In the Footsteps of Proust

I'm rarely drawn to places which writers or their fictional characters have inhabited (though several years ago I couldn't resist walking past Stanley Kunitz's home in Provincetown, Massachusetts).

If you are traveling to France and are interested in seeing Proust sites in Paris and Illiers (Combray), here's a guide for you.

Swann's Way Wordle

It's summer.... time to be frivolous.

Art. Death. Transcendence?

Book sales of Proust’s fifth and sixth novels drop significantly when compared to the four novels that precede them, suggesting that people stop reading In Search of Lost Time when they come to The Captive. I sympathize with readers’ willingness to give up at this point. I did not have a fond memory of the novel before I jumped into it again. “You read The Captive and The Fugitive on your own,” I suggested to the RHH Proust group as we finished Sodom and Gomorrah. “We can reconvene for Time Regained.”


They balked. “We want to read them together. Besides, if we don’t read as a group, we’ll lose our motivation.” I was not at my best when I pressed on, urging, “Don’t worry about motivation. If you don’t read all of The Captive and The Fugitive, that’s okay. They’re a separate, self-contained part of the Search.” Doubting the integrity of my argument, the group scheduled four dinners during the summer.


As I drove to our first meeting, I imagined an evening of regrets. “You were right,” I would hear the group admit. “Let’s skim through these novels. Page after page of Marcel’s obsession of Albertine! Enough!”

Instead, after finishing dinner and listening to the group discuss The Captive, I heard, “Are we glad we didn’t skip this novel!” “I’m glad too,” I replied truly, if sheepishly. The group had again shown me aspects of Proust that I had not seen before.


I had not sufficiently taken in—blinded as I was by Marcel’s incessant jealousy—the novel’s ruminations on death and art, which begin with Bergotte’s death while viewing A View of Delft at a Vermeer exhibition.


Gazing at the painting, Bergotte “noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. 'That’s how I ought to have written,' he said. 'My last books are too dry. I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour… like this little patch of yellow wall.’” Repeating the phrase “little patch of wall,” the writer collapsed and died. He was dead, Proust writes. "Dead for ever? Who can say?...All we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life…” The artist leaves behind works, even great works, that matter little to his “worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer." We cannot know what precedes and follows our life, but the artist’s work survives. Bergotte, dead and interned, was gone, "but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection."


Later in the novel, Marcel questions this conclusion. After playing Vinteuil’s sonata on his piano, Marcel denies that art is “something above and beyond life.” Individuality in works of art is “due merely to the illusion produced by technical skill,” he says. Marcel, however, does not hold this view for long; as he vacillates again in his relationship with Albertine, his ideas about art, which threatened to prevent him from becoming a writer, recover “from the diminution that they have suffered…” Thinking of Swann’s life, Marcel reaffirms the writer’s ability to create something that lasts beyond death. Speaking of the Search, Marcel/Proust addresses Swann, dead many years. Marcel himself, “he whom you must have regarded as a young idiot has made you the hero of one of his novels [so] that people are beginning to speak of you again and that your name will perhaps live. If, in Tissot’s picture representing the balcony of the Rue Royale club, where you figure with Galliffet, Edmond de Polignac and Saint-Maurice, people are always drawing attention to you, it is because they see that there are some traces of you in the character of Swann.”


At this point in the Search’s narrative, Marcel has been able to only write his impression of the steeples of Martinville. We know, of course, that he has achieved becoming a writer, for we are reading the Search, Marcel’s story of his quest to become an artist, which begins with the novel that made Swann a hero. Within the chronology of that story, Swann could have been in Tissot’s 1868 painting. Fiction—the narrative, Marcel as the author of that narrative, and Swann’s presence in the painting—mingles with reality—our reading of the Search, the actuality of Swann’s Way, and Tissot’s painting—to affirm the possibility of art and its ability to transcend death. Both had been in doubt.


Doubt is a poison that flows like a raging stream through The Captive. Marcel is enervated by it, a man thrashing about in a seemingly vain attempt to escape from doubt into truth. This drama of Marcel’s battle with doubt and jealousy centers on his sexual relationship with Albertine, a battle so fierce that it became my memory of The Captive. But mine was a myopic view of the novel. I had underestimated Marcel’s critical struggle to overcome his doubt about the value of art. Is art, even great art, merely a mastery of technique, or is art able to transcend our mortality? Provisionally, at least, Marcel believes in the power of art to symbolically “resurrect” the artist who has died. Reading the Search, we might believe it also.

