Thinking of Proust

A librarian ponders reading Proust, often accompanying her thoughts with Masao Yamamoto's photographs.

[Thanks to The English Teacher.]

Reading Moby-Dick

Having finished In Search of Lost Time, I'm reading Moby-Dick and leading a group through Melville's masterpiece beginning next month. I'll be posting occasional musings on the novel at UnpackingMyLibrary.

I hope to read Swann's Way again in 2009, and perhaps lead another group through Proust's first novel of the Search. Of the seven, it's my favorite and, I believe, the one novel that can give first-time readers of Proust a feeling for the texture of the entire Search.

Happy reading to all!

Paintings in Proust

Eric Karpeles' compilation of paintings in Proust is receiving attention before the holidays. For a slide show with corresponding passages, see The New York Times. David Carrier has a dissenting opinion in artcritical.com.

The Search Ends

The Richard Hugo House Proust Reading Group finished In Search of Lost Time with a celebration at a local French bistro. (With apologies to Marcel Proust), the group came “to endure the Search like a form of fatigue, build it up like a church, follow it like a medical regime, vanquish it like an obstacle, win it like a friendship, cosset it like a little child, create it like a new world without neglecting those mysteries whose explanation is to be found probably only in world other than our own and the presentiment of which is the thing that moves us more deeply in life and in art.” In short it became part of our lives, and we part of the lives of each other.

Bonne lecture!

Proust's Mock Goncourt Journal

A recently published collection of short parodies that Proust wrote for Le Figaro includes a mock Goncourt Journal entry concerning the Lemoine diamond fraud. Proust creates his own obituary at the end of the parody.

Goncourt Journal 21st December 1907

Dined with Lucien Daudet [Proust’s lover] who spoke to me with a touch of whimsical humour about the fabulous diamonds seen on the shoulders of Mme X..., diamonds said by Lucien in vigourously amusing language, to be sure, always the artist in his notation, revealing the wholly superior writer by the savoury choice of his epithets, to be in spite of everything a bourgeois stone, rather silly, in no way comparable, for example to emerald or ruby. And at dessert Lucien almost knocked us to the floor by what he had been told by Lefebvre de Béhaine that evening, to he Lucien, and as opposed to the opinion held by that charming woman Mme de Nadaillac, that a certain Lemoine had discovered the secret of the manufacture of diamonds. According to Lucien all this was causing furious anxieties in the world of business, in the face of the possible depreciation of unsold diamond stocks, anxieties that could well end by prevailing over the magistracy and leading to the imprisonment of this Lemoine for the rest of his days, in a sort of in pace, for the crime of lèse-bijouterie. It is more powerful than the story of Galilee, more modern, lending itself more to the artistic evocation of the times, and all at once I saw an excellent subject for one of our pieces, a piece which could contain some robust things about the power of today's high industry, a power guiding, in the main, government and judiciary and resisting any new invention which could be calamitous to it. Like a bouquet, Lucien is brought the news, giving me the details of the tale which had just been sketched out to him, that their friend Marcel Proust had killed himself, after the fall in price of diamond shares, a fall which had annihilated part of his fortune.

Proust parodies the Goncourt brothers again in Time Regained, using a much longer mock Goncourt journal entry to describe the ascent of the Verdurins to the pinnacle of Parisian society.

Proust's Unchanging Characters

“Proust’s characters change without changing,” writes Jean-Francois Revel in On Proust. “Sometimes they undergo a complete change without anything remarkable happening to them. On the other hand, there are times when their existence undergoes a major transformation without their changing.”

