Alex Ross on Proust on Music

Alex Ross, author of the highly praised The Rest is Noise, points to a passage of Sodom and Gomorrah for Proust's insight into 20th-century music.

The Imagination, Saint-Loup, and His Mistress

The imagination is “like a barrel organ that does not work properly and always plays a different tune from the one it should,” Marcel observes while watching the Princess Guermantes-Baviere. The Princess, whose name had evoked “certain sixteenth-century masterpieces” in Marcel’s imagination, is asking a “stout gentleman” in her opera box, “Will you have a bonbon?” Bonbons do not mix with sixteenth-century masterpieces, and so the imagined Princess begins to change. However, he notes, this bit of reality did not “lead me to conclude that she and her guests were mere mortals like the rest of us.” If not a sixteenth-century masterpiece, she certainly is other than a woman of Marcel’s social class. “I was very conscious of the fact,” he goes on to say

that what they were doing was only a game, and that as a prelude to the acts of their real life (the important part of which they presumably did not conduct here) it was appropriate, in accordance with rituals of which I knew nothing, that they should pretend to offer and decline bonbons…

Imagination persists. Marcel thinks the stout gentleman and the Princess have “sublime thoughts” which they are husbanding for a time when the bonbon game ends. His supposition is immediately undercut, however, when a companion adds a bit more reality and a tad less imagination by referring to Marcel’s stout gentleman as the “fat man.”

Imagination’s power to reach beyond mere reality is a Proustian theme; when Marcel feels he has gotten to the truth, it is almost always the result of an exercise of his imagination. From another perspective, however, imagination gets Marcel and his friends into trouble. The bonbon episode is a prelude to a more extended exploration of this downside of imagination’s power.

The meditation occurs when Marcel meets the mistress of his friend Robert Saint-Loup. Up to this point an unseen figure, the mistress has been a torment to Saint-Loup, first at Balbec, where Saint-Loup reports she is nagging him to return to Paris, and more recently at Doncieres, where her silence drives Saint-Loup crazy with jealousy and worry. Marcel and Saint-Loup have taken the train to her home on the outskirts of Paris. Marcel’s expectations may be high. “She’s a sublime creature,” Saint-Loup had told him. “If you ever meet her, you’ll see what I mean; there’s something noble about her…. She has an astral quality, even something quite vatic. You grasp my meaning—the poet veering toward the status of priest.” Now Marcel waits for the two to emerge from her house.

Suddenly Saint-Loup appeared, accompanied by his mistress, and this woman, who was for him the essence of love, of all the sweet possibilities of life, whose personality, mysteriously enshrined in a body as in a tabernacle, was the constant focus of my friend’s imaginative attention, something he felt he would never really know as he went on asking himself what her inner self could be, behind the veil of eyes and flesh—in this woman I recognized at once “Rachel, when of the Lord,” the woman who, a few years ago (women change their status so rapidly in that world, when they do change), used to say to the procuress, “Tomorrow evening, then if you need me for someone, you’ll send for me, won’t you?"

Though she did not remember, Marcel had met her in a brothel.

In this high comedy, Marcel’s “coarsest sort of acquaintance” with Rachel is strangely different from his friend’s understanding of her. Rachel’s life, thoughts, and “all the men by whom she must have been possessed, were so indifferent” to Marcel that he would have barely any interest if she confessed her past. To Saint-Loup, Rachel was “all-consuming,” the source of his anxiety, fears, torment, and love; to Marcel she was a mere “clockwork toy.” The two men saw

the same thin and narrow face. But we had come to it by two opposite paths that could never converge, and we would never see the same face. I had know this face from the outside, with its looks, its smiles, the movements of its mouth, as the face of some woman who would do anything I asked for twenty francs… for me her looks, her smiles, the movements of her mouth, had seemed meaningful merely as generalized actions with nothing individual about them, and beneath them I should not have had the curiosity to look for a person.

What to Marcel had been merely the “consenting face” of a prostitute, was for Saint-Loup “a goal toward which he had been struggling through endless hopes and doubts, suspicions and dreams.” The experience causes Marcel to realize “how much power a human imagination can put behind a tiny scrap of a face,” a power that led Saint-Loup to spend countless hours of agony and more than thirty thousand francs on jewelry for a woman who seemed to Marcel “not worth twenty francs” when offered to him in a brothel.

“It was not,” Marcel notes, “so much that I found ‘Rachel, when of the Lord’ of little consequence, but that I found the power of the human imagination, the illusion that fostered the pains of love, so momentous.” If the imagination can inflict so much pain, perhaps embracing it is dangerous. The imagination may not be able to transcend the bounds of reality. The barrel organ may always play a tune different from the one it should.

The visit to Rachel’s home occurs several days before Easter, during which Catholic children traditionally receive their first communion in churches decorated with white lilies. In one of the most beautiful passages of The Guermantes Way, Proust draws the association as Marcel catches sight of small gardens “decked with the huge white altars of the flowering fruit trees… the tall pear trees enveloped each house, each humble courtyard, in a more extensive, more uniform, and dazzling whiteness, as if all the dwellings, all the gardens in the village were making their first communion on the same day.”

The beauty of the gardens has moved Marcel close to things we see “not only with our eyes but also feel in our hearts.” Distinguishing between the material world and the world of feeling and spirit, again finding himself coaxed from mere reality by his imagination, Marcel pulls back for a moment to ask whether, in seeing the trees as angels, he has made the same mistake “as Mary Magdalene when, in another garden, on a day whose anniversary was fast approaching, she saw a human form, ‘supposing him to be the gardener'.” Has he, he wonders, wrongly imagined one world for another? In answer, Marcel reaffirms his believe in the power of the imagination to let us see beyond the merely real:

Guardians of the memories of golden age, keepers of the promise that reality is not what we suppose, that the splendor of poetry, the magical light of innocence may shine in it and may be the reward we strive to deserve—were they not, these great white creatures so magnificently stooped over the shade that invites us to rest, to fish, to read, were they not more like angels?

As Marcel, Saint-Loup, and Rachel walk through the village, the material and the spiritual, the real and the imagined, coalesce into one. “The houses were sordid. But beside the most dilapidated of them, the ones that looked like they had been scorched by a shower of brimstone,… a resplendent angel stood over it, stretching the dazzling protection of his widespread wings of innocence in blossom: a pear tree.” In this unexpected, strange, funny, beautiful encounter with Rachel, Marcel’s momentary loss of faith in the imagination strengthens his belief in its power.

Crossposted on Ludwig Richter's Blog.