Almost from the very first, novels have revolved about the lives of their heroes and have been named after them. We had Don Quixote, Pamela, Tom Jones, David Copperfield, Jude the Obscure, etc. Admittedly it has become less so as time has gone on, but the idea is always with us. So why is it that the Twentieth Century novel which appears to begin with the same idea (Lucky Jim, Rabbit Run, Herzog, etc.) seems so thin? This is a genuine puzzle to me and I am certain that it has been considered by scholars who have some very good answers.
Personally, I have only recently begun to worry about this, but my initial impression is that it may have something to do with Freud. With the exception of Dostoyevsky, I cannot think of a pre-Freudian novelist who was much concerned with the psychology of his protagonist, or how he felt, or the internal manifestations of his anger, happiness, etc.[1] And this is different from the authors' obvious concerns for Anna Karenina's distress or Emma Bovary's feelings. The great authors of the past were creating an entire external world, populated with many people, each of whom seemed to have a detailed story if only it were told. As much as anything else, it is the understanding of this that appears to be lacking in contemporary efforts. Our authors' view of the world has become restricted by psychology. They have the talent, but not the vision, to create the whole. I might even go so far to say that they lack the vision because they lack the patience. Great art requires patience as well as craft and we do not live in a patient time.
And so I have come to the threshold of what is nagging at me about my first venture in reading Walker Percy, who is apparently one of those "regional" southern writers. Lancelot is really a very good novel, a monologue by a southern man who, betrayed by his wife, takes revenge, and is committed to a mental hospital as a result. The monologue tells the story in retrospective, and contains a well-managed negative-image theme of the King Arthur tale, with Lancelot as the cuckold. The very best scene, consistent with the imagery, occurs as the narrator describes witnessing his betrayal on a defective videotape, the bodies in negative and the figures breaking up into merging and disconnected body parts and wispy "Pentecostal" hair. At the novel's end there is a hurricane blowing while the mansion house is on fire and we get the same impression of vertical things moving sideways.
Far superior to the alienations and anxieties portrayed by Bellow (Herzog), Updike (Bech: A Book), and others, Lancelot is a creditable heir to Faulkner -- hypnotic, Gothic, and occasionally over-the-top -- with a bit of The Prince of Tides thrown in. But it lacks the sense of a world outside the mind of Lancelot LaMott. I know this was intentional, but I fear that it has become inevitable.
Endnotes
1. If Shakespeare had been a novelist, he would be an exception.
Walker Percy, Love In the Ruins --
This novel is roughly about the breakdown of community and civility in America. Beyond that, however, it is difficult figuring out just what it is. To call it science fiction would be to underrate it; it is more like 1984, but with less seriousness of purpose. For black humor, it is superior to anything Waugh did. In some respects it resembles Our Man In Havana. And of course it is no surprise that it has many points of common reference with Percy's Lancelot: e.g., set in Louisiana (though less specifically), first person protagonist who has spent time in the "nut house," lusty girl from Texas with a cornpone father, etc.
The watered-down Dr. Strangelove plot is not uninteresting or without significant meaning, but at the end of the day, the commentary on contemporary life will soon be dated. One thing I did find interesting: Percy lets his narrator, Tom Moore, repeat himself several times in the novel. The repetition concerns little things, usually, but it contains a nice touch of individualization. Less endearing is Percy's occasional repetition of himself -- e.g. there is a line about women's bottoms perfectly fitting the heart-shaped bottom of a chair that is directly lifted from Lancelot (or vice versa).
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer —
This time Percy, apocalyptic Catholic, tells a story of a Louisiana stockbroker who views his life by reference to what he sees in the movies. (The book was written in the early 1960s and all film references seem dated for a reader 40 years later.) The time will come when I read the book again, but on first reading I could not get very interested in what the author himself evidently intended to portray as a fairly pedestrian life. I believe there is something of a Percy cult, probably because of the tincture of science fiction in his novels, but the unique mixture of southern Catholics with the implications of modern science do nothing more than puzzle me.
Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket --
I have read very little of Poe, but my impression is that his stories are narrated by people in some sort of confinement and that the plot is driven by their psychological reaction to that state. Told in the first person, the book begins with the young narrator's tale of his adventures as a stowaway upon a New England whaling ship, having been put up to the prank by an irresponsible friend whose father was captain. It is by far the strongest section of the book. Although Poe is generally said to be "Gothic," I would not use that word to describe the atmosphere here (except possibly for the Flying Dutchman episode). Furthermore, given the fact that this book is supposedly based on a real sailor's actual adventures, much of it is highly improbable and some of it (the last third) resembles Jules Verne or Edgar Rice Burroughs more than Melville. (plausibility is never an issue in Melville.) One clever feature is Poe's reference to himself in the opening pages (and toward the end) as a third person literary celebrity, thus adding some badly needed verisimilitude. But ultimately I think the book is a failure whose lack of a single plot is not compensated by the episodic, Robinson Crusoe elements.
Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time –
This observation, from one of the 12 short novels which go to make up the extended novel of manners known as A Dance to the Music of Time, is made by the narrator, Nick Jenkins, a somewhat less active Charles Ryder.
Although following the lives of characters in successive novels has been done before (see, e.g. The Forsyte Saga and USA Trilogy), Anthony Powell has his own methodology to follow. Powell’s forte is that he is a careful and subtle writer. He does not appear to venture into the esoteric, but his prose is extremely precise, cultivated, and melodious in a minor key. He does not advertise his vocabulary in any way, but I was arrested more than once in noticing how he can use just the exact word or phrase in the most casual way. It gives a wonderfully comforting effect. It also permits Powell to exercise a most subtle sense of humor (I think that’s what it is) in that his inoffensively elaborate sentences, following one after the other and demanding some attention simply for the sake of plot, will often contain little clauses of observation that can easily be overlooked as the mind is engaged in broader matters.
A sample:
“ . . . the matrimonial vows of the Maclinticks had been an accepted legend. However much one hears about individuals, the picture formed in the mind rarely approximates to the reality. So it was with Mrs. Maclintick. I was not prepared for her in the flesh. When she opened the door to us, her formidable discontent with life swept across the threshold in scorching, blasting waves.”Powell’s favored manner of storytelling is to use some social incident as the platform to move the somewhat glacial plot. Hence there will be a weekend party, the events of which will take 40 pages to tell, followed by the briefest transition (e.g. “I didn’t see him again until the following year when we met by accident at a cab stand in Paris”), followed by another 30 pages of the encounter at the cab stand. Ultimately, although all of this is very well done, it’s rather like a comfortable ride across the continent in a Rolls Royce, so very proficient that anything resembling excitement would be in virtually bad taste. Ironically this thought occurred to me as I read the following reflection contained in one of the volumes, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant:
“Even for the most self-disciplined of artists, a public taken by surprise is more stimulating than a public relieved to find that what is offered can be swallowed without the least sharpness on the palate.”
I accept the accuracy of the observation. Where it took me, in fact, was to ask whether it pertains to A Dance itself, since Powell is nothing if not self-disciplined. As I suggested in my remarks about Powell’s locution, A Dance is not bland, but subtle; and to that I must also add that it is unfamiliar territory, to me at least. Indeed as I think on it, it is possible all of the book is a satire flying under radar.
Recalling Allan Bloom’s observation that to laugh at something one must first know something, I suspect that Powell is conscientiously mining veins that I do not know. He is much too good an author not to differentiate his characters, all of whom come from a particular “set” of British society. Their collective unfamiliarity to me is by and large more pronounced than their idiosyncracies. (I cannot say this of the most successful character, Widmerpool, who is strikingly vivid at all times, though actually a bore.) To elaborate a bit on this, although it may not appear that Powell even recognizes how odd it is that all of his many characters seem to have known about each other whether or not they have met, perhaps he does. Perhaps that’s the point. Given closer inspection, the characters do present traits which lend themselves to cunning burlesque. We have, for example, both the “red earl” and the Communist author and their coterie of left leaning friends. There are artists and homosexuals, rafts of smart young women with titles and pliable libidos. Everyone has a stiff upper lip. Even Jenkins, for that matter, may be less a convention than a Waugh man/straw man.
While I am on Jenkins, I will say that he is not completely passive. Over the course of several volumes, Powell patiently permits him to betray his character, most vividly by making an occasional dry joke. He also employs another trick I do not recall having seen before. One of the minor characters is permitted to “read” Jenkins’s personality by tarot cards. It gives us what we need to know and moves the plot simultaneously. It's a nice touch. And this is also an appropriate juncture to comment on the second most vivid character in the piece, Pamela Flitton – except that she is really not a character at all. There is no question that she serves in the office of a prop, an essential item put on the stage without references to which the story would stagnate. But this is all. Pamela has no apparent motivation but to be beautiful and to torment men. There are such women in real life, of course[1], but they are no more interesting than Pamela, serving as little more than decoration and the eventual stimulus for the follies of the men whom they devour. Eventually Pamela commits a pedestrian suicide, the only thing to do with a character who has no place to go in the story. But I wonder why Pamela’s death, off stage and unremarkable, was not used more significantly by the author[2]. After all, if there is any recurring theme in these novels, it is mysticism and the impermanence of death. I have already mentioned the tarot card reader, but she is simply one of several characters -- e.g. the nutty evangelical, a creepy cleric, an androgynous cult leader, and others – whose periodical appearance begin to resonate by the end of the piece, fortifying the impression that the “dance” continues even after we have “passed over.”
This might also be the point at which to observe that in a work so explicitly devoted to time, the author does not particularly well manage the passage of time for his readers. Obviously there are ample references to the current world situation, wars, films, public figures, and the like, sufficient to give us some sense of where we are; but I found myself persistently guessing about the age of the characters and the exact years in which certain events are taking place. No doubt this is largely attributable to my own too earnest sense of literalism, but there is no doubt that Powell was deliberately coy on a variety of insignificant details which, to my mind, would have added verisimilitude without damaging the story one whit. Why not acknowledge that they were at college in Cambridge? Did Gwinnett teach at Kent State? Was Jenkins’s military unit stationed in Ulster?
Finally, it would be unrealistic for me not to remark in this recollection on the high number of characters who are involved in the arts: painters, writers, musicians, actors, etc. Of them, the most significant are the writers, including Jenkins himself and an excellent creation (something of a prop himself) called X. Trapnel. For his part, Jenkins is working on some sort of book on Robert Burton, the 17th Century author of Anatomy of Melancholy. He doesn’t ever appear to have finished it and thus put me in mind of the pedant Casubon in Middlemarch, though the point is not made explicit[3]. But the efforts of each of these writers, which are made part of the story, give Powell frequent opportunity to comment on the process of writing, reminding me occasionally of Stephen Dedalus’s riffs on Shakespeare in Ulysses. I imagine that someone with the time to re-read all 12 volumes could make a profitable study of just these observations alone. And so at the end of 12 novels, the last scene is like the first: Widmerpool running, this time out of the story.
Endnotes
1. Indeed, I read a book review in summer 2001 of a biography of Lady Caroline Blackwood whose life sounds as though it must have been the model for Pamela Flitten. I have not read the biography itself, however, and the review was silent on the possibility.
2. In fairness, however, she is one of many characters who die throughout the novels – although the only one who may be a necrophiliac.
3. No doubt it is coincidental, but the two novels also each have a character with the somewhat unusual name of Fairbrother.
Marcel Proust – Swann’s Way (Tr. C.K. Scott Moncrief)
Swann’s Way is the first of the six novels making up Remembrance of Things Past, all of them related by the same narrator who comes to us first as a sensitive and melancholy and unnamed child. Given the wonderful overall theme of the impermanence of time and unreliability of memory, a reader at least is given the understanding that in each of the six segments the narrator speaks from distinct ages of his life.
In Swann’s Way he is a boy. But in recalling his mother's bedtime kiss, he alerts us what is to come.
"The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of the intellect in some material object (in the sense in which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die."
This, the narrator says in a later volume, is the “better part” of our memory. And so years later when the boy's mother offers him some tea and a madeleine cake when he is an adult, a symphony unexpectedly rises up in him.
"And in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shares and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike . . . ."
The madeleine, in short, does not ignite a moment of rationality or even memory. It is an epiphany, unadulterated pleasure filtered by memory and innocence, a pleasure which, the author later says, was "destined to have a lasting effect on his character and conduct."
From here the plot, such as it is, only slowly develops and as it does I was periodically arrested by things which played no role in it. The boy's encounter, for example, with M. Legrandin, the engineer who, like all such men who are more literary than men of letters, "bring to their regular occupations either a fantastic indifference or a sustained and lofty application, scornful, bitter, and conscientious."
Legrandin continues to play his part[1], but what of the title, Swann's Way? What does this mean? In the opening section of the novel, following an "overture," we participate in the boy's mixed recollections of Combray, the suburban Parisian village where he and his family periodically take a holiday in the home of his elderly aunt Leonie. He remembers everything which was so important to him a a child -- and more than anything else this means the sensual things, the light in the sky, the smells of the waiting dinner, summer and winter, curtains, reflections, colors. To him "Swann's Way" was a walk they would sometimes take before dinner, though less frequently than their more favored walk called "Guermantes Way." Indeed, "Swann's Way" was actually the less frequently used denotation of their more common reference to the "way" to an even smaller village, Meseglise-la-Vineuse. The boy remembers his father remarking that the Guermantes Way was one of typical river scenery, the other "the finest view of a plain."
And during one delinquent episode when the family mistakenly believes that Swann is absent, thus permitting them to make use of Swann's Way toward the plains, the boy encounters by accident Swann's daughter, a girl of his own approximate age. This is a wonderful literary moment since it weaves in, with the languorous memories, a jolt of connection.
