OCR Document

An Examination of One Aspect
in the Art of Proust and Joyce
In Proust and Joyce, literature turns inwards to explore the dark regions of the mind. The
landscapes of consciousness are painted and their relationship to the world outside carefully
traced. In the work of both artists, external reality is perceived as infinitely rich and varied,
but also as capable of generating an equally rich and varied subjective reality, which in turn
devolves upon the external world shaping it and giving it meaning. For both artists, the
world without can be “read” for meaning, for a meaning which is ultimately an articulate
image of the self. 1
In the Proustian universe the external object hides a truth which, once revealed and
interpreted, turns out to be the unexplored world of the self; external objects are the
intermediaries between the individual self and its unknown counterpart. The object in itself,
however, does not contain that “truth”; it brings it to the field of our perception, it suggests
it, but that “truth” is in the self alone. This particular manner of perceiving an object may
lead to an experience of unity which is almost of a mystical nature. One such experience is
that described in the famous passage of la Petite Madeleine. Through the mediation of the
external world, in the form of a specific object, the present self comes into contact with the
past self, and an ecstasy of freedom immediately follows. The contact is such that the two
1
In establishing parallels between Joyce and Proust, I have resorted to the direct confrontation of texts. My
analysis has been restricted to the third episode of Ulysses, “Proteus,” and to a few passages from Proust’s
“Combray.”
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selves become identical, time is thereby abolished, and pure being, a third, transcendental
self, is experienced. The experience itself, though recreated verbally, is trans-verbal:
Un plaisir délicieux m’avait envahi, isolé, sans la notion de sa cause. Il m’avait
aussitôt rendu les vicissitudes de la vie indifférentes, ses désastres inoffensifs, sa
brièveté illusoire, de la même façon qu’opère l’amour, en me remplissant d’une
essence précieuse: ou plutôt cette essence n’était pas en moi, elle était moi. J’avais
cessé de me sentir médiocre, contingent, mortel… Il est clair que la vérité que je
cherche n’est pas en lui, mais en moi. Il l’y a éveillée, mais ne la connait pas, et ne
peut que répéter indéfiniment, avec de moins en moins de force, ce même
témoignage que je ne sais pas interpréter… (p. 58)
Thus, the search for truth is inwards, not outwards, but since the realm in which the
search must take place is the dark regions of consciousness, the external world, like a
system of signs, must provide guidance to the seeker, a code that may be interpreted. The
individual object becomes like a word full of meaning that the seeker must learn how to
read. This act of interpretation, of reading the universe outside, is itself an act of creation,
of giving “to airy nothing, a local habitation and a name.” Search and creation become
equivalent:
Grave incertitude, toutes les fois que l’esprit se sent dépassé par lui-même; quand
lui, le chercheur, est tout ensemble le pays obscur où il doit chercher et où tout son
bagage ne lui sera de rien. Chercher? pas seulement: créer. Il est en face de quelque
chose qui n’est pas encore et que seul il peut réaliser puis faire entrer dans sa
lumière. (p. 59)
The element of hazard, however, is at the very heart of this act of creation. The
external object is the intermediary without which light cannot be brought to these dark
regions; yet it is only by chance that the seeker encounters this object in the external world.
