A Translation of "Der Umgang mit Namen," a Lecture on Names by Ingeborg Bachmann

Keeping Company with Names

Ladies and gentlemen,

A few weeks ago you here in Frankfurt enjoyed a fortunate opportunity to get acquainted with Alban Berg’s opera Lulu, and it is safe to say that many of you, even including some who were unable to see and hear the work, are now finding it impossible to rid your minds of the name Lulu, the name of this creation of Wedekind the writer and Berg the composer—that this name is permanently anchored in your consciousness, this auratic name, this name with an aura, an aura that it admittedly owes to music and language but that it still has; it would seem that as soon as a name has acquired such radiant power it renders itself free and independent; a name alone suffices to confer being in the world.  There is nothing more mysterious than the light of names and our attachment to such names, and not even total ignorance of the works in which they occur has ever presented an obstacle to the triumphant availability of Lulu and Undine, of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, of Don Quixote, Rastignac, Green Heinrich, and Hans Castorp.  Indeed, keeping company with them in conversation or in our thoughts comes so naturally to us that we never once ask ourselves why their names are in the world, as if somebody had been more thoroughly christened with these names than we with our own; it is as if there had actually been such a christening, one at which, to be sure, no holy water had had to be sprinkled and of which no signature in a register now speaks—as if in this case there had been a proper baptismal ceremony, one more irrevocable than ours and preferable to it, one at which no living person was present.  These names are branded on fictitious beings and also deputize for them; they are durable and so firmly attached to these beings that when we borrow them and use them as names for children, throughout their lives these children carry the allusion to the name around with them or wear it like a kind of costume: the name always clings more tightly to the make-believe person than to the real, living one.

Because literature has sometimes been lucky enough to alight on good names and effect actual christenings with them, the problem of names and the question of names is quite a momentous thing for a writer, and not only in relation to characters but also to places, to streets, that must be referenced in that extraordinary map, in that atlas, that only literature makes visible.  This map matches the geographers’ maps in only a few places.  To be sure, it includes place names that every schoolchild knows, but it also includes others unknown to any schoolchild, and in the aggregate they add up to a network that stretches from Delphi and Aulis to Dublin and Combray, from the Rue Morgue to Alexanderplatz and from the Bois de Boulogne to the Prater: T.E. Lawrence’s desert and the skies flown through by Saint-Exupéry appear on it, but many deserts and many a fruitful field do not—here they are nowhere to be found.  And there are certain places that appear on it quite a number of times; Venice probably appears on it a hundred times, but each time it is a different Venice, the Venice of Goldoni and of Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal’s Venice and Thomas Mann’s, and there are entire countries that are hard to find on any purchasable map—Orplid and Atlantis, and then there are others, like Illyria, that certainly do exist, but Shakespeare’s Illyria does not match this map’s Illyria; and naturally there are also France and England and Italy and the names of all these countries!  But if we should ever go looking for the France we’re thinking of now, if we should ever travel in search of it—we will never reach it; we have either always already been there or we shall never be there.  It has a more genuine place, a much more genuine place, in the magic atlas, and in this Paris the Neva borders on the Seine, and the Seine is crossed by Balzac’s Pont du Carrousel and Apollinaire’s Pont Mirabeau, and its stones and water are made of words.  We shall never set foot on it, on this Pont Mirabeau, and we shall never see the snowy Russia through which Alexander Blok’s Twelve marched.  But on the other hand, during all our journeys, where have we actually been?  In the brothel in Dublin and on the Blocksberg, on the Finnish estate of Mr. Puntila and in the salons of Kakania—perhaps we were actually there.

Our names are extremely fortuitous, and we are often seized by a sense of namelessness vis-à-vis ourselves and the world.  This is why we stand in need of names—names of characters, place names, names in general.  But it is still quite an odd sort of need to have, and who among us is not sometimes inclined to exclaim with Hamlet: “And all for nothing / For Hecuba! / What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba / That he should weep for her?” Indeed, what are Lulu and Julien Sorel to us, and Manon and the boy called Eli[s]?  Are they merely deputies or allusions, as when one of them alludes to Hecuba and Hecuba in turn alludes to a third entity?  Are they placeholders, or something more than that? 

For it seems to me that loyalty to these names—names of characters and place names—is almost the only kind of loyalty that human beings are capable of. Our memory is constituted in such a way that we forget the names of the living, that 15 years later we can hardly even remember what our schoolmates were called; addresses that we once knew by heart vanish from our possession; or we lose a piece of a name, its proper spelling; one fine day a wrong letter or combination of letters makes its first appearance.  And that crepuscule way back when: was it in Parma or in Piacenza?—no, it was in Pavia if it was anywhere!  There are few exceptions to this general death of names within us—these are the names of people who have been closest to us, or names that have anchored certain incidents, certain accidents.  But the names that we were already hoping we would be able to forget as early as our earliest schooldays, because it irritated us to have Odysseus and William Tell forced upon us, and although we swore to forget them along with the chemical formulas that we actually have forgotten—these names we have not forgotten, and our conception of them, whether distinct or rudimentary, is more durable and defendable than our conception of living human beings.  Our companionship with them is indissoluble.  We really do keep company with them; for us they, too, figure in the world’s population. 

Recently a painting by Monet, Water Lilies, was destroyed by fire in a New York museum.  I once saw the painting, and when the news appeared in the papers, I couldn’t stop thinking, Where have the water lilies actually gone to now?  This disappearance, this obliteration, is impossible; our memory retains them, insists on retaining them, and we feel an impulse to talk about them to make them linger on here, for this destruction is quite different from the death of all the water lilies in every body of water in the world, and yet the incineration of the painting was only a trifling destruction compared with all the destructions we know have been caused by war.  And what about the incineration of the library of Alexandria, which we are still incessantly talking about 2,000 years later, as if our houses and cities had not burned to the ground many times in the interval?  We keep thinking about these things, loyal to them amid so much disloyalty.  We do not know if this loyalty—along with tears shed for Hecuba—is acceptable.  We are transmissible and must transmit what is best.  This seems to be a settled state of affairs.

In modern literature there has been a considerable thought-provoking development in the treatment of names—a deliberate attenuation of names and an incapacity to assign names, even though names continue to appear and these names are often still quite robust.  And we must discuss both topics—the maintenance of names and the atrophying of names, their imperilment and its causes.

With the rise to fame of Kafka’s novels and stories came the rise to fame of K. and Josef K., two characters who are scarcely recognizable as novel-characters in the traditional sense, having been reduced from the outset in their very names, in being furnished with something more like a cipher than a full-fledged name.  There is specifically a striking connection between this denial of names on the author’s part and the denial to K. of everything that might entitle him to bear a name.  The character has been deprived of parentage, a social milieu, idiosyncrasies, every binding quality, every inferable quality.  You are familiar with the sorts of consequences Kafka’s ingenious manipulation had.  The Kafka mode has given us heaps of short stories and novels in which the heroes are named A. and X. and N., do not know where they come from and where they are going, live in towns and villages, in countries, in which nobody—not even the author in most cases—can find his way around; in these places there are only generic labels—the Town, the River, the Department; processes, encirclements, that are intended to be read as parables, but to what end?  They are applicable to anything and everything. 

Nevertheless, one ought not to dismiss the epigones out of hand, for a few of them may have either consciously or unconsciously grasped something substantial—namely, the fact that today it is not very easy to name something, to bestow names, that our trust in the naïve assignment of names has been shaken, that there is a real difficulty here, that even other authors, who continue naively to assign names, only rarely succeed at bequeathing to us a name, a character with a name that is more than an identification tag—a name that we find so convincing that we accept it unquestioningly, a name that we commit to memory, repeat to ourselves, and begin to keep company with.

But in contrast to his imitators, Kafka himself proceeds with his names in a highly logical manner, as I would like to show you via a discussion of his novel The Castle.  With what supreme precision are we led by him into insecurity and imprecision!

