The
Dave Harris Entry to the Summarize
Proust Competition
This is
from the Scott-Moncrieff translation, arguably
the best
NB written mostly after having read Guattari's
commentary. I read each
night between July and Ocotber 2014 ( with
a week off now and then to read some banal
crime fiction as Nivea for the mind), then
summarized each morning.
A
preposterously over -sensitive French
bourgeois with too much time and money
bangs on endlessly about the beauty of
Life, and marvels at his own capacity to
develop a superior romantic gaze and to
recall minute details of endless
romantic love affairs, awful soirees,
the Parisian Queer scene, and the
intricate mechanisms of French social
distanciation practices. He covers for
his role as observer by posing as an
invalid and as a budding writer.
A lengthier and straighter (!) summary on
Wikipedia here
Now read on...
Volume 1 Swann in Love 1
Well… In the overture, Proust/Narrator talks
about how his memory works. He suspects that
looking at objects can somehow evoke memories
which he does not intend and of which he is not
immediately conscious, and he struggles to
remember the details about the past. The key
is the famous episode when he tastes a bit of
petite madeleine, which he describes as a
scallop-shaped cake, (cf the modern Viennese
whirl) soaked in a spoonful of lime tea.
This immediately recalls his childhood holidays in
Combray, because his great aunt used to give him
little treats like that. I can see why Deleuze and
Guattari rate this bit as a description of
non-conscious memory, and you could translate it
into Bergson's
terms no probs.
Our hero can gradually reconstruct his memories of
Combray (in the section entitled Combray) in some
detail [!] . An early one is how he felt
having to go to bed early as a child, and having
to say goodnight to his mother in a cool way,
otherwise his father would have been
annoyed. She would sometimes come up to see
him again and kiss him goodnight. On one
particular evening, the family was visited by
their neighbour Swann, and his father had
dispatched him to bed particularly early so that
they could discuss matters. Swann was by
then a rather notorious character having chosen an
occupation different from his father's (an art
expert then a mere adviser to the rich wishing to
purchase paintings) and had married a
dubious lady (Odette) from a lower status, so the
family did not really want our hero to meet
him. He went up to bed early, was totally
unable to sleep, occupied by childish fears,
longings and love for his mother, and eventually
decided to write her a note and gave it to the
servant to give it to her. His parents found
out, but to his surprise, his father relented and
let his mother spend the night in his room, to his
great delight. All this looks like classic
Freudian material, but Proust resolves it, says Guattari, by
seeing it as semiotic material, analyzing what
faces mean and how they change (almost the talking
cure, still).
Other episodes are related, mostly turning on the
French bourgeois and their peculiar customs and
habits, especially when dealing with other
people. For example, it becomes important to
thank Swann for a gift of wine in a very indirect
and elliptical way, by making light remarks about
how some bottles have nice contents, or how good
neighbours can make all the difference. The
aunts are particularly good at this discourse, and
consider it vulgar to do anything more
direct. They are also terribly waspish,
especially when it comes to dealing with the lower
orders, especially Great Aunt Léonie, and the
faithful maidservant Françoise is a particular
victim, being alternately accused of deception and
praised to the skies as a marvel. She's also
frequently set off against another female visitor,
and Léonie is particularly good at slipping small
gifts to the visitor, who has to feign surprise
each time, in order to make the domestic
servant jealous. Léonie is an invalid and
spends most of her time looking out of the window
discussing the affairs of the people who pass by,
making all sorts of inferences about their
behaviour.
The Vinteuils are so concerned with politeness and
etiquette that they hardly dare speak or act for
fear of being seen to presume something about the
motives of visitors, or to give an impression of
vulgarity or self-interest. Thus Papa Vinteuil the
musician, who writes the Sonata which includes the
ear worm 'little phrase', tidies up his work
before visitors arrive in case they think he left
it out deliberately to impress them. Mlle Vinteuil
spontaneously asks a friend (a close female
friend) to join her in admiring the view through a
window then regrets it in case the friend thought
it was an excuse to be close to her, although they
then fondle each other anyway. They also mock a
photo of Papa Vinteuil. It's a male
adolescent observing a lesbian primal scene. It's
neurotic 'presentation of self' for French
bourgeois.
The Verdurins (whom we meet when Swann's story
proper gets going, back in Paris) are even worse,
running a nightly provincial soirée with a pretty
mixed crowd of regulars (because they are marginal
to the proper aristos) . Poor old French bourgeois
had nothing else to do in the evenings! They fancy
themselves as fun people and cultured. The
attenders are mixed -- provincial bourgeois, a
young modern painter and musician, Odette
(described as a woman of easy virtue, even a
courtesan), and she lures in Swann, who constantly
has to keep his own aristo circles and tastes
quiet. Everyone has to keep quiet in fact -- the
lower orders don't really like the unconventional
art and have 'popular aesthetic' tastes, so they
pretend. The Verdurins are not in with the
real bourgeois so they have to pretend it is
because they are more culturally adventurous and
they chose their downmarket version. Everyone
tries to make the relationship between Swann and
Odette into something permanent (contradicted
later though) , especially the musician who plays
Vinteuil's 'little phrase' every time they arrive:
Swann is also 'in love' with another 'plump, rosy'
working class girl though (he often 'loves' her in
his coach before attending the Verdurins) and is
already a bit tired of the 'little phrase', but
Odette insists it is their tune.
Proust's narrator's memories are organized and
coordinated by various walks ('ways') around
the countryside -- the Méséglises Way and the
Guermantes Way. (There is also 'Swann's Way' which
involves a walk past his house and 'park' -- could
be the Méséglises Way) The whole walk is a
submersion in the senses -- sights and smells of
flowers and plants (which he knows pretty well),
and buildings, sounds, knowledge of the histories
of the settlements, occasional observations of his
neighbours (especially the Vinteuils). The overall
effect is ecstasy, or as modern outdoor educators
would call it 'spirituality'. Returning home
would then produce the anxiety about bedtime and
his mama. These memories are overwhelmingly
realist (and readers are also convinced by the
detail, says Guattari's
reading) , not like the fantasies he also
develops. His project, as a novelist rather than
philosopher is to get an organizing theme out of
all this, and when he recaptures the past in its
fullness he gets dead chuffed. En route, says
Guattari, he discovers multiplicities, rhizomes,
transverse semtiotization, faciality and refrains.
This sort of indirect discourse and social
closure, based on the most imperceptible of
discriminations, reminded me of Jane Austen, but
is much more perceptive, detailed, and
critical. The descriptions would make an
excellent background to Bourdieu on distinction.
However, the style is far too florid, descriptive
and intricate for my tastes, and goes on for page
after page, and I don't like these people or
admire them, although it is fun to mock
them. I'm not sure I can struggle through
the other 11 volumes (in my Chatto and Windus 1971
edition -- 7 in the original apparently).
Volume 2 Swann in Love
2
It is now clear that Swann and Odette do their
courting in Paris -- so the Verdurins must live
there too. This volume starts with the bit about
Swann seeing bits of famous faces in other
people--Odette's eyes(?) are the same as in
Botticelli's painting of Ziporah, his coachman's
nose reminds him of a statue etc. These are the
'components of faciality' Guattari refers
to? A lengthy extract might be helpful:
On his way to the
house, as always when he knew they were to
meet, he [Swann] formed a picture of her
[Odette] in his mind; and the necessity, if he
was to find any beauty in her face, of fixing
his eyes on the fresh and rosy protuberance of
her cheekbones, and of shutting out all the
rest of those cheeks which were so often
languorous and sallow, except when they were
punctuated with little fiery spots, plunged
him in acute depression, as proving that one's
ideal is always unattainable, and one's
actual happiness mediocre.... As she
stood there beside him... Swann was struck by
her resemblance to the figure of Zipporah,
Jethro's Daughter, which is to be seen in one
of the Sistine frescoes. He had always found a
peculiar fascination in tracing in the
paintings of the Old Masters, not merely the
general characteristics of the people whom he
encountered in his daily life, but rather what
seems least susceptible of generalization, the
individual features of men and women whom he
knew, as, for instance, in a bust of the Doge
Loredan by Antonio Ritzo, the prominent
cheekbones, the slanting eyebrows, in short, a
speaking likeness to his own coachman Rémi; in
the colouring of a Ghirlandaio, the nose of M.
de Palancy; in a portrait by Tintoretto, the
invasion of the plumpness of the cheek by an
outcrop of whisker, the broken nose, the
penetrating stare, the swollen eyelids of Dr
de Boulbon. Perhaps because he had always
regretted, in his heart, that he confined his
attention to the social side of life, had
talked, always rather than acted, he felt that
he might find a sort of indulgence bestowed
upon him by those great artists, in his
perception of the fact that they also had
regarded with pleasure and had admitted into
the canon of their works such types of
physiognomy as give those works the strongest
possible certificate of reality and trueness
to life... Perhaps, also he had so far
succumbed to the prevailing frivolity of the
world of fashion that he felt the necessity of
finding in an old masterpiece some such
obvious and refreshing allusion to a person
about whom jokes could be made and repeated
and enjoyed today. Perhaps, on the other hand,
he had retained enough of the artistic
temperament to be able to find a genuine
satisfaction in watching these individual
features take on a more general significance
when he saw them, uprooted and disembodied, in
the abstract idea of similarity between an
historic portrait and a modern original, whom
it was not intended to represent. However that
might be... It was with an unusual intensity
of pleasure, a pleasure destined to have a
lasting effect upon his character and conduct,
that Swann remarked Odette's resemblance to
the Zipporah of that Alessandro de Mariano, to
whom one shrinks from giving his more popular
surname [Botticelli]. He no longer based his
estimate of the merit of Odette's face on the
more or less good quality of her cheeks, and
the softness and sweetness... which, he
supposed, would greet his lips there, should
he ever hazard an embrace, but regarded it
rather as a skein of subtle and lovely silken
threads, which his gazing eyes collected and
wound together... as though from a portrait of
herself, in which her type was clearly made
intelligible.
He stood gazing at her;
traces of the old fresco were apparent in her
face and limbs, and these he tried
incessantly, afterwards, to recapture, both
when he was with Odette, and when he was only
thinking of her in her absence… His admiration
for the Florentine masterpiece was probably
based upon his discovery that it had been
reproduced in her [but] the similarity
enhanced her beauty also, and rendered her
more precious in his sight… [He] counted
himself fortunate that his pleasure in the
contemplation of Odette found the
justification in his own system of aesthetic…
He was not, as he had until then supposed,
falling back, merely, upon an expedient of
doubtful and certainly inadequate value, since
she contained in herself what satisfied the
utmost refinement of his taste in art… [This]
enabled him (gave him, as it were, a legal
title) to introduce the image of Odette into a
world of dreams and fancies which, until then,
she had been debarred from entering, and where
she assumed a new and nobler form. And whereas
the mere sight of her in the flesh, by
perpetually reviving his misgivings as to the
quality of her face, her figure, the whole of
her beauty, used to cool the ardour of his
love, those misgivings were swept away and
that love confirmed now that he could redirect
his estimate of her on the sure foundations of
these aesthetic principles…
On his study table, at
which he worked, he had placed, as it were a
photograph of Odette, a reproduction of
Jethro's Daughter. He would gaze in admiration
of the large eyes, the delicate features in
which the imperfection of her skin might be
surmised, the marvellous locks of hair that
fell along her tired cheeks; and, adapting
what he had already felt to be beautiful, on
aesthetic grounds, to the idea of a living
woman, he converted it into a series of
physical merits which he congratulated himself
on finding assembled in the person of one whom
he might, ultimately, possess… When he had sat
for a long time gazing at the Botticelli, he
would think of his own living Botticelli, who
seemed all the lovelier in contrast ( Vol.2:
pp 6--9).
Swann does this to reconcile his 'love' with his
aesthetic principles. She is also hard to locate
socially: she lives in a dubious area of Paris in
an apartment in a dodgy-looking house but she has
money enough to buy flash furniture and employ
servants, so she is a serial mistress. Swann certainly ends up giving her
lots of money as well as expensive presents, and
begins to realize this could be seen as 'keeping
her'.
As well as aestheticizing
Odette's face, Swann also copes by getting
relativist about the poseurs he meets at the
Verdurins, including two new characters, a minor
and rather dim aristocrat who knows him (de
Fourcheville) , a leading physician (Cottard) and
a marvellously pompous pedagogic Parisian
professor (Brichot). He sees his own values as
relative, and theirs as perfectly sincere after
all (common anyway in mature aristocratic circles
says Proust). There is a great deal more on
the subtle facial expressions of the participants
at the Verdurins, as a series of looks and glances
show how the climate is shifting. The
aristocrat starts to reveal something about
Swann's other life mixing with Parisian high
society, and the Verdurins subsequently see him as
traitorously pretending to like them, just as he
starts to see them as genuine folk after
all. Worse, the aristocrat fancies Odette
and it might be reciprocated. Swann now
starts to veer wildly as a prelude to what
Guattari calls his 'semiotic collapse', denouncing
the Verdurins loudly to himself as he walks home,
then almost immediately trying to work out how he
can get back into their favour. As he no
longer gets invited to the Verdurins, this also
poses a problem about how he's going to continue
to meet Odette. Certainly, his old
established pattern of mixing in several worlds at
once is now at an end, because the worlds have
started to interpenetrate each other.
For the next few dozen pages,
Swann's obsession with Odette is described in
horrifying detail. The mood swings, the
paranoia, the obsessive thinking about what she is
doing, the endless reinterpretations of her
actions, the pathetic attempts to find excuses to
meet and pass messages. Odette all the while
is keeping her distance, stringing him along,
maybe in a calculating way and maybe in a casual
way because she is tiring of him. It is
cruel but also rather comic to see an intelligent
man undone like this by amour fou. It is
horrible to read, but also a masterpiece of
detailed descriptive writing, of course.
We also get a bit more on faciality as Swann meets
a number of gentlemen wearing fashionable
monocles, and these are of different kinds with
different effects on their faces. One of
them is a general whose face has been disfigured
by war, which makes him both initially repulsive
and hard to read.There
is an undertone of homosexual attraction with
these men and with other strapping servants at an
aristocratic party.
There is also a grain of hope as Swann begins to
realize the power and potential of music to divert
him -- and to help him resemiotize (I hope).
There is a welcome interlude
when Swann goes to an aristo soiree, and the
posing, backbiting and discreet displays of
cultural snobbery are very well described.
This is presumably going to be developed later,
because we learn that these people are part of the
Guermantes set. Again there is much careful
presentation of self and distanciation at the most
subtle levels of averted glances, aggressive use
of forenames, falsely modest sitting on the
periphery, elaborate compliments and banter based
on them. It is at this gathering that Swann
also begins to appreciate music, in a rather
Deleuzian way, as something concrete and real
produced from an almost endless multiplicity of
musical notes and turns. He can begin to analyze
the musical forms of the little phrase and its
combinations of notes and intervals. He
hears the little phrase in its proper context of
the whole sonata and this also helps him get a bit
more philosophical about his relationship with the
Odette [he puts that in context as well?].
