Proust and Benjamin: the Invisible Image

Benjamin's essay "Zum Bilde Prousts" questions the status of the image even as it leafs through the possibilities and variations that form it—as photograph, figure, representation, disappearing trace or promise of creation. As the image of Proust's novel, Benjamin's text takes up the elements of A la Recherche du temps perdu (poetic language, autobiography, critical commentary) in the terms of Benjamin's theory of allegory reflected through the Proustian strategy of reading and writing. "Zum Bilde Prousts" examines the traditional markers of "art" and "life," locating Proustian recherche—and Benjamin's image—in the deep waters beyond them. Through an interpretation of Benjamin's image of Proustian ecstasy (the descent of the mystic) and the images unfolded "Au Temps Perdu" (Benjamin's mystical station of nineteenth-century allegory), Benjamin's essay sollicits a new reading of time and eternity, memory and ecstasy. The final illumination of Proust's artful night indicates the decisive turn toward writing at the spot where "Niles of language" come together—the point of convergence of the image and its invisibility. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol11/iss1/6 PROUST AND BENJAMIN: THE INVISIBLE IMAGE BERYL SCHLOSSMAN The Johns Hopkins University Aux veux du souvenir At the conclusion of the Proustian itinerary, the closing sentence of A la Recherche du temps perdu, the reader circles back to the "petite phrase" at the beginning: "Longtemps je me suis couche de bonne heure." Although it has become a critical commonplace to link the narrator's conclusive vocation with the writing of Proust's novel, the gesture of circularity is encoded within Proust's fiction: it is an effect. Unlike the narrator, Proust himself is the author of the Recherche. At the very moment of circling back, the reader is confronted by the impossibility of his own gesture and the incommensurable gap separating the announcement of the narrator's scriptural vocation from the first sentence and its nightfall. Just as the arc cannot be closed and made into a circle, it is impossible to collapse narrator and author into a single identity. In this sense, the effect of the Proustian voyage toward the narrator's vocation is the revelation of vocation as mystery-as a mystical event. The "end" of Proust's novel opens the question of vocation rather than closing it. Beyond rational experience, the ecstasy that takes the narrator as its field reveals truth to him in the form of an inner book awaiting creation. It is not by chance that at the end of Walter Benjamin's essay, "Zum Bilde Prousts" ("Toward the Image of Proust "),' the reader turns back to its first paragraph in search of a beginning-something that might have led to the final Proustian image of Proust himself. creating the Creation, suspended on a scaffold like Michelangelo. But Proust's scaffold is the sickbed, and death. In Benjamin's text as in Proust's final scene of the matinee chez la princesse de Guermantes, the image of creation is predicated on one of disappearance. The central Bild-figure, representation, photograph, and so on-is as much