A land surveyor, K., arrives in the village, supposedly as an employee of the castle.  A bit later his assistants also turn up, and the following scene ensues:

“It’s hard with you two,” K. said, and compared their faces as he had already done from time to time; “how ever am I supposed to tell you apart from each other? The only thing that sets you apart from each other is your names; otherwise you’re as alike as—” he faltered, then reflexively continued—“otherwise you’re as alike as two snakes.” They smiled.  “Everybody else can tell us apart just fine,” they said defensively.  “I believe it,” said K.; “indeed, I have clearly witnessed it myself, but I see only with my own eyes, and with them I can’t tell you apart.  Accordingly, I shall treat you as one man and call you both Artur, which is after all one of your names.  Is it yours?” K. asked one of them.  “No,” the latter replied; “my name is Jeremias.”  “It makes no difference,” said K.; “I shall call you both Artur.  If I send Artur somewhere, you’ll both go there; if I give Artur a task, both of you will carry it out…”

But we shall see that K.’s ignorance will come back to haunt him, for he is not entitled to deny names.

But K. himself gets into a serious predicament himself when he is finally summoned by the castle and required to phone in.  K. hesitates to state his name.  K.’s hesitation makes the man on the other end impatient. “‘Who’s there?’ he repeated and added: ‘I would be much happier if I didn’t get so many telephone calls from over there; somebody just called a second ago.’”  K. makes no reply to this remark; instead, acting on a sudden impulse, he falsely identifies himself as the land surveyor’s assistant.  On being pressingly asked which assistant he actually is, K. finally divulges his first name and says, “Josef.”  He is slightly disconcerted by the murmuring of the peasants behind his back; obviously they are none too pleased that he has not truthfully identified himself.

The voice down the line contradicts him; they know there that the assistants are called Artur and Jeremias.  K. continues to lie, maintaining that he is the surveyor’s old assistant, who followed him to the village.  “‘No!’ the voice now cried.  ‘Well, who am I then?’ asked K., who remained calm.”  And after a pause the voice concedes to him what he wants to hear—that he is the old assistant.  Now the fatal die has been cast; there is nothing he can do but take cover behind the identity of another person and ask when his boss, meaning himself, may come to the castle.  And the answer is “Never.” 

No sooner has K. brought himself to call Jeremias “Jeremias,” than the latter becomes a hazard to him; Artur has run away and is working against him at the castle, but this is also too late, because, as he is obliged to discover, Jeremias has robbed him of Frieda, whom he for his part was trying to marry because she was the mistress of the supposedly powerful Klamm from the castle.  Moreover, in a conversation about Klamm in which K. sounds out the landlady, also a former mistress of Klamm’s, K. receives a significant reply:

The landlady did not speak and merely looked K. up and down searchingly.  Then she said, “I promise to listen calmly to everything you have to say.  Speak as bluntly as you have to, and don’t worry about offending me.  I have only one request: don’t use Klamm’s name.  Call him ‘he’ or anything else except his name.”

But if in Klamm’s case the use of a name is still straightforward—even if it is only his name that wanders through the book like a ghost (K. gets to see him only once, indistinctly through a peephole, and even the landlady only manages to hold on to a photograph of the messenger who once summoned her to Klamm)—the confusion of names becomes complete whenever a fairly high-ranking person from the castle has appeared in the flesh and cast his shadow, as if the camouflaging desired by Kafka is once again meant to be achieved by a certain way of dealing with names.  At the very beginning of his residence in the village, K. encounters the name of an official—Sordini.  Somebody explains:

“…I don’t understand how even a stranger can believe that when he rings up, for example, Sordini, it’s actually Sordini who answers him.  It’s much more likely some petty clerk in an entirely different division.  On the other hand, it’s undoubtedly possible at certain times of day to ring up that same petty clerk and be answered by Sordini himself.  To be sure, in such cases it’s better to run away from the phone before it makes the first audible sound.”

K. thinks he is hearing about Sordini again when Olga tells him the story of her sister Amalia, who has rebuffed the official’s shamelessly overt advances and whose entire family has since been struggling to reestablish its position in the village:

“…There’s an important official at the castle; he’s called Sortini.”  “I’ve already heard about him,” said K.; “he was aware of my appointment as surveyor.” “I don’t think so,” said Olga; “Sortini hardly ever appears in public.  Aren’t you confusing him with Sordini with a ‘d’?”  “You’re right,” said K.; “it was Sordini.”  “Yes,” said Olga; “Sordini is very well known, one of the hardest-working officials; there’s a lot of talk about him.  Sortini, on the other hand, is very retiring and a stranger to most people…”

His story follows, and later we again read:

“…Everybody knows that Klamm is very rude; he supposedly goes for hours without speaking and then he suddenly says one of those incredibly rude things that make you cringe.  Nobody knows anything of the kind about Sortini, because of course he isn’t very well-known in general.  Actually the only thing  anybody knows about him is that his name is almost the same as Sordini’s; if it weren’t for this similarity of names, they probably wouldn’t know him at all.  Even as a master-firefighter he probably gets mistaken for Sordini, who is the actual master firefighter and exploits the similarity of their names, mainly in order to foist the duties of representation onto him…”

The unknownness of the characters or their relative unknownness is thus complemented by the fluctuations in or secretiveness of names.  The one conditions the other.  And this is why one is no longer surprised when one reads K.’s grotesque conversation with the teacher regarding the count whose seat is the castle: “But K. refused to give up and asked yet again, ‘What?  You don’t know the count?’  ‘How am I supposed to know him?’ the teacher softly said and loudly added in French, ‘Remember that there are innocent children present.’”  This “Remember that there are innocent children present,” as if there were something obscene or criminal about such a harmless question about a person, is unprecedented.  The fact that Kafka’s work incorporates simple, homely names—for example the girls’ names Frieda and Olga, as well as family names like Gerstäcker and Laseman–in all their obviousness and inconsiderableness serves only to distract the reader’s gaze from the by now-ineluctable question of names.

In a moment of genuine insight the book’s hero K. tells himself that in order to find his peace in the village he would need to make himself blend in unobtrusively with the Gerstäckers and the other villagers.  Max Brod reports that K. was supposed to learn on his deathbed that he would be allowed to live and work in the village, although he would be granted no legal right to do so.  The coincidence of his death with the arrival of this news is necessary, for it is impossible to imagine how the name K. could ever turn conformist or make itself at home among the other, simple names.  K. is only imaginable as being en route to his goal; it is impossible to imagine his having attained it—this precisely on account of his name.

But far be it from me to engage in the exegesis of Kafka.

We are still accustomed to recognizing characters by their names, and to keeping abreast of the events of the plot with the help of names, such that we believe that once we have the name we have the character.  Even in Kafka we can still catch hold of the names; to be sure they sometimes shove us away, make us feel uneasy, but we catch hold of them once again.  We are highly accustomed to it and also spoiled by it—spoiled not only by older literature but also by certain contemporaries of those writers who whisked names out of our hands for the first time.  I am thinking especially of Thomas Mann.  But the refinement with which he serves most of his names up to us is perhaps also nothing but a warning sign.  Names are accorded great importance in Thomas Mann’s work; he is the last great inventor of names, an enchanter of names.  But he enrobes his characters in names ironically; comically and tragically; with a very judicious amount of nuance.  He wants to get everything out of his names.  Serenus Zeitblom, Helene Oelhafen, Madame Houpflé, the Marquise de Venosta, née Plettenberg—bourgeois gravitas, ordinariness, humdrumness, pallor or exoticism, pseudoexoticism—everything is precisely measured out beforehand, injected into the name, and even a serious name like Adrian Leverkühn is precisely laden with the significance that is accorded to the character.  Or the emphatically north-German, the south-German, the southern names, which are strongly intended to highlight a book’s theme.  Or as in Tonio Kröger, which proclaims its affiliation with two worlds.  From the outset, the name hints at the conflict the hero is going to be drawn into.

