The Transmission of Memory in James and Proust

The Transmission of Memory in James and Proust: Composing Private Texts in The Wings of the Dove and La Prisonnière Phyllis van Slyck City University of New York, LaGuardia Forthcoming in: Reading Henry James in the 21st Century: Heritage and Transmission. Eds. Annick Duperray, Adrian Harding, Dennis Tredy. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. The Transmission of Memory in James and Proust: Composing Private Texts in The Wings of the Dove and La Prisonnière Phyllis van Slyck City University of New York, LaGuardia Henry James and Marcel Proust, two giants of the nineteenth and twentieth century novel, explore strikingly similar territory: the emotionally powerful relationship between memory and imagination. Their characters explore the creative possibilities of memory, its capacity to produce the “illusion of immanence” (Sartre 50), and its ability to generate an intimacy with a subject that may not have been possible in “real” life. Jean Paul Sartre, The Imaginary, 53. I have taken the liberty of applying Sartre’s ideas about mental “images” to the construction of memories in James and Proust. It should be noted that Sartre makes a distinction between an “image” (“a given absent”) and a “memory” (“a given past”) (181); however, the creative aspect of memory in these writers’ texts, the way “irreal objects” are reconstituted (Sartre 142), makes the philosopher’s discussion of the “image” appropriate to our discussion of memory or what Ricoeur calls a “memory-image.” Both writers stage scenes in which characters compose imaginative “memory-images” (Ricoeur 53) in order to satisfy a desire. This activity offers an intriguing perspective on the themes of transmission and heritage. Proust and James are fascinated not only by the location of memories, their enigmatic encryption in inaccessible places, but also by the secret emptiness at the center of a memory that exposes the ultimate failure of transmission. Proust and James thus chart a tension, a fraught internal ambiguity, between memory and its emotional remainder. Although it is generally agreed that these two writers never met, their shared obsession with the reproduction of memories, specifically with the inner life of privately recalled and re-transmitted memory-images is worth sustained scrutiny. Although Proust and James may never have met, Edith Wharton interprets James’s response to A la Recherche, which she introduced to him: “He [James] seized upon Du Côté de Chez Swann and devoured it in a passion of curiosity and admiration. . . . I look back with peculiar pleasure at having made Proust known to James, for the encounter gave him his last, and one of his strongest, artistic emotions” (8). See also Bruce Lowery’s Marcel Proust et Henry James: Une Confrontation. An early reviewer of that text, William S. Bell, comments: “The evidence which Bruce Lowery gives in his ‘Introduction’ concerning the possible relations between Proust and James does not add up to a clear-cut case. There are only four passing allusions to James in Proust’s correspondence, one of them to “Henry James que je n’ai jamais connu” (576). If memory is the core of one’s understanding of self, and one’s connections to others, that is to say, one’s personal heritage, how do James and Proust explore not only the dialectic of transmission but also the telos or purpose of a memory, its relationship to one’s desire and one’s being? In an early story, “The Diary of a Man of Fifty,” James’s protagonist wonders about the curious power and hidden presence of memories that reside in an individual’s consciousness: At the moment they were powerful enough; but they afterwards faded away. What in the world became of them? Whatever becomes of such things, in the long intervals of consciousness? Where do they hide themselves away? In what unvisited cupboards and crannies of our being do they preserve themselves? They are like the lines of a letter written in sympathetic ink; hold the letter to the fire for a while and the grateful warmth brings out the invisible words. (1) For James, if memories are never truly lost, only hidden, they require a special kind of attention to be evoked and experienced anew. They are sensitive creatures, hiding themselves, preserving themselves, and, only surfacing if an individual knows how to “hold the letter to the fire.” Finding the “sympathetic ink” becomes a lifelong mission, not only for James but also Proust. Subjects recalled as creative compositions, thoroughly infused with an individual’s desire, are, perhaps, the central fact or truth for characters in both writers’ works. These re-transmissions enable the formation of the self as a passionate being, often newly engaged in a gratifying, transformative relationship. Such compositions, however, also reveal memory’s internal limitations. They betray the failure of the imagination to sustain a world. In The Wings of the Dove, Merton Densher recalls Kate Croy’s single visit to his rooms in Venice in a ritual re-enactment of desire. As a condition for that visit, he has agreed to stay with Milly Theale after the others depart, allowing the deception that he loves her to persist. After Kate has left, Densher goes out each day to be with Milly but returns to his rooms each night to relive this secret moment of pleasure with Kate. It played for him — certainly in this prime afterglow — the part of a treasure kept at home in safety and sanctity, something he was sure of finding in its place . . . The door had but to open for him to be with it again and for it to be all there: so