Sodom and Gomorrah (2)

As I was saying, Balbec, “a place that had been once mysterious and anxiety provoking” to Marcel, had become by the end of Sodom and Gomorrah “laden with purely human effluivia,” a landscape whose atmosphere was now “breathable without difficulty, too soothing even.” Social life had drained the seaside resort and its surrounding villages of their mystery. Or so Marcel claims.

Near the close of the novel, this passage, I think, throws his claim in doubt:

The light of the sun, which was about to come up, by modifying the object around me, made me once again, as if shifting my position for a moment in relation to it, aware, even more cruelly, of my pain. Never had I seen so beautiful and so sorrowful a morning. Reflecting on all the indifferent landscapes that were about to be illuminated, and which, only yesterday, would have filled me only with the desire to visit them, I could not contain a sob, when, in a mechanically executed gesture of oblation, seeming to symbolize for me the bloody sacrifice that I was about to have to make of all joy, each morning, until the end of my life, a renewal, solemnly celebrated at each dawning of my daily unhappiness and of the blood from my wound, the gold egg of the sun, as if propelled by the break in equilibrium produces at the moment of coagulation by a change of density, barbed with flames as in painting, burst in one bound through the curtain behind which I sensed it quivering for the past few moments, ready to enter on the stage and to spring upwards, and whose mysterious, congealed purple it erased beneath floods of light.

The pain Marcel speaks of is, of course, his fear that Albertine is a lesbian, a fear that has intensified following his discovery that she had been raised by Mlle. Vintueil’s friend (the friend whom a younger Marcel had secretly watched make love to Mlle. Vintueil). Marcel’s cry is an “oblation,” a “bloody sacrifice” to joy, a gesture “solemnly celebrated” with the “blood from my wound.” The language evokes the Passion. Faced with yet another real or imagined bit of damning evidence, he is suffering as Jesus suffered on the cross. The imagery of the sun (son) reinforces the comparison. As it rises “barbed with flames,” it erases the “congealed purple” behind Marcel’s curtains. (Purple the color of vestments worn in Catholic masses during Good Friday and the Easter Vigil, the high holy days preceding the Passion.) The contrast between indifference and engagement could hardly be more startling. Those who hesitate to identify Marcel with Jesus might still concede that this passage presents us with a mystery.

As a whole the closing pages of Sodom and Gomorrah are filled with mystery. As the sun rises, “in the disorder of the night mists that still hung in blue and pink shreds over waters littered with the pearly debris of the dawn, boats were passing, smiling at the oblique light that had turned their sails and the tips of their bowsprits yellow….” The sunrise was a “pure evocation of the sunset…” Just before watching daybreak, Marcel had woken suddenly to his bedroom door opening. “My heart pounding, I seemed to see my grandmother before me, as in one of those apparitions that I had already had, but only in my sleep.” Like the dawn, this experience—the apparition is his mother—inverts the expected to create a mysterious, other-worldly moment. Perhaps the most striking transformation occurs still earlier in the novel's last pages, when Marcel reflects on his distance from Albertine. “Should something violently alter the position of that soul in relation to us, to show us that it loves other human beings and not ourselves [as apparently Albertine had], them by the beating of our dislocated hearts, we feel that the cherished creature was not a few feet away, but inside us.” Not more distance, but not distant at all.

When I read the last pages of Sodom and Gomorrah, I see only counter-evidence to Marcel’s assertion that mystery no longer exists. “What a deceitful sense sight is!” he exclaims. Yes, what a misleading observation!

Proust and Fashion

Ms. Grapeshot/Odette has interesting comments about Proust and fashion. One notes the fascination Yves Saint Laurent had for Proust, with an aside about Ms. Grapeshot/Odette's link to the designs of YSL. The other provides a pointer to Fortuny, the designer of some of Mme. de Guermantes' clothes. (Remember Marcel grilling her about what she wore so that he could buy similar clothes for Albertine?)

Sodom and Gomorrah (1)

As our Proust reading class made its way through Sodom and Gomorrah, the group asked, “Why are we reading this?” More to the point, “Why did Proust write more than one hundred pages on the Verdurin salon?” While the Verdurins’ missteps and faux pas in Swann’s Way made us laugh, their mean spirited, self-serving attempt to establish themselves in high society did not amuse us now. What was the point? How did the large middle section of the novel fit in with the rest of In Search of Lost Time? Our reading had begun to acquire a tinge of drudgery.

