J. M. W. Turner once depicted a harbor seen against the light. 1 He showed the drawing to a naval officer, who remarked that the ships had no portholes. "No, certainly not," Turner replied and told the naval officer that if he would look at the ships against the sunset, he would find he could not see the portholes. The naval officer retorted that the artist surely must have known they were there. "Yes," said Turner, "I know that well enough; but my business is to draw what I see, and not what I know is there." Where the painter's eye perceives sun-drenched vessels, the naval officer perceives armed warships. Aesthetic experience and practical reason do not inhabit the same world. To observe an object from a user's point of view, the anecdote implies, is to engage in a perceptual activity radically different from the point of view of a spectator who has no interest in the object perceived other than to, say, paint it.
An influential champion of Turner's late manner, John Ruskin quoted this anecdote in his treatise on the relations between art and the natural sciences. 2 For him, the story epitomized an aesthetic program, whose ultimate task was to correct the detrimental effects of industrial society on human experience. Ruskin resented many things modern: railway travel, for example, fatigued the human sensorium; photography risked making the eye too fastidious; and viewing instruments such as the Claude glass perverted artistic seeing.
The anecdote, which Marcel Proust related in the preface to his translation of Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens, points to one of many links between the British art critic and the French author. 3 A sincere admirer of Ruskin's philosophy of art, Proust made the spirit of the anecdote into his own. As Jean Autret has emphasized, it provides a key to the artistic sensibility for which Remembrance of Things Past becomes a vehicle and that the portrait of the painter Elstir in particular serves to articulate. 4 Fresh sense perception versus confining intellectual notions: this distinction is fundamental to Proust's visual aesthetics. Teaching the virtues of the cultivation of sensory experience, Remembrance of Things Past articulates a didactics of disinterested perception--of seeing for seeing's sake, of listening for the pleasure of sounds, and so on. The task of the artist is to be alert to the immediacy of sensory experience and, as Proust's narrator underscores in the Elstir episode, to restore it by inventing the appropriate metaphor.
Given Proust's reverence for Ruskin, and given his adoption of the master's belief in the innocence and purity of the painterly eye, one would expect the author of Remembrance of Things Past to reject mechanical means of visual representation. After all, Proust's novel is concerned, among many other things, with the discovery by the narrator of an aesthetic program that rests upon the Ruskinian distinction between numbing habit and unmediated sensory experience, between agreed-upon intellectual notions and unbiased forms of comprehension. And true enough, as the narrator warms to the didactic tasks he has set himself, particularly in the last volume, Time Regained, he repeatedly criticizes photography and cinematography, declaring them inferior to the human eye, the art of writing, and last but not least, the workings of memory.
But Proust would not be Proust if it were that simple. There is a tremendously complex and productive relationship between the ideal of unmediated vision articulated by Remembrance of Things Past and the author's deployment of photographic and cinematographic techniques of representing visual experience. For not only does Proust appropriate such modes of representation; he puts them to use at precisely those moments where he attempts to elaborate what one may call a phenomenology of perception, that is, when he seeks to render perceptual activities that are uninhibited by intellectual preconceptions. Indeed, some of Proust's boldest stylistic solutions owe their deepest impulses to machines of vision. Cinematographic means of representation, I want to argue, are singularly well suited to Proust's ambition to restore sensory impressions that have not been domesticated by the dulling force of habit.
Nowhere does this become as clear as in the article "Impressions de route en automobile." Written in the early fall of 1907 and published in Le ro on 19 November, the article is based on the motoring trips Proust had made that same summer with Alfred Agostinelli, the driver he had hired for the purpose. Together they visited places in Normandy that Ruskin had written about, such as Bayeux, Conches, Lisieux, and Caen. Comfortably reclining in the passenger seat, Proust was able to concentrate on the vistas passing by; the most thrilling ones made their way into "Impressions de route en automobile." In fact, Proust was so pleased with the centerpiece of the article--the description of the church steeples rising above Caen--that he was to recycle it in Remembrance, in the pages known as the Martinville episode. Widely thought of as one of the most important and most enigmatic passages the novel, the Martinville episode relates how the young narrator, sitting next to the coachman on a horse-driven carriage, comes to witness how the steeples of Martinville appear to be dancing on the horizon. Significantly enough, the visual experience propels the narrator's very first piece of writing.
As Jean-Yves Tadié has suggested, the ro article was an "embryo of the future work." 5 Yet "Impressions de route en automobile" merits our attention not just because it casts an interesting light on the genesis of Proust's novel. Read closely, it complicates the received view of the French author's relationship to Ruskin. Although Proust's période ruskinienne is commonly believed to have ended in 1906, the motoring article shows that post-Ruskinian Proust was at once more Ruskinian and more modernistic than has previously been thought. For while the piece is strikingly Ruskinian in spirit, Proust paid tribute to his old mentor's aesthetic program in rather unexpected ways--by turning Ruskin's anti-modern stance on its head. How can this be? The answers will carry us far into Proust's universe. Ultimately, the 1907 article provides us with a richer understanding of the aesthetics of perception that informs Remembrance of Things Past, which he began writing the following year.
An episode in the second volume, Within A Budding Grove, takes us to the heart of the novel's visual aesthetics. The narrator is vacationing in Balbec, a seaside resort on the Norman coast. One hot summer day he pays a visit to the atelier of the famous painter Elstir. A fictitious re, Elstir is a composite of an array of nineteenth-century painters, first of all Turner, but also artists such as Monet, Whistler, Moreau, and Vuillard; in addition, Elstir is designed to remind the reader of Ruskin. 6 No sooner has the narrator entered the studio than he is seized by happiness and the prospect of rising to a poetical understanding of reality. Elstir's atelier, he proclaims enthusiastically, is nothing less than a "laboratory of a sort of new creation of the world . . . ." 7 The canvases lining the studio, most of them seascapes, makes him perceive the sea anew, and the beach and the sky and the foaming waves. The experience elicits a piece of art criticism, as spirited as it is ingenious: "[Elstir] had extracted, by painting them on various rectangles of canvas that were placed at all angles, here a sea-wave angrily crashing its lilac foam on to the sand, there a young man in white linen leaning on the rail of a ship. The young man's jacket and the splashing wave had acquired a new dignity from the fact that they continued to exist, even though they were deprived of those qualities in which they might be supposed to consist, the wave being no longer able to wet or the jacket to clothe anyone" (RTP, 1:892-3/2:190).
Not only has Elstir freed the wave and the jacket from their established denotations; he has also restored the meanings that habitual perception prevents the beholder from perceiving. This is to say that the wave and the jacket, having slipped out of the grip of a reality which revolves around usage and function, have managed to enter a world of purposeless beauty. In this way, the narrator intimates that Elstir is not a realist, much less a naturalist; if anything, the painter is an impressionist--he is faithful to the visual impression and the immediate ways in which it comes before him. He transforms the visible world, at the same time restoring its lost glory, with the effect that the beholder is taken back to the dawn of creation: "if God the father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names that Elstir created them anew. The names which designate things correspond invariably to an intellectual notion ["notion de l'intelligence"], alien to our true impressions, and compelling us to eliminate from them everything that is not in keeping with that notion" (RTP, 1:893/2:191).
The world of phenomena appears as though it had just been born, for the conventional links between signifier and signified have been severed. To this end, Elstir's prime means is the painterly equivalent of the metaphor--the metamorphosis. This is why the narrator seizes on those seascapes where the contours of land and sea blend and eventually change places, where the town rising above the sea has been rendered in "marine terms," and the sea has been depicted in "urban terms." To be sure, the beholder will eventually recognize the sea and the town, but through notions not typically associated with them. This is the sense in which Elstir not only strips things of their common names but also, and above all, endows them with new ones. And in naming things anew, the artist invites the beholder to see them anew, richer, fuller, and more dignified.
The episode also contains an enigmatic description of the studio itself. The blinds are closed, the atelier plunged in half-light. But there is one place, the narrator underscores, "where daylight laid against the wall its brilliant but fleeting decoration, dark; one small rectangular window alone was open" (RTP, 1:893/2:191). A darkened chamber, with a small opening providing the only source of light: Elstir's studio is literally and ratively represented as a camera obscura, complete with an aperture. The dark room turns into a metaphor for the artist's power to recreate the world as he pleases. 8
The painter's eye as camera obscura? The metaphor acquires a peculiar resonance, as the episode also includes a lengthy reflection upon the rivalry between painting and photography. The competition with the mechanically produced image has forced Elstir to reinvent his painterly aesthetics. This is because photography--"une industrie," Proust writes--has banalized traditional art. "Since Elstir began to paint, we have grown familiar with what are called 'wonderful' [in French, "admirable"] photographs of scenery and towns" (RTP, 1:896/2:194). The appeal of photography lies in its ability to explode habitual ways of seeing by estranging seemingly familiar visual domains, at the same time being a faithful recording of the motif in question: "If we press for a definition of what admirers mean by the epithet [i.e., "admirable"], we shall find that it is generally applied to some unusual image of a familiar object, an image different from those that we are accustomed to see, unusual and yet true to nature, and for that reason doubly striking because it surprises us, takes us out of our cocoon of habit, and at the same time brings us back to ourselves by recalling to us an earlier impression" (RTP, 1:896-7/2:194).
No matter how pleasing and revelatory photographic means of representation may be, and no matter how effectively it ruptures habitual modes of perception, it was painting, not photography, that was first in the field. Historically speaking, what characterized painting was its extraordinary ability to defamiliarize the familiar and to make the beholder look at the world anew, but the mechanically produced image has now appropriated this very domain, with the effect that traditional painting appears obsolete, even lacking in originality. So it is that the sheer existence of photography forces the art of painting to reinvent itself. In other words, in suggesting that the superior ability of photography to represent landscape and urban sceneries has forced Elstir to abandon his classical motifs, the narrator offers a historical explanation of the painter's artistic choices. As Anne Henry has underscored, this is all the more remarkable since Proust, throughout Remembrance, tends to deny that history may serve as a valid point of departure for explication in the realm of art. 9 Yet here history is explicitly and insistently evoked--in order to explain how Elstir's classical motifs and mode of painting began to lose legitimacy and how, as a result, he tries to attain an innocent, unbiased, and non-theoretical mode of seeing. In short, he comes to celebrate the visual and visionary capacities of the disinterested spectator--just like Turner did in his late period and as Monet and other impressionists were to do later in the nineteenth century. Nathalie Sarraute has captured this sea change in an apt phrase: "since Impressionism, all pictures have been painted in the first person." 10
Elstir thus gives priority to the visual impression, not the intellect. This is why he always attempts to rid himself of all knowledge (in French, "intelligence") before sitting down to paint. To know a thing means that the thing ceases to exist in and of itself, the narrator maintains, an idea that reveals not merely what one may call a phenomenological strand in Proust's work but also an epistemological stance, including the ideal of an inductive knowledge of the "essences" of the world by way of pure perception. That Elstir seeks to remain faithful to the purely visual aspects of the seen does not mean, however, that his paintings are necessarily "true" in the ordinary sense of the word; he may well depict an optical illusion and therefore commit an "error," as when the sea emerges like a town. But the narrator conceives of such illusions as prior to the work of the intellect and therefore artistically true (RTP, 2:194/1:897). For all the immediacy of such optical errors, however, the artist nonetheless has to unlearn his mode of seeing in order to be able to see what he actually perceives; in fact, he has to accustom his eyes ("habituer les yeux") to not recognizing, for example, that fixed boundary which separates land from sea and so tells the beholder to identify the town as a town and the waves as waves (RTP, 2:192-3/1:895). In other words, Elstir's aesthetics of perceptual innocence presupposes the education of the eye.
The narrator's encounter with Elstir is a key episode in Remembrance. Like the portraits of the writer Bergotte, the composer Vinteuil, and the actress Berma, the Elstir episode articulates crucial aspects of the novel's artistic program. Proust alludes several times to the studio visit, thus making sure that his readers will not miss the significance of the crucial insights that the hero takes to heart. For example, in Within a Budding Grove, the narrator anticipates how he will come to understand why Madame de Sévigné's letters bring him such pleasure, for she "is an artist of the same school as a painter whom I was to meet at Balbec, where his influence on my ways of seeing things was immense. I realised at Balbec that it was in the same way as he that she presented things to her readers, in the order of our perception of them, instead of first explaining them in relation to their several causes" (RTP, 1:703/2:14). In The Guermantes Way, moreover, the narrator contemplates Elstir's aesthetics with a completeness of detail that recalls his reflections during the studio visit. Invited to a dinner party at the duke and duchess of Guermantes, he asks to see their Elstir collection and forgets about the social gathering:
Among these pictures, some of those that seemed most absurd to people in fashionable society interested me more than the rest because they recreated those optical illusions which prove to us that we should never succeed in identifying objects if we did not bring some process of reasoning to bear on them. How often, when driving, do we not come upon a bright street beginning a few feet away from us, when what we have actually before our eyes is merely a patch of wall glaringly lit which has given us the mirage of depth. This being the case, it is surely logical . . . to return to the very root of the impression, to represent one thing by that other for which, in the flash of a first illusion, we mistook it. . . . Elstir sought to wrest from what he had just felt what he already knew; he had often been at pains to break up that medley of impressions which we call vision. [RTP, 2:434-5/2:712-3]
Further on in the same volume, the narrator makes a comparison between Elstir and himself: "My imagination, like Elstir engaged upon rendering some effect of perspective without reference to the notions of physics he might well possess, depicted for me not what I knew but what it saw" (RTP, 2:590/2:856). Clearly, the narrator is well on his way to incorporating the painter's aesthetics with his own artistic sensibility.
