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Proust Among the Stars

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There are many books about Proust. If you're just getting started and feeling overwhelmed, this book is helpful in sorting out the major themes in the book of art, politics, class, etc. Highly recommended.

Malcolm Bowie's Proust Among The Stars is one of the most appealing works of thematic criticism that I read in a long time. By concentrating on specific themes such as Self, Time, Art, Politics and Sex, Bowie explains in great detail how Proust in his novel treats these topics in their sublime aspects, but at the same time how the sublime is given a human habitation as it were. Bowie, with many fine textual examples draws our attention to how the profundity and profusion everywhere apparent in Proust's masterpiece, coexists with dispersal and loss. He explores the many ways in which Proust is able to embed his rich and allusive art firmly in the real world; how Proust's attention to the minutiae of everyday life is never lost within the plethora of the Proustian paragraph. In his chapter on Sex, Bowie explains how Proust creates in his central protagonist someone who is "by turns a Lothario and a spoiled child, a visionary and a pathological case, a hero of the speculative intellect and a paragon of self-defeating folly".

Excellent fare indeed and a book to read and reread.

Who ever thought thematic criticism could ever be so intellectually satisfying, delightful, insightful, and so damn well-written. Bowie writes with poise and passion. One of the best of recent Proust studies for any reader.

I took a break from reading Time Regained to read Bowie's critical study of Proust. I picked it up with some hesitation, given that Bowie has also written a book on Lacan, whose writings I find obscure. And you will find some of this style in places, especially in free associations on words. To give an example, Proust writes on Albertine:


...and her belly..was closed, at the base of her thighs, by two valves with a curve as languid, as reposeful, as cloistral as that of the horizon after the sun has set. (V,82)

Bowie comments:


The fact that valve, which comes within punning distance of vulve, contains a reminiscence of the madeleine, the novel's supreme edible object, opens up another biological vista: the desire to eat and desire to mate as interconnected versions of one inextinguishable élan vital. (249)

But fortunately this style does not dominate the book. Bowie, though, is not so interested in talking about broad thematic structures as he is in making discoveries by burrowing into passages of the novel. His chapters have very broad titles: Self, Time, Art, Politics, Morality, Sex and Death. To give you a taste of his bottom-up style, I will focus on one recurring theme, the reasons for the length and complexity of Proust's sentences.

Proust has much to say on the metaphysics of time, of time as a subject in itself. But he also utilizes syntax to give the reader an appreciation of the flow of time. He cites this sentence of Proust:


How often have I watched, and longed to imitate when I should be free to live as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lay flat on his back in the bottom of his boat, letting it drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky gliding slowly by above him, his face aglow with a foretaste of happiness and peace! (I,204)

And comments:


At least three time scales are present. The oarsman sinks back languorously after hard work with arms and legs; the narrator enjoys himself when he is finally able to break free from a constraining family; and Proust's sentence arrives at its final visionary affirmation after much syntactic travail....The problem - and the pleasurableness - of sentences on this model lies in their insistent intermixing of past, present and future. Their syntax and tense-pattern deal in prematurity and belatedness to the near-exclusion of linear succession....The temporality of Proust's sentence is insistently heterogenous: moment by moment, the flow of time is stalled, and unpacked into its backward- and forward-looking ingredients. (37)

In another passage Bowie talks about how the long, syntactically involved sentences provide a type of thinking, one that compresses and enlarges, compares and distinguishes.


Yet what is remarkable in all this seeming flouting of the rules - whether of story-telling, or art history, or inferential argument - is that something strict and rule-governed is still going on sentence by sentence. Distinctions have to be clear if a coherent play of ambiguity, as distinct from mere semantic havering or fuss, is to be sustained. The machinery for making such distinctions is to be found in the bifurcating syntax of the Proustian sentence, and it is the peculiar property of these sentences, placed end to end and seemingly so autonomous, to organise long stretches of text around relatively few underlying structural schemes. The sentences do many unruly things, of course: their syntax ramifies and proliferates; their meanings are sometimes amplified and embellished to the point of distraction. Yet they studiously repeat, almost in the manner of intellectual home truths, certain characteristic patterns of thought. Antithetical qualities are held against each other in equipoise. The alternative potentialities of a single situation are expounded. Surprising details yield large insights, and large insights, once they have been naturalized, seize upon the further surprising details they require to remain credible. (49)

Finally, Bowie observes the erotic character of Proust's sentences, the desire that is delayed then gratified.


Whereas in sentences of this kind desire is directed towards a goal, and victorious in the face of delay and complication, others are of course more radically dispersed and fail to achieve, and seem often to desire to fail to achieve, a perfect final cadence.....The syntactic patterning of his book connects short-lived local wishes to the imposing invariant structures of human feeling, and brings a quality that one might call desirousness - desire stripped of its objects - into prominence in all manner of seemingly non-sexual scenarios. The sentences last as long as they do, sub-divide and reassemble themselves as intricately as they do, because they have this generalizing task to perform. (229)

Often as densely worded as Proust himself, Bowie's close reading of Search has given me a better ability to be a close reader myself.

I guess if you are a person who thought having to read a history of the English Monarchy was good as a companion piece to understanding Shakespeares Henry IV ..etc, then this would be helpful to appreciating IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME.

The interconnections of smells, memory and impressions that make Proust's work flow like a river are undone by books like this.

A much better guide would be the 10 pages or so in Vladimir Nabokov's LECTURES ON LITERATURE...the chapter on Proust.

It gives you a simple,yet incisive, outline.. of the path of that meandering "river" of smells sounds and reflections.... without attempting to reproduce it like some cheap postcard print.

Fans of Proust's writings or Remembrance Of Things Past will relish this title, which tackles the major themes in his works - art, sex, and politics - and provides a reader's link to the meaningful passages in his weighty writings. A 'must' for any student of Remembrance Of Things Past who would better understand Proust's method and philosophy.