by David Malouf
This is on click here of Volume One in the Kilmartin translation. Quite soon after, in the description of Vinteuil’s young daughter, the presence of the male within the female is hinted at again; and Mlle Vinteuil is to become of course one of the book’s many lesbians:
His one and only passion was for his daughter, and she, with her somewhat boyish appearance, looked so robust that it was hard to restrain a smile when one saw the precautions her father used to take for her health … My grandmother had drawn our attention to the gentle, delicate, almost timid expression which might often be caught flitting across the freckled face of this otherwise stolid child. Whenever she spoke she heard her own words with the ears of those to whom she had addressed them, and became alarmed at the possibility of a misunderstanding, and one would see in clear outline, as though in a transparency, beneath the mannish face of the ‘good sort’ that she was, the finer features of a young woman in tears. (pp. 122–3)
It is part of the normal mode of the book that the narrator here is observing, and revealing, more than he at present knows; the language does it, and the attentive reader will not be surprised when the narrator witnesses, fifty pages later, the little scene between Mlle Vinteuil and her friend in which a homosexual relationship is presented openly, and in terms of humiliation and triumph that are themselves essential to the way Proust sees these things. The young narrator, without being aware of it, is being given clues (which he does not recognise) for solving the central puzzle of his own relationship, later, with Albertine; and it is in the early days of his fascination with her and the little band of girls at Balbec, on page 958 of this present edition, that the Eulalie/Eloi opposition recurs. It will solve for us, long before the narrator himself tumbles to it, the mystery of the ‘little band’ – though it is he, of course, who offers us the clue:
So too when I ordered the cheese or salad sandwiches or sent out for the cakes which I would eat on the cliff with the girls, and which they ‘might very well have taken turns to provide, if they hadn’t been so closefisted’, declared Françoise, to whose aid there came at such moments a whole heritage of atavistic peasant rapacity and coarseness, and for whom one would have said that the divided soul of her late enemy Eulalie had been reincarnated, more becomingly than in St Eloi, in the charming bodies of my friends of the little band.
The link between Eulalie and the ‘little band’ belongs here to the character of Françoise, to her suspicion of both, and to her meanness; but the evocation of St Eloi in the prose, and that phrase ‘the divided soul’, already unties a knot. Our awareness of what is really going on in A la Recherche is always in the language the narrator uses rather than in what he consciously tells; and what is difficult to assess, because it changes from moment to moment, is whether the narrator’s awareness belongs unconsciously to the dramatic moment or, as here perhaps, to the consciousness of hindsight in which he is recreating a past in the full knowledge at last of what it is.
This sort of play across the text, and under it, is one thing; but for most contemporary readers the game goes on well beyond it. In the feminised boys’ names of the narrator’s lovers – Gilberte, Albertine – and the transposition of males, as Proust himself put it in a conversation with Gide, ‘à l’ombre des jeunes filles’, a game is being played by the narrator (and this time I mean Proust himself) with the facts of his own life.
This of course is an impertinence – this reading outside the text into the life; but Proust’s life, and its various transformations in the events of the novel, the equivocal placing of his narrator (another Marcel as we finally discover) halfway between historical fact and fiction, are as familiar now as the book itself, and too close to us for an awareness of them not to colour what we read. Proust anticipated this and took it into account. What we know of the life is part of the book, as a second reading is part of the first. It is as if, between dramatic present and recollected past, between what the narrator tells us and what the language reveals, between first and second reading, between the events of A la Recherche and the facts of Proust’s own life, we stood in the position described on click here by that same Curé who a page earlier has introduced, in his great innocence, the theme of a double sex. He is describing, this time, the view from the tower of St Hilaire:
‘And then another thing; you can see at the same time places which you normally see one without the other, as, for instance, the course of the Vivonne and the irrigation ditches at Saint-Assise-lès-Combray, which are separated by a screen of tall trees, or again, the various canals at Jouy-le-Vicomte, which is Gaudiacus vice comitis, as of course you know. Each time I’ve been to Jouy I’ve seen a bit of canal in one place, and then I’ve turned a corner and seen another, but when I saw the second I could no longer see the first. I tried to put them together in my mind’s eye; it was no good. But from the top of Saint-Hilaire it’s quite another matter – a regular network in which the place is enclosed. Only you can’t see any water; it’s as though there were great clefts slicing up the town so neatly that it looks like a loaf of bread which still holds together after it has been cut up. To get it all quite perfect you would have to be in both places at once …’
To come specifically to that other ‘double view’, the created fiction and the life of the writer, we have, in a passage on Bergotte, Proust’s own view of how we are to reconcile a writer’s ‘vices’ with the high morality of his work – and I choose this aspect of the problem because it opens into a related one (Proust’s presentation of the homosexual) that may itself be a stumbling-block to the modern reader. Proust is in no doubt that a contemporary writer’s life will be known and is part of the text:
Perhaps it is only in really vicious lives that the problem of morality can arise in all its disquieting strength. And to this problem the artist offers a solution in the terms not of his own personal life but of what is for him his true life, a general, a literary solution. As the great Doctors of the Church began often, while remaining good, by experiencing the sins of all mankind, out of which they drew their own personal sanctity, so great artists often, while being wicked, make use of their vices in order to arrive at a conception of the moral law that is binding upon us all. It is the vices (or merely the weaknesses and follies) of the circle in which they live, the meaningless conversation, the frivolous or shocking lives of their daughters, the infidelity of their wives, or their own misdeeds that writers have most often castigated in their books, without, however, thinking to alter their way of life or improve the tone of their household. But this contrast had never before been so striking as it was in Bergotte’s time, because, on the one hand, in proportion as society grew more corrupt, notions of morality became increasingly refined, and on the other hand the public became a great deal more conversant than it had ever been before with the private lives of literary men. (I, p. 601)
This passage may serve to excuse the contemporary reader from the charge of misreading or trivialising A la Recherche when he takes into account in his reading what he knows of the life; but it is meant, I think, in the light of what we do know, to excuse Proust himself from the charge of hypocrisy. Some of the events in the book that most shock us, as they also shock the narrator, are events in which Proust was personally involved. This is what so affronted Gide. Gide’s diaries record two night conversations with Proust, on 13 May and 15 May 1921. They are worth quoting in full since they provide the context for his savage condemnation, when it appeared, of Cities of the Plain.
