SOURCE: Stewart, Susan. “Proust's Turn from Nostalgia.” Raritan 19, no. 2 (fall 1999): 77-94.

[In the following essay, Stewart argues against the notion that Proust's masterwork is a memoir rooted in nostalgia.]

You can return to a book, but you cannot return to yourself. I had remembered Proust's In Search of Lost Time as a memoir driven by a nostalgic yearning for the past. Yet when I went back to it after a period of twenty years, Proust's research, in fact, turned out not to be about nostalgia at all. Rather, he frames a critique of such willful yearning and poses a certain form of aesthetic practice as counter to it. Proust's many-volumed book bears an analogue to memory, but not to experience; it opens on a world already shaped by desire, but in its manifold of sensual particulars it reveals far more than the reader would expect it to reveal, and in its layers of coincidence it creates an art that is counter to the temporality of everyday life. Through such detail and coincidence, Proust draws us out of our social conventions for structuring time. Those structures themselves are created in light of the inimitable fact of death and the inevitable transformation of the world around us from a world inhabited and engaged by the living to a world haunted and inflected by the dead. Our relations to the dead, unlike our relations to the articulated systems of time consciousness, take place under the opposed, yet interconnected, conditions perhaps most clearly and rigorously explored in Proust's research: the forms of voluntary and involuntary memory. Proust makes evident the futility of volitional memory as expressed in nostalgia. He shows how nostalgia's willfulness is compensatory to our submission to time and, simultaneously, how nostalgia, as a dream of the recreation of what is lost in the ongoing flow of experience, is doomed to an inauthentic form.

Proust himself claims, in Within a Budding Grove, that the names designating things in the world correspond only to the intellect and thus remain alien to our true impressions. But it may be useful to trace the etymology of nostalgia as it gives evidence to an evolution out of the original Greek words nostos, or return home, and algia, a painful condition—an evolution from physical to emotional symptoms, rather than a continuing state. In a famous passage in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton discussed nostalgia as “a childish humour to hone after home,” arguing against those “base Icelanders and Norwegians” who prefer their own “ragged islands” to Italy and Greece, “the gardens of the world.” In the late seventeenth century, nostalgia was diagnosed by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer as an extreme homesickness suffered by his fellow countrymen as they fought as mercenaries far from their native mountains. The symptoms Hofer described were lability of emotion, ready weeping, wasting away, despondency, and, in some cases, suicide. In the early modern period the notion continues that nostalgia involves not merely a desire for return in time, but also a condition consequent to a severing from a place of origin. Thus nostalgia is linked to conditions of exile—whether exile from place or from childhood itself.

Such varieties of nostalgia based upon a longing for return might be addressed by a psychoanalytic model of the replete relation the infant bears to the mother's body. Yet when we juxtapose these descriptions of an early modern illness to many twentieth-century versions of nostalgia, we find a transformation from a singular, yet potentially universal, emotion, based on an individual's attachment to a site of origin and plentitude, to a somewhat ironic link between nostalgia and novelty—the capacity of contemporary culture to recycle history as commodity. This may not indicate a change in emotion—perhaps the authentic emotion remains in all of us—but now we have an attempt to market or “package” an emotion. Before we accept nostalgia under such packaged terms, terms that could only illumine the varieties of voluntary memory, we might give further attention to the dialectic between conscious and unconscious forms of return. From Freud, we receive a model of return based upon the emergence of what has been repressed. From the work of various social theorists—for example, Vladimir Jankélévitch's L'Irréversible et la nostalgie and Fred Davis's Yearning for Yesterday—we receive a model of return prompted by alienation from modernity and tending toward collective and legitimating forms of identification such as nationalism. And in Nietzsche, as in Proust, return is linked to the happiness consequent to the pursuit of truth, a truth only inferable in the recursive conditions of the retrospective view. In each of these models, we find a search for finite conditions of contingency. Such models imply a theological aspect, for they seek to mediate the separations between finite objects, finite subjects, and the infinite power of whatever is outside of human consciousness.

