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Proust's Metaphors from the Natural and the Exact Sciences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Reino Virtanen
Reino Virtanen*
Affiliation:
University of Nebraska, Lincoln 8
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Extract

Goethe with his elective affinities, Stendhal with his cristallisation, are among Marcel Proust's forerunners in the use of scientific analogies in fiction. In our time, D. H. Lawrence has made his readers familiar with electricity as an analogue for the passion of love. But it seems safe to say that no writer has ever made more varied and skillful use of metaphors from science than Proust. This is the more remarkable because A la Recherche du Temps perdu is better known for the allusions to painting and music than for the allusions to science. Admirers like André Maurois, Camille Vettard, and Jean Mouton content themselves with citing a few examples. A study of Proust's analogies from the sciences is interesting for several reasons. There is, for one thing, the question of Proust's scientific culture. Another question is the value of these analogies for clarification of the phenomena described. A third point of interest concerns their artistic value. Do they come up to the ideal of the author who wrote: “Je crois que la métaphore seule peut donner une sorte d'éternité au style … ”? What is the function of these metaphors in the novel conceived as a work of art?

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 69 , Issue 5 , December 1954 , pp. 1038 - 1059
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1954

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References

1 Cf. Joseph Warren Beach, The Twentieth Century Novel (New York, 1932), pp. 372-375.

2 Maurois, A la Recherche de Marcel Proust (Paris, 1949), pp. 200-202; Vettard, “Proust et Einstein,” NRF, xix (1 Aug. 1922), 247-251, and “Proust et le Temps,” Hommage à Marcel Proust, NRF, xx (1 Jan. 1923), 204-211; Mouton, Le Style de Marcel Proust (Paris, 1948), pp. 71-72, 88-92. Cf. Denis Saurat, “Proust,” Tendances (Paris, 1928), pp. 194-208.

3 Marcel Proust, “A propos du style de Flaubert,” Chroniques, Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1936), x, 197. All references to Proust's works are to the same edition (NRF, 1930-36). These abbreviations are used: AD: Albertine disparue; CG: Le Côté de Guermantes; JF: A l'Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs; P: La Prisonnière; S: Du Côté de chez Swann; SG: Sodome et Gomorrhe; TR: Le Temps retrouvé.

4 Including electricity, photography, and optics, the number for physics is about 100; astronomy, over 50; chemistry, some 30; geology, about 12. A low figure for botany, about a score, is of course no measure of botanical allusions in general. Some metaphors involve more than one field.

5 Bergson's pre-Einsteinian reference to time as a “fourth dimension” is part of his critique of spatialized time. Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 36th ed. (Paris, 1938), p. 83 (original ed., 1888). For Bergson on Einstein, see The Creative Mind (New York, 1946), pp. 301-303, and Durée et Simultanéité (Paris, 1922).

6 See Sylvia N. Levy, “Proust's Realistic Treatment of Illness,” FR, xv (Jan., Feb., March 1942), 233-238, 324-329, 421-424; Dr. Pierre Mauriac, “Marcel Proust et la médecine,” La Revue Hebdomadaire, xi, xxxii (Nov. 1923), 38-57.

7 Robert de Billy, Marcel Proust, Lettres et conversations (Paris, 1930). Billy no doubt underestimates the place of reading in Proust's development when he writes: “bien qu'il parcourût les livres avec une vitesse fulgurante … il ne lisait pas beaucoup. La conversation et la correspondance ont été pour lui des animatrices plus précieuses que les textes” (p. 10). This is contradicted by Lucien Daudet: “il lisait beaucoup, très vite et à fond.” Autour de soixante Lettres de Marcel Proust, Cahiers V (Paris, 1929), p. 38.

8 Billy, p. 224.

9 Correspondance générale de Marcel Proust (Paris, 1930), iii, 180. Lettres à la NRF, Cahiers, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1932), vi, 259. Proust also found in the Duc de Guiches a good “popularizer of science” with whom he would have liked to discuss Einstein. Proust writes that as he did not know algebra, he could not understand a word of Einstein's theories. Princesse Bibesco, Le Voyageur voilé (Geneva, 1947), p. 105.

