Premises of Visuality: Max Blecher and Marcel Proust

Abstract

In this article we discuss the modern premises of visuality and the effects of the cultural transfer of optical and photographic techniques on the work of Max Blecher, a Romanian Jewish writer who was a keen explorer of Marcel Proust’s works. In his works Blecher pursued the same theme as Proust—the mechanisms of interior memory and life—and often used optical instruments as a metaphor of identity. The role of the photographic model in his depiction of social tableaux, characters, and dispositions, originated partly in the influence of Proust’s writing and partly in other techniques of the European literary avant-gardes.

Acknowledgement

This paper was supported by the project “Progress and development through post-doctoral research and innovation in engineering and applied sciences– PRiDE - Contract no. POSDRU/89/1.5/S/57083”, a project co-funded from European Social Fund through Sectorial Operational Program Human Resources 2007-2013.

Notes

1. Max Blecher, Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality, trans. Alistair Ian Blyth (Plymouth, UK: University of Plymouth Press, 2009), 26; originally published as Intimplari din irealitatea imediata (Buckarest, 1937); page references to the English edition are cited in the text.

2. The features that initially justified considering Blecher as a follower of Proust included the use of the dialectics of remembrance and oblivion, the refined psychological construct, the homodiegetical view, the pregnant auto-fictional character, and even the writer’s biography. The young Blecher’s reception of Proust, as a medical student in Paris in the late 1920s, was quickly noted in literary circles. His close friendship with Pierre Minet also seems to have had a powerful effect on him. He had early on published work in French literary journals under André Breton, such as Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution, and Les Feuillets inutiles. But his association with Proust seems even more striking if we consider their physical conditions: Michel Foucault’s comments in “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” (in Dits et écrits [Paris: Gallimard, 2001]) on the mutual determination of the process of writing and death and on how Proust envisaged his literary creation in the confinement imposed by his asthma, also applies to Blecher. Suffering from bone tuberculosis, Blecher wrote his novel in bed in utter isolation from the world outside. His novelistic reconstruction of reality shares much with Proust’s approach, though we hesitate to limit their similarity to merely placing their art between autobiography and fiction. As with Proust, Blecher’s visual observation is often a metaphor of identity.

3. Ernst Robert Curtius, Französischer Geist im neuen Europa (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1925), Die französische Kultur (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1930).

4. Max Blecher, Vizuina luminata: Jurnal de sanatoriu [The Lit Up Burrow: Sanatorium Journal] (Bucharest, 1947; rpt., Bucharest: Cartea Romaneasca, 1971).

5. Marcel Proust, Essais et articles (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 341.

6. We should consider here the modern conception of the act of writing, of self-observation, and self-analysis. The metaphor of the telescope, which is often applied to writing, reinforces the metaphor of writing as a translation of the reader’s sensitivities, which is also of Proustian origin, suggesting that the act of writing potentially enables the reader to see the minute movements in the invisible layers of the subjective world.

7. Frédéric Fladenmüller, Téléscopie. La science du genre d’A la Recherche du temps perdu (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 18.

8. From the 1960s onwards, scholars have turned their attention to the role of optical instruments in Proustian fiction. See, among others, Roger Schattuk, Proust’s Binoculars (1963), Infantino Stefen, Photographic Vision in Proust (1992), Mieke Bal, Images littéraires: ou comment lire visuellement Proust (1997), Frédéric Fladenmüller, Téléscopie. La science du genre d’A la recherche du temps perdu (2002), Patrick Matthieu, Proust, une question de vision: pulsion scopique, photographie et représentation littéraires (2009), and Jean-François Chevrier, Proust et la photographie: La résurrection de Venise (2009).

9. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

10. Schopenhauer, whose philosophy had a major impact on the modern concept of the irrational and dynamic nature of the self, devoted a large part of his work to the study of the meeting points of thought and sensorial perceptions. In Techniques of the Observer Crary considers him as “one of the first major nineteenth-century thinkers to detail the unstable and specifically temporal nature of perception,” and to study the connection between attention and perceptual disintegration. The faulty and fragmentary nature of subjective attention is compared, in Schopenhauer’s words, to a “magical lantern, in the focus of which only one picture can appear at a time; and every picture, even when it depicts the most noble thing, must nevertheless soon vanish to make way for the most different and most vulgar thing ” (59).

11. Any discussion of the economic development of Romania in early-twentieth-century Europe should take into account two factors: (1) Romania versus the Western countries (France, Germany, Great Britain, etc.); and (2) Romania versus the other Balkan countries. After the 1918 Union, Romania was pulled by two opposite complexes: a sense of inferiority towards the Western world, and a sense of superiority towards the other Balkan countries.

12. In the mid-nineteenth century, following the request of Napoleon III (Second Empire) to reshape the architectural structure of Paris after the model of London, Georges-Eugène Haussmann based his modernization project on optical criteria. Around the turn of the century, Romanian city plans also privileged a cleaner geometry of its ancient winding and tangled street lines. These changes were made not only in the larger Romanian cities of Bucharest, Iasi, Cluj but also in southern cities that benefited from the Danube trade, such as Braila, Turnu, Severin, Oltenita, and Cernavoda. Still, the architectural level of the Romanian city projects was not comparable to that of Western capitals.