Nevertheless, when theorists of nostalgia think of this emotion in relation to history, and to the chronological formation of history, they may be beginning without giving adequate consideration to our conventions of time. The philosophy of time in the West has turned continually to the problem of time's status as a derived order of being. Plato, for example, argued in the Timaeus that time was not an aspect of eternity or a dimension of space and matter, but rather a product of our sensations working in combination with our beliefs, for time is something that becomes and changes rather than something belonging to the unchanging realm of reality. Aristotle dissented from Plato's view, arguing that time was not so much created out of a timeless eternity as that eternity is an endless series of moments and time is a measure applied to motion. In Aristotle, the continuity of our awareness of our own being is necessary for our recognition of moments constituting the time-continuum.

Whether following Plato, and later Plotinus, and arguing for time as a rational ordering of eternity, or following Aristotle and arguing for time as a measure of motion, each model of time consciousness implicates a corresponding model of subjectivity. Augustine presents a radical turn when he stops seeing time as a mark of change in nature and begins to see time as a mode of human perception. He departs from temporal description in terms of fixed before-and-after sequences to account for the moving experiential perspective of past, present, and future. In Augustine's argument, works of art are models of temporal order. By means of his famous discussion of a hymn by St. Ambrose, Augustine links a sound that starts, continues, and stops resonating to the past; the “not yet” under which we speak of the stopping of resonance exemplifies the future spoken of as the past and the present under which we are able to say that the sound “is resonating.” This present is already disjunctive to the presence of resonance, and thus we speak of the very passing of the present already in the past tense. In reciting Ambrose's hymn, Augustine's expectations regarding the anticipated closure of the work turn continually toward what remains of it, enacting the process by which the present relegates the future to the past. In Augustine's model the individual soul must provide the continuity of such change. He argues that it is not really accurate to speak of separate perceptual moments because we only become aware of them through the continuity of past, present, and future—the continuity of the desiring self. For Augustine, memory reminds humans of their opacity, of their difficulty in understanding and reflecting upon themselves as minds and as thinking subjects.

Descartes was to borrow Augustine's notion of the thinking subject, but he rejected memory proper and the tradition of the arts of memory since he considered a mathematical method to be a better alternative. In Descartes, the concept of order must supersede the less systematic and experiential type of knowledge achieved through memory. Descartes's identification of the self-identity of human reason with sunlight is parallel to his rejection of temporality in favor of instant certitude. In Cartesianism, resemblance and difference are the grounds for authority and error. Proust, we will see, conducts his research as a kind of correction of this Cartesian model. In Proust's search for lost time, forms of order and the instant certitude of resemblance and difference are the very sources of error; in scene after scene, Proust shows us that first impressions are the weakest, least reliable impressions. Only knowledge as a recursive aggregation leads to truth.

Contemporary philosophers of time have continued to struggle with the relation between time consciousness and subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception argues in Kant's shadow that the experience of time presupposes a view of time. But Merleau-Ponty also suggests that the subject has the capacity to introduce non-being into time experience: subjects have awareness of the past no longer lived and of a future not yet lived. By introducing non-being into the plenitude of being, subjects adumbrate perspectives and bring to the present that which is not there. Like Augustine, Merleau-Ponty opens up our sense of our relation to objects of nature and made things—objects that we animate in accordance with our memories and expectations of time consciousness.

