Proust Writing Photography

Fixing the Fugitive in A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu

Aine Larkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351552905
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The importance of vision and visual arts such as painting, theatre, and sculpture in Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu has long been affirmed; another significant system of visual representation in the novel is photography. Proust appropriated photography as a practice with its own distinctive characteristics which could inform his writing about the processes of perception and memory. Through close textual analysis of scenes where photography is experienced or observed as a practice, and scenes where photography is written into the body of the text, Aine Larkin offers an invigorating new study that sheds genuinely new light on the presence of photographic motifs in Proust's novel, and the subtlety of Proust's engagement with this modern imaging system in his work.

CHAPTER 1

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Thematic Appropriations of Photography

Swann: Through Love of Art to Love of Odette

References to photography and metaphorical evocations of photographic motifs are many in À la recherche du temps perdu. In this chapter we will explore functional appropriations of photography in Proust’s novel, informed by the extent to which they are germane to Marcel’s conception and realization of his creative literary vocation — the novel’s central theme. Thematic appropriations of photography which contribute significantly to this process are considered first, so as to ascertain accurately Proust’s understanding and exploitation of photography’s distinctive features within this context.

To determine precisely the degree to which photography is used to represent Marcel’s evolving awareness of the nature of his literary vocation, his own and other important characters’ use of and response to photography merit examination. Marcel’s ideas about the world of art and his creative endeavours evolve throughout his life, and are shaped by his observation and assimilation of people’s lives and the creative works that he encounters. It is therefore expedient to consider the use of photography by people closest to and wielding the greatest creative influence over Marcel. The first and perhaps most crucial of these is Charles Swann. In Le Temps retrouvé, Marcel explicitly acknowledges Swann’s importance in his life when he states that ‘en somme, si j’y réfléchissais, la matière de mon expérience, laquelle serait la matière de mon livre, me venait de Swann […] cet auteur des aspects de notre vie’ [‘it occurred to me, as I thought about it, that the raw material of my experience, which would also be the raw material of my book, came to me from Swann […] this begetter of all the various aspects of a man’s life’] (IV, 493–94; VI, 278–79). The very structure of À la recherche du temps perdu makes Swann’s importance clear, with the title of the first volume, Du côté de chez Swann, suggesting a special world that Marcel associates with the man. The idea of a unique world that Swann inhabits is reinforced by the juxtaposition of Swann’s Way and the Guermantes Way in the third volume. This geographical and ideological duality structures the novel as a whole until its resolution in the figure of Mlle de Saint-Loup, Swann’s granddaughter, in Le Temps retrouvé [Time Regained].¹

Swann’s affair with Odette de Crécy, recounted through third-person narration in ‘Un amour de Swann’ [‘Swann in Love’], makes up one third of the novel’s first volume.² Emotional connections or parallels between Swann’s life and Marcel’s are established by the later narrator from the earliest scenes of the first volume, when Marcel’s anguish at being deprived of his mother’s kiss on the evenings when Swann dines with or visits his family is explicitly equated with Swann’s suffering because of Odette (I, 30). Similarities between Swann and Marcel in their understanding of love are thus implied from the beginning of the novel. Aside from his position as role model in love, Swann as devoted amateur of art also shapes Marcel’s understanding of what Shattuck refers to as ‘the attractions and rewards of art’ (2000, p. 75).

It is necessary to clarify the degree to which Swann is perceived as a model for Marcel in order accurately to judge the significance of his influence on the conception and realization of Marcel’s vocation. Antoine Compagnon considers Swann the ‘alter ego du héros, son modèle dans tout le roman’ [‘the hero’s alter ego, his model throughout the novel’] (Proust, 2002b, p. xxvi). His opinion is open to debate. Swann is clearly important in Marcel’s life: he is profoundly influential in the development of the latter’s ideas about the major themes of love, society, and art which structure the novel. However, it is ultimately more accurate to consider him to be Marcel’s alter ego only in so far as he presents a possible alternative to or counter-model of the identity Marcel eventually assumes.³ For Swann, unlike Marcel, is a failure as a creative artist. He never begins his study of Vermeer (I, 195).⁴ His example leads Marcel off-beam as the latter struggles to realize his literary vocation. Yet, despite this fact, the later narrator is retrospectively aware of the debt he owes Swann and the advantages of having known him. As prototype of the life of the sterile artist that Marcel almost resigned himself to living, Swann plays an important augural role in Marcel’s artistic, emotional, and social development. Photographs are an element common to several points where Swann and Marcel interact. They also recur in Marcel’s account of Swann’s love affair with Odette. Exploring Swann’s understanding and exploitation of photographs points to photography’s ambiguity as an influence on Marcel’s conception and realization of his vocation as writer. This ambiguity is unique to the photograph due to its semiotic status as indexical icon:

L’aspect le plus irritant, mais aussi le plus stimulant, du signe photographique réside sans doute dans sa flexibilité pragmatique. Nous savons tous que l’image photographique est mise au service des stratégies de communication les plus diverses. Or, ces stratégies donnent lieu à […] des normes communicationnelles, et qui sont capables d’infléchir profondément son statut sémiotique. […] L’image photographique, loin de posséder un statut stable, est fondamentalement changeante et multiple.⁵

[The most irritating, but also stimulating, aspect of the photographic sign doubtless resides in its pragmatic flexibility. We all know that the photographic image is used in the most diverse communication strategies. These strategies give rise to […] communicational norms, which are profoundly capable of affecting its semiotic status. […] Far from having a stable status, the photograph is fundamentally changeable and multi-purpose.]

Proust appreciated this flexibility of the photograph. Given Swann’s influence on Marcel’s artistic and emotional education, studying his manner of engaging with photographs is pertinent and it demonstrates Proust’s exploitation of photography’s complex semiotic status as indexical icon both in Swann’s communication to Marcel of his attitude towards art, and in the representation of the fundamental differences between the two which ultimately determine the former’s creative sterility and the latter’s success. Photographs serve more than once to reveal these differences.

Swann and Marcel: Interaction with the World through Photographs

Different types of photograph play a role in Swann and Marcel’s interaction with each another and the world. The most important are photographic reproductions of art, which figure prominently in Marcel’s artistic education at Swann’s hands and in Swann’s affair with Odette. Marcel’s conception of Italy shows the photograph’s ambiguous power of evocation, pithily underlined through reference to the travel photograph. Swann also engages with old photographic portraits of Odette, thereby showing photography’s power in representing the past. The baron de Charlus observes that ‘la photographie acquiert un peu de la dignité qui lui manque quand elle cesse d’être une reproduction du réel et nous montre des choses qui n’existent plus’ [‘a photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist’] (II, 123; II, 398). What the baron fails to acknowledge, but Proust seems to have appreciated, is photography’s power to represent people and things as they may never actually have been. Here, again, photographs are shown to be ambiguous in that they may represent a past whose existence is confined solely to the realms of the viewer’s imagination. The photograph’s semiotic ambiguity affects both Swann and Marcel significantly with regard to creative endeavour, and as the following pages show, their different ways of engaging with photographs and the norms of reception governing photography are symptoms of Marcel’s eventual creative success and Swann’s failure.

Photographic Reproductions of Art: The Giotto Figures

At Combray, Swann’s gifts of photographic reproductions of Italian masterpieces brought back from his travels shape Marcel’s artistic education (I, 18). This is the first reference to photography in the novel. Although disdained by Marcel’s grandmother for their vulgarity, the later narrator favours Swann’s photographs for their accuracy as documentary evidence of the art and architecture they represent.⁶ Photographs of works by Giotto and Titian and masterpieces of Italian architecture make a profound, lasting impression on Marcel. They kindle his fascination with and desire to see Italy. This desire has important consequences: its lengthy duration and his involuntary memories of Venice lead him ultimately to understand the need to distinguish between external reality and the creative artist’s inner life (IV, 455). His photographs also introduce him to a key aspect of Swann’s way of looking at the world: namely, the tendency to seek out resemblances between people he knows and figures depicted in paintings. Marcel becomes aware of this habit at Combray through the family’s servant girl, who is pregnant:

La fille de cuisine […] commençait à porter difficilement devant elle la mystérieuse corbeille, chaque jour plus remplie, dont on devinait sous ses amples sarraus la forme magnifique. Ceux-ci rappelaient les houppelandes qui revêtent certaines des figures symboliques de Giotto dont Swann m’avait donné des photographies. C’est lui-même qui nous l’avait fait remarquer et quand il nous demandait des nouvelles de la fille de cuisine il nous disait: ‘Comment va la Charité de Giotto?’ (I, 79–80)

[The kitchen-maid […] was beginning to find difficulty in bearing before her the mysterious basket, fuller and larger every day, whose splendid outline could be detected beneath the folds of her ample smock. This last recalled the cloaks in which Giotto shrouds some of his allegorical figures, of which M. Swann had given me photographs. He it was who pointed out the resemblance, and when he inquired after the kitchen-maid he would say: ‘Well, how goes it with Giotto’s Charity?’] (I, 94)

A devoted amateur of art, Swann cultivates a vision of the world informed by his favourite art works (I, 219), a habit which discloses what Shattuck refers to as his idolatrous attitude towards art (2000, p. 156). It not only guides his responses to the world around him but actively influences the way he chooses to live, as the development of his affair with Odette illustrates, with a photographic reproduction of a painting playing a key role. The later narrator suggests several explanations for Swann’s particular manner of engaging with works of art (I, 219–20). His retrospective speculation on Swann’s creative potential, worldliness, and consequent creative sterility as possible reasons for his way of approaching works of art sets up a conflict between the respective demands of social life and a life devoted to creative activity which is not resolved until the end of Le Temps retrouvé. This passage presages the potentially dubious consequences of Swann’s example and of his influence on Marcel’s attitudes to art and creative endeavour. The suggestion that Swann’s superficial engagement with works of art stems from unresolved regret at his own failure to produce an artistic work is borne out by his repeated refusal to pursue any creative line of thought, a refusal accompanied by the gesture of shutting and rubbing his eyes and polishing his glasses — the better to see the world as other artists have, rather than cultivate his own vision. Instead he restricts himself to worship of other people’s art, thus satisfying his aesthetic sensibilities while simultaneously paralysing his creative potential. Photography’s usefulness as a tool for acquiring knowledge of a work of art means that it facilitates Swann’s idolatrous appropriation of art, while passively contributing to his creative sterility. Essentially, the uses to which photographs are put depend largely on the attitude the viewer adopts towards them. Swann restricts his engagement with photography mainly to photographic reproductions of art. His purpose in looking at them seems itself to be restricted to the search for resemblances with living people: hence his interest in the pregnant servant girl and, later, Odette. Photographs do not successfully stimulate his creative endeavours. Rather they passively fuel his veneration of living embodiments of artistically validated human forms. His gifts and example have the potential to impart the same way of appreciating art and thus the same creative sterility to Marcel.

At Combray, Marcel accepts Swann’s appraisal of the servant girl’s resemblance to the Giotto figure (I, 80). Yet for many years he derives no pleasure from looking at his photographs of them on the wall of his ‘salle d’études’ [‘schoolroom’] (I, 80; I, 95) and cannot share Swann’s admiration. The later narrator explains why this is when reflecting on a less immediately evident but nonetheless significant way in which servant girl resembles painted figure (I, 80). The key to Marcel’s eventual enjoyment of the painting is his recognition of the role symbol plays in it:

Mais plus tard j’ai compris que l’étrangeté saisissante, la beauté spéciale de ces fresques tenait à la grande place que le symbole y occupait, et que le fait qu’il fût représenté non comme un symbole puisque la pensée symbolisée n’était pas exprimée, mais comme réel, comme effectivement subi ou matériellement manié, donnait à la signification de l’œuvre quelque chose de plus littéral et de plus précis, à son enseignement quelque chose de plus concret et de plus frappant. (I, 81)

[But in later years I came to understand that the arresting strangeness, the special beauty of these frescoes derived from the great part played in them by symbolism, and the fact that this was represented not as a symbol (for the thought symbolized was nowhere expressed) but as a reality, actually felt or materially handled, added something more precise and more literal to the meaning of the work, something more concrete and more striking to the lesson it imparted.] (I, 96)