intensely there that, as we say, no other act was possible to him than the renewed act, almost the hallucination, of intimacy. (400) Densher preserves the memory of his encounter with Kate, keeps the flame “lit,” as it were, by re-experiencing their intimacy on a private stage in his rooms each night: “He remained thus, in his own theatre, in his single person, perpetual orchestra to the ordered drama, the confirmed ‘run’; playing low and slow . . . for the situations of most importance” (400). The reader never sees the actual event that has transpired between the two lovers. We remain in the antechamber as this indirect encounter is orchestrated in “safety and sanctity.” Months later, when Densher returns to London, after Milly has refused to see him again, he does not reach out to Kate — until he receives Milly’s deathbed letter. He brings this letter to Kate, who tosses it, unopened, into the fire. While Densher flinches at her act, he does not attempt to retrieve the letter. This lost object must now be held to the fire of Densher’s imagination. He will experience, and re-experience, Kate’s burning of the letter as a kind of spiritual loss, as “the sacrifice of something sentient and throbbing” (451). In an ironic parallel to his intimate recollection of Kate, Densher now returns to his rooms to be with Milly’s lost letter: “He kept it back like a favorite pang; left it behind him, so to say, when he went out, but came home again the sooner for the certainty of finding it there” (450). He finds himself “undressing” and “embracing” the letter as though it is Milly herself: “. . . he took it out of its sacred corner and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one” (502). In this moment, Densher becomes a “father, baffled and tender” to Milly, the “maimed child” (502). The “soft wrappings” of memory are carefully undone as he imagines Milly’s loneliness and pain. The letter, an instance of failed transmission in a literal sense, is imaginatively recuperated by Densher, so that he may understand his own “baffled and tender” feelings. Milly’s memory, not Kate’s body, now becomes his most intimate companion, a reality that is not lost on Kate, who tells him in the end, “Her memory’s your love; you want no other” (509). Yet Densher is fixated not on the Milly he has pretended to love in Venice but on something Kate has helped to create: the mystery of Milly’s unknown words. Just as we do not see Kate and Densher in their one moment of intimacy, we do not see Densher’s rendering of Milly’s words. Instead, all of the energy of the text is located in Densher’s attitude: “The part of it missed forever was the turn she would have given her act . . . this turn . . . had possibilities that his imagination had extraordinarily filled out and refined” (503). Her unread letter is a powerful example of the way James gives depth and resonance to a hidden “text” that functions as a “memory,” but is actually a fantasy. Although Densher has “missed forever” the actual letter, the act of composing a hypothetical and intensely private substitute offers a powerful solace. The idea of memories preserving themselves in hidden places, in “unvisited cupboards and crannies of our being,” for us to revisit and imagine in new ways, is equally important to Marcel Proust. In the first pages of Contre Sainte-Beuve, Proust meditates on the way memories remain hidden, and captive forever, unless they can be called up and “set free” through an object or a sensation: Ce que l’intelligence nous rend sous le nom de passé n’est pas lui. En réalité . . . chaque heure de notre vie . . . s’incarne et se cache en quelque objet matériel. Elle y reste captive, à jamais captive, à moins que nous ne rencontrions l’objet. À travers lui nous la reconnaissons, nous l’appelons, et elle est délivrée. L’objet où elle se cache – ou la sensation, puisque tout objet par rapport à nous est sensation – nous pouvons très bien ne le rencontrer jamais. Et c’est ainsi qu’il y a des heures de notre vie qui ne ressusciteront jamais. (45) What intellect restores to us under the name of the past, is not the past. In reality, as soon as each hour of one’s life has died, it embodies itself in some material object. . . . There it remains captive, captive for ever, unless we should happen on the object, recognize what lies within, call it by its name, and so set it free. Very likely we may never happen on the object (or the sensation, since we apprehend every object as sensation) that it hides in; and then there are hours of our life that will never be resuscitated. (“Against Sainte-Beuve” 9) Proust shares James’s awareness of memory’s delicate way of hiding, the danger that it may never be re-found unless (or until) we re-encounter that “object” within which it has been hidden. A tone of lament for “hours” we may never be able to recover will inform much of A la Recherche as Marcel seeks the material objects where memory rests captive. But Proust’s protagonist will not only rely on la memoire involontaire, the “spontaneous recollection” (Bergson 188) that re-transmits a memory through an object or sensation as in the case of the madeleine. Marcel will also construct memories more purposefully, as when, in La Prisonnière, he observes Albertine asleep in his rooms and imagines possessing, not only the individual before him but all of her person, her history, and the sensations that he has experienced with her over time: “il me semblait que c’était condensée en lui, toute la personne, toute la vie de la charmante captive, étendue là sous mes yeux” (La Prisonnière 63). (“I felt that there was