“A Silver Knife Striking A Wall of Glass”

on Marcel Proust and Music

OVERTURE

It is something of a paradox that a novel as renowned, respected and verbose as Proust’s À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu should come to provoke thought about music at the same time that it reveals itself as carrying an understated critique of language.  À La Recherche is so heavy with words, is so entranced by language, that one would think that it could offer nothing more than a reinforcement of a bourgeois logo-centric cultural order. It is the literary work par excellence and, as such, it appears to confront its readers with the force of a narrative tradition that attempts to make experience transparent and unproblematical. This is a book which, surely it seems, can offer nothing to disrupt our conceptual capture at the hands of language, nor, bearing in mind its array of aristocratic characters, shed any light on the workings of common psychical states. 

However, although À La Recherche contains much of a conservative nature, what it does not do is leave language uninterrupted; in fact, throughout this book, Proust stumbles into the limits of his own language simply because he has allowed himself the self-actualisation of an unremitting, almost narcissistic, introspection. Just as the novel is in part about how the main character, Marcel, comes to be a writer – which enables Proust to make of À La Recherche a kind of pre-novel – so too is this theme reflected in the fact that the novel we read is not some irrefutable answer or philosophical model, but has the effect of being a prelude to renewed attempts to express the inexpressible. Proust does not simply infer that our emotional vocabulary should be extended, but, by giving an important place to music, he suggests that an enlarged range of emotion can come to be provoked, explored and alloyed into words or forms that could express them. In foregoing the construction of a conventional narrative novel, Proust presents us with À La Recherche as a process, as thought-in-motion, and in this way offers us an accursed personalised surplus. This has resonance with the way music can make a “violent impression” on us which is in turn related to the way our reception of sound is creative of an enigmatic ‘gap’ between stimulus and response, emotion and its expression, thought and language. 

Not being legitimised, this suspended gap is very rarely recognised as creative, but it is Proust’s contention, through his coming to settle on ‘everyday’ matters and feelings, that creativity proceeds from an engagement with that which is deemed irrelevant and unintelligible. Words can come to define us, restrict the recognition of our own surplus, but music’s intervals and sweeps retaliate against what Proust calls “habit” and cast doubt upon those representations and significations that are too readily recognisable and inhabitable (hence his depiction of the social stasis of the aristocratic milieus.) Instead, for Proust, music heightens a free flowing and destabilised perception that is prior and, in many cases, resistant to our habitual censorship of it. Just as Marcel’s perception of himself and other characters is always changing, so too, with his depictions of music, there is a similar foregrounding of the process of perception that carries with it all manner of delayed responses and indeterminacies that operate to make language seem not as efficient as we believe it to be.

With this in mind, there is, for Proust, always something behind words; they are accompanied by intonation and indirect speech, they seek to cover over the traces of the ‘gap’ and, via condensation and displacement, they point towards unconscious thought-processes and those misconstruals that become a spur to divisive conjecture: “just as this intention did not express itself in her speech in a logical fashion, so the presentiment of this intention, which I had felt tonight, remained just as vague within me.” What Proust discovers is that language can often be inadequate to explain and interpret such gradations of feeling (affect) and emotion and, in a strange fore-echo of the wider popularisation of psychoanalysis, his writing is informed by a search “for the profounder causes of emotion” and a registering of the effects of repression in our miscommunications. 

With such musings as these in mind it is no surprise that music, concerned as it can be with those areas that are beyond immediate and seamless articulation in language, takes on an exploratory and experimental significance for Proust: “I wondered whether music might not have been the unique example of what might have been – if the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas had not been invented – the means of communication between souls.” Aiming, therefore, to make desire legible, to make the inexpressible a component-charge of expression, Proust makes music function in À La Recherche as a plot device; as a way of structuring the novel; as an aid to self-exploration for various characters and, crucially, as an expression of the ‘semiotic instability’ that, through its implied critique of language, destabilises a sense of self as bounded, separate and complete: Proust’s foregrounding of the process of perception, especially its unconscious desiring dimension, subverts the perception of the same and, in undermining habit, opens the way for becomings.