I am unsure if Thomas Mann is very useful to this examination of names in modern literature, but his ironic—in the broadest sense—assignment of names may just compel us to conjecture that here as well the trustful assignment of names has provisionally run its course—albeit not without bequeathing to us a handful of exquisite, majestic names: Peeperkorn, Settembrini, Krull.  It would be a long round dance.

At first blush names are also stable in the work of James Joyce—almost as stable as in the nineteenth-century novel.  They give every sign of being solid; they lull us into a false sense of security: there are the advertising agent Leopold Bloom, Marion or Molly, his wife, and, quite pointedly, Stephen Dedalus, the significance of whose name weighs heavily on him wherever he goes.  “The mockery of it!” somebody says to him: “Your absurd name, an ancient Greek!”  There would be nothing more to remark if the names were not also affected by the linguistic shakeup, the aggressive dissolution of language.  Bloom’s name is initially served up to the reader as is; then it is shaken, tasted anew; it is called out from all directions and in every possible variation: Leo, Poldy, Siopold! Childe Leopold, Sir Leopold, Master Leopold, Stephen D. Leop. Bloom.  In the theater of the night, the brothel chapter, he is initially hailed by the gong: “Bang Bang Bla Bak Blud Bugg Bloo.” Then by a voice: “Poldy!” The watch enter, place their hands on his shoulders, say, “Bloom. Of Bloom. For Bloom. Bloom.”

And slightly later, one of the watch barks at him, “Come.  Name and address.”

Bloom replies, “Dr Bloom, Leopold, dental surgeon. You have heard of von Blum Pasha. Umpteen millions. Donnerwetter! Owns half Austria. Egypt. Cousin.”

The watchman asks, “Proof?”

Bloom hands him a business card.  But from this card the watchman reads the name, “Henry Flower. No fixed abode.”

(For Leopold has his mistress Martha call him Henry Flower, and as we are aware, in the course of the previous day he picked up a poste-restante letter addressed to this name.)

Shortly after the scene with the watch, Martha exclaims, “Henry! Leopold! Lionel, thou lost one! Clear my name.”

Another woman claims to have received a letter from him signed with the name James Lovebirch.

Enter some kisses, which twitter and warble, “Leo!...Leopopold! Leeolee! O, Leo!”

In the further course of the scene Bloom slips into various roles; as an emperor-president and kingchairman he is called Leopold the First.

The archbishop who anoints gives him more names: “Leopold, Patrick, Andreas, David, Georg, be thou anointed!”

Bloom (in his speech to his subjects) says, “My beloved subjects, a new era is about to

dawn. I, Bloom, tell you verily it is even now at hand. Yea, on the word of a Bloom, ye shall ere long enter into the golden city which is to be, the new Bloomusalem…”

Then a man rises from beneath the floor.  He says, “Don’t you believe a word he says. That man is Leopold M’Intosh, the notorious fireraiser. His real name is Higgins.”

As Professor Bloom he becomes a finished example of the new womanly man, who is about to have a baby.  A voice asks him, “Bloom, are you the Messiah ben Joseph or

ben David?”

His daughter Milly: “My! It’s Papli!”

Bloom survives the vanishing of the phantasmagoria of the theater of the night, but he retains a version of the name Bloom that with this vanishing suddenly triggers the associative chain “Bloom, Blue, Bloom,” and Henry Flower has likewise survived as a deputy for the name Bloom, which can turn up in various backdoor translations.

A cottage that has been or is going to be built for him receives the following possible names: Bloom Cottage, Saint Leopold’s, and Flowerville.

Names are subject to mental and aural dislocation in Joyce; they can be dislocated, dispensed, or deputized for, but only in such a way that the original name is always alluded to, as in the acrostic constructed by Bloom as a young man.

Poets oft have sung in rhyme

Of music sweet their praise divine.

Let them hymn it nine times nine.

Dearer far than song or wine.

You are mine…

(The first letters spell out his name, Poldy.)  Another passage (consisting of anagrams Bloom came up with in his youth) shows us how the name Bloom can be spun around like a carousel, until we become dizzy along with the name:

And at one point it is asked with whom he has traveled.  With?

Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.

And finally—as if we could forget this!—the book is entitled Ulysses, and Leopold Bloom’s progress through Dublin on a particular day is undertaken in the shadow of the that great name that is thereby invoked: Odysseus.  This name serves and must serve to remind us constantly of that patiently enduring man’s journey and to disclose to us the scenes from that journey that are allegorized at every turn.

Refusal of the name, ironic treatment of the name, meaningful and meaningless wordplay with the name: these are the possibilities—but there is an even more radical one.  As if it would be too crude to identify a character by means of a name, William Faulkner plunges his reader into despair in what is probably his most important work, The Sound and the Fury.  I almost believe hardly anyone will ever succeed in properly finding his way around the web constituted by this book, although not so much because William Faulkner’s way of dealing with time makes this difficult—the book is constantly jumping to and fro among three different time periods; a handful of sentences referring to 1928 may be immediately followed by another few referring to 1910.  The real difficulty does not lie here, because we have long since acclimatized ourselves to texts that no longer pattern themselves on the course of chronological time, but rather because this book has left us with nothing whatsoever to take hold of when we reach for a name.  One can but enviously admire the author of the blurb of this book, who has managed to make the novel sound essentially like a family saga.  Even once one has progressed deeply into the text, one feels as if one has been transformed into a bloodhound that is constantly losing the trail of his quarry because his nose is constantly catching a whiff of a fresh scent.  The name Caddy appears twice, once with a y and once with ie; Jason appears twice, and so does Quentin, once as a masculine forename and once as a feminine one.  But taking stock of this hardly does us any good at all, because we are emphatically not supposed to identify the characters on the basis of their names.  The names seem like traps.  Rather, we are supposed to identify them on the basis of something entirely different.  On the basis of a kind of array of flowers surrounding each character, a tenderly plotted constellation in the midst of which they all stand.  This constellation is expressed in brief quotations that we are supposed to watch out for, and with each reappearance of the character, be it the he-Quentin or the she-Quentin, and in whichever period of his life—as a child, as a student, as a young girl—this quotation is supplied by the author; it is less important to watch out for the name than for the setting in which the name is mentioned.  The name can appear in the context of a flower, a honeysuckle, a field that has been sold, a wedding announcement.  We suddenly discover that this is the only way in which we are gaining ground, that the characters have remained hidden from us all along.  And they want to hide themselves, because we are dealing here with a foundational event, an enigma, that frightens names.  Once upon a time something, an act of incest, happened, and the guilty parties do not want to be named—the child that is the product of this union must not be named.  Fairly often the incident is invoked and immediately hushed up again, and the names are invoked and hushed up.

We hear about it the first time as follows: “…milkweed.  I said I have committed incest, Father I said. Roses.”

The next time this letter appears in juxtaposition with a name that initially leaves us completely at loose ends, but that is subsequently invoked over and over again, until we grasp its importance.  “I have committed incest I said Father it was I it was not Dalton Ames.  And when he put Dalton Ames.  Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames.”  (Next there is a parenthesis relating to another time period; then this name is uttered again, three times.) “Dalton Ames.  Dalton Ames.  Dalton Ames.”

The roses keep reappearing as quotations.  A flower is often juxtaposed with Benjamin the madman; but the fragrance of honeysuckle is always juxtaposed directly with the hushed-up incident.

He, Quentin, says, “…she held my head against her damp hard breast I could hear her heart going firm and slow now not hammering and the water gurgling among the willows in the dark and waves of honeysuckle coming up the air…”

A bit later: “damn that honeysuckle I wish it would stop”

A bit later: “the honeysuckle drizzled and drizzled…”

Things that were associated with a situation or a person last longer and encircle the respective characters better than the name.  Things attest to the presence of the character, or to the recollection of things.