It was easy to condemn the Verdurins and their “little clan.” Yet I noticed moments in which Proust tempered his view of them. The gathering of the clan on the train created a touching portrait of the group, even if they expelled those who made the mistake of coming into their railway compartment. So I argued with little effect. What of M. and Mme. Verdurin’s interest in the sights and landscape around their rented chateau, La Raspelière? Their main business there, observes Marcel , “was to live agreeably, to go on excursions, to eat well, to talk, to entertain agreeable friends whom they made play amusing games of billiards, have good meals and cheerful tea-parties.” Yet he would discover later

how intelligently they had learned to know the locality, taking their guests on excursions as ‘original’ as the music to which they made them listen. The part that the flowers at La Raspelière, the roads along by the sea, the old houses and the unknown churches played in M. Verdurin’s life was so great that those who saw him only in Paris… could scarcely comprehend the idea he had formed of his own life, and the importance that his pleasures lent it in his own eyes.

The reading group remained unconvinced. Hadn’t Marcel made the same observation earlier, adding that the Verdurins allowed the beauty of the place to “wash passively over them rather than making it the object of their concerns”? I was misreading the novel in order to find something to redeem these social climbers.

The group felt Marcel had matured. He seemed more active in the gatherings of the little clan, for example taking an interest in Brichot’s endless etymologies. Still, the novel seemed unmoored from what we had read before. Marcel’s quest to become a writer had dropped from sight long ago. As Roger Shattuck observes, “the theme of great expectations runs very strong at the start [of In Search for Lost Time] and then diminishes [in Sodom and Gomorrah], leaving us adrift on the ocean of Marcel’s desultory life. The ocean seems to go on forever.”

Perhaps, argued one of our group, the point was to become tired and exasperated by the Verdurins. By doing so, we were experiencing what Marcel lived. The problem with the argument, it seemed, was that Marcel was not tired of the Verdurins. He looked forward to their dinners and enjoyed the gatherings of the clan, only balking at visiting La Raspelière when a visit would interfere with his plans to be alone with Albertine.

And yet. At the end of Chapter 3, Marcel clarifies the change in him, if not in us readers. He had acquired a new habit, the habit of filling his time by visiting friends in the countryside of Balbec; if the “territorial distribution” of the friends along the coast

necessarily lent to the visits I made… the form of a journey, they also now confined the attractions of that journey to the social ones, of a succession of visits…. In this too social valley, to the sides of which clung, whether visible or not, a numerous company of friends, the poetic cry of evening was no longer that of the owl or the frog, but the ‘How goes it?’ of M. de Criquetot, or the ‘Kaire’ of Brichot.

A place that had been once mysterious and anxiety provoking, was now “laden with purely human effluivia” and “breathable without difficulty, too soothing even.” If we were still bored and frustrated with the social world of Balbec, Marcel had become comfortable in it, at a price.

Recovering Grief

This week the Proust Reading Group at Richard Hugo House will read and discuss the beautiful passage of Sodom and Gomorrah in which Marcel discovers that he has been numb for a year to his grandmother's death. André Aciman, author of the Proust Project, discusses Marcel's discovery in a short talk given at the PEN American Center in 2001. You can find more short talks about Proust and his work here .

André Aciman: Parce Que C'était Lui

This talk was originally presented at a Twentieth-Century Masters Tribute to Marcel Proust, sponsored by the PEN American Center, Lincoln Center, the PEN Forums Committee, and Lipper Publications.

---

Parce Que C'était Lui

The little phrase I’m about to read comes from a famous passage in Sodom and Gomorrah when Marcel the narrator is suddenly reminded of his grandmother. He had stayed at the same beach resort in Balbec with her once, but now, more than a year after her death, he’s back at the very same hotel. What he finds, as Proustian characters always find when they expect maximum emotion is, however, minimum sensation. He encounters, more or less, what he experienced at the time of her death, a sense of surprise at feeling so singularly numb, almost indifferent, blasé. All of it is colored by Marcel’s overloaded feeling of not feeling enough, and by the hope that this shamed admission of emotional inadequacy might itself pass for a form of genuine emotion. Now, surrounded by the indolent charm of the grand hotel, what the young adult Marcel thinks of when he arrives at Balbec is not his grandmother, but the social life awaiting him, of the band of young girls he had met there once before, and of the vague, tantalizing thing which Marcel always looks forward to: something exotic, someone new, unexpected, different, who might ultimately lure him out of his humdrum, bookish cocoon, into what Proust calls a new life.