condensed in [her] the whole person, the whole life of the charming captive outstretched there before my eyes” (The Captive 85). All translations of La Prisonnière are from the C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation of The Captive, revised by D. J. Enright. For his imaginative retrieval of Albertine, Marcel, like Densher, creates a private stage where he is free to experience a love that is “pure,” “immaterial,” mysterious” (The Captive 85). Literally sequestering his subject in his rooms where he can watch her sleep, Marcel composes an emotionally gratifying series of fantasies: “Chaque fois qu’elle déplaçait sa tête elle créait une femme nouvelle” . . . . Il me semblait posséder non pas une, mais d’innombrables jeunes filles” (La Prisonnière 64). (“Whenever she moved her head, she created a different woman, often one whose existence I had never suspected . . . . I seemed to possess not one but countless girls”; The Captive 87). But Marcel seeks a degree of physical appropriation that Densher does not. When he is sure that Albertine sleeps soundly, he slips into the skin of his captive in a kind of projective immersion in the imaginary “sea” of her slumber: Alors, sentant que son sommeil était dans son plein, que je ne me heurterais pas à des écueils de conscience recouverts maintenant par la pleine mer du sommeil profond, délibérément je sautais sans bruit sur le lit, je me couchais au long d’elle, je prenais sa taille d’un de mes bras, je posais mes lèvres sur sa joue et sur son coeur, puis, sur toutes les parties de son corps, ma seule main restée libre et qui était soulevée aussi, comme les perles, par la respiration d’Albertine; moi-même, j’étais déplacé légèrement par son mouvement régulier : je m’étais embarqué sur le sommeil d’Albertine. (La Prisonnière 64) Then, feeling that the tide of her sleep was full, that I should not run aground on reefs of consciousness covered now by the high water of profound slumber, I would climb deliberately and noiselessly on to the bed, lie down by her side, clasp her waist in one arm, and place my lips upon her cheek and my free hand on her heart and then on every part of her body in turn, so that it too was raised, like the pearls, by her breathing; I myself was gently rocked by its regular motion: I had embarked upon the tide of Albertine’s sleep (The Captive 87) Marcel’s use of the imperfect (“je sautais”), translated as present conditional, “I would climb,” alerts us to the fact that this is not a single event but a memory of a carefully repeated synthesis and re-transmission. Although his beloved’s “rebirth” is rendered in a gentle, lyrical way, as he is “rocked by the regular motion of her body,” Marcel enacts a kind of intimate violence upon Albertine. He is free to put his lips and hands on “every part of her body in turn,” and as she lies “étendue là sous [ses] yeux” (“outstretched there before [his] eyes”; The Captive 85), he claims to possess “toute la personne, toute la vie de la charmante captive”; La Prisonnière 63) (“the whole person, the whole life of the charming captive”; The Captive 85). Finally, diving more deeply into what he imagines to be Albertine’s dreams, Marcel takes special pleasure in her “rebirth” in his rooms: “Ce fut dans ma chambre qu’elle renaquît à la conscience et à la vie” (La Prisonnière 66). (“It was in my room that she was reborn to consciousness and life”; The Captive 90). This rendering of Albertine reminds us of what Jean Paul Sartre calls an “incantation,” something “destined to produce the thing one desires, in a manner that one can take possession of it . . . a way of playing at satisfying. . . desire” (Imaginary 125). This idea of “incantation” also parallels Walter Benjamin’s observation that Proust engages in an “actualization” of a memory rather than simply a “reflection” (“The Image of Proust” 211). Marcel’s immersion in Albertine’s sleeping body is a dramatic “actualization” of a detailed sensual fantasy. Benjamin’s distinction between actualization and reflection serves our discussion of James as well: the purposeful concealment of the actual memory of Kate, or the imagined memory of Milly’s letter, is a strategy that enhances the focus on reflection, on the emotional remainder. If James’s and Proust’s characters both stage a private re-enactment of a real or imagined experience, if both are absorbed in embracing their subjects, where Densher seems to relinquish control and to submit to Milly, Marcel is consumed by the belief that Albertine’s absent presence assures his possession. If both protagonists seek a kind of gratification, Densher seeks solace by attempting to transmit, to make present an absence, the lost letter he cannot read. It is an opportunity to re-experience a desired suffering, and through that suffering, a kind of rebirth after a conflicted ethical failure. Marcel’s definition of “rebirth,” through which the desired Albertine comes to life, through his body, in his rooms, is a sensual drama of complete possession: “je n’étais pas médiocrement fier d’avoir cueilli, dérobé à tous, la plus belle rose” (La Prisonnière 61). He is “more than a little proud of having plucked and hidden from the rest of the world, the fairest rose” (The Captive 83) (Translation modified). The power of James’s text, of Densher’s experience, seems to reside in the mute unknowability of the original (or lost) experience — for both the character and the reader. We see nothing of what Densher imagines, but we feel everything — most of all, the pain of his loss. The power of Proust’s text derives from Marcel’s engulfment in his own