[There is something
supernatural about of violin which seems to be
capable of generating all sorts of marvelous
noises including human voice]. As though the
musicians were not nearly so much playing the
little phrase as performing the rites on which
it insisted before it would consent to appear…
Swann felt that it was present, like a
protective goddess a confidant of his love who,
so as to be able to come to him through the
crowd, and to draw him aside to speak to him,
had disguised herself in this sweeping cloak of
sound… He felt he was no longer in exile and
alone… For he had no longer, as of old, the
impression that Odette and he were not known to
the little phrase… In that distant time, he had
divined an element of suffering in its smile, in
its limpid and disillusioned intonation, tonight
he found there rather the charm of a resignation
that was almost gay. Of those sorrows, of which
the little phrase had spoken to him then… Those
sorrows which were now become his own… It seemed
to say to him, as once it had said of his
happiness "What does all that matter; it is all
nothing".… Swann found a sweetness in that very
wisdom [referring to the 'vanity of his
sufferings', which had been much commented upon
by others]… The little phrase, unlike them,
whatever opinion it might hold on the short
duration of the states of the soul, saw in them
something not, as everyone else, less serious
than the events of everyday life, but, on the
contrary, so far superior to everyday life has
to be alone worthy of the trouble of expressing
it. Those graces of an intimate sorrow… The
little phrase had captured, had rendered
visible. So much so that it made the value be
confessed, the divine sweetness be tasted by all
those same onlookers [who could promptly 'disown
them in real life']... Swann had regarded
musical motifs as actual ideas, of another
world, of another order, ideas veiled in
shadows, unknown, impenetrable by the human
mind… When, after that first evening at the
Verdurins', he had had the little phrase played
over to him again, and had sought to disentangle
from his confused impressions how it was that,
like a perfume or a caress, it swept over and
enveloped him, he had observed that it was to
the closeness of the intervals between the five
notes which composed it and to the constant
repetition of two of them… But in reality he
knew that he was basing this conclusion not upon
the phrase itself, but merely upon certain
equivalents, substituted (for his mind's
convenience) for the mysterious entity of which
he had become aware… He knew that his memory of
the piano falsified still further the
perspective in which he saw the music, that the
field open to the musician is not a miserable
stave of seven notes, but an immeasurable
keyboard (still, almost all of it, unknown), on
which, here and there only, separated by the
gross darkness of its unexplored tracts, some
few among the millions of keys, keys of
tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity,
which compose it… have been discovered by
certain great artists who do us the service,
when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding
to the theme which they found, of showing us
what richness, what variety lies hidden unknown
to us, in that great black impenetrable night,
discouraging exploration, of our soul...The
little phrase, albeit it presented to the mind's
eye a clouded surface,… contained, one felt, a
matter so consistent, so explicit, to which the
phrase gave so new, so original force that those
who had once heard it preserved the memory of it
in the treasure chamber of their mind.… Even
when he was not thinking of the little phrase,
it existed, latent, in his mind, in the same way
as certain other conceptions without material
equivalent, such as our notions of light, of
sound, of perspective, of bodily desire…
Vinteuil's phrase… had espoused our mortal
state, had endued a vesture [sic] of
humanity that was affecting enough…
So Swann was not mistaken in
believing that the phrase of the sonata did,
really, exist. Human as it was from this point
of view, it belonged, nonetheless, to an order
of supernatural creatures whom we have never
seen but whom, in spite of that, we recognize
and acclaim with rapture when some explorer of
the unseen contrives to coax one forth, to bring
it down from that divine world... this is what
Vinteuil had done for the little phrase…
The phrase had disappeared.
Swann knew that it would come again at the end
of the last movement, after a long passage which
Mme Verdurin's pianist always skipped. There
were in this passage some admirable ideas… Swann
listened to all the scattered themes which
entered into the composition of the phrase, as
its premises enter into the inevitable
conclusion of a syllogism; he was assisting at
the mystery of its birth. "Audacity," he
exclaimed to himself, "as inspired, perhaps as a
Lavoisier or an Ampere", the audacity of
Vinteuil making experiment, discovering the
secret laws that govern an unknown force,
driving across a region unexplored towards the
one possible goal… Never was spoken language of
such inflexible necessity, never had it known
question so pertinent, such obvious replies [in
the dialogue between piano and violin]… Like a
bird deserted by its mate [answered by the
violin]… Swann knew that the phrase was going to
speak to him once again… The strain of waiting
for the imminent moment when he would find
himself face-to-face, once more, with the
phrase, convulsed him in one of those sobs which
a fine line of poetry or a piece of alarming
news will wring from us… It reappeared, but this
time to remain poised in the air… Its brightness
fades, seems to subside, then soars again… So to
the two colours which the phrase had hitherto
allowed to appear it added others now, chords
shot with every hue in the prism, and made them
sing…
From that evening, Swan
understood that the feeling which Odette had
once had for him would never revive… He recorded
those apparent and misleading signs of a slight
movement on her part towards him [only] with…
Tender and sceptical solicitude. (pp180--186)
Then we are back to the detailed description and
analysis of the relationship with Odette.
They seem to be meeting more often now, and they
even have episodes with the cattleya [Swann first
got to grope Odette in his coach by pretending to
rearrange the posy of cattleya {orchids} on her
bosom, and after that, 'doing the cattleya' became
their own private code for what is probably a
heavy petting session at least]. However,
Swann also receives an anonymous letter telling
him about Odette's many affairs, including a
couple of lesbian relationships. He tries to
stay casual and discusses all this with her as if
it's all perfectly normal, but presses her, and
she gradually confesses all, to his secret
agony. She was probably shagging de
Fourcheville even at the most romantic and
enthusiastic stage of the relationship with Swann,
when she was writing him love letters, some of
which he had preserved as being particularly
meaningful. She eventually confesses to
[pretty quick] lesbian relationships 'two or
three times', one of them possibly with Mme
Verdurin, or at least while visiting the Bois with
the Verdurins. As usual, he goes back over
little snatches [!] of conversation chez Verdurin
and elsewhere, which now assume horrible
significance. Knowing all this produces torturing
flashbacks, produced by words or places, as pathological semiotizations.
The section ends with Swann
finally resolving that he is over his obsession
with Odette. Her being absent for long
periods touring Europe with Verdurins helps.
Apart from music, an important part in his
developing understanding is played by a
dream. He sees the characters as
representative of the people in his amorous
drama—Odette, the Verdurins, de Fourcheville
appearing as Napoleon III! Mme Verdurin's
face changes dramatically in the dream, becoming
elongated and male with a heavy moustache [sounds
a bit like Little Hans's father!], and a young man
in a fez seems to be Swann as his younger
self, He parts with Odette in the dream,
wakes up realizing that his mind has constructed a
plausible dream, and presumably a plausible love
for a fantasized object. He realizes that after
all, Odette is not really his type.
Then we then have a separate section where the
narrator reflects on some visits he has paid to
European cities, and how the names of those cities
conjure up whole images, connecting landscape,
seascape, weather, flora and famous
residents. Then we hear that he was unable
to travel one year and so forced to visit only the
Champs Elyseées. While there he encounters a
group of other children, including a group of
'little girls' . One of them is Gilberte,
with whom the young narrator falls in love, pretty
much in the same obsessive way as Swann [which
makes me think that this is an idealized notion of
romantic love widely shared by the bourgeoisie, a
kind of institutionalized or habitual amour fou.
It is not unlike the ways in which strong women in
literature or film conventionally have a career
and some independence and then, stupidly, throw it
all away for love to reassure us all that nature
will triumph]. Gilberte is also the daughter
of Swann and his wife Odette! How the two
came to be married after all that misery is not
discussed here, and it appears as a kind of irony,
or perhaps a further comment on amour fou, or
perhaps a triumph for social class and
respectability after all. The young narrator
persuades his companion to take him for walks
where the Swanns live, hoping to meet Gilberte,
but also admiring Odette, who still seems to lead
the life of a courtesan, parading in an open
carriage and promenading with the others in the
Bois de Boulogne, still notorious. This
volume ends with him revisiting the Bois after
some years, nostalgically regretting those days of
elegant women, horsedrawn carriages, the whole
setting of sexualized gentility.
It's a class -inspired vision, regretting
mass society. Oddly
the themes of social class and distinction are not
discussed in Guattari --he who is so good at
spotting them in Freud (Anti-Oedipus).
The whole business of semioitized self-torturing
love is bourgeois -- they have the cultural
capital to add layers of meaning like this to
excess. Same with outdoor ecstasy. We all feel
these emotions, but the bourgeois can really stoke
them up and make them excessively productive.
As, indeed, they can with
social distinction , although they are socially
supported and not likely to lead to semiotic
collapse (although maybe the encounters with
proles at war time, described in Rancière, can
have that effect?).
Volume 3 Within a Budding Grove (yech) 1 (NB
originally entitled In The Shadow of Young Girls
in Flower)
The narrator's mother and father are giving dinner
parties and may have a problem with Swann because
of his unsuitable marriage. Mr. Proust (pere) also
thinks Swann is a show off and name-dropper, and
there is a suggestion that this is a typical
characteristic of the socially mobile
'Israelite'. Mrs Proust (mere) wants to
invite him to raise the tone of conversation. The
narrator himself thinks it's more likely an
indication of how social circumstances affect your
social behaviour as you adjust to what is normal
in your circle. We sashay into descriptions
of some of the other characters who attend a
dinner parties chez Proust, and they include the
professor, Brichotte, who we met before at the
Verdurins—withdrawn, a bit crusty, but an
excellent medic—and a new noble diplomat, Norpois,
who is charming and skilled in the old ways,
but deeply insincere. Both are
described waspishly. The narrator also discovers
the marvels of the theatre and of a particular
actress, Berma: she is famous but he cannot really
see much nerit in her performance, perhaps because
he had talked it up so much in his imagination. He
comes to see that fame can sometimes have its own
force.
It develops as a real rambling stream of
consciousness, rhizomatic no doubt, a story
leaping from topic to topic. The links look
a bit forced -- for example discussion of the
house guests at a dinner party leads back to Swann
because one of them knows him, and this enables
the narrator to pick up the theme of the
relationship with Gilberte. The narrator
becomes real friends with Gilberte and gains entry
to the Swann household so he can do more
telling detail about Odette's tastes. The narrator
also begins to merge a bit with Swann (could
be developing indirect discourse? Via a bourgeois
habitus?). Eg they both (used to) fantasize about
living with Odette/Giberte; the narrator adores
Odette as much as Gilberte.
We learn a bit more about Swann's notoriety—Odette
gave birth to Gilberte before being married, and
it seems that it was Odette who decided on
marriage and pressured Swann into it, partly by
threatening to manipulate contact with
Gilberte. Swann does more adjusting,
rationalizing his new limited social circles: one
of the way he copes is by calmly checking to see
whether Odette is welcome at various dinner
parties. He gets more mature and
distant about it all, knowing he no longer
loves her and indeed loving other women. His
flashbacks now seem rather cool -- remembering how
he used to love and want to live with her and
wondering about the emotional states he was in.
She is also unfaithful. Meanwhile, she wants
to establish a salon of her own, and Swann helps
with contacts in a rather disinterested way.
The subtlety and pervasiveness of distanciation is
well developed, with particular zeitgeisty phrases
being used to indicate you are fashionable,
particular musicians or singers or actresses
moving in and out of fashion, including Berma. The
Dreyfus case is a background issue that produces
some fashionable anti-semitism and the temporary
need for salon-runners to replace Jewish
acquaintances. This just diffuses without anything
explicit being said. The narrator learns from the
diplomat house guest (Norpois -- French version of
Shitpeas?) how difficult it is to keep your end
up, since strong opinions are exchanged on these
matters, right down to the detail of how you can
display your unsuitability with a particular
sentence construction. The lad is trying to
develop his tastes and to manage, for example by
concealing his strong passions for the (romantic)
real. What a nightmare world!
We seem to have a standard literary device
developing here. The hero meets a new dinner
guest, describes him or her and his characteristic
social distanciating devices, and then rambles off
on a more general topic. The lad is able to
compare very different opinions though -- Bergotte
dislikes Norpois -- and starts to see how it is
all windy generalization. Bergotte is a famous
writer, whose books were much admired by the
narrator as a lad. He turns out to be rather
unimpressive in the flesh, (and has a common and
ugly face) and his speech is more vulgar and
strident than his writing. So why might this be?
We think about speech and writing, local and
personal circumstances, including what we inherit
from our parents, writing and stylistic devices
and the universal mind that literature addresses.
You could get all deleuzian and see this as a
discussion of semiotic machines, but it seems
pretty banal and just like the old cliches about
how writers are both particularistic and universal
at the same time.
The narrator's love for Gilberte develops along
standard lines, just as Swann's did -- he's
obsessed, he thinks only of her, everything
he sees reminds him of her, he tries to get her
keen by avoiding her, while dreading that she will
end it, and dreams of the letters she will
write to him and all that. He calls on Odette
instead and that is a pretext for more stuff
on the bitchiness of the salon -- Mme Verdurin now
also calls on Odette. The interiors are full of
flowers -- a 'winter garden' etc.
Meanwhile our hero is taken to a 'disorderly
house' by one of his parents' dinner guests. He
visits most nights (and presumably is not
constantly reminded of Gilberte?) but says it is
only a modest one without a suitable variety of
women to keep him amused. Some blokes just talk.
One only wants to comb the girls' hair. The madame
wants to fix him up with a 'Jewess'. He gives them
some furniture his great aunt in Combray has left
him but then regrets all the memories it brings
back (so there is a bit more on the importance of
memory).
It get really tedious with a blow-by-blow of the
cooling relationship with Gilberte, the romantic
agony this brings, and the failure of his little
games to pretend he is going off her, although his
family and friends tell Odette he is not unhappy.
A dream helps him resolve it all again (repetition
of Swann's story, shared habitus, or some sort of
free indirect discourse?). Endless descriptions of
Odette's clothes as developing a style of her own
and as displaying conspicuous consumption. She
discusses things in English now and then too.
Asides about the class system as the 'shabby
genteel' meet the grand ladies on their promenades
and have to decide whether or not to greet them
openly. Endless philosophizing about romantic love
as the pursuit of the unattainable idealized
object for men, always ending in disappointment
(Deleuze would not support this notion of desire
as lack). We are also warned that the dick
is going to fall in love again as he casually
mentions Albertine.
As an example of the hopeless mess bourgeois
manly love gets you into:
I was constantly writing to
Gilberte, and in this correspondence I did not
choose the expressions which might, I felt,
have won her over, sought only to carve out
the easiest channel for the torrent of my
tears. For, like desire, regret seeks not to
be analysed but to be satisfied… When one
abandons love one seeks not to know one's
grief but to offer to her who is causing it
that expression of it which seems to one the
most moving. One says things which one feels
the need of saying, and which the other will
not understand [he keeps telling her he cannot
see her, that it is impossible]… The words, as
I wrote them, made me weep because I felt that
they expressed not what I should have liked to
believe but what was probably going to happen…
I should gradually come to the moment when, by
virtue of not having seen her again, I should
not wish to see her. I wept, but I found
courage enough to sacrifice, I tasted the
sweets of sacrificing the happiness of being
with her to the probability of seeming
attractive to her one day, a day when, alas,
my seeming attractive to her would be
immaterial to me. (266 – 7).
Women seem far more sensible, and less
fond of this romantic agony shit, which probably
means they are inferior to men in their
sensibility or some crap. Odette finds another
partner (our narrator finds out as he is returning
from flogging off a family heirloom, intending to
renew the relationship via expensive gifts -- he
spends the money in the whorehouse instead). It is
OK to screw whores because they offer comfort and
he is not in love with them.
The relationship over, our hero is now free to
leave Paris and head off to Balbec on the Normandy
coast so we get a re-run of all that stuff about
place names as external memory prompts, the role
of habit in restricting our romantic excesses but
making the world duller more philosophizing about
train travel, more emotional scenes as he leaves
Mamma. He is so sensitive about everything,
ecstatic about the sea, believing he has grasped
eternal truths after listening to music, falling
in love with girls selling coffee. It reads like
Stendhal Syndrome.
The Grande Hotel at Balbec is a microcosm of
French society (no doubt). Lots of appalling stuff
about social pretensions and malicious gossip
behind the scenes, stifling etiquette, different
forms of address. Our hero envies Francoise who
rapidly makes friends with all the proles and
servants, so much so that she will not
trouble them at unsociable hours even when asked
to do so. This is an example of rigid
proletarian protocols for our hero so it is quite
normal for all to act in this absurd way.
Jesus, will I ever make it to the end of this
stuff?
Here is some of the stuff about the little tune.