All theories of time confront two inevitabilities: first, the inevitability of sequentiality and the impossibility of repetition and, second, the inevitability of death and forgetting as symptoms not just of loss of the past, but of the decay of the self. Indeed, social conventions structuring time consciousness are the secular equivalents of Platonic eternity: by submitting ourselves to the constraints of the social order of time, we enter into a grid of temporal order that continues regardless of the interruptions posed by death. Such a grid, with its increasing distance from the uneven fluctuations of natural bases of temporal change, truly evades human intention and consequence. In the end the perpetuity of the mechanical clock becomes a second, more perfect nature, yet, in the absence of differentiating marks or periods, the hum of its repetitions signifies nothing at all. In his essay on Time, an unfinished and posthumously published work, Norbert Elias writes that the notion that time “takes on the character of a universal dimension is nothing other than a symbolic expression of the experience that everything which exists is part of an incessant sequence of events. Time is an expression of the fact that people try to define positions, the duration of intervals, the speed of changes and such like in this flow for the purpose of orientation.” The sun, moon, stars, and irregular movements of nature as sources of measure are replaced by a mesh of human inventions which then in turn appear as mysterious components of their own nature. This drift toward the eternalization of time, the imagination of a permanent form for time, Elias writes, is no doubt necessary in light of our fear of transience and death.

Elias's ideas are useful for considering the functions of voluntary memory. In discussing the conformity of the subject to social conventions of time, he further links our voluntary compliance with time control to our voluntary compliance with violence control; as social beings, we are willing to surrender our subjective experience of time and our capacity for physical extension. Voluntary memory creates generations, reinforces bonds, produces retrospective conformity, and molds social forms of ego ideals. Voluntary memory here is the foundation of social forms of nostalgia as well. As willed emotions, social nostalgias subjugate the senses and emotions to certain techniques of memory that are readily adapted into conventions of aesthetic forms.

Although we may think of nostalgia as an emotion structured by prior, historical circumstances, we find, in fact, that the forms of nostalgia are quite codified. Further, the conventions of nostalgia often transcend the historical specificity that is nostalgia's claim to particularity. Prominent among these conventions is the creation of a bounded context. This binding of circumstance and environment is readily yoked to ideologies of patriotism and nationalism that are the social forms of homesickness. The patriot's claim regarding an unambiguous relation to a point of origin is a claim regarding the social authenticity of the self. Experience, in fact, is denigrated in such an ideology, for it is the steady identification of self and place that creates the authenticity of the patriot's being. Colonialism rather than travel, village typicality rather than cosmopolitan flux—these nostalgic forms posit a mastery over context that finds its means in the politics of fascism and imperialism. Here nostalgia takes on its function of contributing to the distinctness of generations and social groups; in its demotion of individual experience, it produces retrospective conformity to a certain form of ego ideal.

Nostalgic forms are also bound to a slowed temporality, whether the slow-motion effects of video and cinema or the slowing of tempo long associated with sentiment in music. We might consider the various slowed reunions in advertisements on television or, on a slightly more highbrow note, the deliberating funereal effects of Ravel's “Pavanne for a Dead Princess,” played to the point of stupefaction in the autumn of 1997. Slowing down the view is a cue for affect. And in video and cinema, slow motion depends upon the distancing technique of a switch to the purely pictorial. Slow-motion speech, of course, is reciprocally comic. Nostalgia's bounded slowness characterizes the backward view of a consumer society condemned to faster and faster demands for judgment and action. The speeding-up of experience in truth makes a parody of the very notions of judgment and action. Thus to speak of the willed aspect of nostalgia is to realize that nostalgia itself may stand in the background of contemporary life as a vestigial sphere of agency.

Further nostalgic effects include the metonymic substitution of part for whole, as in the workings of souvenirs and fetishistic objects linked to prior contexts; the fixing of types within bounded contexts or landscapes, as in genre painting; the expression of mastery of nature and skill, as in miniaturization; an emphasis upon the repression of trauma, as in the positing of a moment of integrity before such trauma—think of all the nostalgia accruing around periods known as “prewar”; a presentation of idealized bodies as bodies ripe for reproduction; an emphasis upon appearances that is consequent to the shallowness of any world ensuing in the absence of temporal depth.

