Spatial Form in Modern Literature: An Essay in Two Parts

Author(s): Joseph Frank

Source: The Sewanee Review , Spring, 1945, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Spring, 1945), pp. 221-240
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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 SPATIAL FORM IN MODERN
LITERATURE
AN ESSAY IN TWO PARTS

By JOSEPH FRANK

Part I

IESSING'S Laokoony Andr? Gide once remarked, is one

those books it is good to reiterate or contradict every thirty
^ years. Despite this excellent advice, neither of these at
tudes toward Lao ko on has been adopted by modern writer
Lessing's attempt to define the limits of literature and the plas
arts has become a dead issue?one to which respectful refere
is occasionally made, but which no longer has any fecundat
influence on esthetic thinking. One can understand how th
came about in the nineteenth century, with its passion for hi
toricism, but it is not so easy to understand at present, when
many writers on esthetic problems are occupied with questions
form. To a historian of literature or the plastic arts, Lessin
effort to define the unalterable laws of these mediums may w
have seemed quixotic ; but modern critics, no longer overawed
the bugbear of historical method, have begun to take up again t
problems he tried to solve.
Lessing's own solution to these problems seems, at first glanc
to have little relation to modern esthetic thinking. The litera
school against which the arguments of Laokoon were directed
the school of pictorial poetry, has long since ceased to interest
modern sensibility ; and many of its conclusions, particularly w
based on the plastic arts, grew out of a now-antiquated archeol
whose discoveries, to make matters worse, Lessing knew mainly
second-hand. But it was precisely his quixotic attempt to
above history, to define the unalterable laws of esthetic percep

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222 SPATIAL FORM IN MODERN LITERATURE

rather than to attack or defend any particular school, which

gives his work the perennial freshness to which Andr? Gide
alluded. Since the validity of his theories does not depend on
their relationship to the literary movements of his time, or on
the extent of his first-hand acquaintanceship with the artworks
of antiquity, it is always possible to consider them apart from
these circumstances and use them in the analysis of later develop
ments.
In Laokoony Lessing fuses two distinct currents of thought,
both of great importance in the cultural history of his time. The
archeological researches of Winckelmann, his contemporary, had
stimulated a passionate interest in Greek culture among the Ger
mans. Lessing went back to Homer, Aristotle and the Greek
tragedians, using his first-hand knowledge to attack the distorted
critical theories, supposedly based on classical authority, which
had filtered into France through Italian commentators and then
taken hold in Germany. At the same time, as Wilhelm Dilthey
emphasizes in his famous essay on Lessing, Locke and the em
pirical school of English philosophy had given a new impulse
to esthetic speculation.2 Locke tried to solve the problem of
knowledge by breaking down complex ideas into simple elements
of sensation, and then examining the operations of the mind to
see how these sensations were combined to form ideas. This
method was soon taken over by estheticians : the focus of interest
shifted from external prescriptions for beauty to an analysis
of esthetic perception. Writers like Shaftesbury, Hogarth,
Hutcheson and Burke, to mention only a few, concerned them
selves with the precise character and combination of impressions
that gave esthetic pleasure to the sensibility. Lessing's friend
and critical ally, Mendelssohn, popularized this method of deal
ing with esthetic problems in Germany, and Lessing himself
was a close student of these works and many others in the same
general spirit. Laokoon} as a result, stands at the confluence of
these intellectual currents: Lessing analyzes the laws of esthetic

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 JOSEPH FRANK 223

perception, shows how they prescribe necessary limitations to

literature and the plastic arts, and then demonstrates how Greek
writers and painters, especially Homer, created masterpieces by
obeying these laws.
His argument starts from the simple observation that literature
and the plastic arts, working through different sensuous mediums,
must therefore differ in the fundamental laws governing their
creation. "If it is true," Lessing wrote, "that painting and poetry
in their imitations make use of entirely different means or symbols
?the first, namely, of form and color in space, the second of arti
culated sounds in time?if these symbols indisputably require a
suitable relation to the thing symbolized, then it is clear that
symbols arranged in juxtaposition can only express subjects of
which the wholes or parts exist in juxtaposition; while consecu
tive symbols can only express subjects of which the wholes or
parts are themselves consecutive." Lessing did not originate this
formulation, which has a long and complicated history; but he
is the first to use it systematically, as an instrument of critical
analysis. Form in the plastic arts, according to Lessing, is neces
sarily spatial, because the visible aspect of objects can best be
presented juxtaposed in an instant of time. Literature, on the
other hand, makes use of language, composed of a succession of
words proceeding through time; and it follows that literary
form, to harmonize with the essential quality of its medium, must
be based primarily on some form of narrative sequence. Lessing
used this argument to attack two artistic genres highly popular in
his day: pictorial poetry and allegorical painting. The pictorial
poet tried to paint with words, the allegorical painter to tell a
story in visible images: both were doomed to fail because their
aims were in contradiction with the fundamental properties of
their mediums. No matter how accurate and vivid a verbal de
scription might be, Lessing argued, it could not give the unified
impression of a visible object; no matter how skillfully figures