(… these shadows were barely distinguishable …)

Music and its effects are everywhere in À La Recherche. Just as music can pass by at an extraordinary speed, just as it can be densely layered, so Proust’s novel, in an attempting to capture such experiences and render them affective, employs a digressive style where long flows of words meander and curl back over the length of a page and seem to summon up instrumental solos and the breathless suspension of the readers conscious concentration: often the actual word-meaning that is intended is only grasped by the reader as an after-effect of its prior provocation of emotion and feeling.  At other times a single word suffices to act as a nodal point, containing a breadth of expression and desire condensed into a word-object like the ‘cattleyas’ or proper nouns like ‘Venice’ and ‘Albertine.’ Such compressions remind us of music’s short stabs and the compacting together of tones.  The digressions, in establishing an interaction between author and reader that is intuitively sensed before it is returned-to and rationally understood, are illustrative of the stimulus and latent impression that an unfolding music deposits in the unconscious.

However, this ‘returned-to’ is crucial for it implies a relation to repetition that is as important for music as it is for this novel. In À La Recherche,Proust presents us with a gradual unfurling of similar situations, an echoing of events, a return of characters, themes and relationships that constantly re-occur like the refrains and motifs of music (c.f. repetition reveals differences but these differences are the backdrop to articulate the becomings of characters.)  The very fact that what we read offers us a future work that is nothing other than what we have already read, not only makes a repeated reading inevitable – a return in which the reader’s becomings via the book are profiled to the reader – but works to emboss repetition and variegated layerings as the supple and depthening surface of À La Recherche in its own becoming as a musical work. Such thickening, the laying down of strata, is indicative of music’s simultaneity and depth, and it is used in this novel to make tangible the presence of its characters’ memories that are always returned-to and worked-through. 

Often in À La Recherche memories appear as traumatic ‘jolts,’ as the sudden reappearance of previously repressed memories and affects that puncture and lead astray, not just the seemingly benign and, at times, suspended narrative drive, but the self-image of the characters as well.  Yet just as repetition in music gives off a sensation of stasis, of nothing being changed (or changeable,) so too Proust heightens our appreciation of repetition by not neglecting to profile the minute changes that have occurred: “two themes, substantially composed of the same notes, will present no similarity whatever if they differ in the colour of their harmony and orchestration.”

The very length of À La Recherche is conducive to this enhanced focus (desiring-perception) that repetition can induce, for it suggests to the reader that it is not as important to grasp the overall movement of the novel as it is to settle somehow ‘inside’ the novel. This has the almost surreal effect whereby the reader’s affective discernment is as encouraged as their intellectual development.  A music that relies on repetition creates a similar emotionalising effect, for using such repetition as a structure, as does Proust, our attentions are moved away from the progressions of the ‘whole’, moved away from abstracted appropriation, towards attempting to express and articulate that which we don’t already know or are not encouraged to explore: diffuse desire. Just as Proust jettisons resolution, so, repetitive music, with its “unresolved ambiguity,” similarly relaxes the instilled need for a totalising understanding that can remove desire from our perception. As with non-linguistic sound (drone music, sound poetry etc.,) Proust’s prose can, at times, bring into play a continuous perception, a heightened concentration, which is further creative of instilling a sensitivity to recognising and being inspired by the discovery of the slightest shift, the most miniscule inclination. With repetition we are thus placed between the sequence and the instant and along with this the speed of emotion and feeling can be slowed down into a suspended focus, a self-presencing, or, accelerated towards a relaxation of the need to remember. 

It is this attraction to nuances that the suspension of habitual perception coupled to self-presencing alerts us to.  This sparks-off associations and the impetus of self-discovery (becoming), and which, somewhat traumatically, leads us to encounter the socio-linguistic barrier of translating these nuances into words (nuances that help us to beak our ‘habits.’) À La Recherche seems to be foregrounding this paradoxical gap between the sequence and the instant, between emotion and its articulation, and, through his scorn for journalese and political rhetoric, Proust seems to be suggesting that language is more regularly and comfortably orientated towards ‘Events’ that are esteemed, habitual and widely known. Words, he seems to infer, can tame emotions and make them conform to pre-established meaning, but music, by encouraging an awareness of unacknowledged perceptions and unconscious desires, and by provoking a passion for perceiving, can effect a “change of key in sensibility” that is concomitant with a drive to express what we have, so far been unable to express. What was once repressed, Proust suggests can, when we listen to music, be abreacted, can become conscious. 