Yet although the Elstir episode relates a crucial discovery, Proust has carefully, albeit indirectly, prepared the reader for it. The manner in which Proust describes the long prelude to the visit--the train ride to Balbec, the atmosphere at the seaside resort, Robert de Saint-Loup's appearance, and so on--is itself exemplary of the aesthetics that the narrator discovers in the studio and eventually will make his own. At this stage in the novel, Proust's stylistic solutions become bolder, as if to reinforce the point that the narrator's artistic education is well under way. As we shall see, the hero's surroundings are repeatedly represented as though they were works of art; sometimes they have even been furnished with a frame. Moreover, each time the visual impression takes center stage.
Consider the railway journey which, more than any other episode, works to warm up the reader. Early in the morning, the narrator wakes up in his sleeping compartment, and as the train makes its way towards Balbec, he studies the break of dawn through the square of the window ("le carreau de la fenêtre"). Just above a dark silhouette, he distinguishes "some ragged clouds whose fleecy edges were of a fixed, dead pink, not liable to change, like the colour that dyes the feathers of a wing that has assimilated it or a pastel on which it has been deposited by the artist's whim" (RTP, 1:704/2:15). No sooner has the narrator clapped his eyes on the pink light of dawn than he elevates the sight to a work of art executed by a willful artist. Moments later, daylight bursts forth, and a cascade of colors--red, blue, mother of pearl--appear before the narrator, who readily surrenders to the optical extravaganza:
The sky turned to a glowing pink which I strove, glueing my eyes to the window ["la vitre"], to see more clearly, for I felt that it was related somehow to the most intimate life of Nature, but the course of the line altering, the train turned, the morning scene gave place in the frame of the window ["le cadre de la fenêtre"] to a nocturnal village, its roofs still blue with moonlight, its pond encrusted with the opalescent sheen of night, beneath a firmament still spangled with all its stars, and I was lamenting the loss of my strip of pink sky when I caught sight of it anew, but red this time, in the opposite window which it left at a second bend in the line; so that I spent my time running from one window to the other to reassemble, to collect on a single canvas the intermittent, antipodean fragments of my fine, scarlet, ever-changing morning, and to obtain a comprehensive view and a continuous picture of it ["une vue totale et un tableau continu"]. [RTP, 1:704-5/2:15-16]
Framed by the train windows, the view of the sleepy landscape through which the train travels is represented as a series of tableaux. Scenery follows upon scenery, as in a montage-cut film. Indeed, the railway compartment moves through the landscape like a projector apparatus. Naturalizing the deliciously fragmented representation of the narrator's visual activity, the window frames permit the spectacle to come into being. In a word, the train has become a vehicle of perception.
What is more, the narrator's window gazing promotes an aestheticized way of seeing to such a degree that when the train makes a stop at a little station, and he catches sight of a peasant girl selling coffee, his gaze turns her appearance too into a spectacle. "Flushed with the glow of morning," he remarks, "her face was rosier than the sky" (1:705/2:16). The sight exalts him. During the train ride, he has let go of habitual modes of seeing. He has been exposed to a form of beauty that falls outside of traditional notions and, for this very reason, is proof of genuine beauty. Now he wants to take a good look at the peasant girl, and signals that he would like to purchase a cup of coffee. As she approaches, his gaze puts her appearance behind glass: "Above her tall re, the complexion of her face was so burnished and so glowing that it was as if one were seeing her through a lighted window ["vitrail illuminé"]. She retraced her steps. I could not take my eyes from her face which grew larger as she approached, like a sun which it was somehow possible to stare at and which was coming nearer and nearer, letting itself be seen at close quarters, dazzling you with its blaze of red and gold" (RTP, 1:707/2:17-18).
This description is remarkable not for what is says about the girl's looks--after all, we learn virtually nothing about her--but for what it reveals about the hero's eye. Elstir would have been pleased. The moment the narrator fixes his gaze on the young woman, her face turns into a spectacular light show. He is faithful to what he sees, not to what he knows, and what he sees possesses all the wondrous powers of the idiosyncratic artist's eye. Indeed, Proust writes not that the young woman's face is coming nearer but that it is becoming larger: "je ne pouvais détacher mes yeux de son visage de plus en plus large." It is as though we were watching a film in which the heroine's head approaches the camera and eventually fills the screen. The peasant girl has become pure image.
Now, why does the narrator remark that it is as though he looked at her through a lighted window, "un vitrail illuminé"? At first, the metaphor may seem like mere embellishment. But Proust needs the image of the window: it motivates the narrator's framed vision and naturalizes his aestheticized perspective. Proust makes use of a similar technique when, a few pages later, he introduces Robert de Saint-Loup, a key character in the novel. The narrator is sitting in the hotel dining-room when he catches sight of the young marquis. It is a scorching hot afternoon, the dining room is "plunged in semi-darkness," and through the gaps between the drawn curtains the glittering blue sea can be glimpsed. Like Elstir's studio, the dining room emerges as a camera obscura, complete with apertures. In this giant dark room, the writer-to-be is busy registering remarkable sights, developing one after the other with remarkable artistic skill:
[Robert de Saint-Loup] strode rapidly across the whole width of the hotel, seeming to be in pursuit of his monocle, which kept darting away in front of him like a butterfly. He was coming from the beach, and the sea which filled the lower half of the glass front of the hall made a background against which he stood out full-length, as in certain portraits whose painters attempt, without in any way falsifying the most accurate observation of contemporary life, but by choosing for their sitter an appropriate setting . . . to furnish a modern equivalent of those canvases on which the old masters used to present the human re in the foreground of the landscape. [RTP, 1:783-4]
The snapshot of Saint-Loup is a brilliant portrait, the image of the fluttering butterfly prering the narrator's futile and constantly suspended attempts to decipher the "true" nature of the marquis--in the history of art, we recall, the butterfly signifies psyche, the human soul. The feature that more than any other propels the narrator's scopophilic will-to-know is, of course, Saint-Loup's homosexuality. 11
As in the peasant-girl episode, the sight is framed by the windows that serve to motivate the delimitation of the narrator's field of vision. Here, however, the scene is explicitly rendered as a work of art. The same is true when the narrator enters his hotel room and turns his eyes toward the window. As in the railway episode, the landscape is immediately transformed into a series of tableaux, complete with frames: "Gradually, as the season advanced, the picture [in French, "tableau"] that I found there in my window changed. At first it was broad daylight, and dark only if the weather was bad: and then, in the greenish glass which it distended with the curve of its rounded waves, the sea, set between the iron uprights of my casement window like a piece of stained glass in its leads, ravelled out over all the deep rocky border of the bay little plumed triangles of motionless foam . . ." (RTP, 1:860/2:160).
The narrator hastens to add that the foaming sea recalls Pisanello's drawings of feathers and down, and that the creamy white background makes him think of Emile Gallé's carefully etched glass objects. Waves that look like feathers, foam that appears as down: such a way of seeing is perfectly consistent with Elstir's program. The narrator's eye fails to perceive the essential difference between waves and plumage that his mind will soon discover. The task of the artist is to remain faithful to the seen, to give priority to the imagination over and above confining intellectual notions, and the art-historical re who in this respect exercised the single most important influence on Proust was John Ruskin.
Proust's interest in Ruskin, the most influential art critic of the Victorian age, began in 1899. 12 During a vacation, he read Robert de la Sizeranne's Ruskin et la religion de la beauté (Paris: Hachette, 1897). 13 Interestingly, as Richard Macksey has noted, Proust first invoked Ruskin as an "instrumentality of sight," since he sent for Sizeranne's Ruskin study in order that he, as he said, might "look at the mountains with the eyes of this important man." 14 On the occasion of Ruskin's death in 1900, Proust wrote an obituary notice in Le ro, suggesting that the proper way to pay homage to the British art critic was to visit the French cathedral cities he had written about, as these now "protect his soul." 15 Proust himself was to set out on Ruskinian pilgrimages, particularly in Normandy. He also went as far as Italy with Ruskin's writings as a guide. Most of these trips have left traces in Remembrance. In Padua, for example, Proust made sure to view Giotto's frescoes in the Arena chapel, half a century after Ruskin's visit, and the event is reflected in The Fugitive, in a remarkable episode--I shall have more to say about it later--written long after Proust's période ruskinienne had come to an end.
A passionate advocate of Ruskin's theory of art, Proust translated two of his books into French, The Bible of Amiens (La Bible d'Amiens, 1904) and Sesame and Lilies (Sésame et les lys, 1906), both of which he provided with voluminous prefaces and annotations. What attracted Proust to Ruskin was, among other things, the emphatic distinction between the observed and the known, between fresh sensation and dulling habit. "The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way," Ruskin writes in his seminal work on Turner's late manner, Modern Painters. "To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion,--all in one" (WJR, 5:333; italics in the original). Stressing that the artist must recover the "innocence of the eye," Ruskin promoted "a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify,--as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight" (WJR, 15:27n).
Ruskin's hostility to the modernization process runs through all his writings, a fact, incidentally, that did not escape Proust. 16 Ruskin railed against the "current political economy," including the automation of production and the mechanization of labor; and these sentiments were integral to his theory of the visual arts. When Ruskin championed Turner's art, he argued for the painter's superiority by setting up an opposition between the mechanical and natural or, alternatively, the mechanical and the spiritual. Contrasting Turner with old masters such as Lorrain, Rosa, and Poussin, Ruskin claimed that they submitted to mechanical, hence false, reproductions of nature, as they failed to rise above "the daguerreotype or calotype, or any other mechanical means that ever have been or may be invented" (WJR, 3:169). Therefore, Ruskin concluded, they lacked in love of the phenomena represented.
As Robert Hewison has underscored, Lorrain, Rosa, and Poussin were associated with the so-called picturesque. 17 Deriving from the Italian word pittoresco, or "in the manner of painters," the specifically British notion of the picturesque came into being as a response to the need for a category that complemented Burke's distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. Eminently suited to the features of the English countryside, the picturesque referred to the particular pleasure evoked by natural phenomena that were irregular, rough, and wild--without, however, inspiring awe in the spectator. 18 Cultivating new modes of seeing, it taught antiquarians, tourists, and sketchers how to perceive landscape by way of paintings. In effect, then, the theory of the picturesque fostered not pure but essentially derived ways of seeing. The so- called Claude glass was part of the didactics of the picturesque. A pocket-sized black piece of convex mirror-glass, this specular instrument framed and reflected the surrounding landscape, thus turning the view into something like a picturesque work of art. Ruskin's critique of such visual pleasures was relentless. The glass, he argued in The Elements of Drawing, is "one of the most pestilent inventions for falsifying Nature and degrading art which ever was put into an artist's hand" (WJR, 15:201-2).
Ruskin would nevertheless recommend to his students of drawing the use of an equally mechanical means of reproducing nature, namely photography. Photographs were to be copied as a form of exercise and compared for their "authority" (WJR, 15:100-101; see also 21:294-95). In fact, the young Ruskin--the Ruskin of the picturesque period--celebrated the advent of daguerreotypy, claiming that it beat his own talent for drawing. "It is a noble invention--say what they will of it," Ruskin wrote from Venice in 1845, after having procured a few daguerreotypes of the palaces he had tried to draw, "and any one who has worked and blundered and stammered as I have done for four days, and then sees the thing he has been trying to do so long in vain, done perfectly and faultlessly in half a minute, won't abuse it afterwards."
