The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually (review)

Mieke Bal’s new work centers on Proust and is an impressive successor to her 1991 book, Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. As in the previous volume, Bal here delivers a provocative, meticulous, and engaging reading of her chosen subject, employing an interdisciplinary approach that she is uniquely qualified to apply to the kinds of cultural “texts” under consideration: works by writers, painters, and photographers including Proust, Rembrandt, Chardin, Baugin, Matisse, Bacon, Caravaggio, and Muybridge. In her “visual” reading of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and Contre Saint-Beuve, she ranges expertly through a variety of disciplines including art history, narratology, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and Biblical hermeneutics—all harnessed to her general project of demonstrating Proust’s reliance on and exploration of the imagery of the optical and visual in his theory of perception, of which the Recherche is his greatest elaboration.

Bal opens this ambitious book with two questions that lay the groundwork for her discussion of Proust’s “visual” text. “How can an image be written? And once written, how can it be read?” (p. 1). The book is a fascinating, though at times frustrating, attempt to provide answers to these provocative and important questions. The useful and lucid introduction is followed by three parts, each divided into several chapters and each “given over to one particular aspect of Proustian flatness” (p. 7). In Part 1, “The Mottled Screen: Figurations of Visual Art,” Bal demonstrates her particular skill at synthesizing textual and visual narrative vocabularies into deftly counterbalanced readings of poets and painters—in this case, Proust and Chardin. The bulk of this section is devoted to a reading of Chardin’s painting The Skate, one of several still lifes that Bal considers in great detail and in comparison with Proust’s own visual renderings. Here she shows her consummate skill in reading the subtleties of painted and written texts together. Part 2, “Voyages of Discovery,” explores issues of gender and sexuality, drawing on psychoanalysis far more than on the art criticism employed in the previous part. Part 3, “The Flatness of Photography,” returns us to the realm of visual art by invoking photography as analogical for Proust’s poetics because of its paradoxically fixed but fleeting nature. “Photography serves as a springboard,” Bal writes, “but also on occasion as a reference to a ground on which the ultimate fleeting being, light, can be fixed or ‘put down’ in writing. Here the other can be known, time can be fixed, and space can be spread out” (p. 245). This is a fitting conclusion to Bal’s effort to characterize or “fix” the essence of Proust’s highly visual technique, which, as her study shows, stretches and swells fleeting moments in time through its constant pauses to allow for minute attention to detail.

In delineating Proust’s flatness and the optical metaphors that his text liberally employs, Bal’s analysis brings up a number of interesting paradoxes. One of these is (for Proust’s hero) the agony caused by visual desire and physical fulfillment. Gazing from a distance at the object of desire, one can only see and not possess; yet on moving in close to kiss her cheek, the focus becomes blurry, “everything becomes muddled,” and one cannot feel pleasure because one is too close to see the beloved object (p. 6). Another paradox is that, “with Proust, the deepest secrets are not to be found in the depths” (p. 178), but on surfaces and their “patches” of detail. Bal argues persuasively that, rather than distantiation, detailing is Proust’s vital narrative strategy. It is through distantiation that “we can best measure the importance of the poetics of the detail as the very foundation for the endeavor of searching for lost time” (p. 185; my emphasis). Yet another paradox is produced by the emphasis throughout the novel on connection without penetration, in both visual and sexual terms; the image of the women’s...