(… discernible at most in fleeting changes of expression…)

It has been argued that language is acquired through the daily use of “easily recalled signs” that become stabilised the more they are used. It is easier to acquire these ‘signs’ because words refer to representable letters which themselves refer to phonetic sounds and mental pictures. Musical signs, it is offered, are harder to remember and retain for they are inherently non-referential, unrepresentable and dynamic; they do not refer us back to a specific image or word but to sensory affects that can overwhelm us and, in so doing, attain a kind of polyphonic freedom in that they escape being overcoded by something that is already understood, inherited or socially acquired.

In this way sensory affects such as musical sounds become more reliant on memory, or upon the enhanced memory of repeated listenings, as there is perhaps no prior form of reference to which the experience of sound can initially attach. From this it can be conjectured that a repeated listening to a musical piece is a process whereby the capacity of memory is increased (an expansion of what Felix Guattari termed “existential territories.”) It is as if music temporarily suspends our reliance upon language (secondary process) and opens a passage (an “unconscious pathway” as Guattari suggests) through which the past can be recalled not as containing a ‘key’ but as carrying an affective atmosphere which is somehow still active, incomplete and capable of alighting on new configurations of meaning (access to primary process as abreaction.)

This is to some degree what Proust depicts by means of the madeleine or the sound of a spoon against a plate: sensory affects are felt as atmospheres (emotional compounds) and their recollection comes to us, initially, without their being translated into language. Their articulation, their being understood by means of language comes later, or, with reference to the way to the way that music is layered and contains multiple components occurring simultaneously, the recollection of sensory affects is explored and apprehended at the same time that it is being written, spoken or heard. Appended to this could be that music, with its inexhaustible network of possible relationships, its being polyphonic and unrepresentable, stimulates the memory and thereby opens out many hitherto unreached psychical dimensions which increase the potential for the self-representation, the self-image, to be altered and transformed by non-discursive sensory affects (c.f. becoming.) 

A crucial facet of this relation between music and memory is that if music cannot, initially, be attached to a form of reference such as words, it happens that our remembrance of sound is linked to the social situation in which it is heard. This doesn’t make it as clear cut as the relationship of a word to an image because this attachment of sound to a social situation has the symbiotic effect of attaching one form of multi-centred dynamism, say of the emotions or memory, to the dynamism of the social relationships and social contexts. Yet language does not exist in isolation from society and a facet of the paradox that Proust is working-through is itself informed by the reluctance of people to express themselves fully because, adhering to the prevailing social norms, it is deemed as either selfish or irrelevant, as a superfluity, an accursed share, that lacks its ‘proper’ form and setting. In the world of the Salon that Proust’s characters inhabit, full expression or abreaction, is not encouraged. Such ‘psychical exchange’ is either reduced to witty reapartee or a gregarious frivolity in which amusement, however cruel and snobbish, continually holds non-hypocritical communication in abeyance.

In À La Recherche music transcends this censorious social world and comes to both enable the expression of that which is ordinarily repressed and create a state of receptivity to it. Proust, in discussing music, refers to its making apparent a “residuum of reality which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk […] that ineffable something which differentiates qualitatively what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of phrases in which he can communicate with others only by limiting himself to exteriors…” These psychic residuums can be seen as a ‘profitless’ surplus. They are that which is remaindered and are unable to be circulated commercially in that they negate that efficient work-a-day mode of communication that promises a smooth functioning. As a ‘deeper body of feeling’ (the ‘residuums of reality’) are excised, or repressed, to the realm of the unconscious where they remain inarticulatable at the same time that they persist in making themselves felt as a maddening blockage and as an urge to express. Just as music is consigned to a cultural status beneath that of language and the visual, Proust’s writing comes to function as a ‘return of the repressed’, a flow that rearticulates itself as a continually self-actualising process that carries the proviso that, above all, it is a tentative experiment in finding a means-of-expression through which this affective surplus can be socialised. 

