Illuminations, page 18
II
Matière et mémoire defines the nature of experience in the durée in such a way that the reader is bound to conclude that only a poet can be the adequate subject of such an experience. And it was indeed a poet who put Bergson’s theory of experience to the test. Proust’s work À la Recherche du temps perdu may be regarded as an attempt to produce experience synthetically, as Bergson imagines it, under today’s conditions, for there is less and less hope that it will come into being naturally. Proust, incidentally, does not evade the question in his work. He even introduces a new factor, one that involves an immanent critique of Bergson. Bergson emphasized the antagonism between the vita activa and the specific vita contemplativa which arises from memory. But he leads us to believe that turning to the contemplative actualization of the stream of life is a matter of free choice. From the start Proust indicates his divergent view terminologically. To him, the mémoire pure of Bergson’s theory becomes a mémoire involontaire. Proust immediately confronts this involuntary memory with a voluntary memory, one that is in the service of the intellect. The first pages of his great work are charged with making this relationship clear. In the reflection which introduces the term Proust tells us how poorly, for many years, he remembered the town of Combray in which, after all, he spent part of his childhood. One afternoon the taste of a kind of pastry called madeleine (which he later mentions often) transported him back to the past, whereas before then he had been limited to the promptings of a memory which obeyed the call of attentiveness. This he calls the mémoire volontaire, and it is its characteristic that the information which it gives about the past retains no trace of it. ‘It is the same with our own past. In vain we try to conjure it up again; the efforts of our intellect are futile.’ Therefore Proust, summing up, says that the past is ‘somewhere beyond the reach of the intellect, and unmistakably present in some material object (or in the sensation which such an object arouses in us), though we have no idea which one it is. As for that object, it depends entirely on chance whether we come upon it before we die or whether we never encounter it.’
According to Proust, it is a matter of chance whether an individual forms an image of himself, whether he can take hold of his experience. It is by no means inevitable to be dependent on chance in this matter. Man’s inner concerns do not have their issueless private character by nature. They do so only when he is increasingly unable to assimilate the data of the world around him by way of experience. Newspapers constitute one of many evidences of such an inability. If it were the intention of the press to have the reader assimilate the information it supplies as part of his own experience, it would not achieve its purpose. But its intention is just the opposite, and it is achieved: to isolate what happens from the realm in which it could affect the experience of the reader. The principles of journalistic information (freshness of the news, brevity, comprehensibility, and, above all, lack of connection between the individual news items) contribute as much to this as does the make-up of the pages and the paper’s style. (Karl Kraus never tired of demonstrating the great extent to which the linguistic usage of newspapers paralyzed the imagination of their readers.) Another reason for the isolation of information from experience is that the former does not enter ‘tradition.’ Newspapers appear in large editions. Few readers can boast of any information which another reader may require of him.
Historically, the various modes of communication have competed with one another. The replacement of the older narration by information, of information by sensation, reflects the increasing atrophy of experience. In turn, there is a contrast between all these forms and the story, which is one of the oldest forms of communication. It is not the object of the story to convey a happening per se, which is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds it in the life of the storyteller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening. It thus bears the marks of the storyteller much as the earthen vessel bears the marks of the potter’s hand.
Proust’s eight-volume work conveys an idea of the efforts it took to restore the figure of the storyteller to the present generation. Proust undertook this assignment with magnificent consistency. From the outset this involved him in the primary task of resurrecting his own childhood. In saying that it was a matter of chance whether the problem could be solved at all, he gave the full measure of its difficulty. In connection with these reflections he coined the phrase mémoire involontaire. This concept bears the marks of the situation which gave rise to it; it is part of the inventory of the individual who is isolated in many ways. Where there is experience in the strict sense of the word, certain contents of the individual past combine with material of the collective past. The rituals with their ceremonies, their festivals (quite probably nowhere recalled in Proust’s work) kept producing the amalgamation of these two elements of memory over and over again. They triggered recollection at certain times and remained handles of memory for a lifetime. In this way, voluntary and involuntary recollection lose their mutual exclusiveness.