"A little girl with fair reddish hair, who appeared to be returning from a walk, and held a trowel in her hand, was looking at us raising towards us a face powdered with pinkish freckles. Her black eyes gleamed . . . . I gazed at her at first with that gaze which is not merely a messenger from the eyes, but in whose window all the senses assemble and lean out, petrified and anxious, that gaze which would fain reach, touch, capture, bear off in triumph the body at which it is aimed, and the soul with the body . . . ."
But hard upon his recollection of being thunderstruck by Gilberte, he finds his memory recalling M. Vinteuil, whose daughter was uncomfortably always accompanied by an older girl, causing her widowed father in a few months to degenerate into an old man. When Swann graciously condescends to this patriarch, Vinteuil reciprocates by expressions of admiration of Swann's charm and an aside that it was "a pity that he should have made such a deplorable marriage." We are certainly to hear more of this.
Our narrator, still a boy, is certain he wants to be a writer, though he is frequently discouraged and feels a lack of talent. And then suddenly, "a roof, a gleam of sunlight reflected from a stone, the smell of a road would make me stop still to enjoy the special pleasure that each of them gave me, and also because they appeared to be concealing, beneath what my eyes could see, something which they invited me to approach and seize from them . . . ." Beneath these things he has a foreboding of a confused reality as to which he felt he did not have the energy to "bring to light." These things he perceives while riding next to a coachman, reminding me of another youth, David Copperfield, going on to the sea beside Mr. Barkis.
And for this boy, as for all of us, everything worth remembering is specific. In later years, he did not hope to see simply “a” river in which there were simply beautiful lilies any more than he desired a strange but more beautiful mother. Yes, perhaps this leads to disillusionment, but the memories give his impressions "a foundation, depth, a dimension lacking from the rest."
As the next segment of the novel, called "Swann In Love,"commences, the boy is virtually non-existent, though we are reminded at long intervals that he is still the narrator. The intensity of his personal recollections are replaced by observations he would be in no position to have made. Here we are introduced to the Verdurin family, particularly Mme Verdurin, a specimen of domineering middle class boredom encumbered with pretension and money. She condescends to permit her friend, Mme Odette de Crecy, to invite Swann to one of her contrived soirees[2].
At the outset, it seems that Swann -- "the heir of a rich and respectable middle-class family"-- might be something of a Parisian boulevardier with style enough to captivate sophisticated aristocratic women, and so he should also be above this maneuvering. In fact, it develops that he is intelligent and sophisticated in matters of art -- he has been a student at the Louvre and publishes essays on artists. Indeed, later in the book he becomes socially ostracized for nothing more than his honesty.
"There are certain original and distinguished authors in whom the least freedom of speech is thought revolting because they have not begun by flattering the public taste, and serving up to it the commonplace expressions to which it is used."
But his vanity and insecurity are such that Swann becomes nervous in the society of those of lesser eminence. "Swann, who behaved quite simply and was at his ease when with a duchess, would tremble, for fear of being despised, and would instantly begin to pose, were he to meet her graces maid." And so he melts "at the sight of healthy, abundant, rosy human flesh" and accepts Mme Verdurin’s invitation.
At this exact point, like the boy and his madeleine, Swann himself, experiences a momentous instant of something like memory when Mme Verdurin's pianist guest plays a melody Swann had heard the previous year played on piano and violin[3]. The passage is too lengthy to quote in full, but I cannot resist giving this edited version.
"[I]t had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the narrow ribbon of the violin part, delicate, unyielding, substantial, and governing the whole, he had suddenly perceived . . . the mass of the piano part, multiform, coherent, level, and breaking everywhere in melody like the deep blue tumult of the sea . . . . But at a given moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, . . . suddenly enraptured, he had tried to collect, to treasure in his memory the phrase or harmony -- he knew not which -- that had just been played, and had opened and expanded his soul . . . ."
The memory of the musical phrase alerts Swann to the possibility, in his own phrase, of an "invisible reality" which he had ceased to believe in, kindling in him a desire to "consecrate" his life[4]. But he is unable to identify the piece, which we soon learn was composed by a musician named Vinteuil, possibly a relation of the man whose daughter had such an unconventional friend.
Swann's appreciation of a woman -- his "way" -- is less genuine than the boy's parallel intensity. His birthright, passed on to him by earlier generations, was "the knowledge of the 'right places' and the art of ordering things from shops."He has become intimate with "people of fashion" -- later we see that includes Princess des Laumes, a Guermantes. But Odette -- indeed the people who captivate Swann on this level -- do so because they resemble people painted by the old masters. He fails to observe that "this quality would not naturally avail to bring Odette into the category of women whom he found desirable, simply because his desires had always run counter to his aesthetic taste." Well, we are all fools in love. And so it is Odette who concludes that it is Swann who is intellectually inferior[5]. And he, fatuous as we are in these circumstances, is consoled to like "nothing that was not equally felt and liked by her."
Odette finally tires of Swann. For that matter, "people" who would previously have said of him that although his "long, slightly bald head" was not regularly good-looking it was redeemed by his intelligence and his smile, would now reflect that he was "not positively ugly" because of the "invisible boundary which divides, in a few months interval, the head of an ardent lover from a cuckold's." Odette’s infidelity is brought home to Swann in an anonymous letter, detailing her depravity. His first reaction is not one of pain but of puzzling over which of his friends would have sent such a message, for he is disposed to discount the possibility of truth in the communication. But it is true -- even liaisons with women -- as she obliquely, even innocently, acknowledges to him upon interrogation. (There is a subtle comedy here.) Thus Odette, whom he had always seen as "the most refined of pleasures," is revealed as a foolish creature circling in hell.
But in time Swann's troubles subside.
"For what we suppose to be our love, our jealousy, are neither of them, single, continuous and individual passions. They are composed of an infinity of successive loves, or different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multitude they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity."
A perfunctory introduction which he has made at a party between a general and Legrandin's daughter, Mme Cambremer, becomes the unanticipated foundation of Swann’s future.
The short, final segment of Swann's Way, called "Place-Names: The Name," returns to the narrator, who is now a youth of about 10-12, I would say, apparently sickly and, as he describes himself, "slightly nervous."[6] Coming off of the extended depiction of Swann's emotional ordeal, this section is an abrupt change indeed. But it is entirely congruent with the first part of the novel where we have already learned of the child's sensuality, and it actually commences a pattern which is picked up in the later volumes of Remembrance of Things Past, where the narrator continues to examine place names.
But it is no surprise to learn that the boy is a reader and has poured his imagination into travel books and railway schedules. At the Norman coast which he has visited -- because in his life dreams always come first -- he broods at the fog and sea and mediaeval architecture. When his parents arrange a trip to Italy for his health, he dilates on the Tuscan place names he will visit. "I thought of names," he says, "not as an inaccessible ideal but as a real and enveloping substance into which I was about to plunge." His mental picture of an as yet unseen place is drawn from what he calls the "enforced simplicity" of the names, "the brightness or darkness of their sound, [and] the color in which it is uniformly painted." With the help of Stendhal he imagines the "heavy syllable," Parma, as "compact and glossy, violet-tinted, soft."
But more importantly this section also brings us back to Swann -- from a different angle. Now he is not Swann in love, he is Swann the father of Gilberte, seen by the boy in an entirely different light than the foolish lover of a courtesan. And the boy and Gilberte? -- they are in exactly the same position as was Swann to Odette in the previous section. This makes it less surprising and indeed more logical that near the book's ending it becomes clear that Gilbert's mother -- and Swann's wife -- is Odette, a feature that brings us back to the significant but ambiguous chronology of a novel which depends on time and how it is not remembered chronologically.
ENDNOTES
1. His daughter later appears as Mme Cambremer.
2. Much later in the novel Swann is given his first name, Charles, and still later we learn that he is Jewish (though converted). His father, we are told toward the end, had been a stockbroker. In a later novel we are given Odette's real surname, Sacripant.
3. Taste and sound having now played a role, smell will play its role in the next novel, Within A Budding Grove.
4. Even a hundred pages later the writer is drawn back to the seven notes which for Swann was like "the luminosity of a lamp that has just been lighted [giving a] view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which has vanished even the memory of the darkness.”
5. Mme des Laumes is not deceived, however. “[S]he concluded with the wisdom invariably shown by people who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man ought to be unhappy only about such persons as are worth his while; which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the common bacillus.” 6. In the next volume he describes himself as being “burdened with a sluggish digestion” and “choking fits.” Cystic fibrosis?
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove (Tr. C.K. Scott Moncrief)
The facts of life have no meaning for the artist, they are to him merely an opportunity for exposing the naked blaze of his genius. - Seascape, With Frieze of Girls
This second volume of Remembrance of Things Past might as well have been called a portrait of the artist as a young man, or at least as an adolescent. As it does in Swann’s Way, the plot moves, though slowly and episodically, as the young narrator’s age advances. But what is central are the impressions which the events make on him. Place and new characters are featured, as before. But also as before they are generally noted as much for future reference as any particular incident. Furthermore, the narrator’s voice is no more that of a boy than it had been in Swann’s Way. Yet it is always a sympathetic voice; the voice of wisdom and observation as recalled from the memories of the younger author.
At the opening, we meet the prominent but perhaps passé ambassador M. de Norpois. A business acquaintance of the narrator boy's father (“a simple soul”), de Norpois condescends to dine periodically with the family when the boy is a young adolescent. His parents’ esteem for the ambassador (predominantly because he respects the boy's literary aspirations) opens to the boy a chance which he would not otherwise have enjoyed within his family circle -- meaning that the man's approval is sufficient to gain his parents' permission for him to attend the theater without supervision to see a performance by a legendary actress. Meantime, quoting Norpois at length, the boy inadvertently reveals the man as at least a pedant and gossip, but even so the man, shrewd and observant, provides the reader in passing a malicious but plausible picture of Swann's married life which he claims to have observed first hand. This is of utmost interest to the boy.
Indeed, once Swann is mentioned, the boy immediately takes over the narrative, with details that only an author -- and not the boy -- can know[1]. He reveals, for instance, that Odette had always been angling for a marriage to Swann but little believed that he would consent -- even though they have had a child. Odette had actually steeled herself against the likelihood that Swann intended to leave her.
"A consultant more discerning than M. De Norpois would doubtless have been able to diagnose that it was [a] feeling of shame and humiliation that had embittered Odette, that the devilish characteristics which she displayed were no essential part of her, no irremediable evil, and so would easily have foretold what had indeed come to pass, namely that a new rule of life, the matrimonial, would put an end, with almost magical swiftness, to these painful incidents. . . . ."
And so "impossible" marriages, the boy observes, can be the happiest of all "because they imply the sacrifice of a more or less advantageous position to a purely private happiness."
Time has passed since the first novel. Gilberte, herself now a young teenager, contrives a keep-away game with the boy during one of their play encounters on the Champs Elysees (which at the time, I gather, resembled Central Park.) Their resulting wrestling is so provocative to him that he ever after associates the resulting sooty, mouldy "odor of humidity" with "a positive rapture." Immediately afterwards, however, he links this with his own congenital neurosis which he has trained himself to ignore, like a dying soldier in the heat of battle.
In a way, this portion of Within a Budding Grove retells the awkward story of Swann himself and of all young lovers. It repeats the uncertainties of a young person impelled by love encountering an older generation grown jaded with the memories of the same experiences and, truth be told, jealous of -- if not attracted by -- the ardor of the youths with which they are both familiar and embarrassed. (I ask myself if I would want to have those moments back -- or to relive them again.) At the same time, it becomes obliquely evident that Gilberte's parents make use of moderately prominent families, not including boy himself, for their own diminished social purposes.
And then it seems, after a period of indifference, the Swanns also have suddenly taken the boy in (to the disapprobation of the boy's own stern family.) It is, the boy learns, simply because they view him as one of Gilberte's "chums." But he thereby becomes something like a junior intimate in the Swann household. Mme Swann (whom he comes to worship) plays the Vinteuil sonata for him and then Swann himself solicits the boy's opinion. The couple banter in his presence about their early courtship, and they gossip about people in their social set. They actually introduce him at a soiree to Bergotte, an author the boy has idolized, and whose presence puts him in a dubious state, resembling what he felt when seeing the legendary actress for the first time. Here the boy (who himself, after all, is becoming a writer) first alerts the reader that there will be more to come later on. But second, he also remarks in reference to Bergotte, whose greatest praise of other authors was that they were "mild" -- unlike Dostoevsky and others -- is that
"genius, and even what is only great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement, superior to those of other people, than from the faculty of transposing, and so transforming them . . . . [T]he men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is most brilliant or their culture broadest, but those who have had the power, ceasing in a moment to live only for themselves, to make use of their personality as a mirror . . . ."[2]
In person, however, he perceives that Bergotte is crude and even cruel.
Then Gilberte inevitably tires of the boy. He goes through the torments of rejected young love, but is also wise enough to recognize the futility of it all. Had he spoken to her, she would not have understood his loyalty. "We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening." Thus he becomes fatalistic, persuaded that nature at the end is always poised to wrest our happiness from us. In any event, the boy is now a regular at Mme Swann's parlor even when Gilberte is absent, and the prolonged exposure leads him to become fascinated with Odette's Bohemian style.
When the novel then turns to the segment about place names, the boy, not really in the best of health, is actually successful in finally traveling to the seaside at Balbec where he and his grandmother lodge at a great hotel common to that period to which notables or semi-notables come for a season. The town itself, so frequently referred to in earlier passages, disappoints his imagination. But his grandmother, always clutching the memoirs of the 17th century Mme Sevigne, eventually acknowledges another guest, Mme de Villeparisis[3] and in her company she and the boy daily journey about the countryside in her carriage. This is far more pleasant and sensual than the days leading up to it. On one such trip he is overwhelmed by the sight of three trees, instantly familiar to him, moving in the wind. “In their simple passionate gesticulation I could discern the helpless anguish of a beloved person who has lost the power of speech and feels that he will never be able to say to us what he wishes.” (I think of Ariel.) Like the madeleine cake, the trees are incantations of a past the boy cannot specifically recall.