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224 SPATIAL FORM IN MODERN LITERATURE

might be chosen and arranged, a painting or piece of sculpture

could not successfully set forth the various stages of an action.
As Lessing develops his argument, he attempts to prove that
the Greeks, with an unfailing sense of esthetic propriety, respected
the limits imposed on different art mediums by the conditions
of human perception. But to understand the importance of
Lessing's distinction it is not necessary to follow the ramifications
of his argument, nor even to agree with his specific judgments on
individual writers. Various critics have quarreled with one or
another of these judgments, thinking that, in doing so, they were
in some way undermining Lessing's position ; but such a belief
was based on a misunderstanding of Laokoonys importance in the
history of esthetic theory. It is quite possible to use Lessing's
insights solely as instruments of analysis, without proceeding to
judge the value of individual works by how closely they adhered
to the norms he laid down. And unless this is done, as a matter
of fact, the real meaning of Lao ko on cannot be understood. For
what Lessing offered was not a new set of opinions, but a new con
ception of esthetic form.
The conception of esthetic form inherited by the eighteenth
century from the Renaissance was a purely external one. Classical
literature?or what was known of it?was presumed to have
reached perfection, and later writers could do little better than
imitate its example. A horde of commentators and critics had
deduced certain rules from the classical masterpieces?rules like
the Aristotelian unities, of which Aristotle had never heard?
and modern writers were warned to obey these rules if they
wished to appeal to a cultivated public. Gradually, these rules
came to form an external mold into which the material of a liter
ary work had to be poured: the form of a work was nothing
but the technical arrangement dictated by the rules. Such a
superficial and mechanical notion of esthetic form, however, led
to serious perversions of taste?Shakespeare was considered a
barbarian even by so sophisticated a writer as Voltaire, and Pope

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 JOSEPH FRANK 225

found it necessary in translating Homer to do a good deal of

editing. Lessing's point of view, breaking sharply with this ex
ternal conception of form, marks out the road for esthetic specula
tion to follow in the future.
For Lessing,- as we have seen, esthetic form is not an external
arrangement provided by a set of traditional rules: it is the re
lation between the sensuous nature of the art medium and the
conditions of human perception. Just as the natural man of the
eighteenth century was not to be bound by traditional political
forms, but was to create them in accordance with his own nature,
so art was to create its own forms out of itself, rather than
accepting them ready-made from the practice of the past. Criti
cism was not to prescribe rules for art, but was to explore the
necessary laws by which art governs itself. No longer was
esthetic form confused with mere externals of technique?it was
not a strait jacket into which the artist, willy-nilly, had to force
his creative ideas, but issued spontaneously from the organization
of the art work as it presented itself to perception. Time and
space were the two extremes defining the limits of literature and
the plastic arts in their relation to sensuous perception; and it is
possible, following Lessing's example, to trace the evolution of
art forms by their oscillations between these two poles.8
The purpose of the present essay is to apply Lessing's method
to modern literature?to trace the evolution of form in modern
poetry and, more particularly, in the novel. The first two sec
tions will try to show that modern literature, exemplified by
such writers as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust and
James Joyce, is moving in the direction of spatial form. This
means that 'the reader is intended to apprehend their work spati
ally, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence. So far
as the novel is concerned, this tendency reaches its culmination in
Djuna Barnes's remarkable book Nightwoody which has never
received the critical attention it deserves. The third section will
deal with Nightwood in detail, analyzing its form and explaining

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 226 SPATIAL FORM IN MODERN LITERATURE

its meaning. Finally, since changes in esthetic form always in

volve major changes in the sensibility of a particular cultural
period, an effort will be made to outline the spiritual attitudes
that have led to the predominance of spatial form.

