Day One Hundred Seventy-Six: Finding Time Again, pp. 191-211

From "On the subject of books, I had remembered ..." through "... and to have died for my benefit."

_____

A copy of George Sand's François le Champi in the Prince's library reminds the narrator of the night his mother spent in his room, reading the book to him, and "a thousand insignificant details from Combray, unglimpsed for a very long time, came tumbling helter-skelter of their own accord."

[T]hings -- a book in its red binding, like the rest -- at the moment we notice them, turn within us into something immaterial, akin to all the preoccupations or sensations we have at that particular time, and mingle indissolubly with them. Some name, read long ago in a book, contains among its syllables the strong wind and bright sunlight of the day when we were reading it. Thus the sort of literature which is content to "describe things," to provide nothing more of them than a miserable list of lines and surfaces, despite calling itself realist, is the furthest away from reality, the most impoverishing and depressing, because it unceremoniously cuts all communication between or present self and the past, the essence of which is is retained in things, and the future, where things prompt us to enjoy it afresh. 

This takes us back to the beginning of this volume and the Goncourt parody, when he berated himself for his inability to see and hear as the Goncourts did, to record the minute details of a scene. Now such minutiae are dismissed as "a miserable list of lines and surfaces."

He recalls the night his mother read François le Champi to him as "perhaps the loveliest and saddest night of my life, when I had alas! ... obtained from my parents their first surrendering of authority, from which I would later come to date the decline of my health and my will." On the other hand, he regards this one as a "most glorious day" on which the discovery of the book in the Guermantes' library "illuminated not only the old fumblings of my thoughts, but even the purpose of my life and perhaps of art."

What we call reality is a certain relationship between these sensations and the memories which surround us simultaneously -- a relationship which is suppressed in a simple cinematographic vision, which actually moves further away from truth the more it professes to be confined to it -- a unique relationship which the writer has to rediscover in order to bring its two different terms together permanently in his sentence. 

What the writer does is "the analogue in the world of art of the unique relation created in the world of science by the laws of causality." The writer's task is to "translate" what "already exists within each of us."

How could a purely descriptive literature have any value at all, when reality lies hidden beneath the surface of little things of the sort it documents (grandeur in the distant sound of an aeroplane, or in the outline of the steeple of Saint-Hilaire, the past in the taste of a madeleine, etc.) so that the things have no meaning in themselves until it is disentangled from them?

We run the risk "of dying without having known" the reality "which is quite simply our life."  But more than that, art enables us to glimpse the reality that is other people's lives:

It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon. Thanks to art, ... we ... have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists. 

Art also undoes the work of the narrator's old nemesis, habit:

The work carried out by our vanity, our passions, our imitative faculties, our abstract intelligence, our habits, is the work that art undoes, making us follow a contrary path, in a return to the depths where whatever has really existed lies unrecognized within us.

And he recognizes that this is the path he must follow if he still wants to be an artist: "I needed to restore to even the slightest of the signs which surrounded me (Guermantes, Albertine, Gilberte, Saint-Loup, Balbec, etc.) the meaning which habit had made them lose for me." He realizes that "the work of art was the only means of finding Lost Time again." He resolves to find in his life the materials for his novel, not transcribing the events of his life, but searching through it for the pieces he can assemble into fiction:

The stupidest people manifest by their gestures, their comments, their involuntarily expressed feelings, laws of which they are unaware but which the artist manages to catch in them. Because of observations of this sort, the writer is commonly thought to be malicious, wrongly so, because in an idiosyncrasy the artist sees a beautiful generality and no more holds it against the person observed than a surgeon would dismiss someone for suffering from a common circulation disorder.... In every work of art one can recognize those the artist hated most and also, alas! those whom he loved best. All they have done is to pose for the artist at the moment when, against his will, they were causing him the most suffering.

To succeed as an artist he realizes that he needs to be willing to use what life has presented him, and to distance himself from those whom he has loved, including Albertine and his grandmother: "All those people who had revealed truths to me, and who now were no longer living, appeared to me to have lived lives which had profited only myself, and to have died for my benefit."

