• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 597 0

a situation all the more pitiful for the reader, knowing (as Saint-Loup does not) that when the Narrator saw her in the brothel she could be anyone’s for twenty francs. At the theatre Robert vents his frustration at his inability to control Rachel by slapping a journalist for failing to extinguish a cigar. Moments later in the street a man propositions Saint-Loup. The cascade of punches he unleashes on the man is defamiliarized in the Narrator’s description, whose rendering of the rapid reconfigurations of forms in space is redolent of cubist and futurist visual art (G, 205–6; 885–6). Saint-Loup’s violent reaction in the street recalls the story he himself told of Charlus’s brutal response to a man who made similar overtures to him (see BG, 381; JF, 592–3). The parallel between Uncle and nephew, both of whom will be revealed, in due course, to be homosexual, is striking.

In Doncières and Paris, throughout the social spectrum, one topic is seldom far from people’s lips: the Dreyfus Affair. Anti-Dreyfusism is the dominant position of the establishment and leading society figures; Saint-Loup’s openly expressed dreyfusard convictions therefore sit uneasily with his military colleagues and relations alike. Odette, seeking acceptance by the social elite, perversely speaks out against Dreyfus despite her Jewish husband, and, according to the Narrator, having previously assured him of her conviction of Dreyfus’s innocence (G, 302; 947): those climbing the social ladder must adjust their script according to their audience. Mme de Guermantes leaves as soon as she sees Odette arrive, such is her disinclination to make her acquaintance (G, 301–2; 947). For the Narrator, however, seeing Odette again is instructive since he has recently learnt from Charles Morel, the son of his great-uncle’s valet, that Odette, besides being the androgynous ‘Miss Sacripant’, was also the ‘lady in pink’ who so enraptured him as a boy (see G, 304–5; 949–50). Illustrating the grip the Dreyfus case had on the nation, when the Narrator returns home, he finds his family’s butler and the Guermantes’ butler carrying on effectively the same conversation that Norpois and Bloch had had chez Villeparisis. As he puts it, the arguments ‘contended on high among the intellectuals … were fast spreading downwards into the subsoil of popular opinion’ (G, 340; 973). In society, however, as the Narrator’s often biting commentary attests, what parades itself as knowledge, discernment and intelligence is frequently bluff, received opinion and crass ignorance.

As they are leaving, Charlus suggests to the Narrator that they walk together a while (G, 318; 958). He proposes that he might serve as mentor to the young man. Readers will have little doubt about the subtext here, but the Narrator, although a little confused, remains apparently unaware of Charlus’s motivations, despite Mme de Villeparisis’ unambiguously expressed disapproval of his consorting with Charlus away from her salon (G, 325–6; 963).

At home, his grandmother’s health has deteriorated but the fictional Dr du Boulbon, said to be a protégé of Charcot (1825–93), the founder of modern neurology, recognizes the patient’s literary spirit and determines through talking to her that her complaint is as much nervous as it is physiological (G, 346–7; 977–8). As we read the doctor’s encouraging words (‘Submit to being called a neurotic … Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics’), even a superficial knowledge of Proust’s own health suggests that this apologia for neurosis is not wholly disinterested: ‘we enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures’, continues Boulbon, ‘but we do not know what they cost those who wrought them in insomnia, tears, spasmodic laughter, urticaria, asthma, epilepsy, a terror of death which is worse than any of these’ (G, 350; 979). Mind and body cannot be decoupled: the sublime aesthetic products of intelligence, such as Proust’s book, come at a cost to their creators measurable in the all-too-human terms of suffering and pain.

Boulbon’s recommendation of fresh air and walks is