Later in his career, as an anti-picturesque critic who promoted Turner's late manner, Ruskin was to attack photography and its automatisms in contrast to the inherent virtues of painting. 19 Artistic seeing was for Ruskin a subjective affair, its empire defined by the boundaries of industrial society. For observation to quicken, and for sensation to sharpen, he recommended as "little change as possible." Ruskin evoked a rural Arcadia lingering in the shadow of industrial society:
If the attention is awake, and the feelings in proper train, a turn of a country road, with a cottage beside it, which we have not seen before, is as much as we need for refreshment; if we hurry past it, and take two cottages at a time, it is already too much: hence, to any person who has all his senses about him, a quiet walk along not more than ten or twelve miles of road a day, is the most amusing of all travelling; and all travelling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity. Going by railroad I do not consider as travelling at all; it is merely "being sent" to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel . . . ." [WJR, 3:370] 20
Proust valued Ruskin's sensibility highly. He adopted Ruskin's belief in the primacy of sense perception and of the importance of remaining true to the concrete. He made use of Ruskin's idea that the sensuous world is a universe of signs that the artist is meant to decipher. Yet, for all his admiration for the British art critic during the critical years that preceded his great novel, Proust was nevertheless to invert Ruskin's attitude toward the historical conditions that had prompted some of the most important features of the latter's aesthetic program.
The higher the velocity, the more fatiguing travel becomes, Ruskin maintained. For Proust, the opposite was true. Speed quickened the eye. Indeed, Proust embraced the new culture of velocity with unmistakable enthusiasm and was to declare himself a "fervent d'automobilisme," a motoring fan. 21 Even when he traveled in the tracks of the British art critic whose work and sensibility he had admired for so long, Proust often chose to travel by car, turning the ride into an aesthetic experience of the first rank. In 1907, when he motored in Normandy, automobiles were still something of a novelty. In 1900, as Pär Bergman has observed, there were only about 3,000 automobiles in France, a re that had risen to 50,000 by 1909, and to 100,000 by 1913. 22 Like numerous writers, painters, and photographers, Proust marveled at how speed helped transform the perception of time and space. 23 In 1904, for example, the French photographer Robert Demachy captured a motorcar racing through a curve on a country road, and soon afterwards, the image was reproduced in Alfred Stieglitz's avant-garde art review, Camera Work. Entitled Vitesse, the photograph indirectly addresses a problem that engaged numerous artists at the time: How is an image to convey an impression of speed and movement? That is to say, how is an image to represent temporal extension? Moreover, can the lived experience of locomotion be put into words?
That same year the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck wrote a short story about a motoring trip in the countryside. Thanks to the car, the ecstatic narrator suggests, it has become possible for modern humans to absorb "in one day, as many sights, as much landscape and sky, as would formerly have been granted to us in a whole life-time." 24 Set in the neighborhood of Rouen, "In an Automobile" relates how the narrator goes for a drive by himself for the first time. He speeds past sleepy villages like a missile, cleaving yellow corn fields and red poppy meadows. Traveling at a speed of, say, thirty kilometers an hour, the motor vehicle turns the quiet country road into a spectacle:
The pace grows faster and faster, the delirious wheels cry aloud in their gladness. And at first the road comes moving towards me, like a bride waving palms, rhythmically keeping time to some joyous melody.  It is as though wings, as though myriad wings no eye can see, transparent wings of great supernatural birds that have their homes on invisible mountains swept by the eternal snow, have come to refresh my eyes and my brow with their overwhelming fragrance! ["IA," 181-82/60-61]
Inert matter is here endowed with anthropomorphic features. All that seemed solid jumps into motion. In this way, Maeterlinck attempts to convey a sense of the vertiginous speed with which the motorcar travels through space. For despite all its impressive horsepower, it is not the car but nature that acquires agency in Maeterlinck's scenario. It is nature, not the car, that emerges as a reckless force apparently beyond masculine control.
Revolving around the thrill of the new, Maeterlinck's short story emphasizes the miracle of speed and the concomitant transformations of space. As the vehicle plunges into a valley, the velocity animates the poor old trees lining the road, and little by little the reader realizes that the event is of world-historical significance:
The trees, that for so many slow-moving years have serenely dwelt on its borders, shrink back in dread of disaster. They seem to be hastening one to the other, to approach their green heads, and in startled groups to debate how to bar the way of the strange apparition. But as this rushes onward, they take panic, and scatter and fly, each one quickly seeking its own habitual place; and as I pass they bend tumultuously forward, and their myriad leaves, quick to the mad joy of the force that is chanting its hymn, murmur in my ears the voluble psalm of Space, acclaiming and greeting the enemy that hitherto has always been conquered but now at last triumphs: Speed. ["IA," 182-83/61-62]
Thanks to speed, Maeterlinck asserts, man has triumphed over "Space and Time, its invisible brother" (IA, 183/62). The dust of history whirls up behind the motorcar, and nothing will ever be the same.
The French writer Octave Mirbeau also conceived a story glorifying the horsepower of the motorcar. Mirbeau's 1907 novel La 628-E 8, so named after his license plate, relates a motoring trip through France. In the opening pages, the narrator turns speed into an emblem of human consciousness in the modern age:
His brain is a racetrack around which jumbled thoughts and sensations roar past at 60 miles an hour, always at full throttle. Speed governs his life: he drives like the wind, thinks like the wind, makes love like the wind, lives a whirlwind existence. Life comes hurtling at him and buffeting him from every direction, as in a mad cavalry charge, only to melt flickeringly away like a film ["et disparaît cinématographiquement"] or like the trees, hedges and walls that line the road. Everything around him, and inside him, dances, leaps, and gallops, in inverse proportion to his own movement; not always a pleasant sensation, but powerful, delirious and intoxicating, like vertigo or fever. 25
Diagnosing life in the modern age, Mirbeau suggests that two features characterize the world of the living: an overwhelming experience of speed and an equally overwhelming mass of visual stimuli. Trees, walls, silhouettes--everything is flickering before the eyes of modern humans. Described as a succession of moving images, the world emerges as a film.
Both Maeterlinck and Mirbeau explore the syntax of velocity, seeking to convey a sort of lived experience to which the medium of the printed word is stubbornly resistant: the bodily experience of speed. Both writers thus contemplate a representational problem: how the formal level of description may call forth what is suggested on the level of enunciation. And in response to this linguistic challenge, both writers settle on a rhetoric of inversion, substituting the immobile for the mobile, and vice versa. Mirbeau even writes that the movement of human beings stands in inverse proportion to that of the environment.
It is no coincidence that Mirbeau uses cinema as a metaphor to call forth how the world incessantly races forward and disappears behind the human subject, for it is indeed film that offers a model for how to represent the lived experience of velocity. Early cinema specifically experimented with ways of creating panoramas that simulated speed and movement. From a historical point of view, Tom Gunning argues, "camera movement began as a display of the camera's ability to mobilize and explore space." 26 Up until 1908, when so-called narrative cinema was more fully developed, a vast number of film-makers explored speed and movement by mounting a camera on vehicles such as subway cars, streetcars, trains, aerial balloons, and gondolas. Predicated on the inversion of mobility and immobility, this widespread shooting technique produced an optical illusion of movement by suggesting that the environment rushed towards the camera and, by implication, the spectator.
As early as 1895, shortly after the first screenings of the Lumière program, the writer H. G. Wells and his collaborator Robert Paul had plans to construct a cinematic device for simulating movement through time and space, a visual attraction on the order of Wells's 1895 science-fiction novel The Time Machine. 27 The project failed, but the first decade of the twentieth century saw the emergence of an array of widely popular fairground attractions that similarly produced an illusion of speed and movement. At the Paris Exposition in 1900, an attraction called cinéorama was introduced, simulating the experience of traveling in an aerial balloon hovering over Europe and Africa. 28 The Exposition also included a cinematic attraction called maréorama, which simulated sea travel--hence the name. The trip went from Villefranche to Constantinople via Naples and Venice, and came complete with sirens going off and black smoke rising to the sky (. 1 and 2). A guaranteed success, commented Le ro's correspondent on 22 July 1900.
A few years later an American fairground attraction called Hale's Tours was invented. A worldwide commercial success, especially between the years 1905 and 1907, it offered a synaesthetic experience of railway travel through scenic landscapes around the world. Audiences were seated in a railroad car with an open front, which served as a cinematic frame for motion pictures that had been shot from the cowcatcher of a train. In assuming the camera's point of view, spectators felt as though they themselves were moving through space. The swaying of the railway car, blowing winds, starts and stops, and the characteristic clickety-clack sound enhanced the experience of virtual movement.
The train and the cinema are two distinct sites of spectatorship, to be sure, but as Lynne Kirby has argued in her work on early cinema, they share a fundamental affinity. 29 In fact, she goes as far as to suggest that the railway paved the way for the specifically cinematic construction of the spectator. Add to this historical scenario the advent [Begin Page 113] of the automobile, yet another visual framing device on wheels, and we begin to appreciate the visual thrill that Proust's narrator associates with trains, automobiles, and similar technologies of speed.
In 1908, Leo Tolstoy suggested that "cinema has divined the mystery of motion." 30 In 1909, F. T. Marinetti declared that "the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed." 31 The first Futurist manifesto was published on 20 February 1909 on the front page of Le ro, proclaiming, among many other things, the superior beauty of the motorcar. Fifteen months earlier, on 19 November 1907, the same newspaper had featured a piece called "Impressions de route en automobile," also on the front page, and the author of the article was Marcel Proust.
Proust had been a regular contributor to Le ro since 1900, and in "Impressions de route en automobile" he ventured to capture the optical thrills he had experienced in Normandy with Agostinelli behind the wheel. 32 A stylistic exercise in modernist techniques of visual mimesis, the 1907 article addresses a representational problem: how to render the lived experience of speed and movement. The piece relates how the narrator and his driver travel along a winding road in Normandy, going from a place near Caen to a small town halfway between Lisieux and Louviers. The purpose of their trip is to pay a visit to the narrator's parents. The purpose of the article, however, is to depict how the motorcar catapults through space and how speed transforms the surrounding landscape into a phantasmagoria. These descriptions are then flanked by dense digressions on architecture, religious art, and the history of travel. Both Ruskin and Turner are mentioned, as are seventeenth-century Dutch painters such as Philips Wouwermans and Adriaen van de Velde. Proust thus makes sure to anchor his speed-infused landscape in the esteemed traditions of art history.
No wonder, then, that Proust so often resorts to a vocabulary that revolves around the visual. At the outset, Proust sets the stage for the optical adventures that will follow by pointing out that the windshields convert the vista into an aesthetic object: "To my right, to my left, in front of me, the car windows--which I kept closed--put behind glass, so to speak, the beautiful September day which, even in the open air, one could only see as through a kind of transparence" ("Jea," 63). Darting across the plain of Caen at sunset, the motorists experience a visual event whose delightful nature is a function of the speed. As we shall see, the windshields delimit the view of the landscape, converting it into an object of visual pleasure--a mobile panorama. In other words, the motorcar has become a vehicle of perception, paving the way for new forms of aesthetic gratification.
Meanwhile, it is as though the motorcar is at a standstill while the environment rushes towards it. No sooner has the vehicle gathered momentum than the motorists come to witness how ancient buildings spring to life: "old lopsided houses ran nimbly toward us, offering us fresh roses or proudly showing us the young hollyhock they had grown and which already had outgrown them" ("Jea," 63). The inanimate becomes animate; the immobile becomes mobile. Similarly, when the motorcar arrives at the foot of the cathedral in Caen, Proust writes not that the automobile speeds toward it; instead, it is the steeples that throw themselves at the vehicle, and with such violence that the driver almost collides with the porch. In reversing mobility and immobility, Proust, like Maeterlinck before him, seeks a rhetoric of speed capable of evoking the velocity with which the motorcar traverses the plain. 33 At the same time, Proust insists on what the motorist perceives and not on what he knows. This stylistic technique animates the central panel of the article, the artful representation of the steeples rising above Caen:
The minutes passed, we were traveling fast, and yet the three steeples were always ahead of us, like birds perched upon the plain, motionless and conspicuous in the sunlight. Then the horizon was torn open like a fog unveiling completely and in detail a form invisible an instant before, and the towers of the Trinity appeared, or rather what appeared was one single tower perfectly hiding the other. But it drew aside, the other stepped forward and both of them lined up. Finally, a dilatory steeple . . . had come to join them, springing into position in front of them with a bold leap. Now, between the propagating steeples below which one saw the light which at this distance seemed to smile, the town, following their momentum from below without being able to reach their heights, developed steadily by vertical rises the complicated but candid fugue of its rooftops. 34 ["Jea," 64]
The motorized spectator surely knows what the sun-drenched phenomena on the horizon represent, but he presents them as synechdoches, as part of a not-yet-revealed whole--as steeples, not churches.  In this sense, too, the narrator insists on what his eyes perceive and not on what he knows, all in an effort to render the lived experience of speed and the delicious perception of the landscape through which the car races:
We had long since left Caen, and . . . the two steeples of Saint-Etienne and that of Saint-Pierre waved once again their sun-bathed pinnacles in token of farewell. Sometimes one would withdraw, so that the other two might watch us for a moment still; soon I saw only two. Then they veered one last time like two golden pivots, and vanished from my sight. Many times afterwards, when traveling across the plain of Caen at sunset, I would see them again, sometimes at a great distance, and seeming no more now than two flowers painted upon the sky above the low line of the fields; sometimes from a little closer, the steeple of Saint-Pierre having already caught up with them, they seemed like three maidens in a legend, abandoned in a solitary place over which night had begun to fall; and as I drew away from them, I could see them timidly seeking their way, and after some awkward attempts and stumbling movements of their noble silhouettes, drawing close to one another, gliding one behind another, forming now against the still rosy sky no more than a single dusky shape, pleasant and resigned, and so vanishing in the night. ["Jea," 65]
"The psychology of motoring has found its true writer in Proust," Ernst Robert Curtius notes in his classic study of Remembrance. Reflecting on the close link between the narrator's epiphanic moments of inspiration and his speedy movement through space, in "Impressions de route en automobile" as well as in Remembrance, Curtius aptly remarks that one cannot imagine Proust on foot. 35 Indeed, in Proust speed bursts open a new universe. As the immobile is set in motion, the artistic eye takes possession of the newly transformed visual world, as the following passage drawn from Cities of the Plain suggests: "Coming to the foot of the cliff road, the car climbed effortlessly, with a continuous sound like that of a knife being ground, while the sea, falling away, widened beneath us. The old rustic houses of Montsurvent came rushing towards us, clasping to their bosoms vine or rose-bush; the firs of la Raspelière . . . ran in every direction to escape from us" (RTP, 2:1029-30/3:386).
The proper content of the passage is the excitement of speed, the throbbing thrill of the new and the estrangement of the familiar. And if the scenario appears before the reader as though newly caught, it is because Proust insists on the Ruskinian belief in the primacy of the perceived. He does so particularly on the syntactic level. Not only is the motorcar turned into a subject; the vehicle is soon accompanied by other inanimate objects that also quicken, spring to life, and acquire syntactical agency: the sea pulls back behind the automobile, the houses rush toward the motorists, the firs leap to the side like anxious pedestrians. Here as in "Impressions de route en automobile," then, Proust deploys the re of inversion, and the qualities normally attributed to automobiles--force, speed, mobility--attach themselves to the immobile environment. 36 What is more, the passage shows Proust at his most modernistic, for at the center stands not a human subject but a motorcar, hailed by the futurists as the true incarnation of beauty, second only to the aeroplane. Proust makes use of a similar reversal technique when, in The Fugitive, he describes how the narrator undertakes a gondola trip in Venice. At first the emphasis is placed on the craft and how it moves through the neighborhoods, and then the city itself springs to life. Like the fantastic steeples rising above Caen, the Venetian canals and façades turn into a mobile panorama:
My gondola followed the course of the small canals; like the mysterious hand of a genie leading me through the maze of this oriental city, they seemed, as I advanced, to be cutting a path for me through the heart of a crowded quarter which they bisected, barely parting, with a slender furrow arbitrarily traced, the tall houses with their tiny Moorish windows; and as though the magic guide had been holding a candle in his hand and were lighting the way for me, they kept casting ahead of them a ray of sunlight for which they cleared a route. [RTP, 3:641/4:206]
Like Maeterlinck and Mirbeau, Proust embraces speed and movement with striking enthusiasm, seeking to capture the mobile panorama before the motorists' eyes. Yet although such episodes show Proust at his most modernistic, perhaps at his most innovative, his stylistic techniques are not without precedent. As I have suggested, the Proustian mode of rendering speed and movement is closely related to representational techniques inherent in early cinematography and turn-of-the-century fairground attractions. 37 Cinema enabled the perception of speed as a matter of inversion in the first place, at the same time offering its very mode of representation. 38
In the Martinville episode in Swann's Way, Proust makes use of the motoring article he wrote for Le ro. 39 In these inspired pages, however, he drops the narrative about the automobile ride, along with the art-historical references and the digressions on travel. All that remains is the central panel: the mighty vision of the mobile steeples. It is as though the original building plan is no longer needed, thrown away now that the edifice has been erected. But if the tableau has been stripped of the narrative in which it was first embedded, it is also because Proust places the picturesque panorama within another story, one which revolves around the young narrator's fear that he might never become a writer.
One evening the young hero travels along the Guermantes way in Dr. Percepied's carriage. Sitting next to the coachman, he comes to witness how the glistening steeples of Martinville turn into anthropomorphic characters before his baffled eyes. The sight arouses a peculiar pleasure whose source is difficult to fathom. He decides to act on the irksome impulse, borrows a pencil and a piece of paper from the doctor, and begins to write. It is his first piece of writing. The emergence of writing, then, is intimately linked to technologies of velocity and the new spaces of representation they open up.
Later, looking back at the event, the older narrator details the optical scenario, how the road bends, how the twin steeples appear to change position, now here, now there, and how, suddenly, they are joined by a third sunlit steeple. Remarkably, he then proceeds to duplicate the description of the vertiginous ride and the enchanted steeples. Halting the diegetic flow, he presents the episode to the reader again--in the form of the literary fragment drafted on the coach-box. It is the one and only time that the narrator quotes himself, and the repetition, of course, underscores the singular importance of the sequence. 40
Apart from having been adapted to the Combray topography, and apart from a few cuts and minor modifications, the fragment is a word-for-word replica of the centerpiece of the article on the visual pleasures of motoring written in 1907. 41 The only difference is that Proust has substituted an old-fashioned carriage for the original automobile. There is an obvious reason. The Martinville episode takes place in the early 1880s, well before the advent of the automobile. Now, presumably the narrator has traveled in a carriage many times, so how can it be that he experiences such perceptual freshness? As Bernard Guyon has suggested, this is why Proust underscores the speedy gallop and Dr. Percepied's exceptional haste. 42 Hence the dewiness of the narrator's visual experience.
The Martinville episode rounds off Combray, the overture to Remembrance. But there is more to the episode, for it is to reappear as a leitmotif within Proust's narrative as a whole, as part of the overarching theme which revolves around the narrator's distress that he will fail to become what he so desperately wants to be: a writer. If one pulls the thread that Proust lays out in Swann's Way and that runs through the novel up until the penultimate volume, one will discover some of the stitches that hold the unwieldy tale together. In The Guermantes Way, the narrator mentions in passing that he has found the piece about the Martinville steeples that he wrote on the coach-box of Dr. Percepied's carriage and that he has submitted a slightly edited version to Le ro (RTP, 2:412/2:691-692). It seems to have been in vain, however, for the article fails to appear. In The Captive, the narrator opens Le ro once again in the hope of discovering his article in print (RTP, 3:4-5/3:523). A little later, he repeats the attempt, with the same disappointing result (RTP, 3:114/3:626). It is only in The Fugitive, the next to last volume, that the plot about the unprinted article reaches its climax and the piece finally appears in the pages of the Parisian paper. The narrator swells with pride. He is so taken with the dignity of the event that he begins to sing the praises of the word, the mass produced word: "I considered the spiritual bread of life that a newspaper is, still warm and damp from the press in the murky air of the morning in which it is distributed, at daybreak, to the housemaids who bring it to their masters with their morning coffee, a miraculous, self-multiplying bread which is at the same time one and ten thousand, which remains the same for each person while penetrating innumerably into every house at once" (RTP, 3:579/4:148).
The daily paper is to the soul what bread is to the stomach. In Proust's hands, the newspaper--this profane piece of printed matter that, at best, enjoys a twenty-four-hour life span before it is degraded into wrapping paper--acquires almost religious dimensions. The passage alludes to the episode in the New Testament where Jesus miraculously produces bread to the hungry masses gathered to listen to his sermon. Rarely has a daily paper been described in loftier terms. And this in a work of literature that so emphatically celebrates the book--and certainly not as a mass product but, as Victor Graham has stressed, as a spiritual entity, as a soul that happens to reside in a body. 43
The leitmotif weaves its way through a few more pages. When the narrator runs into monsieur de Guermantes, it turns out that the duke has failed to notice the article. The next time they meet, however, the duke congratulates him on a splendid piece of writing and on having found himself an activity worthy of esteem, but he laments the somewhat precious and clichéd style that, to his mind, characterizes large parts of the text. Tough criticism, to be sure, but what is essential is that the narrator has won recognition as a writer. In this way, then, the thematic thread binds together a course of events that begins with the Martinville episode, when the narrator produces his very first piece of writing, and that ends when Le ro finally runs the article and he makes his long-desired debut. Only one thing remains: for the narrator to write a significant work of literature.
When Remembrance was in its beginning stages, Proust played with the idea of letting the novel open with the episode where the narrator sees his first publication in print. In these early sketches, Proust's hero turns around in his bed, just as in the final version. The difference is that he is anxiously contemplating the fate of the article he has long since submitted to Le ro. The next day his proud mother, trying in vain to appear casual and indifferent, enters his bedroom with a copy of Le ro featuring his article on the front page. Although Proust was to move the ro episode from the opening pages of Swann's Way to The Fugitive, the fact that he originally thought of linking the crucial bedtime episode that opens the novel to the ro episode affirms the latter's importance (RTP, 1:633-36, 639).
At the time of "Impressions de route en automobile," as I have suggested, we find Proust traveling again in Ruskin's footsteps, more than a year after his période ruskinienne is commonly believed to have ended. 44 To prepare himself for these excursions, he asked his friend and ex-partner Reynaldo Hahn to send him a number of Ruskin volumes (C, 7:269-1). It should not come as a surprise, then, that the piece of prose fiction which resulted from these trips treats a number of typically Ruskinian themes: landscape, travel, architecture, painting, seeing; in addition, Ruskin is mentioned twice and quoted once. And it is certainly true that Ruskin's spirit pervades "Impressions de route en automobile," at least as long as the car is kept out of the picture. But the car, of course, is the motor of the scenario. It is both part of the spectacle and its very vehicle. Take away the car and the speed-infused panorama loses its charge, for it is the not-yet-domesticated experience of velocity that, along with the window frames, give rise to the visual marvels that Proust so painstakingly describes. Thanks to modern technologies of speed, a new space of representation has opened up and made itself available to aesthetic exploration.
The British painter and Royal Academician Hubert von Herkomer once explained the appeal of the automobile: "The pleasure [of motoring] is seeing Nature as I could in no other way see it; my car having 'tops,' I get Nature framed--and picture after the other delights my artistic eye," he wrote in 1905. 45 As Herkomer gazed through the windshield, the view transformed itself to a series of tableaux complete with frames. The automobile had become a viewing instrument on the order of, say, the Claude glass.
It is hard to think of a more congenial representation of this idea than Henri Matisse's Le Pare-brise: Sur la route de Villacoublay (The Windshield). Conceived during a long motoring trip in southern France in 1916, Matisse's painting takes as its subject a windshield, including the view of the road and the surrounding landscape as seen through the windows ( 3). A study in perspective, the painting foregrounds the way in which the view is framed, exploring how the three windows delimit the spectator's field of vision and divide the seen into separate yet related visual spaces. These spaces, in their turn, transform themselves into a pictorial suite, into three distinct images--it is as though they were only waiting to be lifted into the artist's sketchbook. And this is indeed what is taking place in Matisse's painting. In the right-hand corner, we glimpse a sketchbook propped up against the steering wheel. The frame of the sketch under way corresponds to the window frame in the front which, in its turn, corresponds to the frame of the canvas itself. Such a complicated play of frames underscores that the painting is more than a mere representation of the road from Villacoublay; it also records its own coming into being. Indeed, Le Pare-brise is a meta-painting. Ultimately, it turns the automobile into a metaphor for the painter's eye.
"When one crosses a landscape by automobile or express train, it becomes fragmented; it loses in descriptive value but gains in synthetic value," Fernand Léger wrote in 1914. Contemplating the affinity between modern technologies of speed and the emergence of new ways of seeing, he suggested that the "view through the door of the railroad car or the automobile windshield, in combination with the speed, has altered the habitual look of things." 46 Proust's mode of describing the automobile ride, the excitement of speed, and the dazzling views through the windshields is a brilliant example of precisely the kind of modernist aesthetic that Léger promotes in his essay, written half a dozen years after Proust's piece was first published. In embracing the modern and making it a vital part of his visual aesthetics, Proust effectively negates Ruskin's anti-modern spirit. What is most striking, of course, is the fact that Proust places an automobile at the center of the spectacle he seeks to represent. But there are other features, in "Impressions de route en automobile" as well as elsewhere, that bespeak the subtle ways in which Proust can be said to invert, even make fun of, Ruskin's anti-modern stance. When, for example, the motorists are forced to stop in Lisieux because of a mechanical problem, the narrator takes a moment to study the façade of the cathedral because, as he points out to the reader, Ruskin once wrote about it. Night has fallen, however, and Lisieux is pitch-black. Agostinelli therefore turns on the headlights and directs them at the cathedral's exterior, endowing the porch with a halo of electric lighting. Needless to say, nothing could be farther from Ruskin's ideal lighting conditions.
In a 1909 pastiche, Proust continues his gentle mockery of Ruskin's programmatic critique of all things mechanical, imagining that the British critic has penned a description of Paris as seen from an aeroplane, a piece that, as Proust writes in a humorous subclause, "is rightly known as one of the master's most refined pieces." 47 Parodying Ruskin's style, Proust describes sight, sites, and atmospheres using the expansive and sumptuous idiom so characteristic of Ruskin's works. These poetic impressions, however, are not generated by the art critic's pre-technological eye. Indeed, this is not a Ruskin who takes slow walks through the countryside but one who darts across the skies in a vision machine, reveling in the joy of looking down on the domes of Sacre- Coeur. And when the mechanical bird finally descends, the creative gaze of the air-borne spectator perceives not the Eiffel Tower but the spear of Odin. In Proust's pastiche, then, air travel promotes precisely the kind of fresh sensory experience that Ruskin honored.
Distant echoes of the aeroplane motif can be heard in The Fugitive, in the episode where the narrator pays a visit to the Arena chapel in Padua. Gazing in amazement at the famous fresco cycle on which Ruskin dwells in Giotto and His Works in Padua, he is struck not by the artist's treatment of the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Crucifixion, and the other Biblical events that make up the glorious life of Christ. Instead, what catches the narrator's eye are Giotto's angels, those speedy creatures criss-crossing the heavenly spheres with all the compelling athleticism otherwise associated with early-twentieth-century aviation shows:
Constantly flitting about above the saints whenever the latter walk abroad, these little beings, since they are real creatures with a genuine power of flight, can be seen soaring upwards, describing curves, "looping the loop" [in French: "décrivant des courbes, mettant la plus grande aisance à exécuter des loopings"], diving earthwards head first, with the aid of wings which enable them to support themselves in positions that defy the laws of gravity, and are far more reminiscent of an extinct species of bird, or of young pupils of Garros practising gliding, than of angels of the Renaissance and later periods whose wings have become no more than emblems and whose deportment is generally the same as that of heavenly beings who are not winged. [RTP, 3:663/4:227]
Without further ado, Giotto's able-bodied angels are here turned into aeroplanes engaged in a sophisticated air show à la Roland Garros. According to Paul Robert's dictionary, this is the first time that the word looping, in the sense of "looping the loop," appears in French. 48 Ruskin surely would have turned over in his grave at the thought of Giotto's heavenly hosts being likened to aeroplanes. 49 Yet, in insisting on the aerotechnical gusto with which they race across the sky, Proust pays tribute to Giotto, to all the tangible plasticity and muscular vigor that characterize his treatment of the angels. As opposed to their ethereal Renaissance colleagues, Giotto's creatures have been furnished with real wings and can actually fly. A greeting from one artist to another, the episode celebrates the flesh-and-blood naturalism that has ensured Giotto such a prominent place in the annals of art history. Not only does Proust cancel Ruskin's anti-modern stance; he also works out a vital element of his own aesthetics.
In this essay, I have discussed the great extent to which Proust takes delight in speed and movement, in "Impressions de route en automobile" as well as in numerous episodes in Remembrance. I have shown how Proust engages the universe of modernity, flung open by technologies of velocity, such as the motorcar, and articulated by technologies of vision, such as cinematography. Beyond this conclusion, however, there is another and more important one, for the point is that Proust, precisely by overturning Ruskin's hostile attitude toward the increasing industrialization of time and space, was able to pay tribute to his old mentor's aesthetic imperative: to keep to what one sees and not to what one knows is there.
At one extreme, Proust's novel is given over to a contemplative inquiry into times lost, exploring the decisive role of the five senses in the search of the past. At the other extreme, the novel is fuelled by a passion for the present, a restless, voracious, and transformative passion that revolves not around memory but around sense perception. If Ruskin helped give birth to the author of Remembrance of Things Past, it was to a forward-looking and future-oriented writer with a hearty appetite for the modern world of technology and the new ways of seeing it affords. Proust knew how to capture this universe at precisely that short-lived moment when the distant past rubs against the absolutely new, when the world suddenly and unexpectedly appears as a swarm of hieroglyphs crying for decipherment.
Sara Danius is Pro Futura Segerstedt Scholar at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences. She is author of Prousts motor (Proust's Motor) and The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Modernist Aesthetics. Currently she is at work on a project on Proust, Kracauer, and Benjamin.
1. For comments on an earlier version of this essay, I thank Fredric Jameson, Stefan Jonsson, Bengt Landgren, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and Tom Whiteside. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own.
2. The Works of John Ruskin, eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 42 vols. (London: George Allen, 1906), 33:210. Hereafter referred to as WJR, with page references given parenthetically in the text.
3. Marcel Proust, "Préface du traducteur," in John Ruskin, La Bible d'Amiens, trans. and annotated by Marcel Proust (Paris: Mercure de France, 1904), 79.
4. See Jean Autret, L'influence de Ruskin sur la vie, les idées et l'oeuvre de Marcel Proust (Geneva: Droz, 1955). On Proust's interest in Ruskin, see Richard Macksey's "Introduction" to Proust, On Reading Ruskin: Prefaces to "La Bible d'Amiens" and "Sésame et les Lys," with Selections from the Notes to the Translated Texts, trans. and ed. Jean Autret, William Burford, and Phillip J. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), xiii-liii. For a critical discussion, see Anne Henry, Marcel Proust: Théories pour une esthétique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971), "Contre Ruskin," 166-257.
5. Jean-Yves Tadié, Proust: Biographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 596.
6. The visual arts play an important role in Proust's novel. On the influence of pre-modernist art, notably Renoir, Turner, and Chardin, see Juliette Monnin-Hornung's classic study, Proust et la peinture (Geneva: Droz, 1951). On the great extent to which Proust relied on specific paintings for his descriptions, see John M. Cocking, "Proust and Painting," in Proust: Collected Essays on the Writer and His Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). See also J. Theodore Johnson, Jr., "Proust and Painting," in Critical Essays on Marcel Proust, ed. Barbara Bucknall (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987), 162-80. For studies that argue the progressive and essentially modernistic character of Proust's aesthetic enterprise, see Reinhold Hohl, "Marcel Proust in neuer Sicht: Kubismus und Futurismus in seinem Romanwerk," Neue Rundschau 88 : 54-72; J. Theodore Johnson, Jr., "Proust's 'Impressionism' Reconsidered in the Light of the Visual Arts of the Twentieth Century," in Twentieth Century French Fiction, ed. George Stambolian (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1975), 27-56; Diane R. Leonard, "Literary Evolution and the Principle of Perceptibility: The Case of Ruskin, Proust, and Modernism," in Proceedings of the Xth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, vol. 1, ed. Anna Balakian et al. (New York: Garland, 1985), 132-7.
7. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, 3 vols. (New York: Vintage, 1982), 1:892; A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols. (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1987-1989), 2:190. Hereafter referred to as RTP. Page references, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text, indicate first the English translation and then the French original.
8. J. Theodore Johnson, Jr. has suggested that Elstir's studio appears like a giant magic lantern, and that the artist personifies the light source and projects the images. As Johnson notes, Proust himself makes this connection elsewhere in the novel; see Johnson, "La Lanterne magique: Proust's Metaphorical Toy," L'Esprit Créateur 11.1 , 28-30. Roxanne Hanney has shown that the "dark room" is a recurrent thematic element in Proust; the narrator's consciousness, for example, is often likened to a dark room, chambre noire. See Roxanne Hanney, "Proust and Negative Plates: Photography and the Photographic Process in A la recherche du temps perdu," Romanic Review (New York) 74.3 (May 1983): 342-54.
9. Anne Henry, "Quand une peinture métaphysique sert de propédeutique à l'écriture: Les métaphores d'Elstir dans A la recherche du temps perdu," in La critique artistique: Un genre littéraire, ed. Jean Gaulmier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), 224.
10. Nathalie Sarraute, The Age of Suspicion: Essays on the Novel, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: George Braziller, 1963), 72.
11. Throughout the novel, the narrator tries to frame Saint-Loup photographically. Put differently, Proust uses photographic modes of representation in order to visualize the difficulties inherent in the narrator's pursuit of secure knowledge. On the epistemology of the photograph and the question of homosexuality in Proust, see Mieke Bal, The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 226-30.
12. Macksey, "Introduction" to Proust, On Reading Ruskin, xviii.
13. Sizeranne was instrumental in making Ruskin's thought known in France. But like Ruskin before him, he was highly critical of photographic means of representation, particularly as an art form. See Robert de la Sizeranne, La Photographie est-elle un art? (Paris: Hachette, 1899).
14. Macksey, "Introduction" to On Reading Ruskin, xix.
15. Proust, "Pèlerinages ruskiniens en France," in Contre Sainte-Beuve, précédé de Pastiches et mélanges et suivi de Essais et articles, ed. Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 441.
16. See Proust, On Reading Ruskin, 43.
17. On the picturesque as an aesthetic category and its significance for the early Ruskin, see Robert Hewison, John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 30-53.
18. Hewison, John Ruskin, 34-35.
19. See WJR, 3:169; 14:358-360; 15:353; and 21:236-37.
20. For other examples of Ruskin's contempt for railway travel, see WJR, 5:380-81; 8:158-59. On Ruskin's attitude toward the railway and its inherent modes of perception, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, [1977] 1986), 52-64.
21. Proust, Correspondance, ed. Philip Kolb, 21 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1970-1993), 7:296; hereafter cited as C.
22. Further, by 1910 a dozen journals and reviews devoted to automobile culture had appeared, proclaiming the triumph of the motorcar and covering new speed records. See Pär Bergman, "Modernolatria" et "Simultaneità": Recherches sur deux tendances dans l'avant-garde littérarire en Italie et en France à la veille de la première guerre mondiale (Uppsala and Stockholm: Scandinavian University Books, 1962), 16-19.
23. Ernst Robert Curtius is, to my knowledge, the first critic to have commented upon the importance of speed and motion in Proust's oeuvre; see Curtius, "Marcel Proust," in Französischer Geist im Neuen Europa (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1925); reprinted as Marcel Proust (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1952), 38-39; 83; 107-9. The most substantial study so far is William C. Carter's The Proustian Quest (New York: New York University Press, 1992), which explores the theme of speed both from a textual and biographical view; see esp. 1-22; 63-91. For an inventory of modern means of transport in Proust, see Roger Kempf, "Sur quelques véhicules," L'Arc, 47 : 47-57. See also Eugène Nicole, "Les inventions modernes dans La recherche du temps perdu," Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de Combray 36 : 528-542.
24. Maurice Maeterlinck, "In an Automobile" (trans. Alfred Sutro), in his The Double Garden, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1905), 172; "En automobile," in Le Double jardin (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1904), 52. Hereafter referred to as "IA," with page references given to first the English translation and then the French original.
25. A selected translation of Octave Mirbeau's La 628--E 8 (Paris: Fasquelle, 1908) appears in Bonnard: Sketches of a Journey: Travels in an Early Motorcar (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 1989), with illustrations by Pierre Bonnard (translation into English not credited).
26. Tom Gunning, "An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film," in Film Before Griffith, ed. John L. Fell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 355-66.
27. Raymond Fielding, "Hale's Tours: Ultrarealism in the Pre-1910 Motion Picture," in Film Before Griffith, 116-7.
28. My account of these cinematic fairground attractions builds upon Gunning, "An Unseen Energy Swallows Space"; Fielding, "Hale's Tours"; Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma, vol. 2, Les Pionniers du cinéma, 1897- 1909 (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1947), 100-116; Kenneth Macgowan, Behind the Screen: The History and Techniques of the Motion Pictures (New York: Delacorte Press, 1965), 465-8; and Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 149-76.
29. Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1997).
30. "Lev Tolstoy," appendix in Jay Leyda, ed., Kino: A History of Russian and Soviet Film, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 410.
31. F. T. Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism," in Let's Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint, trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli, with a preface by Marjorie Perloff (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Classics, 1991), 49.
32. Proust reprinted "Impressions de route en automobile" under the title "Journées en automobile," a name which served as the subtitle to an essay more commonly known as "Les églises sauvées: les cloches de Caen: la cathédrale de Lisieux," in Pastiches et mélanges (Paris: Gallimard, 1919) and added two footnotes. In one of these footnotes he explains that he chose to recycle parts of the ro article in A la recherche du temps perdu; he also points out that in a not-yet-published volume of A la recherche, the publication of the "fragment" about the steeples in Le ro would be the subject of almost an entire chapter. My citations refer to "Journées en automobile," in Contre Sainte-Beuve, précédé de Pastiches et mélanges et suivi de Essais et articles, ed. Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 63-69; hereafter cited as "Jea."
