that this lack of inter est in trees and the light of the setting sun coincides with a new stage in the history of painting, i.e., when the “impressionist” interest in landscapes and atmosphere gives way to preoccupations of a totally different order.
7. Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, Act II, Scene IV.
8. “I scale the rocks in vain: my spirit does not become more elevated, my soul more pure; I carry the cares of the world and bear the burden of human turpitude…. God appears no greater to me from the summit of a mountain than from the bottom of a valley.” Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, Livre IV, I, 16.
9. Madame Bovary, second part, II.
10. Goethe, Faust, Part II, translated by Stuart Atkins, Boston, 1984, p. 285.
11. It should be mentioned here that the agreement Faust enters into with Mephistopheles is partially based on redefining beauty as the future possibility of an instant of joyous plenitude - an instant that Faust never attains, and of which he will only have a “presentiment,” since his demands are unrealizable: “Verweile doch, du bist so schön.” However, it is not the natural world that promises this happiness; this happiness can only result from the ability to look upon accomplished labors and upon a people who are setting off to settle a land that is far across the sea and that has been conquered with great difficulty. The beauty of this instant — in the future - will be the result of the contemplation of the finished work. But this work and this antici pated momentary beauty themselves constitute the act of capitulation to the spirit of evil, the climax of the pact with the devil.
12. We are referring to the letter describing the climb of Mount Ventoux, in which Petrarch's wonder at the dazzling spectacle of nature is brutally interrupted by the Augustan imperative of introspection.
13. “He who has seen beauty with his eyes/Already belongs to Death,” Platen writes (Sämtliche Werke, 4 volumes, Cotta, t. I, pp. 130-131). In the first of the Duino Elegies, we read (lines 4-5): “Beauty is nothing/But the beginning of terror.” And how not to think of Mallarmé's Hérodiade?: “A kiss would kill me/If beauty was not death…. ”
14. Baudelaire, The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo, translated by Rosemary Lloyd, Oxford, 1991, pp. 49-50.
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