The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [44]
The Narrator acknowledges here the disjunction between sensation – our body’s experience of the impressions made on us by the outside world – and the workings of the intellect that seeks to rationalize and categorize them. We encountered this tension in Swann’s Way when the Narrator outlined the distinctions between voluntary and involuntary memory (SW, 50–5; 44–7); progressively we recognize that it is a driving force in much of the Narrator’s speculative thinking.
When he makes a trip to the garrison town of Doncières to visit Saint-Loup, with remarkable attention to the experience of sound, he anatomizes the process of acquainting oneself with unfamiliar surroundings as he waits in Saint-Loup’s room. Staying in the hotel in the town subsequently gives rise to an extended reflection on sleep, its strangeness, its different varieties (G, 89–96; 810–14); these pages recall and develop the musings of the ‘Combray’ overture, adding further nuance to the Narrator’s always ongoing analysis of the nature of consciousness.
In the societal scenes later in the volume there is much emphasis on the vacuity of worldly interaction. At Doncières, however, when a companion suggests that in a military historian’s narrative ‘the most trivial happenings … are only the outward signs of an idea which has to be elucidated and which often conceals other ideas, like a palimpsest’ (G, 119; 829), Saint-Loup reveals his intellect, holding forth with great verve on military history and strategy. The palimpsest, a manuscript that has been erased and overwritten, but on which the earlier text can still be discerned, is a useful figure to keep in mind, since repeatedly in the Search we encounter scenarios which seem to bear the marks of episodes we have already read. Indeed, after Saint-Loup’s impromptu seminar, the Narrator describes how he suffers from not seeing Mme de Guermantes (G, 131; 837–8) in terms that recall the pages exploring the suffering he felt during his separation from Gilberte in the previous volume. This is not the final layer of the Proustian palimpsest, however: The Fugitive details at length his extensive suffering following Albertine’s disappearance.
He speaks with his grandmother by telephone for the first time from Doncières: technology isolates her voice from the visual support that usually accompanies it; as a result, rather than being comforted, the Narrator detects a sadness and fragility he had never previously discerned in her voice. His return to Paris painfully brings presence, absence and suffering into conjunction: returning unannounced and entering the room where his grandmother sits is to be ‘the spectator of [his] own absence’ (G, 155; 853). He remarks that ‘we never see the people who are dear to us save in … the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which, before allowing the images that their faces present to reach us, seizes them in its vortex and flings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them’ (G, 156; 853). Until, that is, a chance event prevents our intelligence from deceiving us and we see reality for what it is. Revealed momentarily to the Narrator, then, ‘sitting on the sofa … red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, daydreaming … [was] an overburdened old woman whom [he] did not know’ (G, 157; 854). This episode illustrates how we protect ourselves from what we do not wish to confront – above all, death – and how chance occurrences can gain great significance in forcing us to face up to reality.
Before the Villeparisis matinée, the Narrator lunches and visits the theatre with Saint-Loup and Rachel. Relativism and point of view are seen again to be key in affairs of the heart: Saint-Loup first encountered Rachel performing on stage and he remains, in part, enraptured by this version of her. Like Swann with Odette (also a sometime actress: the palimpsest again), he lavishes vast sums of money on his mistress,