Modern Anglo-American poetry received its initial impetus

from the Imagist movement of the years directly preceding and
following the first World War. Imagism was important not for
any actual poetry written by Imagist poets?no one knew quite
what an Imagist poet was?but rather because it opened the way
for later developments by its clean break with sentimental Vic
torian verbiage. The critical writings of Ezra Pound, the leading
theoretician of Imagism, are an astonishing farrago of keen
esthetic perceptions thrown in among a series of boyishly naughty
remarks, whose chief purpose, it would seem, is to ?pater le
bourgeois?to startle the stuffed shirts. But Pound's definition
of the image, perhaps the keenest of his perceptions, is of funda
mental importance for any discussion of modern literary form.
"An image" Pound wrote, "is that which presents an intellectual
and emotional complex in an instant of time." The implications
of his definition should be noted?an image is defined not as a
pictorial reproduction, but as unification of disparate ideas and
emotions into a complex presented spatially in an instant of time.
Such a complex is not to proceed discursively, according to the
laws of language, but is rather to strike the reader's sensibility
with an instantaneous impact. Pound stresses this aspect by add
ing, in a later passage, that only the instantaneous presentation
of such complexes gives "that sense of sudden liberation; that
sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of
sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the great
est works of art."
At the very outset, therefore, modern poetry championed a
poetic method in direct contradiction to the way in which Les

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 JOSEPH FRANK 227

sing had said language must be perceived. By comparing

Pound's definition of the image with Eliot's well-known descrip
tion of the psychology of the poetic process, we can see clearly
how profoundly this conception has influenced our modern idea
of the nature of poetry. For Eliot, the distinctive quality of a
poetic sensibility is its capacity to form new wholes, to fuse seem
ingly disparate experiences into an organic unity. The ordinary
man, Eliot writes, "falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two
experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the
noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of
the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes."
While Pound had attempted to define the image in terms of its
esthetic attributes, Eliot, in this passage, is describing its psy
chological origin; but the result in a poem was likely to be the
same.

Such a view of the nature of poetry immediately gave rise to

numerous problems. How was more than one image to be in
cluded in a poem? If the chief value of an image was its capacity
to present an intellectual and emotional complex simultaneously,
linking up images in a sequence would clearly destroy most
of their efficacy. Or was the poem itself one vast image, whose
individual components were to be apprehended as a unity? But
then it would be necessary to undermine the inherent consecutive
ness of language, frustrating the reader's normal expectation of
a sequence and forcing him to perceive the elements of the poem
juxtaposed in space rather than unrolling in time.
This is precisely what Eliot and Pound attempted in their
major works. Both poets, in their earlier work, still retained some
elements of conventional structure. Their poems were looked
upon as daring and revolutionary chiefly because of technical
matters, like the loosening of metrical pattern and the handling
of subjects ordinarily considered non-poetic. Perhaps this is less
true of Eliot than of Pound, especially the Eliot of the more
complex early works like "Prufrock," "Gerontion" and "Portrait

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228 SPATIAL FORM IN MODERN LITERATURE

of a Lady"; but even here, although the sections of the poem

are not governed by syntactical logic, the skeleton of an implied
narrative structure is always present. The reader of "Pr?frock"
is swept up in a narrative movement from the very first lines:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening. . .

And the reader, accompanying Prufrock, finally arrives at their

mutual destination:

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

At this point the poem becomes a series of more or less isolated

fragments, each stating some aspect of Prufrock's emotional dilem
ma; but the fragments are now localized and focused on a specific
set of circumstances: the reader can organize them by referring
to the implied situation. The same method is employed in
"Portrait of a Lady," while in "Gerontion" the reader is specific
ally told that he has been reading the "thoughts of a dry brain
in a dry season"?the stream-of-consciousness of "an old man
in a dry month, being read to by a boy, waiting for the rain." In
both cases there is a perceptible framework, around which the
seemingly disconnected passages of the poem can be organized.
This was one reason why Pound's "Mauberly" and Eliot's early
work were first regarded, not as forerunners of a new poetic
form, but as latter-day vers de soci?t??witty, disillusioned, with
a somewhat brittle charm, but lacking that quality of "high seri
ousness" which Matthew Arnold had chosen as the touchstone of
poetic excellence. These poems were considered unusual mainly
because vers de soci?t? had long fallen out of fashion : there was
little difficulty in accepting them as an entertaining departure
from the grand style of the nineteenth century. In the "Cantos"
and "The Waste Land," however, it should have been clear

