ROBERT ALTER
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the sky, which thus is implicitly transformed into a vast canvas. In the
final image, as a nexus of metonymy leads from flowers to maidens, the
steeples are slipped out of the real landscape into the evocative realm of
legend or fairytale - three young women abandoned in the woods,
drawing together in a delicate choreography until they form a single sil–
houette in the descending darkness.
The free play of imaging through the medium oflanguage is the chief
reason for the intoxication Marcel experiences, and for his secular-mystic
sense that he has succeeded in breaking through the surface of what he
has seen to something essential that lies hidden behind it. Ordinary exis–
tence as Proust conceives it is, no less than for Kafka, a condition of
alienation, exile, separation from origins. In the realm of desire, this
condition is felt in the individual's estrangement, either actual or con–
stantly threatened, from the object of desire. In the realm of perception, it
is manifested in a rasping sense of inescapable distance between the per–
ceiver and the thing perceived. Proust formulates this perceptual distance
brilliantly in one of his most beautiful similes:
When
I
saw an external object, my consciousness that
I
was seeing it
would remain between me and it, surrounding it with a thin spiritual
border that prevented me from ever touching its substance directly;
for it would somehow evaporate before
I
could make contact with it,
just as an incandescent body that is brought into proximity with
something wet never actually touches its moisture, since it is always
preceded by a zone of evaporation.
Let me note that this extraordinary image, which is typical of a whole
category of Proustian figures, has nothing to do with the purportedly
surrealist function of images about which Benjamin speaks. The Proustian
image, as here, is often intricately analytic and thus
discursive,
a subtle in–
strument for separating and sorting and explaining the conceptual layers of
phenomena. Benjamin, with his own bias toward modernist epiphanies,
stresses the revelatory and free-associative Proust and scarcely deals with
Proust the brilliant analyst.
In the instance of the three spires, it is hard to see how the young
protagonist's descriptive similes enable him to touch the substance of the
object of perception, though the image he chooses of peeling away a rind
and reaching a hidden core suggests that is what he feels he has done.
Here Benjamin's tightly packed characterization of Proust as "racked with
homesickness ... for the world distorted in the state of resemblance" may
be helpful. To see the steeples as birds, pivots, flowers, and maidens is to