33. It may well be that Proust, in writing "Impressions de route en automobile," sought to surpass Maeterlinck's "En automobile." Both stories are set in the countryside in Normandy; both stress that the motor car enables modern humans to experience as many landscapes and spectacles in a day as would formerly have demanded a whole life-time; both attempt to represent the visual impressions along the road. A great admirer of Maeterlinck's work, Proust repeatedly returned to the celebrated writer and playwright in his literary texts and especially in his letters. He is likely to have read Maeterlinck's "En automobile." The story was published in Le Double jardin, which came out in 1904, and Proust refers to the volume that same year. Furthermore, as Philip Kolb has noted, in the so-called Carnet de 1908, a notebook containing notes towards Contre Sainte-Beuve, Proust alludes to Maeterlinck's motoring piece: "Odeur des automobiles en campagne. Maeterlinck a tort" (Proust, Carnet de 1908, ed. Philip Kolb, Cahiers Marcel Proust, no. 8 [Paris: Gallimard, 1976], 70). Kolb notes, too, that Proust also alludes to the piece when, in The Captive, the smell of petrol reminds the narrator of his automobile excursions with Albertine. In addition, Proust produced a pastiche of Maeterlinck's style; at the end, he touches upon the automobile theme and the excitement of speed ("L'Affaire Lemoine par Maeterlinck," in Contre Sainte-Beuve, 197-201). If Proust indeed sought to outdo Maeterlinck's motoring piece, it is an impulse that befits what the Martinville episode signifies: the birth of a writer, untouched by the anxiety of influence.
34. Here as well in the following quote from "Journées en automobile," my translation is, as far as possible, based on the English translation of the corresponding passages in Swann's Way.
35. Curtius, Marcel Proust, 83.
36. In a brief article on Proust's cinematic style, Jacques Nantet suggests that the narrator's car ride as well as the Martinville episode demonstrate how the "lens moves with the narrative"; see Nantet, "Marcel Proust et la vision cinématographique," Revue des lettres modernes 5.36-38 : 307-12. Renate Hörisch-Helligrath has similarly proposed that Proust's rendering of the car ride is analogous to techniques of cinematic production, although in her essay, too, the suggestion remains undeveloped; see Hörisch-Helligrath, "Das deutende Auge: Technischer Fortschritt und Wahrnehmungsweise in der Recherche," in Marcel Proust: Motiv und Verfahren, ed. Edgar Mass, Publikationen der Marcel Proust Gesellschaft, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1986), 22.
37. That Proust developed what may be conceived of as literary counterparts of cinematographic techniques, especially montage and close-up techniques, was noted by several early reviewers. In Proust scholarship, however, the resonance between Proust's style and cinema has been largely unexplored. As early as 1914 the French writer and painter Jacques-Emile Blanche, in a review of Swann, remarked that "Proust has not so much been keeping a journal as amusing himself with a kind of cinema film, reconstituting the sequences and posing in it himself for several characters, throwing, as the whim takes him, the cloak of one around the shoulders of another, or even wearing it himself" (Marcel Proust: The Critical Heritage, ed. Leighton Hodson [London: Routledge, 1989], 116). Another critic, reviewing La Prisonnière for The Times in 1924, also underscores the cinematic parallel: "No other author that I have ever read comes near Proust in the photographic, or rather kinematographic delineation of a big social 'crush,' with its tittle-tattle and back-biting, the snobbery and insolent condescension of its 'great ladies,' its occasional epigrams, its bowing and scraping super ignes suppositos, its stifling and noxious atmosphere, its glimpses of queer episodes behind portières and in remote corridors" (Marcel Proust: The Critical Heritage, 269). Benjamin Crémieux, finally, remarked that: "Proust has been described as depicting life in slow motion and this formula has had a certain success. For all that, it is wrong; it is other novelists who depict life speeded up" (Marcel Proust: The Critical Heritage, 289-90). For a more substantial attempt to analyze cinematic modes of representation in Proust, particularly so-called travelings and close-ups, see Jacques Bourgeois, "Le cinéma à la recherche du temps perdu," Revue du cinéma 1.3 (December 1946): 18-38. Remarkably, Bourgeois goes so far as to argue that Proust anticipates a more "mature" form of narrative cinema--mature because psychologically inflected.
38. Jeffrey T. Schnapp has similarly observed that the reversal re--the substitution of immobility for mobility, and vice versa--organizes a great deal of representations of speed and motion in the modernist period. It recurs, he writes, "in nearly every early description of accelerated motion and underlies the design of thrill rides in nineteenth-century amusement parks as well as their cinematic shows: namely, a reversal of perspective such that it now appears as if it is the landscape that is in motion and not the traveler; or, rather, that the landscape is in motion for the traveler." See Jeffrey Schnapp, "Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation)," 6.1 (Jan. 1999): 22 (emphasis in the original). Interestingly enough, Schnapp argues that the re can be traced back as far as to eighteenth-century descriptions of mail-coach travel. My approach differs from his in the sense that I am concerned with the ways in which vehicles in motion--trains as well as automobiles--may serve as visual framing devices and how they, therefore, share an affinity with cinema. Also, I focus on early cinema and turn-of-the-century fairground attractions as simulacra of speed, that is, as means of representation. Combined, these two aspects constitute what I take to be a specifically late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century phenomenon.
39. Most commentators have read the Martinville episode in the interpretive terms proposed by the novel itself, concentrating on the question of literary creation and the mysteries of perspective, sometimes even extending the reading into mystical or religious terms. Poulet's formal analysis deviates from this pattern. Arguing that in Proust travel is even more miraculous than involuntary memory, Poulet suggests that the travel motif is a structural pretext for bringing together unrelated objects in space. Moreover, contrary to memory, the phenomena that travel conjoins do not depend upon resemblances (Poulet, L'espace proustien [Paris: Gallimard, 1963], 91-105). In Deleuze's view, the Martinville episode fuels what he perceives as the novel's global theme: the hero's apprenticeship in the art of reading signs (Deleuze, Proust et les signes, 2nd ed. [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970], 7-9). For Jean-Pierre Richard, the Martinville steeples are a typically Proustian hermeneutic object, but also an allegory to be unpacked along psychoanalytic lines (Richard, Proust et le monde sensible [Paris: Seuil, 1974], 155-67). According to Diane Leonard, the Martinville episode testifies to Proust's modernism, because it introduces perspectival illusions and the question of depth into Proust's novel (Leonard, "Proust and Virginia Woolf, Ruskin and Roger Fry: Modernist Visual Dynamics," Comparative Literature Studies 18.3 (September 1981): 333-43). Linda A. Gordon claims that the episode is "a model of the perspectival relationships between subject and object" (Gordon, "The Martinville Steeplechase: Charting the Course," Style 22.3 (Fall 1988): 402-9). For Howard Moss, the steeples are premonitions, as they embody a slice of Marcel's hidden future: the writerly future. See Howard Moss, The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 87-103. For a stylistic commentary, see Luzius Keller, Proust Lesen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 229-38.
40. Keith Cohen has similarly underscored the importance of the episode: "Marcel's experience of seeing the Martinville and Vieuxvicq steeples from a moving coach makes an indelible mark on the text, since it gives rise to the first piece of writing within the text attributed to Marcel himself" (Cohen, Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 160).
41. Although the Martinville episode is widely thought of as pivotal episode in Proust's novel, most critics have neglected the fact that it derives from an earlier text. Curtius's Proust study offers an exception, as do Bernard Guyon's and Wolfram Nitsch's articles. Guyon provides a close reading of the Martinville episode, arguing that the episode is a "poetical transposition" of the corresponding piece in Le ro. He also maintains that the novel's genesis must be sought in "Impressions de route en automobile" which, on his view, testifies to Proust's greatness as a writer; see Guyon, "Marcel Proust et le mystère de la création littéraire: Essai d'explication des 'Clochers de Martinville,'" Annales de la Faculté des lettres de Toulouse, no. 1-2 : 37-65. Nitsch discusses the genesis of the automobile motif in Proust at large, his principal aim being to study how Proust's attitude towards the motif changes over the years. He concentrates on the ro article, usefully connecting the visual enigmas triggered by the car ride to Elstir's painterly aesthetic; see Nitsch, "Phantasmen aus Benzin: Prousts Automobile in textgeschichtlicher Sicht," in Marcel Proust: Schreiben ohne Ende, ed. Rainer Warning (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1994), 93-108. Carter has also noted the connections between the ro article and the Martinville episode, although he stops short of textual analysis; see Carter, Proustian Quest, 135-37.
42. Guyon, "Marcel Proust et le mystère de la création littéraire," 58.
43. See Victor Graham, The Imagery of Proust (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), 33. Consider, for example, the episode about the death of the writer Bergotte in The Captive, where Proust accomplishes one of his most moving and pregnant images: "They buried him, but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection" (RTP, 3:186/3:693).
44. As Proust's 1907 correspondence shows, he spent August and part of September in Cabourg, and went on trips "en automobile fermée" to architecturally significant sites in Normandy. Judging from the letters, "Impressions de route en automobile" appears to have received an enthusiastic response from his friends. See, for example, Proust's letter to Mme. Straus (C, 7:315-6), in which Proust also refers to Agostinelli's admiring letter; and Daniel Halévy's letter to Proust which, as Philip Kolb has suggested, was part of an exchange apropos of the motoring article ( C, 7:320-2).
45. Quoted in Gerald Silk, "The Automobile in Art," in Automobile and Culture, ed. Gerald Silk (New York: Abrams, 1984), 75. See also Silk's interesting comments on Le Pare-brise . It is interesting to note that Matisse executed a series of paintings of landscapes seen through windshields; see Jack Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art, 1869-1918 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 460-1, 468-9.
46. Fernand Léger, "Contemporary Achievements in Painting," in Functions of Painting, ed. Edward F. Fry, trans. Alexandra Anderson (New York: Viking, 1973), 11. Similarly, László Moholy-Nagy, in Vision in Motion, suggests that "motion, accelerated to high speed, changes the appearance of the objects and makes it impossible to grasp their details. There is a clearly recognizable difference between the visual experience of a pedestrian and a driver in viewing objects. The motor car driver or airplane pilot can bring distant and unrelated landmarks into spatial relationships unknown to the pedestrian" (Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion [Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947], 245).
47. Proust, "La Bénédiction du sanglier," in Contre Sainte-Beuve, 202. The pastiche was found after Proust's death, and Philip Kolb has dated it to 1909.
48. I owe this piece of information to Malcolm Bowie's Proust Among the Stars (London: Harper Collins, 1998), 89. See also his fine reflections on Proust and Giotto (88- 90).
49. Things are more complicated, however, for it is clear that Ruskin's brilliant reading of Giotto's treatment of the angels paved the way for Proust's aerotechnical imagery. In fact, although Ruskin is never mentioned by name in the Padua episode, some of Proust's boldest reflections are indebted to Ruskin: "There is noticeable here," Ruskin writes in Giotto and His Works in Padua, "as in all works of this early time, a certain confidence in the way in which the angels trust to their wings, very characteristic of a period of bold and simple conception. Modern science has taught us that a wing cannot be anatomically joined to a shoulder; and in proportion as painters approach more and more to the scientific, as distinguished from the contemplative state of mind, they put the wings of their angels on more timidly, and dwell with greater emphasis upon the human form, and with less upon the wings, until these last become a species of decorative appendage,--a mere sign of an angel. But in Giotto's time an angel was a complete creature, as much believed in as a bird; and the way in which it would or might cast itself into the air, and lean hither and thither upon its plumes, was as naturally apprehended as the manner of flight of a chough or a starling" (WJR, 24:72; emphasis in the original).
I am not able to share your opinion that the new course in Germany might be only a nightmare lasting a few months. I am filled with the deepest pessimism because I believe that only now will we pay the price for underestimating the opponent, that only now will we see that they will maintain a better, firmer, and more ruthless hold on everything than the republicans ever dared to do during 15 years. . . . I believe that we should be prepared for anything and then let destiny take its course.
Hans Heinsheimer, Universal Edition, to Kurt Weill, 8 February 1933 1
This movement has so much that is healthy and positive that one can regard the artistic and other consequences quite calmly. The battle is directed primarily against the communists and Jews, whose influence is being checked to a considerable degree. A welcome cleaning-up has been undertaken . . . in an attempt to restore decency and order. No doubt there will be a reaction here against non-German art, but the really valuable will again be recognized as before. You must not worry about this . . .
