Day One Hundred Seventy-Five: Finding Time Again, pp. 171-191

From "The Duchesse de Létourville, who was not going to the Princesse de Guermantes's party ..." through "... than that sort of cinematographic approach."

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Jupien and the narrator leave the Baron sitting on a bench to rest while they go for a stroll and talk about Charlus and his state of health. Jupien confides that he can't leave the Baron alone for long because "he's still as randy as a young man" and he's so generous that he keeps giving away "everything he's got to other people." The Baron was temporarily blind, and during this period of sightlessness Jupien once left him alone in a room at "the Temple of Shamelessness," as he calls his brothel, and returned to find Charlus with "a child who wasn't even ten years old." Charlus also tends to cause trouble because of his pro-German sympathies, which he is not shy about voicing loudly:

Even though the war was long over, he would groan about the defeat of the Germans, among whom he counted himself, and say with pride: "And yet there is no doubt but that we shall have our revenge, for we have proved that it is we who are capable of the greater resistance and who have the better organisation." 

Considering the date of Finding Lost Time, Proust is being chillingly prophetic here.

Jupien parts with the narrator: "Look, he's already managed to get into conversation with a gardener's boy.... I can't leave my invalid alone for a second, he's nothing but a great baby." The narrator continues on his way, reflecting that the change from his usual routine is doing him some good, though "The pleasure today seemed to me to be a purely frivolous one, that of going out to an afternoon party at the house of the Princesse de Guermantes." He reflects once again on his lost vocation: "I now had proof that I was no longer good for anything, that literature could no longer bring me any joy, whether through my own fault, because I was not talented enough, or through the fault of literature, if it was indeed less pregnant with reality than I had thought."

And then, entering the courtyard to the Guermantes's house, he dodges an approaching car and steps on some uneven paving stones, triggering the first of a series of epiphanies:

But at the moment when, regaining my balance, I set my foot down on a stone which was slightly lower than the one next to it, all my discouragement vanished in the face of the same happiness that, at different points in my life, had given me the sight of trees I had thought I recognized when I was taking a drive around Balbec, the sight of the steeples of Martinville, the taste of a madeleine dipped in herb tea, and all the other sensations I have spoken about, and which the last works of Vinteuil had seemed to me to synthesize. Just as at the moment when I tasted the madeleine, all uneasiness about the future and all intellectual doubt were gone. Those that had assailed me a moment earlier about the reality of my intellectual talent, even the reality of literature, were lifted as if by enchantment.

He realizes that the paving stones had triggered a memory of similarly "uneven flagstones in the baptistery of St Mark's" in Venice, just as "the taste of the little madeleine had reminded me of Combray. But why had the images of Combray and Venice given me at these two separate moments a joy akin to certainty and sufficient, without any other proofs, to make death a matter of indifference to me?"

Then, while he is waiting in a sitting room for the conclusion of a piece of music that his hostess wishes not to be interrupted, it happens again: a servant knocks a spoon against a plate, which triggers his memory of a hammer striking the wheel of the train he had recently sat in, feeling indifferent to the beauty of the countryside. And again, a butler gives him a plate of petits fours and a glass of orangeade, and when he wipes his mouth with the napkin, the texture of it recalls a similar sensation while he was looking out to sea at Balbec. Each instant of involuntary memory -- connections between past and present triggered by the madeleine, the paving stones, the sound of the spoon, the texture of the napkin -- "suddenly makes us breathe a new air, new precisely because it is air we have breathed before, this purer air which the poets have tried in vain to make reign in paradise and which could not provide this profound feeling of renewal if it had not already been breathed, for the only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost."

The narrator perceives in these moments in which "the past was made to encroach upon the present and make me uncertain about which of the two I was in" something he calls "extra-temporal." When he tasted the madeleine, "at that very moment the being that I had been was an extra-temporal being."

This being had only ever come to me, only ever manifested itself to me on the occasions, outside of action and immediate pleasure, when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. It alone had the power to make me find the old days again, the lost time, in the face of which the efforts of my memory and my intellect always failed.

He believes he has experienced "a little bit of time in its pure state." This perception of "the essence of things"

languishes in the observation of the present where the senses cannot bring this to it, in the consideration of a past where the intelligence desiccates it, and in the expectation of a future which the will constructs out of fragments of the present and the past from which it extracts even more of their reality without retaining any more than is useful for the narrowly human, utilitarian ends that it assigns to them. 

