Images of the Invisible: Composite Photography and Proust`s Ã

Images of the Invisible: Composite Photography and
Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu
Áine Larkin
The significance of the visual in the Proustian narrative and the
diversity of systems of visual representation referenced by Marcel
Proust in the writing of his novel have been noted by many critics of À
la recherche du temps perdu.1 This article will explore Proust’s
appropriation of one type of visual image — the composite
photograph — as a model for his protagonist’s apprehension and
recollection of experience.
The dual narratological structure of À la recherche du temps
perdu facilitates the juxtaposition of diverse spatio-temporal points of
view. Both Roxanne Hanney and Georges Poulet affirm the existence
of stratified versions of a single form in the Proustian narrative.
However, given their belief in the disappearance of ulterior forms
beneath the more recent, both critics appear to underestimate the
spatio-temporal effects of such superimposition.2 This study suggests
that the stratification of images in Proust’s novel serves to create an
impression of spatial and temporal depth and thereby to point up the
inexorable passage of time and its tangible effects on human beings,
1. Howard Moss, The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust (London: Faber & Faber,
1963); Victor E. Graham, The Imagery of Proust (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966);
Mieke Bal, The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997); Roger Shattuck, Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In
Search of Lost Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).
2. Roxanne Hanney, The Invisible Middle Term in Proust’s À la recherche du
temps perdu (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), p. 92, and Georges Poulet,
L’Espace proustien (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), pp. 112–4.
IJFrS 8 (2008)
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LARKIN
facts of which the later narrator is aware but which are not fully
appreciated by Marcel as he interacts with the world.
Georges Poulet’s emphasis on intermittent involuntary
memory as the only means of destabilizing the systematic burial of the
past beneath the present seems to disregard the fact that image
superimposition also characterizes the representation of the world as
perceived visually by both Marcel and the later narrator.3 The
stereoscopic narratological structure of À la recherche du temps perdu
means that the description of Marcel’s process of visual perception is
always informed by the point of view of the later narrator, who is
situated at a point in time and space far removed from that of Marcel.
Since the processes of perception and memory are constantly
interwoven through the alternation of the narrating voices of Marcel
and the later narrator, memory is never wholly distinguishable from
perception in the Proustian narrative. Indeed, in Albertine disparue,
the later narrator announces that ‘notre moi est fait de la superposition
de nos états successifs. Mais cette superposition n’est pas immuable
comme la stratification d’une montagne. Perpétuellement des
soulèvements font affleurer à la surface des couches anciennes’ (my
italics).4 It is this emphasis on the self as a dynamic stratification of
superimposed selves, in which no hierarchy based on temporal
duration is respected, that suggests the composite photographic image.
Insofar
as
composite
photography
involves
the
superimposition of multiple transparent photographic images of a
person or persons, this application of photography, where
3. In Proust et Broch: Les Frontières du temps, les frontières de la mémoire (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2003), Ioana Vultur explores image superimposition in Proust’s
novel. She acknowledges the importance of the connection between memory
and perception, observing that ‘chez Proust, chaque événement raconté dans le
roman est mis en perspective par le souvenir. […] La réalité est décrite comme
un complexe de sensations et de souvenirs et elle apparaît comme un réseau
entre le moi et le monde’ (p. 72).
4. Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols
(Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1987–89), IV, p. 125. Further
references to this edition are given in parenthesis in the text citing volume
number and page range.
IMAGES OF THE INVISIBLE
21
appropriated for the metaphoric representation of Marcel’s
perceptions and memories, points up the connections between past
and present, while also underlining the projection of past and present
into a future as yet unknown to Marcel, though not to the later
narrator. Not only is the unique relationship between surface and
depth in composite photographic images appropriated by Proust in the
representation of Marcel’s apprehension of the world, but this
application of photography further acts as a rich source of analogy in
the Proustian narrative.
In order to relate Proust’s style of writing to composite
photography, it is important to recall the link established by Proust
between essence and metaphor. According to the later narrator in Le
Temps retrouvé, literary style is indistinguishable from the creation of
the fresh and meaningful metaphor through which the writer
communicates to others his unique apprehension of the world (IV,
468). Jean-Pierre Richard explains how in À la recherche du temps
perdu the figure of metaphor operates as superimposition:
[La métaphore] amène en effet deux termes différents à se
rapprocher et se superposer (mentalement), afin de faire
apparaître entre eux, mais en eux tout aussi bien la présence
d’une notion commune. L’unification métaphorique se présente
dans la théorie proustienne comme extraction d’un même à
partir de deux autres conjugués.5
In ‘Proust palimpseste’, Gérard Genette qualifies the relationship at
the heart of Proust’s own definition of metaphor (in Le Temps
retrouvé) as being one of resistance and tension:
Mais qu’est-ce qu’une essence commune, sinon une abstraction,
c’est-à-dire ce que Proust veut éviter à tout prix, et comment
une description fondée sur le ‘rapport’ de deux objets ne
risquerait-elle pas plutôt de faire s’évanouir l’essence de chacun
d’eux? S’il y a dans toute métaphore à la fois la mise en œuvre
d’une ressemblance et celle d’une différence, une tentative
5. Jean-Pierre Richard, Proust et le monde sensible (Paris: Seuil, 1974), p. 283.
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LARKIN
d’‘assimilation’ et une résistance à cette assimilation, faute de
quoi il n’y aurait qu’une stérile tautologie, l’essence n’est-elle
pas davantage du côté de ce qui diffère et qui résiste, du côté
irréductible et réfractaire des choses? 6
According to Genette, essences are more likely to be discernible in the
differences or tensions between the two elements of a metaphor, rather
than in their shared characteristics. Thus the metaphorical linking of
two disparate elements of Marcel’s world constitutes in itself a
superimposition which renders the familiar somewhat strange. The
visual representation of essence was, as we shall see, the fundamental
goal of composite photography as conceived by Francis Galton and as
used by other late-nineteenth century photographers and scientists.
The composite photograph thus illustrates in visual terms the same
struggle or tension between familiar surfaces and uncanny depths that
Genette identifies as inherent to Proustian metaphor.
Composite Photographs: ‘Images of the Invisible’
The photographic image has per se a distinctive semiotic status as
indexical icon, to use the terms of Peircean semiotics as refined by
Jean-Marie Schaeffer.7 As an index, it represents a unique fragment of
time and space, recorded on the sensitive film by the action of light; as
an icon, it bears a resemblance to the recorded object. Its semiotic
status and pragmatic flexibility mean that it is characterized by unique
spatio-temporal tensions and ambiguities which influence profoundly
the relationship between the photographed object and the observer of
the image.8
6. Gérard Genette, ‘Proust palimpseste’, in Figures I (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 46.
7. Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘The Icon, Index, and Symbol’, in Collected Papers of
Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. by C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss and A. W. Burks, 8 vols
(Bristol: Thoemmes, 1998), II, pp. 156–73, and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, L’Image
précaire: du dispositif photographique (Paris: Seuil, 1987).
8. ‘Pragmatic flexibility’ is a term used by Jean-Marie Schaeffer to explain how
the many uses of photography give rise to communicational norms which alter
the photograph’s semiotic status. Thus, a photograph can be perceived as more
IMAGES OF THE INVISIBLE
23
Dwelling on the unique revelatory power of photography,
Daniel Grojnowski observes that it exposes the invisible:
Dès ses premières opérations, la photographie est dotée d’un
remarquable pouvoir. Si elle donne du monde une image d’une
absolue fidélité, elle en révèle également les éléments
insoupçonnés, inaccessibles à l’œil nu. Autrement dit, elle ne se
contente pas de refléter et d’enregistrer, elle est également apte
à explorer un au-delà des réalités immédiates. Elle appréhende
l’invisible.9
Further developing this power of photography to capture or reveal the
invisible, late-nineteenth-century advances in photography facilitated
the superimposition of multiple images within a single (composite)
print. Thus composite photography allowed the representation within
a single photographic print of the superimposed images of different
people or of the same people recorded at different times, but under
rigorously controlled conditions. Francis Galton, who invented
composite photography in 1877, was a biological scientist by
profession. He was a cousin of Charles Darwin and was ‘fascinated by
questions of heredity and the human type’. Indeed, his work
‘employed photographic techniques to serve a theory about human
degeneration’.10
strongly iconic or more strongly indexical, depending on the context in which a
particular observer views it.
9. Daniel Grojnowski, Photographie et langage (Paris: José Corti, 2002), p. 246.
10. Peter Hamilton and Roger Hargreaves, The Beautiful and the Damned: The
Creation of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Photography (Aldershot: Lund
Humphries, 2001), p. 95. Francis Galton’s invention and use of composite
photography in support of his theories of human degeneration and eugenics
envisaged the identification and classification of ‘the “residuum” (that portion of
the working class which, through mental and physical weakness, could fulfil no
useful function)’ (Hamilton and Hargreaves, p. 98). This portion of the
population was to be separated out from society and cared for but above all
prevented from procreating. Thus composite photography was for Francis
Galton an instrument of control, a tool that would facilitate the development of
an improved human race.
