Friday Column: Proust: Combray

With the Combray section of Swann's Way I am beginning to appreciate exactly how much emphasis Proust's narrator places on the physical. Hence the above cute little diagram that show the place and size of the Combray chapter in relation to the three others that make up Swann's Way. I place it here in deference to the narrator's emphasis on the physical and to help make mental space occupied by these memories easier to visualize.

Combray is the narrator's hometown. As understood by him it is dominated by a number of landmarks. Foremost among them is the steeple of the town's church. In the chapter's very first sentence we're told that Combray from a distance "was no more than a church epitomizing the town, representing it, speaking of it and for it to the horizon." He first describes the church's insides in intense detail and then describes the steeple even more thoroughly.

It was the steeple of Saint-Hilaire that shaped and crowned and consecrated every occupation, every hour of the day, every view in the town. . . . None of them keeps in its thrall a whole section of my inmost life as does the memory of those aspects of the steeple of Combray. . . . It was always to the steeple that one must return, always the steeple that dominated everything else . . .

Thus is the steeple the narrator's primary reference point in reconstructing his memory of Combray.

The aunt, who was the one who got us back to Combray in the first place because of the madeleine she once gave the narrator that he remembered when he ate a madeleine years later, turns out to be something of a red herring. A distinctly dislikable character who believes herself sickly and shuts herself up in her room all day, the aunt plays very little role in the narrator's life. Nonetheless, Proust spends a large amount of space on her while discussing the narrator's family life and unraveling the complex relationship between the aunt and the primary kitchen servant, Francoise.

It is in the Combray section that Proust first introduces some elements that, as I understand, will remain important throughout the full cycle of Remembrance. First is the author Bergotte, whom the narrator develops an interest in after hearing his friend recommend him. Interestingly, this friend makes a remark which the poet W.H. Auden is better remembered for. He says: "[Racine did] once in his life, compose a line which is not only fairly rhythmical but has also what is in my eyes the supreme merit of meaning absolutely nothing." (Auden was a little more concise and ambiguous: "Poetry makes nothing happen.")

But back to the narrator and Bergotte. Amongst a few pages of discussing his growing infatuation with this author, the narrator makes an astute comment about how we come to appreciate any particular author's style:

For the first few days, like a tune with which one will soon be infatuated but which one has not yet "got hold of," the things I was to love so passionately in Bergotte's style did not immediately strike me. I could not, it is true, lay down the novel of his which I was reading, but I fancied that I was interested in the subject alone, as in the first dawn of love when we go every day to meet a woman at some party or entertainment which we think is in itself the attraction.

The more I read Proust the more I begin to realize how committed he is to discussing the role played by the arts in the lives of his characters. I like it because he makes the characters' experience of the arts live on the page. This is not something I've seen done all that often. Although Proust's characters sometimes appreciate art for somewhat suspect reasons, it is always interesting to hear how Proust describes the arts and their impact, and the ways that the characters make the arts relevant to themselves.

In addition to presenting us with Bergotte, to whom I expect the narrator to return in later books, the Combray chapter acquaints us with the two trails through the countryside around Combray that--as "alternate paths"--will come to define the structure of the cycle of books. They are Swann's way (more often referred to in this section as the Meseglise way) and the Guermantes way (which is the title for the third and fourth books in the series).

As with the church steeple, these two paths form physical anchors for the narrator's memories, and Proust's description of them takes up almost half of this chapter. Significantly, whereas with the Guermantes way "one could never be sure what time one would be home," Swann's way is taken when "we were not going anywhere in particular"; it's a favorite when there is a threat of rain because it is so straightforward and offers so much protection.

Swann's way then seems to point us toward Swann himself, who is about as middle-of-the-road as you can get for a man of his time and station. And, as the book itself is called Swann's Way, I'd hazard that Swann's uncomplicated life tends to mirror that of the narrator's childhood. (Moreover, in the following chapter Proust will draw a direct comparison between Swann's woman troubles and the narrator's relationship with his mother).

The Guermantes way, which is named for an incredibly wealthy and famous family (we briefly glimpse madam Guermantes at a wedding, and the young narrator is suitably stunned), perhaps will come to represent a somewhat more tumultuous time in the narrator's life. Late in the chapter, while "quivering with emotion" the narrator says that "it was from the Guermantes way that I learned to distinguish between these states which reign alternately with me . . . the one returning to dispossess the other with the regularity of a fever."

