Proust and Photography

“Whenever Proust mentions photographs, he does so disparagingly: as a synonym for a shallow, too exclusively visual, merely voluntary relation to the past, whose yield is insignificant compared with the deep discoveries to be made by responding to cues give by all the senses—the technique he called ‘involuntary memory’.”

Susan Sontag, On Photography

For this photograph was like one encounter more, added to all those that I had already had, with Mme. de Guermantes; better still, a prolonged encounter, as if, by some sudden stride forward in our relations, she had stopped beside me, in a garden hat, and had allowed me for the first time to gaze at my leisure at that plump cheek, that arched neck, that tapering eyebrow (veiled from me hitherto by the swiftness of her passage, the bewilderment of my impressions, the imperfection of memory)…

The Guermantes Way

Doubting the success of his manipulative attempt to have his friend Saint-Loup introduce him to Mme. de Guermantes, Marcel wants the photograph of her—a second best choice, and one at hand. The portrait would provide an encounter with the Duchess that has qualities an actual meeting does not; the photograph would prolong a (albeit vitual) meeting with her and allow Marcel to see the Duchess in a way that a brief encounter would not. More interestingly, Marcel claims here that he could see the Duchess more clearly, as impressions confuse and memory is unreliable. The photograph, Marcel thinks in the midst of his obsession over the Duchess, would enhance his relationship with her.

In the Search, photographs often console, as when Marcel looks at a photograph of Gilberte or Swann uses a photograph of Odette to “remember how exquisite she had been” and relieve himself of the “sufferings that he voluntarily endured on her account.” Referring to a photograph of a house whose residents have fallen out of favor, and another of the Duchess in her youth, M. de Charlus could be describing Swann’s attempt to understand Odette when he remarks that “a photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shews us things that no longer exist.”

Proust sometimes presents photographs as vehicles of insight. Visiting his friend Saint-Loup at Donciere, Marcel imagines his grandmother “as she was when I was with her, but not taking into account the effect upon her of this elimination.” On his return home, he discovers to his dismay that the effect is to make him see his grandmother as she would be if he were not part of her life. We see, he remarks, those we love “through the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which, before allowing the images their faces represent to reach us, draws them into its vortex, flings them back onto the idea of them we have always had, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it.” We see through the accumulation of the history of our love; every “habitual glance is necromancy,” bringing to life what is dead rather than seeing what is now on the faces of those we love. Marcel’s eyes, removed by absence from the vortex, took a photograph of his grandmother when he caught sight of her, causing him to see “what they ought never to linger upon… and start to function mechanically like photographic film” to show him “not the beloved figure who has long ceased to exist, and whose death our affection has never want to reveal, but the new person is has clothed… in a lovingly deceptive likeness.” Photographs can’t but record the present at the time they are created. This is Sontag’s complaint, why photographs are “shallow.”

Photographs play an important part in Marcel’s understanding of his relationship with his grandmother. Marcel stares at her photograph for long periods after she comes to him in a sudden, vivid, involuntary memory. The memory overwhelms him on the evening of his arrival in the seaside resort of Balbec. Marcel tells us he reached down to remove his boots, in the same room he had occupied two years before when his grandmother and he had spent a month at the seashore, and his “chest swelled, filled with an unknown, divine presence.” Sobbing, he “glimpsed, in my memory, bent over my fatigue, the tender, concerned, disappointed face of my grandmother, such as she had been on the first evening of our arrival…” The experience jolts him; “it was only at this instant—more than a year after her funeral…—that I just learned she was dead.” The memory, he realizes, has rescued him “from the aridity of his soul.”

Saint-Loup took the photo that Marcel ponders. When Saint-Loup showed up to take the portrait, the grandmother acted coy, posed in ways that Marcel thought demeaning. Marcel ended up acting badly toward her. Now, two years later, that event has blossomed into nagging guilt. In a reversal characteristic of Proust, Marcel learns from Francoise that his grandmother, terminally ill, had asked Saint-Loup to photograph her so Marcel could have her image after she died. Marcel stares at the photograph, saying to himself, “'It’s grandmother, I am her grandson,' just as an amnesiac rediscovers his name, or as an invalid changes personality.” And the photograph achieves what the grandmother intended. Instead of remembering her as sick and debilitated, Marcel sees in the photograph his grandmother, “looking so elegant, so carefree…less unhappy, and in better health than I imagined.”

Sontag is right to say that photographs are “insignificant compared with the deep discoveries to be made by responding to cues give by all the senses—the technique he called ‘involuntary memory’.” But what does not fall short of involuntary memory's rewards? If the photograph cannot match the achievements of memory and the mining of personal history, in the Search it provides a valuable instrument for examining memory and its mysteries.