“Was I to suppose . . . that they came from years already so remote in my life that the landscape which accompanied them had been entirely obliterated from my memory, and that, like the pages which, with sudden emotion, we recognize in a book which we imagined that we had never read, they surged up by themselves out of the forgotten chapter of my earliest infancy?”
But the carriage then passes on, taking him away from “what alone I believed to be true, what would have made me truly happy; it was like my life.”
Mme de Villeparisis’s notable nephew arrives unexpectedly. Somewhat older than the boy, Robert de Saint-Loup appears initially as a horrible snob, and certainly an aristocrat of great charm and intelligence. But he soon turns out to be something much different: possibly a socialist, a radical, an intellectual anxious to apologize for what he cannot help being -- or maybe something else. Moreover, he is related to a man of an even greater pedigree, the haughty, intelligent, and slightly mad Baron Palamede de Charlus (a Guermantes, naturally), of whom it was said that Mme Swan had once been his lover[4]. He betrays an anti-Semitism and fails in an attempted seduction which the naïve boy does not even recognize.
In rough parallel to Saint-Loup, the boy’s old school friend, Bloch -- “ill bred, neurotic, a snob,” and a self conscious Jew trying to raise himself -- also arrives in Balbec. Bloch is by no means a formidable character (though he is evidently rather handsome). He back-bites the boy to Saint-Loup, and vice-versa. He immediately makes insensitive remarks about M. Charlus to his nephew Saint-Loup and then asserts to the boy that he has had indecent relations on a train with Odette (though he cannot recall her name). Bloch’s father, furthermore, is the subject of the boy’s even more trenchant criticism. The man is educated, shrewd, middle class, living on the “propitious miracle of self-esteem,” meaning envy which impels him to scornful evaluations of distinguished people, such as Bergotte – whom the senior Bloch protests he has no desire to know, not knowing that the boy actually does know him. And even less admirable is Bloch’s ridiculous uncle, M. Nissim Bernard, an almost Dickensian figure who is given to petty ostentation, though with less indulgence than a Dickens family would give.
Following the “Place Names” segment, is the final one titled “Seascape, With a Frieze of Girls.” It is exactly as named. On the Balbec beach the boy encounters five or six young adolescent girls, traveling in a pack as teenagers do, with the same ostentatious indifference and camaraderie which I imagine characterizes them in every epoch. For that matter, they (and perhaps he) also benefit from a peculiar aspect of seaside life: their social status is for the moment invisible, irrelevant. In time the narrator is brought to reflect on the meaning of a girl’s adolescence and how it passes into age. It seems so accurately bittersweet.
One of the girls has the surname Simonet. We later know her as Albertine, a girl who in time we learn is not of the highest social status.
“I see her again today, outlined against the screen which the sea spreads out behind her, and separated from me by a transparent, azure space, the interval of time that has elapsed since then, a first impression, faint and fine in my memory, desired, pursued, then forgotten, then found again . . . .”
This theme – always a variation on the same theme -- is played again in a different key when the boy encounters the painter Elstir at about the same time. He gives a compelling description of one of the man’s landscapes, a novelty now lost to “’magnificent’ photographs,” for Elstir did not reproduce things “as he knew them to be but according to the optical illusions of which our first sight of them is composed.” And among other things this means that he had made a portrait of Odette –- before she was Odette – which “established her . . . as the younger sister of various time-honored courtesans . . . contemporary with . . . models who already belonged to oblivion or history.”
Elstir is also the source of the boy’s wonderful descriptions of the man’s own paintings. And this makes me feel that perhaps I should earlier have described this novel as the portrait of the critic as a young man. Each time he ventures to describe an Elstir painting, for example, regardless of whatever other implications it may have, we have a masterpiece of prose which also reminds us that the artist, on canvas or paper, ultimately is telling us how to see.
The novel ends following the boy’s attempted seduction of Albertine, which completely miscarries. In terms of Proust’s objectives, this is a significant moment. Other authors would have made this incident a vital part of the story, generally comic, but Proust (and the author) are indifferent to plot. For them, it is one more occasion for the narrator to reflect on and to predict the implications, which he sees as “that embryo of moral esteem.”
Within A Budding Grove is then an elaborate bridge. We cross it to The Guermantes Way.
ENDNOTES 1. As a narrator, the boy can be seen as reliable for, as he remarks of himself later on, he is incapable of friendship. 2. Thus there are artists – and also merely critics. 3. She later turns out to be a Guermantes. 4. And perhaps there is a slight suggestion that he may be Gilberte’s father.
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (Tr. C.K. Scott Moncrief) B
Certain impressions, fugitive and fortuitous, carry us back even more effectively to the past, with a more delicate precision, with a flight more light-winged, more immaterial, more headlong, more unerring, more immortal, than . . . organic dislocations.
The Guermantes Way only poses as a separate novel. It is actually an extended chapter in Remembrance of Things Past dealing, as always, with what things seemed, what they were, and what they are, implicitly considering which is best, what is more accurate, and what is an illusion. It is largely a chronicle, often amusing, of the young narrator’s emergence into society, or at least the segment of it represented by the Guermantes clan.
The time is perhaps 1897 and so the Dreyfus affair is frequently the topic driving the conversation in the various social settings. The narrator’s father is an anti-Dreyfusard. A family friend of old standing, Mme Sazerat, is the opposite, as is Saint-Loup and the narrator himself. Indeed, as troops of Guermantes (and their friends) are reviewed in this novel, their Dreyfus credentials, pro or con, are all dutifully recorded. The problem is that – as with so much of the detail that clots this dense recollection of a past era – the Dreyfus passions are no more than backdrop. They do almost nothing to advance anything resembling a story. In actual life, the Dreyfus drama convulsed a country. In this book it is finally no more than a touchstone to reveal character or lack of it.
Insofar as there is a story to be moved forward, in the book’s first paragraph we are simply told that the narrator-boy’s family has moved for the sake of his grandmother from its comfortable home in Combray to an apartment which is part of the Hotel de Guermantes. Although older – I imagine that he is now in his early 20s --- he is still in precarious health, but as such a young man he acknowledges a “perpetual dream” which has led and will lead him to sudden impulses and which at bottom is “an idea for which I would have laid down my life, at the innermost core of which . . . lay the thought of perfection.”
This new home is certainly not the Guermantes castle of “the Guermantes way,” the place of his early childhood. That residence, situated above the ancient forest located near Combray, was known to house coarse mediaeval tapestries and suggested an enchanting time beyond memory. But now the narrator’s “giddy rush of daily life” is conducted at the Hotel de Guermantes in Paris, and the vivid colors of that imagined aristocratic past in Combray, the sense of which always excites him, is merged into a grey of names and practical purposes. Reflection, it is true, might periodically suspend things, permitting him a leisure to recall “the tints which in the course of our existence have been successively presented to us by a single name,” but the reality is that names are not always ancient. The Guermantes, it seems, had acquired their castle second-hand, as it were, not two hundred years ago and the tapestries were newer than that. The Duke and his family of the Hotel de Guermantes are “obscure, clerical and narrow-minded nobles.”
The central personage of this novel is the fascinating Duchesse de Guermantes, born of the La Laume nobility[1]. She is obviously older than the young narrator (how French) and an enchanting enigma. He most often sees her at a distance leaving the hotel on some festive occasion -- usually to attend the Opera -- with friends carrying names like Guise and Parme. Accordingly, he can do no more than make an awkward daily effort to make himself known to her by stationing himself on strategic street corners so that he might bow as she passes in her carriage. But from the opening of the novel, his infatuation with this admittedly fascinating woman – an infatuation which in time declines into a simple admiration -- is always held in check by the innate clarity of his observations. Thus he reminds himself that the goddesses and demi-gods he spies nightly in her Opera box will, like his own passions, eventually no longer be a “sublime and individual essence.” As it touches the Guermantes, much of the novel will be proof of that.
Having failed indirectly at an introduction, and hoping therefore to secure it directly, the young man takes himself to Doncieres, the military garrison where Saint-Loup is stationed. (Surprisingly, Saint-Loup, a Guermantes and the duchess’s nephew, does not hold a commission. He is simply a sergeant with a noble air and good connections.) The young nobleman is perfectly charming and willing to help to his old friend but he is ultimately unable to arrange the requested introduction to Mme de Guermantes.
In fact, in his current situation Saint-Loup is distracted by an infatuation for his own mistress, an actress much below his station and generally considered of no worth by the Guermantes clan. (Not that having a mistress is gauche – these people are French, after all -- but she really should be clever.) In fact, the narrator confides that when he finally met this woman, he recognized Rachel (called Zezette) as a prostitute whom he had encountered at an earlier time. But like Swann in his pursuit of Odette, Saint-Loup is heedless of this, subject to “the power of human imagination, the illusion on which [is] based the pains of love.”
Here occurs one of several interruptions in the narrative in which the author periodically leaves his story in mid-air, as it were, to recount an ethereal moment or passing reflection more or less unrelated to the subject at hand. This worked superbly in the earlier novels and so it is not unwelcome here. But it lacks the hypnotic quality of the earlier moments. In this case, for example, following a quarrel between the two lovers, the narrator is called to a room where they have retired and reconciled. As he passes a mirror, he spies “in an endless vista” a sight of himself, somewhat drunk,
“hideous, a stranger, who was staring at me. The joy of intoxication was stronger than my disgust; . . . I smiled at him, and simultaneously he smiled back at me. . . . . I am not sure whether my sole regret was not at the thought that this hideous self of whom I had just caught sight in the glass was perhaps there for the last time on earth, and that I should never meet the stranger again in the whole course of my life.”
The idiosyncrasy of pauses like this one – there is another one on silence, privacy, and “that healing attack of mental alienation which is sleep” – has a surprising charm, but as they accumulate they detract from the willing suspension of disbelief necessary to the success of a novel. For meaningful French asides, I prefer Montaigne.
To return to Saint-Loup, since he has failed in arranging the narrator’s direct meeting with his aunt, he sends him instead directly to Mme Villeparisis who, after all, is Mme de Guermantes’s aunt as well. When we first met this somewhat eccentric old woman of superior bloodlines in Within a Budding Grove, she was refreshingly imperious and self-willed. But as the young man now revisits her, he makes it clear that this second view is in retrospect, his having in the interim read her Memoirs. Here, she is portrayed as more or less out of society and somewhat regretful because of it. She still maintains a drawing room, but her own pertinacious intelligence has effectively driven people away. This would not faze the young man – in fact it attracts him -- but she is a puzzle to him because although she falls short in understanding genuine genius, she is exemplary in her “eminently social grace.” As is common in this set of novels, he is speaking of her appreciation of fine art.
“Having passed by great works without mastering, sometimes without even noticing them, she had preserved from the period in which she had lived and which, [in her Memoirs] moreover she described with great aptness and charm, little more than the most frivolous of the gifts that they had had to offer her. But a narrative of this sort, even when it treats exclusively of subjects that are not intellectual, is still a work of the intellect and to give in a book . . . a deliberate impression of frivolity, a serious touch is required which a purely frivolous person would be incapable of supplying.”
Thus prompted, we are now placed with the narrator in Mme Villeparisis’s salon.
This comic scene – punctuated, of course, with Dreyfus references -- resembles most of Remembrance of Things Past in that it betrays an undertone of bitterness and cynicism. Mme Guermantes actually does arrive and so does her apparently obtuse husband – separately. In the course of the afternoon, there are conversations involving various Guermantes who come and go, plus Legrandin, Bloch (who is clumsy and then gauche), and M. de Norpois. The latter, having heard that the narrator’s father is contemplating standing for election, remarks that his affection for him is so great that he would not vote for him. Other names are copiously dropped. For instance, there also arrives a German, the comically-named Prince von Faffenheim-Munsterburg-Weinigen, who had been admitted, we learn, to effect something like a diplomatic exchange between himself and M. Norpois so that the prince might secure election to a certain desirable club.
Presently, the social minuet is unsettled by the arrival of Mme Swann who is, after all, never received socially. Now, therefore, Mme de Guermantes (Swann’s friend, remember), who has already been awkwardly obliged to sit next to the callow narrator, must certainly leave for another appointment. And since Mme Swann is “the prettiest woman in the room,” Baron Charlus (though himself not entirely welcome in his aunt’s parlor) is instantly at Odette’s side. Later, when the narrator departs, the Baron catches him up, proclaims that they enjoy an aesthetic kinship, and offers a “purely disinterested and charitable” proposal, in the course of getting to which he confides supposed the non-aristocratic ordinariness of Mme Villeparisis’s origins. As for the Baron’s proposal itself, it remains unarticulated, though it carries the innocent suggestion that the narrator would be something like a private secretary in return for which he could hope for magnificent political connections and insights. And, of course, the narrator would have to stay out of society. But this too is left in the air.
When spring arrives, Albertine unexpectedly visits the young narrator, bringing with her, but only faintly, the beach and horizon of the sea at Balbec. Those memories, he finds, have not remained very stable.
“Live with a woman altogether and you will soon cease to see any of the things that made you love her; though I must add that these . . . sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy. If, after a long period of life in common, I was to end by seeing nothing more in Albertine than an ordinary woman, an intrigue between her and some person whom she had loved at Balbec would still suffice, perhaps, to reincorporate in her, to amalgamate the beach and the unrolling of the tide. Only, as these secondary suggestions no longer captivate our eyes, it is to the heart that they are perceptible and fatal.”
But for all this, he is now able to complete the abortive seduction from the last novel which, among other things (his grandmother’s death among them) has also finally left him romantically indifferent to Mme de Guermantes who is believed to have just separated from her husband. But who can truly know what is what in these novels. The Guermantes, as the author puts it, are in the “semi-royal aristocracy,” which he describes as “stationary.” Hence it “cannot seek to raise itself since above it, from its own special point of view, there exists nothing higher.” So why is it that Mme de Guermantes now abruptly makes the author part of her circle? If there is an answer to be surmised, presumably it is that his merits have been tacitly confirmed by Saint-Loup and Mme Villeparisis.
