The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [51]
He awaits her midnight visit, providing a beautiful assessment of our emotional investment in the process of waiting for people we care about (SG, 149–51; 1307–8), before revealing how manipulative he can be in the service of his own satisfaction: spurred by jealousy and suspicion, he persuades Albertine to change her mind when she telephones to inform him she is not coming. Not to have her presence would be to rekindle the horrors of his bedtime trauma in Combray: Albertine’s kiss is troublingly compared to his mother’s, and now as then we realize the uncompromising tensions of the Narrator’s psyche: ‘the prospect of having to forgo a simple physical pleasure caused me an intense mental suffering’ (SG, 149; 1306). Suffering is a keynote of Sodom and Gomorrah, a term that is never far away in the Narrator’s analyses of love and desire. He arrives at the feeling that with regard to Albertine, ‘out of that tangled mass of details of fact and falsehood, I should never unravel the truth: and that it would always be so, unless I were to imprison her (but prisoners escape) until the end’ (SG, 154, trans. mod.; 1310). Before the shared life with Albertine that this statement adumbrates really begins, however, another form of suffering is experienced: ‘the intermittencies of the heart.’
The Narrator travels to Balbec. The section opens in ludic mode with the hotel director’s comically flawed French, but soon the tone changes: fatigued, stooping to take off his boots, the Narrator experiences the ‘upheaval of [his] entire being’ (SG, 179; 1326), a rush of emotion that suddenly recaptures the instant when his grandmother had helped him in a similar moment of physical weakness on their first trip to Balbec (BG, 284; JF, 531). Now, more than a year after her burial, ‘because of the anachronism which so often prevents the calendar of facts from corresponding to the calendar of feelings’, he finally ‘became conscious that she was dead’ (SG, 180; 1327). The intermittencies of the heart are negatively inflected involuntary memories that bring not a sense of recuperation but of loss. He feels temporarily reinstalled in the adolescent self that, fearful of his new surroundings, arrived at Balbec years before, but the sorrow from which he sought solace in his grandmother’s arms is now that of mourning, which he must come to terms with alone. He tortures himself about being cruel to his grandmother when she arranged for a photograph to be taken (Françoise reveals to the Narrator – who is devastated – that his grandmother’s apparent coquetry when the photograph was taken was born of a desire to conceal her grave illness and to leave him an image by which he might remember her; SG, 203; 1342); and as he attempts to take stock of an existence without her, at every turn he sees his mother, an eerie embodiment of the grandmother, carrying her handbag, reading her books and wearing her dressing gown. Such accoutrements are not necessary for the similarities to be painfully apparent, however, since, in the Narrator’s memorable formulation, ‘the dead annex the living who become their replicas and successors, the continuators of their interrupted life’ (SG, 195; 1337).
During the Narrator’s stay at Balbec we encounter several sparkling examples of Proust’s ear for sociolects and idiolects: the lift-boy’s crudeness and mistakes, the director’s gaffes, Mme de Cambremer’s diminuendo adjectives and the Guermantes’ jargon, all of which add richness to this truly polyphonic novel. It is Albertine’s words, however, and her actions that receive the keenest scrutiny. Her company, in the second chapter of Part Two, slowly appeases the intermittencies of the Narrator’s heart and reignites his desire for happiness.
One afternoon