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 JOSEPH FRANK 229

that a radical transformation was taking place in esthetic struc

ture; but this transformation has been touched on only peri
pherally by modern critics. R. P. Blackmur comes closest to
the central problem while analyzing what he calls Pound's
"anecdotal" method. The special form of the "Cantos," Black
mur explains, "is that of the anecdote begun in one place, taken
up in one or more other places, and finished, if at all, in still
another. This deliberate disconnectedness, this art of a thing
continually alluding to itself, continually breaking off short, is
the method by which the "Cantos" tie themselves together. So
soon as the reader's mind is concerted with the material of the
poem, Mr. Pound deliberately disconcerts it, either by introduc
ing fresh and disjunct material or by reverting to old and, ap
parently, equally disjunct material." Blackmur's remarks apply
equally well to "The Waste Land," where syntactical sequence is
given up for a structure depending on the perception of relation
ships between disconnected word-groups. To be properly under
stood, these word-groups must be juxtaposed with one another
and perceived simultaneously; only when this is done can they
be adequately understood; for while they follow one another in
time, their meaning does not depend on this temporal relation
ship. The one difficulty of these poems, which no amount of
textual exegesis can wholly overcome, is the internal conflict be
tween the time-logic of language and the space-logic implicit
in the modern conception of the nature of poetry.
Esthetic form in modern poetry, then, is based on a space-logic
that demands a complete re-orientation in the reader's attitude
towards language. Since the primary reference of any word
group is to something inside the poem itself, language in modern
poetry is really reflexive: the meaning-relationship is completed
only by the simultaneous perception in space of word-groups
which, when read consecutively in time, have no comprehensible
relation to each other. Instead of the instinctive and immediate
reference of words and word-groups to the objects or events they

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230 SPATIAL FORM IN MODERN LITERATURE

symbolize, and the construction of meaning from the sequence

of these references, modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the
process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pat
tern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity. This
explanation is, of course, the extreme statement of an ideal con
dition, rather than an actually existing state of affairs; but the
conception of poetic form that runs through Mallarm? to Pound
and Eliot, and which has left its traces on a whole generation of
modern poets, can be formulated only in terms of the principle
of reflexive reference. And this principle is the link connecting
the esthetic development of modern poetry with similar experi
ments in the modern novel.

2
For a study of esthetic form in the modern novel, Flaubert's
famous county fair scene in Madame Bovary is a convenient point
of departure. This scene has been justly praised for its mordant
caricature of bourgeois pomposity, its portrayal?unusually sym
pathetic for Flaubert?of the bewildered old servant, and its
burlesque of the pseudo-romantic rhetoric by which Rodolphe
woos the sentimental Emma. At present, it is enough to notice
the method by which Flaubert handles the scene?a method we
might as well call cinematographic, since this analogy comes im
mediately to mind. As Flaubert sets the scene, there is action
going on simultaneously at three levels, and the physical position
of each level is a fair index to its spiritual significance. On the
lowest plane, there is the surging, jostling mob in the street,
mingling with the livestock brought to the exhibition; raised
slightly above the street by a platform are the speech-making
officials, bombastically reeling off platitudes to the attentive multi
tudes ; and on the highest level of all, from a window overlooking
the spectacle, Rodolphe and Emma are watching the proceedings
and carrying on their amorous conversation, in phrases as stilted
as those regaling the crowds. Albert Thibaudet has compared

