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ARTISAN REVIEW
steeples in "Combray":
At a bend in the road I experienced, suddenly, that special pleasure
which was unlike any other, on catching sight of the twin steeples of
Martinville, bathed in the setting sun and constantly changing their
position with the movement of the carriage and the windings of the
road, and then of a third steeple, that of Vieuxvicq, which, although
separated from them by a hill and a valley, and rising from higher
ground in the distance, appeared none the less to be standing by their
side.
In noticing and registering the shape of their spires, their shifting
lines, the sunny warmth of their surfaces, I felt that I was not penetrat–
ing to the core of my impression, that something more lay behind that
nobility, something which they seemed at once to contain and to
conceal.
The debt of this particular mode of visual attention to impresslOntSt
painting - the shifting nature of the object of perception as light changes
and the position of the observer shifts - is obvious. The distinctively
Proustian component, strongly encouraged by the verbal medium of rep–
resentation, is the mysticism of consciousness, the sense that there is a
hidden inner core
(un bout)
of the impression, something "behind" the
surface loveliness it takes in, which the observer needs to penetrate.
A brief while later in narrated time, on the trip home from
Martinville, the boy cranes his neck to retain a backward glimpse of the
steeples in the rapidly gathering dusk that now turns their silhouettes
black, until they disappear around a bend in the road:
I was obliged, in default of other company, to fall back on my own,
and to attempt to recapture the vision of my steeples. And presently
their outlines and their sunlit surfaces, as though they had been a sort
of rind, peeled away; something of what they had concealed from me
became apparent; a thought came into my mind which had not ex–
isted for me a moment earlier, framing itself in words in my head; and
the pleasure which the first sight of them had given me was so greatly
enhanced that, overpowered by a sort of intoxication, I could no
longer think of anything else.
Another way of defining the difference between Kafka's paternal
world and Proust's maternal one is the difference between the quest for
knowledge and the quest for pleasure. (One should note, though, that