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LARKIN
The discovery of ‘composite’ photography enabled Galton to
devise grandiose experiments in order to compile a huge
amount of data to support his theories about degeneration. The
composite image, made by taking very short multiple shots,
would offer a method of synthesising the characteristic
physiognomies from numerous individuals of a particular class
or race: criminals, consumptives, the insane, public schoolboys,
Jews, were among his chosen subjects.11
In a composite photograph, discrete transparent images of a
group of individuals are combined to produce a general ‘type’ whose
authenticity is purportedly affirmed by the semiotic specificity of the
photographic image. The individual is thus sublimated into the general
effect produced by the superimposed layers of images.12 Latenineteenth-century composite photography was used in order to
attempt to display the purportedly essential physical characteristics of
a particular family, social or ethnic group. One popular use of it was
in the synthesis of a newly married couple’s faces for the purpose of
predicting the physiognomic features of their future children. Thus,
while it was indexically linked to the past, the composite photograph
also served as a means to project into the as-yet-unseen potential of
the future. Arthur Batut (1846-1918), a French photographer who was
interested in new techniques, published a treatise entitled La
Photographie appliquée à la production du type d’une famille, d’une
11. Hamilton and Hargreaves, pp. 97–8. My italics.
12. In his correspondence, Proust noted with regard to the models for the characters
in À la recherche du temps perdu that ‘il n’y a pas de clefs pour les personnages
de ce livre; ou bien il y en a huit ou dix pour un seul […]’ (Marcel Proust,
Correspondance, vol. XVII, ed. Philip Kolb (Paris: Plon, 1988), p. 189). In the
same way that a single composite photograph consists of images of more than
one person, each character in the Proustian narrative is described by Proust as
the amalgamation of multiple individuals who together form an independent
fictional entity.
IMAGES OF THE INVISIBLE
25
tribu ou d’une race, in which he further developed Francis Galton’s
composite methodology.13
One of Batut’s principal interests seems to have been in using
his technique to demonstrate physical characteristics, and he
expressly states that his composite portraits are a form of virtual
reality or ‘images of the invisible’, and that they are designed to
reveal physical, non-intellectual, analogies.14
The interest in heredity and physiognomic types that motivated
Francis Galton is evident in À la recherche du temps perdu, where
image superimposition is evoked repeatedly with regard to the women
loved by Marcel, to his friend Bloch, and to the families — including
his own — who intrigue Marcel throughout his life. Examples include
the famous ‘Bal de têtes’ which closes the novel (IV, 496–625);
Marcel’s contemplation of Mme de Surgis and her sons (III, 85–94);
his observations on his friend Bloch (II, 489); his contemplation of
Saint-Loup and his aunt, the duchesse de Guermantes (II, 379) and
also of Albertine, particularly in relation to the Montjouvain scene
(III, 499–514).
The narrative of the protagonist’s development and of the
awakening of his creative vocation in particular also involves motifs
drawn from composite photography and suggests the notions of
lineage and heredity. Thus Marcel appears to inherit the traits of those
closest to him. Early in Du côté de chez Swann the physical
resemblance between Marcel and his mother is underlined when he
pays an unexpected visit to his uncle Adolphe’s apartment. There, the
dame en rose, later understood to be Odette de Crécy, the future Mme
Swann, notes the similarities between Marcel and his mother as she is
depicted in the photographs standing on his uncle’s desk (I, 75). The
growing physical resemblance between Marcel’s mother and
grandmother after the death of the latter is also underlined (III, 513).
13. Arthur Batut, La Photographie appliquée à la production du type d’une famille,
d’une tribu ou d’une race (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1887).
14. Hamilton and Hargreaves, p. 99.
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LARKIN
The influence of the family is, of course, paramount in the longdrawn-out process of self-determination that culminates in the
childless Marcel’s decision to devote his life to the creation of a
literary work that will survive him. His fascination with heredity and
shared family characteristics also serves to point up what he comes to
regard as the inexorable process of conformity of the younger
generation of a family or social group to principles and modes of
conduct characterizing the older generation.