"I knew that places were not the same as the pictures conjured up by their names" -- an observation that takes us back to the concluding sections of Swann's Way ("Place-Names: The Name") and In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower ("Place-Names: The Place"). He recalls the disillusionments at Balbec, the fact that he did not experience its beauty when he was there as much as he did in remembering it, and that he was unable to recapture that beauty when he went back for a second visit.

Impressions of the sort that I was trying to stabilize would simply evaporate if they came in contact with a direct pleasure which was powerless to bring them into being. The only way to continue to appreciate them was to try to understand them more completely just as they were, that is to say within myself, to make them transparent enough to see right down into their depths.

This is a vindication of the narrative strategy of In Search of Lost Time, the endless analysis of relationships (Swann-Odette, narrator-Gilberte, narrator-Albertine), the attempt to understand the emotional intricacies of a life.

It is also an attempt to give coherence to one's own existence:

I remembered with pleasure, because it showed me that I was already the same then and gave me back something that was fundamental to my nature, but also with sadness when I thought that I had not progressed since then, that in Combray already I used attentively to fix before my mind's eye some image which had impelled me to look at it. 

He has been trying to decipher "impressions such as that made on my by the sight of the steeples of Martinville" and other epiphanic moments. And he concludes

I had to try to interpret the sensations as the signs of so many laws and ideas, at the same time as trying to think, that is to draw out from the penumbra what I had felt, and convert it into a spiritual equivalent. And what was this method, which seemed to me to be the only one, but the making of a work of art? 

The "primary character" of these epiphanies, the thing that gives them their authenticity for the narrator (and hence for the reader), "was that I was not free to choose them." They are not subject to logical analysis. "The ideas formed by pure intelligence contain no more than a logical truth, a possible truth; their choice is arbitrary." Whereas the spontaneous impression contains its own truth, and demands an elucidation that "can bring the mind to a more perfected state, and give it pure happiness. An impression is for the writer what an experiment is for the scientist, except that for the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes it, and for the writer it comes afterwards."

Art, then, is a process of discovery, not of will: "we have no freedom at all in the face of the work of art, ... we cannot shape it according to our wishes." And above all, it can't be dominated by rules or theories: "A work in which there are theories is like an object with its price-tag still attached." Proust/the narrator here strikes back at proclamations about the social or political role of the artist: "the sound of the spoon on a plat, or the starched stiffness of the napkin ... had been more valuable for my spiritual renewal than any number of humanitarian, patriotic, internationalist or metaphysical conversations." He admits that the war has brought out proponents of these roles, which remind him of "M. de Norpois's simple theories in opposition to 'flute-players'" when he criticized Bergotte to the young narrator. And he even takes a dig, I think, at stream-of-consciousness writers:

Some even wanted the novel to be a sort of cinematographic stream of things. This was an absurd idea. Nothing sets us further apart from what we have really perceived than that sort of cinematographic approach.  

Day One Hundred Eleven: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 150-166

Part II, Chapter I, from "My second arrival in Balbec was very different..." to "...differed only in its modality, of involuntary memory."

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The section is headed by the subtitle, "The Intermittences of the Heart," which Sturrock's note informs us was a title that Proust considered for the entire novel. 


The narrator returns to Balbec and is treated like royalty by the hotel manager, whose malapropisms may lose something in translation but I suspect were rather tiresomely overdone even in the original. 

He is immediately flooded with memories, but the initial ones are of the superficial sort: "The images chosen by memory are as arbitrary, as confined, and as elusive as those that imagination had formed and that reality has destroyed." But he has come to Balbec partly because of the future as well as because of the past: He has learned that Mme. Verdurin has rented one of the Cambremer châteaux, and that Mme. Putbus, whose maid Saint-Loup has inspired him to pursue, will be one of her guests. Saint-Loup has written a letter of introduction to the Cambremers. But the narrator informs us that the "principal object of my journey was neither attained nor even pursued." 