Day One Hundred Fifty-Five: The Fugitive, pp. 387-410*

*The Fugitive begins on page 387 of the Penguin Classics paperback that also includes The Prisoner

Chapter I: Grieving and Forgetting, through "...saying to myself, 'I have returned her shot, on the volley.'"

_____

The narrator predictably goes through an emotional meltdown on hearing that Albertine has left, beginning with denial, in which "feeling as gentle with myself as my mother had been with my grandmother on her deathbed," he tells himself, "None of this is of any importance." He reads her farewell note and tries to persuade himself that "she does not believe a word of all this" and will be home by evening. "And at the same time I was calculating whether I would have time that morning to go out and buy the yacht and the Rolls-Royce that she desired, and, abandoning all hesitation, did not consider for a moment that I had thought it rather unwise to make her this gift."

He reflects, not for the first time, on the nature of habit:

I suddenly saw Habit in a completely new perspective. Until now I had considered it above all as a negative force suppressing the originality and even our awareness of our perceptions; now I saw it as a fearsome goddess, so attached to us, with her inscrutable face so grafted on to our hearts that if she detaches herself and turns away from us, this deity, whose presence we were barely able to discern, inflicts upon us the most terrible suffering, and then she is as cruel as death.

He berates himself for not taking notice of the warning signs, including "the sound of a suddenly opened window," but instead rationalizing away her discontent: "It is life which little by little, case by case, allows us to realize that what is most important for our hearts or our minds is taught us not by reason but by other powers." Even when he had imagined her leaving him, he could not have foreseen "the unimaginable hell that Françoise had allowed me to glimpse when she said, 'Miss Albertine has left.'"

all the worries that I had felt since I was a child ... had been solicited by this new source of anxiety and had rushed to reinforce it, amalgamating themselves with it into one homogeneous mass which suffocated me.

The experience is worse than his with his previous infatuations, with Mme. de Guermantes and Gilberte, because he "had never tasted sensual pleasure" with them, and his "love for them lacked the all-powerful element of Habit." But this experience also brings out his pride: "I did want her to return, but did not want to be seen to care."

He now remembers that he had been experiencing panic attacks that he had been trying to deny, and that although he had been able to talk himself out of the idea that she might leave him, "when I found her still there when I rang for her in the morning, I had breathed an enormous sigh of relief." Which made the news of her leaving harder to bear because it was "the one unthinkable event, a departure somehow sensed several days in advance, despite my logical reasons for being reassured." As intricate the narrator's self-analysis here may be, it is nonetheless one of the most acute and finely observed accounts of the emotions and rationalizations surrounding such an experience that can be found in literature.

On the street, he sees a little girl and takes her home with him, where he "rocked her for a while on my knees." But the experience only heightens the pain of Albertine's absence and he sends her home with five hundred francs. Having learned that Albertine has left for Touraine, where her aunt lives, he enlists Saint-Loup in his efforts, sending him to put pressure on Mme. Bontemps, even bribing her, to make Albertine return. Saint-Loup is surprised to learn that Albertine has been living there all this time, and when the narrator shows him her picture, "His face registered a surprise that bordered on stupefaction. 'Is this the girl that you love?' he said finally, in a voice whose astonishment was muted by the fear of offending me." He recalls that he was similarly unimpressed by Rachel:

It is ... likely perhaps that the person whose every move is anxiously anticipated by her lover, with all the awe that would be due to a deity, appears as an inconsequential person, only too pleased to do anything required, in the eyes of a man who does not love her, as did Saint-Loup's mistress for me.

The plan is for Saint-Loup to offer Mme. Bontemps "thirty thousand francs for her husband's electoral committee." Saint-Loup protests that if she's that dishonest, "three thousand francs would be enough," but the narrator is not willing to low-ball on anything so important to him. Saint-Loup gives in:

"And although I find it rather odd to set up such a blatant deal, I know well that even in our own circles there are duchesses, even the most strait-laced, who would do more embarrassing things for thirty thousand francs than tell their nieces not to stay in Touraine."

Day Seventy-Eight: The Guermantes Way, pp. 126-137

From "One morning, Saint-Loup confessed that he had..." to "...retained all that brightness for themselves."