However, in daring to speak, in withholding very little from communication, Proust seems to counter the social fear of the psychical ‘residuum’ by refusing not to censor himself. If music can release cacophony, tears, aggression… if it can create semiotic instability by drawing attention to what words are incapable of, then Proust’s novel socialises what no-one wants to hear: it talks of himself, as self-presenced, as his own dissected object, as a subject of fluctuating affect, and it talks of the ‘minority-eros’ of sado-masochism, voyeurism, outlawed homosexuality, oedipal passion and paranoiac jealousy. À La Recherche is a ‘going fragile’ through which Proust makes himself vulnerable and through which he becomes not an ‘individual’ but a ‘singularity.’ And yet, the above quote can also be read as an encouragement to express our own psychic residuum. It can give confidence and, in its accessing of the unconscious, can provoke psychical energies (i.e. diffuse libido) to circulate and ‘force’ themselves to be adjoined to words, to be re-associated and, even then, to only reach a stage of pre-articulation: that which is ‘ineffable’ and/or socially censored can come to be partially uttered. In this connection Proust’s use of the expression “differentiates qualitatively” is crucial for it is such differences, that drawn upon and activate the unconscious, that are the main motor of any (singularising) communicative effort. It is only the social norms, using language as their injunctive vehicle, that tempt us into thinking that there are ‘correct’ expressions and ‘correct’ ideas that can be seamlessly articulated and which can speak our ‘truth’ once and for all. There are, offers Proust, qualitative differences in expression that can only be understood as ‘pre-articulations’. It is in this way that people can come to learn from each other, and it is such differences, expressed in music by, say colour, timbre and repetition, that is one of music’s main attractors. It is by means of music, by means of the affective surplus of the psychic residuum, suggests Proust, that social distances can begin to evaporate. 

(… another drama beneath the words of the spoken drama…)

CODA

Foremost among the listening experiences contained in À La Recherche is the fictitious Vinteuil Sonata. As if to reinforce the connection between memory and music, Proust first introduces this Sonata at the moment when, on the threshold of hearing it again for a second time, Swann begins to recall his reactions to the first time he heard it. At the outset, then, there is already a layering of perception and a sense of simultaneous duration.  Swann recalls that on first hearing the Sonata he had only noticed the “material quality” of the sounds. He seems to suggest that the music existed for him like a piece of furniture, as one rendition of music among others, as a purely physiological experience. This time, and strengthening the metaphor of the layer, the Sonata becomes more fibrous and lithe: Swann’s attention is taken by the way that from beneath the violin section there slowly arises the tone of a piano, before eventually the tones are transformed by each other in a sonic recombination.

As if to accentuate the transformative effects of music, its capacity to alter habitual perception and break with the predominant dualisms instituted by language, Proust chooses to place words in unfamiliar paradoxical combinations: the violins are “slender but robust”, and the impending piano part is “smooth yet restless.” These effects are then related to Proust’s use of a steadily increasing oceanic metaphor which not only hints at the momentousness of the music in relation to the ‘ordinary’ setting, but also reinforces a boundlessness without specific landmark that is slowly beginning to dissolve Swann’s image of himself. When the piano is described as “mutliform but indivisible,” Proust offers the reader an indication of the component-affects that make up any ‘self’ as a kind of ‘group individual’ but also the social connectedness of music through which “the individual is steeped in something more general than himself.” 

The oceanic metaphor continues at the threshold of what becomes Swann’s disorientating psychic confusion. That the music he is listening to does not provide an horizon means that it is without clear outline. As he listens the music becomes less and less a distinct ‘material’ object to be possessed and, what was momentarily becoming familiar (the violin and the piano) is soon lost. The pleasurable stability and reinforcement of identity that would have come through semiotic stability and possession of the ‘piece’ (being able to predict and thereby understand it) is gradually replaced by an experience of the limits of language (informed by the limits of perception) that arises from Swann’s striving to verbalise and hence rationalise what he is hearing. 