Peaceful as Swann's way is, there's at least one notable tear in it. The last thing we are told about is that while walking it the narrator once happened upon a house with a lesbian sadomasochist session taking place. The full description is too long to quote here, but it is a marvel of speaking through restraint. Proust's analysis of sadomasochism is worth quoting at length:

Sadists of Mlle Vinteuil's sort [the receiver] are creatures so purely sentimental, so naturally virtuous, that even sensual pleasure appears to them as something bad, the prerogative of the wicked. And when they allow themselves for a moment to enjoy it they endeavour to impersonate, to identify with, the wicked, and to make their partners do likewise, in order to gain the momentary illusion of having escaped beyond the control of their own gentle and scrupulous natures into the inhuman world of pleasure. . . . Far more than [her father's] photograph, what she really desecrated, what she subordinated to her pleasures through it remained between them and her and prevented her from any direct enjoyment of them. . . . it was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil. And as, each time she indulged in it, it was accompanied by evil thoughts such as ordinarily had no place in her virtuous mind, she came at length to see in pleasure itself something diabolical, to identify it with Evil. . . . She could delude herself for a moment into believing that she was indeed enjoying the pleasures which, with so perverted an accomplice, a girl might enjoy why really did harbour such barbarous feelings towards her father's memory.

Not only is this a rather nice interpretation of the sadomasochist urge, but, as Proust so often does, here he takes an archetypical trait and personalizes it. In this case, it's personalized via Mlle Vinteuil's relationship with her (recently deceased) father. Of all the fetish objects Proust could have chosen to use in an S/M session, he chooses a photo of Mlle Vinteuil's father. Not only is this poignant, as the just-dead, loving had taken much disgrace because of his daughter, but it cuts right to the heart of Mlle Vinteuil.

The more I read the more I see Proust's genius for animating even minor characters by creating a certain detail that lets him take us right into the depths of their personality--often within no more than a paragraph or a long sentence--before swinging back out again and continuing with the narrative at large.

As I read I also begin to see that Proust is intent on structuring his book, chapters, (and perhaps even paragraphs) not according to the logic of a story, in which we artificially order our memories to best take advantage of chronology, but simply according to the logic of memory. For instance, on page 78, the narrator tells us "for some years now I had not gone into my uncle Adolphe's sanctum . . . on account of a quarrel." He dives right into the explication of the quarrel, but as it involves an actress he is diverted for several pages into a digression of his interest in plays as a youngster. And then on page 81 he picks back up the story of the quarrel as though nothing had happened. This time of meandering happens often throughout the chapter.

In doing this, Proust reminds me of Kazuo Ishiguro, an author who pulls off the strange and magnificent trick of structuring his books according to the dictates of memory, but applies that framework to narratives that, though they're couched as a series of remembrances, work quite well as stories. In Ishiguro, the paths of memory and narrative mesh seamlessly, whereas in Proust he seems almost to be trying to make us notice the meandering path he is taking.

Perhaps in traveling in this way Proust is trying to emulate "the life of the mind," which

Doubtless . . . progresses within us imperceptibly, and we had for a long time been preparing for the discovery of the truths which have changed its meaning and its aspect, have opened new paths for us; but that preparation was unconscious; and for us those truths date only from the day, from the minute when they became apparent.

To conclude, a little something about the urge to write. The narrator has already remarked a number of times about how he wants to be an author, and Proust here gives us a picture of his writerly mind as a youth. Whenever he sees a beautiful sight he feels an "obscure pleasure" which he has "never fully explored."

One day he sees a pair of steeples at sunset and

a thought came into my mind which had not existed for me a moment earlier, framing itself in words in my head; and the pleasure which the first sight of them had given me was so greatly enhanced that, overpowered by a sort of intoxication, I could no longer think of anything else. . . .

Without admitting to myself that what lay hidden behind the steeples of Martinville must be something analogous to a pretty phrase, since it was in the form of words which gave me pleasure that it had appeared to me, I borrowed a pencil and some paper from the doctor, and in spite of the jolting of the carriage, to appease my conscience and ot satisfy my enthusiasm, composed the following little fragment . . .

I felt that it had so entirely relieved my mind of its obsession with the steeples and the mystery which lay behind them, that, as though I myself were a hen and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top of my voice.

And now, Proust's obsession with physical details in the Combray chapter begins to make much more sense.

Comments

[Brian Hadd]

Sebald also trains memory right? Borges also I think, I haven't read him but have Collected Fictions.