Swann has by this time dissociated it from his
infatuation with Odette:
… He expresses so
well in that little phrase, the Bois de Boulogne
plunged in a catalytic trance. By the sea it is
even more striking, because you have their the
faint response of the waves, which, of course,
you can hear quite distinctly since nothing else
dares to move. In Paris it is the other way; at
the most you may notice unfamiliar lights among
the old buildings, the sky brightened as though
by a colourless and harmless conflagration… But
in Vinteuil's little phrase, and in the whole
sonata for that matter, it is not like that; the
scene is laid in the Bois; in the gruppetto
you can distinctly hear a voice saying: 'I
can almost see to read the paper!'… In place of
the profound significance that he had so often
sought in it, what it recalled now to Swann were
the leafy boughs, arranged, wreathed, painted
round about it… The whole of one spring season
which he had not been able to enjoy before… The
charm that he had been made to feel by certain
evenings in the Bois, a charm of which
Vinteuil's Sonata served to remind him, he could
not have recaptured by questioning Odette,
although she, as well as the little phrase, had
been his companion there. But Odette had merely
been his companion, by his side, not (as the
phrase had been) within him, and so had seen
nothing — nor would she, had she been 1000 times
as comprehending, have seen anything of that
vision… [Swann says] Vinteuil's phrase now shows
me only the things to which I paid no attention
then. Of my troubles, my loves of those days it
recalls nothing, it has altered all my values
(148 – 150).
Here is another bit that
Deleuze likes about the train journey which offers
Proust a machinic view of totality:
In the pale square of the window, over a small
black wood I saw some ragged clouds whose fleecy
edges were of a fixed, dead pink not liable to
change, like the colour that dyes the wing which
has grown to wear it, or [a painters sketch].
But I felt that, unlike them, this colour was
due neither to inertia nor to caprice but to
necessity and life. Presently there gathered
behind it reserves of light. It brightened… I
felt that it was related somehow to the most
intimate life of nature, but, the course of the
line altering, the train turned, the morning
scene gave place in the frame of the window to a
nocturnal village, its roofs still blue with
moonlight… And I was lamenting the loss of my
strip of pink sky when I caught sight of it
afresh, but red this time, in the opposite
window which it left at the second bend in the
line, so that I spent my time running from one
window to the other to reassemble, to collect on
a single canvas the intermittent, antipodean
fragments of my fine, scarlet, ever-changing
morning, and to obtain a comprehensive view of
it and a continuous picture (325 – 6).
Here is a bit of writing about
the sea:
I asked myself whether [the effect of the sun's
rays quoted by Baudelaire] were not different
from the evening ray, simple and superficial as
the wavering stroke of a golden pencil — just
what at that moment was scorching the sea topaz
brown, fermenting it, turning it pale and milky
like foaming beer, like milk, while now and then
there hovered over it great blue shadows which
some God seemed, for his pastime, to be shifting
to and fro by moving and mirror in the sky (353)
Volume 4 Within a Budding Grove 2
More on life at the Grand Hotel Balbec (these
remarks seem to be gathered under sections called
'place names', perhaps to separate them from the
individual stories). It is the usual
nightmare of fine social distinctions and
point-scoring, and some rather more basic ones as
well. Our hero makes the acquaintance of a
French aristocrat, a real 'Fauborg Saint-Germain',
Mme Villeparisis and they go for drives in the
surrounding countryside in her carriage with his
grandmother. In the process, she gives him
the lowdown on famous French figures, including a
bunch of novelists she has known— Balzac and Hugo
among them. And Stendhal, whom our hero much
admires! They all have character flaws,
mostly appearing as rather vulgar. Later,
back at the hotel, he hears someone delivering
anti-semitic sentiments, and finds it is his old
contact Bloch, newly arrived, insulting his own
family and ethnicity. This is a kind of
authorial ventriloquism, possibly, putting risky
prejudices in the mouths of the characters—might
try it. Bloch seems to play the part of a bluff
rather vulgar outsider dealing with the
bodily necessities, and calling spades
bloody shovels. He is unaware of social niceties
throughout, unaware, for example, how much
Saint-Loup dislikes him.
On the coach trips (!), our hero is his usual
romantic knobby self, waxing lyrical and poetic
about the landscape, and falling in love with
girls that he happens to pass on the road.
He is increasingly aware that real people are far
less attractive than fantasies. I think this
is why he likes landscapes which cannot disabuse
him of his fantasies (they would if he looked
closely, of course). His friend Bloch assures him
that the country girls are available, but he only
ever gets to meet one village girl, and contents
himself with hoping to have impressed her with his
aristocratic contacts, saying he is to meet posh
people in a coach. He seems to get genuine
pleasure of being able to express these advanced
sensibilities, and to store them in his memory,
recapturing them later, leading to marvelling at
how memory works, that it is better if it is
'real' for example, and stitching them together
into whole reveries. This is at the heart of
his subjectivity, and, presumably, his identity as
an aspiring author.
The jerk sees that the same thing is happening
when he falls in love, as a result of the
reflections after meeting the little band (below).
He likes all the agonies and turmoil as a sign of
his own sensibility. He also sees that it is all
really a matter of projecting your own qualities
on to women so you can admire yourself. That was
what loving Gilberte was all about. It relieves
the monotony (aristo boredom I suppose), and he
values his imagination to glamorize events like
meeting people, just as he does with the romantic
gaze directed at landscapes.
There is a hint of a homosexual option after a
tragic hetero affair, just as Guattari suggests
for Swann. This is much more explicit and
prolonged as our hero encounters a beautiful and
elegant young man, another real aristo, Robert,
Marquis de Saint-Loup-en-Bray. staying at the
hotel. After some initial coldness, interpreted
even as a prelude to a challenge to a duel,
they become good friends. The bit about duelling
(mentioned at least twice before en passant),
makes the whole aristo emotional economy an
oddity as far as Eliasan notions of civilization
would be concerned: they are overcivilised in
thinking fully about avoiding possible embarrassed
reactions of others to what they say or do, even
if it is carefully stifling any reactions of their
own to some faux pas like one of Bloch's
mispronunciations, but they are also on some
emotional short fuse always ready to duel or shag
country girls. They like emotions. [Later, our
hero says it was not uncommon for a challenge to a
duel to be turned down with a compliment about the
honour of the challenger -- relief all round]
The hero gets quite passive and feminized in his
status as recovering invalid and gets visited and
looked after by S-L, and, later his uncle (De
Charlus) who enters his bedroom, talks personally
for a while, lends him a book by Bergotte then
demands it back next day (oscillation -- see
below). We meet more of the families of Bloch and
S-L, kept apart at first and then combining at
dinner. Bloch has a rather anxious father,
patrolling any sign of Jewishness like using
Yiddish phrases, or any other signs of 'ill
breeding'. Bloch has a habit of scattering Homeric
phrases through his conversation, largely for
comic effect, but, thinks our hero, also as a sign
of compensation and status anxiety. The real
aristos have different mannerisms, including
disdain for their own position, effortless,
perhaps unintended one-upmanship about their
pedigree, and being at ease with the lower orders
because they are so secure.
Saint-Loup has an even odder uncle, Baron de
Charlus, who is suspiciously macho, walking
everywhere through France, and throwing himself
into icy streams, and delivering diatribes against
social change, including stuff about how Jews are
buying up property and displaying poor taste as
they alter the places (more bizarre distancing --
English gardens! How frightful!). He
presents an aggressive manner with piercing
eyes. He also has a tender side though, as
with the bedroom visit, and virtually fondles our
hero's neck while swimming, only to get aggressive
and macho again when he pulls himself
together. Classical oscillations of
attraction and repulsion. All this is
interspersed with commentary about how easy it is
to be misunderstood, and how one's friends
sometimes attempt to misunderstand one, or take
advantage of their friendship in order to be
excessively frank. It also turns out everyone is
related again -- the Saint-Loups to Mme
Villeparisis by marriage, de Charlus to the
Guermantes, including those who live at Combray --
not a terribly subtle way to link all the little
stories together.
Guattari says this shows that Proust is using the
characters in different assemblages,
deterritorializing them,and developing a machinic
structure for the novel. If this is so, it is
swamped by conventional territorialized bourgeois
commentary about character, motives, themes about
how unattainable the object of our desire really
is, how hypocritical, people are and must be etc.
A pretty standard two-faced sort of complexity
rather than a multiplicity?
We also learn a bit about Saint-Loup who, although
he does not love her any more, is living
with an unsuitable mistress, an actress, (Rachel)
and therefore has fallen out with most of his
family. He has learned to hate the
aristocracy in return, then to become a
republican, to the contempt of Francoise. In
discussing the relationship, Proust talks about
how women can reassure men, moralize and encourage
them, and also feminize them, because men have to
cater to their stupid irrationalities, moods and
sentimentalities. S-L has to return to his
regiment, at least during the day, and then for a
longer period.
Then, the narrator starts to recover his interest
in life,and, finally in the thoughts and
activities of other people. He and S-L start
to attend a fashionable restaurant near Balbec,
Rivebelle, and his interest is drawn to the
numbers of pretty girls who dine there. He
also meets the little band of girls that Guattari
discusses, drifting unselfconsciously along the
promenade at the hour when everyone else is
anxiously scanning the other bourgeois, displaying
good humour and freedom. Guattari sees this
as the narrator 'becoming-woman', (appreciating
female friendship, women as not just objects of
the romantic gaze etc. Compare this with the
disdain for sentimentality etc above). They are
described as 'a band apart', although that phrase
is put in quotes in the novel, suggesting that it
is really someone else's—must look it up (it has
later associations via the Godard film,of course,
itself quoted in Tarantino's Pulp
Fiction) . He sees the little band as
a collective, first, only made up of parts, often
parts of faces of individual girls, even tracing
them to portraits as did Swann, but soon resorts
to his conventional interest in romantic love and
decides that he wants a relationship with one of
them (as all young men find, it is hard to
approach a collective of girls). He hears the name
Simonet and tries to find out which one of them it
is -- it will be Albertine. He wastes his time
hanging round the beach hoping to bump into them
He discovers the details after finally meeting
Elstir, a famous artist, who knows the girl's
families as second home neighbours. They are all
the daughters of rich businessmen and
professionals -- the middle classes for the
narrator. They are also striving for distinction,
including insisting on spelling Simonet with only
one n. While there, he learns a bit about painting
as the assemblage of components (of sea and land)
-- as metaphor is how he puts it. This turns into
a riff about portrait painting as assemblage of
facial components, including universal aspects eg
of all the women the painter knew. Some flirting
with the idea of deeper truths known only to art
etc. He talks about Albertine as a combination of
components, some he likes (her silhouette) and
some he doesn't ( her temple!). NB the components
include voices as well as faces.
The painter turns out to be the little knob at the
Verdurins (the hero finds this out when he sees a
'realistic' portrait of Odette in the studio). Cue
a page or two about how we all have secrets and
things we regret, part of a more general and
constant theme about how real people are
always more disappointing than the idealizations
they have of themselves or others. Albertine looks
feisty and gamine in her beach gear or on her
bike, but is a bit conventional (including
conventionally antisemitic) and not very
well-educated (nor are the young men from the same
wealthy business set - classic ways for
traditional elites to distance themselves via
claims of being cultured etc). There is an
hilarious scene when our hero gets invited to
visit Albertine in bed at his hotel - -he thinks
he is gong to seduce her but when he tries she
fights him off and rings the bell for help. His
subsequent pleading is pathetic -- it would mean
so much to him, and it seems to mean only a small
cost to her etc
The assemblage theme is continued as our hero gets
to know all the girls in the band apart. Bits of
their faces and personalities are components of
the young girlhood multiplicity -- Andree's eyes
and cool manner, Giselle's warmth but shyness etc.
He soliloquizes about
very young girls (!) as being plastic, without
well-formed features. Eventually he decides to
choose Albertine to love (it is obviously a
cultural choice).
Then the seasons ends and everyone leaves Balbec
to go back to Paris.
There is this bit about faces:
The human faces
indeed, like the face of the God of some
Oriental theogony, the whole cluster of faces,
crowded together but on different surfaces so
that one does not see them all at once.
But to a great extent our
astonishment springs from the other persons
presenting to us also a face that is the same as
before. It would require so immense an effort to
reconstruct everything that has been imparted to
us by things other than our self — were it only
the taste of the fruit — that no sooner is the
impression received than we begin imperceptibly
to descend the slope of memory and, without
noticing anything, in a very short time, we have
come a long way from what we actually felt… The
other person is destroyed when we cease to see
him; after which is next appearance means a
fresh creation of him, different from that which
immediately preceded it, if not from them all.
For the minimum variation that is to be found in
these creations is duality… It is understood, of
course, that this loyalty to the first and
purely physical impressions which I formed a
fresh and teaching counter with my friends did
not involve only their facial appearance, since
the reader has seen the site was sensible also
of their voices, more disquieting still, perhaps
(301 – 304).
Volume 5 The Guermantes Way 1
The artifice to join on to this story is that the
narrator's family have moved house and now occupy
an apartment in the complex which includes the
Hotel De Guermantes, apparently a common pattern
of residents, where all sorts of aspirants cluster
around a stately home. He barely bothers to
explain why. The name Guermantes provokes lengthy
reflection about how names help us to connect
particular memories—there was a village or estate
called Guermantes not far from Combray as we know
from vol. one. He also remembers that Saint-Loup
disabused him of the view that the family
originated from there in the distant past.
Francoise is unhappy about the move, because she
has to then reestablish herself in a new pecking
order below stairs. She also has mixed
feelings about the noble Guermantes, as do lots of
French people, apparently, both admiring them, and
also harbouring republican feelings. Her
chats with the servants of the Guermantes is the
pretext for telling us about the life of the noble
family, and how they spend their evenings visiting
other houses, or going to the theatre and
opera.
Our hero goes to the theatre to see another
performance by Berma. This permits him to
talk about the obsession with social distinction
among the theatre audience, some of whom would go
there because they are actually interested in the
theatre, but who are constantly distracted
by looking around to see who else is there,
and wondering how to behave. The aristos
appear to be much more relaxed and unpretentious,
but they are really only displaying aristocratic
distance: Proust tells us that they are relaxed
enough to enjoyed the performance because they are
so secure in their status, but they do not 'have
the mind' to do so, meaning either they are too
dim or not particularly interested.
There are reflections interspersed about how the
idealized picture we have of people are never
matched by the reality, and this applies to the
last time our hero saw Berma performing (when he
was in love with Gilberte). He now has a new
strategy, however, which is to see the very gap
between ideal and reality as some kind of
rewarding aesthetic experience. He still
sees his entire life as seeking out intense
emotions, so disappointments have to be
managed. In particular, he now sees Berma's
performance as conveying some higher truths and
higher experiences, uniquely connecting with the
text, not employing the vulgar rhetorical tricks
of the other actors: what he saw as disappointing
is now testament to her great art. It is the
romantic gaze jacked up a notch.
Inevitably, the jerk falls in love with the
younger Duchesse de Guermantes, Oriane, encouraged
by her smiling at him briefly at the theatre, and
is soon up to his usual tricks of pathetically
trying to arrange to bump into her on her morning
walks so he could exchange formal greetings (he
asks a disapproving Francoise to find out the
routes). He occasionally fantasizes about
other young women that he encounters by accident
as well. His sensitivity is obviously turned
up to maximum, and we get a couple of ecstatic
pages on phenomena such as the wonderful shapes
and colours that milk makes as it boils over in a
pan. He described Mme as offering a series
of faces (and costumes) to the world, some of them
quite different for what he saw when she was all
dolled up at the theatre , and he speculates about
what unites these different faces
He decides to renew his acquaintance with
Saint-Loup who might introduce him to his
aunt (the Duchesse de Guermantes of course),
and sets off to the garrison town to meet
him. (Apparently, a biography states, Proust
really did join the Army as an enlisted man for 1
year). Saint-Loup is on duty however, and our hero
is forced to stay in a hotel. He clearly
finds it 'painful', even living for one night in a
new town, and persuades Saint-Loup to allow him to
sleep in his quarters, and to dine there.