Moreover, on his arrival in his hotel room, he is assaulted by "A convulsion of my entire being." He is "suffering from an attack of cardiac fatigue," and when he bends to remove his boots he is flooded by repressed grief: 

I had just glimpsed, in my memory, bent over my fatigue, the tender, concerned, disappointed face of my grandmother, such as she had been on that first evening of our arrival; the face of my grandmother, not that of the one whom I had been surprised and self-reproachful at having missed so little, who had nothing of her but her name, but of my true grandmother, the living reality of whom, for the first time since the Champs-Élysées, where she had suffered her stroke, I had recovered in a complete and involuntary memory.

In short, he is having another "Proustian moment," one that he explicates in a lengthy discourse that explains the subtitle: 

For to the disturbances of memory are linked the intermittences of the hart. It is no doubt the existence of our body, similar for us to a vase in which our spirituality is enclosed, that induces us to suppose that all our inner goods, our past joys, all our sorrows, are perpetually in our possession. Perhaps this is as inaccurate as to believe that they escape or return. At all events, if they do remain inside us, it is for most of the time in an unknown domain where they are of no service to us, and where even the most ordinary of them are repressed by memories of a different order, which exclude all simultaneity with them in our consciousness. But if the framework of sensations in which they are preserved be recaptured, they have in their turn the same capacity to expel all that is incompatible with them, to install in us, on its own, the self that experienced them. 

Involuntary memory, then, is generated by a "framework of sensations" -- the taste of a madeleine, the bending over to remove a boot -- that can't be voluntarily induced. 

The experience also causes the narrator to reflect on the nature of his grief, which consists in large part of guilt: "for, since the dead exist only in us, it is ourselves that we strike unrelentingly when we persist in remembering the blows we have dealt them." He is subsequently troubled by a bad dream in which his father talks to him about her grandmother in her final illness, frustrating his wish to see her, and ending in a string of nonsense: "stags, stags, Francis Jammes, fork," a "sequence of words" that "no longer held the limpid, logical meaning they had expressed so naturally for me only a moment before and which I could no longer recall." 

He is so distressed by the experience that he stays in his room and sees no one, even when Albertine, who has just arrived in Balbec, comes to call on him. He also sends word that he is "indisposed" when Mme. de Cambremer leaves her calling card.

With his mother due to arrive the following day, he realizes that her grief for her own mother had been "genuine," the kind of grief that "literally takes away your life for long periods, sometimes forever." His own grief he recognizes as "ephemeral," the kind that "we experience only long after the event because in order to feel it we needed to 'understand' that event."  

Day Ninety-Six: The Guermantes Way, pp. 390-412

Part II, Chapter II, from "I have already said (and it was..." to "...the day after my evening with Saint-Loup"

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The narrator begins with a dismissal of the concept of friendship, "which is totally bent on making us sacrifice the only part of ourselves that is real and incommunicable (except through art) to a superficial self that ... finds ... a vague, sentimental satisfaction at being cherished by external support ... and marvels at qualities it would castigate as failings and seek to correct in itself." But he does admit that it can, "in certain circumstances [provide] us with just the boost we needed and the warmth we are unavailable to muster of our own accord." 


So however misanthropic the narrator might eventually become, when Saint-Loup arrives after the narrator has been dumped by Mme. de Stermaria and is weeping into the rolls of carpet that are to be laid before his parents' return, he feels some gratitude. Though he wants to be taken to Rivebelle and the women he remembers from the restaurants there, he settles for one in Paris, which is smothered by a thick fog. 


The fog arouses a "dim memory of arrival in Combray by night" -- but it is only a dim memory, not the transformative one produced by the taste of the madeleine. It does, however, arouse in him a sense of "inspired exhilaration, which might have resulted in something had I remained alone and so avoided the detour of the many futile years I was yet to spend before discovering the invisible vocation which is the subject of this book." In other words, this dim memory of Combray is not enough to set him off in search of lost time. If it had, he observes, "the carriage I found myself in would have deserved to rank as more memorable than Dr. Percepied's, in which I had composed the little descriptive piece about the Martinville steeples, recently unearthed, as it happened, which I had reworked and offered without success to the Figaro." So his rejection of friendship, it seems, is a way of blaming it for his setting aside his career as a writer. 