The codification of nostalgic forms paradoxically helps to undermine the authenticity of nostalgic feeling: once nostalgia can be “worked up,” it transcends particular contexts and is unable to connect to what is specific in lived experiences. Proust reminds us, continually and quite literally, of this inevitable collapse of the stage of voluntary memory. In his work, willed memory is linked to the artificiality of simulation. The Verdurins demonstrate the register of simulation throughout the novel: their conformity to social models of time requires a constant modification of truth to convention and even a modification of truth to the knowing lie. Madame Verdurin takes on the task of continually reifying the boundary of her social world and manipulating the fates of others in the interest of articulating that limit. She is described as an actor in what is quite literally a “dumb show”:

She would descend with the suddenness of the insects called ephemerids upon Princess Sherbatoff; were the latter within reach, the Mistress would cling to her shoulder, dig her nails into it, and hide her face against it for a few moments like a child playing hide and seek. Concealed by this protecting screen, she was understood to be laughing until she cried, but could as well have been thinking of nothing at all as the people who, while saying a longish prayer, take the wise precaution of burying their faces in their hands. Mme. Verdurin imitated them when she listened to Beethoven quartets, in order at the same time to show that she regarded them as a prayer and not to let it be seen that she was asleep.

The great social success of Mme. Verdurin, who ascends in the end to the rank of the Guermantes, stems from her capacity to manipulate the bounds of context and her mastery of the social system of signs. As Gilles Deleuze noted in his Proust and Signs, the simulation of laughter was her particular speciality. The narrator, a figure “from whom all things are hidden,” intuits this register of simulation, and is at the same time tormented, even made paranoid, by sexual jealousy. This jealousy is bound to an inevitable illegibility of language and gesture, an illegibility built into the very arbitrariness of the relation between sign and meaning.

Descartes was forced to admit in the Meditations that only memory can separate the states of waking and sleeping. In distinguishing between states of waking and sleeping, memory provides the continuity of the thinking subject. Proust's critique of voluntary memory further erodes the certainty of immediate apprehension, collapsing the Cartesian model by showing the false bottoms of resemblance and the distorting lenses of what Proust calls “habit.” Consider, for example, two famous scenes in the novel of the Cartesian sorting between waking and sleeping: the initial waking at the beginning of Swann's Way and the waking to the grandmother's death. In the work's well-known opening, the narrator describes the false start of waking in the night:

[M]y eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself: “I'm falling asleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to look for sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was that immediate subject of my book.

As he finds, in waking, that the subject of his book separates itself from him, and his sight is restored to a state of darkness, he thinks of the error of the sleeper who mistakes a gas lamp at midnight for the dawn. The force that keeps him awake is the desire to be united with the mother; the approach of sleep, like the approach of death, marks the end of desire. In this scene the narrator awakens to the mother's absence, an awakening to which the proper response is a return to sleep.

The second awakening occurs some time later, during the grandmother's final agony. The narrator is here in fact awakened by the appearance of his mother. When she asks his forgiveness for disturbing his sleep, he answers that he was not asleep. He explains,

The great modification which the act of awakening effects in us is not so much that of ushering us into the clear life of consciousness, as that of making us lose all memory of the slightly more diffused light in which our mind had been resting, as in the opaline depths of the sea. The tide of thought … kept us in a state of motion perfectly sufficient to enable us to refer to it by the name of wakefulness. But then our actual awakening produces an interruption of memory.

At the moment of her death, the grandmother opens her eyes. And then the narrator finds that from that day forward his mother sleepwalks through life, carrying the books and accoutrements of her mother as if the grandmother's spirit literally went on to inhabit the body of her daughter.

