Proust, for Those With a Memory
By Edward Rothstein
A cosmos is compressed into
cryptic hieroglyphs in the Clare Eddy Thaw Gallery of the Morgan Library &
Museum. Here is an exhibition so condensed, so distilled and in some ways so
abstract and well suited to the gallery’s geometric space (which is a perfect
cube), that unless you arrive properly prepared, you might leave as bewildered
as prospective French publishers were when they rejected Marcel Proust’s “Du
Côté de Chez Swann” (“Swann’s Way”), more
than a century ago.
“Perhaps I am as thick as
two short planks,” reads one of those evaluations, “but I cannot understand how
a man can take 30 pages to describe how he turns round in his bed before he
finally falls asleep.”
But anyone who reads that
first volume of “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” (translated into English as
“Remembrance of Things Past”) has no problem understanding how 30 pages might
be required to capture the turnings of self-consciousness and their cascades of
recollection. Or even, perhaps, how 3,000 more pages might be needed to
scrutinize how sexual compulsion, aesthetic refinement and social perversity
find expression in a cast of characters who can be as brilliant, creepy,
climbing and compelling as their creator.
By now, Proust’s epic
seven-volume novel (the last three were published posthumously in the 1920s)
has become a touchstone of Western literature. And the new exhibition at the
Morgan in honor of the first book’s centennial — “Marcel Proust and ‘Swann’s
Way’: 100th Anniversary” — takes its status for
granted, presuming familiarity.
This presumption is a
mistake, I think, because the materials on loan here from the Bibliothèque Nationale
de France are being shown for the first time outside of Paris. The Proust
scholar Antoine Compagnon, the
curator for the show, along with Robert Parks of the Morgan, has gathered
notebooks and typescripts, doodles and galleys, postcards and photographs, all
related to the creation of “Swann’s Way.” And while the label text is
informative, first the deciphering of Proust’s handwriting is required, and then,
for many, so is a linguistic decoding.
This would be easy enough
to remedy with transcriptions and translations. It would also help, when you
visit, not only to have once read the book, but also to have it fresh in your
mind. Otherwise you might pick up fragments of knowledge and see some
remarkable artifacts, but will not grasp what kinds of processes are on display
here, how the quick, fluent flow of narrative in these notebooks mixes with the
meticulous retractions and reconsiderations of Proust’s revisions. Or how the
almost scattered accumulation of drafts and subjects results from an extended
turning and re-turning of the material, as if the displays were dramatizing
Proust’s dissections of consciousness.
If you keep the book in
mind, each of the objects here stirs a series of readerly recollections, like the famous madeleine the
novel’s narrator dips in tea (in a 1909 version, it was toast; in a 1910
notebook here, it was described as some “biscottes”). The madeleine serves to
open the world of the past, as if, in Proust’s comparison, an entire town and
all its inhabitants were springing into being, unfurling like compressed papers
tossed into Japanese porcelain bowls filled with water.
We see a photograph of
Proust’s mother, Jeanne (née
Weil), with her two sons, Marcel and Robert, from 1896, when Marcel was in his
20s. She is preoccupied, looking off to the side, grimly reflective, but her
sons radiate comfort and assurance in her presence. Robert is relaxed, almost
languidly amused; Marcel, more formal, close by his mother, a young man of leisure.
One source of Marcel’s
novel is latent here, since its writing, we are told, “is linked to the
crushing grief” he felt after his mother’s death in 1905. Their relationship
may have served as a kind of anticipatory madeleine, a foreshadowing of further
imaginings: the novel’s narrator remembers so clinging to his mother’s rationed
love as a child that he organized his evenings around strategies to obtain her
good-night kiss. And Robert, who was the keeper of Marcel’s flame after his
early death in 1922, later said: “I sensed in him the survival of our dear
departed”; Marcel was “my entire past; my entire youth was enclosed in his
person.”
Without the novel in mind,
period picture postcards of the Champs-Élysées on display might seem almost
mundane, except, we learn, that the park became “a kind of literary salon for
the precocious Marcel.” He met a young Russian girl there who became a model
for Swann’s daughter, Gilberte, whom the novel’s narrator covets in that very
park. Another postcard shows the lush, verdant gardens owned by Marcel’s uncle,
grounds that became the model for Swann’s estate.
And postcards of Illiers, “the
ancestral home of the Proust family,” show us not just that ancient town near
Chartres, but also Proust’s fictional Combray, a town whose past is recreated
by the narrator’s reflective archaeologies, restored, as he says, by piercing
through its modern edifices.
A school photograph here of
the 10th grade of the Lycée Condorcet in Paris reflects a period of the
author’s life that, we are told, was “mysteriously unexpressed in his novel.”
But in the photo we can see many young luminaries, including Jacques Bizet, the
son of the composer Georges Bizet. Jacques became an object of the young Proust’s unrequited love, in Edmund
White’s reading, though, interestingly, Proust became close with Jacques’s
mother, Geneviève. In 1908
she gave him the four elegant notebooks on display here, in which he began
thinking about his enterprise. “Should it be a novel,” he writes in one, “a
philosophical essay, am I a novelist?”
The rest of the show traces
his effort to answer that question by filling these notebooks with experiments
in narrative and speculation, veering between reflection and satire, close
analysis and almost painful realism. We can’t follow his quest because only
fragments are open to our view. But in these 20 square feet of space,
resonances accumulate.
Here is Proust’s letter to
the composer Fauré, from perhaps 1897, whose music led to a “dangerous
intoxication” in Proust and inspired the sonata that haunts Swann. Here too are
photographs of Giotto’s frescoes of “Vices” and “Virtues” from
Padua, images that Proust’s narrator contemplates. And Proust, we are told,
planned to structure his novel around the “Vices and Virtues of Padua and
Combray.”
And however compressed and
difficult this exhibition is, it gradually creates an effect. In a pocket
notebook here from 1910, Proust calls artistic reality “a relation, a law
joining different facts.” An artwork establishes connections between different
worlds. That kind of reality, Proust writes, requires style, which is itself a
series of connections in the material, an “alliance of words.” Style is not
something extraneous to an artwork, but part of its essence: “A work of art
only begins to exist from the moment that style appears.”
And while this exhibition
could have provided more assistance (and still could if transcriptions are
added), there are enough connections and relations established here among these
artifacts that they propel us back into the novel in Proustian style.
“Marcel Proust and ‘Swann’s
Way’: 100th Anniversary” is on view through April 28 at the Morgan Library
& Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, Manhattan; (212) 685-0008,
themorgan.org.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/books/marcel-proust-and-swanns-way-at-the-morgan-library.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y&pagewanted=print
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário