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238 III. COMPOSITION
novel. Somewhere in the part entitled The Captive Marcel describes himself as lying awake at dawn and listening to the cries of the street vendors that penetrate his bedchamber.14 So far this episode seems predestined to be filmed. Yet Proust details the hawkers' stereotyped exclamations and intonations mainly for the sake of the memories they evoke in him. They remind him of Gregorian chants. Accordingly, the episode leads up to comparisons between the Paris street cries and these liturgical divisions. But in thus weaving the infinite fabric of observations and recollections in which his life fulfills itself, Proust evolves a continuity impervious to the camera.
The cinema cannot possibly suggest those comparisons and the meditations in their wake without resorting to devious expedients and artificial devices; and of course, no sooner does it draw on them than it ceases to be cinema. What it can represent adequately is not the mental continuum in its entirety but only the physical incidents occasioning it— the vendors in the early street, their sung phrases heard through shutters and curtains, and the narrator's spontaneous response to them. The shots of these incidents may then stir the spectator to embark on the route they throw open to him; in imagining their meanings and implications, however, he will hardly come across the mental images called forth in the novel. So the adapter is in a dilemma. If he features the vendors and their cries he stands little chance of incorporating organically the memories with which they are interwoven; and if he wants to highlight the latter he is heading for uncinematic eleborations which of necessity relegate the street and its noises to the background. Any attempt to convert the mental continuum of the novel into camera-life appears to be hopelessly doomed.
The whole episode is symptomatic of Proust's ambiguous relation to the cinema. On the one hand, he insists that insignificant physical and physiological events— a madeleine dipped in tea, the peculiar position of a limb, the sensation of slightly uneven flagstones— touch off momentous involuntary memories; and it goes without saying that, because of their material character and their very smallness, these events are a natural for the camera. On the other hand, he follows the train of memories, reveling in experiences and thoughts which no longer have an equivalent in the visible world. They are language-bound; even the most ingenious camera work would be only a poor substitute for the visions roused by the words. A contemporary of the rising new medium, Proust acknowledges film in more than one way; at the same time he completely ignores it in his capacity as a writer. His affinity for the cinema makes him sensitive to transient impressions, such as the three trees which look familiar to him; but when he identifies the trees as yet undeciphered phantoms of the