“Chopin, sea of tears…”: around a poem by Marcel Proust

Proust’s rare poetic endeavours seem to be the least significant part
of his corpus, but their existence itself poses some serious questions. His only
published lyrical cycle, “Portraits de peintres et de musiciens”, is usually interpreted
only as a part of “Les Plaisirs et le Jours”, the writer’s first book. The
book’s fragmented and multigenre structure certainly makes the unexpected
poetry section less puzzling – yet it does not explain what role would these eight
poems play in the genesis of “À la recherche du temps perdu” or why Proust lost
all ambitions as a would-be poet so early (while occasionally writing poetry as
part of his private literary or intimate exchanges). This paper proposes to examine
one of the published poems, “Chopin”, as a departure point for some of
Proust’s recurring themes and to explain why their development on the way to
the novel excluded returning to the art of poetry. The analysis of “Chopin”’s
poetics reveals some important contradictions and shows early Proust’s aesthetic
uncertainty. An obvious intertextual link to Baudelaire’s poem “Les Phares” is
misleading, since “Chopin”, as well as the whole sequence, does not really explore any of Baudelaire’s titanic imagery; painters and composers serve as
sources of random and ephemeral impressions rather than awe. One of the poem’s
key words – “larme” (“tear”) – radically changes meaning and function
from the literal depiction of a torrid emotional life to the purely rhetorical “tear
of Hope” in the last verse. A rather unoriginal interpretation of Chopin’s music
(inspired most likely by Reynaldo Hahn’s explanations more than by Proust’s
personal idea on music) contrasts with the extremely personal image of the sick
artist isolated in his room. The poem, far from being a masterpiece, can give us
some interesting insights, if we reconstruct all aspects of the Chopin theme in
the novel and its avant-texte. First, in “Contre Saint-Beuve” Proust repeats some
images and even words from the poem (tears and sighs, sickness), but rearranges
them in a completely new and original a narrative. The novel however overturns
all our expectations. Only twice Chopin is mentioned as a creator of the
passionate and impulsive style (imitated in the poem and described in the essay).
Every other occasion to invoke Chopin is used in an entirely ironic context, as a
pretext for the comical conflict between two Mmes de Cambremer, while all the
“Chopin” images are still present in this travestied version. Our analysis of the
Proust’s Chopin theme allows us to explain why creating an original literary
incarnation of music was made possible for the novelist only by denying poetry.