Abstract
Through experiences with music in his relationship with Albertine, the narrator constitutes himself as a listening subject by allowing music to play a role in constructing his subjectivity. The author is also training us as listening readers to be skeptical of any dogmatic pronouncements the narrator is led to make along the way of this record of his experiences. Such a reaction to music is possible only as a result of the shift in listening practices beginning in the nineteenth century; these involve heightened perception of music and a renewed consciousness of the subject as attentive to perceiving the music. As we become conscious of the way the text acts upon us, we begin to be skeptical of the narrator’s ever-growing confidence in his pronouncements, especially when he claims to have found truth.
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Notes
- 1.
On the Wagnerian leitmotif as an organizing principle in Proust, focusing for instance on strategic recurrence of words such as “longtemps,” see Jany.
- 2.
This space was described as early as the 1860s in Baudelaire’s “Lettre sur Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris” [“Letter on Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris”]: “Dans la musique, comme dans la peinture et même dans la parole écrite, […] il y a toujours une lacune complétée par l’imagination de l’auditeur” [“In music as in painting and even in the written word, there is always a lacuna filled in by the imagination of the hearer”] (OC 2: 781–2).
- 3.
For more on the ways Proust (and Mallarmé) encourage a practice of “reading backwards” in their texts, see my article “Cross-Referencing Bowie.”
- 4.
For more on the move away from redemptive narratives of esthetic, theological, or political kinds in modern French literature since Baudelaire, see Acquisto, The Fall out of Redemption.
- 5.
“De même que le volume de cet Ange musicien était constitué par les trajets multiples entre les différents points du passé que son souvenir occupait en moi et ses différents sièges, depuis la vue jusqu’aux sensations les plus intérieures de mon être, qui m’aidaient à descendre dans l’intimité du sien, la musique qu’elle jouait avait aussi un volume, produit par la visibilité inégale des différentes phrases, selon que j’avais plus ou moins réussi à y mettre de la lumière et à rejoindre les unes aux autres les lignes d’une construction qui m’avait d’abord paru presque tout entière noyée dans le brouillard” [“Just as the volume of that angel musician was constituted by the multiple journeys between the different points in the past which the memory of her occupied within me and the different signs, from the purely visual to the innermost sensations of my being, which helped me to descend into the intimacy of hers, so the music that she played had also a volume, produced by the unequal visibility of the different phrases, according as I had more or less succeeded in throwing light on them and joining up the lines of the seemingly nebulous structure” (358/501).
- 6.
This is not to claim that it is possible to establish a strict parallel with musical form here in the exact sense of exposition, development, and recapitulation, but rather that being attentive to the echoes of those kinds of structures will affect the way we read by heightening the attention we pay to the meanderings of the text and the way their construction affects the way the words are heard and understood.
- 7.
Félix Guattari notes how the refrain serves as a structuring principle for all of the Recherche, allowing us, among other things, to read backwards from the narrator’s experience, which leads to literary creation, to Swann’s, which is ultimately passive: “Blocks of childhood, involuntary remembrances, crystals of perceptive intensity, faces, and landscapes […] find their status in the Recherche only to the extent that they are already engaged in the metabolic process of the refrain considered in its terminal stage. […] Accounting for the elements that arise from this synchronic consistency constantly incites us to approach things ‘from the end,’ from the mostly completed, to envision, for example, Swann’s love through the Narrator’s vocation, and more generally the fundamental couples of the Recherche as so many approximations of the same becoming-woman which coincides moreover with a becoming-creator” (280–81).
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Acquisto, J. (2017). Love, Music, and Truth in the Albertine Story. In: Proust, Music, and Meaning. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47641-4_4
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