Homoeroticism appears again. Saint-Loup continues
to play his role of correcting the false
impressions that Knobhead gets of some of his
fellow officers.
These pots are boiled for 50 more pages (c
100--150), interspersed with asides about how
memory seems to work via prompts and subjective
synthesis. Our man discusses military tactics and
strategies with Saint-Loup's comrades and we
learn of the various constraints. It pleases matey
to acquire this esoteric knowledge unavailable to
non-professionals and he says it it is like art.
Lots of homo-erotic bits in the mess as S-L and
our men declare their love for each other and even
get a bit jealous if others attract more
attention. More social distinction as traditional
aristos socially outrank those created by Napoleon
I despite Army ranks (S-L is only a serjeant but
has the social bite on Captain de Borodino). The
divisions produced by Dreyfus are also emerging,
in civil society as well, with anti-semitic
undertones for the anti party.
Plonker decides he will return to Paris and try
Mme de Guermantes again (on the pretext of wanting
to see her Elstir paintings), and S-L gets leave
to patch things up with his mistress. Hero gets to
meet that lady in Paris and realizes that she is
Rachel, a prostitute/actress (the terms are
interchangeable throughout all 12 volumes) whom he
knew at the low-status brothel. Comments about how
S-L is paying 100k francs to maintain her while
everyone else could have her for 20. Rachel
is nearly caught out when two common 'tarts'
recognize her. S-L is insanely jealous whenever
they meet anyone else (Rachel winds him up a bit
by flirting) and gets involved in scuffles (one
with a dubious male who propositions him). Hero
realizes people see the same face quite
differently, and he sees the changes Rachel can
make in her appearance as she goes on stage -- her
face is pleasantly fuzzy at a distance, permitting
more fantasy. He rethink his relationship with S-L
and recalls seeing S-L drive past greeting him
only indifferently -- so more of the themes of
disappointment versus idealization, faces as
constellations of components (dress and speech
too) , ambiguous if not actually misleading, and
life as a play.
Idiot gets to meet Mme Villparisis again at home
for tea. She is S-L's Aunt and also the Aunt of
Mme de Guermantes. Keep up!. Ghastly scenes in the
salon ensue -- horrible point-scoring and
gamesmanship between the aristo factions over who
is invited and who neglected (divided by age as
well), and more on the bizarre manners required --
eg you invite poets to your salon but it is bad
manners to talk about their work, so the other
guests have to listen to endless prattle about
eggs and how to prepare them. An unspeakably
vulgar woman - - Mme de Crememer (but see
below) -- is mentioned briefly, as she was
in the discussion about life chez Verdurins in
Vol. 1. Other people are refreshed with
quick mentions and walk-on parts-- Bergotte the
novelist, de Norpois, even de Charlus.
Bloch is there and he is now a successful
dramatist. His presence leads to comments about
Jews and Dreyfus. Our hero speculates that Jews
are fashionable guests because they seem so
oriental, while Turks and Egyptians would do as
well. The object of his obsession, Mme de G, is
described holding court, and is already looking
and sounding a bit disappointing --he expects
people from Guermantes to remind him of sunny days
in the country (through residual rural accents and
a sunny healthy appearance). We meet her husband
the Duc.
50 pages ensue of the gossip at the salon, the
bitchy asides and insults, and major
name-dropping. Dreyfus is a constant theme,
with Bloch pro and most of the others anti. De
Norpois gives a master class in offering only
objective comment (on the role of witnesses etc)
to avoid revealing his anti views, although Bloch
keeps pressing. Later, we get a reconstructed
conversation between de Norpois and another
diplomat showing the delicacy of nuance and the
strange coded way they talk. We hear the Verdurins
are strongly anti-Dreyfus. Mme Villeparisis
decides to cut Bloch rudely as he leaves (frosty
glance, silence, looking bored and fatigued,
lively and animated stuff with the next guest to
go) so that he will get the hint and stay away,
but he is too gauche to get it. Odette is
discussed and linked to S-L's equally unfortunate
relationship with a courtesan -- and she finally
turns up! Lots of other subtle allusions to status
and character that I am sure I missed, and a
general insight from Knobhead that in that company
you can never be sure what anyone actually thinks
of you -- all communication seems strategic.
There is an odd episode with de Charlus again who
grabs Our Lad and offers to take him under his
wing if he will do exactly what de Charlus asks
(!) More than a hint of homosexuality again,
including de Charlus's apparent knowledge of the
argot of the gay rent scene (just being populist,
Hero wonders). De Charlus tells him Mme
Villeparisis' husband's title is self-awarded.
Meanwhile Gran is ill and after receiving solemn
and confident assurances from a society doc
(Cottard) that it is all down to her nerves, she
suffers a slight stroke in a kharzi off the Champs
Elysees run by a lady called 'the Marquise'! This
is preceded by an an odd section in which the human
body is seen as a separate animal, operating
inside us according to laws of its own [ a form
of mockery of social pretences again?]
Volume
6 The Guermantes Way 2
Gran is rediagnosed as terminally ill with
'euremia', [kidney failure] and she soon dies,
eased out with morphine and oxygen, but not before
we are treated to asides about the creativity of
art, the body as an animal, and the stoical
practical coping of Francoise that looks so
brutal. These asides are delivered on flimsy
pretexts -- Bergotte visits the bedside and
Knobhead wonders why he is no longer so interested
in his writing, which sashays off into some stuff
about how great art sees the world differently and
this is why it is often rejected at first. I have
just read that some people find War and Peace
irritating because it is always breaking off to
deliver some banal pedagogic insight -- Proust
too. Melville, now...
Some asides are not developed. We learn that Matey
has fought a duel (one offhand sentence -- what
with? Handbags?) and will later join the Army.
More developed is Albertine(!) who visits. In some
amazing pages, Hero thinks she will do sex with
him now because she uses 'adult' language --not
explicit language , of course, but terms he feels
she would not have encountered at home, such as
'lapse in time'. He finds her vocabulary very
'carnal'. Only possible in a rigid and
distanciating society, of course. She also has a
distinct face and body now, and has emerged from
her original mere silhouette into a proper woman.
He doesn't love her but he tries his chances after
hours of evasive talk (it's different with servant
girls - he just grabbed one and told her to feel
in his pocket for some money) . He needs to see
(bourgeois) women as symbolizing something -- the
beach and the summer at Balbec, the little group
and all that -- whereas women one meets in
brothels have no interest. A great technique
is to challenge her to tickle him! Francoise
interrupts at the crucial moment. He finally gets
his evil way, after a lot of stuff about how
perspectives change when you close in to kiss a
woman's cheek (no doubt a euphemism).
Here is the actual bit, which Deleuze sees as
important in the discussion of faciality:
I can think of
nothing that can so effectively as a kiss evoke
from what we believe to be a thing with one
definite aspect, the hundred other things which
it may equally well be since each is related to
a view of it no less legitimate. In short, just
as at Balbec, Albertine had often appeared to me
different, so now, as if, wildly accelerating
the speed of the changes of aspect and the
changes of colouring which a person presents to
us in the course of our various encounters, I
had sought to contain them all in the space of a
few seconds so as to reproduce experimentally
the phenomenon which diversifies the
individuality of a fellow creature, and to draw
out one from another, like a nest of boxes, all
the possibilities that it contains, in this
brief passage of my lips towards her cheek it
was ten Albertines that I saw; the single girl
being like a goddess with several heads, that
which I had last seen, if I tried to approach
it, gave place to another. At least as long as I
had not touched it, that head, I could still see
it, a faint perfume reached me from it. But alas
— for in this matter of kissing our nostrils and
eyes are as ill placed as our lips are shaped —
suddenly my eyes ceased to see; next, my nose,
crushed by the collision, no longer perceived
any fragrance, and, without thereby gaining any
clearer idea of the taste of the rose of my
desire, I learned, from these unpleasant signs,
that at last I was in the act of kissing
Albertine's cheek (76 – 77).
More women ensue. He arranges a date with a woman
of easy virtue (who will readily dine with you in
a private room, S-L assures him) but after
anticipating the encounter for days and arranging
things so there will be the right atmosphere (very
important to combine all the pleasures, with
asides about how memory connects things to produce
pleasure), she cries off - he is reduced to
angry tears. Meanwhile, Mme de Guermantes is
separating from her husband and she suddenly
becomes very friendly and pesters him to dine with
her. Our Man with Bipolar Disorder doesn't want to
now although he was obsessed with her not
long before . He encounters more backbiting
and private dissing. The Princesses of Parma is so
terribly friendly to everyone because she is so
secure in her social superiority, and all the
aristos think it polite and charming to make you
feel you are the most important guest in the
house.
The whole thing is more testament to the dialectic
of gross obsessive desire followed by
inevitable dissatisfaction followed by more
obsessive desire, or the Freudian cycle of
attraction and repulsion. No wonder there was the
dual standard, affaires and many prostitutes!
Little cameos ensue (not that little) about old
nobility down on their luck who have to seek out
rich women to pay their debts, the clear social
division in a restaurant, a clique of rich men who
are suspected of being gay, although one of them
is S-L. Which is a pretext to get him to re-enter
the story: he meets Hero in the restaurant and
goes out of his way to make him comfortable and
warm, turning down an invitation to join an aristo
table to be with Buddy. He is genuinely
considerate, and you can tell this from his
bearing and his noble features, if you are
discerning enough yourself.
Further and increasingly spiky commentary ensues
on the social distinctions, like those between
rival clans de Guermantes and Courvoisiers. The De
Gs pride themselves on their progressive views on
equality and the importance of character over
breeding -- and Proust says therefore it must be
some mischievous spirit that makes them preserve
domestic hierarchies, only marry other nobs, and
permit inferior women to curtsey before raising
them to their feet with a protest. They like
intellectuals and artists but only if they are
already distinguished. They are also famous for
their wit -- eg Mme de G's (Oriane) weak puns
retold under the guise of disapproval by her
husband. The Cs are old fashioned aristos, with
rigid codes of conduct (including a whole
choreography of presenting a distinctive
silhouette before greeting people in a very stiff
manner), and they are suspicious of intellect,
seeing it as leading to misrepresentations and
lies (their objection to Swann). Royals, including
the English ones, are even more ferociously dim.
It still bangs on a lot too long for my taste --
could all have been edited down to about 1/3 the
size without loss. We get it! Shut up! [NB some
people blame the translator for the flowery
style].
The style is not only spiky it is increasingly
classical realist, as the voice turns into the
omniscient narrator, describing events at which
the actual hero was not present, as well as
linking it all together into one demonstration of
hypocrisy, two-facedness, dissimulation, or
testament to the powers of aristocratic politeness
according to taste. There is the occasional
reference to being present, especially in a living
time, waiting for another appointment ( with de
Charlus!) but also a future Hero speaks, looking
back on all this and correcting the impressions
made.
He is also increasingly detached socially, as the
aristos tell stories about their past and their
relatives: it all means something to them but not
to him. ( Not much to we readers either). He
realizes they have a whole collective memory with
subjective time in it. It is also used to
bond and distance, of course.
Eventually he gets away to his rendezvous with de
Charlus.The weirdo is in a towering rage and he
denounces our hero as ungrateful, declares he
never wants to see him again, and attacks him as
ignorant (he failed to interpret the receipt of a
book as an invitation to visit, and invited to sit
in a Louis XIV chair he picks the wrong one). It
all arises from some report that our hero has
dissed the old looney behind his back. Our hero
denies it, and gets increasingly annoyed. Finding
a duel out of the question (no weapons and the
Baron is too old) he seizes upon his hat, left
upturned on the floor as was fashionable, and
tramples and tears it. De Charlus then moodswings
back and gets contrite, offers to run Hero home or
to spend the night (!). He promises another book
as a pretext to meet again after all.
It ends with Swann announcing he is terminally
ill.
Volume 7 Cities of the Plain 1 (ie Sodom and
Gomorrah -- the original title)
Our man outs de Charlus who is secretly and
accidentally observed forming a quick gay liasion
with Jupin the tailor. We get an amazing
discussion of the whole gay scene in France, based
around a particular sector of those who like to be
women, often under a fiercely macho facade, and to
practise their preferences in a solitary way
rather than in 'innocent' public groups which
cover. They learn how to signal their wants to
each other really quickly, via glances, gestures
or body postures, and form fleeting opportunist
couplings, often irrespective of social class. A
lot of this consists of detailed examples which
are probably found in Proust's personal
experience. There are attempts to present the
behaviour as natural (running analogies with plant
fertilization) or acceptable to ancient Greeks
etc. We learn that some of the 'inverts' are
married with kids as well (long before Humphries's
famed study). Others liaise with manly women. Some
specialize in elderly and/or rich men. Our man now
sees de Charlus as acting out sexual attractions
and repulsions in his mad mood swings, just as we
spotted a few hundred pages ago!
Descriptions of life at parties now have this
added dimension of being able to recognize the
signals gay men send to each other (early accounts
of gaydar), as well as the usual class-based
practices of social distanciation. The latter
continue to be waspish, with analyses of the
double-acts run by the Guermantes -- the Duc
(Basin) makes a remark about Oriane so she acts
the role for a bit having been cued in. She can be
all faux-naive after he has set that up, for
example. Everyone is obsessed about who should bow
to whom and how to respond if bowed to. A rival
party-giver, Mme Saint-Euverte is cruising the
Guermantes's do, asking people to attend her
soiree: she always asks in person so she can omit
people who are unsuitable and, if necessary,
explain that she just did not happen to bump into
them. Basin complains loudly about her, pretending
not to see her in the background; Oriane announces
she is away that day,avoiding having to risk being
asked, and intending to make this the kiss
of death for the event. It is all really
repetitive, and Proust himself has to intervene as
author to explain the one of the endless
diversions and asides to an impatient reader (not
very persuasively). The authorial voice appears once
or twice more in this volume to explain and
apologise to the reader, to remind them of
earlier discussions, to refresh the characters
of, say, Francoise and her rural common-sense
(and pronunciation and malapropisms) and
disapproval.
I can't see any diagrammatic innovations as in
Guattari's comment. More and more people are
described with walk-on parts (see the list
of characters for hints). Mostly, the
characters who turn up to the party are
recirculated to bear the main themes -- Oh look!
S-L has just come in! He is now a man of the
world, finished with Rachel, and who recommends
brothels! Mustn't tell him about the one where
Rachel used to work! Oh gosh! Here is Swann! He
looks really ill, and his illness has exaggerated
the prominence of his nose! -- let's revisit the
Dreyfus case and antisemitism!
At the end of this section, we revisit Odette who
is by this time a major player, specializing in
artistic and intellectual visitors rather than
aristo, including Bergotte, by now a famous
writer. Her social obscurity helps because the
intellectual wing of the aristocracy do not
usually appear at the more fashionable soirees:
some new visitors make the mistake of thinking she
is quite humble and a beginner and are stunned by
the glitter of the house and the
visitors. Her dubious origins seem to have
ben forgotten. Her Jewish husband is no
problem because she is so 'sensible': he helps her
choose the best people and to avoid the
anti-semites. Matey gets friendly with her again
and she invites him to contact Gilberte, who is
now beautiful and rich: he fears she will see that
as instrumental.
Matey copes with the visits by getting all
aesthetic and self-congratulatory, and revelling
in the memories induced by statues or staircases
that remind him of Combray: his hostesses
mistakenly think he is ecstatic to see them.
Then we break off and revisit Balbec. Knobby is
placed in the same room in the hotel, mocks the
manager who can barely speak French, and gets a
sustained flashback about visiting before with his
beloved Gran. He recalls life with her, regrets
not seeing enough of her etc. This time, he sees
his idealized construction of her in memory as the
truth of the angelic good lady, not overdone as
when falling in love -- she is a nice non-sexual
woman of course, and not around to contradict him.
(Actually, he gets over it and sees that all that
remains of her in his memory is a reflection of
his own thoughts). He comforts himself with
constructing a romantic gaze towards rows of apple
blossom or to the sea (over tens of pages).