… it is in spite of and within the limits of the unchanging character and destiny that the Proustian characters undergo a process of renewal. The head waiter is always the same head waiter; I shall come across him tomorrow in the same place, but he will renew himself because his mimicry will be even more fetching that it was yesterday… Proust enjoys showing us personal renewals, which are not merely changes in social status (there are few of them or they only happen to secondary characters) as though they had no roots in the past and are therefore not the result of a process of evolution, but the equivalent of the birth of a fresh individual…. Proustian time is not creative. Its role, while bringing about change in the social situation—minimal changes which nevertheless seem of capital importance to the interest parties and are always announced with surprise by the narrator—is to reveal the true nature of the characters, to unveil what men already were without our knowing it. The Albertine of whom we catch a glimpse on the beach is already everything which will be discovered by the narrator as a result of his posthumous investigation of her liaisons.

This strikes me a largely true. So, to use an example provided by Revel, we discover that Octave, the apparently shallow-minded teenage golfer at Balbec, has become a successful writer “whose latest work has just turned modern literature upside down!” The two cannot be linked. On the other hand, Mme. Verdurin devolves into deeper and deeper viciousness as the Search unfolds. If we are not surprised that this character trait continues to define her, we are stunned by the degree to which she unleashes it. Mme. Verdurin may be the exception to Revel’s observation, however. Just as the two ways are revealed in the last novel to be one and the same path, Proust’s characters seem to circle about themselves and one another, their personalities unchanged as they weave the fabric of Time.

Regaining Time

I have been reading Time Regained, reading and pondering it, underlining, noting this and that passage. My reading had seemed perfunctory, though pleasurable, until I came to the passage in which Marcel has finally been allowed into the salon of the Prince and Princess Guermantes. As you remember, he was asked to wait until a music recital finished, and sat outside the grand hall, musing about his past and eating tidbits brought to him by the Guermantes servants. Now Marcel is talking with Gilberte.

Bored I may have been as I stood talking this afternoon to Gilberte or Mme. De Guermantes, but at least as I did so I held within my grasp those of the imaginings of my childhood which I had found most beautiful and thought most inaccessible and, like a shopkeeper who cannot balance his books, I could console myself by forgetting the value of their actual possession and remembering the price which had once been attached to them by my desire.

Here, in a sentence, Marcel squarely faces the choice that has confronted him throughout the Search: Will he choose (to use Edmund Wilson’s phrase) “the life of art or the art of life”? He is bored by society people. Even the beloved Gilberte has become boring. Yet, “at least” (as if they were his lifeline) he has retained “the imaginings” of childhood. At this point in the unfolding of Proust’s sentence, Marcel has not thrown his weight to his imaginings; the word “imaginings” suggests something standing apart from the substantial and putatively real world of adulthood, a world Marcel has been a part of for years.

This is a moment of foreshadowing. Proust looks forward to the end of the sentence by introducing two contrary ideas, the beautiful and the inaccessible. How would anything we perceived as beautiful be inaccessible? Unachievable, perhaps, but not inaccessible. Proust’s words suggest we are still in childhood. When Marcel turns, in the sentence’s final clause, to the present moment—his presence in the Guermantes salon—we once again confront the initial dilemma. Marcel can find relief from the conflict between art and life only by forgetting the value of “actual possession” and remembering the price (the value) he once attached to his youthful imaginings. The simile of the shopkeeper is striking. He is the shopkeeper, balancing the value of actual possession with youthful imaginings. We do not yet know the result; this is a waypoint along the route that Marcel has journeyed now for 3000 pages. Nor are we shocked by his attempt to balance one way of living with another, for in the first pages of Time Regained Marcel put forth the choice: before him stood Swann’s Way or the Guermantes Way. Which would he choose? In this short sentence the choice has become more pressing, if not resolved. Marcel, like the shopkeeper, cannot yet balance his books.

I put down Time Regained, rose from my chair, and took from the shelf my copy of Irving Penn’s Moments Preserved. Haphazardly, I opened Penn’s book of photographs and looked. Before me lay portraits I had first seen nearly fifty years ago, and which retained the price that I had once attached to them by my youthful desires. Turning the pages, I stared at Corbusier, Mauriac, Carlo Levi, Gioni, Marin, Charlie Parker, Montale, T.S. Eliot. Marcel’s effort to balance actual possession with the price of past desire had suddenly become my own.