_____

At Saint-Loup's suggestion, the narrator's grandmother telephones him, a "time-consuming and inconvenient" process that involves going to the post office and waiting for her call. It also produces a characteristically Proustian account of the then unfamiliar business of talking on the phone, including some rather twee personifications of telephone operators as "the Vigilant Virgins ... the All-Powerful Ones who conjure absent beings to our presence ... the Danaids of the unseen ... the ironic Furies ... the forever fractious servants of the Mysteries ... the shadowy priestesses of the Invisible ... the Young Ladies of the Telephone!" And when his grandmother does come on the line, "the isolation of the voice was like a symbol, an evocation, a direct consequence of another isoation, that of my grandmother, separated from me for the first time." 

The result is that homesickness wells up in him and he decides to return to Paris. Circumstances prevent him from saying good-bye to Saint-Loup before his departure, but he leaves nevertheless: "I had to free myself as quickly as possible, in her arms, from the ghostly image, unsuspected until now but suddenly evoked by her voice, of a grandmother who was really separated from me." It's an oddly powerful suggestion of the impact that the telephone might have had, at least on someone as sensitive as the narrator, in its early days. 

And he has another shock coming when he sees his grandmother, unaware of his arrival, after what has been apparently only a couple of weeks' absence.

We never see those who are dear to us except in the animated workings, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which, before allowing the images their faces represent to reach us, draws them into its vortex, flings them back onto the idea we have always had, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it.

Habit has made him "neglect what had become dulled and change about her," so that "for the first time and for a mere second, since she vanished almost immediately, I saw, sitting there on the sofa beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy, and vulgar, ill, her mind in a daze, the slightly crazed eyes wandering over a book, a crushed old woman whom I did not know." Has separation from home made the narrator grow up a little?

On the other hand, his obsession with Mme. de Guermantes has not faded, and he is disappointed that Saint-Loup has evidently forgotten to write to her about giving him permission to see her paintings by Elstir, for he receives no invitation to do so.     

Day Seventy-Four: The Guermantes Way, pp. 75-85

From "But as it happened, I was wrong...." to "...These thoughts carried me far." 

_____

Instead of pining away in his hotel room, the narrator explores the hotel, which takes up only a portion of a former palace, with "passages winding back on themselves" and "lobbies as long as corridors." There's an Alice in Wonderland quality to the narrator's explorations, in which the rooms themselves take on human traits and personalities: "behind a hanging curtain I discovered nothing more than a small closet whose escape had been blocked by the outer wall, hiding there rather sheepishly, staring at me in fright from its little round window, turned blue by the moonlight." 

There follows an extended reverie on the nature of sleep and dreams, as an escape from habit: 

The same is true of sleep as of our perception of the external world. It needs only some modification in our habits to make it poetic; we need only to have dozed off involuntarily on top of the bed while undressing for the dimensions of sleep to be altered and its beauty felt. 

He makes clear the point of these passages -- "to describe human life" -- by noting that it's impossible to do so "without bathing it in the sleep into which it plunges, and which, night after night, encircles it like the sea around a promontory.... In the end, the world in which we live when we are asleep is so different that the foremost concern of people who have difficult in going to sleep is to escape from the waking world." 

And so he analyzes the different kinds of sleep and dreams, including the deepest, "leaden sleep" -- the kind of sleep, when we wake from it, "Identity has vanished," and we have trouble placing not only where we are, but even who we are:

So how, then, searching for our thoughts, our identities, as we search for lost objects, do we eventually recover our own self rather than any other? Why, when we regain consciousness, is it not an identity other than the one we had previously that is embodied in us? ... The resurrection that takes place when we wake up -- after the beneficent attack of mental derangement we call sleep -- must in the end be similar to what happens when we recall a name, a line of poetry, or a refrain we had forgotten. And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is to be thought of as a phenomenon of memory.

He is now afflicted by an anxiety attack, uncontrollable worries about his grandmother and various unnamed "business" in Paris, which spur him to send for the ever-patient Saint-Loup. 