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 JOSEPH FRANK 231

this scene to the medieval mystery play, in which various related

actions occur simultaneously on different stage levels; but this
acute comparison refers to Flaubert's intention rather than to his
method. "Everything should sound simultaneously," Flaubert
later wrote, in commenting on this scene; "one should hear the
bellowing of the cattle, the whisperings of the lovers and the
rhetoric of the officials all at the same time."4
But since language proceeds in time, it is impossible to ap
proach this simultaneity of perception except by breaking up
temporal sequence. And this is exactly what Flaubert does: he
dissolves sequence by cutting back and forth between the various
levels of action in a slowly-rising crescendo until?at the climax
of the scene?Rodolphe's Chateaubriandesque phrases are read
at almost the same moment as the names of prize winners for
raising the best pigs. Flaubert takes care to underline this satiric
similarity by description, as well as by juxtaposition, as if he were
afraid the reflexive relations of the two actions would not be
grasped: "From magnetism, by slow degrees, Rodolphe had ar
rived at affinities, and while M. le Pr?sident was citing Cin
cinnatus at his plow, Diocletian planting his cabbages and the
emperors of China ushering in the new year with sowing
festivals, the young man was explaining to the young woman
that these irresistible attractions sprang from some anterior ex
istence."
This scene illustrates, on a small scale, what we mean by the
spatialization of form in a novel. For the duration of the scene,
at least, the time-flow of the narrative is halted: attention is fixed
on the interplay of relationships within the limited time-area.
These relationships are juxtaposed independently of the progress
of the narrative; and the full significance of the scene is given
only by the reflexive relations among the units of meaning. In
Flaubert's scene, however, the unit of meaning is not, as in mod
ern poetry, a word-group or a fragment of an anecdote, but the
totality of each level of action taken as an integer: the unit is

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232 SPATIAL FORM IN MODERN LITERATURE

so large that the scene can be read with an illusion of complete

understanding, yet with a total unawareness of the "dialectic of
platitude" (Thibaudet) interweaving all levels, and finally link
ing them together with devastating irony. In other words, the
struggle towards spatial form in Pound and Eliot resulted in the
disappearance of coherent sequence after a few lines; but the
novel, with its larger unit of meaning, can preserve coherent
sequence within the unit of meaning and break up only the time
flow of narrative. (Because of this difference, readers of modern
poetry are practically forced to read reflexively to get any literal
sense, while readers of a novel like Nightwood, for example,
are led to expect narrative sequence by the deceptive normality
of language sequence within the unit of meaning). But this does
not affect the parallel between esthetic form in modern poetry
and the form of Flaubert's scene: both can be properly under
stood only when their units of meaning are apprehended re
flexively, in an instant of time.
Flaubert's scene, although interesting in itself, is of minor im
portance to his novel as a whole, and is skillfully blended back
into the main narrative structure after fulfilling its satiric func
tion. But Flaubert's method was taken over by James Joyce,
and applied on a gigantic scale in the composition of Ulysses.
Joyce composed his novel of an infinite number of references
and cross-references which relate to one another independently
of the time-sequence of the narrative; and, before the book fits
together into any meaningful pattern, these references must be
connected by the reader and viewed as a whole. Ultimately, if
we are to believe Stuart Gilbert, these systems of reference form
a complete picture of practically everything under the sun, from
the stages of man's life and the organs of the human body to the
colors of the spectrum; but these structures are far more im
portant for Joyce, as Harry Levin has remarked, than they could
ever possibly be for the reader. Students of Joyce, fascinated by
his erudition, have usually applied themselves to exegesis. Un

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 JOSEPH FRANK 233

fortunately, such considerations have little to do with the per

ceptual form of Joyce's novel.
Joyce's most obvious intention in Ulysses is to give the reader a
picture of Dublin seen as a whole?to re-create the sights and
sounds, the people and places, of a typical Dublin day, much as
Flaubert had re-created his provincial county fair. And, like
Flaubert, Joyce wanted his depiction to have the same unified
impact, the same sense of simultaneous activity occurring in dif
ferent places. Joyce, as a matter of fact, frequently makes use
of the same method as Flaubert?cutting back and forth between
different actions occurring at the same time?and usually does
so to obtain the same ironic effect. But Joyce had the problem
of creating this impression of simultaneity for the life of a whole
teeming city, and of maintaining it?or rather of strengthening
it?through hundreds of pages that must be read as a sequence.
To meet this problem, Joyce was forced to go far beyond what
Flaubert had done; while Flaubert had maintained a clear-cut
narrative line, except in the county-fair scene, Joyce breaks up
his narrative and transforms the very structure of his novel into
an instrument of his esthetic intention.
Joyce conceived Ulysses as a modern epic; and in the epic, as
Stephen Dedalus tells us in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man y "the personality of the artist, at first sight a cry or a cadence
and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out
of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak . . . the artist, like
the God of creation, remains within or beyond or above his
handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring
his fingernails." The epic is thus synonymous for Joyce with the
complete self-effacement of the author; and, with his usual un
compromising rigor, Joyce carries this implication further than
anyone had dared before. He assumes?what is obviously not
true?that his readers are Dubliners, intimately acquainted with
Dublin life and the personal history of his characters. This allows
him to refrain from giving any direct information about his char