Faulkner’s method consists in nothing less than weaning us from names in order to thrust us, bereft of detours and explanations, into reality.  It is not he, the author, who arrogates the government of names, who parades them before us and forestalls cases of mistaken identity.  Rather, only the characters themselves know one another, call themselves and others by name; and as in reality, we must watch from the sidelines and see how far we can penetrate into the mystery and what sorts of correlations we can establish between people who have not been preformed, dissected, and labeled for the sake of greater intelligibility.

Now would be the right time to say that I first began thinking about names as a consequence of reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.  There is no other book that better calls our attention to the way names operate, to their functioning, their density or porosity.  Indeed, even the reason why names are charismatic or names are stillborn will be disclosed to any reader who tenaciously follows the trail of every single one of Proust’s names.  For he has not merely left behind a cemetery full of famous names but rather made names and the experience of living with names into a theme of his novel.  He has said whatever can be said about names, and he has worked on them from two directions: he has enthroned names, bathed them in the light of a magic lantern, then destroyed them and blotted them out; he has suffused them, laden them, with significance, and has at the same time demonstrated their emptiness, thrown them away like so many empty husks, stigmatized them as an arrogation of a singularity.

THE END

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2018 by Douglas Robertson

Source: Ingeborg Bachmann, Frankfurter Vorlesungen.  Probleme zeitgenössischer Dichtung [Frankfurt Lectures. Problems in Contemporary Literature], Munich and Berlin: Piper, 2016.  This is the fourth of a series of five lectures that Bachmann delivered at Goethe University Frankfurt during the 1959-1960 winter semester and recorded for Bavarian Radio in April 1960.

A Translation of "Zugang zu Marcel Proust" by Jean Améry

A Window on Marcel Proust

On the Occasion of the Hundredth Anniversary of the Writer’s Birthday (July 10, 1871)

That he is mandatory reading is something everybody knows.  But many people postpone reading him indefinitely; reading him is an intellectual activity that requires no small amount of effort.  But assuming some reader or other, having avoided Proust up until now, has at last resolved to step into the world of this work, a few pointers on how to read Proust might just be of some use to him at a pinch.  Everyone must establish a rapport with this author in his own way.  Accordingly, the suggestions tendered here are by no means intended to be universally binding; rather, they are aimed at those Proust debutantes who are of approximately the same literary temperament as the author of this essay; these readers will discover themselves to be his kindred spirits.  It is equally certain that others will realize that my advice is not worth a fig to them and will seek their bliss on their own power.

Suggestions for the Beginning Proust Reader

I would like to begin this discussion by recommending to everybody who can do so to read Proust in the original.  This is not to say that the German translation is an unsuccessful one.  To the contrary: the version of the Recherche published by Suhrkamp is probably optimal.  To be sure, here one cannot help wondering whether even the best translation can ever be good enough.  Let us just take for example the title of the second volume, which is called A l’ombre des juenes filles en fleurs in the original.  Once upon a time Walter Benjamin and Franz Hessel rendered this as Im Schatten der jungen Mädchen [In the Shadow of Young Girls].  They left out “en fleurs” because its inclusion would have resulted in a decidedly preposterous German title.  But was the abbreviation Im Schatten der jungen Mädchen preferable?  I am none too sure that it was; I can still very clearly recall the time when I was trying to approach the work via the then-available German version, and that title really put me off.  After all, in German isn’t it better to say just plain “Mädchen” in place of the “jeune fille” that one has to say in French?  And isn’t the Suhrkmap edition’s rendering of the same title as Im Schatten jungen Mädchenblüte even more problematic?

But these are details.  My essential point is that the question of translatability—of prose, that is; for paraphrases of poetry are invariably the most neck-breaking of all literary undertakings—becomes quite especially sharply defined in Proust’s case.  This is because, regardless of what anyone may say to the contrary, Marcel Proust is a social novelist; in his work we encounter scarcely a single page in which the words are bereft of their quite specific socially oriented meanings.  Aller dans le monde, for example, is incredibly difficult to translate, because the social function of elegant sallying-forth in Paris at the turn of the century was a different one—emphatically so even in cultural and literary terms—than in Vienna, Berlin, or London during the same period.  The narrator’s relationship with the aristocracy becomes truly comprehensible only once one has acquired a solid working knowledge of the French haute bourgeoisie and of an aristocracy that while rooted in the Ancien Régime was still a towering presence in the age of the Third Republic and was living its life as though the great revolution had never taken place.  But if one wishes to exhaust all the possibilities of profiting as a reader of Proust, one must not limit one’s acquaintance with his nexus of relationships to the social and historical facts: these are themselves inextricably bound up with the language in which they are realized, so that for example in Time Regained, Morel, a quondam lowlife who had been kept by no less than three homosexual patrons, begins to figure as an homme considérable whom one would never be able to take the full measure of if one tried to represent him in German as an “angesehenen  [respectable or distinguished] Mann.”

There would be little point in my trying to involve myself here in the boundless problem of linguistic transmissibility in the light of further examples.  The old French saying that translations are like women—if they’re beautiful, they aren’t faithful, and if they’re faithful they aren’t beautiful—is especially valid in our case.  Let it be stated that anyone who feels reasonably comfortable with French should read Proust—whose sentences are certainly long and complicated, but whose vocabulary is comparatively simple—in the original.  Anyone who is incapable of doing this should reach for the German version anyway, because a life without Proust is a life of privation; even the risk of misunderstanding something here, of failing to understand anything at all there, on account of the translation, is of no consequence when weighed against complete ignorance of this work, the epic peak of our century.

A number of preliminaries must be recommended.  The first is long practice at being patient and sacrificing time, a great deal of time, because the Recherche, which takes time itself as its central theme, will brook no haste.  Anyone who thinks he will be able to breeze through Proust might as well not read him at all.  We must approach his characters with dogged tenaciousness; we must get to know them intimately, in the way we get to know friends and enemies.  His landscapes must be seen and foreseen, researched, precisely because all of them have something peculiarly spectral and optically elusive about them.  Our hearing must become keener.  How does the Baron de Charlus talk, and how does the Duchesse de Guermantes?  What comically imagery-oozing, classical allusion-ridden turns of phrase are employed by the narrator’s comrade, the ambitious young Bloch?  When he swears by the gods of ancient Greece, do we not hear resonances of his father’s Jewish singsong?  Only if we don’t suppose that we could have him, Bloch, or Saint-Loup or Swann or Mme. Verdurin, speak to us today and perhaps some character from a modern novel speak to us tomorrow, will we perceive the overtones on which everything depends.  In other words: Proust peremptorily demands that we surrender and sacrifice all our reading-time to him.  The ideal reader of Proust is a man who has retired for weeks into a none too well-lighted room, who never goes outside, who receives no visitors, talks to nobody on the telephone.  This kind of thing is difficult to pull off, I know: that’s why I called the reader who can do it an ideal one.  But the prohibition against interleaving one’s reading of Proust with other books is absolute: there is no primrose path leading from this cosmos into any other, and anyone who abandons Proust to concentrate on reading other things, be it only for a few days, will find his way back to him none too easily.

Is it advisable to read about Proust before one has approached him directly oneself?  Not necessarily, for hardly any other author has ever exposed himself—with all the well-contrived encodings that are nevertheless constantly in evidence on the surface—so unabashedly as this one.  The colossal secondary literature—and above all George D. Painter’s monumental biography of Proust-cum-interpretation of his work—is principally the preserve of seasoned “Proustians” and takes far too much for granted to be of much use before one has read the work.  But here and there there is a book that may afford enough of a window on Proust to make him slightly more accessible—in French André Maurois’s A la recherche de Marcel Proust and in the German bookstores Claude Mauriac’s Rowohlt paperback monograph.  Materially speaking these sorts of books are of no assistance.  What one needs in order to acclimatize oneself to Marcel Proust’s world is not a scholarly background in literary history but rather mental composure, calmness, determination, and courage in the face of those difficult passages that may initially seem “tedious.”  One needs more than a bit of what Sartre recently called “empathy” in connection with Flaubert—and as I said before, one also needs time, time, time.