In these scenes, Proust explores the abeyance between life and death characterizing the state of waking; until the dawning of memory, there is no continuity in consciousness—the very continuity that enables one truly to recognize experience. The everyday mind, conscious only within the patterns of habit, is hardly distinguishable here from the sleeping mind. Marcel's mother literally incorporates her grief, subsuming her experience to the carrying forward of her own mother's presence through the totems of her purse and, in a doubling of communication between dead and living generations, her volumes of Mme. de Sévigné's letters to her own daughter. Marcel comments: “death is not in vain … the dead continue to act upon us. They act upon us even more than the living because, true reality being discoverable only by the mind, being the object of a mental process, we acquire a true knowledge only of things that we are obliged to recreate by thought, things that are hidden from us in everyday life. … in this cult of grief for our dead, we pay an idolatrous worship to the things that they loved.” Marcel himself becomes aware of the grandmother's death only later as he reaches down to unbutton his boots on the occasion of his second visit to the Grand Hotel at Balbec. Within the frame of the room, and the silence of the party-wall where previously he and his grandmother had communicated by means of a private language of knocks, he recreates the reality of her life—her sacrifices on his behalf and the nature of her personality. Within the retrospective consciousness made possible by her absence and his grief, she comes forward into view. And only retrospectively do we as readers come to see that Marcel's initial waking out of fear of the absence of his mother was a kind of prolepsis of the trauma of the grandmother's death. During Marcel's childhood it is the grandmother who functions as the mother, and after the grandmother's death it is the mother's turn to take on reciprocally the function of the grandmother/mother figure. Awaking to the scene of the grandmother's death, Marcel cannot grasp its reality; it is in the involuntary compulsion of his own repetition of the fact of death and the involuntary compulsion of his mother's representation of the grandmother, the carrying forward of her belongings like objects severed from a tomb, that her death permeates his consciousness.

The novel continually links the domain of habit to the unthinking, the forgetting, by which death is put aside in the midst of everyday activity. In returning to the alienated condition under which the “subject of the book” is no longer the self, the reward is this false security of mindlessness regarding death. During the grandmother's deathbed agony, the Duke of Guermantes arrives and with him a social whirl oblivious to what is happening in the sick-chamber. In the famous scene of the red shoes, the Duchess of Guermantes is unable and unwilling to absorb the fact of Swann's imminent death, even though it is Swann himself who is informing her of its certainty. Madame Verdurin, who is most expert at ignoring the real conditions of others' lives as well as their deaths, is destined to become the paragon of the Guermantes in this sense. In The Fugitive, the narrator specifically states that “the wordly life [robs] one of the power to resuscitate the dead.”

In Proust, whatever is indeterminate in thought is overwhelmed by temporal contingency: truth appears, and grants us happiness, in moments of insight linked to the retrospective consideration of sensual experience, the “making strange” of what previously had been a matter of assumption and ready certainty. As Gilles Deleuze has noted, Proust presents a sustained critique of philosophical positions that remain blind to their own contingent relation to external forces. This is not simply a matter of returning philosophical certainty to the historical conditions of its appearance, for such a return would be a further enactment of the false confidence of voluntary memory and habitual modes of explanation. For Proust, causality is never a sufficient or adequate explanation. We have only to think of the recurring theme of false etymologies for place names and ideas in the novel. This is not simply a matter of the pronouncements of Brichot, the Sorbonne Professor who is a purveyor of a kind of know-nothing knowledge and yet who is, in the end, endowed with dignity by the journals of the Goncourt brothers. The theme of unstable origins is at the heart of the split between name and blood in the social sphere of the aristocracy and in the constantly mistaken revisions of history performed by the war-time and postwar salons of the Verdurins and Odette de Forcheville. The plot as a whole works out an elaborate etymological pun wherein the fantastic world of Geneviève de Brabant and Gilbert the Bad revealed in the lantern slide comes to life as the Duchess of Guermantes is seen after mass in the chapel of Gilbert the Bad at Combray. Then, as Gilberte Swann is transposed to Mademoiselle de Forcheville, then Madame de Saint-Loup, and finally the Duchess of Guermantes, the two initial figures of legendary time are merged in one historical character.