Proust’s writing also testifies to the developing interest in
phrenology and physiognomy in the latter half of the nineteenth
century. This development meant that composite photographs came to
be used ‘to make direct, physiognomical connections between
physical characteristics and mentality’.15 The latter tenuous
connection between outward appearance and the inner emotional and
mental life is underlined in the Proustian narrative through the
evocation of superimposed images of a single person by whom Marcel
is fascinated and whose essential nature he attempts to grasp. More
generally, however, the technique of taking very short multiple shots
parallels the discontinuous nature of Marcel’s visual perception in À
la recherche du temps perdu, just as the notion of the synthesis of
multiple images into a single frame calls to mind his repeated attempts
to acquire vast quantities of information regarding the people who
fascinate him and to fuse it all into a coherent and definitive character
analysis. Albertine provides the most striking example of Marcel’s
efforts to resolve the many and diverse aspects of her character and
her physical person into a single whole. Though repeatedly frustrated
by the transformative effects of the passage of time in his attempts
accurately to classify his acquaintance, Marcel nonetheless continues
in his endeavours; it is the later narrator who recognizes the folly of
the exercise.
15. Hamilton and Hargreaves, p. 99. Phrenology was a pseudo-science based on the
belief that a person’s mental powers or character could be deciphered from the
shape of their skull; different parts of the brain were thought to be the seat of
specific personality traits and abilities, and so every brain would develop
differently according to the importance of particular faculties in that person.
IMAGES OF THE INVISIBLE
27
The superimposition of multiple transparent photographic
images, each distinct and yet each sharing certain features with the
other images, results in an image characterized by unique effects of
transparency and opacity. The tension between transparency and
opacity on the surface of a composite photographic image creates an
awareness of both spatial and temporal depth in the viewer. This
awareness is dependent, however, upon the retention of each
transparent image, and upon their overlaying so as to create a
composite impression of shared physiognomic characteristics. 16
Temporal flux is palpable in the blurred or indistinct outlines of the
face and body which suggest the physical movement of a unique
subject, an illusion perpetrated by the indisputably indexical nature of
the photographic image. While common characteristics are clearly
outlined in a composite photograph and while their manifestation
constitutes indeed the principal goal of this kind of photography,
features specific to each discrete image are also evident. Thus,
although the overall effect of the composite photograph is to suggest a
‘type’ rather than an individual, the faint visible traces of disparity in
items of clothing, or in the position of the arms and hands or the
arrangement of the hair, serve to underline the individuality of each
contributor to the composite photograph. Thus the composite
photograph constitutes a record of both the shared and the individual
physical features of a family or ethnic group. The eyes, which form
the central point of the composite photograph, are opaque and
therefore clearly visible, as in a developed portrait of a single
individual. The importance of the eyes in the Proustian narrative with
regard to identity formation and communication is underlined through
the appropriation of photography, as when the dame en rose observes
that Marcel has his mother’s beautiful eyes; when Marcel sees his
sickly grandmother; when Morel unexpectedly finds the photograph
16. The creation of composite photographic images of an individual is evoked most
particularly in the representation of Marcel’s perception of Albertine. In relation
to Albertine and also Marcel himself, image superimposition underlines the
shock of unexpected modifications in the character of each (III, 499; III, 576;
III, 850–51; IV, 125).
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LARKIN
of the baron de Charlus in a room where he means to be unfaithful to
him; or when Mlle Vinteuil desecrates the photograph of her dead
father which shows their shared blue eyes. As the only feature of the
human face which does not change throughout life, the eyes are both
consistent and inscrutable, and thus inexhaustibly fascinating to
Marcel. The uncanny power of the composite photograph to suggest
an elusive individual subject is predicated on the central sharpness and
relative opacity of the eyes at the centre of the image, reciprocating
the observer’s gaze through multiple temporal and spatial layers.
Certainly, the composite photograph privileges the general
over the particular in its pursuit of essential characteristics. It affirms
thereby an (artificially exposed) ‘invisible’ and living essence drawn
from the photographed group. Yet the multiplicity of contributors to
such an image, a multiplicity built up from transparent impressions,
precludes any sense of concrete contact with a unique individual,
which nonetheless is suggested by the status of the photographic
image as indexical icon.17 Any apparent opacity or fixity of line in the
facial features represented in a composite ‘group’ photograph is
ultimately illusory; it cannot be attributed to a single individual with
any degree of certainty. Moreover, the transparency of the individual
layers of the composite photograph suggests the intangibility and
elusiveness of the subjects, each of whose identities is as insubstantial
and uncertain as are their outlines on the photographic print.
Ghostly Transparency
By representing the faint outlines of numerous individuals in a single
photographic print, the composite photograph thus exploits the
17. Schaeffer states that ‘puisque la photographie est une empreinte à distance, elle
est située d’entrée de jeu dans une tension spatiale qui implique l’absence de
tout contact direct entre l’imprégnant et l’empreinte. Autrement dit, avant d’être
éventuellement une affaire de miroir, l’image photographique est toujours une
affaire de distance: elle est le résultat d’une distension spatiale’ (Schaeffer, p.