Words are unable to easily attach themselves to these varying multivalent emotional components and, instead, the latter come to efface him, to clear the way for further self-exploration. That Swann is unable to ‘name’ his experience, attach a word to an isolatable sensation and make it ‘significant’, is viewed by him as evidence of his ‘ignorance’ of music! But this inability to attach a rational meaning and bring the experience into full conscious purview has the supplementary effect of multiplying his reactions to the point that he is more than able to apprehend the sensuality of the music … the libidinal quality of that which “vanishes in an instant” … the presence of an immaterial dimension. The Sonata becomes an unconscious territory through which Swann is enabled to make links to other sensual remembrances: the scent of a flower, a dancer tracing the shape of an arabesque. Swann, by losing the will to ‘understand’ the music in its entirety, comes to focus more closely on what is happening to him emotionally and recognises that the notes give rise to sensations which disappear so rapidly because they are being replaced by other notes and sensation and create a “ceaseless overlapping.” Is this akin to Swann’s becoming-music? 

This simultaneity of musical experience calls upon memory to “fashion facsimiles of those fugitive phrases” and these partial apperceptions enable Swann to compare and contrast what has preceded with what follows, and, finally, when the music has ended, provisional memories can be kept intact. In this way Swann, through coming up against his own ‘ignorance,’ has arrived at a form of appreciation and self-understanding that is then relayed to the reader by Proust as something that “was no longer pure music, but rather design, architecture, thought”. It is no longer ‘pure’ because the music no longer exists as exterior and physiological, but has become an intimate part of Swann that has revealed to him the materiality of his own emotions and the existence of unconscious thought-processes. This is accentuated when it is recalled that the music led Swann “this way, then that”, enveloping him in a multi-directional relationship to sound; a sourcelessness which is itself echoed later in the novel when the narrator, Marcel, attempts to locate a watch in his room whose ticking seems to be coming from everywhere. This prompts him to remark that “sounds have no position in space.” 

The Sonata’s evocation of a sense of the dimensions of space, the possibilities of changes in direction and the opening of “new vistas” is prolonged to summon up the notion of an expansion of ‘existential territories’ when Swann remarks that the music has enabled him “to discover the presence of an invisible reality,” to perceive something that is emerging as indefinable, something that is evocative of a sense of pleasure that has not yet been assigned a position or restrictive categorisation. Swann, in this passage, is pre-articulate and the spatio-temporal effect of music is drawn by Proust, not in the language of philosophy, but in terms that portray a sense of space and history as a continual process of engagement; a continual process of becoming as the inherence of the diachronic and the synchronic.

This remembered hearing of the Vinteuil Sonata is an exceptional depiction of the fact that listening to music is not a matter of passive reception but a participatory activity through which, in this case, Swann actively makes his own meaning out of the music, creates his own network of auditory relationships. That this is not tantamount to some instance of self-referential individuality (solipsism) is first demonstrated by Swann’s immediate urge to question and compliment the pianist on the latter’s performance of the piece. His need, almost beside himself, is to share his appreciation with others gathered at the Verudin Salon and to discover the name of the composer. He learns nothing, or not enough, and begins to question friends and acquaintances until, when he finally discovers the name of the composer, learning that he is unknown to the general public, he begins to wonder about him.  

That Swann’s reaction, his heightened susceptibility to affect, is transformed into the need to share and extend his enthusiasm with that of others, is indicative of the sense of rupture that the Sonata has created within him. The rupture amounts to the displacement of what he understood as himself, his self-image, and, when his enthusiasm is met with the cooly distant, superior tone of Mlle Verdurin that can only relate to the Sonata with an elitist and proprietorial “Oh! Haven’t you heard it before!” we come to see that, whereas Swann  has been altered and catalysed, Mlle Verdurin remains in the thrall of a conditioned and standardised reaction: for her the Sonata still exists at the level of its ‘material’ quality, as an object around which arise common sentiments of possession, consumerism, competitiveness and trivialised equivalence; in short, fearful, conformist reactions that are simultaneously being transmitted in the social structures that surround her: the socially repressed focus on surfaces that censors the pleasures to be had from unconscious emotion and associational connection.