Willy Strecker, B. Schott's Söhne, to Igor Stravinsky, 18 April 1933 2
All good music since 1850, T. W. Adorno repeatedly asserted, has renounced commercialism altogether. Extrapolating from Arnold Schoenberg's 1927 dictum that "in the end, art and success have to part company," Adorno succinctly articulated an aesthetic axiom central to modernist ideology: worthwhile art music either floats, unsullied in its autonomy, above economics, politics, and commerce or critically resists its origins and contexts by its very existence. 3 While popular musics are necessarily conditioned by the marketplace and are always, as merchandise, subject to the imperatives of commerce, "good music" exists in a pure state as "art for art's sake." Because it formulates and then obeys its own laws, this music transcends its contexts and "represents a triumph over the world and not a mere reflection of it." 4 Adhering to this axiom, most historical accounts of music in the twentieth century to date have privileged musical composition over other musical activities, including performance, publication, and reception. For example, such bias, unacknowledged and unstated in Arnold Whittall's Music Since the First World War, is manifest in the title of the revised and expanded imprint of 1999, Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century. In his "Millennial Prelude" to the volume, Whittall reaffirms his approach while making a perfunctory disclaimer: "Even if much of my own text may appear to subscribe to the outmoded heresy of autonomy, treating its chosen compositions in isolation from any contexts other than the particular technical features selected by the author, some hint of the world outside the work will break in from time to time. . . . It will, I hope, be obvious that a text conceived in the way I have described cannot be regarded as a history of twentieth-century music." 5
The cultural practice of publishing new music in the twentieth century, in particular, has received scant scholarly attention. In fact, the reproduction, promotion, dissemination, exploitation, and protection of modern art music has been studied far less than analogous publication-related activities in the eras of Monteverdi and Mozart. 6 Yet, what is at stake in charting the course of music publication in the twentieth century is not just a more complete empirical description of musical commerce, as important as that might be, but rather a basis for reconsidering the continuities and discontinuities in the historical arc extending from the heady pre-War days of Weimar experimentation, through National Socialist political appropriation of music as the "most German of the arts," to the post-War "tyranny" of Darmstadt serialism. Now that the "modernist project" is being subjected to closer scrutiny, it is becoming clear that the process of composing music and getting it performed (the good, bad, and ugly alike) was usually conditioned as much by practical and financial considerations as it was by artistic impulse. During the twentieth century the publication of contemporary music has been, in fact, big business. For example, Schott Musik International, headquartered in Mainz, reports on its website: "With a permanent staff of about 250 employees and 150 free-lancers, and offices in Hong Kong, London, Madrid, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Toronto and Zurich, Schott Musik International is today one of the biggest publishing houses of serious music in the classical tradition." 7
Music publishing entails large capital investments, big risks, and high stakes. As protection of intellectual property was gradually expanded and extended, publishers entrusted with copyrights enjoyed virtual monopolies over artistic products that substantially outlived their creators. Even investments in a composer who claimed to be writing for a time fifty years after his death could be amortized over a period of protection lasting a century or more, with reasonable expectations of eventual recoupment or even profit. But speculation in the music market was no less uncertain a gamble than that in commodities, currencies, or securities. Care, subsidy, and mentoring of composers, preparation of performance materials, dissemination of printed scores, and ongoing promotion, accounting, and copyright administration were expensive undertakings, with no guarantees against the vagaries of taste or much direct influence over the vicissitudes of performing organizations and institutions. Publishers counted on short-term sensations like Jonny spielt auf to offset the costs of slow starters such as Wozzeck. The fruits from the rare everbearers, such as Carmina Burana (whose earnings consistently exceed a million dollars annually), and Die Dreigroschenoper (earning several hundred thousand dollars annually) subsidized the printing and warehousing of hundreds of scores and sets of parts that did little more than gather dust on the shelves. A few such stocks, including Mahler's symphonies and Schoenberg's Erwartung, turned out to be "sleepers," lying dormant in the portfolio for decades before skyrocketing in value and paying off handsomely in the long term.
Even the most reckless firms hedged their bets with endeavors less volatile than new music: Urtext editions of "classic" steady earners, perennially in-demand pedagogical materials, music for proliferating organizations of amateurs, youths, soldiers, and workers. As the "democratizing" new media of recordings, radio, and sound films tantalized with the potential of a mass audience for "serious" music, upstarts such as Universal Edition (UE) and Bärenreiter competed within a brave new world with such venerable companies as B. Schott's Söhne (Schott) and Breitkopf & Härtel. Germany started the century as the undisputed center of music publishing (with Leipzig as its capital). By the end of the Weimar period, Schott and UE had emerged as the principal rivals for the publication of new music in Central Europe. As Hans Heinsheimer observed firsthand, "The truly spectacular battles between the big music publishers, mainly between the Schotts of Mainz, led by at least one Strecker, and the Universals of Vienna . . . were fought at the international festivals, the trade fairs of contemporary music. It was ferocious and merciless warfare, marvelous to watch and highly enjoyable to participate in. . . . When they met in hotel lobbies or concerts, they greeted each other with teeth-grinding exuberance and evil smiles." 8
Soon, however, genuine international festivals were listed among the "great sins of the time" that had corrupted "the domain of an art that until then had been seen throughout the world as the most German of all." In his speech that opened the "Entartete Musik" Exhibition in Düssseldorf in May 1938, Joseph Goebbels continued: "A certain period of transition was thus required to remove the errors, failures, and manifestations of decline through the cultivation of the true artistic strengths of our German music. . . . The German masters, who with true artistic command had created immortal works of German tonal art, were suppressed by the flagrantly commercial elements of international Jewry." 9 The following year, Peter Raabe, then president of the Reichsmusikkammer (the Reich Chamber of Music), specifically identified the fate of German music with that of German armies: "Not only musicians participated in the fate of German music, but all Germans, inasmuch as the people of Bach, Beethoven and Bruckner [are] in no other art as superior to other peoples as in music. To protect this music against all current dangers must be a sacred obligation of all those remaining at home, while the army has left to protect [the] country and the people to which fate has accorded the wonderful and magnificent gift: German music." A poster captioned "Das Land der Musik" makes explicit this link between military muscle and the wonderful gift of German music; it features a gigantic Reichsadler (Eagle of the Reich) as an acoustic backdrop with organ pipe feathers ( 1). 10
Though the arts were thus anything but peripheral to the ideology and propaganda of National Socialism, attempts at regulation and coordination (Gleichschaltung) of music in general and music publishing in particular had nevertheless been improvisatory, lethargic, and haphazard for much of the 1930s. Situated precisely in the bureaucratic cracks between culture and commerce, where the interests of Goebbel's Ministry of Propaganda intersected and conflicted with those of the Ministry of Economics, the six hundred members of the Fachverband (Assembly for a Specialized Field of Activity) for music publishing comprised by far the smallest sector of the 95,000-member Reichsmusikkammer, which required all who participated in the "creation, reproduction, intellectual or technical processing, dissemination, preservation, and sale of cultural goods" to join. 11 Founded on the principle of self-administration under state supervision, but hampered by inadequate self-financing from dues, the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture) initially depended on artists and organizations to cooperate voluntarily with the regime and to police themselves--even though only 21% of its members would eventually join the National Socialist Party.
Several of Goebbels's initiatives, including extension of copyright protection in 1934 from thirty to fifty years post-mortem, directly benefitted composers and their publishers. Subsequently the Reichsmusikkammer provided an ongoing subsidy for the purchase of contemporary music by provincial performing organizations. When the Propaganda Ministry began to monitor musical performances more closely, it issued, in September 1935, a list of "musical works allowed under no circumstances, neither to be publicly performed nor broadcast." However, there seems to have been no comparable ban on the printing or sale of this music, other than an initial directive requiring chamber screening before publication or dissemination of printed music composed by "persons who have left the German Reich after the seizure of power by National Socialism" (AIENG, 139). Even after the Nuremburg Laws forced the purging of 2,202 non-Aryan members of the Reichsmusikkammer in 1936, exceptions were made in the cases of seventeen non-Aryan music publishers, including the prominent firms of Fürstner and Peters, which remained in Jewish hands for several more years. (This proved so embarrassing to the Propaganda Ministry that it directed the German press to avoid calling attention to the situation) (AIENG, 112). Non-Aryan music publishers and music dealers were Aryanized only gradually in the late 1930s. By then, a Reichsmusikprüfstelle (Reich Music Examining Board) had been established to review all music planned for German distribution. But the enormity of such a task soon overwhelmed the staff of four and persuaded Reichsmusikkammer president Peter Raabe to modify the directive so that music publishers would be obliged to submit works only on demand of the Prüf (AIENG, 141). The extent of such pre-publication prohibitions is unclear from surviving records, but the Prüfstelle managed to produce only four lists of "unerwünschter musikalischer Werke" ("undesirable musical works"), remarkable in their brevity and encompassing only 150 compositions and composers in all. The lists were eclectic, ranging from Irving Berlin to Egon Wellesz, but with a heavy concentration of American popular music. 12
In retrospect, it seems as if closer regulation of music licensed for performance by the finite number of German and Austrian music publishers would have been less cumbersome than monitoring myriad individual performances throughout the country. However, competing jurisdictions and power struggles within the Third Reich over responsibility for censorship and the conduct of business, the potential ramifications of restrictions on music publishing for international trade and foreign currency reserves, and the desire to maintain an image of "business as usual" in the "land of music" shielded the music publishing industry from the harshest scrutiny. 13 Nevertheless, as in so many other sectors of German society, even minimal threats of coercion by the state had the notable effect of creating an environment of anxiety in which self-censorship by publishers became the norm. Ultimately the purge of Jewish composers and publishers radically and permanently altered the geographical center of gravity within the industry, with many key res emigrating to England and the United States.
Because music publishing had such a low profile within regulatory agencies, surviving official government documentation of that particular Fachverband is sparse. Understandably as reluctant as Philip Morris or Microsoft to open their internal business archives to scholarly scrutiny because of continuing financial, legal, and contractual implications, publishing houses have been particularly sensitive about their history during the twelve-year period of National Socialism. The largely unreliable self-commissioned "official histories" of individual publishing companies have tended to treat this period as a brief aberration of little consequence. 14 With professional sensitivities compounded by personal ones, family-owned firms, of course, have been particularly guarded in this regard. 15 Consequently, historians must piece together a fragmentary and provisional picture from widely scattered documents extant in other repositories, principally correspondence between the publishers and their composers. 16
Two such letters comprise vivid and nearly contemporary post-War snapshots of Schott and UE. These letters also document diametric relationships after 1933 between two leading composers of the Weimar era and their respective publishers. As portals into the period from very different yet complementary perspectives, the documents warrant close reading and beg a wide array of questions about the institution of music publishing under the Nazis. (The letters appear in facsimile in res 2 and 3; they are excerpted in English translation here). The first was written by Willy Strecker from Schott:
Mainz, 16 August 1946
Mr. Paul Hindemith
New Haven
Dear Paul,
. . . From here I can report only good news about the ongoing interest in your works. It's a real stroke of luck that all your works are available here and that performance materials stand at the ready. The twelve-year hiatus hasn't done any damage, since we were always working underground and, notwithstanding the quality of the works, everyone is grabbing whatever is readily available. Almost all the other publishers can't deliver. Therefore Krenek, Schoenberg, Bartok, Weil [sic], Alban Berg, etc., etc. have fallen right into oblivion, and, of the whole group from that time, only you and Stravinsky have been spared. In Leipzig and Berlin nothing more can be produced, and most of the stock and the publishing houses are more or less destroyed.
. . . Soon I will send you the list of important recent performances that is being compiled right now. By all means do send me whatever you have, and let me know your wishes about what should be held back. 17 [Begin Page 9]
Remembering their first meeting during the summer of 1946, Hans Werner Henze described Willy Strecker as "a witty and affable individual then in his sixty-third year. . . . A native of Mainz, he had an Argentinian passport and a house in Wiesbaden, which . . . contained some of the finest Picassos, Klees, and Braques." 18 Hindemith had come to Schott more than a quarter century earlier than Henze, at almost the same time that Willy Strecker and his older brother Ludwig became partners in their father's company, as the First World War gave precarious birth to the Weimar Republic. While Hindemith's reputation and portfolio grew and Willy Strecker assumed more responsibilities within the firm, their professional relationship evolved onto a first-name and Du-basis. Schott's strategic stewardship of Hindemith's career on a global scale helped him to weather the turbulence of "Der Fall Hindemith" in 1934, subsequently to remain viable within Germany's musical life (even securing a commission from the Luftwaffe), and simultaneously to explore options outside Germany. 19 When those efforts finally failed and Hindemith took up residence in Switzerland and then the United States, he maintained direct personal contact with Schott, except during the years of total war. Continued promotion and publication of Hindemith's works abroad by a network of partially or wholly owned foreign affiliates minimized the impact of the 1936 Nazi ban on performance of his works, furnished a firm foundation for his move to the United States, and assured his preeminence in immediate postwar German musical culture.