And whether or not the young man’s entrée into the circle of the Duke and Duchess de Guermantes is genuine, his bond with Saint-Loup is solid and always promises new developments. Thus on a symbolically foggy night in Paris, when people are losing their way in the streets and the narrator himself is afoot, Saint-Loup appears, taking his friend up in his carriage. As they ride to dinner he reveals insouciantly that he has told Bloch, whom he has just left, that the narrator actually finds him vulgar. (This is probably true.) “I’m like that you see,” says Saint-Loup, “I want people to know where they stand,” immediately calling into question, of course, where Saint-Loup himself stands.
“[H]is face was seared, while he uttered this vulgar speech, by a frightful sinuosity which I saw on it once or twice only in all the time I knew him, and which, beginning by running more or less down the middle of his face, when it came to his lips twisted them, gave them a hideous expression of baseness, almost of bestiality, quite transitory and no doubt inherited.”
Whatever is to be made of this, an hour later at the crowded restaurant, Saint-Loup goes out of his way to show his young friend the utmost friendship and attention[2].
In the very next paragraphs, as the restaurant is left behind, that charm of the Guermantes aristocracy is replicated again by M. de Guermantes, the Duke himself, who receives the young man at his home (where he has now been invited) with a remarkable cordiality which the writer attributes to “a survival of habits of many centuries’ growth, habits of the seventeenth century in particular.”[3] This history and these qualities are intoxicating to the young man. Moreover, heightening the pleasure enormously, upon his arrival the Duke takes pains to make available to his private inspection his small collection of Elstir paintings – which the young man embraces with such an appetite that he inadvertently delays commencement of the dinner itself, given by the Duke to honor the Princesse de Parme.
And so now we enter one more Guermantes party, furnishing one more look at the high society of Paris in this day, including the attractive cordiality – though portrayed ironically – of its highest members. The young man understands that he is there as a manqué celebrity, but this is quite enough for him to elicit friendly, virtually democratic bonhomie from all other guests, including the royal princess herself. Most of the room is packed with Guermantes, including the Prince d’Agrigente, a “vulgar drone.” Indeed, although the narrator is never actually unkind to the Guermantes as a whole – in fact he calls them “rarer and more refined” than the rest of noble society -- he periodically singles out one or another for deprecation – including the Duke himself on several occasions.
“Later on, I realized that the Guermantes did indeed regard me as being of another race, but one that aroused their envy because I possessed merits of which I knew nothing and which they professed to regard as alone important. Later still I came to feel that this profession of faith was only half sincere and that in them scorn or surprise could be coexistent with admiration and envy.”
(This leads to a brief dilation on the Courvoisiers, a “rival branch” of the Guermantes family, for whom “intelligence was the sort of burglar’s jemmy by means of which people one did not know from Adam forced the doors of the most reputable drawing-rooms.”)
This segment of the novel is entitled “The Wit of the Guermantes,” a subject which, although it is ironically titled, is seriously examined. In fact, within the family only Mme de Guermantes believes she possesses this quality. As she sees it, it is brilliance accompanied by “a certain want of originality.” It seems to be snobbery elevated over substance with a talent for imitation of the genuine. The narrator himself – who does not entirely disagree with this evaluation -- is nevertheless shrewd enough to report factually on what he sees beyond his fascination. Her mind, he says, attracted him
“just because of what it excluded (which was exactly the content of my own thoughts) . . . . [O]f a formation so anterior to my own, [it] was for me the equivalent of what had been offered me by the procession of the girls of the little band along the seashore. Mme de Guermantes offered me, domesticated and held in subjection by her natural courtesy, by the respect due to another person’s intellectual worth, all the energy and charm of a cruel little girl of one of the noble families round Combray . . . . Only she was incapable of realizing what I had sought for in her, a rustic survival from Guermantes.”
Her rusticity is suggested, in fact, in both her vocabulary and a certain quality in her voice. And it is not long before before the young man also sees both her and her husband through a different historical glass,
“she remaining still Louis XV while her partner is pompously Louis-Philippe. That Mme de Guermantes should be like other women had been for me at first a disappointment; it was now, by a natural reaction . . . almost a miracle.”
It must have been a tricky business writing the party scenes in The Guermantes Way. No doubt the author’s objective was to convey the tediousness and ephemerality of the Guermantes social environment while still moving the plot (such as it is) and not undercutting the principal characters (most of whom are interchangeable Guermantes “cousins”). To do this, he employs paragraphs even longer than those which he has customarily used In the earlier volumes -- and they, to tell the truth, were already much too long for a modern reader. But now we must navigate paragraphs that are virtually endless. At one point I noted a paragraph of over 360 lines covering 8 pages of unbroken text, including quotations from as many as half a dozen speakers -- some of them I admit quite interesting -- not to mention the author’s own precious asides and observations, all idiosyncratically punctuated.
This is not to say that this physically dense text does not impart information useful to the story. Among other things, it is there to illustrate the eventual insignificance of too much reliance on family relationships in this fin de siècle society of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It also illustrates the narrator’s hyper-aestheticism, by which I mean his dreaminess when he sees beyond the contemporary names of the guests to their history and ancient titles. The linked names, he says, become “branches of the most graceful design and an ever-changing color.” They “resembled those finished works of art . . . . in which in every part . . . receives from the rest a justification.”
And yet, as I say, we have not really advanced a story, but simply sharpened an attitude, a positioning of characters which to the author is much more interesting.
Following one more encounter with the unstable M. de Charlus -- this one more explicit and prolonged, but no more successful -- the narrator is favored with another improbable invitation. He is now asked to a party at the drawing room of the Prince and Princess de Guermantes themselves, who are known never to mingle with the bourgeoisie and who maintain a “fossilized rigidity” of aristocratic manners. How is it that he could have been invited? Might it be a practical joke? To be certain, he calls on the Duke and Duchess de Guermantes to solicit their opinion. There, in the closing scene of the book, he encounters Swann who has also called upon them for his own benign ends.
The Guermantes Way ends with another marathon paragraph of small talk, cross-talk, trivialities, and observations among the four of them -- within which Swann at his most genteel, reveals that he is dying.
ENDNOTES
1. Though a La Laume princess, she is not to be confused with her younger cousin, the pleasant Princess de Guermantes-Baviere (Marie-Gilbert), married to the Guermantes prince who is head of the family. They appear only briefly in this volume.
2. I am not ignoring the latent homosexual attraction between Saint-Loup and the narrator; but it is not explicitly mentioned.
3. Did Faulkner read Proust? Here the narrator observes, “The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.” Again, the Duke (Bassin) is not to be confused with his cousin Gilbert, the Prince de Guermantes.
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain (Tr. C.K. Scott Moncrief)
In the most genuine exhaustion, there is, especially in neurotic people, an element that depends upon attracting their attention and is kept going only by an act of memory.
The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as intangible as those which imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than to those in our dreams.
As with The Guermantes Way, its predecessor, this separate book could not stand on its own as a novel. It begins by making explicit reference to that book’s closing events, specifically the narrator’s uncertainty about the genuineness of his invitation to a party at the home of the Princess de Guermantes-Baviere. And by now there is a reason for the reader to share in this doubt: except for occasional previous references to his hope to be a writer on the fine arts, the young man does not appear to have accomplished anything of note. (I should add that this book does nothing to change the situation.)
Of course by now it has become evident that Remembrance of Things Past is little concerned with accomplishment and only moderately with incident. This is not only not fatal, it is intentional. Whatever title is preferred, the work is both a remembrance and a search for it. By the time we embark on this fourth book in the series, the only real action that has been depicted to the reader is the fumbling and unsuccessful seduction attempt on Albertine at the end of Within a Budding Grove.
This said, in opening Cities Of the Plain, the narrator (or the author[2]) momentarily dispenses with his cooler depiction of the subtleties and ironies of human conversation. Instead, he gives a surprisingly unsavory description of his own eavesdropping on a chance homosexual encounter between M. de Charlus and a tailor, Jupien, at the hotel de Guermantes. There is no indication that he sees that his own behavior during this episode is gauche. In fact, much later in the novel there is another scene of an attempted covert witnessing of another such encounter. It is treated as comic, but not disgraceful. At most the scene with the Baron seems merely intended to make explicit what has already been unmistakably implicit about him and to provide the narrator a platform to comment, at unnecessary length, about the torment which “inverts,” as he calls them, must endure in a normal world. Thenceforward, homosexuality is the main recurring theme of Cities of the Plain and the Baron, with some departures, is the main character.
But first, the matter having finally been explicitly introduced, we return to the latest party. The young man’s fears of having been tricked into coming prove unfounded, but we are soon plunged once more into one more gathering of the Parisian social classes, requiring the reader to add even more names to the list of personages arrayed across the pages of Remembrance of Things Past.
Here, for example, appears one more Guermantes, the young Duc de Chatellerault, whose own secret “inversion” is put to the test when he unexpectedly encounters a chance liaison from earlier the same day, much below his station. Presently, we also meet M. de Vaugoubert, a married man in the diplomatic corps who is “in the confidence” of M. de Charlus. Then at this same party we are introduced to the Duke’s current mistress, Mme de Surgis-le-Duc[3] and her two extraordinarily handsome sons. (M. Charlus is immediately sensitive to their presence.) Finally we encounter Mme de Saint-Euverte who, over the years had contrived to use the Guermantes family (by including them on her own guest list) as a lure to expand the quality of her other attendees over the years. The narrator has penetrated this ruse and reveals that it is only in the Parisian press that the Sainte-Euverte drawing room is preeminent, “whereas it was among the last” because this hostess must labor at ensuring attendance. Mme de Saint-Euverte is therefore simply using the princess’s party at the beginning of Cities of the Plain to remind the favored guests of her own annual fete the following day.
It would not be a Proustian party without some back-biting and intrigue. In this case the party itself is the vehicle which shows the unreliability of the facts we think we have learned. We hear that the Prince de Guermantes, host of the party, had encountered Swann -- who after all had been invited – and told him to leave because of his known sentiments favoring Dreyfus. This was then seconded by the Duke who had learned of his brother-in-law’s pose. Although reflecting a paternal sadness about Swann, he expresses a familial solidarity: Swann has been graciously favored by the Guermantes, particularly by his wife the Duchess, but really beyond what would be natural considering the man is a Jew. Swann’s feelings regarding Dreyfus can be no more than a deliberate act of ingratitude. Called upon to make her own remarks, the Duchess, though somewhat smoother, is equally vapid. She avoids the Dreyfus case altogether, acknowledges her sadness that Swann is reported to be dying, and sincerely hopes it is not true. But Swann’s health cannot be a valid reason to have expressed the desire -- of which she has been informed -- that she would receive Odette and Gilberte; if so, then anyone could use a family member’s death as an excuse for an invitation[4].
Then we learn that Swann -- obviously ill -- is still very much present. What? He had not been ejected by the Prince? Was the story a fantasy? Speaking privately with the narrator in his modest manner, Swann dismisses the account as fabrication. Odette leans to the Republican side, he reveals, but the Prince had actually confided his belief to Swann that Dreyfus had been falsely convicted and that the Princess is of the same mind. This is left for the reader to disentangle.
The social season ends in Paris. The narrator returns to Balbec, lodging again at the Grand Hotel. The rest of the book occurs in this summer setting. As I have suggested, nothing momentous in the way of plot unfolds, but there is something about this seaside environment (to which everyone in the book seems to travel) that both brings out the themes and highlights the personalities which are far more important than plot to Remembrance of Things Past.
For example, Albertine is also there (why?) and she comes to the narrator more or less when he sends for her. He has already alerted us that he would eventually be in love with this girl who -- we are now told as though we already knew it -- is an orphan whose aunt, Mme Bontemps, exercises minimal supervision. The young lovers agree that Albertine will be his “cousin” in Balbec and their mutual social adventures are therefore conducted under this subterfuge. And yet it seems there are times when Albertine cannot be found among her various girlfriends in the neighborhood. In this peculiar moment -- which coincides with his suspicion that Albertine’s sexual life is no different from that of Odette before she married Swann -- the narrator now confesses that love for this girl has become his actual state[5].
The Balbec atmosphere is entirely saturated with this second sort of love. Bloch’s uncle, M. Nissim Bernard, has arrived for the season and expropriated a teenage waiter at the Grand Hotel for his own purposes. Bloch’s cousin has also caused a scandal in her relationship with an actress. Later we see the Prince de Guermantes himself in a compromising liaison. Most important, the ubiquitous M. de Charlus (looking now more effeminate) has also appeared in company with Charles Morel, the handsome young son of a servant to the narrator’s great uncle and now part of the regimental band at Donciers[6].
The primary social venue at Balbec is the transplanted salon of the ever-active Mme Verdurin, attended by the current membership of her “faithful circle.” Mme Verdurin has steadily risen in reputation if not society chiefly by dint of relentless effort[7]. Having learned that the young narrator who has made such a social entrance of his own in Paris is in the neighborhood, she eagerly adds him (and his “cousin”) to her group. But her most conspicuous conquest, as she sees it, is the Baron who becomes the vehicle for attracting still more prominent and accomplished vilsitors. The Baron is now regularly present with Morel, brought to the party by the older man ostensibly to play the violin -- which he does quite well. The narrator knows Morel, of course, but remains silent. For himself, Morel, his menial origins otherwise being well disguised, he first takes on a “contemptuous familiarity” vis-à-vis the narrator (whom he also recognizes) making himself all the more contemptible.