The Man behind the Legend

It is remarkable that the literary swotters in France, and increasingly in Germany as well, invariably know a fair amount about the personal life of this novelist before they have read so much as a single line of his work.  Proust the homosexual, the egocentric, the snob, the hypochondriac; Proust, the sufferer of asthma and the Oedipus complex, the spendthrift, the elegant man of the world who eventually turned into a hermit—we have all read about this person in countless arts-section articles.  This pseudo-lore about Proust the man—let’s not talk about Proust the author at all for now—is so extensive that there is a distinct danger that the multitudinous fragments of the Proust legend will overgrow the reality of Proust.  Let us make some very brief observations on what seem to us the elements of this writer’s personal life that need to be known, that are worth knowing, in relation to his exemplarily autobiographical work.  My selective method is not unimpeachable; I shall carry on here in blithe disregard of objections from the partisans of Romanticism, equipped with a crystal-clear conscience and a body of knowledge that, if certainly not crystal-clear, is at any rate not insubstantial.

So according to my lights, such as they are, it was of decisive significance for Marcel Proust’s experience of life and life-trajectory that he was born and raised as a christened Jew, a Christian-Jewish mongrel.  His father, Adrien Proust, a doctor, university professor, and distinguished personality in French scientific and public life, hailed from a provincial bourgeois family.  He was a solid citizen, a man content to live peacefully with himself in his native country, among his own people, and as part of the haute-bourgeois class he had grown into.  From him his son Marcel inherited—what?  Alas, neither his endomorphic physique nor his earnest lifestyle!  But perhaps he did owe to his father his down-homeness and down-to-earthness, both of which can be summarized in the concept of Combray (Illiers in the Département of Eure-et-Loire): a strong attachment to one’s native landscape, a respect for the rank and class-governed society of the Third Republic—an attitude that Proust never shed even after becoming a social critic; a secure intuitive understanding and appreciation of the proprieties, of good manners, of discretion; but also a feeling of sympathy with the little people and a deferential regard for the verifiably high economic productivity of the bourgeoisie, a regard that was ultimately one of the things that enabled the former young rascal and worshiper of aristocrats to bid defiance to some very severe health problems and bring to completion a work that may conventionally be called “titanic” but would perhaps more justly be termed simply difficult and great.

And did he also inherit this from his mommy?  Why, by no means: Madame Adrien Proust, far from being of a cheerful disposition, was a serious, even tragic woman.  She, who bestowed a substantial dowry on her husband so that her son could lead what we would describe today as a playboy’s existence for several years, was thrifty, apprehensive about the future of her favorite son Marcel to the very end, and yet so strict in mollycoddling her child that he refused to grow up properly as long as she was still alive.  Mme. Proust was a highly educated and somewhat phlegmatic Jewess brimming over with pride and sorrow, and she bequeathed to her son a few of the stereotype-contradicting and yet characteristic traits of the Jewish race: intellectuality in peculiar association with social ambitiousness, excellences that can in fact cohabit quite comfortably with selfishness, but above all, her nervousness (admittedly in her case it was kept under control through strict discipline), which nobody was willing to nip in the bud.  As a young girl she was beautiful; as a woman rather too bulky, and as the years passed her tribal affiliation became ever-more strongly evident in her face and figure.

Marcel Proust’s Jewish mother was quite thoroughly assimilated to French culture.  But she never ceased to be conscious of her Jewishness; without actually wanting to she instilled this consciousness in her son, so that the boy who regularly attended Catholic church services in Illiers, the youth who curried favor with the Faubourg St. Honoré, the aristocratic quarter of Paris, the writer who described the Gothic cathedrals of northern France with tender affection, nevertheless strikes us as being a Jewish individual in the most emphatic sense.  By this I do not only mean that during the Dreyfus Affair Marcel Proust was a committed “Dreyfusard” in contrast to his aristocratic friends, not only that in including in the Recherche the character of Bloch he has furnished us with one of the most hilarious and realistic Jewish personages in world literature, not even that in a letter to his mother he quite surprisingly writes, “il y a beaucoup de ‘unsere Leute’ [‘our people’] ici.’”  I mean something rather difficult to comprehend and even more difficult to define; perhaps the off-putting mixture of arrogance and diffidence, of elegant security in one’s living circumstances and deep-seated anxiety about one’s life as a whole, perhaps merely the downright grotesquely overweening desire to assimilate to of all classes the ruling class of yesteryear, to the nobility—but in the end probably something quite different: namely, nothing more and nothing less than what Thomas Mann in his Joseph tetralogy calls “divine worry” [“Gottessorge”], and which in this child of the bourgeois nineteenth century is manifested as a simultaneously metaphysical and physical restlessness.

Moreover, in studying Proust’s biography and pursuing its mother-son-relationship, I can never shake the feeling that the connection between the genteel and culturally refined Mme. Jeanne Proust and her handsome melancholy son was fundamentally that of a Jewish “mamme” and her clever and gifted, slightly sickly and slightly lazy “jungl.”  Admittedly the problematic nature of this connection extends far beyond that between a spoiled brat and his doting mother.  Here—and everyone who thinks even vaguely in terms of psychoanalytic categories will agree with me—we are dealing with a classic example of an ungratified Oedipus complex.  The writer’s odyssey, from the appallingly egocentric and ruthless letters of little Marcel to the homoerotic torments of the great Proust, is an Oedipal drama in the grandest and most tragic vein.  His mother—who in the Recherche is split between the characters of the mother and grandmother— was up until her death (she died when Proust was 35 and had not yet published anything apart from a couple of inconsequential trifles and could have been regarded by any standard as a raté, a failure)—his mother was literally the most important human reference point of his existence.  To say in the hackneyed idiom that he “loved her to the point of idolatry” would be downright grotesque.  For was this still love, this deeply annoying preoccupation with the deficiency of his own physiology in his correspondence with her, these often irritatingly importunate demands for money from a person who had absolutely no clue about how to handle it, the cold, restrained reproaches occasioned by the inadequate provision of conveniences for his day-to-day comfort, his perpetual well-nigh peremptory commands to express-deliver a letter to such-and-such a place, to establish social ties with such-and-such people, to host a dinner for some of his friends, to fetch him some medicine?  Madame Proust was of course the mother without whose good-night kiss the little boy at the beginning of the Recherche could not get to sleep, but she was also the grandmother whose death agonies the narrator hardly noticed owing to his preoccupation with own his amorous woes and social obligations.

This mother also ultimately also figures, albeit metamorphosed, at the center of one of the most horrifying and excruciating scenes in the entire work: Mlle. Vinteuil, the daughter of Vinteuil the composer, is pleasuring and being pleasured by her lesbian lover.  On her bedside table stands a picture of her father, whom she loves tenderly and selflessly.  She orders the girlfriend in whose arms she is now lying to heap profanities on this portrait of her father.  The girlfriend does just that.  The narrator, if we are to believe him, is appalled.  But the reader is more deeply appalled, because he by no means believes in the reality of the narrator’s indignation at this scandalous incident.  With the benefit of hindsight afforded by our knowledge of the nature of Proust’s attachment to his mother, this episode becomes much more than Oedipal, and also much more than a humdrum case of ambivalence.  Here something profoundly uncanny is exposed: an abyss far more perilous in prospect than that of Monsieur de Charlus’s sadomasochistic orgies in the volume entitled Sodom and Gomorrah.  Even today, when every single last detail of the writer’s life and work has been sleuthed out by the secondary literature, the topic of “Proust and his mother” is unexhausted and inexhaustible.[1]   

What else of a biographical nature might serve us as a starting point leading to a window on Proust?  Whenever I browse the secondary literature amassed around me, I am overwhelmed by apprehension and ultimately by despondency.  After all, what hasn’t already been written about, either more or less intelligently, more or less searchingly?  Marcel Proust and asthma, Marcel Proust and music, Proust and time, Proust’s moral philosophy, Bergson and Proust, Proust and painting, Proust’s roman à clef, Proust’s idealism, Proust’s landscape.  I give up on it; I am now inclined, rather, and however unpromising such an undertaking may appear at first blush, to continue pursuing my own arduous way to the end.  If I am not mistaken, in addition to the above-adumbrated circumstances—his half-Jewish lineage, his pathological attachment to his mother, his erotic inversion—the absolutely decisive factor in Proust’s existence as a human being and as a writer was his troubled relationship with money and property, a relationship that in his case is in turn traceable to a foundational problem of the bourgeois-capitalist world order of his time.

