ROGER SHATTUCK
71
Callie:
Yes, yes. Exactly. I want to know if you think this would make
a good lead-in for the discussion. Proust has been discussing
Sylvie,
Nerval's
haunting story about three women, all of whom the hero loves and loses .
The hero is pretty close to Nerval himself speaking in the first person.
Proust, who deeply admires Nerval, tells us that everything is colored purple
in the story, especially the name Sylvie with its two i-sounds. Rimbaud has
the same color for the i-sound in his "Sonnet of the Vowels." Then in one
complex and unforgettable sentence - I have it marked right here - Proust
states that Nerval's story contains "the mysterious laws of thought which I
have often wanted to express - I'd count up to five or six of them." But
that's all. Proust doesn 't tell us what they are and closes the discussion by
saying that there may even be a little too much intelligence in
Sylvie.
Five or
six laws of thought - the idea fascinates me. But there's no follow-up. What
can we do with the passage?
Prof. F:
I've read those pages on Nerval, but I don 't remember the
specific passage. Five or six laws ....
There'~
a challenge for every Prous–
tian alive, philosopher or not. Of course Proust talks about laws all the time.
In
Within a Budding Grove
(another title that should be abandoned), the
narrator blurts right out that "it's useless to observe people's behavior be–
cause you can derive it all from psychological laws." Now, the Nerval pas–
sage you quoted doesn 't sound ironic or playful. I think Proust gives you the
first of his laws right there in the purple i-sounds. He's affirming Baudelaire's
correspondances,
synesthesia, analogies. That law of association of impres–
sions through similarity and proximity leads directly into the great echo
chamber of involuntary memory: association in time. How's that for a first
law? When you attend to them carefully, things mysteriously connect. The
other laws may take a bit longer.
Ned:
You make it sound easy. Callie, do you expect Prof. F. to do all
the work? No. Then I'll suggest one. This may be more a principle than a
law. I mean the double, the
Doppelganger,
the identical Other.
It
doesn't seem
to
me that Proust necessarily borrowed this device from anyone else -
Hoffmann or Poe.
It
was the natural consequence of his decision to write an
autobiographical novel. He lays it right out for us in the Madeleine sequence.
The second and third mouthfuls of tea and cake do not fill him again with the
original precious essence. Marcel, who at that age may be about halfway to
becoming the narrator, puts down his cup and turns toward his mind, his
spirit, as the source of the essence that surpasses mediocrity and contingency.
But - all this is close to verbatim quotation - the mind is in a quandary be–
cause "it, the seeking mind, is also the dark countryside where it must do the
seeking." The endlessly fruitful dilemma of autobiography consists in the fact
that the prey lies inside the hunter. Proust enacts this dilemma by making his
