Proust and the Visual

Nathalie Aubert

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780708325483
• eBook ISBN: 9781783163144
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Proust and the Visual is an edited volume of essays written by Proustian specialists, concerned with a rich phenomenological category, the "visual" whose prominent role in the novel is at the heart of its modernity. The "visual" is defined as manifesting in the image not only space, but also time. The "visual" is considered as a category that delineates the conditions of possibility of all visibility and constitutes an integral part of both the progression of the narrator's journey towards becoming a writer and of the unfolding of the novel itself.

Chapter 5

Proust and Handwriting

Akane Kawakami

Mme Verdurin’s own valet, who from the terrible shock of this fire in which he very nearly lost his life became a changed man, with handwriting so altered that when his master and mistress, then in Normandy, first received a letter from him with the news of the fire, they thought that someone was playing a practical joke on them. And not only an altered handwriting, according to Cottard, who maintains that this man, hitherto, always sober, became such an abominable sot that Mme Verdurin was obliged to get rid of him.¹

In À la recherche du temps perdu, handwriting often functions as a visual sign of the self, a sign that can create meaning in more than one context. At times the sense-making occurs on a graphological level: so Cottard’s anecdote about a man whose personality was drastically altered offers, as proof of this transformation, the completely different handwriting that the man was to call his own thereafter. Graphology has always had better press in France than elsewhere in Europe, perhaps because its inventor in modern times – Jean-Hippolyte Michon – was French. It was generally known about, and commanded some belief, in Proust’s circles: Remy de Gourmont wrote an encouraging preface for E. de Rougemont’s La Graphologie in 1914. Proust’s own view of handwriting certainly appears to accept, with no quibbles, the notion that there exists a relationship between handwriting and character, but in his novel he uses the purely visual aspect of handwriting to make it a sign of the whole self, not just of its psychology: he also uses handwriting as a metaphor for rendering legible other signs marking out the various characters in the novel. In this chapter I will examine a selection of instances in which handwriting functions as a visual sign of the self in À la Recherche, culminating in an extraordinary instance in which handwriting, and by extension writing, denotes temporarily life beyond death.

Handwriting as icon

There are numerous examples in À la Recherche of someone recognizing a handwriting, in the same way that they might recognize a familiar face or a garment: ‘my father […] saw M de Norpois’ handwriting on the envelope’; or ‘one morning she [Françoise] had to bring me with the rest of my mail a letter on the envelope of which she had recognised Albertine’s handwriting’.² In these cases, handwriting functions not so much as something to be read as an identifying sign, a sign that points to a person rather than describes a meaning. Handwriting, in other words, is denotative rather than connotative: the content of the message is a secondary product, as in the case of an illegible signature which is nevertheless recognizable or even an ‘x’ sign made by a person who cannot write his name and which, therefore, fulfils its function as an identifier. Madame de Cambremer’s hand, for instance, is so recognizably upper class that it would be ‘legible’ in this identifying sense even to an illiterate person. Indeed, its identifying powers are implausibly accurate to a Sherlock Holmesian degree:

Indeed a paralytic, stricken with agraphia after a stroke and reduced to looking at the script as at a drawing without being able to read it, would have gathered that the dowager Mme de Cambremer belonged to an old family in which the zealous cultivation of literature and the arts had brought a breath of fresh air to its aristocratic traditions. He would have guessed also the period in which the Marquise had learned simultaneously to write and to play Chopin’s music.³

In order to distinguish between different categories of signification, we may turn briefly to C. S. Peirce’s theory of signs. Peirce’s theory is a complex system which ramifies into a large number of categories when fully developed, but it is based on the tripartite relationship of sign, object and interpretant: ‘what the sign stands for is its object, what it stands to is the interpretant’.⁴ Between the sign and its object, there are three possible kinds of relationship. If a sign is like its object, it is called an icon (‘most icons […] are likenesses of their objects’).⁵ Thus a photograph may be considered to be an icon of what it represents. If a sign has an actual, existential relationship with its object, for instance, that of a weathervane to wind, then it is called an index. If a sign has a conventional relation to its object – a linguistic sign usually falls into this category – it is called a symbol. Following these distinctions, writing – when it is read for its content – is a conventional sign, or a symbol, whereas handwriting – when it is recognized rather than read – is more of an icon, a sign that resembles its object. That the relationship between handwriting and writer is a mimetic one for Proust is confirmed by the following description of Saint-Loup’s handwriting:

I could tell at once when it was from him that a letter came, for it had always that second face which a person assumes when he is absent, in the features of which (the characters of the handwriting) there is no reason why we should not suppose that we can detect an individual soul just as much as in the line of a nose or the inflexions of a voice.⁶

Not only does Proust suggest that the strokes of a particular handwriting capture the soul of their originator as much as the characteristics of a voice or the features of a face, but the use of the word ‘trait’ for all three cases in the French underlines what the three ‘icons’, to use Peirce’s term, have in common. Proust here also emphasizes how handwriting is as much an image as a photograph is, by bestowing on it nothing less than a face, ‘that second face which a person assumes when he is absent’. A photograph is precisely that: a second face which belongs unquestionably to the absent person, but a second face because it is different from the original in its immobility, its expression, its overall otherness from its living model. In saying that handwriting too can offer the viewer a second likeness, Proust puts handwriting and photography on the same level as visual identifiers, as denoters (rather than connoters) of the self, as proof of the self’s existence.