Then there are the Cambremers, permanent residents of Balbec. The Verdurins have leased their Balbec house from M. de Cambremer and his wife, the former Mlle Legrandin whose father played a role in Swann’s Way. Mme Cambremer has cultivated a snobbishness to complement the social status which she thought she had married into. Indeed, that status had also “even succeeded in curing certain tendencies to avarice and adultery to which in her younger days she had been inclined.” But to Mme Verdurin, the Cambremers (her landlords) are provincial and not really up to her circle. Thus the Verdurins invite them to this hired home for one ulterior reason only -- to be certain of getting a lease extension for the next season. And the Cambremers for their part, are doing duty in coming because they want to ensure the same outcome with the lease[8].
As the narrative turns its focus on M. de Charlus -- and how more ridiculous and grotesque he is becoming -- he also becomes more human, sympathetic, and contradictory, a characteristic common to virtually every character in Remembrance of Things Past as the narrative unfolds and also a marker of the essential kindness and wisdom of the young narrator. For example, the Baron is himself a rather accomplished musician and – very important to the narrator – is also an amateur painter “not devoid of talent.” Indeed, later the Baron is described “an artist to his finger tips” and “full of refinement, sensibility, [and] goodness,” though outwardly also haughty and peremptory. At the Verdurins, the Baron will periodically be overheard dominating the conversation and dilating on his family’s status and history[9], probably with the idea of impressing Morel. He also has a little laugh,
“—a laugh that came to him probably from some Bavarian or Lorraine grandmother, who herself had inherited it, in identical form, from an ancestress, so that it had been sounding now, without change, for not a few centuries in little old-fashioned European courts, and one could relish its precious quality like that of certain old musical instruments that have now grown rare.”
In time, the Baron’s infatuation with Morel becomes obvious to all except the self-deluded aristocrat himself. It also becomes evident that Morel (drawing on old times, the narrator now calls him “Charile”) sees M. de Charlus more as an irritating benefactor than a lover. The situation between them, in fact, gets entirely out of hand. It is probably enough to say that Morel treats the Baron badly -- as any unloving mistress will do – and that the older and more sophisticated man is distracted and tormented beyond his comprehension, simply because his refined understanding is entirely incapable of evaluating one so much more base than he. This too is a theme of Remembrance of Things Past.
Cities of the Plain ends with a short chapter of reversals and revelations -- and seeming revelations. The narrator decides to break with Albertine. To the reader he acknowledges that he has already made plans to seduce one of her friends from the old group of teenage girls from the earlier years on the beach. So in the conversation which he plans to be the moment when he will inform Albertine of his indifference, he takes a condescending tone, suggesting her ignorance of music, and particularly of Venteuil, author of the theme which had had so hypnotic an effect on Swann. Her response is deadly. Of course she is intimately associated with Vinteuil, she says; she has the closest friendship with his daughter and her special friend. They have even planned a trip together to Trieste. His tormented over-dramatic reaction – jealousy of a peculiar sort -- is to tell himself that he will never be happy again[1] and to tell her that he had been on the brink of marriage with another woman and was wretched. Cities of the Plain ends as he tells his mother that he will marry Albertine.
ENDNOTES
1. I think the reference is to Sodom and Gomorrha.
2. An early aside assures us that Proust knows quite well that he is playing this game with us – and after all, the ambiguity is one more means of obscuring “facts” related by an omniscient author through a narrator’s intense memories.
3. Later on we learn that, though well born herself, this woman had simply married a very wealthy bourgeois whose surname was “Leduc.” One capitalized letter and the world opens up. This sort of diminuendo recurs regularly in Remembrance of Things Past, particularly when it comes to names
4. Many pages later Swann’s death is almost cruelly reported in a virtual afterthought. If I had infinite time, I would try to consider the differences between Swann and Bergotte, each of whom is essential to understanding the narrator. In a later volume, Proust discusses both deaths, Bergotte’s in detail
5. Albertine is at least a flirt. There is a mutual attraction between her and St. Loup
6. We previously met this uncle Adolphe in Swann’s Way when the author, as a little boy, called upon him unexpectedly, interrupting a liaison of the sort which has made him a family outcast. In the next volume after this one, The Captive, Marcel reveals that the woman had been Odette – by then, Mme Swann
7. Do we take ourselves too seriously? “[W]ith the passage of time,” Proust remarks, “not only do the real talents that may coexist with the most commonplace conversation reveal and impose themselves, but furthermore . . . mediocre persons arrive at those exalted positions, attached in the imagination of our childhood to certain famous elders, when it never occurred to us that, after a certain number of years, their disciples, become masters, would be famous also, and would inspire the respect and awe that once they felt.”
8. There is a double irony here. In Swann’s Way M. LeGrandin, the incorrigibly snobbish father of Mme Cabremer, strenuously avoided telling the narrator’s father about his relatives’ residence in Balbec because he didn’t want them exposed to middle class acquaintances.
9. In The Guermantes Way, the narrator intimated a surprisingly recent eminence of the Guermantes. But if so, then much of the Baron’s own claims to ancient lineage must be factitious. M. de Charlus surely believes it all himself. And yet in the fullness of time, the narrator’s earlier statements are often revealed to have been wrong. As usual, the reader is left to decide.
[1] He compares his feelings to a novel, “a thing of which only a madman would make a lasting and permanent grief that prolonged itself through his life.”
Marcel Proust, The Captive -- (Tr. C.K. Scott Moncrief)
This fifth book of Remembrance of Things Past does not begin as the predecessor volume – Cities of the Plain – suggested it would. The narrator, still unnamed[1], is not married to Albertine but is living with her (and supporting her in expensive style) in the family quarters at the Hotel de Guermantes in Paris[2]. To the outside world she apparently remains his cousin. His mother is now back at Combray, but the arrangement is known; Mamma is disapproving, but keeps her peace.
Albertine will be the main focus of The Captive[3], although “focus” is not exactly the word: the narrator’s views of her never stay exactly fixed and at one point he says of her that she was “several persons in one.” Like Odette in her life with Swann[4], Albertine is becoming (at the narrator’s expense) a lady of fashion. She reads in her free time and betrays an intelligence and even a poetic instinct which the narrator readily concedes. To his relief, their residential proximity means that she will be largely separated from her girlfriends, but he also acknowledges that that is more “a release from suffering rather than a positive joy.” And he also realizes that she was beginning to bore him and that “I was now clearly conscious that I was not in love.”
But he is in love and -- this is far the more important thing in Remembrance of Things Past -- he also knits Albertine into his daydreams,
“into the composer’s phrase or the painter’s image as into a crucible, or [I] used [her] to enrich the book that I was reading. And no doubt the book appeared all the more vivid in consequence. But Albertine herself profited just as much by thus being transported out of one of the two worlds to which we have access . . . by escaping thus from the crushing weight of matter to play freely in the fluid space of mind.”
The narrator, in other words, is still most enlivened by his own solitude and peculiar sensuality. And, at least as it pertains to women, what is really love for him is “perpetual expectation” and evolution. He will inevitably describe it in artistic terms, of light and suggested motion. He gives a surprising apostrophe to “girls” in The Captive, describing them as a
“recurrent ray in the swirl wherein we throb with emotion upon seeing you reappear while barely recognizing you in the dizzy velocity of light. . . . . On each occasion a girl so little resembles what she was the time before (shattering in fragments as soon as we catch sight of her the memory that we had retained of her and the desire that we were proposing to gratify), that the stability of nature which we ascribe to her is purely fictitious and a convenience of speech.”
And so, although he may be becoming a recluse, the narrator recognizes that a man who desires “to go on living . . . must go out driving” -- where he will spy goddesses.
“But the goddesses do not allow us to approach them. Here and there, among the trees, at the entrance to some café, a waitress was watching like a nymph on the edge of a sacred grove, while beyond her three girls were seated by the sweeping arc of their bicycles that were stacked beside them, like three immortals leaning against the clouds . . . .”
(Albertine seems to hold the same view of girls.) Nevertheless he will not lose sight of the sobering possibility that there is “a momentum external to these girls” which is responsible for the changes.
He has ceased being productive. He confesses that he is lazy – and during the day he remains more or less bedridden. Although Albertine urges him to return to work and he promises that he will do so, he does not and the idleness feeds his brooding about what it is Albertine does during the day and reflections about her mysterious absences when they were at Balbec. He finds that he is exclusively jealous of the women Albertine must see, like the anxiety created by loss of a fugitive who has been held a reluctant captive. The mood becomes so unattractive that when he dilates – as he does extensively – on the “lies” he endures from Albertine, the reader is periodically inclined to be dubious that they are lies at all[5]. But there is a broader point here, as well. The art which is at the center of the narrator’s life is always a variation of, an improvement on the truth. The malleability of truth is his métier.
Morel, meantime, is still in the Baron’s orbit but betrothed (to Jupien’s niece), leaving the older man feeling something like a benevolent father-in-law. Morel has begun to reveal both an unattractive temper and the inclination to social deception – although to some degree this characterizes everyone in this book. It is nothing to the narrator’s own possessive attitude toward Albertine.
Back in Paris, the Verdurins re-open their salon at their permanent home, Quai Conti.
“[A]t each political crisis, at each artistic revival, Mme Verdurin had collected one by one, like a bird building its nest, the several items, useless for the moment, of what would one day be her Salon. . . . Mme Verdurin’s strength lay in her genuine love of art, the trouble that she used to take for her faithful, the marvelous dinners that she gave for them alone, without inviting anyone from the world of fashion. Each of the faithful was treated at her table as Bergotte had been treated at Mme Swann’s. When a boon companion of this sort had turned into an illustrious man . . . , his presence at Mme Verdurin’s had none of the artificial, composite effect of a dish at an official or farewell banquet, . . . but was merely a delicious ‘ordinary’ . . .”
The Baron is also still in the circle, but it would be insane to expect an enduring partnership between this heedless aristocrat and the socially ambitious Verdurins. It is beside the point that he is essentially harmless: Charlus is also self-centered, condescending, and eccentric by birth. Privately contemptuous of the Verdurins, he is also oblivious to both the perspective of their middle-class circle and the underlying provisional nature of his entrée. He naturally assumes that it is his presence alone which has bestowed a luster on a group whose main organizer has actually been working tirelessly for years to form a society of sufficient prominence and cachet that her own eminence would be secured.
So when M. Charlus finds it convenient and entirely natural to organize a Verdurin party on his own, to arrogate a veto power over their guest list, and then to take such precedence in the receiving line that Mme Verdurin is for all purposes pushed aside and ignored by the Baron’s guests, he has no idea of the permanent humiliation he has caused her. In fact, this is not only an affront to Mme Verdurin personally but is also contrary to the times. The Dreyfus case has had an unintended effect of encouraging certain hostesses, sympathetic to one side or the other to invite prominent writers and others to their salons according to their sympathies. Once the political convulsion passed, the bond formed with these new celebrities remained unbroken and modern gatherings had become more interesting for their presence than the ancient guests favored by the Baron. This completely eludes him.
The price he pays for ignoring Mme Verdurin at her own party is therefore swift and final. An archer, Mme Verdurin goes right for the bullseye: Morel. Beginning with an educated guess, she confides to him that she knows his menial origins because the Baron has told her and she cautions the young violinist that the Legion of Honor which the Baron has conspicuously and publicly promised him is therefore simply out of the question if recommended by a man of such a sordid character. The result is instantaneous. When the Baron reenters the room Morel astounds him with a shouted rejection, leaving him bewildered and speechless.
This scene is immediately followed by an act of entirely unexpected, discreet, genuine, and wonderful kindness by the Verdurins in favor of one other of their circle. It is as I have previously noted: an illustration of how Proust is always aware of the many contradictory sides of a person’s nature. And the narrator himself, who tells the incident, although he grudginly also acknowledges that although M. Verdurin was therefore also
“a man capable of disinterested action, of unostentatious generosity, that does not necessarily mean a man of feeling, nor a pleasant man, nor a scrupulous, nor a truthful, nor always a good man. . . . . [A]nd so I am brought up against the difficulty of presenting a permanent image as well of a character as of societies and passions.”
In evaluating Swann’s Way I remarked that Proust had used the approximate pattern of Swann’s story to foreshadow what we are to learn of the life of the narrator – and I specifically mentioned the Ventueil sonata whose effect on Swann had been so transcendent. In The Captive there is an extended passage where Marcel hears the same sonata within the context of the entire Venteuil septet[6]. His own reaction and description is given in such detail and is so heartfelt that I am discouraged that it is so much beyond my grasp. But if music criticism, a subject in which I have no bearings, is commonly written like this, it suffers from the same poverty of vocabulary and foolish metaphor as essays on cooking and finance. The fatal passage, he says,
“opened upon a dawn of lilied meadows, parting its slender whiteness to suspend itself over the frail and yet consistent mingling of a rustic bower of honeysuckle with white geraniums, it was upon continuous, level surfaces like those of the sea that, in the midst of a stormy morning beneath an already lurid sky, there began, in an eery silence, in an infinite void, this new masterpiece, and it was into a roseate dawn that, in order to construct itself progressively before me, this unknown universe was drawn from silence and from night.”[7]
Presently he comes closer to making a more intelligible connection when he says that each artist “seems thus to be the native of an unknown country” and when he muses that music might be “the unique example of what might have been – if there had not come the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas”; in short if there had not been everything that makes my own life worthwhile. But the author is entitled to the last word on this subject:
“[W]hat we feel in life, not being felt in the form of ideas, its literary (that is to say an intellectual) translation in giving an account of it, explains it, analyses it, but does not recompose it as does music, in which the sounds seem to assume the inflextion of the thing itself, to reproduce that interior and extreme point of our sensation which is the part that gives us that peculiar exhilaration which we recapture from time to time when we say” ‘What a fine day!’”
The final portion of The Captive is called “The Flight of Albertine,” thus leaving no ambiguity as to its subject matter. The narrator returns home from a party, comforted by the knowledge that his little captive is waiting for him. As usual, they contrive a scene which quickly converts into an exchange of lies between them and the narrator’s announcement of his counterfeit intention that they should permanently part. But it is a question whether either of them really wants this or whether they have become content with the inertia of their current lives.