Female sexuality, the tormented uncertainty of jealousy, and the ambiguity of paternity further this theme of misplaced or catechrestic cause. The uncertain paternity of Gilberte, hinted at by the narrator's discussion of her filial resemblance in physical terms to her mother and moral terms to her father, is contrasted to the finite nominalism of Charlus's adoption of Jupien's niece. The madrepore, whose own etymology speaks to the birth opening of the mother and the coral's fabulous branching growth, can be seen in retrospect as the symbol of a secret and fluid lineage of female sexuality: Odette's resemblance to Rachel, Rachel's to Albertine, Albertine's to Gilberte as earlier Gilberte herself had been the pattern for Albertine, and, finally, the grandmother to the mother. The narrator's frantic jealousy wherein only homosexual, or like to like fraternal and paternal, relations eventually yield up certain knowledge and closure, is perhaps not simply bound to the structures of modernist patriarchy so much as a symptom of the signal absence of the father throughout the text. The narrator's anguished relation to Albertine's unintelligibility is rooted in his equally anguished vigil as he awaits his mother's kiss good-night, uncertain as to whether she will come or not. Here we find a deep structural relation between jealousy and nostalgia: both involve the projection of possible scenes and such projections are motivated by desire. Yet these scenes are also prohibited from actualization and thus suffer a defining lack of authenticity. Paranoia and anxiety inevitably accompany this collapse of sources and ends.

Causal explanation is only one of a variety of mental processes taken up in Proust's experiential and layered process of critique. If habit is the enemy of knowledge and friendship, and if voluntary memory is the willed distortion of truth, Proust offers the mindfulness of artistic making, the reframing of experience through mental activity, as the alternative. Generalization and convention prohibit originality and judgment, and the axiomatic tradition in French philosophy is itself shown to be a kind of binding of perspective. It is here that Proust contrasts the forms of reified boundary-making, of which nostalgia is only one mode of thought, to the forms of art. As nostalgia engages in historical thinking it is conditioned by habit and typification; in contrast, art produces new knowledge by means of form.

Hence the recurrence of haze and outline as a dimension of nostalgic forms represents an attempt to place a boundary upon ambiguity. Nostalgia works a fixed and unidirectional figure/ground shift in which the context of the past, those elements of scene taken for granted when the past is a present sphere of action, becomes the figure of the past, and action is thereby circumscribed by mere scene setting. When the nostalgic viewer enters into the frame—stepping into the image as Keats does in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” as the jealous lover falls into his or her imagination, and as the time-travelers of popular cinema arrive in other worlds—the past's completeness is a foil to intervention. The anachronistic visitor is passively situated as a viewer or, perhaps more accurately, as a dreamer overcome by a plot he has himself created but within which he cannot make an intervening gesture. For Proust, the aesthetic is tied to a negative and self-revising process of perspectivalism that is the opposite of such a nostalgic process. Aesthetic activity requires the constant modification of frame and a transposition of reality from one scene to another.

Fixed perspective results in blocked perspective, as we find in the scene of the “watch-tower” wherein the narrator observes the tryst between Charlus and Jupien. Issues of fixed perspective come in for particular criticism in the recurrence of the theme of anti-Semitism in the text, in the rigid nondiscursive positions assumed by the Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, and in the account of the static social world during the Great War. Fixed dates appear in the text for the first time during the discussion of the war and we see here, as Elias proposed, the cohesion of time control and the organization of violence. Proust describes the war itself as “the monstrous reality under which there is nothing else visible.” It can be said that there are no minor characters in the novel, for Proust's interest continually and vividly turns to the location of minor action, the world of servants, as a site wherein one can observe the unfolding of monumental consequences. In his essay on “The Image of Proust,” Walter Benjamin cited a passage from the writings of Princess Clermont-Tonnerre on this predilection: “And finally we cannot suppress the fact that Proust became enraptured with the study of domestic servants—whether it be that an element which he encountered nowhere else intrigued his investigative faculties or that he envied servants their greater opportunities for observing the intimate details of things that aroused his interest.”