III
In seeking a more substantial definition of what appears in Proust’s mémoire de l’intelligence as a by-product of Bergson’s theory, it is well to go back to Freud. In 1921 Freud published his essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which presents a correlation between memory (in the sense of the mémoire involontaire) and consciousness in the form of a hypothesis. The following remarks based on it are not intended to confirm it; we shall have to content ourselves with investigating the fruitfulness of this hypothesis in situations far removed from those which Freud had in mind when he wrote. Freud’s pupils are more likely to have encountered such situations. Some of Reik’s writings on his own theory of memory are in line with Proust’s distinction between involuntary and voluntary recollection. ‘The function of remembrance [Gedächtnis],’ Reik writes, ‘is the protection of impressions; memory [Erinnerung] aims at their disintegration. Remembrance is essentially conservative, memory is destructive.’ Freud’s fundamental thought, on which these remarks are based, is formulated by the assumption that ‘consciousness comes into being at the site of a memory trace.’ (For our purposes, there is no substantial difference between the concepts Erinnerung and Gedächtnis, as used in Freud’s essay.) Therefore, ‘it would be the special characteristic of consciousness that, unlike what happens in all other psychical systems, the excitatory process does not leave behind a permanent change in its elements, but expires, as it were, in the phenomenon of becoming conscious.’ The basic formula of this hypothesis is that ‘becoming conscious and leaving behind a memory trace are processes incompatible with each other within one and the same system.’ Rather, memory fragments are ‘often most powerful and most enduring when the incident which left them behind was one that never entered consciousness.’ Put in Proustian terms, this means that only what has not been experienced explicitly and consciously, what has not happened to the subject as an experience, can become a component of the mémoire involontaire. According to Freud, the attribution of ‘permanent traces as the basis of memory’ to processes of stimulation is reserved for ‘other systems,’ which must be thought of as different from consciousness. In Freud’s view, consciousness as such receives no memory traces whatever, but has another important function: protection against stimuli. ‘For a living organism, protection against stimuli is an almost more important function than the reception of stimuli; the protective shield is equipped with its own store of energy and must above all strive to preserve the special forms of conversion of energy operating in it against the effects of the excessive energies at work in the external world, effects which tend toward an equalization of potential and hence toward destruction.’ The threat from these energies is one of shocks. The more readily consciousness registers these shocks, the less likely are they to have a traumatic effect. Psychoanalytic theory strives to understand the nature of these traumatic shocks ‘on the basis of their breaking through the protective shield against stimuli.’ According to this theory, fright has ‘significance’ in the ‘absence of any preparedness for anxiety.’
Freud’s investigation was occasioned by a dream characteristic of accident neuroses which reproduce the catastrophe in which the patient was involved. Dreams of this kind, according to Freud, ‘endeavour to master the stimulus retroactively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis.’ Valéry seems to have had something similar in mind. The coincidence is worth noting, for Valéry was among those interested in the special functioning of psychic mechanisms under present-day conditions. (Moreover, Valéry was able to reconcile this interest with his poetic production, which remained exclusively lyric. He thus emerges as the only author who goes back directly to Baudelaire.) ‘The impressions and sense perceptions of man,’ Valéry writes, ‘actually belong in the category of surprises; they are evidence of an insufficiency in man…. Recollection is … an elemental phenomenon which aims at giving us the time for organizing the reception of stimuli which we initially lacked.’ The acceptance of shocks is facilitated by training in coping with stimuli, and, if need be, dreams as well as recollection may be enlisted. As a rule, however – so Freud assumes – this training devolves upon the wakeful consciousness, located in a part of the cortex which is ‘so blown out by the effect of the stimulus’ that it offers the most favourable situation for the reception of stimuli. That the shock is thus cushioned, parried by consciousness, would lend the incident that occasions it the character of having been lived in the strict sense. If it were incorporated directly in the registry of conscious memory, it would sterilize this incident for poetic experience.
The question suggests itself how lyric poetry can have as its basis an experience for which the shock experience has become the norm. One would expect such poetry to have a large measure of consciousness; it would suggest that a plan was at work in its composition. This is indeed true of Baudelaire’s poetry; it establishes a connection between him and Poe, among his predecessors, and with Valéry, among his successors. Proust’s and Valéry’s reflections concerning Baudelaire complement each other providentially. Proust wrote an essay about Baudelaire the significance of which is even exceeded by certain reflections in his novels. In his ‘Situation de Baudelaire’ Valéry supplies the classical introduction to the Fleurs du mal. There he says: ‘The problem for Baudelaire was bound to be this: to become a great poet, yet neither Lamartine nor Hugo nor Musset. I do not claim that this ambition was a conscious one in Baudelaire; but it was bound to be present in him, it was his reason of state.’ There is something odd about speaking of a reason of state in the case of a poet; there is something remarkable about it: the emancipation from experiences. Baudelaire’s poetic output is assigned a mission. He envisioned blank spaces which he filled in with his poems. His work cannot merely be categorized as historical, like anyone else’s, but it intended to be so and understood itself as such.
