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.