In the carriage, he's surprised and angry when Saint-Loup confesses that he has badmouthed the narrator to Bloch: "'I told Bloch you weren't very fond of him, that you found him rather vulgar. You know me, I like things to be clear-cut,' he concluded smugly, in a tone of voice that brooked no argument." The narrator regards this as a betrayal of their friendship, and observes that "his face was marred, while he uttered these vulgar words, by a horribly twisted expression, which I encountered only once or twice in all the time I knew him." He is at a loss to explain Saint-Loup's callousness. 


At the restaurant, the narrator enters alone, while Saint-Loup stays to give the driver instructions. The place is divided into two areas, one of which is dominated by a group of young aristocrats, anti-Dreyfusards, and the other by the Dreyfusards. The narrator takes a seat in the area reserved for the aristocrats, and is rudely ushered into the other area, facing the drafty "door reserved for the Hebrews." He observes the behavior of the aristocrats, who include the Prince de Foix. 


And then there's an ambiguous passage about the Prince de Foix and Saint-Loup, who, the narrator tells us, belonged to a "closely knit group of four" who were "known as the four gigolos," "were never invited to anything separately" and at country houses were always given adjoining bedrooms:

as a result, especially since the four of them were extremely good-looking, rumors circulated about the nature of their intimacy. As far as Saint-Loup was concerned, I was in a position to denounce such rumors categorically. But the curious thing is that, if it eventually came to light that the rumors were true of all four of them, then each one had been utterly unaware of the facts in relatin to the other three. Yet each had done his utmost to inform himself about the others, either to gratify a desire or, more likely, a grudge, to prevent a marriage, or to have the upper hand over the friend whose secret he had uncovered. A fifth member (for in groups of four there are always more than four) had joined this Platonic quartet, a man far more suspect than the others. But religious scruple had held him back until long after the group had broken up and he himself was a married man, the father of a family, one minute rushing off to Lourdes to pray that the next baby might be a boy or a girl, and the next flinging himself at soldiers.

Considering Saint-Loup's previous overreaction to being propositioned by a man on the street, and his apparent jealousy of the narrator's friendship with Bloch, it seems safe to say that we haven't learned everything about Saint-Loup yet. 


Saint-Loup's arrival, and his discovery of the narrator sitting in front of the drafty door, causes a flurry of apologies from the management. It also causes a renewal of admiration of Saint-Loup from the narrator, who compares him to the "foreigners, intellectuals, would-be artists" in the café, who are mocked by the aristocrats for their awkwardness and lack of style but are nevertheless "highly intelligent and goodhearted men who, in the long run, could be profoundly endearing." Saint-Loup has style and grace and wealth in addition to intelligence and good-heartedness, which impresses the narrator because of his background. 

Among the Jews especially, there were few whose parents did not have a kindness of heart, a broad-mindedness, an honest, in comparison with which Saint-Loup's mother and the Duc de Guermantes came across as the sorriest of moral figures in their desiccated emotions, the surface religiosity they cultivated only to condemn scandal, and their clannish apology for a Christianity which never failed to lead ... to colossally wealthy marriages. But, for all this, Saint-Loup, in whatever way the faults of his parents had combined to create a new set of qualities, was governed by a delightful openness of mind and heart.

And he is further endeared to the narrator when he goes to borrow the Prince de Foix's vicuña cloak to keep the narrator warm in the drafty room, and on his return negotiates the crowded room with a graceful balancing act along the banquettes that line the wall. It resembles the act of a lover more than that of a friend. Meanwhile, the waiters have been kowtowing to the narrator, and the proprietor addresses him as "M. le Baron" and then, on being corrected, "M. le Comte." "I had no time to launch a second protest, which would almost certainly have promoted me to the rank of marquis." 


When he's seated again, Saint-Loup tells the narrator that Charlus wants to see him tomorrow evening. The narrator replies that he's dining with the Duchesse de Guermantes that evening. Saint-Loup, who calls it a "fabulous blowout," tries to persuade him that he should "get out of it" and that Charlus doesn't want him to go, but they agree that the narrator will see Charlus afterward at eleven. 


They also talk about the threat of war in Morocco, to which Saint-Loup is scheduled to return and from which he's trying to get transferred, with the Duchesse's help: "she can twist Général de Saint-Joseph round her little finger." He tells the narrator that he doesn't think there will be war with Germany over Morocco, but adds with semi-prescience: "You need only to think what a cosmic thing a war would be today. It would be more catastrophic than the Flood and the Götterdämmerung put together. Only it wouldn't last so long." 