M. de Charlus, Jupien, and the Bee

The tension that Proust creates between the natural and the unnatural in the opening section of Sodom and Gomorrah perplexes me. Marcel, perched at the upper story of his parents’ apartment in the Hotel de Guermantes, is watching for the Duc and Duchesse to return home. Seeing a bee enter the courtyard, he descends the stairs to observe more closely whether “the improbable insect would come to visit the tendered and forlorn pistil” of an orchid. Hidden behind a shutter, Marcel remains unnoticed when M. de Charlus enters the courtyard on his way to lunch at the apartment of Mme. de Villeparisis. Still waiting for the Guermantes, intrigued by the bee, Marcel is at his vigil when Charlus soon reenters the courtyard.

At this point, an amazing exchange between Charlus and the tailor Jupien begins. Charlus,

his half-closed eyes all of a sudden opened wide, was gazing with an extraordinary intentness at the former waistcoat-maker on the doorstep of his shop, while the latter, standing suddenly transfixed in front of M. de Charlus, rooted like a plant, was contemplating with an air of wonderment the ageing Baron’s embonpoint.

A kind of dance begins, where Jupien, “in perfect symmetry with the Baron” had “drawn back his head, set his torso at an advantageous angle, placed his fist on his hip with a grotesque impertinence and made his behind stick out, striking poses with the coquettishness that the orchid might have had for the providential advent of the bumblebee.” The dance leads Jupien to invite Charlus into the tailor shop. Marcel makes his way through the cellar to a shop room, separated by a partition from the two men, where he hears the moans of the two. “I might have thought,” Marcel notes, “that one person was slitting another’s throat close beside me and that the murderer and his resuscitated victim were then taking a bath in order to erase the crime.”

The spying Marcel achieves in this humorous scene recalls the Montjouvain episode of Swann’s Way, when a much younger Marcel secretly looks through a window to watch Mlle. Vinteuil and her female companion making sadistic love. In his biography of Proust, William C. Carter writes that Proust’s editor had wanted him to cut that episode, but Proust “had constructed this work [Remembrance as a whole] so that this episode in the first volume explains the jealousy of my young man in the fourth and fifth volumes, so that by ripping out the column with the obscene capital, I would have brought down the arch.” At this point, the “young man’s” jealousy is yet to foment. We are similarly left wondering when Marcel tells us that while observing the flower, he “had already drawn from the conspicuous stratagem of the flowers a consequence bearing on a whole unconscious element in the work of literature.” The clear and immediate result of observing Charlus and Jupien is a dramatic change in Marcel’s view of the Baron. The Baron’s transformation “into a new person was so complete that not only the contrasts in his face and his voice, but, in retrospect, even the ups and downs of his relationship with me, all that had up until now appeared incoherent to my mind, became intelligible…”

Colleen Lamos argues in Deviant Modernism that the scene in the courtyard of the Hotel de Guermantes “endorses the belief that the male invert has, in Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s notorious phrase, "the soul of a woman in the body of a man.” This certainly is Marcel’s view of Charlus. “I understood why,” Marcel goes on to say following his earlier observation, “when I had seen him coming out of Mme. de Villeparisis’s, I had been able to think that M. de Charlus had the look of a woman: he was one!” Andre Gide admired Charlus yet complained to Proust that the character “contributed to the habitual confusion between the homosexual and the invert.” That is, the identification of the homosexual with a man who has a woman trapped within him.

The long disquisition about inverts and solitaries (gay men who remain alone all their lives rather than reveal their sexuality) feels like a curious departure from the encounter between the two men in the courtyard. For the overriding imagery that flows through the whole section is organic, botanical, and natural. The men are referred to repeatedly as flowers and plants, and when Charlus eventually leaves the hotel after making love, he crosses paths with the bee, on its way to make love with the orchid. As Marcel observes, the joining of the two men was “non-elective,” just as the bee’s union with the orchid’s pistil is hard wired. Marcel remembers seeing jellyfish on the beach when he summered at Balbec. At the time, he thought them ugly, grotesque. After seeing Charlus in a new light (literally in the new sunlight of the courtyard), he realizes that his view was limited. From the point of view of natural history, jellyfish are, “with the transparent velvet of their petals, like the mauve orchids of the sea.” In this opening section of Sodom and Gomorrah, all life seems to be organically one, regardless of the labels Marcel has adopted for men like Charlus and Jupien.