13. The Romanian painters Theodor Amann and Nicolae Grigorescu whose works touch on national identity had studied art in the impressionist circles of the Barbizon School in Paris.

14. Painting from photographs was fashionable in France from as early as the Romantic period. From the 1850s onwards it became common practice in impressionist circles: Gustave Courbet, whose work marked the passage from realism to the Barbizon School, used photographs to paint Les Baigneuses, L’Atelier, La Femme au perroquet, and especially L’Enterrement à Ornan. In 1855, Jean-François Millet told Edward Wheelwright that he used photos as inspiration material for his paintings; Edouard Manet used photographs as a model for La Mort de Maximilien, and Edgar Degas was known for recreating photos in pastel.

15. It was well known that war photographer Karl Popp von Szathmary collaborated with painter Theodor Amann, whose themes were historical and patriotic (The 1907 Riot, and The Independence War).

16. The first photographic studios in Bucharest opened only one year after the French State patented the technique for fixing the image on a photographic plate developed by Daguerre and Niepce in 1839. Wilhelm Priz, Friedrich Binder, and I. Pohlmann owned modern photography laboratories that were quite popular in Bucharest at the time.

17. Karl Popp von Szathmary, Micul Album al Razboiului de Independenta [A Brief Album of the Independence War], I.V. Socec, Bucuresti, 1902. Von Szathmary, the first war photographer to document the Crimean War (1853–56), also produced many photographs of the Romanian Independence War (1877–78), which were published in the German magazine Illustrierte Zeitung and in The Illustrated London News. Many of his Independence War photos were published in Suvenir din Resbelul 1877–1878 [Memories from the 1877–1878 War], are now in the Archives of the National Library in Bucharest. He produced the first photo albums of nineteenth-century Bucharest and many photos of Romanian royal history.

18. Works on photography included among others: Marius de Zayas, Photography (1913), Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo Futurista (1913), Alvin Langdon Coburn, The Future of Pictorial Photography (1916), Paul Strand, Fotografie und der neue Gott (1922), Karel Teige, Bild-Manifest (1923), Edward Weston, Presentation Instead of Interpretation (1924-25), László Moholy-Nagy, Die beispiellose Fotografie (1927), Siegfried Kracauer, Die Fotografie (1927), Salvador Dalí, Photography, Pure Creation of the Mind (1927), and Franz Roh, Mechanismus und Ausdruck (1929).

19. See Raluca Hergheligiu and Oana Petrovici, “Photography in Romanian and European Avant-Garde (1900–1950),” International Journal of Arts and Sciences 24 (2011): 397–404.

20. The interest in Proustian fiction within less than a decade after Proust’s death in 1922 grew out of the acknowledged affinities between his writing and the literary avant-gardes. Proust had become aware of these potential analogies, as reflected by his fear of being labeled a decadent through the association of his work with Wagner’s music. See Nathalie Mauriac-Dyer, Proust inachevé (Paris: Champion, 2005).

21. Infantino Stephen, Photographic Vision in Proust (New York: Peter Lang, 1992),

64.

22. Character inversion in Proust’s writing has been widely debated. In Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality the idea is introduced discreetly by reference to the secret feelings the narrator had for Paul Weber: “I loved him very much, but in secret, and my heart would pound when I caught sight of him on the stairs” (71). Paul Weber’s role in Occurrence allows of a double interpretation. He is “the most enigmatic and fine wax figure” on the floor of the Weber house, the one to bring there “the pale woman, with gestures and a walk like a quiet machinery, who was missing” (72). Obviously, Paul Weber will get married (the hint of the woman’s existence is a repetitive prolepsis), but the false context of the wedding, “gravely ridiculous,” “secretly and intimately ridiculous,” where he though “a bit tired,” keeps on a “sad and forced” smile, a jester’s outfit matching the narrator’s figure, “the small and ignored jester” of the wedding, looking as sad as the groom, indicates a possible double interpretation of the hint on the feminine presence in the Weber house as a repetitive prolepsis (a reference to a later event in the novel, or a “memory from the future,” used by Proust too in In Search of Lost Time), but it also suggests a possible inversion of Paul Weber himself. With a possible love affair between Paul Weber and the narrator in sight, bringing the wax woman into the Weber house can also symbolize his turn to homosexuality. Several details in the novel suggest a possible love relationship between them.

23. See Edward Bizub, Proust et le moi divisé. La Recherche – creuset de la psychologie expérimentale (Droz: Genève, 2006).

24. Irene Albers, Photographische Momente bei Claude Simon (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2002), 116.

25. In “Verführerische Bilder. Zur Intermedialität von Gender, Fetischismus und Feminismus,” Michael Wetzel emphasizes that in French realism the theoretical models of mimetic representation compete with physiological models of contiguity; in Der Entzug der Bilder. Visuelle Realitäten, ed. Michael Wetzel and Herta Wolf (Munich: Fink, 1994), 338.

