The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [4]
Detailing such divergences, however, is something of a fool’s errand. For every aspect of the Narrator we consider that sets him apart from his creator, another will present itself that suggests congruity or sameness. Some readers (and critics of the novel) think of the Narrator as ‘Marcel’, a choice which implicitly aligns the Narrator’s identity with that of his creator and asks a brief moment of the novel to bear a great deal of critical weight. In The Captive (which Proust had not finished editing when he died) the Narrator remarks that Albertine, awakening, would ‘say “My – ” or “My darling – ” followed by my first name, which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would be “My Marcel,” or “My darling Marcel” ’, (C, 77; P, 1658). This sudden acknowledgement of the Narrator’s fictional status and that of the text in which he appears introduces a bewildering ontological dilemma for readers to ponder but is not iron-clad ‘proof’ that the novel’s protagonist is ‘Marcel’ and less still that being so named would mean that he and Proust are one and the same person.
Matters are complicated by the fact that in his correspondence and the notes made during the writing of the novel, Proust habitually adopted the first person when referring to the Narrator of his novel, thus blurring the line between creator and created. Additionally, George Painter, Proust’s first, highly influential, English-language biographer, worked on the premise that the Search was a ‘creative autobiography’. Understanding the novel, for Painter, was largely a question of mapping Proust’s fictional characters on to his real-life acquaintances. Taking all these matters into account, it is most straightforward, and it will be my practice in the present volume, to refer to the individual who leads us through the pages of the Search simply as the ‘Narrator’, similar to but separate from the work’s author.
I shall discuss Proust’s life not because the information thus imparted provides a necessary foundation upon which to rest one’s reading of the Search, or because knowing which individuals from Proust’s social circle may offer ‘keys’ to certain characters will make the novel easier to comprehend and enjoy. Rather, it is fruitful to begin with a consideration of Proust’s life because an awareness of his family background, his health and upbringing, the relations he developed through childhood into adolescence and his conduct in the affairs of his adult life can provide us with a valuable sense of the forces that shaped this singularly complex individual. Readers whose primary interest is in Proust’s novel should inform themselves of biographical fact and anecdote in the way that we might visit a vineyard in order to note how the breeze comes down the slopes, to see how the sun strikes the grapes and to feel the texture of the soil between our fingers, fingers that later will hold a glass of something quite distinct but inextricably related to that earlier experience.
The image of Proust that one might gather from journalistic references is that of a bedridden hypochondriac, a hyper-sensitive, moustachioed aesthete, notoriously nocturnal, independently wealthy and idiosyncratic in taste. There is, naturally, factual foundation for these enduring images: his biographers offer accounts of the treatments he took for his asthma, the installation of the cork lining on the walls of his bedroom, the unusual hours he kept, the drinks and dishes he favoured; and the photographs we have of him at different ages will permit those so minded to piece together a rough timeline for the growth and development of the famous moustache. The clichéd conceptions of Proust, however, which lodge in the collective imagination a picture of an author familiar even to those who have not read his work, are based largely on our knowledge of the adult Proust. What of his childhood and adolescence? Perhaps we should start there if we are to gain some sense of the child that would be father to this most exceptional man.
Proust