17). The absence of contact between photographed object and image extends to
the relationship between image and observer.
IMAGES OF THE INVISIBLE
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indexicality of the photographic image to its fullest extent in the
creation of a predominantly iconic image. The superimposition of
layers of spatio-temporally specific images ensures the elusiveness of
each particular layer, even as the indexicality of the photographic
image guarantees their individual reference to precise moments in
time and space in the past. Discrete constituent parts make up a whole
which represents, on a single print within a single frame, a visually
discernible multiplicity of spatio-temporal fragments. These fragments
coalesce into a disorienting, haunting image whose lack of foundation
in a single photographed subject is belied by its origins in
conventional photographic portraiture. The result is an image
characterized by depth in terms of both space and time, just as the
contemplation of a composite photograph is inevitably characterized
by doubt and hesitancy, which vie with the certainty — albeit narrow
— conferred by the semiotic specificity of the photographic image as
indexical icon.
Marcel’s habitual manner of perceiving individuals within a
strictly circumscribed spatial context, a context subsequently
supplemented and/or replaced by others, is noted by Georges Poulet.
Ainsi, pour Proust, les êtres humains apparaissent, placés dans
certains lieux qui leur servent de support et de cadre, et qui
détérminent la perspective selon laquelle il est permis de les
voir. […] À ce premier cadre d’autres viendront s’ajouter ou se
substituer par la suite. […] Bref, les seules images d’euxmêmes qu’il soit permis aux personnages proustiens de nous
offrir, sont semblables à ces photographies d’une même
personne, dont nos albums sont pleins. […] Chacune de ces
‘photos’ est rigoureusement détérminée par son cadre;
l’ensemble reste discontinu.18
Poulet’s evocation of a photographic album filled with disparate
images of an individual evokes the simple juxtaposition of multiple
images. However, the idea, also posited in the above passage, of the
18. Poulet, pp. 38-40. My italics.
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LARKIN
addition of subsequent prints to an original photographic image is a
distinctive feature of composite photography.19 The frame delineates
the screen or backdrop against which the object of perception is to be
viewed and the careful framing of the image implies the control
exercized by the observer who visually records it. In other words, the
finite screen, which is enclosed within a limited frame, marks out the
spatio-temporal discontinuity that Poulet regards as characteristic of
the representation of an individual character throughout the Proustian
narrative. In a chapter entitled ‘Proustian Photoghosts’, Stephen C.
Infantino explores the function and the (ghostly) effects of
photographic borders:
The imposition of photographic borders functions as a device to
detach the object from its living environment. The
excommunicated exists in mechanical-chemical suspended
animation, en image. This residual visual form may portray a
collection of photo-subjects (or of a single object) all of whom
have been reduced to ghostly, two-dimensional masks,
designated as targets by a process of appropriation that ‘shoots’
them alive.20
The partial transparency of the composite photographic image as
a whole renders it a ghostly, haunting image which points up the
inevitability of death. Mortality — the spatio-temporal finitude of
individual corporeal existence — is indeed the essential and
irrevocable truth communicated through the evocation of composite
photographic images. The process of layering photographic
impressions of different members of a particular family or group
19. With regard to Marcel’s varied impressions of Albertine at Balbec, Samuel
Beckett affirms that ‘thus is established the pictorial multiplicity of Albertine
that will duly evolve into a plastic and moral multiplicity, no longer a mere
shifting superficies and an effect of the observer’s angle of approach rather than
the expression of an inward and active variety, but a multiplicity in depth […].’
Samuel Beckett, Proust (1931; London: John Calder, 1965), p. 47.
20. Stephen C. Infantino, Photographic Vision in Proust (New York: Peter Lang,
1992), p. 30.
IMAGES OF THE INVISIBLE
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serves to highlight the brevity of individual existence in contrast with
the endurance of distinctive physiognomic and psychological
characteristics of a given family through time.
The transparency that is an essential feature of photography
typically marks an intermediate stage in the production of a single
photographic image in the darkroom. Yet, in the case of composite
photography, transparency is fundamental to the end result. David
Mendelson observes as follows the importance of the notion of
transparency for Proust’s style, based as it is on metaphorical vision:
Nous savons en effet que selon Proust le style est ‘une question
non de technique, mais de vision.’ Or nous concevons fort mal
une vision qui serait métaphorique, c’est-à-dire qui
appréhenderait dans le même champ des éléments dissociés
dans la réalité. À moins, évidemment, que ces éléments soient
doués d’une certaine transparence qui permettrait à
l’observateur de les superposer.21
The ‘certaine transparence’ posited here by Mendelson suggests the
shadowy and uneven translucence of the objects perceived by Marcel
and the later narrator. Indeed, the impressions superimposed in
Proust’s novel frequently display a patchy or inconsistent density or
opacity. Within the context of photography, transparency has
distinctive connotations.22 It suggests an inherent lack of
completeness. Thus, there is a sense in which the composite
photograph is an unfinished work, due to the fact that it features so
predominantly what would normally be a transitional phase in the
21. David Mendelson, Le Verre et les objets de verre dans l’univers imaginaire de
Marcel Proust (Paris: José Corti, 1968), p. 29. My italics.