Proust was fascinated by photography, and had been quick to see its potential as well as its limitations: it is an important metaphor and object in various sections of À la Recherche.⁷ The difference between a photograph and its model, that is to say the nature of photography’s ‘second face’, is often used to shock or disappoint when a photograph is produced to impress someone as yet unacquainted with the original, for instance when Saint-Loup shows a photograph of Rachel to the Narrator, or when the Narrator in turn shows Saint-Loup a snapshot of Albertine. And, although Proust does not include in À la Recherche any examples of a person who fails, momentarily, to recognize his own photographic ‘second visage’ – unlike Barthes, who makes much of his failure to recognize himself in photographs⁸ – he does offer an instance of the Narrator struggling to recognize his own handwriting: ‘I had difficulty in recognising the futile, straggling lines of my own handwriting beneath the circles stamped on it at the post-office’, he says, describing a petit bleu that he sent to Gilberte, and which is subsequently brought to his attention.⁹

So handwriting, just like a photograph or a face, is made up of features whose overall arrangement resembles the person who held the pen. Subsequently, if and when these features are interpreted, that is to say read as individual signs, the result begins to approximate graphology. In other words, the iconic ‘second visage’ which handwriting presents to us and which unmistakeably denotes a certain person, can then be broken down into a series of features that connote certain psychological qualities. These can then be ascribed to the person in question, as in the following description of Odette’s hand: ‘That large handwriting in which an affectation of British stiffness imposed an apparent discipline upon ill-formed characters, suggestive, perhaps, to less biased eyes than his, of an untidiness of mind, a fragmentary education, a want of sincerity and will-power.¹⁰ It is important to distinguish between these two ways of viewing a hand. The first, in which a handwriting denotes its origin, is one in which handwriting functions as a complete package which physically resembles its author. The second, where a handwriting is analysed graphologically, breaks the package down into features that belong to a sign system in which certain kinds of stroke mean particular things (unformedness, for instance, connotes unclear thinking habits). These signs cannot be described as purely arbitrary: indeed, they are probably closer to being hieroglyphs, that is to say signs which have a causal relationship with the characteristics they describe: so a large and vigorous hand might be said to belong to a generous and energetic personality.¹¹ In Michel Tournier’s La Goutte d’or, the tale of the Blond Queen describes a woman whose great beauty bewitches all who see her portrait, until a young boy breaks down the perfect features into intelligible signs and learns to read her beauty: the ‘traits’ of her face can, to a practised eye, become the ‘traits’ of a writing. Similarly, handwriting in Proust can be both visual image and a system of connotative signs, even before it is seen as a recognizable sequence of arbitrary signs, better known as French, that can be ‘read’ in the usual sense.

The above description of Odette’s handwriting shows another way in which handwriting, this time at the graphologically analysable level, is comparable to photography. Odette’s hand offers the reader a clear view of her character, but only to a reader whose view is not coloured by prior acquaintance with her charming person (‘ill-formed characters, suggestive, perhaps, to less biased eyes than his’): in this case the reader is Swann, who has just begun to fall in love with her, so the chances of clear vision are not promising. The fact that the evidence, so to speak, visible in her handwriting can be obscured by affect is reminiscent of various moments in À la Recherche in which we realize that we never ‘see’ a photograph without our vision being obscured by our feelings for the model. The examples of Rachel and Albertine’s photographs have already been mentioned: in each case, the vision of he who loves Rachel/Albertine is clouded, unreliable, whereas the stranger – be it Saint-Loup or the Narrator – is able to ‘see’ Rachel or Albertine clearly, or at least more clearly than the man in love.

These feelings or emotions that can impede clarity of vision are what Walter Benjamin called aura, an effect which he associated with objects of art, paintings or portraits: he defines aura as ‘associations or clusters of images gathered about an object of reverence’, and also as ‘an atmosphere, or nimbus, obscuring an object’.¹² In other words, aura is the effect of the viewer’s emotional investment in a loved person or object. The following quotation shows the Narrator’s realizing that he has always seen his grandmother through such ‘love-tinted’ spectacles, in a rare moment when he sees her with a ‘photographic’ kind of vision that strips her of her aura:

I, for whom my grandmother was still myself, I who had never seen her save in my own soul, always in the same place in the past, through the transparency of contiguous and overlapping memories, suddenly, […] for the first time and for a moment only, since she vanished very quickly, I saw, sitting on the sofa beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, day-dreaming, letting her slightly crazed eyes wander over a book, an overburdened old woman whom I did not know.¹³

Visual experience is never free of thought: we never see with a truly ‘naked’ eye, there is always ‘the echo of a thought in sight’.¹⁴ Whether we are looking at a photograph or the handwriting of someone we know, our vision will always be affected by our feelings for the person: in this sense, also, the photograph is no more ‘immediate’ a resemblance than handwriting. In both cases we are in the presence of icons, signs which resemble the object but whose features may be obscured by an aura of our own creation.

Handwriting as metaphor

Handwriting for Proust can thus be an icon and also something between an index and a symbol, a sign with graphological value. At times it is even the sort of sign for which it is most usually known: a set of conventional, legible signs, French or English or something similar, an arbitrary, Saussurean sign system. Interestingly, however, when handwriting is being used in this ‘normal’ sense in À la Recherche, it is usually functioning as a metaphor. The features of the Balbec hotel manager’s face, for instance, are described as a writing, an idiosyncratic han...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series editors’ preface
• Note on abbrevations and quotations
• Figures
• Contributors
• Introduction
• I. The philosophical implications of the quest for truth
• II. Proust’s response to the visual world: the verbal semiotics of translation from the seen to the unseen
• III. Other artists’ interpretations of À la recherche du temps perdu