Of course, as in Nietzsche's thought, the most evident device for retrospective readjustment is irony. Proust reminds us of the complete absence of irony in nostalgic forms and correlatively of the involuntary dimension of true irony. But there is also a Kantian aspect to Proust's aesthetics, for beauty emerges in situations where categories of thought are not sufficient to account for the image and where the relations between figure and ground are suspended. The paintings of Elstir, wherein the sea is a city and the city is a sea; the image of the sea in the bookcases at Balbec; the constant association of Albertine with the sea's transient, metamorphozing form; the turn to organic images, the hawthorns, apple trees, and flowers—all as fleeting in their expression as human faces and vice versa: these are a few of the examples of an aesthetic presentation that itself never brings back images and symbols in any fixed system of metonymy or order.

Rather than pursuing forms of the nostalgic in his research into lost time, Proust suggests the irony underlying the nostalgic impulse. Nostalgia's futility makes possible the practice of aesthetics and rescues the narrator's practice from dilettantism—here seen as an incomplete commitment to whatever is disorienting, and therefore possibly significant, in the experience of temporality. Such an incomplete commitment would be dominated by a teleology of habit: when we find Saint-Loup assuming the gestures of Charlus, and the narrator following in the footsteps of Swann, we watch for the gesture of thought, the decision to act, that will deliver the subject from the relentless force of plot and typification.

In his famous metaphor of the frieze of girls, Proust explores the relations between the temporal experience of subjectivity and a practice of art embedded in its own temporality. The model here is a continual shift in figure/ground relations and specifically the aesthetic history of the frieze. Albertine appears for the first time within this frieze, but, significantly, she appears without relief or individuality. As Beckett describes her in his 1931 study of Proust, she is one aspect of a hedge of Pennsylvanian roses against the breaking line of the waves. The cortege appears in motion, like figures animated in process or, more precisely, like figures who have emerged from their proper background—the sarcophagus that would seal them within a frame. When Albertine is later separated and made a captive, the narrator's jealousy enacts a futile project of reification and possession. Albertine's physical presence nevertheless retains the amorphous movement of the sea that is her proper context. The narrator's dream of fixed form and possession is ironically fulfilled in her ensuing death and the atrophy of his interest. Here we find Proust taking up the theme of death as a modeler or carver. At the time of her death, the grandmother's face is “almost finished” and, at the same time, “On that funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the Middle Ages, had laid her down in the form of a young girl.” In his classic essay on The Life of Forms in Art, written in the 1930s, Henri Focillon similarly described sculptural carving as “starting from the surface and seeking for the form within the block.” The touches of the sculptor become progressively closer and joined in an intimate interlocking of relationships. Yet in Proust, as a face comes into full relief, it is also on the threshold of oblivion and subject to the distortions of memory.

The narrator explains that it is “only after one has recognized, not without some tentative stumblings, the optical errors of one's first impression that one can arrive at an exact knowledge of another person, supposing such knowledge to be ever possible. But it is not; for while our original impression of him undergoes correction, the person himself, not being an inanimate object, changes for his part too: we think that we have caught him, he shifts, and, when we imagine that at last we are seeing him clearly, it is only the old impressions which we had already formed of him that we have succeeded in clarifying, when they no longer represent him.” He goes on to say that this continual task of “catching-up” with reality, linked to the proleptic expectation brought to all exchanges with others, is what protects us from the dreariness of an overly presumptuous habit. Years later, when the narrator sees a photograph of the girls, their faces blurred by similarities and by the viewer's temporal distance, they are distinguishable only by their costumes. The costumes themselves are metonymic to social categories and even elements of design that transcend the temporality of any given subject. Albertine wears a Fortuny cape that can be found in one of Carpaccio's Venetian genre scenes; an Assyrian relief is the prototype of the frock coat. All that emerges in high relief, in particular detail, is bound to be abraded back into surface and barely intelligible fragments of signs.