10 Wells's The Time Machine (published 1895) is the subject of an interesting reference in “Sentiments filiaux d'un parricide” (first published 1 Feb. 1907): “les … yeux … ne sont plus, pour détourner de sa signification une expression de Wells, que des ‘machines à explorer le Temps,‘ des télescopes de l'invisible, qui deviennent à plus longue portée à mesure qu'on vieillit.” Pastiches et mélanges, O. C. (Paris, 1933), viii, 216. Robert Proust implies that his brother's concept of time owed something to his lycée professor Darlu. “Marcel Proust intime,” in Hommage à Marcel Proust, N.R.F. (Jan. 1923), xx, 18.

11 Lettres à la NRF, p. 110; Lettres à André Gide (Paris, 1949), p. 13. Cf. already in Jean Santeuil (Gallimard, 1952), precipitation, iii, 194; spectrum, ii, 66.

12 Darwin's Power of Movement in Plants is entirely devoted to such phenomena as cir cumnutation, of which there is no trace in Sodome et Gomorrhe. Yet Daudet writes: “il avait lu entièrement Faculté motrice dans les plantes de Darwin, avant de terminer une page magnifique de Sodome et Gomorrhe.” In “Transpositions,” Hommage à Marcel Proust, réédition du numéro spécial de la N.R.F., 1 Jan. 1923 (Paris, 1927), 3rd ed., p. 44. Darwin's books on cross-fertilization do, on the other hand, contain data reflected in Sodome et Gomorrhe, such as the fertilization of the Primula veris “à court style” by pollen from Primula veris “à long style.” Cf. SG i, 44, and Charles Darwin, The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilization in the Vegetable Kingdom (New York, 1877), pp. 219-220. On the “gestes tentateurs adressés aux insectes” (SG, i 45), one may refer to The Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilized by Insects (New York, 1877), pp. 175-176. These books were of course available in French translation. Incidentally, Proust's interest in these phenomena is shown already in Jean Santeuil, iii, 40, 45, 118.

13 S i, 174; CG ii, 243. Cf. Lettres à la NRF, p. 269.

14 René Quinton, L'Eau de mer, milieu organique (Paris, 1904); Remy de Gourmont, Promenades philosophiques, 7th ed. (Paris, 1920), ii, 118, first published in Mercure de France.

15 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” Essays, 2nd Ser., Works (Boston and New York, 1876), iii, 48.

16 See Hippolyte Taine, De l'Intelligence, 4th ed. (Paris, 1883), ii, 124, 174, 354-355. Denis Diderot, Rêve de d'Alembert, Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1875), ii, 128-130. Cf. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), p. 233; Aram Vartanian, “Trembley's Polyp and La Mettrie,” JHI, xi (June 1950), 259-286. Cf. Jules Laforgue's amusing “Ballade,” Œuvres Complètes, 4th ed. (MF, 1909), i, 391. It begins:

Oyez, au physique comme au moral,
Ne suis qu'une colonie de cellules
De raccroc; et ce sieur que j'intitule
Moi, n'est, dit-on, qu'un polypier fatal

17 Vettard, “Proust et le Temps,” p. 211.

18 The pastiche of Balzac shows that one element of Proust's conception of that novelist is precisely this analogy between science and society. Cf. “ce Roger Bacon de la nature sociale,” “un physicien du monde moral” (Pastiches et mélanges, pp. 11, 12). We are reminded of the comparison of Vinteuil with Lavoisier and Ampère (S ii, 184), and, in the correspondence, of Léon Daudet with Newton: “La guerre a hélas vérifié, consacré et immortalisé l'Avant-guerre. Depuis Balzac, on n'avait jamais vu un homme d'imagination découvrir avec cette force une loi sociale (dans le sens où Newton(?) a découvert la loi de la gravitation).” Lucien Daudet, Cahiers, v, 103.

19 Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Etre et le Néant (Paris, 1943), pp. 216-217.

20 Du Temps perdu au Temps retrouvé (Paris, 1950), p. 147.