ABSTRACT
In A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, Marcel describes the spume floating in the bay seen through the window of his hotel room in Balbec as something that could have been drawn by Pisanello or inspired — in terms of its colouring — by Gallé. 1 His comparison in a simile of ‘real’ objects with those that feature in (‘real’ or imaginary) works of art creates some fancy quasi-ekphrastic effects, but, in literary terms, it is quite unsurprising. Nevertheless, the narrator’s subsequent observations lift him out of the merely cultivated realm of anecdotal comparison and well-tried literary techniques and mark the beginning of an unusual type of ekphrastic description:
si, sous ma fenêtre, le vol inlassable et doux des martinets et des hirondelles n’avait pas monté comme un jet d’eau, comme un feu d’artifice de vie, unissant l’intervalle de ses hautes fusées par la filée immobile et blanche de longs sillages horizontaux, sans le miracle charmant de ce phénomène naturel et local qui rattachait à la réalité les paysages que j’avais devant les yeux, j’aurais pu croire qu’ils n’étaient qu’un choix, chaque jour renouvelé, de peintures qu’on montrait arbitrairement dans l’endroit où je me trouvais et sans qu’elles eussent de rapport nécessaire avec lu
. (II, 162) 2 This passage raises some questions concerning what David Kaplan refers to as the ‘ofness’ of paintings. 3 If the spume in the Balbec sea reminds the narrator of a Pisanello etching, we might think either that the scene outside resembles for him a seascape that is indeed the work of Pisanello, or that it resembles a seascape in a style that resembles Pisanello’s. In either case (the latter would of course be more plausible), we may also think it natural to conclude that the scene resembles a drawing that is of it, whether by Pisanello or by a Pisanello disciple. In saying that the scene resembles an etching by Pisanello, Proust does not imply that it resembles a scene that has ever been both seen and pictured by Pisanello or by a Pisanello disciple. In fact, he explicitly asserts that his window paintings bear no necessary relation to what they picture (‘peintures qu’on montrait arbitrairement [...] sans qu’elles eussent de rapport nécessaire avec lui [l’endroit où je me trouvais]’). To deny a genetic relationship between the picture and the scene — to refuse the possibility of a relation of ‘ofness’ in Kaplan’s sense — is to set the name vibrating with metaphorical effect. We are prevented from dropping anchor within the artist’s pratice and oeuvre in order to govern or delimit the ‘mouvement infiniment flottant d’un navire’ (i.e. the name). 4 Here we encounter names whose function is analogous to what Derrida, regarding Aristotle’s Poetics, calls ‘une étoile’ rather than 68‘le soleil’ (pp. 289–91). 5 We move away from the apparent referential immobility, the semantic plenitude, of saying ‘l’apparaître propre de la propriété de ce qui est’ (p. 291) to the vibrating ‘errance du sémantique’, a moment of ‘tour’ or ‘détour’ (p. 287) in which ‘la vérité peut toujours se perdre’ (p. 288). 6 We may think that knowing the artist’s name (Pisanello) as well as the nature of the scene outside — or an object depicted in it (spume) — would simplify the task of pinning down the object(s) of the ekphrasis. Proust’s description, however, refuses to work — to denote — in this way. If there is no necessary connection between the picture and the ‘real’ seascape that is under description, then both the artist’s name and our sense of the scene outside remain uncompleteable generalities. To borrow terms from Derrida again, the ‘source ponctuelle de vérité ou de propriété’ is now recognized as ‘invisible ou nocturne’, or at least fictional (p. 291). Proust’s text thus provides an elaborate reminder that proper names in fictions (even extra-fictional ones such as ‘Pisanello’) never function in a fully transparent or extensional manner and thus cannot be purely denotative. In this sense, they are always possessed of a ‘nocturne trouble’. 7