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COPYRIGHT 2002 West Virginia University, Department of Foreign Languages
Many of the great critical works on Proust's chef d'oeuvre focus on the primary themes of time, memory, and the spiritual preservation and renewal made possible by the work of art. (1) These studies examine the narrator's personal and highly reflective pursuit of meaning in his life that would transcend the limitations of temporality and mortality. In analyzing the rhetoric of memory and temporality in 'A la recherche du temps perdu,' they tend to reproduce the Proustian narrator's own hierarchy of values. In interpreting his story, like him, they privilege the experience of literary and artistic creation over and above the realms of social, historical, and sexual experience. Artistic and literary creation can restore and preserve the meaning of individual life; whereas, in these other forms of experience, as the narrator comes to realize, time is irrevocably squandered. In examining Proust's use of biological metaphors, I will go even further here and argue that Proust's duality, the dual nature of identity in Proust determined according to the split condition of temporality and atemporality, not only requires duplicity but limits and effaces it by exposing within it a form of identity that, more than inaccessible, is unknowable because it is simultaneously multiple and undifferentiated.
As a counterpoint to acceptance of the Proustian aesthetic, astute readers and critics of the Recherche all note the preponderance of social, historical, and sexual experience in this fictional record of an individual life and quite justifiably conclude that Proust was one of the greatest social historians of his time. In this too, critics and readers are preempted by the Proustian narrator's own observations to the effect that without the long evenings wasted at insipid social gatherings over the course of a lifetime, without the painfully developed and aborted sexual relationship of several years, without participation in and lengthy reflection on current historical events and trends, there would be no cumulative experience through and against which the actions of involuntary memory and artistic creation could preserve and affirm the essential elements of a human life. To paraphrase simply, without time lost, there can be no time regained. Still, the impression remains that the social, cultural and historic al aspects of Proust's work are secondary to the narrator's theory of literary creation and its essentializing, Platonic, idealist aesthetic. (2)
I am not suggesting that critics as eminent and insightful as Genette, Blanchot, Deleuze, or Shattuck are wrong to emphasize the privileged rhetoric of temporality, or the hermeneutic of artistic reception and creation in Proust's work. However, in concentrating on the rhetoric of memory, temporality, and literary creation in the development of the Recherche, it is easy to marginalize the preponderant role of social and sexual life in the personal record and to neglect one of the most essential metaphorical registers underlying the work. (3) Proust's selective use of biological metaphors symbiotically links the record of individual life to the realm of collective experience in a thematically coherent fashion. (4)
Proust's biological metaphors undercut the narrator's claims about the superiority of authentic artistic experience and its spiritual, nonmaterial essence. Certain metaphors accomplish this goal by assimilating cognitive actions to subconscious organic processes; others threaten radically to transform the concept of individual identity and experience that the artwork is intended to salvage and preserve. In this paper, I will classify and analyze biological metaphors in the Recherche in the following order: zoological metaphors that describe certain characters, botanical metaphors that allegorize sexual behavior as an involuntary communicative process, and cellular metaphors for the collective political and historical community. (5) While the extended genealogical metaphor of heredity simultaneously defines the authenticity of individual identity and experience and menaces it with the evidence of sexual substitution (of one sexual partner for another, of one kind of sexual partner for another, of imaginary par ent-figures for actual parents, of one generation for another) and the ultimate biological reality, death, the cellular metaphor reduces individual identities to virtually identical, atomistic particles.
Many of the zoological metaphors in Proust's work serve to concretize hereditary resemblances. These figures often assimilate shared physical and behavioral traits to morphological and symbolic signs of animal existence. In numerous descriptions, the bird-like features of the Guermantes' race--Oriane, Basin, Saint-Loup, Charlus--signify their individual identities as derived from their genealogical and mythological past and preeminent position within an apparently natural social order. The metaphor evokes the falcons and eagles of heraldry, although the association is one that the narrator simultaneously ascribes to in the mystified vision he has of these characters as an adolescent, and, as the adult narrator, comments upon and ironizes:
La flexibilite physique essentielle aux Guermantes etait double; grace a l'une, toujours en action, a tout moment, et si par exemple un Guermantes male allait saluer une dame, il obtenait une silhouette de lui-meme faite de l'equilibre instable de mouvements asymetriques et nerveusement compenses, une jambe trainant un peu, soit expres, soit parce qu'ayant ete souvent cassee a la chasse elle imprimait au torse, pour rattraper l'autre jambe, une deviation a laquelle la remontee d'une epaule faisait contrepoids, pendant que le monocle s'installait dans l'oeil, haussait un sourcil au meme moment ou le toupet des cheveux s'abaissait pour le salut; l'autre flexibilite, comme la forme de la vague, du vent ou du sillage que garde a jamais la coquille ou le bateau, s'etait pour ainsi dire stylisee en une sorte de mobilite fixe, incurvant le nez busque qui sous les yeux bleus a fleur de tete, au-dessus des levres trop minces, d'ou sortait, chez les femmes, une voix rauque, rappelait l'origine fabuleuse assignee au [XVI.sup.e] siecle par le bon vouloir de gencalogistes parasites et hellenisants a cette race, ancienne sans doute, mais pas au point qu'ils pretendaient quand ils lui donnaient pour origine la fecondation mythologique d'une nymphe par un divin Oiseau. (6)
The genealogical trope is interwoven in the syntactical order of the description, the parallelism of which develops a strict sexual symmetry culminating in the zoological trope whose mythological essence the narrator tactfully denies, exposing its parasitic social origins. The reader, like Marcel, the narrator, has registered these traits before, when Marcel the child first sees the duchess of Guermantes in the church of Combray, "une dame blonde avec un grand nez, des yeux bleus et percants (1:174)," when as a young man he first meets Saint-Loup at Balbec, commenting on his stiff mechanical gestures, "le cou degage, la tete haute et fierement portee," "aux yeux penetrants... ou ne brilla pas la plus faible lueur de sympathie humaine," displaying "ces manieres glacees" that only later will be contrasted with the doting attentions he will shower upon Marcel (1:728-31), bird-like again in a maternizing way. Few pages later, Marcel similarly encounters, before their formal introduction, the baron de Charlus and his predatory gaze, who like a raptor, "fixait sur moi des yeux dilates par I' attention (1:751)." The consistency of the physiological traits repeatedly perceived at very distant intervals is not as startling or astonishing as the extent to which the particular characteristics of the zoological figure precisely correspond to the physical and behavioral traits of the human characters. Piercing eyes, eyes that dilate rapidly and frequently, choppy mechanical movements are all universally recognizable as common traits of several families of avian species. Conflating gender and sexual orientation, even Saint-Loup's appearance of effeminacy, a trait perceived, Marcel...
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