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By Root 587 0

Paris only after the war. Unable to work, he decides to attend a society matinée. En route he meets Charlus, a link between different periods of the Narrator’s existence but now frail and much deteriorated in health. A succession of involuntary memories suddenly revitalizes moments from his past, which he had thought forever inaccessible. With these fleeting extra-temporal experiences, he realizes that the life he has lived can provide the material for a work of art which might help to acquaint others with their own inner depths. The matinée reveals how the social kaleidoscope has turned: Mme Verdurin, by remarriage, has become the Princesse de Guermantes; the two ways of Combray are joined in Gilberte and Saint-Loup’s daughter. All around are intimations of mortality: old acquaintances are transfigured by age, bodies and memories are damaged by the passage of time, but the Narrator must hold firm: his imperative now is to write.

The final volume opens without fanfare. After further revelations of Saint-Loup’s infidelities (to Gilberte’s great chagrin he does keep mistresses, although she ignores that it is not for pleasure but to divert attention from his homosexual affair with Morel), we find the Narrator settling down with some bedtime reading on his final night at Tansonville. As so often in the Search, a mundane activity proves to be highly revealing. In a recently published volume of the Goncourt journal he reads an account (incorporated in the text and in fact a brilliant pastiche of the journal) of a dinner chez Verdurin attended by Edmond de Goncourt in the company of Swann, Cottard, Brichot and others already familiar to us. The journal’s effect on the Narrator is profound. When he attended such dinners, he found the guests insipid, the conversation banal. Goncourt’s version of events suggests quite the opposite. It makes the Narrator question his own capacity for observation, the likelihood of his ever being able to write. He had felt that literature was intended to illuminate the deeper truths of the human condition, yet here it is crammed with crockery design, potato salad and chatter about discoloured pearls. If this is literature, thinks the Narrator, either I am not destined for it, or it is not what I had thought. The crux of the matter, as Elstir had announced long before with regard to painting, comes down to vision and perspective. Without fully recognizing the advantages of such an approach, the Narrator notes that when in society, rather than soaking up surface detail à la Goncourt, his attention is drawn to how individuals’ manners of speaking ‘revealed their character or their foibles’. Rather than looking at guests at a dinner party he ‘was in fact examining them with X-rays’, seeking a knowledge deeper than that afforded by table talk and appearances (TR, 33–4; 2147). For now the Narrator feels that ‘Goncourt knew how to listen, just as he knew how to see; I did not’ (TR, 37; 2149). When he finally recognizes and outlines the goals of his own work of literature later on, it becomes clear how his radiographic approach is well suited to revealing truths about life, far beyond what Goncourt’s writing could ever achieve.

After Tansonville the Narrator mentions the ‘long years – in which I had … completely renounced the project of writing – which I spent far from Paris receiving treatment in a sanatorium’ (TR, 39–40; 2151). With this the narrative winds forward to his return in 1916. The city is changed by the coming of war and the passage of time; the social ascension of Mme Verdurin and Mme Bontemps, for example, is such that they are described as the ‘queens of this wartime Paris’ (TR, 40; 2151). By 1916 it was already a decade since Dreyfus’s pardon and reinstatement in the military: so long, in the memory of the little clan, that Brichot refers to the period of the Affair as ‘ “those prehistoric times” ’ (TR, 45; 2155). Mme Verdurin now says ‘ “Come at 5 o’clock to talk about the war” as she would have said in the past: “Come and talk about the Affair,” or … “Come to hear Morel” ’ (TR, 49; 2157).