LITERARY CRITICISM: Paintings in ProustBy Eric Karpeles Thames Hudson, 352pp, £25
ERIC KARPELES'S Paintings in Proust consists of passages from Proust in which paintings are mentioned, with a full-colour reproduction of the relevant picture next to each quotation. For those who have not read In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), the book is enticing: an intelligent and passionate introduction from a painter who deeply understands Proust, a collection of sumptuous reproductions of paintings from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century, and a window into Proust's sharp, eccentric wit.
For anyone who has read Proust with curiosity or pleasure, Paintings in Proust offers something more. There are remarkably few straightforward physical descriptions of people in the Recherche, and the reader craves clues to what its universe, which feels so real, looks like.
Since Proust so often uses comparisons with paintings instead of direct descriptions of characters, this book inspires a kind of greed. Charles Swann, for example, a character in whose company we spend thousands of pages, and about whom we learn almost everything except his appearance, is mentioned in passing as bearing "a striking resemblance" to one of the Magi as painted by Bernardino Luini.
For most of us, this information is merely tantalising, and Swann remains physically a shadow, a body we mentally have to assemble out of scraps of occasional information and by somehow extrapolating from his feelings, attitudes and actions. So to have the fresco reproduced next to the passage, with the bearded, red-headed Mage clear and intact in front of us, feels a bit like finding yourself sitting next to a character from Coronation Street or The Sopranos.
The references to painting are frequently focused on smaller details than a single character, and in fact the real joy of this book is the way in which some of the deeper concerns of the Recherche, and aspects of Proust's idiosyncratic vision, are brought to life by the juxtaposition of paintings with the texts referring to them.
There are surely few readers who can instantly picture the "uncontrolled, almost distraught movement of the Virgin who dips her pen into the inkpot" in Botticelli's Madonna of the Magnificat, to which an involuntary movement by Swann's lover, Odette, is compared. Having the painting with the hand and inkpot before one's eyes animates this otherwise obscure scene in the novel, as though with a bolt of electricity; in an instant, the gesture becomes shockingly lifelike, and the characters fully human.
Part of this jolt comes from the realisation that while Proust's description - "almost distraught" - is perfectly evocative of the Madonna's hand viewed in isolation, it does not extend to the painting as a whole. The reference adds a vivid new dimension to the scene in the novel, but also cheekily transplants the 15th-century painting into a totally alien context. This is key to Proust's wit and method: his use of decontextualisation to bring to light permanent truths that are independent of context.
UNLIKE JOYCE'S Ulysses, where the action all occurs on a single day, the Recherche is a soap opera, all about change, flow and impermanence. The foolish become wise, the chic fall out of favour, the vulgar become the toast of high society.
On one level, change is the novel's only constant, but on another, it is countered throughout by a desire to capture and describe the reality of fleeting moments. Leafing through Paintings in Proust shows how the epic search for "lost time" is implicated in the way Proust looked at painting, as something that opposes the flow of the novel, a resistance to the unstoppable ebb of time and change.
Indeed, it may be his quest to find truths not subject to time which accounts for Proust's fascination with isolated gestures or minor figures rather than paintings in their entirety. The "search" of his novel's title, after all, is for a reality outside of time, manifested in moments that survive whole and intact from the past to the present.
But for all this book gives - and it is undoubtedly a lot - it also leaves one with the unsettling sense that it takes something away. As Karpeles mentions in the introduction, Proust did not have paintings in his own intimate surroundings. He saw them in galleries, or on his travels in France and Italy, and then supported his memories with descriptions, copies and black-and-white photographs (a few reproductions of period photographs of paintings would have benefited this otherwise so well illustrated volume). Just as he withdrew from social life in order to write about it, so he wrote about paintings from his imagination, at one remove.
MORE IMPORTANTLY, it is not plausible to think that Proust intended his readers to visualise all of these references. Even for the rare individual who could summon at will a mental image of all the works involved, the details involved are too peculiar to be available to the memory.
Since colour photography did not exist at the time, no reader could possibly have had these images to hand in the detail Proust's readings require; their sheer quantity suggests that for Proust, our not getting them is part of the plan.
Part of the reason for this is that knowing or not knowing books, paintings, or other cultural artefacts is a constant game in the novel, in which characters judge each other according to their ability to recognise or appreciate certain references, and where the reaction to one's own ignorance is a key revealer of character. The tone of the narrative implies that the reader will understand all his references, whereas Proust must know we could not.
This has the effect of implicating the reader in the world of the novel: by finding ourselves not merely spectators but participants in the novel's name-dropping game, and moreover finding ourselves on the side of the ignorant, we are forced to re-evaluate the narrator's "official" standpoint on ignorance, culture, knowledge, and - perhaps the novel's key theme - insiderness.
In the end, the sheer reality, the immediate, physical presence of these pictures, risks diminishing, not enhancing, the fullness of the fictional world.
I should repeat that any reader of Proust will take pleasure in this book, a peek into the sources of Proust's imagination which makes him feel suddenly, uncannily real.
But, happy as I am to have it in my possession, I am left with the disquieting feeling that it corresponds to an unattainable desire - that of eliding the gap between life and art. This book, which seduces us with its intelligence, with the beauty of its paintings and its easy access to gems of Proust's wit, may just show us too much.
Barry McCrea is assistant professor of comparative literature at Yale University, and the author of the novel The First Verse