IV
The greater the share of the shock factor in particular impressions, the more constantly consciousness has to be alert as a screen against stimuli; the more efficiently it does so, the less do these impressions enter experience (Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour in one’s life (Erlebnis). Perhaps the special achievement of shock defence may be seen in its function of assigning to an incident a precise point in time in consciousness at the cost of the integrity of its contents. This would be a peak achievement of the intellect; it would turn the incident into a moment that has been lived (Erlebnis). Without reflection there would be nothing but the sudden start, usually the sensation of fright which, according to Freud, confirms the failure of the shock defence. Baudelaire has portrayed this condition in a harsh image. He speaks of a duel in which the artist, just before being beaten, screams in fright. This duel is the creative process itself. Thus Baudelaire placed the shock experience at the very centre of his artistic work. This self-portrait, which is corroborated by evidence from several contemporaries, is of great significance. Since he is himself exposed to fright, it is not unusual for Baudelaire to occasion fright. Vallès tells us about his eccentric grimaces; on the basis of a portrait by Nargeot, Pontmartin establishes Baudelaire’s alarming appearance; Claudel stresses the cutting quality he could give to his speech; Gautier speaks of the italicizing Baudelaire indulged in when reciting poetry; Nadar describes his jerky gait.
Psychiatry knows traumatophile types. Baudelaire made it his business to parry the shocks, no matter where they might come from, with his spiritual and his physical self. This shock defence is depicted graphically in an attitude of combat. Baudelaire describes his friend Constantin Guys, whom he visits when Paris is asleep: ‘… how he stands there, bent over his table, scrutinizing the sheet of paper just as intently as he does the objects around him by day; how he stabs away with his pencil, his pen, his brush; how he spurts water from his glass to the ceiling and tries his pen on his shirt; how he pursues his work swiftly and intensely, as though he were afraid that his images might escape him; thus he is combative, even when alone, and parries his own blows.’ In the opening stanza of his poem ‘Le Soleil’ Baudelaire has pictured himself engaged in such a fantastic combat; this is probably the only place in Les Fleurs du mal that shows the poet at work.
Le long du vieux faubourg, où pendent aux masures
Les persiennes, abri des secrètes luxures,
Quand le soleil cruel frappe à traits redoublés
Sur la ville et les champs, sure les toits et les blés,
Je vais m’exercer seul à ma fantasque escrime,
Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime,
Trébuchant sur les mots comme sur les pavés,
Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés.fn1
Shock is among those experiences that have assumed decisive importance for Baudelaire’s personality. Gide has dealt with the interstices between image and idea, word and thing, which are the real site of Baudelaire’s poetic excitation. Rivière has pointed to the subterranean shocks by which Baudelaire’s poetry is shaken; it is as though they caused words to collapse. Rivière has indicated such collapsing words.
Et qui sait si les fleurs nouvelles que je rêve
Trouveront dans ce sol lavé comme une grève
Le mystique aliment qui ferait leur vigueur.fn2
Or:
Cybèle, qui les aime, augmente ses verdures.fn3
Another example is this famous first line:
La servante au grand coeur dont vous étiez jalouse.fn4
To give these covert laws their due outside his verses as well was Baudelaire’s intention in his Spleen de Paris, his prose poems. In the dedication of his collection to the editor-in-chief of La Presse, Arsène Houssaye, Baudelaire wrote: ‘Who among us has not dreamt, in his ambitious days, of the miracle of a poetic prose? It would have to be musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and resistant enough to adapt itself to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the wave motions of dreaming, the shocks of consciousness. This ideal, which can turn into an idée fixe, will grip especially those who are at home in the giant cities and the web of their numberless interconnecting relationships.’
This passage suggests two insights. For one thing, it tells us about the close connection in Baudelaire between the figure of shock and contact with the metropolitan masses. For another, it tells us what is really meant by these masses. They do not stand for classes or any sort of collective; rather, they are nothing but the amorphous crowd of passers-by, the people in the street.1 This crowd, of whose existence Baudelaire is always aware, has not served as the model for any of his works, but it is imprinted on his creativity as a hidden figure, just as it constitutes the figure concealed in the fragment quoted before. We may discern the image of the fencer in it; the blows he deals are designed to open a path through the crowd for him. To be sure, the faubourgs through which the poet of ‘Le Soleil’ makes his way are deserted. But the meaning of the hidden configuration (which reveals the beauty of that stanza to its very depth) probably is this: it is the phantom crowd of the words, the fragments, the beginnings of lines from which the poet, in the deserted streets, wrests the poetic booty.