22. Jean-Pierre Richard notes the transparency that frequently characterizes physical
matter in À la recherche du temps perdu and affirms that ‘à observer pourtant
d’un peu près le paysage proustien on y voit opérer en même temps une
tendance très exactement inverse: un mouvement tout aussi fort y vise à
coaguler les fluides, affermir les transparences, épaissir les lumières’ (Richard,
p. 147). Richard defines three modes of densification of transparent matter:
épaississements, cristallisations et coagulations. All three of these are relevant
in the analysis of the composite photographic image.
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LARKIN
production of a single photographic image. Indeed, it is the analogy
between photography and the processing of experience that is noted
by Serge Tisseron in his comments on photography as motivated by
the incomplete mental assimilation of lived experience and the
consequential desire for, or hope of, future assimilation. It is that
desire that guides the recording of that experience in the mental
‘darkroom’:
C’est notamment pourquoi le désir de photographier un lieu ou
une situation est d’autant plus vif que la rencontre avec lui a été
vécu comme trop rapide. En effet, les sensations et les émotions
qui y ont été éprouvées n’ont pas pu alors s’y développer
suffisamment pour y être reconnues et nommées.23
In relation to Marcel’s mental operations of perception and memory,
the sustained transparency of superimposed images used in composite
photography suggests his efforts to process impressions snatched from
the flow of time and held in suspension in his memory, without being
fully developed or assimilated, partly due to a lack of temporal
investment on his own part.
More generally, transparency in photographic images conveys
the impression of ghostly incorporeality, where the destructive effects
of the passage of time on the body are made manifest. The complex
relationship between transparency and opacity in composite
photographic images is appropriated throughout the Proustian
narrative in the metaphoric representation of the tensions between
surface and depth which preoccupy Marcel in his interaction with
other people and in his search for essential truths. Opacity, on the
other hand, suggests a concrete reality with which the observer comes
into contact; in resisting ocular penetration, dense physical matter
affirms its autonomy and, at the same time, its mysterious obscurity.
Opacity resists while transparency yields to the eye of the observer.
23. Serge Tisseron, Le Mystère de la chambre claire: photographie et inconscient
(Paris: Flammarion, 1996), p. 30.
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Layers of Loveliness: The ‘Petite Bande’, Past, Present and Future
The analogy of composite photography illuminates several aspects of
Marcel’s fascination with the ‘petite bande’ at Balbec: their youth and
the physical and temperamental alterations concomitant with
adolescence (II, 180–81); their mesmerizing power as a group and the
emergence of their distinctive individual looks (II, 148–51; II, 296–
97); and their inheritance of physiognomic features characteristic of
each of their families (II, 297).
In À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the passage of the young
girls of the ‘petite bande’ from childhood to girlhood is manifested in
the gradually increasing definition in the lines of their facial features,
as evidenced for the later narrator by the contrast between the girls
Marcel sees and comes to know and the old photographic image of the
group which is subsequently acquired by him. The exact point at
which Marcel is given this photograph is never made clear: ‘plus tard
une photographie m’expliqua pourquoi’ (II, 180 — my italics) is the
first reference to its existence. The contrast between the fixed physical
traits of young adulthood and their fluid latency in childhood is
underlined in relation to the ‘petite bande’ through contemplation of
this old photograph, taken when they were small children. It points up
the rapidity of the changes undergone by the girls in a few short years:
Dans une photographie ancienne qu’elles devaient me donner
un jour, et que j’ai gardée, […] on ne peut les y reconnaître
individuellement que par le raisonnement, en laissant le champ
libre à toutes les transformations possibles pendant la jeunesse
jusqu’à la limite où ces formes reconstituées empiéteraient sur
une autre individualité qu’il faut identifier aussi […]; et la
distance parcourue en peu de temps par les caractères
physiques de chacune de ces jeunes filles faisant d’eux un
critérium fort vague, et d’autre part ce qu’elles avaient de
commun et comme de collectif étant dès lors fort marqué, il
arrivait parfois à leurs meilleures amies de les prendre l’une
pour l’autre sur cette photographie […]. (II, 180–81 — my
italics)
34
LARKIN
Time is spatialized in Marcel’s observation regarding the
modifications in the girls’ appearance. His perception of the small
girls in the photograph as a general collection of indistinguishable
features, coupled with the difficulty in accurately identifying the
individuals in it, highlights the tangible effects of time on flesh.