But once found, it is up to him to be able to “read” it correctly, and therefore to “re-write” it
in terms of his own self. This act of creation may take the form, as it does in this episode, of
recollection brought about by an act of involuntary memory. Voluntary memory may bring
back recollections, but only in an abstract form, whereas involuntary memory, by
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abolishing time and by fusing the object with the subject, brings back the past with the
force and vividness of actual recreation. Proust envisages this search for the image from the
past as a veritable act of creation because, once stirred, that single recollection triggers,
actual1y generates, many others related to it, thus populating a whole world. The accuracy
of the analogy that Proust uses at the end of this passage, the delicacy and abundance of
detail—stylistically almost as ecstatic in its successive, mounting illustrations, as the very
experience it analogizes—bring home the intense reality of this creative act of memory:
Et comme dans ce jeu où les Japonais s’amusent à tremper dans un bol de
porcelaine rempli d’eau, de petits morceaux de papier jusque-là indistincts qui, à
peine y sont-ils plongès, s’étirent, se contournent, se colorent, se différencient,
deviennent des fleurs, des maisons, des personnages consistants et reconnaissables,
de même maintenant toutes les fleurs de notre jardin et celles du parc de M. Swann,
et les nymphéas de la Vivonne, et les bonnes gens du village et leurs petits logis et
l’église et tout Combray et ses environs, tout cela qui prend forme et solidité, est
sorti, ville et jardins, de ma tasse de thé. (p. 61)
The act of creation, then, is the rendering intelligible to the human sensibility and
imagination that which exists outside and which corresponds intimately to the world inside;
but it is also the shaping and the rendering intelligible of the universe within by means of
the universe without:
Tous ces souvenirs ajoutés les uns aux autres ne formaient plus qu’une masse, mais
non sans qu’on peut distinger entre eux —entre les plus anciens, et ceus plus
récents, nés d’un parfum, puis ceux qui n’étaient que les souvenirs d’une autre
personne de qui je les avais appris— sinon des fissures, des failles véritables, du
moins ces veinures, ces bigarrures de coloration qui, dans certaines roches, dans
certaines marbres, révélent des différences d’origine, d’âge, de “formation.” (p.
223)
The medley of memories which lies formless and nameless in one’s consciousness,
suddenly, by the correspondence, rises to a new multidimensional identity. The exhilaration
that such a discovery may produce in our imagination comes not only from the awareness
of identity, but also from a deep sense of belonging: there does seem to be a
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correspondence between inner and outer reality. In both Proust and Joyce, language is what
translates this correspondence and makes it comprehensible.
In the passage of the bell-towers of Martinville, we are presented with a vision of
transcendental reality hidden behind a veil of the shapes of concrete reality, which Marcel
must tear in order to apprehend. This time the belfries are the intermediaries that whisper to
him the existence of the other reality:
Bientôt leurs lignes et leurs surfaces ensoleillées, comme si elles avaient été une
sorte d’écorce, se déchirèrent, un peu de ce qui m’était caché en elles m’apparut,
j’eus une pensée qui n’existait pas pour moi l’instant avant, qui se formula en mots
dans ma tête, et le plaisir que m’avait fait tout a l’heure éprouver leur vue s’en
trouva tellement accru que, pris d’une sorte d’ivresse, je ne pus plus penser à autre
chose. (p. 216)
It would be interesting to trace the process by which this revelation is achieved and
formulated into words. The sight of the bell towers arouses in him fortuitously, as is always
the case, that peculiar pleasure that is inevitably associated with this kind of experience.
Then follows the repeated efforts to read into those external forms some meaning. Suddenly
the crust is broken, the object reveals its hidden treasure. One immediate question arises:
What is the revelation? The crust has been torn and yet what we have next appears, at first
sight, as a non sequitur: “j’eus une pensée.” We are not even told what this thought is about
or how it is related to the revelation; all we know is that the thought is formulated in words.
Next we are told that this leads to an intensified joy, which in itself should be the
consequence of the revelation and its accompanying emotion. In fact it is; in fact the
thought formulated in words is the revelation. At the moment in which the crust is torn off,
the external coincides with the shaping of the internal, individual thought: the inner and the
outer universe become one through the mediation of the external object and through
language. Creation then materializes on paper. Marcel, however, does not write about the
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abstract meaning of the revelation, not even about his own special pleasure, but about the
towers themselves: he describes them, recreates through them the inward-outward-inward
movement whereby he finds in the external world a corresponding theme of the soul, an
experience of timeless being.
The written form of the experience may not appear “profound,” because it is not an
exegesis of the experience itself, nor a lyrical rendering of the emotion felt, but it does
capture this inward-outward-inward movement in the physical appearance of the towers.
