“As if there could be anything more interesting!” It’s one of my favorite jokes in Swann’s Way, and, as always in Proust, it’s at the expense of everyone involved while remaining oddly merciful to them all. The narrator’s adolescent friend, Bloch, whose bohemian affectations are both irritating and, for our young narrator, indispensable to his artistic development, has just showed up at the house in Combray soaking wet while insisting that he has no idea whether it’s been raining or not. (“I live so resolutely apart from physical contingencies that my senses no longer trouble to inform me of them.”) The narrator’s father, who shares with so many dads in literature and life a fascination with the barometer, is flabbergasted, and confesses to his son after Bloch has left: “Why, he couldn’t even tell me what the weather was like. As if there could be anything more interesting! He’s an imbecile.”
Given the many other contexts in which Proust inculcates in us a mistrust of the unworldly, we’re certainly meant to agree that Bloch is being a bit of an imbecile here — and that the narrator’s dad is also being a bit of a doofus. For starters, he’s showing the kind of single-minded, Molièresque fixation that always comes in for gentle mockery in Proust — even when its object is as mighty as The Literary (cf. the narrator’s elderly aunts, or Bloch himself). And weather, one might assume, is a much lesser object: good for inane chit-chat and practical planning (will the weather be fine enough to take the Guermantes way?) — or, from a literary perspective, for a reality effect (Barthes’s barometer) or a pinch of the pathetic fallacy — but not much more.
Such might be our evaluation at this early date in the Search. As the book continues, though, Proust comes down more and more on the side of the narrator’s father, and weather starts to seem like it might be the most interesting thing in the world — or, at any rate, a more important source of self-knowledge than Bloch gives it credit for. Here I’m following in the footsteps of the great Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who wrote a beautiful essay on the metaphysics of Proustian weather — one that provided the title for her posthumously published collection. I won’t attempt to summarize that essay’s astoundingly wide and free movement, which somehow manages to weave together Neoplatonism, Buddhism, and Kleinian psychoanalysis; just find a way to read it. I will mention, though, just one of the insights into the Search‘s spiritual world that Sedgwick reaches through the mundane entry point of weather: her observation that the world of the novel is a kind of “embodied divinity-field,” populated by demigods (usually figurative, but with varying degrees of concrete reality) attached to particular places, activities, moods — and, yes, climate conditions.
Indeed, it’s when describing his own involuntary response to a warm, sunny spring day that Proust’s narrator sets forth one of his most important claims: that each of us is not just surrounded by but composed of limited little context-dependent deities like the ones that populate the Proustian landscape. Paying tribute to the “little mannikin” within him who responds infallibly to fine weather, the narrator notes (and Sedgwick quotes): “Of the different persons who compose our personality, it is not the most obvious that are the most essential.” Even as the topmost layers of our character come and go — maybe one era of our life is dominated by intense jealousy, or loss; maybe we pride ourselves of having grown into a more just or more generous person — the truly stable elements of our selves are simpler, stupider, may even not feel like us at all, so little do they seem to take account of the thoughts at the forefront of our consciousness. And yet they may be the only ones, Proust suggests, who will stay with us in our “last agony, when all [our] other ‘selves’ are dead”; even then, the narrator suggests, “if a ray of sunshine steals into the room while I am drawing my last breath, the little barometric mannikin will feel a great relief, and will throw back his hood to sing: ‘Ah, fine weather at last!'”
“A great relief.” One reason these stubborn little selves might be attached to the weather is that the latter is both changeable and recurrent. That is, unlike the broad conditions of our personal or socioeconomic lives, the weather (at least in the European setting of Proust’s life and the North American setting of mine; this is most definitely a Western metaphor system) varies from week to week if not from day to day; but unlike, say, the stock market (I guess; I’m not an economist), it varies within a broad cyclical pattern. This means that the fine-spring-day mannikin is both durable (because he’s been around for every spring season that the narrator has experienced) and usually invisible (because, even during that season, fine spring days retain an element of unpredictable luck). If ten or eleven months can go by between, say, one rainy season and the next, any habits and preferences associated with that season will have time to fade, to be overwhelmed by new habits and preferences, to seemingly disappear until the renewed rainy season awakens them by the same kind of magic that Proust elsewhere identifies as involuntary memory. Weather is pervasive enough that it shapes our selves, by which I mean the plural sub-individual selves with which Proust populates the mind; and it’s changeable enough that it gives us time to forget those selves before spectacularly reviving them.
“A great relief …” Weather leaves and returns, by which I mean it has tended to do that for most of my North American life. That’s changing now, and if I make it to the average lifespan, weather is likely to look substantially different by the time I die. Each season, and each type of weather within each season, really does seem to give rise to a different person in my body: a different way of carrying myself, of dressing, of moving from place to place … It seems likely that these modes will give way to slight variations on “hot,” “intolerably hot,” and “emergency” (hurricane, blizzard, etc.). This is one among many other, more serious reasons to mourn the damage done by climate change: a whole population of Proustian selves will die with the seasons. The author of the Search himself, I think, would indulge and understand the nostalgia I already feel for the weather of my youth (Benjamin Kunkel notes in a New Yorker article on “climate-change literature”: “couldn’t ‘À la Recherche du Temps Perdu’ be translated, if you didn’t know better, as ‘In Search of Lost Weather?'”) — but he’d also already be investigating the new kinds of selves forming from new weather habits … or perhaps, more radically, the shift from an ecosystem of “manikins” adapted to different kinds of weather, literal and otherwise, to a different kind of mind entirely. What the latter might look like is beyond me, but I can’t imagine anything more interesting.
The Arborescent Page 