He would listen to my explanation and respond pertinently; but before he had uttered a world he had transformed me into his own likeness; compared with the important duties that had kept him so busy, so alert, so happy, the worries that a moment ago I had been unable to endure a second longer seemed to me as negligible as they did to him. 

Who needs Paxil when you've got Saint-Loup? 

He begins to venture out to see Saint-Loup's regiment performing its maneuvers and to revert "to the healthy exhaustion of my childhood in Combray."  

Day Forty-Eight: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 246-259

From "She was in a tea gown of cotton cambric..." to "...by 'persons unknown to him.'"

_____

If the infantilizing of the narrator wasn't already clear enough, his account of his attachment to his grandmother raises some curious psychosexual questions:

Whenever my mouth was on her cheeks or her forehead, I drew from them something so nourishing, so beneficent, that I had all the immobility, gravity, and placid gluttony of an infant on the breast.

Of course, not all the questions raised are about the narrator. The grandmother comes in for her share of them, too:

She took such pleasure in any trouble that spared me trouble, such delight in a moment of rest and peace for my weary limbs, that when I tried to prevent her helping me untie my laces and get ready for bed, making as though to undress myself, her pleading glance halted my hands, which were already on my boots and the first buttons of my jacket.

We realize here that we're dealing with a late 19th-century, pre-Freudian attitude toward sexuality -- one that Proust's novel would do much to demolish. The narrator reveals here the extent to which he -- an only child, a gifted and sickly one -- has been spoiled. The question is how much of his sickliness (and perhaps his giftedness) arose from this upbringing.

His word for being spoiled, for his fear of being torn from all that makes him feel secure, is "habit." But he also projects his fear on external objects, on "the loweliest, most obscure, organic, and all-but-unconscious refusal, by the things that make up the best of our present life, to countenance even our theoretical acceptance of a possible future without them: a refusal which was the core of the horror I had so often felt at the thought that my parents would one day be dead, that the requirements of life might force me to live apart from Gilberte or just make me settle for good in a country where I would never see my friends again."

Habit resists change, but paradoxically can also promote change: It can "endear to us people whom we disliked." It "alters the shape of their faces, improves their tone of voice, makes hearts grow fonder." This is "the analgesia of habit." But until it sets in, we fear change -- the loss of family, friends, places we are used to -- because if we accept it, "that would mean our actual self had changed, ... it would amount to a death of our self, albeit followed by a resurrection, but a resurrection in the form of a different self." So that even becoming used to sleeping in a different bedroom becomes a kind of death of the self: "the anguish and alarm I felt when lying beneath a ceiling that was unknown and too high was nothing but the protest of my surviving attachment to a ceiling that was known and lower. No doubt that attachment would end and be replaced by another: first death, then a new life would have done their dual work at the behest of Habit."

But these are night thoughts. When the morning comes, and the effect of the sea and the sun upon it takes hold, his curiosity about the place revives. And we have some wonderful portraits of the types of people who visit this Grand-Hôtel of Balbec, snobs of various orders, including the woman who arrives with her staff and even her own draperies and furnishings, so that "instead of adapting to the outside world, she could erect between it and herself a bulkhead of habit so deftly constructed that it was her own home, with her inside it, that had done the traveling, and not her."

Day Forty-Six: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 217-234

From "By the time my grandmother and I..." to "...for once as a single lasting picture." 
_____
Proust begins the section called "Place-Names: The Place" with a recapitulation of what might be called the "madeleine theory" of memory, or as the narrator puts it, "the general laws of remembering," which are predicated on the fact that memories are often spontaneously generated by similar sensory events that, when we experienced them in other contexts, we thought too trivial to notice: sights, sounds, scents, tastes -- like that of the tea-soaked crumbs of a madeleine.

Habit weakens all things; but the things that are best at reminding us of a person are those which, because they were insignificant, we have forgotten, and which have therefore lost none of their power. Which is why the greater part of our memory exists outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn's first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having no use for it, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again.

Having finally made the journey to Balbec, and convincing himself that he "had reached a state of almost complete indifference toward Gilberte," he still finds that life is "unchronological" and "anachronistic in its disordering of our days." He sometimes finds himself "living farther back in time than I had been on the day or two before, back in the much earlier time when I had been in love with Gilberte." Overhearing some words spoken by a passing stranger recalls a similar phrase from a conversation Gilberte had once had with her father.