This description of Giotto’s Virtues and Vices expresses Marcel’s enthusiasm for the representation of the symbolic as real in the painting — the real as he defines it being that which can be felt or materially handled. It is therefore rooted in sensory experience. Having grasped Giotto’s representation of the symbolic as real, the painting has for Marcel a more precise, literal meaning than it might otherwise have had, and the lesson it imparts is more concrete and striking. At this point the later narrator remarks on the primacy of the concrete over the abstract, both in Giotto’s painting and everyday life, offering the example of practical charity as he has witnessed it in people who have ‘le visage antipathique et sublime de la vraie bonté’ [‘the impassive, unsympathetic, sublime face of true goodness’] (I, 81; I, 97). Central to the later narrator’s creative literary project is this notion of the primacy of the concrete over the abstract, as he retrospectively traces his vocation’s development. While Marcel searches for abstract truths beneath the surface of daily existence (IV, 296–97), the later narrator has come to understand the importance of ‘le côté effectif, douleureux, obscur, viscéral’ [‘the practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect’] (I, 81; I, 96) of life lived by body and mind. His delayed appreciation of the Giotto figures points to the erroneous path Marcel will take in pursuit of his desire to become a writer and also the valuable knowledge the later narrator has ultimately gleaned from Marcel’s experiences. Through its dual narratological structure, À la recherche du temps perdu, like the Giotto figures, presents abstract concepts — the search for lost time and a creative vocation — as inextricably linked to the mundanity of life as lived every day.

Unlike Swann, Marcel knows the Giotto painting only through the photographs Swann has given him. His eventual appreciation of its special beauty is based solely on his perusal of photographic reproductions, a fact thrice reiterated in this two-page passage from Du côté de chez Swann. Thus it is photography which makes significant developments in Marcel’s artistic education possible. Marcel and the later narrator’s scrutiny of the photographs shows an unconscious recognition of and response to the distinctive semiotic status of the photographic reproduction of a painting. The photograph’s hybrid semiotic status explains the tension existing between its causal relation with the part of the world represented (its indexical quality), and its resemblance to the world (its iconic quality) (Friday, p. 49). These two poles of tension are present in every photograph and alternately weakened or strengthened by the norms governing their reception. However, Marcel’s photographs are reproductions of already existing images.⁷ Schaeffer notes that:

Bien entendu, la photographie peut aussi être la reproduction de ce qui déjà est une image: ainsi lorsqu’elle reproduit un tableau. […] Mais nous verrons que dans un tel cas, l’image photographique ne fonctionne pas comme vue analogique. […] Dans l’usage reproductif de la photographie, l’image n’est pas thématisée comme vue photographique, contrairement à ce qui se passe dans son usage ‘canonique’ comme production de vues analogiques, c’est-à-dire de transpositions bidimensionnelles d’un ‘monde’ tridimensionnel. (p. 26)

[Of course, photography may reproduce an image that already exists, as when it reproduces a painting. […] But we shall see that, in such a case, the photographic image does not function as an analogical view. […] In reproduction photography, the image is not read as photographic, as opposed to what happens in its ‘canonical’ use as a means to produce visual analogies, that is, two-dimensional transpositions of a three-dimensional ‘world’.]

A photographic reproduction of a painting is not looked at as an arbitrarily composed, two-dimensional view of the three-dimensional painting situated at a specific point in space. Instead, it is ‘le tenant-lieu du tableau réel’ [‘the real painting’s holding-place’] (Schaeffer, p. 28), so the viewer tends not to recognize a relation of resemblance between photographed painting and painting as it might be viewed by unmediated perceptual contact. Instead, the photograph is taken as a transparent carrier or copy of the original. Marcel’s discussion of the Giotto figures shows his unconscious adoption of this attitude towards the photographic reproduction of a work of art. Notwithstanding his stated awareness that the images are photographs, he discusses them as though he were in direct perceptual contact with the painting: so ‘...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Editions
• Introduction
• 1 Thematic Appropriations of Photography
• 2 Photography, Figuratively
• 3 Narrative Focalization and Image Juxtaposition
• 4 Striving for Synthesis: Superimposed Images
• 5 Clandestine Sexualities and Photography
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index