Otherwise, he confines himself to charting the
amusing social gaffes and pretensions of the
locals, including hotel pages, some of who are
really attractive young men. He dallies with
Albertine, suspects her of Gomorahn tendencies
when she dances bosom to bosom with Andree
(confirmed by the famous quack nerve specialist
Cottard who misdiagnosed his Gran and who
attributes an eye infection of a holidaying Duc to
'toxin' while a local GP removes a speck of dust
and cures him. This time he announces that most
women receive sexual stimulation through their
breasts). Albertine finally goes off with other
people as well instead of remaining entirely and
inexplicably at Plonker's beck and call -- some of
them might be women, he suspects, and he gets
quite nasty.
The thought of Albertine being lesbian haunts him
and makes him jealous. He sees lesbians in
the hotel (Bloch's cousin and an actress) as well
as the gay uncle of Bloch who 'keeps' a male
waiter. It might be the atavism of Jews he
speculates.
Proles are hypocrites interested only in money and
tips, as false as the aristos. It seems he can be
relatively tolerant of and apologetic for male
gays (but not female ones) but then needs to
distance himself from proles and Jews in
compensation..
He confronts Albertine and tells her (falsely) he
is in love with Andree so as to get on to
introduce the topic of lesbianism and whether she
is. The whole episode is weird and in the process,
he speculates about how the emotions, tensions and
the language to express them are always the same
in romantic love -- same speeches, same emotions
with different personnel etc. The closest to the
diagrammatic?
Volume 8 Cities of the Plain 2
Bloch's uncle has an amusing misunderstanding with
identical twins, only one of whom is gay. They
have faces like tomatoes and this puts him off
tomatoes (hilarious!) . Plonker thrills at the thought
that he is in the elect who knows important
people, and it comforts him when he is looked
down on by a petit bourgeois on the train
(mistake - she turns out to be the Russian
Princess Sherbatoff who he meets later at the
Verdurins. The embarrassment is caused by him
groping Albertine in front of her in the
carriage. The Princess pretends they have
never seen each other). There are a
lot of local train journeys with Albertine, one
to see S-L although he is busy so nothing
happens, except that Albertine flirts with
him. On the way back they see De Charlus
chatting up a bandsman.
Mush meets the Cambremers (the Camemberts
the page calls them). He is very cruel about
the appearance of the old dowager duchess with her
lack of teeth, her drooling and her moustaches.
They have rented out one of their stately homes in
Balbec to -- the Verdurins who are now in fashion
as running an intellectual/artist salon. He gets
invited to one of the Wednesday gatherings, and
agrees to go because he thinks the maid of Mme
Putbus might be accessible (she shags , S-L tells
him). He leaves Albertine behind of course.
The invited elect gather on the train to the venue
dressed in 'smoking' (a tux, more casual than full
evening dress?)
Conversation on the train includes pages and pages
of Prof Brichot banging on about the derivation of
the placenames in the area (often Norse in
origin). He does this partly to diminish the
claims of a local vicar who has written a book of
place names, much admired by the Cambremers.
He and Prof Cottard are windy bores with high
standing but dubious expertise, just as in Bourdieu. Tosher
does seem to be genuinely interested in placenames
though -- romantic gaze again? He also loves
trains -- this could be claimed as a railway
novel.
Matey comments on the hypocrisy of it all
again. The Russian princess claims she only goes
to 3 soirees because she detests society,
although the (realist) truth is she only has 3
friends. There is compatible contempt -- the
Cambremers think the Verdurins are bohemian
nobodies, and the Verdurins think the Cambremers
are thick aristos but they agree to dine together
(mostly to cement the commercial renting
relationship).
The musician who played the little phrase in Vol
1, Morel, reappears and is now more famous
as a violinist, although he is actually not very
good technically. De Charlus fancies him and is
jealous of any rival attention. Vinteuil is
mentioned a couple of times. The Verdurins ignore
the beautiful views from their windows, which make
our man ecstatic. (This romantic sensibility is
what helps him distance himself from the knobs
again, and gives him his permanent cool
superiority even after gaffes). It is another
revisit device really. (One bio of Proust says the
whole thing was only 3 vols originally and when he
had success he expanded it. It looks like it).
By contrast we learn in one sentence that Swann is
now dead, and we anticpate further adventures from
Odette. The Verdurins claim they have ruined the
Swanns' always-unsuitable relationship and the one
between Brichot and an unfortunate mistress.
If this is machinic,
Proust could have at least introduced new
characters (doubtless there are too many to manage
now) and this would have helped make the point
that the structural forces persists even though
the actual people change? As it is, it all looks
like a matter of simple change, ageing or
modernising social development, that makes the
Verdurins, say, gauche at one time and fashionable
at another. Matey's romantic gaze remains
constant throughout, never doubted or extended,
and normal realism intrudes quite a lot -- he is
all-knowing, always right etc.
Appallingly detailed descriptions of conversations
at dinner ensue -- for farkin pages!. Bores bang
on about place names (Brichot) and their family
trees (de Charlus). Others take the piss behind
each other's back. It is awful. No doubt witty,
but you have to know a lot about French culture to
see quite why liking Debussy is such a gaffe etc.
Names are also embarrassingly mispronouced. The
main themes were established long ago -- that the
aristos and even the Academician profs are
poseurs, that they are deeply insincere and hate
each other, that they are endlessly scoring points
etc. We know Brichot is a bore --why does he get 3
or 4 chances to show it in the same way?
There is some novelty in comic episodes when de
Charlus mishears bits of conversation and thinks
he has been exposed -- eg (not exact quotes) :
Mme Verdurin
(discussing music at no-one in particular): 'Of
course, tastes vary...I hear you have unusual
tastes, Baron?' De Charlus: 'What the
devil do you mean, Madame?'
Mme Verdurin: 'We have
invited several others of our party to join us
at another dinner -- are you one of them?'
De Charlus: (Splutter...)
We know the aristos are frightful snobs and
bullies. Why not extend it a bit to other
fractions (eg industrial bourgeoisie) and use
different characters to show different sorts of
bore etc. Imagination is surely limited by this
pretence it is all just recall? Why no
self-criticism -- romantic bores always banging on
about the beauties of nature?
We have a break then a long aside about memory
ensues, prompted by thinking about how dreams can
be so realistic and involve memories that affect
us even if they are fictionalized. The involuntary
nature of memory is discussed (in recall) with the
Norwegian philosopher at the Verdurins (previously
known to us only for his comically ponderous
French), who also mentions one of his colleagues
-- M Bergson!
Exciting times! Matey hires a motor car and
chauffeur! Originally it was because he wanted to
get around the counryside while leaving Albertine
to paint a church (in oils, ya prat). He didn't
want her romantic gaze contaminating his. They
marvel at the motor's range and ability to
compress time and distance. On one trip, matey
also sees his first aircraft. Albertine loves
wearing a toque and veil. Among other things, they
call on the Verdurins, but matey likes to squeeze
Albertine in the back seat so he has to put off
Mme V's insistence she accompany them on the
return journey.
We encounter the chauffeur who also services
Morel. They are a nasty couple, cheating the
company and each other over the rates and mileage.
Morel arranges for his existing coachman to leave
so chauffeur can get the job -- it's a horrible
campaign as bits of kit go missing, gossip is
spread, and the coachman is split from his fellow
workers. It all ends in a fight among the hired
hands and the coachman leaves. We are given two
hints that the chauffeur and Morel will cause
problems with Albertine in the future.
The 'little clan' around the Verdurins share their
suspicions of de C and gossip behind his back. Mme
V increasingly introduces double entendres into
her conversations with him. Lots of the references
to literature, music the proclivities of authors
etc go over my head, and there are more and more
Latin phrases, all ambiguous no doubt. De C
refuses to believe that anything can be known, and
introduces 'innocent' remarks of his own about
young men, trying to render them as normal if
slightly eccentric. Everyone sees through him.
De C's relationship with Morel is bipolar as ever,
and he alternately weeps for lost love, and
savages Morel for flouting his sponsorship. He
invents a story about having challenged some
officer to a duel in order to defend his honour
(and maybe Morel's). It works-- Morel runs
back to de C imploring him not to fight.
Morel gets savaged by the Narrator as well,
pointing out his humble origins (his dad was a
valet for Matey's great Uncle). It is all getting
very bitchy and camp. De C tries to provide Morel
with an insider's guide to the aristocracy (which
we hear him expounding again) but it is, of
course, a really bizarre one.
More train-inspired stuff as particular stations
evoke particular memories (garlanded with more
dull and lengthy stuff about place names). Matey
meets an elderly and impecunious aristo at one and
adopts him, taking him for expensive dinners. The
old guy claims a distinguished lineage for his
family -- the Crecys -- and matey remembers that
Odette called herself Odette de Crecy, which would
not have pleased him.
The station at Maineville recalls two farcical
episodes involving Morel. The town has a large new
brothel. A visiting minor aristo sees the place,
thinks it is a nice hotel, and says he would
like to set up there during his stay and invite
nobs to call. The passengers try to explain but he
will have none of it and alights with his luggage.
In the second episode, Morel is picked up by the
Duc de Guermantes, de C's brother, who is in
Balbec unannounced and unknown to Morel. When they
get to the Duc's rented villa, Morel is horrified
to see family photos, including one of de C. He
flees. The Duc tries again and arranges a tryst at
the Mainville brothel. Meanwhile de C has asked
Jupien to visit to spy on Morel and J finds out:
he asks the madame if he and de C can observe the
action. Eventually, after having to pay a lot and
buy loads of expensive champagne as well,
they get to peep through the door into the room
which contains Morel and three whores. But Morel
and the Duc have been tipped off. The Duc has gone
and Morel is so terrified at seeing de C spying on
him that all he can do is have stilted
conversation with the whores.
After that, more pots are boiled. Matey and
Albertine are getting really indiscreet on the
train going to the Verdurins. More place names are
explained.
Matey loves the train journey as offering friendly
contacts at each stop. He is cooling towards
Albertine again as a result (thinking he has lots
of friends so doesn't need her? Maybe realizing
there are lots of potentials for gay contacts as
well? He is still disillusioned with loving women
which is never as good as fantasizing about them,
he reminds us pedagogically). At the same time he
is insanely jealous of Albertine and will not
leave her on the train with S-L for 10 minutes to
say hello to Bloch's Dad in a nearby (horse)
carriage -- Bloch just thinks he must a be a snob,
and Dickhead cannot explain because he does not
want to be seen as jealous!
He says he is off on his own again to visit Mme
Verdurin, because she can tell him a lot about his
favourite musician Vinteuil. Albertine says so can
she - -she has been friendly with Vinteuil's
daughter for years. Matey has an immediate
flashback to observing the lesbian flirting
between Mlle Vinteuil and a lady friend on one of
his childhood walks around Combray (Vol 1).
A massive paranoid fantasy unwinds as he gains
what he calls 'Knowledge' -- there is a widespread
lesbian network with Albertine centrally involved.
He is cut to the quick, Albertine has got inside
his guard (she is inside him is how he puts it).
She has an independent life! He hates being
out of emotional control, just like he was as a
child waiting for Mama to come up to see him at
night. Having told his Mum he is over Albertine
and not about to marry her, he now decides to
insist she accompany him back to Paris at once
where he can supervise her -- and he will indeed
now have to marry her. What a control freak!
Volume 9 The Captive 1
Control freakery persists in Paris. Albertine
lives in, to Mama's chagrin, and Matey confesses
to French kissing at least. However, he thinks of
Albertine like his Mama sleeping in his room that
magic night in Combray. Albertine has to obey the
house rules, though, to her amusement -- eg no
entering Matey's bedroom until he rings (he is
still lying about ill and fatigued a lot). He
often prefers the company of his own 'selves'
instead -- including a little mannikin who wakes
him up (weirdo). He is still jealous and gets
Andree to report on Albertine -- Gomorahns are
everywhere! He is not in love with Albertine -- in
fact she bores him -- but he is determined to keep
her away from lesbians. He now sees love as an
effect, like the result of any sort of strong
emotion, and/or as the peculiar emtion that brings
jealousy. He sees it will all end in tears and
death.
He pretends to be ill but rejoices in his ability
to reconstruct memories and link them to make
aesthetic experiences. It is like a musical
refrain. Reality is disappointing, like real women
of whom one can get very jealous ( as he does,
increasingly). He prefers to peep at women passing
in the street, of all kinds.He can then construct
a composite fantasy of woman -- a multiplicity no
doubt, a stage in becoming-woman, the
clearest hint so far of Guattari's reading.
Then there is more potboiling as he visits Oriane
to get advice on what clothes to buy for Albertine
(she loves it, we are assured). The Duchesse's
rural accent (no RP in France?) and aristocratic
idiosyncratic pronunciations share some features
with the peasantry and with Francoise. It is
another problem for the social climbers who make
mistakes like pronouncing the last n in Béarn.
Returning from meeting Oriane (weak) he meets de
Charlus and Morel visiting Jupien. Morel is going
to marry Jupien's niece. Everyone is happy
at this. De C fancies himself as a kind of father
in law, and thinks this new bond will help him
keep Morel. Morel has already confessed his
fantasy about getting engaged, sleeping with a
woman then abandoning her, leaving her ruined. Now
he want J's niece because she might help him sleep
with some of her (gomorrahn?) girlfriends, and he
can prostitute her to his aristo lady contacts (he
thought his career as a violinist might be over
after developing cramp in his hand) . His only
worry is that she might not make many contacts or
support his social ambitions as a mere seamstress.
At this point Proust addresses the reader
directly, apologises for any distress, insists
this appalling behaviour is not just confined to
aristos, and urges us to see that we can all learn
from deviant behaviour -- a kind of Goffman
marginal strategy, but mixed with claims about
deeper literary truths?
Lots of stuff on Albertine ensues. He is now
undoing her chemise and admiring her naked body.
However, he seems far happier dealing with
abstract women (maybe women as a multiplicity of
components of faciality) , the qualities of women
in general rather than specific women, the way
they endlessly change their appearances and their
moods (for me, perform their expected class and
gender roles as fickle and superficial) -- is this
'becoming -woman'? He says men would be
repelled if it were not for sexual attraction. He
admits he has squashed Albertine's complexity with
his possessiveness -- she is his captive. He also
has Jupien's niece realize that Morel and De C are
just as complex. The clincher is that he
prefers Albertine when she is asleep and he
can fantasize and impose meanings (at one stage
she is his Mama) without her getting in the way.
He experiences himself as as several people
too -- his Aunt Leonie with her permanent
invalidity and her observations of others, his dad
with his obsession with the weather. He also tells
the reader to think of the Narrator as being
Proust the author, and gives him the same first
name -- call him Marcel.
More stuff on obsessive jealousy ensues. It is
indeed the mirror image of his obsessive love. He
now sees that memory can awaken jealous scenes as
he reworks what people said about Albertine at
Balbec. He realizes that lots of men must marry
and keep their wives captive while constantly
worrying about casual words, glances, absences --
Gomorrah is everywhere, and obviously more
threatening than casual hetero affaires.
Jealousy becomes paranoia, a constant obsession.
As asides, Tosspot realizes that threads of memory
tie us all together, and act to distribute people
well outside their actual bodies -- Albertine
appears everywhere in spirit as it were. Mood
swings dominate. He uses musical terms to describe
his feelings. It is not at all Deleuzian when he
claims that love and desire is driven by loss or
lack.
He likes taking Albertine to visit aerodromes
(like harbours for aircraft he explains to we
naifs) and watching people go on pleasure flights.
It remind him of the thrill of seeing his first
aircraft near Balbec.
Matey also becomes two people -- his normal self
and a new stern, controlling, cold man. He
channels his father. Then he wonders if his father
was like that because he too was worried about
control over wayward women. He becomes unable to
talk openly to Albertine and unable to tell her
how much he wants her to be kind to him, and kiss
him goodnight. He has to think of pretexts to get
her back into his room so he can rerun the scene.
When this fails he cries all night.
