The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [41]
Balbec provides a microcosm of French society for the Narrator’s analysis and exploration. At the head of the social hierarchy is Mme de Villeparisis, an old acquaintance of the Narrator’s grandmother whom they meet unexpectedly. Her parents entertained Balzac, Hugo, Chopin and Liszt, amongst others, on which resolutely Sainte-Beuve-ian grounds she judges them as artists; her family are Guermantes who now become a step closer in accessibility for the Narrator. When he first encounters Robert de Saint-Loup, Mme de Villeparisis’s nephew, who becomes his closest friend and ally, the description of him, like that of his uncle, Charlus, includes details of attitude, appearance and dress that point towards an ambiguous gender identity which develops throughout the remainder of the novel. When Charlus first appears, before his introduction to the Narrator, his gait and gestures lead the Narrator to take him for ‘a hotel crook’, ‘a thief’ and ‘a lunatic’ (BG, 383–4; JF, 594), terms of comparison which, by association, place the baron revealingly and unexpectedly from the outset in the company of some of the least desirable members of society.
When Bloch, holidaying at Balbec, reveals that one might do more than merely dream about the girls and young women they see, the Narrator’s excited response ranges characteristically from the corporeal to the metaphysical to the cosmic: ‘from the day on which I had first known that their cheeks could be kissed, I had become curious about their souls. And the universe had appeared to me more interesting’ (BG, 336; JF, 564). The Narrator becomes absorbed in the actions of the little band of girls who roam the resort. A certain dynamism and vitality bind them together; they move differently and at a different pace to most of the sedentary holidaymakers. Proust’s images for the girls, too many to enumerate here, are drawn from many domains, but the majority relate to the seaside and to nature, the environments in which the girls move. Accordingly we might note that Proust’s images are often metonymic in nature, which is to say they are motivated by and drawn from the specific context in which they appear.
Part of the girls’ initial allure derives from the Narrator’s temporary inability to establish any demarcation between them. Out of ‘the continuous transmutation of a fluid, collective and mobile beauty’ (BG, 428; JF, 623), however, emerges Albertine, but she shares the group’s polymorphousness: the Narrator struggles repeatedly to recall the position of her beauty spot when visualizing her after she has left him alone and, as their relation develops, his jealousy is continually spurred by the impossibility of his knowing, let alone controlling, her multiple selves.
The Narrator’s knowledge of art and artistic method develops in parallel with his affections for the band of girls. He realizes, though, that his thoughts of them are often, in fact, thoughts of ‘the mountainous blue undulations of the sea’, concluding that ‘the most exclusive love for a person is always a love for something else’ (BG, 476–7; JF, 655). Soon afterwards, examining Elstir’s paintings, he realizes that ‘the charm of each of them lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the objects represented, analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names that Elstir created them anew’ (BG, 479; JF, 656). These examples suggest that an art like Elstir’s, as exemplified in his painting of the Carquethuit harbour (BG, 480–1; JF, 657), is aesthetically successful because its method in fact mirrors the workings of the human heart, whose indirections we stand to understand better thanks to our contemplation of art.
Under Elstir’s tutelage the Narrator’s vision of the world around him gains greater depth. When he realizes that Elstir’s portrait of a young