“True, Albertine was far more of a prisoner than I. And it was curious to remark how, through the walls of her prison, destiny, which transforms people, had contrived to pass, to change her in her very essence, and turned the girl I had known at Balbec into a tedious and docile captive. . . . . [B]ecause the sea breeze no longer buffeted her skirts, because, above all, I had clipped her wings, she had ceased to be a Victory, was a burdensome slave of whom I would fain have been rid.”
So one spring morning, realizing how things really stand, he finally determines that he will decamp to Venice as he has intended since his childhood. The desire to see Venice he describes as a violent, ineffable dream which had always clutched his soul “with an enchanted, caressing, unseizable, mysterious, confused image.” Confident in his decision, he arises late and learns that she has left.
ENDNOTES
1. Eventually (and grudgingly) Proust permits the reader -- “if we give the narrator the same name as the author of his book” -- permission to think of him as “Marcel.” I accept the offer. His surname, however, is never given, and “Marcel” is never again mentioned.
2. This is evidently not from his earnings. Late in the book we finally learn that he has inherited his aunt’s fortune.
3. The title carries certain ironies, but the initial references to a “captive” are made in reference to Albertine, the first time with the utmost tenderness as she sleeps on Marcel’s bed. (The scene is repeated toward the end of the novel.)
4. In the last novel had we learned in passing that the widowed Odette, by maintaining a friendship with Bergotte, has incrementally and inconspicuously become the proprietress of a formidable drawing room of “profound intellectuality.” Gentlemen of society, expecting to meet the latest playwrights and novelists, now come to her house. She has become the intimate of Comtesse Mole, social successor to the Duchess de Guermantes whose parties, though brilliant, lack the novelty of Mme Swann’s gatherings.
5. He also describes himself as a liar: “but it is not one universe, there are millions, almost as many as the number of human eyes and brains in existence.” Anyway, Plato says that poets are liars.
6. This full piece, we learn, has been deciphered by the profane “friend” of Venteuil’s daughter.
7. Moncrief’s translation has been so wonderful that I cannot believe he went off the tracks here. And there is no indication that the passage was intended as parody
[T]he fact that our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate instrument for grasping the truth is only a reason the more for beginning with the intellect, and not with a subconscious intuition . . . . It is life that, little by little, case by case, enables us to observe that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but by other powers. And then it is the intellect itself which, taking note of their superiority, abdicates its sway to them upon reasoned grounds and consents to become their collaborator and their servant. It is faith confirmed by experiment.
The departure of Albertine, the narrator’s mistress, has occurred just prior to the opening of this next volume in Remembrance of Things Past. It was, he confesses, his life’s greatest calamity. The title of this book, therefore -- The Sweet Cheat Gone -- reveals its inevitable main subject, his obsessive thoughts and meditations about her and what he believes he thought she was. For myself, I felt I had to steel myself for what was about to come – or to be reiterated in an even more obsessive key – in the first chapter.
Before she left, he had dismissed as merely “habit” his way of dealing with Albertine and his attendant emotions. But now he sees this habit was in fact a “dread deity” become as cruel as death. Habit creates oblivion, an enemy to the memories of things past, because oblivion slowly corrupts memory. His earlier longings and memories -- his unrealized plans to see Venice, his desire to know Mme de Guermantes, his mother’s goodnight kiss -- having become stifled and corrupted, they are still are indications of what he fears will eventually be a fading memory of Albertine.
Albertine’s flight, however, has just occurred. It is not yet in the past and so his need to act immediately is overwhelming. He contacts Saint-Loup who agrees to serve as his covert emissary to the girl. Not only does this miscarry, but Proust as usual also then delivers his chief plot element as the diminuendo: Immediately following his receipt of a placatory letter from the girl herself the narrator receives a second letter from Albertine’s aunt notifying him that she has just been killed in a horse-riding accident.
Now he embarks in earnest on his most intense quest for lost times, driven by the inevitability of their oblivion, persisting (tediously in my mind) in his suspicion about Albertine’s “tastes.” He hires a waiter whom he and Albertine had known at Balbec to interview women both there and in Touraine where she died to report to him on her private delectations. He also interviews their mutual friend Andree. The waiter confirms, Andree denies. There are reasons for not being entirely sure about either of them[1]. What facts are revealed are tawdry in a French idiom, but their interest is only in the psychological reactions provoked in the author.
Indeed, Remembrance of Things Past has now become “an essay in subjective psychology spontaneously pursued.” We have left off magical evocations of madeleine cakes, faintly remembered trees blowing in the winds, magic lanterns, and church steeples changing places on the horizon as sensed by an impressionistic child. Now we have a grown man struggling with and evaluating his own passions and regrets. “What we feel” he says, “is the only thing that exists for us, and we project it into the past, into the future, without letting ourselves be stopped by the fictitious barriers of death.” His writing becomes more sententious than ever, his reflections covering pages and pages:
“Art is not alone in imparting charm and mystery to the most insignificant things: the same power of bringing them into intimate relation with ourselves is committed also to grief.”
And,
“There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.”
And,
“[M]emory has no power of invention, . . . it is powerless to desire anything else, even anything better than what we have already possessed . . . .”
This first chapter is essential to the novel I admit. If Albertine was to die, it or something like it had to be offered. But it does not offer a change in the narrator’s allusive style (though it is perhaps more intense) and yet since there has been so much previous introspection, I was relieved for it to end.
Ominously, however, as a new chapter begins, The Sweet Cheat Gone foreshadows a conventional “happily ever after” conclusion to Remembrance of Things Past. There had been a minor character in Swann’s Way, Fourcheville, whom I have not previously mentioned, whose extended liaison with Odette had caused Swann painfully to look the other way. Now we learn through Mme de Guermantes (who has also been missing for several volumes) that when Swann died, Fourcheville had presented himself to Odette as a husband. A man of some prominence, he was now evidently on hard times. Odette, on the other hand, had become not only a wealthy widow but one who has risen socially by virtue of her own efforts. She makes the marriage.
All of this is revealed to the narrator by Mme Guermantes when he comes to visit her, ostensibly for the purpose of being introduced to an attractive woman he has seen in the neighborhood. I suppose that Jane Austen could get away with this, but the following coincidence doesn’t seem to fit what we have read in this much different novel. The woman turns out to be Gilberte, who was essentially adopted by Fourcheville when he married Odette and goes under his name. For that matter, Mme de Guermantes, who had steadfastly refused to meet or acknowledge Odette and her child while Swann was alive, has had a change of heart as an assertion of her independence and thus opened a social connection with the two women which had gone unknown to the narrator. Yes, there have been earlier coincidences in the book and yes society is small. The point is nevertheless jarring and suggestive of a contrivance far more artificial than anything that has gone before.
If there is mitigation, it is that Gilberte is now “a great snob” – and this means that she has not only taken Fourcheville’s name but also does not speak of Swann, preferring it be thought that her father was an unnamed but great man in Odette’s life. “[S]he who ought to have refreshed, not to say perpetuated, his memory, found herself hastening and completing the process of death and oblivion.” (How completely contrary to my own experience; as I see it, American women revere their fathers.)
As I have said, it is oblivion and the notion of many people in one which have now become prominent in the book[2]. Gilberte and Mme de Guermantes are new selves, but so does the narrator gradually change by the process of the oblivion of Albertine in his memory. “It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.” This is not a sentence that could have been written by Jane Austen.
And still the question of Albertine’s unfaithfulness persists (though by now I was long beyond caring). The narrator takes up with Andree who stokes the dwindling fire with apparent confidences. More interesting are the observations revealing Andree’s own character and personality (she has three “natures”). At second hand we also learn of her relationship with a nephew of the Verdurins, a boor who has emerged as a genuinely innovative theatre designer.
Finally the narrator’s preoccupation with Albertine seems to end when the narrator and his mother travel to Venice, of which he has dreamed more or less throughout the entire work. Many years have passed, for when an elderly couple come into the dining room of a Venetian hotel where the narrator is standing he recognizes them as the wreckage of Mme de Villeparisis and her husband (!) M. de Norpois. This is concurrent with the unwelcome news that the narrator’s investments of his inherited fortune have repeatedly miscarried and his worth is now only about a fifth of what he once had – followed immediately by a letter from Albertine revealing that she is in fact alive. Not many good authors would try this.
And it is not the end. Making full use of all of the references to people’s changing identities, the illusions of what we think we have seen, and too many other tricks of the novelist’s trade, Proust presently has the author tell us as plausibly as he can (but his hand is now played out) that he has mistaken the signature on Albertine’s letter. It had really been sent and signed by Gilberte, thus making more sense, if that is the word, of her further announcement that she will soon marry Robert Saint-Loup. This produces a nice aside as the narrator and his mother discuss the situation:
“Thus there developed in our dining room, in the lamplight that is so congenial to them, one of those talks in which the wisdom not of nations but of families, taking hold of some event, a death, a betrothal, an inheritance, a bankruptcy, and slipping it under the magnifying glass of memory, brings it into high relief, detaches, thrusts back, one surface of it, and places in perspective at different points in space and time what, to those who have not lived through the period in question, seems to be amalgamated upon a single surface, the names of dead people, successive addresses, the origins and changes of fortunes, transmissions of property. . . . The Muse who has gathered up everything that the more exalted Muses of philosophy and art have rejected, everything that is not founded upon truth, everything that is merely contingent, but that reveals other laws as well, is History.”[3]
What the narrator ultimately reflects on, however, are the social choices thereafter made in their marriage by Gilberte and Saint-Loup[4]. They are quite wealthy and well positioned to become a most brilliant couple. But Gilberte, unaccountably to the narrator and perhaps to Proust – “the great thing, after all, is to have grand connections” -- becomes indifferent to society’s most prominent members, even as her mother and mother-in-law give the most successful parties. Saint-Loup himself acquiesces, comfortable with this wealth and actually enjoying the more common company favored by Gilberte. For the two of them, the narrator says, it is a “retrogression.” But in fact, Saint-Loup has privately established a liaison with Morel, the young violinist favored by the Baron. Even Jupien is outraged. Gilberte had suspected some sort of infidelity, but not of that sort. Of more ironic interest, Odette (whose fortune is being depleted by Forcheville) is willing to look the other way if Robert will keep her in baubles which he gladly does, placing her where one of her background is most content, indulged by a man who requires nothing in return. Proust calls this “ultimate chastity,” the only really funny remark I recall in the entire book.
ENDNOTES
1. When this novel was originally written, perhaps the retrospective spying on the life of a dead person was novel in literature, but here, although it is well done, there is no jolt of novelty.
2. Somewhat later on the author mingles the latter image with an earlier and recurring one of the changing position of the distant steeples as one travels a winding road. Andree, he says,
“had offered me so many different aspects in succession, as a town gradually alters the position of its buildings so as to overtop, to obliterate the principal monument which alone we beheld from a distance, as we approach it, whereas . . . its true proportions prove to be those which the perspective of the first glance had indicated, the rest . . . being no more than the continuous series of lines of defence which everything in creation raises against our vision, and which we must cross one after another, at the cost of how much suffering, before we arrive at the heart.”
3. I believe this is true. Why hasn’t anyone told all of the modern writers who call themselves Marxists?
4. There is another marriage which has also occurred at the same time. Jupien’s niece, Mlle d’Orlon, a shopgirl who had been “adopted” more or less by Mr. de Charlus, is engaged to the son of the Cambremer family. She is charming but untitled, he is titled but self-effacing. The effect of this match is to put back into prominence (and proximity) M. de Charlus and M. Legrandin, uncle of the bridegroom. The young woman dies, however, just weeks after the marriage. And now we learn that Jupien had been Odette’s cousin. The result, however, by some popular confusion, is that the young man comes to be known as a Guermantes – and Legrandin the Conte de Meseglise. Even the minor characters change identities.
Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured -- (Tr. Frederick A. Blossom)
“. . . . [L]ife disappoints us so much that in the end we come to believe that literature has no relationship to it and we are dumbfounded to see that the precious ideas we found in books are spread right out before us in everyday life, naturally and freely, without fear of being spoiled by handling . . . .”
How was Proust going to end Remembrance of Things Past? It was probably always in his mind that the events of this last installment would be offered as the inspiration for writing all that had gone before. This was sensible and it works well. Before arriving here, after all, he had written a set of interrelated novels about time, oblivion, art, how things change or seem to, and how nothing is permanently what it seems. By itself that does not suggest an obvious conclusion so, since a successful novel – even one apparently organized by haphazard -- must have a framework, Proust’s solution is of a coincidental gathering of the surviving characters somewhat later in life.
The narrator concludes that his career has not prospered because he has no literary talent. “I was unable to listen, or even to observe as soon as I was no longer alone.”
“[W]hat people said escaped me because what interested me was not what they wanted to say, but the way they said it in so far as it revealed their characters or their ludicrous traits; or, rather, there was one thing which had always been the object of my investigation because it gave me a very special pleasure, and that was the point that two human beings had in common.”
On the other hand he has begun to sense that that there is a “midway group whose recollection implies more worth than does our recollection of them” – mediocre people who produce nothing worthwhile but who inspire art in others who themselves are also otherwise mediocre. He gives the character Bergotte as an example. Now, therefore, he has finally been goaded by time to begin to write his own life “sensed in brief flashes” to extract its essence. The writer of such a book
“would have to go to the noblest and most varied arts for comparisons; . . . show the most contradictory sides of each of his characters . . . , prepare it with minute care, constantly regrouping his forces as if for an attack, . . . build it like a church, follow it like a regimen, . . . create it like a world, without overlooking those mysteries whose explanation is probably to be found only in other worlds and the presentiment of which is the quality of life and art which moves us most deeply.” [1]
It might be too much to say that the narrative finally takes on a certain momentum. For example, we are not asked to anticipate the resolution of a plot, as I had feared would happen earlier when he encountered Gilberte so many years later. But we do sense that time has truly passed and the end is nigh. In most of the earlier novels mere paragraphs could go on for page after page. Here on several occasions Proust produces vignettes some of them rather short. He is bringing on an ending, but he never abandons “the Proust way.” Facts given early in “The Past Recaptured” throw an entirely new light on facts we had previously come to know as fixed. Then they in turn are themselves then revised by later points of view, events, and still newer facts.