The temporal disorientation lasts only briefly, however, because "his life at Balbec was free of the habits that in usual circumstances would have helped it prevail."

Habit may weaken all things, but it also stabilizes them; it brings about a dislocation, but then makes it last indefinitely. For years past, I had been roughly modeling my state of mind each day on my state of mind the day before. At Balbec, breakfast in bed -- a different breakfast -- was to be incapable of nourishing the ideas on which my love for Gilberte had fed in Paris.The trip itself puts him once again in the hands of the women who have coddled him, not only his mother but also his grandmother and Françoise. And this man whom we have seen holding his own with Bergotte, listening to the grownup conversations in Mme. Swann's salon, selling his Aunt Léonie's bequest to woo Gilberte, and spending his time with prostitutes, is once again reduced to the emotional state of a little boy fearing separation from his mother.

Or as he puts it another way: "the best way to gain time is to change place."

On the other hand, the process of changing place seems to cast him back into a second childhood, in which all his childish attachment to his mother is restored. And his enthusiasm for seeing this place he has dreamed of is tempered by his awareness that he will probably be in some way disappointed or disillusioned: "Long before going to see La Berma, ... I had learned that whatever I longed for would be mine only at the end of a painful pursuit; and that this supreme goal could be achieved only on condition that I sacrifice to it the pleasure I had hoped to find in it."

Day Nine: Swann's Way, pp. 102-117

From "While I read in the garden ..." to "... all the way to my bed like a little child." 

_____

We focus again on Aunt Léonie and Françoise, as they await the arrival of Eulalie with news about the church service. Rain begins to fall, and Françoise reports that Mme. Amédée, the narrator's grandmother (who has previously been identified as "Bathilde"), has gone out for a walk.

"That doesn't surprise me at all," said my aunt, lifting her eyes to the heavens. "I've always said that her way of thinking is different from everyone else's...."

"Mme. Amédée is always as different as she can be from everyone else," said Françoise gently, refraining until she should be alone with the other servants from saying that she believed my grandmother was a little "touched."

Finally, Eulalie arrives, but her visit coincides with that of the garrulous curé -- "an excellent man," the narrator observes, "with whom I am sorry I did not have more conversations, for if he understood nothing about the arts, he did know many etymologies." His visit tires out Aunt Léonie, who sends Eulalie away without learning the "important" information whether "Mme. Goupil arrived at Mass before the elevation."

Françoise, who detests Eulalie, is unhappy that Aunt Léonie always gives Eulalie money.

She would not, however, have seen any great harm in what my aunt, whom she knew to be incurably generous, allowed herself to give away, so long as it went to rich people. Perhaps she thought that they, having no need of gifts from my aunt, could not be suspected of showing fondness for her because of them.

And so the routine goes on, interrupted only by the kitchen maid's suddenly going into labor, an event that deprives Aunt Léonie of Françoise's ministrations while she is sent to fetch a midwife. The narrator, sent to check on his aunt, looks in to find her awaking with a look of terror on her face. He lingers to hear her murmur, "I've gone and dreamed that my poor Octave had come back to life and was trying to make me go for a walk every day!" There are even subroutines within the routine, as when lunch is served early on Saturdays because Françoise goes to the market in the afternoon. Any stranger who is ignorant of this change in routine, or even any family member who forgets it, is subject to ridicule.

The surprise of a barbarian (this was what we called anyone who did not know what was special about Saturday) who, arriving at eleven o'clock to talk to my father, found us at table, was one of the things in her life which most amused Françoise.

We also meet the "extremely prudish" M. Vinteuil and his "tomboyish" daughter, and we go on a Sunday walk with the narrator and his parents, following a circuitous route familiar only to the father until they reach home.

And from that moment on, I would not have to take another step, the ground would walk for me through that garden where for so long now my actions had ceased to be accompanied by any deliberate attention: Habit had taken me in its arms, and it carried me all the way to my bed like a little child.