For Swann the music has liberated psychical spaces to the extent that it has brought to light the ‘gap’ between affect and expression. In being thus liminal, by defining a no-space as a space, the music has removed “all concern for material interest.” Swann has used the Sonata as an intensifier, as part of a process of self-exploration, as a re-creative experience (becoming), to unhinge and extend himself into other territories through which he travels further from an atomised and solipsistic individuality towards a singularisation of himself (by means of component affect) that is resistant to the solidification of his self-image as an ideal-ego. For Swann possibilities for rejuvenation have been opened. He mutates. His coming-into-being has not ceased and whilst it may seem that, amongst the Salonites, it is Swann who is isolated, this is because he refuses to set a limit upon himself and conform to the undifferentiated faux consensual life of the Salon. 

Their suspicions of him revolve around their view that he is moving in a social circle that does not befit him and this positioning of Swann as an anomalous character is chosen by Proust to emphasise the way that Swann moves from place to place, crossing thresholds, situating himself at various intersections, increasing his opportunities for stimulus, enlarging his affective capacities beyond the institutionalised individualism of the Salon which constitutes, for its members, the only conceivable form of social relations. This is accentuated by his reaction to the Sonata. Swann places himself amidst the music and is traversed by the sounds; he composes himself with it, composes the components of his affective reactions, and this sense of singularisation that adds rather than subtracts, that creates the accursed share of subjectivity, necessarily implies, by the way it is a spur to communication and interaction, the continual presence of others. Crowds of feeling… from a sense of ‘self’, an interiority, we move into anomalous positions, towards territories that are so unstable and unknown, that in refusing to reproduce what is already established by ‘habit’, there is a greater urgency to interact with others, to discover their modes of inhabiting us, a greater urgency to express that which is repressed, that which is rarely heard…

An important facet to Swann’s appreciation of the Vinteuil Sonata is the fact that he is most drawn towards the “little phrase”, a repeating refrain, rather than the whole Sonata. Once heard, it is this “little phrase” that he anticipates. This points towards an important facet of experience, which when experienced as overwhelming, can see us breaking things down into fragments. The extraction of a part from the whole. Whilst it could be suggested that the phrase must be returned to its context for it to be properly understood this neglects the process that occurs, and which is exemplified by Swann, whereby, not being able to express the music in toto, he takes the phrase and, instead of reducing it to a position within the Sonata, he uses it as a poetic nucleus from which he carries out both a self-exploration and an exploration of the Sonata. He uses it as a ‘partial object’, as a condenser, as a ‘too full’ object (i.e. fetish,) from which associative intensification can proceed. The music is embraced as a medley of affects that summon up the sea, smells, touch, amorous feelings… all manner of connections. At one point Swann is lead is to compare the effect of the music to carrying out experiments with perfumes which are inferred by Proust to be tantamount to undermining gender specifities. He makes the music not only expressive of his own emotions, but he fashions it as a ‘machine’ through which to produce and construct ‘new’ emotions and unknown pleasures. He makes it follow the non-duration of ‘felt-time’:  a uchronia of the ‘primary process’?

If his reaction had been similar to that of Mlle Verdurin, he would be comparing the whole of the Sonata to other Sonatas by other composers and as a result he would be led towards the reinforcement of the canonical, towards already well-trod pathways, that, as we have already seen, worked censoriously upon him, restricting him to the dimension of “what it is proper for one to know”. By playing with an easily manipulatable fragment Swann seems to introject it as another dynamic component of his psyche. Just as a child uses the fragment as a ‘transitional object’ as a means of exploring motor-senses without being able to ‘understand’ how the particular object is supposed to function,  so Swann is, to some extent, at a stage of pre-individuation and, akin to the child’s not being fully interpolated into the practices of subjectivity formation that will be, in part, conducted through the acquisition of language, he is able, by means of the phrase (as ‘transitional object’) to disarticulate these practices by allowing himself to be transformed by the affects of the Sonata as they proceed in a ‘felt time’ of open duration. Both Swann and the hypothetical child are exploring an ‘existential territory’. In other words the “little phrase”, in summoning up so many possibilities of connection, by arresting a normative relation to time and placing in its stead the rhythm of perception, helps to increase potential by maintaining a relation to the ever-accessible yet repressed psychical terrain of pre-identity.  The phrase is not a means by which Swann ‘regresses’ to a childhood state, but is a device through which he can maintain access to both a plurality of times and a fluidity of identity that becoming pre-articulate, helps to continually modify his self-image. 