Although static and at times perceived as such—“comme trois oiseaux posés sur la plaine,
immobiles”—the belfries are informed with the motion of the perceiver. This description of
the towers abounds in verbs of motion: “s’élevant,” “montaient,” “venant se placer,” “les
avait rejoints,” “s’écarta,” “s’étaient jetés.” It is almost as if the observer and the observed
were both in motion (“On cherche à retrouver dans les choses… le reflet que notre âme a
projeté sur elles.”). On the other hand, there is an interesting interplay—which could almost
become symbolic—in the spatial relationship of the towers: at the beginning only the two
towers of Martinville appear on the horizon; then a third one, the one of Vieuxvicq, comes
between them, like that “intermediary image” which, as a catalytic substance, effects the
union between the two selves, between the two realities. Its intermediary function is not,
however, constant or assured, and this wavering—suggesting also the fragility of the act of
mediation itself—is here visually paralleled in the constant interplay of the three towers,
sometimes appearing, sometimes disappearing: “Parfois l’un s’effaçait pour que les deux
autres pussent nous apercevoir un instant encore; mais la route changea de direction; ils
virèrent dans la lumière comme trois pivots d’or et disparurent à mes yeux.” (p. 217) Then,
the oneness achieved through the intermediary image or object is paralleled, first, by the
translation of these towers into human forms in the imagination of the perceiver, and then
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by the breaking up of distance between them so that they coalesce, superimposing their
shapes one upon the other until they seem like one:
Mais un peu plus tard, comme nous étions déjà prés de Combray, le soleil étant
maintenant couché, je les aperçus une dernière fois de très loin, qui n’étaient plus
que comme trois fleurs peintes sur le ciel au-dessus de la ligne basse des champs.
Ils me faisaient penser aussi aux trois jeunes filles d’une légende… et tandis que
nous nous éloignons au galop, je les vis timidement chercher leur chemin et, après
quelques gauches trébuchements de leurs nobles silhouettes, se serrer les uns contre
les autres, glisser l’un derrière l’autre, ne plus faire sur le ciel rose qu’une seule
forme noire, charmante et résignée, et s’éffacer dans la nuit. (p. 218)
Those “trébuchements,” which are here attributed to the towers, being, as they are, static,
are they not rather, on the literal level, the stumbling motion of the vehicle on which he is
riding, and, on the level of correspondences, the stumblings and gropings of consciousness
in that darkness where it must search?
This act of creation, the writing of this passage, is expansive for the artist; it leaves
him in freedom. He has read and written reality; the act frees him from the belfries and
from what they are hiding, and “comme si j’avais été moi-même une poule et si je venais de
pondre un oeuf, je me mis a chanter à tue-tête.”
In Joyce, the external world also operates as an intermediary. The opening words of
the “Proteus” episode in Ulysses envision reality as something pre-established and external
to man, but something that can be read and interpreted: “Ineluctable modality of the visible;
at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read,
seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust:
coloured signs.” (p. 37)
The universe outside is perceived as actually evolving a system of signs that may be
read for meaning.
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The spatio-temporal coordinates of reality are here defined around the
nacheinander-nebeneinander axis: contiguity in movement (nacheinander) expresses the
“ineluctable modality of the audible,” time; while contiguity without the dimension of
movement (nebeneinander) expresses the “ineluctable modality of the visible,” space; the
interpenetration of both gives birth to rhythm, the act of creation:
Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity
along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominine
Deasy kens them a’.
Won’t you come to Sandymount,
Madeline the mare?
Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No,
agallop: deline the mare. (p. 37)
External reality is independent of man, ineluctable. “There all the time without you:
and ever shall be, world without end.” But the mind may superimpose the space and time of
the reality of the imagination, so that both may coexist and enrich the other: Stephen closes
his eyes and he becomes Hamlet; Sandymount strand gives birth to Elsinore: “Open your
eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the
nebeneinander ineluctably.” The reality of the imagination seems to be more intense and
immediate here. Inner space and time become so vivid that outside reality is pale by
comparison and becomes a mere background to inner reality. Throughout the whole
episode, outside space will generate the inner space of events relived through memory.
Thus, outside reality is seen here only as a point of departure.
In both Proust and Joyce, the external reality is the starting point towards the
perception and recreation of psychological realities. In Proust, one way in which this is
accomplished is through an act of involuntary memory; in Joyce this role is taken up by
association. In “Proteus,” the sign of a random object (random for the character but
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absolutely and rigidly determined by the artist) will bring either an event from the past, a
quotation, a song or a revelation. The sight of the Pigeonhouse, for example, reminds
Stephen of a passage from Leo Taxil’s irreverent La Vie de Jésus.