I have already said that when Proust’s mother finally closed her eyes after having endured great distress with veritably Roman stoicism, he must have struck her as a failure, as a proper good-for-nothing.  It was only after his mother’s death, when he was a grown man of 35, that this creator of what I am convinced is the greatest novel of our century started working in earnest on a serious project, one that he admittedly could not have so much as dreamed would ever pay his bills.  He spent his adolescence—for in point of fact he was an “adolescent” until the age of 35—as a social parasite bumming around the fringes of the aristocracy.  He squandered money that he never earned himself—for his brief stint of employment at the Bibliothèque Mazarine remunerated him as meagerly as the brief and genuinely insignificant texts whose publication he secured only thanks to the most intricate social intrigues imaginable; ultimately, indeed, as meagerly as his composition of the posthumously published unfinished novel Jean Santeuil; as I was saying: he squandered money that he was never forced to earn and that he never worked for, not even during the composition if his magnum opus, in a fantastically extravagant fashion.  In his work money is discussed as rarely as any sort of professional activity, for his protagonists are persons of independent means, and it is their elegant prerogative to subsist as idlers, aesthetes, eroticists of the world, which is theirs in two senses, because they both live in it and possess it.  And yet his own life, the life of a wealthy man, was constantly beset by financial problems.  As a boy, a youth, and a young gentleman, he was obliged to inveigle both small and fairly large sums from his parents’ pockets.  As a grown man he incessantly felt threatened by ruin, complained about it unrestrainedly, and never had an inkling about the extent of his considerable financial means.  

Because it is also bourgeois, his uneasy aristocratic and bohemian relationship with money and property is only partially interpretable as an expression of his general neurotic constitution; or to put it another way, his illness is the social illness of a bourgeoisie that was already on the verge of assuming the social position of the nobility but had not yet acquired the aristocracy’s clueless and ruthless tendency to regard doing nothing as the most obvious thing to do.  They were wealthy, but not by the grace of God; they felt entitled to enjoy their wealth only when they were taking care of the business of exploiting the working classes, who in turn were working in the sweat of the money-grubbing bourgeois countenance.  Marcel Proust, the well-to-do doctor’s son, had no prospect of doing anything but what he probably would have regarded with a guilty idler’s conscience as menial labor, just like other young men of the haute bourgeoisie.  As for his efforts to fraternize with the nobility—with all those Bibescos, Montesquieus, de Greffulhes, Fénelons—I am inclined to believe that they were the efforts of a typical forward and upward-flying bourgeois, but also to believe that as such a bourgeois—meaning one half burdened with the guilty idler’s conscience and half in thrall to the ideology of the work ethic-orientated tributary of the bourgeoisie—he suffered from his languid refinement more than he cultivated it.

Amid incessant tearful asseverations of his (genuine) physical misery, the young snob took up rebellious arms against his bourgeois parental home and sidled in spirit (and ultimately quite successfully, and effectively in body) from the unpretentious family house in Illiers-Combray to the Chateau Réveillon-Tansonville.  Once his parents were dead, his boyish defiance ceased to meet with any resistance, and his bourgeois work ethic got started composing the Recherche.  Thus did individual psychological conditions and objective social conditions interpenetrate one another: Proust’s elitist consciousness, one of whose numerous aspects was egoism, could discover no substratum and was obliged to abandon all hope in itself, because as a ruling class the bourgeoisie never constituted themselves along ideological lines; rather, in representing their particular essence as a universal one, they regarded themselves as “the world” and the bourgeois individual as “everyman.”  Proust’s reflexively bourgeois understanding of the world, in stumbling against both its twofold experience and the vulgarity of bourgeois life as well as its oppressive function, also stumbled against the society to which it was obligated, so that his refusal, his great refusal, or, if you like, his neurosis together with the sexual peculiarity associated with it, was the only exit that remained open to him.

Life—A Dream?

Whence, after having tided ourselves over with a couple of adumbratory hints about Marcel Proust the man, we have finally arrived at the decisive question: wherein lies the completely singular, as-yet-unmatched and possibly even unmatchable essence of his novelistic opus In Search of Lost Time?  Even within this interpretative purview I shall hardly manage to come up with more than a clue here and there, for I can hardly engage in the sort of pseudoscientific enterprise that smugly spouts quotations from the innumerable available investigations; for in this setting I have as low a regard for stylistic analyses, either of the classical or of the modern structuralist stripe, as for the orthodox decryptive methodologies that Proust’s principal biographer George D. Painter takes such a keen interest in.

The explanations tendered in the old days by readers weaned on solidly plotted novels, including those professional lecturers inclined to give the cold shoulder to Proust’s work from the outset, were as good as useless—exercises in futility.  A little boy can’t get to sleep because his mother won’t come to his bed to give him his goodnight kiss.  A little boy falls in love with a little girl and waits in vain for a letter from her.  A youth strolls the streets of Paris with the aim of crossing paths with a duchess whose attention he wishes to attract, perhaps because he desires her as a woman, and undoubtedly just because she is a duchess.  A man sequesters his sweetheart to keep tabs on her, and after her death he suffers every imaginable torment of jealousy because he learns that she was cheating on him with a lesbian girlfriend.  Another man—Swann—spends night after night standing in front of the darkened window of his mistress’s house, behind whose façade she is being unfaithful to him.  He doesn’t barge in; things never come to a boil; he will never know the truth because he doesn’t want to know it.  An old woman in the provinces performs for her family the meticulously scripted and rehearsed comedy of her illness, which nevertheless happens to be a real one, and which eventually kills her off.  Someone fails to receive an invitation to someplace and feels miserable as a result.  Someplace someone refuses to send an invitation to somebody in order to make him feel miserable.  A masochistic, homosexual nobleman has himself whipped by some poor devil of a male hustler.  A duke with one foot in the grave persecutes his aging sweetheart, whose fading feminine charms have ceased to interest any rivals, with the perfervid jealousy of a youth.  A diplomat delivers interminable subtle and inane speeches.  In an art gallery a famous writer dies of uremia.

“What good can all this stuff and these games do us?” we ask, echoing Hofmannsthal.  Well, what is the point of it?  It is as much and as little as life itself, which only occasionally stitches the episodes of its plot seamlessly together, which hardly ever supplies us with “personalities” (in Mynheer Peeperkorn’s sense of “personalities”), which is vanishing before our eyes, disintegrating in an inarticulate babble, in a welter of cinematic dissolve-cuts, life itself in its dazzling glory and in its wretchedness, its terrifying disorder, against which the counterpoising of a “higher order” is nothing other than a game, with its coming, going, passing away; so that at the end, in the concluding volume, Time Regained, contrary to the author’s own intention and hope, the past as an actuality, which memory believes it is managing to get hold of, might as well never have been at all.

The greatness of the Recherche does not consist in a typically literary compression of reality, but rather in a dissolution thereof.  The dreamlike character of existence—which is a dream in virtue of its fugacity and not of being either some condensed Kafkaesque nightmare, or the structured visionary dream of a Joyce—is Marcel Proust’s discovery.  But let there be no misunderstandings between us: if I have spoken of a dream here, this does not mean that in this colossal work the novelist has ever lost sight, even for an instant, of that daylight reality that is our intersubjectively mediate certainty of everything.  No deliberate transformations of reality within language occur.  The dream is not a linguistic dream in any sense.  Nor is the dream composed of dreamy characters, for its personages crawl and fly like insects; they are little people and the littlest of little people; even if they bear the noblest of noble titles, they are mean, petty figures who outstrip their physical wretchedness as negligibly as they do their irritating peccadilloes and chicly calculating intentions.  But the dream is not Proust’s dream; rather, it is the reflection of our self-dreaming reality in all its misery.