Moreover, the evocation of an old photograph against which Marcel
compares the young girls seems to reinforce the suggestion of the
power of composite photography to display the common
characteristics of the facial features of groups of individuals, and the
physical traces left upon them by the passage of time.
Before his attention becomes trained primarily on Albertine,
Marcel’s collective love and indiscriminate desire for the multiple
members of the ‘petite bande’ is conveyed through his fascination
with the diversity and mutability of their appearance, notwithstanding
the similarities of their features. The later narrator notes that:
[Mon désir] errait entre elles d’autant plus voluptueusement que
sur ces visages mobiles, une fixation relative des traits était
suffisamment commencée pour qu’on en pût distinguer, dût-elle
changer encore, la malléable et flottante effigie. Aux
différences qu’il y avait entre eux, étaient bien loin de
correspondre sans doute des différences égales dans la longueur
et la largeur des traits, lesquels, de l’une à l’autre de ses jeunes
filles, et si dissemblables qu’elles parussent, eussent peut-être
été presque superposables. (II, 296–97 — my italics)
While the shared characteristics of the young girls’ faces are noted
here by Marcel through the evocation of image superimposition, their
emerging difference and individuality at this transitional and
transformative point in their lives proves equally fascinating to him in
this passage. Marcel’s remark that the physical features of the girls’
faces vary so little as to be capable of superimposition or transfer from
one to another evokes the capacity of composite photography to
facilitate both the comparison and the contrasting of individual
physical features in relation to those of other members of the same
group. Moreover, the fixedness of certain characteristics of the girls’
IMAGES OF THE INVISIBLE
35
faces points up the mutability of the whole, as the girls grow and
change. The coincidence of increasingly fixed features in their
animated faces — their ‘visages mobiles’ — underlines the power of
time whose passage facilitates the development of those features, but
which will ultimately curtail the physiognomic flexibility of young
faces that currently move blithely through time and space. The
paradoxical evocation of relatively fixed features in the as yet unfixed
faces of the girls suggests the later narrator’s sharp awareness of the
passage of time during his recollection of the period spent by Marcel
in their youthful presence.
On the thematic level, the photographic image of the girls as
young children with which the narrator describes his younger self as
having compared their adolescent faces, serves to highlight the
swiftness and extent of the change in their appearance (II, 180–81).
The description, in the passage quoted above, of each of their
emergent adult faces as a ‘malléable et flottante effigie’ is indicative
of the inevitable continuity of the process of ageing which is an
integral part of life under the yoke of time. The faces of the young
girls are works-in-progress that will be completed only on their deaths
and decomposition; this fact is implied through the superimposition of
past and present images of them, which together serve to suggest the
fatal future. In the context of this study of the relations between
writing and photography, the use of the word ‘effigie’ in Proust’s
novel is significant. If Roland Barthes considers for his part that
‘l’inscription sur le cliché fait d’un objet tridimensionnel une effigie
bidimensionnelle’,24 Infantino even more resoundingly defines the
photographic image as an effigy:
Photographic images are effigies, light-records of moments past
that crop their victims from the spatial continuity of life. These
are residual forms, the remains of people captured by a
24. Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard
Seuil, 1980), p. 138.
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LARKIN
mechanical eye and planted in monochromatic immobility as
non-living manifestations of a former self.25
As they age, all the characters of the novel seem to manifest an
increasing rigidity or fixity of feature:
Pour les vieillards dont les traits avaient changé, ils tâchaient
pourtant de garder fixée sur eux à l’état permanent, une de ces
expressions fugitives qu’on prend pour une seconde de pose et
avec lesquelles on essaye, soit de tirer parti d’un avantage
extérieur, soit de pallier un défaut; ils avaient l’air d’être
définitivement devenus d’immutables instantanés d’euxmêmes. (IV, 520)
In these lines, the physical appearance of those whose lives are almost
over is explicitly equated with the photographic image. Conversely,
the girls at Balbec are near the beginning of a journey through time
that will lead them to occupy the same state of advanced age and
decrepitude. Though their appearance is currently vividly alive —
‘malléable et flottante’ — they will eventually be nothing more than
effigies. The evocation of rigid facial features among the old suggests
rigor mortis and their increasing physiognomic immobility as they
approach death implies the steady encroachment of the temporal limits
of their lives upon their remaining days. In his commentary on the
passage quoted above, Infantino observes the link established by
Proust’s narrator between photography and death.