He halted. I have passed the way to aunt Sara’s. Am I not going there? Seems not.
No-one about. He turned northeast and crossed the firmer sand towards the
Pigeonhouse.
— Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position ?
— c ‘est le pigeon, Joseph. (p. 41)
This association in turn generates a number of others, until, as in the passage of la
Petite Madeleine, the whole world of Stephen’s Paris life is recreated. Joyce’s manner of
finding correspondence differs from Proust’s in that Joyce does not resort to the direct
sustained analogy, but rather to the superimposition of images and situations contained
within the inner monologue of his characters.
One of the most important external objects that give shape to Stephen’s stream of
thoughts, in the second half of the episode in question, is the dog. Stephen perceives first a
“bloated carcass of a dog” and then thinks of the sands as “language tide and wind have
silted here.” This thought evokes snatches from the early history of Ireland; the theme of
pretence and betrayal runs through them all, as it runs through the whole of Ulysses. The
history of his country is equated to his own personal history; he feels that he was there, too,
belonging and isolated at the same time, just as he is in the present: “Their blood is in me,
their lust my waves. I moved among them on the frozen Liffey, that I, a changeling, among
the spluttering resin fires. I spoke to no-one; none to me.” (p. 45) This sort of metaphorical
reincarnation is also a further development of the theme of metempsychosis, which the
figure of the dog will embody more completely in this episode.
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Later, the sight of a live dog and the hearing of his barking assimilate themselves
into Stephen’s thoughts by means of imagery: at first the dog-image takes on its age-long
meaning of servility: “For that are you pining, the bark of their applause?” But a mythical
image has already been insinuated, superimposing itself upon this more common-place
connotation: the image of Actaeon, which defines the peculiar relationship between
Stephen and the dog. “The dog’s bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back. Dog of my
enemy. I just simply stood pale, silent, bayed about.” [Italics mine] The allusion to Actaeon
turned into a deer and hunted down by his own dogs gives Stephen a new mythical
dimension, which, in spite of the many protean transformations that he will suffer, he will
retain to the very end of the episode when he will be described again as a deer, though at
that point, in terms of heraldry: “He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant.”
At the same time, and by virtue of a motif that first appears in the “Telemachus”
episode, Stephen is also the dog. “Dogsbody” is what Mulligan calls him. In that early
episode, “dogsbody” also represents the inverted blasphemous image of “Godsbody,” just
as Mulligan’s mock-performance of the mass evokes a black mass: “—For this, O dearly
beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns.” (p. 3)
As for the dog, among the many metaphorical transformations that this protean dog
undergoes in this episode is also and significantly that of a buck. Like Stephen’s, this
transformation is described in heraldic terms, thus bringing their identities closer by means
of imagery, mythical allusions and style register: “On a field tenney a buck, trippant,
proper, unattired.”
This association makes the dog Stephen’s double. In the previous episode Stephen
has identified himself with the answer to the rather mystifying riddle that he tells and
nobody understands:
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The cock crew
The sky was blue:
The bells in heaven
Were striking eleven.
Tis time for this poor soul
To go to heaven.
… —What is it, sir? We give it up.
Stephen, his throat itching, answered:
— The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush. (pp. 26-27)
At that point Stephen associates himself to the fox when, on thinking of Cyril Sargent’s
mother—which in turn has led him to think of his own—he equates the poor soul gone to
heaven with the mother image. It is not until the “Proteus” episode, however, that we
understand why it is the “grandmother” being buried in the riddle, rather than just the
mother, the figure that so moves Stephen to remorse: he must free himself not only from
that guilt-ridden memory of his mother but also from Ireland, the demanding mothercountry, the land of his ancestors with whom he has identified himself before. On the other
hand, the dog here in “Proteus,” delving the sand, is described in almost identical terms as
the fox was in “Nestor”:
(“Nestor”) A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox,
red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth,
listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped. (p. 28)
(“Proteus”) Looking for something lost in a past life…
His hindpaws then scattered sand: then his forepaws dabbled and delved.
