That one word ‘only’ — ‘seulement’ — consigns a century of aesthetics to the dustbin. For what Proust is saying here, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, is that in the end aesthetic beauty, the notion of the masterpiece, is completely trivial. The Virgin of Amiens may be inferior artistically to the Mona Lisa (but would Proust have been so categorical today?), but it affects us far more profoundly than any merely aesthetic experience ever could, striking at the core of our being, like those involuntary memories A la recherche will go on to evoke with such eloquence and precision.
The power of memory for Proust lies in the fact that it brings back to us what we had lost so thoroughly that we were not even aware of having lost it. Marcel has mourned his grandmother, of course, but it is only when his body inadvertently repeats a movement it had made in her presence that her death is borne in upon him — in the very instant that he experiences her alive in a way she had, ironically, never been for him when she was actually alive, the magnitude of the loss that is her death hits him for the first time. The experience makes him understand that we are creatures who exist in time, who were once what we are no more, who once had what we can never have again. Our visit to Amiens is precious to us, and the Virgin forms part of that visit, like the colour of the sky, the quality of the breeze, the smell of the train that brought us there, for we experience, in that sleepy provincial town, something we had not been prepared for and which we will find nowhere else, not even there, were we to return. It is not nostalgia which overwhelms Proust but the sense of himself brought to sudden life by the encounter with the cathedral and its sculptures, the sense of possibilities released in him by the encounter which he did not know were there. This sensation, for Proust as for Coleridge, is instinctively linked with joy, and even a cheap postcard reproduction of the Virgin will be enough to remind him of what he owes her, of what she means to him.
It is not of course that a visit to the Louvre cannot lead to a similar experience, but the wrenching of works of art from their matrix and the bundling of so many disparate works into one building militates against this. Of course the Virgin of Amiens was made for a particular place on a particular building, and centuries of sun and rain have ensured that even if at first they were not entirely at ease with each other, they are now indissoluble; an oil painting on canvas, on the other hand, is made, one could almost say, to be displaced, to be a sans patrie, and it does not much matter which great museum it ends up in or who are its neighbours.
And to it, in its new home, will come the tourist group, being lectured to by a guide. What is it that goes through the minds of its members as they stand there, in the Louvre, gazing at the Mona Lisa, or, two days later, in front of Rembrandt's Night Watch in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam? Presumably that they have seen a masterpiece and that this has somehow made them more cultured, more knowledgeable, perhaps even, who knows, better. But what is such culture or knowledge worth? What has it opened in their minds and hearts?
‘Please do not touch.’ That is the one label every visitor to the museum or gallery has read. And if one forgets its message, if one leans forward a little too closely, puts out a hand to follow a contour or point a figure out to a companion, there is always an attendant on hand to warn one away. But, in a sense, the label is both redundant and misleading. In a museum or gallery all the great and famous objects of world culture are ‘at hand’. For the duration of our visit they belong to us. We can, in the British Museum, move from the Rosetta Stone to the Elgin Marbles, from the Lindisfarne Gospels to some ancient Chinese buddha. It is an admirable place to find visual confirmation of what books have told us, and in that sense it is an invaluable educational tool. But just as the gramophone and the radio have brought the masterpieces of world music to us without our having to make any effort to get to them, so here the very abundance and proximity of masterpieces and objects of huge cultural significance tend to deprive each of its aura. We can, if the attendant is not looking, actually touch them — but can they touch us?
3 Boundaries
The trouble with mirrors, as Merleau-Ponty notes in La Prose du monde, is that they show too much. I do not see my body in the ordinary course of things as I see it in the mirror. It is not an object laid open to my gaze, as it is in the mirror, but that which looks, feels, moves. The world exists for me not because I see it but because I am a part of it.
In the ordinary course of things I do not look, I merely take in. But once there is a frame around my field of vision my relation to the field changes. What is within that frame is immediately arresting, it asks to be examined. At the same time what is within the frame is cut off from the rest of the world and cut off from me. The peculiar horror and fascination of mirrors lies in the fact that they present the world to us not as we normally experience it but as both open to our gaze and yet forever beyond our reach.
In our daily dealings with the world we do not encounter frames and we do not gaze. As I talk to a friend it is not his face or body that holds my attention but simply himself. When I shake hands with someone, as Merleau-Ponty again notes, I am conscious not of grasping a hand, flesh and bone, but of meeting someone. It is the same with speech. I do not analyse my friend's words in order to try and understand what he is saying, I merely grasp his meaning. When I am reading a book I do not read words, I read the book; when I am looking at a painting I do not see brushstrokes, I see the painting. Of course the book may direct my attention to its words, the painting to its brushstrokes, just as my friend may make a pun or quote a poem, but that does not alter my essential relationship to the book, the painting or my friend.
At the same time it would be wrong to imagine that even my encounter with my friend is a totally natural occurrence. For it to work as it normally does we both have had, over the years, to learn the rules that underlie such events. For example, I will only respond to him rather than analysing his words and behaviour if he speaks to me in the language we normally use together and if he behaves in a predictable manner. Were he to start talking Italian, for instance, or to stand on his head while talking to me, I might still be able to understand him, but I would not be able to carry on a conversation with him. Instead, I would be trying to analyse his words and gestures in an effort to understand what had got hold of him. Only if he sits down and accepts the cup of coffee I offer him can we pass beyond words and gestures to a conversation.
In other words, even encounters with friends take place within the framework of what literary critics call genre. The genre gives us the ground rules and the horizons of expectation for the encounter and so allows it to flourish. The genre of the conversation over coffee is different from that of the sherry party or the long-distance phone-call. We are not aware of the genre precisely because it is the ground of the encounter, made up not of rules which have to be learned but of practices which we have unconsciously come to master over the years.
It is the same with literary genre. Homer's initial ‘Sing, Goddess, of the wrath of Achilles the son of Peleus’, allows the audience to filter out the other possible things the poem might be about to do and settle down to listen to this. He may of course go on to flout or subvert or extend the genre, but that can easily be grasped, since the audience knows what the conventions are in the first place, just as my friend may in his excitement leave his coffee undrunk and get up from his chair to walk about the room, which will alert me to his state but not leave me bewildered as to his motives or intentions. Moreover, in the original setting, the audience would have known even before the bard started to sing just what kind of an evening they were in for, just as those attending the dramatic festivals in which playwrights were expected to put on a tragic trilogy followed by a satyr play would have known that Aeschylus was not going to give them a comedy or an epic recitation. That the conventionally silent third character on stage, Pylades, is suddenly given speech by Aeschylus and made to utter a crucial phrase in the second part of the Oresteia trilogy (‘Make all men living your enemies, not the gods’), a phrase which finally persuades Orestes that he must kill his mother, would have made that moment more powerful, not incomprehensible.