After the earlier anger, the narrator regains his admiration for Saint-Loup: 

Our rare conversations alone together, and this one in particular, have assumed, in retrospect, the status of important turning points. For him, as for me, this was the evening of friendship. And yet the friendship I felt for him at this moment was scarcely, I feared (with some remorse), what he would have liked to inspire. Still in the throes of the pleasure it had given me to see him come cantering toward me and gracefully reaching his goal, I felt that this pleasure arose from the fact that each of his movement as he had moved along the wall bench possibly derived its meaning from, was motivated by, something very personal to Saint-Loup himself, but that what really lay behind it was something he had inherited, by birth and upbringing, from his race. ... In the same way that Mme de Villeparisis, on an intellectual level, had needed a great deal of serious thought in order to convey a sense of the frivolous in her conversation and in her memoirs, so, in order for Saint-Loup's body to carry so much nobility, all ideas of nobility had first to leave his mind, which was intent on higher things, before returning to his body to re-establish themselves there as noble attributes of an utterly unstudied kind.

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." 
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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 Four: Swann's Way, pp. 37-48

From "Mama spent that night in my room" to "... from my cup of tea." 

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And so we come to the scene everyone knows (or knows about), the "Proustian moment," the epiphany in a teaspoon. I admit that from my previous forays into Proust, I had thought it came at the very beginning of the novel, not 40-some pages in. (Although in a novel the size of In Search of Lost Time, 40-some pages in does rather qualify as "the very beginning.")

The narrator's account of the scenes of his childhood rising before him, awakened by the taste of crumbs from a madeleine steeped in tea, comes after his account of the rare, privileged night his mother spent in his room, reading to him from books that were supposed to be a gift from his grandmother. It is "a sort of puberty of grief, of emancipation from tears," "the beginning of a new era" that "would remain as a sad date."

It also reinforces the grandmother's role in forming the narrator's character as an aesthete, a man of discerning tastes. She "could never resign herself to buying anything from which one could not derive a intellectual profit." And even when forced to select a gift that was utilitarian, preferred to give antique things in which "long desuetude had effaced their character of usefulness."

We could no longer keep count, at home, when my great-aunt wnted to draw up an indictment against my grandmother, of the armchairs she had presented to young couples engaged to be married or old married couples which, at the first attempt to make use of them, had immediately collapsed under the weight of one of the recipients.

Of course, the narrator comes to rebel against the imbuing of art with "that moral distinction which Mama had learned from my grandmother to consider superior to all else in life, and which I was to teach her only much later not to consider superior to all else in books."

But for years afterward, his childhood in Combray remained limited to what it has been in the first 40-some pages of the novel: "the theater and drama of my bedtime" -- "as though Combray had consisted only of two floors connected by a slender staircase and as though it had always been seven o'clock in the evening there." The rest of it comes to life when he pursues something ineffable awakened by the taste of the madeleine in tea. At first, he doesn't know what he has glimpsed: "Undoubtedly what is palpitating thus, deep inside me, must be the image, the visual memory which is attached to this taste and is trying to follow it to me." Note here that he ascribes the volition to the memory, that he must meet the memory -- "struggling too far away" -- halfway.

Ten times I must begin again, lean down toward it. And each time, the laziness that deters us from every difficult task, every work of importance, has counseled me to leave it, to drink my tea and think only about my worries of today, my desires for tomorrow, upon which I may ruminate effortlessly.

For Proust this is, I think, the distinction between the artist and the layman, the willingness to struggle against the "laziness" that traps most of us in the quotidian.

And then he meets the memory, of aunt Léonie giving him a taste of madeleine soaked in lime-blossom tea. It's the fortuitous combination of tea and madeleine that does it -- the intimate power of taste that proves more effective than sight alone in raising the past. He had seen madeleines in shops without awakening any distinct sensations. He even finds a way of moralizing the image of the little shell-shaped cake, "so fatly sensual within its severe and pious pleating."

But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, upon the ruins of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.

And so rooms, roads, people and the town join themselves in his imagination. The stage is set.