The Bleak World of The Captive

Sometimes, as Poe showed in The Purloined Letter, the clue to a puzzle may be so obvious that we are unable to see it. The puzzle, in my case, is Marcel’s jealousy in The Captive. The emotion has been prominent in the Search. Swann’s courtship of Odette, Marcel’s friendship with Gilberte, Charlus’ pursuit of Morel—all have been memorable portraits of jealousy. But The Captive portrays extreme, almost unimaginable jealousy. Marcel’s interest in Albertine has grown into an obsession large even by Proustian standards. Yet that explanation, while true, isn’t sufficient, at least to me.

John Rawls has noted that jealousy arises from the wish to keep what one has. Does Marcel have Albertine? Marcel fears not, even though he has attempted to fulfill this wish in a literal way, by making Albertine a prisoner in his parents’ house. The lock on the prison door is the lie. The opposite appears (falsely) to be the case—a lie exposed would result in Albertine’s expulsion from the house. Marcel is constantly fabricating lies to catch Albertine in what he supposes is one dalliance or another. The motive for Albertine’s lies is more ambiguous; she sometimes tells lies to protect herself, other times to protect Marcel. The Captive tells the story of people struggling to gain control of someone.

One of the great themes of In Search of Lost Time is this struggle. The struggle is bound to fail because the feelings and thoughts of others are always beyond our control. This is a truth Marcel discovers again and again, yet has not be able to act upon on his journey toward becoming a writer. It is “a charming law of nature,” Marcel tells us in The Guermantes Way, “and one that is evident in the heart of the most complex societies, that we live in perfect ignorance of those we love.” I take “charming” to be an ironic touch. “Such a society,” he goes on to explain, “where every being is double, and where the most transparent person, the most notorious, will be known to others only from within a protective shell, a sweet cocoon, as a charming natural curiosity.” Control requires knowledge of others, which Marcel denies possible. Later, in The Captive, he is on a tear to prove himself wrong in his relationship with Albertine. As we know, the effort is futile; the novel ends with her escape from the hôtel and ends the illusion of his control.

Throughout the novel, as the struggle between Marcel and Albertine plays itself out, the possibility of understanding anyone is raised and dismissed. Deception is the social norm. “The fact of a man’s having proclaimed… that it is wicked to lie obliges him as a rule to lie more than other people, without on that account abandoning the solemn mask, doffing the august tiara of sincerity.” The one we love wears the mask and ( in a reversal of the expected Janus face) “is to us like Janus, presenting to us a face that pleases us if the person leaves us, a dreary face if we know him or her to be at our perpetual disposal.” Social events are not what they seem, but “resemble those parties to which doctors invite their patients, who utter the most intelligent remarks, have perfect manners, and would never show that they were mad if they did not whisper in your ear, pointing to some old gentleman going past, 'That’s Joan of Arc.'” Medicine too has its lies in remedies that created “artificially grafted illnesses.” Even the Search itself has its lies. “If we were not obliged, in the interest of narrative tidiness, to confine ourselves to frivolous reasons, how many more serious reasons would enable us to demonstrate the mendacious flimsiness of the opening pages of this volume,” Marcel/Proust tells us.

If life includes redemption from the bleak world that Marcel portrays, we find it in art:

All the residuum of reality which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk, even from friend to friend, from master to disciple, from lover to mistress, that ineffable something which differentiates qualitatively what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in which he can communicate with others only by limiting himself to externals, common to all and of no interest—are brought out by art…

And so Marcel thinks again of the steeples of Martinville and the trees near Balbec. In these experiences lie the possibility of escape from the sterile, mendacious world that permeates The Captive. Albertine is beyond his control; perhaps art is not. If only he could resume writing.

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!

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.

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.

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.