(… bringing into play too many forces of which we have been hitherto unaware…)

That the Sonata takes on a relevance outside that of the character of Swann enables us to gain further evidence that Proust is concerned with depicting his characters as always being constituted within a social field and this constitution, the inter-subjective dimension, is crucial for creative engagement of any kind; be it that of a novelist or revolutionary. For Swann, the Sonata recalls Odette and acts as a materialisation of the bond that exists between them. That he has Odette play it to him upwards of twenty times has the effect, through repetition, of strengthening this bond whilst also hinting at the ‘perverse’ obsessive drive of desire. But Odette also plays the Sonata to Marcel and he in turn introduces it to Albertine. Thus, there is a network of characters in the novel for whom the Sonata acts as a locus for their love affairs. Even so, Marcel’s appreciation of it adds another dimension. Taken with that of Swann’s, Proust makes explicit how the Sonata, or indeed music, functions as a means to bring to light that the individual is a collectivity and the collectivity is the source of singularisations.

The Sonata helps Marcel to “discover new things, the variety of a twofold diversity”. In reference the composer Marcels states that the music “enables us to know the essential quality of another person’s sensations… a diversity inside the work itself combining diverse individualities… whence the plenitude of a music that is indeed filled with so many different strains, each of which is a person.” Like Swann, in being open to affects, Marcel discovers that the composer is vital member of the network of characters: a network which functions as a ‘community’ that never gathers. As with Swann, instead of seeing the reception of music as a purely interiorised experience or one whose ‘possession’ via understanding brings status, Marcel brings Vinteuil’s presence into play, but, not remaining there, he populates the different components of the music to the point that listening becomes a social experience comprised of communication with imagined and absent others. It is as if Proust, normally convinced of the essential separateness of people (socialised repression and the reluctance to express the accursed share of subjectivity), has, through his pursual of music, come to offer poetic proof that the individuality of the characters is not something that exists innately within them, but is created between them. 

This ‘between’, this ‘gap’, is made material by the Sonata itself and we can project that not only is music indicative of a predominantly social orientation (reception contexts like the Salon are a point in case,) it may also be a metaphor for the unconscious being “evoked by and occurring within an inter-subjective field” (Joel Kovel). There are links between the characters that are not expressed but there is, nonetheless, a communication that is active, that is drawn out in terms of an affective and non-discursive response. Marcel says “This music seemed to me something truer than all known books… I thought that this was due to the fact that, what we feel about life not being felt in the form of ideas, its literary, that is to say, intellectual expression, describes it, explains it, analyses it, but does not recompose it…” Such re-composing is essential for À La Recherche, for it is through music that Proust most clearly infers that his project is not solely about recollection or memory, but is as much concerned with how memory operates to re-create self-representation and that this is achieved, so Proust seems to infer, by music being able to “render visible to ourselves that life of ours which cannot effectually observe itself.”  The self-distancing encouraged by music facilitates a re-working of experience such that what we know of ourselves is never static. Indeed, music with its rhythms and variegated pacings, its breadth of wide and narrow focus works as an analogue to this novel, where a sense of movement always implies a return to the past as a precondition for renewed possibilities (becomings.) A working-over. A laxity of logos.  The accursed share of affect as a social glue. An “abrogation of one’s dearest illusions”.

Howard Slater

1999. 

Edited 2025.

• Other texts by Howard Slater on datacide-magazine.com
• Table of content of Break/Flow 2
• All articles from Break/Flow 2

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