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ARTISAN REVIEW
familiar and understandable phenomenon for Benjamin, the friend
and
intellectual confidant of Scholem. Proust's protagonist, still seated on
the
box of the moving carriage, borrows pencil and paper and produces a
paragraph of description that constitutes his first documented response
to
his vocation as a writer. The prose he makes out of the vision of
the
steeples is perhaps a little naive and clearly more conventional than
the
prose of the mature Proust, but there is also marked continuity between
the two. What most evidently links the young Marcel (if that is his name)
with the magisterial novelist is the spectacular role of the image in
his
paragraph. First, the steeples appear before him "like three birds perched
upon the plain"; then, in the backward view on the way home, as
the
road twists, "they veered in the evening light like three golden pivots."
Finally, at the last moment he is able to glimpse them, in the far distance
of falling darkness, they seem
no more now than three flowers painted upon the sky above the low
line of the
fields.
They made me think, too, of three maidens in a leg–
end, abandoned in a solitary place over which night had begun to fall;
and as we drew away from them at a gallop, I could see them timidly
seeking their way, and after some awkward, stumbling movements of
their noble silhouettes, drawing close to one another, gliding one be–
hind another, forming now against the still rosy sky no more than a
single dusky shape, charming and resigned, and so vanishing in the
night.
The young protagonist's little composition offers a lucid illustration,
in somewhat simplified form, of the phenomenon Benjamin described as
the breaking-through of "the true surrealist face of existence" by virtue of
the Proustian image. The ostensible aim of the passage is mimetic, and
there is even an elegantly mimetic rhythmic movement (more accom–
plished in the French original) in the last sentence that catches the vanish–
ing of the steeples into the night. But the images, however self-con–
sciously deployed by the neophyte writer as a exercise in description,
carry us somewhere beyond mimesis. The first two similes do seem
largely efforts to catch the affecting look of the steeples - three perching
birds, then three turning golden pivots. The concluding pair of similes,
however, manifest a more free-associative impulse, something even indi–
cated rhetorically by the phrase that introduces the last comparison,
"They made me think, too, of three maidens in a legend." The three
steeples are now not merely represented through art but translated from
the realm of experience into a realm of artifice, three flowers painted on