26. In perhaps the most impressive chapter of La chambre claire: Notes sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), Roland Barthes quotes Proust’s assertion about the inconsistency of photography as a sign of recovering the image of a long lost person: “Je n’espérais pas de la ‘retrouver’ je n’attendais rien de ces photographies d’un être, devant lesquelles on se le rappelle moins bien qu’en se contentant de penser à lui.” Marcel Proust, A la Recherche du temps perdu (Paris : Gallimard, 2005), 886.

27. Two fragments from A la Recherche du temps perdu illustrate the incongruence between the photographic image and reality. The first is the narrator’s last meeting with his grandmother, where the image of the dying woman, so different from the narrator’s memories of her, is compared to a photograph. This confirms the narrator’s earlier belief that photography is not true to reality: “Ce qui, mécaniquement, se fit à ce moment dans mes yeux quand j’aperçus ma grand-mère, ce fut bien une photographie. … Et, comme un malade qui, ne s’étant pas regardé depuis longtemps et composant à tout moment le visage qu’il ne voit pas d’après l’image idéale qu’il porte en soi-même dans sa pensée… j’aperçus sur le canapé, sous la lampe, rouge, lourde et vulgaire, malade, rêvassant, promenant au-dessus d’un livre des yeux un peu fous, une vieille femme accablée que je ne connaissais pas” (854). The second fragment is where he grasps the difference between the two perspectives, human and photographic: “Mais qu’au lieu de notre œil, ce soit un objectif purement matériel, une plaque photographique, qui ait regardé alors ce que nous verrons, par exemple dans la cour de l’Institut, au lieu de la sortie d’un académicien qui veut appeler un fiacre, ce sera sa titubation, ses précautions pour ne pas tomber en arrière, la parabole de sa chute, comme s’il était ivre ou que le sol fût couvert de verglas” (853).

28. This form of fictional transfer of perception from the physical to the imaginary (photographic) body matches Blecher’s intention to draw a parallel between reality and unreality, where the latter is understood as either the imaginary or the oneiric. The surrealist sources of this form are easy to identify: in “Salvador Dalí, écrivain et autobiographe. Vu de la Suisse,” The European Legacy 15.7 (2010): 901–3, Yves Laberge outlines the premises of this form in Dali’s work, which also influenced Blecher. In his letter to his friend Saşa Pană, a leading representative of Romanian surrealism, from 7 July 1934, Blecher expressed his admiration for their contemporary fellow artist and collaborator of André Breton’s surrealist circle, admitting his wish to convey a vision similar to that of Dalí’s, “that cold lunacy, perfectly legible and essential.” Blecher thoroughly confirms Laberge’s account of Dalí’s life and work, for he too “lived in an age when the exploration of the subconscious by all possible means (including introspective art and writing) was frenetically encouraged by psychoanalysis and by the surrealist movement he had belonged to for a short while” (our translation).

29. Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, 1425.

30. For the experiments of other modernist writers, see Raluca Hergheligiu, “Ursprung oder Finalität? Einiges zur modernen Paradoxie der Autor-Text-Beziehung bei Thomas Mann und Marcel Proust,” Analele Universităţii Alexandru Ioan Cuza, Iaşi, Limbi şi literaturi străine 10 (2007): 155–59.

31. Linda Hutcheon defines narrative features, including double optics, self-reflexivity, linguistic puns and metafiction, as characteristics of postmodern literature. See Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1983).

32. Angelika Corbineau-Hoffmann, Beschreibung als Verfahren. Die Ethik des Objekts im Werk Marcel Prousts (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1980). This concept of imaginative memory is associated with the theories and literary practices of German Romanticism and is further elaborated by Roderich Billermann in Die Metapher bei Marcel Proust. Ihre Wurzel bei Novalis, Heine und Baudelaire, ihre Theorie und Praxis (Munich: Fink, 2000).

33. Erwin Koppen: Literatur und Photographie: Über Geschichte und Thematik einer Medienentwicklung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987), 101.

34. Max Blecher, Intimplari din irealitatea imediata (Bucharest: Editura Art, 2009), 31, our translation.

35. Blecher, Intimplari din irealitatea imediata, 31; our translation.

36. Blecher’s novels were translated into German by Ernest Wichner (Aus der unmittelbaren Unwirklichkeit [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003], and Vernarbte Herzen ([Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006]); Aventures dans l’irréalité immédiate was traslated by Marianna Sora, Georgeta Horodinca and Hélène Fleury (Paris: Nadeau, 1989).

37. For Proust’s use of pastiche, see Irene Albers, “Das photographische Gedächtnis Marcel Prousts,” Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 111.1 (2001): 19–56.

38. A similar convergence between photographic and linguistic media in a pastiched collage of Dadaist images may be seen in Tristan Tzara’s introduction to Man Ray’s 1922 photography album. See Hergheligiu and Petrovici, “Literature and Photography in Romanian and European Avant-Garde,” 397–404.