It is grim stuff, enlivened only by recollecting
the cries of street sellers outside in the morning
-- the grinders and sharpeners, the seafood and
snail salesmen, the goatherd (he milks the goats
for you there and then). Matey likens their
rhythmic cries to music, plainchant, verse or
opera. For me, there were unavoidable references
to 'Allo 'Allo and the onion-sell-eur. A
long parenthesis interrupts (he apologises to the
reader) on the reality of dreams before more
street sellers give Albertine the idea of cooking
a meal (getting Francoise to) from the list
-- little Surrealist. She is also becoming adept
at pursuing the similes linking food (especially
types of ice-cream) and buildings and
getting all arty. Matey congratulates himself that
he is responsible.
We meet again the dastardly chauffeur who is
supposed to accompany and chaperone Albertine but
is evasive about where she was and whether he did
or not shadow her as Mush expects (on the pretext
that she is vulnerable to male intrusion): there
is a suspicious 7 hour lapse on one occasion. He
curses the incompleteness of memory here that
throws up suspicious episodes but fails to store
enough detail to be able to use them to confront
Albertine with evidence. Generally though,he
deploys a musical metaphor,while playing a bit of
Vinteuil after lionising Wagner, to describe how
themes and refrains recur (very like the bit on
refrains in Thousand
Plateaus). Music
contains many possibilities he says, so how can it
be written or interpreted by one person (or
something). Albertine remains remarkably tolerant.
He say she should go to the theatre instead of
visiting the Vedurins. She agrees. Then he sees
that the lesbian actress he encountered at Balbec
is performing so he sends Francoise to fetch her
back on the pretext that he suddenly needs her.
She agrees again! Then he thinks he will go to the
Verdurins at the next opportunity to see who it
was she might have been meeting there.
Meanwhile he returns to fantasising about young
girls working in shops and stalls and gets
Francoise to call one in as a prelude to seduction
-- he is going to ask her to deliver a message and
hope things will progress. He is immediately put
off from the fantasy when he sees the girl. Her
nose is not how he imagined it! It is a real one,
not one of many images like he had thought of it
before. The tacky seduction is stopped when he
sees the name of the actress performing at the
Trocadero (Lea the Lez) and moves to get Albertine
back. He blames Albertine for restricting his
pleasure like this! How will he be able to lech
over the midinettes?
There is a weird scene with Morel, heard shouting
at his girlfriend with the phrase 'grand
pied-a-grue!', literally 'great crane's
foot!.Morel seems to have gone mad,matey thinks,
or reverted to an animal state. The row was about
his girlfriend refusing to procure girls for him.
Matey finds him weeping bitterly in the street as
he thinks it will now all be over with De C as
well now the marriage is off.
Driven by meditating on the complex lies and
presentations of self that Albertine offers, Matey
gets relativist as he insists that we all perceive
the world differently -- each one of us wakes to a
different world.
The volume ends with the death of Bergotte (a
chance to mock doctors again), some speculations
about death and its many meanings, and how some
people can retain coherence after death -- if they
have a title, for example as an historical
record?). Proust intervenes to tell us Swann will
live in his novel, and says some real people will
recognize bits of themselves in his character.
Otherwise, death means dissolution and
fragmentation back into elements.
Volume 10 The Captive 2
Our hero is en route to the Verdurins to spy on
Albertine and he meets Brichot and takes his arm
(Brichot is nearly blind). They meet de C, which
prompts a aside about how male homosexuality used
to be tolerated by the Greeks but has now
been driven underground. More on the extraordinary
combinations of men and women in that scene.
De C is becoming more outrageous, more camp, using
gay talk. He teases Brichot about being gay
because he is arm in arm with Matey. He is
followed increasingly by bits of rough trade
after money. He flirts with the footman and
openly discusses men with other gays
It is De C's gathering, to puff Morel, but
at Mme Verdurin's house. He annoys Mme Verdurin by
vetoing some of her guest list. She needs to
rebuild her contacts after the Dreyfus case
(she chose the Dreyfusard set and got to sit with
Mme Zola and dine with Piquart), but de C's likes
and dislikes are personal and capricious.
She follows fashion in deciding who is in and who
is out and which side she will choose now in the
endless struggle for differentiation.
Authorial asides fill in the details. NB there is
even a translator's aside as he explains that Mme
Verdurin used the word 'tapette' to describe de C,
meaning 'rattle' (the noun, aka 'chatterbox'),
while apparently unaware of its other meaning
('nancy' or 'queer', the online dictionary gives).
Two themes then take up the next 100 pages
(50--150).
The first theme is the music. It is the first
performance of the whole septet by Vinteuil. Matey
is lost at first then recognises the little
phrase. He gets into the genius of the piece,
following the links internally between phrases,
their inversion, calls and responses and silences.
He gets external associations too, thinking of
romantic landscapes, seeing the parts as offering
glimpses of the whole (actualizations as alluding
to multiplicities), the sublime. He even sees that
his mixed feelings for Albertine,and his previous
love affairs all make up some greater love.
However, Mr Mood Swing gets back to the mundane
during one of the more boring sections, and
remembers that Vinteuil had a daughter who batted
for the other side and was a rival for Albertine.
However, he gets to some detached overview,
thinking how this sublime music relied upon the
more sordid -- gay de C sponsoring Morel,
and the bent friend of Mlle Vinteuil doing the
massive labour of translating Vinteuil's notes and
jottings to produce the great work. (He can
reinterpret the primal scene of Vol 1 now a bit
more sympathetically - -they were only mocking
Papa in a spirit of childish naughtiness).
The second theme features De C
increasingly pissing off Mme Verdurin. His guests
are the old guard aristos and they think she is
vulgar and they snub or ignore her, laugh at her
crockery and her Elstir paintings. They also fail
to appreciate the music. She decides to get her
revenge, blackening de C's name to Brichot and Our
Hero by outing him (some of the stories made
up),and vowing to save Morel from him. Really she
wants to reclaim control over Morel as one of the
'little clan' -- Morel will have to choose de C or
her. Matey and Brichot get roped in to distract
the Baron while the Verdurins persuade Morel .
Brichot bangs on about life at the Sorbonne. De C
tells us lots more about the gay/queer scene,
displaying his insider knowedge as he does. He
shocks the other two by announcing only 30%
of famous men have never dabbled. He also fills in
some background about Swann and Odette from Vol 2
-- Odette was indeed a Crecy because she was
married to the unfortunate shabby gentile bloke
matey met at a station in Balbec; De C helped her
run a string of affairs behind Swann's back; he
claimed to have had her himself -- and maybe him
too when they were at school. Matey increasingly
wants to get away home, partly because his
anxieties about Albertine have been raised by the
30% claim.
He casually mentions that he was a very unassuming
youth with little sense of his own worth -- but
also a proud young man and this led him to
fight lots of duels! Afterwards he made little of
them, in order to minimise the sense that they
indicated his moral worth. Brichot for his part
delivers ludicrous overwordy commentary referring
to the classics and to Kantian morality in a
totally impenetrable way --classic French academic
discourse. Dickhead distracts himself by musing
about how he drawing room contains all sorts of
elements (furniture, paintings) from other
contexts: if you traced their origins you wold get
rhizomatic, I expect.
Mme Verdurin does the job on Morel, saying he has
become a laughing stock, that de C has been in
prison and is bankrupt because he is being
blackmailed, that his promises to get Morel a
medal are worthless -- and the clincher, that he
had been mocking Morel behind his back for being
his servant (a dig at Morel's humble origins, of
which she was aware). The Baron returns and is
publicly renounced by the violinist out of shame
at being discovered as much as anything. To
matey's surprise de C does not counterattack with
anger and bluster, but just caves in and is
thoroughly dejected. He is rescued by the (ex)
Queen of Naples who has returned to retrieve her
fan and who witnesses the wholescene. She marches
him out with with aristo dignity, snubbing Morel
and Mme Verdurin on the way. De C gains some
sympathy from matey and Brichot.
De C thinks the others in the little clan have
betrayed him so he writes them furious and
sarcastic letters, but generally enters a decline,
gets pneumonia and pines for Morel.
Then we return to the bit I dreaded - the break-up
with Albertine. The whole thing is very confused
emotionally -- the narrator apologizes to the
reader at one point and admits his feelings must
be very unclear. There are mood swings - he loves
the lady on arriving home, but soon gets
infuriated by her silly lies, of which there are
many, it turns out (she has no chance of
maintaining them because he can easily catch her
in contradiction with his prodigious memory for
detail, and anyway, she told him of her evasions
and strategies to conceal her feelings and put
people off the scent when they were only friends
at Balbec). In order to get her to talk about her
own (suspected) yearning for liberation and her
gomorrhan episodes, he says they must part, hoping
this will induce a final frank discussion (or
maybe he really does want to part with her --
anyway she takes him seriously and prepares to
depart). It is the same device he used with
Gilberte, with the same unwanted consequences, the
jerk! It could be a way of provoking events even
if you are not entirely clear that you want them
to happen?
She gets frank and admits her lies. She has
holidayed with Lea, but she made up the stuff
about Mlle Vinteuil and her lesbo friend to
impress him with her access to music. She has even
kissed Gilberte. She then announces she has indeed
felt a desire to break free from his controlling
relationship, and to find someone who would 'break
my ...' -- she doesn't finish the sentence but
blushes furiously. Matey eventually thinks she
means 'break my pot', although she denies that: it
is apparently a very vulgar expression which even
prostitutes do not use, meaning to have anal
intercourse, an online source tells me. He is
shocked! They have a particular row about Andree
and whether or not she and Albertine did the
dirty: he catches her out in a lie about whether
they met at Balbec; she gets very cool after that,
but they make up and she stays.
He says later he just cannot fathom gomorrahns and
relates two stories about their oddity and
treachery. In one, two couples are dining and the
women grope each other all evening under the table
without the blokes noticing. In another, a lesbian
couple team up and one takes her young son to be
beaten by the other -- I do hope this is not
autobiography
It all ends as predicted. Plonker plays at wanting
to split up so effectively that he makes himself
cry, then they make up, then he is tortured by
thoughts that maybe there was some unspoken
pressure to split after all, that the scene will
now open possibilities in Albertine's mind, that
she is still not really happy with life as a
captive etc. He looks at her sleeping body
as but a particular (actualized) case of a
whole series of interactions and developments in
her life and wonders if there is a 'logarithmic'
rule to explain her current state.
He knows only too well how duplicitous people can
be from de C's behaviour and from his old gran who
used to play passive-aggressive mindgames with
Francoise (F arranged a day out for herself,
confident that the old lady would never be able to
leave her bedroom again, Gran finds out and
promptly asks F to arrange for a full day out for
herself on that date, complete with carriage. F
complies and then Gran cancels at the last minute
claiming she had no idea of F's plans and would
not want to spoil them! ). He admits he knows of
his own duplicity and current desires to chase
women
Poor old Albertine is still very unhappy despite
the Fortuny dresses and antique silverware he buys
for her - not surprisingly, because they never go
out! Idiot entertains her at home by discussing
literature (!). In the process we get pedagogic
asides about Dostoievski (sic) and others who
always write the same novels, says matey,
developing the same themes -- this is their
coherent view of the universe (cf Deleuze on the
universe as meta-cinema). It is almost a machinic
analysis, I suppose, to accompany the other hints
(A's body, the furniture, the music etc). He also
wonders if art depicts some reality (because it is
so real and vivid) or whether it is a product of
the subjective.
So -- it all swings back and forth from love to
paranoid jealousy focusing on Andree, in
tremendous detail. What motivates this obsessive
relating of minor incidents of lying and secrecy,
passing glances and attempts at eye contact? It
must be real life, surely? (One online source says
Proust had a long affaire with someone called
Albert). He knows Albertine is dying of
boredom and getting increasingly depressed and
angry -- and so is he. He wants to go to Venice
but dare not take A nor leave her in Paris because
she will be at it with women. He wants to chase
women. He resolves to leave her and gets a ticket
to Venice. But that morning he wakes late (he is
not to be disturbed until he wakes) and F tells
him Albertine has had her baggage ['boxes and
trunks'] collected and has gone.
Volume 11 The Sweet Cheat Gone
Nearly there!
No prizes for anticipating the massive mood
swings, agonized re-running of events, multiple
interpretations of A's rather sensible and mature
letter, frenetic formation and abandonment of
plans to get A back. Everything he sees reminds
him of her so she is still there. Painfully
adolescent, very immnature compared to A (which
might be the point --more admiration for women,
maybe becoming-woman?) and used to justify the
limits of intellectual anticipations of emotions
compared to the devastation of the real thing.
It goes on for pages ( 1--75 at least). Matey mood
swings. He is in hell. He experiences everything
from total love to resentment at being so
dependent, just as when he waited for Mama to
visit him in Vol. 1. He conceives of a stupid plot
to get S-L to pretend to return some money (30k
francs! S-L is appalled and say he could get a
duchess for less!) to Albertine's aunt with some
silly story about how it was a loan based on his
promise to marry A so now he had to return it,
hoping her aunt would intercede on his behalf (she
has in the past). S-L imagines A must be some rare
beauty to attract such yearning (and money) and is
puzzled when he sees her photo: Matey tells us
this shows that affection for a person is a
compound of accumulated feelings and memories that
make them unique to the beholder -- a haecceity we
might say?
A sees through the plot and writes to him saying
she would come back if he asked. His sad
little heart leaps at first, although he is also
realizing that absence will eventually cool down
the habit of thinking of her as part of his life.
Mood swinging and determined not to look
dependent, he writes back and says it is over,
although he remembers this backfired badly with
Gilberte, and that is a pity because he had some
gifts for her, including a yacht and a Rolls Royce
but he couldn't even meet her to hand them
over. (At this point I remembered he had
inherited a fortune from his Great-Aunt
Leonie). He even says his Ma had given
permission to marry A.
He
persuades a very young girl to go back home with
him to console him. He sits her on his knee for
an hour or two then gives her 500 francs and
sends her away. The police call him in and he is
reprimanded in front of the parents. Afterwards,
the police chief tells him he paid too much and
warns him to be more discreet! He is then told a
neighbour has reported seeing a young woman
entering the house -- Albertine -- and he is
under surveillance. He insists to us that
Albertine is legal but he is afraid he will be
reported again if she comes back. He resents the
fact that now he can't even console himself with
very young girls!
He tries to resemiotize by thinking of the
parallels with the performance (Phèdre) he saw
with Berma in it and sees some parallels --but
little comfort or perspective results. Will it
have to be music again like it was with Swann?
Guattari suggests as much. Matey already
finds comfort in the street songs, and references
to music reoccur -- eg in a gondolier's song (to
come). Vinteuil will also play a major part, G
says.Sure enough, the bit below at the end of the
mourning chapter says preciesly that...
In one of his moodswings he asks F to prepare A's
room for a possible return and she finds some
rings in a drawer. He did not buy them for A. She
told him they were from different people and that
she had bought one -- but two are identical.
Cynical old F makes it clear A must have had
another lover all along. Paranoid Pierre has to
agree the worst. He is heartbroken by A's lies
again.
It is a devastating demonstration of the stupidity
, pride, self-obsession, self-pity and self-harm
of bourgeois male emotions, although he (the
narrator that is -- we will reserve judgement
about Proust) is far from being able to liberate
himself from them to become-woman, even by Vol
11..
Things get worse. Tears are jerked. Idiot writes
to A saying he thinks he will take up with Andree.
This time it kind of works and A wishes him well
but then says she will come back if he asks.
Finally he sends her a telegram begging her to
come back on any terms and gets a telegram back,
crossing in the post, from Aunty saying A
has been killed in a riding accident. He gets the
letter and the telegram at the same time. O
Romeo...
