“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)…
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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.
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