Proust's orchids

Last week, I gave a lecture on Proust's "Swann in Love," a relatively short and manageable section from the seven-volume Remembrance of Things Past. There's a wonderful little scene where Swann, on the pretext of adjusting the Cattleya orchids tucked around Odette's "low-necked bodice," makes love to her for the first time. From that moment on, faire cattleya ("make cattleya") serves as their secret, romantic code for lovemaking. But for Proust the Cattleya is more than an instance of lovers' language. The orchid comes to occupy the narrator's reflections on human nature, the unconscious, and literary creation. 

Detail from Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds (1871)

Proust was fascinated by orchids, especially their complicated pollination syndromes. He knew Darwin's work through translations by Amédée Coutance (1824-1895). Coutance was a curious botanist who authored, in addition to treatises on the oak and the olive tree, a short book on La Fontaine's Fables in which he argued that the seventeenth-century poet "a eu l'intuition des grandes lois qui régissent les luttes pour l'existence, et que, sur quelques points, il a devancé la science de son temps" [intuited the great laws that govern the struggle of existence and in some respects was ahead of the science of his day]. In the opening pages of Sodom and Gomorrah, the fourth volume of Remembrance, the narrator will remark that the laws of plant world are in turn governed by superior laws. All this talk of "laws," of course, nods toward Darwin's laws of evolution and natural selection. A flower's "ruse apparente" [apparent ruse] tricks an insect into pollinating it, but neither the flower nor the insect (nor even the casual observer) knows that this whole scene obeys an inscrutable natural order that ensures fertilization and avoids sterile self-fertilization.

Citing the example of the vanilla orchid, the narrator notes that "l'organe mâle est séparé par une cloison de l'organe femelle" [the male organ is separated from the female by a partition] and that it would remain sterile were it not for the intervention of birds, bees, or a human hand. This little partition, called the rostellum, serves to prevent self-fertilization. For Proust, the image applies to human relationships as well, suggesting the inaccessibility of the beloved and the need for some kind of artifice to unite the two. Hence Swann's recourse to the metaphorical power of language in "make cattleya." It is as though "making cattleya" is the only way Swann can make love to Odette. Of course, the repeated "make cattleya" diminishes the freshness and excitement of the newly-coined metaphor until finally it no longer promises sexual intercourse, but instead frustration and disappointment. "No cattleyas tonight."        

Illustration from Darwin's On the Various Contrivances by which [...] Orchids are Fertilised by Insects (1862). "a" is the male part, "s" the female part, and "r" the rostellum

When it comes to orchids, Proust is less concerned with evolution than with aesthetics, for he goes to say in the manuscript (not, alas, the published work) that the laws of evolution oblige us to consider "un être silencieux" [a silent entity] enclosed within a flower's petals and that we too contain something silent and unknowable that nevertheless obeys certain laws--the unconscious. Now, for an author preoccupied with the unconscious mind--spontaneous memories, sudden associations, dreams, desires--it is hardly surprising that the scene of pollination in turn becomes a metaphor for the "partie inconsciente de l'oeuvre littéraire" [the unconscious part of a literary work]. The famous madeleine scene, for example, captures all the intensity of memory relived. Whereas the conscious effort to recover the past results in frustration, the simple act of dunking a cookie into a cup of tea reaches deep into the unconscious and vividly brings forth past experience. Like self-fertilization, conscious remembrance is sterile. But the fortuitous intervention of an external entity, like a bee or a cookie, productively stimulates the unconscious, allowing use not just to remember, but to relive and recreate the past.

There's a lot more to say about Proust and orchids. Maybe one day I'll get around to putting my thoughts in order. Until then, I'm content just to pick up Sodom and Gomorrah from time to time and read the intoxicating first few pages where literary modernism meets botanical reflection.

Portrait of Proust by Jacques-Emile Blanche (1892), featuring an orchid in his buttonhole