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234 SPATIAL FORM IN MODERN LITERATURE

acters: such information would immediately have betrayed the

presence of an omniscient author. What Joyce does, instead, is
to present the elements of his narrative?the relations between
Stephen and his family, between Bloom and his wife, between
Stephen and Bloom and the Dedalus family?in fragments, as
they are thrown out unexplained in the course of casual conversa
tion, or as they lie embedded in the various strata of symbolic
reference; and the same is true of all the allusions to Dublin life,
history, and the external events of the twenty-four hours during
which the novel takes place. In other words, all the factual
background?so conveniently summarized for the reader in an
ordinary novel?must be reconstructed from fragments, some
times hundreds of pages apart, scattered through the book. As a
result, the reader is forced to read Ulysses in exactly the same
manner as he reads modern poetry?continually fitting fragments
together and keeping allusions in mind until, by reflexive refer
ence, he can link them to their complements.
Joyce intended, in this way, to build up in the reader's mind
a sense of Dublin as a totality, including all the relations of the
characters to one another and all the events which enter their
consciousness. As the reader progresses through the novel, con
necting allusions and references spatially, gradually becoming
aware of the pattern of relationships, this sense was to be imper
ceptibly acquired; and, at the conclusion of the novel, it might
almost be said that Joyce literally wanted the reader to become a
Dubliner. For this is what Joyce demands: that the reader have
at hand the same instinctive knowledge of Dublin life, the same
sense of Dublin as a huge, surrounding organism, which the
Dubliner possesses as a birthright. It is such knowledge which,
at any one moment of time, gives him a knowledge of Dublin's
past and present as a whole; and it is only such knowledge which
might enable the reader, like the characters, to place all the ref
erences in their proper context. This, it should be realized, is
practically the equivalent of saying that Joyce cannot be read?

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 JOSEPH FRANK 235

he can only be re-read. A knowledge of the whole is essential

to an understanding of any part; but, unless one is a Dubliner,
such knowledge can be obtained only after the book has been
read, when all the references are fitted into their proper place
and grasped as a unity. Although the burdens placed on the
reader by this method of composition may seem insuperable, the
fact remains that Joyce, in his unbelievably laborious fragmenta
tion of narrative structure, proceeded on the assumption that a
unified spatial apprehension of his work would ultimately be pos
sible.
In a far more subtle manner than with Joyce and Flaubert,
the same principle of composition is at work in Marcel Proust.
Since Proust himself tells us that, before all else, his novel will
have imprinted on it "a form which usually remains invisible,
the form of Time," it may seem strange to speak of Proust in
connection with spatial form. He has, almost invariably, been
considered the novelist of time far excellence: the literary in
terpreter of that Bergsonian "real time" intuited by the sensi
bility, as distinguished from the abstract, chronological time of
the conceptual intelligence. To stop at this point, however, is
to miss what Proust himself considered the deepest significance
of his work. Obsessed with the ineluctability of time, Proust
was suddenly visited by certain quasi-mystical experiences?de
scribed in detail in the last volume of his work, "Le temps
retrouv?"?which, by providing him with a spiritual technique
for transcending time, enabled him to escape what he considered
to be time's domination. By writing a novel, by translating the
transcendent, extra-temporal quality of these experiences to the
level of esthetic form, Proust hoped to reveal their nature to
the world?for they seemed to him a clue to the ultimate secrets
of reality. And not only should the world learn about these
experiences indirectly, by reading a descriptive account of them,
but, through his novel, it would feel their impact on the sensi
bility as Proust himself had felt it.

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236 SPATIAL FORM IN MODERN LITERATURE

