ROBERT ALTER
399
there is also a dialectically opposite impulse in Proust - to derive from ob–
servation, as the narrator says several times, the general laws of human
behavior. "Happiness alone is salutary for the body," he observes in the
last volume of the novel, "but it is sorrow that develops the mind's pow–
ers.") Benjamin, rather unusually for a critic, was impelled toward both
horizons, playing out the role of the austere exegete (he fantasized that he
would master Hebrew and become a latter-day Ibn Ezra) and allured by
the bright colored lights of ecstatic consciousness, in surrealist free asso–
ciation and in his experience with hashish. In the three steeples passage,
the young observer feels keen pleasure in first seeing the spires, but the
inward reconstruction of the initial vision, which somehow manages to
"peel away" the rind of external appearances, intensifies that pleasure into
rapture, in compliance with "the laws of night and honey." Mysticism, of
a peculiarly hedonistic character, is, I think, a term that has more than
loose application to this whole process. There is something elusive - in
the strict theological sense, ineffable - about the perception of the steeples
and why it should produce such happiness. It surely has much to do with
the sudden, unexpected gift of perceived pattern, a pattern shifting kalei–
doscopically as the position of the observer changes: the two that become
three and the three that constitute an exquisite constellation are a kind of
model of how haunting aesthetic patterns are formed. Perhaps the ele–
vated emotion invested in the steeples is reinforced by their actual asso–
ciation with the realm of the sacred. The narrator picks up a distant visual
signal, the reflected light of the late afternoon sun on the steeples, identi–
fying it as a kind of sensuous abstraction,
ensoleillement
-
"sunniness" or
"sun-irradiation" - whose essence he needs to penetrate.
All immediate pleasure, however, is ephemeral: this recognition lies at
the root of the psychology of desire to which Proust devotes so many
hundreds of pages. The steeples have scarcely been sighted, coming and
going, when they disappear from view, and the narrator, perched on the
box of the carriage but isolated from the coachman next to him, is driven
back on his own resources of memory and art to recapture what he has
seen. The inner core of the vision he now manages to apprehend intoxi–
cates him because it involves an intuition that he can bind the fleeting
prospect of bliss in a chain of images (a process Benjamin stresses) and
catch it in the fixative of language (the linguistic dimension is perhaps
insufficiently represented in Benjamin's account) . As the narrator goes on
to say, "What lay hidden behind the steeples of Martinville must be
something analogous to a pretty phrase, since it was in the form of words
which gave me pleasure that it had appeared to me." Though there are
surely no kabbalistic influences at work here, a mysticism that is largely
linguistic, in which words have hallucinogenic power, would have been a