As for his grandmother: well, if bereavement is the toll the living must pay for the loss of a loved one, then clearly Marcel, to use Jane Austen’s words, has been let off easily. But we are, of course, being set up. For as soon as Marcel is in his hotel room, and bends down to undo one of his boot buttons, something his grandmother had helped him do in that very same room, he suddenly bursts out sobbing, vehemently. What hits him is not just that he misses her terribly, but that he will never, ever, see her again. Because for the first time in his life, and in a manner that devastates him, the arch-premeditator Marcel finally understands, long after it happened, that his grandmother is in fact dead. Yet, come to think of it, this shouldn’t be surprising. Emotion, as every reader of Proust knows after about thirty pages, always comes unannounced, obliquely, inadvertently, just as it does, say, in Freud. The more unexpected, the more poignant it is.

This is how life works in Proust. Conversely, one may bump into the right people, but never when one wants to. One may get what one wants, but only after giving it up, or wanting something else instead. We reach out to seize precious moments not as they are happening to us, but once it’s clear that we’ve lost them. So far, so good. The set up is familiar enough. Proust—this cross between Freud, Woody Allen, and Murphy of Murphy’s Law—is one of us. How well we know him, and how well he knows us. How well he understands repression. And how simple and direct that outburst of earnest grief, and how admirable his knowledge that it is always better to feel something, anything, than to feel nothing at all; that human beings should, and want to, feel things; that we are each of us heat-seeking subjects starved for feeling. Which is why, even at the risk of getting hurt, or making tremendous fools of ourselves, we will not shirk from being drawn to certain places, to certain objects, certain odors, to art, to tears, to plants, to writing, to memory, to music, to vice, and of course, to other human beings. Because by so doing, each of us finds a secret, private conduit to an inner life that is not just our new life, or our true life, but our whole life.

How magnificently—and predictably—modern Proust is. So, for the sake of argument, because I am perverse, let me overturn everything I’ve been saying and ask: What if this true inner life is nothing more than a life made to be lost? But lost before it was ever possessed, or even glimpsed, though it seems to have been lived, because it claims to be remembered. What if this true, inner life hovers on the horizon like a ghost ship that never materializes, but never vanishes either? What if this other life were an ancillary life called: paper. An unlived life made on paper, lived for paper, by a man raised and fed on paper, who has learned that life itself can be so drearily unimaginative sometimes that by a sort of miracle that justifies his life-long commitment and confinement to paper, life will mimic what could only have happened on paper. Where else but on paper does a man desperately seeking a woman among millions in Paris actually bump into her on the streets at night? Proust’s bookish eye is transfixed by those moments in life that are stunning, not because of their inherent beauty, but because they cry out to be committed, that is returned, to paper, to literature, to fiction, the ultimate seat of the inner life.

Small wonder that Proust put so much stock in style. The Proustian sentence, which personifies procrastination, allows him to sink in to paper and never to come up for air, to pile up metaphors and clauses, and take all sorts of sinuous turns, the better to take sorrow and pain and spread them out like gold into cadence, just cadence, because cadence is like feeling, and cadence is like breathing, and cadence is desire, and if cadence doesn’t reinvent everything we would like our life to be, or to become, or to have been, then just the act of searching, and probing, in that particularly cadenced way, becomes a way of feeling, and of being in the world. And yet, having built such a paper world, Proust can suddenly overturn everything I’ve been suggesting, and jolt out, like someone waking from a dream, sputtering things as randomly, and inchoately, as a man who has barely learned how to speak.

No reader of Montaigne can forget that stunning moment when, after probing why he loved his deceased friend Etienne de La Boétie so much, the author of the essays, this master-stylist of baroque prose, breaks down and scrawls out one of the most beautiful sentences penned in French: “You ask me why I loved him,” Montaigne says. “I don’t know. All I can say is parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi.” Because it was he, because it was I. Proust too knows how to cut through layer after layer of searching and probing prose and write as brief a sentence, if only because it too, like his sudden outburst, wells up in him and erupts on something that is more than just paper now. “You ask me why I love my grandmother,” he says. “I don’t know. All I know is this”—and here is the little sentence I promised you earlier— “Elle était ma grand-mère et j’était son petit-fils.” She was my grandmother, and I was her grandson. And if that’s not enough, a few lines down, Proust will say it again, more forcefully. While staring at her photograph in his hotel room, he will say it in even more guileless terms: “C’est ma grand-mère, je suis son petit-fils.” It’s my grandma. I’m her grandson. Anyone can write this. But of course, what surrounds it makes it eloquent. More to the point: life can’t compete with this. Life doesn’t even come close. And, come to think of it, perhaps no one alive can today.