Proust's use of the concept of the frieze coincides in suggestive ways with the use of the concept in the turn-of-the-century aesthetic theories of Alois Riegl, especially his 1893 Stilfragen and 1901 Spatromische Kunstindustrie. As Michael Podro has explained in his useful review of Riegl's work in The Critical Historians of Art, Riegl suggests that in antiquity, and particularly in the art of ancient Egypt, a concept of self-containedness predominates. Represented objects are unconnected with other objects in their respective contexts. Objects appear as continuous unbroken forms enclosed within a boundary, as in an ideal of the self as internally continuous and distinct from its surroundings. Such self-containedness had implications not merely for the relation of the object to context, but also for the relation of the representation to the spectator. Riegl argues that the spectator is invited to comprehend such art immediately through sensual perceptions and to rely as little as possible upon past experience and subjective projections. In addition to the separation of the object from its context and the separation of representation from the spectator, Riegl suggests that space is either denied or suppressed; he sees a maximum correspondence between the depicted object and the real surface of the relief or painting, and spatial effects of depth and projection are refused in favor of a sense of surface.

Riegl goes on to claim that the classical relief begins to make a profound shift in this paradigm of self-containedness. In classical relief, relations between figures are admitted, modeling and the mobility of turning forms give a sense of the space in which they turn. There is a continuity between the space of the viewer and the space of the representation. This continuity comes into full flower in late antiquity—here relief requires limbs and folds of drapery to be carved so deeply that the unity of the figure is dissolved. Coherence is created by means of an optical plan that unites figures and their surroundings and which suggests a continuous optical space between real and represented worlds. Such a continuous space will develop into various perspectival forms known to Roman painting and will later be renewed in the Renaissance. In Riegl's account, the history of art is characterized by a coming to the fore of an awareness of relationality. And this is precisely the ontogeny recapitulated by Proust in the phylogeny of the narrator's consciousness. The frieze is the paradigm of the foreground/background shifts placed in constant mutability and of which the aggregation of the novel itself is the only accessible form. Here the capacity of the bookcase to reflect the sea is the capacity of the novel to reflect the mutability of the experience of time in ever-shifting and retrospectively self-adjusting views. The Arena Chapel frescoes of Giotto are a locus classicus for the novel; they mark the reawakening of the gestural in representation. Uniting the space of appearance with the space of apprehension, they mark the moment when human figures emerge from the world of objects to move and signify, much as the narrator hears his grandmother's voice for the first time when it comes forward in the “relief” of a telephone call. These are figures suspended between the death of inert form and the life of comprehension. The frieze of girls moves forward into the indefinite reification of the photograph. The spectacle of soldiers in formation erases their particular subjectivity and dooms them to be sacrificed. But Giotto's Paduan figures appear to be released from bonds of stone; it is the mental and form-giving activities of the artist here that rework the rules and conventions of representation itself.

In The Fugitive Proust presents a summary of his ideas on memory and forgetting. Memory has no power of invention. It is spiritual and not dependent upon the world for its stimulation. It stems from our desire for the dead—not out of a need for love, but out of a need for the absent person, for the place to be filled. The counterforce of memory, forgetting, is so powerful an instrument of adaptation to reality because it gradually destroys in us the surviving past—a past that is in perpetual contradiction to it. Following the logic of this dialectic, we can see that the willed or voluntary forms of nostalgia that so relentlessly surround us are devices of forgetting in the costume of memory.

The brilliant contribution of Proust's book is his view of the tragic, relentless course of social life once, by means of our own willed confusion, it takes on the power of a form of nature. He imagines works of art structured beyond our habitual, imitative capacities as encompassing a practice of opening the present to the nonbeing of thought—such a practice would involve whatever thought can achieve given the contingencies of habit and the inevitability of death. In Proust's great work we find a rejection of the plenitude of Bergsonian duration and of the positive implications of perspectivalism. Proust's practice is the accommodation of the involuntary and unintelligible in the pursuit of truth. In this activity of mind resides the sublimity of the art work—a Kantianism wherein particularities are not anchored to habitual concepts but return, estranged from their functions. Happiness here is synonymous with aesthetic apprehension—an aesthetic apprehension that bears the contradictions of form-giving and form-eroding activities undertaken in time.