In the very first paragraph of “The Past Recaptured” the narrator spies from his window at Tansonville (Swann’s old home) the wandering Combray church steeple from his youth which now “had come and outlined itself on my windowpane.”1 He is here as the guest of Gilberte – and of Robert, who appears at home only infrequently. It is troubling to the narrator that a formality has grown up between the two men even as Saint-Loup has grown in the estimation of Francoise. And Gilberte, though she is acutely aware of her husband’s absences, appears to be ignorant of Saint-Loup’s new “tendencies” as revealed in the previous novel. In fact, she seems happy to discuss the general subject of such tastes with the narrator [2].
It is 1916, although no mention has yet been made of the world calamity. After two years in a sanitarium the narrator has returned to Paris which he says resembles a second Directory, presided over by two homely queens, Mmes Verdurin and Bontemps. The latter’s husband, in ancient times, had been a Dreyfusard and is now ironically seen as a patriot. Dreyfusism, once shocking, has now been forgotten – or assimilated. And yet women who maintain salons still seem to be at the nucleus of important events; it is simply that old fashions are gone and new ones (already doomed, of course) are current.
The arts are also absent; elegance and pleasure are ascendant. We are given fatuous quotations from a publication discussing the current state of feminine dress (the most absurd of the arts in the best of times). Other imagined quotes come from the Goncourt Brothers who describe several members of the Verdurins’ “little circle” – particularly their way of expressing themselves – and call into question (if that is necessary) the accuracy of previous descriptions by the narrator. The brothers recount their dinner with the Verdurins in Paris, with plenty of recalled quotations from the hostess, including her assurance that it was she who had introduced Elstir to all of the subjects he later painted. Whether the quotation is parody of the Goncourts, I cannot say, but it is certainly even more deliberately overwritten than the rest of Remembrance of Things Past.
Twice earlier in Remembrance of Things Past I noted episodes of some distasteful spying, presumably required by the story. Now comes a third during which we learn – but not with the surprise which was perhaps intended – that Baron de Charlus has come to sponsor a Parisian house of masochism at which he is also a willing customer and where Jupien is something like the maitre d’. The scene is mitigated by another familiar theme, a glimpse of the young employees whose pose as hardened criminals (it’s good for business) is transparent and inartfully carried out. And indeed there is also a comic note: Jupien is obliged to change out the old wooden bed used in the Baron’s room for “an iron bed which harmonized better with the chains.”
Life is insipid. A previously inspiring landscape is valuable only as a token, a memory recalling what he might have felt and described in earlier days. Saint-Loup now dies in combat at the front, perhaps heroically, but like other deaths in Remembrance of Things Past, it is off stage[4]. More years have passed. The narrator again encounters by chance the now elderly Baron de Charlus, crippled by a stroke and attended by Jupien.
Time has wrecked M. de Charlus. Only the narrator has retained a memory of his unique intellect and kind-heartedness. The Baron himself has quarreled with and then refused to reconcile with his peers, leaving him more or less isolated, not because society has determined to shun him, but vice versa. Mme Verdurin, in her own preposterous way, has concluded -- and reported -- that he had been a German spy as of course she had always suspected. Society people of the era, taking her lead, adopt the same attitude, “not because they had seen through, but because they had never seen at all, his unusual intellectual qualities.” And yet, for reasons of heritage, the man actually did favor Germany in the war – an attitude which, like his peculiar “taste,” he holds more or less privately.
But now it is inevitable. Proust must end and give an accounting.
The narrator indifferently accepts an invitation extended by the Prince de Guermantes of old times. “[T]he carriage suddenly seemed to run more easily. . . . I was not passing though the same streets as the strollers who were abroad that day, but through a past that glided softly, sad and sweet.” As he arrives, three trivial things occur in short succession: he steps onto an uneven pavement, once inside he hears a spoon strike a dish, and on being presented an hors d’oeuvre he wipes his lips with a starched napkin. Thus arrives the epiphany. A “dazzling, elusive vision brushed me with its wings, as if to say, ‘Seize me in my flight, if you have the power, and try to solve the riddle of happiness I propound to you.’” This becomes “the most beautiful day of my life.” He is “indifferent to death.”
He sees that his life – maybe all lives -- can only be viewed in retrospect and in a minor key, informed by dead, forgotten mental images which themselves “have retained no trace of life.”
“[T]he slightest word we have spoken or the most insignificant gesture we have made at a certain moment in our life was surrounded and illumined by things that logically had no relation to it and were separated from it by our intelligence which had no need of them . . . ; and yet . . . the most insignificant gesture, the simplest act remain enclosed, as it were, in a thousand sealed jars . . . . [B]etween our present state and the memory that suddenly comes back to us, just as between two recollections of different years, . . . that fact alone would suffice to make comparison between them impossible. If, if, thanks to our ability to forget, a past recollection has been able to avoid any tie, any link with the present moment, if it has remained in its own place and time, if it has kept its distance, . . . it suddenly brings us a breath of fresh air – refreshing because we have breathed it once before – of that purer air which the poets have vainly tried to establish in Paradise, whereas it could not convey that profound sensation of renewal if it had not already been breathed, for the only paradise is always the paradise we have lost.”
In short our intellectual ideas, arbitrarily selected, are at best a “potential truth.” Life is not intellectual. It is not logical. “Reality” is not what we think. Beauty is only known through the imagination -- and “only that which is absent can be imagined.”
Most importantly for the writer, nature at its own whim will suddenly and erratically suspend the law. With no reason it will cause a sensation reflected simultaneously both in the past (imagination) and in the present (physical stimulation). In that lightning instant one can seize “a fragment of time in its pure state,” liberated from the tyranny of chronology.
“A single minute released from the chronological order of time has re-created in us the human being similarly released, in order that he may sense that minute. And one comprehends readily how such a one can be confident in his joy; . . . situated outside the scope of time, what could he fear from the future?”
The narrator – Marcel – sees that his life’s mission is a labor of art – a labor to convert original impressions into a “spiritual equivalent.” Art “is the most real of all things”:
“Only the subjective impression, however inferior the material may seem to be and however improbable the outline, is a criterion of truth. . . . The subjective impression is for the writer what experimentation is for the scientist, but with this difference, that with the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes, and with the writer it comes afterwards.”[5]
Not that Proust himself sees it this way. For him a work of art is prior to us; it must be discovered by effort and cognition as we discover a natural law. For Proust, a writer’s duty is that of a translator[6]. He gives a lengthy and condescending discussion of critics which, as far as I can tell is not intend to be ironic. He warns against an impoverished art, “a repetition of what our eyes see and our intelligence notes,” concluding that
“Only by art can we get outside ourselves, know what another sees of his universe, which is not the same as ours . . . . Thanks to art, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms, and as many as there are original artists, just so many worlds have we at our disposal . . . .”
And so a novel like Remembrance of Things Past is but an “optical instrument,” one in which the reader discovers “in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.”[7]
In a much earlier volume of Remembrance of Things Past – I’m not sure which one it was –the author spoke of a dream. I passed over it because it was not later pursued and dreams are not really the subject matter of the book. Now I wish I had kept it for inclusion and reflection. First, because in reading the passages I have just commented on it seemed to me that what Proust has said would have to be distinguished from dreams; and second, because in this final volume he suddenly does return to the dream subject, particularly the “preposterous game” dreams play with Time, their erotic undertones, and their “composite of feelings, affections, voluptuous delight, [and] dimly outlined regrets” mistakenly making him believe that they were a way to recapture the past.
Why mistaken? Apparently because dreams, which he calls the “nocturnal muse,” are born of “superficial and defective observation” and do not comprehend his periodic point that there are many persons in one. And yet in this backward fashion, dreams emphasize the “purely mental character of reality” and awaken a desire, “a longing for certain non-existent things which is the prerequisite condition for creative work, for getting out of the rut of habit and getting away from the concrete.”
He enters the Prince’s masquerade party. It seems to be the mid-1920s. Acquaintances have so fully altered their appearance that they now might be different people; time, virtually personified, has intervened to cloud mutual recognition[8]. This melancholy passage, witty and grim, is also the farcical and bitter summation of Remembrance of Things Past -- a tale of the culmination of gradual oblivion.
The Princess de Guermantes has died. The Duke has married the widowed Mme Verdurin (but he is now occupied with Odette). Morel is also present, a man of standing and “unimpeachable moral character.” And “[i]f anyone had in the earlier days analysed the stylish appearance of the young Mme Leonor de Cambremer, he would have discovered that she was the niece of the shopkeeper in our building, Jupien.” Bloch, once awkward and obvious, is now admired. Gilberte, Andree, and Rachel appear in a very unexpected ménage. The immutable Guermantes name has been modified by compromise after compromise and has “ceased to function.”
“Thus does the form of the things of this world change; thus the center of empires, the cadastre of private fortunes and the chart of social positions, all that seemed definitively fixed, is being continually made over and the eyes of a man can during a lifetime contemplate the most complete change in the very quarters where it has seemed to him the most impossible.”
I began this note wondering how Proust would end Remembrance of Things Past. But the question at the end is why. One would not write a traditional fiction in this way. Dozens of incidents and characters have been left in the air. Lines of significance have become insignificant. Swann, Albertine, Charlus, intensely examined, have a season -- sometimes more -- and then are essentially dropped and almost forgotten. Of course this is the nature of our lives, but one does not write an autobiography in this way either. So when I ask why, I hope it is because I have been compelled to ask by a great author who need not explain what he has done (note to James Joyce).
The book ends with sad reflections on the struggle between death and time and what has impelled the narrator to write on what he regards as the brink of his own death. He has said he is indifferent to death, but death seasons the passage of time and he now points to some quite specific physical failures that have invaded his remaining time. With the lassitude of age he is now fortified by a sense of urgency, not in the frenetic Kerouac style, but in a Shakespearean atonement for wasted time. Time’s evaporation has become critical; he compares his task to writing the 1001 Arabian Nights, pledging above all else not to “describe a man as having the length, not of his body but of his years.” This is why he has written his book.
“For after death Time withdraws from the body, and the memories – so pale and insignificant – are effaced from her who no longer exists, and soon will be from him whom they still torture, and the memories themselves will perish in the end when the desire of a living body is no longer there to keep them alive.”
ENDNOTES
1. In this he takes a pleasure which he also sees as profitable to others. “[H]uman altruism which is not selfish is sterile, like that of a writer who interrupts his work to receive an unhappy friend . . . .”
2. Later, in one of his characteristic passing revelations, the narrator mentions the church’s wartime destruction -- to prevent its further use by the Germans as an observation point.
3. By now I should think that most readers would have become quite bored by the discoveries of such “tendencies” -- which in the narrator’s world seem to be as predictable as the common cold.
4. Amid contrivances about Paris during the Great War, the narrator departs from his story to tell a brief heart-felt anecdote, which may even be true. Francoise’s penurious young nephew was conscripted and almost immediately killed, leaving his wife destitute. The young man’s family, comfortably retired, immediately sacrifice everything to care for her.
“In this book of mine, in which there is not one fact that is not imaginary, nor any real person concealed under a false name, where everything has been invented by me to meet the needs of my story, I ought to say in praise of my country that, at any rate, these millionaire relatives of Francoise, who gave up their retired life in order to help their niece when she was left without support, are people who really are alive and . . . . it gives me a childlike pleasure and deep emotion to record here their real name, Lariviere . . . .”
5. Here I envision virtually all soi-disant American “artists” nodding their heads in unison with today’s media commentators and academics, as though they were all not the most recent children of the Enlightenment. The American artist and commentator in our epoch is an acolyte of Darwin pretending to be an heir of Rousseau. Subjectivity, imagination, impressions are valid only if congruent with convictions of utility and comfort portrayed as of the utmost common good (abortion, climate change, applied science). Pretention is art and vice versa – but scientists discover an undiscovered world while artists create a new one.
6. Homer nods. Here Proust offers a re-write of a paragraph from a page of two earlier.
7. I do not dismiss this lengthy passage, the main point of which is how much sorrow and disappointment are the also vehicles of art. But the expression of such elusive truths is virtually impossible to put into words that are not contradictory.
8. How cruel is it that the narrator, on first seeing Gilberte, mistakes her for her mother.
Lettered men and women in the American academy have concluded that Gravity’s Rainbow is one of the 20th Century’s outstanding American literary efforts. Subject to what follows, I agree. It is a work of genius and erudition. It must have taken years to write. In retrospect – but only as such -- it is even coherent. Along the way, however, the journey is hallucinogenic, dreamlike, elusive, periodically poetic, often pornographic, and even witty1. There are elements of science fiction. Quotation marks are often optional. It is as though Gravity’s Rainbow were an American version of The Tin Drum written jointly by James Joyce and William Burroughs. Once the reader begins to get the general point, it is also bitterly didactic and despondent.
At the outset let me say that what follows is entirely personal in nature, not a review, and more in the nature of a rough map or perhaps a warning to an unprepared reader about to begin to read the book. It is not an endorsement or a recommendation or a condemnation.
Gravity’s Rainbow is an unconventional story by Thomas Pynchon which begins against the backdrop of the German V-1 and V-2 rockets attacking London toward the end of World War II. Truth be told, however, the book’s unconventionality belies the notion that it is even a story. In fact, although superficially resembling a novel, it is not even that, except in the original sense of the word novel. Indeed, if there is a plot in any recognized sense of the word, it is not exceptionally compelling, and in any event it is mostly vague and secondary to the larger purposes of the author.