May 13, 1921
Far from denying his homosexuality he exhibits it, and I could almost say boasts of it. He claims never to have loved women save spiritually and never to have known love except with men.
May 15, 1921
We scarcely talked, this evening again, of anything but homosexuality. He says he blames himself for that ‘indecision’ which made him, in order to fill out the heterosexual part of his book, transpose A I’ombre des jeunes filles all the attractive, affectionate and charming elements contained in his h
omosexual recollections, so that for Sodom he is left nothing but the grotesque and the abject. But he shows himself very much concerned when I tell him that he seems to have wanted to stigmatise homosexuality; he protests; and eventually I understand that what we consider vile, an object of disgust, does not seem so repulsive to him.
Dec 2, 1921
I have read Proust’s latest pages (Dec issue of NRF) with at first a shock of indignation. Knowing what he thinks, what he is, it is hard for me to see in them anything but a pretence, a desire to protect himself, a camouflage of the cleverest sort, for it can be to no one’s advantage to denounce him. Even more: that offence to truth will probably please everybody; heterosexuals, whose prejudices it justifies and whose repugnances it flatters; and the others, who will take advantage of the alibi and their lack of resemblance to those he portrays.
Proust’s attitude to homosexuality really is ambiguous, but Gide here seems over-sensitive. Despite its high moral tone, the long essay at the beginning of the Cities of the Plain (is this the ‘essai sur la Péderastie, pas facile à publier’?) can only be read as a piece of extended irony, in the typically French manner – going back to Jean Beyle and the Encyclopaedists – in which a straight-faced argument is destroyed by the conclusions it is pushed to and the absurdity, or comic inappropriateness, of the images with which it is embellished. Beginning and ending with the miraculous fertilisation of the orchid (which is after all natural, however improbable, and which the narrator misses only because he is so busy spying on Charlus and Jupien), it tends rather to mock the isolation of the Sodomites than to reinforce the standard view, equating their position, as so often in this text, with that of the Jews. It looks very much like a satirist’s defence of what he is pretending to attack. Still, it is true that in the total design of the book, inversion (to use that quaint old term), both male and female, Sodom and Gomorrah, is one of the deeply corruptive elements of the world as the narrator perceives it. It is one of the book’s great images of evil, part of its mythology; which is to say, perhaps, that Proust was more loyal to the structure of his book, which is also its morality, than to his own nature.
That is his choice as an artist, and he makes it, as the passage on Bergotte suggests, not only in defiance of the Mrs Grundys of this world but of the Gides as well. We accept the mythology because he imposes it so powerfully upon us in the reading; as we accept the old-fashioned notions of gender he makes use of because they obey so perfectly the demands of the work – its obsession with doubleness, ambiguity, travesty, metamorphosis, hermetic gesture and significance. They justify themselves by their adherence not to reality (books make their own reality) but to internal truth. Proust’s psychology of homosexual behaviour (I do not mean his observation of it) belongs to myth. Modern readers will find little in A la Recherche to explain the nature of homosexuality or to further the cause of sexual politics, but Proust was neither a hypocrite nor a defector from the cause. He simply remained loyal to what he was creating rather than to what he was.
Given the vastness of the work – three thousand pages, a million and a quarter words – it is tempting to take the easy path and describe A la Recherche in terms of its ‘set pieces’: the business of the madeleine and the flowering of Combray and the whole world of the novel out of the cup of tea; the hawthorns of Chez Swann; the three men with the monocles, the morning sea at Balbec, the death of the narrator’s grandmother, the courtship dance of Charlus and Jupien; or, by taking four ‘characters’ in the La Bruyère sense, to see in it studies of the artist as writer (Bergotte), painter (Elstir), composer (Vinteuil) and actress (Berma); or to read it as an anthology of all the forms of passion – I mention only a few of the more obvious ways of working towards the centre of the book by choosing either characteristic details or one or more of its various ‘structures’. But something ought to be said, however briefly, of the experience of the reading itself as its manifold views unfold before us, and of the whole as we see it at last from our many perspectives.