composition: we see, almost experience, everything he imagines as he immerses himself in the body of Albertine. Simply put, what James conceals, Proust reveals. Or, as Adam Gopnick has recently suggested, Proust believes in evocations while James believes in implications. But both writers’ characters deliver to us, pulled from that imagined space, pure emotion/affection — as they momentarily capture, and then lose, their subjects. One of our leading students of memory, Paul Ricoeur, in Memory, History, Forgetting, invites us to consider the complicated relationship between memory and imagination, precisely the slippery kind of relationship being charted by these two writers’ protagonists. Ricoeur refers us back to Socrates’s discussion in The Sophist of the eikon (icon), associated with the “imprint” of a memory on the soul, and the eidolon or copy (memory) which Plato opposes to the phantasma, associated with the fantastic or fantasy. See Ricoeur’s discussion of the Theatetus, the Phaedrus and the Philebus in Memory, History, Forgetting, Chapter 1, “Memory and Imagination,” 11-15. Ricoeur, contemplating Socrates’ distinction between the original imprint and the memory, asks how the “affection-impression” arises, and what meaningful relation it maintains to the marking event” (the eikon) (14). While Densher and Marcel seem to seek a specific object or subject, or at least an eidolon, a copy, they actually invoke something closer to a sustaining “affection” for an absent or nonexistent thing, embellished by phantasma or fantasy. In other words, James and Proust are concerned with the gratifying, restorative role of memories that produce “affections,” and, in contrast to Socrates, both see the fantasy involved in transmission as enhancing memory with valuable truths, rather than a form of deception. The emotional experience itself, the “affection,” becomes the memory to which their characters return and immerse themselves — not the absent, or even present, “thing,” or even the copy. Intriguingly, both Densher and Marcel have also transformed their subjects into texts: Milly’s letter is written and rewritten in Densher’s imagination; Albertine’s body is inscribed with Marcel’s touch. This reduction of subject or object to a kind of text has consequences. Marcel is haunted because he cannot re-capture the emotion he experienced when he first saw Albertine on the beach at Balbec: “J’aurais bien voulu avant de l’embrasser, pouvoir la remplir à nouveau du mystère qu’elle avait pour moi sur la plage avant que je la connusse” (Le Côté de Guermantes II 74). (“I should certainly have liked, before kissing her, to be able to fill her afresh with the mystery that she had for me on the beach before I knew her”; The Guermantes Way II 978). In the end, both Marcel and Densher recognize that their subjects have lost what Benjamin refers to, in a slightly different context, as the “aura,” that which grants a work of art its authenticity: “The authenticity of a thing [the aura] is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning” (Italics mine “The Work of Art” 221). Both acknowledge this failure of transmission, the abridged story of a connection that is no longer recoverable. Just as Densher admits in the end that Milly’s letter is irretrievable, a “priceless pearl cast before his eyes. . . into the fathomless sea” (Wings 503), Marcel’s object of desire has been re-imagined in such a way that her identity, by his own testimony, is finally lost to him: “Un fois captive chez moi . . . Albertine avait perdu toutes ses couleurs (La Prisonnière 162).” (“As soon as she was a captive in my house . . . Albertine had lost all her colors”; The Captive 225). Thus it seems that both Densher and Marcel come to experience what Sartre calls “the essential nothingness of the imagined object” (Imaginary 180), and through that nothingness “the void around which desire turns,” (Zupancic 18). But James and Proust explore the powerful capacity of the imagination to recreate or compose a world that matches our impossible desires, even if such moments are fleeting. As Henri Bergson suggests, “To call up the past in the form of an image . . . we must have the power to value the useless, we must have the will to dream” (Matter and Memory 94). Perhaps the desire to enhance the memory, to recompose and transmit it again, “rending the tissue of time” (Blanchot 67) is the reason Densher allows Kate to destroy Milly’s letter and the reason Marcel creates fantasies that allow him to imagine “penetrating” Albertine in richer and more complex ways than his experience in “real” life provided. As Maurice Blanchot suggests, “”to live according to the time of narration . . . is to discover the magical simultaneities [of] existence. . . . Thus death, time’s handiwork, is deferred” (66; 67). Like the artist in James’s early tale, “The Madonna of the Future,” who is told his Madonna is an illusion, he, as well as Densher and Marcel, and perhaps all of us, find our desire and the truth that inscribes our personal heritage, through the freedom to imagine, to compose, to dream. Works Cited Bell, William S. “Marcel Proust et Henry James: Une Confrontation.” French Review 40.4 (Feb. 1967): 576-578. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968. Blanchot, Maurice. “Proust.” The Siren’s Song: Selected Essays. Trans. Sacha Rabinovitch. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. “The Image of Proust.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. Nancy M. Paul and W. Scott Palmer. London: Allen and Unwin, 1950. 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