The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [12]
[It was] as a puppet, a trembling puppet with a beard of white wool, that I saw him being shakily put through his paces …, in a puppet-show which was both scientific and philosophical and in which he served – as though it had been at the same time a funeral oration and a lecture at the Sorbonne – both as a text for a sermon on the vanity of all things and as an object lesson in natural history. (TR, 290; 2306)
No longer in control of its movements, the human body is depicted as puppet-like. The spectacle is described as scientific and philosophical, then the analogies used expand its potential interpretation yet further: a funeral oration might have a spiritual or philosophical dimension but is unlikely to be scientific; a university lecture might be scientific or philosophical. The further suggestions of a sermon on vanitas and a lesson in natural history again reinforce the original terms whilst expanding their range further still. In offering readers these divergent yet complementary possible contexts for thinking about this guignol-like figure, Proust underlines the multiple ways in which people and events may be viewed and understood. The Narrator continues:
A puppet-show, yes, but one in which, in order to identify the puppets with the people whom one had known in the past, it was necessary to read on several planes at once, planes that lay behind the visible aspect of the puppets and gave them depth and forced one … to make a strenuous intellectual effort; one was obliged to study them at the same time with one’s eyes and with one’s memory. (TR, 290, trans. mod.; 2307)
‘To identify’, ‘to read’, ‘to study’: the verbs used here remind us how Proust’s novel is concerned throughout its duration with the pursuit of knowledge. The Search repeatedly asks us to make a strenuous intellectual effort of the sort the Narrator feels himself drawn into here, and the method he identifies – that is, attempting to read on different levels at once – offers us a useful analogy for thinking about Proust’s novel in its cultural and intellectual contexts. Any single page (indeed, any single sentence) of the Search bears inlaid in its imagery, its grand sweeps and its sub-clauses references and allusions to events within the novel, and those of the period in which it is set, to people and to works of art real and imaginary. If we want to get the most from our reading, to revel in the sort of pluralities exposed in the passages quoted above, we have to seek to emulate the Narrator’s efforts at interpretive simultaneity. The present chapter aims to assist readers in so doing by offering a number of contextual frameworks for Proust’s novel.1
I will consider three broad domains: politics and society; science, technology and medicine; literature, philosophy and the arts. These divisions, as will soon become apparent, are relatively arbitrary given the interwoven nature of the events of the period, but reading these sections will give a sense of the heady array of developments and discoveries that drove France ever further into the realm of modernity between the time of the Paris Commune and the aftermath of the First World War. These are contexts in which we might situate Proust’s novel, a project whose vast ambition aligns it with the dynamic, forward-reaching period in which it was produced, yet which equally far exceeds that period, making such demands as it does on the time, intellect and memory of its readers as directly to contravene that same era’s imperative for speed in all things. This very strangeness of Proust’s novel (a strangeness, as Harold Bloom has noted, that often characterizes canonical works) places it somehow beyond the reasonable expectations of any present moment yet gives it a bewildering appeal to readers far removed in time and space from the rarefied atmospheres of post-Commune and pre-war Paris.
Politics