• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 595 0

to temptation. Unable to dissociate positive thoughts of her from the context in which they first met, the Narrator constructs a succession of sea-related metaphors to capture the experience of watching her, ultimately suggesting that he ‘embarked upon the tide of Albertine’s sleep’ (C, 74; P, 1656). He feels that her sleep permits him a sort of holistic possession of her that he cannot have when they talk and he is obliged, as in society, ‘to live on the surface of [himself]’ (C, 71; P, 1654). Access to the deeper reaches of his self is normally possible only when he is isolated from others. For those who are jealous, however, isolation, as The Captive frequently shows, can be as tortuous as the company of the person who provokes their jealousy: even when we are alone, ‘associations of ideas, memories, continue to act upon us’. Nevertheless, when Albertine leaves the apartment, the Narrator is ‘revivified … by the exhilarating virtues of solitude’ (C, 19; P, 1621): looking out on to the new day, he somehow reconnects with the latent musicality of his soul, which is set vibrating by the promise of the outside world.

And it is music that repeatedly provides hope beyond the stifling relationship in which the Narrator is trapped. First there is the experience of hearing the street criers below his window, their motley instruments and the tools of their trades offering a sort of ‘ “Overture for a Public Holiday” ’ and their intermingled cries forming a sort of secular liturgy, a plainchant intoned by hawkers and pedlars (C, 124–38; P, 1689–99). The parts of the Narrator’s personality that he identifies at the start of the volume as likely to survive all others, ‘a certain philosopher who is happy only when he has discovered between two works of art, between two sensations, a common element’ and the ‘little mannikin’ similar to the one in the Combray optician’s window, who responds to changes in the weather (C, 4–5; P, 1611) are active in this scene, predominating for once over his jealous self. Later on, liberated by Albertine’s absence and soothed by the certainty of her return, the Narrator takes the opportunity to apply his thoughts to Vinteuil’s sonata. Within moments he plunges to the heart of his aesthetic concerns (‘was there in art a more profound reality’, he asks, ‘in which our true personality finds an expression that is not afforded it by the activities of life?’; C, 174; P, 1721). He compares the sonata to Wagner’s Tristan and the impact suggests an affirmative answer to the question just posed: he senses an effect deep inside him, an experience of art’s power that is visceral and profound. As so often in the Search, the consideration of one art form leads to a reflection on others: in this case the Narrator quickly moves from Vinteuil and Wagner to a mini essay on the late or retrospectively imposed unity of great works of the nineteenth century, drawing examples from Balzac, Hugo and Michelet (see C, 175–8; P, 1723–4).

The major revelation occurs chez Verdurin where, despite being in company, the Narrator has an experience that draws together art, creativity, memory and desire. Initially he does not recognize the music being played, then suddenly he finds himself ‘right in the heart of Vinteuil’s sonata’ (C, 281; P, 1790). The piece is his septet, which owes its existence to the patient deciphering of old manuscript scores by Mlle Vinteuil’s lover. The septet is Vinteuil’s masterwork; in it aspects of the sonata the Narrator knows so well are dispersed and threaded through a larger, more complex structure. Proust’s metaphor-laden account of the interpretive, rememorative and sensory processes that take place in the act of listening, simple yet wildly complex under analysis, is a remarkable achievement, a high point of The Captive and the Search as a whole. The relation the Narrator describes between the septet and Vinteuil’s early work bears an intriguing resemblance to Proust’s own writings: ‘Vinteuil’s sonata … and his other works as well, had been no more than timid essays, exquisite but very slight, beside