The narrator, at Combray, has two possible ‘ways’ of going – the Méséglise way that passes ‘à côté du chez Swann’, and what appears to be an alternative and opposite one, the Guermantes way. These constitute between them a divided topography of Combray and of the narrator’s original world that becomes also a map of society and a map of the forces that move him this way and that within it.
Now it would be foolish to reduce to any simple scheme what in the writing, and in the reading, is so tangled and so full of qualification and nuance, but the narrator begins by exploring each of these ways in turn: Swann’s way in the obsessive love which leads him to and then away from Gilberte and offers a preview of his own obsessive love for Albertine, and the other way which leads into society, into history, into that dream of ideal values – beauty, nobility – that is embodied for the narrator in the name of Guermantes. It is, of course, only at the very end of the book that the narrator discovers that his map was false, even in the topographical sense, since both ways can be taken to the same place.
But by the time the writer has seen this, and begun to reconstruct his view of things in accordance with ‘truth’, the place no longer exists, and each of its names has been given a significance outside him. Gilberte writes from Tansonville in Time Regained:
‘Probably, like me, you did not imagine that obscure Roussainville and boring Méséglise … would ever be famous places. Well, my dear friend, they have become for ever a part of history, with the same claim to glory as Austerlitz or Valmy. The battle of Méséglise lasted for more than eight months; the Germans lost in it more than six hundred thousand men, they destroyed Méséglise, but they did not capture it. As for the short cut up the hill which you were fond of and which we used to call the hawthorn path, where you claim that as a small child you fell in love with me (whereas I assure you in all truthfulness it was I who was in love with you), I cannot tell you how important it has become. The huge field of corn upon which it emerges is the famous Hill 307, which you must have seen mentioned again and again in the bulletins …’ (III, p. 778)
This final destruction of the world he knew, first the accuracy of his view of it, then the place itself, is where the narrator begins. His world is not resurrected; it is remade by a backward process and rediscovered at the point of the narrator’s primal innocence and ignorance, so that he can once again describe it wrongly and make all its places famous in a different sense from the one Gilberte intended – famous because he creates them in all their details as they never were. The absolute destruction of Méséglise and all else, which seems so final and tragic as we are led towards it in the book, has already taken place before the writer creates it for us, and is the basis of its coming into its real existence. That is the demonstration of the power of memory but even more of the creative power of the word.
So too, if we take up another of the book’s lines of development, the narrator’s disillusionment – with the Guermantes and all they stand for, with love, with the whole innocent world of beginnings – that too has been accomplished before he enters into these things, in the work itself, with all the fullness and freshness of the enraptured child.
Innocence, Paradise, can be re-entered, but the process will lead again and again to inevitable expulsion.
It is worth stressing this double movement, forward and back, because it is easy to read A la Recherche only in terms of decline, as the destruction of innocence, the stripping of illusions, as a movement out of dreams into reality. That is certainly the traditional shape of the ‘Bildungsroman’.
But Proust reverses the process. It is not in the end his acceptance of ‘reality’ that saves the narrator and justifies the long telling, but the power of those dreams themselves, the magic of naming, the super-reality of language itself, which can, in another form, restore and remake reality and in doing so proclaim the primacy of the act of memory and of mind.
This is an anti-realistic novel. Its end is always a new beginning. Its process is cy
clic and its ultimate reality, as it exists both for writer and reader, is in the act of reading, of writing:
Experience had taught me only too well the impossibility of attaining in the real world to what lay deep within myself: I knew that Lost Time was not to be found again on the piazza of St Mark’s any more than I had found it again on my second visit to Balbec or on my return to Tansonville … When I recapitulated the disappointments of my life as a lived life, disappointments which made me believe that its reality must reside elsewhere than in action, what I was doing was not merely to link different disappointments together in a purely fortuitous manner and in following the circumstances of my personal existence. I saw clearly that the disappointment of travel and the disappointment of love were not different disappointments at all but the varied aspects which are assumed, according to the particular circumstances which bring it into play, by our inherent powerlessness to realise ourselves in material enjoyment or in effective action. And thinking again of the extra-temporal joy which I had been made to feel by the sound of the spoon or the taste of the madeleine, I said to myself: ‘Was this perhaps that happiness which the little phrase of the sonata promised to Swann and which he, because he was unable to find it in artistic creation, mistakenly assimilated to the pleasures of love, was this the happiness of which long ago I was given a presentiment – as something more supraterrestrial even than the mood evoked by the little phrase of the sonata – by the call, the mysterious, rubescent call of that septet which Swann was never privileged to hear, having died like so many others before the truth that was made for him had been revealed? A truth that in any case he could not have used, for though the phrase perhaps symbolised a call, it was incapable of creating new powers and making Swann the writer that he was not.’ (III, p. 911)
