In the Place of Language: Literature and the Architecture of the Referent

4. ‘‘Time Refound’’

4. ‘‘Time Refound’’ the recovery of time in the loss of life may seem, from the point of view of individual experience, an oxymoron. From the point of view of literary representation—or rather, from within the long view literature labors to represent—to re-find time is to measure the life, and thus the death, of experience, and in no literary work is that equation carried out more consistently, at greater length, or in more precise detail than in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the monumental work that, considered from a certain, abbreviated perspective it offers to view, can help illuminate and introduce Goethe’s remarkably un-Faust-like novel, a story of life that rather, mysteriously , requires building, Die Wahlverwandtschaften. While the stated ambitions of Proust’s narrator, ‘‘Marcel,’’ and Goethe’s dramatic character could hardly be more different—the one seeking to remember and possess in permanent form what the other wants only to forget—both Proust’s novel and Goethe’s drama represent the conflict between experience and time in the form of something that belongs to neither and serves both alternately. Marking time while negating experience and vice versa, it is only in this fundamentally equivocal sense that building can be said to mediate between them. It is through this double-edged mediation of the architectural, however, that the relation between Faust, in which building provides the basis for the final words of the ‘‘hero’’ of a markedly artificial drama, and Die Wahlverwandtschaften, in which building provides the basis for the first words of a ‘‘realist’’ fiction, may perhaps be glimpsed. For, recalling and contradicting Faust is the original dramatis persona of Proust’s novel of ‘‘time lost’’ and ‘‘refound,’’ the character 60 ‘‘time refound’’ ‡ 61 whom Marcel claims as both his model in life and countermodel in art, Swann. It is the famous, self-declared fate of Swann, unlike that of the narrator who states at the end of this circular work his intention to become a writer, to have ‘‘wasted years of [his] life, to have wanted to die, to have had [his] greatest love, for a woman [he] didn’t like, who was not of [his] genre.’’26 Yet it is also Swann who first constructs the ground, in constructing the ‘‘architecture,’’ of that wasted life when he builds in memory a foundation for its future from the groundless movement, waves or ‘‘flots’’ of music he had loved and lost, and which he heard again in this woman’s presence.27 Swann’s notational construction of memory secures its performance while obliterating its object, actual sensory experience itself, making the fleeting sonoric tides of the Vinteuil Sonata as visibly present as a ‘‘thing . . . of architecture,’’ while rendering the mysterious sensuousness of the music a thing of the past.28 The purpose of Faust’s, unlike Swann’s ‘‘architecture’’ is, however , precisely not to remember, not to relive or capture but rather to discard without trace sensory experience now past. Faust builds a foundation on moving waters so as to make memory itself a thing of the past and the present a thing of the future. In so doing he ends up repeating the words that make ‘‘Faust’’ as dramatis persona a thing of the past instead. Recalling words of his own composition, and whose utterance his whole freedom put off, Faust as builder finds himself wedded to his own wager, saying I do (want the instant to linger) to his own proposal (that he will not). Having passionately sought a composition he could not recall, and in whose identification and permanent notation his freedom is lost, Proust’s Swann too ends up wedded to a citation, but without divine intervention to ‘‘pull him on.’’ Instead, this most anti-Faustian character in fiction knowingly marries a form of the eternal feminine 26. Proust, À la recherche, I:382. 27. Ibid., I:209 (emphasis added). I have discussed Proust’s description of memory, which, ‘‘like a laborer working to establish durable foundations in the middle of tides,’’ constructs an ‘‘architecture’’ unrelated to either voluntary or involuntary memory, in ‘‘Remembering Swann’’; see also Chap. 7, and Coda of The Imposition of Form. 28. Proust, À la recherche, I:382. 62 ‡ goethe’s timelessness itself. Being pulled down by lemurs may be no worse than being married to the very body of quotation, Odette; of that life we...