But to dispose of routine considerations first, Gravity’s Rainbow certainly introduces a multitude of characters across a general (but erratic) timeline. And as we sort through these seemingly disconnected elements, eventually we realize that Pynchon’s architecture is rather like the Hitchcockian idea of an innocent regular man accidentally caught up in an ongoing and sinister drama which is well underway before he becomes ensnared.
1. Names. The “Hitchcockian” character mentioned is Tyrone Slothrop. (That unusual surname is actually pretty much congruent with all of the odd names that the author assigns to the many people who play a role in Slothrop’s odyssey.) Like several other characters, Slothrop is also given other names by the author from time to time with little or no overt guidance to the reader; we just eventually pick it up as we keep reading -- or back-reading. The most common of Slothrop’s secondary names is Rocketman, but for a time he also uses an alias: Ian Skuffling.)
While there are otherwise too many characters to enumerate, the reader must be alert to those of them who also travel under alternate names. Most important of them is Katya -- as to whom an explanation would be too involved, but a reader should be alert that over the course of the book Slothrop (or the author) finds Katya within the characters Bianca, Ilse, and even the young man, Gottfried. The vile character Blicero also seems to be Weissmann. The silent film director, Gerhardt Von Goll – also called “Springer” – is apparently the husband of Greta Erdmann, except that Miklos Thanatz is her husband too. Greta, also called Margherita, is Bianca’s mother. The birth name of Enzian – a member of the Herero tribe of southwest Africa where he was called “Weissmann’s Monster”-- was Nguarorerue. Moreover Enzian is also the half-brother of Vaslav Tchitchurine, whose Russian name is surely intended to recall the Soviet diplomat Gregory Chicherin. Jeremy Swanlake is sometimes called Beaver. Leni Pokler (who might also be Nora Dodson-Truck) is the mother of Ilse (who might also be Bianca).
2. Plot and Theme. Although the plot of this story is not overly compelling, the entirety of the work is still indescribably vivid. To put it another way, the plot is mainly a serviceable structure -– essentially a search -- on which to drape an unrelenting motif and mood of insanity, impotence, and despair2.
And yet it is not quite formless. For example, though it begins in London in early 1945, the narrative of its main character’s experiences eventually take him the next year to newly freed France, then Switzerland, and eventually occupied post-war Germany. Interlarded with this there are unchronological segments set in Mauritius, German Southwest Africa, and central Asia. Always the momentum is driven by the growing suspicion and occasional evidence that there have been secret operations begun decades before the war and still underway, all relating to development of the ultimate rocket, a V-4. As the book proceeds, rockets become the book’s growing obsession.
3. Timeline. Frequently we don’t know what’s happening except in retrospect – yet in retrospect it seems not to make a difference. In any event, it would not be fair to try to disentangle what I have already called the “erratic” timeline in Gravity’s Rainbow. Yes, time is unmistakably a critical element of the narrative, but it is malleable and unreliable3. If this helps, here is a passing remark of seemingly oracular significance, but probably the author’s personal self-reference:
“’Temporal bandwidth’ is the width of your present, your now. It is . . . considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your person. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.”4
A good part of the book’s art is the way in which, after hundreds of pages, facts or possible facts are vaguely mentioned in passing or recited in detail. We never come to what the movies call a great “reveal” that suddenly explains what has been deliberately confused in the earlier telling. What we have is simply the unstated conclusion that everything (and everybody) is connected if you think about it.
No damage will be done, however, if I disclose that the main character, Slothrop, is an American from a family traceable to the early Massachusetts colony. His old business-oriented family, once possibly active in lumber, remains prominent and well connected to this day. Slothrop went to Harvard and seems to be about 30 years old. He is a lieutenant in the American Army in London detailed to a confusingly bureaucratic British outfit stationed in a crumbling old monastery (“the White Visitation”) engaging in odd scientific research.
4. Science. At the outset, the odd scientific “research” which I just mentioned appears to be a weird but official effort to determine whether the rockets which are falling on London in the opening portions of the book can be predicted by occult means. The entire enterprise has a strange Pavlovian side to it linked preposterously with a suspicion that the rockets might be associated somehow with Slothrop’s sexual urges. Hence his multiple sexual conquests across London are being surreptitiously mapped and compared to rocket strikes in the same locations. It is as though he had been unwittingly placed there by someone as a human Guinea pig.
Pynchon fortifies this conceit by random but pointed references to the history of rocket developments in the pre-war period, sponsored by an unnamed international consortium apparently connected to IG Farben. Overlaid on that theme we also periodically hear of Laszlo Jamf, a scientist who in the 1930s developed Imipolex-G, a plastic polymer for insulating rockets, but whose psychological studies into the subconscious may have been subsidized by Slothrop’s uncle in Massachusetts even before that. And then, of course, there is the emphasis on coupling, both of molecules and people.
Furthermore, reflecting again on Pynchon’s “bandwidth” remark, it must be said that the author’s numerous digressions on science often require a good deal more of the reader than simply working to reconstruct the chronology and significance of these narrative items. In short, he doesn’t hesitate to give us complex chemical formulas and unsuccessful formulas, not to mention speculations on and techniques for possible formulas. We learn of the preparation of tests, the tests themselves, and the failures of tests, all anticipating the ultimate V-4 rocket.
5. Pornography. With many decades on my back I admit I have encountered pornography, but never in such detail and with the enthusiasm that the author displays in this book.
Early in my first year in college, I sat in a virginal freshman class when a professor remarked to us that there is a difference between pornography and obscenity. If this was a commonplace, it was to me however an epiphany. It had never earlier crossed my mind. Even today, whether or not the published lexicons agree with that distinction, I do. The pornographic passages in Gravity’s Rainbow are vile, galloping well beyond the occasional literary value of the obscene. What Pynchon has written is excruciatingly, revoltingly detailed and explicit.
Any army of dissenters to this observation would be led by Pynchon. We mustn’t look away from how depraved each of us is, how demanding, urgent, and diverting the sexual urge and performance, or how beautiful and momentarily satisfying the consummation. It is like the firing of a rocket. Homosexual sex, sex with witches, sex with children, it’s all the same and always worth giving the most minute attention to. But even those who would make this defense would have to admit that in writing such things in such intricate and excruciating detail, the author was seriously and insanely enjoying himself.
6. The Conspiracy. A character I have not mentioned so far can simply be called “they.” This is not a strength of the book. I’ve already noted that Gravity’s Rainbow betrays a growing apprehension about both the inevitability of the future and the impotence of normal people to change it. It is well done and not subject to any criticism from this quarter. But quite apart from literature, feelings of impotence against unidentified forces are familiar to mortal men. If there is any innovation in this book, it is that “they”’ have arranged this, but we are all evidently complicit.
“Acts of minor surrealism [and this book is certainly surreal] which – taken in the mass, are an act of suicide, in its dreamless version of the real, but which in its pathology, the Empire commits by the thousands every day, completely unaware of what it’s doing.”5
Even the so-called Counterforce is “as schizoid, as double-minded in the massive presence of money, as any of the rest of us . . . . The Man has a branch office in each of our brains . . . .”
There are historical examples and therefore those several departures, already mentioned, from the conventional timeline: the 19th century Dutch extinction of the dodo bird in Mauritius, the genocide of the Herero tribe in Africa in 1904, the deforestation of the Sloproth lands in Massachusetts, IG Farben, Laszlo Jamf, Imipolex-G, the Kirghiz massacre of 1916, genocide, etc. We are told that in the 1930s Slothrop’s rich uncle has sized up FDR
“as exactly the man: Harvard, beholden to all kinds of money old and new, commodity and retail, Harriman and Weinberg; an American synthesis which had never occurred before, and which opened the way to certain grand possibilities – all grouped under the term ‘control’. . . .”
All these things are connected and they have or will culminate in the V-4 rocket.
7. The Title. Gravity’s Rainbow might be the perfect title for this book, but I continue to puzzle its meaning. Perhaps it helps to recall that “gravity” has two meanings, and it could be fairly said that both senses of the word are at work here. On those occasions where I came across it as I was reading, however, it mostly seems to have been used conventionally as a noun signaling the force that attracts a body (e.g. a rocket) toward the earth – but later gravity is also described as “enslavement.”
The first time I found a reference suggesting the meaning of the title came only about a quarter of a way through the story. Slothrop has linked up with Katya, a mysterious Dutch girl who a year or two before had been commandeered as a sex slave in the rockets’ launching area apparently in Holland. She may also have been an allied spy. In an early conversation after she has met Slothrop in England, she says to him, “Between you and me,”
“’a rocket trajectory [is] also a life. You haven’t even learned the data on our side of the flight profile, the visible or trackable. Beyond them there’s so much more, so much none of us know . . . .’”
And Pynchon adds,
“But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed once or twice – guessed and refused to believe -- that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow and they its children . . . .”
Next I found a reference when Slothrop, in disguise as a news reporter, visits the now-deserted Mittelwerke, an abandoned underground factory headquarters for German rocket scientists in the hidden center of the mountain near the Nordhausen concentration camp. Now the author again dilates on parabolas, double integrals, “masses, moments, centers of gravity” in which
“imaginary centers far down inside the solid fatality of stone are thought of as . . . Gravity’s gray eminence among the councils of the living . . . . And what is the specific shape whose center of gravity is the Brennschluss Point?6 . . . There is only one. It is most likely an interface between one order of things and another.”
Adding to the accumulation of evidence, elsewhere we are told that Sloproth’s sinister Uncle Bland (suspiciously, a Mason), was exited to find that
“gravity, taken so for granted, is really something eerie, Messianic, extrasensory in Earth’s mindbody. . . having hugged to its holy center the wastes of dead species, gathered, packed, transmuted, realigned and rewoven molecules . . . .”
As for the title’s “rainbow” -- which Pynchon once identifies with Pan7 -- toward the book’s end we get this, also taking us back to his obsessive pornography:
“Crosses, swastikas, Zone-mandalas8, how can they not speak to Slothrop? . . . He used to pick up and shovel at the spring roads of Berkshire, . . . . days when in superstition and fright he could make it all fit, seeing clearly [in each item picked up] . . . . and now, in the Zone, . . . after a heavy rain he doesn’t recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural . . . .”
8. Style. A major part of the texture of the texture of Gravity’s Rainbow is the author’s idiosyncratic writing style.
Though lacking in genuine poetry, there are numerous lyrical passages, frequently flecked with both smut and redeeming erudition. There are copious, mostly-unpunctuated passages of description and dialog. The story is episodic; hallucinatory; paranoid; recurrently bitter; and ultimately pessimistic. It is also deliberately unreliable, by which I mean that among the many recited events along the way, the ones that can be truly relied on are the occasional snippets of genuine history, slipped in when necessary to make sense (often retroactively) of earlier references or a character’s names. I imagine the German phrases are correct (but there are probably puns).
Next, the author’s vast familiarity with countless people, historical events, and cultural creations is integral to this wholly original book. It is utterly impressive, unmatched by any other work of fiction in my experience. And yet at a certain point I became too conscious of it. That is not because it was in any way repetitive or even ostentatious. But it slowly became overwhelming. More, given the cynicism of the author’s overall viewpoint, I came to detect what seemed like a private condescension or smugness. “I know what I’m referring to and the readers don’t.”
9. Evaluation. For me, there were many places when I was about to put Gravity’s Rainbow down for good: the pornography, the willfully omitted quotation marks, the abrupt transitions (sometimes within a single paragraph) leading to a deliberately vague sense of time and place, and the eventual reduction of the pervasive bitterness and pessimism to an indifferent resignation in a heart-wrenching soliloquy by Gottfried, a young man kept as a sex slave for the duration of the war.
And yet a novel need not be pleasant. It does not require a sympathetic central character or cheerful theme. No edifying subtle “message” is required. As for Gravity’s Rainbow, whether or not it is a great book I am not the person to say so. I have even hesitated to call it a novel in any conventional sense. Moreover, it seems to me that an evaluation of a such a unique book as this one insists upon a parallel assessment of the author, a dangerous path which is normally criticized. I understand and agree with such criticism.
On the other hand, one cannot read this book without ultimately realizing that the author, having come to his staggering thesis, is genuinely angry. But he is also completely in control at all times. With astonishing erudition, he manages an oblique and immensely challenging delivery; he betrays a vivid, bizarre, and sometimes freakish imagination. Even his spectral pornography -- highly specific and troubling --is indirectly illustrative of his hypothesis. So even if there is no didactic message, Gravity’s Rainbow is premised on an unmistakable thesis:
“It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted . . . secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology . . . by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, ‘Money be dammed, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake’ but meaning most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more. . . . The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms – it was only staged to look that way – but among different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite . . .”
That was published 50 years ago. If Gravity’s Rainbow is in fact a novel, does it matter whether the thesis was right or wrong?
1 E.g. fanciful military acronyms; a law firm called Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De Brutus and Short; a bombed-out German town named Bad Karma.
2“We have to look for power sources here, . . . zeroing in on what incalculable plot?”
3Surprisingly to me, I hardly detected any anachronisms apart from a passing reference to the Kennedy assassination and some Los Angeles freeways.
4This notion is periodically reinforced throughout the book, e.g. in Pynchon’s repeated use of the word “preterite.”
5 Elsewhere: “There’s nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.”
6I had to look it up. It refers to “the cessation of fuel burning in a rocket or the time that the burning ceases.”
7He also identifies one of his minor characters as follows: “Sometime on Midsummer Eve, between midnight and one, fern seeds fell in his shoes. He is the invisible youth, the armored changeling. Providence’s little pal.”
8. Back to the encyclopedia. It’s a Hindu/Buddhist a geometric configuration of symbols, usually circular. In these mystic traditions, mandalas are used for focusing attention for spiritual guidance.
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