The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [65]
He mentions a ‘work on Ruskin’ in which he is engaged – further evidence of a turn towards a productive occupation. Immersion in the art of Venice aids his progress in re-establishing himself post-Albertine, but an involuntary memory relating to her threatens his new-found calm when he notices in a Carpaccio painting a figure wearing a garment on which was modelled the Fortuny cloak Albertine wore on their last trip together. This unexpected link to his past restores to the Narrator ‘the eyes and the heart of him who had set out that evening with Albertine for Versailles’ (F, 743; AD, 2093). Past time, we realize once again, is not static or dormant: it is volatile and apt to burst forth into our present should we happen across the right trigger, the existence of which we might be quite unaware. The desire and melancholy the memory instils in him last only a few moments but as he and his mother prepare for their departure from Venice a new problem, a sort of existential inertia, takes hold of him.
With their luggage already dispatched to the station, he sees in a list of guests due to arrive the name of Mme Putbus, the woman whose maid he has longed to meet since being tipped off about her by Saint-Loup (SG, 109–11; 1280–2). He announces he will stay on in Venice; his mother departs, hoping he will join her at the station when he comes to his senses. He eventually does, but first he yields to a crisis which has been waiting to spill over since Albertine’s disappearance. Unleashed by the thought of the carnal pleasures with the chambermaid that his departure will make him forgo, feelings of frustration, purposelessness and above all isolation circle round the baleful Narrator, carried on the notes of the hotel singer’s rendition of ‘O Sole Mio’, which seems to pull apart the city around him and his relation to it, leaving him stranded, rudderless.
He finally composes himself and makes it to the station just in time. On the train the Narrator opens a letter he received before leaving the hotel. It is from Gilberte, revealing that the telegram purporting to be from Albertine was in fact from her, the flourishes and embellishments of her handwriting leading ‘Gilberte’ to be transcribed by telegraph operator as ‘Albertine’. The tendency towards error inherent in our interpretive efforts is laid bare here: we rely on the accurate deciphering of written and spoken messages in every sphere of our lives yet our hermeneutics – our art of interpretation – is far from being an exact or reliable science. As the Narrator sums it up: ‘we guess as we read, we create; everything starts from an initial error; those that follow (and this applies not only to the reading of letters and telegrams, not only to all reading), extraordinary as they may appear to a person who has not begun at the same place, are all quite natural’ (F, 754; AD, 2099). Proust’s novel celebrates the achievements of art and the revelations of memory; crucial passages like this remind us that it also derives great nuance from its exploration of errors and misconstruals, which often prove to be highly valuable for the would-be artist and the reader of the novel alike.
The focus of the final chapter moves away from the Narrator’s mental travails and on to the marriages of Saint-Loup to Gilberte and