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By Root 544 0

the same period, this time primarily in the field of psychology, and whose thinking offers us a link between Proust and his modernist contemporaries such as Joyce and Woolf, is William James (1842–1910). ‘Consciousness does not appear to itself chopped up in bits’, wrote James in 1890. ‘It is nothing jointed; it flows … In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness.’17 James’s conception of consciousness as a constant flux or flow finds its most forceful literary manifestations in Molly Bloom’s monologue in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). Throughout the Search, although much of the narrative comes to us directly from the thoughts and perceptions – the consciousness – of the first-person Narrator, things are further complicated by Proust’s handling of chronology. We remain always close to the Narrator’s thoughts, but the points from which he recounts his story vary: now he is a weary adult looking back on his life; now he is the young boy of Combray, in need of his mother’s goodnight kiss; now a naive young man starting out in salon society. As we follow the Narrator through the Search we may be privy to the heady flux of his consciousness as James identified it and that Joyce and Woolf exposed in their own radical ways, but combining the non-linear chronology of the novel with the endless curiosity and critical sharpness of the Narrator’s gaze, packaged elegantly in the surges and sinews of his prose, Proust proves that there are more things in the Search than were dreamt of in James’s psychology.

A landmark of the period that I would like to consider in conclusion is the phenomenon that were the Ballets russes [Russian Ballets], brought to tour in Europe under the directorship of Sergei Diaghilev from 1909 to 1929. Proust’s twin loves of music and theatre were satisfied by the lavish productions that showcased dancers such as Vaslav Nijinsky, Ida Rubenstein and Anna Pavlova. Proust greatly admired Wagner’s operas, conceived as Gesamtkunstwerks (total works of art), often taking several days to perform. The Ballets russes offered a quite different spectacle in terms of pace, duration and intensity; they did share, however, the totalizing ambition of Wagner’s operas, albeit on a smaller scale. They brought together the foremost composers of the time, Debussy, Stravinsky, Satie and Ravel, with sumptuous sets and costumes by avant-garde artists and designers, amongst them Léon Bakst, Henri Matisse and Coco Chanel. In 1917 Proust attended a performance of Parade, a new ballet with a scenario written by Jean Cocteau, music by Éric Satie, sets and costumes by Picasso and programme notes by Guillaume Apollinaire. Proust’s passion for music had led him, the previous year, to pay a string quartet to play works by Beethoven, Franck and Fauré for him as he lay in bed, an enraptured audience of one. He now had the apotheosis of high art before him on the stage of the Théâtre du Châtelet: art that challenged conventions, crossed boundaries and evinced the remarkable multiplier effect that collaboration across different media could have in the artistic sphere. This dynamic interplay is transposed into Proust’s novel where the language and techniques of different art forms are used metaphorically as a sort of multiplier that enriches our understanding of the objects of the Narrator’s and others’ attention. Seen through a painter’s eyes the statuary of the Balbec church is read like an illustrated bible; Elstir’s paintings offer the Narrator (and his readers) a model of the functioning and structure of metaphor; the minutest detail of Vermeer’s View of Delft offers the dying Bergotte momentary recognition of how he should have written his novels; and listening to Vinteuil’s bewitching, previously unknown septet alerts the Narrator to the profound sensitivity and vision of the unassuming piano teacher whom he imagines like Michelangelo, having painted the sublime strokes of his ‘musical fresco’ with ‘wild joy’ (C, 287; P, 1794).

When we consider the relation of Proust’s novel