[...] people in photographs do not change. The projected hope of
the vieillard who forever strikes a pose is to attain photographic
extemporality of the body. The narrator’s scrutinising gaze,
however, assigns the opposite value to the wilful resemblance to
mechanical portraits: to resemble photo-portraits is to foreshadow
death.26
25. Infantino, pp. 29–30.
26. Infantino, p. 39.
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37
The composite photograph, which represents a ghostly synthesis of
multiple suspended spatio-temporal fragments, is a fitting source for
the metaphoric representation of the gradually increasing definition of
the girls’ facial features as their individual appearances and
personalities develop. Like all developments, this individualization is
brought about by, and is inseparable from, the passage of time. And
although temporal flow currently favours their blossoming, it will
ultimately consign them to the same fate as the old men at the
Guermantes matinée.
The discontinuous nature of Marcel’s perception of the girls,
which results in his multiple impressions of them and consequently in
his attempts to synthesize those impressions, underlines both the
inexorable flow of time and the paradoxical fact that, as Jean-Pierre
Montier observes, temporal duration is malleable:
Si notre présent est fonction de notre capacité à mettre le passé
entre parenthèses, le passé fait corps avec le présent et crée, en
permanence, avec lui, une synthèse nouvelle. La durée véritable
n’est donc pas adéquatement représentée par une multiplicité
d’instants immobiles mis bout à bout, […] puisqu’on a
commencé, en ce cas, par immobiliser ces moments avant de les
assembler (prétendant en somme, dit Bergson, donner une idée
du mouvement par l’immobilité). La durée n’est pas un fleuve
qui emporterait tout sur son cours, elle est multiple et diverse,
susceptible de dilatation et de dilution.27
Montier regards the serialization of spatio-temporal moments or
instants, a serialization that recalls the succession of
chronophotographic images, as an inadequate means of representing
temporal duration. Frank Wegner’s assertion of the importance of
chronophotography as a paradigm to elucidate what he terms Proust’s
atomism is thus challenged by Montier and also by the model of
27. Jean-Pierre Montier, ‘La photographie “…dans le temps”: de Proust à Barthes et
réciproquement’, in Proust et les images: peinture, photographie, cinéma, vidéo,
ed. Jean Cléder and Jean-Pierre Montier (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de
Rennes, 2003), p. 95.
38
LARKIN
composite photography put forward in this article. While Wegner
affirms, with regard to Marcel’s perception of Albertine, the existence
of ‘a conflict between the verticality of resurrections and the
horizontality of a series of projections onto this silhouette’, it seems
more plausible to suggest that, because Marcel’s perception of
Albertine is repeatedly characterized by spatio-temporal depth,28 the
model of composite photography seems more fitting than that of
chronophotography to describe Marcel’s perception. This is also true
of his perception of the ‘petite bande’ at Balbec. In both cases, the
most persusasive analogy is with the spatialization of the passage of
time in a single photographic print, as discrete images crystallize into
a unique iconic image that simultaneously enjoys a reassuring
indexical status. The analogical representation of Marcel’s perception
of the ‘petite bande’ by the motif of composite photography means
that the notion of visual contact with a concrete reality is affirmed,
even while the ambiguity and ephemerality of that reality is
underlined. The tension between Marcel’s perception of the girls as a
group and as individuals is pointed up in his struggle to compose a
single and definitive image of them both from his own impressions
and from the old photograph which he guards carefully and continues
to contemplate many years later. Moreover, it is the inexorable
passage of time, which Marcel, unlike the later narrator, fails to
appreciate, that constitutes the implicit impediment to the success of
his endeavours.
In conclusion, what Proust calls the chemistry of time (IV,
534) in which are bathed both the Proustian universe with its ‘jeunes
filles en fleurs’ and the world of the reader, is made visually manifest
in the complex tensions between surface and depth which are traced
within a single composite photographic image. Photography is only
one of several systems of visual representation referenced by Proust in
writing À la recherche du temps perdu. However, even within the
further limits of its status as just one specialized application of
28. Frank Wegner, ‘Photography in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu’
(unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 2003), p. 73.
IMAGES OF THE INVISIBLE
39
photography, composite photography has its own important role to
play as an analogon, if not a model, of the Proustian protagonist’s
intricate relationship with time.
Trinity College Dublin