I will try not to stray into the wilds of imprecision; as I am writing this I sense that I am already in danger of such straying; I am pulling back, throwing in the towel on the whole dream hypothesis; I shall focus on particularity and avoid propping myself up on general concepts; I will attempt to describe what was termed “dreamlike” in this attempt at an approach.  Instead of speaking about the dream, I would have done better to speak about the unreality of reality, if this weren’t itself just another throwaway expression, or about an impossibility exemplified by Proust, the impossibility of saying anything binding about reality in a novel.  Let us take a look at Proust’s characters so that we can get to know them from the inside.

In Proust’s work people are not described.  Here and there we get a hint at a gaze, a turn of phrase, a dress, a person’s way of carrying himself, his way of walking, but an extensive delineation of characters such as we are familiar with from classic novels is never supplied.  As a first-rate epicist, Proust recognized that it was impermissible to treat his point of view (and a specific corner of space and a certain moment in time within that point of view) as the quintessential point of view.  What could possibly have been the point of sketching a portrait of the elegant Swann, given that in the course of the narrative it becomes quite clear that not only is this Swann person regarded in various mutually distinct ways by various fellow-characters, but above and beyond this, with the passage of time these same people come to perceive their friend Swann from perspectives that likewise diverge from one another?  One of them says, “Well, I admit he isn’t exactly pretty, but he’s got that shock of hair, and that monocle…”  And another says, “I admit he isn’t positively hideous, but he’s ridiculous—just take a look at that shock of hair, and that monocle…”  After this, it is unnecessary, nay, impermissible, for the narrator to depict and aesthetically appraise the shock of hair and the monocle, for the narrator is nothing but himself and not “the eyes of the world,” which don’t exist, for the world is composed of all too many, and all too diverse, pairs of observing eyes.

What holds true with respect to optical perception and judgment is binding to a much greater degree with respect to the social categorization of the characters.  For simplicity’s sake we will continue to use Swann as an example.  He is a fashionably cultivated member of the Jockey Club who breakfasts with the Prince of Wales and whose company is sought after by duchesses and royal highnesses, but he is also a complete oddball who at certain regularly appointed times of day betakes himself to a patisserie because a certain girl he fancies works there as a waitress.  Amid the fluctuation of perspectives, the uncanny and completely unfathomable fact of time plays its destructive role as an agent of becoming and expiring.  Swann—for we must firmly stand by him—visited the Duchesse de Guermantes almost daily during his glory days as a social presence.  Only a few years after his death Swann’s daughter Gilberte, who was not accepted during his lifetime, because her mother was not socially respectable, is introduced to the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes under her new surname of de Forcheville.  The young girl mentions Swann, her father, and reminds the ducal couple that they knew him.  Knew him?  Of course.  But time has passed.  And the duke and duchess now detachedly call their erstwhile intimate friend an “excellent man,” as if they were recommending him “for employment as a gardener.”

I said that the greatness of the Recherche consists not in its compression but in its utter dissolution of reality.  One can also ring changes on this formulation.  This author’s achievement consists in the visualization of unrecognizability.  Nobody before him and hardly anybody after him expended as much effort not to suggest but to discern reality by literary means.  And in no other writer’s work were the ultimate failures of the intended undertaking transformed into a comparable artistic triumph.  Proust believed that in memory he could successfully constitute and stabilize a reality that as a presence had invariably eluded him.  But in the concluding volume, Time Regained, memory itself—and in particular immediately, spontaneously experienced memory, le souvenir—turns out to be an intellectual error and aberration.  Had the people the narrator knew ever been reality?  The reader sleuthing his general impression of the work after finishing the last page of its last volume has his doubts.  Who was Odette?  The lady in pink, a small-time cocotte with a grand future?  Swann’s spouse, a woman conquering her place in the bourgeois world?  The Countess de Forcheville, the by-now totally senile and pathologically jealous Duc de Guermantes’s mistress, whose marriage has made her a naturalized member of the upper aristocracy?  Each of them.  All of them together.  None of them.  There was no such person as Odette, as Bloch, as Mme. Verdurin.  Time, le Temps, which Proust occasionally writes in capital letters in order to give the word weight and magnificence, has toyed with them, it has transformed them, concealed them, exposed them and veiled them afresh; so that neither memory nor habit—l’Habitude, which likewise happens to be capitalized every now and then—is any match for it, for this Time.

What has been termed the Proustian space-time continuum—reality in the recollection of what has been—is in truth a temporo-spatial discontinuum, a hopeless chaos that cannot be organized into a cosmos without doing violence to it through defamiliarization.  Proust’s greatness becomes discernable in his vanquishment by the work he undertook to produce.  He himself, an I that was nothing more than the Machian “bundle of sensations,” had progressed too far into the cognizance of the uncognizable to be able to find his way back to the naivety of the “here and now,” of the “This is how it was”; he had penetrated too deeply into reality to retain the ability to sculpt reality.

Let us just for a moment take a look out from Proust’s presence into the epoch that was his distant future and is our present; then we shall realize that he was the one who called into question the omnipotence and omniscience of the narrator, that he was the first merely to form tentative conjectures about his characters, that with him began the uncertainty of narration that is the technical stock-in-trade of today’s novelists.  To be sure, though, in Proust’s case what would later be the effect of construction and experimentation was pure and unmodified experience.  He told his story and in telling it made the discovery of just how difficult this is.  Nevertheless, he never made the difficulty of telling the truth into a methodological aesthetic: this distinguishes him from his descendants, meaning all those writers who systematically first only form conjectures about what is to be recounted, and then call into question the raw material of the narrative, language itself, as a medium for im-parting information, and finally—because for them language is just language and nothing else—they deploy it as an autonomous power, and in losing themselves in the structures of describing, renounce all interest in what is described.

Thus Proust’s helplessness in the face of reality was not a method but rather a lived mode of existence.  This helplessness had certain purely individual psychological roots, for this storyteller who was so zealously preoccupied with reality confronted the world skinlessly, so to speak; a superlatively vulnerable mental apparatus of unprecedented sensitivity, an apparatus incapable of taking shelter in a compact, perfectly self-assured ego, was defenselessly addicted to all the stimuli with which the world attacked it.   The clinical allergic asthmatic that he actually was, if the professional medical testimonials are to be credited, was at the same time psychically allergic to reality: the mere existence of the external world caused him intellectual breathlessness just as the scent of a flower, the dust in his room, caused him physical asthma attacks.  He was not merely “at the mercy of the elements in the mountains of the heart,” as Rilke had put it once upon a time, but at the mercy of a highly sensitive nervous system.  This was—and here again individual psychological dispositions are intertwined with the objective social one—the nervous constitution of the bourgeois who transcends his condition, who forfeits the traditional, achievement and financial accumulation-based norms of bourgeois existence.  This loss of norms was simultaneously a loss of ego—whence the narrator’s hypersensitivity, which is perfectly captured in the French metaphor avoir les nerfs á fleur de peau, to have one’s nerves on the flower, on the surface, of one’s skin.