Anyone who has been bereaved can imagine the next
100 pages of self-torment, regret, anger,
disbelief and misery, seeing the loved one
everywhere, unable to think of anything else. I
skimmed it. I am no grief tourist. Partly because
he wants to retain every memory of A, but mostly
because he is still consumed by jealousy and wants
to see if this is unworthy, our hero decides
to check up once and for all to see if she was a
lesbian. He hires Aime (head waiter from Balbec)
to revisit off season and ask around in Balbec. He
reports that she had frequent liasions in a bath
house with various women. Dickhead is still not
sure they were not innocent so he gets Aime to
visit Touraine as well (where A and Aunty lived).
At first nothing, but then Aime meets a shop girl,
questions her and takes her to bed, as you would,
and she tells all, including lascivious hints of
what they did to each other in the woods by the
river.
Matey questions Andree who swears her relationship
with A was entirely innocent and that A was not
that sort of girl.But then says they oftenmet at a
particular place near Balbec -- plonker remembers
asking A if she had ever visited this place and A
denied it so all the doubts and jealousies arise
again.
More agonising ensues as he realizes that even A's
faults are part of her complex character. He
finally comes to realize that he will or is
forgetting her -- her memory is more and more
internal to him and his mind will forget. He
thinks of the components of Vinteuil's little
phrase working together and then fading into
silence as the music stops. It is not just a
reminder of A, as it was for Swann and Odette.The
other musical reference is thinking of the
occasional involuntary memory of A as now a
variation or an echo of the main themes in a minor
key -sad but not devastating.
He recovers his interest in women, with sad
consequences at first as A's memory remains as a
kind of impossible standard. Then three nice young
women arrive to visit Mme de Guermantes (I
remembered that the narrator lives in an apartment
in Hotel Guermantes). One gives him a meaningful
look and his desire takes off. He asks the porter
who they are and gets the name Mlle d'Orgueville
for the saucy one -- this is a person known to S-L
who is shaggable so he telegrams S-L for details
-- but it is not her. He thinks the name might be
different so he tries to track down a Mlle
D'Epourcheville. No joy, Finally he bumps into the
lady at the Guermantes of all places and knows the
truth. She is Mlle de Fourcheville, first name
Gilberte.
De Fourcheville (one of Odette's lovers in Vol 2)
has married Odette after the death of Swann,
mostly because she is rich and he isn't (which
wins over the family who doubted her reputation as
ever), and also because he wanted to make a
gesture towards Jews after the resolution of the
Dreyfus affair made the aristos feel guilty about
antisemitism. Gilberte has also become very rich,
we remember and now has a non-Jewish name as well,
so she is much sought after. Even the Guermantes
have finally agreed to meet her socially after
rationalizing it to themselves. In exchange, G has
to deny any Jewish connections and this causes
embarrassment as when Mme G remembers that Swann
it was who recommended she buy an Elstir. The Gs
talk about Swann as if he were a distant contact,
or as if they were giving a reference to a
gardener, Proust says, even though he was an
intimate friend and better connected than they
were.
Enjoying going to society gatherings is one way in
which he is recovering. He also tries to
partition his life and sees his affair with
Albertine as something conducted by another
self. Finally, he thinks that his love for
Albertine was really a love for the little band of
girls in general: luckily, this permits him to now
turn his attentions to Andree. She might be
married by now, but that still does not stop him,
of course, and he enjoys 'semi-carnal' relations
with the lady.
They discuss Albertine and she tells him a
horrible story about how Albertine actually liked
young working-class virgins, and had formed a
relationship with an attractive young violinist -
Morel, of course - to procure them for her.
They would fall in love with him, he would hand
them over to her before disappearing. They
even took a young girl to a brothel and had a five
part lesbian orgy. That was Albertine's
favourite session, but she began to suffer serious
remorse. That partly informed her interest
in our hero: she hoped that he would marry her and
keep her well away from any temptation.
However, and on a rather jarring note, I thought,
she decided to leave him because she feared the
disapproval of the other girls in the little band
that she was living with him but not married.
Andree tells him the others in the little band
were really censorious.
He tries to digest all this, and finally decides
that there is no point blaming dead people.
If anything, he is quietly pleased that his
intuitions about Albertine proved to be correct,
despite her denials and his doubts. He even
manages to get a bit philosophical about it, by
remembering that Bloch had once argued that sexual
desire was universal, and that even the most
respectable people were gagging for it. It
is a strange world, as Sandy confess to her
strait-laced granny after her own adult sexual
experiences in Blue Velvet.
There are even more accounts of Albertine's
conduct from Andree. She was really trying to
conduct a relationship with another bloke (one of
the sporty idiots at Balbec I think) and her aunt
wanted her to marry him: when it was clear matey
was not going to marry her she left. By this time,
matey realizes how complex human conduct is, how
it is produced by many different overlapping or
contradicting motives and opportunities, and how
people's perceptions are also highly selective. It
is another world (he almost says this literally) .
Then he finally gets to Venice. Mama takes him. He
gets all delirious about the architecture etc.
Inevitably, he meets some of the earlier
characters, including Mme de Villparisis in the
company of her long-time lover the diplomat de
Norpois. We learn a bit more about his diplomatic
skills, making himself indispensable to the
Italian Government by gently suggesting a possible
new prime minister for them, floating the name
into an elusive conversation, and regretting that
all that skill is now overlooked. We learn
that she was once a dazzling femme fatale,
responsible for broken marriages, but is now
dumpy, aged and ugly, unrecognizable.
Plonker is about to return with mama when he hears
Mme Putbus is about to visit, with her randy maid.
He also tells us he has a lovely 17-year old
Italienne on the go (she, and a subsequent
mistress he is keeping in Paris is not the subject
of an intense love affair though, it seems -- none
is described anyway) So he stays, in feverish
arousal and hope, leaving a chagrined Mama to
return to the station alone, but bottles out at
the last minute, seeing Venice as now an
alienating and charmless place. An overheard
song (is this the gondolier's song Guattari
mentions?) -- Sole Mio of course -- begins
as charming , symbolising the delights of Venice,
but soon turns into something banal and
cliched. He rushes to board the train after
all. It must be anxiety about hetero sex again I
think. He tells us below that homosexual men often
need to put on a real show of adulterous hetero
affairs in order to pass: their hearts might not
be in them ( although everyone seems to enjoy a
really flexible sex life) .
In the middle of all this, a cheap writer's stunt
to keep our interest. He gets a telegram saying: I
am not dead as you thought but alive. When do you
return? I want to talk to you about marriage.
Albertine. He is stunned but soon realizes he has
lost interest in the real Albertine (as usual) and
thinks of her very unkindly as dumpy and
masculine. He decides to ignore the telegram. On
the train, Mama hands over more and later letters.
One is from Gilberte saying she is going to marry
Saint-Loup and had sent him a telegram... In an
unlikely get-out he realizes the telegram clerk
had misread the writing and written 'Gilberte' as
'Albertine'. There is also a feeble attempt to
explain the other bits as mistakes in punctuation
-- entirely unconvincing (he had already renewed
his acquaintance with Gilberte chez Mme Guermantes
-- why would she think herself 'dead' to him?) .
The other letter announces the marriage of a minor
Cambremer (a member of the Guermantes clan) to the
niece of Jupien [apparently called Marie
Antoinette, according to a commentary] , formerly
destined for Morel, but now the adopted daughter
of de C ( who has also awarded her one of the many
hereditary titles he claims) . Mama is delighted
that a lovely girl from humble origins can marry
into the aristocracy, but suspects her ma would
have been shocked. There is talk about how Swann
would have felt,seeing his daughter marry into the
Guermantes clan, they who snubbed him for so long
and refused to meet his wife and daughter.
Seeds are clearly being sown for future
crises...it could be Hollyoaks! We learn
lots of details about these marriages. Rival clans
are after Gilberte because she is so rich, and as
another suitor seems to be gaining an advantage,
Mme S-L denounces Gilberte as the daughter
of a courtesan and a Jew. S-L is steered in the
direction of another moderately but still
adequately rich young woman.However, the rival
gets her first, whereupon Gilberte is promptly
made an offer by Mama on S-L's behalf and she
accepts. More tricks of the minor aristocracy are
revealed -- claiming misleading titles, for
example styling yourself 'de Méséglises' meaning
literally someone from Méséglises, but implying a
claim to the ancient title of Duc de Méséglises.
(The Guermantes are exposed in this trick too by
S-L, earlier). Rivals are scornful abot the
real name and title of the S-Ls too. The Méséglise
and Guermantes Ways are increasingly coming to
mean the characteristic trajectories,
social, cultural and strategic of the two rival
aristo clans.
No heteros are to be happy, though. Robert betrays
Gilberte and she finds compromising letters
written to him by a certain Bobette. Proust tells
us that Bobette is really -- Morel. There are
hints that S-L is to die and Gilberte is to become
the Duchesse de Guermantes, but the translator
says this doesn't make sense because the existing
Duchesse is still alive and well long after S-L's
death. Meanwhile, Jupien is revealed
to be a cousin of Odette (no doubt we shall see
why) . His niece soon dies of typhoid fever but
her husband finds consolation in sharing "certain
interests" with de C.
Matey reworks his association with S-L and reworks
some suspicious episodes -- fleeting glances with
waiters, allegations made by a lift boy at Balbec,
the fisticuffs with the journalist (apparently in
outrage that S-L had been propositioned) , but
not, apparently the homoerotic bits when they
stayed together at the barracks in Doncieres. S-L
even looks suspiciously like Rachel at times (but
matey also says he looked a bit like Albertine
before his moustache grew). This is where we are
told that homo men need cover with hetero affairs
-- otherwise they would make perfect husbands! Of
course, marriages were essential for dynastic
purposes not romantic ones, so aristos needed to
amuse themselves on the side wherever they could.
S-L liked Gilberte also because she was also a
gomorrhan (the strange attraction between inverts)
and he hoped to share her girlfriends in
threesomes (or n-somes).
The volume ends with a nice circular narrative
revisit to the walks at Combray, staying with S-L
but increasingly just with Gilberte (at their
place in Tansonville) and in the evening. More
background is filled in. G was in love with Tosher
when they met as kids, but she was already
initiated into sexplay with the local lads and was
too forward and vulgar in her attempts to involve
him. Later, the young lad she was walking with
when he was on his way to meet her with the
flowers he had bought from selling his aunts'
pottery which led to him not making up with her
(keep up!) was Lea in drag. G was not that wealthy
after all because de Fourcheville had spent all
the dough. Odette was now also skint. S-L supplied
her with cash to buy rubies and in exchange she
had to keep G sweet while S-L went on holiday with
Morel. What an eye-opener!
The Méséglises and Guermantes Ways (as country
walks) in fact were connected by short paths
( so the social trajectories might be). The
countryside had lost its charm though and looked
provincial. It was all coming into perspective. No
music was involved at this stage.
Volume 12 Time Regained
At last! 10 weeks after I started in July
2014 ( a lot to get through here though)
We begin with lots of summary about the S-Ls and
their marriage, the gay scene and Albertine and
her possible proclivities. S-L turns out to be a
real bastard towards Gilberte, telling lies about
his assignations. There is some apology for male
homosexuality as natural, even genetic, and
repetition of the remark that they make excellent
husbands, but have to stay furtive, and pursue
unsatisfying encounters with women ('beards' in
2014 parlance) to keep up appearances.
Matey is obviously steeling himself to actually
start writing after all, as we know. At
Tansonville, he reads a diary by M Goncourt which
describes the same salons and gatherings at the
Verdurins that Matey himself attended long ago.
The diaries are really detailed and descriptive
and quoted at some length -- the wonderful
crockery, the costumes, the detailed conversations
and observations of the personal appearances of
the likes of Cottard and Bichot (and Swann).
Narrator realizes he really must focus his mind on
hese details but that he will never be that sort
of descriptive writer -- he is more interested in
psychological themes in his characters and how
they combine to produce specifics (in other words
a machinic approach for Guattari). A bit of
metafiction too!
Narrator has to attend a sanatorium for two
periods and returns to Paris in 1914 and then 1916
( this moves things on nicely and prevents him
being called up I assume). On his first return he
notices first that women's fashions have changed
--shorter skirts, simpler but still glamorous as a
duty to cheer up the poilus (no longer a
contemptuous term). Faces at the salons are
younger and they know less about the backgrounds
of the people they meet. The old hands look really
ancient. New words are in fashion, including
limogé (could be 'dismissed', one of those
words that mark people socially in ways which are
entirely mysterious to outsiders). The War hardly
affects the aristos (or the Parisian lowlife)
except that it provides a new theme for the
Verdurins and others. The Bontemps re-enter the
scene briefly. Dreyfus has ceased to be a major
fault line. Now people come to the Verdurins
because they want to discuss the War, as armchair
strategists, and some assume they will get inside
info there (which the blokes pretend to supply).
S-L says he is scared to rejoin his regiment while
trying everything he can to do so and stay in
it. Bloch is all gung-ho until he is called
up.
S-L and he discuss the War in a light and witty
way, resuming their conversations at Doncieres
about whether there are general laws or not.
Mastery is constantly analogizing with the
treachery and lies told by individuals, and he
essays a methodological individualism in
suggesting that nations are only like assemblages
of individuals. The discussion is referenced
this time, with dates of 1918. Paris suffers
air-raids from Zeppelins and Gothas, and parts of
the city are blacked out at night. S-L
describes aerial combat in musical terms (air raid
sirens as Wagnerian, fighters as valkyries
etc --not very extensive).
Matey meets an aged and bloated de C in the
backstreets (de C is following two Zouaves). De C
prefers mature men but there is getting to be a
shortage of those ( which has also affected the
Verdurin soirees), so, like those marooned in the
colonies, he has to turn to very young boys.
However, de C gets treated much more
sympathetically, a trend that began in the last
volume. He is seen as really witty and poetic in
his attempts to amuse people with his stories and
knowledge, but badly misunderstood by the
newcomers. He has been constantly rubbished in
press articles by Morel among others. Morel's
style is based on channeling Bergotte. Mme
Verdurin continues to diss him, now suggesting
that he is a German spy! (de C does have mixed
ancestry and a couple of hereditary German
titles).
We learn, off hand, that M Verdurin and Brichot
have died. Mme V carries on the soirees alone.
The posturing of the blokes on war is further
discussed (excellent demo of how Proust can write
convincingly detailed personal dialogue). It
is very dense at times, referring to figures like
Caillaux (who seemed to have had a very exotic
time as former Premier of France, accused of
appeasing the Germans, then secretly negotiating
with them, and having a wife who shoots dead the
editor of Figaro when he exposes an affair
in a crime passionel -- see Wikipedia].
Brichot is able to sprinkle his growing collection
of Figaro articles with his erudition (it
is not all windbaggery, which he seem able to
moderate), and gains a public audience for the
first time, much to Mme Verdurins's chagrin: she
retaliates by getting her guests to ridicule his
poor style. [NB Matey also got an article printed
in Figaro, which served as his way back into salon
life after the detah of Albertine]. Norpois also
writes a lot and makes absurdly confident claims
about what he knows will happen, based, as de C
says, simply on what he wishes will happen. De C
pursues a strangely feudal commentary on the War,
claiming to be personal friends of all the
monarchs involved (except the English ones, who he
doesn't like), describing their admirable
characters, claiming insights to their actions
based on their memberships of obscure European
orders like the Order of Malta, and finding
character traits in their heredity. He claims the
Prussians are so proud and martial that demanding
unconditional surrender and punitive
reparations(an English demand) is
counterproductive. His admiration is expressed
loudly to Matey in a public boulevard and a
menacing crowd gathers He assuages them a
bit with a paean of praise about the poilus and
even the English Tommy but says they are
especially brave in confronting the heroic martial
race of Prussia. Luckil they have been walking and
finally shake off the knot of men.
De C throws out hints that he would like to meet
Morel again. An intreresting commentary ensues.
