Alexander Wille, Fang-yu Li, Paola Laterza
Proust / Benjamin
Our reading of Walter Benjamin�s essay On the Image of Proust (1929-1934) focuses
on a certain number of points that attracted our attention as particularly exemplary
of both Prousts work and Benjamins position towards this author. One of these
points is the discrepacy that exists between the sharp, attentive faculties of
our consciousness on the one side, and the sensual, creative depths of our
unconsciousness on the other side. While the former has an invincible control on
our activities during daytime, the latter takes place mostly at night, namely
during a time when our attentiveness grows loose and our body acquires a more urgent
presence. Proust makes clear for us his preference from the very beginning. The
first chapter of Swanns Way displays
a long and detailed description of what the author experienced during his
sleepless nights: an intermittent succession of conscious and unconscious states
that would give him a priviledged access to suggestions and evocations. He
tells us how darkness and silence would favour the emergence of sensations from
his childhood and past experiences, how the confusion that followed abrupt
awakenings would plunge him into a magic and timeless self, and how the loss of
common coordinates would bring him back to a deeper sense of existence.
Eventually, the charming power of the night would stir his memory and
imagination to the point that he would give up sleeping to spend the all night savouring
the disclosure of memories. In claiming the supremacy of the night over the day,
of the unconscious over the conscious, Proust immediately introduces one of the
most compelling themes of his entire work: the relationship between memory and
unconsciousness, and the need to step back from the capacities of our
intelligence in order to better understand the most profound experiences of
our life.
Prousts stance becomes even more meaningful when
we compare it to his epochs obsession with the awareness and capturing of time
The end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth were marked
with a bloom of new inventions that would have changed forever the conception
of space and time within the society: from the advent of telephone to the invention
of the automobile, from the discovery of cinema to the diffusion of the pocket
watch. As film theorist Mary Ann Doane explained in her book The Emergence of Cinematic time (2002), such
modern inventions reflected the desire of the bourgeoise and of capitalist
society to achieve a standardization and rationalization of time for
instrumental uses. Prousts novel abounds of references to the measurement of
time (I would ask myself what time it might be, I would strike a match to
look at my watch, It is midnight, half an hour later, its ten oclock or
even later, etc.), and his memories from childhood are divided into distinct
units of time, each one tied to a specific duty, feeling or expectation (in
the late afternoon, long before the moment when I would have to go to bed, After
dinner, alas, I soon had to leave Mama, I had dinner before everyone else and
afterwards I came and sat at the table until eight oclock when it was
understood that I had to go upstairs, etc.). But the measurement of time in
Proust becomes a source of anxiety, because
it ties every moment to a present instant, that becomes irrecoverable once past.
The child seems to find shelter from these constraints in the fragile and
malleable images of the magic lantern, in the suggestion created by books and
names, in the peace offered by his mothers kiss, and in the acute perceptions
of senses. As an adult, Proust will find his way to escape contingency and
rationalization in the resources of the involuntary memory and the act of
writing.
In his essay on Proust, Benjamin praises Prousts ability of keeping awake at times when sleep is
customary. Like Proust, Benjamin believes that the dream world is
capable of more profound similarities than the wakeful state, and that the
former provides us with the greatest resourcefulness
of thought or imagination (On the Image
of Proust, p. 238). He evokes the
figure of Penelope, who weaves during the day and unravels during night, as a
symmetrical counterpart to Prousts practice of weaving the memory of the past at
night and unraveling during the day. Furthermore,
Benjamin takes part of Prousts claim on stepping away from consciousness and from
the excess of instrumentalization of bourgeois society.
A second point that we have isolated in Benjamins
texts and in Prousts brief selection is the difference between experience and
recollection. We have already noticed in Benjamins Berlin Chronicle how the narrator chose to put us in front of a
montage of subjective experiences, with no regard to chronology and to an
objective historical perspective. We also talked about how Benjamin was more
interested in what he remembers of
his past, rather than to what he actually lived during his childhood.
Similarly, when Benjamin speaks about La
Recherce, what interests him is Prousts abilitity to retell his memories,
rather then factual events. According to Benjamin, (Proust) describes not a
life as it actually was, but a life as it was remembered by the one who had
lived it, and the important thing is not what he experienced, but the weaving
of his memory (On the Image of Proust,
pp. 237-238). This priority accorded to the act of recollection brings as a
consequence a departure from the traditional, linear plot of the novel. The
text becomes an unstoppable flow of flashbacks on the past and anticipations on
future, displayed without a chronological order but following the logic of
memory. Prousts characters are subjected to the same process, so that their physical
features and personalities keep changing throughout the novel in relation to
how the narrator knew them in different periods of his life. According to Benjamin, what really gives unity
to the text is the ability of Proust to weave it as tight as a web (p. 238).
Finally, a third point to underline is the difference
between voluntary memory and involuntary memory. The voluntary memory is the
memory of intelligence and reason: it gives us only a partial, repetitive,
isolated image of the events of our past. Therefore it shows only a dead
moment, something that is lost, something that only belongs to the sphere of
the past and does not connect to the present anymore (Swanns Way, p. 44). Benjamin joins this position when he writes
that a voluntary recollection is probably closer to forgetting than what is
usually called memory. To Proust, what really gives access to our past is our involuntary memory, namely a sudden emergence
of a vivid moment from our past that happens by chance when our senses meet a
stimulus (an object, a taste, a sound...) already experienced in the past. Similar
to the Celtic belief of a soul imprisoned in objects that can be rescued only
by the fortuitous recognition, Proust believes that our memories are attached
to an object, or a sensation, and when by chance we re-experience the object/sensation
in the present, it attracts the old
moment. In this case, the spell is broken and we are suddenly presented with
a complete set of images and sensations from our past (Swanns Way, p. 46). This is exemplified by the famous madeleine
moment (pp. 45-48). On the opposite of the voluntary memory, the involuntary
memory gives us a delicious pleasure, a powerful joy, compared to which all
other conscious states fade away. It is something that immediately renders the
vicissitudines of life unimportant and its brevity innocuous. The most
important feature of the involuntary memory, in Prousts account, is that it allows
us to overcome our anxiety about contingency and death. (p. 45). However, it is
also important to point out that the magic phenomenon of involuntary memory
must be followed by a hard and purposeful work of the conscious mind, in order
to come to a full extraction of the evoked memory from our unconscioussness.
Proust speaks of this work in terms of creation, not just of a mere
recollection, and Benjamins uses the word actualization. This work of the
mind will become Prousts most important occupation throughout his life, in a
ceaseless attempt to recuperate a time that otherwise would go lost forever.