Renascent Joyce

9. Scribbling into Eternity: Paris, Proust, “Proteus”

9 Scribbling into Eternity Paris, Proust, “Proteus” Christine Froula Did Shakespeare know what he was creating when he wrote Hamlet; or Leonardo when he painted the Last Supper? After all, the original genius of a man lies in his scribblings. . . . [I]f the minute scribblings that compose the big work are not significant, the big work goes for nothing no matter how grandly conceived. Which of us can control our scribblings? They are the script of one’s personality like your voice or your walk. James Joyce in conversation as reported by Arthur Power / - / - / - / / - / - / “Won’t | you come | to San- | dymount, | Ma | deline | the mare?” (U 3.21–22). These catalectic “iambs marching” sound in poet Stephen Dedalus ’s mind as his own jambs march the strand in “Proteus.”1 Gifford and Seidman gloss this floating apostrophe, this idle-seeming invitation qua prosodic example, as a possible echo of Madeleine Lemaire, the Parisian society painter whose fashionable salon in the rue de Monceau mingled belle époque aristocrats with artists, poets, and composers. Doubtless young Joyce was not among her guests, nor, probably, did he see Marcel Proust’s homage, “La cour aux lilas et l’atelier des roses: Le salon de Madame Lemaire,” published over the pseudonym Dominique in Le Figaro on May 11, 1903. That was a month almost to the day after John Joyce’s telegram summoned his son home from Paris to his dying mother’s bedside— too late for the impoverished Irish student ostensibly reading medicine in the capital of the world republic of letters to have perused it there, nor Scribbling into Eternity: Paris, Proust, “Proteus” 107 likely noticed by the aspiring Irish-European writer in the Latin quarter hat once home.2 Yet Joyce had lost no time getting hold of work by French contemporaries to fuel his single-handed Irish renaissance. On a 1903 side trip from Paris to Tours with his Siamese friend from the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, he had acquired Edouard Dujardin’s Les lauriers sont coupés (1887–88), a technical inspiration for Stephen’s streaming thoughts in “Proteus”—that most Parisian of episodes—when Joyce, fourteen years later, wrestled shapes strewn over his native provincial shores into avant-garde narrative form.3 In the rather less likely event that Joyce chanced upon Proust’s rare, selfpublished first book, Les plaisirs et les jours (1896), before drafting “Proteus” around 1917,4 he would have found it lavishly adorned by Lemaire’s still lifes and dramatic illustrations, which Proust hoped would entice the Faubourg grandees to acquire it for their libraries.5 Although Stephen’s Madeleine LemaireechocarriesnonecessaryProustianaura —withorwithoutProust,her name floated on the air in 1903 Paris—his preoccupation in “Proteus” with audience, posterity, and legacy evokes Joyce’s parallel course from obscurity to world fame. Stephen’s doggerel conjuring a salonnière for Sandymount, his juvenile fantasy that his epiphanies might be discovered in the world’s great libraries “after a few thousand years,” his wistful “Who ever anywhere will read these written words?” (U 3.143, 3.414–15) all evoke the young Joyce who composed fifteen epiphanies during his short stay in Paris, and who, in OctoberoftheyearStephenwalksSandymountstrandinmourningclothes, again flew to Dublin on a wing and prayer that as yet lacked an Ovidian imprimatur . “Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount Strand?” (U 3.18– 19). Insofar as Stephen recaptures his creator’s youth, his catalectic march is taking him “into eternity”—into the Ulysses “he” will write “in ten years,” although he cannot know it—by way of Paris, where an obscure provincial genius might catch the eye, if not of a society painter or duchess, then of a Sylvia Beach, an Ezra Pound, a Harriet Weaver to back his dream of a place in the world’s great libraries.6 If “Proteus” would not be “Proteus” without the Paris that published and lauded its Irish guest along with its native Proust, its 1917 composition date would seem too early for “Madeline the mare” to resonate with Proust or Plaisirs. Only in 1920, while worrying that he had “made a bad impression” in Paris, did Joyce acknowledge having read “some pages” of “a certain Mr. Marcel Proust,” which seemed to him to confirm his own superiority.7 Not until May 1922 were Joyce and Proust brought face to face, at the Schiffs’ 108 Christine Froula celebratory dinner at the Hotel Majestic for the premiere...