Matey says Morel would insist that any future
relations would only be chaste. This happens with
women in hetero relations, Dickhead says: they see
a man is desperately in love with them, string
them along, and then agree to resume meeting only
on a non-sexual basis, having skilfully calculated
the moment when the bloke will agree. They do this
knowing they will get as many gifts and presents
without having to put out for them. This is an odd
bit for Guattari's thesis that the novel is all
about becoming-woman. It is clearly insightful,
but could be read as matter-of-fact/uncritical or
as hostile to women. I must say that since
reading Freud, it has dawned on me that sexual
intercourse itself must have been full of terrors
for women even with husbands -- pregnancies with
all the serious pain and risk of childbirth, the
risk of STDs, and not even much chance of orgasms.
Hero did mention once mention the douche as a form
of birth control but no doubt the Catholic church
would forbid even that. So it might be a more
sympathetic insight to explain how women
steered away from full sex ( although there are
also many mentions of 'caresses'). It also implies
a female interest in the double standard -- men
could get full sex from prostitutes and not
risk their wives or mistresses (although we know
many did) .
A running theme about class returns, with
Francoise being wound up by the butler's
blood-curdling exaggerations about the War. She is
superstitious and peasant-like. He and she
comically mispronounce words, even when
corrected: they think they have some sort of
democratic right to do so.
Then an amazing episode. Matey wanders in the
partially lit suburbs and finds himself tired and
unable to find a cab (he is cruising in other
words). Only one hotel is open but it looks
dubious, with lots of men and soldiers of
different nationalities wandering in and out. One
might even be S-L. He is forced to go in (yeah,
right!) thinking it might be a place full of
spies, and the inmates are pretty dodgy looking
too. He asks for a room for a couple of hours
(others have been refused -- not gays?) and a
drink. He hears the men talking about someone
being in chains and being whipped and thinks it
must be a prison with a torture cell, so he sneaks
upstairs to find out. Whipping and groaning is
coming from a room so he goes next door and looks
through a peephole (purely to find out what is
happening of course, not for any voyeuristic
pleasure, dear me no). Inside is de C being
whipped, evidently for pleasure -- but not hard
enough for his liking. Quelle surprise! ( These
coincidences are really wearing thin by now. I
have tried to go along with it, suspending
disbelief as one does, but these encounters
have obviously all been prearranged. Of
course, if they were real, they would have to be
fictionalized to prevent prosecution). The
patron comes in to suggest replacement whippers,
telling stories of having found murderers and
slaughtermen who will be cruel, and bringing some
nice new chains.
In fact, the whippers are nice normal people who
are kind to everyone and spend their ill-gotten
gains on supporting aged relatives and their
brothers at the Front, to the chagrin of de C.
Plonker speculates how it is they have become
involved in this degrading activity and concludes
it is anomie exaggerated by the War. De C is
different. He is on the slide towards degradation
due to age and ugliness, but he also relishes
masochism for its theatricality/poetry and its
medieval connotations in his case ( old fashioned
chains and whips). However, the other
working class inverts have degenerated physically,
they show the signs on their faces and bodies --
ugly disfigurements, or an inability tomatch
facial expression with words. De C has already
shown himself to still be poetic, by imagining the
air raids as burying Paris under rubble, to be
excavated in the future to form a modern Pompeii
(Sodom is also connected).
Matey dodges out and meets on the stairs --
Jupien. J is the manager of this brothel, and de
C is the owner. Matey hides next door again
as de C re-enters the room,having paid his 50
francs, and much flirting ensues with the dodgy
clientele. Matey learns that servicement are
especially welcome, including Scots in their
kilts, and Canadians with their
old-fashioned French: Scots are described as
offering 'lacustrine' pleasures ( something to do
with lakes?). Groping in subways is also now very
popular, taking advantage of the blackouts: the
gays like it because there is no need for speech
and you can claim it is all a mistake if anyone
objects.
S-L dies heroically leading his men. We discover
it is he who has left his Croix de Guerre in
Jupien's brothel (I guessed as soon as one of the
blokes announced he had found one). Narrator gives
him a kind of standard obituary (reminiscent of
the typical ones in Bourdieu), and noting how S-L
had been significant at differnt stages of the
story, threaded through hismemories . S-L's final
legacy is to posthumously rescue Morel, who has
been arrested as a deserter and in his defence is
threatening to spill the beans about de C and
another aristo. N says both were horrified to hear
of the other. The Army decides to cover up,
unwilling to risk dragging in S-L , and just send
Morel back to the Front -- where he performs
bravely and earns his own Croix de Guerre. N.
offers asides on heroes who did not that well
after the War in politics though, which was
promptly dominated by the old politicos again.
Then another bit of metafiction. Proust himself
intervenes to tell us that everything so far has
been fictitious, devised to suit his presentation,
this is not even a roman a
clef (p. 149 if you need to check). But
there really was a heroic family who rallied round
to run a shop after a son was killed in the War,
even though they had made their money and retired
-- the Larivières -- and he wants to give them a
mention. A realist device? All legally necessary
by this time?
Matey return to Paris after another long spell in
the sanatorium, admires the countryside but not in
that old ecstatic way. He broods about having lost
any pretension to be a writer as a result. He sees
it as a pose after all and decides to give up
altogether and just enjoy the simple pleasures
which he had denied himself before ( or combined
with a sense of guilt that he was not writing). He
sets off to an afternoon with the Guermantes,
determined just to enjoy it. En route -- he meets
de C and Jupien. De C is really old and decrepit,
losing his ability to use the right words and
pronunciations, which horrifies his acquaintances,
but Matey finds him still sharp under the
crumbling facade, and able to pass by pretending
he meant (wrong) words poetically. Jupien tells
him de C went blind once but recovered, and, in
the process, found himself groping a young man --
who turned out to be 10 years old.
Then -- the miracle, induced no doubt (in my view
anyway) by the pressure to write being lifted.
Matey gets able to deploy his romantic gaze again.
The streets en route remind him of visiting the
Champs Elysées with Francoise. He feels he is
moving back, lifted, towards the peaks of memory.
He descends from the carriage and steps on some
uneven stones (much made of this in Guattari),
which prompts a memory in the recesses of his
mind. He captures it -- uneven stones in Venice
with all the memories of that day. He thinks of
other prompts -- the madeleine, the trees in
Balbec, the sound of the spoon on the cup of tea,
and hammer blows (maybe the wheeltapper checking
the train on one of his journeys who is mentioned
somewhere?) . Ecstatic pleasure ensues as he
revels in these pleasurable and subjective
experiences. Memory does not just record or get
meaning from current interests: events in memories
have lives and significance of their own. He could
write about that!
We enter a long pedagogic section in which Proust
(who has probably taken over now) seems to
be working towards Husserl
and phenomenology. Items in the past are
connected with items in the present in subjective
time (Time itself according to matey) . The
connection reveals something essential about them,
something transcending everyday life. The
empirical is a realm of what he calls symbols
(which assumes shared meanings?) that points to
these essentials (no systematic method to infer
esences though, no programme of systematic noetic
and noematic variation as in Husserl, only
artistic intuition, inevitably elitist). Empirical
forms of understanding (rational and intellectual
ones) are therefore limited (and,naturally,
it is all individual, although Proust/Narrator can
see the social origins of everyone else's beliefs)
. There is even a transcendental ego emerging,
commenting on the empirical ego and its
experiences, and soaring ecstatically above it.
Why fear death any more (merely empirical) ? Why
not relish the past as immeasurably enriching
current experience? (A claim for artistic
distinction and bourgeois sensibility , as in
Bourdieu?). He tends to see this other level as
real (unlike Husserl who says we cannot know), and
no doubt Deleuze liked that choice too, despite
hints of transcendentalism ( which Deleuze opposes in
favour of the notion of virtual reality ). This is
what Proust/Narrator will now write about, using
his own past, to tell readers of these
philsosophical and moral insights (fantasies of
the public role of the writer?)
These phenomenological insights are pursued, and
rendered as a a description of the artistic
process. We are told that the artist goes
inside (reminiscent of the last motto of Cartesian Meditations
[that truth lies in the inner man]) , discovering
the relations between things that seem unrelated,
in order to generate some insight about
connections and thus essences. [Bugger!
Someone else has noticed this too --
Morrison and Stack (1968) [!] 'Proust and
Phenomenology', Man and World 1: 604--17.
Others have claimed that Proust had read Bergson).
Artists have to do this by treating things as
signs (not symbols this time), and becoming a
creative artist is to undergo an apprenticeship in
reading the signs (a phrase that Deleuze
particularly likes). Experience is to be
seen as providing the raw material. Proust
sounds a bit like Durkheim in arguing that most
ordinary people are quite capable of seeing these
connections, but they stick with the limits
of the empirical and the immediate, whereas it
takes a more abstract mission to thoroughly
explore them (I think it is not just artists who
do this of course but so do systematic social
theorists, including Durkheim or Marx, or any of
the heroes operating with the notion of an
immanent structure or base to social life).
Proust makes another favourite Deleuzian point
(mentioned also in Guattari) by saying that
artists are as interested in this underlying
structural dimension as scientists, although they
might have a different motivation: they are driven
by passion, including emotional suffering, to
explore the deeper dimensions of love affairs or
social relations. The hints already offered
about moving through a sequence of specific loves
-- Gilberte, Mme de Guermantes, Albertine -- in
order to understand love itself are mentioned
again. Maybe this is becoming-woman again?
The Narrator seems back in control with these
examples from the earlier stories, not the
omniscient philsosophical Proust. This is why
artists have to 'regain time', release the
synthesising powers of subjective time to deepen
the present.
There is a consolatory tone in all this
though. All the passions and suffering of
the past can be seen as leading to this great
insight after all, and nothing human is alien
either, so that the rather predatory and sordid
gays described at length earlier can also be seen
as exploring human relationships, as showing signs
of real understanding and real emotion underneath
what looks like rather vulgar interactions.
Again, though, you have to be an artist to see the
genuine affection and the real humanity in gay
quickies. I still think there is more than a hint
that only some of us can be artists, and not only
because only some of us have the financial and
cultural security to devote ourselves to art: the
long apprenticehip is really a lengthy development
of the bourgeois habitus.
The discourse used to organize these reflections
is one that turns on painting rather than music,
however. Painters, we are told, do not just
copy reality, but paint combinations of what they
see now with what they have seen or felt before,
not just the colour of the leaf in front of them,
but memories of other colours and other leaves
that combine in subjective time, and add in all
sorts of emotional contexts. Realistic forms
of depiction, whether it is 'cinematographic'
visuals, or the sort of realistic and literal
descriptive writing in Goncourt's diaries is
inadequate in still operating at the empirical
level, as is empirical science (and there is a
hint of a Deleuzian criticism of the everyday
pragmatic reality that most of us inhabit).
Artists have to make long and arduous efforts to
break with these limits to choose a suitable
project (heroes!) . In a similar argument,
painters assemble their work from components,
including components of faces but also components
of bodies like the arms, which are derived from a
number of sources, and which are united together
on the canvas through a kind of emotional,
passionate even, subjective synthesis as with
landscapes or still lives.
After speculating about dreams and their reality,
he can't decide on the issue of the reality of his
waking mental life so he settles for
persepctivalism and reminds us that Swann seemed
very different to different characters, as did
Rachel or Albertine. He says that doubtless,
Germany and France look different at different
times, denying any essentialism. This helps him
see the power and dangers of stereotyping and
represents the most insightful, 'philosophical'
point of the meditation.
Then he gets an unsettling shock on actually
entering the drawing room: it is full of strange
old ugly people. Everyone he knew has aged
considerably and in some cases unrecognisably. He
tries to unify older kinder perceptions with
current ones, having just discovered the power to
do so -- but can't with this material (why not --
one day he might discover intentionality? Perhaps
it is the intrusion of objective Time as a rebuke
to his earlier speculations? It is also,
doubtless, bourgeois horror of the body). He
remains horrified at the changes in their bodies
and faces (more faciality stuff, noticing
particular features like bloated noses and cheeks,
and especially hair colour; bodies are also
coarsened, fattened, disabled). Other changes are
also apparent -- Bloch, who now, ironically,
looks like the very Jewish Bloch Snr, has become
fully integrated/Frenchified and changed his name.
Finally it dawns on Doughnut himself -- he has
aged as well in the eyes of others (we get close
to the notion of a looking-glass self) and
is also less recognizable even though he has kept
his dark hair. This is the negative and objective
effect of Time, and it nearly puts him off writing
again (Get over it! Get back to thinking machinic,
ya prick!).
The ravaging effects of age are disgusting,
especially in close-up -- patches of oily skin!
There are some anomalies. Some have lasted better
than others if they have avoided alcohol --and
salt. Gilberte is now stout and matronly, but
Odette has lasted well (but is to succumb to
mental fraility we are told). Old emnities are
forgotten -- kindness comes with maturity. Morel
has just been congratulated by a judge in a court
action for his moral stance. New marriages have
occurred --Mme Verdurin has got through a
remarriage to a minor duke and is now married to a
major one -- the Prince of Guermantes. There are
newcomers, including some who would never have
been admitted before. They display a lack of
knowledge about the intricate social connections
among the elderly (funny -- I was just reading
Bourdieu about how people misrecognise the effects
of kinship among social elites because only common
surnames are visible while links with step-kin,
cousins, nephews etc are concealed). Thus (one of
many examples) people think Gilberte was
introduced to the fauborg St-Germain through her
husband de Fourcheville, not her dad Swann (who
has now been largely forgotten despite his early
importance). Matey and Gilberte discuss memories
of S-L -- rather polite ones.
There is a general catching up, all around the
same theme of comparing deep undertsandings
basedon elapsed shared time (shared duree as
Schutz calls it) with the impressions of
newcomers. Rachel appears (as a hideous old woman)
at the soiree reciting some verses, for example,
now a famous actress, but some in the audience
know she was once a cheap whore -- including matey
and Gilberte. Gilberte gets in a dig, reminiscent
of her father, about the exaggerated
performance of Rachel's recitation. We catch up
with Berma, isolated and shunned by contrast,
terminally ill, who had a rival event chez elle
but no-one turned up and even her daughter and
son-in-law left to go to the Verdurin do instead
-- so Rachel was able to score lots of points by
making them wait outside for a bit before
admitting them with deep apologies. Oriane is a
shadow of her former self and her attempts at
Guermantes wit fall flat or are
unrecognised. Her husband the Duc is keeping
Odette. Albertine is as forgotten as Swann,
and Tosser reminisces about the contingent nature
of all the meetings and partings that weave all
the participants together.
He mentions a novel François le Champi as
having had an influence,and it later becomes oneof
those contingencies that guide him through
networks ( as below -- he sees it in the Duc de
Guermantes' library while waiting to attend the
recital). It is a novel by George Sands. It is
only mentioned briefly in this volume, and, I am
reminded by the excellent series
of notes on Proust that it appeared in Vol 1
as well as one of the things Mama read to him in
bed. The compiler of the notes says it is a novel
about country life and incest, so we can now see
the point. The same commentary also points out
that the petit madeleine was probably actually a
rusk, but Kristeva (no less) asks 'what lurks behind the
transformation of the prosaic biscuit into a name
possessed by a female sinner, then by a saint, and
finally by a common sweetmeat' .
He develops this idea as a series of networks of
roads ending in a crossroad which is one
individual . It happens to be Gilberte's duaghter,
a nice young girl (oh no -- she is described as
the new Albertine). She unites the Méséglise Way
(Swann) and the Guermantes Way (S-L via Gilberte).
Many things connect the ways, including Vinteuil's
music, but it is not prominent as a metaphor here
and others include Francoise's beef terrine with
lots of other meats, and painting again. And the
George Sands novel. A final try-out for faciality
occurs in the middle of a final speculation about
whether emotions are real or not -- sometimes
faces are just blank screens on to which we
project components .
There is an aside about death and how works
survive people, while different selves die ( the
theme of multiple selvces has arisne now and then
before): it gets to worry Matey about his
own developing feebleness and loss of
memory, and whether he will now live long enough
to complete the Great Work.
It all ends with a Bergson-like insight into Time.
Matey sees himself as perched at the apex of a
great duration (he does use that term but not
quite in that context). Time not space is the
great dimension which people occupy.
And then -- it is over, mes amis...
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