To define the method by which this is accomplished, one must

first understand clearly the precise nature of the Proustian reve
lation. Each such experience, Proust tells us, is marked by a feel
ing that "the permanent essence of things, usually concealed, is
set free and our true self, which had long seemed dead but was
not dead in other ways, awakes, takes on fresh life as it receives
the celestial nourishment brought to it." This celestial nourish
ment consists of some sound, or odor, or other sensory stimulus,
"sensed anew, simultaneously in the present and the past." But
why should these moments seem so overwhelmingly valuable
that Proust calls them celestial? Because, Proust observes, his
imagination could only operate on the past; and the material
presented to his imagination, therefore, lacked any sensuous im
mediacy. But, at certain moments, the physical sensations of
the past came flooding back to fuse with the present; and, in
these moments, Proust believed that he grasped a reality "real
without being of the present moment, ideal but not abstract."
Only in these moments did he attain his most cherished ambition
?"to seize, isolate, immobilize for the duration of a lightning
flash" what otherwise he could not apprehend, "namely: a frag
ment of time in its pure state." For a person experiencing this
moment, Proust adds, the word "death" no longer has meaning.
"Situated outside the scope of time, what could he fear from
the future?"
The significance of this experience, though obscurely hinted
at throughout the book, is made explicit only in the concluding
pages which describe the final appearance of the narrator at the
reception of the Princesse de Guermantes. The narrator decides
to dedicate the remainder of his life to re-creating these experi
ences in a work of art; and this work will differ essentially from
all others because, at its foundation, will be a vision of reality
that has been refracted through an extra-temporal perspective.
Viewing Proust as the last and most debilitated of a long line of
neurasthenic esthetes, many critics have found in this decision to

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 JOSEPH FRANK 237

create a work of art merely the final step in his flight from the
burdens of reality. Edmund Wilson, ordinarily so discerning,
links up this view with Proust's ambition to conquer time, as
suming that Proust hoped to oppose time by establishing some
thing?a work of art?impervious to its flux; but this somewhat
ingenuous interpretation scarcely does justice to Proust's own
conviction, expressed with special intensity in the last volume
of his work, that he was fulfilling a prophetic mission. It was
not the work of art qua work of art that Proust cared about?his
contempt for the horde of faddish scribblers was unbounded?
but a work of art which should stand as a monument to his per
sonal conquest of time. This his own work could do not simply
because it was a work of art, but because it was at once the vehicle
through which he conveyed his vision and the concrete substance
of that vision shaped by a method which compels the reader to
re-experience its exact effect.
The prototype of this method, like the analysis of the revela
tory moment, occurs during the reception at the Princesse de
Guermantes. After spending years in a sanatorium, losing touch
almost completely with the fashionable world of the earlier vol
umes, the narrator comes out of seclusion to attend the recep
tion. He finds himself bewildered by the changes in social posi
tion, and the even more striking changes in character and per
sonality among his former friends. According to some socially
minded critics, Proust intended to paint here the invasion of
French aristocratic society by the upper bourgeoisie, and the
gradual breakdown of all social and moral standards caused by
the first World War. No doubt this process is incidentally de
scribed at some length; but, as the narrator takes great pains to
tell us, it is far from being the most important meaning of the
scene. What strikes the narrator, almost with the force of a blow,
is this : in trying to recognize old friends under the masks which,
as he feels, the years have welded to them, he is jolted for the
first time into a consciousness of the passage of time. When a

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238 SPATIAL FORM IN MODERN LITERATURE

young man addresses the narrator respectfully, instead of familiar

ly as if he were an elderly gentleman, the narrator realizes sud
denly that he has become an elderly gentleman; but for him the
passage of time had gone unperceived up until that moment. To
become conscious of time, the narrator begins to understand, it
had first been necessary to remove himself from his accustomed
environment?or, what amounts to the same thing, from the
stream of time acting on that environment?and then to plunge
back into the stream after a lapse of years. In so doing, the nar
rator found himself presented with two images?the world as
he had formerly known it, and the world, transformed by time,
that he now saw before him; and when these two images are
juxtaposed, the narrator discovers, the passage of time is sud
denly experienced through its visible effects. Habit, that uni
versal soporific, ordinarily conceals the passage of time from those
who have gone their accustomed ways: at any one moment of
time the changes are so minute as to be imperceptible. "Other
people," Proust writes, "never cease to change places in relation
to ourselves. In the imperceptible, but eternal march of the
world, we regard them as motionless in a moment of vision, too
short for us to perceive the motion that is sweeping them on.
But we have only to select in our memory two pictures taken of
them at different moments, close enough together however for
them not to have altered in themselves?perceptibly, that is to
say?and the difference between the two pictures is a measure of
the displacement that they have undergone in relation to us." By
comparing these two images in a moment of time, the passage
of time can be experienced concretely, in the impact of its visible
effects on the sensibility, rather than as a mere gap counted off
in numbers. And this discovery provides the narrator with a
method which, in T. S. Eliot's phrase, is an "objective correla
tive" to the visionary apprehension of the fragment of "pure
time" intuited in the revelatory moment.
When the narrator discovers this method of communicating

