The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [38]
This optical instrument is one of many incorporated into the Search, which is so concerned with perception, vision and insight. In referring to the Dreyfus case the Narrator anticipates one of the major themes of The Guermantes Way and the final, speculative sentence is a chilling prolepsis: a war with Germany did of course come, and its impact on society and individuals’ prejudices is explored in Time Regained.
One day, chez Swann, the Narrator hears Odette play Vinteuil’s sonata and the reflection this prompts, in effect a short essay on the reception and understanding of complex works of art, is a good example of the generic hybridity of Proust’s novel. Here, as a little later when, upon meeting Bergotte, the Narrator offers a similar, sustained discussion of style in the novel, we find at work Proust’s irrepressible urge to sound the depths of any experience, particularly aesthetic ones. Upon examination, such passages often reveal themselves to be reflexively instructive, offering insight into the act we carry out as we read the Search. ‘Since I was able to enjoy everything that this sonata had to give me only in a succession of hearings’, the Narrator confides, ‘I never possessed it in its entirety: it was like life itself’ [‘elle ressemblait à la vie’] (BG, 119; JF, 423); or, one might suggest, like Proust’s novel. At the key moment of exaltation before the trees at Hudimesnil, whose allure he cannot quite comprehend, a similar formulation is used: Mme de Villeparisis’ carriage moves off, ‘bearing me away from what alone I believed to be true, what would have made me truly happy; it [the carriage] was like my life’ [‘elle ressemblait à ma vie’] (BG, 345; JF, 569). The echo between these images highlights the underlying connections between the experiences being discussed: the beauties of art and of the natural world cannot be comprehensively known and, as time rushes on, carrying us relentlessly forward, we cannot comfortably apprehend and categorize all that we see and feel. These are the conditions that provoke the Narrator’s frustration during his first trip to the theatre, where the words spoken on stage cannot be lingered over like those of a written text (BG, 23; JF, 361).
In ‘Mme Swann at Home’, as well as seeking knowledge of art and nature the Narrator must also come to terms with the vicissitudes of love. Gilberte eventually tires of him and when she chooses a dance lesson over his company he decides to effect an immediate separation, despite his love being unaltered, and his continued assiduity at Odette’s salon. This section tracks the suffering felt in the absence of a loved one, as well as the painful self-scrutiny that any break-up inevitably provokes. The Narrator’s turmoil recalls Swann’s earlier in the novel and prepares the ground for his later relation with Albertine. When we are in love, he states, love cannot be contained within us:
It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other’s feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves. (BG, 214; JF, 482–3)
This conception of love is constructed by the Narrator in the depths of his despair. It shatters the romantic conception of love as mutual admiration and understanding but, as Proust illustrates elsewhere in the novel, in love very often we see, hear and understand what we want to, and not what is apparent to disinterested onlookers.
When the Narrator meets Elstir, he learns a great deal about perspective and our habitual modes of perception. This does not teach him how to be happy in love but it gives the reader