Malcolm Bowie - Proust Among the Stars: How to Read Him; Why Read Him?

William Collins

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1998

Copyright Malcolm Bowie

Malcolm Bowie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006863557

Ebook Edition JUNE 2016 ISBN: 9780008193324

Version: 2016-06-06

More from the reviews

The great strength of the book lies in the way Professor Bowie traces the alternating rhythms of Prousts sensibility in the looping movement of his complex sentences and of his meandering narrative The overriding subject of Proust Among the Stars and its major contribution to Proust studies is a rhythm that lies both in the periodic concentration and dispersal of the narrators sense of selfhood and in the alternating copiousness and restraint of the novels deployment of language. Bowies discussions of the foldings and unfoldings in Prousts sentences and in his convoluted storyline contribute to the sustained demonstration that Prousts novel breathes, that it develops the sensible pulse of a living thing. A responsive reader soon begins to sense the alternating rhythms that propel the novel: solitude and society, elation and despair, plenitude and nothingness. Bowie encourages us to hear these vital rhythms in every aspect of Prousts work Like Baudelaire, Proust found a way which to describe the vast arena in which life, both individual and general, enacts its elaborate dance, alternating ceaselessly between sturdiness and precariousness. We all inhabit that arena. Yet without literary works as revealing as these, we barely recognise it.

ROGER SHATTUCK, TLS

Very refreshing read this splendidly tough-minded and generous introduction

GABRIEL JOSIPOVICI, Independent

Just, discriminating, deft and learned.

ROBIN PURVES, Glasgow Herald

Ripplingly intricate Bowie is as at home with the intellectually complex (he has written on Mallarm and the Art of Being Difficult), as with the indomitably tortuous (a surprisingly agreeable primer on Lacan), acutely shading in with expert deftness the cross-hatchings of feelings and commitment within A la recherche.

ERIC GRIFFITHS, Evening Standard

Clear and inventively analytical

ROBERT NYE, Scotsman

Subtle and beautiful

PETER CONRAD, Observer

The love and knowledge Malcolm Bowie demonstrates in Proust Among the Stars makes this the book for existing and would-be buffs

LISA APPIGNANESI, Independent, Books of the Year

A trenchant, affectionate and beautifully written study.

EUAN CAMERON, Tablet

There are plenty of quotations from Proust in Bowies book; none, though, have drifted free from its moorings; all beat us back ceaselessly to what he calls that three thousand page incantation, an insolently protracted exercise in word-magic. Proust is worth it. Bowies book helps explain why.

STUART JEFFRIES, Guardian

A searching attempt to grasp the nature of Prousts vast project [written with] sheer passionate thoughtfulness. Bowie gives brilliant analyses of Prousts long sentences, showing how the wavering movement of feeling in them can actually lift the reader up into an experience like the uneasy rise and culmination or the frustration of physical desire The final chapter draws Bowies argument together through a reflection on the scene where Marcel and Albertine lie together at night on Balbec beach. This is where we find Proust among the stars. At one moment the stars are a pure scattering of luminous points, and turn the narrator into a scatterbrain. This images the books variety and richness. The next minute the stars have become constellations symbols of the books colossal architecture. Bowie proceeds from here to a final, fascinating consideration of all the other meanings of stars in Ala recherche. I think he gets three or four stars himself for this fresh and ardent book.

DERWENT MAY, The Times

Sind wir nicht auch ein Weltgebaude, so gut als der Sternenhimmel, und eines das wir besser kennen solten, und besser kennen knnten, sollte man denken, als das dort oben?

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG, Gedankenbcher

Are we too not a cosmic system, and one we know better, or at least ought to know better, than we do the heavenly firmament?

Notebooks

It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy, or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Friendship

LET THE MILKY WAY BE SPLIT INTO THE MILKY WAY OF INVENTOR/EXPLORERS AND THE MILKY WAY OF INVESTOR/EXPLOITERS

VELIMIR KHLEBNIKOV, The Trumpet of the Martians

CONTENTS

My Proust quotations are taken from the new Pliade edition of A la recherche du temps perdu (4 volumes under the general editorship of Jean-Yves Tadi, Paris, Gallimard, 19879), and accompanied in my main text by volume number and page. English translations of each passage quoted are taken from C. K. Scott Moncrieffs version as revised by Terence Kilmartin, and further revised, to take account of the additions and corrections made by Tadi and his team, by D. J. Enright (6 volumes, Chatto and Windus, 1992), and again accompanied by volume and number and page. I have silently corrected a number of minor errors in this admirable English version.

The novel itself, and its component volumes, are referred to by their French titles throughout:

A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time)

Du ct de chez Swann (Swanns Way)

A lombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (Within a Budding Grove)

Le Ct de Guermantes (The Guermantes Way)

Sodome et Gomorrhe (Sodom and Gomorrah)

La Prisonnire (The Captive)

Albertine disparue (The Fugitive)

Le Temps retrouv (Time Regained)

This volume is subdivided into Combray, Un Amour de Swann (Swann in Love), and Noms de pays: le nom (Place-Names: The Name).

Sources for all other quotations and references are provided in the Notes section (below, pp. 32938).

Le seul vritable voyage, le seul bain de Jouvence, ce ne serait pas daller vers de nouveaux paysages, mais davoir dautres yeux, de voir lunivers avec les yeux dun autre, de cent autres, de voir les cent univers que chacun deux voit, que chacun deux est; et cela nous le pouvons avec un Elstir, avec un Vinteuil, avec leurs pareils, nous volons vraiment dtoiles en toiles.