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 JOSEPH FRANK 239

his experience of the revelatory moment, he decides, as we have

already said, to incorporate it in a novel. But the novel the nar
rator decides to write has just been finished by the reader; and its
form is controlled by the method that the narrator has outlined
in its concluding pages. The reader, in other words, is substi
tuted for the narrator, and is placed by the author throughout
the book in the same position as the narrator occupies before his
own experience at the reception of the Princesse de Guermantes.
This is done by the discontinuous presentation of character?a
simple device which, nevertheless, is the clue to the form of
Proust's vast structure. Every reader soon notices that Proust
does not follow any of his characters through the whole course of
his novel: they appear and re-appear, in various stages of their
lives, but hundreds of pages sometimes go by between the time
they are last seen and the time they re-appear; and when they do
turn up again, the passage of time has invariably changed them
in some decisive way. Instead of being submerged in the stream
of time?which, for Proust, would be the equivalent of present
ing a character progressively, in a continuous line of develop
ment?the reader is confronted with various snapshots of the
characters "motionless in a moment of vision," taken at different
stages in their lives; and the reader, in juxtaposing these images,
experiences the effects of the passage of time exactly as the nar
rator had done. As he had promised, therefore, Proust does
stamp his novel indelibly with the form of time; but we are now
in a position to understand exactly what he meant by the promise.
To experience the passage of time, Proust learned, it was neces
sary to rise above it, and to grasp both past and present simultane
ously in a moment of what he called "pure time." But "pure
time," obviously, is not time at all?it is perception in a moment
of time, that is to say, space. And, by the discontinuous presenta
tion of character, Proust forces the reader to juxtapose disparate
images of his characters spatially, in a moment of time, so that
the experience of time's passage will be fully communicated to

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240 SPATIAL FORM IN MODERN LITERATURE

their sensibility. There is a striking analogy here between Proust's

method and that of his beloved Impressionist painters; but this
analogy goes far deeper than the usual comments about the
"impressionism" of Proust's style. The Impressionist painters
juxtaposed pure tones on the canvas, instead of mixing them on
the palette, in order to leave the blending of colors to the eye
of the spectator. Similarly, Proust gives us what might be called
pure views of his characters?views of them "motionless in a
moment of vision" in various phases of their lives?and allows
the sensibility of the reader to fuse these views into a unity. Each
view must be aprehended by the reader as a unit; and Proust's
purpose is only achieved when these units of meaning are referred
to each other reflexively in a moment of time. As with Joyce
and the modern poets, we see that spatial form is also the struc
tural scaffolding of Proust's labyrinthine masterpiece.
[To be concluded in the next issue"]

FOOTNOTES

Irving Babbitt, in 191c, wrote The New Loakoon, with the intention of doing for
modern art what Lessing had done for the art of his own day. Brieflly, Babbitt's
thesis was that, just as the confusion of genres in Lessing's time could be traced to
a false theory of imitation, so the artistic aberrations of our own time could be traced
to a false theory of spontaneity. Babbitt's thesis, however, has nothing to do with
Lessing' theories. The discussion of Lessing in the first half of the book merely rein
forces the analogy between Lessing's purpose and Babbitt's own.
2Das Erlebnis und Die Dichtung, von Wilhelm Dilthey, p. 38-60.
^German art criticism, in the last few decades, has experienced a veritable renais
sance along the lines marked out by Lessing, although he seems to have had no
direct influence on these writers. Numerous efforts have been made to trace the
evolution of esthetic forms?usually called style by the Germans?by establishing
certain categories of perception and correlating these with various climates of feeling
and opinion. Among these critics, perhaps the name most familiar to English readers
is Wilhelm Worringer, many of whose ideas were put into currency through the
writings and lectures of T. E. Hulme. This whole critical movement, and Wor
ringer's ideas in particular, will be discussed in more detail in a later section. Mention
should also be made, at this point, of Edwin Muir's Structure of the Novel, the only
work in English?so far as is known to the present writer?which attempts to discuss
form in literature in terms of perceptual categories.
4This discussion of the county-fair scene owes a good deal to Albert Thibaudet's
Gustave Flaubert, probably the best critical study yet written on the subject. The
quotation from Flaubert's letter is used by Thibaudet and has been translated from
his book.

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