Something he buried there, his grandmother. He rooted in the sand, dabbling,
delving and stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand and stopped to listen to
the air, scraped up the sand again with a fury of his claws, soon ceasing, a pard, a
panther, got in spouse-breach, vulturing the dead. (pp. 46-47)
Thus, by virtue of the superimposition of innumerable images this dog ceases to be
just an ordinary dog and becomes itself the symbol of the protean force of transformation.
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Two cathartic images result for Stephen from this chain of associations. One is
prompted by the sea, which is the other important protean figure of this episode. Once
more, we hear echoes from the first episode:
Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the
wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of
liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green
sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning
vomiting. (p. 5)
In the “Telemachus” episode, the powerful association between Dublin Bay
containing the green waters of the sea and the bowl of china containing the green bile of his
dying mother’s liver has been established; the image of the sea, with these connotations,
will reappear like a leit-motif throughout the novel. The sea has now become a personal
symbol, not only of life, but of death and decay.
In “Proteus,” the sea in this twofold connotation of life and death suggests its
correspondent, symbolically, in the man that has been reported drowned (a sea
transformation: “Those are pearls that were his eyes”). This triggers the memory of being
pushed into the ditch at Clongowes, Stephen’s horror of water, and the acknowledgment
that he now makes that he would not have been able to save a drowning man. This train of
associations finally brings him to the painful but cathartic realization that he could not save
his mother: “A drowning man. His human eyes scream to me out of horror of his death. I…
With him together down… I could not save her. Waters: bitter death: lost.” (p. 46)
The second cathartic image, which turns into an insight into his immediate future
and into the possibility of being completed by another, is brought about by the metaphorical
transformation of the dog. As we have seen, the dog is like an alter ego to Stephen, but at
the same time he is also associated to Bloom. The dog has been linked to a pard in
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Stephen’s imagination, and this is precisely the image that will be associated later on to
Bloom, which in turn associates him with Christ, since the pard is emblematic of Christ in
Medieval imagery (one of Joyce’s “medieval abstrusiosities”). Once the image appears in
connection with the dog, unconsciously, this reminds Stephen of a dream which is itself a
premonition of his meeting with Bloom:
After he woke me up last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway. Street
of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it. That man led me,
spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against my face. Smiled:
creamfruit smell. That was the rule, said. In. Come. Red carpet spread. You will see
who. (p. 47)
It is after this recollection that Stephen writes his poem. Although the poem itself is
very much inferior in quality to the poetic prose of the whole chapter (and deliberately so,
since it must be taken as a symptom of Stephen’s immaturity; he is not yet ready to be
Dedalus, he is still Icarus), it is a curious synthesis of the mother-father motifs of this
episode: it is a lovers’ union but he is a “pale vampire.” In “Telemachus,” Stephen, in
horror, has struggled to free himself from his mother’s memory and he has called her
“Ghoul! Chewer of corpses! / No mother. Let me be and let me live.” (p. 10) Now it is the
male figure, the one who plays the vampire in this world of interchangeable identities. It is,
nonetheless, a union of opposites of sorts, more powerfully expressed in the thoughts
aroused by the poem than in the poem itself.
His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her womb. Oomb,
allwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched: ooeeehah: roar
of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring wayawayawayawayawayaway. (p. 48)
[Italics mine]
The sea is then a powerful symbol of the meeting of opposites: the great sweet
mother of the Greeks, oinopa ponton, but also decaying motherhood; the avatar of great
mythical gods, Mananaan MacLir of the Celts and Proteus, the old man of the sea, but also
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the terrible drowner of men. Inner reality breathes into the inert world of objects and gives
them life. Dublin Bay is no longer just a geographical entity; poetry has filled it with
innumerable meanings. Imagery, like so many stratified layers of meaning, has turned it
into a more complex, richer object, just as a whole universe gushes forth from Marcel’s cup
of tea. For Proust and Joyce have lit up many of the dark regions of consciousness, have
plotted some of its geography. Valleys, rivers, mountains and ravines claim our attention,
while the outside world, at times, becomes a pale screen on which the other is projected,
and, at others, a world enriched by the living presence of myth, by the living presence of
the past.
Works Cited
Joyce, James. Ulysses, (Vintage) Random House, New York.
Proust, Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, I, “Du côté de chez Swann” (Folio)
Gallimard, Paris.
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