Comparisons with characters in German literature spring to mind, and I am particularly keenly reminded of Hanno Buddenbrook and Tonio Kröger.  But the man who says I in the Recherche does not hail from the Free Hanseatic City of Lübeck, from the well-tempered little capital of German commercial assiduity, but rather from the metropolis of Paris, where endeavors and their attendant perils attain the utmost degree of intensity; furthermore, although Hanno Buddenbrook and Tonio Kröger were decidedly homeless in the bourgeois world, they undertook the comparatively modest endeavor of attempting to trade in a traditional bourgeois life for the life of an artist, whereas Proust’s narrator hybridically propelled himself up into the world of the nobility, where things can always take a painfully lethal turn, from the brusquely insulting tirades in which a M. de Charlus rails against his social inferiors, to the duels that one has no choice but to go through with in certain emergencies.  Hanno’s and Tonio’s frailty was therefore (and irrespective of individual conditions) gently elegiac in character, whereas the frailty of Proust’s narrator strikes us being capricious, petulant, incurable by any remedy, not even excepting a flight into discipline and “comportment.”  Something that must also ultimately be remembered here is an objective social moment, one that separates the diverse qualities of the abovementioned contemporaneous French and German decadents from each other.  Hanno and Tonio were Nordo-Latin half-breeds who found themselves in a bourgeois social position that, although not always comfortable, was on the whole fairly bearable.  On the other hand, Proust, whose features we recognize in his narrator, was half-Jewish during the epoch of the Dreyfus Affair, and beyond this, unlike Tonio or the hero of Death in Venice, he was not merely beset by sublimated homosexual tendencies but a practicing homosexual in the most unambiguous sense of the term.

To be sure, Proust’s vulnerability and defenselessness have contributed to the notion that he—to carry the comparison even further but also finish it off—in contrast to the creator of Hanno and Tonio, was a social novelist—albeit perhaps a more significant one than those who—like Martin du Gard, for instance—are officially subsumed under this heading by literary historians.   Not that his work could have served as vehicle of social pathos, social protest: to the contrary, the author very much comes across as a man who lives on perfectly good terms with the social structure; when his discourses skirt the edges of class problems as the need arises, they are edifying rather than muckraking, just as he holds forth in camouflage on the homosexual question in a worthily moralizing vein.  His work is social—not in its intentions but rather in its existence.  Proust is no social critic; he speaks from the platform of a fundamentally critical mindset.  He is nothing but the faithful recorder of what is playing out in society, but this fidelity to facts ends up being more accusatory than plangent protests ever could be.  

One thinks in this connection of Françoise the housekeeper’s identification with her authority, which is a good example of the alienation of the servant class, and from this example it is perhaps an astonishingly short albeit airy transition to the crimes that Genet’s “Bonnes” commit against their employers.   Or one recalls the rent boys in Jupien’s house—was the depersonalization of the proletariat ever more horrifyingly exhibited anywhere else?  Proust limns the psychological vulgarity of the bourgeoisie—represented by Dr. Cottard and his wife inter alia—with the same, almost natural-scientific objectivity that he brings to bear on the naïve arrogance of the aristocracy or the loneliness of a waiter taking refuge in polite coldness.  Even though it is nowhere explicitly described as such, in the narrator’s possessive jealousy one can readily discern an essential feature of the possessive bourgeois mentality.  Moreover—if we may turn our attention away from the work and towards the biography for a moment—was Proust’s habit of giving downright laughably enormous tips to hotel porters and footboys, a habit that was mostly seen as a mere personal peculiarity, not an expression of the guilty feelings of a bourgeois who admittedly unconsciously called into question the modi vivendi of his class but adopted them as nothing more than self-evident choices?

In his life as in his work Proust was the most impressive example of how social and individual-phenomenological problems, not directly to mention personal-metaphysical ones, interpenetrate one another.  To be sure, he confined his conscious shaping to the personal level, which he may have regarded as an “eternal constant” and that may actually possess some supratemporal worth.  The relationship of the human individual to time, which transforms him inwardly and leads him to death, a relationship that is polyphonically summarized in the last volume of the Recherche, is possibly quite literally trans-social: the description of, for example, the aged faces of former friends whom the narrator recognizes and yet no longer recognizes at the Princesse de Guermantes’s reception, strikes me as a depiction of lived experience that transcends all social contingencies, that apprehends the fundamental condition of human existence.  I see something comparable in his futile efforts to visualize the church tower of Martinville (Caen) behind his closed eyelids, to describe and shed light on the feeling of happiness that an optical experience prepared for him, an essential problem in the adaptation of reality that leads us straight to the boundless complexity of a metaphysics of the senses.  His peculiar lack of confidence in the world, a lack that inheres in these kinds of experiences, can legitimately be interpreted both in terms of this poetic soul’s neurotic constitution and in terms of the social condition of a cultural haute bourgeoisie stretched to the psychological breaking point by its internal contradictions.  But when considering such scenes (scenes such as the experience of recollection triggered by the taste of the madeleine biscuit, the access of emotion over the beauty of the church tower, the estrangement and defamiliarization of people through the mere passage of time) it is possible—and this may ultimately be the true essence of Proust’s greatness—to set aside the social as well as individual psychological facts and find oneself faced with a number of questions whose answers are to be found only in the field of speculative metaphysics because they are metaphysical questions posed to us.

Or am I deluding myself?  Am I, too, succumbing to the temptation to take the bourgeois particular for a universal and to speak of those “eternal human problems” that do not exist as far as any thinker of a strictly social-philosophical orientation is concerned?  I do not believe I am, but I have long since lost the courage—ultimately no thanks to Proust’s teachings—to pass off what I believe or do not believe as a science.  And of course in this age of ours, whose accelerativeness has exorcised all our illusions about the everlasting significance of artistic and intellectual values, there is ultimately no need for us to shiver in recognition of the “Eternally Human Truths” in Proust’s magnum opus.  The only thing we can be sure of is this: as long as we are stuck here in and with this epoch, which is every bit as much a late-bourgeois epoch as in Proust’s day, we cannot get by without him.  He is of concern to us, and we have a right to acknowledge that we are of concern to him, even if we aren’t dukes, princesses, or members of the upper bourgeoisie.

Proust worked on his masterpiece for about seventeen years, from 1905 until just before his death in 1922.  An invalid, he withdrew from the world—which he had conquered on a social level by dint of the utmost exertion of his powers—into a hermetically sealed room in which he superficially went to seed in the midst of manuscript pages; surrounded by medicinal drugs (sleeping aids that he gourmandized; stimulant-pills that jerked him out of his semi-slumber); engulfed in the fumes of cups of boiling-hot coffee gulped down almost uninterruptedly in huge quantities; repined at no longer by his mother, but merely by his housekeeper Céleste; already estranged from his friends: he no longer sought them out as living presences but merely as memory-traces that seemed to him to possess a higher degree of reality.

Yes, he spent many years searching for lost time, stalking expired years.  He wrote Time Regained.  But can one regain something that one has never possessed?  Time Not Graspable and Therefore Not Regained—this may very well have been the most appropriate title for the monumental epic he left behind.  He finished a work that defined a century, and it left him dying but empty-handed.  Our hands are likewise empty once we have turned over the last pages of the Recherche, for by then we have learned nothing less than that the world always eludes us, both as a presence and as a memory.  But in this emptiness we possess something precious.  Anybody who is unacquainted with it knows nothing of a world that is Will and Representation, a world that pieces together our ego, which we can no more lay claim to than Proust’s narrator can lay claim to the Martinville church tower or Vinteuil’s little melody.

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[1] Postwar France even saw the publication of a book (Briand: Le secret de Marcel Proust) propounding the thesis that the description of this relationship as “bordering on incestuous” was inadequate because the incest had actually been consummated.  The assertion was poorly supported and untenable, and so the study quickly went out of print.  I mention it here only to give you an idea of the sort of quagmire of stale and fresh errors, confusions, and torments we get bogged down in whenever we set out to sort out the nature of Proust’s relationship with his mother.

THE END

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2017 by Douglas Robertson

Source: Jean Améry, Zugang zu Marcel Proust. Zum 100. Geburtstag des Dichters (10. Juli 1871) (Werke, ed. Heidelberger-Leonhardt , 1st edn, 9 vols (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 2002-2008), v, p. 86-115). Améry’s essay was originally published in No. 279 of the magazine Merkur in July 1971.