While Willy Strecker's son Hugo oversaw from the London office an orderly transfer of rights, Schott's affiliate in New York, Associated Music Publishers (AMP), secured conducting and performing engagements for Hindemith, served as an operational base for his American tours, and provided ongoing support services during his residency in New Haven. 20 "The Pub shop in New York," Hindemith wrote Willy Strecker "is a kind of substitute for the Weihergarten," the address of Schott's palatial headquarters in Mainz. Grateful for such constancy, Hindemith, in turn, volunteered that under the circumstances of 1941 his monthly stipend should be decreased to only what was necessary to sustain his mother and mother-in-law, who had remained behind in Germany. Hindemith wrote Strecker:
I have received your statement of accounts from last July, and a statement from Stagma has arrived as well. It would be foolish to expect more in the present circumstances--in spite of that, the Stagma soared up to a sum greater than I have seen for years!--and I should be glad if things were to begin to look better for you. Though I am certain that things will work out to the advantage of the publishing firm in the long term, even if we ourselves don't all live to see it, I should not want to win for myself more advantages from the situation than seem reasonable. I should therefore like to suggest that we bring our contractual and publishing relationship more into line with present circumstances
. . . . You will doubtless find the fairest, best, and most practical way for us both. 21
Having lost direct contact after December 1941, composer and publisher managed only sporadic communications through intermediaries until August 1945. Emerson Kailey, an American bandsman, for example, visited Strecker in Mainz in May 1945 and reported back to Hindemith that no manuscripts or plates of his works had been lost and "they have been publishing everything that came through from America. The Ludus Tonalis has sold 1,200 copies in the three months it has been out in Germany." Kailey told Hindemith that he didn't see Dr. Ludwig Strecker because the brothers "alternate in going to Mainz. One goes one day and the other the next day. The reason for that is that they have only one bicycle." The soldier concluded, "Herr Strecker asked me to tell you that Germany needs you." 22 Strecker's own hand-carried note reported that "the old Weihergarten has come through it all more or less intact, [but] the printing works are completely destroyed." The relationship between the composer and his German publisher had also survived the war more or less intact. It remained symbiotic and monogamous; copyrights were systematically reassigned to Schott, and works composed in America were soon available for sale in Germany. All of Hindemith's music was (and continues to be) published exclusively by Schott.
Six weeks after Hindemith had received the encouraging letter from Strecker of August 1946, Kurt Weill found in his rural mailbox near New City, New York, a very different sort of letter from Alfred Schlee, the new de facto Director of UE:
Vienna, 26 September 1946
Sehr verehrter Herr Weill!
I don't know if you remember me. During the last stages of your time in Berlin, I visited you a few times as representative of Universal Edition and probably left you with a very bad impression.Meanwhile, following the liberation of Vienna, I've taken over management of Universal Edition, as you might have already heard from [Hans] Heinsheimer.
. . .
During the period of the Nazi-Regime, there were still several employees with me at Universal Edition (especially Fräulein Rothe and Herr Deczey) who tried very hard to save as many of our properties as possible. Unfortunately, we could not prevent the Gestapo from seizing a few items and carrying them off. To my greatest regret, Mahagonny was one of them. Since performances of this work would now be possible, especially in the first version, we want to ask if you might have some of that material. If so, please do send it to us as soon as possible. Do you have any new orchestral or chamber music which could be played over here? I hear that you are working very successfully on Broadway. But perhaps you may nevertheless have written something that might be appropriate for Europe.
Schlee's letter is the first extant contact between composer and his Austrian publisher since 1938. Prior to his flight from Berlin in March 1933, Weill had corresponded with UE on almost a daily basis, most often with Hans Heinsheimer, the head of the stage department. Already then, the exchange had frequently been plaintive or accusatory rather than collaborative in tone, especially as the political environment grew more hostile to performances of Weill's works and the composer's frustrations with his publisher's efforts intensified. In June 1932, Heinsheimer attempted to reassure Weill: "Financial considerations . . . can play a role only to the extent that we remain aware of the interaction between artistic and financial concerns. . . . In the case of Kurt Weill, you can continue to be fully and absolutely assured of our most generous and far-sighted publishing policies." 23 But Weill had hardly arrived in Paris when UE informed him in April 1933 that, because the prevailing political situation discouraged performances of his stage works in Germany and there was little interest in them elsewhere, the firm would have to reduce his contractually mandated monthly stipend from 1,000 to 500 marks. 24 In June UE proposed that the payments be discontinued temporarily or, alternatively, their contract be suspended, with rights in Weill's works returned to him for a year. When Weill rejected this proposal and UE ceased its monthly payments anyway, further acrimonious negotiations culminated in back-payment of five months' reduced stipend and mutual release from contractual obligations. UE stipulated, however, that it reserved the right to recoup the unearned balance in Weill's account from a small percentage of future earnings he might receive from another publisher. 25 Their contract would never be reinstated, and none of Weill's subsequent compositions would be published by UE.
The arrival of Schlee's letter after almost a decade of silence would not have surprised Weill as much as its signatory would have. Because UE's owners and virtually all of the senior staff had followed Weill into emigration, he would have been unaware that the post-Anschluss leadership vacuum at UE had been filled internally by Alfred Schlee, whom he would have remembered only as a minor functionary within the firm. Schlee's name crops up only a dozen or so times in the nearly 1,400 surviving letters between Weill and UE written prior to Weill's emigration.
Prior to joining UE in 1927, Schlee, a native of Dresden, had studied piano with Erwin Schulhoff and served as chorusmaster in Gera and dramaturg in Münster. Allied with the Wigman school of dance, he accompanied Wigman's protégée Yvonne Georgi, and, as a prolific critic, proselytized for the Ausdruckstanz (expressive dance) in general and the theories of Rudolf von Laban in particular. 26 Laban's innovations in the notation of dance are better known today than his controversial theories of choral dancing, which became the core of what was later understood to be a National Socialist aesthetic. Although Laban allied himself closely with the National Socialists, he fell out of favor in 1938 and emigrated to England. (In dance he is a prime example of the fallacy in assuming that "progressive" aesthetics naturally ally themselves with "leftist" politics). 27 In his first contribution to Modern Music in 1931, Schlee asserted that art must foster an ethics that would support a strong national aesthetic identity: "The German does not consider art as a luxury but as an all-important element of his life and culture. And he is serious about the responsibility which this conception of art entails. It distinguishes him from almost every other race. . . . For this reason also the ethical content and not the appeal to the senses most concerns the German." 28
Having proposed to UE the founding of a dance periodical, Schlee had freelanced in 1926 as Paul Stefan's uncredited assistant for Tanz in dieser Zeit, a special issue of UE's journal, Musikblätter des Anbruch. The following year he officially joined UE's Propaganda-Abteilung, to assist in the founding of a new quarterly journal, Schrifttanz, to be edited by Laban. However, Schlee soon took over sole editorship of the journal and remained in that capacity until its demise in 1931. That year he accompanied the tenor Otto Pasetti (who would later sing opposite Lotte Lenya in the Vienna production of Mahagonny in April 1932) in a recording on the Paloma label of Weill's "Muschel von Margate." 29 In autumn 1931, UE dispatched Schlee to Berlin, where his two-room apartment on Bonner Straße doubled as UE's "Berlin office." Prior to 1933, the responsibilities of the "bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Schlee," as Heinsheimer derisively characterized him to Weill, had not extended much beyond delivering and retrieving scores and parts from copyists, theaters, and composers. 30
Schlee's contributions to Modern Music after January 1933, in contrast to Heinsheimer's courageously outspoken reports, are guarded if not timid. In 1934, Schlee reported, "The year has been marked by all the phenomena traditionally associated with periods of great change, the principal effect having been to restrict the production of new works and works in new styles. Although Gleichschaltung has been consummated, different interpretations of it prevail everywhere. A unified artistic policy cannot yet be guaranteed; it is apparent only in its broad outlines. . . . The great success [of Arabella]--though the text is derived from the non-Aryan Hofmannsthal--is chiefly due to the general worship of the great German personality, Richard Strauss. . . . This last season has been one of change; the next will determine the fate of opera" 31
Schlee remained in Berlin until mid-1938, when he returned to Vienna as one of the very few employees permitted to continue working in the "nazified" UE. The only hint in the surviving correspondence concerning an event which might have left the composer "with a very bad impression" of Schlee is Weill's response to Heinsheimer's report of 28 January 1933: "Schlee told us very proudly that you couldn't work even with Rene Claire, because he, too, had capitulated to the film industry." Weill replied on 6 February: "Mr. Schlee's strange remarks are quite misleading." Considering the enormity of events during the intervening thirteen years, this minor irritation would seem an unlikely cause for Schlee's post-war concern.
Schlee's letter infuriated Weill. Although there is no reply extant in the UE archives, Weill characterized the circumstances to Georg Kaiser's widow as an "unbelievable breach of a publisher's responsibility to its authors." "Unfortunately from here it's very difficult for me to determine with much clarity the overall publishing situation," he explained in response to her inquiry about performance possibilities for the Weill-Kaiser works. "I had a letter from Universal Edition with the casual notification that all my full scores had been confiscated by the Gestapo. . . . I don't have a single full score of my European works and therefore right now I can't say if one can procure them anywhere." 32 (According to the terms of its standard agreement with composers, holograph scores of works printed by UE became the property of the publisher). Weill died without knowing that all but one had, in fact, survived. When in the mid-1950s, they emerged quietly and mysteriously, not from Gestapo warehouses, but from UE's own wartime caches, Weill's widow Lotte Lenya refused to re-assign to UE the twenty-eight-year renewal term of U.S. copyright. She placed with Schott several unpublished works, including Die sieben Todsünden, which UE had declined in 1933.
Shortly before Weill's death, Schlee demanded that Weill now repay the outstanding pre-War balance on his account (14,607.05 Austrian schillings) out of the earnings from Die Dreigroschenoper or from what Schlee assumed Weill must have been earning from his Broadway success. 33 Weill expressed some doubt after the war about UE's right to represent any of his works, but neither he nor Lenya followed through with such a claim. Eventually UE deducted the balance of the unrecouped advance from payments due Weill's estate. As late as 1954, when The Threepenny Opera began its recordbreaking run at the Theater de Lys in New York, UE's share of royalties (5%) was still impounded by the Custodian of Alien Property. UE subsequently allowed many of Weill's works to go out of print and published only two full scores of his stage works in the fifty years following his death. Today, therefore, Weill's oeuvre remains fragmented, individual copyrights literally splintered, with half a dozen publishers picking up pieces in different domains.
Why were the experiences of Schott and UE and their two respective composers so different? On the surface, the firms seem similar: both were small, family-owned businesses, the former headquartered in the heart of Rheinhessen in Mainz, the latter located symbolically within the opulent and tradition-soaked Musikverein on the Karlsplatz in Vienna. The National Socialists so closely identified both of them with decadent developments in music that their house journals, Schott's Melos, which was renamed and retooled in 1934, and UE's Anbruch, which ceased publication in 1937, shared a panel at the 1938 "Entartete Musik" in Düsseldorf, captioned: "In these pages was Cultural Bolshevism nurtured!" ( 4). 34 Despite the inclusion of Hindemith and Stravinsky, UE and its composers held pride of place at that exhibition. After Stravinsky had vociferously protested his inclusion as "absolutely inadmissible," he received (and relayed to Strecker) assurances of "benevolent neutrality" henceforth. 35 An upstart founded in 1901 and specializing in new music, UE was considered by the National Socialist officials to be the Jewish publishing house. Founded and still owned by Jews at the time of the Anschluss, managed largely by Jews, with a catalogue populated by a Jewish majority and a radical leftist minority, UE was also the principal agent in the West for the Soviet State Publishing House. Any nationalist halo emanating from its original Bruckner and Strauss holdings had long since dissipated.
With a history almost parallel to that of German music itself, Schott, on the other hand, was still regarded in the 1930s as the venerable publisher of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen. Its owners, Ludwig Strecker, Sr., and two of his sons, Wilhelm and Ludwig, Jr., were Aryan. Each of them had dutifully submitted a completed questionnaire to that effect to the Reichsmusikkammer, Fachverband Musikalien-Verleger (Assembly of Music Publishers). 36 Tracing their Aryan lineage back through the requisite two generations on both mother's and father's sides, they confirmed that the "Konfession" of their forebears in every case had been "evangelisch," i.e., religion: Protestant. All three Streckers also certified that they had never belonged to the Communist Party or any other subversive political entities.